It goes back further than that. One of the biggest expansions of federal power was actually regarding narcotics. Notice that Prohibition required a constitutional amendment - at the time, the federal government didn't have the authority to prohibit the sale of alcohol with anything less than a constitutional amendment. The closest they could have managed would be to prohibit its transport across state lines under the commerce clause. Today, a few supreme court rulings later, and it doesn't need any such amendment to ban all the currently prohibited narcotics: A simple law will suffice.
Even if you're insisting on magnetic domain only, you aren't limited to one-bit-per-atom. You can point domains more than just up and down - if you accept domains pointing at right angles to the usual directions, you can get two bits per atom.... or as many as you want, limited only by the angular resolution of your sensor. It'd be totally impractical to do something like that though.
High-power phased array transmiter. It works by hitting the ionosphere with a radio beam and observing what happens, sort of like a highly specialised atmospheric radar. Russia actually has their own equivilent, slightly more dated, called the Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility. Works in exactly the same manner.
Maintaining perfectly fixed position (storms aside) isn't difficult. Manouvering thrusters can turn to thrust in any direction. Just throw in a GPS receiver and you can stay in place to within a couple of meters easily.
I remember one game, I think it might be Heretic, where the Doom cheats were inverted: IDKFA would take all your guns away and inform you that 'cheaters don't deserve weapons,' while IDDQD would just kill you instantly.
Do you want to steam from the Comcast library to your Sony TV? Nope, sorry - only Samsung devices are allowed to do that! Expect to see a lot of that sort of thing, as device manufacturers compete to get exclusive contracts with content creators and distributors. Maybe Universial will do an exclusive deal with Apple so you have to buy an iPad, but NBC will do a deal with Microsoft to only show their movies on Windows Eight (/nine, by then) devices... so if you want to view everything on just one device, you'll have to either fall back to old-fashioned cable services or go to the pirates.
There was a technology called DLNA that was supposed to allow your phone to tell your TV to play a file from your media library NAS. Unfortunatly, it sucks, a lot. The consortium that developed it ran into the standard problem of every company wanting to make sure their own patents were required, so it ended up as a bloated unreliable mess.
Actually, from a signal processing perspective, that is almost trivial. Treat the room accoustics as a FIR filter (Which it is), and it becomes a simple problem of taking signal (filter(audio) + uservoice) and (audio) and then calculating (uservoice). The only tricky part is updating your FIR model to account for changes in accoustics caused by opening/closing doors, moving furniture, people walking in front of the TV and so forth. Tricky, but entirely doable. Mobile phones use exactly the same method to prevent the noise from the ear-speaker being transmitted back to the microphone.
Use the Star Trek approach: A single-word, easily-recognised prefix command that informs the device that something important is about to be said and it needs to mute its speakers and listen. At least, I assume this is why voice commands in the series always started by addressing 'Computer.'
For all those curious people replying, I should have identified the virus. The Sophos identified it as Ramnit/A, and it certainly looks like Ramnit in the way it infects HTML files. It also infects removeable drives, hideing files in the recycle bin folder and using an autorun file to launch them, and places itsself in start menu startup. We believe it came in via USB, and suspect Patient Zero to be a user who brought in a copy of Grand Theft Auto 2 he torrented.
We used to use Symantic antivirus at my workplace. Then we had a virus outbreak. Not a cutting-edge virus, just an old USB-stick-infector that symantic was powerless against. Didn't even detect it half the time, and when it did failed to do anything. So we use Sophos now.
FB and google both have business models built around extensive tracking and profiling of users. It is their source of income, their purpose as companies. Google's whole search business is just a way to gather user data, as is facebook's social networking. You can expect them to invade your privacy - if they don't, they aren't doing their jobs right.
Facebook and youtube will be fine! You know the rules: Only sites that don't have enough money to mount a serious defence will be killed. It's all the little sites that are at risk. thatguywiththeglasses.com already did an announcement - they have faced copyright threats before for using clips from films in their reviews (This is why 'The Room' review was pulled), and under SOPA the whole domain might be closed down.
Depends on the software. Open source demonstrates that noncommercial projects can succeed, even on software of great complexity like the linux kernel, and there would likely be some patronage too for very niche applications: If a company needs software that doesn't exist, they'll have to have someone make it. I would expect software to actually be one of the less-affected sectors. Movies and television would be the ones to really suffer in a copyright-free world, music the least-effected, and everything else to some extent in between.
You assume everything must be on the 'make it, sell it' model. Music would thrive without any income at all - the cost of production is so slight people would make it purely as a hobby or for game. Books could do almost as well. It's only the media with a high production cost like television and movies that would suffer. While I imagine some groups would keep doing it noncommercially or for patronage like amateur theater groups, production costs would be far, far lower than we are accustomed to in current movies. Expect plenty of paper-mache monsters and underdecorated sets.
A randian would have left out my sarcastic 'it doesn't always work' at the end. They believe the princible actually works all the time. I just believe it works most of the time, and when it goes wrong can go very wrong indeed.
Or at least prove slightly amusing. Taking down a website wouldn't do much, but you know Anonymous's history of somehow getting their hands on confidential data... maybe something incriminating will leak.
Indeed. I would guess that the message would be 'This site has been blocked under US law section xxx.xx.xxx' followed by a suitably intimidating 'Your access has been logged.' Unless they just repurpose the child-porn filter to save money, in which case you wouldn't get any message at all, just a spoofed 404 or 403 page to make it look like the server is at fault.
I submit the example of My Mother. She is a typical not-very-tech-savvy consumer. She isn't dumb - she's a university graduate, and very good at what she does - but just has no skill with technology or desire to learn. Right now she can't even handle plugging an HDMI lead into the side of her laptop - the notion of selecting an input on the TV confuses her. DVDs, though, she understands: You buy a disc, you put it in the slot, a movie comes on. She even has to get me to rip her (legitimatly-purchased) DVDs onto her iPhone.
Now imagine Internet TV gets really popular. All those My Mothers with computers perminantly hooked up to their TV... suddenly, getting pirated media on the big screen is no harder than buying it legally. Actually, it's easier: No messing around with payments, or ratings, or time-limited deals. Internet TV would eliminate much of the technological complexity of playing pirated media, much as Videolan made it possible to just download and play just about any media file on a computer in seconds without having to become an expert on containers, codecs and plugins.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooner or later someone is going to work out that if you call a law the JWMNXLQZXYL act, people won't *want* to talk about it.
It goes back further than that. One of the biggest expansions of federal power was actually regarding narcotics. Notice that Prohibition required a constitutional amendment - at the time, the federal government didn't have the authority to prohibit the sale of alcohol with anything less than a constitutional amendment. The closest they could have managed would be to prohibit its transport across state lines under the commerce clause. Today, a few supreme court rulings later, and it doesn't need any such amendment to ban all the currently prohibited narcotics: A simple law will suffice.
Even if you're insisting on magnetic domain only, you aren't limited to one-bit-per-atom. You can point domains more than just up and down - if you accept domains pointing at right angles to the usual directions, you can get two bits per atom.... or as many as you want, limited only by the angular resolution of your sensor. It'd be totally impractical to do something like that though.
High-power phased array transmiter. It works by hitting the ionosphere with a radio beam and observing what happens, sort of like a highly specialised atmospheric radar. Russia actually has their own equivilent, slightly more dated, called the Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility. Works in exactly the same manner.
Maintaining perfectly fixed position (storms aside) isn't difficult. Manouvering thrusters can turn to thrust in any direction. Just throw in a GPS receiver and you can stay in place to within a couple of meters easily.
I remember one game, I think it might be Heretic, where the Doom cheats were inverted: IDKFA would take all your guns away and inform you that 'cheaters don't deserve weapons,' while IDDQD would just kill you instantly.
Annoying horrible exclusive deals!
Do you want to steam from the Comcast library to your Sony TV? Nope, sorry - only Samsung devices are allowed to do that! Expect to see a lot of that sort of thing, as device manufacturers compete to get exclusive contracts with content creators and distributors. Maybe Universial will do an exclusive deal with Apple so you have to buy an iPad, but NBC will do a deal with Microsoft to only show their movies on Windows Eight (/nine, by then) devices... so if you want to view everything on just one device, you'll have to either fall back to old-fashioned cable services or go to the pirates.
There was a technology called DLNA that was supposed to allow your phone to tell your TV to play a file from your media library NAS. Unfortunatly, it sucks, a lot. The consortium that developed it ran into the standard problem of every company wanting to make sure their own patents were required, so it ended up as a bloated unreliable mess.
Actually, from a signal processing perspective, that is almost trivial. Treat the room accoustics as a FIR filter (Which it is), and it becomes a simple problem of taking signal (filter(audio) + uservoice) and (audio) and then calculating (uservoice). The only tricky part is updating your FIR model to account for changes in accoustics caused by opening/closing doors, moving furniture, people walking in front of the TV and so forth. Tricky, but entirely doable. Mobile phones use exactly the same method to prevent the noise from the ear-speaker being transmitted back to the microphone.
Use the Star Trek approach: A single-word, easily-recognised prefix command that informs the device that something important is about to be said and it needs to mute its speakers and listen. At least, I assume this is why voice commands in the series always started by addressing 'Computer.'
For all those curious people replying, I should have identified the virus. The Sophos identified it as Ramnit/A, and it certainly looks like Ramnit in the way it infects HTML files. It also infects removeable drives, hideing files in the recycle bin folder and using an autorun file to launch them, and places itsself in start menu startup. We believe it came in via USB, and suspect Patient Zero to be a user who brought in a copy of Grand Theft Auto 2 he torrented.
We used to use Symantic antivirus at my workplace. Then we had a virus outbreak. Not a cutting-edge virus, just an old USB-stick-infector that symantic was powerless against. Didn't even detect it half the time, and when it did failed to do anything. So we use Sophos now.
FB and google both have business models built around extensive tracking and profiling of users. It is their source of income, their purpose as companies. Google's whole search business is just a way to gather user data, as is facebook's social networking. You can expect them to invade your privacy - if they don't, they aren't doing their jobs right.
Facebook and youtube will be fine! You know the rules: Only sites that don't have enough money to mount a serious defence will be killed. It's all the little sites that are at risk. thatguywiththeglasses.com already did an announcement - they have faced copyright threats before for using clips from films in their reviews (This is why 'The Room' review was pulled), and under SOPA the whole domain might be closed down.
Depends on the software. Open source demonstrates that noncommercial projects can succeed, even on software of great complexity like the linux kernel, and there would likely be some patronage too for very niche applications: If a company needs software that doesn't exist, they'll have to have someone make it. I would expect software to actually be one of the less-affected sectors. Movies and television would be the ones to really suffer in a copyright-free world, music the least-effected, and everything else to some extent in between.
You assume everything must be on the 'make it, sell it' model. Music would thrive without any income at all - the cost of production is so slight people would make it purely as a hobby or for game. Books could do almost as well. It's only the media with a high production cost like television and movies that would suffer. While I imagine some groups would keep doing it noncommercially or for patronage like amateur theater groups, production costs would be far, far lower than we are accustomed to in current movies. Expect plenty of paper-mache monsters and underdecorated sets.
All of them.
If you shoot the UN trucks, you lose points.
A randian would have left out my sarcastic 'it doesn't always work' at the end. They believe the princible actually works all the time. I just believe it works most of the time, and when it goes wrong can go very wrong indeed.
Ron Paul, his miraculous primary showing aside, is a joke - and everyone except his followers knows it.
Blood is a rather delicate fluid.
Or at least prove slightly amusing. Taking down a website wouldn't do much, but you know Anonymous's history of somehow getting their hands on confidential data... maybe something incriminating will leak.
Indeed. I would guess that the message would be 'This site has been blocked under US law section xxx.xx.xxx' followed by a suitably intimidating 'Your access has been logged.' Unless they just repurpose the child-porn filter to save money, in which case you wouldn't get any message at all, just a spoofed 404 or 403 page to make it look like the server is at fault.
Start building. I suggest a shared-store architecture. Latency is hell, but it is much easier to administer without any central authority.
I submit the example of My Mother. She is a typical not-very-tech-savvy consumer. She isn't dumb - she's a university graduate, and very good at what she does - but just has no skill with technology or desire to learn. Right now she can't even handle plugging an HDMI lead into the side of her laptop - the notion of selecting an input on the TV confuses her. DVDs, though, she understands: You buy a disc, you put it in the slot, a movie comes on. She even has to get me to rip her (legitimatly-purchased) DVDs onto her iPhone.
Now imagine Internet TV gets really popular. All those My Mothers with computers perminantly hooked up to their TV... suddenly, getting pirated media on the big screen is no harder than buying it legally. Actually, it's easier: No messing around with payments, or ratings, or time-limited deals. Internet TV would eliminate much of the technological complexity of playing pirated media, much as Videolan made it possible to just download and play just about any media file on a computer in seconds without having to become an expert on containers, codecs and plugins.