But what is ludicrous is to charge copyright fees on media and at the same time forbid making copies of copyrighted material onto those media. What exactly do I pay for, then?
You pay for the greater share price of your Corporate Overlords, of course. The same as you always have.
Most Randian literature exalts the virtues of "independent" persons, who "inherit" their virtue from their "lineage" and upbringing. It's essentially a call for an aristocracy or oligarchy, usually hereditary, with the rest of us knowing our place.
I mean, if the bastards actually want fascism, they should just come right out and say so.
Rule by hereditary aristocracy is not fascism. Fascism is essentially a form of government with extremely powerful state; aristocracy transfers most of this power to the aristocrats, making the two mutually exclusive. Unlike fascism, aristocracy - in the form of feudalism - proved to be a stable form of government, altought one plagued by constant small-scale warfare between various aristocrats.
Not that any of this makes it any less hideous to try to return to it, thought.
Although, I can agree for some positions where security is of the utmost importance (perhaps if you have access to nuclear material or something), and the terms are agreed upon before hand...
If an RFID tag can be implanted surgically, it can also be removed and re-implanted into someone else. Consequently, it won't provide any extra security against anyone who is willing to steal nuclear materials for presumably nefarious purposes: they simply capture and kill an employee and take the tag from his cold, dead body.
Sure, you could associate identifying information - fingerprints, faceprints, retina scan, whatever - with the tag, but you could just as easily associate it with normal passcard. No, the only "benefit" from the RFID is that it lets you more easily identify people in casual settings (streets and such). It isn't a security measure, but simply another step towards having everyone tracked 24/7, or in best possible case, just someone's private little power game.
Am I the only one who's getting a little sick of copyright holders constantly trying to enforce their will on manufacturers, legislators, service providers, and the general public ?
In fact I'm starting to get sick of the whole concept of copyright itself, and so I ask: do we really need it ? If the "artists" can't make millions from a single recording, and if no one can build a multibillion dollar company around a singing and dancing cartoon mouse, do we really lose anything important ? And more importantly, do we lose more than we gain: the ability of everyone to freely participate in and expand popular culture without having to build a whole new world from scratch - and no, Disney, Rowling and company haven't done so, they've drawn from existing myths and stories for theirs.
Let us abolish copyright, kill the copyright cartels once and for all, and then freely enjoy the fruits of digital revolution. I assure you, art won't disappear, altought a lot of crap will.
In an NBC4 news story (transcript and video) we hear about the Swedish submarine HMS Gotland, participating in a training exercise with the US Navy:
According to Swedish newspapers, in training exercises the Gotland has sunk our most sophisticated nuclear submarines. But perhaps even more disconcerting, it reportedly sunk our largest aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Reagan.
Well, what did you expect ? They're vikings, for pete's sake ! Half ninjas, half pirates, half polar bears ! They rape, pillage and plunder, and then they flip out and get really mad ! Even Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia knew better than to fuck with them !
Just be thankful they used a wussy submarine and not a Viking longboat with a dragon on the bow - then it'd really have been a massacre.
Efficiency isn't the only design criterion, stealth is an important design objective for a sub.
Why ? These babies already carry nuclear reactors, so just turn equip them with Nuclear Light Bulb engines, using the seawater as a propellant. Someone catches you, you hit the pedal, and you are thrown into air in a ballistic arc while your pursuer gets roasted by the exhaust flames.
Who needs stealth when you can have flying submarines with nuclear blowtorches ?-)
(On some nerd web site in the Artificially Created Universe) I, for one, welcome our new self-proclaimed creator overlords!
And immediately gets a hundred replies claiming that we don't exist, there is no evidence of our existence, and anyone believing our existence is a deluded moron. I wonder if the scientists monitoring the experiment would appreciate the irony ?-)
Govt provided internet would (among many other bad things) reduce choices. Think of schooling for example, when everyone has to pay for public school regardless of usage, the private schools can only cater to very specific niches (mostly religious and wealthy).
And without public schools, only the rich could afford to go to school at all.
I'm sorry, but that was as non-erotic as you can possibly get. If anyone considered it "scoring" that their sim gave a backrub and had a friendly kiss, or worse yet as some pornographic material to choke the chicken to, I'd seriously worry about their mental health. Then they'd probably be as turned on by a bowl of rice.
You underestimate the power of human imagination. I've known people who have masturbated while interacting with a succubus in Nethack: "Time stands still while you and the succubus lay in each others arms...". That text, and the letter @ (the player character) next to the letter & (a demon; a succubus in this case) next to each other in the screen is all it takes.
The phrase "There is someone who is turned on by X" is true for all values of X. There are people who get turned on by bowls of rice; there are people who get turned on by Goatse and Tubgirl; and there are people who get turned on by watching an animated GIF of a cartoon character performing seppuku. By contrast, the guy who gets his kicks from having one Sim perform a backrub on another is positively glowing with mental health. Or is it just the afterglow ?-)...
The question isn't "why are we here"--we're here because of an eons-long chain of chemical and physical phenomena in the universe that lies behind us, not for anything that lies before us.
Actually, that is the (possible) answer to the question "how did we came to be here", not "why are we here". The question of why doesn't neccessarily have any answer, as it implies that there is a purpose for human existence, which in turn isn't provable one way or another.
The question is, "okay, we're here--now what are we going to do about it?".
That question has been answered: sex, drugs (optional) and rock'n roll (or old game music in instrumental remixes). Oh, and anime.
And don't you presume to answer that question for me.
You are here to be dazzled by this brilliant reply and to shake in frustration as your feeble threats are contemptuously ignored;).
While Americans consider graft to be wrong, many American companies find the only way to access foreign markets is to pay off the corrupt gatekeepers. This doesn't neccessarily mean the people of those countries are inferior for failing to erradicate corruption, it just means their culture holds 'different' values.
Um, what do you think campaign contributions are ? Seen from the outside, the US appears extremely corrupted to me.
Why would they need to use a Rootkit (that hides a directory and some processes) to display an eye on the screen?
Because otherwise the user will shut it down pretty quickly. Or would you want a giant eye sitting in the middle of your screen, on top of everything ?
What you describe is entirely unlikely. You act as if the U.S. military would sit back passively while the Chinese spent hours fueling their 130 nuclear missiles. Why would we when we have the means to hit them before they even get off the ground (via Submarine-based ICBMs and Nuclear-armed cruise missiles)?
Gee, I wonder if it ever occurred to Chinese to keep their missiles (or a significant fraction of them) fueled and their locations hidden ?
Perhaps not conventionally, but this is more for geopolitical reasons than military ones. Even in conventional warfare, the U.S. Navy is completely unmatched by anything China has to offer.
Um... So ? You can't conquer a country with navy alone, and China has land routes to Asia, Europe and Africa, so you can't isolate it either.
The funny thing is is how these facts shock even Americans. Should this really be that surprising? The United States spends more on its military than all the other countries in the world combined. You get what you pay for.
Yes, the US does have lots of very advanced weaponry, and is certainly capable of stopping any conventional attack. However, it doesn't have anything capable of stopping an incoming nuke. That's why nuclear weapons are such efficient deterrents, and why everyone wants them nowadays.
True; but an interpreter (or even a compiler which supports an eval function, or some other weirdy "calculated" construct such as treating variables as a property of the containing namespace) wouldn't be able to do that, because it wouldn't have any way to know for certain that the variable really was never going to be used again.
Even most interprete languages (such as Python) are in fact compiled or at the very least parsed and tokenized when loaded, giving the interpreter a chance to evaluate variable scope. If they aren't, then you don't win anything with forget statements, and in fact are likely to lose some: the string forget takes more space than a single 32-bit variable it frees.
Besides, if you use a non-compiled, non-tokenized language, why worry about efficiency - you aren't going to get it no matter what you do;).
Anybody else confused by Java's branding and versioning? Stop calling version 1.7 of the language Java7. When Java2 was released, I thought it'd be Java 2.0; no, it was Java 1.2.
The version of the JVM was 1.2, while the version of the Java language it ran was 2.0. It's a bit like GCC 3.0 (the program) supports C89 (the language).
I know, real programmers just reuse variable names..... it has the same effect..... but the whole idea of modern programming languages is to let the computer do the work for you. An optimising compiler would see the baby-steps followed by a bunch of forgets and decide that since the intermediates were obviously never going to be required again, they could all be stuck into one big long operation.
Even better, you could have the compiler figure out the last position a particular variable is used in a function, and automatically reuse the space for other variables where possible, all without human intervention or forget statements. I wonder if I should patent this revolutionary idea...
Last time I checked, China has about 130 nuclear warheads, US has 9 960, and Russia has 16 000.
Guess who is going to be obliterated first when the WW3 begins.
Whoever the guy with the fastest missiles hates most ?
Please understand that having 9960 nuclear warheads in no way stops 130 enemy warheads from reaching you. While 130 nuclear warheads is not sufficient to carpet bomb a country the size of the USA, it is quite sufficient to take out large cities, industry, food production and central administration. The end result is likely massive death toll from starvation and plague, and collapse of the USA as a nation, or at the very least its removal from its world power status.
It doesn't mention the technology, but I'd bet it was just a Flash animation.
I'd use Javascript, since that allows you to make the Virtual Oppressors walk all over the page rather than be constrained in a box. Or they could simply use a Sony-like rootkit to put a huge, partially translucent eye on top of everything else on the monitor.
But then I realize I'm free, so I can only imagine how creepy, and how sad it is to be reminded every half hour that you are so subjugated.
You need not worry; by all available evidence, the Chinese government is doing its level best to keep its citizens from being reminded of the Tiananmen massacre.
As for you, you won't be free until the last libertarian is strangled with the entrails of the last fascist. As long as we keep on letting ideology of any kind to guide our political or economic decisions, the end result will always be the same: the real world won't conform to the theory, so it gets hammered there by force, since the other choice is admitting that the theory was wrong.
This particular governmental power was hastily repealed in 1802 when it became likely that Thomas Jefferson (a staunch opponent of the act and those who passed it) would win the next presidency.
Is this the same Thomas Jefferson who was elected President in 1800?
Well, you see, they didn't have Diebold machines back then, so they had to do the recounts by hand, and that took some time; so why Jefferson was elected in 1800, they didn't know it until two years later. That's why you need electronic voting: if they had had that, the Diebold accountants could had simply compared the contributions from both parties to determine the winner.
Remember: a political bribe a day keeps freedom away !
What I plan to do: "Hi Son! I'm not going to filter your access. However, I have access to the router logs, so I suggest you don't go anywhere you don't want me to know about."
Therefore teaching him how to sneak around computerized surveillance to access the info he wants without being caught. Not a bad plan, considering the way the world is turning to. Kinda reminds me of the chunin ninja exams in Naruto, where you had to cheat without being caught to pass the test:).
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia, Wraiths eat your words !
You pay for the greater share price of your Corporate Overlords, of course. The same as you always have.
Rule by hereditary aristocracy is not fascism. Fascism is essentially a form of government with extremely powerful state; aristocracy transfers most of this power to the aristocrats, making the two mutually exclusive. Unlike fascism, aristocracy - in the form of feudalism - proved to be a stable form of government, altought one plagued by constant small-scale warfare between various aristocrats.
Not that any of this makes it any less hideous to try to return to it, thought.
If an RFID tag can be implanted surgically, it can also be removed and re-implanted into someone else. Consequently, it won't provide any extra security against anyone who is willing to steal nuclear materials for presumably nefarious purposes: they simply capture and kill an employee and take the tag from his cold, dead body.
Sure, you could associate identifying information - fingerprints, faceprints, retina scan, whatever - with the tag, but you could just as easily associate it with normal passcard. No, the only "benefit" from the RFID is that it lets you more easily identify people in casual settings (streets and such). It isn't a security measure, but simply another step towards having everyone tracked 24/7, or in best possible case, just someone's private little power game.
Am I the only one who's getting a little sick of copyright holders constantly trying to enforce their will on manufacturers, legislators, service providers, and the general public ?
In fact I'm starting to get sick of the whole concept of copyright itself, and so I ask: do we really need it ? If the "artists" can't make millions from a single recording, and if no one can build a multibillion dollar company around a singing and dancing cartoon mouse, do we really lose anything important ? And more importantly, do we lose more than we gain: the ability of everyone to freely participate in and expand popular culture without having to build a whole new world from scratch - and no, Disney, Rowling and company haven't done so, they've drawn from existing myths and stories for theirs.
Let us abolish copyright, kill the copyright cartels once and for all, and then freely enjoy the fruits of digital revolution. I assure you, art won't disappear, altought a lot of crap will.
Well, what did you expect ? They're vikings, for pete's sake ! Half ninjas, half pirates, half polar bears ! They rape, pillage and plunder, and then they flip out and get really mad ! Even Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia knew better than to fuck with them !
Just be thankful they used a wussy submarine and not a Viking longboat with a dragon on the bow - then it'd really have been a massacre.
Why ? These babies already carry nuclear reactors, so just turn equip them with Nuclear Light Bulb engines, using the seawater as a propellant. Someone catches you, you hit the pedal, and you are thrown into air in a ballistic arc while your pursuer gets roasted by the exhaust flames.
Who needs stealth when you can have flying submarines with nuclear blowtorches ?-)
And immediately gets a hundred replies claiming that we don't exist, there is no evidence of our existence, and anyone believing our existence is a deluded moron. I wonder if the scientists monitoring the experiment would appreciate the irony ?-)
Does undead count ?
And without public schools, only the rich could afford to go to school at all.
You underestimate the power of human imagination. I've known people who have masturbated while interacting with a succubus in Nethack: "Time stands still while you and the succubus lay in each others arms...". That text, and the letter @ (the player character) next to the letter & (a demon; a succubus in this case) next to each other in the screen is all it takes.
The phrase "There is someone who is turned on by X" is true for all values of X. There are people who get turned on by bowls of rice; there are people who get turned on by Goatse and Tubgirl; and there are people who get turned on by watching an animated GIF of a cartoon character performing seppuku. By contrast, the guy who gets his kicks from having one Sim perform a backrub on another is positively glowing with mental health. Or is it just the afterglow ?-)...
Actually, that is the (possible) answer to the question "how did we came to be here", not "why are we here". The question of why doesn't neccessarily have any answer, as it implies that there is a purpose for human existence, which in turn isn't provable one way or another.
That question has been answered: sex, drugs (optional) and rock'n roll (or old game music in instrumental remixes). Oh, and anime.
You are here to be dazzled by this brilliant reply and to shake in frustration as your feeble threats are contemptuously ignored ;).
That can't be true, many politicians are dead.
Um, what do you think campaign contributions are ? Seen from the outside, the US appears extremely corrupted to me.
Because otherwise the user will shut it down pretty quickly. Or would you want a giant eye sitting in the middle of your screen, on top of everything ?
Gee, I wonder if it ever occurred to Chinese to keep their missiles (or a significant fraction of them) fueled and their locations hidden ?
Um... So ? You can't conquer a country with navy alone, and China has land routes to Asia, Europe and Africa, so you can't isolate it either.
Yes, the US does have lots of very advanced weaponry, and is certainly capable of stopping any conventional attack. However, it doesn't have anything capable of stopping an incoming nuke. That's why nuclear weapons are such efficient deterrents, and why everyone wants them nowadays.
Even most interprete languages (such as Python) are in fact compiled or at the very least parsed and tokenized when loaded, giving the interpreter a chance to evaluate variable scope. If they aren't, then you don't win anything with forget statements, and in fact are likely to lose some: the string forget takes more space than a single 32-bit variable it frees.
Besides, if you use a non-compiled, non-tokenized language, why worry about efficiency - you aren't going to get it no matter what you do ;).
The version of the JVM was 1.2, while the version of the Java language it ran was 2.0. It's a bit like GCC 3.0 (the program) supports C89 (the language).
Even better, you could have the compiler figure out the last position a particular variable is used in a function, and automatically reuse the space for other variables where possible, all without human intervention or forget statements. I wonder if I should patent this revolutionary idea...
Whoever the guy with the fastest missiles hates most ?
Please understand that having 9960 nuclear warheads in no way stops 130 enemy warheads from reaching you. While 130 nuclear warheads is not sufficient to carpet bomb a country the size of the USA, it is quite sufficient to take out large cities, industry, food production and central administration. The end result is likely massive death toll from starvation and plague, and collapse of the USA as a nation, or at the very least its removal from its world power status.
So no, no one dares attack China.
I'd use Javascript, since that allows you to make the Virtual Oppressors walk all over the page rather than be constrained in a box. Or they could simply use a Sony-like rootkit to put a huge, partially translucent eye on top of everything else on the monitor.
You need not worry; by all available evidence, the Chinese government is doing its level best to keep its citizens from being reminded of the Tiananmen massacre.
As for you, you won't be free until the last libertarian is strangled with the entrails of the last fascist. As long as we keep on letting ideology of any kind to guide our political or economic decisions, the end result will always be the same: the real world won't conform to the theory, so it gets hammered there by force, since the other choice is admitting that the theory was wrong.
Well, you see, they didn't have Diebold machines back then, so they had to do the recounts by hand, and that took some time; so why Jefferson was elected in 1800, they didn't know it until two years later. That's why you need electronic voting: if they had had that, the Diebold accountants could had simply compared the contributions from both parties to determine the winner.
Remember: a political bribe a day keeps freedom away !
Get a 3D printer ?-)
Therefore teaching him how to sneak around computerized surveillance to access the info he wants without being caught. Not a bad plan, considering the way the world is turning to. Kinda reminds me of the chunin ninja exams in Naruto, where you had to cheat without being caught to pass the test :).