I remember reading a story several years back about a guy in NYC who would defecate into tin cans, clinch them shut, and sell them as art. Another woman made what she called "piss flowers" by urinating into snow, having a male helper urinate a squiggly circle around hers, then make a mold of that and bronze it.
Was it art? The second, maybe (though it was stupid art.) The first? No, I don't think so. Some may disagree, but I think it's just shit in a can.
There was another incident in which abstract paintings from an unknown artist started making waves amongst critics, who were saying critic-y things like "such expression! Such emotional power" and other such nonsense. They were somewhat embarrassed when it got out that the paintings had actually been painted by a donkey who's owner had dipped its tail in some paint and backed it up to an easel.
Was THAT art?
The point in all this is that art itself is indeed subjective. I don't think crapping into a can is art. Some people apparently do, as the guy was selling his "art" for a hefty sum of money. Which of us is right?
Once you boil the video-game-as-art issue down to the point where you realize it's a subjective judgement, Ebert's writings become meaningless. It would be as though I wrote essay after essay explaining why hot days suck. Eventually people would start to wonder "Why the hell doesn't he shut up? Who cares whether or not he likes hot days?"
And that's pretty much where I am with Ebert. He's a good movie critic. In fact he was one of the few critics back in the 70's that didn't jump on the "Pan Star Wars" bandwagon. He'd be better off spending his time writing about what he knows, which is film, and not about a genre of (art?) which I'm guessing he's never, or very rarely, been exposed to on a firsthand basis.
I think none of these additional arguments hold water either. You go on vacation and derive satisfaction. You do not derive satisfaction from knowing that a chosen few at NASA go on vacation.
Incorrect. I can read about the astronaut's experiences in articles, and watch them on television, and by listening to what he *experienced,* whatever he went to becomes more real. Do you really think the general public would be as interested in "The moon has lots of dirt on it with particle grain size ranging from.002 to.02nm and composed of various ratios of the following elements. . . " as they would be in "The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots."
Fact is, manned space exploration is what captures the imagination of the public that is funding space exploration. The general public doesn't give a crap what the moon is composed of. They want to know what the moon is *like.*
I assume you are an engineer whose sense of practicality is very different from that of the broad population.
And you're wrong. On both counts.
These things are eminently practical, fulfilling, and consequential aspects of life.
Yes, that would be the point I was making. Manned space exploration is also a fulfilling and consequential aspect of life. Just because you personally don't appreciate a particular painting doesn't mean it's not art, and just because you personally don't appreciate manned space missions doesn't mean they don't have value either.
Finally, the "get off this rock" issue is the worst of them all. That will never happen
Of course you think it won't happen, because you're assuming we'll wake up one day and stop developing man-capable spacecraft.
There's a lot of other things people claimed would never happen. We'd never sail around the world because we'd fall off the edge. We'd never fly. OK fine we can fly, but it'll never be useful. OK fine it's useful but we'll never do transcontinental routes. 640k is enough for anybody. Saying something that is not a violation of the laws of physics will "never" happen is myopic at best.
I don't have to calculate the cost of such an endeavor, nor would such a calculation hold any meaning because we have no idea what technologies we will discover that would make it not only possible, but practical.
As for transferring dollars to the defense industry - - I think they're pulling that sham off just fine without NASA's help, or were you not aware of the 2 unnecessary wars we're in right now and the billions going to defense contractors for them? It's much more profitable for the defense contractor to have the government order more ammunition than it is to have the government commission a space ship. Rockwell made five orbiters. Even assuming they took the entire $2.2billion per pricetag home as profit (and no one would claim that was possible) that's only 10.8 billion across 30 years. By contrast Northrup-Grumman made $1.7 billion last year alone.
You're starting to delve into the realm of wild conspiracy theory here. We send people into space for the same reason we send people anywhere. Because we are people, and we want to go see.
Well, yes, I suppose that my arguments disappear in the absence of humans. I'm not sure what your point is, because the robot is being sent to the space station, which contains humans.
As for being against manned exploration, that's a valid opinion. I think it wrong, however. Sending probes eliminates a key drive that humans experience. "What's out there? I want to go see for myself." When I take a vacation to the Grand Canyon or to Europe, I don't go sit in my basement for a week looking at pictures of my destination. I get on a plane and actually go there. I'm fairly certain you aren't going to sit there and tell me that I'm being stupid and wasting my money, because I should just look at remotely-gathered photographs instead. If we are only going to fund that-which-is-completely-practical, then we are going to throw away the gift that evolution has given us - namely, higher intelligence than the rest of the animal kingdom, which acts exactly as you prescribe - only doing that which directly enhances their survival at the time.
Are manned space missions practical? No. Neither are movies, or operas, or vacations, or nice cars, or getting your wife flowers, or trips to Six Flags, or eating expensive gourmet food when nutritional supplements such as what they send to famine-ravaged countries would nourish you just fine.
Would we want to live completely practically? I wouldn't. How about you?
Besides, it's entirely likely that one day we are going to wake up and discover that we need manned space travel because Earth isn't going to be a habitable place for humans anymore - whether that be from our own destruction of our world, or a meteor impact, or some other natural disaster. And that's not just me talking, that's intellects such as Hawking as well.
Wouldn't it be. . impractical. . if we hadn't continued the development of space travel so that we had no way off the planet?
Especially when robots are in the infancy stage, you don't really want to go building large expensive pieces of equipment like a space station that can only be assembled and serviced by robots. If your onboard robots BSOD or turn out to be a failure at the task to which they are assigned, it's a good idea to have the assembly/repair environment be one that humans can work with, as a backup.
Additionally, I see a psychological component brewing here. A humanoid robot would, on a subconscious level anyway, be more endearing to a crew of humans, and therefore it is more likely that they will work better in concert than with a box with a claw sticking out of it.
Plus, the humanoid form has some distinct advantages, which is why it evolved to the shape it did. If the robot is working in a microgravity environment, it's very (ha) handy to have two hands. One to grip a grabhandle in order to provide counter torque against the other one which is turning the wrench. It further makes sense to mount sensory apparatus up high on the robot because it's easier to judge clearance distances if you only have one direction (down) to worry about, and because you can make that part smaller than the main body and therefore easier to swivel in order to aim the sensory apparatus at whatever the robot needs to sense. Then pack the power supply and main processors into a central trunk (because mounting it anywhere but the centerline would create torque problems when maneuvering it) and you have a shape that starts to look suspiciously humanoid.
This robot is designed to do tasks that humans are doing now. Making it some oddball shape would require all sorts of adaptations to the humanoid form factor of the equipment it will be working on, which would be silly. You don't rebuild the entire space station to accommodate the experimental robot. You build the experimental robot to work with the existing space station.
SOE has gone even further in Star Wars Galaxies. Now most new game content is only available via loot cards in the online trading card game. You have to buy packs of cards to get the loot. . So they're charging you money to maybe (but probably not) get the in-game stuff you want. It's ridiculous. And I think it's gonna sink 'em. They've already shut down half their servers.
Really, though, I see MMO's in a similar light in which I see reality television. Reality shows are crap. But for some reason the public loves them, even though they're predictable, poorly shot, and not real. Similar thing with MMO's. Gameplay is horrible. Just about any single player game has better animation than an MMO. And just about any game has better content. MMO's content is all the same. "Talk to this guy. Go kill that big bunch of guys. Then kill a really big guy. Come back and talk to this guy again to get a collectible trinket. Rinse. Repeat ad-nauseum."
With the exception of the roleplay communities on a few of them, which create their own content and story arcs, but are small and often out-shouted by everyone else, I don't get what people see in MMO's.
A better analogy would be that you rent a house from Verizon for one month, and then actually stay in that house every night for 20 days, at which point Verizon tells you you've used up all your stay-time and have to move out.
I see spoofing enemy planes as having somewhat limited and problematic utility. After all, commanders generally know what planes they've sent where. So if they see a spoofed plane heading in when it's supposed to be heading out, or on station, or in the maintenance hangar, it's pretty likely that they'll radio them on voice, at which point the pilot had better hope he speaks the language and sounds vaguely like the guy he's supposed to be.
The key word here is "purchased." I've purchased exactly 1 app for my Droid. (Advanced Mode Scheduler. It's sweet.) But I've downloaded dozens. The android phones can be successful without lots of purchases on the marketplace because just about anything you could possibly want the phone to do is available in a free app. And even if no updates were available, the Droid is an amazing phone that has a very good suite of apps pre-installed at the factory. I don't really see a need to panic over the fact that a lot of stuff on the Android Marketplace is free.
I agree. When I was a kid, our local library had a software bin. Big ol' ziploc bags with red cardboard protectors in 'em to keep the 5.25 disks from bending when kids took 'em home bungee-corded to the carrier on their bikes. About the only good title they had was Space Rogue. The rest was crap like Project Space Station and Mavis Beacon, but still, the concept wasn't bad.
Perhaps. I've always thought that the problem with Bob, aside from the "this is for kindergartners, right?" design, was that most of the people who needed it didn't need it because they were using Macs. Bob came out not at all long after the Win 3.11 era, which as we all know was really the DOS 5 era. A good number of PC users were used to fiddling around in DOS, and so the idea of needing a little dog to hold their hand through saving documents was absurd.
Nowadays, Windows is so pervasive that, again, if you own a PC, you're probably using Windows (and if you're not, then you're on some flavor of Linux and most certainly don't need any interface help), and probably have been for years. Again, little cartoons reminding you where the file menu is, would be redundant.
What works for one situation is not guaranteed to work for another.
You don't generally have to worry about hitting pedestrians when you're 40,000 feet in the air. Aviation is very tightly controlled. There are very rarely any sudden moves made by pilots - even by private pilots. They're much more highly trained than the average driver and pedestrian. If the kind of idiot you typically see driving around town were to start flying, you'd see a lot more aviation disasters, with or without auto pilot.
And while the autopilot in airplanes works quite well, you don't see the pilots setting the auto pilot and then wandering to the back of the plane for a nap. And pilots who set the auto pilot and then fail to monitor the airplane for an hour while they play on their laptops, get their licenses revoked. If you seriously think drivers would set the auto-nav and then monitor what the car was doing very carefully for the entire trip, you're sorely mistaken. We would be relying strictly upon the computer to conduct the vehicle safely. I'm sure that's in our future, but it's in our very distant future, and it's probably going to involve a centralized computer coordinating everything, rather than individual anarchic computers all acting for themselves.
The major glaring flaw in your post is the word "if."
"IF you are informed."
Well, that's the problem. Most people aren't informed, and they don't want to be informed. It's much more fun to watch Survivor than it is to study politics. It's much more fun to watch the newscast that titillates us with stories about Biden "DROPPING THE F-BOMB" (so what?) or Tiger having sex with women (no really, so what?), or Octomom's gonna be a porn star!!! (So. The hell. What?)
A newscast that takes a long, hard, serious look at the real issues this country is facing is A) going to be on PBS which hardly anybody even looks at and B) most likely going to get ratings somewhere south of Radar Weather.
How much a candidate spends rarely has a direct influence on anyone. But how many times people see a slickly-produced advertisement for that candidate - one that uses every advertising trick in the book to make the politician look like he's the Second Coming, will. And those ads cost money. If our society were as intelligent and as educated as you think it should be (and I agree btw that it should be) candidates would simply send out one dossier to everyone eligible to vote for them, explaining in clear, concise language exactly what they stand for and what they stand against, and people would vote the best person for the job in. And politicians/political movements trying to pull jackass shenanigans like the Tea Party or the Swift Boaters would be laughed off the political stage.
But you may as well say "If it rained gold I'd be rich." It's not going to happen anytime soon, and certainly not until society as a whole gets out of this hedonistic rut we've dug for ourselves over the past 3+ decades and starts taking an interest in more than perceived personal pleasure and profit.
I'll be interested to see if they actually reconcile the bill with the House version. And I'll be even more interested to see how many Republicans vote yes. I mean, they just spent over a month telling us how corrupt and totalitarian using reconciliation is. . . .
You also assume that kicking the lobbyist-influenced bum out will mean he gets replaced with something better. The sad fact is that if you want to get to national office, you need a LOT of money, which means you need corporate help, which means you're automatically predisposed to listen to lobbyists. There's no way around it until we get rid of the multimillion dollar campaigns.
Well generally you are not denied auto insurance because your driveway needed repair back in 1985. And generally if there is a "pre existing condition" that would keep you from getting auto insurance, they do not sign you up for a policy, and then collect money from you for 30 years until you have a wreck, and then drop you because your driveway needed repair back in 1985.
There have been numerous cases of people getting sick with diseases like cancer, and being dropped from their coverage because of "preexisting conditions" consisting of things like having acne when they were teenagers. Thanks to this bill, that kind of insurance industry sleaze will no longer be allowed.
I can't see how you'd pull it off in a video game unless you had some sort of eye tracker to determine exactly what you were looking at.
Some people already have a problem with getting nauseous in FPS games. I'd imagine if they made them 3d there'd be a significant population that would hurl every time they played.
Hunting. No more constructing complex deer blinds. Have the cloak flash visible light in a spectrum the deer can't see so that you don't get shot by another hunter.
Spy tech. A lot easier to hide a bug if the bug is invisible.
Visual nuisances. Don't like that telephone pole in your back yard wrecking your view of the valley? Cloak the bastard.
Military. A cloaked sniper nest's advantages are obvious. Cloak secret military installations. Cloak factories making military hardware (we've already done this, the low-tech way. Back in WWII they disguised the Lockheed factory as a housing development by using giant canvas coverings painted like houses). Cloak troop camps. Cloak airfields. Cloak airplanes. Cloak airplanes in the air (eventually).
Of course, as with any technology, there are lots of malevolent uses too. Peeping toms will love it, as will criminals of all sorts. Hard to find the murder weapon when it's cloaked. Practical jokers will become a nuisance. Put crap on a sidewalk and cloak it, then wait for people to stumble into it.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure people will come up with lots more uses.
First off, they're going easy on the guy. The 1995 TCPA allows for up to $1500 damages per offense, payable to the plaintiff.
Second, the amount of "hurt" of the penalty should be standardized. A megacorporation that gets fined a grand for some act of wrongdoing isn't going to care, and is therefore likely to continue committing the offense, writing the penalty off as a business expense, because it's likely that the business is making far more money off of breaking the law than it is losing in penalties. That same $1000 applied to a burgerflipper at McDonalds is going to hurt a lot more.
(And since corporations insist on being treated as individual people, I would say the doctrine of equal treatment under the law should come into play here, and it's certainly not equal treatment to fine the McDonalds guy 200% of his paycheck for the same offense that you fined the corporation 0.0000001% of its daily earnings, eh?)
Point being, the $1000 fine depends on how much this dude earned. Some spammers earn a hell of a lot of money sending that crap out. Why should they get to keep so much of it after breaking state (and federal) law literally millions of times?
"I guess you should have thought of that before you sent deceptive spam to the whole world."
In general, if you're unable to pay your judgment in a lump sum, the court will work out a payment plan for you. They'll garnish a set amount out of each paycheck (usually depending on what you can reasonably afford) and give it to the plaintiff. Sure, you might be paying $50 every two weeks until you die, but. . . that's where my first sentence comes in.
I agree with your sentiments. Some of us get entirely too nerdy about works of fiction that others created. See: George Lucas haters who are pissed off because of the (admittedly atrocious) prequels.
I hated Enterprise with a passion, but not because it was a prequel, and not because they didn't give a crap about canon (how did they find Ferengi in Enterprise when we supposedly first encountered them sometime between TOS and TNG?). I hated Enterprise because the writers were out of ideas after the first few episodes. You could always tell when they couldn't think of what to write, too. "Hey, I've got writers block. Let's have the hot Vulcan chick get another disease that can only be cured by having a man rub down her naked body with oil. Again."
After the 3rd version of that little plot device, I concluded it wasn't Star Trek, but Baywatch In Space, and gave up.
I use it as well. It's caught enough stuff to convince me that it's probably doing a pretty good job of keeping my system clean.
Best of all, I installed it on the computer I built for my mom. Much nicer not getting a call twice a day asking if she should accept or deny some firewall access request. I just pointed at the taskbar icon and told her "If this is green, things are fine. If it's red, and it's not asking you to upgrade it, then it's unhappy about something and you should call me." My cell phone bill has gone way down since then;)
Avatar was the only one I didn't* get a headache in. My SO loves 3d movies, so I have to see. . pretty much all of them. I remember my eyeballs actually hurting after Coraline. In addition to the problems listed in the article, 3d shooting requires the director to really think about the human eye. Cameron got it pretty close to right in Avatar, because he picked what we were supposed to be focusing on, and made everything else slightly out of focus. Coraline made everything, no matter how far away, in focus, and so the eye couldn't figure out what to do. It knew stuff was 3d because it was layered over other things, but it couldn't judge distance accurately because everything had the same focus.
Because I have a higher-than-4th-grade education, a brain, and the ability to use the above to reason rationally.
If you'd read their documents, you'd see that none of the people practicing the Jedi "religion" are making any claims about being movie-style Jedis, with Jedi powers.
Slashdot Mirror
To a point.
I remember reading a story several years back about a guy in NYC who would defecate into tin cans, clinch them shut, and sell them as art. Another woman made what she called "piss flowers" by urinating into snow, having a male helper urinate a squiggly circle around hers, then make a mold of that and bronze it.
Was it art? The second, maybe (though it was stupid art.) The first? No, I don't think so. Some may disagree, but I think it's just shit in a can.
There was another incident in which abstract paintings from an unknown artist started making waves amongst critics, who were saying critic-y things like "such expression! Such emotional power" and other such nonsense. They were somewhat embarrassed when it got out that the paintings had actually been painted by a donkey who's owner had dipped its tail in some paint and backed it up to an easel.
Was THAT art?
The point in all this is that art itself is indeed subjective. I don't think crapping into a can is art. Some people apparently do, as the guy was selling his "art" for a hefty sum of money. Which of us is right?
Once you boil the video-game-as-art issue down to the point where you realize it's a subjective judgement, Ebert's writings become meaningless. It would be as though I wrote essay after essay explaining why hot days suck. Eventually people would start to wonder "Why the hell doesn't he shut up? Who cares whether or not he likes hot days?"
And that's pretty much where I am with Ebert. He's a good movie critic. In fact he was one of the few critics back in the 70's that didn't jump on the "Pan Star Wars" bandwagon. He'd be better off spending his time writing about what he knows, which is film, and not about a genre of (art?) which I'm guessing he's never, or very rarely, been exposed to on a firsthand basis.
I think none of these additional arguments hold water either. You go on vacation and derive satisfaction. You do not derive satisfaction from knowing that a chosen few at NASA go on vacation.
Incorrect. I can read about the astronaut's experiences in articles, and watch them on television, and by listening to what he *experienced,* whatever he went to becomes more real. Do you really think the general public would be as interested in "The moon has lots of dirt on it with particle grain size ranging from .002 to .02nm and composed of various ratios of the following elements. . . " as they would be in "The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots."
Fact is, manned space exploration is what captures the imagination of the public that is funding space exploration. The general public doesn't give a crap what the moon is composed of. They want to know what the moon is *like.*
I assume you are an engineer whose sense of practicality is very different from that of the broad population.
And you're wrong. On both counts.
These things are eminently practical, fulfilling, and consequential aspects of life.
Yes, that would be the point I was making. Manned space exploration is also a fulfilling and consequential aspect of life. Just because you personally don't appreciate a particular painting doesn't mean it's not art, and just because you personally don't appreciate manned space missions doesn't mean they don't have value either.
Finally, the "get off this rock" issue is the worst of them all. That will never happen
Of course you think it won't happen, because you're assuming we'll wake up one day and stop developing man-capable spacecraft.
There's a lot of other things people claimed would never happen. We'd never sail around the world because we'd fall off the edge. We'd never fly. OK fine we can fly, but it'll never be useful. OK fine it's useful but we'll never do transcontinental routes. 640k is enough for anybody. Saying something that is not a violation of the laws of physics will "never" happen is myopic at best.
I don't have to calculate the cost of such an endeavor, nor would such a calculation hold any meaning because we have no idea what technologies we will discover that would make it not only possible, but practical.
As for transferring dollars to the defense industry - - I think they're pulling that sham off just fine without NASA's help, or were you not aware of the 2 unnecessary wars we're in right now and the billions going to defense contractors for them? It's much more profitable for the defense contractor to have the government order more ammunition than it is to have the government commission a space ship. Rockwell made five orbiters. Even assuming they took the entire $2.2billion per pricetag home as profit (and no one would claim that was possible) that's only 10.8 billion across 30 years. By contrast Northrup-Grumman made $1.7 billion last year alone.
You're starting to delve into the realm of wild conspiracy theory here. We send people into space for the same reason we send people anywhere. Because we are people, and we want to go see.
Well, yes, I suppose that my arguments disappear in the absence of humans. I'm not sure what your point is, because the robot is being sent to the space station, which contains humans.
As for being against manned exploration, that's a valid opinion. I think it wrong, however. Sending probes eliminates a key drive that humans experience. "What's out there? I want to go see for myself." When I take a vacation to the Grand Canyon or to Europe, I don't go sit in my basement for a week looking at pictures of my destination. I get on a plane and actually go there. I'm fairly certain you aren't going to sit there and tell me that I'm being stupid and wasting my money, because I should just look at remotely-gathered photographs instead. If we are only going to fund that-which-is-completely-practical, then we are going to throw away the gift that evolution has given us - namely, higher intelligence than the rest of the animal kingdom, which acts exactly as you prescribe - only doing that which directly enhances their survival at the time.
Are manned space missions practical? No. Neither are movies, or operas, or vacations, or nice cars, or getting your wife flowers, or trips to Six Flags, or eating expensive gourmet food when nutritional supplements such as what they send to famine-ravaged countries would nourish you just fine.
Would we want to live completely practically? I wouldn't. How about you?
Besides, it's entirely likely that one day we are going to wake up and discover that we need manned space travel because Earth isn't going to be a habitable place for humans anymore - whether that be from our own destruction of our world, or a meteor impact, or some other natural disaster. And that's not just me talking, that's intellects such as Hawking as well.
Wouldn't it be. . impractical. . if we hadn't continued the development of space travel so that we had no way off the planet?
Especially when robots are in the infancy stage, you don't really want to go building large expensive pieces of equipment like a space station that can only be assembled and serviced by robots. If your onboard robots BSOD or turn out to be a failure at the task to which they are assigned, it's a good idea to have the assembly/repair environment be one that humans can work with, as a backup.
Additionally, I see a psychological component brewing here. A humanoid robot would, on a subconscious level anyway, be more endearing to a crew of humans, and therefore it is more likely that they will work better in concert than with a box with a claw sticking out of it.
Plus, the humanoid form has some distinct advantages, which is why it evolved to the shape it did. If the robot is working in a microgravity environment, it's very (ha) handy to have two hands. One to grip a grabhandle in order to provide counter torque against the other one which is turning the wrench. It further makes sense to mount sensory apparatus up high on the robot because it's easier to judge clearance distances if you only have one direction (down) to worry about, and because you can make that part smaller than the main body and therefore easier to swivel in order to aim the sensory apparatus at whatever the robot needs to sense. Then pack the power supply and main processors into a central trunk (because mounting it anywhere but the centerline would create torque problems when maneuvering it) and you have a shape that starts to look suspiciously humanoid.
This robot is designed to do tasks that humans are doing now. Making it some oddball shape would require all sorts of adaptations to the humanoid form factor of the equipment it will be working on, which would be silly. You don't rebuild the entire space station to accommodate the experimental robot. You build the experimental robot to work with the existing space station.
SOE has gone even further in Star Wars Galaxies. Now most new game content is only available via loot cards in the online trading card game. You have to buy packs of cards to get the loot. . So they're charging you money to maybe (but probably not) get the in-game stuff you want. It's ridiculous. And I think it's gonna sink 'em. They've already shut down half their servers.
Really, though, I see MMO's in a similar light in which I see reality television. Reality shows are crap. But for some reason the public loves them, even though they're predictable, poorly shot, and not real. Similar thing with MMO's. Gameplay is horrible. Just about any single player game has better animation than an MMO. And just about any game has better content. MMO's content is all the same. "Talk to this guy. Go kill that big bunch of guys. Then kill a really big guy. Come back and talk to this guy again to get a collectible trinket. Rinse. Repeat ad-nauseum."
With the exception of the roleplay communities on a few of them, which create their own content and story arcs, but are small and often out-shouted by everyone else, I don't get what people see in MMO's.
A better analogy would be that you rent a house from Verizon for one month, and then actually stay in that house every night for 20 days, at which point Verizon tells you you've used up all your stay-time and have to move out.
I see spoofing enemy planes as having somewhat limited and problematic utility. After all, commanders generally know what planes they've sent where. So if they see a spoofed plane heading in when it's supposed to be heading out, or on station, or in the maintenance hangar, it's pretty likely that they'll radio them on voice, at which point the pilot had better hope he speaks the language and sounds vaguely like the guy he's supposed to be.
The key word here is "purchased." I've purchased exactly 1 app for my Droid. (Advanced Mode Scheduler. It's sweet.) But I've downloaded dozens. The android phones can be successful without lots of purchases on the marketplace because just about anything you could possibly want the phone to do is available in a free app. And even if no updates were available, the Droid is an amazing phone that has a very good suite of apps pre-installed at the factory. I don't really see a need to panic over the fact that a lot of stuff on the Android Marketplace is free.
I agree. When I was a kid, our local library had a software bin. Big ol' ziploc bags with red cardboard protectors in 'em to keep the 5.25 disks from bending when kids took 'em home bungee-corded to the carrier on their bikes. About the only good title they had was Space Rogue. The rest was crap like Project Space Station and Mavis Beacon, but still, the concept wasn't bad.
Perhaps. I've always thought that the problem with Bob, aside from the "this is for kindergartners, right?" design, was that most of the people who needed it didn't need it because they were using Macs. Bob came out not at all long after the Win 3.11 era, which as we all know was really the DOS 5 era. A good number of PC users were used to fiddling around in DOS, and so the idea of needing a little dog to hold their hand through saving documents was absurd.
Nowadays, Windows is so pervasive that, again, if you own a PC, you're probably using Windows (and if you're not, then you're on some flavor of Linux and most certainly don't need any interface help), and probably have been for years. Again, little cartoons reminding you where the file menu is, would be redundant.
Oh, wait. . .Deja vu.
What works for one situation is not guaranteed to work for another.
You don't generally have to worry about hitting pedestrians when you're 40,000 feet in the air. Aviation is very tightly controlled. There are very rarely any sudden moves made by pilots - even by private pilots. They're much more highly trained than the average driver and pedestrian. If the kind of idiot you typically see driving around town were to start flying, you'd see a lot more aviation disasters, with or without auto pilot.
And while the autopilot in airplanes works quite well, you don't see the pilots setting the auto pilot and then wandering to the back of the plane for a nap. And pilots who set the auto pilot and then fail to monitor the airplane for an hour while they play on their laptops, get their licenses revoked. If you seriously think drivers would set the auto-nav and then monitor what the car was doing very carefully for the entire trip, you're sorely mistaken. We would be relying strictly upon the computer to conduct the vehicle safely. I'm sure that's in our future, but it's in our very distant future, and it's probably going to involve a centralized computer coordinating everything, rather than individual anarchic computers all acting for themselves.
The major glaring flaw in your post is the word "if."
"IF you are informed."
Well, that's the problem. Most people aren't informed, and they don't want to be informed. It's much more fun to watch Survivor than it is to study politics. It's much more fun to watch the newscast that titillates us with stories about Biden "DROPPING THE F-BOMB" (so what?) or Tiger having sex with women (no really, so what?), or Octomom's gonna be a porn star!!! (So. The hell. What?)
A newscast that takes a long, hard, serious look at the real issues this country is facing is A) going to be on PBS which hardly anybody even looks at and B) most likely going to get ratings somewhere south of Radar Weather.
How much a candidate spends rarely has a direct influence on anyone. But how many times people see a slickly-produced advertisement for that candidate - one that uses every advertising trick in the book to make the politician look like he's the Second Coming, will. And those ads cost money. If our society were as intelligent and as educated as you think it should be (and I agree btw that it should be) candidates would simply send out one dossier to everyone eligible to vote for them, explaining in clear, concise language exactly what they stand for and what they stand against, and people would vote the best person for the job in. And politicians/political movements trying to pull jackass shenanigans like the Tea Party or the Swift Boaters would be laughed off the political stage.
But you may as well say "If it rained gold I'd be rich." It's not going to happen anytime soon, and certainly not until society as a whole gets out of this hedonistic rut we've dug for ourselves over the past 3+ decades and starts taking an interest in more than perceived personal pleasure and profit.
The auto-bookmark when you look away might be nice, but dimming text you're not looking at that second is just plain stupid.
I'll be interested to see if they actually reconcile the bill with the House version. And I'll be even more interested to see how many Republicans vote yes. I mean, they just spent over a month telling us how corrupt and totalitarian using reconciliation is. . . .
You also assume that kicking the lobbyist-influenced bum out will mean he gets replaced with something better. The sad fact is that if you want to get to national office, you need a LOT of money, which means you need corporate help, which means you're automatically predisposed to listen to lobbyists. There's no way around it until we get rid of the multimillion dollar campaigns.
Well generally you are not denied auto insurance because your driveway needed repair back in 1985. And generally if there is a "pre existing condition" that would keep you from getting auto insurance, they do not sign you up for a policy, and then collect money from you for 30 years until you have a wreck, and then drop you because your driveway needed repair back in 1985.
There have been numerous cases of people getting sick with diseases like cancer, and being dropped from their coverage because of "preexisting conditions" consisting of things like having acne when they were teenagers. Thanks to this bill, that kind of insurance industry sleaze will no longer be allowed.
I can't see how you'd pull it off in a video game unless you had some sort of eye tracker to determine exactly what you were looking at.
Some people already have a problem with getting nauseous in FPS games. I'd imagine if they made them 3d there'd be a significant population that would hurl every time they played.
Hunting. No more constructing complex deer blinds. Have the cloak flash visible light in a spectrum the deer can't see so that you don't get shot by another hunter.
Spy tech. A lot easier to hide a bug if the bug is invisible.
Visual nuisances. Don't like that telephone pole in your back yard wrecking your view of the valley? Cloak the bastard.
Military. A cloaked sniper nest's advantages are obvious. Cloak secret military installations. Cloak factories making military hardware (we've already done this, the low-tech way. Back in WWII they disguised the Lockheed factory as a housing development by using giant canvas coverings painted like houses). Cloak troop camps. Cloak airfields. Cloak airplanes. Cloak airplanes in the air (eventually).
Of course, as with any technology, there are lots of malevolent uses too. Peeping toms will love it, as will criminals of all sorts. Hard to find the murder weapon when it's cloaked. Practical jokers will become a nuisance. Put crap on a sidewalk and cloak it, then wait for people to stumble into it.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure people will come up with lots more uses.
First off, they're going easy on the guy. The 1995 TCPA allows for up to $1500 damages per offense, payable to the plaintiff.
Second, the amount of "hurt" of the penalty should be standardized. A megacorporation that gets fined a grand for some act of wrongdoing isn't going to care, and is therefore likely to continue committing the offense, writing the penalty off as a business expense, because it's likely that the business is making far more money off of breaking the law than it is losing in penalties. That same $1000 applied to a burgerflipper at McDonalds is going to hurt a lot more.
(And since corporations insist on being treated as individual people, I would say the doctrine of equal treatment under the law should come into play here, and it's certainly not equal treatment to fine the McDonalds guy 200% of his paycheck for the same offense that you fined the corporation 0.0000001% of its daily earnings, eh?)
Point being, the $1000 fine depends on how much this dude earned. Some spammers earn a hell of a lot of money sending that crap out. Why should they get to keep so much of it after breaking state (and federal) law literally millions of times?
"I guess you should have thought of that before you sent deceptive spam to the whole world."
In general, if you're unable to pay your judgment in a lump sum, the court will work out a payment plan for you. They'll garnish a set amount out of each paycheck (usually depending on what you can reasonably afford) and give it to the plaintiff. Sure, you might be paying $50 every two weeks until you die, but. . . that's where my first sentence comes in.
I agree with your sentiments. Some of us get entirely too nerdy about works of fiction that others created. See: George Lucas haters who are pissed off because of the (admittedly atrocious) prequels.
I hated Enterprise with a passion, but not because it was a prequel, and not because they didn't give a crap about canon (how did they find Ferengi in Enterprise when we supposedly first encountered them sometime between TOS and TNG?). I hated Enterprise because the writers were out of ideas after the first few episodes. You could always tell when they couldn't think of what to write, too. "Hey, I've got writers block. Let's have the hot Vulcan chick get another disease that can only be cured by having a man rub down her naked body with oil. Again."
After the 3rd version of that little plot device, I concluded it wasn't Star Trek, but Baywatch In Space, and gave up.
I use it as well. It's caught enough stuff to convince me that it's probably doing a pretty good job of keeping my system clean.
Best of all, I installed it on the computer I built for my mom. Much nicer not getting a call twice a day asking if she should accept or deny some firewall access request. I just pointed at the taskbar icon and told her "If this is green, things are fine. If it's red, and it's not asking you to upgrade it, then it's unhappy about something and you should call me." My cell phone bill has gone way down since then ;)
Avatar was the only one I didn't* get a headache in. My SO loves 3d movies, so I have to see. . pretty much all of them. I remember my eyeballs actually hurting after Coraline. In addition to the problems listed in the article, 3d shooting requires the director to really think about the human eye. Cameron got it pretty close to right in Avatar, because he picked what we were supposed to be focusing on, and made everything else slightly out of focus. Coraline made everything, no matter how far away, in focus, and so the eye couldn't figure out what to do. It knew stuff was 3d because it was layered over other things, but it couldn't judge distance accurately because everything had the same focus.
Because I have a higher-than-4th-grade education, a brain, and the ability to use the above to reason rationally.
If you'd read their documents, you'd see that none of the people practicing the Jedi "religion" are making any claims about being movie-style Jedis, with Jedi powers.