Right. And Nazi's were not to blame for exterminating the Jews. Some dudes that were Nazis were doing all the exterminating. Can't blame the Nazi's for that, can you?
If Russia prosecutes the people responsible, eh, maybe I'll buy that Putin's little fascist youth gang doesn't deserve to be maligned. Of course, seeing as how Nashi, err, people who happen to be a part of Nashi regularly meet in groups to perform various illegal acts with a wink and a nod from the state and don't get prosecuted, I am willing to put my money on no one suffering any consequences inside of Russia.
If Russia has the capacity to send out hit squads and kill every single anti-Russian flame, troll, or well reasoned point, the rest of the world should pretty much just surrender now and welcome our new Russian overlords.
In fact, most seem to think that the legal obligation to turn a profit trumps the legal obligation to follow the law (in nearly every circumstance, if the chance of getting caught * the fine it would have to pay
Nearly all companies follow the law to the letter. In the few rare instances where a company violates the law, it almost always a handful of humans at the top doing the violating unbeknown to the rest of the company. Companies are dumb amoral entities. They are more like computer programs than like people. They mindlessly pursue profit following all of the laws of the land. When companies fail to be moral, 99% of the time it is because laws governing them are not moral.
Why for instance will Yahoo hand over the names of dissidents to the Chinese government, but wont even conduct any business in Cuba? Is it Yahoo's pro China government bias? Hell no. Yahoo does it because the law in US is that you get smacked if you work with Cuba, but don't get smacked if you work with China. If the US had a clear law stating that you will be shut down if work with the law enforcement of nations of questionable moral judgment, Yahoo would stop operating in China to save their US business.
Corporations are mindless and efficient mechanisms of distributing and allocating resources. While not perfect, they do it better than all of the other methods that have been tried. Don't tie them down with laws, and they will start allocating without conciseness based upon the simple rules they follow. It is the responsibility of governments to enforce morality through law. Steve Jobs makes iPods. He isn't someone you want deciding morality. I want my elected government to do that.
You probably don't want the government setting the standard. Governments are notoriously bad at setting standards. That said, it doesn't mean that the government doesn't have a role in setting the standard.
The best thing governments can do is threaten to set a standard if industry doesn't do it themselves. Industry has an incentive to make crappy non-standard devices. By threatening to pick a standard if they don't pick one themselves, you get the best of both worlds. You get a universal standard and you get a good standard. You want device designers and engineers to pick the standard, not bureaucrats and academics.
Think of industry as lazy roommates who keep not buying toilet paper. Think of government as the guy who is threatening to wipe his ass with the roommates towel if they don't buy some toilet paper.
Standard setting is good in many cases, you just want to make sure that the right people set the standard. The government role in this should be prodding the right people in the ass to set a standard.
There is more than one sane city council. Somerville, the next town over from Cambridge, just recently passed a similar law. I believe that the Somerville version halted the camera instillation, killed plans to put up more, and put them under review as to if they want to keep few that are already up.
Companies are dumb amoral entities that don't make laws. They follow them. The vast majority of the companies in the world follow the letter of the law. They don't sit around deciding what laws to violate and what to follow. Even if they wanted to start violating the laws of other nations on moral grounds, how would they decide which to follow and which to violate?
It is the responsibility of nations to set the laws that corporations follow. Set "moral" laws and corporations are for the most part moral. In this case, the burden is on Britain, and by extension of Britain having a representative government, Britain's people, to determine how the corporation should morally act. If the British are upset at the law abiding behavior of their corporations, they need to change their laws. They could easily ban companies that do business in Britain from operating in Egypt. That would have prevented this entire ordeal.
Of course, it is a lot easier to angrily demand act as anything other than the dumb deterministic legal devices that they are than it is to demand that your own government impose morality on its legal entities. It certainly isn't unprecedented for companies to be legislated into moral behavior. A company that operates in the US (and I assume EU has something similar) is required by law to not give or accept bribes anywhere in the world. If you are caught giving a bribe in Thailand you can be smacked in California. This almost certainly keeps some companies form setting up operations in some nations. You could do the same thing for human rights, you just have to accept the economic consequences of shutting out over half of the world from your economy.
Out of curiosity, what is the great challenge in producing an artificial heart? It would seem to me that sloshing some blood around to a regular rhythm in something blandly neutral to your body would be among the easiest of challenges.
At 40,000 feet you are less than 8 miles away from the ground which is well in range of a cell phone tower. What limits most cell phone towers is obstructions to line of sight. The biggest reason why cell phones are not allowed on airplanes is that 1) they are fucking annoying and 2) it makes a mess of the cell phone companies because TOO MANY cell phone tower can see a single phone and they have to pass off the signal quickly as the airplane blasts on. They work just fine. For shits and giggles, try using one in an airplane bathroom some time.
Jesus, you don't even need to be a crazy conspiracy nut... just try turning a fucking phone on in an airplane and see that you can take the tinfoil hat off.
I did the same. It is different though when you slam into the ending full stop and have to back out know the game is "done". If they are going to settle for a bad story, the least they could have done was spread it around. Of course, another issue is that the level cap makes exploration far less rewarding. When you are sitting there with all the weapons, level capped off, and more money than you can spend, the only thing left to explore are the sights and sounds. While Fallout 3 has a lot of fun little niches, it also has a lot of places where it looks like they were going to add something and yanked it half out and half done. The entire northern section of the map is filled with areas where 'something' is happening, but you can murder everyone there (you never get an option to talk) and not find a single document explaining WTF is going on.
Fallout 3 is a good game for what it is, I just hope that they take some lessons from it... and for the love of god, I hope that they hire someone who can write next time. The fact that that Fallout world is awesome an interesting saved this game from its wafer thin poorly written plot.
The problem with Fallout 3's ending was that it was short and stupid.
Close your eyes if you don't want to read a spoilers
The first bit of stupidity is how you die (if you go in). Recognizing that I was about to jump into some heavy duty radiation I dutifully jumped into my rad suit, popped some radaway and rad X, and pumped up on rad resistance. I walked in and watched the old Geiger counter slowly tick up. Awesome. I can stick around here for a good 5 min before anything really bad happens... I hit the button... and the game tells me that I am dead.
WTF.
The other problem is that the story is surprisingly short and narrow. Fallout 3 isn't as "big" as Fallout 1 or 2, but that is ok. The problem is that the story makes it artificially short. In the original Fallout games, the story would lead you to most major locals. You could explore on your own, but you could trust the story to lead you to the highlights. You didn't have to stick around and do all that there was to do, but you knew it was there. In Fallout 3 no such thing happened. The story basically takes you to two towns and a couple of glorified dungeons. If you follow the story you miss out on a massive hunk of content.
The story never gives you much of a chance to breathe and enjoy the world. In the original Fallouts, getting dumped into a town clueless was a pretty common occurrence. You often took breaks from the story because you had to. In Fallout 3, the story is "urgent" and you feel compelled keep up with it. If you do this, you will burn through the thin and shallow story quickly.
Finally, the story sucked. The world wasn't half bad. I personally thought that it felt "emptier" (and not in a good way) than the originals. Characters said less, the world was less complex, the factions more dull, the personalities more transparent, etc. Other than being pretty, the world was shallow. The story made it worse. The story was extremely shallow. You get a taste of what it might be in the opening scenes... but it falls flat on its face.
It is probably unfair to compare, but I know that my response to "winning" the original Fallout was profound. To this day, I still have an emotional response to the song they play as you walk away from the vault with Dogmeat. I can safely say that Fallout was the first game where the ending made me really feel anything and swallow hard a few times. The ending to Fallout 3? Eh. I was annoyed that the game declared me dead despite being basically invulnerable to radiation and annoyed that the game ended with me seeing only a fraction of the world.
I am not trashing on Fallout 3... it is great for what it is. I had a good time and I am glad I played, it is just that Fallout 3 is no Fallout.
I personally was kind of disheartened by TF2. I know I got more millage out of TF than any other game. There were just so many delightful things about it... so many wonderful strategies. Do you recall the joys of the emp grenade? God, I loved that thing.
TF2 has its virtues. It is certainly better balanced than the original in terms of classes, but it achieved that balance by dumbing the game down immensely. The levels are a lot more linear and narrow, and in general they have just stripped out a lot of interesting game play options in favor of balance. Personally, I miss the old TF.
I work for a company that makes chips. They hate using ugly chemicals as much as anyone. Reduction of toxic chemicals is a constant goal. People don't realize the pain that goes into using toxic chemicals. Not only do you have to transport the stuff and pay out the ass for it, but you then need to put in place special protocols for dealing with it.
Finally, you need to be able to dispose of whatever you make. If a company makes chips for a cell phone, you better damn well believe that they also know how to dispose of said chip. You, as a consumer, can just toss your entire cell phone into a trash can and forget about it with little fear of punishment. A company on the other hand will get fined up the ass if they decide to toss a chip out into the normal trash.
So, my point is that it isn't like companies are blind to the pain of dealing with toxic chemicals. They have a very strong incentive to use less toxic chemicals.
The problem is that they can't, especially when you are talking about the cutting edge. There is exactly one way to make a 40 nm chip. It isn't like companies just stamp these things out. They are so close to the edge of failure that you can't even begin to contemplate the day to day struggles that they go through. To make matters worse, they are in one of the most cut throat cost cutting industries in existence.
The only way you could ever make "green" chips would be to close off large markets against toxic chemicals (say the EU and the US), and fully accept that:
1) Your domestic microelectronic industry is going to get slaughtered in the world market.
2) You are going to drop 20 years in terms of technology. Your cell phone is going to look like one of those bricks they walked around in the 80's and you forget about using a modern microprocessor.
Green stuff is nice, but when it comes to electronics it just isn't going to happen in the near future. The field is so cut throat and the downward pressures on prices and the upwards pressures on performance are so high that it would take a radical redefinition of our values as a society to make our e-waste "green".
My advice? Work on better waste disposal and try and make the world a less sucky place such that people don't choose to sit around cannibalizing toxic parts as an alternative to whatever else they could be doing.
Yeah, the one that kicked over two successive governments in under a month while making a decent attempt at refraining from using even a fraction of its power to keep down civilian casualties. Yeah, that same one could pretty easily wipe out all other enemies attempting to invade friendly territory. Bonus points if they are given the thumbs up to pop off nukes and start glassing pieces of the earth's surface.
The US army's ability to crush opposing military forces is unquestionable and unmatched. Iraq had the fourth largest military in the world. The US went half way around the world and wiped it out. During the second Iraq war the Iraqi military didn't even get around to surrendering. They were so devastated by the US attack that instead of surrendering, it simply evaporated... and that was the US military showing restraint and worrying over things like civilian casualties.
Now, imagine a fight for the homeland, on friendly territory, and with supply lines that don't stretch across the globe. The idea that anyone could invade the US, even if it was utterly devastated, is absurd.
If you want to beat the US, fight an unconventional war, blow up civilian, hide among friendly civilians, and whatever you do, do not put on a uniform. Do this, and wait it out until the US populace gets board and leaves after a trivial number of casualties. The US has lots more people in a single day of fighting during World War II than in the entire Afghanistan conflict. The US has lots more people on a one square mile hunk of rock in the Pacific than both the Iraq wars and Afghanistan war's put together. The US didn't get beaten, it got board and the electorate declared it was tired of spending money building neo-con dreams... and even then, the US is going to leave Iraq with a quasi functional government that is not exactly great but (pardon the expression) good enough for government work.
If on the other hand you want to get the piss beat out of you, put on a uniform, try a stand up fight against the US army, and then for a real good laugh try fighting amongst heavily armed civilian population of the US and see how that works out for you.
Pointing out that Americans get bored with insurgent wars after trivial losses in hostile shit hole nations that they don't care about and nagging their politicians to say "fuck it, I'm out" and extrapolating that to mean that trying a stand up fight to occupy the US homeland is a winning proposition takes a pretty impressive leap of self delusion.
If the US is so utterly wiped out that its military can't stomp the piss out of anyone who is looking to attack, the world is over and everyone has bigger problem. A huge fraction of the US military isn't even in the US. Further, much of the US's military is still tooled up to survive a nuclear holocaust. Even if all the nuclear silos were wiped out (they wouldn't be), the nuclear subs would be utterly fine and happy to glass large sections of the Earth's surface to dissuade the apparently suicidal masses that want to enter a disaster zone so utterly inhospitable that the US can't prevent them.
As far as a break down in command and control goes, the US military would not break down. It is at once one of the most loyal armies in the world and at the same time has one of the most flexible command structures that allows isolated units to operate effectively without command. Even if the entire civilian government was wiped out in the US (which is absurd... most people would successfully be evacuated) that would leave tens of thousands of embassy employs and hundreds of thousands civilians who were not in the US at one time or another.
You have been watching too many end of the world movies. You could make every single person in the US drop dead and every single machine in the US stop functioning... and the US would still have more than enough military power and allies sitting around to make short work of suicidal armies looking to take over a wasteland. If the 300,000 or so soldiers stationed off of US soil couldn't do it and NATO decided that it wasn't going to live up to its treaty obligations, that would still leave a few hundred nuclear missiles to give a convincing no argument.
You could dump a few feet of ash onto Boston and Boston would be okay. They would get the snow plows out, everyone would grumble about the fucking weather, you might have to wear a simple filter mask, and life in the northeast would carry on with perhaps a little more northeastern "cheer" than normal. Moving shit that falls from the sky somewhere else is not that hard and the equipment to do it is already readily available.
As far as the environmental effects go, they are vastly overrated. The real danger of ash at any distance is not the gasses. It is the fact that you are breathing with is basically fine glass particles. Thankfully, humans are pretty resourceful and will just toss a simple filter mask on. The effect on the environment is even more trivial. Sure, you might have one shitty year of crops, but after that? Get ready for a bumper harvest like you can't imagine. After a few rain storms that volcanic ash gets neutralized and becomes excellent fertilizer. In fact, most of the world's fertility actually comes from volcanic ash.
There are only two things that make an eruption like that suck. First, you really don't want to be in the blast radius. A good sizable hunk of land in the middle of the US would be useless for a year or two. If it happened with little warning, a lot, but not a truly significant number of Americans might die. Second, dropping global temperatures would also be unpleasant. For the US though, it would be livable. It would suck, but it would be livable. The US has on hand a massive supply of food and can merrily feed its population even if no one else wants to for a significant amount of time. It might be bland, but you would live.
Give modern humans some credit. They don't take kindly to being exterminated and will expend a lot of energy and technological know how to avoid it. Nothing short of massive celestial event is going to wipe out humans any time soon.
u is so smart. u saw rite thruh there evil skem to carg u money on ur credit card with out asking.
Right.
There are plenty of people not worth tossing your credit card number too for a free activation. Doing it for a Russia snuff porn site? Eh, probably a poor idea. Doing to a multinational company running a handful of other MMORPGs? Probably not all that risky. If they do decide in a blatant act of malevolent glee to empty your bank account like some Nigerian scam, I am pretty sure that the law kicks in.
Like I said, buying CDs or paying per pop might work great for you. For me, it is close to worthless. I don't want to collect music like they are stamps to be appreciated for all time. I want it so that when I want a song, or I want to explore a genera, it is simply there.
A great example of this is the other day I heard a great 50's blues song. It rekindled my interest in the genera, so I went out and merrily downloaded about 15 albums from various artists, tossed it into a play list, and hit the shuffle button. Some of it I liked, some of it I didn't. I deleted the stuff I didn't like and downloaded everything ever made by artists that I did like. All said and done, that exercise would have cost me a few hundred dollars if I had bought each song individually online or (worse) bought it as CDs. That, and I would have a pile of crap that I don't like. Instead, it cost me a boring old $15, which is an utterly trivial cost.
If you are an indie kid who hangs out with other indie kids and listens to nothing but indie music, buying CDs makes sense. If collecting stuff gets you off, buying CDs or MP3's makes sense. If on the other hand your taste in music expands into things that your friends are not interested in, is diverse, or you simply consume a lot of music, and collecting things doesn't give you a woody, renting access to every single song ever made for a measly $15 a month is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Like I said, it isn't for everyone. For someone like me though, DRM making it possible to rent access to nearly every single song ever recorded for a trivial cost is frigging awesome.
If I want to support a band, assuming they still exist and are not long since buried in the ground, I'll buy a t-shirt or something.
Personally, I don't find DRM evil when it adds value. SecureRom doesn't add anything. It just cripples something that you bought for free. Steam on the other hand actually adds value. It is easy to buy stuff, quick to get it, your games don't get lost, and when you get a new computer you simply fire up Steam and can quickly reinstall all of your games. Steam's DRM stays out of my way and gives me something I want.
Rhapsody is another great example. Rhapsody's DRM is used such that I can download basically any song in existence on a whim. If the song sucks, I just discard it without a second though. I download a few hundred dollars worth of music on a whim. The DRM again actually adds something of value to me. Sure, I don't "own" the music, but I don't want to. I want to rent it. If collecting is your thing, you should just go buy a CD. If downloading everything ever made by some random band on a whim is your thing, the all you can eat buffet works great.
DRM has the potential to open up new business models, as seen in Rhapsody and Steam. When it is used for that purpose, I am happy with it. When it is used to simply cripple things, as was the case with Spore, or the old iTunes DRM, it pisses me off.
The fact that you can't resell it might matter it someone, put it doesn't to me. I can count on one hand the number of times I have sold my computer games... zero.
Even if you sold every single computer game it just means you are giving yourself a $10 discount in the future. Whoop-de-fucking-do. Personally, I find the fact that I can never lose a video game again to be vastly more useful than the fact that I can't pawn it off.
I am an adult with a job and a pile of disposable income. I like the idea of the Wii, but find the games to be mostly insipid and uninspiring. Cartoons are cute and all, but I like blood, gore, and adult themes. It is about damn time someone took the Wii, which has a very novel interface, and made a game for people who are over 18 and under 60.
If you don't want your kids playing violent video games, be a fucking parent and prevent them. The rest of the grown ups don't want to suffer because someone else is too lazy to be parent.
The Wii has a very novel controller. It is screaming for some awesome games that are more than glorified cartoons. I'll happily take shittier graphics if it means novel gameplay. Graphics are cute and all, but gameplay is what I crave. The Wii has a massive opportunity to introduce some very novel gameplay. We just need some developers to grow a pair and combine a novel controller with a real game.
I am pretty damn sure that the Americans are not in the position of Chief Joseph. American losses are paltry and trivial. Vastly more Americans die each day in automobile accidents than in Iraq. As an American, you probably are as likely to drowned to death by accident as you are to be killed in Iraq. Granted, that is no consolation to the relatives of the dead, but to play it up like the Americans are wading around in their own blood is silly. Americans have lost more people fighting for worthless mile wide hunks of rock in the Pacific during World War II than they have spent over the course of both Iraq wars.
As for why not just "end it", that certainly is a possibility. I personally don't know if Iraq is unwinnable or not. Anyone who claims to know for sure that the US has run into a Kobayashi Maru scenario with a Kirk is either A) full of shit B) extraordinarily well informed and possess super human abilities of analytical capability C) a super secret NSA AI that has become self aware.
Speaking out of my own ass for a moment, I think that the Americans are probably on the path to righting their mistake the best they can (minus a few tens of thousands of dead Iraq's and a pile of money of course). The violence levels in Iraq have dropped and the central government is slowly taking control of the nation. I don't think that there is a shinny post War War II Japan or Germany style government at the end of this like what the neo-cons had wet dreams about, but I would bet that there could be something vaguely stable with vague democratic tendencies at the end of the road. I imagine that if things keep going the way they are going Iraq and Americans don't lose their nerve it is going to end up looking like Korea after the Korean war. That is to say that it won't be a shinny democracy, but instead be something that is vaguely stable for now that has the potential to eventually get its shit together a couple of decades down the road.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Iraq just needs to purge a few percentage points off its population in a good old fashion ethnic genocide. That sure would make things a whole lot easier on the Americans, eh? Genocides are not pretty, but they sure are cheaper then a hundred thousand soldiers standing guard.
I am pretty sure that the definition of "winning" goes far beyond the US just leaving, even for the Iraqis. I am fairly sure that if the US leaves and Iraq descends into a Rwanda style genocide, they will not call that winning, even though American troops are gone.
The war was stupid to jump into in the first place. I thought it was dumb from day one. Unfortunately, you can't unpull a trigger. The US fired, it killed the government, unleashed the openings to an ethnic genocide, and made Iraq their problem. Now they have to fix it. If the cost of fixing Iraq is a few more billion dollars and some dead Americans, that is the price the Americans have to pay.
Everyone wants the "war" to be over with. The problem is that if the Americans leave, it doesn't suddenly make the war over. It makes it over for the Americans, but it doesn't mean it is over for Iraq. Now that the Americans have broken Iraq, the balancing act for the Americans at this point is to get the fuck out as fast as humanly possible without leaving behind a genocide.
The average Iraqi and the US have the same goal at this point. Get the hell out without as little blood as possible. The US wants to go as badly as the Iraqis want them out. The problem is that the players in this game are not just the Americans and the average Iraqi. You also have new Shiite majority leaders still smarting from Sunni brutality under Saddam, nostalgic Sunnis, independence seeking Kurds, Turks, Iran, and Al-qaeda that all have an interest (to greater and lesser extents) in making Iraq a blood bath.
The sad truth is that the US right now is the biggest and meanest on the block in Iraq, and they are what is keeping the conflicting parties from drowning each other in an orgy of blood. At some point, Iraq's central government will be competent and neutral enough to take over the roll of biggest bad ass with a gun and the US can slip out the back. Assuming genocide is not your goal, the question you need to ask yourself is, when will the central government have enough power to keep everyone from killing each other, AND will the central government be able to resist from whacking one group or another?
We can argue until we are blue in the face if or when the time will come when Iraq's central government is strong enough and neutral enough. The simple fact of the matter is that we don't have a frigging clue. Smarter men and women with better knowledge and more information don't know the answer.
Personally, I think the best plan for the Americans is to draw down and pretend like they mean it. If wheels start to fall off, pause, take a breather, then try again. You want to push the Iraqi government to grow a pair and go into the deep end, and you want them to try like their life depends upon it, but if they actually start to drown you want to be there to drag their ass out.
Personally, I think it is a good lesson for the Americans. Next time they try this sort of stupid stunt they will hopefully go in with eyes wide open as to the true cost of kicking over a government and taking responsibility for a nation. Hopefully they will make sure the war is worth the price they are going to pay and reserve toppling governments for when there is truly no other solution.
First, it wasn't password guessing. He exploited Yahoo's password recovery system to get it to reset her password. He basically used public information to pose as Palin and convince Yahoo's password recovery system that he needed the password reset. Exploiting such a weakness in the system is, by any standards, "hacking".
Second, after he got in, he than went through all of her e-mail. Breaking into a system, even if it had been a password guess, and then going through its contents is again, by any standard standard, hacking.
I loath Palin, but this guy is going to get what he has coming. Even shitty and crazy humans who think the world is a few thousand years old and much to my horror might be president one day, get legal protection. It isn't like the police can go, "Yeah, he hacked in, but Palin kinda sucks, so I think we will let this one slide".
String theory is a theory because it fits the evidence. You can use a string theory model and get the universe. On the other hand, declaring that the world started 6000 years ago and that everyone descends from two people 6000 years ago is pretty violently rejected by every scrap of evidence we have from multiple fields.
Further, String Theory isn't taught in schools because at this point it is a mathematics parlor trick. People study it and try and devise ways to test it, but you will never see anyone trying to teach it in a science class room.
As to the "well everyone has a creation story", so what? Everyone civilization also put earth at the center of the universe and was pretty convinced that lightening was mystical. This doesn't mean that we should teach that lightening might be magic and that Earth might really be the center of the universe. The fact that humans like to find a reason for existence is far more interesting to an evolutionary biologist who might be able to explain why we have this urge without invoking "magic" as an explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. And Nazi's were not to blame for exterminating the Jews. Some dudes that were Nazis were doing all the exterminating. Can't blame the Nazi's for that, can you?
If Russia prosecutes the people responsible, eh, maybe I'll buy that Putin's little fascist youth gang doesn't deserve to be maligned. Of course, seeing as how Nashi, err, people who happen to be a part of Nashi regularly meet in groups to perform various illegal acts with a wink and a nod from the state and don't get prosecuted, I am willing to put my money on no one suffering any consequences inside of Russia.
I am pretty sure you are just a coward.
If Russia has the capacity to send out hit squads and kill every single anti-Russian flame, troll, or well reasoned point, the rest of the world should pretty much just surrender now and welcome our new Russian overlords.
In fact, most seem to think that the legal obligation to turn a profit trumps the legal obligation to follow the law (in nearly every circumstance, if the chance of getting caught * the fine it would have to pay
Nearly all companies follow the law to the letter. In the few rare instances where a company violates the law, it almost always a handful of humans at the top doing the violating unbeknown to the rest of the company. Companies are dumb amoral entities. They are more like computer programs than like people. They mindlessly pursue profit following all of the laws of the land. When companies fail to be moral, 99% of the time it is because laws governing them are not moral.
Why for instance will Yahoo hand over the names of dissidents to the Chinese government, but wont even conduct any business in Cuba? Is it Yahoo's pro China government bias? Hell no. Yahoo does it because the law in US is that you get smacked if you work with Cuba, but don't get smacked if you work with China. If the US had a clear law stating that you will be shut down if work with the law enforcement of nations of questionable moral judgment, Yahoo would stop operating in China to save their US business.
Corporations are mindless and efficient mechanisms of distributing and allocating resources. While not perfect, they do it better than all of the other methods that have been tried. Don't tie them down with laws, and they will start allocating without conciseness based upon the simple rules they follow. It is the responsibility of governments to enforce morality through law. Steve Jobs makes iPods. He isn't someone you want deciding morality. I want my elected government to do that.
You probably don't want the government setting the standard. Governments are notoriously bad at setting standards. That said, it doesn't mean that the government doesn't have a role in setting the standard.
The best thing governments can do is threaten to set a standard if industry doesn't do it themselves. Industry has an incentive to make crappy non-standard devices. By threatening to pick a standard if they don't pick one themselves, you get the best of both worlds. You get a universal standard and you get a good standard. You want device designers and engineers to pick the standard, not bureaucrats and academics.
Think of industry as lazy roommates who keep not buying toilet paper. Think of government as the guy who is threatening to wipe his ass with the roommates towel if they don't buy some toilet paper.
Standard setting is good in many cases, you just want to make sure that the right people set the standard. The government role in this should be prodding the right people in the ass to set a standard.
There is more than one sane city council. Somerville, the next town over from Cambridge, just recently passed a similar law. I believe that the Somerville version halted the camera instillation, killed plans to put up more, and put them under review as to if they want to keep few that are already up.
Companies are dumb amoral entities that don't make laws. They follow them. The vast majority of the companies in the world follow the letter of the law. They don't sit around deciding what laws to violate and what to follow. Even if they wanted to start violating the laws of other nations on moral grounds, how would they decide which to follow and which to violate?
It is the responsibility of nations to set the laws that corporations follow. Set "moral" laws and corporations are for the most part moral. In this case, the burden is on Britain, and by extension of Britain having a representative government, Britain's people, to determine how the corporation should morally act. If the British are upset at the law abiding behavior of their corporations, they need to change their laws. They could easily ban companies that do business in Britain from operating in Egypt. That would have prevented this entire ordeal.
Of course, it is a lot easier to angrily demand act as anything other than the dumb deterministic legal devices that they are than it is to demand that your own government impose morality on its legal entities. It certainly isn't unprecedented for companies to be legislated into moral behavior. A company that operates in the US (and I assume EU has something similar) is required by law to not give or accept bribes anywhere in the world. If you are caught giving a bribe in Thailand you can be smacked in California. This almost certainly keeps some companies form setting up operations in some nations. You could do the same thing for human rights, you just have to accept the economic consequences of shutting out over half of the world from your economy.
Out of curiosity, what is the great challenge in producing an artificial heart? It would seem to me that sloshing some blood around to a regular rhythm in something blandly neutral to your body would be among the easiest of challenges.
You are a moron.
At 40,000 feet you are less than 8 miles away from the ground which is well in range of a cell phone tower. What limits most cell phone towers is obstructions to line of sight. The biggest reason why cell phones are not allowed on airplanes is that 1) they are fucking annoying and 2) it makes a mess of the cell phone companies because TOO MANY cell phone tower can see a single phone and they have to pass off the signal quickly as the airplane blasts on. They work just fine. For shits and giggles, try using one in an airplane bathroom some time.
Jesus, you don't even need to be a crazy conspiracy nut... just try turning a fucking phone on in an airplane and see that you can take the tinfoil hat off.
I did the same. It is different though when you slam into the ending full stop and have to back out know the game is "done". If they are going to settle for a bad story, the least they could have done was spread it around. Of course, another issue is that the level cap makes exploration far less rewarding. When you are sitting there with all the weapons, level capped off, and more money than you can spend, the only thing left to explore are the sights and sounds. While Fallout 3 has a lot of fun little niches, it also has a lot of places where it looks like they were going to add something and yanked it half out and half done. The entire northern section of the map is filled with areas where 'something' is happening, but you can murder everyone there (you never get an option to talk) and not find a single document explaining WTF is going on.
Fallout 3 is a good game for what it is, I just hope that they take some lessons from it... and for the love of god, I hope that they hire someone who can write next time. The fact that that Fallout world is awesome an interesting saved this game from its wafer thin poorly written plot.
The problem with Fallout 3's ending was that it was short and stupid.
Close your eyes if you don't want to read a spoilers
The first bit of stupidity is how you die (if you go in). Recognizing that I was about to jump into some heavy duty radiation I dutifully jumped into my rad suit, popped some radaway and rad X, and pumped up on rad resistance. I walked in and watched the old Geiger counter slowly tick up. Awesome. I can stick around here for a good 5 min before anything really bad happens... I hit the button... and the game tells me that I am dead.
WTF.
The other problem is that the story is surprisingly short and narrow. Fallout 3 isn't as "big" as Fallout 1 or 2, but that is ok. The problem is that the story makes it artificially short. In the original Fallout games, the story would lead you to most major locals. You could explore on your own, but you could trust the story to lead you to the highlights. You didn't have to stick around and do all that there was to do, but you knew it was there. In Fallout 3 no such thing happened. The story basically takes you to two towns and a couple of glorified dungeons. If you follow the story you miss out on a massive hunk of content.
The story never gives you much of a chance to breathe and enjoy the world. In the original Fallouts, getting dumped into a town clueless was a pretty common occurrence. You often took breaks from the story because you had to. In Fallout 3, the story is "urgent" and you feel compelled keep up with it. If you do this, you will burn through the thin and shallow story quickly.
Finally, the story sucked. The world wasn't half bad. I personally thought that it felt "emptier" (and not in a good way) than the originals. Characters said less, the world was less complex, the factions more dull, the personalities more transparent, etc. Other than being pretty, the world was shallow. The story made it worse. The story was extremely shallow. You get a taste of what it might be in the opening scenes... but it falls flat on its face.
It is probably unfair to compare, but I know that my response to "winning" the original Fallout was profound. To this day, I still have an emotional response to the song they play as you walk away from the vault with Dogmeat. I can safely say that Fallout was the first game where the ending made me really feel anything and swallow hard a few times. The ending to Fallout 3? Eh. I was annoyed that the game declared me dead despite being basically invulnerable to radiation and annoyed that the game ended with me seeing only a fraction of the world.
I am not trashing on Fallout 3... it is great for what it is. I had a good time and I am glad I played, it is just that Fallout 3 is no Fallout.
I personally was kind of disheartened by TF2. I know I got more millage out of TF than any other game. There were just so many delightful things about it... so many wonderful strategies. Do you recall the joys of the emp grenade? God, I loved that thing.
TF2 has its virtues. It is certainly better balanced than the original in terms of classes, but it achieved that balance by dumbing the game down immensely. The levels are a lot more linear and narrow, and in general they have just stripped out a lot of interesting game play options in favor of balance. Personally, I miss the old TF.
I work for a company that makes chips. They hate using ugly chemicals as much as anyone. Reduction of toxic chemicals is a constant goal. People don't realize the pain that goes into using toxic chemicals. Not only do you have to transport the stuff and pay out the ass for it, but you then need to put in place special protocols for dealing with it.
Finally, you need to be able to dispose of whatever you make. If a company makes chips for a cell phone, you better damn well believe that they also know how to dispose of said chip. You, as a consumer, can just toss your entire cell phone into a trash can and forget about it with little fear of punishment. A company on the other hand will get fined up the ass if they decide to toss a chip out into the normal trash.
So, my point is that it isn't like companies are blind to the pain of dealing with toxic chemicals. They have a very strong incentive to use less toxic chemicals.
The problem is that they can't, especially when you are talking about the cutting edge. There is exactly one way to make a 40 nm chip. It isn't like companies just stamp these things out. They are so close to the edge of failure that you can't even begin to contemplate the day to day struggles that they go through. To make matters worse, they are in one of the most cut throat cost cutting industries in existence.
The only way you could ever make "green" chips would be to close off large markets against toxic chemicals (say the EU and the US), and fully accept that:
1) Your domestic microelectronic industry is going to get slaughtered in the world market.
2) You are going to drop 20 years in terms of technology. Your cell phone is going to look like one of those bricks they walked around in the 80's and you forget about using a modern microprocessor.
Green stuff is nice, but when it comes to electronics it just isn't going to happen in the near future. The field is so cut throat and the downward pressures on prices and the upwards pressures on performance are so high that it would take a radical redefinition of our values as a society to make our e-waste "green".
My advice? Work on better waste disposal and try and make the world a less sucky place such that people don't choose to sit around cannibalizing toxic parts as an alternative to whatever else they could be doing.
Yeah, the one that kicked over two successive governments in under a month while making a decent attempt at refraining from using even a fraction of its power to keep down civilian casualties. Yeah, that same one could pretty easily wipe out all other enemies attempting to invade friendly territory. Bonus points if they are given the thumbs up to pop off nukes and start glassing pieces of the earth's surface.
The US army's ability to crush opposing military forces is unquestionable and unmatched. Iraq had the fourth largest military in the world. The US went half way around the world and wiped it out. During the second Iraq war the Iraqi military didn't even get around to surrendering. They were so devastated by the US attack that instead of surrendering, it simply evaporated... and that was the US military showing restraint and worrying over things like civilian casualties.
Now, imagine a fight for the homeland, on friendly territory, and with supply lines that don't stretch across the globe. The idea that anyone could invade the US, even if it was utterly devastated, is absurd.
If you want to beat the US, fight an unconventional war, blow up civilian, hide among friendly civilians, and whatever you do, do not put on a uniform. Do this, and wait it out until the US populace gets board and leaves after a trivial number of casualties. The US has lots more people in a single day of fighting during World War II than in the entire Afghanistan conflict. The US has lots more people on a one square mile hunk of rock in the Pacific than both the Iraq wars and Afghanistan war's put together. The US didn't get beaten, it got board and the electorate declared it was tired of spending money building neo-con dreams... and even then, the US is going to leave Iraq with a quasi functional government that is not exactly great but (pardon the expression) good enough for government work.
If on the other hand you want to get the piss beat out of you, put on a uniform, try a stand up fight against the US army, and then for a real good laugh try fighting amongst heavily armed civilian population of the US and see how that works out for you.
Pointing out that Americans get bored with insurgent wars after trivial losses in hostile shit hole nations that they don't care about and nagging their politicians to say "fuck it, I'm out" and extrapolating that to mean that trying a stand up fight to occupy the US homeland is a winning proposition takes a pretty impressive leap of self delusion.
If the US is so utterly wiped out that its military can't stomp the piss out of anyone who is looking to attack, the world is over and everyone has bigger problem. A huge fraction of the US military isn't even in the US. Further, much of the US's military is still tooled up to survive a nuclear holocaust. Even if all the nuclear silos were wiped out (they wouldn't be), the nuclear subs would be utterly fine and happy to glass large sections of the Earth's surface to dissuade the apparently suicidal masses that want to enter a disaster zone so utterly inhospitable that the US can't prevent them.
As far as a break down in command and control goes, the US military would not break down. It is at once one of the most loyal armies in the world and at the same time has one of the most flexible command structures that allows isolated units to operate effectively without command. Even if the entire civilian government was wiped out in the US (which is absurd... most people would successfully be evacuated) that would leave tens of thousands of embassy employs and hundreds of thousands civilians who were not in the US at one time or another.
You have been watching too many end of the world movies. You could make every single person in the US drop dead and every single machine in the US stop functioning... and the US would still have more than enough military power and allies sitting around to make short work of suicidal armies looking to take over a wasteland. If the 300,000 or so soldiers stationed off of US soil couldn't do it and NATO decided that it wasn't going to live up to its treaty obligations, that would still leave a few hundred nuclear missiles to give a convincing no argument.
You could dump a few feet of ash onto Boston and Boston would be okay. They would get the snow plows out, everyone would grumble about the fucking weather, you might have to wear a simple filter mask, and life in the northeast would carry on with perhaps a little more northeastern "cheer" than normal. Moving shit that falls from the sky somewhere else is not that hard and the equipment to do it is already readily available.
As far as the environmental effects go, they are vastly overrated. The real danger of ash at any distance is not the gasses. It is the fact that you are breathing with is basically fine glass particles. Thankfully, humans are pretty resourceful and will just toss a simple filter mask on. The effect on the environment is even more trivial. Sure, you might have one shitty year of crops, but after that? Get ready for a bumper harvest like you can't imagine. After a few rain storms that volcanic ash gets neutralized and becomes excellent fertilizer. In fact, most of the world's fertility actually comes from volcanic ash.
There are only two things that make an eruption like that suck. First, you really don't want to be in the blast radius. A good sizable hunk of land in the middle of the US would be useless for a year or two. If it happened with little warning, a lot, but not a truly significant number of Americans might die. Second, dropping global temperatures would also be unpleasant. For the US though, it would be livable. It would suck, but it would be livable. The US has on hand a massive supply of food and can merrily feed its population even if no one else wants to for a significant amount of time. It might be bland, but you would live.
Give modern humans some credit. They don't take kindly to being exterminated and will expend a lot of energy and technological know how to avoid it. Nothing short of massive celestial event is going to wipe out humans any time soon.
u is so smart. u saw rite thruh there evil skem to carg u money on ur credit card with out asking.
Right.
There are plenty of people not worth tossing your credit card number too for a free activation. Doing it for a Russia snuff porn site? Eh, probably a poor idea. Doing to a multinational company running a handful of other MMORPGs? Probably not all that risky. If they do decide in a blatant act of malevolent glee to empty your bank account like some Nigerian scam, I am pretty sure that the law kicks in.
Like I said, buying CDs or paying per pop might work great for you. For me, it is close to worthless. I don't want to collect music like they are stamps to be appreciated for all time. I want it so that when I want a song, or I want to explore a genera, it is simply there.
A great example of this is the other day I heard a great 50's blues song. It rekindled my interest in the genera, so I went out and merrily downloaded about 15 albums from various artists, tossed it into a play list, and hit the shuffle button. Some of it I liked, some of it I didn't. I deleted the stuff I didn't like and downloaded everything ever made by artists that I did like. All said and done, that exercise would have cost me a few hundred dollars if I had bought each song individually online or (worse) bought it as CDs. That, and I would have a pile of crap that I don't like. Instead, it cost me a boring old $15, which is an utterly trivial cost.
If you are an indie kid who hangs out with other indie kids and listens to nothing but indie music, buying CDs makes sense. If collecting stuff gets you off, buying CDs or MP3's makes sense. If on the other hand your taste in music expands into things that your friends are not interested in, is diverse, or you simply consume a lot of music, and collecting things doesn't give you a woody, renting access to every single song ever made for a measly $15 a month is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Like I said, it isn't for everyone. For someone like me though, DRM making it possible to rent access to nearly every single song ever recorded for a trivial cost is frigging awesome.
If I want to support a band, assuming they still exist and are not long since buried in the ground, I'll buy a t-shirt or something.
Personally, I don't find DRM evil when it adds value. SecureRom doesn't add anything. It just cripples something that you bought for free. Steam on the other hand actually adds value. It is easy to buy stuff, quick to get it, your games don't get lost, and when you get a new computer you simply fire up Steam and can quickly reinstall all of your games. Steam's DRM stays out of my way and gives me something I want.
Rhapsody is another great example. Rhapsody's DRM is used such that I can download basically any song in existence on a whim. If the song sucks, I just discard it without a second though. I download a few hundred dollars worth of music on a whim. The DRM again actually adds something of value to me. Sure, I don't "own" the music, but I don't want to. I want to rent it. If collecting is your thing, you should just go buy a CD. If downloading everything ever made by some random band on a whim is your thing, the all you can eat buffet works great.
DRM has the potential to open up new business models, as seen in Rhapsody and Steam. When it is used for that purpose, I am happy with it. When it is used to simply cripple things, as was the case with Spore, or the old iTunes DRM, it pisses me off.
The fact that you can't resell it might matter it someone, put it doesn't to me. I can count on one hand the number of times I have sold my computer games... zero.
Even if you sold every single computer game it just means you are giving yourself a $10 discount in the future. Whoop-de-fucking-do. Personally, I find the fact that I can never lose a video game again to be vastly more useful than the fact that I can't pawn it off.
I am an adult with a job and a pile of disposable income. I like the idea of the Wii, but find the games to be mostly insipid and uninspiring. Cartoons are cute and all, but I like blood, gore, and adult themes. It is about damn time someone took the Wii, which has a very novel interface, and made a game for people who are over 18 and under 60.
If you don't want your kids playing violent video games, be a fucking parent and prevent them. The rest of the grown ups don't want to suffer because someone else is too lazy to be parent.
The Wii has a very novel controller. It is screaming for some awesome games that are more than glorified cartoons. I'll happily take shittier graphics if it means novel gameplay. Graphics are cute and all, but gameplay is what I crave. The Wii has a massive opportunity to introduce some very novel gameplay. We just need some developers to grow a pair and combine a novel controller with a real game.
Where is that goatse link when you need it?
I am pretty damn sure that the Americans are not in the position of Chief Joseph. American losses are paltry and trivial. Vastly more Americans die each day in automobile accidents than in Iraq. As an American, you probably are as likely to drowned to death by accident as you are to be killed in Iraq. Granted, that is no consolation to the relatives of the dead, but to play it up like the Americans are wading around in their own blood is silly. Americans have lost more people fighting for worthless mile wide hunks of rock in the Pacific during World War II than they have spent over the course of both Iraq wars.
As for why not just "end it", that certainly is a possibility. I personally don't know if Iraq is unwinnable or not. Anyone who claims to know for sure that the US has run into a Kobayashi Maru scenario with a Kirk is either A) full of shit B) extraordinarily well informed and possess super human abilities of analytical capability C) a super secret NSA AI that has become self aware.
Speaking out of my own ass for a moment, I think that the Americans are probably on the path to righting their mistake the best they can (minus a few tens of thousands of dead Iraq's and a pile of money of course). The violence levels in Iraq have dropped and the central government is slowly taking control of the nation. I don't think that there is a shinny post War War II Japan or Germany style government at the end of this like what the neo-cons had wet dreams about, but I would bet that there could be something vaguely stable with vague democratic tendencies at the end of the road. I imagine that if things keep going the way they are going Iraq and Americans don't lose their nerve it is going to end up looking like Korea after the Korean war. That is to say that it won't be a shinny democracy, but instead be something that is vaguely stable for now that has the potential to eventually get its shit together a couple of decades down the road.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Iraq just needs to purge a few percentage points off its population in a good old fashion ethnic genocide. That sure would make things a whole lot easier on the Americans, eh? Genocides are not pretty, but they sure are cheaper then a hundred thousand soldiers standing guard.
I am pretty sure that the definition of "winning" goes far beyond the US just leaving, even for the Iraqis. I am fairly sure that if the US leaves and Iraq descends into a Rwanda style genocide, they will not call that winning, even though American troops are gone.
The war was stupid to jump into in the first place. I thought it was dumb from day one. Unfortunately, you can't unpull a trigger. The US fired, it killed the government, unleashed the openings to an ethnic genocide, and made Iraq their problem. Now they have to fix it. If the cost of fixing Iraq is a few more billion dollars and some dead Americans, that is the price the Americans have to pay.
Everyone wants the "war" to be over with. The problem is that if the Americans leave, it doesn't suddenly make the war over. It makes it over for the Americans, but it doesn't mean it is over for Iraq. Now that the Americans have broken Iraq, the balancing act for the Americans at this point is to get the fuck out as fast as humanly possible without leaving behind a genocide.
The average Iraqi and the US have the same goal at this point. Get the hell out without as little blood as possible. The US wants to go as badly as the Iraqis want them out. The problem is that the players in this game are not just the Americans and the average Iraqi. You also have new Shiite majority leaders still smarting from Sunni brutality under Saddam, nostalgic Sunnis, independence seeking Kurds, Turks, Iran, and Al-qaeda that all have an interest (to greater and lesser extents) in making Iraq a blood bath.
The sad truth is that the US right now is the biggest and meanest on the block in Iraq, and they are what is keeping the conflicting parties from drowning each other in an orgy of blood. At some point, Iraq's central government will be competent and neutral enough to take over the roll of biggest bad ass with a gun and the US can slip out the back. Assuming genocide is not your goal, the question you need to ask yourself is, when will the central government have enough power to keep everyone from killing each other, AND will the central government be able to resist from whacking one group or another?
We can argue until we are blue in the face if or when the time will come when Iraq's central government is strong enough and neutral enough. The simple fact of the matter is that we don't have a frigging clue. Smarter men and women with better knowledge and more information don't know the answer.
Personally, I think the best plan for the Americans is to draw down and pretend like they mean it. If wheels start to fall off, pause, take a breather, then try again. You want to push the Iraqi government to grow a pair and go into the deep end, and you want them to try like their life depends upon it, but if they actually start to drown you want to be there to drag their ass out.
Personally, I think it is a good lesson for the Americans. Next time they try this sort of stupid stunt they will hopefully go in with eyes wide open as to the true cost of kicking over a government and taking responsibility for a nation. Hopefully they will make sure the war is worth the price they are going to pay and reserve toppling governments for when there is truly no other solution.
First, it wasn't password guessing. He exploited Yahoo's password recovery system to get it to reset her password. He basically used public information to pose as Palin and convince Yahoo's password recovery system that he needed the password reset. Exploiting such a weakness in the system is, by any standards, "hacking".
Second, after he got in, he than went through all of her e-mail. Breaking into a system, even if it had been a password guess, and then going through its contents is again, by any standard standard, hacking.
I loath Palin, but this guy is going to get what he has coming. Even shitty and crazy humans who think the world is a few thousand years old and much to my horror might be president one day, get legal protection. It isn't like the police can go, "Yeah, he hacked in, but Palin kinda sucks, so I think we will let this one slide".
String theory is a theory because it fits the evidence. You can use a string theory model and get the universe. On the other hand, declaring that the world started 6000 years ago and that everyone descends from two people 6000 years ago is pretty violently rejected by every scrap of evidence we have from multiple fields.
Further, String Theory isn't taught in schools because at this point it is a mathematics parlor trick. People study it and try and devise ways to test it, but you will never see anyone trying to teach it in a science class room.
As to the "well everyone has a creation story", so what? Everyone civilization also put earth at the center of the universe and was pretty convinced that lightening was mystical. This doesn't mean that we should teach that lightening might be magic and that Earth might really be the center of the universe. The fact that humans like to find a reason for existence is far more interesting to an evolutionary biologist who might be able to explain why we have this urge without invoking "magic" as an explanation.