I heard a story on NPR about a writer whose dog would sleep under the table while the writer worked. The moment he thought about taking the dog out, the dog would get up and head towards the door. The writer couldn't decide who was reading whose mind;)
You think that paper passports will still be valid after they introduce RFID passports? That would ruin the whole idea -- 10 years is a long time, and I imagine that anyone who would need a passport already has one. There would be a slow trickle of RFID passports if they let paper passports remain valid.
Not that I'm saying the government always does the smartest, most efficient thing, but they seem pretty serious about this.
"Private schooled kids are better educated.
Charter schooled kids are better educated.
Home schooled kids are better educated.
finally I will bet that computer schooled kids are better educated.
when compared to public schools.
It is a written in stone fact. only the fools believe otherwise."
Right now the people that are pulling their kids out of ppublic school to home school them are highly motivated and have the resources to do so properly. You're telling me that when *everybody*, every crack-addicted single mom and every set of end-times Evangelical parents are teaching their kids at home, those kids will be better educated? Call me a fool.
As far as how the tapes were loss, my guess is that they were in boxes labelled "1969 Apollo Moon Landing SSTV Tapes", not something like "The only original recordings of the very first moon landing don't let things things out of your sight or else this valuable piece of history will be lost forever". My guess is that almost *everything* in the US National Archives is the only remaining piece/copy of whatever valuable part of our history it is.
As far as why there won't be any more SSTV tapes is that technology needs to be supported by a knowledge and manufacturing base. Eventually, some part of the reader will wear out or break down. We'll need a replacement part, and there are no more factories or workshops that make such parts. The people who knew how retired long, and they don't remember. Documentation, specs, and blueprints didn't need to be stored after decades of uselessness. The only option is to hire some engineer to reverse engineer the tech (hopefully without destroying even one of the last remaining copies of the original Moon Landing tapes) and re-create a machine... or transfer it to a new medium.
Racketeering is a business model based on illegal acts. For instance, you could have a racket based on extortion, or blackmail, illegal gambling, or prostitution, etc.
In this case, there isn't a free market. There is limited space for runnning lines all over the country right up to people's houses, so only a few companies own a limited number of lines. (Otherwise we'd have lines all over the place, if there were 50 different companies, each needing their own lines). This is called a natural monopoly. If you don't like your cable company, you can't have another company dig up your neighborhood to run new lines to your house.
So basically, you are right. This is simply greed with no market justification. They want money for nothing. If they don't get the free money that they are after, they can do less maintenance on their networks, and then when consumers get lousier service, they will say "See? All this new internet video trafiic is bogging down this network. We need some free money so that we can throttle bandwidth."
Can you really download all of the windows updates as individual executables? I was under the impression that you could only do that for large upgrades, like the service packs.
...And a 'golden egg' like that would be shut down almost as soon as it goes up.
Here's an even better prize for a hacker who can get into windowsupdate: a nice big banner across every windows computer that had been updated in the past week, perfectly synchronized across millions of computers all over the world.
You know, the difference between open source and closed source software is that with open source, *we know what's going on*. Debian admins are being very bold and forthright in stating that the machine was hacked.
How many times has windowsupdate.microsoft.com been hacked? Zero? How would you know? What incentives ( and disincentives ) does Microsoft have to tell us if such a thing were to happen?
So if corporate America wants to trust a black box, let 'em. There's no convincing them anyway.
"Did they issue such a warning for hurricane Katrina? I honestly don't recall if they did. If they did, kudos to them.
You betcha, the National Weather Service did an excellent job."
In this case, the 'they' was FEMA, not the National Weather Service. The timeline you mention doesn't specifically state if FEMA gave warnings. Wikipedia claims that "The National Weather Service (NWS) is one of the six scientific agencies that make up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States government." So, it is not part of FEMA. AFAICT from these sources, FEMA gave no warning of hurricane Katrina.
"While he didn't write any of the code himself, he did help to build the controller used to fly the ships in the game, and also supplied Stephen Russel with the sine and cosine routines from the DEC. Think about it: he designed a gaming controller when no one knew what that even was." [emphasis mine]
Okay, look, I'm not trying to downplay Kotok's contribution, but is it really fair to say that a game controller was something totally unimaginable? Were there any flying vehicles around back then that were piloted at least in part with some kind of stick? So wouldn't it kind of make sense that you move the ships in a simulation/video game with some kind of stick? If someone walked in him, say, a retired military pilot, would they have said "What the hell are you making? I have no idea!" or "Oh, are you building a controller?"
It seems to me that you could say he stood on the shoulders of giants rather than doing something really revolutionary. I mean, car steering wheels had been around for a while -- is it really such a jump to think that you could control something with a stick?
I think MMORPGs would improve immensely if users had greater control over the environment. Nowadays, the paradigm seems to be to hire quest designers who regularly churn out boring, unoriginal quests.
If avatars were allowed to amass power (i.e. labor) and wealth, they could build castles and form alliances to protect their wealth. They could dig dungeons and spike them with traps and seed them with moster populations. Of course, the greater the treasure, the greater the incentive to find it, and the greater the incentive to protect it, leading to ever more creative dungeons, more daring heroes and quests.
To carry the thinking out of the dungeons, if you have Kingdoms that control wealth, and royalty that commands armies, then you make for the kind of human drama that makes for interesting quests. People would form alliances, and break them and double-cross each other. Someone would try to make an ally look like an enemy.
I think for this to work, there needs to be some kind of lego-type feature for building new, creative things. You start with a basic, finite set of elements, and allow for their combinations to affect the world in novel ways. Put them in people's hands and you will witness creativity you never thought possible.
Basically, make the world creative, generative, and put people in charge, and you will have sustained, user-created content.
I think it's a little early for you to come to this conclusion.
"If they send out any kind of alert and nothing happens, they overreacted (even if there was a real threat and the perps simply scratched their mission once they were exposed.). "
If you look at a timeline of terror alerts, they all seem to coincide with the release of news that was damaging to the Bush administration.
"If they don't send an alert and something happens, they take the blame for that. "
Has that actually happened (yet)? That's why I say it is perhaps too early for you to say that they can't win.
"If they use it to send out emergency information on a hurricane bearing down on New Orleans... well, they won't do that right, because you believe this tech will only be used for political gain (though TFA says it may be used for natural disasters)."
Did they issue such a warning for hurricane Katrina? I honestly don't recall if they did. If they did, kudos to them.
If this is a tech that can be used for good or evil, based on historical evidence, I think the Bush administration will use it for evil.
There is no such thing as 'the government'. It sounds like your friends got jobs in some federal agency or department. As for needing Top Secret clearance for a job with any of the state governments, I highly doubt it.
How about a Matrix prequel where all of teenager Neo's buddies are getting stoned and laid while he spends all of his time on the computer. Buddies go on to successful lives as managers and real estate brokers, while Neo is perpetually late to work, and spends most of his time browsing slashdot, until that one fateful day where the internet reaches out to him and he becomes the savior of reality...
I didn't say it wasn't limited. I just said it wasn't based on any kind of intellectual competency test , but rather race, gender, ethnicity, and also wealth and age, as you pointed out. I'm certain there were a few wealthy, white, landowning, 21+ idiots, but they were allowed to vote.
"So what if he said some people aren't fit to drive...?"
Different story. Driving is not a civil liberty or political freedom.
To tell you the truth, I agree with him also. I think a lot of people really don't understand the issues or what they are voting on. The problem is -- and this is a *very serious*, *very real* problem -- if you start a system where you say most people are idiots and shouldn't be allowed to vote, eventually some of those idiots will come into power. And then you will soon find that somehow *you* meet the criteria for those not eligible to vote.
So anyone who holds the 'most people are idiots' philosophy is not elibigle to vote, in my book, because they have not thought things through to the obvious consequences.
"People look at me like I'm a Nazi because I seriously don't think most Americans should be enfranchised. Let's face an ugly truth. Our founding fathers were right: most people are unfit to vote."
The reason people look at you like you're a Nazi is because once you start with "these people aren't fit to vote, I know what's best for them", then you start feeling entitled to make other decisions for them, such as what kinds of jobs they can hold, where they can live, and whether they are allowed to reproduce. The 'slippery slope' card is one that's too often use where it's not warranted, but this is a place where it's obviously warranted, by historical precedent.
Let me say this as clearly as I can: if you think you know better than me as to what's right in my life, fuck you. You have no place making decisions for me, or anyone else. Society really goes to hell, as in labor camps and mass exterminations, when we let right-wing ideologies like yours come into power. We've fought long and hard to get where we are today, and it makes me sick to hear you say that just because you don't like myspace. It's a friggin' website, for crying out loud!
Futhermore, the founding fathers didn't say that most people are unfit to vote. They specfically left out particular groups based on race, ethnicity and gender -- women, blacks, Indians, etc. They did not say that most people are unfit to vote. I would bet that you know, or at least know of, women and blacks that are certainly fit to vote by your standards, just as there are women and blacks that are unfit to vote by your standards. The problem comes when someone starts thinking their standards are the ones we should use to disenfranchise voters.
If you'd have RTFA, you would have noticed that the scientists scanned *other* artists work do not exhibit the level of accuracy that Van Gogh's work does.
"Van Gogh seems to be the only painter able to render turbulence with such mathematical precision. "We have examined other apparently turbulent paintings of several artists and find no evidence of Kolmogorov scaling," says Aragon.
Edvard Munch's The Scream, for example, looks to be superficially full of van Gogh-like swirls, and was painted by a similarly tumultuous artist, but the luminance probability distribution doesn't fit Kolmogorov's theory."
So, if other artists were looking at turbulence and painting it, they failed, only Van Gogh was able to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard a story on NPR about a writer whose dog would sleep under the table while the writer worked. The moment he thought about taking the dog out, the dog would get up and head towards the door. The writer couldn't decide who was reading whose mind ;)
Hey, I was always *excited* when a gfr asked me to show her the porn ... ;)
Could you tell us a little more about the business you set up and some of the things that you learned?
You think that paper passports will still be valid after they introduce RFID passports? That would ruin the whole idea -- 10 years is a long time, and I imagine that anyone who would need a passport already has one. There would be a slow trickle of RFID passports if they let paper passports remain valid.
Not that I'm saying the government always does the smartest, most efficient thing, but they seem pretty serious about this.
"Private schooled kids are better educated.
Charter schooled kids are better educated.
Home schooled kids are better educated.
finally I will bet that computer schooled kids are better educated.
when compared to public schools.
It is a written in stone fact. only the fools believe otherwise."
Right now the people that are pulling their kids out of ppublic school to home school them are highly motivated and have the resources to do so properly. You're telling me that when *everybody*, every crack-addicted single mom and every set of end-times Evangelical parents are teaching their kids at home, those kids will be better educated? Call me a fool.
As far as how the tapes were loss, my guess is that they were in boxes labelled "1969 Apollo Moon Landing SSTV Tapes", not something like "The only original recordings of the very first moon landing don't let things things out of your sight or else this valuable piece of history will be lost forever". My guess is that almost *everything* in the US National Archives is the only remaining piece/copy of whatever valuable part of our history it is.
As far as why there won't be any more SSTV tapes is that technology needs to be supported by a knowledge and manufacturing base. Eventually, some part of the reader will wear out or break down. We'll need a replacement part, and there are no more factories or workshops that make such parts. The people who knew how retired long, and they don't remember. Documentation, specs, and blueprints didn't need to be stored after decades of uselessness. The only option is to hire some engineer to reverse engineer the tech (hopefully without destroying even one of the last remaining copies of the original Moon Landing tapes) and re-create a machine... or transfer it to a new medium.
I saw Michael Jackson in concert back in '86. I doubt that the '69 moonwalk would compare.
Extortion is a one-time event.
Racketeering is a business model based on illegal acts. For instance, you could have a racket based on extortion, or blackmail, illegal gambling, or prostitution, etc.
In this case, there isn't a free market. There is limited space for runnning lines all over the country right up to people's houses, so only a few companies own a limited number of lines. (Otherwise we'd have lines all over the place, if there were 50 different companies, each needing their own lines). This is called a natural monopoly. If you don't like your cable company, you can't have another company dig up your neighborhood to run new lines to your house.
So basically, you are right. This is simply greed with no market justification. They want money for nothing. If they don't get the free money that they are after, they can do less maintenance on their networks, and then when consumers get lousier service, they will say "See? All this new internet video trafiic is bogging down this network. We need some free money so that we can throttle bandwidth."
Can you really download all of the windows updates as individual executables? I was under the impression that you could only do that for large upgrades, like the service packs.
...And a 'golden egg' like that would be shut down almost as soon as it goes up.
Here's an even better prize for a hacker who can get into windowsupdate: a nice big banner across every windows computer that had been updated in the past week, perfectly synchronized across millions of computers all over the world.
You know, the difference between open source and closed source software is that with open source, *we know what's going on*. Debian admins are being very bold and forthright in stating that the machine was hacked.
How many times has windowsupdate.microsoft.com been hacked? Zero? How would you know? What incentives ( and disincentives ) does Microsoft have to tell us if such a thing were to happen?
So if corporate America wants to trust a black box, let 'em. There's no convincing them anyway.
"Did they issue such a warning for hurricane Katrina? I honestly don't recall if they did. If they did, kudos to them.
You betcha, the National Weather Service did an excellent job."
In this case, the 'they' was FEMA, not the National Weather Service. The timeline you mention doesn't specifically state if FEMA gave warnings. Wikipedia claims that "The National Weather Service (NWS) is one of the six scientific agencies that make up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States government." So, it is not part of FEMA. AFAICT from these sources, FEMA gave no warning of hurricane Katrina.
"While he didn't write any of the code himself, he did help to build the controller used to fly the ships in the game, and also supplied Stephen Russel with the sine and cosine routines from the DEC. Think about it: he designed a gaming controller when no one knew what that even was. " [emphasis mine]
Okay, look, I'm not trying to downplay Kotok's contribution, but is it really fair to say that a game controller was something totally unimaginable? Were there any flying vehicles around back then that were piloted at least in part with some kind of stick? So wouldn't it kind of make sense that you move the ships in a simulation/video game with some kind of stick? If someone walked in him, say, a retired military pilot, would they have said "What the hell are you making? I have no idea!" or "Oh, are you building a controller?"
It seems to me that you could say he stood on the shoulders of giants rather than doing something really revolutionary. I mean, car steering wheels had been around for a while -- is it really such a jump to think that you could control something with a stick?
I think MMORPGs would improve immensely if users had greater control over the environment. Nowadays, the paradigm seems to be to hire quest designers who regularly churn out boring, unoriginal quests.
If avatars were allowed to amass power (i.e. labor) and wealth, they could build castles and form alliances to protect their wealth. They could dig dungeons and spike them with traps and seed them with moster populations. Of course, the greater the treasure, the greater the incentive to find it, and the greater the incentive to protect it, leading to ever more creative dungeons, more daring heroes and quests.
To carry the thinking out of the dungeons, if you have Kingdoms that control wealth, and royalty that commands armies, then you make for the kind of human drama that makes for interesting quests. People would form alliances, and break them and double-cross each other. Someone would try to make an ally look like an enemy.
I think for this to work, there needs to be some kind of lego-type feature for building new, creative things. You start with a basic, finite set of elements, and allow for their combinations to affect the world in novel ways. Put them in people's hands and you will witness creativity you never thought possible.
Basically, make the world creative, generative, and put people in charge, and you will have sustained, user-created content.
"What I find unfortunate is that DHS can't win. "
I think it's a little early for you to come to this conclusion.
"If they send out any kind of alert and nothing happens, they overreacted (even if there was a real threat and the perps simply scratched their mission once they were exposed.). "
If you look at a timeline of terror alerts, they all seem to coincide with the release of news that was damaging to the Bush administration.
"If they don't send an alert and something happens, they take the blame for that. "
Has that actually happened (yet)? That's why I say it is perhaps too early for you to say that they can't win.
"If they use it to send out emergency information on a hurricane bearing down on New Orleans... well, they won't do that right, because you believe this tech will only be used for political gain (though TFA says it may be used for natural disasters)."
Did they issue such a warning for hurricane Katrina? I honestly don't recall if they did. If they did, kudos to them.
If this is a tech that can be used for good or evil, based on historical evidence, I think the Bush administration will use it for evil.
There is no such thing as 'the government'. It sounds like your friends got jobs in some federal agency or department. As for needing Top Secret clearance for a job with any of the state governments, I highly doubt it.
How about a Matrix prequel where all of teenager Neo's buddies are getting stoned and laid while he spends all of his time on the computer. Buddies go on to successful lives as managers and real estate brokers, while Neo is perpetually late to work, and spends most of his time browsing slashdot, until that one fateful day where the internet reaches out to him and he becomes the savior of reality...
You are correct. I made a biased statement.
What does "YHBT YHL HAND" mean?
"Sounds pretty limiting to me."
I didn't say it wasn't limited. I just said it wasn't based on any kind of intellectual competency test , but rather race, gender, ethnicity, and also wealth and age, as you pointed out. I'm certain there were a few wealthy, white, landowning, 21+ idiots, but they were allowed to vote.
"So what if he said some people aren't fit to drive...?"
Different story. Driving is not a civil liberty or political freedom.
To tell you the truth, I agree with him also. I think a lot of people really don't understand the issues or what they are voting on. The problem is -- and this is a *very serious*, *very real* problem -- if you start a system where you say most people are idiots and shouldn't be allowed to vote, eventually some of those idiots will come into power. And then you will soon find that somehow *you* meet the criteria for those not eligible to vote.
So anyone who holds the 'most people are idiots' philosophy is not elibigle to vote, in my book, because they have not thought things through to the obvious consequences.
I think it is the large corporations who pay the congressperson's campaigns, and put them on the board of directors, who get their agendas legislated.
"People look at me like I'm a Nazi because I seriously don't think most Americans should be enfranchised. Let's face an ugly truth. Our founding fathers were right: most people are unfit to vote."
The reason people look at you like you're a Nazi is because once you start with "these people aren't fit to vote, I know what's best for them", then you start feeling entitled to make other decisions for them, such as what kinds of jobs they can hold, where they can live, and whether they are allowed to reproduce. The 'slippery slope' card is one that's too often use where it's not warranted, but this is a place where it's obviously warranted, by historical precedent.
Let me say this as clearly as I can: if you think you know better than me as to what's right in my life, fuck you. You have no place making decisions for me, or anyone else. Society really goes to hell, as in labor camps and mass exterminations, when we let right-wing ideologies like yours come into power. We've fought long and hard to get where we are today, and it makes me sick to hear you say that just because you don't like myspace. It's a friggin' website, for crying out loud!
Futhermore, the founding fathers didn't say that most people are unfit to vote. They specfically left out particular groups based on race, ethnicity and gender -- women, blacks, Indians, etc. They did not say that most people are unfit to vote. I would bet that you know, or at least know of, women and blacks that are certainly fit to vote by your standards, just as there are women and blacks that are unfit to vote by your standards. The problem comes when someone starts thinking their standards are the ones we should use to disenfranchise voters.
"That's a long goodbye that doesn't bear thinking about."
Hell, if I accidentally pushed off, I'd just blow the suit at that point.
If you'd have RTFA, you would have noticed that the scientists scanned *other* artists work do not exhibit the level of accuracy that Van Gogh's work does.
"Van Gogh seems to be the only painter able to render turbulence with such mathematical precision. "We have examined other apparently turbulent paintings of several artists and find no evidence of Kolmogorov scaling," says Aragon.
Edvard Munch's The Scream, for example, looks to be superficially full of van Gogh-like swirls, and was painted by a similarly tumultuous artist, but the luminance probability distribution doesn't fit Kolmogorov's theory."
So, if other artists were looking at turbulence and painting it, they failed, only Van Gogh was able to do it.