That's a very dangerous statement to wave around in most of the United States. Where law draws the line on sexuality betwen child and adult is 18 in most places, but biologically, it could easily be negotiable. I've always wondered why it differs from state to state, and what the discussions are like that surround the issue.
I also wonder if these discussions will eventually land us all in jail when the GOP seizes power of all three branches of government.
You say that as if the internet is the only vechial in which this type of content is carried. Do you realize that there are more TVs
Bingo. I personally believe that the Warner Brother's network (dubya-bee) is single-handedly responsible for the increase in pedophiles in this country. They constantly portray nubile babes as underaged objects of raw sexuality (think how much midriff, microskirt and nipple action do you see with 20-something actresses portraying ~15-16 year old kids). Anything for a Neilson point I suppose.
I think the images presented on prime-time TV do more damage to kids' minds by virtue of constant bombardment and innundation of 'ideals' than does a brief image of lactating transexual goat fucker.
Of course, the long term affects of heavy porn usage still haven't been disclosed...
Obfuscated C is funny because C is supposed to be all strict and anal. Obfuscated Perl isn't funny because Perl deliberately allows obfuscation for the sake of speedy coding.
It's like the Dem/Repub convetions: they are supposed to be flimsy and full of rhetoric, so why does the press write articles proclaiming how flimsy and rhetorical(?) the convetions are (will be.) Duh. As my grandma would say as she downed another Miller Lite: "No shit, Sherlock."
Part of the advantage with AMD's offering, is that porting from the 32bit x86 to their 64bit x86 is MUCH, MUCH easier than porting from x86 to IA64.
I completely disagree. You don't simply flip a switch in your compiler and suddenly all of your data types are 64 bit. I think porting to Sledgy would be more bug-prone that porting to 'Tinny because there would be more subtle errors.
IMHO: Since IA64 is a complete rewrite, it is under more severe scrutiny, whereas more would pass under the radar while porting to x86-64. Result: compared to vanilla ia32 OS-"X", final build "Xy" would be more robust on IA64 and buggier x86-64.
Me, I'd rather see IA48 as a transitionary vehicle.;-)
Intel posts all of their errata, unlike AMD. If AMD was as big and successful as Intel, it would have just as many enemies uncovering every tiny shred of non-documented operations, which become useless errata.
100k is reasonable when a label is trying to break a band. 99% of almost all pop music actually written by the songwriter is made listenable/marketable by the producer and/or studio engineer (this is excluding music written by ghost writers because the label is just selling a talentless face, aka britney, ricky, etc...) The cost of hiring a producer to transmute a 2-chord-bomb into a lead-off single is enormous. (Blink 182, Alanis, Jewel, Smashmouth... nothing without tons of $$$ in post-production work... Smashmouth even admitted it in a really funny interview.) Even boner local studios charge 100 beans an hour to use dusty 1" 16 track and an HP-CDR.
---
Any problems w/Lithium Ion batteries?
on
The new Palm VIIx
·
· Score: 1
Just wondering if anyone has had problems with lithium ion rechargable batteries failing to take a charge after time? My biggest problem with rechargable devices has been that after a year or so, they no longer hold a charge. Of course, I'm referring to cheap devices like cordless drills and beard trimmers, which may just be cheap batteries, but I'd hate to drop $400 on a Palm IIIc/Vx/VIIx and then have to toss it b/c the battery eventually fails...
Cool article, the first 1/2 made sense, then when started talking.NET IL, I glazed over. But overall it feels like this guy's big brain (and hist team) gave this much thought before churning out a new language. Here's my $0.02...
1. extensible metadata gives me wood... oh yeah!
2. categorizing code as safe/unsafe opens the door to the possibility of on-CPU encrypted execution: won't be able to hack w/o Tektronix TLA-711 logic analyzer, but definite plus for more secure computing.
3. the section on garbage collection sounds like s/w "hints" to the core libs that aren't specifically procedure calls. if that's true, and they're intrinsics, that would be way cool. (like lfetch.nta in ia64... assembler hints to the cpu) this ties into his statement about where the standard libs end and the langauge begins.
I agree with your last statement 100%. Personally: If you have to hide as an AC to make a statement, then (a) it obviously is a flame, or (b) you have no self respect or integrity for your opinions and deserve everything you get in life. (I purposefully leave off my email address b/c I'd probably get boned if my company saw what I was saying... which I guess by my logic is another kind of cowardice, but I'm ok w/that b/c I really like my job;-)
Occasionally I surf at -1, and I've never seen anything that looks like biased political censorship. Anyone with a different opinion, please feel free to supply a comment # if you feel otherwise.
I think the/. moderation system is a great system. The little karma nuggets force people to post on topic and intelligently, and it easy to filter through the noise to get to the actually discussion: which is why I'm here in the first place. Yes, it's sort of sick reward system which is based on a communal ego template, but I can live with it. Otherwise I just wouldn't bother surfing here...
In fact, CSS is just a trade-secret - that is all. DeCSS is something else altogther.
Trade secret? Hmmm... that doesn't sound right, but...
After a recent patent/IP training seminar at my company, I learned that trade secrets are not patentable. They are trades secrets only until someone knows about them. Then they become public domain.
That is why coca-cola won't patent its secret formula: to do so would require them to publish a trade secret!
corporations and government have tried to quantify and manipulate the underground, only to find that this is impossible because it changes so rapidly
Well that's all fine and dandy for you, but what about those of us who define ourselves by how we're perceived by others?;-) I like to use the word 'commoditize'.
its already old hat to us, and we've tired with it and are moving on to something else...
True to an extent: I would like to see some more discussion on something other than stack smashing and DoS studies. Since I know practically zero about networks (which means that to me most of the Phrack/2600 discussions are complete gibberish!) I'm sort of bummed because it seems to be the majority of the content out there. Personally, I purposefully avoid studying networks for same reason I don't own a gun...
And what the hell was that round puck thing on RS6000 systems in '88-89? It didn't have a wheel and wasn't optical. It had two knobs that jittered underneath it... was that a friction sensor or something?
And technically, I think old vector style mainframes with light pens were "FIRST". In college I had to learn CAD on a mainframe with a vector display, lightpen and a palette of knobs. The light pen selected objects or line segments and the knobs adjusted various properties (I never got to use one b/c only three of the terminals had them).
Talk about an ergonomic nightmare! Not only was it impossible to tell the difference between selected lines and non-selected lines b/c of contrast (which got worse with more lines to draw), but holding your hand in front of the screen made my shoulders sore.
I think if a hacker society wanted to call themselves 'undergound', we wouldn't see in-depth coverage about them in every major news publication. Of course, one could argue that the media is just good at covering these secret groups, but judging by the (a) size of DEFCON and (b) how cool it is to be perceived as a hacker... you get my point...
At one point I was also very excited about Hagelin and NLP because they had gathered a few neat ideas - and hey, when was the last time we had a president with a PhD?
This is exactly where I am right now. To gather more info, I've been dropping his name here and there to see what kind of responses I get. Yours has been the most insightful, thanks for providing such detail. I haven't had time to study all of this yet, but I appreciate the reply and will dig into it.
Kids today have it easy because us late 20-something GenXers suffered for the cause. And now hacking is tres chic these days.
<voice="old-man">
Why, when I was kid, from 6th to 11th grad (that would be circa 1983-1988) I was routinely beat-up and harrassed because I spent my recess periods--and countless hours after school--programming the schools commodore Pet. Ok, I guess I deserved it because I was skinny and wore argyle sox all of the time, and maybe I should have done book reports on other things besides Ada Lovelace, ENIAC and the transistor... but hey...
</voice>
Now it's ultrahip to be a hacker. Look at the exponential growth at DefCon (had to get a hotel in Barstow!!!)
Posers vs. Punks vs. Script Kiddes
Script kiddies are the equivalent of some poser who has 50 bucks and few hours to kill, and thus become instantly hardcore by getting a tribal tattoo around his/her bicept... or maybe even a tongue piercing and bleached hair. Ooo. Bad-ass. If punks hadn't been invented this culture in '75-85, and then pop culture hadn't made punk culture a commodity, nerdy suburban kids would still be wearing Izods and ProKeds.
I hate being introduced by my friends as a hacker. And it's my fault, I should just lie when friends call me to go out on weekends and I'm too busy optimizing assembly code. I think the best thing real hackers can do is to help devolve the image of hackers back to being booger-eating social-skill-lacking losers so that we can have the quiet solitude of our underground handed back to us.
Consumer Reports does it, and their reputation is unimpugnable.
I always thought CR was a reliable source of information until some time in 1990. I worked at a bicycle store as a mechanic for most of the 80's (back when a 100ns 64kbit DRAM chip in a DIP package cost ~$7).
Anyway, I read a review in CR on a number of bicycles, and to my surprise, they had listed a few department store bikes over specialized, higher quality brands. I couldn't figure out how they could make these claims, I mean, there's a world of difference in just the components alone.
After reading the article, it appeared to me that the stores which supplied the test bikes obviously had differing levels of competence w.r.t. their mechanics. I don't remember the exact wording, but apparently the reviewers' opinions were based largely on the performance of the bicycle, rather than the components. Since the department store had better mechanics, the inferior product got higher marks.
So I guess there really isn't a parallel for video cards since there isn't any real 'tuning' per-se. However, it is interesting how even the most well-intentioned publication can be misleading through no fault of its own.
Trapping light invites all sorts of intriguing questions, Fink points out. For instance, if you light a candle in a room lined with perfect mirrors, would the room stay illuminated even after the flame is extinguished?
It seems there wouldn't be any way to test to see if the light was trapped inside the room. If you looked inside, some light would escape, and if any energy was exiting the box as a result of the light, then it wouldn't be trapped in the room.
Maybe I'm confusing light & energy here, but if you burned a candle in a box made of this perfect mirror: 1) all of the heat energy from the chemical reaction during burning the candle is released in photons via radiation; which means 2) all of the chemical energy would be converted to photons bouncing around in the box; therefore 3) the box/room would now be a type of battery storing the energy in photons.
So could one create little boxes-o'-light that would have pracitcal uses like a common battery?
I think I'll stop now that I've grossly misused a good number of physics concepts...
Ok, I can understand why you would take shot at the first part: obviously in your mind meditation smacks of Hinduism which smacks of religion in schools. Understandable. Personally, I'm compleletly appalled and embarassed by the Jesus myth and having the 10-commandments forced into schools. Ergo, John had better keep TM discussion out of the media if he hopes to be taken seriously by the (narrow-minded) masses.
However it is important to explain to people that an activity used in religious ceremonies doesn't make it a religious activity when used out of context. I don't readily see how you could defend relaxation techniques as being particularly 'religious', but it would be a fun debate.
As for part II, what's that all about? I never heard of that and would like to better understand it so I can rebuff it. (if it is rebuffable, that is...)
So, they might be a little too anti-corporate for some of the more wealthy around here.
Xactly. Nader would be my choice if he wasn't so anti-wealthy. I share some Libertarian and Green ideals, but unfortunately I'm their target because I make more than 100k/yr. Funny how I'm villified by some of their supporters just for being a reasonably decent hacker...
I think he has a much better understanding and foresight necessary to handle the these heavy genetic and environmental issues better than Nader or Gore... unfortunately he lacks Gore's soft-money supporters, and Nader's teamsters unions.
While I agree that there should be a moratorium on genetic foods (a la bovine hormones), I don't think the best way to understand DNA is to be limited by ethical constraints. If someone wants to tinker with human zygotes in a lab, by all means do it. How else would we learn what the human genome does? The fact is, we are going to at some point HAVE to make gruesome mistakes.
Anyone: How many times you sat down and wrote a lengthy piece of code, and it compiled and run succesfully with zaero boogs? Not!!! All the planning in the world won't free us from the first pass of genetic fuckups.
We just need to stomach it and get over our naive nature to overinflate the value of life. It's just a machine, folks, a very complicated machine.
Oh yeah, although he'd probably wretch at my last comment, vote Hagelin.
Scenes like the escape from the Near-Death Star illustrate interesting 2.5D rendering techniques. During this scene, the engines are finally reactivated, the ship rises, the scene freezes, and the camera pans around the object in a plenoptic-like rendering effect. That to me looks like a 3D scene rendered with one of those cool cartoon rendering algorithms I saw at siggraph a few years ago.
There was an entire siggraph track on "non-photorealistic rendering" during which several papers demonstrated methods for rendering a 3D scene into something that looks sloppily hand-drawn; some effects were even weirder. It was a very very cool concept.
True, however it brings up the delimma of 'who will watch the watchmen.' In Larry Lessig's book, "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace", he immediately quotes Dilbert's Guide to the Future: "[In the future, technology will prove 100% of the crimes, unfortunately it will also prove that 100% of us are criminals]". And Brin makes the point that we can either ALL have the technology to watch EVERYONE, including military leaders and politicians. Or we can let the leaders have it and just pretend that it doesn't exist.
So yes, in countries where only the government has the technology, they could use it to oppress. Just like guns. But what if everyone had it? Perhaps it is just a translation of the second amendment.
Perhaps some countries would expend massive amounts of military force to tightly control this technology (like China's media), but I doubt that could happen in America. Our citizenry is too armed and edgy and suspicious (and based more on $$$, not moral/ethical values). I think it would be hard to supress any sizeable sect in america. Even though secession is against federal law, if the Freemen or the Davidians had numbers in the millions, they wouldn't have lost to the Feds.
IMHO, I don't think the resolution of conflict in which all sides are armed with the same technology would be a "...a rather oppressive State with a large percentage of the population in jail..." as you put it.
I think there would be too much public sentiment in favor of this technology, and hopefully the muscle of the governement (the actual soldiers) would share the same.
Has CC ever written-in a mention of/. when visiting the lone gmen? i bet we see that this year. or at least some mention of a named online discussion group/fanzine. they're always throwing in more recent jargon and buzzwords. ---
Anyone know why E-ink is still selling only Point-of-sale type displays? www.eink.com They were claiming paper replacements in 95 but I still haven't seen em yet.
Must admit, this is the best looking webpad yet. The cylinder on top gives it balance and orientation and still makes a roomy place to stuff more electronics/antenna/battery without affecting a particular handedness.
Slashdot Mirror
our normal, biological sexuality.
That's a very dangerous statement to wave around in most of the United States. Where law draws the line on sexuality betwen child and adult is 18 in most places, but biologically, it could easily be negotiable. I've always wondered why it differs from state to state, and what the discussions are like that surround the issue.
I also wonder if these discussions will eventually land us all in jail when the GOP seizes power of all three branches of government.
---
You say that as if the internet is the only vechial in which this type of content is carried. Do you realize that there are more TVs
Bingo. I personally believe that the Warner Brother's network (dubya-bee) is single-handedly responsible for the increase in pedophiles in this country. They constantly portray nubile babes as underaged objects of raw sexuality (think how much midriff, microskirt and nipple action do you see with 20-something actresses portraying ~15-16 year old kids). Anything for a Neilson point I suppose.
I think the images presented on prime-time TV do more damage to kids' minds by virtue of constant bombardment and innundation of 'ideals' than does a brief image of lactating transexual goat fucker.
Of course, the long term affects of heavy porn usage still haven't been disclosed...
---
Obfuscated C is funny because C is supposed to be all strict and anal. Obfuscated Perl isn't funny because Perl deliberately allows obfuscation for the sake of speedy coding.
It's like the Dem/Repub convetions: they are supposed to be flimsy and full of rhetoric, so why does the press write articles proclaiming how flimsy and rhetorical(?) the convetions are (will be.) Duh. As my grandma would say as she downed another Miller Lite: "No shit, Sherlock."
---
Part of the advantage with AMD's offering, is that porting from the 32bit x86 to their 64bit x86 is MUCH, MUCH easier than porting from x86 to IA64.
;-)
I completely disagree. You don't simply flip a switch in your compiler and suddenly all of your data types are 64 bit. I think porting to Sledgy would be more bug-prone that porting to 'Tinny because there would be more subtle errors.
IMHO: Since IA64 is a complete rewrite, it is under more severe scrutiny, whereas more would pass under the radar while porting to x86-64. Result: compared to vanilla ia32 OS-"X", final build "Xy" would be more robust on IA64 and buggier x86-64.
Me, I'd rather see IA48 as a transitionary vehicle.
---
Intel posts all of their errata, unlike AMD. If AMD was as big and successful as Intel, it would have just as many enemies uncovering every tiny shred of non-documented operations, which become useless errata.
---
100k is reasonable when a label is trying to break a band. 99% of almost all pop music actually written by the songwriter is made listenable/marketable by the producer and/or studio engineer (this is excluding music written by ghost writers because the label is just selling a talentless face, aka britney, ricky, etc...) The cost of hiring a producer to transmute a 2-chord-bomb into a lead-off single is enormous. (Blink 182, Alanis, Jewel, Smashmouth... nothing without tons of $$$ in post-production work... Smashmouth even admitted it in a really funny interview.) Even boner local studios charge 100 beans an hour to use dusty 1" 16 track and an HP-CDR.
---
Just wondering if anyone has had problems with lithium ion rechargable batteries failing to take a charge after time? My biggest problem with rechargable devices has been that after a year or so, they no longer hold a charge. Of course, I'm referring to cheap devices like cordless drills and beard trimmers, which may just be cheap batteries, but I'd hate to drop $400 on a Palm IIIc/Vx/VIIx and then have to toss it b/c the battery eventually fails...
Thanks, in advance.
---
Cool article, the first 1/2 made sense, then when started talking .NET IL, I glazed over. But overall it feels like this guy's big brain (and hist team) gave this much thought before churning out a new language. Here's my $0.02...
.NET is all about...
1. extensible metadata gives me wood... oh yeah!
2. categorizing code as safe/unsafe opens the door to the possibility of on-CPU encrypted execution: won't be able to hack w/o Tektronix TLA-711 logic analyzer, but definite plus for more secure computing.
3. the section on garbage collection sounds like s/w "hints" to the core libs that aren't specifically procedure calls. if that's true, and they're intrinsics, that would be way cool. (like lfetch.nta in ia64... assembler hints to the cpu) this ties into his statement about where the standard libs end and the langauge begins.
Now to go read what
And when can we get a compiler for C#?
---
Ah, shut your stinky pie hole.
I agree with your last statement 100%. Personally: If you have to hide as an AC to make a statement, then (a) it obviously is a flame, or (b) you have no self respect or integrity for your opinions and deserve everything you get in life. (I purposefully leave off my email address b/c I'd probably get boned if my company saw what I was saying... which I guess by my logic is another kind of cowardice, but I'm ok w/that b/c I really like my job
Occasionally I surf at -1, and I've never seen anything that looks like biased political censorship. Anyone with a different opinion, please feel free to supply a comment # if you feel otherwise.
I think the
---
In fact, CSS is just a trade-secret - that is all. DeCSS is something else altogther.
Trade secret? Hmmm... that doesn't sound right, but...
After a recent patent/IP training seminar at my company, I learned that trade secrets are not patentable. They are trades secrets only until someone knows about them. Then they become public domain.
That is why coca-cola won't patent its secret formula: to do so would require them to publish a trade secret!
---
corporations and government have tried to quantify and manipulate the underground, only to find that this is impossible because it changes so rapidly
Well that's all fine and dandy for you, but what about those of us who define ourselves by how we're perceived by others?
its already old hat to us, and we've tired with it and are moving on to something else...
True to an extent: I would like to see some more discussion on something other than stack smashing and DoS studies. Since I know practically zero about networks (which means that to me most of the Phrack/2600 discussions are complete gibberish!) I'm sort of bummed because it seems to be the majority of the content out there. Personally, I purposefully avoid studying networks for same reason I don't own a gun...
---
And what the hell was that round puck thing on RS6000 systems in '88-89? It didn't have a wheel and wasn't optical. It had two knobs that jittered underneath it... was that a friction sensor or something?
And technically, I think old vector style mainframes with light pens were "FIRST". In college I had to learn CAD on a mainframe with a vector display, lightpen and a palette of knobs. The light pen selected objects or line segments and the knobs adjusted various properties (I never got to use one b/c only three of the terminals had them).
Talk about an ergonomic nightmare! Not only was it impossible to tell the difference between selected lines and non-selected lines b/c of contrast (which got worse with more lines to draw), but holding your hand in front of the screen made my shoulders sore.
---
I agree.
I think if a hacker society wanted to call themselves 'undergound', we wouldn't see in-depth coverage about them in every major news publication. Of course, one could argue that the media is just good at covering these secret groups, but judging by the (a) size of DEFCON and (b) how cool it is to be perceived as a hacker... you get my point...
---
Awww, c'mon dad, a little a little schadenfreude never hurt anyone! ;-)
---
At one point I was also very excited about Hagelin and NLP because they had gathered a few neat ideas - and hey, when was the last time we had a president with a PhD?
This is exactly where I am right now. To gather more info, I've been dropping his name here and there to see what kind of responses I get. Yours has been the most insightful, thanks for providing such detail. I haven't had time to study all of this yet, but I appreciate the reply and will dig into it.
---
Bah!!
Kids today have it easy because us late 20-something GenXers suffered for the cause. And now hacking is tres chic these days.
<voice="old-man">
Why, when I was kid, from 6th to 11th grad (that would be circa 1983-1988) I was routinely beat-up and harrassed because I spent my recess periods--and countless hours after school--programming the schools commodore Pet. Ok, I guess I deserved it because I was skinny and wore argyle sox all of the time, and maybe I should have done book reports on other things besides Ada Lovelace, ENIAC and the transistor... but hey...
</voice>
Now it's ultrahip to be a hacker. Look at the exponential growth at DefCon (had to get a hotel in Barstow!!!)
Posers vs. Punks vs. Script Kiddes
Script kiddies are the equivalent of some poser who has 50 bucks and few hours to kill, and thus become instantly hardcore by getting a tribal tattoo around his/her bicept... or maybe even a tongue piercing and bleached hair. Ooo. Bad-ass. If punks hadn't been invented this culture in '75-85, and then pop culture hadn't made punk culture a commodity, nerdy suburban kids would still be wearing Izods and ProKeds.
I hate being introduced by my friends as a hacker. And it's my fault, I should just lie when friends call me to go out on weekends and I'm too busy optimizing assembly code. I think the best thing real hackers can do is to help devolve the image of hackers back to being booger-eating social-skill-lacking losers so that we can have the quiet solitude of our underground handed back to us.
</rant>
---
Consumer Reports does it, and their reputation is unimpugnable.
I always thought CR was a reliable source of information until some time in 1990. I worked at a bicycle store as a mechanic for most of the 80's (back when a 100ns 64kbit DRAM chip in a DIP package cost ~$7).
Anyway, I read a review in CR on a number of bicycles, and to my surprise, they had listed a few department store bikes over specialized, higher quality brands. I couldn't figure out how they could make these claims, I mean, there's a world of difference in just the components alone.
After reading the article, it appeared to me that the stores which supplied the test bikes obviously had differing levels of competence w.r.t. their mechanics. I don't remember the exact wording, but apparently the reviewers' opinions were based largely on the performance of the bicycle, rather than the components. Since the department store had better mechanics, the inferior product got higher marks.
So I guess there really isn't a parallel for video cards since there isn't any real 'tuning' per-se. However, it is interesting how even the most well-intentioned publication can be misleading through no fault of its own.
---
This is from one of the links off of the article:
Trapping light invites all sorts of intriguing questions, Fink points out. For instance, if you light a candle in a room lined with perfect mirrors, would the room stay illuminated even after the flame is extinguished?
It seems there wouldn't be any way to test to see if the light was trapped inside the room. If you looked inside, some light would escape, and if any energy was exiting the box as a result of the light, then it wouldn't be trapped in the room.
Maybe I'm confusing light & energy here, but if you burned a candle in a box made of this perfect mirror: 1) all of the heat energy from the chemical reaction during burning the candle is released in photons via radiation; which means 2) all of the chemical energy would be converted to photons bouncing around in the box; therefore 3) the box/room would now be a type of battery storing the energy in photons.
So could one create little boxes-o'-light that would have pracitcal uses like a common battery?
I think I'll stop now that I've grossly misused a good number of physics concepts...
---
Ok, I can understand why you would take shot at the first part: obviously in your mind meditation smacks of Hinduism which smacks of religion in schools. Understandable. Personally, I'm compleletly appalled and embarassed by the Jesus myth and having the 10-commandments forced into schools. Ergo, John had better keep TM discussion out of the media if he hopes to be taken seriously by the (narrow-minded) masses.
However it is important to explain to people that an activity used in religious ceremonies doesn't make it a religious activity when used out of context. I don't readily see how you could defend relaxation techniques as being particularly 'religious', but it would be a fun debate.
As for part II, what's that all about? I never heard of that and would like to better understand it so I can rebuff it. (if it is rebuffable, that is...)
---
So, they might be a little too anti-corporate for some of the more wealthy around here.
Xactly. Nader would be my choice if he wasn't so anti-wealthy. I share some Libertarian and Green ideals, but unfortunately I'm their target because I make more than 100k/yr. Funny how I'm villified by some of their supporters just for being a reasonably decent hacker...
I think that was offtopic...
But, I'll say it again:
Vote Hagelin 2000
I think he has a much better understanding and foresight necessary to handle the these heavy genetic and environmental issues better than Nader or Gore... unfortunately he lacks Gore's soft-money supporters, and Nader's teamsters unions.
---
(Ha ha. Love the goth sig.)
While I agree that there should be a moratorium on genetic foods (a la bovine hormones), I don't think the best way to understand DNA is to be limited by ethical constraints. If someone wants to tinker with human zygotes in a lab, by all means do it. How else would we learn what the human genome does? The fact is, we are going to at some point HAVE to make gruesome mistakes.
Anyone: How many times you sat down and wrote a lengthy piece of code, and it compiled and run succesfully with zaero boogs? Not!!! All the planning in the world won't free us from the first pass of genetic fuckups.
We just need to stomach it and get over our naive nature to overinflate the value of life. It's just a machine, folks, a very complicated machine.
Oh yeah, although he'd probably wretch at my last comment, vote Hagelin.
---
Scenes like the escape from the Near-Death Star illustrate interesting 2.5D rendering techniques. During this scene, the engines are finally reactivated, the ship rises, the scene freezes, and the camera pans around the object in a plenoptic-like rendering effect. That to me looks like a 3D scene rendered with one of those cool cartoon rendering algorithms I saw at siggraph a few years ago.
There was an entire siggraph track on "non-photorealistic rendering" during which several papers demonstrated methods for rendering a 3D scene into something that looks sloppily hand-drawn; some effects were even weirder. It was a very very cool concept.
---
True, however it brings up the delimma of 'who will watch the watchmen.' In Larry Lessig's book, "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace", he immediately quotes Dilbert's Guide to the Future: "[In the future, technology will prove 100% of the crimes, unfortunately it will also prove that 100% of us are criminals]". And Brin makes the point that we can either ALL have the technology to watch EVERYONE, including military leaders and politicians. Or we can let the leaders have it and just pretend that it doesn't exist.
So yes, in countries where only the government has the technology, they could use it to oppress. Just like guns. But what if everyone had it? Perhaps it is just a translation of the second amendment.
Perhaps some countries would expend massive amounts of military force to tightly control this technology (like China's media), but I doubt that could happen in America. Our citizenry is too armed and edgy and suspicious (and based more on $$$, not moral/ethical values). I think it would be hard to supress any sizeable sect in america. Even though secession is against federal law, if the Freemen or the Davidians had numbers in the millions, they wouldn't have lost to the Feds.
IMHO, I don't think the resolution of conflict in which all sides are armed with the same technology would be a "...a rather oppressive State with a large percentage of the population in jail..." as you put it.
I think there would be too much public sentiment in favor of this technology, and hopefully the muscle of the governement (the actual soldiers) would share the same.
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Has CC ever written-in a mention of /. when visiting the lone gmen? i bet we see that this year. or at least some mention of a named online discussion group/fanzine. they're always throwing in more recent jargon and buzzwords.
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Anyone know why E-ink is still selling only Point-of-sale type displays? www.eink.com They were claiming paper replacements in 95 but I still haven't seen em yet.
Must admit, this is the best looking webpad yet. The cylinder on top gives it balance and orientation and still makes a roomy place to stuff more electronics/antenna/battery without affecting a particular handedness.
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