He's been last seen getting arrested for "protesting" the Putin regime (actually, he was picked up off the street just for suspicion that he was going to). Good for him. With his brains, he could probably beat Putin from inside a cell, and may have to.:^(
This is not funny. Someone's taken this very seriously, and though YOU and I can see it's a joke, there are many people, many of them members of NOW, who will not get it.
This is about as funny to me as a "How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" joke is to them.
Thanks so much. Yup. As I suspected, these jokers couldn't even be bothered to hook their subjects up to a pulseoximeter to see if there was any physical response that would increase aptitude.
Here's some real poisoning. Estrogen has been correlated with increased risk of breast cancer in pre-menopausal and menopausal women, and can highly accelerate tumor's growth if it is present.
but a dear friend passed away from a massive tumor that developed in a mere 6 months while on estrogen therapy for menopause. She was clear of cancer earlier on, and six months later had a golf ball sized tumor that stunned her specialists. When she was put into chemotherapy, the doctor specifically put her on a drug that counters estrogen tumor enlargement, and the tumor responded dramatically to that "anti-estrogen," but the cancer had already reached her spinal fluid...
This is *real* poisoning. Be very cautious of any hormone treatment. Spread the word.
I can think of another theory which would fit the results...
How about people who have higher testosterone levels get bigger (or quicker) *adrenal responses*? Did these scientists check any other hormone levels? Did they have subjects hooked up to a pulse/ox monitor? Did they check adrenal response, and/or other fight-or-flight factors, when they administered their test?
I have worked in a University psych department, and though it is not mentioned in the article, I doubt they had these subjects hooked up to so much as a *pulse/ox*. Most psychologists tend to divorce the brain from the body. It is foolish. The brain is just another organ, and we need to stop treating it like it is somehow mystically separate from the body. Especially scientists, who should be ashamed of themselves for doing so.
News flash: Your brain is hooked up to your cardiovascular system, and if that gets goosed, your brain, if it can stand the strain, is going to be more efficient.
I want to know what the subjects' heart rates were when they saw that angry face.
But rather than investigating the obvious suggestion of a physical response to negative stimulus, these dopes claim that such men ENJOY seeing an angry face instead? Malarkey. I doubt *any* subject would agree with the sentence: "I like angry faces."
I think the only goal of this study was to put down men, and how perverse we apparently are. These are politicians, not scientists, and when they collect data that may indicate that testosterone can confer limited advantage in crisis, they perversely claim that men *relish* anger, because no matter what data came back, that's what they've set out to "prove."
Of course, there is the ugly fact that MY explanation might have us reviewing the concept of female combat brigades again, and that is politically unacceptable to these "scientists."
"Guess What? Men _Are_ More Naturally Able When Confronting Hostility" (Can you imagine that headline?)
But honestly, we can give female soldiers shots of testosterone to improve their combat readiness if my theory is correct. What can we do when we draw the *wrong* conclusion: that men "enjoy" anger? Ban men? Didn't Maureen Dowd write a book about that?
God save us from politicians, and their damned lies, statistics, and correlative studies.
-- Toro
Next study, "high testosterone" males more likely to shoot off angry emails without thinking!
Imagine what the historians and archaeologists are going to do with these doorstops. The quest for perfect data security is beginning to sound an awful lot like the final pages of _Fahrenheit 451_.
I'd mod you up if I could. You're right, and that highlights some shoddy thinking on my part, because I specifically mentioned that Verizon was sharing their *own customer data*, and that the headline was misleading.
The only right we have regarding that is to use one of their competitors.
However, the indiscriminate monitoring of all American domestic and international communications by the NSA is something that has to be addressed, and that *is* a fourth amendment issue, and I highly doubt that any American communications carrier is not bending over backwards to provide illegal wiretapping to that agency, in addition to the the customer data so that the tapping is no longer anonymous. The combination is an end run around our Constitutional guarantees.
So I guess we're back to the fourth amendment, and if this first amendment canard is taken seriously and the courts look deeply enough into the awful, unconstitutional behavior of our communications carriers, we have the makings of a severe political scandal that implicates every Presidency since, at least, the Nixon administration.
First off, shame on Verizon for undermining the first and fourth amendments by pitting them in direct opposition to one another. I'm really unhappy with the clever corporate lawyer who came up with this idea, and his brilliant "strategy" will do nothing but undermine at least one if not both of those amendments. What the hell happened to discretion?
After all, there is a big difference between what is legal and what is ethical.
There is no compromise here. Free speech is about EXPRESSION, not CONTENT. You do not have the right to express any CONTENT you wish. In this case, our privacy and right against unreasonable search is protected by law, and the CONTENT protected by those laws may not be EXPRESSED without permission, in the exact same way that your photo may not be published without your permission.
So either the first amendment will now be weakened by the precedent, hamstringing companies about how they may internally use consumer data (or even if they may retain it beyond the billing cycle), or an unjust ruling will weaken the fourth amendment. Way to go Verizon legal team!
I'm betting on the fourth amendment this time. Clever lawyers are killing their own companies. They should consider the stakes before raising such arguments. Discretion is everything in law.
On a lesser note, shame on Slashdot for reporting that Verizon's delivering call logs to the NSA is anything but data, used to corroborate and mine the substantive assets of NSA wiretapping of our communications grid that has gone on since at least the Nixon administration.
Editors, if you have a problem with the NSA, criticize the NSA for "wiretapping," not Verizon. Verizon is delivering *consumer data*, not the contents or verbiage of phone calls. It is not "wiretapping," it is data mining. Data mining is bad enough, but please be accurate because this is not entertainment news. This is really quite important.
The Supreme Court and the body of legal precedent disagree with you. The "Right To Privacy" is a 9th amendment non-enumerated right granted by a number of decisions. It is a matter of established law.
The precedent of granting personal rights to corporate entities is one of the greatest legal mistakes this Union has ever made and is responsible, in no small part, for the mess we are in today.
Only people should have rights. "Entities," such as corporations, should have "powers" that they can exercise in opposition to personal rights. Our personal rights are greater than the powers of the government. That guarantee of personal freedom from egregious abuse of power, in any form, is what preserves liberty. There are some things an "entity" should not be allowed to do to an individual.
Instead, we have corporate entities with "personal rights" becoming the exact same oppressive and arbitrary tyrants this country was trying to escape all those years ago. Admittedly, this happened because no one had the prescience to see that these companies would become such enormous pseudogovernmental enterprises.
But at this point, we either have to break them up into rational sized businesses, or change the law entirely. The current situation is intolerable.
First off, shame on Slashdot for reporting that Verizon's delivering call logs to the NSA is anything but data, used to corroborate and mine the substantive assets of NSA wiretapping of our communications grid that has gone on since at least the Nixon administration.
Editors, if you have a problem with the NSA, criticize the NSA, not Verizon. Verizon is delivering *consumer data*, not the contents or verbiage of phone calls. It is not "wiretapping," it is data mining. Data mining is bad enough, but be accurate here because this is important.
Secondly, shame on Verizon for undermining the first and fourth amendments by pitting them in direct opposition to one another. I'm really unhappy with the clever corporate lawyer who came up with this idea, and his brilliant "strategy" will do nothing but undermine at least one if not both of those amendments. What the hell happened to discretion?
After all, there is a big difference between what is LEGAL and what is ETHICAL.
There is no compromise here. Free speech is about EXPRESSION, not CONTENT. You do not have the right to express any CONTENT you wish. In this case, our privacy and right against unreasonable search is protected by law, and the CONTENT protected by those laws may not be EXPRESSED without our permission, in the exact same way that your photo may not be published without your permission.
So the first amendment will now be weakened by the precedent, hamstringing companies about how they may internally use consumer data (or even if they may retain it beyond the billing cycle), or an unjust ruling will weaken the fourth amendment. Way to go Verizon legal team!
I'm betting on the fourth amendment this time. Clever lawyers are killing their own companies. They should consider the stakes before raising such arguments. Discretion is everything in law.
The non-violent games you mention do not allow players to create custom maps of their town or school. That was the criteria I specified. The problem I pointed out is that they have a choice between a) $600 architectural software or b) a $30 FPS, and they're going to wind up with the FPS. The lack of a peaceful choice for any creative person is astounding.
And a 15-16 year old is still a kid in my book. How old are you that you think a 16-year-old is no longer a child? Most people don't become adults until they're well out of college these days.
Finally, I don't have to design a non-violent game that 15-18 year old males would like to play, because the designs already exist. I played "SimCity" a lot at that age, and any "builder game" which stresses building a working, functional design would meet the criteria. "The Sims," if it let the user embark on a full scale civic engineering project, would handily fit the bill.
I also played a lot of puzzle games, like "Pipe Dreams" and "Sokoban." Any puzzle game is generally non-violent, and some let you build your own puzzles. Thus, peace and creative outlet for your intelligent 14-18 year old.
And let's not forget the obvious: Any game that has anything to do with sex would fit the bill. But GOD we can't have that. Better that they learn how to handle an assault rifle than a girl's breast.
Name one *peaceful* video game where he would have the opportunity to create a map? Why are all the "virtual reality" games we play about wielding AK47's and rocket launchers (or swords and crossbows) in an attempt to save the human race from "Evil?"
Is he sick for making a map of what he knows, with the only tools he was given, or are *we* sick for giving him no VR outlet other than FPS killing fields?
I don't believe the games are a cause of violence, but our violent natures and limited, dichotomous "good vs. evil" paradigms most certainly are the cause of the games. It's an ugly reflection on our culture that this kid couldn't fire up some cheap CAD software alternative, and had only "killing games" to model with.
Give this kid a peaceful outlet, like SimCity, and you no longer have a problem. He can build his hometown and hit it with a tornado if he likes.;^)
For the past 5 years, when I've gone to look at computer games, the overwhelming majority of them are wargames. What are *we* preparing our children for?
Don't ask for a socio-political housecleaning. There has never been one that was not a massacre. The guillotine was *invented* with such a purpose in mind, and the Jacobean's were only trying to help when it started.
I understand your outrage, but please be responsible when expressing the sentiment. We do need a political restructuring, but it must be done through the proper channels and carefully. No maid can do it for us, it's going to take the full political involvement of at least half of our disillusioned electorate.
So far we have about as many *true* political participants as there were Communist party members in the USSR. Voting is not enough.
Or deceiving and backstabbing a company, IBM, that had a richly deserved monopoly based on quality business products, typewriters, and then degenerated into a corrupt superpower, dependent on a bunch of crooks who claimed to be people who can write software.
(They *bought* PC-DOS.)
I just keep waiting for a Scandinavian to show up and kill everyone but Claudius.
But poor, mad Linux just keeps monologuing the "To be or not to be" speech.
It goes like this: "To free, or not to free..."
Hamlet too had an identity crisis, and look what happened to him!;^)
And I assume this is an "either/or" because you are rhetorically challenged?
You *can* have it both ways. Despite the fact that there are currently major defections, and this will hurt MS, in 2 years, the monopoly OEM agreements and end-of-service status (by MS fiat) of XP will make MS Vista king by default, and we'll all be forced into a crap product.
So we can thrash all we like (option B) in the interim, but Microsoft has made defection VERY painful, by creating barriers to defection (training, proprietary formats) and arbitrarily declaring planned obsolescence periods (reality A).
That much should be obvious.
Less obvious is the fact that planned obsolescence is a necessary business practice when everyone uses the same thing. There's no reason to switch if there's nothing to switch to.
Totalitarian structures work because DESPITE the lively debate and all indications of competition, the authorities still win because there is no other place to go. The barrier to defection is too large.
I predict chaos for 2 years as another crap product creates a sense of FUD in the computer market, and MS's choice of either a) Extended XP Product-life, or b) fixing Vista, probably by reverting to XP API's and code. I suspect DX10 is a goner.
I think MS will choose (b).
As long as we accept that monoculture is necessary, MS is the only one making the choices.
Honestly, I reached that point when I saw my first 386. I remember telling my Dad, "No one needs this." I was 20.
I'm posting with an Athlon 3200+, and having less fun and productivity now. I was right, only desktop publishers and those who wish to make money by selling something useless needed more than the 386. The Word Processing and Spreadsheet has gotten no better, and the Internet is more and more annoying. Especially those sites done entirely in Flash.
The games are fun, but do we all need personally edited family video DVD's with effects?
I don't think Moore ever foresaw a situation where we couldn't USE the transistors to improve single processor power. The letter of Moore's Law is still true, but the spirit is broken.
So what if we can fit 20 processors on a single die, if each one of those processors has reached a functional plateau? Our languages and methods are still largely designed for a single processor.
Gee folks, it might be a good idea to finally shuffle off the mortal coil of the last remnants of the X86 architecture. Otherwise, I suspect SMP multi-cores are going to be very disappointing.
Since the X86 is the legacy he helped pioneer, his "Law" is now irrelevant. The number of transistors, while notable, no longer means the same thing.
"B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communications"
This, in my opinion, includes *any* computer connected to the Internet.
That's because every Internet client you ever run is "used in communications." Clients are all communications applications, by definition, and the scope of the proposed monitoring is not limited to just the app, while it is involved in interstate communications, but is instead the entire computer, whenever, if the apps it has loaded are capable of interstate communications.
They call this status "protected," but what they really seem to mean is untrustworthy or suspicious. It's Orwellian doublespeak. This is just "Trustworthy computing," writ far too large for my tastes. We won't buy it and they can't sell it or even make it work right (Vista ME II), so now they're going to try to ram it down our throats via techniques developed by criminals, with the support of laws written by corrupt politicians.
And at that point, you have to start wondering if there's a point in making a distinction between the criminals who invented spyware, and the criminals who want this bill to succeed.
Spying is justifiable, in a court of law, and should only take place with a warrant obtained either in a FISA Court or publicly. Unmonitored computers are no more suspicious than unmonitored people.
And forbids parts of H.R. 964, as I read. (c.f.: Amendment 4.);^)
"Prevention" is not an excuse for wiretapping, which is what legal spyware for certain "trusted" parties is. Blanket wiretapping. I need to talk to someone down at Ft. Meade. I'll take the NSA over corporate America as my "Guardian" (shades of Ultima VII) any day.
Don't be so thankful just yet. You just try and blackhole the entire United States of America as you attempt to use the Internet. Do you use Google or YouTube? Do you want every transaction you ever make with networks within our borders logged and stored as privately owned data, and open for use in the purposes of "detecting or preventing fraudulent activities?"
Possibly/sans/ warrant? (if my feeble legal skills aren't off)
This is an international issue, because it is an *Inter*net. You can live without us, but do you really want to?
Slashdot Mirror
...and eventually took up more useful causes.
:^(
He's been last seen getting arrested for "protesting" the Putin regime (actually, he was picked up off the street just for suspicion that he was going to). Good for him. With his brains, he could probably beat Putin from inside a cell, and may have to.
--
Toro
This is not funny. Someone's taken this very seriously, and though YOU and I can see it's a joke, there are many people, many of them members of NOW, who will not get it.
This is about as funny to me as a "How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" joke is to them.
The punchline? "That's not funny."
--
Toro
Thanks so much. Yup. As I suspected, these jokers couldn't even be bothered to hook their subjects up to a pulseoximeter to see if there was any physical response that would increase aptitude.
:^(
What a waste of time.
--
Toro
Testosterone poisoning?
i ng-Women/dp/089793198X
o ut/2006/04/11/hscout532075.html
Here's some real poisoning. Estrogen has been correlated with increased risk of breast cancer in pre-menopausal and menopausal women, and can highly accelerate tumor's growth if it is present.
http://www.amazon.com/Estrogen-Breast-Cancer-Warn
There are those who say this isn't true,
http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hsc
but a dear friend passed away from a massive tumor that developed in a mere 6 months while on estrogen therapy for menopause. She was clear of cancer earlier on, and six months later had a golf ball sized tumor that stunned her specialists. When she was put into chemotherapy, the doctor specifically put her on a drug that counters estrogen tumor enlargement, and the tumor responded dramatically to that "anti-estrogen," but the cancer had already reached her spinal fluid...
This is *real* poisoning. Be very cautious of any hormone treatment. Spread the word.
--
Toro
I can think of another theory which would fit the results...
How about people who have higher testosterone levels get bigger (or quicker) *adrenal responses*? Did these scientists check any other hormone levels? Did they have subjects hooked up to a pulse/ox monitor? Did they check adrenal response, and/or other fight-or-flight factors, when they administered their test?
I have worked in a University psych department, and though it is not mentioned in the article, I doubt they had these subjects hooked up to so much as a *pulse/ox*. Most psychologists tend to divorce the brain from the body. It is foolish. The brain is just another organ, and we need to stop treating it like it is somehow mystically separate from the body. Especially scientists, who should be ashamed of themselves for doing so.
News flash: Your brain is hooked up to your cardiovascular system, and if that gets goosed, your brain, if it can stand the strain, is going to be more efficient.
I want to know what the subjects' heart rates were when they saw that angry face.
But rather than investigating the obvious suggestion of a physical response to negative stimulus, these dopes claim that such men ENJOY seeing an angry face instead? Malarkey. I doubt *any* subject would agree with the sentence: "I like angry faces."
I think the only goal of this study was to put down men, and how perverse we apparently are. These are politicians, not scientists, and when they collect data that may indicate that testosterone can confer limited advantage in crisis, they perversely claim that men *relish* anger, because no matter what data came back, that's what they've set out to "prove."
Of course, there is the ugly fact that MY explanation might have us reviewing the concept of female combat brigades again, and that is politically unacceptable to these "scientists."
"Guess What? Men _Are_ More Naturally Able When Confronting Hostility" (Can you imagine that headline?)
But honestly, we can give female soldiers shots of testosterone to improve their combat readiness if my theory is correct. What can we do when we draw the *wrong* conclusion: that men "enjoy" anger? Ban men? Didn't Maureen Dowd write a book about that?
God save us from politicians, and their damned lies, statistics, and correlative studies.
--
Toro
Next study, "high testosterone" males more likely to shoot off angry emails without thinking!
Now you're talking. "Instant lunch" is gonna kill all of us geeks one of these days.
Never eat anything that TASTES like CTHULHU!
--
Toro
...is a message in a HERMETICALLY SEALED bottle?
Imagine what the historians and archaeologists are going to do with these doorstops. The quest for perfect data security is beginning to sound an awful lot like the final pages of _Fahrenheit 451_.
--
Toro
I'd mod you up if I could. You're right, and that highlights some shoddy thinking on my part, because I specifically mentioned that Verizon was sharing their *own customer data*, and that the headline was misleading.
The only right we have regarding that is to use one of their competitors.
However, the indiscriminate monitoring of all American domestic and international communications by the NSA is something that has to be addressed, and that *is* a fourth amendment issue, and I highly doubt that any American communications carrier is not bending over backwards to provide illegal wiretapping to that agency, in addition to the the customer data so that the tapping is no longer anonymous. The combination is an end run around our Constitutional guarantees.
So I guess we're back to the fourth amendment, and if this first amendment canard is taken seriously and the courts look deeply enough into the awful, unconstitutional behavior of our communications carriers, we have the makings of a severe political scandal that implicates every Presidency since, at least, the Nixon administration.
God Bless America.
--
Toro
First off, shame on Verizon for undermining the first and fourth amendments by pitting them in direct opposition to one another. I'm really unhappy with the clever corporate lawyer who came up with this idea, and his brilliant "strategy" will do nothing but undermine at least one if not both of those amendments. What the hell happened to discretion?
After all, there is a big difference between what is legal and what is ethical.
There is no compromise here. Free speech is about EXPRESSION, not CONTENT. You do not have the right to express any CONTENT you wish. In this case, our privacy and right against unreasonable search is protected by law, and the CONTENT protected by those laws may not be EXPRESSED without permission, in the exact same way that your photo may not be published without your permission.
So either the first amendment will now be weakened by the precedent, hamstringing companies about how they may internally use consumer data (or even if they may retain it beyond the billing cycle), or an unjust ruling will weaken the fourth amendment. Way to go Verizon legal team!
I'm betting on the fourth amendment this time. Clever lawyers are killing their own companies. They should consider the stakes before raising such arguments. Discretion is everything in law.
On a lesser note, shame on Slashdot for reporting that Verizon's delivering call logs to the NSA is anything but data, used to corroborate and mine the substantive assets of NSA wiretapping of our communications grid that has gone on since at least the Nixon administration.
Editors, if you have a problem with the NSA, criticize the NSA for "wiretapping," not Verizon. Verizon is delivering *consumer data*, not the contents or verbiage of phone calls. It is not "wiretapping," it is data mining. Data mining is bad enough, but please be accurate because this is not entertainment news. This is really quite important.
--
Toro
Mod this guy up!
The Supreme Court and the body of legal precedent disagree with you. The "Right To Privacy" is a 9th amendment non-enumerated right granted by a number of decisions. It is a matter of established law.
--
Toro
The precedent of granting personal rights to corporate entities is one of the greatest legal mistakes this Union has ever made and is responsible, in no small part, for the mess we are in today.
Only people should have rights. "Entities," such as corporations, should have "powers" that they can exercise in opposition to personal rights. Our personal rights are greater than the powers of the government. That guarantee of personal freedom from egregious abuse of power, in any form, is what preserves liberty. There are some things an "entity" should not be allowed to do to an individual.
Instead, we have corporate entities with "personal rights" becoming the exact same oppressive and arbitrary tyrants this country was trying to escape all those years ago. Admittedly, this happened because no one had the prescience to see that these companies would become such enormous pseudogovernmental enterprises.
But at this point, we either have to break them up into rational sized businesses, or change the law entirely. The current situation is intolerable.
A dark day in Santa Clara indeed.
--
Toro
First off, shame on Slashdot for reporting that Verizon's delivering call logs to the NSA is anything but data, used to corroborate and mine the substantive assets of NSA wiretapping of our communications grid that has gone on since at least the Nixon administration.
Editors, if you have a problem with the NSA, criticize the NSA, not Verizon. Verizon is delivering *consumer data*, not the contents or verbiage of phone calls. It is not "wiretapping," it is data mining. Data mining is bad enough, but be accurate here because this is important.
Secondly, shame on Verizon for undermining the first and fourth amendments by pitting them in direct opposition to one another. I'm really unhappy with the clever corporate lawyer who came up with this idea, and his brilliant "strategy" will do nothing but undermine at least one if not both of those amendments. What the hell happened to discretion?
After all, there is a big difference between what is LEGAL and what is ETHICAL.
There is no compromise here. Free speech is about EXPRESSION, not CONTENT. You do not have the right to express any CONTENT you wish. In this case, our privacy and right against unreasonable search is protected by law, and the CONTENT protected by those laws may not be EXPRESSED without our permission, in the exact same way that your photo may not be published without your permission.
So the first amendment will now be weakened by the precedent, hamstringing companies about how they may internally use consumer data (or even if they may retain it beyond the billing cycle), or an unjust ruling will weaken the fourth amendment. Way to go Verizon legal team!
I'm betting on the fourth amendment this time. Clever lawyers are killing their own companies. They should consider the stakes before raising such arguments. Discretion is everything in law.
--
Toro
The non-violent games you mention do not allow players to create custom maps of their town or school. That was the criteria I specified. The problem I pointed out is that they have a choice between a) $600 architectural software or b) a $30 FPS, and they're going to wind up with the FPS. The lack of a peaceful choice for any creative person is astounding.
And a 15-16 year old is still a kid in my book. How old are you that you think a 16-year-old is no longer a child? Most people don't become adults until they're well out of college these days.
Finally, I don't have to design a non-violent game that 15-18 year old males would like to play, because the designs already exist. I played "SimCity" a lot at that age, and any "builder game" which stresses building a working, functional design would meet the criteria. "The Sims," if it let the user embark on a full scale civic engineering project, would handily fit the bill.
I also played a lot of puzzle games, like "Pipe Dreams" and "Sokoban." Any puzzle game is generally non-violent, and some let you build your own puzzles. Thus, peace and creative outlet for your intelligent 14-18 year old.
And let's not forget the obvious: Any game that has anything to do with sex would fit the bill. But GOD we can't have that. Better that they learn how to handle an assault rifle than a girl's breast.
--
Toro
Name one *peaceful* video game where he would have the opportunity to create a map? Why are all the "virtual reality" games we play about wielding AK47's and rocket launchers (or swords and crossbows) in an attempt to save the human race from "Evil?"
;^)
Is he sick for making a map of what he knows, with the only tools he was given, or are *we* sick for giving him no VR outlet other than FPS killing fields?
I don't believe the games are a cause of violence, but our violent natures and limited, dichotomous "good vs. evil" paradigms most certainly are the cause of the games. It's an ugly reflection on our culture that this kid couldn't fire up some cheap CAD software alternative, and had only "killing games" to model with.
Give this kid a peaceful outlet, like SimCity, and you no longer have a problem. He can build his hometown and hit it with a tornado if he likes.
For the past 5 years, when I've gone to look at computer games, the overwhelming majority of them are wargames. What are *we* preparing our children for?
--
Toro
So wow. Just drink your milk (Vitamin D fortified, of course) or take your cod liver oil, or get out in the sun a little more often.
The dairy folks are going to love this, and start advertising that they put Vitamin D in their milk, I'll bet.
--
Toro
Don't ask for a socio-political housecleaning. There has never been one that was not a massacre. The guillotine was *invented* with such a purpose in mind, and the Jacobean's were only trying to help when it started.
I understand your outrage, but please be responsible when expressing the sentiment. We do need a political restructuring, but it must be done through the proper channels and carefully. No maid can do it for us, it's going to take the full political involvement of at least half of our disillusioned electorate.
So far we have about as many *true* political participants as there were Communist party members in the USSR. Voting is not enough.
--
Toro
Or deceiving and backstabbing a company, IBM, that had a richly deserved monopoly based on quality business products, typewriters, and then degenerated into a corrupt superpower, dependent on a bunch of crooks who claimed to be people who can write software.
;^)
(They *bought* PC-DOS.)
I just keep waiting for a Scandinavian to show up and kill everyone but Claudius.
But poor, mad Linux just keeps monologuing the "To be or not to be" speech.
It goes like this: "To free, or not to free..."
Hamlet too had an identity crisis, and look what happened to him!
--
Toro
And I assume this is an "either/or" because you are rhetorically challenged?
You *can* have it both ways. Despite the fact that there are currently major defections, and this will hurt MS, in 2 years, the monopoly OEM agreements and end-of-service status (by MS fiat) of XP will make MS Vista king by default, and we'll all be forced into a crap product.
So we can thrash all we like (option B) in the interim, but Microsoft has made defection VERY painful, by creating barriers to defection (training, proprietary formats) and arbitrarily declaring planned obsolescence periods (reality A).
That much should be obvious.
Less obvious is the fact that planned obsolescence is a necessary business practice when everyone uses the same thing. There's no reason to switch if there's nothing to switch to.
Totalitarian structures work because DESPITE the lively debate and all indications of competition, the authorities still win because there is no other place to go. The barrier to defection is too large.
I predict chaos for 2 years as another crap product creates a sense of FUD in the computer market, and MS's choice of either a) Extended XP Product-life, or b) fixing Vista, probably by reverting to XP API's and code. I suspect DX10 is a goner.
I think MS will choose (b).
As long as we accept that monoculture is necessary, MS is the only one making the choices.
--
Toro
Bad idea. The state highways would slow down to a crawl if we Slashdotted it. :^P
--
Toro
Honestly, I reached that point when I saw my first 386. I remember telling my Dad, "No one needs this." I was 20.
;^)
I'm posting with an Athlon 3200+, and having less fun and productivity now. I was right, only desktop publishers and those who wish to make money by selling something useless needed more than the 386. The Word Processing and Spreadsheet has gotten no better, and the Internet is more and more annoying. Especially those sites done entirely in Flash.
The games are fun, but do we all need personally edited family video DVD's with effects?
I'm gonna go with no.
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Toro
I don't think Moore ever foresaw a situation where we couldn't USE the transistors to improve single processor power. The letter of Moore's Law is still true, but the spirit is broken.
So what if we can fit 20 processors on a single die, if each one of those processors has reached a functional plateau? Our languages and methods are still largely designed for a single processor.
Gee folks, it might be a good idea to finally shuffle off the mortal coil of the last remnants of the X86 architecture. Otherwise, I suspect SMP multi-cores are going to be very disappointing.
Since the X86 is the legacy he helped pioneer, his "Law" is now irrelevant. The number of transistors, while notable, no longer means the same thing.
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Toro
Exactly, the bill says a protected computer is...
"2)... a computer..."
"B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communications"
This, in my opinion, includes *any* computer connected to the Internet.
That's because every Internet client you ever run is "used in communications." Clients are all communications applications, by definition, and the scope of the proposed monitoring is not limited to just the app, while it is involved in interstate communications, but is instead the entire computer, whenever, if the apps it has loaded are capable of interstate communications.
They call this status "protected," but what they really seem to mean is untrustworthy or suspicious. It's Orwellian doublespeak. This is just "Trustworthy computing," writ far too large for my tastes. We won't buy it and they can't sell it or even make it work right (Vista ME II), so now they're going to try to ram it down our throats via techniques developed by criminals, with the support of laws written by corrupt politicians.
And at that point, you have to start wondering if there's a point in making a distinction between the criminals who invented spyware, and the criminals who want this bill to succeed.
Spying is justifiable, in a court of law, and should only take place with a warrant obtained either in a FISA Court or publicly. Unmonitored computers are no more suspicious than unmonitored people.
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Toro
And forbids parts of H.R. 964, as I read. (c.f.: Amendment 4.) ;^)
"Prevention" is not an excuse for wiretapping, which is what legal spyware for certain "trusted" parties is. Blanket wiretapping. I need to talk to someone down at Ft. Meade. I'll take the NSA over corporate America as my "Guardian" (shades of Ultima VII) any day.
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Toro
Don't be so thankful just yet. You just try and blackhole the entire United States of America as you attempt to use the Internet. Do you use Google or YouTube? Do you want every transaction you ever make with networks within our borders logged and stored as privately owned data, and open for use in the purposes of "detecting or preventing fraudulent activities?"
/sans/ warrant? (if my feeble legal skills aren't off)
Possibly
This is an international issue, because it is an *Inter*net. You can live without us, but do you really want to?
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Toro