One of the more interesting topics I've seen in a while.
The idea of America losing it's technological edge to short-sighted management decisions as a repeat of how we lost our edge in manufacturing is a scenario that raises shudders.
There are a lot of large land-masses with neither technology nor manufacturing going for them. I think they're collectively referred to as, 'The Third World.'
There were a lot of interesting threads above arguing the right or lack of a right of a drug company to hold patent secrets and the attendent ability to set prices.
This rapidly becomes a matter of taste in morals and what a society should allow or does allow in terms of ethics.
The way pharmaceutical companies operate in many cases, is analogous to blackmail: a man walks up to a woman whose husband has a violent temper. He tells her that he has put them in a place where her husband is bound to find them very soon unless he gives her all the money she can beg, borrow or steal.
Like someone with a fatal illness, the woman has very little time to respond and has to put many of her resources into providing for her tormentor's profit.
One man is a filthy criminal. The other is a corporate hero.
It is interesting to note that when there is a sufficient pressure of national interest, governments lesson or remove the power of companies and individuals to derive profit from their inventions (see the conflict between the Wright Brothers and the Inventor Curtis over the aileron at the start of the first World War).
The key question which is only resolved by the political will of the people in control is: 'at what point do the interests of the many (alleviation of suffering, survival), outweigh the interests of corporations and entrepreneurs?'
It's an ugly question. Not everyone has the stomach to intellectualize people dying of infection by a resistant strain so they can charge $100 for antibiotics instead of $10 but this is what drug companies are all about.
Looked at one way, Microsoft is only trying to limit their legal liability for something that they are too lazy, too uninterested, or too incompetent to stop on their own.
It's a matter of control without responsibility. The measures that the article mentions are as draconian as spam is loathsome. The measure provides a penalty of a thousand dollars per message sent and it is bound to bankrupt anyone caught doing it; essentially providing the equivalent of a class-suit in a can.
This is a very effective measure against spam as written, but even a penalty as severe as the one mentioned would be only an inconvenience to Microsoft which would be made to pay for their taste for expansion with real risks under a law that provided effective penalties against spam.
Once more, the topic is control without responsibility and there is nothing surprising about Microsoft, a company that writes Petri dishes into its software and doesn't take them out after years of exploits, wanting special exemptions for the next time they are fooled, hacked, or get a wild-hair that makes them do what back-alley creeps resort to.
A nice broad, sweeping, law always seems to be a great idea for people involved in legislative groupthink and there is real irony in the this example.
Considering the many, well-understood, and readily-available ways of the creating the means for blowing up--hint: *never* apply heat or spark to vaporized gasoline--a legal dragnet that impedes access to things as innocuous as model rocket moters is pure irony.
You've got to laugh imagining some bearded guy shouting at another, 'put away that fertilizer and help me scrape out nine-thousand number threes!'
We have proof positive that our government is run by people who were expected to make laws for Disneyland.
With that many people working on submarine projects, two things come to mind immediately: how many of these guys really understand what they're doing? And... where on god's green earth do they get their money???
I can easily understand building a better bicycle frame, but a pressure hull? I don't *think* so...
The Oscars are a highly politicised event in the motion picture industry and not a late-night bull-session about the Silmarillion. Key to understanding this is that the/. post mentions failed lobbying for the nomination and not surprise at the performance's having failed to garner the nomination on its merits.
When all is said and done, the nomination depends on the performance--what the audience and the judges see and that is the whole movie: the script, the direction the cinematography, etc.
Therein lies the problem: you can imagine that the judges weren't ready. What the judges must have seen watching LOTR/TTT was a talented actor providing voice for an eccentric performance by an advanced muppet.
Is anyone really surprised that something tearing rabbits with its teeth didn't grab the judges interest?
Thank god it was 'only' a matter of (perceived) national security.
If there had been PAC money behind it, it not only would have passed but the Supreme court would have put it up next to the bible. All in all, it's a reason to be cheerful.
The ability to encrypt information for secure transmission is part of a security apparatus. Without it, you have to assume your information can be read and secure it in other ways. With it, you assume that your information is safe via 'normal' (read, faster, easier, cheaper) channels and you act accordingly.
Basically, it's a bet. If you are right, your orders and information travel faster and more securely than the enemy's even if they have samples of your messages. If however, you are wrong, you start to notice strange patterns involving your U-boat fleet and the safety of high-ranking officers who travel by air.
The short form in the real world: Everything is theorhetically unbreakable until someone rifines the theory.
Its easy to understand why Sci-Fi would make a miniseries of Dune, since it's a great book. Were it not for Hollywood's sequel mentality, it would be a lot harder to understand why they're making a miniseries of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune
This is a curiously modern problem. The need of the writer or producer to exploit their 'product,' 'franchise,' or what have you outweighs the needs of the story to be a complete and completed experience and the combination of the need to exploit success coupled with the nature of stories themselves form a trap for writers and writing.
A story works by solving the problems that drive the action in it and once all those problems are solved the story is over. Epic fictions like Dune makes this aspect of writing glaringly obvious; when you have 'saved the universe' or 'destroyed and remade the old order,' you're done and there's nothing left to the story that flows from it naturally; more storytelling is anticlimax.
It's just one reason history has spared us, 'Romeo and Juliet II.'
One thought though, if you're doing 90 knots underwater when the sea is full of debris [slashdot.org], you might want really good maps and a kick ass gps+VR rig to guide you through the canyons, because I doubt sonar will be able to image for you fast enough.
The speed of sound in air is over five hundred miles and hour. I don't know what it is in air but if you assume that it is half again as fast in either direction, then it cannot be less than two-hundred and fifty miles per hour, nor more than seven-hundred and fifty miles per hour at the high end.
If things are workable at the low end, the high end is fine. Therefore, the low end is the 'danger zone.' Assuming an active sonar range of one mile. Now, submariners don't like using active sonar, it's analogous to a soldier standing in an empty field at night and shouting, 'shoot me!!'
Be that as it may, working with the assumption that the submariners use it, it is fairly safe to assume that any system they use for detecting objects in their path would be used to provide the most proactive solution to the problem of not running into things possible.
Basically, if you were doing 90 knots when you turned on your sonar system, in a place with potential hazards at close range, you might not like it, but assuming you spent all your time pinging like crazy, it is safe to assume that you would have advanced warning on objects in the distance because your sonar data would let you catalog them before they became a threat to you.
Note also that GPS systems use radio waves which don't work well at all when transmitted through water.
Be that as it may. It is of course true that VR-goggles and GPS techology are both very cool.
"Hey! Hey! Careful! You could put somebody's wall out with that.
Seeing a potato cannon again after all this time produces *stirrings*, raising a renewed adolescent fascination with mindless destruction and the deepest regret that I never got to build one.
I admit it: just seeing one of those things again, makes me want to destroy mindlessly.
It is interesting to observe the cultural differences and surprises.
I mean, yes, there were, as I remember some incidents in the United States that caused concern, but it seems hard to imagine Germans--even young ones--of all people going through the trouble of building these things and not bothering themselves too much about who or what is down range.
Stranger still is yet another instance of an internet news paradox: find a phenomenon you *don't* want anyone to imitate, write about it to tell everyone how bad it is and, presto! One hour later, half the world knows exactly how to do it...
The Economist's Editorial is cogent and logically thought out as an abstraction to foster the public interest but the thinking behind it collapses in the real world.
By extending copyright, the various content providers have taken images and ideas that are public icons and locked them up behind a wall that is to all intents and purposes eternal.
Generations have grown up knowing who Mickey Mouse is and there is every reason to expect that Disney, as only one of many content companies, will want to hang on to the iconic power of their rodent for as long as possible. Having an attractive idea that is to all intents and purposes self-advertising is worth a huge amount of money to them and they will want to continue to exploit it.
The real-world problem with the editorialist's proposed scenario is that even if one could realistically expect the idea to go past two PAC-fattened United States legislative bodies and an executive branch that caresses the advantaged (e.g., the Bush Administration's handling of the Microsoft Antitrust Case), there would be no reason for content providers provided with hardware protection-schemes not to pursue the same copyright extensions in the future that they have recently won--either immediately or towards the end of their first or second copyright term. Once they were provided with the ability to define all computer hardware as machinery incapable of violating copyright (however you choose to define 'violation'), their pursuit of prefabricated eternal profit-streams would be only a matter of rational self-interest.
There would in fact be even less to dissuade them in this scenario because fourteen to twenty-eight years from now, holding the keys to all machinery that could replicate content, they would have less to lose to the threat of piracy than they do now.
The problem is more than just one of language and cynicism. In the United States, there is a repeated pattern of providing advantage to drug companies to the detriment of ordinary people who are undergoing terrible suffering.
Anti-viral drug therapies to combat HIV are a good example. Drug companies in the United States sold the materials for early anti-HIV regimens for vast sums of money. So much so, that for a time, gay support-groups found that they could take advantage of the price-differential between the United States and Europe by sending someone to France to pick up the same compounds.
Drug companies based this on the two-part claim that the cost was justified by having to recoup research and development costs and that the complexity of the processes involved in making the drugs also justified their expense. Critics of the companies that manufacture prescription drugs have pointed out that reality bares out neither of these assertions because the funding for the research into the drugs was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health, while Indian researches who reverse-engineered the compounds found that they could produce them at a small fraction of the cost at which those drugs were being provided to American Citizens whose tax-dollars had funded the research that provided them. If memory serves, the price differential was by not less than a factor of ten.
With this in mind, someone's ranting about how unfair, how sordid, and how squalidly nasty he expects the distribution of the drug or therapy to be is not unjustified by publicly-available past experience. You can almost state it as a formula: the expense and rarity of a therapy are in direct proportion to the sufferer's desperation.
Research into methods of curing disease and lessoning suffering are a wonderful source of pride in human achievement, but once those stunning, original thoughts leave the ivory tower they very often end up in the mud.
First off, the piece says that Rosen is leaving, not that she has been or will be:
a) Immediately and ignomineously fired,
and...
b) I also believe she is expected to be leaving at the end of this year. Great news on December 2nd but, indifferent at best in late January.
I personally don't mind the thought of dancing in the streets over it but as far as we know, the whole reason for her leaving is that she got a really irressistable offer from a headhunter.
The other shoe that should keep everyone's eyes pointed skyward is the possibility that the cause behind her leaving is that they've found someone who is like her but a smoother liar...;
I've never had a girlfriend who used hairspray, but if I had had one, I am sure of three things that would be true of the can: 1. the contents would be flammable. 2. it would be smarter than tipper gore. 3. it would have gone much farther to make things stiff than she ever had.
Yes, there are Democrats who will support anything for a vote or a buck but I think the timing on this is the point of it.
The only thing different here in round two is that the Republicans feel they have a realistic shot at it and they're taking it.
This proposed law falls under three main categories: 1. Interesting, but not good. 2. The Republican version of legislating morality. 3. Brownie-point lawmaking.
One A law mandating federal penalities for distributing violent games to minors is nothing new. They trotted it out before without control of both houses and it didn't make it. Now that the Republican party has both houses, it's time for some of the best-loved bubbles to come out of the mud again. It isn't surprising and it isn't interesting except as part of a historical study in chutzpah--it stank on ice with the Democrats capable of blocking it, but now that they're out, it's a brave new world and nonsense is golden.
With the Republicans in control, It's time to bring back everything that was nauseating six months ago, like judicial appointees who think that hate-crimes really aren't so bad and parental augmentation by way of capital hill. By threatening to put video-game distributors into orange jumpsuits, the government will try and take decisions out of parent's hands while placing an unfair burden on a commercial entity that is not equipped to know that much about who the final recipients of its products are.
You want to sell ninja-swords? Keep them out of California and New York and you're fine. You want to sell a copy of grand-theft auto without knowing who's going to play it? That's a federal crime.
Two 'You can't legislate morality' is a good modern finger-pointer of a phrase and both sides of a political debate love the sting of it. The first time I heard it, it was applied by conservative, semi-rural friends of mine while talking about liberals/democratic gun-control legislation. Now, it seems that the Conservatives in power have taken it up (again) in their own idiom.
It kind of makes you wonder: I mean, what you allow you kids to see or not is essentially a right, a form of free speech and what we choose to control is an interesting mirror that societies hold up. In our society, sex and nudity are way out of the fringe, limited to signals and metaphors on Television and wildly in demand on the internet. Violence has always been available in the mass media. You have to wonder if the people who put the paddles to this thing's chest really imagine that children can be made to sit through eighteen years of the Velveteen Rabbit without going insane.
Three If the human race woke up tomorrow and found itself ten IQ-points smarter on average, we would bury laws like this one in the same pit into which we threw graft-fueled copyright-extensions and minimum sentencing.
It's the classic appeal to the middle ages: 'you believe that the dark magic of computers has enslaved the minds of our youth, turning them into blood-crazed zombies who read the reports on the Columbine Massacre one-handed.' The truth is, neither you nor we have any idea why the same games sell in other countries without raising the murder-rate there, but we know what you believe and we're going to feed you the ineffectual and harmful pablum you demand. Think of it as free sound-bites come election time... Ignore that man raving about free speech and the rights of parents behind the curtain. Have a nice day.'
Something tells me that this is a holdover from earlier times and more primative equipment.
You, kryonD, are absolutely right (and perceptive) to note that the number of digits is hardly justified, except that the numbers in question are divided among localized geographical areas in an arrangement from a time where phones were much thinner on the ground.
If memory serves, once upon a time, the individual exchanges were nice, neat affairs where human operators interfaced with the system directly, placing and connecting calls through switchboards, with small phone numbers preceded by a few digits which indicated the exchange of the call's recipient. These early prefixes often formed a mnemonic reference; 'Operator, please give me, "Butterfield-six-three-three..."'
The ineficiencies you point out seem to be the result of a system with a lot of built-in legacy thinking which points back to far less sophisticated technologies.
Basically, if everyone in the country, or on earth shared one phone system, putting us all under one umbrella from New York and on to far Beijing, a rationalized system would work but you would be very hard pressed to interest anyone in establishing one.
I mean, if you were to view the entire industry as a game, then Microsoft has "won". And it would be a show of great sportsmanship to collect their gold medal, step off the podium and leave the playing field.
I think in order to understand this you have to delve into psychology.
First off:
People really don't get it when they think of Bill Gate's money. They think that they understand it but they miss one crucial point: If you have one billion dollars, you have made what an ordinary mortal working at a job that pays fifty-thousand dollars a year would make working for twenty-thousand years--that is, before the time that most archeologists consider the origin of Civilization.
With only one billion dollars, in cash, you are set in a way that few people can really dream of.
How set is he? Instead of building a dinky, 25 mega-dollar, home in the gray rain of Washington State, he could make an offer for Manhattan's Citicorp Center skyscraper ($175 million in 1977), and use the residual money to throw one million-dollar party in it, every day for the next two years. That is what he could do if he were worth only one billion in Cash.
On paper, according to the Bill Gates Net Worth Page, he is worth, 32 billions. If he were to sell out for cash with no loss from the lessened scarcity of Microsoft Stock (read, 'market panic'), he would be able to make everyone in Denmark a six-thousand-and-four dollar loan.
The entire banking system would have to collapse, taking what we understand as civilization with it, before Bill Gates was ever to go hungry. It isn't about money, but it is about need.
It's the need to win even if you have to rewrite the rules to make sure that you do. It's a game that changes the face of the world and so long as Microsoft wins it, he can feel good about himself in ways that are a lot harder to understand than exactly what his money is worth in skyscrapers and entertainment: imagine, if you will, what you would need to live down the absence of every dumb jock's birthright: imagine needing to be the richest man on earth before the world would let you marry a woman who worked for you.
I use a Yahoo mail address and I find that they do a very good job of keeping the tide down below my chin. The downside to this is that they're only willing to do so much for you for free and I'm left having to consider kicking in a few bucks to get a larger, heftier version of my current mailbox with more extensive blocking and filtering routines.
I think that Jellomizer's advice about not posting in newsgroups and using a name that is hard for an algorithm to make out are good ideas, but considering the pace of innovation and the constant warfare between the cleverest programmer working for a spammer and the cleverest programmer working against one, the only way to keep down spam seems to involve filtration routines and intelligent use of your email accounts.
After seeing this thread, I wonder about luck: it's been a long time since anyone's offered to inflate my breasts and stretch my penis on the same day...
I don't think that the silly lawsuits are a valid cause for enthusiasm.
Our age didn't invent the stupid law or the weird implementation. Our age did not give birth to the damned silly lawsuit. The root of the problem is not the time in which we live, but the deterioration of the values of American politicians to which our age is witness.
It's a fascinating paradox: now, in an age with never-before-imaginable possibilities for public scrutiny of political actions, American politicians have become brazen in their pandering to special interests that run counter to the public good.
As Justice Stevens's dissenting opinion in yesterday's Supreme Court cited, an inventor had lobbied congress for a patent extension in the 1790's, not long after the laws governing patents had been given their initial form. Steven's citation notes that the inventor successfully lobbied congress for an extension of his patent, but Stevens noted that it took the man years to gather the support needed to make Congress grant his extension--an extension which Stevens opines was unconstitutional.
Contrast the men of those Congressional sessions with the people behind the DMCA and the sickening Sonny-Bonno extension, and you see the actions of men who don't see themselves as public servants, or as honorable men with the heritage of a nation to protect. Looked at this way, it's all intellectual clear-sailing and there is nothing surprising at all to be found in a law that facilitates lawsuits that raise the cost of innovation against the public interest.
Basically, 'they're creeps. They don't care. The results are not surprising.
If they cave though, then bullying becomes a legal and effective way of getting your way, and we're all screwed.
Actually, it (bullying) is already a very effective tactic.
There is a mechanism at work here: a company can communicate with anyone it wants to and threaten to seek a legal remedy if any exists in the target nation's legal system.
If any of the target companies/individuals don't give in to the demand, two things can happen:
1. The corporation can walk away, having scared all, some or none of the target ISP's.
2. They can make good on the threat of legal action.
Walking away after even partial success entails the company's having worked wonders for the price of a few emails written by people they have on salary. Essentially, it costs them nothing.
Corollary: defending billions in revenues can cost very little money.
Making good on the threat closes down an avenue of access--remember that carnival game with the gophers and the hammer--for 'pirates,' 'liberators,' 'guys-who-feel-hosed-by-overpricing,' etc., while simultaneously proving to any onlooker who wasn't scared before that a multibillion-dollar organization has a long reach.
Corollary: Even given a suit with no imaginable merit, a court system will go through the motions forcing the companies and individuals to spend money--at the very least, in answering motions and summonses to court.
Corollary 2: with a legal staff in place, a lawsuit is a minor expense for a large enough company that can easily bankrupt an ordinary citizen or smaller company.
We won't even talk about what happens when the corporation is big enough to get the U.S. government involved...
Slashdot Mirror
One of the more interesting topics I've seen in a while.
The idea of America losing it's technological edge to short-sighted management decisions as a repeat of how we lost our edge in manufacturing is a scenario that raises shudders.
There are a lot of large land-masses with neither technology nor manufacturing going for them. I think they're collectively referred to as, 'The Third World.'
Yes. Before I read sentence three, sentence two made my hackles rise. :D
There were a lot of interesting threads above arguing the right or lack of a right of a drug company to hold patent secrets and the attendent ability to set prices.
This rapidly becomes a matter of taste in morals and what a society should allow or does allow in terms of ethics.
The way pharmaceutical companies operate in many cases, is analogous to blackmail: a man walks up to a woman whose husband has a violent temper. He tells her that he has put them in a place where her husband is bound to find them very soon unless he gives her all the money she can beg, borrow or steal.
Like someone with a fatal illness, the woman has very little time to respond and has to put many of her resources into providing for her tormentor's profit.
One man is a filthy criminal. The other is a corporate hero.
It is interesting to note that when there is a sufficient pressure of national interest, governments lesson or remove the power of companies and individuals to derive profit from their inventions (see the conflict between the Wright Brothers and the Inventor Curtis over the aileron at the start of the first World War).
The key question which is only resolved by the political will of the people in control is: 'at what point do the interests of the many (alleviation of suffering, survival ), outweigh the interests of corporations and entrepreneurs?'
It's an ugly question. Not everyone has the stomach to intellectualize people dying of infection by a resistant strain so they can charge $100 for antibiotics instead of $10 but this is what drug companies are all about.
Looked at one way, Microsoft is only trying to limit their legal liability for something that they are too lazy, too uninterested, or too incompetent to stop on their own.
It's a matter of control without responsibility. The measures that the article mentions are as draconian as spam is loathsome. The measure provides a penalty of a thousand dollars per message sent and it is bound to bankrupt anyone caught doing it; essentially providing the equivalent of a class-suit in a can.
This is a very effective measure against spam as written, but even a penalty as severe as the one mentioned would be only an inconvenience to Microsoft which would be made to pay for their taste for expansion with real risks under a law that provided effective penalties against spam.
Once more, the topic is control without responsibility and there is nothing surprising about Microsoft, a company that writes Petri dishes into its software and doesn't take them out after years of exploits, wanting special exemptions for the next time they are fooled, hacked, or get a wild-hair that makes them do what back-alley creeps resort to.
A nice broad, sweeping, law always seems to be a great idea for people involved in legislative groupthink and there is real irony in the this example.
Considering the many, well-understood, and readily-available ways of the creating the means for blowing up--hint: *never* apply heat or spark to vaporized gasoline--a legal dragnet that impedes access to things as innocuous as model rocket moters is pure irony.
You've got to laugh imagining some bearded guy shouting at another, 'put away that fertilizer and help me scrape out nine-thousand number threes!'
We have proof positive that our government is run by people who were expected to make laws for Disneyland.
With that many people working on submarine projects, two things come to mind immediately: how many of these guys really understand what they're doing? And... where on god's green earth do they get their money???
I can easily understand building a better bicycle frame, but a pressure hull? I don't *think* so...
The Oscars are a highly politicised event in the motion picture industry and not a late-night bull-session about the Silmarillion. Key to understanding this is that the /. post mentions failed lobbying for the nomination and not surprise at the performance's having failed to garner the nomination on its merits.
When all is said and done, the nomination depends on the performance--what the audience and the judges see and that is the whole movie: the script, the direction the cinematography, etc.
Therein lies the problem: you can imagine that the judges weren't ready. What the judges must have seen watching LOTR/TTT was a talented actor providing voice for an eccentric performance by an advanced muppet.
Is anyone really surprised that something tearing rabbits with its teeth didn't grab the judges interest?
Thank god it was 'only' a matter of (perceived) national security.
If there had been PAC money behind it, it not only would have passed but the Supreme court would have put it up next to the bible. All in all, it's a reason to be cheerful.
The ability to encrypt information for secure transmission is part of a security apparatus. Without it, you have to assume your information can be read and secure it in other ways. With it, you assume that your information is safe via 'normal' (read, faster, easier, cheaper) channels and you act accordingly.
Basically, it's a bet. If you are right, your orders and information travel faster and more securely than the enemy's even if they have samples of your messages. If however, you are wrong, you start to notice strange patterns involving your U-boat fleet and the safety of high-ranking officers who travel by air.
The short form in the real world: Everything is theorhetically unbreakable until someone rifines the theory.
Good on her!
Does she have a website for contributions to her legal fund?
Its easy to understand why Sci-Fi would make a miniseries of Dune, since it's a great book. Were it not for Hollywood's sequel mentality, it would be a lot harder to understand why they're making a miniseries of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune
This is a curiously modern problem. The need of the writer or producer to exploit their 'product,' 'franchise,' or what have you outweighs the needs of the story to be a complete and completed experience and the combination of the need to exploit success coupled with the nature of stories themselves form a trap for writers and writing.
A story works by solving the problems that drive the action in it and once all those problems are solved the story is over. Epic fictions like Dune makes this aspect of writing glaringly obvious; when you have 'saved the universe' or 'destroyed and remade the old order,' you're done and there's nothing left to the story that flows from it naturally; more storytelling is anticlimax.
It's just one reason history has spared us, 'Romeo and Juliet II.'
One thought though, if you're doing 90 knots underwater when the sea is full of debris [slashdot.org], you might want really good maps and a kick ass gps+VR rig to guide you through the canyons, because I doubt sonar will be able to image for you fast enough.
The speed of sound in air is over five hundred miles and hour. I don't know what it is in air but if you assume that it is half again as fast in either direction, then it cannot be less than two-hundred and fifty miles per hour, nor more than seven-hundred and fifty miles per hour at the high end.
If things are workable at the low end, the high end is fine. Therefore, the low end is the 'danger zone.' Assuming an active sonar range of one mile. Now, submariners don't like using active sonar, it's analogous to a soldier standing in an empty field at night and shouting, 'shoot me!!'
Be that as it may, working with the assumption that the submariners use it, it is fairly safe to assume that any system they use for detecting objects in their path would be used to provide the most proactive solution to the problem of not running into things possible.
Basically, if you were doing 90 knots when you turned on your sonar system, in a place with potential hazards at close range, you might not like it, but assuming you spent all your time pinging like crazy, it is safe to assume that you would have advanced warning on objects in the distance because your sonar data would let you catalog them before they became a threat to you.
Note also that GPS systems use radio waves which don't work well at all when transmitted through water.
Be that as it may. It is of course true that VR-goggles and GPS techology are both very cool.
"Hey! Hey! Careful! You could put somebody's wall out with that.
Seeing a potato cannon again after all this time produces *stirrings*, raising a renewed adolescent fascination with mindless destruction and the deepest regret that I never got to build one.
I admit it: just seeing one of those things again, makes me want to destroy mindlessly.
It is interesting to observe the cultural differences and surprises.
I mean, yes, there were, as I remember some incidents in the United States that caused concern, but it seems hard to imagine Germans--even young ones--of all people going through the trouble of building these things and not bothering themselves too much about who or what is down range.
Stranger still is yet another instance of an internet news paradox: find a phenomenon you *don't* want anyone to imitate, write about it to tell everyone how bad it is and, presto! One hour later, half the world knows exactly how to do it...
The Economist's Editorial is cogent and logically thought out as an abstraction to foster the public interest but the thinking behind it collapses in the real world.
By extending copyright, the various content providers have taken images and ideas that are public icons and locked them up behind a wall that is to all intents and purposes eternal.
Generations have grown up knowing who Mickey Mouse is and there is every reason to expect that Disney, as only one of many content companies, will want to hang on to the iconic power of their rodent for as long as possible. Having an attractive idea that is to all intents and purposes self-advertising is worth a huge amount of money to them and they will want to continue to exploit it.
The real-world problem with the editorialist's proposed scenario is that even if one could realistically expect the idea to go past two PAC-fattened United States legislative bodies and an executive branch that caresses the advantaged (e.g., the Bush Administration's handling of the Microsoft Antitrust Case), there would be no reason for content providers provided with hardware protection-schemes not to pursue the same copyright extensions in the future that they have recently won--either immediately or towards the end of their first or second copyright term. Once they were provided with the ability to define all computer hardware as machinery incapable of violating copyright (however you choose to define 'violation'), their pursuit of prefabricated eternal profit-streams would be only a matter of rational self-interest.
There would in fact be even less to dissuade them in this scenario because fourteen to twenty-eight years from now, holding the keys to all machinery that could replicate content, they would have less to lose to the threat of piracy than they do now.
The problem is more than just one of language and cynicism. In the United States, there is a repeated pattern of providing advantage to drug companies to the detriment of ordinary people who are undergoing terrible suffering.
Anti-viral drug therapies to combat HIV are a good example. Drug companies in the United States sold the materials for early anti-HIV regimens for vast sums of money. So much so, that for a time, gay support-groups found that they could take advantage of the price-differential between the United States and Europe by sending someone to France to pick up the same compounds.
Drug companies based this on the two-part claim that the cost was justified by having to recoup research and development costs and that the complexity of the processes involved in making the drugs also justified their expense. Critics of the companies that manufacture prescription drugs have pointed out that reality bares out neither of these assertions because the funding for the research into the drugs was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health, while Indian researches who reverse-engineered the compounds found that they could produce them at a small fraction of the cost at which those drugs were being provided to American Citizens whose tax-dollars had funded the research that provided them. If memory serves, the price differential was by not less than a factor of ten.
With this in mind, someone's ranting about how unfair, how sordid, and how squalidly nasty he expects the distribution of the drug or therapy to be is not unjustified by publicly-available past experience. You can almost state it as a formula: the expense and rarity of a therapy are in direct proportion to the sufferer's desperation.
Research into methods of curing disease and lessoning suffering are a wonderful source of pride in human achievement, but once those stunning, original thoughts leave the ivory tower they very often end up in the mud.
Seeing it gives me a new fevered mantra:
Gotta make money....
Gotta make money....
First off, the piece says that Rosen is leaving, not that she has been or will be:
a) Immediately and ignomineously fired,
and...
b) I also believe she is expected to be leaving at the end of this year. Great news on December 2nd but, indifferent at best in late January.
I personally don't mind the thought of dancing in the streets over it but as far as we know, the whole reason for her leaving is that she got a really irressistable offer from a headhunter.
The other shoe that should keep everyone's eyes pointed skyward is the possibility that the cause behind her leaving is that they've found someone who is like her but a smoother liar...;
I've never had a girlfriend who used hairspray, but if I had had one, I am sure of three things that would be true of the can:
1. the contents would be flammable.
2. it would be smarter than tipper gore.
3. it would have gone much farther to make things stiff than she ever had.
Yes, there are Democrats who will support anything for a vote or a buck but I think the timing on this is the point of it.
The only thing different here in round two is that the Republicans feel they have a realistic shot at it and they're taking it.
You kinda wish they wouldn't.
This proposed law falls under three main categories:
1. Interesting, but not good.
2. The Republican version of legislating morality.
3. Brownie-point lawmaking.
One
A law mandating federal penalities for distributing violent games to minors is nothing new. They trotted it out before without control of both houses and it didn't make it. Now that the Republican party has both houses, it's time for some of the best-loved bubbles to come out of the mud again. It isn't surprising and it isn't interesting except as part of a historical study in chutzpah--it stank on ice with the Democrats capable of blocking it, but now that they're out, it's a brave new world and nonsense is golden.
With the Republicans in control, It's time to bring back everything that was nauseating six months ago, like judicial appointees who think that hate-crimes really aren't so bad and parental augmentation by way of capital hill. By threatening to put video-game distributors into orange jumpsuits, the government will try and take decisions out of parent's hands while placing an unfair burden on a commercial entity that is not equipped to know that much about who the final recipients of its products are.
You want to sell ninja-swords? Keep them out of California and New York and you're fine. You want to sell a copy of grand-theft auto without knowing who's going to play it? That's a federal crime.
Two
'You can't legislate morality' is a good modern finger-pointer of a phrase and both sides of a political debate love the sting of it. The first time I heard it, it was applied by conservative, semi-rural friends of mine while talking about liberals/democratic gun-control legislation. Now, it seems that the Conservatives in power have taken it up (again) in their own idiom.
It kind of makes you wonder: I mean, what you allow you kids to see or not is essentially a right, a form of free speech and what we choose to control is an interesting mirror that societies hold up. In our society, sex and nudity are way out of the fringe, limited to signals and metaphors on Television and wildly in demand on the internet. Violence has always been available in the mass media. You have to wonder if the people who put the paddles to this thing's chest really imagine that children can be made to sit through eighteen years of the Velveteen Rabbit without going insane.
Three
If the human race woke up tomorrow and found itself ten IQ-points smarter on average, we would bury laws like this one in the same pit into which we threw graft-fueled copyright-extensions and minimum sentencing.
It's the classic appeal to the middle ages: 'you believe that the dark magic of computers has enslaved the minds of our youth, turning them into blood-crazed zombies who read the reports on the Columbine Massacre one-handed.' The truth is, neither you nor we have any idea why the same games sell in other countries without raising the murder-rate there, but we know what you believe and we're going to feed you the ineffectual and harmful pablum you demand. Think of it as free sound-bites come election time... Ignore that man raving about free speech and the rights of parents behind the curtain. Have a nice day.'
You, kryonD, are absolutely right (and perceptive) to note that the number of digits is hardly justified, except that the numbers in question are divided among localized geographical areas in an arrangement from a time where phones were much thinner on the ground.
If memory serves, once upon a time, the individual exchanges were nice, neat affairs where human operators interfaced with the system directly, placing and connecting calls through switchboards, with small phone numbers preceded by a few digits which indicated the exchange of the call's recipient. These early prefixes often formed a mnemonic reference; 'Operator, please give me, "Butterfield-six-three-three..."'
The ineficiencies you point out seem to be the result of a system with a lot of built-in legacy thinking which points back to far less sophisticated technologies.
Basically, if everyone in the country, or on earth shared one phone system, putting us all under one umbrella from New York and on to far Beijing, a rationalized system would work but you would be very hard pressed to interest anyone in establishing one.
I think in order to understand this you have to delve into psychology.
First off:
People really don't get it when they think of Bill Gate's money. They think that they understand it but they miss one crucial point: If you have one billion dollars, you have made what an ordinary mortal working at a job that pays fifty-thousand dollars a year would make working for twenty-thousand years--that is, before the time that most archeologists consider the origin of Civilization.
With only one billion dollars, in cash, you are set in a way that few people can really dream of.
How set is he? Instead of building a dinky, 25 mega-dollar, home in the gray rain of Washington State, he could make an offer for Manhattan's Citicorp Center skyscraper ($175 million in 1977), and use the residual money to throw one million-dollar party in it, every day for the next two years. That is what he could do if he were worth only one billion in Cash.
On paper, according to the Bill Gates Net Worth Page, he is worth, 32 billions. If he were to sell out for cash with no loss from the lessened scarcity of Microsoft Stock (read, 'market panic'), he would be able to make everyone in Denmark a six-thousand-and-four dollar loan.
The entire banking system would have to collapse, taking what we understand as civilization with it, before Bill Gates was ever to go hungry. It isn't about money, but it is about need.
It's the need to win even if you have to rewrite the rules to make sure that you do. It's a game that changes the face of the world and so long as Microsoft wins it, he can feel good about himself in ways that are a lot harder to understand than exactly what his money is worth in skyscrapers and entertainment: imagine, if you will, what you would need to live down the absence of every dumb jock's birthright: imagine needing to be the richest man on earth before the world would let you marry a woman who worked for you.
I use a Yahoo mail address and I find that they do a very good job of keeping the tide down below my chin. The downside to this is that they're only willing to do so much for you for free and I'm left having to consider kicking in a few bucks to get a larger, heftier version of my current mailbox with more extensive blocking and filtering routines.
I think that Jellomizer's advice about not posting in newsgroups and using a name that is hard for an algorithm to make out are good ideas, but considering the pace of innovation and the constant warfare between the cleverest programmer working for a spammer and the cleverest programmer working against one, the only way to keep down spam seems to involve filtration routines and intelligent use of your email accounts.
After seeing this thread, I wonder about luck: it's been a long time since anyone's offered to inflate my breasts and stretch my penis on the same day...
I don't think that the silly lawsuits are a valid cause for enthusiasm.
Our age didn't invent the stupid law or the weird implementation. Our age did not give birth to the damned silly lawsuit. The root of the problem is not the time in which we live, but the deterioration of the values of American politicians to which our age is witness.
It's a fascinating paradox: now, in an age with never-before-imaginable possibilities for public scrutiny of political actions, American politicians have become brazen in their pandering to special interests that run counter to the public good.
As Justice Stevens's dissenting opinion in yesterday's Supreme Court cited, an inventor had lobbied congress for a patent extension in the 1790's, not long after the laws governing patents had been given their initial form. Steven's citation notes that the inventor successfully lobbied congress for an extension of his patent, but Stevens noted that it took the man years to gather the support needed to make Congress grant his extension--an extension which Stevens opines was unconstitutional.
Contrast the men of those Congressional sessions with the people behind the DMCA and the sickening Sonny-Bonno extension, and you see the actions of men who don't see themselves as public servants, or as honorable men with the heritage of a nation to protect. Looked at this way, it's all intellectual clear-sailing and there is nothing surprising at all to be found in a law that facilitates lawsuits that raise the cost of innovation against the public interest.
Basically, 'they're creeps. They don't care. The results are not surprising.
Holy Density, Batman!
God, I've always wanted to say that...
Actually, it (bullying) is already a very effective tactic.
There is a mechanism at work here: a company can communicate with anyone it wants to and threaten to seek a legal remedy if any exists in the target nation's legal system.
If any of the target companies/individuals don't give in to the demand, two things can happen:
1. The corporation can walk away, having scared all, some or none of the target ISP's.
2. They can make good on the threat of legal action.
Walking away after even partial success entails the company's having worked wonders for the price of a few emails written by people they have on salary. Essentially, it costs them nothing.
Corollary: defending billions in revenues can cost very little money.
Making good on the threat closes down an avenue of access--remember that carnival game with the gophers and the hammer--for 'pirates,' 'liberators,' 'guys-who-feel-hosed-by-overpricing,' etc., while simultaneously proving to any onlooker who wasn't scared before that a multibillion-dollar organization has a long reach.
Corollary: Even given a suit with no imaginable merit, a court system will go through the motions forcing the companies and individuals to spend money--at the very least, in answering motions and summonses to court.
Corollary 2: with a legal staff in place, a lawsuit is a minor expense for a large enough company that can easily bankrupt an ordinary citizen or smaller company.
We won't even talk about what happens when the corporation is big enough to get the U.S. government involved...