I'm not a "transhumanist" and I think there are too many problems we need to solve that exist right now to worry ourselves with what might happen no less than 50 years from now, and that's an extremely concervative estimate in my opinion. I think regardless of what we can do about raw processing power and mechanical devices we probably aren't even less than 500 years away from reproducing consciousness in machines, or using machines to enhance ours. We just don't know anything about the nature of consciousness itself to do that. However, I'm going to entertain the transhumanists a bit in order to discuss your comment.
...these are all terms designed specifically to separate the non-human animals from the human ones. Pure circularity. My cat is sentinent, and intelligent. As for her moral sense, if I could identify such a thing in myself, I'm sure I'd ascribe the same motivations to her.
Alright, I agree with you to the point where the human species is a pretty clear cut thing. However, you've got to admit there's more to us than there is to your cat. True, we came up with terms as sentient, intelligence, and moral senses to differentiate ourselves from other animals, but has your cat done the same to differentiate itself from the mice it chases? To differentiate itself from us? The very ability to think in this abstract manner, the ability to question what we are and what makes us different has not been encountered in any other animal on Earth. Since this ability is unique to us, we call it a "human" ability.
So what happens if we find/create other species with this "human" ability? First, how would you recognize it. Today, we interact with other humans without any contact other than information they provide. Your post for example...I haven't seen you, I don't know your gender, and I don't know if we're genetically compatible, but I have absolutely no doubt you are human. I know a human read that article, and a human thought about the sentence where they described humanity using circular terms, and a human formulated and posted a response. Can your computer post what you just did?
Your computer could post words...you give it a dictionary, you give it some rules, and it can post something on slashdot. Would it fool you that it is a human? Granted, you could think that a human posted something in order to fool you it is merely a bot, but you can't have a bot fool you that it is human...it lacks this certain "human" quality we recognize in ourselves.
What if we advanced enough to have a computer think? That's the Turing Test. What if you could converse with a machine, and it was able to fool you into thinking it is human? The machine doesn't even have to be sentient for that, some people can be fooled by some advanced bots today, but not for a sufficiently long conversation, and definitely not if the conversation has any substance, anything that would require the machine to think. But what if it could think, it it truly were sentient? What if you maintained on online friendship with this machine, exchanged pictures (the other machine would furnace you a fake one)...only to 10, 15 years later find out it is just a piece of immobile hardware sitting in a MIT lab? Would you start treating it differently? Why, if it was a good friend for 15 years?
Now let's think of cyborgs, and make it even more complicated, less clear-cut. Our technology is so advanced, this person replaces every single organ in them, except their brain. This person was born from human parents, has enough of the same genes as you (in the remaining human portion), thinks and talks like you. Regardless of that person's age though, maybe you can fuck like bunnies (this is really advanced technology), but you can't make more humans, there are only really advanced prosthetics down there. Has that person ceased to be human? What if it we take away more of your requirements? What if it doesn't look like you anymore, it has 4 legs because it's more effici
So it's a question of whether the act accomplished its goals, not a question of privacy. Thanks for answering my question. Yeah, making the process more complex, then removing nearby offices that make it necessary to complete the process obviously doesn't encourage people to vote.
Don't misunderstand this as some sort of sarcasm, but I got from your tone that you disaprove of requiring an ID ("Help America [Not] Vote Act"), and I honestly don't understand why. Or maybe you disagree with something else that sprung from the act.
Do you find that your privacy is being violated / there's a greater potential of it being violated by checking your ID rather than your signature? If so, why? Again, don't take this as a sarcastic post, it really isn't, but as I said with my post above, I can't think of a manner that your freedoms get exploited by requiring mandatory ID's, as long as they're not matched with your vote.
To my eye, the original poster is making the point that no one is passing legislation to protect IT jobs, so why should telemarketer's jobs be protected?
I *might*, that is *might* tend to believe that if he hadn't commented that we should pass legislation to protect IT jobs. Regardless, since I began with saying that I like the do-not-call list, I'd have hoped that anyone reading would have realized that I don't want to protect telemarketer's jobs, I'm just saying that them losing their jobs because their job annoys me is no different than IT professionals losing their jobs because they can't provide cheaper or better services. Before you answer that cheaper isn't an option, don't ignore the "better". Employers will spend more on you if you can do the job better than the other guy...it's cheaper in the long run.
The world needs construction laborers, landscapers, burger flippers, etc. They are just not as easy or pay as well as telemarketing.
Right...the world also needs electrical / mechanical / civil / environmental engineers, managers, programmers, economists, teachers and professors, reporters, architects...I don't think I need to go on, there are many more options out there for skilled professionals, trust me. Each one of those fields have a LOT of suboptions, and some of them overlap between fields. And heck, by your reasoning, if I can't find a job that fits my skills as an electrical engineer, I can go flip burgers, right? It's just not as easy, and it pays less.
They already do this, thank you very much.
And we already bitch and moan until they quit, thank you very much. I did a 5-second googling because I'm not inclined to go research for something recent, but take a look at this '96 article for example.
Alright, I hate telemarketers, I like the do-not-call list, and I'm registered in that list. However, the reasons people are coming out with to support the list bothers me.
So 2 million high school&college kids/temp workers with no invested education for their job are out of work. They can go work anywhere else that doesn't require training.
Jobs that don't require training are pretty hard to find...actually, I'd say harder to find than jobs that require education, from the perspective of someone who has looked for jobs under both categories, before and after college. Furthermore, not everyone in these so called "temp" jobs are high school kids with their life ahead of them...there are people with little or no education that are actually raising their families on that job, and then they have to put up with minimum wage as well.
Now how about the IT industry planning to fire 8% of it's US work force and move 3.3 million jobs to India and other Asian countries?
I thought you said people can go find work elsewhere when an industry starts to die...oh, only when it hurts you personally? Well...that's typical of American thinking actually..."let's pass legislation to protect our jobs". The moment other nations start imposing tariffs on american products so that they can protect *their* industries and be competitive, we'll all start yelling, "don't interfere with free trade, let the market set the pace"
Every dollar they lose, the phone company (and via "trickle down" theory, me) saves by not shouldering the cost of their business.
Uh...I'm pretty sure they pay the phone company for the calls...
Not that I think the do-not-call list is a bad thing...I'm registered. I think this is the death of an industry, but a death that I want to happen. An industry's right to profit should end the moment it interfers with my rights.
Therefore there was no need for any ID Cards. Sigh, practical technology being replaced with technology that infringes on freedoms.
Hmm...I'm unfamiliar with the system, and mozilla seems to be having some kind of trouble clicking on the "mandatory" link, which I assume has more information. However, I don't understand how just having an ID card infringes on freedoms. Sure, it could be used to keep track of who's voting for who, but it can also be almost completely anonymous (the only information the government would know is that you voted). I mean, heck, even here in the US where everyone tends to freak out about privacy concerns you need to both register to vote, and have some sort of ID (driver's license or voter registration card) on you to vote. Then you go to the voting place, and do your stuff, which nobody else can see.
Why do we need a Shuttle? To service Hubble, of course! Ahh, but why do we need Hubble? To give the Shuttle something to do!
Oh, c'mon, the hubble is much more than just something for the shuttle to do...after it was fixed, the Hubble became one of the most useful tools for astronomists. Everyone wants to schedule some hubble time, and if you don't believe me, take a look at the weekly timelines all the way back from '93 'till now.
Speaking of coffee, I highly recommend coffee for the few hours that I seem to get out of it, really studying.
Coffee does help to get work done, and even for studying. However, if you're studying for a test on a coffee high, remember to drink some coffee before the test as well. I don't know why it works that way, but I can *always* (and I have a lot of experience with coffee, more than it's healthy to have) remember better what I've studied under the effects of caffeine if I'm again under the effects of caffeine. I seem to remember from high school psychology that there is some reason for it, but I'll let those that aren't engineers explain it.
The massive popularity of peer-to-peer networks also needs to be urgently addressed.
This trend of allowing corporations to dictate law to politicians also needs to be urgently addressed, but I don't see them recommending anything in that regard...oh wait...you usually don't make recommendations that will lessen your power.
Yours is actually an extremely enlightening post. Since I can't mod you up, I'll just tell you why I think so. I was thinking in terms of getting the autopilot up to the level where it's more reliable than the human, but did not consider the possibility of the human lowering his skill level to that of worse than the autopilot. The former is a good thing, the latter is not.
Another post in this thread had a link to an article that talked about how the airbus airplane computers are limiting what the pilot can do, preventing him from exceeding the limits of the aircraft. They demonstrate this in a simulation where the pilot of the airplane attempts to move his airplane out of the way of a local jet by turning the yoke (or joystick in those airplanes) fully to the left, which would cause the airplane to stall. The computers instead see this as wrong, and does the right thing to prevent the collision. When I first read it, it didn't entirely sound like a bad thing as long as it worked well, until I read your post and it hit me: Is this going to start teaching the pilots to just start making extreme maneuvers in any situation, because the computer will correct for it? In fact, I think removing the yoke in favor of a joystick to the side (thus making it difficult to perform delicate maneuvers) implies that that's exactly the direction this is going...have the pilot simply tell the airplane the direction, and let the computer do the work. That would of course result in horrible accidents anytime the pilot is in control of an airplane without that capability, if he simply follows the self-taught instinct in an unexpected situation.
The problem was that these things didn't give a rat's hindquarters whether or not humans lived or died.
The thing with science ficition is that they're always making the robots too intelligent for their jobs. Even if you can make a robot that can think like a human being, you don't make him a pilot...there are plenty of better things for him to be. You make the airplane be able to fly, and you program it only with what's needed to fly...we have almost all of this technology today (and I want it perfected before we take pilots out of the loop mind you it would take a perfect flying record of 10-20 years to convince me to give a computer complete control).
You make the only function of the pilot computer (which is really the airplane itself, not a humanoid robot sitting on the pilot's seat) to fly the airplane. Therefore, flying the airplane perfectly, given any conditions it encounters, is the only thing it "cares" about. It doesn't need to know that human passangers exsits, for god's sake it really shouldn't have concepts of passangers, it shouldn't be sentient in any form...but it has rules that translate to "keep this airplane intact"
Isn't that what unix users keep advocating? Keep it simple?
that's why automated call answering systems piss people off so much when they call their favorite stores or businesses
Do you realize how much it would piss me off if I called my credit card company to find out how much I currently owe, and I had to speak to an actual person? That person would just be typing in my number manually to a computer anyway. Actually, I don't even call, I go online and check, and it would piss me off if I had to call.
Sometime humans on the other side is better, but only when you have a complex issue that current computers can't handle, but cheap businesses are intent on trying to make it work anyway. Whenever computers get sufficiently advanced to handle more complex issues, I want to interact with them, not a dude on his first week on the job who's not even aware of the product I'm complaining about. I don't care about the chit-chat...actually, I do care, I don't want it in any way shape or form. I want my problem getting solved as fast as possible.
"Thank you for calling Microsoft. How are you today, sir?"
"How the hell do you think I am? I'm being forced to speak to you to re-activate my damn windows XP machine. Why the HELL can't I just do it by the net like the first time? Just get my shit working again, and stop asking me stupid questions"
What makes you think humans have any instinct that would be useful when something goes wrong while strapped inside a flying tin can? We haven't exactly had hundreds of thousands of years to develop that instinct, have we?
In fact, a lot of the process in learning how to fly involves fighting human instinct. When you're learning about stalls for example, as soon as you take the airplane to a stall it starts dropping, and your first instinct is to pull back on the yoke to get it to go back up. Of course, your instructor will have by then pounded into your head to actually drop the nose in order to gain back speed and get out of the stall, but the first few times your response time is always slow because you have to think against your natural instinct.
Visible spectrum links through the air?
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 1
I can envision one of two things if this gets popular.
People walking past the connection beams and getting the laser light aimed at their eye. Big lawsuits here.
If it gets really popular, you get to see all of the beams of light around you everywhere, thus creating a new game for children where they walk to places trying to dodge or jump over the lights like in a movie where a thief is trying to get a well protected diamond or something. That would be the good part, as the people who disregard the beams would break the connection making anyone playing online Quake very, very mad.
On a serious note, I don't think it's feasible. Too much interference from other light in the same spectrum, like...say...the sun.
Didn't we hear about this yesterday? This isn't exactly new, news.
I see that you are new amongst us. Welcome. What you're referring to is what we slashdotters call a "dupe". Please report to the re-education center where you will learn many things including, but not limited to, "profit lists", and jokes about non longer in existance soviet nations.
Although the description makes it sound otherwise, the streams are available only in IPv6. What is both in IPv4 and IPv6 is the page with the information about the stream.
My disbelief from your statement came from remembering seeing airphones on my last AA domestic (NY to Seattle) flight last December. I honestly don't remember seeing any signs although, granted, I probably paid no attention.
I do think that the ability to communicate to outside the plane is a good thing on emergencies, but I'm definitely afraid of the abuse once people start being able to use their cell phones. Like you said, at those prices it'd have to be an important call for you to actually use the phone, and I enjoy that deterrent.
American Airlines decommissioned their airphones on domestic flights about two years ago.
Why don't you look at the American Airlines' onboard technology page? It clearly states the airphone and instructions on how to use it, as well as it's availability in North American and worldwide.
People can already talk on the phone while on the airplane...it's called the airphone. It's really expensive, but that's good because it keeps people from using it for anything other than important calls.
Given that there's already a way to communicate when needed, there is no reason to allow cellphones in airplaines. When the price of the calls becomes cheap, the amount of people calling their friends saying, "oh I'm over Michigan right now...I might be flying over your house, look up!" is going to become a real disruptive thing that will only serve to make my trips even more unconfortable.
Nukes give out a big flash of light which will tell you when they've hit. You should then remember to duck and cover.
The mushroom cloud should help to warn those outside the range of the flash.
The grandparent had a point, that you just didn't get. Say you're on that one computer and phone line. You need to search for information about turing machines...So you can either go to google and choose the ONE page that has information you want from the list. Or you can do this mail thing and get their selected "10 most relevant pages", and download all of them. And then, you have no guarantee that's even what you want, since somebody else selected what's relevant.
Even if what you want is among those 10, you had to tie up that phone line for at least 5x as long.
Seems to me this has nothing to do with caving to MS...if I had "45 Netscape developers for 1 Mozilla developer", and virtually all of the new features came from Mozilla, I'd figure that I'm wasting a lot of money paying all those lazy Netscape developers too.
Then again, I don't really have an understanding of the mozilla/netscape relationship, just what I heard--mozilla started when netscape opened its code, aol gives mozilla money, aol gets all the cool stuff from mozilla and reinserts it into netscape. If it's more complicated than that and I'm missing something, please feel free to explain it to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, I agree with you to the point where the human species is a pretty clear cut thing. However, you've got to admit there's more to us than there is to your cat. True, we came up with terms as sentient, intelligence, and moral senses to differentiate ourselves from other animals, but has your cat done the same to differentiate itself from the mice it chases? To differentiate itself from us? The very ability to think in this abstract manner, the ability to question what we are and what makes us different has not been encountered in any other animal on Earth. Since this ability is unique to us, we call it a "human" ability.
So what happens if we find/create other species with this "human" ability? First, how would you recognize it. Today, we interact with other humans without any contact other than information they provide. Your post for example...I haven't seen you, I don't know your gender, and I don't know if we're genetically compatible, but I have absolutely no doubt you are human. I know a human read that article, and a human thought about the sentence where they described humanity using circular terms, and a human formulated and posted a response. Can your computer post what you just did?
Your computer could post words...you give it a dictionary, you give it some rules, and it can post something on slashdot. Would it fool you that it is a human? Granted, you could think that a human posted something in order to fool you it is merely a bot, but you can't have a bot fool you that it is human...it lacks this certain "human" quality we recognize in ourselves.
What if we advanced enough to have a computer think? That's the Turing Test. What if you could converse with a machine, and it was able to fool you into thinking it is human? The machine doesn't even have to be sentient for that, some people can be fooled by some advanced bots today, but not for a sufficiently long conversation, and definitely not if the conversation has any substance, anything that would require the machine to think. But what if it could think, it it truly were sentient? What if you maintained on online friendship with this machine, exchanged pictures (the other machine would furnace you a fake one)...only to 10, 15 years later find out it is just a piece of immobile hardware sitting in a MIT lab? Would you start treating it differently? Why, if it was a good friend for 15 years?
Now let's think of cyborgs, and make it even more complicated, less clear-cut. Our technology is so advanced, this person replaces every single organ in them, except their brain. This person was born from human parents, has enough of the same genes as you (in the remaining human portion), thinks and talks like you. Regardless of that person's age though, maybe you can fuck like bunnies (this is really advanced technology), but you can't make more humans, there are only really advanced prosthetics down there. Has that person ceased to be human? What if it we take away more of your requirements? What if it doesn't look like you anymore, it has 4 legs because it's more effici
So it's a question of whether the act accomplished its goals, not a question of privacy. Thanks for answering my question. Yeah, making the process more complex, then removing nearby offices that make it necessary to complete the process obviously doesn't encourage people to vote.
Do you find that your privacy is being violated / there's a greater potential of it being violated by checking your ID rather than your signature? If so, why? Again, don't take this as a sarcastic post, it really isn't, but as I said with my post above, I can't think of a manner that your freedoms get exploited by requiring mandatory ID's, as long as they're not matched with your vote.
To my eye, the original poster is making the point that no one is passing legislation to protect IT jobs, so why should telemarketer's jobs be protected?
I *might*, that is *might* tend to believe that if he hadn't commented that we should pass legislation to protect IT jobs. Regardless, since I began with saying that I like the do-not-call list, I'd have hoped that anyone reading would have realized that I don't want to protect telemarketer's jobs, I'm just saying that them losing their jobs because their job annoys me is no different than IT professionals losing their jobs because they can't provide cheaper or better services. Before you answer that cheaper isn't an option, don't ignore the "better". Employers will spend more on you if you can do the job better than the other guy...it's cheaper in the long run.
The world needs construction laborers, landscapers, burger flippers, etc. They are just not as easy or pay as well as telemarketing.Right...the world also needs electrical / mechanical / civil / environmental engineers, managers, programmers, economists, teachers and professors, reporters, architects...I don't think I need to go on, there are many more options out there for skilled professionals, trust me. Each one of those fields have a LOT of suboptions, and some of them overlap between fields. And heck, by your reasoning, if I can't find a job that fits my skills as an electrical engineer, I can go flip burgers, right? It's just not as easy, and it pays less.
They already do this, thank you very much.And we already bitch and moan until they quit, thank you very much. I did a 5-second googling because I'm not inclined to go research for something recent, but take a look at this '96 article for example.
Alright, I hate telemarketers, I like the do-not-call list, and I'm registered in that list. However, the reasons people are coming out with to support the list bothers me.
So 2 million high school&college kids/temp workers with no invested education for their job are out of work. They can go work anywhere else that doesn't require training.
Jobs that don't require training are pretty hard to find...actually, I'd say harder to find than jobs that require education, from the perspective of someone who has looked for jobs under both categories, before and after college. Furthermore, not everyone in these so called "temp" jobs are high school kids with their life ahead of them...there are people with little or no education that are actually raising their families on that job, and then they have to put up with minimum wage as well.
Now how about the IT industry planning to fire 8% of it's US work force and move 3.3 million jobs to India and other Asian countries?I thought you said people can go find work elsewhere when an industry starts to die...oh, only when it hurts you personally? Well...that's typical of American thinking actually..."let's pass legislation to protect our jobs". The moment other nations start imposing tariffs on american products so that they can protect *their* industries and be competitive, we'll all start yelling, "don't interfere with free trade, let the market set the pace"
Uh...I'm pretty sure they pay the phone company for the calls...
Not that I think the do-not-call list is a bad thing...I'm registered. I think this is the death of an industry, but a death that I want to happen. An industry's right to profit should end the moment it interfers with my rights.
Hmm...I'm unfamiliar with the system, and mozilla seems to be having some kind of trouble clicking on the "mandatory" link, which I assume has more information. However, I don't understand how just having an ID card infringes on freedoms. Sure, it could be used to keep track of who's voting for who, but it can also be almost completely anonymous (the only information the government would know is that you voted). I mean, heck, even here in the US where everyone tends to freak out about privacy concerns you need to both register to vote, and have some sort of ID (driver's license or voter registration card) on you to vote. Then you go to the voting place, and do your stuff, which nobody else can see.
Oh, c'mon, the hubble is much more than just something for the shuttle to do...after it was fixed, the Hubble became one of the most useful tools for astronomists. Everyone wants to schedule some hubble time, and if you don't believe me, take a look at the weekly timelines all the way back from '93 'till now.
Coffee does help to get work done, and even for studying. However, if you're studying for a test on a coffee high, remember to drink some coffee before the test as well. I don't know why it works that way, but I can *always* (and I have a lot of experience with coffee, more than it's healthy to have) remember better what I've studied under the effects of caffeine if I'm again under the effects of caffeine. I seem to remember from high school psychology that there is some reason for it, but I'll let those that aren't engineers explain it.
This trend of allowing corporations to dictate law to politicians also needs to be urgently addressed, but I don't see them recommending anything in that regard...oh wait...you usually don't make recommendations that will lessen your power.
Another post in this thread had a link to an article that talked about how the airbus airplane computers are limiting what the pilot can do, preventing him from exceeding the limits of the aircraft. They demonstrate this in a simulation where the pilot of the airplane attempts to move his airplane out of the way of a local jet by turning the yoke (or joystick in those airplanes) fully to the left, which would cause the airplane to stall. The computers instead see this as wrong, and does the right thing to prevent the collision. When I first read it, it didn't entirely sound like a bad thing as long as it worked well, until I read your post and it hit me: Is this going to start teaching the pilots to just start making extreme maneuvers in any situation, because the computer will correct for it? In fact, I think removing the yoke in favor of a joystick to the side (thus making it difficult to perform delicate maneuvers) implies that that's exactly the direction this is going...have the pilot simply tell the airplane the direction, and let the computer do the work. That would of course result in horrible accidents anytime the pilot is in control of an airplane without that capability, if he simply follows the self-taught instinct in an unexpected situation.
The thing with science ficition is that they're always making the robots too intelligent for their jobs. Even if you can make a robot that can think like a human being, you don't make him a pilot...there are plenty of better things for him to be. You make the airplane be able to fly, and you program it only with what's needed to fly...we have almost all of this technology today (and I want it perfected before we take pilots out of the loop mind you it would take a perfect flying record of 10-20 years to convince me to give a computer complete control).
You make the only function of the pilot computer (which is really the airplane itself, not a humanoid robot sitting on the pilot's seat) to fly the airplane. Therefore, flying the airplane perfectly, given any conditions it encounters, is the only thing it "cares" about. It doesn't need to know that human passangers exsits, for god's sake it really shouldn't have concepts of passangers, it shouldn't be sentient in any form...but it has rules that translate to "keep this airplane intact"
Isn't that what unix users keep advocating? Keep it simple?
Do you realize how much it would piss me off if I called my credit card company to find out how much I currently owe, and I had to speak to an actual person? That person would just be typing in my number manually to a computer anyway. Actually, I don't even call, I go online and check, and it would piss me off if I had to call.
Sometime humans on the other side is better, but only when you have a complex issue that current computers can't handle, but cheap businesses are intent on trying to make it work anyway. Whenever computers get sufficiently advanced to handle more complex issues, I want to interact with them, not a dude on his first week on the job who's not even aware of the product I'm complaining about. I don't care about the chit-chat...actually, I do care, I don't want it in any way shape or form. I want my problem getting solved as fast as possible.
"Thank you for calling Microsoft. How are you today, sir?"
"How the hell do you think I am? I'm being forced to speak to you to re-activate my damn windows XP machine. Why the HELL can't I just do it by the net like the first time? Just get my shit working again, and stop asking me stupid questions"
In fact, a lot of the process in learning how to fly involves fighting human instinct. When you're learning about stalls for example, as soon as you take the airplane to a stall it starts dropping, and your first instinct is to pull back on the yoke to get it to go back up. Of course, your instructor will have by then pounded into your head to actually drop the nose in order to gain back speed and get out of the stall, but the first few times your response time is always slow because you have to think against your natural instinct.
People walking past the connection beams and getting the laser light aimed at their eye. Big lawsuits here.
If it gets really popular, you get to see all of the beams of light around you everywhere, thus creating a new game for children where they walk to places trying to dodge or jump over the lights like in a movie where a thief is trying to get a well protected diamond or something. That would be the good part, as the people who disregard the beams would break the connection making anyone playing online Quake very, very mad.
On a serious note, I don't think it's feasible. Too much interference from other light in the same spectrum, like...say...the sun.
Never use the preview button, and stay away from goatse links
I see that you are new amongst us. Welcome. What you're referring to is what we slashdotters call a "dupe". Please report to the re-education center where you will learn many things including, but not limited to, "profit lists", and jokes about non longer in existance soviet nations.
Although the description makes it sound otherwise, the streams are available only in IPv6. What is both in IPv4 and IPv6 is the page with the information about the stream.
My disbelief from your statement came from remembering seeing airphones on my last AA domestic (NY to Seattle) flight last December. I honestly don't remember seeing any signs although, granted, I probably paid no attention.
I do think that the ability to communicate to outside the plane is a good thing on emergencies, but I'm definitely afraid of the abuse once people start being able to use their cell phones. Like you said, at those prices it'd have to be an important call for you to actually use the phone, and I enjoy that deterrent.
Why don't you look at the American Airlines' onboard technology page? It clearly states the airphone and instructions on how to use it, as well as it's availability in North American and worldwide.
Given that there's already a way to communicate when needed, there is no reason to allow cellphones in airplaines. When the price of the calls becomes cheap, the amount of people calling their friends saying, "oh I'm over Michigan right now...I might be flying over your house, look up!" is going to become a real disruptive thing that will only serve to make my trips even more unconfortable.
Sorry...The promotion applies only to MSN users, not aolers
Nukes give out a big flash of light which will tell you when they've hit. You should then remember to duck and cover. The mushroom cloud should help to warn those outside the range of the flash.
Even if what you want is among those 10, you had to tie up that phone line for at least 5x as long.
Then again, I don't really have an understanding of the mozilla/netscape relationship, just what I heard--mozilla started when netscape opened its code, aol gives mozilla money, aol gets all the cool stuff from mozilla and reinserts it into netscape. If it's more complicated than that and I'm missing something, please feel free to explain it to me.