First, this seems to be the failings of security through obscurity writ large, and not much to be done about it. Unless you can start closing off whole areas of cities so celebrities can walk through them, I don't see how you can address this sort of problem.
The other thing that occurs to me, unfortunately, is that this will lead us even more down the path of trying to prevent crimes rather than punish them. It sounds like a good idea - I mean, isn't it better to stop the Bad Thing from even happening? The problem with it, of course, is that the only way to prevent crime is to actually curtail the abilities of people to do things that could be criminal. Fundamentally, it's a tradeoff of liberty for security.
I'm not exactly a wild-haired anarchist, and I do believe that some tradeoffs of that nature are necessary given the amount of damage ten dedicated people can inflict (to paraphrase a quote that went something like "the progress of history can be measured by how many people a group of ten dedicated men can kill"...but I don't remember who said it. Help with attribution would be appreciated), but we (by which I mean the so-called first world) keep moving in only one direction: more security, less liberty. It's a cultural decision which is based on events like plane hijackings, car bombs and assasinations, but results in policies like the DMCA and the CBDTPA.
The article certainly comes across as a justification for engaging in yet more crime prevention. At some point, I can only hope that we turn around and realize that we can't prevent Bad Things from happening, so we're better off allowing liberty and punishing criminals than eliminating liberty and making criminals out of everyone.
This a good policy for games that end up in the bargain bin and books that become softcovers...but the reason I see movies around release isn't to see them right now, it's to see them in a fashion I won't be able to later: on a full theater screen with more expensive surround sound than I'll ever have.
Watching The Ring, for example, on a 27" TV in a never-really-dark living room wouldn't have been even close to as terrifying as it was in the theater. Movies like The Matrix and Fellowship Of the Ring also gain something from being experienced in a theater as opposed to at home.
Not necessarily. When I was in college, WI was mailing out stickers that you put on your license to renew them (trusting you to mail in the check...yes, it was a silly idea). So I mailed in my check, but I forgot to put the sticker on the license.
Then I went to buy liquor with my perfectly valid driver's license that just looked expired, and was turned down because it wasn't adequate proof that I was of legal age.
I'm pretty sure that if Sentry employees don't accept expired licenses, airline employees in our current paranoid era won't either.
Are you thinking of the HAL supercomputers that hit the news a few years back? IIRC, all the processing was done on FPGA boards, and you just added boards into the box at whim. I remember them claiming you could fire a gun into the box, and it would keep running, just slower.
I wish I could remember better what they were called.
Because corporations always (well, with very few exceptions) choose short-term profit over long-term. Freeing up the bandwidth is the sort of thing which will have benefits in terms of being able to do things we haven't been able to do before - but we don't know yet what those things are. Hence, no corporation in its right mind will sacrifice current revenue streams (analog broadcasts) for future potential (digital broadcasts).
Much like the internet itself: without government funding, the internet would never have happened. All the profits that are made off its existence now are based on services that couldn't even be conceived of until the medium to support them existed.
I agree with the principle you're espousing, but it's impractical. If we intend to ever free spectrum by eliminating analog TV signals, something will have to be done to appease those who are content with the current situation. If, suddenly, 15% (a number I'm pulling out of a hat, admittedly) of the population are by law cut off from their television fix, the uproar would be immense enough to kill the whole plan.
I am, in general, against government handouts of any kind. This is one, however, that's in the interests of the public good. Hopefully, the money spent on assisting analog-to-digital upgrades (digital-to-analog downgrades, depending on your POV) could be recouped by selling off the spectrum freed up by shutting off analog TV broadcasts.
To free up bandwidth. Analog TV is a bandwidth hog in comparison to digital signals. We could cram a huge number of other services in the spectrum occupied by analog television broadcasts today.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of O'Reilly doing this, but for a publisher of current computer science reference works, 14 years vs. perpetuity is a distinction without a difference: the odds of Building Cocoa Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide being of any use beyond idle curiosity in May of 2026 are not measurably greater than the odds of it being of any use beyond idle curiosity in May of 2126.
Record labels, on the other hand, look back at Pearl Jam, U2, the Dead, the Beatles, Elvis, the Andrews Sisters & so forth, and know that if they're successful, those works may well still be in demand in a century.
Please don't read this as a defense of copyright or the RIAA - I'm against any form of copyright except attribution, frankly - but the fact remains that it's much easier for a company like O'Reilly to try and buy goodwill with a founder's copyright than it is for BMG.
I have a hard time believing that you can honestly look at your OS of choice and claim that there have been no innovative changes in it since 1994.
Does it still provide the same basic functions? Sure; file handling, I/O, disk writing and the like are still what the OS does. But by the same token, transportation without personal labor is what the car does...just like the horse and buggy did.
I don't think anyone who uses computers on an even vaguely regular basis can honestly look at them and say that the state of software hasn't changed in the last 10 years. Sure, you can claim that much of that is due to hardware improvements, and that's true. But making software that couldn't exist before because the hardware didn't exist is also innovation, otherwise we'd all still be running DOS 3, but at blazing speeds.
I suddenly feel validated. There are times I look around at reports of the newest viruses and worms and whatnot and wonder if I'm just cockeyed to be thoroughly unimpressed. I'm in a similar position as you seem to be - at 27, I remember when viruses were clever, and had to be to do any damage. These days, they're completely uninteresting.
To me, at least, there used to be a cachet attached to perpetrating a good virus. Not necessarily a positive one, or one worth pursuing; more the kind of dismayed admiration you feel for someone who pulls off a really slick bank heist. Now, though, when I hear about Code Red, or Sasser or Blaster or whatever else, I associate them with simple vandalism. Throwing bricks through windows, and that sort of thing.
You're right. I don't know how I missed that one, in fact. I can't count the number of times I've struggled with the "friendly" interface to get it to do what I could have done in seconds with proper boolean logic.
That's pretty much what I use my DC for, to be honest. The only DC game I actually play is Crazy Taxi 2, and even that I haven't broken out in quite some time.
Partially, though, that's because the 65" TV is rear projection, and doesn't work with the DC's light gun, or I'd play...er...that one game...Confidential Mission, or some such...
Actually, I don't. I don't really take trips of any kind (every time I've got the money to spend on travelling somewhere, I convince myself it would be better spent on PC hardware. This is a very similar reason to why I don't have a laptop).
If I did more travelling, I might have a use for it. But as it stands, I haven't been anywhere I haven't driven to in...oh, my...ten years?
I suppose if I had kids, it might be different. That sounds like a good time...as it stands, though, I already have more unfinished video games than I can shake a stick at (Metroid: Prime, XIII, Hitman 2, Mario Sunshine, Tron 2.0, Ikaruga...probably more that I'm forgetting). I wouldn't have finished Wind Waker if I hadn't had three friends over for a weekend to race.
Not to mention Doom III and HL2 (if it ever comes out).
I never knew in college how good I had it, with time to finish games as they came out, instead of continually falling further and further behind...
...you're probably right. Where's the registrar? I need to turn in my geek card.;)
I am young, but I did have a couple LED-driven tabletop (is that the word? Mini-cabinets?) games. I forget what they were called...joystick on the left, one button on the right...one was a top-down shooter. Little space ship, shooting little lasers at oncoming little space ships...ah, those were the days. I forgot how much I loved those games.
I didn't count them as "handhelds," though, since they had wall warts. Or something like four C cells, IIRC.
Dammit, where was this stuff when I was a kid? All I had for hand-held gaming was "Castlevania," which had a monochrome LCD screen that could display Our Hero in three different positions, four different enemies in two positions each, and a series of flagstones for me to "walk" on.
Nowadays, these things are fantastically cool, and I love them, but man, do I not need another video game platform. Now I drive myself places. My only video game time is at home, where I've got a 65" TV, a PC, and six different consoles. I want a GBA, I'm sure I'll want the DS, but I know I'd never play them.
I should also mention that this blurb caused me to go back and give them another chance despite them already being classified as "useless" in my head based on trying them out way back before I found Google. (Late nineties? Certainly before/. posted the "interview with Ask Jeeves" way back in the day...you know, the one with the bees...maybe I'll go ask Google to find that/. story, and then Ask Jeeves to find that/. story, and see which one gets me better results...maybe I'll also stretch this parenthetical out a bit longer...)
That's all there is to it. Based on this blurb, I went to look at Ask Jeeves, and see what they had to offer. Ran a search, clicked on a result - and they lost me when they kept control of a portion of my browser window so I could run another search.
I don't understand why so many companies don't understand such a simple concept: get off my back. Isn't Google's example clear enough for them? I like Google because it's fast and accurate, by and large. Because it's a simple page that loads quickly even if I'm somewhere on a dialup. It doesn't pop windows over or under my browser window. In short, Google acts like they want to help me, rather than like they want me to help them.
That's all there is to it. I can't think of a feature a search engine could add that would overcome Google's interface advantage. To get my clicks, another search engine would have to have an even more simple interface, and I see that being hard to accomplish.
Wait, I lied. If a search engine was able to somehow figure out what I mean conceptually rather than contextually, I would use it all the time...but since that would require an almost human level of language comprehension, I don't think I'll need to worry about switching any time soon. As it stands, AJ's "natural language" abilities were just "we won't tell you we ignored 'of' and 'the' in your search request."
In other news, Hallmark reports that the number of holidays requiring you to buy an amusing greeting card rose by 173% last year. This information is further supported by DeBeers' recent finding that more women than ever before expect to receive diamonds on major holidays.
(Seriously, this information may or may not be true...but can we say "vested interest?")
To quote the article: most of the teams assumed that the world would be largely submerged in water
This certainly implies a change in the current state. The fact that more than two thirds of the planet is already covered in water isn't much of an assumption, is it? Particularly when the quote above (helpfully labelled point "a)") is immediately followed by point "b)", assuming that the atmosphere will be unbreathable.
So why don't you valet park your high horse, and at least pick legitimate nits.
Slashdot Mirror
The other thing that occurs to me, unfortunately, is that this will lead us even more down the path of trying to prevent crimes rather than punish them. It sounds like a good idea - I mean, isn't it better to stop the Bad Thing from even happening? The problem with it, of course, is that the only way to prevent crime is to actually curtail the abilities of people to do things that could be criminal. Fundamentally, it's a tradeoff of liberty for security.
I'm not exactly a wild-haired anarchist, and I do believe that some tradeoffs of that nature are necessary given the amount of damage ten dedicated people can inflict (to paraphrase a quote that went something like "the progress of history can be measured by how many people a group of ten dedicated men can kill"...but I don't remember who said it. Help with attribution would be appreciated), but we (by which I mean the so-called first world) keep moving in only one direction: more security, less liberty. It's a cultural decision which is based on events like plane hijackings, car bombs and assasinations, but results in policies like the DMCA and the CBDTPA.
The article certainly comes across as a justification for engaging in yet more crime prevention. At some point, I can only hope that we turn around and realize that we can't prevent Bad Things from happening, so we're better off allowing liberty and punishing criminals than eliminating liberty and making criminals out of everyone.
It's too bad Duke Nukem Forever is coming out before either, or it could fit on just one of these discs.
Watching The Ring, for example, on a 27" TV in a never-really-dark living room wouldn't have been even close to as terrifying as it was in the theater. Movies like The Matrix and Fellowship Of the Ring also gain something from being experienced in a theater as opposed to at home.
I don't know the size of a 3" CD off the top of my head
You know, I understand exactly what you meant, but do you realize how funny this read on my first pass?
Then I went to buy liquor with my perfectly valid driver's license that just looked expired, and was turned down because it wasn't adequate proof that I was of legal age.
I'm pretty sure that if Sentry employees don't accept expired licenses, airline employees in our current paranoid era won't either.
I wish I could remember better what they were called.
Google to the rescue: HAL "hypercomputers"
Much like the internet itself: without government funding, the internet would never have happened. All the profits that are made off its existence now are based on services that couldn't even be conceived of until the medium to support them existed.
I am, in general, against government handouts of any kind. This is one, however, that's in the interests of the public good. Hopefully, the money spent on assisting analog-to-digital upgrades (digital-to-analog downgrades, depending on your POV) could be recouped by selling off the spectrum freed up by shutting off analog TV broadcasts.
To free up bandwidth. Analog TV is a bandwidth hog in comparison to digital signals. We could cram a huge number of other services in the spectrum occupied by analog television broadcasts today.
Record labels, on the other hand, look back at Pearl Jam, U2, the Dead, the Beatles, Elvis, the Andrews Sisters & so forth, and know that if they're successful, those works may well still be in demand in a century.
Please don't read this as a defense of copyright or the RIAA - I'm against any form of copyright except attribution, frankly - but the fact remains that it's much easier for a company like O'Reilly to try and buy goodwill with a founder's copyright than it is for BMG.
I have a hard time believing that you can honestly look at your OS of choice and claim that there have been no innovative changes in it since 1994.
Does it still provide the same basic functions? Sure; file handling, I/O, disk writing and the like are still what the OS does. But by the same token, transportation without personal labor is what the car does...just like the horse and buggy did.
I don't think anyone who uses computers on an even vaguely regular basis can honestly look at them and say that the state of software hasn't changed in the last 10 years. Sure, you can claim that much of that is due to hardware improvements, and that's true. But making software that couldn't exist before because the hardware didn't exist is also innovation, otherwise we'd all still be running DOS 3, but at blazing speeds.
I suddenly feel validated. There are times I look around at reports of the newest viruses and worms and whatnot and wonder if I'm just cockeyed to be thoroughly unimpressed. I'm in a similar position as you seem to be - at 27, I remember when viruses were clever, and had to be to do any damage. These days, they're completely uninteresting.
To me, at least, there used to be a cachet attached to perpetrating a good virus. Not necessarily a positive one, or one worth pursuing; more the kind of dismayed admiration you feel for someone who pulls off a really slick bank heist. Now, though, when I hear about Code Red, or Sasser or Blaster or whatever else, I associate them with simple vandalism. Throwing bricks through windows, and that sort of thing.
It's nice to hear I'm not alone.
You're right. I don't know how I missed that one, in fact. I can't count the number of times I've struggled with the "friendly" interface to get it to do what I could have done in seconds with proper boolean logic.
Good call.
Partially, though, that's because the 65" TV is rear projection, and doesn't work with the DC's light gun, or I'd play...er...that one game...Confidential Mission, or some such...
If I did more travelling, I might have a use for it. But as it stands, I haven't been anywhere I haven't driven to in...oh, my...ten years?
Not to mention Doom III and HL2 (if it ever comes out).
I never knew in college how good I had it, with time to finish games as they came out, instead of continually falling further and further behind...
...you're probably right. Where's the registrar? I need to turn in my geek card. ;)
I am young, but I did have a couple LED-driven tabletop (is that the word? Mini-cabinets?) games. I forget what they were called...joystick on the left, one button on the right...one was a top-down shooter. Little space ship, shooting little lasers at oncoming little space ships...ah, those were the days. I forgot how much I loved those games.
I didn't count them as "handhelds," though, since they had wall warts. Or something like four C cells, IIRC.
Nowadays, these things are fantastically cool, and I love them, but man, do I not need another video game platform. Now I drive myself places. My only video game time is at home, where I've got a 65" TV, a PC, and six different consoles. I want a GBA, I'm sure I'll want the DS, but I know I'd never play them.
It's really kind of depressing.
I should also mention that this blurb caused me to go back and give them another chance despite them already being classified as "useless" in my head based on trying them out way back before I found Google. (Late nineties? Certainly before /. posted the "interview with Ask Jeeves" way back in the day...you know, the one with the bees...maybe I'll go ask Google to find that /. story, and then Ask Jeeves to find that /. story, and see which one gets me better results...maybe I'll also stretch this parenthetical out a bit longer...)
That's all there is to it. Based on this blurb, I went to look at Ask Jeeves, and see what they had to offer. Ran a search, clicked on a result - and they lost me when they kept control of a portion of my browser window so I could run another search.
I don't understand why so many companies don't understand such a simple concept: get off my back. Isn't Google's example clear enough for them? I like Google because it's fast and accurate, by and large. Because it's a simple page that loads quickly even if I'm somewhere on a dialup. It doesn't pop windows over or under my browser window. In short, Google acts like they want to help me, rather than like they want me to help them.
That's all there is to it. I can't think of a feature a search engine could add that would overcome Google's interface advantage. To get my clicks, another search engine would have to have an even more simple interface, and I see that being hard to accomplish.
Wait, I lied. If a search engine was able to somehow figure out what I mean conceptually rather than contextually, I would use it all the time...but since that would require an almost human level of language comprehension, I don't think I'll need to worry about switching any time soon. As it stands, AJ's "natural language" abilities were just "we won't tell you we ignored 'of' and 'the' in your search request."
;)
OOPS - I Almost forgot the obligatory ad hominem: stupid stratjakt garbage face.
(Seriously, this information may or may not be true...but can we say "vested interest?")
Er...yes, but what does that have to do with the decision to not vaccinate against TB, which is what the parent was talking about?
largely submerged in water
This certainly implies a change in the current state. The fact that more than two thirds of the planet is already covered in water isn't much of an assumption, is it? Particularly when the quote above (helpfully labelled point "a)") is immediately followed by point "b)", assuming that the atmosphere will be unbreathable.
So why don't you valet park your high horse, and at least pick legitimate nits.