For the longest time we could alway count on the greed of other corperations to keep personal information private for two reasons. One they might get sued and the other is money, corperations are by nature greedy and information is money. This was a natural and for the most part balancing nature of true capatalism.
Now we have TIA which forces these small pockets of data into the governments hands with ot without our explicit knowledge or concent. Statics will do the rest. It won't catch terrorists ( http://www.bgladd.com/Total_Information_Awareness/ ) because their are not enough true positive. On the other hand this system will be great for catching political dissidents, lazy criminals, affairs, and toher things that the majority of society will see no reason to protect THOSE people.
Before we know it we are srtipped of all civil rights since for the most part people are more conforatable no longer thinking for themselves.
1) Never give your phone number out at the cash register. I can't beleive the number of people that will give thier number, that makes a legitimate buisness relationship and they can call for another year and harass you.
2) "Take me off your list" and "I don't ever want to receive a call from this marketing company either"
3) They are required to provide you with name and contact information if asked. If you are on a DNC list demade the info and tkae the 2 minutes to fill out the web form that most states have.
As for the charities and political calls. Sorry, the Supreme Court has always help political and non-commercial speeach with high reguard ( as we all would hope ).
Since I have been on the NY DNC list I have received only a few annoying telemarketing calls and those were from people that disreguarded my previous attempt to legaly make them stop calling. They have since stoped since I filed a protest with NYS. Now if I could only get the Damm Red Cross to stop calling.
Oh wait, he required that kind of access to do his job? So DRM wouldn't have helped. What do you mean that most hacks are inside jobs?.... nothing to see, please move along.
Most information I've seen is that they don't mind 480i ( standard TV ) resolution output even if not 100% copy protected. What they worry about is HDTV 1080i or 720p becomming the next rippable format without a fight.
C'mon this is the same crap the TV manufactured whined about when CC became mandatory. The chip now gos for $2US in bulk. By the time this becomes the standard simple decoder boxes will proabably be in the sub $50 range and the cost in a new TV will be less than $20.
Australia Taps More Phones -LEGALLY- Than Entire U.S.
Since even those in chage say that the number underreported ia on an order or mangitude higher than those reported. These numbers also don't take into account US customs whose records were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. They are still trying to re-create those records from ancilarry data.
At my company [part of a global publishing company] bids are also evaluated against known metrics. They do a function point count, figure the number of hours and then budget accordingly based on staffing and timeline. They have thousands of projects cataloged and they can (based on each developers metrics) come fairly close to what we are telling them. Your bid was probably way too low compared to the # of hours that the project was expected to take. They don't want to give the project to you and have you unable to complete it becaue you bid to low. I don't care who you are the first %80 takes %20 of the time to do the last %20.
If that didn't kill your bid, mabye your elitist attitude did.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen buisness spend more money on internal development than I had ever expected, but they won't pay for simple computer upgrades for the developers..... weird.
Driving aka freedom to travel is a right that is protected.
State and federal laws are only allowed to be as minimally invasive as necessary to keep driving safe for everyone. A rodeblock looking for drug trafickers did not hold up to court scrutinty since it does not help road safty. Red light camers are being very carefully scrutinized as well since the benifit of the camers in trafic safty seem to be mininimal at best and therefore it's too intrusive. Police MUST have a legit reason to stop you, and laws to protect the safty of all must me the least intrusive as possible.
On topic:
Check your contract, scream bloody murder if those provisions are not in it.
Wi-Fi cards have many uses BESIDE use at a hotspot. If Rabbit allowed someone to go from airport to airport, home, work, coffie shop,... ( Highway ). Wi-Fi is supported by a raft of inexpensive interchangable devices that can be used with any interoperable equipment.
So if I already have a card and I wander into a hotspot I am much more likley to use it. This is much diffrent from purchacing equipment that MUST be used in specific locations.
So Wi-Fi hotspots are taking advantage of what people ALREADY OWN. I can't wander into a coffiee shop or an airport nowadays WITHOUT seeing a laptop out if not a dozen. Comparing this to rabbit would be like trying hotspots in the early 90's, nobody really had the equipment and it would be doomed to fail.
10 ) Ok, but what about moving to a better system where you can compile against a specific version. Try to compile agains 1.3 with methods that were depreciated and it will fail.
9 ) Ok, within the java API the naming convention should be consistant. Outside of the API it's the programmers decesion. To dictate a style of writing would place an undue burden on programmers
8) No, not on your life. You can take my primitives from my cold dead body. If you want to suggest that primative should not be used in most production applications that's fine, but their is a time and a place for priatives that are very important. Suggesting that we get rid of primatives severly hurts your credability.
As for your comment about 2b + 2b != 4b... No shit you add two SIGNED 32bit values and expect it to work properly despite the buffer overflow! BigInteger is part of java.math and is a perfedt counterpart to Integer, but can be as big as you want.
7) Um, mabye. Chars are already expected to represent string and I doubt there would be much resistance to having a JVM decide how big those should be. It's not like he's trying to suggest that short should be changed ( oh... yea ).
6) I can see some cleanup here. Threadgroups could go away and 99.9% of people would not care. As for the non-atomic nature of 64bit+ primatives that has alwyas been clearly documented in the spec. It does not guarentee atomic operations on anything longer than 32bits. Although this could be changed it was always a trade off between the smaller systems and the larger systems that java would be running on.
5) No, please, no more bloat. XML is great, but to continue to add LARGER API's with memory hungry requirements to the system is a death sentance.
4) Smoking the BAD crack. AWT has it's warts and problems, but just look at mozilla on the MAC for all the reasons that native widgets should continue to be supported at all costs. I would not mind an alternate WM/WT as long as it had true native peers so that java can participate as a first class application on all platforms. AWT currently is poorly designed to handle the diffrences between OS's and take advantage of the niceties on some platforms, but that's no reason to abandon native widgets.
3) Java has two sets of collecations. Ove that was based on 1.1 ( Vector, Hashtable ) and one for Java2 ( List, HashMap ). Anybody that's bothered to read a performace tuning book would realize that the Java2 collection system ( although without generics ) is by far the better system. The Java2 system allows either synchronized or non-synchronized operation. This is because the vast majority of java collection use is internal to a class or method where syncronization just adds a burden to the system. Why use a beartrap for holding your desk pens when a cup would work just as well.
2) Yes, count me in. The I/O subsystem uner java it totally inoperative for many tasks. A RFE currently pending ( for several years ) is to adda simple way of finding out how much free space is availible on the filesystem. Metadata information is a casulatly of war. It just needs to be tossed out.
One thing that he doesn't hit on, but it a REQUIREMENT for interoperability is some standardized way of doing fixed block decoding/encoding ( think struct ). It's just amess trying to get complex binary structures into and out of java without going quite mad.
I don't agree that Streams should be buffered by default as that can CAUSE problems. Buffering should alwyas be under the control of the programer.
1) Yes, it's already known that the current class loader has some issues, but they are working on a better one. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many advanced programs are running into problems expecially when they are using custom class loaders.
But.... he didn't even mention quite a few issues I have personally with my big pet peve being....
The GC. Many programs need some feedback and some wat to hint or force the GC of specific objects ( since they peer with NATIVE blocks of ( memeory/code) ). It's very important that the programmer be able to programmaticly control SOME operations of the GC subsystem. I'm not asking for malloc/free, but there are some objects that can be a pain to work with and some programming requirements that cannot be achived under the current GC system. It's a black box without any feedback. I would like to be able to tell the GC when I have 10ms where I know the system's time would be better spent cleaning up after itself to go ahead nad do it. I need to be able to force the cleanup of specific classes/instances when they are holding on to native resources.
Anyways..... I think I've rated enough. I can see where this guy is comming from, but most of his points are whining or ignorace of the system.
Haha. Do you believe your own drivel? The intellectual property industry has shown time and time again, that they will crack down on infringement even when there is no chance of it hurting their revenue stream.
Actually, even if they are not making money directly they could be loosing sales of NEW if people are GASP still using the old stuff. This is a big reason they fear loosing conrtrol over the items, the idea that there could be hundreds of thousands of creative works just out there in the public domain scares the hell out of them. It would put a dent in NEW ip media.
We are finally getting to the point where the software is good enough, it's now just the packaging that is driving people away.
Some of his points that do not hold up well are the source issues. Most modern programs use configure, it does not get much easier than configure, make, make install unless omething goes wrong.
Games. Transgaming works so well I have heard of people using linux for games and windows for everything else.
Sounds like he just needs a better distro. Debian ( nothing personal ) is not easy to get working well. Mandrake 8.x series is just too bloated and useless. Gentoo has been a breath of fresh air, but it's not for the source code phobic. Mabye he would be better off with licorish or whatever they are calling it.
Game Boy and GBA's biggest market segment has always been adults and not children. Now we are talking about a cell phone, something most people spend excessivly already, adding games is a logical extension if they are not compromising the rest of the system.
Don't accept it. Unless they are going to give you a bonified legal employment contract.... why...
Because otherwise you will be the first on their list when they are looking to get rid on someone to cut costs. You are not only disloyal ( not that companies are ever loyal to you ) but you are probably making more than others doing the same work.
Trust me, it's a bad game to play unless you are willing to accept that your employer will always be wondering if you are going to jumo ship again.
This "STUDY" does not take into account all of the various audits that have taken place in the distributions that use them ( RH, OBSD,... ) nor does it take into account all of the smaller patches that have been sent in by dedicated users. What about those projects that are "obvious" but never make it into "mature" according to source forge. I would be much more interested in the study if it included "stable/production" projects as well.
I would say this study does more to sterotype OSS developers as 1-man shows rather than a developer with LOTS of feedback from their users.
The opt-out system in NY works great. There are few exemptions, and there are penalties.
The one thing that HAS been a problem are survey callers now. I've gotten called a dozen times in the past two weeks DURING DINNER asking if I would like to participate in a survey. I asked on of the to take me off their list and the claim that they do not have lists. ARGHHH
I don't want the lack of unsolicited commercilal calls to be replaced with surveys...
I got one of these beasts back in novenber. Despite some problems it does work as described, BUT the company has not been forthcomming with any documentation for the propriatary XML language or binaries that the device uses.
Harmony has time and again broken promises to release the full XML spec. I have even extrapolated non-documented xml features that have helped, but I should not have to.
As a simple remote with "activities" they are great, but if you are getting this to do complex programming steer clear.
Is it just me or is all of this really quite moot. Between what we are exposed to outside naturally or what we subject ourselves to daily what is on our workstation is hardly going to really make a difference one way or another.
Lets see some things that are probalw worse.
1) Any food/drink ordered from think geek 2) Coke 3) Paint fumes/dust and metal dust from people Modding their case. 4) Sitting in from of this damm irradating device for 12hrs/day 5).. 6)... 203331) some extra bactera on your desk
Held:COPAs reliance on community standards to identify what material is harmful to minors does not by itself render the statute substantially overbroad for First Amendment purposes. The Court, however, expresses no view as to whether COPA suffers from substantial overbreadth for reasons other than its use of community standards, whether the statute is unconstitutionally vague, or whether the statute survives strict scrutiny. Prudence dictates allowing the Third Circuit to first examine these difficult issues. Because petitioner did not ask to have the preliminary injunction vacated, and because this Court could not do so without addressing matters the Third Circuit has yet to consider, the Government remains enjoined from enforcing COPA absent further action by the lower courts. P. 22.
Basicly the supreme court ruled against the ACLU's argument that the "community standards" were unconstitutional, but left the rest up to the lower coutrs to decide. This may bounce back to the supreme court at a later date, but for now it's been repremanded back to the federal circuit.
The injunction is still in place which means that the law cannot be enforced currently.
One of the major problems with psuedo-science is..
Unexplained != Inexplicable
Just because we don't know why some things happed does not mean there is some supernatural reason behind it.
ESP has never been proven to be anything but statistical number games or fraud. Cold reading is a well documented skill that has been used for centuries.
Psuedo-science != Relegion
Religion takes things on faith. People believe in religion for many reasons. Psuedo-science attempts to prove something is true by using scientific ( language, tools,... ) but in no way what they are doing is scientific. The one thing that psuedo-science does not have that really sets them appart is they have NO peer revier of their findings.
To summerize what alot of people have said already...
"But too many people believe it not to be true" This is a classic appeal to populatity. Common knoledge is often simplified or all together wrong.
"You cannot prove that it's NOT ESP" I don't have to. That is an appeal to ignorance. By that reasoning I can prove and disprove anything I want. Basic critical reasoning says that I don't have to prove you wrong, you have to prove to me that you are RIGHT.
"ESP is a faith just like any other science" Nope, see above. Science has the feature of being peer reviewed and have reproducable results. ESP has never been proven in any controled environment.
As most of the slashdot public has proven this article is quite right.
Slashdot Mirror
For the longest time we could alway count on the greed of other corperations to keep personal information private for two reasons. One they might get sued and the other is money, corperations are by nature greedy and information is money. This was a natural and for the most part balancing nature of true capatalism.
Now we have TIA which forces these small pockets of data into the governments hands with ot without our explicit knowledge or concent. Statics will do the rest. It won't catch terrorists ( http://www.bgladd.com/Total_Information_Awareness
Before we know it we are srtipped of all civil rights since for the most part people are more conforatable no longer thinking for themselves.
1) Never give your phone number out at the cash register. I can't beleive the number of people that will give thier number, that makes a legitimate buisness relationship and they can call for another year and harass you.
2) "Take me off your list" and "I don't ever want to receive a call from this marketing company either"
3) They are required to provide you with name and contact information if asked. If you are on a DNC list demade the info and tkae the 2 minutes to fill out the web form that most states have.
As for the charities and political calls. Sorry, the Supreme Court has always help political and non-commercial speeach with high reguard ( as we all would hope ).
Since I have been on the NY DNC list I have received only a few annoying telemarketing calls and those were from people that disreguarded my previous attempt to legaly make them stop calling. They have since stoped since I filed a protest with NYS. Now if I could only get the Damm Red Cross to stop calling.
Actuall for clarification...
YUV 4:2:0 is 12 bits per pixel since the chroma is only samples every other line. YUV 4:2:2 is 16 bits per pixel.
so thats...
711 Mbps or 89 MBps or about (wierd) 89 minutes of uncompressed HD based on the fact that 500GB actually means 500000000000 bytes.
From the masses of laid off geeks that still have enough money in their pockets to read slashdot!
Cmon... how many of you have real jobs?
DRM will be our savior.....
Oh wait, he required that kind of access to do his job? So DRM wouldn't have helped. What do you mean that most hacks are inside jobs?
Since the site is so hosed it's not even funny. So they remain obsure.
-sigh-
Most information I've seen is that they don't mind 480i ( standard TV ) resolution output even if not 100% copy protected. What they worry about is HDTV 1080i or 720p becomming the next rippable format without a fight.
C'mon this is the same crap the TV manufactured whined about when CC became mandatory. The chip now gos for $2US in bulk. By the time this becomes the standard simple decoder boxes will proabably be in the sub $50 range and the cost in a new TV will be less than $20.
Australia Taps More Phones -LEGALLY- Than Entire U.S.
Since even those in chage say that the number underreported ia on an order or mangitude higher than those reported. These numbers also don't take into account US customs whose records were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. They are still trying to re-create those records from ancilarry data.
At my company [part of a global publishing company] bids are also evaluated against known metrics. They do a function point count, figure the number of hours and then budget accordingly based on staffing and timeline. They have thousands of projects cataloged and they can (based on each developers metrics) come fairly close to what we are telling them. Your bid was probably way too low compared to the # of hours that the project was expected to take. They don't want to give the project to you and have you unable to complete it becaue you bid to low. I don't care who you are the first %80 takes %20 of the time to do the last %20.
If that didn't kill your bid, mabye your elitist attitude did.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen buisness spend more money on internal development than I had ever expected, but they won't pay for simple computer upgrades for the developers..... weird.
Driving aka freedom to travel is a right that is protected.
State and federal laws are only allowed to be as minimally invasive as necessary to keep driving safe for everyone. A rodeblock looking for drug trafickers did not hold up to court scrutinty since it does not help road safty. Red light camers are being very carefully scrutinized as well since the benifit of the camers in trafic safty seem to be mininimal at best and therefore it's too intrusive. Police MUST have a legit reason to stop you, and laws to protect the safty of all must me the least intrusive as possible.
On topic:
Check your contract, scream bloody murder if those provisions are not in it.
Day 8: Watch pr0n
Day 9: Start receiving adult advertizements on TiVo when paused.
Day 10: Receive mail offers for adult entertainment.
Day 11: Return TiVo for a Replay.
Wi-Fi cards have many uses BESIDE use at a hotspot. If Rabbit allowed someone to go from airport to airport, home, work, coffie shop, ... ( Highway ). Wi-Fi is supported by a raft of inexpensive interchangable devices that can be used with any interoperable equipment.
So if I already have a card and I wander into a hotspot I am much more likley to use it. This is much diffrent from purchacing equipment that MUST be used in specific locations.
So Wi-Fi hotspots are taking advantage of what people ALREADY OWN. I can't wander into a coffiee shop or an airport nowadays WITHOUT seeing a laptop out if not a dozen. Comparing this to rabbit would be like trying hotspots in the early 90's, nobody really had the equipment and it would be doomed to fail.
10 ) Ok, but what about moving to a better system where you can compile against a specific version. Try to compile agains 1.3 with methods that were depreciated and it will fail.
9 ) Ok, within the java API the naming convention should be consistant. Outside of the API it's the programmers decesion. To dictate a style of writing would place an undue burden on programmers
8) No, not on your life. You can take my primitives from my cold dead body. If you want to suggest that primative should not be used in most production applications that's fine, but their is a time and a place for priatives that are very important. Suggesting that we get rid of primatives severly hurts your credability.
As for your comment about 2b + 2b != 4b... No shit you add two SIGNED 32bit values and expect it to work properly despite the buffer overflow! BigInteger is part of java.math and is a perfedt counterpart to Integer, but can be as big as you want.
7) Um, mabye. Chars are already expected to represent string and I doubt there would be much resistance to having a JVM decide how big those should be. It's not like he's trying to suggest that short should be changed ( oh... yea ).
6) I can see some cleanup here. Threadgroups could go away and 99.9% of people would not care. As for the non-atomic nature of 64bit+ primatives that has alwyas been clearly documented in the spec. It does not guarentee atomic operations on anything longer than 32bits. Although this could be changed it was always a trade off between the smaller systems and the larger systems that java would be running on.
5) No, please, no more bloat. XML is great, but to continue to add LARGER API's with memory hungry requirements to the system is a death sentance.
4) Smoking the BAD crack. AWT has it's warts and problems, but just look at mozilla on the MAC for all the reasons that native widgets should continue to be supported at all costs. I would not mind an alternate WM/WT as long as it had true native peers so that java can participate as a first class application on all platforms. AWT currently is poorly designed to handle the diffrences between OS's and take advantage of the niceties on some platforms, but that's no reason to abandon native widgets.
3) Java has two sets of collecations. Ove that was based on 1.1 ( Vector, Hashtable ) and one for Java2 ( List, HashMap ). Anybody that's bothered to read a performace tuning book would realize that the Java2 collection system ( although without generics ) is by far the better system. The Java2 system allows either synchronized or non-synchronized operation. This is because the vast majority of java collection use is internal to a class or method where syncronization just adds a burden to the system. Why use a beartrap for holding your desk pens when a cup would work just as well.
2) Yes, count me in. The I/O subsystem uner java it totally inoperative for many tasks. A RFE currently pending ( for several years ) is to adda simple way of finding out how much free space is availible on the filesystem. Metadata information is a casulatly of war. It just needs to be tossed out.
One thing that he doesn't hit on, but it a REQUIREMENT for interoperability is some standardized way of doing fixed block decoding/encoding ( think struct ). It's just amess trying to get complex binary structures into and out of java without going quite mad.
I don't agree that Streams should be buffered by default as that can CAUSE problems. Buffering should alwyas be under the control of the programer.
1) Yes, it's already known that the current class loader has some issues, but they are working on a better one. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many advanced programs are running into problems expecially when they are using custom class loaders.
But.... he didn't even mention quite a few issues I have personally with my big pet peve being....
The GC. Many programs need some feedback and some wat to hint or force the GC of specific objects ( since they peer with NATIVE blocks of ( memeory/code) ). It's very important that the programmer be able to programmaticly control SOME operations of the GC subsystem. I'm not asking for malloc/free, but there are some objects that can be a pain to work with and some programming requirements that cannot be achived under the current GC system. It's a black box without any feedback. I would like to be able to tell the GC when I have 10ms where I know the system's time would be better spent cleaning up after itself to go ahead nad do it. I need to be able to force the cleanup of specific classes/instances when they are holding on to native resources.
Anyways..... I think I've rated enough. I can see where this guy is comming from, but most of his points are whining or ignorace of the system.
We are finally getting to the point where the software is good enough, it's now just the packaging that is driving people away.
Some of his points that do not hold up well are the source issues. Most modern programs use configure, it does not get much easier than configure, make, make install unless omething goes wrong.
Games. Transgaming works so well I have heard of people using linux for games and windows for everything else.
Sounds like he just needs a better distro. Debian ( nothing personal ) is not easy to get working well. Mandrake 8.x series is just too bloated and useless. Gentoo has been a breath of fresh air, but it's not for the source code phobic. Mabye he would be better off with licorish or whatever they are calling it.
Cheers.
Game Boy and GBA's biggest market segment has always been adults and not children. Now we are talking about a cell phone, something most people spend excessivly already, adding games is a logical extension if they are not compromising the rest of the system.
Don't accept it. Unless they are going to give you a bonified legal employment contract.... why...
Because otherwise you will be the first on their list when they are looking to get rid on someone to cut costs. You are not only disloyal ( not that companies are ever loyal to you ) but you are probably making more than others doing the same work.
Trust me, it's a bad game to play unless you are willing to accept that your employer will always be wondering if you are going to jumo ship again.
Cm'on if you have 1.0_rc3 and you are not having problems, please do everyone a favor and DON'T download today...
Unless you are having problems.. try this weekend after the mirrors have had time to catch up!
This "STUDY" does not take into account all of the various audits that have taken place in the distributions that use them ( RH, OBSD, ... ) nor does it take into account all of the smaller patches that have been sent in by dedicated users. What about those projects that are "obvious" but never make it into "mature" according to source forge. I would be much more interested in the study if it included "stable/production" projects as well.
I would say this study does more to sterotype OSS developers as 1-man shows rather than a developer with LOTS of feedback from their users.
The opt-out system in NY works great. There are few exemptions, and there are penalties.
The one thing that HAS been a problem are survey callers now. I've gotten called a dozen times in the past two weeks DURING DINNER asking if I would like to participate in a survey. I asked on of the to take me off their list and the claim that they do not have lists. ARGHHH
I don't want the lack of unsolicited commercilal calls to be replaced with surveys...
I got one of these beasts back in novenber. Despite some problems it does work as described, BUT the company has not been forthcomming with any documentation for the propriatary XML language or binaries that the device uses.
Harmony has time and again broken promises to release the full XML spec. I have even extrapolated non-documented xml features that have helped, but I should not have to.
As a simple remote with "activities" they are great, but if you are getting this to do complex programming steer clear.
http://www.remotecentral.com/
Good forums that have true user feedback.
Is it just me or is all of this really quite moot. Between what we are exposed to outside naturally or what we subject ourselves to daily what is on our workstation is hardly going to really make a difference one way or another.
.. ...
Lets see some things that are probalw worse.
1) Any food/drink ordered from think geek
2) Coke
3) Paint fumes/dust and metal dust from people Modding their case.
4) Sitting in from of this damm irradating device for 12hrs/day
5)
6)
203331) some extra bactera on your desk
Basicly the supreme court ruled against the ACLU's argument that the "community standards" were unconstitutional, but left the rest up to the lower coutrs to decide. This may bounce back to the supreme court at a later date, but for now it's been repremanded back to the federal circuit.
The injunction is still in place which means that the law cannot be enforced currently.
... can't reason their way out of a paper bag.
... ) but in no way what they are doing is scientific. The one thing that psuedo-science does not have that really sets them appart is they have NO peer revier of their findings.
One of the major problems with psuedo-science is..
Unexplained != Inexplicable
Just because we don't know why some things happed does not mean there is some supernatural reason behind it.
ESP has never been proven to be anything but statistical number games or fraud. Cold reading is a well documented skill that has been used for centuries.
Psuedo-science != Relegion
Religion takes things on faith. People believe in religion for many reasons. Psuedo-science attempts to prove something is true by using scientific ( language, tools,
To summerize what alot of people have said already...
"But too many people believe it not to be true"
This is a classic appeal to populatity. Common knoledge is often simplified or all together wrong.
"You cannot prove that it's NOT ESP"
I don't have to. That is an appeal to ignorance. By that reasoning I can prove and disprove anything I want. Basic critical reasoning says that I don't have to prove you wrong, you have to prove to me that you are RIGHT.
"ESP is a faith just like any other science"
Nope, see above. Science has the feature of being peer reviewed and have reproducable results. ESP has never been proven in any controled environment.
As most of the slashdot public has proven this article is quite right.
But seriously... it costs like $3/minute to make US calls how much will it cost per minute/kb used?