This would be an environmetal benefit if we compare to generating the same energy by burning fossil fuel. Say coal. Burning coal is not part of the CO2 cycle - thus it adds CO2 to the atmosphere. The danger is NOT CO2; but from where the C in CO2 come frome. Why do you always get this wrong, its quite irritating.
But they got those fossil fuels on Earth so there should be no net change on Earth from having an intake of additional fuels/energy. It's not like they were going to the moon, mars, or venus and bringing back fossil fuels for us to burn here on Earth. We are taught that "fossil fuels" were created by planets and animals long ago. Um, if that's true, then oil, coal, and gas are part of the carbon cycle and should be thrown back up into the air to complete the long cycle.
Now, if oil, coal, and gas weren't created from plants or animals long ago and from some geologic process then we are changing the atmospheric carbon balance. Um, you do reliaze that creationists would love it for their to be no fossils or "fossil fuels" being created from plant/animals "long ago." They'd love God sticking oil, coal, and gas in the ground 6K years ago for our own use.
Um, Sony told them not to publish their article. I'd believe that Sony didn't want the news/idea out there yet. They may have been afraid that it would be easy for Nintendo or MS to copy the concept for their systems once published. From the slashdot summary alone, I actually support Sony's decision on this one. Sony is just blackballing that blogger's site. Sony isn't sueing them. Sony isn't black balling every blogger. Sony is just targetting this one site that had Sony insider knowledge and Sony asked them not to publish the store. This blackballing by Sony is the polite responsee by Sony. So what if a blogger gamer site that I've never heard of before till it made slashdot's front page gets black balled by Sony! They can still cover Nintendo's and MS's products. They just lost out on "insider" news from Sony. If they wanted future insider Sony stores, they should listen and do what Sony asks. Gosh, I don't even know why this made it to slashdot except that Sony has been evil lately. All of Sony's actions aren't evil though. This action doesn't look evil to me. It looks polite to me.
I have personal objection to me doing the sorting for recycling. I don't mind trash being sorted and recycled by professions, just not me. I actually wouldn't mind a very small across the board "recycling/trash sorting" tax in addition to sales tax on everything if I believed that it would do good and not line some one's pockets or be suffled around for other uses. I've been observing my local city government lately. I don't have faith that any government would properly run a recycling/trash sorting tax in good faith with their citizens. They'd be too tempted to use the money for other uses.
In fact, the specific identification of the content could guide provision of related goods, services and community designed to maximize the consumer's enjoyment of the entertainment experience.
I await your results.
The said photographer/musician/content producer will threaten to sue for IP infringement of their unlicensed works being used without their premission if their corporate consumers don't pay up for additional content that they make. Doesn't matter if the business likes or needs said content; it would be cheaper to pay for the "additional content" than know that your company would loss a suit for copy right infringment and using their content without permission. Think, I know you've illegally been using my stuff, I won't press charges if you buy more of my stuff at this low but reasonable price, but if you don't then I'm suing your ass and getting as much as possible from you.
This isn't aimmed at the home use or small time crowd. It's ideal role is aimed at finding big name corporate offenders that have unlicensed PR crap on brochers, websites, or ads and making sure that the guy whose's content it is gets his cut. It's not worth it to go against small time folks. Think of professional photographers making sure their photos aren't run in mags or on the web without them getting their cut.
Just curious. What liberties have you lost due to anti-terror legislation in whatever country you are living in?
I ask because I keep hearing about how the US has become a police state. Well, I'm in the US and as far as I can tell, this new Bush police state looks exactly as it did under Clinton, except the economy is better. I think it is only fair that I stand with my fellow Americans and suffer as they have, but before I do that, I need to know what it is I'm missing.
You missed the memo. We are living in a near Nazish, police state that started a religious crusade only because a Republican is a president and that Democrats didn't control congress at the time. If Gore were President, the same or similiar laws would have been passed. He'd would have been declared a Nazish forcing us into a police state by all the republicans, but you wouldn't hear that on slashdot though because of our liberal bias. We'd declare a Democrat's anti-terror measures to be protective for the general citizenry similiar on how network admins need to implement policies to restrict users access to most resources for their own good.
If Gore didn't "do something" after 9/11, then he'd have been impeached since both the Democrats and Republicans would have been forced to nail him for their own political good. Of course, Gore would have "done something" to really hit the entire middle east by spending $100+ billion on sustainable non-foreign based power plants instead of the war on terror. I could easily have seen a campign "Let's not spend a penny on foreign oil!" under Gore that would have had more drastic short and long term changes for the US and the globe as the US virtually stopped buying any middle east oil. The public anger would have taken much longer to work out of our system, but we'd all be feeling like we were indirectly hurting them rather than directly hurting them.
See this link [go.com] and this link [salon.com] for what a con artist this guy is and how he's endangering peoples lives with his lies as well an analysis by a doctor [infomercialwatch.org] about his claims.
Con artists/medical quacks are one of the few selection pressures that we have left in our society. This guy helps select against stupidity! We should be protecting his business from completely disappearing so the stupid will buy into his medical claims and remove themselves from the general population.
No, the bird flu aspect is the least important. Flocks of RC pigeons can do all sort of nasty stuff - most obvious (which I actually had in my story submission but which the/. eds removed) being to take down a plane or attack groups of people with lots of small explosive charges.
Um the pigeons just want us to think that. In reality, if it was found out that birds were that kind of threat, we'd remove all flying wildlife from the US. It sounds difficult. I think we could do it in a very short amount of time if we actually needed to though. We'd setup wind farms on borders to kill birds and bats. We'd then have unrestricted hunting on birds that wouldn't kill as many as we'd hope though. (The modern hunter makes sure to obey hunting rules to conserve and maintain the prey population. It'll go against their nature to attempt to exterminate all birds.) Cities would be the most difficult places to exterminate them though. You'd have populations complaining about preserving the native wildlife each time you tried it. There would have to be a couple of bird related events to scare monger the general population and then there would be massive demand to do something though.
The insect populations would really love us for removing all their predators though. That wouldn't stop us from doing something out of fear and then letting nature correct itself afterward.
Why stop at crapping on targets?. I bet the American security services are worried. Now there's a real risk of using one of these Pigeons as a remote spying device. Imagine an innocent looking pigeon sitting on a window ledge, but really its fitted with a microphone and remote control. It would be ideal for spying.
This is an intel nightmare. Why? Because pontentially, you could use any animal other than just pigeons. Say cats, bats, or other animals that are actually native to your where your hidden base is. Remember reading how Area 51 was supposed to be wired up to where any human approaching it was found and a squad of MPs sent out to send them away? Well, with this tech in existance, places like Area 51 should have their MPs shoot to kill any and all wild life until better countermeasures come along. If the Chinese can do it, we could do it, but to defend against it, you'd have to ID and track every native critter around your base. Any non-native critter should be ID'd ASAP and shoot and then disected just to see if this tech was in the critter. If nothing is found, just burn it. If something is found, ID the tech and try to back track where the animal came from.
I could see them starting off with large critters, and then working their way down to small bugs. We'd have to defend against both in expectation of the tech advance.
Those poor honey bees are in middle of war! TFA said it was illness by mites that are the main thing. Well, that's just what the Africanized bees want us to think. The Africanized bees are bringing their mites to do biowarfare against the lowly honey bee! Oh no! We are being invaded and losses in our domesticated bee population are terrible! We need to support our commerical allies the honey bees in their war aganist Africanized bees and their bio warfare mites before our agriculture collapses!
Um, there isn't a difference between socialist state, a police state, a religious state, or an athiest communist state. All the states want their citizens to be uniform and instinctively follow the behavior the governmental model demands. Thought control is fundmental to action action. If most of your population doesn't just think, but know that crimes are impossible to commit without either the state or god watching them, then most of your population will follow your dictates. You can actually ignore the.01% of people that actually try to think. It's usually better to funnel those people into R&D universities so those ideas are all contained in an isolated environment. All scientists and those on the science career track ought to be keep away from the general citizenry for both groups own good. The scientists should never be allowed to directly communicate to the general citizens as that might give the scientists power or disrupt the general harmony of the general population. All sciencists should be treated like scared holy virgins and never allowed to be spoken to except by a special priest or governmental official. Most governmental officals actually running things and knowning the state of the things shouldn't be allowed near the general population either. They need to be isolated just as the scientists need to be isloated.
The general population needs to stay busy, stay feed, stay happy, and most importantly stay in their mental boxes. As long as you have enough entertainers or a nice safe religion to follow, most of your population will be perfectly happy. I've left out the role of teachers and education, but that's just to setup the mental boxes on the general population and ID those that need to be funneled into science or government posts.
I mean, hey, great - I'm really glad this guy got the compensation very much due him. What worries me more is that the article didn't read "Corporation ignores serious national security concerns because there was no obvious profit."
I always wonder... do businesses really think they're immune to the affairs of their "mother country?" I'm quite sure any corporation that sees most of its factories razed would find their bottom line hit pretty hard.
Um, I'm all for nationalism, but there is a part of me that believes a global multinational corporate controlled world would be better for most people. Why should the US get special treatment from companies? What if the companies started funding their own mercs and fought back? There has been fiction on that subject. It's good thing for our national governments that our corporations don't have merc wars against each other or some governments would be in deep trouble.
god says it aint good to gamble. Damn, I was trying to make Russian Roulette popular among the religious.
Um, only an atheist would fall for that. They don't believe they'd be punished by a God if they loose. A religious person on the other hand has to fear immortally being punished by their creator if they suicide or gamble. (Gamble is alot lesser of a sin than suicide generally.) So that means atheism wouldn't be a positive surival mechanism and being religious would be a survival trait.
according to similar polls, 34% believe in ghosts, 34% believe in UFOs, 29% believes in astrology, 25% believe in reincarnation and 24% believes in witches
Hey, don't bash anothers beliefs! I believe that there is more research that we could do in those areas. UFOs are flying things that we don't know about. So we just need to built a system to track and ID every visual flying object. I think that astrology needs to be funded just for blue sky research reasons. I've always thought what would happen if they could get a computer like the Earth Simulator and modeled the entire earth's population/migratation/wars due to visual stellar events back in time. (An also took into account how each of the locals interpreted the stellar event for their people.) Then you just have to use models to future stellar events including coments, asteroids and such to predict most people's gut reaction to such events based on past reactions. (Assumes no really new stellar event up there.) Well, it could predict people just as well as climate models predict climate. Ghosts, the soul, and reincarantion all deserve some research. Ghosts are thought to be either a trapped soul "left behind" or some psychic footprint left behind that only a few can pick up. We should be able to test, monitor, and reproduce some of that. Actual physical proof or non-proof of a "soul" would be Earth shattering in global poltics. I think that there would be a faction of scientists that would refuse to believe in the physical proof of a soul as much as the masses would instantly love it being verified by our science and not just our religions. What happens to a given soul/spirit/mind after death has been on of the questions that science has yet to begin to answer and we built religion to take care of it. Religion just states believe this and don't question it too much. That is a bit anti-science, but most people can't handle a science based world veiw and don't like the answers that science has currently given them. We don't like to be told that we only are going to live 30-78 years and then die and nothing of us is left behind or goes onto a new existance. Proof or disprove it don't beyond any need for "faith" in what happens. Forget a noble prize, you'd be our next living saint legend for imparting that proof to the world.
Witches? I do believe in magic/psychics, yet I've yet to come across any myself. I have a wierd definition of "magic." My definition of magic is any tech that works, yet I don't know how or why it works. I'm an IT guy, and computers are 90% magic to me. Cars, ovens, stop lights, and even paved roads are all magic. I could vaguely describe in general terms how I think each of them works, but I know that I don't have the knowledge to build any of those things myself other than a computer given the parts/tools. (I couldn't explain why a sound card or video card works or build or design one of those from scratch, but given completed parts, I could build a desktop computer.) Really thinking about there, is alot more magic out there than I previously thought.
This is what happens when you pander to religious fruit loops - it started with the 'In God We Trust' rebrand of the US (in particular, on money) which was the thin end of the wedge and now we have a situation whereby scientists cannot even discuss things properly.
I don't know. I've always like the "In God we trust." It's vague and generic. The E PLURIBUS UNUM meaning "Out of many, one" doesn't really do any thing for me. On money is the only place that you really encounter "In God, we trust." Do you even look at it? Nah, you just look at the amount and then when ever there is a redesign of the dollar. Be honest is this an issue that you care about? According ot wikipedia, they started the "In God, we trust" as a reaction to atheist communist USSR. Choosing your battles wisely is what this about! Regilious people are voters and no matter how much their views differ from yours; they have a political effect. It makes sense for the NIH to limit the word "evolution" in any and all grants/abracts relating to public health just because if they stuck that single word in there would be contraversy. Without the word, they can describe all the effects and be sure of getting the NIH money for public health. If they used "evolution" in researching things like a cure for cancer, AIDS, or another random diease there is a possiblity that their funding could be cut due to contraversy. This isn't a battle any sane scientist would fight! They've learned to work around the public. If only, all nuclear research could do the same.
Take back your personal freedom and stop listening to the "but you are in public!" bullshit. If they aren't willing to have real people watch you then I'm not willing to tolerate it.
Um, I'd rather live in the IT police state where everything is recorded and nothing much ever looked at rather than the police state that has actual cops everywhere. Let's be honest. Police aren't meant to stop violence or protect anyone. Police are meant to clean up afterwards, fill out their paper work, and do something to make most people feel safer. Very shortly we are going to have cell phones that have biometric security. Most of that, I'd assume is actually stored on the phone. How difficult would it be for each time biometeric cell phone being ID'd for it to be run through finger print database for wanted criminals? I could see people tying all their devices like, ipods, cell phones, digital cameraa, and other tech crap with biometric ID that have all "authorized users" prints in them and if anyone unauthorized tries to use the device it sends the info of unauthorized usage attempt with date/time/GPS to some federal anti-theft police database.
You know it "only" costs $1500-2000 for a 80GB DVR with 4 camera setup for you to wire your own security system. That price startled me. Remember that slashdot article about using mulitple cameras to do a retina scan? How long before you can have the tech for $1500-2000 and ID every door to door sales person or other person that steps onto your property?
Yeah, about 2 years ago, I would have agreed with your assessment of nukes. It is a SAD state that we are in. But with Gore pushing facts on Global Warming (and perhaps a bit of the conjecture), I think that oil and coal will slow down. In particular, TCU (a Texas energy company) was about to build a dozen VERY LARGE coal plants in texas. IIRC, it would double the emissions from Texas.... Finally, I think that more and more environmentalists are becoming pragmatics about this. Few will try to stop any none oil/coal solution.
Um, I don't think so. I think they'll just boycott any power solution oil/coal/nukes/wind/hydro and other. Roof top solar is the only "good sounding" solution to some people. Solar isn't there to support our life style. You want to see an outcry? Wait till the cellphone/ipod/laptop/blackberry generation are told that their toys use too much electricity, and you have to cut back. (The good thing about those products is that they do have short life spans and if better more efficient models come out they will be bought as replacements.)
W. has given a series of tax breaks to Coal and Oil and has our troops guarding major pipelines where the oil companies are having issues (Iraq comes to mind). In addition, he has dropped a number of needed environmental protections and possible fines. IOW, he has artificially lowered the costs of Oil and Coal. He is pouring money into hydrogen research, while trying to cut all other avenues.
OTH, there has been damn little incentives for nukes or Alternatives.
I recently actually looked into some of the offical stuff. I've come to the conclusion that we are pretty much doomed. Why? We will shortly (within 10-20 years or so) be taking I think that it was something like 10GW of nuclear power off line. We won't be replacing them with other nuclear power plants. Let's be honest there is just too much of a global anti-nuke lobby for them to ever be built. I've been reading up on wind and geothermal. Both are a mixed bag. Geothermal seems to have tons of potential. What's the downsides? We don't know how to do it and national labs studying it want a few million to study better drilling techs. We could ramp up and really exploit wind power in a few states. The problem that I see with wind is that the wind industry and its supporters would be thrilled upping the wind power percentage to 5-10%. Um, that's just nowhere near enough. I've not read up on the lastest solar or bio-fuel papers. I'm not thrilled with their economics though. (If they were economic we'd be using them now.) I hate to say it, but G.W. Bush having US control of any foreign nation's oil supplies is a great thing for the US. The environmentalists say that there is only 50-100 years of oil left... Well, think of Iraq as securing a national US resource. It doesn't matter that it was another nation's recource. We need it; we have the power to take it and enforce our will on others; therefore a war for that energy resource makes some sense.
There is a part of me that actually think's that it won't be too bad though. Why? Because there is a ton of money to be made with renewable/sustainable/efficient products. The oil/coal companies are becoming "energy" companies. It's to their interest to determine if we really only have 50 years of energy left and how to make sure they have a product to sell. Nuclear power is the only energy resource that has been proven to work on the energy scale that we need without adjusting our lifestyle (and that we have a few thousand years of fuel). We won't build more nuclear power plants; there are anti-wind lobbies, anti-solar lobbies, and even anti-geothermal lobbies and few of them are from energy companies. They are from enviromentalist that want no land to be used for wind, solar, or geothermal uses or just plain NIMBY.
I give up. You know let's be evil. Let's build nukes to power this country for the next 10K years and dump all our nuclear waste in the mideast. That was supposed to be black humor, but I have the sinking feeling our US government would do it for the US good.
I don't get it. Between work and home I have two Win2000 boxes and two XP boxes (and a Redhat as well). I remember still running NT when XP was introduced.
You know the silly feature in WinXP that made me want to upgrade my Win2000 box and some Win98 boxes to it? The built-in MS Picture and Fax viewer. Oh, sure I could download and install free ware image apps, and of course I have photoshop for evey image editing crap. But for those times just sitting down at some one else's PC and needing a builtin app. It was either IE or that MS Picture and Fax viewer to view images in WinXP. That's my most loved feature. The stability, system restore, and windows updates where you don't have to restart after every single freaking downloaded patch were just additional bonuses.
From what I've read linked off of slashdot, Vista really needs 2 GB of RAM to be happy and is really happy with 4 GB RAM. Only our newests machines have 2 GB of RAM. We have no plans of moving to vista and as the general computer guy, my box would have to one of the first to trickled down replaced. I have no idea what little feature is in Vista that I'll like and want everywhere. From the article, the only thing that sounds useful is the start menu intelligently using a scroll wheel. Doesn't sound like a big deal does it. But its the little things like that, which makes the entire OS progress. Slashdot forgets the human/user side of the coin very often. It's the little things that matter. The only thing about Vista that would make it really annoying is all those security dialogs. I'd really like to see how many of them my mom encounters playing AOL flash games. It's not the slashdot user that Vista is aimmed at. It's the Walmart customer that MS is really hoping to aim at. Did they hit that target? It sounds like it. My Vista advice that I've been handing out to non techies is try to wait 6 months; if you get a new computer with plans for vista, make sure it comes with vista preinstalled do not order a computer with XP that has a Vista upgrade vocher. I've not even played around with Vista; I'm just giving advice to keep them from rushing out and buying a PC that won't do what they want it to do. When I start hearing on slashdot that the $500-700 walmart PCs are running Vista o.k. to comfortablly then I'll recommend folks to buy it. I've heard a very wide range of opinions, but it seems to be make sure you have the RAM and CPU to handle vista. I don't think that's at the $500-700 price point, yet.
I'm actually surprised at the apathy shown towards the Bank of America fiasco of exploiting loopholes in the law to allow them to open accounts and credit cards for illegal aliens!! I figured there would have been a much larger rush of people to move their accounts away from them. I guess aiding and abetting law breakers just isn't enough to get the typical US citizen's ire up....
Um, I don't really care if a US bank opens and account for a citizen of any country and it gets used. I don't care if my small town back will open and operate an account for "illegal" aliens. I would want the rules that all accounts operate to be the same. For banks to deny "illegal" aliens, foreign nations, or international business clients the ability to open and operate an account, then they'd have to do some background checks on the individual. I just remember filling out address information when opening my checking account and a copy of my DL. I didn't have to go through any big ID check at the bank to verify that it was me or that I had the proper background to do business with that bank.
Now, you could agrue that we should have some national ID card and if you open any account at any US bank then you need to have that national ID card and a complete background/ID check. Um, I can live with "illegal" foreigners or just foreigners doing business in the US without all those ID checks. There is a part of me that does think that the banks should be able to confirm your ID like that, but that part of me says that every credit card reader in the country should be able to do a complete biometric scan to ID that the person holding the card is the actual card holder or authorized user for each and every credit card transaction. (It should be as quick and seemless as our current system except authorization process is also an ID process to prevent fraud/ID theft.)
A genuine example, from the 1500s. A footnote to an edition of Rabelais reveals that at one public fair in France, the prostitutes wanting to operate their trade had to take part at the start of the fair in a naked public footrace. This operates on a number of levels. It would tend to discourage unhealthy or diseased prostitutes. It constituted a form of advertising. And it provided entertainment. But it also shows that, no matter what you think of current entertainment standards, they were just as bad in the 1500s.
I don't know to complain about that or cheer them on. All in all, I'd want a video of someone recreating the event though. Heck, they could modernize it a bit for visitors and drop the prostitute part, but stick the label just wants some sex and gets random horny women to run naked around town with a big orgy at the end of the race. It would spread faster than St. Patrick's day.
I would like to know if this is a learned behavior from an outside source or if this is simply something they have discovered on their own.
If it is learned behavior, it took them long enough! I mean come on we've been using spears for awhile. Heck, spears have gone out of fashion today, but used to be much more common so you'd think the critters would have copied from us back then if that's where they picked it up.
If you noticed, there's a second kid in the house - a kid who's turning out just fine.
That don't mean anything. My wife and her older brother turned out ok, but their 7 year younger sister was the family black sheep. She pushed the limits and fought for control of her life. She did underage drinking, smoking, sex, and drugs. I think that she was just being experimental, but she did it in a manner to piss off her mom royally. My sister-in-law also happens to have the habit of picking the worst jerk/bad boy types for mates. Her baby's daddy is in jail on a drug charge. I'm just thank full that she's an offical adult, living on her own, working, going to college and attempting to raise a babby. I don't like her; she is a bitch most times to any one that she some what dislikes, but other than that she seems to be running her life the way she wants it and somewhat successfully.
I guess in a sense this is evolution in action. It doesn't matter if slashdot, me or my mother-in-law dislikes my sister-in-law's lifestyle/personal choices as long as she breeds and the child manages to successfully breed. Heck what's really funny about evolution is that doesn't care if my sister raises the kid or my mother-in-law, or my wife, other family, or some other org as long as the child grows up and manages to breed evolution is doing its bit. This is why babies are "cute" so we'll raise other people's kids for them.
But I'm curious how PA has verified that this person is who she claims to be.
Um, this got me to thinking. The second article had the kids name in it. To those that this story is local, the family whose kid this is would "know" if the person in the PA article was legit, PA making something up, or someone else conning PA. I don't know how much of their local community could easily figure out the woman's name from the description of her relation to the kid.
What gets me is that she didn't have to stick around the father if she was a step-parent. I wonder how much she is just covering her own butt that it wasn't her fault the kid was bad; it's always been him or it was his crazy family or such and such. This reminds me of my mother-in-law and her last marriage. It was her 3rd marriage. She was marrying the guy cause she liked him. He was marrying her so he'd have a woman to raise his teenage son (13-16.) That marriage lasted about a year or two. My mother-in-law was far stricter than my parents and "tried" raising he kid for about 5-10 days. His "crazy" natural mom lived a few blocks away and any time my mother-in-law made a rule or enforced one of her rules he'd just go to his mom's and do what he wanted. This kid wasn't doing anything illegal. He was just a spoiled brat according to my mother-in-law. The thing is she had already raised her 3 kids and the last one had just getting into college when all this was taking place. She just didn't want to put up that shit and divorced the guy.
The kid wasn't the step-parent's problem. The step-parent should have just divorced their mate rather than be around that kid. Was the kid's parent rich or very good in bed that you could just put up with or ignore the kid until this happened? Nah, can't have been a rich parent or the kid would have been in a distant boarding school the first time the kid started getting out of hand.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be an environmetal benefit if we compare to generating the same energy by burning fossil fuel. Say coal. Burning coal is not part of the CO2 cycle - thus it adds CO2 to the atmosphere. The danger is NOT CO2; but from where the C in CO2 come frome. Why do you always get this wrong, its quite irritating.
But they got those fossil fuels on Earth so there should be no net change on Earth from having an intake of additional fuels/energy. It's not like they were going to the moon, mars, or venus and bringing back fossil fuels for us to burn here on Earth. We are taught that "fossil fuels" were created by planets and animals long ago. Um, if that's true, then oil, coal, and gas are part of the carbon cycle and should be thrown back up into the air to complete the long cycle.
Now, if oil, coal, and gas weren't created from plants or animals long ago and from some geologic process then we are changing the atmospheric carbon balance. Um, you do reliaze that creationists would love it for their to be no fossils or "fossil fuels" being created from plant/animals "long ago." They'd love God sticking oil, coal, and gas in the ground 6K years ago for our own use.
Um, Sony told them not to publish their article. I'd believe that Sony didn't want the news/idea out there yet. They may have been afraid that it would be easy for Nintendo or MS to copy the concept for their systems once published. From the slashdot summary alone, I actually support Sony's decision on this one. Sony is just blackballing that blogger's site. Sony isn't sueing them. Sony isn't black balling every blogger. Sony is just targetting this one site that had Sony insider knowledge and Sony asked them not to publish the store. This blackballing by Sony is the polite responsee by Sony. So what if a blogger gamer site that I've never heard of before till it made slashdot's front page gets black balled by Sony! They can still cover Nintendo's and MS's products. They just lost out on "insider" news from Sony. If they wanted future insider Sony stores, they should listen and do what Sony asks. Gosh, I don't even know why this made it to slashdot except that Sony has been evil lately. All of Sony's actions aren't evil though. This action doesn't look evil to me. It looks polite to me.
I have personal objection to me doing the sorting for recycling. I don't mind trash being sorted and recycled by professions, just not me. I actually wouldn't mind a very small across the board "recycling/trash sorting" tax in addition to sales tax on everything if I believed that it would do good and not line some one's pockets or be suffled around for other uses. I've been observing my local city government lately. I don't have faith that any government would properly run a recycling/trash sorting tax in good faith with their citizens. They'd be too tempted to use the money for other uses.
In fact, the specific identification of the content could guide provision of related goods, services and community designed to maximize the consumer's enjoyment of the entertainment experience.
I await your results.
The said photographer/musician/content producer will threaten to sue for IP infringement of their unlicensed works being used without their premission if their corporate consumers don't pay up for additional content that they make. Doesn't matter if the business likes or needs said content; it would be cheaper to pay for the "additional content" than know that your company would loss a suit for copy right infringment and using their content without permission. Think, I know you've illegally been using my stuff, I won't press charges if you buy more of my stuff at this low but reasonable price, but if you don't then I'm suing your ass and getting as much as possible from you.
This isn't aimmed at the home use or small time crowd. It's ideal role is aimed at finding big name corporate offenders that have unlicensed PR crap on brochers, websites, or ads and making sure that the guy whose's content it is gets his cut. It's not worth it to go against small time folks. Think of professional photographers making sure their photos aren't run in mags or on the web without them getting their cut.
Just curious. What liberties have you lost due to anti-terror legislation in whatever country you are living in?
I ask because I keep hearing about how the US has become a police state. Well, I'm in the US and as far as I can tell, this new Bush police state looks exactly as it did under Clinton, except the economy is better. I think it is only fair that I stand with my fellow Americans and suffer as they have, but before I do that, I need to know what it is I'm missing.
You missed the memo. We are living in a near Nazish, police state that started a religious crusade only because a Republican is a president and that Democrats didn't control congress at the time. If Gore were President, the same or similiar laws would have been passed. He'd would have been declared a Nazish forcing us into a police state by all the republicans, but you wouldn't hear that on slashdot though because of our liberal bias. We'd declare a Democrat's anti-terror measures to be protective for the general citizenry similiar on how network admins need to implement policies to restrict users access to most resources for their own good.
If Gore didn't "do something" after 9/11, then he'd have been impeached since both the Democrats and Republicans would have been forced to nail him for their own political good. Of course, Gore would have "done something" to really hit the entire middle east by spending $100+ billion on sustainable non-foreign based power plants instead of the war on terror. I could easily have seen a campign "Let's not spend a penny on foreign oil!" under Gore that would have had more drastic short and long term changes for the US and the globe as the US virtually stopped buying any middle east oil. The public anger would have taken much longer to work out of our system, but we'd all be feeling like we were indirectly hurting them rather than directly hurting them.
See this link [go.com] and this link [salon.com] for what a con artist this guy is and how he's endangering peoples lives with his lies as well an analysis by a doctor [infomercialwatch.org] about his claims.
Con artists/medical quacks are one of the few selection pressures that we have left in our society. This guy helps select against stupidity! We should be protecting his business from completely disappearing so the stupid will buy into his medical claims and remove themselves from the general population.
No, the bird flu aspect is the least important. Flocks of RC pigeons can do all sort of nasty stuff - most obvious (which I actually had in my story submission but which the /. eds removed) being to take down a plane or attack groups of people with lots of small explosive charges.
Um the pigeons just want us to think that. In reality, if it was found out that birds were that kind of threat, we'd remove all flying wildlife from the US. It sounds difficult. I think we could do it in a very short amount of time if we actually needed to though. We'd setup wind farms on borders to kill birds and bats. We'd then have unrestricted hunting on birds that wouldn't kill as many as we'd hope though. (The modern hunter makes sure to obey hunting rules to conserve and maintain the prey population. It'll go against their nature to attempt to exterminate all birds.) Cities would be the most difficult places to exterminate them though. You'd have populations complaining about preserving the native wildlife each time you tried it. There would have to be a couple of bird related events to scare monger the general population and then there would be massive demand to do something though.
The insect populations would really love us for removing all their predators though. That wouldn't stop us from doing something out of fear and then letting nature correct itself afterward.
"crap on specified targets"
Why stop at crapping on targets?. I bet the American security services are worried. Now there's a real risk of using one of these Pigeons as a remote spying device. Imagine an innocent looking pigeon sitting on a window ledge, but really its fitted with a microphone and remote control. It would be ideal for spying.
This is an intel nightmare. Why? Because pontentially, you could use any animal other than just pigeons. Say cats, bats, or other animals that are actually native to your where your hidden base is. Remember reading how Area 51 was supposed to be wired up to where any human approaching it was found and a squad of MPs sent out to send them away? Well, with this tech in existance, places like Area 51 should have their MPs shoot to kill any and all wild life until better countermeasures come along. If the Chinese can do it, we could do it, but to defend against it, you'd have to ID and track every native critter around your base. Any non-native critter should be ID'd ASAP and shoot and then disected just to see if this tech was in the critter. If nothing is found, just burn it. If something is found, ID the tech and try to back track where the animal came from.
I could see them starting off with large critters, and then working their way down to small bugs. We'd have to defend against both in expectation of the tech advance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee
Those poor honey bees are in middle of war! TFA said it was illness by mites that are the main thing. Well, that's just what the Africanized bees want us to think. The Africanized bees are bringing their mites to do biowarfare against the lowly honey bee! Oh no! We are being invaded and losses in our domesticated bee population are terrible! We need to support our commerical allies the honey bees in their war aganist Africanized bees and their bio warfare mites before our agriculture collapses!
Um, there isn't a difference between socialist state, a police state, a religious state, or an athiest communist state. All the states want their citizens to be uniform and instinctively follow the behavior the governmental model demands. Thought control is fundmental to action action. If most of your population doesn't just think, but know that crimes are impossible to commit without either the state or god watching them, then most of your population will follow your dictates. You can actually ignore the .01% of people that actually try to think. It's usually better to funnel those people into R&D universities so those ideas are all contained in an isolated environment. All scientists and those on the science career track ought to be keep away from the general citizenry for both groups own good. The scientists should never be allowed to directly communicate to the general citizens as that might give the scientists power or disrupt the general harmony of the general population. All sciencists should be treated like scared holy virgins and never allowed to be spoken to except by a special priest or governmental official. Most governmental officals actually running things and knowning the state of the things shouldn't be allowed near the general population either. They need to be isolated just as the scientists need to be isloated.
The general population needs to stay busy, stay feed, stay happy, and most importantly stay in their mental boxes. As long as you have enough entertainers or a nice safe religion to follow, most of your population will be perfectly happy. I've left out the role of teachers and education, but that's just to setup the mental boxes on the general population and ID those that need to be funneled into science or government posts.
I mean, hey, great - I'm really glad this guy got the compensation very much due him. What worries me more is that the article didn't read "Corporation ignores serious national security concerns because there was no obvious profit."
I always wonder... do businesses really think they're immune to the affairs of their "mother country?" I'm quite sure any corporation that sees most of its factories razed would find their bottom line hit pretty hard.
Um, I'm all for nationalism, but there is a part of me that believes a global multinational corporate controlled world would be better for most people. Why should the US get special treatment from companies? What if the companies started funding their own mercs and fought back? There has been fiction on that subject. It's good thing for our national governments that our corporations don't have merc wars against each other or some governments would be in deep trouble.
god says it aint good to gamble.
Damn, I was trying to make Russian Roulette popular among the religious.
Um, only an atheist would fall for that. They don't believe they'd be punished by a God if they loose. A religious person on the other hand has to fear immortally being punished by their creator if they suicide or gamble. (Gamble is alot lesser of a sin than suicide generally.) So that means atheism wouldn't be a positive surival mechanism and being religious would be a survival trait.
according to similar polls, 34% believe in ghosts, 34% believe in UFOs, 29% believes in astrology, 25% believe in reincarnation and 24% believes in witches
Hey, don't bash anothers beliefs! I believe that there is more research that we could do in those areas. UFOs are flying things that we don't know about. So we just need to built a system to track and ID every visual flying object. I think that astrology needs to be funded just for blue sky research reasons. I've always thought what would happen if they could get a computer like the Earth Simulator and modeled the entire earth's population/migratation/wars due to visual stellar events back in time. (An also took into account how each of the locals interpreted the stellar event for their people.) Then you just have to use models to future stellar events including coments, asteroids and such to predict most people's gut reaction to such events based on past reactions. (Assumes no really new stellar event up there.) Well, it could predict people just as well as climate models predict climate.
Ghosts, the soul, and reincarantion all deserve some research. Ghosts are thought to be either a trapped soul "left behind" or some psychic footprint left behind that only a few can pick up. We should be able to test, monitor, and reproduce some of that. Actual physical proof or non-proof of a "soul" would be Earth shattering in global poltics. I think that there would be a faction of scientists that would refuse to believe in the physical proof of a soul as much as the masses would instantly love it being verified by our science and not just our religions.
What happens to a given soul/spirit/mind after death has been on of the questions that science has yet to begin to answer and we built religion to take care of it. Religion just states believe this and don't question it too much. That is a bit anti-science, but most people can't handle a science based world veiw and don't like the answers that science has currently given them. We don't like to be told that we only are going to live 30-78 years and then die and nothing of us is left behind or goes onto a new existance. Proof or disprove it don't beyond any need for "faith" in what happens. Forget a noble prize, you'd be our next living saint legend for imparting that proof to the world.
Witches? I do believe in magic/psychics, yet I've yet to come across any myself. I have a wierd definition of "magic." My definition of magic is any tech that works, yet I don't know how or why it works. I'm an IT guy, and computers are 90% magic to me. Cars, ovens, stop lights, and even paved roads are all magic. I could vaguely describe in general terms how I think each of them works, but I know that I don't have the knowledge to build any of those things myself other than a computer given the parts/tools. (I couldn't explain why a sound card or video card works or build or design one of those from scratch, but given completed parts, I could build a desktop computer.) Really thinking about there, is alot more magic out there than I previously thought.
This is what happens when you pander to religious fruit loops - it started with the 'In God We Trust' rebrand of the US (in particular, on money) which was the thin end of the wedge and now we have a situation whereby scientists cannot even discuss things properly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Pluribus_Unum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_God_we_trust
I don't know. I've always like the "In God we trust." It's vague and generic. The E PLURIBUS UNUM meaning "Out of many, one" doesn't really do any thing for me. On money is the only place that you really encounter "In God, we trust." Do you even look at it? Nah, you just look at the amount and then when ever there is a redesign of the dollar. Be honest is this an issue that you care about? According ot wikipedia, they started the "In God, we trust" as a reaction to atheist communist USSR. Choosing your battles wisely is what this about! Regilious people are voters and no matter how much their views differ from yours; they have a political effect. It makes sense for the NIH to limit the word "evolution" in any and all grants/abracts relating to public health just because if they stuck that single word in there would be contraversy. Without the word, they can describe all the effects and be sure of getting the NIH money for public health. If they used "evolution" in researching things like a cure for cancer, AIDS, or another random diease there is a possiblity that their funding could be cut due to contraversy. This isn't a battle any sane scientist would fight! They've learned to work around the public. If only, all nuclear research could do the same.
Take back your personal freedom and stop listening to the "but you are in public!" bullshit. If they aren't willing to have real people watch you then I'm not willing to tolerate it.
Um, I'd rather live in the IT police state where everything is recorded and nothing much ever looked at rather than the police state that has actual cops everywhere. Let's be honest. Police aren't meant to stop violence or protect anyone. Police are meant to clean up afterwards, fill out their paper work, and do something to make most people feel safer. Very shortly we are going to have cell phones that have biometric security. Most of that, I'd assume is actually stored on the phone. How difficult would it be for each time biometeric cell phone being ID'd for it to be run through finger print database for wanted criminals? I could see people tying all their devices like, ipods, cell phones, digital cameraa, and other tech crap with biometric ID that have all "authorized users" prints in them and if anyone unauthorized tries to use the device it sends the info of unauthorized usage attempt with date/time/GPS to some federal anti-theft police database.
You know it "only" costs $1500-2000 for a 80GB DVR with 4 camera setup for you to wire your own security system. That price startled me. Remember that slashdot article about using mulitple cameras to do a retina scan? How long before you can have the tech for $1500-2000 and ID every door to door sales person or other person that steps onto your property?
Yeah, about 2 years ago, I would have agreed with your assessment of nukes. It is a SAD state that we are in. But with Gore pushing facts on Global Warming (and perhaps a bit of the conjecture), I think that oil and coal will slow down. In particular, TCU (a Texas energy company) was about to build a dozen VERY LARGE coal plants in texas. IIRC, it would double the emissions from Texas. ...
Finally, I think that more and more environmentalists are becoming pragmatics about this. Few will try to stop any none oil/coal solution.
Um, I don't think so. I think they'll just boycott any power solution oil/coal/nukes/wind/hydro and other. Roof top solar is the only "good sounding" solution to some people. Solar isn't there to support our life style. You want to see an outcry? Wait till the cellphone/ipod/laptop/blackberry generation are told that their toys use too much electricity, and you have to cut back. (The good thing about those products is that they do have short life spans and if better more efficient models come out they will be bought as replacements.)
W. has given a series of tax breaks to Coal and Oil and has our troops guarding major pipelines where the oil companies are having issues (Iraq comes to mind). In addition, he has dropped a number of needed environmental protections and possible fines. IOW, he has artificially lowered the costs of Oil and Coal. He is pouring money into hydrogen research, while trying to cut all other avenues.
OTH, there has been damn little incentives for nukes or Alternatives.
I recently actually looked into some of the offical stuff. I've come to the conclusion that we are pretty much doomed. Why? We will shortly (within 10-20 years or so) be taking I think that it was something like 10GW of nuclear power off line. We won't be replacing them with other nuclear power plants. Let's be honest there is just too much of a global anti-nuke lobby for them to ever be built. I've been reading up on wind and geothermal. Both are a mixed bag. Geothermal seems to have tons of potential. What's the downsides? We don't know how to do it and national labs studying it want a few million to study better drilling techs. We could ramp up and really exploit wind power in a few states. The problem that I see with wind is that the wind industry and its supporters would be thrilled upping the wind power percentage to 5-10%. Um, that's just nowhere near enough. I've not read up on the lastest solar or bio-fuel papers. I'm not thrilled with their economics though. (If they were economic we'd be using them now.) I hate to say it, but G.W. Bush having US control of any foreign nation's oil supplies is a great thing for the US. The environmentalists say that there is only 50-100 years of oil left... Well, think of Iraq as securing a national US resource. It doesn't matter that it was another nation's recource. We need it; we have the power to take it and enforce our will on others; therefore a war for that energy resource makes some sense.
There is a part of me that actually think's that it won't be too bad though. Why? Because there is a ton of money to be made with renewable/sustainable/efficient products. The oil/coal companies are becoming "energy" companies. It's to their interest to determine if we really only have 50 years of energy left and how to make sure they have a product to sell. Nuclear power is the only energy resource that has been proven to work on the energy scale that we need without adjusting our lifestyle (and that we have a few thousand years of fuel). We won't build more nuclear power plants; there are anti-wind lobbies, anti-solar lobbies, and even anti-geothermal lobbies and few of them are from energy companies. They are from enviromentalist that want no land to be used for wind, solar, or geothermal uses or just plain NIMBY.
I give up. You know let's be evil. Let's build nukes to power this country for the next 10K years and dump all our nuclear waste in the mideast. That was supposed to be black humor, but I have the sinking feeling our US government would do it for the US good.
I don't get it.
Between work and home I have two Win2000 boxes and two XP boxes (and a Redhat as well). I remember still running NT when XP was introduced.
You know the silly feature in WinXP that made me want to upgrade my Win2000 box and some Win98 boxes to it? The built-in MS Picture and Fax viewer. Oh, sure I could download and install free ware image apps, and of course I have photoshop for evey image editing crap. But for those times just sitting down at some one else's PC and needing a builtin app. It was either IE or that MS Picture and Fax viewer to view images in WinXP. That's my most loved feature. The stability, system restore, and windows updates where you don't have to restart after every single freaking downloaded patch were just additional bonuses.
From what I've read linked off of slashdot, Vista really needs 2 GB of RAM to be happy and is really happy with 4 GB RAM. Only our newests machines have 2 GB of RAM. We have no plans of moving to vista and as the general computer guy, my box would have to one of the first to trickled down replaced. I have no idea what little feature is in Vista that I'll like and want everywhere. From the article, the only thing that sounds useful is the start menu intelligently using a scroll wheel. Doesn't sound like a big deal does it. But its the little things like that, which makes the entire OS progress. Slashdot forgets the human/user side of the coin very often. It's the little things that matter. The only thing about Vista that would make it really annoying is all those security dialogs. I'd really like to see how many of them my mom encounters playing AOL flash games. It's not the slashdot user that Vista is aimmed at. It's the Walmart customer that MS is really hoping to aim at. Did they hit that target? It sounds like it. My Vista advice that I've been handing out to non techies is try to wait 6 months; if you get a new computer with plans for vista, make sure it comes with vista preinstalled do not order a computer with XP that has a Vista upgrade vocher. I've not even played around with Vista; I'm just giving advice to keep them from rushing out and buying a PC that won't do what they want it to do. When I start hearing on slashdot that the $500-700 walmart PCs are running Vista o.k. to comfortablly then I'll recommend folks to buy it. I've heard a very wide range of opinions, but it seems to be make sure you have the RAM and CPU to handle vista. I don't think that's at the $500-700 price point, yet.
I'm actually surprised at the apathy shown towards the Bank of America fiasco of exploiting loopholes in the law to allow them to open accounts and credit cards for illegal aliens!!
I figured there would have been a much larger rush of people to move their accounts away from them.
I guess aiding and abetting law breakers just isn't enough to get the typical US citizen's ire up....
Um, I don't really care if a US bank opens and account for a citizen of any country and it gets used. I don't care if my small town back will open and operate an account for "illegal" aliens. I would want the rules that all accounts operate to be the same. For banks to deny "illegal" aliens, foreign nations, or international business clients the ability to open and operate an account, then they'd have to do some background checks on the individual. I just remember filling out address information when opening my checking account and a copy of my DL. I didn't have to go through any big ID check at the bank to verify that it was me or that I had the proper background to do business with that bank.
Now, you could agrue that we should have some national ID card and if you open any account at any US bank then you need to have that national ID card and a complete background/ID check. Um, I can live with "illegal" foreigners or just foreigners doing business in the US without all those ID checks. There is a part of me that does think that the banks should be able to confirm your ID like that, but that part of me says that every credit card reader in the country should be able to do a complete biometric scan to ID that the person holding the card is the actual card holder or authorized user for each and every credit card transaction. (It should be as quick and seemless as our current system except authorization process is also an ID process to prevent fraud/ID theft.)
You can't have it both ways.
A genuine example, from the 1500s. A footnote to an edition of Rabelais reveals that at one public fair in France, the prostitutes wanting to operate their trade had to take part at the start of the fair in a naked public footrace. This operates on a number of levels. It would tend to discourage unhealthy or diseased prostitutes. It constituted a form of advertising. And it provided entertainment. But it also shows that, no matter what you think of current entertainment standards, they were just as bad in the 1500s.
I don't know to complain about that or cheer them on. All in all, I'd want a video of someone recreating the event though. Heck, they could modernize it a bit for visitors and drop the prostitute part, but stick the label just wants some sex and gets random horny women to run naked around town with a big orgy at the end of the race. It would spread faster than St. Patrick's day.
I would like to know if this is a learned behavior from an outside source or if this is simply something they have discovered on their own.
If it is learned behavior, it took them long enough! I mean come on we've been using spears for awhile. Heck, spears have gone out of fashion today, but used to be much more common so you'd think the critters would have copied from us back then if that's where they picked it up.
20,000 people die each year from the flu, perhaps there should be some sort of war on virii declared - maybe we'll get universal health care funding :)
A war on transmittable disease could lead to the worst police that you can think of all in the name of public health.
If you noticed, there's a second kid in the house - a kid who's turning out just fine.
That don't mean anything. My wife and her older brother turned out ok, but their 7 year younger sister was the family black sheep. She pushed the limits and fought for control of her life. She did underage drinking, smoking, sex, and drugs. I think that she was just being experimental, but she did it in a manner to piss off her mom royally. My sister-in-law also happens to have the habit of picking the worst jerk/bad boy types for mates. Her baby's daddy is in jail on a drug charge. I'm just thank full that she's an offical adult, living on her own, working, going to college and attempting to raise a babby. I don't like her; she is a bitch most times to any one that she some what dislikes, but other than that she seems to be running her life the way she wants it and somewhat successfully.
I guess in a sense this is evolution in action. It doesn't matter if slashdot, me or my mother-in-law dislikes my sister-in-law's lifestyle/personal choices as long as she breeds and the child manages to successfully breed. Heck what's really funny about evolution is that doesn't care if my sister raises the kid or my mother-in-law, or my wife, other family, or some other org as long as the child grows up and manages to breed evolution is doing its bit. This is why babies are "cute" so we'll raise other people's kids for them.
But I'm curious how PA has verified that this person is who she claims to be.
Um, this got me to thinking. The second article had the kids name in it. To those that this story is local, the family whose kid this is would "know" if the person in the PA article was legit, PA making something up, or someone else conning PA. I don't know how much of their local community could easily figure out the woman's name from the description of her relation to the kid.
What gets me is that she didn't have to stick around the father if she was a step-parent. I wonder how much she is just covering her own butt that it wasn't her fault the kid was bad; it's always been him or it was his crazy family or such and such. This reminds me of my mother-in-law and her last marriage. It was her 3rd marriage. She was marrying the guy cause she liked him. He was marrying her so he'd have a woman to raise his teenage son (13-16.) That marriage lasted about a year or two. My mother-in-law was far stricter than my parents and "tried" raising he kid for about 5-10 days. His "crazy" natural mom lived a few blocks away and any time my mother-in-law made a rule or enforced one of her rules he'd just go to his mom's and do what he wanted. This kid wasn't doing anything illegal. He was just a spoiled brat according to my mother-in-law. The thing is she had already raised her 3 kids and the last one had just getting into college when all this was taking place. She just didn't want to put up that shit and divorced the guy.
The kid wasn't the step-parent's problem. The step-parent should have just divorced their mate rather than be around that kid. Was the kid's parent rich or very good in bed that you could just put up with or ignore the kid until this happened? Nah, can't have been a rich parent or the kid would have been in a distant boarding school the first time the kid started getting out of hand.