I guess they wouldn't aim the beam at their own car...or the cars of by-standers....or they could fit their own microchips with a metal jacket which shields it from this sort of thing.
Metal jacket... like, say, the car itself ?-)
Trying to punch enough microwave radiation trough the multi-layered Faraday cage known as a car to disable a microchip has to be some kind of record in bad ideas, especially because said microchips are likely to be already shielded from electric interference due to their close proximity to the ignition system - you know, the thing which fires high-voltage sparks hundreds of times a second - and because the engine is usually located in the front of the car, while a pursuing police car would be behind it, putting the main body of the car - and its passengers - between them.
In short, not only is this a stupid idea, but this is a stupid idea even by the standards of US law enforcement.
First step would be to build an Earth based reciever that won't get picketted by envirowhackos intent on protecting the ecology of the desert.
Not really: just make the beam a hundred meters wider than the antenna farm. You'll lose some of the power, but gain a grillzone to protect the antennas.
Yeah because, obviously, democracy (as defined by the USA) is the only viable option for intelligent people, and should be forced down their troths. God help anyone who even consider something different than having a president elected by direct voting. They are all stupid people.
The US doesn't select its president by direct voting. Each state selects representatives who in turn select the president. That's the theory anyway, in reality Diebold - or whatever hacker has hijacked their machines - selects the president.
But yes, historically, democracies are the best countries to live in. The inherent inefficiency of having to do everything by committee protects against obsessive-compulsive busybodies making laws and decisions based on their religion, personal likes or dislikes, or any other irrational or rational reason you may or may not agree with. Democracies tend towards the middle road in all things, with the opposing extremes of ideology balancing each other out.
So yes, the people who want to live in a none-democracy tend to be stupid, or at least short-sighted. Even if you think the current leader is God's representative on Earth, you never know if the next one will be the Devil's. That's why you don't want to give too much power to any government official, even if you agree with him; and that's why you want to have some method of removing him from his position if that turns out to be neccessary. Voting is the least bloody and dangerous such method invented this far.
oh grow up. they sell music. what's the new business plan? give the product away for free? great plan kid, try explaining to the tens of thousands working in the music industry how they tell the mortgage provider that "my business plan is not to earn money".
Perhaps they could ask the millions who lost their jobs because of outsourcing ? Or that woman the RIAA recently got a judgement of hundreds of thousands of dollars against ?
Or maybe, cold as this may sound, those who can't make a living making art should get some other job, and do art as a hobby, until such a time they are good enough to make a living with it ?
Of course there is always the possibility of the government funding art directly. That approach does have its problems, of course, not the least ones being that people would be forced to pay for what might appear as crap to them, and government-sponsored artists might be tempted to not be very critical of the hand that feeds them. It would, however, solve the problem of copyright laws perverting the development of technology with absurdities like forbidding "circumvention devices" or the prohibition against reverse-engineering.
We were all quite happy to pay for music until some internet kiddies found out you could steal it and likely not get caught.
I wasn't. Radio was cheaper, so I never saw the need to pay for CDs.
GET A FUCKING JOB AND PAY YOUR WAY.
Well, I wouldn't put it quite that bluntly, but yes, that is what the tends of thousands working in a music industry must do if they can't make a living there anymore. Preferably before their mortgage provider tells it to them.
Altought, if you knew this all along, why did you make it sound like there was a problem ?
Theft being wrong isn't a business model, it's a moral model, and one that civiliztion is more or less based on.
The RIAA's method of threatening to sue random people with expensive lawsuits unless they settle out of court, while of course fulfilling the signs of theft insofar as property is exchanging hands due to coercion, is called extortion. And yes, it is very wrong.
As for civilization, it is based on the ability to communicate abstract concepts and the resulting cumulative culture and division of labor. Copyright law, as perverted by the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk, is disturbing this process, and could become a serious problem as access to information becomes more and more dependent on technology if it isn't dealt with now. Thankfully, there are some bravepeople fighting this modern-day Nidhögg; let us help them, before it chews the very roots of our culture.
If anything they have the most to thank towards Global warming.. nobody wants Siberia. However, there is a treasure trove of minerals that can be extracted when the permafrost thaws.
One would imagine it being easier to mine and transport vast amounts of heavy minerals from solid ground than methane-spitting swamp, but maybe that's just me.
It's been my experience that the one thing Virtual Servers aren't good at it's io intensive applications like I don't know.... DATABASE SERVERS?
Well, of course. With virtualization, each system call has to go through an extra layer before reaching the host kernel, and the cache might also be affected.
Our failure to detect them could have been due to inadequate equipment, or else incompetent personnel or practices, or worse, arrogance.
Or it could be that they were detected, but surprise was feigned in order to make the current funding seem inadequate and in need of increasing. That's the perverse thing about Army: the less effective it seems, the more funding it gets.
And then they will face a lawsuit in reponse to that. you cant make an employee sign a new agreement without consideration for them. ie what are they getting out of it. continued employment doesnt count.
But they can fire you for completely unrelated reasons if you don't sign.
They should just stick to those two rules or else we would see a different Google logo everyday.
That's nothing. The shit will really hit the fan when two groups both decide their particular holidays deserve the logo and happen to be on the same day. To make the shit radiactive, have one of the groups be muslims. To make it supercritical, make the other group be of any other religion.
Capitalism uses the power of the state to concentrate economic power into the hands of a few.
I believe you mean Capitalism as practiced in the U.S. uses the power of the state, etc. But to me, that's not Capitalism, but another form of Statism (nay, even Collectivism.)
All form of Capitalism lead to the concentration of wealth and thus power into the hands of few. This is because the more you have, the easier it is to get even more; compound interest rules, thus very small differences near the beginning are turned into huge gaping holes after a while has passed.
Free-Market Capitalism is simply not a stable system. It collapses into aristocracy sooner or later - propably sooner. And once it has, of course the new aristocrats want to prevent anyone else from threatening their power, and start using it to pass regulations to that effect.
I'm not sure there is a way around this problem. Any system where people can advance ends with some advancing to the top and barring the way from and abusing those beneath them.
Name one other organization that sends armed people to your door if you refuse to buy to their "services"
Al Qaeda. Mafia. RIAA and MPAA with their baseless court cases. BSA with audits. Monsanto, if you happen to be a farmer unfortunate enough to get your field polluted by Monsanto seed. Patent trolls, too many of them to count.
No, no, no.... the proper word for referral then becomes "Sheheit". Proper pronunciation puts the accent on the "he" and the word should be drawled in your best Southern United States accent.
But what if the entity in question has a multiple personality disorder - sorry, I meant is singularity challenged ? Shouldn't it be "hesheittheyoneorsomeorallofthem" ?
Apologies to Peter David, who used this joke already in his Star Trek: New Frontier novels for the Federation diplomats breaking down in laughter when the Hermat race actually proposed this.
Yesterdays horror stories and absurd jokes are todays reality.
More people voted for an American Idol finalist than voted in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, which is a travesty.
The difference between American Idol and American President election is that in American Idol election you vote for the best candidate, while on the American President election you vote for the least bad, after which the Diablo voting machines discard your vote and pick the absolute worst candidate as the winner. Given this, is it any wonder that more people bother with the former than the latter ?
Then maybe people should just stop assuming and write in a gender-neutral way. It really doesn't take much effort. "He or she" takes half a second more to type.
But what about hermaphrodites ? After all, they aren't "he or she", but "he and she". You need to write "he and/or she". But even then you run the risk of offending the odd person who has been born without genitalia of any kind, or perhaps asexual aliens who may be reading Slashdot; so better use "he and/or she or it". But what if the aliens have three genders ? Two of them get referred to as persons - "he" and "she" - while the third is referred to as "it", likening it to an animal or object.
So, in the interest of political correctness, call everyone "it". It's the only way to guarantee equal verbal treatment of all possible gender combinations, altought it of course still horribly discriminates against nonentities, since "it" can only refer to an entity.
That, or simply ignore the people who take personal offense when someone doesn't know their gender and doesn't go out of his way to not have to guess.
I've yet to see a language where you don't use a female pronoun when referring specifically to a woman but I'd be very curious to learn if there is one.
Finnish uses "hän" for persons and "se" for everything else, altought the current trend seems towards using "se" for persons too.
That only applies if it's a contract between you and the government. The corporation is also free to hire (or not) who they choose to, under whatever conditions they choose to (as permitted by applicable laws, of course). You, in turn, are free not to accept their terms. See, saying things about a "free nation" implies that we're free with respect to the government. It implies nothing about our freedoms with respect to fellow citizens, and businesses run by them.
The Government is also run by fellow citizens. It is simply the most powerful organization in the country. It is not in principle different from any other organizations; indeed, a powerful enough corporation is largely indistinguishable from a government, especially in a legal system like the US where the victory in court usually goes to the one with most money.
Furthermore, freedom of contract is not absolute. As you yourself noted, it is limited by laws. Whether non-compete agreements and "all your inventions are belong to us" are enforceable is subject to those laws, and it is not at all certain that they should be.
Even in a free country, more than one being can't have absolute freedom simultanously. The question, then, becomes one of finding the right balance. Non-compete agreements limit people's freedom; perhaps it would be best to outlaw them.
Xbox, Microsoft TV, Zune, MSN services, etc. What about just Operating Systems?
Because Microsoft OS's are horrible. They won't float on their own, but need the help of tie-in products not interoperable with other OS'ses. That's why Microsoft has to try to get every computing-related field under its control.
Windows isn't competitive on its own, it needs the help of lock-in services to keep customers captive. Microsoft can't do just Operating Systems, because nobody would buy them.
Wish this was the ancient Greece, where people can be sentenced to death for corrupting the mind of youths.
Do you really want "not thinking of the children" to be a crime with death penalty as punishment ? Especially when the Greeks themselves invented that crime to get some excuse to kill Socrates, the real reason being that Socrates held unpopular views for his time ?
I, for one, think that our overlords are bad enough already. Besides, thinking of children all the time is a bit creepy, and acting on those thoughts is outright illegal in most jurisdictions. Download some lolicon and get it out of your system, you pervert overlords.
You're creating a false dichotomy between pack-forming species and "loner" species. How about hive societies? They may or may not get "culture" going (depending on your definition of that word) but they could co-operate well enough to pursue large objectives, and still be totally alien to our frame of reference.
Culture: accumulation of knowledge from generation to generation.
It isn't a question of having the manpower to pursue large objectives, it is a question of each generation not having to start from scratch. You have to stand on the shoulders of giants to reach the stars, and you can't do that if there is no culture.
So, either the hive members are independent enough to enable the "society" to gain and keep knowledge, independent of and unlimited by any single individual's (such as the queen) lifespan, in which case they are a pack, or the hive acts as a single organism, in which case the hives can still form packs where the hives themselves are members. Lacking either option means that they never accumulate enough information to get anywhere.
Re:More than one path to most things
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
The path that life on Earth took to civilization is obviously a successful one. Your supposition that it is the only path to reach civilization is unsubstantiated supposition.
I haven't made any such supposition. I have simply listed the minimum requirements for reaching civilization: staying alive (self-preservation and reproduction) and social interaction (information exchange, to be exact). An extinct species won't be building cultures, neither will one there each member has to start development from scratch.
What about a race of loner sentients where the only interaction ever is to mate, and the parents (or parent) to teach, and that's it period. Maybe their biology makes them forget language at all times except while offspring is around to pass it on.
This means there is no division of labor, and no ability to get knowledge from anyone but your direct ancestors. In this situation there is a ridiculously strong selective pressure towards more social interaction.
Sure, it'd take a considerable amount of time to develop, but it could. I don't see as a giant leap to think about a race who do not directly intercommunicate, but still assist each other by chance/coincidence. Given a billion years, sure, what's to keep them from having a space ship with a million residents with no language to call their own, no communication, and people just fill a role as suits their interests, maybe given by their biology.
Well, it took only a bit more than 1 billion years to go from first multicellural life forms to humans on Earth. Given this, it is extremely unlikely that a more social subspecies - or a whole another intelligent species - wouldn't evolve in the billion years it would take to reach the stars.
Slashdot Mirror
Metal jacket... like, say, the car itself ?-)
Trying to punch enough microwave radiation trough the multi-layered Faraday cage known as a car to disable a microchip has to be some kind of record in bad ideas, especially because said microchips are likely to be already shielded from electric interference due to their close proximity to the ignition system - you know, the thing which fires high-voltage sparks hundreds of times a second - and because the engine is usually located in the front of the car, while a pursuing police car would be behind it, putting the main body of the car - and its passengers - between them.
In short, not only is this a stupid idea, but this is a stupid idea even by the standards of US law enforcement.
Not really: just make the beam a hundred meters wider than the antenna farm. You'll lose some of the power, but gain a grillzone to protect the antennas.
The US doesn't select its president by direct voting. Each state selects representatives who in turn select the president. That's the theory anyway, in reality Diebold - or whatever hacker has hijacked their machines - selects the president.
But yes, historically, democracies are the best countries to live in. The inherent inefficiency of having to do everything by committee protects against obsessive-compulsive busybodies making laws and decisions based on their religion, personal likes or dislikes, or any other irrational or rational reason you may or may not agree with. Democracies tend towards the middle road in all things, with the opposing extremes of ideology balancing each other out.
So yes, the people who want to live in a none-democracy tend to be stupid, or at least short-sighted. Even if you think the current leader is God's representative on Earth, you never know if the next one will be the Devil's. That's why you don't want to give too much power to any government official, even if you agree with him; and that's why you want to have some method of removing him from his position if that turns out to be neccessary. Voting is the least bloody and dangerous such method invented this far.
Perhaps they could ask the millions who lost their jobs because of outsourcing ? Or that woman the RIAA recently got a judgement of hundreds of thousands of dollars against ?
Or maybe, cold as this may sound, those who can't make a living making art should get some other job, and do art as a hobby, until such a time they are good enough to make a living with it ?
Of course there is always the possibility of the government funding art directly. That approach does have its problems, of course, not the least ones being that people would be forced to pay for what might appear as crap to them, and government-sponsored artists might be tempted to not be very critical of the hand that feeds them. It would, however, solve the problem of copyright laws perverting the development of technology with absurdities like forbidding "circumvention devices" or the prohibition against reverse-engineering.
I wasn't. Radio was cheaper, so I never saw the need to pay for CDs.
Well, I wouldn't put it quite that bluntly, but yes, that is what the tends of thousands working in a music industry must do if they can't make a living there anymore. Preferably before their mortgage provider tells it to them.
Altought, if you knew this all along, why did you make it sound like there was a problem ?
The RIAA's method of threatening to sue random people with expensive lawsuits unless they settle out of court, while of course fulfilling the signs of theft insofar as property is exchanging hands due to coercion, is called extortion. And yes, it is very wrong.
As for civilization, it is based on the ability to communicate abstract concepts and the resulting cumulative culture and division of labor. Copyright law, as perverted by the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk, is disturbing this process, and could become a serious problem as access to information becomes more and more dependent on technology if it isn't dealt with now. Thankfully, there are some brave people fighting this modern-day Nidhögg; let us help them, before it chews the very roots of our culture.
One would imagine it being easier to mine and transport vast amounts of heavy minerals from solid ground than methane-spitting swamp, but maybe that's just me.
Well, of course. With virtualization, each system call has to go through an extra layer before reaching the host kernel, and the cache might also be affected.
Or it could be that they were detected, but surprise was feigned in order to make the current funding seem inadequate and in need of increasing. That's the perverse thing about Army: the less effective it seems, the more funding it gets.
But they can fire you for completely unrelated reasons if you don't sign.
That's nothing. The shit will really hit the fan when two groups both decide their particular holidays deserve the logo and happen to be on the same day. To make the shit radiactive, have one of the groups be muslims. To make it supercritical, make the other group be of any other religion.
Now that's a Googlefight from Hell ;).
All form of Capitalism lead to the concentration of wealth and thus power into the hands of few. This is because the more you have, the easier it is to get even more; compound interest rules, thus very small differences near the beginning are turned into huge gaping holes after a while has passed.
Free-Market Capitalism is simply not a stable system. It collapses into aristocracy sooner or later - propably sooner. And once it has, of course the new aristocrats want to prevent anyone else from threatening their power, and start using it to pass regulations to that effect.
I'm not sure there is a way around this problem. Any system where people can advance ends with some advancing to the top and barring the way from and abusing those beneath them.
Square Enix would sue.
Al Qaeda. Mafia. RIAA and MPAA with their baseless court cases. BSA with audits. Monsanto, if you happen to be a farmer unfortunate enough to get your field polluted by Monsanto seed. Patent trolls, too many of them to count.
But what if the entity in question has a multiple personality disorder - sorry, I meant is singularity challenged ? Shouldn't it be "hesheittheyoneorsomeorallofthem" ?
Yesterdays horror stories and absurd jokes are todays reality.
Egads, you're right ! From now on, whenever I rave, I'll use your name to do it !
The difference between American Idol and American President election is that in American Idol election you vote for the best candidate, while on the American President election you vote for the least bad, after which the Diablo voting machines discard your vote and pick the absolute worst candidate as the winner. Given this, is it any wonder that more people bother with the former than the latter ?
But what about hermaphrodites ? After all, they aren't "he or she", but "he and she". You need to write "he and/or she". But even then you run the risk of offending the odd person who has been born without genitalia of any kind, or perhaps asexual aliens who may be reading Slashdot; so better use "he and/or she or it". But what if the aliens have three genders ? Two of them get referred to as persons - "he" and "she" - while the third is referred to as "it", likening it to an animal or object.
So, in the interest of political correctness, call everyone "it". It's the only way to guarantee equal verbal treatment of all possible gender combinations, altought it of course still horribly discriminates against nonentities, since "it" can only refer to an entity.
That, or simply ignore the people who take personal offense when someone doesn't know their gender and doesn't go out of his way to not have to guess.
Finnish uses "hän" for persons and "se" for everything else, altought the current trend seems towards using "se" for persons too.
The Government is also run by fellow citizens. It is simply the most powerful organization in the country. It is not in principle different from any other organizations; indeed, a powerful enough corporation is largely indistinguishable from a government, especially in a legal system like the US where the victory in court usually goes to the one with most money.
Furthermore, freedom of contract is not absolute. As you yourself noted, it is limited by laws. Whether non-compete agreements and "all your inventions are belong to us" are enforceable is subject to those laws, and it is not at all certain that they should be.
Even in a free country, more than one being can't have absolute freedom simultanously. The question, then, becomes one of finding the right balance. Non-compete agreements limit people's freedom; perhaps it would be best to outlaw them.
Because Microsoft OS's are horrible. They won't float on their own, but need the help of tie-in products not interoperable with other OS'ses. That's why Microsoft has to try to get every computing-related field under its control.
Windows isn't competitive on its own, it needs the help of lock-in services to keep customers captive. Microsoft can't do just Operating Systems, because nobody would buy them.
Yeah. It doesn't change anything anyway.
Do you really want "not thinking of the children" to be a crime with death penalty as punishment ? Especially when the Greeks themselves invented that crime to get some excuse to kill Socrates, the real reason being that Socrates held unpopular views for his time ?
I, for one, think that our overlords are bad enough already. Besides, thinking of children all the time is a bit creepy, and acting on those thoughts is outright illegal in most jurisdictions. Download some lolicon and get it out of your system, you pervert overlords.
Culture: accumulation of knowledge from generation to generation.
It isn't a question of having the manpower to pursue large objectives, it is a question of each generation not having to start from scratch. You have to stand on the shoulders of giants to reach the stars, and you can't do that if there is no culture.
So, either the hive members are independent enough to enable the "society" to gain and keep knowledge, independent of and unlimited by any single individual's (such as the queen) lifespan, in which case they are a pack, or the hive acts as a single organism, in which case the hives can still form packs where the hives themselves are members. Lacking either option means that they never accumulate enough information to get anywhere.
I haven't made any such supposition. I have simply listed the minimum requirements for reaching civilization: staying alive (self-preservation and reproduction) and social interaction (information exchange, to be exact). An extinct species won't be building cultures, neither will one there each member has to start development from scratch.
This means there is no division of labor, and no ability to get knowledge from anyone but your direct ancestors. In this situation there is a ridiculously strong selective pressure towards more social interaction.
Well, it took only a bit more than 1 billion years to go from first multicellural life forms to humans on Earth. Given this, it is extremely unlikely that a more social subspecies - or a whole another intelligent species - wouldn't evolve in the billion years it would take to reach the stars.