And, if I read it right, the 1983 crash was coincident with the introduction of a new gaming platform (the home computer) which destabilized the market a bit
I remember the crash in the 80s, and I would argue that this was not the case. In fact, I think the author of TFA is correct.
Then, as now, there were new consoles coming on the market. They were too expensive, there were too many optional add-ons that not many games supported, there was a glut of mediocre games for the previous generation of consoles, and all of the manufacturers were caught up in a bad strategy to try and convince people that consoles were more than just game systems because you could turn them into a crappy toy computer with one of the expensive add-ons.
The main difference this time is that instead of the "it's a computer too!" angle, Sony and MS are trying to market their consoles as "media centers," when they don't even have the features of a cheap alternative like a modded Xbox.
I also think that they are leaning too far towards online gaming and micropayments to jack up the cost of games even more. There is certainly a market for those things, but it isn't the *majority* of gamers, and so it shouldn't be the main focus.
Why haven't they registered here, and aquired real developer license then?
Probably because a lot of its attractiveness comes from functionality that is either illegal under laws like the DMCA, or goes far enough against what MS and the media corporations think is "proper" use of a media device that it would never be approved.
If microsoft refuses XBMC as a suitable software, just slap them with monopoly lawsuit.
Yeah, I'm sure the XBMC team has enough money for that legal battle in their spare change jar.
I don't have a lot of information on the rest of your claims, but I do know this one to be utter BS, at least where there is at least one honest forensic investigator.
There was a corrupt Seattle-area police officer who used a variation on this. I can't find the article at the moment, but he told someone he had such a throw-away gun in his trunk, and if they didn't cooperate with him he'd use it to shoot them, leaving no way to trace it back to himself.
I hear you. I really tried to get some of the upper management to care about the issue, but it didn't work. Even some of the other engineers basically said "it's difficult to get access to the file that stores the 'encrypted' passwords, so this is less of a security concern than some others that are outstanding."
The company has a substantial investment in this particular product (on the order of half a million dollars in licensing), so they wouldn't consider replacing it.
I am a little more confident in the latest revision of the 'encryption' because it doesn't have any obvious patterns. The previous two were obviously weak because patterns started emerging after seeing what a handful of passwords 'encrypted' to. I also did some preliminary research to see if e.g. they had taken the XOR pad to the next level and had it change based on the line number in the text file as well as the character position on each line. I still don't think it's a strong mechanism, but at least it's not the awful joke it started out as.
At the time, I had also gotten my hand slapped by the security department for sending my cracking script to anyone other than them (I cc'd the vendor and the management above my group), so I pretty much left it alone until their staff changed.
In relation to TFA, this isn't evan a matter of poking through things where you don't belong, if you can crack your own password, that's enough of a concern that someone else could too.
I agree. They might have been able to make a flimsy legal case against me though because the crack would work for the passwords on any machine in the world running the software - the pad had no salt of any kind.
the original screenplay was VERY different than the final edit that the studio spit out.
I've heard this claim every time Johnny Mnemonic the film comes up, but I have yet to see the supposed "VERY" different screenplay. There are a few minor things that didn't make it into the theatrical film, but they are more of the same - e.g. more screentime for the street preacher character.
The flaws in the film go much deeper - the basic plot of Keanu Reeves having to get something out of his head before it kills him is hokey, there is no depth to the characters, the overall feeling is almost that of a comedy, and there is a Molly knockoff instead of Molly. The short story was amazing, but for some reason Gibson ditched everything that made it that way when it became a film.
No it does NOT! That's NOT at all how one should impliment an account recovery scheme!
It's not for account recovery, it's for performing operations as if it were the user in question. It needs to know the unencrypted password to pass it on to Windows' authentication - a nonreversible hash is not good enough.
Also, to answer another comment, I don't trust that it's done right this time either. I just haven't had time to try and crack it.
It is a fact that programs get released with known bugs, it's actually an economic certainty for commercial programs.
Bugs are going to happen. Incompetent design doesn't have to.
There is an expensive (~$3000 license per machine) "enterprise" product that we use throughout the company. It needs to store usernames and passwords with reversible encryption. In the first version we deployed, the encryption was a substitution cipher - literally the level of "security" you'd get from a cereal box spy ring. We complained to the vendor. The next version used a one-time pad that was the same for every password on every machine where the software was installed in the world. I wrote a script that generated a decoding table in a few hours, and I'm not even a cryptography geek. We complained again, and they changed it to something that at least *appears* reasonably secure, I haven't had time to look into it.
Even assuming it is decent this time, why did it take so long for them to do? Encryption isn't a new field. There were plenty of algorithms they could have used from the beginning instead of re-inventing ciphers from centuries ago.
What they don't mention in the glossies is that all of those users with thin clients are out of the water if the servers are down.
Definitely. And in my experience (we use a lot of Windows 2003 terminal servers), there are server problems fairly regularly. Some examples:
- We have to relax security in order to make crappy applications work. A disturbingly large percentage of so-called "enterprise" software vendors still aren't writing their apps to work using the security model that MS has been recommending since Windows 2000. When we have to give end users write access to system folders or in some cases make them members of the Administrators group (I'm looking at you, Cognos), we lose the ability to keep the system in a good state.
- A midrange server (~$10k) doesn't have *that* much more horsepower than a decent desktop. Maybe 3-4 times the CPU, 4 times the RAM, 4 times the disk space (more IO from SCSI RAID, of course). Yet people expect to be able to have 20-30 concurrent users with performance at least as good as that $500 desktop.
- Coming back to the legacy software, some of it can be made to work, but isn't as flexible. We have a mainframe terminal client that was released in the Windows 95 era. We haven't upgraded it because the vendor wants some ridiculous license fee. We haven't replaced it because none of the free alternatives support the exact same text colours and macro system as this one, which is a hard requirement set by the business. It has a single file with the configuration settings, like most apps of that era. So on a shared system, everybody gets the same settings, and no one can customize them. We use a configuration that lets each user have at least two sessions of each terminal model, but just a few months ago I had someone in hysterics because the ones that her group needed were sessions 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2 like they are on their desktops.
There may be better ways of doing this, using Citrix or a better OS. I've used Unix and Linux, but not for this purpose so I can't comment on them. This was the cheapest way to make it happen using our existing software and hardware, and it's been a big headache. Desktop machines are *very* cheap now, and I think that's where desktop apps belong in most environments.
I don't mind resemblances so much. I do dislike wholesale lifting of obvious plot elements, like a main character who is an evil albino with a soul-stealing runesword.
I've seen it before, so it doesn't add anything to the story. There's nothing surprising about it.
I thought there were some good things about WC3, but I also thought it would have been a *lot* better if it had more originality.
As though elfs and orcs are the sole commercial property of the Tolkein estate.
It's not just the races. When I played through WC3 I noticed names of places taken directly from Tolkien, and a lot of the plot was suspiciously similar to e.g. parts of the Silmarillion.
There's also Arthas turning into an obvious knockoff of Moorcock's Elric.
Not below retail. Again, there is a hardcore gamer market that will pay $500 for a console, but it's not enough to base a price that will last at least a year on.
This is why people buy game consoles - to play the games that they can play nowhere else.
You don't say. If you read my original post, you may notice the part where I mention that I own all three current-gen systems. I also have a Dreamcast, a Saturn, a Nuon, and an SNES at the moment.
All you're saying is that you're not interested in video games.
No, what I'm saying is that video games alone aren't worth spending $500-$600 on. Not just for me, but for the vast majority of people. That is a considerable chunk of change for nearly everyone in the industrialized world. The only reason I spent that much on my PC is that it actually lets me be productive in addition to playing things like Oblivion and the new Tomb Raider.
I know it might be expensive for some of you, and you'll have to wait to be able to afford it, but in the long run it'll be nice to have all those features in the baseline system so game authors can design around them.
I think the system looks nice, but the ludicrous price is going to kill it in the real world, meaning there won't be many games produced for it.
Of the current-gen systems (I have all three), I like my PS2 the best. But I think Sony really screwed up here and forgot that the hardcore gamer market is a minuscule fraction of the people out there buying console titles.
I haven't even bought a 360 yet because its price was stupid. The PS3 costs almost as much as my PC - an Athlon 3800+ with 2GB of DDR400 RAM, a 250GB SATA 3.0gb drive, an NForce4 Ultra motherboard, and a Geforce7600GT - which was $650 not including the case. I can do a LOT more with my PC, like development, graphics, and audio. There is not a chance in hell I'm paying over $300 for a game console.
For some reason there are a vocal base of PC gamers who are happy to shell out $300 for a 7900GT but not $30 for a DVD-ROM drive. They whine and throw a hissy fit when a game isn't available on CD.
He's not very empathetic and expects people to have the emotions he imposes on them and he even expects them to like it and is unreceptive if they don't.
I've read a good chunk of their site, and the impression I got was more that they were putting on a performance. Like live theatre, they would *acknowledge* the audience if they had to (e.g. someone asking them why they didn't have pants on), but didn't try and compel anyone to take part, particularly if they didn't want to.
They also seem very careful to stage their activities in places that won't be impacted - they did the Anton Chekov at a Borders which didn't have a "meet the author" thing going on at the time, for example.
I'd be more than happy to run into them in the middle of a performance. It might even be fun to have a counter-group that pulled the same thing on them - like during the Best Buy event, if the counter-group had waited for them to permeate the store, then sent in a group of equal size dressed like Circuit City employees. It would be especially funny when the store management tried to figure out what was going on, and the blue shirts would honestly not know the whole story.
Even though our military technology can stomp on anyone on the planet, the Pentagon has long argued for increased capabilities against a phantom Chinese threat.
I think the guy in the article is less than credible, but your argument doesn't make sense to me.
The Air Force kept the SR-71 and F-117 secret for years, even as they were building less advanced aircraft for most of their work. Furthermore, if they *had* stumbled onto something truly amazing - antigravity, photon torpedos, alchemy, a Fry's employee who knows what a BNC connector is, etc. - that they wanted to keep secret in that way, they would *have* to keep the number of people involved low to avoid leaks. Less staff means it would take longer to develop properly. So, like the SR-71, there would be a tiny handful of people working on it, it would take years to develop and stay secret for decades afterwards, and it would be used on a very limited and small-scale basis.
Personally, I find it incredibly unlikely that anyone on Earth has alien technology. On the other hand, I don't put it past the US government to have made physics and engineering breakthroughs that they're keeping quiet. I grew up in an area with lots of Boeing employees, and there were constantly rumours spreading of AI-piloted Cessnas, prototype laser weapons, and antigravity. Most or all of it was probably fiction, but if that many people were working on secret military projects, some of them had to be pretty impressive.
Or... our 'enemies' could just start building reflective satellites, or even just carrying a big, reflective 'shield' underneath them.
Mirrors at what parts of the spectrum? All the US would have to do is build lasers at a variety of frequencies, because nothing is going to reflect them all.
Why would it be bad to have competition in the type of service provided? Why would it be bad to be able to prioritize types of network traffic? Why would it be bad to have competitive internets where different networks interconnected out of market pressure instead of FCC or Congressional regulation?
Because the end result would be a "diverse" array of options that were all worse than what we have now.
Your argument sounds like the one American health care companies pitch to their customers - "hey, wouldn't it be great if you could *choose* to pay a different rate because you live a healthy lifestyle according to this detailed information you supplied us with?" The implication is supposed to be that your health care costs will go down because you're healthy, when really they will stay the same (instead of increasing)... for now. As time passes, your rates will still increase as other "unhealthy" behaviours are added to the list.
No telecom corporation in the US is going to *improve* service in the name of competition for internet access customers. They will race to the bottom to see who can provide the shittiest service while still retaining the most subscribers, because it's more profitable in the short term (which is all they care about now, thanks to myopic shareholders and execs).
The internet works just fine the way it is. What *possible* benefit could competing networks provide, other than to the people with stock in the telecom companies involved?
From what I've read, Tesla didn't crack until after his power transmission prototype burned down - after which point he did very little work.
It's been awhile since I read his biography, but IMO it's probably hard to pin down when it got bad enough that he started producing bogus work, given that he stopped writing down the details out of paranoia that someone was going to pull an Edison on him again.
I personally think that all of the truly amazing-sounding inventions that are cited by fringe pseudo-science can be safely categorized as the product of incorrect assumptions about the physical world (e.g. the aether), and/or a breaking mind. I would love to be disproven, but I don't think Occam's Razor favours that outcome.
The scalar wave forcefield is one of the ones that really strikes me as impossible. If it were *truly* impenetrable, it would violate conservation of energy.
The "death ray," lossless power transmission, mind-controlled naval vessels, the forcefield, etc all strike me as exactly the kind of thing that a genius would "invent" in their heads if they went psychotic.
Except, you know, possible in the real world. Tesla was brilliant, but towards the end he obviously cracked, and the people that invent stories of Russian scalar wave forcefields are worse.
Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend.
I was just about to say the same thing. I think this would be especially important given that he was asking his girlfriend to sit still while the characters crawled along over the 300 baud connection.
In terms of the government, since Joshua's creator knew it was an AI, he probably wanted to give it a voice of its own, rather than being limited to text.
There is a deprecated "wi" syllable in Japanese that could be used. Even without that, most English speakers pronounce "we"/"wii" as two syllables (like the French "oui"), so "uii" is accurate in that sense. Doubling the vowel sounds in Japanese just makes them longer, it doesn't modify the pronounciation as it does with e.g. the English "drop"/"droop".
I mean just look at the people with flags on their houses. Try finding a single other country worldwide where people feel compelled to do something odd like that.
My family has lived in what is now the US since the early 1600s. When I was a kid, we would fly a flag on holidays like Independence Day. If I had a house instead of an apartment, and the last six years of neo-con fascism hadn't happened, I would be doing the same.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if I read it right, the 1983 crash was coincident with the introduction of a new gaming platform (the home computer) which destabilized the market a bit
I remember the crash in the 80s, and I would argue that this was not the case. In fact, I think the author of TFA is correct.
Then, as now, there were new consoles coming on the market. They were too expensive, there were too many optional add-ons that not many games supported, there was a glut of mediocre games for the previous generation of consoles, and all of the manufacturers were caught up in a bad strategy to try and convince people that consoles were more than just game systems because you could turn them into a crappy toy computer with one of the expensive add-ons.
The main difference this time is that instead of the "it's a computer too!" angle, Sony and MS are trying to market their consoles as "media centers," when they don't even have the features of a cheap alternative like a modded Xbox.
I also think that they are leaning too far towards online gaming and micropayments to jack up the cost of games even more. There is certainly a market for those things, but it isn't the *majority* of gamers, and so it shouldn't be the main focus.
Why haven't they registered here, and aquired real developer license then?
Probably because a lot of its attractiveness comes from functionality that is either illegal under laws like the DMCA, or goes far enough against what MS and the media corporations think is "proper" use of a media device that it would never be approved.
If microsoft refuses XBMC as a suitable software, just slap them with monopoly lawsuit.
Yeah, I'm sure the XBMC team has enough money for that legal battle in their spare change jar.
What a day to be without mod points.
I don't have a lot of information on the rest of your claims, but I do know this one to be utter BS, at least where there is at least one honest forensic investigator.
There was a corrupt Seattle-area police officer who used a variation on this. I can't find the article at the moment, but he told someone he had such a throw-away gun in his trunk, and if they didn't cooperate with him he'd use it to shoot them, leaving no way to trace it back to himself.
I hear you. I really tried to get some of the upper management to care about the issue, but it didn't work. Even some of the other engineers basically said "it's difficult to get access to the file that stores the 'encrypted' passwords, so this is less of a security concern than some others that are outstanding."
The company has a substantial investment in this particular product (on the order of half a million dollars in licensing), so they wouldn't consider replacing it.
I am a little more confident in the latest revision of the 'encryption' because it doesn't have any obvious patterns. The previous two were obviously weak because patterns started emerging after seeing what a handful of passwords 'encrypted' to. I also did some preliminary research to see if e.g. they had taken the XOR pad to the next level and had it change based on the line number in the text file as well as the character position on each line. I still don't think it's a strong mechanism, but at least it's not the awful joke it started out as.
At the time, I had also gotten my hand slapped by the security department for sending my cracking script to anyone other than them (I cc'd the vendor and the management above my group), so I pretty much left it alone until their staff changed.
In relation to TFA, this isn't evan a matter of poking through things where you don't belong, if you can crack your own password, that's enough of a concern that someone else could too.
I agree. They might have been able to make a flimsy legal case against me though because the crack would work for the passwords on any machine in the world running the software - the pad had no salt of any kind.
the original screenplay was VERY different than the final edit that the studio spit out.
I've heard this claim every time Johnny Mnemonic the film comes up, but I have yet to see the supposed "VERY" different screenplay. There are a few minor things that didn't make it into the theatrical film, but they are more of the same - e.g. more screentime for the street preacher character.
The flaws in the film go much deeper - the basic plot of Keanu Reeves having to get something out of his head before it kills him is hokey, there is no depth to the characters, the overall feeling is almost that of a comedy, and there is a Molly knockoff instead of Molly. The short story was amazing, but for some reason Gibson ditched everything that made it that way when it became a film.
No it does NOT! That's NOT at all how one should impliment an account recovery scheme!
It's not for account recovery, it's for performing operations as if it were the user in question. It needs to know the unencrypted password to pass it on to Windows' authentication - a nonreversible hash is not good enough.
Also, to answer another comment, I don't trust that it's done right this time either. I just haven't had time to try and crack it.
It is a fact that programs get released with known bugs, it's actually an economic certainty for commercial programs.
Bugs are going to happen. Incompetent design doesn't have to.
There is an expensive (~$3000 license per machine) "enterprise" product that we use throughout the company. It needs to store usernames and passwords with reversible encryption. In the first version we deployed, the encryption was a substitution cipher - literally the level of "security" you'd get from a cereal box spy ring. We complained to the vendor. The next version used a one-time pad that was the same for every password on every machine where the software was installed in the world. I wrote a script that generated a decoding table in a few hours, and I'm not even a cryptography geek. We complained again, and they changed it to something that at least *appears* reasonably secure, I haven't had time to look into it.
Even assuming it is decent this time, why did it take so long for them to do? Encryption isn't a new field. There were plenty of algorithms they could have used from the beginning instead of re-inventing ciphers from centuries ago.
What they don't mention in the glossies is that all of those users with thin clients are out of the water if the servers are down.
Definitely. And in my experience (we use a lot of Windows 2003 terminal servers), there are server problems fairly regularly. Some examples:
- We have to relax security in order to make crappy applications work. A disturbingly large percentage of so-called "enterprise" software vendors still aren't writing their apps to work using the security model that MS has been recommending since Windows 2000. When we have to give end users write access to system folders or in some cases make them members of the Administrators group (I'm looking at you, Cognos), we lose the ability to keep the system in a good state.
- A midrange server (~$10k) doesn't have *that* much more horsepower than a decent desktop. Maybe 3-4 times the CPU, 4 times the RAM, 4 times the disk space (more IO from SCSI RAID, of course). Yet people expect to be able to have 20-30 concurrent users with performance at least as good as that $500 desktop.
- Coming back to the legacy software, some of it can be made to work, but isn't as flexible. We have a mainframe terminal client that was released in the Windows 95 era. We haven't upgraded it because the vendor wants some ridiculous license fee. We haven't replaced it because none of the free alternatives support the exact same text colours and macro system as this one, which is a hard requirement set by the business. It has a single file with the configuration settings, like most apps of that era. So on a shared system, everybody gets the same settings, and no one can customize them. We use a configuration that lets each user have at least two sessions of each terminal model, but just a few months ago I had someone in hysterics because the ones that her group needed were sessions 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2 like they are on their desktops.
There may be better ways of doing this, using Citrix or a better OS. I've used Unix and Linux, but not for this purpose so I can't comment on them. This was the cheapest way to make it happen using our existing software and hardware, and it's been a big headache. Desktop machines are *very* cheap now, and I think that's where desktop apps belong in most environments.
I don't mind resemblances so much. I do dislike wholesale lifting of obvious plot elements, like a main character who is an evil albino with a soul-stealing runesword.
I've seen it before, so it doesn't add anything to the story. There's nothing surprising about it.
I thought there were some good things about WC3, but I also thought it would have been a *lot* better if it had more originality.
As though elfs and orcs are the sole commercial property of the Tolkein estate.
It's not just the races. When I played through WC3 I noticed names of places taken directly from Tolkien, and a lot of the plot was suspiciously similar to e.g. parts of the Silmarillion.
There's also Arthas turning into an obvious knockoff of Moorcock's Elric.
Once demand slackens, the price will drop.
Not below retail. Again, there is a hardcore gamer market that will pay $500 for a console, but it's not enough to base a price that will last at least a year on.
This is why people buy game consoles - to play the games that they can play nowhere else.
You don't say. If you read my original post, you may notice the part where I mention that I own all three current-gen systems. I also have a Dreamcast, a Saturn, a Nuon, and an SNES at the moment.
All you're saying is that you're not interested in video games.
No, what I'm saying is that video games alone aren't worth spending $500-$600 on. Not just for me, but for the vast majority of people. That is a considerable chunk of change for nearly everyone in the industrialized world. The only reason I spent that much on my PC is that it actually lets me be productive in addition to playing things like Oblivion and the new Tomb Raider.
I know it might be expensive for some of you, and you'll have to wait to be able to afford it, but in the long run it'll be nice to have all those features in the baseline system so game authors can design around them.
I think the system looks nice, but the ludicrous price is going to kill it in the real world, meaning there won't be many games produced for it.
Of the current-gen systems (I have all three), I like my PS2 the best. But I think Sony really screwed up here and forgot that the hardcore gamer market is a minuscule fraction of the people out there buying console titles.
I haven't even bought a 360 yet because its price was stupid. The PS3 costs almost as much as my PC - an Athlon 3800+ with 2GB of DDR400 RAM, a 250GB SATA 3.0gb drive, an NForce4 Ultra motherboard, and a Geforce7600GT - which was $650 not including the case. I can do a LOT more with my PC, like development, graphics, and audio. There is not a chance in hell I'm paying over $300 for a game console.
I'm not sure why they do this
For some reason there are a vocal base of PC gamers who are happy to shell out $300 for a 7900GT but not $30 for a DVD-ROM drive. They whine and throw a hissy fit when a game isn't available on CD.
He's not very empathetic and expects people to have the emotions he imposes on them and he even expects them to like it and is unreceptive if they don't.
I've read a good chunk of their site, and the impression I got was more that they were putting on a performance. Like live theatre, they would *acknowledge* the audience if they had to (e.g. someone asking them why they didn't have pants on), but didn't try and compel anyone to take part, particularly if they didn't want to.
They also seem very careful to stage their activities in places that won't be impacted - they did the Anton Chekov at a Borders which didn't have a "meet the author" thing going on at the time, for example.
I'd be more than happy to run into them in the middle of a performance. It might even be fun to have a counter-group that pulled the same thing on them - like during the Best Buy event, if the counter-group had waited for them to permeate the store, then sent in a group of equal size dressed like Circuit City employees. It would be especially funny when the store management tried to figure out what was going on, and the blue shirts would honestly not know the whole story.
Even though our military technology can stomp on anyone on the planet, the Pentagon has long argued for increased capabilities against a phantom Chinese threat.
I think the guy in the article is less than credible, but your argument doesn't make sense to me.
The Air Force kept the SR-71 and F-117 secret for years, even as they were building less advanced aircraft for most of their work. Furthermore, if they *had* stumbled onto something truly amazing - antigravity, photon torpedos, alchemy, a Fry's employee who knows what a BNC connector is, etc. - that they wanted to keep secret in that way, they would *have* to keep the number of people involved low to avoid leaks. Less staff means it would take longer to develop properly. So, like the SR-71, there would be a tiny handful of people working on it, it would take years to develop and stay secret for decades afterwards, and it would be used on a very limited and small-scale basis.
Personally, I find it incredibly unlikely that anyone on Earth has alien technology. On the other hand, I don't put it past the US government to have made physics and engineering breakthroughs that they're keeping quiet. I grew up in an area with lots of Boeing employees, and there were constantly rumours spreading of AI-piloted Cessnas, prototype laser weapons, and antigravity. Most or all of it was probably fiction, but if that many people were working on secret military projects, some of them had to be pretty impressive.
Or... our 'enemies' could just start building reflective satellites, or even just carrying a big, reflective 'shield' underneath them.
Mirrors at what parts of the spectrum? All the US would have to do is build lasers at a variety of frequencies, because nothing is going to reflect them all.
The current FAS page says it's a tracking facility (sounds like how Starfire is used for now), and the ASAT thing was a US theory that was inaccurate.
Do you know of any reliable information that it is an ASAT system?
Why would it be bad to have competition in the type of service provided? Why would it be bad to be able to prioritize types of network traffic? Why would it be bad to have competitive internets where different networks interconnected out of market pressure instead of FCC or Congressional regulation?
Because the end result would be a "diverse" array of options that were all worse than what we have now.
Your argument sounds like the one American health care companies pitch to their customers - "hey, wouldn't it be great if you could *choose* to pay a different rate because you live a healthy lifestyle according to this detailed information you supplied us with?" The implication is supposed to be that your health care costs will go down because you're healthy, when really they will stay the same (instead of increasing)... for now. As time passes, your rates will still increase as other "unhealthy" behaviours are added to the list.
No telecom corporation in the US is going to *improve* service in the name of competition for internet access customers. They will race to the bottom to see who can provide the shittiest service while still retaining the most subscribers, because it's more profitable in the short term (which is all they care about now, thanks to myopic shareholders and execs).
The internet works just fine the way it is. What *possible* benefit could competing networks provide, other than to the people with stock in the telecom companies involved?
From what I've read, Tesla didn't crack until after his power transmission prototype burned down - after which point he did very little work.
It's been awhile since I read his biography, but IMO it's probably hard to pin down when it got bad enough that he started producing bogus work, given that he stopped writing down the details out of paranoia that someone was going to pull an Edison on him again.
I personally think that all of the truly amazing-sounding inventions that are cited by fringe pseudo-science can be safely categorized as the product of incorrect assumptions about the physical world (e.g. the aether), and/or a breaking mind. I would love to be disproven, but I don't think Occam's Razor favours that outcome.
The scalar wave forcefield is one of the ones that really strikes me as impossible. If it were *truly* impenetrable, it would violate conservation of energy.
The "death ray," lossless power transmission, mind-controlled naval vessels, the forcefield, etc all strike me as exactly the kind of thing that a genius would "invent" in their heads if they went psychotic.
Sounds like a rehash of a phase conjugate mirror.
Except, you know, possible in the real world. Tesla was brilliant, but towards the end he obviously cracked, and the people that invent stories of Russian scalar wave forcefields are worse.
Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend.
I was just about to say the same thing. I think this would be especially important given that he was asking his girlfriend to sit still while the characters crawled along over the 300 baud connection.
In terms of the government, since Joshua's creator knew it was an AI, he probably wanted to give it a voice of its own, rather than being limited to text.
Yeah, the article's claim is a load of crap.
There is a deprecated "wi" syllable in Japanese that could be used. Even without that, most English speakers pronounce "we"/"wii" as two syllables (like the French "oui"), so "uii" is accurate in that sense. Doubling the vowel sounds in Japanese just makes them longer, it doesn't modify the pronounciation as it does with e.g. the English "drop"/"droop".
I mean just look at the people with flags on their houses. Try finding a single other country worldwide where people feel compelled to do something odd like that.
My family has lived in what is now the US since the early 1600s. When I was a kid, we would fly a flag on holidays like Independence Day. If I had a house instead of an apartment, and the last six years of neo-con fascism hadn't happened, I would be doing the same.
Understanding is a three-edged sword.