I think you are giving the american people too much credit. We have become much like the Roman mob, as long as we have our wine and circuses (beer and football) we will be content. Moreover, many people have bought into the whole "war on terrorism" ploy. While many have not, that is irrelevent, enough bought it to re-elect Bush and give the Republicans control of both houses, and shortly, the Judiciary as well. Yes, many of those seats in congress were secured through gerrymandering, but that is simply another sign of the ongoing decay. We have allowed, and in some cases supported, the current government's method of "divide and conquer". The people have done nothing to stop gerrymandering; and after it is done, we still go to the polls and elect the people who set up the districts to their advantage. We know it's going on, yet there is no movement to stop it.
The people have become complaicent. In 2004 we had a voter turn out of about 30%, as I recall. This means that greater than half the people of voting age didn't care enough to vote. Either we have become so disaffected or disgusted that we don't even try anymore. And who can blame the non-voters? Yes, third parties exist but the rules have been setup by the two major parties to marginalize the third parties, and enough propaganda spewed forth about how voting for a third party is "wasting your vote", that people refuse to do so. So our choices this time boiled down to:
A facist who wants to rush headlong into a "war on terror" and thinks that there ought to be some limits to freedoms.
A socialist who wants to stop for a moment to seem different, then rush headlong into the "war on terror".
So where's the guy who's willing to call this war for what it is, a "war on civil liberties".
I think this whole thing is set to get worse before it gets better. Even now, people are accepting the idea that we need to allow restrictions on our freedoms for the sake of security. This shouldn't even be a debate, we are a country founded on the idea of freedom and liberty. Yes, this means that all of us must live with the added risk an open and free society brings. But, this is no longer acceptable to people. They want to feel secure in the blanket of false security, and are willing to sacrifice all kinds of liberties in order to have that feeling. In the end, they will get what they are after, they will be totally secure in their police state.
So, here we are now, on the virge of facism. The people are convince that we are under attack, and those that question this are decried as unpatriotic and are claimed to be putting the nation in danger. Herman Goreing was right, it is the same in any country: "Of course the people dont want war...that is understood. But voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Hermann Goering
Oh good, I was thinking I was the only one.
For the humor impaired (or terminally stupid):
<Sarcasm>
Yer all a bunch of commie pinko liberal America-haters. Our President is doing the BEST HE CAN to protect us from terrorism, and he NEEDS these powers.
</Sarcasm>
Underground pipe + California + faultlines + earthquakes = Spraying seawater all over the place.
+ Risk management + good planning = acceptable risk
Honestly, what's the worst that could happen, the pipe breaks, a drop in pressure is noted, and the pumps shut off. The pipe gets patched, and the pumps turned back on.
Yes, there are risks, but with good planning, those can be mitigated. And what's the worst that will happen? Some seawater gets out? That's hardly a catastrophy. Granted, a sink hole could form, but this would require an unnoticed leak to be let go for a while.
The California Aqueduct carries water for 450 miles, without a hitch. And it was built in the 70's, I have to believe that, in the last 30 years we have gotten a bit better at building transport mechanisms for water, and could transport cold ocean water for a good long way. Though, I would expect that the pipe would have to be burried down a ways, just to provide insulation during transit, say 100 feet or so.
On top of that, the furthest it would need to go is around 1500 miles (It's about 1800 miles from Los Angeles to North Dakota, and that could be cut down by starting in Washington), so I would think that, while it would be a hell of a project, it is within the realm of current engineering. Doing something like this across the US might be really good for the country.
It would get us largely off of fossil fuels for electricity generation.
Coupled with hydrogen fuel cell cars, we could bankrupt the middle east in a few years.
Much like Rossevelt's "New Deal" this could be a good way for the US government to kick-start the economy. The scope of this project would require a lot of skilled and unskilled labor, it would get money moving.
Once the infrastructure was complete, this should bring the cost of electricity down. And, if we are using hydrogen cars by then, the cost of transportation would go down. Giving a boost to the buying power of the people.
Over the long term, this project would provide a large number of jobs running and maintaing the system, which should absorb any job losses from other electricity industries.
To use today's buzzwords: this would increase American enegry independence, improving national security
For places, like the mojave desert, where water is scarce, this system could be used to provide drinking water.
Overall, this type of technology could be very good for the US, but since it would be very bad for the oil and power generation industries, it might as well be considered dead in the US now.
Want to know a secret? Girls like looking at good-looking naked guys, too. The fact that you believe they don't is why they're capable of controlling you.
While I would bet that this is true to some extent, I think guys have it worse. Or, at least, its much more prevalent. If you look at advertising, when a product is being targeted at a male audiance, you can generally expect to see one or more good looking women in various states of undress. Or, at least, the implication that the product is useful for attracting a good looking woman. It might just be the TV I watch, but I don't see the reverse as commonly. Yes, it does exist, I think there is an Expedia commercial that uses a male model for sex appeal, but most of the commercials seem to either use female models or try to sell a product without overt sexual overtones.
I know women are hardwired for sex, just like men are, but I think that, at least in the US, the gender roles that we are trained with from a young age tend to make women supress their sexuality more than males. Consider for a moment the "teen preganancy" epidemic. It usually centers around "teen mothers". For every one of those teen mothers you can be certain that there was a father involved at the point of conception, and many of those fathers are teens themselves. But the stigma gets attached to the female, she will become everything from a slut to a whore, while the guy will be getting high-fives from his buddies. We've created a society where a sexually active female gets ostracized, while a male that engages in the same activity gains prestiege.
I think this is why we see men more willing to express thier sexual interests than women, and why the sexual advertising works better on men than women. Men have been trained for thie entire secondary schooling that having sex and being sexual is a positive thing, while women have been taught that it is a bad thing to be suppressed. After enough training, that sort of thing becomes ingrained second nature (see Pavlov's dog).
At least strippers don't have to pose next to a fat bald guy so he can show the pictures to his friends as proof of his story that he made out with a hot chick.
No, instead they get to give the bald fat guy a lap dance, and feel his dick getting hard as they grind against it in a sexual manner.
Honestly, if I was a female, it'd take far less money to convince me to pose with a bunch of geeks for pictures than it would to convince me to rub myself all over those same geeks.
Ya, the presence of and gawking over booth babes is sexist and objectifies women. Now, why am I supposed to care? I'm sorry ladies, but guys are very simple creatures, we like looking at semi-naked, good looking, women. If they happen to be in a costume that reflects a particular interest of ours, then all the better.
There is sort of a catch-22 going on at shows like this one. Gaming has usually been the domain of males. Because gaming has been primarilly the domian of males, the advertising is aimed at males. Since the advertising and games are aimed primarilly at males, the industry attracts a mostly male audience, goto 10.
Booth babes are going to be a part of gaming for a long time to come, and I doubt they will ever disappear entirely. Once the industry matures (no pun intended) we should see that sort of advertising toned down a bit, but it will still be there. At the end of the day, it's still easy to sell a guy on sex, so advertisers will still be doing it for years to come. Look at the music industry, do you really think Britney Spears would have done so well if she had dressed respectfully?
The major problem with the PS3 at this stage will be the cost. There is agreement with the masses that a Cell processor/Blu-Ray HD-DVD combo isn't going to come cheap. I personally suspect $450-500, but many are talking in the region of $600. I'm sure you'll agree, this monster could price itself out of the market...
Maybe my memory is faulty, but when the PS2 and XBox were in the works, I seem to recall that people were expecting ridiculous prices for those consoles as well, e.g. $500+. In the end, they both released for around $300 and quickly dropped to $250.
I expect the same thing to happen again. The manufacturers will pump specs and numbers out to the media, to try to sound like the hottest thing on the block. I wouldn't be suprised if the articles, which question the price of the consoles, are just paid shills for the industry players. They get people all worked up about how cool a console will be, and how it can't be cheap. Then, the companies release thier respective consoles at a lower price point that any of the articles talked about, and everyone goes, "wow, that's cheap, they must be losing a lot of money" While, techinically, they are, it's simply a standard loss leader. they sell you a console at a loss and then make it up on the license costs of the games.
This is a non-issue, the PS2 and XBox will both hit at around $300, maybe $350, but I don't expect $400 or more. Yes, they will be taking it in the shorts for a while, but they will make it back on the games. Eventually, the economics of scale will catch up with the consoles, and the losses on those will either shrink dramatically, or disappear.
At a guess, they probably aren't. It's less expensive to just have a camera recording constantly. Though, that will still have a timestamp; and, it would be a very quick process to corrolate an access entry with a recording manually. The software to do the record buffer and triggering is a bit expensive, so very few places were moving to it when I left the security industry. Mostly, it was just government sites, with a few larger corporations looking into it.
But, all in all, you can expect that, if you have cameras running, and are using an ID badge to access doors, they can pinpoint the source of a problem, if they have a rough idea when it occured.
By way of antecdote, while I was still working with security systems, we had a large customer who needed to find out who went through a door at a specific time, a little over a year and a half prior. Now, this company has something like 1000 doors (not exagerating at all, they owned a skyscraper) and employees moving about regularly. So, you now have a table with a few million records in it, and it only took me a couple of minutes to find the data they wanted. The point of this is, that badge is tracking you, and a three year history of all doors is fairly common, anywhere you went is easy to figure out.
So that means that if an inmate cuts off the tag, disabling the transmitter, they know it instantly, but they no longer know "where" the inmate is? What's the point of that?
True, but they know where he was a second ago, literally. The prison goes into lockdown, and a team of guards go to the last known spot and search till they find the guy in the orange jumpsuit, without an orange tag.
Heck, you don't even need to lock down the whole prison, just lock all of the doors in the area around the, now dead, tag. This could even be automated. A tag goes down in an area, that area is quarantened. Guards open one door and have all of the people come out one at a time and show them thier hands. If any of them cause a problem, you have two guards on stand-by with shotguns, no more problem.
Don't they think this stuff through?
I'm fairly certain that better minds than your's or mine have looked at this.
If you kill all the terrorists, you're just going to have more terrorists.
Technically, if you follow this plan to its logical extreme, it will be successful. The downside is that the logical extreme will end up being better written as "Kill all followers of Islam." While it's a common saying that, "Violence never solves anything" this is obviously untrue. The problem is that most modern societies lack the will to follow through with the level of violence necessary to solve some problems. Perhaps a better saying is, "If violence isn't solving your problem, use more."
As in the example of Islamic extremists, if you kill a few of them, you just piss off more. If you kill a very large number of them, you still end up with those who become pissed off exteremists. However, if you were to commit genocide (a bit of a misnomer, but you get the point) and kill off every last follower of Islam, no matter how peaceful, in the end you would have no Islamic extremeists left. It might also require killing a lot of related people as well, but the general principal is there.
Now, thankfully, the few societies which have the military power to start commiting genocide refuse to do so on moral grounds. Which means that, we would probably be better served to use some measure of diplomacy to resolve the issue. Though, with the general trend in US people these days, I am starting to wonder if they might soon condone genocide as an option?
RFID is just a wireless bar code scanner people? If you arent worried about pirate bar code scanners why does RFID scare you so much?
Not necessarilly, there are RFID smart cards, which can hold a lot more information than just a string of numbers. For example, one application is to have a number, a fingerprint, and a picture of a person in a smart card. All of this is read by a hand-held scanner, the picture is displayed, the fingerprint can be checked, and the number looked up in a database to get the rest of the info.
With just a little imagination, this can be abstracted to a contactless National ID card, which would hold all of the information about a person, and be easily used to track citizens wherever they go, and to steal their info by an unscrupulous person.
All that said, I like this idea. You go to jail, you get tagged. When you get out, you get to take the tag off. That the guards get tagged too is not a bad idea, it would be a good safety feature in case of riot. SWAT would know where any hostages are, and be able to storm that room to get them out. Plus, knowing where the rioting inmates are would make shooting them eaiser. Though, the guard's tag should be removed when they go home at night.
While I can see some useful things coming of this it makes you wonder how long before the prox-cards that get lots of people into work also track them as well.
Those prox-cards you wear(which are a form of RFID) already do track you to some extent. I used to work on access control systems, and one of the biggest things they were used for was to figure out who went through what door when. The system I worked with had default reports built right in to do just that. And those reports were admisable as evidence in court. Granted, there's always the, "I let so-and-so borrow my card" defense, but that is an easy thing to sort out in court. Plus, some systems will have a read activated camera. You swipe your card at a secure door, and a video camera starts recording. Actually, the recording starts a few seconds before the read thanks to a buffer and event triggers. Not only does the employer have a record of who went through the door when, they have a nice digital video of that person doing it, timestamped, corrolated to the access record in the database, and watermarked to prevent video tampering. Ok, so it's not real-time tracking, but it can be darn close if setup right.
While what you say is true, I think there is one hole in the argument. You only need one dedicated pirate to put it on a P2P network, and the game is over. If anything, the more difficult the DRM becomes to break, the more it will drive the pirate groups to try to release a zero-day hack. A lot of the small groups which do this sort of thing are doing it simply for the recognition they receive on their local IRC channel. They will still be driven to break the DRM, and post the result. Everyone else will still have their convienent point and click interface, and will still be more than happy to share bandwidth to get around having to pay for it.
Is this legal, ethical, moral? I'll let the reader sort all of those out for himself. But I don't think it's suprising. Anytime a monopoly exists on a product, and that monopoly is used to keep prices above the perceived value of a product, you can expect a black market to pop up to fill the demand at a lower cost. That's what's happened with P2P networks and music and movies. It may be ethically dubious, but its an expected outcome of a capitalistic system under an artificial imposed scarcity.
I can see it now, Disney buys out Ubisoft. A little over a year and a half later we get "Splinter Cell:The Movie". It will be all animated, and we will be subjected to a showstopping musical number, wherein the main protagonist is singing while sneaking into the evil enemy fortress. He won't actually kill anyone, simply distact them at opportune points in the musical number with the most over-the-top stunts ever seen by man. During this whole time the villian's minions will be singing backup for the protagonist.
Evetually, the story (what little of it there is) will degenerate into a heroic duet as the protagonist and the villian fight it out to the last.
This movie will be followed by "Splinter Cell:The Movie 2", followed shortly by the direct-to-video release of "Splinter Cell:Kids" The story of the children, who just happen to be agents, rescuing their parents from the evil villian, with silly antics and blindingly obvious traps.
And, of course, we'll get the accompanying games, which let you "play the movie." Which will, according to the laws of the universe, suck.
That's actually a pretty common problem on modern military fighters. Most of them have a negative stability. This is the reason the F-16 can manuver so well; however, if the computers on the F-16 were to go out completely, it would tumble out of control. It's much like throwing a dart backwards, it will naturally flip over, it's just worse when thrust is being constantly applied.
I made a journal entry, which I think was saguine to this. I'll paraphras here:
Let us assume for a moment, that God actually did come down to Abraham, and told him the story of Genesis. God:Abraham, put down that chisel, and listen to me. I am the Lord your God. And you will be my prophet. I will tell you the story of the Earth, and you will write it down and take it to the people. Abraham:Great, now I'm hearing voices, the baker must be using moldy wheat to make bread again. Ok, God, what can I do for you, mind you I've got to get this idol made by 3, or my father will be cross. God:Forget the idol, forget crosses, trust me, you'll get enough of those later. I'm going to explain to you how I created the universe and your little planet. Abraham:Alright, but I don't want to miss my tea. God:Fine, now get a pen and start writing what I saw. Abraham:Ok, ready God:In the beginning, there was only a quantum singularity, which contained everything. Then, I caused a fluctuation to occur within that sigularity, and BOOM, the universe expanded into a quark plasma. But, that is an unstable state according to the laws I wrote so that quickly cooled down and formed into matter. From there, the universe expanded outward at an ever incresing speed which...yes, what is it Abraham? Abraham:Um, God, I had you though "In the beginning." But, what does quantum mean? God:Well, it means that something is quantized. In the case of a quantum sigularity, it means that everything is compressed down into a very small space, about the size of a sub-atomic particle. Abraham:What? God:Alright, I see we're going to have to start at a more basic level. How is your calculus? Abraham:What's that, is that even a appropriate question for a god to be asking? God:Ok, so need to get through calculus first. You are at least familiar with infinite limits and sums, right? Abraham:... God:I'll take that as a no. Ok fine, Let's start over. Abraham:Ok, none of that quanta-whatever stuff this time? God:I promise. Ok, so, In the beginning...
And the rest, is the Bible.
*Dramatic fade to black, cut to commercial*
Do you really think a god would have wanted to explain astrophysics to people who were doing well to sort out how to cook meat?
And there is no proof that a higher power/doesn't/ exist, now is there?:
Ahh, the wonder fallacy of "burdern of proof", religious people seem to love this one.
Consider for a moment, how does one prove that a god of some sort doesn't exist? Even if we were to be able to explain every thing that happens in our universe perfectly, even if we were able to create universes of our own, belivers in said god could still argue, "well, god is all powerful. He can break the rules he wrote, if he wants to, so you just haven't detected him, he's just dicking with you."
Short answer: One cannot prove the non-existance of a god. However, one could prove the existance of a god, if they can show some sort of repeatable experiment, which is unexplainable as a natural phenomena. Therefore, the burden of proof lies on the people proposing a god to show some proof of his existance.
And, no, that life is wonderfully complex is not proof. Life also has some pretty obvious blunders.
Another important point that should be made, science and religion are not mutually exclusive. As an above poster's teahcer put it. Religion says that some god did it, scienece is just trying to figure out how. Science and religion should have absolutly nothing to do with each other.
I guess that could be argued, but then, I'm actually trying to learn, not just get it up and running. Plus I tend to like to tweak things to my own designs, so I didn't have a choice.
Thing is, I'm running Debian on the box. So getting Apache functional was really just an "apt get apache". After that finished, I walked through the confgiuration program (about the same as a wizard). At the end of that, I did have a functional web server, with zero clue about what was in the httpd.conf, or really that an httpd.conf file existed.
I think the biggest mistake I made so far was that I left a directory open to the world, which I had intended to be password protected. Fortunatly, it was nothing that I care about being kept secret. It's just that it was large files which I archived for myself and a couple friends, and I didn't want my badnwidth being killed by any old person downloading them.
I'm still trying to sort out how to get the.htaccess file to keep it protected. I think I am actually close, the problem is, that the directory is a share on the Windows box, which is mounted in fstab. This is done because the windows box has an 80GB drive, as opposed to the 2GB drive in the Linux box. The data is about 10GB, so I can't move it over, yet. Eventually, I intend to back the data off the windows box, and move the 80GB drive into the Linux box, wipe the drive and then mount it as/var/inet with./www and./ftp folders on it to hold the web and ftp stuff respectivly.
Apache requires you to read the documentation and crack the httpd.conf with a text editor in order to change stuff. This ensures that you are at least one evolutionary level above blind, one-armed chimp, which is the only required level to use the mouse and click-click-click on the Internets MMC configurator for IIS. At a minimum, Apache web admins are *slightly* more talented than IIS admins
Um, bullshit.
I've been trying to teach myself more about Linux and Apache. And, honestly, I haven't a clue about half the stuff in the httpd.conf file. I'm getting there, but that still hasn't stopped me from getting a web server functioning, nor has it stopped me from getting apache-ssl up and running, with squirrel mail. Is my server anywhere near secure? I highly doubt it. Truth is, the Win2K server with IIS5 I had running beforehand was probably more secure, simply because I had a clue about what I was doing in those clicky "Internets MMC configurator for IIS".
As the old axiom goes, "it's a poor carpenter who blames his tools". Yes, the Linux/Apache setup is more secure by default, but when it's setup by someone with little to no clue what they are doing, it's very likely to end up unsecure. Once I am a little more knowledgeable about running and securing Linux/Apache, I'll probably reformat the box, start over, and do a better job about it. Until then, I just assume the box is going to be hacked. And, no, I don't think I am above the evolutionary level of blind one-armed chimp when it comes to running Apache. Hoestly, comming in blind the online manuals sucked.
Jury nullification is a wonderful idea in theroy, but I'd hate to have to rely on it in practice. First off, the likelyhood of actually having a jury which knows about jury nullification is pretty low. Second, having that same jury have the balls to pull it off, if the government is starting to show tyranical leanings, is even worse. Really, the best way to stop this sort of thing is before it starts. Of course, one could probably argue that the camel is already in the tent, and people like me are just fooling ourselves if we think we're going to slow it down any.
Agreed, this is why I abandon a lot of shopping carts online. I really hate it when a site tries to make me jump through all the hoops of buying a product before telling me the price of the product. If you can't be up front with your price, you aren't worth my time. I've seen sites go so far as to try to get me to put in all of my shipping and payment information, before telling me a price. Forget it, I'll put up with having it in my shopping cart, but unless I'm actually going to buy the item, I'm keeping the rest of that info to myself. The same goes for registering for a site to see prices. Either let me see the prices, or piss off.
Slashdot Mirror
The people have become complaicent. In 2004 we had a voter turn out of about 30%, as I recall. This means that greater than half the people of voting age didn't care enough to vote. Either we have become so disaffected or disgusted that we don't even try anymore. And who can blame the non-voters? Yes, third parties exist but the rules have been setup by the two major parties to marginalize the third parties, and enough propaganda spewed forth about how voting for a third party is "wasting your vote", that people refuse to do so. So our choices this time boiled down to:
- A facist who wants to rush headlong into a "war on terror" and thinks that there ought to be some limits to freedoms.
- A socialist who wants to stop for a moment to seem different, then rush headlong into the "war on terror".
So where's the guy who's willing to call this war for what it is, a "war on civil liberties".I think this whole thing is set to get worse before it gets better. Even now, people are accepting the idea that we need to allow restrictions on our freedoms for the sake of security. This shouldn't even be a debate, we are a country founded on the idea of freedom and liberty. Yes, this means that all of us must live with the added risk an open and free society brings. But, this is no longer acceptable to people. They want to feel secure in the blanket of false security, and are willing to sacrifice all kinds of liberties in order to have that feeling. In the end, they will get what they are after, they will be totally secure in their police state.
So, here we are now, on the virge of facism. The people are convince that we are under attack, and those that question this are decried as unpatriotic and are claimed to be putting the nation in danger. Herman Goreing was right, it is the same in any country:
"Of course the people dont want war...that is understood. But voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Hermann Goering
Oh good, I was thinking I was the only one.
For the humor impaired (or terminally stupid):
<Sarcasm>
Yer all a bunch of commie pinko liberal America-haters. Our President is doing the BEST HE CAN to protect us from terrorism, and he NEEDS these powers.
</Sarcasm>
I would say I'm suprised but, I'm not.
Underground pipe + California + faultlines + earthquakes = Spraying seawater all over the place.
+ Risk management + good planning = acceptable risk
Honestly, what's the worst that could happen, the pipe breaks, a drop in pressure is noted, and the pumps shut off. The pipe gets patched, and the pumps turned back on.
Yes, there are risks, but with good planning, those can be mitigated. And what's the worst that will happen? Some seawater gets out? That's hardly a catastrophy. Granted, a sink hole could form, but this would require an unnoticed leak to be let go for a while.
On top of that, the furthest it would need to go is around 1500 miles (It's about 1800 miles from Los Angeles to North Dakota, and that could be cut down by starting in Washington), so I would think that, while it would be a hell of a project, it is within the realm of current engineering. Doing something like this across the US might be really good for the country.
- It would get us largely off of fossil fuels for electricity generation.
- Coupled with hydrogen fuel cell cars, we could bankrupt the middle east in a few years.
- Much like Rossevelt's "New Deal" this could be a good way for the US government to kick-start the economy. The scope of this project would require a lot of skilled and unskilled labor, it would get money moving.
- Once the infrastructure was complete, this should bring the cost of electricity down. And, if we are using hydrogen cars by then, the cost of transportation would go down. Giving a boost to the buying power of the people.
- Over the long term, this project would provide a large number of jobs running and maintaing the system, which should absorb any job losses from other electricity industries.
- To use today's buzzwords: this would increase American enegry independence, improving national security
- For places, like the mojave desert, where water is scarce, this system could be used to provide drinking water.
Overall, this type of technology could be very good for the US, but since it would be very bad for the oil and power generation industries, it might as well be considered dead in the US now.Want to know a secret? Girls like looking at good-looking naked guys, too. The fact that you believe they don't is why they're capable of controlling you.
While I would bet that this is true to some extent, I think guys have it worse. Or, at least, its much more prevalent. If you look at advertising, when a product is being targeted at a male audiance, you can generally expect to see one or more good looking women in various states of undress. Or, at least, the implication that the product is useful for attracting a good looking woman. It might just be the TV I watch, but I don't see the reverse as commonly. Yes, it does exist, I think there is an Expedia commercial that uses a male model for sex appeal, but most of the commercials seem to either use female models or try to sell a product without overt sexual overtones.
I know women are hardwired for sex, just like men are, but I think that, at least in the US, the gender roles that we are trained with from a young age tend to make women supress their sexuality more than males. Consider for a moment the "teen preganancy" epidemic. It usually centers around "teen mothers". For every one of those teen mothers you can be certain that there was a father involved at the point of conception, and many of those fathers are teens themselves. But the stigma gets attached to the female, she will become everything from a slut to a whore, while the guy will be getting high-fives from his buddies. We've created a society where a sexually active female gets ostracized, while a male that engages in the same activity gains prestiege.
I think this is why we see men more willing to express thier sexual interests than women, and why the sexual advertising works better on men than women. Men have been trained for thie entire secondary schooling that having sex and being sexual is a positive thing, while women have been taught that it is a bad thing to be suppressed. After enough training, that sort of thing becomes ingrained second nature (see Pavlov's dog).
At least strippers don't have to pose next to a fat bald guy so he can show the pictures to his friends as proof of his story that he made out with a hot chick.
No, instead they get to give the bald fat guy a lap dance, and feel his dick getting hard as they grind against it in a sexual manner. Honestly, if I was a female, it'd take far less money to convince me to pose with a bunch of geeks for pictures than it would to convince me to rub myself all over those same geeks.
Ya, the presence of and gawking over booth babes is sexist and objectifies women. Now, why am I supposed to care? I'm sorry ladies, but guys are very simple creatures, we like looking at semi-naked, good looking, women. If they happen to be in a costume that reflects a particular interest of ours, then all the better.
There is sort of a catch-22 going on at shows like this one. Gaming has usually been the domain of males. Because gaming has been primarilly the domian of males, the advertising is aimed at males. Since the advertising and games are aimed primarilly at males, the industry attracts a mostly male audience, goto 10.
Booth babes are going to be a part of gaming for a long time to come, and I doubt they will ever disappear entirely. Once the industry matures (no pun intended) we should see that sort of advertising toned down a bit, but it will still be there. At the end of the day, it's still easy to sell a guy on sex, so advertisers will still be doing it for years to come. Look at the music industry, do you really think Britney Spears would have done so well if she had dressed respectfully?
The major problem with the PS3 at this stage will be the cost. There is agreement with the masses that a Cell processor/Blu-Ray HD-DVD combo isn't going to come cheap. I personally suspect $450-500, but many are talking in the region of $600. I'm sure you'll agree, this monster could price itself out of the market...
Maybe my memory is faulty, but when the PS2 and XBox were in the works, I seem to recall that people were expecting ridiculous prices for those consoles as well, e.g. $500+. In the end, they both released for around $300 and quickly dropped to $250.
I expect the same thing to happen again. The manufacturers will pump specs and numbers out to the media, to try to sound like the hottest thing on the block. I wouldn't be suprised if the articles, which question the price of the consoles, are just paid shills for the industry players. They get people all worked up about how cool a console will be, and how it can't be cheap. Then, the companies release thier respective consoles at a lower price point that any of the articles talked about, and everyone goes, "wow, that's cheap, they must be losing a lot of money" While, techinically, they are, it's simply a standard loss leader. they sell you a console at a loss and then make it up on the license costs of the games.
This is a non-issue, the PS2 and XBox will both hit at around $300, maybe $350, but I don't expect $400 or more. Yes, they will be taking it in the shorts for a while, but they will make it back on the games. Eventually, the economics of scale will catch up with the consoles, and the losses on those will either shrink dramatically, or disappear.
At a guess, they probably aren't. It's less expensive to just have a camera recording constantly. Though, that will still have a timestamp; and, it would be a very quick process to corrolate an access entry with a recording manually. The software to do the record buffer and triggering is a bit expensive, so very few places were moving to it when I left the security industry. Mostly, it was just government sites, with a few larger corporations looking into it.
But, all in all, you can expect that, if you have cameras running, and are using an ID badge to access doors, they can pinpoint the source of a problem, if they have a rough idea when it occured.
By way of antecdote, while I was still working with security systems, we had a large customer who needed to find out who went through a door at a specific time, a little over a year and a half prior. Now, this company has something like 1000 doors (not exagerating at all, they owned a skyscraper) and employees moving about regularly. So, you now have a table with a few million records in it, and it only took me a couple of minutes to find the data they wanted. The point of this is, that badge is tracking you, and a three year history of all doors is fairly common, anywhere you went is easy to figure out.
So that means that if an inmate cuts off the tag, disabling the transmitter, they know it instantly, but they no longer know "where" the inmate is? What's the point of that?
True, but they know where he was a second ago, literally. The prison goes into lockdown, and a team of guards go to the last known spot and search till they find the guy in the orange jumpsuit, without an orange tag.
Heck, you don't even need to lock down the whole prison, just lock all of the doors in the area around the, now dead, tag. This could even be automated. A tag goes down in an area, that area is quarantened. Guards open one door and have all of the people come out one at a time and show them thier hands. If any of them cause a problem, you have two guards on stand-by with shotguns, no more problem.
Don't they think this stuff through?
I'm fairly certain that better minds than your's or mine have looked at this.
(1) Kill all terrorists.
If you kill all the terrorists, you're just going to have more terrorists.
Technically, if you follow this plan to its logical extreme, it will be successful. The downside is that the logical extreme will end up being better written as "Kill all followers of Islam." While it's a common saying that, "Violence never solves anything" this is obviously untrue. The problem is that most modern societies lack the will to follow through with the level of violence necessary to solve some problems. Perhaps a better saying is, "If violence isn't solving your problem, use more."
As in the example of Islamic extremists, if you kill a few of them, you just piss off more. If you kill a very large number of them, you still end up with those who become pissed off exteremists. However, if you were to commit genocide (a bit of a misnomer, but you get the point) and kill off every last follower of Islam, no matter how peaceful, in the end you would have no Islamic extremeists left. It might also require killing a lot of related people as well, but the general principal is there.
Now, thankfully, the few societies which have the military power to start commiting genocide refuse to do so on moral grounds. Which means that, we would probably be better served to use some measure of diplomacy to resolve the issue. Though, with the general trend in US people these days, I am starting to wonder if they might soon condone genocide as an option?
RFID is just a wireless bar code scanner people? If you arent worried about pirate bar code scanners why does RFID scare you so much?
Not necessarilly, there are RFID smart cards, which can hold a lot more information than just a string of numbers. For example, one application is to have a number, a fingerprint, and a picture of a person in a smart card. All of this is read by a hand-held scanner, the picture is displayed, the fingerprint can be checked, and the number looked up in a database to get the rest of the info.
With just a little imagination, this can be abstracted to a contactless National ID card, which would hold all of the information about a person, and be easily used to track citizens wherever they go, and to steal their info by an unscrupulous person.
All that said, I like this idea. You go to jail, you get tagged. When you get out, you get to take the tag off. That the guards get tagged too is not a bad idea, it would be a good safety feature in case of riot. SWAT would know where any hostages are, and be able to storm that room to get them out. Plus, knowing where the rioting inmates are would make shooting them eaiser. Though, the guard's tag should be removed when they go home at night.
While I can see some useful things coming of this it makes you wonder how long before the prox-cards that get lots of people into work also track them as well.
Those prox-cards you wear(which are a form of RFID) already do track you to some extent. I used to work on access control systems, and one of the biggest things they were used for was to figure out who went through what door when. The system I worked with had default reports built right in to do just that. And those reports were admisable as evidence in court. Granted, there's always the, "I let so-and-so borrow my card" defense, but that is an easy thing to sort out in court. Plus, some systems will have a read activated camera. You swipe your card at a secure door, and a video camera starts recording. Actually, the recording starts a few seconds before the read thanks to a buffer and event triggers. Not only does the employer have a record of who went through the door when, they have a nice digital video of that person doing it, timestamped, corrolated to the access record in the database, and watermarked to prevent video tampering. Ok, so it's not real-time tracking, but it can be darn close if setup right.
While what you say is true, I think there is one hole in the argument. You only need one dedicated pirate to put it on a P2P network, and the game is over. If anything, the more difficult the DRM becomes to break, the more it will drive the pirate groups to try to release a zero-day hack. A lot of the small groups which do this sort of thing are doing it simply for the recognition they receive on their local IRC channel. They will still be driven to break the DRM, and post the result. Everyone else will still have their convienent point and click interface, and will still be more than happy to share bandwidth to get around having to pay for it.
Is this legal, ethical, moral? I'll let the reader sort all of those out for himself. But I don't think it's suprising. Anytime a monopoly exists on a product, and that monopoly is used to keep prices above the perceived value of a product, you can expect a black market to pop up to fill the demand at a lower cost. That's what's happened with P2P networks and music and movies. It may be ethically dubious, but its an expected outcome of a capitalistic system under an artificial imposed scarcity.
I can see it now, Disney buys out Ubisoft. A little over a year and a half later we get "Splinter Cell:The Movie". It will be all animated, and we will be subjected to a showstopping musical number, wherein the main protagonist is singing while sneaking into the evil enemy fortress. He won't actually kill anyone, simply distact them at opportune points in the musical number with the most over-the-top stunts ever seen by man. During this whole time the villian's minions will be singing backup for the protagonist.
Evetually, the story (what little of it there is) will degenerate into a heroic duet as the protagonist and the villian fight it out to the last.
This movie will be followed by "Splinter Cell:The Movie 2", followed shortly by the direct-to-video release of "Splinter Cell:Kids" The story of the children, who just happen to be agents, rescuing their parents from the evil villian, with silly antics and blindingly obvious traps.
And, of course, we'll get the accompanying games, which let you "play the movie." Which will, according to the laws of the universe, suck.
That's actually a pretty common problem on modern military fighters. Most of them have a negative stability. This is the reason the F-16 can manuver so well; however, if the computers on the F-16 were to go out completely, it would tumble out of control. It's much like throwing a dart backwards, it will naturally flip over, it's just worse when thrust is being constantly applied.
I made a journal entry, which I think was saguine to this. I'll paraphras here:
Let us assume for a moment, that God actually did come down to Abraham, and told him the story of Genesis.
God:Abraham, put down that chisel, and listen to me. I am the Lord your God. And you will be my prophet. I will tell you the story of the Earth, and you will write it down and take it to the people.
Abraham:Great, now I'm hearing voices, the baker must be using moldy wheat to make bread again. Ok, God, what can I do for you, mind you I've got to get this idol made by 3, or my father will be cross.
God:Forget the idol, forget crosses, trust me, you'll get enough of those later. I'm going to explain to you how I created the universe and your little planet.
Abraham:Alright, but I don't want to miss my tea.
God:Fine, now get a pen and start writing what I saw.
Abraham:Ok, ready
God:In the beginning, there was only a quantum singularity, which contained everything. Then, I caused a fluctuation to occur within that sigularity, and BOOM, the universe expanded into a quark plasma. But, that is an unstable state according to the laws I wrote so that quickly cooled down and formed into matter. From there, the universe expanded outward at an ever incresing speed which...yes, what is it Abraham?
Abraham:Um, God, I had you though "In the beginning." But, what does quantum mean?
God:Well, it means that something is quantized. In the case of a quantum sigularity, it means that everything is compressed down into a very small space, about the size of a sub-atomic particle.
Abraham:What?
God:Alright, I see we're going to have to start at a more basic level. How is your calculus?
Abraham:What's that, is that even a appropriate question for a god to be asking?
God:Ok, so need to get through calculus first. You are at least familiar with infinite limits and sums, right?
Abraham:...
God:I'll take that as a no. Ok fine, Let's start over.
Abraham:Ok, none of that quanta-whatever stuff this time?
God:I promise. Ok, so, In the beginning...
And the rest, is the Bible.
*Dramatic fade to black, cut to commercial*
Do you really think a god would have wanted to explain astrophysics to people who were doing well to sort out how to cook meat?
And there is no proof that a higher power /doesn't/ exist, now is there? :
Ahh, the wonder fallacy of "burdern of proof", religious people seem to love this one.
Consider for a moment, how does one prove that a god of some sort doesn't exist? Even if we were to be able to explain every thing that happens in our universe perfectly, even if we were able to create universes of our own, belivers in said god could still argue, "well, god is all powerful. He can break the rules he wrote, if he wants to, so you just haven't detected him, he's just dicking with you."
Short answer: One cannot prove the non-existance of a god. However, one could prove the existance of a god, if they can show some sort of repeatable experiment, which is unexplainable as a natural phenomena. Therefore, the burden of proof lies on the people proposing a god to show some proof of his existance.
And, no, that life is wonderfully complex is not proof. Life also has some pretty obvious blunders.
Another important point that should be made, science and religion are not mutually exclusive. As an above poster's teahcer put it. Religion says that some god did it, scienece is just trying to figure out how. Science and religion should have absolutly nothing to do with each other.
I guess that could be argued, but then, I'm actually trying to learn, not just get it up and running. Plus I tend to like to tweak things to my own designs, so I didn't have a choice.
Thing is, I'm running Debian on the box. So getting Apache functional was really just an "apt get apache". After that finished, I walked through the confgiuration program (about the same as a wizard). At the end of that, I did have a functional web server, with zero clue about what was in the httpd.conf, or really that an httpd.conf file existed.
I think the biggest mistake I made so far was that I left a directory open to the world, which I had intended to be password protected. Fortunatly, it was nothing that I care about being kept secret. It's just that it was large files which I archived for myself and a couple friends, and I didn't want my badnwidth being killed by any old person downloading them. .htaccess file to keep it protected. I think I am actually close, the problem is, that the directory is a share on the Windows box, which is mounted in fstab. This is done because the windows box has an 80GB drive, as opposed to the 2GB drive in the Linux box. The data is about 10GB, so I can't move it over, yet. Eventually, I intend to back the data off the windows box, and move the 80GB drive into the Linux box, wipe the drive and then mount it as /var/inet with ./www and ./ftp folders on it to hold the web and ftp stuff respectivly.
I'm still trying to sort out how to get the
Apache requires you to read the documentation and crack the httpd.conf with a text editor in order to change stuff. This ensures that you are at least one evolutionary level above blind, one-armed chimp, which is the only required level to use the mouse and click-click-click on the Internets MMC configurator for IIS. At a minimum, Apache web admins are *slightly* more talented than IIS admins
Um, bullshit.
I've been trying to teach myself more about Linux and Apache. And, honestly, I haven't a clue about half the stuff in the httpd.conf file. I'm getting there, but that still hasn't stopped me from getting a web server functioning, nor has it stopped me from getting apache-ssl up and running, with squirrel mail. Is my server anywhere near secure? I highly doubt it. Truth is, the Win2K server with IIS5 I had running beforehand was probably more secure, simply because I had a clue about what I was doing in those clicky "Internets MMC configurator for IIS".
As the old axiom goes, "it's a poor carpenter who blames his tools". Yes, the Linux/Apache setup is more secure by default, but when it's setup by someone with little to no clue what they are doing, it's very likely to end up unsecure. Once I am a little more knowledgeable about running and securing Linux/Apache, I'll probably reformat the box, start over, and do a better job about it. Until then, I just assume the box is going to be hacked. And, no, I don't think I am above the evolutionary level of blind one-armed chimp when it comes to running Apache. Hoestly, comming in blind the online manuals sucked.
Jury nullification is a wonderful idea in theroy, but I'd hate to have to rely on it in practice. First off, the likelyhood of actually having a jury which knows about jury nullification is pretty low. Second, having that same jury have the balls to pull it off, if the government is starting to show tyranical leanings, is even worse. Really, the best way to stop this sort of thing is before it starts. Of course, one could probably argue that the camel is already in the tent, and people like me are just fooling ourselves if we think we're going to slow it down any.
Agreed, this is why I abandon a lot of shopping carts online. I really hate it when a site tries to make me jump through all the hoops of buying a product before telling me the price of the product. If you can't be up front with your price, you aren't worth my time. I've seen sites go so far as to try to get me to put in all of my shipping and payment information, before telling me a price. Forget it, I'll put up with having it in my shopping cart, but unless I'm actually going to buy the item, I'm keeping the rest of that info to myself. The same goes for registering for a site to see prices. Either let me see the prices, or piss off.