This is very cool. But it is only one component that I need alongside my Leatherman. When they can put my 21 inch monitor on my keychain, then I'll be impressed.
Heck, you can do that now. I'm not saying it won't be heavy, but you can do it.
And what happens when a non-FBI person gets ahold of this virus and uses it for, shall we say, more nefarious purposes? Can you release this thing into the wild and not expect someone to eventually find it, copy it, and modify it to be their own?
Wouldn't even something as simple as a telegraph fall under this definition? It is, after all, both "interactive" and "digital" (1's and 0's, dots and dashes). OK, I realize that they're not exactly in wide use anymore, but still, it points out stupid this law is.
The ordinance specifically and only prohibited sexual entertainment in certain zones. The
"entertainment" wasn't occurring there, but wherever the video is downloaded.
So here's an interesting thought: Does this mean that zoning laws would apply to you in your home in a zoned residential area if you wanted to view the content?
AIDS has no where near the impact of the bubonic plague, or malaria, or typhoid, or polio, or influenza, or tuberculosis, or any of a host of other diseases.
In the US, at least, the plague, malaria, typhoid, polio, influenza, and TB have very little impact. They're virtually unheard of. (OK, the last two less so, but they're still quite rare.) Now if you want to talk about historical impact of these diseases which have been around for most of human history compared to HIV which we discovered only about 20 years ago, well, the jury's still out on that one. Why don't we meet up again in a thousand years and discuss it?
Except for a few subsaharan countries where social structures guarantee high rates of infection (for EVERY STD by the way....), it has no where near the rates of infection,
Yeah, but it's hard to die from the clap.
it has no where near the rates of death, illness, incapacitation, and maiming of
The rate of death from AIDS is virtually 100%. Not so for ALL of the diseases you mentioned.
not all, but most) of the people being infected by AIDS can avoid those infections by changing their behavior
You're talking about regions of the world where often people do not acknowledge that HIV causes AIDS at all, let alone understand how it is spread. Why would they change their behavior?
So, while AIDS is a tragedy, and we should be doing many things that we aren't doing to help fight the spread of the
disease, to claim that the situation is on par with the most destructive epidemics of the past and present is pandering and
clearly ridiculous.
This very morning I heard one estimate that 1 in 2 Africans in this century may die from HIV/AIDS. How is that anything other than one of the most destructive epidemics in history? Even the plague didn't kill more than 1/3 of Europe's population.
FWIW, I find the definition of boulder to be quite interesting: "A large rounded mass of rock lying on the surface of the
ground or embedded in the soil". Why not just say "a large rounded mass of rock", and leave it at that?
SOS is based in Utah, and we have different legal and cultural norms here. The first amendment (ratified by the same
idiots who brought us the secon amendment) may prevail in the Federal courts, but that doesn't mean we enforce it to the
same extent in the state courts.
Fiddle, faddle. Unless the Civil War turned out significantly different than I remember from high school civics class, Utah is still part of the Union. As such, the US Constitution trumps the State Constitution and certainly any such "legal and cultural norms."
And even if we did, it'd be irrelevant here. The first amendment exists to protect political speech...
No, (IANAL) the 1st amendment protects all speech. Political speech is just held to a particularly high degree of protection. Plus, this site apparently was for discussions of the student government of a state instiution, so it was a form of political speech.
Dan, you need to learn to distinguish between personal discomfort and political outrage. The university is well within its
rights (and upholding its duty to instill good moral character within its students)
Yes, good moral character. When someone does or says something you don't like, don't respond to them in a civilized fashion. Instead, try to destroy their career.
...another inefficiency of the dead-tree based system.
Just a thought... What about archiving? I regularly need to look up articles that are 20+ years old. I love being able to download articles while sitting in my office, but old articles generally mean I have to schlep to the library and Xerox them myself. If we go to an entirely electronic distribution system, what's going to happen several decades down the road when direct neural interfaces;) replace PDFs? Some sort of massive conversion effort, I guess.
As I understand it, most scientific papers are submitted electronically in printable form (Tex, or formatted
word processor documents), and scientific journals do not need a lot of fancy formatting. For the rest --
that's the cost of your inefficient, dead-tree based process, not the intrinsic cost of publication.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, that's not quite true. It's easy to submit an article electronically in pdf/TeX/Word/WordPerfect/etc., but there is generally a lot of reformatting done to put the paper in the journal's preferred format for publication (two columns, single spaced). Also, think about the sheer number of symbols and foreign characters that a journal needs to have available. If nothing else, they need to be able to differentiate a hyphen from an em dash from an en dash! I've gotten proofs back that had clearly been gone over with a pen and fine-toothed comb, with every single non-alphanumeric circled and some sort of character code written next to it.
...cost of your inefficient, dead-tree based process, not the intrinsic cost of publication.
And I think there's another issue here. I don't know anyone that reads journal articles on his computer. They always get printed out and eventually stuck in a file somewhere. So, regardless of the efficiency of web publications, there's some cost-shifting going on here; if just to the individual's printer, rather than the publisher's printing press.
It seems that there are two mechanisms that are at work when discussing the 'Net, positive and negative. The negative mechanism (e.g. censorware) restricts access to information because it is considered undesirable / harmful / etc. The positive mechanism (e.g. personalized sites, Slashdot, etc.) emphasize certain information because it is useful. While they are similar in that they both limit the amount of information the user sees, the consequences are very different.
Slashdot is essentially a moderated discussion. The important key is that the moderators act in a responsible fashion, modding up posts that have value. And it is possible for an opinion to be valuable, even if you don't agree with it!
The sheer amount of data out there, irrespective of the signal/noise ratio is overwhelming; there needs to be some way of sifting through it all. That's why I generally read/. at +2, 300+ posts are just way too much for me to get through in any reasonable amount of time.
The problem with the negative mechanism is that it relies on an outside agency to make a judgment call about what information i can have. Thanks, but I want to be able to decide that information for myself. Once access to that information is gone, there isn't even any way to determine if the decision to restrict access was a valid one or not. Take for example, the fact that many censorware programs block access to sites that are critical of them.
Basically the point I'm trying to make, and that this guy seems to gloss over, is that there needs to be some way of sorting through all the chaff to get to the information that these 'citizens' need/can/want to absorb.
There was a case a while ago where there was a web page run my an anonymous member of the u.s. navy dedicated to gay sex.
Just to be pedantic, it wasn't a web page "dedicated to gay sex." In his AOL profile, under marital status, he said he was gay. That's it, nothing more.
A technology which doesn't really exist, is going to be manufactured with sufficient ease that it will replace probably the most ubiquitous, multipurpose, and versatile materials in our everyday lives? Right. Paper right now costs about $.004/ft^2. This e-paper is composed of little multicolored uniform spheres, a plastic layer, plus all the underlying circutry. Even if they can even build this stuff to the specifications they are promising (remember, right now it's low-res and stiff), I'm very skeptical that it will ever be manufactured to the point where it's cheap enough to replace paper. Maybe for certain, specialized applications, but completely replace books? I'm not holding my breath.
And God help us if it does. If e-books made from this e-paper replace regular books, how long do you think it will be before books are sold by subscription? That is, when you go the bookstore / e-book Web site, you're going to be licensing the "author's intellectual property" rather than buying the book. And I can't wait until they start building time limits into these books. "Sorry, your book license has expired. Press here to license it for another 60 days for the low, low price of $2.00"
So MS is trying to shift their company focus and go to a subscription-based paradigm, right? Not that I had a lot to begin with, but any faith I ever had in their.NET initiative has now floated out to sea...
I can just see it now:
"Sorry boss, but no one in the company can do any work because the MS servers we need to run Word 2006 are down."
Come on, if they can't even keep their website accessible, I'm supposed to trust them with my data/applications?
The DMA has an
opt-out list, which its members must abide by.
Wrong! The DMA's opt-out list (Mail Preference Service, MPS) is entirely optional. What's more, it costs companies money to subscribe to it! Essentially DMA is asking companies to pay extra money to shorten their list of potential customers.
For more info, see this link. They do say that this list is "made available" to companies, not that they are required to use it.
I remember reading an article mentioning that some companies have even used this list as a source of names and addresses to send mail to! Unfortunately, I'm unable to find the article.
It just comes down to where the power is assigned to, and I still don't see how the Palm could use as much
as a refrigerator.
What most people dont seem to realize is how much power the Internet needs. First, information-rich ore must be shipped from the East Coast and overseas to Silicon Valley. California has attempted using their own data mines, but apparently the filming of so many decades of saccharine romantic comedies in and around Hollywood has left the ore in the area light on information and rich on complex sugar compounds.
Once the ore reaches California, it must be refined electrolytically (much like aluminum) to yield information-grade data. This is an extremely energy-intensive process. One industry analyst estimates that it takes 4 megawatt-hours to refine one ton of raw ore to 4.2 MB of usable data. Mind you, this ratio is better for regions of the Internet that can use lower-grade data, like Usenet.
This yields data that is suitable for use on low-content sites like the Drudge report and NBCi. Sites that require very high levels of information content (like/.) generally require a second level of refining, using up even more power. California's strict pollution laws don't help matters, either. The waste material must be further processed, and usually winds up as the Weekly World News.
Maybe someone at Adobe reads/.?
I downloaded v1.1 of the Reader (the most recent non-beta version), and Alice, and got this. No mention of reading it out loud.
Did Adobe make changes, or is this only something that shows up with the beta versions?
Several posters have said that this French judge has ruled it is now illegal for French people even to view the auctions of Nazi memorabilia.
But the Court's ruling reads: (emphasis mine)
Order Yahoo! Inc. to take all measures
at their availability, to dissuade and render impossible all visitation on Yahoo.com to participate in the auction service of nazi objects...
Now, IANAL (and especially not a French one), but this reads to me that the judge is ordering Yahoo to take reasonable precautions against French citizens from actually taking part in these auctions. Surely viewing an auction based in the US, that would be illegal in France, is not considered participating in that auction, any more than witnessing a hold-up at a bank would make someone guilty of armed robbery.
Of course, this doesn't address the issue of whether or not it is appropriate for the French government to ban this sort of auction, but that's an entirely different question, and can only be answered by the French people themselves.
I believe in the Almighty God / Jesus model of creation. Why? Because believing in eternal life sure beats
the alternative. Becoming worm manure is not my ideal final resting place.
I'm not sure if responding to this is a good idea or not; I hope this doesn't turn into a religious flame war...
So you believe in God because otherwise, the universe would feel like a less welcoming place? Either some God(s) exists or not (with a few possibilities in between); your beliefs are irrelevant to that. Believe in an afterlife all you want, if there isn't one, you are stilll worm manure with the rest of us.
Science is belief according to available evidence. Faith is belief in the absence of evidence.
On the subject of God versus no causality, I'll support the existance of a God. My arguments are similar to
Rees' (the precise state of the constants of the universe necessary to support life are no coincidence),
although I don't believe all of his "arguments"
But you're making the massive assumption that the current state of these six constants is the one and only state that can support life. It's the other way around; life evolved such that it can live in a universe with these six constants. It's like when creationists say that life must have been created, because we are perfectly suited to our environment. If, say the Earth were slightly closer or farther from the Sun, we wouldn't exist because it would be too cold/hot. But they ignore the fact that maybe we would exist, just being adapted to a warmer/colder environment.
Similarly, maybe if the gravitational force were slightly weaker, sure matter might not have condensed to form planets or starts, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be some other form of life adapted to life in a sea of available hydrogen. (Or something else entirely.)
Just because these six constants are what makes the universe comfortable for US doesn't mean that life is impossible if it were any other way!
Technologically, this is easy. Setup a linux box as a NAT router with a transparent squid proxy. Do not
give the kid the root password for the router. (Do give the kid root on his own computer so he can learn).
Once in a while, scan the squid logs.
The kid can bypass this by using an external SSL proxy. If he does, he has won the arms race and is
obviously ready to take on some pr0n;)
I think you overestimate the technological savvy of the average parent. Heck, I'm not a computer illiterate and I don't really understand what you're talking about!
First of all, computers are expensive and buying a new one to act as a router and setting up a home network just to check if a teenager is getting to sites he shouldn't is unreasonable.
Would it really be that difficult to password-protect the Clear History function? Either through a plugin, 3rd party software, or just in the next version of the major browsers? Of course, steps would have to be taken so the file where the history data is stored isn't just plain deleted. Sure, it's not a perfect solution, (are there any?) but for 90% of parental monitoring, it should suffice.
It's the Direct Marketing Association, guy. They have some pretty stringent rules, and I believe that there are some laws that require direct marketers to follow the rules.
Actually, no. The DMA keeps a Mail Supression List and will put you name, address and phone number on it if you request. But its use by a direct mail company is completely optional. They are free to ignore it if they so choose. I think the DMA even charges for access to it. The DMA's purpose is not to act as a consumer advocate, but to prevent government regulation of direct mail. More information at: EcoFuture
With fuel cells, your car uses a chemical reaction to convert fuel (hydrogen, gasoline, or a number of other possibilites) into electricity.
But where do you get all this hydrogen? Generally from the electrolysis of water, which requires power, and therefore a power plant. By using an H2 fuel cell, all you've done is move the emissions to the power plant, not eliminated them. (This is not to say that one large power plant can't generate hydrogen more efficiently that a lot of little cars burn gasoline, with a net loss in emissions.)
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, you can do that now. I'm not saying it won't be heavy, but you can do it.
And what happens when a non-FBI person gets ahold of this virus and uses it for, shall we say, more nefarious purposes? Can you release this thing into the wild and not expect someone to eventually find it, copy it, and modify it to be their own?
Wouldn't even something as simple as a telegraph fall under this definition? It is, after all, both "interactive" and "digital" (1's and 0's, dots and dashes). OK, I realize that they're not exactly in wide use anymore, but still, it points out stupid this law is.
So here's an interesting thought: Does this mean that zoning laws would apply to you in your home in a zoned residential area if you wanted to view the content?
My apologies then. Sometimes it's hard to tell the humorous posts from the default Slashdot attitude that MS sucks. :-)
Just a thought... What about archiving? I regularly need to look up articles that are 20+ years old. I love being able to download articles while sitting in my office, but old articles generally mean I have to schlep to the library and Xerox them myself. If we go to an entirely electronic distribution system, what's going to happen several decades down the road when direct neural interfaces ;) replace PDFs? Some sort of massive conversion effort, I guess.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, that's not quite true. It's easy to submit an article electronically in pdf/TeX/Word/WordPerfect/etc., but there is generally a lot of reformatting done to put the paper in the journal's preferred format for publication (two columns, single spaced). Also, think about the sheer number of symbols and foreign characters that a journal needs to have available. If nothing else, they need to be able to differentiate a hyphen from an em dash from an en dash! I've gotten proofs back that had clearly been gone over with a pen and fine-toothed comb, with every single non-alphanumeric circled and some sort of character code written next to it.
And I think there's another issue here. I don't know anyone that reads journal articles on his computer. They always get printed out and eventually stuck in a file somewhere. So, regardless of the efficiency of web publications, there's some cost-shifting going on here; if just to the individual's printer, rather than the publisher's printing press.
Slashdot is essentially a moderated discussion. The important key is that the moderators act in a responsible fashion, modding up posts that have value. And it is possible for an opinion to be valuable, even if you don't agree with it!
The sheer amount of data out there, irrespective of the signal/noise ratio is overwhelming; there needs to be some way of sifting through it all. That's why I generally read /. at +2, 300+ posts are just way too much for me to get through in any reasonable amount of time.
The problem with the negative mechanism is that it relies on an outside agency to make a judgment call about what information i can have. Thanks, but I want to be able to decide that information for myself. Once access to that information is gone, there isn't even any way to determine if the decision to restrict access was a valid one or not. Take for example, the fact that many censorware programs block access to sites that are critical of them.
Basically the point I'm trying to make, and that this guy seems to gloss over, is that there needs to be some way of sorting through all the chaff to get to the information that these 'citizens' need/can/want to absorb.
Just my $0.02
And God help us if it does. If e-books made from this e-paper replace regular books, how long do you think it will be before books are sold by subscription? That is, when you go the bookstore / e-book Web site, you're going to be licensing the "author's intellectual property" rather than buying the book. And I can't wait until they start building time limits into these books. "Sorry, your book license has expired. Press here to license it for another 60 days for the low, low price of $2.00"
I can just see it now:
Come on, if they can't even keep their website accessible, I'm supposed to trust them with my data/applications?
Wrong! The DMA's opt-out list (Mail Preference Service, MPS) is entirely optional. What's more, it costs companies money to subscribe to it! Essentially DMA is asking companies to pay extra money to shorten their list of potential customers.
For more info, see this link. They do say that this list is "made available" to companies, not that they are required to use it.
I remember reading an article mentioning that some companies have even used this list as a source of names and addresses to send mail to! Unfortunately, I'm unable to find the article.
What most people dont seem to realize is how much power the Internet needs. First, information-rich ore must be shipped from the East Coast and overseas to Silicon Valley. California has attempted using their own data mines, but apparently the filming of so many decades of saccharine romantic comedies in and around Hollywood has left the ore in the area light on information and rich on complex sugar compounds.
Once the ore reaches California, it must be refined electrolytically (much like aluminum) to yield information-grade data. This is an extremely energy-intensive process. One industry analyst estimates that it takes 4 megawatt-hours to refine one ton of raw ore to 4.2 MB of usable data. Mind you, this ratio is better for regions of the Internet that can use lower-grade data, like Usenet.
This yields data that is suitable for use on low-content sites like the Drudge report and NBCi. Sites that require very high levels of information content (like /.) generally require a second level of refining, using up even more power. California's strict pollution laws don't help matters, either. The waste material must be further processed, and usually winds up as the Weekly World News.
Maybe someone at Adobe reads /.?
I downloaded v1.1 of the Reader (the most recent non-beta version), and Alice, and got this. No mention of reading it out loud.
Did Adobe make changes, or is this only something that shows up with the beta versions?