This is true. I remember a comment by Michael Yon saying that the general MO for suicide bombing is to get the bomber drugged up and laid the night before to entice him while he commits, and then don't let him get sober. Still dangerous, but hardly having the type of zeal they are portryed to have.
Islam needs to stop being the subject when people talk about extremism. Its poverty and lack of freedom that causes it, and Islam is just the paint on the outside. Need to focus on the root. Like my dad used to say, when you have a lexus to drive around town, you have better things to do than blow yourself up.
I think it actually shows that she's willing to play along with nonsense in order to advance her own career. That, similar to what I think is happening here, she's happy to pretend she has the same opinion as whoever she's trying to appeal to. In other words, she's the same shitty no personal integrity we've become accustomed to. She's just saying what she thinks voters want to hear. Not much better than what you thought:\.
heh alright true. But in my defense, I was talking about effects on the revolutionary society - and anyway the world was a lot more zero sum in those days, so... I don't feel too bad. But I guess my last name isn't running water or anything either.
Er there was a revolution, if you'll recall. That's not really top down in the sense that the OP was using. But seriously, it was kind of a stupid thing of you to say anyway, because all you really said is that revolutions are bad... but then something that happened in 1776 would seem to contest your theory. The bolsheviks (its an s for plural in English, don't use the russian, and I hope the use wasn't intentional or that was pointlessly pretentious of you), did a lot of bad things, but that had nothing to do with the fact that they overthrew the established order, other than the fact that the act gave them the power to do so.
Anyhow, the point of the top down approach was the we consumers are too powerless to effect the change. If all products use DRM (or nearly), its pretty hard to vote with your wallet. Add to that artificial lock in, and maybe we don't have a chance. The suggestion, then, was to get some power by whoring yourself out to corporate america, and trying to influence policy that way.
Don't worry. After the drug delivering mold has done its work we send in mold eating chinese needle snakes. But aren't those worse than the mold you say? Don't worry. After the mold's all gone we then send in gorillas to eat the snakes. What about the fact that you now have gorillas in your eyes? That's the real brilliance of the plan. Come winter, all the gorillas will freeze to death and the natural cleaning function of your eyes will flush them out after a short period, and you'll be fully cured! Another triumph of modern medicine.
Well its not quite there yet. This is a software player compromise, so all it will mean is that users are forced to patch, which they are unlikely to get too upset about. Now when hardware player keys start getting revoked... People get upset when they find out they payed 1 grand for a fancy brick. And as always, the pirates won't have to put up with any of this rediculous crap. Way to sell following your rules MPAA.
Not having his victim die immediately was actually an advantage I suspect. Remember he was killing an ex-spy with dangerous enemies, and its fairly likely that Lugovoi didn't venture out into places that didn't have witnesses. Poison allowed him to kill Lugovoi in plain sight. It was stupid to use polonium, however. Or maybe he's really been framed, who knows.
Reevaluating existing currency? Maybe if we were as desperate as the Germans in the 20's, but at least they evalutated down. I mean hell, why don't we just reevalute 1's to be 5's, 5's to be tens, and on down the line with bills too. Look how much wealthier everyone is! An instant boost to the economy as they go shopping with their new found cash! Or maybe not.
A defense could be made that there isn't enough money in penny form to matter, but it would still be an ugly, embarrassing solution, that might even have an impact on the security of the dollar. Much better solutions would be phasing out pennies, or changing their material so they are no longer overvalued. That wouldn't stop a period of melting, but then at least the problem would be over with. Making pennies worth more to prevent people melting them down is like mailing a stereo to someone before they steal yours. It's not really solving the right problem.
But also, that's not a million ps3's in households, thats a million ps3's in stores. That's a fairly large and important difference, but even if it wasn't, 1 million is probably about 1 percent of US households. That's similar to the market share of, say, the Opera browser. Ask the average joe what he thinks about Opera, and he'll have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Point: HD capability is still basically below the radar and the format doesn't really exist to the average consumer.
To some extent they actually do... many modern printers print unique paterns on every paper they print that are invisible to the human eye (very nearly at least) but are serials and timestamps to connect the printer and anything it prints, and then obviously to stores and credit card records etc. Its an anti-counterfeit measure to give police a lead when they find (poorly) counterfeited money. I don't know what quantity of HP printers do this (because its not public information), but you can assume some. So just to add some real world weight to your joke:D.
Complaining that people are frequently bad decision makers is usually not worthwhile. Much better to recognize the truth that they are, and then work to try and take the decisions out of their hands.
Its similar to a pretty interesting conceptual innovation in medicine, when people realized that even excellent doctors will at some point make grossly negligent mistakes simply due to the shear amount of work they do (i.e. operating on people with paralytics but not analgesics). So the innovation is to make them make fewer decisions - machines that check settings before running, labels that a four year old could understand, arrows and other reminders liberally applied.
So similarly here, yes it's annoying that people continue to "fund" spammers, but education is not the answer. Because, unfortunately, the spammer's target market of "everyone in the world" will always contain enough people to make their trade profitable if all we rely on is good decision making on the parts of spam recipients. So the solution has to be technical or legal. And in that regard, another small step for man here.
But come on. "The cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model line up with the observations." The summary says that like its some type of verification. They line up (duh) because he picked the cycles that way. What a stupid end to the summary.
Fwiw, I like the line of thinking - that the ice ages are an action of the sun rather than the earth, but its entirely unsubstantiated and to go _holy crap_ the model that he crafted to fit historical data fits historical data is fantastically disingenious.
Am I the only one that thinks the sharks tail looks like it pushes water perpendicular to a point _below_ its center of gravity? Somebody needs to evolve... I mean jeez, get yourself together mr. deep seel frill shark.
Why do people always give the "just burn it onto a CD" defense to the ipod lock in? I have hundreds of songs on my ipod. Is sitting down and burning->ripping 10's of CD's really something anyone is going to do?
I like apple, my ipod and (some) other parts of your post, but seriously, no one that doesnt stink of cheetos or something is going to transfer songs through hours of cd burning and ripping. Apple drm is easily restrictive enough to accomplish the goal of inconveniencing people enough that they don't circumvent it (which is all you can really hope for anyway). And in that regard, it is most definitely a lock in.
Well, no. I mean I hate the RIAA, and I hate the way they're holding back the _music_ industry, but laws do have certain intents, and it does seem that the intent here is violated. That doesn't mean XM should pay punitive damamges or anything like that, but its hard to make a case that this device wouldn't constitute a little too much fairuse. To me it's sort of like some coupon that gives you a dollar off meals at some restaurant with no restrictions, but then someone realizes that they can just photocopy (use a device) an arbitrary number of the coupons and get meals for free. You would be saying, hey that's in accordance with the rules, and you'd be right. But they'd also be right when they said the benefit to you and detriment to them that the rules (or lack thereof) were creating were far in excess of the original intent. So eventually they create a "one per customer per week" sort of rule, but in this case it seems like they are suing you rather than just lobbying, which does seem unreasonable. The law citing the right to record broadcasts for personal use is pretty black and white. It's just that it was never intended to be used this way.
Passing the cost on to the consumer is one of the worst idea's I've ever heard. First off, towards promoting better security, put the hurt on the bank because they're the one's who have the power to improve their security. But more importantly, losing their lifesavings is about as scary as anything can be to first worlders. Remember how people stopped flying after 9/11? When significant numbers of people getting burned out of their retirement funds hits CNN, you can bet online banking stops nearly overnight. Not a step forward.
The only possible good that could come from your suggestion is that public outcry would force congress to enact legislation that required better security, but that's clearly not your intended point and I'm not sure that said path is particularly good anyway. And anyway, if you run windows (which is not me but that doesn't mean I think someone who does is an idiot), being compromised is not neccassarily your fault, nor is your bank's poor security practices.
Alright Its getting late for me here anyway. Gnight. But seriously, my point was that this tech isnt particularly newsworthy, not that its fine and I have no capacity for intelligent thought.
You know you'd think they could have done a better job with their PR. I'm pretty sure identifying tattoos + people are not a winning mix, and I can't imagine trying to convince someone to use one of these. "No its fine! Think of all the other people that have done it before you... of wait... er...."
Good post, and its always nice to see someone who has real science's back, but as far as I know in no theory of gravitons are there an infinite amount in all directions, unless of course we take the universe to be infinite, in which case there is an infinite amount of everything in all directions (assuming no strange emergence of uniformity that we are unaware of). Anyhow, like I said, way to torture to death someone that knows less than you:D.
I don't really see many additional privacy concerns here, seeing as RFID capsules already have been implanted in people. I guess this tech represents another theoretical vector (to the extent that its cheaper or more durable), but really the whole putting it in people thing and associated privacy issues seems pretty contrived for this issue, and only present to create artificial buzz. Here's a hint, when implanting objects (or dyes, etc) in animals, don't be surprised if those same objects can go in people because - hey! people are animals too.
I actually found out maybe a more useful measure of the missile damage, which (anecdotally) appears to be a blast with destructive capacity of about half an f-14. F-14's are 62'X38', so if we approximate the destructive area of the explosion as a sphere with diameter = 20', you're not far off on its (somewhat) limited capacity for damage. On the other hand, as we've seen with the shoebomber et al (and I think this is really the more important point) actually destroying your intended target is not a requirement for terroist mission success. Even if a hit plane managed to land (which gets pretty unlikely unless the damage is constrained to one engine - think catastrophic failure of a wing, or a gaping hole in the side of the craft), it would be all of 24 hour cable news for days, and if it happened in mainland US, I can promise you there would be terrible consequences for the airline industry and the federal budget. Of course the joke is, we would ultimately be the ones to punish ourselves the most by throwing away billions to (maybe) save another plane and 100 lives rather than perhaps thousands by spending that money on medicine or car safety (for instance).
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This is true. I remember a comment by Michael Yon saying that the general MO for suicide bombing is to get the bomber drugged up and laid the night before to entice him while he commits, and then don't let him get sober. Still dangerous, but hardly having the type of zeal they are portryed to have.
Islam needs to stop being the subject when people talk about extremism. Its poverty and lack of freedom that causes it, and Islam is just the paint on the outside. Need to focus on the root. Like my dad used to say, when you have a lexus to drive around town, you have better things to do than blow yourself up.
I think it actually shows that she's willing to play along with nonsense in order to advance her own career. That, similar to what I think is happening here, she's happy to pretend she has the same opinion as whoever she's trying to appeal to. In other words, she's the same shitty no personal integrity we've become accustomed to. She's just saying what she thinks voters want to hear. Not much better than what you thought :\.
heh alright true. But in my defense, I was talking about effects on the revolutionary society - and anyway the world was a lot more zero sum in those days, so... I don't feel too bad. But I guess my last name isn't running water or anything either.
Er there was a revolution, if you'll recall. That's not really top down in the sense that the OP was using. But seriously, it was kind of a stupid thing of you to say anyway, because all you really said is that revolutions are bad... but then something that happened in 1776 would seem to contest your theory. The bolsheviks (its an s for plural in English, don't use the russian, and I hope the use wasn't intentional or that was pointlessly pretentious of you), did a lot of bad things, but that had nothing to do with the fact that they overthrew the established order, other than the fact that the act gave them the power to do so.
Anyhow, the point of the top down approach was the we consumers are too powerless to effect the change. If all products use DRM (or nearly), its pretty hard to vote with your wallet. Add to that artificial lock in, and maybe we don't have a chance. The suggestion, then, was to get some power by whoring yourself out to corporate america, and trying to influence policy that way.
Cheers.
Don't worry. After the drug delivering mold has done its work we send in mold eating chinese needle snakes. But aren't those worse than the mold you say? Don't worry. After the mold's all gone we then send in gorillas to eat the snakes. What about the fact that you now have gorillas in your eyes? That's the real brilliance of the plan. Come winter, all the gorillas will freeze to death and the natural cleaning function of your eyes will flush them out after a short period, and you'll be fully cured! Another triumph of modern medicine.
Er right... but how is that at all contrary to the position of the parent? His point was about business acumen, nothing else.
Well its not quite there yet. This is a software player compromise, so all it will mean is that users are forced to patch, which they are unlikely to get too upset about. Now when hardware player keys start getting revoked... People get upset when they find out they payed 1 grand for a fancy brick. And as always, the pirates won't have to put up with any of this rediculous crap. Way to sell following your rules MPAA.
Not having his victim die immediately was actually an advantage I suspect. Remember he was killing an ex-spy with dangerous enemies, and its fairly likely that Lugovoi didn't venture out into places that didn't have witnesses. Poison allowed him to kill Lugovoi in plain sight. It was stupid to use polonium, however. Or maybe he's really been framed, who knows.
Reevaluating existing currency? Maybe if we were as desperate as the Germans in the 20's, but at least they evalutated down. I mean hell, why don't we just reevalute 1's to be 5's, 5's to be tens, and on down the line with bills too. Look how much wealthier everyone is! An instant boost to the economy as they go shopping with their new found cash! Or maybe not.
A defense could be made that there isn't enough money in penny form to matter, but it would still be an ugly, embarrassing solution, that might even have an impact on the security of the dollar. Much better solutions would be phasing out pennies, or changing their material so they are no longer overvalued. That wouldn't stop a period of melting, but then at least the problem would be over with. Making pennies worth more to prevent people melting them down is like mailing a stereo to someone before they steal yours. It's not really solving the right problem.
Thats, uh, a pretty authoritative source... :D
But also, that's not a million ps3's in households, thats a million ps3's in stores. That's a fairly large and important difference, but even if it wasn't, 1 million is probably about 1 percent of US households. That's similar to the market share of, say, the Opera browser. Ask the average joe what he thinks about Opera, and he'll have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Point: HD capability is still basically below the radar and the format doesn't really exist to the average consumer.
To some extent they actually do... many modern printers print unique paterns on every paper they print that are invisible to the human eye (very nearly at least) but are serials and timestamps to connect the printer and anything it prints, and then obviously to stores and credit card records etc. Its an anti-counterfeit measure to give police a lead when they find (poorly) counterfeited money. I don't know what quantity of HP printers do this (because its not public information), but you can assume some. So just to add some real world weight to your joke :D.
That is a very clever sig you have. Tip o' the hat [/*:-).
Complaining that people are frequently bad decision makers is usually not worthwhile. Much better to recognize the truth that they are, and then work to try and take the decisions out of their hands.
Its similar to a pretty interesting conceptual innovation in medicine, when people realized that even excellent doctors will at some point make grossly negligent mistakes simply due to the shear amount of work they do (i.e. operating on people with paralytics but not analgesics). So the innovation is to make them make fewer decisions - machines that check settings before running, labels that a four year old could understand, arrows and other reminders liberally applied.
So similarly here, yes it's annoying that people continue to "fund" spammers, but education is not the answer. Because, unfortunately, the spammer's target market of "everyone in the world" will always contain enough people to make their trade profitable if all we rely on is good decision making on the parts of spam recipients. So the solution has to be technical or legal. And in that regard, another small step for man here.
But come on. "The cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model line up with the observations." The summary says that like its some type of verification. They line up (duh) because he picked the cycles that way. What a stupid end to the summary.
Fwiw, I like the line of thinking - that the ice ages are an action of the sun rather than the earth, but its entirely unsubstantiated and to go _holy crap_ the model that he crafted to fit historical data fits historical data is fantastically disingenious.
Am I the only one that thinks the sharks tail looks like it pushes water perpendicular to a point _below_ its center of gravity? Somebody needs to evolve... I mean jeez, get yourself together mr. deep seel frill shark.
Why do people always give the "just burn it onto a CD" defense to the ipod lock in? I have hundreds of songs on my ipod. Is sitting down and burning->ripping 10's of CD's really something anyone is going to do?
I like apple, my ipod and (some) other parts of your post, but seriously, no one that doesnt stink of cheetos or something is going to transfer songs through hours of cd burning and ripping. Apple drm is easily restrictive enough to accomplish the goal of inconveniencing people enough that they don't circumvent it (which is all you can really hope for anyway). And in that regard, it is most definitely a lock in.
Well, no. I mean I hate the RIAA, and I hate the way they're holding back the _music_ industry, but laws do have certain intents, and it does seem that the intent here is violated. That doesn't mean XM should pay punitive damamges or anything like that, but its hard to make a case that this device wouldn't constitute a little too much fairuse. To me it's sort of like some coupon that gives you a dollar off meals at some restaurant with no restrictions, but then someone realizes that they can just photocopy (use a device) an arbitrary number of the coupons and get meals for free. You would be saying, hey that's in accordance with the rules, and you'd be right. But they'd also be right when they said the benefit to you and detriment to them that the rules (or lack thereof) were creating were far in excess of the original intent. So eventually they create a "one per customer per week" sort of rule, but in this case it seems like they are suing you rather than just lobbying, which does seem unreasonable. The law citing the right to record broadcasts for personal use is pretty black and white. It's just that it was never intended to be used this way.
Passing the cost on to the consumer is one of the worst idea's I've ever heard. First off, towards promoting better security, put the hurt on the bank because they're the one's who have the power to improve their security. But more importantly, losing their lifesavings is about as scary as anything can be to first worlders. Remember how people stopped flying after 9/11? When significant numbers of people getting burned out of their retirement funds hits CNN, you can bet online banking stops nearly overnight. Not a step forward.
The only possible good that could come from your suggestion is that public outcry would force congress to enact legislation that required better security, but that's clearly not your intended point and I'm not sure that said path is particularly good anyway. And anyway, if you run windows (which is not me but that doesn't mean I think someone who does is an idiot), being compromised is not neccassarily your fault, nor is your bank's poor security practices.
Alright Its getting late for me here anyway. Gnight. But seriously, my point was that this tech isnt particularly newsworthy, not that its fine and I have no capacity for intelligent thought.
Like my brother says: the Home Owner's association, the last bastion of fascism in america.
I don't know why. Would you choose the world's best samurai to fight an f-14? Technology can make a huge difference.
You know you'd think they could have done a better job with their PR. I'm pretty sure identifying tattoos + people are not a winning mix, and I can't imagine trying to convince someone to use one of these. "No its fine! Think of all the other people that have done it before you... of wait... er...."
Good post, and its always nice to see someone who has real science's back, but as far as I know in no theory of gravitons are there an infinite amount in all directions, unless of course we take the universe to be infinite, in which case there is an infinite amount of everything in all directions (assuming no strange emergence of uniformity that we are unaware of). Anyhow, like I said, way to torture to death someone that knows less than you :D.
I don't really see many additional privacy concerns here, seeing as RFID capsules already have been implanted in people. I guess this tech represents another theoretical vector (to the extent that its cheaper or more durable), but really the whole putting it in people thing and associated privacy issues seems pretty contrived for this issue, and only present to create artificial buzz. Here's a hint, when implanting objects (or dyes, etc) in animals, don't be surprised if those same objects can go in people because - hey! people are animals too.
I actually found out maybe a more useful measure of the missile damage, which (anecdotally) appears to be a blast with destructive capacity of about half an f-14. F-14's are 62'X38', so if we approximate the destructive area of the explosion as a sphere with diameter = 20', you're not far off on its (somewhat) limited capacity for damage. On the other hand, as we've seen with the shoebomber et al (and I think this is really the more important point) actually destroying your intended target is not a requirement for terroist mission success. Even if a hit plane managed to land (which gets pretty unlikely unless the damage is constrained to one engine - think catastrophic failure of a wing, or a gaping hole in the side of the craft), it would be all of 24 hour cable news for days, and if it happened in mainland US, I can promise you there would be terrible consequences for the airline industry and the federal budget. Of course the joke is, we would ultimately be the ones to punish ourselves the most by throwing away billions to (maybe) save another plane and 100 lives rather than perhaps thousands by spending that money on medicine or car safety (for instance).