Yup. Other movie ideas I'm having along the same approach:
X-Men movie but swap the DNA mutations for emo culture and hard metal/rock underground. Batman movie without costumes and gadgets, about the struggles of a billionaire Bruce Wayne to increase his company revenue. James Bond prequel. Like, how his parents met up and married or something? Toy Story movie about alcoholic toys in mid-life crisis, sexual problems and physical abuse. Star Wars movie set in the wild west. Jurassic Park, but instead of real dinosaurs, it turns out Dr. John Hammond hired ILM to make elaborate fake computer dinosaurs and escape abroad with hundreds of millions of investor funding. Saw 4, where it turns out everything in Saw 1, 2, 3 was a dream sequence of a poor patient dying of cancer, and telling the story of a cancer patient finding true love in his last days of life.
Wow! I had no idea a famous Hollywood screenwriter was posting on Slashdot! So tell me - how's the work on the latest Star Trek sequel going?
Not to say that's the only reason he did that.. who knows. It just a bit odd. Other military people have come forward, including a high ranking general (who released a book). The general claimed all our current technology came from UFOs. Such as the night-vision goggles. This is a fairly outrageous claim even for someone with a rudimentary understanding of electronics.
Something to remember about these sorts of claims - just because someone was a military officer doesn't preclude him or her from being a bald-faced liar and complete crackpot. Another case in point: Lt. Col. (ret.) Tom Bearden, who claims that the Japanese and Russia mafia have scalar electromagnetic weapons that they are using to alter the weather patterns over the United States, and that a vast conspiracy is suppressing devices that can extract free energy from the vacuum.
I conclude that either these phone-home scripts are useless, or we should redefine the best practices of security and remove power-on and user account passwords from the list, so that the phone-home script actually gets a chance to connect somewhere.
Agreed. Most thieves are lazy, opportunistic, and not particularly bright. If you completely lock down your laptop to keep anyone from using it, then your data will be safe, but you'll never get the laptop back. The thief will be forced to sell it to someone who will wipe or replace the hard drive, and after that it's gone.
I use a different strategy. I put a non-administrative guest account on my laptop and set my normal user account to auto-logout. A thief can't get to my data, but he can use the guest account - and that's exactly what I want him to do. Formatting and reconfiguring a computer is tedious work, and the last thing a typical thief (or the person who buys the laptop from him) wants to do is actually have to put time and effort into making the laptop work. He just wants to connect to the web and start using it.
After that, it's just a matter of using a daemon to update the laptop's IP address to a free dynamic DNS service, and running a VNC server with a strong password in the background. Your typical user won't even know the software is running unless he knows what to look for. At the very least I'll learn the IP address of the person using laptop; if I'm lucky and he's not operating behind a hardware firewall, I'll be able to use VNC to watch what he's doing and make some screenshots. It's not perfect, but at least it gives me a shot at recovering the laptop, and the software is free.
A final note to Linux users who want to try this technique: as much as I hate to say this, you'll probably want to keep a small Windows partition as the honeypot on your laptop. Give the thief the ability to login to a familiar operating system, and you stand a much better chance of finding your laptop.
I would rather have the University give the students a head up and tell them that the University is doing all they can to help the students, instead of aid the music industry. The University should look after their interests: the students.
Why do you think the university would aid the students? The students are not employees of the university; at best, they can be considered customers, but even then the school has no obligation to legally defend them if they are sued for actions that are not officially sanctioned by the university.
Any college student who has read the news for the past three years has to know that the RIAA has been suing filesharers. If they choose to download music without paying for it, they should also know better than to complain if they're served with a subpoena. It doesn't matter whether they may feel that they're justified in downloading the music, or that the RIAA is evil - the reality is that downloading music is a legally risky proposition right now, and it's naive for anyone to think otherwise.
I can't decide, what do people think, 65 years is basically a life sentence. Is that excessive?
I think if you added up all the hours of other peoples' lives that have been wasted dealing with the spam he's sent, then 65 years is a fair sentence.
Consider: if 10 million people worldwide spent five minutes of their lives deleting the spams he has mailed, that works out to 95.1 years. An eye for an eye seems only fair.
Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture)
Very few professors bother to take roll. Personally I don't care if students attend or not, as long as they do the work and show up for exams. They're adults and the choice is theirs.
But I can tell you who would care - the parents. One question I often pose to students: "If this classroom had a webcam that allowed your parents to see if you were attending class, how many of you think your parents would use it?" Typically about 10% to 20% of the students raise their hands. I think the actual percentage would be considerably higher.
I do think students are going to face real privacy issues from this sort of technology in the coming decade, but it'll be implemented because their moms and dads will demand it, not because the university wants it.
so i think we need to retire the 1984 references, and lose the obsession with an intrusive government... because we can intrude right back, and it may be your fellow citizen who is more of a "tyranny" of eavesdropping than the government anyways. what's the proper way to think about this issue? i don't know, but it is weirder and more complex than the stereotypical orwellian ideas on the subject
Exactly. The "death of privacy" scenario has far less to do with your government that it has to do with your fellow citizens. Individuals have just as much ability to leverage cheap technology as governments do. I know the day is coming when I will be recorded almost constantly in public, but it won't be by government cameras alone. It'll be by the cameras installed outside every home and business, and carried by every person I pass on the street.
I've been waiting for some manufacturer to offer an inexpensive CMOS image sensor and microphone unit that plugs into an iPod and records compressed digital video. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. You clip the unit to the front of your shirt, plug it into your iPod, and you're good to go for hours. In a few more years iPods will have the capacity to record days of continuous video as long as the battery holds out. I worry far less what the government will do with the images made of me; the goverment can at least be changed or influenced by votes, legislation, and protests. I have no influence whatsoever over the hundreds of individuals who'll also be keeping me under surveillance.
The only sad thing is going to be our grandkids asking us what it means to drive "stick".
Actually, your grandkids are going to be asking you what it means to "drive". To them, a car will be something you get into and then tell where you want to go.
In 25 years, knowing how to manually drive a car will be about as useful and quaint as knowing how to ride a horse is today.
The sad thing is, there still isn't a great competitor to Windows. Linux is nice and Ubuntu and other distros have come far, but it seems they lack that final step (like "How do I change my screen resolution?" or other bits that only techies would know). OS X is my preferred OS as a security analyst, but it only runs on one system (I know - Apple sells hardware, blah, blah, blah, but damn - if they make Leopard for *all* X86 systems, they might take over the desktops - I've met plenty of CIO's who want that).
Four years ago, I would have agreed with you. But not any more.
Although I'm often forced to use Windows in my daily work, my personal preference has always been for OS X. Four years ago, I played around with Red Hat Linux and concluded that Linux simply wasn't ready for the desktop consumer market. There were simply too many rough edges that a non-techie couldn't deal with. Until now, I've assumed that the home desktop market for non-technical users had to be split between Windows and OS X.
Then last week, I was asked to help one of my wife's co-workers. This co-worker has the very bad habit of clicking on every email attachment and web pop-up she sees. Any Windows machine she uses is quickly turned into a spyware- or bot-infested nightmare unless administrative access is kept from her. She cannot be trained to be a "smart" user - she unfortunately has cognitve disabilities that affect her memory.
Her problem is her home computer - she hasn't been able to use it for months, because spyware has rendered it unusable. She can't afford a new computer, and re-installing Windows won't help because she starts clicking on pop-ups and email attachments again. I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 to see if it could be used as a viable OS alternative on her machine.
After a few hours of playing with Ubuntu, I was impressed. The Linux desktop has come a long way in the past four years. The Ubuntu distro has just about reached the point where it could be used on most of those low-end email/web/word processor appliances that we set up and maintain for our parents and relatives. At its present rate of development, in another year or two Ubuntu will have the ability to take away a significant chunk of Microsoft's market share in the home userspace. I'm going to put it on the co-worker's computer, and I think she'll be thrilled with the results.
Microsoft has every reason to be scared to death of Linux. Their DRM-riddled business model is going to take a major beating in the home market. Given the choice, I'd still choose a Mac for the integrated experience, but Ubuntu has, for the first time, turned me into a Linux advocate as well.
After reading the article, I typed "diamonds" and "engagement ring" into Google, then looked at the sponsored links. No sign of skyfacet.com, Mr. Sanar's company. I find it hilarious that Sanar would pay $35,000 to some slimball "consultant" to try to distort the Google search rankings, but not spend one penny on Google sponsored links, which would put him on the first page every time.
I have zero sympathy for unscrupulous businessmen who try to game the system, get caught, and then whine about it. Kudos to Google for playing hardball and fighting to keeping their search engine useful and relevant instead of letting the spammers ruin it.
(1) Learn that one of your competitors can be easily manipulated to make its front page results 100% spam.
(2) As a "courtesy" to the community, post an article on Slashdot announcing this fact, describing the technique in detail, and offering a solution that will almost certainly be ignored by your competitor.
(3) Rub your hands in satisfaction as thousands more spammers are now made aware how easy it is to manipulate the competition.
(4) Watch the competition crash and burn as its signal to noise ratio plummets to zero.
Lee, who plans to enter boot camp for the Marines in October, said teacher Nora Capron told the class to write about whatever they wanted.
Ah, the irony. Mr. Lee is arrested for writing about shooting and stabbing people, which the government now disapproves of. And a few months from now, he'll be trained to do precisely that, and then sent to Iraq or Afghanistant to actually do it, with the government's blessings.
There is one very reasonable change I'd like to see enacted. I want to have the option of putting my credit file on permanent Fraud Alert with the major credit reporting agencies. Currently consumers have the right to make a phone call to an automated line which places a Fraud Alert on their credit files (I call Equifax at 800-525-6285, who then shares the alert with the other agencies). This alert prevents identity thieves from opening a new line of credit in your name without the agency contacting you first.
The only problem is that the alert must be renewed every 90 days. To get a permanent Fraud Alert, you must prove you've already been a victim of identity theft - essentially closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out.
Consumers need to have the right to request a permanent alert without question, and for any reason. I am long past the point in my life where I need instant credit. I can afford to wait long enough for the credit agency to call me if I need to open a new account. Of course, the credit agencies will fight any such measure tooth and nail (the 90 day alert had to be forced upon them by law), but unlike some proposals I've read so far, this one is actually doable with a realistic amount of effort on everyone's part.
As a former IBMer, I know that one of IBM's biggest strengths in IC research has always been packaging technology. If they are confident enough to announce this as a breakthrough , then you can safely assume they've figured out how to tackle the thermal issues and keep the chip cool.
3. Same robot as #3, but now it is made out of flesh and blood; a kind of golem. (Meat is every bit a construction material as is metal and carbon fibre)
Is that ethical? Should this be permitted?
Let me add another example to your list.
4. Same robot as #4, but this robot looks and acts exactly like a pre-pubescent child.
Your post brings up a huge looming issue that society will have to face sometime this century. What happens when virtual reality, advanced robotics, or some combination of the two gives people the ability to act out their sickest and most depraved fantasies in a manner that is practically indistinguishable from "real life"? Will it be legal and ethical for people to rape children or torture young women to death on a regular basis, just because their victims aren't human? What happens when a sizable chunk of society consists of closet sociopaths who have no restrictions on their behavior as long as it doesn't involve a "born" person?
As a past employee of my universities alumni association (with a greek system) I must comment. It is of no surprise that greeks are our biggest donors, nor is it really a secret. Most of the people who attend the functions and reunions were also greeks, a lot of board members are also greeks, and one of the biggest outreach programs we had was with the current greeks. The only group that rivals greek donations is that of large (and small) corporations making research grants, but those aren't done through the alumni association. As far as I know, it was never a big secret, nor did we hate admission of the fact that greeks are the biggest donors. I'm at a loss to see where you got that assumption.
My assumption comes from what I've seen at my alma mater (Georgia Tech) as well as my place of employment (Vanderbilt University). Both schools have a love-hate relationship with the Greek system. On one hand, they wish they could get rid of the headaches that the fraternities and sororities sometimes cause on campus. On the other hand, they love the millions of dollars that fraternity and sorority alumni donate every year. I've heard similar stories from alumni at other schools. Most of the alumni donations come from former Greeks, but for a school to advertise this fact would be a tacit admission that fraternities and sororities actually do a great deal of good for the school in the long run, and that's something they don't want to acknowledge.
You've seen how vehement the anti-fraternity sentiment is on/. It's every bit as bad, or worse, in most college staff and faculty. It only changes where people interact with the alumni, just as you did, and realize they're normal people who happen to have a strong emotional connection to the school thanks to their undergraduate experiences as Greeks.
Me(you): "So you think I bought my friends? Tell me, do you attend church?"
Him(me): "No, I dont believe in mass indoctrination of any kind"
Me(you): "doyeee?? Lookz aat myz myspacez! i iz kool!"
Him(me): "oh yeah. You gonna finish that 26er, friend?"
Lesson: Don't put words in other peoples mouths or they will do it right back.
So you don't believe in mass indoctrination. Fine. Then I use this argument:
Me: "Do you have friends of your own? Family members you're fond of?"
Him: "Sure. Who doesn't?"
Me: "Do you sometimes give them presents? Do you buy things to please them?"
Him: "Of course."
Me: "So you buy their love and friendship, don't you?"
Lesson: Don't use simplistic "You buy your friends" arguments on anyone, because those arguments can be thrown right back in your face.
Human beings are "joiners" by nature, be it a bridge club, the Lions Club, a Masonic lodge, the VFW, the local church, or a college fraternity. By their nature, social organizations require commitment in the form of time and/or money. That why fraternity men pay dues - to support the needs and goals of the organization - not to "buy friends", any more than the members of any other organization "buy" the friends they make.
First point: PLEDGING. Doing stupid stuff to earn the members' respect and loyalty. If I have to do dumb things to join ANY organization and to earn respect, that's not the kind of respect I want to earn.
Hmm, last time I checked the military academies were still hazing new members. I mean, the upperclassmen still treat freshmen like dirt, and haze them mercilessly, don't they? "Beast Barracks" still exists, doesn't it? Fraternities can't hold a candle to some of the crap I've read about - oh, but that's "tradition" for the U.S. military, isn't it?
Given the numbers we ahd at the time, if everybody paid their dues on time, the debts to the national chapter would be gone in two months; it was a full year after first starting the colony, and yet the debts were still on the books. Where was the money going? The treasurer didn't seem to have a good answer, and nobody else really seemed to care too much.
So because you unfortunately had some bad officers (and I daresay some irresponsible members who didn't pay their dues), somehow fraternities in general are bad? Are you saying you've never heard stories about lack of accountability, or money being lost or wasted, while in the Navy? What planet were you stationed on, by the way?
Leadership and management skills...please. I quit in disgust after a semester. I got real leadership and management training in the Navy, where failures in leadership would have dire consequences.
This line really made me chuckle. Yes, as we all know, no Naval officer ever covers his ass when he screws up. Everyone is always accountable for his mistakes. The guilty are always punished, and the innocent are always rewarded. Sure, you betcha. What brand of Kool-aid did they serve you?
Face it - fraternities and sororities are no different than any other organization made up of human beings. There is good and there is bad. Most Greeks usually try to do the right thing, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes people say one thing but do another. Sometimes people screw up and try to hide their mistakes. But if you're going to condemn Greeks for those things, you're being a hypocrite if you don't condemn the Navy (and practically every other organization since the dawn of time) for exactly the same things.
As a fraternity man myself, I usually respond to the old "Greeks buy their friends" line with one of my own:
Me: "So you think I bought my friends? Tell me, do you attend church?"
Him: "Yeah, why?"
Me: "Do you ever donate money to your church?"
Him: "Sometimes - what of it?"
Me: "So you're trying to buy your way into heaven, aren't you?"
That usually shuts them up, or at least makes them think twice about what they said.
Another interesting fact for all to consider: go to the alumni association of any university with a Greek system, and find out the percentage of alumni donors who were Greeks. You may be enlightened by what you discover, although universities hate to admit it. Did you somehow think that alumni give money to a college because of all the wonderful times they had in class being lectured by professors?
Just the other day I stumbled across the Wikipedia bio for Andy Gibb (don't ask). It said he died in 1988 of heart disease. I distinctly remembered him dying from a drug overdose in 1982 (I even remember Entertainment Tonight doing a special on it at the time, something like "The Tragedy of Andy Gibb"). It also mentioned a bunch of stuff he did after 1982 that I don't remember (Broadway, wtf?!?!?). That's a pretty significant difference between how I remember something and how it supposedly actually happened.
Check out Larry Niven's short story "For a Foggy Night". The basic premise is that fog is the periodic manifestation of parallel universes merging together. Things in the distance look blurry in a fog because the different universes smear together, resulting in an indistinct image. The reason things seem different than the way you remember them is because at some point in the past you went walking in the fog and wound up in a universe that is similar to, but not exactly like, the one you came from. Anyone foolish enough to go outside in a pea soup fog may wind up in a universe so radically different that Earth's inhabitants won't even be human. Or you may wind up in a universe where everyday stories about your home Earth turn you into a successful science fiction / fantasy author, or you can become wealthy patenting common inventions nobody else knows about.
Like several of Niven's stories, "For a Foggy Night" provides an entertaining explanation for a common quirk everyone shares. In this case, it's the tendency to read or hear about something and realize you don't remember it the same way everyone else does. However, there are times when I wonder if Niven knows something the rest of us don't.:-)
There is no evidence that will quiet those people. Any contradiction to their already formed conclusion will simply be part of the "conspiracy".
Anyone with a few minutes to waste (and I do mean waste) can browse Richard Hoagland's web site (enterprisemission.com) and see just how true this statement is.
Twenty years ago, before high-resolution photos of Mars were available, Hoagland got a lot of mileage out of the low-res Cydonia photos. I remember that he even wrote a couple of fairly serious speculative articles about Cydonia that were published in Analog magazine. After the high-res images became available, and it became obvious that the "face" was nothing of the sort, Hoagland went completely off the deep end, and now claims that the surface of Mars is literally covered with artifacts, i.e. "rocks" to the non-believers. Hoagland will show image after image of a random rock on the surface of Mars and proclaim that this rock is clearly artificial, that NASA is denying the obvious truth, etcetera, etcetera.
The beauty of being delusional is that you can find any pattern you want in random images or data, provided you decide to pick and choose what parts of the image/data to disregard. However, in Hoagland's case it's probably less a matter of being delusional than a case of wanting to maintain his revenue stream from the True Believers.
Which wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. A phone's a phone in the eyes of the airlines; they're not going to start up different regulations for different makes and models. "Oh, if it's an Apple model, *and* you can verify that "plane mode" is switched on, then it's ok." No way that's gonna work.
Clearly you have not traveled by air in the past three years. The airlines are well aware that modern cellphones can operate in "game mode" or "plane mode", and have been for some time. In fact, the flight attendants will specifically announce that phones can only be operated in those modes while the plane is in the air.
Did you also know that most airlines now allow you to switch into "phone mode" as soon as the plane touches down on the runway, without having to wait until the plane pulls into the gate? The airlines are not as ignorant of modern wireless technology as many may think.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! I had no idea a famous Hollywood screenwriter was posting on Slashdot! So tell me - how's the work on the latest Star Trek sequel going?
Something to remember about these sorts of claims - just because someone was a military officer doesn't preclude him or her from being a bald-faced liar and complete crackpot. Another case in point: Lt. Col. (ret.) Tom Bearden, who claims that the Japanese and Russia mafia have scalar electromagnetic weapons that they are using to alter the weather patterns over the United States, and that a vast conspiracy is suppressing devices that can extract free energy from the vacuum.
Agreed. Most thieves are lazy, opportunistic, and not particularly bright. If you completely lock down your laptop to keep anyone from using it, then your data will be safe, but you'll never get the laptop back. The thief will be forced to sell it to someone who will wipe or replace the hard drive, and after that it's gone.
I use a different strategy. I put a non-administrative guest account on my laptop and set my normal user account to auto-logout. A thief can't get to my data, but he can use the guest account - and that's exactly what I want him to do. Formatting and reconfiguring a computer is tedious work, and the last thing a typical thief (or the person who buys the laptop from him) wants to do is actually have to put time and effort into making the laptop work. He just wants to connect to the web and start using it.
After that, it's just a matter of using a daemon to update the laptop's IP address to a free dynamic DNS service, and running a VNC server with a strong password in the background. Your typical user won't even know the software is running unless he knows what to look for. At the very least I'll learn the IP address of the person using laptop; if I'm lucky and he's not operating behind a hardware firewall, I'll be able to use VNC to watch what he's doing and make some screenshots. It's not perfect, but at least it gives me a shot at recovering the laptop, and the software is free.
A final note to Linux users who want to try this technique: as much as I hate to say this, you'll probably want to keep a small Windows partition as the honeypot on your laptop. Give the thief the ability to login to a familiar operating system, and you stand a much better chance of finding your laptop.
Clearly you weren't reading Slashdot yesterday!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
Why do you think the university would aid the students? The students are not employees of the university; at best, they can be considered customers, but even then the school has no obligation to legally defend them if they are sued for actions that are not officially sanctioned by the university.
Any college student who has read the news for the past three years has to know that the RIAA has been suing filesharers. If they choose to download music without paying for it, they should also know better than to complain if they're served with a subpoena. It doesn't matter whether they may feel that they're justified in downloading the music, or that the RIAA is evil - the reality is that downloading music is a legally risky proposition right now, and it's naive for anyone to think otherwise.
Google doesn't need consent from anyone. All they need to do is blur out the images of any people in a street scene, just like the TV networks do.
Why is everyone making such a fuss over this when the solution is well known and trivial to implement?
I think if you added up all the hours of other peoples' lives that have been wasted dealing with the spam he's sent, then 65 years is a fair sentence.
Consider: if 10 million people worldwide spent five minutes of their lives deleting the spams he has mailed, that works out to 95.1 years. An eye for an eye seems only fair.
Very few professors bother to take roll. Personally I don't care if students attend or not, as long as they do the work and show up for exams. They're adults and the choice is theirs.
But I can tell you who would care - the parents. One question I often pose to students: "If this classroom had a webcam that allowed your parents to see if you were attending class, how many of you think your parents would use it?" Typically about 10% to 20% of the students raise their hands. I think the actual percentage would be considerably higher.
I do think students are going to face real privacy issues from this sort of technology in the coming decade, but it'll be implemented because their moms and dads will demand it, not because the university wants it.
Exactly. The "death of privacy" scenario has far less to do with your government that it has to do with your fellow citizens. Individuals have just as much ability to leverage cheap technology as governments do. I know the day is coming when I will be recorded almost constantly in public, but it won't be by government cameras alone. It'll be by the cameras installed outside every home and business, and carried by every person I pass on the street.
I've been waiting for some manufacturer to offer an inexpensive CMOS image sensor and microphone unit that plugs into an iPod and records compressed digital video. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. You clip the unit to the front of your shirt, plug it into your iPod, and you're good to go for hours. In a few more years iPods will have the capacity to record days of continuous video as long as the battery holds out. I worry far less what the government will do with the images made of me; the goverment can at least be changed or influenced by votes, legislation, and protests. I have no influence whatsoever over the hundreds of individuals who'll also be keeping me under surveillance.
Actually, your grandkids are going to be asking you what it means to "drive". To them, a car will be something you get into and then tell where you want to go.
In 25 years, knowing how to manually drive a car will be about as useful and quaint as knowing how to ride a horse is today.
Four years ago, I would have agreed with you. But not any more.
Although I'm often forced to use Windows in my daily work, my personal preference has always been for OS X. Four years ago, I played around with Red Hat Linux and concluded that Linux simply wasn't ready for the desktop consumer market. There were simply too many rough edges that a non-techie couldn't deal with. Until now, I've assumed that the home desktop market for non-technical users had to be split between Windows and OS X.
Then last week, I was asked to help one of my wife's co-workers. This co-worker has the very bad habit of clicking on every email attachment and web pop-up she sees. Any Windows machine she uses is quickly turned into a spyware- or bot-infested nightmare unless administrative access is kept from her. She cannot be trained to be a "smart" user - she unfortunately has cognitve disabilities that affect her memory.
Her problem is her home computer - she hasn't been able to use it for months, because spyware has rendered it unusable. She can't afford a new computer, and re-installing Windows won't help because she starts clicking on pop-ups and email attachments again. I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 to see if it could be used as a viable OS alternative on her machine.
After a few hours of playing with Ubuntu, I was impressed. The Linux desktop has come a long way in the past four years. The Ubuntu distro has just about reached the point where it could be used on most of those low-end email/web/word processor appliances that we set up and maintain for our parents and relatives. At its present rate of development, in another year or two Ubuntu will have the ability to take away a significant chunk of Microsoft's market share in the home userspace. I'm going to put it on the co-worker's computer, and I think she'll be thrilled with the results.
Microsoft has every reason to be scared to death of Linux. Their DRM-riddled business model is going to take a major beating in the home market. Given the choice, I'd still choose a Mac for the integrated experience, but Ubuntu has, for the first time, turned me into a Linux advocate as well.
After reading the article, I typed "diamonds" and "engagement ring" into Google, then looked at the sponsored links. No sign of skyfacet.com, Mr. Sanar's company. I find it hilarious that Sanar would pay $35,000 to some slimball "consultant" to try to distort the Google search rankings, but not spend one penny on Google sponsored links, which would put him on the first page every time.
I have zero sympathy for unscrupulous businessmen who try to game the system, get caught, and then whine about it. Kudos to Google for playing hardball and fighting to keeping their search engine useful and relevant instead of letting the spammers ruin it.
(1) Learn that one of your competitors can be easily manipulated to make its front page results 100% spam.
(2) As a "courtesy" to the community, post an article on Slashdot announcing this fact, describing the technique in detail, and offering a solution that will almost certainly be ignored by your competitor.
(3) Rub your hands in satisfaction as thousands more spammers are now made aware how easy it is to manipulate the competition.
(4) Watch the competition crash and burn as its signal to noise ratio plummets to zero.
(5) Profit!
Ah, the irony. Mr. Lee is arrested for writing about shooting and stabbing people, which the government now disapproves of. And a few months from now, he'll be trained to do precisely that, and then sent to Iraq or Afghanistant to actually do it, with the government's blessings.
There is one very reasonable change I'd like to see enacted. I want to have the option of putting my credit file on permanent Fraud Alert with the major credit reporting agencies. Currently consumers have the right to make a phone call to an automated line which places a Fraud Alert on their credit files (I call Equifax at 800-525-6285, who then shares the alert with the other agencies). This alert prevents identity thieves from opening a new line of credit in your name without the agency contacting you first.
The only problem is that the alert must be renewed every 90 days. To get a permanent Fraud Alert, you must prove you've already been a victim of identity theft - essentially closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out.
Consumers need to have the right to request a permanent alert without question, and for any reason. I am long past the point in my life where I need instant credit. I can afford to wait long enough for the credit agency to call me if I need to open a new account. Of course, the credit agencies will fight any such measure tooth and nail (the 90 day alert had to be forced upon them by law), but unlike some proposals I've read so far, this one is actually doable with a realistic amount of effort on everyone's part.
...that I hear coming from the direction of Redmond?
Looks like Vista will have a few more months to get its act together.
As a former IBMer, I know that one of IBM's biggest strengths in IC research has always been packaging technology. If they are confident enough to announce this as a breakthrough , then you can safely assume they've figured out how to tackle the thermal issues and keep the chip cool.
Let me add another example to your list.
4. Same robot as #4, but this robot looks and acts exactly like a pre-pubescent child.
Your post brings up a huge looming issue that society will have to face sometime this century. What happens when virtual reality, advanced robotics, or some combination of the two gives people the ability to act out their sickest and most depraved fantasies in a manner that is practically indistinguishable from "real life"? Will it be legal and ethical for people to rape children or torture young women to death on a regular basis, just because their victims aren't human? What happens when a sizable chunk of society consists of closet sociopaths who have no restrictions on their behavior as long as it doesn't involve a "born" person?
My assumption comes from what I've seen at my alma mater (Georgia Tech) as well as my place of employment (Vanderbilt University). Both schools have a love-hate relationship with the Greek system. On one hand, they wish they could get rid of the headaches that the fraternities and sororities sometimes cause on campus. On the other hand, they love the millions of dollars that fraternity and sorority alumni donate every year. I've heard similar stories from alumni at other schools. Most of the alumni donations come from former Greeks, but for a school to advertise this fact would be a tacit admission that fraternities and sororities actually do a great deal of good for the school in the long run, and that's something they don't want to acknowledge.
You've seen how vehement the anti-fraternity sentiment is on
So you don't believe in mass indoctrination. Fine. Then I use this argument:
Me: "Do you have friends of your own? Family members you're fond of?"
Him: "Sure. Who doesn't?"
Me: "Do you sometimes give them presents? Do you buy things to please them?"
Him: "Of course."
Me: "So you buy their love and friendship, don't you?"
Lesson: Don't use simplistic "You buy your friends" arguments on anyone, because those arguments can be thrown right back in your face.
Human beings are "joiners" by nature, be it a bridge club, the Lions Club, a Masonic lodge, the VFW, the local church, or a college fraternity. By their nature, social organizations require commitment in the form of time and/or money. That why fraternity men pay dues - to support the needs and goals of the organization - not to "buy friends", any more than the members of any other organization "buy" the friends they make.
Hmm, last time I checked the military academies were still hazing new members. I mean, the upperclassmen still treat freshmen like dirt, and haze them mercilessly, don't they? "Beast Barracks" still exists, doesn't it? Fraternities can't hold a candle to some of the crap I've read about - oh, but that's "tradition" for the U.S. military, isn't it?
So because you unfortunately had some bad officers (and I daresay some irresponsible members who didn't pay their dues), somehow fraternities in general are bad? Are you saying you've never heard stories about lack of accountability, or money being lost or wasted, while in the Navy? What planet were you stationed on, by the way?
This line really made me chuckle. Yes, as we all know, no Naval officer ever covers his ass when he screws up. Everyone is always accountable for his mistakes. The guilty are always punished, and the innocent are always rewarded. Sure, you betcha. What brand of Kool-aid did they serve you?
Face it - fraternities and sororities are no different than any other organization made up of human beings. There is good and there is bad. Most Greeks usually try to do the right thing, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes people say one thing but do another. Sometimes people screw up and try to hide their mistakes. But if you're going to condemn Greeks for those things, you're being a hypocrite if you don't condemn the Navy (and practically every other organization since the dawn of time) for exactly the same things.
As a fraternity man myself, I usually respond to the old "Greeks buy their friends" line with one of my own:
Me: "So you think I bought my friends? Tell me, do you attend church?"
Him: "Yeah, why?"
Me: "Do you ever donate money to your church?"
Him: "Sometimes - what of it?"
Me: "So you're trying to buy your way into heaven, aren't you?"
That usually shuts them up, or at least makes them think twice about what they said.
Another interesting fact for all to consider: go to the alumni association of any university with a Greek system, and find out the percentage of alumni donors who were Greeks. You may be enlightened by what you discover, although universities hate to admit it. Did you somehow think that alumni give money to a college because of all the wonderful times they had in class being lectured by professors?
Check out Larry Niven's short story "For a Foggy Night". The basic premise is that fog is the periodic manifestation of parallel universes merging together. Things in the distance look blurry in a fog because the different universes smear together, resulting in an indistinct image. The reason things seem different than the way you remember them is because at some point in the past you went walking in the fog and wound up in a universe that is similar to, but not exactly like, the one you came from. Anyone foolish enough to go outside in a pea soup fog may wind up in a universe so radically different that Earth's inhabitants won't even be human. Or you may wind up in a universe where everyday stories about your home Earth turn you into a successful science fiction / fantasy author, or you can become wealthy patenting common inventions nobody else knows about.
Like several of Niven's stories, "For a Foggy Night" provides an entertaining explanation for a common quirk everyone shares. In this case, it's the tendency to read or hear about something and realize you don't remember it the same way everyone else does. However, there are times when I wonder if Niven knows something the rest of us don't.
Anyone with a few minutes to waste (and I do mean waste) can browse Richard Hoagland's web site (enterprisemission.com) and see just how true this statement is.
Twenty years ago, before high-resolution photos of Mars were available, Hoagland got a lot of mileage out of the low-res Cydonia photos. I remember that he even wrote a couple of fairly serious speculative articles about Cydonia that were published in Analog magazine. After the high-res images became available, and it became obvious that the "face" was nothing of the sort, Hoagland went completely off the deep end, and now claims that the surface of Mars is literally covered with artifacts, i.e. "rocks" to the non-believers. Hoagland will show image after image of a random rock on the surface of Mars and proclaim that this rock is clearly artificial, that NASA is denying the obvious truth, etcetera, etcetera.
The beauty of being delusional is that you can find any pattern you want in random images or data, provided you decide to pick and choose what parts of the image/data to disregard. However, in Hoagland's case it's probably less a matter of being delusional than a case of wanting to maintain his revenue stream from the True Believers.
Clearly you have not traveled by air in the past three years. The airlines are well aware that modern cellphones can operate in "game mode" or "plane mode", and have been for some time. In fact, the flight attendants will specifically announce that phones can only be operated in those modes while the plane is in the air.
Did you also know that most airlines now allow you to switch into "phone mode" as soon as the plane touches down on the runway, without having to wait until the plane pulls into the gate? The airlines are not as ignorant of modern wireless technology as many may think.