yuppers. Apparently people haven't heard of a "secured line of credit" either. It's where you "Secure" a credit card by putting down an investment that is held as collateral. If you want a $500 credit card, put down $1000 in a GIC that cannot be cashed unless you cancel your credit card, and you can get a card without a big deal at all, regarless of your credit history. If you screw up, they'll take it out of your deposit.
And also, yeah, the Checking Account CC is another option.
if you're the kind of person that's going to enjoy porn
Can I ask a question? Why is porn so restricted in the first place? It's such a big deal only because we make it such a big deal. There are far fewer laws and restrictions on nudity in Europe, and IIRC they have a much smaller problem with these sort of things. Christ, you can buy post cards with topless babes on a beach without any problem at all. You can buy beer in McDonalds alongside your happy meal (I swear, I saw a kid who couldn't have been more than 12 years old getting beer with his happy meal. It was hillarious).
After high school, I ran up a huge long distance bill calling BBSes across the country. I didn't have the money to pay the bill on time, so an entry was put on my credit report that I had a late payment. As a consequence, it was more than five years later before any credit card company would touch me.
What? Having 1 late phone bill payment doesn't give you a negative credit rating. Having 1 late bill payment that you don't pay for 6 months after several notices and warnings, however, will. I've been late several times. They just add on interest and you pay it late.
When it comes right down to it, there just isn't a good way to know for sure who is on the other side of the keyboard
You are exactly right. So although credit card usage isn't perfect, it's about the best method that we have to do it.
As for the virtual porn...It's just one step from saying an artistic rendering of a real act is illegal to saying writing about it is illegal...
That's another reason why I doubt that they're going to illegalize it. And I disagree with you there, making a real-to-life picture about something and writing about it is a rather large step, not a very small one. And in this case especially I doubt that people will get their kicks from reading about said acts vs viewing realistic impressions of them.
On the other hand, a (virtual) crime is depicted and thereby probably even promoted (nonvirtual).
Doesn't promoting a crime you in some degree guilty of the same crime?
How is it promoting the crime? You're getting a virtual view of something that is illegal.
But the important part to realize about why it is illegal is because of exploitation of children.
If people can get their kicks by watching something that is virtual and not real, then we can remove part of the market that caters to these people. And anyone who says that "being able to watch it increases the desire to do it in real life" I think needs to give their head a shake. There are plenty of things that proove quite the opposite. I'm horny, GF isn't around or on another continent (sniff) so I pop in some porn and relieve myself. I don't go to a strip club, I don't go and rape some woman, and I don't cheat on my GF. Thus, I can conclude that it's benefitial in all respects for my usage. If, for some reason, I got my kicks watching kiddie porn then I'd assume that the results would be much the same.
I've complained to my credit card company about porn sites that I have (way back when, don't do that anymore) checked out with my credit card and then they scammed me. Yes, I look at pornography. Big deal.
Until we get biometrics on every computer there will always be easy ways to get around the age verification issue, but the age verification isn't designed to be foolproof, only provide an easy way to stop most people who might be interested. Just like pirating music or software, if you're determined to look at pornography, you will be able to find it. It doesn't matter how old you are.
The ISP idea won't help either because how many kids use their parents ISP accounts?
As far as the online age-verification is concerned, the government should only be allowed to require that if they could also require real-world stores to do the same. As far as I know, they can't.
Bars, strip clubs, buying cigarettes or liquor, all of these places are required to check for ID. So what are you talking about?
Anyway, credit cards won't work very well on the Internet, especially with the advent of Visa Buxx and similar cards that are designed for 13-17 year olds
It takes 1/2 a second to do an online check to see (a) if the credit card is valid and (b) to see if it's a minor or an adult card.
Perhaps the argument should be wether or not there should be age restrictions on things like alcohol, liquor, porn et al.
the other idea is to run a program that scans your screen to detect if it can see the ad. I know that eudora uses this idea where if the ad itself cannot be seen it will alert the user. But then again their ads aren't very obtrusive or annoying so they're easy to ignore.
can you blame them if the target for the 90% of the market, instead of the 10% that isn't complient with the rest? Perhaps you should be angry at the people who make your browser for not making it complient, instead of the corporations who are targetting the browser that has the 90% market share? I've had to work with Javascript code that allows for both IE and NS usage, and it's a PITA to have support for NS in it. I can't blame them for not supporting every browser under the sun.
yes, I think it would not only be linux as we know it, but a lot better than we know it.
The variety is linux's own worst enemy. As long as Linux isn't standardized you won't have the support required in order to support normal people moving over. You can still have variety and different environments, but just organize the development a little more and try to figure out what people want, and perhaps cut back on a few of the less used features to get the more used ones running better.
Everyone else in the real world has to use real age verification systems (be is visual "hmm, he looks like a 11 year old" or "ID please") when it comes to things that can be deemed "harmful" to minors, so why shouldn't online systems? Asking for something like credit card information seems to be the easiest and most widely spread use of such a method, as I cannot think of any other methods that can be (more) successfully used? (not that credit cards are an infallible age verification system, as they're easy to "borrow" and also I had my first credit card at 16 years old)
As for the child porn, for starters I think that if you get a kick out of that then there is something seriously wrong with you, but that feeling aside I can't see why "virtual" child porn should be illegal. The arguments against real life child porn is the exploitation of children, which is perfectly understandable. However if you get a kick out of seeing some sort of 3 year old alien that's virtual, or a pair of boots, or anything else that's virtual, hey, whatever turns your crank. No minors are being harmed or exploited in such endeavours (unless of course they're being modelled or are the ones being forced to program it), but as for the act of "virtual child porn" I cannot see why it should be illegal. Morally reprehensible, perhaps, but not illegal.
If you have any idea what you are going to be doing in 5 years, nevermind 10 or 20, then perhaps you can count yourself as one of the lucky ones. I know very few people who know that they want to do 5 years from now, never mind know what they will be doing.
I know that universities tend to teach a well rounded education, a little of everything, but this will almost certainly pay off in your later life, especially if you plan to move around a lot and get very high paying jobs. If you want a pointed career without a lot of advancement opportunities, then you can go for a much more direct approach to education, like college. However I know that all of the people that I have heard complain about how university was a waste of their time have changed their tune after the downturn of the economy, and a lot of the college grads who were laughing suddenly are unemployed.
When the time comes that you are bored with your job / get unemployed and get an opportunity for that job that was 15% better paying than before, there's a much better chance that you would be qualified for that job because of a much more "rounded" rather than "targeted" education. Yeah, in Grade 5 I didn't want to study french, "Why the hell would I ever want to go to France?" and here I am, living in France right now. In the early years of university I kinda skimped on the math side of courses, but I learned enough and had enough BS skills to wind up getting a great job doing cryptography. (It helps that I'm a very quick learner as well). There have also been a few other opportunities that I haven't been able to take because I was of the opinion that "Bah, why would I need to know how to do that?", and similarly there have been numerous times when knowledge of physics, astronomy, calculus, algebra, psychology, and many other "side courses" that I took have come in handy.
Finally, it's 5 years out of your life. Perhaps 2 or 3 more than taking a college degree. Consider it an "investment" in your future. Not only are university degrees looked at more favorably than college degrees, but you leave a number of doors open instead of closing them. I think spending 3 years of your life to leave your opportunities open in the future is a very smart idea, but then again that's just my opinion =)
what product does a news site offer?
what product does/. offer?
what product does google offer?
they're all services. you do to use their sites. the only money that they can get back in return from the money that they spend such that you can use their site is by banner ads. I'm not saying that's their product, but I am saying that that is the only way that they are going to make any sort of money. readership on the net doesn't pay bills. popup ads and clickthrus do. If a site is sufficiently big enough and their normal ads scheme isn't working because of either insufficient readership or too much readership or people blocking ads then the powers that be will do what they must do in order to increase revenue.
Don't forget that it's not only rising costs but lower ad revenue simply because the advertisers are paying less now than they were before and the advertisers are demanding more intrusive advertisements. Some websites simply have no choice but to increase the obtrusiveness of their advertisements because otherwise they'd be out of business due to changing prices in either hosting or ad based revenue.
I wonder how you'll feel when/. announces that they've been told that they must increase their ads revenue.
And lastly don't forget that things are dominated by one thing : money. If you can make more money by doing this, they you'll do it. Very simple concept.
So I'm curious then. How do you justify the bandwidth that you use off the sites which ads you block? They're paying so that you can get free content and you don't even have the curtosey to view the ads so that they can pay their bills?
Sounds a lot like the MP3 "I buy more after I try!" talk that I hear a lot of. There is absolutely no evidence to proove that most people who listen to MP3s buy more CDs than before, and a lot of evidence that prooves the contrary... Increasing overall CD sales doesn't proove that at all. Someone posted a good comment on one of the other threads that said something along the lines of either :
a) pay for the CDs and give the artists what they're due
-or-
b) don't listen to their music.
This is the same thing. You are incurring them a cost by viewing their content that they are providing to you free of charge with the only request that you view advertisements so that they can pay their bills. How do you justify blocking those ads? If you don't like their advertising scheme then perhaps you should not be visiting their site.
Sorry if I seem a little bitter here, but I'm getting tired of the hypocrisy in general (not aimed at you).
Most likely they just detect if the banner has been displayed. On the client side blocking software, I'm assuming, just doesn't download the banners and blocks popup windows from even oppening, so if the ads don't get loaded successfully first, don't display content. Once the server has a successful load of the ad, you can send the content.
This of course won't stop anti-ad software from simply downloading the ad and not putting it on screen, but most blocking mechanisms just don't download the ad anyways.
However I think that we should not use blocking software. You are getting "free as in beer" content, so you should be required to "pay" for it, in this case with your time. The servers that you are reading your pages off of have bills to pay, and the only way that most of them can do this is to serve ads. The only reason why ads have gotten so fscking annoying is because the conventional style isn't working. Why isn't it working? Because people block it. So thus the more you work against the system, the nastier it will become.
Now seriously, how much trouble is it to read around a huge ad in the middle of your page? I'm being serious here. I have mental filtering. I just don't notice them anymore. I close popups usually before they're finished loading and even sometimes if I think the content is good I'll go and click on the ad just to give them a bit more money. Having these ads maybe adds 5% to the time required to read the article. Big whoop. Do it so that they can get paid. There is no free lunch, they have bills to pay and the least that you can do is to at least glance at the ads and sometimes click so that they can pay their bills. Because if people keep blocking then we will be forced to start physically paying to view pages, via micropayments perhaps, but we will pay because they have to pay their bills. It is much cheaper for us to just put up with the ads and that way it won't get much worse, and we won't be faced with having to pay physical cash to view the stuff that we want to view.
People aregue about "Artists' rights" and that they should be paid for their music that you download in MP3 form. Although I agree with this, the same thing applies here. People have spent their time to write the articles that you are viewing, and they deserve your patronage to put up with the ads so that they can pay their bills.
you think that the music industry is the artists' friend?
.... this popular artist doesn't seem to think so, as well as many others that I've heard about, and a few that I've known.
Re:what happened to good old balloons?
on
Raising the Kursk
·
· Score: 2
you could easily release air as the tank rises, have a few extra balloons in case one breaks. you could easily control the exact rise rate by computers too.
you know if there was organization to the development of linux, a "project leader" so to say that could harness the power of all of these people, linux would kick ass in much much less time and gain huge acceptance. But as long as everyone is running around doing their own thing and you have 15 different versions that you can download and none is perfect, that just ain't gonna happen.
If you have many of the same application's windows open they will collapse into a single window icon on the bar, you click on it and get a list of all of the windows.
And for everyone else, the second that I see "windoze" or "M$" or "micro$oft" I stop reading your post. If you can't even have the maturity to type the names properly...
what happened to good old balloons?
on
Raising the Kursk
·
· Score: 2
IIRC they've used balloons before to raise sunken ships. This give you the advantage that it's relatively cheap and you don't need to do a lot of work, just drop down some compressed air with it and once they're all attached just pump'em full of air and it raises itself. Why wasn't this done in this case?
Any assumptions that I make are in tune with assumptions that professionals have made on this topic.
For there to be interstellar combat starships must be capable of achieving speeds close to light speed
You are, for the most part, correct. However what about in 2158 when the colony on Mars decides to rebel against home? (just a possibility)
And one of the most plausable methods for FTL travel would be by using humungous drives or pieces of equiptment to bend space around the ship (I.e. if you can take a concentration of positive energy/mass and put it in front of your ship, and a concentration of negative energy behind your ship, it's possible that space will contract in front of your ship (this is the effect of gravity) and expand behind your ship, which could cause your ship to have appeared to have moved relative to a stationary observer without having undergone inertial change, thus bypassing the speed of light problem). In order to do this you require something active on behalf of the weapon, thus any sort of light (laser/phaser/whatever) beam itself can't exceed the speed of light.
Who is to say that sensor systems are limited to light speed?
Supposing that you send out drones and they can communicate back with your ship at FTL speeds, then the sensor drones themselves can be destroyed.
the concept of "sensoring" implies using light and/or other radiation sources or something that's currently inside space, which by that definition then limits the speed of said sensors to the speed of light.
At this point anyones theories could be true with the right values for these variables
Yes, but doing so would require a major overturning of the current laws of the universe as we see them. But of course anything is possible. Extra dimensions, time travel, blah blah could play a role, who knows.
But also in reality space is so goddamed big that why would you ever bother to fight someone? There's 10^15 stars in a galaxy alone, there's no need to do so for resource reasons or territorial reasons or for frankly any other reason that I can think of that a rational spacefaring race could require. Unless perhaps we find physical phenomena that cannot be reproduced and are worth protecting, but even then what would be? A wormhole? So who cares if there is one? Why would you want to protect it so much? I'm also assuming that any race that can acheive FTL travel will be a nonviolent race by nature because the violent races probably wouldn't have made it that far to begin with.
Also Star Trek lacks real AI so combat occurs at the speeds of human reaction.
Not at all. We've seen Data many many many times working the controls far faster than what we can, but it's not entertaining to NOT have violence in space that contains people at the controls. Who wants to see a bunch of computerized drones duking it out in under 30 seconds if you can have a dramatic 6 episode long war with real people?
If you want to gripe, gripe about how ships don't move that way in space. Its just a TV show.
Do you even bother to read anything that I write? I have stated many times that I don't care about startrek and I'm not arguing about science fiction. I'm arguing about plausable ways for space based weapons to work based on current knowledge of physics and an imagination.
In practical air combat you do not shoot something you cannot positively identify
Right, but you have sensors that can positively identify ships that are far out of sight due to the fact that the sensors can work at the speed of light which is several orders of magnitude faster than you can travel. There are many many ways to have positively identified a ship that is outside of visual range, check the links that I sent you if you don't believe me. This technology is used, you do fire at ships outside of your visual range. I don't know why you're trying to argue this.
In short, the two of you are simply bullshitting each other. You will get nowhere.
So what the hell do you care? I'm trying to point out things that are in line with what we know in physics and what is likely to be possible in the future. People seem to have this preconceived notion that because you can see it in Star Trek that will be what can happen. I'm saying no, it's not likely that is possible, however this stuff is. Christ. We didn't invite you in here to tear a strip off us, go away if you don't want to play nicely. If you want to have a serious arguement by all means, but don't go down to the level of telling us that we're just bullshitting each other. I've reasearched these things and read a lot about them, I don't think that I'm making fundamentally invalid assumptions, and I am quick to say that "provided there is no major overhaul in our understanding of the universe, this is what I think would happen". Key words: "I think" and "fundamental overhaul".
1. Star Trek is not real life. They know no real physics. Do not treat it like they do and say that Star Trek should be X. Especially when being X breaks continuity which is far more important for storytelling
I don't recall ever saying that it is. Actually, I recall several times stating that they do not follow physics or follow their own make believe physics. I NEVER said that "they do and therefore star trek should be like X" so please point that comment elsewhere. I also recall saying several times that in SF you must have concessions in order to tell a story (like language for example), however shows like Babylon 5 have shown that you can stick very very very close to known physics and realism while still having an amazing story.
2. Air combat is not "shoot missile from 5km out". Why? Because that is the way air liners are shot down. Dead civilians bad.
You've apparently never heard of BVRC or BVRAAM (Beyond Visual Range Combat / Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missiles). You can go here to get a good google search that will show you roughly 6,600 pages explaining what this is and where it's used and why.
3. Guns exist on current missile cruisers and aircraft for one simple reason. Economics. You should not pay a million dollars to kill someone if you can do it for a hundred. That is why fighters and naval ships have guns. Therefore it is reasonable to assume any military starship will have a gun equivalent for the same purpose of killing weak or unskilled things cheaply.
You're absolutely right. However I do recall that what I was talking about was ship-to-ship combat, debating that you will (probably) not have massive weapons on your ship as your primary weapons, and I do recall saying that you will (probably) have short range (point defense) weapons for taking out fighters/other small incoming things.
4. Any discussion of combat techniques requires at least the establishment of ratios like combat range/projectile speed and more importantly vehicle speed/projectile speed. In star trek these ratios are roughly equivalent to WWII military combat so their combat tech follows.
You're missing one very important variable: range. Space combat would be faught over much much much larger ranges, up to several light seconds (again you can go here for another google search explaining why space combat would be faught like this).
5. Missiles of the conventional phallic shape maneuver like bricks. Even worse in space because they are built entirely wrong. A good fighter pilot can easily outmaneuver a SAM provided he sees it coming. Just bring it over your wing and it will stall and crash into the ground. If the speed, etc. are as you describe getting the missile to hit the opposing ship would be just as difficult as shooting it accurately.
They maneuver like bricks in AIR, yes. And it IS hard to outmaneuver any missiles that are recent because they will explode in proximity if they miss their target, or they will be designed to be proximity explosive in the first place. In space things change considerably because you are not required to be aerodynamic or even have wings, and it's very easy (given sufficient drive technology of course) to change the velocity vector of something that small. IN ADDITION I was saying that they would be (for example) fusion bomb laser pumped missiles, which means that you don't need to change the velocity vector at all, you just need to change the orientation of the missile (which is very easy to do with rotational gyros) and then dump your load onto your target from a laser. You can't outrun or simply have one of these guys "skim off your wing".
6. Don't assume big "guns" must be swung about on heavy carriages to target them. It is equally possible that they may be directed highly accurately using electro-magnetic fields, etc. which can be altered to incredible precision instantaneously. Beam weapons could be used to sweep a designated area which may contain the ship, rather than simply targeting a ship. If their contact is sufficiently powerful in relation to the ships defenses this is just as good as shooting at them. Note that current shipboard anti-aircraft guns use this technique. They fill an area with lots of lead and the missile will simply run into it.
You're also forgetting one thing. Laser cannons are most likely going to be exactly that, a cannon. You will shoot one very large burst at a time, you will not have the ability to simply turn it on and swing it about to hit your target. The amount of energy that you need to pump into a laser to give it sufficient power is astronomical and your beam must be of a small size in order to concentrate the power. However you did raise a valid point, even if you can get your gun to stay on for a second, you can swing it around enough to hit a much wider area, as well good point about the electromagnetically aimed, however as I pointed out the level of accuracy is 10^-12th of a degree, and the fact that if you're three light seconds away, your perception is 3 seconds behind their current position and they have another 3 seconds to move after you fire your weapon.
Lastly, the future of combat is autonomous and unmanned
Yes, I do believe that was the point that I was trying to make!
Very shortly people will not have the response times required even on earth let alone space so computers will have to do it.
I also said that, so why are you arguing with me about it?
However it is unlikely combat will be big ship to big ship because big ships would be slower to maneuver and lack physical response time
Yes, exactly, that was my point. And add in the distance factor and ship-to-ship combat will be highly unlikely.
What you will most likely see in space is something similar to fighter vs. intercepter vs. fighter bomber combat but thousands of times faster. Various defensive and offensive drones fighting each other at incredible speed with mothership based anti-drone weapons thrown in.
Ok, sorry, so replace "missile" in my comments with "drones". Same thing. The problem is that if you're attacking a big ship the amount of power that your "drones" are going to need to do any damage to that ship will be far too high if you want to have your "drones" to be of any reasonable size. This is why the idea is to simply put a nuclear reactor on it, and have it destroy itself in the process of emptying out all of the energy that it can into one large laser blast to hit the target.
And before you say that "well, you can just get interceptors to intercept them" or anything along that sort, keep in mind that these things will be moving very very fast, and you don't need to use all of the missiles that you launch. so you launch a lot of them over a wide angle of attack (i.e. they fly off on an angle before changing course) you will be hard pressed to intercept them. Once a few have fired the rest can return home. And even they don't need to get very close to the target to dump their load, a light second away would be close enough, and once their load is shot it will be impossible to block it. Don't forget, we're talking about weapons that are fired at the speed of light and thus detecting them is impossible, much less blocking them. If a missile detects something coming in, it can just blow it's load prior to being destroyed, or just use it's fusion bomb to explode rather than powering the laser, thus destroying the interceptor.
Of course we can't know that because they don't exist.
Of course, it's all just pure speculation right now:), however we can say certain things based on what we know of physics, and assuming that those laws aren't going to be horrably overturned (I'm speaking about horribly here, just discovering a minor inconsistancy or making a new law that refines current ones isn't considered overturning old laws) then we can make a pretty accurate judgement of what space combat could be like, given sufficient technologies.
Or I could be horribly mistaken, but I'm taking things that well respected physicists and other people with lots of letters behind their name are saying, so I think they're much more qualified than I to give predictions.;)
spend $250 to get a wintv PVR, $400 to get 2x75GB HD and you have 150GB and a PVR that can record 12mbit/sec mpeg2 video at 5% processor utilization, store up to 290 hours at VCD quality, and you can you the disk space for other stuff, and ALL FOR LESS THAN the $700 model TiVo that gives you 25 hours. Pop on the net and get freeware/shareware PVR solutions and you're all set.
I don't know exactly why anyone would spend so much money on a TiVo ($2000????? PC +$15 for an ethernet card) when you can get much better use (and use the HD for other stuff) out of doing it yourself on your computer. Perhaps not _as_ simple, and you can't view it _directly_ on your TV, but if you really want that, drop another $100 and get a pretty decent 3d accellerator card with TV output and you're all set.
is there something I'm missing here?
Oh and BTW, Why would encoding in real time to mpeg2 be so costly to do in real time? You can get specialized hardware to do it for very cheap... For example, the $250 WinTV PVR card has a built in mpeg2 encoder. It's not serious cash.
I hardly qualify that as plot continuity. That's more like a "hey, didn't we send ferrengi over here some time? Cool, why don't we find'em? Yeah, so it's a whole 1/4 of the galaxy and the chances are slim-to-none that they'll run into them, but we never pay attention to facts anyways!" type of plot-continuity.
I'm talking about the well thought out before hand, planned, lasting 3 years type of plot continuity.
Hell, never mind that, I'd be happy if they just didn't contradict themselves.
TNG didn't have **any** plot continuity until like the 5th season or so, they were all pretty much independant episodes. DS9 around their 2nd half finally started to get into long plots, which acted quite well, but they were too broad based and not intricate enough. They were of the "ok, we are getting into a war!" plot styles, not the down-to-every-last-character-plot-building style plots.
Voyager was dealing with warp travel messing up space? Huh??
no my bad, I forgot to mutiply by 2 and add a few, sorry =)
There's roughly 42 minutes of actual footage per hour of a given show (~14-16 minutes of commercials, ~1-2 minutes for opening seq and ~1-2 for closing), so for a 2 hour show you can get about 86-88 minutes of footage out of it. My bad =) Brain running on autopilot, forgot to turn it back on after watching the show (j/k!) Need more sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
anyone can get one
yuppers. Apparently people haven't heard of a "secured line of credit" either. It's where you "Secure" a credit card by putting down an investment that is held as collateral. If you want a $500 credit card, put down $1000 in a GIC that cannot be cashed unless you cancel your credit card, and you can get a card without a big deal at all, regarless of your credit history. If you screw up, they'll take it out of your deposit.
And also, yeah, the Checking Account CC is another option.
if you're the kind of person that's going to enjoy porn
Can I ask a question? Why is porn so restricted in the first place? It's such a big deal only because we make it such a big deal. There are far fewer laws and restrictions on nudity in Europe, and IIRC they have a much smaller problem with these sort of things. Christ, you can buy post cards with topless babes on a beach without any problem at all. You can buy beer in McDonalds alongside your happy meal (I swear, I saw a kid who couldn't have been more than 12 years old getting beer with his happy meal. It was hillarious).
After high school, I ran up a huge long distance bill calling BBSes across the country. I didn't have the money to pay the bill on time, so an entry was put on my credit report that I had a late payment. As a consequence, it was more than five years later before any credit card company would touch me.
What? Having 1 late phone bill payment doesn't give you a negative credit rating. Having 1 late bill payment that you don't pay for 6 months after several notices and warnings, however, will. I've been late several times. They just add on interest and you pay it late.
When it comes right down to it, there just isn't a good way to know for sure who is on the other side of the keyboard
You are exactly right. So although credit card usage isn't perfect, it's about the best method that we have to do it.
As for the virtual porn...It's just one step from saying an artistic rendering of a real act is illegal to saying writing about it is illegal...
That's another reason why I doubt that they're going to illegalize it. And I disagree with you there, making a real-to-life picture about something and writing about it is a rather large step, not a very small one. And in this case especially I doubt that people will get their kicks from reading about said acts vs viewing realistic impressions of them.
On the other hand, a (virtual) crime is depicted and thereby probably even promoted (nonvirtual).
Doesn't promoting a crime you in some degree guilty of the same crime?
How is it promoting the crime? You're getting a virtual view of something that is illegal.
But the important part to realize about why it is illegal is because of exploitation of children.
If people can get their kicks by watching something that is virtual and not real, then we can remove part of the market that caters to these people. And anyone who says that "being able to watch it increases the desire to do it in real life" I think needs to give their head a shake. There are plenty of things that proove quite the opposite. I'm horny, GF isn't around or on another continent (sniff) so I pop in some porn and relieve myself. I don't go to a strip club, I don't go and rape some woman, and I don't cheat on my GF. Thus, I can conclude that it's benefitial in all respects for my usage. If, for some reason, I got my kicks watching kiddie porn then I'd assume that the results would be much the same.
Why are you too embarassed to complain about it?
I've complained to my credit card company about porn sites that I have (way back when, don't do that anymore) checked out with my credit card and then they scammed me. Yes, I look at pornography. Big deal.
Until we get biometrics on every computer there will always be easy ways to get around the age verification issue, but the age verification isn't designed to be foolproof, only provide an easy way to stop most people who might be interested. Just like pirating music or software, if you're determined to look at pornography, you will be able to find it. It doesn't matter how old you are.
The ISP idea won't help either because how many kids use their parents ISP accounts?
As far as the online age-verification is concerned, the government should only be allowed to require that if they could also require real-world stores to do the same. As far as I know, they can't.
Bars, strip clubs, buying cigarettes or liquor, all of these places are required to check for ID. So what are you talking about?
Anyway, credit cards won't work very well on the Internet, especially with the advent of Visa Buxx and similar cards that are designed for 13-17 year olds
It takes 1/2 a second to do an online check to see (a) if the credit card is valid and (b) to see if it's a minor or an adult card.
Perhaps the argument should be wether or not there should be age restrictions on things like alcohol, liquor, porn et al.
the other idea is to run a program that scans your screen to detect if it can see the ad. I know that eudora uses this idea where if the ad itself cannot be seen it will alert the user. But then again their ads aren't very obtrusive or annoying so they're easy to ignore.
can you blame them if the target for the 90% of the market, instead of the 10% that isn't complient with the rest? Perhaps you should be angry at the people who make your browser for not making it complient, instead of the corporations who are targetting the browser that has the 90% market share? I've had to work with Javascript code that allows for both IE and NS usage, and it's a PITA to have support for NS in it. I can't blame them for not supporting every browser under the sun.
yes, I think it would not only be linux as we know it, but a lot better than we know it.
The variety is linux's own worst enemy. As long as Linux isn't standardized you won't have the support required in order to support normal people moving over. You can still have variety and different environments, but just organize the development a little more and try to figure out what people want, and perhaps cut back on a few of the less used features to get the more used ones running better.
Everyone else in the real world has to use real age verification systems (be is visual "hmm, he looks like a 11 year old" or "ID please") when it comes to things that can be deemed "harmful" to minors, so why shouldn't online systems? Asking for something like credit card information seems to be the easiest and most widely spread use of such a method, as I cannot think of any other methods that can be (more) successfully used? (not that credit cards are an infallible age verification system, as they're easy to "borrow" and also I had my first credit card at 16 years old)
As for the child porn, for starters I think that if you get a kick out of that then there is something seriously wrong with you, but that feeling aside I can't see why "virtual" child porn should be illegal. The arguments against real life child porn is the exploitation of children, which is perfectly understandable. However if you get a kick out of seeing some sort of 3 year old alien that's virtual, or a pair of boots, or anything else that's virtual, hey, whatever turns your crank. No minors are being harmed or exploited in such endeavours (unless of course they're being modelled or are the ones being forced to program it), but as for the act of "virtual child porn" I cannot see why it should be illegal. Morally reprehensible, perhaps, but not illegal.
Just my $0.02
If you have any idea what you are going to be doing in 5 years, nevermind 10 or 20, then perhaps you can count yourself as one of the lucky ones. I know very few people who know that they want to do 5 years from now, never mind know what they will be doing.
I know that universities tend to teach a well rounded education, a little of everything, but this will almost certainly pay off in your later life, especially if you plan to move around a lot and get very high paying jobs. If you want a pointed career without a lot of advancement opportunities, then you can go for a much more direct approach to education, like college. However I know that all of the people that I have heard complain about how university was a waste of their time have changed their tune after the downturn of the economy, and a lot of the college grads who were laughing suddenly are unemployed.
When the time comes that you are bored with your job / get unemployed and get an opportunity for that job that was 15% better paying than before, there's a much better chance that you would be qualified for that job because of a much more "rounded" rather than "targeted" education. Yeah, in Grade 5 I didn't want to study french, "Why the hell would I ever want to go to France?" and here I am, living in France right now. In the early years of university I kinda skimped on the math side of courses, but I learned enough and had enough BS skills to wind up getting a great job doing cryptography. (It helps that I'm a very quick learner as well). There have also been a few other opportunities that I haven't been able to take because I was of the opinion that "Bah, why would I need to know how to do that?", and similarly there have been numerous times when knowledge of physics, astronomy, calculus, algebra, psychology, and many other "side courses" that I took have come in handy.
Finally, it's 5 years out of your life. Perhaps 2 or 3 more than taking a college degree. Consider it an "investment" in your future. Not only are university degrees looked at more favorably than college degrees, but you leave a number of doors open instead of closing them. I think spending 3 years of your life to leave your opportunities open in the future is a very smart idea, but then again that's just my opinion =)
what product does a news site offer? /. offer?
/. announces that they've been told that they must increase their ads revenue.
what product does
what product does google offer?
they're all services. you do to use their sites. the only money that they can get back in return from the money that they spend such that you can use their site is by banner ads. I'm not saying that's their product, but I am saying that that is the only way that they are going to make any sort of money. readership on the net doesn't pay bills. popup ads and clickthrus do. If a site is sufficiently big enough and their normal ads scheme isn't working because of either insufficient readership or too much readership or people blocking ads then the powers that be will do what they must do in order to increase revenue.
Don't forget that it's not only rising costs but lower ad revenue simply because the advertisers are paying less now than they were before and the advertisers are demanding more intrusive advertisements. Some websites simply have no choice but to increase the obtrusiveness of their advertisements because otherwise they'd be out of business due to changing prices in either hosting or ad based revenue.
I wonder how you'll feel when
And lastly don't forget that things are dominated by one thing : money. If you can make more money by doing this, they you'll do it. Very simple concept.
So I'm curious then. How do you justify the bandwidth that you use off the sites which ads you block? They're paying so that you can get free content and you don't even have the curtosey to view the ads so that they can pay their bills?
Sounds a lot like the MP3 "I buy more after I try!" talk that I hear a lot of. There is absolutely no evidence to proove that most people who listen to MP3s buy more CDs than before, and a lot of evidence that prooves the contrary... Increasing overall CD sales doesn't proove that at all. Someone posted a good comment on one of the other threads that said something along the lines of either :
a) pay for the CDs and give the artists what they're due
-or-
b) don't listen to their music.
This is the same thing. You are incurring them a cost by viewing their content that they are providing to you free of charge with the only request that you view advertisements so that they can pay their bills. How do you justify blocking those ads? If you don't like their advertising scheme then perhaps you should not be visiting their site.
Sorry if I seem a little bitter here, but I'm getting tired of the hypocrisy in general (not aimed at you).
Most likely they just detect if the banner has been displayed. On the client side blocking software, I'm assuming, just doesn't download the banners and blocks popup windows from even oppening, so if the ads don't get loaded successfully first, don't display content. Once the server has a successful load of the ad, you can send the content.
This of course won't stop anti-ad software from simply downloading the ad and not putting it on screen, but most blocking mechanisms just don't download the ad anyways.
However I think that we should not use blocking software. You are getting "free as in beer" content, so you should be required to "pay" for it, in this case with your time. The servers that you are reading your pages off of have bills to pay, and the only way that most of them can do this is to serve ads. The only reason why ads have gotten so fscking annoying is because the conventional style isn't working. Why isn't it working? Because people block it. So thus the more you work against the system, the nastier it will become.
Now seriously, how much trouble is it to read around a huge ad in the middle of your page? I'm being serious here. I have mental filtering. I just don't notice them anymore. I close popups usually before they're finished loading and even sometimes if I think the content is good I'll go and click on the ad just to give them a bit more money. Having these ads maybe adds 5% to the time required to read the article. Big whoop. Do it so that they can get paid. There is no free lunch, they have bills to pay and the least that you can do is to at least glance at the ads and sometimes click so that they can pay their bills. Because if people keep blocking then we will be forced to start physically paying to view pages, via micropayments perhaps, but we will pay because they have to pay their bills. It is much cheaper for us to just put up with the ads and that way it won't get much worse, and we won't be faced with having to pay physical cash to view the stuff that we want to view.
People aregue about "Artists' rights" and that they should be paid for their music that you download in MP3 form. Although I agree with this, the same thing applies here. People have spent their time to write the articles that you are viewing, and they deserve your patronage to put up with the ads so that they can pay their bills.
you think that the music industry is the artists' friend?
.... this popular artist doesn't seem to think so, as well as many others that I've heard about, and a few that I've known.
you could easily release air as the tank rises, have a few extra balloons in case one breaks. you could easily control the exact rise rate by computers too.
you know if there was organization to the development of linux, a "project leader" so to say that could harness the power of all of these people, linux would kick ass in much much less time and gain huge acceptance. But as long as everyone is running around doing their own thing and you have 15 different versions that you can download and none is perfect, that just ain't gonna happen.
nononono that's not true!
.README and .HOWTO's that contain wonderful information like:
you get the
"well it's pretty straightforward from here. you got the menus and the buttons, everything's right there."
or the even better man pages.
Windows XP has this feature too, BTW.
If you have many of the same application's windows open they will collapse into a single window icon on the bar, you click on it and get a list of all of the windows.
And for everyone else, the second that I see "windoze" or "M$" or "micro$oft" I stop reading your post. If you can't even have the maturity to type the names properly...
IIRC they've used balloons before to raise sunken ships. This give you the advantage that it's relatively cheap and you don't need to do a lot of work, just drop down some compressed air with it and once they're all attached just pump'em full of air and it raises itself. Why wasn't this done in this case?
You are making fundamentally invalid assumptions.
Any assumptions that I make are in tune with assumptions that professionals have made on this topic.
For there to be interstellar combat starships must be capable of achieving speeds close to light speed
You are, for the most part, correct. However what about in 2158 when the colony on Mars decides to rebel against home? (just a possibility)
And one of the most plausable methods for FTL travel would be by using humungous drives or pieces of equiptment to bend space around the ship (I.e. if you can take a concentration of positive energy/mass and put it in front of your ship, and a concentration of negative energy behind your ship, it's possible that space will contract in front of your ship (this is the effect of gravity) and expand behind your ship, which could cause your ship to have appeared to have moved relative to a stationary observer without having undergone inertial change, thus bypassing the speed of light problem). In order to do this you require something active on behalf of the weapon, thus any sort of light (laser/phaser/whatever) beam itself can't exceed the speed of light.
Who is to say that sensor systems are limited to light speed?
Supposing that you send out drones and they can communicate back with your ship at FTL speeds, then the sensor drones themselves can be destroyed.
the concept of "sensoring" implies using light and/or other radiation sources or something that's currently inside space, which by that definition then limits the speed of said sensors to the speed of light.
At this point anyones theories could be true with the right values for these variables
Yes, but doing so would require a major overturning of the current laws of the universe as we see them. But of course anything is possible. Extra dimensions, time travel, blah blah could play a role, who knows.
But also in reality space is so goddamed big that why would you ever bother to fight someone? There's 10^15 stars in a galaxy alone, there's no need to do so for resource reasons or territorial reasons or for frankly any other reason that I can think of that a rational spacefaring race could require. Unless perhaps we find physical phenomena that cannot be reproduced and are worth protecting, but even then what would be? A wormhole? So who cares if there is one? Why would you want to protect it so much? I'm also assuming that any race that can acheive FTL travel will be a nonviolent race by nature because the violent races probably wouldn't have made it that far to begin with.
Also Star Trek lacks real AI so combat occurs at the speeds of human reaction.
Not at all. We've seen Data many many many times working the controls far faster than what we can, but it's not entertaining to NOT have violence in space that contains people at the controls. Who wants to see a bunch of computerized drones duking it out in under 30 seconds if you can have a dramatic 6 episode long war with real people?
If you want to gripe, gripe about how ships don't move that way in space. Its just a TV show.
Do you even bother to read anything that I write? I have stated many times that I don't care about startrek and I'm not arguing about science fiction. I'm arguing about plausable ways for space based weapons to work based on current knowledge of physics and an imagination.
In practical air combat you do not shoot something you cannot positively identify
Right, but you have sensors that can positively identify ships that are far out of sight due to the fact that the sensors can work at the speed of light which is several orders of magnitude faster than you can travel. There are many many ways to have positively identified a ship that is outside of visual range, check the links that I sent you if you don't believe me. This technology is used, you do fire at ships outside of your visual range. I don't know why you're trying to argue this.
In short, the two of you are simply bullshitting each other. You will get nowhere.
So what the hell do you care? I'm trying to point out things that are in line with what we know in physics and what is likely to be possible in the future. People seem to have this preconceived notion that because you can see it in Star Trek that will be what can happen. I'm saying no, it's not likely that is possible, however this stuff is. Christ. We didn't invite you in here to tear a strip off us, go away if you don't want to play nicely. If you want to have a serious arguement by all means, but don't go down to the level of telling us that we're just bullshitting each other. I've reasearched these things and read a lot about them, I don't think that I'm making fundamentally invalid assumptions, and I am quick to say that "provided there is no major overhaul in our understanding of the universe, this is what I think would happen". Key words: "I think" and "fundamental overhaul".
Just about every motherboard these days has an IR thingy already, it shouldn't be very hard to get an extension for it to fire at the settop box.
You are both wrong
:), however we can say certain things based on what we know of physics, and assuming that those laws aren't going to be horrably overturned (I'm speaking about horribly here, just discovering a minor inconsistancy or making a new law that refines current ones isn't considered overturning old laws) then we can make a pretty accurate judgement of what space combat could be like, given sufficient technologies.
;)
And so are you...
1. Star Trek is not real life. They know no real physics. Do not treat it like they do and say that Star Trek should be X. Especially when being X breaks continuity which is far more important for storytelling
I don't recall ever saying that it is. Actually, I recall several times stating that they do not follow physics or follow their own make believe physics. I NEVER said that "they do and therefore star trek should be like X" so please point that comment elsewhere. I also recall saying several times that in SF you must have concessions in order to tell a story (like language for example), however shows like Babylon 5 have shown that you can stick very very very close to known physics and realism while still having an amazing story.
2. Air combat is not "shoot missile from 5km out". Why? Because that is the way air liners are shot down. Dead civilians bad.
You've apparently never heard of BVRC or BVRAAM (Beyond Visual Range Combat / Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missiles). You can go here to get a good google search that will show you roughly 6,600 pages explaining what this is and where it's used and why.
3. Guns exist on current missile cruisers and aircraft for one simple reason. Economics. You should not pay a million dollars to kill someone if you can do it for a hundred. That is why fighters and naval ships have guns. Therefore it is reasonable to assume any military starship will have a gun equivalent for the same purpose of killing weak or unskilled things cheaply.
You're absolutely right. However I do recall that what I was talking about was ship-to-ship combat, debating that you will (probably) not have massive weapons on your ship as your primary weapons, and I do recall saying that you will (probably) have short range (point defense) weapons for taking out fighters/other small incoming things.
4. Any discussion of combat techniques requires at least the establishment of ratios like combat range/projectile speed and more importantly vehicle speed/projectile speed. In star trek these ratios are roughly equivalent to WWII military combat so their combat tech follows.
You're missing one very important variable: range. Space combat would be faught over much much much larger ranges, up to several light seconds (again you can go here for another google search explaining why space combat would be faught like this).
5. Missiles of the conventional phallic shape maneuver like bricks. Even worse in space because they are built entirely wrong. A good fighter pilot can easily outmaneuver a SAM provided he sees it coming. Just bring it over your wing and it will stall and crash into the ground. If the speed, etc. are as you describe getting the missile to hit the opposing ship would be just as difficult as shooting it accurately.
They maneuver like bricks in AIR, yes. And it IS hard to outmaneuver any missiles that are recent because they will explode in proximity if they miss their target, or they will be designed to be proximity explosive in the first place. In space things change considerably because you are not required to be aerodynamic or even have wings, and it's very easy (given sufficient drive technology of course) to change the velocity vector of something that small. IN ADDITION I was saying that they would be (for example) fusion bomb laser pumped missiles, which means that you don't need to change the velocity vector at all, you just need to change the orientation of the missile (which is very easy to do with rotational gyros) and then dump your load onto your target from a laser. You can't outrun or simply have one of these guys "skim off your wing".
6. Don't assume big "guns" must be swung about on heavy carriages to target them. It is equally possible that they may be directed highly accurately using electro-magnetic fields, etc. which can be altered to incredible precision instantaneously. Beam weapons could be used to sweep a designated area which may contain the ship, rather than simply targeting a ship. If their contact is sufficiently powerful in relation to the ships defenses this is just as good as shooting at them. Note that current shipboard anti-aircraft guns use this technique. They fill an area with lots of lead and the missile will simply run into it.
You're also forgetting one thing. Laser cannons are most likely going to be exactly that, a cannon. You will shoot one very large burst at a time, you will not have the ability to simply turn it on and swing it about to hit your target. The amount of energy that you need to pump into a laser to give it sufficient power is astronomical and your beam must be of a small size in order to concentrate the power. However you did raise a valid point, even if you can get your gun to stay on for a second, you can swing it around enough to hit a much wider area, as well good point about the electromagnetically aimed, however as I pointed out the level of accuracy is 10^-12th of a degree, and the fact that if you're three light seconds away, your perception is 3 seconds behind their current position and they have another 3 seconds to move after you fire your weapon.
Lastly, the future of combat is autonomous and unmanned
Yes, I do believe that was the point that I was trying to make!
Very shortly people will not have the response times required even on earth let alone space so computers will have to do it.
I also said that, so why are you arguing with me about it?
However it is unlikely combat will be big ship to big ship because big ships would be slower to maneuver and lack physical response time
Yes, exactly, that was my point. And add in the distance factor and ship-to-ship combat will be highly unlikely.
What you will most likely see in space is something similar to fighter vs. intercepter vs. fighter bomber combat but thousands of times faster. Various defensive and offensive drones fighting each other at incredible speed with mothership based anti-drone weapons thrown in.
Ok, sorry, so replace "missile" in my comments with "drones". Same thing. The problem is that if you're attacking a big ship the amount of power that your "drones" are going to need to do any damage to that ship will be far too high if you want to have your "drones" to be of any reasonable size. This is why the idea is to simply put a nuclear reactor on it, and have it destroy itself in the process of emptying out all of the energy that it can into one large laser blast to hit the target.
And before you say that "well, you can just get interceptors to intercept them" or anything along that sort, keep in mind that these things will be moving very very fast, and you don't need to use all of the missiles that you launch. so you launch a lot of them over a wide angle of attack (i.e. they fly off on an angle before changing course) you will be hard pressed to intercept them. Once a few have fired the rest can return home. And even they don't need to get very close to the target to dump their load, a light second away would be close enough, and once their load is shot it will be impossible to block it. Don't forget, we're talking about weapons that are fired at the speed of light and thus detecting them is impossible, much less blocking them. If a missile detects something coming in, it can just blow it's load prior to being destroyed, or just use it's fusion bomb to explode rather than powering the laser, thus destroying the interceptor.
Of course we can't know that because they don't exist.
Of course, it's all just pure speculation right now
Or I could be horribly mistaken, but I'm taking things that well respected physicists and other people with lots of letters behind their name are saying, so I think they're much more qualified than I to give predictions.
Thank you Mr Gates!
now can you please come and step over here?
Yes, on that large yellow X.
No, the hanging cow is just for decoration.
or this just in!!
spend $250 to get a wintv PVR, $400 to get 2x75GB HD and you have 150GB and a PVR that can record 12mbit/sec mpeg2 video at 5% processor utilization, store up to 290 hours at VCD quality, and you can you the disk space for other stuff, and ALL FOR LESS THAN the $700 model TiVo that gives you 25 hours. Pop on the net and get freeware/shareware PVR solutions and you're all set.
I don't know exactly why anyone would spend so much money on a TiVo ($2000????? PC +$15 for an ethernet card) when you can get much better use (and use the HD for other stuff) out of doing it yourself on your computer. Perhaps not _as_ simple, and you can't view it _directly_ on your TV, but if you really want that, drop another $100 and get a pretty decent 3d accellerator card with TV output and you're all set.
is there something I'm missing here?
Oh and BTW, Why would encoding in real time to mpeg2 be so costly to do in real time? You can get specialized hardware to do it for very cheap... For example, the $250 WinTV PVR card has a built in mpeg2 encoder. It's not serious cash.
I hardly qualify that as plot continuity. That's more like a "hey, didn't we send ferrengi over here some time? Cool, why don't we find'em? Yeah, so it's a whole 1/4 of the galaxy and the chances are slim-to-none that they'll run into them, but we never pay attention to facts anyways!" type of plot-continuity.
I'm talking about the well thought out before hand, planned, lasting 3 years type of plot continuity.
Hell, never mind that, I'd be happy if they just didn't contradict themselves.
TNG didn't have **any** plot continuity until like the 5th season or so, they were all pretty much independant episodes. DS9 around their 2nd half finally started to get into long plots, which acted quite well, but they were too broad based and not intricate enough. They were of the "ok, we are getting into a war!" plot styles, not the down-to-every-last-character-plot-building style plots.
Voyager was dealing with warp travel messing up space? Huh??
no my bad, I forgot to mutiply by 2 and add a few, sorry =)
There's roughly 42 minutes of actual footage per hour of a given show (~14-16 minutes of commercials, ~1-2 minutes for opening seq and ~1-2 for closing), so for a 2 hour show you can get about 86-88 minutes of footage out of it. My bad =) Brain running on autopilot, forgot to turn it back on after watching the show (j/k!) Need more sleep.