> The ones who fucked up were the ones who believed the numbers about wildly escalating traffic and assumed that this growth
curve would never flatten out.
Hey, don't blame the ISPs, blame Judge Patel.
If we still had Napster, we probably would have a use for this bandwidth;-)
(And half-seriously, perhaps Freenet and Gnutella will provide an excuse to start using it. Of course, before bandwidth becomes "too cheap to meter", we'll likely have to wait for a bunch of telcos to go belly-up, so the assets can be purchased for pennies on the dollar, and it's profitable for the new owners to give you megabits up and down for $19.95 per month...)
> Alpha could be a good backup strategy for Intel: it's a more traditional architecture with lots of
existing compiler backends.
OK, then, so why not have AMD buy Alpha, if for no other reason than to deny Intel access to it?
Both companies have about the same amount of cash. AMD may even have the stronger balance sheet than INTC. What's the Alpha division really worth? (And can it be bought for less, perhaps CPQ is open to selling it at fire-sale prices in order to clear the decks for their new "We can't beat DELL when it comes to moving hardware, so we'll sell support/services" strategy?)
> (No, I can't post a link to the story. It's a *print* magazine, and that issue isn't out yet. Sorry.)
Have you checked alt.binaries.pictures.webhostingmagazine for the pre-release post from DeadTreeGroup, the K-r4dd3st m4g4z1n3 r1pp3rz around, or did @Home delete that group from their servers too?
Hate to follow up my own post, but here's another tip:
Have you tried running mplayer.exe on your box?
I just tried it on my 98SE box from the suggestion in this post, based on the fact that I'm running basically the same system this guy was, but I *do* have the Preview tab.
So it looks like whatever makes the Preview tab go away has nothing to do with my setup or yours, but that the old "mplayer.exe" Media Player, if it exists on your system, will play incomplete AVIs without worrying about all the mucking about with Explorer. Just invoke mplayer.exe from the command line, and drag-and-drop the.AVI onto it.
(Looks like Windows Media Player 6.4 is MPLAYER2.EXE, and the MPLAYER.EXE that the poster is talking about is the old one that came with Win98. On my system, it doesn't even have a version number on Help->About. Far out.)
Reminds me of the time I had to use WINFILE.EXE (Yes, the Windows 3.1 file manager was still included at least as recently as Win98SE, is it still there on Win2000?) to change a file association because my "Open With..." menu option wouldn't come up for some obscure reason.
(For historical reference, yeah, that's WINFILE.EXE -> File -> Associate. Far out, it still works. Of course, that tells you just how old the codebase for Win9x really is...)
And yes, it is crap like this that's made me not bother with 2K, and I'll skip XP too. After five years of cheating my way around the OS, I'm sick of it. My next OS upgrade doesn't come from Redmond.
> Which Windows? I just tried it on WinMe and there is is no Preview tab, just General and Sumamry.
Works for me on Win98SE and Windows Media Player 6.4.somethingorother and the related DLLs. I'll upgrade to 7 or higher shortly after hell freezes over.
Most of the results in Google for "AVI preview incomplete" or "partial AVI preview" are one-message threads from people saying "crap, it doesn't work!", or worse, "it used to work but now it's broken".
Perhaps this is another "feature" the boys in Redmond decided was too useful to permit its continued existence:(
This looks promising, though:
This link says that it's disabled in Win2K Pro, but to re-enable it, you go to:
WinExplorer -> Tools -> Folder_Options -> General tab -> "Enable Web Content in Folders".
(WTF this has to do with it, I don't know, but I'm not running Win2000. It works fine with web content in folders *dis*abled in Win98SE. As always, YMMV.)
Meanwhile, let's hear it for the pr0n-hounds and Google, without whom I'd have never found out about this cheat, and without whom I'd also have never found this potential workaround for Win2K.
> U 2227 alt.binaries.gdead.highspeed >
U 1159 alt.binaries.gdead.highspeed.reposts >
U 2810 alt.binaries.sounds.radio.oldtime.highspeed
And for those not keeping up...
The Dead have said that trading their music is OK. So alt.binaries.gdead.* aren't in violation of the DMCA. (In the same way that the Beatles said it was not OK, and absmp3.beatles is in violation.)
The old-time-radio is a case where the broadcasts may or may not be copyrighted - but many of the broadcasts were made before the current "hell freezes over before it goes public domain" law - far enough before, that many of the broadcasts probably are in the public domain.
> Of course now I must wonder if I should thank/. for giving me more p0rn links to peruse...
ROFLMAO. Well, if there's one sure-fire way to improve the S/N ratio of the long-abandoned-to-the-spammers pr0n groups...
(Ah, I remember the good old days, when all we had was alt.sex, with the occasional binary thrown in for good measure (and nobody cared whether it came from Penthouse, Playboy or Hustler!), and then alt.sex.pictures... and the flamewar when alt.binaries.pictures.erotica was first created... not that I ever read stuff in that hierarchy, nope, I was only there to read the.d group for the flames, honest;-)
> There's a lot of crap going on about a lot of people losing access due to posting, or downloading of newsgroup headers....
Please elucidate.
I can understand losing access due to posting copyrighted material - content-owner sees it, copies headers, fires DMCA complaint to @Home, @Home TOSses user.
But what objection could anyone have about downloading newsgroup headers (as opposed to message bodies)? Is the mere knowledge that someone's posted the latest Britney Spears single also a copyright violation?;-)
> Nice try, but the divx codec doesn't let you watch incomplete downloads.
Actually, there's a cheat in Windoze Explorer. Select the.AVI file, then right-click on File -> Properties. Click on "Preview" tab. You can view most partial.AVIs this way, as long as you have the first part of the file.
Pity that Windoze Media Player is too braindead to do the same thing. ("Streaming? Sure, we do streaming. We just don't play incomplete stuff you've downloaded!")
> Or you could keep using your cable company for passin' the packets, and use someone else's servers for usenet.
Problem is, that's still a helluvalotta traffic for your ISP.
Full feed - 250GB per day. Let's assume you have 10000 users downloading 100M per day out of it. That 250G transit gives your users 1 TB (1 million megabytes) of downloads in the aggregate - but the 1TB of traffic is all on your LAN, so you don't have to pay (or otherwise make nicey-nicey with your Tier-1 pier;-) for it. You eat 250G of transit costs to grab it to your disk farm and serve it locally.
But instead the PHBs tell you to dump your USENET server. Now you've got 10000 users subscribing to a premium USENET service to slurp down the binaries. The whole damn terabyte now comes from outside your network and onto your users' drives. You pay four times as much for transit as you used to in the USENET days.
For some things (MP3s of obscure bands), it may not matter -- you won't typically have all 10000 users downloading the same stuff.
For other things (e.g., this October, when Star Wars gets DivX'ed;-), it may make a lot of difference - everyone is gonna be after the same 600M binary, so wouldn't you rather pay the transit for it once, rather than for every user who grabs a copy?
The picture makes a lot more sense if you stop thinking of the binary part of USENET as "USENET" and start thinking of it as a very large caching server.
Prediction: Imminent death of USENET predicted within 24 hours of the release of "Star Wars". Film at... er, part of film at October, with reposts of other parts of film through November, December, and probably most of 2002.
> The sites listed almost all have copyrighted/trademark names, and indeed, are fairly self explanatory in exactly WHAT it is they
are distributing.
Huh? I think we're in partial agreement, but there are some entries that confuse me.
Most of the newsgroups have copyrighted content: Hustler, Playgirl and Penthouse are copyrighted publications.
I'm damned if I know what's going on in.shadowrealm,.mirage-mrg, or.purity. I have no idea what these are for, so I won't comment.
But.divx and.movies strike me as odd. The fact that someone's encoding stuff with DivX;-) does not imply a copyright violation. Nor does the fact that someone's posting a "movie". (Whatever happened to alt.binaries.multimedia?)
Basically, my position here is the same as with the.mp3 hierarchy:
absmp3.beatles - removable under DMCA. The owners of the Beatles' music have requested that the music not be swapped via USENET.
absmp3.1960s - not removable under DMCA. Just because it was made in the 60s, doesn't mean it was copyrighted.
abs.mp3 - not removable under DMCA. Just because it's an MP3 doesn't mean it's copyrighted. (Likewise, just because it's a DivX stream doesn't mean it's copyrighted.)
Personally, I see this as a potentially-good thing at least as far as the MP3 front goes -- a full USENET feed is over 250GB per day, and can saturate an OC-3. Retention at my server seems to be holding up, but propagation is slowly falling apart as transit servers drop articles on the floor. If we can cut down on the volume of 600M files being tossed around, many of which are being posted from @home users, USENET can continue to function for a little while (6-12 months) longer.
IMHO the short-term solution to binary-USENET's "a full feed is too much to manage" problem isn't to drop groups, it's for broadband providers to impose upload caps of 100-200M per day at their own NNTP server on their users. Large files would still be postable - it'd just take a little longer, and retention and propagation could improve immeasurably for everyone else.
But on purely-DMCA grounds, it looks like @home has the right idea on some groups, the wrong idea on others, and may just be confused on a few more.
> IDC Announced today that all of their calculations were done on Pentium chips containing the notorious
FDIV bug, and that all of their analysis for the last six years should be disregarded. When confronted,
IDC's IT Manager Mongo Lloyd's only comment was "My bad."
Huh?
I think you misspelt "But we've corrected the error, and you can buy the new survey for $1,999.95!"
> I can see where the technology is
headed with the quality of graphics being produced (planetside?) but what kind of psychological conditioning is being
given to troops these days? If I were a villager, I wouldn't want to confront a U.S. soldier whose only negotiation skills
were garnered from an FPS game back home.
Actually, you're right - there's a lot of attention being paid to psychological training of our troops.
Do a keyword search for "the three-block war", or variants thereof.
"In one moment in time, our service members will be feeding and clothing displaced refugees - providing humanitarian assistance. In the next moment, they will be holding two warring tribes apart - conducting peacekeeping operations. Finally, they will be fighting a highly lethal mid-intensity battle. All on the same day, all within three city blocks. It will be what we call the three block war."
General Charles C. Krulak - 31st Commandant - United States Marine Corps
So yes, a lot of attention is being paid to these issues. Other keywords to search for: MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain), "OBUA" (Operations in Built Up Areas), and "FIBUA" (Fighting In Built Up Areas).
The hardest part of the soldier's job, IMHO, will be in figuring out which block he's in at any given moment. That's where the training will pay off - both in terms of protecting our troops, and for (well, at least in blocks one and two;-) the native population.
> What gets me is how many politicians are swayed by the religious angles of genetic research and still insist that there is a
seperation of church and state.
Politicians exist to get re-elected.
If you have a high proportion of fundies in your district, and those fundies fear genetic engineering because they believe it's against God's will, then you (as a politician) are obliged (on pain of not getting re-elected) to take up the cause.
Same thing as "It's for the chilllldrun". It's a rhetorical device used to get votes. You think the politicians give a shit about the damage their laws do, so long as they get re-elected?;)
Personally, I'd like to see a system whereby posession of a law degree precludes one from sitting on a committee responsible for making decisions about technology. Better yet, an amendment where a B.Sc. or P.Eng is a requirement sitting on such a committee.
The real problem with democracy as it exists today is that the people making the decisions have no fscking clue what they're legislating. They are forced - by virtue of their cluelessness - to rely on their advisors. The advisors are similarly clueless, and rely on the only source of information available to them, namely the stuff that's spoon-fed them by the lobbyists.
> religious angles of genetic research
Religious story for you: When I attended church regularly, we had a pastor who held a Ph.D. in philosophy. The best sermon he ever delivered was the one where he stood up in front of the 1000-odd people in his congregation and started a speech on evolution with "I'm not going to attempt to scientifically prove the existence of God. It can't be done." I was flabbergasted -- the guy was being honest about it.
The next 40 minutes was basically the Douglas Adams argument: Proof denies faith, and without faith, God is nothing.
He urged the crowd to stop trying to "prove" creationism and "disprove" evolution. Not only are the observed facts not on your side (Why would a benevolent God endow us with the capacity for wonder and reason, and then load the tar pits with "fake" dino bones, the universe with "fake" redshifts, etc etc, so that when we use these gifts, we come to the wrong conclusions? Do these people believe God is some kind of psychopath?)... but even if someone were to "prove" God existed, it would make faith worthless, and thereby defeat the purpose.
Of course, when he delivered the sermon, he backed up most of the argument with scripture. The best part was towards the end, when I saw many heads nodding -- even the heads of the stereotypical "little old ladies with blue hair".
Props to him. He had clue. Wish more of 'em did.
Re:Gattaca is not dependent on scientific efficacy
on
Heredity and Humanity
·
· Score: 2
> We have already experienced some of the injustice of eugenics, and if
we are not careful, we may yet again. One infamous example: > >
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." >
--Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the Supreme Court of the United States, Buck v. Bell (1927).
[Yes, I know I'm taking you completely out of context and being totally insensitive to the, uh, neurologically-differently-abled], but maybe he was onto something.
After all, it seems to explain the Kennedys pretty well, and I'm sure there are plenty of Democrats who feel that two generations of Bush in the White House are plenty;-)
> Worm smart tags into webpages to "Enhance the Internet experience with useful links"
I think you're exactly right about the long-term plan - MSFT will "bundle" an "enhanced" set of "smart" tags with every IE upgrade or (mandatory) phone-home of XP. This will ultimately become a source of advertising revenue.
Solution obvious: You skr1pt k1dd13z whip up one of those.VBS worms. 0wn a site pointed to by one of those obnoxious "Click here to enhance your browser", or "Your internet connection is not optimized" banner ads.
Clicking, of course, overwrites the client-side XML file that defines the smart tags, with lots of goatse.cx links. All of a sudden, people start phoning Micros~1 tech support, saying "I clicked on the word 'Office XP-2001' and I got a picture of a goat!". Bill rethinks his plan for world domination.
> I thought OOBE stood for Out Of Body Experience.
Out Of Body Experience, Out Of Box Experience. I dunno, same thing to me. I spend so much time inside my PC's case that I don't even bother to put the cover on anymore.
> User registers MS Windows and completes MS OOBE.
...and if you're running 'doze98 at home, blowing away C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\OOBE\*.* is an easy 4-5 megs saved. Poke around in there - have you ever seen any of that crap used? (And would you want to?;-)
(Why does it matter? I dunno about you, but I cram my '98 installs into either 256M or 512M partitions, just so I can keep my "OS" and data separate. OOBE is bloat, bloat, bloat.)
> My Soyo motherboard (6BA-III+) has a boot up scren that announces "your computer is PhoenixNet enabled."
I think I aquired this feature in a BIOS update that I installed to fix a Matrox related bug.
Question to all: Has anyone run CBROM.EXE on a PhoenixNet-enabled BIOS dump?
I'm wondering if PhoenixNet is a module that can be unloaded from BIOS, and then the BIOS reflashed.
Given that it's marketing-related (i.e, Award expects to make money off it), it's quite plausible that they'd release BIOSes that "have it" (because the manufacturer/reseller either paid or got paid for it) and "don't have it" (for those evil OEM types). The logical way to do this would be to modularize it, in the same way that the.BMP that makes up the "boot logo" is a module that can be loaded or unloaded before reflashing.
> I think it would be nice if it were helping me to flash the bios.
The hell it would be.
When I want to flash BIOS, I'll flash BIOS. If I don't have any problems with my current BIOS regs, I won't flash BIOS and run the risk of introducing bugs that may have come with the new revision.
> Q: What if I want to discontinue using the PhoenixNet resident application?
Of course, since I buy my drives OEM and install my own damn OS on 'em, I never have to worry about this in the first place - no phone-homeware installed, no phone-home risk.
I really pity people who buy their PCs from name-brand manufacturers as opposed to screwdriver shops. I really do.
> If you drive the same style on the
Autobahn as Californains on the Freeways (I was only visiting Cal twice, I cant speak for anything else), it would be deadly.
I agree with your original point (speed differential is dangerous, not absolute speed per se), but take issue with you on one point:
If the rest of the drivers in California were trained as well as the drivers on the Autobahn, it wouldn't be deadly at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, don't blame the ISPs, blame Judge Patel.
If we still had Napster, we probably would have a use for this bandwidth ;-)
(And half-seriously, perhaps Freenet and Gnutella will provide an excuse to start using it. Of course, before bandwidth becomes "too cheap to meter", we'll likely have to wait for a bunch of telcos to go belly-up, so the assets can be purchased for pennies on the dollar, and it's profitable for the new owners to give you megabits up and down for $19.95 per month...)
Well, that about wraps it up for Google, doesn't it?
OK, then, so why not have AMD buy Alpha, if for no other reason than to deny Intel access to it?
Both companies have about the same amount of cash. AMD may even have the stronger balance sheet than INTC. What's the Alpha division really worth? (And can it be bought for less, perhaps CPQ is open to selling it at fire-sale prices in order to clear the decks for their new "We can't beat DELL when it comes to moving hardware, so we'll sell support/services" strategy?)
> 1) Titty bar
> 2) Slashdot.
So what the hell am I doing here instead of bein' at the titty bar where I belong?
(Oh yeah, I'm a geek, I forgot about that for a minute.)
Have you checked alt.binaries.pictures.webhostingmagazine for the pre-release post from DeadTreeGroup, the K-r4dd3st m4g4z1n3 r1pp3rz around, or did @Home delete that group from their servers too?
(Sorry, couldn't resist ;)
Have you tried running mplayer.exe on your box?
I just tried it on my 98SE box from the suggestion in this post, based on the fact that I'm running basically the same system this guy was, but I *do* have the Preview tab.
So it looks like whatever makes the Preview tab go away has nothing to do with my setup or yours, but that the old "mplayer.exe" Media Player, if it exists on your system, will play incomplete AVIs without worrying about all the mucking about with Explorer. Just invoke mplayer.exe from the command line, and drag-and-drop the .AVI onto it.
(Looks like Windows Media Player 6.4 is MPLAYER2.EXE, and the MPLAYER.EXE that the poster is talking about is the old one that came with Win98. On my system, it doesn't even have a version number on Help->About. Far out.)
Reminds me of the time I had to use WINFILE.EXE (Yes, the Windows 3.1 file manager was still included at least as recently as Win98SE, is it still there on Win2000?) to change a file association because my "Open With..." menu option wouldn't come up for some obscure reason. (For historical reference, yeah, that's WINFILE.EXE -> File -> Associate. Far out, it still works. Of course, that tells you just how old the codebase for Win9x really is...)
And yes, it is crap like this that's made me not bother with 2K, and I'll skip XP too. After five years of cheating my way around the OS, I'm sick of it. My next OS upgrade doesn't come from Redmond.
Works for me on Win98SE and Windows Media Player 6.4.somethingorother and the related DLLs. I'll upgrade to 7 or higher shortly after hell freezes over.
Most of the results in Google for "AVI preview incomplete" or "partial AVI preview" are one-message threads from people saying "crap, it doesn't work!", or worse, "it used to work but now it's broken".
Perhaps this is another "feature" the boys in Redmond decided was too useful to permit its continued existence :(
This looks promising, though:
This link says that it's disabled in Win2K Pro, but to re-enable it, you go to:
WinExplorer -> Tools -> Folder_Options -> General tab -> "Enable Web Content in Folders".
(WTF this has to do with it, I don't know, but I'm not running Win2000. It works fine with web content in folders *dis*abled in Win98SE. As always, YMMV.)
Meanwhile, let's hear it for the pr0n-hounds and Google, without whom I'd have never found out about this cheat, and without whom I'd also have never found this potential workaround for Win2K.
> U 1159 alt.binaries.gdead.highspeed.reposts
> U 2810 alt.binaries.sounds.radio.oldtime.highspeed
And for those not keeping up...
The Dead have said that trading their music is OK. So alt.binaries.gdead.* aren't in violation of the DMCA. (In the same way that the Beatles said it was not OK, and absmp3.beatles is in violation.)
The old-time-radio is a case where the broadcasts may or may not be copyrighted - but many of the broadcasts were made before the current "hell freezes over before it goes public domain" law - far enough before, that many of the broadcasts probably are in the public domain.
ROFLMAO. Well, if there's one sure-fire way to improve the S/N ratio of the long-abandoned-to-the-spammers pr0n groups...
(Ah, I remember the good old days, when all we had was alt.sex, with the occasional binary thrown in for good measure (and nobody cared whether it came from Penthouse, Playboy or Hustler!), and then alt.sex.pictures... and the flamewar when alt.binaries.pictures.erotica was first created... not that I ever read stuff in that hierarchy, nope, I was only there to read the .d group for the flames, honest ;-)
Ah, I gotcha. I was thinking of a game called Shadowrealm, not the movie-releasing group. Thanx for the clue.
Please elucidate.
I can understand losing access due to posting copyrighted material - content-owner sees it, copies headers, fires DMCA complaint to @Home, @Home TOSses user.
But what objection could anyone have about downloading newsgroup headers (as opposed to message bodies)? Is the mere knowledge that someone's posted the latest Britney Spears single also a copyright violation? ;-)
Actually, there's a cheat in Windoze Explorer. Select the .AVI file, then right-click on File -> Properties. Click on "Preview" tab. You can view most partial .AVIs this way, as long as you have the first part of the file.
Pity that Windoze Media Player is too braindead to do the same thing. ("Streaming? Sure, we do streaming. We just don't play incomplete stuff you've downloaded!")
Problem is, that's still a helluvalotta traffic for your ISP.
Full feed - 250GB per day. Let's assume you have 10000 users downloading 100M per day out of it. That 250G transit gives your users 1 TB (1 million megabytes) of downloads in the aggregate - but the 1TB of traffic is all on your LAN, so you don't have to pay (or otherwise make nicey-nicey with your Tier-1 pier ;-) for it. You eat 250G of transit costs to grab it to your disk farm and serve it locally.
But instead the PHBs tell you to dump your USENET server. Now you've got 10000 users subscribing to a premium USENET service to slurp down the binaries. The whole damn terabyte now comes from outside your network and onto your users' drives. You pay four times as much for transit as you used to in the USENET days.
For some things (MP3s of obscure bands), it may not matter -- you won't typically have all 10000 users downloading the same stuff.
For other things (e.g., this October, when Star Wars gets DivX'ed ;-), it may make a lot of difference - everyone is gonna be after the same 600M binary, so wouldn't you rather pay the transit for it once, rather than for every user who grabs a copy?
The picture makes a lot more sense if you stop thinking of the binary part of USENET as "USENET" and start thinking of it as a very large caching server.
Prediction: Imminent death of USENET predicted within 24 hours of the release of "Star Wars". Film at... er, part of film at October, with reposts of other parts of film through November, December, and probably most of 2002.
Huh? I think we're in partial agreement, but there are some entries that confuse me.
Most of the newsgroups have copyrighted content: Hustler, Playgirl and Penthouse are copyrighted publications.
I'm damned if I know what's going on in .shadowrealm, .mirage-mrg, or .purity. I have no idea what these are for, so I won't comment.
But .divx and .movies strike me as odd. The fact that someone's encoding stuff with DivX ;-) does not imply a copyright violation. Nor does the fact that someone's posting a "movie". (Whatever happened to alt.binaries.multimedia?)
Basically, my position here is the same as with the .mp3 hierarchy:
absmp3.beatles - removable under DMCA. The owners of the Beatles' music have requested that the music not be swapped via USENET. absmp3.1960s - not removable under DMCA. Just because it was made in the 60s, doesn't mean it was copyrighted. abs.mp3 - not removable under DMCA. Just because it's an MP3 doesn't mean it's copyrighted. (Likewise, just because it's a DivX stream doesn't mean it's copyrighted.)
Personally, I see this as a potentially-good thing at least as far as the MP3 front goes -- a full USENET feed is over 250GB per day, and can saturate an OC-3. Retention at my server seems to be holding up, but propagation is slowly falling apart as transit servers drop articles on the floor. If we can cut down on the volume of 600M files being tossed around, many of which are being posted from @home users, USENET can continue to function for a little while (6-12 months) longer.
IMHO the short-term solution to binary-USENET's "a full feed is too much to manage" problem isn't to drop groups, it's for broadband providers to impose upload caps of 100-200M per day at their own NNTP server on their users. Large files would still be postable - it'd just take a little longer, and retention and propagation could improve immeasurably for everyone else.
But on purely-DMCA grounds, it looks like @home has the right idea on some groups, the wrong idea on others, and may just be confused on a few more.
Because the DMA's lobbyists contribute more to campaign coffers than you and I can ever hope to.
> If you made Spam illegal how else would they meet attractive barely-legal teens in nearby colleges who need to meet men?
Funny, I thought that's what Congress was for.
The right to swap h0t t33n 1nt3rn pu55y for political favors is part of the package, is it not?
Huh?
I think you misspelt "But we've corrected the error, and you can buy the new survey for $1,999.95!"
Actually, you're right - there's a lot of attention being paid to psychological training of our troops.
Do a keyword search for "the three-block war", or variants thereof.
So yes, a lot of attention is being paid to these issues. Other keywords to search for: MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain), "OBUA" (Operations in Built Up Areas), and "FIBUA" (Fighting In Built Up Areas).
The hardest part of the soldier's job, IMHO, will be in figuring out which block he's in at any given moment. That's where the training will pay off - both in terms of protecting our troops, and for (well, at least in blocks one and two ;-) the native population.
Politicians exist to get re-elected.
If you have a high proportion of fundies in your district, and those fundies fear genetic engineering because they believe it's against God's will, then you (as a politician) are obliged (on pain of not getting re-elected) to take up the cause.
Same thing as "It's for the chilllldrun". It's a rhetorical device used to get votes. You think the politicians give a shit about the damage their laws do, so long as they get re-elected? ;)
Personally, I'd like to see a system whereby posession of a law degree precludes one from sitting on a committee responsible for making decisions about technology. Better yet, an amendment where a B.Sc. or P.Eng is a requirement sitting on such a committee.
The real problem with democracy as it exists today is that the people making the decisions have no fscking clue what they're legislating. They are forced - by virtue of their cluelessness - to rely on their advisors. The advisors are similarly clueless, and rely on the only source of information available to them, namely the stuff that's spoon-fed them by the lobbyists.
> religious angles of genetic research
Religious story for you: When I attended church regularly, we had a pastor who held a Ph.D. in philosophy. The best sermon he ever delivered was the one where he stood up in front of the 1000-odd people in his congregation and started a speech on evolution with "I'm not going to attempt to scientifically prove the existence of God. It can't be done." I was flabbergasted -- the guy was being honest about it.
The next 40 minutes was basically the Douglas Adams argument: Proof denies faith, and without faith, God is nothing.
He urged the crowd to stop trying to "prove" creationism and "disprove" evolution. Not only are the observed facts not on your side (Why would a benevolent God endow us with the capacity for wonder and reason, and then load the tar pits with "fake" dino bones, the universe with "fake" redshifts, etc etc, so that when we use these gifts, we come to the wrong conclusions? Do these people believe God is some kind of psychopath?)... but even if someone were to "prove" God existed, it would make faith worthless, and thereby defeat the purpose.
Of course, when he delivered the sermon, he backed up most of the argument with scripture. The best part was towards the end, when I saw many heads nodding -- even the heads of the stereotypical "little old ladies with blue hair".
Props to him. He had clue. Wish more of 'em did.
>
> "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
> --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the Supreme Court of the United States, Buck v. Bell (1927).
[Yes, I know I'm taking you completely out of context and being totally insensitive to the, uh, neurologically-differently-abled], but maybe he was onto something.
After all, it seems to explain the Kennedys pretty well, and I'm sure there are plenty of Democrats who feel that two generations of Bush in the White House are plenty ;-)
I think you're exactly right about the long-term plan - MSFT will "bundle" an "enhanced" set of "smart" tags with every IE upgrade or (mandatory) phone-home of XP. This will ultimately become a source of advertising revenue.
Solution obvious: You skr1pt k1dd13z whip up one of those .VBS worms. 0wn a site pointed to by one of those obnoxious "Click here to enhance your browser", or "Your internet connection is not optimized" banner ads.
Clicking, of course, overwrites the client-side XML file that defines the smart tags, with lots of goatse.cx links. All of a sudden, people start phoning Micros~1 tech support, saying "I clicked on the word 'Office XP-2001' and I got a picture of a goat!". Bill rethinks his plan for world domination.
Out Of Body Experience, Out Of Box Experience. I dunno, same thing to me. I spend so much time inside my PC's case that I don't even bother to put the cover on anymore.
(Why does it matter? I dunno about you, but I cram my '98 installs into either 256M or 512M partitions, just so I can keep my "OS" and data separate. OOBE is bloat, bloat, bloat.)
Question to all: Has anyone run CBROM.EXE on a PhoenixNet-enabled BIOS dump?
I'm wondering if PhoenixNet is a module that can be unloaded from BIOS, and then the BIOS reflashed.
Given that it's marketing-related (i.e, Award expects to make money off it), it's quite plausible that they'd release BIOSes that "have it" (because the manufacturer/reseller either paid or got paid for it) and "don't have it" (for those evil OEM types). The logical way to do this would be to modularize it, in the same way that the .BMP that makes up the "boot logo" is a module that can be loaded or unloaded before reflashing.
For more information:
BIOS Customization Page
(And many more, but this gives you the general idea of what CBROM.EXE is for.)
The hell it would be.
When I want to flash BIOS, I'll flash BIOS. If I don't have any problems with my current BIOS regs, I won't flash BIOS and run the risk of introducing bugs that may have come with the new revision.
> Q: What if I want to discontinue using the PhoenixNet resident application?
Of course, since I buy my drives OEM and install my own damn OS on 'em, I never have to worry about this in the first place - no phone-homeware installed, no phone-home risk.
I really pity people who buy their PCs from name-brand manufacturers as opposed to screwdriver shops. I really do.
I agree with your original point (speed differential is dangerous, not absolute speed per se), but take issue with you on one point:
If the rest of the drivers in California were trained as well as the drivers on the Autobahn, it wouldn't be deadly at all.