Having been involved with quite a few government contracts, government and military project proposals are often drafted and worded specifically to push certain vendors to bend over backward. Even if, in the end, that certain vendor gets the contract with changes.
For example, I was with a company that tried to bid on a state-wide law enforcement data-sharing app. The proposal stipulated that the source code had to be given to the state along with the product. While you'd think that might convince some vendors with pre-existing "off-the-shelf" solutions to bow out of the bidding, what it really did was convince them to lower their licensing in order to get the state to lift the source code from the proposal.
Recently a National Cash Register executive related a story in Business 2.0 magazine. I'm paraphrasing but the short of it goes like this:
Joe is a new salesman and brings in his first order from a customer. The processing clerk tells Joe he has to take the order back because it's not filled out correctly. Joe's manager drops by to see how the new salesman is doing. Down in the mouth, Joe relates the story about how the processing clerk is sending him back out to the customer to get a corrected order.
The manager is livid. He marches to the processing clerk and tells him: "When my man comes in here with a sale, you get up and shake his hand because he's keeping you employed! If there's a problem with the order, you fix it!"
So where does this relate to this story? Easy: the bills have to get paid. There's bandwidth to pay for, computers, journalists salaries or freelancing fees...something has to pay for it. You can argue all you want about whether or not some of those things are paid at the level they should be (high executive salaries, high sales commissions)...but they still have to be paid. And after all that, mass media conglomerates have shareholders to think about, too.
Plus...there's a glut of freelance journalists out there. Freelancers especially should be glad they get their stuff published anywhere. It may leave a bad taste in your mouth to see links in your article or pop-ups because of keywords in your article, but it could be worse: your article could have not been published.
If this "trend" is all you've got to worry about, you've got too much time on your hands.
I didn't see anything in there about this particular topic, although there is a bit about the fact that they will be using cookies (natch).
Personally, I find it hard to be too concerned about this. My web-surfing patterns are already recorded in a "soft" way via my browser history and a much "harder" way via my ISP's access logs. I can go out of my way to use proxies and make it difficult to trace, etc, but it isn't like you can't figure out what my machine is doing (unless I'm doing some fairly advanced stuff).
Although I can't tell if that's sarcasm or not, I have a related true story.
A former co-worker of mine was building a point-of-sale/accounting system for a strip club. For a while, he was building it from his home office, but the club owner wanted him to come interview the managers and...er...entertainers to learn where the money changed hands.
<side note>
For those of you who don't know, most strip clubs use what's called "funny money". Let's say you come in with $100. You exchange that $100 at the door for what is essentially play money. You spend that play money inside the club. That way, there's one controlled spot at which cash flows. This is to reduce theft.
</side note>
So my buddy starts hanging out in the strip club and learning how the business works. In the process, he learns something about strippers: although some small percentage are *ahem* putting themselves through college, most are alcoholics, addicts, hookers, porn stars or all of the above. Most of the middle managers are crooks. And that's the part that became worst about the job. He learned that the managers were skimming cash - this was easy because funny money often got torn up, thrown away or otherwise lost - and ripping off the owner. And the managers became aware that my buddy knew this.
Thankfully, he got out of that situation with all his limbs intact.
The hospital had more than 15,000 pages of "standards and procedures" documentation. Almost no two were in the same structure.
I had the "good" part: create a structure to which all these documents could be adapted and then make an application for putting the documents in a database.
Two intern developers had the "bad" part: scan and OCR 15,000 pages of hospital documents. Proof-read them for OCR errors. Since no one was willing to pay for a tie-in between the OCR program and the application I developed, the interns had to cut-and-paste the documents from Word to my app. I wanted to cry for those guys.
Howard Dean had a tremendous online following and couldn't even come close to locking up the Democratic nomination. John Kerry has a website, but I seriously doubt he has even a modest amount of understanding of what the Internet can be used to do.
Yes, the Internet is important as a medium to use in reaching an important voter demographic. But it's not as important as television (yet) because the senior and low-income demographics are larger and have higher voter turn out.
The senior population is the largest it's ever been in recorded history and it's going to get even larger. That's why Social Security is often called the third rail of politics...touch it and you die. Most seniors don't know squat about the Internet except that 60 Minutes tells them pedophiles love it and kids use it to watch porn and plan school shootings. Sarcastic, I know, but the point is that that television is what informs that demographic.
Similarly, the low-income demographic is large and is often the target of "bussing"...a practice whereby a candidate dependent on voter turn out hires out charter buses to carry low-income voters from their homes/apartments/projects to voting stations in their district. These are largely not people that are reachable via the Internet.
Kudos to all the candidates thus far who have taken their message online. It shows a degree of thoroughness that is admirable. But the Internet has not become make-or-break for national politicians yet.
WalMart has been pretty consistent about selling only music that has been stripped of offensive content. Which I find strange, given that they sell R-rated movies. I don't mind if they position themselves as family-friendly vendor - whatever works, I guess - but it sure isn't consistent.
I have a palm OS-based color screen phone and I can't use the darned thing in daylight because the screen isn't visible. The non-color screen palm devices are much more readable in direct sunlight.
Bring on something readable.
And how long before we have the pda/camera/phone/e-book combo device?
Yes, but for a telecom, re-wiring is a pretty heavy investment. Depending on what state they are operating in there are different requirements for using unionized labor, there's literally tons of mechanical equipment involved, etc.
I'm not sure where the point of diminishing returns is, but it's still quite important that someone concentrate on taking the utmost advantage of copper since a lot of people are going to be stuck with it for a while.
Two years ago a friend of mine in New Orleans converted his employer to an all Linux/GNOME office running Open Office. The particular distro was Debian I think. It is about 40 users on a small network and they host their own website with BSD/Apache/PHP.
A year ago another friend in Mobile, Alabama converted his office of 10 users to Linux/KDE. Again, running Open Office. Small network, just a file server running Linux as well. The distro was Redhat.
I keep hearing tales of conversions all the time, each with (mostly) good results. The Gulf Coast isn't exactly a high-tech area, so I can only imagine that Linux desktops are being adopted (at least in the corporate world) at a better pace than I originally believed. Anyone from more...er..."modern" areas care to back that up or refute it?
For a while my wife was a physical therapist at a nursing facility that specialized in head tramau and paralysis. I installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking for several patients there and several of them became extremely proficient in using it. I'm not sure how having built-in support would be more advantageous, though.
I can't see this having wide acceptance in the corporate world. Cube farms are noisy enough. I can't imagine what it must sound like for everyone to be browsing by voice.
I also can't imagine some of my co-workers saying the addresses of what they browse out loud. *shudder*
Oh yeah, Microsoft will pay some money. And they'll keep fighting in the courts.
Along the way they'll pay off European business leaders and politicians to continually pressure the courts and the judges.
And, of course, Microsoft could be banking on something that seems to be ever-so-close to happening: the complete dissolution of the EU. Then there will be no one to pay.
This is one programmer acting alone (and stupidly). Organized crime requires an organization. If the programmer had been hired by someone else who had the idea to extort Google but not the technical know-how, this would be organized crime.
iTunes hits it big and suddenly the market is flooded with competitors. That's the way it happens. Ultima Online started making a mint and along came Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, etc. Nirvana hit the big time and suddenly there was a "Seattle" sound.
After a couple of years only a few players will remain. The rest will either have collapsed, merged or been bought by other competitors.
I will say that I'm surprised that Microsoft is getting into this game now, though. But getting into the console field seemed pretty alien so I suppose nothing is too far-fetched.
What I'm waiting on is a content provider model where one of the big companies - let's say Apple - with access to a huge library of material allows you to create your own mini-store. Sort of like Cafe Press, I suppose. You can populate your store with anything from the massive database (although most will be specialty stores selling particular genres of music). I'm not exactly sure how you could put the proper intellectual property protections on it, but it would really be great if the store "owner" could then upload material (local bands, amateur work, etc) to sell in the store.
- Incredible tree-climbing ability
- Facial-gesture mimicry
- Pick parasites out of fur (useful!)
- Poo-flinging
And I don't know if it's all orangutans, but the ones at my local zoo have an affinity for tire swings. They wear through the rope and then roll the tire into the safety moat.
The goal of "the company" is to increase shareholder value. Microsoft has to persue avenues that lead to more profits. For the longest time one of the biggest issues with purchasing a Windows server OS was that it couldn't be deployed to handle a single task at mass scale. But, to MS's credit, those same Windows servers - well, the Windows 2000 kernel ones - do pretty at being all-in-one servers for small environments. Anyway, it's been a heck of a lot better - from a cost/benefit standpoint - to put up a dedicated *nix server when you need one task done as consistently as possible.
Server administration isn't even close to my full-time job, but I can recall many occassions when I've found myself stopping services on a Windows server that had no business running those services in the first place. "SMTP spending resources on the file server? WHY?!?"
I think the guy makes some good points. I was even thinking that it was one of the best-sounding MS interviews I'd read in a while until he said that Linux was definitely being used in the "fringe".
DISCLAIMER: I don't use Linux in my professional day-to-day work. I rarely touch a Linux box. Or any *nix box. But when a programmer/IT buddy of mine told me he had converted ALL his company's servers AND desktops to Linux without much fuss, I realized that this is not just for the fringe. MS may not be in total denial, but they're still in denial.
First, when you say that "half or more" do not have responsible parents, you're assuming that the each parent that has been divorced or is a single parent is not responsible. I don't think that's a fair assumption.
Secondly, I don't think anyone can deny violent video games are going to have a profound impact on the minds of impressionable children.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to say which children are going to be impressionable and which are not. There is a percentage of well-adjusted, non-violent children out there (although I'll admit they are mostly in their teen years) that can see a game like GTA and understand that it's make-believe and acting in such a way will get you killed or imprisoned.
But since there is some percentage of children who can not suficiently seperate such fantasy from reality, I can understand the need - not just want...need - to set a standard.
Movie ratings are not assigned for censorship purposes. They are assigned for the benefit of the consumer who otherwise will not have a clue as to the content of the movie.
And, no, an entire generation - my generation - of video gamers didn't grow into plumbers who bust tail to save princesses. But none of us has been put in a situation wherein we need to choose between, say, walking across the street and stomping a giant walking mushroom.
Yeah, Liberman missed the punishment part of beating up old ladies, but what he saw was a game mechanic where you are given the opportunity to beat up old ladies. He's not asking for censorship, he just wants game developers to realize - just like people want professional atheletes and celebrities to realize - that they have an impact on future generations and to gauge their actions accordingly.
And, hey Pudge...I don't curse around my children. Ever. It might not prevent them from cursing but I'm trying to do my part.
Excellent! I hope this translates into the kind of momentum that makes iTunes so large that music companies would rather spend their time selling their wares through iTunes rather than influence its license structure.
If you hadn't heard, Sony and BMG are merging their music businesses. I am sure it's a move to consolidate resources in an effort to address a rapidly-changing business dynamic. I wasn't looking forward to seeing such large music distributors trying to impose their will on iTunes.
...like some sort of discussion about how male artists submitting entries would reveal much about their psyche and their take on the "perfect" woman. It could even serve as an indicator of regionally or perhaps even racially influenced preferences.
But instead, I'll say this:
Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball
One image gallery and you've got a website, MSNBC.
For the last few years I've been developing software systems for law enforcement, so occassionally I pick up interesting bits of information about how government funding works. If you didn't hear about it - and not many people did - the Dept. of Homeland Security made a sort of "open call" (via the Dept. Of Justice, if I remember correctly) about a year or so ago. It was - more or less - an open invitation for vendors to propose innovative ideas to the DHS about fighting terrorism within the United States. The really interesting thing about the open call was that it was specifically worded to encourage "innovative" and "new" approaches. I joked at the time that I actually felt good about the open call...it seemed like the guys at the DHS were acknowledging that they didn't have a clue what to do and where looking for expert help on making things radically better.
I'd be interested to find out if the "model internet" was a proposed idea. In terms of government funding, $5 million isn't all that much, so I wouldn't be surprised to see if this was an idea pitched by people at UCB and USC during the open call. I'd heard that big names asking for reasonably small amounts of money were getting through pretty easily.
I tried to convince my company to pitch a variant of our crime analysis/trendspotting tools. Include a reference per recorded crime that indicates political or religious bias as the motive of the crime. Get a concentration of those - even if they are "lesser" crimes like vandalism or simple assualt - and you've got "smoke". And where there's "smoke"...
I would agree that high-quality versions of these weapons would be at the very least inconvenient for run-of-the-mill terrorists (if one could refer to terrorists as such) to obtain and use effectively.
Outside of military use, I still see corporate sabotage as the most likely place for these types of weapons to be used. Would a manufacturing company in Taiwan secretly fund the sabotage of a rival manufacturing company via EMP? It's not too far-fetched in my mind. Bringing down a competitor even temporarily may mean the difference between getting a multi-million (or even multi-billion) dollar manufacturing contract and not.
...but does anyone remember the John Travolta/Christian Slater movie Broken Arrow? Not a great movie, in my opinion...a friend of mine who is a chemical engineer and I spent a good deal of the movie picking the movie apart.
There was one scene in particular that made me almost choke on my popcorn: the nuclear response team's helicopter being brought down by the EMP of an underground nuclear blast. Not to discuss the physics of an EMP that would make it through several thousand feet of earth, this was supposed to be the helicopter used by the nuclear response team of the United States of America. And it is susceptible to the EMP of a nuclear blast?!? Oy vey.
Although I don't believe most military equipment is shielded against such attacks (as a matter of fact, I believe most military equipment - that with electronics in it, anyway - is susceptible to such attacks), it is important to consider the world outside of traditional warfare.
Two applications immediately spring to mind: corporate sabotage and terrorism.
Corporate sabotage might seem a little far fetched, but corporate assasination is still a well-used tool in parts of the world, so don't think it isn't a possibility. What is the cost to a large tech company if, say, their entire research and development facility is crippled for some time? What is the cost to a manufacturing company if the sensors that monitor heat and pressure suddenly stop working?
And even smaller scale...what is the cost to a small-to-medium-sized software company if the lead salesperson's laptop suddenly stops working right before a big presentation to a customer taking bids on a project that can make/break the company?
The uses terrorists can derive from this should be obvious...air traffic towers that suddenly go offline. Busy intersections of major cities that suddenly don't work, causing massive pileups. The concentration of people reaches critical mass, presenting the perfect impact opportunity.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been involved with quite a few government contracts, government and military project proposals are often drafted and worded specifically to push certain vendors to bend over backward. Even if, in the end, that certain vendor gets the contract with changes.
For example, I was with a company that tried to bid on a state-wide law enforcement data-sharing app. The proposal stipulated that the source code had to be given to the state along with the product. While you'd think that might convince some vendors with pre-existing "off-the-shelf" solutions to bow out of the bidding, what it really did was convince them to lower their licensing in order to get the state to lift the source code from the proposal.
Recently a National Cash Register executive related a story in Business 2.0 magazine. I'm paraphrasing but the short of it goes like this:
Joe is a new salesman and brings in his first order from a customer. The processing clerk tells Joe he has to take the order back because it's not filled out correctly. Joe's manager drops by to see how the new salesman is doing. Down in the mouth, Joe relates the story about how the processing clerk is sending him back out to the customer to get a corrected order.
The manager is livid. He marches to the processing clerk and tells him: "When my man comes in here with a sale, you get up and shake his hand because he's keeping you employed! If there's a problem with the order, you fix it!"
So where does this relate to this story? Easy: the bills have to get paid. There's bandwidth to pay for, computers, journalists salaries or freelancing fees...something has to pay for it. You can argue all you want about whether or not some of those things are paid at the level they should be (high executive salaries, high sales commissions)...but they still have to be paid. And after all that, mass media conglomerates have shareholders to think about, too.
Plus...there's a glut of freelance journalists out there. Freelancers especially should be glad they get their stuff published anywhere. It may leave a bad taste in your mouth to see links in your article or pop-ups because of keywords in your article, but it could be worse: your article could have not been published.
If this "trend" is all you've got to worry about, you've got too much time on your hands.
Here is the privacy policy.
I didn't see anything in there about this particular topic, although there is a bit about the fact that they will be using cookies (natch).
Personally, I find it hard to be too concerned about this. My web-surfing patterns are already recorded in a "soft" way via my browser history and a much "harder" way via my ISP's access logs. I can go out of my way to use proxies and make it difficult to trace, etc, but it isn't like you can't figure out what my machine is doing (unless I'm doing some fairly advanced stuff).
Although I can't tell if that's sarcasm or not, I have a related true story.
A former co-worker of mine was building a point-of-sale/accounting system for a strip club. For a while, he was building it from his home office, but the club owner wanted him to come interview the managers and...er...entertainers to learn where the money changed hands.
<side note>
For those of you who don't know, most strip clubs use what's called "funny money". Let's say you come in with $100. You exchange that $100 at the door for what is essentially play money. You spend that play money inside the club. That way, there's one controlled spot at which cash flows. This is to reduce theft.
</side note>
So my buddy starts hanging out in the strip club and learning how the business works. In the process, he learns something about strippers: although some small percentage are *ahem* putting themselves through college, most are alcoholics, addicts, hookers, porn stars or all of the above. Most of the middle managers are crooks. And that's the part that became worst about the job. He learned that the managers were skimming cash - this was easy because funny money often got torn up, thrown away or otherwise lost - and ripping off the owner. And the managers became aware that my buddy knew this.
Thankfully, he got out of that situation with all his limbs intact.
The hospital had more than 15,000 pages of "standards and procedures" documentation. Almost no two were in the same structure.
I had the "good" part: create a structure to which all these documents could be adapted and then make an application for putting the documents in a database.
Two intern developers had the "bad" part: scan and OCR 15,000 pages of hospital documents. Proof-read them for OCR errors. Since no one was willing to pay for a tie-in between the OCR program and the application I developed, the interns had to cut-and-paste the documents from Word to my app. I wanted to cry for those guys.
Howard Dean had a tremendous online following and couldn't even come close to locking up the Democratic nomination. John Kerry has a website, but I seriously doubt he has even a modest amount of understanding of what the Internet can be used to do.
Yes, the Internet is important as a medium to use in reaching an important voter demographic. But it's not as important as television (yet) because the senior and low-income demographics are larger and have higher voter turn out.
The senior population is the largest it's ever been in recorded history and it's going to get even larger. That's why Social Security is often called the third rail of politics...touch it and you die. Most seniors don't know squat about the Internet except that 60 Minutes tells them pedophiles love it and kids use it to watch porn and plan school shootings. Sarcastic, I know, but the point is that that television is what informs that demographic.
Similarly, the low-income demographic is large and is often the target of "bussing"...a practice whereby a candidate dependent on voter turn out hires out charter buses to carry low-income voters from their homes/apartments/projects to voting stations in their district. These are largely not people that are reachable via the Internet.
Kudos to all the candidates thus far who have taken their message online. It shows a degree of thoroughness that is admirable. But the Internet has not become make-or-break for national politicians yet.
I can only imagine that they will.
WalMart has been pretty consistent about selling only music that has been stripped of offensive content. Which I find strange, given that they sell R-rated movies. I don't mind if they position themselves as family-friendly vendor - whatever works, I guess - but it sure isn't consistent.
Agreed.
I have a palm OS-based color screen phone and I can't use the darned thing in daylight because the screen isn't visible. The non-color screen palm devices are much more readable in direct sunlight.
Bring on something readable.
And how long before we have the pda/camera/phone/e-book combo device?
Yes, but for a telecom, re-wiring is a pretty heavy investment. Depending on what state they are operating in there are different requirements for using unionized labor, there's literally tons of mechanical equipment involved, etc.
I'm not sure where the point of diminishing returns is, but it's still quite important that someone concentrate on taking the utmost advantage of copper since a lot of people are going to be stuck with it for a while.
Two years ago a friend of mine in New Orleans converted his employer to an all Linux/GNOME office running Open Office. The particular distro was Debian I think. It is about 40 users on a small network and they host their own website with BSD/Apache/PHP.
A year ago another friend in Mobile, Alabama converted his office of 10 users to Linux/KDE. Again, running Open Office. Small network, just a file server running Linux as well. The distro was Redhat.
I keep hearing tales of conversions all the time, each with (mostly) good results. The Gulf Coast isn't exactly a high-tech area, so I can only imagine that Linux desktops are being adopted (at least in the corporate world) at a better pace than I originally believed. Anyone from more...er..."modern" areas care to back that up or refute it?
For a while my wife was a physical therapist at a nursing facility that specialized in head tramau and paralysis. I installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking for several patients there and several of them became extremely proficient in using it. I'm not sure how having built-in support would be more advantageous, though.
I can't see this having wide acceptance in the corporate world. Cube farms are noisy enough. I can't imagine what it must sound like for everyone to be browsing by voice.
I also can't imagine some of my co-workers saying the addresses of what they browse out loud. *shudder*
Oh yeah, Microsoft will pay some money. And they'll keep fighting in the courts.
Along the way they'll pay off European business leaders and politicians to continually pressure the courts and the judges.
And, of course, Microsoft could be banking on something that seems to be ever-so-close to happening: the complete dissolution of the EU. Then there will be no one to pay.
I can't wait for the force-feedback version.
...but...
extortion != organized crime
This is one programmer acting alone (and stupidly). Organized crime requires an organization. If the programmer had been hired by someone else who had the idea to extort Google but not the technical know-how, this would be organized crime.
iTunes hits it big and suddenly the market is flooded with competitors. That's the way it happens. Ultima Online started making a mint and along came Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, etc. Nirvana hit the big time and suddenly there was a "Seattle" sound.
After a couple of years only a few players will remain. The rest will either have collapsed, merged or been bought by other competitors.
I will say that I'm surprised that Microsoft is getting into this game now, though. But getting into the console field seemed pretty alien so I suppose nothing is too far-fetched.
What I'm waiting on is a content provider model where one of the big companies - let's say Apple - with access to a huge library of material allows you to create your own mini-store. Sort of like Cafe Press, I suppose. You can populate your store with anything from the massive database (although most will be specialty stores selling particular genres of music). I'm not exactly sure how you could put the proper intellectual property protections on it, but it would really be great if the store "owner" could then upload material (local bands, amateur work, etc) to sell in the store.
- Incredible tree-climbing ability
- Facial-gesture mimicry
- Pick parasites out of fur (useful!)
- Poo-flinging
And I don't know if it's all orangutans, but the ones at my local zoo have an affinity for tire swings. They wear through the rope and then roll the tire into the safety moat.
The goal of "the company" is to increase shareholder value. Microsoft has to persue avenues that lead to more profits. For the longest time one of the biggest issues with purchasing a Windows server OS was that it couldn't be deployed to handle a single task at mass scale. But, to MS's credit, those same Windows servers - well, the Windows 2000 kernel ones - do pretty at being all-in-one servers for small environments. Anyway, it's been a heck of a lot better - from a cost/benefit standpoint - to put up a dedicated *nix server when you need one task done as consistently as possible.
Server administration isn't even close to my full-time job, but I can recall many occassions when I've found myself stopping services on a Windows server that had no business running those services in the first place. "SMTP spending resources on the file server? WHY?!?"
I think the guy makes some good points. I was even thinking that it was one of the best-sounding MS interviews I'd read in a while until he said that Linux was definitely being used in the "fringe".
DISCLAIMER: I don't use Linux in my professional day-to-day work. I rarely touch a Linux box. Or any *nix box. But when a programmer/IT buddy of mine told me he had converted ALL his company's servers AND desktops to Linux without much fuss, I realized that this is not just for the fringe. MS may not be in total denial, but they're still in denial.
Thank you, U.S. Government, for giving me more reasons to continue to preach for smaller government.
Attention, citizens! Your government has so much time and money on its hands that it felt compelled to declare an official font! That is all!
First, when you say that "half or more" do not have responsible parents, you're assuming that the each parent that has been divorced or is a single parent is not responsible. I don't think that's a fair assumption.
Secondly, I don't think anyone can deny violent video games are going to have a profound impact on the minds of impressionable children.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to say which children are going to be impressionable and which are not. There is a percentage of well-adjusted, non-violent children out there (although I'll admit they are mostly in their teen years) that can see a game like GTA and understand that it's make-believe and acting in such a way will get you killed or imprisoned.
But since there is some percentage of children who can not suficiently seperate such fantasy from reality, I can understand the need - not just want...need - to set a standard.
Movie ratings are not assigned for censorship purposes. They are assigned for the benefit of the consumer who otherwise will not have a clue as to the content of the movie.
And, no, an entire generation - my generation - of video gamers didn't grow into plumbers who bust tail to save princesses. But none of us has been put in a situation wherein we need to choose between, say, walking across the street and stomping a giant walking mushroom.
Yeah, Liberman missed the punishment part of beating up old ladies, but what he saw was a game mechanic where you are given the opportunity to beat up old ladies. He's not asking for censorship, he just wants game developers to realize - just like people want professional atheletes and celebrities to realize - that they have an impact on future generations and to gauge their actions accordingly.
And, hey Pudge...I don't curse around my children. Ever. It might not prevent them from cursing but I'm trying to do my part.
Excellent! I hope this translates into the kind of momentum that makes iTunes so large that music companies would rather spend their time selling their wares through iTunes rather than influence its license structure.
If you hadn't heard, Sony and BMG are merging their music businesses. I am sure it's a move to consolidate resources in an effort to address a rapidly-changing business dynamic. I wasn't looking forward to seeing such large music distributors trying to impose their will on iTunes.
...like some sort of discussion about how male artists submitting entries would reveal much about their psyche and their take on the "perfect" woman. It could even serve as an indicator of regionally or perhaps even racially influenced preferences.
But instead, I'll say this:
Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball
One image gallery and you've got a website, MSNBC.
For the last few years I've been developing software systems for law enforcement, so occassionally I pick up interesting bits of information about how government funding works. If you didn't hear about it - and not many people did - the Dept. of Homeland Security made a sort of "open call" (via the Dept. Of Justice, if I remember correctly) about a year or so ago. It was - more or less - an open invitation for vendors to propose innovative ideas to the DHS about fighting terrorism within the United States. The really interesting thing about the open call was that it was specifically worded to encourage "innovative" and "new" approaches. I joked at the time that I actually felt good about the open call...it seemed like the guys at the DHS were acknowledging that they didn't have a clue what to do and where looking for expert help on making things radically better.
I'd be interested to find out if the "model internet" was a proposed idea. In terms of government funding, $5 million isn't all that much, so I wouldn't be surprised to see if this was an idea pitched by people at UCB and USC during the open call. I'd heard that big names asking for reasonably small amounts of money were getting through pretty easily.
I tried to convince my company to pitch a variant of our crime analysis/trendspotting tools. Include a reference per recorded crime that indicates political or religious bias as the motive of the crime. Get a concentration of those - even if they are "lesser" crimes like vandalism or simple assualt - and you've got "smoke". And where there's "smoke"...
I would agree that high-quality versions of these weapons would be at the very least inconvenient for run-of-the-mill terrorists (if one could refer to terrorists as such) to obtain and use effectively.
Outside of military use, I still see corporate sabotage as the most likely place for these types of weapons to be used. Would a manufacturing company in Taiwan secretly fund the sabotage of a rival manufacturing company via EMP? It's not too far-fetched in my mind. Bringing down a competitor even temporarily may mean the difference between getting a multi-million (or even multi-billion) dollar manufacturing contract and not.
...but does anyone remember the John Travolta/Christian Slater movie Broken Arrow? Not a great movie, in my opinion...a friend of mine who is a chemical engineer and I spent a good deal of the movie picking the movie apart.
There was one scene in particular that made me almost choke on my popcorn: the nuclear response team's helicopter being brought down by the EMP of an underground nuclear blast. Not to discuss the physics of an EMP that would make it through several thousand feet of earth, this was supposed to be the helicopter used by the nuclear response team of the United States of America. And it is susceptible to the EMP of a nuclear blast?!? Oy vey.
Although I don't believe most military equipment is shielded against such attacks (as a matter of fact, I believe most military equipment - that with electronics in it, anyway - is susceptible to such attacks), it is important to consider the world outside of traditional warfare.
Two applications immediately spring to mind: corporate sabotage and terrorism.
Corporate sabotage might seem a little far fetched, but corporate assasination is still a well-used tool in parts of the world, so don't think it isn't a possibility. What is the cost to a large tech company if, say, their entire research and development facility is crippled for some time? What is the cost to a manufacturing company if the sensors that monitor heat and pressure suddenly stop working?
And even smaller scale...what is the cost to a small-to-medium-sized software company if the lead salesperson's laptop suddenly stops working right before a big presentation to a customer taking bids on a project that can make/break the company?
The uses terrorists can derive from this should be obvious...air traffic towers that suddenly go offline. Busy intersections of major cities that suddenly don't work, causing massive pileups. The concentration of people reaches critical mass, presenting the perfect impact opportunity.
Not all weapons are strictly for war.