My favourite is still those little preservative packets that come in shoes labelled "DO NOT EAT". I wonder if I would have a case if I choked scarfing down the laces.
There are plenty of threads laughing at cross-cultural faux pas where oriental instructions get mistranslated into English, but IIRC, Silica Gel is behind a mistake of our own.
I can't find the source, but I remember hearing that when we dropped MRE's on Afghanistan, they included salt and pepper packets, and another packet that many locals simply assumed was another strange American seasoning. Of course, it was the Silica Gel used to keep the MRE dry. Doesn't do a lot of good to write "DO NOT EAT" in English when you're air-dropping MRE's in the middle of Afghanistan, does it?
Come to think of it, that may qualify "SILICA GEL - DO NOT EAT" for the "Silliest Product Instructions" award in an entirely different way.
Foo: We tried, but we're voluntarily limiting our memories of Keanu Reeves' acting career to The Matrix and Bill and Ted's Awesome Adventure. Bar: Bill and Ted never had an "awesome" adventure... they had an "excellent" adventure and a "bogus" journey, but not "awesome".
Just a system glitch in the grandparent. Either there was an error in his long-term adjective storage, or possibly an error in cache while retrieving Brain.Movies.Titles.That_Movie_I_Saw_While_Stoned.
Interesting service, but how well will it work with independent, non-mainstream artists?
Susan Gibson wrote and originally recorded the song "Wide Open Spaces" It became a hit for the Dixie Chicks. What happens if I put the phone to the radio while a station that knows the difference is playing the original version?
Would an artist like Slaid Cleaves or Mark David Manders, which you won't hear on your local corporate country channel, even be identified?
I suspect the music library won't be broad enough to support the people who actually care about the music enough to use the service.
It was in a 50km/hr zone, and he was driving (according to the black box) 130km/hr. Can you think of any circumstance where you could be driving from a law-abiding 50km/hr before, and arrive at 130km/hr with the gas pedal pressed down within the recording window?
I'm not concerned about an obvious case like this one. Arguing that this is typical is like justifying the death penalty based on Charles Manson or Ted Bundy.
I'm worried about the "edge" cases, where maybe something *did* happen just before that 5-second window. That's why we have judges and juries -- not for the obvious cases, but for the ones that require human judgement. After all, we know what happens when you take a computer's word without question, right?
Besides, I don't think there's ever been too much issue with "how fast" someone is going. The guys who do the work on this stuff know their stuff, and could probably take a five second look at the accident scene and recreate 95% of it. The other 5% are the specific details.
I think you've been watching too much CSI. In the real world, "experts" are a bit harder to come by.
When my wife was a teenager, she hit the brakes, ran off the road and got stuck. A cop pulled up, and gave her a ticket for speeding based on the skid marks. Problem was, those weren't her skid marks! Basically, she got screwed because a small-town cop with little or no training thought he knew what he was doing.
This is why I say the data should be easily retrieved by the car's owner, without going through the manufacturer. It would have been easy to prove (or disprove) her assertion with that sort of data. Without it, even if she'd gone to court, it would have been teenage girl vs. "expert" cop -- no contest.
Last friday I read in other news that a cell phone possibly ignited a flash explosion of gas vapors
But there's a huge difference between what happened in that story, and what happens at your local gas station.
For one thing, it wasn't a gas station, but a Texas oil well where the explosion occurred. Oilfield work is inherently dangerous, and subject to freak accidents like this one, where gas pressure blew a plug into some poor guy's head.
Add to that the location. Here in Texas, every pump has a stupid "NO CELLPHONES" sticker on it. So everyone thinks that cellphones cause explosions, despite zero evidence. Now, in the article, it says "It is believed that either the cell phone or static electricity when the person reached to pick up or open the cell phone caused the ignition of the gas in the area." The cell phone got the headline, but I doubt it was to blame.
Also, note that "gas vapors... had accumulated in a low-lying area." That's a recipe for disaster, since natural gas is heavier than air.
All in all, I feel much better than I did before about using my cell phone at the gas station, and I'm still looking for any evidence an explosion was actually caused by a cell phone. Note, though, that POTS phones *do* spark!
I have to take off my tinfoil hat for this one. While where I go and how fast I got there aren't anyone's business under normal circumstances, five seconds of data gathered right before I crash are fair game.
However, there are some issues to be careful about:
* Five seconds is probably not long enough to know what really happened. I could have mashed the brake to the floor at t-10s, then hit the gas to avoid being T-Bone'd at t-6s... in that case, it looks like I was rushing headlong into the wreck.
* But how long is enough? 30 seconds? Five minutes? A day or two? Pick a silly extreme, and someone is likely to attempt to legislate it.
* Who has read access to the data? It's my data, so I should be able to plug the car into my USB port and see it for myself (as should my attorney).
* Who has write access? Obviously, the car's sensors and nobody else. But are there safeguards (digital signature?) to ensure against tampering? And what if a hacker replaces the car's CPU?
* How about "erase"? IIRC, airline black boxes have a button that the pilot can hit on his way out of the cockpit to erase the voice recorder after a successful landing (defined: one you walk away from). Is this a Good Thing, or Considered Harmful?
* Is it fair if my car has the feature, but the other guy's doesn't? You can tell that I was speeding, but what if he was speeding more? Remember the "Malcolm in the Middle" episode, where the camera "saw" Mom pull out in front of someone, but another camera showed that the other car made a U-Turn right in front of her?
Lots of issues to be resolved. But I'll get one, if I can, *if* there's an insurance discount.
Foo: If you've got nothing to hide... Bar: Why do I need to have something to hide in order to want privacy? Can't I simply desire to prevent others from gathering unnecessary information on me?
My definition of "liberty" includes the right to explore the boundaries... and sometimes, to step on the other side.
When I was younger (in the '80s, statute of limitations has long passed, heh), I did my share of vadding (long before I ever heard the term). Technically, I was trespassing -- got caught once, while still in high school, and were my parents ever pi^Wupset!
I sure wouldn't explore those places now -- I'm older and I know better. But would I have known better if I hadn't checked out the limits when I was young?
Online, there are places that probably shouldn't be found (goat-related links are just one eye-melting example). But truthfully, I'm not terribly worried about my teens finding the goatse guy -- because once they know how bad it can get, they'll be much happier back in the "safe" zone.
Contrast that with the self-appointed mavens of online "decency", whose worst online experience was the face on Janet's nipple, and therefore want to regulate everything into blandness.
Of course, this is threading away from the main topic, the A9 "I Know Where You Surfed Last Summer" search engine. I guess the risk is that A9's all-seeing eye could become the norm, rather than the exception. At least we still have Lance Cottrell on our side.
Search History: All your searches at A9.com are stored on our servers and shown to you at any time from any computer you use. Clicking on a link performs the search again. You can hide the window at any time and a password will be required to open it again. You can edit your history, for example, to hide an entry.
Click History: If any of the web search results include a site that you have seen before, it's marked on the result. We even tell you the last time you visited that site.
You don't have to be among the tin-foil hat crowd to have a low regard for this "feature". There are just some searches that you *don't* want to remember.
It's not a stretch to imagine a situation like this:
Boss: "Google me some info on our competitors."
Lackey: "Check out this new A9.com search!"
Boss: "What's that link there? I didn't know you were interested in goats... [Click] Damn! You're fired!"
I hate when people try to justify socialism or communism.
I hate when people try to justify their bad habits behind the veil of Libertarian freedom.
How do you KNOW 100% that the seat belt laws work, or that helmut laws work? The ONLY thing that is known is that it raises revenues for police departments.
I don't know if the laws work. I do know that the seat belts work. My wife works at a children's hospital, and the difference between the quick and the dead is often determined by a single click -- or absense thereof.
If you wear your seat belt, you may still die in a crash... but it's less likely. If you don't wear your seat belt, you may still live through a crash... but it's less likely.
And what sort of seat belt is installed in your vehicle that you have to unbuckle it to scratch your itch, anyway?
Full disclosure: I wasn't very good about wearing my seat belt when I lived at home with my parents, either. Then I totaled my mom's car, and the banged-up knees and humongous forehead bruise were enough to remind me not to forget again...
I never have gotten to the end of Conker... I like the game, but I'm not gamer enough (read: too many RL responsibilities) to commit the time required.
But I was going to point out Bad Fur Day as one of the games that knows it's a game. For one thing, the game is littered with "B" buttons -- I mean, they're actually green buttons with the letter "B" on them. When you stand on the "B" button, you do something special, like throw toilet paper at the Great Mighty Poo. Conker occasionally quips "Hmm, this looks like one of those 'B' button moments."
Best of all, one of his idle states involves playing his Game Boy. You can use the "view change" buttons without disturbing him, and look over his shoulder to see how he's doing. It's some sort of generic fighting game, IIRC.
Best nine bucks I ever spent -- there were a stack of BFD's when the local K-Marts closed.
I can't believe I fell for it. The site is such an obvious fake. These guys are laughing their collective butts off at our readiness to don the tinfoil hat and march into battle.
Mod me down... after replying to such a fake, I don't deserve Karma.
Now, what do we do about Timothy, the editor, and gbjbaanb, the submitter?
it's for real from a Danish company that has already shown it off at a Chinese Police exhibition.
This sentence leads to some interesting concepts:
* If the Chinese authorities had this cyber-weapon at their disposal, would lives have been saved at Tiananmen Square?
* If the demonstrators had been tagged instead of shot outright, would it have been any better for them in the long run?
* Isn't the whole idea incredibly creepy?
Actually, I have my doubts that a map, like the one tracking the terrorist padre in the demo, is currently possible. Remember the distance-squared law, frequently mentioned in other RFID articles?
This sounds more like a James Bond tracking device than anything possible in the Real World.
Something similar that *would* be useful against *real* criminals would be a TollTag gun -- fire a vehicle tracker into the body panel of a fleeing vehicle, and track it as it travels the freeway system in a wired-up town like Houston.
My neighbor wanted to take down his tree. It was 150 feet tall.
I'm sure I don't have enough information to judge, but... what the heck is this guy thinking? He'd got a fifteen-story tree, a masterpiece of Nature's art, and he wants to get rid of it?
The tallest thing that grows on our God-forsaken played-out cotton field is mesquite, which would grow to maybe 20 feet if left alone, but turns into a spiky 5-foot bush 'cause the ranchers keep cutting it down. I'd give my left n^Hleg for a 150-foot tree out here!
While it is indisputable that the technology that is required to travel to Mars and establish a rudimentary colony around the hull of the space craft and any transported plants and animals exists and can be taken to Mars (at great cost), it is highly doubtful that they would be able to bring themselves back from the red planet.
What makes you think that getting back home is even part of the mission goal? There are plenty of folks -- many right here on Slashdot -- who wouldn't blink an eye before volunteering for a one-way mission to a truly uncharted frontier. Even after you weed out the obvious psychos and wannabes, you're still going to have a decent pool of qualified volunteers.
And just suppose they *do* get to the surface, with survivors >= 1. You don't think *that* will stir the collective imagination? Expect another human launch at the next planetary alignment, with regularly scheduled departures thereafter.
It'll just take a handful of visionary retired scientists with nothing to lose -- and our existing media culture -- to start the migration off this watery rock.
The problem is lack of attention. Censorship is a problem too, but there certainly are sources out there, albeit obscure ones, that cover all sorts of stuff that "mainstream" sources don't touch.
Even with a P2P news network, the problem will still be lack of attention.
It's easy to get a bored young web surfer with a broadband connection to let his/her PC be a stopping point for popular music, 1337 warez, or hot pr0n. But what's the chance of getting said netizen to give up valuable MP3 space for the latest news from CNN?
On the other hand, plaintext news won't take nearly the storage and bandwidth of pirated music files. I guess if 1% of P2P'ers are socially minded, they could satisfy the need... since a picture's worth a thousand DWORDs.
The NYT article (available here reg-free (thanks, guys!)) is short on details, but the manufacturer's web site has much more detail.
Some interesting notes:
* Their technology currently only works on GSM phones, so here in the US, it'll only block T-Mobile customers. No more Catherine Zeta-Jones hollering "Stop!" in the middle of your bowling tournament. I hate it when that happens.
* The company is Canada-based, so they're outside the reach of Ashcroft & co. The NYT article quotes the company's founder as saying that the technology is useful in mosques... if the founder is indeed Muslim, he's probably wary of landing on Ashcroft's little Enemies List. Heck, I'm worried myself, 'cause I'm not sure what he thinks of Methodists these days!
The NYT article (available here reg-free (thanks, guys!)) is short on details, but the manufacturer's web site has much more detail.
Some interesting notes:
* Their technology currently only works on GSM phones, so here in the US, it'll only block T-Mobile customers. No more Catherine Zeta-Jones hollering "Stop!" in the middle of your bowling tournament. I hate it when that happens.
* The company is Canada-based, so they're outside the reach of Ashcroft & co. The NYT article quotes the company's founder as saying that the technology is useful in mosques... if the founder is indeed Muslim, he's probably wary of landing on Ashcroft's little Enemies List. Heck, I'm worried myself, 'cause I'm not sure what he thinks of Methodists these days!
The thing is that Lloyds is actually a marketplace of "syndicates", not exactly a monolithic institution (at least, this is how he explained it to me).
Here in Texas, Farmers Insurance recently cancelled thousands of homeowners insurance insurance policies in the wake of unfavorable court decisions, a spate of bad weather, and (unofficially) the bath they took in the stock market. We were among those who ended up with a "surplus line" Lloyd's policy that's not subject to state regulation.
Anyway... on my insurance documents, I recall that there was a page that listed the syndicates that were the actual underwriters for our house. There were more than a dozen, with varying percentages (none over 15%, IIRC). Most looked to be individuals, I think, but some of the names looked like companies or partnerships.
It was cool, in a way, to think that some dude in London had a personal stake in keeping my home from burning down.
Side note: I'd have probably kept some sort of real insurance if my agent had followed through. His father was great, but when Dad retired, things went into the crapper. If you're in Dallas, I'd avoid this agency -- but YMMV, of course. I've moved to a new house, and a new Farmers agent.
You have to be able to sing "Rocket Man" from memory.
I would have thought that "Major Tom" would have been more apropos...
Ground control to Major Tom:
Your circuit's dead, there's something wong. Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you... Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the moon Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...
Press Release Contact: Henry J. Price Date Posted: April 7, 2004
But further down:
The license was issued April 1 by the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., headed by aviation record-holder Burt Rutan, for a sequence of sub-orbital flights spanning a one-year period.
As fun as it is to slam "the government", somebody was very much on the ball to realize that it would be a bad idea to release this news on April Fool's Day!
I know, I'm too late for anyone to actually *read* this. But it must be pointed out that you will *not* need to use flea shampoo on a dead badger. Fleas need a live host. As soon as the host dies, the flea looks for another warm-blooded host.
How the flea is likely to behave when its original host is re-animated, however, might be up for debate.
Slashdot Mirror
My favourite is still those little preservative packets that come in shoes labelled "DO NOT EAT". I wonder if I would have a case if I choked scarfing down the laces.
There are plenty of threads laughing at cross-cultural faux pas where oriental instructions get mistranslated into English, but IIRC, Silica Gel is behind a mistake of our own.
I can't find the source, but I remember hearing that when we dropped MRE's on Afghanistan, they included salt and pepper packets, and another packet that many locals simply assumed was another strange American seasoning. Of course, it was the Silica Gel used to keep the MRE dry. Doesn't do a lot of good to write "DO NOT EAT" in English when you're air-dropping MRE's in the middle of Afghanistan, does it?
Come to think of it, that may qualify "SILICA GEL - DO NOT EAT" for the "Silliest Product Instructions" award in an entirely different way.
Foo: We tried, but we're voluntarily limiting our memories of Keanu Reeves' acting career to The Matrix and Bill and Ted's Awesome Adventure.
.
Bar: Bill and Ted never had an "awesome" adventure... they had an "excellent" adventure and a "bogus" journey, but not "awesome".
Just a system glitch in the grandparent. Either there was an error in his long-term adjective storage, or possibly an error in cache while retrieving Brain.Movies.Titles.That_Movie_I_Saw_While_Stoned
Interesting service, but how well will it work with independent, non-mainstream artists?
Susan Gibson wrote and originally recorded the song "Wide Open Spaces" It became a hit for the Dixie Chicks. What happens if I put the phone to the radio while a station that knows the difference is playing the original version?
Would an artist like Slaid Cleaves or Mark David Manders, which you won't hear on your local corporate country channel, even be identified?
I suspect the music library won't be broad enough to support the people who actually care about the music enough to use the service.
It was in a 50km/hr zone, and he was driving (according to the black box) 130km/hr. Can you think of any circumstance where you could be driving from a law-abiding 50km/hr before, and arrive at 130km/hr with the gas pedal pressed down within the recording window?
I'm not concerned about an obvious case like this one. Arguing that this is typical is like justifying the death penalty based on Charles Manson or Ted Bundy.
I'm worried about the "edge" cases, where maybe something *did* happen just before that 5-second window. That's why we have judges and juries -- not for the obvious cases, but for the ones that require human judgement. After all, we know what happens when you take a computer's word without question, right?
Besides, I don't think there's ever been too much issue with "how fast" someone is going. The guys who do the work on this stuff know their stuff, and could probably take a five second look at the accident scene and recreate 95% of it. The other 5% are the specific details.
I think you've been watching too much CSI. In the real world, "experts" are a bit harder to come by.
When my wife was a teenager, she hit the brakes, ran off the road and got stuck. A cop pulled up, and gave her a ticket for speeding based on the skid marks. Problem was, those weren't her skid marks! Basically, she got screwed because a small-town cop with little or no training thought he knew what he was doing.
This is why I say the data should be easily retrieved by the car's owner, without going through the manufacturer. It would have been easy to prove (or disprove) her assertion with that sort of data. Without it, even if she'd gone to court, it would have been teenage girl vs. "expert" cop -- no contest.
Last friday I read in other news that a cell phone possibly ignited a flash explosion of gas vapors
But there's a huge difference between what happened in that story, and what happens at your local gas station.
For one thing, it wasn't a gas station, but a Texas oil well where the explosion occurred. Oilfield work is inherently dangerous, and subject to freak accidents like this one, where gas pressure blew a plug into some poor guy's head.
Add to that the location. Here in Texas, every pump has a stupid "NO CELLPHONES" sticker on it. So everyone thinks that cellphones cause explosions, despite zero evidence. Now, in the article, it says "It is believed that either the cell phone or static electricity when the person reached to pick up or open the cell phone caused the ignition of the gas in the area." The cell phone got the headline, but I doubt it was to blame.
Also, note that "gas vapors... had accumulated in a low-lying area." That's a recipe for disaster, since natural gas is heavier than air.
All in all, I feel much better than I did before about using my cell phone at the gas station, and I'm still looking for any evidence an explosion was actually caused by a cell phone. Note, though, that POTS phones *do* spark!
When will G.W. announce a manned mission to look for oil?
As soon as the spectral analysis comes back, and they discover that the "dark red" color is due to high levels of alien automatic transmission fluid
(I know, I've made that joke before, but by golly it's a good one!)
I have to take off my tinfoil hat for this one. While where I go and how fast I got there aren't anyone's business under normal circumstances, five seconds of data gathered right before I crash are fair game.
However, there are some issues to be careful about:
* Five seconds is probably not long enough to know what really happened. I could have mashed the brake to the floor at t-10s, then hit the gas to avoid being T-Bone'd at t-6s... in that case, it looks like I was rushing headlong into the wreck.
* But how long is enough? 30 seconds? Five minutes? A day or two? Pick a silly extreme, and someone is likely to attempt to legislate it.
* Who has read access to the data? It's my data, so I should be able to plug the car into my USB port and see it for myself (as should my attorney).
* Who has write access? Obviously, the car's sensors and nobody else. But are there safeguards (digital signature?) to ensure against tampering? And what if a hacker replaces the car's CPU?
* How about "erase"? IIRC, airline black boxes have a button that the pilot can hit on his way out of the cockpit to erase the voice recorder after a successful landing (defined: one you walk away from). Is this a Good Thing, or Considered Harmful?
* Is it fair if my car has the feature, but the other guy's doesn't? You can tell that I was speeding, but what if he was speeding more? Remember the "Malcolm in the Middle" episode, where the camera "saw" Mom pull out in front of someone, but another camera showed that the other car made a U-Turn right in front of her?
Lots of issues to be resolved. But I'll get one, if I can, *if* there's an insurance discount.
Foo: If you've got nothing to hide...
Bar: Why do I need to have something to hide in order to want privacy? Can't I simply desire to prevent others from gathering unnecessary information on me?
My definition of "liberty" includes the right to explore the boundaries... and sometimes, to step on the other side.
When I was younger (in the '80s, statute of limitations has long passed, heh), I did my share of vadding (long before I ever heard the term). Technically, I was trespassing -- got caught once, while still in high school, and were my parents ever pi^Wupset!
I sure wouldn't explore those places now -- I'm older and I know better. But would I have known better if I hadn't checked out the limits when I was young?
Online, there are places that probably shouldn't be found (goat-related links are just one eye-melting example). But truthfully, I'm not terribly worried about my teens finding the goatse guy -- because once they know how bad it can get, they'll be much happier back in the "safe" zone.
Contrast that with the self-appointed mavens of online "decency", whose worst online experience was the face on Janet's nipple, and therefore want to regulate everything into blandness.
Of course, this is threading away from the main topic, the A9 "I Know Where You Surfed Last Summer" search engine. I guess the risk is that A9's all-seeing eye could become the norm, rather than the exception. At least we still have Lance Cottrell on our side.
From the 7 Reasons to Use A9.com:
Search History: All your searches at A9.com are stored on our servers and shown to you at any time from any computer you use. Clicking on a link performs the search again. You can hide the window at any time and a password will be required to open it again. You can edit your history, for example, to hide an entry.
Click History: If any of the web search results include a site that you have seen before, it's marked on the result. We even tell you the last time you visited that site.
You don't have to be among the tin-foil hat crowd to have a low regard for this "feature". There are just some searches that you *don't* want to remember.
It's not a stretch to imagine a situation like this:
Boss: "Google me some info on our competitors."
Lackey: "Check out this new A9.com search!"
Boss: "What's that link there? I didn't know you were interested in goats... [Click] Damn! You're fired!"
I hate when people try to justify socialism or communism.
I hate when people try to justify their bad habits behind the veil of Libertarian freedom.
How do you KNOW 100% that the seat belt laws work, or that helmut laws work? The ONLY thing that is known is that it raises revenues for police departments.
I don't know if the laws work. I do know that the seat belts work. My wife works at a children's hospital, and the difference between the quick and the dead is often determined by a single click -- or absense thereof.
If you wear your seat belt, you may still die in a crash... but it's less likely.
If you don't wear your seat belt, you may still live through a crash... but it's less likely.
And what sort of seat belt is installed in your vehicle that you have to unbuckle it to scratch your itch, anyway?
Full disclosure: I wasn't very good about wearing my seat belt when I lived at home with my parents, either. Then I totaled my mom's car, and the banged-up knees and humongous forehead bruise were enough to remind me not to forget again...
He he... Reading the subject, I thought for sure this was a reply in this thread! Acorns... falling squirrels...
I never have gotten to the end of Conker... I like the game, but I'm not gamer enough (read: too many RL responsibilities) to commit the time required.
But I was going to point out Bad Fur Day as one of the games that knows it's a game. For one thing, the game is littered with "B" buttons -- I mean, they're actually green buttons with the letter "B" on them. When you stand on the "B" button, you do something special, like throw toilet paper at the Great Mighty Poo. Conker occasionally quips "Hmm, this looks like one of those 'B' button moments."
Best of all, one of his idle states involves playing his Game Boy. You can use the "view change" buttons without disturbing him, and look over his shoulder to see how he's doing. It's some sort of generic fighting game, IIRC.
Best nine bucks I ever spent -- there were a stack of BFD's when the local K-Marts closed.
I can't believe I fell for it. The site is such an obvious fake. These guys are laughing their collective butts off at our readiness to don the tinfoil hat and march into battle.
Mod me down... after replying to such a fake, I don't deserve Karma.
Now, what do we do about Timothy, the editor, and gbjbaanb, the submitter?
it's for real from a Danish company that has already shown it off at a Chinese Police exhibition.
This sentence leads to some interesting concepts:
* If the Chinese authorities had this cyber-weapon at their disposal, would lives have been saved at Tiananmen Square?
* If the demonstrators had been tagged instead of shot outright, would it have been any better for them in the long run?
* Isn't the whole idea incredibly creepy?
Actually, I have my doubts that a map, like the one tracking the terrorist padre in the demo, is currently possible. Remember the distance-squared law, frequently mentioned in other RFID articles?
This sounds more like a James Bond tracking device than anything possible in the Real World.
Something similar that *would* be useful against *real* criminals would be a TollTag gun -- fire a vehicle tracker into the body panel of a fleeing vehicle, and track it as it travels the freeway system in a wired-up town like Houston.
[raises hand] Ooo ooo ooo!! Pick me!!!
Well, your website url indicates that you're halfway there...
My neighbor wanted to take down his tree. It was 150 feet tall.
I'm sure I don't have enough information to judge, but... what the heck is this guy thinking? He'd got a fifteen-story tree, a masterpiece of Nature's art, and he wants to get rid of it?
The tallest thing that grows on our God-forsaken played-out cotton field is mesquite, which would grow to maybe 20 feet if left alone, but turns into a spiky 5-foot bush 'cause the ranchers keep cutting it down. I'd give my left n^Hleg for a 150-foot tree out here!
While it is indisputable that the technology that is required to travel to Mars and establish a rudimentary colony around the hull of the space craft and any transported plants and animals exists and can be taken to Mars (at great cost), it is highly doubtful that they would be able to bring themselves back from the red planet.
What makes you think that getting back home is even part of the mission goal? There are plenty of folks -- many right here on Slashdot -- who wouldn't blink an eye before volunteering for a one-way mission to a truly uncharted frontier. Even after you weed out the obvious psychos and wannabes, you're still going to have a decent pool of qualified volunteers.
And just suppose they *do* get to the surface, with survivors >= 1. You don't think *that* will stir the collective imagination? Expect another human launch at the next planetary alignment, with regularly scheduled departures thereafter.
It'll just take a handful of visionary retired scientists with nothing to lose -- and our existing media culture -- to start the migration off this watery rock.
The problem is lack of attention. Censorship is a problem too, but there certainly are sources out there, albeit obscure ones, that cover all sorts of stuff that "mainstream" sources don't touch.
Even with a P2P news network, the problem will still be lack of attention.
It's easy to get a bored young web surfer with a broadband connection to let his/her PC be a stopping point for popular music, 1337 warez, or hot pr0n. But what's the chance of getting said netizen to give up valuable MP3 space for the latest news from CNN?
On the other hand, plaintext news won't take nearly the storage and bandwidth of pirated music files. I guess if 1% of P2P'ers are socially minded, they could satisfy the need... since a picture's worth a thousand DWORDs.
Can't believe I forgot to link the manufacturer's web site in my post! Here it is again:
The NYT article (available here reg-free (thanks, guys!)) is short on details, but the manufacturer's web site has much more detail.
Some interesting notes:
* Their technology currently only works on GSM phones, so here in the US, it'll only block T-Mobile customers. No more Catherine Zeta-Jones hollering "Stop!" in the middle of your bowling tournament. I hate it when that happens.
* The company is Canada-based, so they're outside the reach of Ashcroft & co. The NYT article quotes the company's founder as saying that the technology is useful in mosques... if the founder is indeed Muslim, he's probably wary of landing on Ashcroft's little Enemies List. Heck, I'm worried myself, 'cause I'm not sure what he thinks of Methodists these days!
The NYT article (available here reg-free (thanks, guys!)) is short on details, but the manufacturer's web site has much more detail.
Some interesting notes:
* Their technology currently only works on GSM phones, so here in the US, it'll only block T-Mobile customers. No more Catherine Zeta-Jones hollering "Stop!" in the middle of your bowling tournament. I hate it when that happens.
* The company is Canada-based, so they're outside the reach of Ashcroft & co. The NYT article quotes the company's founder as saying that the technology is useful in mosques... if the founder is indeed Muslim, he's probably wary of landing on Ashcroft's little Enemies List. Heck, I'm worried myself, 'cause I'm not sure what he thinks of Methodists these days!
The thing is that Lloyds is actually a marketplace of "syndicates", not exactly a monolithic institution (at least, this is how he explained it to me).
Here in Texas, Farmers Insurance recently cancelled thousands of homeowners insurance insurance policies in the wake of unfavorable court decisions, a spate of bad weather, and (unofficially) the bath they took in the stock market. We were among those who ended up with a "surplus line" Lloyd's policy that's not subject to state regulation.
Anyway... on my insurance documents, I recall that there was a page that listed the syndicates that were the actual underwriters for our house. There were more than a dozen, with varying percentages (none over 15%, IIRC). Most looked to be individuals, I think, but some of the names looked like companies or partnerships.
It was cool, in a way, to think that some dude in London had a personal stake in keeping my home from burning down.
Side note: I'd have probably kept some sort of real insurance if my agent had followed through. His father was great, but when Dad retired, things went into the crapper. If you're in Dallas, I'd avoid this agency -- but YMMV, of course. I've moved to a new house, and a new Farmers agent.
I would have thought that "Major Tom" would have been more apropos...
Interesting difference in dates:
Press Release
Contact: Henry J. Price
Date Posted: April 7, 2004
But further down:
The license was issued April 1 by the
Federal Aviation Administration's
Office of Commercial Space
Transportation to Scaled Composites of
Mojave, Calif., headed by aviation
record-holder Burt Rutan, for a
sequence of sub-orbital flights
spanning a one-year period.
As fun as it is to slam "the government", somebody was very much on the ball to realize that it would be a bad idea to release this news on April Fool's Day!
I know, I'm too late for anyone to actually *read* this. But it must be pointed out that you will *not* need to use flea shampoo on a dead badger. Fleas need a live host. As soon as the host dies, the flea looks for another warm-blooded host.
How the flea is likely to behave when its original host is re-animated, however, might be up for debate.