Let's say that, suddenly, all home internet connections were magically transformed into Gbps pipes (I'm assuming that's enough for HDTV; I don't actually know that, but it's irrelevant to my point, anyway).
How would that force slashdot to stop providing free (or at least, ad-supported) content? Or, if we don't consider slashdot to be a content producer, how would that force the hojillion bloggers out there to stop providing free (and you get what you pay for) content?
I don't get the leap you're making between high speed home connections and suddenly expensive content.
Which is why we'd want to have the people live there for almost two years. Which also happens to be the time between ideal orbital alignments for least-time transits between Earth and Mars.
I'm with you on hoping the SCOTUS hears the case - if certain justices are as constructionist as they claim to be, it should be open-and-shut. The best result, of course, would be to finally incorporate the second under the fourteenth, though I sincerely doubt that's going to happen.
Your comments about/. bias are spot on. Also, your comments about Kelo are spot on./. also didn't report on government seizures of legal firearms after hurricane Katrina, nor does it often point out what a gross overreach of SCOTUS authority Roe v Wade represents.
However: the fact that/. did not comment on one bad event does not mean that when they do comment on another bad event, that second event isn't bad.
It's indicative of bias, yes. But, irrespective of/. bias, the particular executive order in question is a travesty.
If you read the order, you'll find that it specifically applies only to people who have committed or pose a significant risk of committing an act of violence, not just anyone who undermines efforts.
Now, it's plenty troubling to have the "might commit" aspect in there, but the order does specify that it's risk of violent action, not just risk of peaceful protest.
Not that I'm defending the EO, as my other comments on this post should make clear. But it doesn't say what the summary says it does.
Yes. Every person entitled to all the other rights of being a citizen of the US should.
Yes. Ditto the above.
No, and here's why: owning firearms is and should be legal. Threatening people with firearms - that is, aiming firearms at people - is and should be generally illegal, since it's an infringement on that person's liberty through exertion of force. Nuclear weapons have the property that they are always aimed at everyone within their blast radius. That is, nuclear weapons threaten everyone in range simply by existing, rather than by intent of the owner.
Strictly speaking, it should be legal to own nuclear weapons as long as they are kept in such a fashion that their detonation at any given instant will not have ill effects on anyone other than the owner - that is, as long as they are not used in a threatening manner. This turns out to be indistinguishable from a ban on private ownership of nuclear arms.
As a practical matter, though, it is valid until a court says otherwise, since the Dept. of the Treasury will treat it as valid, and so will your bank.
And as long as it's only used against legitimate threats, courts will be reluctant to declare it invalid, since that will also mean letting some scumbag off. And the more often it's wielded successfully, the more validity it accrues through precedent. Of course it is always possible, no matter how long this has gone on, for a court to strike it down on Constitutional grounds, but it becomes less likely.
For a real-world example of a very similar sequence of events, consider the court decisions from Miller to now regarding gun control. By the time you get to an outright ban on automatic weapons in the 80s, you've got a clear violation of the 2nd (whether you think that's a good idea or not is beside the point), based entirely on a chain of precedents going all the way back to Miller. It's arguable that Miller was, itself, bad case law. But it doesn't matter now, because it's been upheld as valid for so long.
I did read it. There are two parts that trouble me:
(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:
Emphasis mine. Which means you don't actually have to have done anything, they (and, by they, I mean three unelected officials) have to believe you might do something that they also believe might be intended to have a specific effect. And the effects they're talking about don't say anything about terrorists, just about undermining efforts in Iraq. Which means if you're at a war protest, and throw a brick through a window, not only are you guilty of vandalism, but you can also have your assets frozen because of it.
Or, if they think you're going to go to such a protest and probably throw a brick through a window, you can have your assets frozen because of it.
And then if someone else gives you money, that person's assets can be frozen:
(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the
receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
Also, 3(c) specifically notes that US citizens are subject to this order, and section 5 (which you didn't quote) specifically provides that, since due process would hamper the execution of this order, we won't bother with it:
Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets
instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.
And section 6 is even better, when it says that the Secretary of the Treasury can not only create rules and regulations in support of executing these powers, but can also delegate these powers to other government officers as he or she sees fit:
Sec. 6. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government, consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken.
Whether or not they intend this to set up some kind of Orwellian secret police force independently convicting people of thinking about violence is immaterial (I, personally, sincerely doubt that they do). The fact remains that it sets the stage for that happening, and I, personally, don't trust government not to overstep its bounds.
Hence the circumscriptions in the Constitution on what the government is allowed to do...one of which is being circumvented by this EO.
Or rather, the emphasis would have been mine if I hadn't just been posting over at ars and not mentally switched back to HTML.
That should have read:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, [b]nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law[/b]; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
(Emphasis mine, obviously)
Asset freezes and property blocking are deprivations of liberty and property.
You're right, insofar as he hasn't actually overturned the fifth.
However, the claim that this will/can only be used against foreign persons is inaccurate. Whatever their intent may be, Section 5 of the order specifically provides for cases where the person or entity in has a "Constitutional presence in the United States." Which includes US citizens. Nowhere in the order does it state it applies only to non-citizens.
I agree with you insofar as I'm sure their intent is simply to increase the efficiency of dealing with actual threats. But the effect is to circumvent - if not the letter, then the spirit - of the fifth amendment. At that point, trusting them to mean well is not very comforting.
any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,
(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:
"[T]o pose a significant risk of committing" is the particularly troublesome part. It's bad enough that we've got three unelected officials getting to determine if someone has committed a crime - thereby undermining the entire concept of due process in criminal trials. It is even worse to have those unelected officials getting to determine if you're going to commit a crime.
The bit later on in the document (Section 5) explaining that, in cases where the person is Constitutionally guaranteed due process (ie, is a citizen of the US), they do not need to be notified that their assets will be seized, because such notification makes seizing their assets harder. Which parses to: because due process is kind of a pain, we're not going to bother with it.
Do I think Bush is trying to become President For Life or some such? No. He's doing what he actually thinks is best. But that's not very comforting. The fact that they mean well is not enough to overcome the fact that they've granted themselves extraordinary, and unconstitutional, powers. The Constitution specifically doesn't say the limits on government are there unless you mean well and really, really want to circumvent them. It puts limits on government because abuse is inherent in power.
Alternatively, what we consider to be paradoxes could be a feature of our limited and flawed understanding of the universe. I don't consider it entirely unlikely that time isn't a "special" dimension, it's just like all the others. Causality may be a result of the fact that we remember the past and not the future, rather than a universal reality. If that's the case, then paradox goes away.
Not from our point of view, however, since - if we're limited to remembering the past and not the future - there can't be any time travel in the H.G. Wells sense. I suspect that any attempts to cause paradox through time travel will fail, not because they're impossible, but because we'll observe events in a way that appears to agree with causality.
In any event, if one considers the arrow of time to be a universal law, then you're right. If one considers the arrow of time to be a consequence of "consciousness" being a feature of increasing entropy, however, you're not necessarily right. Not that it will matter either way, of course.
If nothing else, you can't go back and change the past, because if you did, then you already did, and you don't need to.;)
Strictly speaking, he could have been referring to the Earth's rotation. Since you can always detect if you're in a rotational frame, that's motion that's real in a more absolute sense than linear motion.
Of course, an interesting thought experiment is to consider a universe consisting of exactly one particle...and then ask if that particle is spinning.
and if it uses only algae that would not otherwise have been grown, or at least would have otherwise been burnt
Only if you postulate immortal algae. Otherwise, the C is released back into the environment when the algae dies and rots (or is eaten by another higher-order creature then excreted), most likely as CO2. You're potentially accelerating the cycle, but you're going to have to increase algae growth to compensate for the acceleration, or you're going to run out of algae.
if there is no energy cost in processing the fuel
Or if that energy cost is paid in fuel derived from the algae, similar to the way the energy cost of oil processing is paid in petroleum products.
Basically, once you get past the startup costs to get the cycle going (which will have to be paid out of fossil fuels, basically, since there's little alternative), the whole thing becomes net carbon neutral.
Well, see, it turns out that combustible fuels are really nice from an energy-density standpoint. Liquid combustible fuels are particularly nice from a portability and distribution standpoin. And if you're planning on flying, pushing air backwards is the most efficient way to do it, since then you don't have to carry your own reaction mass as well as fuel. I suppose it wouldn't have to be hot, but jet engines have proven to be more efficient than props.
Moreover, there certainly are people looking to improve electricity storage to be used for transportation. Of course, you take a huge end-to-end efficiency hit for that (combustion -> electricity -> electricity storage -> kinetic energy versus combustion -> kinetic energy) unless we move to a non-combustion powered electrical grid, but people are working on it.
If you have suggestions for flight that don't involve moving air - or suggestions for equivalently-useful non-flight travel (particularly across oceans) - or even suggestions for feasible alternatives to combustion, by all means pursue them. There's a lot of money to be made.
Farscape's super-long story arcs meant you had to be watching from the start, or at least for a very long time, if you wanted to understand what was going on. I fear this doomed it in the end, as people weren't able to just channel surf and get into it.
Which made it perfect for release to DVD...if that had been done in a better (ie, cheaper) fashion. Not, of course, the Farscape was or is alone in charging prices that made it infeasible to buy an entire season.
Really, I think there's an untapped market segment there; not just for Farscape, but for certain kinds of TV shows in general. I think it might eventually be a successful business model to plan your show around only having a few episodes on television, solely as marketing for the DVD release of the full season.
I use the term "DVD release," but there's potential in a couple different places for a new model of on-demand viewing: Netflix' streaming rentals, for one. I could certainly see TiVo doing video push to STBs at some point. Cable already has pay-per-view and on-demand streaming infrastructures in place.
We're not there yet, but I think it could happen. How many people would have paid for more episodes of Firefly, for example?
Randomly select a different port each time you connect to the zombie. If you're really worried about users running netstat to check their open ports (and I suspect that zombied machines are more often owned by people who don't even know the CLI exists, much less who generally run network diagnostic tools via the CLI than not - and by a wide margin), then have it only open the port for ten minutes every hour. Windows, by default, updates its clock to NIST weekly, so you can be reasonably sure that your zombies are synced enough for that to work. Round-robin assign the ten minute window to the zombies (xx:00 - xx:09, xx:01 - xx:10, xx:02 - xx:11, etc). During that window, you use the zombie to host content, and you can push a listen port update. At any given time, most of your zombies are running on the same port (they have to be, or your victims can't connect to your content), but blocking that port will only be effective for however long you determine. How fast can ISPs identify a rogue port and block it?
If my experience with spam is any indication, the linked sites go down almost as fast as the spam comes in, but that's (apparently) not a problem for the spammers. So you rotate ports every two, three days.
And this is just the scheme I've come up with off the top of my head in less than a minute.
Come to think of it, you're already executing arbitrary code on the zombied machine. Have them determine when they can listen on their assigned port, with a minimum frequency and duration set, with a bias towards times the user isn't at the console. When the window opens, step one is to notify the mother ship that this machine is active.
There are probably holes in this scheme, but I don't see the problem as being intractable. I do see any effort to just block port 80 as being naive (at best). I don't think ISPs can respond fast enough to block a new port every couple days, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.
I am not a networking guru (IANANG, copyright 2007, me, all rights reserved), so I'd appreciate somebody setting me straight on this if necessary.
But I don't really see how blocking port 80 would be an effective way to fight this sort of thing. There's nothing special about port 80 aside from it being the default http port. Unless the victims are typing the URL into their address bar, I don't see any reason the mother ship couldn't have bots listen on another port. I mean, the machine is already owned, so it's not like opening up port 43783 is difficult. And I can't help believing that most - if not all - people going to these sites are clicking links, not typing addresses.
So you close off port 80, and anyone running a legit (well, probably not, given the TOS of most ISPs, but at least not a malicious) web server out of their house/apartment/dorm room can no longer easily direct people to it. Meanwhile, the malicious sites are slowed down by the amount of time it takes some jackass to change one constant in one piece of code.
Unless, of course, there's some other factor I'm unaware of making it more difficult to reach an http host over something other than port 80.
It's not that surprising. We've got the same deal, and we're a US-only company. Now, strictly speaking, I don't know whether that agreement is tied to being a Gold Partner or to our ESA, but we do have that agreement. Each employee is licensed for one copy on one machine of our currently-deployed version of MS Office (2003, in our case).
They do the same thing for MSDN subscribers - the software is made available for testing purposes only, except for MS Office. MSDN subscribers are licensed one copy on one machine of MS Office. Notably, they're not licensed any copies of any MS OS.
He can't be sure, I suppose, but it's a safe assumption - the article specifically indicates that the stresses from folding are what cause the higher energy density. If there's no folding involved, the implication is that the energy density isn't differentiated.
Of course, it's possible that it's poorly worded on their part or poorly interpreted on mine, and the differing energy densities are, in fact, a property of the shape rather than the process used to create it - but that's not the way I read it.
I suppose it could just be me, but it sure seems obvious what they're doing here. They're trying to acquire a patent defense against Google. Google's raking them over the coals about desktop search - and it's pretty clear how Google would go about making money off desktop search: targeted advertising.
So Microsoft is trying to get a defensive patent to prevent Google from leveraging the OS as an ad-serving mechanism. The proximate motive for this is, I believe, probably to use as ammo against Google in the current dispute, and certainly in the inevitable near- and mid-term disputes.
Which is not to say that MS itself won't implement a tech like this in some fashion at some point, but I'm in agreement with some other posters that it will be a free/cheap version of Windows. They're just not short-sighted enough to try and shovel this into the enterprise; it would be the end of Windows upgrades for business if they did.
I seem to remember ad supported internet, which didn't really go anywhere.
That depends on your definition of "go anywhere." NetZero the organization is still around, but NetZero the 100% ad-supported ISP model is no longer extant.
Slashdot Mirror
...I'm not sure I follow your logic.
Let's say that, suddenly, all home internet connections were magically transformed into Gbps pipes (I'm assuming that's enough for HDTV; I don't actually know that, but it's irrelevant to my point, anyway).
How would that force slashdot to stop providing free (or at least, ad-supported) content? Or, if we don't consider slashdot to be a content producer, how would that force the hojillion bloggers out there to stop providing free (and you get what you pay for) content?
I don't get the leap you're making between high speed home connections and suddenly expensive content.
Strictly speaking, I don't think a base on Deimos or Phobos would be "lunar."
Which is why we'd want to have the people live there for almost two years. Which also happens to be the time between ideal orbital alignments for least-time transits between Earth and Mars.
I'm with you on hoping the SCOTUS hears the case - if certain justices are as constructionist as they claim to be, it should be open-and-shut. The best result, of course, would be to finally incorporate the second under the fourteenth, though I sincerely doubt that's going to happen.
Yes.
Slashdot is being highly non-responsive. I can't conclude anything about the cause, but it is experientially slower. Traceroute and ping confirm this.
Your comments about /. bias are spot on. Also, your comments about Kelo are spot on. /. also didn't report on government seizures of legal firearms after hurricane Katrina, nor does it often point out what a gross overreach of SCOTUS authority Roe v Wade represents.
/. did not comment on one bad event does not mean that when they do comment on another bad event, that second event isn't bad.
/. bias, the particular executive order in question is a travesty.
However: the fact that
It's indicative of bias, yes. But, irrespective of
If you read the order, you'll find that it specifically applies only to people who have committed or pose a significant risk of committing an act of violence, not just anyone who undermines efforts.
Now, it's plenty troubling to have the "might commit" aspect in there, but the order does specify that it's risk of violent action, not just risk of peaceful protest.
Not that I'm defending the EO, as my other comments on this post should make clear. But it doesn't say what the summary says it does.
Yes. Every person entitled to all the other rights of being a citizen of the US should.
Yes. Ditto the above.
No, and here's why: owning firearms is and should be legal. Threatening people with firearms - that is, aiming firearms at people - is and should be generally illegal, since it's an infringement on that person's liberty through exertion of force. Nuclear weapons have the property that they are always aimed at everyone within their blast radius. That is, nuclear weapons threaten everyone in range simply by existing, rather than by intent of the owner.
Strictly speaking, it should be legal to own nuclear weapons as long as they are kept in such a fashion that their detonation at any given instant will not have ill effects on anyone other than the owner - that is, as long as they are not used in a threatening manner. This turns out to be indistinguishable from a ban on private ownership of nuclear arms.
As a practical matter, though, it is valid until a court says otherwise, since the Dept. of the Treasury will treat it as valid, and so will your bank.
And as long as it's only used against legitimate threats, courts will be reluctant to declare it invalid, since that will also mean letting some scumbag off. And the more often it's wielded successfully, the more validity it accrues through precedent. Of course it is always possible, no matter how long this has gone on, for a court to strike it down on Constitutional grounds, but it becomes less likely.
For a real-world example of a very similar sequence of events, consider the court decisions from Miller to now regarding gun control. By the time you get to an outright ban on automatic weapons in the 80s, you've got a clear violation of the 2nd (whether you think that's a good idea or not is beside the point), based entirely on a chain of precedents going all the way back to Miller. It's arguable that Miller was, itself, bad case law. But it doesn't matter now, because it's been upheld as valid for so long.
Emphasis mine. Which means you don't actually have to have done anything, they (and, by they, I mean three unelected officials) have to believe you might do something that they also believe might be intended to have a specific effect. And the effects they're talking about don't say anything about terrorists, just about undermining efforts in Iraq. Which means if you're at a war protest, and throw a brick through a window, not only are you guilty of vandalism, but you can also have your assets frozen because of it.
Or, if they think you're going to go to such a protest and probably throw a brick through a window, you can have your assets frozen because of it.
And then if someone else gives you money, that person's assets can be frozen:
Also, 3(c) specifically notes that US citizens are subject to this order, and section 5 (which you didn't quote) specifically provides that, since due process would hamper the execution of this order, we won't bother with it:
And section 6 is even better, when it says that the Secretary of the Treasury can not only create rules and regulations in support of executing these powers, but can also delegate these powers to other government officers as he or she sees fit:
Whether or not they intend this to set up some kind of Orwellian secret police force independently convicting people of thinking about violence is immaterial (I, personally, sincerely doubt that they do). The fact remains that it sets the stage for that happening, and I, personally, don't trust government not to overstep its bounds.
Hence the circumscriptions in the Constitution on what the government is allowed to do...one of which is being circumvented by this EO.
Or rather, the emphasis would have been mine if I hadn't just been posting over at ars and not mentally switched back to HTML.
That should have read:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment Five:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, [b]nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law[/b]; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
(Emphasis mine, obviously)
Asset freezes and property blocking are deprivations of liberty and property.
You're right, insofar as he hasn't actually overturned the fifth.
However, the claim that this will/can only be used against foreign persons is inaccurate. Whatever their intent may be, Section 5 of the order specifically provides for cases where the person or entity in has a "Constitutional presence in the United States." Which includes US citizens. Nowhere in the order does it state it applies only to non-citizens.
I agree with you insofar as I'm sure their intent is simply to increase the efficiency of dealing with actual threats. But the effect is to circumvent - if not the letter, then the spirit - of the fifth amendment. At that point, trusting them to mean well is not very comforting.
"[T]o pose a significant risk of committing" is the particularly troublesome part. It's bad enough that we've got three unelected officials getting to determine if someone has committed a crime - thereby undermining the entire concept of due process in criminal trials. It is even worse to have those unelected officials getting to determine if you're going to commit a crime.
The bit later on in the document (Section 5) explaining that, in cases where the person is Constitutionally guaranteed due process (ie, is a citizen of the US), they do not need to be notified that their assets will be seized, because such notification makes seizing their assets harder. Which parses to: because due process is kind of a pain, we're not going to bother with it.
Do I think Bush is trying to become President For Life or some such? No. He's doing what he actually thinks is best. But that's not very comforting. The fact that they mean well is not enough to overcome the fact that they've granted themselves extraordinary, and unconstitutional, powers. The Constitution specifically doesn't say the limits on government are there unless you mean well and really, really want to circumvent them. It puts limits on government because abuse is inherent in power.
Alternatively, what we consider to be paradoxes could be a feature of our limited and flawed understanding of the universe. I don't consider it entirely unlikely that time isn't a "special" dimension, it's just like all the others. Causality may be a result of the fact that we remember the past and not the future, rather than a universal reality. If that's the case, then paradox goes away.
;)
Not from our point of view, however, since - if we're limited to remembering the past and not the future - there can't be any time travel in the H.G. Wells sense. I suspect that any attempts to cause paradox through time travel will fail, not because they're impossible, but because we'll observe events in a way that appears to agree with causality.
In any event, if one considers the arrow of time to be a universal law, then you're right. If one considers the arrow of time to be a consequence of "consciousness" being a feature of increasing entropy, however, you're not necessarily right. Not that it will matter either way, of course.
If nothing else, you can't go back and change the past, because if you did, then you already did, and you don't need to.
Strictly speaking, he could have been referring to the Earth's rotation. Since you can always detect if you're in a rotational frame, that's motion that's real in a more absolute sense than linear motion.
Of course, an interesting thought experiment is to consider a universe consisting of exactly one particle...and then ask if that particle is spinning.
and if it uses only algae that would not otherwise have been grown, or at least would have otherwise been burnt
Only if you postulate immortal algae. Otherwise, the C is released back into the environment when the algae dies and rots (or is eaten by another higher-order creature then excreted), most likely as CO2. You're potentially accelerating the cycle, but you're going to have to increase algae growth to compensate for the acceleration, or you're going to run out of algae.
if there is no energy cost in processing the fuel
Or if that energy cost is paid in fuel derived from the algae, similar to the way the energy cost of oil processing is paid in petroleum products.
Basically, once you get past the startup costs to get the cycle going (which will have to be paid out of fossil fuels, basically, since there's little alternative), the whole thing becomes net carbon neutral.
Well, see, it turns out that combustible fuels are really nice from an energy-density standpoint. Liquid combustible fuels are particularly nice from a portability and distribution standpoin. And if you're planning on flying, pushing air backwards is the most efficient way to do it, since then you don't have to carry your own reaction mass as well as fuel. I suppose it wouldn't have to be hot, but jet engines have proven to be more efficient than props.
Moreover, there certainly are people looking to improve electricity storage to be used for transportation. Of course, you take a huge end-to-end efficiency hit for that (combustion -> electricity -> electricity storage -> kinetic energy versus combustion -> kinetic energy) unless we move to a non-combustion powered electrical grid, but people are working on it.
If you have suggestions for flight that don't involve moving air - or suggestions for equivalently-useful non-flight travel (particularly across oceans) - or even suggestions for feasible alternatives to combustion, by all means pursue them. There's a lot of money to be made.
Farscape's super-long story arcs meant you had to be watching from the start, or at least for a very long time, if you wanted to understand what was going on. I fear this doomed it in the end, as people weren't able to just channel surf and get into it.
Which made it perfect for release to DVD...if that had been done in a better (ie, cheaper) fashion. Not, of course, the Farscape was or is alone in charging prices that made it infeasible to buy an entire season.
Really, I think there's an untapped market segment there; not just for Farscape, but for certain kinds of TV shows in general. I think it might eventually be a successful business model to plan your show around only having a few episodes on television, solely as marketing for the DVD release of the full season.
I use the term "DVD release," but there's potential in a couple different places for a new model of on-demand viewing: Netflix' streaming rentals, for one. I could certainly see TiVo doing video push to STBs at some point. Cable already has pay-per-view and on-demand streaming infrastructures in place.
We're not there yet, but I think it could happen. How many people would have paid for more episodes of Firefly, for example?
*shrug*
Randomly select a different port each time you connect to the zombie. If you're really worried about users running netstat to check their open ports (and I suspect that zombied machines are more often owned by people who don't even know the CLI exists, much less who generally run network diagnostic tools via the CLI than not - and by a wide margin), then have it only open the port for ten minutes every hour. Windows, by default, updates its clock to NIST weekly, so you can be reasonably sure that your zombies are synced enough for that to work. Round-robin assign the ten minute window to the zombies (xx:00 - xx:09, xx:01 - xx:10, xx:02 - xx:11, etc). During that window, you use the zombie to host content, and you can push a listen port update. At any given time, most of your zombies are running on the same port (they have to be, or your victims can't connect to your content), but blocking that port will only be effective for however long you determine. How fast can ISPs identify a rogue port and block it?
If my experience with spam is any indication, the linked sites go down almost as fast as the spam comes in, but that's (apparently) not a problem for the spammers. So you rotate ports every two, three days.
And this is just the scheme I've come up with off the top of my head in less than a minute.
Come to think of it, you're already executing arbitrary code on the zombied machine. Have them determine when they can listen on their assigned port, with a minimum frequency and duration set, with a bias towards times the user isn't at the console. When the window opens, step one is to notify the mother ship that this machine is active.
There are probably holes in this scheme, but I don't see the problem as being intractable. I do see any effort to just block port 80 as being naive (at best). I don't think ISPs can respond fast enough to block a new port every couple days, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.
I am not a networking guru (IANANG, copyright 2007, me, all rights reserved), so I'd appreciate somebody setting me straight on this if necessary.
But I don't really see how blocking port 80 would be an effective way to fight this sort of thing. There's nothing special about port 80 aside from it being the default http port. Unless the victims are typing the URL into their address bar, I don't see any reason the mother ship couldn't have bots listen on another port. I mean, the machine is already owned, so it's not like opening up port 43783 is difficult. And I can't help believing that most - if not all - people going to these sites are clicking links, not typing addresses.
So you close off port 80, and anyone running a legit (well, probably not, given the TOS of most ISPs, but at least not a malicious) web server out of their house/apartment/dorm room can no longer easily direct people to it. Meanwhile, the malicious sites are slowed down by the amount of time it takes some jackass to change one constant in one piece of code.
Unless, of course, there's some other factor I'm unaware of making it more difficult to reach an http host over something other than port 80.
It's not that surprising. We've got the same deal, and we're a US-only company. Now, strictly speaking, I don't know whether that agreement is tied to being a Gold Partner or to our ESA, but we do have that agreement. Each employee is licensed for one copy on one machine of our currently-deployed version of MS Office (2003, in our case).
They do the same thing for MSDN subscribers - the software is made available for testing purposes only, except for MS Office. MSDN subscribers are licensed one copy on one machine of MS Office. Notably, they're not licensed any copies of any MS OS.
He can't be sure, I suppose, but it's a safe assumption - the article specifically indicates that the stresses from folding are what cause the higher energy density. If there's no folding involved, the implication is that the energy density isn't differentiated.
Of course, it's possible that it's poorly worded on their part or poorly interpreted on mine, and the differing energy densities are, in fact, a property of the shape rather than the process used to create it - but that's not the way I read it.
I suppose it could just be me, but it sure seems obvious what they're doing here. They're trying to acquire a patent defense against Google. Google's raking them over the coals about desktop search - and it's pretty clear how Google would go about making money off desktop search: targeted advertising.
So Microsoft is trying to get a defensive patent to prevent Google from leveraging the OS as an ad-serving mechanism. The proximate motive for this is, I believe, probably to use as ammo against Google in the current dispute, and certainly in the inevitable near- and mid-term disputes.
Which is not to say that MS itself won't implement a tech like this in some fashion at some point, but I'm in agreement with some other posters that it will be a free/cheap version of Windows. They're just not short-sighted enough to try and shovel this into the enterprise; it would be the end of Windows upgrades for business if they did.
I seem to remember ad supported internet, which didn't really go anywhere.
That depends on your definition of "go anywhere." NetZero the organization is still around, but NetZero the 100% ad-supported ISP model is no longer extant.