There was a warning on the box in an ancient script that someone translated as "do not open this box or you will die"- we figured we would open it for a lark.
If truth in advertising laws were enforced, that would be on engagement ring boxes.
...and religions would have to find some other way to market their product.
Personally, using voice commands for operating anything inside a car doesn't really interest me. It's probably a generational thing, but using voice commands to control anything makes me feel like a douche. It's nothing but a higher-tech Clapper.
Hmmm...not everybody drives cars, dude. I think Siri is fan-fucking-tastic because my daily driver is a Ducati 1098. Suddenly, with Siri, I can actually do more than queue up a new playlist or make/take calls with the Sena SMH10 comm system in my helmet. Much beyond that, I would have had to find a spot to pull over so that I could get to the touchscreen interface on my iPhone. With Siri, I can text my pals, pull up (and edit!) my calendar, get turn by turn directions even easier than on my very-motorcycle-friendly Garmin Zumo 660, and even jump in vent and chat with my guildies if I want to, all without having to stop, or even having to take my eyes off the road, which I still sometimes have to do with the Zumo, despite it's well thought-out interface. If Siri is a glimpse of the future of voice interfaces, I'm liking it.
Same can be said for the Romans, the Byzantines, Mongols, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and every other major collapsed empire that had thousands upon thousands in cities that were lost to time or to diaspora.
If my descendants live in a country that is no longer the United States of America, even if they live in the same geographical area as I live now or anywhere else within the extant borders, they're no longer Americans. Their nation and culture define that encompassing label, and if that nation or culture goes away, then the label no longer applies.
A national identity is more than the socio-cultural matrix that gives rise to it -- ask any sociologist or anthropologist. Better yet, go see "300," and then ask yourself if the "Spartan" label has lost any of its power, even though Sparta itself has been swallowed up by history. If you actually believe "American" is a mere label, I think you are in for a really rude awakening. I'm not trolling you, I'm telling you straight up: Americans have the technological and economic means to utterly dominate this planet politically, even if they didn't already dominate it culturally. Tell me, does your model still hold up if the "extant borders" of the country happen to encompass the entire planet and its population?
Deceive, decoy, deny -- you win elections first, and then worry about the fallout from your tactics after the election, when you are in a better position to deal with it. Can't say I'm surprised that our northern neighbors engage in the same kind of election hijinks that have plagued our plebiscites. When we get reports of dead voters casting ballots in their elections, this might become interesting.
These scientists were irresponsible in their dealings with their press.
I never saw a single irresposible statement from them. They were very clear that there was likely to be an error in their experiment. The press wasn't irresponsible either. Every article I read was balanced and careful to state that there may be a simple explaination.
They should have kept it strictly within the community...
Who exactly is "the community"? Scientists are not a priesthood, and the public does not need to be "protected" from scientific debate.
Most scientists rely on public funding to eat. The community of scientists is exactly like a priesthood in that respect. In fact, scientists have to make the same kind of unfulfillable promises to the people that financially support them that any other priest does -- you know, the kind that require a long time and (ideally) a lot of money to fulfill. Priests tell people god moves in mysterious ways when the promises don't appear to be working out; the scientist says, "You wouldn't understand the math."
So yeah, a case can be made that that the community of scientists is, in many ways, like a priesthood. High barriers to entry? Check. Cloistered life? Double check. A formal distinction drawn between the anointed and the laity? Check. Subject only to the the laws of their society, and above the mundane courts? Oh, you better believe that's a check.
But back on point. Like priests, scientists are human, so somebody is going to have to be blamed for this. The people who funded this Italian experiment are not going to be as generous the next time around, if the scientists can't find a plausible place to put the blame that leaves them in the clear. This isn't about the scientific method anymore, it is about CYA - the scientists have to make sure that it has the right spin on it so that their funding doesn't completely dry up on them amid charges of incompetency. I would not want to be that project manager the next time he has to go begging for funding. (And that one Italian project of yours, a loose connection? Really? In this day and age? Thank you for your presentation, Professor, I'm sure you know how to find the exit.)
Right. And if chicks didn't dress all slutty, they wouldn't get all raped, AMIRITE?
Do you people understand rape IS NOT the woman's fault? How ignorant do you have to be to understand rape is because the rapist is a sick fuck, not because of how the woman is dressed.
Actually, most rapes probably occur because of miscommunication. A guy was never taught that the behavior he is engaged in is rape, and maybe his support network doesn't characterize it as rape, so he doesn't realize it's rape. A girl feels violated by something like what the guy considers to be rape, that she (or her support network) consider to be rape, under the same behavior. Ask a dozen different people what happened based on the same facts, you'll get wildly divergent answers as to whether or not there was rape. The problem is that we have an idea of what "rape" is in society, and it's stranger rape, which isn't what rape really is. The problem is we have conflicting beliefs as to what behavior is okay and what behavior isn't. Labeling a rapist a sick fuck is probably usually wrong. Usually rape occurs because of miscommunication and either unclear or incorrect social norms, not because of any mental deformity. If we made rape education as big a priority as rape punishment--or perhaps bigger--we would see a bigger reduction in the amount of rape than we do from punishment.
For what it is worth, Kurosawa elegantly exposed this idea of conflicting views of the same incident in Rashomon. It might be worth the time it takes to watch it to get some perspective on the whole differing norms debate when it comes to rape.
Given the mobility of aerial camera platforms and the sophistication of current imaging hardware, I don't think ground fire from a bunch of huntards (can you tell I play WoW alot?) is going to pose a serious threat to the remote airborne surveillance business. Autonomous quad- and octocopters can (and have been) programmed to fly stealthily and evasively. Hitting an agile, small, nearly invisible target even if one knows the target is there is not a trivial thing. A better defense for the huntards is camoflage, deception and misdirection, not a frontal assault on the drone. Seriously, using decoys to sucker the drones away from the area you are going to be hunting in (like professional poachers do in African game parks right now) is probably the optimal strategy to defeat a quadcopter surveillance platform, not shooting it down.
Of course, there are plenty of distopian possibilities as well... seen GATACA? We just need to make certain that we invent a whole new raft of privacy laws that protect free speech, the freedom of genetic diversity, and right to one's own genome not being used to segregate, subjugate or in any way marginalize a person.
Welcome to the brave new world, if your butt isn't just a little puckered, you're just not paying attention.
Whaaat? Your genome doesn't belong to you, dude. You are, at best, a transitory tenant in a house whose foundations were laid three and a half billion years ago. The genome, if it can be said to belong to anyone, belongs to the species, not to any particular instantiation of the phenotype. GATTACA was indeed a pretty bleak glimpse of the future, but only from the perspective of the poor sod who had the bad luck to be born before all the inferior DNA was screened away. Certainly, the film focused on that individual, but the flip side to GATTACA is a species that is almost completely free of disease and strife, and one that is taking its DNA to another planet. I think you may have lost sight of the fact that reproductive success via preferential selection is *why* you and I are at the top of the food chain on this planet. I would think the logical next step would be to encourage prospective parents to submit themselves to DNA screening, and not the legislation you suggest which, from the perspective of the species, would serve only to protect an individual organisms's right to bear defective off-spring. The selective pressures that produced our species were pretty much not under our control -- with this technology, we can sidestep those selective pressures and substitute our own. Why would you legislate to constrain our ability to control our own evolution?
...the mines and the teachers. This is a swift kick to the latter's. Unions are only as strong as their cash boxes are deep. Force the Arizona teacher's unions to start defending members in court against something as wide open to interpretation as FCC decency standards, and that will drain the cashbox very quickly. A brilliant tactic on the part of the union busters; Arizona has long been a "right-to-work" state (read: anti-union) and this will effectively take the teacher's union out of the game if it gets through the legislature.
A movie is just a game with a really crappy user interface. Games provide entertainment to people with enough disposable income to waste on them, just like movies. And just like movie studios, the game studios don't risk their money on unknown or untested content. Hollywood has figured out that it can raid your childhood memories, wrap them up with some eye-candy special effects, and sell them back to you at a tidy profit. If Hollywood could figure out how to make movies to be addictive like games, the gaming industry would be in trouble, and not vice-versa. Game studios can, unlike their Hollywood counterparts, addict their demographic targets, so once they find a profitable formula, they can stick with it forever. But Hollywood hasn't figured out how to create an addiction yet; they have to rely on farming each new generation's fantasies for next summer's releases. That's why Hollywood gives us serial iterations of the same formula every summer, hoping they can figure out the next childhood fantasy to exploit before people stop paying to see the current crop.
I think those who want to export American democracy are in the minority, at least in the elements of the country that doesn't watch FOX News. I understand that it's pretty much impossible to be isolationist anymore but I am generally of the opinion that we should stay out of the affairs of other countries.
hmmm...I don't watch Fox News, and I don't want to export American democracy. What I want is a stable, predictable planet, and that means a stable, predictable America. As long as American democracy remains under the control of large corporations, that will eventually happen. Most corporations want stability and predictability. Unfortunately for the planet, there are several American companies who have a vested interest in global instability, and have been actively lobbying for an aggressive American foreign policy. Sadly, what is left of American industrial infrastructure belongs to these same companies -- companies whose bottom-line is primarily a function of American foreign policy, like Boeing, Lock-Mar, and Raytheon. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, these companies have been looking for some way to justify and sustain their manufacturing capability. They found it in the Carter Doctrine, and they are successfully lobbying to make sure the current administration understands and acknowledges it, which Obama did in his recent SoU speech. If you have relatives in Iran, or pretty much anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz, I suggest you invite them to take a long vacation -- the sooner, the better.
The weak link in any security scheme is the humans that are involved. I don't see how DMARC, DKIM, SPF or any other combination of policies and technology is going to prevent the compromise of the human elements. Phishing is *way* too lucrative an enterprise to be abandoned; the phishers and the criminal organizations that back them are not going to give it up without a fight. What is going to stop a criminal organization, for example, from suborning the system administrators at a DMARC-compliant hosting provider? What will stop them from bribing/extorting sysadmins to look the other way (or whatever that means in terms of compromising DMARC) if/when DMARC starts to compromise their profits?
Yeah good thing the police are always right there preventing those murders that don't happen every single day.
Yeah, and I'll add one thing: we all know that someone using force to murder another person is exactly, precisely, in every conceivable way, just like asking them to trust someone who is not trustworthy and wouldn't pass even the most cursory smell-test.
No, unlike murder, this crime requires the "victim's" active cooperation. Anyone who doesn't recognize that difference is simply not being honest. If GP has to be deceptive to argue against my position, it reinforces my position.
NO. most murder victims actively cooperate in their demise by compromising their personal safety in some way, usually as the result of ignorance, laziness, or simple bad judgement. Ditto victims of phishing, who out of ignorance, laziness, or simple bad judgment get hacked. The difference you note is one of degree, not kind.
I don't see a republican president moving money from the bottom row to the top row. More likely it will be more money pumped into the military to fund gulf war v3.0.0
...and there is always Africa. The pirate problem in Somalia could be a useful pretext for more US adventurism. There are other resources than oil that the US badly needs, and Africa is chock full of them. And there will be nearly zero public outcry if a few rogue African warlords are replaced with US-approved warlords. If Romney is smart (and he is) as president he will steer the US and their economic and political dependence on war and high tech towards Africa and away from the Middle East. Creating a permanent, politically reliable, economically stable Africa is just as exciting and just as technically challenging as establishing a permanent human presence off-planet. The difference is that Africa doesn't require *any* delta-V to get to...
When (not if) China supercedes the U.S. as the new world superpower in the next decade or two, I sincerely hope my fellow Americans will get off their butts and realize that we need to *work* to maintain our standard of living and our place in the world. Even if it's unpleasant, even if it's not what we really want to do at the moment. Otherwise, I fear that I'm going to live to see the fall of the U.S. democracy. Given our history of foreign policy, I'm certain that the rest of the world will celebrate it much as we celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union.
You don't really think China is going to let that happen, do you? China's power brokers have been refining their techniques of control since the Qin unified China 2200 years ago. They are not going to abandon their current (successful) economic strategy against the US. You don't let a potential enemy redevelop an industrial base after you've spent several decades destroying it by flooding their their economy with inexpensive goods. Once they've killed off the industrial base, they will leverage all the American debt they've been quietly acquiring and kill off the rest of the American economy, and the riots in the streets will finish the job for them, and they never had to fire a shot. If you are an educated American, learn Mandarin, and make sure your kids learn it to.
Thats what I was thinking, sex is more than just physical, it's also about a connection with another living being.
Of course that connection can be good or bad, or even indifferent but it's still a connection.
huh? I don't feel any "connection" with the woman servicing my johnson, anymore than I feel a connection with the mechanic servicing my Ducati. Sex is friction, dude, anything else is pretty much just emotional baggage. It's a transaction, certainly, and it can even be a two way transaction, if the woman can let go of the emotional baggage and focus on the sex. Or are you female? (Unlikely in this forum, but possible.) If you are female, then yes, you (probably) think you need some kind of emotional attachment to get off, or so the kinseys would have us believe. I would think it would suck to be constrained like that. Sex is one of the great things about being human -- why anybody would let something like emotion get in the way of it is beyond me.
Really? you don't see the difference? assuming you aren't a troll, what are you not getting? When you get content from your Tivo -- like say, a season of Numb3rs from Netflix, to kinda stay on topic -- the studios were compensated by Netflix. fwiw, Netflix paid over US $2B in licensing fees for the content they provided in 2011, and they will be paying 10X that amount in 2012. In contrast, the studios received zero compensation from the thief that provided you a torrent of that same season of Numb3rs. This is not rocket science, dude -- you do understand that copyright owners are entitled to compensation when somebody produces a COPY of a copyrighted work, right? If you don't understand this basic concept, you might as well stop reading now.
Also, why are you are trying to make a distinction between a performance and the COPY of a performance? It is a distinction without legal merit. Copyright holders are entitled to compensation for the use of their copyrighted work whether it is for a live one-time performance, but also if the copyrighted work is ever COPIED for any reason, like for rebroadcast. That is why it's called the copyright -- you don't have the right to copy it if you don't own the copyright.
And while it may be true that "most people" don't call time- and format-shifting piracy, the courts in the US have a very different opinion when it comes to copyrighted content on a DVD. Under the fair use doctrine, there exist specific, limited exceptions to the exclusive nature of the copyright, and in Universal v. Sony Corp, time-shifting was found to be fair use, but if you try to offer fair use as a defense for being caught in possession of say, a torrented season of Numb3rs that you format-shifted to your iPhone so that you could watch it in the morning on the bus on your way to work, you *will* lose, and you will (rightfully) be called a thief for the rest of your life.
I'll stop caring once I have a proven, valid, and honest answer from the Government as to why they are wasting tax dollars data mining "playgrounds for marketing teams". If it's so "innocent", then why do they care enough to waste a few billion jumping in these discussions? Perhaps that is the more prudent question to ask and focus on.
I have an answer for you, but I don't think you are going to like it. Anybody with a desire to see their grandchildren live and thrive fifty years from now *wants* the government to take active measures to keep the citizenry content, productive, and civilized. Is that really so hard to understand? If the government catches even one malcontent/subversive/nascent terrorist by data-mining Facebook, it justifies the expense. Though, to be honest, subversives that can be caught by data-mining Facebook probably aren't that much of a threat to the public safety. Still, better to weed 'em out whenever and wherever you find them. It only takes one malcontent with some education to ruin your day...
In that case, did XP mean Xeroderma Pigmentosum because it couldn't withstand the light of day?
completely off-topic, but XP was an inside joke by the NT team at MS. The project name for the client-server architecture to be based on NT was "Cairo". Win95 and Win98 were the first public releases of the Cairo client-side architecture. It was disappointing to the Windows dev community, because they lacked many of the security and networking features promised by the Cairo team. The gist of the forums comments were, "Where's Cairo?" W2K was the first public release of the server-side Cairo architecture, but it still had only a bare subset of the Cairo features. Again, public commentary was basically, "AD and NTFS is nice, but where's the journaling file system? C'mon MS, give us Cairo." So, the Cairo team responded, and gave the world XP. X is the greek letter chi, and P is the greek letter rho -- Chi-Rho, or Cairo.
one of the reasons auto theft declined is police busted and closed chop shops that took and resold the parts. and you can now buy cheap off brand parts for any car as well. not like anyone stole cars back in the day for personal use
Hmmm. I don't think reselling parts is why vehicles get stolen. At least, not in Arizona. Or any state that borders on Mexico right now, I would guess. Stolen vehicles are basically untraceable, so when Mexico's drug lords need to move contraband, or kidnap/murder/rape someone, they steal a vehicle to do it. Large trucks and SUVs are routinely stolen from our secured parking lots where I work (about one a month) while the Porches, 'Vettes, and Ferraris seem to be relatively immune. Even my Ducati, which could be easily tossed into the bed of a pickup truck by two people in about two seconds has been ignored, while the Hummers and Escalades I park next to keep disappearing.
You used to be able to shoot someone if they tried to steal your horse. I'm not advocating violence, but this isn't exactly a crime our ancestors took lightly.
Well, in the civilized state of Arizona, you still can. In fact, you face less legal hassle if you cap a thief in the act, than you would if you capped somebody who was trying to kill you.
you pose some interesting theoretical questions. Here's a few questions of my own for you, based on yours...
1) Biased, incompetent testing hasn't been an impediment to the transportation, electronic, computer, and consumer products industries, so why do you think it is going to be an impediment to the GM crop industry?
2) Corporations exist explicitly to decouple those risks from the investors in the corporation. It allows investors to be legally shielded from the pitchforks and torches of the peasants who object to their corporation's products. Why are you trying to exempt GM crop producing corporations from this legal shield?
3) We've been reducing genetic diversity among our food crops since we stopped living as hunter-gatherers and invented agriculture and animal husbandry. We've been consuming what essentially is cow treated with fire for a long, long time, along with a side of rice or potatoes. Not much diversity in the diet of any given culture on the planet, and it's been losing its diversity for about 10k years -- ever since we figured out how to put a fence around our land to keep dinner on the inside and competitors on the outside. Don't you think if there were warning signs we needed to heed, they'd have showed up in 10k years?
4) and 5) The consequences are pretty clear -- stable, long term profits provided by the elimination of competition, and the ability to set national agendas from corporate boardrooms instead of voting booths. It worked for Big Pharma and Big Oil -- why do you think it is going to be any different for Big Food?
Your questions got me thinking a little. I realized that Big Food is as inevitable as Big Pharma and Big Oil, and will have pretty much the same impact on the social, economic, and geopolitical vectors of our civilization as they did. Thanks for the opportunity to explore that a little.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to get technical, but do worms even have heads?
Sure. It's the one the shit does not come out of.
Are you suggesting that conservatives have two heads?
There was a warning on the box in an ancient script that someone translated as "do not open this box or you will die"- we figured we would open it for a lark.
If truth in advertising laws were enforced, that would be on engagement ring boxes.
...and religions would have to find some other way to market their product.
Personally, using voice commands for operating anything inside a car doesn't really interest me. It's probably a generational thing, but using voice commands to control anything makes me feel like a douche. It's nothing but a higher-tech Clapper.
Hmmm...not everybody drives cars, dude. I think Siri is fan-fucking-tastic because my daily driver is a Ducati 1098. Suddenly, with Siri, I can actually do more than queue up a new playlist or make/take calls with the Sena SMH10 comm system in my helmet. Much beyond that, I would have had to find a spot to pull over so that I could get to the touchscreen interface on my iPhone. With Siri, I can text my pals, pull up (and edit!) my calendar, get turn by turn directions even easier than on my very-motorcycle-friendly Garmin Zumo 660, and even jump in vent and chat with my guildies if I want to, all without having to stop, or even having to take my eyes off the road, which I still sometimes have to do with the Zumo, despite it's well thought-out interface. If Siri is a glimpse of the future of voice interfaces, I'm liking it.
Same can be said for the Romans, the Byzantines, Mongols, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and every other major collapsed empire that had thousands upon thousands in cities that were lost to time or to diaspora.
If my descendants live in a country that is no longer the United States of America, even if they live in the same geographical area as I live now or anywhere else within the extant borders, they're no longer Americans. Their nation and culture define that encompassing label, and if that nation or culture goes away, then the label no longer applies.
A national identity is more than the socio-cultural matrix that gives rise to it -- ask any sociologist or anthropologist. Better yet, go see "300," and then ask yourself if the "Spartan" label has lost any of its power, even though Sparta itself has been swallowed up by history. If you actually believe "American" is a mere label, I think you are in for a really rude awakening. I'm not trolling you, I'm telling you straight up: Americans have the technological and economic means to utterly dominate this planet politically, even if they didn't already dominate it culturally. Tell me, does your model still hold up if the "extant borders" of the country happen to encompass the entire planet and its population?
Deceive, decoy, deny -- you win elections first, and then worry about the fallout from your tactics after the election, when you are in a better position to deal with it. Can't say I'm surprised that our northern neighbors engage in the same kind of election hijinks that have plagued our plebiscites. When we get reports of dead voters casting ballots in their elections, this might become interesting.
These scientists were irresponsible in their dealings with their press.
I never saw a single irresposible statement from them. They were very clear that there was likely to be an error in their experiment. The press wasn't irresponsible either. Every article I read was balanced and careful to state that there may be a simple explaination.
They should have kept it strictly within the community ...
Who exactly is "the community"? Scientists are not a priesthood, and the public does not need to be "protected" from scientific debate.
Most scientists rely on public funding to eat. The community of scientists is exactly like a priesthood in that respect. In fact, scientists have to make the same kind of unfulfillable promises to the people that financially support them that any other priest does -- you know, the kind that require a long time and (ideally) a lot of money to fulfill. Priests tell people god moves in mysterious ways when the promises don't appear to be working out; the scientist says, "You wouldn't understand the math."
So yeah, a case can be made that that the community of scientists is, in many ways, like a priesthood. High barriers to entry? Check. Cloistered life? Double check. A formal distinction drawn between the anointed and the laity? Check. Subject only to the the laws of their society, and above the mundane courts? Oh, you better believe that's a check.
But back on point. Like priests, scientists are human, so somebody is going to have to be blamed for this. The people who funded this Italian experiment are not going to be as generous the next time around, if the scientists can't find a plausible place to put the blame that leaves them in the clear. This isn't about the scientific method anymore, it is about CYA - the scientists have to make sure that it has the right spin on it so that their funding doesn't completely dry up on them amid charges of incompetency. I would not want to be that project manager the next time he has to go begging for funding. (And that one Italian project of yours, a loose connection? Really? In this day and age? Thank you for your presentation, Professor, I'm sure you know how to find the exit.)
Right. And if chicks didn't dress all slutty, they wouldn't get all raped, AMIRITE?
Do you people understand rape IS NOT the woman's fault? How ignorant do you have to be to understand rape is because the rapist is a sick fuck, not because of how the woman is dressed.
Actually, most rapes probably occur because of miscommunication. A guy was never taught that the behavior he is engaged in is rape, and maybe his support network doesn't characterize it as rape, so he doesn't realize it's rape. A girl feels violated by something like what the guy considers to be rape, that she (or her support network) consider to be rape, under the same behavior. Ask a dozen different people what happened based on the same facts, you'll get wildly divergent answers as to whether or not there was rape. The problem is that we have an idea of what "rape" is in society, and it's stranger rape, which isn't what rape really is. The problem is we have conflicting beliefs as to what behavior is okay and what behavior isn't. Labeling a rapist a sick fuck is probably usually wrong. Usually rape occurs because of miscommunication and either unclear or incorrect social norms, not because of any mental deformity. If we made rape education as big a priority as rape punishment--or perhaps bigger--we would see a bigger reduction in the amount of rape than we do from punishment.
For what it is worth, Kurosawa elegantly exposed this idea of conflicting views of the same incident in Rashomon . It might be worth the time it takes to watch it to get some perspective on the whole differing norms debate when it comes to rape.
Given the mobility of aerial camera platforms and the sophistication of current imaging hardware, I don't think ground fire from a bunch of huntards (can you tell I play WoW alot?) is going to pose a serious threat to the remote airborne surveillance business. Autonomous quad- and octocopters can (and have been) programmed to fly stealthily and evasively. Hitting an agile, small, nearly invisible target even if one knows the target is there is not a trivial thing. A better defense for the huntards is camoflage, deception and misdirection, not a frontal assault on the drone. Seriously, using decoys to sucker the drones away from the area you are going to be hunting in (like professional poachers do in African game parks right now) is probably the optimal strategy to defeat a quadcopter surveillance platform, not shooting it down.
Of course, there are plenty of distopian possibilities as well... seen GATACA? We just need to make certain that we invent a whole new raft of privacy laws that protect free speech, the freedom of genetic diversity, and right to one's own genome not being used to segregate, subjugate or in any way marginalize a person.
Welcome to the brave new world, if your butt isn't just a little puckered, you're just not paying attention.
Whaaat? Your genome doesn't belong to you, dude. You are, at best, a transitory tenant in a house whose foundations were laid three and a half billion years ago. The genome, if it can be said to belong to anyone, belongs to the species, not to any particular instantiation of the phenotype. GATTACA was indeed a pretty bleak glimpse of the future, but only from the perspective of the poor sod who had the bad luck to be born before all the inferior DNA was screened away. Certainly, the film focused on that individual, but the flip side to GATTACA is a species that is almost completely free of disease and strife, and one that is taking its DNA to another planet. I think you may have lost sight of the fact that reproductive success via preferential selection is *why* you and I are at the top of the food chain on this planet. I would think the logical next step would be to encourage prospective parents to submit themselves to DNA screening, and not the legislation you suggest which, from the perspective of the species, would serve only to protect an individual organisms's right to bear defective off-spring. The selective pressures that produced our species were pretty much not under our control -- with this technology, we can sidestep those selective pressures and substitute our own. Why would you legislate to constrain our ability to control our own evolution?
...the mines and the teachers. This is a swift kick to the latter's. Unions are only as strong as their cash boxes are deep. Force the Arizona teacher's unions to start defending members in court against something as wide open to interpretation as FCC decency standards, and that will drain the cashbox very quickly. A brilliant tactic on the part of the union busters; Arizona has long been a "right-to-work" state (read: anti-union) and this will effectively take the teacher's union out of the game if it gets through the legislature.
Not only that, but Texas barbecue is universally a dry, tasteless mess that is only edible by slathering it with a ton of sauce.
...which accurately describes the French and Spanish cuisine that the Caribes invented barbacoa to fix.
At least there is lots of beer and pretty girls!
right...there's a pretty girl behind every tree. you just have to find the trees. When I was at Fox-1 on the DEW line, that was the welcoming joke.
A movie is just a game with a really crappy user interface. Games provide entertainment to people with enough disposable income to waste on them, just like movies. And just like movie studios, the game studios don't risk their money on unknown or untested content. Hollywood has figured out that it can raid your childhood memories, wrap them up with some eye-candy special effects, and sell them back to you at a tidy profit. If Hollywood could figure out how to make movies to be addictive like games, the gaming industry would be in trouble, and not vice-versa. Game studios can, unlike their Hollywood counterparts, addict their demographic targets, so once they find a profitable formula, they can stick with it forever. But Hollywood hasn't figured out how to create an addiction yet; they have to rely on farming each new generation's fantasies for next summer's releases. That's why Hollywood gives us serial iterations of the same formula every summer, hoping they can figure out the next childhood fantasy to exploit before people stop paying to see the current crop.
I think those who want to export American democracy are in the minority, at least in the elements of the country that doesn't watch FOX News. I understand that it's pretty much impossible to be isolationist anymore but I am generally of the opinion that we should stay out of the affairs of other countries.
hmmm...I don't watch Fox News, and I don't want to export American democracy. What I want is a stable, predictable planet, and that means a stable, predictable America. As long as American democracy remains under the control of large corporations, that will eventually happen. Most corporations want stability and predictability. Unfortunately for the planet, there are several American companies who have a vested interest in global instability, and have been actively lobbying for an aggressive American foreign policy. Sadly, what is left of American industrial infrastructure belongs to these same companies -- companies whose bottom-line is primarily a function of American foreign policy, like Boeing, Lock-Mar, and Raytheon. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, these companies have been looking for some way to justify and sustain their manufacturing capability. They found it in the Carter Doctrine, and they are successfully lobbying to make sure the current administration understands and acknowledges it, which Obama did in his recent SoU speech. If you have relatives in Iran, or pretty much anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz, I suggest you invite them to take a long vacation -- the sooner, the better.
The weak link in any security scheme is the humans that are involved. I don't see how DMARC, DKIM, SPF or any other combination of policies and technology is going to prevent the compromise of the human elements. Phishing is *way* too lucrative an enterprise to be abandoned; the phishers and the criminal organizations that back them are not going to give it up without a fight. What is going to stop a criminal organization, for example, from suborning the system administrators at a DMARC-compliant hosting provider? What will stop them from bribing/extorting sysadmins to look the other way (or whatever that means in terms of compromising DMARC) if/when DMARC starts to compromise their profits?
Yeah good thing the police are always right there preventing those murders that don't happen every single day.
Yeah, and I'll add one thing: we all know that someone using force to murder another person is exactly, precisely, in every conceivable way, just like asking them to trust someone who is not trustworthy and wouldn't pass even the most cursory smell-test. No, unlike murder, this crime requires the "victim's" active cooperation. Anyone who doesn't recognize that difference is simply not being honest. If GP has to be deceptive to argue against my position, it reinforces my position.
NO. most murder victims actively cooperate in their demise by compromising their personal safety in some way, usually as the result of ignorance, laziness, or simple bad judgement. Ditto victims of phishing, who out of ignorance, laziness, or simple bad judgment get hacked. The difference you note is one of degree, not kind.
I don't see a republican president moving money from the bottom row to the top row. More likely it will be more money pumped into the military to fund gulf war v3.0.0
...and there is always Africa. The pirate problem in Somalia could be a useful pretext for more US adventurism. There are other resources than oil that the US badly needs, and Africa is chock full of them. And there will be nearly zero public outcry if a few rogue African warlords are replaced with US-approved warlords. If Romney is smart (and he is) as president he will steer the US and their economic and political dependence on war and high tech towards Africa and away from the Middle East. Creating a permanent, politically reliable, economically stable Africa is just as exciting and just as technically challenging as establishing a permanent human presence off-planet. The difference is that Africa doesn't require *any* delta-V to get to...
When (not if) China supercedes the U.S. as the new world superpower in the next decade or two, I sincerely hope my fellow Americans will get off their butts and realize that we need to *work* to maintain our standard of living and our place in the world. Even if it's unpleasant, even if it's not what we really want to do at the moment. Otherwise, I fear that I'm going to live to see the fall of the U.S. democracy. Given our history of foreign policy, I'm certain that the rest of the world will celebrate it much as we celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union.
You don't really think China is going to let that happen, do you? China's power brokers have been refining their techniques of control since the Qin unified China 2200 years ago. They are not going to abandon their current (successful) economic strategy against the US. You don't let a potential enemy redevelop an industrial base after you've spent several decades destroying it by flooding their their economy with inexpensive goods. Once they've killed off the industrial base, they will leverage all the American debt they've been quietly acquiring and kill off the rest of the American economy, and the riots in the streets will finish the job for them, and they never had to fire a shot. If you are an educated American, learn Mandarin, and make sure your kids learn it to.
Thats what I was thinking, sex is more than just physical, it's also about a connection with another living being. Of course that connection can be good or bad, or even indifferent but it's still a connection.
huh? I don't feel any "connection" with the woman servicing my johnson, anymore than I feel a connection with the mechanic servicing my Ducati. Sex is friction, dude, anything else is pretty much just emotional baggage. It's a transaction, certainly, and it can even be a two way transaction, if the woman can let go of the emotional baggage and focus on the sex. Or are you female? (Unlikely in this forum, but possible.) If you are female, then yes, you (probably) think you need some kind of emotional attachment to get off, or so the kinseys would have us believe. I would think it would suck to be constrained like that. Sex is one of the great things about being human -- why anybody would let something like emotion get in the way of it is beyond me.
Really? you don't see the difference? assuming you aren't a troll, what are you not getting? When you get content from your Tivo -- like say, a season of Numb3rs from Netflix, to kinda stay on topic -- the studios were compensated by Netflix. fwiw, Netflix paid over US $2B in licensing fees for the content they provided in 2011, and they will be paying 10X that amount in 2012. In contrast, the studios received zero compensation from the thief that provided you a torrent of that same season of Numb3rs. This is not rocket science, dude -- you do understand that copyright owners are entitled to compensation when somebody produces a COPY of a copyrighted work, right? If you don't understand this basic concept, you might as well stop reading now.
Also, why are you are trying to make a distinction between a performance and the COPY of a performance? It is a distinction without legal merit. Copyright holders are entitled to compensation for the use of their copyrighted work whether it is for a live one-time performance, but also if the copyrighted work is ever COPIED for any reason, like for rebroadcast. That is why it's called the copyright -- you don't have the right to copy it if you don't own the copyright.
And while it may be true that "most people" don't call time- and format-shifting piracy, the courts in the US have a very different opinion when it comes to copyrighted content on a DVD. Under the fair use doctrine, there exist specific, limited exceptions to the exclusive nature of the copyright, and in Universal v. Sony Corp, time-shifting was found to be fair use, but if you try to offer fair use as a defense for being caught in possession of say, a torrented season of Numb3rs that you format-shifted to your iPhone so that you could watch it in the morning on the bus on your way to work, you *will* lose, and you will (rightfully) be called a thief for the rest of your life.
I'll stop caring once I have a proven, valid, and honest answer from the Government as to why they are wasting tax dollars data mining "playgrounds for marketing teams". If it's so "innocent", then why do they care enough to waste a few billion jumping in these discussions? Perhaps that is the more prudent question to ask and focus on.
I have an answer for you, but I don't think you are going to like it. Anybody with a desire to see their grandchildren live and thrive fifty years from now *wants* the government to take active measures to keep the citizenry content, productive, and civilized. Is that really so hard to understand? If the government catches even one malcontent/subversive/nascent terrorist by data-mining Facebook, it justifies the expense. Though, to be honest, subversives that can be caught by data-mining Facebook probably aren't that much of a threat to the public safety. Still, better to weed 'em out whenever and wherever you find them. It only takes one malcontent with some education to ruin your day...
In that case, did XP mean Xeroderma Pigmentosum because it couldn't withstand the light of day?
completely off-topic, but XP was an inside joke by the NT team at MS. The project name for the client-server architecture to be based on NT was "Cairo". Win95 and Win98 were the first public releases of the Cairo client-side architecture. It was disappointing to the Windows dev community, because they lacked many of the security and networking features promised by the Cairo team. The gist of the forums comments were, "Where's Cairo?" W2K was the first public release of the server-side Cairo architecture, but it still had only a bare subset of the Cairo features. Again, public commentary was basically, "AD and NTFS is nice, but where's the journaling file system? C'mon MS, give us Cairo." So, the Cairo team responded, and gave the world XP. X is the greek letter chi, and P is the greek letter rho -- Chi-Rho, or Cairo.
one of the reasons auto theft declined is police busted and closed chop shops that took and resold the parts. and you can now buy cheap off brand parts for any car as well. not like anyone stole cars back in the day for personal use
Hmmm. I don't think reselling parts is why vehicles get stolen. At least, not in Arizona. Or any state that borders on Mexico right now, I would guess. Stolen vehicles are basically untraceable, so when Mexico's drug lords need to move contraband, or kidnap/murder/rape someone, they steal a vehicle to do it. Large trucks and SUVs are routinely stolen from our secured parking lots where I work (about one a month) while the Porches, 'Vettes, and Ferraris seem to be relatively immune. Even my Ducati, which could be easily tossed into the bed of a pickup truck by two people in about two seconds has been ignored, while the Hummers and Escalades I park next to keep disappearing.
You used to be able to shoot someone if they tried to steal your horse. I'm not advocating violence, but this isn't exactly a crime our ancestors took lightly.
Well, in the civilized state of Arizona, you still can. In fact, you face less legal hassle if you cap a thief in the act, than you would if you capped somebody who was trying to kill you.
you pose some interesting theoretical questions. Here's a few questions of my own for you, based on yours...
1) Biased, incompetent testing hasn't been an impediment to the transportation, electronic, computer, and consumer products industries, so why do you think it is going to be an impediment to the GM crop industry?
2) Corporations exist explicitly to decouple those risks from the investors in the corporation. It allows investors to be legally shielded from the pitchforks and torches of the peasants who object to their corporation's products. Why are you trying to exempt GM crop producing corporations from this legal shield?
3) We've been reducing genetic diversity among our food crops since we stopped living as hunter-gatherers and invented agriculture and animal husbandry. We've been consuming what essentially is cow treated with fire for a long, long time, along with a side of rice or potatoes. Not much diversity in the diet of any given culture on the planet, and it's been losing its diversity for about 10k years -- ever since we figured out how to put a fence around our land to keep dinner on the inside and competitors on the outside. Don't you think if there were warning signs we needed to heed, they'd have showed up in 10k years?
4) and 5) The consequences are pretty clear -- stable, long term profits provided by the elimination of competition, and the ability to set national agendas from corporate boardrooms instead of voting booths. It worked for Big Pharma and Big Oil -- why do you think it is going to be any different for Big Food?
Your questions got me thinking a little. I realized that Big Food is as inevitable as Big Pharma and Big Oil, and will have pretty much the same impact on the social, economic, and geopolitical vectors of our civilization as they did. Thanks for the opportunity to explore that a little.