Think about the government's track record dealing with citizen's data. Now think about continually submitting your whereabouts and details of your environment to the government to the level of detail that you describe. There's no way I'd trust anyone not to change the terms of use for the data without informing anyone...
Ah, but can you do without this neat techy toy or new cell phone? You can't hack it, but it does monitor you 24x7 and does as much scanning of the surroundings as we can fit in there. We aren't really going to tell everyone about the 24x7 monitoring till about the 3-4 generation when everyone has one of our handy devices and can't live without one. Do you use a black berry, a pager, a cellphone? Any of those could be used to monitor you, and depending on your level of need; you couldn't just give it up.
Even before that, safe for which humans? Plenty of us wouldn't care about something that only kills people on the coasts, if we live inland, but those people on the coasts get to vote too, most places. If wave rockers on the Texas coast affect erosion of the few remaining sandbars protecting New Orleans, Texas may think they're great, but Louisiana won't.
Obviously safe for my/our group of humans. You are thinking regionally at the state level where some states can fight against each other. But what's really going to be it is when the US as a whole finds a magic energy source that just means messing up one spot on the globe that we never see. Damn, sounds like I've almost described oil, but oil only messes up far more than the domestic politics of the oil producing nations.
If we had some solar farm over Nevada, or tidal energy generating sources along most of our entire sea coast, if a foreign ship dared beach itself on them, they'll be paying out for the down time and the replacement costs and the clean up costs. You don't think that we'd really let some foreign interests trump domestic concerns do you? The whole mess with oil can be summed up by saying it gives some domestic folk interests in foreign resources and such. Heck, we care about the price per a gallon of gas or a barrel of oil.
What if almost the entire US didn't care about the price of gas or barrels of oil from foreign markets because we were using sustainable domestic energy sources? From a military point of view, we'd be much better off. If that time ever came, the US would never take part in any more middle east peace talks and would really start not caring about the entire region. Part of their problem with us is that our government has to take an interest in those countries for our oil resources. If we didn't need oil resources, we'd let them rot.
Find out how even wave and tide, if scaled up to produce tens or hundreds of gigawatts, means thousands of small boat accidents a year, plus Manatees and probably many other species will inevitably become extinct and whole ecologies such as the everglades will likely follow. For any power source, read up on where it is to be located, and the human costs of sending the power to where it is to be used. THERE IS NO SAFE!
Be honest though. As long as it is safe for humans, we don't care if it kills off every life form that we aren't actively breeding/farming on this planet. That's really how much we care about nature and wild life. PETA may think animals ought to be saved, but, truthfully, every other party would kill animals in hordes as long as we got anything positive from it like meals most of us think taste good.
If the detectors are that cheap and small that they can squeeze them into cellphones, just stick them into street lights and then (assuming the terrorists dont have access to cranes and ladders) you have a bit more trust in your data.
Sensor networks are a great idea for some things, but maybe not this one...
I had my sci-fi wierd tech thought for the moment. You combine a GPS + Cellphone + large media storage device + small scale tricorder + camera + a central government database to dump the results. Wait. I used the star trek's tricorder term since most are familiar with what that does. I doesn't care if you are interested in finding radiation, most-wanted criminals, keeping community tabs on registered sex offenders, "illegal" drugs, "illegal" chemicals, environmental damage, protecting wildlife, hunting wild life, high EM sources, or people/things with bad odor or just taking random data samples all over the place with your toy.
It almost doesn't even matter if you are looking for anything; just that you have millions of people taking data samples and submitting the results to you. Think about what you could do with the data even low quality data. I've been having the thought real-time census data-collection for awhile. Cellphones + some monitoring tools might come close to that.
This of it this way, if your cell phone could ID harmful chemicals on your food or children's made in China toys and let you know what shouldn't be there and to remove, would you use it? Think of just using it as a food poison detector and submitting bad food results to the FDA.
Now, you say that using my logic, one could ban the Internet because it is more effective than the printing press. This is incorrect. First of all, there isn't such a thing as "too much" freedom of speech, or "too much" freedom of the press. As I already demonstrated, however, there is such as thing as "too much" right to bear arms. Therefore, while no line needs to be drawn for freedom of the press, one does need to be drawn for the right to bear arms. Secondly, and more importantly, I am not arguing that assault rifles are too effective; I am arguing that while they might be protected by the letter of the law, they are not covered by the spirit of it.
Um, yeah if I was a wolf in government, I couldn't care less if you talked bad about me. I would care if you actually had the means to remove me by force though. This is the main reason so many in government could really care less about freedom of press and come down like a pile of bricks on bearing weapons.
I wish Anonymous well, but Scientologists and their cousins in the Landmark Forum are beyond reason. And fighting cults rarely works unless they're small and focused around a single charismatic leader. Both Scientology and Landmark are too big and widespread for that, and fighting them will probably only make them stronger.
Um, I think that the difference between a religion and a cult is that cults disappear after that leader dies. Religions go on for along time afterward. Just look at christianity. I've been listening to my wife tell her family about some Mormon video thing that they've been watching about how the book of Mormon is fake because scientists don't use it and the Bible is an authority because scientists can use it and to find these events in the past. Its not worth trying to tell her the truth.
If I used an accurate US history book, and added either European or Asian history and then laid a moral belief system on top of course scientists 500 years from now would be able to use my book to find things in the past. My wife didn't get it. The Bible was the Jewish history/moral story book. Big freaking deal. Of course, almost everything it mentions almost certainly happened in one form or another to the Jews. That doesn't mean that it was handed down by God. It means a group has lasted a very long time and kept their written history/culture together and scientists surprise discover that its accurate to find sites with. It doesn't mean God or any other pagan diety came down and spelled out the being of the book for the clan's ancestors though regardless of what the clan's high priest wrote in it.
I think Scientology has just as much right to be called a religion as christainty. Christains generally tell me that I'll burn in hell for not following their belief system. How is that any different from Scientologists playing telemarketer/spammer? If anything I can actually understand a religion using those means to spread itself. Doesn't mean I like or follow that religion, but I can understand it. Think how most people raise their kids. I never wanted to attend christain churches, but was pretty much forced to go growing up. Most of those like me become christains that show up and give something to the church that they attend. I'm kinda the exception rather than the rule though I do show up and keep my mouth closed if I need to attend. My home life is easier that way.
Any "Church" that charges for its teachings and also has them copyrighted to prevent free distribution is not a church it's a scam at best and a dangerous cult at worst.
I had dealings with them about 10 years ago. I ended up paying GBP30 for a course just to get out of the hard sell and even though I never did the course the often phoned and wrote letters of about 5 years after.
Um, christainty asks for ten percent income tax to go to your local church if I recall correctly. How is charging for the books any different than getting tithes?
A UAV is controlled by a COMPUTER which has no concept of instruction like what I just gave. It could announce itself in some fashion digitally, which would mean that planes that have digital "situational awareness" systems with RADAR and XM Satellite weather might display them just fine - but many planes don't even have a RADIO! (planes with no radio do not fly over major cities - you'd be shocked at how much airspace this still allows)
I don't fly unless I really have to. There is a part of me that has never trusted transportation that I or a family member isn't driving. I don't trust the drivers of planes, trains, and buses. UAVs are coming and soon. A few months ago I came across a page relating air plane safety and what the effects where with the FAA were after words was. You only have air traffic controllers because of a couple major air planes running into each other. It seemed like every safety device that you have on the plane is because of a couple of other planes crashed to the FAA finally did something.
My predictions: some entity will launch a small number of these and they will prove popular for everyone. (I'm talking local cops, high school sporting events pretending to be big leagues, county wide mapping, traffic monitoring, wild life monitoring, watching natural lands where people aren't supposed to be.) Now either one of two things will happen a UAV will be hit by a small plane with less than five people aboard or it'll be hit by a major airline causing either the plane to crash or make an emergency landing.
If the smaller craft is lost, I hate to say it, but not much will be done. Oh if you are lucky it "might" spark off ATC for UAV but I wouldn't count on it. If a couple of larger aircraft go down, then one of two thing things will happen. UAVs will either been banned out right, which would be a big shame, or the FAA decides to pause all UAV until ATC are upgraded and there are master federal ATC that have control over every human flying object up there. Planes that can't download and fly according to the new ATC rules might be grandfathered in, or they might be deemed a safety risk and all planes would have to have some new hardware downloading from ATCs where everyone else is.
That all planes aren't required to have a radio shows what effect grandfathering in crap allows.
Every federal agency should have to periodically justify its existence and some should be abolished. An agency can be outdated or it's functions better done by another agency or the states. Unfortunately the federal government has become a jobs program.
I've always thought that its been that way since the whole New Deal thing.
they really ought to teach basic genetics in schools.
Um, they did back when I went to high school. What they really need to do is do a better job of teaching stat math so terms like 1/X won't confuse those that made it through high school educated people when the sample size is smaller than X.
In college, you learn most stats, polls, and surveys are just plan lies to push you in the desired direction.
It's precisely because of the "free rider" problem that this is the case. It's cheaper to use the roads, but only because truckers don't have to pay their fair share of the road's maintenance. They use the roads more than the average citizen, and cause way more damage to said road, but don't have to pay proportionally more for it's use. If they did, the cost of shipping by truck would be more than by train.
Blinks. Around here roads and highways are paid through GAS TAXES! Um, my wife and I don't have to make 2-3 trips across the state a day. A trucker on a route may be driving back and forth across their route several times a day or maybe once every couple of days. Well, those truckers paid for a ton more gas than my family will ever use and they pay more in gas taxes than I do! Those average citizens are the free riders that the truckers would like to kick off the highway. (That would actually make the highways safer for the truckers to use.)
It would never happen because families like mine would vote against any person or party that tried to stop us from using or highways. We may only really use it 3-4 times a year, but still all those families like mine out number the truckers in voters. Actually, if you consider how often we buy products that were delivered via the highway, we most likely are indirectly using the highway by those truckers.
I'm going to let you know how my "teen" RPG christmas went. Shadow Hearts 2 & 3, XenoSaga 1-3, Tales of the Abyss, and Disagea 1 & 2. So far I've made it mostly through Disagea 1, beat Tales of the Abyss, beat XenoSaga 1 and at the final dungeon of XenoSaga 2. I got feed up with XS2's annoyingly difficult enemies that I couldn't just level up and get past so I started Shadow Hearts 2 last night.
I have nearly the entire FF Series and it's rated Teen and I found really nothing in it to object to... I have two kids one 8 years old the other 10. Disagea was too boring for them to watch Daddy play it. Tales of the Abyss's main character jerk's favorite expression throughout the game was "What the hell?" Hell used in that manner in our household is considered cussing. Cussing isn't allowed for us or our kids. Other than Daddy reminding the kids every 5 minutes that's not language that we use in this house hold there wasn't really anything I found objectionable for the kids to watch. Well, o.k. Daddy cheering when Ion finally dies rather than being kidnapped for the nth time was "bad" thing that they didn't see, but other than that I couldn't find fault other other than minor language.
Now, we start XenoSaga we bribed the rates board to get a Teen rating. If you took all the cutscenes in this game and had the movie rates people view them, it would be an obvious R rated movie. This RPG should have been M for adult themed material and extreme blood and gore. It took a bit before my wife and I encountered why this game should have had an M rather than T rating. Alien's invade the main character's star ship and slaughter nearly every one that you had spent the last hour running around and meeting. We aren't just talking about lifeless bodies on the floor. We are talking about splattered bodies on the floors and walls with cutscenes of the random folks getting their head smashed in by aliens. The "adult themed content" wasn't sex. In that society, they are basically using slightly modified clones as slave labor and that's legal and o.k. They bring back the dead as cyborgs and the cyborgs are owned by who ever brings them back. It's a great RPG and I recommend playing it if you can rent it and spare oh 40-45 hours most of which are watching great cutscenes. Actually, I guess T could be o.k. if I've not been in the habit of letting my 8-10 year olds play nearly every T rated game that I have. If they were 13-15 I would have no problems with them viewing this content and asking questions about the society in question.
XS2 had excessive blood splash up/out of every organic enemy. Heck, I think that I saw it splash out of the robots as well. I was actually more annoyed by that rather than finding it something to object to. I just tuned it out. I wished that I could actually turn it off so the battles could end 2-3 seconds sooner. Load times for normal random encounter type battles sucked in that game.
Now I just started Shadow Hearts 2 last night. After the intro clip of a group of soldiers inside of a church all being owned in a very scary manner. It was deemed that kids shouldn't watch this one either. There are some very gay/queer shop keepers, the enemy priest looks/walks like it, and the big guy caring the lumber kinda looks like it as well. Other than that completely coming out of left field, so far it's not been too bad other than the cutscenes and the actual plot. So if you have gay/homosexual issues, Shadow Hearts may not be family viewing in your household. I could actually have put up with it, but why oh why did they have to zoom in on the guys shaking butt and place his dialog over it when you are first introduced to them? It's almost as bad as the zooming in on Jessica's boobs in DQ8.
BTW, please save the commerce-needs-transport retort, it costs four times as much to ship something by truck compared to rail.
I doubt that's an accurate stat. Why? Because if it was, UPS, FedEx, or the US Postal Service would stick their trucks on the train to transfer packages from point A to point B. That those companies don't do that, means that it isn't cheaper for a business to use truck transport than rail transport. Let's be honest, most businesses use shipping companies to transport everything except their personnel. You have generally have next day Air or week long ground transport shipping options. If it was really, cheaper to ship a parcel from point A to point B at the expense of time, then all said shipping companies would list it as an option.
One of the biggest problems of being able to type in a question and have an answer (or sorts) fired back seconds later is that you become very used to dealing facts but are in danger of lacking understanding. Back when we relied more on books, you'd often go through several books and many pages looking for something and along the way see all manner of peripheral information on the subject which over time builds in to a much broader grasp of the subject and a better basis for joining the dots and developing understanding. I suspect that in the unlikely event that the web disappeared overnight, we'd have a whole generation or two of apparantly 'smart' people floundering badly.
Considering how much I use the internet to look up instructions manuals to products that I own, or use wikipedia to find stuff rather than look in 4-5 different sets of encyclopedias and hope that the topic made it into one of them, I'd agree. I spent slightly more than 2K on my last computer. If I recall what my parents told me that those encyclopedia things cost it was around $800-900 for one set and it seemed that most of my relatives had 2-3 different sets. I and many others would be ticked at having to buy printed reference materials just to start looking at a subject rather than googling something and finding it in wikipedia. The quality of life with the internet is better than without it. I couldn't tell you how difficult my life would be if I had to actually keep track of and organize all the printed materials that come with tons of products just on the off chance that I'd need it.
I've never had to use the library for anything other than recreational reading since school. If the internet/google/wikipedia disappeared, I and many others would have to learn the locations of those places and figure out how to use them. In all the time commuting to and than looking up just the names of reference materials in libraries, we'd become really, really grateful for the internet/google/wikipedia.
When I peer-review papers (I'm currently in law school), it's very obvious which students started their research with academic sources, and which started on Google. The problem can be quickly solved by professors taking the approach seen at my institution: students failing to have in-depth research on the topic get poor marks.
When your peers that like using google review your work, do they give you poor marks for starting with academic sources rather than google?
You know weirdly, I'd have been o.k. with it, but now reading the slashdot headline, I'm against it for some weird reason. Why is this?
I'm o.k. with having pigs and other animals genetically engineered to grow ideal human organs for transplant into humans. I could care less about the animal. I'm also o.k. with vat like bacteria/yeast making various human hormones and other things. I don't care about animals of other species being mass slaughtered for our benefit. I eat at McDonald's every day so I enjoy the fruits of mass slaughtering cattle. It's got to be that it's in a slashdot headline that makes something about this inherently wrong.
This issue isn't just limited to AT&T customers. It affects everyone because AT&T is a tier 1 provider, meaning that they provide backbone access for several ISPs. They are looking to sniff *all* traffic, not just traffic of their DSL customers.
Um, isn't that illegal under telephone wiretapping laws? AT&T doesn't have the right to drop in and listen to all the phone conversations over its lines; it shouldn't have the right to selectively drop in and listen in to data going over its lines either.
If I'm a business subleasing services from AT&T out to others, wouldn't AT&T snooping on my data be a violation of both my company's rights and my user's rights?
Some government agencies might want to do this and have wiretapping ability with court oversight for listening in to telephone conversations, but the same set of laws should prevent AT&T and other ISPs from listening/snooping onto data going over bandwidth that they've sold under existing wiretapping laws. I hope some one here knows the that's the case or not.
The system could also "automatically detect frustration or stress in the user" and "offer and provide assistance accordingly".
Great! I can just see it now. Clippy pops up on my screen: "It looks like you are extremely frustrated with your current job? Would you like my assistance in composing your resume?"
They'll be stunned when they get the tech to actually read most of the workers minds... They'll find a good percentage of people thinking about clubbing their stupid boss over the head at any given time. Clippy will pop up and say. I see you are frustrated and it is caused by your stupid boss, would you like too see an animation of your boss having a humorous death?
Occasionally, adults 18-25 "lure" young girls 14-17 into sexual encounters. What usually happens is some socially inept 18-22 year old spends several weeks/months talking to a 14-16 year old online, the usually talk on the phone a bit, sometimes talk via web cam, etc. then they meet. If the older person isnt' arrested before the meeting, they sometimes have sex and everything blows up.
I remember when I was 18 in college spending almost all my free time in the computer labs in chat rooms trying to hook up with any girls remotely my age in my state or hopefully even in the current city. I remember chatting with several girls that were in the 14-16 age range and all were like 4 states away or in Canada. At the rate I socialize at, they'd have turned 18 before I got ready to do anything. No one really considers how innocent/sheltered most of these young 18-22 college guys are.
Every one seems to think 14-16 aged girls are naive pure white and that males are 15+ are all ready to have sex with them. Well, that might actually be the case, but girls 14+ do have a brain and they generally do try to chose guys with some sort of income or what they see as social status. Social status could be high school jock, which they really know means almost nothing outside of high school, or college student which means the guy at least is attending higher education and is likely to make more money in the long run. The ideal case would be finding some recent grad that just got hired, but high school girls aren't attractive to that age group. Actually, they are attractive, but the big disadvantage that makes them unattractive is the whole jail bait thing. No 18+ guy with half a brain dates any 17 and under female because they are all jail bait.
I managed to find my wife in my college computer lab. College computer labs are a great general age verification tool as people under 18 generally don't go to college and usually only students their hang out in the computer labs.
Really.. When I was younger I told my parents what all my email addresses were, and I would never have created a new hotmail, etc address without telling them...... Someone needs a dose of reality.
My mom didn't know my high school or college assigned e-mail addresses. She doesn't know my yahoo e-mail. I'm fairly certain that she doesn't have my current work e-mail address. My dad has that one though.
My parents live about a 5-10 minute drive away. If I need to talk to them, I call or go over there. I usually only go over there during major holidays and never call them. Mom has my home phone and the wife's cell phone. We get a phone call about every other day.
1. I'd make sure teh IRS was overseeing the 5% federal sales tax and remove all other federal taxes. Everything has to fit within that 5% though. 2. No more subsidies for anything over one decade. 3. All drugs medical and recreational can be released on the market after 24 hours of animal tests with an additional 20% tax on all recreational drugs. 4. I hate those ads, but really, I want no government ad censoring at all. 5. SS and Medicare can live. They just have to get only a slice of that 5% though. 8. I think all elected offices should be one term only of an entire decade. You can't resign or be fired though. You've got one decade to succeed or really mess up. We hold exit elections when you leave office and you can be deported or shot if the population didn't think you did a good job in office.
14. With my new federal sales tax everyone here is being taxed. So if you can prove that you've been in the US for 24 hours and have made let's say $100 of purchases of US goods within the US then congrates your a US citizen. 15. I agree. But english changes too much. From now on, we are converting all government forms to latin and they all must be filled in with latin if you want them to be processed.
16. I like that Mandatory civil service idea. I think that city, state, and feds should be required to hire new high school or college grads. It would help keep government pay low. I think voting, drinking, sex, marriage, smoking, doing random drugs, entering the military or government service should all be legal at age 16.
19. I've never like abortions. I'll start a federal creche where every person given up for adoption goes. Biological parents have no rights over those offspring, but have to pay a 5% additional child support tax and write a yearly biography have medical history taken, and write an essay entitled "Why I chose to give you up."
20 & 21. I'm very different from you here. The government no longer recognizes the institution of marriage. If you want to, go ahead, but it's just a religious service and has no government function what so ever. As far as the government cares, you can register or dissolve a marriage with 5 minutes of paper work, but a "marriage" doesn't give either party additional property or legal rights over either party any more.
22, 23, & 24. I'm very different on the educational front. I think education is over rated. I think all education should be revamped about what citizens actually need to know to get by in life, fill out forms and effectively complain to the government to change crap. Everything else educational wise is bonus. All basic education should be expected to be finished by age 15. By age 16, you are either working for the government for 5 years, or in a min. wage job, or preparing to go to college. I'm very mixed on the entire work force needing college. My educational policy is that all schools from preschool to university are no longer tax supported and get no city, state, or federal funds. Every school makes up a bill of how much that grade's education will cost, and the students will have to prepay the costs. School isn't required any more, but if you want to go there, then you are going to see that it has an upfront cost. The schools can choose to fine discipline problem students by increasing their next bill by a factor of ten. If they won't pay, they don't have to go to that school anymore. If they do pay 10x more than everyone else, then they should be taking it seriously.
Where I am a bit radical is that I'd actually use the OLPC and require one to be purchased per every US student. I'd also require that every US textbook is automatically owned by the US government and put up on a federal website that all those OLPC laptops should be able to access. The government no longer funds most research. If the government does happen to fund any part of your research though, the government automatically owns all of it and you are required to write up textbook type
Today. Tomorrow children. In a generation or 2, everyone will have them.
This is one of the reasons why sex offender monitoring and limiting programs gives me the creeps. If they aren't safe enough to be released into society, leave them in jail. If they aren't a danger and have completed their sentence don't monitor them.
It's a very short logic jump of why are we just monitoring sex offenders and not just all previous criminals? So let's do that as well.
I think schools will want them on their students. The UK has a love affair with big brother so they'll do it before the US. The US actually has some use for that religious right. Stopping anything numbering people is one of the few things in the bible that most of them remember and will vote against. For the short term, I can't see any school administrator in the south suggesting tagging all their students.
Parents just have to give their kids a cell phone... and coming soon the cell phone companies will provide that tracking option for you with a handy web interface so you'll know just where your kid/wife has been from anywhere with an internet connection. We won't put up with the government publicly doing that, but we'd want to do it to each other.
Um, we aren't raised to live in a democracy. Public schools really are designed for most us to be happy in a factory/prison situation. Most of us have zero ability to change school rules/policy/or personnel while/before we attend a given school. The school can and will treat the students anyway that they want.
I have lots of bad thoughts to think about my former university and my present employer, but I'm never going to say them or post them on a website. I will bitch to my family about it and maybe to handful of coworkers/friends, but it will be people with a vested interested not to tell those over me what I said. Us underlings don't have any other rights other than the right of moving away if it gets too bad.
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Think about the government's track record dealing with citizen's data. Now think about continually submitting your whereabouts and details of your environment to the government to the level of detail that you describe. There's no way I'd trust anyone not to change the terms of use for the data without informing anyone...
Ah, but can you do without this neat techy toy or new cell phone? You can't hack it, but it does monitor you 24x7 and does as much scanning of the surroundings as we can fit in there. We aren't really going to tell everyone about the 24x7 monitoring till about the 3-4 generation when everyone has one of our handy devices and can't live without one. Do you use a black berry, a pager, a cellphone? Any of those could be used to monitor you, and depending on your level of need; you couldn't just give it up.
Even before that, safe for which humans? Plenty of us wouldn't care about something that only kills people on the coasts, if we live inland, but those people on the coasts get to vote too, most places. If wave rockers on the Texas coast affect erosion of the few remaining sandbars protecting New Orleans, Texas may think they're great, but Louisiana won't.
Obviously safe for my/our group of humans. You are thinking regionally at the state level where some states can fight against each other. But what's really going to be it is when the US as a whole finds a magic energy source that just means messing up one spot on the globe that we never see. Damn, sounds like I've almost described oil, but oil only messes up far more than the domestic politics of the oil producing nations.
If we had some solar farm over Nevada, or tidal energy generating sources along most of our entire sea coast, if a foreign ship dared beach itself on them, they'll be paying out for the down time and the replacement costs and the clean up costs. You don't think that we'd really let some foreign interests trump domestic concerns do you? The whole mess with oil can be summed up by saying it gives some domestic folk interests in foreign resources and such. Heck, we care about the price per a gallon of gas or a barrel of oil.
What if almost the entire US didn't care about the price of gas or barrels of oil from foreign markets because we were using sustainable domestic energy sources? From a military point of view, we'd be much better off. If that time ever came, the US would never take part in any more middle east peace talks and would really start not caring about the entire region. Part of their problem with us is that our government has to take an interest in those countries for our oil resources. If we didn't need oil resources, we'd let them rot.
Find out how even wave and tide, if scaled up to produce tens or hundreds of gigawatts, means thousands of small boat accidents a year, plus Manatees and probably many other species will inevitably become extinct and whole ecologies such as the everglades will likely follow. For any power source, read up on where it is to be located, and the human costs of sending the power to where it is to be used. THERE IS NO SAFE!
Be honest though. As long as it is safe for humans, we don't care if it kills off every life form that we aren't actively breeding/farming on this planet. That's really how much we care about nature and wild life. PETA may think animals ought to be saved, but, truthfully, every other party would kill animals in hordes as long as we got anything positive from it like meals most of us think taste good.
If the detectors are that cheap and small that they can squeeze them into cellphones, just stick them into street lights and then (assuming the terrorists dont have access to cranes and ladders) you have a bit more trust in your data.
Sensor networks are a great idea for some things, but maybe not this one...
I had my sci-fi wierd tech thought for the moment. You combine a GPS + Cellphone + large media storage device + small scale tricorder + camera + a central government database to dump the results. Wait. I used the star trek's tricorder term since most are familiar with what that does. I doesn't care if you are interested in finding radiation, most-wanted criminals, keeping community tabs on registered sex offenders, "illegal" drugs, "illegal" chemicals, environmental damage, protecting wildlife, hunting wild life, high EM sources, or people/things with bad odor or just taking random data samples all over the place with your toy.
It almost doesn't even matter if you are looking for anything; just that you have millions of people taking data samples and submitting the results to you. Think about what you could do with the data even low quality data. I've been having the thought real-time census data-collection for awhile. Cellphones + some monitoring tools might come close to that.
This of it this way, if your cell phone could ID harmful chemicals on your food or children's made in China toys and let you know what shouldn't be there and to remove, would you use it? Think of just using it as a food poison detector and submitting bad food results to the FDA.
Now, you say that using my logic, one could ban the Internet because it is more effective than the printing press. This is incorrect. First of all, there isn't such a thing as "too much" freedom of speech, or "too much" freedom of the press. As I already demonstrated, however, there is such as thing as "too much" right to bear arms. Therefore, while no line needs to be drawn for freedom of the press, one does need to be drawn for the right to bear arms. Secondly, and more importantly, I am not arguing that assault rifles are too effective; I am arguing that while they might be protected by the letter of the law, they are not covered by the spirit of it.
Um, yeah if I was a wolf in government, I couldn't care less if you talked bad about me. I would care if you actually had the means to remove me by force though. This is the main reason so many in government could really care less about freedom of press and come down like a pile of bricks on bearing weapons.
I wish Anonymous well, but Scientologists and their cousins in the Landmark Forum are beyond reason. And fighting cults rarely works unless they're small and focused around a single charismatic leader. Both Scientology and Landmark are too big and widespread for that, and fighting them will probably only make them stronger.
Um, I think that the difference between a religion and a cult is that cults disappear after that leader dies. Religions go on for along time afterward. Just look at christianity. I've been listening to my wife tell her family about some Mormon video thing that they've been watching about how the book of Mormon is fake because scientists don't use it and the Bible is an authority because scientists can use it and to find these events in the past. Its not worth trying to tell her the truth.
If I used an accurate US history book, and added either European or Asian history and then laid a moral belief system on top of course scientists 500 years from now would be able to use my book to find things in the past. My wife didn't get it. The Bible was the Jewish history/moral story book. Big freaking deal. Of course, almost everything it mentions almost certainly happened in one form or another to the Jews. That doesn't mean that it was handed down by God. It means a group has lasted a very long time and kept their written history/culture together and scientists surprise discover that its accurate to find sites with. It doesn't mean God or any other pagan diety came down and spelled out the being of the book for the clan's ancestors though regardless of what the clan's high priest wrote in it.
I think Scientology has just as much right to be called a religion as christainty. Christains generally tell me that I'll burn in hell for not following their belief system. How is that any different from Scientologists playing telemarketer/spammer? If anything I can actually understand a religion using those means to spread itself. Doesn't mean I like or follow that religion, but I can understand it. Think how most people raise their kids. I never wanted to attend christain churches, but was pretty much forced to go growing up. Most of those like me become christains that show up and give something to the church that they attend. I'm kinda the exception rather than the rule though I do show up and keep my mouth closed if I need to attend. My home life is easier that way.
Any "Church" that charges for its teachings and also has them copyrighted to prevent free distribution is not a church it's a scam at best and a dangerous cult at worst.
I had dealings with them about 10 years ago. I ended up paying GBP30 for a course just to get out of the hard sell and even though I never did the course the often phoned and wrote letters of about 5 years after.
Um, christainty asks for ten percent income tax to go to your local church if I recall correctly. How is charging for the books any different than getting tithes?
A UAV is controlled by a COMPUTER which has no concept of instruction like what I just gave. It could announce itself in some fashion digitally, which would mean that planes that have digital "situational awareness" systems with RADAR and XM Satellite weather might display them just fine - but many planes don't even have a RADIO! (planes with no radio do not fly over major cities - you'd be shocked at how much airspace this still allows)
I don't fly unless I really have to. There is a part of me that has never trusted transportation that I or a family member isn't driving. I don't trust the drivers of planes, trains, and buses. UAVs are coming and soon. A few months ago I came across a page relating air plane safety and what the effects where with the FAA were after words was. You only have air traffic controllers because of a couple major air planes running into each other. It seemed like every safety device that you have on the plane is because of a couple of other planes crashed to the FAA finally did something.
My predictions: some entity will launch a small number of these and they will prove popular for everyone. (I'm talking local cops, high school sporting events pretending to be big leagues, county wide mapping, traffic monitoring, wild life monitoring, watching natural lands where people aren't supposed to be.) Now either one of two things will happen a UAV will be hit by a small plane with less than five people aboard or it'll be hit by a major airline causing either the plane to crash or make an emergency landing.
If the smaller craft is lost, I hate to say it, but not much will be done. Oh if you are lucky it "might" spark off ATC for UAV but I wouldn't count on it.
If a couple of larger aircraft go down, then one of two thing things will happen. UAVs will either been banned out right, which would be a big shame, or the FAA decides to pause all UAV until ATC are upgraded and there are master federal ATC that have control over every human flying object up there. Planes that can't download and fly according to the new ATC rules might be grandfathered in, or they might be deemed a safety risk and all planes would have to have some new hardware downloading from ATCs where everyone else is.
That all planes aren't required to have a radio shows what effect grandfathering in crap allows.
Let's buy as many of them as we can, and plant them in Washington DC.
Reminds me of this manga:
http://www.onemanga.com/BioMeat_-_Nectar/
Every federal agency should have to periodically justify its existence and some should be abolished. An agency can be outdated or it's functions better done by another agency or the states. Unfortunately the federal government has become a jobs program.
I've always thought that its been that way since the whole New Deal thing.
they really ought to teach basic genetics in schools.
Um, they did back when I went to high school. What they really need to do is do a better job of teaching stat math so terms like 1/X won't confuse those that made it through high school educated people when the sample size is smaller than X.
In college, you learn most stats, polls, and surveys are just plan lies to push you in the desired direction.
It's precisely because of the "free rider" problem that this is the case. It's cheaper to use the roads, but only because truckers don't have to pay their fair share of the road's maintenance. They use the roads more than the average citizen, and cause way more damage to said road, but don't have to pay proportionally more for it's use. If they did, the cost of shipping by truck would be more than by train.
Blinks. Around here roads and highways are paid through GAS TAXES! Um, my wife and I don't have to make 2-3 trips across the state a day. A trucker on a route may be driving back and forth across their route several times a day or maybe once every couple of days. Well, those truckers paid for a ton more gas than my family will ever use and they pay more in gas taxes than I do! Those average citizens are the free riders that the truckers would like to kick off the highway. (That would actually make the highways safer for the truckers to use.)
It would never happen because families like mine would vote against any person or party that tried to stop us from using or highways. We may only really use it 3-4 times a year, but still all those families like mine out number the truckers in voters. Actually, if you consider how often we buy products that were delivered via the highway, we most likely are indirectly using the highway by those truckers.
I'm going to let you know how my "teen" RPG christmas went. Shadow Hearts 2 & 3, XenoSaga 1-3, Tales of the Abyss, and Disagea 1 & 2. So far I've made it mostly through Disagea 1, beat Tales of the Abyss, beat XenoSaga 1 and at the final dungeon of XenoSaga 2. I got feed up with XS2's annoyingly difficult enemies that I couldn't just level up and get past so I started Shadow Hearts 2 last night.
I have nearly the entire FF Series and it's rated Teen and I found really nothing in it to object to... I have two kids one 8 years old the other 10. Disagea was too boring for them to watch Daddy play it. Tales of the Abyss's main character jerk's favorite expression throughout the game was "What the hell?" Hell used in that manner in our household is considered cussing. Cussing isn't allowed for us or our kids. Other than Daddy reminding the kids every 5 minutes that's not language that we use in this house hold there wasn't really anything I found objectionable for the kids to watch. Well, o.k. Daddy cheering when Ion finally dies rather than being kidnapped for the nth time was "bad" thing that they didn't see, but other than that I couldn't find fault other other than minor language.
Now, we start XenoSaga we bribed the rates board to get a Teen rating. If you took all the cutscenes in this game and had the movie rates people view them, it would be an obvious R rated movie. This RPG should have been M for adult themed material and extreme blood and gore. It took a bit before my wife and I encountered why this game should have had an M rather than T rating. Alien's invade the main character's star ship and slaughter nearly every one that you had spent the last hour running around and meeting. We aren't just talking about lifeless bodies on the floor. We are talking about splattered bodies on the floors and walls with cutscenes of the random folks getting their head smashed in by aliens. The "adult themed content" wasn't sex. In that society, they are basically using slightly modified clones as slave labor and that's legal and o.k. They bring back the dead as cyborgs and the cyborgs are owned by who ever brings them back. It's a great RPG and I recommend playing it if you can rent it and spare oh 40-45 hours most of which are watching great cutscenes. Actually, I guess T could be o.k. if I've not been in the habit of letting my 8-10 year olds play nearly every T rated game that I have. If they were 13-15 I would have no problems with them viewing this content and asking questions about the society in question.
XS2 had excessive blood splash up/out of every organic enemy. Heck, I think that I saw it splash out of the robots as well. I was actually more annoyed by that rather than finding it something to object to. I just tuned it out. I wished that I could actually turn it off so the battles could end 2-3 seconds sooner. Load times for normal random encounter type battles sucked in that game.
Now I just started Shadow Hearts 2 last night. After the intro clip of a group of soldiers inside of a church all being owned in a very scary manner. It was deemed that kids shouldn't watch this one either. There are some very gay/queer shop keepers, the enemy priest looks/walks like it, and the big guy caring the lumber kinda looks like it as well. Other than that completely coming out of left field, so far it's not been too bad other than the cutscenes and the actual plot. So if you have gay/homosexual issues, Shadow Hearts may not be family viewing in your household. I could actually have put up with it, but why oh why did they have to zoom in on the guys shaking butt and place his dialog over it when you are first introduced to them? It's almost as bad as the zooming in on Jessica's boobs in DQ8.
BTW, please save the commerce-needs-transport retort, it costs four times as much to ship something by truck compared to rail.
I doubt that's an accurate stat. Why? Because if it was, UPS, FedEx, or the US Postal Service would stick their trucks on the train to transfer packages from point A to point B. That those companies don't do that, means that it isn't cheaper for a business to use truck transport than rail transport. Let's be honest, most businesses use shipping companies to transport everything except their personnel. You have generally have next day Air or week long ground transport shipping options. If it was really, cheaper to ship a parcel from point A to point B at the expense of time, then all said shipping companies would list it as an option.
One of the biggest problems of being able to type in a question and have an answer (or sorts) fired back seconds later is that you become very used to dealing facts but are in danger of lacking understanding.
Back when we relied more on books, you'd often go through several books and many pages looking for something and along the way see all manner of peripheral information on the subject which over time builds in to a much broader grasp of the subject and a better basis for joining the dots and developing understanding.
I suspect that in the unlikely event that the web disappeared overnight, we'd have a whole generation or two of apparantly 'smart' people floundering badly.
Considering how much I use the internet to look up instructions manuals to products that I own, or use wikipedia to find stuff rather than look in 4-5 different sets of encyclopedias and hope that the topic made it into one of them, I'd agree. I spent slightly more than 2K on my last computer. If I recall what my parents told me that those encyclopedia things cost it was around $800-900 for one set and it seemed that most of my relatives had 2-3 different sets. I and many others would be ticked at having to buy printed reference materials just to start looking at a subject rather than googling something and finding it in wikipedia. The quality of life with the internet is better than without it. I couldn't tell you how difficult my life would be if I had to actually keep track of and organize all the printed materials that come with tons of products just on the off chance that I'd need it.
I've never had to use the library for anything other than recreational reading since school. If the internet/google/wikipedia disappeared, I and many others would have to learn the locations of those places and figure out how to use them. In all the time commuting to and than looking up just the names of reference materials in libraries, we'd become really, really grateful for the internet/google/wikipedia.
When I peer-review papers (I'm currently in law school), it's very obvious which students started their research with academic sources, and which started on Google. The problem can be quickly solved by professors taking the approach seen at my institution: students failing to have in-depth research on the topic get poor marks.
When your peers that like using google review your work, do they give you poor marks for starting with academic sources rather than google?
You know weirdly, I'd have been o.k. with it, but now reading the slashdot headline, I'm against it for some weird reason. Why is this?
I'm o.k. with having pigs and other animals genetically engineered to grow ideal human organs for transplant into humans. I could care less about the animal. I'm also o.k. with vat like bacteria/yeast making various human hormones and other things. I don't care about animals of other species being mass slaughtered for our benefit. I eat at McDonald's every day so I enjoy the fruits of mass slaughtering cattle. It's got to be that it's in a slashdot headline that makes something about this inherently wrong.
This headline feels "wrong" for some reason.
This issue isn't just limited to AT&T customers. It affects everyone because AT&T is a tier 1 provider, meaning that they provide backbone access for several ISPs. They are looking to sniff *all* traffic, not just traffic of their DSL customers.
Um, isn't that illegal under telephone wiretapping laws? AT&T doesn't have the right to drop in and listen to all the phone conversations over its lines; it shouldn't have the right to selectively drop in and listen in to data going over its lines either.
If I'm a business subleasing services from AT&T out to others, wouldn't AT&T snooping on my data be a violation of both my company's rights and my user's rights?
Some government agencies might want to do this and have wiretapping ability with court oversight for listening in to telephone conversations, but the same set of laws should prevent AT&T and other ISPs from listening/snooping onto data going over bandwidth that they've sold under existing wiretapping laws. I hope some one here knows the that's the case or not.
The system could also "automatically detect frustration or stress in the user" and "offer and provide assistance accordingly".
Great! I can just see it now. Clippy pops up on my screen: "It looks like you are extremely frustrated with your current job? Would you like my assistance in composing your resume?"
They'll be stunned when they get the tech to actually read most of the workers minds... They'll find a good percentage of people thinking about clubbing their stupid boss over the head at any given time. Clippy will pop up and say. I see you are frustrated and it is caused by your stupid boss, would you like too see an animation of your boss having a humorous death?
Atari Frogger, PacMan, and Spider Fighter were the first games that I recall playing.
Occasionally, adults 18-25 "lure" young girls 14-17 into sexual encounters. What usually happens is some socially inept 18-22 year old spends several weeks/months talking to a 14-16 year old online, the usually talk on the phone a bit, sometimes talk via web cam, etc. then they meet. If the older person isnt' arrested before the meeting, they sometimes have sex and everything blows up.
I remember when I was 18 in college spending almost all my free time in the computer labs in chat rooms trying to hook up with any girls remotely my age in my state or hopefully even in the current city. I remember chatting with several girls that were in the 14-16 age range and all were like 4 states away or in Canada. At the rate I socialize at, they'd have turned 18 before I got ready to do anything. No one really considers how innocent/sheltered most of these young 18-22 college guys are.
Every one seems to think 14-16 aged girls are naive pure white and that males are 15+ are all ready to have sex with them. Well, that might actually be the case, but girls 14+ do have a brain and they generally do try to chose guys with some sort of income or what they see as social status. Social status could be high school jock, which they really know means almost nothing outside of high school, or college student which means the guy at least is attending higher education and is likely to make more money in the long run. The ideal case would be finding some recent grad that just got hired, but high school girls aren't attractive to that age group. Actually, they are attractive, but the big disadvantage that makes them unattractive is the whole jail bait thing. No 18+ guy with half a brain dates any 17 and under female because they are all jail bait.
I managed to find my wife in my college computer lab. College computer labs are a great general age verification tool as people under 18 generally don't go to college and usually only students their hang out in the computer labs.
Really.. When I was younger I told my parents what all my email addresses were, and I would never have created a new hotmail, etc address without telling them......
Someone needs a dose of reality.
My mom didn't know my high school or college assigned e-mail addresses. She doesn't know my yahoo e-mail. I'm fairly certain that she doesn't have my current work e-mail address. My dad has that one though.
My parents live about a 5-10 minute drive away. If I need to talk to them, I call or go over there. I usually only go over there during major holidays and never call them. Mom has my home phone and the wife's cell phone. We get a phone call about every other day.
I can see we are very different people.
1. I'd make sure teh IRS was overseeing the 5% federal sales tax and remove all other federal taxes. Everything has to fit within that 5% though.
2. No more subsidies for anything over one decade.
3. All drugs medical and recreational can be released on the market after 24 hours of animal tests with an additional 20% tax on all recreational drugs.
4. I hate those ads, but really, I want no government ad censoring at all.
5. SS and Medicare can live. They just have to get only a slice of that 5% though.
8. I think all elected offices should be one term only of an entire decade. You can't resign or be fired though. You've got one decade to succeed or really mess up. We hold exit elections when you leave office and you can be deported or shot if the population didn't think you did a good job in office.
14. With my new federal sales tax everyone here is being taxed. So if you can prove that you've been in the US for 24 hours and have made let's say $100 of purchases of US goods within the US then congrates your a US citizen.
15. I agree. But english changes too much. From now on, we are converting all government forms to latin and they all must be filled in with latin if you want them to be processed.
16. I like that Mandatory civil service idea. I think that city, state, and feds should be required to hire new high school or college grads. It would help keep government pay low.
I think voting, drinking, sex, marriage, smoking, doing random drugs, entering the military or government service should all be legal at age 16.
19. I've never like abortions. I'll start a federal creche where every person given up for adoption goes. Biological parents have no rights over those offspring, but have to pay a 5% additional child support tax and write a yearly biography have medical history taken, and write an essay entitled "Why I chose to give you up."
20 & 21. I'm very different from you here. The government no longer recognizes the institution of marriage. If you want to, go ahead, but it's just a religious service and has no government function what so ever. As far as the government cares, you can register or dissolve a marriage with 5 minutes of paper work, but a "marriage" doesn't give either party additional property or legal rights over either party any more.
22, 23, & 24. I'm very different on the educational front. I think education is over rated. I think all education should be revamped about what citizens actually need to know to get by in life, fill out forms and effectively complain to the government to change crap. Everything else educational wise is bonus. All basic education should be expected to be finished by age 15. By age 16, you are either working for the government for 5 years, or in a min. wage job, or preparing to go to college. I'm very mixed on the entire work force needing college. My educational policy is that all schools from preschool to university are no longer tax supported and get no city, state, or federal funds. Every school makes up a bill of how much that grade's education will cost, and the students will have to prepay the costs. School isn't required any more, but if you want to go there, then you are going to see that it has an upfront cost. The schools can choose to fine discipline problem students by increasing their next bill by a factor of ten. If they won't pay, they don't have to go to that school anymore. If they do pay 10x more than everyone else, then they should be taking it seriously.
Where I am a bit radical is that I'd actually use the OLPC and require one to be purchased per every US student. I'd also require that every US textbook is automatically owned by the US government and put up on a federal website that all those OLPC laptops should be able to access. The government no longer funds most research. If the government does happen to fund any part of your research though, the government automatically owns all of it and you are required to write up textbook type
Today.
Tomorrow children. In a generation or 2, everyone will have them.
This is one of the reasons why sex offender monitoring and limiting programs gives me the creeps. If they aren't safe enough to be released into society, leave them in jail. If they aren't a danger and have completed their sentence don't monitor them.
It's a very short logic jump of why are we just monitoring sex offenders and not just all previous criminals? So let's do that as well.
I think schools will want them on their students. The UK has a love affair with big brother so they'll do it before the US. The US actually has some use for that religious right. Stopping anything numbering people is one of the few things in the bible that most of them remember and will vote against. For the short term, I can't see any school administrator in the south suggesting tagging all their students.
Parents just have to give their kids a cell phone... and coming soon the cell phone companies will provide that tracking option for you with a handy web interface so you'll know just where your kid/wife has been from anywhere with an internet connection. We won't put up with the government publicly doing that, but we'd want to do it to each other.
This sort of thinking is what kills democracy.
Um, we aren't raised to live in a democracy. Public schools really are designed for most us to be happy in a factory/prison situation. Most of us have zero ability to change school rules/policy/or personnel while/before we attend a given school. The school can and will treat the students anyway that they want.
I have lots of bad thoughts to think about my former university and my present employer, but I'm never going to say them or post them on a website. I will bitch to my family about it and maybe to handful of coworkers/friends, but it will be people with a vested interested not to tell those over me what I said. Us underlings don't have any other rights other than the right of moving away if it gets too bad.