It's a college campus not the entire freaking community where the college campus is. They could hold their nerf event some where else in the community.
I could come up with a short list of 3 easy reasons that they were banned.
1 The college didn't want to be sued by some one that was not part of the event that got hit with a nerf toy. 2 The wrong college faculty/staff member got hit at a previous event. 3 They could have been worried that it would annoy any one (students, staff, or faculty) that weren't part of the event but had to pass through nerf fire to get where they were going.
I mean, what is it with these large scale IT projects? They take a simple problem and turn it into a money pit. Here in the UK we've had several high profile massive budget IT failures in the last 10 years, air traffic control, national health patient record databases, in fact the more critical it is the more of a spectacular unqualified fuck-up it becomes.
Now, if you got a couple of average hacker nerds and gave then the same specs, but didn't tell them it was for a large scale project, or for whom, they would give you a faultless solution using commodity hardware, stock methods and free software in a few months at one *millionth* the cost we're looking at here.
Obviously some one who has never worked on a large project. It it was "easy" for these "large scale critical" projects to be done; they would be solved, and it they would be non-issues. Oh, I'm sure most programmers can fast prototype a small scale solution within a week. Will that prototype fit all the specs and actually scale up? Not likely.
I know its hard to believe, but there are lots of problems that are hard to solve. Open Source programmers aren't mad scientists that can magically invent with little apparent effort. They are people like everyone else that will run into the same problems everyone else does. I think most of these "large scale projects" fail because of project politics more than anything else. Project politics isn't something open source can fix. Ever heard of how many people couldn't play nice with others or didn't want to in the first place and just forked their OS project? That doesn't work for everything.
I think we need to make slashdot predictions for the next 100 hundred years.
I'd hate to say it, but "one" commercial fusion reactor making a profit. Global climate change still an issue though the bulk of humanity is still around despite it being 2100. Starting to play with large scale nano-tech. Intel is selling chips that run 1000x faster than today for 1/1000th of the power usage for less than a $1 (adjusted for inflation) and making a huge profit. Google Government evolved enough to handle the routine governmental tasks of your average town of less than 50K without any problems.
Democracy is the norm and people don't care. We still vote in the Hitler/Stalin types into office once every other generation. The Hitler/Stalin types have discovered that internet list of "what I'd do if I were an evil overlord list" and try to stick to it. So the evil Tyrant gives out free internet/music/video/games to all as long as you aren't actively trying to remove the Tyrant. You can bad mouth him all you want on the internet, but if you start the physical process of removing the Tyrant, the Tyrant calls out the Strom Troopers on you.
Most people are happy, healthy, have cheap food to eat, and are very supportive of their evil overlord.
People pay vast sums for the latest toys only to throw them away or into storage after about a week/month of playing with them.
...in his prediction of intelligence pills. Either that, or a lot of people I encountered today need to adjust their dosage.
Nah, we don't really think that's important. We are into fad diets around here. If he had predicted a few hundred diet pills, and viagra, then he'd have had something...
I'm just waiting for some one to sell the instant orgasm pill though with our entire industry of sex toys and our culture of porn on the internet we don't really need a pill for that.
I think the only majors with a higher general opinion of themselves are philosophy majors.
Physics majors (cause they are that smart), premeds, law students and those studying to be teachers. In that order. The thing is most of don't care about physics grads because we will never encounter them. Doctors and lawyers are well known for liking to play god with the rest of us. Teachers just like to mentally dominate students and parents.
Stealing someone's internet bandwidth (their porn came down slower than usual!) is now worth up to three years in the slammer? I always thought wardriving was a silly little crime like jaywalking, not something on the order of grand theft auto. Why is the punishment so steep in that bill?
Because wasting all that gas driving around is a serious offense against the environment.
Basically, they want something that'll look like a bird, fly like a bird, and would be able to engage in surveillance without anyone noticing. The next logical step would be to make a pigeon-like creature, that would be unnoticeable in an urban environment. A few thousand of those in a large city could make enforcing "free speech zones" much easier.
Don't you mean enforcing government sponsored thought control and censorship much easier?
It's not just ISPs and sites who can be faulted for co-operating with foreign censors. Much of the censorware used by such governments is developed in America. A great step would be to introduce legislation to expose which companies are selling censorware to foreign governments. This a tool of oppression, and exports should be scrutinized like weapons.
The US is using China to beta test it. Sort of like how the US is using the UK to beta test that whole 1984 big brother thing that they have going on.
You sound silly. Thought control and censor ship seems a pretty basic meme for governments to control their populations with. I can see why any government would want better censorship tools. It'd be pretty silly of us not selling it to them; considering they are one of our top trading partners. Oh. I forgot this is a political issue. Never mind. Go ahead and rant about the evils of the foreign government all you want.
I try not to think of all the ways that we could die off. Like climate change, asteroid impact, wars over resources be it energy reserves or fresh drinking water, the problems with living a police state, and the bee death. Now I have to worry about our food resources being threated by disease as well at least until lunch.
Remember, a while back some one was wanting to build a farming sky scraper? A couple of events like this that we survive at our current tech level, will be enough to get us to play around with that concept.
I'm assuming our farmers and the government are doing everything possible to prevent farm diseases from invading as a routine measure. The only way to be really sure is to have all the food grown where we could control all the air and materials that come into contact with the farm products. In theory, we could grow any type of plant even if it was highly likely to get the disease simply because the normal disease vectors would never come into contact with our farming sky scraper or underground farms, or under ocean farms or orbital farms.
Actually, I'd guess that there are a good number of people who are afraid that their own kid just might get caught by it, so they'll resist getting into the DNA database. The reason is that humanity has a long, sorry history of looking for this sort of magic test that will lighten the tough load of good police work, and let the authorities just go out and arrest people who show some physical features that are listed as sure signs of criminality.
You had a great comment. I didn't read the article, but I've been thinking two steps ahead. No one would want their kid's fingerprint or DNA in a "bad kid" or "potential criminal" index. They'll suddenly be o.k. with it though if they are registering all kids to catch those "potential criminals" when they've committed a crime. You are right that it is easy to type cast and to pick out any sub group as the target. The best/fairest thing would be for all kids to be registered. I don't know what percent of the population actually becomes criminals, but lets say 99.99% never commit a crime. Well, their data would be in the database and searched against every crime that the police recover DNA evidence for. So we'd actually find out that magic percentage of the population that becomes criminals and if that.01% or whatever it is becomes a criminal, then it would be much easier to id them after the fact.
I'm actually mixed on this sort of crap. Why? Because police generally don't want to share any of the data that they hold so if they held a DNA index of citizenry then I'd be fairly certain that info isn't being sold to spammers or just to random companies that ask/pay the government for it. The police don't share out the NCIC database with any one.
Note: that doesn't stop mis use of the system. There are guidelines for NCIC operators and policies to follow if anyone is accused of misuse of the system. I'm envisioning more of a DB that stores all the citizens DNA/finger prints rather than one that's just a best guess at what's a potential criminal. Let's be honest. Everyone is a potential criminal so every one needs to be registered. All registering your citizens does is catch the criminals that are registered citizens. You miss all those illegal immigrates, but now you have an excuse to hunt down anyone that may be an unregistered/illegal immigrate/terrorist.
You are right that we currently don't have a clue about most of DNA. In 50-100, we might start to have enough data to actually determine if your DNA actually means that you are likely to be arrested or convicted. Though you are right, that's sort of like telling a black guy that there is a 70% chance that you'll be arrested by living in a mainly white neighborhood and 5-10% chance that you'd be convicted. What would be interesting is if you could be told that your behavior has an x percentage chance to leading you to be arrested in these areas, but the percentage changes in these others areas so you could use the data to move where you'd have the least likely chance to be arrested.
Of course there are days that I think that all those sex offenders need to live in the same area so that they and their neighbors know that 49%+ of the adult population of said area is either a sex offender or spouse or relative of a sex offender.
Right, but it was the construction of a police state that made the racism, oppression and genocide possible. I don't believe the current UK or US governments plan to start imprisoning their opponents or murdering people en masse, but they're building infrastructure that will make that kind of thing a lot easier for future governments.
Um, wrong. It was the people that made it possible not the Nazi government. Tt was the anti-Jewish average German that made it happen. The US has had slavery and remember how the US about used genocide to relocate/remove the native American menace. Where are those native Americans now a days? The US didn't need a police state or a Nazi government in power to do what we did to the native Americans or the native Africans. It can happen in a democracy or republic. It's the people and their culture that cause those things to be possible.
Have you ever looked into why Mexico isn't a US state? Let's just way that we were and still are bigoted. It's the people that make the country. You don't need a Nazi like party or a police state to have racism or just different groups hating each others guts. The existence of groups that don't get along or one group on top of or in charge of the other groups is all that is required for this crap to happen.
I'm more concerned with how much of our taxes this is going to waste before they realise it's pointless.
Um, that's where you are actually wrong. What the department of home land security mainly does is pointless. Registering all school kids by DNA and finger prints would be highly useful and successful at solving/preventing some crime. Note: those crimes that were prevented would be only because the kids knew up front that all their ID info was registered so better be really careful or don't do crime. On the other hand, if you got raped or something it would be trivial to take the DNA samples and pull up the exact person. This assumes that the person that committed the crime on you has been registered. Wait 80 years and all new citizens will be registered and nearly every unregistered citizen will have been dieing off. The problem with this is that it will solve crimes.
Note: In 80 years when the entire population is registered and accepts it as a matter of course that can't be changed, they'll come down like so called biblical wrath of god on unregistered criminals/citizens/illegal immigrates whenever they find them.
I predict tomorrow's headline to be "90% of x computers belong to one of six bot nets." where x is either a group of foreign countries, corporate computers, or home computers depending on the mood of the day.
unaging. Physically staying 27 until I die from something other then natural causes.
I'm almost hitting 30. I hear hitting all those other decades gets even tougher. I want to roll back to about 20 or even better around 16-18 for internal organs and stuff. I'd like most of my external stuff to stay around my 22-25 age. I can tell you those 30+ might like to live forever, but they'd really, really hope some one can give them a better/newer body rather than living forever with their current body. I'd want regeneration. With enough time, you'd lose some body part just due to accidents.
Really, it's not like Masters of Orion or some other 4x game.
Nah, its exactly like Masters of Orion. The thing that folks tend to forget is that each turn may be anywhere from 10 to 100 years. I think at turns being set at 100 years that we'd colonize the other system planets within 20-30 turns. It would also take lots of turns for use to send out scouts to the nearer systems. Remember the best thing to do was colonize, colonize, colonize. So you'd think that there would be some species that has gotten far enough along that they could afford to build/send out hundreds or thousands of colony ships. At that scale, it doesn't matter if you lose a percentage, the important thing is that another 50 turns down the line that your empire/species will have 100s or 1000s of systems colonized and somewhat productive.
No other advance would ever be as important as a quick way between the stars for colonization of other places in the galaxy. It would change our world so much indirectly just by us having the ability to leave it.
Um, suicide booths would have the similar effects for the remaining earth population. Nah, sleeper colony ships that just use the colonists as spare body parts for the remaining population. It would breed out/lessen the urge to colonize. Star Trek replicators and Niven Style teleporters would have better positive social effects. All cheap space travel does is shift your domestic problems from home to the outworlds/rim where they aren't visible or have their power base any more.
The problem with time travel is although it may be possible to travel in time it would not be a good idea. Let me explain, if have an actual time machine and travel back lets say 1 week you would materialize millions of miles away from earth in the middle of deep space. The reason for this becomes obvious when you realise earth is actually moving through space faster than a speeding bullet thus totally stuffing up the usefulness of traveling through time.
Sounds like a great way to toss stuff into space to me.
Hearing the term vaporware brings to mind duke nuke forever, flying cars, rocket packs, death rays, immortality drugs, cures for any disease, fusion, zero point/vacuum energy, quantum/DNA computers, electric cars, and AI.
Those fields and a few others I just ignore all PR news until there are products that I can buy from Walmart or Target.
The site is a stupid, terrible idea anyway. I'm personally aware of many people who have an irrational hatred for the police and police officers, simply because of what they are.
Yes, you have bad cops. You've also got a lot of good cops who would be harassed and defamed by users of this site. Frankly, it's as stupid as that site that lets high school kids make unsubstantiated complaints about their teachers. Just because you have free speech, doesn't mean that you can use it to make a person's life hell.
Did you go to a college that had students give teacher/professor evals about twice a semester? I never encountered that from K-12. I thought that was the best idea ever though in college. I wondered why the heck that we didn't have that for those other K-12 years though. Those teacher evals actually got things changed sometimes. O.k. some times you'd have to wait a semester before a bad temp professor didn't have their contract renewed, but for the most part students saw results.
You know what. Complaining to your local police department through their stated complaint process will get something changed/noticed. Now, if its something that they can train for, they'll try it. If its something that your average person won't be able to do, don't expect random cops to be supermen. The thing with those teacher evals is that the admin went out and did them. The students didn't go to the dean of the department and just complain. What we'd need is the police departments sending out evals to a those that have had contact with the police and have them fill out a review form on the police performance.
There is a legitimate concern for cops that do go undercover (they tend to do so off and on throughout a career), in that once they do, there's a big, fat online database that folks can check against before even asking "are you a cop?". This can present a legitimate danger if there's pictures or other personally identifiable information right there on the site.
There is a superior need for transparency in any society, but sometimes that has to be balanced against personal safety - including the safety of the cops.
Um, it should be common sense that some cops can never ever go under cover again. What do I mean by that? Think of every cop that is filmed or photographed being their public information officer. Those people shouldn't ever be eligible to go undercover again. Our agency produces monthly/annual reports and actually has a recruiting bill board some where around town. I doubt your average citizen even looks through those reports, but they have pictures of crime scene, CID, and patrol police in there. I'd be more worried about any of those folks on that recruiting bill board. Don't you think it should be common sense that those folks shouldn't ever expect to go under cover?
Our department usually cycles brand new to our agency police through the drug task force as soon as possible simply because they aren't locally known as police yet. That's common sense. Our long term DTF personnel usually hang out in those mass transit areas bus, train, airplane stops that's where out of towners cycle through, and they wouldn't have a clue who the local cops are. That's common sense.
It should be common sense that if your police personnel become nationally known that they should never expect to go under cover again in their career.
Furthermore, unless they figure out how to take away all of our camera cell phones, tiny solid state audio recorders, etc then we will continue to have vastly more power to document police corruption than we did just 10 years ago when you'd have to have a camcorder at hand, charged and with a tape in it, to capture anything.
Just wait until somethings become cheap. Imagine $20 terabyte or petabyte flash drives. Imagine google selling/licensing the equipment that they use for google street view for you to mount on your car and the price of that falling to say around $100-200. Imagine any subculture being rabid/fanatic fans of this and uploading everything/everywhere that they drive by to google street/highway view. You don't have to imagine if your insurance company would lower your rates if you had one of these mounted on your car.
We have one subculture (cops) that have video recording in cars, and it costs around $3K for the camera and recording equipment. Most of us wouldn't spend around $3K for something like that with only one forward facing video. We'd want/need a couple of cameras all around the car to record "everything;" those interested in this would have internal/external audio recordings as well.
How would you change your behavior if you knew that citizen watchers could pass by and record your conduct? Remember the Bill of Rights only protects you from the government not other citizens or companies. Would you want/try to make it illegal to record anything that is happening in public?
Life recorders that store an entire life time of audio/video data will come if the data storage and recording equipment become cheap enough. When that happens, what will do?
I'm just wondering if it'll be within 5 or 10 years that they start doing some form of ads. I'm fairly certain that they'll do it. It's only a matter of time. If they do it like those google ads tons of people might not even notice. Sad isn't it. I'm wondering which would be best for them. A simple banner ad at the top, or in that left nav bar. Well, its not really like I even notice slashdot's ads, so why should I care about wikipedia getting them?
I just hope that they aren't annoying ads. People around here seem to think that ads are the end of the world. Honestly, come on. I remember having ads on book covers in elementary school. I remember what we did was put the book covers on so that the blank side was on the outside and the ads were all towards the book. I'd much rather put up with some ads than some PBS style fund raising. (Speaking of Fund Raising that pushes my buttons is the public school sending both my kids home selling their crap. Grr. At least, wikipedia doesn't try to have its users go out and sell something to raise money.)
So are you suggesting that it be pitch black unless theres a car coming by so everyone without one stays inside all night?
Yes, I can't help, but think that it would reduce night time crime. I'd be for business parking lot lighting as we all actually use that, but not street side lights. Cars have their own lights. Why should we build street lights?
It's a really unfortunate choice of names, this "T-ray." Inevitably, it wants to make a person associate these waves with x-rays. Photons are photons, but as far as these guys go healthwise, it's pretty certain they'll have more in common with radio or microwaves than x-rays. Heck, the reason they call them x-rays and gamma rays in the first place is because they're in the regime where it makes sense to talk about photons as particles, rather than waves. And they call them "radio waves" and "microwaves" because THEY are down in the more wave-like regime. Just call it "millimeter wave" and be done with it, before we get people claiming they're getting ARS from T-ray devices.
Are you kidding? That's most likely the way we will get the government to stop scanning everyone! Its bad for our privacy health if we are constantly scanned.
Slashdot Mirror
We're banning nerf guns now? Why?
It's a college campus not the entire freaking community where the college campus is. They could hold their nerf event some where else in the community.
I could come up with a short list of 3 easy reasons that they were banned.
1 The college didn't want to be sued by some one that was not part of the event that got hit with a nerf toy.
2 The wrong college faculty/staff member got hit at a previous event.
3 They could have been worried that it would annoy any one (students, staff, or faculty) that weren't part of the event but had to pass through nerf fire to get where they were going.
I mean, what is it with these large scale IT projects? They take a simple problem and turn it into a money pit. Here in the UK we've had several high profile massive budget IT failures in the last 10 years, air traffic control, national health patient record databases, in fact the more critical it is the more of a spectacular unqualified fuck-up it becomes.
Now, if you got a couple of average hacker nerds and gave then the same specs, but didn't tell them it was for a large scale project, or for whom, they would give you a faultless solution using commodity hardware, stock methods and free software in a few months at one *millionth* the cost we're looking at here.
Obviously some one who has never worked on a large project. It it was "easy" for these "large scale critical" projects to be done; they would be solved, and it they would be non-issues. Oh, I'm sure most programmers can fast prototype a small scale solution within a week. Will that prototype fit all the specs and actually scale up? Not likely.
I know its hard to believe, but there are lots of problems that are hard to solve. Open Source programmers aren't mad scientists that can magically invent with little apparent effort. They are people like everyone else that will run into the same problems everyone else does. I think most of these "large scale projects" fail because of project politics more than anything else. Project politics isn't something open source can fix. Ever heard of how many people couldn't play nice with others or didn't want to in the first place and just forked their OS project? That doesn't work for everything.
I think we need to make slashdot predictions for the next 100 hundred years.
I'd hate to say it, but "one" commercial fusion reactor making a profit.
Global climate change still an issue though the bulk of humanity is still around despite it being 2100.
Starting to play with large scale nano-tech.
Intel is selling chips that run 1000x faster than today for 1/1000th of the power usage for less than a $1 (adjusted for inflation) and making a huge profit.
Google Government evolved enough to handle the routine governmental tasks of your average town of less than 50K without any problems.
Democracy is the norm and people don't care. We still vote in the Hitler/Stalin types into office once every other generation.
The Hitler/Stalin types have discovered that internet list of "what I'd do if I were an evil overlord list" and try to stick to it. So the evil Tyrant gives out free internet/music/video/games to all as long as you aren't actively trying to remove the Tyrant. You can bad mouth him all you want on the internet, but if you start the physical process of removing the Tyrant, the Tyrant calls out the Strom Troopers on you.
Most people are happy, healthy, have cheap food to eat, and are very supportive of their evil overlord.
People pay vast sums for the latest toys only to throw them away or into storage after about a week/month of playing with them.
...in his prediction of intelligence pills.
Either that, or a lot of people I encountered today need to adjust their dosage.
Nah, we don't really think that's important. We are into fad diets around here. If he had predicted a few hundred diet pills, and viagra, then he'd have had something...
I'm just waiting for some one to sell the instant orgasm pill though with our entire industry of sex toys and our culture of porn on the internet we don't really need a pill for that.
I think the only majors with a higher general opinion of themselves are philosophy majors.
Physics majors (cause they are that smart), premeds, law students and those studying to be teachers. In that order. The thing is most of don't care about physics grads because we will never encounter them. Doctors and lawyers are well known for liking to play god with the rest of us. Teachers just like to mentally dominate students and parents.
Stealing someone's internet bandwidth (their porn came down slower than usual!) is now worth up to three years in the slammer? I always thought wardriving was a silly little crime like jaywalking, not something on the order of grand theft auto. Why is the punishment so steep in that bill?
Because wasting all that gas driving around is a serious offense against the environment.
Basically, they want something that'll look like a bird, fly like a bird, and would be able to engage in surveillance without anyone noticing. The next logical step would be to make a pigeon-like creature, that would be unnoticeable in an urban environment. A few thousand of those in a large city could make enforcing "free speech zones" much easier.
Don't you mean enforcing government sponsored thought control and censorship much easier?
It's not just ISPs and sites who can be faulted for co-operating with foreign censors. Much of the censorware used by such governments is developed in America. A great step would be to introduce legislation to expose which companies are selling censorware to foreign governments. This a tool of oppression, and exports should be scrutinized like weapons.
The US is using China to beta test it. Sort of like how the US is using the UK to beta test that whole 1984 big brother thing that they have going on.
You sound silly. Thought control and censor ship seems a pretty basic meme for governments to control their populations with. I can see why any government would want better censorship tools. It'd be pretty silly of us not selling it to them; considering they are one of our top trading partners. Oh. I forgot this is a political issue. Never mind. Go ahead and rant about the evils of the foreign government all you want.
What the hell does racism have to do with Mexico not being a US state?
Look it up. We had a shot at taking over Mexico. The reason Mexico is an independent country and not a US state is because of US racism.
I try not to think of all the ways that we could die off. Like climate change, asteroid impact, wars over resources be it energy reserves or fresh drinking water, the problems with living a police state, and the bee death. Now I have to worry about our food resources being threated by disease as well at least until lunch.
Remember, a while back some one was wanting to build a farming sky scraper? A couple of events like this that we survive at our current tech level, will be enough to get us to play around with that concept.
I'm assuming our farmers and the government are doing everything possible to prevent farm diseases from invading as a routine measure. The only way to be really sure is to have all the food grown where we could control all the air and materials that come into contact with the farm products. In theory, we could grow any type of plant even if it was highly likely to get the disease simply because the normal disease vectors would never come into contact with our farming sky scraper or underground farms, or under ocean farms or orbital farms.
Actually, I'd guess that there are a good number of people who are afraid that their own kid just might get caught by it, so they'll resist getting into the DNA database. The reason is that humanity has a long, sorry history of looking for this sort of magic test that will lighten the tough load of good police work, and let the authorities just go out and arrest people who show some physical features that are listed as sure signs of criminality.
.01% or whatever it is becomes a criminal, then it would be much easier to id them after the fact.
You had a great comment. I didn't read the article, but I've been thinking two steps ahead. No one would want their kid's fingerprint or DNA in a "bad kid" or "potential criminal" index. They'll suddenly be o.k. with it though if they are registering all kids to catch those "potential criminals" when they've committed a crime. You are right that it is easy to type cast and to pick out any sub group as the target. The best/fairest thing would be for all kids to be registered. I don't know what percent of the population actually becomes criminals, but lets say 99.99% never commit a crime. Well, their data would be in the database and searched against every crime that the police recover DNA evidence for. So we'd actually find out that magic percentage of the population that becomes criminals and if that
I'm actually mixed on this sort of crap. Why? Because police generally don't want to share any of the data that they hold so if they held a DNA index of citizenry then I'd be fairly certain that info isn't being sold to spammers or just to random companies that ask/pay the government for it. The police don't share out the NCIC database with any one.
Note: that doesn't stop mis use of the system. There are guidelines for NCIC operators and policies to follow if anyone is accused of misuse of the system. I'm envisioning more of a DB that stores all the citizens DNA/finger prints rather than one that's just a best guess at what's a potential criminal. Let's be honest. Everyone is a potential criminal so every one needs to be registered. All registering your citizens does is catch the criminals that are registered citizens. You miss all those illegal immigrates, but now you have an excuse to hunt down anyone that may be an unregistered/illegal immigrate/terrorist.
You are right that we currently don't have a clue about most of DNA. In 50-100, we might start to have enough data to actually determine if your DNA actually means that you are likely to be arrested or convicted. Though you are right, that's sort of like telling a black guy that there is a 70% chance that you'll be arrested by living in a mainly white neighborhood and 5-10% chance that you'd be convicted. What would be interesting is if you could be told that your behavior has an x percentage chance to leading you to be arrested in these areas, but the percentage changes in these others areas so you could use the data to move where you'd have the least likely chance to be arrested.
Of course there are days that I think that all those sex offenders need to live in the same area so that they and their neighbors know that 49%+ of the adult population of said area is either a sex offender or spouse or relative of a sex offender.
Right, but it was the construction of a police state that made the racism, oppression and genocide possible. I don't believe the current UK or US governments plan to start imprisoning their opponents or murdering people en masse, but they're building infrastructure that will make that kind of thing a lot easier for future governments.
Um, wrong. It was the people that made it possible not the Nazi government. Tt was the anti-Jewish average German that made it happen. The US has had slavery and remember how the US about used genocide to relocate/remove the native American menace. Where are those native Americans now a days? The US didn't need a police state or a Nazi government in power to do what we did to the native Americans or the native Africans. It can happen in a democracy or republic. It's the people and their culture that cause those things to be possible.
Have you ever looked into why Mexico isn't a US state? Let's just way that we were and still are bigoted. It's the people that make the country. You don't need a Nazi like party or a police state to have racism or just different groups hating each others guts. The existence of groups that don't get along or one group on top of or in charge of the other groups is all that is required for this crap to happen.
I'm more concerned with how much of our taxes this is going to waste before they realise it's pointless.
Um, that's where you are actually wrong. What the department of home land security mainly does is pointless. Registering all school kids by DNA and finger prints would be highly useful and successful at solving/preventing some crime. Note: those crimes that were prevented would be only because the kids knew up front that all their ID info was registered so better be really careful or don't do crime. On the other hand, if you got raped or something it would be trivial to take the DNA samples and pull up the exact person. This assumes that the person that committed the crime on you has been registered. Wait 80 years and all new citizens will be registered and nearly every unregistered citizen will have been dieing off. The problem with this is that it will solve crimes.
Note: In 80 years when the entire population is registered and accepts it as a matter of course that can't be changed, they'll come down like so called biblical wrath of god on unregistered criminals/citizens/illegal immigrates whenever they find them.
I predict tomorrow's headline to be "90% of x computers belong to one of six bot nets." where x is either a group of foreign countries, corporate computers, or home computers depending on the mood of the day.
unaging.
Physically staying 27 until I die from something other then natural causes.
I'm almost hitting 30. I hear hitting all those other decades gets even tougher. I want to roll back to about 20 or even better around 16-18 for internal organs and stuff. I'd like most of my external stuff to stay around my 22-25 age. I can tell you those 30+ might like to live forever, but they'd really, really hope some one can give them a better/newer body rather than living forever with their current body. I'd want regeneration. With enough time, you'd lose some body part just due to accidents.
Really, it's not like Masters of Orion or some other 4x game.
Nah, its exactly like Masters of Orion. The thing that folks tend to forget is that each turn may be anywhere from 10 to 100 years. I think at turns being set at 100 years that we'd colonize the other system planets within 20-30 turns. It would also take lots of turns for use to send out scouts to the nearer systems. Remember the best thing to do was colonize, colonize, colonize. So you'd think that there would be some species that has gotten far enough along that they could afford to build/send out hundreds or thousands of colony ships. At that scale, it doesn't matter if you lose a percentage, the important thing is that another 50 turns down the line that your empire/species will have 100s or 1000s of systems colonized and somewhat productive.
No other advance would ever be as important as a quick way between the stars for colonization of other places in the galaxy. It would change our world so much indirectly just by us having the ability to leave it.
Um, suicide booths would have the similar effects for the remaining earth population. Nah, sleeper colony ships that just use the colonists as spare body parts for the remaining population. It would breed out/lessen the urge to colonize. Star Trek replicators and Niven Style teleporters would have better positive social effects. All cheap space travel does is shift your domestic problems from home to the outworlds/rim where they aren't visible or have their power base any more.
The problem with time travel is although it may be possible to travel in time it would not be a good idea. Let me explain, if have an actual time machine and travel back lets say 1 week you would materialize millions of miles away from earth in the middle of deep space. The reason for this becomes obvious when you realise earth is actually moving through space faster than a speeding bullet thus totally stuffing up the usefulness of traveling through time.
Sounds like a great way to toss stuff into space to me.
Hearing the term vaporware brings to mind duke nuke forever, flying cars, rocket packs, death rays, immortality drugs, cures for any disease, fusion, zero point/vacuum energy, quantum/DNA computers, electric cars, and AI.
Those fields and a few others I just ignore all PR news until there are products that I can buy from Walmart or Target.
The site is a stupid, terrible idea anyway. I'm personally aware of many people who have an irrational hatred for the police and police officers, simply because of what they are.
Yes, you have bad cops. You've also got a lot of good cops who would be harassed and defamed by users of this site. Frankly, it's as stupid as that site that lets high school kids make unsubstantiated complaints about their teachers. Just because you have free speech, doesn't mean that you can use it to make a person's life hell.
Did you go to a college that had students give teacher/professor evals about twice a semester? I never encountered that from K-12. I thought that was the best idea ever though in college. I wondered why the heck that we didn't have that for those other K-12 years though. Those teacher evals actually got things changed sometimes. O.k. some times you'd have to wait a semester before a bad temp professor didn't have their contract renewed, but for the most part students saw results.
You know what. Complaining to your local police department through their stated complaint process will get something changed/noticed. Now, if its something that they can train for, they'll try it. If its something that your average person won't be able to do, don't expect random cops to be supermen. The thing with those teacher evals is that the admin went out and did them. The students didn't go to the dean of the department and just complain. What we'd need is the police departments sending out evals to a those that have had contact with the police and have them fill out a review form on the police performance.
There is a legitimate concern for cops that do go undercover (they tend to do so off and on throughout a career), in that once they do, there's a big, fat online database that folks can check against before even asking "are you a cop?". This can present a legitimate danger if there's pictures or other personally identifiable information right there on the site.
There is a superior need for transparency in any society, but sometimes that has to be balanced against personal safety - including the safety of the cops.
Um, it should be common sense that some cops can never ever go under cover again. What do I mean by that? Think of every cop that is filmed or photographed being their public information officer. Those people shouldn't ever be eligible to go undercover again. Our agency produces monthly/annual reports and actually has a recruiting bill board some where around town. I doubt your average citizen even looks through those reports, but they have pictures of crime scene, CID, and patrol police in there. I'd be more worried about any of those folks on that recruiting bill board. Don't you think it should be common sense that those folks shouldn't ever expect to go under cover?
Our department usually cycles brand new to our agency police through the drug task force as soon as possible simply because they aren't locally known as police yet. That's common sense. Our long term DTF personnel usually hang out in those mass transit areas bus, train, airplane stops that's where out of towners cycle through, and they wouldn't have a clue who the local cops are. That's common sense.
It should be common sense that if your police personnel become nationally known that they should never expect to go under cover again in their career.
Furthermore, unless they figure out how to take away all of our camera cell phones, tiny solid state audio recorders, etc then we will continue to have vastly more power to document police corruption than we did just 10 years ago when you'd have to have a camcorder at hand, charged and with a tape in it, to capture anything.
Just wait until somethings become cheap. Imagine $20 terabyte or petabyte flash drives. Imagine google selling/licensing the equipment that they use for google street view for you to mount on your car and the price of that falling to say around $100-200. Imagine any subculture being rabid/fanatic fans of this and uploading everything/everywhere that they drive by to google street/highway view. You don't have to imagine if your insurance company would lower your rates if you had one of these mounted on your car.
We have one subculture (cops) that have video recording in cars, and it costs around $3K for the camera and recording equipment. Most of us wouldn't spend around $3K for something like that with only one forward facing video. We'd want/need a couple of cameras all around the car to record "everything;" those interested in this would have internal/external audio recordings as well.
How would you change your behavior if you knew that citizen watchers could pass by and record your conduct? Remember the Bill of Rights only protects you from the government not other citizens or companies. Would you want/try to make it illegal to record anything that is happening in public?
Life recorders that store an entire life time of audio/video data will come if the data storage and recording equipment become cheap enough. When that happens, what will do?
I'm just wondering if it'll be within 5 or 10 years that they start doing some form of ads. I'm fairly certain that they'll do it. It's only a matter of time. If they do it like those google ads tons of people might not even notice. Sad isn't it. I'm wondering which would be best for them. A simple banner ad at the top, or in that left nav bar. Well, its not really like I even notice slashdot's ads, so why should I care about wikipedia getting them?
I just hope that they aren't annoying ads. People around here seem to think that ads are the end of the world. Honestly, come on. I remember having ads on book covers in elementary school. I remember what we did was put the book covers on so that the blank side was on the outside and the ads were all towards the book. I'd much rather put up with some ads than some PBS style fund raising. (Speaking of Fund Raising that pushes my buttons is the public school sending both my kids home selling their crap. Grr. At least, wikipedia doesn't try to have its users go out and sell something to raise money.)
So are you suggesting that it be pitch black unless theres a car coming by so everyone without one stays inside all night?
Yes, I can't help, but think that it would reduce night time crime. I'd be for business parking lot lighting as we all actually use that, but not street side lights. Cars have their own lights. Why should we build street lights?
It's a really unfortunate choice of names, this "T-ray." Inevitably, it wants to make a person associate these waves with x-rays. Photons are photons, but as far as these guys go healthwise, it's pretty certain they'll have more in common with radio or microwaves than x-rays. Heck, the reason they call them x-rays and gamma rays in the first place is because they're in the regime where it makes sense to talk about photons as particles, rather than waves. And they call them "radio waves" and "microwaves" because THEY are down in the more wave-like regime. Just call it "millimeter wave" and be done with it, before we get people claiming they're getting ARS from T-ray devices.
Are you kidding? That's most likely the way we will get the government to stop scanning everyone! Its bad for our privacy health if we are constantly scanned.