Has anyone considered the historical evidence of what happens when superior civilizations encounter lesser ones? The Native Americans, the Mayans, the Incas, the Australian Aborigines, the tribes of South America, the natives of Pacific Islands, to name a few, all cry out to humanity to avoid at all costs encounters of the first, second, and third kinds. We have no reason to expect anything but annihilation from advanced alien races- either they are truculent and violent like we are, or they will destroy us as a service to the rest of the galaxy. We do not wants aliens to find us!
Not a problem, unless they're very long lived or really have found a faster than light travel mechanism. Civilizations that were conquered on earth were all reachable well inside a human lifetime. What's more the civilizations all had things of value to the invaders - land, resources, natives to indoctrinate in their religion. Any civilization sufficiently advanced to invade would likely be able to obtain their resources more locally, and colonise more local uninhabited worlds. I would hope they're past superstition, but who knows.
1. Ability to handle distraction is not a constant like, say your eye color. It varies with the circumstances. One day you might handle lots of distraction at the level of a fighter pilot, but the next day have the flu or you're hung over and probably shouldn't be on the road even if you're doing it 10-and-2, eyes sweeping.
A fighter pilot isn't fit to go up if he has the flu. If he goes up anyway and doesn't report it and is caught there are consequences.
It's true that a person's abilities aren't constant, but if they are unable to prove those abilities under ideal conditions, those abilities will not magically appear. So the driving test should test you for driving distracted, including at which threshold you should be pulling over.
I used to drive drunk all the time and I never had an accident or hurt anyone. So for 20 years of my life, I've never had an accident after drinking. Therefore, I think that I've proven that I can drink and drive and the government should give me a special waiver.
Then you won't mind being tested on a vehicular obstacle course while drunk. If you fail your license is revoked.
I also have this special amulet that keeps tigers from eating me. I've had it all my life and I've never been eaten by a tiger...
Lets take you to the local zoo, and put you in the tiger cage to test this out. Your license won't be at stake. Your life is sufficient.
1) You've been able to change the screen orientation of a laptop for a very long time. Not the keyboard.
2) A real keyboard is very useful while REPLYING to email
3) Never had a problem showing photos on a laptop. Don't know what you're on about with that binocular comment.
There's a reason I like my full sized laptop. I can do everything I want with it including play games(including reaslistic flight sims and chess since I have decent mobile graphics), watch movies, read and reply to email, browse the web, edit documents, run a development environment, view and edit photos, attach many devices, run CPU/FPU intensive math software, burn a DVD or CD. I can't do half of that with an iPad.
I would love a touch screen and an accelerometer. (interestingly I could add them to my laptop, it would just be expensive and a little awkward). If my laptop hinged differently so I could hide the keyboard sometimes that would be a small plus. But I won't swap those things for my DVD drive, USB ports, processing power and ability to install whatever I like. I won't even downgrade to a netbook.
I'd really like to see someone make a send up skit. It would involve some fanboi buying an iPad and trying to use it as a phone then getting very disappointed when he realises it can't be used as one.
The iPad is a device looking for a purpose. The Apple designers built a beautiful little smart phone - so nice that people would work around their crippling it with nonsense like jailbreaking. So nice that they'd overlook basic missing functionality like MMS in the first couple of revisions. So nice that they'd pay through the nose and get into ridiculous contracts to own it. It wasn't even about the phone functionality but the accelerometer and touch screen that let you play games and enabled some interesting applets. So then they thought lets make it bigger - that small screen is limiting. And since people aren't buying it for the phone we can leave that functionality for the next generation.
They forgot that laptops and netbooks already exist and are more versatile. So what you have is a turkey of a device. Crippled and limited. It's best use will be providing competition. Expect to see new laptops with accelerometers and perhaps touch screens built in. Apart from those two features and the ability to run iPhone apps, the iPad has NO advantages over a common laptop or netbook. As one reviewer said, it's an oversized iPhone without the phone.
You have quite plainly demonstrated that you are a douche, but not why I must be a liar.
Here's the thing, I'm not getting personal when I call you a liar. I simply do not believe that you could possibly have read every document. You're just name calling when you call me a douche. I don't suppose you'll see the difference but that's your problem.
I can't think of any software I use that came with an EULA, although I usually read the license it comes with if it is new to me. For example, the GPL took me 3/4 of an hour to read 8 years ago.
Ah I see. So have you ever used anything that's licensed as GPL 3? What about a BSD license? Has any software you've used varied from the GPL? Are you fucking seriously telling me you read and digested the entire GPL in 3/4 of an hour, with all it's implications, when there are grey areas around it? (Why do you think GPL 3 was created?)
But the rest of your rant makes no sense.
Perhaps if you refuse to try to understand it.
Where did you get the idea I was for abolishing the protections that exist? How does suggesting that people be responsible for what they sign mean that I believe companies are free to write whatever conditions they like? What kind of logic are you using?
The same logic that hauls Google and T-Mobile up to answer for their inclusion of terms in the contract that are not reasonable and allow them to double dip and overcharge for breaking a contract. Those same protections that make it illegal and unenforceable to enslave your family in the fine print of a contract are the ones that come into play for this story. I don't know what is so difficult for you to understand.
Whatever was going through your mind, the fact is that in THIS case we are talking about a straight up contract - there was no adhesion or exploitation.
You don't think that charging more for a device under a break of contract than for a brand new device up front is exploitative? And you call me a douche? Get a grip!
Anyone else getting flashbacks from Planet of the Apes?
Is that the new code name for the next version of Chrome? Ubuntu Panhandling Panda, now featuring Chrome Apes! Download now! Steve Balmer your Monkey Boy days are numbered, so dance while you can, it's the year of the Google Desktop.
Yes I do. Reading and understanding the document is a prerequisite of signing it. Can't be much plainer then that.
You are quite simply and plainly a liar. There are not enough hours in the day to read every contract you have to. Important contracts, sure. But every EULA for every piece of software? Gimme a break.
Now THAT is a moronic thing to say. Firstly - If I had read the contract I would not have signed it. Secondly such a contract would be illegal even if I WAS dumb enough to sign it.
Not moronic at all. Both your points are true, but a logical extension of your argument is that such protections should not exist, because everyone should read every contract in full before signing. Are you conveniently forgetting that being double charged for breaking the contract is coming under investigation by the very kinds of authorities that offer the protection you're waving in my face. If you have no issue with being protected like this, you should not have "no sympathy" for those who are similarly protected against exploitative break of contract clauses in their mobile phone contract. Your argument is not logically consistent.
No, people who don't read contracts allow companies to screw them. Common sense says a corporation is not giving away expensive gadgets because they want to be your friend. Before you even look at the contract you should know that something akin to an early termination fee will be in there. Don't be a sucker.
Make up your mind. Should there be protection against exploitative fine print in a contract or should there not? You seem to be in favour of protection for the extreme circumstances like selling your family into slavery, but fine with it for excessive contract termination fees. Make some sense would you!?
I'm sorry, but I've got no sympathy for people who sign up for a subsidized service and don't read the conditions.
Yes, because I'm sure you've read and fully understood all the fine print on every contract you've signed. What a fucking moronic thing to say. Tell me, if one of your contracts insisted that your family was to be sold into slavery, would you have no sympathy for yourself? People like you enable companies to screw people.
Seriously. Fuck Google. I'm sick of it being painted as some knight in shining armour company that shits butterflies and rescues kittens in it's spare time. Do no evil my arsehole. I'm hoping that both companies are slapped with a VERY nice big fine and forced to change their contracts PLUS let any existing customers out without paying any penalty. I know I'm smoking fairy dust but that is what should happen. That and the bastard lawyer that drafted that "This is a scheduled fee not an early termination fee" line in T-Mobile's contract should be strung up from the tallest tree by his left testicle.
Child Pornography is illegal because it violates the rights of the children contained therein -- the right to consent, amongst others
That's a strong argument against creation, but a weaker one against distribution. (You could still argue that distribution does further damage by embarassing the child, so it's still a valid argument - just not as strong)
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
I think you'd find the powers that be phrase it differently. For instance argue that gratification from cartoons leads to or encourages real world abuse.
I'm in 2 minds about this, but I do think we should save harsh punishment for harsh crimes, and destroying someone's life and imprisoning them definitely qualifies as a harsh punishment where as having a giggle at immature cartoon porn that may involve depiction of child characters I find difficult to classify as a harsh crime. People and the laws they make have no sense of proportionality as soon as the word sex is mentioned. The dichotomy of laws like this with prolific sexual material and the legal sexualisation of children through idiotic kiddie pagents and the like is disturbing. It's a sign of a truly sick society that's lost it's way.
It's more than just an iPod touch that won't fit in your pocket...it's also an underpowered netbook with no keyboard. It's the worst of both worlds!
Steve Jobs will be releasing the new iPants in the next couple of months. The iPants have iPockets that will fit an iPad. If you don't own a pair you won't be iCool anymore, so better save up those iPennies.
Apple has always released crippled products and insisted that they were superior. You had to wait till iPhone 3.0 to have MMS and buy a 3rd party app (not available at release) to record video. These are things that have been standard in phones for 5 years. Apple's genius is not the product, it's the marketing which seems to catch out every wannabe geek and fashion victim.
Here's a tip, folks. The minute you see some science journalist use the word "paradigm", as in "paradigm shift" or "paradigm breaking" you can be quite certain that what follows will be neither.
Thank goodness! Relativity and Quantum Mechanics make my head hurt. With this wonderful insight you've provided I can crawl back into my Newtonian clockwork universe shell and ignore them!;-)
More seriously. Pardigms do "shift" and get "broken". It's just that almost every journalist wants to sensationalise their news piece to sell it. That doesn't mean there aren't genuine breakthroughs. Just that you can't trust a journalist to tell you about them.
It's an excellent analogy because that's how managers and other non-computer scientists in many (maybe most) workplaces view their software developers, software engineers, web developers, sysadms, etc.
No, it's an excellent analogy because chicks dig mechanics.
"So what exactly do you do?" "I'm a mechanic baby!" - She can find out you're a "computer mechanic" much much later, preferably after sex;-)
Except they still have most of their wealth in Google stock. More likely they just want some money. Bill Gates did the same thing when he started his charitable organization, so maybe they are planning on starting a charity. Or maybe they want to buy some islands somewhere. Or a small country.
Just some a-grade weed and one hell of a high price hooker!
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Has anyone considered the historical evidence of what happens when superior civilizations encounter lesser ones? The Native Americans, the Mayans, the Incas, the Australian Aborigines, the tribes of South America, the natives of Pacific Islands, to name a few, all cry out to humanity to avoid at all costs encounters of the first, second, and third kinds. We have no reason to expect anything but annihilation from advanced alien races- either they are truculent and violent like we are, or they will destroy us as a service to the rest of the galaxy. We do not wants aliens to find us!
Not a problem, unless they're very long lived or really have found a faster than light travel mechanism. Civilizations that were conquered on earth were all reachable well inside a human lifetime. What's more the civilizations all had things of value to the invaders - land, resources, natives to indoctrinate in their religion. Any civilization sufficiently advanced to invade would likely be able to obtain their resources more locally, and colonise more local uninhabited worlds. I would hope they're past superstition, but who knows.
I keep asking this question: Why can't we detect ET's transmissions?
DRM'ed, no doubt.
Dude, if only that were true! You'd find aliens just by searching the pirate bay!
1. Ability to handle distraction is not a constant like, say your eye color. It varies with the circumstances. One day you might handle lots of distraction at the level of a fighter pilot, but the next day have the flu or you're hung over and probably shouldn't be on the road even if you're doing it 10-and-2, eyes sweeping.
A fighter pilot isn't fit to go up if he has the flu. If he goes up anyway and doesn't report it and is caught there are consequences.
It's true that a person's abilities aren't constant, but if they are unable to prove those abilities under ideal conditions, those abilities will not magically appear. So the driving test should test you for driving distracted, including at which threshold you should be pulling over.
I used to drive drunk all the time and I never had an accident or hurt anyone. So for 20 years of my life, I've never had an accident after drinking. Therefore, I think that I've proven that I can drink and drive and the government should give me a special waiver.
Then you won't mind being tested on a vehicular obstacle course while drunk. If you fail your license is revoked.
I also have this special amulet that keeps tigers from eating me. I've had it all my life and I've never been eaten by a tiger...
Lets take you to the local zoo, and put you in the tiger cage to test this out. Your license won't be at stake. Your life is sufficient.
What is wrong with people? I made a joke, and they assume I don't understand the context? WTF?
1) You've been able to change the screen orientation of a laptop for a very long time. Not the keyboard.
2) A real keyboard is very useful while REPLYING to email
3) Never had a problem showing photos on a laptop. Don't know what you're on about with that binocular comment.
There's a reason I like my full sized laptop. I can do everything I want with it including play games(including reaslistic flight sims and chess since I have decent mobile graphics), watch movies, read and reply to email, browse the web, edit documents, run a development environment, view and edit photos, attach many devices, run CPU/FPU intensive math software, burn a DVD or CD. I can't do half of that with an iPad.
I would love a touch screen and an accelerometer. (interestingly I could add them to my laptop, it would just be expensive and a little awkward). If my laptop hinged differently so I could hide the keyboard sometimes that would be a small plus. But I won't swap those things for my DVD drive, USB ports, processing power and ability to install whatever I like. I won't even downgrade to a netbook.
Steve Jobs can keep his little fashion statement.
Somehow, I doubt they're auctioning off Amanda Tapping.
Hey! Quit knocking Amanda Tapping. I find your words quite rattling.
I'd really like to see someone make a send up skit. It would involve some fanboi buying an iPad and trying to use it as a phone then getting very disappointed when he realises it can't be used as one.
The iPad is a device looking for a purpose. The Apple designers built a beautiful little smart phone - so nice that people would work around their crippling it with nonsense like jailbreaking. So nice that they'd overlook basic missing functionality like MMS in the first couple of revisions. So nice that they'd pay through the nose and get into ridiculous contracts to own it. It wasn't even about the phone functionality but the accelerometer and touch screen that let you play games and enabled some interesting applets. So then they thought lets make it bigger - that small screen is limiting. And since people aren't buying it for the phone we can leave that functionality for the next generation.
They forgot that laptops and netbooks already exist and are more versatile. So what you have is a turkey of a device. Crippled and limited. It's best use will be providing competition. Expect to see new laptops with accelerometers and perhaps touch screens built in. Apart from those two features and the ability to run iPhone apps, the iPad has NO advantages over a common laptop or netbook. As one reviewer said, it's an oversized iPhone without the phone.
You have quite plainly demonstrated that you are a douche, but not why I must be a liar.
Here's the thing, I'm not getting personal when I call you a liar. I simply do not believe that you could possibly have read every document. You're just name calling when you call me a douche. I don't suppose you'll see the difference but that's your problem.
I can't think of any software I use that came with an EULA, although I usually read the license it comes with if it is new to me. For example, the GPL took me 3/4 of an hour to read 8 years ago.
Ah I see. So have you ever used anything that's licensed as GPL 3? What about a BSD license? Has any software you've used varied from the GPL? Are you fucking seriously telling me you read and digested the entire GPL in 3/4 of an hour, with all it's implications, when there are grey areas around it? (Why do you think GPL 3 was created?)
But the rest of your rant makes no sense.
Perhaps if you refuse to try to understand it.
Where did you get the idea I was for abolishing the protections that exist? How does suggesting that people be responsible for what they sign mean that I believe companies are free to write whatever conditions they like? What kind of logic are you using?
The same logic that hauls Google and T-Mobile up to answer for their inclusion of terms in the contract that are not reasonable and allow them to double dip and overcharge for breaking a contract. Those same protections that make it illegal and unenforceable to enslave your family in the fine print of a contract are the ones that come into play for this story. I don't know what is so difficult for you to understand.
Whatever was going through your mind, the fact is that in THIS case we are talking about a straight up contract - there was no adhesion or exploitation.
You don't think that charging more for a device under a break of contract than for a brand new device up front is exploitative? And you call me a douche? Get a grip!
Anyone else getting flashbacks from Planet of the Apes?
Is that the new code name for the next version of Chrome? Ubuntu Panhandling Panda, now featuring Chrome Apes! Download now! Steve Balmer your Monkey Boy days are numbered, so dance while you can, it's the year of the Google Desktop.
Yes I do. Reading and understanding the document is a prerequisite of signing it. Can't be much plainer then that.
You are quite simply and plainly a liar. There are not enough hours in the day to read every contract you have to. Important contracts, sure. But every EULA for every piece of software? Gimme a break.
Now THAT is a moronic thing to say. Firstly - If I had read the contract I would not have signed it. Secondly such a contract would be illegal even if I WAS dumb enough to sign it.
Not moronic at all. Both your points are true, but a logical extension of your argument is that such protections should not exist, because everyone should read every contract in full before signing. Are you conveniently forgetting that being double charged for breaking the contract is coming under investigation by the very kinds of authorities that offer the protection you're waving in my face. If you have no issue with being protected like this, you should not have "no sympathy" for those who are similarly protected against exploitative break of contract clauses in their mobile phone contract. Your argument is not logically consistent.
No, people who don't read contracts allow companies to screw them. Common sense says a corporation is not giving away expensive gadgets because they want to be your friend. Before you even look at the contract you should know that something akin to an early termination fee will be in there. Don't be a sucker.
Make up your mind. Should there be protection against exploitative fine print in a contract or should there not? You seem to be in favour of protection for the extreme circumstances like selling your family into slavery, but fine with it for excessive contract termination fees. Make some sense would you!?
I'm sorry, but I've got no sympathy for people who sign up for a subsidized service and don't read the conditions.
Yes, because I'm sure you've read and fully understood all the fine print on every contract you've signed. What a fucking moronic thing to say. Tell me, if one of your contracts insisted that your family was to be sold into slavery, would you have no sympathy for yourself? People like you enable companies to screw people.
Seriously. Fuck Google. I'm sick of it being painted as some knight in shining armour company that shits butterflies and rescues kittens in it's spare time. Do no evil my arsehole. I'm hoping that both companies are slapped with a VERY nice big fine and forced to change their contracts PLUS let any existing customers out without paying any penalty. I know I'm smoking fairy dust but that is what should happen. That and the bastard lawyer that drafted that "This is a scheduled fee not an early termination fee" line in T-Mobile's contract should be strung up from the tallest tree by his left testicle.
I'm an AI researcher, though not precisely in this area
What's that like? I'm curious.
Child Pornography is illegal because it violates the rights of the children contained therein -- the right to consent, amongst others
That's a strong argument against creation, but a weaker one against distribution. (You could still argue that distribution does further damage by embarassing the child, so it's still a valid argument - just not as strong)
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
I think you'd find the powers that be phrase it differently. For instance argue that gratification from cartoons leads to or encourages real world abuse.
I'm in 2 minds about this, but I do think we should save harsh punishment for harsh crimes, and destroying someone's life and imprisoning them definitely qualifies as a harsh punishment where as having a giggle at immature cartoon porn that may involve depiction of child characters I find difficult to classify as a harsh crime. People and the laws they make have no sense of proportionality as soon as the word sex is mentioned. The dichotomy of laws like this with prolific sexual material and the legal sexualisation of children through idiotic kiddie pagents and the like is disturbing. It's a sign of a truly sick society that's lost it's way.
Talk about your playstation generation. 5 years is not long term, except in political circles where it's past the next election.
It's more than just an iPod touch that won't fit in your pocket...it's also an underpowered netbook with no keyboard. It's the worst of both worlds!
Steve Jobs will be releasing the new iPants in the next couple of months. The iPants have iPockets that will fit an iPad. If you don't own a pair you won't be iCool anymore, so better save up those iPennies.
Apple has always released crippled products and insisted that they were superior. You had to wait till iPhone 3.0 to have MMS and buy a 3rd party app (not available at release) to record video. These are things that have been standard in phones for 5 years. Apple's genius is not the product, it's the marketing which seems to catch out every wannabe geek and fashion victim.
What an unfortunate name. One could conceiveably think that Apple is delving into the untapped market of network-enabled feminine hygiene products.
You're thinking of the second generation yet to be released iPad Maxi.
They limit what we can do, so we have to find innovative [openbsd.org] ways to avoid them.
Innovative!? Quick, patent the technique!!!
Here's a tip, folks. The minute you see some science journalist use the word "paradigm", as in "paradigm shift" or "paradigm breaking" you can be quite certain that what follows will be neither.
Thank goodness! Relativity and Quantum Mechanics make my head hurt. With this wonderful insight you've provided I can crawl back into my Newtonian clockwork universe shell and ignore them! ;-)
More seriously. Pardigms do "shift" and get "broken". It's just that almost every journalist wants to sensationalise their news piece to sell it. That doesn't mean there aren't genuine breakthroughs. Just that you can't trust a journalist to tell you about them.
It's an excellent analogy because that's how managers and other non-computer scientists in many (maybe most) workplaces view their software developers, software engineers, web developers, sysadms, etc.
No, it's an excellent analogy because chicks dig mechanics.
"So what exactly do you do?" "I'm a mechanic baby!" - She can find out you're a "computer mechanic" much much later, preferably after sex ;-)
Greedy motherfucking bastards, that's why.
Except they still have most of their wealth in Google stock. More likely they just want some money. Bill Gates did the same thing when he started his charitable organization, so maybe they are planning on starting a charity. Or maybe they want to buy some islands somewhere. Or a small country.
Just some a-grade weed and one hell of a high price hooker!
http://sol.astro.virginia.edu/~rsl4v/PSC/
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BwFDuloZpz_BNWE1OTBmMjYtZTg5ZS00NDMxLTg0YzAtZjA3N2ZlYjBmNDdj&hl=en
It will force shutdown even if you don't check the box at the end of the installer. How can this be so wrong at so many levels.
You don't get it. Shutting down your computer IS the security fix. If you start it up again, you're back where you started - with Windows and IE.