> What we should do, is somehow let them (the politicos) know that we constitute a significant
voting block.
Which would be nice, if we were a significant voting block. Unfortunately, we aren't.
> Another approach would be to put some techies in office. But I can't think of any that would be willing to take those kinds of jobs.
Which is the real problem. The only people that want these jobs are power-hungry lawyer types. So we get laws written by power-hungry lawyers for power-hungry lawyers.
Look on the bright side - if government were as efficient as it could be, every MP3 downloader would be in prison. (On the other hand, every spammer would be a greasy smudge near an automated laser cannon. Lose some, win some.)
> Remeber that the government has released security extensions to linux already. so don't be to quick to beat them down. If the software they provide is open and auditable then why not?
And even if it isn't open, why not? Whether it's designed to be auditable or not, it's gonna be audited. Bigtime.
NSA has two mandates - 0wn non-Americans' b0x3n, and help us secure our b0x3n against non-Americans. This seems to be part of the latter mandate.
For those speculating that this isn't an NSA thing to secure your boxes, but is instead a sneaky way to get you to install FBI trojanware - finding proof of such a claim would probably be the greatest prize in hackerdom.
With that much fame at stake, you don't think every hacker and cracker on the planet isn't gonna be disassembling every last byte of this code, looking for precisely this sort of evidence? Once the binary's released, there'll be no way to put the cat back in the bag once an army of determined reverse-engineers goes over it. With that many eyes, even trojans/bugs in closed-source apps are shallow.
Our government may be dumb, but they're not that dumb. So odds are very good that this is merely what it claims to be - a quick-and-dirty tool to help secure a system.
Much as it can be fun to imagine otherwise, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
> Just for future reference, it's "toed," not "towed."
And as long as we're starting a spelling thread - for anyone reading, here's my pet peeve:
"Populous" was a cool game.
"Populace" is the noun that means "the population".
"Populous" is an adjective meaning "Having a population".
To wit: "PopCon 2001 was held in East Buttfsck, Montana. Nobody showed up. The gaming populace decided to hold next year's PopCon in a more populous region."
> Of course a corporation is owned by people. That doesn't mean those people have any say in what the corporation as a whole does.
When was the last time you looked at a shareholder proxy?
The owners of the corporation elect the Board. If the Board is sucking ass, the owners of the corporation can withhold their vote for a nominated director, or - if a shareholder has an alternate slate of directors that he or she would prefer, and can convince a majority of other shareholders that this new board would be preferable to the current board - elect a new board.
I'll grant that this doesn't happen often. But whose fault is that? The fault of the board, or the fault of the shareholders who re-elect it?
> To extend that logic it is then OK to walk into MCIs head quarter and shit on their carpet in order to express my dissatisfaction with their customer service.
And as long as we're talking about telcos and ways to express our opinions of them, I'd say you have a gift for understatement.
> Hypothetically if somebody where to suggest GM tabacco with low/no nicotine, the established tabacco producers would likly follow a similar path and oppose, probably stating similar reasons GM is bad, taste, choice, et. all.
Well, most of the harmful effects from smoking are due to the fact that you're slurping partially-oxidized chemicals straight into the mucus membranes of your lungs, so I suspect that a nic-free smoke wouldn't be much healthier than your current smokes.
Problem is, a nic-free smoke wouldn't provide the pleasure to the smoker that nicotine provides, so it'd do poorly in the market. Cigarette smokers would never switch to nicotine-free cigarettes - why bother? (Just as pot smokers have no reason to smoke hemp - you can't get high off THC-free marijuana, so you make rope out of it instead of smoking it:)
Without the nicotine "high" to addict first-time users, nic-free cigarettes would be useless even as an entry-level product. ("Freddy! We know you're the 'cool' kid on the block, but this Junior Camel your Dad gave you tastes/smells like crap! Why the hell do the grownups smoke this stuff again?")
So yes, you could engineer nic-free tobacco, but the tobacco lobby wouldn't care either way, because nobody would pay money to smoke it.
Side note: I always thought the nicotine patch was a good idea - but that it shouldn't require a prescription.
Nicotine's a drug. It's legal in an air-fouling, often-lung-cancer-causing (cigarette/pipe/cigar) form without a prescription. It's legal in a clean (unless you're kissing the user), sometimes-mouth-cancer-causing (chewing) form without a prescription, why can't it be legal in an even cleaner, non-cancer-causing (patch) form without a prescription?
FWIW, I'm a non-smoker, and the reason I don't hang around smokers is because, well, I think your drug of choice smells like crap. If you nicotine addicts could just dose up with a patch, you might still have a heart disease risk from long-term nicotine use, but your lung cancer rates would drop, and most importantly, none of us non-smokers would have any legitimate reason to ask you to butt out -- because you wouldn't be filling our air with your choice. Just like coffee drinkers, you could enjoy your drug of choice in public or in the workplace without anyone getting on your case!:-)
> But the interesting thing is, whether crosspollinated or engineered, genes do escape into the wild, and the cousin species do pick up the new characteristics -even from the GM plants. That's pretty scary.
How so? Evolution takes care of its own.
For instance, I happen to think that decaf is an abomination unto my sight. Were I in the business of running a coffee plantation, and GM-hacked decaf beans started showing up, I'd (a) be pissed, (b) rip out the decaf plants, and (c) probably sue the inventors of decaf beans for the cost of replanting. The gene for decaf stops at the border of my field because I select against it.
Suppose I'm wrong, and most people prefer decaf. I can either (a) go out of business, or (b) grow decaf or less-caffeinated beans. The gene for decaf propagates, but it propagates because I choose to stay in business and select for it.
Suppose everyone's wrong, and human civilization stops. Then we're back to natural selection.
Caffeine is bitter stuff, and toxic to some insects. That may be why it evolved in coffee beans. Within a few dozen generations, predators will take advantage of the decaf beans - low-caffeine plants will have their beans eaten more often, thereby producing fewer offspring, and things will return to normal.
In the case of the Flavr-Savr tomato, the same thing applies -- I'd expect that a tomato with a tough skin and long shelf life, in the absence of human intervention, would sit on the ground and act as a tasty morsel for predators for longer periods of time than unmodded tomatoes.
Meantime, unmodded tomatoes that rot after a day or two - get their seeds into the ground faster, have their offspring germinate sooner, and have more nutrients (from the soil created after the fruit rots away) - than the Flavr-Savrs.
Farmers planting GM foods are no different than farmers who select crops for desirable traits. In neither case are farmers selecting traits that are advantageous to the food plants -- they're selecting for traits that are advantageous to humans.
And if you think that's somehow wrong or immoral, I suggest you research how we've directed the evolution of corn over the past 1500 years.
> GM doesn't just make crops more plentiful or disease resistant, it introduces a new species. This can cause all sorts of problems. GM plants can destroy biodiversity [...]
HuH? Either the GM-hacked coffee cross-pollinates with unmodded coffee, or it doesn't.
If there's no cross-pollination, then there's no risk of the GM-hacked coffee making it into the wild.
If there is cross-pollination, aren't you contradicting yourself? How can introducing new genes into the pool "destroy biodiversity"? The very definition of "biodiversity" makes it an inherent contradiction.
(The real question about GMing coffee not to produce caffeine is "Why bother? What self-respecting geek drinks decaf anyways? Maybe if they can make g3n3-h4x0r3d c0ff33 with more caffeine, I'll be interested.")
> Be a good citizen and join the citizen corps today!
First off - 1 in 24 Americans - but the article in.au talks about one million informants. That's make the population of the USA... 24 million?!
Unless the Feds are planning on someone wiping out 90+% of the US population, someone slipped a decimal point.
But if we're gonna draw a 1984 parallel, I'd call your attention to the fact that Outer Party members were under far more surveillance than the proles.
I'd expect that the same would be true for the Corps. In fact, were I in charge, the first people I'd investigate would be those first in line to join the Corps. (Those who protest loudest about their loyalty often doth protest too much.)
As for the rest of us proles, we'll stick to minding our own business, enjoying our prolefeed on Slashdot, and watching reruns on our old TVs that can still be turned off.
Personally, I think the future's gonna be more like Max Headroom than 1984, but even if a future administration decides to abuse its police powers, I think I rate low enough on the threat scale that I won't have to worry. Hell, if I can rack up enough "+5, Funny" scores, they might even decide to hire me as a propagandist.
(...and somewhere, deep in the bowels of HomeSec, a hard drive controller scribbles "Profile Tackhead: Will Write Prolefeed For Beer And Pizza. Establish contact and recruit via TIPS agent working at nearest Domino's"...:-)
> Sure it is possible to listen to dissention but that is merely because those in power have failed to keep ahead of the curve.
THANK YOU!
This debate has nothing to do with capitalism vs. communism, nor whether "gubmint" or "big corporations" will form Big Brother.
What went right in the collapsed Eastern Bloc states, had nothing to do with free information flow in the West per se, but everything to do with the East's failure to recognize it as a threat.
When your culture is that of a bureaucracy of desk jobs and paper and typewriters, and it takes 5-10 years to fill out the forms for a photocopier, you think you're secure. Then some wise-azzez named Woz and Jobs invent the personal computer (ca. 1978), and by the time your requisition for that new photocopier has come through, the whole friggin' world's changed (1988), and by the time you realize this might be a problem, it's all over (1991).
Lest anyone think we're immune - how 'bout the US government's response to terrorism. An INS based on jobs-for-life where nobody can be fired for the grossest incompetence, led to the "response" of issuing visas to the 9/11 hijackers six months after the attack.
The reason the 'net took off is that Governments Don't Get Technology (GDGT). The reason GDGT is because the type of person that works for governments tends not to Get Technology. Look around at the useless drones populating any DMV office. Or read 1984, and see how everyone in the Party was Just Doing Their Jobs, regardless of how pointless the drudgery in question was. They're the same kinds of people - they serve a useful function, but only insofar as the world doesn't change. Mindless adherence to volumes of regulations works fine - but only so long as reality doesn't change faster than new regs can be created.
Because technology changed faster than governments could adapt to that change, governments collapsed.
It's looking like our government has woken up to this, and is now playing catch-up in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.
For what it's worth, I hope they succeed -- the alternative is even worse. (Anyone who writes 1985, the sequel in which Winston and Julia start an Internet cafe, leading to the Party's collapse in Oceania (and the collapse of Parties in Eastasia and Eurasia), had damn well better write 1986, when civilians in all three nations starve to death en masse because they can no longer think or work in their own interests.)
Also, for what it's worth - you can argue that East Germany (in particular) collapsed due to internal inefficiencies created by an overwhelmingly high proportion of its population snitching on each other in the Stasi - and the rest of the population having to keep track of Stasi's records.
A government capable of exploiting advanced technologies such as data mining could end up with the best of both worlds - more efficient monitoring of citizens would eliminate the need for a crippling bureaucracy, while still affording the reduced crime rates associated with the security state.
(In other words, imagine playing Alpha Centauri without the "-2 Efficiency" penalty for running under Police State. Combine that with Free Market economics and we're talking major world-taking-over possibilities here:-)
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't seen too many people argueing the other side of the coin. That is the big argument for restricting crypto is that "the terrorists" (tm) will use it to communicate with each other.
Fair enough, and yeah, they could be.
> Are we arguing that the "the terrorists" (tm) could be hacking into communication networks and gaining vital information from everyday conversation? It seems just as plasable.
I'm not sure if anyone's argued that. Personally, I'd find that argument pretty far-fetched.
We're talking about guys who use the Journal of Irreproducible Results (a source of "science geek humor") as a source for their nuclear weapons plans.
We're talking about guys who can't seem to figure out that soggy fuses in shoes won't light reliably. (Thankfully.)
We're talking about guys whose only successful operation above the level of truck-bombing was to steal a piece of 20th-century technology (jet aircraft turned into flying bomb) using 11th-century technology (knives and physical intimidation) and the knowledge that up to September 10, 2001, passengers had been trained to cooperate with hijackers in the hope of eventual release.
So no, I don't think Al-Queda is capable of intercepting useful communications from US citizens.
And furthermore, given NSA's public statements on their difficulty in dealing with the deluge of data they intercept -- it's pretty obvious that "the terrorists" (or even terrorist states) lack the technology to use such information, even if they had a live stream of every byte passing through MAE-East.
While it's never wise to underestimate one's enemy, and while securing government, military, or corporate communication systems (whether you suspect terrorist monitoring thereof or not!) is a Good Thing, it seems pretty obvious to me that our enemies simply aren't capable of intercepting much.gov,.mil, or.com traffic, let alone Joe and Jane Sixpack or Slashdotter's. Encrypting your emails doesn't secure 'em against the terrorists, because the terrorists aren't intercepting your unencrypted mails.
A high-tech war in which everyone needs secure comms could be kinda fun. But it's not the kind of war we're fighting today. (Maybe in 50+ years when nanotech takes off, and microscopic self-replicating listening devices become ubiquitous, and maybe against a nation with enough nanotech designers to make it interesting. But not today, and not against this enemy.)
> > [...a fool and his money are soon parted] > >Since it was a government contract, the money belonged to the taxpayers of California... Am I to
intrepret your post as a knock on Californians ?
I'm not gonna speak for the original poster, but consider what Californyuh's facing.
$23B deficit, budget at an impasse (to be fixed using Enronesque off-balance-sheet financing tricks that won't show up in higher taxes until after the election), mismanaged power crisis, highly questionable Oracle deal, pay-for-play legislation for pipefitters unions (in exchange for campaign donations, banning PVC pipe because it's cheaper to install than metal, which the pipefitters oppose) and prison guards' unions (similar exchange: give campaign funds, get favorable legislation).
Dot-com implosion started in 2000. Last time I looked, this was 2002. Anyone here not able to guess that capital gains taxes would drop precipitously, resulting in a drop in state revenues? Yet spending is up, year-over-year, by a rate far over that of inflation. Up 20% this year alone. Oh, right. This is CA, where only budget that matters is the campaign budget.
Yet Davis still leads in the polls. So yeah, it looks like a taxpayer and his money are easily parted.
But I'll be charitable and withhold judgement until after the elections.
> There's an article over at CNet about all those software contracts that are out there, and what to watch for
before signing the dotted line.
Using California's $95 million Oracle problem, they define what the general terms are that get used in software procurement and support contracts."
At least in California, the list of "things to watch for before the contract gets signed" is pretty short:
1) A $25,000 campaign donation to the Governor's re-election fund.
> It's not the regulations that are to blame. There's absolutely no reason why a mass-produced device like an airbag, which is essentially a 12-gauge blank wired to a model rocket igniter and sewn into a nylon bag, should cost $1000.
No, there isn't. But if you were to build 100,000 such airbags at the $50-100 cost of materials involved (it's a little more complicated than a blank and a squib:), someone would be injured by an accidental firing, or someone would find a steering column through their chest due to an accidental non- firing.
And that's where the lawyers would come in and eat you alive.
And that's where the costs go up. Not in producing the gear, but in ensuring compliance with regulations written not by engineers, but by lawyers and politicians.
About the only good thing that's come out of the second round of legal wrangling about airbags (when they found that they could injure kids in forward-facing seats) is that you can at least turn the damn passenger-side airbag off when you're the only passenger in the car, thereby preventing an additional $1000+ of damage in the event of any collision that would otherwise have activated it.
> Hell, with that argument, the GREENEST choice seems to be to say, fuck it, new cars are for suckers, I'm gonna spend $1000 on a 30 year old aircooled VW, and keep driving it and fixing it until the universe dies.
Works in California.
Doesn't work in a state where it snows and there's salt on the road. The body will rust out of most cars within 10 years.
(Which is too bad, because you're right on the money -- an old car for $1000 with a large supply of readily-available parts, and/or easily-reproduced aftermarket parts, will be cheaper to maintain than a brand-new $20000 car that'll depreciate to $5000 within 3 years.)
> The 1924 Model-T touring car cost $290. That's $2901.86 in 2001 dollars. What the hell happened?
In a nutshell, safety and emissions regs.
Each airbag on a modern car costs about $1000, and it's against the law to build a car that doesn't have one.
Add another $500 or so worth for the catalytic converter, but at least the catalytic converter doesn't need replacement after a fender-bender.
Finally, add in the cost of designing the equipment into the car, plus the cost of filling out the paperwork to ensure that the design's approvable by all of the myriad of state and federal officials that pass judgement.
(And you can add another $4-500 if it's an SUV and it's gonna be sold in California next year.:-)
ScienceWire has learned that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (DOE:LBNL) is under investigation from the Nobel Physics Committee regarding possible fraud with respect to the existence of Elements 116 and 118.
Lab director, Beef Shank, is "shocked, shocked, I tell you" that fabrication of research went on under his watch. "We have since fired Arthur Anderson from our peer review committee, and have commenced an aggressive investigation in concert with the Nobel Committee, and intend to release our findings when the facts come to light. No further comment."
The individual singled out by Shank, but not identified by him [what the fuck? sometimes satire writes itself -- Editor], was identified by several newspapers as fired physicist and author Victor Nabokov.
Nabokov was suspended by the lab in November, later fired, and has a grievance pending regarding his dismissal for writing books about a quest for an island of stability in a sea of daughter radioisotopes with short half-lives.
Shank lauded his own department for ferreting out the fraud. "There is nothing more important for a laboratory than scientific integrity," Shank told lab employees. "Only with such integrity will the Congress, which funds our work, provide us with more grant money. On the bright side, at least we can conclusively say that we've found at least two candidates for the element Unobtainium."
LBNL stock found no such stability, closing down almost 70% today, to $1.14 (US protons), or $1.84 (Euro neutrons), on heavy volume.
> I have a feeling that minuteman was first used as the codename for America's rapid response missile system, when the idea was that the missiles could be readied to fire within a minute. I guess the name is a nod to that. JP.
Close, but no cigar.
Both were nods to the original soldiers in the American Revolution - younger, single men who'd taken an oath to respond to a call to arms within one minute. They were the elite of the militia at the time.
They were involved in this little scuffle, about which your history teachers (if you're an American) may have told you. It was the "shot heard 'round the world".
Re:Genocide by machine...
on
Robot Wars
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· Score: 2
> Mechanical weapons have pinned down an group, and that group decides to surrender. The person or entity on the other side of that machine feels no threat to his life, so like an execution, they might just "pull the switch" on them. WHY? It is a colder decision... or that decision is automated for "no quarter" fighting.
The CO of the guy "pulling the switch" takes one look at the archived MPEG-4 stream and throws him in the stockade for the rest of his life for a war crime.
The excuse "I was just following orders" or "they were comin' right for us!" doesn't fly when the video stream's there for all (all along the chain of command) to see.
Perhaps the chain of command can be corrupted and will cover it up. But that's a far greater risk with manned warfare (which, by defintion, features fewer witnesses) than with our hypothetical war-by-remote-control-robot.
> > We already go to great effort, including putting our own guys at great risk, to avoid hitting civilian targets. This will make that much easier (and safer) to do. What's your objection? > > Well it will make it alot more tempting(and feasible) to just beat the whole world into submission. Poor people growing coke cause the land was poisoned(by the US) so that nothing else will grow? Put them up the clones! Poor people trying to form a union, so they don't have to work 16h/day for some american company? Put them up the clones! When the US replayces some democratically elcted govt. with their choise of dictator, and people try to fight back? Put them up the clones! Failed to get that exeption so US soliders can't commit crimes against humanity and get away with it? Put them up the clones instead! Is Japan exporting more to the US than importing? And competing with product quality whould cost the campain contributors too much money? PUT THEM UP THE CLONES!
Slashdotter ignoring the poster's point - that US soldiers already put themselves at risk to avoid civilian casualties, and that a 6-inch-tall remote-controlled robot can get much closer to, (and hold the laser designator on), the target for longer periods of time than a live soldier, thereby reducing the chances of collateral damage and US casualties?
Slashdotter who apparently gets all his ideas from reading the works of cunning linguist Noam Chomsky, but still unable to form a coherent argument, use paragraph breaks, or even spell? (OK, so Chomsky may not be able to form a coherent argument either, but at least he's good for two out of three:-)
Slashdotter merely trying to be funny, but not even able to get an AYBABTU reference correct?
Somebody - set - up - him - the... oh, nevermind.;-)
> She is from a country (Korea) that has just recently rebuilt itself after a conflict between two superpowers that was not directly welcomed by any Koreans themselves.
Something she might want to ponder -- the role of land mines (antitank and antipersonnel) -- in making sure that the war doesn't start up again. There's considerable discussion of it in yesterday's Slashdot article on a laser-based mine removal system. (Basically, a big honkin' laser on a Humvee, intended for clearing small areas of mines under battlefield conditions.)
Briefly - the US isn't a major user of land mines, and the DMZ is one of two areas in the world where the US still needs 'em. NK forces could easily overrun SK forces, were it not for the minefields in the DMZ.
Risk to civilian life from these minefields is nil - because nobody lives in the DMZ. Their presence keeps the truce, even when NK is in rather dire political/economic straits, and SK becomes a tempting target.
> In the game of war, alot of bad stuff is going to go down, but I guess you just have to hope it's the other guy that gets the worst of it.
Yup. And if I'm gonna quote Patton, I should also quote Gen. Douglas MacArthur:
"A soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must bear the deepest wounds and scars of war."
> I certainly understand, and share, the apprehension, and the feeling this could be a very bad thing. But while I was sitting here reading the comments of others, a nuclear bomb went off in my head. [...]
> Technology has already allowed us to move past the days of soldiers getting thier limbs blown off in the jungle and into a new era where our military is essentially invincable.
Yeah, I'll accept that your original question ("do we really have a problem with casualties") wasn't meant the way I took it. My bad.
But I think your followup question (even though it's intended rhetorically:-)
> Ask the countrymen of those ware torn areas if the US needs any new military weapons that will enable them to dominate over any other country in the world.
...still betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what war's about.
War's not about asking your adversary (or enemy) what he thinks your army should be doing.
"Pardon us, Mr. Bin Laden, do you think it's a good idea that our troops be better-trained, better-equipped, and better-armed than yours, thereby achieving seriously kickass frag ratios against your forces? Or should we give 'em all single-shot rifles, ten rounds of ammo, one day's training, and then order a few thousand recruits to wander aimlessly on the battlefield directly in front of your troops in the middle of the day, you know, to sorta even things out a bit?"
As Patton said - war's not about dying for your country, it's about making some other son of a bitch die for his.
That's not to say that war's somehow good -- it's not, as any soldier will also tell you. It simply means that by the time you are at war, you owe it to your troops (your troops, not the other guy's troops!) to give them the maximum advantage possible.
85 years ago, that advantage was biplanes and the first tanks.
60 years ago, that advantage was crypto, long-range antisubmarine bombers, long-range fighter escorts, and yes, the first nuclear weapons.
10 years ago, it was cruise missiles, GPS, night vision, and the F-117.
Today, it's cheap GPS-guided bombs dropped from B-52s, thermobaric bombs, earth-penetrating warheads, and snipers.
10 years from now, it may be be killer robots, theater-based missile defense systems and airborne lasers. Or stuff that's just a gleam in some weaponeer's mind.
That's the name of the game. Were I a soldier, I'd be thankful for every advantage my weaponeers could give me -- because if the shit hits the fan and I have to use those weapons, the enemy on the battlefield sure as hell ain't gonna cut me any slack.
Slashdot Mirror
Which would be nice, if we were a significant voting block. Unfortunately, we aren't.
> Another approach would be to put some techies in office. But I can't think of any that would be willing to take those kinds of jobs.
Which is the real problem. The only people that want these jobs are power-hungry lawyer types. So we get laws written by power-hungry lawyers for power-hungry lawyers.
Look on the bright side - if government were as efficient as it could be, every MP3 downloader would be in prison. (On the other hand, every spammer would be a greasy smudge near an automated laser cannon. Lose some, win some.)
And even if it isn't open, why not? Whether it's designed to be auditable or not, it's gonna be audited. Bigtime.
NSA has two mandates - 0wn non-Americans' b0x3n, and help us secure our b0x3n against non-Americans. This seems to be part of the latter mandate.
For those speculating that this isn't an NSA thing to secure your boxes, but is instead a sneaky way to get you to install FBI trojanware - finding proof of such a claim would probably be the greatest prize in hackerdom.
With that much fame at stake, you don't think every hacker and cracker on the planet isn't gonna be disassembling every last byte of this code, looking for precisely this sort of evidence? Once the binary's released, there'll be no way to put the cat back in the bag once an army of determined reverse-engineers goes over it. With that many eyes, even trojans/bugs in closed-source apps are shallow.
Our government may be dumb, but they're not that dumb. So odds are very good that this is merely what it claims to be - a quick-and-dirty tool to help secure a system.
Much as it can be fun to imagine otherwise, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
And as long as we're starting a spelling thread - for anyone reading, here's my pet peeve:
"Populous" was a cool game.
"Populace" is the noun that means "the population".
"Populous" is an adjective meaning "Having a population".
To wit: "PopCon 2001 was held in East Buttfsck, Montana. Nobody showed up. The gaming populace decided to hold next year's PopCon in a more populous region."
When was the last time you looked at a shareholder proxy?
The owners of the corporation elect the Board. If the Board is sucking ass, the owners of the corporation can withhold their vote for a nominated director, or - if a shareholder has an alternate slate of directors that he or she would prefer, and can convince a majority of other shareholders that this new board would be preferable to the current board - elect a new board.
I'll grant that this doesn't happen often. But whose fault is that? The fault of the board, or the fault of the shareholders who re-elect it?
And as long as we're talking about telcos and ways to express our opinions of them, I'd say you have a gift for understatement.
Well, most of the harmful effects from smoking are due to the fact that you're slurping partially-oxidized chemicals straight into the mucus membranes of your lungs, so I suspect that a nic-free smoke wouldn't be much healthier than your current smokes.
Problem is, a nic-free smoke wouldn't provide the pleasure to the smoker that nicotine provides, so it'd do poorly in the market. Cigarette smokers would never switch to nicotine-free cigarettes - why bother? (Just as pot smokers have no reason to smoke hemp - you can't get high off THC-free marijuana, so you make rope out of it instead of smoking it :)
Without the nicotine "high" to addict first-time users, nic-free cigarettes would be useless even as an entry-level product. ("Freddy! We know you're the 'cool' kid on the block, but this Junior Camel your Dad gave you tastes/smells like crap! Why the hell do the grownups smoke this stuff again?")
So yes, you could engineer nic-free tobacco, but the tobacco lobby wouldn't care either way, because nobody would pay money to smoke it.
Side note: I always thought the nicotine patch was a good idea - but that it shouldn't require a prescription.
Nicotine's a drug. It's legal in an air-fouling, often-lung-cancer-causing (cigarette/pipe/cigar) form without a prescription. It's legal in a clean (unless you're kissing the user), sometimes-mouth-cancer-causing (chewing) form without a prescription, why can't it be legal in an even cleaner, non-cancer-causing (patch) form without a prescription?
FWIW, I'm a non-smoker, and the reason I don't hang around smokers is because, well, I think your drug of choice smells like crap. If you nicotine addicts could just dose up with a patch, you might still have a heart disease risk from long-term nicotine use, but your lung cancer rates would drop, and most importantly, none of us non-smokers would have any legitimate reason to ask you to butt out -- because you wouldn't be filling our air with your choice. Just like coffee drinkers, you could enjoy your drug of choice in public or in the workplace without anyone getting on your case! :-)
How so? Evolution takes care of its own.
For instance, I happen to think that decaf is an abomination unto my sight. Were I in the business of running a coffee plantation, and GM-hacked decaf beans started showing up, I'd (a) be pissed, (b) rip out the decaf plants, and (c) probably sue the inventors of decaf beans for the cost of replanting. The gene for decaf stops at the border of my field because I select against it.
Suppose I'm wrong, and most people prefer decaf. I can either (a) go out of business, or (b) grow decaf or less-caffeinated beans. The gene for decaf propagates, but it propagates because I choose to stay in business and select for it.
Suppose everyone's wrong, and human civilization stops. Then we're back to natural selection.
Caffeine is bitter stuff, and toxic to some insects. That may be why it evolved in coffee beans. Within a few dozen generations, predators will take advantage of the decaf beans - low-caffeine plants will have their beans eaten more often, thereby producing fewer offspring, and things will return to normal.
In the case of the Flavr-Savr tomato, the same thing applies -- I'd expect that a tomato with a tough skin and long shelf life, in the absence of human intervention, would sit on the ground and act as a tasty morsel for predators for longer periods of time than unmodded tomatoes.
Meantime, unmodded tomatoes that rot after a day or two - get their seeds into the ground faster, have their offspring germinate sooner, and have more nutrients (from the soil created after the fruit rots away) - than the Flavr-Savrs.
Farmers planting GM foods are no different than farmers who select crops for desirable traits. In neither case are farmers selecting traits that are advantageous to the food plants -- they're selecting for traits that are advantageous to humans.
And if you think that's somehow wrong or immoral, I suggest you research how we've directed the evolution of corn over the past 1500 years.
Hey, you say that like drinking 96 cups of coffee in 48 hours would be a bad thing ;-)
HuH? Either the GM-hacked coffee cross-pollinates with unmodded coffee, or it doesn't.
If there's no cross-pollination, then there's no risk of the GM-hacked coffee making it into the wild.
If there is cross-pollination, aren't you contradicting yourself? How can introducing new genes into the pool "destroy biodiversity"? The very definition of "biodiversity" makes it an inherent contradiction.
(The real question about GMing coffee not to produce caffeine is "Why bother? What self-respecting geek drinks decaf anyways? Maybe if they can make g3n3-h4x0r3d c0ff33 with more caffeine, I'll be interested.")
First off - 1 in 24 Americans - but the article in .au talks about one million informants. That's make the population of the USA... 24 million?!
Unless the Feds are planning on someone wiping out 90+% of the US population, someone slipped a decimal point.
But if we're gonna draw a 1984 parallel, I'd call your attention to the fact that Outer Party members were under far more surveillance than the proles.
I'd expect that the same would be true for the Corps. In fact, were I in charge, the first people I'd investigate would be those first in line to join the Corps. (Those who protest loudest about their loyalty often doth protest too much.)
As for the rest of us proles, we'll stick to minding our own business, enjoying our prolefeed on Slashdot, and watching reruns on our old TVs that can still be turned off.
Personally, I think the future's gonna be more like Max Headroom than 1984, but even if a future administration decides to abuse its police powers, I think I rate low enough on the threat scale that I won't have to worry. Hell, if I can rack up enough "+5, Funny" scores, they might even decide to hire me as a propagandist.
(...and somewhere, deep in the bowels of HomeSec, a hard drive controller scribbles "Profile Tackhead: Will Write Prolefeed For Beer And Pizza. Establish contact and recruit via TIPS agent working at nearest Domino's"... :-)
THANK YOU!
This debate has nothing to do with capitalism vs. communism, nor whether "gubmint" or "big corporations" will form Big Brother.
What went right in the collapsed Eastern Bloc states, had nothing to do with free information flow in the West per se, but everything to do with the East's failure to recognize it as a threat.
When your culture is that of a bureaucracy of desk jobs and paper and typewriters, and it takes 5-10 years to fill out the forms for a photocopier, you think you're secure. Then some wise-azzez named Woz and Jobs invent the personal computer (ca. 1978), and by the time your requisition for that new photocopier has come through, the whole friggin' world's changed (1988), and by the time you realize this might be a problem, it's all over (1991).
Lest anyone think we're immune - how 'bout the US government's response to terrorism. An INS based on jobs-for-life where nobody can be fired for the grossest incompetence, led to the "response" of issuing visas to the 9/11 hijackers six months after the attack.
The reason the 'net took off is that Governments Don't Get Technology (GDGT). The reason GDGT is because the type of person that works for governments tends not to Get Technology. Look around at the useless drones populating any DMV office. Or read 1984, and see how everyone in the Party was Just Doing Their Jobs, regardless of how pointless the drudgery in question was. They're the same kinds of people - they serve a useful function, but only insofar as the world doesn't change. Mindless adherence to volumes of regulations works fine - but only so long as reality doesn't change faster than new regs can be created.
Because technology changed faster than governments could adapt to that change, governments collapsed.
It's looking like our government has woken up to this, and is now playing catch-up in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.
For what it's worth, I hope they succeed -- the alternative is even worse. (Anyone who writes 1985, the sequel in which Winston and Julia start an Internet cafe, leading to the Party's collapse in Oceania (and the collapse of Parties in Eastasia and Eurasia), had damn well better write 1986, when civilians in all three nations starve to death en masse because they can no longer think or work in their own interests.)
Also, for what it's worth - you can argue that East Germany (in particular) collapsed due to internal inefficiencies created by an overwhelmingly high proportion of its population snitching on each other in the Stasi - and the rest of the population having to keep track of Stasi's records.
A government capable of exploiting advanced technologies such as data mining could end up with the best of both worlds - more efficient monitoring of citizens would eliminate the need for a crippling bureaucracy, while still affording the reduced crime rates associated with the security state.
(In other words, imagine playing Alpha Centauri without the "-2 Efficiency" penalty for running under Police State. Combine that with Free Market economics and we're talking major world-taking-over possibilities here :-)
Fair enough, and yeah, they could be.
> Are we arguing that the "the terrorists" (tm) could be hacking into communication networks and gaining vital information from everyday conversation? It seems just as plasable.
I'm not sure if anyone's argued that. Personally, I'd find that argument pretty far-fetched.
We're talking about guys who use the Journal of Irreproducible Results (a source of "science geek humor") as a source for their nuclear weapons plans.
We're talking about guys who can't seem to figure out that soggy fuses in shoes won't light reliably. (Thankfully.)
We're talking about guys whose only successful operation above the level of truck-bombing was to steal a piece of 20th-century technology (jet aircraft turned into flying bomb) using 11th-century technology (knives and physical intimidation) and the knowledge that up to September 10, 2001, passengers had been trained to cooperate with hijackers in the hope of eventual release.
So no, I don't think Al-Queda is capable of intercepting useful communications from US citizens.
And furthermore, given NSA's public statements on their difficulty in dealing with the deluge of data they intercept -- it's pretty obvious that "the terrorists" (or even terrorist states) lack the technology to use such information, even if they had a live stream of every byte passing through MAE-East.
While it's never wise to underestimate one's enemy, and while securing government, military, or corporate communication systems (whether you suspect terrorist monitoring thereof or not!) is a Good Thing, it seems pretty obvious to me that our enemies simply aren't capable of intercepting much .gov, .mil, or .com traffic, let alone Joe and Jane Sixpack or Slashdotter's. Encrypting your emails doesn't secure 'em against the terrorists, because the terrorists aren't intercepting your unencrypted mails.
A high-tech war in which everyone needs secure comms could be kinda fun. But it's not the kind of war we're fighting today. (Maybe in 50+ years when nanotech takes off, and microscopic self-replicating listening devices become ubiquitous, and maybe against a nation with enough nanotech designers to make it interesting. But not today, and not against this enemy.)
>
>Since it was a government contract, the money belonged to the taxpayers of California... Am I to intrepret your post as a knock on Californians ?
I'm not gonna speak for the original poster, but consider what Californyuh's facing.
$23B deficit, budget at an impasse (to be fixed using Enronesque off-balance-sheet financing tricks that won't show up in higher taxes until after the election), mismanaged power crisis, highly questionable Oracle deal, pay-for-play legislation for pipefitters unions (in exchange for campaign donations, banning PVC pipe because it's cheaper to install than metal, which the pipefitters oppose) and prison guards' unions (similar exchange: give campaign funds, get favorable legislation).
Dot-com implosion started in 2000. Last time I looked, this was 2002. Anyone here not able to guess that capital gains taxes would drop precipitously, resulting in a drop in state revenues? Yet spending is up, year-over-year, by a rate far over that of inflation. Up 20% this year alone. Oh, right. This is CA, where only budget that matters is the campaign budget.
Yet Davis still leads in the polls. So yeah, it looks like a taxpayer and his money are easily parted.
But I'll be charitable and withhold judgement until after the elections.
At least in California, the list of "things to watch for before the contract gets signed" is pretty short:
1) A $25,000 campaign donation to the Governor's re-election fund.
No, there isn't. But if you were to build 100,000 such airbags at the $50-100 cost of materials involved (it's a little more complicated than a blank and a squib :), someone would be injured by an accidental firing, or someone would find a steering column through their chest due to an accidental non- firing.
And that's where the lawyers would come in and eat you alive.
And that's where the costs go up. Not in producing the gear, but in ensuring compliance with regulations written not by engineers, but by lawyers and politicians.
About the only good thing that's come out of the second round of legal wrangling about airbags (when they found that they could injure kids in forward-facing seats) is that you can at least turn the damn passenger-side airbag off when you're the only passenger in the car, thereby preventing an additional $1000+ of damage in the event of any collision that would otherwise have activated it.
Works in California.
Doesn't work in a state where it snows and there's salt on the road. The body will rust out of most cars within 10 years.
(Which is too bad, because you're right on the money -- an old car for $1000 with a large supply of readily-available parts, and/or easily-reproduced aftermarket parts, will be cheaper to maintain than a brand-new $20000 car that'll depreciate to $5000 within 3 years.)
In a nutshell, safety and emissions regs.
Each airbag on a modern car costs about $1000, and it's against the law to build a car that doesn't have one.
Add another $500 or so worth for the catalytic converter, but at least the catalytic converter doesn't need replacement after a fender-bender.
Finally, add in the cost of designing the equipment into the car, plus the cost of filling out the paperwork to ensure that the design's approvable by all of the myriad of state and federal officials that pass judgement.
(And you can add another $4-500 if it's an SUV and it's gonna be sold in California next year. :-)
ScienceWire has learned that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (DOE:LBNL) is under investigation from the Nobel Physics Committee regarding possible fraud with respect to the existence of Elements 116 and 118.
Lab director, Beef Shank, is "shocked, shocked, I tell you" that fabrication of research went on under his watch. "We have since fired Arthur Anderson from our peer review committee, and have commenced an aggressive investigation in concert with the Nobel Committee, and intend to release our findings when the facts come to light. No further comment."
The individual singled out by Shank, but not identified by him [what the fuck? sometimes satire writes itself -- Editor], was identified by several newspapers as fired physicist and author Victor Nabokov.
Nabokov was suspended by the lab in November, later fired, and has a grievance pending regarding his dismissal for writing books about a quest for an island of stability in a sea of daughter radioisotopes with short half-lives.
Shank lauded his own department for ferreting out the fraud. "There is nothing more important for a laboratory than scientific integrity," Shank told lab employees. "Only with such integrity will the Congress, which funds our work, provide us with more grant money. On the bright side, at least we can conclusively say that we've found at least two candidates for the element Unobtainium."
LBNL stock found no such stability, closing down almost 70% today, to $1.14 (US protons), or $1.84 (Euro neutrons), on heavy volume.
Maslow was evidently never a coder :)
Close, but no cigar.
Both were nods to the original soldiers in the American Revolution - younger, single men who'd taken an oath to respond to a call to arms within one minute. They were the elite of the militia at the time.
They were involved in this little scuffle, about which your history teachers (if you're an American) may have told you. It was the "shot heard 'round the world".
The CO of the guy "pulling the switch" takes one look at the archived MPEG-4 stream and throws him in the stockade for the rest of his life for a war crime.
The excuse "I was just following orders" or "they were comin' right for us!" doesn't fly when the video stream's there for all (all along the chain of command) to see.
Perhaps the chain of command can be corrupted and will cover it up. But that's a far greater risk with manned warfare (which, by defintion, features fewer witnesses) than with our hypothetical war-by-remote-control-robot.
>
> Well it will make it alot more tempting(and feasible) to just beat the whole world into submission. Poor people growing coke cause the land was poisoned(by the US) so that nothing else will grow? Put them up the clones! Poor people trying to form a union, so they don't have to work 16h/day for some american company? Put them up the clones! When the US replayces some democratically elcted govt. with their choise of dictator, and people try to fight back? Put them up the clones! Failed to get that exeption so US soliders can't commit crimes against humanity and get away with it? Put them up the clones instead! Is Japan exporting more to the US than importing? And competing with product quality whould cost the campain contributors too much money? PUT THEM UP THE CLONES!
Slashdotter ignoring the poster's point - that US soldiers already put themselves at risk to avoid civilian casualties, and that a 6-inch-tall remote-controlled robot can get much closer to, (and hold the laser designator on), the target for longer periods of time than a live soldier, thereby reducing the chances of collateral damage and US casualties?
Slashdotter who apparently gets all his ideas from reading the works of cunning linguist Noam Chomsky, but still unable to form a coherent argument, use paragraph breaks, or even spell? (OK, so Chomsky may not be able to form a coherent argument either, but at least he's good for two out of three :-)
Slashdotter merely trying to be funny, but not even able to get an AYBABTU reference correct?
Somebody - set - up - him - the... oh, nevermind. ;-)
Something she might want to ponder -- the role of land mines (antitank and antipersonnel) -- in making sure that the war doesn't start up again. There's considerable discussion of it in yesterday's Slashdot article on a laser-based mine removal system. (Basically, a big honkin' laser on a Humvee, intended for clearing small areas of mines under battlefield conditions.)
Briefly - the US isn't a major user of land mines, and the DMZ is one of two areas in the world where the US still needs 'em. NK forces could easily overrun SK forces, were it not for the minefields in the DMZ.
Risk to civilian life from these minefields is nil - because nobody lives in the DMZ. Their presence keeps the truce, even when NK is in rather dire political/economic straits, and SK becomes a tempting target.
> In the game of war, alot of bad stuff is going to go down, but I guess you just have to hope it's the other guy that gets the worst of it.
Yup. And if I'm gonna quote Patton, I should also quote Gen. Douglas MacArthur:
"A soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must bear the deepest wounds and scars of war."
Damn. Now that's an Excedrin moment :-)
Yeah, I'll accept that your original question ("do we really have a problem with casualties") wasn't meant the way I took it. My bad.
But I think your followup question (even though it's intended rhetorically :-)
> Ask the countrymen of those ware torn areas if the US needs any new military weapons that will enable them to dominate over any other country in the world.
War's not about asking your adversary (or enemy) what he thinks your army should be doing.
"Pardon us, Mr. Bin Laden, do you think it's a good idea that our troops be better-trained, better-equipped, and better-armed than yours, thereby achieving seriously kickass frag ratios against your forces? Or should we give 'em all single-shot rifles, ten rounds of ammo, one day's training, and then order a few thousand recruits to wander aimlessly on the battlefield directly in front of your troops in the middle of the day, you know, to sorta even things out a bit?"
As Patton said - war's not about dying for your country, it's about making some other son of a bitch die for his.
That's not to say that war's somehow good -- it's not, as any soldier will also tell you. It simply means that by the time you are at war, you owe it to your troops (your troops, not the other guy's troops!) to give them the maximum advantage possible.
85 years ago, that advantage was biplanes and the first tanks.
60 years ago, that advantage was crypto, long-range antisubmarine bombers, long-range fighter escorts, and yes, the first nuclear weapons.
10 years ago, it was cruise missiles, GPS, night vision, and the F-117.
Today, it's cheap GPS-guided bombs dropped from B-52s, thermobaric bombs, earth-penetrating warheads, and snipers.
10 years from now, it may be be killer robots, theater-based missile defense systems and airborne lasers. Or stuff that's just a gleam in some weaponeer's mind.
That's the name of the game. Were I a soldier, I'd be thankful for every advantage my weaponeers could give me -- because if the shit hits the fan and I have to use those weapons, the enemy on the battlefield sure as hell ain't gonna cut me any slack.