You're right. I air-to-surface torpedos are kind of over these days. It's all about air to surface missles now. My big complaint on this is it's an example of the military's tendency to spend where there isn't a real-world problem. This problem climbs all the way up into the executive branch. In his first term, George W. Bush decided to pull the US out of the ABM treaty. This was because our government wanted the freedom to develop technology to destroy ICBMs. Even after Sept. 11th, the US government wasn't convinced that low-tech is the more plausible threat. The entities who will actually do us harm aren't going to invest in complex systems that send explosive material guided by computers and lasers.
In Iraq, our blind eye to low tech has been exploited with roadside bombs that penetrate the thinly-armored underbelly of our troop transport vehicles. Same with the tens of thousands of RPG launchers menacing our soldiers. More recently, the military has improved the shielding beneath these vehicles and figured out better ways to protect against RPGs. The current method is to erect galvanized tin around tanks and APCs so that the RPG will detonate outside the vehicle. It's a directed charge, so without an impact, it causes exponentially less harm when exploded beside the vehicle. Here's a description of an electric force-field concept to protect against RPGs.
Anyway, I hate to see money misdirected at defending against implausible scenarios while very real threats abound. And to sacrifice whales for the cause is icing on the cake of waste.
I'm pretty unfamiliar with surface-to-surface torpedos. I've heard of airborn missles, but not torpedos. Same with the other examples you've given. In those cases, computer-aimed mini-guns loaded with depleted uranium bullets seem to do a good job against airborn anti-ship missles.
A life of a sailor is, in my mind, worth more than any hypothetical whale that may or may not be harmed by the use of this technology.
I understand your position here. I am countering it by saying that we won't need humans in this capacity much longer. That's how we'll ultimately protect them from torpedos. Not this pork research project.
Besides, in modern times, very few sailors have been injured by torpedos. If we want to protect the maximum number of service men and women with our finite military research budget (the use of the word finite is an exagerration, btw), that money would be better spent developing systems to counter rocket propelled grenades. RPGs will be pointed at our soldiers for a very long time into the future and are currently injuring thousands more soldiers each year than torpedos.
Next time I'm on a submarine under fire though, I won't be wishing a torpedo away based on some ideals of pacifism.
I will satisfy your request by calling you short-sighted. Humans on submarines are an expensive luxury. Humans have sailed these subsurface warships for over a hundred years, but it is unlikely they will sail them for a hundred more. I think we all hope that whales will be around for at least the next hundred and more years. Technology that threatens their existence while preserving something we won't need much longer is an unacceptable tradeoff.
Submarines' primary value is providing an unpredictable launch location for missles. In short order, we should be able to accomplish the same with drones more cheaply and effectively. Without life support overhead, these drones should be able to operate indefinitely underwater without surfacing. This acoustic detonation project is a waste of tax dollars supporting a system that has a limited lifespan.
but the funny thing is you have better selection today than you ever have.
WHen I read the gp post and then the responses about the selection being better now than ever before, I couldn't help but think of Devo's song, Freedom of Choice.
Freedom of Choice is what you've got...
Freedom FROM Choice is what you want...
The GP is probably suffering from too many choices and has given up the search for music.
Considering how much damage smaller introduced animals (cats, dogs, rats, mice, rabbits, foxes, cane toads, et al) have done to our wildlife, do we really want much larger ones running around unchecked?
Some extinct Australian creatures, like the Tasmanian Tiger, would probably include humans in your list.
You are probably referring to the Tasmanian Tiger. It actually was a marsupial wolf that had stripes, so ignorant humans called it a 'tiger'. The humans then proceeded to place a bounty on its head and hunt it into extinction. It was indigineous to the area. The humans were less so.
Seth
If grey goo was possible, Mother Nature the true master of nanotech (see molecular biology) would have already come up with it.
Grey goo, if I remember from that Bill Joy piece, is enrestrained entropy. That already exists everywhere-- I think most people call it 'green goo'. The current arrangement you and I are familiar with exists in spite of the entropy constantly working to disassemble us and everything around us. Cancer is the number one killer of Americans, and that's a great example of where entropy succeeds at a cellular level in disassembling us.
I sometimes wonder if they don't purposefully create scenes with the intent of only putting them into a DVD release to entice people to buy them.
Living in the post-Jar-Jar world we find ourselves in, it's going to take a lot more than extra scenes to entice me to rent a Star Wars DVD. Like maybe if they mislabelled it Kung Fu Hustle.
Microsoft bought an advertorial with IGN. IGN then bought an advertorial on slashdot to help juice up their referrals even more. So yeah, I agree. Hardly big news. Pay-for-hype.
Although this is undoubtedly a hoax, let's pretend these key cards did have unencrypted credit card information on them. As you've described, the clerks have access to the CC info anyway, so this is a non-issue. Desk Clerks aren't the concern. A CC # theft operation anchored by a hotel desk clerk would be identified immediately by cross-referencing card usage prior to the theft.
The larger threat would be non-employees pilfering cards out of the convenient 'express checkout' drop-boxes. Much more difficult to track down.
I do think you're a little premature here in your concern over a google-monopoly. So far as yet, they haven't put anyone else out of business. I also can't see any of their products excluding other players from their space. The traditional monopolists like MaBell and Microsoft leveraged product areas where consumers seemingly only have one choice-- local phone provider or OS provider. In the case of Google, consumers will always be able to install other tool bars, use other email services, reference different online map providers, etc.
Darth, I think the gp post could be referring to how a car is a multi-function device. Like it drives, and can play music, and to some extent you can sleep in it (hopefully not while driving and playing music). You can even get specialized cars like vans and trucks that still play music, drive, but can carry stuff or enable you to sleep more comfortably.
But it's not really a good analogy to your original criticism of multi-function devices. I think the epitome of your criticism is the All-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier devices that sell so well these days. Those things 100% prove your case. I don't think the problem is with physical limitations, but more so with marketing controlling the design budget. There just isn't an incentive for a company to put a super-kick-ass postscript laser printer with 64mb of RAM in one of these things because they're trying to sell it to non-discriminating customers who will casually use each feature and don't want to spend money for a fax modem that they'll only use once in a while.
What will probably happen, though, is that in cell phones, these features (camera, mp3 player, text messg) will become part of the expected standard set among consumers. Like how people shopping for cars expect there to be air conditioning and a CD player. Those used to be options.
Right now, sure, there's limited RAM in the motorola iTunes phone. But in the next rev. it's entirely possible they could enable streaming audio over the phone's internet connection. Then the phone becomes an internet radio, which could compete with the satellite radio providers who are forever going to be challenged to power a portable receiver in a walkman-style form factor. Plus, internet radio is free outside of the bandwidth fees of the user's provider...
I frequently see posts like the Grandparent asking why hardware vendors don't open up their video card drivers. The reality is these are HARDWARE vendors. They have outsourced much of the SOFTWARE development of drivers to third-party companies that have strict licensing requirements about how their code is going to be used. It isn't even so much about "know how to make their product perform better than yours" as it is keeping their lines of code in-house and private so they can get a contract to do another video card driver in the future.
For the video card companies to get unrestricted use of this code would cost them piles more cash than what they paid for the limited usage.
In this utopian dream of charging for email, I'll also add that whitelists would need to be maintained which track users who don't get charged, or have their fee refunded. This would allow people to continue to run listserves and the like without it costing any money. The listserve would also need to track which members aren't refunding the mail fee and drop them from the list. The fee would really only be needed for mail recieved from anonymous senders.
I wanted to say you have voiced excellent points here. One I'd like to add to your list--- draconian control over mods. From what I can tell, if someone comes out with a naked mod, or an unlicensed Simpsons mod, Steam can prevent your copy of HL2 from loading it. Another name for this is "content control."
It will be interesting if a blind person does post a comment on my site. I do advocate for the ADA and am a web programmer for a govt. agency where I have to argue against my co-workers using non-ADA compliant content types like PDF, FLASH, POWERPOINT, and MS Word docs on our web sites. I think that for a blind person, the internet can really expose them to a lot of stuff that's difficult to interpret in hardcopy.
So, I'm not saying that the visually impared are unwelcome on my personal website. It's just that I've made a judgement call between suffering comment spam and excluding a minority of people who would ever be interested in the stuff on my website. Similarly, I was plagued by Brazillian script kiddies attacking my server, so I put firewall rules in place that block all connections from Brazil. Just to save bandwidth, I also eliminated connections from Australia, China, Taiwan, and a few other countries. My website is about skateboarding in Austin, and the intended audience isn't really people in those countries. This may seem like an arbitrarily unfair case of discrimination on my part, but that's my right as an independent internet publisher.
I don't feel so bad using a Captcha on my site regarding the inconvenience it causes to vision-impared visitors. You only need to fill in the Captcha for posting comments. Otherwise, blind people can access the rest of my site unhindered.
I'd also like to point out that since I've implemented my Captcha, this level of obscurity has blocked 100% of the comment spam I was dealing with in my Wordpress-powered site.
I do think it presents an undesireable hurdle for blind people accessing other sites like registering for email accounts and the like.
You're right. He uses the words 'FedEx' in his URL and on his website in reference to the furniture. Copyright wouldn't be hard to prove, besides, this guy doesn't have the finances to defend ANY kind of lawsuit.
But this does remind me of something I noticed recently. A local fashion boutique offers Pabst Blue Ribbon belt buckles. Under closer inspection, I noticed that these were made from snipped aluminum can pieces featuring the PBR logo and the pieces were embedded in some kind of plastic. An enterprising 3rd party recycled a bunch of aluminum cans by crafting these belt buckles and now they're selling them without any licensing going to Pabst. Pretty damn clever if you ask me. Would be hard for Pabst to sue over copyright infringement since the belt buckle maker isn't reproducing the PBR logo... they're using copies of the logo reproduced by PBR themselves!
I'm seeing a lot of 'use Dreamweaver' responses that are well-meaning and probably will solve this guy's dilemna. But what about those of us running CMS systems with text area inputs in forms? Our content people copy-and-paste directly from word and these crazy MsWord entities get crudly transposed into ASCII question marks.
Anyone got a good regsub routine for correctly substituting these entities for their approximate ASCII equivalents? I'm just looking for pattern matching here... Don't need a bunch of code.
I could do without the boobs that find their way into damn near every movie now, though...
This is a very common misconception. The trend in cinema is for fewer and fewer movies to release with an R rating and as such fewer are allowed to contain naked breasts. Of the R-rated films, not even all of them contain naked breasts. Compared to cinema in the seventies, far fewer of today's films contain female nudity or sex scenes.
I would provide statistics to support my observation here, but I'm at work and a search for 'female nudity in films' isn't something I want to embark upon.
My theory as to why this misconception exists is that people are becoming more sensitive to the appearance of female nudity than they were in the past.
I fully agree. Kung Fu Hustle is now one of my top 4 favorite movies of all time. For documentaries, we've also got the Aristocrats to look forward to this year. It just opened up on four screens this past weekend and earned $243,796. I suspect Aristocrats will top this penguin movie in box office reciepts.
Oh, yeah. There was also the American release of "Old Boy" earlier this year. It's definitely the most extreme revenge flick I have ever seen. So, yeah, some people may generalize and say nothing but Hollywood crap is in the theaters, but like you've pointed out, that's not the case.
Baby penguins makes it political. Baby ducks just makes it senselessly cruel.
Valdrax picked up on my intent perfectly. Those who are posting that I missed the opportunity to connect the metaphor to linux via the penguin mascot are asking for their satire to be spoon fed to them. I chose baby ducks because they are universally agreed upon as sweet, non-threatening creatures whose only purpose is to make quacking noises and wiggle their tail feathers. Penguins fit this role, too, but when related to computers, some people align them with linux which is considered to be a threat to Microsoft, etc.
For many people working on open source projects, their intent isn't to harm Microsoft. It's to create something unique that is shared for free with others. Most of what comprises a Linux distribution fits this definition. These guys who Microsoft has hired to run their Linux lab are actively working to help this mega-corporation suppress the adoption of these projects (distros). Even people who eat ducks don't want to see baby ducks getting stomped, but that's what these guys are doing every day, all day long.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. I air-to-surface torpedos are kind of over these days. It's all about air to surface missles now.
My big complaint on this is it's an example of the military's tendency to spend where there isn't a real-world problem. This problem climbs all the way up into the executive branch. In his first term, George W. Bush decided to pull the US out of the ABM treaty. This was because our government wanted the freedom to develop technology to destroy ICBMs. Even after Sept. 11th, the US government wasn't convinced that low-tech is the more plausible threat. The entities who will actually do us harm aren't going to invest in complex systems that send explosive material guided by computers and lasers.
In Iraq, our blind eye to low tech has been exploited with roadside bombs that penetrate the thinly-armored underbelly of our troop transport vehicles. Same with the tens of thousands of RPG launchers menacing our soldiers. More recently, the military has improved the shielding beneath these vehicles and figured out better ways to protect against RPGs. The current method is to erect galvanized tin around tanks and APCs so that the RPG will detonate outside the vehicle. It's a directed charge, so without an impact, it causes exponentially less harm when exploded beside the vehicle. Here's a description of an electric force-field concept to protect against RPGs.
Anyway, I hate to see money misdirected at defending against implausible scenarios while very real threats abound. And to sacrifice whales for the cause is icing on the cake of waste.
Seth
I'm pretty unfamiliar with surface-to-surface torpedos. I've heard of airborn missles, but not torpedos. Same with the other examples you've given. In those cases, computer-aimed mini-guns loaded with depleted uranium bullets seem to do a good job against airborn anti-ship missles. A life of a sailor is, in my mind, worth more than any hypothetical whale that may or may not be harmed by the use of this technology.
I understand your position here. I am countering it by saying that we won't need humans in this capacity much longer. That's how we'll ultimately protect them from torpedos. Not this pork research project.
Besides, in modern times, very few sailors have been injured by torpedos. If we want to protect the maximum number of service men and women with our finite military research budget (the use of the word finite is an exagerration, btw), that money would be better spent developing systems to counter rocket propelled grenades. RPGs will be pointed at our soldiers for a very long time into the future and are currently injuring thousands more soldiers each year than torpedos.
Seth
Next time I'm on a submarine under fire though, I won't be wishing a torpedo away based on some ideals of pacifism.
I will satisfy your request by calling you short-sighted. Humans on submarines are an expensive luxury. Humans have sailed these subsurface warships for over a hundred years, but it is unlikely they will sail them for a hundred more. I think we all hope that whales will be around for at least the next hundred and more years. Technology that threatens their existence while preserving something we won't need much longer is an unacceptable tradeoff.
Submarines' primary value is providing an unpredictable launch location for missles. In short order, we should be able to accomplish the same with drones more cheaply and effectively. Without life support overhead, these drones should be able to operate indefinitely underwater without surfacing. This acoustic detonation project is a waste of tax dollars supporting a system that has a limited lifespan.
Seth
but the funny thing is you have better selection today than you ever have.
WHen I read the gp post and then the responses about the selection being better now than ever before, I couldn't help but think of Devo's song, Freedom of Choice. The GP is probably suffering from too many choices and has given up the search for music.
Seth
Here is an analysis of the DNA describing it as a wolf.
Here is an article in Audubon magazine titled, "How Tasmania's Marsupial Wolf Became Extinct."
So, I think you have no idea what you're anonymously talking about.
Seth
Considering how much damage smaller introduced animals (cats, dogs, rats, mice, rabbits, foxes, cane toads, et al) have done to our wildlife, do we really want much larger ones running around unchecked?
Some extinct Australian creatures, like the Tasmanian Tiger, would probably include humans in your list.
Seth
You are probably referring to the Tasmanian Tiger. It actually was a marsupial wolf that had stripes, so ignorant humans called it a 'tiger'. The humans then proceeded to place a bounty on its head and hunt it into extinction. It was indigineous to the area. The humans were less so. Seth
If grey goo was possible, Mother Nature the true master of nanotech (see molecular biology) would have already come up with it.
Grey goo, if I remember from that Bill Joy piece, is enrestrained entropy. That already exists everywhere-- I think most people call it 'green goo'. The current arrangement you and I are familiar with exists in spite of the entropy constantly working to disassemble us and everything around us. Cancer is the number one killer of Americans, and that's a great example of where entropy succeeds at a cellular level in disassembling us.
Joy's grey goo is just a matter of waiting.
Seth
I sometimes wonder if they don't purposefully create scenes with the intent of only putting them into a DVD release to entice people to buy them.
.
Living in the post-Jar-Jar world we find ourselves in, it's going to take a lot more than extra scenes to entice me to rent a Star Wars DVD. Like maybe if they mislabelled it Kung Fu Hustle
Seth
Microsoft bought an advertorial with IGN. IGN then bought an advertorial on slashdot to help juice up their referrals even more. So yeah, I agree. Hardly big news. Pay-for-hype.
Seth
Although this is undoubtedly a hoax, let's pretend these key cards did have unencrypted credit card information on them. As you've described, the clerks have access to the CC info anyway, so this is a non-issue. Desk Clerks aren't the concern. A CC # theft operation anchored by a hotel desk clerk would be identified immediately by cross-referencing card usage prior to the theft.
The larger threat would be non-employees pilfering cards out of the convenient 'express checkout' drop-boxes. Much more difficult to track down.
Seth
I do think you're a little premature here in your concern over a google-monopoly. So far as yet, they haven't put anyone else out of business. I also can't see any of their products excluding other players from their space. The traditional monopolists like MaBell and Microsoft leveraged product areas where consumers seemingly only have one choice-- local phone provider or OS provider. In the case of Google, consumers will always be able to install other tool bars, use other email services, reference different online map providers, etc.
Seth
Darth, I think the gp post could be referring to how a car is a multi-function device. Like it drives, and can play music, and to some extent you can sleep in it (hopefully not while driving and playing music). You can even get specialized cars like vans and trucks that still play music, drive, but can carry stuff or enable you to sleep more comfortably.
But it's not really a good analogy to your original criticism of multi-function devices. I think the epitome of your criticism is the All-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier devices that sell so well these days. Those things 100% prove your case. I don't think the problem is with physical limitations, but more so with marketing controlling the design budget. There just isn't an incentive for a company to put a super-kick-ass postscript laser printer with 64mb of RAM in one of these things because they're trying to sell it to non-discriminating customers who will casually use each feature and don't want to spend money for a fax modem that they'll only use once in a while.
What will probably happen, though, is that in cell phones, these features (camera, mp3 player, text messg) will become part of the expected standard set among consumers. Like how people shopping for cars expect there to be air conditioning and a CD player. Those used to be options.
Right now, sure, there's limited RAM in the motorola iTunes phone. But in the next rev. it's entirely possible they could enable streaming audio over the phone's internet connection. Then the phone becomes an internet radio, which could compete with the satellite radio providers who are forever going to be challenged to power a portable receiver in a walkman-style form factor. Plus, internet radio is free outside of the bandwidth fees of the user's provider...
Seth
I frequently see posts like the Grandparent asking why hardware vendors don't open up their video card drivers. The reality is these are HARDWARE vendors. They have outsourced much of the SOFTWARE development of drivers to third-party companies that have strict licensing requirements about how their code is going to be used. It isn't even so much about "know how to make their product perform better than yours" as it is keeping their lines of code in-house and private so they can get a contract to do another video card driver in the future.
For the video card companies to get unrestricted use of this code would cost them piles more cash than what they paid for the limited usage.
Seth
In this utopian dream of charging for email, I'll also add that whitelists would need to be maintained which track users who don't get charged, or have their fee refunded. This would allow people to continue to run listserves and the like without it costing any money. The listserve would also need to track which members aren't refunding the mail fee and drop them from the list. The fee would really only be needed for mail recieved from anonymous senders.
Can't hurt to dream.
Seth
I wanted to say you have voiced excellent points here. One I'd like to add to your list--- draconian control over mods. From what I can tell, if someone comes out with a naked mod, or an unlicensed Simpsons mod, Steam can prevent your copy of HL2 from loading it. Another name for this is "content control."
Seth
It will be interesting if a blind person does post a comment on my site. I do advocate for the ADA and am a web programmer for a govt. agency where I have to argue against my co-workers using non-ADA compliant content types like PDF, FLASH, POWERPOINT, and MS Word docs on our web sites. I think that for a blind person, the internet can really expose them to a lot of stuff that's difficult to interpret in hardcopy.
So, I'm not saying that the visually impared are unwelcome on my personal website. It's just that I've made a judgement call between suffering comment spam and excluding a minority of people who would ever be interested in the stuff on my website. Similarly, I was plagued by Brazillian script kiddies attacking my server, so I put firewall rules in place that block all connections from Brazil. Just to save bandwidth, I also eliminated connections from Australia, China, Taiwan, and a few other countries. My website is about skateboarding in Austin, and the intended audience isn't really people in those countries. This may seem like an arbitrarily unfair case of discrimination on my part, but that's my right as an independent internet publisher.
Seth
I don't feel so bad using a Captcha on my site regarding the inconvenience it causes to vision-impared visitors. You only need to fill in the Captcha for posting comments. Otherwise, blind people can access the rest of my site unhindered.
I'd also like to point out that since I've implemented my Captcha, this level of obscurity has blocked 100% of the comment spam I was dealing with in my Wordpress-powered site.
I do think it presents an undesireable hurdle for blind people accessing other sites like registering for email accounts and the like.
Wow. Thanks for the reference to that wysiwyg textarea editor!!! For me, in my work, this is huge! I'm going to implement this ASAP!
Appreciatively,
Seth
You're right. He uses the words 'FedEx' in his URL and on his website in reference to the furniture. Copyright wouldn't be hard to prove, besides, this guy doesn't have the finances to defend ANY kind of lawsuit.
But this does remind me of something I noticed recently. A local fashion boutique offers Pabst Blue Ribbon belt buckles. Under closer inspection, I noticed that these were made from snipped aluminum can pieces featuring the PBR logo and the pieces were embedded in some kind of plastic. An enterprising 3rd party recycled a bunch of aluminum cans by crafting these belt buckles and now they're selling them without any licensing going to Pabst. Pretty damn clever if you ask me. Would be hard for Pabst to sue over copyright infringement since the belt buckle maker isn't reproducing the PBR logo... they're using copies of the logo reproduced by PBR themselves!
Seth
I'm seeing a lot of 'use Dreamweaver' responses that are well-meaning and probably will solve this guy's dilemna. But what about those of us running CMS systems with text area inputs in forms? Our content people copy-and-paste directly from word and these crazy MsWord entities get crudly transposed into ASCII question marks.
Anyone got a good regsub routine for correctly substituting these entities for their approximate ASCII equivalents? I'm just looking for pattern matching here... Don't need a bunch of code.
Appreciatively,
Seth
To which Paul Allen responded from the deck of his yacht, "We're going to need a bigger boat!"
Seth
I could do without the boobs that find their way into damn near every movie now, though...
This is a very common misconception. The trend in cinema is for fewer and fewer movies to release with an R rating and as such fewer are allowed to contain naked breasts. Of the R-rated films, not even all of them contain naked breasts. Compared to cinema in the seventies, far fewer of today's films contain female nudity or sex scenes.
I would provide statistics to support my observation here, but I'm at work and a search for 'female nudity in films' isn't something I want to embark upon.
My theory as to why this misconception exists is that people are becoming more sensitive to the appearance of female nudity than they were in the past.
seth
I fully agree. Kung Fu Hustle is now one of my top 4 favorite movies of all time. For documentaries, we've also got the Aristocrats to look forward to this year. It just opened up on four screens this past weekend and earned $243,796. I suspect Aristocrats will top this penguin movie in box office reciepts.
Oh, yeah. There was also the American release of "Old Boy" earlier this year. It's definitely the most extreme revenge flick I have ever seen. So, yeah, some people may generalize and say nothing but Hollywood crap is in the theaters, but like you've pointed out, that's not the case.
Seth
Baby penguins makes it political. Baby ducks just makes it senselessly cruel.
Valdrax picked up on my intent perfectly. Those who are posting that I missed the opportunity to connect the metaphor to linux via the penguin mascot are asking for their satire to be spoon fed to them. I chose baby ducks because they are universally agreed upon as sweet, non-threatening creatures whose only purpose is to make quacking noises and wiggle their tail feathers. Penguins fit this role, too, but when related to computers, some people align them with linux which is considered to be a threat to Microsoft, etc.
For many people working on open source projects, their intent isn't to harm Microsoft. It's to create something unique that is shared for free with others. Most of what comprises a Linux distribution fits this definition. These guys who Microsoft has hired to run their Linux lab are actively working to help this mega-corporation suppress the adoption of these projects (distros). Even people who eat ducks don't want to see baby ducks getting stomped, but that's what these guys are doing every day, all day long.
Seth