Honestly, its time for the US population to stop thinking like Miss Carolina and just grow the fuck up. Nobody gives a shit if you're gay, lesbian, bi, or straight, or you cheated on your spouse, or you have debt, or you used illegal drugs, or you have a Britney Speares collection. Nobody. And the sooner the government makes this their official position, and sends a clear signal to the rest of society, the sooner blackmail for this sort of crap will no longer be possible.
Yes and very, very no. I can scare you with the amount of trivia that I'd want the census to collect on everyone. Your right though, most people wouldn't care about your fetishes. The thing is if you would care. If you believe others would care. It doesn't even have to be a "dirty" secret. It's that you have a secret at all that you don't want others to know.
If you think you don't care about your various fetishes, you wouldn't mind me or the government tracking everything. I'd track every UPC product and know exactly what every household has been buying. No one on slashdot cares that you bought a Vista Dell computer and that you actually buy MS Office and have never downloaded fire fox or open office. That's most likely the "dirty" secret of half of slashdot users right there. Be very, very thankful that I don't work for Walmart's IT department.
I held a TS with SBI once upon a time. The main reason for background checks, as I understand it, is to ferret out any levers that could be used against you by hostile agent. Too much debt? We'll get you out of trouble if you give us info. Cheating on your wife? With a man?! It would be a shame if we had to call her. Think of your kids.
It's not that they're morally judging you, its that they're making sure that you're not unduly susceptible to influence.
It's not fair, but it's not about fairness.
Um, I agree with this in theory. In theory, the "security guys" don't really care if your gay or in debt or have a gambling problem.
Freedom is being able to choose your own fetish. Privacy is keeping your fetishes out of other people's knowledge. Most people wouldn't want their parents/selected others to know their fetishes. Security is making sure your fetishes can't be used against us not you. The potential evil is the political guys using the security guys to select only those folks that have the same fetish as the political guys and to remove by various means those that have different or opposing fetishes.
The problem isn't that they can know what cab rides you have been on. The problem is that before you know it they can know what cab,bus,airplane,train you were on, what restaurant you ate at, where you placed a call with your cellphone, which "security" camera you walked by, what stores you visited.. etc etc... Much of this data is already being collected, and as long as it is kept there is little to stop a future government from suddenly overturning all privacy laws and demand access to all this data at once. If ( i.e when/already ) they do this they will be able to reconstruct your entire life. Were you politically inconvenient? Well, what have we known, suddenly there are laws which punish you retroactively...
The scary bit is that I don't even have to come up with a conspiracy theory. The law already permits it. The NSA already has the taps running, and the legislation is already in place. Good game.
Hey, if they really wanted to speed it up, the government would encourage Google to buy Maxis and develop SimCity 5/6 be a real time cross with Google Earth and Google Street View and try to track/map everything. I'm waiting for real time Census myself. You know once every ten years was great at the beginning of the country, but with our modern tech we should be able to answer our census questions in real time or maybe just a week's delay.
OK, so they have the Oz books, but have they got a Harold Arlen and a Ray Bolger and a Judy Garland? Great material doesn't guarantee a great movie. Don't forget, there was also a Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings.
This brings to mind Romeo & Juliet themed plots and also A Christmas Carol plots. A few of each are o.k., but hardly any really do the original justice.
"McFarlane has a vision of Oz that is a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight," wrote journalist Michael Fleming. "That was clear with a toy line he launched several years ago that featured a buxom Dorothy and Toto re-imagined as an over-sized snarling warthog.
While nothing else is really complete, these two want to assure you that the plan to replace every warm, fuzzy childhood story with nightmarish tales so that you'll lose all sense of past and therefore be willing to watch anything is proceeding according to plan and scheduled to be complete by the year 2015.
Hey, Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland were the two most scary horror filled movies that I had to suffer through. Both movies are a walk through some one's drug trip. The horror in wizard of Oz starts with killing off an old woman, whom the munchkins claim is a witch and then the evil little girl not happy with killing off one member of the family goes and kills the old woman's sister as well. Oh, and the horror of fly monkeys, walking scare crows, a lion, and the Wizard's city. I'm sorry, but McFarlane was just honestly showing the Wizard of Oz as an honest remake as I recall the movie. Alice in the Drug trip was the other horror flick, but I'm just not going there that world was scary.
The quality of the Oz books is very uneven. Some of the later ones have long, extremely tedious sections that serve no purpose except to bring back a long list of favorite characters like Jack Pumpkinhead. A lot of the plots revolve around lame puns.
You just ruined my hopes that they'd make an animated series of Xanth.
Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain. We need to tear-down a lot of the post 9/11 every-foreign-student-is-a-potential-terrorist rules, and kill H1B, replacing it with a fast-track to citizen-ship visa (I say go so far as to make citizen-ship a requirement after 3 years on this theoretical visa) so that we attract and then keep all the smart people from the rest of the world.
I think stealing citizens is our best bet as well. We need just a 7 months here, and you can apply to become a citizen. The min. that I would want is a brief English class (enough to fill out most government forms and to communicate with other US citizens), laws and civics class of what's legal and what's not, and myths of the US that you may have been told. If they can do that, then let 'em be a citizens. Any workers with advanced skill sets that we want/need give them a fast track 7 weeks to be a citizen. I figure that if they ought to speak good enough English if they've been hired to work here in an advanced position.
Shoot what am I thinking. I've had 5 college CS professors that could barely speak enough English to be understood. Well, at least we'd have stolen their best and brightest.
The ones I saw had an edited sticker. This will get modded down but Wal-Mart isn't censoring anything. They have simply told the music companies that they will not carry albums with parental advisory stickers. The record companies don't have to comply. Wal-Mart isn't censoring anymore than you are if you choose not to watch Fox News.
I, um, download most of my music. I've found out lately that I've gotten old and really dislike any versions of songs other than the radio-edit. There were 4-5 songs that I liked on the radio, but I could no longer stand after hearing the "unedited" version. The "unedited" versions have been ruining good songs. Actually, I want radio/chorus edits. There are some songs that I only start paying attention to once the chorus hits. It wasn't until hearing the complete song that I found out the first 30-45 seconds of my favorite chorus songs are absolutely horrible. Thank god that I got a copy of cakewalk so that I can make my own edits.
I do find it a little silly that they worry about "bad" words but sell alcohol, tobacco, and guns. I find tobacco a lot more offensive and family unfriendly than most bad words.
This is one of the weird things about people and the way the world works. Wal-mart can "censor" music/games/books that it doesn't like and get away with it fairly easily. Why? because most of the "censored" music/games/books you can find in the music/games/book store a few blocks down. The complaint against alcohol, tobacco, and guns is funny. Why? Because Walmart has always carried alcohol, tobacco, and guns.
The only Walmart's that I don't sell alcohol are those that are in dry counties. You may be unfamiliar with that odd concept. Here in Arkansas and many other southern states various counties have voted not to allow alcohol to be sold in their county. This is extremely funny because if you look at a map of which counties are dry and which are wet, it's a checker board. There is almost always a liquor store at the county line as well. That liquor store might as well be the everything that the "good" folks don't want to see bought "here" but will be bought and brought back anyway store.;)
Free market. End government supported monopolies to the extent possible.
I would like the feds to take ownership of the infrastructure that they bought with the $200 billion tax breaks on various telephone companies and then the government can build/support the internet like our roads, highways, water, gas, and electricity. The so called free market has been seriously mistreating the US public for the last decade. It's not the government that supports the semi-monopolies. It's your free market that keeps on developing them.
It's not that IT is bad -- it's just that you have to blame or praise management for the proper application of it. Which is just another way of saying "you can't spend your way through problems without thought".
This is why I'd want everyone that's always shouting to increase educational spending have really painful things happen to them. Actually, I think the same about folks wanting a drastic increase in NASA budgets for any manned space missions and many other pet projects. It's not just about money. It's about what actual resources/people/power that you get with the money and how you use it.
Actually, my favourite definition of intelligence, partly because of its succinctness, is "productive laziness".
When a computer can beat all grand masters at the same time without any human based programing changes while using only about.1% of capacity while using the other capacity to waste time/be lazy playing around on the internet/doing random things like spending the spare cycles on folding at home or something, then I'll start to worry.
Now, windows 2K was the last version I used much (praise the Lord), but from what I've seen of XP and Vista, Windows, while maybe becoming prettier (and having a better UI) now treats the user with absolute contempt.
Why do people (especially Slashdotters) put up with it, when there are other options that are so much better?
Um, system restore and actually only having to do that once a blue moon because crashes and such are so rare. Don't forget games also. Enough said.
Americans will stand for anything. Somebody will tell them that it is a way of reducing petty crime, protecting the children, making paying for groceries easier, etc. Nowhere will it be mentioned that the entire reason for the system is to track your asses. The dumb cattle majority of people there (and around the world) will buy the lies hook, line and sinker. the masses will only work out that it's about tracking their asses when it's too late to do anything about it.
Heck, it would just take a few chain stores like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Exxon to roll out a customer facial ID program where they use their in store cameras to ID every one entering the building and also match the people with employees, existing customers, cash only customers, or banned person inform the cashier/door guard and inform the police. Did you know that if a store like Walmart bans a person that they are banned from all Walmart's everywhere? The only thing preventing stores from enforcing that is that currently stores don't know every one that comes into their building and unless that person is arrested for shop lifting again it never comes up. Well, tech. the stores have the right to have kept the shoplifter/banned person out of their store without any reason doing so is a different thing. The only business that I can think of that requires you to show photo ID of some type to enter the building is Sam's Club. I could see one day stores requiring you to swipe your DL/ID card before it let's you into the building. What if some store banned all the registered sex offenders in the city from their store and used that as gimmick to get people to shop there? What if it got popular and Walmart copied them?
I live in Germany and we still got democracy here, but who guaranties me that this will be like that forever? China's use of total surveillance should be a warning to us all, what can happen too us, too.
Now a giant robot film has done well so the bandwagon looks for the next passenger it can send down. Personally I think voltron will tank. Hardly anyone knows what it is and it lacked that 'cool' factor when I was a kid growing up, even my father knew what transformers were then and wanted to see the film now. But Voltron?
Nah, Voltron will most likely make as much as your average Power Rangers movie since that's what most people will confuse it with.
Anecdotal evidence is hardly an appropriate substitute for reliable, reproducable scientific analysis. Unless, that is, you've already made up your mind on the subject, in which case anything that supports your view will suffice as "proof".
When I was in high school in 1992-1996, we did some projects and pretty much determined at the time that the scientists really didn't know what was going on. I ignored the whole thing in college, and afterwards. About 2003, I started looking at the issue again. Apparently, the "scientists" are all bound and determined that GW is happening now and if you don't agree with us then we will discredit you or your research and try to get you unemployed ASAP. Now that its 2007, I have no faith in almost anything GW related. I'd like us to cease wasting money on the scientists studying GW and start spending money that money on engineers and new stuff improving efficiency in all our products. Of course, I'd also like us to stop wasting money on reporters and media people talking about GW and spend that money on the new products as well.
Fill a bathtub with hot water. As the tub fills, throw in a few grains of rice. Now, it's the Meterologist's job to predict where the rice will be in an hour, tomorrow and 4 days from now. It's the Climatologists job to predict the temperature of the water in a year, and 5 years, and 10 years.
I just love it when people want the Climatologist to determine the position of the rice before it's put in the tub. And denounce global warming because he can't.
Um, that's the standard that we want climatologist to have to meet. If they can't, its their problem and not ours.;) Personally, I think that climatologists should have their budgets cut until they can meet those standards.:) I'm in an evil mood at present and really have had enough of the entire GW thing from all sides to last the rest of my life. Considering, I'm likely to live another 4 decades, I'd rather cut the funding of those climatologists just so I don't have to listen to how the world is going to end sometime in 2020, 2025, or maybe in 2100. I quit attending church because most of them where convinced the end of world would happen within our life time in a time frame of any where in 2015-2050. I'm sorry, but I hate hearing from the religious or some what religious about how the world is going to end if we don't modify my/our behavior to meet your religious/ethical standard.
If you up the frequency until out of the first block of TV channels (2-4), you interfere with wireless hearing aids. If you up it out of the second block (5-6), you interfere with FM radio. If you up it out of the third block (7-13), you interfere with the military. If you up it out of the last block (14-69), you interfere with cell phones. Of course they are dropping channels 60-69 from the dial. This is the "700 MHz" band we have heard so much about lately. The trouble is that while you could probably use the 700MHz band for this, it performs poorly in hilly, rural areas. VHF frequencies (like those around channels 7-13, and especially around 2-6) perform really well in such areas.
Well, out of those options, sorry about those deaf people but they don't really need so much spectrum just for hearing aids. Actually, we could throw out FM, AM & cell phones if we had a nice handy dandy wireless internet ready to go. I wouldn't want to mess with military or police band widths cause those guys have guns.
The red cross symbol has become synonymous with 'First Aid' in the public mind.
So you're right that the defensibility of ownership for either of them is a little iffy, but the fact that I've started to see that horrible green in more places means that it's starting to become known that somebody owns it. My gut tells me that it's usually the ARC that people think of (or get letters from), but if they're now starting to directly compete in the market with Johnson & Johnson, who knows which way a judge or jury would go?
This is when some one needs to revise things to where that red cross symbol isn't a trademark, but must be a label for first aid or medical supplies.
So J & J has no choice but to sue the ARC to prevent them from sub-licensing the trademark they do not own.
Take the emotions out of the discussion, this is purely business. No, it is not big pharma beating on a poor charity, it is a trademark licensee abusing a license agreement in such a way the owner of the trademark is negatively impacted. Until J & J officially turns the trademark over to the ARC, they own and they must defend it.
Um, is it just me or shouldn't some things not be allowed to be a trademark. I've never associated a red cross with either the Red Cross organization or J&J. A red cross is what goes on those white boxes of medical supplies to denote that they are medical supplies. It's sort of like the old skull and cross bones being put on products that were dangerous to drink. That J&J and the Red Cross ever held that as a trademark is terrible.
I think that J&J have the law on their side in this case. Of course, whether the law is good or not is a different debate (and those of you who know my politics will know my opinion on laws in general...).
On the more flamebait side, when one of those nutjobs are lecturing in the main mall of your local university, try asking them what they think about crystal lattices- complex, beautiful geometrical structures which will form naturally, and ask if there was an intelligent designer forming the covalent bonds in your ice tray this morning.
That's Jack Frost's Day job now a days. He has been a busy fellow since we've invented refrigeration.
So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
That sounds neat.. I think that we should just subcontract our next war to Disney an have them build a theme park and hire the locals to dress as Disney Characters. I can't think of anything worse that we could to them.
Wrong: Bot soldiers will eventually be used to do suicide missions that the meat variety won't do. That means more intense and grubby conflict which means more injury and deaths - not less.
Um, it means less harm to the side with bots, and a lot more harm to the side without. The only question is the price of the bots and if they are cheaper than human troops. I'd believe for the next 10 years that a human troop will be cheaper to train and use, but where the bots come in is PR costs and long term health care. A lot of bots blowing up and only accountants care. Humans dieing and you have their families complaining why did it take that many troops for what ever the action was. Today bots are expensive to build, but their PR costs are low if they are lost. The big major PR cost will come when some one starts using bots to monitor a border and shoot at anything coming from that direction and you sooner or later get a friendly fire incident. The first time that happens we'll see the real PR test that could nearly kill this line of research for a few generations.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, its time for the US population to stop thinking like Miss Carolina and just grow the fuck up. Nobody gives a shit if you're gay, lesbian, bi, or straight, or you cheated on your spouse, or you have debt, or you used illegal drugs, or you have a Britney Speares collection. Nobody. And the sooner the government makes this their official position, and sends a clear signal to the rest of society, the sooner blackmail for this sort of crap will no longer be possible.
Yes and very, very no. I can scare you with the amount of trivia that I'd want the census to collect on everyone. Your right though, most people wouldn't care about your fetishes. The thing is if you would care. If you believe others would care. It doesn't even have to be a "dirty" secret. It's that you have a secret at all that you don't want others to know.
If you think you don't care about your various fetishes, you wouldn't mind me or the government tracking everything. I'd track every UPC product and know exactly what every household has been buying. No one on slashdot cares that you bought a Vista Dell computer and that you actually buy MS Office and have never downloaded fire fox or open office. That's most likely the "dirty" secret of half of slashdot users right there. Be very, very thankful that I don't work for Walmart's IT department.
I held a TS with SBI once upon a time. The main reason for background checks, as I understand it, is to ferret out any levers that could be used against you by hostile agent. Too much debt? We'll get you out of trouble if you give us info. Cheating on your wife? With a man?! It would be a shame if we had to call her. Think of your kids.
It's not that they're morally judging you, its that they're making sure that you're not unduly susceptible to influence.
It's not fair, but it's not about fairness.
Um, I agree with this in theory. In theory, the "security guys" don't really care if your gay or in debt or have a gambling problem.
Freedom is being able to choose your own fetish. Privacy is keeping your fetishes out of other people's knowledge. Most people wouldn't want their parents/selected others to know their fetishes. Security is making sure your fetishes can't be used against us not you. The potential evil is the political guys using the security guys to select only those folks that have the same fetish as the political guys and to remove by various means those that have different or opposing fetishes.
The problem isn't that they can know what cab rides you have been on. The problem is that before you know it they can know what cab,bus,airplane,train you were on, what restaurant you ate at, where you placed a call with your cellphone, which "security" camera you walked by, what stores you visited.. etc etc... Much of this data is already being collected, and as long as it is kept there is little to stop a future government from suddenly overturning all privacy laws and demand access to all this data at once. If ( i.e when/already ) they do this they will be able to reconstruct your entire life. Were you politically inconvenient? Well, what have we known, suddenly there are laws which punish you retroactively...
The scary bit is that I don't even have to come up with a conspiracy theory. The law already permits it. The NSA already has the taps running, and the legislation is already in place. Good game.
Hey, if they really wanted to speed it up, the government would encourage Google to buy Maxis and develop SimCity 5/6 be a real time cross with Google Earth and Google Street View and try to track/map everything. I'm waiting for real time Census myself. You know once every ten years was great at the beginning of the country, but with our modern tech we should be able to answer our census questions in real time or maybe just a week's delay.
OK, so they have the Oz books, but have they got a Harold Arlen and a Ray Bolger and a Judy Garland?
Great material doesn't guarantee a great movie. Don't forget, there was also a Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings.
This brings to mind Romeo & Juliet themed plots and also A Christmas Carol plots. A few of each are o.k., but hardly any really do the original justice.
"McFarlane has a vision of Oz that is a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight," wrote journalist Michael Fleming. "That was clear with a toy line he launched several years ago that featured a buxom Dorothy and Toto re-imagined as an over-sized snarling warthog.
While nothing else is really complete, these two want to assure you that the plan to replace every warm, fuzzy childhood story with nightmarish tales so that you'll lose all sense of past and therefore be willing to watch anything is proceeding according to plan and scheduled to be complete by the year 2015.
Hey, Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland were the two most scary horror filled movies that I had to suffer through. Both movies are a walk through some one's drug trip. The horror in wizard of Oz starts with killing off an old woman, whom the munchkins claim is a witch and then the evil little girl not happy with killing off one member of the family goes and kills the old woman's sister as well. Oh, and the horror of fly monkeys, walking scare crows, a lion, and the Wizard's city. I'm sorry, but McFarlane was just honestly showing the Wizard of Oz as an honest remake as I recall the movie. Alice in the Drug trip was the other horror flick, but I'm just not going there that world was scary.
The quality of the Oz books is very uneven. Some of the later ones have long, extremely tedious sections that serve no purpose except to bring back a long list of favorite characters like Jack Pumpkinhead. A lot of the plots revolve around lame puns.
You just ruined my hopes that they'd make an animated series of Xanth.
Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain. We need to tear-down a lot of the post 9/11 every-foreign-student-is-a-potential-terrorist rules, and kill H1B, replacing it with a fast-track to citizen-ship visa (I say go so far as to make citizen-ship a requirement after 3 years on this theoretical visa) so that we attract and then keep all the smart people from the rest of the world.
I think stealing citizens is our best bet as well. We need just a 7 months here, and you can apply to become a citizen. The min. that I would want is a brief English class (enough to fill out most government forms and to communicate with other US citizens), laws and civics class of what's legal and what's not, and myths of the US that you may have been told. If they can do that, then let 'em be a citizens. Any workers with advanced skill sets that we want/need give them a fast track 7 weeks to be a citizen. I figure that if they ought to speak good enough English if they've been hired to work here in an advanced position.
Shoot what am I thinking. I've had 5 college CS professors that could barely speak enough English to be understood. Well, at least we'd have stolen their best and brightest.
The ones I saw had an edited sticker. This will get modded down but Wal-Mart isn't censoring anything. They have simply told the music companies that they will not carry albums with parental advisory stickers. The record companies don't have to comply. Wal-Mart isn't censoring anymore than you are if you choose not to watch Fox News.
;)
I, um, download most of my music. I've found out lately that I've gotten old and really dislike any versions of songs other than the radio-edit. There were 4-5 songs that I liked on the radio, but I could no longer stand after hearing the "unedited" version. The "unedited" versions have been ruining good songs. Actually, I want radio/chorus edits. There are some songs that I only start paying attention to once the chorus hits. It wasn't until hearing the complete song that I found out the first 30-45 seconds of my favorite chorus songs are absolutely horrible. Thank god that I got a copy of cakewalk so that I can make my own edits.
I do find it a little silly that they worry about "bad" words but sell alcohol, tobacco, and guns.
I find tobacco a lot more offensive and family unfriendly than most bad words.
This is one of the weird things about people and the way the world works. Wal-mart can "censor" music/games/books that it doesn't like and get away with it fairly easily. Why? because most of the "censored" music/games/books you can find in the music/games/book store a few blocks down. The complaint against alcohol, tobacco, and guns is funny. Why? Because Walmart has always carried alcohol, tobacco, and guns.
The only Walmart's that I don't sell alcohol are those that are in dry counties. You may be unfamiliar with that odd concept. Here in Arkansas and many other southern states various counties have voted not to allow alcohol to be sold in their county. This is extremely funny because if you look at a map of which counties are dry and which are wet, it's a checker board. There is almost always a liquor store at the county line as well. That liquor store might as well be the everything that the "good" folks don't want to see bought "here" but will be bought and brought back anyway store.
Free market. End government supported monopolies to the extent possible.
I would like the feds to take ownership of the infrastructure that they bought with the $200 billion tax breaks on various telephone companies and then the government can build/support the internet like our roads, highways, water, gas, and electricity. The so called free market has been seriously mistreating the US public for the last decade. It's not the government that supports the semi-monopolies. It's your free market that keeps on developing them.
It's not that IT is bad -- it's just that you have to blame or praise management for the proper application of it. Which is just another way of saying "you can't spend your way through problems without thought".
This is why I'd want everyone that's always shouting to increase educational spending have really painful things happen to them. Actually, I think the same about folks wanting a drastic increase in NASA budgets for any manned space missions and many other pet projects. It's not just about money. It's about what actual resources/people/power that you get with the money and how you use it.
Actually, my favourite definition of intelligence, partly because of its succinctness, is "productive laziness".
.1% of capacity while using the other capacity to waste time/be lazy playing around on the internet/doing random things like spending the spare cycles on folding at home or something, then I'll start to worry.
When a computer can beat all grand masters at the same time without any human based programing changes while using only about
Now, windows 2K was the last version I used much (praise the Lord), but from what I've seen of XP and Vista, Windows, while maybe becoming prettier (and having a better UI) now treats the user with absolute contempt.
Why do people (especially Slashdotters) put up with it, when there are other options that are so much better?
Um, system restore and actually only having to do that once a blue moon because crashes and such are so rare. Don't forget games also. Enough said.
Americans will stand for anything. Somebody will tell them that it is a way of reducing petty crime, protecting the children, making paying for groceries easier, etc. Nowhere will it be mentioned that the entire reason for the system is to track your asses. The dumb cattle majority of people there (and around the world) will buy the lies hook, line and sinker. the masses will only work out that it's about tracking their asses when it's too late to do anything about it.
Heck, it would just take a few chain stores like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Exxon to roll out a customer facial ID program where they use their in store cameras to ID every one entering the building and also match the people with employees, existing customers, cash only customers, or banned person inform the cashier/door guard and inform the police. Did you know that if a store like Walmart bans a person that they are banned from all Walmart's everywhere? The only thing preventing stores from enforcing that is that currently stores don't know every one that comes into their building and unless that person is arrested for shop lifting again it never comes up. Well, tech. the stores have the right to have kept the shoplifter/banned person out of their store without any reason doing so is a different thing. The only business that I can think of that requires you to show photo ID of some type to enter the building is Sam's Club. I could see one day stores requiring you to swipe your DL/ID card before it let's you into the building. What if some store banned all the registered sex offenders in the city from their store and used that as gimmick to get people to shop there? What if it got popular and Walmart copied them?
I live in Germany and we still got democracy here, but who guaranties me that this will be like that forever? China's use of total surveillance should be a warning to us all, what can happen too us, too.
I bet you within 3 years the UK will try this.
Now a giant robot film has done well so the bandwagon looks for the next passenger it can send down. Personally I think voltron will tank. Hardly anyone knows what it is and it lacked that 'cool' factor when I was a kid growing up, even my father knew what transformers were then and wanted to see the film now. But Voltron?
Nah, Voltron will most likely make as much as your average Power Rangers movie since that's what most people will confuse it with.
Anecdotal evidence is hardly an appropriate substitute for reliable, reproducable scientific analysis.
Unless, that is, you've already made up your mind on the subject, in which case anything that supports your view will suffice as "proof".
When I was in high school in 1992-1996, we did some projects and pretty much determined at the time that the scientists really didn't know what was going on. I ignored the whole thing in college, and afterwards. About 2003, I started looking at the issue again. Apparently, the "scientists" are all bound and determined that GW is happening now and if you don't agree with us then we will discredit you or your research and try to get you unemployed ASAP. Now that its 2007, I have no faith in almost anything GW related. I'd like us to cease wasting money on the scientists studying GW and start spending money that money on engineers and new stuff improving efficiency in all our products. Of course, I'd also like us to stop wasting money on reporters and media people talking about GW and spend that money on the new products as well.
Fill a bathtub with hot water. As the tub fills, throw in a few grains of rice. Now, it's the Meterologist's job to predict where the rice will be in an hour, tomorrow and 4 days from now. It's the Climatologists job to predict the temperature of the water in a year, and 5 years, and 10 years.
;) Personally, I think that climatologists should have their budgets cut until they can meet those standards. :) I'm in an evil mood at present and really have had enough of the entire GW thing from all sides to last the rest of my life. Considering, I'm likely to live another 4 decades, I'd rather cut the funding of those climatologists just so I don't have to listen to how the world is going to end sometime in 2020, 2025, or maybe in 2100. I quit attending church because most of them where convinced the end of world would happen within our life time in a time frame of any where in 2015-2050. I'm sorry, but I hate hearing from the religious or some what religious about how the world is going to end if we don't modify my/our behavior to meet your religious/ethical standard.
I just love it when people want the Climatologist to determine the position of the rice before it's put in the tub. And denounce global warming because he can't.
Um, that's the standard that we want climatologist to have to meet. If they can't, its their problem and not ours.
If you up the frequency until out of the first block of TV channels (2-4), you interfere with wireless hearing aids.
If you up it out of the second block (5-6), you interfere with FM radio.
If you up it out of the third block (7-13), you interfere with the military.
If you up it out of the last block (14-69), you interfere with cell phones.
Of course they are dropping channels 60-69 from the dial. This is the "700 MHz" band we have heard so much about lately.
The trouble is that while you could probably use the 700MHz band for this, it performs poorly in hilly, rural areas. VHF frequencies (like those around channels 7-13, and especially around 2-6) perform really well in such areas.
Well, out of those options, sorry about those deaf people but they don't really need so much spectrum just for hearing aids. Actually, we could throw out FM, AM & cell phones if we had a nice handy dandy wireless internet ready to go. I wouldn't want to mess with military or police band widths cause those guys have guns.
The red cross symbol has become synonymous with 'First Aid' in the public mind.
So you're right that the defensibility of ownership for either of them is a little iffy, but the fact that I've started to see that horrible green in more places means that it's starting to become known that somebody owns it. My gut tells me that it's usually the ARC that people think of (or get letters from), but if they're now starting to directly compete in the market with Johnson & Johnson, who knows which way a judge or jury would go?
This is when some one needs to revise things to where that red cross symbol isn't a trademark, but must be a label for first aid or medical supplies.
So J & J has no choice but to sue the ARC to prevent them from sub-licensing the trademark they do not own.
Take the emotions out of the discussion, this is purely business. No, it is not big pharma beating on a poor charity, it is a trademark licensee abusing a license agreement in such a way the owner of the trademark is negatively impacted. Until J & J officially turns the trademark over to the ARC, they own and they must defend it.
Um, is it just me or shouldn't some things not be allowed to be a trademark. I've never associated a red cross with either the Red Cross organization or J&J. A red cross is what goes on those white boxes of medical supplies to denote that they are medical supplies. It's sort of like the old skull and cross bones being put on products that were dangerous to drink. That J&J and the Red Cross ever held that as a trademark is terrible.
I think that J&J have the law on their side in this case. Of course, whether the law is good or not is a different debate (and those of you who know my politics will know my opinion on laws in general...).
But should a trademark last from 1887 to 2007?
On the more flamebait side, when one of those nutjobs are lecturing in the main mall of your local university, try asking them what they think about crystal lattices- complex, beautiful geometrical structures which will form naturally, and ask if there was an intelligent designer forming the covalent bonds in your ice tray this morning.
That's Jack Frost's Day job now a days. He has been a busy fellow since we've invented refrigeration.
The Future of Geothermal Energy Impact of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) on the United States in the 21st Centuryl ogy.html
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/egs_techno
This is a fun pdf to read if you are actually interested in this subject.
So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
That sounds neat.. I think that we should just subcontract our next war to Disney an have them build a theme park and hire the locals to dress as Disney Characters. I can't think of anything worse that we could to them.
Wrong: Bot soldiers will eventually be used to do suicide missions that the meat variety won't do. That means more intense and grubby conflict which means more injury and deaths - not less.
Um, it means less harm to the side with bots, and a lot more harm to the side without. The only question is the price of the bots and if they are cheaper than human troops. I'd believe for the next 10 years that a human troop will be cheaper to train and use, but where the bots come in is PR costs and long term health care. A lot of bots blowing up and only accountants care. Humans dieing and you have their families complaining why did it take that many troops for what ever the action was. Today bots are expensive to build, but their PR costs are low if they are lost. The big major PR cost will come when some one starts using bots to monitor a border and shoot at anything coming from that direction and you sooner or later get a friendly fire incident. The first time that happens we'll see the real PR test that could nearly kill this line of research for a few generations.