I have always loved that explanation. The first thing that came to my mind when I first heard it, was that falling does not kill you, no matter how far, only the sudden stop at the bottom.
Actually, evolution does not contradict creationism. It only contradicts some people's interpretation of creationism. Creationism only states that God created everything. It does not in any way describe how God created anything. It does not rule out expected incremental and not so incremental changing. It does not rule out some things being created after others. It does not rule out species changing over time.
These people who fight evolution are truly ignorant. They are actually insulting their own God. As they claim God must have created everything at one step, they are also inherently claiming God could not/would not have created a dynamic system that modified itself over time to present/overcome different challenges as time went on.
If you believe in God, give God credit. Evolution sounds exactly like something God would have put in play. Read the Bible more closely. One of the consistent things in the Bible is God changing things to present new challenges to mankind. Beyond that, if God did not want evolution, then why the heck did God put genes in everyone as the basis for pro-creative continuation?? It is hard to believe that God based the transmission of life on genes unless God had the express concept of evolution in mind in the first place.
Remember, God knows everything. He set this ball in motion, God knows how his work *works* and where it will go. Evolution might throw a wrench in a simpleton's concept of creation (we are all simpletons compared to an omniscient God), but that only goes to prove how little we understand the world we live in.
No disagreement there. Though I may be wrong, I do seriously doubt you were one of the major investors who pushed so hard to de-regulate the telco industry after the break-up (just playing the odds). I seriously doubt you were one of the people who had major ownership in the companies that stood to benefit most from that de-regulation. I agree that trusting the government is not a good thing. Unfortunately, trusting a business is no better, and you do not always have the choice you think you have. In markets like the telco, cable and health markets, choosing between competitors might not be that much of a choice, if you have a choice at all.
Just because the businesses that pushed this change through had ideas in mind that had nothing to do with trusting the government does not preclude you or me from not trusting the government. Its just that what we thought did not matter as to what happened.
I think in this case, it has very little to nothing to do with trust of the government. It has much to do with very wealthy businesses and people pushing the government to give them resources that allow them to greatly increase the resources those privates have. This is more a case of abusive practices by powerful business interests using the government agencies as tools.
When I got married, I had no idea I was introducing a pseudo-randomizing device into my life. I have a place for everything in my house. But, somehow, it moves. If I stop to think like my spouse, I can find it sometimes, other times, I can not seem to pick up on the correct start point in her algorithm. Once I have the start point, as long as I can figure out her next action, I can normally find most of the stuff. But, I still wind up buying duplicates or just not being able to find things. It is totally unenforceable. She never had to clean up after herself as a child, and she is just as bad as an adult (still love her though). Our kids like her way of course.
My solution... I now have two rooms that are mine. A den for work and a work area for tools and projects. Both doors have locks that only I have keys to. Now, the rest of the house I do not bring people into. But, my study (with its own doors) and the work are are fine. And things I need do not go missing from those areas anymore.
Like all technologies, the implementation of the one has a direct impact on the other. Entirely on topic, as the installation of any technology ought to be accomplished only after the impacts of its installation are considered. Ask an sysadmin. Kind of like what parents ought to consider before installing that first game system for their kids. 8-)
The real comparison is to a newspaper or magazine that is delivered and the post office having the rights to modify it on the fly.
The content publisher has designed a *page* (think magazine or newspaper) that may have dynamic content or not. The crux of the issue is that the publisher has designed this page to provide a certain look and feel with specific content. This is their publication. The delivery agent (like the US post office) has no rights to modify the contents of the page (package). The end user might want to have it changed, but that does not mean the delivery agent can do that. That would be akin to the US Post Office having an opt out policy where they open the mail (packets) and add pages to publications advertising products based on the publications.
As far as the comparison to "If you take that stance, then all those noscript and adblock plugins violate copyright also", this is the same as clipping the publication. To my understanding, perfectly legal under fair use. The product has been delivered and the recipient (and nobody else) has decided what to do with the package. They may have received a hint from the neighborhood watch group about what content might be unsafe, but it is their decision and their action in the end (not an opt-out policy) that determines this.
I would love to see the WSJ or the NYT get a bite in this. Or maybe, Amazon. One of the big players who is probably going to have the muscle and the will power to take them on.
Here is a prime example of copyrighted material being stolen and then used without the appropriate royalties being paid. This seems to me to be a prime example of copyright violation! The web pages being served in their aggregate form are copyrighted by the users/companies who created the pages. By modifying those web pages from their original form, they have modified a copyrighted work without the express approval of the copyright owner.
If for no other reason, this ought to be an expensive lesson for the companies involved in this. If it is not, then all pages are able to be copied and modified for almost any purpose, including but not limited to modifying someone else's content for your own profit.
I couldn't help notice that the linked article doesn't use the word "spying" at all, but slashdot doesn't seem to mind upping the rhetorical ante in that regard. I'm not saying it ISN'T spying; I'm just saying the language is argumentative on purpose.
Here, I'll help you with the understanding of that...
3. a person who seeks to obtain confidential information about the activities, plans, methods, etc., of an organization or person, esp. one who is employed for this purpose by a competitor: an industrial spy.Most Internet Users expect their traffic to be unmolested and not intercepted in typical usage.
8. to search for or examine something closely or carefully.
10. to discover or find out by observation or scrutiny (often fol. by out).
12. to inspect or examine or to search or look for closely or carefully.
Now, I don't know about you, but these being some of the definitions of spying, and these being the actions being described as being planned by the company, it would seem that the term spying is not just appropriate, but self-proclaimed via definition by the company itself. Maybe I missed something.
We're talking about the USAF taking offensive action against civilians (possibly US citizens) guilty only of ignorance.
If memory serves me correctly, many a time on this very site, I have seen many people suggesting that we do something like this actively to people's computers that are owned. The theory was that it would make their lack of responsibility have a cost to that they themselves would feel and would most likely cause them to want to correct the situation. The theory went on to say that if those systems were down (offline or otherwise), then the malware/botnet on them would no longer be online through them either. If this were done with enough consistency, many of the woes would start to vanish (and many noted that they thought that MS Windows would also disappear). Is this bad? The US Military creates a network that takes out hostile networks. It even nails owned systems that have become enemy agents.
Take a look at the physical world. If you are caught up in a spy/espionage ring, but are unaware of it, do you think the FBI is simply going to walk away and apologize? Nah, not likely. We have all read stories in the press and even here about people who were innocent and what happened to them.. Remember the hardware that simply vanished for so many people? If you leave your system unprotected, or if you use software that leaves your system unprotected, and then you wind up being an enemy agent (yes, I use those words intentionally), you will be investigated and potentially prosecuted along with the real villains. So, lock up your property, close and lock your entrances, don't use screen doors as your only door and don't leave room for nefarious individuals to use your home/business as a criminal launching point.
Yeah, no one uses Firefox or Safari because all the popular web sites require ActiveX
Conversely... Noone uses MS IE because it has bugs, security issues and renders html worse than most other browsers. You are missing the real issue. The more technologies that MS controls that are large market share technologies, the closer they come to controlling the Internet itself (and thus digital communications). They do not need (nor do they probably want) 100% market share, but they can control the technical direction of the Internet and then lay siege to Google and others the same way they have knocked others out of the market with OS domination. Have you forgotten all the trouble they went to for office document XML formats? They took some mud, and they know it was worth it. Nothing about that standard is technically superior, or even good. But, they got monkeys to vote for it anyway. Same thing here. Money, income, prestige, etc speak loudly.
why would anyone switch?
Have you forgotten about PHB's? The single most destructive force in computing today!
How long has it taken them to start gaining on Apache? How long did it take them to come out with a browser, then squash the market? How long did it take them to kill of any of their competitors? You must be shortsighted or forgetful. People will switch slowly, but they will switch given the right incentives even if it is technically risky. MS knows this better than anybody else out there.
MS will simply work on the technology until they are ready to push it out as part of IE. Then, one update, it goes live to all of the IE users they can push it to. They already have critical mass, they only have to flip that switch. You have to remember MS does not move on a dime. They are slower and more methodical in their market take overs. They have time and money on their side. And they normally get what they want.
They will probably have all (or most) of their websites with a silverlight version running before they flip that switch. Then, they will push it out and the new experience will start. But, they will want that experience to be noticeably *better* before they do it.
To make this truly useful, the addresses should be in a text searchable format. Then, one could truly look for one's own address, or a client's address, or a friends address, or just block email from them, or whatever. This is only eye-candy, and we all know what that is only useful for.
Which is nothing more than sugar water with flavoring added (and a few electrolytes). Sooo, one could basically say Gatorade would be the devil's kool-aid in that case.
But the question we have to ask isn't "Why hasn't spacefaring civilization X set up shop in our neighborhood?"
I have a better question: Why would they?
As far as comparing our race to a space faring race, we are not even uninteresting. Probably useful as a source of hopefully illegal exotic pets (people). Why assume that this dainty little solar system has much real value? I really do not see an advanced race doing much more than secretly studying us, if they are out there. We are so violent, abusive, untrustworthy as a whole. What could we bring to a species advanced enough to traverse the galaxy? Nah. We are probably no more than monkeys in the forest to them. Cute, interesting if you are into that kind of thing, but not really worth the capital expenditure to do much with it. And, on top of that, we are destroying the planet, so unless they live in the toxic soup we are turning the planet into, why would they want to be here?
BTW, if you are interested in my assumptions, think of how we treat wildlife in our world. The more advanced we get, the more we study it and leave it alone. The less advanced we are, the more we cut it down and claim it as a right to destroy it for our pleasure and our desires.
Nah, it was the grays. The are on a mission to educate people by planting bits of knowledge here and there and then letting whispers build up the pool of knowledge, and more importantly what is accepted as true knowledge over time. They taught Bush and co how to do it (and maybe the Clintons as well!). Bush thought they were angels. They have been studying us for a long time and have learned that repetition of something over time causes many if not most people to accept that thing as true. You never know, they might be secretly training most of the successful politicians to gain a strong foothold on our planet.
Yeah. You are right... It is an urban legend, and it was an article on here in the past, but I can not find the link to it. I added the clicking sound thing in to see who was asleep. lol
Why couldn't he have just had a nice sex scandal. They could have impeached him for lying about the sex. That would have been so neat and easy. Noooo, he had to go and do all this "God told me to" stuff and lie about WMD in Iraq and lie about Al Quaeda and Iraq relations. He had to get us in this illegitimate war (Saddam was a very bad man, but the reasons were lies). Heck, if he had just been honest about why, I would not be so indignant about his leadership today. But, his is a house of lies, and one that seems to know no shame or any morals.
Camcorders, and other digital optics used to not have the IR blocked. It was not until it became popular to post IR pictures of people in normal clothing became popular. The problem was/is that IR tends to let us imagine we are seeing through the clothing. As one could understand, not something most people want being done. So, congress rattled its saber and the camera manufacturers removed or filtered the IR. This is also related to why digital cameras make clicking sounds that in many cases you can not disable. It was to warn victims of someone taking illicit photographs.
Which just goes to show, anything can be used in ways that were never intended by the inventor/manufacturer.
I think I see the problem..... people have stopped believing others are entitled to an opinion unless it agrees with them.
Entitled to an opinion. Sure, everyone is. No issues there. But, I have also learned to ignore the rants of the uninformed. As far as agreeing about what the facts meant, I stated nothing in any context that suggested that. You pulled that one out of your darker spaces. Facts do not change from person to person, only there interpretation. News is about facts, commentary is about commenting on those facts, so the opinions you reference have nothing to do with what I was talking about, which was news. Commentary without the facts is not commentary (you are not commenting on something), but rather story telling. I do not view experts as fountains of fact in most cases, but rather fountains of opinions, hopefully based on facts.
So what you are saying is the only accurate reporting are the ones you agree with
Factual new reporting has nothing to do with what I agree with or not. It only has to do with whether or not the facts are presented without bias and in completion. As far as understanding why most outlets do not have factual reporting, that has only to do with understanding the business model behind the industry. I'll make this simple.
Revenue is a must. If the earnings are not in the black overall, then it is not making money. The news industry itself has not always been a money maker.
Revenue streams for the news include, but are not limited to advertising and sponsorship (pretty much the same thing, but that is how NPR does it). Advertisers complain when the news is not drawing enough viewers (market share) or when the news contains something they do not like (bad news...). They complain for other reasons as well, but these are the primary reasons.
News programs make money based on things like market share (percent of viewers watching from the current market, such as 6:00pm Monday market or readers in the current market, such as Atlanta, Georgia) sponsorships (like NPR's All Things Considered or Rush Limbaugh) and from events they are paid to be at (much rarer, but still happens).
The percentage and the raw number of viewers/readers/listeners are what determine the overall value of a news outlet to a marketer. Of course, with that is the market demographic itself. You typically do not advertise on Rush Limbaugh to reach democrats.
Now, this soup of conditions is what the advertiser/sponsor is paying for. They get a value based on what the audience is composed of and how large it is. Many want their brand to be held in context with a certain viewpoint (target market?). When the news presents issues or paints them in a light that does not maintain the audience, the advertiser/sponsor typically pulls out.
The real humor behind all of this was we were just watching a program the other night talking about stories and news being pulled/changed because a sponsor/owner/advertiser did not like what the news was conveying. The news was factual in the cases discussed, but the news organization for one reason or another chose to drop or modify the news to be something other than the truth (heres the facts, and all the facts). True, one might argue that they did not have all the facts, and that the facts they had somehow painted a not so truthful picture. Rather than digging deeper into the story, they dropped it. Why? Because someone above them felt it was not of fiscal or personal value. Hmm.. Where is the truth in that? Where is the news in that?
When you are trying to make money by producing news, you only produce what makes money. Kind of simple. But, whether you like it or not, presenting a sound bite and calling it news is neither factual nor news. It is only entertainment. It does not provide enough information (think Bush's war for a recent big example) to make a judgment on, nor does it provide enough information to be at all informed. Yep, there are simple
Nah. I place the real blame with the average news consumer who is not at all interested in truth, merely entertainment. Seems many people these days only want an answer for what ails them. A true answer is not needed. Same with the war. The truth was easy to spot before the war, but it was not in demand, so people easily swallowed the lie others offered instead. Can you imagine how the poor average viewer would feel if they saw the true results of their indifference to the realities of htis war before it started. Patriotism indeed!
Just like the current elections. How much of what is being bantered about is truth? "I will","When I am elected" and other such comments are not truths but are promises. The truths are only in the past and many of those are unfulfilled promises. As easily as this country was sold on an Iraq invasion in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, it does not say much about the average Joe citizen's desire for truth or real factual news..
There are publications out there that produce news. Mostly unbiased news. They cost money. They are not free. They are not cheap. Why? Because only a relatively small part of the population is interested in what they have to say. So, they do not get a mass market to sell ads to. They do not get a large distribution to spread costs over. What they do get are people who want to know what is really happening and are willing to pay for that knowledge.
The media outfits are an entertainment industry. They are paid based upon number of copies sold and ad value based on reader rates. They are not in any way shape or form paid based upon factual news. They are only paid to provide what a large enough market segment wants to make the paper profitable. So, you can blame the media, but you would be asking them to go out of business by providing the cold hard truth to people who do not want it. They Brittany. They want Baseball. They want lots of meaningless stuff.
It might be wishful thinking, but I am speaking from experience in the military. The networks were definitely redundant in many locations that were critical. I would be willing to bet that a part if not most of this network, especially given the price tag, has a certain level of redundancy behind those 50 gateways.
1) Each point of failure might have a greater chance to block a part of the network (depends on design). They could design it so that the 50 points lead to a network that is redundant behind the 50 points. If one point were to be blocked, then the traffic could be re-routed to other points. Much more secure and manageable than 4000 points. Bandwidth is only as much of an issues as the 50 points of connectivity allow/limit.
2) Actually, as to honeypots and counter-surveillance, you are getting much better control. There is not limit to how many false access points you can seed (outside of resources). With fewer access points to monitor, policing the network becomes much easier.
With 50 gateways, if the internal network is built correctly (unlike say a how certain cable company does their's), then I can not think of any real net negatives except the complexity of the internal network now. But, given the serious issues the 4000 has, the complexity of the internal network is a relatively non-existent issue.
Changing careers is one thing, changing jobs to someone who may benefit from *evidence* you gather in a trial against someone else is clearly a conflict of interest and unlawful in most western countries that I know of. You just do not do it. In many locales (not sure about his), he could be looking at jail time depending on what comes out about his involvement, time frames, actions, etc. Too bad we don't have restrictions against lawmakers doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I have always loved that explanation. The first thing that came to my mind when I first heard it, was that falling does not kill you, no matter how far, only the sudden stop at the bottom.
InnerWeb
Actually, evolution does not contradict creationism. It only contradicts some people's interpretation of creationism. Creationism only states that God created everything. It does not in any way describe how God created anything. It does not rule out expected incremental and not so incremental changing. It does not rule out some things being created after others. It does not rule out species changing over time.
These people who fight evolution are truly ignorant. They are actually insulting their own God. As they claim God must have created everything at one step, they are also inherently claiming God could not/would not have created a dynamic system that modified itself over time to present/overcome different challenges as time went on.
If you believe in God, give God credit. Evolution sounds exactly like something God would have put in play. Read the Bible more closely. One of the consistent things in the Bible is God changing things to present new challenges to mankind. Beyond that, if God did not want evolution, then why the heck did God put genes in everyone as the basis for pro-creative continuation?? It is hard to believe that God based the transmission of life on genes unless God had the express concept of evolution in mind in the first place.
Remember, God knows everything. He set this ball in motion, God knows how his work *works* and where it will go. Evolution might throw a wrench in a simpleton's concept of creation (we are all simpletons compared to an omniscient God), but that only goes to prove how little we understand the world we live in.
InnerWeb
No disagreement there. Though I may be wrong, I do seriously doubt you were one of the major investors who pushed so hard to de-regulate the telco industry after the break-up (just playing the odds). I seriously doubt you were one of the people who had major ownership in the companies that stood to benefit most from that de-regulation. I agree that trusting the government is not a good thing. Unfortunately, trusting a business is no better, and you do not always have the choice you think you have. In markets like the telco, cable and health markets, choosing between competitors might not be that much of a choice, if you have a choice at all.
Just because the businesses that pushed this change through had ideas in mind that had nothing to do with trusting the government does not preclude you or me from not trusting the government. Its just that what we thought did not matter as to what happened.
InnerWeb
I think in this case, it has very little to nothing to do with trust of the government. It has much to do with very wealthy businesses and people pushing the government to give them resources that allow them to greatly increase the resources those privates have. This is more a case of abusive practices by powerful business interests using the government agencies as tools.
InnerWeb
When I got married, I had no idea I was introducing a pseudo-randomizing device into my life. I have a place for everything in my house. But, somehow, it moves. If I stop to think like my spouse, I can find it sometimes, other times, I can not seem to pick up on the correct start point in her algorithm. Once I have the start point, as long as I can figure out her next action, I can normally find most of the stuff. But, I still wind up buying duplicates or just not being able to find things. It is totally unenforceable. She never had to clean up after herself as a child, and she is just as bad as an adult (still love her though). Our kids like her way of course.
My solution... I now have two rooms that are mine. A den for work and a work area for tools and projects. Both doors have locks that only I have keys to. Now, the rest of the house I do not bring people into. But, my study (with its own doors) and the work are are fine. And things I need do not go missing from those areas anymore.
InnerWeb
Like all technologies, the implementation of the one has a direct impact on the other. Entirely on topic, as the installation of any technology ought to be accomplished only after the impacts of its installation are considered. Ask an sysadmin. Kind of like what parents ought to consider before installing that first game system for their kids. 8-)
InnerWeb
The real comparison is to a newspaper or magazine that is delivered and the post office having the rights to modify it on the fly.
The content publisher has designed a *page* (think magazine or newspaper) that may have dynamic content or not. The crux of the issue is that the publisher has designed this page to provide a certain look and feel with specific content. This is their publication. The delivery agent (like the US post office) has no rights to modify the contents of the page (package). The end user might want to have it changed, but that does not mean the delivery agent can do that. That would be akin to the US Post Office having an opt out policy where they open the mail (packets) and add pages to publications advertising products based on the publications.
As far as the comparison to "If you take that stance, then all those noscript and adblock plugins violate copyright also", this is the same as clipping the publication. To my understanding, perfectly legal under fair use. The product has been delivered and the recipient (and nobody else) has decided what to do with the package. They may have received a hint from the neighborhood watch group about what content might be unsafe, but it is their decision and their action in the end (not an opt-out policy) that determines this.
I would love to see the WSJ or the NYT get a bite in this. Or maybe, Amazon. One of the big players who is probably going to have the muscle and the will power to take them on.
InnerWeb
Here is a prime example of copyrighted material being stolen and then used without the appropriate royalties being paid. This seems to me to be a prime example of copyright violation! The web pages being served in their aggregate form are copyrighted by the users/companies who created the pages. By modifying those web pages from their original form, they have modified a copyrighted work without the express approval of the copyright owner.
If for no other reason, this ought to be an expensive lesson for the companies involved in this. If it is not, then all pages are able to be copied and modified for almost any purpose, including but not limited to modifying someone else's content for your own profit.
Did I miss anything?
InnerWeb
I couldn't help notice that the linked article doesn't use the word "spying" at all, but slashdot doesn't seem to mind upping the rhetorical ante in that regard. I'm not saying it ISN'T spying; I'm just saying the language is argumentative on purpose.
Here, I'll help you with the understanding of that...
Spying -
- 3. a person who seeks to obtain confidential information about the activities, plans, methods, etc., of an organization or person, esp. one who is employed for this purpose by a competitor: an industrial spy.Most Internet Users expect their traffic to be unmolested and not intercepted in typical usage.
- 8. to search for or examine something closely or carefully.
- 10. to discover or find out by observation or scrutiny (often fol. by out).
- 12. to inspect or examine or to search or look for closely or carefully.
Now, I don't know about you, but these being some of the definitions of spying, and these being the actions being described as being planned by the company, it would seem that the term spying is not just appropriate, but self-proclaimed via definition by the company itself. Maybe I missed something.InnerWeb
We're talking about the USAF taking offensive action against civilians (possibly US citizens) guilty only of ignorance.
If memory serves me correctly, many a time on this very site, I have seen many people suggesting that we do something like this actively to people's computers that are owned. The theory was that it would make their lack of responsibility have a cost to that they themselves would feel and would most likely cause them to want to correct the situation. The theory went on to say that if those systems were down (offline or otherwise), then the malware/botnet on them would no longer be online through them either. If this were done with enough consistency, many of the woes would start to vanish (and many noted that they thought that MS Windows would also disappear). Is this bad? The US Military creates a network that takes out hostile networks. It even nails owned systems that have become enemy agents.
Take a look at the physical world. If you are caught up in a spy/espionage ring, but are unaware of it, do you think the FBI is simply going to walk away and apologize? Nah, not likely. We have all read stories in the press and even here about people who were innocent and what happened to them.. Remember the hardware that simply vanished for so many people? If you leave your system unprotected, or if you use software that leaves your system unprotected, and then you wind up being an enemy agent (yes, I use those words intentionally), you will be investigated and potentially prosecuted along with the real villains. So, lock up your property, close and lock your entrances, don't use screen doors as your only door and don't leave room for nefarious individuals to use your home/business as a criminal launching point.
InnerWeb
Yeah, no one uses Firefox or Safari because all the popular web sites require ActiveX
Conversely... Noone uses MS IE because it has bugs, security issues and renders html worse than most other browsers. You are missing the real issue. The more technologies that MS controls that are large market share technologies, the closer they come to controlling the Internet itself (and thus digital communications). They do not need (nor do they probably want) 100% market share, but they can control the technical direction of the Internet and then lay siege to Google and others the same way they have knocked others out of the market with OS domination. Have you forgotten all the trouble they went to for office document XML formats? They took some mud, and they know it was worth it. Nothing about that standard is technically superior, or even good. But, they got monkeys to vote for it anyway. Same thing here. Money, income, prestige, etc speak loudly.
why would anyone switch?
Have you forgotten about PHB's? The single most destructive force in computing today!
How long has it taken them to start gaining on Apache? How long did it take them to come out with a browser, then squash the market? How long did it take them to kill of any of their competitors? You must be shortsighted or forgetful. People will switch slowly, but they will switch given the right incentives even if it is technically risky. MS knows this better than anybody else out there.
InnerWeb
I guess you never heard of Netscape?>
MS will simply work on the technology until they are ready to push it out as part of IE. Then, one update, it goes live to all of the IE users they can push it to. They already have critical mass, they only have to flip that switch. You have to remember MS does not move on a dime. They are slower and more methodical in their market take overs. They have time and money on their side. And they normally get what they want.
They will probably have all (or most) of their websites with a silverlight version running before they flip that switch. Then, they will push it out and the new experience will start. But, they will want that experience to be noticeably *better* before they do it.
InnerWeb
To make this truly useful, the addresses should be in a text searchable format. Then, one could truly look for one's own address, or a client's address, or a friends address, or just block email from them, or whatever. This is only eye-candy, and we all know what that is only useful for.
InnerWeb
Maybe they'll all drink Gatorade instead...
Which is nothing more than sugar water with flavoring added (and a few electrolytes). Sooo, one could basically say Gatorade would be the devil's kool-aid in that case.
InnerWeb
But the question we have to ask isn't "Why hasn't spacefaring civilization X set up shop in our neighborhood?"
I have a better question: Why would they?
As far as comparing our race to a space faring race, we are not even uninteresting. Probably useful as a source of hopefully illegal exotic pets (people). Why assume that this dainty little solar system has much real value? I really do not see an advanced race doing much more than secretly studying us, if they are out there. We are so violent, abusive, untrustworthy as a whole. What could we bring to a species advanced enough to traverse the galaxy? Nah. We are probably no more than monkeys in the forest to them. Cute, interesting if you are into that kind of thing, but not really worth the capital expenditure to do much with it. And, on top of that, we are destroying the planet, so unless they live in the toxic soup we are turning the planet into, why would they want to be here?
BTW, if you are interested in my assumptions, think of how we treat wildlife in our world. The more advanced we get, the more we study it and leave it alone. The less advanced we are, the more we cut it down and claim it as a right to destroy it for our pleasure and our desires.
InnerWeb
Nah, it was the grays. The are on a mission to educate people by planting bits of knowledge here and there and then letting whispers build up the pool of knowledge, and more importantly what is accepted as true knowledge over time. They taught Bush and co how to do it (and maybe the Clintons as well!). Bush thought they were angels. They have been studying us for a long time and have learned that repetition of something over time causes many if not most people to accept that thing as true. You never know, they might be secretly training most of the successful politicians to gain a strong foothold on our planet.
[/humor]
InnerWeb
Yeah. You are right... It is an urban legend, and it was an article on here in the past, but I can not find the link to it. I added the clicking sound thing in to see who was asleep. lol
InnerWeb
Why couldn't he have just had a nice sex scandal. They could have impeached him for lying about the sex. That would have been so neat and easy. Noooo, he had to go and do all this "God told me to" stuff and lie about WMD in Iraq and lie about Al Quaeda and Iraq relations. He had to get us in this illegitimate war (Saddam was a very bad man, but the reasons were lies). Heck, if he had just been honest about why, I would not be so indignant about his leadership today. But, his is a house of lies, and one that seems to know no shame or any morals.
InnerWeb
I thought that was a Sock of Fleagulls.
InnerWeb
Camcorders, and other digital optics used to not have the IR blocked. It was not until it became popular to post IR pictures of people in normal clothing became popular. The problem was/is that IR tends to let us imagine we are seeing through the clothing. As one could understand, not something most people want being done. So, congress rattled its saber and the camera manufacturers removed or filtered the IR. This is also related to why digital cameras make clicking sounds that in many cases you can not disable. It was to warn victims of someone taking illicit photographs.
Which just goes to show, anything can be used in ways that were never intended by the inventor/manufacturer.
InnerWeb
I think I see the problem ..... people have stopped believing others are entitled to an opinion unless it agrees with them.
Entitled to an opinion. Sure, everyone is. No issues there. But, I have also learned to ignore the rants of the uninformed. As far as agreeing about what the facts meant, I stated nothing in any context that suggested that. You pulled that one out of your darker spaces. Facts do not change from person to person, only there interpretation. News is about facts, commentary is about commenting on those facts, so the opinions you reference have nothing to do with what I was talking about, which was news. Commentary without the facts is not commentary (you are not commenting on something), but rather story telling. I do not view experts as fountains of fact in most cases, but rather fountains of opinions, hopefully based on facts.
So what you are saying is the only accurate reporting are the ones you agree with
Factual new reporting has nothing to do with what I agree with or not. It only has to do with whether or not the facts are presented without bias and in completion. As far as understanding why most outlets do not have factual reporting, that has only to do with understanding the business model behind the industry. I'll make this simple.
Revenue is a must. If the earnings are not in the black overall, then it is not making money. The news industry itself has not always been a money maker.
Revenue streams for the news include, but are not limited to advertising and sponsorship (pretty much the same thing, but that is how NPR does it). Advertisers complain when the news is not drawing enough viewers (market share) or when the news contains something they do not like (bad news...). They complain for other reasons as well, but these are the primary reasons.
News programs make money based on things like market share (percent of viewers watching from the current market, such as 6:00pm Monday market or readers in the current market, such as Atlanta, Georgia) sponsorships (like NPR's All Things Considered or Rush Limbaugh) and from events they are paid to be at (much rarer, but still happens).
The percentage and the raw number of viewers/readers/listeners are what determine the overall value of a news outlet to a marketer. Of course, with that is the market demographic itself. You typically do not advertise on Rush Limbaugh to reach democrats.
Now, this soup of conditions is what the advertiser/sponsor is paying for. They get a value based on what the audience is composed of and how large it is. Many want their brand to be held in context with a certain viewpoint (target market?). When the news presents issues or paints them in a light that does not maintain the audience, the advertiser/sponsor typically pulls out.
The real humor behind all of this was we were just watching a program the other night talking about stories and news being pulled/changed because a sponsor/owner/advertiser did not like what the news was conveying. The news was factual in the cases discussed, but the news organization for one reason or another chose to drop or modify the news to be something other than the truth (heres the facts, and all the facts). True, one might argue that they did not have all the facts, and that the facts they had somehow painted a not so truthful picture. Rather than digging deeper into the story, they dropped it. Why? Because someone above them felt it was not of fiscal or personal value. Hmm.. Where is the truth in that? Where is the news in that?
When you are trying to make money by producing news, you only produce what makes money. Kind of simple. But, whether you like it or not, presenting a sound bite and calling it news is neither factual nor news. It is only entertainment. It does not provide enough information (think Bush's war for a recent big example) to make a judgment on, nor does it provide enough information to be at all informed. Yep, there are simple
Nah. I place the real blame with the average news consumer who is not at all interested in truth, merely entertainment. Seems many people these days only want an answer for what ails them. A true answer is not needed. Same with the war. The truth was easy to spot before the war, but it was not in demand, so people easily swallowed the lie others offered instead. Can you imagine how the poor average viewer would feel if they saw the true results of their indifference to the realities of htis war before it started. Patriotism indeed!
Just like the current elections. How much of what is being bantered about is truth? "I will","When I am elected" and other such comments are not truths but are promises. The truths are only in the past and many of those are unfulfilled promises. As easily as this country was sold on an Iraq invasion in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, it does not say much about the average Joe citizen's desire for truth or real factual news..
There are publications out there that produce news. Mostly unbiased news. They cost money. They are not free. They are not cheap. Why? Because only a relatively small part of the population is interested in what they have to say. So, they do not get a mass market to sell ads to. They do not get a large distribution to spread costs over. What they do get are people who want to know what is really happening and are willing to pay for that knowledge.
The media outfits are an entertainment industry. They are paid based upon number of copies sold and ad value based on reader rates. They are not in any way shape or form paid based upon factual news. They are only paid to provide what a large enough market segment wants to make the paper profitable. So, you can blame the media, but you would be asking them to go out of business by providing the cold hard truth to people who do not want it. They Brittany. They want Baseball. They want lots of meaningless stuff.
InnerWeb
It might be wishful thinking, but I am speaking from experience in the military. The networks were definitely redundant in many locations that were critical. I would be willing to bet that a part if not most of this network, especially given the price tag, has a certain level of redundancy behind those 50 gateways.
InnerWeb
Let me see...
With 50 gateways, if the internal network is built correctly (unlike say a how certain cable company does their's), then I can not think of any real net negatives except the complexity of the internal network now. But, given the serious issues the 4000 has, the complexity of the internal network is a relatively non-existent issue.
InnerWeb
Changing careers is one thing, changing jobs to someone who may benefit from *evidence* you gather in a trial against someone else is clearly a conflict of interest and unlawful in most western countries that I know of. You just do not do it. In many locales (not sure about his), he could be looking at jail time depending on what comes out about his involvement, time frames, actions, etc. Too bad we don't have restrictions against lawmakers doing the same thing.
InnerWeb