> This is a public event sponsored by the military. Not a military event. You can't simply have all these civs just wandering around White Sands chasing their four ton toy cars across the missle range.
> > That's only fun until someone loses their structural integrity.
...then it's not only hilarious, it's a mission kill!
> I hope the China Internet Police force will do something about: > chinanet.cn.net
> The source of 80% of my spam.
1) Implement a random number generator, preferably one with known weaknesses, in a Perl script.
2) Generate blocks of 5 random characters using the IP address of the spammer as the seed for the random number generator.
3) "550 - Thank you for your support and participation in the Falun Gong money chain. We appreciate the risk you take in the use of steganographically encoded spams as a means to conceal the keys used by participants to unlock access to their funds. The public portion of your key is DFUQZ FPQGFS FLNRA IZOSB UNDPZ. Again, thank you for taking this risk to support freedom in China."
4) Hilarity ensues.
> Nuclear weapons might start WWIII, but they aren't the end-of-the-world sort of destruction
that we'll probably wish they were when this comes down. Rather, they'll be one of those
severely annoying tragic things that you can't really do much about, like living in LA despite quakes. You can only play this trump card one time.
Precisely. We nuked ourselves with above-ground atomic tests on our own soil for decades. We're still here. The areas were habitable within 10-20 years.
We're a big nation. I still miss my Twin Towers, and when we get nuked, I'll miss the city that gets hit. Bacterial infections can kill cells, but the body adapts, responds, wipes out the enemy, and survives. The enemy can kill individual citizens, but the nation adapts, responds, wipes out the enemy, and survives.
Just as in WW2 - we have an industrial capacity unequalled the world over, and our nodes of production are sufficiently widely distributed that it can't be destroyed (and can barely be disrupted) with the loss of a few nodes.
The use of nuclear weapons in a direct military confrontation between the antagonists of World War IV (the Cold War) likely would have meant the end of our civilization, because both sides really did have the capability to annihilate the other. As such, WW III was fought through proxy states, and some of the leftovers (from both sides) left the mess that led to WW IV.
World War IV is unlike World War II in that both sides are likely to have some nuclear capability at some point during the conflict. It's unlike World War III in that there will be no balance of power. Consequently, World War IV is much like World War II in that the only difference nuclear weapons will make in World War IV will be to drastically shorten the length of the war.
We didn't start this war, but if the enemy acquires and uses nuclear weapons, by God, we'll end it.
> Human beings are computers, meat
machines, they accept input using their senses (hearing, seeing, feeling) and they respond with
output (feeling, speech, touch). The appropriate input gets you the right output just like any normal functioning computer does. > > Humans are not universal machines, they are more complex and the inputs varies based on
culture, social class, environment and such, so to program them, one has to be aware of all that. > >[snip big NLP plug]
On that note - on geeks and getting laid, or lack thereof:
"[...] for a group of healthy college-age males, there was remarkably
little discussion of a topic which commonly obsesses groups of that
composition. Females. Though some led somewhat active social
lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into
what would be called 'bachelor mode.' It was easy to fall into -- for
one thing -- as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human
relationship -- which made hacking particularly attractive. But an
even weightier factor was the hackers' impression that computing was much
more/important/ than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was
a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives."
"[Hacking] was a mission. You would hack, and you would live by the
Hacker Ethic, and you knew that that horribly inefficient and wasteful
things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory
space. 'Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,' one
PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. 'How can a hacker tolerate
such an imperfect being?'
- Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution, Steven Levy.
Whether NLP can get me laid or not doesn't matter to me. The more I interact with individual humans, the more I realize they aren't the kind of machines I'm interested in programming, especially for something as easily-obtainable as orgasm.
> Personal hygene + the gym + ability to talk about things other than computers + confidence = pussy.
Spending time on your hygiene and appearance, and spending brain cycles on something other than computers, and entering the LAN party with any confidence whatsoever, doesn't equal "pussy", it equals "pwn3d".
> This is Slashdot, the only problems with people's sex life here is that they don't have one.
That's not a bug, it's a feature, and it's working as intended! From an old joke, source attributed to NASA's JPL:
Every engineer needs both a wife and a mistress.
The way it works, is you tell your wife you're spending the night with your mistress,
and you tell your mistress you're with the wife, and you can finally get back
down to the lab and work!
> Ouch. You're fucked, noda132.
You just suggested that someone could reproduce 9/11 today. That means you must have some idea of how to do it. That means you might possibly try your plan, if it exists, one day. That means that you are a potential terrorist. And since anyone could be wire-tapped at any time, you could be wire-tapped. Or being monitored on-line. Since now it's possible that you might have an idea on how to maybe commit a terrorist act, you need to be investigated.
No, forget that, let's just be safe.
Welcome to G-Bay, noda132.
Law enforcement and intelligence resources are stretched thin. Always have been, always will be.
And yes, in an open society, everyone is a potential terrorist. If the taking of noda123's comments out of context can end up getting him detained, the system is terribly broken.
Given that everything we do online is now being monitored, however, I don't think his comments were even close to the human investigation threshold. Nor are yours. Nor are mine. Gitmo? Please.
Because every time the filters do get a false positive, a human has to look at it. It's the same problem we face with spam. Humans looking at emails and Slashdot postings for evidence of terrorist plots are a Bad Thing, because humans cost too damn much compared to filters.
In the case of spam, we glance at the mail and, upon seeing HTML or a "200." at the start of the IP address, reflexively delete what our filters missed. But maybe our best friend is in South America and using some dorky kiosk that only sends HTML. Oops. His mail gets deleted it's cheaper to discard all 200.0/8 mail as spam than it is to waste time investigating it.
But unlike our spam situation, the default option for a filter reading the comment isn't to send the comment to an agent, and the default option for an agent reading the filter's false positive isn't to disappear noda132. Why? Because even though an agent reading noda132's posting history and checking for other records in the database has already cost his department a small fortune compared to the automated filter, actually ordering the disappearance of someone requires vastly more resources still.
The most cost-effective approach to security is widespread (omnipresent) monitoring and automated filtering with a high threshold to reduce investigation costs, followed by human investigation with a still higher threshold to reduce the costs of disappearing a false positive. You can read the word "cost" in that sentence in dollars or in civil liberties and the argument remains the same.
Bottom line: Those who defend the nation's security and those who defend its civil liberties share a common goal in keeping wisecrackers like noda123 off the radar screen in the first place, and and from being disappeared should he be so unlucky as to make it past the filter as a false positive.
The people on both sides of this debate are all on the good guys' side.
Re:Rant: Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy. Deal with it.
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 1
> You know, throwing around the word "hate" is not particularly constructive.
You know, actually being full of hate isn't very constructive
either. I'm gonna pull another one of those horrible Western values you seem to... well, actively dislike (since you're somehow above "hate") and ask you this:
Yes, instead of asking why do they hate us, why not ask why they rape us? Oh, right, it's her fault if an "Australian pig" (or Norwegian whore, or French harlot, or your wife, or your sister, or your daughter) doesn't want to get "fucked Leb style", she should just put on a fuckin' burkha with the rest of the cattle, shouldn't she?
To which I say - fuck that.
Re:Rant: Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy. Deal with it.
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 1
> This is why the conquest of Iraq was necessary. Even more important than the medium-term threat
posed by Saddam Hussein, it is vital to reform radical Islamic fundamentalist culture, and we need a
staging area to do so. See Steven Den Beste's excellent analysis. [ at http://denbeste.nu/essays/strategic_overview.shtml ]
Wow. That was great reading. While we're on the subject, Malathir's recent speech (the one with the anti-Semitic diatribe) offers essentially the same analysis and conclusions, albeit from the enemy's perspective.
And yes, I also agree that if we can't get the cultural imperialist programme through "in time", we may have to resort to other methods.
To the relativists, this war can be summed up in one sentence: "This planet isn't big enough for two mutually-exclusive cultures", and the fact that you believe otherwise, and the fact that I desperately wish you were right, doesn't mean jack shit to our common enemy.
Rant: Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy. Deal with it.
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 1, Troll
> Yet the rise of Islam between 700-1200 in the common era was spread by the capitalist and
free market practices of the predominantly urban members of the new faith.
Absolutely. 1000 years ago, we were the barbarians trying to impose a tyrannical theocracy on everyone, and they were the light of the civilized world.
But what have they done for humanity lately?
(Emphasis added)
Fully
97% of significant figures in the sciences
come from the West. The same figure is arrived at
from looking only at significant events. Even
America is dwarfed by European accomplishment
in the sciences, hosting less than 20% of
significant figures before 1950 compared to
Europe's nearly 80%. Europe's dominance over
America is even greater in the arts. And though
Murray makes sure to calculate what is an upper
limit for artistic accomplishment in non-Western
parts of the world, the graph is substantially the
same [for artistic accomplisment] as that for the sciences.
One of the astonishing parts of Murray's data is
how it demonstrates the significant effects of legal
equality. Jewish achievement after 1850
skyrocketed due to their newfound position before
the law. Between 1910 and 1950, Jewish
achievement tripled despite even the Third Reich
and the Holocaust.
And that is why they hate us.
Thus beginneth the rant. This is not addressed to the poster to whom I'm responding, your post just provided me with a jumping-off point for a rant that's been brewing in my mind all week.
An open letter to the world's barbarians:
"DEMOCRACY! WHISKEY! SEXY!"
If the best your culture has to offer the 21st Century is mass gang rape in
France ("taking turns", I believe you call it?) and mass murder damn near
everywhere else, then fuck you,
I call bullshit on your culture, because by any rational measure, your culture is inferior to ours.
That's right. I said a taboo word. You're
not "different". You're not "diverse". You're inferior. You are
barbarians. And worse, you're not just content to live as animals, you seek to reduce us to your level. And I'm sick to my stomach at
having to watch the news - as every day, you use our western tendency towards tolerance
as a shield for your culture's twin values of mass rape and mass murder. I am a free man. I will not tolerate Dhimmitude. You will have to kill me before I bow down to your false God.
You have two options. You can join civilization or you can be wiped out by an unstoppable wave of cultural imperialism. You have left us with no other means of dealing with you short of genocide. (I know you - being barbarians - won't understand this, but we believe it's better, not just for our bottom line, but on a moral level, to sell stuff to you than kill you.)
We're the 2-3 billion people who have adopted Western Civilization.
We're here, we're better than you, and we're not going away.
> But just to keep us on our toes, these morons (http://clients.enfocom.com/avs/products_winvote.h tml) actually put wireless LAN interfaces on their touchscreen machines ("The functionality linchpin of the WINvoteTM system is its wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11b) system - called the Wireless Information Network (WIN) -- that enables the user to communicate remotely with the major components of the voting system.")
/me turns in his moron card, hangs his head in shame, and walks away, having been completely outclassed. Inherently crackable WLAN technology in a voting machine. Just... damn.
Then again, didn't we all want to grow up in a world where geeks ruled the earth? Well, guess what? Now we do. The next President of the United States will be elected by whichever faction of wardrivers has the m4dd35t ski11z.
So, time to start thinking. Will it be ESR or RMS? (Linus isn't eligible, bummer.)
> You honestly think Houston-based Enron got no help from Texas Gov. George W. Bush? LOL
Have you taken a look at Enron's stock price since Bush got elected? How about Halliburton's?
(Don't most of the the conspiracy theories involve the assertion that Bush and Cheney were supposed to be *helping* their friends in the energy sector? Is that assertion borne out by even the most cursory glance at the stock charts of the companies involved?)
> Who cares if it's sharper? The people with large TV screens. Current analog images look ok on
smaller screens, if you don't mind the color bleed, the static on images from distant stations, and the blurring of small objects into non-existance. On large screens (20" and above), it gets annoying, and on home theater setups (60" and larger), it looks bad.
As opposed to digital television, where the large blocky squares around moving objects on static backgrounds make the real Super Bowl look worse than Madden 2003 ported to the Atari 2600.
Someday we're going to realize that a 13" TV and a pair of bunny ears was never all that bad.
> More importantly, what happens to "family time" when you can fit all your porn on a 1GB hard drive?
Something good, because with barely enough capacity for an hour of half-decent video, you'll get bored and go back to fucking the wife pretty quickly? *rimshot*
> Never mind that, imagine Darl trying to get his $699 licence money:
"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin
charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."
- Linus Torvalds
Seems the Army's catching on. Darl McBride, consider that as a warning.
> In FY 2004, the U.S. Government is expecting to take in 1.8 trillion dollars (or so.) Divide the number of dollars you paid in taxes last year by this number, and you'll have an approximation of the portion of the total government expenditures you funded yourself. > > Now think about the cost of covering all the bandwidth required by all search engines which would be blocked by this robots.txt file. Multiply it by the "your portion" calculated above to find out what your share of that project would cost you in higher taxes.
Now thing about $1,800,000,000,000 (1.8 trillion tax revenue) divided by 300,000,000 (300 million) people in the US.
If you paid more than $6,000 in federal taxes, you're already paying more than your fair share.
> Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It's the supreme law of the land, not a suicide pact.
Note that even if you read it with the literality of a Biblical fundamentalist, you only have the right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Reasonable searches and seizures are allowed. That's a loophole big enough to drive an galactic supercluster through, and it was put there for a reason.
Re:Today's kids = tomorrow's workers. Prepare them
on
Reading, Writing, RFID
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> You seem to be arguing that loss of privacy is enevitable, that we should get over it, and it's really a good thing anyway.
Correct. I'm not threatened by your willingness to pick up a gun to defend what you perceive as your rights. There are very few of you, your numbers are shrinking, and should your kind actually start firing that gun, your lives will be shortened quickly.
In our presently insecure society, the security meme propagates extremely well. It is outcrowding, and will continue to outcrowd, the privacy meme. People need to be led. They're willing to give their lives for security, never mind their privacy. Once the privacy meme has been effectively neutralized and a secure society established, there'll be a few stragglers, but they'll be recognized as paranoids or sociopaths, and given medical treatment to help them overcome their affliction.
> This boils down to our right to be anonymous in our speech and in our beliefs. Lack of privacy
means lack of anonymity. A lack of anonymity means a lack of freedom in speech. A lack of freedom of speech means that we no longer control our own lives.
Anonymity (or even Slashdotesque pseudonymity) does not mean that you are not accountable to others for your actions, words, or thoughts. Privacy is not a shield for lawlessness; anonymity is not a shield for privacy.
> It's SO bad that SOE (Sony Entertainment Online) made the forums private so that no
perspective buyers could read the 99.9% "you suck" content that exists there. > >Let me reiterate: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!
The game is bugged because the design process and the implementation process are also bugged. Programmers can fix bugs in code. They can't fix fundamental design flaws or fucked-up development processes.
That's the polite way of saying it. The honest truth? Raph Koster, you are a poor game designer, because you fail to understand what "fun" means, and you doggedly implement your "vision" no matter how "un-fun" it happens to be to your customers.
And SOE, you are a poor gaming company, because you fail to understand what "buggy" means, and you forced a poor designer to release a poor game too early, compounding the problem.
And for both of these reasons, that, is why SWG failed.
> At what point in a society equipped with oversight such as this do our children "learn" to choose the right path? > >There is a very real correlation to abused children becoming irresponsible adults, it is a common psychological side effect of the abuse.
1) A program of rigorous mental conditioning to eliminate "wrong" options from thought. If you can't conceive of irresponsible behavior, you can't carry it out.
2) Don't remove the device upon graduation from school. Simply alter the behaviors that produce reward and punishment. This is a more primitive way of doing #1. It's also more expensive.
I suspect we'll end up with option #2. That's fine, more securindustry technology providers for me to invest in:)
> But the tags need to be surgically implanted, with small explosive charges (just enough to remove the child's head efficiently) to prevent tampering.
Bad idea. You think I hate kids on airplanes now? (No, wait. This is a good idea. I'll never have to put up with kids on airplanes again, because y'all parental types will hafta just drive.)
But seriously - explosives would be bad. But a GPS-linked location tracker, embedded under the skin and hooked up to a remotely-operated medical pump and pre-metered dose of stimulant or sedative would be just as effective. Good for Alzheimer's patients (always wandering and forgetting their meds). It's also the cure for infant diabetes (one cell of the medical pump could contain insulin). A extremely strong dose of sedatives for prisoners would be a nonlethal way of securing prisoners for transport. Variations on stims/seds could be effective in military use. Your kids won't be the beta testers; they'll get whatever of those ideas turns out to work best.
> Instead of the English classes reading '1984', maybe the f*cking administration should.
Shouldn't the English department be teaching literature instead of boring functional specifications? (Short critique: It's barely a concept document, let alone a full functional spec. Too many ambiguities. Needs an executive summary.)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> That's only fun until someone loses their structural integrity.
> chinanet.cn.net
> The source of 80% of my spam.
1) Implement a random number generator, preferably one with known weaknesses, in a Perl script.
2) Generate blocks of 5 random characters using the IP address of the spammer as the seed for the random number generator.
3) "550 - Thank you for your support and participation in the Falun Gong money chain. We appreciate the risk you take in the use of steganographically encoded spams as a means to conceal the keys used by participants to unlock access to their funds. The public portion of your key is DFUQZ FPQGFS FLNRA IZOSB UNDPZ. Again, thank you for taking this risk to support freedom in China."
4) Hilarity ensues.
2 : The setting for most of the coolest science fiction books.
Bring on Dystopia, I say!
D'oh. Next time I'll use Preview. WW4 is our current war. I was referring to WW3, not WW4, when I mentioned the Cold War.
Precisely. We nuked ourselves with above-ground atomic tests on our own soil for decades. We're still here. The areas were habitable within 10-20 years.
We're a big nation. I still miss my Twin Towers, and when we get nuked, I'll miss the city that gets hit. Bacterial infections can kill cells, but the body adapts, responds, wipes out the enemy, and survives. The enemy can kill individual citizens, but the nation adapts, responds, wipes out the enemy, and survives.
Just as in WW2 - we have an industrial capacity unequalled the world over, and our nodes of production are sufficiently widely distributed that it can't be destroyed (and can barely be disrupted) with the loss of a few nodes.
The use of nuclear weapons in a direct military confrontation between the antagonists of World War IV (the Cold War) likely would have meant the end of our civilization, because both sides really did have the capability to annihilate the other. As such, WW III was fought through proxy states, and some of the leftovers (from both sides) left the mess that led to WW IV.
World War IV is unlike World War II in that both sides are likely to have some nuclear capability at some point during the conflict. It's unlike World War III in that there will be no balance of power. Consequently, World War IV is much like World War II in that the only difference nuclear weapons will make in World War IV will be to drastically shorten the length of the war.
We didn't start this war, but if the enemy acquires and uses nuclear weapons, by God, we'll end it.
>
> Humans are not universal machines, they are more complex and the inputs varies based on culture, social class, environment and such, so to program them, one has to be aware of all that.
>
>[snip big NLP plug]
On that note - on geeks and getting laid, or lack thereof:
Whether NLP can get me laid or not doesn't matter to me. The more I interact with individual humans, the more I realize they aren't the kind of machines I'm interested in programming, especially for something as easily-obtainable as orgasm.
Spending time on your hygiene and appearance, and spending brain cycles on something other than computers, and entering the LAN party with any confidence whatsoever, doesn't equal "pussy", it equals "pwn3d".
*rimshot*
That's not a bug, it's a feature, and it's working as intended! From an old joke, source attributed to NASA's JPL:
Law enforcement and intelligence resources are stretched thin. Always have been, always will be.
And yes, in an open society, everyone is a potential terrorist. If the taking of noda123's comments out of context can end up getting him detained, the system is terribly broken.
Given that everything we do online is now being monitored, however, I don't think his comments were even close to the human investigation threshold. Nor are yours. Nor are mine. Gitmo? Please.
Because every time the filters do get a false positive, a human has to look at it. It's the same problem we face with spam. Humans looking at emails and Slashdot postings for evidence of terrorist plots are a Bad Thing, because humans cost too damn much compared to filters.
In the case of spam, we glance at the mail and, upon seeing HTML or a "200." at the start of the IP address, reflexively delete what our filters missed. But maybe our best friend is in South America and using some dorky kiosk that only sends HTML. Oops. His mail gets deleted it's cheaper to discard all 200.0/8 mail as spam than it is to waste time investigating it.
But unlike our spam situation, the default option for a filter reading the comment isn't to send the comment to an agent, and the default option for an agent reading the filter's false positive isn't to disappear noda132. Why? Because even though an agent reading noda132's posting history and checking for other records in the database has already cost his department a small fortune compared to the automated filter, actually ordering the disappearance of someone requires vastly more resources still.
The most cost-effective approach to security is widespread (omnipresent) monitoring and automated filtering with a high threshold to reduce investigation costs, followed by human investigation with a still higher threshold to reduce the costs of disappearing a false positive. You can read the word "cost" in that sentence in dollars or in civil liberties and the argument remains the same.
Bottom line: Those who defend the nation's security and those who defend its civil liberties share a common goal in keeping wisecrackers like noda123 off the radar screen in the first place, and and from being disappeared should he be so unlucky as to make it past the filter as a false positive.
The people on both sides of this debate are all on the good guys' side.
You know, actually being full of hate isn't very constructive either. I'm gonna pull another one of those horrible Western values you seem to... well, actively dislike (since you're somehow above "hate") and ask you this:
What's not to hate about rape?
Yes, instead of asking why do they hate us, why not ask why they rape us? Oh, right, it's her fault if an "Australian pig" (or Norwegian whore, or French harlot, or your wife, or your sister, or your daughter) doesn't want to get "fucked Leb style", she should just put on a fuckin' burkha with the rest of the cattle, shouldn't she?
To which I say - fuck that.
Wow. That was great reading. While we're on the subject, Malathir's recent speech (the one with the anti-Semitic diatribe) offers essentially the same analysis and conclusions, albeit from the enemy's perspective.
And yes, I also agree that if we can't get the cultural imperialist programme through "in time", we may have to resort to other methods.
To the relativists, this war can be summed up in one sentence: "This planet isn't big enough for two mutually-exclusive cultures", and the fact that you believe otherwise, and the fact that I desperately wish you were right, doesn't mean jack shit to our common enemy.
Absolutely. 1000 years ago, we were the barbarians trying to impose a tyrannical theocracy on everyone, and they were the light of the civilized world.
But what have they done for humanity lately?
(Emphasis added)
And that is why they hate us.
Thus beginneth the rant. This is not addressed to the poster to whom I'm responding, your post just provided me with a jumping-off point for a rant that's been brewing in my mind all week.
An open letter to the world's barbarians:
"DEMOCRACY! WHISKEY! SEXY!"
If the best your culture has to offer the 21st Century is mass gang rape in France ("taking turns", I believe you call it?) and mass murder damn near everywhere else, then fuck you, I call bullshit on your culture, because by any rational measure, your culture is inferior to ours. That's right. I said a taboo word. You're not "different". You're not "diverse". You're inferior. You are barbarians. And worse, you're not just content to live as animals, you seek to reduce us to your level. And I'm sick to my stomach at having to watch the news - as every day, you use our western tendency towards tolerance as a shield for your culture's twin values of mass rape and mass murder. I am a free man. I will not tolerate Dhimmitude. You will have to kill me before I bow down to your false God.
You have two options. You can join civilization or you can be wiped out by an unstoppable wave of cultural imperialism. You have left us with no other means of dealing with you short of genocide. (I know you - being barbarians - won't understand this, but we believe it's better, not just for our bottom line, but on a moral level, to sell stuff to you than kill you.)
We're the 2-3 billion people who have adopted Western Civilization. We're here, we're better than you, and we're not going away.
Then again, didn't we all want to grow up in a world where geeks ruled the earth? Well, guess what? Now we do. The next President of the United States will be elected by whichever faction of wardrivers has the m4dd35t ski11z.
So, time to start thinking. Will it be ESR or RMS? (Linus isn't eligible, bummer.)
Have you taken a look at Enron's stock price since Bush got elected? How about Halliburton's?
(Don't most of the the conspiracy theories involve the assertion that Bush and Cheney were supposed to be *helping* their friends in the energy sector? Is that assertion borne out by even the most cursory glance at the stock charts of the companies involved?)
As opposed to digital television, where the large blocky squares around moving objects on static backgrounds make the real Super Bowl look worse than Madden 2003 ported to the Atari 2600.
Someday we're going to realize that a 13" TV and a pair of bunny ears was never all that bad.
>
> Just like you shouldn't drink while drunk.
Proofreading while drunk is also not recommended.
Something good, because with barely enough capacity for an hour of half-decent video, you'll get bored and go back to fucking the wife pretty quickly? *rimshot*
Seems the Army's catching on. Darl McBride, consider that as a warning.
>
> Now think about the cost of covering all the bandwidth required by all search engines which would be blocked by this robots.txt file. Multiply it by the "your portion" calculated above to find out what your share of that project would cost you in higher taxes.
Now thing about $1,800,000,000,000 (1.8 trillion tax revenue) divided by 300,000,000 (300 million) people in the US.
If you paid more than $6,000 in federal taxes, you're already paying more than your fair share.
It's the supreme law of the land, not a suicide pact.
Note that even if you read it with the literality of a Biblical fundamentalist, you only have the right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Reasonable searches and seizures are allowed. That's a loophole big enough to drive an galactic supercluster through, and it was put there for a reason.
Correct. I'm not threatened by your willingness to pick up a gun to defend what you perceive as your rights. There are very few of you, your numbers are shrinking, and should your kind actually start firing that gun, your lives will be shortened quickly.
In our presently insecure society, the security meme propagates extremely well. It is outcrowding, and will continue to outcrowd, the privacy meme. People need to be led. They're willing to give their lives for security, never mind their privacy. Once the privacy meme has been effectively neutralized and a secure society established, there'll be a few stragglers, but they'll be recognized as paranoids or sociopaths, and given medical treatment to help them overcome their affliction.
> This boils down to our right to be anonymous in our speech and in our beliefs. Lack of privacy means lack of anonymity. A lack of anonymity means a lack of freedom in speech. A lack of freedom of speech means that we no longer control our own lives.
Anonymity (or even Slashdotesque pseudonymity) does not mean that you are not accountable to others for your actions, words, or thoughts. Privacy is not a shield for lawlessness; anonymity is not a shield for privacy.
>
>Let me reiterate: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!
On that note. I just finished reading the Best. SWG. Postmortem. Evah.
The game is bugged because the design process and the implementation process are also bugged. Programmers can fix bugs in code. They can't fix fundamental design flaws or fucked-up development processes.
That's the polite way of saying it. The honest truth? Raph Koster, you are a poor game designer, because you fail to understand what "fun" means, and you doggedly implement your "vision" no matter how "un-fun" it happens to be to your customers.
And SOE, you are a poor gaming company, because you fail to understand what "buggy" means, and you forced a poor designer to release a poor game too early, compounding the problem.
And for both of these reasons, that, is why SWG failed.
>
>There is a very real correlation to abused children becoming irresponsible adults, it is a common psychological side effect of the abuse.
1) A program of rigorous mental conditioning to eliminate "wrong" options from thought. If you can't conceive of irresponsible behavior, you can't carry it out.
2) Don't remove the device upon graduation from school. Simply alter the behaviors that produce reward and punishment. This is a more primitive way of doing #1. It's also more expensive.
I suspect we'll end up with option #2. That's fine, more securindustry technology providers for me to invest in :)
Bad idea. You think I hate kids on airplanes now? (No, wait. This is a good idea. I'll never have to put up with kids on airplanes again, because y'all parental types will hafta just drive.)
But seriously - explosives would be bad. But a GPS-linked location tracker, embedded under the skin and hooked up to a remotely-operated medical pump and pre-metered dose of stimulant or sedative would be just as effective. Good for Alzheimer's patients (always wandering and forgetting their meds). It's also the cure for infant diabetes (one cell of the medical pump could contain insulin). A extremely strong dose of sedatives for prisoners would be a nonlethal way of securing prisoners for transport. Variations on stims/seds could be effective in military use. Your kids won't be the beta testers; they'll get whatever of those ideas turns out to work best.
Shouldn't the English department be teaching literature instead of boring functional specifications? (Short critique: It's barely a concept document, let alone a full functional spec. Too many ambiguities. Needs an executive summary.)