that happened between now and then called "The Enlightenment." Just read up on Francis Bacon and Galileo to see what has fundamentally changed from the Greeks like Aristotle sitting on their duffs and saying, "This sounds reasonable."
Sorry, but there's no other way to describe it. Scientists take no more on faith than the religious do. The only thing that they take on faith is that what their senses tell them is basically accurate, and that other individuals besides themselves exist who have their own senses that work.
Your example on repeatability is easily disproven with one counterexample: quantum mechanics. Everything is probabilistic by nature, and never exactly repeatable in principle.
Science does not use the mind for anything but best guesses on where to look for new phenomena. Mathematics is the field where a precise language is defined, a priori, and then used by science to describe what they observe. True, scientists generally assume that things observed over and over again don't change, but if they did then science is still no in trouble because that only means that the theory was wrong and needs to be changed. Perhaps there was some special circumstance not considered before (just like when magnets rotated to align with the Earth's field), perhaps the process is governed by probability, etc.
For some great info on what science actually is, go to www.wikipedia.com and check out their article on the scientific method and the associated discussion page. They do a much more thorough and complete job than I.
For the vast majority of people, science is just another religion: taken on faith or rejected as heresy. It's sad, but true. The reason a lot of people probably get disillusioned with science is because science doesn't have all the answers, and isn't always right, and it makes no bones about it (at least the good scientists don't, anyway). I find that one quote I love is the one from a movie called Dangerous Beauty, "The people want answers. They don't care if they're wrong answers, they want them just the same." When someone comes across something not currently explained by science, and science cannot explain it immediately, they automatically assign a supernatural explanation to it.
Are people just so arrogant as to not be able to admit, or perhaps even afraid to admit, that there are just some things that have not been explained yet? Things that are just beyond our current grasp, but not necessarily beyond our potential grasp?
They found out about this before they sold super futuristic clothes out of this. Imagine what would have happened if this hadn't been discovered until someone tried to take a picture of junior! I know, slim chance it would have made it that far without a picture being taken of it, but still...
Luckily, it's only a specific type of nanotube that's vulnerable. The double walled ones are supposedly not vulnerable to this problem. I would still like them to test it against ultraviolet and infrared flashes, and x-rays (imagine going to the dentist's office and catching fire!).
Good thinking, I hadn't considered the ionosphere, but that's an engineering detail. Claiming that it isn't possible to run a wire through it is like claiming that the the Panama Canal couldn't be built (very similar situations if you think about it, more later). I'll outline one possible solution. The ionosphere is heavily charged, right? Is it like a big capacitor or just a big charged sphere? The difference is minor, it just effects the final form of the solution, not the concept behind it. In short, it would use the same idea as the locks used to make the Panama Canal: The cable would be a series of pairs of wires, heavily insulated, that have inductors at each end to isolate the system (as far as electrical charge goes), and are maintained at a voltage such that the insulation is sufficient to prevent discharge of the ionosphere. If the ionosphere is charged shell-like, the charge would be pulled from the ground. Capacitor-like is even easier since you'll need one section at high voltage and one at low. This, of course, leaves out a ton of engineering details like: how to make the cable strong enough (esp since it can't be made out of metal; carbon fibers are one thing that comes to mind), how many sections of what type to have, how much power would be dissipated maintaining the charge, etc. That's for people with more knowledge and time than I have, though.
Oh, yes, the similarity with Panama is, as I mentioned, the lock system. The other similarity is that if the canal had been built Suez style, as the French originally planned, it might have screwed Europe and the Eastern U.S. When South and North America weren't joined, the weather was very different because the gulf stream went in to the Pacific. IIRC, connecting the two continents is what warmed Europe, created the Sahara Desert, etc. So they are similar in weight of consequent as well.
"Sorry I don't believe, hey guys we are talking of a Pentium 733 with 64Mb. Does it cost 500$?."
No, but the Nvida GF3+ (it's a little more than a GF3) with the chipset, plus the hard drive, plus breakage (which is probably higher than other console makers due to the relative fragility of a hard drive), etc. all point to a unit cost of somewhere around $400 at the beginning of the console's life. And a unit cost of $400 means that M$ would be losing more than $100 when selling it retail (remember, you need to consider the store's cut too) for $300. They may have gotten costs down further since then, but I doubt that they have it below $300 (still selling at a loss, mind you).
"Selling below cost is a busines stratagy that should have died with the dot-com'ers."
Bad news. Loss leaders are an old business strategy. Automotive stores, for instance, sell motor oil at virtually nil profit or less. Grocery stores advertise sales on some items, but make up for it on others. It would be stupid to not sell the consoles on at least razor thin margins to try to get a big installed user base so that you can sell more software. Console companies don't really make money on the consoles, and they never have. They make money because they take a cut of the profits of all the games sold for their console. So even if they lose, say, $50 on the console, they make it up and then some if they make $10 on each game and the person buys more than 5 games over the time they own the console (most do).
BlackGriffen
True, but...
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
First of all, that darn atmosphere absorbs a lot of it. Second, that's the energy that keeps you warm and feeds you (plants don't live off of love, you know).
The only way the moon as power source will be practicable will be if we move up there or figure out how to get that energy down here. Neither one is any easy task. You can pretty much forget about the first, and the second involves crazy plans with microwaves. What happens when the aiming device gets hit by a meteor, and the microwaves fry some poor shmuck? oops. Not to mention the amount of power that such a system would lose sending the signal through the atmosphere.
The only way I see space based power being practicable is with some sort of geo-synchronous elevator (the ones that are connected to the planet by a metal cable in sci-fi). Then you could put solar panels, fission/fusion or pretty much any other type of power plant up there, and just let the wires carry it down with a whole lot less risk than a microwave beam.
Don't hold your breath for any practicable space based power in our time, though.
M$ was already selling at a hefty loss (for some reason $100-$200 dollars comes to mind, but I'm not certain). This is standard practice in the console industry, though: sell the console as a loss-leader to make up profits in software royalties. Sony does it. Nintendo does it (though to a lesser extent). They were already basically dumping the XBoxes, and now they're trying to avalanche them.
Hopefully they get sued, and are forced to sell at cost >:).
These jag-offs want the ease of linking, but don't want others to link to them. It's like putting up a sign on a public street, and then telling people not to give each other directions to reach the sign that don't pass the other signs posted. There are numerous ways to make it so that content needs to be accessed sequentially, and the onus is on the owner of the content to not simply put the stuff out in the open!
I wonder if authors of regular books bitch about readers who read then last chapter first. What legal right does the author have to dictate how the work is used, as long as it isn't used commercially or taken credit for?
From the article: "Congress is examining bundled software and related issues. In 1999, and again in 2001, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., introduced legislation to force spyware distributors to get permission and notify people with a detailed description of the information they're collecting. No committee has picked up the bill, but broader consumer notice and privacy concerns are showing up in a compromise Internet privacy legislation soon to be introduced by Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C."
Watch this jack-@ss like a hawk! Who here wants to bet he's going to tack the SSSCA on to this thing, call it a, "Consumer privacy bill," and try to sneak it in that way? I wouldn't trust that man to be a janitor in city hall.
Another thing that I just love that they mention are the, "modify without notice or consent," clauses. Does that mean that if they change the contract to, "By clicking I agree, you agree to be an indentured servant for not less than 10, and not more than 10000 years," it's legally binding? An agreement, by it's very nature, cannot be modified without consent of both parties involved, or it isn't an agreement.
I would advise against using this if you want your memory to function. It's still probably just a theory, but I still remember hearing the most probable explanation for the brain's need to sleep that I've ever heard. Basically, the theory goes that when you enter deep sleep (i.e. non-REM sleep) your brain is literally wiring new connections: shifting memories to long term storage, connections are reinforced with more connections, etc. Your brain then goes in to REM sleep to test those connections, which is why REM sleep seems pretty random, but is often related to what's going on in your life.
Some evidence for this: there is a specific type of autism (I can't remember the name) that baffled researchers until they started monitoring the EEG's at night. The researchers found out that the people with this type of autism were literally going in to seizures at night, at least they were experiencing the "electrical storm" in their brains that characterize a seizure. The researchers put the patients on anti-epilepsy medication, and it cleared up the symptoms right away. As the theory goes, the brain was using all of it's connections every night, preventing unused/unneeded connections from atrophying. So the patient was literally unable to forget anything, but also didn't have any more room for more connections.
The moral of the story (considering that only a fool wouldn't realize that these pills won't be more abused than Viagra)? Don't use/abuse these pills if you want to be able to remember/learn anything long-term.
So it would be Ok if they changed the page to something like, "In my opinion, it would damage the railway badly if someone were to..."? Violating the spirit of the law but sticking to the letter you say? Well, that's Ok because the German Constitution obviously violates the spirit of free speech whilst maintaining a resemblance to the letter of it.
Let me spell it out to you: the spirit of free speech is that the government is not permitted to regulate the flow of information. Controlling all information is tyranny just as surely as a Gestapo or some other secret police. It is a far more insidious tyranny, in fact, because it is a hidden tyranny, where the prisoners can injure themselves on the bars because they are not permitted to see them.
If the government is permitted to regulate the flow of factual information that it does not like, then it will not permit people to inform others about government graft and corruption, etc.
If you want to discuss pedophiles, remember that pedos are a much smaller problem than a government tyranny (in terms of the number of people it effects). Tyranny control has to be done first, then the pedophiles can be dealt with (laws such as victimizing children, aiding and abetting, etc.).
Plants actually switch over to metabolizing oxygen in to CO2 at night, so that over a 24 hr cycle, plants do very little to change CO2 to oxygen, except for any energy stored.
The vast majority of O2, IIRC, comes from microorganisms in the ocean. So if CO2 is building up, we may be polluting the oceans too much, or the little buggers may just not be able to keep up.
My problem is how the machine was presented. They said something to the effect of "Trap CO2 with lime, heat lime to let out and bottle, repeat." The energy to heat the lime has to come from somewhere, where will it come from? If they burn anything for that energy, they'll operate at a loss (guaranteed). Solar? Wind? On site nuclear reactor? How are they going to minimize the loss of lime as the thing operates? Just engineering concerns, I suppose, but there are lots of things that are possible except for "engineering concerns."
Here's hoping that just such a thing comes to pass. The FCC could be a sticking point, but if it's possible to use those, I think they're called, UWB radio broadcasters to get around FCC detection (I doubt it, though, since they don't need to read you're signal, just pinpoint it, and a large network would require the connections to remain open longer than a spy would need), we might be able to build up a ham internet! It's a beautiful dream, maybe someday we'll be able to make it a reality.
It'll never have the capacity of the fat pipes, mind you, but it would do for usenet and other text mediums, and it might even permit some file sharing.
I thought that there was a bandwidth surplus? If that's true, then why is it so expensive? Someone should look into this, because I'd bet there are some seriously sleazy deals going on here to keep the price higher than demand justifies. If bandwidth is so expensive, then WTF is Hollings doing trying to encourage broadband adoption? I know, TANSTAAFL, but that doesn't mean that there isn't such a thing as price fixing at unrealistic levels for the market and such. Damn, the future of the internet is turning out to be truly $hitty:
pay to connect pay for the amount of data you download pay for the content of the data pay every time you view the content of the data and you have to do this from a crippled computer to boot (you think the internet will be immune from the CPTBA? Ha! You won't be "permitted to connect to the internet with a computer without DRM, and there will be stiff penalties if the network detects you trying to connect with a DRMless computer [small prediction of mine]).
Damn, that future sucks. Maybe I should consider moving to Russia, China, or maybe just become some hermit like those gun nuts, though I'll be a computer nut, if crap like this comes to pass. If I'm lucky, they'll be colonizing Mars before I die, and I can go there. I'll need to stockpile some good, old fashioned paper books, though, to keep myself occupied. This all, of course, assumes that Canada, Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, France, and Japan all follow the U.S. lead, since I think I could live in any of those places before I move to Russia or China.
The Constitution doesn't say I have a right to wipe my own @ss, either. Fortunately, the framers of the Constitution weren't that stupid:
Amendment IX
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
What needs to be done is a clarification on just what exactly copyright is. As near as I can tell, this is what it should be: authors and inventors shall be rewarded with a monopoly on the sale and distribution of their respective works. Infringement of copyright then becomes a theft of market. Unfortunately, with Washington so thoroughly bought and paid for, I doublt that we'll see that kind of system any time soon.
Leave it to the Dutch, the only people I know of who have sensible laws about marijuana (no worse than alcohol) and prostitution (consenting adults, who just happen to consent for commercial reasons rather than emotional/hormonal ones). That little sub-ocean level country is probably about as close to a libertarian country as we're likely to see. Well, on social issues anyway. Here's hoping the U.$. doesn't get all self-righteous on the Netherlands.
If you had amino acids forming in deep ocean, then the lack of ozone layer wouldn't be a problem, would it? (honest question, sorry it can be read as rhetorical) As for the high oxygen levels in our atmosphere, is it possible that life is necessary to do that? I'm no chemist, but it's my understanding that oxygen is highly reactive, and thus incredibly good at 'oxidizing' (pun intended) things. It strikes me as odd that any planet would have a significant amount of O2 without some process putting it there (just like Cl2 isn't abundant). Thus it would stand to reason that on possible reason life spent so long in the oceans was because that the life in the ocean had to liberate enough O2 to get an ozone layer set up. It's my understanding, also, that the organism's work would simply be undone as the chemicals were released when it died. Thus, the formation of large carbon deposits (read: coal, oil, natural gas, and that methane impregnated ice) may have played a critical role in cooling the planet down; that is, assuming that the sun's temperature hasn't varied a whole lot over the past billion years or so (unlikely).
Just the musings of a college student who really should be sleeping.
Nice, he knows enough to eliminate the amateurs. Still lots of ways around anything he cooks up, though: one, degrade quality. Any watermark that a human can't detect will be destroyed by only a marginal loss in quality. Two, don't let the computer know what your recording. All inputs are essentially fast voltage meters. All you need is a sufficiently fast input with enough range and sensitivity. Make sure the output goes in to a collection of raw binary files, and from there it is just coming with home brewed software solutions (taking away the ability to even write programs is far too totalitarian). Don't let the software know what it is manipulating either; it's just a large stream of numbers in a big arithmetic problem. Removing the water mark is just trial and error from there. Three: isolate the computer. It will report you over the internet if you try to disassemble it? Unplug it. It will "scream for help" via radio frequencies? Stick it in a room with walls lined with aluminum foil. Four: file already on your hard drive? Erase the file, then alloc the memory the file was in to a new file that begins before the old file did. You can now edit the binary to your heart's content. One and two are sufficient, three and four are icing on the cake. It may be possible to short out whatever hardware they put in the machine so that it always returns a, "go ahead and copy," signal. Ultimately they'll either have to eliminate the programmable computer entirely, leaving the public with media viewers, or fail. Considering the black market and the existing technology base, this is not realistically possible.
Barring a black market (assuming the CBDTPA has somehow been passed and effectively enforced world wide), it will come down to analog signal processing and trial and error. Simply filter selected frequencies until I've hacked the watermark beyond recognition without effecting the music. Barring that, I'll do one of the following: move to another country that will let me keep my freedoms, run for office, and/or say, "Screw you guys, I'm reading a good old fashioned book."
Slashdot Mirror
that happened between now and then called "The Enlightenment." Just read up on Francis Bacon and Galileo to see what has fundamentally changed from the Greeks like Aristotle sitting on their duffs and saying, "This sounds reasonable."
BlackGriffen
That's a great quote.
BG
Sorry, but there's no other way to describe it. Scientists take no more on faith than the religious do. The only thing that they take on faith is that what their senses tell them is basically accurate, and that other individuals besides themselves exist who have their own senses that work.
Your example on repeatability is easily disproven with one counterexample: quantum mechanics. Everything is probabilistic by nature, and never exactly repeatable in principle.
Science does not use the mind for anything but best guesses on where to look for new phenomena. Mathematics is the field where a precise language is defined, a priori, and then used by science to describe what they observe. True, scientists generally assume that things observed over and over again don't change, but if they did then science is still no in trouble because that only means that the theory was wrong and needs to be changed. Perhaps there was some special circumstance not considered before (just like when magnets rotated to align with the Earth's field), perhaps the process is governed by probability, etc.
For some great info on what science actually is, go to www.wikipedia.com and check out their article on the scientific method and the associated discussion page. They do a much more thorough and complete job than I.
BlackGriffen
For the vast majority of people, science is just another religion: taken on faith or rejected as heresy. It's sad, but true. The reason a lot of people probably get disillusioned with science is because science doesn't have all the answers, and isn't always right, and it makes no bones about it (at least the good scientists don't, anyway). I find that one quote I love is the one from a movie called Dangerous Beauty, "The people want answers. They don't care if they're wrong answers, they want them just the same." When someone comes across something not currently explained by science, and science cannot explain it immediately, they automatically assign a supernatural explanation to it.
Are people just so arrogant as to not be able to admit, or perhaps even afraid to admit, that there are just some things that have not been explained yet? Things that are just beyond our current grasp, but not necessarily beyond our potential grasp?
*sigh*
BlackGriffen
They found out about this before they sold super futuristic clothes out of this. Imagine what would have happened if this hadn't been discovered until someone tried to take a picture of junior! I know, slim chance it would have made it that far without a picture being taken of it, but still...
Luckily, it's only a specific type of nanotube that's vulnerable. The double walled ones are supposedly not vulnerable to this problem. I would still like them to test it against ultraviolet and infrared flashes, and x-rays (imagine going to the dentist's office and catching fire!).
BlackGriffen
I can't mod, so I'll just respond with kudos!
BlackGriffen
Good thinking, I hadn't considered the ionosphere, but that's an engineering detail. Claiming that it isn't possible to run a wire through it is like claiming that the the Panama Canal couldn't be built (very similar situations if you think about it, more later). I'll outline one possible solution. The ionosphere is heavily charged, right? Is it like a big capacitor or just a big charged sphere? The difference is minor, it just effects the final form of the solution, not the concept behind it. In short, it would use the same idea as the locks used to make the Panama Canal: The cable would be a series of pairs of wires, heavily insulated, that have inductors at each end to isolate the system (as far as electrical charge goes), and are maintained at a voltage such that the insulation is sufficient to prevent discharge of the ionosphere. If the ionosphere is charged shell-like, the charge would be pulled from the ground. Capacitor-like is even easier since you'll need one section at high voltage and one at low. This, of course, leaves out a ton of engineering details like: how to make the cable strong enough (esp since it can't be made out of metal; carbon fibers are one thing that comes to mind), how many sections of what type to have, how much power would be dissipated maintaining the charge, etc. That's for people with more knowledge and time than I have, though.
Oh, yes, the similarity with Panama is, as I mentioned, the lock system. The other similarity is that if the canal had been built Suez style, as the French originally planned, it might have screwed Europe and the Eastern U.S. When South and North America weren't joined, the weather was very different because the gulf stream went in to the Pacific. IIRC, connecting the two continents is what warmed Europe, created the Sahara Desert, etc. So they are similar in weight of consequent as well.
BlackGriffen
"Sorry I don't believe, hey guys we are talking of a Pentium 733 with 64Mb. Does it cost 500$?."
No, but the Nvida GF3+ (it's a little more than a GF3) with the chipset, plus the hard drive, plus breakage (which is probably higher than other console makers due to the relative fragility of a hard drive), etc. all point to a unit cost of somewhere around $400 at the beginning of the console's life. And a unit cost of $400 means that M$ would be losing more than $100 when selling it retail (remember, you need to consider the store's cut too) for $300.
They may have gotten costs down further since then, but I doubt that they have it below $300 (still selling at a loss, mind you).
BlackGriffen
"Selling below cost is a busines stratagy that should have died with the dot-com'ers."
Bad news. Loss leaders are an old business strategy. Automotive stores, for instance, sell motor oil at virtually nil profit or less. Grocery stores advertise sales on some items, but make up for it on others. It would be stupid to not sell the consoles on at least razor thin margins to try to get a big installed user base so that you can sell more software. Console companies don't really make money on the consoles, and they never have. They make money because they take a cut of the profits of all the games sold for their console. So even if they lose, say, $50 on the console, they make it up and then some if they make $10 on each game and the person buys more than 5 games over the time they own the console (most do).
BlackGriffen
First of all, that darn atmosphere absorbs a lot of it. Second, that's the energy that keeps you warm and feeds you (plants don't live off of love, you know).
The only way the moon as power source will be practicable will be if we move up there or figure out how to get that energy down here. Neither one is any easy task. You can pretty much forget about the first, and the second involves crazy plans with microwaves. What happens when the aiming device gets hit by a meteor, and the microwaves fry some poor shmuck? oops. Not to mention the amount of power that such a system would lose sending the signal through the atmosphere.
The only way I see space based power being practicable is with some sort of geo-synchronous elevator (the ones that are connected to the planet by a metal cable in sci-fi). Then you could put solar panels, fission/fusion or pretty much any other type of power plant up there, and just let the wires carry it down with a whole lot less risk than a microwave beam.
Don't hold your breath for any practicable space based power in our time, though.
BlackGriffen
M$ was already selling at a hefty loss (for some reason $100-$200 dollars comes to mind, but I'm not certain). This is standard practice in the console industry, though: sell the console as a loss-leader to make up profits in software royalties. Sony does it. Nintendo does it (though to a lesser extent). They were already basically dumping the XBoxes, and now they're trying to avalanche them.
Hopefully they get sued, and are forced to sell at cost >:).
BlackGriffen
These jag-offs want the ease of linking, but don't want others to link to them. It's like putting up a sign on a public street, and then telling people not to give each other directions to reach the sign that don't pass the other signs posted. There are numerous ways to make it so that content needs to be accessed sequentially, and the onus is on the owner of the content to not simply put the stuff out in the open!
I wonder if authors of regular books bitch about readers who read then last chapter first. What legal right does the author have to dictate how the work is used, as long as it isn't used commercially or taken credit for?
BlackGriffen
From the article: "Congress is examining bundled software and related issues. In 1999, and again in 2001, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., introduced legislation to force spyware distributors to get permission and notify people with a detailed description of the information they're collecting. No committee has picked up the bill, but broader consumer notice and privacy concerns are showing up in a compromise Internet privacy legislation soon to be introduced by Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C."
Watch this jack-@ss like a hawk! Who here wants to bet he's going to tack the SSSCA on to this thing, call it a, "Consumer privacy bill," and try to sneak it in that way? I wouldn't trust that man to be a janitor in city hall.
Another thing that I just love that they mention are the, "modify without notice or consent," clauses. Does that mean that if they change the contract to, "By clicking I agree, you agree to be an indentured servant for not less than 10, and not more than 10000 years," it's legally binding? An agreement, by it's very nature, cannot be modified without consent of both parties involved, or it isn't an agreement.
BlackGriffen
I would advise against using this if you want your memory to function. It's still probably just a theory, but I still remember hearing the most probable explanation for the brain's need to sleep that I've ever heard. Basically, the theory goes that when you enter deep sleep (i.e. non-REM sleep) your brain is literally wiring new connections: shifting memories to long term storage, connections are reinforced with more connections, etc. Your brain then goes in to REM sleep to test those connections, which is why REM sleep seems pretty random, but is often related to what's going on in your life.
Some evidence for this: there is a specific type of autism (I can't remember the name) that baffled researchers until they started monitoring the EEG's at night. The researchers found out that the people with this type of autism were literally going in to seizures at night, at least they were experiencing the "electrical storm" in their brains that characterize a seizure. The researchers put the patients on anti-epilepsy medication, and it cleared up the symptoms right away. As the theory goes, the brain was using all of it's connections every night, preventing unused/unneeded connections from atrophying. So the patient was literally unable to forget anything, but also didn't have any more room for more connections.
The moral of the story (considering that only a fool wouldn't realize that these pills won't be more abused than Viagra)? Don't use/abuse these pills if you want to be able to remember/learn anything long-term.
BlackGriffen
So it would be Ok if they changed the page to something like, "In my opinion, it would damage the railway badly if someone were to..."? Violating the spirit of the law but sticking to the letter you say? Well, that's Ok because the German Constitution obviously violates the spirit of free speech whilst maintaining a resemblance to the letter of it.
Let me spell it out to you: the spirit of free speech is that the government is not permitted to regulate the flow of information. Controlling all information is tyranny just as surely as a Gestapo or some other secret police. It is a far more insidious tyranny, in fact, because it is a hidden tyranny, where the prisoners can injure themselves on the bars because they are not permitted to see them.
If the government is permitted to regulate the flow of factual information that it does not like, then it will not permit people to inform others about government graft and corruption, etc.
If you want to discuss pedophiles, remember that pedos are a much smaller problem than a government tyranny (in terms of the number of people it effects). Tyranny control has to be done first, then the pedophiles can be dealt with (laws such as victimizing children, aiding and abetting, etc.).
BlackGriffen
Plants actually switch over to metabolizing oxygen in to CO2 at night, so that over a 24 hr cycle, plants do very little to change CO2 to oxygen, except for any energy stored.
The vast majority of O2, IIRC, comes from microorganisms in the ocean. So if CO2 is building up, we may be polluting the oceans too much, or the little buggers may just not be able to keep up.
My problem is how the machine was presented. They said something to the effect of "Trap CO2 with lime, heat lime to let out and bottle, repeat." The energy to heat the lime has to come from somewhere, where will it come from? If they burn anything for that energy, they'll operate at a loss (guaranteed). Solar? Wind? On site nuclear reactor? How are they going to minimize the loss of lime as the thing operates? Just engineering concerns, I suppose, but there are lots of things that are possible except for "engineering concerns."
BlackGriffen
Here's hoping that just such a thing comes to pass. The FCC could be a sticking point, but if it's possible to use those, I think they're called, UWB radio broadcasters to get around FCC detection (I doubt it, though, since they don't need to read you're signal, just pinpoint it, and a large network would require the connections to remain open longer than a spy would need), we might be able to build up a ham internet! It's a beautiful dream, maybe someday we'll be able to make it a reality.
It'll never have the capacity of the fat pipes, mind you, but it would do for usenet and other text mediums, and it might even permit some file sharing.
Who knows...
BlackGriffen
I thought that there was a bandwidth surplus? If that's true, then why is it so expensive? Someone should look into this, because I'd bet there are some seriously sleazy deals going on here to keep the price higher than demand justifies. If bandwidth is so expensive, then WTF is Hollings doing trying to encourage broadband adoption? I know, TANSTAAFL, but that doesn't mean that there isn't such a thing as price fixing at unrealistic levels for the market and such. Damn, the future of the internet is turning out to be truly $hitty:
pay to connect
pay for the amount of data you download
pay for the content of the data
pay every time you view the content of the data
and you have to do this from a crippled computer to boot (you think the internet will be immune from the CPTBA? Ha! You won't be "permitted to connect to the internet with a computer without DRM, and there will be stiff penalties if the network detects you trying to connect with a DRMless computer [small prediction of mine]).
Damn, that future sucks. Maybe I should consider moving to Russia, China, or maybe just become some hermit like those gun nuts, though I'll be a computer nut, if crap like this comes to pass. If I'm lucky, they'll be colonizing Mars before I die, and I can go there. I'll need to stockpile some good, old fashioned paper books, though, to keep myself occupied. This all, of course, assumes that Canada, Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, France, and Japan all follow the U.S. lead, since I think I could live in any of those places before I move to Russia or China.
Bah! Yeah, I'm just bitching.
BlackGriffen
Something good came out of Brittney Speare's career! Now maybe I can be a teen idol pop start too!
:D
BlackGriffen
The Constitution doesn't say I have a right to wipe my own @ss, either. Fortunately, the framers of the Constitution weren't that stupid:
Amendment IX
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
What needs to be done is a clarification on just what exactly copyright is. As near as I can tell, this is what it should be: authors and inventors shall be rewarded with a monopoly on the sale and distribution of their respective works. Infringement of copyright then becomes a theft of market. Unfortunately, with Washington so thoroughly bought and paid for, I doublt that we'll see that kind of system any time soon.
BlackGriffen
Carl Sagan quote.
BlackGriffen
Leave it to the Dutch, the only people I know of who have sensible laws about marijuana (no worse than alcohol) and prostitution (consenting adults, who just happen to consent for commercial reasons rather than emotional/hormonal ones). That little sub-ocean level country is probably about as close to a libertarian country as we're likely to see. Well, on social issues anyway. Here's hoping the U.$. doesn't get all self-righteous on the Netherlands.
BlackGriffen
If you had amino acids forming in deep ocean, then the lack of ozone layer wouldn't be a problem, would it? (honest question, sorry it can be read as rhetorical) As for the high oxygen levels in our atmosphere, is it possible that life is necessary to do that? I'm no chemist, but it's my understanding that oxygen is highly reactive, and thus incredibly good at 'oxidizing' (pun intended) things. It strikes me as odd that any planet would have a significant amount of O2 without some process putting it there (just like Cl2 isn't abundant). Thus it would stand to reason that on possible reason life spent so long in the oceans was because that the life in the ocean had to liberate enough O2 to get an ozone layer set up. It's my understanding, also, that the organism's work would simply be undone as the chemicals were released when it died. Thus, the formation of large carbon deposits (read: coal, oil, natural gas, and that methane impregnated ice) may have played a critical role in cooling the planet down; that is, assuming that the sun's temperature hasn't varied a whole lot over the past billion years or so (unlikely).
Just the musings of a college student who really should be sleeping.
BlackGriffen
Nice, he knows enough to eliminate the amateurs. Still lots of ways around anything he cooks up, though: one, degrade quality. Any watermark that a human can't detect will be destroyed by only a marginal loss in quality. Two, don't let the computer know what your recording. All inputs are essentially fast voltage meters. All you need is a sufficiently fast input with enough range and sensitivity. Make sure the output goes in to a collection of raw binary files, and from there it is just coming with home brewed software solutions (taking away the ability to even write programs is far too totalitarian). Don't let the software know what it is manipulating either; it's just a large stream of numbers in a big arithmetic problem. Removing the water mark is just trial and error from there. Three: isolate the computer. It will report you over the internet if you try to disassemble it? Unplug it. It will "scream for help" via radio frequencies? Stick it in a room with walls lined with aluminum foil. Four: file already on your hard drive? Erase the file, then alloc the memory the file was in to a new file that begins before the old file did. You can now edit the binary to your heart's content. One and two are sufficient, three and four are icing on the cake. It may be possible to short out whatever hardware they put in the machine so that it always returns a, "go ahead and copy," signal. Ultimately they'll either have to eliminate the programmable computer entirely, leaving the public with media viewers, or fail. Considering the black market and the existing technology base, this is not realistically possible.
Barring a black market (assuming the CBDTPA has somehow been passed and effectively enforced world wide), it will come down to analog signal processing and trial and error. Simply filter selected frequencies until I've hacked the watermark beyond recognition without effecting the music. Barring that, I'll do one of the following: move to another country that will let me keep my freedoms, run for office, and/or say, "Screw you guys, I'm reading a good old fashioned book."