Two of the smartest people I have ever met married and began cranking out kids. They now have one of the biggest collection of marginal morons you have ever seen. Nice kids, yes. Well behaved kids, yes. But they don't have the sense God gave a herd of cows. All I can figure is that the parents IQ waves were 180 degrees out of phase. Either that, or they are putting on one helluva show when company is around.
Um, I think this proves that they did become much much smarter. The thing is smarter people seem very very stupid to every one else. The best that they can really hope for is to shut the heck and look well behaved/well mannered to everyone else. Let's hope that they aren't actual geniuses. They'd look like an insane asylum to "normal folks."
Of course, if they have over 3 kids running around, (no matter how well behaved) they'd also look like an insane asylum to childless folks.
Their are various definitions of smart as well. If you are meaning street smart, then the kids could be book smart and look like morons yet still be geniuses; they'd esp look stupid to the street smart crowd.
1984 was about active surveillance of everyone, all the time. Watching what they're doing and saying, with who, and when. The example you cite, "Quick, can you Google Earth Joe the Plumber's house, and give me his address, telephone and the most likely schools that his kids go to? Damn, isn't that scary/easy?" is poor because the government isn't actually involved in any of those things, private industry publishes all that information, and it's generally useful.
The government isn't really who I'm worried about. It's other people namely family members that I don't want looking me up. Now back in college, I had this awesome idea. real time active census. Answers every census question for every one within the US in real time. I went to college in 1996-2000 and figured that we had the tech base then to do it without many problems.
I'm morally opposed to facebook/myspace. I've got a damned myspace account because I needed one to see some else's my space content. Other than that the profile is absolutely empty. My wife and some other family members have face book accounts. I've got shudders just thinking about that. Pretty much though I'll have to get a face book account if I ever want to view any of their stuff. We know how face book just loves protecting our privacy...
Now I'm a bad example, but others that use those services make it trivial to be tracked on who they are talking about, when, and where. Here is something to think about. Private industry can publish/sell your deepest darkest secrets, who you've been talking to, what items you buy and where you favorite sites/shippers are, how about your medical, insurance data/ or finance data? If you are the "right entity," then you can buy/sell this stuff. The deepest darkest secrets depends on just how much you devulge on your blog, social site, or dating service. (Heck, with dating services they could sell/trade your preferences in a mate.) Trust me, I'm not worried about the government. They couldn't get such a system to work given 3 decades of trying. I'm worried about it just kinda sorta happening with "private industry internet."
What if it cost me only $.25 to get all this "public" digital data from you, and to buy the photo tracking of you for the past month? The reason that we are seeing all this crap is because it's gotten much, much cheaper lately. I'd never hire a detective, but if I could pay google earth $5 a month to real time track up to 5 different individuals/objects and all their associated digital data, I'd seriously consider it. Wouldn't you?
I'm not really afraid of 1984 at all since that's not where we are heading. We are getting all the tech, but we are using it differently for now.
If you don't think that information gets casually read and accessed by nosy bureaucrats and pencil pushers, then you've never worked in a British bureaucracy. The only thing that protects you from 1984 style monitoring and management is the sheer incompetence of those little managers, running through all their files, muttering 'Tuttle, Tuttle, Tuttle, where the deuce is the file marked Tuttle?' They couldn't organize a thorough investigation if their coffee money and parking space depended on it. (Yes, they drink coffee, and my god, it's bad coffee.)
Sounds like we need a discworld book on a country that went out and tried to build a 1984 style government/city, but didn't get it due to incompetence/corruption/stupidity on everyone's part.
Why do the same people that constantly harp on 1984 surveillance continue to demand larger government with more widespread social programs? The government can't conduct 1984 style surveillance unless everyone works for, and is part of, the government.
That's not really true. You can have tons and tons of "surveillance" and recordings with little staff. If I were going to do it, I'd come up with the methods for obtaining real-time tracking info on everyone (free government cell phone/ID cards) first, and then worry about access to it later.
Really, most of it 99.99999% of the records could be thrown away as totally boring day in day out useless stuff... Or records of the woods or empty fields. It's when you need to look up info about "Joe the Plumber" that all that surveillance could be useful. With news, blogs, and wikipedia, we've got resources of who others find interesting and why for various reasons.
Quick, can you Google Earth Joe the Plumber's house, and give me his address, telephone and the most likely schools that his kids go to? Damn, isn't that scary/easy?
Either 1984 has become so diffuse that all it means is badness+database, or the summary is badly confused. 1984 was all about a scenario where the state had ubiquitous control(with force of law) over information, which was used against everybody all the time. The state in 1984 was oppressive, and not one I would consider legitimate; but it ran "by the book" as it were. In this case, we have a much more prosaic example of certain individuals illegally accessing a celebrity's records, against policy, on an ad-hoc basis.
You know there are days when I think each of these "private government databases" needs a web front end for every US citizen to query. I hadn't a clue who Joe the Plumber was until some one posted a link to that handy site wikipedia. We've got things like the phone book online. I remember in college as a freshman in 1996 people, other students, being freaked if they gave me their name, I could pull their address/phone number from the white pages. 9/10 they lived in that city/state so it wasn't that hard of a search. Those folks would act like it was the end of the world because it was trivial/easy for me to pull that info about them if I had some info about them already.
Now, let's think about how we'd be forced to change our society if "any one" could find pull up my DL, public educational history, mortgage info, finical risk info, what banks/credit card companies that I do business with, monthly photos of my house, and real time traffic updates of where my car was last sighted (with a trail of where its passed within any sensors ever), and what ever social sites that I may visit. Where all the "any one" would really need is my name and maybe a location to narrow it down a bit.
You know no one has put up a fuss that this guy has his info put up in wikipedia. The big upset is that "government officals" have access to data that they don't. I'm wondering how long it'll take for us to change that. I tell my coworkers, I'm not afraid of the big bad government because I'm harmless to them. I'm afraid of my mother in law or worse mom using it to keep tabs on my family. Those are the ones to be really afraid of...
There's certainly parallels that can be made, but you have to be reasonable - people claiming Western societies are like 1984 come off like chicken little.
With YouTube, Google, Walmart, and Acxiom, you don't need or get 1984. You get The Cold Cash War where multinational corps control/run things and know everything about you.
I'm just waiting for Google Government beta where google codes mytown/myvillage of all/most of the government services that a town/village under 1000 needs and rolls it out.
I can't wait until I can pick up my cheap open source Chinese made knock offs at Walmart. Maybe a website with links to open source hardware and where you can buy it will do cheaply what RadioShack used to promise.;)
I'm not ready to risk my life in an open source car yet. I would buy an open source dishwasher, washing machine or dryer. I'm kinda mixed on the the dry, microwave, and oven though. If it won't burn down the house or endanger my life and is cheap/open source, I'd give it a shot...
What we are really ready for is open source McDonalds toys.
so the kid was physically assaulted with a deadly weapon, but the court decided to charge the perpetrators for stealing the victim's Runescape items? is it just me or are the court's priorities just a little screwed up?
Nah, I'm sure the local cops charged them with a whole string of offenses. What got reported as an attention getting headline was that one bit about stolen game property. Nothing to see, move along.
If my local cops took a theft of property report from you, you and they could certainly fill out the form with items from an online game. The cop is just humoring you though. Where it really comes to play is when they actually have some one to arrest like these kids with a whole string of "real world" offenses. Then they can pad on all the extras like these in hope that something sticks. The judge and lawyers might not really take it seriously, but if it was the object of theft and assault was done for it; you'd bet damn well that the cop will mention in his narrative on his report and the lawyers will bring it up some time during the trial.
I could see both sides lawyers thinking "these kids were so stupid to commit assault and then theft of worthless very traceable virtual items as well."
So if blizzard decides X is too powerful or valuable or whatever they can, at their option, simply remove them from the game, or substitute another item, or change the parameters of the item, etc, etc. And you can't say squat. They can also simply 'ban' you.
The same simply isn't true of your bank account. Your bank can't just decide you aren't a customer, and close your account. Transfering your funds to another account, or perhaps even just "deleting" them.
I'm kinda waiting for the first class action lawsuit against Blizzard to stop them from acting like that and forcing them to act more like a bank in some respects. I'd have to laugh and cry about it, but you know its only a matter of time before it happens.
The biggest problem with DRM isn't that people hate it while they're using it. It's that they REALLY hate it when the company they bought their music/movies/games from turns their entire collection of "owned" content to dust because the company got tired [techreport.com] of running their DRM servers.
I just had a really evil idea... That's the real point of DRM. To make "digital content" all expire like milk. Everyone knows that milk goes bad if you leave it out and that you have to keep on going to the store every other week if you want more milk. That's the real goal of DRM to make all your content have a defined time limited shelf life and to force all your customers to go out and buy more content/ the next version of the content when you are ready.
This is not necessarily true. The UK DNA database allows the police to make educated guesses about the last name of the originator of a DNA sample, as your father often will have the surname name as you. Is it a stretch that with a possible name, race, and good probabilities of the contents of their medical records, it only takes a small push to get laws passed making this information part of the Government-accessible domain?
I actually could careless if we had a decent federal department that kept track of all of our medical records and such. In theory, it'd be a better thing than what we currently have. Where privacy comes in, is that I don't care if medical workers see that info. Where I start "caring" is if "the government" started giving or tried to give access to that info to insurance companies, family members, the public, potential mates, non-medical related government departments, or various mad scientist researchers.
Assuming intelligent alien life take about as long as intelligent Earth life to evolve (give or take a billion years), these other civilizations would have billions and billions of years ahead of us.
Um, depends on the civ/species. Some species might take a half billion year to come up with a new thought or depend on environmental conditions to drive their species's evolution. Others could learn/advance faster than we do and only take 100 years to get 5000 years farther ahead than us.
There is also the thing that a civ that far ahead could just be classified godlike and though they have limits, their kids could seed the entire rest of galaxy with random life, probes to monitor it all, and do it cheaply for an elementary school project on budget of what we'd see as what any parent would waste on any given class room project... say less than about $20 worth of effort. Now what could we do to them? Nothing. We should just be happy to be their classroom project and hope that they don't sterilize the planet when they don't need us anymore.
we could, but we *won't*..we won't throw these fucking tyrants out because, because people are fucking sheep.
individuals can't do it, because they'll be arrested and/or shot in the process. we would have to have the whole fucking populace just up and storm the capital buildings, oppressive police districts, etc.
Well, if I recall my high school and college level American history... There wasn't that much popular support for the revolution. About 1/3 didn't care. 1/3 supported the British side and then 1/3 were those terrorists organizing to overthrow the government and make life difficult for the other 2/3 of the population.
You could say that the government wants to make sure that no new governments come along and have been taking the steps to make sure.
I'd say that in at LEAST 2/3rds of the conversations I've ever had with Americans about the 2nd amendment, they bring up the idea that a well armed populace will keep the government from doing illegal things, because the populace will call them to account.
Even China's Tianamen Square atrocity has a western parallel with the USA's killing of Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University in 1970. Wrong, there has been, and continues to be, absolutely no attempt by the US government to disallow access to websites that mention the Kent State University incident.
This is what some of the Chinese leadership needs to learn... The average person in the US was like... Kent state... WTH happened in Kent state? I never knew of it until this slashdot thread. Now on the other hand everyone knows China's evil because of the Tianamen Square thing.
I kinda laugh when I read the thing that 8 million folks apparently protested something in the US. Huh, didn't make much of an effect seeing as how I never knew about it until know. This is the benefit of citizen apathy, the internet/tons of media, and democracy/tons of groups yelling at each other all the time.
Over here, everyone seems to have their 15 minutes of fame and then it gets recorded in the newspaper/internet and then no one really cares about it 20 minutes later. There is no need to censor anything when nothing can get the citizenry angry enough to remove/change the current leadership.
Protection from self incrimination was to prevent confessions under duress or torture. I don't see the difference between refusing to turn over an encryption key and refusing to let the police in your house when they have a valid search warrant.
I see it as giving "them" free reign to go through your entire history and every document that you've ever created/looked out without any defense.
You don't need confessions under torture or duress when your facebook/myspace or just local word documents prove you guilty of political crimes against the state.
I view my computer files as an extension of my will and should be protected the same as my physical body and mind.
I wonder how long it'll take for "everything" "human made" to be assigned an IP address? I don't see why my socks or undies need an IP address, but sooner or later... I'm waiting for RFID or something similar to get going widespread and for our houses to do an inventory of all the crap that we bring into them.
I wonder how long it'll take to combine IPv6 with RFID and these types of devices and say a 1/2 GB of storage for less than $.001
Will my bottle of equate pain reliever with 100 caplets have it's own IP address and the default value of 100 and maybe a date/time stamp of every time the lid will be removed? Will the lid ever show how many remaining tablets are in the bottle?
Will my pens each have their own IP address? What do I need an IP addressable pen for anyway? An RFID pen I could somewhat see so I could find the thing, but what info would I need to retrieve about a pen? This goes for most kitchen appliances as well.
Would giving them back do anything other than encourage network providers to procrastinate on IPv6 for another couple years?
Maybe, just maybe because there is no real reason pushing for IPv6 if the IPv4 address space were properly managed.
Heck, how do we know IPv6 won't be all assigned out in 5-10 years? Yes, it's an ungodly massive number of addresses, but that won't stop folks that don't need that many addresses from being assigned address ranges in the trillions or more to start of with. How will IPv6 stop one guy/company/organization from being assigned like 5% of the address space right off? That's the real problem with IPv4. If that were fixed, there most likely wouldn't be a real reason to push for IPv6 for most people for a few more decades.
I think a vote for or against someone because of a single view, be it abortion stance, environmental stance, or net neutrality stance is not exactly the best way to go about things. If you boil things down to one really narrow issue and vote solely on that you run the risk of voting in 9 evils for the 1 "good" idea you're passionate about.
That's kinda how my wife and I view both sides. They are more like two dozen evils and trying to find a decent good thing to like. It's not quite as bad as this, but I joked with her as having to pick between Stalin and Hitler for your next leader... Let's see they both killed of larges parts of their own population, they both were tough on crime, they both would conquer a neighbor at a moment's notice... Well Stalin was in theory for the little guy/factory worker. While Hilter's system was more for supporting factory owners. That's how we feel with these two nuts that are running.
Damn I miss the Bush/Gore election. That was was you couldn't lose no matter which you picked. This one you can't win with either party.
If they tacked on a year to the product name, they'd be bound to that date and would never hear the end of it when it's late.
Yeah, but we could have the names for the next 3 Windows versions today. Win2010, Win2015, and Win2020. It would also give them that unseen edge in that all those still using Win95, Win98, Win2000 or WinXP will be seen as running really old versions. (If you are able to run a Win95 or Win98 box in 2010-2015, then more power to you.)
What happens when the MMO dev goes under and they pull the plug? You can't take that character (along with all of his money and items) and move him over to a new MMO. He's stuck on someone else's server. You can take your D&D Character sheet to another DM's table and maybe he'll allow you to play with that character in his game. You can't really do this with an MMO.... It would be interesting to see an "Open Source" MMO engine that would allow character transfers between actual games, but I doubt we'd ever see a commercially successful one.
That's sort of why I've not sunk any money into any MMO. I'd rather have portable characters that I can transfer between games/worlds/companies, and I'll just wait until the scene evolves such.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't any college town count as this? Or if that's really too broad for you, any population center with at least 3 colleges/universities.
Two of the smartest people I have ever met married and began cranking out kids. They now have one of the biggest collection of marginal morons you have ever seen. Nice kids, yes. Well behaved kids, yes. But they don't have the sense God gave a herd of cows. All I can figure is that the parents IQ waves were 180 degrees out of phase. Either that, or they are putting on one helluva show when company is around.
Um, I think this proves that they did become much much smarter. The thing is smarter people seem very very stupid to every one else. The best that they can really hope for is to shut the heck and look well behaved/well mannered to everyone else. Let's hope that they aren't actual geniuses. They'd look like an insane asylum to "normal folks."
Of course, if they have over 3 kids running around, (no matter how well behaved) they'd also look like an insane asylum to childless folks.
Their are various definitions of smart as well. If you are meaning street smart, then the kids could be book smart and look like morons yet still be geniuses; they'd esp look stupid to the street smart crowd.
>o?A town entirely full of science geeks ?
Well, at least they shouldn't expect a very high birth rate...
Los Alamos Neighborhood Profile
http://realestate.yahoo.com/New_Mexico/Los_Alamos/neighborhoods
Population Growth: 5.1%
Of course, that could be all the new folks coming in to replace/expand those existing projects...
1984 was about active surveillance of everyone, all the time. Watching what they're doing and saying, with who, and when. The example you cite, "Quick, can you Google Earth Joe the Plumber's house, and give me his address, telephone and the most likely schools that his kids go to? Damn, isn't that scary/easy?" is poor because the government isn't actually involved in any of those things, private industry publishes all that information, and it's generally useful.
The government isn't really who I'm worried about. It's other people namely family members that I don't want looking me up. Now back in college, I had this awesome idea. real time active census. Answers every census question for every one within the US in real time. I went to college in 1996-2000 and figured that we had the tech base then to do it without many problems.
I'm morally opposed to facebook/myspace. I've got a damned myspace account because I needed one to see some else's my space content. Other than that the profile is absolutely empty. My wife and some other family members have face book accounts. I've got shudders just thinking about that. Pretty much though I'll have to get a face book account if I ever want to view any of their stuff. We know how face book just loves protecting our privacy...
Now I'm a bad example, but others that use those services make it trivial to be tracked on who they are talking about, when, and where. Here is something to think about. Private industry can publish/sell your deepest darkest secrets, who you've been talking to, what items you buy and where you favorite sites/shippers are, how about your medical, insurance data/ or finance data? If you are the "right entity," then you can buy/sell this stuff. The deepest darkest secrets depends on just how much you devulge on your blog, social site, or dating service. (Heck, with dating services they could sell/trade your preferences in a mate.) Trust me, I'm not worried about the government. They couldn't get such a system to work given 3 decades of trying. I'm worried about it just kinda sorta happening with "private industry internet."
What if it cost me only $.25 to get all this "public" digital data from you, and to buy the photo tracking of you for the past month? The reason that we are seeing all this crap is because it's gotten much, much cheaper lately. I'd never hire a detective, but if I could pay google earth $5 a month to real time track up to 5 different individuals/objects and all their associated digital data, I'd seriously consider it. Wouldn't you?
I'm not really afraid of 1984 at all since that's not where we are heading. We are getting all the tech, but we are using it differently for now.
If you don't think that information gets casually read and accessed by nosy bureaucrats and pencil pushers, then you've never worked in a British bureaucracy. The only thing that protects you from 1984 style monitoring and management is the sheer incompetence of those little managers, running through all their files, muttering 'Tuttle, Tuttle, Tuttle, where the deuce is the file marked Tuttle?' They couldn't organize a thorough investigation if their coffee money and parking space depended on it. (Yes, they drink coffee, and my god, it's bad coffee.)
Sounds like we need a discworld book on a country that went out and tried to build a 1984 style government/city, but didn't get it due to incompetence/corruption/stupidity on everyone's part.
Why do the same people that constantly harp on 1984 surveillance continue to demand larger government with more widespread social programs? The government can't conduct 1984 style surveillance unless everyone works for, and is part of, the government.
That's not really true. You can have tons and tons of "surveillance" and recordings with little staff. If I were going to do it, I'd come up with the methods for obtaining real-time tracking info on everyone (free government cell phone/ID cards) first, and then worry about access to it later.
Really, most of it 99.99999% of the records could be thrown away as totally boring day in day out useless stuff... Or records of the woods or empty fields. It's when you need to look up info about "Joe the Plumber" that all that surveillance could be useful. With news, blogs, and wikipedia, we've got resources of who others find interesting and why for various reasons.
Quick, can you Google Earth Joe the Plumber's house, and give me his address, telephone and the most likely schools that his kids go to? Damn, isn't that scary/easy?
Either 1984 has become so diffuse that all it means is badness+database, or the summary is badly confused. 1984 was all about a scenario where the state had ubiquitous control(with force of law) over information, which was used against everybody all the time. The state in 1984 was oppressive, and not one I would consider legitimate; but it ran "by the book" as it were. In this case, we have a much more prosaic example of certain individuals illegally accessing a celebrity's records, against policy, on an ad-hoc basis.
You know there are days when I think each of these "private government databases" needs a web front end for every US citizen to query. I hadn't a clue who Joe the Plumber was until some one posted a link to that handy site wikipedia. We've got things like the phone book online. I remember in college as a freshman in 1996 people, other students, being freaked if they gave me their name, I could pull their address/phone number from the white pages. 9/10 they lived in that city/state so it wasn't that hard of a search. Those folks would act like it was the end of the world because it was trivial/easy for me to pull that info about them if I had some info about them already.
Now, let's think about how we'd be forced to change our society if "any one" could find pull up my DL, public educational history, mortgage info, finical risk info, what banks/credit card companies that I do business with, monthly photos of my house, and real time traffic updates of where my car was last sighted (with a trail of where its passed within any sensors ever), and what ever social sites that I may visit. Where all the "any one" would really need is my name and maybe a location to narrow it down a bit.
You know no one has put up a fuss that this guy has his info put up in wikipedia. The big upset is that "government officals" have access to data that they don't. I'm wondering how long it'll take for us to change that. I tell my coworkers, I'm not afraid of the big bad government because I'm harmless to them. I'm afraid of my mother in law or worse mom using it to keep tabs on my family. Those are the ones to be really afraid of...
There's certainly parallels that can be made, but you have to be reasonable - people claiming Western societies are like 1984 come off like chicken little.
With YouTube, Google, Walmart, and Acxiom, you don't need or get 1984. You get The Cold Cash War where multinational corps control/run things and know everything about you.
I'm just waiting for Google Government beta where google codes mytown/myvillage of all/most of the government services that a town/village under 1000 needs and rolls it out.
I can't wait until I can pick up my cheap open source Chinese made knock offs at Walmart. Maybe a website with links to open source hardware and where you can buy it will do cheaply what RadioShack used to promise. ;)
I'm not ready to risk my life in an open source car yet. I would buy an open source dishwasher, washing machine or dryer. I'm kinda mixed on the the dry, microwave, and oven though. If it won't burn down the house or endanger my life and is cheap/open source, I'd give it a shot...
What we are really ready for is open source McDonalds toys.
so the kid was physically assaulted with a deadly weapon, but the court decided to charge the perpetrators for stealing the victim's Runescape items? is it just me or are the court's priorities just a little screwed up?
Nah, I'm sure the local cops charged them with a whole string of offenses. What got reported as an attention getting headline was that one bit about stolen game property. Nothing to see, move along.
If my local cops took a theft of property report from you, you and they could certainly fill out the form with items from an online game. The cop is just humoring you though. Where it really comes to play is when they actually have some one to arrest like these kids with a whole string of "real world" offenses. Then they can pad on all the extras like these in hope that something sticks. The judge and lawyers might not really take it seriously, but if it was the object of theft and assault was done for it; you'd bet damn well that the cop will mention in his narrative on his report and the lawyers will bring it up some time during the trial.
I could see both sides lawyers thinking "these kids were so stupid to commit assault and then theft of worthless very traceable virtual items as well."
So if blizzard decides X is too powerful or valuable or whatever they can, at their option, simply remove them from the game, or substitute another item, or change the parameters of the item, etc, etc. And you can't say squat. They can also simply 'ban' you.
The same simply isn't true of your bank account. Your bank can't just decide you aren't a customer, and close your account. Transfering your funds to another account, or perhaps even just "deleting" them.
I'm kinda waiting for the first class action lawsuit against Blizzard to stop them from acting like that and forcing them to act more like a bank in some respects. I'd have to laugh and cry about it, but you know its only a matter of time before it happens.
The biggest problem with DRM isn't that people hate it while they're using it. It's that they REALLY hate it when the company they bought their music/movies/games from turns their entire collection of "owned" content to dust because the company got tired [techreport.com] of running their DRM servers.
I just had a really evil idea... That's the real point of DRM. To make "digital content" all expire like milk. Everyone knows that milk goes bad if you leave it out and that you have to keep on going to the store every other week if you want more milk. That's the real goal of DRM to make all your content have a defined time limited shelf life and to force all your customers to go out and buy more content/ the next version of the content when you are ready.
This is not necessarily true. The UK DNA database allows the police to make educated guesses about the last name of the originator of a DNA sample, as your father often will have the surname name as you. Is it a stretch that with a possible name, race, and good probabilities of the contents of their medical records, it only takes a small push to get laws passed making this information part of the Government-accessible domain?
I actually could careless if we had a decent federal department that kept track of all of our medical records and such. In theory, it'd be a better thing than what we currently have. Where privacy comes in, is that I don't care if medical workers see that info. Where I start "caring" is if "the government" started giving or tried to give access to that info to insurance companies, family members, the public, potential mates, non-medical related government departments, or various mad scientist researchers.
Or, just possibly, they are rational individuals who lack the privacy fetish and extremism so common on Slashdot.
I read this wrong... I read it as they are rash individuals who lack the privacy fetish and rationalism so common on Slashdot.
Assuming intelligent alien life take about as long as intelligent Earth life to evolve (give or take a billion years), these other civilizations would have billions and billions of years ahead of us.
Um, depends on the civ/species. Some species might take a half billion year to come up with a new thought or depend on environmental conditions to drive their species's evolution. Others could learn/advance faster than we do and only take 100 years to get 5000 years farther ahead than us.
There is also the thing that a civ that far ahead could just be classified godlike and though they have limits, their kids could seed the entire rest of galaxy with random life, probes to monitor it all, and do it cheaply for an elementary school project on budget of what we'd see as what any parent would waste on any given class room project... say less than about $20 worth of effort. Now what could we do to them? Nothing. We should just be happy to be their classroom project and hope that they don't sterilize the planet when they don't need us anymore.
we could, but we *won't*..we won't throw these fucking tyrants out because, because people are fucking sheep.
individuals can't do it, because they'll be arrested and/or shot in the process. we would have to have the whole fucking populace just up and storm the capital buildings, oppressive police districts, etc.
Well, if I recall my high school and college level American history... There wasn't that much popular support for the revolution. About 1/3 didn't care. 1/3 supported the British side and then 1/3 were those terrorists organizing to overthrow the government and make life difficult for the other 2/3 of the population.
You could say that the government wants to make sure that no new governments come along and have been taking the steps to make sure.
I'd say that in at LEAST 2/3rds of the conversations I've ever had with Americans about the 2nd amendment, they bring up the idea that a well armed populace will keep the government from doing illegal things, because the populace will call them to account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
It didn't work the one time that we really tried it. So the second amendment is there just so we can hunt and delude ourselves.
Even China's Tianamen Square atrocity has a western parallel with the USA's killing of Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University in 1970.
Wrong, there has been, and continues to be, absolutely no attempt by the US government to disallow access to websites that mention the Kent State University incident.
This is what some of the Chinese leadership needs to learn... The average person in the US was like... Kent state... WTH happened in Kent state? I never knew of it until this slashdot thread. Now on the other hand everyone knows China's evil because of the Tianamen Square thing.
I kinda laugh when I read the thing that 8 million folks apparently protested something in the US. Huh, didn't make much of an effect seeing as how I never knew about it until know. This is the benefit of citizen apathy, the internet/tons of media, and democracy/tons of groups yelling at each other all the time.
Over here, everyone seems to have their 15 minutes of fame and then it gets recorded in the newspaper/internet and then no one really cares about it 20 minutes later. There is no need to censor anything when nothing can get the citizenry angry enough to remove/change the current leadership.
Protection from self incrimination was to prevent confessions under duress or torture.
I don't see the difference between refusing to turn over an encryption key and refusing to let the police in your house when they have a valid search warrant.
I see it as giving "them" free reign to go through your entire history and every document that you've ever created/looked out without any defense.
You don't need confessions under torture or duress when your facebook/myspace or just local word documents prove you guilty of political crimes against the state.
I view my computer files as an extension of my will and should be protected the same as my physical body and mind.
I wonder how long it'll take for "everything" "human made" to be assigned an IP address? I don't see why my socks or undies need an IP address, but sooner or later...
I'm waiting for RFID or something similar to get going widespread and for our houses to do an inventory of all the crap that we bring into them.
I wonder how long it'll take to combine IPv6 with RFID and these types of devices and say a 1/2 GB of storage for less than $.001
Will my bottle of equate pain reliever with 100 caplets have it's own IP address and the default value of 100 and maybe a date/time stamp of every time the lid will be removed? Will the lid ever show how many remaining tablets are in the bottle?
Will my pens each have their own IP address? What do I need an IP addressable pen for anyway? An RFID pen I could somewhat see so I could find the thing, but what info would I need to retrieve about a pen? This goes for most kitchen appliances as well.
Would giving them back do anything other than encourage network providers to procrastinate on IPv6 for another couple years?
Maybe, just maybe because there is no real reason pushing for IPv6 if the IPv4 address space were properly managed.
Heck, how do we know IPv6 won't be all assigned out in 5-10 years? Yes, it's an ungodly massive number of addresses, but that won't stop folks that don't need that many addresses from being assigned address ranges in the trillions or more to start of with. How will IPv6 stop one guy/company/organization from being assigned like 5% of the address space right off? That's the real problem with IPv4. If that were fixed, there most likely wouldn't be a real reason to push for IPv6 for most people for a few more decades.
I think a vote for or against someone because of a single view, be it abortion stance, environmental stance, or net neutrality stance is not exactly the best way to go about things. If you boil things down to one really narrow issue and vote solely on that you run the risk of voting in 9 evils for the 1 "good" idea you're passionate about.
That's kinda how my wife and I view both sides. They are more like two dozen evils and trying to find a decent good thing to like. It's not quite as bad as this, but I joked with her as having to pick between Stalin and Hitler for your next leader... Let's see they both killed of larges parts of their own population, they both were tough on crime, they both would conquer a neighbor at a moment's notice... Well Stalin was in theory for the little guy/factory worker. While Hilter's system was more for supporting factory owners. That's how we feel with these two nuts that are running.
Damn I miss the Bush/Gore election. That was was you couldn't lose no matter which you picked. This one you can't win with either party.
"Some people can actually drive and talk on a phone at the same time...."
And some people (the same set, actually) only think they can.
Better outlaw all multi passenger cars. No cars since gasp you could have some one talking with the driver!
If they tacked on a year to the product name, they'd be bound to that date and would never hear the end of it when it's late.
Yeah, but we could have the names for the next 3 Windows versions today. Win2010, Win2015, and Win2020. It would also give them that unseen edge in that all those still using Win95, Win98, Win2000 or WinXP will be seen as running really old versions. (If you are able to run a Win95 or Win98 box in 2010-2015, then more power to you.)
What happens when the MMO dev goes under and they pull the plug? You can't take that character (along with all of his money and items) and move him over to a new MMO. He's stuck on someone else's server. You can take your D&D Character sheet to another DM's table and maybe he'll allow you to play with that character in his game. You can't really do this with an MMO. ...
It would be interesting to see an "Open Source" MMO engine that would allow character transfers between actual games, but I doubt we'd ever see a commercially successful one.
That's sort of why I've not sunk any money into any MMO. I'd rather have portable characters that I can transfer between games/worlds/companies, and I'll just wait until the scene evolves such.