The color really isn't that hard. As long as you have black-and-white film that can hold the number of bits of each channel (R, G, and B) in the color image, you could just have three film frames for each color frame in the original. You don't actually need color film to record color images; three black-and-white ones will do fine, and are pretty easy to reconstruct.
You could even use more frames in this manner to achieve greater bit depths per channel than the film supports (use one frame for the first 12 bits of the channel, then another frame for the last 12 bits -- thus, 24 bits per channel). Thus with six film frames per actual 'frame' in the digital version, you could get RGB at 72bpp, if you wanted such a thing. Used this way, gamut is not a problem. You could even throw in another frame with nothing but error-correcting data.
The nice thing about the one-frame-per-channel encoding is that, in the very worst case, you can always rig up some sort of analog projector with three different colored lenses and get a crude color projection out of it: not even digital technology is required. But of course, if you make the pixels big enough relative to the grain structure of the film, you can always scan it and get a pixel-perfect digital version back.
I was reading something recently that discussed the US Postal Service in the late 19th century. In some major cities, like New York and Boston, the mail used to come as much as five times a day. That meant you could write to someone (local, served from the same Post Office) in the early morning, have it picked up in the first round, delivered in the second, have their reply picked up in the third, and delivered on the fourth. (And you could even send a reply back in the final pickup for delivery the next morning.) That's pretty good -- some people I know don't even check their email that often!
If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.
This is a slippery distinction made between the two domains in the context of "free speech". You would have the.kids domain restricted by a peer review committee and that's just dandy. But that same philosophical application somehow does not work for.xxx? Well, there's a valid argument as to whether we should even bother to 'protect' children from pornography, rather than trying to educate them as to the differences between healthy and unhealthy sexuality, reality vs fantasy, etc. I think that's a valid discussion to have, and in an ideal world, I'd be all for education rather than enforced "innocence", but I realize that's a non-starter in most parts of the world today.
So, if we take on premise that children need to be 'protected' from some content, I think it's more practical and less philosophically repugnant to create safe-zones around children than to try and 'child-proof' the entire world except for certain 'adult zones' where we allow uncensored conversations to take place. Basically, if you go into a kids' zone, you agree to self-censor. If you don't want to do that, you don't have to go in.
Similarly, if you wanted a site in.kids.us, or some other "kindernet," you would have to go through some sort of review process, or perhaps post a bond and swear that you'd keep it clean. If you didn't want to do this, you could just get a regular domain and not worry about it -- the only customers you'd lose would be the ones whose browsers don't let them access anything outside of the kindernet.
This is a pretty fundamentally different process from trying to censor everything that's in the general TLDs and force everything that's 'kid-unfriendly' into.xxx-type zones. Plus, while there's only one "general" Internet to censor and make child-friendly (meaning that you have to find one lowest-common-denominator standard), you can have many kindernets, corresponding to what different people feel is appropriate for different groups of children. You can have.kids.us and.kids.ir, for George Bush's and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ideas of kid-friendliness, respectively; you could also further subdivide.kids.us into.G.kids.us and.PG13.kids.us and the like for fine-grained control. Parents could feel free to enable whichever domains they thought were appropriate (and sites in more restrictive could automatically 'trickle down' to less restrictive ones; e.g. PG13.kids.us would be a superset of.PG.kids.us and.G.kids.us plus its own sites).
Now, I'm not saying this would be the best solution -- I think the overall best solution would be to educate kids so that they won't be harmed by 'adult' culture as early as possible, rather than keeping them in bubbles, and I think DNS may not be the best way to signify the 'adult-ness' of content on a page -- but it's certainly better than trying to force all 'adult' content on the Internet into a 'free speech zone.'
Are you just trolling or are you seriously this thick?
Who'd want example.com when they could have example.xxx ? Why would anyone want the latter, particularly if it means they're going to be automatically censored in large parts of the country/world? I suspect there are lots of porn consumers who live blatantly hypocritical lives ("uh, sure, honey... you can block.xxx, I certainly don't care about it..."). At any rate, it doesn't make much sense to restrict one's market. And with the price of domain names, the logical solution for any adult site would be to buy both: get yourname.xxx and yourname.com. This is the main driver behind the.xxx TLD in the first place -- it's a cash cow for the registrars.
I think in time any pron sites left in.com will feel pressure to move to "where they should be". Pressure from who? And why would they care? Certainly not social pressure. There are porn sites around for lots of, shall we say... fringe activities; things that are certainly not acceptable in mainstream society. No amount of tut-tutting is going to push them into the.xxx ghetto when there's a clear ongoing economic incentive to remain in both. And as for government/legal pressure, that only works within the borders of a single nation; there's nothing stopping me from setting up a.com porn site in some neutral territory and thus reaching all those consumers stuck behind.xxx-blocks for whatever reason. The only way you could enforce this is with a national firewall and universal content screening.
And this whole scheme doesn't do anything about adult content that appears on sites other than ones 100% dedicated to porn. You're always going to have imageboards and interactive/user-created content sites that are going to tend towards 'adult,' because that's what people are interested in. You're not going to change that through any amount of legislation.
The result is that no matter how much you try, there is always going to be adult content available in the 'general' Internet. And that means it'll never be "porn free," ever, undermining the whole point of the endeavor. You can't make the Internet, in general, "safe for kids," because the Internet is mostly populated by adults, and much of what adults want to talk about is, well, adult. So not only is it a recipe for censorship and unnecessarily burdensome, it's futile in terms of actually achieving its stated purpose.
There's already a kids domain. It was a huge flop. Yep, very true. The take-away point here? Nobody really gives that much of a shit about protecting kids, or creating a 'safe zone' for them. The.xxx proposals are about two things: they're an attempt by the registrars to make a few bucks, and they're a way for some social authoritarians to try and regulate the lives of others' and censor the public sphere by pushing content they find disagreeable into a walled ghetto.
Of course I expect to be told I'm wrong, I'm just curious to hear why.
You answered your own question several sentences earlier:
The article was scanty on how the age verification would be done... Setting aside the issue of whether it's the government's legitimate purpose and responsibility to limit access to these sorts of materials in the first place (and I don't think that it is -- that's definitely the parents' job, and I don't think that the government should be falling over itself to "help" parents, but that sort of stupidity is endemic to all democracies), it's idiotic to try and implement age limits when there's no effective way to determine age.
Yes but if you control the kindernet, you could introduce concepts such as sex in a tasteful, sensible & perhaps even educational fashion. After all, they wont know any different. What a strange world you must come from. Here on Earth, at least in the United States of America, we prefer to teach our children about sexuality and reproduction by keeping them in the dark as long as possible, then lying through our teeth to them, and then letting them learn about it via the always-accurate medium of hardcore pornography. (Although the Catholic Church does offer some 'hands-on' advanced placement courses...they're quite the forward-thinking bunch there.)
But that's not the best part; just wait until you hear about our drug policy!
But that would be too sensible, just like the notion of.xxx to enable easy filtering.
Hold it right there. A.kids namespace and associated content makes sense; but a.xxx space does not, and would not work. They are fundamentally different concepts.
A.kids TLD (or better yet,.kids.us or.kids.au or whatever) is a WHITELIST. You only allow content into it that's been reviewed, and is guaranteed-clean. It's trivial to restrict browsers to it. You can set up whatever kind of review committee you want to keep tabs on it. It's strictly opt-in by design.
However,.xxx or.porn or.adult are exactly the opposite. They are BLACKLISTS and can only function when you effectively censor the rest of the Internet, in order to force adult content into the "adult" TLDs. This is hugely impractical and spectacularly dangerous from a freedom-of-speech perspective. Essentially what this tries to do is turn the entire Internet EXCEPT one corner of it into a "kids"-zone, and that's just not going to happen. It's impossible to police effectively without a national firewall (because unlike a TLD, which you could put under your country's namespace and easily apply national laws to, you'd be trying to censor all of the 'net), and such a scheme would lead to fragmentation of the network in short order.
Do not confuse.kids, which is a good idea, with.xxx, which is dangerous and stupid.
Well, the House already passed a bill that links Federal student aid monies to the implementation of RIAA-drafted "anti-piracy" measures. I don't think the GP's fear is too farfetched; certain members of Congress are pretty obviously in the pockets of the media corporations.
I'm with you, but sadly we lost that battle long ago, back in the mid-1980s. And really, the groundwork for the loss was in place long before that.
The problem is the whole jurisprudential theory of "reasonableness," where the Constitution and traditional common-law rights (you know, those ones that are supposed to be retained by the States and the people via the Ninth Amendment) can be bent or trampled so long as there's a "legitimate purpose" in doing so. As soon as you veer away from absolute interpretations of individual rights it's all downhill. There's no limit to how far you can expand what's "reasonable," and in reality it pretty clearly boils down to 'whoever has the most money and resources to expend on bribes.'
That's why your property rights get trampled in order to preserve the lazy business model of the DBS providers.
Huh? You can go to any Best Buy or WalMart and buy a Wii that's not in a bundle. Or at least you could until they ran out of stock for the Christmas rush, but I'm sure if you stand around on the day they get their resupply that they'll sell you one in the regular retail box, which is nothing but the the console, one Wiimote, and Wii Sports, just fine.
Gamestop seem to be notorious for its bundling policies, but then again I think Gamestop is one notch up from a guy selling electronics and Persian rugs out of the back of a van.
With a terabyte on a single disk this strategy might be useful again. It would be good if software could automate it though - striping the data for me automagically.
This is what Parchives are designed for. You can specify an amount of redundancy (from 0% up to whatever you please, I personally do 30% on DVDs, but I use good media and haven't had many problems, plus I have disk backups as well) and it will create all the parity files necessary. Then you just go and burn it to the disc. Later if the file proves corrupted, you can use the parity files to repair or reassemble it.
It's all open source, which is good for 'future proofing,' and gives you a lot more control than just recording multiple copies of the same file (which limits you to multiples of 100% redundancy).
Glad you pointed that out; I was going to say the same thing. CACs work very well on recent versions of OS X, the trick is just getting IT departments to realize this and allow them, and of course ensuring that you don't need any software that's PC-only.
But you can use any number of a bunch of commodity USB smartcard readers and do just fine on the Mac. The drivers are all there; once enabled, it's pretty slick actually. At least as of a while ago, Apple actually had at least one full-time employee working on CAC and other US Government compatibility issues. (Or at least seemed to be responding to mailing-list questions.)
Hydroelectric power is not cleaner. It involves damming up rivers, which essentially destroys them as ecosystems. By eliminating flowing water it also lowers oxygen levels which can increase organic pollution, because it's no longer removed by natural processes.
Plus, hydroelectric projects often involve flooding large areas and the forcible relocation of whole communities. I'd rather live near a well-designed, modern nuclear reactor than have my house condemned.
Just out of curiosity, does Opera have an ad blocker that supports automatic filterset updates? (Like Adblock Plus on FF) I did a bit of quick Googling and it does seem as though Opera has some level of ad-blocking features but I wondered how advanced they are. Can you subscribe to public blocklists or is it more of a right-click-to-block thing on an individual basis?
The problem in switching away from Firefox is that I've become dependent on quite a few addons. Adblock Plus is the major one I couldn't live without, but Google Browser Sync is unbelievably slick, too.
I'm really not even all that crazy about Firefox as a browser (the memory usage and lack of multithreading kills me...why should a page or JS applet that's loading in one tab lock up every other tab?), but its "ecosystem" of addons is tough to beat. Though, I suppose that's just the sort of justification that keeps Windows alive.
In what universe does the topic of gun control belong on a list of issues important to geeks, scientists and environmentalists? Probably not in any one. Which makes it a good thing that this isn't a list of things important to geeks, scientists, and environmentalists, it's a list of things important to Popular Mechanics readers. And I can assure you that gun control is definitely on that list, and PopMech runs a lot of gun-related articles.
What you're reading came from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. It was overruled, on appeal, by the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit:
To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad).
The U.S. Supreme Court granted cert and is scheduled to hear oral arguments in March.
Debian uses GPG to sign packages as well. I don't know about RedHat's RPM system, although I assume it must use some sort of cryptographic validation on binary packages; it's just too much of a weak link to ignore completely.
You could just stop caring about internal documents and eliminate or change the laws that depend on them. Treat the corporation as a 'black box,' in other words.
I'm not sure why we should really give a shit about what goes on inside a company. What matters is what it does. If a corporation does something bad, punish it. I don't really care, and I don't think it should matter, whether people in the corporation "knew" what they were doing was bad, and that's mainly what the retention laws are all about. They exist in order to make it easier to pin down when so-and-so knew something. If you just tell companies you don't care, and enforce rigorous strict-liability doctrine (on the corporation -- I don't really agree with strict liability as applied to individuals, but that's a separate discussion), you can leave the internal policing to the corporations themselves.
The idea is that basically, you make the corporations responsible for the actions their employees take in their name and the results of those actions, whether intentional or not, and whether the harm was foreseeable or not. Leave it up to them to decide how they want to manage risk and how much freedom they want to give employees to act without authorization.
I don't really see why we need to peer into companies in order to regulate them. If a company wants to keep its financial records in cuneiform impressed on wads of sodden toilet paper, that's fine by me. The market will punish them for it when nobody wants to buy their stock because there's no way to gain any insight into their performance. Maybe the stock exchanges would even enforce minimum accounting standards for listed companies, as a way of keeping the crap out. But caveat emptor -- do your own research, and don't come whining to anyone else if you put all your money into a company that implodes. If you want secure investments, that's what savings accounts are for.
Similarly, if a company pollutes or otherwise externalizes costs on the public, punish it. If they don't cough up payment for the externality, forcibly seize whatever physical assets they have under their direct control and sell them at auction.
I can train my dog without knowing exactly what's going on in his head every moment; that's exactly the philosophy I'd apply to corporate governance. Reward good overall corporate behavior, punish overall bad behavior with meaningful sanctions (asset forfeiture and seizure), and let them do whatever the hell they want internally.
although the idealized modern view of the historical times tends to forgot the sorrowful and filthy side of the past reality. Maybe we are more mature now, however?
That's putting it lightly. Until very recently, all but a very small elite in most places lived in squalor and physical discomfort, probably sick (by modern standards) most of the time, either freezing cold or sweating hot, living and dying without venturing much further than you could see today from a moderately-tall building. And based on the quantities of alcohol consumed, they were probably half in the bag most of the time.
With the possible exception of being perennially wasted (and even that would get old after a while), none of that seems particularly pleasant. We can talk about getting back to basics and in "harmony" and all this other trash, but there's nothing stopping modern people from living the way their ancestors did only two or three centuries ago. Very, very few people would want to, I think; myself included.
People didn't live like Robinson Crusoe. (And that aside, it's a pretty weird example to cite -- the whole point of Crusoe is that he's a Western European who tames nature with his body and mind, and manages to create 'civilization' where none exists from whole cloth. It's very much man-vs-nature in the standard Imperialist mode; hardly "harmony.") Real pre-technological life, particularly in tropical or desert climes, is pretty rough. And based on the only even arguably objective evidence we have available -- people's preferences over time -- once people are exposed to technology, they choose to use it. You see those choices happen over and over: children grow up, they have a choice between two cultures, and they pick one. It's a rare group that can hold out and make a low-technology lifestyle attractive enough to ensure their own preservation as a community (e.g. the Amish).
It's easy to speculate about the nobleness of pre-technological life and getting 'back to nature' in various forms, when you're sitting at the pinnacle of 6,000+ years of development. But the key to remember is that, every step of the way, people have chosen to adopt technology because it offered them a life that they thought was better than what they had already. I don't really see much reason to second-guess that process.
Agreed. The only interesting thing about this whole story is that the NSA apparently reviewed the PRNG function and rubber-stamped it, missing the critical vulnerability. Since the vulnerability really isn't that good of a backdoor, and doesn't seem to have been all that subtle, I think this is far more likely to be incompetence rather than malice on their part.
As an American, that doesn't make me feel a whole lot better -- in some ways, I'd really like to have the secret agencies of so many spy movies rather than the massive bureaucratic pile that I know exists in reality -- but disappointment in government is something I've gotten used to. You don't last long in Washington without it.
Scientific theories, as structures of logically coherent hypotheses, must agree with observed reality. That is all. The more they agree, the better we say they are and the more useful they tend to be at predicting future observations. So long as a scientific theory consistently offers a logically coherent explanation of observed reality, we give it credence until new evidence comes along that contradicts the theory. If ever such evidence comes along, or if a theory comes along that does a better job of explaining observed reality - better meaning it possesses greater elegance, comprehensiveness and simplicity which we lump together under the term 'parsimony' - we either modify the original theory or toss the theory out. That may be your definition of science, but since I don't see any way of quantifying "parsimony" I think it's edging very close to being a crock. The predictive ability of a theory is the sole and golden standard by which it is judged. It's elegance and 'parsimony' are the icing on the cake.
Theories which explain things but do not offer predictions are intellectual masturbation at best, religions at worst. Until you can make predictions and verify them with experiments, a theory has very little value. In the past we have seen numerous theories which looked elegant on paper destroyed by the whims of reality -- science has little place for elegance except insofar as it is indicative of truth.
This is a problem that many scientists, physicists (my field) in particular, get hung up on. Theories and mathematics are simply frameworks for understanding theories and making predictions. They are ways of modeling reality, and hopefully making useful predictions, nothing more. The universe doesn't care about elegance, and the universe is not driven by equations -- the equations and theories exist only to model and predict reality. They do not drive it.
As it happens this 'technology' has been around for at least a century in the form of parabolic reflectors. If you're including passive sound reflectors, I think you could go back a lot further than that; I've heard several times that the Greeks used large hammered-metal bowls and sheets to reflect and reinforce the sound in public spaces.
Still, I don't think the fact that the technology is old makes its use in targeted advertising any less obnoxious.
Men, broadly speaking, are sexually interested in women in a purely objective, physical sense. The sexual desires of women, on the other hand, tend to be much more subtle, nuanced, and involve the complexities of personality, social status, behavioral context, and many other non-physical factors. There are of course exceptions, and men of course want companionship as well as sex, but for men the act of sex can be teased out (no pun intended) from intimacy. That doesn't happen to nearly the same extent for women. This smacks of social conditioning. There's no real reason why this has to, or even ought to, be the case, it's merely the way that Western Christian society has developed. I've never seen any evidence to suggest that there's any fundamental biological reason for it that didn't seem specious or like it was attempting to justify or explain a preexisting social/cultural phenomenon.
Bluntly -- in a world where you have birth control and have effectively separated the sexual decision from the reproductive one, there's no reason why male and female attitudes to sex necessarily would be any different.
Aside from knee-jerk religious/cultural conservative opposition, I'm not sure why the sexual implications of human-like robots would be any more negative for women than they would be for men.
Slashdot Mirror
The color really isn't that hard. As long as you have black-and-white film that can hold the number of bits of each channel (R, G, and B) in the color image, you could just have three film frames for each color frame in the original. You don't actually need color film to record color images; three black-and-white ones will do fine, and are pretty easy to reconstruct.
You could even use more frames in this manner to achieve greater bit depths per channel than the film supports (use one frame for the first 12 bits of the channel, then another frame for the last 12 bits -- thus, 24 bits per channel). Thus with six film frames per actual 'frame' in the digital version, you could get RGB at 72bpp, if you wanted such a thing. Used this way, gamut is not a problem. You could even throw in another frame with nothing but error-correcting data.
The nice thing about the one-frame-per-channel encoding is that, in the very worst case, you can always rig up some sort of analog projector with three different colored lenses and get a crude color projection out of it: not even digital technology is required. But of course, if you make the pixels big enough relative to the grain structure of the film, you can always scan it and get a pixel-perfect digital version back.
I was reading something recently that discussed the US Postal Service in the late 19th century. In some major cities, like New York and Boston, the mail used to come as much as five times a day. That meant you could write to someone (local, served from the same Post Office) in the early morning, have it picked up in the first round, delivered in the second, have their reply picked up in the third, and delivered on the fourth. (And you could even send a reply back in the final pickup for delivery the next morning.) That's pretty good -- some people I know don't even check their email that often!
If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.
So, if we take on premise that children need to be 'protected' from some content, I think it's more practical and less philosophically repugnant to create safe-zones around children than to try and 'child-proof' the entire world except for certain 'adult zones' where we allow uncensored conversations to take place. Basically, if you go into a kids' zone, you agree to self-censor. If you don't want to do that, you don't have to go in.
Similarly, if you wanted a site in
This is a pretty fundamentally different process from trying to censor everything that's in the general TLDs and force everything that's 'kid-unfriendly' into
Now, I'm not saying this would be the best solution -- I think the overall best solution would be to educate kids so that they won't be harmed by 'adult' culture as early as possible, rather than keeping them in bubbles, and I think DNS may not be the best way to signify the 'adult-ness' of content on a page -- but it's certainly better than trying to force all 'adult' content on the Internet into a 'free speech zone.'
And this whole scheme doesn't do anything about adult content that appears on sites other than ones 100% dedicated to porn. You're always going to have imageboards and interactive/user-created content sites that are going to tend towards 'adult,' because that's what people are interested in. You're not going to change that through any amount of legislation.
The result is that no matter how much you try, there is always going to be adult content available in the 'general' Internet. And that means it'll never be "porn free," ever, undermining the whole point of the endeavor. You can't make the Internet, in general, "safe for kids," because the Internet is mostly populated by adults, and much of what adults want to talk about is, well, adult. So not only is it a recipe for censorship and unnecessarily burdensome, it's futile in terms of actually achieving its stated purpose. There's already a kids domain. It was a huge flop. Yep, very true. The take-away point here? Nobody really gives that much of a shit about protecting kids, or creating a 'safe zone' for them. The
Of course I expect to be told I'm wrong, I'm just curious to hear why.
You answered your own question several sentences earlier: The article was scanty on how the age verification would be done... Setting aside the issue of whether it's the government's legitimate purpose and responsibility to limit access to these sorts of materials in the first place (and I don't think that it is -- that's definitely the parents' job, and I don't think that the government should be falling over itself to "help" parents, but that sort of stupidity is endemic to all democracies), it's idiotic to try and implement age limits when there's no effective way to determine age.But that's not the best part; just wait until you hear about our drug policy!
A
However,
Do not confuse
Well, the House already passed a bill that links Federal student aid monies to the implementation of RIAA-drafted "anti-piracy" measures. I don't think the GP's fear is too farfetched; certain members of Congress are pretty obviously in the pockets of the media corporations.
I'm with you, but sadly we lost that battle long ago, back in the mid-1980s. And really, the groundwork for the loss was in place long before that.
The problem is the whole jurisprudential theory of "reasonableness," where the Constitution and traditional common-law rights (you know, those ones that are supposed to be retained by the States and the people via the Ninth Amendment) can be bent or trampled so long as there's a "legitimate purpose" in doing so. As soon as you veer away from absolute interpretations of individual rights it's all downhill. There's no limit to how far you can expand what's "reasonable," and in reality it pretty clearly boils down to 'whoever has the most money and resources to expend on bribes.'
That's why your property rights get trampled in order to preserve the lazy business model of the DBS providers.
Huh? You can go to any Best Buy or WalMart and buy a Wii that's not in a bundle. Or at least you could until they ran out of stock for the Christmas rush, but I'm sure if you stand around on the day they get their resupply that they'll sell you one in the regular retail box, which is nothing but the the console, one Wiimote, and Wii Sports, just fine.
Gamestop seem to be notorious for its bundling policies, but then again I think Gamestop is one notch up from a guy selling electronics and Persian rugs out of the back of a van.
With a terabyte on a single disk this strategy might be useful again. It would be good if software could automate it though - striping the data for me automagically.
This is what Parchives are designed for. You can specify an amount of redundancy (from 0% up to whatever you please, I personally do 30% on DVDs, but I use good media and haven't had many problems, plus I have disk backups as well) and it will create all the parity files necessary. Then you just go and burn it to the disc. Later if the file proves corrupted, you can use the parity files to repair or reassemble it.
It's all open source, which is good for 'future proofing,' and gives you a lot more control than just recording multiple copies of the same file (which limits you to multiples of 100% redundancy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
http://parchive.sourceforge.net/
Glad you pointed that out; I was going to say the same thing. CACs work very well on recent versions of OS X, the trick is just getting IT departments to realize this and allow them, and of course ensuring that you don't need any software that's PC-only.
But you can use any number of a bunch of commodity USB smartcard readers and do just fine on the Mac. The drivers are all there; once enabled, it's pretty slick actually. At least as of a while ago, Apple actually had at least one full-time employee working on CAC and other US Government compatibility issues. (Or at least seemed to be responding to mailing-list questions.)
Hydroelectric power is not cleaner. It involves damming up rivers, which essentially destroys them as ecosystems. By eliminating flowing water it also lowers oxygen levels which can increase organic pollution, because it's no longer removed by natural processes.
Plus, hydroelectric projects often involve flooding large areas and the forcible relocation of whole communities. I'd rather live near a well-designed, modern nuclear reactor than have my house condemned.
Well, I don't know why you'd want one in the first place; it's not like you get much of a view in that mine.
Just out of curiosity, does Opera have an ad blocker that supports automatic filterset updates? (Like Adblock Plus on FF) I did a bit of quick Googling and it does seem as though Opera has some level of ad-blocking features but I wondered how advanced they are. Can you subscribe to public blocklists or is it more of a right-click-to-block thing on an individual basis?
The problem in switching away from Firefox is that I've become dependent on quite a few addons. Adblock Plus is the major one I couldn't live without, but Google Browser Sync is unbelievably slick, too.
I'm really not even all that crazy about Firefox as a browser (the memory usage and lack of multithreading kills me...why should a page or JS applet that's loading in one tab lock up every other tab?), but its "ecosystem" of addons is tough to beat. Though, I suppose that's just the sort of justification that keeps Windows alive.
Mea culpa, in that case. Glad we're on the same page.
Debian uses GPG to sign packages as well. I don't know about RedHat's RPM system, although I assume it must use some sort of cryptographic validation on binary packages; it's just too much of a weak link to ignore completely.
You could just stop caring about internal documents and eliminate or change the laws that depend on them. Treat the corporation as a 'black box,' in other words.
I'm not sure why we should really give a shit about what goes on inside a company. What matters is what it does. If a corporation does something bad, punish it. I don't really care, and I don't think it should matter, whether people in the corporation "knew" what they were doing was bad, and that's mainly what the retention laws are all about. They exist in order to make it easier to pin down when so-and-so knew something. If you just tell companies you don't care, and enforce rigorous strict-liability doctrine (on the corporation -- I don't really agree with strict liability as applied to individuals, but that's a separate discussion), you can leave the internal policing to the corporations themselves.
The idea is that basically, you make the corporations responsible for the actions their employees take in their name and the results of those actions, whether intentional or not, and whether the harm was foreseeable or not. Leave it up to them to decide how they want to manage risk and how much freedom they want to give employees to act without authorization.
I don't really see why we need to peer into companies in order to regulate them. If a company wants to keep its financial records in cuneiform impressed on wads of sodden toilet paper, that's fine by me. The market will punish them for it when nobody wants to buy their stock because there's no way to gain any insight into their performance. Maybe the stock exchanges would even enforce minimum accounting standards for listed companies, as a way of keeping the crap out. But caveat emptor -- do your own research, and don't come whining to anyone else if you put all your money into a company that implodes. If you want secure investments, that's what savings accounts are for.
Similarly, if a company pollutes or otherwise externalizes costs on the public, punish it. If they don't cough up payment for the externality, forcibly seize whatever physical assets they have under their direct control and sell them at auction.
I can train my dog without knowing exactly what's going on in his head every moment; that's exactly the philosophy I'd apply to corporate governance. Reward good overall corporate behavior, punish overall bad behavior with meaningful sanctions (asset forfeiture and seizure), and let them do whatever the hell they want internally.
although the idealized modern view of the historical times tends to forgot the sorrowful and filthy side of the past reality. Maybe we are more mature now, however?
That's putting it lightly. Until very recently, all but a very small elite in most places lived in squalor and physical discomfort, probably sick (by modern standards) most of the time, either freezing cold or sweating hot, living and dying without venturing much further than you could see today from a moderately-tall building. And based on the quantities of alcohol consumed, they were probably half in the bag most of the time.
With the possible exception of being perennially wasted (and even that would get old after a while), none of that seems particularly pleasant. We can talk about getting back to basics and in "harmony" and all this other trash, but there's nothing stopping modern people from living the way their ancestors did only two or three centuries ago. Very, very few people would want to, I think; myself included.
People didn't live like Robinson Crusoe. (And that aside, it's a pretty weird example to cite -- the whole point of Crusoe is that he's a Western European who tames nature with his body and mind, and manages to create 'civilization' where none exists from whole cloth. It's very much man-vs-nature in the standard Imperialist mode; hardly "harmony.") Real pre-technological life, particularly in tropical or desert climes, is pretty rough. And based on the only even arguably objective evidence we have available -- people's preferences over time -- once people are exposed to technology, they choose to use it. You see those choices happen over and over: children grow up, they have a choice between two cultures, and they pick one. It's a rare group that can hold out and make a low-technology lifestyle attractive enough to ensure their own preservation as a community (e.g. the Amish).
It's easy to speculate about the nobleness of pre-technological life and getting 'back to nature' in various forms, when you're sitting at the pinnacle of 6,000+ years of development. But the key to remember is that, every step of the way, people have chosen to adopt technology because it offered them a life that they thought was better than what they had already. I don't really see much reason to second-guess that process.
Agreed. The only interesting thing about this whole story is that the NSA apparently reviewed the PRNG function and rubber-stamped it, missing the critical vulnerability. Since the vulnerability really isn't that good of a backdoor, and doesn't seem to have been all that subtle, I think this is far more likely to be incompetence rather than malice on their part.
As an American, that doesn't make me feel a whole lot better -- in some ways, I'd really like to have the secret agencies of so many spy movies rather than the massive bureaucratic pile that I know exists in reality -- but disappointment in government is something I've gotten used to. You don't last long in Washington without it.
Theories which explain things but do not offer predictions are intellectual masturbation at best, religions at worst. Until you can make predictions and verify them with experiments, a theory has very little value. In the past we have seen numerous theories which looked elegant on paper destroyed by the whims of reality -- science has little place for elegance except insofar as it is indicative of truth.
This is a problem that many scientists, physicists (my field) in particular, get hung up on. Theories and mathematics are simply frameworks for understanding theories and making predictions. They are ways of modeling reality, and hopefully making useful predictions, nothing more. The universe doesn't care about elegance, and the universe is not driven by equations -- the equations and theories exist only to model and predict reality. They do not drive it.
Still, I don't think the fact that the technology is old makes its use in targeted advertising any less obnoxious.
Bluntly -- in a world where you have birth control and have effectively separated the sexual decision from the reproductive one, there's no reason why male and female attitudes to sex necessarily would be any different.
Aside from knee-jerk religious/cultural conservative opposition, I'm not sure why the sexual implications of human-like robots would be any more negative for women than they would be for men.