Let's not get carried away here. There's a difference between civil disobedience and breaking the law because you find it inconvenient and don't really expect to get caught.
I favor marijuana legalization, but when I used to pass the pipe around in high school I was hardly engaging in civil disobedience. Nor is it civil disobedience to share mp3s on an anonymous P2P network.
Civil disobedience is a statement -- the action is secondary, a way of showing that you're serious. Unless you're prepared to notify all relevant authorities of just exactly which laws you're breaking and why, don't pretend to be doing it for the sake of freedom.
I'm all for civil disobedience. It's a very noble thing to be willing to go to jail (especially give the state of our overstuffed prisons) for your ideals.
But in this case, they're talking about a $500,000 fine. I'm not sure how something like that works out if you can't pay it -- whether they substitute jail time or what. But supposing this guy was fined, and paid it, is that really civil disobedience? Somehow writing the bad guys a check and saying "in your face, man!" lacks the punch of imprisonment.
This whole matter of DVD region encoding becomes absurd when you really look at it. Hacking a DVD player to be multi-region is illegal, according to DMCA. But I can import a DVD player from another region, right (if not, why not)? Or build one from scratch, as another poster suggested? So let's say I've got one hacked DVD player, and one imported from the UK, and they'll both play the DVDs I bought in London. They're essentially the same piece of hardware (ignoring for the moment that the hacked player also plays DVDs from my native region -- I guess I could disable that or something), and yet one is illegal. Whose interests are served by that, and why should we consider them to be legitimate?
Way to criticize without thinking, pal. I think it was a couple of months ago we saw an article here on slashdot about how airline jets are probably having a significant effect on weather patterns.
And why did you feel a need for quotes around "sky." Are you trying to be sarcastic or something? It didn't work.
I read an article a while back on NASA's mission failures from the last few years (Sci Am maybe? I dunno). One interviewee working there affirmed that quality control was a big area for cutbacks, and in the light of the failures that have been happening they're seeking to spend a lot more time and money on quality control.
Makes sense to me, if they want to reproduce the successes of the past. "Faster, better, cheaper" is a myth -- you can't just spout a slogan and get everything you want. If you want better stuff, you've got to be prepared to spend more time or money on it, period. It's like the old programmer's motto: "Fast, cheap, good. Pick two."
Really, there are a lot of analogies between how NASA works and how software dev houses work, and perhaps the two could learn from each other's successes. Code reviews, as was discussed not so long ago on Slashdot, are by far the most cost-effective use of developers' time because of the enormous amount of bugs they prevent. But it's also a very frequently skimped-on area, due to penny pinching and programmer hubris (nothing wrong with MY code!).
What kind of idiot would buy moon rocks over the Internet for any appreciable sum of money? How exactly would you verify what you were buying? And what kind of idiot wouldn't know that any moon rocks for sale must be stolen property?
There is, last time I checked, *one* moon rock in the U.S. (or the world?) that is in any way available to the public. You can go and touch it. I did. Whee. Looked like a rock, to me.
"The War Against Terror will never be over, because terror (read: asymmetrical warfare) is the weapon of the disempowered against the powerful. As long as literally billions of people on the planet don't have clean drinking water, let alone access to education and so on, then there will be an endless supply of rage to feed the other end of the process."
I regret that I have no mod points to spend on this -- I think it's the most succinct statement of the problem with the War on Terror I've ever heard. Nicely put.
Am I the only person on Earth who has not seen this ad campaign? I also never saw the "Wazaap" commercials, except when I saw people looking at them on Adcritic or whatever. The things that happen when you download all your TV shows rather than watching them on the set. Quick, somebody sue me.
Speaking of such things, imagine if someone hacked in to your t-shirt. How long would it take before someone told you that you had goatse dot cx on your back?
This could be cool... change your clothes with the push of a button. Wear a new face (probably not a very realistic-looking one until the technology matures, but we're dreaming here...). Wear the skin of your favorite porn star. With adaptive padding it could modify the underlying shape as well.
Do the conductors have to be metal? They could ultimately be made of something more resistant to mechanical fatigue. Buckytubes spring readily to mind, though they've still got some R&D to be done before they're practical for an application such as this.
I think you're underestimating materials science here. There have got to be good solutions to something as simple as metal fatigue. High redundancy, fancy lattice structures, exotic semiconductors or conductive polymers or ceramics, I don't know... something.
Sorry, I don't like wet blankets on cool ideas. Nothing personal.:)
Sorry, no. Well, it depends how good of camo you're talking about. What I'd like to believe is that technology like this can create a true "stealth suit" which creates a duplicate image of whatever's on the other side, effectively making the wearer invisible. But keep in mind, this is still a 2D display and you can't project a different image to viewers at different viewing angles. Not yet, anyway. Maybe eventually. The other big obstacle to this approach (microcameras, etc.) is that the shape of the suit would change as the wearer moves. So you need unprecedentedly high-res, low-latency motion tracking for every point on the wearer's body.
No mass-market for these screens on clothing? Hmm. Show of hands, who has read Niel Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_, with its vision of a future immersed in nanotechnology, and especially in a pervasive atmosphere of ever-changing displays (mostly ads) on damn near every surface.
Imagine seeing a cityscape where every inch of every skyscraper is a billboard. Sound far-fetched? Read the article -- this is about printing televisions. These things are going to be cheap. Look at the end result of a technology such as the printing press becoming widely available -- we now have reams of printed matter everywhere we look. An active display technology that is so convenient to use and cheap to produce has just as much potential, if not more, for becoming pervasive and used everywhere.
I think the biggest question for widespread use of these things, on a commodity level rather than an appliance level (toilet paper, not PDAs), is power. I don't think anything on the market today is truly a satisfactory answer to the question of how to power ubiquitous flexible displays like these, but we're close. See a very recent slashdot post (no link, so lazy...) about flexible solar cells being developed. Also, there is an incredible push for greatly improved battery technology, and great steps are being made there.
Ultimately, there will be two kinds of uses for this technology. The first one we'll see will be the sort that is more or less permanently installed, and can therefore be plugged into the wall all or some of the time. Even the skyscraper-as-television fits into this category. But at some point you'll need batteries or solar cells or some other power source (some wacky nanotech?) to power more "disposable" applications like animated handbills, greeting cards, movie posters, etc.
End result: advertising is about to get a lot more annoying. Let's just hope they haven't got paper-thin speakers to go with this.
As in most matters of law, there is no black-and-white easy solution when it comes to discussing the contents of a criminal's motivations for his special crime. The most common complaint against hate crime legislation is that it amounts to "thought crime," making it illegal to think in a certain way. This is a slippery slope that many are justifiably afraid to tread.
Problem 1, you can't generally prove what a person was or was not thinking when they did something. It's their word against that of... well, who exactly is an authority on the contents of someone else's mind? Mistress Cleo or whatever her name is, with the 900 number?
Problem 2, there really is a difference between "first vs. second degree murder" and "hate crime or not." The first case is about a person's particular motivations and thought processes for the crime in question. But a hate crime amounts to something slightly different.
Let's say I hate black people and think they deserve to die (I don't, but let's say). Let's say there's readily available proof of this (hate literature in my handwriting, photos of me shaking hands with David Duke, etc.). Now suppose I decide to knock over a liquor store. It goes wrong, and the hapless clerk gets a faceful of lead. But oops, he was black! I'm now a hate criminal, as opposed to just a bigot who knocks over liquor stores.
The difference here is that for something like first-degree murder, it can in many cases be reasonably demonstrated that there was calculation, that the motivation for the crime had certain characteristics we see as worse than a simple fit of rage. But for a hate crime, all you can really prove is a coincidence (literally, for two things to coincide). You've got a crime, and you've got a pattern of hate against people like the victim. But only in extremely specialized circumstances will it be absolutely demonstrable that the crime itself was a direct result of that hate. I would have to have a great deal more faith in the justice system than I do if I wanted to believe that only in such cases would hate crime laws be applied. In the real world, having such laws means punishing people for what they happen to think, not because of anything pertinent to their actual crime. That's thought crime, and it's a really bad idea to set such a precedent.
It's also totally unnecessary. There is such a thing as flexibility in sentencing (don't get me started on mandatory sentences, though). If it's clear that a killer is a really despicable person, a murderous bigot or whatever, I think that flexibility should be sufficient to account for it and give a harsher sentence.
Saying that life sponteneously arises easily in Earth-like environments is one thing. It even seems plausible. But we too easily forget that there's a huge gap between the primitive organic molecules such a scenario describes and the sort of sentient life we're looking for with SETI.
Personally, I find it hard to get worked up about ET algae or whatever. I mean, it's a good thing in terms of implications for habitability of other worlds, terraforming, etc. But every time someone trots out an argument about how easy it is for life to arise in the universe, people assume that once you have life at all, you have intelligent life.
If life has arisen independently on Earth multiple times, how many times has it produced humans? And by this I mean, how many times did humans evolve, from scratch, our of distinct gene pools? I would have a hard time believing any answer greater than 1 (or less than 1, for that matter). So the more times life has formed and *not* evolved into sentience, the worse the odds are that it will have done so in other environments.
And even if sentient life has evolved on some reasonably nearby planet, what are the odds that we'll inhabit the same slice of time as them? Human beings have been a technological species for an infinitesimal time slice compared to the age of the galaxy, and at the rate we're going that time slice may not last much longer. If this is representative of sentient species in general, it would be very rare for two species to chance upon the necessary coincidence of space and time to actually meet each other. Sad but true.
Did you see Minority Report? The cars in that film are fairly sleek and outlandish, but I think they look good. And they're supposed to be fuel cell vehicles. I saw a writeup in Popular Science about it. Very well-designed, so you couldn't even tell where the cells were tucked away.
Now if they can just make it dock with my living room... that's what I call universal compatibility!
GM is a big company. One wonders how much the right and left hands talk to the gripping hand and whatnot.
I don't know the fuel effeciency numbers for the Suburban, but it seems like most of the big auto manufacturers are guilty of some pretty bad guzzlers. They're just satisfying what they see as the market, though -- I just moved to Stockholm from the U.S. and the cars here are so much smaller, but with the same brands.
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I favor marijuana legalization, but when I used to pass the pipe around in high school I was hardly engaging in civil disobedience. Nor is it civil disobedience to share mp3s on an anonymous P2P network.
Civil disobedience is a statement -- the action is secondary, a way of showing that you're serious. Unless you're prepared to notify all relevant authorities of just exactly which laws you're breaking and why, don't pretend to be doing it for the sake of freedom.
But in this case, they're talking about a $500,000 fine. I'm not sure how something like that works out if you can't pay it -- whether they substitute jail time or what. But supposing this guy was fined, and paid it, is that really civil disobedience? Somehow writing the bad guys a check and saying "in your face, man!" lacks the punch of imprisonment.
This whole matter of DVD region encoding becomes absurd when you really look at it. Hacking a DVD player to be multi-region is illegal, according to DMCA. But I can import a DVD player from another region, right (if not, why not)? Or build one from scratch, as another poster suggested? So let's say I've got one hacked DVD player, and one imported from the UK, and they'll both play the DVDs I bought in London. They're essentially the same piece of hardware (ignoring for the moment that the hacked player also plays DVDs from my native region -- I guess I could disable that or something), and yet one is illegal. Whose interests are served by that, and why should we consider them to be legitimate?
NASA: "Wait... is that 19 metric years?"
Ah, that's reasonable. Sorry, people putting things in "quotes" for no good "reason" is one of my "many" grammatical pet peeves.
Good call, let's get Cid right on this. ;)
And why did you feel a need for quotes around "sky." Are you trying to be sarcastic or something? It didn't work.
Makes sense to me, if they want to reproduce the successes of the past. "Faster, better, cheaper" is a myth -- you can't just spout a slogan and get everything you want. If you want better stuff, you've got to be prepared to spend more time or money on it, period. It's like the old programmer's motto: "Fast, cheap, good. Pick two."
Really, there are a lot of analogies between how NASA works and how software dev houses work, and perhaps the two could learn from each other's successes. Code reviews, as was discussed not so long ago on Slashdot, are by far the most cost-effective use of developers' time because of the enormous amount of bugs they prevent. But it's also a very frequently skimped-on area, due to penny pinching and programmer hubris (nothing wrong with MY code!).
There is, last time I checked, *one* moon rock in the U.S. (or the world?) that is in any way available to the public. You can go and touch it. I did. Whee. Looked like a rock, to me.
Actually, it's a little-known fact that all CD-ROMs do keep the CD stationary, and simply spin the rest of the universe around it. True fact. ;)
No, this was one less than a week ago about solar cells made of lots of tiny spheres embedded in an aluminum sheet.
That's weird. I find it not so much funny or insightful as F*CKING OBVIOUS.
I regret that I have no mod points to spend on this -- I think it's the most succinct statement of the problem with the War on Terror I've ever heard. Nicely put.
Actually, "a Beowulf cluster of beer" is the first funny Beowulf cluster joke I've heard in a long time.
Am I the only person on Earth who has not seen this ad campaign? I also never saw the "Wazaap" commercials, except when I saw people looking at them on Adcritic or whatever. The things that happen when you download all your TV shows rather than watching them on the set. Quick, somebody sue me.
Speaking of such things, imagine if someone hacked in to your t-shirt. How long would it take before someone told you that you had goatse dot cx on your back?
This could be cool... change your clothes with the push of a button. Wear a new face (probably not a very realistic-looking one until the technology matures, but we're dreaming here...). Wear the skin of your favorite porn star. With adaptive padding it could modify the underlying shape as well.
I think you're underestimating materials science here. There have got to be good solutions to something as simple as metal fatigue. High redundancy, fancy lattice structures, exotic semiconductors or conductive polymers or ceramics, I don't know... something.
Sorry, I don't like wet blankets on cool ideas. Nothing personal. :)
Sorry, no. Well, it depends how good of camo you're talking about. What I'd like to believe is that technology like this can create a true "stealth suit" which creates a duplicate image of whatever's on the other side, effectively making the wearer invisible. But keep in mind, this is still a 2D display and you can't project a different image to viewers at different viewing angles. Not yet, anyway. Maybe eventually. The other big obstacle to this approach (microcameras, etc.) is that the shape of the suit would change as the wearer moves. So you need unprecedentedly high-res, low-latency motion tracking for every point on the wearer's body.
Imagine seeing a cityscape where every inch of every skyscraper is a billboard. Sound far-fetched? Read the article -- this is about printing televisions. These things are going to be cheap. Look at the end result of a technology such as the printing press becoming widely available -- we now have reams of printed matter everywhere we look. An active display technology that is so convenient to use and cheap to produce has just as much potential, if not more, for becoming pervasive and used everywhere.
I think the biggest question for widespread use of these things, on a commodity level rather than an appliance level (toilet paper, not PDAs), is power. I don't think anything on the market today is truly a satisfactory answer to the question of how to power ubiquitous flexible displays like these, but we're close. See a very recent slashdot post (no link, so lazy...) about flexible solar cells being developed. Also, there is an incredible push for greatly improved battery technology, and great steps are being made there.
Ultimately, there will be two kinds of uses for this technology. The first one we'll see will be the sort that is more or less permanently installed, and can therefore be plugged into the wall all or some of the time. Even the skyscraper-as-television fits into this category. But at some point you'll need batteries or solar cells or some other power source (some wacky nanotech?) to power more "disposable" applications like animated handbills, greeting cards, movie posters, etc.
End result: advertising is about to get a lot more annoying. Let's just hope they haven't got paper-thin speakers to go with this.
I don't think so. Isn't that big new weather-prediction site in Japan? I would imagine that's bigger, though I haven't checked the numbers.
Problem 1, you can't generally prove what a person was or was not thinking when they did something. It's their word against that of... well, who exactly is an authority on the contents of someone else's mind? Mistress Cleo or whatever her name is, with the 900 number?
Problem 2, there really is a difference between "first vs. second degree murder" and "hate crime or not." The first case is about a person's particular motivations and thought processes for the crime in question. But a hate crime amounts to something slightly different.
Let's say I hate black people and think they deserve to die (I don't, but let's say). Let's say there's readily available proof of this (hate literature in my handwriting, photos of me shaking hands with David Duke, etc.). Now suppose I decide to knock over a liquor store. It goes wrong, and the hapless clerk gets a faceful of lead. But oops, he was black! I'm now a hate criminal, as opposed to just a bigot who knocks over liquor stores.
The difference here is that for something like first-degree murder, it can in many cases be reasonably demonstrated that there was calculation, that the motivation for the crime had certain characteristics we see as worse than a simple fit of rage. But for a hate crime, all you can really prove is a coincidence (literally, for two things to coincide). You've got a crime, and you've got a pattern of hate against people like the victim. But only in extremely specialized circumstances will it be absolutely demonstrable that the crime itself was a direct result of that hate. I would have to have a great deal more faith in the justice system than I do if I wanted to believe that only in such cases would hate crime laws be applied. In the real world, having such laws means punishing people for what they happen to think, not because of anything pertinent to their actual crime. That's thought crime, and it's a really bad idea to set such a precedent.
It's also totally unnecessary. There is such a thing as flexibility in sentencing (don't get me started on mandatory sentences, though). If it's clear that a killer is a really despicable person, a murderous bigot or whatever, I think that flexibility should be sufficient to account for it and give a harsher sentence.
Personally, I find it hard to get worked up about ET algae or whatever. I mean, it's a good thing in terms of implications for habitability of other worlds, terraforming, etc. But every time someone trots out an argument about how easy it is for life to arise in the universe, people assume that once you have life at all, you have intelligent life.
If life has arisen independently on Earth multiple times, how many times has it produced humans? And by this I mean, how many times did humans evolve, from scratch, our of distinct gene pools? I would have a hard time believing any answer greater than 1 (or less than 1, for that matter). So the more times life has formed and *not* evolved into sentience, the worse the odds are that it will have done so in other environments.
And even if sentient life has evolved on some reasonably nearby planet, what are the odds that we'll inhabit the same slice of time as them? Human beings have been a technological species for an infinitesimal time slice compared to the age of the galaxy, and at the rate we're going that time slice may not last much longer. If this is representative of sentient species in general, it would be very rare for two species to chance upon the necessary coincidence of space and time to actually meet each other. Sad but true.
Now if they can just make it dock with my living room... that's what I call universal compatibility!
I don't know the fuel effeciency numbers for the Suburban, but it seems like most of the big auto manufacturers are guilty of some pretty bad guzzlers. They're just satisfying what they see as the market, though -- I just moved to Stockholm from the U.S. and the cars here are so much smaller, but with the same brands.