> "We'll be on Mars in 30 years" > >
That statement is just as true as it was 30 years ago.
Well, of course it is. Because we're powering the Martian colony with nuclear fusion!
> Kerry is also very careful to not actually commit to anything. He'll consider options, but potentially he could continue right along with Bush's current policy, and it would not actually contradict what he said.
That was last week. In his latest stump speech, Kerry outlined a position in which he was going to be very careless and make firm commitments to everything. He said he'll continue right along Bush's current policy, but potentially he could consider other options.
> I still think Hong Kong had the best model, right before the ChiComs took over. Minimalist but competent government, simple 15% flat tax (complexity == corruption when it comes to laws), and at least near-American standard of living. Damned if I know how the system could be replicated.
No argument there. Unfortunately - as you point out - we lost, statism won, and that war was lost ten years ago. The Chinese model of statism still beats the brand of statism practiced in the West. If we must live under an all-encompassing government, it's semi-reassuring to see that the Chinese and Western models appear to be merging and taking the most useful parts from each other.
> > The West still has a political requirement to appear free and capitalistic, but is increasingly becoming more statist.
> >Sadly I have to agree here, but I disagree with the reasons. I'd blame an overabundance of lawyers (and the resulting defenses against them) and the natural tendency of bureaucracies to grow and their members to vote themselves more resources.
Yes, those are also major factors. In a way, the Chinese "make 'em pay for the bullets" model is at least a partial defense against lawyers. At least you can get things done. Sometimes those things are "evil", like Tienanmen. But the ability to wipe out dissent without lawyers getting in the way also enables you to do "good" things, like building economic infrastructures such as power plants, mines, housing, roads, and what-not.
Making a living in a semi-free market is still possible - it's just that "the best business plan" now includes a new factor: how much pull a company has on the Hill, and what branches of the bureaucracy are in political ascendance or decline, and are therefore more likely to get the lion's share of funding. Bush makes noises about medicare bill, buy stocks in HMOs that have high Medicare exposure. Bush makes noises about prescription drug benefit, buy pharmaceuticals. Kerry makes noise about universal healthcare? Sell 'em back, and short McDonald's while you're at it.
As we adopt Chinese methods of mass behavioral modification/control, the Chinese adopt our methods of efficient computerized surveillance, and the two societies can leverage each other's strengths. Economic collapse of either society is a pretty bad scenario for the world, so even if the merger of Chinese and Western political systems only delays implosion for 50 years, that's still long enough for my needs:)
>...Everyone else uses libJPEG.
> >
Any bets on how long it'll be until someone finds either a hole in the Microsoft PNG decoder or libJPEG? We've had holes in libPNG and Microsoft's JPEG decoder.
Ah, but in a world of closed-source third-party software, who's "everyone"? Without a sample JPEG as a proof-of-concept of the vector, there's no trivial way to tell whether FooView32.exe v1.03, or BarSee.exe v4.9 uses and/or was built with the affected components.
This is a real-world issue. Anyone who uses a digital camera frequently will probably end up using third-party image viewer/library software, because the image-viewing capability built into IE is unusable for even semi-serious work.
> China's economy is becoming more and more capitalistic, but China is still politically and socially very much a state-run nation. The increasing captilism is part of the government's plan to bring the Chinese economy to the forefront of the world, and I tend to believe that this surge in R&D is just as much a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chinese government.
And it cuts both ways: The West still has a political requirement to appear free and capitalistic, but is increasingly becoming more statist. The increasing statism is part of our governments' plans to consolidate power in the face of declining domestic R&D capabilities. (An undereducated population's easier to control, so why not outsource the R&D, and bring the profits back home, in the form of earnings to shareholders, and taxes on the profits and any income distributed to shareholders? Spend the taxes on making sure the non-shareholders have enough cash to buy the cheap goods you're making offshore, and everyone's happy!)
As a fringe benefit, we get to beta-test the new surveillance and data-mining techniques on a population not subject to the few remaining privacy limits in the West, and to see how various methods of social control work against various groups of unreliable social elements.
50 years ago, or even 20 years ago, that model wasn't viable; most states that tried it wound up collapsing under the weight of their own bureaucracies. East Germany was probably the worst example; there were so many people filing records for STASI that there was nobody left to design or build the new toys.
> Frankly, I find the whole thing fascinating.
Ditto. China seems to have achieved the social stability and unity of purpose normally associated with totalitarianism, without sacrificing the rising standards of living afforded by capitalism. It's actually a pretty cool model.
(Which is a good thing, because it's the model we'll probably end up with whether we think it's cool or not:)
> No, it's quite clearly these probes are trying to go past the edge of the map in this computer game setting we're a part of.
>
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Good.sig choice for this thread:)
"'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, {always} choose 'Retry.'"
> The consultation document itself uses the term "traffic data", but nowhere do I see an explicit indication that this refers to the *contents* of messages.
I couldn't figure out what the difference was, so I did what anyone does. I made the following HTTP request:
And then I clicked on a URL, and a Referrer-ID: was generated client-side (because I forgot to block it) as part of the HTTP session initiation. It also looked something like this:
So, umm, you were saying?:) If I were in charge, I'd certainly like to have that kind of access to what my subjects were doing. It'd be like having a window into their tiny little brains, 24/7. Criminals who write their own confessions, one URL at a time. Sweet!
> "One of the great things about flies is that you can get them to come to you," he said. Hence the downside of the fully autonomous robot: it will have to use sewage or excrement to attract the flies and is bound to smell appalling. > >
Hello, McFly!
...you look like you are Scottish, crunchy and taste good with a proton exchange membrane?
> "The choppers have landed near the probe, but no word yet as to the condition of the space dust."
I'm not normally a betting man, but I'd wager the space dust is is just fine. The containment vessel designed to isolate the dust, however... lookin' a little shaky.
> Imagine... [ lots of cool stuff ] > >But given that MMORPG game design is based on the principle of maintaining the status quo while only giving the illusion of advancement and change, this isn't going to happen.
Yep. Imagine - 30+ years of storylines and characters. Imagine - hordes of slavering geeks aching to live the world of their dreams.
Imagine... imagine shooting the same asteroid for four hours a day, seven days a week, $15 a month, to become a Master Asteroid Miner (the first level of 20 that you need to command a starship) - only to lose three of those four hours' work when you get ganked by a Klingon (who leveled his Master Asteroid Miner three weeks faster than you did because he put a brick on the "SHOOT" key) who blows you away in one shot, and graces you with the fact that "u suck ur a fed looser bet u fuk ur momma 2 hahaha!1!1!!!one!1!"
Why, it'd be almost like that other Deep Space Franchise MMORPG!
It's weird - for all the tens of millions of development cash that gets sucked down the MMORPG swirlyhole, why couldn't someone say "Hey! Star [Trek|Wars] is about storylines, not about foozle-whacking! If we don't put content into the game, we're only going to make a galaxy of suck! And since players can eat content faster than we can develop it, why the fuck are we wasting a license like this on a fucking MMORPG?"
> Anyway, the point is - I don't know (nor do I want to) the people that live six inches away from me on the other side of the wall. Why the FUCK would I want to know any other people in the "neighborhood"?
Hell, I've seen the people six inches away from me on the other side of the wall. Now I know why their bathroom fan is on 24 hours a day, for 3 days a week. I want to move the fuck away from them, not get to know them better.
Be thankful you don't know yours. The only community I want to join is the community of shotgun owners.
> If those of us in Nevada have our say, you'll never have Yucca Mountain. We don't have a single nuclear reactor in the state and yet,
Hey, hey.
Nevada has had hundreds of nuclear reactors in its history. Of course, they were all of the prompt critical variety, and only ran for a few microseconds, but that still probably adds up to more nuclear reactors than the rest of the country put together!
> Storage of waste is also a serious issue, probably easier for the Beijing governement to handle as they have a way of handling protesters that US administrations can only fantasize about. The Hanford site, in Washinton state is a damn mess and we still don't have Yucca mountain or anything else permanent.
If we'd "handled" our protestors in a more Chinese fashion, Yucca would be online by now.
Better yet, if we'd simply tweaked the educational system to impart a basic level of scientific literacy in our population, not only would Yucca be online by now, we wouldn't have to adopt a Chinese solution to our NIMBY/BANANA segment of our population, because people would realize that nuclear power has its sucky elements, but that it sucks a lot less than other forms of energy generation.
Naw. Heck with nuclear. Let's just keep sending another few billion to Saudi Arabia every year. We'll be safer that way.
Re:Damned if they do, damned if they don't
on
China Goes Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
> While I prefer cleaner energy sources (like water) and am not a fan of nuclear reactors (I experienced some of the Chernobyl 'magic' cloud a couple of decades ago), what the hell is China supposed to do?
Why, follow America's lead... by burning fossil fuels (LNG, crude) imported from the Middle East!
(Isn't it ironic? China has a vested long-term interest in propping up Islamic fundamentalist regimes, because doing so guarantees we'll be too thinly-stretched to defend Taiwan, should China choose to take it by force. And yet, China will achieve energy independence 20 years before we will.)
> 1/r^2 stands true for all electromagnetic waves. That means the intensity of the signal will decrease by the square of its distance.
But getting back to the original question... unless you engineer the DNA to eat the rocks and thereby replicate itself, 1/r^2 for radio still beats the heck out of the 1/r^3 you get for throwing bug-laden rocks around the galaxy:)
> > As our tests below indicate, China blocks access to the Google cache and to searches that contain certain keywords > >
I can't help but wonder how long until this begins to happen in the US, all in the name of fighting terrorism
The proper thing for the government to do is to allow its citizens access to the content... and to log all the traffic instead.
You're free to read whatever you want. Most people Googling for sensitive topics are merely researching them. If your clickstream indicates otherwise, then it's time for the hammer to come down.
I can think of a few books that have effectively (and possibly for good reason) disappeared from library shelves and retreated to professors' bookshelves in recent times. One title from 30 years ago comes to mind. (No, I don't own a copy.)
Googling for that title is just fine. If I were still studying that field, I'd sure as hell be leery of buying a copy online, though:)
Slashdot Mirror
And this differentiates SIPshare from anything else offered by Earthlink... precisely how?
>
> *I* need women.
>
> As do most
I don't know about you, but I don't need women badly enough to fuck a clump of rust at -50F. Major shrink factor there, bud.
> "We'll be on Mars in 30 years"
>
> That statement is just as true as it was 30 years ago. Well, of course it is. Because we're powering the Martian colony with nuclear fusion!
That was last week. In his latest stump speech, Kerry outlined a position in which he was going to be very careless and make firm commitments to everything. He said he'll continue right along Bush's current policy, but potentially he could consider other options.
No argument there. Unfortunately - as you point out - we lost, statism won, and that war was lost ten years ago. The Chinese model of statism still beats the brand of statism practiced in the West. If we must live under an all-encompassing government, it's semi-reassuring to see that the Chinese and Western models appear to be merging and taking the most useful parts from each other.
> > The West still has a political requirement to appear free and capitalistic, but is increasingly becoming more statist.
>
>Sadly I have to agree here, but I disagree with the reasons. I'd blame an overabundance of lawyers (and the resulting defenses against them) and the natural tendency of bureaucracies to grow and their members to vote themselves more resources.
Yes, those are also major factors. In a way, the Chinese "make 'em pay for the bullets" model is at least a partial defense against lawyers. At least you can get things done. Sometimes those things are "evil", like Tienanmen. But the ability to wipe out dissent without lawyers getting in the way also enables you to do "good" things, like building economic infrastructures such as power plants, mines, housing, roads, and what-not.
Making a living in a semi-free market is still possible - it's just that "the best business plan" now includes a new factor: how much pull a company has on the Hill, and what branches of the bureaucracy are in political ascendance or decline, and are therefore more likely to get the lion's share of funding. Bush makes noises about medicare bill, buy stocks in HMOs that have high Medicare exposure. Bush makes noises about prescription drug benefit, buy pharmaceuticals. Kerry makes noise about universal healthcare? Sell 'em back, and short McDonald's while you're at it.
As we adopt Chinese methods of mass behavioral modification/control, the Chinese adopt our methods of efficient computerized surveillance, and the two societies can leverage each other's strengths. Economic collapse of either society is a pretty bad scenario for the world, so even if the merger of Chinese and Western political systems only delays implosion for 50 years, that's still long enough for my needs :)
>
> Any bets on how long it'll be until someone finds either a hole in the Microsoft PNG decoder or libJPEG? We've had holes in libPNG and Microsoft's JPEG decoder.
Ah, but in a world of closed-source third-party software, who's "everyone"? Without a sample JPEG as a proof-of-concept of the vector, there's no trivial way to tell whether FooView32.exe v1.03, or BarSee.exe v4.9 uses and/or was built with the affected components.
This is a real-world issue. Anyone who uses a digital camera frequently will probably end up using third-party image viewer/library software, because the image-viewing capability built into IE is unusable for even semi-serious work.
The number one rule of talking about the DMCA and archiving the results, encrypted, on a Lexar JumpDrive.
You do NOT talk about DMCA and archive the results, encrypted, on a Lexar Jumpdrive!
And it cuts both ways: The West still has a political requirement to appear free and capitalistic, but is increasingly becoming more statist. The increasing statism is part of our governments' plans to consolidate power in the face of declining domestic R&D capabilities. (An undereducated population's easier to control, so why not outsource the R&D, and bring the profits back home, in the form of earnings to shareholders, and taxes on the profits and any income distributed to shareholders? Spend the taxes on making sure the non-shareholders have enough cash to buy the cheap goods you're making offshore, and everyone's happy!)
As a fringe benefit, we get to beta-test the new surveillance and data-mining techniques on a population not subject to the few remaining privacy limits in the West, and to see how various methods of social control work against various groups of unreliable social elements.
50 years ago, or even 20 years ago, that model wasn't viable; most states that tried it wound up collapsing under the weight of their own bureaucracies. East Germany was probably the worst example; there were so many people filing records for STASI that there was nobody left to design or build the new toys.
> Frankly, I find the whole thing fascinating.
Ditto. China seems to have achieved the social stability and unity of purpose normally associated with totalitarianism, without sacrificing the rising standards of living afforded by capitalism. It's actually a pretty cool model.
(Which is a good thing, because it's the model we'll probably end up with whether we think it's cool or not :)
> Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Good .sig choice for this thread :)
"'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, {always} choose 'Retry.'"
Bad'l Ron, Wakener
Morgan Polysoft
I couldn't figure out what the difference was, so I did what anyone does. I made the following HTTP request:
http://www.google.com/search? hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=traffic+data+message+contents+dif ference&btnG=Google+Search
And then I clicked on a URL, and a Referrer-ID: was generated client-side (because I forgot to block it) as part of the HTTP session initiation. It also looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search? hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=traffic+data+message+contents+dif ference&btnG=Google+Search
So, umm, you were saying? :) If I were in charge, I'd certainly like to have that kind of access to what my subjects were doing. It'd be like having a window into their tiny little brains, 24/7. Criminals who write their own confessions, one URL at a time. Sweet!
That sounds like it would suck. Of course, I wouldn't know, because I'VE NEVER EXPERIENCED ANYTHING LIKE THAT, YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD! :)
Won't work. If anything, cameras attract criminals. Just watch C-SPAN. :)
You tryin' to tell us that after all this time, Jabba shot first?
>
> Hello, McFly!
I'm not normally a betting man, but I'd wager the space dust is is just fine. The containment vessel designed to isolate the dust, however... lookin' a little shaky.
"The prophecies are true! We have found him! The perfect MMORPG customer!"
- Some dude in a suit.
>
>But given that MMORPG game design is based on the principle of maintaining the status quo while only giving the illusion of advancement and change, this isn't going to happen.
Yep. Imagine - 30+ years of storylines and characters. Imagine - hordes of slavering geeks aching to live the world of their dreams.
Imagine... imagine shooting the same asteroid for four hours a day, seven days a week, $15 a month, to become a Master Asteroid Miner (the first level of 20 that you need to command a starship) - only to lose three of those four hours' work when you get ganked by a Klingon (who leveled his Master Asteroid Miner three weeks faster than you did because he put a brick on the "SHOOT" key) who blows you away in one shot, and graces you with the fact that "u suck ur a fed looser bet u fuk ur momma 2 hahaha!1!1!!!one!1!"
Why, it'd be almost like that other Deep Space Franchise MMORPG!
It's weird - for all the tens of millions of development cash that gets sucked down the MMORPG swirlyhole, why couldn't someone say "Hey! Star [Trek|Wars] is about storylines, not about foozle-whacking! If we don't put content into the game, we're only going to make a galaxy of suck! And since players can eat content faster than we can develop it, why the fuck are we wasting a license like this on a fucking MMORPG?"
Hell, I've seen the people six inches away from me on the other side of the wall. Now I know why their bathroom fan is on 24 hours a day, for 3 days a week. I want to move the fuck away from them, not get to know them better.
Be thankful you don't know yours. The only community I want to join is the community of shotgun owners.
Hey, hey.
Nevada has had hundreds of nuclear reactors in its history. Of course, they were all of the prompt critical variety, and only ran for a few microseconds, but that still probably adds up to more nuclear reactors than the rest of the country put together!
If we'd "handled" our protestors in a more Chinese fashion, Yucca would be online by now.
Better yet, if we'd simply tweaked the educational system to impart a basic level of scientific literacy in our population, not only would Yucca be online by now, we wouldn't have to adopt a Chinese solution to our NIMBY/BANANA segment of our population, because people would realize that nuclear power has its sucky elements, but that it sucks a lot less than other forms of energy generation.
Naw. Heck with nuclear. Let's just keep sending another few billion to Saudi Arabia every year. We'll be safer that way.
Why, follow America's lead... by burning fossil fuels (LNG, crude) imported from the Middle East!
(Isn't it ironic? China has a vested long-term interest in propping up Islamic fundamentalist regimes, because doing so guarantees we'll be too thinly-stretched to defend Taiwan, should China choose to take it by force. And yet, China will achieve energy independence 20 years before we will.)
Geek gets into nightclub, gets paid to program perl! And all you want to do is talk to the humans. WTF? :)
But getting back to the original question... unless you engineer the DNA to eat the rocks and thereby replicate itself, 1/r^2 for radio still beats the heck out of the 1/r^3 you get for throwing bug-laden rocks around the galaxy :)
>
> I can't help but wonder how long until this begins to happen in the US, all in the name of fighting terrorism
The proper thing for the government to do is to allow its citizens access to the content... and to log all the traffic instead.
You're free to read whatever you want. Most people Googling for sensitive topics are merely researching them. If your clickstream indicates otherwise, then it's time for the hammer to come down.
I can think of a few books that have effectively (and possibly for good reason) disappeared from library shelves and retreated to professors' bookshelves in recent times. One title from 30 years ago comes to mind. (No, I don't own a copy.)
Googling for that title is just fine. If I were still studying that field, I'd sure as hell be leery of buying a copy online, though :)
Yeah, but before the site goes down, we'll all know how to swear in Chinese! W00t!