First off, the early race-flame posts are ridiculous, so Why bother?
One of the key virtues to the internet is that no one knows you're an idiot until you open your mouth, so why the urge to walk up to an enemy with a rifle and say, 'hey, I think you dropped these bullets?'
Second, holy spit! Robots posessing that degree of physical dexterity are really frightening.
Before that article, it was easy to imagine that the writer from How Stuff Works.com was writing a distant, pie-in-the-sky scenario when he talked about anthropomorphic robots capable of replacing people in jobs. Seeing a robot, smaller than a midget human, and so dextrous that it can approximate sumo or Tai-Ji moves makes you think of applications for the near-term.
Can a team of them spot-weld hard-to-reach places in automobile assembly with the power problem of individual units solved by a 'chaining' or 'tag-team' system that replaces each one that runs down with others given the same instructions that are charging in nearby racks?
Could industrial versions be used for remote visual inspection tasks in ships, planes and architectural crawl-spaces and will future designs incorporate spaces that can only accomodate them saving space in each?
Is the technology behind this degree of articulation adaptable to use in pre-existing technologies like hard-shell diving suits?
Currently, approximately three million Americans are employed in agriculture with an efficiency so great that government subsidies are needed to make comodity production a viable industry. What happens to world markets when all the labor of farming in the United States is done by a million robots, working day and night, serviced by ten-thousand technicians?
With first-world price protections in commodities strangling third-world agriculture today, full mechanization would make the situation much worse in the future.
The possibilities boggle the mind and as more and more technological glitches are solved and as some designs turn away from anthropomorphic models, it is pretty easy to imagine many technologies which simply cut the human out of the manufacturing equation altogether.
Capitalism worships efficiency and with a sufficient capital outlay it its disposal, it is easy to see a massive influx of robots changing the picture of how the world works, either by completely destroying much of labor's value, or by freeing up huge numbers of people to dream and build and organize and create higher things.
Considering the lust for power and dominance that seems built in to the organism, it is very hard to imagine machines decreasing the bargaining power of labor leading to increased freedom.
Here you've got a situation where the wonders of modern technology throw a big bright spotlight on the classical evils of monopoly. One company that not only participates in the market but for all intents and purposes is the market, in fact, a crucial, ubiquitous market will inevitably not only fix prices in ways that avoid the scrutiny of the regulatory organs of industry and the state, but will actually buy or replace the regulators with the machinery of its own advantage.
There is no surprise in watching yet another Microsoft critic going silent in the face of pressure, threats, lawsuits, stock-buys or whatever the hell else it was this time. Theory, experience and history all say that giant companies will offer less-than-optimal performance to the societies that play host to them; there will always be something visibly better and money, prestige or 'clout' will always blind those at the top from seeing it. This is no surprise.
What is surprising however is that we can go through so much, so regularly with the consequences limited to a ritual sacrifice of only a few billions every year to fix problems caused by Microsoft's bloated sloppiness--call it the second Microsoft tax.
Really, the only surprise is that the bill or the comeuppance haven't been bigger. In today's world, with Western European nations suddenly finding themselves with real, determined, well-hidden enemies, it's a good thing that the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan is going to be a gigantic military rubber duckie instead of a real target in a world filled with real conflicts.
As the first United States vessel with information systems built from the ground up around Microsoft technology, and one with a crew of three-thousand, the potential for tragedy would be stunning.
Of course, by the logic that led to the closing of the Microsoft Vulnerabilities page--with crackers and script kiddies having no information sources whatsoever but what MS-critics reveal--my writing this is an even greater disservice to the military than its using software that is as secure a sieve with a hole in it.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Every technology that changes society changes the way things work and in a very real sense, changes consciousness.
Telemarketing supported by old mechanized telephone exchange technology and computers have made telemarketing ubiquitous and intrusive to the point that people have learned to find it offensive. This social change is a great one and, as the original poster points out, there is bound to be resistance.
Worse still than the resistance itself, the resistance to the national 'do not call list' is bound to vary in quality reflecting the qualities of the companies that make the calls.
A company that hands the recipient a load of crap about the caller's 'breaking up,' when he asked for information on who was calling is obviously a 'fly-by-night' company--fully equivalent to a low-class spammer--an organization that likes the rights but not the obligations of doing business decently.
The people the original poster talked about shouldn't be too disturbing in the long run, because it shouldn't take too much luck or effort to straighten things out with the bargain-basement companies with 'you're breaking up' cover stories. As anyone who's watched 'law and order' or paid an itemized bill for a cellphone has long known, someone somewhere knows where each phone call on earth comes from and where it goes goes to and when it was placed, and you can bet anatomy that some litigious soul is going to make use of this fact sooner rather than later.
Instead of a Manpurse, there is the classic, flap-thrown-over, 'bookbag' that functions as a manpurse. It's got a lot of advantages.
You can consolidate your stuff in there, it's fulla pockets which makes it modular. It's smaller than a messenger bag (smaller than a real one, at least), and many designs can expand or contract with the opening or closing of a zipper.
Better still, the classic bookbag affirms your humanity by not saying that you are hidebound by corporate style.
Interesting, so they are so desparate to do things against piracy that they are willing to lower the quality of their films, not to stop it, mind you, but just to make an act of piracy to some measure less attractive?
This amazes me considering that DVD movie technology, and by extension, digital movie files, naturally involve a measureable loss of detail and quality over, say, watching it in a theater.
It almost sounds like a desparate measure; as if someone out there threw the idea out without taking into consideration how little quality matters when it comes to satisfying the average DVD consumer.
The best pen for you is, well, the best one for you, and only you can determine that. Just to make the choice harder for writers, pen choice has both mechanical and psychological dimenisons--What might let me *cut loose* like Kerouac might make you grimace and hunt for a garbage can.
There are lots of approaches, some of them cost real money. Few of them need to.
A Mt. Blanc Diplomat might work for you because the heavy, perfect feel of it makes you feel like Thomas Mann. It's excalibur. You don't write with it, you wield it as part of a symbiotic relationship. That's the good news. The bad news is you better be wealthy, because they cost more than a teenager working full-time at McDonald's makes in a week.
Pilot makes some of the best non-rich writer-pens on earth. Many pilot pens, including their disposable fountain pen can be great for writing prose--smooth enough to scream across the paper when you're hot but neat enough to draw technical sketches when you slow down.
In that respect, Pilot is on a mission. Pilot is one of the only pen maker's out there to have really mastered gel ink and to have made it controllable and consistent.
Pilot's P-500 gel-ink ball-points write like they mean it, and keep at it until the last drop dissappears down the reservoir and you know you're a writer because you do so much of it, that it sucks the life out of ball-points.
Audition as many pens as possible, cheap ones, expensive ones; find out not just what you think you need but use your experience to remind you about the 'magic pen,' the one you were using that time you really got there.
Before you can ask what pen you should be using, you should find out what kind of character a pen has to have to not distract you both when you're 'on,' and when you're not.
Verisign is one of the nastiest companies ever to come to (not enough of) the public's attention.
After verisign tracked down people whose domain names were up for renewal some years ago and sent them fake bills asking them to reregister through verisign at a vastly inflated cost, verisign should have had nasty things happen to it. Verisign essentially worked a confidance trick on thousands of the internet users it's supposed to protect. Verisign is scum.
It's no surprise that they should somehow become involved in proposed electronic voting. It's just depressing.
The result of this of course is that every journalist sued for not turning documents over as a result of the unconstitutional subpoena...
I think that there is a measure of confusion in the above statement which needs immediate clarification. The reason that the (mis-) use of provisions in the Patriot Act, to demand that the reporters in question preserve their notes, communciations etc. preparatory to turning them over has nothing to do with a lawsuit. Lawsuits are the results of 'Torts', acts of commission or omission where one party or another suffers some damage and seeks redress in a court through legal means.
What is scary about the article, if it is true, is that the FBI is using the Patriot act to demand that the journalists preserve their information to hand over to the Department of Justice and threatening them with prosecution for obstruction of justice if they refuse to comply.
Obstruction of Justice is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment and/or fine.
In a tort, you pull out your checkbook to satisfy a judgment against you. 'Satisfying the judgment' in a federal criminal proceeding more often than not requires that you surrender your person for use by the federal corrections system. In other words, you go to prison.
The thing that makes this ugly, shocking, egregious and a good reason to vote out the current administration A.S.A.P. is that the article demonstrates that the Patriot Act is living up to the worst nightmares of its detractors by having its broad application effect things beyond its scope (i.e., journalists treated as ISP administrators) while it is used as an end-run around the Constitutional protections afforded the Press which allow Americans access to information without government interference; this system allows journalists to access individuals without their being forced to aid in criminal investigations regardless of the severity of the individual's alleged crime.
The real problem here is that by using the patriot act to tunnel under the constitution and demand Journalist's records, the FBI is doing what they simply should not be able to do in the United States: they are threatening reporters with imprisonment for not turning over constitutionally protected information.
This could be ugly. If the Patriot Act can be used to turn news sources into nothing more than an advertisment board for Georgie's trips in flight suits we should all look up the procedure for asking Canada for asylum.
why does anybody need a fancy client to play a text-mode game?
Mud clients are extremely useful in many ways. When you first start playing a mud and you don't know the commands well, a client can reduce a multi-word command you're expected to type in accurately once every few seconds to a few characters that you type in once, and as your experience in mudding increases and you end up in longer fights, a scripting a client can save you getting bored by hundreds of repetitions of the same command.
Better still, since mudding invariably involves long sequences of directions to get to places, you can program long pathways and save them in files for speed and safety in getting from point A to point B.
These are all basic functions shared by all clients, but better clients, like TinyFugue, can be used to automate things you do on your mud to levels where you save tremendous time and energy by allowing the use of techniques incorporating features of structured programming like 'triggers' ('whenever monks shout that, respond this!') and conditional execution ('if you have a potion in your inventory and your hit points go below a certain level, drink the potion.').
Essentially, once you've played a text-based mud for a while, you find mud clients indispensable aids to playing them and once you've used them, the sky's the limit, with the power the client gives you only limited by your own skills as a programmer; essentially giving you any degree of flexibility you desire from automating the login to actually creating an autonomous agent, or 'bot' which plays the game for you (mud administrators differ in the degree of automation they're comfortable with, be careful and check the rules, or just be careful.;-D).
There is a large number of clients out there, but I personally recommend TinyFugue. Despite its sometimes cumbersom syntax, TinyFugue is a very powerful client that runs under Unix/Linux, either on your own box or remotely allowing you to play in a consistent way using any telnet client and it interfaces smoothly with the mud's own macro-engine if there is one letting you send commands spaced out in time so that the mud does the work for you.
If you use Unix, TinyFugue is it. It got me all the way to level 99 on Realmsmud and there's no reason it couldn't do the same for you.
It's more than a little scary to see that this particular piece of information, 'Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!', The basis of an ad for a monster truck event has enjoyed such enormous longevity.
It must be one of the most successful pieces of advertising copy *ever* written. More memorable than, 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing,' or, 'Where's the beef?!'
One of the main problems conducting any discussion is speaking at cross purposes but it is often difficult to establish a common ground. Without a common point of reference, what might otherwise an intelligent examination of the issues suffers 'death by epigram.'
In really intense capsule form, this is where I'm coming from.
First, the personal: inasmuch as societies spring in part from religions, Islam sucks as a religion for existing in the modern world. From the sheer attention to ritual that orthodox Islam demands, to its views on lending and borrowing at interest, to its treatment of women, Islam is a tremendous impedence to any society's striving towards wealth and safety and the proof is in the history: societies under Islam have produced no real genuinely wealthy societies nor democracies in the six decades since the withdrawal of direct colonial control by the west began.
Second, there is the history. When you mention people in Islamic societies dancing in the street with knives, they probably mean that they want to kill one of your near or distant forefathers.
After a period of conquest, during and immediately following the life of the prophet Mohammad, which spread islam over the course of centuries creating an empire that included all of India and Afghanistan (once, part of a great Buddhist empire) and north into parts of Eastern Europe (Chechnya, Slavic genes, moslem culture) and even a large part of Spain where you can still find Arabic-based words in the language.
Islam saw periods of rise and decline. The crusades, in which Europe invaded and occupied parts of Middle East, are filled with images or horrible European barbarism that the Islamic World has never forgotten including well-documented mistreatment of prisoners, massacres and even cannibalism--imagine, if you can, how the word, 'Crusade,' sounds to Moslem coming out of Bush's mouth.
Jump ahead a few hundred years, and you see the rise of the Turkish Empire. The Turk's military success terrified Europe and this terror helped give form to European history on innumerable levels (read up on the history of the French croissant). Jump ahead to the end of the nineteenth century and you see the Turkish Empire at the end of its arc as a great power as well as the end of its control over the lands to the south of Turkey, including the moslem holy lands where Islam began its rise.
After decades, if not centuries of decline, Turkey had worked hard to modernize, especially in the military area, but the end of first world war saw them on the losing side in the conflict and largely dissappearing from any meaningful role on the world's stage (watch the movie, 'Lawrence of Arabia' and/or read T.E. Lawrence's book, 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.')
The period following the first world war sets the stage for the problems we see today. After world war one, the British and French divided up the territories that the various Arabic-speaking people's had fought guerilla wars of independence against the Turkish state, drawing largely arbitrary lines on the map, often throwing together people from vastly different societies who had despised one another for centuries (Iraq: Kurds to the north, Sunni moslems in the middle, Shiite Moslems--the majority population both in Iraq and in Iran--to the south, with a smattering of Christians and Jews.)
After the end of the second world war, the process by which the Zionist movement had long been settling in the Middle East accelerated rapidly as European Jews who had survived the holocaust settled in Palestine in ever increasing numbers, coming into conflict both with their Arab neighbors and with the British colonial administration (hint: among the first terrorists hanged in the M.E. after WWII were jews who fought for independence from the British).
Eventually, the British gave the territory to the Jews and the U.N. established the state of Israel which rapidly received massive amounts of military aid, covert at first and then more and more openly as Ara
...but real, sustainable peace is cheaper still...
Yes, I'm quoting myself. I think the point was missed the first time.
I believe that there exist one or more sets of circumstances which can be brought about by human effort which would allow a sustainable peace in the Middle East. That is an article of faith with me.
I personally do not know what those actions are (I'm not a diplomat) however, I am certainly not stupid enough to believe the solution to the current problems are, 'tie up two thirds of your armed forces to invade a country other than the one in which the enemy leader is hiding,' and then 'build a complex, untested and untestable machinery, and bet your lives and the lives of your children that it will defend you against threats for which it was in no way designed.
I guess I'm just a wild and crazy thinker in that respect.
You write, 'at least the other ideas have some possibility of working,' and by this, I can only assume you mean, star wars (see 'religious faith' in my previous note).
IF this is the case please explain to me how a multibillion-dollar, space-based missile defense system can defend against:
a) A truckload of explosives. b) more guys on planes with weapons that get past metal detectors. c) someone in an important place with thirty sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest.
If you can do this with an answer that sounds sane and cogent, I will not only concede your point, but I will take out a small personals ad in the New York Times to proclaim the triumph of your reasoning.
You come up with the jaw-slackening act of genius and I'll provide you with an object that you can show your grandchildren.
There are a lot of threads here, some of them old and ugly.
1. With regard to the Middle Eastern Mess; it's, well, a mess. None of the Ugly anti-semitic, anti-jewish/anti-arab arguments, slurs, conspiracy theories--ancient and modern-- and what have you are anything like necesary.
Really, save yourself the energy; borrow a page from Witgenstein and, instead of making meaningless statements, why not just say that sickening generalizations aren't worth your time? Really, they aren't and can't be when playing with a yo-yo for the time it took to think up the biggot-stuff would at least have the fact that it built motor coordination to recommend it.
2. Concerning the star wars/anti star wars arguments, it's a nasty can of worms to have opened. Now that that it's in the world, the people who like it seem to hold it in a similar light to that which is usually reserve for questions of religious faith. Star wars just won't die and that's too bad, considering how short life is. I obviously fall on the 'anti' side when it comes to the issue and I think my reasons are good.
Long thoughtful books have been written on just what crap the whole notion of missle defense is. Missile screens are vastly expensive and, like the Maginot Line, limited by their specialization. Worse still, If nothing else, the September 11 attacks clearly and unequivocally demonstrate that the traditional 'nuclear deterrent' enjoyed by the great powers is itself ineffective and is rapidly becoming less so because every small nation that gets nuclear arms and aims them at anything important get to thumb its nose at the great powers that have them. Current affairs in North Korea, suggest that if Saddam Hussein had had them, he'd be smoking a cigar in Baghdad right now.
Real, effective, missile defense is decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions away and even if it had been up and running, running perfectly, from some spotless control center two years ago, it would have been meaningless against 20 guys in the right place armed with ten bucks worth of boxcutters.
In the world of fantasy and need, a simple, single solution like star wars is a magic bullet. Magic bullets aren't like the real world's compromises and partial successes; magic bullets solve all known old problems and create no new ones. When people imagine a magic bullet, hope blows away common sense, in this case, at an unimaginable cost.
Star wars is expensive. Boxcutters are cheap, but real, sustainable peace is cheaper still.
Now that the initial 'rush to press' has died down, how about some ideas.
Someone wrote that this should hit the mainstream press ASAP: I agree. Morever, it should be brought to the attention of the opposition party as quickly as possible. Spam Democratic senators and congressmen with it to call it to their attention as a very important issue.
Someone else wrote that just because the results can be downloaded from the database, doesn't mean that a dishonest person or group could upload results to the system. Since none of us are engineers employed on the project with direct access to the systems involved, none of us are qualified to have a deep, meaningful discussion about the ramifications, however, some measure of alarm seems in order.
We don't know whether the machines are each provided with a a unique and irreproduceable set of secret encryption routines, burned into a chip locked to each board with a seal from the board of elections. By the same token, for all we know, the security of some upcoming elections could be based on Hamster Feces.
In the real world, public ignorance about technical matters is a free good--a useful and inexpensive form of security. Gold bricks require thick walls, locked doors and armed guards to keep them in one place while a an obscured PERL file would be comparatively safe left running in the middle of Times Square. Unfortunately, This fact makes the bent and savvy twice as dangerous.
A side note With regard to our third-party candidates:
Until such time as we change our political system to embrace and accomodate ideologically aligned coalitions as one party, so that you can, for example, have a vote for a 'green party' candidate going to the Democrats (hint: not in your lifetime), third-party candidates will only weaken the chances of the party whose platform theirs most resembles.
Think about it this way: if Ralph Nader had popped a coronary on the eve of the last election, it is very possible that we might have had an administration that could read a map and knew the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan: scores of U.S. servicemen, now dead in Iraq, might well be alive today.
By this reasoning, all things being equal, one could say that in terms of health care, labor, the environment, fiscal policy...etc., H. Ross Perot, was one of the greatest Presidents America never had.
Should he run again, I will certainly contribute money to his campaign and vote for someone else.
Think of the matter at hand as good reasons for controlled--and thus effective--panic.
Unlike Joe Young Republican, the proud republican voter with the spelling and syntax problems some notes above, this guy has an idea which is not only not anyone in particular's dogma but is actually interesting in itself: skill and ability *are* contextual, the ability to make a Japanese sword from the iron ore on up is a tremendous skill requiring long study, talent and vast research and yet, it is just this side of useless unless you are in Japan.
The point about astronomers is just something from the grand category of 'sad-but-true.' If you don't believe it, walk up to a few people in a bar and ask them what the phrase, 'main sequence' refers to in astronomy.
He is by no means trolling and this response to him is, to my mind, quite surprising.
There's something wonderful about a piece like the one I've just read. It's wonderful and very sad.
Very like Karl Marx, the author tries to work on the basis of a burgeoning materialism. He assumes that people will do constructive things in the interest of their fellow man--he thinks that ways and means will find one another to create a reasonable and happy outcome. By doing so, he commits his first failing as a visionary; assuming, I think foolishly, that people are going to behave intelligently and rationally while ignoring an opportunity to create ruin.
Long before we will have to worry about robots, we will have to deal with problems involving capitalism's acting like the mythical snake eating its own tail. America is the world's largest economy and yet, capitalism in America is working to produce an efficiency that may very well rob it of the markets it needs to function. For the people at the top of the heap, capitalism is zero-sum game and they are playing not to survive, but to win and for one party in a game to win, another party has to lose.
It is a basic idea of capitalism that in order to maximize profits to those who own businesses but who do not actually produce anything, labor costs must be reduced to the bare minimum, which, already means that businesses everywhere will be either exporting jobs or importing cheap labor from less economically advanced countries. It's not happening twenty years from now. It's happening now.
All over the United States, millions of businesses from farming labor to food service to construction are supported by legal and illegal immigrants whose willingness to take less, not worry about worker safety and sometimes to live rough in order to earn starvation wages in dollars instead of pesos, depresses wages for U.S. citizens which the author already describes as stagnating.
By exporting jobs, which provide people with the means to buy things--basically the definition of economic power--the upper classes in the United States are locked in a trap which must eventually lessen their ability to increase their wealth. The problem, the trap, in the 'make there, sell here,' scenario, is, as the author himself points out, sooner or later, the unemployed cease to be a market and under this scenario, you may one day be able to think of America as a market in the same way that you think of Mexico or most of Africa; massive unemployment equals tiny market participation.
Furthermore, the optimism of his scenario is further damaged by current trends in American politics. Somehow, it is possible for the current administration to empty the social security fund, do as little as possible to stimulate the economy by government activity and spend hundreds of dollars per U.S. citizen (you, or possibly your children personally owe hundreds of dollars for the war in Iraq) in pursuit of a war that makes Americans not a jot more secure than they were on September 10, 2001 and the only political fallout from all this is that the current administration is expected to break the record for epic campaign funding that it had set in its original election bid.
Another problem with the Author's scenario is that it violates the assumption of classical economics that participation in the system is run by scarcity. Basically, putting the whole country on a stipend would certainly free us from mindless drudgery, but it would also free us from the constraints that having to go out and earn it puts on us and this creates a number of unfortunate foreseeable effects; the least of which would be an acceleration of the environmental damage that capitalist consumption does to the environment.
The Author's work is a jewel of perfect kindness. It is very well argued in some places, it is grand and beautiful but by discounting human nature, it fails to see that his main argument involves a scenario which is fundamentally unsound, if for no other reason than that people are nasty enough to kill one another for advantage
It's sometimes amazing to see what governments will get up to when they put their minds to it--the shortsightedness and the ability to believe they can depend on the goodwill of their citizens is amazing.
First off, the proposed measure is just plain nasty.
I mean really, these *bugs* which is essentially what these little dossier-stuffers are, are a civil liberties nightmare. Do you really have privacy if the only way you can get to somewhere on one else needs to know about is wear a mask (remember, cameras!) while you pay cash for a bus-ticket?
Second, with criminals from all over the place becoming more and more technologically sophisticated, does anyone outside of governments really believe that a retrofitted, government issue radio transmitter in a car--probably put in a standardized location--will really deter thieves?
Third, it really makes you wonder about culture: how is it that anyone can propose something like this when its safe to assume that anyone can walk into an electronics store and buy books with plans for voltage multipliers in them?
You can already hear people mumbling, 'capacitor, diode, capacitor, diode...'
The end result: a lot of modern electronics works using components that you have to protect from the static charge you accumulate by walking over a carpet and it's hard to imagine these things standing tall after a shot of 10,000 volts AC.
The criminals and savvy anarchists will dance. Everybody else will get to feel a bit more like sheep.
The original poster wrote that once the spammer who became known shut down his operation, saw a 98% reduction makes an interesing point: if we knew who was sending the spam and who was profiting, we the community could send him enough hate-mail and other forms of revenge for the richer ones to be more content with the money they've already made while the poorer ones might take up more noble pursuits.
It's a pity that there is, as yet, no elegant, widely-known mechanism for finding the people who are the source of spam. God, one of *them* unable to use email without having to learn to use complex filters to get his messages.
I want someone to multiply the power of the doll's engine *many* times. Then, I want them to fill it with lots of information and to give it a measure of speech as well as visual recognition.
I want to ask it fuzzy little questions about words. I want it to plug into my computer as my dictionary and thesaurus--no, did I say, 'plug in'? Sorry, I meant, interface via wifi with my computer, as my copy of seven different encyclopedias and as my database of seldom-used Bash and VI commands.
When all that is done, I want it to work pronunciation drills for me when I decide to improve my Russian and review my German.
Really, honestly, for me, all it needs to make me very, very happy as an adjunct to a computer is more power than I know what to do with and a glowing cubical casing.
Bang?! Not good.... Not unexpected but not good...
on
Flaming Cellphones
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· Score: 1
This nasty incident has interesting things to say about current-day capitalism.
With all the pressure to make things better and faster by exploiting cheaper labor and vast international differentials in labor and environmental laws, capitalism has created a situation that makes the event described seem a lot less like news.
With Globalization in place, Asian companies are getting a lot of exposure to cutting-edge technology in an industrial wild-west setting in which you find companies manufacturing items involving more and more complex/precise technologies engineered by companies that are very concerned by the prospect of facing class-action suits for personal injury that might eliminate their profits from even a stellar project.
This wild-west aspect comes from having large fish working alongside small fish in tight spaces. Back-alley manufactures are bound to do some cheating: it's hard to imagine having a bunch of intelligent, underpaid, job-hungry workers with health-problems being very good for industrial security and the results show up in the decades-old, made-in-Asia black-market for counterfeit products of all kinds from fake Levi's jeans to unlicensed, ultra-cheap component electronics and 'fly-by-night,' or 'botchitt-and-scarper' operations remove the fear of lawsuits from cutting corners when working with potentially shrapnel-producing battery chemistries.
Oddly enough, this isn't the only such incident seen on Slashdot recently. The current story only attracts more attention because of the spectacular personal injury factor.
Some months ago, Slashdot carried a story on some capacitors which caused problems that brought about a motherboard recall. They were all the result of Chinese industrial espionage of Japanese processes leading first one company and then others to misunderstand how to make an advanced electrolyte compound.
Arguments about what the government should and should not fund are, as Judge Bork put it in one of his last coherent statements, 'an intellectual feast.' There are a lot of things to spread out on the table.
First off, you have to put your feet in the dangerous waters of 'national character.' To talk about a project like the one in question meaningfully, you have to remember that the Japanese do practice capitalism, but they do it in a very different way than we do. Japanese capitalism involves much more overt collaboration between government and industry than ours does.
Their capitalism is more collectivized than ours is (that is, they are more interested in the value, power and prestige of their companies than in short-term profit than we are) and this is something which you can never talk about enough when talking about the differing approaches to fundamental research into high-tech.
When the Japanese try to spend a lot of public money on thirty years worth of robotics research, they are betting on the long-term future in an attempt to give themselves an edge in what they project will be a major world industry and the government is trying to give Japanese industry a leg-up on the rest of the world before the technology and the market it will facilitate even exist. If it works, there will be jobs and money in Japan a long time from now.
Cool desu-neh?
This is something that Japanese science does very well: doing research to create products to exploit markets which gives them the money to do research to create products to exploit markets to... I'm sure you get the idea.
If you don't, read up on the history of IBM before the rise of the personal computer. Pay special attention to the sections on the mainframe computer market.
For an example of one of the consequences of Japan's 'collectivizing' capitalism, read the Time's account of the law suit over the development of the Blue-Light LED by the researcher who made it possible.
By contrast, you can say that we do the same thing in the US on many levels but with shorter-term goals as reflects the current version of American corporate culture. If you don't believe that, please read the New York Time's reporting on some of the corporate tax refunds made under the current administration as well as their environmental policy.
You will see BIG income-tax refunds to corporations--including some to corporations that paid no taxes in recent years--and measures made law that allow corporations to do lots and lots of environmental damage that someone other than the source of the problem has to either live with or pay to clean up later.
Hint: which is the bigger secret under the current administration--which is harder to find out: what are the ingredients for an atomic bomb are or just how polluted the rivers in Texas really are?
Both schools of capitalism enhance the interests of some segment of the societies they represent but their approaches and their results are different: the Japanese model, in its ideal form, will lead to your waking up one day and saying, 'Hey! Where did all these robots come from and why aren't we making them or selling them?!'
The American model is different. It accomplishes results faster. Its effects are more immediately felt: It lets you wake up, right now, and wonder how it can be that the US spends billions (your tax dollars at work!) protecting a dead domestic steel industry and fattening already wealthy agro-businessmen while Ken Lay and others of his ilk remain out of jail long after the collapse of Enron.
Whee!
Now, to the question of government spending, the questions of what the government spends money on or should is a matter of values--essentially, a question of the tastes of those in power--and thus moot questions. You can have things both ways basing your arguments on equally valid, mutually exclusive, base assumptions and chains of reasoning.
Personally, as a hemi-demi-quasi-crypto-lefty, I lean
It's interesting to see people in England rejecting these things so quickly and so thoroughly. It leaves one to wonder how we will react to them if they are given a trial in the United States.
After all, part of the mythos of our national character is that we are rugged individualists who only want to be left alone, but we regularly put up with the knowlege that various private and government agencies develop and deploy some of the most sophisticated intrusive security technologies in the world (e.g., public security cameras, biometrics, face recognition, gait recognition, cellular phone location, productivity logging etc, etc, ad nauseum...) and with that often in the pursuit of genuinely base motives.
This raises a question: 'Which of our faces will we in the U.S. turn towards a technology that, for a brief interval at least, simply does away with the privacy inherent in the inability of anyone anywhere to know precisely where you are?'
In one of the messages above, someone asked if there were any good uses for the technology and I think I can see the technology revolutionizing point-of-sale technologies for credit/debit card use; possibly reproducing the scenario in the speculative IBM commercial where someone shops in a supermarket by stuffing items in his coat and walking out of the place, only to be stopped by a security guard who reminds him to take the receipt for his purchases.
Basically, if a system knows you are carrying x items of y value that belong to the store until you walk them past a point where their cost is deducted from your account, you can eliminate cashiers. Of course, what those girls who operate supermarket cash registers do with themselves after you do is anyone's guess.
One more interesting thing is that these are electronic devices that have to send a signal in order to function: they have *got* be vulnerable to something.
Perhaps part of your transaction in your point-of-sale system of the future could be frying the tags one the items to mark them as sold which would also take care of the paranoia problem.
Before anyone mentions it: buying, selling or possessing any of the Russian or Taiwanese tag-zappers that would soon hit the market would be punishable by fine, imprisonment or both.
It's all a game really. Living under pure capitalism is an attempt to make life as much of an adventure as possible and it produces some odd statements, none of them odder than the some of the ones generated by using a cell phone cellular.
The ellipses of cellular usage are bizarre things, from: 'The fact that American companies and ONLY American companies charge both the person who placed the call AND the person receiving it doesn't make us BOTH suckers,' to 'technological fashion demands that I pay a lot of money so my boss can reach me while I'm making love.'
Yes, the inner game of cellular use is a strange one and you've got to play it as smartly as possible on your end because you are an amateur while the people working for the multibillion-dollar corporations whose whole reason for existing is to replace the payphone are trained professionals who think of ways of rogering their customers on overtime.
So where does this leave you when it comes to number portability?
Stay flexible. As the poster from Finland pointed out, where he is, number portability lead to companies making big efforts to keep customers from switching to other companies. Something like that *might* happen here--you can certainly imagine that entering the mix when the legislation is enacted--but it is just as likely that the same class of businessmen who brought you the eternal copyright will certainly use the fees the law grants to hide another fifty-cents on your bill every month while kicking and screaming to avoid giving you a choice. Why would anyone expect them to do otherwise? There's no downside for them.
Your part of the game as a customer is to maintain all the flexibility, and the best bargaining position you can in dealing with them. Look at it this way. As things are now, switching out of a new contract with a provider already means, handing a company that has proven its lack of worth a stack of bills so you can own a dead cell phone.
Cellular providers hold all the psychological cards against switching so it's your job to find the company that combines the strongest mix of features with the strongest motivation for keeping you. If that means paying ten dollars a month so you can plan-hop when they offer something better than what you have, or jump ship if someone else outbids them, so be it.
Making the right decision can surprise you: I use a phone from one of the smaller fish in the big game and during the recent blackout, my web service functioned for a while even after my voice service didn't, and I ended lending my phone to several people whose service only came back hours later.
I think the best way of thinking about ones relationship with cellular providers is to think of it as friendly warfare.:D
I find your biological comments interesting but I have to say that if you are going to use a latin tag as your sig, you might consider running your note through a spell-checker. Sudden discoveries like 'Occures' works hard to spoil the effect.
This, by the way, is by no means a flame. I like your note. It makes me want to know more.
1. With few exceptions, all information (speech) is licit under our constitution--including things that would let you blow stuff up or overthrow the government.
2. So long as you do not get together with other and plan to *perform* a set of *actions* like assassinating someone at a given place at a certain time, you can talk about overthrowing the government to your heart's content.
3. Our notion of government is one where the people and the nation are in some sense the property of a ruling body; the ruling body serves the people and not vice versa.
In a population with a diversity of ideas, there will always be a number of people who will want not reform but revolution, and it is one of the functions of government to keep their numbers low by providing a free and prosperous society that is immune to revolutionaries because there are no viable, convincing arguments for a grass-roots revolution in such a society.
With this in mind, what the government did is like a crime against nature and it shows a sickening lack of understanding. In most cases, a few years of working a decent job and getting laid semi-regularly beats the anarchy right out of young men, instead, the government's activist stance here works to demonstrate that the kid's Anarchist, revolutionary philosophy is spot-on correct.
It says that our government can and does punish the dissemination of information it dislikes (mis-)using anti-terror laws to suppress free speech just like every modern dictatorship, from Hitler's Germany to the People's Republic of China. The only difference is one of extent--the placement of the threshold of action--and a prosecution sweetened by judicial blackmail does a lot to lesson the difference.
Another thing to consider is what it's going to do to the kid in the long run. It hard to imagine how much the kid is going to hate the system after spending what should be his sophmore year in college in a federal prison. Before, the kid wanted to talk about throwing bombs, in a year's time, maybe he'll end up wanting to do Timothy McVeigh one better.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, the early race-flame posts are ridiculous, so Why bother?
One of the key virtues to the internet is that no one knows you're an idiot until you open your mouth, so why the urge to walk up to an enemy with a rifle and say, 'hey, I think you dropped these bullets?'
Second, holy spit! Robots posessing that degree of physical dexterity are really frightening.
Before that article, it was easy to imagine that the writer from How Stuff Works.com was writing a distant, pie-in-the-sky scenario when he talked about anthropomorphic robots capable of replacing people in jobs. Seeing a robot, smaller than a midget human, and so dextrous that it can approximate sumo or Tai-Ji moves makes you think of applications for the near-term.
Can a team of them spot-weld hard-to-reach places in automobile assembly with the power problem of individual units solved by a 'chaining' or 'tag-team' system that replaces each one that runs down with others given the same instructions that are charging in nearby racks?
Could industrial versions be used for remote visual inspection tasks in ships, planes and architectural crawl-spaces and will future designs incorporate spaces that can only accomodate them saving space in each?
Is the technology behind this degree of articulation adaptable to use in pre-existing technologies like hard-shell diving suits?
Currently, approximately three million Americans are employed in agriculture with an efficiency so great that government subsidies are needed to make comodity production a viable industry. What happens to world markets when all the labor of farming in the United States is done by a million robots, working day and night, serviced by ten-thousand technicians?
With first-world price protections in commodities strangling third-world agriculture today, full mechanization would make the situation much worse in the future.
The possibilities boggle the mind and as more and more technological glitches are solved and as some designs turn away from anthropomorphic models, it is pretty easy to imagine many technologies which simply cut the human out of the manufacturing equation altogether.
Capitalism worships efficiency and with a sufficient capital outlay it its disposal, it is easy to see a massive influx of robots changing the picture of how the world works, either by completely destroying much of labor's value, or by freeing up huge numbers of people to dream and build and organize and create higher things.
Considering the lust for power and dominance that seems built in to the organism, it is very hard to imagine machines decreasing the bargaining power of labor leading to increased freedom.
In other words, 'uh oh.'
Here you've got a situation where the wonders of modern technology throw a big bright spotlight on the classical evils of monopoly. One company that not only participates in the market but for all intents and purposes is the market, in fact, a crucial, ubiquitous market will inevitably not only fix prices in ways that avoid the scrutiny of the regulatory organs of industry and the state, but will actually buy or replace the regulators with the machinery of its own advantage.
There is no surprise in watching yet another Microsoft critic going silent in the face of pressure, threats, lawsuits, stock-buys or whatever the hell else it was this time. Theory, experience and history all say that giant companies will offer less-than-optimal performance to the societies that play host to them; there will always be something visibly better and money, prestige or 'clout' will always blind those at the top from seeing it. This is no surprise.
What is surprising however is that we can go through so much, so regularly with the consequences limited to a ritual sacrifice of only a few billions every year to fix problems caused by Microsoft's bloated sloppiness--call it the second Microsoft tax.
Really, the only surprise is that the bill or the comeuppance haven't been bigger. In today's world, with Western European nations suddenly finding themselves with real, determined, well-hidden enemies, it's a good thing that the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan is going to be a gigantic military rubber duckie instead of a real target in a world filled with real conflicts.
As the first United States vessel with information systems built from the ground up around Microsoft technology, and one with a crew of three-thousand, the potential for tragedy would be stunning.
Of course, by the logic that led to the closing of the Microsoft Vulnerabilities page--with crackers and script kiddies having no information sources whatsoever but what MS-critics reveal--my writing this is an even greater disservice to the military than its using software that is as secure a sieve with a hole in it.
I'm deeply ashamed.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Every technology that changes society changes the way things work and in a very real sense, changes consciousness.
Telemarketing supported by old mechanized telephone exchange technology and computers have made telemarketing ubiquitous and intrusive to the point that people have learned to find it offensive. This social change is a great one and, as the original poster points out, there is bound to be resistance.
Worse still than the resistance itself, the resistance to the national 'do not call list' is bound to vary in quality reflecting the qualities of the companies that make the calls.
A company that hands the recipient a load of crap about the caller's 'breaking up,' when he asked for information on who was calling is obviously a 'fly-by-night' company--fully equivalent to a low-class spammer--an organization that likes the rights but not the obligations of doing business decently.
The people the original poster talked about shouldn't be too disturbing in the long run, because it shouldn't take too much luck or effort to straighten things out with the bargain-basement companies with 'you're breaking up' cover stories. As anyone who's watched 'law and order' or paid an itemized bill for a cellphone has long known, someone somewhere knows where each phone call on earth comes from and where it goes goes to and when it was placed, and you can bet anatomy that some litigious soul is going to make use of this fact sooner rather than later.
Today's forecast is for transitions.
Instead of a Manpurse, there is the classic, flap-thrown-over, 'bookbag' that functions as a manpurse. It's got a lot of advantages.
You can consolidate your stuff in there, it's fulla pockets which makes it modular. It's smaller than a messenger bag (smaller than a real one, at least), and many designs can expand or contract with the opening or closing of a zipper.
Better still, the classic bookbag affirms your humanity by not saying that you are hidebound by corporate style.
Interesting, so they are so desparate to do things against piracy that they are willing to lower the quality of their films, not to stop it, mind you, but just to make an act of piracy to some measure less attractive?
This amazes me considering that DVD movie technology, and by extension, digital movie files, naturally involve a measureable loss of detail and quality over, say, watching it in a theater.
It almost sounds like a desparate measure; as if someone out there threw the idea out without taking into consideration how little quality matters when it comes to satisfying the average DVD consumer.
Pens! Pens! Pens!
The best pen for you is, well, the best one for you, and only you can determine that. Just to make the choice harder for writers, pen choice has both mechanical and psychological dimenisons--What might let me *cut loose* like Kerouac might make you grimace and hunt for a garbage can.
There are lots of approaches, some of them cost real money. Few of them need to.
A Mt. Blanc Diplomat might work for you because the heavy, perfect feel of it makes you feel like Thomas Mann. It's excalibur. You don't write with it, you wield it as part of a symbiotic relationship. That's the good news. The bad news is you better be wealthy, because they cost more than a teenager working full-time at McDonald's makes in a week.
Pilot makes some of the best non-rich writer-pens on earth. Many pilot pens, including their disposable fountain pen can be great for writing prose--smooth enough to scream across the paper when you're hot but neat enough to draw technical sketches when you slow down.
In that respect, Pilot is on a mission. Pilot is one of the only pen maker's out there to have really mastered gel ink and to have made it controllable and consistent.
Pilot's P-500 gel-ink ball-points write like they mean it, and keep at it until the last drop dissappears down the reservoir and you know you're a writer because you do so much of it, that it sucks the life out of ball-points.
Audition as many pens as possible, cheap ones, expensive ones; find out not just what you think you need but use your experience to remind you about the 'magic pen,' the one you were using that time you really got there.
Before you can ask what pen you should be using, you should find out what kind of character a pen has to have to not distract you both when you're 'on,' and when you're not.
Have a good one.
Verisign is one of the nastiest companies ever to come to (not enough of) the public's attention.
After verisign tracked down people whose domain names were up for renewal some years ago and sent them fake bills asking them to reregister through verisign at a vastly inflated cost, verisign should have had nasty things happen to it. Verisign essentially worked a confidance trick on thousands of the internet users it's supposed to protect. Verisign is scum.
It's no surprise that they should somehow become involved in proposed electronic voting. It's just depressing.
The result of this of course is that every journalist sued for not turning documents over as a result of the unconstitutional subpoena...
I think that there is a measure of confusion in the above statement which needs immediate clarification. The reason that the (mis-) use of provisions in the Patriot Act, to demand that the reporters in question preserve their notes, communciations etc. preparatory to turning them over has nothing to do with a lawsuit. Lawsuits are the results of 'Torts', acts of commission or omission where one party or another suffers some damage and seeks redress in a court through legal means.
What is scary about the article, if it is true, is that the FBI is using the Patriot act to demand that the journalists preserve their information to hand over to the Department of Justice and threatening them with prosecution for obstruction of justice if they refuse to comply.
Obstruction of Justice is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment and/or fine.
In a tort, you pull out your checkbook to satisfy a judgment against you. 'Satisfying the judgment' in a federal criminal proceeding more often than not requires that you surrender your person for use by the federal corrections system. In other words, you go to prison.
The thing that makes this ugly, shocking, egregious and a good reason to vote out the current administration A.S.A.P. is that the article demonstrates that the Patriot Act is living up to the worst nightmares of its detractors by having its broad application effect things beyond its scope (i.e., journalists treated as ISP administrators) while it is used as an end-run around the Constitutional protections afforded the Press which allow Americans access to information without government interference; this system allows journalists to access individuals without their being forced to aid in criminal investigations regardless of the severity of the individual's alleged crime.
The real problem here is that by using the patriot act to tunnel under the constitution and demand Journalist's records, the FBI is doing what they simply should not be able to do in the United States: they are threatening reporters with imprisonment for not turning over constitutionally protected information.
This could be ugly. If the Patriot Act can be used to turn news sources into nothing more than an advertisment board for Georgie's trips in flight suits we should all look up the procedure for asking Canada for asylum.
why does anybody need a fancy client to play a text-mode game?
;-D).
Mud clients are extremely useful in many ways. When you first start playing a mud and you don't know the commands well, a client can reduce a multi-word command you're expected to type in accurately once every few seconds to a few characters that you type in once, and as your experience in mudding increases and you end up in longer fights, a scripting a client can save you getting bored by hundreds of repetitions of the same command.
Better still, since mudding invariably involves long sequences of directions to get to places, you can program long pathways and save them in files for speed and safety in getting from point A to point B.
These are all basic functions shared by all clients, but better clients, like TinyFugue, can be used to automate things you do on your mud to levels where you save tremendous time and energy by allowing the use of techniques incorporating features of structured programming like 'triggers' ('whenever monks shout that , respond this !') and conditional execution ('if you have a potion in your inventory and your hit points go below a certain level, drink the potion.').
Essentially, once you've played a text-based mud for a while, you find mud clients indispensable aids to playing them and once you've used them, the sky's the limit, with the power the client gives you only limited by your own skills as a programmer; essentially giving you any degree of flexibility you desire from automating the login to actually creating an autonomous agent, or 'bot' which plays the game for you (mud administrators differ in the degree of automation they're comfortable with, be careful and check the rules, or just be careful.
There is a large number of clients out there, but I personally recommend TinyFugue. Despite its sometimes cumbersom syntax, TinyFugue is a very powerful client that runs under Unix/Linux, either on your own box or remotely allowing you to play in a consistent way using any telnet client and it interfaces smoothly with the mud's own macro-engine if there is one letting you send commands spaced out in time so that the mud does the work for you.
If you use Unix, TinyFugue is it. It got me all the way to level 99 on Realmsmud and there's no reason it couldn't do the same for you.
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X
It's more than a little scary to see that this particular piece of information, 'Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!', The basis of an ad for a monster truck event has enjoyed such enormous longevity.
It must be one of the most successful pieces of advertising copy *ever* written. More memorable than, 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing,' or, 'Where's the beef?!'
One of the main problems conducting any discussion is speaking at cross purposes but it is often difficult to establish a common ground. Without a common point of reference, what might otherwise an intelligent examination of the issues suffers 'death by epigram.'
In really intense capsule form, this is where I'm coming from.
First, the personal: inasmuch as societies spring in part from religions, Islam sucks as a religion for existing in the modern world. From the sheer attention to ritual that orthodox Islam demands, to its views on lending and borrowing at interest, to its treatment of women, Islam is a tremendous impedence to any society's striving towards wealth and safety and the proof is in the history: societies under Islam have produced no real genuinely wealthy societies nor democracies in the six decades since the withdrawal of direct colonial control by the west began.
Second, there is the history. When you mention people in Islamic societies dancing in the street with knives, they probably mean that they want to kill one of your near or distant forefathers.
After a period of conquest, during and immediately following the life of the prophet Mohammad, which spread islam over the course of centuries creating an empire that included all of India and Afghanistan (once, part of a great Buddhist empire) and north into parts of Eastern Europe (Chechnya, Slavic genes, moslem culture) and even a large part of Spain where you can still find Arabic-based words in the language.
Islam saw periods of rise and decline. The crusades, in which Europe invaded and occupied parts of Middle East, are filled with images or horrible European barbarism that the Islamic World has never forgotten including well-documented mistreatment of prisoners, massacres and even cannibalism--imagine, if you can, how the word, 'Crusade,' sounds to Moslem coming out of Bush's mouth.
Jump ahead a few hundred years, and you see the rise of the Turkish Empire. The Turk's military success terrified Europe and this terror helped give form to European history on innumerable levels (read up on the history of the French croissant). Jump ahead to the end of the nineteenth century and you see the Turkish Empire at the end of its arc as a great power as well as the end of its control over the lands to the south of Turkey, including the moslem holy lands where Islam began its rise.
After decades, if not centuries of decline, Turkey had worked hard to modernize, especially in the military area, but the end of first world war saw them on the losing side in the conflict and largely dissappearing from any meaningful role on the world's stage (watch the movie, 'Lawrence of Arabia' and/or read T.E. Lawrence's book, 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.')
The period following the first world war sets the stage for the problems we see today. After world war one, the British and French divided up the territories that the various Arabic-speaking people's had fought guerilla wars of independence against the Turkish state, drawing largely arbitrary lines on the map, often throwing together people from vastly different societies who had despised one another for centuries (Iraq: Kurds to the north, Sunni moslems in the middle, Shiite Moslems--the majority population both in Iraq and in Iran--to the south, with a smattering of Christians and Jews.)
After the end of the second world war, the process by which the Zionist movement had long been settling in the Middle East accelerated rapidly as European Jews who had survived the holocaust settled in Palestine in ever increasing numbers, coming into conflict both with their Arab neighbors and with the British colonial administration (hint: among the first terrorists hanged in the M.E. after WWII were jews who fought for independence from the British).
Eventually, the British gave the territory to the Jews and the U.N. established the state of Israel which rapidly received massive amounts of military aid, covert at first and then more and more openly as Ara
...but real, sustainable peace is cheaper still...
Yes, I'm quoting myself. I think the point was missed the first time.
I believe that there exist one or more sets of circumstances which can be brought about by human effort which would allow a sustainable peace in the Middle East. That is an article of faith with me.
I personally do not know what those actions are (I'm not a diplomat) however, I am certainly not stupid enough to believe the solution to the current problems are, 'tie up two thirds of your armed forces to invade a country other than the one in which the enemy leader is hiding,' and then 'build a complex, untested and untestable machinery, and bet your lives and the lives of your children that it will defend you against threats for which it was in no way designed.
I guess I'm just a wild and crazy thinker in that respect.
You write, 'at least the other ideas have some possibility of working,' and by this, I can only assume you mean, star wars (see 'religious faith' in my previous note).
IF this is the case please explain to me how a multibillion-dollar, space-based missile defense system can defend against:
a) A truckload of explosives.
b) more guys on planes with weapons that get past metal detectors.
c) someone in an important place with thirty sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest.
If you can do this with an answer that sounds sane and cogent, I will not only concede your point, but I will take out a small personals ad in the New York Times to proclaim the triumph of your reasoning.
You come up with the jaw-slackening act of genius and I'll provide you with an object that you can show your grandchildren.
There are a lot of threads here, some of them old and ugly.
1. With regard to the Middle Eastern Mess; it's, well, a mess. None of the Ugly anti-semitic, anti-jewish/anti-arab arguments, slurs, conspiracy theories--ancient and modern-- and what have you are anything like necesary.
Really, save yourself the energy; borrow a page from Witgenstein and, instead of making meaningless statements, why not just say that sickening generalizations aren't worth your time? Really, they aren't and can't be when playing with a yo-yo for the time it took to think up the biggot-stuff would at least have the fact that it built motor coordination to recommend it.
2. Concerning the star wars/anti star wars arguments, it's a nasty can of worms to have opened. Now that that it's in the world, the people who like it seem to hold it in a similar light to that which is usually reserve for questions of religious faith. Star wars just won't die and that's too bad, considering how short life is. I obviously fall on the 'anti' side when it comes to the issue and I think my reasons are good.
Long thoughtful books have been written on just what crap the whole notion of missle defense is. Missile screens are vastly expensive and, like the Maginot Line, limited by their specialization. Worse still, If nothing else, the September 11 attacks clearly and unequivocally demonstrate that the traditional 'nuclear deterrent' enjoyed by the great powers is itself ineffective and is rapidly becoming less so because every small nation that gets nuclear arms and aims them at anything important get to thumb its nose at the great powers that have them. Current affairs in North Korea, suggest that if Saddam Hussein had had them, he'd be smoking a cigar in Baghdad right now.
Real, effective, missile defense is decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions away and even if it had been up and running, running perfectly, from some spotless control center two years ago, it would have been meaningless against 20 guys in the right place armed with ten bucks worth of boxcutters.
In the world of fantasy and need, a simple, single solution like star wars is a magic bullet. Magic bullets aren't like the real world's compromises and partial successes; magic bullets solve all known old problems and create no new ones. When people imagine a magic bullet, hope blows away common sense, in this case, at an unimaginable cost.
Star wars is expensive. Boxcutters are cheap, but real, sustainable peace is cheaper still.
Now that the initial 'rush to press' has died down, how about some ideas.
Someone wrote that this should hit the mainstream press ASAP: I agree. Morever, it should be brought to the attention of the opposition party as quickly as possible. Spam Democratic senators and congressmen with it to call it to their attention as a very important issue.
Someone else wrote that just because the results can be downloaded from the database, doesn't mean that a dishonest person or group could upload results to the system. Since none of us are engineers employed on the project with direct access to the systems involved, none of us are qualified to have a deep, meaningful discussion about the ramifications, however, some measure of alarm seems in order.
We don't know whether the machines are each provided with a a unique and irreproduceable set of secret encryption routines, burned into a chip locked to each board with a seal from the board of elections. By the same token, for all we know, the security of some upcoming elections could be based on Hamster Feces.
In the real world, public ignorance about technical matters is a free good--a useful and inexpensive form of security. Gold bricks require thick walls, locked doors and armed guards to keep them in one place while a an obscured PERL file would be comparatively safe left running in the middle of Times Square. Unfortunately, This fact makes the bent and savvy twice as dangerous.
A side note With regard to our third-party candidates:
Until such time as we change our political system to embrace and accomodate ideologically aligned coalitions as one party, so that you can, for example, have a vote for a 'green party' candidate going to the Democrats (hint: not in your lifetime), third-party candidates will only weaken the chances of the party whose platform theirs most resembles.
Think about it this way: if Ralph Nader had popped a coronary on the eve of the last election, it is very possible that we might have had an administration that could read a map and knew the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan: scores of U.S. servicemen, now dead in Iraq, might well be alive today.
By this reasoning, all things being equal, one could say that in terms of health care, labor, the environment, fiscal policy...etc., H. Ross Perot, was one of the greatest Presidents America never had.
Should he run again, I will certainly contribute money to his campaign and vote for someone else.
Think of the matter at hand as good reasons for controlled--and thus effective--panic.
Mod this guy up!
Unlike Joe Young Republican, the proud republican voter with the spelling and syntax problems some notes above, this guy has an idea which is not only not anyone in particular's dogma but is actually interesting in itself: skill and ability *are* contextual, the ability to make a Japanese sword from the iron ore on up is a tremendous skill requiring long study, talent and vast research and yet, it is just this side of useless unless you are in Japan.
The point about astronomers is just something from the grand category of 'sad-but-true.' If you don't believe it, walk up to a few people in a bar and ask them what the phrase, 'main sequence' refers to in astronomy.
He is by no means trolling and this response to him is, to my mind, quite surprising.
It's sometimes amazing to see what governments will get up to when they put their minds to it--the shortsightedness and the ability to believe they can depend on the goodwill of their citizens is amazing.
First off, the proposed measure is just plain nasty.
I mean really, these *bugs* which is essentially what these little dossier-stuffers are, are a civil liberties nightmare. Do you really have privacy if the only way you can get to somewhere on one else needs to know about is wear a mask (remember, cameras!) while you pay cash for a bus-ticket?
Second, with criminals from all over the place becoming more and more technologically sophisticated, does anyone outside of governments really believe that a retrofitted, government issue radio transmitter in a car--probably put in a standardized location--will really deter thieves?
Third, it really makes you wonder about culture: how is it that anyone can propose something like this when its safe to assume that anyone can walk into an electronics store and buy books with plans for voltage multipliers in them?
You can already hear people mumbling, 'capacitor, diode, capacitor, diode...'
The end result: a lot of modern electronics works using components that you have to protect from the static charge you accumulate by walking over a carpet and it's hard to imagine these things standing tall after a shot of 10,000 volts AC.
The criminals and savvy anarchists will dance. Everybody else will get to feel a bit more like sheep.
The original poster wrote that once the spammer who became known shut down his operation, saw a 98% reduction makes an interesing point: if we knew who was sending the spam and who was profiting, we the community could send him enough hate-mail and other forms of revenge for the richer ones to be more content with the money they've already made while the poorer ones might take up more noble pursuits.
It's a pity that there is, as yet, no elegant, widely-known mechanism for finding the people who are the source of spam. God, one of *them* unable to use email without having to learn to use complex filters to get his messages.
I would *pay* to see that.
I want someone to multiply the power of the doll's engine *many* times. Then, I want them to fill it with lots of information and to give it a measure of speech as well as visual recognition.
I want to ask it fuzzy little questions about words. I want it to plug into my computer as my dictionary and thesaurus--no, did I say, 'plug in'? Sorry, I meant, interface via wifi with my computer, as my copy of seven different encyclopedias and as my database of seldom-used Bash and VI commands.
When all that is done, I want it to work pronunciation drills for me when I decide to improve my Russian and review my German.
Really, honestly, for me, all it needs to make me very, very happy as an adjunct to a computer is more power than I know what to do with and a glowing cubical casing.
This nasty incident has interesting things to say about current-day capitalism.
With all the pressure to make things better and faster by exploiting cheaper labor and vast international differentials in labor and environmental laws, capitalism has created a situation that makes the event described seem a lot less like news.
With Globalization in place, Asian companies are getting a lot of exposure to cutting-edge technology in an industrial wild-west setting in which you find companies manufacturing items involving more and more complex/precise technologies engineered by companies that are very concerned by the prospect of facing class-action suits for personal injury that might eliminate their profits from even a stellar project.
This wild-west aspect comes from having large fish working alongside small fish in tight spaces. Back-alley manufactures are bound to do some cheating: it's hard to imagine having a bunch of intelligent, underpaid, job-hungry workers with health-problems being very good for industrial security and the results show up in the decades-old, made-in-Asia black-market for counterfeit products of all kinds from fake Levi's jeans to unlicensed, ultra-cheap component electronics and 'fly-by-night,' or 'botchitt-and-scarper' operations remove the fear of lawsuits from cutting corners when working with potentially shrapnel-producing battery chemistries.
Oddly enough, this isn't the only such incident seen on Slashdot recently. The current story only attracts more attention because of the spectacular personal injury factor.
Some months ago, Slashdot carried a story on some capacitors which caused problems that brought about a motherboard recall. They were all the result of Chinese industrial espionage of Japanese processes leading first one company and then others to misunderstand how to make an advanced electrolyte compound.
Arguments about what the government should and should not fund are, as Judge Bork put it in one of his last coherent statements, 'an intellectual feast.' There are a lot of things to spread out on the table.
First off, you have to put your feet in the dangerous waters of 'national character.' To talk about a project like the one in question meaningfully, you have to remember that the Japanese do practice capitalism, but they do it in a very different way than we do. Japanese capitalism involves much more overt collaboration between government and industry than ours does.
Their capitalism is more collectivized than ours is (that is, they are more interested in the value, power and prestige of their companies than in short-term profit than we are) and this is something which you can never talk about enough when talking about the differing approaches to fundamental research into high-tech.
When the Japanese try to spend a lot of public money on thirty years worth of robotics research, they are betting on the long-term future in an attempt to give themselves an edge in what they project will be a major world industry and the government is trying to give Japanese industry a leg-up on the rest of the world before the technology and the market it will facilitate even exist. If it works, there will be jobs and money in Japan a long time from now.
Cool desu-neh?
This is something that Japanese science does very well: doing research to create products to exploit markets which gives them the money to do research to create products to exploit markets to... I'm sure you get the idea.
If you don't, read up on the history of IBM before the rise of the personal computer. Pay special attention to the sections on the mainframe computer market.
For an example of one of the consequences of Japan's 'collectivizing' capitalism, read the Time's account of the law suit over the development of the Blue-Light LED by the researcher who made it possible.
By contrast, you can say that we do the same thing in the US on many levels but with shorter-term goals as reflects the current version of American corporate culture. If you don't believe that, please read the New York Time's reporting on some of the corporate tax refunds made under the current administration as well as their environmental policy.
You will see BIG income-tax refunds to corporations--including some to corporations that paid no taxes in recent years--and measures made law that allow corporations to do lots and lots of environmental damage that someone other than the source of the problem has to either live with or pay to clean up later.
Hint: which is the bigger secret under the current administration--which is harder to find out: what are the ingredients for an atomic bomb are or just how polluted the rivers in Texas really are?
Both schools of capitalism enhance the interests of some segment of the societies they represent but their approaches and their results are different: the Japanese model, in its ideal form, will lead to your waking up one day and saying, 'Hey! Where did all these robots come from and why aren't we making them or selling them?!'
The American model is different. It accomplishes results faster. Its effects are more immediately felt: It lets you wake up, right now, and wonder how it can be that the US spends billions (your tax dollars at work!) protecting a dead domestic steel industry and fattening already wealthy agro-businessmen while Ken Lay and others of his ilk remain out of jail long after the collapse of Enron.
Whee!
Now, to the question of government spending, the questions of what the government spends money on or should is a matter of values--essentially, a question of the tastes of those in power--and thus moot questions. You can have things both ways basing your arguments on equally valid, mutually exclusive, base assumptions and chains of reasoning.
Personally, as a hemi-demi-quasi-crypto-lefty, I lean
It's interesting to see people in England rejecting these things so quickly and so thoroughly. It leaves one to wonder how we will react to them if they are given a trial in the United States.
After all, part of the mythos of our national character is that we are rugged individualists who only want to be left alone, but we regularly put up with the knowlege that various private and government agencies develop and deploy some of the most sophisticated intrusive security technologies in the world (e.g., public security cameras, biometrics, face recognition, gait recognition, cellular phone location, productivity logging etc, etc, ad nauseum...) and with that often in the pursuit of genuinely base motives.
This raises a question: 'Which of our faces will we in the U.S. turn towards a technology that, for a brief interval at least, simply does away with the privacy inherent in the inability of anyone anywhere to know precisely where you are?'
In one of the messages above, someone asked if there were any good uses for the technology and I think I can see the technology revolutionizing point-of-sale technologies for credit/debit card use; possibly reproducing the scenario in the speculative IBM commercial where someone shops in a supermarket by stuffing items in his coat and walking out of the place, only to be stopped by a security guard who reminds him to take the receipt for his purchases.
Basically, if a system knows you are carrying x items of y value that belong to the store until you walk them past a point where their cost is deducted from your account, you can eliminate cashiers. Of course, what those girls who operate supermarket cash registers do with themselves after you do is anyone's guess.
One more interesting thing is that these are electronic devices that have to send a signal in order to function: they have *got* be vulnerable to something.
Perhaps part of your transaction in your point-of-sale system of the future could be frying the tags one the items to mark them as sold which would also take care of the paranoia problem.
Before anyone mentions it: buying, selling or possessing any of the Russian or Taiwanese tag-zappers that would soon hit the market would be punishable by fine, imprisonment or both.
Have a good one...
The ellipses of cellular usage are bizarre things, from: 'The fact that American companies and ONLY American companies charge both the person who placed the call AND the person receiving it doesn't make us BOTH suckers,' to 'technological fashion demands that I pay a lot of money so my boss can reach me while I'm making love.'
Yes, the inner game of cellular use is a strange one and you've got to play it as smartly as possible on your end because you are an amateur while the people working for the multibillion-dollar corporations whose whole reason for existing is to replace the payphone are trained professionals who think of ways of rogering their customers on overtime.
So where does this leave you when it comes to number portability?
Stay flexible. As the poster from Finland pointed out, where he is, number portability lead to companies making big efforts to keep customers from switching to other companies. Something like that *might* happen here--you can certainly imagine that entering the mix when the legislation is enacted--but it is just as likely that the same class of businessmen who brought you the eternal copyright will certainly use the fees the law grants to hide another fifty-cents on your bill every month while kicking and screaming to avoid giving you a choice. Why would anyone expect them to do otherwise? There's no downside for them.
Your part of the game as a customer is to maintain all the flexibility, and the best bargaining position you can in dealing with them. Look at it this way. As things are now, switching out of a new contract with a provider already means, handing a company that has proven its lack of worth a stack of bills so you can own a dead cell phone.
Cellular providers hold all the psychological cards against switching so it's your job to find the company that combines the strongest mix of features with the strongest motivation for keeping you. If that means paying ten dollars a month so you can plan-hop when they offer something better than what you have, or jump ship if someone else outbids them, so be it.
Making the right decision can surprise you: I use a phone from one of the smaller fish in the big game and during the recent blackout, my web service functioned for a while even after my voice service didn't, and I ended lending my phone to several people whose service only came back hours later.
I think the best way of thinking about ones relationship with cellular providers is to think of it as friendly warfare.
I find your biological comments interesting but I have to say that if you are going to use a latin tag as your sig, you might consider running your note through a spell-checker. Sudden discoveries like 'Occures' works hard to spoil the effect.
This, by the way, is by no means a flame. I like your note. It makes me want to know more.
This thing is reductible to a few simple points:
1. With few exceptions, all information (speech) is licit under our constitution--including things that would let you blow stuff up or overthrow the government.
2. So long as you do not get together with other and plan to *perform* a set of *actions* like assassinating someone at a given place at a certain time, you can talk about overthrowing the government to your heart's content.
3. Our notion of government is one where the people and the nation are in some sense the property of a ruling body; the ruling body serves the people and not vice versa.
In a population with a diversity of ideas, there will always be a number of people who will want not reform but revolution, and it is one of the functions of government to keep their numbers low by providing a free and prosperous society that is immune to revolutionaries because there are no viable, convincing arguments for a grass-roots revolution in such a society.
With this in mind, what the government did is like a crime against nature and it shows a sickening lack of understanding. In most cases, a few years of working a decent job and getting laid semi-regularly beats the anarchy right out of young men, instead, the government's activist stance here works to demonstrate that the kid's Anarchist, revolutionary philosophy is spot-on correct.
It says that our government can and does punish the dissemination of information it dislikes (mis-)using anti-terror laws to suppress free speech just like every modern dictatorship, from Hitler's Germany to the People's Republic of China. The only difference is one of extent--the placement of the threshold of action--and a prosecution sweetened by judicial blackmail does a lot to lesson the difference.
Another thing to consider is what it's going to do to the kid in the long run. It hard to imagine how much the kid is going to hate the system after spending what should be his sophmore year in college in a federal prison. Before, the kid wanted to talk about throwing bombs, in a year's time, maybe he'll end up wanting to do Timothy McVeigh one better.
You've gotta love it.