Ask anyone who has served in a direct nuclear rate in the US Navy what kinds of opportunities in the industry there are. The answer is limited. The US Navy cranks out experienced officers (read: college educated, 4yr, masters and some phd) and enlisted personnel (two year degree equivelent + minimum four years OTJ training). Their training program is amazingly good. Britain, Russia and other powers with nuclear subs have pretty damn good training programs, too.
This is a false shortage. The reason for this program is to promote building more power plants (which imo isn't a bad thing). I could use a break from $150 electric bills and acid rain:)
It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking.
This has been said about just about every achievement of man. Too expensive, impractical, unfeasible. And we continue to surprise ourselves. Never say never. Just because a thing is difficult today doesn't mean it can't be made easy. I wonder how many objects in your home were claimed to be impossible in the past?
Science Fiction is one of the fuels for the man's desire to innovate. In science fiction, you see ideas that aren't feasible yet or proven applied to challenging situations. You can have your no-possibilities world. As for me, I'll continue to dream and try to push the envelope. Because that envelope might just give a little bit.
Any relatively small package capable of releasing tremendous energy will be usable as a weapon, and that is exactly what's keeping nuclear power down.
Kooks who like their rain acidic and their garden carcinogenic because they can't give up on fossil fuels are the reason. Reactors do not have to produce anything near weapons grade byproducts.
It's a little bit scary. I saw Al Gore debate GWB in 2000. Even though Gore didn't sound so brilliant, he didn't sound like he had his head up his ass. GWB was clearly giving his speeches from the inner sanctum of his rectum.
LOLx2... Bush is not the world's most compelling speaker at all. Then again, neither was Al Snore (I still get laughs when I imitate his risky tax scheme routine in context of IT... that's a risky security scheme. We should put that server in a lockbox). I thought this next election maybe I would have a choice that involved good versus evil, but I keep getting a choice between evil and eviler (or in the case of the last election dumb and dumberer -- I think dumb won the court case and dumberer won the popular election, but I'm not quite clear that that is the case).
This is high school we are talking about, and as someone who just recently graduated from high school I can say that about 90% of the students were not capable of graduating with such skills. They could barely handle the math/reading/writing/social studies aspect.
Where is it that we lost the dirve to be excellent? I am absolutely sick of people not applying the rocking chair test to their @#$@ lives:
When you are 90 and in the rocking chair, will you look back and be content with your life or will you be bitter and depressed?
It seems to me that most high school students concentrate on where they can get their next beer, drug, or sexual relation at, not school work.
They would care more if their work had some meaning or significance beyond just getting the grade.
If this school generates graduates who understand how computers work, how informaiton is used & flows, how to apply technology to real world problems and sound project and diagnostic skills plus the usual math/reading/writing/social studies, this is great.
If on the other hand, students simply learn to use applications like PowerPoint, Excel, Word and Publisher, it's a waste. That's what most schools do today.
They are original ideas, they just don't make it into the PC world where MS dominates. MS come up with as many original ideas as McDonalds and since all KDE & Gnome (and frankly most open source projects) are doing is playing catchup with MS then originality is never going to be a prime concern.
Well said. Invent and innovate, don't just duplicate. I would love to see MS complain, "Those OSS guys have extended the ____ (fill in MS Standard) standard to do _____, ____ and _____. We just can't keep up with them."
You think you can actually ban anything? Then why have laws at all? Laws reduce the occurance of socially unacceptable behaviors by establishing decentives. Some laws (taxes, licensing, etc) say you must do things or else. No law is 100% effective period. 90% effective is better than 0%. 25% is better than 0%.
Banning behavior drives profit. Banning non political speech drives profit in the name of self rightcheousness.
Banning behavior can drive profit. It can also reduce the size of a market and the resulting profits substantially. People who might buy a product if it were legal will not buy if it is illegal and the potential penalty isn't worth the benefit of buying. The result is that the industry serving the market is smaller, with fewer players serving a smaller base of buyers.
I want to know why you think that child porn is protectable speech. It is expression, but not speech. The only way to create non-animated kiddie porn involves a physical or sexual assult of a child. The product that results is contraband - it is result of a crime and simply should never have existed.
you expose a substantial number of otherwise innocent people to both prosecution and persecution.
Laws suck if you disagree with them. At any given time in history someone has been "persecuted" or "prosecuted" for doing something he or she thought was OK and the govt didn't. Fortunately, in the case of child pornography, most of us either have children or actually were children at one time in our lives. Child porn is one of the few areas where citizens would be ready to ammend the constitution in the case the courts said it was protected speech. In the context of anonymous file sharing, there is great potential for the state to abuse people's rights becuase many people are unwitting participants in trafficing child porn. That said, the right thing to do is make sure the government understands the nature of anonymous p2p sharing - that users do not have control of what files are cached and distributed through thier node. It is much like a public area - I may own it, but I can't control the actions of the patrons.
Prosecuting people purely for motive amounts to thought crimes, I'm not aware of any crimes that are pure motive crimes. Motive certainly can be used to determine the severity of a crime or to define a crime. Each of these crimes is different based on the motive:
* You kill your neighbor's mom when you rush out of your garage because you are late, late, late to work. (Manslaughter, less jail time) * You kill your neighbor's mom because she is black and looked at you funny. (Hate Crime, more jail time possible death penalty) * You kill your neighbor's mom because she had an affair with your male or female partner. (Murder, more jail time, possible death penalty)
It appears by giving them your name and address, you're giving them permission to come knocking on your door with a warrant?
The goal of the RIAA is to:
* Establish file sharing as socially unacceptable behavior. Based on media coverage, I think they have achieved the start. * Sue offenders and hope that social acceptance of file sharing being wrong continues. If they are acceptable, then society will expect ip violaters to be prosecuted. * Push for the criminalization of minor copyright offense. The government enforcing copyright would go a l o n g way towards restoring profitability in the industry and would further reduce piracy. Result: * Establish technology that requires music listeners pay, pay, pay and pay again for music.
I'm betting the lawsuit backfires on RIAA and causes the public to alter their copyright rights.
First, don't assume you know what I belive or not. If you want to know, ask. Here is a very clear statement for you:
* People have the right to be anonymous and assume privacy in your affairs. * When a crime is committed law enforcement must identify who committed the crime.
In other words, the government should not be looking if they have no reason to look. Altering rights (i.e. requiring a backdoor or key escrow) to make looking easier for the govt would be a problem: it would eliminate annonymity and the assumption of privacy, and chill free speech.
If the system is TRUELY anonymous, how can anyone identify a person? Technically you are right. In the real world, there will always be some kind of chain of evidence. It may not be digital - but it will be there and can be followed to unmask the culprit.
Police can't do anything because it is technologically impossible to trace people in such a sytem (NOTE: I am assuming that Freent can implement a truely anonymous system. I have never used it and don't know how it works so this is just an assumption at this point).
As long as there are users, there will be people who can be identified. The police should not be allowed to alter freedoms simply to make it easy to identify the bad guys. That's the tough part of police work: figuring out whodunit.
(not counting non-progressive, or conservative regions) This isn't a conservative/liberal/progressive issue.
Now about Freenet and other anonymous tools: There is no reason to restrict them. My original post was taking exception to Kiddie Porn = Expression => Should be acceptable as free speech.
Why am I not surprised to find lots of ways to hack a system in a kitchen sink software package. If you think Word is bad, you ought to take a look at Access and Excel...
As I cleaned a few hundred infected e-mails out of my inbox for the nth time,
If you think DRM will prevent evil people from messing up your computer, think again. Adding another layer of complexity only adds another layer of bugs, holes and backdoors that can be exploited.
Reality: Most consumers wouldn't give a rat's ass about it as they are busy looking at porn off the net. When it's too late, they will blame _______ (insert big business and Republicans if you are liberal, or trial lawyers and Democrats if you are conservative) about it on Slashdot.
You may choose your scapegoat from the following liberal/conservative choices:
* Liberals or Conservatives * Labor Unions and Trial Lawyers or Big Business and Globalisation * Bill Clinton or G W Bush * Global Warming or Environmental Wackos * Overpopulation or Tyrrany * The Health Care Industry or Socialists * Communists or Capitalists * RIAA or Pirates * Prochoice or Prolife
I just mean it is impossible to stop (the distribution that is) without limiting anonymity and thereby free speech. It is always impossible to enforce any law at a 100% compliance rate. So what? Anonymity is something that allows citizens to excercise their freedoms. The government has the right to un-anonymize you the minute they find a crime either has been committed or have compelling cause to believe a crime will be committed.
So, news footage of a high-speed pursuit or bank robbery should not be protected free speech because it depicts a crime? Who gets to decide to what crimes this rule applies? What about depictions of police violence? Apples and Oranges. Filming a crime for the sole purpose of profiting from it is very different than what the news does. Last I looked, the local TV stations weren't paying/bamboozling people into committing crimes just so they could film them and sell commercials.
To allow it's trade or distribution perpetuates the crime. Oh please. The same has been said about (regular) porn being a cause of rape. Also, it's not exactly *allowing* its distribution, it's more a case of accepting that the alternative (restricted privacy/anonymity/free speech) might be worse in the long run. Apples and Oranges. Adult porn involves people engaged in whatever... that they consent to and agree to be filmed doing. Child porn is always a violation of rights of the child. No consent. The only way to make kiddie porn with real people is criminal. Making a really raunchy adult porn film is simply not. Regardless, there's no reason I can't have the expectation of privacy... unless I have committed a crime and the govt is looking for the criminal.
So by your own logic, if I make a movie about growing cannabis, that should be illegal? No. Look up what the word conspire means. If you write a business plan about starting a pot distribution organization and you have the intent to execute the plan, you've committed conspiracy. Writing a speculative book on growing cannibis would actually be protected speech.
You can not choose "anonymous free speech" and "not anonymous kiddie porn". Your choices are "anonymous flow of information" or "not anonymous flow of information".
Wow. This is really confusing the issue. Should information be able to flow anonymously? Yes. Should law enforcement seek to identify and arrest criminals? Yes. Can law enforcement do their job without ending the right to be anonymous? Yes. Actually, in the US, we make law enforcement jump through LOTS of hoops to protect citizen rights.
I can understand the argument that child porn is something we'll just need to accept if we want to allow true freedom of speech
Wow. This argument is horse#@$# of the worst kind. Accept it? I think NOT! Bamboozling and/or forcing kids into performing on camera is base criminal behavior. To equate the evidence of the crime (the pictures/video/whatever of the crime) to protected free speech or even commercial speech requires you set aside:
* The criminal act committed in creating said kiddie porn. * The violation of (the rights)a minor. * Selling evidence for a profit. * Violating a minor in the pursuit of making money.
In other words, for this "free speech" to exist one must overlook the chain of crime committed in creating, distributing and selling said kiddie porn! The problem is that with the exception of non-photographic art (which is sick, but protected expression), child porn of the photo or motion picture type is 100% a recording of the criminal violation of a minor and cannot exist without the commission of a very, very serious crime. To allow it's trade or distribution perpetuates the crime.
For an analogy: conspiring, growing, distributng and using pot is illegal. Kiddie porn is no different: conspiring, creating, distributing and using it is illegal.
Am not sure if the Electronic Freedom Foundation is focused enough. The results aren't there. I think it's time for an organization that can get nasty with RIAA. Suing high school kids is pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course we know what happens to a P2P system with all leachers and no sharers...
It turns into alt.binaries.* ?
Ask anyone who has served in a direct nuclear rate in the US Navy what kinds of opportunities in the industry there are. The answer is limited. The US Navy cranks out experienced officers (read: college educated, 4yr, masters and some phd) and enlisted personnel (two year degree equivelent + minimum four years OTJ training). Their training program is amazingly good. Britain, Russia and other powers with nuclear subs have pretty damn good training programs, too.
:)
This is a false shortage. The reason for this program is to promote building more power plants (which imo isn't a bad thing). I could use a break from $150 electric bills and acid rain
It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking.
This has been said about just about every achievement of man. Too expensive, impractical, unfeasible. And we continue to surprise ourselves. Never say never. Just because a thing is difficult today doesn't mean it can't be made easy. I wonder how many objects in your home were claimed to be impossible in the past?
Science Fiction is one of the fuels for the man's desire to innovate. In science fiction, you see ideas that aren't feasible yet or proven applied to challenging situations. You can have your no-possibilities world. As for me, I'll continue to dream and try to push the envelope. Because that envelope might just give a little bit.
Any relatively small package capable of releasing tremendous energy will be usable as a weapon, and that is exactly what's keeping nuclear power down.
Kooks who like their rain acidic and their garden carcinogenic because they can't give up on fossil fuels are the reason. Reactors do not have to produce anything near weapons grade byproducts.
And properly applied firewalls are the solution (okay, a solution, one which can be applied by an ISP). So what's the problem here?
Let's see here: could it be that there is more to the internet than HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and FTP? Nah.
The problem isn't ports - it's the applications that use the ports.
Governments realizing they can reduce a large tax on their entire economy by eliminting Microsoft's monopoly.
Linux is like the rubble before an avalanche
It's a little bit scary. I saw Al Gore debate GWB in 2000. Even though Gore didn't sound so brilliant, he didn't sound like he had his head up his ass. GWB was clearly giving his speeches from the inner sanctum of his rectum.
LOLx2... Bush is not the world's most compelling speaker at all. Then again, neither was Al Snore (I still get laughs when I imitate his risky tax scheme routine in context of IT... that's a risky security scheme. We should put that server in a lockbox). I thought this next election maybe I would have a choice that involved good versus evil, but I keep getting a choice between evil and eviler (or in the case of the last election dumb and dumberer -- I think dumb won the court case and dumberer won the popular election, but I'm not quite clear that that is the case).
And why is that a waste?
Because that is a skill so basic it should be taught at the time students learn to write with a big mo pencil.
This is high school we are talking about, and as someone who just recently graduated from high school I can say that about 90% of the students were not capable of graduating with such skills. They could barely handle the math/reading/writing/social studies aspect.
Where is it that we lost the dirve to be excellent? I am absolutely sick of people not applying the rocking chair test to their @#$@ lives:
When you are 90 and in the rocking chair, will you look back and be content with your life or will you be bitter and depressed?
It seems to me that most high school students concentrate on where they can get their next beer, drug, or sexual relation at, not school work.
They would care more if their work had some meaning or significance beyond just getting the grade.
If this school generates graduates who understand how computers work, how informaiton is used & flows, how to apply technology to real world problems and sound project and diagnostic skills plus the usual math/reading/writing/social studies, this is great.
If on the other hand, students simply learn to use applications like PowerPoint, Excel, Word and Publisher, it's a waste. That's what most schools do today.
They are original ideas, they just don't make it into the PC world where MS dominates. MS come up with as many original ideas as McDonalds
and since all KDE & Gnome (and frankly most open source projects) are doing is playing catchup with MS then originality is never going to be
a prime concern.
Well said. Invent and innovate, don't just duplicate. I would love to see MS complain, "Those OSS guys have extended the ____ (fill in MS Standard) standard to do _____, ____ and _____. We just can't keep up with them."
You think you can actually ban anything?
Then why have laws at all? Laws reduce the occurance of socially unacceptable behaviors by establishing decentives. Some laws (taxes, licensing, etc) say you must do things or else. No law is 100% effective period. 90% effective is better than 0%. 25% is better than 0%.
Banning behavior drives profit. Banning non political speech drives profit in the name of self rightcheousness.
Banning behavior can drive profit. It can also reduce the size of a market and the resulting profits substantially. People who might buy a product if it were legal will not buy if it is illegal and the potential penalty isn't worth the benefit of buying. The result is that the industry serving the market is smaller, with fewer players serving a smaller base of buyers.
I want to know why you think that child porn is protectable speech. It is expression, but not speech. The only way to create non-animated kiddie porn involves a physical or sexual assult of a child. The product that results is contraband - it is result of a crime and simply should never have existed.
you expose a substantial number of otherwise innocent people to both prosecution and persecution.
Laws suck if you disagree with them. At any given time in history someone has been "persecuted" or "prosecuted" for doing something he or she thought was OK and the govt didn't. Fortunately, in the case of child pornography, most of us either have children or actually were children at one time in our lives. Child porn is one of the few areas where citizens would be ready to ammend the constitution in the case the courts said it was protected speech. In the context of anonymous file sharing, there is great potential for the state to abuse people's rights becuase many people are unwitting participants in trafficing child porn. That said, the right thing to do is make sure the government understands the nature of anonymous p2p sharing - that users do not have control of what files are cached and distributed through thier node. It is much like a public area - I may own it, but I can't control the actions of the patrons.
Prosecuting people purely for motive amounts to thought crimes,
I'm not aware of any crimes that are pure motive crimes. Motive certainly can be used to determine the severity of a crime or to define a crime. Each of these crimes is different based on the motive:
* You kill your neighbor's mom when you rush out of your garage because you are late, late, late to work. (Manslaughter, less jail time)
* You kill your neighbor's mom because she is black and looked at you funny. (Hate Crime, more jail time possible death penalty)
* You kill your neighbor's mom because she had an affair with your male or female partner. (Murder, more jail time, possible death penalty)
It appears by giving them your name and address, you're giving them permission to come knocking on your door with a warrant?
The goal of the RIAA is to:
* Establish file sharing as socially unacceptable behavior. Based on media coverage, I think they have achieved the start.
* Sue offenders and hope that social acceptance of file sharing being wrong continues. If they are acceptable, then society will expect ip violaters to be prosecuted.
* Push for the criminalization of minor copyright offense. The government enforcing copyright would go a l o n g way towards restoring profitability in the industry and would further reduce piracy. Result:
* Establish technology that requires music listeners pay, pay, pay and pay again for music.
I'm betting the lawsuit backfires on RIAA and causes the public to alter their copyright rights.
DRM will just make stupid gits try harder to screw everything up for everyone else.
And more devastating when they do...
Oh well... live and don't learn.
First, don't assume you know what I belive or not. If you want to know, ask. Here is a very clear statement for you:
* People have the right to be anonymous and assume privacy in your affairs.
* When a crime is committed law enforcement must identify who committed the crime.
In other words, the government should not be looking if they have no reason to look. Altering rights (i.e. requiring a backdoor or key escrow) to make looking easier for the govt would be a problem: it would eliminate annonymity and the assumption of privacy, and chill free speech.
If the system is TRUELY anonymous, how can anyone identify a person?
Technically you are right. In the real world, there will always be some kind of chain of evidence. It may not be digital - but it will be there and can be followed to unmask the culprit.
Police can't do anything because it is technologically impossible to trace people in such a sytem (NOTE: I am assuming that Freent can implement a truely anonymous system. I have never used it and don't know how it works so this is just an assumption at this point).
As long as there are users, there will be people who can be identified. The police should not be allowed to alter freedoms simply to make it easy to identify the bad guys. That's the tough part of police work: figuring out whodunit.
(not counting non-progressive, or conservative regions)
This isn't a conservative/liberal/progressive issue.
Now about Freenet and other anonymous tools:
There is no reason to restrict them. My original post was taking exception to Kiddie Porn = Expression => Should be acceptable as free speech.
Why am I not surprised to find lots of ways to hack a system in a kitchen sink software package. If you think Word is bad, you ought to take a look at Access and Excel...
As I cleaned a few hundred infected e-mails out of my inbox for the nth time,
If you think DRM will prevent evil people from messing up your computer, think again. Adding another layer of complexity only adds another layer of bugs, holes and backdoors that can be exploited.
DRM is a pure marketing play.
Reality: Most consumers wouldn't give a rat's ass about it as they are busy looking at porn off the net. When it's too late, they will blame _______ (insert big business and Republicans if you are liberal, or trial lawyers and Democrats if you are conservative) about it on Slashdot.
You may choose your scapegoat from the following liberal/conservative choices:
* Liberals or Conservatives
* Labor Unions and Trial Lawyers or Big Business and Globalisation
* Bill Clinton or G W Bush
* Global Warming or Environmental Wackos
* Overpopulation or Tyrrany
* The Health Care Industry or Socialists
* Communists or Capitalists
* RIAA or Pirates
* Prochoice or Prolife
I just mean it is impossible to stop (the distribution that is) without limiting anonymity and thereby free speech.
It is always impossible to enforce any law at a 100% compliance rate. So what? Anonymity is something that allows citizens to excercise their freedoms. The government has the right to un-anonymize you the minute they find a crime either has been committed or have compelling cause to believe a crime will be committed.
So, news footage of a high-speed pursuit or bank robbery should not be protected free speech because it depicts a crime? Who gets to decide to what crimes this rule applies? What about depictions of police violence?
Apples and Oranges. Filming a crime for the sole purpose of profiting from it is very different than what the news does. Last I looked, the local TV stations weren't paying/bamboozling people into committing crimes just so they could film them and sell commercials.
To allow it's trade or distribution perpetuates the crime.
Oh please. The same has been said about (regular) porn being a cause of rape. Also, it's not exactly *allowing* its distribution, it's more a case of accepting that the alternative (restricted privacy/anonymity/free speech) might be worse in the long run.
Apples and Oranges. Adult porn involves people engaged in whatever... that they consent to and agree to be filmed doing. Child porn is always a violation of rights of the child. No consent. The only way to make kiddie porn with real people is criminal. Making a really raunchy adult porn film is simply not. Regardless, there's no reason I can't have the expectation of privacy... unless I have committed a crime and the govt is looking for the criminal.
So by your own logic, if I make a movie about growing cannabis, that should be illegal?
No. Look up what the word conspire means. If you write a business plan about starting a pot distribution organization and you have the intent to execute the plan, you've committed conspiracy. Writing a speculative book on growing cannibis would actually be protected speech.
You can not choose "anonymous free speech" and "not anonymous kiddie porn". Your choices are "anonymous flow of information" or "not anonymous flow of information".
Wow. This is really confusing the issue. Should information be able to flow anonymously? Yes. Should law enforcement seek to identify and arrest criminals? Yes. Can law enforcement do their job without ending the right to be anonymous? Yes. Actually, in the US, we make law enforcement jump through LOTS of hoops to protect citizen rights.
I can understand the argument that child porn is something we'll just need to accept if we want to allow true freedom of speech
Wow. This argument is horse#@$# of the worst kind. Accept it? I think NOT! Bamboozling and/or forcing kids into performing on camera is base criminal behavior. To equate the evidence of the crime (the pictures/video/whatever of the crime) to protected free speech or even commercial speech requires you set aside:
* The criminal act committed in creating said kiddie porn.
* The violation of (the rights)a minor.
* Selling evidence for a profit.
* Violating a minor in the pursuit of making money.
In other words, for this "free speech" to exist one must overlook the chain of crime committed in creating, distributing and selling said kiddie porn! The problem is that with the exception of non-photographic art (which is sick, but protected expression), child porn of the photo or motion picture type is 100% a recording of the criminal violation of a minor and cannot exist without the commission of a very, very serious crime. To allow it's trade or distribution perpetuates the crime.
For an analogy: conspiring, growing, distributng and using pot is illegal. Kiddie porn is no different: conspiring, creating, distributing and using it is illegal.
Am not sure if the Electronic Freedom Foundation is focused enough.
The results aren't there. I think it's time for an organization that can get nasty with RIAA. Suing high school kids is pathetic.
penny pinching accountants, or is it body snatchers, I cant remember.
Worse: we've been invaded by consultants from big accounting firms.
Resident Evil
This describes the quality of most movies about games.