> Funny how the Russians have no problem sending nuclear power into space. > > Hey! that gives me an idea!
In Soviet Russia, nuclear power sends you into space!
The most moving commercial I ever saw was a 2-minute job at a movie, and it went something like this:
Scene 1: Old guy retiring - his boss saying "You can change your mind..."
Scene 2: Old guy saying goodbye to his family.
Scene 3: Old guy alone on a filthy, cramped jet. Foreign voices.
Scene 4: Old guy in a rickety bus surrounded by people in camos.
Scene 5: Rickety bus being waved through a security checkpoint. Guards have AK-47s and red stars on their hats.
Scene 6: Old guy strapped into a chair. Shaking violently. He's terrified.
Scene 7: Energia launch.
Scene 8: Old guy, grinning ear-to-ear, floating in space, holding a high-end Sony camcorder, and looking down at Earth.
Voiceover: "When your grandchildren ask you where the retirement money went, show them."
The saddest part is that the existence of such a commercial is proof that even the ad industry understands that we Americans have accepted that if any of us ever manages to get into space, it's not going to be on an American spacecraft.
> Enemy's profile? And just what would that be? John Walker Lindh was a young, suburban, American white male. Osama bin Ladin is an older male Arab. The guys who tried to bring bombs into the US to blow things up during the Y2K celebrations were middle-aged Algerians. So let's see, the enemy is either black, white, or brown - is either American, African, or Middle Eastern - is either young, middle-aged, or older - are we getting the picture yet? What's the profile? What does my enemy look like? What language does my enemy speak? English? German? Arabic? All of the above? What's the profile?
"Do you worship a God? What God do you worship? Are there other Gods? Does your God have a Prophet? What is the name of the Prophet of your God?" "Give Fido the bomb-sniffing dog a milk bone!" ("Would you like a ham sandwich" wouldn't work, but "Meet my dog" would, and camels are a little too unruly to keep at security checkpoints.:)
Oh, right. We're not supposed to ask those kinds of questions 'cuz we might offend people.
But I'll bet all the terrorists you listed would, if answering truthfully, display a pattern. If they were lying, some of them might have a very hard time lying about all of them.
> search ALL baggage that's
going on to an airplane [... ] baggage is tied to a particular
individual, with a thumbprint stamped on the tags for the bag at the counter [... ] Qualified, well-trained security personnel man every terminal [... ] entrances to the tarmac are monitored 24/7. [... ] airport personnel must undergo background
screenings [... ] thick, steel doors that cannot be opened during flight. [... ] Well-trained air marshals travel with every flight, with one visible
and one or more in plain clothes
HELL YES, to all of those, and they should have been implemented on 9/12:)
I'm just saying that passenger profiling and quick interrogations have also been pretty damn effective, and I cite El Al's record as evidence.
> Drunk drivers have probably killed 10X that number since Sept 2001. Why don't we have a database so we can match the identity and profiles of everyone who goes into a bar or liquor
store?
Because we haven't established any evidence that going into a bar or liquor store makes you more likely to be a drunk driver.
But yes - if we integrated systems that track driving behavior with systems that track location, I'd be all for it. ("Sir, you're being pulled over for a sobriety check because your mobile phone was at Fred's Bar for 30 minutes, and 10 minutes later, the same phone was registered moving at 60 mph, with no other phones within 1m of your phone, implying that you were operating a motor vehicle within 40 minutes of entering Fred's Bar, and within 10 minutes of leaving Fred's Bar, and all of this happened recently enough that if you chose to have a drink at Fred's Bar, the alcohol is still in your system at levels incompatible with safe operation of a motor vehicle.")
My solution to DUI is a little more invasive, but much easier to work - just a implant a small BAC measuring device in the hand of someone convicted of DUI, and modify the offender's car with a device that shuts down the engine if the BAC reported by the implant is anything other than zero.
> The solution to stopping terrorism on flights is two-fold. One, everyone travels naked, without carrying thing on the plane. Two, luggage goes on a second plane operated by robots.
Hmm. Why not just lock (and I mean lock) the cabin door and let the robots fly the plane.
The plane has no controls - it's remotely-operated by pilots in secure ground stations, just like UAVs are today. (Worried about jamming? Fine, piggyback a backup control system by relaying the control signals off satellites. Worried about remote-hijacking? That's a key management/exchange problem that was solved years ago, assuming the communications stream is protected by hard crypto.)
Back to the plane, the remotely-operated pnane has no cockpit, so it has no cockpit door to break down, and there are no controls on the plane for a terrorist on the plane to compromise. Terrorist gets on board, onboard video cameras report the incident to ground control, and the plane simply lands itself at the nearest military airbase, where it gets hosed down (presumably the terrorist has either killed the passengers or been killed by the passengers), before flying on to its destination.
> 1.I have no credit history because I have little income and can't get a credit card. > 2.I pay cash because I can get a discount > 3.I buy a one way ticket because I wont be returning until I have earned enough money to afford a return journey > > Will I be barred from travel? I think I might. At the very least I'm likely to be detained for further questioning.
If it were up to me, "no". Your profile (low income, student, poor credit history) is consistent with each other and with the profile of law-abiding people who purchase one-way tickets with cash. Shit happens to good folks, and if you're buying a last-minute one-way ticket with cash, it's probably because that's the only way you're going to be able to afford your trip.
I'm on the opposite end of that scale. Middle-class income, well-documented employment history, great credit rating. If I showed up at an airline counter asking for a one-way ticket and paying with cash, I'd fully expect the royal treatment, up to and including the body cavity search. Because the act of paying cash for a one-way ticket is inconsistent with everything else in my profile. So if I buy a last-minute one-way ticket with cash, I'm probably trying to hide something.
The right thing to do in all cases (credit card, round-trip, cash, or one-way) is to ask questions like "When will you be returning?" "Where are you going?" "What are you doing there?" "Who are you meeting there?" "How will you be returning?" Maybe a few "control" questions there like "what's the weather like in $CITY" or "What's going on in $CITY?" - the interrogator doesn't have to know the answer to any of the questions, he/she is merely looking for evasive behavior in the face of the target.
Odds are that you'll have a much better set of answers ("Dude! I need a discount to see my aunt in Peoria and I'll get the money to get back from her! Haven't you ever had to do that before? And the Hot Rawk Dawgz are teh UBER Peoria bar band! Whaddya mean you've never heard of HRD? Go to hotrawkdawgz.com, they've got MP3z there an' everything!") than I will.
("Umm, I... I'm seeing... uh, my... friend... yeah, friend, we're gonna see the... Eiffel Tower! What? The Eiffel Tower's not in Peoria?! But my girlfriend has a dildo shaped just li-oh, shit, that slipped, look, my wife's gonna kill me, she thinks I'm traveling on company business, just get me on the goddamn plane, willya?")
End result: We both get to go to Peoria. But any astute observer would have realized that I was lying long before I even slipped up and mentioned the Eiffel Tower.
The problem with the system as envisioned is that it still requires an astute observer. The drone at the ticket counter certainly doesn't qualify. And I'm afraid that most of the TSA folks don't qualify either.
I hope that the interrogators for folks who do match the enemy's profile, are trained to detect evasiveness.
> First they came for the Jews >and I did not speak out >because I was not a Jew. > >
Then they came for the Communists
>and I did not speak out > because I was not a Communist. > > Then they came for the trade unionists > and I did not speak out
> because I was not a trade unionist.
Funny answer:
...and I'm getting tired of waiting for them to come for the trite!
Serious answer:
Then they came for the terrorists
And I did not speak out
Because I was afraid of being accused of ethnic profiling
Then they came for my neighbors
And three thousand of them
Can no longer speak at all
> "Serious concerns surrounded the safety of carrying hundreds of atomic bombs through Earth's
atmosphere."
Google for "B-52" or "Tu-95". It's been done.
Heck, during the era of surface nuclear tests, we detonated dozens of the damn things above ground. Kinda sucked to be immediately downwind. Wasn't the end of the world.
Considering where we're launching the nuclear rockets from, and considering we're designing the reactors in those rockets not to blow up, I'd happily volunteer to ride on a boat anywhere underneath the flight path of any launch vehicle containing a nuclear-powered spacecraft or its components. Hell, I'd volunteer to ride on the launch vehicle.
> Space Elevator. Everything else is too dangerous and expensive.
Two more words for you: Suspension bridge.
When you can build a 40,000-millimeter suspension bridge out of carbon nanotubes and cross the river near the campus materials lab building, then you can start fantasizing about a 40,000-kilometer space elevator.
Until then, NERVA is the only way to go. Everything else is still at the research stage.
> You know, you're probably living in the wrong country. There are places in the world without
all this wasteful welfare baloney. We call them 'Third World Countries' -- perhaps you've seen them on the news -- their citizens tend to be a strange colour? Do you think that there might be even the slightest chance that there is a direct economic link between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support provided to the citizens of that country?
One recent example comes to mind, namely the earthquakes in California and Iran.
Two earthquakes: Magnitude 6.5 vs 6.6. Two social systems: Capitalism watered-down with welfare, versus Socialism watered-down with theocracy. Two body counts:...four orders of magnitude apart.
So to answer your question - Yes, I do think that there is a direct correlation between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support (read: "socialism") provided to its citizens. It just happens to be an inverse correlation.
Compare former third-world countries like Chile, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea... against any nation you want to choose in Africa.
> Instead of spending money on research to find life on mars, Bush should spend money on
research that creates environmentally friendly technology (low energy consumption, low amount of waste, reuse of waste).
Hey! I'm trying to keep six scientists alive on a tin can for six months, and on the surface of Mars for a period of two weeks. Someone just scrapped the shuttle/ISS money sink, and I have a big bag of money sitting around.
Those technologies you describe... they sound like just what I need! Here's part of my big bag of money! Please build them!
> What are the similarities between CueCat and the EPC Directory project? It seems to me that the only difference is the scale of the implementation.
CueCat: Privacy-intrusive, shaped like a dildo so you could go fuck yourself with it, and run by a useless bloody looney who was first against the wall when the last tech revolution ended.
VeriSign: Privacy-intrusive, is useful only for telling you as a customer to go fuck yourself, and run by a load of useless bloody looneys who will be first against the wall when the next tech revolution starts.
So in answer to your question... really not much difference at all.
Q: How can you tell your sysadmin's got a Verisign rep on the phone?
A: You hear someone screaming "YOU STUPID FUCING COCKSUCKERS!" into a phone every ten seconds, from six cubicles away.
> Is that an RS-232 port I see on the side? If it is, why? Is there something wrong with just providing a few USB ports?
Data acquisition and sensing is one of the Really Cool Applications for an ultraportable. It's a hell of a lot easier for Joe Labgeek to h4x0r something together that talks RS-232 than USB. I'm glad there's at least one "legacy" port.
> Don't be confused. It's quite simple, really. Win98SE is every bit as broken as we agreed. What works for me is that it's predictably broken. I know what will break it - my system is 'stabilized' (if you could call it that) to the point where I can predict when crashes will occur most times. I still can't avoid them, but at least I can see them coming.
+10, Useful!
I'm playing a game under 98SE. I'm playing MP3s in the background. I quit the game, and about 10% of the time, the box bluescreens. I hit ENTER to "continue, even though the system may be unstable", and I decide whether or not to reboot. If it bluescreens again due to this flaw in either soundcard drivers, MP3 player, and application, I know the box will lock hard.
If I'm doing nothing, I reboot.
If I have a large file downloading in the background, I play a different game that goesn't have this bug.
If my 98SE box bluescreened randomly (and a nontechnical user might see "10% of the time upon exiting a game with an MP3 player running" as "randomly" -- I don't), I'd be peeved. But it doesn't. It bluescreens for a reason. (This is one of two or three on my system.) As long as I know what makes it break, and I don't do what makes it break, the box stays up, often for weeks at a time.
Meantime, with the cruft removed from it, not using Outleak or Internet Exploiter, and no services listening to any port, I'll put my 98SE box up against any remote attack you care to launch against it. Six years and counting, and never a virus nor a worm nor spyware has ever infected it.
Ironically, I'm also gaming on an XP system. The game frequently crashes. Although the game ceases to run, and XP remains in control of the OS, XP doesn't actually display anything overtop of the dead game. So even though the OS is still running, I can't see what it's doing, and the only way to recover is a hard-reset, hopefully while some XP process isn't writing to disk. Go figure.
> There's a book entitled "Toxic Metal Syndrome" that claims that these plaques can be removed using chelation therapy. The links are Google searches, so you'll be able to get a lot of viewpoints on both the book and the therapy.
There are also Quacks who sell Books and Bogus Cures based on Bogus Claims and Bad Science.
If you don't want the specific debunkings because you're afraid someone might have something negative to say about your particular "alternative health remedy" (which is obviously Not Bunk, because You're No Mere Tool of the Medical Conspiracy, and because You're Obviously Too Smart To Fall For Bunk, and because Science Doesn't Have All The Answers Anyways!), at least read the articles on How Quackery Sells25 ways to spot it and do your own due diligence.
> > IEEE reports that the first commercial use will be to track public opinion for companies.
> > Can't wait to see what the entry for SCO looks like...
You mean you haven't seen goatse.cx yet?! pfft. n00b!
> I want better education, cheaper college tuitition, free health care for the working poor and senior citizens, and social security when I retire. YEs, its going to be gone very very fast at this rate of spending!
Well, since I'm already paying 30% of my income for your programmes...
...and since I already have my degree, can afford to buy my own health insurance, and would gladly forfeit "my" from the Socialist Insecurity Pyramid Scheme in exchange for being able to not having to pay into it ever again...
...and since your pet programmes cost trillions, and since my pet programme costs only tens of billions...
...how about you knuckle the fuck down and pony up for my trip to Mars for a change.
> your theories about careers in computational biology or nanotechnology are seriously flawed - what makes you think those won't be offshored next.
They will be. It's entirely possible that our chowderheaded Congressdrones, by banning legitimate scientific research and turning a blind eye to creation "science" in order to get votes from the religious segment of the population, will effectively block an entire generation of American kids from their shot at being bioengineers.
But in answer to your question - when that happens, someone'll invent something else that's cool. Maybe it'll be superconductors. Fusion. (Hah, in 20 years maybe:) Buckytubes and space elevators.
As the other poster has replied to you - "However, I recognize that people in other countries are just as smart and motivated as me, and that there is no guarantee that I won't eventually find myself without a job for longer than is comfortable. That's why I save my money now... because while the relocation of my kind of jobs may be personally painful, I can't bring myself to believe that I deserve the job simply because I happen to have been born in the US."
Even if you aren't smart enough to invent the Next Big Thing (I'm certainly not), you can still use your brains to get the capital required to invest in the companies and people that do.
> Sure they will. If you currently earn $0/year, $1000/year looks pretty attractive. Likewise, if you currently pay some nameless peon $12,000/year to flip burgers, paying them $1000/year looks equally attractive.
If I pay someone $12K/y to flip burgers, paying another peon $1K/y looks pretty attractive. So I fire my $12K/y person and put up a "Help Wanted - Burgerflipper - Paying $0.50 an hour, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day" sign.
But if I earn $0/y, earning $1000/y for 8 hours a day ain't gonna help me enough. I can sit on a street corner and provide momentary flashes of emotional comfort to altruists who feel guilty about having jobs. This form of self-employment (commonly referred to as "begging") earns more than $0.50 per hour, so why would I flip burgers when there are better opportunities available to me?
And if I offered $24000/y, I'd probably have prospective burgerflippers lined up outside my door.
But somewhere between $0.50 ($1000/y) and $12.00 ($24000/y), there'll be a price where someone will decide that my burgers are worth flipping. That price is the price at which someone thinks they're getting a fair shake for flipping my burgers - or they wouldn't have signed up with me, preferring another employer, or going into some form of self-employment - be it begging or opening up their own damn burger stand. It's also the price that leaves me the most money left over after paying my flippers to open another burger shop down the street.
Markets aren't Gods. Markets are merely a means of determining a price at which commodities can be exchanged to the benefit of both buyer and seller. To be buzzword-compliant, markets are massively parallel, decentralized, P2P-based mechanisms for real-time price determination. A glance at the activity on the trading floor of the CBOE or any other open-outcry commodities market should provide more than adequate proof.
> Didn't you just have to type Go at the OpenBoot prompt? Or was OpenBoot much different back then?
Well, yeah, but by the time the whole thing could have been brought back up, the point would have been moot. So we just shrugged, blamed the overheating, said we did everything we could have, and told everyone to go home.:)
Which wasn't that big of a lie. Temperatures in the room had been rising quickly enough that we probably would have had to shut down in an hour or two anyway. The last mistake only hastened the inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to paste Queen Elizabeth's head onto a Victorian-era pornographic woodcutting, but goddamn Photoshop won't let me!
>
> Hey! that gives me an idea!
In Soviet Russia, nuclear power sends you into space!
The most moving commercial I ever saw was a 2-minute job at a movie, and it went something like this:
Scene 1: Old guy retiring - his boss saying "You can change your mind..."
Scene 2: Old guy saying goodbye to his family.
Scene 3: Old guy alone on a filthy, cramped jet. Foreign voices.
Scene 4: Old guy in a rickety bus surrounded by people in camos.
Scene 5: Rickety bus being waved through a security checkpoint. Guards have AK-47s and red stars on their hats.
Scene 6: Old guy strapped into a chair. Shaking violently. He's terrified.
Scene 7: Energia launch.
Scene 8: Old guy, grinning ear-to-ear, floating in space, holding a high-end Sony camcorder, and looking down at Earth.
Voiceover: "When your grandchildren ask you where the retirement money went, show them."
The saddest part is that the existence of such a commercial is proof that even the ad industry understands that we Americans have accepted that if any of us ever manages to get into space, it's not going to be on an American spacecraft.
"Do you worship a God? What God do you worship? Are there other Gods? Does your God have a Prophet? What is the name of the Prophet of your God?" "Give Fido the bomb-sniffing dog a milk bone!" ("Would you like a ham sandwich" wouldn't work, but "Meet my dog" would, and camels are a little too unruly to keep at security checkpoints. :)
Oh, right. We're not supposed to ask those kinds of questions 'cuz we might offend people.
But I'll bet all the terrorists you listed would, if answering truthfully, display a pattern. If they were lying, some of them might have a very hard time lying about all of them.
> search ALL baggage that's going on to an airplane [ ... ] baggage is tied to a particular
individual, with a thumbprint stamped on the tags for the bag at the counter [ ... ] Qualified, well-trained security personnel man every terminal [ ... ] entrances to the tarmac are monitored 24/7. [ ... ] airport personnel must undergo background
screenings [ ... ] thick, steel doors that cannot be opened during flight. [ ... ] Well-trained air marshals travel with every flight, with one visible
and one or more in plain clothes
HELL YES, to all of those, and they should have been implemented on 9/12 :)
I'm just saying that passenger profiling and quick interrogations have also been pretty damn effective, and I cite El Al's record as evidence.
Because we haven't established any evidence that going into a bar or liquor store makes you more likely to be a drunk driver.
But yes - if we integrated systems that track driving behavior with systems that track location, I'd be all for it. ("Sir, you're being pulled over for a sobriety check because your mobile phone was at Fred's Bar for 30 minutes, and 10 minutes later, the same phone was registered moving at 60 mph, with no other phones within 1m of your phone, implying that you were operating a motor vehicle within 40 minutes of entering Fred's Bar, and within 10 minutes of leaving Fred's Bar, and all of this happened recently enough that if you chose to have a drink at Fred's Bar, the alcohol is still in your system at levels incompatible with safe operation of a motor vehicle.")
My solution to DUI is a little more invasive, but much easier to work - just a implant a small BAC measuring device in the hand of someone convicted of DUI, and modify the offender's car with a device that shuts down the engine if the BAC reported by the implant is anything other than zero.
Hmm. Why not just lock (and I mean lock) the cabin door and let the robots fly the plane.
The plane has no controls - it's remotely-operated by pilots in secure ground stations, just like UAVs are today. (Worried about jamming? Fine, piggyback a backup control system by relaying the control signals off satellites. Worried about remote-hijacking? That's a key management/exchange problem that was solved years ago, assuming the communications stream is protected by hard crypto.)
Back to the plane, the remotely-operated pnane has no cockpit, so it has no cockpit door to break down, and there are no controls on the plane for a terrorist on the plane to compromise. Terrorist gets on board, onboard video cameras report the incident to ground control, and the plane simply lands itself at the nearest military airbase, where it gets hosed down (presumably the terrorist has either killed the passengers or been killed by the passengers), before flying on to its destination.
> 2.I pay cash because I can get a discount
> 3.I buy a one way ticket because I wont be returning until I have earned enough money to afford a return journey
>
> Will I be barred from travel? I think I might. At the very least I'm likely to be detained for further questioning.
If it were up to me, "no". Your profile (low income, student, poor credit history) is consistent with each other and with the profile of law-abiding people who purchase one-way tickets with cash. Shit happens to good folks, and if you're buying a last-minute one-way ticket with cash, it's probably because that's the only way you're going to be able to afford your trip.
I'm on the opposite end of that scale. Middle-class income, well-documented employment history, great credit rating. If I showed up at an airline counter asking for a one-way ticket and paying with cash, I'd fully expect the royal treatment, up to and including the body cavity search. Because the act of paying cash for a one-way ticket is inconsistent with everything else in my profile. So if I buy a last-minute one-way ticket with cash, I'm probably trying to hide something.
The right thing to do in all cases (credit card, round-trip, cash, or one-way) is to ask questions like "When will you be returning?" "Where are you going?" "What are you doing there?" "Who are you meeting there?" "How will you be returning?" Maybe a few "control" questions there like "what's the weather like in $CITY" or "What's going on in $CITY?" - the interrogator doesn't have to know the answer to any of the questions, he/she is merely looking for evasive behavior in the face of the target.
Odds are that you'll have a much better set of answers ("Dude! I need a discount to see my aunt in Peoria and I'll get the money to get back from her! Haven't you ever had to do that before? And the Hot Rawk Dawgz are teh UBER Peoria bar band! Whaddya mean you've never heard of HRD? Go to hotrawkdawgz.com, they've got MP3z there an' everything!") than I will.
("Umm, I... I'm seeing... uh, my... friend... yeah, friend, we're gonna see the... Eiffel Tower! What? The Eiffel Tower's not in Peoria?! But my girlfriend has a dildo shaped just li-oh, shit, that slipped, look, my wife's gonna kill me, she thinks I'm traveling on company business, just get me on the goddamn plane, willya?")
End result: We both get to go to Peoria. But any astute observer would have realized that I was lying long before I even slipped up and mentioned the Eiffel Tower.
The problem with the system as envisioned is that it still requires an astute observer. The drone at the ticket counter certainly doesn't qualify. And I'm afraid that most of the TSA folks don't qualify either.
I hope that the interrogators for folks who do match the enemy's profile, are trained to detect evasiveness.
ROFLMAO. Then again, if the launch vehicle's an Orion, that'd be strangely appropriate. So yeah, I would :-)
>and I did not speak out
>because I was not a Jew.
>
> Then they came for the Communists
>and I did not speak out
> because I was not a Communist.
>
> Then they came for the trade unionists
> and I did not speak out
> because I was not a trade unionist.
Funny answer:
Serious answer:
Google for "B-52" or "Tu-95". It's been done.
Heck, during the era of surface nuclear tests, we detonated dozens of the damn things above ground. Kinda sucked to be immediately downwind. Wasn't the end of the world.
Considering where we're launching the nuclear rockets from, and considering we're designing the reactors in those rockets not to blow up, I'd happily volunteer to ride on a boat anywhere underneath the flight path of any launch vehicle containing a nuclear-powered spacecraft or its components. Hell, I'd volunteer to ride on the launch vehicle.
Two more words for you: Suspension bridge.
When you can build a 40,000-millimeter suspension bridge out of carbon nanotubes and cross the river near the campus materials lab building, then you can start fantasizing about a 40,000-kilometer space elevator.
Until then, NERVA is the only way to go. Everything else is still at the research stage.
One recent example comes to mind, namely the earthquakes in California and Iran.
Two earthquakes: Magnitude 6.5 vs 6.6. ...four orders of magnitude apart.
Two social systems: Capitalism watered-down with welfare, versus Socialism watered-down with theocracy.
Two body counts:
So to answer your question - Yes, I do think that there is a direct correlation between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support (read: "socialism") provided to its citizens. It just happens to be an inverse correlation.
Compare former third-world countries like Chile, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea... against any nation you want to choose in Africa.
Hey! I'm trying to keep six scientists alive on a tin can for six months, and on the surface of Mars for a period of two weeks. Someone just scrapped the shuttle/ISS money sink, and I have a big bag of money sitting around.
Those technologies you describe... they sound like just what I need! Here's part of my big bag of money! Please build them!
>
> I'd shine his knob.
No, that was the previous President!
>
> Maybe it was the lack of a frictionless economy.
Well, at least until you get into grad school, space exploration is just a series of physics problems.
So assume a uniform, spherical frictionless economy... :)
CueCat: Privacy-intrusive, shaped like a dildo so you could go fuck yourself with it, and run by a useless bloody looney who was first against the wall when the last tech revolution ended.
VeriSign: Privacy-intrusive, is useful only for telling you as a customer to go fuck yourself, and run by a load of useless bloody looneys who will be first against the wall when the next tech revolution starts.
So in answer to your question... really not much difference at all.
Q: How can you tell your sysadmin's got a Verisign rep on the phone?
A: You hear someone screaming "YOU STUPID FUCING COCKSUCKERS!" into a phone every ten seconds, from six cubicles away.
Data acquisition and sensing is one of the Really Cool Applications for an ultraportable. It's a hell of a lot easier for Joe Labgeek to h4x0r something together that talks RS-232 than USB. I'm glad there's at least one "legacy" port.
+10, Useful!
I'm playing a game under 98SE. I'm playing MP3s in the background. I quit the game, and about 10% of the time, the box bluescreens. I hit ENTER to "continue, even though the system may be unstable", and I decide whether or not to reboot. If it bluescreens again due to this flaw in either soundcard drivers, MP3 player, and application, I know the box will lock hard.
If I'm doing nothing, I reboot. If I have a large file downloading in the background, I play a different game that goesn't have this bug.
If my 98SE box bluescreened randomly (and a nontechnical user might see "10% of the time upon exiting a game with an MP3 player running" as "randomly" -- I don't), I'd be peeved. But it doesn't. It bluescreens for a reason. (This is one of two or three on my system.) As long as I know what makes it break, and I don't do what makes it break, the box stays up, often for weeks at a time.
Meantime, with the cruft removed from it, not using Outleak or Internet Exploiter, and no services listening to any port, I'll put my 98SE box up against any remote attack you care to launch against it. Six years and counting, and never a virus nor a worm nor spyware has ever infected it.
Ironically, I'm also gaming on an XP system. The game frequently crashes. Although the game ceases to run, and XP remains in control of the OS, XP doesn't actually display anything overtop of the dead game. So even though the OS is still running, I can't see what it's doing, and the only way to recover is a hard-reset, hopefully while some XP process isn't writing to disk. Go figure.
There are also Quacks who sell Books and Bogus Cures based on Bogus Claims and Bad Science.
Here is a good place to start if you'd like to understand why Chelation Therapy and Homeopathy are bunk.
If you don't want the specific debunkings because you're afraid someone might have something negative to say about your particular "alternative health remedy" (which is obviously Not Bunk, because You're No Mere Tool of the Medical Conspiracy, and because You're Obviously Too Smart To Fall For Bunk, and because Science Doesn't Have All The Answers Anyways!), at least read the articles on How Quackery Sells 25 ways to spot it and do your own due diligence.
>
> Can't wait to see what the entry for SCO looks like...
You mean you haven't seen goatse.cx yet?! pfft. n00b!
Heh. I didn't know the source either, and I got it slightly wrong too. After some googling, here it is, straight from the horse's mouth:
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Source: Ed Howdershelt himself, confirming the origin of the quote, on USENET.
(Damn. Even in 2004, there are moments when I realize just how unspeakably cool the 'net is.)
>Freedom depends on four boxes.
> The soapbox. The ballot box. The jury box. The cartridge box.
You forgot the important part of the quotation.
"Use them in the order listed."
Well, since I'm already paying 30% of my income for your programmes...
They will be. It's entirely possible that our chowderheaded Congressdrones, by banning legitimate scientific research and turning a blind eye to creation "science" in order to get votes from the religious segment of the population, will effectively block an entire generation of American kids from their shot at being bioengineers.
But in answer to your question - when that happens, someone'll invent something else that's cool. Maybe it'll be superconductors. Fusion. (Hah, in 20 years maybe :) Buckytubes and space elevators.
As the other poster has replied to you - "However, I recognize that people in other countries are just as smart and motivated as me, and that there is no guarantee that I won't eventually find myself without a job for longer than is comfortable. That's why I save my money now... because while the relocation of my kind of jobs may be personally painful, I can't bring myself to believe that I deserve the job simply because I happen to have been born in the US."
Even if you aren't smart enough to invent the Next Big Thing (I'm certainly not), you can still use your brains to get the capital required to invest in the companies and people that do.
If I pay someone $12K/y to flip burgers, paying another peon $1K/y looks pretty attractive. So I fire my $12K/y person and put up a "Help Wanted - Burgerflipper - Paying $0.50 an hour, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day" sign.
But if I earn $0/y, earning $1000/y for 8 hours a day ain't gonna help me enough. I can sit on a street corner and provide momentary flashes of emotional comfort to altruists who feel guilty about having jobs. This form of self-employment (commonly referred to as "begging") earns more than $0.50 per hour, so why would I flip burgers when there are better opportunities available to me?
And if I offered $24000/y, I'd probably have prospective burgerflippers lined up outside my door.
But somewhere between $0.50 ($1000/y) and $12.00 ($24000/y), there'll be a price where someone will decide that my burgers are worth flipping. That price is the price at which someone thinks they're getting a fair shake for flipping my burgers - or they wouldn't have signed up with me, preferring another employer, or going into some form of self-employment - be it begging or opening up their own damn burger stand. It's also the price that leaves me the most money left over after paying my flippers to open another burger shop down the street.
Markets aren't Gods. Markets are merely a means of determining a price at which commodities can be exchanged to the benefit of both buyer and seller. To be buzzword-compliant, markets are massively parallel, decentralized, P2P-based mechanisms for real-time price determination. A glance at the activity on the trading floor of the CBOE or any other open-outcry commodities market should provide more than adequate proof.
Well, yeah, but by the time the whole thing could have been brought back up, the point would have been moot. So we just shrugged, blamed the overheating, said we did everything we could have, and told everyone to go home. :)
Which wasn't that big of a lie. Temperatures in the room had been rising quickly enough that we probably would have had to shut down in an hour or two anyway. The last mistake only hastened the inevitable.