Really, they broke the law for a sensational story for which they could have written a less interesting story without the privacy violations. I don't consider them to have a "journalistic duty to society" justification.
I can understand journalism where people trespassed on the Manhattan Project grounds. There's really no other way to demonstrate that you can get into nuclear research facilities other than to do so.
On the other hand, they could have easily said "we have found the following vulnerability, which probably allows us full access to X, Y, and Z". They would have done their security work (and if they got hammered by the network admins for probing the network, I'd agree... the admins should get chewed out), would have gotten their story, and so forth. Oh, and this assumes that they notified the admins far enough in advance of their publish date that the problem could be *fixed* before all the students at the university were told about it -- unlike the Manhattan Project, where a couple more guards can just be rolled out or reassigned from another location temporarily, it may take a bit to test software changes before a rollout is appropriate.
Besides, if all it takes is the willingness to write an article later to avoid getting in trouble, people can be poking around some awfully dicey places.
html editing component (e.g. mail's compose window) has serious issues with long documents; IE's equivalent component is much faster, although not as nice IMHO.
IE has an HTML editing component? When did they add that?
What our taciturn friend is saying is that the Netscape line still exists, and is basically Mozilla with some tweaks made. You can give your "Mozilla"-disliking folks the real thing -- Netscape.
I haven't used remade MSIE browsers. But there are some important features in Firefox that I'm not sure MSIE browsers have. I'll mention them, though I realize that it may be irrelevant.
* MSIE's search capabilities go to MSDN. This is an area where bundling is a bad idea -- MSDN just isn't as *nice* as Google.
* MSIE's rendering engine isn't as standards-compliant or featureful as the Mozilla/Firefox engine, Gecko. The most galling thing to me is the lack of alpha-channel PNG support. Most websites *do* avoid using features that are broken in MSIE, but it's still awfully frusterating.
* MSIE is not as threaded as Mozilla -- when a page is rendering, interacting with the browser *stops*. The window can't be dragged. It's very disruptive.
* I can use the same setup on my home Linux boxes and when I need to use Windows at work. Not such a big deal if you only use Windows.
* Aliased searches. This is really important to me. I have a number of aliased searches set up, so that I can type "gg foobar" to search Google for "foobar". Same goes for imdb to search IMDB and fm to search Freshmeat. It's like WAIS all over again, but better.
* Highlighting style. MSIE uses the standard Microsoft approach of completely highlighting a "word" if you've highlighted most of the word. This drives me bananas, because I frequently do not want to highlight text along word boundaries. There may be a way to disable this behavior, but I am not aware of what it is (I had a bunch of other reasons to use Firefox).
* I can change Firefox. Again, for most people, this is no big deal. I used to use the uber-lightweight webbrowser dillo, and when I wanted a feature or didn't like the way something worked, I could just submit a patch, and did so on several occasions. It was awfully nice. I've yet to need to submit a Firefox patch, but the ability to do so is really nice.
* Stability. I've had a couple of stability problems with Windows and (oddly enough) Office after MSIE crashes. Firefox dying (and that doesn't happen all that much) doesn't seem to affect the stability of other software on a system. Dunno if that affects MSIE clones as well.
First of all, has anyone noticed the number of *awful* things sponsored by Sen. Orin Hatch? Why is he the source of so much stupidity? Why doesn't he get, y'know, voted out? It seems like a lot of things he does are awfully unpopular.
It is no secret that the intellectual property assets of our nation are under assault, as never before.
Absurd. We have had stronger intellectual property protection in our nation for the last few decades than we have *ever* had.
The bill is aimed at ensuring the vibrancy of both our creative community and our technology community.
I'm not sure that it helps either artists or technology companies. It is possible, if the RIAA's thesis that they are badly losing money is correct, that it helps music publishing companies.
We urge you to support it. It is intended to target bad actors only - those who have built business models to get away with stealing the creative work of predominantly American artists. The bill finds the right balance to protect both technology AND content innovators.
In subsection (g), "intentionally induces" means intentionally aids, abets, induces, counsels, or procures, and intent may be shown by acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement based upon all relevant information about such acts then reasonably available to the actor, including whether the activity relies on infringement for its commercial viability.
As other analysis has pointed out, no, the bill decidedly *does* target people who are not "bad actors".
Global sales of recorded music - dominated by our country - quadrupled from 1980 to 1999. Then, almost on a dime, that trend line reversed, with sales figures falling by about a third to the mid point of last year. Before the launch of lawsuits by the industry last fall against those induced to steal music online, we were spiraling down with no sense of a floor.
I do not have the data necessary to judge the accuracy of this claim. However, I have seen many citations of numbers that do not agree with this, and many people have pointed out that there is a strong coincidence with the current economic recession and finally, that it is possible that RIAA-sold music simply does not have the appeal that it once did -- for example, the Internet allows a broader range of new types of music to be discovered, which makes the music that the RIAA markets have less advantage relative to non-RIAA marketed music.
I do not think that this data is convincing enough to broadly extend the reach of IP law, and to make illegal much development in a field that is seeing some of the most interesting research in computer science.
Finally, let us assume that the RIAA really is losing large sums of money and that copyright infringment is the direct cause -- what of the companies that have *benefitted* from the current boom in MP3s? Apple, HP, and many other companies have profited admirably. I know people that spent more money on music-related technology than ever did on music. There are still questions of whether this is a sustainable or long-term beneficial system, but even if the RIAA establishes that it is making less money is not cause for the RIAA claiming that this bill is necessary. Finally, the ultimate goal of IP law is to ensure that production in the arts continues -- I know people that have both pirated music and found new musicians that they were never familiar with before, and purchased albums from those (European musicians, odd techno types, and the like). In addition, electronic music distribution may be a more economically efficient method of music evaluation for such purposes than MTV or the radio. I am very unsure that even if the RIAA is making less money, that there is less money going into the pockets of content creators. The RIAA is primarily a set of companies that do music promotion. If promotion is no longer required for people to find artists that they like (the now-Microsoft-purchased-and-d
I'm a little disappointed that Apple isn't on the list of companies requesting a review -- it would seem that their iPod produce is certainly one of the affected devices.
Actually, at the prices that folks here are talking about, if he's willing to work out of state, he might still be a good deal even if he has to be flown out.
I dunno about all the claims from photographers that they need to retain copyright. I don't do photography, and I would assume that a photographer probably doesn't get constant work. Plus, he has to buy his own equipment.
Still, it seems like there must be a better solution (like having a number of photographers go into business together and be more tightly scheduled, thus getting more work) than having to have such harsh IP requirements over wedding pictures.
Because BitTorrent provides some reward for those with fast upstream connections, it encourages consumers to demand better upstream service -- currently, consumer broadband providers generally provide awfully poor upstream connections.
It's easy for the MPAA to have contractors monitor almost all systems to some extent, with the possible exception of Freenet (and some more half-assed network that attempted to be private with a name that escapes me at the moment). Such is the life of the packet-swtiched network user.
BitTorrent is rather unlike any of the other P2P systems out there.
From a user standpoint, it's "http, but vastly more scalable". It doesn't do file searching or anything like that. It just distributes load among all people downloading a file.
I dunno if I agree with Gates on this one. First, there is an awful lot of deployed hardware to handle DVDs. Second, media companies are pretty happy with the model of being able to sell a physical object. Microsoft, on the other hand, would love to become a service provider that everyone subscribes to. Third, the consumer benefits that Gates lists are pretty, well, unimpressive. The facial recognition is just fluff. The fragility of DVDs is true, but even an object that needs to be handled carefully is more substantial (and in my experience, trustworthy) than 100% reliable service. Having a personalized electronic video index instead of one general one might be somewhat nice, but it's not all that exciting. "Keeping the kids out" hasn't sold much of anything thus far, and I don't see it likely to start, especially not migrating everyone to a new format. The "know what we want to watch" thing was tried with the Tivo, and I expect that it will eventually be an interesting feature, but it's not a feature that neccessitates a format change -- an existing DVD player with some way of grabbing the latest "similar associations" database or phoning home could do it -- you don't need to blow away the entire DVD format for it.
No, if Gates is right, it will be for other reasons. If we can really get the bandwidth for it, video-on-demand is a neat idea. You pay a subscription fee, and get to watch all the movies you want, and the ones of your choice. There will probably be some kind of add-ins that publishers will come up with that don't exist on DVDs, and demand for the add-ins might produce enough consumer interest.
Other than that, I see DVD staying around for a while.
From memory, the MS system has a mechanism for key recovery and/or an admin back-door. This makes sense in an office situation (e.g someone leaves or is fired) but it still leaves me wondering about other backdoors. It doesn't sound like paranoid-tinfoil-hat-crowd level encryption to me.
Well, sort of. IIRC, EFS can store a second copy of an encryption key encrypted with an administrator's (key? password? Been too long, but the interface exposed to the administrator should be the same.) I'm not an EFS guru, but I believe that the internals of the storage structure are public... I don't see how or why Microsoft would start backdooring the thing, especially when they do things like sell Windows to military and other clients (granted, they may have non-EFS policy, but still...).
dm-crypt was introduced in kernel 2.6.4. This uses the new device-mapper API to encrypt a file or device. From what I've read, it's a much cleaner implementation than cryptoloop.
Could be -- thanks for the link, as this is new to me -- but when the author is talking about cleanliness, this is a kernel hacker or at best a developer interface. The problem is that there is still no setup done by the distros to make this particularly accessable to the users -- I don't want to have to manually play with PAM on each system to convince it to hand off a password to an encrypted loopback layer, and really, even the most do-it-yourselfer would probably prefer to have certain basic things (particularly related to filesystems) automatically set up -- maybe kept in the open so that the workings are accessable and configurable, but this is not a process that benefits greatly from a lack of a standard mechanism or an easy setup.
As you point out -- these are block-level-device interfaces, and the code needs to be filesystem level. Dunno about whether Linux can do it, but it might be possible to produce a "pass-through" filesystem that does encryption on files (though directories wouldn't be feasible...dunno how EFS treats dirents). Dunno if Linux filesystem code can call back through the VFS, either, and if not that'd shoot this down. This approach would be nice and generic, at least, so you get encrypted filesystem-level encryption under just about any filesystem, though the interface'd be a titch less nice for the fstab user than having encryption features just available in each filesystem.
About virtual terminals: I gather that most distros now use gdm, kdm, or even good old xdm to provide an all-graphical login. None of this clunky startx stuff. Much more prettier looking as well:)
This is true; I mention it because it has been a significant problem in the past (oh, and folks that use xhost + are still around, too).
About user switching: I think KDE recently (last year?) added a "switch user" feature. I'm a Gnome user, so I'm not really sure. I know I've seen it recently, but I can't find it in the Gnome foot menu here. So it's probably in KDE.
Hmm. Interesting. Looks like it provides a front end in the screensaver for firing up a new kdm instance in a new xorg instance.
Apparently the GNOME project has its own efforts underway in the same direction.
And this idea doesn't have huge potential for abuse or privacy issues because, after all, children just *look* like little people. They aren't real people, not like you and me. They certainly don't need privacy to develop, as was unfortunately inflicted upon you and me during our own formative years.
You know, that game got good review scores and plenty of press, but I was hard-pressed to figure out what people liked about it. It had unimpressive weaponry and gameplay. The pathfinding wasn't phenomenal, nor were the tactics employed by the computer anywhere near par for current games. It was marginally better than Doom's "hunt-the-switch", but I haven't run into such simplistic path-to-goal gameplay in a long time. The environments (well, as far as I played into the game) weren't all that great. The only thing that might have been unique about it was that the reviews claimed that you could eventually control a large squad (~12, IIRC) of NPCs, which just isn't that amazing. If I wanted to play a game with multiple NPCs, I'd infinitely prefer the excellent Hostile Waters or one of the other games out there with good control over what the NPCs are doing...just "go to", "attack", and "return" isn't all that exceptional.
Freedom Force's implausible plotline could really have been good if it had been made as a Starship Troopers-style over-the-top satire -- what I was hoping for as soon as I saw the first bit of the storyline. Instead, it took a more serious approach.
There are some good reasons for use of fuel cells.
The big one is that you can only fit so much engine-related aparatus on the car -- otherwise, you might as well just slap a nuclear power plant on the thing, as we have on our submarines and large ships. We don't use gasoline in power plants; the reason it's popular in cars is because a simple, cheap, and reliable device can convert gasoline into mechanical energy without requiring a lot of weight in either the device or fuel.
So, yes, there is *some* reason for fuel cells. They mean
1) That it's easier for us to use other power sources (since fuel cells can be produced by all kinds of electricity, including variable-level sources like tidal, wind, or solar power)
2) That we reduce emissions at the car level. This allows emissions to be localized at the power plant.
3) We can take advantage of heavy, more elaborate emissions control systems at the power plant.
You, on the other hand, are absolutely right that fuel cells are often misrepresented as producing nothing but the emissions that come from the car, which is indeed incorrect.
While I agree that cargo capacity can be important to have every now and then, when was the last time that you drove to a brick-and-mortar computer store to buy a 21" monitor?
Hell, when was the last time that you bought anything besides a cable or adapter at a brick-and-mortar computer store?
While SUVs are safer *in crashes* than many lighter vehicles, the higher percentage of things like fatal rollovers actually push them up to be more dangerous than passenger cars.
One thing that's a problem is that a lot of people don't actually understand the ways to drive to maximize MPG - drive smoothly, try not to brake as much as possible (just let up off the gas!)
Coincidentally, this is also the combination of actions that produces the smoothest and most comfortable ride for passengers.
Of course, try convincing Johnny NewVP with his new BMW that he shouldn't tear up the brakes and motor as much as possible...
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Really, they broke the law for a sensational story for which they could have written a less interesting story without the privacy violations. I don't consider them to have a "journalistic duty to society" justification.
... the admins should get chewed out), would have gotten their story, and so forth. Oh, and this assumes that they notified the admins far enough in advance of their publish date that the problem could be *fixed* before all the students at the university were told about it -- unlike the Manhattan Project, where a couple more guards can just be rolled out or reassigned from another location temporarily, it may take a bit to test software changes before a rollout is appropriate.
I can understand journalism where people trespassed on the Manhattan Project grounds. There's really no other way to demonstrate that you can get into nuclear research facilities other than to do so.
On the other hand, they could have easily said "we have found the following vulnerability, which probably allows us full access to X, Y, and Z". They would have done their security work (and if they got hammered by the network admins for probing the network, I'd agree
Besides, if all it takes is the willingness to write an article later to avoid getting in trouble, people can be poking around some awfully dicey places.
IE still uses the Microsoft VM?
I thought that Microsoft killed that off, and that it had ceased to exist years ago.
html editing component (e.g. mail's compose window) has serious issues with long documents; IE's equivalent component is much faster, although not as nice IMHO.
IE has an HTML editing component? When did they add that?
I was *wondering* what magic of routing I wasn't familiar with there for a moment. :-)
What our taciturn friend is saying is that the Netscape line still exists, and is basically Mozilla with some tweaks made. You can give your "Mozilla"-disliking folks the real thing -- Netscape.
I haven't used remade MSIE browsers. But there are some important features in Firefox that I'm not sure MSIE browsers have. I'll mention them, though I realize that it may be irrelevant.
* MSIE's search capabilities go to MSDN. This is an area where bundling is a bad idea -- MSDN just isn't as *nice* as Google.
* MSIE's rendering engine isn't as standards-compliant or featureful as the Mozilla/Firefox engine, Gecko. The most galling thing to me is the lack of alpha-channel PNG support. Most websites *do* avoid using features that are broken in MSIE, but it's still awfully frusterating.
* MSIE is not as threaded as Mozilla -- when a page is rendering, interacting with the browser *stops*. The window can't be dragged. It's very disruptive.
* I can use the same setup on my home Linux boxes and when I need to use Windows at work. Not such a big deal if you only use Windows.
* Aliased searches. This is really important to me. I have a number of aliased searches set up, so that I can type "gg foobar" to search Google for "foobar". Same goes for imdb to search IMDB and fm to search Freshmeat. It's like WAIS all over again, but better.
* Highlighting style. MSIE uses the standard Microsoft approach of completely highlighting a "word" if you've highlighted most of the word. This drives me bananas, because I frequently do not want to highlight text along word boundaries. There may be a way to disable this behavior, but I am not aware of what it is (I had a bunch of other reasons to use Firefox).
* I can change Firefox. Again, for most people, this is no big deal. I used to use the uber-lightweight webbrowser dillo, and when I wanted a feature or didn't like the way something worked, I could just submit a patch, and did so on several occasions. It was awfully nice. I've yet to need to submit a Firefox patch, but the ability to do so is really nice.
* Stability. I've had a couple of stability problems with Windows and (oddly enough) Office after MSIE crashes. Firefox dying (and that doesn't happen all that much) doesn't seem to affect the stability of other software on a system. Dunno if that affects MSIE clones as well.
I am an European. And I will die for Europe if necessary.
Ballsy to say that during the Bush Administration.
[shrug] It's not a proper business letter. You're certainly welcome to use anything you find insightful in it if you write a letter, though.
First of all, has anyone noticed the number of *awful* things sponsored by Sen. Orin Hatch? Why is he the source of so much stupidity? Why doesn't he get, y'know, voted out? It seems like a lot of things he does are awfully unpopular.
It is no secret that the intellectual property assets of our nation are under assault, as never before.
Absurd. We have had stronger intellectual property protection in our nation for the last few decades than we have *ever* had.
The bill is aimed at ensuring the vibrancy of both our creative community and our technology community.
I'm not sure that it helps either artists or technology companies. It is possible, if the RIAA's thesis that they are badly losing money is correct, that it helps music publishing companies.
We urge you to support it. It is intended to target bad actors only - those who have built business models to get away with stealing the creative work of predominantly American artists. The bill finds the right balance to protect both technology AND content innovators.
In subsection (g), "intentionally induces" means intentionally aids, abets, induces, counsels, or procures, and intent may be shown by acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement based upon all relevant information about such acts then reasonably available to the actor, including whether the activity relies on infringement for its commercial viability.
As other analysis has pointed out, no, the bill decidedly *does* target people who are not "bad actors".
Global sales of recorded music - dominated by our country - quadrupled from 1980 to 1999. Then, almost on a dime, that trend line reversed, with sales figures falling by about a third to the mid point of last year. Before the launch of lawsuits by the industry last fall against those induced to steal music online, we were spiraling down with no sense of a floor.
I do not have the data necessary to judge the accuracy of this claim. However, I have seen many citations of numbers that do not agree with this, and many people have pointed out that there is a strong coincidence with the current economic recession and finally, that it is possible that RIAA-sold music simply does not have the appeal that it once did -- for example, the Internet allows a broader range of new types of music to be discovered, which makes the music that the RIAA markets have less advantage relative to non-RIAA marketed music.
I do not think that this data is convincing enough to broadly extend the reach of IP law, and to make illegal much development in a field that is seeing some of the most interesting research in computer science.
Finally, let us assume that the RIAA really is losing large sums of money and that copyright infringment is the direct cause -- what of the companies that have *benefitted* from the current boom in MP3s? Apple, HP, and many other companies have profited admirably. I know people that spent more money on music-related technology than ever did on music. There are still questions of whether this is a sustainable or long-term beneficial system, but even if the RIAA establishes that it is making less money is not cause for the RIAA claiming that this bill is necessary. Finally, the ultimate goal of IP law is to ensure that production in the arts continues -- I know people that have both pirated music and found new musicians that they were never familiar with before, and purchased albums from those (European musicians, odd techno types, and the like). In addition, electronic music distribution may be a more economically efficient method of music evaluation for such purposes than MTV or the radio. I am very unsure that even if the RIAA is making less money, that there is less money going into the pockets of content creators. The RIAA is primarily a set of companies that do music promotion. If promotion is no longer required for people to find artists that they like (the now-Microsoft-purchased-and-d
I'm a little disappointed that Apple isn't on the list of companies requesting a review -- it would seem that their iPod produce is certainly one of the affected devices.
Sounds like it's time someone started making a registry of dweeby photographers, so we can know who to avoid.
Wouldn't it be easier and more useful to make a registry of, y'know, good photographers?
Actually, at the prices that folks here are talking about, if he's willing to work out of state, he might still be a good deal even if he has to be flown out.
I dunno about all the claims from photographers that they need to retain copyright. I don't do photography, and I would assume that a photographer probably doesn't get constant work. Plus, he has to buy his own equipment.
Still, it seems like there must be a better solution (like having a number of photographers go into business together and be more tightly scheduled, thus getting more work) than having to have such harsh IP requirements over wedding pictures.
Because BitTorrent provides some reward for those with fast upstream connections, it encourages consumers to demand better upstream service -- currently, consumer broadband providers generally provide awfully poor upstream connections.
It's easy for the MPAA to have contractors monitor almost all systems to some extent, with the possible exception of Freenet (and some more half-assed network that attempted to be private with a name that escapes me at the moment). Such is the life of the packet-swtiched network user.
BitTorrent is rather unlike any of the other P2P systems out there.
From a user standpoint, it's "http, but vastly more scalable". It doesn't do file searching or anything like that. It just distributes load among all people downloading a file.
I dunno if I agree with Gates on this one. First, there is an awful lot of deployed hardware to handle DVDs. Second, media companies are pretty happy with the model of being able to sell a physical object. Microsoft, on the other hand, would love to become a service provider that everyone subscribes to. Third, the consumer benefits that Gates lists are pretty, well, unimpressive. The facial recognition is just fluff. The fragility of DVDs is true, but even an object that needs to be handled carefully is more substantial (and in my experience, trustworthy) than 100% reliable service. Having a personalized electronic video index instead of one general one might be somewhat nice, but it's not all that exciting. "Keeping the kids out" hasn't sold much of anything thus far, and I don't see it likely to start, especially not migrating everyone to a new format. The "know what we want to watch" thing was tried with the Tivo, and I expect that it will eventually be an interesting feature, but it's not a feature that neccessitates a format change -- an existing DVD player with some way of grabbing the latest "similar associations" database or phoning home could do it -- you don't need to blow away the entire DVD format for it.
No, if Gates is right, it will be for other reasons. If we can really get the bandwidth for it, video-on-demand is a neat idea. You pay a subscription fee, and get to watch all the movies you want, and the ones of your choice. There will probably be some kind of add-ins that publishers will come up with that don't exist on DVDs, and demand for the add-ins might produce enough consumer interest.
Other than that, I see DVD staying around for a while.
From memory, the MS system has a mechanism for key recovery and/or an admin back-door. This makes sense in an office situation (e.g someone leaves or is fired) but it still leaves me wondering about other backdoors. It doesn't sound like paranoid-tinfoil-hat-crowd level encryption to me.
... I don't see how or why Microsoft would start backdooring the thing, especially when they do things like sell Windows to military and other clients (granted, they may have non-EFS policy, but still...).
:)
Well, sort of. IIRC, EFS can store a second copy of an encryption key encrypted with an administrator's (key? password? Been too long, but the interface exposed to the administrator should be the same.) I'm not an EFS guru, but I believe that the internals of the storage structure are public
dm-crypt was introduced in kernel 2.6.4. This uses the new device-mapper API to encrypt a file or device. From what I've read, it's a much cleaner implementation than cryptoloop.
Could be -- thanks for the link, as this is new to me -- but when the author is talking about cleanliness, this is a kernel hacker or at best a developer interface. The problem is that there is still no setup done by the distros to make this particularly accessable to the users -- I don't want to have to manually play with PAM on each system to convince it to hand off a password to an encrypted loopback layer, and really, even the most do-it-yourselfer would probably prefer to have certain basic things (particularly related to filesystems) automatically set up -- maybe kept in the open so that the workings are accessable and configurable, but this is not a process that benefits greatly from a lack of a standard mechanism or an easy setup.
As you point out -- these are block-level-device interfaces, and the code needs to be filesystem level. Dunno about whether Linux can do it, but it might be possible to produce a "pass-through" filesystem that does encryption on files (though directories wouldn't be feasible...dunno how EFS treats dirents). Dunno if Linux filesystem code can call back through the VFS, either, and if not that'd shoot this down. This approach would be nice and generic, at least, so you get encrypted filesystem-level encryption under just about any filesystem, though the interface'd be a titch less nice for the fstab user than having encryption features just available in each filesystem.
About virtual terminals: I gather that most distros now use gdm, kdm, or even good old xdm to provide an all-graphical login. None of this clunky startx stuff. Much more prettier looking as well
This is true; I mention it because it has been a significant problem in the past (oh, and folks that use xhost + are still around, too).
About user switching: I think KDE recently (last year?) added a "switch user" feature. I'm a Gnome user, so I'm not really sure. I know I've seen it recently, but I can't find it in the Gnome foot menu here. So it's probably in KDE.
Hmm. Interesting. Looks like it provides a front end in the screensaver for firing up a new kdm instance in a new xorg instance.
Apparently the GNOME project has its own efforts underway in the same direction.
This may be the first time I've ever seen a potential Slashdot major meme start. This could easily reach the level of:
...
...
* Natalie Portman, naked and petrified
* Pouring hot grits down the front of my pants
* In SOVIET RUSSIA
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of
And this idea doesn't have huge potential for abuse or privacy issues because, after all, children just *look* like little people. They aren't real people, not like you and me. They certainly don't need privacy to develop, as was unfortunately inflicted upon you and me during our own formative years.
You know, that game got good review scores and plenty of press, but I was hard-pressed to figure out what people liked about it. It had unimpressive weaponry and gameplay. The pathfinding wasn't phenomenal, nor were the tactics employed by the computer anywhere near par for current games. It was marginally better than Doom's "hunt-the-switch", but I haven't run into such simplistic path-to-goal gameplay in a long time. The environments (well, as far as I played into the game) weren't all that great. The only thing that might have been unique about it was that the reviews claimed that you could eventually control a large squad (~12, IIRC) of NPCs, which just isn't that amazing. If I wanted to play a game with multiple NPCs, I'd infinitely prefer the excellent Hostile Waters or one of the other games out there with good control over what the NPCs are doing...just "go to", "attack", and "return" isn't all that exceptional.
Freedom Force's implausible plotline could really have been good if it had been made as a Starship Troopers-style over-the-top satire -- what I was hoping for as soon as I saw the first bit of the storyline. Instead, it took a more serious approach.
Cars generally lack regenerative braking, and have to stop relatively frequently. Trains start, continue, stop.
I'd be amazed if they require more power than cars.
There are some good reasons for use of fuel cells.
The big one is that you can only fit so much engine-related aparatus on the car -- otherwise, you might as well just slap a nuclear power plant on the thing, as we have on our submarines and large ships. We don't use gasoline in power plants; the reason it's popular in cars is because a simple, cheap, and reliable device can convert gasoline into mechanical energy without requiring a lot of weight in either the device or fuel.
So, yes, there is *some* reason for fuel cells. They mean
1) That it's easier for us to use other power sources (since fuel cells can be produced by all kinds of electricity, including variable-level sources like tidal, wind, or solar power)
2) That we reduce emissions at the car level. This allows emissions to be localized at the power plant.
3) We can take advantage of heavy, more elaborate emissions control systems at the power plant.
You, on the other hand, are absolutely right that fuel cells are often misrepresented as producing nothing but the emissions that come from the car, which is indeed incorrect.
While I agree that cargo capacity can be important to have every now and then, when was the last time that you drove to a brick-and-mortar computer store to buy a 21" monitor?
Hell, when was the last time that you bought anything besides a cable or adapter at a brick-and-mortar computer store?
While SUVs are safer *in crashes* than many lighter vehicles, the higher percentage of things like fatal rollovers actually push them up to be more dangerous than passenger cars.
One thing that's a problem is that a lot of people don't actually understand the ways to drive to maximize MPG - drive smoothly, try not to brake as much as possible (just let up off the gas!)
Coincidentally, this is also the combination of actions that produces the smoothest and most comfortable ride for passengers.
Of course, try convincing Johnny NewVP with his new BMW that he shouldn't tear up the brakes and motor as much as possible...