Anyone with investments in fence making companies and black arm band manufacturers are gonna clean up. Maybe Geeks should start wearing yellow pocket protectors.
Remember it's your patriotic duty to overreact and report your neighbors, parents, etc. and submit freely to full body cavity searches. If you can't lash out at the people responsible, you find the next best scapegoat and lash out at them. They know where you live. You are all doomed, bwah ha ha ha! (evil laugh)
Are your sure those donuts you're eating are covered with just powdered sugar and not anth...(Oh, I better not add unecessarily to the general level of paranoia)
The show had everything the adolescent geek male in all of us could want: A cool action hero, Captain Archer; a perky Vulcan babe science officer,Sub-Commander T'Pol; and multi-colored alien exotic dancers with twelve inch tongues. OK, the doctor reminded me too much of Neelix, yet having a cute dog is preferable to having a cute kid.
I think Vulcan females are eminently logical. They wear push up bras. I think the producers learned their lesson from Six of Nine's hooters and high heels. The gel scene and prominent display of nipples was one of the best gratuitous sexual scenes I've seen on a television show. I would have timed how long T'Pol nipples were shown, but I didn't want to miss a second of it. It's possible they were fake, but who cares.
Oh, and I agree the theme song sucked, but I can always tivo my way through it and the extra long commercial breaks.
I did like the tacit nod to the 2nd Amendment, even if it was some farmer with a plasma rifle that looked suspiciously like a silver painted over and under twelve gauge shotgun. There really is a Broken Bow, Oklahoma. It's near Idabel in southeastern Oklahoma. Most of southeastern Oklahoma is hilly and covered with trees. Western Oklahoma is more likely to be flat and covered with cornfields.
Finally, when are they going to have an episode with the famous Star Trek rock in it?
COBRA, my ass. When I got laid off earlier this year I found out I could keep my health benefits for slightly more than my rent, paid every month.
Your lucky that you could even get COBRA. If your company goes belly up like mine did, you don't even get the option to buy it,since there is no company there is no group policy.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Personally, I'd like to sit back and watch Michael Caine's and Sean
Connery's fine performances in The Man Who Would Be King again, but I'd
like to throw a little historical perspective into the current crisis. I
think the Afghans have been pissed off at the West ever since it was
conquered by some Greek dude named Alexander. Of course the British didn't
help the West with it's more recent activities either. Afghanistan really
has a fascinating history, just as much as Iraq does. It's too bad they are
both ruled over by despotic regimes. I am particularly taken with the first
paragraph from
this essay on Kipling's Imperialism:
In Kipling's work, as in his life, the British Empire assumed
a complex mythical or legendary function, which he passed
on to his readers. It was a positive force in the sense that it
ordered and unified his creativity, and a negative one to the
extent that it limited his perspective. In life he seems to have
thought of it very much as one might have thought of the
earlier Roman Empire: its purpose was to maintain stability,
order, and peace amongst the heathen, to relieve famine,
provide medical assistance, to abolish slavery, to construct
the physical and the psychological groundwork for "civilization,"
and to protect the mother country. It was an island of security
in a chaotic world. (And in fact, when the Empire did eventually
dissolve, many of the worst nightmares of the Imperialists
came to pass--in the slaughter which marked the partition
of India, for example).
And while you're at it take a gander at Kipling's Imperialist apologist
masterpiece
The White Man's Burden
This war on terrorism is going to require of us a true understanding of our
enemies and not to make the same mistakes others have before us in dealing
with them. I will close my comments with the last stanza of that poem as
well (believe me, the irony is not lost on me).
Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
This is a long and rambling rant, more for my benefit (venting my spleen) than a feeble attempt to persuade others.
How is the world of crypto different from World War II and today? I'm sure anyone caught using crypto in the US during WWII not affiliated with the government would be considered a spy. Certainly they didn't have the technology that we enjoy today. I don't know what the answer is. There must be a balance, but giving the gov't cart blanche on my liberties isn't a balance.
Besides there is nothing from keeping people from double encrypting their messages. The first message would be encrypted with a known, secure, and trustesd crypto program and then encrypting it with the backdoor program.I know that I would like to have a key recovery system, but I'd have to store my access info with a secure and trusted third party, and that isn't with the government.
It is a sad commentary on certain people and certain agencies that would use an act of war to permanently cripple our rights to liberty and to privacy. Heaven forbid that America should be defeated and conquered but if it were then those backdoors would be in the hands of our enemies.
If Americans can keep their crypto and their guns it would make it far more difficult for an enemy to control us. Of course if they are merely bent on wiping us out then it wouldn't do us any good anyway. America has been generous to it's enemies after defeating them. Cynical observers might say we helped rebuild Japan and Germany to make them our allies against the Soviets. To some extent that was true.
We should do more to help our friends and if we must fight our enemies then fight them and defeat them. Then we must be generous to them.
So what does this have to do with backdoors. Not much really. So back to the topic.
There are plenty of legitimate and mundane reasons not to allow them. How can you trust a financial transaction that requires crypto if someone has a backdoor? What if you have travel plans to a friendly foreign country like England? You certainly don't want to advertise that you will be away from home. And finally with a backdoor, what is to keep an agency from using it as a fishing expedition because they don't know what it is they are looking for. Only stupid criminals and enemies are going to use compromised crypto.
Customer info is one of the primary assets a business has to sell. If I were in a position to buy an existing business, I would require the customer list as part of the deal. What would be bad is if the company was just selling the info to any Tom, Dick, or Harry that wanted it.
Just having the customer info is no guarantee of customer loyalty or repeat business. As long as it's only going to the successor company, I don't have a problem with it, but they will have to work to retain my business.
Encryption is the digital equivalent of an envelope. We don't think twice about putting personal letters in an envelope. "Hmmm... You must have something to hide. From now on all your letters have to be on postcards."
Perhaps the best use of encryption is for digital signatures. If governments have the backdoor to them, how can we trust who the message is from, even if it's sent without being encrypted.
As has been posted numerous times, encryption is already available and in source code as well. The bad guys aren't going to stop using it, if they really are.
The rest of this comment is a long rant. Read it at your own peril.
Our politicians are playing right into the hands of the terrorists. It is our freedoms that gives us our strengths. The freedom to assemble, the freedom to speak, the freedom to worship, the freedom to bear arms, and the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Our liberties have eroded over the decades. All in the name of security, most especially, our war on drugs. We cannot let our politicians take away from us what the terrorists have failed to do. Our liberties.
America isn't perfect. It has it's warts, but it's a damn sight better than any other country. Yes, we are hated around the world, but why then does everyone wants to come here.
We must take action not pass laws. We must prepare for a long and bitter struggle against those who would destroy America. We have the resources to do it. Americans have always risen to the occasion when in peril.
Shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped is a common strategy of politicians. Yes, we won't be able to conduct our daily lives the same as it was before, but we shouldn't rush to ad insult to injury. I think their should be a sixty day cooling off period before politicians consider passing a law in response to a terrible event.
I'm a reasonably intelligent person, I know that the NSA is basically admitting to recording all cell phone traffic, I know this will include my private calls...
It doesn't mean they are recording domestic calls. The NSA can intercept international calls. They aren't supposed to intercept domestic calls, their mandate is to collect intelligence beyond our borders. Those calls could have been made from here to other countries, and so been intercepted within the rules of their mandate.
That being said, they do have the capability to monitor radio traffic within US borders. As it is a highly secretive organization, the question is do you trust them? How do you prevent abuses of power within such a group?
I think the only way for a secret organization to survive like that is that secrets must be made public in a timely manner. It may take 25 or 50 years for such knowledge to become declassified. That brings up another question. How do we know that it's all been brought into the light? There are tradeoffs between security and freedom. And this is what is at stake this very moment. Beware any temporary measures becoming permanent.
If NSA intelligence fingers the culprits then I say bravo. Then we can get those bastards who are trying to destroy America.
The Hugo's are voted on by fans who shell out the bucks to vote and those who shell out the bucks to nominate. But you can only buy one vote, your own. Some unscrupulous person(s) tried to subvert that process in 1989 by nominating The Guardsman by P.J. Beese and Todd Cameron Hamilton. The authors of said book whose nomination was hastily withdrawn claimed no knowledge of the sequentially numbered money orders. And as I recall reading at the time suspicion was aroused when all the envelopes had the same postmark showing they originated from the same post office. I don't know remember if any changes were made to the Hugo voting system, but it was interesting to learn how it all works.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was my last hope for a good summer blockbuster. And it succeeded. All the rest were from OK to mediocre to bad to worse: A.I., Shrek, Planet of the Apes, Jurasic Park III, Atlantis, Lara Croft, The Mummy Returns, Final Fantasy and even the execrable Pearl Harbor (As Kyle in South Park said, "There is no God... Michael Bey keeps making movies."). Though the best low key movie I saw this summer was The Dish.
No. I love to bash MS. It's what gives my life purpose. I'm glad there is so much bickering in the industry. They all want to be on top: Oracle, Sun, Apple. What galls intelligent people is that Microsoft and their mediocre products are on top. Is Scott McNealy really any more appealing than Bill Gates?
They only took out the Quicktime plugin because it is a stable feature
Quicktime isn't stable in IE. It crashes on big files about 3/4 the way through playing. I know some others who have the same problem.
Microsoft practices the Conan theory of competition:
Man: Conan, what is good in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies... see them scattered before you... and to hear the lamentation of their women.
It's way further than a bit. I'd say Oklahoma City and Dallas are over 400 miles west of the Mississippi River.
The American conquest and subsequent resettlement of North America was a movement westward.
Geez, why is it that everyone with an axe to grind has to find some excuse to whet it, no matter how unrelated it is to the topic at hand. You seem to be enjoying the fruits of this conquest. If you don't like it, go back to your ancestor's country, wherever that is.
The history of the world is one people displacing another. If we are going to redress the wrongs in America, why don't we redress them worldwide back to the dawn of time, instead of singling America out as being somehow unique in this regard.
What a moral weasel, Bush is. He is effectively killing stem cell research. It's the same decision he made when he said he'd end bombing on Vieques (we should not end it). He's trying to please both sides. Except he's not. He's trying to kowtow to his big bu$ine$$ contributor$, but at the same time he must kowtow to his religious supporters who think first amendment only loosely applies to Christianity.
Those 60 lines already derived, well golly, are already murdered (according to pro lifer's standards). Might as well make the most of them. That's like telling George Washington, "Gee, George, you've already chopped down the cherry tree. Might as well sell it for firewood. No sense letting it go to waste."
If government funding is used for stem cell research then no company should be allowed to derive intellectual property from it.
Re:How much deeper does this hole get?
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 1
By the time we get to 6.2 (i.e. Mozilla 1.0 stable), there will be five Netscape users left.
Yeah, I gave up on Netscape along time ago. I doubt Mozilla is "the Great White Hope" for Open Source, but I'll give it a try when it comes out. Oh, for the days of NCSA Mosaic.
farscape is the best sci-fi show in production. We'll see how Enterrpise fares when it airs in the fall. As for Lexx and The Invisible Man, they both blow. Be grateful they pulled The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. I forced myself to watch the first episode after the teaser (Yes, it was that bad), and it only got worse. Andromeda is actually entertaining. Much better than the execrable Gene Roddenberry's Earth. Oh, and I mustn't forget Futurama.
And I guess for non-sci-fi I'll have to say I like Angry Beavers, South Park, and The Sopranos.
I suspect that once this "technological singularity" is reached in computing it will go something like this:
DEEP THOUGHT : What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space have been called into existence?
FOOK: Well, your task, O Computer is...
LUNKWILL: No, wait a minute, this isn't right, We distinctly designed this computer to be the greatest one ever and we're not making do with second best.
LUNKWILL: Deep Thought,are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest most powerful computer in all time?
Anyway, most of you know the rest. If not time to listen to radio series again H2G2
If Orson Scott Card quits writing, I don't know what I'll do:-(
I gave up Card a while back, but have you tried George R.R. Martin, Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Greg Egan, Connie Willis, Tony Daniel, Michael J. Straczynski, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, or Ben Bova? Gardner Dozois makes a valid claim that there are good new authors out there. You just have to look for them.
By the middle of the 21st century, the major cost of any material item will be the 'intellectual property' charge.
It has always been the intellectual property charge for anything. It goes like this oversimplification: Bob says, "Gee, that sure is a pretty rock. I wonder if I can trade some pussy for it." And hands it to Jill. Jill says, "What a nice rock." and tosses it on the pile of other pretty rocks she's collected. And they have sex.
It is the shared idea that the rock has value that counts. Why else would people care so much for little green pieces of paper? It's because they can buy their sex, drugs, rock n' roll, cigarettes, and booze with it. And isn't that what a corporation wants guaranteed repeat business.
Last time I checked, science distinguishes itself from any other field of human endeavor by its ability for self-correction. Science is littered with the corpses of discarded theories. How are we to understand the world around us if scientists don't make mistakes?
The public needs to understand that most scientific research is going to end up a failure, but the rewards for success make it worthwhile. And it's hard to predict when or where the next breakthrough will come. We get a skewed view of scientific progress because we only see the breakthroughs (e.g. Galileo's telescope, Maxwell's equations, Darwin's natural selection, Crick & Watson's DNA).
If it turns out to be true, this guy should be voted the Iago of the Internet. People really hate being played for rubes. Destroying trust is a serious no-no. It shouldn't be too hard to prove the story. Check if those so-called aliases are real people. If not that should lend credence to the story.
Note - Iago (not the parrot on Disney's Aladdin) was a rumormonger that got Desdemona whacked by her own husband Othello (not the board game).
Geez! This is old news. Plato already covered this very issue in Phaedrus when he discussed the dangers of writing: "...for this discovery [writing] of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories;"
So in the Internet age history is doomed to repeat itself in a matter of hours instead of years. Besides, I have more important things to do like watch Angry Beavers than read something about spootheads who have no attention.
If you don't like the terms of their rental agreement go rent somewhere else.
He should have used a credit card instead of a debit card. He'd probably be in a much better position to dispute the charges. I think the real reason why the rental company is tracking speeding is to reduce the wear and tear on the car and thus lower their maintainance costs.
Are there devices to measure the forces on a car (and possibly every action)? For example since it's not their property, a driver is more likely to be more abusive with their rental. The rental company with such a device could calculate how much this abuse costs in extra wear and tear. Then they could stipulate in your contract in very small print "abuse this car and you'll pay us big bucks."
The thing is I'm sure car rental agencies already take into account their maintainence costs and are reflected in the rental price. In this scenario they don't pass the savings on to the consumer and slap the hands of anyone who doesn't treat their rental like grandma going for a Sunday drive.
Hollywood has a long tradition of frankly appalling British accents, from Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins" through Keanu Reeves in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (quite possibly the worst example in living memory) to modern example like this and Renée Zellweger in "Bridget Jones' Diary". They are dramatically over the top, competely unplaceable or just plain laughable (back to Mr Reeves again there!).
How can you forget the execrable performances of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Christian Slater, and Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? They should have been bitch slapped every time they attempted a British accent.
On a personal note I went to England a while back and got to meet some brits. On the way to a pub I asked if I good my fake british accent a try. They said sure and I did. Well, they said they could tell no difference between my mid-west accent and my fake brit attempt. I was crushed. I thought I did it pretty good. My guess is they were being polite. At least we still went to the pub and got pissed.
This may be a bit off topic but this seems like a good opportunity to rant.
When I accepted the job at my now defunct company I looked at the wages and benefits and saw that they were good enough. I considered the stock options to be icing on the cake. If it paid off it would have made a nice down payment for a house (not in the Bay Area). I'm glad I wasn't counting on them. Now for the rest of the story.
"You'll get nothing and you'll like it!"
These words have become prophetic for those of us hit by the dot-com fallout. About a year ago, a former co-worker of mine related the details of a phone conference held with a client. (Note to those who use speakerphones: They may not put you on hold but merely mute their mike.) Whilst he and his team members--with their phone mike muted--discussed how to continue the conversation, they overheard the party at the other end joking. One of the lines spoken was "You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
He said they stared at each other for a moment and gave an 'Oh-my-God-I-can't believe-they-said-that!' look to each other. They were very tempted when they unmuted the phone to repeat those very words back to them. Alas, they did not. They pretended it was never said and continued with the phone conference. Afterwards, my former co-worker related the story to me.
Almost six months ago our company went belly up and everyone was laid off. For me it was a relief. The company had been in trouble for some time now, and had already had one round of layoffs. The uncertainty was over. I'd held on so I wouldn't have to pay back my moving expenses.
On the day the axe fell, many of us gathered at a local watering hole to drink our sorrows away. A few hours later another former employee showed up at the club wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!" with the company logo. How apropos. The company paid us a quarter of what was owed for our final pay period.
I did find out later he had actually had the shirt made a while back. It was just the first time I'd seen it. I believe that slogan should become the motto of all those who tried to cash in on the dot-com boom when it tanked.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with investments in fence making companies and black arm band manufacturers are gonna clean up. Maybe Geeks should start wearing yellow pocket protectors.
Remember it's your patriotic duty to overreact and report your neighbors, parents, etc. and submit freely to full body cavity searches. If you can't lash out at the people responsible, you find the next best scapegoat and lash out at them. They know where you live. You are all doomed, bwah ha ha ha! (evil laugh)
Are your sure those donuts you're eating are covered with just powdered sugar and not anth...(Oh, I better not add unecessarily to the general level of paranoia)
The show had everything the adolescent geek male in all of us could want: A cool action hero, Captain Archer; a perky Vulcan babe science officer,Sub-Commander T'Pol; and multi-colored alien exotic dancers with twelve inch tongues. OK, the doctor reminded me too much of Neelix, yet having a cute dog is preferable to having a cute kid.
I think Vulcan females are eminently logical. They wear push up bras. I think the producers learned their lesson from Six of Nine's hooters and high heels. The gel scene and prominent display of nipples was one of the best gratuitous sexual scenes I've seen on a television show. I would have timed how long T'Pol nipples were shown, but I didn't want to miss a second of it. It's possible they were fake, but who cares.
Oh, and I agree the theme song sucked, but I can always tivo my way through it and the extra long commercial breaks.
I did like the tacit nod to the 2nd Amendment, even if it was some farmer with a plasma rifle that looked suspiciously like a silver painted over and under twelve gauge shotgun. There really is a Broken Bow, Oklahoma. It's near Idabel in southeastern Oklahoma. Most of southeastern Oklahoma is hilly and covered with trees. Western Oklahoma is more likely to be flat and covered with cornfields.
Finally, when are they going to have an episode with the famous Star Trek rock in it?
COBRA, my ass. When I got laid off earlier this year I found out I could keep my health benefits for slightly more than my rent, paid every month.
Your lucky that you could even get COBRA. If your company goes belly up like mine did, you don't even get the option to buy it,since there is no company there is no group policy.
I saw the last stanza quoted in an op-ed piece: from Rudyard Kipling's The Young British Soldier
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Personally, I'd like to sit back and watch Michael Caine's and Sean Connery's fine performances in The Man Who Would Be King again, but I'd like to throw a little historical perspective into the current crisis. I think the Afghans have been pissed off at the West ever since it was conquered by some Greek dude named Alexander. Of course the British didn't help the West with it's more recent activities either. Afghanistan really has a fascinating history, just as much as Iraq does. It's too bad they are both ruled over by despotic regimes. I am particularly taken with the first paragraph from this essay on Kipling's Imperialism:
And while you're at it take a gander at Kipling's Imperialist apologist masterpiece The White Man's Burden
This war on terrorism is going to require of us a true understanding of our enemies and not to make the same mistakes others have before us in dealing with them. I will close my comments with the last stanza of that poem as well (believe me, the irony is not lost on me).
Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
How is the world of crypto different from World War II and today? I'm sure anyone caught using crypto in the US during WWII not affiliated with the government would be considered a spy. Certainly they didn't have the technology that we enjoy today. I don't know what the answer is. There must be a balance, but giving the gov't cart blanche on my liberties isn't a balance.
Besides there is nothing from keeping people from double encrypting their messages. The first message would be encrypted with a known, secure, and trustesd crypto program and then encrypting it with the backdoor program.I know that I would like to have a key recovery system, but I'd have to store my access info with a secure and trusted third party, and that isn't with the government.
It is a sad commentary on certain people and certain agencies that would use an act of war to permanently cripple our rights to liberty and to privacy. Heaven forbid that America should be defeated and conquered but if it were then those backdoors would be in the hands of our enemies.
If Americans can keep their crypto and their guns it would make it far more difficult for an enemy to control us. Of course if they are merely bent on wiping us out then it wouldn't do us any good anyway. America has been generous to it's enemies after defeating them. Cynical observers might say we helped rebuild Japan and Germany to make them our allies against the Soviets. To some extent that was true.
We should do more to help our friends and if we must fight our enemies then fight them and defeat them. Then we must be generous to them.
So what does this have to do with backdoors. Not much really. So back to the topic.
There are plenty of legitimate and mundane reasons not to allow them. How can you trust a financial transaction that requires crypto if someone has a backdoor? What if you have travel plans to a friendly foreign country like England? You certainly don't want to advertise that you will be away from home. And finally with a backdoor, what is to keep an agency from using it as a fishing expedition because they don't know what it is they are looking for. Only stupid criminals and enemies are going to use compromised crypto.
Customer info is one of the primary assets a business has to sell. If I were in a position to buy an existing business, I would require the customer list as part of the deal. What would be bad is if the company was just selling the info to any Tom, Dick, or Harry that wanted it.
Just having the customer info is no guarantee of customer loyalty or repeat business. As long as it's only going to the successor company, I don't have a problem with it, but they will have to work to retain my business.
Encryption is the digital equivalent of an envelope. We don't think twice about putting personal letters in an envelope. "Hmmm... You must have something to hide. From now on all your letters have to be on postcards."
Perhaps the best use of encryption is for digital signatures. If governments have the backdoor to them, how can we trust who the message is from, even if it's sent without being encrypted.
As has been posted numerous times, encryption is already available and in source code as well. The bad guys aren't going to stop using it, if they really are.
The rest of this comment is a long rant. Read it at your own peril.
Our politicians are playing right into the hands of the terrorists. It is our freedoms that gives us our strengths. The freedom to assemble, the freedom to speak, the freedom to worship, the freedom to bear arms, and the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Our liberties have eroded over the decades. All in the name of security, most especially, our war on drugs. We cannot let our politicians take away from us what the terrorists have failed to do. Our liberties.
America isn't perfect. It has it's warts, but it's a damn sight better than any other country. Yes, we are hated around the world, but why then does everyone wants to come here.
We must take action not pass laws. We must prepare for a long and bitter struggle against those who would destroy America. We have the resources to do it. Americans have always risen to the occasion when in peril.
Shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped is a common strategy of politicians. Yes, we won't be able to conduct our daily lives the same as it was before, but we shouldn't rush to ad insult to injury. I think their should be a sixty day cooling off period before politicians consider passing a law in response to a terrible event.
It doesn't mean they are recording domestic calls. The NSA can intercept international calls. They aren't supposed to intercept domestic calls, their mandate is to collect intelligence beyond our borders. Those calls could have been made from here to other countries, and so been intercepted within the rules of their mandate.
That being said, they do have the capability to monitor radio traffic within US borders. As it is a highly secretive organization, the question is do you trust them? How do you prevent abuses of power within such a group?
I think the only way for a secret organization to survive like that is that secrets must be made public in a timely manner. It may take 25 or 50 years for such knowledge to become declassified. That brings up another question. How do we know that it's all been brought into the light? There are tradeoffs between security and freedom. And this is what is at stake this very moment. Beware any temporary measures becoming permanent.
If NSA intelligence fingers the culprits then I say bravo. Then we can get those bastards who are trying to destroy America.
The Hugo's are voted on by fans who shell out the bucks to vote and those who shell out the bucks to nominate. But you can only buy one vote, your own. Some unscrupulous person(s) tried to subvert that process in 1989 by nominating The Guardsman by P.J. Beese and Todd Cameron Hamilton. The authors of said book whose nomination was hastily withdrawn claimed no knowledge of the sequentially numbered money orders. And as I recall reading at the time suspicion was aroused when all the envelopes had the same postmark showing they originated from the same post office. I don't know remember if any changes were made to the Hugo voting system, but it was interesting to learn how it all works.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was my last hope for a good summer blockbuster. And it succeeded. All the rest were from OK to mediocre to bad to worse: A.I., Shrek, Planet of the Apes, Jurasic Park III, Atlantis, Lara Croft, The Mummy Returns, Final Fantasy and even the execrable Pearl Harbor (As Kyle in South Park said, "There is no God ... Michael Bey keeps making movies."). Though the best low key movie I saw this summer was The Dish.
Quit bashing microsoft.
No. I love to bash MS. It's what gives my life purpose. I'm glad there is so much bickering in the industry. They all want to be on top: Oracle, Sun, Apple. What galls intelligent people is that Microsoft and their mediocre products are on top. Is Scott McNealy really any more appealing than Bill Gates?
They only took out the Quicktime plugin because it is a stable feature
Quicktime isn't stable in IE. It crashes on big files about 3/4 the way through playing. I know some others who have the same problem.
Microsoft practices the Conan theory of competition:
Man: Conan, what is good in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies... see them scattered before you... and to hear the lamentation of their women.
That line is a bit west of the Mississippi River.
It's way further than a bit. I'd say Oklahoma City and Dallas are over 400 miles west of the Mississippi River.
The American conquest and subsequent resettlement of North America was a movement westward.
Geez, why is it that everyone with an axe to grind has to find some excuse to whet it, no matter how unrelated it is to the topic at hand. You seem to be enjoying the fruits of this conquest. If you don't like it, go back to your ancestor's country, wherever that is.
The history of the world is one people displacing another. If we are going to redress the wrongs in America, why don't we redress them worldwide back to the dawn of time, instead of singling America out as being somehow unique in this regard.
Back on topic. Yes, light pollution sucks. Go to the International Dark-Sky Association site to see what you can do to curb it.
What a moral weasel, Bush is. He is effectively killing stem cell research. It's the same decision he made when he said he'd end bombing on Vieques (we should not end it). He's trying to please both sides. Except he's not. He's trying to kowtow to his big bu$ine$$ contributor$, but at the same time he must kowtow to his religious supporters who think first amendment only loosely applies to Christianity.
Those 60 lines already derived, well golly, are already murdered (according to pro lifer's standards). Might as well make the most of them. That's like telling George Washington, "Gee, George, you've already chopped down the cherry tree. Might as well sell it for firewood. No sense letting it go to waste."
If government funding is used for stem cell research then no company should be allowed to derive intellectual property from it.
By the time we get to 6.2 (i.e. Mozilla 1.0 stable), there will be five Netscape users left.
Yeah, I gave up on Netscape along time ago. I doubt Mozilla is "the Great White Hope" for Open Source, but I'll give it a try when it comes out. Oh, for the days of NCSA Mosaic.
farscape is the best sci-fi show in production. We'll see how Enterrpise fares when it airs in the fall. As for Lexx and The Invisible Man, they both blow. Be grateful they pulled The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. I forced myself to watch the first episode after the teaser (Yes, it was that bad), and it only got worse. Andromeda is actually entertaining. Much better than the execrable Gene Roddenberry's Earth. Oh, and I mustn't forget Futurama.
And I guess for non-sci-fi I'll have to say I like Angry Beavers, South Park, and The Sopranos.
I suspect that once this "technological singularity" is reached in computing it will go something like this:
DEEP THOUGHT : What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space have been called into existence?
FOOK: Well, your task, O Computer is...
LUNKWILL: No, wait a minute, this isn't right, We distinctly designed this computer to be the greatest one ever and we're not making do with second best.
LUNKWILL: Deep Thought,are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest most powerful computer in all time?
Anyway, most of you know the rest. If not time to listen to radio series again H2G2
If Orson Scott Card quits writing, I don't know what I'll do :-(
I gave up Card a while back, but have you tried George R.R. Martin, Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Greg Egan, Connie Willis, Tony Daniel, Michael J. Straczynski, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, or Ben Bova? Gardner Dozois makes a valid claim that there are good new authors out there. You just have to look for them.
For those who must have a morbid fascination with not dead yet lists see: Oldest Living Authors/Editors/Artists Obviously they haven't had time to remove Poul's name from that list. It is from the Internet Science Fiction Database (ISFDB) Derived Information page.
The question should be how many "Golden Age" authors are left that are still writing?
By the middle of the 21st century, the major cost of any material item will be the 'intellectual property' charge.
It has always been the intellectual property charge for anything. It goes like this oversimplification: Bob says, "Gee, that sure is a pretty rock. I wonder if I can trade some pussy for it." And hands it to Jill. Jill says, "What a nice rock." and tosses it on the pile of other pretty rocks she's collected. And they have sex.
It is the shared idea that the rock has value that counts. Why else would people care so much for little green pieces of paper? It's because they can buy their sex, drugs, rock n' roll, cigarettes, and booze with it. And isn't that what a corporation wants guaranteed repeat business.
Tobacco is the perfect product. Customers are addicted; It takes a long time to kill them; and best of all, since they die young the government doesn't have to pay outall the social security they've collected.
It's the collective idea and its specific implementation that counts.
Last time I checked, science distinguishes itself from any other field of human endeavor by its ability for self-correction. Science is littered with the corpses of discarded theories. How are we to understand the world around us if scientists don't make mistakes?
The public needs to understand that most scientific research is going to end up a failure, but the rewards for success make it worthwhile. And it's hard to predict when or where the next breakthrough will come. We get a skewed view of scientific progress because we only see the breakthroughs (e.g. Galileo's telescope, Maxwell's equations, Darwin's natural selection, Crick & Watson's DNA).
If it turns out to be true, this guy should be voted the Iago of the Internet. People really hate being played for rubes. Destroying trust is a serious no-no. It shouldn't be too hard to prove the story. Check if those so-called aliases are real people. If not that should lend credence to the story.
Note - Iago (not the parrot on Disney's Aladdin) was a rumormonger that got Desdemona whacked by her own husband Othello (not the board game).
Geez! This is old news. Plato already covered this very issue in Phaedrus when he discussed the dangers of writing: "...for this discovery [writing] of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories;"
So in the Internet age history is doomed to repeat itself in a matter of hours instead of years. Besides, I have more important things to do like watch Angry Beavers than read something about spootheads who have no attention.
If you don't like the terms of their rental agreement go rent somewhere else.
He should have used a credit card instead of a debit card. He'd probably be in a much better position to dispute the charges. I think the real reason why the rental company is tracking speeding is to reduce the wear and tear on the car and thus lower their maintainance costs.
Are there devices to measure the forces on a car (and possibly every action)? For example since it's not their property, a driver is more likely to be more abusive with their rental. The rental company with such a device could calculate how much this abuse costs in extra wear and tear. Then they could stipulate in your contract in very small print "abuse this car and you'll pay us big bucks."
The thing is I'm sure car rental agencies already take into account their maintainence costs and are reflected in the rental price. In this scenario they don't pass the savings on to the consumer and slap the hands of anyone who doesn't treat their rental like grandma going for a Sunday drive.
Hollywood has a long tradition of frankly appalling British accents, from Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins" through Keanu Reeves in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (quite possibly the worst example in living memory) to modern example like this and Renée Zellweger in "Bridget Jones' Diary". They are dramatically over the top, competely unplaceable or just plain laughable (back to Mr Reeves again there!).
How can you forget the execrable performances of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Christian Slater, and Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? They should have been bitch slapped every time they attempted a British accent.
On a personal note I went to England a while back and got to meet some brits. On the way to a pub I asked if I good my fake british accent a try. They said sure and I did. Well, they said they could tell no difference between my mid-west accent and my fake brit attempt. I was crushed. I thought I did it pretty good. My guess is they were being polite. At least we still went to the pub and got pissed.
This may be a bit off topic but this seems like a good opportunity to rant.
When I accepted the job at my now defunct company I looked at the wages and benefits and saw that they were good enough. I considered the stock options to be icing on the cake. If it paid off it would have made a nice down payment for a house (not in the Bay Area). I'm glad I wasn't counting on them. Now for the rest of the story.
"You'll get nothing and you'll like it!"
These words have become prophetic for those of us hit by the dot-com fallout. About a year ago, a former co-worker of mine related the details of a phone conference held with a client. (Note to those who use speakerphones: They may not put you on hold but merely mute their mike.) Whilst he and his team members--with their phone mike muted--discussed how to continue the conversation, they overheard the party at the other end joking. One of the lines spoken was "You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
He said they stared at each other for a moment and gave an 'Oh-my-God-I-can't believe-they-said-that!' look to each other. They were very tempted when they unmuted the phone to repeat those very words back to them. Alas, they did not. They pretended it was never said and continued with the phone conference. Afterwards, my former co-worker related the story to me.
Almost six months ago our company went belly up and everyone was laid off. For me it was a relief. The company had been in trouble for some time now, and had already had one round of layoffs. The uncertainty was over. I'd held on so I wouldn't have to pay back my moving expenses.
On the day the axe fell, many of us gathered at a local watering hole to drink our sorrows away. A few hours later another former employee showed up at the club wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!" with the company logo. How apropos. The company paid us a quarter of what was owed for our final pay period.
I did find out later he had actually had the shirt made a while back. It was just the first time I'd seen it. I believe that slogan should become the motto of all those who tried to cash in on the dot-com boom when it tanked.
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Host: If you were a parasite what kind of parasite would you be?
Microsoft: Elephantitis.
Host: Why is that?
Microsoft: I'd be able to bloat testicles to the size of canteloupes and the owner will think they have something of real value.
Host: But that'll make them impotent.
Microsoft: Your point being?
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