Macs are immune to all attacks and viruses and Linux just does not have the market share to be a target of interest. All regulars here on Slashdot know this. You must be new here.
Since when did Federal law enforcement begin enforcing tort laws, and more importantly, how do I get the Feds to raid the guy down the street who's using my GPL code in violation of the license?
Well.. as much as I disapprove of the amount of money spent for such questionable gains, this does not fall under civil courts to my knowledge. It falls under the criminal infringement section of IP laws because of the scale of operation and the profit that was made. These were also physical items, not just 1's and 0's floating around in cyberspace.
IP laws do make a distinction for criminal levels, but it is quite rare to see them enforced since 99.9999% of all infringement should be remanded to the civil courts as you suggest. In fact, most of the time it has been. For all the incorrect assertions that copyright infringement is stealing, those cases are tried in civil courts.
Which is why we should all be fighting SOPA/PIPA/ACTA so damn hard. It will take simple copyright infringement and remove due process from the remediation provided to the copyright holder and go straight past the criminal trial to the sentencing and punishment phase.
the common consumer knows that their $50 tshirt is a quality product and not some cheap knockoff
That's a weak argument. Quality can be the same. I think you would have made your point better with authenticity instead.
Not everything the government does is to support the 1%
Just 99% of what they do. While I can understand your point, are these actions being enforced equally for all intellectual property holders or just the ones who can afford to donate to campaigns?.
DigiShaman said it pretty well:
To the Feds, it's not about priorities. It's about taking action to justify their department and funding necessary to maintain the status quo (and then some). It's precisely why the go after the low hanging fruit first and foremost.
That's my biggest issue. The 1% is getting preferential treatment because they generate headlines in newspapers, magazine, and online news sources. The small business man with a branded product is not going to get an FBI task force running through the local malls taking down knockoff products.
How am I wrong when everything you say afterwards agrees with the statement you quoted?
The next generation of communication has arrived in the form of iPhone/Android devices. Most people will have some type of mobile phone on them for the foreseeable future. Facebook happened to be lucky enough to be the social networking leader when it happened. "Social Networking" is no longer confined to coming home, offloading your pictures from your camera and camping out by your computer. It is with you all day long. Many people are basically on Facebook in some capacity from the moment they get up until the moment they go to bed. It is embedded itself much farther into the public psyche than MySpace/Friendster/Whatever have. Nearly every vaguely media type web site has "Share on Facebook" buttons.
Okay. Can we summarize that as an evolving method of communication and as a trend?
It is rare to run into a person who is at all competent with tech and likes communicating with friends who doesn't at least have a Facebook account.
Not rare at all.
Most people I deal with refuse to have a Facebook account. Contrary to the posts slamming me as "not getting it", "antisocial with my own character flaws preventing me from getting it", etc., I understand the motive but disagree with the platform.
I value my privacy a little more than that and my experience with a fake account has led me to believe that serious and grave privacy issues aside, Facebook is fucking bullshit because it is a pale comparison to what actual communication is.
By that I mean that posts on a wall, that are just reposts from other people, hardly qualify as meaningful communication to me. It's just too shallow with too much information flying by. It seems cool, but is really creating distance between you and other people. In my opinion.
Don't get me started on the "Like" crap, because that is just gamed by marketing to the point where if you "tell" me you like something and I am bit incredulous as to whether or not you even thought about it for a second. Hardly a testimonial, and far from a well thought out and considered endorsement of a product or service. When I recommend a product or service, I tell you why, compare alternatives, and give examples of usage. A "like" button is like a primordial cell in comparison.
I have had more fulfilling relationships with people on IRC or mailing lists than on Facebook. Counter intuitively, Facebook seems less personal and intimate.
You simply cannot dismiss something that has 800,000,000 active users as some passing fad
I most certainly did not. What I said was that Facebook is the passing fad, but that the trend towards more evolved methods of communication is not a fad.
The fact is that I would love to be involved in Social Networking on my own terms. Those specifically being I have absolute control over who gets to see what, and that I can even indicate whether or not the data should be shared. Indicate, not control, and there is a difference.
I want a P2P distributed architecture where I can host my own node, locate other nodes, exchange secure means of communication with them, set up security and data distribution polices, etc.
Sounds complicated, but with the right interfaces and wizards it could be easier to understand than Facebook.
What I want more than anything is a much more evolved method of communicating than email/IRC/mailing lists. Something that is not shallow, but that I can really share more than just blurbs.
I don't dismiss those 800,000,000 people at all. What I lament is the huge price they are unwittingly paying to enjoy that level of communication.
As it relates to Facebook as a company, I don't think, and you don't seem to think either, that they have the lock on it. So how can i
DARPA sets ambitious goals in order to make faster progress.
How do ambitious goals make faster progress?
With that logic I hereby set as a goal to get laid by no less than three hot celebrities by the end of the week; Eva Mendes, Jessica Alba, and that volcanic hot blonde from Chuck.
Accordingly this means that progress will be achieved faster and I should get laid by a reasonably good looking, conscious and otherwise not impaired, healthy woman by the end of the month.
Not sure where you are from, but in the USA our courts treat digital content as property
No. They most certainly do not.
You can consider three components comprising an instance of intellectual property.
1) The physical medium upon which the content is transferred. 2) The content itself. 3) The copyright that provides certain legal entitlements to the copyright holder to control what happens with the content in specific ways.
What is treated as physical property is the copyright not the content. That is why it is said that somebody can "own" a copyright. They don't "own" the content, but get to treat their control over that content as something physical to ostensibly tie into terms of ownership we can understand.
Nobody ever owns the content. Ownership of information and ideas is dangerous and irrational. The only reasonable justification for providing copyrights is to create an incentive to create new ideas, art, music, etc. That is supposed to be temporary anyways if you go along with that theory, which some do not. While I personally support the idea of creating incentives it deeply concerns me that people don't understand the what, why, and how it works.
This misunderstanding and ignorance, coupled with outright greed, is what creates an environment where somebody can say that you can own 1's and 0's and it is not seen as completely ludicrous instantaneously.
Your Ass Has Been Redirected To Your Country Specific Jail. Be happy that you are not redirected to some China's jail.....
Not to be crude, but if my Ass had to be redirected towards a jail I would rather it be a jail with a small average penis size. Literally easier to handle. Just being pragmatic...
my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication........but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.
LOL.
Uhhh, no. I "got" it. Then threw it back like the steaming turd that it was and still is.
I got a fake Facebook account some time ago to keep connected with younger relatives since it seemed the only way to get their attention was to play Mafia Wars or place a message sign on their farm in Farmville. Being a geek and techie, I saw Facebook for what it really was:
1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me. 2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes. 3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place. Starting their own credit system was basically a coup against Zynga which was valued in the billions initially because of revenue, most of which was illicitly gained through dirty tactics like premium charges on cell phones and other such instances of fraud. One of my younger relatives got hit with a $300 cell phone bill one month and honestly did not know the consequences of wanting some shiny that Zynga was offering.
So, No you are quite wrong. Most of us geeks and techies completely understand the trend that Facebook is. When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".
What I wish is that other people would get what Facebook really is.
Your comment about SPAM and marketing is utter hilarity considering what the Facebook experience was like for me for the short while that I had it. Marketing overload anyone........ I had less SPAM and useless information coming into my junkmail folder at Yahoo, and that is saying something.
Anybody that puts money into this is a sucker. They are just making the payday dreams of the early and special investors come true and then you are holding the bag of shit. Same with Zynga.
Facebook might be hot for awhile, but the real trend is an evolving method of communication. To say that Facebook has the lock on that it is incredibly untrue. So many different projects in the works to satisfy this new kind of communication methodology, and with far better signal to noise ratios too.
At the end of the day Facebook has revenues tied to something that you would be foolish to call "stable". It's damn near whimsical over the long run.
Put your thinking cap on for a second. 75 billion. With a B. How can that possibly be true in reality? We are not talking Exxon here that makes something tangible that we are literally addicted too. This is based off credits and advertising revenue, both of which don't have a strong foundation, and can have a huge swing in profitability and volume.
Facebook and Zynga are incredibly over valued and over hyped. God help everyone who buys into it at the high range.
I tried to submit this story basically asking how to rephrase and resubmit.
Everyone here wants to bitch about corruption, blah, blah, blah, but the White House had a very *specific* response. They cannot initiate a criminal investigation of a private citizen, and that is listed among the conditions of petitions, whatever.
We should ask this again and let the lawyers here rephrase it to make it more difficult to just dismiss on a technicality. If they dismiss it again, you refine it, and come back again.
If we were to create 5 petitions, progressively worded better and better, I think that would make quite a statement too. Not to mention get picked up from the press. It's pretty damn hard to get egregious legislation like this passed when people are actually paying attention and screaming.
I agree that darts are not the best way to describe this. Just pointing out that the comparison was not wildly inaccurate and certainly not deserving of flamebait.
I don't think you mean that half of Slashdot is made up of gay men, because in that case it would still be 100%. It's just that they would also want the dildo on the other side they could suck.
You must mean that half of Slashdot is made up of women, and none of them would want this. I disagree. They would all want it, and it would be the Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary present to their significant others.
Some men only get blowjobs on their anniversaries. The difference is that now their wives will just hand them a box and go to sleep.
Having experienced the Internet since it started, and we all know that ChatRoulette is really PenisRoulette, I am pretty confident that it will all be dudes kissing each other while some dudes are pretending to be chicks. For whatever reason.
Approach it from the other direction....
Women. What woman, one that you would want to kiss, is going to settle for some robotic lips when they have the absolute power to go out and get a man anytime they want too?
Personally, I don't want to face the high statistical probability of kissing another dude.
I know the sex toy industry is incredibly one-sided right now towards the females, but call me a old fashioned fellow. Some Kleenex and hand lotion for me, none of that fancy robot action all you youngsters are thinking about.
Sir... this is Slashdot. I have experienced the coding prowess here. You want to trust people that have problems coding javascript to give you fellatio with a robotic device that takes commands remotely?
Well... okay... I might try it. But I sure as fuck won't be running IE when I do it.
Snipers work in pairs don't they? Sniper and Spotter?
If the sniper no longer needs a spotter right next to him, or even close to him, then the IR point is not valuable to the "other side".
This opens up whole new possibilities too. A sniper and spotter are required right now to due the extreme skill and experience required to make long shots. Guidance on the bullets greatly decreases the "barrier to entry" here for a lethal system.
Imagine a group of drones. Half tasked to keep the lasers on several targets at one time, the other half tasked to repeatedly fire bullets, while all drones are moving targets themselves.
In such a situation the muzzle flashes will not help you at all, and drones could randomly distribute their targeting lasers while moving so you could only guess where they were in the air.
Add to this, depleted uranium bullets and other such devastating ordinance, and I don't think wherever you are in the open is going to help you against multiple bullets fired against you. Even ducking into a hardened container is going to be dangerous and I would think only getting deep inside a fortified building might help you.
"Ducking". Okay.... the bullet is guided. Nothing says that X amount of distance before impact gain altitude and readjust so you come in a steep angle to the target. Multiple bullets means the target has to dodge multiple times from incoming rounds coming in at a steep angle. Think MIRV too. Multiple bullets to create a kill zone surrounding where the target was. How fast can you really move within 3 seconds once somebody yells? Fast enough to get out of the kill zone?
Keep in mind... not having a sniper on the ground means he does not need to carry all the ordinance. In fact, you could have groups that are just trained to place hardware and camouflage them before activating them remotely onto designated targets from the safety of a remote unknown location.
Its pretty hard to sneak up on someone and plant an emitter "of some sort" on them, and convince them to stand still for 30 seconds.
That's why super hot spy girls get trained to plant emitters on targets, or in some cases, in targets.
I imagine for targets in the Middle East we might be able to train camels, or whatever the equivalent for a hot chick is over there. Apparently they stone them on sight or something.
A bullet does not have any fins, or any other physical designs that are protruding from the bullet to stabilize its flight. It relies on spin to provide stability once fired.
Before rifling and spinning bullets you had spherical bullets which were still wildly inaccurate, and even spherical bullets must have spin to stabilize.
The poster is raising a good question. Once you add fins and actuators to the "bullet" does it still qualify as a bullet as we typically think of one? With fins and actuators it starts sounding more like the midpoint between a bullet and a guided missile.
Now a dart has fins to provide stability in flight and not for guidance, but nonetheless, I found the poster's question insightful. If only I had mod points....
Why can't we build something like Bittorrent, but for Web pages? You browse to http://thepiratebay.org/ and you download pieces from scattered machines around the globe. No way to stop that. Luckily torrent files are small, and once you download the torrent file through a proxy... even a slow one... you're in business.
They already built something like this. It's called Freenet. Completely encrypted and the end user has the benefit of being able to say they have no idea what they are storing on their hard drive or serving to others. You can create a Freenet page and be the only one able to modify it, with the added benefit that it will geographically disperse itself according to demand.
I think nothing. Bluray was never remotely a consideration for me. I refuse to support it with a single dollar for a single second. Bluray has encryption that keeps changing which requires firmware updates and they are progressively moving towards Internet enabled players to verify playback licensing and retrieve encryption updates.
I won't touch the shit.
It is marginally better than DVD anyways. The way I see it, if I paid for the DVD copy, I am entitled to the higher resolution copy. The argument that the higher resolution copyright is different and requires extra compensation if complete fucking bullshit. By that argument, music could be sold differently depending on the bitrate.
Besides, a quick Google search shows that over 70% of all Bluray titles are region free anyways, that it is trivial to bypass, and it is not firmware based.
Give it enough time and you will see region free Bluray players as well.
I'm not wrong on the region codes either. In the past I knew you could buy region code specific DVD players and have them shipped in. Not unusual. My last pair of glasses was shipped in from Hong Kong.
Slashdot Mirror
Which OS do all these botnets run on?
Silly question.
Windows. Obviously.
Macs are immune to all attacks and viruses and Linux just does not have the market share to be a target of interest. All regulars here on Slashdot know this. You must be new here.
Since when did Federal law enforcement begin enforcing tort laws, and more importantly, how do I get the Feds to raid the guy down the street who's using my GPL code in violation of the license?
Well.. as much as I disapprove of the amount of money spent for such questionable gains, this does not fall under civil courts to my knowledge. It falls under the criminal infringement section of IP laws because of the scale of operation and the profit that was made. These were also physical items, not just 1's and 0's floating around in cyberspace.
IP laws do make a distinction for criminal levels, but it is quite rare to see them enforced since 99.9999% of all infringement should be remanded to the civil courts as you suggest. In fact, most of the time it has been. For all the incorrect assertions that copyright infringement is stealing, those cases are tried in civil courts.
Which is why we should all be fighting SOPA/PIPA/ACTA so damn hard. It will take simple copyright infringement and remove due process from the remediation provided to the copyright holder and go straight past the criminal trial to the sentencing and punishment phase.
At least quote it correctly.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
2 more strikes and you lose your geek card.
So much of what the government does is not tied to the name of the agency.
In Texas the Rail Road commission oversees Oil & Gas.
the common consumer knows that their $50 tshirt is a quality product and not some cheap knockoff
That's a weak argument. Quality can be the same. I think you would have made your point better with authenticity instead.
Not everything the government does is to support the 1%
Just 99% of what they do. While I can understand your point, are these actions being enforced equally for all intellectual property holders or just the ones who can afford to donate to campaigns?.
DigiShaman said it pretty well:
To the Feds, it's not about priorities. It's about taking action to justify their department and funding necessary to maintain the status quo (and then some). It's precisely why the go after the low hanging fruit first and foremost.
That's my biggest issue. The 1% is getting preferential treatment because they generate headlines in newspapers, magazine, and online news sources. The small business man with a branded product is not going to get an FBI task force running through the local malls taking down knockoff products.
it has all the awesomeness of my original couch
That's not possible. What about the hidden Cheetos and that expensive remote under the cushions?
The official outlets and suppliers are kept safe not just by the current laws, but by preferential treatment by the FBI as another posted noted.
When you have the influence in government apparently you can get jackbooted thugs to come in and raid businesses for you.
Copyright law is not just unjust towards society and the consumer, it is not even enforced equally.
I think this is where you are wrong
How am I wrong when everything you say afterwards agrees with the statement you quoted?
The next generation of communication has arrived in the form of iPhone/Android devices. Most people will have some type of mobile phone on them for the foreseeable future. Facebook happened to be lucky enough to be the social networking leader when it happened. "Social Networking" is no longer confined to coming home, offloading your pictures from your camera and camping out by your computer. It is with you all day long. Many people are basically on Facebook in some capacity from the moment they get up until the moment they go to bed. It is embedded itself much farther into the public psyche than MySpace/Friendster/Whatever have. Nearly every vaguely media type web site has "Share on Facebook" buttons.
Okay. Can we summarize that as an evolving method of communication and as a trend?
It is rare to run into a person who is at all competent with tech and likes communicating with friends who doesn't at least have a Facebook account.
Not rare at all.
Most people I deal with refuse to have a Facebook account. Contrary to the posts slamming me as "not getting it", "antisocial with my own character flaws preventing me from getting it", etc., I understand the motive but disagree with the platform .
I value my privacy a little more than that and my experience with a fake account has led me to believe that serious and grave privacy issues aside, Facebook is fucking bullshit because it is a pale comparison to what actual communication is.
By that I mean that posts on a wall, that are just reposts from other people, hardly qualify as meaningful communication to me. It's just too shallow with too much information flying by. It seems cool, but is really creating distance between you and other people. In my opinion.
Don't get me started on the "Like" crap, because that is just gamed by marketing to the point where if you "tell" me you like something and I am bit incredulous as to whether or not you even thought about it for a second. Hardly a testimonial, and far from a well thought out and considered endorsement of a product or service. When I recommend a product or service, I tell you why, compare alternatives, and give examples of usage. A "like" button is like a primordial cell in comparison.
I have had more fulfilling relationships with people on IRC or mailing lists than on Facebook. Counter intuitively, Facebook seems less personal and intimate.
You simply cannot dismiss something that has 800,000,000 active users as some passing fad
I most certainly did not. What I said was that Facebook is the passing fad, but that the trend towards more evolved methods of communication is not a fad.
The fact is that I would love to be involved in Social Networking on my own terms. Those specifically being I have absolute control over who gets to see what, and that I can even indicate whether or not the data should be shared. Indicate, not control, and there is a difference.
I want a P2P distributed architecture where I can host my own node, locate other nodes, exchange secure means of communication with them, set up security and data distribution polices, etc.
Sounds complicated, but with the right interfaces and wizards it could be easier to understand than Facebook.
What I want more than anything is a much more evolved method of communicating than email/IRC/mailing lists. Something that is not shallow, but that I can really share more than just blurbs.
I don't dismiss those 800,000,000 people at all. What I lament is the huge price they are unwittingly paying to enjoy that level of communication.
As it relates to Facebook as a company, I don't think, and you don't seem to think either, that they have the lock on it. So how can i
DARPA sets ambitious goals in order to make faster progress.
How do ambitious goals make faster progress?
With that logic I hereby set as a goal to get laid by no less than three hot celebrities by the end of the week; Eva Mendes, Jessica Alba, and that volcanic hot blonde from Chuck.
Accordingly this means that progress will be achieved faster and I should get laid by a reasonably good looking, conscious and otherwise not impaired, healthy woman by the end of the month.
I'll let you know how that works out.
Not sure where you are from, but in the USA our courts treat digital content as property
No. They most certainly do not.
You can consider three components comprising an instance of intellectual property.
1) The physical medium upon which the content is transferred.
2) The content itself.
3) The copyright that provides certain legal entitlements to the copyright holder to control what happens with the content in specific ways.
What is treated as physical property is the copyright not the content. That is why it is said that somebody can "own" a copyright. They don't "own" the content, but get to treat their control over that content as something physical to ostensibly tie into terms of ownership we can understand.
Nobody ever owns the content. Ownership of information and ideas is dangerous and irrational. The only reasonable justification for providing copyrights is to create an incentive to create new ideas, art, music, etc. That is supposed to be temporary anyways if you go along with that theory, which some do not. While I personally support the idea of creating incentives it deeply concerns me that people don't understand the what, why, and how it works.
This misunderstanding and ignorance, coupled with outright greed, is what creates an environment where somebody can say that you can own 1's and 0's and it is not seen as completely ludicrous instantaneously.
Really surprised no one has thrown a Spider-man comment.
Probably because it would have only been some crude comment about how hard it was to milk Spider-man. Slashdot is better than that right?
Your Ass Has Been Redirected To Your Country Specific Jail. Be happy that you are not redirected to some China's jail.....
Not to be crude, but if my Ass had to be redirected towards a jail I would rather it be a jail with a small average penis size. Literally easier to handle. Just being pragmatic...
my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication........but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.
LOL.
Uhhh, no. I "got" it. Then threw it back like the steaming turd that it was and still is.
I got a fake Facebook account some time ago to keep connected with younger relatives since it seemed the only way to get their attention was to play Mafia Wars or place a message sign on their farm in Farmville. Being a geek and techie, I saw Facebook for what it really was:
1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.
2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes.
3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place. Starting their own credit system was basically a coup against Zynga which was valued in the billions initially because of revenue, most of which was illicitly gained through dirty tactics like premium charges on cell phones and other such instances of fraud. One of my younger relatives got hit with a $300 cell phone bill one month and honestly did not know the consequences of wanting some shiny that Zynga was offering.
So, No you are quite wrong. Most of us geeks and techies completely understand the trend that Facebook is. When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".
What I wish is that other people would get what Facebook really is.
Your comment about SPAM and marketing is utter hilarity considering what the Facebook experience was like for me for the short while that I had it. Marketing overload anyone........ I had less SPAM and useless information coming into my junkmail folder at Yahoo, and that is saying something.
Anybody that puts money into this is a sucker. They are just making the payday dreams of the early and special investors come true and then you are holding the bag of shit. Same with Zynga.
Facebook might be hot for awhile, but the real trend is an evolving method of communication. To say that Facebook has the lock on that it is incredibly untrue. So many different projects in the works to satisfy this new kind of communication methodology, and with far better signal to noise ratios too.
At the end of the day Facebook has revenues tied to something that you would be foolish to call "stable". It's damn near whimsical over the long run.
Put your thinking cap on for a second. 75 billion. With a B. How can that possibly be true in reality? We are not talking Exxon here that makes something tangible that we are literally addicted too. This is based off credits and advertising revenue, both of which don't have a strong foundation, and can have a huge swing in profitability and volume.
Facebook and Zynga are incredibly over valued and over hyped. God help everyone who buys into it at the high range.
I tried to submit this story basically asking how to rephrase and resubmit.
Everyone here wants to bitch about corruption, blah, blah, blah, but the White House had a very *specific* response. They cannot initiate a criminal investigation of a private citizen, and that is listed among the conditions of petitions, whatever.
We should ask this again and let the lawyers here rephrase it to make it more difficult to just dismiss on a technicality. If they dismiss it again, you refine it, and come back again.
If we were to create 5 petitions, progressively worded better and better, I think that would make quite a statement too. Not to mention get picked up from the press. It's pretty damn hard to get egregious legislation like this passed when people are actually paying attention and screaming.
I agree that darts are not the best way to describe this. Just pointing out that the comparison was not wildly inaccurate and certainly not deserving of flamebait.
Half of us do anyway.
LMFAO.
What do you mean by half!?
I don't think you mean that half of Slashdot is made up of gay men, because in that case it would still be 100%. It's just that they would also want the dildo on the other side they could suck.
You must mean that half of Slashdot is made up of women, and none of them would want this. I disagree. They would all want it, and it would be the Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary present to their significant others.
Some men only get blowjobs on their anniversaries. The difference is that now their wives will just hand them a box and go to sleep.
Did anyone else get the image of making out with a robot with the appearance of Henry Kissinger? Or am I the crazy one here...
Hey, at least you didn't order a Lucy Liu sexbot and get one that looked like Margaret Thatcher instead....
Any port in a storm.....
I have a different reaction.
Having experienced the Internet since it started, and we all know that ChatRoulette is really PenisRoulette, I am pretty confident that it will all be dudes kissing each other while some dudes are pretending to be chicks. For whatever reason.
Approach it from the other direction....
Women. What woman, one that you would want to kiss, is going to settle for some robotic lips when they have the absolute power to go out and get a man anytime they want too?
Personally, I don't want to face the high statistical probability of kissing another dude.
I know the sex toy industry is incredibly one-sided right now towards the females, but call me a old fashioned fellow. Some Kleenex and hand lotion for me, none of that fancy robot action all you youngsters are thinking about.
...With fellatio for +5 comments? I'm in.
-- Ethanol-fueled
captcha: "frosted"
Sir... this is Slashdot. I have experienced the coding prowess here. You want to trust people that have problems coding javascript to give you fellatio with a robotic device that takes commands remotely?
Well... okay... I might try it. But I sure as fuck won't be running IE when I do it.
Snipers work in pairs don't they? Sniper and Spotter?
If the sniper no longer needs a spotter right next to him, or even close to him, then the IR point is not valuable to the "other side".
This opens up whole new possibilities too. A sniper and spotter are required right now to due the extreme skill and experience required to make long shots. Guidance on the bullets greatly decreases the "barrier to entry" here for a lethal system.
Imagine a group of drones. Half tasked to keep the lasers on several targets at one time, the other half tasked to repeatedly fire bullets, while all drones are moving targets themselves.
In such a situation the muzzle flashes will not help you at all, and drones could randomly distribute their targeting lasers while moving so you could only guess where they were in the air.
Add to this, depleted uranium bullets and other such devastating ordinance, and I don't think wherever you are in the open is going to help you against multiple bullets fired against you. Even ducking into a hardened container is going to be dangerous and I would think only getting deep inside a fortified building might help you.
"Ducking". Okay.... the bullet is guided. Nothing says that X amount of distance before impact gain altitude and readjust so you come in a steep angle to the target. Multiple bullets means the target has to dodge multiple times from incoming rounds coming in at a steep angle. Think MIRV too. Multiple bullets to create a kill zone surrounding where the target was. How fast can you really move within 3 seconds once somebody yells? Fast enough to get out of the kill zone?
Keep in mind... not having a sniper on the ground means he does not need to carry all the ordinance. In fact, you could have groups that are just trained to place hardware and camouflage them before activating them remotely onto designated targets from the safety of a remote unknown location.
Its pretty hard to sneak up on someone and plant an emitter "of some sort" on them, and convince them to stand still for 30 seconds.
That's why super hot spy girls get trained to plant emitters on targets, or in some cases, in targets.
I imagine for targets in the Middle East we might be able to train camels, or whatever the equivalent for a hot chick is over there. Apparently they stone them on sight or something.
Why is this marked flamebait? Seriously?
A bullet does not have any fins, or any other physical designs that are protruding from the bullet to stabilize its flight. It relies on spin to provide stability once fired.
Before rifling and spinning bullets you had spherical bullets which were still wildly inaccurate, and even spherical bullets must have spin to stabilize.
The poster is raising a good question. Once you add fins and actuators to the "bullet" does it still qualify as a bullet as we typically think of one? With fins and actuators it starts sounding more like the midpoint between a bullet and a guided missile.
Now a dart has fins to provide stability in flight and not for guidance, but nonetheless, I found the poster's question insightful. If only I had mod points....
Why can't we build something like Bittorrent, but for Web pages? You browse to http://thepiratebay.org/ and you download pieces from scattered machines around the globe. No way to stop that. Luckily torrent files are small, and once you download the torrent file through a proxy ... even a slow one ... you're in business.
They already built something like this. It's called Freenet. Completely encrypted and the end user has the benefit of being able to say they have no idea what they are storing on their hard drive or serving to others. You can create a Freenet page and be the only one able to modify it, with the added benefit that it will geographically disperse itself according to demand.
Check it out.
I think nothing. Bluray was never remotely a consideration for me. I refuse to support it with a single dollar for a single second. Bluray has encryption that keeps changing which requires firmware updates and they are progressively moving towards Internet enabled players to verify playback licensing and retrieve encryption updates.
I won't touch the shit.
It is marginally better than DVD anyways. The way I see it, if I paid for the DVD copy, I am entitled to the higher resolution copy. The argument that the higher resolution copyright is different and requires extra compensation if complete fucking bullshit. By that argument, music could be sold differently depending on the bitrate.
Besides, a quick Google search shows that over 70% of all Bluray titles are region free anyways, that it is trivial to bypass, and it is not firmware based.
Give it enough time and you will see region free Bluray players as well.
I'm not wrong on the region codes either. In the past I knew you could buy region code specific DVD players and have them shipped in. Not unusual. My last pair of glasses was shipped in from Hong Kong.
But wait... It gets so much better!
Multiple Region Code DVD Players FTW :)