and the general population for our current leadership.
The general population? Or the justices of the Supreme Court?
That said, to get back more on topic, I hope some lawyer somewhere will have the balls to run with a case against the PATRIOT Act, and run far with it, taking it to the Supreme Court. By that time, hopefully, there will be some new court members in and maybe, just maybe, the general population will see how badly the act is fucking them over, and with popular support, something could be done.
If you buy a DVD player from another continent, which I assume is another region, won't that screw up your chances of playing the DvDs you bought in this country? I thought there was some sort of protection against that, or does this player get around that as well?
If this isn't enough to make one sick, discussing of who's tech to use after you finish dropping bombs on people... just... wow. Capitalism has some really nasty looking sides when you step back a little bit.
First, would this make theft pretty much impossible? If there's a chance that products a & b can be tracked even while in the store, it would look pretty obvious if they don't wind up at a check-out counter or tied to anyone's check, credit, or cash payment. I suppose that's a good side to that.
On a worse thought though, there have already been stories about making a massive "Total Information Awareness" database to monitor everyone and everyone's interaction with everyone else, what they do, what they buy, and so on, and with recent events from eBay showing that when it comes down to making money and looking patriotic, what will it take for *my* shopping habbits to be turned over to some government megaubercomputer somewhere so they can run a program and determine if the number of cases of Pepsi I buy every couple of weeks, and clothing every couple times a year, puts me in one of those "suspicious" categories or not.
I don't believe I should be investigated or tracked if I haven't done anything wrong.
Re:The future? Just like the past should be...
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Is it possible for the public sector to take on something like NASA though? Could the money be gathered? I can see where you are coming from, that the program would be better if it wasn't 100% government controlled and operated, but could such a huge, broad-based organization such as the present day NASA be assembled to successfully maintain a shuttle program?
The future? Just like the past should be...
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Find problem, examine problem, fix problem, learn from problem, push forward.
Sure worked (and still does) for trains, planes, and automobiles...
Het, when I get out of college, odds are there will be jobs of 50k and up just waiting for me, while the jocks are slaving away at some factory somewhere, or still asking if they want fries with that, they can be as cruel as they would like, just gives me more things to chuckle about when things in my life go right.
That and I have a girlfriend and they don't... also a plus!
(yes, a geek with a girlfriend.. please don't revoke my geek license)
What matters is that eventually, the cursed thing was used. Go ahead and say it was to save x number of troops or y politcal plans, or anything else, but the bottom ine is that the first to discover the thing was going to use it, and this world has been quite the scary & dangerous place ever since.
Pessimist, well to a point, but if no one is being told anything and our odds of doing anything about it are quite little. The more we can actually do to prepare, the less pessimistic I would be.
Well, will anything you build be able to survive the impact shockwave? There are many, many other problems that would arise aside from just getting past the no sun bit, more than I can think of, but a few that do come to my head...
1) Worldwide global warming on a pace that makes the previous century look like nothing, with the new rampant greenhouse effect, would a decent place to live and actually grow something be found?
2) For the living, would they be at risk to catching disease with hundreds of millions, probably billions of dead bodies in various places around the world that aren't burned in the global fires?
3) If we can get past the centuries of no sunlight, when the skies finally do clear, if I'm not mistaken, a massive ice age sets in with the clearing and a major release of heat from the planet. So take our higher-ground living areas from the years of raised oceans, now we have to once again find a new place to live, with those places now glaciers.
Can we really survive all of this? Better yet, what sort of shape would we be in after it all? It's hard to believe that we will advanse at all and hell, we could come out of this as cavepeople once again, if we come out of it at all.
Seems like we're just getting a message from nature.. Well, you're not welcomed here anymore, time for next stage of evolution, bye bye now.
But would you want to survive? If you make it past the impact, survive in your shelter as the massive P-waves rip most above-ground construction apart, happen to live through the tidal waves and global forest fires raging overhead, you walk out of your little shelter into a world that is blackened, dead, burning, and is a million times worse than the world's collective nightmare squared. Would you really want to see that sort of world?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I would love to get a shelter and try to live through this thing just like the next guy, but when your options are dying instantly or dying gradually over the next few years (blocked out sun = no photosynthesis = no green plants = no food = good luck), unless the chances were greater than 50/50 of dying anyways, I'd much rather be living my simple little life out to the end.
Especially in the space program, you can not, never in a million years, expect any launch vehicle to have a 100% safety record. Fine, how about 99%? Well for every 100 missions, you'll have another Challenger/Columbia. You figure it out. Disasters like this will happen because in order to get out there, get where we want, do the research we desire, advance ourselves as a species that (sadly too little of ourselves) desire, the risk will have to be taken to get out there.
The internal combustion engine... wonderful invention, and how many people went on to die from trains, cars, and planes. Numbers by now in the *taking a stab in the dark* hundreds of thousands, but look at the benefits, how much more quickly goods and people can be moved from point A to point B. Took a lot of suffering, a lot of checks and rechecks, a lot of "well person x was killed so kill project x" noise from people who can't accept change and their mouthpieces in the media.
My largest hope from all of this is that the end result that is achieved is better, faster, safer, cheaper, more technologically advanced space vehicles will be spawned, and the exploration shall continue.
Read your alternate history... there should have been a story on slashdot sometime in 2000 with a title like "Man Lands On Mars".
We can do a heck of a lot more than we currently do. Somebody just needs the balls to get the ball rolling.
Giving robots the ability to have face as well as voice recognition, inevitably I can see some sort of security system being done with robots such as these (only recognized people get through, others get... dealt with), and then if the robot can be put on the internet than the robot could be hacked. Forget identity theft, how would you like it if you came home one day and your robot wouldn't let you in the door because you "no longer lived there" (in other words, it doesn't recognize you), or worse yet lets someone else in because it is now programmed to accept that person as someone who lives at the house.
To make a long story short, IMHO, I don't believe robot "house-sitters" are a good thing. I for one would never give up control of the security or well-being of my house to a walking, talking computer program.
I just don't see the pros outweighing the cons here.
Check how much they cost before patriotism was in.
Commercialism does not bend and change for who is in power or what is 'right', it just englufs the current mood as well, and still profits.
Not to be a troll here but...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...since when does watching the Super Bowl count as a patriotic activity? I thought it was just a game, a football game. I didn't hear Bush tell me to watch the game, I didn't see the U.N. pass a resolution, and I didn't hear an "Axis of Evil" tag attached to it.
Tone down the crazyness, things that have been a part of American culture do not necessarily mean they are thru-and-thru patriotic.
...just a game, folks.
So how has it all changed?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Back when you were on last, Hotmail was an independent company, no one knew what the GO network was, NetNanny was just an idea,.coms could go no where but up, p2p was underground, everything was free, and no one had pened the term 'cyber terrorism'.
How is the 'net different now from the last time and are you going to miss it?
There will always be a need for a simple game (board game, tetris game, etc.) that doesn't greet the user with 200fps and take 5 gigs to install needing 1.5 gigs of ram to run smoothly on the newest mind-bending video card. There will always be a market for that, but there is just a level of satisfaction of beating a computer at chess that shooting someone on a Counter-Strike map can never duplicate.
Slashdot Mirror
and the general population for our current leadership.
The general population? Or the justices of the Supreme Court?
That said, to get back more on topic, I hope some lawyer somewhere will have the balls to run with a case against the PATRIOT Act, and run far with it, taking it to the Supreme Court. By that time, hopefully, there will be some new court members in and maybe, just maybe, the general population will see how badly the act is fucking them over, and with popular support, something could be done.
It is, after all, a nice dream.
Check out Amazon, AOL, and who can forget Dr. Koop.com for examples on why this could be a bad thing.
Ebay imports, anyone?
If you buy a DVD player from another continent, which I assume is another region, won't that screw up your chances of playing the DvDs you bought in this country? I thought there was some sort of protection against that, or does this player get around that as well?
If this isn't enough to make one sick, discussing of who's tech to use after you finish dropping bombs on people... just... wow. Capitalism has some really nasty looking sides when you step back a little bit.
Until we stop looking at pictures and send some more probes and people over there. It can be done, and we'll finally know for sure.
First, would this make theft pretty much impossible? If there's a chance that products a & b can be tracked even while in the store, it would look pretty obvious if they don't wind up at a check-out counter or tied to anyone's check, credit, or cash payment. I suppose that's a good side to that.
On a worse thought though, there have already been stories about making a massive "Total Information Awareness" database to monitor everyone and everyone's interaction with everyone else, what they do, what they buy, and so on, and with recent events from eBay showing that when it comes down to making money and looking patriotic, what will it take for *my* shopping habbits to be turned over to some government megaubercomputer somewhere so they can run a program and determine if the number of cases of Pepsi I buy every couple of weeks, and clothing every couple times a year, puts me in one of those "suspicious" categories or not.
I don't believe I should be investigated or tracked if I haven't done anything wrong.
Is it possible for the public sector to take on something like NASA though? Could the money be gathered? I can see where you are coming from, that the program would be better if it wasn't 100% government controlled and operated, but could such a huge, broad-based organization such as the present day NASA be assembled to successfully maintain a shuttle program?
Find problem, examine problem, fix problem, learn from problem, push forward. Sure worked (and still does) for trains, planes, and automobiles...
Het, when I get out of college, odds are there will be jobs of 50k and up just waiting for me, while the jocks are slaving away at some factory somewhere, or still asking if they want fries with that, they can be as cruel as they would like, just gives me more things to chuckle about when things in my life go right.
That and I have a girlfriend and they don't... also a plus!
(yes, a geek with a girlfriend.. please don't revoke my geek license)
What matters is that eventually, the cursed thing was used. Go ahead and say it was to save x number of troops or y politcal plans, or anything else, but the bottom ine is that the first to discover the thing was going to use it, and this world has been quite the scary & dangerous place ever since.
I think my desire to see the 1998-99 internet doubles every time I see a story like this.
It is rapidly being forgotten that things being free was one of the reasons why this internet thingy took off in the first place.
Pessimist, well to a point, but if no one is being told anything and our odds of doing anything about it are quite little. The more we can actually do to prepare, the less pessimistic I would be.
Well, will anything you build be able to survive the impact shockwave? There are many, many other problems that would arise aside from just getting past the no sun bit, more than I can think of, but a few that do come to my head...
1) Worldwide global warming on a pace that makes the previous century look like nothing, with the new rampant greenhouse effect, would a decent place to live and actually grow something be found?
2) For the living, would they be at risk to catching disease with hundreds of millions, probably billions of dead bodies in various places around the world that aren't burned in the global fires?
3) If we can get past the centuries of no sunlight, when the skies finally do clear, if I'm not mistaken, a massive ice age sets in with the clearing and a major release of heat from the planet. So take our higher-ground living areas from the years of raised oceans, now we have to once again find a new place to live, with those places now glaciers.
Can we really survive all of this? Better yet, what sort of shape would we be in after it all? It's hard to believe that we will advanse at all and hell, we could come out of this as cavepeople once again, if we come out of it at all.
Seems like we're just getting a message from nature.. Well, you're not welcomed here anymore, time for next stage of evolution, bye bye now.
But would you want to survive? If you make it past the impact, survive in your shelter as the massive P-waves rip most above-ground construction apart, happen to live through the tidal waves and global forest fires raging overhead, you walk out of your little shelter into a world that is blackened, dead, burning, and is a million times worse than the world's collective nightmare squared. Would you really want to see that sort of world?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I would love to get a shelter and try to live through this thing just like the next guy, but when your options are dying instantly or dying gradually over the next few years (blocked out sun = no photosynthesis = no green plants = no food = good luck), unless the chances were greater than 50/50 of dying anyways, I'd much rather be living my simple little life out to the end.
damn you... lol (yes)
Especially in the space program, you can not, never in a million years, expect any launch vehicle to have a 100% safety record. Fine, how about 99%? Well for every 100 missions, you'll have another Challenger/Columbia. You figure it out. Disasters like this will happen because in order to get out there, get where we want, do the research we desire, advance ourselves as a species that (sadly too little of ourselves) desire, the risk will have to be taken to get out there.
The internal combustion engine... wonderful invention, and how many people went on to die from trains, cars, and planes. Numbers by now in the *taking a stab in the dark* hundreds of thousands, but look at the benefits, how much more quickly goods and people can be moved from point A to point B. Took a lot of suffering, a lot of checks and rechecks, a lot of "well person x was killed so kill project x" noise from people who can't accept change and their mouthpieces in the media.
My largest hope from all of this is that the end result that is achieved is better, faster, safer, cheaper, more technologically advanced space vehicles will be spawned, and the exploration shall continue.
Read your alternate history... there should have been a story on slashdot sometime in 2000 with a title like "Man Lands On Mars".
We can do a heck of a lot more than we currently do. Somebody just needs the balls to get the ball rolling.
Giving robots the ability to have face as well as voice recognition, inevitably I can see some sort of security system being done with robots such as these (only recognized people get through, others get... dealt with), and then if the robot can be put on the internet than the robot could be hacked. Forget identity theft, how would you like it if you came home one day and your robot wouldn't let you in the door because you "no longer lived there" (in other words, it doesn't recognize you), or worse yet lets someone else in because it is now programmed to accept that person as someone who lives at the house.
To make a long story short, IMHO, I don't believe robot "house-sitters" are a good thing. I for one would never give up control of the security or well-being of my house to a walking, talking computer program.
I just don't see the pros outweighing the cons here.
There's got to be a better phrase than "shameless pun" for this.
Not that it's a bad thing...
God help those families, and God help maned exploration of space.
Just as long as people are taught to apply a 6 month old patch so their SQL isn't being pinged into oblivion :)
If all this already exists, what is the copyright office going to do about it to prevent the big companies to just keep chugging along?
Check how much they cost before patriotism was in.
Commercialism does not bend and change for who is in power or what is 'right', it just englufs the current mood as well, and still profits.
...since when does watching the Super Bowl count as a patriotic activity? I thought it was just a game, a football game. I didn't hear Bush tell me to watch the game, I didn't see the U.N. pass a resolution, and I didn't hear an "Axis of Evil" tag attached to it.
...just a game, folks.
Tone down the crazyness, things that have been a part of American culture do not necessarily mean they are thru-and-thru patriotic.
Back when you were on last, Hotmail was an independent company, no one knew what the GO network was, NetNanny was just an idea, .coms could go no where but up, p2p was underground, everything was free, and no one had pened the term 'cyber terrorism'.
How is the 'net different now from the last time and are you going to miss it?
There will always be a need for a simple game (board game, tetris game, etc.) that doesn't greet the user with 200fps and take 5 gigs to install needing 1.5 gigs of ram to run smoothly on the newest mind-bending video card. There will always be a market for that, but there is just a level of satisfaction of beating a computer at chess that shooting someone on a Counter-Strike map can never duplicate.