It really shouldn't surprise anyone that The Skeptical Environmentalist was rebuked and most of what the guy had to say was bogus.
Even the right neo-liberal economy worshippers who view anything that could cut into profits as inherently evil have stopped arguing that human activity is causing wide-spread climate change. (I love how the ignorant media loves to call these people 'conservative'. Look the word up in a damn dictionary, a conservative - someone who hopes to conserve the status quo and is suspicious of the mechanisms and out comes of change - would be AGAINST climate change.... Sorry.)
The official Wallstreet / Whitehouse message is now, "There's nothing we can do about it and it would be too expensive to try. It'll hurt the economy so we'll just have to adapt. So go about your business and, oh, hey look, a Cadillac Escalade!" When these guys admit that the argument against climate change can be dismissed as a canard...
The issue is not, is there accelerated climate change as a result of man's activities? This issue is how bad are things going to get, how much will we loose and what can and should we be doing to stop or slow it down. Oh course, the people who are most directly responsible are the same people who will be the least affected.
I didn't say undoubtably, and if you read my post again you'll see that I didn't.
If you're going to form opinions you can either beak off on speculation, or you can go with what you know. Any discussion of human-alien first contact is going automatically be anthropocentric because we are human, all we know is humanity and as of yet the aliens are an unknown quantity. So what we know: * Humanity is an agressive, competitive species. * Pretty much all historical instances of first contact between human cultures have been instances of tragedy or war (take a serious look at history). When there is an inequality of technology, tragedy, when the cultures are relatively equal - war. * Encounters with new animal species almost always go badly for the non-humans, regardless of the intelligence of the species. Dogs and cats are pretty much the only animals in all of history to do well by associating with humans.
* Finally, any potential alien civilization is a complete unknown. Maybe they'll be able to hold their own, maybe not... but if you're a betting man, bet on the species you already know is a viscious effective killer.
Oh, and as a side note the odds of meeting a technologically equal civilization are close to zero. Either we come to them, or they come to us. The chances that we meet half way...
Actually, I thought of that. But frankly, we seem to be damn good at war, especially Americans and Europeans and it's likely those are the people that will head up any future space missions. Also, we humans are the ones with the legacy of killing off species and cultures with a vengence.
Still, it might be us who get screwed, but cliches asside, I'd put my money on the humans. I still love and remember that quote from DS9 when Quark and some other Ferengi went back in time to Roswell.
"You humans detonated nuclear weapons in your own atmosphere!?!"
We're a psychotic pack of killing machines who would gleefully destroy ourselves to take out the other guy. That kind of determined destruction has got to be rare amongst species which survive. (Or... the fact that humans couldn't manage to kill themselves off means that nothing else is likely to manage either.)
Look at every historical example of first contact between two cultures, especially two cultures of unequal technological advancement. The historical legacy of unmitigated disaster would be an excellent reason for aliens to avoid us and for us to avoid aliens. It might even be a good reason for them to avoid each other.
Would we really want to repeat what happened when the Spanish colonized / conquered the Americas and almost completely wiped out the native Mexica. I would hope that for most super-civilizations, one or two instances of unintentional genocide would be enough to encourage them to stay home.
Look at us, if we made contact with another species we'd turn them into a thrid-world planet. Buy our products or DIE!!! Adopt our economic models or DIE!!!
Maybe different species are not really meant to get along, or maybe there is no evolutionary advantage early on of developing "get along with other species" traits. Either way, I do honestly fear that whatever unlucky civilization we encounter first - we're going to wipe out, whether we mean to or not.
Caught a great book once called "The Ambidextrous Universe" that had a chapter on alien life and the forms it would take. (Book itself was about symmetry and asymmetry in nature - very cool.) It made the argument that if we encounter non-plantlike alien life it will likely be recognizable and that the basic 'animal' forms on earth are likely universal. Argument went thusly:
If a creature is motile, then symmetry dictates basics. There is rarely any functional difference between left and right but there is a difference between forward and backward. So animals would likely have a front and a back, but would be symmetrical along a dorsal axis. (There are exceptions to this in nature, creatures with a spiral morphology like the conch, or creatures like the fiddler crab, but these are rare exceptions.) Since front is generally more emphasized than back, sensory organs are more likely to be collected near the front. Further, if the animal feeds (which seems likely) then it seems logical that sensory organs would be concentrated around the feeding orifice. Further, since minimal distance between sensory organs and the 'brain' (assuming aliens have brains) is more efficient for reacting faster to the environment, it seems likely that the mouth and forward facing sensory organs would be concentrated on a head-analog. (A face, basically.)
The argument wasn't claiming to be definitive, but rather that the recognizable forms of symmetry, faces set on the front of heads, heads at the front of bodies (and set high up to elevate the sensory organs to extend range) have a logic to them that would likely be repeated.
The Oxygen in earths atmosphere came from the earliest living organisms. They metabolized CO2 and released waste Oxygen. Oxygen is too reactive to nature naturally in large quantities in an atmosphere. If we find Oxygenated worlds, we found life of some kind, and life that has been established for billions of years no less.
Is excellent for small hands. My 12 year old brother has one and he does fine with it. He also baby sits kids for my mother's friends and I've seen him teaching kids as young as 5 - 7 to play Pikmin. Also, the Game Cube, although far from lacking in adult titles (Eternal Darkness was great) is probably the strongest console for kids games.
I work as a security auditor for an accounting firm. I go in ahead of the auditors and sign off on the systems in use in the company and basically give the OK for the auditors to come in and do their job.
If I discovered that a company hadn't taken as simple and easily implementable security precaution as passworded access to systems, I would simply say in my report that the auditors could not rely on the evidence provided to them from the company.
This is VERY VERY VERY bad. CIO's can, have and do get fired over less than this.
Auditing standards for security are (frustratingly) low, and yet if you don't pass them and you're a publicly traded company - you're fucked. If you're a private firm, a partnership or anything where someone else doesn't actually own the company - do what you want. If you're public, you're assuming an ENORMOUS risk. (Here I mean risk in the business-audit sense of the word.)
Basically, if you implement this, it will last up until the next audit at which time the people responsible for this decision will be forced to recant and if they don't have the word "chief" in their title, they'll probably be fired.
Oh yes, how they have declined. Or at least I think so... they suck now and for some reason I assume that wasn't always the case.
I used to sell computers at Future Shop (a shitty Canadian retailer ala Best Buy in the US) and we would get shipments where head office would tell us to expect 1 in 10 to 1 in 6 be be defective right out of the box. At least twice, we got shipments where every other machine was defective. I started tracking returns and warrantee issues that would come back to the store and I would honestly estimate that some manufacturers (who rhyme with Bompaq and Baych-pee and eBachines) would hit over 25% defective units in the first year on some models.
Manufactures need to cut costs everywhere they can and quality just doesn't seem to matter. When I would get a serious geek (who was some how clueless enough to be in a Future Shop) I would quietly refer them to a local clone dealer with a rep for quality work and using good components
This summer I finally got my ass in gear and went back to school for those two credits I needed for my Anthropology major. Had to take an archaeology course and decided on one called Alberta Archaeology. I figured it would be interesting as Alberta really acted as the gateway to the Americas for early man entering through the Ice Free Corridor.
What I ended up learning was that the Ice Free Corridor hypothesis is growing more and more tenuous as the evidence piles up. The preponderance of new archaeological evidence is starting to suggest that the first known migrants to the Americas arrived via boat, making their way down the coast from Alaska all the way to Northern California or Oregon and then pressing inland.
One of the major problems facing Archaeology of the Ancient Americas is that it seems there has to have been Pre-Clovis people somewhere in the Americas, but there is NO definitive evidence of them anywhere. The Clovis people, where ever they came from seem to have exploded onto the scene somewhere between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago nothing yet has been discovered to definitively prove that people where here before that. Every find that suggests earlier occupation of the Americas has somehow landed in controversy. (Not to say that they're not valid data, just that they're not definitive data.)
However, with each new early find, it seems more and more likely that people didn't come down through the Ice Free Corridor. The timing for the corridor to have been open just doesn't add up to the times people seem to have been here. Further, with the Ice Free Corridor hypothesis, one would expect to find most of the really old evidence in Alberta, Montana and Saskatchewan and that just isn't the case.
Generally, what churns my butter in a science fiction story is how thought provoking or insightful it can be. Greg Egan is one of my favourite authors despite the fact that his characters can be flat listless plot devices that are there to put a human face on an abstract concept. (In fairness, this does not speak to all his characters or stories.)
Science fiction allows authors to explore themes that come off as contrived at best in regular fiction: explorations of human nature, information theory, the role of power in nature, the true implications of the existence of X. My rule of thumb is that if a story can leave you pondering something, it's a successful science fiction story.
That doesn't excuse some of the piss poor hacks who have a cool idea and a word processor. Neato factor does not a successful story make. A harlequin romance could be brilliantly written (in theory I guess, I'll never know) and the best story concept ever could be given to the Eye-of-Aragon guy.
I guess what I'm getting at is that if all the other elements of a good story - interesting & believable characters, gripping plot, well developed setting, good writing are there what separates a good read from a brilliant story is the underlying concept.
That said, Ian Banks (anything), Neal Stephenson (Snowcrash and Diamond Age), Orson Scott Card (Pastwatch and Enders Game), Harry Turtledove (Guns of the South, How Few Remain and the Great War Series), Peter Hogan (The Giants Series and some of his other stuff), Joe Haldeman (Forever War), Peter F. Hamilton (Reality Dysfunction) and Robert J. Sawyer (Calculating God, The Terminal Experiment and Factoring Humanity) are off the top of my head examples of great vs. good science fiction.
Seems that every few years someone figures out that something in nature that was perviously though to have no function or a trivial function to particular process is actually critically important. "Junk genes" was another way of saying "I don't understand this so I'm going to pretend that it doesn't matter."
No surprise that the "junk genes" in one of the most complicated structures in nature - DNA - that has been fine tuning itself for billions of years, turn out to have a function and a critically important one. True insight will always come from people with enough courage to say, "I don't know."
and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.
Seriously?
Do the guys at Microsoft seriously consider the PC to be a most reliable of entities? Man, you think after years of running Windows you'd know better.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up, and wouldn't be that useful day to day unless you were carrying it with you. I forget to take pictures, how am I going to remember to upload the pictures I actually take? And has anyone ever gone back and reread their old email...BORING... unless you're narsisistic who cares what you posted on/. two years ago.
This thing sounds good in theory, but in practice people just are not taking that many pictures or writing that many memorable letters. This will be a product for the vain, the famous and the rich who don't know what else to spend their money on. ------
There have been numerous parodies of both you and of Star Trek. If you were given carte blanche to parody anyone or anything - star in a Galaxy Quest equivalent of some other series or movie, what would you parody? Why? Any ideas on how you'd approach it?
Your Take on Subversive Themes
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Ask William Shatner
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Looking back on the show with a bit of a post-modernist eye there were some really interesting subversive themes laced into the ST plot. The occasional anti-capitalist themes, the concept of the Federation as a nearly perfect communist society, the promotion of secular humanism and multiple episodes where the plot was literally man against god. There were the racial harmony themes, anti-religious themes and the prime directive itself could have been taken as a statement against cultural imperialism. All of this on tv in a world where Joe McCarthy was still a very fresh memory.
Now I know that Rodenberry was responsible for most of it, but how did it feel to be caught up in something like that during the 60's? (This is such a set up for the response, "I was just a tv show.")
Sorry, auditing specific terminology there is going to sink me. An audit program is usually a 2 to 20 page document (average 5-ish pages) that consists of a series of questions to ask, things to check and what documentation to request. You follow the audit program and you can proove your audit opinions.
So, if I find shitty security (doesn't matter what OS) I report on it. If I'm satisfied, I report on it.
Problem I encounter is that Win2K, I haven't found a good audit document (program) yet. So even if there is great Win2K security (which ALWAYS means it's bundled in with other security, and ALWAYS means they have a good security policy), I have a hard time prooving it. Similarly, when I find bad Win2k securuty and am called on to proove it (proof in an audit opinion sense, not the same as trying to explain active directories to senior management) I have a hard time.
Recently I've been working as an IT auditor for an accounting firm, and I've found myself completely at loggerheads for finding a good Win2k audit program for security. (Here I mean program as in a sequence of checks that I follow, not compiled program.)
The trouble I find is that I'm able to evaluate the level diligence the IT staff at any given company has taken, I'm able to audit the level of (attempted) compliance to any documented security policy and I'm even able to assess internal security configuration and controls.
Ultimately though, I'm signing off on audit opinions that ALWAYS says
"name of firm" has observed
adequate Windows 2000 security..."
and feeling a little sick about it. If we got sued, I could provide documentation proving that I diligently checked security and based on "accepted" business standards the security was implement at a reasonable level. Basically, I could cover my ass.
Is there anyone out there that has an audit program for Win2k that they would feel comfortable using to tell the auditors that they can rely on the numbers? Just curious.
Oh, BTW, the auditors could care less about Common Criteria and even though they're thick as pudding about IT, they're still smart enough o bring in outside people when they need to rely on any computer's numbers.
Geek Horse Racing Joke
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Science Askew
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· Score: 2
A physicist, a mathematician and a statistician all go to the horse races, each assuring the other that they have an infallible system to pick the winners.
They agree to meet at the end of the day to share their stories of victories.
At the end of the day they meet in a pub to talk. The mathematician laments, "I had it all perfectly worked out. I had devised a calculation that factored in horse muscle mass, jocky wieght, turf consistency on the track and a dozen other variables. It was perfect and yet I didn't even win above chance."
The statistician nods, "I did an analysis of every horse, jocky, weather condition track rating and previous race and was sure I had the winning formula and still won at chance."
The physistist smiles, pulls out a HUGE role of bills and peels a few off. "I guess drinks are on me tonight."
The other two look at the money and one demands, "What's your system?"
The physisists pulls out a pen and paper and starts, "First, I assume that all horses are identical and spherical..."
This seems to happen around once or twice a year in Canada. Some beaurocrat or treaty negotiator gets excited, puts something up for review and once the government figures out that it would violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (this clearly would) or just generally piss people off, it gets dropped.
Look at the knee jerk terrorism laws that were suggested after 9/11. Once the MPs looked at them seriously, cooler heads prevailed nothing happened. Same shit all over again.
As for the Charter of Rights,this law would easily be shot down in court on a number of counts including:
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.
7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.
24. (1) Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.
(2) Where, in proceedings under subsection (1), a court concludes that evidence was obtained in a manner that infringed or denied any rights or freedoms guaranteed by this Charter, the evidence shall be excluded if it is established that, having regard to all the circumstances, the admission of it in the proceedings would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
Any law that infringes on this even a little will get thrown out by the courts the first time the police come hunting for a search warrant. The fact that the ISPs are not stupid means they will not be willing to shell out the cash for an infrastructute of a law that would collapse on the first court challenge.
The thing is, for someone to end up ordering penis enlargement pills over the internet, there have to be several acts of ignorance and failures of common sense in a row. They need to not know what spam is, not know anything about medical techniques, not realize that if penis enlargement pills worked they would be in the news and bigger than viagra. They then need to actually send the money.
Ignorance on that many levels is the reason we have the word 'stupid'.
Main Entry: 1stupid
Pronunciation: 'stü-p&d, 'styü-
Function: adjective
1 a : slow of mind : OBTUSE b : given to unintelligent decisions or acts : acting in an unintelligent or careless manner c : lacking intelligence or reason : BRUTISH
2 : dulled in feeling or sensation : TORPID
3 : marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting:
Being uninformed is naive, making uninformed decisions is stupid.
If you want to be fair, you might say that some of the people had that ernest combination of gulibility, wishful thinking and innocent ignorance... but 500,000 people. That is a clear indication of a stupid people doing stupid things.
That means that 500,000 people ordered penis enlargement pills!!! Five hundred thousand!!!.
If there are five hundred thousand people out there stupid enough to read their spam, then visit the web site and actually send the money... it shouldn't surprise people that the internet is full of garbage content. Oh wait, the surprised people are probably the same people who sent their $60.
The internet can't make stupid people less stupid, and frankly it can't make smart people smarter. All it can do is let smart people get at information they want faster, and stupid people get to the charlatans faster. Anyone who is really surprised by any of this, please send me $40 and I'll send you my left over penis enlargement pills.
Check out Nausicaa.net for more about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. These people are brilliant, and Disney bought the North American distribution rights because they're (as much as I hate them) good business people. Porco Rosso, Mononoke Hime, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, The Castle of Cagliostro and Tonari No Totoro are all examples of pure brilliance.
This is what Animation should be. Also, Disney's trailer sucks, ignore it, the trailer for the French release was WAY better, check out the official France site or follow the "La Fiche du Film" link here (they took down the really good trailer, damn). There are other trailers around, anyone got links?
"[These films] are innocents in a jungle, ready to be ambushed by anyone," says Jack Valenti.
Those POOR films! I can just see "The Matrix" walking "When Harry Met Sally" home after a nice night out when all of a sudden out jumps ME, ready to ruthlessly make a copy of innocent old 'Harry Met' for my own use. We're animals, you hear me, ANIMALS!!!
Oh, wait, Jack was being mellow dramatic... ah... I get it now. Never mind.
Seriously, they can legislate, tax, rant, criminalize and encrypt all they want. They'll never win and they'll still be Hollywood so they'll still be making billions. They can spend millions of dollars figuring it out and push people's freedoms to the limit. People will still 'pirate' songs for their own use, third world distribution pirates will still get away with it, good artists will do well, bad ones won't and life will go on.
Pay them no mind, help with the circumvention when you can and support the people who are standing up to this non-sense. But never will there be an underground file sharing 'le resistance' and no matter how hard or illegal it becomes, we'll still be listening to our mp3s at work.
My keys, wallet, watch, PDA, Blackberry, Cel AND my crypto leash. Great.
Anyone who is concerned enough about their laptop security to consider bothering with one of these should already have good crypto security in place. And preferably security where the 'key' can't be stolen off the nightstand. These will attract the gadget happy crowd and CFO's who don't understand info sec and want to see a physical product. Anyone who feels the need to be able to point to their security device shouldn't be making security decisions.
Your examples fall apart on even a cursory examination.
"If channels are publicly open, then expect to have to consume resources filtering it, just like you filter TV commercials, door-to-door salesmen, and junk mail."
TV ads, door to door salesmen and junk mailers (paper, not email) are all themselves paying to distribute their messages. Spammers are letting others foot the bill. Email may seem trivially expensive, but when a spammer sends out 10 million emails a week, there are real costs involved and the spammer is not the one paying them.
A couple of people have commented here that there is no right to not receive spam, and they are correct in that there are no rights on paper whatsoever regarding the internet. What people do have a right to do is control the resources they pay for. It's called property. Email is useless if people cannot send you a message, so you can't close it down to the outside world. However, it is totally legitimate to take steps to prevent people from abusing the system - it is totally legitimate to take steps to keep the spammers from dumping their costs on to the recipients.
Going after spammers for money it not the least bit unreasonable, they are advertising - this is an activity that should cost money. I'm not actually saying that spammers have no right to exist, I'm just saying that they have no right to expect other people to bear the cost burden of what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
It really shouldn't surprise anyone that The Skeptical Environmentalist was rebuked and most of what the guy had to say was bogus.
Even the right neo-liberal economy worshippers who view anything that could cut into profits as inherently evil have stopped arguing that human activity is causing wide-spread climate change. (I love how the ignorant media loves to call these people 'conservative'. Look the word up in a damn dictionary, a conservative - someone who hopes to conserve the status quo and is suspicious of the mechanisms and out comes of change - would be AGAINST climate change.... Sorry.)
The official Wallstreet / Whitehouse message is now, "There's nothing we can do about it and it would be too expensive to try. It'll hurt the economy so we'll just have to adapt. So go about your business and, oh, hey look, a Cadillac Escalade!" When these guys admit that the argument against climate change can be dismissed as a canard...
The issue is not, is there accelerated climate change as a result of man's activities? This issue is how bad are things going to get, how much will we loose and what can and should we be doing to stop or slow it down. Oh course, the people who are most directly responsible are the same people who will be the least affected.
Sigh.
I didn't say undoubtably, and if you read my post again you'll see that I didn't.
If you're going to form opinions you can either beak off on speculation, or you can go with what you know. Any discussion of human-alien first contact is going automatically be anthropocentric because we are human, all we know is humanity and as of yet the aliens are an unknown quantity. So what we know:
* Humanity is an agressive, competitive species.
* Pretty much all historical instances of first contact between human cultures have been instances of tragedy or war (take a serious look at history). When there is an inequality of technology, tragedy, when the cultures are relatively equal - war.
* Encounters with new animal species almost always go badly for the non-humans, regardless of the intelligence of the species. Dogs and cats are pretty much the only animals in all of history to do well by associating with humans.
* Finally, any potential alien civilization is a complete unknown. Maybe they'll be able to hold their own, maybe not... but if you're a betting man, bet on the species you already know is a viscious effective killer.
Oh, and as a side note the odds of meeting a technologically equal civilization are close to zero. Either we come to them, or they come to us. The chances that we meet half way...
Actually, I thought of that. But frankly, we seem to be damn good at war, especially Americans and Europeans and it's likely those are the people that will head up any future space missions. Also, we humans are the ones with the legacy of killing off species and cultures with a vengence.
Still, it might be us who get screwed, but cliches asside, I'd put my money on the humans. I still love and remember that quote from DS9 when Quark and some other Ferengi went back in time to Roswell.
"You humans detonated nuclear weapons in your own atmosphere!?!"
We're a psychotic pack of killing machines who would gleefully destroy ourselves to take out the other guy. That kind of determined destruction has got to be rare amongst species which survive. (Or... the fact that humans couldn't manage to kill themselves off means that nothing else is likely to manage either.)
Look at every historical example of first contact between two cultures, especially two cultures of unequal technological advancement. The historical legacy of unmitigated disaster would be an excellent reason for aliens to avoid us and for us to avoid aliens. It might even be a good reason for them to avoid each other.
Would we really want to repeat what happened when the Spanish colonized / conquered the Americas and almost completely wiped out the native Mexica. I would hope that for most super-civilizations, one or two instances of unintentional genocide would be enough to encourage them to stay home.
Look at us, if we made contact with another species we'd turn them into a thrid-world planet. Buy our products or DIE!!! Adopt our economic models or DIE!!!
Maybe different species are not really meant to get along, or maybe there is no evolutionary advantage early on of developing "get along with other species" traits. Either way, I do honestly fear that whatever unlucky civilization we encounter first - we're going to wipe out, whether we mean to or not.
Caught a great book once called "The Ambidextrous Universe" that had a chapter on alien life and the forms it would take. (Book itself was about symmetry and asymmetry in nature - very cool.) It made the argument that if we encounter non-plantlike alien life it will likely be recognizable and that the basic 'animal' forms on earth are likely universal. Argument went thusly:
If a creature is motile, then symmetry dictates basics. There is rarely any functional difference between left and right but there is a difference between forward and backward. So animals would likely have a front and a back, but would be symmetrical along a dorsal axis. (There are exceptions to this in nature, creatures with a spiral morphology like the conch, or creatures like the fiddler crab, but these are rare exceptions.) Since front is generally more emphasized than back, sensory organs are more likely to be collected near the front. Further, if the animal feeds (which seems likely) then it seems logical that sensory organs would be concentrated around the feeding orifice. Further, since minimal distance between sensory organs and the 'brain' (assuming aliens have brains) is more efficient for reacting faster to the environment, it seems likely that the mouth and forward facing sensory organs would be concentrated on a head-analog. (A face, basically.)
The argument wasn't claiming to be definitive, but rather that the recognizable forms of symmetry, faces set on the front of heads, heads at the front of bodies (and set high up to elevate the sensory organs to extend range) have a logic to them that would likely be repeated.
The Oxygen in earths atmosphere came from the earliest living organisms. They metabolized CO2 and released waste Oxygen. Oxygen is too reactive to nature naturally in large quantities in an atmosphere. If we find Oxygenated worlds, we found life of some kind, and life that has been established for billions of years no less.
Is excellent for small hands. My 12 year old brother has one and he does fine with it. He also baby sits kids for my mother's friends and I've seen him teaching kids as young as 5 - 7 to play Pikmin. Also, the Game Cube, although far from lacking in adult titles (Eternal Darkness was great) is probably the strongest console for kids games.
Well, not exactly.
I work as a security auditor for an accounting firm. I go in ahead of the auditors and sign off on the systems in use in the company and basically give the OK for the auditors to come in and do their job.
If I discovered that a company hadn't taken as simple and easily implementable security precaution as passworded access to systems, I would simply say in my report that the auditors could not rely on the evidence provided to them from the company.
This is VERY VERY VERY bad. CIO's can, have and do get fired over less than this.
Auditing standards for security are (frustratingly) low, and yet if you don't pass them and you're a publicly traded company - you're fucked. If you're a private firm, a partnership or anything where someone else doesn't actually own the company - do what you want. If you're public, you're assuming an ENORMOUS risk. (Here I mean risk in the business-audit sense of the word.)
Basically, if you implement this, it will last up until the next audit at which time the people responsible for this decision will be forced to recant and if they don't have the word "chief" in their title, they'll probably be fired.
Oh yes, how they have declined. Or at least I think so... they suck now and for some reason I assume that wasn't always the case.
I used to sell computers at Future Shop (a shitty Canadian retailer ala Best Buy in the US) and we would get shipments where head office would tell us to expect 1 in 10 to 1 in 6 be be defective right out of the box. At least twice, we got shipments where every other machine was defective. I started tracking returns and warrantee issues that would come back to the store and I would honestly estimate that some manufacturers (who rhyme with Bompaq and Baych-pee and eBachines) would hit over 25% defective units in the first year on some models.
Manufactures need to cut costs everywhere they can and quality just doesn't seem to matter. When I would get a serious geek (who was some how clueless enough to be in a Future Shop) I would quietly refer them to a local clone dealer with a rep for quality work and using good components
This summer I finally got my ass in gear and went back to school for those two credits I needed for my Anthropology major. Had to take an archaeology course and decided on one called Alberta Archaeology. I figured it would be interesting as Alberta really acted as the gateway to the Americas for early man entering through the Ice Free Corridor.
What I ended up learning was that the Ice Free Corridor hypothesis is growing more and more tenuous as the evidence piles up. The preponderance of new archaeological evidence is starting to suggest that the first known migrants to the Americas arrived via boat, making their way down the coast from Alaska all the way to Northern California or Oregon and then pressing inland.
One of the major problems facing Archaeology of the Ancient Americas is that it seems there has to have been Pre-Clovis people somewhere in the Americas, but there is NO definitive evidence of them anywhere. The Clovis people, where ever they came from seem to have exploded onto the scene somewhere between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago nothing yet has been discovered to definitively prove that people where here before that. Every find that suggests earlier occupation of the Americas has somehow landed in controversy. (Not to say that they're not valid data, just that they're not definitive data.)
However, with each new early find, it seems more and more likely that people didn't come down through the Ice Free Corridor. The timing for the corridor to have been open just doesn't add up to the times people seem to have been here. Further, with the Ice Free Corridor hypothesis, one would expect to find most of the really old evidence in Alberta, Montana and Saskatchewan and that just isn't the case.
Generally, what churns my butter in a science fiction story is how thought provoking or insightful it can be. Greg Egan is one of my favourite authors despite the fact that his characters can be flat listless plot devices that are there to put a human face on an abstract concept. (In fairness, this does not speak to all his characters or stories.)
Science fiction allows authors to explore themes that come off as contrived at best in regular fiction: explorations of human nature, information theory, the role of power in nature, the true implications of the existence of X. My rule of thumb is that if a story can leave you pondering something, it's a successful science fiction story.
That doesn't excuse some of the piss poor hacks who have a cool idea and a word processor. Neato factor does not a successful story make. A harlequin romance could be brilliantly written (in theory I guess, I'll never know) and the best story concept ever could be given to the Eye-of-Aragon guy.
I guess what I'm getting at is that if all the other elements of a good story - interesting & believable characters, gripping plot, well developed setting, good writing are there what separates a good read from a brilliant story is the underlying concept.
That said, Ian Banks (anything), Neal Stephenson (Snowcrash and Diamond Age), Orson Scott Card (Pastwatch and Enders Game), Harry Turtledove (Guns of the South, How Few Remain and the Great War Series), Peter Hogan (The Giants Series and some of his other stuff), Joe Haldeman (Forever War), Peter F. Hamilton (Reality Dysfunction) and Robert J. Sawyer (Calculating God, The Terminal Experiment and Factoring Humanity) are off the top of my head examples of great vs. good science fiction.
Seems that every few years someone figures out that something in nature that was perviously though to have no function or a trivial function to particular process is actually critically important. "Junk genes" was another way of saying "I don't understand this so I'm going to pretend that it doesn't matter."
No surprise that the "junk genes" in one of the most complicated structures in nature - DNA - that has been fine tuning itself for billions of years, turn out to have a function and a critically important one. True insight will always come from people with enough courage to say, "I don't know."
Seriously?
Do the guys at Microsoft seriously consider the PC to be a most reliable of entities? Man, you think after years of running Windows you'd know better.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up, and wouldn't be that useful day to day unless you were carrying it with you. I forget to take pictures, how am I going to remember to upload the pictures I actually take? And has anyone ever gone back and reread their old email...BORING... unless you're narsisistic who cares what you posted on
This thing sounds good in theory, but in practice people just are not taking that many pictures or writing that many memorable letters. This will be a product for the vain, the famous and the rich who don't know what else to spend their money on.
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There have been numerous parodies of both you and of Star Trek. If you were given carte blanche to parody anyone or anything - star in a Galaxy Quest equivalent of some other series or movie, what would you parody? Why? Any ideas on how you'd approach it?
Looking back on the show with a bit of a post-modernist eye there were some really interesting subversive themes laced into the ST plot. The occasional anti-capitalist themes, the concept of the Federation as a nearly perfect communist society, the promotion of secular humanism and multiple episodes where the plot was literally man against god. There were the racial harmony themes, anti-religious themes and the prime directive itself could have been taken as a statement against cultural imperialism. All of this on tv in a world where Joe McCarthy was still a very fresh memory.
Now I know that Rodenberry was responsible for most of it, but how did it feel to be caught up in something like that during the 60's? (This is such a set up for the response, "I was just a tv show.")
Sorry, auditing specific terminology there is going to sink me. An audit program is usually a 2 to 20 page document (average 5-ish pages) that consists of a series of questions to ask, things to check and what documentation to request. You follow the audit program and you can proove your audit opinions.
So, if I find shitty security (doesn't matter what OS) I report on it. If I'm satisfied, I report on it.
Problem I encounter is that Win2K, I haven't found a good audit document (program) yet. So even if there is great Win2K security (which ALWAYS means it's bundled in with other security, and ALWAYS means they have a good security policy), I have a hard time prooving it. Similarly, when I find bad Win2k securuty and am called on to proove it (proof in an audit opinion sense, not the same as trying to explain active directories to senior management) I have a hard time.
The trouble I find is that I'm able to evaluate the level diligence the IT staff at any given company has taken, I'm able to audit the level of (attempted) compliance to any documented security policy and I'm even able to assess internal security configuration and controls.
Ultimately though, I'm signing off on audit opinions that ALWAYS says and feeling a little sick about it. If we got sued, I could provide documentation proving that I diligently checked security and based on "accepted" business standards the security was implement at a reasonable level. Basically, I could cover my ass.
Is there anyone out there that has an audit program for Win2k that they would feel comfortable using to tell the auditors that they can rely on the numbers? Just curious.
Oh, BTW, the auditors could care less about Common Criteria and even though they're thick as pudding about IT, they're still smart enough o bring in outside people when they need to rely on any computer's numbers.
A physicist, a mathematician and a statistician all go to the horse races, each assuring the other that they have an infallible system to pick the winners.
They agree to meet at the end of the day to share their stories of victories.
At the end of the day they meet in a pub to talk. The mathematician laments, "I had it all perfectly worked out. I had devised a calculation that factored in horse muscle mass, jocky wieght, turf consistency on the track and a dozen other variables. It was perfect and yet I didn't even win above chance."
The statistician nods, "I did an analysis of every horse, jocky, weather condition track rating and previous race and was sure I had the winning formula and still won at chance."
The physistist smiles, pulls out a HUGE role of bills and peels a few off. "I guess drinks are on me tonight."
The other two look at the money and one demands, "What's your system?"
The physisists pulls out a pen and paper and starts, "First, I assume that all horses are identical and spherical..."
Look at the knee jerk terrorism laws that were suggested after 9/11. Once the MPs looked at them seriously, cooler heads prevailed nothing happened. Same shit all over again.
As for the Charter of Rights,this law would easily be shot down in court on a number of counts including:Any law that infringes on this even a little will get thrown out by the courts the first time the police come hunting for a search warrant. The fact that the ISPs are not stupid means they will not be willing to shell out the cash for an infrastructute of a law that would collapse on the first court challenge.
Just won't happen.
Ignorance on that many levels is the reason we have the word 'stupid'.Being uninformed is naive, making uninformed decisions is stupid.
If you want to be fair, you might say that some of the people had that ernest combination of gulibility, wishful thinking and innocent ignorance... but 500,000 people. That is a clear indication of a stupid people doing stupid things.
That means that 500,000 people ordered penis enlargement pills!!! Five hundred thousand!!!.
If there are five hundred thousand people out there stupid enough to read their spam, then visit the web site and actually send the money... it shouldn't surprise people that the internet is full of garbage content. Oh wait, the surprised people are probably the same people who sent their $60.
The internet can't make stupid people less stupid, and frankly it can't make smart people smarter. All it can do is let smart people get at information they want faster, and stupid people get to the charlatans faster. Anyone who is really surprised by any of this, please send me $40 and I'll send you my left over penis enlargement pills.
Check out Nausicaa.net for more about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. These people are brilliant, and Disney bought the North American distribution rights because they're (as much as I hate them) good business people. Porco Rosso, Mononoke Hime, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, The Castle of Cagliostro and Tonari No Totoro are all examples of pure brilliance.
This is what Animation should be. Also, Disney's trailer sucks, ignore it, the trailer for the French release was WAY better, check out the official France site or follow the "La Fiche du Film" link here (they took down the really good trailer, damn). There are other trailers around, anyone got links?
Oh, wait, Jack was being mellow dramatic... ah... I get it now. Never mind.
Seriously, they can legislate, tax, rant, criminalize and encrypt all they want. They'll never win and they'll still be Hollywood so they'll still be making billions. They can spend millions of dollars figuring it out and push people's freedoms to the limit. People will still 'pirate' songs for their own use, third world distribution pirates will still get away with it, good artists will do well, bad ones won't and life will go on.
Pay them no mind, help with the circumvention when you can and support the people who are standing up to this non-sense. But never will there be an underground file sharing 'le resistance' and no matter how hard or illegal it becomes, we'll still be listening to our mp3s at work.
My keys, wallet, watch, PDA, Blackberry, Cel AND my crypto leash. Great.
Anyone who is concerned enough about their laptop security to consider bothering with one of these should already have good crypto security in place. And preferably security where the 'key' can't be stolen off the nightstand. These will attract the gadget happy crowd and CFO's who don't understand info sec and want to see a physical product. Anyone who feels the need to be able to point to their security device shouldn't be making security decisions.
A couple of people have commented here that there is no right to not receive spam, and they are correct in that there are no rights on paper whatsoever regarding the internet. What people do have a right to do is control the resources they pay for. It's called property. Email is useless if people cannot send you a message, so you can't close it down to the outside world. However, it is totally legitimate to take steps to prevent people from abusing the system - it is totally legitimate to take steps to keep the spammers from dumping their costs on to the recipients.
Going after spammers for money it not the least bit unreasonable, they are advertising - this is an activity that should cost money. I'm not actually saying that spammers have no right to exist, I'm just saying that they have no right to expect other people to bear the cost burden of what they do.