Many people have trashed this option for not being as cost-effective as cable or ADSL. True, for most people, it isn't anywhere near as cost-effective...for MOST people. For many people, particularly in Canada's sparsely populated north, cable and ADSL (and sometimes even dialup) simply aren't options. I spend my summers on a six-acre island on Lake Muskoka, Ontario. We get power and telephone from hideously expensive underwater lines that were laid connecting the island to a nearer, slightly larger island, which, in turn, paid a hideously large amount to lay its own lines, which connect it to the mainland. Not suprisingly, cable and ADSL aren't an option. Dialup isn't either. Dialup requires that I dial the nearest ISP and pay long distance charges to connect to it through what appears to be about 10^n hops back to the central server somewhere in the Orion Nebula. Satellite Internet, therefore, is a fabulous option for me, even at this price. It's not the be-all and end-all of Internet access, but it'll certainly help bridge the "digital divide" whereby people in remote areas were the last, if they ever did, to get dialup, adsl and cable, respectively.
"Safety will improve. Troublemakers will be identified early, as data-mining software flags behavior in children that leads to crime, sparking remedial programs."
Watch out, kiddies. Play Chaotic Evil in Baldur's Gate VII, when our digital dystopia has been realised and you may just get a knock at your door from the FBI.
Do I get in trouble if the government's spy software catches me wantonly killing NPCs, or just if they catch me PKing?
As a linguistics student, I find the Quebec government's stance not only frustrating, but poorly informed. It's almost comical that, in its attempt to preserve French, Quebec has made its language far less viable for trade by restrictive language laws (where trade has traditionally been the most important vehicle for the survival of non-insular languages) and, furthermore, has begun policing within its own language in the sort of vain attempt that has often led, in the past, to the creation of "vulgar" and "high" varieties of language (e.g., In the creation of Katharevusa as a "pure" form of Greek, lacking the borrowed vocabulary of Demotic).
The Pequistes who began rewriting French to be free of foreign influence (e.g., the state declared "web" to be, henceforth, "oueb") don't seem to be aware that enforcing the insular nature of Quebec French is the most efficient way they could possibly kill the language. No lingua franca, spoken by a large majority within its region, as is French, ever died because of foreign signage and loan-words. Take the below sentence, for example:
"Language is a constantly changing art"
The only words in that sentence that English didn't borrow from French are "is" and "a". "language, "constant", "change" and "art" are all French loan-words. Similarly, French borrowed them from Latin. The fact that French coexisted with English as a major language of England after the Norman conquest and lent it much of its vocabularly didn't impede English's eventual emergence as a trade language. In fact, becoming a trade language is specifically what saved English. If Quebec French attempts to isolate itself from trade and engineer a linguistic-supremicist "High French", it's sealing its own fate and assuring its demise.
When I got my first CD-ROM, it blew me away. I had a brand new 486SX-33 with a 200MB drive. That 200MB drive was nicely complimented by a 650MB ROM drive. At 3.25 times the size of my hard drive, CD-ROM was an invaluable medium. Now, my main box has 200GB of storage. Why the hell do I need a DVD medium only a few times larger than my 486's optical storage? Am I going to back up my HDs on 308 CDs? How about double-sided, dual layer DVDs? That's still 13 disks. The existence of the internet, itself, is making optical storage worthless. I can download any Linux distro. Why would I need a disk, from which to install it. Encyclopedias and image/media libraries used to be bought and stored on optical media, but the web's a vastly superior medium now.
If there's a way to make optical drives what they originally were (3.5 times the size of the largest hard drive available), then more power to the manufacturers, but 80GB drives are old news and 240GB optical disks seem unlikely for the moment (and don't tell me about any of these silly vapourware utopian optical storage solutions Slashdot has harped on in the past).
Who knows. Pocketquake is coming along well enough
on
Sketch Quake Renderer
·
· Score: 2
Maybe you were kidding, but it actually might be possible (though not on a Psion). Either way, Pocket Quake will do for now. Anyway, this mod seems to put a hefty surplus burden on my processor as it is. I wouldn't want to try it on a handheld. My Casio EM-500 Pocket PC, at 200MHz, (overclocked) can just barely handle Pocket Quake, itself, at a reasonable framerate.
With all the insane things that are currently running on my EM-500 as it is (e.g., Pocket Hexen and Pocket Doom) that I'll believe anything is possible on those plucky little PPCs (yes, it's a microsoft OS, but their pocket gaming API has turned out pretty well and they're exponentially faster than the new Palms, so I'm willing to forgive them).
"Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy."
- John Keats
I have many times had this aesthetic argument with math and physics students. It took a long time, but we eventually came to the following consensus on the aesthetics of science:
Scientific fact, in and of itself, is as completely devoid of artistic interest, as any fact is. The mere cold fact of the way in which paint was arranged on a piece of canvas to create the Mona Lisa is devoid of aesthetic value. Only a human interpretation of the meaning of this arrangement of paints can yield aesthetic worth. Therefore, for example, while the theory of relativity is, in and of itself, without merit as art, by an interpretation of its implications to humanity, it can gain meaning. The exciting thing about it is that we DON'T understand it completely. We can make all manner of wild romantic ponderings on its meaning with regard to light-speed travel and all sorts of fantasies. It's only because we don't understand it that we can make these ponderings, however. If we had a complete and thorough "scientific" knowledge of its (or "the theory of everything"'s) meaning and nature, light-speed travel or time travel, for that matter, would be either 1) recognised as impossible or 2) as matter-of-fact as travel at greater than the speed of sound.
The only reason science is interesting is because it entails mystery (if it didn't, there would be nothing more to investigate) and uncovers new topics for us to consider in wonder. Unfortunately, while it does this, it disproves the things that we used to wonder at (like a 6,000-year-old earth and Thor weilding his thunderbolts from the clouds). The end result is that the only things that we have to wonder at any more are so incredibly abstruse that only scientists can explore them. The common man used to be able, as the above poster noted, to look up into the stars and wonder even what they might be. Unfortunately, these wonders within the reach of the common man have already been explained. The worm holes, dark matter and Uncertainty which remain the wonders of today are somewhat beyond his grasp.
I think this is all summed up in a quote from David Hume:
The anatomist is useful to the painter"
The scientist investigating the human body and the artist who depicts it work hand in hand to create the final product. This is perhaps a consensus to be made between scientific and artistic aesthetics.
He's going to exit the atmosphere in a capsule named "Earthsar 1", eh? This is a fabulous venture, but if he's going to risk his life and spend his livelyhood on an attempt like this, he might have taken more care in picking a name for his vehicle that isn't already taken by a fungus. You'll notice that NASA carefully employed the tactic of not naming its own vehicles after parasitic organisms. The Mildew VII and Mold X never made it to the Cape Canaveral launch pad, I'm afraid.
Russia was similarly successful in avoiding fungal monikers. Sputnik, however, might be considered only a minor success, mind you, as it makes the mistake of being most easily likened to a sound you make when you sneeze.
I find this most fascinating from a psychological standpoint. As I look at these pictures and consider their age, I am unable to conceive of the concept of looking on a scene from this time period in full colour. All my life, I've seen the world of these years in black and white. To see them in colour is to deconstruct a piece of the allure that surrounds them. As Marshall Mcluhan would argue, the medium here, is, indeed, the message. To change the medium is to completely change the way I have been taught to view the period. The black and white medium alienates me from the people the past, providing me, through its imperfection, a way to differentiate present reality from past reality. By removing this alienating force, I find myself able to identify with the time in which these photos were taken in a way that is so new and different that I find it disturbing. The power of images in creating a "global village" is something that Mcluhan talked about at length. Perhaps these images of the past help bridge differences between past and present in the same way that TV images help bridge differences between western and eastern hemisphere.
technology is going to change so much in the next 20 years that we can't begin to imagine what we will and won't be able to do
This really depends on your perspective. Some neo-futurists (with whom I agree) have started taking a different look at technology, which is more in terms of a "punctuated equilibria" style of development. That is to say, development of technology occurs in tremendous bursts of advancement, rather than on a linear, continual basis. On the basis of older futurism, people would be prone to suggest, for example (as, indeed, they did), in the early-20th century, that radio technology would develop to such an extent that our society would be completely transformed by way of traditional commercial radio broadcasts. Of course, this wasn't the case at all. Other, completely unpredictable developments (e.g., data processing, digital telecommunications) usurped the technological limelight from radio, which stayed largely static. I see futurists treating computers, today, much as they treated radio in the past.
Along these lines, I'd say that suggesting technology, especially with regard to something as incredibly specific as aircraft, is going to drastically change in the next 20 years is an unfounded suggestion. There may well be a lull in development, in which only previous technologies are advanced, and new ones are not invented (i.e., no punctuation in our equilibria).
Even were our experience of past development to support the theory that future development will be exponential, that argument would be essentially baseless. The inductive historical approach which says that our experience of development in the future will match our experience of development in the past is just based on the fact that, in the past, our experience of comparing the past to the future has yielded a predicted future similar to the past. The argument is copmletely circular and, therefore, invalid (though adequately abstruse that most people miss the logical fallacy).
Now if they can just make a veggie-powered computer, coders will be set for life. With all the organic waste stacked around the average programmer's comp (day old pizza, last week's coffee, doritos) he could power the thing for a year!
Coppin said record labels are entitled to 7.5 cents for each download of a ring tone that uses copyrighted material, but industry sources couldn't confirm that figure.
So someone's lawyers decided that each ring is worth a value of exactly 7.5 cents. Who comes up with these figures?
I have just now decided that each post I write on Slashdot is worth a value of exactly YOUR SOUL. Please, upon your having completed the reading of this post, return said soul to the possession of its rightful owner, screwballicus@hotmail.com with all speed. Thank you.
Aside from the obvious possibility of keeping digital copies of media through screenshots or other recording programs, there will never be a way to stop people from going the analogue route. Even if our kernels themselves were carefully programmed to prevent copying of digital media in any way shape or form, we could easily hook up an RCA-out to any other comp's RCA-in and take a capture there. Or if we want copy-protected sound recorded, we can just hook our audio-out up with any other comp's audio-in and record to our heart's delight.
Unless they lock all our computers in glass cases and leave us without a single port to access, we'll still be able to record this stuff to our heart's delight. This is all hullabaloo.
All of our contracts give HavenCo the right to cancel at will if the customer's web site or service is endangering our access to Internet connectivity, reasons for which spam is typically #1. Our advanced technical anti-spam and anti-attack techniques will prevent all customers from using our services for this purpose, and we will respond promptly to any complaints of spam.
While I think we can all agree with their choice to ban use of servers for spam on the basis that it could seriously endanger their business, what does this imply about their provision of other taboo services? If someone sets up Napster2 on Sealand, will it be shut down on this same basis, that it "is endangering [their] access to Internet connectivity"?
Sealand could face some major flak if they serve as a safe-harbour to exiled Internet services and they may simply not be willing to allow that flak to threaten their operations, as Spam would.
At that distance, radio signals take 21 hours and 45 minutes to make the roundtrip between the Earth and the spacecraft.
Seems like every time you join a multiplayer game these days, there has to be ONE extrasolar spacecraft with a ping of 21 hours dragging the rest of the players down.
How about someone tries to portscan the bastard? At 21 hours a shot We'll have covered Netbios, HTTP and FTP before the month is out.
The problem with many of these so called Microsoft-bashing stories isn't that Microsoft is a sainted and blessed purveyor of good and truth to the net community, it's that, while Microsoft may be bad (to its workers, to users, to competitors, etc.), these stories don't present anything new to the Microsoft-monopolisation picture. Sure, this story is an illustration of Microsoft's cannibalisation of its competitors, but you could run 100 stories a day that show Bill's a monopolist and we would be none the better informed, still writing exactly the same "the microsoft bohemoth has to be stopped" posts, we did a few minutes ago. We'd know Bill's a monopolist, like we knew before we read the story, and we'd have essentially gained nothing from this news. If we want to be any the richer for reading these stories, their editorial philosophy has to expand beyond Linux vs. Microsoft. I'm sure IBM, Apple, Nvidia or any of the other major players have used aggresive monopolistic tactics. But the fact that we can't make a romantic doomsday pronouncement about their hegemony causes us to ignore them, in our fetishistic pursuit of editorial drama.
This is, more or less, the problem with a lot of contemporary media. It's either dogmatic or oriented towards the entertainment of the viewer. Information alone doesn't sell.
Now shut your god damn heathen mouth before I bomb you like we did those damn chinese in world war 2
I realise you're trolling, but even trolls usually keep their facts straight. Likely, you're kidding, but maybe you aren't aware that the United States was in military alliance with China throughout WW2. China's defence was for all intents and purposes, under American command and control and vast quantities of supplies, vehicles and armaments were transferred there (first, for the fight against the Japanese and, subsequent to the war, for the fight against the Communists).
Don't organize a protest, it will just make you look like wackoes infuriated because your channels for stealing music are being restricted. Protests did not work in the 60's
Ever heard of the civil rights movement? Yeah, that thing.
What you should do is find some independent musicians (not signed with any RIAA member) and get them to go down there and demand to be heard
A plethora of independent musicians already oppose the RIAA and the major labels. The (quite ironically) popular punk subculture and all its bands have been speaking out against it for years. Unfortunately, they just aren't listened to. The only bands who will be heard on these issues are bands that are already signed with major labels, and they are already impotent. Remember Offspring's attempt to release an album for free download over the web? Their label vetoed the idea. Sorry to sound like a cynic, but it seems only these popular bands can make and impact and it is they who are not allowed to.
While we can laugh off Microsoft's unwillingness to deal with state law not weighing towards their legal advantage, we have to confront a serious problem here. Microsoft products are still legal in 49 American states, and that's a threat that we have to deal with, and soon.
If Maryland can implement laws which make Microsoft shy away, so can the rest of the states. For example, cigarrette manufacturers, in Canada, are required to have large warning signs on packets, explaining that cigarrettes can cause heart disease, etc. Why don't the fun-loving, legalised-pot-smoking legislators in California, for example, implement a law requiring Microsoft to refer to itself only as "Microsuck" and Bill Gates only as "Herr William the Conqueror, Purveyor of Truth to the Unbelieving" on products and in marketing. It might be an effective measure.
Sure. You're right. Any nation of Canada's size (economically) would have the means to conduct something like NASA's space program. That, however, would have involved starving our poor and letting medicare and education go to waste. So far, only the USSR has had the guts to do that (although China is considering jumping on the bandwagon).
Canada could have sent a lander to the moon, like the USSR, but, because we cared about the other things in our budget, we didn't.
Don't belittle the great achievements of the species with petty economical arguments
My argument isn't economic. It's human. It is that, while putting money into the space program equates to great achievements for certain members of the species, it consumes funds which might be directed at the mere survival of others. I totally understand your perspective here. I place emotional value on human milestones too. Nevertheless, I can't seem to come up with any sort of ethical system which allows me to consider expenditures on these milestones as superior to expenditures on simple human needs (feeding and developing the third world). The pyramids were a great human milestone, but they were dependent on horribly mistreated, starved slaves for their construction. I can't see a milestone as an end in itself if its cost is human well-being (which NASA's and the Canadarm's funding could have gone to).
You're right. I do. So does anybody else who didn't get their history of lunar exploration off of commemorative postage stamps. I apologise for disseminating fact where it may be found to conflict with American nationalist propaganda. Should you, however, wish to endanger your grip on nationalist myth with historical matter of fact some time, you can go to Britannica's article on it or any other site which will tell you that, as I said, the Luna 9 lander was the first achieve a successful moon-landing. To quote Britannica
Luna 2 (launched Sept. 12, 1959) was the first spacecraft to strike the Moon, and Luna 3 (Oct. 4, 1959) made the first circumnavigation of the Moon and returned the first photographs of its far side. Luna 9 (Jan. 31, 1966) made the first successful lunar soft landing. Luna 16 (Sept. 12, 1970) was the first unmanned spacecraft to carry lunar soil samples back to Earth.
Thank you.
-Says landing on the moon was a waste anyway
What, exactly, is wrong with saying that the landing was a waste? The landing, in and of itself, was utterly pointless, I maintain. The research involved was valuable, but that could have been done, regardless, for a fraction of the cost. The remaining cash was spent on hubris.
-Says "architecture" in Washington, D.C. is "nationalist" (Hope he's not talking about the Vietnam War Memorial or Tomb of the Unknowns, he'll be stoking up some angry vets).
What purpose does the Washington Monument serve for humanity? It's not even the world's largest phallic symbol (that would be the CN Tower in Toronto). The same goes for the rows upon rows of Corinthian columns that line Washington streets. They're quite pretty, but that's all they are...I'm getting into a debate about aesthetics here, so I'll stop.
-Says the US should be less "nationalist". Meanwhile, we're expected to be the policemen, firefighters, and EMTs of the world. You can't do that without being a world power.
Why does a world power have to be nationalist? Furthermore, why does a policeman of neighbouring regions have to be a world power? Nigeria and South Africa do more for peace in Africa than the US ever will. They are hardly world powers. Finally, the US presence in many of these "police actions" has hardly been met warmly by the world. The 1954 Guatemalan police actions stands as one of the great tragedies of modern Latin American history. I'm not singling the US out, however. As a Canadian, I believe Canadians, too, should be far less nationalistic (especially the French, who verge on Soviet-style cultural nationalism). Canadian participation in the NATO bombing of Serbia (as a result of reports of genocide which were almost completely false) is something I'm not at all proud of.
Racism. This is definitely a problem. However, the World Human Rights Guide, in 1991 (I lack a more up-to-date source on this), named Finland the most advanced nation, in terms of "civil and political rights", on earth. Their list goes like this:
1. Finland 99%
2. Aotearoa/NZ 98%
    Denmark 98%
    Germany 98%
    Netherlands 98%
6. Czechoslovakia 97%
    Hungary 97%
    Norway 97%
9. Belgium 96%
    Switzerland 96%
(12. Canada 94%; 15. UK 93%; 17. Australia 91%; 18. US 90%.)
(remember, this is civil and political rights, not technological or economic development)
I'm a Canadian who just spent the weekend in Washington DC. I have to say, it's a beautiful city. Certainly more architecturally beautiful than anything Canada has to offer. However, when I consider the expense and manpower required to erect these great huge glorious pieces of nationalist symbology, I have to wonder what the point of it all is, in the long run. Canada has, more often than not, shunned meaningless nationalist ventures (often simply because it doesn't have the means to create them). I would like to keep it that way. Armstrong's lunar vacation didn't do anything for the human race (after all, the Russians had already had a successful moon landing with the Luna-9 well ahead of his arrival). It just fed the national imperialist urge to expand territories and claim foreign lands (in this case, an asteroid). I will be very dissappointed if Canada joins the field of space exploration in this way, in order to get a Canadian flag on the international space station. Hundreds of millions of dollars that could easily be saving the lives of, for example, thousands of Afghan refugees is, disturbingly, being put towards this hubristic interest in extraterrestrial phenomena which are, for the most part, only of scholarly interest, not of any sort of immediate human necessity. As interesting as Astronomy and the cosmogonies it develops are, Canada should be saving lives with funding for cancer and AIDS treatment programs before it looks to the stars.
The nordic nations, the Netherlands and Finland, in particular, have the best human rights and social development records on earth and they've never engaged in the kind of nationalistic nonsense from which the space race has proceeded (the Swedes have a space program, mind you). Canada (and the United States) should aspire to such progressiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
A paper on the death of print media? Why not just have web news story on the survival of newsprint dailies?
Many people have trashed this option for not being as cost-effective as cable or ADSL. True, for most people, it isn't anywhere near as cost-effective...for MOST people. For many people, particularly in Canada's sparsely populated north, cable and ADSL (and sometimes even dialup) simply aren't options. I spend my summers on a six-acre island on Lake Muskoka, Ontario. We get power and telephone from hideously expensive underwater lines that were laid connecting the island to a nearer, slightly larger island, which, in turn, paid a hideously large amount to lay its own lines, which connect it to the mainland. Not suprisingly, cable and ADSL aren't an option. Dialup isn't either. Dialup requires that I dial the nearest ISP and pay long distance charges to connect to it through what appears to be about 10^n hops back to the central server somewhere in the Orion Nebula. Satellite Internet, therefore, is a fabulous option for me, even at this price. It's not the be-all and end-all of Internet access, but it'll certainly help bridge the "digital divide" whereby people in remote areas were the last, if they ever did, to get dialup, adsl and cable, respectively.
"Safety will improve. Troublemakers will be identified early, as data-mining software flags behavior in children that leads to crime, sparking remedial programs."
Watch out, kiddies. Play Chaotic Evil in Baldur's Gate VII, when our digital dystopia has been realised and you may just get a knock at your door from the FBI.
Do I get in trouble if the government's spy software catches me wantonly killing NPCs, or just if they catch me PKing?
The Pequistes who began rewriting French to be free of foreign influence (e.g., the state declared "web" to be, henceforth, "oueb") don't seem to be aware that enforcing the insular nature of Quebec French is the most efficient way they could possibly kill the language. No lingua franca, spoken by a large majority within its region, as is French, ever died because of foreign signage and loan-words. Take the below sentence, for example:
"Language is a constantly changing art"
The only words in that sentence that English didn't borrow from French are "is" and "a". "language, "constant", "change" and "art" are all French loan-words. Similarly, French borrowed them from Latin. The fact that French coexisted with English as a major language of England after the Norman conquest and lent it much of its vocabularly didn't impede English's eventual emergence as a trade language. In fact, becoming a trade language is specifically what saved English. If Quebec French attempts to isolate itself from trade and engineer a linguistic-supremicist "High French", it's sealing its own fate and assuring its demise.
If there's a way to make optical drives what they originally were (3.5 times the size of the largest hard drive available), then more power to the manufacturers, but 80GB drives are old news and 240GB optical disks seem unlikely for the moment (and don't tell me about any of these silly vapourware utopian optical storage solutions Slashdot has harped on in the past).
With all the insane things that are currently running on my EM-500 as it is (e.g., Pocket Hexen and Pocket Doom ) that I'll believe anything is possible on those plucky little PPCs (yes, it's a microsoft OS, but their pocket gaming API has turned out pretty well and they're exponentially faster than the new Palms, so I'm willing to forgive them).
- John Keats
I have many times had this aesthetic argument with math and physics students. It took a long time, but we eventually came to the following consensus on the aesthetics of science:
Scientific fact, in and of itself, is as completely devoid of artistic interest, as any fact is. The mere cold fact of the way in which paint was arranged on a piece of canvas to create the Mona Lisa is devoid of aesthetic value. Only a human interpretation of the meaning of this arrangement of paints can yield aesthetic worth. Therefore, for example, while the theory of relativity is, in and of itself, without merit as art, by an interpretation of its implications to humanity, it can gain meaning. The exciting thing about it is that we DON'T understand it completely. We can make all manner of wild romantic ponderings on its meaning with regard to light-speed travel and all sorts of fantasies. It's only because we don't understand it that we can make these ponderings, however. If we had a complete and thorough "scientific" knowledge of its (or "the theory of everything"'s) meaning and nature, light-speed travel or time travel, for that matter, would be either 1) recognised as impossible or 2) as matter-of-fact as travel at greater than the speed of sound.
The only reason science is interesting is because it entails mystery (if it didn't, there would be nothing more to investigate) and uncovers new topics for us to consider in wonder. Unfortunately, while it does this, it disproves the things that we used to wonder at (like a 6,000-year-old earth and Thor weilding his thunderbolts from the clouds). The end result is that the only things that we have to wonder at any more are so incredibly abstruse that only scientists can explore them. The common man used to be able, as the above poster noted, to look up into the stars and wonder even what they might be. Unfortunately, these wonders within the reach of the common man have already been explained. The worm holes, dark matter and Uncertainty which remain the wonders of today are somewhat beyond his grasp.
I think this is all summed up in a quote from David Hume:
The anatomist is useful to the painter"
The scientist investigating the human body and the artist who depicts it work hand in hand to create the final product. This is perhaps a consensus to be made between scientific and artistic aesthetics.
Russia was similarly successful in avoiding fungal monikers. Sputnik, however, might be considered only a minor success, mind you, as it makes the mistake of being most easily likened to a sound you make when you sneeze.
I find this most fascinating from a psychological standpoint. As I look at these pictures and consider their age, I am unable to conceive of the concept of looking on a scene from this time period in full colour. All my life, I've seen the world of these years in black and white. To see them in colour is to deconstruct a piece of the allure that surrounds them. As Marshall Mcluhan would argue, the medium here, is, indeed, the message. To change the medium is to completely change the way I have been taught to view the period. The black and white medium alienates me from the people the past, providing me, through its imperfection, a way to differentiate present reality from past reality. By removing this alienating force, I find myself able to identify with the time in which these photos were taken in a way that is so new and different that I find it disturbing. The power of images in creating a "global village" is something that Mcluhan talked about at length. Perhaps these images of the past help bridge differences between past and present in the same way that TV images help bridge differences between western and eastern hemisphere.
technology is going to change so much in the next 20 years that we can't begin to imagine what we will and won't be able to do
This really depends on your perspective. Some neo-futurists (with whom I agree) have started taking a different look at technology, which is more in terms of a "punctuated equilibria" style of development. That is to say, development of technology occurs in tremendous bursts of advancement, rather than on a linear, continual basis. On the basis of older futurism, people would be prone to suggest, for example (as, indeed, they did), in the early-20th century, that radio technology would develop to such an extent that our society would be completely transformed by way of traditional commercial radio broadcasts. Of course, this wasn't the case at all. Other, completely unpredictable developments (e.g., data processing, digital telecommunications) usurped the technological limelight from radio, which stayed largely static. I see futurists treating computers, today, much as they treated radio in the past.
Along these lines, I'd say that suggesting technology, especially with regard to something as incredibly specific as aircraft, is going to drastically change in the next 20 years is an unfounded suggestion. There may well be a lull in development, in which only previous technologies are advanced, and new ones are not invented (i.e., no punctuation in our equilibria).
Even were our experience of past development to support the theory that future development will be exponential, that argument would be essentially baseless. The inductive historical approach which says that our experience of development in the future will match our experience of development in the past is just based on the fact that, in the past, our experience of comparing the past to the future has yielded a predicted future similar to the past. The argument is copmletely circular and, therefore, invalid (though adequately abstruse that most people miss the logical fallacy).
Now if they can just make a veggie-powered computer, coders will be set for life. With all the organic waste stacked around the average programmer's comp (day old pizza, last week's coffee, doritos) he could power the thing for a year!
So someone's lawyers decided that each ring is worth a value of exactly 7.5 cents. Who comes up with these figures?
I have just now decided that each post I write on Slashdot is worth a value of exactly YOUR SOUL. Please, upon your having completed the reading of this post, return said soul to the possession of its rightful owner, screwballicus@hotmail.com with all speed. Thank you.
Unless they lock all our computers in glass cases and leave us without a single port to access, we'll still be able to record this stuff to our heart's delight. This is all hullabaloo.
All of our contracts give HavenCo the right to cancel at will if the customer's web site or service is endangering our access to Internet connectivity, reasons for which spam is typically #1. Our advanced technical anti-spam and anti-attack techniques will prevent all customers from using our services for this purpose, and we will respond promptly to any complaints of spam.
While I think we can all agree with their choice to ban use of servers for spam on the basis that it could seriously endanger their business, what does this imply about their provision of other taboo services? If someone sets up Napster2 on Sealand, will it be shut down on this same basis, that it "is endangering [their] access to Internet connectivity"?
Sealand could face some major flak if they serve as a safe-harbour to exiled Internet services and they may simply not be willing to allow that flak to threaten their operations, as Spam would.
Seems like every time you join a multiplayer game these days, there has to be ONE extrasolar spacecraft with a ping of 21 hours dragging the rest of the players down.
How about someone tries to portscan the bastard? At 21 hours a shot We'll have covered Netbios, HTTP and FTP before the month is out.
This is, more or less, the problem with a lot of contemporary media. It's either dogmatic or oriented towards the entertainment of the viewer. Information alone doesn't sell.
So my question is, by responding to you, am I advancing the irony by responding to a troll once again?
I realise you're trolling, but even trolls usually keep their facts straight. Likely, you're kidding, but maybe you aren't aware that the United States was in military alliance with China throughout WW2. China's defence was for all intents and purposes, under American command and control and vast quantities of supplies, vehicles and armaments were transferred there (first, for the fight against the Japanese and, subsequent to the war, for the fight against the Communists).
Now just fill up that clear case with a non-conducting, oxygenated liquid, throw in some gold fish and watch them munch the algae off your mainboard!
Ever heard of the civil rights movement? Yeah, that thing.
What you should do is find some independent musicians (not signed with any RIAA member) and get them to go down there and demand to be heard
A plethora of independent musicians already oppose the RIAA and the major labels. The (quite ironically) popular punk subculture and all its bands have been speaking out against it for years. Unfortunately, they just aren't listened to. The only bands who will be heard on these issues are bands that are already signed with major labels, and they are already impotent. Remember Offspring's attempt to release an album for free download over the web? Their label vetoed the idea. Sorry to sound like a cynic, but it seems only these popular bands can make and impact and it is they who are not allowed to.
While we can laugh off Microsoft's unwillingness to deal with state law not weighing towards their legal advantage, we have to confront a serious problem here. Microsoft products are still legal in 49 American states, and that's a threat that we have to deal with, and soon.
If Maryland can implement laws which make Microsoft shy away, so can the rest of the states. For example, cigarrette manufacturers, in Canada, are required to have large warning signs on packets, explaining that cigarrettes can cause heart disease, etc. Why don't the fun-loving, legalised-pot-smoking legislators in California, for example, implement a law requiring Microsoft to refer to itself only as "Microsuck" and Bill Gates only as "Herr William the Conqueror, Purveyor of Truth to the Unbelieving" on products and in marketing. It might be an effective measure.
Don't belittle the great achievements of the species with petty economical arguments
My argument isn't economic. It's human. It is that, while putting money into the space program equates to great achievements for certain members of the species, it consumes funds which might be directed at the mere survival of others. I totally understand your perspective here. I place emotional value on human milestones too. Nevertheless, I can't seem to come up with any sort of ethical system which allows me to consider expenditures on these milestones as superior to expenditures on simple human needs (feeding and developing the third world). The pyramids were a great human milestone, but they were dependent on horribly mistreated, starved slaves for their construction. I can't see a milestone as an end in itself if its cost is human well-being (which NASA's and the Canadarm's funding could have gone to).
-Says Russia got to the moon first
You're right. I do. So does anybody else who didn't get their history of lunar exploration off of commemorative postage stamps. I apologise for disseminating fact where it may be found to conflict with American nationalist propaganda. Should you, however, wish to endanger your grip on nationalist myth with historical matter of fact some time, you can go to Britannica's article on it or any other site which will tell you that, as I said, the Luna 9 lander was the first achieve a successful moon-landing. To quote Britannica
Luna 2 (launched Sept. 12, 1959) was the first spacecraft to strike the Moon, and Luna 3 (Oct. 4, 1959) made the first circumnavigation of the Moon and returned the first photographs of its far side. Luna 9 (Jan. 31, 1966) made the first successful lunar soft landing. Luna 16 (Sept. 12, 1970) was the first unmanned spacecraft to carry lunar soil samples back to Earth. Thank you.
-Says landing on the moon was a waste anyway
What, exactly, is wrong with saying that the landing was a waste? The landing, in and of itself, was utterly pointless, I maintain. The research involved was valuable, but that could have been done, regardless, for a fraction of the cost. The remaining cash was spent on hubris.
-Says "architecture" in Washington, D.C. is "nationalist" (Hope he's not talking about the Vietnam War Memorial or Tomb of the Unknowns, he'll be stoking up some angry vets).
What purpose does the Washington Monument serve for humanity? It's not even the world's largest phallic symbol (that would be the CN Tower in Toronto). The same goes for the rows upon rows of Corinthian columns that line Washington streets. They're quite pretty, but that's all they are...I'm getting into a debate about aesthetics here, so I'll stop.
-Says the US should be less "nationalist". Meanwhile, we're expected to be the policemen, firefighters, and EMTs of the world. You can't do that without being a world power.
Why does a world power have to be nationalist? Furthermore, why does a policeman of neighbouring regions have to be a world power? Nigeria and South Africa do more for peace in Africa than the US ever will. They are hardly world powers. Finally, the US presence in many of these "police actions" has hardly been met warmly by the world. The 1954 Guatemalan police actions stands as one of the great tragedies of modern Latin American history. I'm not singling the US out, however. As a Canadian, I believe Canadians, too, should be far less nationalistic (especially the French, who verge on Soviet-style cultural nationalism). Canadian participation in the NATO bombing of Serbia (as a result of reports of genocide which were almost completely false) is something I'm not at all proud of.
1. Finland 99%
2. Aotearoa/NZ 98%
    Denmark 98%
    Germany 98%
    Netherlands 98%
6. Czechoslovakia 97%
    Hungary 97%
    Norway 97%
9. Belgium 96%
    Switzerland 96%
(12. Canada 94%; 15. UK 93%; 17. Australia 91%; 18. US 90%.)
(remember, this is civil and political rights, not technological or economic development)
The nordic nations, the Netherlands and Finland, in particular, have the best human rights and social development records on earth and they've never engaged in the kind of nationalistic nonsense from which the space race has proceeded (the Swedes have a space program, mind you). Canada (and the United States) should aspire to such progressiveness.