I take your point that genetic testing can be used against us by insurance companies. This is a very powerful tool with awesome benefits and consequences. Genetic testing, medicine and genetic engineering has the potential to make a "better" human race. And therein lies the problem.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley foresees genetic engineering used to subordinate the lower classes by making them stupid and purging creative and destructive thought processes. Yuval Harari, in Homo Deus, predicts the rich and powerful will use genetic engineering to give their offspring immortality, happiness and even more power, and in the process create another kind of human. At some point these super humans will integrate with AI in a singularity that renders unnecessary current human affairs - and current humans.
Even if the bleak predictions of Huxley or Harari do not come true, once we tamper with our genetic code, there's no turning back. We lose the nature's evolutionary sorting in favor of designer genes. I'm not sure which best for the survival of the species.
These are the oldest known human remains in the Americas? How about the "Arlington Woman", who's 13,000 year old bones were found in the 1960s on a Channel Island of Ventura County, Southern California. http://articles.latimes.com/1999/apr/11/news/mn-26401
Controversially, James M. Adovasio, Dennis Stanford and Joseph and Lynn McAvoy; and on the wilder side, Albert Goodyear and Tom Demere say there is evidence for humans in the Americas that goes back much further. Their evidence and theories are not generally accepted. Good reads though.
You might want to hesitate buying a new TV right now. Chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, is pushing for a new ATSC 3.0, Over-The-Air (OTA) TV standard that will require new tuners. It could have a major impact even for cable and dish users. As this new standard becomes ubiquitous, TVs not compatible with the new format may go the way of the analog TV.
ATSC 3.0 is an IP based system - an internet protocol that not only delivers a HD 4K picture, and allows directly broadcasting to mobile devices; it lets stations encrypt broadcasts and initiate pay-for OTA subscriptions. (multiple obscenities). If you can wait, LG will be selling TV with both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 later this year.
ahref=https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/2/14488608/4k-tv-broadcasts-ajit-pai-atsc-3-hdr/rel=url2html-30264https://www.theverge.com/2017/...>
Yes, but how do the reptilians fit into all of this?
The reptilians are the/. overlords. David Icke, Rick and Morty said so, so it's gotta be... hey, wait a minute. I recognize those shape shifting machinations of yours. E tu, epyT-R!
Whoever bought Slashdot has some really WEIRD agenda.
It's true. Controversial stories are specifically chosen to elicit comments, that are in turn stored, analyzed, and used to categorize the user base in terms of psychological type, underlying disorders, as well as sociological and criminal profiles. Further, psychologists, sociologists, police, priests, and professionals in business, education and comedy pose as average commentators, monitors, and administrators who, through skillful interaction, gradually change the readers' belief structures, and conceptions of reality, ultimately manipulating the very fabric of society. In sum,/. is trying to indoctrinate us into their thought collective.
Deep, Archtech. Good stuff. Calls for a 3 beer conversation sometime. BTW, my favourite Cockburn was Alexander, who died in 2012. He co-edited that CounterPunch your so fond of.
I agree that, on first blush, Google's new news format sucks.
Content is another matter. News aggregators are having a tough time. The news biz is failing, and their jobs drying up, so journalism degrees are becoming worthless. At the same time, vested interests are seeding the media with 'techniques of persuasion', i.e., propaganda. It's no shock then that journalistic standards are plummeting. Honesty and integrity in the news are getting harder to find.
All that said, and besides the main stories everybody gets, doesn't Google give us news the same way they give us commercials, that is, select stories based on our Google profile and their data tracking algorithms?
No. NAFTA Tribunal do not cover the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods
Full disclose: Not being a lawyer, The following is just a lay person's bullshit.
As stated in the article, this was a
intellectual property case over whether judges can apply their own country's laws to all of the internet.
As the 7-2 ruling suggests, the decision is debatable.
This is something NAFTA was made for. One of NAFTA's roles is to facilitate trade between favored nations and to protect business from unfair practices. In this case, chapter 11, NAFTA's investor-state dispute mechanism, allows Google to sue Canada in a secret tribunal. That Canada is the most successfully sued country under NAFTA could be one small point in Google's favor. https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/nafta-chapter-11-investor-state-disputes-january-1-2015
A larger point is that the judges are applying Canadian law on the rest of the globe, something far beyond a mere local intellectual property dispute. The NAFTA Secretariat and the aforementioned tribunal could easily rule this extension of Canadian law an unfair practice. And in so doing, would negate the entire ruling.
Couldn't Google get a NAFTA Tribunal to challenge Canada's Supreme Court ruling? Google would probably win. Then Canada would have to compensate, maybe even overcompensate for the resulting loss of revenue for all that deleting.
These geeks are driving around in their cars, surfing the WEB and talking to each other with technology straight off the amateur radio shelf. Relay stations allow for service virtually worldwide. You just need the hardware, the software and the license. D-Star is a digital voice and data protocol specification for amateur radio. There are open source alternatives to D-Star, but I don't know much about them.
Hard Drive Encryption is the best solution, IMHO.
There are Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs). Many solid state drives have encryption built in. Sweet. Nothing but fine. You gotta turn it on though. RTFM.
PGP Hard Drive Encryption is great. And there's Bitlocker (Windows) too.
Yes, backups are a very good idea. And backing up to or having your backups at multiple locations (Distributed Architecture), even better. But you gotta plan for updates. Just a thought: sensitive files should be encrypted, period. And if all your secret stuff is already encrypted, do you really need to encrypt your backup?
Online backup services are available too, like Carbonite($). Good rep. Haven't tried 'em.
For a full system image, trust Clonezilla - IFF you get it from the source (http://clonezilla.org/). It's straightforward, but read the docs anyway. There are other options, but I go with what I know. And I know that if you're moving from a Dell(x) to an Asus(y), a full system image might not be what you're looking for.
For small stuff, like documents and files, you might think about copying to a Flash drive. Just a warning: they are notoriously easy to recover deleted files from.
Don't forget to backup your.vimrc, if you're into Vim. I forget every time.
I agree with you that we need to move off fossil fuels. But I disagree with you about horse shoes and that the depreciation allowance is Big Oil's biggest US subsidy. I'm often wrong, so I checked with the right wing, Libertarian 'Competitive Enterprise Institute'. The three largest fossil fuel subsidies in the US are: Foreign tax credit ($15.3 billion); Credit for production of non-conventional fuels ($14.1 billion); and Oil and Gas exploration and development expense ($7.1 billion).
So Big Oil isn't just wallowing in depreciation allowances. And I could be wrong about horse shoes; I didn't check.
Spending a few tax payer bucks on wind and solar is money well spent. Let's get this straight: All Viable Energy Is Subsided. It keeps the prices at a sweet spot for producers and consumers alike. In fact, fossil fuels, like oil, have been hugely subsidized. In 2015, global fossil fuel subsidies were over $5 trillion dollars. Oil, natural gas, and coal received 70% of the total energy subsides from 1950-2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
Oil is the reason we war in the Middle East, sacrificing lives and tax payer money; it's another form of subsidy. War a racket, as the great Major General Smedley Butler pointed out. We have reached peak oil, and future dependency on oil projects a bleak future, with more war, scarce resources and dire prices. Raytheon, Academi/Xe/Black Water, Lockheed Martin and others would love such a Dystopia. Not me.
Subsidizing alternate energies is a good idea. Wind, solar, water and yes, even other energy sources like fusion should be subsidized, encouraged and exploited.
So much of the data a business keeps is because they are required by law to do so. There's even a 'keep-by-date' on email. I believe the cloud will leverage stuff like this, and will eventually have special pricing on audits, subpoenas, police investigations, etc. CA-Ching!
God damn the cloud pushers, man. AWS and MS give you a taste of the cloud, for free. Then nearly free. You think, you say, you know you can quit any time you want, but soon so much hardware is gone, and there's two people left in the IT department. Then you're hooked. The cloud prices are jacked up, terms are changed and before you know it, you're waiting on the cloud pusher man.
There's a really big difference between reaching space and reaching orbit, about 8 km/s worth if I remember correctly. The X-15 flight is almost completely irrelevant here.
True enough, but considering the X-15 reached space in 1963, I believe it demonstrates the potential for reaching orbit with similar techniques, and the right tech. I really don't want to get into the 'what if' department, especially after what Ben Rich said, so let me hang up my spurs on this one. But if you're interested in some pretty wild-ass space flight stuff, look up this guy. Rich is the 'Father of Stealth' and the 2nd director of Skunkwork's - where the X-15 came from.
I have high hopes for the 'Deuce Goose' launching spacecraft from mid-air. The B52 launched the X15 from under its wing, and that panned out. This has the potential of drastically reducing the price of getting off the planet and thus re-starting the space race.
No surprise./. had a story Yesterday (5/25/17) about "Cord-Cutters Are Ditching Their Cable Packages At the Fastest Rate Ever." When real G5 becomes ubiquitous, Comcast's 'screw the customer' policies will come back to bite/byte them on their butt.
There's more than 25 stations over-the-air. Mostly crap, but there are gems here and there. And I've got over a decade of TV recorded. I can pick whichever Dr. Who, cartoon, monster, detective, superdude or smeghead to waste the weekend with. Then there's Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Creative Commons, France24, DW, NHK, Sky... and of course, Kodi. I stay totally legal with Kodi. I know about Exodus, Phoenix, etc., but Metalkettle ain't even installed. Stuff like this that's giving the UK a shit-fit. If these addons were were legal, Kodi would rule the world.
OTA is terrible, so does Cable. Channels? Ad breaks? Not gonna fly...
The PC in the back records 3 shows at once, and MCE Buddy strips commercials, compresses to a VLC readable format, and nicely organizes them in folders. Long ago, when cable let me record, I had cable TV. When they wouldn't let me do that anymore, I got an antenna.
Used to have Netflix, but I canceled. They kept dropping the stuff I wanted to see, and I got bored watching the remains over and over.
There's still lots to record, and there's the library with years video on big hard drives. Used to have MythTV, but I'm just not into watching everything everywhere anymore. I watch too much TV anyway.
If a new business model offers a better deal, I might change my mind.
The tunnel is actually plausible. Tunnel boring can be done for about $10,000 per foot. So a 20 mile stretch from San Jose to Palo Alto, with a tube in each direction, would cost roughly $2B, which is affordable. For a 10% ROI, it would need to generate about $600k per day in tolls. If the toll was $10 each way, that would be 30,000 round trips. Since it could draw traffic from both US-101 and I-280, that is plausible.
Flying cars for mass transportation, with existing tech, are a fantasy.
Talk about knowing your facts! Impressed. I too think flying cars for the masses are a fantasy. They do attract investors, though. There's probably a niche market for flying cars in a tax bracket higher than I'll ever see.
Slashdot Mirror
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley foresees genetic engineering used to subordinate the lower classes by making them stupid and purging creative and destructive thought processes. Yuval Harari, in Homo Deus, predicts the rich and powerful will use genetic engineering to give their offspring immortality, happiness and even more power, and in the process create another kind of human. At some point these super humans will integrate with AI in a singularity that renders unnecessary current human affairs - and current humans.
Even if the bleak predictions of Huxley or Harari do not come true, once we tamper with our genetic code, there's no turning back. We lose the nature's evolutionary sorting in favor of designer genes. I'm not sure which best for the survival of the species.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls - Lenny Bruce (1923 - 1966)
Evidence of humans in the Americas go back further. A 14,000 year old village was found on Triquet Island, northwest of Victoria Canada. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-oldest-north-american-settlements-found-180962750/
Controversially, James M. Adovasio, Dennis Stanford and Joseph and Lynn McAvoy; and on the wilder side, Albert Goodyear and Tom Demere say there is evidence for humans in the Americas that goes back much further. Their evidence and theories are not generally accepted. Good reads though.
ATSC 3.0 is an IP based system - an internet protocol that not only delivers a HD 4K picture, and allows directly broadcasting to mobile devices; it lets stations encrypt broadcasts and initiate pay-for OTA subscriptions. (multiple obscenities). If you can wait, LG will be selling TV with both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 later this year. ahref=https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/2/14488608/4k-tv-broadcasts-ajit-pai-atsc-3-hdr/rel=url2html-30264https://www.theverge.com/2017/...>
Yes, but how do the reptilians fit into all of this?
The reptilians are the /. overlords. David Icke, Rick and Morty said so, so it's gotta be... hey, wait a minute. I recognize those shape shifting machinations of yours. E tu, epyT-R!
Whoever bought Slashdot has some really WEIRD agenda.
It's true. Controversial stories are specifically chosen to elicit comments, that are in turn stored, analyzed, and used to categorize the user base in terms of psychological type, underlying disorders, as well as sociological and criminal profiles. Further, psychologists, sociologists, police, priests, and professionals in business, education and comedy pose as average commentators, monitors, and administrators who, through skillful interaction, gradually change the readers' belief structures, and conceptions of reality, ultimately manipulating the very fabric of society. In sum, /. is trying to indoctrinate us into their thought collective.
How weird is that?
Deep, Archtech. Good stuff. Calls for a 3 beer conversation sometime. BTW, my favourite Cockburn was Alexander, who died in 2012. He co-edited that CounterPunch your so fond of.
All that said, and besides the main stories everybody gets, doesn't Google give us news the same way they give us commercials, that is, select stories based on our Google profile and their data tracking algorithms?
No. NAFTA Tribunal do not cover the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods
Full disclose: Not being a lawyer, The following is just a lay person's bullshit.
As stated in the article, this was a
intellectual property case over whether judges can apply their own country's laws to all of the internet.
As the 7-2 ruling suggests, the decision is debatable. This is something NAFTA was made for. One of NAFTA's roles is to facilitate trade between favored nations and to protect business from unfair practices. In this case, chapter 11, NAFTA's investor-state dispute mechanism, allows Google to sue Canada in a secret tribunal. That Canada is the most successfully sued country under NAFTA could be one small point in Google's favor. https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/nafta-chapter-11-investor-state-disputes-january-1-2015
A larger point is that the judges are applying Canadian law on the rest of the globe, something far beyond a mere local intellectual property dispute. The NAFTA Secretariat and the aforementioned tribunal could easily rule this extension of Canadian law an unfair practice. And in so doing, would negate the entire ruling.
Couldn't Google get a NAFTA Tribunal to challenge Canada's Supreme Court ruling? Google would probably win. Then Canada would have to compensate, maybe even overcompensate for the resulting loss of revenue for all that deleting.
YouTube Ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbMUGQQ2Pn4
D-STAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR
Hard Drive Encryption is the best solution, IMHO. There are Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs). Many solid state drives have encryption built in. Sweet. Nothing but fine. You gotta turn it on though. RTFM.
PGP Hard Drive Encryption is great. And there's Bitlocker (Windows) too.
Yes, backups are a very good idea. And backing up to or having your backups at multiple locations (Distributed Architecture), even better. But you gotta plan for updates. Just a thought: sensitive files should be encrypted, period. And if all your secret stuff is already encrypted, do you really need to encrypt your backup?
Online backup services are available too, like Carbonite($). Good rep. Haven't tried 'em.
For a full system image, trust Clonezilla - IFF you get it from the source (http://clonezilla.org/). It's straightforward, but read the docs anyway. There are other options, but I go with what I know. And I know that if you're moving from a Dell(x) to an Asus(y), a full system image might not be what you're looking for.
For small stuff, like documents and files, you might think about copying to a Flash drive. Just a warning: they are notoriously easy to recover deleted files from.
Don't forget to backup your .vimrc, if you're into Vim. I forget every time.
So Big Oil isn't just wallowing in depreciation allowances. And I could be wrong about horse shoes; I didn't check.
Which third party?
Oil is the reason we war in the Middle East, sacrificing lives and tax payer money; it's another form of subsidy. War a racket, as the great Major General Smedley Butler pointed out. We have reached peak oil, and future dependency on oil projects a bleak future, with more war, scarce resources and dire prices. Raytheon, Academi/Xe/Black Water, Lockheed Martin and others would love such a Dystopia. Not me.
Subsidizing alternate energies is a good idea. Wind, solar, water and yes, even other energy sources like fusion should be subsidized, encouraged and exploited.
God damn the cloud pushers, man. AWS and MS give you a taste of the cloud, for free. Then nearly free. You think, you say, you know you can quit any time you want, but soon so much hardware is gone, and there's two people left in the IT department. Then you're hooked. The cloud prices are jacked up, terms are changed and before you know it, you're waiting on the cloud pusher man.
Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion
There's a really big difference between reaching space and reaching orbit, about 8 km/s worth if I remember correctly. The X-15 flight is almost completely irrelevant here.
True enough, but considering the X-15 reached space in 1963, I believe it demonstrates the potential for reaching orbit with similar techniques, and the right tech. I really don't want to get into the 'what if' department, especially after what Ben Rich said, so let me hang up my spurs on this one. But if you're interested in some pretty wild-ass space flight stuff, look up this guy. Rich is the 'Father of Stealth' and the 2nd director of Skunkwork's - where the X-15 came from.
The X-15 was suborbital though - great for site seeing and tourists, not all that great for anything practical :)
I'm not getting into a Skunk Works vs Wernher von Braun fracas. I'll concede to reality.
Good Point. My point is that in 1963 the X-15 reached 105.9 km (65.8 miles) into the Thermosphere, past the Karman line, and technically outer space.
I have high hopes for the 'Deuce Goose' launching spacecraft from mid-air. The B52 launched the X15 from under its wing, and that panned out. This has the potential of drastically reducing the price of getting off the planet and thus re-starting the space race.
No surprise. /. had a story Yesterday (5/25/17) about "Cord-Cutters Are Ditching Their Cable Packages At the Fastest Rate Ever." When real G5 becomes ubiquitous, Comcast's 'screw the customer' policies will come back to bite/byte them on their butt.
But how do you get TV then, legally?
There's more than 25 stations over-the-air. Mostly crap, but there are gems here and there. And I've got over a decade of TV recorded. I can pick whichever Dr. Who, cartoon, monster, detective, superdude or smeghead to waste the weekend with. Then there's Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Creative Commons, France24, DW, NHK, Sky ... and of course, Kodi. I stay totally legal with Kodi. I know about Exodus, Phoenix, etc., but Metalkettle ain't even installed. Stuff like this that's giving the UK a shit-fit. If these addons were were legal, Kodi would rule the world.
OTA is terrible, so does Cable. Channels? Ad breaks? Not gonna fly...
The PC in the back records 3 shows at once, and MCE Buddy strips commercials, compresses to a VLC readable format, and nicely organizes them in folders. Long ago, when cable let me record, I had cable TV. When they wouldn't let me do that anymore, I got an antenna.
Used to have Netflix, but I canceled. They kept dropping the stuff I wanted to see, and I got bored watching the remains over and over.
There's still lots to record, and there's the library with years video on big hard drives. Used to have MythTV, but I'm just not into watching everything everywhere anymore. I watch too much TV anyway.
If a new business model offers a better deal, I might change my mind.
For years I've just had just the $15/mo cheapo cable internet and it works for me. Straight OTA, and I still watch too much TV.
The tunnel is actually plausible. Tunnel boring can be done for about $10,000 per foot. So a 20 mile stretch from San Jose to Palo Alto, with a tube in each direction, would cost roughly $2B, which is affordable. For a 10% ROI, it would need to generate about $600k per day in tolls. If the toll was $10 each way, that would be 30,000 round trips. Since it could draw traffic from both US-101 and I-280, that is plausible.
Flying cars for mass transportation, with existing tech, are a fantasy.
Talk about knowing your facts! Impressed. I too think flying cars for the masses are a fantasy. They do attract investors, though. There's probably a niche market for flying cars in a tax bracket higher than I'll ever see.