the free call minutes on your cell phone account may be just bits in a server somewhere, but they are yours, and they do have a value
No, the bits aren't yours, and furthermore, the value of the bits representing free call minutes sitting on a server somewhere does not originate from their status as bits per se. The important part is that those bits are a record of a contract that you have entered into with the phone company, whereupon they provide you with phone minutes in exchange for money.
The bits don't matter, it's the legally binding contract that's important. The same principle holds for items in MMO games, which is why the Terms of Service of just about all the major MMO games has legalese that can be translated to the effect of:
"Not yours. Ours. All imaginary. Really. Not responsible if your n00b ass gets owned because in-game conditions are subject to change without notice. Oh, and you have to pay money to us for the right to play with these bits that are actually ours."
At this point, you're probably not going to get anywhere in forcing a game company to compensate you for in-game loss without first establishing that elements of the TOS itself are not legally valid or binding... usually a tough proposition.
MMO admins can and do compensate gamers for many problems, but that is entirely voluntary and has more to do with good customer service than any legal obligation.
Argue about who is right and wrong allyou want but there is one point missing here.
Anyone who shoots at cops or even threatens a cop is very, very stupid. The only sensible thing to do when the cops show up to arrest you is to let them do their job and keep your mouth shut. Anything else can get you killed.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin
The degree to which it is safe to comply with the demands of civil authorities is proportional to the degree of accountability which the civil authorities are held to. If you had valid reasons to believe that you would be falsely accused and handed over to Syria for interrogation under torture, I certainly hope you wouldn't dismiss the option of violently resisting arrest.
Consider the Gestapo as a baseline example of police without accountability. Think it'll never happen again? Take a look at Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Guatemala, Myanmar, or half a dozen other countries I could name. We're quite lucky here in the United States because the vast majority of police do act justly, but it doesn't have to stay that way forever, and it certainly isn't that way everywhere.
Accountability is based on verifiable proof that authority is being justly exercised, not an assumption that the actions taken by authority are warranted. Require them to prove that what they are doing is correct, every step of the way. If their answers aren't valid, then your choice as a rational individual comes down to the balance of risks between acting to protect yourself or unconditionally surrendering to their power.
No matter what, in the end, the human CANT be wrong... right?
Nah, wrong.
At least, I think it's wrong. Either way, one of us is wrong, so I must be right, because you said that humans can't be wrong and I said that you're wrong about that. Right?
I suppose it depends how you're defining spam. Perhaps the ultimate spam messages that don't get past them are capable of passing a turing test... hence fooling those gullible human recipients into thinking that it isn't even spam!
Fortunately, soon we will all be able to use the superhuman spam-detection capabilities of these filters to save us from ourselves. Imagine all of those pesky e-mails from your 'friends' getting caught by your spam filter before they even impinge upon your consciousness.
It'd be a wonderful world.
Re:Only so much carbon...
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
What if we put a nuke underneath and launched the sardine tin into orbit?
We could become fearless explorers of the universe together as the human race!
I did that with a sardine tin and some firecrackers when I was just a boy... It had some fearless ant-stronauts aboard too if I recall correctly.
Maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea after all...
I notice that none of your examples of historical nanny-states occurred in the USA.
It's starting to happen right here and right now, and that is why I am concerned. This intrusion of government into every facet of life is what the founders of our nation most surely wished to avoid... and also what our nation is doing such a studious job of ignoring.
Don't like it? Vote. Unless you're voting on a Diebold machine...
"Those who give up liberty for the sake of security deserve neither liberty nor security."
-- Ben Franklin
They're not going to fool the newer coke machines with scanned/printed bills anyway.
What did you think they had in there, an OCR set to determine whether someone just put in a $1, $5, or $100? They run off bill thickness/shape, positioning of the security threads, watermarks, and other not-very-noticeable-to-the-naked-eye bits to determine validity.
An old counterfeiting trick was removing the dye from a low-denomination bill with a solvent and printing a high-denomination bill on the blank note, and these machines would see right through *that*.
More secure modes and cheaper to scan is a win/win for vending machines. Once the late 90's-series bills are out of circulation in five years, it'll get even easier.
Re:Modern diesels are cleaner than gasoline.
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
Particles of sooty stuff in visible exhaust are a minor visual annoyance for a minute or two, whereas invisible NOx compounds and volatilized hydrocarbons translate straight into ozone and smog.
It's the invisible pollutants that merit extra worry... a major source of ozone and smog in major cities was the hydrocarbon vapors released directly at gas stations, before environmental laws and better pump design reduced them to a more manageable level. Little two-stroke engines are another example of nasty unburned hydrocarbon release.
A more complete statement would be that Blizzard doesn't owe you or me, or their publisher, any money, and hence can take as long as they need to to ensure that their game is actually finished when they release it.
Financial pressure is the real reason for most optimistic release dates, and the insane pressure of creating an up-to-date working awesome game on the schedules alloted to the dev teams is the reason that many games do not meet those optimistic release dates.
Consider the statement "If we don't go gold by November our publisher is going to stop paying our operating costs and we're all going to be out of a job." and you have some idea why some games are released when they are.
Modern diesels are cleaner than gasoline.
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
The emissions from engines that meet the current on-the-road standards for diesel and gasoline engines in the US are roughly equal in released toxicity per unit of fuel burned.
http://www.osti.gov/fcvt/deer2002/mauderlypaper. pd f
Diesel fuel is somewhat more energy-dense than gasoline, so you're actually better off with a modern diesel engine. Sure, the old diesel engines were nasty, but the new ones are cleaner-burning than a conventional gas engine.
Plus, the particles in diesel exhaust tend to be larger, so they're less likely to become lodged in your lungs. Handy, that...
All of which is besides the point-- tuning engines for higher performance is directly correlated with increased emissions. It takes more time and gives lower returns to more completely combust the fuel as opposed to just throwing more fuel in.
Yeah, but I've been hit by standard household current and its not that bad really
Yeah, unless it kills you, which can happen pretty easily if you're unable to quickly remove yourself from any short circuit which happens to cross your heart. That's why serious electricians tend to avoid grounding their off hand when they're near hot wires-- zap right through the ticker if something flamingoes up.
110V is pretty nasty-- enough to spaz out your muscles without enough ZAP to really knock you out of contact with whatever you grabbed. It doesn't seem like much compared to 240 or higher, but you definitely don't want to screw around with it.
Nah, he's also talking about the difficulties of dealing with any given nano-engineered material. PCBs and dioxin aren't self-replicating, but they're incredibly nasty in the environment and incredibly expensive to ameliorate once they're there.
Given that the entire idea of nanotechnology is designer molecules and tiny particles with interesting properties, it's a very valid concern.
Some nanotech shouldn't be disassembled.
on
The Law of Disassembly
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
An interesting goal, and an innovative approach to the gray goo problem... but I take issue with his statement that *every* nanotech item should be easy to disassemble.
Some nanotech shouldn't be disassembled, and we should know how to make it that way.
There are some nanotech applications where this "Law Of Disassembly" would be a generally bad plan, because there are some things that we want to stay made.
Space elevators and other similar tech come to mind... leaving easy dissassembly possibilities in megastructures is a pretty horrendous risk from a security perspective.
Or... to toss his own ideas back at him, the possibility of long-term nuclear waste storage in virtually-indestructible nanotech containers.
We don't want them breakable, and we don't want them to have flaws that can be exploited by unscrupulous individuals or groups.
An analogous situation would be the single-molecule spacecraft hull postulated by Larry Niven-- completely invulnerable to nearly any conceivable force until it encountered enough antimatter to destabilize the structure and reduce the entire hull to powder. In interstellar space, unfortunately...
I still agree that easy disassembly is a good idea for most purposes, but there are few laws that should always be applied without exception.
Human intelligence is Directorate of Operations. Weird tech stuff is under the aegis of the Directorate of Science and Technology, and they do a LOT of it.
Yes, but Japan is also conducting extensive research into new reactor designs, not to mention their extensive funding of hot fusion research.
Contrast that with the US, where the R&D budget for nuclear power is absolutely pathetic compared to the investment in R&D for other fields.
As for nuclear plants in the US... heh, you don't even want to know about the safety violations that used to happen. It's a testament to the fundamentally error-tolerant design of most nuclear plants in the US that there has not been significant outside radioactive contamination as a result of an accident in a commercial nuclear power plant in the USA.
Really, commercial nuclear power isn't all that dangerous unless the regulators are ignored... which doesn't really happen anymore because people are aware of just how big a sling they'll need for their asses if they screw up. If you want to be scared, be scared of the nuclear programs run by the Department of Defense... without regulation, all over the place, and rather terrifying because most of the mess hasn't been cleaned up yet...
Close to 100% of France's electrical power is nuclear, and they export power to much of western Europe.
Japan is big on nukes, also.
Actually, just about every industrialized country other than the USA sees the risks as much less of a barrier to development than they are here... blame the idiot wing of the environmental lobby and the pathetic PR efforts of utilities here for shutting down nuclear in the US, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths from coal-fired power plant emissions over the last several decades.
Texas interchangable with Mexico because they once used to be a part of the same country?
In fact, President Bush is working to ensure that we can use the term "Texaco" to describe ownership of the entities formerly known as Mexico and Texas.
Either that, or he just muffed his pronunciation again...
Cruise missiles are a pretty concrete example of our current overwhelming aerospace tech superiority.
You may argue that they're not relevant to space applications, but the military is looking to soup them up a bit. How about the sub-orbital intercontinental/hypersonic cruise missiles that the US military is developing to reduce dependency on foreign airfields when deliver explosives to various locations.
They're aiming for demonstrations of a mach-12 delivery system by 2012.
Somewhere, a lonely N*Gage is howling at the moon.
...and somewhere else, Van Helsing is sharpening his stake collection in anticipation of someday hunting that last N*Gage down and putting it out of its misery.
Slashdot Mirror
the free call minutes on your cell phone account may be just bits in a server somewhere, but they are yours, and they do have a value
No, the bits aren't yours, and furthermore, the value of the bits representing free call minutes sitting on a server somewhere does not originate from their status as bits per se. The important part is that those bits are a record of a contract that you have entered into with the phone company, whereupon they provide you with phone minutes in exchange for money.
The bits don't matter, it's the legally binding contract that's important. The same principle holds for items in MMO games, which is why the Terms of Service of just about all the major MMO games has legalese that can be translated to the effect of:
"Not yours. Ours. All imaginary. Really. Not responsible if your n00b ass gets owned because in-game conditions are subject to change without notice. Oh, and you have to pay money to us for the right to play with these bits that are actually ours."
At this point, you're probably not going to get anywhere in forcing a game company to compensate you for in-game loss without first establishing that elements of the TOS itself are not legally valid or binding... usually a tough proposition.
MMO admins can and do compensate gamers for many problems, but that is entirely voluntary and has more to do with good customer service than any legal obligation.
Tom Cruise can save us, but at what cost?
I mean, think about it. If Tom Cruise's stated price for saving the world was that we let him make Battlefield Earth 2 , maybe it just isn't worth it.
Tom Cruise wants you to help save the world... with scientology!
Maybe this time, Neo took the blue pill.
That'd explain why he's working on software for The Man, after all...
Argue about who is right and wrong allyou want but there is one point missing here.
Anyone who shoots at cops or even threatens a cop
is very, very stupid. The only sensible thing to do when the cops show up to arrest you is to let them do their job and keep your mouth shut. Anything else can get you killed.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin
The degree to which it is safe to comply with the demands of civil authorities is proportional to the degree of accountability which the civil authorities are held to. If you had valid reasons to believe that you would be falsely accused and handed over to Syria for interrogation under torture, I certainly hope you wouldn't dismiss the option of violently resisting arrest.
Consider the Gestapo as a baseline example of police without accountability. Think it'll never happen again? Take a look at Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Guatemala, Myanmar, or half a dozen other countries I could name. We're quite lucky here in the United States because the vast majority of police do act justly, but it doesn't have to stay that way forever, and it certainly isn't that way everywhere.
Accountability is based on verifiable proof that authority is being justly exercised, not an assumption that the actions taken by authority are warranted. Require them to prove that what they are doing is correct, every step of the way. If their answers aren't valid, then your choice as a rational individual comes down to the balance of risks between acting to protect yourself or unconditionally surrendering to their power.
You need to hack the sound insulation in the walls around er... wherever you are.
Let me be the first to say it... "OMFG wallh4x!!!"
No matter what, in the end, the human CANT be wrong... right?
Nah, wrong.
At least, I think it's wrong. Either way, one of us is wrong, so I must be right, because you said that humans can't be wrong and I said that you're wrong about that. Right?
In Soviet Russia, math is bad at you!
I suppose it depends how you're defining spam. Perhaps the ultimate spam messages that don't get past them are capable of passing a turing test... hence fooling those gullible human recipients into thinking that it isn't even spam!
Fortunately, soon we will all be able to use the superhuman spam-detection capabilities of these filters to save us from ourselves. Imagine all of those pesky e-mails from your 'friends' getting caught by your spam filter before they even impinge upon your consciousness.
It'd be a wonderful world.
What if we put a nuke underneath and launched the sardine tin into orbit?
We could become fearless explorers of the universe together as the human race!
I did that with a sardine tin and some firecrackers when I was just a boy... It had some fearless ant-stronauts aboard too if I recall correctly.
Maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea after all...
I notice that none of your examples of historical nanny-states occurred in the USA.
It's starting to happen right here and right now, and that is why I am concerned. This intrusion of government into every facet of life is what the founders of our nation most surely wished to avoid... and also what our nation is doing such a studious job of ignoring.
Don't like it? Vote. Unless you're voting on a Diebold machine...
"Those who give up liberty for the sake of security deserve neither liberty nor security."
-- Ben Franklin
They're not going to fool the newer coke machines with scanned/printed bills anyway.
What did you think they had in there, an OCR set to determine whether someone just put in a $1, $5, or $100? They run off bill thickness/shape, positioning of the security threads, watermarks, and other not-very-noticeable-to-the-naked-eye bits to determine validity.
An old counterfeiting trick was removing the dye from a low-denomination bill with a solvent and printing a high-denomination bill on the blank note, and these machines would see right through *that*.
More secure modes and cheaper to scan is a win/win for vending machines. Once the late 90's-series bills are out of circulation in five years, it'll get even easier.
Particles of sooty stuff in visible exhaust are a minor visual annoyance for a minute or two, whereas invisible NOx compounds and volatilized hydrocarbons translate straight into ozone and smog.
It's the invisible pollutants that merit extra worry... a major source of ozone and smog in major cities was the hydrocarbon vapors released directly at gas stations, before environmental laws and better pump design reduced them to a more manageable level. Little two-stroke engines are another example of nasty unburned hydrocarbon release.
Blizzard doesn't owe you or me anything
A more complete statement would be that Blizzard doesn't owe you or me, or their publisher, any money, and hence can take as long as they need to to ensure that their game is actually finished when they release it.
Financial pressure is the real reason for most optimistic release dates, and the insane pressure of creating an up-to-date working awesome game on the schedules alloted to the dev teams is the reason that many games do not meet those optimistic release dates.
Consider the statement "If we don't go gold by November our publisher is going to stop paying our operating costs and we're all going to be out of a job." and you have some idea why some games are released when they are.
The emissions from engines that meet the current on-the-road standards for diesel and gasoline engines in the US are roughly equal in released toxicity per unit of fuel burned.
. pd f
http://www.osti.gov/fcvt/deer2002/mauderlypaper
Diesel fuel is somewhat more energy-dense than gasoline, so you're actually better off with a modern diesel engine. Sure, the old diesel engines were nasty, but the new ones are cleaner-burning than a conventional gas engine.
Plus, the particles in diesel exhaust tend to be larger, so they're less likely to become lodged in your lungs. Handy, that...
All of which is besides the point-- tuning engines for higher performance is directly correlated with increased emissions. It takes more time and gives lower returns to more completely combust the fuel as opposed to just throwing more fuel in.
Unburned hydrocarbons = bad news.
Yeah, but I've been hit by standard household current and its not that bad really
Yeah, unless it kills you, which can happen pretty easily if you're unable to quickly remove yourself from any short circuit which happens to cross your heart. That's why serious electricians tend to avoid grounding their off hand when they're near hot wires-- zap right through the ticker if something flamingoes up.
110V is pretty nasty-- enough to spaz out your muscles without enough ZAP to really knock you out of contact with whatever you grabbed. It doesn't seem like much compared to 240 or higher, but you definitely don't want to screw around with it.
Sweet... 0wnz0r3d is up for best novelette.
Highly cool, Cory Doctorow is bloody brilliant. If you haven't read 0wnz0red yet, go do it.
Nah, he's also talking about the difficulties of dealing with any given nano-engineered material. PCBs and dioxin aren't self-replicating, but they're incredibly nasty in the environment and incredibly expensive to ameliorate once they're there.
Given that the entire idea of nanotechnology is designer molecules and tiny particles with interesting properties, it's a very valid concern.
An interesting goal, and an innovative approach to the gray goo problem... but I take issue with his statement that *every* nanotech item should be easy to disassemble.
Some nanotech shouldn't be disassembled, and we should know how to make it that way.
There are some nanotech applications where this "Law Of Disassembly" would be a generally bad plan, because there are some things that we want to stay made.
Space elevators and other similar tech come to mind... leaving easy dissassembly possibilities in megastructures is a pretty horrendous risk from a security perspective.
Or... to toss his own ideas back at him, the possibility of long-term nuclear waste storage in virtually-indestructible nanotech containers.
We don't want them breakable, and we don't want them to have flaws that can be exploited by unscrupulous individuals or groups.
An analogous situation would be the single-molecule spacecraft hull postulated by Larry Niven-- completely invulnerable to nearly any conceivable force until it encountered enough antimatter to destabilize the structure and reduce the entire hull to powder. In interstellar space, unfortunately...
I still agree that easy disassembly is a good idea for most purposes, but there are few laws that should always be applied without exception.
The Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science and Technology
Human intelligence is Directorate of Operations. Weird tech stuff is under the aegis of the Directorate of Science and Technology, and they do a LOT of it.
Yes, but Japan is also conducting extensive research into new reactor designs, not to mention their extensive funding of hot fusion research.
Contrast that with the US, where the R&D budget for nuclear power is absolutely pathetic compared to the investment in R&D for other fields.
As for nuclear plants in the US... heh, you don't even want to know about the safety violations that used to happen. It's a testament to the fundamentally error-tolerant design of most nuclear plants in the US that there has not been significant outside radioactive contamination as a result of an accident in a commercial nuclear power plant in the USA.
Really, commercial nuclear power isn't all that dangerous unless the regulators are ignored... which doesn't really happen anymore because people are aware of just how big a sling they'll need for their asses if they screw up. If you want to be scared, be scared of the nuclear programs run by the Department of Defense... without regulation, all over the place, and rather terrifying because most of the mess hasn't been cleaned up yet...
Close to 100% of France's electrical power is nuclear, and they export power to much of western Europe.
Japan is big on nukes, also.
Actually, just about every industrialized country other than the USA sees the risks as much less of a barrier to development than they are here... blame the idiot wing of the environmental lobby and the pathetic PR efforts of utilities here for shutting down nuclear in the US, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths from coal-fired power plant emissions over the last several decades.
Texas interchangable with Mexico because they once used to be a part of the same country?
In fact, President Bush is working to ensure that we can use the term "Texaco" to describe ownership of the entities formerly known as Mexico and Texas.
Either that, or he just muffed his pronunciation again...
Trust silver-investor.com to give you the inside information about silver's coming boom!
Mmm-hmm! I certainly will!
Cruise missiles are a pretty concrete example of our current overwhelming aerospace tech superiority.
You may argue that they're not relevant to space applications, but the military is looking to soup them up a bit. How about the sub-orbital intercontinental/hypersonic cruise missiles that the US military is developing to reduce dependency on foreign airfields when deliver explosives to various locations.
They're aiming for demonstrations of a mach-12 delivery system by 2012.
Somewhere, a lonely N*Gage is howling at the moon.
...and somewhere else, Van Helsing is sharpening his stake collection in anticipation of someday hunting that last N*Gage down and putting it out of its misery.