I can even see the Wii-mote getting fitted with knife, pot/pan, whisk, $kitchen_utensil attachments sold as a set sorta like the sports and Zelda sword/shield packages that they sell.
What, something like http://www.gameasylum.us/wiicomacooff1.html ? Even with the accessories, I can't see it becoming sufficiently free-form to be any more fun than the existing cooking games. Unless you can create a Fois Gras, Sea Urchin Roe, Caviar and Truffle Ice Cream, I'm not interested.
The future world will have to depend on a mix of energy sources, most renewable, some probably not.
This kind of thing will work great for Las Vegas, and a number of Moroccan arrays would be great for Western Europe with submarine cables across the Mediterranean. Hell, there's lots of great possible sites for this kind of thing in Australia too - even more, if we look at things like using the peak to do things like pump salt water up hill, or store pressurised air, where a couple of days of cloud cover and peak demand won't result in solidification of your thermal reservoir.
But what about Galena, Alaska? With places like that, the options are probably need to either continue shipping in hydrocarbons (either fossil or renewable)or ship in a micro nuclear plant.
I know this is going to sound like some bizarro socialist mish-mash, but what just might be needed is a pricing structure for energy that's in part based on actual costs, in part based on environmental impact, and in part based on the practicalities involved in providing power in a particular location. Under such a scheme, Las Vegas might pay an absolute fortune for electricity generated from natural gas fuelled turbines (a.k.a. ex-airliner jet engines) but very little for solar - enough to make solar the far more attractive option, but allow the gas turbines to be kept available for peak demand (e.g. aircon load on the hottest days, because a couple of arrays are down for maintenance). Galena, however, would probably pay cost of production + shipping + reasonable profit margins for the biodiesel used to fuel its generators, plus maybe a very small surcharge for any mineral diesel purchased and cycled through as reserve stocks (due to biodiesel's shorter storage life). What this would involve is some proper resource planning, above and beyond just what's going to provide the biggest return to investors over the next three to five, and that's why I don't hold much hope for it happening. If we're smart as a species, though, we'll look carefully at how we can reduce our dependance on fossil fuels while still holding them in reserve for emergency power uses or using them for specialised purposes - feedstocks for manufacturing, for example, rather than as a general source of power.
4. Banner ad fills your IE cache with goat porn that you've never viewed. Then it seduces your goat.
Oooh... I don't like that, not one little bit. Everyone knows that the defiled ones are no good as sacrifices to your SCSI bus, and I have more than enough trouble keeping track of which ones are and are not as it is.
Article name: Isoimmunization against Human Chorionic Gonadotropin with Conjugates of Processed beta-Subunit of the Hormone and Tetanus Toxoid
Okay, that's "Conjugates of Processed beta-Subunit of the Hormone and Tetanus Toxoid", i.e. specific lumps knocked off the hCG molecule and attached to the Tetanus Toxoid molecule - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugate_vaccine for some more details on that kind of technique. That's not hCG and Tetanus Toxoid injected at the same time because they were shipped in the one ampoule. In the former, you've got a molecule that that will generate an immune response that bears certain markers that will cause the immune system to also develop an immune response to hCG. In the latter, you have two separate molecules - hCG, which occurs in the body naturally, and tetanus toxoid, which does not - and only one of those should elicit an immune response.
As for possible reasons why hCG and Tetanus Toxoid would be administered together... that'll be to help maintain the pregnancy, i.e. reduce the risk of spontaneous abortion due to the immune response to the tetanus toxoid. They shouldn't administer that particular combined vaccine to men for much the same reasons as you wouldn't ordinarily give a man a shot of hCG without a good reason to do so.
As for why there would be research going on into vaccines that will cause an immune response to hCG... well, there are a number of cancers that are sensitive to hCG, and it could be handy to be able to use the body's own immune systems to suppress it instead of screwing around with other hormone treatments or suppressants. It's also good to know about the characteristics of particular molecules or their fragments will affect how well a particular custom-vaccine will work - that could be very important when producing special-purpose vaccines for individualised treatment. You can already get special-purpose vaccines made from your own cancer cells, and it would be great if those manufacturing such vaccines could say "These cells have markers X, Y and Z, so we'll use carrier molecule A - but those ones have markers Q,R and S, so for that patient we'd be better use carrier molecule B instead".
Also, provided one isn't philosophically opposed to the idea of contraception in the first place, what's inherently wrong with research into what might pan out to be an immunological contraceptive mechanism anyway? With things like the pill, you're messing with homone balances in ways that might be dangerous, and some formulations were, for most of a woman's reproductive life. The idea of a shot that prevents pregnancy UNTIL such time as the woman wishing to become pregnant goes on a course of medication flips that on its head - instead of decades on the pill and years off it, she's going for decades without medication and maybe a few years on it. I'm not saying it's an approach that's safe - we can't know that without research - but it's an interesting idea that warrants further research before we can say it's a good idea or a bad one.
hCG is used medically in women for a number of purposes - it's great for inducing ovulation, but it's also used to maintain pregnancy. How do I know? Mrs Roadkill had it administered, and the two BoFHlets owe their existance to hCG and a *very* generous public health system that funded their conception to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
Neonatal tetanus is *really* nasty, and occurs in a lot of developing countries. In those places, tetanus boosters during pregnancy make a lot of sense and can help protect both mother and child - as does something to help make the body more likely to maintain the pregnancy, despite the immune response brought on by the tetanus booster itself, so it makes sense that hCG may be a suitable additive that could reduce the spontaneous abortion rate following vaccination.
As for why it's probably not a good idea to give that particular hCG-laced vaccine to men... well, hCG can boost testosterone production and boost fertility. Don't know about you, but if I was going in for what I assumed was a tetanus booster I wouldn't want something that would also mess with my gonads. If I was female and pregnant, though, and lived in slums full of tetanus spores, I'd want the vaccine that would not only protect my child after my midwife cut the cord with a rusty knife, but which would also have a lower risk of spontanous abortion than the plain-vanilla vaccine did. This combined vaccine seems to fit that bill very nicely.
Oh, and Mr Engdahl, if you ever see this, my Kool-Aid is just fine thanks... how's yours?
I don't see why a third party can't bring this.... or maybe a grey market version. Off to ebay!
It goes in the back, so that makes it a Slot 1 cartridge. That means an unauthorised third-party device will need to use the same kind of trickery that Slot 1 flashcarts use - either exploiting some "defects" in the DS's bios, a'la Passme devices, or mimicking an actual DS cartridge through using copyrighted Nintendo boot codes. Nintendo are going to love that, and they're currently coming down on a number of flashcart manufacturers and issuing DMCA notices to a number of US based or hosted retailers over flashcarts as circumvention devices and over the alleged violation of Nintendo's intellectual property. If I had a box of third-party DS TV tuners, I certainly wouldn't be sticking them on ebay - I don't want Nintendo to get my account killed.
The interesting thing is, I suspect a third-party game manufacturer or third-party TV Tuner manufacturer might be able to stand up to Nintendo over this if they wanted to slog it out through the courts - the copyrighted code sequence in question appears in part to be an electronic representation of a Nintendo logo and its hash, and if it's not there the DS won't boot the cartridge - so it might be arguable that third-party products that don't act as circumvention devices should be allowed to use that code as it's the only way to provide interoperability.
I am not a lawyer, and I'm not really part of the "scene", but this is my understanding of things - and it may be flawed.
Mrs Roadkill calls hers an "Uz-beh" just because it pisses me off. She also says "Uh-bun-tah", for much the same reason. I think it's part of some new sport called "Geek-baiting", which is a bit like bear-baiting except you're less likely to lose a limb.
Of course, I had sent her a plain text mail, but she was reading it as HTML, and hotmail had been kind enough to translate the URL I had typed into a clickable link... only the href attribute of the link did not point directly to the GNU project, for instance
Okay, I do NOT want to apologise for Microsoft. I am not a huge fan of a lot of what they've done and continue to do.
As someone who drives mailservers and web filters and deals with idiots who click on stupid stuff, though, I can see some valid reasons to do this kind of thing - if you've got the bandwidth and hardware to run the redirectors, and the resources to keep a disallow-list up to date.
No matter how good your spam filters are, if you expect a reasonable amount of legitimate mail to get through you are also risking that new phishing emails will get through. Or that other spam directing people to virus-laden sites will get through. It makes sense to prevent your users going directly to sites that you don't know about, as you have the ability to then block the redirection if you suddenly discover that dubdubdub dot bankofamericac dot om isn't really the Bank of America website. With the redirection, you also have the potential to have automated systems vet the sites and look for danger signs too - and real-time information about new links in email that are being followed, which could also be used to refine your mail filters if particularly dangerous ones are found.
The re-writing as clickable also means that the recipient can follow the link without manually entering it in their browser. There are good and bad things about doing that, but it's something that makes it easier for most people to use the service without having to think (and again, there are good and bad things about doing that too...)
I'm not saying that that's how Microsoft were playing the game, or that they're not evil. What I am saying, though, is that for the average inattentive Hotmail user, having Microsoft make links clickable AND having Microsoft able to render those links harmless at a later date if they suddenly discover that they've been inundated with links to malware are probably a good thing. Looks like they've dropped the ball on maintenance in this particular instance, but that doesn't mean it's not a good thing in most cases.
Yes, I know... slippery slope, "first they blocked the phishing sites but I didn't speak up because I don't engage in Identity Theft", how long 'til they monitor and block political dissent too, tinfoil hat, etc... but Microsoft could use this as a selling feature for their service without much more work. Use some good data about which sites people shouldn't visit for safety reasons, publicise the fact that Hotmail re-links "for your safety", and you've got another good reason for people to consider using their service. Hell, if they were open and transparent about it and used good data and re-directed to a warning that you could still click through if you wanted to (and perhaps included a security assessment of the blocked page too, and a thumbnail) I'd recommend their service, especially to those people I can't manage to convince to use something other than IE.
I find that in about fifty percent of support visits, loosening one nut between the keyboard and the chair works wonders... but you'll occasionally need to sharpen the edge of the keyboard first.
Oh, they've still got lots of nukes, and if they want more they can probably just buy some back on the black market - but they'll probably want to save those for special occasions. No, I see this as more of a way to show off what they can do relatively cheaply and cleanly. Say you've just invaded, oh, I don't know, Futtbuckistan. You've got most of the population subdued and happy, but there's a large rebel base you want to level. Light the blue touchpaper, drop it out the back of an Antonov, and when the dust settles send in the Corps of Engineers to build a shiny new town that you can hand over to a bunch of well-behaved peasants from a neighbouring region. When the rains come they can grow crops without worring about radiation, they'll have a nice place to live, and the whole country will know what happens if you don't play ball. Carrot and stick in one. Nobody is game to use nukes because, well, they're nukes - but a power that had a halfway-decent rationalisation for using one of these could probably talk their way out of the international backlash... and if they couldn't, well, would you really want to piss them off, knowing what they were capable of?
I can see it now. Some wack-job malcontent who would otherwise have loaded up a truck with explosives and taken out half a federal building and its daycare centre will instead penetrate the network of a western company in China. From there, he will penetrate a Chinese low-security network, and launch an attack against the toilet paper inventory system at the Pentagon. This will trigger the IDS, and the next thing we know the United States of America launches a first-strike against the Henan branch of the People's Yak Testicle Grading Board because that's who the attacking IP address belongs to. China retaliates. The U.S.A. retaliates against the retaliation.
Still look like a good idea?
(And for fuck's sake, nobody mod this funny. Okay, the People's Yak Testicle Grading board is hilarious, but the thought of *any* automated system being hooked up to launch controls is the stuff of nightmares... especially when there's no real way to tell if the "attack" is from your opponent or someone else who wants to pin the blame on them. Someone massing troops on the border or lobbing nukes your way? Worth a military escalation. Someone probing your network? Not so much.)
I know you like the collegial atmosphere out at JPL. I know you like being able to have your work peer-reviewed. In short, I know that you like the lives that some of you have lead for the last several decades. Unfortunately, you and I both know that things are changing, largely at the request of your own government.
I know you don't like the new security checks. No matter how squeaky-clean your lives are, or how much you love your country, there are always some skeletons in the closet that can come back to haunt you. Also, the rules are always changing - what was unacceptable twenty years ago but acceptable ten years ago is now unacceptable again. Nobody should have to live like that.
My organisation already knows all your secrets. They weren't that hard to find - as you've probably already realised, money talks. And you know what? We don't care. That's right, we don't give a shit that you cross-dress, have sex with livestock, eat your own boogers or have a gambling problem. (Actually, on that last point, we do - and treat it as a medical problem with treatment covered entirely under our health plan, and our financial planners can help you get your life back together too. Same deal with drugs.)
From our secret base of operations somewhere south-east of Florida we plan World Domination. Our Weather Machine and Death Ray divisions are approaching the deployment phase, but there's still a pressing need for talent in the Heavy Launch, Orbital Habitat and Orbital Weapons Platform divisions.
Our employees receive world-class free health care, six weeks paid vacation each year and a pension plan that makes the GDP of many small countries look pitiful - and there's lots of room for advancement, so your pension payout could actually *be* Lichtenstein or Peru. We also pay all re-location expenses, and have great schools a short submarine ride away. We have a wide range of recreational and sporting facilities. We are family-friendly, with common-sense and generous carers leave provisions. On the subject of family-friendly, we have a petting zoo. We also have a less family-oriented heavy-petting zoo, but we don't usually like to talk about it.
If you think it's time for a change and that you can make a difference, reply here - don't worry, although your government will find you we've paid their operatives enough to make sure we get to you first. No pressure - we won't tell your dirty little secrets, but then, we don't have to. The choice is entirely yours.
Sincerely,
Xavier F. Megalomaniac Supervillain
P.S. We have administrative, support and security roles available too - and leather and spandex are only required on formal occasions.
Look, we all know that the Chinese government is going to be monitoring as much as it can. They're control freaks. I, for one, welcome any measures they take to remind the people that they're being watched - maybe such reminders will help the people of china think about what kind of society they live in and what kind of society they would like to live in, and encourage them to take action to try to shape their future.
"Oh, that's easy. Age of Steamboat Willie + 50 years. No, not just 50 years from now - from whenever the question is asked, forever more. Next question?"
what if someone flushes a bag of drugs cuz they know the police are gonna search their house? That'd make it look like 1000 people overdosed at once lol
Although some of most drugs will probably be excreted untransformed, what they're probably looking for in the waste is particular metabolites. So, by looking for both drug metabolites and the actual drug they can probably identify both consumers and flushers.
Another interesting application, if they check further upstream, could be identifying areas containing drug labs. Looking for high concentrations of drugs and various manufacturing by-products in the waste stream could identify neighbourhoods containing labs. I used to be vaguely acquainted with a police forensic chemist who told me that they regularly laughed at some of the amphetamine labs they busted - in some cases, 60%-80% of their yield was going down the drain.
And I apologise for apparently misunderstanding you. Looks like we may agree on more than I'd thought.
My hope that you don't get targeted by The Powers That Be still stands though... it doesn't seem like a safe time to hold unpopular views, but then, I suppose no time ever is.
*Knock* *Knock* *Knock*... muffled voices... vague sounds of a struggle... the slamming of a van door, and the van driving off.
Karmatic, I'm really not sure that want I agree with a hell of a lot that you say. To some extent, I see it as symptomatic of that whole "Don't trust any government under any circumstances, and you've gotta own guns so the King of England can't take you back, and elected corrupt judges and officials and sherrifs are better than appointed professionals who may or may not have a high degree of integrity" mindset that, from my point of view, is half the problem with the United States. Your founding fathers wanted out from under the thumb of an oppressive foreign power and its appointed corrupt officials. Things have moved on the last 200 years though, and in some ways Canada and Ausstralia are far better off with their unelected police and judges and garbage collection officials than you are.
The problem is, though, given *how* things are in the United States right now, and the direction things seem to be moving in, I can see how the kind of armed dissent you're advocating can be seen as the only alternative. Thoroughly ingrained in your history and your culture is the idea that the American Revolutionary War was a right and just struggle, and that tyranny should be opposed by the people... you've even got things like bits of your constitution at least paying lip-service to that idea. Your government has to realise that too, and must see any group which would take that seriously enough to want to try to arm and protect themselves as a threat to be stamped out... not so much because they presently pose a direct threat to the government, but because they set a precedent or example for others who *might* pose a real threat to those in power. That little incident in Waco may have been not so much about them directly posing a threat as it was about providing a disincentive for any other group that might want to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
So, I don't know... are you delusional and paranoid and dangerous, or the inevitable - and desirable - product of 200+ years of American history? I find both options disquieting and depressing, but I thank you for making this foreigner uncomfortable and only hope you can make enough of your countrymen uncomfortable enough for them to think seriously about ways toward a better life without a need for bloodshed - and without the need for you to hope the shout of "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms" at your door is just a delivery.
I know that "open" means never having to rely on a single source (if you don't want to), but a great hardware solution coupled with all open source code would make one (or a few) companies really pop.
Paradoxically, one key benefactor of any such move may well be Diebold themselves. Forget for a moment how badly they screwed the pooch with their voting hardware and software, and think for a moment about that other great area of expertise of theirs - Automated Teller Machines. In general, that kind of machine is tamper-resistant and tamper-evident. They could *really* clean up as hardware manufacturers and systems integrators for a quality e-voting system based around open-source software and high-quality proprietary hardware, if they can hide the stench of their previous offerings.
Another group of companies who are ideally positioned to benefit from this are gaming machine manufacturers. In fact, since ATMs probably aren't as open to government scrutiny and regulation as your average video poker machine is, the gaming machine manufacturing industry is probably *better* positioned to comply with government regulation and produce a tamper-resistant system than Diebold is, and could probably fairly easily adapt one of their gaming platforms to the purpose - you sign in, you get a card to insert in the machine (good for one "voting credit"), you make and review your choices, you collect the machine-punched verification card and "voting card" and deposit both in the appropriate boxes on the way out (with the punched "ballot paper" really only being for verification and tamper-control purposes). Forget the privacy concerns - the voting cards needn't be traceable to any particular individual, and could be constantly re-coded with one-time-use "voting-credit-numbers" as they're recycled during the course of the day - and since the paper electoral rolls won't have timestamps on them, there'll be no way to tie the time of use of a particular voting-credit to a particular voter. To me, this almost seems natural and self-evident, and I'd be very surprised if there weren't gaming companies considering either doing this themselves or spinning off subsidiaries to do this themselves.
I know that not everyone has a permanent connection to the net everywhere they go, but what is the point of storing a local copy of Wikipedia?
Ummm... I think the whole point is, as you've pointed out, that not everyone has a permanent connection to the net everywhere they go. Or maybe they don't have access to everything they'd like even if they *do* have net access everywhere, or want to pay extravagant data rates while out and about.
Joe has all-you-can-eat broadband at home, or an understanding employer with a fat pipe, and spends two hours each day on the train. Two and a half gig per month (and lets face it, you probably don't want to update it more frequently that that) and he's got probably half his reading material sorted out.
Wang lives in Buttfuckistan, a fictional country with totalitarian leanings with too many real-world counterparts. The Great Firewall of Buttfuckistan (i.e. squidguard, under the control of Buttfuckistan Telecom, and settings in the routers to drop non-port-80 traffic half the time) makes it impossible to reliably access Wikipedia from inside their borders, which is a great shame because the entry on Buttfuckistan is particularly unflattering. Once a month, Joe sticks a DVD with five minutes from an old re-run of Friends and an encrypted dump of Wikipedia in an airmail envelope and sends it to Wang.
Mary is still at secondary school, and her particular school has wifi access for students who are encouraged to purchase their own laptops, but since the local pastor discovered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dream_of_the_fi shermans_wife_hokusai.jpg they've been forced to add wikipedia to the school's blocklist. Which is a pity, because it's a great first-approximation source for material or research directions, but there you go. Mary can make a local copy through her home broadband connection, and can access it locally on her laptop wherever she goes - even at school, or church. Bill, Jillian and Mungo (the pastor's son) find out about this, and now all four of them take it in turns to make the copy each month, sharing the bandwidth costs. Their friends Harry and Sally, who don't have broadband but are great friends of the other four, also get copies... and there are plans to distribute the copies further, as a kind of teenage grass-roots knowledge-sharing and social-justice effort.
Slashdot Mirror
The future world will have to depend on a mix of energy sources, most renewable, some probably not.
This kind of thing will work great for Las Vegas, and a number of Moroccan arrays would be great for Western Europe with submarine cables across the Mediterranean. Hell, there's lots of great possible sites for this kind of thing in Australia too - even more, if we look at things like using the peak to do things like pump salt water up hill, or store pressurised air, where a couple of days of cloud cover and peak demand won't result in solidification of your thermal reservoir.
But what about Galena, Alaska? With places like that, the options are probably need to either continue shipping in hydrocarbons (either fossil or renewable)or ship in a micro nuclear plant.
I know this is going to sound like some bizarro socialist mish-mash, but what just might be needed is a pricing structure for energy that's in part based on actual costs, in part based on environmental impact, and in part based on the practicalities involved in providing power in a particular location. Under such a scheme, Las Vegas might pay an absolute fortune for electricity generated from natural gas fuelled turbines (a.k.a. ex-airliner jet engines) but very little for solar - enough to make solar the far more attractive option, but allow the gas turbines to be kept available for peak demand (e.g. aircon load on the hottest days, because a couple of arrays are down for maintenance). Galena, however, would probably pay cost of production + shipping + reasonable profit margins for the biodiesel used to fuel its generators, plus maybe a very small surcharge for any mineral diesel purchased and cycled through as reserve stocks (due to biodiesel's shorter storage life). What this would involve is some proper resource planning, above and beyond just what's going to provide the biggest return to investors over the next three to five, and that's why I don't hold much hope for it happening. If we're smart as a species, though, we'll look carefully at how we can reduce our dependance on fossil fuels while still holding them in reserve for emergency power uses or using them for specialised purposes - feedstocks for manufacturing, for example, rather than as a general source of power.
There's seldom much sense to the moderation here. I'd mod you up as insightful if I had the points... oh wait, never mind.
No, I'd like to see "I'm A CEO - Get Me Out Of Here".
Steve Ballmer, a stack of chairs, and Larry Page. Oh, and a couple of bottles of tequila. And handguns.
Darl McBride, twelve inches of hosepipe and a bottle of fireants - lube will be optional.
Who else wants to see Mark Burnett or Jon de Mol pick this up and run with it?
As for possible reasons why hCG and Tetanus Toxoid would be administered together... that'll be to help maintain the pregnancy, i.e. reduce the risk of spontaneous abortion due to the immune response to the tetanus toxoid. They shouldn't administer that particular combined vaccine to men for much the same reasons as you wouldn't ordinarily give a man a shot of hCG without a good reason to do so.
As for why there would be research going on into vaccines that will cause an immune response to hCG... well, there are a number of cancers that are sensitive to hCG, and it could be handy to be able to use the body's own immune systems to suppress it instead of screwing around with other hormone treatments or suppressants. It's also good to know about the characteristics of particular molecules or their fragments will affect how well a particular custom-vaccine will work - that could be very important when producing special-purpose vaccines for individualised treatment. You can already get special-purpose vaccines made from your own cancer cells, and it would be great if those manufacturing such vaccines could say "These cells have markers X, Y and Z, so we'll use carrier molecule A - but those ones have markers Q,R and S, so for that patient we'd be better use carrier molecule B instead".
Also, provided one isn't philosophically opposed to the idea of contraception in the first place, what's inherently wrong with research into what might pan out to be an immunological contraceptive mechanism anyway? With things like the pill, you're messing with homone balances in ways that might be dangerous, and some formulations were, for most of a woman's reproductive life. The idea of a shot that prevents pregnancy UNTIL such time as the woman wishing to become pregnant goes on a course of medication flips that on its head - instead of decades on the pill and years off it, she's going for decades without medication and maybe a few years on it. I'm not saying it's an approach that's safe - we can't know that without research - but it's an interesting idea that warrants further research before we can say it's a good idea or a bad one.
hCG is used medically in women for a number of purposes - it's great for inducing ovulation, but it's also used to maintain pregnancy. How do I know? Mrs Roadkill had it administered, and the two BoFHlets owe their existance to hCG and a *very* generous public health system that funded their conception to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
Neonatal tetanus is *really* nasty, and occurs in a lot of developing countries. In those places, tetanus boosters during pregnancy make a lot of sense and can help protect both mother and child - as does something to help make the body more likely to maintain the pregnancy, despite the immune response brought on by the tetanus booster itself, so it makes sense that hCG may be a suitable additive that could reduce the spontaneous abortion rate following vaccination.
As for why it's probably not a good idea to give that particular hCG-laced vaccine to men... well, hCG can boost testosterone production and boost fertility. Don't know about you, but if I was going in for what I assumed was a tetanus booster I wouldn't want something that would also mess with my gonads. If I was female and pregnant, though, and lived in slums full of tetanus spores, I'd want the vaccine that would not only protect my child after my midwife cut the cord with a rusty knife, but which would also have a lower risk of spontanous abortion than the plain-vanilla vaccine did. This combined vaccine seems to fit that bill very nicely.
Oh, and Mr Engdahl, if you ever see this, my Kool-Aid is just fine thanks... how's yours?
The interesting thing is, I suspect a third-party game manufacturer or third-party TV Tuner manufacturer might be able to stand up to Nintendo over this if they wanted to slog it out through the courts - the copyrighted code sequence in question appears in part to be an electronic representation of a Nintendo logo and its hash, and if it's not there the DS won't boot the cartridge - so it might be arguable that third-party products that don't act as circumvention devices should be allowed to use that code as it's the only way to provide interoperability.
I am not a lawyer, and I'm not really part of the "scene", but this is my understanding of things - and it may be flawed.
Mrs Roadkill calls hers an "Uz-beh" just because it pisses me off. She also says "Uh-bun-tah", for much the same reason. I think it's part of some new sport called "Geek-baiting", which is a bit like bear-baiting except you're less likely to lose a limb.
As someone who drives mailservers and web filters and deals with idiots who click on stupid stuff, though, I can see some valid reasons to do this kind of thing - if you've got the bandwidth and hardware to run the redirectors, and the resources to keep a disallow-list up to date.
No matter how good your spam filters are, if you expect a reasonable amount of legitimate mail to get through you are also risking that new phishing emails will get through. Or that other spam directing people to virus-laden sites will get through. It makes sense to prevent your users going directly to sites that you don't know about, as you have the ability to then block the redirection if you suddenly discover that dubdubdub dot bankofamericac dot om isn't really the Bank of America website. With the redirection, you also have the potential to have automated systems vet the sites and look for danger signs too - and real-time information about new links in email that are being followed, which could also be used to refine your mail filters if particularly dangerous ones are found.
The re-writing as clickable also means that the recipient can follow the link without manually entering it in their browser. There are good and bad things about doing that, but it's something that makes it easier for most people to use the service without having to think (and again, there are good and bad things about doing that too...)
I'm not saying that that's how Microsoft were playing the game, or that they're not evil. What I am saying, though, is that for the average inattentive Hotmail user, having Microsoft make links clickable AND having Microsoft able to render those links harmless at a later date if they suddenly discover that they've been inundated with links to malware are probably a good thing. Looks like they've dropped the ball on maintenance in this particular instance, but that doesn't mean it's not a good thing in most cases.
Yes, I know... slippery slope, "first they blocked the phishing sites but I didn't speak up because I don't engage in Identity Theft", how long 'til they monitor and block political dissent too, tinfoil hat, etc... but Microsoft could use this as a selling feature for their service without much more work. Use some good data about which sites people shouldn't visit for safety reasons, publicise the fact that Hotmail re-links "for your safety", and you've got another good reason for people to consider using their service. Hell, if they were open and transparent about it and used good data and re-directed to a warning that you could still click through if you wanted to (and perhaps included a security assessment of the blocked page too, and a thumbnail) I'd recommend their service, especially to those people I can't manage to convince to use something other than IE.
Oh, they've still got lots of nukes, and if they want more they can probably just buy some back on the black market - but they'll probably want to save those for special occasions. No, I see this as more of a way to show off what they can do relatively cheaply and cleanly. Say you've just invaded, oh, I don't know, Futtbuckistan. You've got most of the population subdued and happy, but there's a large rebel base you want to level. Light the blue touchpaper, drop it out the back of an Antonov, and when the dust settles send in the Corps of Engineers to build a shiny new town that you can hand over to a bunch of well-behaved peasants from a neighbouring region. When the rains come they can grow crops without worring about radiation, they'll have a nice place to live, and the whole country will know what happens if you don't play ball. Carrot and stick in one. Nobody is game to use nukes because, well, they're nukes - but a power that had a halfway-decent rationalisation for using one of these could probably talk their way out of the international backlash... and if they couldn't, well, would you really want to piss them off, knowing what they were capable of?
Yeah, smart move.
I can see it now. Some wack-job malcontent who would otherwise have loaded up a truck with explosives and taken out half a federal building and its daycare centre will instead penetrate the network of a western company in China. From there, he will penetrate a Chinese low-security network, and launch an attack against the toilet paper inventory system at the Pentagon. This will trigger the IDS, and the next thing we know the United States of America launches a first-strike against the Henan branch of the People's Yak Testicle Grading Board because that's who the attacking IP address belongs to. China retaliates. The U.S.A. retaliates against the retaliation.
Still look like a good idea?
(And for fuck's sake, nobody mod this funny. Okay, the People's Yak Testicle Grading board is hilarious, but the thought of *any* automated system being hooked up to launch controls is the stuff of nightmares... especially when there's no real way to tell if the "attack" is from your opponent or someone else who wants to pin the blame on them. Someone massing troops on the border or lobbing nukes your way? Worth a military escalation. Someone probing your network? Not so much.)
Dear NASA Scientists,
I know you like the collegial atmosphere out at JPL. I know you like being able to have your work peer-reviewed. In short, I know that you like the lives that some of you have lead for the last several decades. Unfortunately, you and I both know that things are changing, largely at the request of your own government.
I know you don't like the new security checks. No matter how squeaky-clean your lives are, or how much you love your country, there are always some skeletons in the closet that can come back to haunt you. Also, the rules are always changing - what was unacceptable twenty years ago but acceptable ten years ago is now unacceptable again. Nobody should have to live like that.
My organisation already knows all your secrets. They weren't that hard to find - as you've probably already realised, money talks. And you know what? We don't care. That's right, we don't give a shit that you cross-dress, have sex with livestock, eat your own boogers or have a gambling problem. (Actually, on that last point, we do - and treat it as a medical problem with treatment covered entirely under our health plan, and our financial planners can help you get your life back together too. Same deal with drugs.)
From our secret base of operations somewhere south-east of Florida we plan World Domination. Our Weather Machine and Death Ray divisions are approaching the deployment phase, but there's still a pressing need for talent in the Heavy Launch, Orbital Habitat and Orbital Weapons Platform divisions.
Our employees receive world-class free health care, six weeks paid vacation each year and a pension plan that makes the GDP of many small countries look pitiful - and there's lots of room for advancement, so your pension payout could actually *be* Lichtenstein or Peru. We also pay all re-location expenses, and have great schools a short submarine ride away. We have a wide range of recreational and sporting facilities. We are family-friendly, with common-sense and generous carers leave provisions. On the subject of family-friendly, we have a petting zoo. We also have a less family-oriented heavy-petting zoo, but we don't usually like to talk about it.
If you think it's time for a change and that you can make a difference, reply here - don't worry, although your government will find you we've paid their operatives enough to make sure we get to you first. No pressure - we won't tell your dirty little secrets, but then, we don't have to. The choice is entirely yours.
Sincerely,
Xavier F. Megalomaniac
Supervillain
P.S.
We have administrative, support and security
roles available too - and leather and spandex
are only required on formal occasions.
Look, we all know that the Chinese government is going to be monitoring as much as it can. They're control freaks. I, for one, welcome any measures they take to remind the people that they're being watched - maybe such reminders will help the people of china think about what kind of society they live in and what kind of society they would like to live in, and encourage them to take action to try to shape their future.
Another interesting application, if they check further upstream, could be identifying areas containing drug labs. Looking for high concentrations of drugs and various manufacturing by-products in the waste stream could identify neighbourhoods containing labs. I used to be vaguely acquainted with a police forensic chemist who told me that they regularly laughed at some of the amphetamine labs they busted - in some cases, 60%-80% of their yield was going down the drain.
(I know. She said you were so bad she didn't know whether to laugh or just kick you out and finish the job all by herself.)
The Victor Company of Japan called.
They said they want their market disruption techniques back.
And I apologise for apparently misunderstanding you. Looks like we may agree on more than I'd thought.
My hope that you don't get targeted by The Powers That Be still stands though... it doesn't seem like a safe time to hold unpopular views, but then, I suppose no time ever is.
*Knock* *Knock* *Knock*... muffled voices... vague sounds of a struggle... the slamming of a van door, and the van driving off.
Karmatic, I'm really not sure that want I agree with a hell of a lot that you say. To some extent, I see it as symptomatic of that whole "Don't trust any government under any circumstances, and you've gotta own guns so the King of England can't take you back, and elected corrupt judges and officials and sherrifs are better than appointed professionals who may or may not have a high degree of integrity" mindset that, from my point of view, is half the problem with the United States. Your founding fathers wanted out from under the thumb of an oppressive foreign power and its appointed corrupt officials. Things have moved on the last 200 years though, and in some ways Canada and Ausstralia are far better off with their unelected police and judges and garbage collection officials than you are.
The problem is, though, given *how* things are in the United States right now, and the direction things seem to be moving in, I can see how the kind of armed dissent you're advocating can be seen as the only alternative. Thoroughly ingrained in your history and your culture is the idea that the American Revolutionary War was a right and just struggle, and that tyranny should be opposed by the people... you've even got things like bits of your constitution at least paying lip-service to that idea. Your government has to realise that too, and must see any group which would take that seriously enough to want to try to arm and protect themselves as a threat to be stamped out... not so much because they presently pose a direct threat to the government, but because they set a precedent or example for others who *might* pose a real threat to those in power. That little incident in Waco may have been not so much about them directly posing a threat as it was about providing a disincentive for any other group that might want to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
So, I don't know... are you delusional and paranoid and dangerous, or the inevitable - and desirable - product of 200+ years of American history? I find both options disquieting and depressing, but I thank you for making this foreigner uncomfortable and only hope you can make enough of your countrymen uncomfortable enough for them to think seriously about ways toward a better life without a need for bloodshed - and without the need for you to hope the shout of "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms" at your door is just a delivery.
Another group of companies who are ideally positioned to benefit from this are gaming machine manufacturers. In fact, since ATMs probably aren't as open to government scrutiny and regulation as your average video poker machine is, the gaming machine manufacturing industry is probably *better* positioned to comply with government regulation and produce a tamper-resistant system than Diebold is, and could probably fairly easily adapt one of their gaming platforms to the purpose - you sign in, you get a card to insert in the machine (good for one "voting credit"), you make and review your choices, you collect the machine-punched verification card and "voting card" and deposit both in the appropriate boxes on the way out (with the punched "ballot paper" really only being for verification and tamper-control purposes). Forget the privacy concerns - the voting cards needn't be traceable to any particular individual, and could be constantly re-coded with one-time-use "voting-credit-numbers" as they're recycled during the course of the day - and since the paper electoral rolls won't have timestamps on them, there'll be no way to tie the time of use of a particular voting-credit to a particular voter. To me, this almost seems natural and self-evident, and I'd be very surprised if there weren't gaming companies considering either doing this themselves or spinning off subsidiaries to do this themselves.
Joe has all-you-can-eat broadband at home, or an understanding employer with a fat pipe, and spends two hours each day on the train. Two and a half gig per month (and lets face it, you probably don't want to update it more frequently that that) and he's got probably half his reading material sorted out.
Wang lives in Buttfuckistan, a fictional country with totalitarian leanings with too many real-world counterparts. The Great Firewall of Buttfuckistan (i.e. squidguard, under the control of Buttfuckistan Telecom, and settings in the routers to drop non-port-80 traffic half the time) makes it impossible to reliably access Wikipedia from inside their borders, which is a great shame because the entry on Buttfuckistan is particularly unflattering. Once a month, Joe sticks a DVD with five minutes from an old re-run of Friends and an encrypted dump of Wikipedia in an airmail envelope and sends it to Wang.
Mary is still at secondary school, and her particular school has wifi access for students who are encouraged to purchase their own laptops, but since the local pastor discovered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dream_of_the_f
Still can't see the point?