No, not even sort of. There actually is a metric arse ton of idle fiber between Australia, Asia, and other parts of the world. Nobody is clamouring to lay more because it's actually not needed, at least not any time soon.
The figures they use are on the anal side of conservative for fiber, and probably only true of satellite if their hands are utterly tied - it's expensive, they don't pay for what they aren't using, so no guarantee it'll be available when it's suddenly needed. The telcos are rather secretive when it comes to the specifics of their infrastructure at the best of times, they do have quite a bit more than what they claim. (Ex DSD drone, this kind of thing was important to my work for a while)
Classified information doesn't start life in a bubble.
While your office might stick internet accessible computers in a different room away from everything else, there are other areas where such delineation is at odds with the mission.
The internet is absolutely connected to classified systems, just not using 'your' definition of connected, but connected they are.
Not true good man, not true at all. The 'internet' is only, like, one of the biggest intelligence sources ever. When sticking ones passive little fingers in the data stream to make a bit for bit copy, those same fingers can and do get burned at times. The air gap just helps to keep it all from flowing back out to the newspapers. This air-gap doesn't start at 'secret', it starts at the fence line.
Intellink has been around for a lot of years now, I'm not sure how porn would go on that network though:-)
Speaking of Generals, at one point a girl in the room next to me (navy accommodation) was secretary to the Australian chief of the defence force (the head dude) - the internet was pretty new back then and he had his own pool of modems for remote access. This access also extended to the aforementioned secretary whenever the lines were not in use. Lets just say that it didn't take very long for fingers to get slapped on the quiet.
You do realize just how staggeringly large the public communications infrastructure is don't you? Not even the multi-billion dollar budgets of all the worlds 3 letter agencies combined could put a tiny dent in those kinds of data rates.
Slaving a collection system to a single pipe is one thing, but what does it get you? You still have to break it down to component parts - voice or fax in the clear is largely a thing of the past, an expensive waste of bandwidth for the telco, now everything is buried a few multiplexers deep, is compressed, or is just doing esoteric crap like using VOIP to send a v.26 modem across the wire plugged up to the stops with ancient teletype.
I guess my point is that hard drive space is finite, and even with a comparatively small data stream of only a couple of Mbps, one could easily envisage such a transmission being able to saturate a serious amount of hardware through the sheer variety of geeky things that people can do just for the hell of it.
Echelon is a pretty old buzz word that has not been used by anyone within the UKUSA setup for at least 20 years now, but your sig still serves the greater purpose none the less.
So long as ones name isn't ~in~ any of the end product reports, then sure, the bark is worse than the bite:-)
--- Disgruntled former Defence Signals Directorate drone, no longer willing to exchange secrets for beer or carbonated diet beverage.
Think some misguided youth dropping a brick off a bridge at cars doing highway speeds. It can and does kill people, it can and does cause significant damage to vehicles.
Try hitting a dog at a hundred miles per hour on a motorbike. I hit one 4 months ago at half that speed - outlook - not so good for either of us.
Michael Malone personally banned me from iinet after I said I didn't want his spam sent to my iinet email address any longer. According to him I was the only one out of his entire customer base who complained about the advertising. He even drove up country to come visit me at my home because, in his words, I was 'causing them a lot of costly problems' (In the form of a simple 'opt-in' switch to continue receiving their corporate propaganda)
Meh, I call bullshit to this little pony show video anyway. The ISP's will cry a river saying it'll never work, the government will say 'ok, we'll pay for it then you frigging cry babies.'
The end result will be the federal government shoving in a few Sun boxes at public expense in various little choke points across the country, the ISP's keep their mouths shut about it all, and ASIO suddenly has a lot less need for their employees to be chained to federal crime authority as they run around swinging warrants and subpoenas - DSD will then recall all their worker drones from the ASIO basement, and life goes on. New overlord laws are set in motion never to be repealed, government gets to spy on its populous and live happily ever after.
Speaking of handy, I purged Alsa the other day, after hitting [Y] I saw the fine print informing me that it would also be removing two rarely used and completely insignificant packages - those being GDM and Ubuntu-Desktop. Very smart people, very smart!
You are correct, but you are also very wrong about where and when all of this started.
The Australian public were just as slow to pick up on the 'internet' as were the decision makers within government. Beyond the geeks, this whole internet thing just wasn't on the RADAR until the mid 90's. That left a lot of opportunity on both sides of the fence for a handful of people to grab the ball and run with it.
Forgetting the general public for a little bit: Government: By around 2000, mid level management was just starting to seriously catch on, the geeks below had been screaming about porn, mp3's, VOIP, and you know, foreign countries using it for classified crap for the last 10 years. These same managers saw a fine opportunity to steal the glory, and so they did. Ideas and new potentials were championed up the chain, the message back down was 'yup, fucking A, do it!'
One thing you have to realise is that when you take money out of the equation, all you are left with is an incentive to make a bigger impression than the next idiot so you can get promoted, some more perks, better parking spots, a little licking from the CO, whatever gets you up in the morning.
Some of our Army boys head off to quiet the odd little skirmish here and there around the globe, a few of their calls home to mum, dad, the wife, the girlfriend, the mistress, the drug dealer, the 'whoever'. People are wondering and asking questions, a few little inquiries and royal commissions later the public is soothed, behind the scenes there is back petting and self congratulations all round, job well done boys, see you on the weekend for the barbie?
What do you end up with internally? You end up with a taste for wanting to know more, to twist legal definitions. Bending rules to within a hair of snapping becomes common place. All of this just so you can know more than what you did yesterday, and today's twist becomes tomorrows normal.
Also it really is 'just a job' - why would the average worker drone care? The rationale is 'hell, they already know everything about me, so I have nothing to hide' - and the job gets done, day in day out.
Getting back to the General public: You have a lot of cool systems in government, lots of tech developed by some very smart people, and a bunch of other agencies looking at what you do and thinking that stuff would be pretty cool to stick in their basements too. Some back room dealing, some paperwork, a little training, some agency cross pollination, spread the potential and joy to everyone.
So you end up with the situation we have today. Government wants to 'protect the children' - anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that this is not quite on the level, something bigger and nastier is lurking beneath. Absolutely nobody will be able to opt out because everyone that matters has convinced themselves that it is good, that it is needed.
Well, colour me utterly unsurprised. I left for foreign soil a bunch of years ago now. Yah yah, wave the flag, patriotism and all that crap, I did my time and I'm keeping my mouth shut. I signed the delta brief, I signed again to say I'd keep my mouth shut until I die too. And I will. What I see today is not the result of people voting in new legislation, nor is it an apathetic population - it's a bunch of people already in the system saying to the new kid on the block "Look what we can do? Terrorism, save the children, FUD, blah blah blah, so on and so forth, you want in?" - and the response is "You can do that?" - well, sure, we can do it, let us show you how for the next 4 years mmokay.
That can't be true at all, it'd be like saying stargate is pure make believe and not the fine set of documentaries that it is. Next you'll be saying HEROS isn't real either. What's the world coming to! People don't even believe photographs any more!
I don't know about this particular scientist, though I do know that in some of the more secret 3 letter agencies (and various other slightly longer acronyms) that I worked for in Australia, we had a few black and white rules and regulations on the subject. It always amused me that one of those rules made it 'forbidden' to actually talk / write / comment about UFO's. I often wondered what evolution took place that would actually get those policies enacted in the first place. Was it some twisted idiot like myself messing around, or was it for slightly more serious reasons? I guess I'll never know.
That said, I used to bring the subject up pretty much as a matter of routine in some very amusing places. At least they were amusing to me. Before I was employed by government, one of the psychs at the interview asked me why I wanted to have a job in this particular category. I told him straight up: "I want to find out if UFO's exist" - he giggled like a school girl and assumed I was making a joke, scribbled some notes, and I got the job.
For a short while I got mixed up with a few contacts at DSTO, South Australia (Adelaide) who had access to a couple of bits of interesting gear (of the human manufactured kind) - in a briefing about it all one time, the perfect opportunity arose for another of my socially inappropriate remarks and I blurted out "So, you also take crashed UFO's there too?"
The answer was interesting, not quite what I was expecting, but lets just say, even at those levels there is "No Conspiracy"
I'm as anti-censorship as they come, but some things probably do need to be kept quiet lest you piss off someone that can actually hurt you.
Lets put it this way: Through your binoculars you see test platforms and foreign planes flying around area 51, rednecks see UFO's, through our telescopes we see more, or perhaps more frequently, a lot less of much the same thing over various parts of our red dirt. We have our own supply of locally produced rednecks too.
Glorietta: I'm inclined to believe numerous independent investigative bodies as opposed to anyone with a vested interest 'buying' their own outcome, or, and absolutely no offence to your good wife sir, gut feelings.
Davao had a bomb go off in a waiting shed away from the airport, sadly it killed 22 people. Hard to say if it was an act of terrorism or a targeted hit on someone waiting for an arrival.
I don't disagree that there are a handful of violent extremists in this country, resorting to terrorism at times, though what I do disagree with is portraying this country as a place rife with terrorism, it just isn't so. It's a peaceful country on the whole.
Kidnappings, the reason people do this is because 'it actually does pay off' - friends, family, governments, businesses, they are all inclined to pay the ransom, whatever that may be.
Now, all of that said, if I ever met you, I'd sit down for a beer and we could hash this out:-) I'm sure my 'vision' isn't entirely accurate, it's just based on what I read, how I travel, and trying to understand the culture. I've been at it near on 10 years I guess, and I'm still barely scratching the surface.
PH is my adopted home as well, though don't be so quick to make a mountain in the form of 'terrorism' when most (probably all) of what you see here is a response to corruption, theft, and frustration - i.e. Payback.
Mall bombings? What mall bombings? Glorietta was a methane explosion, a preventable accident. Ayala land, the owners, hired their own 'experts' who said it was C-4. (Probably for insurance reasons) Nobody else, including local and foreign experts, found any traces or indication of anything other than an accident due to sloppy ventilation.
I can't think of any other bombings post 2001 that were not targeted at key individuals, or just plain old personal vendetta.
The Philippines doesn't have a terrorist problem, it has corruption fleeced with opportunistic greed issues going on. Instances of 'bad things' are so rare that your odds of getting struck by lightning are far better.
Possibly bad form to reply to myself, but meh... I went through the process of restarting one of my ancient profiles just now - I suspect Yahoo have made a few changes since the story hit the tubes. Not everything is blanked out, in fact most details were resurrected just fine. All my pictures and contacts are still there, though I had to go through a couple of simple mouse clicks to make it happen.
The only people who will be really annoyed by this are those that are bitching about the loss of all their split personalities (aliases) - well not exactly, they can keep the multiple names, just that Yahoo is going to point back to a single profile and link all the aliases to that one profile. This will clean up all the crazies who roll out a new persona with every new boy/girlfriend, bad hair day, full moon, EMO issue, and so on and so forth.
Probably just a housekeeping strategy internally at yahoo - it'd save them a few bucks on hard drive space at the very least. I guess for anyone who really wants a bunch of different profiles, they can always create another account. They are free after all.
The only thing that seems to have visibly changed is http://profiles.yahoo.com/ - this died a quiet death years ago anyway, nobody actually used it for anything serious. It was always nothing more than a place to stick a couple of pictures and a few fields for the odd comment or two. http://360.yahoo.com/ is far more popular and provides services akin to actual 'social networking' - it makes for a better 'profile' anyway.
Either way this new system is a step up from what it used to be, though yes, a tad annoying in the sense that they just blanked everything out, but I probably would have done the same, It was just an incoherent disjointed mess. The user experience was horrid right from the beginning.
Well, lets diss the puny little accelerometer then and replace it with a triple ring laser gyro. It'll be accurate to a couple of centimetres for every thousand or so kilometres that you push it on the table. For those unhappy about this level of inaccuracy you could also link it in with GPS and perhaps your own personal DGPRS beacon and so forth to keep the pointer where it damn well needs to be.:-)
I've seen a lot of posts from you, I guess it's your sig that I remember. Anyway, you're pretty hard line, I'd consider you as someone at the extremities on most topics. Don't be offended though, it's just an observation gleaned from a few hundred lines of text and subject to stereotype and various inaccuracies.
I'm happy you are all for censorship (which is really to say that I don't care either way), and I'll defend your right to do whatever you please so long as it doesn't affect me. If you want to censor my own inane disgruntled rantings as a former secret 3 letter agency worker drone, then I'll be more than happy to censor your.... (insert whatever it is you hold most dearly)
If you want to protect me from the ogrish of the world, don't bother. I don't need it. I'm big enough to handle my own affairs and sane enough to give my baby girl a happy and balanced childhood filled with pony's, daffodils, geek, and a sense of place and purpose within society. I can do this without the help of the government, so thanks anyway, but censorship is not for me.
Certainly they may be jumping for joy. Though there is more to it than just wiring an electrode to a muscle before the fat lady can sing again.
A functional limb without any sense of its location in relation to the body is a problem, one without feeling is also a problem. Did they think about electrodes for everything else the nervous system is responsible for too?
Not a screen as such, but I bought a logitec newtouch split keyboard with a touch pad in 1997, this handled multi-touch just fine - three fingers to bring up the right mouse menu, two for middle.
Ancient tech.
I was using flat panel plasma displays in the military with multi-touch somewhere around 1993.
In the Pegasus galaxy touch screens improve worker drone productivity by about a billion times. They allow for inordinately complicated physics and math problems to be solved in around three to four hard and rapid taps on the screen. Who wouldn't want that?
Slashdot Mirror
Which part of 'making more money' don't you understand?
No, not even sort of. There actually is a metric arse ton of idle fiber between Australia, Asia, and other parts of the world. Nobody is clamouring to lay more because it's actually not needed, at least not any time soon.
This page (below) gives a total fiber capacity of four terabits per second, and 4Gbps via satellite to the outside world.
http://www.business.nsw.gov.au/investment/infrastructure/
The figures they use are on the anal side of conservative for fiber, and probably only true of satellite if their hands are utterly tied - it's expensive, they don't pay for what they aren't using, so no guarantee it'll be available when it's suddenly needed. The telcos are rather secretive when it comes to the specifics of their infrastructure at the best of times, they do have quite a bit more than what they claim. (Ex DSD drone, this kind of thing was important to my work for a while)
Classified information doesn't start life in a bubble.
While your office might stick internet accessible computers in a different room away from everything else, there are other areas where such delineation is at odds with the mission.
The internet is absolutely connected to classified systems, just not using 'your' definition of connected, but connected they are.
Not true good man, not true at all. The 'internet' is only, like, one of the biggest intelligence sources ever. When sticking ones passive little fingers in the data stream to make a bit for bit copy, those same fingers can and do get burned at times. The air gap just helps to keep it all from flowing back out to the newspapers. This air-gap doesn't start at 'secret', it starts at the fence line.
Intellink has been around for a lot of years now, I'm not sure how porn would go on that network though :-)
Speaking of Generals, at one point a girl in the room next to me (navy accommodation) was secretary to the Australian chief of the defence force (the head dude) - the internet was pretty new back then and he had his own pool of modems for remote access. This access also extended to the aforementioned secretary whenever the lines were not in use. Lets just say that it didn't take very long for fingers to get slapped on the quiet.
You do realize just how staggeringly large the public communications infrastructure is don't you? Not even the multi-billion dollar budgets of all the worlds 3 letter agencies combined could put a tiny dent in those kinds of data rates.
Slaving a collection system to a single pipe is one thing, but what does it get you? You still have to break it down to component parts - voice or fax in the clear is largely a thing of the past, an expensive waste of bandwidth for the telco, now everything is buried a few multiplexers deep, is compressed, or is just doing esoteric crap like using VOIP to send a v.26 modem across the wire plugged up to the stops with ancient teletype.
I guess my point is that hard drive space is finite, and even with a comparatively small data stream of only a couple of Mbps, one could easily envisage such a transmission being able to saturate a serious amount of hardware through the sheer variety of geeky things that people can do just for the hell of it.
Add encryption in to that mix...
Echelon is a pretty old buzz word that has not been used by anyone within the UKUSA setup for at least 20 years now, but your sig still serves the greater purpose none the less.
So long as ones name isn't ~in~ any of the end product reports, then sure, the bark is worse than the bite :-)
---
Disgruntled former Defence Signals Directorate drone, no longer willing to exchange secrets for beer or carbonated diet beverage.
I'm sure by the time 256 cores is the 'norm' on grandma's desktop, Windows 7 will be old news :-)
Think some misguided youth dropping a brick off a bridge at cars doing highway speeds. It can and does kill people, it can and does cause significant damage to vehicles.
Try hitting a dog at a hundred miles per hour on a motorbike. I hit one 4 months ago at half that speed - outlook - not so good for either of us.
Michael Malone personally banned me from iinet after I said I didn't want his spam sent to my iinet email address any longer. According to him I was the only one out of his entire customer base who complained about the advertising. He even drove up country to come visit me at my home because, in his words, I was 'causing them a lot of costly problems' (In the form of a simple 'opt-in' switch to continue receiving their corporate propaganda)
Meh, I call bullshit to this little pony show video anyway. The ISP's will cry a river saying it'll never work, the government will say 'ok, we'll pay for it then you frigging cry babies.'
The end result will be the federal government shoving in a few Sun boxes at public expense in various little choke points across the country, the ISP's keep their mouths shut about it all, and ASIO suddenly has a lot less need for their employees to be chained to federal crime authority as they run around swinging warrants and subpoenas - DSD will then recall all their worker drones from the ASIO basement, and life goes on. New overlord laws are set in motion never to be repealed, government gets to spy on its populous and live happily ever after.
I no longer live in Australia.
Speaking of handy, I purged Alsa the other day, after hitting [Y] I saw the fine print informing me that it would also be removing two rarely used and completely insignificant packages - those being GDM and Ubuntu-Desktop. Very smart people, very smart!
You are correct, but you are also very wrong about where and when all of this started.
The Australian public were just as slow to pick up on the 'internet' as were the decision makers within government. Beyond the geeks, this whole internet thing just wasn't on the RADAR until the mid 90's. That left a lot of opportunity on both sides of the fence for a handful of people to grab the ball and run with it.
Forgetting the general public for a little bit: Government: By around 2000, mid level management was just starting to seriously catch on, the geeks below had been screaming about porn, mp3's, VOIP, and you know, foreign countries using it for classified crap for the last 10 years. These same managers saw a fine opportunity to steal the glory, and so they did. Ideas and new potentials were championed up the chain, the message back down was 'yup, fucking A, do it!'
One thing you have to realise is that when you take money out of the equation, all you are left with is an incentive to make a bigger impression than the next idiot so you can get promoted, some more perks, better parking spots, a little licking from the CO, whatever gets you up in the morning.
Some of our Army boys head off to quiet the odd little skirmish here and there around the globe, a few of their calls home to mum, dad, the wife, the girlfriend, the mistress, the drug dealer, the 'whoever'. People are wondering and asking questions, a few little inquiries and royal commissions later the public is soothed, behind the scenes there is back petting and self congratulations all round, job well done boys, see you on the weekend for the barbie?
What do you end up with internally? You end up with a taste for wanting to know more, to twist legal definitions. Bending rules to within a hair of snapping becomes common place. All of this just so you can know more than what you did yesterday, and today's twist becomes tomorrows normal.
Also it really is 'just a job' - why would the average worker drone care? The rationale is 'hell, they already know everything about me, so I have nothing to hide' - and the job gets done, day in day out.
Getting back to the General public: You have a lot of cool systems in government, lots of tech developed by some very smart people, and a bunch of other agencies looking at what you do and thinking that stuff would be pretty cool to stick in their basements too. Some back room dealing, some paperwork, a little training, some agency cross pollination, spread the potential and joy to everyone.
So you end up with the situation we have today. Government wants to 'protect the children' - anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that this is not quite on the level, something bigger and nastier is lurking beneath. Absolutely nobody will be able to opt out because everyone that matters has convinced themselves that it is good, that it is needed.
Well, colour me utterly unsurprised. I left for foreign soil a bunch of years ago now. Yah yah, wave the flag, patriotism and all that crap, I did my time and I'm keeping my mouth shut. I signed the delta brief, I signed again to say I'd keep my mouth shut until I die too. And I will. What I see today is not the result of people voting in new legislation, nor is it an apathetic population - it's a bunch of people already in the system saying to the new kid on the block "Look what we can do? Terrorism, save the children, FUD, blah blah blah, so on and so forth, you want in?" - and the response is "You can do that?" - well, sure, we can do it, let us show you how for the next 4 years mmokay.
That can't be true at all, it'd be like saying stargate is pure make believe and not the fine set of documentaries that it is. Next you'll be saying HEROS isn't real either. What's the world coming to! People don't even believe photographs any more!
I don't know about this particular scientist, though I do know that in some of the more secret 3 letter agencies (and various other slightly longer acronyms) that I worked for in Australia, we had a few black and white rules and regulations on the subject. It always amused me that one of those rules made it 'forbidden' to actually talk / write / comment about UFO's. I often wondered what evolution took place that would actually get those policies enacted in the first place. Was it some twisted idiot like myself messing around, or was it for slightly more serious reasons? I guess I'll never know.
That said, I used to bring the subject up pretty much as a matter of routine in some very amusing places. At least they were amusing to me. Before I was employed by government, one of the psychs at the interview asked me why I wanted to have a job in this particular category. I told him straight up: "I want to find out if UFO's exist" - he giggled like a school girl and assumed I was making a joke, scribbled some notes, and I got the job.
For a short while I got mixed up with a few contacts at DSTO, South Australia (Adelaide) who had access to a couple of bits of interesting gear (of the human manufactured kind) - in a briefing about it all one time, the perfect opportunity arose for another of my socially inappropriate remarks and I blurted out "So, you also take crashed UFO's there too?"
The answer was interesting, not quite what I was expecting, but lets just say, even at those levels there is "No Conspiracy"
I'm as anti-censorship as they come, but some things probably do need to be kept quiet lest you piss off someone that can actually hurt you.
Lets put it this way:
Through your binoculars you see test platforms and foreign planes flying around area 51, rednecks see UFO's, through our telescopes we see more, or perhaps more frequently, a lot less of much the same thing over various parts of our red dirt. We have our own supply of locally produced rednecks too.
Glorietta: I'm inclined to believe numerous independent investigative bodies as opposed to anyone with a vested interest 'buying' their own outcome, or, and absolutely no offence to your good wife sir, gut feelings.
Davao had a bomb go off in a waiting shed away from the airport, sadly it killed 22 people. Hard to say if it was an act of terrorism or a targeted hit on someone waiting for an arrival.
I don't disagree that there are a handful of violent extremists in this country, resorting to terrorism at times, though what I do disagree with is portraying this country as a place rife with terrorism, it just isn't so. It's a peaceful country on the whole.
Kidnappings, the reason people do this is because 'it actually does pay off' - friends, family, governments, businesses, they are all inclined to pay the ransom, whatever that may be.
Now, all of that said, if I ever met you, I'd sit down for a beer and we could hash this out :-) I'm sure my 'vision' isn't entirely accurate, it's just based on what I read, how I travel, and trying to understand the culture. I've been at it near on 10 years I guess, and I'm still barely scratching the surface.
PH is my adopted home as well, though don't be so quick to make a mountain in the form of 'terrorism' when most (probably all) of what you see here is a response to corruption, theft, and frustration - i.e. Payback.
Mall bombings? What mall bombings? Glorietta was a methane explosion, a preventable accident. Ayala land, the owners, hired their own 'experts' who said it was C-4. (Probably for insurance reasons) Nobody else, including local and foreign experts, found any traces or indication of anything other than an accident due to sloppy ventilation.
I can't think of any other bombings post 2001 that were not targeted at key individuals, or just plain old personal vendetta.
The Philippines doesn't have a terrorist problem, it has corruption fleeced with opportunistic greed issues going on. Instances of 'bad things' are so rare that your odds of getting struck by lightning are far better.
Possibly bad form to reply to myself, but meh... I went through the process of restarting one of my ancient profiles just now - I suspect Yahoo have made a few changes since the story hit the tubes. Not everything is blanked out, in fact most details were resurrected just fine. All my pictures and contacts are still there, though I had to go through a couple of simple mouse clicks to make it happen.
The only people who will be really annoyed by this are those that are bitching about the loss of all their split personalities (aliases) - well not exactly, they can keep the multiple names, just that Yahoo is going to point back to a single profile and link all the aliases to that one profile. This will clean up all the crazies who roll out a new persona with every new boy/girlfriend, bad hair day, full moon, EMO issue, and so on and so forth.
Probably just a housekeeping strategy internally at yahoo - it'd save them a few bucks on hard drive space at the very least. I guess for anyone who really wants a bunch of different profiles, they can always create another account. They are free after all.
Yahoo is popular yes, but profiles.yahoo.com, not so much.
The only thing that seems to have visibly changed is http://profiles.yahoo.com/ - this died a quiet death years ago anyway, nobody actually used it for anything serious. It was always nothing more than a place to stick a couple of pictures and a few fields for the odd comment or two. http://360.yahoo.com/ is far more popular and provides services akin to actual 'social networking' - it makes for a better 'profile' anyway.
Either way this new system is a step up from what it used to be, though yes, a tad annoying in the sense that they just blanked everything out, but I probably would have done the same, It was just an incoherent disjointed mess. The user experience was horrid right from the beginning.
Well, lets diss the puny little accelerometer then and replace it with a triple ring laser gyro. It'll be accurate to a couple of centimetres for every thousand or so kilometres that you push it on the table. For those unhappy about this level of inaccuracy you could also link it in with GPS and perhaps your own personal DGPRS beacon and so forth to keep the pointer where it damn well needs to be. :-)
I've seen a lot of posts from you, I guess it's your sig that I remember. Anyway, you're pretty hard line, I'd consider you as someone at the extremities on most topics. Don't be offended though, it's just an observation gleaned from a few hundred lines of text and subject to stereotype and various inaccuracies.
I'm happy you are all for censorship (which is really to say that I don't care either way), and I'll defend your right to do whatever you please so long as it doesn't affect me. If you want to censor my own inane disgruntled rantings as a former secret 3 letter agency worker drone, then I'll be more than happy to censor your.... (insert whatever it is you hold most dearly)
If you want to protect me from the ogrish of the world, don't bother. I don't need it. I'm big enough to handle my own affairs and sane enough to give my baby girl a happy and balanced childhood filled with pony's, daffodils, geek, and a sense of place and purpose within society. I can do this without the help of the government, so thanks anyway, but censorship is not for me.
Certainly they may be jumping for joy. Though there is more to it than just wiring an electrode to a muscle before the fat lady can sing again.
A functional limb without any sense of its location in relation to the body is a problem, one without feeling is also a problem. Did they think about electrodes for everything else the nervous system is responsible for too?
Not a screen as such, but I bought a logitec newtouch split keyboard with a touch pad in 1997, this handled multi-touch just fine - three fingers to bring up the right mouse menu, two for middle.
Ancient tech.
I was using flat panel plasma displays in the military with multi-touch somewhere around 1993.
In the Pegasus galaxy touch screens improve worker drone productivity by about a billion times. They allow for inordinately complicated physics and math problems to be solved in around three to four hard and rapid taps on the screen. Who wouldn't want that?
Even easier and much less prone to scratching the paint work, just grab and hold the door as you step out, current harmlessly disappears, no zap.