Just my idle curiosity, what kinds of counter-intuitive measures have you found so far? Also, how do you go about gathering the information on the kids? I would imagine that something like "One or both parents has a history of drug abuse" would be a huge indicator, but there is often no easy way for people within the school system to know about that.
One of the key administrators involved has been answering all questions about the program by invoking the Fifth Amendment.
No doubt he was instructed by his lawyer to do so. At least this means that the 'Oh Shit' lightbulb has finally gone off in someones head, someone finally is realizing that this could very easily end up with jail time and a spot on the sex offenders registry.
It's not really that complex. Something like 80% of people can get the largest refund possible by filling out the a single form, with around 15 entries on it. The only way this isn't true is if you spend a lot of your paycheck on things like student loans, mortgage interest, charity, or medical bills. All of which encourage things that help to stabalize our society, so I don't really see much of a problem with them personally.
Maybe you don't understand. Toddlers have racial biases. Even babies just a few months old will prefer to look at a picture of someone with the same skin color as them. It's built into the way our brain works. These kids don't have that at any age. They also don't have the subconscious biases that 99% of people have, even the people that are nice to everyone and would never say, do, or even think a racist thought.
All that that means is that at any moment she could post the 'wrong' thing that generates lots of attention and find herself in trouble. The fact that it does happen sometimes is more than enough to make the behavior brave in my opinion, certainly braver than anything I've done with my life. And by the sound of it she is the source for a substantial amount of leaks through the firewall, just because it gets propagated through many different blogs and silently deleted doesn't mean that no one is looking for the source. Saying no one really gets harassed unless they get a large audience puts these people at the whim of their audience, what they're doing is dangerous because at any moment, without them changing anything at all, they could find themselves in very deep water.
You're right about cost but I think you're wrong about capabilities. We know more about the moon as a result of the Apollo program than we do as a result of all the unmanned missions combined. A few guys on Mars could do what the rovers have done in a couple of months. Human beings are much more adaptable than any robot that will could conceivably be made within the next 20 years, probably more like 50 years.
What holds space flight back is the cost. Its simply too hard to get anything into orbit right now, let alone the extra weight of life support and supplies that human beings need. Not to mention that if we're ever going to have long range space flight we're going to need to start building ships big enough that they can be spun for gravity. The cost of launching that much material right now makes it impossible but there are, as I see it, two ways around the problem.
One: New launch technologies. There have been technologies on the drawing board that would revolutionize space travel for decades, but nothing has gone anywhere because the funds for R&D have always been spent on current missions and incremental improvements to existing designs. Nuclear rockets have been possible for at least 30 years, but public fears have made them impossible. Non-rocket launch technologies aren't really feasible yet, maybe in 20 or 30 years but current materials are either inadequate or too close to trust in such an expensive and high profile endeavor.
Two: Pull us up by our bootstraps. Launching a manned interplanetary ship from earth is too hard? Build it in orbit then. Mine the materials from NEO's, set up foundries and chemical refineries in orbit, process water and out of asteroids, and build orbital refueling stations. By the time the orbital infrastructure is set up, the materials for a space elevator will be there and it can be manufactured in orbit, eliminating the cost of launching the cable and allowing it to be manufactured as it is being deployed, saving time and money.
Tweens and Teens sounds like a pretty big market to me. Depending on the price they'll either do alright or fail miserably. If Jr want's a $200 smart phone but one of these can be had for $50 you can bet there's going to be a lot of parents that take something like this as a compromise. If the options are spend $400 (+$30 per month) or something at a more reasonable price that gets by with a smaller data plan, parents will jump all over it (lest they be labeled 'bad parents' by their kids for not getting them what they want).
Time will tell, we don't really know enough about the phones to say much at the moment. To me they look like the almost-but-not-quite smart phones that are already on the market today. MS might be too late to the party to see major sales.
In what appears to be a setback for Hollywood and the recording industry, the government said that it sees problems with the methodology used in studies those sectors have long relied on to support claims that piracy was destructive to their businesses. The accountability office even noted the existence of data that shows piracy may benefit consumers in some cases.
And why on Earth would anyone devote hundreds of hours of their time (and money) to developing a product that, according to the developer ToS, would never, ever be approved?
I suspect that this isn't about supporting Flash as much as it is about Apple's not allowing linker-level Flash ports. There are good reasons to not allow Flash on the iDevices, it's much harder to make the case for Flash apps that have been converted to stand alone applications.
If the net effect is a positive for the virus, the behavior would have evolved on it's own in nature. If it's a negative, the virus will be out competed by other viruses. Even if it's neutral, it will at most fulfill its current niche and the water splitting abilities will be lost to genetic drift since it doesn't convey any advantage. In other words: Nothing is going to go wrong, control your irrational fears of genetic engineering and biotechnology.
That kind of sounds like something that sounds right at first, but when you stop to think about it almost definitely isn't true. First, movies don't come out in 'just' 3D, and they probably never will. As long as the old media and formats are there the old ways of pirating will still work. Still stands even if you're talking about pirating in the sense of bringing a camera into a movie theater, every theater I've been to also shows the 2-D version. Even if they move over to 100% 3D in theaters, how long before the pirates realize all they have to do is put a polarizing lens on the camera?
Encrypted document: Classified Secret. Encryption keys: Classified Top Secret, Crypto.
There is a big difference between those two things. Secret is things that the powers that be would rather aren't publicly available. Top Secret is things that would significantly impact the armed forces abilities to do their job. You don't leak encryption keys... you just don't do it.
It's just an underpowered and fragile disaster waiting to happen.
Saying this about a project an engineer has devoted 7 years of their life to is an attack on that engineer. It implies that they don't know what they're doing, that they're uninformed, that they're idiots. Thinking that you can outsmart someone who is demonstrably more knowledgeable and experienced about the subject (unless of course you happen to have a solar powered plane in your garage) insults that person.
As one of the designers of the system, I have just this to say... gosh, we never thought of that. Looking at the designs again in light of your insightful, informed comments it's clear that we're all insane and or incompetent for designing this thing. We should have realized sooner, but I guess we were all to drunk/high to notice.
END SARCASM
This was designed by engineers with experience in the field. They know all about power to weight ratios, wingspans, and surface areas. The fact that you were able to come up with your objections with about 30 seconds of thought should make you realize that the engineers involved probably came up with the same concerns somewhere along the 7 year development cycle. As for it being miserable to fly... of course it is, this isn't a sport plane or even a transport plane, it's a proof of concept at best (and I don't really see how the concept could ever really be made into anything other than a gee whiz toy).
Casinos are specifically and carefully designed to exploit people's natural instincts
So is World of Warcraft, and no one is trying to outlaw that. Hell, as far as college age people goes, I knew 5 people that dropped out of college as a result of WoW addictions. We're talking playing 100+ hours per week without sleep or going to classes numerous problems with relationships, few friends outside of their addiction, and extreme difficulty holding down a job. In other words, all the hallmarks of a destructive addiction, and any psychologist can tell you that the game is designed to create exactly that.
The problem with putting conventional warheads on an ICBM is that no one would know for sure that it isn't a nuke until much too late. Technologically, it's possible to launch a missile from the continental US and have it hit a specific house halfway around the world within 3 hours. But if the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans/Iranians think you've just launched a nuke against someone, things could get very dicey, very fast.
I'll grant you there may be reasons why this happened. Maybe a suicide bomber hit their squad mate in that square just a week ago. Maybe the rules of engagement said to fire if you felt threatened (I highly doubt that but maybe). Maybe some in the crowd looked suspicious, maybe a camera looked like a gun for a second.
None of that would change the fact that a fully automatic weapon was discharged into an unarmed crowd of civilians. If it was a mistake, fine, warfare is ugly and brutal. But the soldiers involved should have been investigated, public apologies should have been made, rules of engagement should have been changed, training should have been improved. Instead, the incident was lied about, covered up, denied, and ignored and that is unforgivable in my opinion.
Dude, it's on the internet. It's been downloaded, uploaded, torrented, copied, cleaned up, trimmed down, analyzed, re-analyzed, commented on, posted, and removed dozens of times already. Even if you somehow identified every website that currently has it posted and somehow forced them to pull the video, it would live on and be recovered from people's caches and be re-posted to an order of magnitude more websites tomorrow. It's over. If the DoD has any intelligence whatsoever they'll ignore the video and hope it goes away, such is the only possible defense to something you don't like hitting the internet.
I have no doubt that the book was boring, plodding, and pointless to you. Let's face it, it was written by a teenage girl who never expected anyone to read it, 95% of the book is detailing spending time in close confines with her family, locked in a small room and experiencing nothing new and nothing exciting.
The book only becomes interesting if you know and appreciate the 'back-story'. I assume that most people reading it, even those stuck in high school lit or history classes, will at least know the back story. Intellectually, they understand what the book is about and why they're confined and why they must be quiet. But I have my doubts whether the average high school student takes that information into account when actually reading it. It is only through that knowledge that there is any real tension in the book. Saying "We heard the troops downstairs today, it was scary" isn't very good literature, unless you appreciate that while she was writing it, there actually were troops downstairs that would have arrested and eventually killed her and her family. If the voice you hear in your mind when reading it isn't a terrified 13 year old girl, you'll never really understand the book.
I realized relatively recently that I have two lists in my head: One being the list of the best movies I had ever seen, and another being my favorite movies. What was surprising was how little overlap there was between those two lists. There's even movies on my 'favorites' list that I know are not very good movies, but hey I enjoy them. Personally, I can enjoy both categories, but doubtless there are art buffs who only enjoy the 'good' movies, and doubtless there are schlubs that only enjoy the 'entertaining' movies.
If you're in orbit around the planet, you already have everything you need to destroy the Earth's military and economic power. A bar of steel dropped from orbit has more power than an anti-tank round. An asteroid has the power of a nuclear weapon. In a high orbit, an alien spaceship would be essentially untouchable from any available weapons and would have firepower in direct proportion to available mass. Interstellar travel is hard, the energy requirements just to get a ship into orbit are massive, let alone accelerating it to a speed that would make interstellar travel acceptable. There is no form of realistic interstellar propulsion that wouldn't also make a devastatingly powerful weapon, if for no other reason than you can always drop a few tons of steel onto the planet at 10% the speed of light.
Slashdot Mirror
Just my idle curiosity, what kinds of counter-intuitive measures have you found so far? Also, how do you go about gathering the information on the kids? I would imagine that something like "One or both parents has a history of drug abuse" would be a huge indicator, but there is often no easy way for people within the school system to know about that.
One of the key administrators involved has been answering all questions about the program by invoking the Fifth Amendment.
No doubt he was instructed by his lawyer to do so. At least this means that the 'Oh Shit' lightbulb has finally gone off in someones head, someone finally is realizing that this could very easily end up with jail time and a spot on the sex offenders registry.
It's not really that complex. Something like 80% of people can get the largest refund possible by filling out the a single form, with around 15 entries on it. The only way this isn't true is if you spend a lot of your paycheck on things like student loans, mortgage interest, charity, or medical bills. All of which encourage things that help to stabalize our society, so I don't really see much of a problem with them personally.
Maybe you don't understand. Toddlers have racial biases. Even babies just a few months old will prefer to look at a picture of someone with the same skin color as them. It's built into the way our brain works. These kids don't have that at any age. They also don't have the subconscious biases that 99% of people have, even the people that are nice to everyone and would never say, do, or even think a racist thought.
All that that means is that at any moment she could post the 'wrong' thing that generates lots of attention and find herself in trouble. The fact that it does happen sometimes is more than enough to make the behavior brave in my opinion, certainly braver than anything I've done with my life. And by the sound of it she is the source for a substantial amount of leaks through the firewall, just because it gets propagated through many different blogs and silently deleted doesn't mean that no one is looking for the source. Saying no one really gets harassed unless they get a large audience puts these people at the whim of their audience, what they're doing is dangerous because at any moment, without them changing anything at all, they could find themselves in very deep water.
little more than an added complexity to getting what you want from the internet in China
Basic communication shouldn't take heroic levels of bravery. People have been imprisoned in China for doing less than what she is doing.
You're right about cost but I think you're wrong about capabilities. We know more about the moon as a result of the Apollo program than we do as a result of all the unmanned missions combined. A few guys on Mars could do what the rovers have done in a couple of months. Human beings are much more adaptable than any robot that will could conceivably be made within the next 20 years, probably more like 50 years.
What holds space flight back is the cost. Its simply too hard to get anything into orbit right now, let alone the extra weight of life support and supplies that human beings need. Not to mention that if we're ever going to have long range space flight we're going to need to start building ships big enough that they can be spun for gravity. The cost of launching that much material right now makes it impossible but there are, as I see it, two ways around the problem.
One: New launch technologies. There have been technologies on the drawing board that would revolutionize space travel for decades, but nothing has gone anywhere because the funds for R&D have always been spent on current missions and incremental improvements to existing designs. Nuclear rockets have been possible for at least 30 years, but public fears have made them impossible. Non-rocket launch technologies aren't really feasible yet, maybe in 20 or 30 years but current materials are either inadequate or too close to trust in such an expensive and high profile endeavor.
Two: Pull us up by our bootstraps. Launching a manned interplanetary ship from earth is too hard? Build it in orbit then. Mine the materials from NEO's, set up foundries and chemical refineries in orbit, process water and out of asteroids, and build orbital refueling stations. By the time the orbital infrastructure is set up, the materials for a space elevator will be there and it can be manufactured in orbit, eliminating the cost of launching the cable and allowing it to be manufactured as it is being deployed, saving time and money.
Vin Diesel? Still not seeing the connection.
Tweens and Teens sounds like a pretty big market to me. Depending on the price they'll either do alright or fail miserably. If Jr want's a $200 smart phone but one of these can be had for $50 you can bet there's going to be a lot of parents that take something like this as a compromise. If the options are spend $400 (+$30 per month) or something at a more reasonable price that gets by with a smaller data plan, parents will jump all over it (lest they be labeled 'bad parents' by their kids for not getting them what they want).
Time will tell, we don't really know enough about the phones to say much at the moment. To me they look like the almost-but-not-quite smart phones that are already on the market today. MS might be too late to the party to see major sales.
In what appears to be a setback for Hollywood and the recording industry, the government said that it sees problems with the methodology used in studies those sectors have long relied on to support claims that piracy was destructive to their businesses. The accountability office even noted the existence of data that shows piracy may benefit consumers in some cases.
And why on Earth would anyone devote hundreds of hours of their time (and money) to developing a product that, according to the developer ToS, would never, ever be approved?
I suspect that this isn't about supporting Flash as much as it is about Apple's not allowing linker-level Flash ports. There are good reasons to not allow Flash on the iDevices, it's much harder to make the case for Flash apps that have been converted to stand alone applications.
If the net effect is a positive for the virus, the behavior would have evolved on it's own in nature. If it's a negative, the virus will be out competed by other viruses. Even if it's neutral, it will at most fulfill its current niche and the water splitting abilities will be lost to genetic drift since it doesn't convey any advantage. In other words: Nothing is going to go wrong, control your irrational fears of genetic engineering and biotechnology.
That kind of sounds like something that sounds right at first, but when you stop to think about it almost definitely isn't true. First, movies don't come out in 'just' 3D, and they probably never will. As long as the old media and formats are there the old ways of pirating will still work. Still stands even if you're talking about pirating in the sense of bringing a camera into a movie theater, every theater I've been to also shows the 2-D version. Even if they move over to 100% 3D in theaters, how long before the pirates realize all they have to do is put a polarizing lens on the camera?
Just for starters...
Why has it persisted for so long?
Why is it red?
Encrypted document: Classified Secret.
Encryption keys: Classified Top Secret, Crypto.
There is a big difference between those two things. Secret is things that the powers that be would rather aren't publicly available. Top Secret is things that would significantly impact the armed forces abilities to do their job. You don't leak encryption keys... you just don't do it.
It's just an underpowered and fragile disaster waiting to happen.
Saying this about a project an engineer has devoted 7 years of their life to is an attack on that engineer. It implies that they don't know what they're doing, that they're uninformed, that they're idiots. Thinking that you can outsmart someone who is demonstrably more knowledgeable and experienced about the subject (unless of course you happen to have a solar powered plane in your garage) insults that person.
As one of the designers of the system, I have just this to say... gosh, we never thought of that. Looking at the designs again in light of your insightful, informed comments it's clear that we're all insane and or incompetent for designing this thing. We should have realized sooner, but I guess we were all to drunk/high to notice.
END SARCASM
This was designed by engineers with experience in the field. They know all about power to weight ratios, wingspans, and surface areas. The fact that you were able to come up with your objections with about 30 seconds of thought should make you realize that the engineers involved probably came up with the same concerns somewhere along the 7 year development cycle. As for it being miserable to fly... of course it is, this isn't a sport plane or even a transport plane, it's a proof of concept at best (and I don't really see how the concept could ever really be made into anything other than a gee whiz toy).
Casinos are specifically and carefully designed to exploit people's natural instincts
So is World of Warcraft, and no one is trying to outlaw that. Hell, as far as college age people goes, I knew 5 people that dropped out of college as a result of WoW addictions. We're talking playing 100+ hours per week without sleep or going to classes numerous problems with relationships, few friends outside of their addiction, and extreme difficulty holding down a job. In other words, all the hallmarks of a destructive addiction, and any psychologist can tell you that the game is designed to create exactly that.
The problem with putting conventional warheads on an ICBM is that no one would know for sure that it isn't a nuke until much too late. Technologically, it's possible to launch a missile from the continental US and have it hit a specific house halfway around the world within 3 hours. But if the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans/Iranians think you've just launched a nuke against someone, things could get very dicey, very fast.
I'll grant you there may be reasons why this happened. Maybe a suicide bomber hit their squad mate in that square just a week ago. Maybe the rules of engagement said to fire if you felt threatened (I highly doubt that but maybe). Maybe some in the crowd looked suspicious, maybe a camera looked like a gun for a second.
None of that would change the fact that a fully automatic weapon was discharged into an unarmed crowd of civilians. If it was a mistake, fine, warfare is ugly and brutal. But the soldiers involved should have been investigated, public apologies should have been made, rules of engagement should have been changed, training should have been improved. Instead, the incident was lied about, covered up, denied, and ignored and that is unforgivable in my opinion.
Dude, it's on the internet. It's been downloaded, uploaded, torrented, copied, cleaned up, trimmed down, analyzed, re-analyzed, commented on, posted, and removed dozens of times already. Even if you somehow identified every website that currently has it posted and somehow forced them to pull the video, it would live on and be recovered from people's caches and be re-posted to an order of magnitude more websites tomorrow. It's over. If the DoD has any intelligence whatsoever they'll ignore the video and hope it goes away, such is the only possible defense to something you don't like hitting the internet.
I have no doubt that the book was boring, plodding, and pointless to you. Let's face it, it was written by a teenage girl who never expected anyone to read it, 95% of the book is detailing spending time in close confines with her family, locked in a small room and experiencing nothing new and nothing exciting.
The book only becomes interesting if you know and appreciate the 'back-story'. I assume that most people reading it, even those stuck in high school lit or history classes, will at least know the back story. Intellectually, they understand what the book is about and why they're confined and why they must be quiet. But I have my doubts whether the average high school student takes that information into account when actually reading it. It is only through that knowledge that there is any real tension in the book. Saying "We heard the troops downstairs today, it was scary" isn't very good literature, unless you appreciate that while she was writing it, there actually were troops downstairs that would have arrested and eventually killed her and her family. If the voice you hear in your mind when reading it isn't a terrified 13 year old girl, you'll never really understand the book.
I realized relatively recently that I have two lists in my head: One being the list of the best movies I had ever seen, and another being my favorite movies. What was surprising was how little overlap there was between those two lists. There's even movies on my 'favorites' list that I know are not very good movies, but hey I enjoy them. Personally, I can enjoy both categories, but doubtless there are art buffs who only enjoy the 'good' movies, and doubtless there are schlubs that only enjoy the 'entertaining' movies.
If you're in orbit around the planet, you already have everything you need to destroy the Earth's military and economic power. A bar of steel dropped from orbit has more power than an anti-tank round. An asteroid has the power of a nuclear weapon. In a high orbit, an alien spaceship would be essentially untouchable from any available weapons and would have firepower in direct proportion to available mass. Interstellar travel is hard, the energy requirements just to get a ship into orbit are massive, let alone accelerating it to a speed that would make interstellar travel acceptable. There is no form of realistic interstellar propulsion that wouldn't also make a devastatingly powerful weapon, if for no other reason than you can always drop a few tons of steel onto the planet at 10% the speed of light.