Anyone who thinks the approximate location of a child has anything to do with what the child is doing should not be a parent.
The phone will render them unable to drive to the next city while pretending to be at the local Taco Bell.
However, it won't stop them for being behind the local Taco Bell, the local methhead hangout, buying some meth they will do this weekend while standing outside their friend's house. Parents can rest secure, however, they know exactly where their kids are while they do drugs or whatever the problem de jour is.
OTOH, I have nothing against GPS phones for kids. It doesn't needlessly invade privacy like random room searches do, and few children can argue that parents should, indeed, know where they are. Even the ones who argue they should be able to go to X don't argue their parents shouldn't know that.
In addition, it adds to the safety of a normal cell phone in that you can find them even if something has happened to them.
However, no one's making GPS phones for kids. They're making GPS phones that can be enabled remotely, and selling them to everyone.
As for it being a solution for truancy, WTF? That doesn't make any sense. The way to find out if your kid is at school is to have them call you if he's not, which school do. Then, if he has a cell phone, you call him for an expanation and tell him to get to school in ten minutes.
If you're required to physically locate your child and haul him back to school, well...
However, I must correct you. Making a very violent video game starring someone morally opposed to video games isn't ironic, where you fight violent video gamers. That would actually be satire.(1)
What would be ironic is if you were honestly trying to dissuade people from violent video games, and unintentionally made your game extremely violent in an attempt to do so.
Irony requires an unintended result that is what you were trying to avoid, or at least worse than you were trying to avoid. (At least, for non-verbal irony.)
Now, this entire situtation is ironic, because the end result is that Penny Arcade has come out looking morally better than ol' Jacky, and Jack has come off looking like a hypocrite, which is exactly opposite of what he was trying to convey with his proposal.
1) However, proposing someone do that is not satire. It's just dumb.
Censorware is sofware that blocks access to certain content, automatically, either via lists, scanning, or some combination of that. You can make the case the term should apply to software that automatically deletes certain content outright also, and if that existed, I'd agree.
But there is no such software on DNS servers(1), and there is no such software on Usenet servers. In fact, there is no such software like that on servers. No server deletes stuff on itself automatically via censorware, because censorware is poor at choosing what it doesn't like.
If it doesn't do it automatically, it's just a damn delete command. Deleting things the government tells you to delete is not 'censorware'. Not even via automated process. It can be censorship, but censorware is when the software makes the decision.
And neither is deleting all AVIs, or all executable attachments. Censorware must pretend to be filtering on content, not type of content, or it's just filtering.
Now, computers can't actually filter on content, because computers are not as intelligent as people, which is why censorware is a fraud, but censorware must claim it blocks 'objectionable content' of some sort.
In addition, to be censorware, it has to block something the end user wants to see, otherwise it's just 'voluntaryfilteringware'. Aka, spam fighting software.
Spam fighters at least are honest about this inability to block content, because they started as pure content filters, leading to 'm or t g a g e your home' and other tricks to avoid content scanners. So they have invented quite a lot of technology that works on other, non-content signs, like finding open proxies and whatnot. Censorware people, however, continue to lie, and continue to keep lists secret so they cannot be checked, and insert their own personal agendas into them.
As for poisoning the well, that's all well and good, but it's not actually blocking any access to anything.
1) There isn't even anyway you could have it on DNS servers, so I don't even know what you're talking about. I've run a damn DNS server. DNS servers don't know anything about any content. Unless you're talking about not being able to register certain name, which doesn't have anything to do with the DNS servers themselves, and isn't censorware because DNS isn't content, and is extremely unrelated to content.
And the censorware designed to filter out child pornography is where, exactly?
Oh, that's right. There is none. Intelligent people know censorware doesn't work in a free society, regardless of whether the censoring is justified or not. Ethical people, those interested in stamping out child porn, hence do not propose measures that will not work.
However, I don't know how we could shame censorware companies more by revealing they sell to repressive governments...their entire purpose is repressive.
And they are liars and frauds, as they can't actually do what they say.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams
himself your master."
The only reason for that is the gene is very limited in quantity, and it's dominate,so there are no hidden carriers. As they aren't that likely to hook up with big-size people, the gene is not spreading.
Well, at least, that's true of one specific type of that disorder. There are probably all sorts of other causes, but the major one that can't be cured with hormones is one dominate gene.
And there is absolutely nothing stopping an entire population from having this gene, and, indeed, it might be a useful trait with limited resources.
Some disorders, especially mild forms, are trivial to live with.
It's not a 'preference' however, that's just gibberish. That's like talking about how your car 'likes' to drift to the right, but could choose to go straight or to the left. Well, yes, but it's still misaligned. The fact that mild disorders can be overridden is great for people with them, it doesn't make them less real.
And, of course, some people don't mind their disorders, and we can have a great debate whether or not a certain disorder should be called a 'disorder'. (Almost all disorders have some use.) I suspect ADD (without hyperactivity) is going to vanish within 50 years for that reason, and homosexuality already did.
However, that only applies for mild disorders. Someone who suffers panic attacks cannot override them. Someone who suffers from depression cannot decide to be happy. Someone who suffers from bipolar disorder can learn to recognize the mood swings and modify their behavior, but they can't choose to not have them.
If you think of a 'normal' mind as level ground, then disorders are slants. Sometimes mildly slanted ground are fine, we can walk up them, and, hey, we can coast back from the store on our bike, although it's more work going.
But sometimes the whole ground suddenly tilts at 50 degrees and you fall down, or survive by clutching a nearby tree. If that is your sexual orientation, well, fine. If that make you loathe chocolate, fine.
If that makes you panic when your stress levels get too high, or want to die, you're probably going to want to do something about that. You can take drugs to bring the ground to a reasonable level, and then therapy to learn how to walk on the newly level ground.
I spent years building a time machine on my basement after I appeared from the future and gave myself the plans.
I then made a copy of the plans, and prepared to go back to give them to myself in the past, but before I could leave, the plans, the copy, and the time machine were destroyed in a fire.
I'm expecting that we'll find that gravity operates through the extra spacetime dimensions that might possibly exist. In fact, some string theory already says explicitly this.
This quite neatly explains where all the 'dark matter' is. It's 'That way'. *points at a right angle to the observed dimensions*
Darksuckers don't hold dark. That's a common misconception.
The dark goes out through the socket at the top of them. That's why they don't work when they are unplugged. The wall switch opens the channel up or not, like the switch on the drain in your shower. (In fact, they work to some extent without the darksucker, the darksucker is just a funnel.)
If it stopped sucking dark, and worked when you got a new one, that merely means that it got clogged up somewhere.
Usually they get clogged up inside the glass, so you can't clean them, but it might be worth taking some steel wool to the inside of the socket, to see if you can clean it.
If you leave the switch in 'drain' position, and look closely at it, you can actually see some dark get sucked in if you clear it out. Run the steel wool around the metal spiral, that makes sure the dark is going the same direction as it goes down the drain.
Be sure to to get the metal-looking bit at the very bottom. That's the actual drain.
Sometimes I think we should just go back to burning off the dark like they used to.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why I'm even arguing this. Who the heck even says the box sitting by the desk even is the computer? Maybe the monitor (and the power switch) runs through the wall to some other computer elsewhere. When the power goes 'out' they just send no signal to the screen and reset the VM. When it comes 'on' they start up the VM again.
In fact, that's how I'd do it anyway. I'd have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and USB port on the keyboard or monitor, and nothing else visible. Stick the computer up in the ceiling or behind a wall or something.
If they were intelligent, there'd be the end of a USB KVM laying out, so people could plug laptops into the keyboard/monitor, or flip a switch to use the build-in computer, including booting off a USB stick if there is one. (Or a basic install of Windows if not.) Use repeaters to go to a rack in the basement.
And if you do that, you can even charge people for computers, and have less than one a room. Free for laptops, or they can pay to have one of the hotel computers hooked to their room.
If they were really clever, these 'racks' in the basement would actually be VMs. Not for spying, but simply for cost. Sadly, at that point, you're off standard hardware, even standard rack hardware.
And, like I said, if they want to spy on you, getting a USB drive/keyboard/mouse dump via a hacked hub (residing inside the computer) might be easier and more useful. (Have it write to, heh, a second hard drive that's hooked up via said hub. You know, there has to be some 'drive imager' type thing that does this already.)
What do you mean, why should there 'still' be a past?
You mean the past might have existed in the past, but not the present? Huh?
What you mean to say is, 'why should there be a past?'.
However, that is the wrong way to ask it. When you leave a coordinate that location continues to exist. In the case of time, there isn't even any temporal dimension for them to 'stop' existing in. (1) If you 'are' there in the now, you must continue 'to be' there when now becomes the past.
So what you are really asking is if it is fundamentally possible to change coordinates in time, at all, not just via time travel.
Are we 'moving forward' through time, and changing coordinates, or are we simply now, and there is no such thing as other times...any resembance this 'now' has to any remembered 'now' might exist, or not.
Of course, that's what you might call 'Extreme Solipsism'. Not only are the only person you believe in, but this moment is the only one you believe in.
1) I.e., while The Langoliers was a fun movie, it can't possibly be true.
Dark matter is the kind of solution you get when you actually have the flaws in a scientific theory that intelligent design advocates insist is present in evolution. We have theories about the universe's layout that works okay...if there's a lot of invisible stuff.
However, because the people talking about 'Dark Matter' are actually scientists, they loathe this 'solution'. They quite rightly say 'Saying there's just some stuff out there we don't know about is not 'science'. Either it's there, and we need to find it, or it's not, and we need another theory.'
Everyone who thinks scientists are scoffing at 'Intelligent Design' because they are all evil athiests need to look at how they are treating dark matter. This is what happens where a perfectly good theory has a huge crack in it. Scientists run around wildly trying to prove both sides, usually ending up somewhere in the middle, which is probably what's going to happen here:
'Okay, so it turns out only 10% of the universe is invisible, according to these new equations we've figured out. And there it is, over there. See? Well, of course not, but look at these models we've prepared, which clearly demonstrate what must be there. Whew. Okay, we solved that one, we can all stop looking like idiots.'.
And the rest of the world goes...um, okay. Is this important?
Yeah, because theoretical physicists have never done anything towards curing cancer.
Except radiation therapy, to kill cancer.
And lasers, to also kill cancer.
And MRIs, to find cancer so you can kill it.
And semiconductors, leading to cheap computers, which 100% of all cancer research uses, and the aforementioned technology above also requires, and have also led to cameras that can be inserted into the human body for cancer (and other) surgeries.
Every single one of those uses physical laws that were unknown 110 years ago, laws which were discovered by theoretical physicists.
I'm not talking about the technology, some of that was perfected quite recently, I'm talking about the physics behind them. You could give a vaccuum tube to Thomas Edison and he'd understand it. You couldn't give a semiconductor to him, because that relies on certain quantum effects that he does not know. Same with lasers and MRIs, they rely on quantum effects.
And he wouldn't understand generating radiation at all.
But I'm sure they should quit all their jobs discovering new and interesting physical laws that could be applied towards all sorts of advancements, medical included, and go study medicine for a decade so they can start researching cancer.
Regardless of any aptitude or lack thereof for medicine they might have.
I've always been confused as to why it's treated like actual matter in our universe.
It seems to me, the simpliest explaination for extra gravity that apparnetly exists, but has no apparent mass to explain it, is merely that the mass is currently in a dimension we cannot detect.
Postulating form of matter that has mass but no other effect on the universe is a bit screwy, if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
The phone will render them unable to drive to the next city while pretending to be at the local Taco Bell.
However, it won't stop them for being behind the local Taco Bell, the local methhead hangout, buying some meth they will do this weekend while standing outside their friend's house. Parents can rest secure, however, they know exactly where their kids are while they do drugs or whatever the problem de jour is.
OTOH, I have nothing against GPS phones for kids. It doesn't needlessly invade privacy like random room searches do, and few children can argue that parents should, indeed, know where they are. Even the ones who argue they should be able to go to X don't argue their parents shouldn't know that.
In addition, it adds to the safety of a normal cell phone in that you can find them even if something has happened to them.
However, no one's making GPS phones for kids. They're making GPS phones that can be enabled remotely, and selling them to everyone.
As for it being a solution for truancy, WTF? That doesn't make any sense. The way to find out if your kid is at school is to have them call you if he's not, which school do. Then, if he has a cell phone, you call him for an expanation and tell him to get to school in ten minutes.
If you're required to physically locate your child and haul him back to school, well...
However, I must correct you. Making a very violent video game starring someone morally opposed to video games isn't ironic, where you fight violent video gamers. That would actually be satire.(1)
What would be ironic is if you were honestly trying to dissuade people from violent video games, and unintentionally made your game extremely violent in an attempt to do so.
Irony requires an unintended result that is what you were trying to avoid, or at least worse than you were trying to avoid. (At least, for non-verbal irony.)
Now, this entire situtation is ironic, because the end result is that Penny Arcade has come out looking morally better than ol' Jacky, and Jack has come off looking like a hypocrite, which is exactly opposite of what he was trying to convey with his proposal.
1) However, proposing someone do that is not satire. It's just dumb.
Jack Thompson has just cross that line.
Damn. You're right.
This isn't anywhere near 'early' for IM clients, at least not in internet terms.
This is early for VoIP. This is early for purchasing music. This is early for downloading TV shows legally.
Early for IM was back when ICQ was bought by AOL.
I just want to say: Your porn stash rocks.
Censorware is sofware that blocks access to certain content, automatically, either via lists, scanning, or some combination of that. You can make the case the term should apply to software that automatically deletes certain content outright also, and if that existed, I'd agree.
But there is no such software on DNS servers(1), and there is no such software on Usenet servers. In fact, there is no such software like that on servers. No server deletes stuff on itself automatically via censorware, because censorware is poor at choosing what it doesn't like.
If it doesn't do it automatically, it's just a damn delete command. Deleting things the government tells you to delete is not 'censorware'. Not even via automated process. It can be censorship, but censorware is when the software makes the decision.
And neither is deleting all AVIs, or all executable attachments. Censorware must pretend to be filtering on content, not type of content, or it's just filtering.
Now, computers can't actually filter on content, because computers are not as intelligent as people, which is why censorware is a fraud, but censorware must claim it blocks 'objectionable content' of some sort.
In addition, to be censorware, it has to block something the end user wants to see, otherwise it's just 'voluntaryfilteringware'. Aka, spam fighting software.
Spam fighters at least are honest about this inability to block content, because they started as pure content filters, leading to 'm or t g a g e your home' and other tricks to avoid content scanners. So they have invented quite a lot of technology that works on other, non-content signs, like finding open proxies and whatnot. Censorware people, however, continue to lie, and continue to keep lists secret so they cannot be checked, and insert their own personal agendas into them.
As for poisoning the well, that's all well and good, but it's not actually blocking any access to anything.
1) There isn't even anyway you could have it on DNS servers, so I don't even know what you're talking about. I've run a damn DNS server. DNS servers don't know anything about any content. Unless you're talking about not being able to register certain name, which doesn't have anything to do with the DNS servers themselves, and isn't censorware because DNS isn't content, and is extremely unrelated to content.
Of course, that doesn't work unless it's actually backed up with force.
Oh, that's right. There is none. Intelligent people know censorware doesn't work in a free society, regardless of whether the censoring is justified or not. Ethical people, those interested in stamping out child porn, hence do not propose measures that will not work.
However, I don't know how we could shame censorware companies more by revealing they sell to repressive governments...their entire purpose is repressive.
And they are liars and frauds, as they can't actually do what they say.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Or just get a check card. Minors can have checking acounts.
Well, at least, that's true of one specific type of that disorder. There are probably all sorts of other causes, but the major one that can't be cured with hormones is one dominate gene.
And there is absolutely nothing stopping an entire population from having this gene, and, indeed, it might be a useful trait with limited resources.
It's not a 'preference' however, that's just gibberish. That's like talking about how your car 'likes' to drift to the right, but could choose to go straight or to the left. Well, yes, but it's still misaligned. The fact that mild disorders can be overridden is great for people with them, it doesn't make them less real.
And, of course, some people don't mind their disorders, and we can have a great debate whether or not a certain disorder should be called a 'disorder'. (Almost all disorders have some use.) I suspect ADD (without hyperactivity) is going to vanish within 50 years for that reason, and homosexuality already did.
However, that only applies for mild disorders. Someone who suffers panic attacks cannot override them. Someone who suffers from depression cannot decide to be happy. Someone who suffers from bipolar disorder can learn to recognize the mood swings and modify their behavior, but they can't choose to not have them.
If you think of a 'normal' mind as level ground, then disorders are slants. Sometimes mildly slanted ground are fine, we can walk up them, and, hey, we can coast back from the store on our bike, although it's more work going.
But sometimes the whole ground suddenly tilts at 50 degrees and you fall down, or survive by clutching a nearby tree. If that is your sexual orientation, well, fine. If that make you loathe chocolate, fine.
If that makes you panic when your stress levels get too high, or want to die, you're probably going to want to do something about that. You can take drugs to bring the ground to a reasonable level, and then therapy to learn how to walk on the newly level ground.
Maybe he doesn't understand...all of it! Hehe.
I then made a copy of the plans, and prepared to go back to give them to myself in the past, but before I could leave, the plans, the copy, and the time machine were destroyed in a fire.
Please advise, situtation critical.
I don't believe in Philip K. Dick.
It's about keeping the computer that run things safe, whether or not they are on the internet.
Granted, in most cases they can be made safe by removing remote access and restricting physical access to them.
This quite neatly explains where all the 'dark matter' is. It's 'That way'. *points at a right angle to the observed dimensions*
The theory is 'Intelligent Falling'.
The dark goes out through the socket at the top of them. That's why they don't work when they are unplugged. The wall switch opens the channel up or not, like the switch on the drain in your shower. (In fact, they work to some extent without the darksucker, the darksucker is just a funnel.)
If it stopped sucking dark, and worked when you got a new one, that merely means that it got clogged up somewhere.
Usually they get clogged up inside the glass, so you can't clean them, but it might be worth taking some steel wool to the inside of the socket, to see if you can clean it.
If you leave the switch in 'drain' position, and look closely at it, you can actually see some dark get sucked in if you clear it out. Run the steel wool around the metal spiral, that makes sure the dark is going the same direction as it goes down the drain.
Be sure to to get the metal-looking bit at the very bottom. That's the actual drain.
Sometimes I think we should just go back to burning off the dark like they used to.
In fact, that's how I'd do it anyway. I'd have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and USB port on the keyboard or monitor, and nothing else visible. Stick the computer up in the ceiling or behind a wall or something.
If they were intelligent, there'd be the end of a USB KVM laying out, so people could plug laptops into the keyboard/monitor, or flip a switch to use the build-in computer, including booting off a USB stick if there is one. (Or a basic install of Windows if not.) Use repeaters to go to a rack in the basement.
And if you do that, you can even charge people for computers, and have less than one a room. Free for laptops, or they can pay to have one of the hotel computers hooked to their room.
If they were really clever, these 'racks' in the basement would actually be VMs. Not for spying, but simply for cost. Sadly, at that point, you're off standard hardware, even standard rack hardware.
And, like I said, if they want to spy on you, getting a USB drive/keyboard/mouse dump via a hacked hub (residing inside the computer) might be easier and more useful. (Have it write to, heh, a second hard drive that's hooked up via said hub. You know, there has to be some 'drive imager' type thing that does this already.)
You mean the past might have existed in the past, but not the present? Huh?
What you mean to say is, 'why should there be a past?'.
However, that is the wrong way to ask it. When you leave a coordinate that location continues to exist. In the case of time, there isn't even any temporal dimension for them to 'stop' existing in. (1) If you 'are' there in the now, you must continue 'to be' there when now becomes the past.
So what you are really asking is if it is fundamentally possible to change coordinates in time, at all, not just via time travel.
Are we 'moving forward' through time, and changing coordinates, or are we simply now, and there is no such thing as other times...any resembance this 'now' has to any remembered 'now' might exist, or not.
Of course, that's what you might call 'Extreme Solipsism'. Not only are the only person you believe in, but this moment is the only one you believe in.
1) I.e., while The Langoliers was a fun movie, it can't possibly be true.
However, because the people talking about 'Dark Matter' are actually scientists, they loathe this 'solution'. They quite rightly say 'Saying there's just some stuff out there we don't know about is not 'science'. Either it's there, and we need to find it, or it's not, and we need another theory.'
Everyone who thinks scientists are scoffing at 'Intelligent Design' because they are all evil athiests need to look at how they are treating dark matter. This is what happens where a perfectly good theory has a huge crack in it. Scientists run around wildly trying to prove both sides, usually ending up somewhere in the middle, which is probably what's going to happen here:
'Okay, so it turns out only 10% of the universe is invisible, according to these new equations we've figured out. And there it is, over there. See? Well, of course not, but look at these models we've prepared, which clearly demonstrate what must be there. Whew. Okay, we solved that one, we can all stop looking like idiots.'.
And the rest of the world goes...um, okay. Is this important?
Except radiation therapy, to kill cancer.
And lasers, to also kill cancer.
And MRIs, to find cancer so you can kill it.
And semiconductors, leading to cheap computers, which 100% of all cancer research uses, and the aforementioned technology above also requires, and have also led to cameras that can be inserted into the human body for cancer (and other) surgeries.
Every single one of those uses physical laws that were unknown 110 years ago, laws which were discovered by theoretical physicists.
I'm not talking about the technology, some of that was perfected quite recently, I'm talking about the physics behind them. You could give a vaccuum tube to Thomas Edison and he'd understand it. You couldn't give a semiconductor to him, because that relies on certain quantum effects that he does not know. Same with lasers and MRIs, they rely on quantum effects.
And he wouldn't understand generating radiation at all.
But I'm sure they should quit all their jobs discovering new and interesting physical laws that could be applied towards all sorts of advancements, medical included, and go study medicine for a decade so they can start researching cancer.
Regardless of any aptitude or lack thereof for medicine they might have.
What are you talking about? Your example assumes the existence of time by taking about how an action takes T seconds. Seconds is a measure of time.
It seems to me, the simpliest explaination for extra gravity that apparnetly exists, but has no apparent mass to explain it, is merely that the mass is currently in a dimension we cannot detect.
Postulating form of matter that has mass but no other effect on the universe is a bit screwy, if you ask me.