Though the counterarguments are pretty strong; it isn't 1984 and 2nd Amendment and the NRA, like someone is going to sit on their porch with a rifle and stop "them varmints". On the other hand, the Bush family has been war profiteers since Prescott. They make the Mafia look like morons.
Parent is a little off-topic, but really, the end of Democracy and the rise of indentured servitude is important enough to repeat.
And I figured out he was talking about a Neutron bomb. I don't think it's an issue, because the mission seems to be to have a large starving population that will do anything for the corporate dole.
See, nobody has to actually talk about the issues anymore, because they are trained to respond like Pavlov's dog to certain words. I talk about large corporate and political abuse, and I am a hippy complaining about "the man". I talk about problems with our contries Tyranny, and I'm anti-American. I talk about issues like ownership being favored over labor and I'm a Socialist. You don't even have to listen to what is said--you already know what to say. And if I point out that you are wrong--quick answer--"oh, you are one of THEM". Whatever THEM is, currently. You will really disappoint me if you start saying that those who criticize capitalism are communists or those who criticize America are Anti-American. To keep this system and country great, you must check the inherent weaknesses to the system. It has been reduced to a Pavlovian Response. Just like saying; "Knee Jerk Liberal". Some people actually do respond automatically--both sides are guilty.
Of course, I don't expect any response, I'm talking to people who "get it". But I don't have the time or ink to rehash and spell it out. So I'll give someone a brief overview of "THE REAL WORLD".
I used to think like you do, that you shouldn't assign to conspiracy that which can easily be explained by stupidity. Democrats, unions, and consumer groups don't have the money or power to do much of anything anymore. They are a dead horse that the Corporate media likes to pound every now and then to pretend there is an adversary to capitalism.
The REAL way the world works can be described in Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins . It is part of the infrastructure and has been for almost 200 years. It represents Trillions of dollars (mostly offshore) and is the major reason for the economic power of the United States. Look, I have been a Dem, an Independent, a Republican and a Ross Perot Libertarian. I'm hoping the Progressives are at least as useful as a floating piece of wood but their current silence and cowardess makes me despair.
The corporate media wastes air time on straw issues like welfare, where we spend less than a tenth of the money that the Pentagon admits to losing. You could fund all our social programs with what we lost in the S&L crisis--so how is regulation NOT a fiscally conservative issue? Do the math.
GM, Unicol, Bechtel, Haliburton, et alas (not a comprehensive list) are always spending money on politicians and are first at the trough when the US has a war, or the US repairs a country, or the World Bank gives a loan. See, the way the world really works is that "consultants" wine and dine a third-world leader. They promise riches and support for power in whichever country... let's say Panama. So, the current leader ends up, more or less dead, Noriega gets money to fund his push for power. World Bank now gives Panama mucho dinero for development. Since Noriega has a nice sweet heart deal with the "consultants", he returns the favor and sends troops to whatever "freedom fight" or weeny roast we have at the time. And he also makes sure that all the money ends up going to one of the multinationals in the trust. Flash forward a few years and you find, that with rare exception, another country is bankrupt because all of that World Bank loan went to a US Multinationals that did nothing for the country, and didn't make much of a positive economic impact. But the dictator is still in power and wealthy, but usually his people go hungry. When you have an exception, you get military intervention. Noriega didn't send his drugs through the correct channels. Saddam didn't follow James Baker's plan to give all his countries wealth to Kuwait. And Bin Laden wouldn't let UNICAL put a gas pipeline through Afghanistan without some compensation to the people. I'm not saying these guys are sweethearts--remember, we put every one of them in power (Shah of Iran and Batista in Cuba as other examples). But, like Chaves in Venezuela (with more than a dozen assassination attempts), the difference between a live Tyrant and a dead
I was worried about that little weasel word; "protected computer". I was hoping that this congress would have actually done something good(TM), but again, they have been cynical and shifty. If this is only for Government and Financial institutions, it means they are still philosophically opposed to helping anyone not helping their pocket.
I sound like a broken record, don't I. But this is depressing. They could have done something good, and it would have only hurt a few spammers and jerks. Unfortunealy, I am not one of the protected class.
Expect to get MORE spam and trojan horses after this bill--just like the spam bill actually ended up making SPAM OK. I just have to tell them to stop, so they can hit my verified email from a thousand other ip addresses.
PenchantToLurk. You sound reasonable, but you are a moron among many. You are the sheeple you make fun of.
OK, I'm going to generalize, but anyone can find a thousand examples of what I'm talking about--I can get them if I thought it would change any minds; Social Contract & Capitalism 101; The government should be involved in what companies can put into contracts. Every business attempts to remove all rights from people with these contracts. Most people don't have lawyers on hand to read and dispute these things. There are no banks without contracts that allow them to arbitrarily do whatever they want and not be held accountable (except for the $100k account insurance).
You are living in a fantasy world where capitolism is America actually provides "CHOICE". That has been gone for a while now, since the Government gave up it's duty to regulate and control monopoly abuse.
In the real world, people don't have the time to dispute each and every contract, and they must pay bills, taxes, get to day care or a 1,000 other things that keep us insanely busy. We have food quality protect by the FDA so that people don't have to sue AFTER they lose a loved one to botullism. We have the EPA so that a class action lawsuit (which has a slim chance to actually compensate anyone) can be conducted years after birth defects and cancer are found (and torte reform is pretty much ending this). We used to have some protection.
There is this dillusional absolute theory of free market and choice that never, ever existed. It results in people who just suck up to anyone in power with the words; "you had a choice". Hey, there is no more Santa Claus, and people have choice only when they have the time and energy to fight. But how can I fight the landlord, the bank, the insurance company, the grocery store, the school that serves pizzas and has no PE? How do I fight the phone company that doesn't allow me DSL without paying for services I don't want? How do I fight the government that is stealing my childrens future?
You sound reasonable, because everyone has become clueless and insanity is the norm.
4) It will be all over the news. Like that will have any effect. You seem to confuse the insipid sock puppet shouting that goes on CNN and Fox for journalism. After the noise then more noise about something else. There will be nothing done. Did you know they found $3 Trillion in T-Bills recently? Sounds like an important topic. Suprising that wasn't on the news. The news in this country is total crap, and you think its liberal... because it tells you so. Wow.
The Libertarian/Republican thought is just a club to make people think they are smart by agreeing with eachother. At least the Dems and Progressives know there is something wrong. We keep shouting it to you people, but you think we are saying; "hey, we are whining about things not being more Liberal!". No, we are upset that things are wrong. I am a results oriented person. Do you see any good results from all this corporate profiteering and lack of accountability?
Please don't whine when your child gets Athsma, or your pension is robbed so that executives can have million $ golden parachutes. Remember, it was your choice.
The RIAA can't arrest anyone. It could be police or FBI, depending on the charges. I don't think the particulars matter. They just have the power to throw people in jail for this nonsense--basically, criminal laws to protect profits that should be solved by technology or actually providing things that people will pay for.
The is no RIGHT to make a profit.
Whatever. The RIAA is pretty much the equivalent of forcing car owners to pay for buggy whips.
I'm really excited about this competition for services. I knew that if we all had faith, companies would actually compete and make better things that add value for normal folks. There were all those naysayers and regulation happy people--sure, that stuff works like, 90% of the time, but where is the fun? Give me my pollution and gutted startups and raided trust funds-- can you smell the free market? A lot like burning hair with a nice layer of vanilla that doesn't quite cover up the previous scent.
Too bad one of them is going to have to win, then patent everything to death and the charge through the nose on 15 levels once they have "lock in".
Just makes it all the more exciting to have that rare blossom in the poop pile!
The dealt with pressure differentials on the water planet.
I'm sure the English "thing" used some sort of "babblefish" solution--but that one annoys me too.
The interface to the wormhole could be a method to destroy/record matter and then transmit, but how do you explain people poking hands through and pulling them out?
Nope. A little soft on science.
The randomness could be solved with a sufficiently large network and a way of testing destinations. Kind of like the internet. A lot of random directions, but the network routes the packets. But chunks might have to be re-assembled.
Personally, I think you could be safe in assuming that we have everything wrong anyway. I think that you just enter "no space". Inside of "no space", a wormhole smaller than a hair is sufficient since its properties don't contain place, dimension or time (basically, outside existence). At least in medicine, you can find many examples of where the scientists were absolutely convinced and had it all wrong. When it comes to black holes and wormholes, one minor flaw in the calculations and things could act the opposite of the assumption. Stephen Hawkings has reveresed himself on a few black hole theories.
We seem to have these ingrained constraints on the universe because we are prejudiced by matter and existense, when it is quite possible that these factors are rare--it may be possible to "tear through" the universe. But I haven't seen any physics theories on that yet.
What if you made the wormhole about 2 feet long? Then factor in, that the exotic matter is accelerated to give it more mass. Now add that the object being moved, is considered stationary, as it is moving in a "bubble" inside the wormhole.
Look at bubbles floating to the surface in water. How could something a thousand times less dense than the staggeringly massive ocean hope to push it aside?
Is there some rule that a wormhole must reach from the thing being transported to the destination? Can't it be created (like the even horizon of a bubble) along the way.
What is the calculation for the energy for a worm-bubble? How much acceleration of the exotic matter is possible?
By the way, I'd like this point I'm making considered as prior art in case Microsoft copyrights.
I can't understand the "Group Think" that is going on. The same people who want to unleash the FBI on kiddies who download mp3's seem to never hold businesses accountable for anything.
We are so ripe for authoritarian rule. We want to leave control of our lives to others, and all we expect of security is to punish someone who doesn't cross every t and dot every i when they report on the failures.
The fact that Wachovia has my money and social security number and can demand many things of me without proof (such as fees and late charges), means that conversely, they should be responsible and compensate me for any damages resulting from their failure to live up to this trust. I think I need to pull my money out this week.
I thoroughly expect the news service to retract and fire anyone who reported this, but might have gotten the date wrong.
The wormhole doesn't have to be stable to be useful. You could create a wormhole around a ship, and allow it to break apart behind. You could also say that rockets are unstable, because they only have a stable stream of plasma for a few feet--yet they still move the rocket.
Of course, putting limits on things that are still fiction is kind of ironic.
Opinion pieces are sold as fact now, while real journalism is on the run. The vultures in the media jumping on Rather and Newsweek are groups that don't look beyond the AP reports or the daily directive. Fox and CNN for the most part are regurgitated opinion pieces.
The idea that Afghanis are rebelling, not because they have a foreign occupation for 3 years. Not because their country remains a bombed-out husk. Not because illegal drugs now account for 75% of exports. Not because the fable of US control exists around the US appointed president who is himself a drug lord and has to hire Taliban forces to patrol the country. Not because they have to contend with an oil pipeline from Unical across their land without seeing revenues. No, the Afghanis got really upset the day their weekly Newseek magazine showed up on their doorstep suggesting that torturing of their people included disrespecting the Koran.
Wow. Did anybody rule out the sun coming up, or a sick goat? I'd better buy Newsweek if it has more influence than an M-16 at the door.
Or perhaps, if you do any investigative journalism, you'd better have enough evidence to convict in a court of law if you are going to say something antithetical to our new Oligarchy. This story was with the Pentagon, which approved it. But since they only had one source and no photographs (thanks, Rumsfeld for confiscating all cameras to ensure no abuses ever occur again).
News is an essentially Liberal service--it questions those in authority and power. News services should not be backing Democratic or Progressive or NeoCon groups. That is not their job. It's just that "Liberal Media" has been redefined as "not supporting the government". But 90% of the media is owned and controlled by about 5, very large companies.
It is a pretty high bar to raise to say that anyone putting up a storey has to be perfect. Yet you can support monied interests that pad your own pocket and never be called into question. Look where the money, profit and power are... not in the hands of the critics.
Dvorak is Yet-Another-Shill. He will defend the mighty and advertisers from the small and non-profit any day of the week. This is not news.
Golias, it would take too long to explain how wrong you are.
As things stand right now. Apple could not make a device to grab video from a, current purchased DVD and store it to play back unless it copied the DRM with it and added some other restrictions that would have to be negotiated with each and every DVD vendor who could have rights infringed.
So, it will have to be video downloaded from iTunes or future DVDs that have a new license and DRM scheme. The device would not copy older DVDs because--there isn't enough ink to cover the legal briefs that would take.
Apple's amazing achievement with the iTunes music store was not the technology (although the payment system is pretty elegant), its overcoming all the legal hurdles.
TiVo's "ToGo" device has had a lot of troubles and they already have a "fair use" storage on a hard drive. DeCrypting from a DVD is not considered fair use because it circumnavigates a copy protection device--which was a cool legal way to get around fair use by the content providers.
Apple has to deal with a thousand, greedy stupid clones of Donald Trump. Imagine the egos and palms to be greased and fears to be overcome. Shudder. That has got to be the second toughest job in the world (the first would be staying married to Donald Trump for the duration of the "marriage").
Either you stream out the data to a device that can actually handle H.264, or you add a CELL chip to the video iPod.
I think we are going to get a Remote that controls a media stream over a next gen Airport Extreme with some wireless receiver you add to your home electronics.
A video iPod could control or sample the library of media through iTunes, and tell the computer to transmit or decompress the video.
There are a lot of different ways you could, ahem, play this.
Gawd. You obviously know how to jerk some chains Epiphani... I mean it is GUARANTEED that you will get into a useless and heated argument if you even mention Monolithic in a sentence. You might as well compare Pico and Edlin or the merits of a Command Line.
Everyone knows that the entire computer is a module in userspace.
Absolutely right on target. The Media Center has to be the remote to make interacting with all this stuff easy--not work.
I've seen a lot of normal consumer electronics in homes not work for the simple issue of connectors and "in and out" modes. A media center PC that has computer interface means a geek with an expensive TV on his computer.
The conduit is the next generation Airport eXpress eXtreme II (or something equally hideously named).
Previous post is right. The light does not BEND for you to see the side of the lamppost until you reach the side of the lightpost. The light ALWAYS reaches you at light speed. The Universe changes shape and time dilates to accommodate. The light coming towards you goes up in frequency and therefore energy. Even if you are traveling very near light speed, you still get the "same amount" of light from the rear, just at a lower frequency and energy.
Einstein posited that an actually object trying to achieve the speed of light would expand and would take increasing amounts of energy (you see this in cyclotrons trying to get one proton to the speed of light--even with megawatts they only get close). The energy approaches infinite.
So the idea of traveling on a bike, and seeing if a flashlight still works is a bit beyond the energy budget of our galaxy.
The blue-shift and red-shift concepts work with below light speed. At light speed, you only have photons interacting with other photons. Perhaps the only way to really see what would happen is to sit in an extremely large gravity field--since gravity is the same as velocity when it comes to relativity (hence, how objects have more mass as they approach relative velocities).
This does not mean that you couldn't go faster than light if you were not in the universe. But, since all our observations have been made INSIDE the universe, we have no proof of this yet. I'm hoping for FTL, because going to other stars would be a very boring trip under Einsteinian physics.
Not that it couldn't be surmounted. But more and more the average person is made to become a criminal to ensure more revenue for less effort on the parts of copyright and patent holders. You can already get more jail time for copyright violations than violent crime.
People already subscribe to cable and satellite and buy DVDs and go to movies. So the fact that people can possibly download something illegal has negligible effect on convenience expenses for entertainment. In other words, if the average household expenditure is say, $200 per month, it won't go up any, it will mean fewer entertainment products purchased. Even less of that might be movies (like the way music has shrunk). Having encrypted, RFID DVDs with a pay-as-you-go model isn't much different from Pay-Per-View TV. The chance of anyone re-purchasing OLD content becomes a nuisance factor. They will have the cost of maintaining a system that has too compete with NEW content. This is like subsidizing video game consoles with the purchase of games--you better hope people buy more games.
I think the statistics would back me up on consumers buying more entertainment when it becomes cheaper. I get 24/7/365 entertainment on DishNetwork for about $80 per month (with premium channels) on about 200 channels. Looked at one way, the movie industry could say they were ripped off, because I only payed a fraction of a penny on something I theoretically could have seen. Looked at another way, that is $80 more than I spend on music CDs--which I totally quit bothering with because an hour of music isn't worth $14.
Of course, when entertainment becomes too expensive, then people are going to stop filling their days with fluff and maybe, just maybe start thinking and voting. So, maybe the government might actually stop this, because too much DRM will mean people are less distracted and will start getting angry.
At least, the publishing industry might really appreciate RFID disabled movies...
I trust none of the parties in your example. I don't trust the school administrators because they practice a tail-chasing bureaucracy to protect them, rather than any knowledge --and I don't trust the hackers because they are unaccountable. Meanwhile, the average Joe is too busy to care unless this takes food off his table. The average Joe used to care about accountability, but now he is too numb with sleep deprivation and satiated with high-carb meals and is watching the Apprentice as soon as he leaves work praying that he never has to work for any of the jerks on the show.
I don't get your point. The system only holds citizens accountable because they are the only ones affected by poor control of SSNs and the only ones damaged by it.
Why wouldn't I gnash my teeth? What the average guy on the street understands is told to him by CNN or Fox--which is crap-o-la. Why are we basing things on mass hysteria and common knowledge? Um, why are we 27th in the world in healthcare (tied with Saudi Arabia), 37th in education (tied with Cuba), #1 in crime and jails and really depressingly poor on pollution for a civilized country?
Well, that is a rhetorical question, really. It's like asking "why do we weaken pollution controls?" Because we want to shift the burden from the industrial polluters to the hospitals that take care of the Asthma and lung disease (and other issues). Now, not all regulation is good, but it isn't all bad either (trying to avoid flamewar wherein reactionaries call me a Socialist). Why NOT put the burden of securing information on the people entrusted with the information? The SSN system is like a screen door on a bank. And we expect the honor system is going to save us...
Hackers are the only reason we have some tiny bit of data security. The government wants to make the few bad hackers and few terrorists the reason to take control away from the citizens on numerous fronts while absolving themselves of responsibility. In this case, it is a school--and the real dynamic that costs in schools is the administration (not teachers) and their desire to control their fiefdoms. Why would schools not look to an open source security model for running school systems? That's like; Why wouldn't the government create an open source project at Universities that had the scrutiny of millions to create a low cost electronic voting system? Because an expensive, closed, secretive system benefits those in control of it. This isn't a knee jerk reaction because they were geeks. This seems like some kids who were not following the rules and disrespecting authority (which is the duty of anyone under 21) and who took a little initiative.
Always, always, always, when you have people who have control and no accountability coupled with secrecy, you get these kinds of problems. The kids who hacked this should have known better to cover their butts. They could have released the SSN of the admins at the school and never mentioned their own names and gotten real results for security and not this mountain of pain they are in. Good intentions, however, will never go unpunished when you embarrass incompetent people with power.
Agreed. Though Episode 4 (the first Star Wars), was a Western.
I mean, you can hear the blasters in space. For die-hard sci-fi fans, there have been few, actual science fiction movies--ever and fewer tv series.
Babylon 5 and 2001 had at least some appreciation for physics, but there was still huge dependance upon technologies so superior they seemed like magic. Hollywood just doesn't think scifi has any real interest.
The future of war is a lot of small and large networked devices and robots and a huge use of stealth. As lethality increases, so does the need for staying hidden until you can deliver a death blow. So, strangely, Predator kind of wins as about the most plausible science fiction movie ever. Stupid plot lines of an advanced alien species coming to earth for a bite to eat make no sense because the power expenditure of transportation far outways what it takes to make food. However, if your society is stuck in violence and chivalry, that's about the only warped reason you might cross a galaxy to kill someone.
Plus, the alien didn't do anything beyond what is feasible in physics.
But what we know is just a drop in the bucket about the universe. No reason there can't be a force that we could control. Explaining that it was effectively the mitochondria in living organisms (they had their own name). This doesn't make sense for how the force acts and can't be copied/improved with science--but I guess he wanted to get it out of religious terms--which to me was what made it interesting.
It might even make more sense than some of the garbage our religions make up... just give it a few hundred years of PR.
Apple will be lucky enough to get "the Deal". I think that the media moguls are just as scared of Apples success as they are of doing nothing. I think they realize that Apple is a better format for distribution. Just look at food, oil, trucking, etc. and tell me that distribution isn't king.
Wow, I just found out about these SlashDot messages.
Personally, I think that Gilliam would do what you say; not follow the script. Which is exactly what DNA would do if he were still alive and had his own way. Which is the point that I'm making that DNA made fun of trying to make points about the whole big Mish Mosh. Life has no point, but if you have a martini at the right time, it is bareable.
Gilliam I think is a genius and he is running at the same "tune" as DNA. He would Grok it and piss off almost every DNA puritan and make an awesomely funny movie. To me, Terry can do no wrong.
I mean Time Bandits was brilliant. Baron Munchausen was a great fable. Terry just needs to get a contract with Steve Jobs and produce a Pixar movie--there he could get creative!
Transformer oil sounds safer to me... but what about viscocity?
And you'd have to test the Silicon oil over time and be sure it doesn't release toxic fumes or explosive gases. I'm sure that companies have probably tried this before. Of course, if they couldn't sell it, they might have gone to a proprietary substance. But it's more likely there is a byproduct that shows up enough to make it dangerous.
But it's worth a shot. I would just test it with a smoke/heat detector when leaving it running. It would take a lot more to test for noxious substances.
Slashdot Mirror
Though the counterarguments are pretty strong; it isn't 1984 and 2nd Amendment and the NRA, like someone is going to sit on their porch with a rifle and stop "them varmints". On the other hand, the Bush family has been war profiteers since Prescott. They make the Mafia look like morons.
Parent is a little off-topic, but really, the end of Democracy and the rise of indentured servitude is important enough to repeat.
And I figured out he was talking about a Neutron bomb. I don't think it's an issue, because the mission seems to be to have a large starving population that will do anything for the corporate dole.
See, nobody has to actually talk about the issues anymore, because they are trained to respond like Pavlov's dog to certain words. I talk about large corporate and political abuse, and I am a hippy complaining about "the man". I talk about problems with our contries Tyranny, and I'm anti-American. I talk about issues like ownership being favored over labor and I'm a Socialist. You don't even have to listen to what is said--you already know what to say. And if I point out that you are wrong--quick answer--"oh, you are one of THEM". Whatever THEM is, currently. You will really disappoint me if you start saying that those who criticize capitalism are communists or those who criticize America are Anti-American. To keep this system and country great, you must check the inherent weaknesses to the system. It has been reduced to a Pavlovian Response. Just like saying; "Knee Jerk Liberal". Some people actually do respond automatically--both sides are guilty.
Of course, I don't expect any response, I'm talking to people who "get it". But I don't have the time or ink to rehash and spell it out. So I'll give someone a brief overview of "THE REAL WORLD".
I used to think like you do, that you shouldn't assign to conspiracy that which can easily be explained by stupidity. Democrats, unions, and consumer groups don't have the money or power to do much of anything anymore. They are a dead horse that the Corporate media likes to pound every now and then to pretend there is an adversary to capitalism.
The REAL way the world works can be described in Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins . It is part of the infrastructure and has been for almost 200 years. It represents Trillions of dollars (mostly offshore) and is the major reason for the economic power of the United States. Look, I have been a Dem, an Independent, a Republican and a Ross Perot Libertarian. I'm hoping the Progressives are at least as useful as a floating piece of wood but their current silence and cowardess makes me despair.
The corporate media wastes air time on straw issues like welfare, where we spend less than a tenth of the money that the Pentagon admits to losing. You could fund all our social programs with what we lost in the S&L crisis--so how is regulation NOT a fiscally conservative issue? Do the math.
GM, Unicol, Bechtel, Haliburton, et alas (not a comprehensive list) are always spending money on politicians and are first at the trough when the US has a war, or the US repairs a country, or the World Bank gives a loan. See, the way the world really works is that "consultants" wine and dine a third-world leader. They promise riches and support for power in whichever country... let's say Panama. So, the current leader ends up, more or less dead, Noriega gets money to fund his push for power. World Bank now gives Panama mucho dinero for development. Since Noriega has a nice sweet heart deal with the "consultants", he returns the favor and sends troops to whatever "freedom fight" or weeny roast we have at the time. And he also makes sure that all the money ends up going to one of the multinationals in the trust. Flash forward a few years and you find, that with rare exception, another country is bankrupt because all of that World Bank loan went to a US Multinationals that did nothing for the country, and didn't make much of a positive economic impact. But the dictator is still in power and wealthy, but usually his people go hungry. When you have an exception, you get military intervention. Noriega didn't send his drugs through the correct channels. Saddam didn't follow James Baker's plan to give all his countries wealth to Kuwait. And Bin Laden wouldn't let UNICAL put a gas pipeline through Afghanistan without some compensation to the people. I'm not saying these guys are sweethearts--remember, we put every one of them in power (Shah of Iran and Batista in Cuba as other examples). But, like Chaves in Venezuela (with more than a dozen assassination attempts), the difference between a live Tyrant and a dead
I was worried about that little weasel word; "protected computer". I was hoping that this congress would have actually done something good(TM), but again, they have been cynical and shifty. If this is only for Government and Financial institutions, it means they are still philosophically opposed to helping anyone not helping their pocket.
I sound like a broken record, don't I. But this is depressing. They could have done something good, and it would have only hurt a few spammers and jerks. Unfortunealy, I am not one of the protected class.
Expect to get MORE spam and trojan horses after this bill--just like the spam bill actually ended up making SPAM OK. I just have to tell them to stop, so they can hit my verified email from a thousand other ip addresses.
PenchantToLurk. You sound reasonable, but you are a moron among many. You are the sheeple you make fun of.
OK, I'm going to generalize, but anyone can find a thousand examples of what I'm talking about--I can get them if I thought it would change any minds;
Social Contract & Capitalism 101; The government should be involved in what companies can put into contracts. Every business attempts to remove all rights from people with these contracts. Most people don't have lawyers on hand to read and dispute these things. There are no banks without contracts that allow them to arbitrarily do whatever they want and not be held accountable (except for the $100k account insurance).
You are living in a fantasy world where capitolism is America actually provides "CHOICE". That has been gone for a while now, since the Government gave up it's duty to regulate and control monopoly abuse.
In the real world, people don't have the time to dispute each and every contract, and they must pay bills, taxes, get to day care or a 1,000 other things that keep us insanely busy. We have food quality protect by the FDA so that people don't have to sue AFTER they lose a loved one to botullism. We have the EPA so that a class action lawsuit (which has a slim chance to actually compensate anyone) can be conducted years after birth defects and cancer are found (and torte reform is pretty much ending this). We used to have some protection.
There is this dillusional absolute theory of free market and choice that never, ever existed. It results in people who just suck up to anyone in power with the words; "you had a choice". Hey, there is no more Santa Claus, and people have choice only when they have the time and energy to fight. But how can I fight the landlord, the bank, the insurance company, the grocery store, the school that serves pizzas and has no PE? How do I fight the phone company that doesn't allow me DSL without paying for services I don't want? How do I fight the government that is stealing my childrens future?
You sound reasonable, because everyone has become clueless and insanity is the norm.
4) It will be all over the news.
Like that will have any effect. You seem to confuse the insipid sock puppet shouting that goes on CNN and Fox for journalism. After the noise then more noise about something else. There will be nothing done. Did you know they found $3 Trillion in T-Bills recently? Sounds like an important topic. Suprising that wasn't on the news. The news in this country is total crap, and you think its liberal... because it tells you so. Wow.
The Libertarian/Republican thought is just a club to make people think they are smart by agreeing with eachother. At least the Dems and Progressives know there is something wrong. We keep shouting it to you people, but you think we are saying; "hey, we are whining about things not being more Liberal!". No, we are upset that things are wrong. I am a results oriented person. Do you see any good results from all this corporate profiteering and lack of accountability?
Please don't whine when your child gets Athsma, or your pension is robbed so that executives can have million $ golden parachutes. Remember, it was your choice.
The RIAA can't arrest anyone. It could be police or FBI, depending on the charges. I don't think the particulars matter. They just have the power to throw people in jail for this nonsense--basically, criminal laws to protect profits that should be solved by technology or actually providing things that people will pay for.
The is no RIGHT to make a profit.
Whatever. The RIAA is pretty much the equivalent of forcing car owners to pay for buggy whips.
I'm really excited about this competition for services. I knew that if we all had faith, companies would actually compete and make better things that add value for normal folks. There were all those naysayers and regulation happy people--sure, that stuff works like, 90% of the time, but where is the fun? Give me my pollution and gutted startups and raided trust funds-- can you smell the free market? A lot like burning hair with a nice layer of vanilla that doesn't quite cover up the previous scent.
Too bad one of them is going to have to win, then patent everything to death and the charge through the nose on 15 levels once they have "lock in".
Just makes it all the more exciting to have that rare blossom in the poop pile!
The dealt with pressure differentials on the water planet.
I'm sure the English "thing" used some sort of "babblefish" solution--but that one annoys me too.
The interface to the wormhole could be a method to destroy/record matter and then transmit, but how do you explain people poking hands through and pulling them out?
Nope. A little soft on science.
The randomness could be solved with a sufficiently large network and a way of testing destinations. Kind of like the internet. A lot of random directions, but the network routes the packets. But chunks might have to be re-assembled.
Personally, I think you could be safe in assuming that we have everything wrong anyway. I think that you just enter "no space". Inside of "no space", a wormhole smaller than a hair is sufficient since its properties don't contain place, dimension or time (basically, outside existence). At least in medicine, you can find many examples of where the scientists were absolutely convinced and had it all wrong. When it comes to black holes and wormholes, one minor flaw in the calculations and things could act the opposite of the assumption. Stephen Hawkings has reveresed himself on a few black hole theories.
We seem to have these ingrained constraints on the universe because we are prejudiced by matter and existense, when it is quite possible that these factors are rare--it may be possible to "tear through" the universe. But I haven't seen any physics theories on that yet.
What if you made the wormhole about 2 feet long?
Then factor in, that the exotic matter is accelerated to give it more mass.
Now add that the object being moved, is considered stationary, as it is moving in a "bubble" inside the wormhole.
Look at bubbles floating to the surface in water. How could something a thousand times less dense than the staggeringly massive ocean hope to push it aside?
Is there some rule that a wormhole must reach from the thing being transported to the destination? Can't it be created (like the even horizon of a bubble) along the way.
What is the calculation for the energy for a worm-bubble? How much acceleration of the exotic matter is possible?
By the way, I'd like this point I'm making considered as prior art in case Microsoft copyrights.
I can't understand the "Group Think" that is going on. The same people who want to unleash the FBI on kiddies who download mp3's seem to never hold businesses accountable for anything.
We are so ripe for authoritarian rule. We want to leave control of our lives to others, and all we expect of security is to punish someone who doesn't cross every t and dot every i when they report on the failures.
The fact that Wachovia has my money and social security number and can demand many things of me without proof (such as fees and late charges), means that conversely, they should be responsible and compensate me for any damages resulting from their failure to live up to this trust. I think I need to pull my money out this week.
I thoroughly expect the news service to retract and fire anyone who reported this, but might have gotten the date wrong.
The wormhole doesn't have to be stable to be useful. You could create a wormhole around a ship, and allow it to break apart behind. You could also say that rockets are unstable, because they only have a stable stream of plasma for a few feet--yet they still move the rocket.
Of course, putting limits on things that are still fiction is kind of ironic.
Watching what?
Opinion pieces are sold as fact now, while real journalism is on the run. The vultures in the media jumping on Rather and Newsweek are groups that don't look beyond the AP reports or the daily directive. Fox and CNN for the most part are regurgitated opinion pieces.
The idea that Afghanis are rebelling, not because they have a foreign occupation for 3 years. Not because their country remains a bombed-out husk. Not because illegal drugs now account for 75% of exports. Not because the fable of US control exists around the US appointed president who is himself a drug lord and has to hire Taliban forces to patrol the country. Not because they have to contend with an oil pipeline from Unical across their land without seeing revenues. No, the Afghanis got really upset the day their weekly Newseek magazine showed up on their doorstep suggesting that torturing of their people included disrespecting the Koran.
Wow. Did anybody rule out the sun coming up, or a sick goat? I'd better buy Newsweek if it has more influence than an M-16 at the door.
Or perhaps, if you do any investigative journalism, you'd better have enough evidence to convict in a court of law if you are going to say something antithetical to our new Oligarchy. This story was with the Pentagon, which approved it. But since they only had one source and no photographs (thanks, Rumsfeld for confiscating all cameras to ensure no abuses ever occur again).
News is an essentially Liberal service--it questions those in authority and power. News services should not be backing Democratic or Progressive or NeoCon groups. That is not their job. It's just that "Liberal Media" has been redefined as "not supporting the government". But 90% of the media is owned and controlled by about 5, very large companies.
It is a pretty high bar to raise to say that anyone putting up a storey has to be perfect. Yet you can support monied interests that pad your own pocket and never be called into question. Look where the money, profit and power are... not in the hands of the critics.
Dvorak is Yet-Another-Shill. He will defend the mighty and advertisers from the small and non-profit any day of the week. This is not news.
Golias, it would take too long to explain how wrong you are.
As things stand right now. Apple could not make a device to grab video from a, current purchased DVD and store it to play back unless it copied the DRM with it and added some other restrictions that would have to be negotiated with each and every DVD vendor who could have rights infringed.
So, it will have to be video downloaded from iTunes or future DVDs that have a new license and DRM scheme. The device would not copy older DVDs because--there isn't enough ink to cover the legal briefs that would take.
Apple's amazing achievement with the iTunes music store was not the technology (although the payment system is pretty elegant), its overcoming all the legal hurdles.
TiVo's "ToGo" device has had a lot of troubles and they already have a "fair use" storage on a hard drive. DeCrypting from a DVD is not considered fair use because it circumnavigates a copy protection device--which was a cool legal way to get around fair use by the content providers.
Apple has to deal with a thousand, greedy stupid clones of Donald Trump. Imagine the egos and palms to be greased and fears to be overcome. Shudder. That has got to be the second toughest job in the world (the first would be staying married to Donald Trump for the duration of the "marriage").
In the case of video condoms, I'll bet you're waiting for sufficiently advanced miniaturization, huh?
;-)
Hey, Mine is HD-ready.
It's just that the aspect ratio really sucks.
Either you stream out the data to a device that can actually handle H.264, or you add a CELL chip to the video iPod.
I think we are going to get a Remote that controls a media stream over a next gen Airport Extreme with some wireless receiver you add to your home electronics.
A video iPod could control or sample the library of media through iTunes, and tell the computer to transmit or decompress the video.
There are a lot of different ways you could, ahem, play this.
Gawd. You obviously know how to jerk some chains Epiphani... I mean it is GUARANTEED that you will get into a useless and heated argument if you even mention Monolithic in a sentence. You might as well compare Pico and Edlin or the merits of a Command Line.
Everyone knows that the entire computer is a module in userspace.
The previous Anonymous Coward is either a hypocrite or unemployed. Possibly both.
If you have good management, they go by results. If not, they go by time served and rules broken.
Mod SockIt2Me up.
Absolutely right on target. The Media Center has to be the remote to make interacting with all this stuff easy--not work.
I've seen a lot of normal consumer electronics in homes not work for the simple issue of connectors and "in and out" modes. A media center PC that has computer interface means a geek with an expensive TV on his computer.
The conduit is the next generation Airport eXpress eXtreme II (or something equally hideously named).
Previous post is right. The light does not BEND for you to see the side of the lamppost until you reach the side of the lightpost. The light ALWAYS reaches you at light speed. The Universe changes shape and time dilates to accommodate. The light coming towards you goes up in frequency and therefore energy. Even if you are traveling very near light speed, you still get the "same amount" of light from the rear, just at a lower frequency and energy.
Einstein posited that an actually object trying to achieve the speed of light would expand and would take increasing amounts of energy (you see this in cyclotrons trying to get one proton to the speed of light--even with megawatts they only get close). The energy approaches infinite.
So the idea of traveling on a bike, and seeing if a flashlight still works is a bit beyond the energy budget of our galaxy.
The blue-shift and red-shift concepts work with below light speed. At light speed, you only have photons interacting with other photons. Perhaps the only way to really see what would happen is to sit in an extremely large gravity field--since gravity is the same as velocity when it comes to relativity (hence, how objects have more mass as they approach relative velocities).
This does not mean that you couldn't go faster than light if you were not in the universe. But, since all our observations have been made INSIDE the universe, we have no proof of this yet. I'm hoping for FTL, because going to other stars would be a very boring trip under Einsteinian physics.
I don't.
Not that it couldn't be surmounted. But more and more the average person is made to become a criminal to ensure more revenue for less effort on the parts of copyright and patent holders. You can already get more jail time for copyright violations than violent crime.
People already subscribe to cable and satellite and buy DVDs and go to movies. So the fact that people can possibly download something illegal has negligible effect on convenience expenses for entertainment. In other words, if the average household expenditure is say, $200 per month, it won't go up any, it will mean fewer entertainment products purchased. Even less of that might be movies (like the way music has shrunk). Having encrypted, RFID DVDs with a pay-as-you-go model isn't much different from Pay-Per-View TV. The chance of anyone re-purchasing OLD content becomes a nuisance factor. They will have the cost of maintaining a system that has too compete with NEW content. This is like subsidizing video game consoles with the purchase of games--you better hope people buy more games.
I think the statistics would back me up on consumers buying more entertainment when it becomes cheaper. I get 24/7/365 entertainment on DishNetwork for about $80 per month (with premium channels) on about 200 channels. Looked at one way, the movie industry could say they were ripped off, because I only payed a fraction of a penny on something I theoretically could have seen. Looked at another way, that is $80 more than I spend on music CDs--which I totally quit bothering with because an hour of music isn't worth $14.
Of course, when entertainment becomes too expensive, then people are going to stop filling their days with fluff and maybe, just maybe start thinking and voting. So, maybe the government might actually stop this, because too much DRM will mean people are less distracted and will start getting angry.
At least, the publishing industry might really appreciate RFID disabled movies...
I trust none of the parties in your example. I don't trust the school administrators because they practice a tail-chasing bureaucracy to protect them, rather than any knowledge --and I don't trust the hackers because they are unaccountable. Meanwhile, the average Joe is too busy to care unless this takes food off his table. The average Joe used to care about accountability, but now he is too numb with sleep deprivation and satiated with high-carb meals and is watching the Apprentice as soon as he leaves work praying that he never has to work for any of the jerks on the show.
I don't get your point. The system only holds citizens accountable because they are the only ones affected by poor control of SSNs and the only ones damaged by it.
Why wouldn't I gnash my teeth? What the average guy on the street understands is told to him by CNN or Fox--which is crap-o-la. Why are we basing things on mass hysteria and common knowledge? Um, why are we 27th in the world in healthcare (tied with Saudi Arabia), 37th in education (tied with Cuba), #1 in crime and jails and really depressingly poor on pollution for a civilized country?
Well, that is a rhetorical question, really. It's like asking "why do we weaken pollution controls?" Because we want to shift the burden from the industrial polluters to the hospitals that take care of the Asthma and lung disease (and other issues). Now, not all regulation is good, but it isn't all bad either (trying to avoid flamewar wherein reactionaries call me a Socialist). Why NOT put the burden of securing information on the people entrusted with the information? The SSN system is like a screen door on a bank. And we expect the honor system is going to save us...
Hackers are the only reason we have some tiny bit of data security. The government wants to make the few bad hackers and few terrorists the reason to take control away from the citizens on numerous fronts while absolving themselves of responsibility. In this case, it is a school--and the real dynamic that costs in schools is the administration (not teachers) and their desire to control their fiefdoms. Why would schools not look to an open source security model for running school systems? That's like; Why wouldn't the government create an open source project at Universities that had the scrutiny of millions to create a low cost electronic voting system? Because an expensive, closed, secretive system benefits those in control of it. This isn't a knee jerk reaction because they were geeks. This seems like some kids who were not following the rules and disrespecting authority (which is the duty of anyone under 21) and who took a little initiative.
Always, always, always, when you have people who have control and no accountability coupled with secrecy, you get these kinds of problems. The kids who hacked this should have known better to cover their butts. They could have released the SSN of the admins at the school and never mentioned their own names and gotten real results for security and not this mountain of pain they are in. Good intentions, however, will never go unpunished when you embarrass incompetent people with power.
Agreed. Though Episode 4 (the first Star Wars), was a Western.
I mean, you can hear the blasters in space. For die-hard sci-fi fans, there have been few, actual science fiction movies--ever and fewer tv series.
Babylon 5 and 2001 had at least some appreciation for physics, but there was still huge dependance upon technologies so superior they seemed like magic. Hollywood just doesn't think scifi has any real interest.
The future of war is a lot of small and large networked devices and robots and a huge use of stealth. As lethality increases, so does the need for staying hidden until you can deliver a death blow. So, strangely, Predator kind of wins as about the most plausible science fiction movie ever. Stupid plot lines of an advanced alien species coming to earth for a bite to eat make no sense because the power expenditure of transportation far outways what it takes to make food. However, if your society is stuck in violence and chivalry, that's about the only warped reason you might cross a galaxy to kill someone.
Plus, the alien didn't do anything beyond what is feasible in physics.
But what we know is just a drop in the bucket about the universe. No reason there can't be a force that we could control. Explaining that it was effectively the mitochondria in living organisms (they had their own name). This doesn't make sense for how the force acts and can't be copied/improved with science--but I guess he wanted to get it out of religious terms--which to me was what made it interesting.
It might even make more sense than some of the garbage our religions make up... just give it a few hundred years of PR.
Apple will be lucky enough to get "the Deal". I think that the media moguls are just as scared of Apples success as they are of doing nothing. I think they realize that Apple is a better format for distribution. Just look at food, oil, trucking, etc. and tell me that distribution isn't king.
Wow, I just found out about these SlashDot messages.
Personally, I think that Gilliam would do what you say; not follow the script. Which is exactly what DNA would do if he were still alive and had his own way. Which is the point that I'm making that DNA made fun of trying to make points about the whole big Mish Mosh. Life has no point, but if you have a martini at the right time, it is bareable.
Gilliam I think is a genius and he is running at the same "tune" as DNA. He would Grok it and piss off almost every DNA puritan and make an awesomely funny movie. To me, Terry can do no wrong.
I mean Time Bandits was brilliant. Baron Munchausen was a great fable. Terry just needs to get a contract with Steve Jobs and produce a Pixar movie--there he could get creative!
The main reason some people have desktop PCs at the office is to have a larger screen.
But I suspect everyone here is overcompensating for something by demanding all this "bigness".
Transformer oil sounds safer to me... but what about viscocity?
And you'd have to test the Silicon oil over time and be sure it doesn't release toxic fumes or explosive gases. I'm sure that companies have probably tried this before. Of course, if they couldn't sell it, they might have gone to a proprietary substance. But it's more likely there is a byproduct that shows up enough to make it dangerous.
But it's worth a shot. I would just test it with a smoke/heat detector when leaving it running. It would take a lot more to test for noxious substances.