I think we need to first focus on humanity. Humanity has to become better at fulfilling our ideals as a species. We need to be hardier, capable of extended periods in micro-gravity without any drugs to keep us from pissing out our bones.
We need NASA to help big energy companies safely deploy technologies which will enable a hydrogen economy, not just for the seven wealthiest nations, but for everyone, because there's no prize for half-assing global technology like automobiles and power-plants. We need to get that stuff out there.
We should park the ISS at L4 and take a decade to scour all our rubbish out of low-earth orbit. Wouldn't it suck if the shuttle was struck by something someone accidentally dropped while working on the ISS months before?
The cool thing about all that "cleanning up LEO" would be that while a bunch of flyboys are playing RPV with radar and massive glad-bags, we could still be doing all the bullshit science that's made NASA and graduate students slaving away at research colleges happy for years.
Maybe we could take a good thirty years to finish that clean-up job, and by that time we'll have the kind of genetics technology which permits us to endure complete weightlessness, and maybe even allow us to hibernate just like bears so we don't need as much food, air, or have to worry about all that pesky psychology and some reality-tv producer buying all the NASA footage and making a tv series out of it.
And everyone here knows that there's absolutely no reason why we can't engineer perfectly good stuctures at the bottom of the well, develop the technologies to sustatin life in them. We could wrap up that knowledge, send it into orbit and create a civilization.
What stops us? We do. We let clerics and technologists tell us fairy tales and we wet ourselves. Some of us have been trained from birth to entertain them. We let politicians and their day-to-day pissing contests and in-fighting hamstring us in everything from feeding ourselves to enabling us to justify stepping on someone's face. We let merchants push our buttons, control what we do with things we own, and we enjoy being controlled in so many different ways that it's become woven into the very culture...what we wear, what we play, and what we drive, what we want to wank to.
Our biggest problem is us. And since we're quite happy being dipshits, until something happens to change that, solving any of these other little problems isn't going to matter.
Hey, it gets better. Really. Imagine you have specific encryption keys, stuff that takes ten minutes on a 3ghz desktop to cook-up, and it's part of the whole, "This is my key, there are many like it but this one is mine" scheme. Now, imagine what happens when grandma dunks that beastie, or your three-year old uses it as a flotation device...or better yet, you do a hard-reset without thinking about it and loose everything because of a fatal error in your software used to return the unit to service (patches and software downloads on your PC which don't work because it's not the newest shinny version of the lock-in juggernaut's fleece-you plan). Wow, that sure would be fun. Just ask T-Mobile users how they like their Pocket-PC phones. I'm sure they have plenty of cheerful anecdotes.
Now that M$ has George Orwell's future in their sights the next thing you know they'll create a medical-services division that goes on to make ICU equipment that would give Aldus Huxley's vision of the future a fresh new coat of human suffering.
Bring on the boots, I still have teeth, you steenking M$ apologists.
I have a playstation2 unit which was part of the first holiday batch (november 2000?--I'm an absent minded professor and it seems like just a little while ago to me) that landed at ToysRus.
I am an avid gamer, and I know how to treat computer equipment, so I rarely used the hard-switch, and for the most part the unit was happily doing it's job. Then when the really nice dynamic 3D render games started showing up (Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Jak and Daxter and such) my Playstation2 gradually stopped playing anything due to disc read errors. There was also this terrible ratcheting noise that it makes whenever the caddy opens. Really annoying cheap noise reminiscent of cheap-ass matsushita cd-rom units that die after about a month of use back in the day.
Using a dry-brush cleaning kit did nothing for this problem, so I went online and after some serious google-diving I managed to find a site that elaborated on the problems with the DVD unit (lens discoloration reaction to cleaning agents, sensor faults and how to adjust the unit). I was going to give that a try but then I'm a programmer (read:lazy bastard) and decided to just send the bugger in.
My Playstation2 was returned about three weeks later and it had developed a really interesting problem with the graphics...going to the inventory in Baldur's Gate:Dark Alliance would cause all the little objects to throw interesting splines all over the place...the brighter the object the worse the problem.
Sent it back for that issue and three weeks later I was playing games without any problems other than that damn annoying ratchet noise from the media-caddy. That was about nine months ago and now, I'm back to the problem of the unit not reading any media (well, memory cards don't count), no music CD's, no Playstation1 games, and no Playstation2 games.
Now I'm getting ready to send the unit back again, and hopefully they'll have the sense to throw-out the DVD unit and replace it with another...knowing my luck they'll give me a phone call and say something like "...and we need to charge you an additional $75 in order to replace the DVD unit in your console, do you want us to do this?" Of course the answer will be "Yeah, I guess so." and I'll be rattling off my CC#.
Why? Because it's what I play games on. And it's something of an "evil you know is better than the one you don't" situation. I could go drop another $150-$200 on a new unit, but I figure they've already made at least one engineering mod (for the graphics problem they fixed) and if the unit is stable when I get it back I'll probably spring for a linux-kit for it, or get one of those schweet logitech netplay contoller keyboards.
Initially I was really torqued about this, but then as someone who has to deal with hardware and software issues all the time I have cooled down a bit from the inital "Screw this crap!" reaction.
And as for longevity with the origial Playstations...I have an ancient second-hand playstation1 that has never, ever failed...it's survivied every TombRaider game, CrashTeam Racing, and an army of titles. Great piece of kit. Someday I hope the Playstation2 get's there.
It would be nice if someone (OPM,or other game mags, independent webmaster with hosting in some other country that doesn't cave to corporate BS) could sponsor an impartial site which would track console issues.
W00T! Hey, it's my first "TROLL" Post!!! Thanks for the reply.
I'm probably being gang-moderated by a whole office of (card-carrying librarians | angry teachers | freshly reamed MSCE's | Seminary punks | sore sex-workers in a freshly rebooted Internet cafe) for my sweeping commentary. Just the very thought of someone actually wanting to pay that much karmatic attention to me is so exciting.
I was very well spoken and used proper english. If they understood the terms they're not a pure or as justified to mod me down as they assume they are. It was a very (tightly) fitting metaphor to describe the situation. I didn't even specify any company names. If a moderator isn't satisfied by a topical and brevitous post that doesn't play politics or name-names then they're just frustrated in other less texutal ways.
Of course, maybe they're just seeking some form of retribution or release for failing to remember their safe-word and waking up in the hospital. Nothing worse than lame bottoms with an Internet connection--no good will ever come of such diversions.
...should sometimes take the full width and breadth of their own fat rubber cock, you know so they might actually have a sense of empathy for the bottoms they normally trample with their patches and $500 dollar support incidents. They want lube? Ahahahah! Not today!
That would thrill an audience of thousands on webcams with a delicious sense of irony. Hell, I would enthusiastically ejactulate twice!!
Hey, you noticed all the GoldBricking and showmanship. That's what this is really about. It might also go that extra-mile when high-school kids are herded into an auditorium to watch recruitment videos made using it. All the shop-doodz might get wood and talk about making their own war-buggy, and the chess-headz would probably cookup stats for it so they could play with one in an RPG game or try to draw one for a extra-credit in their cad class, and all the welfare kids would probably be hoping for a scholarship so they wouldn't have to join up to get into college and eat.
Of those that enlist with this kind of thing in mind, 99.9% of them won't realize that they'll probably never see one in actual use; maybe in a motorpool, or maybe if they're not passing out in formation at a parade as a general drives past them in one, but that's about it.
If any intelligence gathering unit showed up with something like this, it would be RPG bait. Little kids would be told to roll grenades under it, and could you imagine getting it ready for inspection?! There would be a pissed off captain somewhere yelling, "Sick Call!! The whole damn platoon!?!"
Field work is much more successful when they just (skunkworks local 151) rework several large delivery trucks, paint them up with the words, "Delivery" or "Plumbing" in the native language of the area, hire the local piraiah who can't get laid and doesn't have any friends and still lives at home playing video games or programming(holy shit, I just described 90% of slashdot!) to drive the damn thing, and spend the day driving around with electronic vacuum cleaners feeding hard-drives and tape recorders. Nobody would say a word, and the job would get done. The biggest retrofit would be to tear off the metallic top over the cargo area and setup an RF neutral one using fiberglass...no biggie, what, all of $2500 to $5000 per vehicle, and maybe all of $200 to the driver for as long as you need them, when you need them.
Crap...I'm probably screwing up posting this, I certainly hope nobody in the "Axis of Evil" is reading slashdot right now...
The moderation system must be retarded...mmoncur hit it spot on, and should be packing a (score:5) for this insightful post.
The only experience I've had with ebooks was vile, I only had tens-of-thousands of PepsiStuff points (Air, Diet-soda...both essential for life these days) and decided to try an ebook. I don't remember what the ebook was, but I do remember it taking three websites and twenty minutes before I essentially had an Adobe chastity belt (reading harness) suitable for reading an ebook on that machine, and only that machine. The whole process was just wrong...ebooks are premmature, and like the parent message in this thread points out, this isn't good or common tech. I personally wish they wouldn't waste our time with it. Haven't we emasulated ourselves enough already? There's probably enough dead-tree books out right now to build houses out of and fuel our cooking fires (and the occasional bacchanal) for some time to come. Let's worry about digital reader enslavement when someone out of Bill Joy's closet of horrors decides to play a joke on the planet and creates a prolific self-replicating nanobot that just loves paper. Then and only then will ebooks really work.
Straight up, we need to leave the Von-Neuman crap serving webpages and go straight to using a DNA matricies and a highly paralleled quantum system to work through solution sets instead of pushing a brute-force asymmetric namespace around. If we can use simple DNA we can manipulate massive datasets in realtime. Ackerman has probably danced around such ideas (he's the "A" in RSA) and avoided them in to avoid showing up on spook-radar and being forced to live in another country.
If the key to the survival of the Federal Govt. rested on cracking a paltry 2048bit encryption key the NSA/NCSA would have it done in time to recive a bonus and loads of poorly documented funding for more happy-fun projects after lunch the same day. Of course I'm probably being optimistic, but I deal the plausibility card based on the idea that if the government could not somehow deal with RSA algorithms, they would be outlawed. For a time they were, but that seems to have passed.
And on a personal note, I would love to see the classification for the XBox go from "Game Console" to "Personal Computer" and see every single game they have for it pulled out of Blockbuster and every other rental location. Why you ask? Because there are laws in the United States for what qualifies as a product you can rent software for. Computers, like the kind used to submit this reply, are ineligible for software rentals. Due to the accessories, Secondary storage, and shared software libaries like DirectX, the Xbox should be considred a computer and maybe even an example of Palladium in action.
Mentioning anything here about GPS and cars is like begging for asbestos long-johns.:-D
What we could snag off the shelf to accomplish something similar to this would be the same kind of proximity sensors that go into neighborhood annoynance devices (car alarms) which sense proximity based on very low intensity microwaves (like a radar). We could set these up fore and aft with radomes which could be wagged to cover a significant azimuth. Almost every automobile since the late 80's in the US has some kind of computer system for ignition, brakes, and dealer incentive idiot lights (I would like to hack car computers systems but I'm a poor man). It would be nice to have a "cooperation" protocol among sensing systems between vehicles, with some kind of transponder squirt between vehicles, an info-only handshake to id what class of vehicle, relative speed to you, and maybe even something useful like call-signs or a cell-phone number/email address/tag-line limited to 32 characters and displayed if and only if you wanted that info. And you can bet your ass there would be an advert flag on this crap...I'd probably have road-rage as a Frito-Lay truck passes by and I get a chime and a tagline of "Once your crunch...you can't stop!" slide along the top of the display.
It would also be pretty easy to have transponder squirt relays before each major on-ramp/off-ramp which would you could preload so you'd get a chime or maybe a customized "voice" informing you of a place you need to go (preloaded by the user or based on an accumulation of info over time and enabled if you're interested in such alerts). This could be done using a locality broadcast in a restricted ghz range aimed to cover areas of the highway/road so it would dissipate quickly instead of bleeding into the local area RF traffic. It wouldn't take much to put an eraser mouse or trackball on the steering wheel so you wouldn't have to take your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel to make selections or interact with it...take it a step further and just have it use voice commands.
This stuff is all easily achived without touching big-brothers wet dream in orbit. Best to leave that stuff to the military so they can drop ordinance or find their way back to the mess-tent. Hell, most of this stuff is probably already sitting in a building right now waiting for the next big auto show. Hopefully fellow gadet freaks in subsidiaries of Toyota, Nissan, Ford, Mercedes, Plymoth, or Volvo are reading this...we need to get car-makers infected with this stuff. But the thing that really drives everyone nuts is that The Man will own everyone's ass with anything that can do these things...you know every car will have it's serial hashed into the transponder, which in turn could be used to track vehicles and their exact mph over the posted speed limit anywhere along the path, and in effect, this would both lower the number of law-enforcement people on the road, while generating a huge revenue stream--that's the only thing which will really be considered by governments, while the value-add of tracking road-use, or accidents would just be benefits after the fact.
Warning slippery slope and technology as a ratchet metaphors abound when mind and movement control are involved.
Fly-by-wire aircraft use computers all the time. There are backups for many real-time systems used for this purpose, and after nearly thirty years, these are proven products. The space-shuttle is a very good example of this. Early space-shuttle control systems were a nightmare of guages and displays. Now, it's a very refined system, with an emphasis on what the crew needs to know instead of some instrumentation jockey's wet-dream.
Many new aircraft are equipped with the MFD's (multi-function displays) that the military has had for decades (in one form or another) and it's about time. Most of the work done in this field is done for military use.
Anyone can bitch all they want, but when Betty starts squawking you listen and when you look at your panel you need to know exactly what's wrong. MFD's do that better than any analog guage. Combine advances in data delivery with multiple bioinformatics and a pilot will have a nearly intuitive understanding of what's going on.
I don't see a downside here, since everything is going to be exhaustively tested before it's permitted to move mass quantities of crunchy humans from one shopping spot to another. It's going to be some time before the really cool stuff finds its way into public transportation. Personally, I'm still waiting for a civilian version of a HUD, because what passes for useful car instrumentation blows (looking through the gaps in the steering wheel for data sucks) and from a consumer point-of-view, nothing addresses this shortcomming (not even that bs Cadillac thermal display). Cheers.
where a protagonist has to give us a nakey moment as they show up in WWII America, prevent event "X" from ever taking place by blowing the hell out of Port Chicago, and then riding the shockwave back into the future while (supposedly) cleansing themselves from the timeline by erasing all the evidence(that was the plan)--but not before tittilating us all by pressing lips and bumping-uglies with someone they shouldn't have, forking a mutual process and irreperably horking the timeline forever...resulting in (Microsoft | TIA | Petrolum-Based-Economics | Silicone Breast implants | Barney) -- pick any two--and remember, the police state can work for you; so turn in a wrong-thinking family member today and preserve democracy for now and the future. Act now and we'll waive or discount the cost of the.357 round used to re-educate them. (DOH! There goes the timeline!)
With all the restraining orders and paid security, you would think he would have some peace. Poor chap, and now he's been TAKEN. We should take a moment to remember there's always time for Kubrication. (owiee..owiee...I won't do that again, I promise.)
The reason Wintel fosters this notion does have a grain of truth to it.
If everything you're looking at on a webpage is being pushed at you through streams because some butt-head corporate site has invested heavily in Macromedia (FLASH/SHOCKWAVE) then yes, running with anything other than a dreamsystem is going to result in some minor irritation.
This is just one of the reasons why flash pages should be an option, and not the mainstay of a website, but a little while back some ass-monkeys (I must have piped them to/dev/null) were trying to generate support for the use of flash for entire sites.
Personally, I'm a "slow-tech" kind of person. I actually order bios upgrades and reuse hardware until a _real_ need to upgrade presents itself and then I upgrade to satisfy just that need. But the idea of a _needed_ upgrade is completely subjective. I won't knock anybody who feels they have have the latest and the greatest, especially if they turn around a while later and say , "Hey, could you use __________?" Oh yeah.:-D
Actually I've heard noises from on high about a plan to eventually replace all paper currency with metallic currency. Sure, it's probably a fanciful fiction, but if the highest value of coin you can carry is $1.00, then getting your paycheck in "Cash" is going to be rather extreme.
Wow, given this kind of 'sploit, it would be pretty easy giving yourself a heart-attack from laughing on your last day on the job. Just modify the company's intranet login page to perform this exploit (using somebody else's account of course) and be sure nobody sees you having giggling like a lunatic. Charge a consulting fee if they beg-plead-demand that you come back and help.
Anyone running Linux on all of their servers, using PERL/PHP/PYTHON with PostgreSQL/MySQL who is suddenly forced to run monopoly-ware by some excise-assholes, complete with Visual.NET and Win2kSp3 requirements, and maybe even a bit of MSSQL thrown in for good measure should be pissed because the monopolyware is headed right to the toilet with forced subscription licensing. And that doesn't even touch all the technical issues, like SECURITY. Depending on what it's written with and depolyed, how it accepts updates and batches or asynchronously updates to the home-office, it's going to be a pain in the ass to secure and maintain--because government will charge us for the use of the software in addition to probably having to purchase an SSL-Cert for the nasty bugger too.
If one cannot look forward enough to know how government works with regards to software deployment, then they haven't had the life-enriching experience. What will be really interesting is to see which companies in the local private sectors from each state will be awared the contract for rolling this out. We should expect still-in-college start-ups who are socially networked to family in local government with no bottom line to pitch bids and get them (government and business are nepotistic by design). It will be a damn good time to NOT be an admin for a company that actually offers something online.
If you're too busy fixing things to make an argument for upgrading and eliminating a frightfully flawed server deployment, then you're wearing a Prometheus hat. Sure you're keeping things running, but then every wicked 'sploit is another vulture set to tear your liver out. Of course you're renewed after recovering from a back-up and applying a hotfix, but then there will always be another vulture.
Maybe what you have is a slight case of Battered Admin Syndrome. The first indicator is a destructive co-dependency on the thing which beats your ass. It's not your fault, and in order to break the cycle of violence you have to stand up to the agressor here. We can't blame Cerf or the NSF for the current state of things, but we can finger a rather monolithic corporate abuser which has fostered and supported an environment of dependency with a cycle of licensing violence that has made it increasingly harder to be an admin when dealing with pointy-haired manager types. I have never heard of any company suing M$ for dammages because they make buggy software. No manager in their right mind is going to tell you that by saving them money and releasing them from license audits that you're causing problems. Nobody is going to value you less if you don't have to work as hard to make them happy.
In the end, it's up to you. Either the monoculture assmonkeys that hold you down have to understand the problem, or you will lead a quiet life of back-up, patch, and recovery desperation.
Everyone has the capacity to be a Bastard Operator from Hell, some of us just don't have to work that hard at it. Cheers!
M$ will gleefully deliver a firehose of CD's, half-assed poorly documented API's, and happy-fun stickers, folders, and posters in the target localization at the first hint of being able to get a toe-hold in some emergent or established company anywhere in the world.
Then they'll regularly send someone by to see how things are going, talk up their latest "inno-cough-vative" offering, and see if the target company is _motivated_. Sometimes, if they're lucky, one of the new programmers will have some "happy fun intranet site, or happy joy widget" made with said technology to show off (you know, the port of something which has already been working in PERL, PHP, or both using Sun, or Zeus) that will probably score them some nifty t-shirts, a mug, or hey, maybe another dousing with the developer-cd firehose.
And then if they really want to see how things are going, they'll ask for a tour of the _server room_, the holiest of the holies for said company. The annointed one will be walked around, and they'll look for familiar names, like Compaq, or Dell. But, if they see "SUN", or beige boxen then the annointed one will carefully steer conversation towards determining the nature and purpose of these boxen. Depending on the cluefulness of the tour-guide, things could either go well, and the annointed one will leave, only making note of a possible hardware upgrade deal, or they will become wrathful, and the sales-calls, port-scans, and off-hours questioning through "chance meetings" will take place until they have enough information to confront the president of the company. They will act hurt, or betrayed, and say interesting things like,
"I thought we had an understanding that you were a Microsoft Development shop", or
"How can we help you fully become a Microsoft Developer?", or my favorite,
"How has Microsoft failed to meet your needs? We are eager to help you in any way we can."
Of course, years later when the BSA sends out their letters to the less-than-faithful, and begins bringing in the police to follow up on portscans and megabytes of downloaded header logs showing all of the boxen development-only copies of software running. there will be those who remember these honeyed promises aimed only at the hearts, minds, and struggling companies or schools.
M$ has much to gain, but in the end, as they squeeze diversity and skill out of developing countries, they will also loose these possibilities forever. Linux is safe, becuase just like the smart people in Africa who refused flawed crop-seed to avoid a hideous cycle of dependency, developers in India and around the world know that freedom is more important than easily made promises. Held to a hard-line of artificial ability and capability(M$ API's are Black-boxes...no lookee, no touch-ee, no-feelie) with brittle security, smart developers and business leaders will realize that there is no get-rich quick incentive to supporting a core of fatally flawed intractable components supplied by a company which is really incapable of doing anything more than strong-arming hardware and software developers(even savvy developers need support--and when they become the support they are no longer developers), coercing companies with hideous licensing schemes by buying legislation and counting coup on the legal system of the United States. Companies seeking to get rich by suckling at the four-paned teat would do well to remember that M$ eats it's young, and often the young of others too.
Isn't Idaho Mormon Country?...I can imagine the church leaflets now, done in stylish two-color stock, probably red or blue, showing the transition of young model citizens to pierced porn-stars, as they follow a treacherous path layed down for them by online news addiction, StarCraft, Big Government and Big Business and finally, the realization that someone would pay to seem them nekkid (purposefully mispelled). And then in the final frame they will be genuflecting before a huge display showing all the bad sites they visitied, superimposed with all the terrible carnal things they did prior to being flushed way way way down--you know, to where we can spend an eternity getting to know their flesh and all that fun.
Personally, I look forward to the future of streaming video veggie play with good solid farm-girls, complete with a scripted online voting interface (php!? perl?! Who cares!)...Peeled or unpeeled?! Help her decide for $5 U.S. now!!!
Meanwhile in a rural farm-house in the middle of NO-WHERE,
"Watch out! UGH!" A perfectly quiet school-night is tainted by the sounds of pleasure and then a startling, almost scrap-heap challengesque sound normally made by something firing a pumpkin causes flocks of pigeons to leave the wires, trees, fences, and nearly every other surface of the landscaping in a massive roiling protest.
SCHOOOMPH!
This followed closely by the sounds of breaking glass and the screams of the cameraman when the spud creases the top of his head causing a permanent furrow which will set off a new trend when seen by millions around the world...the ploughed look. One development cycle later, it will be hailed as the new cleavage. Anyone with forehead cleavage will get on well with the big prosthetic foreheads they buy off of E-Bay and wear upon their real ploughed foreheads, of course.
In reality the whole damn thing smacks of yet another
E-Rate, whereby small opportunistic businesses will be weakened and consumed by the bigger fish when three months later the small business owners realize that the government may or may not actually provide any incentive after the business did the work...believe it or not...so this kind of move often serves to destory the initial or early implementers of technology and makes it easier for the big players to enter a market refreshingly clear of any real competition (buy failing business and obtain their contracts...aaaahh...refreshing captialism fueled by big business--who could ask for anything more?).
Compared to business as usual, maybe a bit of super-kegel exhibitionism isn't that bad?
Our faithful parent has been handed a list of desired media by their spouse. They go to one of the big media retailers, like Sam Goody (is there a listerine for the brain...I hate that place!), collect the desired titles and endure the latest R&B female vocalist performing an orgasm over the PA system (shudder) while waiting at the counter.
"Hi, are you ready to check out?" "Yes, uhm, could you tell me if this," the customer holds up the first title for the clerk to see, "is copy protected?" The clerk has this "uh-oh" look and nods. "Yes," the clerk hesitantly replies trying to avoid the attention of the other clerk who is busy ringing up someone else's order. The Customer holds up each title and each time the clerk nods, looking less happy as the customer puts them in a seperate pile, until at last there's only the pile of copy protected titles. "Well, it was nice shopping. See ya." The customer shrugs. The clerk watches as the customer walks away from the counter, leaving the small pile of titles, probably near $200 worth, sitting on the counter.
The worst part...if this kind of thing happens a new policy of ignorance will emerge, where the clerks will simply say they don't know or can't say. And then the store will refuse to accept any media for refund or exchange once it's been opened.
Oh, and don't forget, there's always a charge for refunding purchases made with some form of plastic, so there's going to be many people who will simply "eat it". Especially the passive cattle with plastic in this great land of diminishing returns.
Extract additional monies besides taxes for anything you do that violates law
Secure the monopoly of services you are taxed for
To serve as the guarantors of punishment as decreed by the judicial system
Properly intimidate, threaten, and by their very prescense quell any social unrest caused by the effects of laws on the system.
In short, if you are not a cop you are the enemy. If the ratchet of technology and laws and the info-tainment industry continue to erode the perception of security and liberty, soon we'll be living in a European democracy--the kind where people are rolled out of bed a 0400, given a tight pair of connected bracelets and be forced to explain anything and everything they're asked...and then spend some cursory time in jail w/o the ability or the right to tell anyone about it afterwards.
Now imagine the military in the role of police...the job of the military is to destory things and kill people. You don't send them anywhere to do anything but that...so once the zealots pass new laws subverting pre-existing law against just such a thing, which makes soldiers into cops, people are going to die, and things will get destroyed.
We would all be wise to remember that by Geneva Convention it's illegal to fire anything but light munitions at the enemy, all those 20mm, and 50-caliber rounds are really being fired at equipment. When the Military is turned against the people, we're no longer living in the United States, we're living in China. Cheers!
Once, there was a time when I went out shopping for music. It was that glorious time of my life when I didn't have kids, a mortgage, health-car-home insurance, or the crushing bills that seem to just continually get bigger every year even though nothing changes or improves.
Now, I'm to the point where going out and buying a CD is a waste of time and money. As a hobbled wage-slave, I don't give a rat's ass about the fsckin' problems the music industry says they have. The bastards have been making obscene amounts of money for decades, and if the nipple isn't quite as sweet as it once was for them, then maybe they need to try the bottle.
Personally, I'm tired of all the we are in control, do not attempt to back up your media or play it on anything we have not blessed strategies and crappy laws. They don't matter when in the privacy of my home I can break copy protections at whim and blow the crap on drives or play it on hacked players. The industry needs to quit wasting their time thinking they can stop a technically superior consumer-base, just because you didn't hire us doesn't mean we're incapable of completely owning your corporate asses. We will own any format, any player, anything that doesn't blow us into tiny bits when tampered with will be defeated at whim, and the only thing they're doing is hobbling themselves, and then complaining that they have to spend too much to control us. Ahahahah...P.T. Barnum is still the man.
If there's anyone from BMG or any of the other wannabe in control media companies out there reading, I have just one final thing to say: I want to buy your product, but if and only if I can put it in player X and it will play, and then I can put it in player Xn and it will play, and if player X supports Video and Audio, then I want both, and I don't want Ads, I don't want the number of the beast tatooed on my ass, and I don't want to use only non-free OS's in order to enjoy the media I've legally purchased from some peddler. I want DVD capacities and I want some real freakin value for my buck...add hard-copy materials and packaging that make buying your product worth the time and effort. Oh yeah, and I'm not the only one--we are legion.
Hey, does the original poster of this work write for a term-paper mill? Thank you for your contribution to...this intercourse.
It still strikes me as odd that politicians can create laws that govern so much of what goes on through
intercourse, when they have no knowledge of it themselves. I feel like they are trying to regulate it in a similar way as (pot | welfare | taxes | oxygen). However,intercourse isn't just in the United States. It's also throughout the whole world. How can we decree what other countries must follow? This is a conondrum that needs to be addressed in it's own arena, separate from the real world, because it is not the real world. If politicians are able to expand their powers through limiting action within intercourse, then what's to stop them from gradually throwing out the constitution altogether?
Besides that, I feel that there is too much trust when it comes to intercourse. I don't trust media companies, why should they have the right to hack into anyone's body cavities? I really hope that people are able to keep ridiculus laws from being enacted that are only made by the politicians as ways of gathering support (and money) when they are so far reaching (As the article says). Well. I guess I agree with them.
Well, bathroom references aside, I think the lack of a perfectly working automated deconatmination unit (aka "The Transporter") on Enterprise makes for some interesting moments. There's always that wonderful goo and the rubbing..mmmmm, rubbing. Maybe they're just trying to be a viable property for the Sci-Fi Channel, Showtime or HBO as a targeted adult sci-fi program: I'd actually subscribe to see that.
It shouldn't be a secret that most of us who discovered the really good sci-fi found it filled with sex, violence, and plenty of space-opera: hence the really good classificaiton.
As for SG-10...I've never seen an episode that really made me like the show. The show just feels wrong...how they ever made it to a seventh season is almost maddening. I still can't believe anyone is watching Andromeda, or Earth: Final Conflict for the same reasons...change-writers and kill the show.
I can't be the only person here who remembers a really great show called Space Above and Beyond, and how it was asphyxiated for funds and ridden out of town on a rail. The people who made that show had a vision of a future which was gritty, and mired in war. War is an unparalleled catalyst...and all the BS "Temporal Cold War", or "Here a Gate, there a gate" plot-line shenanigans are a pretty damn weak backdrop compared to the gritty nature of dealing with war without pulling some miracle devices out of nowhere, or completely disregarding the simplicity of making the characters grow.
I guess what we're looking at, with SG-10, is that a show doesn't have to be all that good to those who don't buy in, it just has to be good the advertisers...same probably goes for all shows on TV regardless of genre.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we need to first focus on humanity.
Humanity has to become better at fulfilling our ideals as a species. We need to be hardier, capable of extended periods in micro-gravity without any drugs to keep us from pissing out our bones.
We need NASA to help big energy companies safely deploy technologies which will enable a hydrogen economy, not just for the seven wealthiest nations, but for everyone, because there's no prize for half-assing global technology like automobiles and power-plants. We need to get that stuff out there.
We should park the ISS at L4 and take a decade to scour all our rubbish out of low-earth orbit. Wouldn't it suck if the shuttle was struck by something someone accidentally dropped while working on the ISS months before?
The cool thing about all that "cleanning up LEO" would be that while a bunch of flyboys are playing RPV with radar and massive glad-bags, we could still be doing all the bullshit science that's made NASA and graduate students slaving away at research colleges happy for years.
Maybe we could take a good thirty years to finish that clean-up job, and by that time we'll have the kind of genetics technology which permits us to endure complete weightlessness, and maybe even allow us to hibernate just like bears so we don't need as much food, air, or have to worry about all that pesky psychology and some reality-tv producer buying all the NASA footage and making a tv series out of it.
And everyone here knows that there's absolutely no reason why we can't engineer perfectly good stuctures at the bottom of the well, develop the technologies to sustatin life in them. We could wrap up that knowledge, send it into orbit and create a civilization.
What stops us?
We do. We let clerics and technologists tell us fairy tales and we wet ourselves. Some of us have been trained from birth to entertain them.
We let politicians and their day-to-day pissing contests and in-fighting hamstring us in everything from feeding ourselves to enabling us to justify stepping on someone's face.
We let merchants push our buttons, control what we do with things we own, and we enjoy being controlled in so many different ways that it's become woven into the very culture...what we wear, what we play, and what we drive, what we want to wank to.
Our biggest problem is us.
And since we're quite happy being dipshits, until something happens to change that, solving any of these other little problems isn't going to matter.
Hey, it gets better. Really.
Imagine you have specific encryption keys, stuff that takes ten minutes on a 3ghz desktop to cook-up, and it's part of the whole, "This is my key, there are many like it but this one is mine" scheme. Now, imagine what happens when grandma dunks that beastie, or your three-year old uses it as a flotation device...or better yet, you do a hard-reset without thinking about it and loose everything because of a fatal error in your software used to return the unit to service (patches and software downloads on your PC which don't work because it's not the newest shinny version of the lock-in juggernaut's fleece-you plan). Wow, that sure would be fun. Just ask T-Mobile users how they like their Pocket-PC phones. I'm sure they have plenty of cheerful anecdotes.
Now that M$ has George Orwell's future in their sights the next thing you know they'll create a medical-services division that goes on to make ICU equipment that would give Aldus Huxley's vision of the future a fresh new coat of human suffering.
Bring on the boots, I still have teeth, you steenking M$ apologists.
I have a playstation2 unit which was part of the first holiday batch (november 2000?--I'm an absent minded professor and it seems like just a little while ago to me) that landed at ToysRus.
I am an avid gamer, and I know how to treat computer equipment, so I rarely used the hard-switch, and for the most part the unit was happily doing it's job. Then when the really nice dynamic 3D render games started showing up (Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Jak and Daxter and such) my Playstation2 gradually stopped playing anything due to disc read errors. There was also this terrible ratcheting noise that it makes whenever the caddy opens. Really annoying cheap noise reminiscent of cheap-ass matsushita cd-rom units that die after about a month of use back in the day.
Using a dry-brush cleaning kit did nothing for this problem, so I went online and after some serious google-diving I managed to find a site that elaborated on the problems with the DVD unit (lens discoloration reaction to cleaning agents, sensor faults and how to adjust the unit). I was going to give that a try but then I'm a programmer (read:lazy bastard) and decided to just send the bugger in.
My Playstation2 was returned about three weeks later and it had developed a really interesting problem with the graphics...going to the inventory in Baldur's Gate:Dark Alliance would cause all the little objects to throw interesting splines all over the place...the brighter the object the worse the problem.
Sent it back for that issue and three weeks later I was playing games without any problems other than that damn annoying ratchet noise from the media-caddy. That was about nine months ago and now, I'm back to the problem of the unit not reading any media (well, memory cards don't count), no music CD's, no Playstation1 games, and no Playstation2 games.
Now I'm getting ready to send the unit back again, and hopefully they'll have the sense to throw-out the DVD unit and replace it with another...knowing my luck they'll give me a phone call and say something like
"...and we need to charge you an additional $75 in order to replace the DVD unit in your console, do you want us to do this?"
Of course the answer will be "Yeah, I guess so." and I'll be rattling off my CC#.
Why?
Because it's what I play games on.
And it's something of an "evil you know is better than the one you don't" situation. I could go drop another $150-$200 on a new unit, but I figure they've already made at least one engineering mod (for the graphics problem they fixed) and if the unit is stable when I get it back I'll probably spring for a linux-kit for it, or get one of those schweet logitech netplay contoller keyboards.
Initially I was really torqued about this, but then as someone who has to deal with hardware and software issues all the time I have cooled down a bit from the inital "Screw this crap!" reaction.
And as for longevity with the origial Playstations...I have an ancient second-hand playstation1 that has never, ever failed...it's survivied every TombRaider game, CrashTeam Racing, and an army of titles. Great piece of kit. Someday I hope the Playstation2 get's there.
It would be nice if someone (OPM,or other game mags, independent webmaster with hosting in some other country that doesn't cave to corporate BS) could sponsor an impartial site which would track console issues.
Cheers
W00T! Hey, it's my first "TROLL" Post!!! Thanks for the reply.
I'm probably being gang-moderated by a whole office of (card-carrying librarians | angry teachers | freshly reamed MSCE's | Seminary punks | sore sex-workers in a freshly rebooted Internet cafe) for my sweeping commentary. Just the very thought of someone actually wanting to pay that much karmatic attention to me is so exciting.
I was very well spoken and used proper english. If they understood the terms they're not a pure or as justified to mod me down as they assume they are. It was a very (tightly) fitting metaphor to describe the situation. I didn't even specify any company names. If a moderator isn't satisfied by a topical and brevitous post that doesn't play politics or name-names then they're just frustrated in other less texutal ways.
Of course, maybe they're just seeking some form of retribution or release for failing to remember their safe-word and waking up in the hospital. Nothing worse than lame bottoms with an Internet connection--no good will ever come of such diversions.
...should sometimes take the full width and breadth of their own fat rubber cock, you know so they might actually have a sense of empathy for the bottoms they normally trample with their patches and $500 dollar support incidents. They want lube? Ahahahah! Not today!
That would thrill an audience of thousands on webcams with a delicious sense of irony. Hell, I would enthusiastically ejactulate twice!!
Hey, you noticed all the GoldBricking and showmanship. That's what this is really about. It might also go that extra-mile when high-school kids are herded into an auditorium to watch recruitment videos made using it. All the shop-doodz might get wood and talk about making their own war-buggy, and the chess-headz would probably cookup stats for it so they could play with one in an RPG game or try to draw one for a extra-credit in their cad class, and all the welfare kids would probably be hoping for a scholarship so they wouldn't have to join up to get into college and eat.
Of those that enlist with this kind of thing in mind, 99.9% of them won't realize that they'll probably never see one in actual use; maybe in a motorpool, or maybe if they're not passing out in formation at a parade as a general drives past them in one, but that's about it.
If any intelligence gathering unit showed up with something like this, it would be RPG bait. Little kids would be told to roll grenades under it, and could you imagine getting it ready for inspection?! There would be a pissed off captain somewhere yelling,
"Sick Call!! The whole damn platoon!?!"
Field work is much more successful when they just (skunkworks local 151) rework several large delivery trucks, paint them up with the words, "Delivery" or "Plumbing" in the native language of the area, hire the local piraiah who can't get laid and doesn't have any friends and still lives at home playing video games or programming(holy shit, I just described 90% of slashdot!) to drive the damn thing, and spend the day driving around with electronic vacuum cleaners feeding hard-drives and tape recorders. Nobody would say a word, and the job would get done. The biggest retrofit would be to tear off the metallic top over the cargo area and setup an RF neutral one using fiberglass...no biggie, what, all of $2500 to $5000 per vehicle, and maybe all of $200 to the driver for as long as you need them, when you need them.
Crap...I'm probably screwing up posting this, I certainly hope nobody in the "Axis of Evil" is reading slashdot right now...
Cheers
The moderation system must be retarded...mmoncur hit it spot on, and should be packing a (score:5) for this insightful post.
The only experience I've had with ebooks was vile, I only had tens-of-thousands of PepsiStuff points (Air, Diet-soda...both essential for life these days) and decided to try an ebook. I don't remember what the ebook was, but I do remember it taking three websites and twenty minutes before I essentially had an Adobe chastity belt (reading harness) suitable for reading an ebook on that machine, and only that machine. The whole process was just wrong...ebooks are premmature, and like the parent message in this thread points out, this isn't good or common tech. I personally wish they wouldn't waste our time with it. Haven't we emasulated ourselves enough already? There's probably enough dead-tree books out right now to build houses out of and fuel our cooking fires (and the occasional bacchanal) for some time to come. Let's worry about digital reader enslavement when someone out of Bill Joy's closet of horrors decides to play a joke on the planet and creates a prolific self-replicating nanobot that just loves paper. Then and only then will ebooks really work.
Straight up, we need to leave the Von-Neuman crap serving webpages and go straight to using a DNA matricies and a highly paralleled quantum system to work through solution sets instead of pushing a brute-force asymmetric namespace around. If we can use simple DNA we can manipulate massive datasets in realtime. Ackerman has probably danced around such ideas (he's the "A" in RSA) and avoided them in to avoid showing up on spook-radar and being forced to live in another country.
If the key to the survival of the Federal Govt. rested on cracking a paltry 2048bit encryption key the NSA/NCSA would have it done in time to recive a bonus and loads of poorly documented funding for more happy-fun projects after lunch the same day. Of course I'm probably being optimistic, but I deal the plausibility card based on the idea that if the government could not somehow deal with RSA algorithms, they would be outlawed. For a time they were, but that seems to have passed.
And on a personal note, I would love to see the classification for the XBox go from "Game Console" to "Personal Computer" and see every single game they have for it pulled out of Blockbuster and every other rental location. Why you ask?
Because there are laws in the United States for what qualifies as a product you can rent software for. Computers, like the kind used to submit this reply, are ineligible for software rentals. Due to the accessories, Secondary storage, and shared software libaries like DirectX, the Xbox should be considred a computer and maybe even an example of Palladium in action.
Mentioning anything here about GPS and cars is like begging for asbestos long-johns. :-D
What we could snag off the shelf to accomplish something similar to this would be the same kind of proximity sensors that go into neighborhood annoynance devices (car alarms) which sense proximity based on very low intensity microwaves (like a radar). We could set these up fore and aft with radomes which could be wagged to cover a significant azimuth. Almost every automobile since the late 80's in the US has some kind of computer system for ignition, brakes, and dealer incentive idiot lights (I would like to hack car computers systems but I'm a poor man).
It would be nice to have a "cooperation" protocol among sensing systems between vehicles, with some kind of transponder squirt between vehicles, an info-only handshake to id what class of vehicle, relative speed to you, and maybe even something useful like call-signs or a cell-phone number/email address/tag-line limited to 32 characters and displayed if and only if you wanted that info. And you can bet your ass there would be an advert flag on this crap...I'd probably have road-rage as a Frito-Lay truck passes by and I get a chime and a tagline of "Once your crunch...you can't stop!" slide along the top of the display.
It would also be pretty easy to have transponder squirt relays before each major on-ramp/off-ramp which would you could preload so you'd get a chime or maybe a customized "voice" informing you of a place you need to go (preloaded by the user or based on an accumulation of info over time and enabled if you're interested in such alerts). This could be done using a locality broadcast in a restricted ghz range aimed to cover areas of the highway/road so it would dissipate quickly instead of bleeding into the local area RF traffic. It wouldn't take much to put an eraser mouse or trackball on the steering wheel so you wouldn't have to take your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel to make selections or interact with it...take it a step further and just have it use voice commands.
This stuff is all easily achived without touching big-brothers wet dream in orbit. Best to leave that stuff to the military so they can drop ordinance or find their way back to the mess-tent. Hell, most of this stuff is probably already sitting in a building right now waiting for the next big auto show. Hopefully fellow gadet freaks in subsidiaries of Toyota, Nissan, Ford, Mercedes, Plymoth, or Volvo are reading this...we need to get car-makers infected with this stuff. But the thing that really drives everyone nuts is that The Man will own everyone's ass with anything that can do these things...you know every car will have it's serial hashed into the transponder, which in turn could be used to track vehicles and their exact mph over the posted speed limit anywhere along the path, and in effect, this would both lower the number of law-enforcement people on the road, while generating a huge revenue stream--that's the only thing which will really be considered by governments, while the value-add of tracking road-use, or accidents would just be benefits after the fact.
Warning slippery slope and technology as a ratchet metaphors abound when mind and movement control are involved.
Cheers.
Fly-by-wire aircraft use computers all the time. There are backups for many real-time systems used for this purpose, and after nearly thirty years, these are proven products. The space-shuttle is a very good example of this. Early space-shuttle control systems were a nightmare of guages and displays. Now, it's a very refined system, with an emphasis on what the crew needs to know instead of some instrumentation jockey's wet-dream.
Many new aircraft are equipped with the MFD's (multi-function displays) that the military has had for decades (in one form or another) and it's about time. Most of the work done in this field is done for military use.
Anyone can bitch all they want, but when Betty starts squawking you listen and when you look at your panel you need to know exactly what's wrong. MFD's do that better than any analog guage. Combine advances in data delivery with multiple bioinformatics and a pilot will have a nearly intuitive understanding of what's going on.
I don't see a downside here, since everything is going to be exhaustively tested before it's permitted to move mass quantities of crunchy humans from one shopping spot to another. It's going to be some time before the really cool stuff finds its way into public transportation. Personally, I'm still waiting for a civilian version of a HUD, because what passes for useful car instrumentation blows (looking through the gaps in the steering wheel for data sucks) and from a consumer point-of-view, nothing addresses this shortcomming (not even that bs Cadillac thermal display).
Cheers.
where a protagonist has to give us a nakey moment as they show up in WWII America, prevent event "X" from ever taking place by blowing the hell out of Port Chicago, and then riding the shockwave back into the future while (supposedly) cleansing themselves from the timeline by erasing all the evidence(that was the plan)--but not before tittilating us all by pressing lips and bumping-uglies with someone they shouldn't have, forking a mutual process and irreperably horking the timeline forever...resulting in (Microsoft | TIA | Petrolum-Based-Economics | Silicone Breast implants | Barney) -- pick any two--and remember, the police state can work for you; so turn in a wrong-thinking family member today and preserve democracy for now and the future. Act now and we'll waive or discount the cost of the .357 round used to re-educate them. (DOH! There goes the timeline!)
With all the restraining orders and paid security, you would think he would have some peace. Poor chap, and now he's been TAKEN. We should take a moment to remember there's always time for Kubrication. (owiee..owiee...I won't do that again, I promise.)
The reason Wintel fosters this notion does have a grain of truth to it.
/dev/null) were trying to generate support for the use of flash for entire sites.
:-D
If everything you're looking at on a webpage is being pushed at you through streams because some butt-head corporate site has invested heavily in Macromedia (FLASH/SHOCKWAVE) then yes, running with anything other than a dreamsystem is going to result in some minor irritation.
This is just one of the reasons why flash pages should be an option, and not the mainstay of a website, but a little while back some ass-monkeys (I must have piped them to
Personally, I'm a "slow-tech" kind of person. I actually order bios upgrades and reuse hardware until a _real_ need to upgrade presents itself and then I upgrade to satisfy just that need. But the idea of a _needed_ upgrade is completely subjective. I won't knock anybody who feels they have have the latest and the greatest, especially if they turn around a while later and say ,
"Hey, could you use __________?"
Oh yeah.
Actually I've heard noises from on high about a plan to eventually replace all paper currency with metallic currency. Sure, it's probably a fanciful fiction, but if the highest value of coin you can carry is $1.00, then getting your paycheck in "Cash" is going to be rather extreme.
Now you've done it...Steve Jackson is going to be reading through here and suddenly start having flashbacks.
Wow, given this kind of 'sploit, it would be pretty easy giving yourself a heart-attack from laughing on your last day on the job. Just modify the company's intranet login page to perform this exploit (using somebody else's account of course) and be sure nobody sees you having giggling like a lunatic. Charge a consulting fee if they beg-plead-demand that you come back and help.
Anyone running Linux on all of their servers, using PERL/PHP/PYTHON with PostgreSQL/MySQL who is suddenly forced to run monopoly-ware by some excise-assholes, complete with Visual .NET and Win2kSp3 requirements, and maybe even a bit of MSSQL thrown in for good measure should be pissed because the monopolyware is headed right to the toilet with forced subscription licensing. And that doesn't even touch all the technical issues, like SECURITY. Depending on what it's written with and depolyed, how it accepts updates and batches or asynchronously updates to the home-office, it's going to be a pain in the ass to secure and maintain--because government will charge us for the use of the software in addition to probably having to purchase an SSL-Cert for the nasty bugger too.
If one cannot look forward enough to know how government works with regards to software deployment, then they haven't had the life-enriching experience. What will be really interesting is to see which companies in the local private sectors from each state will be awared the contract for rolling this out. We should expect still-in-college start-ups who are socially networked to family in local government with no bottom line to pitch bids and get them (government and business are nepotistic by design). It will be a damn good time to NOT be an admin for a company that actually offers something online.
Maybe what you have is a slight case of Battered Admin Syndrome. The first indicator is a destructive co-dependency on the thing which beats your ass. It's not your fault, and in order to break the cycle of violence you have to stand up to the agressor here. We can't blame Cerf or the NSF for the current state of things, but we can finger a rather monolithic corporate abuser which has fostered and supported an environment of dependency with a cycle of licensing violence that has made it increasingly harder to be an admin when dealing with pointy-haired manager types. I have never heard of any company suing M$ for dammages because they make buggy software. No manager in their right mind is going to tell you that by saving them money and releasing them from license audits that you're causing problems. Nobody is going to value you less if you don't have to work as hard to make them happy.
In the end, it's up to you. Either the monoculture assmonkeys that hold you down have to understand the problem, or you will lead a quiet life of back-up, patch, and recovery desperation.
Everyone has the capacity to be a Bastard Operator from Hell, some of us just don't have to work that hard at it.
Cheers!
Then they'll regularly send someone by to see how things are going, talk up their latest "inno-cough-vative" offering, and see if the target company is _motivated_. Sometimes, if they're lucky, one of the new programmers will have some "happy fun intranet site, or happy joy widget" made with said technology to show off (you know, the port of something which has already been working in PERL, PHP, or both using Sun, or Zeus) that will probably score them some nifty t-shirts, a mug, or hey, maybe another dousing with the developer-cd firehose.
And then if they really want to see how things are going, they'll ask for a tour of the _server room_, the holiest of the holies for said company. The annointed one will be walked around, and they'll look for familiar names, like Compaq, or Dell. But, if they see "SUN", or beige boxen then the annointed one will carefully steer conversation towards determining the nature and purpose of these boxen. Depending on the cluefulness of the tour-guide, things could either go well, and the annointed one will leave, only making note of a possible hardware upgrade deal, or they will become wrathful, and the sales-calls, port-scans, and off-hours questioning through "chance meetings" will take place until they have enough information to confront the president of the company. They will act hurt, or betrayed, and say interesting things like,
"I thought we had an understanding that you were a Microsoft Development shop", or
"How can we help you fully become a Microsoft Developer?", or my favorite,
"How has Microsoft failed to meet your needs? We are eager to help you in any way we can."
Of course, years later when the BSA sends out their letters to the less-than-faithful, and begins bringing in the police to follow up on portscans and megabytes of downloaded header logs showing all of the boxen development-only copies of software running. there will be those who remember these honeyed promises aimed only at the hearts, minds, and struggling companies or schools.
M$ has much to gain, but in the end, as they squeeze diversity and skill out of developing countries, they will also loose these possibilities forever. Linux is safe, becuase just like the smart people in Africa who refused flawed crop-seed to avoid a hideous cycle of dependency, developers in India and around the world know that freedom is more important than easily made promises. Held to a hard-line of artificial ability and capability(M$ API's are Black-boxes...no lookee, no touch-ee, no-feelie) with brittle security, smart developers and business leaders will realize that there is no get-rich quick incentive to supporting a core of fatally flawed intractable components supplied by a company which is really incapable of doing anything more than strong-arming hardware and software developers(even savvy developers need support--and when they become the support they are no longer developers), coercing companies with hideous licensing schemes by buying legislation and counting coup on the legal system of the United States. Companies seeking to get rich by suckling at the four-paned teat would do well to remember that M$ eats it's young, and often the young of others too.
Personally, I look forward to the future of streaming video veggie play with good solid farm-girls, complete with a scripted online voting interface (php!? perl?! Who cares!)...Peeled or unpeeled?! Help her decide for $5 U.S. now!!!
Meanwhile in a rural farm-house in the middle of NO-WHERE,
"Watch out! UGH!"
A perfectly quiet school-night is tainted by the sounds of pleasure and then a startling, almost scrap-heap challengesque sound normally made by something firing a pumpkin causes flocks of pigeons to leave the wires, trees, fences, and nearly every other surface of the landscaping in a massive roiling protest.
SCHOOOMPH!
This followed closely by the sounds of breaking glass and the screams of the cameraman when the spud creases the top of his head causing a permanent furrow which will set off a new trend when seen by millions around the world...the ploughed look. One development cycle later, it will be hailed as the new cleavage. Anyone with forehead cleavage will get on well with the big prosthetic foreheads they buy off of E-Bay and wear upon their real ploughed foreheads, of course.In reality the whole damn thing smacks of yet another E-Rate, whereby small opportunistic businesses will be weakened and consumed by the bigger fish when three months later the small business owners realize that the government may or may not actually provide any incentive after the business did the work...believe it or not...so this kind of move often serves to destory the initial or early implementers of technology and makes it easier for the big players to enter a market refreshingly clear of any real competition (buy failing business and obtain their contracts...aaaahh...refreshing captialism fueled by big business--who could ask for anything more?).
Compared to business as usual, maybe a bit of super-kegel exhibitionism isn't that bad?
Our faithful parent has been handed a list of desired media by their spouse. They go to one of the big media retailers, like Sam Goody (is there a listerine for the brain...I hate that place!), collect the desired titles and endure the latest R&B female vocalist performing an orgasm over the PA system (shudder) while waiting at the counter.
"Hi, are you ready to check out?"
"Yes, uhm, could you tell me if this," the customer holds up the first title for the clerk to see, "is copy protected?"
The clerk has this "uh-oh" look and nods.
"Yes," the clerk hesitantly replies trying to avoid the attention of the other clerk who is busy ringing up someone else's order.
The Customer holds up each title and each time the clerk nods, looking less happy as the customer puts them in a seperate pile, until at last there's only the pile of copy protected titles.
"Well, it was nice shopping. See ya." The customer shrugs.
The clerk watches as the customer walks away from the counter, leaving the small pile of titles, probably near $200 worth, sitting on the counter.
The worst part...if this kind of thing happens a new policy of ignorance will emerge, where the clerks will simply say they don't know or can't say. And then the store will refuse to accept any media for refund or exchange once it's been opened.
Oh, and don't forget, there's always a charge for refunding purchases made with some form of plastic, so there's going to be many people who will simply "eat it". Especially the passive cattle with plastic in this great land of diminishing returns.
Cheers.
- Extract additional monies besides taxes for anything you do that violates law
- Secure the monopoly of services you are taxed for
- To serve as the guarantors of punishment as decreed by the judicial system
- Properly intimidate, threaten, and by their very prescense quell any social unrest caused by the effects of laws on the system.
In short, if you are not a cop you are the enemy. If the ratchet of technology and laws and the info-tainment industry continue to erode the perception of security and liberty, soon we'll be living in a European democracy--the kind where people are rolled out of bed a 0400, given a tight pair of connected bracelets and be forced to explain anything and everything they're asked...and then spend some cursory time in jail w/o the ability or the right to tell anyone about it afterwards.Now imagine the military in the role of police...the job of the military is to destory things and kill people. You don't send them anywhere to do anything but that...so once the zealots pass new laws subverting pre-existing law against just such a thing, which makes soldiers into cops, people are going to die, and things will get destroyed.
We would all be wise to remember that by Geneva Convention it's illegal to fire anything but light munitions at the enemy, all those 20mm, and 50-caliber rounds are really being fired at equipment. When the Military is turned against the people, we're no longer living in the United States, we're living in China.
Cheers!
Now, I'm to the point where going out and buying a CD is a waste of time and money. As a hobbled wage-slave, I don't give a rat's ass about the fsckin' problems the music industry says they have. The bastards have been making obscene amounts of money for decades, and if the nipple isn't quite as sweet as it once was for them, then maybe they need to try the bottle.
Personally, I'm tired of all the we are in control, do not attempt to back up your media or play it on anything we have not blessed strategies and crappy laws. They don't matter when in the privacy of my home I can break copy protections at whim and blow the crap on drives or play it on hacked players. The industry needs to quit wasting their time thinking they can stop a technically superior consumer-base, just because you didn't hire us doesn't mean we're incapable of completely owning your corporate asses. We will own any format, any player, anything that doesn't blow us into tiny bits when tampered with will be defeated at whim, and the only thing they're doing is hobbling themselves, and then complaining that they have to spend too much to control us. Ahahahah...P.T. Barnum is still the man.
If there's anyone from BMG or any of the other wannabe in control media companies out there reading, I have just one final thing to say: I want to buy your product, but if and only if I can put it in player X and it will play, and then I can put it in player Xn and it will play, and if player X supports Video and Audio, then I want both, and I don't want Ads, I don't want the number of the beast tatooed on my ass, and I don't want to use only non-free OS's in order to enjoy the media I've legally purchased from some peddler. I want DVD capacities and I want some real freakin value for my buck...add hard-copy materials and packaging that make buying your product worth the time and effort. Oh yeah, and I'm not the only one--we are legion.
Cheers!
It shouldn't be a secret that most of us who discovered the really good sci-fi found it filled with sex, violence, and plenty of space-opera: hence the really good classificaiton.
As for SG-10...I've never seen an episode that really made me like the show. The show just feels wrong...how they ever made it to a seventh season is almost maddening. I still can't believe anyone is watching Andromeda, or Earth: Final Conflict for the same reasons...change-writers and kill the show.
I can't be the only person here who remembers a really great show called Space Above and Beyond, and how it was asphyxiated for funds and ridden out of town on a rail. The people who made that show had a vision of a future which was gritty, and mired in war. War is an unparalleled catalyst...and all the BS "Temporal Cold War", or "Here a Gate, there a gate" plot-line shenanigans are a pretty damn weak backdrop compared to the gritty nature of dealing with war without pulling some miracle devices out of nowhere, or completely disregarding the simplicity of making the characters grow.
I guess what we're looking at, with SG-10, is that a show doesn't have to be all that good to those who don't buy in, it just has to be good the advertisers...same probably goes for all shows on TV regardless of genre.