> Bingo. Lawyers are the new priests; worthless parasites
Isn't this a fun quandry.
The Law and Government are the evolution of what started in the 1200's with the Magna Carta. Prior to that we had Kings, and what the king said, was Law. (Not exact with all of this, but the general gist.) In essence, Law and Government are recognition that a society works better that enables and rewards more of its populace, not just a hereditary few. Absent Law and Government, we'd mostly be farming, sometimes having wars when egotistic kings got on each others' nerves, etc. They are what makes the society we have possible.
So who are today's underlying bogeymen? Lawyers and Government.
Unfortunately, when corruption sets in, that's true. But WE have to understand that both institutions are there to serve us, have enabled us, and have enabled this thing we call human progress. WE have to recognize that the corruption is the problem, not the institutions.
There's an obvious solution that won't immediately occur to a software-oriented crowd.
Use a movie camera that records on film - you know, that stuff with a funny silver-based coating. Then get the film processed, convert it to digital, and use a free codec.
The "camera problem" is that they're fully bundled pieces of hardware and software, essentially inseparable. You can't buy just the front-end and do your own software for it - at least not yet. But the technology to scan film is not so encumbered - in that case they're just making sure that you're not violating copyright, and won't be a problem here.
The obvious problem is economic - film is a heck of a lot more expensive than digital. But there are ways to mitigate this. For instance, dual-shoot everything, in digital and film. Examine your digital footage, decide what film cuts you like, and process those. Typically processing film is as expensive as buying film, so by doing your selection in digital you never have to process the junk. (Of course reel-level granularity will limit savings, and you probably want to process more than what you plan to finish with, anyway.) Your digital footage never leaves the studio.
Or there are people working on a "free digital camera". How far from there to a "free movie camera"?
When the US appears to be on a tear sending its manufacturing (who just work) overseas, how else do you think they plan to run an economy. What's interesting is that 20-30 years ago the rise of the Service Sector Economy was widely evangelized. The push for the IP Sector Economy seems to have started silenty about a decade ago.
To whoever modded the AC down, they're EXACTLY the same.
After H.264 is the dominant video codec, will MPEG-LA go after increased royalties?
After Mono is the dominant Linux desktop API, will Microsoft go after increased royalties?
Actually, I guess the cases are different, after all. I don't think Microsoft wants royalties from Mono, I think they just want to set the direction of the API, and make sure that Windows is always ahead and Linux a day late and a dollar short.
Didn't stop Rambus. It eventually wound up at the Supreme Court, but Rambus won EVERYTHING!
The system is so screwed up I more than half expect SCO to do to the same.
This country seems to DESPERATELY WANT the genie back in the bottle - to take this whole internet, OSS, computing thing and stuff it back in the pockets of a few corporate overlords, where it belongs.
I read your post, too. So someone else noticed. By reading the post, it was clear that your patch wasn't nearly ready for someone like me, who only occasionally goes off of distro kernels to vanilla. But it's Gentoo, so at least I compile my own kernels, distro or vanilla.
As a general thoght on the whole subject, I recently started using FS-Cache for my nfsv4 at home, which I've been using for several years. Reading through the documentation, it appears that FS-Cache is a generic middle-layer which can have any number of front-end filesystems and can accomodate multiple types of back-ends. He describes nfs and afs as network filesystems in front, but also talks of using iso9660 as an example of a "slow" front-end filesystem that could use caching, but is not networked. On the back-end he describes 2 cache systems, one partition-based and one filesystem-based.
It seems to me that another way this thing could be viewed is with your cache as a high-performance back-end to FS-Cache, which would make it advantageous for traditional disk (not network) based filesystems to hook into FS-Cache for the performance boost. I've no idea how far this deviates from what you've already done, or how hard it would be to patch existing filesystems to hook into FS-Cache. It just seems like perhaps a more generic implementation. It also suggests further work for FS-Cache, in that it would be nice to have multiple back-ends simultaneously active, perhaps in an L4/L5 cache type of way, where L5 would only back network filesystems while L4 would back most-active files, local or network.
Nice of me to suggest - I know, I need to show some code.
As I read this thread, it strikes me that there might be something worse than corrupt.
A corrupt politician might accept campaign contributions from big business, know that he's not really right, and do the minimum necessary to fulfill his quid-pro-quo without buying into it.
On the other hand, there are also politicians who believe in the big business cause, accept campaign contributions because they feel that those businesses are important constituents, and pursue those goals with personal will, desire, and thoroughness.
The former is dishonest, yes - but he's doing less harm to me than the latter. As voters we're generally educated to know the difference. (I'd like to think.)
> While that sets you apart from many of us, it also reveals Windows on your desktop. Why?
I have putty on Windows machines to talk to Linux machines. I have putty on Linux machines, because every now and then I need to talk telnet to some other machine. I don't run telnet, I don't have telnet installed on my machines, and I'd just as soon not have the binary present, at all. I know it's silly, since I can simply not start the server, but I'll go ahead a be a bit silly about it.
Putty is the simplest way to get a telnet client, for those rare occasions when I might need one, given that I'm usually running X on my desktops, anyway.
There's another perspective on this, and another reason to do as you do - the credit card tax.
Everyone is up in arms about taxes these days - longer than just that really. People give up their days to protest taxes in various places. But I'll be that those very same people think nothing of using their credit cards to pay for that day's expenses. Or even if they don't, they don't realize that they're paying for the privilege of others using their credit cards.
The credit cards get a transaction fee - typically somewhere in the 3-4 % range. Years ago, I remember some places used to charge a slight premium for using a credit card. I'm not sure if it was through legislation or other pressure, but that practice stopped, in favor of "same price, cash or credit." What that really means is that EVERYONE is paying for the credit card transaction fee, whether you're paying cash or credit.
What do you call it when there's an extra percentage fee tacked onto your purchases? One word might be "tax", except this one isn't collected by any government, but by private agencies. Nor is it voluntary, like a "free market" thing, because it's tacked onto your purchases, whether you use credit or not.
I have a lot of sympathy for small, local businesses. I try to have a premium I will pay to buy locally, knowing that that money stays in my area, though I can't always do it, and I have my limits. But one thing I try even harder to do is avoid using my credit card with local businesses. They have to set their prices to account for the transaction fees, or else they go out of business. But by paying them in cash or check instead of credit, that piece of transaction fee goes to them instead of to some far-off bank. I can't get the "tax" back for myself, but at least I can give it to a local business.
> That has less to do with carrying capacity and more to do with economics.
I absolutely agree - but that was why I worded it the way I did.
> I'm not even sure if I buy that. There are remote communities that have very little (if any) > interaction with the outside world. They would seem to be isolated from most transmission vectors.
But the Black Ep was really neat - a binary with several years between the true infection and the trigger. Remote communities are possible, but give the wide separation between the two stages, chances become very good of making the first-stage infection universal. At that point you're a ticking time-bomb waiting for either your own travels or the winds to bring you in contact with the trigger. (btv, Nick Sagan is a fiction author, in addition to being the obvious offspring.)
I wouldn't go so far as to predict "the end of life on Earth", or even "the end of the human race," even if we were to unleash the nukes, and have The Big One.
I would however say, "the end of our recognizable civilization."
By most measures the Earth is past carrying capacity for its human population. If we were to massively reorganize our society with the overriding goal of carrying capacity, we could probably still grow some. But we're not. We have a rather disorganized structure which isn't quite doing the job of sustaining our whole population. Furthermore, the structure that we have doesn't appear to be sustainable. Take a look at the brittleness of our monoculture crops and the progressive overfishing of the oceans, to name just two. It's very easy to imagine a massive, progressive breakdown - food supply failure with attendant wars - that would kill billions. There would be pockets of people left, and it's anyone's guess how capable they would be of rebuilding science, technology, or society. Science fiction literature is full of projections of such "devolved societies" as well as "recovered societies." It's also full of end-of-the-world and end-of-mankind scenarios, but I don't think either of those two are very likely, at the moment. Though come to think of it, a genetically-engineered virus like the Black Ep (see Nick Sagan) probably could do the end-of-mankind job, and is probably within our reach.
I just wish Terry Gilliam would get around to (or be permitted to) make a film adaptation of "Good Omens". (The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter: Witch) Too much longer, and all of the 70's jokes will be lost and stale.
When I was a kid, and my mom took me in for my first eye examination, she made sure that the eye doctor tested my depth perception. There was a blurry picture of a bee on a piece of paper. I put on the glasses he gave me, looked at the paper, and was absolutely stunned to what looked like a giant bee standing on top of the paper, that moments before had held a fuzzy picture. (Just remembered a key point. They asked me to touch the tip of the wing, so of course I touched a point floating in mid-air.) My mom had a very good reason for specifying the test...
Many years before, my dad had been having headaches for some time, and was getting his eyes checked. After the exam, he was given the same lens prescription, until he happened to have a chance conversation about those newfangled 3D movies. (I presume the red-blue kind, for that era.) My dad said that they were a ripoff, waste of time and money, and looked no different from a regular movie. The eye doctor took my dad back in and did the 3D test. I don't know what image they used, but in effect he put his finger right on the paper when asked to touch what was supposed to be floating in mid-air.
They then gave my dad a different prescription for his lenses, and the headaches stopped.
I didn't say it was easy, just that I wanted it, as long as they're talking about "smart windshields." Tracking the eye is only part (though likely the hardest part) of the battle, then you have to track the sun, as well as draw a truncated cone between the two, then intersect that cone with the windshield, etc. Not to mention that so far HUDs have only projected onto windshields not darkened any part of them. That would be more like an embedded LCD than a projector.
All in all, not an easy task. But it would have to be easier than designing a robot to even comprehend the Three Laws, let alone implement them.
I live west of my place of employment, and the recent time change has given me it's yearly double-whammy. When you live west of where you work, it means that you're driving east in the morning to get there, and west in the evening to get home. Depending on start and stop times, it means that the sun can be right on the horizon, blinding you at both times. This happens for a few weeks each spring and fall, until the sun rises earlier and sets later, so that the visor can adequately and easily block it. Then time change comes, knocking the sun back down to the horizon.
I want an "active windshield" that knows where my eyeballs are, knows where the sun is, and blackens just the right spot (with a little margin, of course) to shade my eyes. Compared to that, any heads-up displays are secondary.
You're being funny, (I hope) but I might more seriously wonder about other side-effects. Way back when they were looking at a tidal energy project at the Bay of Fundy, when hydraulic modeling showed that harnessing that tidal energy would have the "side effect" of flooding Boston. I hope they've done such modeling for this. Now that I think of it, with greater computer power available, I wonder if they could examine variations on the Bay of Fundy project to find a way to get the energy without flooding Boston.
First off, for the encryption fans, this is all about what can be done legally without a warrant. Obviously by breaking the law or by getting a warrant, all bets are off. But if someone is breaking the law, AND if you can detect and prove it, you've got recourse - and presumably warrants require just cause, some evidence, and due process.
This ruling is walking a tiny, sneaky technicality. They have likened email to snail mail, and applied the same protections.
While in transit, snail mail is protected by the rights of the mail carrier and by your rights. Once the mail carrier had delivered the mail to you, their rights in the issue evaporate. So the court is saying essentially the same thing about email - once it's handed to you, the ISPs rights are no longer involved. We are probably thinking of email more like (weakened) banking or medical information - the ISP holds it on our behalf.
At this point it's worth noting that if you use POP, you're legally "safe", but it's only that delete-after-delivery that does it, and your ability to secure your own machine.
Is anyone else bothered by the branding of Bing as "a decision engine"?
I've tucked this response under this 1984 thread, because Microsoft promoting "a decision engine" leaves me with that feeling that they're making the "generous" offer to decide for me. They have such a long and checkered history of guiding and restricting customers' decisions, both by making sure that their product is the "easy choice" and with time changing that to "only choice."
I don't think this stuff is going to play out well in the long run for China. The government wants it both ways - technological prosperity for its people, yet retaining their monopoly on power. The only way to make that stable is to skip to the "bread and circus" stage, but that stage isn't stable either - it's part of the road downhill.
Unfortunately a large-enough proportion of the population of the use doesn't act very intelligently, or at least not very wisely. What's worse is that there appear to be sufficient Powers That Be that like it that way - see "sheeple." And for another definition of "sheeple" think about the ones with guns who cry out against gun control and those other "sheeple" who demand it, yet those same guns are the rings in their noses by which they're being led.
Not-so-intelligent, (or wise) impulsive people are more readily led in directions that are ultimately not in their own best interests.
Perhaps you're more comfortable being called a "Turk" than I am an "American," at least in recent years. There is much that is good about America, and there is much that as bad as well. I presume this can be said about any nation. My biggest problem is with the direction we're moving. I had hoped better out of the Obama administration.
Please keep in mind that saying "you Americans" is kind of like saying "you Turks" and then applying ANY sort of uniform generalization. Many of us are as annoyed with this kind of stuff as you are, as angry about the policies of the US overseas, etc. (You forgot about the War on Drugs, if you want to talk about Stupid and Evil policies, but you probably wouldn't have if you lived in South America.) Oh, and we vote the other way every chance we get - fat lot of good it does.
The saddest thing of all is that when it all hits the fan, the people that you and I both complain about will continue to sit pretty and comfortable. Your "revenge" will be exacted on people (like me) who aren't the root cause of the problem, while those who are will get away scott-free.
This subthread reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuinn in "The Dispossessed".
"The toothbrush that I use."
I'd just as soon it by MY toothbrush, thank you very much.
Capitalism is capable of great evil, and must be held in check. The same can be said of Socialism. WhyOhWhyOhWhy does it seem like everyone is on some sort of "economic system purity" rampage?!? Can't we pick what is good, and what works, erring on the side of caution?
Oh yeah, Socialism denies/curses greed. Capitalism worships it. In reality, greed is a strong motivator. So are a lot of other things. Why can't we treat it like other motivations, Good AND Evil instead of Good OR Evil?
> Expensive is to have poor homes where children -- who should be the next generation > scientists and engineers -- don't get a proper education and diet since their parents > are sick.
Unfortunately you've missed a point. These days, the big corporate employers in the US don't want US scientists and engineers - they expect to be paid something in keeping with domestic market and cost-of-living values. Companies would rather have overseas scientists and engineers at a fraction of the cost.
Perhaps this is perfectly valid reasoning, but at the same time that they're trying to reduce pay scales across the board in the working US, they'd also better realize that those workers will no longer be able to afford their products. There's a gap here, if the foreign middle-class isn't built up enough to buy your products before you've destroyed the middle-class in the US. The other reckoning will be when foreign workers leave US companies to form their own, and realize that they don't have to overpay their executives the way we have been.
Slashdot Mirror
> Bingo. Lawyers are the new priests; worthless parasites
Isn't this a fun quandry.
The Law and Government are the evolution of what started in the 1200's with the Magna Carta. Prior to that we had Kings, and what the king said, was Law. (Not exact with all of this, but the general gist.) In essence, Law and Government are recognition that a society works better that enables and rewards more of its populace, not just a hereditary few. Absent Law and Government, we'd mostly be farming, sometimes having wars when egotistic kings got on each others' nerves, etc. They are what makes the society we have possible.
So who are today's underlying bogeymen?
Lawyers and Government.
Unfortunately, when corruption sets in, that's true. But WE have to understand that both institutions are there to serve us, have enabled us, and have enabled this thing we call human progress. WE have to recognize that the corruption is the problem, not the institutions.
There's an obvious solution that won't immediately occur to a software-oriented crowd.
Use a movie camera that records on film - you know, that stuff with a funny silver-based coating. Then get the film processed, convert it to digital, and use a free codec.
The "camera problem" is that they're fully bundled pieces of hardware and software, essentially inseparable. You can't buy just the front-end and do your own software for it - at least not yet. But the technology to scan film is not so encumbered - in that case they're just making sure that you're not violating copyright, and won't be a problem here.
The obvious problem is economic - film is a heck of a lot more expensive than digital. But there are ways to mitigate this. For instance, dual-shoot everything, in digital and film. Examine your digital footage, decide what film cuts you like, and process those. Typically processing film is as expensive as buying film, so by doing your selection in digital you never have to process the junk. (Of course reel-level granularity will limit savings, and you probably want to process more than what you plan to finish with, anyway.) Your digital footage never leaves the studio.
Or there are people working on a "free digital camera". How far from there to a "free movie camera"?
When the US appears to be on a tear sending its manufacturing (who just work) overseas, how else do you think they plan to run an economy. What's interesting is that 20-30 years ago the rise of the Service Sector Economy was widely evangelized. The push for the IP Sector Economy seems to have started silenty about a decade ago.
To whoever modded the AC down, they're EXACTLY the same.
After H.264 is the dominant video codec, will MPEG-LA go after increased royalties?
After Mono is the dominant Linux desktop API, will Microsoft go after increased royalties?
Actually, I guess the cases are different, after all. I don't think Microsoft wants royalties from Mono, I think they just want to set the direction of the API, and make sure that Windows is always ahead and Linux a day late and a dollar short.
By the same Congress that extends copyright terms every time Steamboat Willie is about to expire into the public domain?
Didn't stop Rambus. It eventually wound up at the Supreme Court, but Rambus won EVERYTHING!
The system is so screwed up I more than half expect SCO to do to the same.
This country seems to DESPERATELY WANT the genie back in the bottle - to take this whole internet, OSS, computing thing and stuff it back in the pockets of a few corporate overlords, where it belongs.
I read your post, too. So someone else noticed. By reading the post, it was clear that your patch wasn't nearly ready for someone like me, who only occasionally goes off of distro kernels to vanilla. But it's Gentoo, so at least I compile my own kernels, distro or vanilla.
As a general thoght on the whole subject, I recently started using FS-Cache for my nfsv4 at home, which I've been using for several years. Reading through the documentation, it appears that FS-Cache is a generic middle-layer which can have any number of front-end filesystems and can accomodate multiple types of back-ends. He describes nfs and afs as network filesystems in front, but also talks of using iso9660 as an example of a "slow" front-end filesystem that could use caching, but is not networked. On the back-end he describes 2 cache systems, one partition-based and one filesystem-based.
It seems to me that another way this thing could be viewed is with your cache as a high-performance back-end to FS-Cache, which would make it advantageous for traditional disk (not network) based filesystems to hook into FS-Cache for the performance boost. I've no idea how far this deviates from what you've already done, or how hard it would be to patch existing filesystems to hook into FS-Cache. It just seems like perhaps a more generic implementation. It also suggests further work for FS-Cache, in that it would be nice to have multiple back-ends simultaneously active, perhaps in an L4/L5 cache type of way, where L5 would only back network filesystems while L4 would back most-active files, local or network.
Nice of me to suggest - I know, I need to show some code.
As I read this thread, it strikes me that there might be something worse than corrupt.
A corrupt politician might accept campaign contributions from big business, know that he's not really right, and do the minimum necessary to fulfill his quid-pro-quo without buying into it.
On the other hand, there are also politicians who believe in the big business cause, accept campaign contributions because they feel that those businesses are important constituents, and pursue those goals with personal will, desire, and thoroughness.
The former is dishonest, yes - but he's doing less harm to me than the latter. As voters we're generally educated to know the difference. (I'd like to think.)
> While that sets you apart from many of us, it also reveals Windows on your desktop. Why?
I have putty on Windows machines to talk to Linux machines. I have putty on Linux machines, because every now and then I need to talk telnet to some other machine. I don't run telnet, I don't have telnet installed on my machines, and I'd just as soon not have the binary present, at all. I know it's silly, since I can simply not start the server, but I'll go ahead a be a bit silly about it.
Putty is the simplest way to get a telnet client, for those rare occasions when I might need one, given that I'm usually running X on my desktops, anyway.
There's another perspective on this, and another reason to do as you do - the credit card tax.
Everyone is up in arms about taxes these days - longer than just that really. People give up their days to protest taxes in various places. But I'll be that those very same people think nothing of using their credit cards to pay for that day's expenses. Or even if they don't, they don't realize that they're paying for the privilege of others using their credit cards.
The credit cards get a transaction fee - typically somewhere in the 3-4 % range. Years ago, I remember some places used to charge a slight premium for using a credit card. I'm not sure if it was through legislation or other pressure, but that practice stopped, in favor of "same price, cash or credit." What that really means is that EVERYONE is paying for the credit card transaction fee, whether you're paying cash or credit.
What do you call it when there's an extra percentage fee tacked onto your purchases? One word might be "tax", except this one isn't collected by any government, but by private agencies. Nor is it voluntary, like a "free market" thing, because it's tacked onto your purchases, whether you use credit or not.
I have a lot of sympathy for small, local businesses. I try to have a premium I will pay to buy locally, knowing that that money stays in my area, though I can't always do it, and I have my limits. But one thing I try even harder to do is avoid using my credit card with local businesses. They have to set their prices to account for the transaction fees, or else they go out of business. But by paying them in cash or check instead of credit, that piece of transaction fee goes to them instead of to some far-off bank. I can't get the "tax" back for myself, but at least I can give it to a local business.
(paraphrased - it may have been a decade since I last read it)
Crowly sent a software license down to the demons who write contracts for lost souls, with one word scrawled across it, "LEARN!"
> That has less to do with carrying capacity and more to do with economics.
I absolutely agree - but that was why I worded it the way I did.
> I'm not even sure if I buy that. There are remote communities that have very little (if any)
> interaction with the outside world. They would seem to be isolated from most transmission vectors.
But the Black Ep was really neat - a binary with several years between the true infection and the trigger. Remote communities are possible, but give the wide separation between the two stages, chances become very good of making the first-stage infection universal. At that point you're a ticking time-bomb waiting for either your own travels or the winds to bring you in contact with the trigger. (btv, Nick Sagan is a fiction author, in addition to being the obvious offspring.)
I wouldn't go so far as to predict "the end of life on Earth", or even "the end of the human race," even if we were to unleash the nukes, and have The Big One.
I would however say, "the end of our recognizable civilization."
By most measures the Earth is past carrying capacity for its human population. If we were to massively reorganize our society with the overriding goal of carrying capacity, we could probably still grow some. But we're not. We have a rather disorganized structure which isn't quite doing the job of sustaining our whole population. Furthermore, the structure that we have doesn't appear to be sustainable. Take a look at the brittleness of our monoculture crops and the progressive overfishing of the oceans, to name just two. It's very easy to imagine a massive, progressive breakdown - food supply failure with attendant wars - that would kill billions. There would be pockets of people left, and it's anyone's guess how capable they would be of rebuilding science, technology, or society. Science fiction literature is full of projections of such "devolved societies" as well as "recovered societies." It's also full of end-of-the-world and end-of-mankind scenarios, but I don't think either of those two are very likely, at the moment. Though come to think of it, a genetically-engineered virus like the Black Ep (see Nick Sagan) probably could do the end-of-mankind job, and is probably within our reach.
I just wish Terry Gilliam would get around to (or be permitted to) make a film adaptation of "Good Omens". (The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter: Witch) Too much longer, and all of the 70's jokes will be lost and stale.
When I was a kid, and my mom took me in for my first eye examination, she made sure that the eye doctor tested my depth perception. There was a blurry picture of a bee on a piece of paper. I put on the glasses he gave me, looked at the paper, and was absolutely stunned to what looked like a giant bee standing on top of the paper, that moments before had held a fuzzy picture. (Just remembered a key point. They asked me to touch the tip of the wing, so of course I touched a point floating in mid-air.) My mom had a very good reason for specifying the test...
Many years before, my dad had been having headaches for some time, and was getting his eyes checked. After the exam, he was given the same lens prescription, until he happened to have a chance conversation about those newfangled 3D movies. (I presume the red-blue kind, for that era.) My dad said that they were a ripoff, waste of time and money, and looked no different from a regular movie. The eye doctor took my dad back in and did the 3D test. I don't know what image they used, but in effect he put his finger right on the paper when asked to touch what was supposed to be floating in mid-air.
They then gave my dad a different prescription for his lenses, and the headaches stopped.
FWIW, the outer shell of the "plot vehicle" in the movie "The Core" was cited as being made of Unobtanium.
I didn't say it was easy, just that I wanted it, as long as they're talking about "smart windshields." Tracking the eye is only part (though likely the hardest part) of the battle, then you have to track the sun, as well as draw a truncated cone between the two, then intersect that cone with the windshield, etc. Not to mention that so far HUDs have only projected onto windshields not darkened any part of them. That would be more like an embedded LCD than a projector.
All in all, not an easy task. But it would have to be easier than designing a robot to even comprehend the Three Laws, let alone implement them.
I live west of my place of employment, and the recent time change has given me it's yearly double-whammy. When you live west of where you work, it means that you're driving east in the morning to get there, and west in the evening to get home. Depending on start and stop times, it means that the sun can be right on the horizon, blinding you at both times. This happens for a few weeks each spring and fall, until the sun rises earlier and sets later, so that the visor can adequately and easily block it. Then time change comes, knocking the sun back down to the horizon.
I want an "active windshield" that knows where my eyeballs are, knows where the sun is, and blackens just the right spot (with a little margin, of course) to shade my eyes. Compared to that, any heads-up displays are secondary.
You're being funny, (I hope) but I might more seriously wonder about other side-effects. Way back when they were looking at a tidal energy project at the Bay of Fundy, when hydraulic modeling showed that harnessing that tidal energy would have the "side effect" of flooding Boston. I hope they've done such modeling for this. Now that I think of it, with greater computer power available, I wonder if they could examine variations on the Bay of Fundy project to find a way to get the energy without flooding Boston.
First off, for the encryption fans, this is all about what can be done legally without a warrant. Obviously by breaking the law or by getting a warrant, all bets are off. But if someone is breaking the law, AND if you can detect and prove it, you've got recourse - and presumably warrants require just cause, some evidence, and due process.
This ruling is walking a tiny, sneaky technicality. They have likened email to snail mail, and applied the same protections.
While in transit, snail mail is protected by the rights of the mail carrier and by your rights. Once the mail carrier had delivered the mail to you, their rights in the issue evaporate. So the court is saying essentially the same thing about email - once it's handed to you, the ISPs rights are no longer involved. We are probably thinking of email more like (weakened) banking or medical information - the ISP holds it on our behalf.
At this point it's worth noting that if you use POP, you're legally "safe", but it's only that delete-after-delivery that does it, and your ability to secure your own machine.
Is anyone else bothered by the branding of Bing as "a decision engine"?
I've tucked this response under this 1984 thread, because Microsoft promoting "a decision engine" leaves me with that feeling that they're making the "generous" offer to decide for me. They have such a long and checkered history of guiding and restricting customers' decisions, both by making sure that their product is the "easy choice" and with time changing that to "only choice."
I don't think this stuff is going to play out well in the long run for China. The government wants it both ways - technological prosperity for its people, yet retaining their monopoly on power. The only way to make that stable is to skip to the "bread and circus" stage, but that stage isn't stable either - it's part of the road downhill.
Unfortunately a large-enough proportion of the population of the use doesn't act very intelligently, or at least not very wisely. What's worse is that there appear to be sufficient Powers That Be that like it that way - see "sheeple." And for another definition of "sheeple" think about the ones with guns who cry out against gun control and those other "sheeple" who demand it, yet those same guns are the rings in their noses by which they're being led.
Not-so-intelligent, (or wise) impulsive people are more readily led in directions that are ultimately not in their own best interests.
Perhaps you're more comfortable being called a "Turk" than I am an "American," at least in recent years. There is much that is good about America, and there is much that as bad as well. I presume this can be said about any nation. My biggest problem is with the direction we're moving. I had hoped better out of the Obama administration.
Please keep in mind that saying "you Americans" is kind of like saying "you Turks" and then applying ANY sort of uniform generalization. Many of us are as annoyed with this kind of stuff as you are, as angry about the policies of the US overseas, etc. (You forgot about the War on Drugs, if you want to talk about Stupid and Evil policies, but you probably wouldn't have if you lived in South America.) Oh, and we vote the other way every chance we get - fat lot of good it does.
The saddest thing of all is that when it all hits the fan, the people that you and I both complain about will continue to sit pretty and comfortable. Your "revenge" will be exacted on people (like me) who aren't the root cause of the problem, while those who are will get away scott-free.
This subthread reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuinn in "The Dispossessed".
"The toothbrush that I use."
I'd just as soon it by MY toothbrush, thank you very much.
Capitalism is capable of great evil, and must be held in check. The same can be said of Socialism. WhyOhWhyOhWhy does it seem like everyone is on some sort of "economic system purity" rampage?!? Can't we pick what is good, and what works, erring on the side of caution?
Oh yeah, Socialism denies/curses greed. Capitalism worships it. In reality, greed is a strong motivator. So are a lot of other things. Why can't we treat it like other motivations, Good AND Evil instead of Good OR Evil?
> Expensive is to have poor homes where children -- who should be the next generation
> scientists and engineers -- don't get a proper education and diet since their parents
> are sick.
Unfortunately you've missed a point. These days, the big corporate employers in the US don't want US scientists and engineers - they expect to be paid something in keeping with domestic market and cost-of-living values. Companies would rather have overseas scientists and engineers at a fraction of the cost.
Perhaps this is perfectly valid reasoning, but at the same time that they're trying to reduce pay scales across the board in the working US, they'd also better realize that those workers will no longer be able to afford their products. There's a gap here, if the foreign middle-class isn't built up enough to buy your products before you've destroyed the middle-class in the US. The other reckoning will be when foreign workers leave US companies to form their own, and realize that they don't have to overpay their executives the way we have been.