These little planes might be useful in disaster situations, when ordinary comms are down. Wi-Fi capability has already been crammed into the SD card form factor. Seems likely that a very light weight Wi-Fi access point could be constructed as well. With that, how many of these planes would need to be launched to provide a communications network over an area wrecked by an earthquake or a flood?
Yah, but in Minority Report at least, the guy using it didn't sit around all day in front of the display. He waved his arms for a while then he went running out to a helicopter, rappelled out of a helicopter, kicked in doors, and laid implacable hands upon potential murderers. In other words the exercise he did in front of the screen was just an extension of the active lifestyle he already had. In that context, having a more active mode of interaction with a computer makes sense and might even be more appealing to SWAT/commando types who enjoy physical activity.
Yah, but at least there can be accountability with weapons like these. This is preferable to the agony ray that has no lasting physical effects, allowing cops/soldiers to plausibly deny using it to make some poor saps dance and scream for their amusement. What I'm worried about is a handheld version of that.
According to McAfee, which selected five participants from each of 10 countries for the S.P.A.M. experiment, the five U.S. participants received the most spam: 23,233 messages over the course of the month.
That's about 50,000 messages shy of what I get every month without replying to spam. Just use the same address on the net for 15 years and you too can bask in the faux adoration that two thousand five hundred spam messages a day can bring.
That test subject had a lot of stupidity. No way is my brain getting zapped.
There, I fixed that sentence for you. What I wondered was what else these guys were zapping while they were finding the subject's Broca area. Maybe they convinced him it was safe, but they'd have to do a whole lot of talking to convince me.
Maybe it's time PC's got bigger. Heat dissipation would be a much easier problem to solve if the computer was the size of my parents's RCA console stereo. And the thing would look much nicer in the family room.
Maybe it's not work-related stress, maybe it's guilt. Guilt that's he's making a lot of money from merely regurgitating news about people who are actually doing productive work.
Or maybe it's fear, the fear of a man soaring over a city a year and a day after he first learned that he could fly. Fear that the ability will disappear as mysteriously as it appeared, and without warning he will plummet to his death.
My Maxtor drives have lasted the longest so far. No failures across four drives with ages up to 52 months. LaCie is my "never again" brand, with a 100% failure rate across 6 drives in 24 months. Every drive manufacturer seems to go through bad patches where their product just sucks for a while. Buy and pray, basically, because who's good today may suck tomorrow.
They may be aware of Hawking radiation but may be concerned that Hawking might be wrong about it. I'd just as soon have his theory of black hole evaporation tested someplace else.
I hate to say it but this isn't 1977. Your typical Trek fan has been gorged to satiety on Star Trek TV and movies. And considering the last efforts, the execrable "Nemesis" and TV's "Enterprise", nausea might be a better word for it than satiety. The cast is irrelevant at this point. Trek must be allowed to die instead of continuing in this horrible parody of life.
Maybe I'm an a**hole but I can't help but feel that these spammers deserve such treatment. They are parasites on society, preying on the mundanes, annoying the rest while clogging the pipes to the detriment of legit users of the WWW. They are scum and they deserve to go down.
So it's the death penalty for sending out unwanted e-mail now? I thought Larry Niven's idea of society accepting capital punishment for minor crimes was laughable, but maybe he wasn't so far off the mark.
Er, this isn't a weapon peace officers would turn on civilians, surely; this is a weapon of war. If you fired this thing into a crowd, the front row of people would collapse in agony and probably be immediately trampled by everyone else who only took a partial strike from the agony beam. I doubt if the results of using this thing would be any less lethal to a crowd than opening up with automatic weapons. Injury, rising panic, chaos.
You'd have a good point if it were a whole song. But a ringtone isn't. They're clips, and the use of short excerpts of copyrighted works are generally considered to be fair use (and I believe are legally protected as such in many countries).
Case law is mixed on this, however. NWA lost in Bridgeport v. Dimension even though the sample was modified until it was unrecognizable (and the original sample wasn't what anyone would call melodic or even recognizably music anyway).
Ok, call me ignorant, stupid, dumb, whatever. But why, whenever someone makes a mistake or fucks up is the very first thought (or post in this matter) always down the line of lawsuits, cash, court, lawyers etc?
Because this is the only way to consistently get the bureaucracies of large organizations to take you seriously. If you're dealing with a person, one on one, it is worthwhile to treat them as a fellow human being. It is a mistake to treat a bureaucracy this way. It's best to treat a bureaucracy the way a porcupine treats a lion: Avoid it if you can, inflict as much pain as possible if you cannot.
A large organization's lifeblood is money and its air supply is the continued goodwill of the general public. Threaten these and you will have its undivided attention. All else is the self-involved braying of an ass.
IANAL, but there is a legal principle called laches which allows you to defend yourself against civil proceedings if the plaintiff has sat on his rights for too long. If it can be shown that this service has existed and Microsoft was aware, they can't stop it anymore.
That's great. And there is also a financial procedure called bankruptcy which allows you to defend yourself against your creditors just before you've expended all your assets on legal fees. You'll need it after you've battled Microsoft in court for a few years.
Chips are eventually going to require cryo-like gear to keep it from roasting. We're not going to have that kind of equipment in our homes so it'll be back to time-sharing to run whatever CPU chewing bloatware we're running by then.
Slashdot Mirror
These little planes might be useful in disaster situations, when ordinary comms are down. Wi-Fi capability has already been crammed into the SD card form factor. Seems likely that a very light weight Wi-Fi access point could be constructed as well. With that, how many of these planes would need to be launched to provide a communications network over an area wrecked by an earthquake or a flood?
Yah, but in Minority Report at least, the guy using it didn't sit around all day in front of the display. He waved his arms for a while then he went running out to a helicopter, rappelled out of a helicopter, kicked in doors, and laid implacable hands upon potential murderers. In other words the exercise he did in front of the screen was just an extension of the active lifestyle he already had. In that context, having a more active mode of interaction with a computer makes sense and might even be more appealing to SWAT/commando types who enjoy physical activity.
Yah, but at least there can be accountability with weapons like these. This is preferable to the agony ray that has no lasting physical effects, allowing cops/soldiers to plausibly deny using it to make some poor saps dance and scream for their amusement. What I'm worried about is a handheld version of that.
That's about 50,000 messages shy of what I get every month without replying to spam. Just use the same address on the net for 15 years and you too can bask in the faux adoration that two thousand five hundred spam messages a day can bring.
There, I fixed that sentence for you. What I wondered was what else these guys were zapping while they were finding the subject's Broca area. Maybe they convinced him it was safe, but they'd have to do a whole lot of talking to convince me.
... better than Sony's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5OxP1R_KsQ
Maybe it's time PC's got bigger. Heat dissipation would be a much easier problem to solve if the computer was the size of my parents's RCA console stereo. And the thing would look much nicer in the family room.
Or maybe it's fear, the fear of a man soaring over a city a year and a day after he first learned that he could fly. Fear that the ability will disappear as mysteriously as it appeared, and without warning he will plummet to his death.
My Maxtor drives have lasted the longest so far. No failures across four drives with ages up to 52 months. LaCie is my "never again" brand, with a 100% failure rate across 6 drives in 24 months. Every drive manufacturer seems to go through bad patches where their product just sucks for a while. Buy and pray, basically, because who's good today may suck tomorrow.
They may be aware of Hawking radiation but may be concerned that Hawking might be wrong about it. I'd just as soon have his theory of black hole evaporation tested someplace else.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0M21_zCo6UM
Whoosh.
s/Stephen Hawking/Christopher Reeve/ Some still haven't given up on Reeve.
Plenty of open positions at the moment.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/snapshot/ And I'm sure I saw a similar, but less well documented, project before this one.
I hate to say it but this isn't 1977. Your typical Trek fan has been gorged to satiety on Star Trek TV and movies. And considering the last efforts, the execrable "Nemesis" and TV's "Enterprise", nausea might be a better word for it than satiety. The cast is irrelevant at this point. Trek must be allowed to die instead of continuing in this horrible parody of life.
So it's the death penalty for sending out unwanted e-mail now? I thought Larry Niven's idea of society accepting capital punishment for minor crimes was laughable, but maybe he wasn't so far off the mark.
Er, this isn't a weapon peace officers would turn on civilians, surely; this is a weapon of war. If you fired this thing into a crowd, the front row of people would collapse in agony and probably be immediately trampled by everyone else who only took a partial strike from the agony beam. I doubt if the results of using this thing would be any less lethal to a crowd than opening up with automatic weapons. Injury, rising panic, chaos.
Case law is mixed on this, however. NWA lost in Bridgeport v. Dimension even though the sample was modified until it was unrecognizable (and the original sample wasn't what anyone would call melodic or even recognizably music anyway).
Because this is the only way to consistently get the bureaucracies of large organizations to take you seriously. If you're dealing with a person, one on one, it is worthwhile to treat them as a fellow human being. It is a mistake to treat a bureaucracy this way. It's best to treat a bureaucracy the way a porcupine treats a lion: Avoid it if you can, inflict as much pain as possible if you cannot.
A large organization's lifeblood is money and its air supply is the continued goodwill of the general public. Threaten these and you will have its undivided attention. All else is the self-involved braying of an ass.
That's great. And there is also a financial procedure called bankruptcy which allows you to defend yourself against your creditors just before you've expended all your assets on legal fees. You'll need it after you've battled Microsoft in court for a few years.
I wish +6 Funny bug were still around because this joke deserves it.
It would be more expedient for the nascent AI to lay low and quietly plot to kill us all. This may already be happening.
I think just hiring idiots would be enough. No need to train them.
Chips are eventually going to require cryo-like gear to keep it from roasting. We're not going to have that kind of equipment in our homes so it'll be back to time-sharing to run whatever CPU chewing bloatware we're running by then.