"what guidelines will they be using to determine what is child porn and what is not?"
Sophisticated TLAR (That Looks About Right) age guesstimation technigues and IOA (Inspecting Official Arousal) metrics will ensure fair and unbiased content review.
"Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?"
Yeah, but their business model isn't my problem.
Maybe it will result in a cool gadget for me to play with (for cheap when it ends up at the flea market) or maybe not.
"Laptops require more physical interaction than you want to engage in when you're reading a 1,000 page tome. To read on a laptop you have to sit up, stare in one direction, operate a scroll wheel each time you want to see the next page (or click, or drag, or reach out and press a key). You can't "lounge about" on large pieces of soft furniture, adjusting your position as bits of you become overcompressed or uncomfortable. Laptops are fine for a little light reading, but they fail miserably for long stretches."
Reading comfort for me is all about preparing a suitable recumbent setting.
I read in my electric recliner ("medical lift chair", keep an eye out for used ones!) using my Thinkpad A31 on my lap (with a cooling pad Velcro'ed to the bottom to avoid roasted nuts) and a Logitech Marble Mouse for minimal hand movement. The setup is very comfortable, adjustable, and I can vegetate comfortably for many hours at a stretch. No need to hold the lappie up or hold it in place. I vnc into my other machines so no need to move about.
The parent helos (H-3 variants, UH-60) construction is common knowledge and so it how to shoot one down.
Many H-3 variants were shot down during the Viet Nam war and plinking Blackhawks has been proven practical with RPGs (which cannot be jammed or spoofed) since Mogadishu.
Hit the tail rotor, gearbox, or important accessories like the aircrew and you'll have a nice smoking hole without benefit of P2P.
Wood is primarily used due to cost and ease of fabrication. It is, compared to steel and concrete, cheap shit. When I see bunkers, factories, or hardened aircraft shelters made of wood I might recant.:)
Every house in a place threatened by nature should IMO be a (cozy and eco-friendly) bunker or have one added. One doesn't see new factories made of wood, nor hardened aircraft shelters. If you live in an area that will get hit, design to shelter when getting hit. A 20' ISO container could be potted in concrete or revetted with Hesco earth bastion as a free-standing shelter no quake would break (unless it fell into a hole) and no wildfire could consume.
I don't live in a quake zone, but adapting concrete construction for those who do is old hat. Fiber reinforcement, rebar, reinforcing mat and so forth work fine, and rebar can be potted into block walls with mortar. Private dwellings in quake-prone areas shouldn't be over a single storey.
There will be plenty more wildfires, and the odd earthquake. I find preparedness more appealing than pain.
Traditional wood-framed (cheap shit) construction is popular because it can be assembled with a three-man crew. The components are light (therefore easy to lift) and do not require much in the way of tools on-site. Wood, wood products, plastic, and so forth are very easy to work with for a contractor with modest experience. The tools fit in a pickup truck.
People don't think about what they are buying other than wanting it to look like everything else.
People don't think about using fire-resistant materials like concrete which are far superior to wood, nor do they choose modern metal roofing which is durable and easily outlasts shingles (and weighs less, is stronger in storms, and is much easier to install).
If you want a house to resist fire, simple concrete block construction on a cement slab with a steel roof on steel trusses is a fine way to go. Cut GENEROUS firebreaks around it (fires need fuel, so cut down the brush and trees and compost them away from structures) and have some amount of water under pressure available to fight fire should it reach your home.
If you want outbuildings to resist fire, store flammables outdoors in lockers away from them, and use metal for your structures. I use two forty-foot ISO containers (buy the 9'6" High Cubes if you have a choice) and a Steelmaster garage.
Concrete is durable, termites don't eat it, it doesn't burn, and it lasts far longer than wood. If you want sexy, rustic concrete then mimic adobe structures. Containers are also excellent and could easily replace single-wide mobile homes, and are far stronger and more weatherproof (good to 100mph winds!).
"There is so much genetic material phasing into and out of existence, human beings could not begin to comprehend it all. "
That is why we should collect as much as practical for future examination and exploitation. Save the data for when we have much greater power to use it. Every species lost is potentially useful data.
Keeping the frogs available for study may help us learn to exploit them.
The more creatures we "ranch" the more we have available. Think of it as a "seed bank" of sorts. Instead of killing off species, we can retain and manipulate them.
"Why does no one care about ISS or a permanent moon base? Are they inherently dullsville, or has the space science community done a lousy job selling itself to the public?"
Because we have shorted the incredible potential of robotic exploration in the pointless rush to send meat tourists into space. Meat explorers were cost-effective on Earth because we could afford to expend many men and many ships, and in those days it was accepted that many of them would not come back.
Now we can explore and learn from afar, and the development of better and better robots is of more value then sending fixed-capability meat tourists on short trips in transport systems that cannot rapidly evolve due to overwhelming crew safety considerations!
We can wait a hundred years to send tourists, meanwhile sending out many cheap probes which we do not need to get back. We should evolve our tech so far that we don't need people on the spot anywhere for anything.
Have some Voyager, and consider how many, MANY more such we could launch if we weren't jerking off sending tourists into Earth orbit:
"The main reason behind people thinking we're the most technologically advanced country is the idiotic "God Bless America" / "We're #1" crap"
Religion is a key reason for the intellectual backwardness of the majority of the US population. Science is the enemy of their imaginary celestial friend, and all intellectuals are just a bunch of scheming atheist Commie liberals.
The stereotypical American is the typical American. We have some very bright people. but the mob is the enemy of social progress. There is a huge disconnect between "leading edge" Americans and the mass of ignorant slaves to theism. I find it interesting that we fight the Taliban not because they are backward and toxic, but because they are not Bible Thumpers.
"Standard forensics procedure is to make an exact copy before even touching anything. They even have special hardware for mirroring devices like hard drives and whatnot."
That implies a forensic-level search as opposed to some underpaid flunky doing a cursory lookover.
What is needed is a destructive decryption program that produces files with innocent.zip or.rar file extensions that "decompress" into benign images or other files while destroying the original data. Unless the file is renamed and then opened with the appropriate program, no data is available.
All defaults would appear "wholesome",
The Thought Police request access to your flash drive. You hand it to them without comment, they open the files which display innocent images you personally selected beforehand. There is no steganography, the data is lost.
"But I have an even better idea. Why don't we use our military to evacuate cities and then destroy them. Think of all the jobs that will be created in the evacuation, military, and construction industries!"
The Khmer Rouge tried basically that, but the jobs thing didn't pan out. Their HR department was a tad harsh and tended to alienate surviving workers.
They were scrapped carcasses back many decades ago. For example, M151s were demilled by being torchcut into chunks. "Jeeps" of the actual "Jeep" persuasion are ancient history.
is where to directly bid online for much of what Uncle Sugar no longer needs, but bulk buyers drive up costs quite a bit. If you collect military vehicles, large trucks are often bargains, but fun stuff like CUCVs tend to go high. Lots of interesting stuff, and well worth a browse.
If the target office has a networked telephone system connected between the computer and the network, you might be able to monitor that at the same time. Many desks sit undisturbed for years, and even if someone sees the device they might not remove it.
Slashdot Mirror
"what guidelines will they be using to determine what is child porn and what is not?"
Sophisticated TLAR (That Looks About Right) age guesstimation technigues and IOA (Inspecting Official Arousal) metrics will ensure fair and unbiased content review.
Intel should just buy out Psion, problem solved.
"Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?"
Yeah, but their business model isn't my problem.
Maybe it will result in a cool gadget for me to play with (for cheap when it ends up at the flea market) or maybe not.
"Where's your God now?"
In R'lyeh, sleeping. Why do you ask?
"Laptops require more physical interaction than you want to engage in when you're reading a 1,000 page tome. To read on a laptop you have to sit up, stare in one direction, operate a scroll wheel each time you want to see the next page (or click, or drag, or reach out and press a key). You can't "lounge about" on large pieces of soft furniture, adjusting your position as bits of you become overcompressed or uncomfortable. Laptops are fine for a little light reading, but they fail miserably for long stretches."
Reading comfort for me is all about preparing a suitable recumbent setting.
I read in my electric recliner ("medical lift chair", keep an eye out for used ones!) using my Thinkpad A31 on my lap (with a cooling pad Velcro'ed to the bottom to avoid roasted nuts) and a Logitech Marble Mouse for minimal hand movement. The setup is very comfortable, adjustable, and I can vegetate comfortably for many hours at a stretch. No need to hold the lappie up or hold it in place. I vnc into my other machines so no need to move about.
Boring.
The parent helos (H-3 variants, UH-60) construction is common knowledge and so it how to shoot one down.
Many H-3 variants were shot down during the Viet Nam war and plinking Blackhawks has been proven practical with RPGs (which cannot be jammed or spoofed) since Mogadishu.
Hit the tail rotor, gearbox, or important accessories like the aircrew and you'll have a nice smoking hole without benefit of P2P.
"Cheap shit, just because of a timber frame?"
Wood is primarily used due to cost and ease of fabrication. It is, compared to steel and concrete, cheap shit. :)
When I see bunkers, factories, or hardened aircraft shelters made of wood I might recant.
Every house in a place threatened by nature should IMO be a (cozy and eco-friendly) bunker or have one added. One doesn't see new factories made of wood, nor hardened aircraft shelters. If you live in an area that will get hit, design to shelter when getting hit. A 20' ISO container could be potted in concrete or revetted with Hesco earth bastion as a free-standing shelter no quake would break (unless it fell into a hole) and no wildfire could consume.
I don't live in a quake zone, but adapting concrete construction for those who do is old hat. Fiber reinforcement, rebar, reinforcing mat and so forth work fine, and rebar can be potted into block walls with mortar. Private dwellings in quake-prone areas shouldn't be over a single storey.
There will be plenty more wildfires, and the odd earthquake. I find preparedness more appealing than pain.
Traditional wood-framed (cheap shit) construction is popular because it can be assembled with a three-man crew. The components are light (therefore easy to lift) and do not require much in the way of tools on-site. Wood, wood products, plastic, and so forth are very easy to work with for a contractor with modest experience. The tools fit in a pickup truck.
People don't think about what they are buying other than wanting it to look like everything else.
People don't think about using fire-resistant materials like concrete which are far superior to wood, nor do they choose modern metal roofing which is durable and easily outlasts shingles (and weighs less, is stronger in storms, and is much easier to install).
If you want a house to resist fire, simple concrete block construction on a cement slab with a steel roof on steel trusses is a fine way to go. Cut GENEROUS firebreaks around it (fires need fuel, so cut down the brush and trees and compost them away from structures) and have some amount of water under pressure available to fight fire should it reach your home.
If you want outbuildings to resist fire, store flammables outdoors in lockers away from them, and use metal for your structures. I use two forty-foot ISO containers (buy the 9'6" High Cubes if you have a choice) and a Steelmaster garage.
Concrete is durable, termites don't eat it, it doesn't burn, and it lasts far longer than wood. If you want sexy, rustic concrete then mimic adobe structures. Containers are also excellent and could easily replace single-wide mobile homes, and are far stronger and more weatherproof (good to 100mph winds!).
"Till humans end up in captive breeding programs to keep the population alive?"
We do essentially that with foreign aid.
"There is so much genetic material phasing into and out of existence, human beings could not begin to comprehend it all. "
That is why we should collect as much as practical for future examination and exploitation. Save the data for when we have much greater power to use it. Every species lost is potentially useful data.
"This is not "pimp my router"."
If enough customers will spend sweet, sweet monies on a pimped router there is every reason to give them that option.
Slashdot has already provided a suitably artful theme:
http://armish.linux-sevenler.org/blog/wp-content/pembeslash.jpg
Keeping the frogs available for study may help us learn to exploit them.
The more creatures we "ranch" the more we have available. Think of it as a "seed bank" of sorts. Instead of killing off species, we can retain and manipulate them.
"Why does no one care about ISS or a permanent moon base? Are they inherently dullsville, or has the space science community done a lousy job selling itself to the public?"
Because we have shorted the incredible potential of robotic exploration in the pointless rush to send meat tourists into space. Meat explorers were cost-effective on Earth because we could afford to expend many men and many ships, and in those days it was accepted that many of them would not come back.
Now we can explore and learn from afar, and the development of better and better robots is of more value then sending fixed-capability meat tourists on short trips in transport systems that cannot rapidly evolve due to overwhelming crew safety considerations!
We can wait a hundred years to send tourists, meanwhile sending out many cheap probes which we do not need to get back. We should evolve our tech so far that we don't need people on the spot anywhere for anything.
Have some Voyager, and consider how many, MANY more such we could launch if we weren't jerking off sending tourists into Earth orbit:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/mission.html
"The main reason behind people thinking we're the most technologically advanced country is the idiotic "God Bless America" / "We're #1" crap"
Religion is a key reason for the intellectual backwardness of the majority of the US population. Science is the enemy of their imaginary celestial friend, and all intellectuals are just a bunch of scheming atheist Commie liberals.
The stereotypical American is the typical American. We have some very bright people. but the mob is the enemy of social progress. There is a huge disconnect between "leading edge" Americans and the mass of ignorant slaves to theism. I find it interesting that we fight the Taliban not because they are backward and toxic, but because they are not Bible Thumpers.
I mentioned renaming because the program sould be designed to "extract" benign content WITHOUT a password of any sort.
Only by renaming the file extension would it request a password. "Wholesome defaults" all the way.
"Standard forensics procedure is to make an exact copy before even touching anything. They even have special hardware for mirroring devices like hard drives and whatnot."
That implies a forensic-level search as opposed to some underpaid flunky doing a cursory lookover.
What is needed is a destructive decryption program that produces files with innocent .zip or .rar file extensions that "decompress" into benign images or other files while destroying the original data. Unless the file is renamed and then opened with the appropriate program, no data is available.
All defaults would appear "wholesome",
The Thought Police request access to your flash drive. You hand it to them without comment, they open the files which display innocent images you personally selected beforehand. There is no steganography, the data is lost.
"But I have an even better idea. Why don't we use our military to evacuate cities and then destroy them. Think of all the jobs that will be created in the evacuation, military, and construction industries!"
The Khmer Rouge tried basically that, but the jobs thing didn't pan out. Their HR department was a tad harsh and tended to alienate surviving workers.
"Isn't there some sort of larger personality issue involved there?"
Other than the reasonable expectation that the flies will take care of my grooming?
"Why could that be? I think it might be because it contains 'spik,' but even that seems ridiculous."
It's obviously offensive on many levels. :)
Just use a wholesome nick like "Coprophagous" and be done with it.
"And we wonder if the government wastes taxpayer money: SOLD - PS3 Guitar Hero guitar [govliquidation.com] "
Stuff on govliquidation isn't always directly bought by the goverment when new, and may include impounded or abandoned items.
"In all seriousness, where are those $15 jeeps?"
They were scrapped carcasses back many decades ago. For example, M151s were demilled by being torchcut into chunks. "Jeeps" of the actual "Jeep" persuasion are ancient history.
http://www.govliquidation.com/
is where to directly bid online for much of what Uncle Sugar no longer needs, but bulk buyers drive up costs quite a bit. If you collect military vehicles, large trucks are often bargains, but fun stuff like CUCVs tend to go high. Lots of interesting stuff, and well worth a browse.
If the target office has a networked telephone system connected between the computer and the network, you might be able to monitor that at the same time. Many desks sit undisturbed for years, and even if someone sees the device they might not remove it.
Label it "LAN Surge Protector" or similar.
"If you're struggling to use Windows XP on a daily basis, perhaps you should try something like this laptop."
At last, a computer for First Lieutenants!
Once these are issued they won't have to fight the 2LT's for the Etch-A-Sketch,
I'd be delighted if Windows died.
Open and Free competition would still be "competition", and to judge by OS and distro diversity there would _remain_ plenty of eager competitors.