During the Soviet era, all typewriters had a sample page registered with the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti == Committee for State Security). Access to photocopiers required even higher levels of accountability; photocopiers were often sealed at night and their use during the day was overseen by the State Security Committee.
For all our bragging about technology and higher standards of living, when it comes to what's important, we in the West are at least 40 years behind the times. We have a long way to go before we catch up.
> By about age 150, we'd all have the mental capacity of broccoli. Now, you might think, "sure, 150 beats beats 80", but consider the bigger problem - Immortal 150+ year old broccoli-controlled mech suits running around your local farmers' market. Do we really want that, for a gain of a few extra years?
I'm imagining it. And I'm liking it. Comedy gold for the spectators. Probably fun for the broccoli-heads too.
> - Immortal 150+ year old broccoli-controlled mech suits running around your local farmers' market.
> Yes, the very same way we today look back on the book 1984 as "amazingly prophetic". Sure, there are some similarities, and people still like to draw parallels between everything that happens today and what happens in the book, but the world in large is very far from the world in the book.
"Yeah, but we're working on it!"
(You ever seen a government project that didn't have a 50% time and cost overrun?)
> Should we forbid someone from taking a certain job based on their genetic makeup? And how long can we breed the "best" children before the best become so far ahead of the worst, that the worst no longer have any "value" to society at all?
We're already facing this dilemma, albeit in terms of culture instead of genetics.. A large proportion of our population (North America and Europe) has neither the education nor the work ethic to perform even unskilled labor. These people are as worthless today as genetically unenhanced humans (i.e. we) will be in 100 years.
People on both the right ("gas the worthless so that the productive can keep their toys") or the left ("gas the filthy rich, take their toys, and give 'em to the underprivileged!") would probably agree that we're not only in denial about the issue today, but that we're likely to continue avoiding it for the forseeable future, on the very sensible grounds that both alternatives suck pretty hard.
> Ok, so it's not a "dragnet," but a "dossier net" that just keeps a file on everybody synthesized from government and commercial data. I fail to see how this could possibly detect someone using a false name, who does not want to be found and probably doesn't use credit cards.
Because it only takes one mistake. And everybody makes mistakes.
Suppose the guy you're looking for has a bank account under a fake name - all you know is the bank account number, and nothing at all about the holder. Suppose further that you have access to all TCP/IP headers on the planet.
Hey - look at that. The bank's logs show that our guy logged on to the bank from aa.bb.cc.dd. It was a kiosk in the middle of an airport.
And someone accessed Slashdot from IP address aa.bb.cc.dd only 30 seconds later.
And the security cameras at the airport show only one person used that kiosk for the entire hour.
So we can now look at his Slashdot user info and posting history we can learn a lot more about him than we knew previously. Maybe enough to guess his real identity.
The saying "every criminal leaves something at the crime scene, and every criminal takes something home from the crime scene" applies to more than just criminals, and to more than just crime scenes. Information may not want to be free, but it sure wants to leak.
Wow. Once these things go up, those tinfoil-hat wearing folks will be out of luck.
Sure, the tinfoil protects them from the invisible mind control lasers, but the reflected solar radiation just makes them easier to target from the air with the onboard plasma cannons.
. History has shown time and time again that it's hard to write laws and regulations to "level a playing field" without accdentally writing in exploitable loopholes. It's really the same sort of problem as the difficulty of writing secure software. > >
Attempts to do this may well backfire and amplify the power of those with deep pockets -- they will be in a much better position to afford the lawyer time to look for loopholes in the laws and regulations, use them, and then defend that use in court.
"That's not a bug, it's a feature!" - Some Lawyer Dude
> > Apparently the adapters run the risk of overheating and can be a fire and electrocution risk. > >Oh just great.
(reaches for power supply)
Now I have to retur-{{{{ZOT}}}}
It's worse than that.
"For users in the State of California, USA:
WARNING: Handling the cord on this product will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling"
When it catches fire or becomes a shock hazard, don't even think of trying to pick it up by the cord.
If it's passive, where's the problem? It's no different than a barcode or a magstripe, as it requires extremely close physical proximity to a reading device.
If it's active, such as an ignition interlock that prevents your car from powering up unless the RFID reader embedded in the seat detects a licensed driver, we've got a problem -- but that's not what's being proposed.
Passive RFID drivers' licenses cannot be used to track citizens' whereabouts 24/7 unless the government is willing to spend trillions to bury several gigawatts' worth of transmitters into every road in the State.
> Burt Rutan, take it overseas. Let the united states fall if they want to kill off anything that would give this country some hope and create new jobs. > >SpaceShipOne is about to become the new Tucker.
Burt. Don't be the next Tucker. Be the first John Galt.
/wants to retire in Burt's Gulch. //wants even more to tell the second generation of settlers that the Gulch was once known as Valles Marineris.
> Especially their crawler-full of hilarity. I was watching their very early coverage of the Shuttle explosion, and the crawler said something like "Was travelling at twice the speed of light when it exploded" (wish I had a screen capture of it!).
Only twice the speed of light? Maybe for that little dinky SpaceShip One contraption.
> >... Nobody's exactly sure why or how the FBI got warrants to take Indymedia's HDs, but their speculation tends to center around the fact that the Feds were spooked by the fact that Indymedia was able to publish RNC delegate names.
> >Yeah that freedom of speech thing is a real pain, isn't it?
Yeah, that privacy thing is a real pain, isn't it?
Supposing for a moment that the speculation is correct: If they were publishing DNC delegate names, or bank/credit card customer names, or even the names under which people had registered at a web site, you'd argue that such an activity ought also to be protected under the First Amendment?
Or do privacy laws somehow become a bad thing when they protect members of a political party with whom you disagree?
> Yeah... I mean, heaven forbid we try and stop people from dumping boosters on people's houses, or launching people on 6G-accel rockets with a 90% chance of killing their passengers without telling them of the risks. > >
This is common sense stuff. Just because you hear the word "regulation" doesn't mean it's time to freak out. I'm thankful as hell that the airlines are regulated.
If you drop a booster on my house, I'll sue you into the stone age.
If your 6G rocket kills 90% of its passengers, and my 5G rocket kills 5% of its passengers, people will figure out the risks for themselves, and choose to fly on my rockets rather than yours, at least until you redesign your rocket to be safer than mine.
There's a happy medium, but ultimately, this is also common sense stuff.
Congress, you govern a very large economy. Can't you leave this little piece of it alone? Surely there must be something left that you can fuck up for lobbyist dollars than space tourism. Is the well of freedom truly that dry that you have to wipe out private space tourism when it's less than 72 hours old?
> Yes, let's remember you have a better chance of getting killed in a car wreck than in contracting AIDS. If you're inclined to use a condom even those tiny odds decline dramatically.
Tried that. Cop looked at me real funny when he pulled me over, and suggested I go back to using seat belts.
I guess it works, though. I got off with a warning.
> Ok, so with millions of people dying all around, with the human race possibly facing extinction, there is absolutely no motivation to find said genes?
There's no long-term threat to humanity here -- the mutant gene exists, and over the course of the next century or two, those that carry it will out-reproduce those who do not. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. Evolution finds a way.
But in the short term, why cure a disease or vaccinate against it when you can charge $10-20K/month, times millions infected, to manage it?
You're saying the people whose disease you're managing don't have the money to cover the cost of treament? No problem! Have the government step in and take it from the healthy taxpayers on their behalf! Always a few more sheep to be sheared, especially if it's for a good cause!
The day some wise-ass develops a cure or (worse-yet) one-time vaccine, that revenue stream dries up in 5 years, not 50.
Just be thankful that AIDS is more easily prevented than polio, because if polio were around today, we'd all be typing from inside iron lungs.
> How about live Robotron 2084 for the real Olympics? I'd say we've reached the point morally and socially, where it might be a worthwhile and acceptable idea.
A few years ago, someone told me about a show called "Survivor". Believing that we'd finally reached the "Running Man" stage of society, I wondered how the legal arrangements, and concluded that they used a shell corporation and some small country that would change its laws for the right price. Five minutes into the premiere, when I discovered that people got voted off the island in Survivor, rather than starved or killed, I turned the TV off in disgust.
We've played live NARC for decades, waited 12 years to finally beat General Akhboob's baby milk factory in Total Carnage (we missed the code to unlock the pleasure domes, gotta try again), but I still want my Smash TV!
Like you said, it's Eugene Jarvis' world. We just play in it.
> Games are simply better than real life! In computer games, I can kill dragons, rescue Princesses, become a rich intergalactic trading tycoon, conquer armies and destroy worlds. I blew up the Death Star this morning while the people who wrote this were at work. Enough said.
Yeah, someone once told me to get a life, so I did. RL is as boring as the Sims, but it's even slower-paced, and the speed-up key can only be used once a day, and it only works at night, when you're at home trying to game, rather than you just pusshing fast-forward during the day when nobody's home!
And there's no fucking save/restore feature either! Sepend six weeks setting up a menage-a-trois with you, your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and you might as well pull out the old.45 and reroll.
> Sorry, but unless we are landing on some rock outside of Earth and going on a nature walk or doing SOMETHING I'm not terribly interested in paying $100k. > >I equate this to paying $1000 to drive to Niagra Falls, looking at it from the car, and turning around and going home.
And yet, somebody who'd lived in the Sahara Desert (or Saskatchewan or North Dakota, for that matter) all his life might still think it worth the trip.
I'm in for $25K tomorrow, $50K in 2010, $100K in 2020, and $1M in 2030 (because if I have more than $1M in 2030, I probably won't have much more time to spend it:)
> If a typical mobile phone handset was really the equivalent of a billion billion supernovas, then you could see why they don't let you use them on aircraft. Even one supernova stuck in your ear might cause cancer over long periods.
Well, as you pointed out, it's about signal strength. You'll die of old age before you get enough space shuttle main fuel tanks of energy from either source to cause cancer.
> Seems more like a scheme to keep the public in the dark should there be a successful attack on the telecom infrastructure... If the public doesn't know...it didn't happen.
Conversely, if the public doesn't know, then it wasn't a very successful attack on the telecom infrastructure, was it?:)
> Before the guys at Hangar 18 can make their weapons with 23 times the energy of a space shuttle fuel tank, they're going to have to figure out how to produce and store large amounts of antimatter. That's the research that you should be doing first for any purpose, destructive or constructive.
I can think of a method that's pretty close to breakeven. Starting with 23 space shuttle fuel tanks full of hydrogen and oxygen, it ends up with 22 empty space shuttle fuel tanks that you can reuse... and one very large bomb.
Problem is, the bomb needs a space shuttle to deliver it.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> About as much as an elephant resembles a Saturn V.
Which is which?
Put enough thrust under the elephant to achieve escape velocity, and the difference is moot.
The link is a Google search for USSR typewriter KGB samizdat.
During the Soviet era, all typewriters had a sample page registered with the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti == Committee for State Security). Access to photocopiers required even higher levels of accountability; photocopiers were often sealed at night and their use during the day was overseen by the State Security Committee.
For all our bragging about technology and higher standards of living, when it comes to what's important, we in the West are at least 40 years behind the times. We have a long way to go before we catch up.
I'm imagining it. And I'm liking it. Comedy gold for the spectators. Probably fun for the broccoli-heads too.
> - Immortal 150+ year old broccoli-controlled mech suits running around your local farmers' market.
*pause to reconsider, scratches head*
I'm still failing to see a downside here.
"Yeah, but we're working on it!"
(You ever seen a government project that didn't have a 50% time and cost overrun?)
We're already facing this dilemma, albeit in terms of culture instead of genetics.. A large proportion of our population (North America and Europe) has neither the education nor the work ethic to perform even unskilled labor. These people are as worthless today as genetically unenhanced humans (i.e. we) will be in 100 years.
People on both the right ("gas the worthless so that the productive can keep their toys") or the left ("gas the filthy rich, take their toys, and give 'em to the underprivileged!") would probably agree that we're not only in denial about the issue today, but that we're likely to continue avoiding it for the forseeable future, on the very sensible grounds that both alternatives suck pretty hard.
Because it only takes one mistake. And everybody makes mistakes.
Suppose the guy you're looking for has a bank account under a fake name - all you know is the bank account number, and nothing at all about the holder. Suppose further that you have access to all TCP/IP headers on the planet.
Hey - look at that. The bank's logs show that our guy logged on to the bank from aa.bb.cc.dd. It was a kiosk in the middle of an airport.
And someone accessed Slashdot from IP address aa.bb.cc.dd only 30 seconds later.
And the security cameras at the airport show only one person used that kiosk for the entire hour.
So we can now look at his Slashdot user info and posting history we can learn a lot more about him than we knew previously. Maybe enough to guess his real identity.
The saying "every criminal leaves something at the crime scene, and every criminal takes something home from the crime scene" applies to more than just criminals, and to more than just crime scenes. Information may not want to be free, but it sure wants to leak.
Sure, the tinfoil protects them from the invisible mind control lasers, but the reflected solar radiation just makes them easier to target from the air with the onboard plasma cannons.
It has a different name. That means it's for freedom! Won't somebody think of reducing the burden on middle-class children?
>
> Attempts to do this may well backfire and amplify the power of those with deep pockets -- they will be in a much better position to afford the lawyer time to look for loopholes in the laws and regulations, use them, and then defend that use in court.
"That's not a bug, it's a feature!"
- Some Lawyer Dude
>
>Oh just great.
(reaches for power supply)
Now I have to retur-{{{{ZOT}}}}
It's worse than that.
When it catches fire or becomes a shock hazard, don't even think of trying to pick it up by the cord.
If it's active, such as an ignition interlock that prevents your car from powering up unless the RFID reader embedded in the seat detects a licensed driver, we've got a problem -- but that's not what's being proposed.
Passive RFID drivers' licenses cannot be used to track citizens' whereabouts 24/7 unless the government is willing to spend trillions to bury several gigawatts' worth of transmitters into every road in the State.
>
>SpaceShipOne is about to become the new Tucker.
Burt. Don't be the next Tucker. Be the first John Galt.
If I had a million bucks, y'know what I'd do?
Two chicks at once. In space. Five times.
Only twice the speed of light? Maybe for that little dinky SpaceShip One contraption.
When NASA does it, they go all-out. The Space Shuttle was doing nearly 18 times the speed of light.
Thank you, CNN...
>
>Yeah that freedom of speech thing is a real pain, isn't it?
Yeah, that privacy thing is a real pain, isn't it?
Supposing for a moment that the speculation is correct: If they were publishing DNC delegate names, or bank/credit card customer names, or even the names under which people had registered at a web site, you'd argue that such an activity ought also to be protected under the First Amendment?
Or do privacy laws somehow become a bad thing when they protect members of a political party with whom you disagree?
>
> This is common sense stuff. Just because you hear the word "regulation" doesn't mean it's time to freak out. I'm thankful as hell that the airlines are regulated.
If you drop a booster on my house, I'll sue you into the stone age.
If your 6G rocket kills 90% of its passengers, and my 5G rocket kills 5% of its passengers, people will figure out the risks for themselves, and choose to fly on my rockets rather than yours, at least until you redesign your rocket to be safer than mine.
There's a happy medium, but ultimately, this is also common sense stuff.
Congress, you govern a very large economy. Can't you leave this little piece of it alone? Surely there must be something left that you can fuck up for lobbyist dollars than space tourism. Is the well of freedom truly that dry that you have to wipe out private space tourism when it's less than 72 hours old?
Tried that. Cop looked at me real funny when he pulled me over, and suggested I go back to using seat belts.
I guess it works, though. I got off with a warning.
There's no long-term threat to humanity here -- the mutant gene exists, and over the course of the next century or two, those that carry it will out-reproduce those who do not. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. Evolution finds a way.
But in the short term, why cure a disease or vaccinate against it when you can charge $10-20K/month, times millions infected, to manage it?
You're saying the people whose disease you're managing don't have the money to cover the cost of treament? No problem! Have the government step in and take it from the healthy taxpayers on their behalf! Always a few more sheep to be sheared, especially if it's for a good cause!
The day some wise-ass develops a cure or (worse-yet) one-time vaccine, that revenue stream dries up in 5 years, not 50.
Just be thankful that AIDS is more easily prevented than polio, because if polio were around today, we'd all be typing from inside iron lungs.
A few years ago, someone told me about a show called "Survivor". Believing that we'd finally reached the "Running Man" stage of society, I wondered how the legal arrangements, and concluded that they used a shell corporation and some small country that would change its laws for the right price. Five minutes into the premiere, when I discovered that people got voted off the island in Survivor, rather than starved or killed, I turned the TV off in disgust.
1982: Robotron 2084
1988: NARC
1990: Smash TV ("Big money! Big prizes! I love it!")
1992: Total Carnage ("All we are making is baby milk!")
We've played live NARC for decades, waited 12 years to finally beat General Akhboob's baby milk factory in Total Carnage (we missed the code to unlock the pleasure domes, gotta try again), but I still want my Smash TV!
Like you said, it's Eugene Jarvis' world. We just play in it.
Yeah, someone once told me to get a life, so I did. RL is as boring as the Sims, but it's even slower-paced, and the speed-up key can only be used once a day, and it only works at night, when you're at home trying to game, rather than you just pusshing fast-forward during the day when nobody's home!
And there's no fucking save/restore feature either! Sepend six weeks setting up a menage-a-trois with you, your boss' wife and just one lousy goat, and you might as well pull out the old .45 and reroll.
RL is teh suck. I wouldn't even warez it.
>
>I equate this to paying $1000 to drive to Niagra Falls, looking at it from the car, and turning around and going home.
And yet, somebody who'd lived in the Sahara Desert (or Saskatchewan or North Dakota, for that matter) all his life might still think it worth the trip.
I'm in for $25K tomorrow, $50K in 2010, $100K in 2020, and $1M in 2030 (because if I have more than $1M in 2030, I probably won't have much more time to spend it :)
Well, as you pointed out, it's about signal strength. You'll die of old age before you get enough space shuttle main fuel tanks of energy from either source to cause cancer.
Conversely, if the public doesn't know, then it wasn't a very successful attack on the telecom infrastructure, was it? :)
I can think of a method that's pretty close to breakeven. Starting with 23 space shuttle fuel tanks full of hydrogen and oxygen, it ends up with 22 empty space shuttle fuel tanks that you can reuse... and one very large bomb.
Problem is, the bomb needs a space shuttle to deliver it.