I think someone watches too many Hollywood movies.
You can't stop a bully by force. Consider: 1. He's probably got mates to gang you afterwards 2. A punch can be fatal, nevermind being up on charges for it 3. What if he's got a knife/keys/sharp pencil and gets creative.
This isn't the Marvel Universe. Adults need to get more involved in how kids behave toward each other. If they don't, kids are fucked. Life nowadays is mostly better than 50 yrs ago, but somewhere along the line kids stopped respecting adults. There are a lot of reasons for that besides parenting.
But we have a situation where now it's considered child abuse to spank your own child. What, do we really think antisocial kids are going to listen to a talk about ethics and suddenly go, "oh my god, how misguided I was!"?
I love the hypocrisy. Don't spank the kid for the sake of discipline, rather buy into revenge culture and hope another kid beats him up. Wonderful alternative there.
That logic may apply right now, but think of the future where many more people are tech-savvy and know about the various methods of getting movies, bandwidth is cheaper and network speed is faster.
Somewhere on the timeline there will be a cut-off point, where the argument of "pirates buy stuff" or even "pirates don't affect anything" doesn't apply anymore.
Look at like that, I can see why they feel the need to do something now, to stop *those* floodgates opening.
The bacteria in yoghurt doesn't do anything for yeast infections or to improve "vaginal flora". It may, however, feel soothing, and is not harmful if you use *plain*, natural yoghurt.
I wouldn't mind at all paying the BBC (I live outside the UK) up to $50/year for access.
Why? Because I respect them, and they have tons of content all over their site I often want to view. In other words, they offer good journalism and content, unlike Murdoch and other newspapers where I only ever would read one article now and then, and only because it was linked to from an oft-used aggregate site like/.
However, like others have said, if I had to pay *more than one* subscription, suddenly it's too expensive. So this whole plan fails from the start, unless perhaps it's like $5 per year per site, then I can subscribe to a handful.
Thing is, Murdoch complains that the BBC's out there are ruining his business model, but they were *already there* when he started his online business. That was always the landscape and he knew it. He's a nasty hypocrite and he can go choke on it.
Murdoch always knew he was competing with Free. Maybe he's just not as smart as Google, Facebook, etc. who have managed to make money out of Free. If Murdoch is competing for the advertising dollar, then maybe he's competing more with THEM than with the BBCs of the world. Not because Google "steals news", but because they're stealing his *advertising clients*.
Online newspapers can't deliver targeted ads based even on reader demographics, let alone buying habits, browsing habits, email & feed keywords of them and their social circle, etc. So who are *advertisers* going to go for? Google & Facebook or traditional no-specific-audience newspaper sites?
The concept of biometrics? Don't most notebooks nowadays have a fingerprint scanner? Why aren't the banks (or any such site) using that? It's such a common thing now, at least for laptops. It should at least be an option. I don't mean the provided PC s/ware which manages your passwords, I mean something like a Flash(?) app which communicates your swipe directly to the site.
Or did biometrics become redundant since the swipe data can still be phished anyway? So for Web stuff it's really no more protection than a typed password?
Given that browsers, or your email client, is only "vulnerable" when the user opens something they shouldn't (in the case of email) or browses to a malicious site, why don't they just friggin tell people that? Tell them to BE CAREFUL and what to watch out for, ie. *educate them* instead of "omg Windows/Linux has a security hole, quick turn your PC off now!"
Then again, point me to a government that doesn't treat their citizens like idiots and would prefer them to be so.
"If there's going to be another Bill Gates," says former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, "Mark is as close as anyone."
Of course the Harvard president would say that. Mark only made FB. Gates made a tad more. Mark used existing tech to make what - a web app. Wow. Any team of coders can do that. Gates, along with others, helped create the foundation for all these things.
What about the next Gates being someone from Google, since they make real product that help people do a whole lot more that Mark's fancy web site. The next Gates my ass.
Well, as H.L. Mencken once said - the purist form of democracy is the lynch mob.
Well, he was wrong. Since when did a lynch mob represent the opinions and decisions of the majority? I'll wager, in most cases, the vast majority of people would not want done what lynch mobs do, whether at the time or in retrospect.
Having said that, "pure democracy" doesn't work well in a society, because the vast majority of people are self-interested and ill-informed.
Well, if time is the 4th dimension, then, taking the hypercube example, a 3D cube is the "shadow" of the 4-dimensional hypercube. How can "time" cast a shadow? And you'd still have to, in 4 or 5 or however many dimensions, measure "rate of change" of those objects, which leaves you with time as a separate thing altogether.
What exactly is the "physics of time" if not the physics of "observation of change, the rate of which being measured against observations of other changes"?
That is to say, we conceptualise time as "rate of change". But the only way to measure how quickly something is changing or moving, is to compare it with something else which is changing. IMO there's no such thing as "measuring time", only change in relation other change - chemical changes in the brain relate to sensation of time.
The most experientially direct form of time is memory. We measure time by how it feels - yesterday has a different feeling to last week. Why? Perhaps our concept of time is something to do with memory access, but I'm sure we'll find out eventually. A dream is like wading through a memory - a visualisation - but it has the tag of "now". Memories have tags that "feel old". There's probably a mechanism for that in the brain.
So is there any real reason we can say time is an actual property of the universe, external to us?
Time is not the "4th dimension" - that's a completely arbitrary and illogical statement. May as well say "thought" is the fourth dimension. Time is not "sideways to" the 3 dimensions of space.
Time is not necessarily a property of the universe at all. All we can directly measure is CHANGE. We cannot directly measure TIME, however we do measure change *as a function of something*. That sometime is, basically, other changes. That is to say, our perception of what we call "time" is just our brains comparing one set of changes with another.
Time is something that we, as humans, agree on. If we did not all have some kind of common "ticker" in the brain, which measures a beat we all have in common, the effect would be that we would not agree with each other on how fast time is going.
Time is relative in a much more encompassing way than Einstein meant (I won't say more "subtle" or "profound", that's silly talk). Drugs can change our perception of time, yet we say, "no - time is more or less constant". But that's only because the vast majority of us run at the same "speed". Whatever changes in the brain allow us to measure time, it's the same for all of us most of the.. er, time. So to speak.
There is no time. There is only change. You might say there can be no "change" without time - something to measure change against. So I say time is all about *perception*. If we had no memory at all, we would not be able to experience time. Time is the experience of change in relation to what our brains said was the state of things a second ago.
So I think Adams was right, and time is an illusion, in the most timeless sense.
I'm a successful programmer, but have always had math anxiety. Don't ask me to split the restaurant bill or work out the change at the supermarket. But I've always been great with algebra - symbols, equations, love em. Numbers, can't do em. Maybe it's money anxiety.:)
I think it stems back to school - having to stand up in class and answer math questions. I found it very awkward and stressful doing that, and the feeling returns when I'm put on the spot to answer a math question. I think everyone has areas of confidence and areas of self-doubt which affects their abilities.
Perhaps it comes down to that trite saying - believe in yourself and you will succeed! In this case, it probably applies. The fact I don't believe I'll be right makes me fail. Yoda would not be pleased.
[quote]Through the magic of a priori reasoning, I know that you cannot be harmed merely because you're not getting what you are not entitled.[/quote] Ironic, as this is the reason people use for pirating some games: "They're using draconian DRM, it's not fair to me, so I'll go pirate/crack this game, because I should be able to play it without following their rules."
This may say more about my state of mind than anything, but I think - perhaps - it's a calculated decision to actually *increase* the amount of piracy going on. If a game company can point to rampant piracy, as in it's not a fringe thing anymore, and it's demonstrably affecting sales (even if they practically force people to do it) then they win.
They win because piracy will become more of a legislative issue, it will get more press, it will be like, "even previously law-abiding citizens are doing it now".
It's funny how gamers say, "hell, I'm not buying this, it's unfair, so I'm going to pirate it instead" and think that's a perfectly valid response. As some kind of revenge, they won't just not buy the game, they'll do something illegal. That's what they're saying all over the net because of this, and my guess is that's exactly what companies like Ubisoft want. It's helping them no end to lobby government for legislative changes we will enjoy a lot less than their games.
As an aside, I also wonder if software companies get tax breaks for "lost sales" due to piracy? Regardless of the high probability that most people who pirate a game weren't going to buy it in the first place. Though that may be less probable soon.
Children SHOULD NOT BE USING the Internet. Computers of course, as long as they exercise too, but Internet no. Children should be socialising IRL not chatting to each other online. Children should be learning things about the real world, having difficult ideas explained, not being fed schoolyard opinions at home as well as at school. Children's peers should not be as important as their (hopefully positive) adult role models (hopefully their parents). Children should find joy and imagination in nature, books, art and music, not the Internet. Sure those things can be found on the net - if you're looking for it. But mainly no.
Take a walk down a busy street with your kid - by the time you get home, s/he will probably have questions that you're glad you can explain in person. The Internet is NOT FOR KIDS, period. Just the chat on most game servers is not for kids.
That position will sound extreme, but as long as I can do an image search on google for "breasts" and get this,..
uh.. so like I was saying.. extreme position.. What?
That's an excellent point which should have at least been mentioned in such a "controversial" study. I personally think we're going to continue this sad argument, as a species, until Google starts to index all users' neural pathways and we can sort this out once and for all.
So, terrorism-related sites, discussion groups, etc. get taken "off the internet" (I assume they mean filtered from public access in Britain). This basically results in that information being accessible only to government authorities, but not to the public. I assume the authorities still want access to those sites, as they might give clues about planned attacks, etc.
We've already been drawn into war based on "secret information" which turned out to be false. This seems like just another opportunity for abuse of public trust and stifling public scrutiny of government decision-making.
I'm not talking about Joe Bloggs needing to know what terrorist and propaganda sites are out there, but certain people do. Journalists, academics, etc. Those important parts of public society that help us keep an eye on those we put in office. The power is ours, not the government's - we pay their salaries, they work for us. Yet they fail us on so many levels, and need to be constantly held to account.
Who is going to play that role, if the information is not there any more?
This is only a UK filter, so the sites are still "on the internet", but the principle should be raised.
I love PHP when I need to throw something together fast (like today) but don't expect a lot of heavy use. I love PHP when I want to get some handy tools that I can easily hack into doing what I really want. Still, when I have a significant project, and server load starts to matter, I loathe trying to use PHP and would usually rather write it as...
Why is classic ASP / ASP(VB).NET never mentioned in this context? Surely, like PHP, VB(script or.NET) is just as quick and easy (or more so) and, like PHP, not suitable for time-critical processes.
Yet not a squeak about ASP/VB, as if good old BASIC doesn't exist!
Call this the Over 40's Relationship Theory of First Contact. In this theory, the term "advanced civilisation" refers to one which is over the self-important, self-destructive, self-unaware phase, having achieved relative peace, equity and opportunity for all its citizens.
Would such a civilisation bother responding to radio waves from a world such as ours? I imagine their response would be: sure, you can go all night, but the conversation sucks. No, I imagine they'd bookmark us for later, and keep on looking.
For one thing is certain - if there's more than one intelligent species out there, there will be many more. So what's so special about us, in this point in our history, if any species out there is advanced enough to directly contact us?
Avatar has just grossed US$1B, helped along mightily by the more expensive tickets of the 3D release.
Oh well, there goes that revenue stream for the movie industry. I had assumed 3D their brainchild way out of all the "lost profits" from piracy. Soon 3D will be nothing special and nobody will want to pay extra for the tickets. At least the boost in grosses may have eased their foul whining about piracy for a while.
Of course I'm in Australia, where a 3D movie ticket is $20. My impression is that's a bit more than other countries.
Personally I really enjoyed the *subtle* 3D visuals of Avatar.. like doing a "fern-dolly" through the forest, with all the beautiful greenery coming out at me.. that was nice! Apart from that, 3D just distracts me from the *story*. I don't need 3D fonts or even coloured lettering to profoundly appreciate a good book. That would distract me from relaxing and absorbing what I'm reading. Same with movies, unless of course you're James Cameron and story isn't a factor.
The live-action scenes looked terrible.. actors looked like cardboard cut-outs against the 3D background. Perhaps the combination of live action on 3D CGI is yet to be fine-tuned.. but it was quite jarring for me. It may be the last 3D movie I ever see, at least until 3D becomes part of the *art* of movie making instead of a distracting gimmick. But points to Cameron for being relatively subtle with it.
I've since seen it again, from a 1.4GB avi file on my not-quite-wide-enough TV. Strangely, I enjoyed it just as much - brainless and disappointing climax/ending notwithstanding. James Cameron is an artist of detail, immersion and lead-up, but that doesn't make up his inability to write a story that has meaning. But then he's a movie-maker, not an author. The inspiration behind Avatar cried out for a real story to go along with it, but we got stereotypes and robot exoskeletons again. Epic yet empty, at best vainglorious, climactic confrontation.. again.
Such an evocative, immersive, even emotive journey, beautifully set up... just to take us *there* again?
I really loved the lead-up, all of us had tears and excited grins. Zoe Saldana was incredible, truly leading us into another realm. That's why I truly hate the let-down so much. The going-nowhere story. It could have had real meaning and been so much more.
I hear a lot about climate change on science programs - good ones, like the BBC or ABC radio here in Australia, not the daft Discovery Channel. I hear a lot of perspectives on facets of climate change - the various things contributing to it (both natural and artificial) and the various ways it will (and is) affect animals, plants, oceans, atmosphere, insects, migration patterns, human life, etc.
I liken life on this planet to moss clinging to a rock. "The Earth" isn't the issue - "The Earth" doesn't give a shit about the thin, wispy film of vapour and ooze that, thanks to a noisome magnetic field, hasn't yet been cleaned away by the purifying rays of solar wind.
And here we reside, for now, clucking proudly at our own existence. Point being, minute changes - of only a few degrees on average - in this vast and complex system we call "the environment" can have catastrophic effects. Point being, it's happened before, will again, and we should not take our to-date comfortable lives for granted. Point being, by talking about "fiddling" with the climate, we're playing with the only card we have.
So, to me anyway, the only clear, rational course of action is not to come up with crazy schemes to "manage" our environment. That way lies ruin and regret. The only rational course I see is to do our absolute, utter best to get the climate back to what it was - in terms of CO2 content, etc. - at pre-industrial times.
That will be our "control" environment, if you like. If the Earth still keeps warming, or cooling or turning a nice shade of purple, well then, who could argue it's not a natural phase. The bickering goes away (hopefully). But in the meantime, climate changes we are seeing are *statistically relevant* and we have *little time* to play with.
There are two roads. One, keep going as we are and hope to hell that technology will give us comfortable lives, no matter how much coastline, habitat, species and weather predictability are lost. Second road: Return the atmosphere to its pre-industrial condition and hope to hell that prevents more climate change.
Both clear and logical courses, though neither have guaranteed success. But I imagine it will be *much easier* to protect people from economic fallout from making the necessary changes, that will be protecting them from climatic fallout.
The economy has always been a tool, a figment of our imagination. Perhaps it's time to grow up as a species, put down our toys and start *thinking like a species*. That's my humble, dumb-ass, non-scientific, observer's take.
Slashdot Mirror
I think someone watches too many Hollywood movies.
You can't stop a bully by force. Consider:
1. He's probably got mates to gang you afterwards
2. A punch can be fatal, nevermind being up on charges for it
3. What if he's got a knife/keys/sharp pencil and gets creative.
This isn't the Marvel Universe. Adults need to get more involved in how kids behave toward each other. If they don't, kids are fucked. Life nowadays is mostly better than 50 yrs ago, but somewhere along the line kids stopped respecting adults. There are a lot of reasons for that besides parenting.
But we have a situation where now it's considered child abuse to spank your own child. What, do we really think antisocial kids are going to listen to a talk about ethics and suddenly go, "oh my god, how misguided I was!"?
I love the hypocrisy. Don't spank the kid for the sake of discipline, rather buy into revenge culture and hope another kid beats him up. Wonderful alternative there.
That logic may apply right now, but think of the future where many more people are tech-savvy and know about the various methods of getting movies, bandwidth is cheaper and network speed is faster.
Somewhere on the timeline there will be a cut-off point, where the argument of "pirates buy stuff" or even "pirates don't affect anything" doesn't apply anymore.
Look at like that, I can see why they feel the need to do something now, to stop *those* floodgates opening.
The bacteria in yoghurt doesn't do anything for yeast infections or to improve "vaginal flora". It may, however, feel soothing, and is not harmful if you use *plain*, natural yoghurt.
http://www.abc.net.au/health/talkinghealth/factbuster/stories/2008/10/14/2379507.htm
We should get MythBusters onto this. Particularly Kari.
I wouldn't mind at all paying the BBC (I live outside the UK) up to $50/year for access.
Why? Because I respect them, and they have tons of content all over their site I often want to view. In other words, they offer good journalism and content, unlike Murdoch and other newspapers where I only ever would read one article now and then, and only because it was linked to from an oft-used aggregate site like /.
However, like others have said, if I had to pay *more than one* subscription, suddenly it's too expensive. So this whole plan fails from the start, unless perhaps it's like $5 per year per site, then I can subscribe to a handful.
Thing is, Murdoch complains that the BBC's out there are ruining his business model, but they were *already there* when he started his online business. That was always the landscape and he knew it. He's a nasty hypocrite and he can go choke on it.
Murdoch always knew he was competing with Free. Maybe he's just not as smart as Google, Facebook, etc. who have managed to make money out of Free. If Murdoch is competing for the advertising dollar, then maybe he's competing more with THEM than with the BBCs of the world. Not because Google "steals news", but because they're stealing his *advertising clients*.
Online newspapers can't deliver targeted ads based even on reader demographics, let alone buying habits, browsing habits, email & feed keywords of them and their social circle, etc. So who are *advertisers* going to go for? Google & Facebook or traditional no-specific-audience newspaper sites?
The concept of biometrics? Don't most notebooks nowadays have a fingerprint scanner? Why aren't the banks (or any such site) using that? It's such a common thing now, at least for laptops. It should at least be an option. I don't mean the provided PC s/ware which manages your passwords, I mean something like a Flash(?) app which communicates your swipe directly to the site.
Or did biometrics become redundant since the swipe data can still be phished anyway? So for Web stuff it's really no more protection than a typed password?
why hasn't Stephen Hawking been using it?
Surely he'd be the best advertising for them?
Mainly from just using it, of course, not from what he says with it.
Given that browsers, or your email client, is only "vulnerable" when the user opens something they shouldn't (in the case of email) or browses to a malicious site, why don't they just friggin tell people that? Tell them to BE CAREFUL and what to watch out for, ie. *educate them* instead of "omg Windows/Linux has a security hole, quick turn your PC off now!"
Then again, point me to a government that doesn't treat their citizens like idiots and would prefer them to be so.
Apple could get them on provocation.
Wonder where the device was made?
The Chinese really seem to be into this backdoor stuff. rowwr.
From that page:
"If there's going to be another Bill Gates," says former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, "Mark is as close as anyone."
Of course the Harvard president would say that. Mark only made FB. Gates made a tad more. Mark used existing tech to make what - a web app. Wow. Any team of coders can do that. Gates, along with others, helped create the foundation for all these things.
What about the next Gates being someone from Google, since they make real product that help people do a whole lot more that Mark's fancy web site. The next Gates my ass.
Well, as H.L. Mencken once said - the purist form of democracy is the lynch mob.
Well, he was wrong. Since when did a lynch mob represent the opinions and decisions of the majority? I'll wager, in most cases, the vast majority of people would not want done what lynch mobs do, whether at the time or in retrospect.
Having said that, "pure democracy" doesn't work well in a society, because the vast majority of people are self-interested and ill-informed.
Well, if time is the 4th dimension, then, taking the hypercube example, a 3D cube is the "shadow" of the 4-dimensional hypercube. How can "time" cast a shadow? And you'd still have to, in 4 or 5 or however many dimensions, measure "rate of change" of those objects, which leaves you with time as a separate thing altogether.
What exactly is the "physics of time" if not the physics of "observation of change, the rate of which being measured against observations of other changes"?
That is to say, we conceptualise time as "rate of change". But the only way to measure how quickly something is changing or moving, is to compare it with something else which is changing. IMO there's no such thing as "measuring time", only change in relation other change - chemical changes in the brain relate to sensation of time.
An interesting read about time-challenged patients. :)
http://www.unisci.com/stories/20011/0227013.htm
The most experientially direct form of time is memory. We measure time by how it feels - yesterday has a different feeling to last week. Why? Perhaps our concept of time is something to do with memory access, but I'm sure we'll find out eventually. A dream is like wading through a memory - a visualisation - but it has the tag of "now". Memories have tags that "feel old". There's probably a mechanism for that in the brain.
So is there any real reason we can say time is an actual property of the universe, external to us?
Time is not the "4th dimension" - that's a completely arbitrary and illogical statement. May as well say "thought" is the fourth dimension. Time is not "sideways to" the 3 dimensions of space.
Time is not necessarily a property of the universe at all. All we can directly measure is CHANGE. We cannot directly measure TIME, however we do measure change *as a function of something*. That sometime is, basically, other changes. That is to say, our perception of what we call "time" is just our brains comparing one set of changes with another.
Time is something that we, as humans, agree on. If we did not all have some kind of common "ticker" in the brain, which measures a beat we all have in common, the effect would be that we would not agree with each other on how fast time is going.
Time is relative in a much more encompassing way than Einstein meant (I won't say more "subtle" or "profound", that's silly talk). Drugs can change our perception of time, yet we say, "no - time is more or less constant". But that's only because the vast majority of us run at the same "speed". Whatever changes in the brain allow us to measure time, it's the same for all of us most of the.. er, time. So to speak.
There is no time. There is only change. You might say there can be no "change" without time - something to measure change against. So I say time is all about *perception*. If we had no memory at all, we would not be able to experience time. Time is the experience of change in relation to what our brains said was the state of things a second ago.
So I think Adams was right, and time is an illusion, in the most timeless sense.
I'm a successful programmer, but have always had math anxiety. Don't ask me to split the restaurant bill or work out the change at the supermarket. But I've always been great with algebra - symbols, equations, love em. Numbers, can't do em. Maybe it's money anxiety. :)
I think it stems back to school - having to stand up in class and answer math questions. I found it very awkward and stressful doing that, and the feeling returns when I'm put on the spot to answer a math question. I think everyone has areas of confidence and areas of self-doubt which affects their abilities.
Perhaps it comes down to that trite saying - believe in yourself and you will succeed! In this case, it probably applies. The fact I don't believe I'll be right makes me fail. Yoda would not be pleased.
[quote]Through the magic of a priori reasoning, I know that you cannot be harmed merely because you're not getting what you are not entitled.[/quote]
Ironic, as this is the reason people use for pirating some games: "They're using draconian DRM, it's not fair to me, so I'll go pirate/crack this game, because I should be able to play it without following their rules."
This may say more about my state of mind than anything, but I think - perhaps - it's a calculated decision to actually *increase* the amount of piracy going on. If a game company can point to rampant piracy, as in it's not a fringe thing anymore, and it's demonstrably affecting sales (even if they practically force people to do it) then they win.
They win because piracy will become more of a legislative issue, it will get more press, it will be like, "even previously law-abiding citizens are doing it now".
It's funny how gamers say, "hell, I'm not buying this, it's unfair, so I'm going to pirate it instead" and think that's a perfectly valid response. As some kind of revenge, they won't just not buy the game, they'll do something illegal. That's what they're saying all over the net because of this, and my guess is that's exactly what companies like Ubisoft want. It's helping them no end to lobby government for legislative changes we will enjoy a lot less than their games.
As an aside, I also wonder if software companies get tax breaks for "lost sales" due to piracy? Regardless of the high probability that most people who pirate a game weren't going to buy it in the first place. Though that may be less probable soon.
What's so difficult about this concept:
Children SHOULD NOT BE USING the Internet. Computers of course, as long as they exercise too, but Internet no. Children should be socialising IRL not chatting to each other online. Children should be learning things about the real world, having difficult ideas explained, not being fed schoolyard opinions at home as well as at school. Children's peers should not be as important as their (hopefully positive) adult role models (hopefully their parents). Children should find joy and imagination in nature, books, art and music, not the Internet. Sure those things can be found on the net - if you're looking for it. But mainly no.
Take a walk down a busy street with your kid - by the time you get home, s/he will probably have questions that you're glad you can explain in person. The Internet is NOT FOR KIDS, period. Just the chat on most game servers is not for kids.
That position will sound extreme, but as long as I can do an image search on google for "breasts" and get this, ..
uh.. so like I was saying.. extreme position.. What?
That's an excellent point which should have at least been mentioned in such a "controversial" study. I personally think we're going to continue this sad argument, as a species, until Google starts to index all users' neural pathways and we can sort this out once and for all.
Hofstadter's Law
So, terrorism-related sites, discussion groups, etc. get taken "off the internet" (I assume they mean filtered from public access in Britain). This basically results in that information being accessible only to government authorities, but not to the public. I assume the authorities still want access to those sites, as they might give clues about planned attacks, etc.
We've already been drawn into war based on "secret information" which turned out to be false. This seems like just another opportunity for abuse of public trust and stifling public scrutiny of government decision-making.
I'm not talking about Joe Bloggs needing to know what terrorist and propaganda sites are out there, but certain people do. Journalists, academics, etc. Those important parts of public society that help us keep an eye on those we put in office. The power is ours, not the government's - we pay their salaries, they work for us. Yet they fail us on so many levels, and need to be constantly held to account.
Who is going to play that role, if the information is not there any more?
This is only a UK filter, so the sites are still "on the internet", but the principle should be raised.
I love PHP when I need to throw something together fast (like today) but don't expect a lot of heavy use. I love PHP when I want to get some handy tools that I can easily hack into doing what I really want. Still, when I have a significant project, and server load starts to matter, I loathe trying to use PHP and would usually rather write it as ...
Why is classic ASP / ASP(VB).NET never mentioned in this context? Surely, like PHP, VB(script or .NET) is just as quick and easy (or more so) and, like PHP, not suitable for time-critical processes.
Yet not a squeak about ASP/VB, as if good old BASIC doesn't exist!
Apart from the one about dinosaurs.
Call this the Over 40's Relationship Theory of First Contact. In this theory, the term "advanced civilisation" refers to one which is over the self-important, self-destructive, self-unaware phase, having achieved relative peace, equity and opportunity for all its citizens.
Would such a civilisation bother responding to radio waves from a world such as ours? I imagine their response would be: sure, you can go all night, but the conversation sucks. No, I imagine they'd bookmark us for later, and keep on looking.
For one thing is certain - if there's more than one intelligent species out there, there will be many more. So what's so special about us, in this point in our history, if any species out there is advanced enough to directly contact us?
Avatar has just grossed US$1B, helped along mightily by the more expensive tickets of the 3D release.
Oh well, there goes that revenue stream for the movie industry. I had assumed 3D their brainchild way out of all the "lost profits" from piracy. Soon 3D will be nothing special and nobody will want to pay extra for the tickets. At least the boost in grosses may have eased their foul whining about piracy for a while.
Of course I'm in Australia, where a 3D movie ticket is $20. My impression is that's a bit more than other countries.
Personally I really enjoyed the *subtle* 3D visuals of Avatar.. like doing a "fern-dolly" through the forest, with all the beautiful greenery coming out at me.. that was nice! Apart from that, 3D just distracts me from the *story*. I don't need 3D fonts or even coloured lettering to profoundly appreciate a good book. That would distract me from relaxing and absorbing what I'm reading. Same with movies, unless of course you're James Cameron and story isn't a factor.
The live-action scenes looked terrible.. actors looked like cardboard cut-outs against the 3D background. Perhaps the combination of live action on 3D CGI is yet to be fine-tuned.. but it was quite jarring for me. It may be the last 3D movie I ever see, at least until 3D becomes part of the *art* of movie making instead of a distracting gimmick. But points to Cameron for being relatively subtle with it.
I've since seen it again, from a 1.4GB avi file on my not-quite-wide-enough TV. Strangely, I enjoyed it just as much - brainless and disappointing climax/ending notwithstanding. James Cameron is an artist of detail, immersion and lead-up, but that doesn't make up his inability to write a story that has meaning. But then he's a movie-maker, not an author. The inspiration behind Avatar cried out for a real story to go along with it, but we got stereotypes and robot exoskeletons again. Epic yet empty, at best vainglorious, climactic confrontation.. again.
Such an evocative, immersive, even emotive journey, beautifully set up... just to take us *there* again?
I really loved the lead-up, all of us had tears and excited grins. Zoe Saldana was incredible, truly leading us into another realm. That's why I truly hate the let-down so much. The going-nowhere story. It could have had real meaning and been so much more.
They at least claim to know where it is. Amusingly, this was listed as a related story beside TFA.
I hear a lot about climate change on science programs - good ones, like the BBC or ABC radio here in Australia, not the daft Discovery Channel. I hear a lot of perspectives on facets of climate change - the various things contributing to it (both natural and artificial) and the various ways it will (and is) affect animals, plants, oceans, atmosphere, insects, migration patterns, human life, etc.
I liken life on this planet to moss clinging to a rock. "The Earth" isn't the issue - "The Earth" doesn't give a shit about the thin, wispy film of vapour and ooze that, thanks to a noisome magnetic field, hasn't yet been cleaned away by the purifying rays of solar wind.
And here we reside, for now, clucking proudly at our own existence. Point being, minute changes - of only a few degrees on average - in this vast and complex system we call "the environment" can have catastrophic effects. Point being, it's happened before, will again, and we should not take our to-date comfortable lives for granted. Point being, by talking about "fiddling" with the climate, we're playing with the only card we have.
So, to me anyway, the only clear, rational course of action is not to come up with crazy schemes to "manage" our environment. That way lies ruin and regret. The only rational course I see is to do our absolute, utter best to get the climate back to what it was - in terms of CO2 content, etc. - at pre-industrial times.
That will be our "control" environment, if you like. If the Earth still keeps warming, or cooling or turning a nice shade of purple, well then, who could argue it's not a natural phase. The bickering goes away (hopefully). But in the meantime, climate changes we are seeing are *statistically relevant* and we have *little time* to play with.
There are two roads. One, keep going as we are and hope to hell that technology will give us comfortable lives, no matter how much coastline, habitat, species and weather predictability are lost. Second road: Return the atmosphere to its pre-industrial condition and hope to hell that prevents more climate change.
Both clear and logical courses, though neither have guaranteed success. But I imagine it will be *much easier* to protect people from economic fallout from making the necessary changes, that will be protecting them from climatic fallout.
The economy has always been a tool, a figment of our imagination. Perhaps it's time to grow up as a species, put down our toys and start *thinking like a species*. That's my humble, dumb-ass, non-scientific, observer's take.