You sir are a communist. Don't you understand the/. meme. Big corporations should be allowed to fuck over anyone they want in any way they want in the name of the free market. Of course the fact that in a truly free market you wouldn't have the concept of the limited liability corporation which shields the stockholders, the owners, of the corporation for liability concerning its actions, is a mere bagatelle that must be disregarded. Big corporations are good, unless of course they're Microsoft, SCO, Disney, any RIAA member or an MPAA member, in which case they're bad and evil and you can flame them as much as you like. How dare you post something rational and thoughtful about contract reform. You are a bad, bad communist and if people read your post the terrorists will have won.
Come up with a TPM that stops people from copying and distributing a work more than "fair use", but that allows "fair use". You get to decide exactly what "fair use" means technically, but it must fit today's working definition -- personal backups, personal use on other devices, research/library use.
Can you do it? Or do you just want to sit there flaming about nasty corporations?
Wow, it's funny how someone posted earlier about how some libertard corporate ass-licker was going to come to the defense of the media conglomerates and here it is, not more than 20 posts later. Here's the problem libertard corporate ass-licker, aka browncs, the corporations who are pushing for things such as TPM, the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Mickey Mouse copyright extension act have no interest in any fair-use whatsoever, none, nada, dick, fuck-all. These are the companies that tried to develop a VCR that counted each person in the room so they could charge accordingly. If such a fair-use TPM system were invented you would have to force these companies to accept it. These are the companies that sent Jack Valenti to Washington to say "[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.".
Here's my challenge to you: based upon the hostility that the content industries have had towards any concept of fair use and technical innovation, going back to the invention of the player piano, elaborate why you think these industries would accept any TPM system that guaranteed fair use rights without being forced to do so by the government.
Can you do it, or are you just going to regurgitate the corporate shit that you've been eating?
Reality check time. You can't run a military without a few things.. two of them are oil and money.
Gold cannot always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get you gold.
Niccolo Machiavelli
So let's see, we have ICANN, which is pretty bad, on the other hand we have the EU kleptocracy in Brussels which makes ICANN look like a model of transparency, efficiency accountability and competence (Hell, the EU makes the friggin Soviet Union look like a model of transparency and accountability) and the UN, which is a bad, bad, bad joke. I'll take
ICANN thank you very much, perhaps the Europeans should drop this and work on figuring out a constitution that their members will actually agree to.
For good Card-bashing, I'll point you to: Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat. It's a great read.
Yeah, I suppose that that essay is a great read, if you're a pathetic sycophant who is trying to suck up to Roger Williams, aka "localroger", a totally unknown and apparently untalented SF writer who publishes through vanity presses and is so far below the radar that his books don't even have reviews on Amazon or B&N.com. I mean really, even Joel Rosenberg, who responded to localroger's increasinly bizarre claims on K5 (the web equivalent of a overflowing septic tank stuffed with dead rats and feminine hygiene products) and who is about as boringly tendentious as they come is better known than Williams and has actually been published by real publishers. localroger comes off like some paranoid SF version of John Hinckley or Mark David Chapman.
If you buy a tree from Home Depot's garden center, and plant it in your yard... 30 years later it gets to a good size, then it gets infected so that the insides are eaten out, and it falls on you house... Should you be able to sue Home Depot for selling you the tree that has the capability of smashing you house?
Another mod that's needed besides '-1 humorless fuckstick', the '-1 completely specious legal analogy' mod.
And how is this a problem with Linux? The same criticisms you make apply to Windows as well, or to Suns (although having a problematic device is less of an issue in UNIX/Linux) or for that matter to every operating system out there. I've had great luck with Linux stability, and I've seen boxes which were getting the shit beaten out of them.
Hell, your post is meaningless. It's like saying "Sure, I've known people who swear by Honda Accords,
but they've never driven one of them over a gravel road at 175 miles an hour in a driving rain. I love
the Accord but pepple who have never seen the pain of trying to use one as a jet-propelled off road
vehicle." Except it's dumber than that. If you have hardware that underperforms at high load it's going to underperform at high load on any OS. It's not as if there's some magic OS out there that makes underperforming hardware perform better ("Shit, I knew I should have compiled the kernel with '--turn_it_up_to_11'"), especially at a high load. Some OS's may handle this situation more gracefully
than other, mainframe OSs are supposed to be very good, Solaris is supposedly the best UNIX and Linux is better than Windows, but it's still going to start to suck at some point.
As a result of the early release, Episode III only managed to earn $380 million at the box office.
Nice editorializing there. Yeah, the movie made a boatload of money. That does not change the fact that the people who screened the movie violated the agreement under which they received the screener copies.
Is there a "-1 humorless fuckstick" mod? No, pity, because there should be one for posts such as this one.
is running a story about how umbilical stem cells could be used to treat paraplegia. WorldNet Daily is a "news" website run by right wing
freakazoid wingnutjob Joseph Farah. Farah has an axe to grind, he's one
of those Republican pro-lifers who believes that life begins at conception, ends at birth and then resumes if you're a white woman in a coma. Farah and his pals at WND are firmly in the anti embryonic
stem cell crowd and if tomorrow it was discovered that embryonic stem cells could cure everything they were claimed to cure you wouldn't see word one about it at WorldNet Daily. So basically this story has about as much veracity as something published in the Weekly World News.
I have a question out there for the "life begins at conception" crowd, namely, if a fetus is a human being how come it looks like a steamed prawn?"
Where the fuck did you get this bullshit theory from? Did you pull it out of your ass? Did you pull it out of someone else's ass? I'm curious because you sure didn't get it from observing anything that the rest of us out here in reality-ville might have seen, case in point, telecommunications subsidies, that nice thing you get to pay on your phone bill for "Universal Service" is used to subsidize phone networks in rural areas because otherwise the telecomms wouldn't run phone lines up the dirt road to the tar-paper shack you live in. That's a nice subsidy of rural areas by city dwellers. And of course you're completely and totally full of shit about Seattle's relationship to Washington State. Seattle contains the following:
Amazon.com corporate headquarters
A large slice of Boeing
Washington Mutual corporate headquarters
The Port of Seattle, largest port in the state of Washington and one of the largest on the West Coast
The University of Washington, one of the largest research universities in the country
Harborview Medical Center, one of the best trauma centers in the country
The University of Washington Medical Center, one of the best research medical centers in the country
oh, and Starbucks has their corporate headquarters here too. That's just off the top of my head. So Seattle does pretty well since it's a nice place to live and work, much better than say Ephrata, or Winthrop or Twisp, or anywhere else east of the eastern King County line. In fact once you get outside of King County you're pretty much outside all of the major economic activity in the state of Washington. What major companies have headquarters in Olympia, or Bellingham, or Spokane or Vancouver? Hmmmmm, that would be none.
As far as road money goes well in the last ten years King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, the largest and most urban counties in the state generated about $1 billion in revenue for the 29 smallest counties in the state.
As far as cities being a drag on their states if that is the case then why is it that the most heavily urbanized states are also the ones who pay the most in federal taxes relative to the amount of federal spending. Hmmmm, could it be because the large cities in those states drive their economies in a way that you don't find in Bumfuck, MT?
Good quote, for planes..
Now, let's imagine a missile (or several) aimed at the elevator..
Suddendly it seems more difficult to defend, doesn't it?
OK, the first moron who posted was talking about a 9/11 style attack. 9/11 was airplanes, not missiles. Secondly this whole "Oh yeah, someone might shoot a missile at the space elevator, whatcha gonna do about that" is typical dork bullshit. You have all of these dorks out there who like to think that they're cool because they can think of ways to blow things up. However most of them don't know their ass from a whole in the ground. Yeah, someone can launch a bunch of missiles at the space elevator and knock it down. Big fucking deal. Someone could drive a nuke to the base of Grand Coulee or Hoover dams and blow them up too, or they could launch missiles into NYC. Two things keep this from happening: logistics and conseqences. It's difficult to get a bunch of missiles and fire them all off at once, there aren't any terrorist groups
who can do this kind of thing, which moves it to the province of governments. Governments are restrained from doing things like this because it's an act of war, which means that you've become a target. Saddam Hussein was a crazy bastard, he could have launched Scuds armed with chemical warheads against Israel in Desert Storm, Part I. What kept him from doing so? Well the fact that the minute that he did that the Israelis were going to nuke Iraq (and would probably have gone after the rest of the Arab world as well). This was a very good deterrent against Saddam, who had not hesitated to use chemical weapons against the Kurds or the Iranians.
LSB may be fundamentally broken, but just wait for LSC, which will almost work. And then, emerging from the smoking ashes of LSC, after much pain and labor, we'll have LSD. And LSD is going to be faaaaaar out.
Naaahhhh, they'll never let us have LSD, we'll get stuck at LSC++.
You had me with you until "enforce it with a couple of Patriot missile batteries..." Now that's funny.
No, you're just ignorant. I'll admit that the Patriot is way, way oversold as an anti-missile missile, but if you're in an airplane and someone shoots one at you then you're dead. Patriot was designed to take out Soviet fast movers in the NATO theatre of operations and all of its tests showed that it was very good at that. Taking out missiles is something that it was never designed to do, the Army decided to make modifications to it to try to get some SDI cash in the late '80s. The fact that they had some success is indicative of how well they engineered the Patriot as an anti-aircraft missile.
the problem is, tactically, a frickin space elevator is really hard to defend.
think sept. 11
Bullshit, 9/11 happened because it was a one off, it's unlikely to happen again because who is going to believe highjackers who tell you that you'll be all right if you cooperate and don't resist. That's not likely to happen again. Also you can set up a no-fly zone for 100 miles or so around the elevator and enforce it with a couple of Patriot missile batteries for distance work and Vulcan cannons for close in work. We have bunches and bunches of people in all four services thinking about ways of improving "if it flies, it dies" technology and they'd love a chance to try out their stuff.
quoted in the IEEE Spectrum article comes from, comes from, it sure isn't inside of my horizon volume. The Big Dig in Boston cost 12 billion more than its original cost estimates and that was just for a few lousy miles of roads and tunnels, not for thousands of kilometers of carbon nanotube cabling and the associated support structures.
Wow! This is so awesome! I know of two new ways to copy DVDs, one in Linux and the other in Windows. Goddamn I love/.!
Oh, and one thing I forgot about with MP3s which someone pointed out was bandwidth. Yeah, I completely spaced on how major that is. I can remember in early 2000 have a non-techie friend call me at 11:30 at night on my cell phone. I was concerned because I thought it must be some serious emergency involving one of our friends, turned out he had just found about Napster and spent the evening downloading music.
Someone also noted that the situation vis a vis hard drive space will change within 5 years, we might have HD-DVD by then which will keep the ratio of hard drive space to DVD content roughly the same as it is today, but that will totally change the way DVDs are stored.
Am I on crack or does the push towards HD-DVD seem as if it's going to go about as well as the push towards SACD and DVD-A has? SACD and DVD-A were touted as the next great thing in music, multi-channel sound sampled at high resolutions with the added benefit of multimedia content. But despite the fact that pretty much every DVD player Sony sells these days also plays SACDs and there are a ton of DVD/SACD combo players out there there isn't that much media content for them and the big buzz these days is all about online music services which sell music that is not only two channel, but is even lower resolution than CDs. People just haven't really gone for DVD-A or SACD, despite the the fact that they are pretty cool and can produce some pretty awesome sound (The DVD-A release of Hotel California by the Eagles is pretty good as is DVD-A release of Fleetwood Macs Rumours.). Is everyone really going to rush out and get HD-DVD players when the jump from DVD to HD-DVD is going to be of the same magnitude as the jump from CD to SACD/DVD-A. Both of these were significant, but they aren't as significant by at least an order of magnitude than the jump from VHS to DVD or LP/Cassette to CD.
refer to in the article. It sounds like FUD to me, DVDs are nowhere near as easy to copy as CDs, especially if it's a dual layer DVD.
It would be nice if these media retards understood that the reasons why MP3s took off in the late 1990s was that hard drive capacities increased dramatically in a short period of time relative to the capacity of CD-ROMs, because CD-RW drives became real cheap all of a sudden and because the people who liked making mix tapes really liked a format that was a lot easier to deal with that allowed you to make mix CDs with hundreds of songs just by pointing and clicking. None of these things apply with DVDs, the biggest hard drive you can get today will only hold 100 uncompressed DVD images (I'm assuming that we don't want further compression because it degrades the image which looks like shit on a big screen TV), people don't make video mix tapes (although it would be kind of interesting) and also because it's still a pain in the ass to strip CSS off of DVDs. Jesus Christ, could these lazy media bastards just put down the grape-flavored MPAA piracy Kool-Aid for once?
I think your system is brilliant and sensible. Which of course means that we could never adopt it in America.
I know, I'm asking for a lot. I was told by a coworker that it's a stupid request. After all, if I have an electronic voting system, isn't that suppose to eliminate the need for paper?
Want to know how to shut him up? Take his printer access away and when he bitches say "Hey, that's a stupid request after all, you have a computer and weren't computers supposed to eliminate the need for paper and usher in the era of the paperless office?"
A space elevator would be entirely electric. The elevator itself would not have to carry its own fuel, nor would it have to generate its own power. Further, if the elevator is built out to a geostationary point, the centrifugal force of the Earth's rotation can give spacecraft an immense velocity -- without needing an ounce of fuel! I've seen figures that say the trip to Mars could be shortened from nine months to perhaps as little as two months. If true, this would make the logistics of a Mars mission far easier to plan for, not to mention exploration of the rest of the outer and inner solar system.
Plus there is the fact that a space elevator can be built to take advantage of the fact that a gravitational field is a conservative field, meaning that you can convert potential energy into kinetic energy and vice versa. Put a back EMF on the coils of your descending lifters and you generate power which you can then feed into the ascending lifters. You can't do this with a rocket. You blast away lots of energy to achieve orbit and then you blast away lots of energy as braking thrust and then as re-entry heat, when you land.
Dude, after reading this post I realize that there ought to be a mod for informative, insightful, interesting and underrated. You are a total stallion for pointing out that r is not the Rydberg constant but is instead the universal gas constant. You are a total fucking stallion, seriously, this is not a troll, you are so fucking awesome.
No. Oxygen additives don't produce a better chemical reaction, just a cleaner version of the same reaction. Adding water doesn't help combustion, just try adding some to your campfire. The old water injection systems reduced intake charge temperature by the phase change of water to steam, allowing greater compression ratios and greater efficiency.
Whatever happened to water injectors? I remember seeing advertisements for them in Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Mother Earth News back in the '70s after the first gas crisis. The ads all had a sort of "stick it to the man by installing this bit of kit
" aura that I could detect even though I was a pre-teen or in my early teens when I read them.
I also recall hearing that there was a WWII era fighter plane that used a water injection system. How do injectors affect fuel economy and NOx production? What's the downside? There must be a fairly significant one or these would be standard equipment on all cars.
Words alone won't skew too many opinions unless they are backed up by more concrete evidence.
Canada. Europe.
Exactly. Some of the worst health care there is. I've been to both, have had friends in both with medical problems, and they're terrible. Add in the fact that "free" health care costs consumers more than free market health care, and you've got a sinking ship. Government's solution to the terrible "free" health care problem: more money!
Hey, Mr. "Words alone won't skew too many opinions unless they are backed up by more concrete evidence." could we see some concrete evidence as to exactly how bad the Canadian and European health care systems are compared to the US? I want real concrete evidence, not your bullshit anecdotal "I spent a week in Amsterdam smoking dope and getting blowjobs in the RLD and my buddy who was with me who got anal clap from being assfucked with a dirty strap-on didn't get good health care" stories.
This is a horrible thing to say but then I am a total bastard, I would love to see you get sick, really sick, chronically ill, and then have to deal with your private health insurance company. Yeah, you'll be singing the virtues of the free market right after they say "hey dude, you're really sick, we don't want to pay for that, it will fuck up our profit margins and we won't be able to pay the CEO as much." Go talk to people who have lost a limb and are trying to get their health insurance company to pay for a decent prosthetic, you'll learn a lot more than you will if you just wank off while reading mises.org and lewrockwell.com.
Except Tort Reform problems and the high cost of litigation makes it difficult to sue your doctor. I know, I've two friends who had no choice other than to hire ambulance chasers as the real lawyers wanted way too much per hour to even take the case.
Uh oh, you've gone off the reservation, if you're a good little Randite and Lew Rockwell reader then you should know that the real reason health care costs too much is that it's too easy to sue doctors. Sounds like you need to go back to talking point central and get reprogrammed.
Realising that parents don't do their job or do it badly, just take a look at all the problems that are with children (nothing new, been like that for ages), why shouldn't the government step in when parents fail? Or do you think it's OK for parents to don't give a shit?
Nice strawman, but no one here thinks it's OK when parents don't give a shit, so take your strawman and stuff it back up your ass. I think that most/.ers believe that as bad as parental neglect is a nanny state that steps in to regulate the behavior of the idiot loin spawn of neglectful parents is a lot worse. Witness the War on some Drugs which ostensibly is waged to protect drug users from fucking themselves up on drugs and which not only fails to do that but costs billions of dollars, tramples our civil liberties and in its most perverse guise denies patients suffering from chronic pain the medications that they need. We don't need a war on violent video games. We don't need a PEA (Parental Enforcement Agency).
The problem is not so much the control, but that it is the *gasp* government! The fear of government here in USA is crippeling this country, Katrina was another example of this.
People fear government for good reason, government is that organization that when you act against its will basically gets to shoot you in the head. Think about it, if you aren't questioning the government and you aren't questioning its expansion then you don't have a clue what its all about.
Stop beeing so afraid that someone actually do the job that your parents should do. It's like my boss, if I don't do my job, he will get someone else to do it and make life a hell for me. Until parents have proved that they can handle the problem, I have no problems with regulations since it's obvious that selfregulation don't work.
You're not a libertarian, or a democrat, or a republican, no, you're something else, something that I would call, for lack of a better term, a fascisto-idiotarian. Yeah, the government is going to do such a fantastic job stepping in here, why look at the fantastic job they've done with the Transportation Safety Administration, wow, having fat guys pat me down every time I take an airplane trip sure has done a lot to make America's skies a safer place, and look at the great job our government is doing in Iraq right now and look at the great job the public schools did in teaching you basic grammar and spelling. Yeah, let's give the government a larger role in raising our children, Hell, let's prohibit anyone from having kids until they've been certified as being fit to do so by a government social worker. Having idiot government bureaucrats step in to do the job of irresponsible parents is probably the worst thing that could happen to the children of said parents.
You also miss another point, the gaming industry is being singled out here, there is no similar government regulation of the movie and TV industry, nothing for the music industry and the kids can go to the library and check out a copy of Mein Kampf if they want. Are you advocating that the government step in to protect them from those influences too, perhaps the local librarian should be fined if she lets lil Johnny check out anything that's too salacious, and what if Johnny's parents know that he plays GTA III, know what GTA III is about and are OK with it, why they're probably irresponsible monsters and lil Johnny should be taken away from them and raised in a violent video game free foster home.
their left arms together, putting a knife in their right hand and letting them fight to the death, preferably with the Star Trek fight music in the background, you know, that's the theme that goes something like this:
Dah dah dah dah dah dahdahdahdah.
That would be totally cool, especially if they were both dressed up in Star Trek outfits (I believe that science geeks wore blue tunics), and no one, but no one, would fuck with the winner.
Slashdot Mirror
Come up with a TPM that stops people from copying and distributing a work more than "fair use", but that allows "fair use". You get to decide exactly what "fair use" means technically, but it must fit today's working definition -- personal backups, personal use on other devices, research/library use.
Can you do it? Or do you just want to sit there flaming about nasty corporations?
Wow, it's funny how someone posted earlier about how some libertard corporate ass-licker was going to come to the defense of the media conglomerates and here it is, not more than 20 posts later. Here's the problem libertard corporate ass-licker, aka browncs, the corporations who are pushing for things such as TPM, the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Mickey Mouse copyright extension act have no interest in any fair-use whatsoever, none, nada, dick, fuck-all. These are the companies that tried to develop a VCR that counted each person in the room so they could charge accordingly. If such a fair-use TPM system were invented you would have to force these companies to accept it. These are the companies that sent Jack Valenti to Washington to say "[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.".
Here's my challenge to you: based upon the hostility that the content industries have had towards any concept of fair use and technical innovation, going back to the invention of the player piano, elaborate why you think these industries would accept any TPM system that guaranteed fair use rights without being forced to do so by the government.
Can you do it, or are you just going to regurgitate the corporate shit that you've been eating?
Gold cannot always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get you gold .
Niccolo Machiavelli
So let's see, we have ICANN, which is pretty bad, on the other hand we have the EU kleptocracy in Brussels which makes ICANN look like a model of transparency, efficiency accountability and competence (Hell, the EU makes the friggin Soviet Union look like a model of transparency and accountability) and the UN, which is a bad, bad, bad joke. I'll take ICANN thank you very much, perhaps the Europeans should drop this and work on figuring out a constitution that their members will actually agree to.
Yeah, I suppose that that essay is a great read, if you're a pathetic sycophant who is trying to suck up to Roger Williams, aka "localroger", a totally unknown and apparently untalented SF writer who publishes through vanity presses and is so far below the radar that his books don't even have reviews on Amazon or B&N.com. I mean really, even Joel Rosenberg, who responded to localroger's increasinly bizarre claims on K5 (the web equivalent of a overflowing septic tank stuffed with dead rats and feminine hygiene products) and who is about as boringly tendentious as they come is better known than Williams and has actually been published by real publishers. localroger comes off like some paranoid SF version of John Hinckley or Mark David Chapman.
Another mod that's needed besides '-1 humorless fuckstick', the '-1 completely specious legal analogy' mod.
Hell, your post is meaningless. It's like saying "Sure, I've known people who swear by Honda Accords, but they've never driven one of them over a gravel road at 175 miles an hour in a driving rain. I love the Accord but pepple who have never seen the pain of trying to use one as a jet-propelled off road vehicle." Except it's dumber than that. If you have hardware that underperforms at high load it's going to underperform at high load on any OS. It's not as if there's some magic OS out there that makes underperforming hardware perform better ("Shit, I knew I should have compiled the kernel with '--turn_it_up_to_11'"), especially at a high load. Some OS's may handle this situation more gracefully than other, mainframe OSs are supposed to be very good, Solaris is supposedly the best UNIX and Linux is better than Windows, but it's still going to start to suck at some point.
Nice editorializing there. Yeah, the movie made a boatload of money. That does not change the fact that the people who screened the movie violated the agreement under which they received the screener copies.
Is there a "-1 humorless fuckstick" mod? No, pity, because there should be one for posts such as this one.
I have a question out there for the "life begins at conception" crowd, namely, if a fetus is a human being how come it looks like a steamed prawn?"
Amazon.com corporate headquarters
A large slice of Boeing
Washington Mutual corporate headquarters
The Port of Seattle, largest port in the state of Washington and one of the largest on the West Coast
The University of Washington, one of the largest research universities in the country
Harborview Medical Center, one of the best trauma centers in the country
The University of Washington Medical Center, one of the best research medical centers in the country
oh, and Starbucks has their corporate headquarters here too. That's just off the top of my head. So Seattle does pretty well since it's a nice place to live and work, much better than say Ephrata, or Winthrop or Twisp, or anywhere else east of the eastern King County line. In fact once you get outside of King County you're pretty much outside all of the major economic activity in the state of Washington. What major companies have headquarters in Olympia, or Bellingham, or Spokane or Vancouver? Hmmmmm, that would be none.
As far as road money goes well in the last ten years King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, the largest and most urban counties in the state generated about $1 billion in revenue for the 29 smallest counties in the state.
As far as cities being a drag on their states if that is the case then why is it that the most heavily urbanized states are also the ones who pay the most in federal taxes relative to the amount of federal spending. Hmmmm, could it be because the large cities in those states drive their economies in a way that you don't find in Bumfuck, MT?
OK, the first moron who posted was talking about a 9/11 style attack. 9/11 was airplanes, not missiles. Secondly this whole "Oh yeah, someone might shoot a missile at the space elevator, whatcha gonna do about that" is typical dork bullshit. You have all of these dorks out there who like to think that they're cool because they can think of ways to blow things up. However most of them don't know their ass from a whole in the ground. Yeah, someone can launch a bunch of missiles at the space elevator and knock it down. Big fucking deal. Someone could drive a nuke to the base of Grand Coulee or Hoover dams and blow them up too, or they could launch missiles into NYC. Two things keep this from happening: logistics and conseqences. It's difficult to get a bunch of missiles and fire them all off at once, there aren't any terrorist groups who can do this kind of thing, which moves it to the province of governments. Governments are restrained from doing things like this because it's an act of war, which means that you've become a target. Saddam Hussein was a crazy bastard, he could have launched Scuds armed with chemical warheads against Israel in Desert Storm, Part I. What kept him from doing so? Well the fact that the minute that he did that the Israelis were going to nuke Iraq (and would probably have gone after the rest of the Arab world as well). This was a very good deterrent against Saddam, who had not hesitated to use chemical weapons against the Kurds or the Iranians.
Naaahhhh, they'll never let us have LSD, we'll get stuck at LSC++.
No, you're just ignorant. I'll admit that the Patriot is way, way oversold as an anti-missile missile, but if you're in an airplane and someone shoots one at you then you're dead. Patriot was designed to take out Soviet fast movers in the NATO theatre of operations and all of its tests showed that it was very good at that. Taking out missiles is something that it was never designed to do, the Army decided to make modifications to it to try to get some SDI cash in the late '80s. The fact that they had some success is indicative of how well they engineered the Patriot as an anti-aircraft missile.
think sept. 11
Bullshit, 9/11 happened because it was a one off, it's unlikely to happen again because who is going to believe highjackers who tell you that you'll be all right if you cooperate and don't resist. That's not likely to happen again. Also you can set up a no-fly zone for 100 miles or so around the elevator and enforce it with a couple of Patriot missile batteries for distance work and Vulcan cannons for close in work. We have bunches and bunches of people in all four services thinking about ways of improving "if it flies, it dies" technology and they'd love a chance to try out their stuff.
Oh, and one thing I forgot about with MP3s which someone pointed out was bandwidth. Yeah, I completely spaced on how major that is. I can remember in early 2000 have a non-techie friend call me at 11:30 at night on my cell phone. I was concerned because I thought it must be some serious emergency involving one of our friends, turned out he had just found about Napster and spent the evening downloading music.
Someone also noted that the situation vis a vis hard drive space will change within 5 years, we might have HD-DVD by then which will keep the ratio of hard drive space to DVD content roughly the same as it is today, but that will totally change the way DVDs are stored.
Am I on crack or does the push towards HD-DVD seem as if it's going to go about as well as the push towards SACD and DVD-A has? SACD and DVD-A were touted as the next great thing in music, multi-channel sound sampled at high resolutions with the added benefit of multimedia content. But despite the fact that pretty much every DVD player Sony sells these days also plays SACDs and there are a ton of DVD/SACD combo players out there there isn't that much media content for them and the big buzz these days is all about online music services which sell music that is not only two channel, but is even lower resolution than CDs. People just haven't really gone for DVD-A or SACD, despite the the fact that they are pretty cool and can produce some pretty awesome sound (The DVD-A release of Hotel California by the Eagles is pretty good as is DVD-A release of Fleetwood Macs Rumours.). Is everyone really going to rush out and get HD-DVD players when the jump from DVD to HD-DVD is going to be of the same magnitude as the jump from CD to SACD/DVD-A. Both of these were significant, but they aren't as significant by at least an order of magnitude than the jump from VHS to DVD or LP/Cassette to CD.
It would be nice if these media retards understood that the reasons why MP3s took off in the late 1990s was that hard drive capacities increased dramatically in a short period of time relative to the capacity of CD-ROMs, because CD-RW drives became real cheap all of a sudden and because the people who liked making mix tapes really liked a format that was a lot easier to deal with that allowed you to make mix CDs with hundreds of songs just by pointing and clicking. None of these things apply with DVDs, the biggest hard drive you can get today will only hold 100 uncompressed DVD images (I'm assuming that we don't want further compression because it degrades the image which looks like shit on a big screen TV), people don't make video mix tapes (although it would be kind of interesting) and also because it's still a pain in the ass to strip CSS off of DVDs. Jesus Christ, could these lazy media bastards just put down the grape-flavored MPAA piracy Kool-Aid for once?
I know, I'm asking for a lot. I was told by a coworker that it's a stupid request. After all, if I have an electronic voting system, isn't that suppose to eliminate the need for paper?
Want to know how to shut him up? Take his printer access away and when he bitches say "Hey, that's a stupid request after all, you have a computer and weren't computers supposed to eliminate the need for paper and usher in the era of the paperless office?"
Plus there is the fact that a space elevator can be built to take advantage of the fact that a gravitational field is a conservative field, meaning that you can convert potential energy into kinetic energy and vice versa. Put a back EMF on the coils of your descending lifters and you generate power which you can then feed into the ascending lifters. You can't do this with a rocket. You blast away lots of energy to achieve orbit and then you blast away lots of energy as braking thrust and then as re-entry heat, when you land.
Dude, after reading this post I realize that there ought to be a mod for informative, insightful, interesting and underrated. You are a total stallion for pointing out that r is not the Rydberg constant but is instead the universal gas constant. You are a total fucking stallion, seriously, this is not a troll, you are so fucking awesome.
Whatever happened to water injectors? I remember seeing advertisements for them in Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Mother Earth News back in the '70s after the first gas crisis. The ads all had a sort of "stick it to the man by installing this bit of kit " aura that I could detect even though I was a pre-teen or in my early teens when I read them. I also recall hearing that there was a WWII era fighter plane that used a water injection system. How do injectors affect fuel economy and NOx production? What's the downside? There must be a fairly significant one or these would be standard equipment on all cars.
Words alone won't skew too many opinions unless they are backed up by more concrete evidence.
Canada. Europe.
Exactly. Some of the worst health care there is. I've been to both, have had friends in both with medical problems, and they're terrible. Add in the fact that "free" health care costs consumers more than free market health care, and you've got a sinking ship. Government's solution to the terrible "free" health care problem: more money!
Hey, Mr. "Words alone won't skew too many opinions unless they are backed up by more concrete evidence." could we see some concrete evidence as to exactly how bad the Canadian and European health care systems are compared to the US? I want real concrete evidence, not your bullshit anecdotal "I spent a week in Amsterdam smoking dope and getting blowjobs in the RLD and my buddy who was with me who got anal clap from being assfucked with a dirty strap-on didn't get good health care" stories.
This is a horrible thing to say but then I am a total bastard, I would love to see you get sick, really sick, chronically ill, and then have to deal with your private health insurance company. Yeah, you'll be singing the virtues of the free market right after they say "hey dude, you're really sick, we don't want to pay for that, it will fuck up our profit margins and we won't be able to pay the CEO as much." Go talk to people who have lost a limb and are trying to get their health insurance company to pay for a decent prosthetic, you'll learn a lot more than you will if you just wank off while reading mises.org and lewrockwell.com.
Except Tort Reform problems and the high cost of litigation makes it difficult to sue your doctor. I know, I've two friends who had no choice other than to hire ambulance chasers as the real lawyers wanted way too much per hour to even take the case.
Uh oh, you've gone off the reservation, if you're a good little Randite and Lew Rockwell reader then you should know that the real reason health care costs too much is that it's too easy to sue doctors. Sounds like you need to go back to talking point central and get reprogrammed.
Nice strawman, but no one here thinks it's OK when parents don't give a shit, so take your strawman and stuff it back up your ass. I think that most /.ers believe that as bad as parental neglect is a nanny state that steps in to regulate the behavior of the idiot loin spawn of neglectful parents is a lot worse. Witness the War on some Drugs which ostensibly is waged to protect drug users from fucking themselves up on drugs and which not only fails to do that but costs billions of dollars, tramples our civil liberties and in its most perverse guise denies patients suffering from chronic pain the medications that they need. We don't need a war on violent video games. We don't need a PEA (Parental Enforcement Agency).
The problem is not so much the control, but that it is the *gasp* government! The fear of government here in USA is crippeling this country, Katrina was another example of this.
People fear government for good reason, government is that organization that when you act against its will basically gets to shoot you in the head. Think about it, if you aren't questioning the government and you aren't questioning its expansion then you don't have a clue what its all about.
Stop beeing so afraid that someone actually do the job that your parents should do. It's like my boss, if I don't do my job, he will get someone else to do it and make life a hell for me. Until parents have proved that they can handle the problem, I have no problems with regulations since it's obvious that selfregulation don't work.
You're not a libertarian, or a democrat, or a republican, no, you're something else, something that I would call, for lack of a better term, a fascisto-idiotarian. Yeah, the government is going to do such a fantastic job stepping in here, why look at the fantastic job they've done with the Transportation Safety Administration, wow, having fat guys pat me down every time I take an airplane trip sure has done a lot to make America's skies a safer place, and look at the great job our government is doing in Iraq right now and look at the great job the public schools did in teaching you basic grammar and spelling. Yeah, let's give the government a larger role in raising our children, Hell, let's prohibit anyone from having kids until they've been certified as being fit to do so by a government social worker. Having idiot government bureaucrats step in to do the job of irresponsible parents is probably the worst thing that could happen to the children of said parents.
You also miss another point, the gaming industry is being singled out here, there is no similar government regulation of the movie and TV industry, nothing for the music industry and the kids can go to the library and check out a copy of Mein Kampf if they want. Are you advocating that the government step in to protect them from those influences too, perhaps the local librarian should be fined if she lets lil Johnny check out anything that's too salacious, and what if Johnny's parents know that he plays GTA III, know what GTA III is about and are OK with it, why they're probably irresponsible monsters and lil Johnny should be taken away from them and raised in a violent video game free foster home.
Dah dah dah dah dah dahdahdahdah.
That would be totally cool, especially if they were both dressed up in Star Trek outfits (I believe that science geeks wore blue tunics), and no one, but no one, would fuck with the winner.
Obligatory Simpson's references:
Platformization is a perfectly cromulent word.
It sounds from the article as if Gates is attempting to claim that Microsoft will embiggen users.