That you might actually believe your laughable, ridiculous argument is frightening.
By your reckoning, Australia should have turned into a fascist state by now; let me assure you, it hasn't. Those who hold the power do not become totalitarian by nature simply because there is less chance of armed revolution.
I will, however, counter your argument as simply as it ever could be by pointing out that regardless of how many rifles, handguns, etc. you own, you will never be able to defeat a military that has the ability to wipe you off of the face of the earth with a few keystrokes. The entire NRA could never hope to hold off the American military for more than a few hours at best when the 'enemy' has conventional bombs that can level a small city, and nuclear options that produce minimal fallout.
This is simply about personal empowerment -- the ability to shoot at those who 'threaten' you, the comfort that 'if you had to' you could take the life of another human being. It's thinly-veiled psychopathy that becomes blatant once you actually kill somebody.
Given some of the plot-lines in PotC, I hope Disney won't shy away from Lucas' original vision of Luke going bad, and Han going Ben Kenobi like the suits at LucasFilm did.
I honestly think most of the nerds here are far more frightened to discover the brave-new-jedi-utopia went horribly wrong than they are about suffering Jar Jar Binks again.
Personally, I'd be happy to see Emperor Skywalker frying Ewoks. After all, he's in love with his sister, his 'parents' were violently killed, and how many people did he kill when he blew up the Death Star? It's not going to take too much to push him over the edge.
"Messages in the EAS are composed of four parts: a digitally encoded SAME (Specific Area Message Encoding) header, an attention signal, an audio announcement, and a digitally encoded end-of-message marker.
The SAME header (helpÂinfo) is the most critical part of the EAS design. It contains information about who originated the alert (the President, state or local authorities, the National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS), or the broadcaster), a short, general description of the event (tornado, flood, severe thunderstorm), the areas affected (up to 32 counties or states), the expected duration of the event (in minutes), the date and time it was issued (in UTC), and an identification of the originating station. (See SAME for a complete breakdown of the header.)"
So, we already have a system, implemented in 1997, that openly broadcasts information over an audio channel for any receiving device to decode and then act upon accordingly. I'd call that significant prior art...
I wonder; what if guns in the US themselves were to remain relatively unrestricted (but still required registration) but instead, bullets became closely tracked, and that the purchase of additional bullets by a gun-owner required them to account for the bullets they had previously acquired?
After all, someone who has a handgun for 'protection' from a sole assailant only requires a small number of bullets for such a purpose. This would make casual stockpiling more difficult. People who gave vague reasons, but went through a lot of ammo would also face more intense scrutiny, weeding out poachers or people on-selling bullets to criminals. Additional metals could also be added to bullets to 'fingerprint' them, making it easier to tie bullets back through the supply chain.
Regulating and restricting bullets doesn't take away the US citizen's right to 'bear arms' while increasing accountability and hindering the ability to go on a shooting spree. To me, it looks like a win-win.
What bothers me the most about modern mental 'disorders' is that they seem to have come about as a result of a 'popular' rejection of Freudian psychology -- in particular, relating to the role of nurture on the psyche.
The sad truth is, people who are afraid of social rejection probably learned that fear from the actions of their parents. Period. Now, I'm sure all of you self-protective parents are going to shortly mod this post into oblivion, but as someone who fell under the wheels of the 'autistic' bus, only to emerge and prove that diagnosis to be largely unfounded, I am quite adamant about my position.
If you parent improperly -- if you teach your child that people cannot be trusted -- you will have socially maladjusted children. It's just how it is. Simple cause and effect. Nurture, not nature.
However, much to my great personal suffering and on-going chagrin, we now live in a society that has decided, at some point along the modern road of ever-sharpening curves, that it's 'unproductive' to criticise parents about their parenting, but impractical to educate them properly, and politically difficult to take their children away from them when they're obviously doing them mental damage.
This has in turn led to a disastrous multi-generational scenario where children who had bad parents grew up to -- guess what -- be bad parents.
And now, to make that problem even worse than it already was, the 'powers that be' have decided 'in their infinite wisdom' that the nebulous definition of 'Asperger's Syndrome' could have been leading to 'unproductive' guilt in the minds of the parents of so-'afflicted' children, and that to solve this 'problem', we've opted to move this collection of symptoms over to the autism spectrum in an effort to re-assure these disconcerted parents that it's really a physical problem -- a congenital birth-defect -- and not anything they've personally done to their child.
To be quite frank, this is bullshit. Parenting is hard -- I understand that, and nobody is questioning that. But no parent should ever be given a 'free pass' to disassociate themselves from their child's social difficulties by being absolved of blame at every turn through bullshit 'diagnosis' that attempt to make everything a 'developmental' problem.
This does not encourage behaviour change on the part of parents, and only serves to only allow the damage to continue unabated, further aggravated by the ultimate stigmatisation of a child who is ultimately told that they were 'born defective', and that normality will be a hard road, if one even traversable at all.
The reality is, bad parenting breeds anxious, depressed, socially awkward children. This is obvious to anyone who contemplates it for even but a moment. This is the 'elephant in the room' -- children do not want to blame their parents. Parents do not wish to feel guilt about the lives of their children. So, we all dance around, blaming it on in-vitro 'accidents', or poor genetics -- anything but to face the truth, that socialisation is the ultimate responsibility of parents, and the failure of socialisation lies chiefly at their feet.
Well, I am here to lay that blame. It will not make me popular. But parents need to know that it may not be a congenital defect, but instead that at a crucial moment, you laid little Nancy down when she needed you most. Nobody wants to deal with that, but for the sake of the child, they should.
According to TFA, the patent apparently infringed upon has expired, however this mob can still sue people who used it in the past for the next six years.
So, if you start a new company now that uses SSL you should be in the clear.
There was some dude on the Daily Show who let slip that they use (in part) information purchased from reward cards, your credit score, and other commercially-purchasable demographic information such as warranty cards.
His argument was that this was doing the voter a service by enabling (the Democrats) to sell them a 'targeted message'. Jon nervously laughed at him but it was clear even he thought this wasn't a particularly comfortable revelation.
Americans aren't voters anymore, they're customers, and the party in power is the corporation that was able to sell their message to the majority of them.
Have you thought about modifying your strategic plan to include features that aren't present in the current system?
You can be really creative here. Basically you just revise the desired spec on your IT system so that the current system no longer meets those requirements. Obviously, you need a sensible argument to appease Bob, but I'm sure you can figure out some BS to sell it... =)
Oh yeah, and the phone company came out the other day (here in Australia they bury all the phone lines) and they have a nifty little bore machine that lets you dig little tunnels under streets, driveways, sidewalks, etc. (Just in case anyone wants to rebut with the whole 'patching concrete is expensive' bit...) =)
It's probably going to be cheaper and easier to get rights-of-way from the council and dig rather than mess around with FCC stuff. Also, you would be providing a more reliable service to your customers.
Just dig a trench and lay PVC pipe with normal CAT in it, restrict access to MAC addresses of routers you provide to people and there you go. People don't pay, cut off their MAC address. Easy done.
Sure people could spoof their neighbour's MAC address or what-have-you but there's that potential for abuse in any system. But I still think you're going to have an easier time getting clearance to dig trenches than you are dealing with the wireless mess.
I really do think he was just playing Devil's Advocate with this -- the obvious real solution is to evolve humanity to a point where the idea of committing an abhorrent crime is, well, abhorrent.
Sadly I think that we're going to lose any semblance of real privacy before we get even close to that ideal world though.
May as well get used to living a public life now...
Einstein did invent the atomic bomb, didn't he...?
That said, sure, strip his name from the file system to dishonour him, but at least acknowledge that we _do_ use all sorts of tech today invented by people who did some pretty bad shit...
If we can assume that such a civilisation would still want sunlight to hit their planet, then any Dyson "sphere" would need to have a 'gap' around the plane of the inhabited planet. This wouldn't be perfect, and there would still be a bleed that would at distance be observable from any angle.
Wouldn't this money be better served feeding starving kids in Africa? (Just sayin'...)
It's not that they're afraid they'll 'cease to exist' but separation anxiety is a bit closer to the truth -- anxiety disorders have become epidemic in recent years for a number of reasons I won't get into here, and talking to someone familiar is a typical way of preventing panic attacks due to agoraphobia, or claustrophobia, both of which become a factor when you're locked on a train with strange people. The part of your brain prone to panic doesn't understand that the familiar person you're talking to isn't actually there with you, and so becomes relaxed. Once they're 'gone', and you're 'alone' again, all of the anxiety comes back.
The point of signing a petition is that you're willing to go on the public record with a position. Don't want to be on the public record with that position? Don't sign the petition!
If petitions were anonymous, they'd carry _very_ little political weight, and no government would listen to them. They only listen because you're willing to stand up and _be counted_.
What ever happened to those? Or were they traded away at some point?
Companies can put whatever they like in a EULA. Whether it will actually stand up to scrutiny is another matter.
There's a reason why eBay is allowing people to 'opt-out' -- TBH, if there _was_ a problem, and you sent them a letter threatening to attempt a class-action anyway (and could prove the means to fight it), you'd probably get a personal settlement offer straight away. Nobody's going to want to risk an adverse ruling on a challenge, since it well 'discourages' anyone from 'wasting' money launching a class-action and thus does it's job...
I don't think it's fair to tie a lack of ethics or morality to 'unconditional love / loyalty." You can certainly be ethical and moral and just in your relationships without being forced to accept someone being an ass-hat simply because they're related to you, or because you've known them for a certain, arbitrary amount of time.
Later generations have learned not to take shit. If this means that the older generations who, for example, raised their children under a false assumption that they'd be there for them later in life 'no matter what' are sadly disappointed and lonely in their elder years -- guess what? TOUGH.
You get what you give. Nothing more and nothing less. I don't think there's anything wrong with that principle at all. If you do, then you probably take more than you give, and I can't have any sympathy for you.
You'd think with all of that experience and wisdom of age you'd recognise when someone was being tongue-in-cheek... (and if you didn't, you'd still know not to feed the trolls...)
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That you might actually believe your laughable, ridiculous argument is frightening.
By your reckoning, Australia should have turned into a fascist state by now; let me assure you, it hasn't. Those who hold the power do not become totalitarian by nature simply because there is less chance of armed revolution.
I will, however, counter your argument as simply as it ever could be by pointing out that regardless of how many rifles, handguns, etc. you own, you will never be able to defeat a military that has the ability to wipe you off of the face of the earth with a few keystrokes. The entire NRA could never hope to hold off the American military for more than a few hours at best when the 'enemy' has conventional bombs that can level a small city, and nuclear options that produce minimal fallout.
This is simply about personal empowerment -- the ability to shoot at those who 'threaten' you, the comfort that 'if you had to' you could take the life of another human being. It's thinly-veiled psychopathy that becomes blatant once you actually kill somebody.
Given some of the plot-lines in PotC, I hope Disney won't shy away from Lucas' original vision of Luke going bad, and Han going Ben Kenobi like the suits at LucasFilm did.
I honestly think most of the nerds here are far more frightened to discover the brave-new-jedi-utopia went horribly wrong than they are about suffering Jar Jar Binks again.
Personally, I'd be happy to see Emperor Skywalker frying Ewoks. After all, he's in love with his sister, his 'parents' were violently killed, and how many people did he kill when he blew up the Death Star? It's not going to take too much to push him over the edge.
Er, not forgetting of course that Fox News (and the practice of direct political interference by the media) is the brainchild of an ex-Australian?
Also, have you ever watched Today/Tonight?
From Wikipedia:
"Messages in the EAS are composed of four parts: a digitally encoded SAME (Specific Area Message Encoding) header, an attention signal, an audio announcement, and a digitally encoded end-of-message marker.
The SAME header (helpÂinfo) is the most critical part of the EAS design. It contains information about who originated the alert (the President, state or local authorities, the National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS), or the broadcaster), a short, general description of the event (tornado, flood, severe thunderstorm), the areas affected (up to 32 counties or states), the expected duration of the event (in minutes), the date and time it was issued (in UTC), and an identification of the originating station. (See SAME for a complete breakdown of the header.)"
So, we already have a system, implemented in 1997, that openly broadcasts information over an audio channel for any receiving device to decode and then act upon accordingly. I'd call that significant prior art...
I wonder; what if guns in the US themselves were to remain relatively unrestricted (but still required registration) but instead, bullets became closely tracked, and that the purchase of additional bullets by a gun-owner required them to account for the bullets they had previously acquired?
After all, someone who has a handgun for 'protection' from a sole assailant only requires a small number of bullets for such a purpose. This would make casual stockpiling more difficult. People who gave vague reasons, but went through a lot of ammo would also face more intense scrutiny, weeding out poachers or people on-selling bullets to criminals. Additional metals could also be added to bullets to 'fingerprint' them, making it easier to tie bullets back through the supply chain.
Regulating and restricting bullets doesn't take away the US citizen's right to 'bear arms' while increasing accountability and hindering the ability to go on a shooting spree. To me, it looks like a win-win.
What bothers me the most about modern mental 'disorders' is that they seem to have come about as a result of a 'popular' rejection of Freudian psychology -- in particular, relating to the role of nurture on the psyche.
The sad truth is, people who are afraid of social rejection probably learned that fear from the actions of their parents. Period. Now, I'm sure all of you self-protective parents are going to shortly mod this post into oblivion, but as someone who fell under the wheels of the 'autistic' bus, only to emerge and prove that diagnosis to be largely unfounded, I am quite adamant about my position.
If you parent improperly -- if you teach your child that people cannot be trusted -- you will have socially maladjusted children. It's just how it is. Simple cause and effect. Nurture, not nature.
However, much to my great personal suffering and on-going chagrin, we now live in a society that has decided, at some point along the modern road of ever-sharpening curves, that it's 'unproductive' to criticise parents about their parenting, but impractical to educate them properly, and politically difficult to take their children away from them when they're obviously doing them mental damage.
This has in turn led to a disastrous multi-generational scenario where children who had bad parents grew up to -- guess what -- be bad parents.
And now, to make that problem even worse than it already was, the 'powers that be' have decided 'in their infinite wisdom' that the nebulous definition of 'Asperger's Syndrome' could have been leading to 'unproductive' guilt in the minds of the parents of so-'afflicted' children, and that to solve this 'problem', we've opted to move this collection of symptoms over to the autism spectrum in an effort to re-assure these disconcerted parents that it's really a physical problem -- a congenital birth-defect -- and not anything they've personally done to their child.
To be quite frank, this is bullshit. Parenting is hard -- I understand that, and nobody is questioning that. But no parent should ever be given a 'free pass' to disassociate themselves from their child's social difficulties by being absolved of blame at every turn through bullshit 'diagnosis' that attempt to make everything a 'developmental' problem.
This does not encourage behaviour change on the part of parents, and only serves to only allow the damage to continue unabated, further aggravated by the ultimate stigmatisation of a child who is ultimately told that they were 'born defective', and that normality will be a hard road, if one even traversable at all.
The reality is, bad parenting breeds anxious, depressed, socially awkward children. This is obvious to anyone who contemplates it for even but a moment. This is the 'elephant in the room' -- children do not want to blame their parents. Parents do not wish to feel guilt about the lives of their children. So, we all dance around, blaming it on in-vitro 'accidents', or poor genetics -- anything but to face the truth, that socialisation is the ultimate responsibility of parents, and the failure of socialisation lies chiefly at their feet.
Well, I am here to lay that blame. It will not make me popular. But parents need to know that it may not be a congenital defect, but instead that at a crucial moment, you laid little Nancy down when she needed you most. Nobody wants to deal with that, but for the sake of the child, they should.
Pardon my embarrassing abuse of an apostrophe... it's been a long night =/
Cyber-democracy doesn't work if government's can arbitrarily censor participants.
In their own words, doing what they want would be "letting the terrorists win".
According to TFA, the patent apparently infringed upon has expired, however this mob can still sue people who used it in the past for the next six years.
So, if you start a new company now that uses SSL you should be in the clear.
Seriously?
A fool and his money are soon parted. Sheesh.
There was some dude on the Daily Show who let slip that they use (in part) information purchased from reward cards, your credit score, and other commercially-purchasable demographic information such as warranty cards.
His argument was that this was doing the voter a service by enabling (the Democrats) to sell them a 'targeted message'. Jon nervously laughed at him but it was clear even he thought this wasn't a particularly comfortable revelation.
Americans aren't voters anymore, they're customers, and the party in power is the corporation that was able to sell their message to the majority of them.
Have you thought about modifying your strategic plan to include features that aren't present in the current system?
You can be really creative here. Basically you just revise the desired spec on your IT system so that the current system no longer meets those requirements. Obviously, you need a sensible argument to appease Bob, but I'm sure you can figure out some BS to sell it... =)
Oh yeah, and the phone company came out the other day (here in Australia they bury all the phone lines) and they have a nifty little bore machine that lets you dig little tunnels under streets, driveways, sidewalks, etc. (Just in case anyone wants to rebut with the whole 'patching concrete is expensive' bit...) =)
It's probably going to be cheaper and easier to get rights-of-way from the council and dig rather than mess around with FCC stuff. Also, you would be providing a more reliable service to your customers.
Just dig a trench and lay PVC pipe with normal CAT in it, restrict access to MAC addresses of routers you provide to people and there you go. People don't pay, cut off their MAC address. Easy done.
Sure people could spoof their neighbour's MAC address or what-have-you but there's that potential for abuse in any system. But I still think you're going to have an easier time getting clearance to dig trenches than you are dealing with the wireless mess.
I really do think he was just playing Devil's Advocate with this -- the obvious real solution is to evolve humanity to a point where the idea of committing an abhorrent crime is, well, abhorrent.
Sadly I think that we're going to lose any semblance of real privacy before we get even close to that ideal world though.
May as well get used to living a public life now...
Einstein did invent the atomic bomb, didn't he...?
That said, sure, strip his name from the file system to dishonour him, but at least acknowledge that we _do_ use all sorts of tech today invented by people who did some pretty bad shit...
If we can assume that such a civilisation would still want sunlight to hit their planet, then any Dyson "sphere" would need to have a 'gap' around the plane of the inhabited planet. This wouldn't be perfect, and there would still be a bleed that would at distance be observable from any angle.
Wouldn't this money be better served feeding starving kids in Africa? (Just sayin'...)
It's not that they're afraid they'll 'cease to exist' but separation anxiety is a bit closer to the truth -- anxiety disorders have become epidemic in recent years for a number of reasons I won't get into here, and talking to someone familiar is a typical way of preventing panic attacks due to agoraphobia, or claustrophobia, both of which become a factor when you're locked on a train with strange people. The part of your brain prone to panic doesn't understand that the familiar person you're talking to isn't actually there with you, and so becomes relaxed. Once they're 'gone', and you're 'alone' again, all of the anxiety comes back.
The point of signing a petition is that you're willing to go on the public record with a position. Don't want to be on the public record with that position? Don't sign the petition!
If petitions were anonymous, they'd carry _very_ little political weight, and no government would listen to them. They only listen because you're willing to stand up and _be counted_.
In Putin's Russia, Twitter Updates You...
What ever happened to those? Or were they traded away at some point?
Companies can put whatever they like in a EULA. Whether it will actually stand up to scrutiny is another matter.
There's a reason why eBay is allowing people to 'opt-out' -- TBH, if there _was_ a problem, and you sent them a letter threatening to attempt a class-action anyway (and could prove the means to fight it), you'd probably get a personal settlement offer straight away. Nobody's going to want to risk an adverse ruling on a challenge, since it well 'discourages' anyone from 'wasting' money launching a class-action and thus does it's job...
It appears from the whois that Demonoid's domains have been transferred to a registrar in Brazil.
That would make a certain amount of sense. The 'legal issue' is probably that Sedo didn't actually have the right to sell the domains.
However, this development does encourage the notion that Demonoid intends to come back...
...er, but couldn't the phone communicate over 3G/4G data?
Somehow I doubt the 'typical' Starbucks customer doesn't have data on their phone plan...
I don't think it's fair to tie a lack of ethics or morality to 'unconditional love / loyalty." You can certainly be ethical and moral and just in your relationships without being forced to accept someone being an ass-hat simply because they're related to you, or because you've known them for a certain, arbitrary amount of time.
Later generations have learned not to take shit. If this means that the older generations who, for example, raised their children under a false assumption that they'd be there for them later in life 'no matter what' are sadly disappointed and lonely in their elder years -- guess what? TOUGH.
You get what you give. Nothing more and nothing less. I don't think there's anything wrong with that principle at all. If you do, then you probably take more than you give, and I can't have any sympathy for you.
You'd think with all of that experience and wisdom of age you'd recognise when someone was being tongue-in-cheek... (and if you didn't, you'd still know not to feed the trolls...)