Last year, Kansas almost cancelled teaching evolution in public school science classes. I don't trust Kansas schoolin' all that much... they may know Latin, but they almost lost the late Nineteenth and all of the Twentieth century of biological science.
Here's a question, roughly related to yours: when will former president of Nicaragua, Manuel Noriega, ever be charged with a crime? Is he a non-person, forever in a forgotten American cell? And when will we be told how many civilians were killed to get at him?
I'm not some knee-jerk anti-American. I am very concerned with how we are treating foreign nationals who violate our laws while dwelling in their own country. What the hell are we doing? Are we becoming the stereotypical authoritarian state our enemies describe us as?
The only reason we get away with yanking non-US citizens into our prisons, without bail in this case, is because we have the power to be the biggest bastards in the world. Our old isolationist tendencies do not prepare us for dealing with other nations fairly -- we are riding roughshod over them, and we don't care what they think of us. This does not bode well for the future. You see, just because we are the biggest bully on the block doesn't mean everyone else is going to sit back and get their citizens plucked off the streets and have their lunch money stolen. The rest of the world is growing economically and politically, and eventually, if this keeps up, sadly, they will have to do something about our arrogance.
Is that so bad? What about the thousands that are employed by the companies building these things? Many companies and people depend on projects like this to keep them in business and alive. It's just tax dollars coming back into peoples paychecks.
Yes, it is bad when billions of dollars are paid to contractors building weapons systems that may not be necessary, and more importantly, do not work either mechanically or strategically. The money in question gives the contractors the incentive to lie, and lie big, to get the money to finance their companies.
And about the money being good for the economy; isn't government spending to stimulate the economy the ultimate bugaboo of the far right? It's supposed to be communistic -- all those totalitarian, confiscatory laws designed to give our hard-earned tax dollars to unworthy blacks, etc. But it's OK if it's a rich pack of contractors in Idaho getting the money, I guess...
The business of the government of the people of the U.S. is not keeping defense businesses well-funded and alive. I can't think of anything more anti-free market at the moment.
Exactly. And here's a point: What the hell is Corporate America? Is it a separate division of America of which I am not aware? Another: are they somehow entitled to rights not shared by the rest of us? Another: corporations are fictitious persons granted charter to exist as such by the American people for the sole purpose of enriching our everyday lives. They are not powers per se; they were bloody never intended to be.
Well, I do hope this slows down the Church of Scientology in their discovery efforts of Usenet posters, but I doubt it. (They were first on the scene to try this nonsense on the Internet). The "prima facie" evidence of harm to the plaintiff necessary to request identity of a poster from an ISP depends on the amiability of a judge to the plaintiff, and that is a little too open for interpretation.
By the way, re-read you last sentence. I'm not talking about your content, just the grammer. It's painful.
Flaming grammar be dangerous, especially if you spell it grammer.
Let's be kind here...
The DC-X program died becaues NASA wouldn't fund it to the tune of, what, ten mil? The SSTO vehicle worked (tho a tech inadvertently failed to lock a landing strut and it went boom) and was working well. Tho I love NASA and its accomplishments dearly, they do not like competition, firstly; secondly they are winged aircraft afficianados; thirdly, if the cheap SSTO concept worked, they would have had a lot of 'splainin to do about the tens of billions the superplanes require for research.
I love the supertech, but, like the wet navy, you make incremental moves towards new vehicles. The slow and cheap, use-what-works method the Japanese are using will get them to orbit sooner or later, and when they do, it'll be a efficient workhorse (which blows up occasionally). Think a Honda Civic vs. a formula racer. The thing about cheap is, you can make more ships if they crash or explode, or just wear out. NASA has no safety margin with 2 billion dollar craft. They must not fail; to fail would be the end.
NASA once upon a time floated dreams about Mars and lunar cities, and was brutally disillusioned about the public's desire for such things. So they have to be safe, flying 31 year old designs into orbit, building a station which does little. I grew up on space, i dreamed it. Gerry O'Neil was my god. But space is locked up by an agency that, tho it wants to fly, can only plod if it wants to live.
Small. Cheap. Composite. Cheap fuels. Fast turnaround on land/launch cycles. Vertical take off, vertical landing. These will open space for commerce, maybe even open up the moon and the solar system for us all, eventually. NASA's programs cannot.
I mourn the Roton and the DC-X/Delta Clipper. I am damned happy someone, somewhere is carrying on making the sky our new home. I don't want new drugs made in microgravity, or more intensive astronomy. I WANT TO GO MYSELF, and this project brings it a little closer to reality. NASA will never give us that.
When you are poor, textbooks cost a LOT. And it's irrelevant, because an open-source textbook's cost is exactly zero.
As for the administration and the financing being at fault, don't be silly. Teachers and administrators are paid far, far less than their counterparts in private industry. And don't forget: school budgets are public documents. When someone puts forth the argument that the money is wasted, I have to ask: how? Isn't that rather knee-jerk? And you mean ALL those districts are cheating their students? Wow.
I've heard the argument for years, but I never see a budget analysis done that backs it up. Reason being, it really isn't a supportable argument. Poor districts have no property tax base, so they depend on state and fed funds, which are pretty iffy and scarce.
The school admins would probably be glad to sit down and explain why there isn't enough money, but they don't get many people taking them up on the offer.
We don't pay enough taxes to fund our schools. Oh, in affluent districts they may, but education is funded on a local level. We don't put enough money into schools. Flat out. The teachers aren't taking cruises, the admins are not riding Caddies. They need help, and I am merely saying the the open source model lends itself to alleviating the cost of the books, not to mention increasing the quality of the material itself.
"Blame the politicians" "blame the school boards" "blame the lazy teachers" -- decades of this I have heard, and the teachers wearily try to hold it together as those catchphrases block any changes. We don't need more testing; we need to reduce the costs of the materials, increase teacher salaries, fix the problems!. The "politicians" are our elected officials, and they do what we want them to do, which is mostly nothing.
No, we by definition do not pay enough, in money or in attention, and that has caused our public school education system to die.
It was a minor violation. The teacher used Office because the whole world "voluntarily" uses Office, so he had to use it too. But money was tight. So he copied it. Did Microsoft get harmed? No. Licenses be damned, the richest corporation around decided to "punish" a teacher for no harm to itself.
I thunk of it a few weeks ago. Why must a school system buy insanely expensive textbooks every few years? (Not to mention the incestous textbook business which vets content in Texas, but I digress).
English, math, science textbooks -- these things are perfectly suited for open source projects. Besides, math doesn't really change every few years, so a textbook can last a long time.
Schools are always underfunded, even the most well-financed. But schools in areas without wealthy homeowners have worst of it all. I grew up in one. We didn't even have construction paper. No glue. Books were shared sometimes. There just wasn't enough money. And this was CHICAGO!
I know this is a not technically on topic, but it is the same problem. Schools have to limp along on shoestring budgets. I know about the efforts to equip schools with free software, but how about creating some good textbooks for everyone to use without ever worrying about paying a company for dead trees? Print the books out on standard copy paper at Kinkos, or the school copy room.
Additionally, advantages I see are: unlimited supply of books, easy replacement if one gets lost (a sore point with me; i lost out on a semester of trig in HS 'cause my book was stolen and I couldn't pay for the replacement), and the ability to correct and extend the course content by the teachers themselves.
Um, they have more than enough techno know-how to build a missile control system, or any weapon of mass destruction they choose. And any other nation can simply buy it, or send some students to universities here to learn it.
What is this American obsession with "secret" missle and nuke tech? It isn't secret. Everyone has it. Knowledge, no matter what the Intellectual Property groupies want to believe, breaks free and roams in the wild fairly quickly. The whole point of the Internet was to distribute information!
Point: this fear of killer missiles is a holdover from the '50's. Let the fear go. It's dumb. We have over 10,000 warheads - no sane nation will ever launch a nuke on a missile at us. They'd be destroyed in days. Game over.
A nuke, should it come, will be in a U-Haul parked in front of the Smithsonian Institution. It may happen. We'll survive it. Terrorists can't detonate hundreds of nukes to get all of our assets, and no matter what they do, we and the rest of the world would hunt the mad dogs down in REALLY short order. It's self-preservation!
The commies got the bomb, the Iranians (probably) have the bomb, the South Africans have the bomb -- think about it. The bloody bomb is useless! What the hell can you do with it, other than promise to use it if someone bombs you?
The Eighties reconstituted the Bomb scare of the Fifties, and we will be a long time getting rid of the notion of commie nukes raining from the sky.
Wanna be scared? Think of HIV-like genetic material inserted into a common cold virus. Think of the "fleshing-eating" bacteria's code installed into some innocuous bacterium. Think of plagues keyed to common genetic markers, say, like those females may possess (think Herbert's "White Plague"). THOSE are weapons of mass destruction. They make nukes look like annoying sunburn agents.
Ah, Fox News? Then the pop-under ads were, of course, linked to the liberal deviousness of Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. No doubt, ad revenue generated from the nefarious left-slanted ads are funneled to a Chinese bank account in Hong Kong, ultimately winding up in the pockets of one President Bill Clinton, Esquire. President Clinton will be derrogatorily referred to as "Bill" 85 times.
Sources for all of this were never mentioned, tho Matt Drudge and the Freepers were, as usual, jumping up and down screaming "ME! ME!!".
MS-NBC will pick up on the story, which in five minutes will then be carried on CNN. Later on CBS, Dan Rather and a ranking Republican will be discussing Dan Burton's new investigation of Clinton's involvement in Javascript corruption. Suspicious links to the "natural" death of SF's great Douglas Adams will also be raised, since Clinton was known to live in the same hemisphere the day of his death.
Ya know... it is possible to be older than 29, and still walk and run. 'Sides, if you yunguns get too uppity, the oldsters can just shoot ya.
Seriously, the revulsion (fear?) of the young for the old is getting to me a bit as I get older myself. It is possible to date, use computers, run, and even have an adventure or two after you turn thirty.
Don't just worry about the government or the police monitoring you 24/7. Private organizations can do the same thing, and believe me, there aren't as many checks and balances on those corporate entities. And they have far different agendas than the police do. You can unelect governments, and change police chiefs. But private intelligence agents with sunglasses answer to know one, ultimately. They are scary.
It's not that I'd like to sit in a classroom watching Powerpoint presentations of photocopied pages. It's just that we need the pieces of paper that say we attended a class of this or that. On the job training is great, but for resumes, you need course credits. YMMV. Of course, I agree that self-training is the only way to go if you want to actually know something.
Meow. As the article states, and as I recall, interception of the stream alters the photons... that nasty Uncertainty Principle again. Any bucket brigade attack is detectable per the laws of physics. It's devious. The stream is irreproducible.
The cat may be alive or it may be dead, but god does that box stink.
Judge Saul Sanders, the man who effectively ruled the election in Bush's favor, almost attended a Free Republican rally in his honor with Katherine Harris last week. At the very last second, under some considerable pressure, he excused himself from the lionization. Bias? Where was the news coverage of this?
Judge Jackson simply stated the obvious. Gates was dissembling at the trial, Microsoft attorneys were arrogant and transparently lying.
Difference between Sanders and Jackson is that Jackson had a well-oiled attack machine on his butt, and Sanders sort of filters through the cracks of news coverage.
Nope -- no one's beaming their land onto your land However, the sat TV providers are flooding you with their EM. To make decoding that signal illegal is like declaring a view of a privately-owned mountain illegal if viewed without permission and payment of the mountain owner. Or, say, use of a pair of binoculars to view a home, or a telescope to look at a private beach. Light is not illegal to intercept, so why not radio? The only reason it is illegal to use the TV signal is because the companies ran tothe courts and legislatures and got it declared illegal before anyone noticed the putch. Now, people just accept that building a radio receiver is illegal in some instances. IMO, if you beam a signal into my home, it's mine to play with, baby.
I've NEVER heard of a college student using a deodorizer in the fridge. It'd be overwhelmed by the semester-old tuna sandwiches lying unwrapped next to the dirty dishes hidden in the back of the month-old melted ice cream tub.
It takes years for college students to realize that bathrooms and kitchens do not have a Mom Genie that magically cleans up up after them.
Unfortunately, the problem with a government funded Internet infrastructure is that you have to abide by government rules.
That's the beauty of the Internet in its current form - no single entity can pull the plug on it if they don't like what's happening. Or so the theory goes.
You say that as tho it's a bad thing. If you don't like government rules, you can always go to your representative and start a process to get the laws changed. Who do we go to when a telecom decides not to service us? What venue in private industry will give you justice if all DSL providers yank their service? Or what if someday a very conservative owner of your ISP decided you are too immoral to be using his network. It's in his rights to chop you - he owns the network.
WE are the Evil Government. It responds to US at election time. The corps don't vote, we do. Acting as tho it's some alien lifeforce is schizophrenic and dangerous to our democracy. It shows a lack of understanding of what we are And we claim to lead the world, when we won't trust our own elected government?
Oh yes -- the "government" created the internet protocols by redistributing tax dollars to learning institutions and the military. Business didn't. Business took a government-funded protocol and added a bit of magic, and kazam, it is a business matter only, this "Net".
What if the interstate highway program had not been built with government money? Would we be whizzing at low cost from small town to smaller town, all over the continent? Nope. The best roads would be toll roads, owned by conglomerates, and spurs would be added to outlying towns when it was financially viable to do so. We'd STILL be waiting for roads in areas witho no financial incentive to invite contruction. Ditto the phone company.
The Canadians are simply using logic, common sense, and an educated grasp of history unclouded by economic religion. They are building the infrastructure needed to wire their nation NOW, at a relatively small cost. How much as we spending, in all the private efforts, and what do we have to show for it in the "last mile"? Where will our choices lie when one company owns the only accessible broadband in a home area? Don't laugh. If they don't now, a few buyouts will concentrate ownership quickly and legally, and defacto monopolies will result. Markets are not naturally free. They need regulation to stay free.
Canada is simply creating an interstate highway system for the internet. They will have high-speed to every home for a reasonable price, soon, and we will just look on and snort, "Hah! Socialism!" as we pay $150US a month for high-speed symmetrical DSL that the Canadians will be getting for $40US. Who's more crazy?
Here's a thought: how far along would our economy now be, if every mile of the interstate highway system built in the last fifty years, and every single street and alley upgraded to asphalt in the last hundred, had to be paid for by for-profit companies? Think about it: how long would it have taken for Nevada to be in the system? Alaska? How expensive would it have been for the drivers if every road was a toll road?
I only mention this because of the obvious analogy to how the high-speed infrastructure is being built-up in the U.S. Slow, expensive, and every mile must be justified by shown profit. This is going to take forever.
Waaah! I don't WANT a giant ISP value-adding expensive junk on my bill. I just want to share a set of high-speed lines within a co-op, let's say.
Sigh. Our laws will never let this happen, will they. Liability for copyright infringement, city guvmint wanting a piece of the pie.
Is it possible a quiet co-op could build such a thing without attracting the attention of the whole mad legal world? Why not maintain our own file servers? Probably not possible. Too many possible lawsuits, for just about everything. Not to mention angry ISPs wanting those interlopers made an example.
In a state that is baking under intense sunlight, it should be rather obvious that solar should be on the fast track over there. I wonder if now, after the distributors and sellers have cleaned their collective Golden State pockets in the Great Robbery of 2001, that Californians might view a power array on their roofs to be a REALLY COOL thing to have from now on.
Well, it can give you some of the abilities I originally envisioned for high-speed connections: broadcasting television (well, multi-casting), radio stations, super-fast transfers of media files, entire libraries. Live video feeds from GOOD video cameras. Videophones ditto. Needless to say, the Guvmint, lawyers, the MPAA, RIAA, radio and TV stations, you name 'em, are NOT going to like such capabilities! Especially if the streams are encrypted. Oh my aching legal bill.
Even if the court revisits the case, it will be 2010 by the time it wends thru the system again, and it will be far, far too late for anything at all to be done about Microsoft.
And as long as everyone can learn carpentry, electrical wiring on the professional level, plumbing, roofing, concrete work, masonry, and a dozen other related fields, they have no right to complain about shoddy home construction or high home prices, or expensive union labor. Build your own houses, you slackers!
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Last year, Kansas almost cancelled teaching evolution in public school science classes. I don't trust Kansas schoolin' all that much... they may know Latin, but they almost lost the late Nineteenth and all of the Twentieth century of biological science.
Here's a question, roughly related to yours: when will former president of Nicaragua, Manuel Noriega, ever be charged with a crime? Is he a non-person, forever in a forgotten American cell? And when will we be told how many civilians were killed to get at him?
I'm not some knee-jerk anti-American. I am very concerned with how we are treating foreign nationals who violate our laws while dwelling in their own country. What the hell are we doing? Are we becoming the stereotypical authoritarian state our enemies describe us as?
The only reason we get away with yanking non-US citizens into our prisons, without bail in this case, is because we have the power to be the biggest bastards in the world. Our old isolationist tendencies do not prepare us for dealing with other nations fairly -- we are riding roughshod over them, and we don't care what they think of us. This does not bode well for the future. You see, just because we are the biggest bully on the block doesn't mean everyone else is going to sit back and get their citizens plucked off the streets and have their lunch money stolen. The rest of the world is growing economically and politically, and eventually, if this keeps up, sadly, they will have to do something about our arrogance.
Sad.
Yes, it is bad when billions of dollars are paid to contractors building weapons systems that may not be necessary, and more importantly, do not work either mechanically or strategically. The money in question gives the contractors the incentive to lie, and lie big, to get the money to finance their companies.
And about the money being good for the economy; isn't government spending to stimulate the economy the ultimate bugaboo of the far right? It's supposed to be communistic -- all those totalitarian, confiscatory laws designed to give our hard-earned tax dollars to unworthy blacks, etc. But it's OK if it's a rich pack of contractors in Idaho getting the money, I guess...
The business of the government of the people of the U.S. is not keeping defense businesses well-funded and alive. I can't think of anything more anti-free market at the moment.
Exactly. And here's a point: What the hell is Corporate America? Is it a separate division of America of which I am not aware? Another: are they somehow entitled to rights not shared by the rest of us? Another: corporations are fictitious persons granted charter to exist as such by the American people for the sole purpose of enriching our everyday lives. They are not powers per se; they were bloody never intended to be.
Well, I do hope this slows down the Church of Scientology in their discovery efforts of Usenet posters, but I doubt it. (They were first on the scene to try this nonsense on the Internet). The "prima facie" evidence of harm to the plaintiff necessary to request identity of a poster from an ISP depends on the amiability of a judge to the plaintiff, and that is a little too open for interpretation.
Flaming grammar be dangerous, especially if you spell it grammer.
Let's be kind here...
The DC-X program died becaues NASA wouldn't fund it to the tune of, what, ten mil? The SSTO vehicle worked (tho a tech inadvertently failed to lock a landing strut and it went boom) and was working well. Tho I love NASA and its accomplishments dearly, they do not like competition, firstly; secondly they are winged aircraft afficianados; thirdly, if the cheap SSTO concept worked, they would have had a lot of 'splainin to do about the tens of billions the superplanes require for research.
I love the supertech, but, like the wet navy, you make incremental moves towards new vehicles. The slow and cheap, use-what-works method the Japanese are using will get them to orbit sooner or later, and when they do, it'll be a efficient workhorse (which blows up occasionally). Think a Honda Civic vs. a formula racer. The thing about cheap is, you can make more ships if they crash or explode, or just wear out. NASA has no safety margin with 2 billion dollar craft. They must not fail; to fail would be the end.
NASA once upon a time floated dreams about Mars and lunar cities, and was brutally disillusioned about the public's desire for such things. So they have to be safe, flying 31 year old designs into orbit, building a station which does little. I grew up on space, i dreamed it. Gerry O'Neil was my god. But space is locked up by an agency that, tho it wants to fly, can only plod if it wants to live.
Small. Cheap. Composite. Cheap fuels. Fast turnaround on land/launch cycles. Vertical take off, vertical landing. These will open space for commerce, maybe even open up the moon and the solar system for us all, eventually. NASA's programs cannot.
I mourn the Roton and the DC-X/Delta Clipper. I am damned happy someone, somewhere is carrying on making the sky our new home. I don't want new drugs made in microgravity, or more intensive astronomy. I WANT TO GO MYSELF, and this project brings it a little closer to reality. NASA will never give us that.
When you are poor, textbooks cost a LOT. And it's irrelevant, because an open-source textbook's cost is exactly zero.
As for the administration and the financing being at fault, don't be silly. Teachers and administrators are paid far, far less than their counterparts in private industry. And don't forget: school budgets are public documents. When someone puts forth the argument that the money is wasted, I have to ask: how? Isn't that rather knee-jerk? And you mean ALL those districts are cheating their students? Wow.
I've heard the argument for years, but I never see a budget analysis done that backs it up. Reason being, it really isn't a supportable argument. Poor districts have no property tax base, so they depend on state and fed funds, which are pretty iffy and scarce.
The school admins would probably be glad to sit down and explain why there isn't enough money, but they don't get many people taking them up on the offer.
We don't pay enough taxes to fund our schools. Oh, in affluent districts they may, but education is funded on a local level. We don't put enough money into schools. Flat out. The teachers aren't taking cruises, the admins are not riding Caddies. They need help, and I am merely saying the the open source model lends itself to alleviating the cost of the books, not to mention increasing the quality of the material itself.
"Blame the politicians" "blame the school boards" "blame the lazy teachers" -- decades of this I have heard, and the teachers wearily try to hold it together as those catchphrases block any changes. We don't need more testing; we need to reduce the costs of the materials, increase teacher salaries, fix the problems!. The "politicians" are our elected officials, and they do what we want them to do, which is mostly nothing.
No, we by definition do not pay enough, in money or in attention, and that has caused our public school education system to die.
It was a minor violation. The teacher used Office because the whole world "voluntarily" uses Office, so he had to use it too. But money was tight. So he copied it. Did Microsoft get harmed? No. Licenses be damned, the richest corporation around decided to "punish" a teacher for no harm to itself.
I thunk of it a few weeks ago. Why must a school system buy insanely expensive textbooks every few years? (Not to mention the incestous textbook business which vets content in Texas, but I digress).
English, math, science textbooks -- these things are perfectly suited for open source projects. Besides, math doesn't really change every few years, so a textbook can last a long time.
Schools are always underfunded, even the most well-financed. But schools in areas without wealthy homeowners have worst of it all. I grew up in one. We didn't even have construction paper. No glue. Books were shared sometimes. There just wasn't enough money. And this was CHICAGO!
I know this is a not technically on topic, but it is the same problem. Schools have to limp along on shoestring budgets. I know about the efforts to equip schools with free software, but how about creating some good textbooks for everyone to use without ever worrying about paying a company for dead trees? Print the books out on standard copy paper at Kinkos, or the school copy room.
Additionally, advantages I see are: unlimited supply of books, easy replacement if one gets lost (a sore point with me; i lost out on a semester of trig in HS 'cause my book was stolen and I couldn't pay for the replacement), and the ability to correct and extend the course content by the teachers themselves.
Um, they have more than enough techno know-how to build a missile control system, or any weapon of mass destruction they choose. And any other nation can simply buy it, or send some students to universities here to learn it.
What is this American obsession with "secret" missle and nuke tech? It isn't secret. Everyone has it. Knowledge, no matter what the Intellectual Property groupies want to believe, breaks free and roams in the wild fairly quickly. The whole point of the Internet was to distribute information!
Point: this fear of killer missiles is a holdover from the '50's. Let the fear go. It's dumb. We have over 10,000 warheads - no sane nation will ever launch a nuke on a missile at us. They'd be destroyed in days. Game over.
A nuke, should it come, will be in a U-Haul parked in front of the Smithsonian Institution. It may happen. We'll survive it. Terrorists can't detonate hundreds of nukes to get all of our assets, and no matter what they do, we and the rest of the world would hunt the mad dogs down in REALLY short order. It's self-preservation!
The commies got the bomb, the Iranians (probably) have the bomb, the South Africans have the bomb -- think about it. The bloody bomb is useless! What the hell can you do with it, other than promise to use it if someone bombs you?
The Eighties reconstituted the Bomb scare of the Fifties, and we will be a long time getting rid of the notion of commie nukes raining from the sky.
Wanna be scared? Think of HIV-like genetic material inserted into a common cold virus. Think of the "fleshing-eating" bacteria's code installed into some innocuous bacterium. Think of plagues keyed to common genetic markers, say, like those females may possess (think Herbert's "White Plague"). THOSE are weapons of mass destruction. They make nukes look like annoying sunburn agents.
End of Pleasant Thought For Today.
Ah, Fox News? Then the pop-under ads were, of course, linked to the liberal deviousness of Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. No doubt, ad revenue generated from the nefarious left-slanted ads are funneled to a Chinese bank account in Hong Kong, ultimately winding up in the pockets of one President Bill Clinton, Esquire. President Clinton will be derrogatorily referred to as "Bill" 85 times.
Sources for all of this were never mentioned, tho Matt Drudge and the Freepers were, as usual, jumping up and down screaming "ME! ME!!".
MS-NBC will pick up on the story, which in five minutes will then be carried on CNN. Later on CBS, Dan Rather and a ranking Republican will be discussing Dan Burton's new investigation of Clinton's involvement in Javascript corruption. Suspicious links to the "natural" death of SF's great Douglas Adams will also be raised, since Clinton was known to live in the same hemisphere the day of his death.
Fox News, home of the FairandBalanced reports.
Ya know... it is possible to be older than 29, and still walk and run. 'Sides, if you yunguns get too uppity, the oldsters can just shoot ya.
Seriously, the revulsion (fear?) of the young for the old is getting to me a bit as I get older myself. It is possible to date, use computers, run, and even have an adventure or two after you turn thirty.
Check out the story of the cameras in Clearwater, Florida.
Don't just worry about the government or the police monitoring you 24/7. Private organizations can do the same thing, and believe me, there aren't as many checks and balances on those corporate entities. And they have far different agendas than the police do. You can unelect governments, and change police chiefs. But private intelligence agents with sunglasses answer to know one, ultimately. They are scary.
It's not that I'd like to sit in a classroom watching Powerpoint presentations of photocopied pages. It's just that we need the pieces of paper that say we attended a class of this or that. On the job training is great, but for resumes, you need course credits. YMMV. Of course, I agree that self-training is the only way to go if you want to actually know something.
Meow. As the article states, and as I recall, interception of the stream alters the photons... that nasty Uncertainty Principle again. Any bucket brigade attack is detectable per the laws of physics. It's devious. The stream is irreproducible.
The cat may be alive or it may be dead, but god does that box stink.
Judge Saul Sanders, the man who effectively ruled the election in Bush's favor, almost attended a Free Republican rally in his honor with Katherine Harris last week. At the very last second, under some considerable pressure, he excused himself from the lionization. Bias? Where was the news coverage of this?
Judge Jackson simply stated the obvious. Gates was dissembling at the trial, Microsoft attorneys were arrogant and transparently lying.
Difference between Sanders and Jackson is that Jackson had a well-oiled attack machine on his butt, and Sanders sort of filters through the cracks of news coverage.
Follow the money.
Nope -- no one's beaming their land onto your land However, the sat TV providers are flooding you with their EM. To make decoding that signal illegal is like declaring a view of a privately-owned mountain illegal if viewed without permission and payment of the mountain owner. Or, say, use of a pair of binoculars to view a home, or a telescope to look at a private beach. Light is not illegal to intercept, so why not radio? The only reason it is illegal to use the TV signal is because the companies ran tothe courts and legislatures and got it declared illegal before anyone noticed the putch. Now, people just accept that building a radio receiver is illegal in some instances. IMO, if you beam a signal into my home, it's mine to play with, baby.
I've NEVER heard of a college student using a deodorizer in the fridge. It'd be overwhelmed by the semester-old tuna sandwiches lying unwrapped next to the dirty dishes hidden in the back of the month-old melted ice cream tub.
It takes years for college students to realize that bathrooms and kitchens do not have a Mom Genie that magically cleans up up after them.
WE are the Evil Government. It responds to US at election time. The corps don't vote, we do. Acting as tho it's some alien lifeforce is schizophrenic and dangerous to our democracy. It shows a lack of understanding of what we are And we claim to lead the world, when we won't trust our own elected government?
Oh yes -- the "government" created the internet protocols by redistributing tax dollars to learning institutions and the military. Business didn't. Business took a government-funded protocol and added a bit of magic, and kazam, it is a business matter only, this "Net".
What if the interstate highway program had not been built with government money? Would we be whizzing at low cost from small town to smaller town, all over the continent? Nope. The best roads would be toll roads, owned by conglomerates, and spurs would be added to outlying towns when it was financially viable to do so. We'd STILL be waiting for roads in areas witho no financial incentive to invite contruction. Ditto the phone company.
The Canadians are simply using logic, common sense, and an educated grasp of history unclouded by economic religion. They are building the infrastructure needed to wire their nation NOW, at a relatively small cost. How much as we spending, in all the private efforts, and what do we have to show for it in the "last mile"? Where will our choices lie when one company owns the only accessible broadband in a home area? Don't laugh. If they don't now, a few buyouts will concentrate ownership quickly and legally, and defacto monopolies will result. Markets are not naturally free. They need regulation to stay free.
Canada is simply creating an interstate highway system for the internet. They will have high-speed to every home for a reasonable price, soon, and we will just look on and snort, "Hah! Socialism!" as we pay $150US a month for high-speed symmetrical DSL that the Canadians will be getting for $40US. Who's more crazy?
Here's a thought: how far along would our economy now be, if every mile of the interstate highway system built in the last fifty years, and every single street and alley upgraded to asphalt in the last hundred, had to be paid for by for-profit companies? Think about it: how long would it have taken for Nevada to be in the system? Alaska? How expensive would it have been for the drivers if every road was a toll road?
I only mention this because of the obvious analogy to how the high-speed infrastructure is being built-up in the U.S. Slow, expensive, and every mile must be justified by shown profit. This is going to take forever.
Waaah! I don't WANT a giant ISP value-adding expensive junk on my bill. I just want to share a set of high-speed lines within a co-op, let's say.
Sigh. Our laws will never let this happen, will they. Liability for copyright infringement, city guvmint wanting a piece of the pie.
Is it possible a quiet co-op could build such a thing without attracting the attention of the whole mad legal world? Why not maintain our own file servers? Probably not possible. Too many possible lawsuits, for just about everything. Not to mention angry ISPs wanting those interlopers made an example.
In a state that is baking under intense sunlight, it should be rather obvious that solar should be on the fast track over there. I wonder if now, after the distributors and sellers have cleaned their collective Golden State pockets in the Great Robbery of 2001, that Californians might view a power array on their roofs to be a REALLY COOL thing to have from now on.
Well, it can give you some of the abilities I originally envisioned for high-speed connections: broadcasting television (well, multi-casting), radio stations, super-fast transfers of media files, entire libraries. Live video feeds from GOOD video cameras. Videophones ditto. Needless to say, the Guvmint, lawyers, the MPAA, RIAA, radio and TV stations, you name 'em, are NOT going to like such capabilities! Especially if the streams are encrypted. Oh my aching legal bill.
Even if the court revisits the case, it will be 2010 by the time it wends thru the system again, and it will be far, far too late for anything at all to be done about Microsoft.
And as long as everyone can learn carpentry, electrical wiring on the professional level, plumbing, roofing, concrete work, masonry, and a dozen other related fields, they have no right to complain about shoddy home construction or high home prices, or expensive union labor. Build your own houses, you slackers!