Alright, your correction seems valid, but it still sounds like these things were legal to sell (although an investigation is reasonable).
More importantly, it strikes me that being the "department of homeland security" ought to make you worry about "homeland security," not customs issues. Perhaps it was a mistake to move customs into homeland security at all? Or perhaps homeland security is an overbroad concept, and theere should just be one little "department of potential terrirism analysis" which runs simulations, and makes suggestions to other more traditional departments. Heck, they could even smuggle things themselves, just to prove their point.
Linux does have a strong analog to AppleScript: open source. You can modify most anything.
On the one hand, a well written program, whose internal functions are libraries and whose GUI is writen in an effecient langauge (as opposed to these god aweful GUI APIs we use today), is probably far far better then AppleScript for medium sized projects, i.e. anything where you want to change the GUI. Plus, such a structured system will lend itself to "interaction with a running program" ala true AppleScript.
On the other hand, our current technology lags in terms of making programs comprehensible, and some things are hard to do that way.
In the end, AppleeScript is damn nice, no two ways about it. The following schell script grabs the session cookies from the front Safari windoww, and prints them in a manor suitable for curl.
#!/bin/bash echo -n "Set-Cookie: " osascript _EOF_ | perl -pe "s/;/\\nSet-Cookie:/g" tell application "Safari"
do JavaScript "document.cookie" in document 1 end tell _EOF_
The could deside to install filtering "for the children. Luckly, there are enough legal issues involved in filtering at the neighborhood level that the home owners association would likely just offer a filtering proxy as a service.. and (unfairly) make everyone pay for it.
The good news is that your neighbors are likely a lot of ignorent baffons when it comes to technology, so the few people who (a) are tech savy and (b) are willing to contribute the effort to the neighborhood could exercise enough power to prevent bandwidth caps. Hopefully these people would be honest enough to bill the extra bandwidth to the right people.
Anyway, the classical home owners association nazis are not a major threat here. Assuming they actually vote on things you should be able to manage things like cost quite effectivly. Heck, I say do this for phone lines too and cut your monthly phone bill in half. The real risk here is that the developer would maintain significant control over the homeowners. You could end up paying more for internet if the developer was taking a cut off the monthly service.. or taking a kickback for forcing the development to stay with a specific provider.
..about low speed scram jets. I had always been told that the shock was totally impossible bellow Mach 4. They should eventually get the speed down if its only a stability issue. AEs seem to be good at designing arround stability problems. Perhaps they could even lower it further by including compressed oxygen on the plane? The oxygen could be used to help with the standing shock.
Perhaps something like this: Normal jet engines from take off to mach n (n 4), compressed oxygen "rocket mode" version of the scram jet enginee up to mach m, real scram jet mode on up. You would get three diffrent types of engine for the cost of two.
..forbit addition of spyware. I would not be surprised to see RMS pay a lawyer to write such a lissence and I think people would use it. It might even provide a major selling point over the BSD lissence.. why anyone would use BSD is another question entirely.
Ultimatly, the lissence restrictions (GPL, no spyware, etc.) makes no diffrence to people like NeoNapster who want to distribute a signle program. They can always just buy the rights to distribute it closed source from the author. Who is going to say no to $10,000, even if it dose mean a few Windows lusers get porn pop-ups covering their desktop? The only people who the lissence effects are people like RedHat who are forced to deal with a large number of diffrent packages.
People should not risk being sent home for leaving their current job. Immigration and greencards should be biased towards (a) those with education and (b) those with a job and/or family waithing for them. If your company wants a foreign worker, said worker should be recieving a greencard.
It might not be relevent to diseases, but there are things people should be able to find out about easily. Like being about to tell the diffrence between a vericose vein and a break in the collogin due to changes in excercise habits. This might not revolutionize 99% of doctors visits from the doctors perspective, but for the large numbers of people who understand how to deal with a cold but occasionally want to know if a skin blimish is malignant, expert systems could be useful.
First, you really should factor all the government support of nuclear power when you evaluate the costs, like temporary storage, Yucca, inspection, etc. After adjusting the costs for these government programs, nuclear is about on par with wind (which dose not lag fossile fuels by much). Solar is now only about 2x as expencive too.
Second, nuclear requires large complex regulated projects to produce. Solar and wind work with large numbers of companies and instilation firms producing and installing large numbers of small objects (electric generators or solar cells). You need tallented reliabile people to build a nuclear plant. You can use a frigging mexican illegal immigrant who don't speak english to build wind stuff.
Lets make this crystal clear once and for all: humans can deal with large numbers of small things far far better. Indeed, to a large extent the large vs. small focus is why the soviet union collapsed. Perhaps more tellingly, we have the computer revolution. Remember, solar cells are produced by a photographic process. We could easily witness periods of "Moores law" applied to solar energy.
Third, wind and solar actually can be used most places on the plannet. You can simply implement them in the good places (say Texas) today and implement them in other places later with better technology.
When you come right down to it, wind and solar and far far cheaper in the long run (once you get them up and running). Nuclear dose have a few advantages though, it dose not influence the weather and you can sometimes mine Uranium without destroying large areas of land (wind and solar both require land). Wind also kills *lots* of birds if its in a migration route.
There are problems with Stargate, but you managed to miss em'.
1) The Carter-Mar'touf (sp?) thing was good character development. They even killed the guy. The Carter Jack thing was really really truely amazingly dumb. The large breasted (7 of 9) Tok'ra was also pretty stupid.
2) Invasion of the episodic technobabble: One of the cool things about Stargate is that they find cleaver solutions to hard problems, by doing some amazingly simple thing with advanced alien technology they happen to find. Blowing up the McNeil to kill a bunch of replicators was a good example. A stable of human technology in Stargate is "ships rentering from orbit tend to burn up," not exactly knock your socks off technology. Another good example, was the time they failed to save the plannet with the sun going nova, but their failed method was scientifically sound and their failure was ambiguious, so the Asguard save the plannet without telling anyone. Anyway, this has definitly gone down hill recently. Its been bad, very very bad. Carter should be seen, not heard, or we will all be reminded of the lameness of technobabble.
3) Not using Daniel enough. He was historically the most importent charater on the show. The Daniel-Jack dialog was among the best dialog available in a sci-fi show. He was also the favorit character from the fans perspective. Plot wize, his concience and the fact that he was an archeologist (and not a technobabbler) was really the main thing the show had going for it. Daniels assention would have been a perfect ending to the series. Unfortuantly, they seem to be making another seasson for some odd reason.
Ultimatly, Stargates story arc is no big deal one way or another. It was always a pretty simple show. They do seem to make an episode one season with the knoweldge that they will make an episode relating to it next season, but I don't think episodes generally depend on other episodes very much.
If your industry only has a few decades in the sun, you should monopolize everything and screw everyone over, including your customer. After that, there is no more *big* money to be made, so you can quit and go home rich.
Indeed, i'd say that perhaps its the learning to lissen to consumers which will kill the industry. Specifically, once there are real alternatives, the consumers will have a voice, and there will be no more big money to be made. Needless to say, this is a very very good thing, unlessyou happen to be a record company executive.
The U.S. gov. could always stop bying oil products itself. It can also tax the externalities caused by oil products (and significantly reduce our income taxes in the process). no one is asking it to ban oil products. We are asking it to stop subsadising oil products.
Understand, the vast majority of the "over regulation" that people bitch about is actually subsadies. Our fat lazy corperations and state governments would prefer to keep their subsadies and be regulated, to loosing the subsadies. But the corperations are not above tring to adjust the regulations to keep out smaller compeditors if t they can get away with it.
If they gave damn about the customer they would let you turn those fucking TVs off. JetBlue is all bout shoving advertismets in your face (or getting you to pay an arm and a leg for worthless programming). I was on one of their early flights with the TVs where they gave you all the programming you wanted for free. It sucked and even with my barf bag attached firmly over the TV my head still hurt from off the other TVs in the plane. I will never ever fly JetBlue again.
Tuition plus some book money is free for all Georgia residents at all state schools (assming you can keep a B average, non-trivial for most at GeorgiaTech). You can apply the money towards tuition at a private school in Georgia (like Emory), but tuition is cheap at state school, so it dose not go far at private schools. Housing is realitivly cheap at all schools in Geogria, an on campus job can pay for the cheap housing easily. When I started at GeorgiaTech, instate tuition was a bit over 2,000 per year and the same for the cheap housing. I queskly changed to the more expencive housing, so I don't know how the prices changed during the time I was there.
GT was 70:30 when I entered and 60:40 or better when I got out (4 years later). It just takes some time to work out all the old farts, especially at GT where people take forever.
Its the schools like CMU (and Caltech maybe) which have a reputations for misstreating women which you need to watch out for.
If you get into MIT, go there. If you get into Berkley, go there. If not, Georgia Tech is pretty darn good and damn cheap (free instate). No loans to pay off really kicks ass.
Yes there are oftin errors in annonced proofs, but mathematicians rarely miss serious flaws in the proof. Once you understand what is going on (and have spend years working in the area) you can make little small mistakes and avoid making big mistakes.
Frequently, the guy to announce the proof has truely understood something deep about the problem, thus making asignificant contribution. Indeed, they frequently have understood so much that the rest of the mathematical community fills in even the serious gaps if their are any. The one notable execption to this is P=NP.. lots of people have announced results for that one.
..from a language research perspective for three reasons:
a).NET gives you more newe cool toys in the object oriented world. Java was never a very serious language when it came to serious langague features.
b).NET will work with your new coll research langague, ala Haskell.
c) Microsoft is paying you to developee your new cool research langague, ala Haskell.
Ultimatly, all computer science educations is trickle down from the research langauge world, so I expect that MS has finally won the battle of the API with.NET. The only real question is, can Gnome keep up.
I'm not a conspriacy nut, but I think that privacy violations are the only possible reason for this system. Their are two perfectly good solutions which do not require modifing cars:
a) They could simulate the desired effect by increasing the gas tax and decreasing the cost of public transit during rush hour. This could work if gas is currently expencive enough to have "real value" in the UK.
This would at least simulate the effect monitarily. I'm not shure it would have the desired physcological impact, i.e. people might really avoid those times if they are getting taxed twice for driving at those hours.
b) They could also just tax the all day parking garages; thus forcing companies to charge their employees for parking permits. This would have exactly the desired effect (as they don't really care about reducing the non-all day parking trafic during rush hour).
I don't see why anyone would support this (expencive) system, unless they really just wanted to know where everyone was driving.
The story of the caster shells is great. The whole episode is just filler for the story of the casters. I just loved the idea of the casters.. as least once I saw that episode. If I ever end up DM a D&D campaign a caster like potion gun would be a good idea for a magic item based plot.
I still need to see EP 25 & 26. I have several diffrent AVIs of each, but they do not seem to play under any player I've found. I don't think I will ever take the time to see the Episodes prior to 23. The ones I saw on Toonami were just not that great.
It seems to me that the various subscription oriented sites are going to spend a lot of effort on various stupid activities. I'm specifically thinking about the endless marketing campaign Sluggy Freelance is forced to run.
It seems to me that someone should start an "interesting website" charity. They could provide hosting to sites which were deemed to "significantly improve or diversify internet culture." It would be a kind of united way for interesting web sites. The really nice thing about this type of charity is that it can seek large donations from signle sources, in addition to large numbers of small donations.
This may exist to some extent. I notice large numbers of realitivly independent online comics being hosted by the same service, but I expect that the hosting service is not a charity.
btw> The real question is would this hypothetical charity host goatse.cx. It dose add *something* to internet culture..:)
Lasers are less of aboondoggle then shooting down ICBMs with other missles. They are basically faking all the data which says they can shoot down an ICBM with a missle. I have not heard that the laser data is faked.
btw> It is possible to shoot down an ICBM with a missle.. a nuclear missle. A conventional war anti-ICBM missle can not distinguish the war head from the decoys. A nuke dose not need to.
Trade schools like devry should worry about training people to do a job as soon as they get out. Universities are supposed to worry about providing a "breadth and depth of experences necissary to truely function in a changing world." All universities should have clusters with Windows, Mac, Linux systems.. and a unix command line interface to email via telnet. They should attempt to enshure that students find all systems at least partially useful at diffrent times. Clearly, it's more importent to enshure that students learn something about the theory side of computation in cs101, but cluster diversity is a good way of reinforcing it.
How do I get all my snail mail forwarded via Vermont? I'd pay good money to have a Vermont address while I live in New Jersy if it mens I can sue or screw with any junk mailers who send me stuff.
Purely functional langauges stateless work quite well under an object oriented frame work. Yes, I know objectes are supposed to have state. Object level states are handled very well in all modern purely functional langauges via monads. I think Haskell has transioned to COM programming very nicely.
As a side note, anyone notice how all the current langague research is going on under Windows with Microsoft grants? Currently, most of the projects simultaniously support Windows and Linux, but these projects are currently focusing a lot of attention of COM and.NET. They are not even adding support for the various open source technologies like CORBA. I expect that you will find open source operating systems to be a bit behind the times langauge wize in a few years.
Cyber terrorism is not a big threat. Critical systeems break, you anoy a few customers, the market hickups, and you fix the critical systems. It's just not that big a deal.
The combination of technological dependance and technological ignorance dose have another effect which none of these Ashcroftian terrorist threat mongers will discuss: Corperations userping power from the people and governments.
Make no mistake we are going through a second "industrial revolution" along with all the negitive side effects like rober barons (Bill Gates), political bosses (corperate campaign contributions), and control of large corperations over minutia of people's lives (DeCSS, DMCA, etc.). This wave of problems is caused by corperations "getting their first" with respect to new technology.
The two fundamental technological development which are driving this wave of problems are: globilization and computers / media technology. (Yes, globilization and even trade are technologies) We must be willing to take back control over these technologies from the corperations which got there first. A few ideas to help (and incurage) are OSS, global unions, sale of foreign films in the US, not sacrificing understanding for user friendliness in software (i.e. make your kids use an OS they will learn from, not Windows), independent media sources, global enviromental policy, P2P, and even camwhores (independent entertainment media).
Jeff
btw> Various social factors, like Thacher style backlash to excessive socialism in Europe and eradication of anti-monopolgy laws (to allow American companies to grow to the same size as Japanese companies), is making this wave of problems worse then necissary.
Non-violent protests should not be met with jail time even if they are disruptive or financially costly to the protested party. If your office descided to unionize and needed to strike, they would and should try to make it as obnoxious as possible for "scabs" without actualy hurting people. Simillarly, people should be allowed to protest online via virtual sitins.
The real fine point of law here is what happens when it's a one person protest who magnifies his protests effectivness via technological tricks like a DDOS. This is really an amazingly subtil point. It would clearly be wrong to prevent a non-violent one person protest in front of your local Kmart just because the guy was some how evvective.. say he made farting noises to get people's attention. COnversly, you would definitly stop him if he were breaking windows. The DDOS attack is more like this hypothetical one person protestor was going though your checkout line, but managing to be very slow about it. Anyway, it's really a very subtil issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, your correction seems valid, but it still sounds like these things were legal to sell (although an investigation is reasonable).
More importantly, it strikes me that being the "department of homeland security" ought to make you worry about "homeland security," not customs issues. Perhaps it was a mistake to move customs into homeland security at all? Or perhaps homeland security is an overbroad concept, and theere should just be one little "department of potential terrirism analysis" which runs simulations, and makes suggestions to other more traditional departments. Heck, they could even smuggle things themselves, just to prove their point.
Linux does have a strong analog to AppleScript: open source. You can modify most anything.
/\\nSet-Cookie: /g"
On the one hand, a well written program, whose internal functions are libraries and whose GUI is writen in an effecient langauge (as opposed to these god aweful GUI APIs we use today), is probably far far better then AppleScript for medium sized projects, i.e. anything where you want to change the GUI. Plus, such a structured system will lend itself to "interaction with a running program" ala true AppleScript.
On the other hand, our current technology lags in terms of making programs comprehensible, and some things are hard to do that way.
In the end, AppleeScript is damn nice, no two ways about it. The following schell script grabs the session cookies from the front Safari windoww, and prints them in a manor suitable for curl.
#!/bin/bash
echo -n "Set-Cookie: "
osascript _EOF_ | perl -pe "s/;
tell application "Safari"
do JavaScript "document.cookie" in document 1
end tell
_EOF_
The could deside to install filtering "for the children. Luckly, there are enough legal issues involved in filtering at the neighborhood level that the home owners association would likely just offer a filtering proxy as a service.. and (unfairly) make everyone pay for it.
The good news is that your neighbors are likely a lot of ignorent baffons when it comes to technology, so the few people who (a) are tech savy and (b) are willing to contribute the effort to the neighborhood could exercise enough power to prevent bandwidth caps. Hopefully these people would be honest enough to bill the extra bandwidth to the right people.
Anyway, the classical home owners association nazis are not a major threat here. Assuming they actually vote on things you should be able to manage things like cost quite effectivly. Heck, I say do this for phone lines too and cut your monthly phone bill in half. The real risk here is that the developer would maintain significant control over the homeowners. You could end up paying more for internet if the developer was taking a cut off the monthly service.. or taking a kickback for forcing the development to stay with a specific provider.
..about low speed scram jets. I had always been told that the shock was totally impossible bellow Mach 4. They should eventually get the speed down if its only a stability issue. AEs seem to be good at designing arround stability problems. Perhaps they could even lower it further by including compressed oxygen on the plane? The oxygen could be used to help with the standing shock.
Perhaps something like this: Normal jet engines from take off to mach n (n 4), compressed oxygen "rocket mode" version of the scram jet enginee up to mach m, real scram jet mode on up. You would get three diffrent types of engine for the cost of two.
..forbit addition of spyware. I would not be surprised to see RMS pay a lawyer to write such a lissence and I think people would use it. It might even provide a major selling point over the BSD lissence.. why anyone would use BSD is another question entirely.
Ultimatly, the lissence restrictions (GPL, no spyware, etc.) makes no diffrence to people like NeoNapster who want to distribute a signle program. They can always just buy the rights to distribute it closed source from the author. Who is going to say no to $10,000, even if it dose mean a few Windows lusers get porn pop-ups covering their desktop? The only people who the lissence effects are people like RedHat who are forced to deal with a large number of diffrent packages.
People should not risk being sent home for leaving their current job. Immigration and greencards should be biased towards (a) those with education and (b) those with a job and/or family waithing for them. If your company wants a foreign worker, said worker should be recieving a greencard.
It might not be relevent to diseases, but there are things people should be able to find out about easily. Like being about to tell the diffrence between a vericose vein and a break in the collogin due to changes in excercise habits. This might not revolutionize 99% of doctors visits from the doctors perspective, but for the large numbers of people who understand how to deal with a cold but occasionally want to know if a skin blimish is malignant, expert systems could be useful.
First, you really should factor all the government support of nuclear power when you evaluate the costs, like temporary storage, Yucca, inspection, etc. After adjusting the costs for these government programs, nuclear is about on par with wind (which dose not lag fossile fuels by much). Solar is now only about 2x as expencive too.
Second, nuclear requires large complex regulated projects to produce. Solar and wind work with large numbers of companies and instilation firms producing and installing large numbers of small objects (electric generators or solar cells). You need tallented reliabile people to build a nuclear plant. You can use a frigging mexican illegal immigrant who don't speak english to build wind stuff.
Lets make this crystal clear once and for all: humans can deal with large numbers of small things far far better. Indeed, to a large extent the large vs. small focus is why the soviet union collapsed. Perhaps more tellingly, we have the computer revolution. Remember, solar cells are produced by a photographic process. We could easily witness periods of "Moores law" applied to solar energy.
Third, wind and solar actually can be used most places on the plannet. You can simply implement them in the good places (say Texas) today and implement them in other places later with better technology.
When you come right down to it, wind and solar and far far cheaper in the long run (once you get them up and running). Nuclear dose have a few advantages though, it dose not influence the weather and you can sometimes mine Uranium without destroying large areas of land (wind and solar both require land). Wind also kills *lots* of birds if its in a migration route.
There are problems with Stargate, but you managed to miss em'.
1) The Carter-Mar'touf (sp?) thing was good character development. They even killed the guy. The Carter Jack thing was really really truely amazingly dumb. The large breasted (7 of 9) Tok'ra was also pretty stupid.
2) Invasion of the episodic technobabble: One of the cool things about Stargate is that they find cleaver solutions to hard problems, by doing some amazingly simple thing with advanced alien technology they happen to find. Blowing up the McNeil to kill a bunch of replicators was a good example. A stable of human technology in Stargate is "ships rentering from orbit tend to burn up," not exactly knock your socks off technology. Another good example, was the time they failed to save the plannet with the sun going nova, but their failed method was scientifically sound and their failure was ambiguious, so the Asguard save the plannet without telling anyone. Anyway, this has definitly gone down hill recently. Its been bad, very very bad. Carter should be seen, not heard, or we will all be reminded of the lameness of technobabble.
3) Not using Daniel enough. He was historically the most importent charater on the show. The Daniel-Jack dialog was among the best dialog available in a sci-fi show. He was also the favorit character from the fans perspective. Plot wize, his concience and the fact that he was an archeologist (and not a technobabbler) was really the main thing the show had going for it. Daniels assention would have been a perfect ending to the series. Unfortuantly, they seem to be making another seasson for some odd reason.
Ultimatly, Stargates story arc is no big deal one way or another. It was always a pretty simple show. They do seem to make an episode one season with the knoweldge that they will make an episode relating to it next season, but I don't think episodes generally depend on other episodes very much.
If your industry only has a few decades in the sun, you should monopolize everything and screw everyone over, including your customer. After that, there is no more *big* money to be made, so you can quit and go home rich.
Indeed, i'd say that perhaps its the learning to lissen to consumers which will kill the industry. Specifically, once there are real alternatives, the consumers will have a voice, and there will be no more big money to be made. Needless to say, this is a very very good thing, unlessyou happen to be a record company executive.
The U.S. gov. could always stop bying oil products itself. It can also tax the externalities caused by oil products (and significantly reduce our income taxes in the process). no one is asking it to ban oil products. We are asking it to stop subsadising oil products.
Understand, the vast majority of the "over regulation" that people bitch about is actually subsadies. Our fat lazy corperations and state governments would prefer to keep their subsadies and be regulated, to loosing the subsadies. But the corperations are not above tring to adjust the regulations to keep out smaller compeditors if t
they can get away with it.
If they gave damn about the customer they would let you turn those fucking TVs off. JetBlue is all bout shoving advertismets in your face (or getting you to pay an arm and a leg for worthless programming). I was on one of their early flights with the TVs where they gave you all the programming you wanted for free. It sucked and even with my barf bag attached firmly over the TV my head still hurt from off the other TVs in the plane. I will never ever fly JetBlue again.
Tuition plus some book money is free for all Georgia residents at all state schools (assming you can keep a B average, non-trivial for most at GeorgiaTech). You can apply the money towards tuition at a private school in Georgia (like Emory), but tuition is cheap at state school, so it dose not go far at private schools. Housing is realitivly cheap at all schools in Geogria, an on campus job can pay for the cheap housing easily. When I started at GeorgiaTech, instate tuition was a bit over 2,000 per year and the same for the cheap housing. I queskly changed to the more expencive housing, so I don't know how the prices changed during the time I was there.
GT was 70:30 when I entered and 60:40 or better when I got out (4 years later). It just takes some time to work out all the old farts, especially at GT where people take forever.
Its the schools like CMU (and Caltech maybe) which have a reputations for misstreating women which you need to watch out for.
If you get into MIT, go there. If you get into Berkley, go there. If not, Georgia Tech is pretty darn good and damn cheap (free instate). No loans to pay off really kicks ass.
Yes there are oftin errors in annonced proofs, but mathematicians rarely miss serious flaws in the proof. Once you understand what is going on (and have spend years working in the area) you can make little small mistakes and avoid making big mistakes.
Frequently, the guy to announce the proof has truely understood something deep about the problem, thus making asignificant contribution. Indeed, they frequently have understood so much that the rest of the mathematical community fills in even the serious gaps if their are any. The one notable execption to this is P=NP.. lots of people have announced results for that one.
..from a language research perspective for three reasons:
.NET gives you more newe cool toys in the object oriented world. Java was never a very serious language when it came to serious langague features.
.NET will work with your new coll research langague, ala Haskell.
.NET. The only real question is, can Gnome keep up.
a)
b)
c) Microsoft is paying you to developee your new cool research langague, ala Haskell.
Ultimatly, all computer science educations is trickle down from the research langauge world, so I expect that MS has finally won the battle of the API with
I'm not a conspriacy nut, but I think that privacy violations are the only possible reason for this system. Their are two perfectly good solutions which do not require modifing cars:
a) They could simulate the desired effect by increasing the gas tax and decreasing the cost of public transit during rush hour. This could work if gas is currently expencive enough to have "real value" in the UK.
This would at least simulate the effect monitarily. I'm not shure it would have the desired physcological impact, i.e. people might really avoid those times if they are getting taxed twice for driving at those hours.
b) They could also just tax the all day parking garages; thus forcing companies to charge their employees for parking permits. This would have exactly the desired effect (as they don't really care about reducing the non-all day parking trafic during rush hour).
I don't see why anyone would support this (expencive) system, unless they really just wanted to know where everyone was driving.
The story of the caster shells is great. The whole episode is just filler for the story of the casters. I just loved the idea of the casters.. as least once I saw that episode. If I ever end up DM a D&D campaign a caster like potion gun would be a good idea for a magic item based plot.
I still need to see EP 25 & 26. I have several diffrent AVIs of each, but they do not seem to play under any player I've found. I don't think I will ever take the time to see the Episodes prior to 23. The ones I saw on Toonami were just not that great.
It seems to me that the various subscription oriented sites are going to spend a lot of effort on various stupid activities. I'm specifically thinking about the endless marketing campaign Sluggy Freelance is forced to run.
:)
It seems to me that someone should start an "interesting website" charity. They could provide hosting to sites which were deemed to "significantly improve or diversify internet culture." It would be a kind of united way for interesting web sites. The really nice thing about this type of charity is that it can seek large donations from signle sources, in addition to large numbers of small donations.
This may exist to some extent. I notice large numbers of realitivly independent online comics being hosted by the same service, but I expect that the hosting service is not a charity.
btw> The real question is would this hypothetical charity host goatse.cx. It dose add *something* to internet culture..
Lasers are less of aboondoggle then shooting down ICBMs with other missles. They are basically faking all the data which says they can shoot down an ICBM with a missle. I have not heard that the laser data is faked.
btw> It is possible to shoot down an ICBM with a missle.. a nuclear missle. A conventional war anti-ICBM missle can not distinguish the war head from the decoys. A nuke dose not need to.
Trade schools like devry should worry about training people to do a job as soon as they get out. Universities are supposed to worry about providing a "breadth and depth of experences necissary to truely function in a changing world." All universities should have clusters with Windows, Mac, Linux systems.. and a unix command line interface to email via telnet. They should attempt to enshure that students find all systems at least partially useful at diffrent times. Clearly, it's more importent to enshure that students learn something about the theory side of computation in cs101, but cluster diversity is a good way of reinforcing it.
How do I get all my snail mail forwarded via Vermont? I'd pay good money to have a Vermont address while I live in New Jersy if it mens I can sue or screw with any junk mailers who send me stuff.
Purely functional langauges stateless work quite well under an object oriented frame work. Yes, I know objectes are supposed to have state. Object level states are handled very well in all modern purely functional langauges via monads. I think Haskell has transioned to COM programming very nicely.
.NET. They are not even adding support for the various open source technologies like CORBA. I expect that you will find open source operating systems to be a bit behind the times langauge wize in a few years.
As a side note, anyone notice how all the current langague research is going on under Windows with Microsoft grants? Currently, most of the projects simultaniously support Windows and Linux, but these projects are currently focusing a lot of attention of COM and
Cyber terrorism is not a big threat. Critical systeems break, you anoy a few customers, the market hickups, and you fix the critical systems. It's just not that big a deal.
The combination of technological dependance and technological ignorance dose have another effect which none of these Ashcroftian terrorist threat mongers will discuss: Corperations userping power from the people and governments.
Make no mistake we are going through a second "industrial revolution" along with all the negitive side effects like rober barons (Bill Gates), political bosses (corperate campaign contributions), and control of large corperations over minutia of people's lives (DeCSS, DMCA, etc.). This wave of problems is caused by corperations "getting their first" with respect to new technology.
The two fundamental technological development which are driving this wave of problems are: globilization and computers / media technology. (Yes, globilization and even trade are technologies) We must be willing to take back control over these technologies from the corperations which got there first. A few ideas to help (and incurage) are OSS, global unions, sale of foreign films in the US, not sacrificing understanding for user friendliness in software (i.e. make your kids use an OS they will learn from, not Windows), independent media sources, global enviromental policy, P2P, and even camwhores (independent entertainment media).
Jeff
btw> Various social factors, like Thacher style backlash to excessive socialism in Europe and eradication of anti-monopolgy laws (to allow American companies to grow to the same size as Japanese companies), is making this wave of problems worse then necissary.
Non-violent protests should not be met with jail time even if they are disruptive or financially costly to the protested party. If your office descided to unionize and needed to strike, they would and should try to make it as obnoxious as possible for "scabs" without actualy hurting people. Simillarly, people should be allowed to protest online via virtual sitins.
The real fine point of law here is what happens when it's a one person protest who magnifies his protests effectivness via technological tricks like a DDOS. This is really an amazingly subtil point. It would clearly be wrong to prevent a non-violent one person protest in front of your local Kmart just because the guy was some how evvective.. say he made farting noises to get people's attention. COnversly, you would definitly stop him if he were breaking windows. The DDOS attack is more like this hypothetical one person protestor was going though your checkout line, but managing to be very slow about it. Anyway, it's really a very subtil issue.