The best airport security policy is the cruelest. We will destroy the entire village or sector of the city of anyone who creates a terrorist act on an airplane of our country that causes a loss of live. Then forget about inspecting shoes and laptops and hearing aids and soap bottles, etc...
When the criminals realize that they will be destroying their city, their mosque, their people, themselves, by convincing young men and women to murder random others in the name of some god, then this nonsense will stop. The first few times that we have to do it, we will get called the greatest mass murderers since the Germans (oh, excuse me, the Nazis) and monsters and all those other things.
But the rest of the world isn't going to miss the people from the villages and slum sectors of the giant mega-cities from when these criminals come. And they aren't going to miss the holy men who sent them either. Despite all that they say. Yes, the first few times that they call our bluff and blow up an airplane in the name of what passes for a god in their part of the world, and we just nonchalantly nuke their sorry asses and go back to watching the Brittany show, it will be hard.
But it will pass. And it will come to be seen as simply the way that the world works in the new era where there are billions of surplus people.
And the terrorism will stop...or just fade away to a few incidents.
And we won't have to take off our shoes to board an airplane anymore.
The hardest part of this strategy is learning how to avoid being manipulated into destroying someone by one of their tribal enemies. Say that there are three countries: A, B, C. A and B have huge nuclear arsenals and C has only one little atom bomb, maybe ten kilotons. C also hates B with a passion that is historic and pathological and senseless. If C uses its one bomb on B, it gets one good sneak attack and then gets wiped out by B.
But if C uses its one bomb on A and convinces A that B did it, then A will completely destroy B and also be wiped out by B. C doesn't care what happens to A. And with both A and B reduced to ashes, C is now the king shit country and the 'peacemaker'.
But if A and B have a secret agreement that if any bomb goes off in either of their countries, then before they attack each other they are going to first completely destroy C, D, E, and all the other pissant little psychopathic peoples republics, then this plan will keep the peace because D, E, and all the rest will do whatever they can to make sure that C and all the rest of the pissants behave. This means a lot of little wars and assassinations among the pissants, but it is the price paid to avoid nuclear exchanges.
If we are going to adopt a policy of nuking pissants every time that they blow up an airliner, then we going to both have a lot of secret agreements and be willing to accept a lot of random bloodletting between the pissants.
But if it keeps the rest of the civilized world safe, well then, fine...just do it.
This is another perfect example about how new media can't understand technology.
In this case, the technology is advanced chemical analysis machines that can detect trace amounts of drugs. In fact, it can detect trace amounts of whatever chemical it happens to be programmed to find if the trace amounts are present. The key word here is trace, as in a few hundred thousand or less Molecules.
But give these jokers the opportunity to combine the words 'detect' and 'drugs', and they turn into self-righteous raving lunatics predicting the end of civilization and, by implication of the word 'drugs', millions of crazed niggers and hippies running amok, which is what the word 'drugs' means to the media fear mongers.
Since the level of the trace amounts detected is so far below the effective medical dose to have any effect on human behavior or physiology, then why are they reporting it as if it were some kind of imminent problem?
And, what, pray tell, is exactly so new about this situation? These trace amounts of (oh, horrors!) 'drugs' seem to have always been in the environment. What's new is not their presence, it's the ability to detect molecular levels of them.
But the news media is presenting this as a warning that some terrible thing is about to happen. But it's not. This is a non-story being 'fear amplified' by the news media who are extremely limited in the real stories that they are allowed to cover by their corporate owners. So they just pander to vague fears.
To hell with them. They are not professionals anymore, nor do they have anything resembling credibility left.
And I am all so sick and tired of normal healthy productive people being fired from their jobs just because molecular trace amounts of 'drugs' turn up in the body fluids that they have been forced to surrender against the 4th and 5th ammendment of the US constitution that we are suspossed to live under in the USA.
So you invented a machine that can 'prove' that someone smoked weed a month ago and therefore you can legally use this 'evidence' as an excuse to destroy their life? Well, fuck you and your machine. You are an asshole and a fascist and you are not doing your company, your people, or your country any favors by pretending otherwise.
This concept means that the police will be going away from fighting crime and more into information brokering. If information has value (and EVERY Slashdaughter believes that it does) then what the police find on the computers that they search is going to be worth a lot more than what it pays to be a policeman. You just have to know what it is worth when you find it.
And policemen, being young and usually deeply into popular culture, will certainly copy for their own use any MP3 file or piece of media about their own favorite pop group. Then we might get to see the RIAA sueing the police to stop 'info-cop' piracy. A lot of individual officers will be fired. And they will mostly all become information brokers between the people who want what is found in all these searched hard-drives and the remaining police who are doing the searching (but don't know the value of what they find).
In the meantime, all really sensitive information will be encrypted and hidden in international corporate websites or secret Geocities-like storage sites.
The first thing that one must ask, after ohh-ing and ahh-ing over the fantastic concept, is 'Why did this fail in the past?' Because really great ideas in city planning are never new, and have always been tried before. If it is still around, then it worked. If not, then it was abandoned because it didn't work. Why?
This mini-tunnel concept was done in Paris about 100 years ago. Small packages were delivered around the city using compressed air in a long series of tubes. It was abandoned by the late 1960s.
Tunnels have problems. Especially in the middle of cities. The buildings are high and the foundations are deep. The tunnels have to be deeper. And their sides re-enforced.
How are you going to keep the water out of them?
What do you do when they become obstructed by cave-in or automated-container collisions?
Who's going to pay for all this?
Who's going to pay to fix it in twenty to fifty years when it becomes known that massive amounts of money were stolen during the initial construction phase? (like the 'big dig' in Boston).
One of the great things about being a student of German history is to watch them meticiously design, craft, and build an elaborate 'solution' and then blow it all up in a fit of Wagnerian madness. Then pick up the pieces, go back into 'DeutscheKraftwerk' (not a real word but a real concept) mentality, and begin the whole process all over again with a new generation purified by fire and the triumph of the will. While the rest of the world just watches and feels sorry for their neighbors.
The only good point about teaching 'creationism' as an alternative to evolution is that it gives teachers an opportunity to show students how the scientific process works. With one side being an world-accepted principle and the other being a religious myth, teachers could show how the ideas of evolution were developed since the 1850s.
However, the religious fundamentalists don't want this at all. Having managed to pass a law requiring teaching religious myth as equal to scientific principle, the next law that they would pass would be to outlaw teaching any form of scientific methodology that easily exposes the religious side as fantasy. The fundamentalists haven't the slightest interest in presenting creationism as a alternative to scientific principle; they want to make the teaching of evolution illegal.
I sometimes wonder if Lincoln was wrong in forcing a great and brutal war to keep the USA together. If he had let the Confederates have their own country, the rest of us wouldn't have to support them or be subjected to their bizarre fantasies. Harry Turtledove has written a series of alternative-history novels about the consequences of Confederate independence. His conclusion is that it would have led to a long series of bloody and pointless wars between to the two original halves of the USA that would have continued to the present day.
But maybe the time has come at the present to let the Confederacy go. They can hang homos and pot-smokers from every lamppost and enforce religious fantasy as scientific law. In a generation they would be a huge poor backward third-world country full of religious zealots endlessly ambushing each other from burned-out shopping malls and Mcmansion shells. The rest of the former USA would as rich as Switzerland from not having to support them or their massive global war-machine world-domination through 'freedom' expensive delusions any more.
Nevertheless, the wacko American religious right may have simply shot their wad. Their power came from a politically-convenient coalition between them and the corporate elite to take control of the American government and pass laws embedding and institutionalizing corporate economic power. As that has largely happened since the first Reagan administration, the religious right are no longer needed by the corporate wealthy and are often an embarrassment to them.
In that case their power is fading now and they are becoming more of an amusement than a threat to scientists.
Seriously. Why are the Americans obsessed with searching for traces of drugs? Most so-called 'drug users' that drive the Americans batshit are harmless young cannibus smokers. And if they develop a machine that detects microscopic and molecular trace levels of cannibus (that's weed, you'all), well they are going to find it. Because roughly 10% of the people going through what they call 'airport security' are going to have molecular levels of exposure to cannibus. Seek and ye shall find.
So what are the stupid Americans going to do then when they find some young person with trace molecular levels of cannibus in their aura? Shut down the airport? Call out the National Guard? Taser the poor motherfucker over and over and make him or her flop around on the airport floor like a white shark dragged into a tuna boat? All of the above?
And what are they going to do when it happens again a half hour later?
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Americans! Let us give you a hint about security. Forget about finding the molecular levels of cannibus on random college students. Concentrate on the people who are seriously interested in blowing up airplanes.
Here's another hint. No serious terrorist is going to try hijacking a commercial airliner any more. If they are serious about flying a big plane into a place where a plane has no reason to be they will spend the money to rent a private plane, or blackmail some corrupt CEO into letting them borrow the corporate jet. Which never get inspected by what these bozos call 'security'. Because they are corporate private property. Which according to what passes for logic in the American mind, can't be used for terrorist activities because it is corporate property. Inconceivable!
If the Americans were really serious about making their airports safe they would turn the whole operation over to the Israelis or even the British. After all, this would give them more time to go around tasering random young people found in the presence of molecular traces of 'drugs'.
All these predictions by our technological superiors should not be taken seriously. They (ya... that's you, Ray!) live in a rarified glass jar. All their physical needs are met; all their intellectual curiosities are allowed to flower; and all their enemies are kept away by discrete and effective 'security' forces. It is they who are the crown of creation. For them, everything works, everyone is cool and smart; a place for everything and everything in its place. The future's so bright, they run their solar iPod off it.
But, boy, that's them, and that's not you. This being Slashdot, there's always a dazzling technostar lurking around these listings. But even so, the 20th century is over, and the 21st has different plans for those who prospered so well in the scientific-technological era. There's no real reason to expect that the wonders of the 20th century will continue. And to predict that they will arrive by schedule is foolhardy.
There are some serious nasties waiting around the bend for us. They're weak now, so they aren't taken seriously. In twenty years they won't be so weak. They'll be the royal bitch.
Global Warming A cliché now and we can even pretend that it either doesn't exist or that some god is just going to hop out of someone's asshole and fix it, just in time. Or we'll focus the intellect of the entire planet and send robots out to space to build a giant sunglass shield or some other pseudo-technological solution. Sorry, but this isn't going to happen. In twenty years (which is not a long time away) you'll be lucky if the robot waving a sign in front of the Burger King still works.
Over-Population There are twice as many people alive now then there were when you were born. In twenty years from now there be twice as many people as there are now. For every one of those people who will be engineering the bright future, there will be a thousand trying to blow up the world in the name of some god that found His way out of someone's asshole. Everybody loves cute little children; but they grow up and have to be either be fed, bled, or made dead.
Environmental Collapse Destruction of the topsoil, clear-cutting of the forests, disappearance of the fishing stocks, pollution. All solvable problems by themselves in isolation. But all together, all at the same time, happening in the same place. No solution.
Energy Crisis The oil stops oozing out of the deep holes that we dig into the places that oil has always oozed out of before. The remaining oil is there, yeah, six miles under the sea in the middle of CAT5 hurricane alley. The truth is that the scientific-technological age runs on oil. The predicted advancements are based on the continuance of this cheap and powerful energy source. All the so called alternative energy sources depend on oil also. BioDiesel depends on cheap crops, which depends on cheap fertilizer, which is made from cheap oil. High efficency solar panels depend on advanced electronic silicon wafer technology and billion dollar fabrication complexes. All that depends on cheap oil. No cheap oil means no biodiesel, no alternative energy wind farms, and billion dollar solar fabs. $100 a barrel is not cheap oil. And it's not going to go back to $15 a barrel, no matter how many stupid SUVs and Hummers the Americans build.
Engineered diseases Do you know that you can download the genetic sequence for smallpox? And for about $50000 you can buy a DNA sequencer to assemble it? There's a lot of bad things in the world, and smallpox used to be the worst. It's gone now. But in twenty years, some god might crawl out of someone's asshole and promise him 72 virgins and 100 goats if he resequences it back into existence. This disease spreads faster than a new picture of Britney's vulva and it doesn't take ten years to give you a very nasty death like AIDs does.
The real issue is not RIAA bullying. The real issue is the pain and difficulty involved in 'moving on' past the RIAA. The real issue is to what extent that what you consider to be your cultural heritage is owned by the RIAA.
This is not easy. From birth we are exposed by media that is owned by the RIAA. We absorb these recordings and come to have a deep inherent cultural identification with these recordings. But if you listen to these recordings by downloading them, then you are breaking 'the law'
Basically you have been addicted from birth to these recordings. Then when the technical means arrives to freely and easily copy and distribute these recordings, and you do this, because they are your cultural identity, then you are a criminal. Under their law. They set you up from birth to be a criminal, and by extension, a slave as a result of the lawful punishment imposed on you for 'breaking the law'.
This is the situation. The only way out is to accept as adults that we have been lied to and tricked. What we believed to be our cultural birthright is being used by corporations as a legal means to enslave us.
We have to break the RIAA addiction. That means that we must, to a certain extent, reject what we have been given from birth as a cultural heritage. We have to accept that the 'artists' or 'stars' are part of the problem, however unwillingly that they entered into this condition, and reject their star status.
We also have rebuild our own culture. and we must do it secretly We must hide and protect our new culture from the RIAA.
All this is very difficult, but it is the only realistic way to defeat the RIAA. It can't be done legally or through technology.
In a situation like this, it is best to remember that the laptop is just a tool for accessing the data, and not primarily a storage for data.
It would be a better alternative to have the data stored on an internationally accessible website in an encrypted format. Then when you need to work, get a laptop or an internet cafe where you can run your own programs. Download the encryption program from the website. Download your data. Work it and when finished, re-encrypt the new data and upload it to the website.
Yes, I know, all websites are international, ect.... But this isn't college. You want to use a website that isn't going to draw the attention of the people who are monitoring your internet session. Yes, you say that I'm being paranoid. Shit, grow up, places like Singapore, China, and Malaysia, and many others, exist where people just like you are going to be monitored. Learn to live with it.
And learn how to get work done discretely, effectively, and privately while being monitored by paranoid, mentally-defective assholes who have the authority to do any fucking thing that they want, and not a clue of what to do. (like Americans in uniforms).
36% of 'children' met with strangers that they met on-line
Not in the USA. Maybe in Israel, but still,.... probably not.
And the category of children being between the ages of 9 to 18? 18-year-olds are not children in any sense except in certain legal categories. 'met strangers'? Yeah, maybe, 18 year olds in neighboring high-schools meeting each other for coffee or just hanging out after looking at each other's picture and trading instant messages about common interests. Not the same thing as 9-year-olds meeting 'strangers with candy' on the big bad internet!
Totally meaningless study. Just easy grant money for half-wit psychology grad students.
The RIAA should be careful what they ask for...because they just might get it. The RIAA's entire case and frame-of-reference is that they are providing better entertainment product that anyone else and that all copying of their product is stealing material goods from them. They are then attacking people who download and 'consume' RIAA product. These attacks, they believe, will stop the downloading for free and return to the purchase of individual units of RIAA product on disk media.
This is not true. The distribution of free entertainment product is an established fact now. It's not going to go away. Nor will the RIAA/MPAA ever be able to charge for downloaded product what they charge for the product on disk. The market has changed.
By persecuting people who consume downloaded RIAA/MPAA product, they will not bring these people back to overpriced entertainment product, they will create a secondary market of non-RIAA product that is available through low or no-cost download.
The RIAA is destroying the market for their own product.
They assume that because the RIAA product is better entertainment quality now that it will always be better entertainment product that non-RIAA material. But non-RIAA entertainment will get better over time given the large audience.
The RIAA should refocus on what they do best. They should be taking all the dork music and videos on YouTube and the alt-RIAA music sites and giving recommendations for improvement. Then they should offer contracts to marginal bands for low cost distribution of music and videos. They need to learn to function inside the 'long tail'. If they don't then someone else will and they will lose the opportunity to enter and profit in this new market.
Most likely, the RIAA will split the music business into two basic parts; a mass-media world of a few stars and an 'underground' of no stars, but groups with clusters of devoted fans. This exists today, but what the RIAA will create in the coming years is a market where the people in the musical underground will have no interest in the rock/pop star world . A market situation will arise where large sections of the population will have a 'magnetic like-pole' adversion to RIAA mass pop product. This would be bad for the RIAA (I know, they're just a front company, but I mean all the companies that fund the RIAA) because it will cause them to permanently lose 1/3 to 1/2 of their current market.
If that happens, then it won't matter if they lower their product prices, or remove the DRM. Because a large segment of the musical market will have a fundamental aversion to their product, and won't consume it under any market conditions.
This is the true danger to the RIAA in their current actions.
I'm a monster for bringing this up, but... if you go about curing the diseases that kill 100 million people a year, and you don't provide jobs, housing, food, clothes, education, health care, etc. for these people that would have died but now live, then you have 100 million MORE people in the world that have no jobs, housing, food, clothes, education, health care, AND believe that the Americans are responsible for all the misery in their lives.
Which they are. Especially you, Mr. Gates.
And if the 100 million people who would have died of diseases go on to have ten kids each, then there is another billion dirt-poor people in the world who will come to believe that they will go directly to heaven and have 72 hamburgers, 72 cars, and 72 virgins if they manage to kill an American (like you...walking with your sweetie on your honeymoon on a beautiful third-world unspoiled beach).
So if you're not prepared to provide jobs, housing, food, clothes, education, health care, ect. for the people whose lives that you save by killing mosquitoes, then don't cure the diseases. Because you're not doing these people (or the rest of us) any favors.
Jeez, don't you just hate people like me who say things like this? Why can't we all just, you know, like, good things and shit, man!
As another hippie loon, may I add that the people who don't believe in copyright aren't the fucking thieves here. The media corporations who keep paying off the politicians to extend the copyright period are the fucking thieves!
Look, if you buy something on time, you make monthly payments until the time period is up. Then the thing belongs to you and you don't have to pay any more for it. Copyright works the same way. You pay during the copyright period. After the period is up, you don't pay because the formerly copyrighted item goes into public domain. It's yours because you have finished paying for it. In the case of items in the public domain, it's not only yours, it's everyone's.
When you pay off someone to extend the copyright period right before an item goes into to the public domain, you are stealing the public domain. You are making people pay you for things that they already own. That's fucking theft, not sharing files. Sharing files is what you do to protect the public domain from the fucking thieves that are stealing it!
Each time that the global media corporations extend the copyright period, they are stealing the public domain.
They are the fucking thieves, not us!
By the way, there are no 12-year-olds on Slashdot.
Underneath it all, Geeks are Romantics, which explains their basic conservatism and penchant for order. In that light, it's surprising that the Geek Art Guide doesn't emphasize the paintings of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli nearly single-handedly created the modern (that is post-Renaissance; one must think long term when considering the social impact of the fine arts) ideal of a beautiful woman with his stylized paintings of Simonetta Vespucci (1453-1476), the first Italian super-model. She was the inspiration for The Birth of Venus and her image is found in most of his other surviving paintings. Even 550 years later, her beauty stops traffic.
The best way to approach the fine arts from a Geek perspective is to read some of writings of Camille Paglia; the thinking man's radical lesbian feminist. She is one of the few modern social and art critics that makes any sense and because of that she is despised by the entire politically-correct liberal arts academic community. She is the one who has shown that after the invention of photography, the artist's obsession with feminine beauty created the advertising industry and abandoned painting. Check out the front third of any issue of Vanity Fair and you can believe it. It's like visiting an art museum. Her books on art criticism are dense but worth the effort.
It's not smart to piss off all the college students. They (eventually) grow into positions of authority. Or, they become the shaper of your legacy by both being the historians of their era and being the writers of the novels and movies about the era.
For example, take the case of J. Edgar Hoover. Founder and director-for-life of the American Federal police force; the FBI. He basically created his own myth as a brilliant policeman and police manager. In his younger years he destroyed nearly all of the small gangs that overwhelmed the small local and state police forces in the depression years.
But in his later years, he decided to singlehandedly destroy the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam-war movement at the same time. He seriously pissed off all the blacks and all the anti-war college students (which was most of them by the early 1970s). Now he is forgotten outside of his agency. He is more known now for being a strident anti-gay gay man who liked cross-dressing and for keeping blackmail records on everybody in Washington than he is for his earlier achievements.
I strongly doubt that this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't decided to take on all the young people and black people at the end of his career. The moment that he died all the young people that he pissed off and imprisoned started writing books to destroy the myth that he built around himself in the 1940's and 1950's.
The same will happen with the 20th-century record industry executives. By deciding to take on all the college students they are all but assuring that they will be remembered and written about by these same students as creeps and fools. When the RIAA has fallen (and they eventually will) there will be millions of young people who will go out of their way to ensure that the four or five global media conglomerates are legally broken up into tiny companies and forced to stay that way.
Personally, if I ran a giant global industry that is in the process of a structural transformation of its business model, I would hesitate to anger and alienate all the college students. They seem weak at the time, but they eventually grow very strong.
The risk of getting fired because you spend five to ten minutes getting your computer to boot in the morning is FAR more important than the waste of millions of kilowatt hours of electricity. People's HEALTH CARE, credit card payments, and mortgages depend on the whim of the corporate head office. When they need to lay-off the next round of 20000 employees to protect their own personal $20,000,000 performance bonus and golden parachute, they are going to look at things like whose PC boots on last in the office each morning in order to decide who to 'let go'.
Anyone in America who thinks something like saving energy is actually important has to be an under-30 recent grad or new hire. Forgive them, they don't have a clue about how things actually work in the corporate working world.
and second hand bookstores who have books that haven't been in print for 50 years.
I am not trying to argue or offer a rebuttal.
One service that an internet bookseller can offer the small second-hand bookstores is a listing service for these individual titles. This could be like eBay where people who are interested in a topic can search for titles that are, say, 'out of print', or 'over 30 years old', or 'non-English language'.
Someone would consider a 55 year-old book in French on making pastry an incredible find is not likely to come across the one title sitting on the back shelf of a Portland Oregon second-hand book store. But if that book store listed that title under the above categories with a listing service hosted by Amazon (for a small fee), then it would be sold quickly.
Actually, the man succumbed to mental illness. Hopefully you're never in a position to pass any meaningful judgment on people who have these kinds of issues.
Every four years I vote in the American presidential election.
My first PC program was 'Vegas Johnny's Draw Poker' ver 1.01 by John Comeau 1989 (Top Score Software). This is basic poker trainer that simulates a Draw game with eight players. It gives advice and odds on each hand.
What a fantastic program! I used it until the 486 era when the internal math co-processor caused it to not run on PCs (I believe that this is the case). For fifteen years I could only run it on a very old, barely working 386 laptop. Then I found DOS BOX program that simulates very old PCs and allows 1980's programs to run on modern machines. I still play it often.
Video games are fun, but, sooner or later, YOU ALWAYS LOSE. With accurate and *unforgiving* casino simulations you can develop skills that will allow you to actually make real money in the real world. The difficult part is to find simulations that are accurate and fast. I can win millions of dollars on Video Poker simulation programs and lose $100 in a half hour on a real Video Poker game in a bar. You want a program that shows you what you are doing wrong and simulates high-level master opponents. You want to master the game before you actually step into the casino.
The only first person shooter that I liked was Wolfenstein, probably because of the cartoon-like graphics. DOOM was too creepy and weird. When you live in an American city, you don't need a game to get daily exposure to weirdness and dangerous violence. Only people in protected and sheltered suburbs actually seek out this kind of experience. In the real world, this kind of experience seeks out you.
The trick to getting seriously good audio has nothing to do with audio reproduction equipment. All music is subjective; it's an emotional experience.
Stop paying $10000 for a 'sound system' and wanking endlessly on Slashdot about specs and which recording sounds better. Get yourself a $100 electric guitar and a simple but good headphone amp. A $1 LM386 audio amp IC and a couple of resistors/capacitors from a trashed stereo works fine.
Download some tab files of your favorite songs (the ones that you were going to use to judge the quality of your $10000 stereo system) and some MIDI files of the same songs (if you can find them still on the web).
Learn to play them on your guitar.
It takes a little time, sure. But the results are often feel better than endlessly listening to the same recording on a $10000 system (even with Monster cables).
And I assure you that you will be hearing parts and intricacies of the music that you didn't notice before learning to play the songs yourself on your own instrument. Even if you're listening on a $5 garage sale cassette Walkman.
Music is subjective. It is what you make it to be. 20-year-old Eddie Cochran, John Lennon, Eddie Van Halen, or Carlos Santana didn't need $10000 sound systems to make incredible music. Neither do you.
WHY are these bozos spending money on this? Who needs a driver-less car?
Hey, Let me guess. The Saudis NEED driverless cars when their wives, daughters, and girlfriends want to go to the mall and there is no male around to drive them.
Fair enough (for them). But why in the civilized world would anyone need a driverless car? There's no shortage of people who would be happy to have a job driving for you if you don't drive.
So why are they spending all this money on this nonsense?
There have been several incidents where commercial airliners have been shot down. Nearly all were downed by official military. The fact that there have been so few attests to the professionalism of the various militaries.
In the late 1960's, Israel shot down a Jordanian airliner. In the early 1980's, an Iranian airliner was shot down by an American missile. The American destroyer was off-shore an Iranian city (Abidan, I believe) and was being attacked at the time by several Iranian PT boats. The US destroyer's captain ordered a missile launch against the PT boats, but the missile locked onto a commercial airliner that was on its final approach and blew it up. This incident scared the shit out everyone and caused major revisions in technology and tactics. The Iranians never attacked American warships with PT boats; the Americans didn't park warships so close to the Iranian shore; and an extensive rewriting of the software on the AGEIS ? system was done to prevent a reoccurence of this accident. It hasn't happened since.
In the mid-1980's a Korean 747 was shot down by the Soviets after flying near a secret Soviet airbase in Siberia. All the questions were never answered, but it has never happened again.
In 1987, Islamic terrorists working with Libya blew up a British Airways 747 over Scotland.
In 2000, the Islamic terrorist group, al-Qaida, attempted to blow up between six and twelve commercial airliners flying across the Pacific at the same time. This plot was discovered at the last minute. In 2001, the same group hijacked four airliners at the same time and crashed them into buildings, killing thousands of people in the USA. A year later, a passenger attempted to blow up a jet mid-flight with explosives packed in his shoes. He was subdued while attempting to get the fuse lit. A few years after that, Islamic terrorists based in the UK attempted to cause explosions on several airliners by mixing ordinary household liquids into explosive combinations while the plane's were in flight. This plot was foiled by inspectors who noticed several passengers attempting to board the aircraft while carrying unusually large amounts of legal but curious household chemicals. An example would be swimming pool chlorine mixed with automobile engine degreaser. These two chemicals ignite into a very hot flame when mixed, which occasionally burns up a suburbanite's car on their way home from CostCo.
The most noticeable facet about commercial airliners being shot down by air forces or terrorists is how rarely it happens. Airlines fly constantly in and around militarily hot areas. But airlines and the international air organizations work constantly to make sure airliners stick to established routes and have active ID transponders. Plus, they've made it quite clear to all the third-world dictators and would-be dictators still fighting in the jungle that their own 747 (flying as the trophy airship of the countrie's national airline) would be totally unwelcome at London, Paris, or Zurich airport if they took a notion to fucking around with commercial airliners. That keeps everyone on the straight and narrow.
Since it is primarily the Arabs who are telling the world that their God have given them permission to shoot down commercial airliners, wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run to just not give or sell anti-aircraft missiles to the Arabs? You don't hear the Dutch, the Peruvians, or the Mongolians talk about how they are going to heaven by killing Americans, only Arabs. It would be cheaper to just not give missiles to Arabs.
But the whole point is not to save money or lives, the whole point is make sure that the 40 billion dollars is going to your company to make technology to protect against what is currently a non-existent threat. (If the threat were real, then the Arabs would be shooting down planes with the Stingers that the Americans gave them twenty years ago).
The only real threat is the possibility that the 40 billion dollars would be spent on health care, education, housing cost, or tax relief, And not be directed to your company and your golden parachute. Then when the money has gone to your company to make anti-missile technology, then actual missile will be distributed to the Arabs where they will make their way to the terrorist groups who will shoot one off occasionally at an airplane.
When you understand that the whole point of the war on terror is ensure an endless stream public monies go to huge expensive war technology contracts instead of other public needs, then you understand the entire point of the permanent endless war on terror.
Just don't buy any of that cheap foreclosed pennies-on-a-dollar real estate that is right next to the airport!
Encryption doesn't matter for a passport...if you are hunting Americans and Americans are the only ones who have RFIDs in their passports.
If you have a device that detects RFIDs and you find someone walking down the street in a country outside the USA with an RFID on their person, then that person is most likely to carrying an American passport. If you are looking to kidnap or kill an American because your God has given His OK to do so (the mullah told you so), well then chances are very high that you've found one.
So run up and do Allah's will. If it's a woman or child, so much the better because there is less likelyhood that they will fight back or resist.
This RFID in passports is such a bad idea that it is all but unimagineable that any other country will do it. Americans have become obsessed with techno-fascist stupidities since the Saudi Arabian massacre of their people in September 2001. They need to step back a little and give some serious thought to what is a good idea and what is only a technological fad with unwanted consequences.
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The best airport security policy is the cruelest. We will destroy the entire village or sector of the city of anyone who creates a terrorist act on an airplane of our country that causes a loss of live. Then forget about inspecting shoes and laptops and hearing aids and soap bottles, etc...
When the criminals realize that they will be destroying their city, their mosque, their people, themselves, by convincing young men and women to murder random others in the name of some god, then this nonsense will stop. The first few times that we have to do it, we will get called the greatest mass murderers since the Germans (oh, excuse me, the Nazis) and monsters and all those other things.
But the rest of the world isn't going to miss the people from the villages and slum sectors of the giant mega-cities from when these criminals come. And they aren't going to miss the holy men who sent them either. Despite all that they say. Yes, the first few times that they call our bluff and blow up an airplane in the name of what passes for a god in their part of the world, and we just nonchalantly nuke their sorry asses and go back to watching the Brittany show, it will be hard.
But it will pass. And it will come to be seen as simply the way that the world works in the new era where there are billions of surplus people.
And the terrorism will stop...or just fade away to a few incidents.
And we won't have to take off our shoes to board an airplane anymore.
The hardest part of this strategy is learning how to avoid being manipulated into destroying someone by one of their tribal enemies. Say that there are three countries: A, B, C. A and B have huge nuclear arsenals and C has only one little atom bomb, maybe ten kilotons. C also hates B with a passion that is historic and pathological and senseless. If C uses its one bomb on B, it gets one good sneak attack and then gets wiped out by B.
But if C uses its one bomb on A and convinces A that B did it, then A will completely destroy B and also be wiped out by B. C doesn't care what happens to A. And with both A and B reduced to ashes, C is now the king shit country and the 'peacemaker'.
But if A and B have a secret agreement that if any bomb goes off in either of their countries, then before they attack each other they are going to first completely destroy C, D, E, and all the other pissant little psychopathic peoples republics, then this plan will keep the peace because D, E, and all the rest will do whatever they can to make sure that C and all the rest of the pissants behave. This means a lot of little wars and assassinations among the pissants, but it is the price paid to avoid nuclear exchanges.
If we are going to adopt a policy of nuking pissants every time that they blow up an airliner, then we going to both have a lot of secret agreements and be willing to accept a lot of random bloodletting between the pissants.
But if it keeps the rest of the civilized world safe, well then, fine...just do it.
This is another perfect example about how new media can't understand technology.
In this case, the technology is advanced chemical analysis machines that can detect trace amounts of drugs.
In fact, it can detect trace amounts of whatever chemical it happens to be programmed to find if the trace amounts are present.
The key word here is trace, as in a few hundred thousand or less Molecules.
But give these jokers the opportunity to combine the words 'detect' and 'drugs', and they turn into self-righteous raving lunatics predicting the end of civilization and, by implication of the word 'drugs', millions of crazed niggers and hippies running amok, which is what the word 'drugs' means to the media fear mongers.
Since the level of the trace amounts detected is so far below the effective medical dose to have any effect on human behavior or physiology, then why are they reporting it as if it were some kind of imminent problem?
And, what, pray tell, is exactly so new about this situation? These trace amounts of (oh, horrors!) 'drugs' seem to have always been in the environment. What's new is not their presence, it's the ability to detect molecular levels of them.
But the news media is presenting this as a warning that some terrible thing is about to happen. But it's not. This is a non-story being 'fear amplified' by the news media who are extremely limited in the real stories that they are allowed to cover by their corporate owners. So they just pander to vague fears.
To hell with them. They are not professionals anymore, nor do they have anything resembling credibility left.
And I am all so sick and tired of normal healthy productive people being fired from their jobs just because molecular trace amounts of 'drugs' turn up in the body fluids that they have been forced to surrender against the 4th and 5th ammendment of the US constitution that we are suspossed to live under in the USA.
So you invented a machine that can 'prove' that someone smoked weed a month ago and therefore you can legally use this 'evidence' as an excuse to destroy their life? Well, fuck you and your machine. You are an asshole and a fascist and you are not doing your company, your people, or your country any favors by pretending otherwise.
Have a nice day!
This concept means that the police will be going away from fighting crime and more into information brokering. If information has value (and EVERY Slashdaughter believes that it does) then what the police find on the computers that they search is going to be worth a lot more than what it pays to be a policeman. You just have to know what it is worth when you find it.
And policemen, being young and usually deeply into popular culture, will certainly copy for their own use any MP3 file or piece of media about their own favorite pop group. Then we might get to see the RIAA sueing the police to stop 'info-cop' piracy. A lot of individual officers will be fired. And they will mostly all become information brokers between the people who want what is found in all these searched hard-drives and the remaining police who are doing the searching (but don't know the value of what they find).
In the meantime, all really sensitive information will be encrypted and hidden in international corporate websites or secret Geocities-like storage sites.
The first thing that one must ask, after ohh-ing and ahh-ing over the fantastic concept, is 'Why did this fail in the past?' Because really great ideas in city planning are never new, and have always been tried before. If it is still around, then it worked. If not, then it was abandoned because it didn't work. Why?
This mini-tunnel concept was done in Paris about 100 years ago. Small packages were delivered around the city using compressed air in a long series of tubes. It was abandoned by the late 1960s.
Tunnels have problems. Especially in the middle of cities. The buildings are high and the foundations are deep. The tunnels have to be deeper. And their sides re-enforced.
How are you going to keep the water out of them?
What do you do when they become obstructed by cave-in or automated-container collisions?
Who's going to pay for all this?
Who's going to pay to fix it in twenty to fifty years when it becomes known that massive amounts of money were stolen during the initial construction phase? (like the 'big dig' in Boston).
One of the great things about being a student of German history is to watch them meticiously design, craft, and build an elaborate 'solution' and then blow it all up in a fit of Wagnerian madness. Then pick up the pieces, go back into 'DeutscheKraftwerk' (not a real word but a real concept) mentality, and begin the whole process all over again with a new generation purified by fire and the triumph of the will. While the rest of the world just watches and feels sorry for their neighbors.
The only good point about teaching 'creationism' as an alternative to evolution is that it gives teachers an opportunity to show students how the scientific process works. With one side being an world-accepted principle and the other being a religious myth, teachers could show how the ideas of evolution were developed since the 1850s.
However, the religious fundamentalists don't want this at all. Having managed to pass a law requiring teaching religious myth as equal to scientific principle, the next law that they would pass would be to outlaw teaching any form of scientific methodology that easily exposes the religious side as fantasy. The fundamentalists haven't the slightest interest in presenting creationism as a alternative to scientific principle; they want to make the teaching of evolution illegal.
I sometimes wonder if Lincoln was wrong in forcing a great and brutal war to keep the USA together. If he had let the Confederates have their own country, the rest of us wouldn't have to support them or be subjected to their bizarre fantasies. Harry Turtledove has written a series of alternative-history novels about the consequences of Confederate independence. His conclusion is that it would have led to a long series of bloody and pointless wars between to the two original halves of the USA that would have continued to the present day.
But maybe the time has come at the present to let the Confederacy go. They can hang homos and pot-smokers from every lamppost and enforce religious fantasy as scientific law. In a generation they would be a huge poor backward third-world country full of religious zealots endlessly ambushing each other from burned-out shopping malls and Mcmansion shells. The rest of the former USA would as rich as Switzerland from not having to support them or their massive global war-machine world-domination through 'freedom' expensive delusions any more.
Nevertheless, the wacko American religious right may have simply shot their wad. Their power came from a politically-convenient coalition between them and the corporate elite to take control of the American government and pass laws embedding and institutionalizing corporate economic power. As that has largely happened since the first Reagan administration, the religious right are no longer needed by the corporate wealthy and are often an embarrassment to them.
In that case their power is fading now and they are becoming more of an amusement than a threat to scientists.
Seriously. Why are the Americans obsessed with searching for traces of drugs? Most so-called 'drug users' that drive the Americans batshit are harmless young cannibus smokers. And if they develop a machine that detects microscopic and molecular trace levels of cannibus (that's weed, you'all), well they are going to find it. Because roughly 10% of the people going through what they call 'airport security' are going to have molecular levels of exposure to cannibus. Seek and ye shall find.
So what are the stupid Americans going to do then when they find some young person with trace molecular levels of cannibus in their aura? Shut down the airport? Call out the National Guard? Taser the poor motherfucker over and over and make him or her flop around on the airport floor like a white shark dragged into a tuna boat? All of the above?
And what are they going to do when it happens again a half hour later?
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Americans! Let us give you a hint about security. Forget about finding the molecular levels of cannibus on random college students. Concentrate on the people who are seriously interested in blowing up airplanes.
Here's another hint. No serious terrorist is going to try hijacking a commercial airliner any more. If they are serious about flying a big plane into a place where a plane has no reason to be they will spend the money to rent a private plane, or blackmail some corrupt CEO into letting them borrow the corporate jet. Which never get inspected by what these bozos call 'security'. Because they are corporate private property. Which according to what passes for logic in the American mind, can't be used for terrorist activities because it is corporate property. Inconceivable!
If the Americans were really serious about making their airports safe they would turn the whole operation over to the Israelis or even the British. After all, this would give them more time to go around tasering random young people found in the presence of molecular traces of 'drugs'.
All these predictions by our technological superiors should not be taken seriously. They (ya... that's you, Ray!) live in a rarified glass jar. All their physical needs are met; all their intellectual curiosities are allowed to flower; and all their enemies are kept away by discrete and effective 'security' forces. It is they who are the crown of creation. For them, everything works, everyone is cool and smart; a place for everything and everything in its place. The future's so bright, they run their solar iPod off it.
But, boy, that's them, and that's not you. This being Slashdot, there's always a dazzling technostar lurking around these listings. But even so, the 20th century is over, and the 21st has different plans for those who prospered so well in the scientific-technological era. There's no real reason to expect that the wonders of the 20th century will continue. And to predict that they will arrive by schedule is foolhardy.
There are some serious nasties waiting around the bend for us. They're weak now, so they aren't taken seriously. In twenty years they won't be so weak. They'll be the royal bitch.
Global Warming A cliché now and we can even pretend that it either doesn't exist or that some god is just going to hop out of someone's asshole and fix it, just in time. Or we'll focus the intellect of the entire planet and send robots out to space to build a giant sunglass shield or some other pseudo-technological solution. Sorry, but this isn't going to happen. In twenty years (which is not a long time away) you'll be lucky if the robot waving a sign in front of the Burger King still works.
Over-Population There are twice as many people alive now then there were when you were born. In twenty years from now there be twice as many people as there are now. For every one of those people who will be engineering the bright future, there will be a thousand trying to blow up the world in the name of some god that found His way out of someone's asshole. Everybody loves cute little children; but they grow up and have to be either be fed, bled, or made dead.
Environmental Collapse Destruction of the topsoil, clear-cutting of the forests, disappearance of the fishing stocks, pollution. All solvable problems by themselves in isolation. But all together, all at the same time, happening in the same place. No solution.
Energy Crisis The oil stops oozing out of the deep holes that we dig into the places that oil has always oozed out of before. The remaining oil is there, yeah, six miles under the sea in the middle of CAT5 hurricane alley. The truth is that the scientific-technological age runs on oil. The predicted advancements are based on the continuance of this cheap and powerful energy source. All the so called alternative energy sources depend on oil also. BioDiesel depends on cheap crops, which depends on cheap fertilizer, which is made from cheap oil. High efficency solar panels depend on advanced electronic silicon wafer technology and billion dollar fabrication complexes. All that depends on cheap oil. No cheap oil means no biodiesel, no alternative energy wind farms, and billion dollar solar fabs. $100 a barrel is not cheap oil. And it's not going to go back to $15 a barrel, no matter how many stupid SUVs and Hummers the Americans build.
Engineered diseases Do you know that you can download the genetic sequence for smallpox? And for about $50000 you can buy a DNA sequencer to assemble it? There's a lot of bad things in the world, and smallpox used to be the worst. It's gone now. But in twenty years, some god might crawl out of someone's asshole and promise him 72 virgins and 100 goats if he resequences it back into existence. This disease spreads faster than a new picture of Britney's vulva and it doesn't take ten years to give you a very nasty death like AIDs does.
The real issue is not RIAA bullying. The real issue is the pain and difficulty involved in 'moving on' past the RIAA. The real issue is to what extent that what you consider to be your cultural heritage is owned by the RIAA.
This is not easy. From birth we are exposed by media that is owned by the RIAA. We absorb these recordings and come to have a deep inherent cultural identification with these recordings. But if you listen to these recordings by downloading them, then you are breaking 'the law'
Basically you have been addicted from birth to these recordings. Then when the technical means arrives to freely and easily copy and distribute these recordings, and you do this, because they are your cultural identity, then you are a criminal. Under their law. They set you up from birth to be a criminal, and by extension, a slave as a result of the lawful punishment imposed on you for 'breaking the law'.
This is the situation. The only way out is to accept as adults that we have been lied to and tricked. What we believed to be our cultural birthright is being used by corporations as a legal means to enslave us.
We have to break the RIAA addiction. That means that we must, to a certain extent, reject what we have been given from birth as a cultural heritage. We have to accept that the 'artists' or 'stars' are part of the problem, however unwillingly that they entered into this condition, and reject their star status.
We also have rebuild our own culture. and we must do it secretly We must hide and protect our new culture from the RIAA.
All this is very difficult, but it is the only realistic way to defeat the RIAA. It can't be done legally or through technology.
In a situation like this, it is best to remember that the laptop is just a tool for accessing the data, and not primarily a storage for data.
It would be a better alternative to have the data stored on an internationally accessible website in an encrypted format. Then when you need to work, get a laptop or an internet cafe where you can run your own programs. Download the encryption program from the website. Download your data. Work it and when finished, re-encrypt the new data and upload it to the website.
Yes, I know, all websites are international, ect.... But this isn't college. You want to use a website that isn't going to draw the attention of the people who are monitoring your internet session. Yes, you say that I'm being paranoid. Shit, grow up, places like Singapore, China, and Malaysia, and many others, exist where people just like you are going to be monitored. Learn to live with it.
And learn how to get work done discretely, effectively, and privately while being monitored by paranoid, mentally-defective assholes who have the authority to do any fucking thing that they want, and not a clue of what to do. (like Americans in uniforms).
36% of 'children' met with strangers that they met on-line
.... probably not.
Not in the USA. Maybe in Israel, but still,
And the category of children being between the ages of 9 to 18? 18-year-olds are not children in any sense except in certain legal categories. 'met strangers'? Yeah, maybe, 18 year olds in neighboring high-schools meeting each other for coffee or just hanging out after looking at each other's picture and trading instant messages about common interests. Not the same thing as 9-year-olds meeting 'strangers with candy' on the big bad internet!
Totally meaningless study. Just easy grant money for half-wit psychology grad students.
Garbage in: Garbage out.
The RIAA should be careful what they ask for...because they just might get it. The RIAA's entire case and frame-of-reference is that they are providing better entertainment product that anyone else and that all copying of their product is stealing material goods from them. They are then attacking people who download and 'consume' RIAA product. These attacks, they believe, will stop the downloading for free and return to the purchase of individual units of RIAA product on disk media.
This is not true. The distribution of free entertainment product is an established fact now. It's not going to go away. Nor will the RIAA/MPAA ever be able to charge for downloaded product what they charge for the product on disk. The market has changed.
By persecuting people who consume downloaded RIAA/MPAA product, they will not bring these people back to overpriced entertainment product, they will create a secondary market of non-RIAA product that is available through low or no-cost download.
The RIAA is destroying the market for their own product.
They assume that because the RIAA product is better entertainment quality now that it will always be better entertainment product that non-RIAA material. But non-RIAA entertainment will get better over time given the large audience.
The RIAA should refocus on what they do best. They should be taking all the dork music and videos on YouTube and the alt-RIAA music sites and giving recommendations for improvement. Then they should offer contracts to marginal bands for low cost distribution of music and videos. They need to learn to function inside the 'long tail'. If they don't then someone else will and they will lose the opportunity to enter and profit in this new market.
Most likely, the RIAA will split the music business into two basic parts; a mass-media world of a few stars and an 'underground' of no stars, but groups with clusters of devoted fans. This exists today, but what the RIAA will create in the coming years is a market where the people in the musical underground will have no interest in the rock/pop star world . A market situation will arise where large sections of the population will have a 'magnetic like-pole' adversion to RIAA mass pop product. This would be bad for the RIAA (I know, they're just a front company, but I mean all the companies that fund the RIAA) because it will cause them to permanently lose 1/3 to 1/2 of their current market.
If that happens, then it won't matter if they lower their product prices, or remove the DRM. Because a large segment of the musical market will have a fundamental aversion to their product, and won't consume it under any market conditions.
This is the true danger to the RIAA in their current actions.
I'm a monster for bringing this up, but... if you go about curing the diseases that kill 100 million people a year, and you don't provide jobs, housing, food, clothes, education, health care, etc. for these people that would have died but now live, then you have 100 million MORE people in the world that have no jobs, housing, food, clothes, education, health care, AND believe that the Americans are responsible for all the misery in their lives.
Which they are. Especially you, Mr. Gates.
And if the 100 million people who would have died of diseases go on to have ten kids each, then there is another billion dirt-poor people in the world who will come to believe that they will go directly to heaven and have 72 hamburgers, 72 cars, and 72 virgins if they manage to kill an American (like you...walking with your sweetie on your honeymoon on a beautiful third-world unspoiled beach).
So if you're not prepared to provide jobs, housing, food, clothes, education, health care, ect. for the people whose lives that you save by killing mosquitoes, then don't cure the diseases. Because you're not doing these people (or the rest of us) any favors.
Jeez, don't you just hate people like me who say things like this? Why can't we all just, you know, like, good things and shit, man!
As another hippie loon, may I add that the people who don't believe in copyright aren't the fucking thieves here. The media corporations who keep paying off the politicians to extend the copyright period are the fucking thieves!
Look, if you buy something on time, you make monthly payments until the time period is up. Then the thing belongs to you and you don't have to pay any more for it. Copyright works the same way. You pay during the copyright period. After the period is up, you don't pay because the formerly copyrighted item goes into public domain. It's yours because you have finished paying for it. In the case of items in the public domain, it's not only yours, it's everyone's.
When you pay off someone to extend the copyright period right before an item goes into to the public domain, you are stealing the public domain. You are making people pay you for things that they already own. That's fucking theft, not sharing files. Sharing files is what you do to protect the public domain from the fucking thieves that are stealing it!
Each time that the global media corporations extend the copyright period, they are stealing the public domain.
They are the fucking thieves, not us!
By the way, there are no 12-year-olds on Slashdot.
Underneath it all, Geeks are Romantics, which explains their basic conservatism and penchant for order. In that light, it's surprising that the Geek Art Guide doesn't emphasize the paintings of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli nearly single-handedly created the modern (that is post-Renaissance; one must think long term when considering the social impact of the fine arts) ideal of a beautiful woman with his stylized paintings of Simonetta Vespucci (1453-1476), the first Italian super-model. She was the inspiration for The Birth of Venus and her image is found in most of his other surviving paintings. Even 550 years later, her beauty stops traffic.
The best way to approach the fine arts from a Geek perspective is to read some of writings of Camille Paglia; the thinking man's radical lesbian feminist. She is one of the few modern social and art critics that makes any sense and because of that she is despised by the entire politically-correct liberal arts academic community. She is the one who has shown that after the invention of photography, the artist's obsession with feminine beauty created the advertising industry and abandoned painting. Check out the front third of any issue of Vanity Fair and you can believe it. It's like visiting an art museum. Her books on art criticism are dense but worth the effort.
It's not smart to piss off all the college students. They (eventually) grow into positions of authority. Or, they become the shaper of your legacy by both being the historians of their era and being the writers of the novels and movies about the era.
For example, take the case of J. Edgar Hoover. Founder and director-for-life of the American Federal police force; the FBI. He basically created his own myth as a brilliant policeman and police manager. In his younger years he destroyed nearly all of the small gangs that overwhelmed the small local and state police forces in the depression years.
But in his later years, he decided to singlehandedly destroy the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam-war movement at the same time. He seriously pissed off all the blacks and all the anti-war college students (which was most of them by the early 1970s). Now he is forgotten outside of his agency. He is more known now for being a strident anti-gay gay man who liked cross-dressing and for keeping blackmail records on everybody in Washington than he is for his earlier achievements.
I strongly doubt that this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't decided to take on all the young people and black people at the end of his career. The moment that he died all the young people that he pissed off and imprisoned started writing books to destroy the myth that he built around himself in the 1940's and 1950's.
The same will happen with the 20th-century record industry executives. By deciding to take on all the college students they are all but assuring that they will be remembered and written about by these same students as creeps and fools. When the RIAA has fallen (and they eventually will) there will be millions of young people who will go out of their way to ensure that the four or five global media conglomerates are legally broken up into tiny companies and forced to stay that way.
Personally, if I ran a giant global industry that is in the process of a structural transformation of its business model, I would hesitate to anger and alienate all the college students. They seem weak at the time, but they eventually grow very strong.
And they have long memories.
This is America, guy...
The risk of getting fired because you spend five to ten minutes getting your computer to boot in the morning is FAR more important than the waste of millions of kilowatt hours of electricity. People's HEALTH CARE, credit card payments, and mortgages depend on the whim of the corporate head office. When they need to lay-off the next round of 20000 employees to protect their own personal $20,000,000 performance bonus and golden parachute, they are going to look at things like whose PC boots on last in the office each morning in order to decide who to 'let go'.
Anyone in America who thinks something like saving energy is actually important has to be an under-30 recent grad or new hire. Forgive them, they don't have a clue about how things actually work in the corporate working world.
and second hand bookstores who have books that haven't been in print for 50 years.
I am not trying to argue or offer a rebuttal.
One service that an internet bookseller can offer the small second-hand bookstores is a listing service for these individual titles. This could be like eBay where people who are interested in a topic can search for titles that are, say, 'out of print', or 'over 30 years old', or 'non-English language'.
Someone would consider a 55 year-old book in French on making pastry an incredible find is not likely to come across the one title sitting on the back shelf of a Portland Oregon second-hand book store. But if that book store listed that title under the above categories with a listing service hosted by Amazon (for a small fee), then it would be sold quickly.
Actually, the man succumbed to mental illness. Hopefully you're never in a position to pass any meaningful judgment on people who have these kinds of issues.
Every four years I vote in the American presidential election.
My first PC program was 'Vegas Johnny's Draw Poker' ver 1.01 by John Comeau 1989 (Top Score Software). This is basic poker trainer that simulates a Draw game with eight players. It gives advice and odds on each hand.
What a fantastic program! I used it until the 486 era when the internal math co-processor caused it to not run on PCs (I believe that this is the case). For fifteen years I could only run it on a very old, barely working 386 laptop. Then I found DOS BOX program that simulates very old PCs and allows 1980's programs to run on modern machines. I still play it often.
Video games are fun, but, sooner or later, YOU ALWAYS LOSE. With accurate and *unforgiving* casino simulations you can develop skills that will allow you to actually make real money in the real world. The difficult part is to find simulations that are accurate and fast. I can win millions of dollars on Video Poker simulation programs and lose $100 in a half hour on a real Video Poker game in a bar. You want a program that shows you what you are doing wrong and simulates high-level master opponents. You want to master the game before you actually step into the casino.
The only first person shooter that I liked was Wolfenstein, probably because of the cartoon-like graphics. DOOM was too creepy and weird. When you live in an American city, you don't need a game to get daily exposure to weirdness and dangerous violence. Only people in protected and sheltered suburbs actually seek out this kind of experience. In the real world, this kind of experience seeks out you.
The trick to getting seriously good audio has nothing to do with audio reproduction equipment. All music is subjective; it's an emotional experience.
Stop paying $10000 for a 'sound system' and wanking endlessly on Slashdot about specs and which recording sounds better. Get yourself a $100 electric guitar and a simple but good headphone amp. A $1 LM386 audio amp IC and a couple of resistors/capacitors from a trashed stereo works fine.
Download some tab files of your favorite songs (the ones that you were going to use to judge the quality of your $10000 stereo system) and some MIDI files of the same songs (if you can find them still on the web).
Learn to play them on your guitar.
It takes a little time, sure. But the results are often feel better than endlessly listening to the same recording on a $10000 system (even with Monster cables).
And I assure you that you will be hearing parts and intricacies of the music that you didn't notice before learning to play the songs yourself on your own instrument. Even if you're listening on a $5 garage sale cassette Walkman.
Music is subjective. It is what you make it to be. 20-year-old Eddie Cochran, John Lennon, Eddie Van Halen, or Carlos Santana didn't need $10000 sound systems to make incredible music. Neither do you.
WHY are these bozos spending money on this? Who needs a driver-less car?
Hey, Let me guess. The Saudis NEED driverless cars when their wives, daughters, and girlfriends want to go to the mall and there is no male around to drive them.
Fair enough (for them). But why in the civilized world would anyone need a driverless car? There's no shortage of people who would be happy to have a job driving for you if you don't drive.
So why are they spending all this money on this nonsense?
There have been several incidents where commercial airliners have been shot down. Nearly all were downed by official military. The fact that there have been so few attests to the professionalism of the various militaries.
In the late 1960's, Israel shot down a Jordanian airliner. In the early 1980's, an Iranian airliner was shot down by an American missile. The American destroyer was off-shore an Iranian city (Abidan, I believe) and was being attacked at the time by several Iranian PT boats. The US destroyer's captain ordered a missile launch against the PT boats, but the missile locked onto a commercial airliner that was on its final approach and blew it up. This incident scared the shit out everyone and caused major revisions in technology and tactics. The Iranians never attacked American warships with PT boats; the Americans didn't park warships so close to the Iranian shore; and an extensive rewriting of the software on the AGEIS ? system was done to prevent a reoccurence of this accident. It hasn't happened since.
In the mid-1980's a Korean 747 was shot down by the Soviets after flying near a secret Soviet airbase in Siberia. All the questions were never answered, but it has never happened again.
In 1987, Islamic terrorists working with Libya blew up a British Airways 747 over Scotland.
In 2000, the Islamic terrorist group, al-Qaida, attempted to blow up between six and twelve commercial airliners flying across the Pacific at the same time. This plot was discovered at the last minute. In 2001, the same group hijacked four airliners at the same time and crashed them into buildings, killing thousands of people in the USA. A year later, a passenger attempted to blow up a jet mid-flight with explosives packed in his shoes. He was subdued while attempting to get the fuse lit. A few years after that, Islamic terrorists based in the UK attempted to cause explosions on several airliners by mixing ordinary household liquids into explosive combinations while the plane's were in flight. This plot was foiled by inspectors who noticed several passengers attempting to board the aircraft while carrying unusually large amounts of legal but curious household chemicals. An example would be swimming pool chlorine mixed with automobile engine degreaser. These two chemicals ignite into a very hot flame when mixed, which occasionally burns up a suburbanite's car on their way home from CostCo.
The most noticeable facet about commercial airliners being shot down by air forces or terrorists is how rarely it happens. Airlines fly constantly in and around militarily hot areas. But airlines and the international air organizations work constantly to make sure airliners stick to established routes and have active ID transponders. Plus, they've made it quite clear to all the third-world dictators and would-be dictators still fighting in the jungle that their own 747 (flying as the trophy airship of the countrie's national airline) would be totally unwelcome at London, Paris, or Zurich airport if they took a notion to fucking around with commercial airliners. That keeps everyone on the straight and narrow.
Since it is primarily the Arabs who are telling the world that their God have given them permission to shoot down commercial airliners, wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run to just not give or sell anti-aircraft missiles to the Arabs? You don't hear the Dutch, the Peruvians, or the Mongolians talk about how they are going to heaven by killing Americans, only Arabs. It would be cheaper to just not give missiles to Arabs.
But the whole point is not to save money or lives, the whole point is make sure that the 40 billion dollars is going to your company to make technology to protect against what is currently a non-existent threat. (If the threat were real, then the Arabs would be shooting down planes with the Stingers that the Americans gave them twenty years ago).
The only real threat is the possibility that the 40 billion dollars would be spent on health care, education, housing cost, or tax relief, And not be directed to your company and your golden parachute. Then when the money has gone to your company to make anti-missile technology, then actual missile will be distributed to the Arabs where they will make their way to the terrorist groups who will shoot one off occasionally at an airplane.
When you understand that the whole point of the war on terror is ensure an endless stream public monies go to huge expensive war technology contracts instead of other public needs, then you understand the entire point of the permanent endless war on terror.
Just don't buy any of that cheap foreclosed pennies-on-a-dollar real estate that is right next to the airport!
Encryption doesn't matter for a passport...if you are hunting Americans and Americans are the only ones who have RFIDs in their passports.
If you have a device that detects RFIDs and you find someone walking down the street in a country outside the USA with an RFID on their person, then that person is most likely to carrying an American passport. If you are looking to kidnap or kill an American because your God has given His OK to do so (the mullah told you so), well then chances are very high that you've found one.
So run up and do Allah's will. If it's a woman or child, so much the better because there is less likelyhood that they will fight back or resist.
This RFID in passports is such a bad idea that it is all but unimagineable that any other country will do it. Americans have become obsessed with techno-fascist stupidities since the Saudi Arabian massacre of their people in September 2001. They need to step back a little and give some serious thought to what is a good idea and what is only a technological fad with unwanted consequences.
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