Marketing Flak: Hey, I know about all these cool services that we can add to our default setup! Tech: What do you mean 'cool'? MF: I mean, we can install them, and then when people browse, we get money. It's like free cash! Vice-President: Free cash? It'll make my budget easier? T: Oh you mean spyware. You want to install spyware and crapware on the computers before they go out the door? MF: It's not spyware, like that stuff from what, Gator? It's a consumer-prefence program and digital wallet from Claria. It makes sure that users only see ads directed to their particular tastes. T: Yeah, like 8 bajillion ads. VP: Free money? Sounds great! Tech, make it so! T: But... VP: I can replace you, you know. T: Yes sir.
_______________________ Note to Michael Dell: congratulations, dumbass. You just found out nothing is FREE. Add crapware on your computers and (surprise) you're going to find out that the people who have problems with this crapware start telling others that Dells are hard to deal with. Hope that $0.0001 clickthrough revenue is enough to mitigate the cost of your lost sales.
Wait, so if I understand it: 1) someone can post a story based on/linked to entirely unattributed quotation that's 100% pure slander = "news" and front page posting on slashdot 2) I use the exact same standards and it's flamebait.
You guys are hilarious. "I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way." "Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution." "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Can I try? "I'm fully in support of Al-Qeada," said Howard Dean, "I hope they kill every stupid redneck in the country!" "No shit," chimed in Nancy Pelosi, "I'd love to see the murder of all those goddamn Republicans. They get in the way of our utopian love-state." One aide tried to calm the histrionics, until he was shot in the head by Al Franken. Franken called for the immediate nuclear annihilation of Israel, the return of the Louisiana purchase to the French, and the dismantling of our armed forces. "Everyone in the military is just a repressed Nazi jackbooted thug," said Franken, before engaging in a deep soul kiss with John Murtha, Congressman and former Vietnam veteran.
____________ You can have great fun tossing around unattributed quotations on what was said and done in a closed meeting? KEWL! It's like the news reportage version of anonymized dung-throwing. But hey, why bother with facts when speculation is so much more EMPOWERING, right?
My favorite part of TFA is this one: ""Oh, how I hate the phrase we have--a 'living document,'" Scalia says. "We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete's sake."... "We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones," Scalia warns. "Don't think that it's a one-way street." Yes, exactly. Read it again. HE'S SAYING THAT TAKING AWAY RIGHTS IS BAD. He's using the example of the Leftist USSC judges 'reading' rights into the consitution as WEAKENING it because if you can that easily add rights you can ipso facto 'read' them away...which is a BAD THING. My god, Liberals are so fraking stupid when their dander is up. And you have the nuts to call Bush a self-righteous idiot?
Didn't have time to RT(whole)FA, does this mean any real advantage for anyone with older (say, 9700-generation) ATI cards, or is it only with the newer hardware that it's so wonderful?
No, because any commercial entity (even a non-profit) is going to do the same analysis that NASA did, and probably come to the same conclusion: cost > return.
If it's such a boon to mankind, convince some multigajillionaire to buy it for naming rights. Instead of the "Hubble Space Telescope" we could be getting this sort of data from the U2 Space Telescope or the Bjorn Bayley Space Telescope.
...and some just throw in gratuitous anti-religious slaps because their Left-Coast metaculture teaches them that this how they can feel better about themselves.
As much as I like debunking fraudulent 'studies' against videogames, this one is just as weak.
"1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers -- 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. It also misdirects energy away from eliminating the actual causes of youth violence and allows problems to continue to fester."
Let's just dissect this one, shall we? -Rate of juvenile crime is at a 30 year low: no causal link. This could have to do with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it could have to do with computers, it could have to do with the position of the Milky Way in the sky....sorry guys, 0 for 1. - Criminals consume less media than others: well, 'typical' criminals are poor. Who consumes more media, a poor person or a rich person? Again, not really clearly linked to what they are talking about. 0 for 2. - The overwhelming majority of kids who play don't commit antisocial acts. Well, yeah, the overwhelming majority of kids who DON'T play don't commit such acts, neither does the majority of kids that eat donuts, or kids who get their hair cut, or kids with blue eyes. Pointless statistic. 0 for 3. - Strongest link attributed to mental stability....definitely 1 for 4.
So we're one out of four. The rest of the study is equally weakly argued. Look, I AGREE with the authors, but I have to say that this 'study' is utterly unconvincing.
Look at it like this, at least they are not spending their money on trying to figure out ways to stockpile enough munitions to destroy the Earth 4 times over.
Not sure how clear you are on your world history, but they did try this about 60 years back. Didn't work out for them.
Oh, by the way, they happen to have a lot of spare cash since their security has been subsidized heavily by the US taxpayer for the last half-century. You know, that same taxpayer whose funding of US military programs has also funded some useful discoveries as well? Or is it only bad if the US discovers something?
I love dimwits that throw in that irrelevant political jab at the end of comments...it's so politically correct. It just warms my cockles.
Please don't take this as a flame - it's not meant as such at all.
1) The Continental Army fought much the same way as the British army. The idea that the Americans 'hid behind rocks and trees' while the British fought in lines is a tired old chestnut with no basis in fact. Both sides used skirmishers, light troops who fought from cover, to great effect. The Brits were unhappily surprised by the lethality and range of the American rifles, but in general the US Army was beaten in almost every engagement except for the critical battles of Saratoga and Cowpens.
2) to suggest that the Americans have somehow routinely relied on deception and ambush thereafter is simply misreading the facts. Until recently, American militaries were NOT known for their subtlety - the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, WW1, WW2, Korea, and even the failed efforts in Vietnam were almost entirely about a standup, face-to-face battle where the US won more by its overwhelming resources than by its surprise attacks or deception.
Again, this isn't meant as a flame, I simply think your interpretation is entirely wrong. Your parallel of "the US abandoned honor in war = Iraqi terrorists abandoning honor" thereby implies very dangerously some sort of 'moral equivalency' between the American revolutionaries and the Iraqi jihadis. While I recognize that no doubt SOME Iraqis are fighting for purely nationalist reasons, it's not their main motivation.
I would argue that the Shiite uprisings against Saddam that we failed to support (to our shame) were a far closer parallel to the American revolution.
Efax is free. Print the form, fill it out with sloppy handwriting forcing someone to puzzle their way through it. Efax it to yourself, and you get a 200dpi scanned copy. Email the resulting tif file to them.
When they complain about the unreadability, explain that perhaps a fillable form would have been better.
In the US, you can watch violence but not the panis or boobehs. In Europe, you can watch panis and boobehs all you want, but violence is seen as some sort of secular sin.
And don't give me "sex is part of life" nonsense because violence is JUST as endemic to life as sex. Do I think the US's 'approval' of violence is ok? No. But I also think that the smugly moralizing Europeans are hypocrites whose "watching boobehs is fine" position has more to do with their mens' widespread (and accepted) patronizing and degrading objectification of women, than any pseudo-sophisticated enlightenment.
I'm interested in the limiting rules for the competitions. Why not use GPS?
I wonder how long it is before someone thinks to throw a GPS net over Mars; with slightly-more-capable satellites, this 'web' could serve as multipurpose GPS, commo net, and safety system. I don't know how much it cost for GPS here, but it seems like a reasonable investment that would greatly accelerate the exploration and use of Mars.
The thing nobody has been able to match is to have an END. This sounds stupid, but it implies closure and a pre-written script that arcs over multiple seasons. It allows you to set up character attributes in season one that they will not make use of until season 4, and when done right it makes for a fantastic viewing experience.
More importantly still, it allowed his characters to develop like real people, ie. permanently. What Hollywood still doesn't really get is that this adds verisimilitude that you can't SIMULATE. People change, and change in permanent ways. With a finite arc (in X years, we are DONE), you can kill characters, change them radically, do whatever, and (here's the key) they don't return to their original "character concept" by the end of 45 minutes or a couple of episodes. Really, as a viewer you never know when you're going to be handed a major character change...which is neat.
I don't know about you, but every time I deal with a retailer - internet or face to face - I have an 'option plan' to follow if the transaction fails. With internet retailers it's typically "lose the money and get screwed" - that's the 'risk surcharge' you take when dealing with ANY remote transaction, be it by phone, mail or teh intarweb.
Yes, you are getting a lower price from them, they have to, to compensate you for the implied risk. If you cannot accept the risk, buy it from a bricks and mortar store that you can at least burn down if you're totally pissed off.
This is kind of like the folks that buy an XBox360 a week before release for $100 on ebay and are shocked that they get taken to the cleaners.
Let's be clear. Without a government-issued ID there is no actual prohibition on TRAVEL. There is, however, the ability for COMMERCIAL, PRIVATE transport companies (be they bus, train, plane, ferry, whatever) to REFUSE SERVICE to people failing to present such an ID. You can still go pretty much anywhere you want using class 1 shoe leather. But for people who've invested $millions$ in equipment, and who are responsible for hundreds and thousands of lives, it's reasonable for them to say "ok, you don't have an ID? Fine, you're an unacceptable risk in our estimation."
I hate sloppy language, especially when it's used by chicken-littles to suggest we're moving toward a police state...like the hypocrites at Cryptome. They're utter libertarians for THEMSELVES, but they apparently find it reprehensible that private businesses also may make choices.
FWIW I'd personally like to see the marketplace decide. All the tinfoil-hatters need to band together, invest, and start a budget airline where there is NO I.D. required, no searches, no security. See how many people fly such an airline. I think airline security is mostly a joke, and more an exercise in mass psychology than actual safety, but I'm happy to go through even a pastiche of a security check that will weed out the stupidest criminals.
I'm with the above-poster. I like to think I'm fairly ept as far as computers are concerned. I've built my own systems since the late 1980's. Set up firewalls, WANs, several LANs, etc.etc. So I'm not an expert but neither am I a n00b.
But while I dislike MS's monopolistic behavior as much as the next guy, I won't touch linux with a 10' (3m for you Euros) pole. Sure, I've run Knoppix and was actually very pleasantly suprised how smooth and fast it runs. But let me look at my bookshelf of probably 60-80 PC game titles to see how many of them will also run on Linux? That would be perhaps 2: I think Doom3 and NWN have Linux versions.
Sorry, XP makes me pull my hair out sometimes, but until I can slip in a linux install cd, run it, and have an OS that will run even only 75% of my games I'm not touching it.
Indeed. And if one felt the need to continue the movie-plot security hypothesizing, one would further recognize that such a sufficiently-advanced civilization, if we're assuming such hostility, poses threats in other contexts that are multiple orders of magnitude more likely: - We've been broadcasting our location clearly to the universe since Marconi first threw the switch, if not earlier. - Any sufficiently hostile, technologically capable civilization could wipe us out with a large, well-aimed ROCK. - If they wanted to make it nearly un-interceptable they'd accelerate it to a high fraction of c. - If they REALLY were ticked off (say, they watched Gilligan's Island or something) they'd lob a small singularity at us, or heck, into our sun.
Let's just recognize that IF we're postulating sci-fi threats, it doesn't take a Ph.D to realize that this isn't even a very credible one. Any sufficiently advanced society, capable of this sort of insidious assault, would have so many multiple ways of wrecking us it's illogical to waste resources trying to stop any of them.
Reading an Iain Banks novel, while entertaining, shouldn't really guide policy.
...just more intricate than most people are willing to consider.
It's practically the core programming of evolution that every species has a drive to breed, expand, and spread itself. Aside from lemmings (who may have been stampeded over the cliff by Disney dudes anyway) there seems to be no limit to this drive aside from external forces like environment and predation.
So we have humans. 5 BILLION of them. That would be a fairly high population for any animal, but then add that every handful of them has a FIRE going, 24 hours a day. (Sure, in "civilized" countries few of us have cooking fires going, but we do have a boiler, a car, and a power generation facility running for our benefit somewhere...).
Heat in the system increases. Ya think?
But my question really is, SO WHAT?
Oh noes! Humans might be heating the atmosphere and making it warmer! Who's going to suffer? HUMANS. Sounds very karmic to me. Florida's going to be flooded? I'm sure the alligators are laughing it up, as are the migratory bird population. Yes, our prices are going to go up, millions more may die in more significant weather events. Cities placed on marginal land (like, oh, I don't know - say ones built in a SWAMP, between a major, shifting river, a huge lake, and the ocean) will eventually be wiped away.
But the climate of earth is dynamic. It's never been static, and it's never going to be static. Humans are what, 3 to 4 million years on this planet? Did it ever occur to anyone that we may have blossomed in a climate that was, briefly, particularly mild and hospitable? And that may have in itself been a transient event, a long one, but still transient?
Humanity is like any other species. They expand like a cancer until they breach the carrying capacity of the environment or become the subject of a new predator. Surprise, it's happeneing to us. So why do the environmentalists think we're somehow "special" and that the course of species development should be different for us?
Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?' They believe that internet publishing would harm the the profitability of being the middleman in the exchange of knowledge between researchers.
I think you are overreacting. Mankind has been trying to eradicate all bugs for oh, roughly 2-3 million years and as far as we know, we haven't succeeded in eliminating a single species.
I'm thinking that this may be a device to win a battle, but the bugs are gonna win the war.
I'm reminded of pictures of kids running around playing in the spray of the neighborhood DDT truck in the 1950s.....
Re:I remember actually wanting ads in a game once.
on
In-Game Ads Necessary?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, going off a little further on your final point - that's a bubble I'm waiting to see burst. Frankly, I wonder if this will cause a catastrophic wreck to our economy.
See, there are $bajillions$ spent on advertising, and as far as I can tell, it's almost entirely wasted. When's the last time that you were flipping through Time magazine, and were struck by a full page laundry soap ad, and decided to try that new laundry soap *because of the ad?* Yet that laundry soap company paid probably $100,000 or MORE for that single advertisement. Does Bud Light actually make $3 million MORE dollars than they would have if they hadn't had that 30 second TV spot during the Superbowl? Now that DVR/TiVo is spreading, doesn't this become even MORE irrelevant?
At some point, someone with a big pair of cajones is going to say "Wait a second! We already have a widely-recognized brand name, our products are popular, let's cut our ad budget by 85% and see what happens."... and they are going to find out that they didn't lose anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Marketing Flak: Hey, I know about all these cool services that we can add to our default setup!
Tech: What do you mean 'cool'?
MF: I mean, we can install them, and then when people browse, we get money. It's like free cash!
Vice-President: Free cash? It'll make my budget easier?
T: Oh you mean spyware. You want to install spyware and crapware on the computers before they go out the door?
MF: It's not spyware, like that stuff from what, Gator? It's a consumer-prefence program and digital wallet from Claria. It makes sure that users only see ads directed to their particular tastes.
T: Yeah, like 8 bajillion ads.
VP: Free money? Sounds great! Tech, make it so!
T: But...
VP: I can replace you, you know.
T: Yes sir.
_______________________
Note to Michael Dell: congratulations, dumbass. You just found out nothing is FREE. Add crapware on your computers and (surprise) you're going to find out that the people who have problems with this crapware start telling others that Dells are hard to deal with. Hope that $0.0001 clickthrough revenue is enough to mitigate the cost of your lost sales.
Wait, so if I understand it:
1) someone can post a story based on/linked to entirely unattributed quotation that's 100% pure slander = "news" and front page posting on slashdot
2) I use the exact same standards and it's flamebait.
No hypocrisy there, I'm sure?
You guys are hilarious.
...
"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."
"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Can I try?
"I'm fully in support of Al-Qeada," said Howard Dean, "I hope they kill every stupid redneck in the country!"
"No shit," chimed in Nancy Pelosi, "I'd love to see the murder of all those goddamn Republicans. They get in the way of our utopian love-state."
One aide tried to calm the histrionics, until he was shot in the head by Al Franken. Franken called for the immediate nuclear annihilation of Israel, the return of the Louisiana purchase to the French, and the dismantling of our armed forces.
"Everyone in the military is just a repressed Nazi jackbooted thug," said Franken, before engaging in a deep soul kiss with John Murtha, Congressman and former Vietnam veteran.
____________
You can have great fun tossing around unattributed quotations on what was said and done in a closed meeting? KEWL! It's like the news reportage version of anonymized dung-throwing. But hey, why bother with facts when speculation is so much more EMPOWERING, right?
My favorite part of TFA is this one:
""Oh, how I hate the phrase we have--a 'living document,'" Scalia says. "We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete's sake."
"We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones," Scalia warns. "Don't think that it's a one-way street."
Yes, exactly. Read it again. HE'S SAYING THAT TAKING AWAY RIGHTS IS BAD. He's using the example of the Leftist USSC judges 'reading' rights into the consitution as WEAKENING it because if you can that easily add rights you can ipso facto 'read' them away...which is a BAD THING.
My god, Liberals are so fraking stupid when their dander is up. And you have the nuts to call Bush a self-righteous idiot?
Didn't have time to RT(whole)FA, does this mean any real advantage for anyone with older (say, 9700-generation) ATI cards, or is it only with the newer hardware that it's so wonderful?
Magazines in business to make money, news at 11.
No, because any commercial entity (even a non-profit) is going to do the same analysis that NASA did, and probably come to the same conclusion: cost > return.
If it's such a boon to mankind, convince some multigajillionaire to buy it for naming rights. Instead of the "Hubble Space Telescope" we could be getting this sort of data from the U2 Space Telescope or the Bjorn Bayley Space Telescope.
...and some just throw in gratuitous anti-religious slaps because their Left-Coast metaculture teaches them that this how they can feel better about themselves.
What a stupid thing to say.
That's not very nice to say about Bill Clinton. He's not even president anymore.
As much as I like debunking fraudulent 'studies' against videogames, this one is just as weak.
"1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence.
According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers -- 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. It also misdirects energy away from eliminating the actual causes of youth violence and allows problems to continue to fester."
Let's just dissect this one, shall we?
-Rate of juvenile crime is at a 30 year low: no causal link. This could have to do with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it could have to do with computers, it could have to do with the position of the Milky Way in the sky....sorry guys, 0 for 1.
- Criminals consume less media than others: well, 'typical' criminals are poor. Who consumes more media, a poor person or a rich person? Again, not really clearly linked to what they are talking about. 0 for 2.
- The overwhelming majority of kids who play don't commit antisocial acts. Well, yeah, the overwhelming majority of kids who DON'T play don't commit such acts, neither does the majority of kids that eat donuts, or kids who get their hair cut, or kids with blue eyes. Pointless statistic. 0 for 3.
- Strongest link attributed to mental stability....definitely 1 for 4.
So we're one out of four. The rest of the study is equally weakly argued. Look, I AGREE with the authors, but I have to say that this 'study' is utterly unconvincing.
Look at it like this, at least they are not spending their money on trying to figure out ways to stockpile enough munitions to destroy the Earth 4 times over.
Not sure how clear you are on your world history, but they did try this about 60 years back. Didn't work out for them.
Oh, by the way, they happen to have a lot of spare cash since their security has been subsidized heavily by the US taxpayer for the last half-century. You know, that same taxpayer whose funding of US military programs has also funded some useful discoveries as well? Or is it only bad if the US discovers something?
I love dimwits that throw in that irrelevant political jab at the end of comments...it's so politically correct. It just warms my cockles.
Please don't take this as a flame - it's not meant as such at all.
1) The Continental Army fought much the same way as the British army. The idea that the Americans 'hid behind rocks and trees' while the British fought in lines is a tired old chestnut with no basis in fact. Both sides used skirmishers, light troops who fought from cover, to great effect. The Brits were unhappily surprised by the lethality and range of the American rifles, but in general the US Army was beaten in almost every engagement except for the critical battles of Saratoga and Cowpens.
http://theamericanrevolution.org/battles.asp
2) to suggest that the Americans have somehow routinely relied on deception and ambush thereafter is simply misreading the facts. Until recently, American militaries were NOT known for their subtlety - the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, WW1, WW2, Korea, and even the failed efforts in Vietnam were almost entirely about a standup, face-to-face battle where the US won more by its overwhelming resources than by its surprise attacks or deception.
Again, this isn't meant as a flame, I simply think your interpretation is entirely wrong. Your parallel of "the US abandoned honor in war = Iraqi terrorists abandoning honor" thereby implies very dangerously some sort of 'moral equivalency' between the American revolutionaries and the Iraqi jihadis. While I recognize that no doubt SOME Iraqis are fighting for purely nationalist reasons, it's not their main motivation.
I would argue that the Shiite uprisings against Saddam that we failed to support (to our shame) were a far closer parallel to the American revolution.
Efax is free.
Print the form, fill it out with sloppy handwriting forcing someone to puzzle their way through it.
Efax it to yourself, and you get a 200dpi scanned copy.
Email the resulting tif file to them.
When they complain about the unreadability, explain that perhaps a fillable form would have been better.
Pot = Kettle
In the US, you can watch violence but not the panis or boobehs.
In Europe, you can watch panis and boobehs all you want, but violence is seen as some sort of secular sin.
And don't give me "sex is part of life" nonsense because violence is JUST as endemic to life as sex. Do I think the US's 'approval' of violence is ok? No. But I also think that the smugly moralizing Europeans are hypocrites whose "watching boobehs is fine" position has more to do with their mens' widespread (and accepted) patronizing and degrading objectification of women, than any pseudo-sophisticated enlightenment.
I'm interested in the limiting rules for the competitions. Why not use GPS?
I wonder how long it is before someone thinks to throw a GPS net over Mars; with slightly-more-capable satellites, this 'web' could serve as multipurpose GPS, commo net, and safety system. I don't know how much it cost for GPS here, but it seems like a reasonable investment that would greatly accelerate the exploration and use of Mars.
The thing nobody has been able to match is to have an END. This sounds stupid, but it implies closure and a pre-written script that arcs over multiple seasons. It allows you to set up character attributes in season one that they will not make use of until season 4, and when done right it makes for a fantastic viewing experience.
More importantly still, it allowed his characters to develop like real people, ie. permanently. What Hollywood still doesn't really get is that this adds verisimilitude that you can't SIMULATE. People change, and change in permanent ways. With a finite arc (in X years, we are DONE), you can kill characters, change them radically, do whatever, and (here's the key) they don't return to their original "character concept" by the end of 45 minutes or a couple of episodes. Really, as a viewer you never know when you're going to be handed a major character change...which is neat.
How about "caveat emptor"?
TANSTAAFL.
I don't know about you, but every time I deal with a retailer - internet or face to face - I have an 'option plan' to follow if the transaction fails. With internet retailers it's typically "lose the money and get screwed" - that's the 'risk surcharge' you take when dealing with ANY remote transaction, be it by phone, mail or teh intarweb.
Yes, you are getting a lower price from them, they have to, to compensate you for the implied risk. If you cannot accept the risk, buy it from a bricks and mortar store that you can at least burn down if you're totally pissed off.
This is kind of like the folks that buy an XBox360 a week before release for $100 on ebay and are shocked that they get taken to the cleaners.
That's no big deal, most people on either coast fail to see any moral distinction between the two anyway.
Let's be clear. Without a government-issued ID there is no actual prohibition on TRAVEL. There is, however, the ability for COMMERCIAL, PRIVATE transport companies (be they bus, train, plane, ferry, whatever) to REFUSE SERVICE to people failing to present such an ID. You can still go pretty much anywhere you want using class 1 shoe leather. But for people who've invested $millions$ in equipment, and who are responsible for hundreds and thousands of lives, it's reasonable for them to say "ok, you don't have an ID? Fine, you're an unacceptable risk in our estimation."
I hate sloppy language, especially when it's used by chicken-littles to suggest we're moving toward a police state...like the hypocrites at Cryptome. They're utter libertarians for THEMSELVES, but they apparently find it reprehensible that private businesses also may make choices.
FWIW I'd personally like to see the marketplace decide. All the tinfoil-hatters need to band together, invest, and start a budget airline where there is NO I.D. required, no searches, no security. See how many people fly such an airline. I think airline security is mostly a joke, and more an exercise in mass psychology than actual safety, but I'm happy to go through even a pastiche of a security check that will weed out the stupidest criminals.
I'm with the above-poster.
I like to think I'm fairly ept as far as computers are concerned. I've built my own systems since the late 1980's. Set up firewalls, WANs, several LANs, etc.etc. So I'm not an expert but neither am I a n00b.
But while I dislike MS's monopolistic behavior as much as the next guy, I won't touch linux with a 10' (3m for you Euros) pole. Sure, I've run Knoppix and was actually very pleasantly suprised how smooth and fast it runs. But let me look at my bookshelf of probably 60-80 PC game titles to see how many of them will also run on Linux? That would be perhaps 2: I think Doom3 and NWN have Linux versions.
Sorry, XP makes me pull my hair out sometimes, but until I can slip in a linux install cd, run it, and have an OS that will run even only 75% of my games I'm not touching it.
Indeed.
And if one felt the need to continue the movie-plot security hypothesizing, one would further recognize that such a sufficiently-advanced civilization, if we're assuming such hostility, poses threats in other contexts that are multiple orders of magnitude more likely:
- We've been broadcasting our location clearly to the universe since Marconi first threw the switch, if not earlier.
- Any sufficiently hostile, technologically capable civilization could wipe us out with a large, well-aimed ROCK.
- If they wanted to make it nearly un-interceptable they'd accelerate it to a high fraction of c.
- If they REALLY were ticked off (say, they watched Gilligan's Island or something) they'd lob a small singularity at us, or heck, into our sun.
Let's just recognize that IF we're postulating sci-fi threats, it doesn't take a Ph.D to realize that this isn't even a very credible one. Any sufficiently advanced society, capable of this sort of insidious assault, would have so many multiple ways of wrecking us it's illogical to waste resources trying to stop any of them.
Reading an Iain Banks novel, while entertaining, shouldn't really guide policy.
...just more intricate than most people are willing to consider.
It's practically the core programming of evolution that every species has a drive to breed, expand, and spread itself. Aside from lemmings (who may have been stampeded over the cliff by Disney dudes anyway) there seems to be no limit to this drive aside from external forces like environment and predation.
So we have humans. 5 BILLION of them. That would be a fairly high population for any animal, but then add that every handful of them has a FIRE going, 24 hours a day. (Sure, in "civilized" countries few of us have cooking fires going, but we do have a boiler, a car, and a power generation facility running for our benefit somewhere...).
Heat in the system increases. Ya think?
But my question really is, SO WHAT?
Oh noes! Humans might be heating the atmosphere and making it warmer! Who's going to suffer? HUMANS. Sounds very karmic to me. Florida's going to be flooded? I'm sure the alligators are laughing it up, as are the migratory bird population. Yes, our prices are going to go up, millions more may die in more significant weather events. Cities placed on marginal land (like, oh, I don't know - say ones built in a SWAMP, between a major, shifting river, a huge lake, and the ocean) will eventually be wiped away.
But the climate of earth is dynamic. It's never been static, and it's never going to be static. Humans are what, 3 to 4 million years on this planet? Did it ever occur to anyone that we may have blossomed in a climate that was, briefly, particularly mild and hospitable? And that may have in itself been a transient event, a long one, but still transient?
Humanity is like any other species. They expand like a cancer until they breach the carrying capacity of the environment or become the subject of a new predator. Surprise, it's happeneing to us. So why do the environmentalists think we're somehow "special" and that the course of species development should be different for us?
Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?' They believe that internet publishing would harm the the profitability of being the middleman in the exchange of knowledge between researchers.
I think you are overreacting. Mankind has been trying to eradicate all bugs for oh, roughly 2-3 million years and as far as we know, we haven't succeeded in eliminating a single species.
I'm thinking that this may be a device to win a battle, but the bugs are gonna win the war.
I'm reminded of pictures of kids running around playing in the spray of the neighborhood DDT truck in the 1950s.....
Actually, going off a little further on your final point - that's a bubble I'm waiting to see burst. Frankly, I wonder if this will cause a catastrophic wreck to our economy.
... and they are going to find out that they didn't lose anything.
See, there are $bajillions$ spent on advertising, and as far as I can tell, it's almost entirely wasted. When's the last time that you were flipping through Time magazine, and were struck by a full page laundry soap ad, and decided to try that new laundry soap *because of the ad?* Yet that laundry soap company paid probably $100,000 or MORE for that single advertisement. Does Bud Light actually make $3 million MORE dollars than they would have if they hadn't had that 30 second TV spot during the Superbowl? Now that DVR/TiVo is spreading, doesn't this become even MORE irrelevant?
At some point, someone with a big pair of cajones is going to say "Wait a second! We already have a widely-recognized brand name, our products are popular, let's cut our ad budget by 85% and see what happens."