There is always a way it will be abused, whether some guy involved in a lame slashdot conversation can think of it or not.
It's not that I can't think of abuses to such a system. It's that I firmly believe that such an all-encompassing system will not be built. It would cost too much, and be too big of a project to complete, and would require too much manpower no matter the level of automation you think can be built into it.
Also, selective harassment already is a huge problem, we don't need to envision Orwellian futures to worry about that. Who hasn't heard a comedian joke about being pulled over for "driving while black"? Cops already have power trips, hot chicks already get stalked... these are certainly issues. We absolutely need recourse to take to task those who abuse any system of power; we must have the ability to watch the watchers.
All that aside, the fantasy database that tracks everybody all the time is just that: fantasy. And it will remain so. It's just not going to happen. That's the only point I'm really trying to make, here.
Lets face it, people will soon be tracked, it will be impossible to just slip into a city. The police will know who you are and where you are at all times.
<sigh> I cannot tell you how weary I am of hearing that. It would do you and all your ilk a world of good to go work for the FBI or the police, even as an intern, for a stretch of time.
For starters, no government agency has remotely enough manpower to keep track of "who you are and where you are at all times". They barely have enough manpower to keep up with their current tasks. I challenge you to find a single law enforcement agency in this country that would tell you they have plenty of people to handle their workload, thanks.
Second, think for a moment the kind of processing power it would take to track everybody all the time automatically. It just doesn't exist. Heck, the storage to store it all probably doesn't exist, not for the Orwellian future you're imagining. "Oh, let's see where John Doe was last Thursday. Say, here's a video of him talking to a prostitute on Main Street! Send a car to his house."
Third, if the tech did exist, you know it would be phenomenally expensive; where's the return on the investment? What could possibly make such a massive expenditure of money worth it? If you think Congress is going to divert a couple trillion dollars for something like this, you're insane.
Fourth, if you're smoking joints or picking up prostitutes, you deserve to get caught. If you're worried that they're watching you when you're not engaged in illegal activities...
FIFTH, get off your high horse and face the fact that nobody cares what you do with your private time. Nobody is interested in "tracking you" to see where you go and what you do. Some stupidly huge percentage of Americans live law-abiding lives of quiet, boring desperation; recording every one into some database would be phenomenally silly.
I'm reminded of this by people setting themselves up as guniea pig experiments for laser eye surgery. I'll wait another 10 years before diving into that one too. A lot of theory suggests everything will be okay but I'll let father time be the judge of that.
How much do you require? They've been doing laser eye surgury for something like 30 years now; when I had mine done in 1999, the 20-year trials had been complete for years already. That's one of the reasons why it became so popular in the late 90s.
Point taken on this media, though. It doesn't look like it's even a product yet, lets see how long the media lasts before we commit all our backups to it...
Believe it or not, but OO2 relying so heavily on Java is a problem, as Java is not free software.
From TFA:
Scott Carr, OO.o's quality assurance project co-lead pointed out, "OO.o will run perfectly well without any JVM, but if there is a JVM then it has to do checks to make sure what features are supported in the JVM as well as run various functions. These are only run in the presence of a JVM."
So, "relying so heavily on Java" isn't the case at all. Next point!
This gcj request asks for the addition of java.awt.Frame.createBufferStrategy which is all that is missing from gcj to build the java canvas stuff. (Though the canvas module contains a pile of spurious imports of sun.awt which are unnecessary and can be removed, not that there's much point right now, if a createBufferStrategy becomes available then removing the sun.awt from the canvas/java.javas is all that's outstanding)
So, it doesn't use Sun-specific stuff, and the only gcj problem is something that gcj doesn't support... and it runs fine without a JVM in the first place...
What about platforms where Sun does not provide a JVM? Those people will never be able to tun the full OOo, and the more Java used, the less they will be able to use. Will it eventually be zero?
From TFA:
Scott Carr, OO.o's quality assurance project co-lead pointed out, "OO.o will run perfectly well without any JVM, but if there is a JVM then it has to do checks to make sure what features are supported in the JVM as well as run various functions. These are only run in the presence of a JVM."
So, no. It will never be zero, and it's currently 100% usable without a JVM.
If the FCC is serious about ever transitioning to DTV, it needs to... come up with a way for TV stations to broadcast digital and analog in parallel for a few years and then mandate that they do so (with some form of just compensation).
With the exception of the "just compensation", which I guess I'm not really understanding, this is exactly what they did do. A year or two ago, I'm not sure when, they handed out more spectrum for the broadcasters to use to also send out digital signal. In fact, from the article:
Over 1400 broadcasters now transmit in digital as well as analog, reaching 99 percent of the U.S. television market.
So... done. And by the time this switchover happens, in almost two years, this dual broadcasting will have been in effect at least four years.
I agree with you on dropping the 'broadcast flag', though. That's was just stupid.
You seem to know what you're talking about, maybe you can help me. I'm an American, and I know somebody who's in the UK right now. I supposedly know the address where she's staying, but try as I might, I cannot get Google Maps UK to show it. Here is the address, verbatim as I received it:
54, Meakin Avenue, Westbury Park
Newcastle.
Staffs
ST5 4EY
I can actually find the street, because I know where it is from other mapping programs, but I can't get Google to find it for me. I assume I'm just unfamiliar with how UK addresses should be formatted in the search bar. Can you help? Thanks.
I'm a Windows user, but as time goes on the thought of an mac mini just to give the OS a try becomes more and more tempting.
Last year, I thought the same thing, and went out and got an iMac, just to try out OS X. My advice to you: do it. It's really a nice system, I very much enjoy working with it. I still game on my phat Windows box, but I do most everything else on the Mac now. I'll be shelling out for Tiger.
This is how it starts... It ends with two dstinct races of humans, those not genetically engineered, and those that are...
I understand how you see that as a possibility, but why is it a certainty? I predict that as more and more people do it, it will get cheaper and cheaper. And then charity organizations will start programs to bring the genetic engineering to the third-world countries, just like now they're trying to bring medicine and food and the like. Only the 'neering will be easier, in the long run, since it's cumulative. Engineer some kids, and THEIR kids will very likely already have it.
..super-intelligent super-fit...
Awesome, I say. To produce more people like this can only help the human race, as a whole.
...blond blue-eyed products who won't want to mix their bloodlines with the inferior 'naturals'.
...and, there you just lost it by devolving into scare tactics by implying that this 'super race' would essentially be another Nazi. There's no evidence that this would happen, or even that if this sort of thing were commonly available, or even available only to the rich, that all the kids would be blond and blue-eyed. Aren't there rich people all around the world? Might they choose to have their kids resemble whatever their version of beauty might be?
Then, of course, you don't mind paying more to cover the cost of a direct download only connection. Right?
Right! That's exactly how it should work. Make it a sliding scale, even. Work it like this: Downloading the bits of two hours of content costs you, say, $6. Add that to my monthly bill. And then for every, say, hour of content I upload, credit my account $1. This credit will never be paid to me in cash, but can be applied to future downloads.
Then, in the software or set-top box or whatever, give me some options:
Never upload
Upload at N KB/sec
...until I break even
...forever
People who want to leech can do so freely, at $6/movie. If I rent a movie a month, I can set mine to trickle up to slowly pay for my movie without me noticing it. Or maybe I watch movies in the evenings, so I can crank up the upload and it'll be 'done' overnight. Or maybe I 'rent' a lot, so I give it a decent upload all the time, so I always have a healthy credit to rent movies at no effective charge to me.
One simple mechanism, many ways for customers to use it to fit their style. Am I the only one that thinks this would work awesome??
Realtime raytracing is a dead end, because all of the techniques that make offline raytraced images good (soft shadows, subsurface scattering, caustics, global illumination, etc) are too slow to implement in a real time raytracer.
<chuckle> I love you people. Your argument boils down to: it's too slow right now, so therefore it's a dead end. You don't even notice that today we seem to be doing it 3-5 times faster than yesterday. What about next month? What about next year? Five years?
I'm not asserting that real-time ray tracing is the wave of the future or anything. I'm merely chuckling at your total lack of the "long view". What if in the 60s everybody said "This 'coherent light' stuff is neat, but what is it good for? Nothing. Shelve it." Would we have LASIK today? Barcode readers in supermarkets?
It's okay to be excited about cool tech, even if what we're using today is better/faster/cheaper. Because no technology is better/faster/cheaper than what it replaces right out of the gate. This is a demonstration, a prototype. It's something that couldn't be done yesterday. Lets applaud their efforts and just sit back and wait and see if it leads to better-looking games for you and I in the future, instead of telling them to give up because they didn't beat the current leaders on their first try.
If they have the authority to do something, and it becomes in the company's best interest to do it, they will do it, without hesitation.
I hate this gross oversimplification. Both the corporation and the body of shareholders are people, and as such they may very well decide that they're not going to do any evil. In fact, they may all decide that they're going to make all that money by not being evil.
The fact that you want to make a buck or two doesn't automatically mean that you'll eat babies to do it. The people at AOL may refuse to do evil, and the shareholders may refuse to try and make them. We'll just have to see.
Believe it or not, under current US law, you're not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence.
I'm going with 'not', but does anybody know of any US laws that pertain to this? The list of "illegal to discriminate against" in the US is limited to: race, religion, national origin,
color, sex, age, disability, veteran status, familial status. At least, that's what I thought. I'd be interested to know more, if anybody happens to know off-hand.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that I can't think of abuses to such a system. It's that I firmly believe that such an all-encompassing system will not be built. It would cost too much, and be too big of a project to complete, and would require too much manpower no matter the level of automation you think can be built into it.
Also, selective harassment already is a huge problem, we don't need to envision Orwellian futures to worry about that. Who hasn't heard a comedian joke about being pulled over for "driving while black"? Cops already have power trips, hot chicks already get stalked... these are certainly issues. We absolutely need recourse to take to task those who abuse any system of power; we must have the ability to watch the watchers.
All that aside, the fantasy database that tracks everybody all the time is just that: fantasy. And it will remain so. It's just not going to happen. That's the only point I'm really trying to make, here.
Doug
So, it's only gay porn, then?
Doug
<sigh> I cannot tell you how weary I am of hearing that. It would do you and all your ilk a world of good to go work for the FBI or the police, even as an intern, for a stretch of time.
For starters, no government agency has remotely enough manpower to keep track of "who you are and where you are at all times". They barely have enough manpower to keep up with their current tasks. I challenge you to find a single law enforcement agency in this country that would tell you they have plenty of people to handle their workload, thanks.
Second, think for a moment the kind of processing power it would take to track everybody all the time automatically. It just doesn't exist. Heck, the storage to store it all probably doesn't exist, not for the Orwellian future you're imagining. "Oh, let's see where John Doe was last Thursday. Say, here's a video of him talking to a prostitute on Main Street! Send a car to his house."
Third, if the tech did exist, you know it would be phenomenally expensive; where's the return on the investment? What could possibly make such a massive expenditure of money worth it? If you think Congress is going to divert a couple trillion dollars for something like this, you're insane.
Fourth, if you're smoking joints or picking up prostitutes, you deserve to get caught. If you're worried that they're watching you when you're not engaged in illegal activities...
FIFTH, get off your high horse and face the fact that nobody cares what you do with your private time. Nobody is interested in "tracking you" to see where you go and what you do. Some stupidly huge percentage of Americans live law-abiding lives of quiet, boring desperation; recording every one into some database would be phenomenally silly.
In closing, get a grip.
Doug
How much do you require? They've been doing laser eye surgury for something like 30 years now; when I had mine done in 1999, the 20-year trials had been complete for years already. That's one of the reasons why it became so popular in the late 90s.
Point taken on this media, though. It doesn't look like it's even a product yet, lets see how long the media lasts before we commit all our backups to it...
Doug
If I had a dime for every misuse of there/their/they're (or your/you're or its/it's) on Slashdot alone, I'd retire a wealthy man.
Test yourself!
Doug
Footfall!
Doug
The Cell Processor doesn't count?
Doug
From TFA:
So, "relying so heavily on Java" isn't the case at all. Next point!
Oh, they shouldn't use Sun stuff at all? From Caolán McNamara's blog:
So, it doesn't use Sun-specific stuff, and the only gcj problem is something that gcj doesn't support... and it runs fine without a JVM in the first place...
Why are we still talking about this?
Doug
From TFA:
So, no. It will never be zero, and it's currently 100% usable without a JVM.
Doug
I do not think that word means what you think it means: luddite
Slashdotters typically personify many things, but 'luddite' isn't one of them. :)
Doug
With the exception of the "just compensation", which I guess I'm not really understanding, this is exactly what they did do. A year or two ago, I'm not sure when, they handed out more spectrum for the broadcasters to use to also send out digital signal. In fact, from the article:
So... done. And by the time this switchover happens, in almost two years, this dual broadcasting will have been in effect at least four years.
I agree with you on dropping the 'broadcast flag', though. That's was just stupid.
Doug
You seem to know what you're talking about, maybe you can help me. I'm an American, and I know somebody who's in the UK right now. I supposedly know the address where she's staying, but try as I might, I cannot get Google Maps UK to show it. Here is the address, verbatim as I received it:
54, Meakin Avenue, Westbury Park
Newcastle.
Staffs
ST5 4EY
I can actually find the street, because I know where it is from other mapping programs, but I can't get Google to find it for me. I assume I'm just unfamiliar with how UK addresses should be formatted in the search bar. Can you help? Thanks.
Doug
Last year, I thought the same thing, and went out and got an iMac, just to try out OS X. My advice to you: do it. It's really a nice system, I very much enjoy working with it. I still game on my phat Windows box, but I do most everything else on the Mac now. I'll be shelling out for Tiger.
Doug
I don't know why they failed, but I do know that there is no obfiscation involved. In fact, WSP published a guided tour of the test.
Doug
I understand how you see that as a possibility, but why is it a certainty? I predict that as more and more people do it, it will get cheaper and cheaper. And then charity organizations will start programs to bring the genetic engineering to the third-world countries, just like now they're trying to bring medicine and food and the like. Only the 'neering will be easier, in the long run, since it's cumulative. Engineer some kids, and THEIR kids will very likely already have it.
Awesome, I say. To produce more people like this can only help the human race, as a whole.
...and, there you just lost it by devolving into scare tactics by implying that this 'super race' would essentially be another Nazi. There's no evidence that this would happen, or even that if this sort of thing were commonly available, or even available only to the rich, that all the kids would be blond and blue-eyed. Aren't there rich people all around the world? Might they choose to have their kids resemble whatever their version of beauty might be?
Doug
<insert standard comment about geek girls and/or pillow fights here>
Doug
Tied for 6th place!
Doug
That solution fails, by the way, to reproduce the target. I'm using:
>aFIRSTLINEd<>aNEXTLINE
That should reproduce any target, without regard to the input. And I submitted it, we'll see just how well it does. :)
Doug
Submit it, then. I'll look for Mycroft in the live standings.
Doug
Right! That's exactly how it should work. Make it a sliding scale, even. Work it like this: Downloading the bits of two hours of content costs you, say, $6. Add that to my monthly bill. And then for every, say, hour of content I upload, credit my account $1. This credit will never be paid to me in cash, but can be applied to future downloads.
Then, in the software or set-top box or whatever, give me some options:
People who want to leech can do so freely, at $6/movie. If I rent a movie a month, I can set mine to trickle up to slowly pay for my movie without me noticing it. Or maybe I watch movies in the evenings, so I can crank up the upload and it'll be 'done' overnight. Or maybe I 'rent' a lot, so I give it a decent upload all the time, so I always have a healthy credit to rent movies at no effective charge to me.
One simple mechanism, many ways for customers to use it to fit their style. Am I the only one that thinks this would work awesome??
Doug
<chuckle> I love you people. Your argument boils down to: it's too slow right now, so therefore it's a dead end. You don't even notice that today we seem to be doing it 3-5 times faster than yesterday. What about next month? What about next year? Five years?
I'm not asserting that real-time ray tracing is the wave of the future or anything. I'm merely chuckling at your total lack of the "long view". What if in the 60s everybody said "This 'coherent light' stuff is neat, but what is it good for? Nothing. Shelve it." Would we have LASIK today? Barcode readers in supermarkets?
It's okay to be excited about cool tech, even if what we're using today is better/faster/cheaper. Because no technology is better/faster/cheaper than what it replaces right out of the gate. This is a demonstration, a prototype. It's something that couldn't be done yesterday. Lets applaud their efforts and just sit back and wait and see if it leads to better-looking games for you and I in the future, instead of telling them to give up because they didn't beat the current leaders on their first try.
Doug
I hate this gross oversimplification. Both the corporation and the body of shareholders are people, and as such they may very well decide that they're not going to do any evil. In fact, they may all decide that they're going to make all that money by not being evil.
The fact that you want to make a buck or two doesn't automatically mean that you'll eat babies to do it. The people at AOL may refuse to do evil, and the shareholders may refuse to try and make them. We'll just have to see.
Doug
I'm going with 'not', but does anybody know of any US laws that pertain to this? The list of "illegal to discriminate against" in the US is limited to: race, religion, national origin, color, sex, age, disability, veteran status, familial status. At least, that's what I thought. I'd be interested to know more, if anybody happens to know off-hand.
Doug
From the print.google.com FAQ:
Doug
It's times like these that browsing with sigs turned off is deeply, deeply satisfying. And somewhat amusing. :)
...biotch.
Doug