Bzzzt! Nope. Nukes are NOT "designed for airburst". It depends on your intent. Airburst levels buildings, takes out troops, over a longer range. A groundburst is good for hard target busting. If you are aiming to hit a silo or command center, you do ground burst as an airburst is all but useless. If you are aiming to destroy factories, troop concentrations, aircraft, power stations (other than hydroelectric or nuke) you can use airburst to best effect.
Me too! Oh, sorry. What I meant to comment about was that MY car is immune to your pathetic EMP devices. It doesn't have any IC chips. None. Old fashioned engine, old fashioned electronics...well, the alternator might be killable(?) but nothing else. It doesn't even have a radio!
As far as the nature/nurture dicotomy, I am primarily referring to basic traits. One's basic personality is not nurtured. Boys WILL be boys, on the whole, and girls WILL be girls. You are not taught to be a heterosexual (or homosexual), you are BORN a heterosexual (or homosexual). All "nurture" does is confuse the person (trying to teach them to be hetero when they are, in fact, homo) or modify the basic biological trait. You are trained in how to express your sexuality, not what your sexuality is, for instance.
Your basic personality (and the cat's) is what it is. It can be somewhat modified by training - confidence alters your "personality" to some extent - but on the whole the type of person you are is not trained. You have a distinctive personality somewhat modified by experience, but not generated or significantly altered by experience.
Want to truly alter someone's personality? Physically or chemically alter their brain. That WILL do it in real ways that training will never do.
All the clones being produced are nifty in their own rights from a certain standpoint, but they are not a good means as generated to detail what precise role genes or experience/nurture play in development. They need a baseline and a lot more information about en utero biology/biochemistry, gene state, etc, before any clear data can be collected.
REALLY? Michellin wont sell my personal data to anyone? Ever? Businesses are sooooo nice! They NEVER violate privacy with keystroke loggers, never listen in on phonecalls, read emails...and they never ever sell database information (nor would they want to) to other businesses or marketing firms. The money to be made by doing so is NO inducement in that regard.
What country do you live in that businesses are 100% ethical, never do wrong, never screw anyone for $$? I want to live there.
The INTENT is reasonable but that does not mean be sanguine about it. Whenever any such tracking method is introduced it MUST be thoroughly vetted and reviewed and any and ALL possible misuses of this power nipped in the bud BEFORE there is a smoking gun to drive posthumus nipping.
ALL such technologies must be vetted for possible privacy violations. This sort of concern is what drove the adoption of privacy policies with many businesses and sites. They wouldn't have had any compunction about selling YOUR data if people did not get crazy about it beforehand.
It is better to prevent abuse before actual abuse occurs. You cannot regain your privacy once your data is broadcast to everyone under the sun.
The potential abuse of RFIDs need to be examined and rules/laws enacted to PREVENT abuse, not react to it.
Just to be sure, leave your badge/card on your desk whenever you leave it to do ANYTHING. Don't have it with you when you go get coffee, go to the drinking fountain, go to the bathroom, shag your office lover in the janitor closet, etc. ONLY have it with you to get into the building. If they are lying or still are tracking you but cannot use the information as before, all they'll get is a highly productive worker who never leaves his/her desk.
If you don't do anything wrong, why worry about illegal searches? Why seal envelopes when you mail them? Why EVER use PGP? Why encrypt, period? What are you trying to hide criminal?
Never EVER use any iteration of the phrase, "If you don't do anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about." That is the road to zero civil liberties. That is the road to Police State.
You could do the cloning from the embryonic stage. If you impregnate a cat and let the eggs start developing, then select one or two embryos, split them into two (now half-sized) embryos, reimplant them, then let them continue development then you would TRUE clones that went through the same environment during development. The same burst of hormones from the mother at the same time, the same nutritional environment, etc.
The clones being produced of late from adult somatic cells are not good measures of the strength of genes in creating a creature/person. Why? No, NOT because of "nurture" being more important (it isn't). It is because the de facto biological environment en utero is different (different hormone levels from mom, different nutritional conditions, etc...no two pregnancies are the same in this regard particularly from different mothers).
Original cat biologically developed in a certain set of biological conditions en utero. That cat was also produced from properly regulated/formed egg-sperm fusion. Copy cat was produced from a somatic cell which DID contain mutations (inevitable given the basal mutation rate), many genes were silenced or activated in a manner totally different from a normal fertilized egg and all that regulatory machinery has to be unwound to get embryonic development going. This unwinding of regulatory mechanisms is imperfect - hence the MANY MANY failures to get a successful clone; the why behind the huge failure rate (added to mutations).
You end up with a disregulated genome in the embryo that is TOTALLY different than the properly regulated/prepared genome resulting from a standard egg-sperm fertilization event, coupled to a different biological environment en utero and you will NOT get a carbon copy. Can't happen, wont happen.
The time between inserting the nucleus from a somatic cell into an enucleated egg (the standard method of cloning in these circumstances) is too short. Those cells capable of dividing begin dividing almost immediately. There is NOT enough time for the somatic genome to be "reset" (if resetting is truly even possible) to a state equivalent to that of a normal egg-sperm state. Thus you end up with a mishmash of improperly regulated genes in the clone's genome - differences and problems galore. NO carbon copy.
Kinda off-topic no? In any case, shortcuts SUCK. They clutter your desktop with poo-poo when it is all right there in your kmenu. Sheesh. But...right click on your desktop, create new...link to application, enter the stuff and select an icon. Ta-da.
Or, go to the kmenu. Select "configure panel" then "add -> button" then select your app and it is magically added to your kpanel. Pretty much a shortcut no? Right there on your panel.
As other posters have indicated, I do believe that M$ releasing source to Russia is seen to them as a win-win situation. They "win" by potentially gaining a large government customer, with this what is hoped (by them) as the first of many major governments taking them up on it.
They also "win" because they WILL use the inevitable leak of source onto the wider internet as a means to kill/attack Wine and Samba and perhaps other "bothersome" OSS projects. They are not getting religion wrt their OS and opensource, they will NEVER get it but what they do get are unethical tactics to kill off competition. They will use leaked source as a weapon, that is as inevitable as is the leaking of the code.
Nuclear propulsion does NOT (necessarily) mean nuclear detonations. The main designs for nuclear rockets simply use the nuclear pile to superheat your-favorite-gas/propellant and accelerate it out an exhaust nozzle WAY more efficiently than ANY chemical rocket ever could hope for.
Of course, with Bush's lack of intelligence, foresight, and ethics, he probably would be all for breaking international treaties banning the detonation of nukes in space and support a detonation rocket (ala Orion) just be be a shit(head).
Except...mozilla's UI is butt-ugly and totally wrong for ANY desktop. The default UI themes are WRONG for both Gnome AND KDE and neither desktop system's theming/coloration system works with mozilla. You have several apps up and running, they are likely to all look compatible with each other instead of a random scattering of UIs and colors. Start up mozilla and it looks either VERY much like a windoze app or some blue thing with no compatibility with your system look/feel/theme.
Openoffice/staroffice...same thing only you get one and only one UI - a windoze interface.
I select my desktop colors and themes for a reason. They work best with ME and the colors work best with me. It looks coherent and is the same across apps (I use KDE). I start up a gtk app or mozilla or staroffice/oo and they are bastard stepchildren clashing with everything. Same goes in Gnome, which I have run on occassion when I've trashed KDE during an upgrade or rebuild or some such. Those two apps don't look right in Gnome either.
Publish your API and let the desktop handle the GUI part. I want the apps I use to obey my color and theme selection, period. I made the selection for a reason. Lowest common demoninator GUI design is butt-ugly.
I've never heard any. I am a Mandrake user for 2 reasons: it IS easy and fast to install. I do NOT enjoy dicking with installation. I'm no newbie, I simply want to get the system up and running fast without muss or fuss. After that, I'll tweak and build as time and interest allows. I need my system to work for me, not vice versa.
I disdain those anyone who badmouths this distro or that distro - it is ridiculous. It's ALL linux. I switched originally to Mandrake several years ago because it was the only distro at the time that optimized beyond generic i386. Yeah, yeah, you can build your own tarballs or packages and optimize it on other distros but this one CAME that way from the get-go. I wanted pretty damn optimized from the start so I wouldn't NEED to rebuild this or that package to optimize it unless I really had a hankerin.
Mandrake has been/is a nice distro. 8.2 was pure simplicity itself. 9.0 is troublesome. 9.1 is looking to be a thing of beauty. If my father or sister wanted to try linux, I would recommend Mandrake (8.2, or if I was available to get past the problems, 9.0) without hesitation. It is the distro with which I am most familiar right now (I have used Redhat and Suse in the past).
If Mandrake pulls through this bankruptcy, I'll go to 9.1 when it is available, otherwise, I have no particular preference: Suse or Redhat depending on user comments/input. I don't have broadband so I will not do any distro that requires downloading to install. That is my primary requirement, even before just being able to install and use my system productively as quickly as possible.
It's not this in an of itself, it is the additive effect of many such techniques/technologies that bears watching. Your license plate camera can only localize a car to a turnpike on a given date, it cannot identify what businesses, friends, parks you visit.
All you need is some George W. Bush and Adm. Poindexter to get together and decide that there are all these separate little things, none of which are specifically linked together, that can be used to track people. Let's create a central repository and database that will tie all these various identifiers and trackers together into one coherent system. Credit card purchases, RFIDs, chips in your driver's license or other ID, face recognition software and cameras, license plate cameras, etc, all glomed into a nice central database accessible to trustworthy souls like...Bush and Poindexter.
This is just one more item that must be watched CLOSELY to ensure that its use is strictly limited. Nifty addons ands expansions need to be reviewed by people OTHER than a Bush or Poindexter, et al, and limits established and not exceeded. It is too easy to incrementally add "features" and capabilities for "customer satisfaction" or for "homeland security" purposes. The problem is a bunch of incremental steps add up big in the end.
This is just something to keep a wary eye on, not something (yet) requiring aluminum foil hats or Tempest-class houses.
For some of these transfers, it is irrelevant. You are simply producing a trail of individuals that can be tied to you. Perhaps you would find out how soon Kevin Bacon gets that sweater (will it be within 6 transfers?).
Where it goes really south is in clothing donation. Give it to Goodwill Ind. and the trail goes cold (though it identifies you as some kind of freakin' do-gooder. It may also identify your friends as freakin' do-gooders too if you gave it to them and THEY dump it at Goodwill).
Perhaps you could even use it to identify the ungrateful bastards in your circle. Give them a sweater and track it. See if it still gives off a signal when next you visit. How long before that signal vanishes, indicating that the "friend" thought you and your gift SUCKED and got rid of it? There's a use for it. You'll know who to ignore next year on their B-day. The bastard/bitch.
That's an easy extension to add. Give each bit of clothing a unique ID tag. You buy it with a credit card/check card and that ID is now tied to you. If you bought the item as a gift (for a lover or spouse or whomever), this produces a trail from them to you.
It might be INTENDED as something innocuous - but even in this innocuous form you will be hit with generic spam based on the chips on your person. It is merely a small step to make it a specific privacy violation and means of "passive" tracking and profiling.
All you need is EMP. A little EMP goes a long way to disable any such microchippie toy.
When/if such a chip becomes common (this would allow that annoying "Minority Report"-style privacy invasion in which billboards track you everywhere and spam the crap out of you with every step), first thing you do when you get home is pulse your clothing purchase with an EMP. Obviously, this wouldn't work with consumer electronics. EMP your watch to kill the chip and you kill the watch to boot.
Fourth, how many files would this have to be to get 95% of P2P users? The only way it could is by infecting every file you share, but SOMEBODY would have to notice that, whether the file size changes or some A/V data is thrown out.
This one's EASY. All need be infected is one or two Britney Spears mp3s ("Oops, I did it again" is a sure bet) and you'd nail EVERYONE because it is virtual certainty that everyone on P2P networks has at least one or two Britney Spears songs. Go ahead, you can admit it.
Safe assumption. The KID is what, 16? He's in school, I assure you, and he doesn't get to devote ALL his time EVERY day for ~2 years (he started when he was 15ish) on coding this one thing. He DID have to do class work, study, in other courses.
Except in my vision, instead of there being a complete free-for-all where the strongest gang of players has their random way with anyone and everyone else, there could be a virtual police force, virtual militaries, etc, for in game policing. You do your thing but may pay the consequences ingame from virtual authorities, preferably made up of other people (no AI cheating).
Of course, in standard RPGs it is possible to collect "magical" items or superweapons/armor, and character points such that your character becomes virtually invincible. Not so in my vision. Your persona is just as vulnerable as anyone else's. You never get to a point where you have some forms of magical superpowers or protections so that you are invulnerable. A lone sniper could take you out on his/her first day in the virtual world if they got lucky and knew what they were doing. Real-lifelike vulnerability is a must.
As a leader of a group/band, you could also get offed by a treacherous member of your own group.
YOU miss the point. With a bunch of idiots living out their "lives" online in virtual worlds, that means fewer people to dick things up in the REAL world. Parks will become less crowded and polluted because a lot of the slobs will be pretending to me svelt hotties in a virtual world getting the babes, etc. They can even "enjoy" a virtual visit to a virtual park whilst you, me, and the few other sane people go to the REAL parks and see them as they used to be.
This could be great. The more addictive the better, I say, wrt these "games". I WANT to be able to go camping again and not run into a family of fatsos 10 meters away in their trailer (with TV and VCR). To hear the breeze again, hear birds chirping, water tinkling instead of boom boxes and loud drunken gatherings around the campfire in the next door campsite.
Well, the whole thing is largely stupid/looney/ridiculous to begin with. Escape from your life for several hours a day (or more if you're a true major-league wacko) to...play at life again with the same crap you're "escaping" from: doing dishes, taking out trash, mowing your lawn, going to work, etc, etc. Sheesh.
If I could enter one of these silly worlds as a terrorist or mad scientist and unleash virtual plagues "blow up" virtual diners or other "gatherings" then it becomes interesting - but the virtual people have to "die", that is, the characters don't get to come back to virtual life and the "owners" of the characters have to start anew with a new/different character. It becomes interesting then. It would be amusing in its effects on those people who get overly attached to a non-real avatar/persona.
Basically, I would be interested in it if the users could turn the virtual world into some dystopian hell-hole by simply NOT being restricted in any way (by software rules/game rules). See what comes of it. Cool experiment and fun to play...and it IS only playing, and thus not worth the emotional investment too many people put into it.
Corporate speech is NOT individual speech. Individual HUMANS have free speech rights. A corporation is a collection of INDIVIDUAL humans, each with their own individual and independent speech rights that do not necessarily coincide. Does "corporate" Nike or M$ get to speak for all its employees/laborers/slaves? No, only THEY as individuals can speak for themselves. It is not correct or moral to assume that a group of overpaid execs gets to trump the speech rights of all the workers that actually do the heavy lifting, sometimes just to survive (Nike with slave-labor sweatshops). They are quite capable of speaking for themselves...and without retribution.
I doubt that all employees of M$ are immoral, unethical slimes that agree with everything that Gates and company pull. Ballmer and Gates do NOT get to collectively speak for anyone but THEMSELVES. A corporation cannot have an opinion, only the individuals that make up a corporation have opinions, some that are not coincident.
Ever install Suse? Or Redhat? What's bloated? Last Suse distro I had came with 7 disks chock full of cool-ass stuff. And then extra CDs of even more cool-ass stuff. Is that bloat or thoroughness? If you want it it is probably on one of the CDs. There are 2 CDs for the core Mandrake distro. Depending on how much YOU choose to install you may need a couple or all of the others. It is up to you. You are not required to use all the CDs when installing.
While I agree with you in principle, in practice it doesn't hold wrt M$. Why? Because M$ IS a court-recognized illegal monopoly violating just about every anti-trust law in existence then and now. Monopolists get to live by different regulations than others, particularly convicted monopolists. The problem here is that MPEG-4 really cannot compete. M$ has such a huge cash reserve and cash flow that even if MPEG-4 matches M$ price on WMP, M$ can still go lower, even to 0 cost for as long as it takes to kill MPEG-4.
While MPEG-4 should drop its price as Apple suggests, M$ cannot be left to run as they wish because of their proven illegal activities. They WILL go to 0 pricing if anyone tries to compete (MPEG-4) on price. M$ can afford it for a lot longer than any (even better) innovators or software producers.
That isn't the market in action as it is supposed to work and is envisioned by la-la land capitalism apologists, that is abuse of monopoly position and leveraging monopoly in one area to gain monopoly in another. Illegal.
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Bzzzt! Nope. Nukes are NOT "designed for airburst". It depends on your intent. Airburst levels buildings, takes out troops, over a longer range. A groundburst is good for hard target busting. If you are aiming to hit a silo or command center, you do ground burst as an airburst is all but useless. If you are aiming to destroy factories, troop concentrations, aircraft, power stations (other than hydroelectric or nuke) you can use airburst to best effect.
Me too! Oh, sorry. What I meant to comment about was that MY car is immune to your pathetic EMP devices. It doesn't have any IC chips. None. Old fashioned engine, old fashioned electronics...well, the alternator might be killable(?) but nothing else. It doesn't even have a radio!
As far as the nature/nurture dicotomy, I am primarily referring to basic traits. One's basic personality is not nurtured. Boys WILL be boys, on the whole, and girls WILL be girls. You are not taught to be a heterosexual (or homosexual), you are BORN a heterosexual (or homosexual). All "nurture" does is confuse the person (trying to teach them to be hetero when they are, in fact, homo) or modify the basic biological trait. You are trained in how to express your sexuality, not what your sexuality is, for instance.
Your basic personality (and the cat's) is what it is. It can be somewhat modified by training - confidence alters your "personality" to some extent - but on the whole the type of person you are is not trained. You have a distinctive personality somewhat modified by experience, but not generated or significantly altered by experience.
Want to truly alter someone's personality? Physically or chemically alter their brain. That WILL do it in real ways that training will never do.
All the clones being produced are nifty in their own rights from a certain standpoint, but they are not a good means as generated to detail what precise role genes or experience/nurture play in development. They need a baseline and a lot more information about en utero biology/biochemistry, gene state, etc, before any clear data can be collected.
REALLY? Michellin wont sell my personal data to anyone? Ever? Businesses are sooooo nice! They NEVER violate privacy with keystroke loggers, never listen in on phonecalls, read emails...and they never ever sell database information (nor would they want to) to other businesses or marketing firms. The money to be made by doing so is NO inducement in that regard.
What country do you live in that businesses are 100% ethical, never do wrong, never screw anyone for $$? I want to live there.
The INTENT is reasonable but that does not mean be sanguine about it. Whenever any such tracking method is introduced it MUST be thoroughly vetted and reviewed and any and ALL possible misuses of this power nipped in the bud BEFORE there is a smoking gun to drive posthumus nipping.
ALL such technologies must be vetted for possible privacy violations. This sort of concern is what drove the adoption of privacy policies with many businesses and sites. They wouldn't have had any compunction about selling YOUR data if people did not get crazy about it beforehand.
It is better to prevent abuse before actual abuse occurs. You cannot regain your privacy once your data is broadcast to everyone under the sun.
The potential abuse of RFIDs need to be examined and rules/laws enacted to PREVENT abuse, not react to it.
Just to be sure, leave your badge/card on your desk whenever you leave it to do ANYTHING. Don't have it with you when you go get coffee, go to the drinking fountain, go to the bathroom, shag your office lover in the janitor closet, etc. ONLY have it with you to get into the building. If they are lying or still are tracking you but cannot use the information as before, all they'll get is a highly productive worker who never leaves his/her desk.
If you don't do anything wrong, why worry about illegal searches? Why seal envelopes when you mail them? Why EVER use PGP? Why encrypt, period? What are you trying to hide criminal?
Never EVER use any iteration of the phrase, "If you don't do anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about." That is the road to zero civil liberties. That is the road to Police State.
You could do the cloning from the embryonic stage. If you impregnate a cat and let the eggs start developing, then select one or two embryos, split them into two (now half-sized) embryos, reimplant them, then let them continue development then you would TRUE clones that went through the same environment during development. The same burst of hormones from the mother at the same time, the same nutritional environment, etc.
The clones being produced of late from adult somatic cells are not good measures of the strength of genes in creating a creature/person. Why? No, NOT because of "nurture" being more important (it isn't). It is because the de facto biological environment en utero is different (different hormone levels from mom, different nutritional conditions, etc...no two pregnancies are the same in this regard particularly from different mothers).
Original cat biologically developed in a certain set of biological conditions en utero. That cat was also produced from properly regulated/formed egg-sperm fusion. Copy cat was produced from a somatic cell which DID contain mutations (inevitable given the basal mutation rate), many genes were silenced or activated in a manner totally different from a normal fertilized egg and all that regulatory machinery has to be unwound to get embryonic development going. This unwinding of regulatory mechanisms is imperfect - hence the MANY MANY failures to get a successful clone; the why behind the huge failure rate (added to mutations).
You end up with a disregulated genome in the embryo that is TOTALLY different than the properly regulated/prepared genome resulting from a standard egg-sperm fertilization event, coupled to a different biological environment en utero and you will NOT get a carbon copy. Can't happen, wont happen.
The time between inserting the nucleus from a somatic cell into an enucleated egg (the standard method of cloning in these circumstances) is too short. Those cells capable of dividing begin dividing almost immediately. There is NOT enough time for the somatic genome to be "reset" (if resetting is truly even possible) to a state equivalent to that of a normal egg-sperm state. Thus you end up with a mishmash of improperly regulated genes in the clone's genome - differences and problems galore. NO carbon copy.
Kinda off-topic no? In any case, shortcuts SUCK. They clutter your desktop with poo-poo when it is all right there in your kmenu. Sheesh. But...right click on your desktop, create new...link to application, enter the stuff and select an icon. Ta-da.
Or, go to the kmenu. Select "configure panel" then "add -> button" then select your app and it is magically added to your kpanel. Pretty much a shortcut no? Right there on your panel.
As other posters have indicated, I do believe that M$ releasing source to Russia is seen to them as a win-win situation. They "win" by potentially gaining a large government customer, with this what is hoped (by them) as the first of many major governments taking them up on it.
They also "win" because they WILL use the inevitable leak of source onto the wider internet as a means to kill/attack Wine and Samba and perhaps other "bothersome" OSS projects. They are not getting religion wrt their OS and opensource, they will NEVER get it but what they do get are unethical tactics to kill off competition. They will use leaked source as a weapon, that is as inevitable as is the leaking of the code.
Nuclear propulsion does NOT (necessarily) mean nuclear detonations. The main designs for nuclear rockets simply use the nuclear pile to superheat your-favorite-gas/propellant and accelerate it out an exhaust nozzle WAY more efficiently than ANY chemical rocket ever could hope for.
Of course, with Bush's lack of intelligence, foresight, and ethics, he probably would be all for breaking international treaties banning the detonation of nukes in space and support a detonation rocket (ala Orion) just be be a shit(head).
Except...mozilla's UI is butt-ugly and totally wrong for ANY desktop. The default UI themes are WRONG for both Gnome AND KDE and neither desktop system's theming/coloration system works with mozilla. You have several apps up and running, they are likely to all look compatible with each other instead of a random scattering of UIs and colors. Start up mozilla and it looks either VERY much like a windoze app or some blue thing with no compatibility with your system look/feel/theme.
Openoffice/staroffice...same thing only you get one and only one UI - a windoze interface.
I select my desktop colors and themes for a reason. They work best with ME and the colors work best with me. It looks coherent and is the same across apps (I use KDE). I start up a gtk app or mozilla or staroffice/oo and they are bastard stepchildren clashing with everything. Same goes in Gnome, which I have run on occassion when I've trashed KDE during an upgrade or rebuild or some such. Those two apps don't look right in Gnome either.
Publish your API and let the desktop handle the GUI part. I want the apps I use to obey my color and theme selection, period. I made the selection for a reason. Lowest common demoninator GUI design is butt-ugly.
I've never heard any. I am a Mandrake user for 2 reasons: it IS easy and fast to install. I do NOT enjoy dicking with installation. I'm no newbie, I simply want to get the system up and running fast without muss or fuss. After that, I'll tweak and build as time and interest allows. I need my system to work for me, not vice versa.
I disdain those anyone who badmouths this distro or that distro - it is ridiculous. It's ALL linux. I switched originally to Mandrake several years ago because it was the only distro at the time that optimized beyond generic i386. Yeah, yeah, you can build your own tarballs or packages and optimize it on other distros but this one CAME that way from the get-go. I wanted pretty damn optimized from the start so I wouldn't NEED to rebuild this or that package to optimize it unless I really had a hankerin.
Mandrake has been/is a nice distro. 8.2 was pure simplicity itself. 9.0 is troublesome. 9.1 is looking to be a thing of beauty. If my father or sister wanted to try linux, I would recommend Mandrake (8.2, or if I was available to get past the problems, 9.0) without hesitation. It is the distro with which I am most familiar right now (I have used Redhat and Suse in the past).
If Mandrake pulls through this bankruptcy, I'll go to 9.1 when it is available, otherwise, I have no particular preference: Suse or Redhat depending on user comments/input. I don't have broadband so I will not do any distro that requires downloading to install. That is my primary requirement, even before just being able to install and use my system productively as quickly as possible.
It's not this in an of itself, it is the additive effect of many such techniques/technologies that bears watching. Your license plate camera can only localize a car to a turnpike on a given date, it cannot identify what businesses, friends, parks you visit.
All you need is some George W. Bush and Adm. Poindexter to get together and decide that there are all these separate little things, none of which are specifically linked together, that can be used to track people. Let's create a central repository and database that will tie all these various identifiers and trackers together into one coherent system. Credit card purchases, RFIDs, chips in your driver's license or other ID, face recognition software and cameras, license plate cameras, etc, all glomed into a nice central database accessible to trustworthy souls like...Bush and Poindexter.
This is just one more item that must be watched CLOSELY to ensure that its use is strictly limited. Nifty addons ands expansions need to be reviewed by people OTHER than a Bush or Poindexter, et al, and limits established and not exceeded. It is too easy to incrementally add "features" and capabilities for "customer satisfaction" or for "homeland security" purposes. The problem is a bunch of incremental steps add up big in the end.
This is just something to keep a wary eye on, not something (yet) requiring aluminum foil hats or Tempest-class houses.
For some of these transfers, it is irrelevant. You are simply producing a trail of individuals that can be tied to you. Perhaps you would find out how soon Kevin Bacon gets that sweater (will it be within 6 transfers?).
Where it goes really south is in clothing donation. Give it to Goodwill Ind. and the trail goes cold (though it identifies you as some kind of freakin' do-gooder. It may also identify your friends as freakin' do-gooders too if you gave it to them and THEY dump it at Goodwill).
Perhaps you could even use it to identify the ungrateful bastards in your circle. Give them a sweater and track it. See if it still gives off a signal when next you visit. How long before that signal vanishes, indicating that the "friend" thought you and your gift SUCKED and got rid of it? There's a use for it. You'll know who to ignore next year on their B-day. The bastard/bitch.
That's an easy extension to add. Give each bit of clothing a unique ID tag. You buy it with a credit card/check card and that ID is now tied to you. If you bought the item as a gift (for a lover or spouse or whomever), this produces a trail from them to you.
It might be INTENDED as something innocuous - but even in this innocuous form you will be hit with generic spam based on the chips on your person. It is merely a small step to make it a specific privacy violation and means of "passive" tracking and profiling.
All you need is EMP. A little EMP goes a long way to disable any such microchippie toy.
When/if such a chip becomes common (this would allow that annoying "Minority Report"-style privacy invasion in which billboards track you everywhere and spam the crap out of you with every step), first thing you do when you get home is pulse your clothing purchase with an EMP. Obviously, this wouldn't work with consumer electronics. EMP your watch to kill the chip and you kill the watch to boot.
Fourth, how many files would this have to be to get 95% of P2P users? The only way it could is by infecting every file you share, but SOMEBODY would have to notice that, whether the file size changes or some A/V data is thrown out.
This one's EASY. All need be infected is one or two Britney Spears mp3s ("Oops, I did it again" is a sure bet) and you'd nail EVERYONE because it is virtual certainty that everyone on P2P networks has at least one or two Britney Spears songs. Go ahead, you can admit it.
Safe assumption. The KID is what, 16? He's in school, I assure you, and he doesn't get to devote ALL his time EVERY day for ~2 years (he started when he was 15ish) on coding this one thing. He DID have to do class work, study, in other courses.
Yes, but for a year-and-a-half? EVERY day? AND while, presumably, taking other classes and studying for tests in other courses, having friends, etc?
Think not.
Except in my vision, instead of there being a complete free-for-all where the strongest gang of players has their random way with anyone and everyone else, there could be a virtual police force, virtual militaries, etc, for in game policing. You do your thing but may pay the consequences ingame from virtual authorities, preferably made up of other people (no AI cheating).
Of course, in standard RPGs it is possible to collect "magical" items or superweapons/armor, and character points such that your character becomes virtually invincible. Not so in my vision. Your persona is just as vulnerable as anyone else's. You never get to a point where you have some forms of magical superpowers or protections so that you are invulnerable. A lone sniper could take you out on his/her first day in the virtual world if they got lucky and knew what they were doing. Real-lifelike vulnerability is a must.
As a leader of a group/band, you could also get offed by a treacherous member of your own group.
YOU miss the point. With a bunch of idiots living out their "lives" online in virtual worlds, that means fewer people to dick things up in the REAL world. Parks will become less crowded and polluted because a lot of the slobs will be pretending to me svelt hotties in a virtual world getting the babes, etc. They can even "enjoy" a virtual visit to a virtual park whilst you, me, and the few other sane people go to the REAL parks and see them as they used to be.
This could be great. The more addictive the better, I say, wrt these "games". I WANT to be able to go camping again and not run into a family of fatsos 10 meters away in their trailer (with TV and VCR). To hear the breeze again, hear birds chirping, water tinkling instead of boom boxes and loud drunken gatherings around the campfire in the next door campsite.
Well, the whole thing is largely stupid/looney/ridiculous to begin with. Escape from your life for several hours a day (or more if you're a true major-league wacko) to...play at life again with the same crap you're "escaping" from: doing dishes, taking out trash, mowing your lawn, going to work, etc, etc. Sheesh.
If I could enter one of these silly worlds as a terrorist or mad scientist and unleash virtual plagues "blow up" virtual diners or other "gatherings" then it becomes interesting - but the virtual people have to "die", that is, the characters don't get to come back to virtual life and the "owners" of the characters have to start anew with a new/different character. It becomes interesting then. It would be amusing in its effects on those people who get overly attached to a non-real avatar/persona.
Basically, I would be interested in it if the users could turn the virtual world into some dystopian hell-hole by simply NOT being restricted in any way (by software rules/game rules). See what comes of it. Cool experiment and fun to play...and it IS only playing, and thus not worth the emotional investment too many people put into it.
Corporate speech is NOT individual speech. Individual HUMANS have free speech rights. A corporation is a collection of INDIVIDUAL humans, each with their own individual and independent speech rights that do not necessarily coincide. Does "corporate" Nike or M$ get to speak for all its employees/laborers/slaves? No, only THEY as individuals can speak for themselves. It is not correct or moral to assume that a group of overpaid execs gets to trump the speech rights of all the workers that actually do the heavy lifting, sometimes just to survive (Nike with slave-labor sweatshops). They are quite capable of speaking for themselves...and without retribution.
I doubt that all employees of M$ are immoral, unethical slimes that agree with everything that Gates and company pull. Ballmer and Gates do NOT get to collectively speak for anyone but THEMSELVES. A corporation cannot have an opinion, only the individuals that make up a corporation have opinions, some that are not coincident.
Bloated?
Ever install Suse? Or Redhat? What's bloated? Last Suse distro I had came with 7 disks chock full of cool-ass stuff. And then extra CDs of even more cool-ass stuff. Is that bloat or thoroughness? If you want it it is probably on one of the CDs. There are 2 CDs for the core Mandrake distro. Depending on how much YOU choose to install you may need a couple or all of the others. It is up to you. You are not required to use all the CDs when installing.
While I agree with you in principle, in practice it doesn't hold wrt M$. Why? Because M$ IS a court-recognized illegal monopoly violating just about every anti-trust law in existence then and now. Monopolists get to live by different regulations than others, particularly convicted monopolists. The problem here is that MPEG-4 really cannot compete. M$ has such a huge cash reserve and cash flow that even if MPEG-4 matches M$ price on WMP, M$ can still go lower, even to 0 cost for as long as it takes to kill MPEG-4.
While MPEG-4 should drop its price as Apple suggests, M$ cannot be left to run as they wish because of their proven illegal activities. They WILL go to 0 pricing if anyone tries to compete (MPEG-4) on price. M$ can afford it for a lot longer than any (even better) innovators or software producers.
That isn't the market in action as it is supposed to work and is envisioned by la-la land capitalism apologists, that is abuse of monopoly position and leveraging monopoly in one area to gain monopoly in another. Illegal.