jamming wireless signals in the US is a serious felony.
OMG, tell me it's not a "serious" felony! Perhaps you have a counter example of a comedic felony? "Well, your Honor, there I was robbing this bank when in walks a priest, a rabbi, and Bill Gates. Oh, hey, stop me if you've convicted this one before..."
So buy a pair of noise canceling headphones and set the volume on your MP3 player to "ignore humanity". Works great, unless there's a squalling kid next to you, in which case you have to set it to "ignore humanity loudly".
I figure that it's much harder for other people to be d!cks to me if I don't even acknowledge that they exist. And while that may make me an arrogant jerk, at least I'm quiet about it.
That they were able to chain so many together says loads about their security practices and policies. One SQL injection attack is a mistake. But on a home-grown internet-facing execs-only CMS server? Who architected their setup? Who did security reviews? Who set up their password policies? Hell, there's no evidence at all of a security policy. At a security company.
It's good for them that Barr stepped down, but they have a lot to fix before the rest of their clients jump ship.
Changing the subject doesn't invalidate my previous point. Your previous comment was talking about spam being thwarted by SSL, but that's what zombies easily bypass. Each zombie could easily send out 100 emails a day and not trigger "suspicion" flags at the ISP level. With a hundred thousand zombies, that's ten million spams that the security software would never catch. And I'd bet that a competent botherder could probably quote each major ISP's spam threshold from memory, so if Comcast's throttle is 1,000 emails per day he probably limits his Comcast zombies to about 900 spams per day.
The point of my previous post is that certificates are not a cure-all, because they're meaningless on a compromised box. Once it's owned, it can't be considered trustworthy. And most home users couldn't tell you whether or not their box is working right or not, because they can't even tell the difference between useful software and the shovelware that stores like Best Buy poop onto the hard disks before delivering the equipment. There's almost no chance they will detect malware zombie code.
YThe worst outcome would be if people ended up using it, but at this point I'm guessing it'll be a huge dud; some government entities will support it, as will a few corporations, but that's it.
I don't think they will be so lucky. I'd bet the government will require it for some communication and account access. Over time it will become more inconvenient to have multiple email accounts and people will just default to using de-mail.
I can see the commercial sector driving adoption on its own. As a business, I might ask all business to be transacted through De-mail to ensure legitimacy of contracts and payment. Or as an insurer, I might offer reduced rates of coverage to business transactions that take place over De-mail, as I would trust them to have less chance of being fraudulent.
This is not a problem of encryption or SSL. Zombies can simply bypass all security measures by emulating the end user.
Think of a zombie that opens up your copy of Outlook Express, fake-clicks "Create new email message", types something about penis enlargement, types in a hundred addresses, then fake-clicks "Send". As far as the entire chain of email is concerned, the email came from somersault@example.com. You (and by you I mean your computer acting on your behalf) sent the spam, so De-mail could block you until you clean up your act.
If your machine is infested, having your email client require you to type a secret password is pretty much useless, too. The malware could sniff your secret password keystrokes and the zombie would simply play them back whenever it wanted to send more spam.
So if the idea is "If De-mail detects spam coming from one of the authenticated users, it will refuse to permit that user to send more email until they can demonstrate they are not going to send more spam." It'll be up to the end user to correct the problem before being allowed to rejoin the collective, which is a good thing.
When you're jet-lagged, you're certainly not thinking at your best, and picking up environmental cues is likely not as easy as you make it out to be.
But what I think Pingmaster is kind of saying is that we still have a need for local conventions. Local bus schedules will be tied to the common morning and evening rush hours, which are today centered around local solar noon. And despite geeky protestations to the contrary, local solar noon is important as we are still diurnal mammals whose circadian rhythms are tied to sunlight.
But what are those "standard" hours for local bus schedules? If we set them simply according to lines of longitude, we could run "common rush hour" right through the middle of a big city, which would likely be inconvenient for the locals. "Hey, am I at 93.499 degrees west, or 93.501 degrees west? I don't know if I can still catch the last bus home!"
The existing political maintainers of time zones have already made those choices. And we could of course retain those existing zone lines to eliminate the problems above. But if we start referring to points in time as "5:31 Offset -6" meaning "do the offset calculations for local events based on subtracting 6 hours to UTC to get to local solar noon", it seems to me it would get really confusing really fast, because everyone has to do the math every time, rather than directly read a clock.
There are no doubt a hundred capable organizations about the world who would likely be willing to host and maintain the database, but the problem is going to be politics. The NIST would likely be seen by non-Americans as a U.S. Government run operation, which they may believe would threaten their sovereignty.
And any time you deal with an international map, you deal with nasty national politics. "How dare you put Palestine in the Israel Standard Time zone!" "Taiwan must use China Standard Time!" "You cannot have Kashmir in Pakistan Time Zone, it must be in Indian Standard Time!" (I seem to remember Microsoft running afoul of the Kashmir claim when they released Windows 95.) And the claims can come from anywhere. Whoever makes the claim might be a cleric expressing local solidarity with their brethren in their holy city, the representative of a regional government claiming rule over a disputed land, or just a local citizen trying to set his watch to get to work on time.
As an individual, Mr. Olson probably quietly accepted the word of the geeks who contacted him, and that was good enough to be very effective for a long time. If it is transferred to an official government organization, these sorts of local political arguments will likely become vastly elevated to international debates.
Face detected, but contrast poor. Consider adding a light from just over your left shoulder.
And now the geek in me wants a little RF-controlled quadcopter-mounted flash unit. It could dock on top of the camera, and take off and fly to the correct point once you press the shutter release halfway down. Backlighting, fill flash, bounce reflectors, all could fly around under control of a sufficiently smart camera. Then imagine sky-darkening clouds of camera accessories flying around the paparazzi surrounding Charlie Sheen, for example.
Anyway, your suggestion is far and away the best answer so far. Give the camera "good taste", when it's obvious the operator has none. I could sell a semi-load of those tomorrow!
conferences are a great way to find out if what you are doing is worth anything
I know that what I am doing isn't worth publishing, but they keep pushing me to anyway since it is part of the game. I really don't want fly across the country to hobnob with people.
Once you realize "the game" can personally offer you significant benefits, you may change your mind. If it helps your motivation, think of "hobnob" as "presenting yourself to potential future employers."
And if you already have a steady gig, remember that no job is guaranteed to last forever. Getting your name out in the industry and associated with research never hurts.
I guess what I was trying to say is that the world went through a multi-culturally shared musical age of discovery about 50-70 years ago. Everybody who passed through that era saw the shift from the local bands to world music. Musicians of the age applied that in wonderfully creative (and also awfully derivative) ways. But it was an event - it started, it happened, and it ended. It's like baking a cake: you'll never get back to the eggs and flour.
People and musicians born since that era have always had the polyphony in the background, and so the wonderment of discovery doesn't take place for them, at least not in the larger social sense. It's not realistic to think that a group of kids would grow up in isolation today, perhaps listening only to country music, having never heard rap and being suddenly surprised or blown away by it all. They may reject rap as bad music, but they know what rap is because they've heard it on TV, in movies, friends' iPods, etc. There is no magical discovery event where an entire planet full of different kinds of music is dropped on them at once.
To your point, discovery continues to happen all the time, but only in the small: some kid will discover a new artist or niche that blows him away, shares it with his friends, they all start playing the new music, it becomes the song for the next high school prom, they lose their virginity with it playing in the background, and they all remember it fondly for the rest of their days. Music is still important to people, and there are still individual gems to be discovered. But it's not the giant culture shift that the world experienced simultaneously from about WWII through the 1960s. Think about all the reasons why the "Ed Sullivan Show" wouldn't be a giant commercial success today, and that's why it's not the same.
Nothing will make the problem go away, because at no point are any of the modern musicians going to be as wondrous to today's audiences as the musicians of the 50s, 60s, and 70s were to theirs. Prior to then, music was pretty much local. If you lived in the hills, you listened to local boys with banjos. If you lived in Italy, you listened to local boys with mandolins. If you lived in Germany, you listened to local polka bands. If you had money and traveled, you'd hear different local music.
Then as recorded music became available, so did Elvis, the British Invasion, Dick Clark's American Bandstand, rock and roll, and it was all NEW to everyone. People created new sounds, they collaborated with other musicians, and it was an amazing time for everyone. The record companies printed money in the shape of round black vinyl discs, and hired people to shovel cash into their limousines.
And then it wasn't new any more. Music fashions appeared and disappeared, new bands came and went after sharing a one-hit-wonder with the world, and the mummified corpses of the 1960s and 1970s bands were propped up on stages around the world, with such unforgettable names as the "Steel Wheelchairs Tour" and "The Traveling Dingle-berries", hawking overpriced concert tickets to acid-brain-washed aging hippies who never really left the 1970s. And as time was unkind, they had to get out of their own limos to shovel the money in.
The system was already getting tired, and then along came digital music. As modern music entered a new age of suckage, perfect digital copies introduced the modern consumer to a new age of self-empowered selfishness. The double whammy has left the music industry where it is: barely able to afford Korbel Brut taps in their limousines instead of hot and cold running Dom Perignon. And nobody wants to drink Korbel after that.
I've just looked back at JCPenney's stock price, and there's no fluctuation or even a news mention about them getting Google-slapped for SEO gaming.
Why should the stock price change?
Apparently it means that SEO gaming does not rise to the level of "Corporate Evil" that would divert shoppers or stock traders.
Again, why would it? Did this incident have a measurable impact on the expected future revenue of the company?
Why would it change? Stockholders are jittery about things like news: good or bad, news articles can make stock prices move sharply. And having the biggest search engine in existence spank you seems like some bad news to me. So I looked, expecting to see some kind of a bump in their picture, but saw nothing of significance. I thought that a bit surprising.
If I were a stockholder in JCP, I'd be pissed off on news that their Google ranking on things like "draperies" dropped from from the first page to the seventh, especially since their "catalog" (now internet) business is an important revenue driver for them. That could mean much weaker first quarter sales, so this would be a good time to sell. But we don't know for sure, because we don't yet know what impact Google's page rank will have on them. And even simply that kind of uncertainty can alter investor behavior -- get out now before something bad happens.
No, Sony was great before they bought CBS records, a content producing company. They were happy selling us tape recorders, VCRs with timers, Walkmans and other home electronics. When I was a kid, Sony stuff was amazingly cool.
Once they bought CBS records and started producing stuff that people wanted to copy, it all changed. DAT recorders and mini-disc recorders had their Serial Content Management System and the infamous copy bit that prevented second-generation recordings on stock home recording decks. Sony became the driving force for evil DRM in consumer electronics, and by the mid 90s I stopped buying anything Sony. I still don't, and if someone's asking my recommendation on products at an electronics store (which happens often as I'm the 'family computer nerd') I steer them away from Sony. I don't care if they're buying a TV or a PC, I recommend against them, with the simple explanation of "I never buy Sony, their equipment prevents you from making copies of your own stuff."
Sony's evil is also the sole reason I early-adopted an HD-DVD system instead of BluRay. (Of course we all know how that choice worked out.) But in terms of evil, I still rank Sony higher than I do Microsoft.
I've just looked back at JCPenney's stock price, and there's no fluctuation or even a news mention about them getting Google-slapped for SEO gaming. They made it through the Christmas season selling tons of stuff, Google has slapped them down, yet there isn't even a bump. An analyst noted they had slightly weaker January sales and blamed it on "Lower inventory clearance coupled with bad weather".
Apparently it means that SEO gaming does not rise to the level of "Corporate Evil" that would divert shoppers or stock traders. I guess the public must just see it as "corporations advertising like normal."
I wouldn't call it "masterful." It was clumsy and heavy-handed. What I saw was over-the-top evil from both the "heroes" and the "villains" to the point where it put me off the movie completely. For it to be masterful, it would have to connect at least a tiny bit to humanity, kind of like the spot of humanity Silk Spectre was looking for from Dr. Manhattan. And I realize that you're saying "look how hard it is to be good", but there was simply no touchstone at all, even when the characters were actively groping for it in the dark. The government was evil (the presence of Nixon just made that all the more in-your-face), the romance between the Silk Spectre and Nite Owl was tainted, the evil plot wasn't foiled, there wasn't even a tiny pimple of redemption. You might claim that at least Rorschach stayed true, and thus never needed redeeming, yet he was murdered by the "heroes" as a result.
The movie was missing that key element, some tiny piece to hang your hope on, and it wasn't there. There wasn't even a fake piece of hope in the movie to tease us. No, the angry mob could have won the day, shredded the heroes, and I'd have been all the happier for it.
What was great about it was that for every setting, you were presented with a one-sided view of the world, in which your group is the heroes, and everybody else is a bunch of monsters, savages, or people who have been corrupted by power. Then you read the other books, and find out that you only saw a superficial view of that group, and that they had a good reason for their stance.
I like the way that the video game America's Army does it. When you join a game, you are always on the side of the Americans, wearing American uniforms and wielding American weapons. The other side is always seen as the OPFOR, dressed as hostiles and firing Russian or Chinese made gear. As an American squad, you have to assist and escort a local VIP to escape from a hospital about to be overrun by an assault force attempting to kill the VIP. Or as an American squad you have to prevent a known terrorist from fleeing a hospital where he is being assisted in his escape by militants.
The best part is that both sides are presented as equally valid positions with sound reasons for holding each, with no hint of irony that it's "good guys" on either side, depending on your point of view.
If you saw the Watchmen, you'd have seen that while they painted the protagonists with a dark brush, the criminals were far, far worse. So by that comparison, it was easy to see them as "more good than bad". But most were evil to some degree, all were amoral, none were likable, and by comparison to the daily life of the residents of the movie, they were all deserving of the contempt and scorn they had earned among the public. And to me they were all so distasteful that I found I didn't care about any of them, either. Nuke 'em, don't nuke 'em, just end the stupid movie already.
multiply the pirates up by a couple of orders of magnitude, close the suez, and remove any military in the area. Who's going to bother then?
We're talking about the unrealistic sci-fi concept of an effective blockade of a planet from space. A couple orders of magnitude will change nothing.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams.
The Somali pirates control an effective area of less than about 50 km each (maybe a 15km radius if they have radar, and much less if they don't) randomly patrolling an area of water about 1600 square km. Given that they are effective to a vertical range of perhaps 100 meters above the water (effective against ships 10m tall or less, and able to fire small arms at airplanes), a fully crewed Somali pirate ship "controls" a volume of about.005 cubic kilometers.
The geosynchronous orbital sphere surrounding Earth is a surface area of about 6 billion square kilometers, containing a volume of about 40 billion cubic kilometers. It would take about 300 trillion Somali pirate ships to achieve the same density of coverage in geosynchronous orbit around Earth, and many quadrillions if you wanted to have pirates "all the way down". Sure, we can imagine that a pirate space ship goes faster, has longer range weapons, and so has a bigger effective sphere of influence, but it won't change the math by enough orders of magnitude to make a practical difference. In order to have an effective blockade around a single planet, it would still take more than the entire food output of the planet just to feed all the blockaders required.
And the reavers weren't simply blockading the planet, they were "occupying" the space between planets! When the movie showed Serenity flying through them, it wasn't like a one-ship-per-blockade-volume, either. The reavers were flying in close formation, mere hundreds of meters apart. Given that a space ship in the Firefly 'verse can fly between planets in a period of days, there seems to be little reason to fly through any obstacle they could have easily flown around.
While the Flying Spaghetti Monster may approve of that many pirates, we'd probably all be happier if he'd focus more on the beer volcanoes.
Maybe it's like the flight paths between our major airports? Airplanes don't go wherever they want.
Oddly enough, smugglers often find flight paths counterproductive to the goal of remaining hidden. There'd be no reason Serenity would stay in a space equivalent of shipping lanes, and plenty of reasons for her not to.
"Blockades" around planets is still one of those sci-fi plot holes that always bugs me. Seriously, who could have enough hardware to surround an entire planet such that they can stop a wee little 100m ship from passing by at a speed difference of dozens of kilometers per second? Or worse, when the Reavers were occupying the space between planet Miranda and the other nearby colony? Seriously, there were enough reavers to blockade "space"? Their lasers might as well go "pew-pew" for all the realism in the blockade.
The WBC are definitely not loons. They're barrators with a money stream that looks like this:
1. Select a sign guaranteed to offend people in a 100% legal fashion, and chant carefully worded slogans trolling for a reaction. 2. Receive reaction in the form of ??? (a punch in the nose, or a city council bannination, either works) 3. File lawsuits and profit !!!
What anonymous seems to be failing to understand is that they're just a bunch of amateurs, while the WBC are *professional trolls*. They make their living by trolling. They will not be stopped by other trolls, as they are simply too disciplined to fall for a troll. It's like trying to con a con-artist.
Some of the other God Hates $(foo) groups may be loonies who believe the hateful crap they're defecating on the world, but do not count the WBC in that group. There is actually little chance the WBC believes their own crap. They just substitute the value for $(foo) that looks like it will offend the local crowds the most.
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jamming wireless signals in the US is a serious felony.
OMG, tell me it's not a "serious" felony! Perhaps you have a counter example of a comedic felony? "Well, your Honor, there I was robbing this bank when in walks a priest, a rabbi, and Bill Gates. Oh, hey, stop me if you've convicted this one before..."
So buy a pair of noise canceling headphones and set the volume on your MP3 player to "ignore humanity". Works great, unless there's a squalling kid next to you, in which case you have to set it to "ignore humanity loudly".
I figure that it's much harder for other people to be d!cks to me if I don't even acknowledge that they exist. And while that may make me an arrogant jerk, at least I'm quiet about it.
That they were able to chain so many together says loads about their security practices and policies. One SQL injection attack is a mistake. But on a home-grown internet-facing execs-only CMS server? Who architected their setup? Who did security reviews? Who set up their password policies? Hell, there's no evidence at all of a security policy. At a security company.
It's good for them that Barr stepped down, but they have a lot to fix before the rest of their clients jump ship.
Changing the subject doesn't invalidate my previous point. Your previous comment was talking about spam being thwarted by SSL, but that's what zombies easily bypass. Each zombie could easily send out 100 emails a day and not trigger "suspicion" flags at the ISP level. With a hundred thousand zombies, that's ten million spams that the security software would never catch. And I'd bet that a competent botherder could probably quote each major ISP's spam threshold from memory, so if Comcast's throttle is 1,000 emails per day he probably limits his Comcast zombies to about 900 spams per day.
The point of my previous post is that certificates are not a cure-all, because they're meaningless on a compromised box. Once it's owned, it can't be considered trustworthy. And most home users couldn't tell you whether or not their box is working right or not, because they can't even tell the difference between useful software and the shovelware that stores like Best Buy poop onto the hard disks before delivering the equipment. There's almost no chance they will detect malware zombie code.
YThe worst outcome would be if people ended up using it, but at this point I'm guessing it'll be a huge dud; some government entities will support it, as will a few corporations, but that's it.
I don't think they will be so lucky. I'd bet the government will require it for some communication and account access. Over time it will become more inconvenient to have multiple email accounts and people will just default to using de-mail.
I can see the commercial sector driving adoption on its own. As a business, I might ask all business to be transacted through De-mail to ensure legitimacy of contracts and payment. Or as an insurer, I might offer reduced rates of coverage to business transactions that take place over De-mail, as I would trust them to have less chance of being fraudulent.
This is not a problem of encryption or SSL. Zombies can simply bypass all security measures by emulating the end user.
Think of a zombie that opens up your copy of Outlook Express, fake-clicks "Create new email message", types something about penis enlargement, types in a hundred addresses, then fake-clicks "Send". As far as the entire chain of email is concerned, the email came from somersault@example.com. You (and by you I mean your computer acting on your behalf) sent the spam, so De-mail could block you until you clean up your act.
If your machine is infested, having your email client require you to type a secret password is pretty much useless, too. The malware could sniff your secret password keystrokes and the zombie would simply play them back whenever it wanted to send more spam.
So if the idea is "If De-mail detects spam coming from one of the authenticated users, it will refuse to permit that user to send more email until they can demonstrate they are not going to send more spam." It'll be up to the end user to correct the problem before being allowed to rejoin the collective, which is a good thing.
When you're jet-lagged, you're certainly not thinking at your best, and picking up environmental cues is likely not as easy as you make it out to be.
But what I think Pingmaster is kind of saying is that we still have a need for local conventions. Local bus schedules will be tied to the common morning and evening rush hours, which are today centered around local solar noon. And despite geeky protestations to the contrary, local solar noon is important as we are still diurnal mammals whose circadian rhythms are tied to sunlight.
But what are those "standard" hours for local bus schedules? If we set them simply according to lines of longitude, we could run "common rush hour" right through the middle of a big city, which would likely be inconvenient for the locals. "Hey, am I at 93.499 degrees west, or 93.501 degrees west? I don't know if I can still catch the last bus home!"
The existing political maintainers of time zones have already made those choices. And we could of course retain those existing zone lines to eliminate the problems above. But if we start referring to points in time as "5:31 Offset -6" meaning "do the offset calculations for local events based on subtracting 6 hours to UTC to get to local solar noon", it seems to me it would get really confusing really fast, because everyone has to do the math every time, rather than directly read a clock.
There are no doubt a hundred capable organizations about the world who would likely be willing to host and maintain the database, but the problem is going to be politics. The NIST would likely be seen by non-Americans as a U.S. Government run operation, which they may believe would threaten their sovereignty.
And any time you deal with an international map, you deal with nasty national politics. "How dare you put Palestine in the Israel Standard Time zone!" "Taiwan must use China Standard Time!" "You cannot have Kashmir in Pakistan Time Zone, it must be in Indian Standard Time!" (I seem to remember Microsoft running afoul of the Kashmir claim when they released Windows 95.) And the claims can come from anywhere. Whoever makes the claim might be a cleric expressing local solidarity with their brethren in their holy city, the representative of a regional government claiming rule over a disputed land, or just a local citizen trying to set his watch to get to work on time.
As an individual, Mr. Olson probably quietly accepted the word of the geeks who contacted him, and that was good enough to be very effective for a long time. If it is transferred to an official government organization, these sorts of local political arguments will likely become vastly elevated to international debates.
If "the camera adds 5 kilos", can those be digitally removed as well?
The camera adds 5 kilos! OMG, do you know how many cameras they must be pointing at me right now?
Face detected, but contrast poor. Consider adding a light from just over your left shoulder.
And now the geek in me wants a little RF-controlled quadcopter-mounted flash unit. It could dock on top of the camera, and take off and fly to the correct point once you press the shutter release halfway down. Backlighting, fill flash, bounce reflectors, all could fly around under control of a sufficiently smart camera. Then imagine sky-darkening clouds of camera accessories flying around the paparazzi surrounding Charlie Sheen, for example.
Anyway, your suggestion is far and away the best answer so far. Give the camera "good taste", when it's obvious the operator has none. I could sell a semi-load of those tomorrow!
Anyone who thinks that "devolution" is a valid concept doesn't actually understand evolution.
Maybe not, but I still like their music.
conferences are a great way to find out if what you are doing is worth anything
I know that what I am doing isn't worth publishing, but they keep pushing me to anyway since it is part of the game. I really don't want fly across the country to hobnob with people.
Once you realize "the game" can personally offer you significant benefits, you may change your mind. If it helps your motivation, think of "hobnob" as "presenting yourself to potential future employers."
And if you already have a steady gig, remember that no job is guaranteed to last forever. Getting your name out in the industry and associated with research never hurts.
I guess what I was trying to say is that the world went through a multi-culturally shared musical age of discovery about 50-70 years ago. Everybody who passed through that era saw the shift from the local bands to world music. Musicians of the age applied that in wonderfully creative (and also awfully derivative) ways. But it was an event - it started, it happened, and it ended. It's like baking a cake: you'll never get back to the eggs and flour.
People and musicians born since that era have always had the polyphony in the background, and so the wonderment of discovery doesn't take place for them, at least not in the larger social sense. It's not realistic to think that a group of kids would grow up in isolation today, perhaps listening only to country music, having never heard rap and being suddenly surprised or blown away by it all. They may reject rap as bad music, but they know what rap is because they've heard it on TV, in movies, friends' iPods, etc. There is no magical discovery event where an entire planet full of different kinds of music is dropped on them at once.
To your point, discovery continues to happen all the time, but only in the small: some kid will discover a new artist or niche that blows him away, shares it with his friends, they all start playing the new music, it becomes the song for the next high school prom, they lose their virginity with it playing in the background, and they all remember it fondly for the rest of their days. Music is still important to people, and there are still individual gems to be discovered. But it's not the giant culture shift that the world experienced simultaneously from about WWII through the 1960s. Think about all the reasons why the "Ed Sullivan Show" wouldn't be a giant commercial success today, and that's why it's not the same.
Nothing will make the problem go away, because at no point are any of the modern musicians going to be as wondrous to today's audiences as the musicians of the 50s, 60s, and 70s were to theirs. Prior to then, music was pretty much local. If you lived in the hills, you listened to local boys with banjos. If you lived in Italy, you listened to local boys with mandolins. If you lived in Germany, you listened to local polka bands. If you had money and traveled, you'd hear different local music.
Then as recorded music became available, so did Elvis, the British Invasion, Dick Clark's American Bandstand, rock and roll, and it was all NEW to everyone. People created new sounds, they collaborated with other musicians, and it was an amazing time for everyone. The record companies printed money in the shape of round black vinyl discs, and hired people to shovel cash into their limousines.
And then it wasn't new any more. Music fashions appeared and disappeared, new bands came and went after sharing a one-hit-wonder with the world, and the mummified corpses of the 1960s and 1970s bands were propped up on stages around the world, with such unforgettable names as the "Steel Wheelchairs Tour" and "The Traveling Dingle-berries", hawking overpriced concert tickets to acid-brain-washed aging hippies who never really left the 1970s. And as time was unkind, they had to get out of their own limos to shovel the money in.
The system was already getting tired, and then along came digital music. As modern music entered a new age of suckage, perfect digital copies introduced the modern consumer to a new age of self-empowered selfishness. The double whammy has left the music industry where it is: barely able to afford Korbel Brut taps in their limousines instead of hot and cold running Dom Perignon. And nobody wants to drink Korbel after that.
I've just looked back at JCPenney's stock price, and there's no fluctuation or even a news mention about them getting Google-slapped for SEO gaming.
Why should the stock price change?
Apparently it means that SEO gaming does not rise to the level of "Corporate Evil" that would divert shoppers or stock traders.
Again, why would it? Did this incident have a measurable impact on the expected future revenue of the company?
Why would it change? Stockholders are jittery about things like news: good or bad, news articles can make stock prices move sharply. And having the biggest search engine in existence spank you seems like some bad news to me. So I looked, expecting to see some kind of a bump in their picture, but saw nothing of significance. I thought that a bit surprising.
If I were a stockholder in JCP, I'd be pissed off on news that their Google ranking on things like "draperies" dropped from from the first page to the seventh, especially since their "catalog" (now internet) business is an important revenue driver for them. That could mean much weaker first quarter sales, so this would be a good time to sell. But we don't know for sure, because we don't yet know what impact Google's page rank will have on them. And even simply that kind of uncertainty can alter investor behavior -- get out now before something bad happens.
No, Sony was great before they bought CBS records, a content producing company. They were happy selling us tape recorders, VCRs with timers, Walkmans and other home electronics. When I was a kid, Sony stuff was amazingly cool.
Once they bought CBS records and started producing stuff that people wanted to copy, it all changed. DAT recorders and mini-disc recorders had their Serial Content Management System and the infamous copy bit that prevented second-generation recordings on stock home recording decks. Sony became the driving force for evil DRM in consumer electronics, and by the mid 90s I stopped buying anything Sony. I still don't, and if someone's asking my recommendation on products at an electronics store (which happens often as I'm the 'family computer nerd') I steer them away from Sony. I don't care if they're buying a TV or a PC, I recommend against them, with the simple explanation of "I never buy Sony, their equipment prevents you from making copies of your own stuff."
Sony's evil is also the sole reason I early-adopted an HD-DVD system instead of BluRay. (Of course we all know how that choice worked out.) But in terms of evil, I still rank Sony higher than I do Microsoft.
I've just looked back at JCPenney's stock price, and there's no fluctuation or even a news mention about them getting Google-slapped for SEO gaming. They made it through the Christmas season selling tons of stuff, Google has slapped them down, yet there isn't even a bump. An analyst noted they had slightly weaker January sales and blamed it on "Lower inventory clearance coupled with bad weather".
Apparently it means that SEO gaming does not rise to the level of "Corporate Evil" that would divert shoppers or stock traders. I guess the public must just see it as "corporations advertising like normal."
Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain that Tolkien is not in fact a zombie?
Of course not. We all know he's a wight haunting a barrow, not a zombie.
Pirates of "Silicone Valley"? What's that? An I.T. themed porno?
Starring the guy who took his porn name from something in his mailbox and something in his yard. Bill Gate! That him!
I wouldn't call it "masterful." It was clumsy and heavy-handed. What I saw was over-the-top evil from both the "heroes" and the "villains" to the point where it put me off the movie completely. For it to be masterful, it would have to connect at least a tiny bit to humanity, kind of like the spot of humanity Silk Spectre was looking for from Dr. Manhattan. And I realize that you're saying "look how hard it is to be good", but there was simply no touchstone at all, even when the characters were actively groping for it in the dark. The government was evil (the presence of Nixon just made that all the more in-your-face), the romance between the Silk Spectre and Nite Owl was tainted, the evil plot wasn't foiled, there wasn't even a tiny pimple of redemption. You might claim that at least Rorschach stayed true, and thus never needed redeeming, yet he was murdered by the "heroes" as a result.
The movie was missing that key element, some tiny piece to hang your hope on, and it wasn't there. There wasn't even a fake piece of hope in the movie to tease us. No, the angry mob could have won the day, shredded the heroes, and I'd have been all the happier for it.
What was great about it was that for every setting, you were presented with a one-sided view of the world, in which your group is the heroes, and everybody else is a bunch of monsters, savages, or people who have been corrupted by power. Then you read the other books, and find out that you only saw a superficial view of that group, and that they had a good reason for their stance.
I like the way that the video game America's Army does it. When you join a game, you are always on the side of the Americans, wearing American uniforms and wielding American weapons. The other side is always seen as the OPFOR, dressed as hostiles and firing Russian or Chinese made gear. As an American squad, you have to assist and escort a local VIP to escape from a hospital about to be overrun by an assault force attempting to kill the VIP. Or as an American squad you have to prevent a known terrorist from fleeing a hospital where he is being assisted in his escape by militants.
The best part is that both sides are presented as equally valid positions with sound reasons for holding each, with no hint of irony that it's "good guys" on either side, depending on your point of view.
If you saw the Watchmen, you'd have seen that while they painted the protagonists with a dark brush, the criminals were far, far worse. So by that comparison, it was easy to see them as "more good than bad". But most were evil to some degree, all were amoral, none were likable, and by comparison to the daily life of the residents of the movie, they were all deserving of the contempt and scorn they had earned among the public. And to me they were all so distasteful that I found I didn't care about any of them, either. Nuke 'em, don't nuke 'em, just end the stupid movie already.
multiply the pirates up by a couple of orders of magnitude, close the suez, and remove any military in the area. Who's going to bother then?
We're talking about the unrealistic sci-fi concept of an effective blockade of a planet from space. A couple orders of magnitude will change nothing.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams.
The Somali pirates control an effective area of less than about 50 km each (maybe a 15km radius if they have radar, and much less if they don't) randomly patrolling an area of water about 1600 square km. Given that they are effective to a vertical range of perhaps 100 meters above the water (effective against ships 10m tall or less, and able to fire small arms at airplanes), a fully crewed Somali pirate ship "controls" a volume of about .005 cubic kilometers.
The geosynchronous orbital sphere surrounding Earth is a surface area of about 6 billion square kilometers, containing a volume of about 40 billion cubic kilometers. It would take about 300 trillion Somali pirate ships to achieve the same density of coverage in geosynchronous orbit around Earth, and many quadrillions if you wanted to have pirates "all the way down". Sure, we can imagine that a pirate space ship goes faster, has longer range weapons, and so has a bigger effective sphere of influence, but it won't change the math by enough orders of magnitude to make a practical difference. In order to have an effective blockade around a single planet, it would still take more than the entire food output of the planet just to feed all the blockaders required.
And the reavers weren't simply blockading the planet, they were "occupying" the space between planets! When the movie showed Serenity flying through them, it wasn't like a one-ship-per-blockade-volume, either. The reavers were flying in close formation, mere hundreds of meters apart. Given that a space ship in the Firefly 'verse can fly between planets in a period of days, there seems to be little reason to fly through any obstacle they could have easily flown around.
While the Flying Spaghetti Monster may approve of that many pirates, we'd probably all be happier if he'd focus more on the beer volcanoes.
Maybe it's like the flight paths between our major airports? Airplanes don't go wherever they want.
Oddly enough, smugglers often find flight paths counterproductive to the goal of remaining hidden. There'd be no reason Serenity would stay in a space equivalent of shipping lanes, and plenty of reasons for her not to.
"Blockades" around planets is still one of those sci-fi plot holes that always bugs me. Seriously, who could have enough hardware to surround an entire planet such that they can stop a wee little 100m ship from passing by at a speed difference of dozens of kilometers per second? Or worse, when the Reavers were occupying the space between planet Miranda and the other nearby colony? Seriously, there were enough reavers to blockade "space"? Their lasers might as well go "pew-pew" for all the realism in the blockade.
The WBC are definitely not loons. They're barrators with a money stream that looks like this:
1. Select a sign guaranteed to offend people in a 100% legal fashion, and chant carefully worded slogans trolling for a reaction.
2. Receive reaction in the form of ??? (a punch in the nose, or a city council bannination, either works)
3. File lawsuits and profit !!!
What anonymous seems to be failing to understand is that they're just a bunch of amateurs, while the WBC are *professional trolls*. They make their living by trolling. They will not be stopped by other trolls, as they are simply too disciplined to fall for a troll. It's like trying to con a con-artist.
Some of the other God Hates $(foo) groups may be loonies who believe the hateful crap they're defecating on the world, but do not count the WBC in that group. There is actually little chance the WBC believes their own crap. They just substitute the value for $(foo) that looks like it will offend the local crowds the most.