Wouldn't it be possible to include some sort of radiation reducer, like a steel mesh or some such, on the user's side of the phone
They do!
Stay up and watch late night TV. In between the Psychic Network and the Sharper Image Personal Cooler ads you will find a handy little attachment for any cell phone. It comes with the signal booster you buy for $19.95.
Is it inconcivable to build a player that cannot be disassembled?
If it can be built, it can be taken apart. There is no such thing as a bullet-proof jacket and there is no such thing as an armor piercing bullet. Any program can be taken apart using disassemblers and reverse compilers. Sometimes companies leave debugging symbols in their code and inadvertantly make this process easier.
Just like the security watermark on your paycheck. If you try to change the amount of the check you ruin the whole thing.
Wrong! I know a guy who can do just that with about $3.00 worth of chemicals. You just have to know which ones to use. When I watched him do it, it freaked me out. The watermark only prevents people from making photocopies of the check and does nothing to prevent someone from stealing one of your checks to your credit card company, altering the payee and the amount, and cashing it.
Sure you could make a bitwise copy of a DVD and it would play in any DVD player, but to do so is prohibitivly expensive.
For now. Soon recordable multilayer DVD disks will be $0.50 a piece and a typical computer will be able to record your friends' DVDs much as CDs are now copied.
And the music industry has never been very concerend with analog piracy of digital music.
MP3 is a lossy algorithm, much like analog recording yet RIAA is still going after it full force. By your logic, I could play a CD while recording it through the line in jack on my computer, encode it to MP3, and distribute it and you say RIAA is not concerned with this? I doubt that.
"Traditionally the battery-powered handheld appliances, like PDAs and mobile phones, are based on RISC microprocessors, which normally consume only a few hundred mini-watts while the traditional X86 microprocessors consume more than ten times of that figure."
Ask Slashdot - What is a mini-watt?
Al Gore - I invented mini-watts.
G. Bush - My daddy gave me mini-watts.
I think Colombia House uses this scheme for their CDs. But they did not use the internet. Al Gore wouldn't give them the specs because he was pissed about being sent a Jefferson Airplane CD for the fifth time. That's also what motivated him invent the "MP3", but he doesn't want to claim that because it might irritate the very wealthy RIAA (who paid for 7 nights in the Lincoln bedroom). George gets all his music from his daddy.
Some of the new Dell Inspirons have a screen that does 1600x1200. Windows users don't need that res on a notebook, but it would make a great X setup.
Why would users of one particular OS not need high resolution? I use it all the time, along with the two headed output.
The Dells are sweet and I use it as a mobile embedded development box. I use Win2k for CE and VxWorks stuff and I must say (as a Windows user) I do need the resolution. All those debugging windows and such. I actually need it less than on the Linux side (X@1280x1024) because I have fewer apps running at once.
I'd like to move to Mars. Getting away from the government and megacorps would be good with me.
Who is going to build the spaceship to carry your ass to the next planet? Who is going to develop the habitation modules on the next planet? Who is going to give you a job when you get to the next planet?
You've been watching too much Star Trek, man. If anything, a move like this will only strengthen government's and industry's hold on us. All us little folks (who cant afford the $55 million to pay for the trip and a house on Mars) would become indentured servants for the rest of our lives.
I'd rather the government intercepted and stopped wackos before, rather than after the fact.
To do this you need an intrusive government. They need to be able to see what you are doing, thinking, writing, viewing, etc. in order to determine if you are a "wacko". If you pass some bureaucrat's notion of non-wackoness then you have nothing to worry about. However, if you are a wacko, by someone else's standards, you open yourself up to government surveillance. If, for instance, you own a gun and had been arrested for smoking pot back in college, you may be classified as an armed drug dealer, which poses a significant threat to society.
The fact is that everyone would be forced to live to some bland definition of normal. If you irritate one group than you may be considered a wacko and have your activities curtailed by the all-knowing government. Consider if your activities were subject to the same rules that the FCC dictates to television.
I would rather live in a world where I could do what I want without worrying that someone is watching. I would rather deal with the reality that a car-bomb may blow up at my kid's school than live under the ever watchful eye of big brother. Because as you pointed out, government is made out of people and they are not immune to the trappings of power. The checks and balances you mention should be swift justice for those who break the law not the subjugation of the citizenry to constant surveillance.
Two electrons would hold infinity ^ 2 (infinity squared). The number of unique states that can be represented is your base number (infinity) raised to the power of the number of digits you have. In this case each electron is a digit that represents an infinite number of states.
But if cultural and influence and economic power is increasingly tied to cyberspace, and the ballooning business moving onto the Net and the Web, the rationale for most wars would evaporate. So would the idea of physical defense, one of the mainstays of the nation-state.
Don't forget that someone has to protect the infrastructure. If you have no military, your influence in cyberspace can be nullified with a good old-fashioned iron bomb placed squarely on a critical router.
There is a lot of wishful thinking going on here, but the internet is basically a glorified telephone. It facilitates communication. Nothing more. It does not render governments obsolete. It took a while for governments to adapt to industry (Sherman Anti-trust Act) and telecommunications (wiretap warrants) but they eventually tamed it. The internet will be no different. The government will find a way to assert their power. After all, that's what governments do best.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And just to piss you off I picked up 4 from 4 different stores. Paid cash and gave then a bogus name and address at each. Wank! Wank! Wank!
Little do you know that Digital Convergence entered into an agreement with Radio Shack to get the register security tapes for each CueCat device. The images are integrated into their master database an correlated to your real identity (using your image captured at the cash machine). Then, to enforce their EULA, they put you onto every mailing list in the known world and flood your mailbox with junk. The postman, already irritable from fighting with your neighbor's rotweiller, decides that you and your 20 kilos of junk mail must stop. You come home after work and you are met by a hail of gunfire from the postman's AK-47. Death by marketing. Digital Convergence then wallows in smug satisfaction as you are placed 2 meters down in the earth. "That's the last time HE'LL ever fsck with us. Heh, heh, heh."
Trollbait, but I'll bite.
SETI is looking for a technilogically advanced lifeforms in particular regions of the sky. Intelligent life can evolve that does not have technical capabilities.
There could be millions of worlds with life, but they all may be populated with dinosaurs or whales which do not have technical abilities, but are still intelligent. Furthermore, there are many more lifeforms, with less intelligence. The least intelligent life is also the most populous. Do not interpret SETI's lack of results as meaning that there is no life elsewhere. There is just no life using radios.
I think that man's ego needs to be deflated a bit. To think that we are the pinnacle of creation is extremely self-centered. Imagine if you came across someone who belived that he was superior to everyone else by divine right, and tried to assert that superiority over everyone he came in contact with. You would avoid him like the plague. How do we know that other civilizations are not avoiding us in a similar way? We may be the obnoxious neighbor that mows the lawn at 2 AM and is constantly throwing beer cans over the fence.
By tagging each content component with metadata designating items such as chapter, sectoin, author, pulbisher, and access/print privileges, XML allows information to be readily located, reused, and controlled.
I read a book about 15 years ago fortelling of how information was the basis for the next economy. Those who control it will profit.
The problem with this model is that the machines we are developing are making it easier to "manufacture" or replicate information. Imagine if you had a machine that could copy your friend's car or house with no material cost to you. Manufacturing as an economy would collapse. That is the fundamental flaw with an information economy. Info is too easy to copy and redistribute. People will try to control information, but they will ultimately fail because you cannot restrain ideas. They are better off trying to figure out new methods to allow information to be shared instead of trying to bottle it up.
Actually, they have. NASA used the dish at Arecibo to map Venus a while back. They ran it through a machine to generate a map.
My guess is that they don't do it because they already have good maps of the inner planets, and the outer planets are just a bunch of gasballs. The outer moons might be interesting to look at, but you'd need a serious transmitter to send a reasonable signal out that far, and at that distance by the time it got back, it'd probably be lost in the noise. Remember, the moons emit very little if any radio signals. That means that we would have to illuminate them somehow. It's probably cheaper to send a couple of probes out there to take pictures than to build a giant radio flashlight. Besides, would you want a terawatt maser in your backyard? Not me.
Arrays will produce a higher degree of resolution whereas a large dish will be able to detect fainter signals.
Although you have a larger surface area with the array, each reciever in the array is only recieving from one dish so the sensitivity of the array to a signal is the same as the sensitivity of one of the dishes. The effect is not additive. The advantage to the array is that signals can be taken from multiple points and run through a computer. An analogy would be making a 3D picture from two pictures taken at slightly different points. The new 3D picture has more information than the two 2D pictures. That's basically what arrays are good at. They compare different signals from the same source to get more information out.
Large dishes simply concentrate more energy on the reciever. This allows the reciever to see weaker signals than with a smaller dish. The array doesn't see the weak signal because each dish does not amplify the signal enough for the reciever to pick it up. Thus the signal is never seen.
Now if you could get the array of smaller dishes to focus the signal onto one reciever, then you'd have some power.
These things are like skeet for any nation's antisat weapons, why not sell them as that and get them destroyed that way. The government is aching to waste money on weapons again, why not sell these useless things as TARGETS?
Good idea. I think we should blow up every defective/old satellite and leave the debris orbiting. Any rogue asteroid that threatens to destroy the earth ( a la "Deep Impact" ) will be pulverized before it even gets here.
I thought DVDs used visible red diodes. This was an improvement over CDs which used infrared. Most of the improvement in capacity of the DVD comes not from the shorter wavelength, but from the improvements in controlling and focusing the laser. Old late 70's technology was pretty sloppy at this. The size of the features on the CD had to be very large so that the primitive devices could reasonably discern the features.
But you are right about time to market. Once you develop a technology, you have to figure out how to mass produce it. IBM can move individual atoms around, but until they mass produce the equipment to do that, nobody is going to be building things atom by atom.
Please put onus where onus belongs. Do you think japan or china spend half as much as we do on defense? No? Why not?? Because they are not policing half the freaking world with aircraft carriers. They don't have forward deployed troops in 30 countries.
It's time for us to pick our battles. One carrier battle group off of Iraq, one off of Taiwan (I want my Crusoe's dammit, and I don't want Taiwan semiconductor to get sacked!) and bring everybody else home.
Not everybody has the same priorities as you. That is why we need to police the world. Our interests are all over the world, not just Iraq and Taiwan. If we took a less active role in the world, Oil and semiconductor prices could be much higher ( Saddam with 43% of the world's oil and China with a significant portion of the semiconductor manufacturing base. ) So you can pay taxes to the US govt ( which really are not that high ), or you can pay to line the coffers of some regieme in another part of the world. I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep my money here in the States.
Also, notice that your taxes are significantly lower than in other developed nations, but we still have the leading economy ( stable and growing ) and the ability to enforce our policy worldwide. I'd consider that a pretty good deal.
If you think that all the money goes to defense and contractors and other fat cats, just remember that the defense budget is only about %35 of the budget. The largest draw on the budget is all of the entitlement programs ( Social Security, Medicare, etc ). Check out the budget website.
Bottom line: Defense pays for itself by protecting the most stable economy in the world. Japan doesn't need to spend on defense because the U.S provides it for them. China relies on conscription and slave labor to keep costs down. US troops in other countries are usually there to keep them from openly obliterating each other. We gave the Europeans 4 years (1992-1996) to stop the Balkan wars and they couldn't do it. We had many debates about getting involved in these foriegn brushfires. Only when the U.S. stepped and bombed everything, did things calm down.
Never attribute to malice that which can satisfactorily be explained by incompetence -- N. Bonaparte
I never heard that quote come from Napolean. I understood that it came from Robert A. Heinlein's "Logic of Empire" in which a character quoth "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity." I would be curious to see if this is taken from an older quote. Do you have any references?
Get used to it. I've seen my rejected posts show up a day or two after they were rejected. I want to know who rejects my stuff so that when this happens I can yell at the appropriate person. This is the main reason why I do not submit stories anymore. If I have something important to say, I'll just make an offtopic post somewhere. There seems to be a lot less censorship in that area.
I sent them an e-mail today applauding the decision, but warning them that I would no longer be a customer if they did install it. I ask that all other Earthlink users do the same. It's funny, but in this way we can essentially "bribe" the government (a "bribe" by proxy via Earthlink) to protect the rights they're supposed to be protecting anyway.
All of us non-Earthlink users should also email our ISP's and indicate that if they have not installed Carnivore - don't! Otherwise we will take our business to another ISP that does not yield so easily to intrusive government.
As to the cold of space killing any microorganisms on the spacecraft, in fact it has been discovered that microorganisms _can_ survive in space (I don't have a reference handy), hence NASAs decision to crash the Galileo probe into Jupiter, to ensure it doesn't accidentally crash into, and contaminate, Europa.
Don't forget about radiation. Once outside of Earth's Van Allen belts, the spacecraft is bombarded by ionizing radiation. This would rip any exposed cell membranes to shreds. There are hardened areas in the spacecraft that are shielded from radiation, but I still doubt that an organism could withstand the temperature extremes, radiation, and lack of nutrition for several years. We have trouble even making the spacecraft work in that environement.
As for the comment about NASA crashing Galeleo onto Jupiter to avoid contaminating the other moons, I believe their concern was for the plutonium in the craft's reactor. Remember the big stink everyone generated when that thing was lanuched?
I think a reasonable log would be one similar to what the telephone companies keep. A log of who connects to the ISP from which dialup line, calling from whatever phone line (from CallerID), at which time and is given this IP number. This will give them adequate information that they can use to get a warrant (in the States, anyway) for a more intrusive search on THAT PARTICULAR USER.
Scanning the data in packets for anything that is just passing through the ISP's network is not such a good idea. I don't know who works there. I do not know if they are maliciouos or not. I do not even know if they are competent or not.
I'll handle my own security, thank you.
People seem to be willing to give up their rights for security. The problem is - the security is just an illusion. Law enforcement, by design, is supposed to react when a crime is committed, not to prevent crimes from happening. More and more, people are giving up their rights to have a proactive law enforcement body. By giving up your rights, you often create a more pressing problem than the one you are trying to solve by giving up you rights.
I think it was Ben Franklin ( or Thomas Jefferson ) who said "Those who give up their liberties for security, are deserving of neither". Don't give up your rights just to feel safe. It does not work. You end up trading fear of criminals for the fear of the government. I'd rather deal with a script kiddies than fight with the NSA or AOL.
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Wouldn't it be possible to include some sort of radiation reducer, like a steel mesh or some such, on the user's side of the phone
They do!
Stay up and watch late night TV. In between the Psychic Network and the Sharper Image Personal Cooler ads you will find a handy little attachment for any cell phone. It comes with the signal booster you buy for $19.95.
Is it inconcivable to build a player that cannot be disassembled?
If it can be built, it can be taken apart. There is no such thing as a bullet-proof jacket and there is no such thing as an armor piercing bullet. Any program can be taken apart using disassemblers and reverse compilers. Sometimes companies leave debugging symbols in their code and inadvertantly make this process easier.
Just like the security watermark on your paycheck. If you try to change the amount of the check you ruin the whole thing.
Wrong! I know a guy who can do just that with about $3.00 worth of chemicals. You just have to know which ones to use. When I watched him do it, it freaked me out. The watermark only prevents people from making photocopies of the check and does nothing to prevent someone from stealing one of your checks to your credit card company, altering the payee and the amount, and cashing it.
Sure you could make a bitwise copy of a DVD and it would play in any DVD player, but to do so is prohibitivly expensive.
For now. Soon recordable multilayer DVD disks will be $0.50 a piece and a typical computer will be able to record your friends' DVDs much as CDs are now copied.
And the music industry has never been very concerend with analog piracy of digital music.
MP3 is a lossy algorithm, much like analog recording yet RIAA is still going after it full force. By your logic, I could play a CD while recording it through the line in jack on my computer, encode it to MP3, and distribute it and you say RIAA is not concerned with this? I doubt that.
"Traditionally the battery-powered handheld appliances, like PDAs and mobile phones, are based on RISC microprocessors, which normally consume only a few hundred mini-watts while the traditional X86 microprocessors consume more than ten times of that figure."
Ask Slashdot - What is a mini-watt?
Al Gore - I invented mini-watts.
G. Bush - My daddy gave me mini-watts.
I think Colombia House uses this scheme for their CDs. But they did not use the internet. Al Gore wouldn't give them the specs because he was pissed about being sent a Jefferson Airplane CD for the fifth time. That's also what motivated him invent the "MP3", but he doesn't want to claim that because it might irritate the very wealthy RIAA (who paid for 7 nights in the Lincoln bedroom). George gets all his music from his daddy.
Some of the new Dell Inspirons have a screen that does 1600x1200. Windows users don't need that res on a notebook, but it would make a great X setup.
Why would users of one particular OS not need high resolution? I use it all the time, along with the two headed output.
The Dells are sweet and I use it as a mobile embedded development box. I use Win2k for CE and VxWorks stuff and I must say (as a Windows user) I do need the resolution. All those debugging windows and such. I actually need it less than on the Linux side (X@1280x1024) because I have fewer apps running at once.
I'd like to move to Mars. Getting away from the government and megacorps would be good with me.
Who is going to build the spaceship to carry your ass to the next planet? Who is going to develop the habitation modules on the next planet? Who is going to give you a job when you get to the next planet?
You've been watching too much Star Trek, man. If anything, a move like this will only strengthen government's and industry's hold on us. All us little folks (who cant afford the $55 million to pay for the trip and a house on Mars) would become indentured servants for the rest of our lives.
I'd rather the government intercepted and stopped wackos before, rather than after the fact.
To do this you need an intrusive government. They need to be able to see what you are doing, thinking, writing, viewing, etc. in order to determine if you are a "wacko". If you pass some bureaucrat's notion of non-wackoness then you have nothing to worry about. However, if you are a wacko, by someone else's standards, you open yourself up to government surveillance. If, for instance, you own a gun and had been arrested for smoking pot back in college, you may be classified as an armed drug dealer, which poses a significant threat to society.
The fact is that everyone would be forced to live to some bland definition of normal. If you irritate one group than you may be considered a wacko and have your activities curtailed by the all-knowing government. Consider if your activities were subject to the same rules that the FCC dictates to television.
I would rather live in a world where I could do what I want without worrying that someone is watching. I would rather deal with the reality that a car-bomb may blow up at my kid's school than live under the ever watchful eye of big brother. Because as you pointed out, government is made out of people and they are not immune to the trappings of power. The checks and balances you mention should be swift justice for those who break the law not the subjugation of the citizenry to constant surveillance.
Simple, but wrong.
Two electrons would hold infinity ^ 2 (infinity squared). The number of unique states that can be represented is your base number (infinity) raised to the power of the number of digits you have. In this case each electron is a digit that represents an infinite number of states.
Back in the sixties, NASA spent something like 2 million dollars to develop the technology for a "space pen". The Russians used pencils.
Not to knock the US space program, but sometimes they make things much more complicated than they need to be.
Unless he comes up with a cheaper way to store the data, the cost of the flash parts is going to keep these cameras out of my hands.
But if cultural and influence and economic power is increasingly tied to cyberspace, and the ballooning business moving onto the Net and the Web, the rationale for most wars would evaporate. So would the idea of physical defense, one of the mainstays of the nation-state.
Don't forget that someone has to protect the infrastructure. If you have no military, your influence in cyberspace can be nullified with a good old-fashioned iron bomb placed squarely on a critical router.
There is a lot of wishful thinking going on here, but the internet is basically a glorified telephone. It facilitates communication. Nothing more. It does not render governments obsolete. It took a while for governments to adapt to industry (Sherman Anti-trust Act) and telecommunications (wiretap warrants) but they eventually tamed it. The internet will be no different. The government will find a way to assert their power. After all, that's what governments do best.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And just to piss you off I picked up 4 from 4 different stores. Paid cash and gave then a bogus name and address at each. Wank! Wank! Wank!
Little do you know that Digital Convergence entered into an agreement with Radio Shack to get the register security tapes for each CueCat device. The images are integrated into their master database an correlated to your real identity (using your image captured at the cash machine). Then, to enforce their EULA, they put you onto every mailing list in the known world and flood your mailbox with junk. The postman, already irritable from fighting with your neighbor's rotweiller, decides that you and your 20 kilos of junk mail must stop. You come home after work and you are met by a hail of gunfire from the postman's AK-47. Death by marketing. Digital Convergence then wallows in smug satisfaction as you are placed 2 meters down in the earth. "That's the last time HE'LL ever fsck with us. Heh, heh, heh."
Trollbait, but I'll bite. SETI is looking for a technilogically advanced lifeforms in particular regions of the sky. Intelligent life can evolve that does not have technical capabilities.
There could be millions of worlds with life, but they all may be populated with dinosaurs or whales which do not have technical abilities, but are still intelligent. Furthermore, there are many more lifeforms, with less intelligence. The least intelligent life is also the most populous. Do not interpret SETI's lack of results as meaning that there is no life elsewhere. There is just no life using radios.
I think that man's ego needs to be deflated a bit. To think that we are the pinnacle of creation is extremely self-centered. Imagine if you came across someone who belived that he was superior to everyone else by divine right, and tried to assert that superiority over everyone he came in contact with. You would avoid him like the plague. How do we know that other civilizations are not avoiding us in a similar way? We may be the obnoxious neighbor that mows the lawn at 2 AM and is constantly throwing beer cans over the fence.
By tagging each content component with metadata designating items such as chapter, sectoin, author, pulbisher, and access/print privileges, XML allows information to be readily located, reused, and controlled.
I read a book about 15 years ago fortelling of how information was the basis for the next economy. Those who control it will profit.
The problem with this model is that the machines we are developing are making it easier to "manufacture" or replicate information. Imagine if you had a machine that could copy your friend's car or house with no material cost to you. Manufacturing as an economy would collapse. That is the fundamental flaw with an information economy. Info is too easy to copy and redistribute. People will try to control information, but they will ultimately fail because you cannot restrain ideas. They are better off trying to figure out new methods to allow information to be shared instead of trying to bottle it up.
Actually, they have. NASA used the dish at Arecibo to map Venus a while back. They ran it through a machine to generate a map.
My guess is that they don't do it because they already have good maps of the inner planets, and the outer planets are just a bunch of gasballs. The outer moons might be interesting to look at, but you'd need a serious transmitter to send a reasonable signal out that far, and at that distance by the time it got back, it'd probably be lost in the noise. Remember, the moons emit very little if any radio signals. That means that we would have to illuminate them somehow. It's probably cheaper to send a couple of probes out there to take pictures than to build a giant radio flashlight. Besides, would you want a terawatt maser in your backyard? Not me.
Arrays will produce a higher degree of resolution whereas a large dish will be able to detect fainter signals.
Although you have a larger surface area with the array, each reciever in the array is only recieving from one dish so the sensitivity of the array to a signal is the same as the sensitivity of one of the dishes. The effect is not additive. The advantage to the array is that signals can be taken from multiple points and run through a computer. An analogy would be making a 3D picture from two pictures taken at slightly different points. The new 3D picture has more information than the two 2D pictures. That's basically what arrays are good at. They compare different signals from the same source to get more information out.
Large dishes simply concentrate more energy on the reciever. This allows the reciever to see weaker signals than with a smaller dish. The array doesn't see the weak signal because each dish does not amplify the signal enough for the reciever to pick it up. Thus the signal is never seen.
Now if you could get the array of smaller dishes to focus the signal onto one reciever, then you'd have some power.
These things are like skeet for any nation's antisat weapons, why not sell them as that and get them destroyed that way. The government is aching to waste money on weapons again, why not sell these useless things as TARGETS?
Good idea. I think we should blow up every defective/old satellite and leave the debris orbiting. Any rogue asteroid that threatens to destroy the earth ( a la "Deep Impact" ) will be pulverized before it even gets here.
I thought DVDs used visible red diodes. This was an improvement over CDs which used infrared. Most of the improvement in capacity of the DVD comes not from the shorter wavelength, but from the improvements in controlling and focusing the laser. Old late 70's technology was pretty sloppy at this. The size of the features on the CD had to be very large so that the primitive devices could reasonably discern the features.
But you are right about time to market. Once you develop a technology, you have to figure out how to mass produce it. IBM can move individual atoms around, but until they mass produce the equipment to do that, nobody is going to be building things atom by atom.
Please put onus where onus belongs. Do you think japan or china spend half as much as we do on defense? No? Why not?? Because they are not policing half the freaking world with aircraft carriers. They don't have forward deployed troops in 30 countries.
It's time for us to pick our battles. One carrier battle group off of Iraq, one off of Taiwan (I want my Crusoe's dammit, and I don't want Taiwan semiconductor to get sacked!) and bring everybody else home.
Not everybody has the same priorities as you. That is why we need to police the world. Our interests are all over the world, not just Iraq and Taiwan. If we took a less active role in the world, Oil and semiconductor prices could be much higher ( Saddam with 43% of the world's oil and China with a significant portion of the semiconductor manufacturing base. ) So you can pay taxes to the US govt ( which really are not that high ), or you can pay to line the coffers of some regieme in another part of the world. I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep my money here in the States.
Also, notice that your taxes are significantly lower than in other developed nations, but we still have the leading economy ( stable and growing ) and the ability to enforce our policy worldwide. I'd consider that a pretty good deal.
If you think that all the money goes to defense and contractors and other fat cats, just remember that the defense budget is only about %35 of the budget. The largest draw on the budget is all of the entitlement programs ( Social Security, Medicare, etc ). Check out the budget website.
Bottom line: Defense pays for itself by protecting the most stable economy in the world. Japan doesn't need to spend on defense because the U.S provides it for them. China relies on conscription and slave labor to keep costs down. US troops in other countries are usually there to keep them from openly obliterating each other. We gave the Europeans 4 years (1992-1996) to stop the Balkan wars and they couldn't do it. We had many debates about getting involved in these foriegn brushfires. Only when the U.S. stepped and bombed everything, did things calm down.
Never attribute to malice that which can satisfactorily be explained by incompetence -- N. Bonaparte
I never heard that quote come from Napolean. I understood that it came from Robert A. Heinlein's "Logic of Empire" in which a character quoth "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity." I would be curious to see if this is taken from an older quote. Do you have any references?
Get used to it. I've seen my rejected posts show up a day or two after they were rejected. I want to know who rejects my stuff so that when this happens I can yell at the appropriate person. This is the main reason why I do not submit stories anymore. If I have something important to say, I'll just make an offtopic post somewhere. There seems to be a lot less censorship in that area.
I'm sure the gamma rays are traveling at the 183MHz range quite easily
Gamma rays are around 10^20 Hz. Radeon seems to be bombarding your system with some VHF radiation. Check your TV!
Please moderate to -1 for excessive use of useless information.
I sent them an e-mail today applauding the decision, but warning them that I would no longer be a customer if they did install it. I ask that all other Earthlink users do the same. It's funny, but in this way we can essentially "bribe" the government (a "bribe" by proxy via Earthlink) to protect the rights they're supposed to be protecting anyway.
All of us non-Earthlink users should also email our ISP's and indicate that if they have not installed Carnivore - don't! Otherwise we will take our business to another ISP that does not yield so easily to intrusive government.
As to the cold of space killing any microorganisms on the spacecraft, in fact it has been discovered that microorganisms _can_ survive in space (I don't have a reference handy), hence NASAs decision to crash the Galileo probe into Jupiter, to ensure it doesn't accidentally crash into, and contaminate, Europa.
Don't forget about radiation. Once outside of Earth's Van Allen belts, the spacecraft is bombarded by ionizing radiation. This would rip any exposed cell membranes to shreds. There are hardened areas in the spacecraft that are shielded from radiation, but I still doubt that an organism could withstand the temperature extremes, radiation, and lack of nutrition for several years. We have trouble even making the spacecraft work in that environement.
As for the comment about NASA crashing Galeleo onto Jupiter to avoid contaminating the other moons, I believe their concern was for the plutonium in the craft's reactor. Remember the big stink everyone generated when that thing was lanuched?
I think a reasonable log would be one similar to what the telephone companies keep. A log of who connects to the ISP from which dialup line, calling from whatever phone line (from CallerID), at which time and is given this IP number. This will give them adequate information that they can use to get a warrant (in the States, anyway) for a more intrusive search on THAT PARTICULAR USER.
Scanning the data in packets for anything that is just passing through the ISP's network is not such a good idea. I don't know who works there. I do not know if they are maliciouos or not. I do not even know if they are competent or not.
I'll handle my own security, thank you.
People seem to be willing to give up their rights for security. The problem is - the security is just an illusion. Law enforcement, by design, is supposed to react when a crime is committed, not to prevent crimes from happening. More and more, people are giving up their rights to have a proactive law enforcement body. By giving up your rights, you often create a more pressing problem than the one you are trying to solve by giving up you rights.
I think it was Ben Franklin ( or Thomas Jefferson ) who said "Those who give up their liberties for security, are deserving of neither". Don't give up your rights just to feel safe. It does not work. You end up trading fear of criminals for the fear of the government. I'd rather deal with a script kiddies than fight with the NSA or AOL.