Just think - the CIA/NSA/current administration somehow managed to purchase foreign-flagged ships of the line from arguably 'enemy' countries, hiding said purchases from both those governments, our own goverment, and the rest of the world, and then they somehow managed to get them to drop their anchors in just the places needed to cut the proper cables lying submerged on the seabed. They pulled all this off successfully - until YOU managed to figure it out.
Brilliant!
Come on, it would make more sense for a few simple black ops where your Seals or whatever are tasked with boarding said ship and planting a simple device on it and returning undiscovered. The said device would automatically lower the anchor by either remote control or when ever the ship was within certain spots.
For extra credit, have the black ops seal team remove said device after ship lowers anchor where you need it.
Is she mad that people are contributing their knowledge for free, while she expects to be paid? What a terrible blow Wikipedia has inflicted on our poor starving experts.
Paid? They don't get paid. They pay journals and their peers to review their work. They work for free reviewing their peers work. They pay to let others see it. Their peers pay a lot to get copies as well. Where's this concept of getting paid for content coming from? Oh, yeah, that's the some what free market. Knowledge can be profitable, but professors just don't do that unless they get a cut out of book/notes profits. If they were profit minded,they wouldn't be staying around as a professor type person.
The concept of "blind trust" as applied to public, but not professional sources, isn't new... and it certainly existed long before Wikipedia.
Um, I trust what David and PeTree have to tell me about medical crap. What qualities do they have that I should "trust" them? They both sit right by me in the same office. I guess that's not "blind trust" I am only trusting those that sit right beside me. I would never trust my Boss for medical or finical advice.
What other people are on my trusted list? My wife and my mom. I don't really talk with others.
Would I trust random slashdot comments? Maybe on a computer topic, but not on anything else.
I think you give first-year college students too much credit. Having taught them for 5 years, I can tell you from first hand experience that MOST of them do not know the first thing about proper research or what makes for good source materials.
Considering, I only had to write two papers in high school. I'd say most HS students haven't a clue at the requirements. One of those papers was for English where the assignment was "write a paper" and the other was a biology class where we really wrote a paper.
Now my kids are in second and third grade and being told to write papers. 98% of the information that makes it into their "papers" is from wikipedia. I'm sorry, but if my kids are having a hard time writing sentences, then its a bit too soon to be assigning "papers."
I would say that this line of thinking is kind of "selfish" in a way. The need for people to believe sports are fair and uncompromised by drugs has skewed the way people think of performance enhancment. Enhancement is good. We like enhancement. Get over it.
Um, you are saying sports enhancement drugs are the same a cancer drugs? It's a bit of a stretch for me. Using some that has bad effects to save my or some one else life is generally good. Unless it the side effects are extreme and the life extension isn't worth it. Would you choose to live one week longer in intense pain the entire time?
I'd be mixed on solider boost drugs. If I knew that I'm in a time and place that I'm likely to die in the next few minutes, I'd use some drugs that might get me through that situation. I'd want to be informed about the known side effects and if years after the war/conflict my health suffers, will I'd know that I'm only alive because of the solider booster.
Athletes are crazy people. Generally they do things that for their long term good, but they'll do things that are really stupid just for scoring a bit higher in one sporting event. Scoring a bit higher in a sporting event is not the same as saving a life that would die without said drugs. That's the best that I can state it.
Suppose the fellow goes home at night and has a few too many glasses of scotch. Suppose he has threesomes with sluts. Suppose he does any number of things you don't personally like. Are you gonna take away his funding for that, too?
If one of the sluts is my wife, daughter, or female friend/family that doesn't do that sort of thing, then of course I'm going to remove his funding. If one of the sluts is your wife, your daughter, or your female friend/family that doesn't do that sort of thing, then of course I'm not going to care, but you might.
If he does things that I don't approve of and any of the sluts reports it to me, I'd remove his funding. If he does things that you don't approve of and any of the sluts reports it to me, I'd ask the slut if they want his funding removed... If slut said yes, I'd ask about how much do you think would be a fair plenty?
If he does things that I don't approve of and the police report it to me, I'd remove his funding. If he does things that you don't approve of and the police report it to me, I'd ask if it was illegal. If no, I'd make sure office rumors spread about the incident. If yes, I'd remove his funding, let the police jail him, and make sure office rumors spread about him.
If you don't want to pay the cost associated with my behavior, then don't pay it. If I overdose on drugs, let me lay there and die if I don't have insurance or can't pay the bill myself if you so choose. But your actions in assuming responsibility for my debts don't give you any legitimate authority over my behavior.
You've forgotten the case where I pay for services done for/to you, and then I own/control your ass/body/mind/soul until you've repaid said debt to me. If I can't recover any thing from you, I sell the debt to a debt collection agency and let them get it out of you.
It doesn't matter if you never agreed to those services as long as I can convince your family, friends, neighbors, place of employment, or government that said services where for your own good and that they generally agree to it.
Not when it affects those in society. Ie, if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business.
Simple answer, check their insurance tag. If they don't have any, then they don't have to be moved from the spot. Person dies end of problem. Of course, then you do have "clean" the left overs up. Its cheaper for society to just harvest organs/blood from said person to pay disposal costs if that hasn't been previously arranged.
The only reason there is any one around to attempt any medical care is because some one else (be it family, friends, company, government, or insurance company) is alive to complain about it not being done and has/will pay for it.
A significant number of the laws on the books in the country I live in (the USA) are inherently wrong, outright un- or anti-constitutional, or something even worse. Using them to define what is "right" leads directly to behaviors that are despicable -- or worse.
One can be cynical and simply say that this is because our legislators aren't very good at their jobs.
I was reading fark the other day... I came across were the AR state government removed the age limit for marriages. It was 16 for boys and 14 for girls. They were trying to change it to be 18 for both. They left out a word and well removed the limit. The good thing is that they did in fact have a special session and fix it. (It's bad that it made it in there to begin with.)
I hate to say it, but it sounds like you need to move if laws that you don't believe in are on the books and are being enforced. Just because its not in the Bill of rights doesn't mean your neighbors can't make laws and try to force you to change your behavior. They can and will do so at every chance they get. All the Bill of Rights really limits is things that the federal government can do to limit you. Oh, the states or towns can still go do what ever they want to you. It's not until after you've been arrested/held in jail for said law and try fighting it that it could ever get the chance to make it to the supreme court.
Most of us aren't crazy/stupid enough to get ourselves involved in something like that. That means that your neighbors that do get things into laws can get things that you don't like in there. Its not until some crazy stupid person goes against them that single law/rule gets removed. For every bad rule that gets removed, how many do you still think are in there though?
Sure, in 20 years those sort of implants will be available, but having one will make you look like the fat guy wearing his shirt tucked in, comfortable socks under sandals with his trusty treo attached to his belt. The vocal minority will now say "why do i need a holographic projector and full size keyboard in my cell phone? all i need is a 8mp camera, web browser, day planner! oh, and voice." and everyone else will just follow the trends of the uber computer that also still makes voice calls. It's going to take a lot longer than 20 years for implants to become the norm, IMO.
Implants have always seemed stupid to me. I do wear my glasses 24x7 though and think that they should do double duty for display device as well. No would would make negative comments about uber cool looking shades that you can just swap if you get bored with the style. Glasses might as well be implants, but there is a large difference in how most of would think of the two. I always have a my wedding ring, watch, wallet, and glasses on. I can take them all all off at any time. (Well, my wedding ring might take some soap to get off, but its still removable.) Removing my glasses gives me a headache, but I can function. Now tell me how fast can you remove those implants and what type of health side effects other than just a headache that you'd have without them.
While embedded devices will be nice for grabbing information on the fly, or for integrating computers with other activities, I don't think laptops and desktops are going anywhere. When doing work such as coding, writing, graphics, etc., people are still going to want a nice big display, full keyboard, and a chair to sit down in.
Imagine an absurdly large data sized USB thumb drive. Say 1 Petabyte or heck 1 exabtye in a form factor slightly larger than the usb plug and a slight rectangle or square. (We could make the form anything we actually want that's not important.) Now make the thing cheap. $1-5 for package of 100 of 'em. Now imagine that you can set down at any keyboard, monitor, mouse combo in the world and have your personalized desktop, all your files, full data connection to every other computing device on the globe all in that little magic data storage device. That thumb drive could become a watch, ring, necklace, or even ear ring. It shouldn't matter about a physical connection so it should have some wireless USB thing in it.
We've not figured out on the computing end of it though. That's shrink the entire Earth Simulator down also into it and also be able to run without heavy body burns and say about months worth 24x7 usage battery life.
Its assumed that we'd have some magic HUD glasses that can show our virtual desktop anywhere we want. I agree that we like full sized keyboards to type on and large viewing areas. It should be a matter of sitting in the desk and instantly your crap is on it and fully available to you.
There are some more things we'd need like biometrics at all the desktops so that the desktops can refer that physical user information back to the device before giving up complete access. You might have a public desktop and a few public programs data files that pop up until you've fully logged in.
The point is that it doesn't matter where you go sitting down in the chair at McDonalds to a random bathroom stall to sitting on a beach chair that you'd have trival full computer access. (I'm not saying if it is a good/bad thing for you to have all that connectivity or computing at those places, just that its there at your figure tips any where that you desire it.)
Now, think about what you or others would do with that amount of data storage and computing power.
I'd hope that we'd come up with good weather prediction software for one.
Well, here is the catch. Who ever spends the money should gain control of the resulting infrastructure. If the BBC/British government pays to upgrade the lines you can expect a great big (politely worded) fuck you to the telecoms if they try to set any demands.
If the telecoms pay for the infrastructure, they get to say what happens to it. Within whatever terms they negotiate for the use of public land to build on. And if they continue the false advertising of their services, they can expect that at some point a class action lawsuit will be made and will break them.
Um, I really, really hate to say it, but it goes down to one of two things tax payers or consumers are going to be paying for it. As I understand it, the BBC/British Government forces a per house hold TV tax for the BBC to exist. They also have pay TV as well. This has always made sense to the British. We tend to just look at them funny when they say that though. It comes down to us end-users are going to be paying if we are tax payers or consumers.
Consider all those folk choking up the internet with video downloads, P2P etc "because it's free" and they've got nothing better to do with their time. They're all choking up the pipes for everyone.
Pay-per-use is one way to get a free market into this and allow people to buy the QoS they want and the market decides the price points. It would also motivate some of the spam botters to clean up their act.
I view the internet = over the air/cable TV. Ok. Over the air TV we've got a double handful of channels. Cable we've got what 100-200 channels? My parents have direct TV and I think that they have atleast 600+ channels. (no comment on the actually content of said channels.)
I'm happy to pay $25 a month for basic DSL internet. It should be enough to support video feeds and global IP telephone communications if I choose to do so. How many freaking channels do you get for basic cable in your area? O.k. its not all two way channels, but still that's kinda of how I view the internet. Actually, I view the internet as the medium for me to make n number of channels to my n number of friends. I've paid for x amount of bandwidth with my DSL service. That's all that they should do is give me that amount of bandwidth per month per how much that they are billing me. (Actually, I should be fining their butts since I get around 40% of the bandwidth that I pay for, but I'm not going there.)
Some thing that I've noticed about my parents Direct tv is that a good 300+ of the channels are PPV in some format. I guess that's where we'd really end up. I wonder if we will have an over the air free option to connect to the internet. We really, really need one. (Even if its only at dailup speeds.)
Down at the bottom it said the thing was going to cost £299. According to google, UK£ 299 = 588.3423 US$. I don't know about you, but for $580 close to $600, I'd want a laptop with near a full sized keyboard. I've gotten to the point where I don't really care about anything else.
I got sick of small keypads back in high school programming TI-8x series cals. Small keyboards sicken me.;) Actually, I don't care because it's gotten to the point where the "low end" comes with a DVD burner/wifi 802.xx with atleast 15"+. I'll let others worry about battery life and options glore. My 8 year old girl has been bugging me for a laptop. I'm holding out until the price drops low enough that I can buy two laptops for around $500. It's only a matter of time.
So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.
My view is that humanity has always been on the renewable energy bit. Only a small segment of the overall population is using non-renewables and that's only be for about the last 100 years or so. Look at Africa, Asia, Central and South America for land masses where people still use renewable. The huge problem with "renewables" is that they haven't generally supported a populations in the hundreds of millions or a standard of living for most of the citizens as the non-renewable path is currently providing.
There are folks that seem to think that it'll take the government or a self styled environmental dictator to change a non-renewable country to renewables. That's not the answer at all. It'll take "renewables" being faster/cheaper/better than nonrenewables. When the price at the pump is say $5+ for non-newable gas and for renewable gas its $1-2; then you'll see everyone which to gas from renewable sources.
I change my opinion every few months on if there is actually anything to worry about on the energy crisis front. We could get the US back bone in 90% renewables without changing our SOL within 5 years if we really wanted to pay the price. There currently isn't any short term reason for us to switch though. There are lots of great long term reasons though. (Heck, my personal favorite idea is that we should have screwed the middle east by having a national drive for US energy independence instead of this whole war on terror. It would have ruined the Middle East far worse long term than this little war/police action that we are doing at the moment.)
His initial career was only made possible due to a loophole in German tax law which allowed him to spend other people's money on his bad movies since they could write off the loss for tax purposes. Once that loophole was closed, he decided to stop making expensive ($1M+) movies He's quite arrogant and usually pretty angry (which you might be too if people kept shitting on your movies He lured critics out to a charity fight and then beat the snot out of them, sending one to the hospital
This guy is my new hero. WTH does it matter that you or I don't like his movies or that they were funded by a tax loop hole? Nada. There are similar tax loops here in the US. One of my college professors made movies using the US version of this. He was pretty up front about all of it. Yep the people who fund him don't care about money or where their money is being spent because they just need to lose some for tax purposes.
I'm impressed that this guy had the guts to beat the snot out of his critics. Most of us would B.S. about it or try to bluff our way out of something, but we just wouldn't have the balls to do that. I'm sorry, but that's great. It doesn't matter how bad his movies are. He's defending them and some one is obviously paying him to make them. This guy now ranks above Cmdr Taco in my people that deserve respect for doing something that I should have done/would like to do book.
So, how many of those are actually things we're really missing, as opposed to just not having?
Well, the toy robot thingy looked neat. We have other robot thingies though so I guess we aren't missing out on that. Well, nothing else in there even raised my eye brow. It was either boring looking stuff or stuff that looked like it wouldn't sell/uncool/old model crap. How are we missing out by not having any of that crap? I'm not missing anything. I figure if anything in there is actually somewhat popular; then something like it will start selling here sooner or later. Nothing on that website looked like anything that I'd buy. Heck, a few of the items would make me avoid the store that had them on the shelves so I can understand them not being sold here.
Or you know, you could obey the speed limit, stop at red lights, etc. Seems to keep quite a few of us from getting tickets.
Just think of it as another tax on/for stupid people. Smart people obey the traffic rules and get off the road ASAP. Why? Because driving on the road ways is one of those ways to get killed by stupid people. Stupid people like to drink and drive or drive and sleep or drive and eat/talk on cell phone/groom. Traffic cops exist to tax stupid people and reduce the number of accidents from stupid people.
Police exist to reduce the harm/punish stupid people cause the rest of us. Of course, police tend to think every one is a stupid person.
I just thought some one needs to make a religious version of this. You know a little PDA with everything against the common stuff found in your specific religion. Every time you do or encounter something that you are supposed to be against in your religion it notes it, pulls up the specific religious text that you are violating, and then gives you a somewhat religious rant/rave that you did or saw something wrong and should correct your behavior.
In short, China's approach to the environment is nothing short of a disaster. And unhappily for them, the effects of the disaster are immediately felt and born by the rank-and-file Chinese, given the high population density. Yet because of the totalitarian presence of the CCP and its totalizing ideology and propaganda, the country and its people are unable to efficiently evaluate proposals and effectively respond to problems.
It's sad, because the Chinese are an incredibly inventive and resourceful group. They've given so much to the world. One wonders what they could achieve in a free and open society. But alas, they have, at least for the time being, chosen to handicap themselves with a system that turns all their genius to idiocy.
I just have to say that the modern Chinese communist peasant is freaking amazing to put up and live through what they have to. I guess if I actually think about it; all communists have to be amazing to have lived through Stalin or Mao. We've only got to put up with Bushs or Clitons.
For what its worth, Atlanta did the same thing in 1996. The whole Olympic Centennial Park area, all the new stadiums, etc were all built in former slums occupied by people who were strangely no longer in Atlanta after.
I heard about that. The local police instead of arresting some one for public intox where driving them to the local bus stations and handing them a $50 ticket to neighboring cities. It sounds like a great way to export your homeless problem to others.
Someone please try to justify evicting one and a half million people for the Olympics.
I'm sure someone will try...which just proves that China's subtle information campaigns to attempt to make the world think that everything is rosy or somehow justified are working like a charm.
Um, easy. They weren't evicted. They were displaced due to higher paying government jobs at the capital for the next 4-6 years.
If D.C. was going on a building spree and handing out thousands of jobs for around $100K each, would you complain that people from the neighboring communities have been displaced to D.C. at the government's whim?
The only things I know that tend to get a reaction are if the victim is rich and white, OR if the cop blows up and shoots a brother officer in anger (which happens more often than ANYBODY realizes. Why? It often doesn't get prosecuted and is hushed up by the local media). That's about the only thing I know that will actually get a cop fired PDQ.
There are WAY too many dangerously unhinged individuals with the attitude of "I AM THE LAW!" running around in uniform.
Well, they can get in major trouble if they get caught by another agency for anything drinking related. I've heard some get in trouble because they told other people that they'd like to fuck them. I've heard of people getting in trouble for fucking on duty. That's not usually a firing offense, but will lead to a few days off without pay. (Those cases are usually the officer and their S.O. getting caught doing it. They are normal people.)
Cops are the most monitored employees that we have on the planet at the moment. Most of what patrol cops do is recorded. Everything they say over the radio or transmit over a computer is recorded. You'd be surprised at how often that they get in trouble for what they say over the radio or over the incar computer email. Not firing offenses, but black marks on their record. You'd be surprised at how much a police department is about image and they generally want their uniformed cops to look and act like the most upstanding citizens that the society has. Most of those black marks are about cops not looking like super cop.
We're talking about groups of consenting adults having a little bit of fun and blowing off some steam, and even if it is a little odd, it's the sort of thing university students do, and given earlier posts in this article, it's probably one of the safer activities one can do on campus.
It's actually better than the alternative which is them drinking or having sex where you can't see them. The college/university could get a bad image from that sort of thing. No one cares about D&D or role playing groups. They do care about something that might be annoying like smokers or nerf fire. Nerf won't kill you, but you try studying and then have some one hit you or just come close to you with any nerf weapon and see how much studying that you get done.
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Just think - the CIA/NSA/current administration somehow managed to purchase foreign-flagged ships of the line from arguably 'enemy' countries, hiding said purchases from both those governments, our own goverment, and the rest of the world, and then they somehow managed to get them to drop their anchors in just the places needed to cut the proper cables lying submerged on the seabed. They pulled all this off successfully - until YOU managed to figure it out.
Brilliant!
Come on, it would make more sense for a few simple black ops where your Seals or whatever are tasked with boarding said ship and planting a simple device on it and returning undiscovered. The said device would automatically lower the anchor by either remote control or when ever the ship was within certain spots.
For extra credit, have the black ops seal team remove said device after ship lowers anchor where you need it.
Is she mad that people are contributing their knowledge for free, while she expects to be paid? What a terrible blow Wikipedia has inflicted on our poor starving experts.
,they wouldn't be staying around as a professor type person.
Paid? They don't get paid. They pay journals and their peers to review their work. They work for free reviewing their peers work. They pay to let others see it. Their peers pay a lot to get copies as well. Where's this concept of getting paid for content coming from? Oh, yeah, that's the some what free market. Knowledge can be profitable, but professors just don't do that unless they get a cut out of book/notes profits. If they were profit minded
The concept of "blind trust" as applied to public, but not professional sources, isn't new... and it certainly existed long before Wikipedia.
Um, I trust what David and PeTree have to tell me about medical crap. What qualities do they have that I should "trust" them? They both sit right by me in the same office.
I guess that's not "blind trust" I am only trusting those that sit right beside me. I would never trust my Boss for medical or finical advice.
What other people are on my trusted list? My wife and my mom. I don't really talk with others.
Would I trust random slashdot comments? Maybe on a computer topic, but not on anything else.
I think you give first-year college students too much credit. Having taught them for 5 years, I can tell you from first hand experience that MOST of them do not know the first thing about proper research or what makes for good source materials.
Considering, I only had to write two papers in high school. I'd say most HS students haven't a clue at the requirements. One of those papers was for English where the assignment was "write a paper" and the other was a biology class where we really wrote a paper.
Now my kids are in second and third grade and being told to write papers. 98% of the information that makes it into their "papers" is from wikipedia. I'm sorry, but if my kids are having a hard time writing sentences, then its a bit too soon to be assigning "papers."
I would say that this line of thinking is kind of "selfish" in a way. The need for people to believe sports are fair and uncompromised by drugs has skewed the way people think of performance enhancment. Enhancement is good. We like enhancement. Get over it.
Um, you are saying sports enhancement drugs are the same a cancer drugs? It's a bit of a stretch for me. Using some that has bad effects to save my or some one else life is generally good. Unless it the side effects are extreme and the life extension isn't worth it. Would you choose to live one week longer in intense pain the entire time?
I'd be mixed on solider boost drugs. If I knew that I'm in a time and place that I'm likely to die in the next few minutes, I'd use some drugs that might get me through that situation. I'd want to be informed about the known side effects and if years after the war/conflict my health suffers, will I'd know that I'm only alive because of the solider booster.
Athletes are crazy people. Generally they do things that for their long term good, but they'll do things that are really stupid just for scoring a bit higher in one sporting event. Scoring a bit higher in a sporting event is not the same as saving a life that would die without said drugs. That's the best that I can state it.
Suppose the fellow goes home at night and has a few too many glasses of scotch. Suppose he has threesomes with sluts. Suppose he does any number of things you don't personally like. Are you gonna take away his funding for that, too?
If one of the sluts is my wife, daughter, or female friend/family that doesn't do that sort of thing, then of course I'm going to remove his funding.
If one of the sluts is your wife, your daughter, or your female friend/family that doesn't do that sort of thing, then of course I'm not going to care, but you might.
If he does things that I don't approve of and any of the sluts reports it to me, I'd remove his funding.
If he does things that you don't approve of and any of the sluts reports it to me, I'd ask the slut if they want his funding removed... If slut said yes, I'd ask about how much do you think would be a fair plenty?
If he does things that I don't approve of and the police report it to me, I'd remove his funding.
If he does things that you don't approve of and the police report it to me, I'd ask if it was illegal. If no, I'd make sure office rumors spread about the incident. If yes, I'd remove his funding, let the police jail him, and make sure office rumors spread about him.
If you don't want to pay the cost associated with my behavior, then don't pay it. If I overdose on drugs, let me lay there and die if I don't have insurance or can't pay the bill myself if you so choose. But your actions in assuming responsibility for my debts don't give you any legitimate authority over my behavior.
You've forgotten the case where I pay for services done for/to you, and then I own/control your ass/body/mind/soul until you've repaid said debt to me. If I can't recover any thing from you, I sell the debt to a debt collection agency and let them get it out of you.
It doesn't matter if you never agreed to those services as long as I can convince your family, friends, neighbors, place of employment, or government that said services where for your own good and that they generally agree to it.
Not when it affects those in society. Ie, if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business.
Simple answer, check their insurance tag. If they don't have any, then they don't have to be moved from the spot. Person dies end of problem. Of course, then you do have "clean" the left overs up. Its cheaper for society to just harvest organs/blood from said person to pay disposal costs if that hasn't been previously arranged.
The only reason there is any one around to attempt any medical care is because some one else (be it family, friends, company, government, or insurance company) is alive to complain about it not being done and has/will pay for it.
A significant number of the laws on the books in the country I live in (the USA) are inherently wrong, outright un- or anti-constitutional, or something even worse. Using them to define what is "right" leads directly to behaviors that are despicable -- or worse.
One can be cynical and simply say that this is because our legislators aren't very good at their jobs.
I was reading fark the other day... I came across were the AR state government removed the age limit for marriages. It was 16 for boys and 14 for girls. They were trying to change it to be 18 for both. They left out a word and well removed the limit. The good thing is that they did in fact have a special session and fix it. (It's bad that it made it in there to begin with.)
I hate to say it, but it sounds like you need to move if laws that you don't believe in are on the books and are being enforced. Just because its not in the Bill of rights doesn't mean your neighbors can't make laws and try to force you to change your behavior. They can and will do so at every chance they get. All the Bill of Rights really limits is things that the federal government can do to limit you. Oh, the states or towns can still go do what ever they want to you. It's not until after you've been arrested/held in jail for said law and try fighting it that it could ever get the chance to make it to the supreme court.
Most of us aren't crazy/stupid enough to get ourselves involved in something like that. That means that your neighbors that do get things into laws can get things that you don't like in there. Its not until some crazy stupid person goes against them that single law/rule gets removed. For every bad rule that gets removed, how many do you still think are in there though?
Sure, in 20 years those sort of implants will be available, but having one will make you look like the fat guy wearing his shirt tucked in, comfortable socks under sandals with his trusty treo attached to his belt. The vocal minority will now say "why do i need a holographic projector and full size keyboard in my cell phone? all i need is a 8mp camera, web browser, day planner! oh, and voice." and everyone else will just follow the trends of the uber computer that also still makes voice calls. It's going to take a lot longer than 20 years for implants to become the norm, IMO.
Implants have always seemed stupid to me. I do wear my glasses 24x7 though and think that they should do double duty for display device as well. No would would make negative comments about uber cool looking shades that you can just swap if you get bored with the style. Glasses might as well be implants, but there is a large difference in how most of would think of the two. I always have a my wedding ring, watch, wallet, and glasses on. I can take them all all off at any time. (Well, my wedding ring might take some soap to get off, but its still removable.) Removing my glasses gives me a headache, but I can function. Now tell me how fast can you remove those implants and what type of health side effects other than just a headache that you'd have without them.
While embedded devices will be nice for grabbing information on the fly, or for integrating computers with other activities, I don't think laptops and desktops are going anywhere. When doing work such as coding, writing, graphics, etc., people are still going to want a nice big display, full keyboard, and a chair to sit down in.
Imagine an absurdly large data sized USB thumb drive. Say 1 Petabyte or heck 1 exabtye in a form factor slightly larger than the usb plug and a slight rectangle or square. (We could make the form anything we actually want that's not important.) Now make the thing cheap. $1-5 for package of 100 of 'em. Now imagine that you can set down at any keyboard, monitor, mouse combo in the world and have your personalized desktop, all your files, full data connection to every other computing device on the globe all in that little magic data storage device. That thumb drive could become a watch, ring, necklace, or even ear ring. It shouldn't matter about a physical connection so it should have some wireless USB thing in it.
We've not figured out on the computing end of it though. That's shrink the entire Earth Simulator down also into it and also be able to run without heavy body burns and say about months worth 24x7 usage battery life.
Its assumed that we'd have some magic HUD glasses that can show our virtual desktop anywhere we want. I agree that we like full sized keyboards to type on and large viewing areas. It should be a matter of sitting in the desk and instantly your crap is on it and fully available to you.
There are some more things we'd need like biometrics at all the desktops so that the desktops can refer that physical user information back to the device before giving up complete access. You might have a public desktop and a few public programs data files that pop up until you've fully logged in.
The point is that it doesn't matter where you go sitting down in the chair at McDonalds to a random bathroom stall to sitting on a beach chair that you'd have trival full computer access. (I'm not saying if it is a good/bad thing for you to have all that connectivity or computing at those places, just that its there at your figure tips any where that you desire it.)
Now, think about what you or others would do with that amount of data storage and computing power.
I'd hope that we'd come up with good weather prediction software for one.
Well, here is the catch. Who ever spends the money should gain control of the resulting infrastructure. If the BBC/British government pays to upgrade the lines you can expect a great big (politely worded) fuck you to the telecoms if they try to set any demands.
If the telecoms pay for the infrastructure, they get to say what happens to it. Within whatever terms they negotiate for the use of public land to build on. And if they continue the false advertising of their services, they can expect that at some point a class action lawsuit will be made and will break them.
Um, I really, really hate to say it, but it goes down to one of two things tax payers or consumers are going to be paying for it. As I understand it, the BBC/British Government forces a per house hold TV tax for the BBC to exist. They also have pay TV as well. This has always made sense to the British. We tend to just look at them funny when they say that though. It comes down to us end-users are going to be paying if we are tax payers or consumers.
Consider all those folk choking up the internet with video downloads, P2P etc "because it's free" and they've got nothing better to do with their time. They're all choking up the pipes for everyone.
Pay-per-use is one way to get a free market into this and allow people to buy the QoS they want and the market decides the price points. It would also motivate some of the spam botters to clean up their act.
I view the internet = over the air/cable TV. Ok. Over the air TV we've got a double handful of channels. Cable we've got what 100-200 channels? My parents have direct TV and I think that they have atleast 600+ channels. (no comment on the actually content of said channels.)
I'm happy to pay $25 a month for basic DSL internet. It should be enough to support video feeds and global IP telephone communications if I choose to do so. How many freaking channels do you get for basic cable in your area? O.k. its not all two way channels, but still that's kinda of how I view the internet. Actually, I view the internet as the medium for me to make n number of channels to my n number of friends. I've paid for x amount of bandwidth with my DSL service. That's all that they should do is give me that amount of bandwidth per month per how much that they are billing me. (Actually, I should be fining their butts since I get around 40% of the bandwidth that I pay for, but I'm not going there.)
Some thing that I've noticed about my parents Direct tv is that a good 300+ of the channels are PPV in some format. I guess that's where we'd really end up. I wonder if we will have an over the air free option to connect to the internet. We really, really need one. (Even if its only at dailup speeds.)
Down at the bottom it said the thing was going to cost £299. According to google, UK£ 299 = 588.3423 US$. I don't know about you, but for $580 close to $600, I'd want a laptop with near a full sized keyboard. I've gotten to the point where I don't really care about anything else.
;)
I got sick of small keypads back in high school programming TI-8x series cals. Small keyboards sicken me.
Actually, I don't care because it's gotten to the point where the "low end" comes with a DVD burner/wifi 802.xx with atleast 15"+. I'll let others worry about battery life and options glore. My 8 year old girl has been bugging me for a laptop. I'm holding out until the price drops low enough that I can buy two laptops for around $500. It's only a matter of time.
So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.
My view is that humanity has always been on the renewable energy bit. Only a small segment of the overall population is using non-renewables and that's only be for about the last 100 years or so. Look at Africa, Asia, Central and South America for land masses where people still use renewable. The huge problem with "renewables" is that they haven't generally supported a populations in the hundreds of millions or a standard of living for most of the citizens as the non-renewable path is currently providing.
There are folks that seem to think that it'll take the government or a self styled environmental dictator to change a non-renewable country to renewables. That's not the answer at all. It'll take "renewables" being faster/cheaper/better than nonrenewables. When the price at the pump is say $5+ for non-newable gas and for renewable gas its $1-2; then you'll see everyone which to gas from renewable sources.
I change my opinion every few months on if there is actually anything to worry about on the energy crisis front. We could get the US back bone in 90% renewables without changing our SOL within 5 years if we really wanted to pay the price. There currently isn't any short term reason for us to switch though. There are lots of great long term reasons though. (Heck, my personal favorite idea is that we should have screwed the middle east by having a national drive for US energy independence instead of this whole war on terror. It would have ruined the Middle East far worse long term than this little war/police action that we are doing at the moment.)
His initial career was only made possible due to a loophole in German tax law which allowed him to spend other people's money on his bad movies since they could write off the loss for tax purposes. Once that loophole was closed, he decided to stop making expensive ($1M+) movies
He's quite arrogant and usually pretty angry (which you might be too if people kept shitting on your movies
He lured critics out to a charity fight and then beat the snot out of them, sending one to the hospital
This guy is my new hero. WTH does it matter that you or I don't like his movies or that they were funded by a tax loop hole? Nada. There are similar tax loops here in the US. One of my college professors made movies using the US version of this. He was pretty up front about all of it. Yep the people who fund him don't care about money or where their money is being spent because they just need to lose some for tax purposes.
I'm impressed that this guy had the guts to beat the snot out of his critics. Most of us would B.S. about it or try to bluff our way out of something, but we just wouldn't have the balls to do that. I'm sorry, but that's great. It doesn't matter how bad his movies are. He's defending them and some one is obviously paying him to make them. This guy now ranks above Cmdr Taco in my people that deserve respect for doing something that I should have done/would like to do book.
So, how many of those are actually things we're really missing, as opposed to just not having?
Well, the toy robot thingy looked neat. We have other robot thingies though so I guess we aren't missing out on that. Well, nothing else in there even raised my eye brow. It was either boring looking stuff or stuff that looked like it wouldn't sell/uncool/old model crap. How are we missing out by not having any of that crap? I'm not missing anything. I figure if anything in there is actually somewhat popular; then something like it will start selling here sooner or later. Nothing on that website looked like anything that I'd buy. Heck, a few of the items would make me avoid the store that had them on the shelves so I can understand them not being sold here.
sqrt(-1) = natural disaster!
That's an imaginary natural disaster
So are we talking about the SimCity disaster button that unleashes a monster or ufo attack?
Or you know, you could obey the speed limit, stop at red lights, etc. Seems to keep quite a few of us from getting tickets.
Just think of it as another tax on/for stupid people. Smart people obey the traffic rules and get off the road ASAP. Why? Because driving on the road ways is one of those ways to get killed by stupid people. Stupid people like to drink and drive or drive and sleep or drive and eat/talk on cell phone/groom. Traffic cops exist to tax stupid people and reduce the number of accidents from stupid people.
Police exist to reduce the harm/punish stupid people cause the rest of us. Of course, police tend to think every one is a stupid person.
I just thought some one needs to make a religious version of this. You know a little PDA with everything against the common stuff found in your specific religion. Every time you do or encounter something that you are supposed to be against in your religion it notes it, pulls up the specific religious text that you are violating, and then gives you a somewhat religious rant/rave that you did or saw something wrong and should correct your behavior.
That looked like a clean myspace page to me.
In short, China's approach to the environment is nothing short of a disaster. And unhappily for them, the effects of the disaster are immediately felt and born by the rank-and-file Chinese, given the high population density. Yet because of the totalitarian presence of the CCP and its totalizing ideology and propaganda, the country and its people are unable to efficiently evaluate proposals and effectively respond to problems.
It's sad, because the Chinese are an incredibly inventive and resourceful group. They've given so much to the world. One wonders what they could achieve in a free and open society. But alas, they have, at least for the time being, chosen to handicap themselves with a system that turns all their genius to idiocy.
I just have to say that the modern Chinese communist peasant is freaking amazing to put up and live through what they have to. I guess if I actually think about it; all communists have to be amazing to have lived through Stalin or Mao. We've only got to put up with Bushs or Clitons.
For what its worth, Atlanta did the same thing in 1996. The whole Olympic Centennial Park area, all the new stadiums, etc were all built in former slums occupied by people who were strangely no longer in Atlanta after.
I heard about that. The local police instead of arresting some one for public intox where driving them to the local bus stations and handing them a $50 ticket to neighboring cities. It sounds like a great way to export your homeless problem to others.
Someone please try to justify evicting one and a half million people for the Olympics.
I'm sure someone will try...which just proves that China's subtle information campaigns to attempt to make the world think that everything is rosy or somehow justified are working like a charm.
Um, easy. They weren't evicted. They were displaced due to higher paying government jobs at the capital for the next 4-6 years.
If D.C. was going on a building spree and handing out thousands of jobs for around $100K each, would you complain that people from the neighboring communities have been displaced to D.C. at the government's whim?
The only things I know that tend to get a reaction are if the victim is rich and white, OR if the cop blows up and shoots a brother officer in anger (which happens more often than ANYBODY realizes. Why? It often doesn't get prosecuted and is hushed up by the local media). That's about the only thing I know that will actually get a cop fired PDQ.
There are WAY too many dangerously unhinged individuals with the attitude of "I AM THE LAW!" running around in uniform.
Well, they can get in major trouble if they get caught by another agency for anything drinking related. I've heard some get in trouble because they told other people that they'd like to fuck them. I've heard of people getting in trouble for fucking on duty. That's not usually a firing offense, but will lead to a few days off without pay. (Those cases are usually the officer and their S.O. getting caught doing it. They are normal people.)
Cops are the most monitored employees that we have on the planet at the moment. Most of what patrol cops do is recorded. Everything they say over the radio or transmit over a computer is recorded. You'd be surprised at how often that they get in trouble for what they say over the radio or over the incar computer email. Not firing offenses, but black marks on their record. You'd be surprised at how much a police department is about image and they generally want their uniformed cops to look and act like the most upstanding citizens that the society has. Most of those black marks are about cops not looking like super cop.
We're talking about groups of consenting adults having a little bit of fun and blowing off some steam, and even if it is a little odd, it's the sort of thing university students do, and given earlier posts in this article, it's probably one of the safer activities one can do on campus.
It's actually better than the alternative which is them drinking or having sex where you can't see them. The college/university could get a bad image from that sort of thing. No one cares about D&D or role playing groups. They do care about something that might be annoying like smokers or nerf fire. Nerf won't kill you, but you try studying and then have some one hit you or just come close to you with any nerf weapon and see how much studying that you get done.