Cool - maybe they'll have it identify you at the door and notify the salesdroids that:
1) This guy spends a lot of money in our store and
2) Having commissioned salespeople oozing all over him is the quickest way to get him to leave.
Why is it that I can drop a thousand dollars a month on electronics and software at Best Buy and I still have to show ID and get my packages checked at the door, but I spend $20 a week at the pancake house and I get treated like royalty? I'd pay _extra_ to have a system see me walk in the door and broadcast my picture and a message to all the terminals saying "Don't hassle this guy - he's a loyal customer, and don't try to bullsh*t him if he asks about technical specifications, or he'll laugh in your face and leave."...
I'm no rocket scientist (although I want to be when I grow up), but couldn't they recycle at least some of the parts of Mir? At the very least, I'd think those big solar panel arrays, and maybe some of the computer or scientific equipment would be worth carting over to Alpha. Considering it's what... $10,000/lb to get the stuff to orbit, anything remotely reusable should be kept up there if possible. I wonder if a trajectory would be possible for the shuttle or a Soyuz to stop by Mir, salvage what they could, and then match orbits with Alpha and drop them off for future use?
The Japanese ruling bothers me quite a bit. How far do they take this? If Site A carries a link to Site B (which is a movie review site, but carries no illegal material itself), and Site B carries a link to Site X (an adult movie review site, which carries material considered illegal in Japan), can Site A be prosecuted under the current interpretation of the law? It has, after all, "increased the number of ways to access obscene sites", which seems to be the basis for finding the defendant guilty under their "Article 62" (Aiding and abetting crimes involving the distribution of pornographic material.) If so, how deep does one take this? If there are 3 other sites in the chain of links between you and the offending site, are you still liable? 4? 20? It almost seems as though you could make a case for every site on the Internet being liable, as you could probably find a way to follow links from most any site to an adult site. (Wasn't there something said a couple of years ago that most sites are only 6 links away from pornographic material?) Another problem - what if Site A carries exactly one link, which points to XYZ.COM, a on-line ordering site for children's books, and a year down the road, XYZ.COM is bought by an adult magazine and begins featuring porn, without the knowledge of Site A's owners? I can see the need for sites to be able to request that no links be made to them (as in the example someone posted, wherein a small site is taken down due to links from a high-traffic site), but making one site legally liable for material presented on a site it links to seems absurd to me.
Could the "raw materials" not be used in some way? While it sounds as though the Iridium system itself is no longer practical, and schemes for repurposing it seem to be a dead-end, I would think that the structural materials and power-generating solar arrays would be useful in other projects. Perhaps the orbits are too low to make this practical, but at the per-pound cost of lofting *anything* into orbit these days, I can't help but wonder if a salvage expedition of some sort might not be a money-maker. (What the hell was the name of that stupid sci-fi series in the 70's/80's about the space garbage truck? The one with the alien clone girls and the intelligent plant???)
where they allow the submission of sites to be reviewed for possible removal from their "CyberNOT" list, and posted the following comment in regard to the site http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala.
"Why is this site on your list in the first place? Does it contain obscenity or nudity? No. It contains information about your product that you don't want people to see. Using a product with the scope and influence of CyberPatrol to censor opinions your company doesn't agree with is _ethically_and_morally_reprehensible_."
If enough people do the same, maybe it will at least get their attention. I also e-mailed a summary of what CyberPatrol is doing to the editor of our local newspaper.
I was a bit surprised to see that www.slashdot.org doesn't appear on their censored list by now...
If someone can afford a couple of textbooks at the ridiculous prices those things go for, they can certainly afford a decent laptop. I'm sitting here surfing the web, reading my e-mail, reading SlashDot, and looking over some Perl code I've been working on, all on a Compaq LTE Elite 486/75 running FreeBSD. It has a beautiful active-matrix color display, a built-in trackball, a PCMCIA ethernet card, and a 33.6K modem. Total cost: about $175, used, from ePay. Some of the functionality is provided by our server, but then if a school is going require laptops, I would imagine they could scrape together a server or six which students could access via their laptops from their dorm rooms. Stick a copy of RedHat and Star Office (or whatever it's being called these days) on a sub-$200 laptop, and you're in business. I think the whole concept is great; I know when I was in school, I kept thinking "Okay - I can think circles around most of these people, but why do I have to _memorize_ all this stuff and regurgitate it on paper during exams?" Unless I'm stuck on Gilligan's Island, I can _probably_ find a reference book or two to look up the information. And _that_ was before the marvelous Internet, which lets you find all kinds of useful (and useless...) information at a few keystrokes. People need exposure to the tools of the trade when they're in school, and those tools are computers for most college graduates today.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool - maybe they'll have it identify you at the door and notify the salesdroids that: 1) This guy spends a lot of money in our store and 2) Having commissioned salespeople oozing all over him is the quickest way to get him to leave. Why is it that I can drop a thousand dollars a month on electronics and software at Best Buy and I still have to show ID and get my packages checked at the door, but I spend $20 a week at the pancake house and I get treated like royalty? I'd pay _extra_ to have a system see me walk in the door and broadcast my picture and a message to all the terminals saying "Don't hassle this guy - he's a loyal customer, and don't try to bullsh*t him if he asks about technical specifications, or he'll laugh in your face and leave."...
Am I the only one who remembers the movie "Deal of the Century" with Chevy Chase?
I'm no rocket scientist (although I want to be when I grow up), but couldn't they recycle at least some of the parts of Mir? At the very least, I'd think those big solar panel arrays, and maybe some of the computer or scientific equipment would be worth carting over to Alpha. Considering it's what... $10,000/lb to get the stuff to orbit, anything remotely reusable should be kept up there if possible. I wonder if a trajectory would be possible for the shuttle or a Soyuz to stop by Mir, salvage what they could, and then match orbits with Alpha and drop them off for future use?
The Japanese ruling bothers me quite a bit. How far do they take this? If Site A carries a link to Site B (which is a movie review site, but carries no illegal material itself), and Site B carries a link to Site X (an adult movie review site, which carries material considered illegal in Japan), can Site A be prosecuted under the current interpretation of the law? It has, after all, "increased the number of ways to access obscene sites", which seems to be the basis for finding the defendant guilty under their "Article 62" (Aiding and abetting crimes involving the distribution of pornographic material.) If so, how deep does one take this? If there are 3 other sites in the chain of links between you and the offending site, are you still liable? 4? 20? It almost seems as though you could make a case for every site on the Internet being liable, as you could probably find a way to follow links from most any site to an adult site. (Wasn't there something said a couple of years ago that most sites are only 6 links away from pornographic material?) Another problem - what if Site A carries exactly one link, which points to XYZ.COM, a on-line ordering site for children's books, and a year down the road, XYZ.COM is bought by an adult magazine and begins featuring porn, without the knowledge of Site A's owners? I can see the need for sites to be able to request that no links be made to them (as in the example someone posted, wherein a small site is taken down due to links from a high-traffic site), but making one site legally liable for material presented on a site it links to seems absurd to me.
Oh yeah - "Quark"...
Could the "raw materials" not be used in some way? While it sounds as though the Iridium system itself is no longer practical, and schemes for repurposing it seem to be a dead-end, I would think that the structural materials and power-generating solar arrays would be useful in other projects. Perhaps the orbits are too low to make this practical, but at the per-pound cost of lofting *anything* into orbit these days, I can't help but wonder if a salvage expedition of some sort might not be a money-maker. (What the hell was the name of that stupid sci-fi series in the 70's/80's about the space garbage truck? The one with the alien clone girls and the intelligent plant???)
I just stopped by:
http://www.cyberpatrol.com/forms/siterev.asp
where they allow the submission of sites to be reviewed for possible removal from their "CyberNOT" list, and posted the following comment in regard to the site http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala.
"Why is this site on your list in the first place? Does it contain obscenity or nudity? No. It contains information about your product that you don't want people to see. Using a product with the scope and influence of CyberPatrol to censor opinions your company doesn't agree with is _ethically_and_morally_reprehensible_."
If enough people do the same, maybe it will at least get their attention. I also e-mailed a summary of what CyberPatrol is doing to the editor of our local newspaper.
I was a bit surprised to see that www.slashdot.org doesn't appear on their censored list by now...
If someone can afford a couple of textbooks at the ridiculous prices those things go for, they can certainly afford a decent laptop. I'm sitting here surfing the web, reading my e-mail, reading SlashDot, and looking over some Perl code I've been working on, all on a Compaq LTE Elite 486/75 running FreeBSD. It has a beautiful active-matrix color display, a built-in trackball, a PCMCIA ethernet card, and a 33.6K modem. Total cost: about $175, used, from ePay. Some of the functionality is provided by our server, but then if a school is going require laptops, I would imagine they could scrape together a server or six which students could access via their laptops from their dorm rooms. Stick a copy of RedHat and Star Office (or whatever it's being called these days) on a sub-$200 laptop, and you're in business. I think the whole concept is great; I know when I was in school, I kept thinking "Okay - I can think circles around most of these people, but why do I have to _memorize_ all this stuff and regurgitate it on paper during exams?" Unless I'm stuck on Gilligan's Island, I can _probably_ find a reference book or two to look up the information. And _that_ was before the marvelous Internet, which lets you find all kinds of useful (and useless...) information at a few keystrokes. People need exposure to the tools of the trade when they're in school, and those tools are computers for most college graduates today.