Fiberglass particulate is just as nasty and it's in your home right now! *ominous look upwards* Oh, wait... it's sealed behind a wall. Nevermind. Same principle apples to "space dust". Build the structure, then coat the insides or attach walls to make it a happy fun place for all.
Offtopic, there may be more/. lurkers in MN than you might think. I rarely post but I've seen your posts quite a bit, and I didn't know until now that you were from MN. I sincerely wish you the best of luck with that, because it's getting tougher to find someone to have an intellectual discussion with, period; let alone available lesbians.
Well, if you're looking for an intellectual discussion, there is this thing called instant messaging and e-mail. Reply back on a future thread and ask me.:)
It's a common experience for lesbians. I am kindof a soft androgyny, whereas my girlfriend is quite butch (almost irritatingly so). She's also short for a girl, and I'm tall for one. So we make quite the spectacle. Needless to say, in the summertime people like to yell out the window dyke, cow, fat ass, etc., when they pass by. If approached, sometimes they'll ask me if I could "give their friend some love", despite the obviousness that I'm holding her hand and we're obviously a couple. She and I have both been called 'sir' in public on an irregular basis. And if I rebuff those sexual advances, they do sometimes mutter that "well you're just chicks with dicks anyway" and storm off. For the record, I'm not strictly a lesbian, I'm actually bi -- I've just had no luck with men. I don't know what journals this person is referring to, since I don't post any on slashdot, but hey. *shrugs* Who knows what google turns up given the right search words? Point is, it's just throwing hate out there because the poster wants women to be "put in their place" -- which in this case means subservient to heterosexual men. And that's just plain hateful bullshit.
On a somewhat different note, trans-women are part of the life and the community as much as any others. I know some lesbians would detest me for saying that, but we need to show a common front. I don't believe gender is in between your legs like most believe, it's in between your ears. How else would it be that my girlfriend acts more like a man and I act more like a woman? Sexuality, and for that matter physical sex itself, is a spectrum. Most people concentrate at the polls, but that's no reason to be hateful towards those who, for whatever reason, are found elsewhere.
Dunno about meeting up anywhere. I'm only looking for friends in the world right now. Pride is coming in a few months. Maybe I'll see you there?
"I disagree with your pessimism regarding humanity. You're a clever bloke, but far too cynical. Wanna make out?"
A bloke is a dude. If you're going to throw out british slang, at least use it right. The word you're looking for is 'skirt', or if you're feeling less charitable, 'Doris'.
There's something about your posts that I find grating. I should try to figure out what it is.
I'm very intelligent, but unlike most, I'm also very direct. I don't sugar-coat, and I'm world-weary and don't care much about whether or not I hurt somebody else's feelings. I also do tend to over-generalize and draw on stereotypes because those are things people can emotionally relate to. It's that mixture of facts and emotional appeal that makes me both persuasive and irritating at the same time. So you're on the right track.
but I'm guessing you'd be hard pressed to acknowledge prosocial inclinations.
Well, actually I believe that at the root of human nature is the need for social acceptance. This need is so entrenched in us (being social creatures as all mammals are) that it often overrides our judgement or blinds us to the pain we cause others. For a far better elucidation on this, look up the speech The Perils of Indifference, by Elie Wiesel. As a holocaust survivor, he struggled to understand why so many people would be indifferent to the suffering of others like him. See also: Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment for additional insight. I'm not saying people are fundamentally evil. I'm saying we're fundamentally social creatures -- and our desire for acceptance (amongst other things) often leads us to abuse our fellow human beings in ways not easily understood or, if understood, are dismissed as cognitive dissonance -- "I'm not responsible. It's not my fault."
Maybe this hyperbole isn't warranted? Especially just on the heels of a counterexample?
Or maybe I just wanted to attach my post as high up on the tree as I could so as many people could read and comment on this as possible, rather than on a more relevant, but lower-ranked thread.
...but technology can be leveraged. And that's a critical point which we ought not sweep under the rug mid-rant.
You're saying technology is just a tool. It's neither good nor evil. I don't disagree.
Self-gratifyingly vent your gall bladder about the inherent and irremediable evil of humankind? But meanwhile thus paint an ugly picture of humanity for others to absorb? Did you know that the more we contemn and so fear others the less helpful we become? Indeed, the more we become the things we're hating? Selfish, ungenerous, unkind? Get my drift? If we call humans ugly we make it so. Technology has amplified your mouth. Watch your mouth.
People need to be held up to the mirror every now and then and reminded that they aren't perfect. They need reminders of our history -- they need to remember that many of the most tragic things that happened in the history of our race started with words like "It's for your own good," or "think of how much this could benefit others!" We have nuclear reactors now that power many of our cities. That same knowledge was used to destroy two cities. We should have a guarded vigilance towards any new technology -- that isn't to say don't develop it, or don't use it, but that we should carefully consider the rammifications of their widespread use before it becomes widely used. An ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure. You say I'm cynical and spit vitrol at the human condition -- no. Emphatically, no. What I say is we should be aware of it, and consider that although individually we may be moral and good people, the world as a whole is not filled with people like us, and we need to put our technology forward with that in mind from the beginning, not waiting until after and then going "Damn! Didn't see that one coming."
Next time I'm in Minnesota, you wanna grab a coffee?
Hmmm. You really do read most of my posts. Sure. Uptown, a place called Uncommon Grounds. They make the best chai tea you'll find this side of the mississippi.
That's "Whose" not "Who's." After all, if you're set on letting ANYbody here into your pants, you're going to need to straighten that stuff out first. Heh. Heheh. Don't be ridiculous!:)
Fortunately, discovering that someone is an intellectual snob usually happens on the first date. That's when I split the tab, and then split for the exit. Besides, I'm under no illusions that there's any eligible lesbians who read slashdot in my zipcode. To date, I've found two regular posters here that ping the radar, and neither are even in my state.:(
A well thought-out, on-topic response being modded as redundant? Even if you don't agree with the poster's reasoning, this certainly isn't redundant.
You must be new here, so I'll make this simple: Most of my posts are well thought-out, on-topic, and therefore piss off a lot of people, who make it a point whenever they get mod points to nuke any post with my username associated with it into oblivion. So you need to make a diversionary post, like this:
Attention Moderator Who Put Me Down As Redundant:
You Have a Small Penis. No Amount of Mod Points Can Fix This.
Sincerely, The Girl Who's Pants You'll Never Get Into.
See? Works nicely. Now they'll waste their points moderating this down (with hopefully a few +1, Funny, to keep it afloat for awhile), thus providing the necessary diversion to get the well-thought out post past the haters. Now sit back and watch the fireworks, kiddo.;)
Though now that I think a little more, a spam attack on your eyeballs could be troubling...
People always think of the best outcome when a new technology is created, forgetting the cesspool we call humanity that's going to use and pervert it. The day you have bionic eyes is the day people start paying good money to augment your "virtual reality" to replace competitors advertisements, add advertisements onto everyday objects surrepticiously, and what you'll end up with is drowning in useless information just as much now, sitting at your keyboard reading this, except you won't be able to unplug.
Most of my friends have the social expectation that if they send me a text or email, I reply in a few minutes, a half hour tops. Any longer, and they think something's gone wrong, and start calling me and everyone I know to find out what happened. God help us all the day we're linked continuously with each other over a massive communications network; Kiss democracy goodbye, privacy, anonymity, freedom, and the right to choose how you life your life goodbye. It'll all be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It'll be like Ghost in the Shell, with police, government agents, and large corporations being able to cloak themselves from being seen. And there won't be trials anymore -- the bionic eye's constant connection with the network will mean everything you see from the moment you wakeup until you go to bed will be available for review. They'll make their use mandatory because it results in zero crime. Or so they'll say.
It isn't fear-mongering to expect this. Not fifteen years ago when the internet was in its infancy, most of what was out there was high quality scientific research and most of the e-mails being sent were between real people, having real conversations. Today, it's a cesspool where 99% of what your inbox gets hit with is someone trying to sell you something. Every window into the web has advertisements hanging off of it. And here in Minnesota, the Supreme Court recently ruled that it was okay for people to be convicted of DUI if they could have been capable of operating a motor vehicle. People being thrown in jail because of the possibility that a crime could have occurred -- it is no longer necessary that the public (or yourself) be harmed for the law to reach into your lives. Today we live in a society where the merest possibility of a person engaging in a criminal act is sufficient grounds for conviction.
Technology does not change the way people think. Human intellectual capacity has not altered in the past 4,000 years (at least) as far as we can tell. We can laugh at people who believed the world was flat, but the fault is ours for doing so -- we did not understand how they saw the world. There wasn't anything wrong with their eyes, or their brains. We're fundamentally no smarter than they were. But we think we are. And we're so confident, so smugly superior to our predecessors that we know this future can't happen.
Of course there will be trials. And freedom. And democracy. And all that good stuff. We know it because, well, gosh darn it, that's how it has to be.
No.
No it doesn't.
All these things we value will die, and we can't blame technology for it. All technology does, this one included, is expose and direct us towards the fundamental question of what it means to be human. And let me just say -- that definition is not sunshine and rainbows. We were given free will. Nowhere in that does it say we are in any way inclined to do good; When it comes right down to it, very few people truly trust one another, and we'd believe our own direct sensory experiences over what anyone would tell us. We imitate others. That's all culture is -- the direct observation of our environment, which is translated into coping mechanisms (behaviors) that we then interpose between ourselves and it.
So tell me, where does that leave us when those sensory experiences become artificial and malleable?
Yeah, except you actually do get some of the money. With these places, you're out a car, all the money you invested, and nothing you can do except start over. And anyone who's thinking they can make monthly payments for two or three years and not be late once -- you're either wealthy enough to not have to resort to this kind of thing, or you're a grade school teacher. Everyone else misses payments. Don't ask me why teachers always pay their bills. I don't know... but I worked for a place once that had several thousand of them for customers. We never once had a check bounce, or a late fee assessed. Management was pissed, but a contract's a contract. Our christmas parties were, achem, cheap affairs.
Says the person who every day is a friend, a child, an adult, a coworker, a consumer, a citizen, a geek, nevermind all the other divisions that create your own self-identity. You say role players scare you, but you fail to see just how pervasive role playing is in your own daily life.
There's a lot of unpleasant stuff you can put in there. My guess is "rods from god", that is, a payload of tungsten or depleted uranium rods that you can drop on a target.
Yeah, if we ignore the fact that should something go wrong and the uranium be exposed to plasma during re-entry, we've got a rather large area that's been coated in DU.
Maybe they're looking at retrieving satellites in order to get more data out of them. Remember physically moving data is still the fastest way to move data. You are restricted in how much data you can transfer from space to ground via radio.
That might be true enough, but in the 70s they used to drop the film from satellites and then have it caught mid-air by a retrieval aircraft. It's not exactly difficult to build an ejection mechanism into a satellite, or track the return of the package to Earth when you control the initial vector, orbit, and timing. Why expend all that fuel to travel upwards, when you can just drop it?
For example, multispectral scans of the Earth at 1 meter resolution. A single byte of information per square meter would be roughly 150 terabytes of data. A single byte of information per 10 cm (decimeter) square would be 15 petabytes of information.
I think optical transmission would be a better way to send that amount of data. The visual spectrum of light is 400-790 THz and the only thing you need to receive the signal is a clear sky. If we're looking at transmitting massive amounts of data in a way that isn't necessarily time-sensitive, I'd suggest optical data transfer. Of course, you have to buffer all that data...
The DoD gets both a 270 day satellite with latest technology and a massive, comprehensive archive which it can dig through at its leisure.
The value of most surveillance is directly proportional to how soon it can be retrieved, processed, analyzed, and a decision made and executed based on the analysis via the chain of command. If you know that your high value target, Achmed the Terrorist is going to be visiting a friend's flat at 7:30pm tonight, according to an intercepted cell phone call, but it's in an area with lots of known hostiles, you probably want to recon the area from 7:00--8:00pm using something with enough resolution to be reasonably sure Achmed the Terrorist has shown up at the house, and then maintain that surveillance until a tactical squad can reach the area. LEO vehicles, which is what this is, can have an orbital time of as little as 90 minutes. Yes, you get better resolution on your images, but there's a tradeoff: You don't get as much time over the target.
If you want a more plausible scenario for the use of this -- inter-satellite communication. You can use a much, much wider band of RF to transmit in space than on the ground, and it goes a lot farther. Ground-based interception of this is, for all intents and purposes, impossible.
Does the system as a whole get into a weird state if packets drop?
My theory: Older drivers tend to not to mash the accelerator. Have you noticed on like PS2 or XBox that if the controller loses calibration because you went into a menu or are very gentle with moving it sometimes it'll 'stick' in the software and rotate continually until you unplug the controller (thus resetting the zero state)?
It's like the Therac-25 incident; The software makes certain assumptions about the mechanical interlocks that, in select cases, result in an inconsistent reading. It happens all the time in embedded systems.
it looks like the Golden Age of the web will continue for some time.
Dude, the web didn't even exist until about 18 years ago. We're still evaluating the impact that the internet is having on culture -- what with some countries defining it as an inalienable human right and others eager to all but destroy or censor the crap out of it, the "golden age" is not what I'd call this time period. I'd call it the friggin' dark ages -- a mish-mash of global entities all competing at cross-purposes, a thriving black market, and every week more of our technology becomes connected to it, and people being burned at the stake for "file sharing", and the world wide web is being crapflooded with advertisements and commercial interests that continually infest the garden of knowledge that is the web like weeds.
I know I'm going to hell for this but... why build robots when it costs less to use a bunch of third world labor? I'm all for technology, but when you've got a few billion people just laying around with not much to do, it makes more sense to hire them for pennies than to build a robotic replacement that costs thousands plus maintenance.
(btw, I've seen you shouting bullshit in many different areas, from running trackers to some china government and now this - do you even know what you're talking about?)
Ad hominim attacks will get you nowhere.
Also, are you really serious about us economy being closed?
Ah, a righteous uprising by the people is a much more reasonable explanation than their import/export imbalance being a lot different than the US. And compare what is being imported and exported with the United States, and you'll see what I'm trying to say.
Did you forget China and Taiwan, the Indian coders and phone support, even us mail manual processing being offshored to Singapore? You can't be serious.
We weren't talking about the price of tea in China. We were discussing why the ACTA is being fought by the European Union. Please stay on topic.
*cough* No, I think the EU is doing this as an act of self-preservation. Unlike the US, that has an economy that is mostly closed (despite what you may think, our import/exports make up only a small amount of GDP), most of the EU has an open economy. The ACTA would screw them a lot harder than the United States. The US is just looking for a way to justify backing out of various free trade agreements and the ACTA is basically a way of us adding tariffs to our imported/exported services by creating artificial marketplaces while maintaining the illusion that we're all about free trade. We've created an artificial division between goods and services because our economy has transitioned from producing goods to producing services. It's in our best interests, financially, to create an artificial framework now to ensure we'll get our cut when other countries' economies transition to this as well -- basically continuing the long-standing tradition of passing the production to poor countries and living on top of them by providing the services and support that ultimately control the means of production.
Quite clever, don't you think? The EU can portray itself as the hero to the people, but it's only delaying the ACTA and similar acts -- once its economy gets closer to being representative of the US model, it'll quietly resurrect. So they get to be heroes today, and tomorrow they're just "going with the flow", portraying it as the inevitable price we have to pay for economic progress.
It's been well-established that a lack of privacy discourages people from peaceful assembly and accessing other tools necessary to the success of a democracy. When we have designated protest zones in cages tipped with razor wire and a hundred cameras covering every angle, and people being profiled by the FBI and investigated as potential subversives for doing this, it becomes clear that privacy, while not being the same as freedom, is essential to it. One cannot survive without the other.
If the NSA has any problem, then it's to store and process/search through the data they get...not the acquisition.
Well that, and interagency cooperation, which the Department of Homeland Security was designed to fix. Instead, it now pursues its own agenda and has proven counterproductive towards those ends. The value of intelligence is not in whether or not you can acquire the information, but whether you can do so in a timely and reliable fashion, and have the resources to analyze it to determine trends, form conclusions, and execute decisions in a timely manner. Intelligence operations don't have a defined start and end point. They are organic cycles which vary over time depending on current policy decisions. But it is a continual process, not a linear one as many here seem to think.
Breaking codes is just a small part of the NSA's overall role within the government. Not only that, but they're not the ones spying on you domestically (generally); That's the job of the FBI (generally) unless a foreign national is involved or they suspect you have international ties with a terrorist organization or individual, or are pursuing criminal enterprise that could endanger national security (for example, if you're a network administrator at Honeywell, which does defense work), or if you are related to any of the above. And frankly, the FBI has a pattern of only investigating high value targets or those that gather media attention because their internal organizational structure is so inefficient that most of their resources are eaten in administrative overhead, leaving very little for actual field work. Unlike marines that live for the day they get to go outside the wire, most at the FBI are content to work 9-to-5 shifts moving papers from one desk to the next. Believe it or not, a major portion of the FBI's intelligence gathering is still open source, even given the low barriers to nearly unlimited access to anything in the private sector.
That said, intelligence gathering proactively in sigint is a rarity -- it can provide leads, but generally it is reactive in nature. You have your boots in the ground finding names and getting a lay of the land. sigint resources are then allocated against the target to see if anything interesting can be found. In other words, the fact that the NSA has all your emails, phone records, etc., doesn't mean anything unless somebody files a report saying "Hey, check this guy out." There's plenty of files they have where they have good reason to suspect criminal activity but don't invest resources in it because it just isn't costing society enough yet to justify the judicial process.
transgender != decrying traditional gender roles. Most trans people I know are so committed to them, they get surgery, take hormones, and deal with the legal system in non-trivial ways. That sounds more like a shining endorsement, not condemnation.
They do it because it's easier to blend in to society. Gender is the initial division upon which all others in society are derived from -- race, ethnicity, etc. They're not doing it to support the system. They're doing it because it's nearly impossible to survive otherwise. Transgender people kill themselves with remarkable regularity because of their inability to conform -- the mortality rate over a 7 year period is about 50-60% last I read, which is worse than most forms of cancer. What's worse is the misguided notion that it's a "choice" on their part -- which denies them access to the medical resources necessary to live comfortably in society and contribute to it meaningfully. We save Steven Hawking and the Hellen Kellers of the world, support people with far more expensive medical conditions like AIDS because we view them as not having a choice -- it's something that "happens" to them, not something they choose. People don't choose their gender. They can redefine it, because identities are fluid and change with the circumstances and environment, but they can't erase it.
We're bored because we're worried we'll be jailed over some misunderstanding or another by our less intelligent counterparts in law enforcement, politics, and the general public. Just about every technology has two sides: A beneficial one, and a harmful one. In this reactionary knee-jerk society, do you really want to be caught with a pile of beakers, or a bunch of electronic parts, or anything that appears homemade? We've got people who think circuit boards with LEDs and coins-sized batteries are bombs and close off entire streets. We've got a legislature drafting secret legislation, serving orders from secret courts, and imprisoning people as enemies of the state without charge, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had something on them deemed "suspicious".
It's dangerous to let people know you're smart in this society. Especially when the exploration of science and technology inevitably leads us to learn exactly the kinds of things the government is afraid of: How to manufacture our own chemicals, how to make explosives, or high power transmitters, or about a bazillion other things that are just tools. The authorities never see just tools: They only see criminal intent, and since you can't prove what someone was thinking, we've decided judicially and legislatively to simply assume the worst and dole out punishments accordingly.
Go to any public school today and you'll see the smart kids sitting in the corner, desperate not to show it, while the idiots boast about the fact that they've never read a book in their entire academic career cover to cover, and revel in the latest American Idol episode while beating up or humiliating anything they don't understand. At this point, our public educational system is turning out people who are functionally illiterate to science, technology, and don't even know where to go or how to ask even the most basic questions -- out of a random number of people you meet on the street, how many of them even know the basic steps to testing a hypothesis? Or could even explain the basic principles of how any piece of technology in their life works -- even the mundane light bulb?
Smart is illegal in this country, and it shows... Other countries are kicking our asses in every field of scientific inquiry, every industry, and about the only thing we have left is how to leverage financial resources -- America's only remaining strength right now is our financial know-how. We've let our infrastructure rot, our educational institutions fall into ruin, and we have text books that are so politically neutral as to be devoid of any real lessons or content... and we're putting warning labels on scientific textbooks not dissimilar to what we put on the side of packs of cigarettes!
I don't belive we'll ever be able to get back a US where there isn't government subsidies in everything.
Nor would we want to. That caused the Great Depression. Regulation of the free markets is a necessary activity. Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism. Of course, nobody agrees on how to do this... Subsidies are one answer. If you want to suggest another one, present your argument, but don't just wish for it to go away without a valid replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you say bad Idea?
Fiberglass particulate is just as nasty and it's in your home right now! *ominous look upwards* Oh, wait... it's sealed behind a wall. Nevermind. Same principle apples to "space dust". Build the structure, then coat the insides or attach walls to make it a happy fun place for all.
Offtopic, there may be more /. lurkers in MN than you might think. I rarely post but I've seen your posts quite a bit, and I didn't know until now that you were from MN. I sincerely wish you the best of luck with that, because it's getting tougher to find someone to have an intellectual discussion with, period; let alone available lesbians.
Well, if you're looking for an intellectual discussion, there is this thing called instant messaging and e-mail. Reply back on a future thread and ask me. :)
Yeah... this is hugely off topic, but hey.
It's a common experience for lesbians. I am kindof a soft androgyny, whereas my girlfriend is quite butch (almost irritatingly so). She's also short for a girl, and I'm tall for one. So we make quite the spectacle. Needless to say, in the summertime people like to yell out the window dyke, cow, fat ass, etc., when they pass by. If approached, sometimes they'll ask me if I could "give their friend some love", despite the obviousness that I'm holding her hand and we're obviously a couple. She and I have both been called 'sir' in public on an irregular basis. And if I rebuff those sexual advances, they do sometimes mutter that "well you're just chicks with dicks anyway" and storm off. For the record, I'm not strictly a lesbian, I'm actually bi -- I've just had no luck with men. I don't know what journals this person is referring to, since I don't post any on slashdot, but hey. *shrugs* Who knows what google turns up given the right search words? Point is, it's just throwing hate out there because the poster wants women to be "put in their place" -- which in this case means subservient to heterosexual men. And that's just plain hateful bullshit.
On a somewhat different note, trans-women are part of the life and the community as much as any others. I know some lesbians would detest me for saying that, but we need to show a common front. I don't believe gender is in between your legs like most believe, it's in between your ears. How else would it be that my girlfriend acts more like a man and I act more like a woman? Sexuality, and for that matter physical sex itself, is a spectrum. Most people concentrate at the polls, but that's no reason to be hateful towards those who, for whatever reason, are found elsewhere.
Dunno about meeting up anywhere. I'm only looking for friends in the world right now. Pride is coming in a few months. Maybe I'll see you there?
"I disagree with your pessimism regarding humanity. You're a clever bloke, but far too cynical. Wanna make out?"
A bloke is a dude. If you're going to throw out british slang, at least use it right. The word you're looking for is 'skirt', or if you're feeling less charitable, 'Doris'.
There's something about your posts that I find grating. I should try to figure out what it is.
I'm very intelligent, but unlike most, I'm also very direct. I don't sugar-coat, and I'm world-weary and don't care much about whether or not I hurt somebody else's feelings. I also do tend to over-generalize and draw on stereotypes because those are things people can emotionally relate to. It's that mixture of facts and emotional appeal that makes me both persuasive and irritating at the same time. So you're on the right track.
but I'm guessing you'd be hard pressed to acknowledge prosocial inclinations.
Well, actually I believe that at the root of human nature is the need for social acceptance. This need is so entrenched in us (being social creatures as all mammals are) that it often overrides our judgement or blinds us to the pain we cause others. For a far better elucidation on this, look up the speech The Perils of Indifference, by Elie Wiesel. As a holocaust survivor, he struggled to understand why so many people would be indifferent to the suffering of others like him. See also: Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment for additional insight. I'm not saying people are fundamentally evil. I'm saying we're fundamentally social creatures -- and our desire for acceptance (amongst other things) often leads us to abuse our fellow human beings in ways not easily understood or, if understood, are dismissed as cognitive dissonance -- "I'm not responsible. It's not my fault."
Maybe this hyperbole isn't warranted? Especially just on the heels of a counterexample?
Or maybe I just wanted to attach my post as high up on the tree as I could so as many people could read and comment on this as possible, rather than on a more relevant, but lower-ranked thread.
...but technology can be leveraged. And that's a critical point which we ought not sweep under the rug mid-rant.
You're saying technology is just a tool. It's neither good nor evil. I don't disagree.
Self-gratifyingly vent your gall bladder about the inherent and irremediable evil of humankind? But meanwhile thus paint an ugly picture of humanity for others to absorb? Did you know that the more we contemn and so fear others the less helpful we become? Indeed, the more we become the things we're hating? Selfish, ungenerous, unkind? Get my drift? If we call humans ugly we make it so. Technology has amplified your mouth. Watch your mouth.
People need to be held up to the mirror every now and then and reminded that they aren't perfect. They need reminders of our history -- they need to remember that many of the most tragic things that happened in the history of our race started with words like "It's for your own good," or "think of how much this could benefit others!" We have nuclear reactors now that power many of our cities. That same knowledge was used to destroy two cities. We should have a guarded vigilance towards any new technology -- that isn't to say don't develop it, or don't use it, but that we should carefully consider the rammifications of their widespread use before it becomes widely used. An ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure. You say I'm cynical and spit vitrol at the human condition -- no. Emphatically, no. What I say is we should be aware of it, and consider that although individually we may be moral and good people, the world as a whole is not filled with people like us, and we need to put our technology forward with that in mind from the beginning, not waiting until after and then going "Damn! Didn't see that one coming."
Next time I'm in Minnesota, you wanna grab a coffee?
Hmmm. You really do read most of my posts. Sure. Uptown, a place called Uncommon Grounds. They make the best chai tea you'll find this side of the mississippi.
That's "Whose" not "Who's." After all, if you're set on letting ANYbody here into your pants, you're going to need to straighten that stuff out first. Heh. Heheh. Don't be ridiculous! :)
Fortunately, discovering that someone is an intellectual snob usually happens on the first date. That's when I split the tab, and then split for the exit. Besides, I'm under no illusions that there's any eligible lesbians who read slashdot in my zipcode. To date, I've found two regular posters here that ping the radar, and neither are even in my state. :(
A well thought-out, on-topic response being modded as redundant? Even if you don't agree with the poster's reasoning, this certainly isn't redundant.
You must be new here, so I'll make this simple: Most of my posts are well thought-out, on-topic, and therefore piss off a lot of people, who make it a point whenever they get mod points to nuke any post with my username associated with it into oblivion. So you need to make a diversionary post, like this:
Attention Moderator Who Put Me Down As Redundant:
You Have a Small Penis. No Amount of Mod Points Can Fix This.
Sincerely, The Girl Who's Pants You'll Never Get Into.
See? Works nicely. Now they'll waste their points moderating this down (with hopefully a few +1, Funny, to keep it afloat for awhile), thus providing the necessary diversion to get the well-thought out post past the haters. Now sit back and watch the fireworks, kiddo. ;)
Though now that I think a little more, a spam attack on your eyeballs could be troubling...
People always think of the best outcome when a new technology is created, forgetting the cesspool we call humanity that's going to use and pervert it. The day you have bionic eyes is the day people start paying good money to augment your "virtual reality" to replace competitors advertisements, add advertisements onto everyday objects surrepticiously, and what you'll end up with is drowning in useless information just as much now, sitting at your keyboard reading this, except you won't be able to unplug.
Most of my friends have the social expectation that if they send me a text or email, I reply in a few minutes, a half hour tops. Any longer, and they think something's gone wrong, and start calling me and everyone I know to find out what happened. God help us all the day we're linked continuously with each other over a massive communications network; Kiss democracy goodbye, privacy, anonymity, freedom, and the right to choose how you life your life goodbye. It'll all be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It'll be like Ghost in the Shell, with police, government agents, and large corporations being able to cloak themselves from being seen. And there won't be trials anymore -- the bionic eye's constant connection with the network will mean everything you see from the moment you wakeup until you go to bed will be available for review. They'll make their use mandatory because it results in zero crime. Or so they'll say.
It isn't fear-mongering to expect this. Not fifteen years ago when the internet was in its infancy, most of what was out there was high quality scientific research and most of the e-mails being sent were between real people, having real conversations. Today, it's a cesspool where 99% of what your inbox gets hit with is someone trying to sell you something. Every window into the web has advertisements hanging off of it. And here in Minnesota, the Supreme Court recently ruled that it was okay for people to be convicted of DUI if they could have been capable of operating a motor vehicle. People being thrown in jail because of the possibility that a crime could have occurred -- it is no longer necessary that the public (or yourself) be harmed for the law to reach into your lives. Today we live in a society where the merest possibility of a person engaging in a criminal act is sufficient grounds for conviction.
Technology does not change the way people think. Human intellectual capacity has not altered in the past 4,000 years (at least) as far as we can tell. We can laugh at people who believed the world was flat, but the fault is ours for doing so -- we did not understand how they saw the world. There wasn't anything wrong with their eyes, or their brains. We're fundamentally no smarter than they were. But we think we are. And we're so confident, so smugly superior to our predecessors that we know this future can't happen.
Of course there will be trials. And freedom. And democracy. And all that good stuff. We know it because, well, gosh darn it, that's how it has to be.
No.
No it doesn't.
All these things we value will die, and we can't blame technology for it. All technology does, this one included, is expose and direct us towards the fundamental question of what it means to be human. And let me just say -- that definition is not sunshine and rainbows. We were given free will. Nowhere in that does it say we are in any way inclined to do good; When it comes right down to it, very few people truly trust one another, and we'd believe our own direct sensory experiences over what anyone would tell us. We imitate others. That's all culture is -- the direct observation of our environment, which is translated into coping mechanisms (behaviors) that we then interpose between ourselves and it.
So tell me, where does that leave us when those sensory experiences become artificial and malleable?
It's the auto equivalent of pay-day loans.
Yeah, except you actually do get some of the money. With these places, you're out a car, all the money you invested, and nothing you can do except start over. And anyone who's thinking they can make monthly payments for two or three years and not be late once -- you're either wealthy enough to not have to resort to this kind of thing, or you're a grade school teacher. Everyone else misses payments. Don't ask me why teachers always pay their bills. I don't know... but I worked for a place once that had several thousand of them for customers. We never once had a check bounce, or a late fee assessed. Management was pissed, but a contract's a contract. Our christmas parties were, achem, cheap affairs.
Role-players scare me.
Says the person who every day is a friend, a child, an adult, a coworker, a consumer, a citizen, a geek, nevermind all the other divisions that create your own self-identity. You say role players scare you, but you fail to see just how pervasive role playing is in your own daily life.
There's a lot of unpleasant stuff you can put in there. My guess is "rods from god", that is, a payload of tungsten or depleted uranium rods that you can drop on a target.
Yeah, if we ignore the fact that should something go wrong and the uranium be exposed to plasma during re-entry, we've got a rather large area that's been coated in DU.
Maybe they're looking at retrieving satellites in order to get more data out of them. Remember physically moving data is still the fastest way to move data. You are restricted in how much data you can transfer from space to ground via radio.
That might be true enough, but in the 70s they used to drop the film from satellites and then have it caught mid-air by a retrieval aircraft. It's not exactly difficult to build an ejection mechanism into a satellite, or track the return of the package to Earth when you control the initial vector, orbit, and timing. Why expend all that fuel to travel upwards, when you can just drop it?
For example, multispectral scans of the Earth at 1 meter resolution. A single byte of information per square meter would be roughly 150 terabytes of data. A single byte of information per 10 cm (decimeter) square would be 15 petabytes of information.
I think optical transmission would be a better way to send that amount of data. The visual spectrum of light is 400-790 THz and the only thing you need to receive the signal is a clear sky. If we're looking at transmitting massive amounts of data in a way that isn't necessarily time-sensitive, I'd suggest optical data transfer. Of course, you have to buffer all that data...
The DoD gets both a 270 day satellite with latest technology and a massive, comprehensive archive which it can dig through at its leisure.
The value of most surveillance is directly proportional to how soon it can be retrieved, processed, analyzed, and a decision made and executed based on the analysis via the chain of command. If you know that your high value target, Achmed the Terrorist is going to be visiting a friend's flat at 7:30pm tonight, according to an intercepted cell phone call, but it's in an area with lots of known hostiles, you probably want to recon the area from 7:00--8:00pm using something with enough resolution to be reasonably sure Achmed the Terrorist has shown up at the house, and then maintain that surveillance until a tactical squad can reach the area. LEO vehicles, which is what this is, can have an orbital time of as little as 90 minutes. Yes, you get better resolution on your images, but there's a tradeoff: You don't get as much time over the target.
If you want a more plausible scenario for the use of this -- inter-satellite communication. You can use a much, much wider band of RF to transmit in space than on the ground, and it goes a lot farther. Ground-based interception of this is, for all intents and purposes, impossible.
Does the system as a whole get into a weird state if packets drop?
My theory: Older drivers tend to not to mash the accelerator. Have you noticed on like PS2 or XBox that if the controller loses calibration because you went into a menu or are very gentle with moving it sometimes it'll 'stick' in the software and rotate continually until you unplug the controller (thus resetting the zero state)?
It's like the Therac-25 incident; The software makes certain assumptions about the mechanical interlocks that, in select cases, result in an inconsistent reading. It happens all the time in embedded systems.
it looks like the Golden Age of the web will continue for some time.
Dude, the web didn't even exist until about 18 years ago. We're still evaluating the impact that the internet is having on culture -- what with some countries defining it as an inalienable human right and others eager to all but destroy or censor the crap out of it, the "golden age" is not what I'd call this time period. I'd call it the friggin' dark ages -- a mish-mash of global entities all competing at cross-purposes, a thriving black market, and every week more of our technology becomes connected to it, and people being burned at the stake for "file sharing", and the world wide web is being crapflooded with advertisements and commercial interests that continually infest the garden of knowledge that is the web like weeds.
I know I'm going to hell for this but... why build robots when it costs less to use a bunch of third world labor? I'm all for technology, but when you've got a few billion people just laying around with not much to do, it makes more sense to hire them for pennies than to build a robotic replacement that costs thousands plus maintenance.
Please paste those imbalances and differences in what is being exported if they actually matter.
That report is the closest I can find to statistics on the EU as a whole regarding import/export deficits in relation to total GDP.
(btw, I've seen you shouting bullshit in many different areas, from running trackers to some china government and now this - do you even know what you're talking about?)
Ad hominim attacks will get you nowhere.
Also, are you really serious about us economy being closed?
Yes.
...and that's why it will fight ACTA.
Ah, a righteous uprising by the people is a much more reasonable explanation than their import/export imbalance being a lot different than the US. And compare what is being imported and exported with the United States, and you'll see what I'm trying to say.
Did you forget China and Taiwan, the Indian coders and phone support, even us mail manual processing being offshored to Singapore? You can't be serious.
We weren't talking about the price of tea in China. We were discussing why the ACTA is being fought by the European Union. Please stay on topic.
My image towards EU has growth a lot with this.
*cough* No, I think the EU is doing this as an act of self-preservation. Unlike the US, that has an economy that is mostly closed (despite what you may think, our import/exports make up only a small amount of GDP), most of the EU has an open economy. The ACTA would screw them a lot harder than the United States. The US is just looking for a way to justify backing out of various free trade agreements and the ACTA is basically a way of us adding tariffs to our imported/exported services by creating artificial marketplaces while maintaining the illusion that we're all about free trade. We've created an artificial division between goods and services because our economy has transitioned from producing goods to producing services. It's in our best interests, financially, to create an artificial framework now to ensure we'll get our cut when other countries' economies transition to this as well -- basically continuing the long-standing tradition of passing the production to poor countries and living on top of them by providing the services and support that ultimately control the means of production.
Quite clever, don't you think? The EU can portray itself as the hero to the people, but it's only delaying the ACTA and similar acts -- once its economy gets closer to being representative of the US model, it'll quietly resurrect. So they get to be heroes today, and tomorrow they're just "going with the flow", portraying it as the inevitable price we have to pay for economic progress.
Remember kids, privacy != freedom
It's been well-established that a lack of privacy discourages people from peaceful assembly and accessing other tools necessary to the success of a democracy. When we have designated protest zones in cages tipped with razor wire and a hundred cameras covering every angle, and people being profiled by the FBI and investigated as potential subversives for doing this, it becomes clear that privacy, while not being the same as freedom, is essential to it. One cannot survive without the other.
Yeah. You posted it as a reply to a thread I made, and you stole my thunder, you insensitive clod. :)
That 1984 commercial gets more ironic by the moment.
Think different.
If the NSA has any problem, then it's to store and process/search through the data they get...not the acquisition.
Well that, and interagency cooperation, which the Department of Homeland Security was designed to fix. Instead, it now pursues its own agenda and has proven counterproductive towards those ends. The value of intelligence is not in whether or not you can acquire the information, but whether you can do so in a timely and reliable fashion, and have the resources to analyze it to determine trends, form conclusions, and execute decisions in a timely manner. Intelligence operations don't have a defined start and end point. They are organic cycles which vary over time depending on current policy decisions. But it is a continual process, not a linear one as many here seem to think.
Breaking codes is just a small part of the NSA's overall role within the government. Not only that, but they're not the ones spying on you domestically (generally); That's the job of the FBI (generally) unless a foreign national is involved or they suspect you have international ties with a terrorist organization or individual, or are pursuing criminal enterprise that could endanger national security (for example, if you're a network administrator at Honeywell, which does defense work), or if you are related to any of the above. And frankly, the FBI has a pattern of only investigating high value targets or those that gather media attention because their internal organizational structure is so inefficient that most of their resources are eaten in administrative overhead, leaving very little for actual field work. Unlike marines that live for the day they get to go outside the wire, most at the FBI are content to work 9-to-5 shifts moving papers from one desk to the next. Believe it or not, a major portion of the FBI's intelligence gathering is still open source, even given the low barriers to nearly unlimited access to anything in the private sector.
That said, intelligence gathering proactively in sigint is a rarity -- it can provide leads, but generally it is reactive in nature. You have your boots in the ground finding names and getting a lay of the land. sigint resources are then allocated against the target to see if anything interesting can be found. In other words, the fact that the NSA has all your emails, phone records, etc., doesn't mean anything unless somebody files a report saying "Hey, check this guy out." There's plenty of files they have where they have good reason to suspect criminal activity but don't invest resources in it because it just isn't costing society enough yet to justify the judicial process.
transgender != decrying traditional gender roles. Most trans people I know are so committed to them, they get surgery, take hormones, and deal with the legal system in non-trivial ways. That sounds more like a shining endorsement, not condemnation.
They do it because it's easier to blend in to society. Gender is the initial division upon which all others in society are derived from -- race, ethnicity, etc. They're not doing it to support the system. They're doing it because it's nearly impossible to survive otherwise. Transgender people kill themselves with remarkable regularity because of their inability to conform -- the mortality rate over a 7 year period is about 50-60% last I read, which is worse than most forms of cancer. What's worse is the misguided notion that it's a "choice" on their part -- which denies them access to the medical resources necessary to live comfortably in society and contribute to it meaningfully. We save Steven Hawking and the Hellen Kellers of the world, support people with far more expensive medical conditions like AIDS because we view them as not having a choice -- it's something that "happens" to them, not something they choose. People don't choose their gender. They can redefine it, because identities are fluid and change with the circumstances and environment, but they can't erase it.
This is why smart people should never be bored.
We're bored because we're worried we'll be jailed over some misunderstanding or another by our less intelligent counterparts in law enforcement, politics, and the general public. Just about every technology has two sides: A beneficial one, and a harmful one. In this reactionary knee-jerk society, do you really want to be caught with a pile of beakers, or a bunch of electronic parts, or anything that appears homemade? We've got people who think circuit boards with LEDs and coins-sized batteries are bombs and close off entire streets. We've got a legislature drafting secret legislation, serving orders from secret courts, and imprisoning people as enemies of the state without charge, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had something on them deemed "suspicious".
It's dangerous to let people know you're smart in this society. Especially when the exploration of science and technology inevitably leads us to learn exactly the kinds of things the government is afraid of: How to manufacture our own chemicals, how to make explosives, or high power transmitters, or about a bazillion other things that are just tools. The authorities never see just tools: They only see criminal intent, and since you can't prove what someone was thinking, we've decided judicially and legislatively to simply assume the worst and dole out punishments accordingly.
Go to any public school today and you'll see the smart kids sitting in the corner, desperate not to show it, while the idiots boast about the fact that they've never read a book in their entire academic career cover to cover, and revel in the latest American Idol episode while beating up or humiliating anything they don't understand. At this point, our public educational system is turning out people who are functionally illiterate to science, technology, and don't even know where to go or how to ask even the most basic questions -- out of a random number of people you meet on the street, how many of them even know the basic steps to testing a hypothesis? Or could even explain the basic principles of how any piece of technology in their life works -- even the mundane light bulb?
Smart is illegal in this country, and it shows... Other countries are kicking our asses in every field of scientific inquiry, every industry, and about the only thing we have left is how to leverage financial resources -- America's only remaining strength right now is our financial know-how. We've let our infrastructure rot, our educational institutions fall into ruin, and we have text books that are so politically neutral as to be devoid of any real lessons or content... and we're putting warning labels on scientific textbooks not dissimilar to what we put on the side of packs of cigarettes!
I don't belive we'll ever be able to get back a US where there isn't government subsidies in everything.
Nor would we want to. That caused the Great Depression. Regulation of the free markets is a necessary activity. Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism. Of course, nobody agrees on how to do this... Subsidies are one answer. If you want to suggest another one, present your argument, but don't just wish for it to go away without a valid replacement.
Sounds like a good way to gather intel on the people using this technology in these "friendly" countries.
Yeah, like ours.