Rape is considered so terrible because it is often done specifically to impregnate the woman and to make her 'unfit for marriage' in traditional cultures where this is of primary importance. In that light, no one gives a fuck when a man gets raped (excuse the pun).
Who owns culture? That's what this is all about. The five global entertainment companies claim that they do. They own all the recordings. They own all the video, all the film, all the books, all the comic books, all the whatever. Sooner or later, they are going to claim to own the ideas and stories behind the 'product'. Then they will claim to own things like the C#minor chord or the plot device of a simple hero driven to vengence by a dastardly crime.
So their lawyers tell them. And their lawyers will have no trouble buying politicians to pass laws supporting these fantasies. Especially in countries that are totally corrupt and owned by corporations, like the USA.
But owning culture is like owning air. The ability to enforce ownership is dependent on the ability to use violence to force people to give you their money. Sooner or later, everyone will realize that all copyright is nothing but extortion. And they will realize that they have done nothing to morally justify the extremely harsh verdicts imposed upon them for so-called copyright crimes.
Historically in situations like this, people fight back. Someone gets a notice that they 'owe' $100000000 for being overheard humming a copyrighted tune in the park by a secret microphone. They track down the person who sent the notice, pay a fee to get background on this person and his family, and kidnap one or all of this bozo's children. Ransom being equal to the amount 'owed' for humming a tune in the park.
All you end up with is a lot of dead children and lawyers who aren't worried any more about making child support payments. What? You assumed that an entertainment industry lawyer had the ability to actually love somebody, like a family? No way.
All copyright is stupid with the technology available to us in the 21st century. Accept it. Don't let these assholes steal your money. Don't give them any of your money. And don't kidnap and kill their children because it's bad for your karma.
Stupidity passes in time: evil remains. Don't let entertainment lawyers trick you into transforming yourself into an evil person. I keep telling myself this over and over.
The only reason Apple exists is to transfer money from the bank accounts of overpaid yuppies dazzled by babbles to the bank account of Steven Jobs. This company doesn't do anything that isn't done cheaper and better by many others.
This has been obvious for a long time to anyone with half a brain.
Steven Jobs is God's way of telling us that we have too many stupid yuppies running around.
And some nitwit company that has seen its stock price fall a huge percentage because it spends far too much on psychotic lawyers than it does on R&D is filing a lawsuit about 'Spark' being close to 'sparc'. And this idiot lawyers have convinced someone that they 'own' the word 'spark'.
Am I reading this correct? Please tell me that this is not Sun Microsystems! Founded by geniuses, creators and leaders in the workstation industry, the true visionary company of the valley.
You would think that these guys would be too embarrassed to show their faces in the valley again after something as stupid as this.
These guys have no shame.
Since the world's population is bursting and there is...so...much....surplus...talent available, why don't we just put all these dumb fucks out of their (and our) misery. "take out the trash, clean out the crusty, and let them spend the rest of their days walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain."
What! There's a law against that too? Law or no law, sooner or later, it's going to be cheaper just to kill them all.
It's a shame that with all their education and vested options, they still don't realize this.
Software gets its deep appeal to the intellectual class of people because of its inherent contradiction: The ability to change the operation of physical machinery by manipulating symbols.
Sure the more technical you are, the more you can understand the rationity behind this seemingly divine contradiction. Ones and zeros controlling electrical voltage levels channeled through thousands of transistors, etc...
But the ability to change physicality by manipulating symbols has been an art reserved to magicians, shamans, and high priests. This ability to stand in the shadow of divinity has always appealed to men, because it is an analog or approximation of a divine absolute power. This is the subconscious appeal of software programming.
It also explains why software is primarily a masculine field of interest and employment. Women get the 'shadow of the divinity' power and feeling not by controlling physical nature through the manipulation of symbols, but by actually creating life inside themselves. This is something that men can and will never be able to do.
The most obvious ap for a pressure sensitive keyboard is for music and MIDI input. Because the standard PC/PS2 keyboard encodes both key-press and key-release as separate events (distinct scan-code sequences sent from the kbd to the PC), the PS2 makes a good *CHEAP* MIDI tone module input device.
Each key is mapped to a MIDI note or a MIDI parameter. Key press sounds the note and key release turns the note off. Any $1 microcontroller can be programmed to act as an interface. It's not a 'real' piano-type keyboard, but it doesn't cost $120 either.
The major disadvantages of using a PS2 keyboard as a MIDI input are three:
- Not every combination of keypresses produces corresponding polyphonic chords. Every manufacturers PS2 keyboard has 'dead' combinations of keys due to the internal row/column matrix.
- The keys are too small and are not linear. Nevertheless, accordion players learn to get around this problem.
- There is no MIDI velocity. There is no way to affect the sound's volume or tonality by varying how hard the PS2 keys are pressed. MIDI piano keyboards measure the time between a key's leaving the top position and its reaching the bottom of its movement. This becomes the Note Velocity value and is a programmable parameter of the note's sound, usually volume.
A pressure-sensitive keyboard would solve problems 1 and 3 above. It would be most welcome in the DIY MIDI community, IF it were both CHEAP and easy-to-program. By cheap, I mean less than $20 US and easy-to-program means that additional pressure parameter follow the same hardware quasi-SPI electronic waveforms as the current PS2 format and not be dependent on internal Windows APIs for its implementation. And, I almost forgot, the new keyboard must be absolutely low-powered. If it consumed more than 2-3 milliamps, then it would be worthless. Current HPs and Dell PS2 keyboards consume between 1 and 2 milliamps at +5 volts, while the 1995-2000 era Microsoft split-keyboard actually consumed about 80 milliamps or more. Which made them worthless for battery-powered off-PC applications.
If a pressure-sensitive keyboard isn't both cheap, low-powered, and easy-to-program, then it is just another stupid useless expensive toy keyboard destined to be stacked up in the back of Weird Stuff Warehouse six months after its grand release.
An excellent article in the field of Omnicide Studies. The science of knowing about and preventing the use of any technology that is specifically designed to deliberatly eliminate human life from Earth.
This will probably grow in a University degree field in the next 100 years.
Omnicide must be acknowledged as being different from genocide and meglocide. The German holocast against the jews in the 1940s was genocide. The slaughter of millions in the insane Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was meglocide. Omnicide is "La Jetee", a sci-fi film from 1962, although that was accidental omnicide.
Omnicide is do by four ways: release of a toxin, release of a biological agent, invoking a total nuclear war, and triggering an geological or astro-physical event such as redirecting an asteroid to strike the Earth. The first three are generally available now and the fourth is most likely far in the future.
Nostradamus was a middle-ages French monk who wrote cryptic poetry that hundreds of years later people have claimed was prophecy. But actually reading it shows that it is nothing more than junk poetry commonly written by monks in the middle-ages driven mad by religious obsession and hunger.
What does this have to do with my economic theories of my post? My point is that infrastructure transformation doesn't happen simply by the development of new technologies.
The 20th century was characterized by the positive feedback loop of technology creating capital resources that enabled the creation of huge manufacturing enterprises that in turn led to development of the next cycle of technology development. This process will not continue in the 21st century because the capital resources are not being created at the same pace as technological development. We are seeing capital resources begin to self-destruct. Peak Oil, over-population, and environmental destruction will cause a positive feedback loop in the 21st century that will most likely destroy the gains of the 20th century. 2150 will look more like 1850 than it will resemble 2000.
Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP programs don't have the funding to sustain their levels of service for the numbers of people who be entering these programs the next twenty years. There is not enough capital resources available to invest in new infrastructures for 100+ MPG vehicles and to support health care systems based on diminished-returns on investment. And the government will be trying to finance these programs at the same time that all the deficits that have been building up since the Reagan administration become due. If the ever-increasing deficits can be refinanced, then there is no problem. If the US government bonds can't be refinanced, (if the interest due on past deficits is greater than the present tax revenues generated) then the entire Ponzi scheme collapses and the depression of 2020 makes the recession of 2008 look minor.
What that means is that someone is going to decide sometime around 2025 whether to build new high-tech factories and let the baby-boomers all die or to not kill the baby-boomers and accept a lower standard of living for the younger people.
Since the boomers have all the votes then they will choose to make you live poorly. This will happen in most advanced countries; the never-to-be-developed economies of what we now call the third world simply won't matter to anyone after 2020.
My number comes from the book The Three Trillion Dollar War 2008 by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, both of whom are American economists not dependent on government funding for their research.
The point is there is a finite supply of money. Money spent on the war is money that not available to manufacture fuel-efficient vehicles. And since the money has already been spent on the war, there will be no development of American fuel-efficient vehicles on the scale needed to sustain American prosperity at 20th-century levels.
My point is that there is big difference between researching more fuel efficient vehicles and actually making millions of these fuel efficient vehicles. Even if the research was successful and the prototype 100+ MPG vehicles were created, there still is no money to create the factories and the infrastructure needed to convert the entire fleet of present vehicles.
The idea that there is no problem creating a new infrastructure from new technologies is a 20th century economic concept that depended on the ability to create capital for investment from undeveloped or underdeveloped natural resources. In the 21st century, those natural resources such as huge pools of surface-level light-crude oil are no longer available. And, because of 50 years of huge government deficit spending, the capital resources are not available to us as they were in the years after World War II when the other major countries were destroyed but we weren't.
My point is that it doesn't matter if you have a great new technology or prototype engineering project if there isn't any money left to develop the technology for the millions of people that need access to it. My point is that there is no more fucking money! . Sooner or later everyone is going to get the point that I'm making here.
I suggest taking a few economics classes to complement your engineering degree.
Everyone with all these wonderful plans to get the "Happy Motoring" era happy again with 100+ MPG vehicles is conveniently forgetting that it will take a HUGE amount of money to convert the VAST fleet of current BFACs (big f'ing American cars) to anything resembling a 100+ MPG fleet of vehicles.
This is money that we don't have. We have (you may recall) pissed away 3 trillion dollars on the PEW (permanent endles worthless war) so far and it's still at PEW status. We have bankrupted the middle-class on a bogus housing bubble to the point where half the houses built and sold in the past ten years are 'underwater'. We have maxed out our credit cards and destroyed the major banks to the point where they required two seperate 760 billion dollar 'bailouts' in a single year. We have no realistic health care system at a point where a 100 million people born between 1945 and 1970 are nearing retirement. Our totally corporately-owned corrupt government runs up a trillion dollars of deficit every fucking year. And the rest of the world is talking behind our backs about not continuing to buy our Ponzi Federal Reserve bonds.
Not only are we out of money, we are out of money with 100 million stupid and obese self-entitled citizens. And all this is happening when we face Peak Oil and global warming environmental transformation. And when the number of $1 a day people in the 'never-to-be-developing' world are increasing their population from 4 to 8 billion in 30 years.
There isn't going to be any great new 'Apollo' or 'Manhattan' project to deal with these problems. No one seems to realize this, ESPECIALLY here at Slashdot, but there is no more fucking money . Over the next ten years, critical systems for economic growth are continute to shut down, one by one. It's not going to be easy, or pretty, or fair. And as a member of the technological elite, it's going to really piss you off because you know that we could be doing so much, if only...
Start thinking like this and stop thinking about giant government projects and Mars Landing and all that other 20th century fantasy and you will be around to play with your grandchildren. And please don't mod me down to -1 because my rational discussions bum you out. If I bother you, reply here as to exactly why I'm wrong. Believe me, I do want to be wrong about all this. But I have this bad feeling...
I've never seen this game. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that there is some kind of small plastic guitar-shaped controller with about six colored buttons on the fretboard. From what I've been able to determine, a version of a 1960s-1990s classic rock song plays and the person presses buttons on controller in a sequence determined by a video display.
Allow me to suggest an alternative.
Get a cheap guitar from Craigslist or a friend. Get a beater electric. Don't worry about the tone, but it should have all six strings and they should be close enough to the fretboard so that you don't have to press them more than 1/8th of an inch even at the highest frets (where the neck meets the body). A cheap 'strat' or 'telecaster' clone is an excellent choice. Don't buy one on eBay because the shipping charge will be more than the instrument is worth (if you take my advice and get a cheap guitar). Acoustic guitars sound great, but they are too loud. Electrics can be loud, or very quiet; you control the volume. Acoustics are always loud when you strum them briskly, and they hurt your fingers after a few hours.
Get a book from the library about guitar chords or have a friend show you some. Learn how to tune it. Get a real cheap electronic tuner from eBay or plug your new guitar into the line audio input of your PC and download a tuning program.
Look up some songs that you know from recordings on the web. Google the song name in quotes along with 'tab'. With luck, you'll be able to find the chord patterns to songs that you like. Try playing along with the song but be aware that the tab file and the actual song are likely to be in different keys.
Try 'dork' or pop songs that you may know from radio or old recordings. The older the song (at least for songs back to the 1960s), the more likely that it will be found as a good quality tab file.
When you get some skill at playing, try downloading a MIDI notation program and some MIDI files. You can play them through the sound card or IC on your PC. They sound cheezy, but that's not the point. Try learning how to read the music and chords from the sheet music displayed by the notation program. You learned to read English; you learned to read C++, you learned Perl and Python, you can learn to read music. It's not hard. Search the web for MIDI files of songs that you know, download them, and feed them to the MIDI notation program.
It will look overwhelming at first, but the music notation has every little riff and every complicated chord progression displayed in the notes and staffs of the music notation. It's an order-of-magnitude harder than 'Rock Band' because you have about 20 notes on each string and the instructions for playing are not numbers on a display, they are the position of the music symbols on the staff display of the MIDI notation program. For complex lead solos of classic rock, such as the Stairway to Heaven or Dark Side of the Moon, check out all the people on YouTube who are showing off their ability to copy solos in real time. There are also tab files available of most if not all the great classic rock guitar solos from the 60s and 70s. Some from the 80s and 90s are also available.
Use an old boom box as an amp if you can't afford a real and expensive one. Get cheap effects pedals from eBay. I recommend any Death Metal Distortion pedal to start, or a cheap Grunge pedal. If you know electronics, keep in mind that it is always cheaper to buy effects pedals on eBay than it is to make them. But check out all the effects schematics on the web so you get an idea of how effects work. The DSP-chip-based 'All-in-one' effects boxes suck. Anything with a seven-segment LED display is going to suck, don't waste your money.
When you feel good and up to it, start playing with other people.
After all the money spent on the moon shot and the stealth fighters why not throw a dollars at the 500,000,000 people living in extreme poverty in your country?
Sure, it's great to feel national pride at technological advances. But people in civilized countries take take pride at knowing that hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens are starving to death and living in slums and shit holes.
Ah, yes, you say,..."that is true. But that is because it is wish of the giant elephant-headed god who rides on a mouse that all these people be dirt-poor. There really is nothing that we can do about the situation until the giant elephant-headed god who rides on a mouse changes his mind.
And he hasn't spoken in 3500 years! And if you understood India you wouldn't make such stupid and racist statements about our beloved poverty".
People who won't act civilized should sooner or later find themselves 'de-civilized'. Why are we taking an endless amount of shit from these losers?
A few hydrogen-to-helium convertors delivered right to their door does wonders to get across the message we are not a people to be fucked with!
If they can't police themselves and insist on ripping off systematically people in foreign countries, then send 'em some great balls of fire.
When this shit happened fifty years ago, Khrushchev would have just sent some NKVD to scoop up these parasites, take 'em back behind the outhouse, and beat their brains inside out. And all their friends and family would get ten years in the gulag.
I miss Nikita and Eisenhauer. (Nike and Ike) Great times. No one took any shit: no one gave anyone chickenshit like this. There were limits and those limits were respected. No one from Eastern Europe was sneaking into your bank account. Fucking peasants. Khrushchev slaughtered almost a million of his own troops to stop the Germans at Stalingrad. One phone call from the US State Department and all these sleazy little cock-sucking hackers would have been mince-meat.
Nike and Ike had the ability to blow up the world. But, they didn't blow up the world. They came to respect life after taking part in so much slaughter and bloodletting.
Would you trust a sleezy Ukrainian hacker with a modem to not blow up the world if he had a chance? No way. Or some smug little twisted little shit-for-brains in Estonia to behave himself. Let's face facts here; going to another country and randomly stealing people's money is an act of war! When is Putin gonna knock these guys upside the head so hard that their eyes roll out? We have real enemies now and we need to work together against them. All this cross-border chickenshit financial crime is inexcusable. It's a new world, a new century. Get a real job, stop fucking around with petty rip-offs. Assholes!
Let's all work together to rid civilization of the shit-people!
Another great Slashdot rant. Too bad it will get modded down to -1 by toads that don't appreciate this kind of thing.
Use technology to solve the Dilbert situations in your organization. Use speech-to-text software that is in every new copy of MS Word. Or something better. Have everyone at the meeting forward their personal speech-to-text template file (what you created when you read The Wizard of Oz to your PC) to the meeting's secretary. Then use these templates to create a transcript of the meeting into a text file. E-mail the text file to anyone at the company who couldn't be at the meeting because they were doing useful and profitable work for the company. Have them e-mail their comments about the meeting's topics to the other people at the meeting.
If all this is too much or too complicated, then stop having so many useless meetings. You guys are the technocratic elite: so start using technology to solve your nitwit manager problems. Any intelligent person can read much faster than they can speak or listen.
There is no real reason that all meetings have to be face-to-face and in real time. Jeez, guys, enter the 21st century. Or better yet, stop caring about meetings so much. Zone out while still looking attentive and consider a meeting to be a half-hour vacation. Don't forget, the economy is collapsing. It's only a matter of time before it collapses your company. If you make money for your company through your work, there is a slightly less chance that you will be in the early waves of layoffs. Use meeting time to think about how to use your programming skills to increase local food production and neighborhood security. Or just dream of fondling your pretty co-worker's breasts. Nod your head occasionally to give the impression that you agree with the moron who is presently making sound come out of his mouth. Pretend that you're Nicole Kidman in 'The Interpreter' and are in the UN and translating the speaker's words into Kuu or Bongo language. Do something creative;anything.
Just remember, if it's not written down and sent to you as a memo or e-mail, it's not serious or important.
Start them with Objects... I had a hard time getting into OO programming because I started with a very low level language.
I started on Fortran. It was horrible. Then I got a home computer with BASIC and advanced to assembly language.
25 years later, I still am at the assembly language stage for programming. But I use different processors and tools. The language is not as important as the tools that support that language. Visual BASIC is great because it gives a simple easy-to-use way to create programs in a Windows environment. Its structural limitations are irrelevant. It is the cost and sophistication of the development tools that is more important.
Now that you can buy a microcontroller for $1.50 that has more power than the original IBM PC, development tools like IDEs are the most important consideration. Computer science was important when computers cost a million dollars: it is meaningless today when they cost a few dollars.
I detest C because I can't debug it on the IDE that controls my $1.50 microcontroller. I can read it and write it fine. I can work with it fine. But I hate it because it's too abstract. I have no idea of what exactly the CPU is doing.
OOP is just science fiction; it's advantages are imaginary. If your application is so advanced and complex that you need OOP to create a program to do it, then it's time to completely rethink the idea of what a computer does.
Computer science is the process of reconfiguring complex concepts to fit into the limitations of the machine. Computer science becomes irreverent when you realize that the more complex the problem, the easier it is to solve by redesigning the computer to fit the problem. Not reducing the problem into small enough processes that will fit into the machine.
It is cheaper and faster to design a custom arrangement of 1000 $1.50 microprocessors to match the needs of complex problem than it is to write and debug the software that will 'solve' the problem on a $5000 standard Von Neumann computer. Microcontroller programmers are cheap and easy to recruit: OOP software development teams are expensive.
This is the new reality of the 21st-century. OOP is the last gasp of the 'big iron' boys.
Nothing new here: All brutal corrupt dictatorships hate Skype. Russia just happens to be the biggest and most technologically advanced brutal corrupt dictatorship in the world. Fascist dictatorships like Russia are designed to transfer the wealth of the society to a small group of very wealthy people.
What makes a fascist dictatorship different from a corporate state like the USA is that this small group of wealthy people actively try to prevent any wide introduction of new technology among the people that could reduce the amount of wealth that they get from the people.
Corporate states, on the other hand, actively encourage the people to develop and adopt new technologies in order the new wealth will be created. After new sources of wealth are created, the corporations move in to take them over and assume control over the new wealth source.
All brutal dictatorships, from a tiny Central African despot cannibal to the vast expanses of the Russian rodina hate new technology. They will always prohibit and delay its introduction until it can be shown without a shadow of a doubt that the new technology will bring in more wealth to the rulers than the old technology can. In any brutal dictatorship, any early-adopter of any new technology, regardless of how benign, is considered a political traitor.
The point of IntroTo Programming courses is to instill a comprehension and sense of awe at the ability to control the actions, operations, and functions of physical machinery by using symbols, that are non-physical. It is by using your brain to amplify your body (robotics) or by using your brain to build and control a machine that can vastly amplify your brain (a pocket calculator).
Intro To Programming needs to skip language and process at the beginning and first teach how electricity can be used to create and manipulate symbols. This is multi-stage process that teaches how to use electricity to represent binary numbers, then using binary numbers to represent decimal numbers, using decimal to represent CPU instructions, using instructions to make programs, and using programs to control machines that amplify the users physical and mental abilities. And finally, how to use the imagination to create new structures of symbols to create programs.
Install the sense of god-like awe at the ability to manipulate physical reality by rearranging symbols, and the mundane details of language structure are of minor importance to both the student and the teacher.
There are two things about the illegal drugs situation that the South Koreans should consider. One is that there are basically three types of illegal drugs: the addictive opiates, the 'boosters' activity-increasing drugs like amphetamines/cocaine, and the mind-expander/entertainment/recreationals like marijuana/hashish/cannibus or the psychedelics like LSD/ecstasy.
The recreationals are basically a political problem. They are only a problem because the politicians say that they are. For society, they are neutral. They increase creativity and productivity in some people, but not in most people. Korea would probably be a little better off if the politicians look the other way at any weed/psychedelic use. Roughly 25% of middle class Americans have been using these drugs at various times of their lives with no real ill-effect on society. The positive effects of these drugs on creativity and their ability to dissipate anti-government political activity means that their use wouldn't be a real problem for Korea. (I know you disagree, but this is the basic reality of the situation). Of course, it will never happen in Korea.
The boosters are a problem when the manager class in Korea quietly encourages or ignores their use in order to get people to work longer and harder, two or more jobs. This is their main function in the USA. These are harmful substances and will destroy public health with their wide use. The government should discourage the manager class from promoting these drugs onto their workers. Of course, it will never happen in Korea.
The real danger is the addictive opiates such as heroin. They change basic body chemistry to make it nearly impossible to stop taking them after the addiction transformation, which happens after a few weeks of constant use. Then huge powerful corrupt criminal organizations form to supply this drug to addicts. The addicts provide the drug to non-addicts to get new customers to pay for their own addiction. There is huge increase in theft and prostitution resulting from the introduction of heroin.
South Korea lives next door to a huge violent corrupt criminal organization across its northern border. When these criminals decide to flood the south with huge amounts of heroin, there will be little that the South Koreans can do to stop them. This would lead to a new very-bloody round of the endless Korean civil war, which nobody wants at this time. Having clone dope-sniffing dogs at the airport will do nothing to keep North Korean heroin out of the South, because the North will use tunnels and boats to bring the heroin into the South. It is possible, but not likely, that a renegade force of the North Korean army will start a drug trade in the South to get money and power for their group. It is more likely that these splinter North Korean criminal gangs will supply illegal booster-types drugs to Japan and the Philippines.
Primarily the dope-sniffing dogs will be used to find harmless amounts of recreational/entertainment drugs on tourists and western backpackers. Then the authorities will make a big show of imposing draconian and brutal penalties on these unlucky but harmless tourists in order to show that they are 'tough' on 'decadent western influences and lifestyles'.
However if it weren't for decadent western influences and lifestyles, they would still be as dirt-poor and primitive as they were in 1953. Just another example of Asian duplicity, hypocrisy, and cruelty. Ever wonder why millions of American college graduates are trying to move to crime-ridden neighborhoods in Asian cities in order to open little grocery stores so that their children can have a hope of a better future?
I've only read the Slashdot header. I don't read American legalizees. But I get the feeling that things are all 'just not right' here. Why would anyone pay a 'cracker' $250,000 to read an EPROM? If someone had this kind of money, then they would be part of a serious criminal organization. If so, then they wouldn't be fooling around with a 'cracker'. They would have their own people to do this or they would bring the EPROM to someone in China or Malaysia to reverse-engineer it. $250K buys a lot more than a 'cracker' outside of the OCED countries.
This case sounds like a 'agent provacateur' type of deal. It 'smells' like that case in Miami where three drunken crackheads were arrested as the cadre of a major terrorist cell when in reality it was just a government undercover schmuck buying everyone endless 40 oz bottles and talking non-stop about 'offing da pig'. Typical late 1960s horseshit. Great for headlines and 40oz sales, but totally meaningless for anyone's realistic concept of national security.
The poster above is right. Who gives a hoot about the mediocre entertainment that's on network or cable television? Anything that is actually good in this medium is going to be in the torrents within days. And not a lot of good programming actually comes out of this medium.
I'll stick with the traditional legal concept of assuming innocent before proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in 'smelly' DMCA cases like this. ennee, meenee, mainee, moe DCMA justice in this crock.
Even if the difference in IQ were true and scientifically verifiable, there is still a bell curve for intelligence distribution. Which means that there are still millions of Africans (and African Americans) who are higher IQs than millions of European-Americans.
Perhaps the endless, permanent 2000-year-old European civil war (currently in remission for the past 60 years, but not over by any definition) has had the effect of killing off all the tranparently stupid white people in young adulthood.
There has been only one instance in history where the European people have put aside their inflated differences and have been able to live together in relative peace with each other for a long period of time. That instance is the United States. And the USA is populated by people who were more or less thrown out of their origin countries by their social superiors. It was always the stupid, ugly, backward, and embarrassing people who were 'encouraged' to emigrate to America by the better class of Europeans. The useless dregs with the low IQs.
As for the accomplishments of the Germans, I have several Jewish friends who would disagree with the notion of German cultural, moral, and social superiority.
but why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?
And a more important question.
Why do the technically advanced people in the overdeveloped parts of the world feel this overwhelming compulsion to force all this inappropriate and culturally disruptive technology onto the tribal people of the world?
Listen, we are not all the same. If someone is living in more or less the same way that their people have lived for the past two thousand years, then their way of life is sustainable and suitable for them.
So you (you being the technological elite, and that's you if you're a Slashdaughter) should just leave them the fuck alone.
You aren't helping them in any way. You aren't making their lives any better.
Yes, they're 'primitive'. Yes, they're technologically backward. Yes, they could probably live ten years longer if only had the advantage of the technology that you feel so compelled to bring to them.
But, so what!?! What's it to you? What difference does it make to you how they live?
You need to lose your missionary complex. This obsession of bringing technology to the distant regions of the earth regardless of any real need for it is only the latest manifestation of the same obsession that drove your great-grandparents to go to the distant corners of the earth in order to save the souls of the heathen.
This obsession is your real problem. Their lack of technology (or having an unsaved soul) is not a problem for them. Actually, YOU are a problem for them.
So do yourself a favor, and do them a favor,...Stay home. Leave people alone. Deal with your own mental diseases. Not everyone wants and needs your techno toys as much as you do.
Slashdot Mirror
Rape is considered so terrible because it is often done specifically to impregnate the woman and to make her 'unfit for marriage' in traditional cultures where this is of primary importance. In that light, no one gives a fuck when a man gets raped (excuse the pun).
Who owns culture? That's what this is all about. The five global entertainment companies claim that they do. They own all the recordings. They own all the video, all the film, all the books, all the comic books, all the whatever. Sooner or later, they are going to claim to own the ideas and stories behind the 'product'. Then they will claim to own things like the C#minor chord or the plot device of a simple hero driven to vengence by a dastardly crime.
So their lawyers tell them. And their lawyers will have no trouble buying politicians to pass laws supporting these fantasies. Especially in countries that are totally corrupt and owned by corporations, like the USA.
But owning culture is like owning air. The ability to enforce ownership is dependent on the ability to use violence to force people to give you their money. Sooner or later, everyone will realize that all copyright is nothing but extortion. And they will realize that they have done nothing to morally justify the extremely harsh verdicts imposed upon them for so-called copyright crimes.
Historically in situations like this, people fight back. Someone gets a notice that they 'owe' $100000000 for being overheard humming a copyrighted tune in the park by a secret microphone. They track down the person who sent the notice, pay a fee to get background on this person and his family, and kidnap one or all of this bozo's children. Ransom being equal to the amount 'owed' for humming a tune in the park.
All you end up with is a lot of dead children and lawyers who aren't worried any more about making child support payments. What? You assumed that an entertainment industry lawyer had the ability to actually love somebody, like a family? No way.
All copyright is stupid with the technology available to us in the 21st century. Accept it. Don't let these assholes steal your money. Don't give them any of your money. And don't kidnap and kill their children because it's bad for your karma.
Stupidity passes in time: evil remains. Don't let entertainment lawyers trick you into transforming yourself into an evil person. I keep telling myself this over and over.
Hope that it works.
I probably was a couple of Arab suicide bombers who got lost while looking for an elementary school to blow up.
Allah Akbar!!
The only reason Apple exists is to transfer money from the bank accounts of overpaid yuppies dazzled by babbles to the bank account of Steven Jobs. This company doesn't do anything that isn't done cheaper and better by many others.
This has been obvious for a long time to anyone with half a brain.
Steven Jobs is God's way of telling us that we have too many stupid yuppies running around.
So SPARC is something like SPARK...
And some nitwit company that has seen its stock price fall a huge percentage because it spends far too much on psychotic lawyers than it does on R&D is filing a lawsuit about 'Spark' being close to 'sparc'. And this idiot lawyers have convinced someone that they 'own' the word 'spark'.
Am I reading this correct? Please tell me that this is not Sun Microsystems! Founded by geniuses, creators and leaders in the workstation industry, the true visionary company of the valley.
You would think that these guys would be too embarrassed to show their faces in the valley again after something as stupid as this.
These guys have no shame.
Since the world's population is bursting and there is ...so...much....surplus...talent available, why don't we just put all these dumb fucks out of their (and our) misery. "take out the trash, clean out the crusty, and let them spend the rest of their days walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain."
What! There's a law against that too? Law or no law, sooner or later, it's going to be cheaper just to kill them all.
It's a shame that with all their education and vested options, they still don't realize this.
Software gets its deep appeal to the intellectual class of people because of its inherent contradiction: The ability to change the operation of physical machinery by manipulating symbols.
Sure the more technical you are, the more you can understand the rationity behind this seemingly divine contradiction. Ones and zeros controlling electrical voltage levels channeled through thousands of transistors, etc...
But the ability to change physicality by manipulating symbols has been an art reserved to magicians, shamans, and high priests. This ability to stand in the shadow of divinity has always appealed to men, because it is an analog or approximation of a divine absolute power.
This is the subconscious appeal of software programming.
It also explains why software is primarily a masculine field of interest and employment. Women get the 'shadow of the divinity' power and feeling not by controlling physical nature through the manipulation of symbols, but by actually creating life inside themselves. This is something that men can and will never be able to do.
The most obvious ap for a pressure sensitive keyboard is for music and MIDI input. Because the standard PC/PS2 keyboard encodes both key-press and key-release as separate events (distinct scan-code sequences sent from the kbd to the PC), the PS2 makes a good *CHEAP* MIDI tone module input device.
Each key is mapped to a MIDI note or a MIDI parameter. Key press sounds the note and key release turns the note off. Any $1 microcontroller can be programmed to act as an interface. It's not a 'real' piano-type keyboard, but it doesn't cost $120 either.
The major disadvantages of using a PS2 keyboard as a MIDI input are three:
- Not every combination of keypresses produces corresponding polyphonic chords. Every manufacturers PS2 keyboard has 'dead' combinations of keys due to the internal row/column matrix.
- The keys are too small and are not linear. Nevertheless, accordion players learn to get around this problem.
- There is no MIDI velocity. There is no way to affect the sound's volume or tonality by varying how hard the PS2 keys are pressed. MIDI piano keyboards measure the time between a key's leaving the top position and its reaching the bottom of its movement. This becomes the Note Velocity value and is a programmable parameter of the note's sound, usually volume.
A pressure-sensitive keyboard would solve problems 1 and 3 above. It would be most welcome in the DIY MIDI community, IF it were both CHEAP and easy-to-program. By cheap, I mean less than $20 US and easy-to-program means that additional pressure parameter follow the same hardware quasi-SPI electronic waveforms as the current PS2 format and not be dependent on internal Windows APIs for its implementation. And, I almost forgot, the new keyboard must be absolutely low-powered. If it consumed more than 2-3 milliamps, then it would be worthless. Current HPs and Dell PS2 keyboards consume between 1 and 2 milliamps at +5 volts, while the 1995-2000 era Microsoft split-keyboard actually consumed about 80 milliamps or more. Which made them worthless for battery-powered off-PC applications.
If a pressure-sensitive keyboard isn't both cheap, low-powered, and easy-to-program, then it is just another stupid useless expensive toy keyboard destined to be stacked up in the back of Weird Stuff Warehouse six months after its grand release.
An excellent article in the field of Omnicide Studies. The science of knowing about and preventing the use of any technology that is specifically designed to deliberatly eliminate human life from Earth.
This will probably grow in a University degree field in the next 100 years.
Omnicide must be acknowledged as being different from genocide and meglocide. The German holocast against the jews in the 1940s was genocide. The slaughter of millions in the insane Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was meglocide. Omnicide is "La Jetee", a sci-fi film from 1962, although that was accidental omnicide.
Omnicide is do by four ways: release of a toxin, release of a biological agent, invoking a total nuclear war, and triggering an geological or astro-physical event such as redirecting an asteroid to strike the Earth. The first three are generally available now and the fourth is most likely far in the future.
You, gentle reader, appear to have taken too many engineering courses.
Yes, the bullet that has just been fired out the gun pointed at you actually weighs 9.5234234784895789 grams instead of 9.0 grams.
But the point is that in .047938756973837856 seconds from now it is going to blow your head off your shoulders.
Nostradamus was a middle-ages French monk who wrote cryptic poetry that hundreds of years later people have claimed was prophecy. But actually reading it shows that it is nothing more than junk poetry commonly written by monks in the middle-ages driven mad by religious obsession and hunger.
What does this have to do with my economic theories of my post? My point is that infrastructure transformation doesn't happen simply by the development of new technologies.
The 20th century was characterized by the positive feedback loop of technology creating capital resources that enabled the creation of huge manufacturing enterprises that in turn led to development of the next cycle of technology development. This process will not continue in the 21st century because the capital resources are not being created at the same pace as technological development. We are seeing capital resources begin to self-destruct. Peak Oil, over-population, and environmental destruction will cause a positive feedback loop in the 21st century that will most likely destroy the gains of the 20th century. 2150 will look more like 1850 than it will resemble 2000.
Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP programs don't have the funding to sustain their levels of service for the numbers of people who be entering these programs the next twenty years. There is not enough capital resources available to invest in new infrastructures for 100+ MPG vehicles and to support health care systems based on diminished-returns on investment. And the government will be trying to finance these programs at the same time that all the deficits that have been building up since the Reagan administration become due. If the ever-increasing deficits can be refinanced, then there is no problem. If the US government bonds can't be refinanced, (if the interest due on past deficits is greater than the present tax revenues generated) then the entire Ponzi scheme collapses and the depression of 2020 makes the recession of 2008 look minor.
What that means is that someone is going to decide sometime around 2025 whether to build new high-tech factories and let the baby-boomers all die or to not kill the baby-boomers and accept a lower standard of living for the younger people.
Since the boomers have all the votes then they will choose to make you live poorly. This will happen in most advanced countries; the never-to-be-developed economies of what we now call the third world simply won't matter to anyone after 2020.
My number comes from the book The Three Trillion Dollar War 2008 by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, both of whom are American economists not dependent on government funding for their research.
The point is there is a finite supply of money. Money spent on the war is money that not available to manufacture fuel-efficient vehicles. And since the money has already been spent on the war, there will be no development of American fuel-efficient vehicles on the scale needed to sustain American prosperity at 20th-century levels.
Talk is cheap.
My point is that there is big difference between researching more fuel efficient vehicles and actually making millions of these fuel efficient vehicles. Even if the research was successful and the prototype 100+ MPG vehicles were created, there still is no money to create the factories and the infrastructure needed to convert the entire fleet of present vehicles.
The idea that there is no problem creating a new infrastructure from new technologies is a 20th century economic concept that depended on the ability to create capital for investment from undeveloped or underdeveloped natural resources. In the 21st century, those natural resources such as huge pools of surface-level light-crude oil are no longer available. And, because of 50 years of huge government deficit spending, the capital resources are not available to us as they were in the years after World War II when the other major countries were destroyed but we weren't.
My point is that it doesn't matter if you have a great new technology or prototype engineering project if there isn't any money left to develop the technology for the millions of people that need access to it. My point is that there is no more fucking money! . Sooner or later everyone is going to get the point that I'm making here.
I suggest taking a few economics classes to complement your engineering degree.
Everyone with all these wonderful plans to get the "Happy Motoring" era happy again with 100+ MPG vehicles is conveniently forgetting that it will take a HUGE amount of money to convert the VAST fleet of current BFACs (big f'ing American cars) to anything resembling a 100+ MPG fleet of vehicles.
This is money that we don't have. We have (you may recall) pissed away 3 trillion dollars on the PEW (permanent endles worthless war) so far and it's still at PEW status. We have bankrupted the middle-class on a bogus housing bubble to the point where half the houses built and sold in the past ten years are 'underwater'. We have maxed out our credit cards and destroyed the major banks to the point where they required two seperate 760 billion dollar 'bailouts' in a single year. We have no realistic health care system at a point where a 100 million people born between 1945 and 1970 are nearing retirement. Our totally corporately-owned corrupt government runs up a trillion dollars of deficit every fucking year. And the rest of the world is talking behind our backs about not continuing to buy our Ponzi Federal Reserve bonds.
Not only are we out of money, we are out of money with 100 million stupid and obese self-entitled citizens. And all this is happening when we face Peak Oil and global warming environmental transformation. And when the number of $1 a day people in the 'never-to-be-developing' world are increasing their population from 4 to 8 billion in 30 years.
There isn't going to be any great new 'Apollo' or 'Manhattan' project to deal with these problems. No one seems to realize this, ESPECIALLY here at Slashdot, but there is no more fucking money . Over the next ten years, critical systems for economic growth are continute to shut down, one by one. It's not going to be easy, or pretty, or fair. And as a member of the technological elite, it's going to really piss you off because you know that we could be doing so much, if only...
Start thinking like this and stop thinking about giant government projects and Mars Landing and all that other 20th century fantasy and you will be around to play with your grandchildren. And please don't mod me down to -1 because my rational discussions bum you out. If I bother you, reply here as to exactly why I'm wrong. Believe me, I do want to be wrong about all this. But I have this bad feeling...
I've never seen this game. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that there is some kind of small plastic guitar-shaped controller with about six colored buttons on the fretboard. From what I've been able to determine, a version of a 1960s-1990s classic rock song plays and the person presses buttons on controller in a sequence determined by a video display.
Allow me to suggest an alternative.
Get a cheap guitar from Craigslist or a friend. Get a beater electric. Don't worry about the tone, but it should have all six strings and they should be close enough to the fretboard so that you don't have to press them more than 1/8th of an inch even at the highest frets (where the neck meets the body). A cheap 'strat' or 'telecaster' clone is an excellent choice. Don't buy one on eBay because the shipping charge will be more than the instrument is worth (if you take my advice and get a cheap guitar). Acoustic guitars sound great, but they are too loud. Electrics can be loud, or very quiet; you control the volume. Acoustics are always loud when you strum them briskly, and they hurt your fingers after a few hours.
Get a book from the library about guitar chords or have a friend show you some. Learn how to tune it. Get a real cheap electronic tuner from eBay or plug your new guitar into the line audio input of your PC and download a tuning program.
Look up some songs that you know from recordings on the web. Google the song name in quotes along with 'tab'. With luck, you'll be able to find the chord patterns to songs that you like. Try playing along with the song but be aware that the tab file and the actual song are likely to be in different keys.
Try 'dork' or pop songs that you may know from radio or old recordings. The older the song (at least for songs back to the 1960s), the more likely that it will be found as a good quality tab file.
When you get some skill at playing, try downloading a MIDI notation program and some MIDI files. You can play them through the sound card or IC on your PC. They sound cheezy, but that's not the point. Try learning how to read the music and chords from the sheet music displayed by the notation program. You learned to read English; you learned to read C++, you learned Perl and Python, you can learn to read music. It's not hard. Search the web for MIDI files of songs that you know, download them, and feed them to the MIDI notation program.
It will look overwhelming at first, but the music notation has every little riff and every complicated chord progression displayed in the notes and staffs of the music notation. It's an order-of-magnitude harder than 'Rock Band' because you have about 20 notes on each string and the instructions for playing are not numbers on a display, they are the position of the music symbols on the staff display of the MIDI notation program. For complex lead solos of classic rock, such as the Stairway to Heaven or Dark Side of the Moon, check out all the people on YouTube who are showing off their ability to copy solos in real time. There are also tab files available of most if not all the great classic rock guitar solos from the 60s and 70s. Some from the 80s and 90s are also available.
Use an old boom box as an amp if you can't afford a real and expensive one. Get cheap effects pedals from eBay. I recommend any Death Metal Distortion pedal to start, or a cheap Grunge pedal. If you know electronics, keep in mind that it is always cheaper to buy effects pedals on eBay than it is to make them. But check out all the effects schematics on the web so you get an idea of how effects work. The DSP-chip-based 'All-in-one' effects boxes suck. Anything with a seven-segment LED display is going to suck, don't waste your money.
When you feel good and up to it, start playing with other people.
This is the 'old-school' tri
After all the money spent on the moon shot and the stealth fighters why not throw a dollars at the 500,000,000 people living in extreme poverty in your country?
Sure, it's great to feel national pride at technological advances. But people in civilized countries take take pride at knowing that hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens are starving to death and living in slums and shit holes.
Ah, yes, you say, ..."that is true. But that is because it is wish of the giant elephant-headed god who rides on a mouse that all these people be dirt-poor. There really is nothing that we can do about the situation until the giant elephant-headed god who rides on a mouse changes his mind.
And he hasn't spoken in 3500 years! And if you understood India you wouldn't make such stupid and racist statements about our beloved poverty".
People who won't act civilized should sooner or later find themselves 'de-civilized'. Why are we taking an endless amount of shit from these losers?
A few hydrogen-to-helium convertors delivered right to their door does wonders to get across the message we are not a people to be fucked with!
If they can't police themselves and insist on ripping off systematically people in foreign countries, then send 'em some great balls of fire.
When this shit happened fifty years ago, Khrushchev would have just sent some NKVD to scoop up these parasites, take 'em back behind the outhouse, and beat their brains inside out. And all their friends and family would get ten years in the gulag.
I miss Nikita and Eisenhauer. (Nike and Ike) Great times. No one took any shit: no one gave anyone chickenshit like this. There were limits and those limits were respected. No one from Eastern Europe was sneaking into your bank account. Fucking peasants. Khrushchev slaughtered almost a million of his own troops to stop the Germans at Stalingrad. One phone call from the US State Department and all these sleazy little cock-sucking hackers would have been mince-meat.
Nike and Ike had the ability to blow up the world. But, they didn't blow up the world. They came to respect life after taking part in so much slaughter and bloodletting.
Would you trust a sleezy Ukrainian hacker with a modem to not blow up the world if he had a chance? No way. Or some smug little twisted little shit-for-brains in Estonia to behave himself. Let's face facts here; going to another country and randomly stealing people's money is an act of war! When is Putin gonna knock these guys upside the head so hard that their eyes roll out? We have real enemies now and we need to work together against them. All this cross-border chickenshit financial crime is inexcusable. It's a new world, a new century. Get a real job, stop fucking around with petty rip-offs. Assholes!
Let's all work together to rid civilization of the shit-people!
Another great Slashdot rant. Too bad it will get modded down to -1 by toads that don't appreciate this kind of thing.
Use technology to solve the Dilbert situations in your organization. Use speech-to-text software that is in every new copy of MS Word. Or something better. Have everyone at the meeting forward their personal speech-to-text template file (what you created when you read The Wizard of Oz to your PC) to the meeting's secretary. Then use these templates to create a transcript of the meeting into a text file. E-mail the text file to anyone at the company who couldn't be at the meeting because they were doing useful and profitable work for the company. Have them e-mail their comments about the meeting's topics to the other people at the meeting.
If all this is too much or too complicated, then stop having so many useless meetings. You guys are the technocratic elite: so start using technology to solve your nitwit manager problems. Any intelligent person can read much faster than they can speak or listen.
There is no real reason that all meetings have to be face-to-face and in real time. Jeez, guys, enter the 21st century. Or better yet, stop caring about meetings so much. Zone out while still looking attentive and consider a meeting to be a half-hour vacation. Don't forget, the economy is collapsing. It's only a matter of time before it collapses your company. If you make money for your company through your work, there is a slightly less chance that you will be in the early waves of layoffs. Use meeting time to think about how to use your programming skills to increase local food production and neighborhood security. Or just dream of fondling your pretty co-worker's breasts. Nod your head occasionally to give the impression that you agree with the moron who is presently making sound come out of his mouth. Pretend that you're Nicole Kidman in 'The Interpreter' and are in the UN and translating the speaker's words into Kuu or Bongo language. Do something creative;anything.
Just remember, if it's not written down and sent to you as a memo or e-mail, it's not serious or important.
Start them with Objects... I had a hard time getting into OO programming because I started with a very low level language.
I started on Fortran. It was horrible. Then I got a home computer with BASIC and advanced to assembly language.
25 years later, I still am at the assembly language stage for programming. But I use different processors and tools. The language is not as important as the tools that support that language. Visual BASIC is great because it gives a simple easy-to-use way to create programs in a Windows environment. Its structural limitations are irrelevant. It is the cost and sophistication of the development tools that is more important.
Now that you can buy a microcontroller for $1.50 that has more power than the original IBM PC, development tools like IDEs are the most important consideration. Computer science was important when computers cost a million dollars: it is meaningless today when they cost a few dollars.
I detest C because I can't debug it on the IDE that controls my $1.50 microcontroller. I can read it and write it fine. I can work with it fine. But I hate it because it's too abstract. I have no idea of what exactly the CPU is doing.
OOP is just science fiction; it's advantages are imaginary. If your application is so advanced and complex that you need OOP to create a program to do it, then it's time to completely rethink the idea of what a computer does.
Computer science is the process of reconfiguring complex concepts to fit into the limitations of the machine. Computer science becomes irreverent when you realize that the more complex the problem, the easier it is to solve by redesigning the computer to fit the problem. Not reducing the problem into small enough processes that will fit into the machine.
It is cheaper and faster to design a custom arrangement of 1000 $1.50 microprocessors to match the needs of complex problem than it is to write and debug the software that will 'solve' the problem on a $5000 standard Von Neumann computer. Microcontroller programmers are cheap and easy to recruit: OOP software development teams are expensive.
This is the new reality of the 21st-century. OOP is the last gasp of the 'big iron' boys.
Nothing new here: All brutal corrupt dictatorships hate Skype. Russia just happens to be the biggest and most technologically advanced brutal corrupt dictatorship in the world. Fascist dictatorships like Russia are designed to transfer the wealth of the society to a small group of very wealthy people.
What makes a fascist dictatorship different from a corporate state like the USA is that this small group of wealthy people actively try to prevent any wide introduction of new technology among the people that could reduce the amount of wealth that they get from the people.
Corporate states, on the other hand, actively encourage the people to develop and adopt new technologies in order the new wealth will be created. After new sources of wealth are created, the corporations move in to take them over and assume control over the new wealth source.
All brutal dictatorships, from a tiny Central African despot cannibal to the vast expanses of the Russian rodina hate new technology. They will always prohibit and delay its introduction until it can be shown without a shadow of a doubt that the new technology will bring in more wealth to the rulers than the old technology can. In any brutal dictatorship, any early-adopter of any new technology, regardless of how benign, is considered a political traitor.
It's just the way that the world works.
The point of IntroTo Programming courses is to instill a comprehension and sense of awe at the ability to control the actions, operations, and functions of physical machinery by using symbols, that are non-physical. It is by using your brain to amplify your body (robotics) or by using your brain to build and control a machine that can vastly amplify your brain (a pocket calculator).
Intro To Programming needs to skip language and process at the beginning and first teach how electricity can be used to create and manipulate symbols. This is multi-stage process that teaches how to use electricity to represent binary numbers, then using binary numbers to represent decimal numbers, using decimal to represent CPU instructions, using instructions to make programs, and using programs to control machines that amplify the users physical and mental abilities. And finally, how to use the imagination to create new structures of symbols to create programs.
Install the sense of god-like awe at the ability to manipulate physical reality by rearranging symbols, and the mundane details of language structure are of minor importance to both the student and the teacher.
There are two things about the illegal drugs situation that the South Koreans should consider.
One is that there are basically three types of illegal drugs: the addictive opiates, the 'boosters' activity-increasing drugs like amphetamines/cocaine, and the mind-expander/entertainment/recreationals like marijuana/hashish/cannibus or the psychedelics like LSD/ecstasy.
The recreationals are basically a political problem. They are only a problem because the politicians say that they are. For society, they are neutral. They increase creativity and productivity in some people, but not in most people. Korea would probably be a little better off if the politicians look the other way at any weed/psychedelic use. Roughly 25% of middle class Americans have been using these drugs at various times of their lives with no real ill-effect on society. The positive effects of these drugs on creativity and their ability to dissipate anti-government political activity means that their use wouldn't be a real problem for Korea. (I know you disagree, but this is the basic reality of the situation). Of course, it will never happen in Korea.
The boosters are a problem when the manager class in Korea quietly encourages or ignores their use in order to get people to work longer and harder, two or more jobs. This is their main function in the USA. These are harmful substances and will destroy public health with their wide use. The government should discourage the manager class from promoting these drugs onto their workers. Of course, it will never happen in Korea.
The real danger is the addictive opiates such as heroin. They change basic body chemistry to make it nearly impossible to stop taking them after the addiction transformation, which happens after a few weeks of constant use. Then huge powerful corrupt criminal organizations form to supply this drug to addicts. The addicts provide the drug to non-addicts to get new customers to pay for their own addiction. There is huge increase in theft and prostitution resulting from the introduction of heroin.
South Korea lives next door to a huge violent corrupt criminal organization across its northern border. When these criminals decide to flood the south with huge amounts of heroin, there will be little that the South Koreans can do to stop them. This would lead to a new very-bloody round of the endless Korean civil war, which nobody wants at this time. Having clone dope-sniffing dogs at the airport will do nothing to keep North Korean heroin out of the South, because the North will use tunnels and boats to bring the heroin into the South. It is possible, but not likely, that a renegade force of the North Korean army will start a drug trade in the South to get money and power for their group. It is more likely that these splinter North Korean criminal gangs will supply illegal booster-types drugs to Japan and the Philippines.
Primarily the dope-sniffing dogs will be used to find harmless amounts of recreational/entertainment drugs on tourists and western backpackers. Then the authorities will make a big show of imposing draconian and brutal penalties on these unlucky but harmless tourists in order to show that they are 'tough' on 'decadent western influences and lifestyles'.
However if it weren't for decadent western influences and lifestyles, they would still be as dirt-poor and primitive as they were in 1953. Just another example of Asian duplicity, hypocrisy, and cruelty. Ever wonder why millions of American college graduates are trying to move to crime-ridden neighborhoods in Asian cities in order to open little grocery stores so that their children can have a hope of a better future?
I've only read the Slashdot header. I don't read American legalizees.
But I get the feeling that things are all 'just not right' here.
Why would anyone pay a 'cracker' $250,000 to read an EPROM? If someone had this kind of money, then they would be part of a serious criminal organization. If so, then they wouldn't be fooling around with a 'cracker'. They would have their own people to do this or they would bring the EPROM to someone in China or Malaysia to reverse-engineer it. $250K buys a lot more than a 'cracker' outside of the OCED countries.
This case sounds like a 'agent provacateur' type of deal. It 'smells' like that case in Miami where three drunken crackheads were arrested as the cadre of a major terrorist cell when in reality it was just a government undercover schmuck buying everyone endless 40 oz bottles and talking non-stop about 'offing da pig'. Typical late 1960s horseshit. Great for headlines and 40oz sales, but totally meaningless for anyone's realistic concept of national security.
The poster above is right. Who gives a hoot about the mediocre entertainment that's on network or cable television? Anything that is actually good in this medium is going to be in the torrents within days. And not a lot of good programming actually comes out of this medium.
I'll stick with the traditional legal concept of assuming innocent before proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in 'smelly' DMCA cases like this. ennee, meenee, mainee, moe DCMA justice in this crock.
Even if the difference in IQ were true and scientifically verifiable, there is still a bell curve for intelligence distribution. Which means that there are still millions of Africans (and African Americans) who are higher IQs than millions of European-Americans.
Perhaps the endless, permanent 2000-year-old European civil war (currently in remission for the past 60 years, but not over by any definition) has had the effect of killing off all the tranparently stupid white people in young adulthood.
There has been only one instance in history where the European people have put aside their inflated differences and have been able to live together in relative peace with each other for a long period of time. That instance is the United States. And the USA is populated by people who were more or less thrown out of their origin countries by their social superiors. It was always the stupid, ugly, backward, and embarrassing people who were 'encouraged' to emigrate to America by the better class of Europeans. The useless dregs with the low IQs.
As for the accomplishments of the Germans, I have several Jewish friends who would disagree with the notion of German cultural, moral, and social superiority.
See if you can guess why?
Not to put too fine a point on it,...
but why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?
And a more important question.
Why do the technically advanced people in the overdeveloped parts of the world feel this overwhelming compulsion to force all this inappropriate and culturally disruptive technology onto the tribal people of the world?
Listen, we are not all the same. If someone is living in more or less the same way that their people have lived for the past two thousand years, then their way of life is sustainable and suitable for them.
So you (you being the technological elite, and that's you if you're a Slashdaughter) should just leave them the fuck alone.
You aren't helping them in any way. You aren't making their lives any better.
Yes, they're 'primitive'. Yes, they're technologically backward. Yes, they could probably live ten years longer if only had the advantage of the technology that you feel so compelled to bring to them.
But, so what!?! What's it to you? What difference does it make to you how they live?
You need to lose your missionary complex. This obsession of bringing technology to the distant regions of the earth regardless of any real need for it is only the latest manifestation of the same obsession that drove your great-grandparents to go to the distant corners of the earth in order to save the souls of the heathen.
This obsession is your real problem. Their lack of technology (or having an unsaved soul) is not a problem for them. Actually, YOU are a problem for them.
So do yourself a favor, and do them a favor,...Stay home. Leave people alone. Deal with your own mental diseases. Not everyone wants and needs your techno toys as much as you do.