"No one seems to ask: why are we funding X different packages that do 80% of the same things, but none of them well?"
When I think about this, I'd rather have that than one single package, if only for the reason that without competition, I'd not be able to know if it was doing anything well or not.
Pragmatism here says plurality is probably better than some kind of Stalinist central control.
TFA has no evidence what-so-evar to back up its claim that people don't trust mobile apps any more or less than they do any other type of app (hell, even freakin' MS Office asks if you want to supply "anonymous data" to Redmond). Well, unless they're saying that "prominent lawmakers" == consumers.
This is just some random journo opinion. You'd have thought it would have maybe fired up Surveymonkey or something for some attempt at a citation.
In most (all?) jurisdictions, it's contract, not copyright, that says what the producer does with the work. You can pretend you own the work all you want, but if the contract you signed with the publisher, university, company, whatever, says you don't, then you don't.
If we really want to make a difference, reverse that relationship: make copyright trump contract and you're cooking with gas.
"Any apparatus capable of receiving live TV programmes needs to be licensed"
Sigh. No, the policy you quote does not say that. It says no licence is needed if the "occupier has declared that there is no television receiving equipment being used at the address to receive live broadcasts".
About a third of comments on/. are worthless. 90% of email is spam. 70% of FM radio signal is noise...
What matters is not the noise, it's whether you can consume the signal. It's easy to keep the "signal" in focus when looking for a file on a BT tracker - look for files with lots of seeders. Ergo, this research reports on a problem that isn't a problem.
I have used a throw away computer isolated from network to mess around with Kazaa, Shareaza, Limewire, TPB, etc. My computer was a diseased smoking husk in about two weeks.
Running executable files obtained from untrusted sources on the net? And you got b0ned? I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!
What we need is simple: we need to make Spamming unprofitable. (I almost said make Spam unprofitable, but I actually kinda like Hormel's product).
This wouldn't be that hard to do. Spammers hit government addresses like anything else. Hit the purveyors of the product, the people who hire the spammers, with a nasty "kill your business for good" level fine for every product that goes out in a spamming campaign - problem solved, none of these guys will ever be so stupid as to hire a spammer again.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
So not only would you have to remember what functions relate to each key for each application as you do today, but you would ALSO need to remember where and in what form the buttons that invoke those functions are?
Sounds like a total and undiluted nightmare to me. It would be quite hard to design a more confusing system. Perhaps if the buttons moved around during your use of the application?
If you've been considering UI design as a career, you might like to re-consider before you do some serious damage.
It's not "digital newstands" that stink, it's "news" itself. It always has stunk, but it's not until we've had the Internet and free distribution channels for any alternatives that it's started to be seen for what it is.
Most, if not all of the content you find in any given "quality newspaper" is baloney. It's either political public opinion testing ("Obama MAY ban [something controversial]"), worthless human-interest crap and celebrity gossip, sport, re-heated press-releases, or pompous "this writer thinks..." editorials reading only slightly less well than most stand-up comedy routines ("Single mothers!?! What's up with them???!!").
In terms of content, I think newspapers and most magazines have hit the buffers now. They used to fulfil a middle-class need for mental masturbation, making people feel they had to "keep up" with the "news" or they would mysteriously fall victim to being "uninformed" about whether some politician wanted them to know about some policy or other (pretty much consumption of propaganda from government and industry). But with the web, blogs, Twitter, RSS whatever, it's now much easier to get what you need about news that matters to you in more concentrated form than newspapers or magazines are offering.
So the decline in news consumption has less to do with platforms or channels, and much more to do with the fact that the Internet has simply unmasked publications like Newsweek and Wired as being pretty poor-quality against the general free flow of information from non-mainstream sources. In short, content is RALLY king this time. Heck, on any given subject, I would get more out of/. than I would from reading Time's coverage of it.
Holy mother of screaming baby jeezus. I've been on/. for years and never have I seen such a frustrating thread as this.
Nintendo (or Namco or whoever they are) created Pac Man about 30 bloody years ago. Isn't that ENOUGH TIME for them to have made some money out of it?? Let it go to the public domain where people like this guy can re-interpret it (however incrementally) and maybe make it BETTER! If it's a boring clone, then it deserves to be - and will be - forgotten. If it's not, then cool!
To all those bleating "it's copyright infringement!" here: Would you have it that if I install the plumbing in your house, I should have the right to ask you for a payment every time you have a bath - for the rest of my life plus 70 years? And what do you think went on before about 1750? Was there no culture or innovation in the arts? There was no copyright then after all.
Can't you see that this post is a fantastic example of how we have been completely eaten up by crazy long copyright terms. WHAT DOES IT MATTER THAT THIS GAME IS A RIP-OFF OF A 30 YEAR OLD IDEA? I have no sympathy with cigar-smoking fatsos wanting to squeeze yet more money out of one person's ancient idea so they can build another swimming pool in their garden.
Absolutely none. I hope this little guy wins, and wins big.
If you are seriously complaining that you totally ripped off an extremely famous game for profit and got called out. Consider yourself lucky thats all they did!
I'd say that this is in fact what's wrong with *copyright* (if this is a case of copyright infringement, which I doubt).
Nintendo had the original idea for Pac Man in the friggin' 1980s! Don't you think it's been enough time for them to have made some money off it so we can now do our own versions?
The fact that cigar-smoking nobodies can build swimming pools and retire on huge pension for decades and decades on the back of some tiny act of creative genius is ridiculous.
I hope this guy wins, and better still, goes on to make a good deal of money from his own interpretation of Pac Man.
Your game is a complete knock off of the original. From your website, it looks like you copied: (1) the pac man character (2) the ghosts (3) the dots and power dots (3) the style of the maze
It's amazing how, in a world full of copyrights and trademarks and patents and intellectual "property" and all sorts, that people just don't understand any of it.
The items you list above CANNOT be a "clear case of copyright infringement" because you cannot copyright an idea. If you could copyright an idea, then Hollywood would probably produce about 1 film a decade while the lawyers researched the script for stuff people had done before ("This script has a cop with a chip on his shoulder. That was done in Lethal Weapon. Next! Nope, you can't have a bunch of 20-something yuppies living together, that was done in Friends.").
There may be a case against the guy for using the word "Pac" in the name of the game, but not even in the wildest dreams of any copyright lawyer are you going to get away with saying that having a ghost in an arcade game is copyright infringement!
What next? Sue Jamiroquai for singing like Steve Wonder?
You could try developing something original. Why do you think you can just make money rewriting someone else's idea on a new platform. [snip]
Posted as AC cuz slashdot has an anti copyright bias. Im not trolling.
I think what you call "anti copyright bias" is just plain common sense in most cases. Nintendo or whoever they are have made a shedload of cash from a single creative event that happened about 30 years ago. They then "rewrote" this idea numerous times and re-sold it because the copyright system allowed them to, and will allow them to pretty much for ever.
How about limiting the TIME of copyright to about 10 years so that people can rip mix and burn stuff to their heart's content, just like they used to a few hundred years ago?
Who knows, maybe we'll derive some BETTER works out of that, and ALL benefit from it. Not just bunch of non-creative suits and lawyers from Namco.
While I am kinda rooting for wikileaks in this, I think anyone who is considering to sign up to think about this:
1. you give them shell access to your host 2. you grant access on the basis of a ssh public key, which you're getting from an unencrypted page. It could be anyone's and it could be coming from anywhere.
Yeah, I thought about that to.
As to point 1., you don't have to give them shell access, just rsync over SSH. So, give the shell as/dev/null in/etc/passwd (and don't set the password, to be extra safe).
As to point 2., well, it's a question of trust alright. About the same level of trust I give to updating software via Debian apt repos, or any number of scenarios where the publisher says "here's my public key, please use it". Not foolproof by any means, but it's a chance I'm willing to take.
Hence, the Christian taxpayer is being forced to fund religious teachings (suspending the Laws of Thermodynamics for the big bang requires "belief" without fact) that he may or may not believe in.
I think you'll find suspending the Laws of Thermodynamics for the big bang requires rather a lot of mathematics and predictive logical reasoning. At what point does scientific theory start and "belief" end, I wonder?
So a small bomb can take down a plane, but can't necessarily take out a ship or train, especially if in a cargo area.
My point is there is nothing NEW in that. At any time since the invention of air freight, it has been possible to put a bomb in a box and see that box ride a plane, just as letter bombs are literally 100 years old. Sure, timed or remotely detonated bombs are relatively new (like maybe 80 years), but that makes little difference.
What has changed in the last few years that we now see a 100 year old threat as being something to freak out about?
You may say, as the TSA do, that the fact a threat is old does not mean that we should not defend against it. But the issue here is freedom and perspective. What if the Yemen bombs had gone off? Planes might have crashed, people might have been killed. It would have been awful. However, I myself think that there is nothing wrong with doing what we have ALWAYS HISTORICALLY DONE in the face of such incredibly rare and isolated acts of lunatics: shrug and let life carry on.
That is what the British did with the IRA (give or take a few public waste bin removals).
That was what Germany did with Baader-Meinhoff.
That is what Spain has been doing with ETA for the last half century.
The pitiful reaction in the US to Middle East terrorists almost makes me what to become a terrorist myself!
What I don't understand about the screaming to ban deadly packages flying by air mail is that for literally 100 YEARS letter bombs have been on the scene. I myself was in Washington DC in about 1975 when a letter bomb posted by the IRA was delivered to the British Embassy. It blew the hand off a secretary who opened it up. Yes, there was an investigation, the police were called, the IRA condemned etc. etc. but nobody suggested banning packages in the mail or removing the rights of anyone who went into a post office. Heck, these devices from Yemen didn't even explode and we're falling apart with fear!
What the hell is going on? Why has the US become a nation of panty-wetting idiots?
"My kinect tells me that it's almost time to stop touching devices at all, and I believe it."
Voice control (or the easy possibility of it) on mobile devices has been around for years. What's changed recently that you should think it's going to become something that's worth doing?
Absolutely. In fact, scoot forward maybe 20-30 years or so and imagine passively-powered storage devices. Imagine them tiny, dirt cheap, made in China and anywhere you care to look.
Boof - we got ourselves a totally new world: On my way to work, my phone alerts me to the fact that I've just walked past the entire works of Hollywood, in 1080p, on a chip the size of a pinhead and the cost of a stick of gum. Would I like to copy some to my device? OK. 10 seconds later, I've got everything made between 1940 and 1950.
Not messaging networks as we know them, but a web of data mixed in to the fabric of everyday life. What's that on your shoulder? Dandruff? No, it's some 10 petabyte storage devices that somebody's scattered over the heads of the crowd. Hey! They've got the Pentagon's email correspondence from 2012 on them. Time for some mining!
From TFA: "Success in this field will not only bring major social benefits it could also bring significant commercial rewards for those involved."
If they're talking about a type of mesh network, then I say bring it on! Right now, things really don't look good for the "traditional" Internet as we know it. It's controllable servers, lap-dog ISPs, government p0wned routers, etc. One day, the net will just be Rupert Murdoch's pay-ground just as sure as cable TV went main stream in the 1980's.
Take out the centrality, enter the mesh. They stole our revolution - let's steal it back!!
(Sits back and waits for the sound of cynical laughter and replies beginning "In the real world...")
Slashdot Mirror
(oh dear replying to my own post...) .. of course, if you were talking open source, then that would be another matter :-)
"No one seems to ask: why are we funding X different packages that do 80% of the same things, but none of them well?"
When I think about this, I'd rather have that than one single package, if only for the reason that without competition, I'd not be able to know if it was doing anything well or not.
Pragmatism here says plurality is probably better than some kind of Stalinist central control.
TFA has no evidence what-so-evar to back up its claim that people don't trust mobile apps any more or less than they do any other type of app (hell, even freakin' MS Office asks if you want to supply "anonymous data" to Redmond). Well, unless they're saying that "prominent lawmakers" == consumers.
This is just some random journo opinion. You'd have thought it would have maybe fired up Surveymonkey or something for some attempt at a citation.
In most (all?) jurisdictions, it's contract, not copyright, that says what the producer does with the work. You can pretend you own the work all you want, but if the contract you signed with the publisher, university, company, whatever, says you don't, then you don't.
If we really want to make a difference, reverse that relationship: make copyright trump contract and you're cooking with gas.
"Any apparatus capable of receiving live TV programmes needs to be licensed"
Sigh. No, the policy you quote does not say that. It says no licence is needed if the "occupier has declared that there is no television receiving equipment being used at the address to receive live broadcasts".
I don't know exactly why I get this impression, but was the guy on the sofa wearing the worst fake tan in all of human history?
About a third of comments on /. are worthless. 90% of email is spam. 70% of FM radio signal is noise...
What matters is not the noise, it's whether you can consume the signal. It's easy to keep the "signal" in focus when looking for a file on a BT tracker - look for files with lots of seeders. Ergo, this research reports on a problem that isn't a problem.
I have used a throw away computer isolated from network to mess around with Kazaa, Shareaza, Limewire, TPB, etc. My computer was a diseased smoking husk in about two weeks.
Running executable files obtained from untrusted sources on the net? And you got b0ned? I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!
What we need is simple: we need to make Spamming unprofitable. (I almost said make Spam unprofitable, but I actually kinda like Hormel's product).
This wouldn't be that hard to do. Spammers hit government addresses like anything else. Hit the purveyors of the product, the people who hire the spammers, with a nasty "kill your business for good" level fine for every product that goes out in a spamming campaign - problem solved, none of these guys will ever be so stupid as to hire a spammer again.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
So not only would you have to remember what functions relate to each key for each application as you do today, but you would ALSO need to remember where and in what form the buttons that invoke those functions are?
Sounds like a total and undiluted nightmare to me. It would be quite hard to design a more confusing system. Perhaps if the buttons moved around during your use of the application?
If you've been considering UI design as a career, you might like to re-consider before you do some serious damage.
Keyboard ON the screen == bad: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html
Keyboard away from the screen and horizontal, no problem. But then, what's the point in virtualizing it?
It's not "digital newstands" that stink, it's "news" itself. It always has stunk, but it's not until we've had the Internet and free distribution channels for any alternatives that it's started to be seen for what it is.
Most, if not all of the content you find in any given "quality newspaper" is baloney. It's either political public opinion testing ("Obama MAY ban [something controversial]"), worthless human-interest crap and celebrity gossip, sport, re-heated press-releases, or pompous "this writer thinks..." editorials reading only slightly less well than most stand-up comedy routines ("Single mothers!?! What's up with them???!!").
In terms of content, I think newspapers and most magazines have hit the buffers now. They used to fulfil a middle-class need for mental masturbation, making people feel they had to "keep up" with the "news" or they would mysteriously fall victim to being "uninformed" about whether some politician wanted them to know about some policy or other (pretty much consumption of propaganda from government and industry). But with the web, blogs, Twitter, RSS whatever, it's now much easier to get what you need about news that matters to you in more concentrated form than newspapers or magazines are offering.
So the decline in news consumption has less to do with platforms or channels, and much more to do with the fact that the Internet has simply unmasked publications like Newsweek and Wired as being pretty poor-quality against the general free flow of information from non-mainstream sources. In short, content is RALLY king this time. Heck, on any given subject, I would get more out of /. than I would from reading Time's coverage of it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilgongo/5282908367
Holy mother of screaming baby jeezus. I've been on /. for years and never have I seen such a frustrating thread as this.
Nintendo (or Namco or whoever they are) created Pac Man about 30 bloody years ago. Isn't that ENOUGH TIME for them to have made some money out of it?? Let it go to the public domain where people like this guy can re-interpret it (however incrementally) and maybe make it BETTER! If it's a boring clone, then it deserves to be - and will be - forgotten. If it's not, then cool!
To all those bleating "it's copyright infringement!" here: Would you have it that if I install the plumbing in your house, I should have the right to ask you for a payment every time you have a bath - for the rest of my life plus 70 years? And what do you think went on before about 1750? Was there no culture or innovation in the arts? There was no copyright then after all.
Can't you see that this post is a fantastic example of how we have been completely eaten up by crazy long copyright terms. WHAT DOES IT MATTER THAT THIS GAME IS A RIP-OFF OF A 30 YEAR OLD IDEA? I have no sympathy with cigar-smoking fatsos wanting to squeeze yet more money out of one person's ancient idea so they can build another swimming pool in their garden.
Absolutely none. I hope this little guy wins, and wins big.
If you are seriously complaining that you totally ripped off an extremely famous game for profit and got called out. Consider yourself lucky thats all they did!
I'd say that this is in fact what's wrong with *copyright* (if this is a case of copyright infringement, which I doubt).
Nintendo had the original idea for Pac Man in the friggin' 1980s! Don't you think it's been enough time for them to have made some money off it so we can now do our own versions?
The fact that cigar-smoking nobodies can build swimming pools and retire on huge pension for decades and decades on the back of some tiny act of creative genius is ridiculous.
I hope this guy wins, and better still, goes on to make a good deal of money from his own interpretation of Pac Man.
Your game is a complete knock off of the original. From your website, it looks like you copied:
(1) the pac man character
(2) the ghosts
(3) the dots and power dots
(3) the style of the maze
It's amazing how, in a world full of copyrights and trademarks and patents and intellectual "property" and all sorts, that people just don't understand any of it.
The items you list above CANNOT be a "clear case of copyright infringement" because you cannot copyright an idea. If you could copyright an idea, then Hollywood would probably produce about 1 film a decade while the lawyers researched the script for stuff people had done before ("This script has a cop with a chip on his shoulder. That was done in Lethal Weapon. Next! Nope, you can't have a bunch of 20-something yuppies living together, that was done in Friends.").
There may be a case against the guy for using the word "Pac" in the name of the game, but not even in the wildest dreams of any copyright lawyer are you going to get away with saying that having a ghost in an arcade game is copyright infringement!
What next? Sue Jamiroquai for singing like Steve Wonder?
You could try developing something original. Why do you think you can just make money rewriting someone else's idea on a new platform. [snip]
Posted as AC cuz slashdot has an anti copyright bias. Im not trolling.
I think what you call "anti copyright bias" is just plain common sense in most cases. Nintendo or whoever they are have made a shedload of cash from a single creative event that happened about 30 years ago. They then "rewrote" this idea numerous times and re-sold it because the copyright system allowed them to, and will allow them to pretty much for ever.
How about limiting the TIME of copyright to about 10 years so that people can rip mix and burn stuff to their heart's content, just like they used to a few hundred years ago?
Who knows, maybe we'll derive some BETTER works out of that, and ALL benefit from it. Not just bunch of non-creative suits and lawyers from Namco.
While I am kinda rooting for wikileaks in this, I think anyone who is considering to sign up to think about this:
1. you give them shell access to your host
2. you grant access on the basis of a ssh public key, which you're getting from an unencrypted page. It could be anyone's and it could be coming from anywhere.
Yeah, I thought about that to.
As to point 1., you don't have to give them shell access, just rsync over SSH. So, give the shell as /dev/null in /etc/passwd (and don't set the password, to be extra safe).
As to point 2., well, it's a question of trust alright. About the same level of trust I give to updating software via Debian apt repos, or any number of scenarios where the publisher says "here's my public key, please use it". Not foolproof by any means, but it's a chance I'm willing to take.
Hence, the Christian taxpayer is being forced to fund religious teachings (suspending the Laws of Thermodynamics for the big bang requires "belief" without fact) that he may or may not believe in.
I think you'll find suspending the Laws of Thermodynamics for the big bang requires rather a lot of mathematics and predictive logical reasoning. At what point does scientific theory start and "belief" end, I wonder?
So a small bomb can take down a plane, but can't necessarily take out a ship or train, especially if in a cargo area.
My point is there is nothing NEW in that. At any time since the invention of air freight, it has been possible to put a bomb in a box and see that box ride a plane, just as letter bombs are literally 100 years old. Sure, timed or remotely detonated bombs are relatively new (like maybe 80 years), but that makes little difference.
What has changed in the last few years that we now see a 100 year old threat as being something to freak out about?
You may say, as the TSA do, that the fact a threat is old does not mean that we should not defend against it. But the issue here is freedom and perspective. What if the Yemen bombs had gone off? Planes might have crashed, people might have been killed. It would have been awful. However, I myself think that there is nothing wrong with doing what we have ALWAYS HISTORICALLY DONE in the face of such incredibly rare and isolated acts of lunatics: shrug and let life carry on.
That is what the British did with the IRA (give or take a few public waste bin removals).
That was what Germany did with Baader-Meinhoff.
That is what Spain has been doing with ETA for the last half century.
The pitiful reaction in the US to Middle East terrorists almost makes me what to become a terrorist myself!
What I don't understand about the screaming to ban deadly packages flying by air mail is that for literally 100 YEARS letter bombs have been on the scene. I myself was in Washington DC in about 1975 when a letter bomb posted by the IRA was delivered to the British Embassy. It blew the hand off a secretary who opened it up. Yes, there was an investigation, the police were called, the IRA condemned etc. etc. but nobody suggested banning packages in the mail or removing the rights of anyone who went into a post office. Heck, these devices from Yemen didn't even explode and we're falling apart with fear!
What the hell is going on? Why has the US become a nation of panty-wetting idiots?
"My kinect tells me that it's almost time to stop touching devices at all, and I believe it."
Voice control (or the easy possibility of it) on mobile devices has been around for years. What's changed recently that you should think it's going to become something that's worth doing?
Absolutely. In fact, scoot forward maybe 20-30 years or so and imagine passively-powered storage devices. Imagine them tiny, dirt cheap, made in China and anywhere you care to look.
Boof - we got ourselves a totally new world: On my way to work, my phone alerts me to the fact that I've just walked past the entire works of Hollywood, in 1080p, on a chip the size of a pinhead and the cost of a stick of gum. Would I like to copy some to my device? OK. 10 seconds later, I've got everything made between 1940 and 1950.
Not messaging networks as we know them, but a web of data mixed in to the fabric of everyday life. What's that on your shoulder? Dandruff? No, it's some 10 petabyte storage devices that somebody's scattered over the heads of the crowd. Hey! They've got the Pentagon's email correspondence from 2012 on them. Time for some mining!
From TFA: "Success in this field will not only bring major social benefits it could also bring significant commercial rewards for those involved."
If they're talking about a type of mesh network, then I say bring it on! Right now, things really don't look good for the "traditional" Internet as we know it. It's controllable servers, lap-dog ISPs, government p0wned routers, etc. One day, the net will just be Rupert Murdoch's pay-ground just as sure as cable TV went main stream in the 1980's.
Take out the centrality, enter the mesh. They stole our revolution - let's steal it back!!
(Sits back and waits for the sound of cynical laughter and replies beginning "In the real world...")
I assume the name "Qualcomm" in the diagram has a dotted red underline because MS PowerPoint thinks it's mis-spelt?
Ah, this is the Grauniad we're talking about. Ignore me.