Movies have distribution channels, theater chains like Loews. Books have publishers, and more importantly there are outlets like Border's which have massive say-so on what books do well vs. languish based on if they will carry it. Music, well... companies like Viacom have equal touchpoints into marketing DVDs as well as CDs, and radio stations are the equivalent to tv stations, so I'm lost on that one as well. Ask Howard Stern if he thinks a radio conglomerate like Clear Channel Communications can make or break a pop icon like Jessica Simpson or the American Idol chubby chick, Clarkson. They can and do.
Well, here's mine. It hasn't been brought up yet, so let's see if anyone considers it insightful...
The Chinese are not our enemies in this issue. They actually fear a totally destabilized N. Korea as well. That they came to the rescue in the Korean War belies a much more complicated truth about the relationship between Koreans and Chinese. China, on the verge of becoming the 2nd superpower economically, is really not all tha keen on seeing Kim Il Jong do things like test fire intermediate range missiles into the Sea of Japan. They know that quite a few U.S. boomers are riding the coast of Korea, and will have Trident IIs arriving on target in minutes if we think a nuke had been actually launched, at either the West Coast (which we know they cannot yet reach) or Japan. And they know that the Chinese would not respond.
The worst case scenario really is, that NK's increasing starving and helpless population is thrust under some stupid pretext into an attack on S. Korea and a nuclear weapon is moved to the front and detonated and then denied. Again, I think the U.S. would go nuclear if that happened.
Prosperity of S. Korea combined with an internal assassination campaign is probably Washington's strategy. It's best to fight this one using spies and satellites, a conventional invasion would be pointless and unlike Iraq, we don't want to assert control over the region.
David Lynch and a few others not withstandaing, it's very unviable to run a production company on a download or subscription model.
Take for instance, thousands and thousands of hours of decent content which is produced regardless if anybody watches it or not. Yes, I'm talking about independant film. Hundreds of films get made around the world every year, some end up at film festivals, some stay highly regional, some make it to Sundance in the USA and other prestigious film fests for indy films.
Very few of these films are torrent-able. A tiny, tiny margin - maybe 1%, probably less. There isn't enough bandwidth or storage space to encode them all, even though the filmmakers are looking at nothing but profit if they participate in the process instead of letting the canisters rot in their attic. Still, it doesn't happen.
Now, cut out the distribution methods in your model. These networks greenlight projects, review them for quality, and decide if they will bankroll them. Take that away, and you have anarchy.
Seriously, what would happen over time is an insane S/N ratio. Hundreds of small production companies would vie for your dollars. Here! Bankroll this, we'll sign Shatner! Seriously, we'll put his fat ass in a rubber suit and make him recite King Lear! Pay here!
A few companies would eventually emerge, just as in the game industry, where the barriers to entry used to be low, and an EA or Microsoft would try and step in as the content "management" provider, and you'd just substitute the bogeyman you hate, with a new and more manevolent one.
It all seems very democratic or populist, but it doesn't play out that way. The market abhors a vacuum.
It's a very Gartner "quadrant" thing to say, to be so deterministic. It's as if Gartner can only see a world in which one company drives the web.
No mention of W3C or standards or the state of plugin specifications, or anything about frameworks for interoperability.
These three analysts are Ray Valdes, David Mitchell Smith and Whit Andrews. I question the assertion that the growth of Firefox is based on unsustainable market conditions? Like what? That IE is insecure? If IE becomes "secure" will that immediately revert to the IT paradigm these guys are familiar with, where one technology emerges and drives standards?
Could it POSSIBLY be that Gartner analysts just don't see a larger force at work, that when open source products compete on quality and stability and unify their distribution methods, they are INHERENTLY more desireable, even on closed operating systems, than proprietary browsers? Because the standards can't be wrested into corporate control and the IT industry is waking up to the benefits of open source?
This is why I prefer Burton to Gartner. Burton papers tend to see things more how I see them. I have no axe to grind, nor do I work for Burton. I just encourage you, as the reading IT professional or hobbyist, not to revere the Gartner name blindly.
I pulled some very old Gartner papers out the other day, and they were laughably wrong about web standards 5 years ago. I don't trust them anymore now.
I'm not too enthused about the prospect of international sex slavery going online.
Im terms of human rights abuses, you are correct. I brought it up to illustrate a point, where I don't think the question is orthogonal at all.
Exactly what is the difference from a virtual sex trade and mining phat l00t in World of Warcraft and selling it for real money on Ebay? Perhaps you meant the question of consent. High dollar sex world would promote slavery as the prostitution rings do now in Latin America, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Japan, China and Eastern Europe. It would incite organized crime to force women into the trade. It negates the question here, which is - do these guys completing l33t quests and using teamwork to beat the game have fun?
I would suggest to you, it doesn't matter. If these long hours and slave conditions exist as the best occupation in a poor economy or one they are forcibly made to perform, the result is the same. It's just economic slavery vs. literal slavery.
As for the virtual sex world, with VR sex and stim toys and VOIP and a Matrix like world of bondage chicks - it's coming. The question, do we use cases like these to construct the cyberspace (I hate that word) laws needed to stop it when it arrives?
I would submit to you that Project Entropia is really exactly that, just without some of the more "functional" graphics and technology really needed to make it work.
I propose a business plan whose time has come. Take a look at the graphics of men and women in WoW. Take a look at these gfx. The 3D engines have reached the point where the next big sim is Sex World.
Bondage camps, all kinds of lingerie and toys, fully animated and adjustable genitalia, special "attacks", and the PvP area can fufill mud wrestling or something.
Proximity to other players can trigger VOIP, for the phone sex angle and most importantly, you can convert game currency BACK to dollars or any other world currency through a partnership with a large enough bank like Citibank.
It's the natural next step after the Sims, right? It would make the sweatshops start teaching english, german, swedish, french and russian to local women real fast. If the environment was as immersive as WoW, and not some cheesy 3D engine, it would be probably be a big moneymaker.
And, since I'm fleshing (no pun intended, ok... intended) let's add gambling and a formal auction house for the bling bling, like stretch hummers (cars, people, keep your mind outta the gutter a bit) Ferraris, Porsches, diamond rings, Glock pistols (gotta have a ranged combat system in the PvP areas) maybe even have the real bad boys carrying Uzis.
It would make GTA look like a PBS kids show. Encourage the sweatshoppers, make it a real way to have a virtual economy. It can't be far off now.
This is an excellent point. One may note that birth records often contain fingerprints, and those can be a matter of public records. A microfiche machine and a little time at a university library or a county records building and you can get copies of hundreds of fingerprints.
All biometrics fail the test of permanence. Which is why they will never be used. That's right... never. All those sci-fci movies got it wrong. It will be a cryptographic key on a chip or a card, a chip implanted under the skin for use by a proximity reader would work best because it could be changed.
Just think of all that pain that Tom Cruise could have avoided in Minority Report if they stopped using retinas.
And exactly what is being done in Rwanda? How about... nothing. The UN got burned in Somalia, and now it won't go into a lot of bad neighborhoods, including the congo and places where intervention is a lost cause.
The answer to your rhetorical question (usually I don't answer these) is that at some point in the globalization process, a nation needs to assess it's own as being worth more than others. To protect it's own integrity. Anything else is unrealistic hyberbole by people who want to assume the moral highground as long as it doesn't affect their own pocket books and doesn't get their kids killed.
To further answer your question, Hussein had slaughtered Kurds under Bush I and he did nothing. In fact, the movie Three Kings with Clooney and Mark Wahlberg is largely about that. Somalia was a mess, and we had to wait until Adid died to make progress. In China, there are untold human rights violations as documented by Amnesty International and yet they retain most favored trade status. Get your head out of your ass and wake up. Not very fight is worth fighting. Innocents die, sometimes horribly and brutally. Win the war not each battle. We don't win the war by staying in a situation that is financially so unviable, it's causing the U.S.A. to incur record deficits and go bankrupt. Bin Laden himself said the way to break the West is to cause it to spend itself into a death spiral, just as Reagan did to the Soviets. The military arms race cost them their soviet union and the federated states broke up and sank or swam by themselves.
As for "we need to stay" being the common line by politicians... Kerry went with it and it was a big problem. Now that he's off the hook for winning a national election he is finally saying what he really thinks, which is that we need to start withdrawing... and fast. If you put him with Kennedy and the far left, then how about some Republicans like McCain who are fairly blunt when saying that once the security forces are trained, we need an immediate exit policy because the costs are too high. I mean, who do want to say it?
Did you know that Stratfor has stated in their position paper that we do NOT have to be in Iraq? That it would make more financial sense to step back to the borders and allow the Sunni-Shite-Kurd war to happen, and then move to secure the Basra area up the Euphrates towards Baghdad after the war exhausts the means of war?
There is nothing holding in place, yet we continue to assign a military designed to conduct war and be offensive to a police action, and the result is we incur needless casualties and get planes and helos shot down daily.
That NASA can't get $1B to launch a mission to fix equipment which is bringing hard science to the table on a daily basis in this context is a joke.
You are a joke for citing useless casualty statistics under Hussein. He was a brutal dictator who oppressed his people. His sons were thugs of the lowest order who used to rape and pillage like Vikings, and were twisted and evil. He gassed Kurds. He gassed Iraqis.
He also kept oil flowing because he needed to, and it didn't cost American lives. You want to face reality? Face that. He was much more useful as he was than what we have going now, which incites Islamic radicals to unify under one banner against the West (not just the U.S.) and destabilizes the relationship with Iran and pushes them toward nuclear acquisition so they won't get invaded.
I'm so sick of the attitude of "what's done is done" that I can't stand it. The fact that you carp the party line that "ok, we're there we need to stay." is so typical of the right. Meanwhile, hard science goes to the back of the bus.
A more common scenario - A junkie tells a fellow junkhead where to score drugs. Should he be charged under minimum sentencing guidelines for selling drugs?
The people that cooperating are not from Acxiom. They are from snipermail. This scumbag Scott Levine and his half-brother, Miguel Castro (Jesus, you can't make these names up, truth is stranger than fiction) created a directed marketing "opt-in" scheme to sell email addresses. They hired a sysadmin by the name of William Clinton (ok, now this is getting positively 'Office Space' like. I'm suprised they didn't have Michael Bolton working there as well.) and good 'ol Billy found that Acxiom ran an unsecured FTP site, which you could CD to/etc and get the password file. He grabbed it and ran crack on it. He decoded 40% of the passwords. They started looging in with those usernames & passwords.
They weren't clever enough to grab root and cover their tracks or overwrite logfiles, though. These toads remind me of Chris Cooper in Adaptation. Schemin Florida bums without too much upstairs.
Acxiom hired a security firm to run an audit regarding the PREVIOUS break-in, and the team found that these morons were stealing reams of credit card data with the logins from companies like Microsoft and others. They were then selling the credit card numbers on the black market, mostly overseas.
This whole sordid tale is laid out in the court documents, which are online and make for a great read. This Scott Levine reminds me of Scott Peterson, in sort of that creepy stupid way, where you know he did it just by the smirk on his face.
Anyhow, these guys are going to federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison, and hopefully Bill Clinton will cooperate and get off since I doubt with a name like that, he would fare too well in prison.
These are the actions of a company that realizes they are no longer a growth stock and is no longer looking to finance things via the market but rather reward consistent investors and enter into a "slow, continuous growth" mode instead of acting like a start-up. Investors will like quarterly dividends and the buyback will shore up the flagging stock price.
Now, if only Cisco would buyback their stock (way too many shares floating), start expensing their options like a proper company and start paying some dividends, maybe they could be considered a grown-up stock as well.
I can confirm the Tivo issue. The Cisco ATA186 that Vonage ships, is not setup to support T.37 or T.38. for FAX machines or V.Moip using G.711 and therefore my Tivo cannot phone home. I have now gone 300 days without my Hughes Tivo/Rcvr combo phoning home. Since the program guide is pulled from the air, there seems to be no downside to it but tech support gets upset when they hear this. I tell them I only own a cell phone, I don't mention Vonage. They tell me if I have broadband, to get the ethernet enabled version of my Tivo/Rcvr but unless they are going to ship it to me for free, I'm not paying for it.
I heard Vonage converted to a Motorola gateway for the home, but I still don't think it uses any form of Modem-pass through over G711, I doubt even you turn all the compression settings off you get a modem to handshake with anything. And the Hughes Tivo doesn't allow you access to the modem settings inside the unit anyhow.
This pretty much leaves me out on an island until I get a Hughes unit that has the ethernet and IP built in. I like the unit, it is far superior to the Sony unit I used to have, as Sony's used crappy Quantum Fireball hard drives that quickly fragmented and got bad sectors, causing the Tivo unit to stutter and even the pause function would get porked. This unit supports dual-LMB dish and you can watch one show and Tivo the other, other than the fact it can't call home over Vonage, it's ok.
As to the E911 issue, Vonage has you fill out a form and send it in. I am moving and taking my Vonage with me, I need to fill out a new one. It routes 911 to the local PSAP and works just fine. Once Vonage send me confirmation I picked up the phone and dialed 911 and calmly told the operator that I was testing to see if PSAP routing was working over my IP phone. She confirmed my address and all was fine. So, don't let them FUD you on that.
He's using the Sveasoft and two Linksys devices to accomplish something that would be much easier to do using the radio management features of a Cisco 1200 AP and Cisco PCMCIA NIC card. You can measure path loss directly from the utilities that ship with the firmware.
The TNC connectors support a huge variety of antennas with different dbm characteristics and the radio wattage adjustments in the 1200 mean he could keep himself entertained for days. He's going to spend a grand in fuel just taking off, landing, adjusting, and taking off again. Spend it on a device that does the job better instead of going for the cheap shit.
This Cringely, is he the guy on PBS? He doesn't seem real bright.
How about the zombie police officers in resident evil? No historical obfuscation there. It IS a public law enforcement officer, no question about that. It just happens to not want to serve and protect, unless it means serving up your brains for lunch.
What about a film noir story that depicts a corrupt cop? Is it ok to kill him, because he is corrupt? What defines his corruption? What if he just performs vigiliante actions, like killing robbers and then planting guns on them? Can he be killed?
Would it be okay to make a game in which I could be allowed to...oh....say.... rob a hooker after doing her? Carjack innocent people? Oh....wait
The parent article might actually have posted the laws, instead of directing us to a poorly organized website. Here they are:
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The website deals with the mile wide gaps in these laws. Let's take it right from the top - Robots as functional as the ones in the film would be very good as soldiers, thus taking that first rule and chucking it right out. In fact, it's the defense industry that would most like robots like the ones in the film.
But let's stay on course, and assume these are robots meant as domestic servants. Does the robot take non-lethal contradictory rules and simply process them in order, taking the last order? Two children would amuse themselves for hours telling the robot "pick up that broom", "don't pick up that broom" and keeping the robot in limbo. The robot should tell the children to behave and go pick up their rooms. Directly violating rule 2.
How about the running into the burning building scenario? It's unclear that there is anybody in the building left alive to save, or if everyone has escaped or not. Does the robot violate Rule 3 in order to *possibly* meet Rule 1?
Anyhow, the website has more papers on the subject that examine the issue in a moral framework. These are super simple examples to show the issues.
In his biography of Feynman, "Genius", James Gleick basically comes out and states that there is a cult of personality around Hawking. I need to grab the book and find the exact passage, but he states that some physicists and cosmologists have gotten way too much pub due to their personal afflictions. And that many others who are perfectly healthy have had their work overlooked because they aren't in a wheelchair.
I don't know if it's quite that vitriolic, but I remember reading it and thinking "wow, he's no fan of Hawking."
Gleick's new biography is on Issac Newton, so perhaps he will have something else to say about modern physicists in there, I haven't read it yet.
1. My take on it is that they mean "not trivially removeable", like a wristwatch. It's under the skin, I doubt it's grafted to the bone.
2. His RFID code can be read to allow him access to the bank. It's a heck of a lot better than a driver's license as ID.
3. Kidnapping is a HUGE problem in Mexico. huge. Hollywood put Denzel Washington in a movie, "Man on Fire" - about the kidnapping rings in Mexico. Vincente Fox has been asked to crack down on the issue. Mexican police are shot at about as often as U.S. forces in Baghdad, i.e. just about daily. You just don't read about it unless you read Spanish newspapers, like La Raza or others. At this point, RFID might be a minor deterrent to kidnapping. But it might just persuade potential enemies to just kill him outright in the street. In fact, they may put a hit on the guy JUST TO SEND A MESSAGE.
I see a world like the one in Minority Report within my lifetime, and I'm 35. The Gap has a electronic voice that greets you as you walk in. Every subway car you board goes into a database. Every transaction your credit card makes goes through a heuristic filter for abnormal pattern matching, and certain kinds of deviations get you reported automatically to the government. RFID is just the means to make it happen.
They scheduled me for surgery and a short time later I had widened sinus passages, no adenoids, no tonsils, and much less of a palette in the back of my throat. The two weeks after the surgery really sucked, I couldn't even drink water for 4 days. I was constantly coughing up blood and required an IV and home health to administer the much desired pain medication.
Man, that sounds severe. Really severe. I was thinking of having minor nasal surgery to stop snoring, but that sounds downright dissuading.
There's a very good reason that Mike didn't want to give the BBC his real name. These guys are like the mafia, I don't think they appreciate being made fools of. Many Nigerians believe in "Sharia" - or the death penalty for all kinds of transgressions. Source link
Probably not good people to have your home address and phone.
C) Learning Martial arts is about self disaplin not violence.
The original poster states this was a joke after he said it, but it betrayed his true intentions. The fact is, swimming or tennis or any sport can teach discipline. Martial arts has done a good job wrapping itself in Oriental mysticism, when Jet Li can utter some tripe about "to defeat your enemy, you must first know yourself." Fact is, it is interpersonal combat, in the same way boxing is. Boxing has a purer spirit, and it's place in American history especially is more pronounced. If i was going to teach my kid anything about combat, it would be to box. May not help him much in a street or bar fight, but that's what guns are for. Oh wait.... just kidding.
Will your kids be born because you fixed some hooker's motherboard?
Hey, maybe my kids and your kids can get together and play, and my kids can beat up your kids! Wouldnt that be fun!?
I'll tell ya what, you teach your kids all that, I'll teach my kids skills that don't involve violence. Then, your kids can come over and wash my kids cars for some pocket change, ok?
I recently biught a Trek 5200. I could have easily gone with a Trek 2300 or smaller, because I am no power rider. I ride about 10-20 miles in the morning. Every other day. That's it. Many of you could destroy probably cream me on a $99 Huffy.
But the bike is a joy to ride. I owned a crappy Schwinn most of my road bike riding days and so I splurged a bit and got some Sidi shoes and this bike. I enjoy riding it, esp. going up hills.
Maybe I overspent, but I enjoy the bike. The OLCV Carbon is damn light. And if I enjoy riding, I'll ride more. I had my fill of heavy steel bikes, this really is a whole different league. I've read a few responses that mock people for spending too much on the bike. Most of those people have a iPod and a $500 video card just to play counterstrike.
Slashdot Mirror
Movies have distribution channels, theater chains like Loews. Books have publishers, and more importantly there are outlets like Border's which have massive say-so on what books do well vs. languish based on if they will carry it. Music, well... companies like Viacom have equal touchpoints into marketing DVDs as well as CDs, and radio stations are the equivalent to tv stations, so I'm lost on that one as well. Ask Howard Stern if he thinks a radio conglomerate like Clear Channel Communications can make or break a pop icon like Jessica Simpson or the American Idol chubby chick, Clarkson. They can and do.
Home of the unqualified opinion!
Well, here's mine. It hasn't been brought up yet, so let's see if anyone considers it insightful...
The Chinese are not our enemies in this issue. They actually fear a totally destabilized N. Korea as well. That they came to the rescue in the Korean War belies a much more complicated truth about the relationship between Koreans and Chinese. China, on the verge of becoming the 2nd superpower economically, is really not all tha keen on seeing Kim Il Jong do things like test fire intermediate range missiles into the Sea of Japan. They know that quite a few U.S. boomers are riding the coast of Korea, and will have Trident IIs arriving on target in minutes if we think a nuke had been actually launched, at either the West Coast (which we know they cannot yet reach) or Japan. And they know that the Chinese would not respond.
The worst case scenario really is, that NK's increasing starving and helpless population is thrust under some stupid pretext into an attack on S. Korea and a nuclear weapon is moved to the front and detonated and then denied. Again, I think the U.S. would go nuclear if that happened.
Prosperity of S. Korea combined with an internal assassination campaign is probably Washington's strategy. It's best to fight this one using spies and satellites, a conventional invasion would be pointless and unlike Iraq, we don't want to assert control over the region.
Cost of distribution model.
David Lynch and a few others not withstandaing, it's very unviable to run a production company on a download or subscription model.
Take for instance, thousands and thousands of hours of decent content which is produced regardless if anybody watches it or not. Yes, I'm talking about independant film. Hundreds of films get made around the world every year, some end up at film festivals, some stay highly regional, some make it to Sundance in the USA and other prestigious film fests for indy films.
Very few of these films are torrent-able. A tiny, tiny margin - maybe 1%, probably less. There isn't enough bandwidth or storage space to encode them all, even though the filmmakers are looking at nothing but profit if they participate in the process instead of letting the canisters rot in their attic. Still, it doesn't happen.
Now, cut out the distribution methods in your model. These networks greenlight projects, review them for quality, and decide if they will bankroll them. Take that away, and you have anarchy.
Seriously, what would happen over time is an insane S/N ratio. Hundreds of small production companies would vie for your dollars. Here! Bankroll this, we'll sign Shatner! Seriously, we'll put his fat ass in a rubber suit and make him recite King Lear! Pay here!
A few companies would eventually emerge, just as in the game industry, where the barriers to entry used to be low, and an EA or Microsoft would try and step in as the content "management" provider, and you'd just substitute the bogeyman you hate, with a new and more manevolent one.
It all seems very democratic or populist, but it doesn't play out that way. The market abhors a vacuum.
Highlander! There can be only one!
It's a very Gartner "quadrant" thing to say, to be so deterministic. It's as if Gartner can only see a world in which one company drives the web.
No mention of W3C or standards or the state of plugin specifications, or anything about frameworks for interoperability.
These three analysts are Ray Valdes, David Mitchell Smith and Whit Andrews. I question the assertion that the growth of Firefox is based on unsustainable market conditions? Like what? That IE is insecure? If IE becomes "secure" will that immediately revert to the IT paradigm these guys are familiar with, where one technology emerges and drives standards?
Could it POSSIBLY be that Gartner analysts just don't see a larger force at work, that when open source products compete on quality and stability and unify their distribution methods, they are INHERENTLY more desireable, even on closed operating systems, than proprietary browsers? Because the standards can't be wrested into corporate control and the IT industry is waking up to the benefits of open source?
This is why I prefer Burton to Gartner. Burton papers tend to see things more how I see them. I have no axe to grind, nor do I work for Burton. I just encourage you, as the reading IT professional or hobbyist, not to revere the Gartner name blindly.
I pulled some very old Gartner papers out the other day, and they were laughably wrong about web standards 5 years ago. I don't trust them anymore now.
I'm not too enthused about the prospect of international sex slavery going online.
Im terms of human rights abuses, you are correct. I brought it up to illustrate a point, where I don't think the question is orthogonal at all.
Exactly what is the difference from a virtual sex trade and mining phat l00t in World of Warcraft and selling it for real money on Ebay? Perhaps you meant the question of consent. High dollar sex world would promote slavery as the prostitution rings do now in Latin America, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Japan, China and Eastern Europe. It would incite organized crime to force women into the trade. It negates the question here, which is - do these guys completing l33t quests and using teamwork to beat the game have fun?
I would suggest to you, it doesn't matter. If these long hours and slave conditions exist as the best occupation in a poor economy or one they are forcibly made to perform, the result is the same. It's just economic slavery vs. literal slavery.
As for the virtual sex world, with VR sex and stim toys and VOIP and a Matrix like world of bondage chicks - it's coming. The question, do we use cases like these to construct the cyberspace (I hate that word) laws needed to stop it when it arrives?
I would submit to you that Project Entropia is really exactly that, just without some of the more "functional" graphics and technology really needed to make it work.
Has anybody seen Project Entropia's screenshots. Take at these shots at some of the women in thongs. Now, the game readily converts in real currency to game currency, but NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
I propose a business plan whose time has come. Take a look at the graphics of men and women in WoW. Take a look at these gfx. The 3D engines have reached the point where the next big sim is Sex World.
Bondage camps, all kinds of lingerie and toys, fully animated and adjustable genitalia, special "attacks", and the PvP area can fufill mud wrestling or something.
Proximity to other players can trigger VOIP, for the phone sex angle and most importantly, you can convert game currency BACK to dollars or any other world currency through a partnership with a large enough bank like Citibank.
It's the natural next step after the Sims, right? It would make the sweatshops start teaching english, german, swedish, french and russian to local women real fast. If the environment was as immersive as WoW, and not some cheesy 3D engine, it would be probably be a big moneymaker.
And, since I'm fleshing (no pun intended, ok... intended) let's add gambling and a formal auction house for the bling bling, like stretch hummers (cars, people, keep your mind outta the gutter a bit) Ferraris, Porsches, diamond rings, Glock pistols (gotta have a ranged combat system in the PvP areas) maybe even have the real bad boys carrying Uzis.
It would make GTA look like a PBS kids show. Encourage the sweatshoppers, make it a real way to have a virtual economy. It can't be far off now.
This is an excellent point. One may note that birth records often contain fingerprints, and those can be a matter of public records. A microfiche machine and a little time at a university library or a county records building and you can get copies of hundreds of fingerprints.
All biometrics fail the test of permanence. Which is why they will never be used. That's right... never. All those sci-fci movies got it wrong. It will be a cryptographic key on a chip or a card, a chip implanted under the skin for use by a proximity reader would work best because it could be changed.
Just think of all that pain that Tom Cruise could have avoided in Minority Report if they stopped using retinas.
And exactly what is being done in Rwanda? How about... nothing. The UN got burned in Somalia, and now it won't go into a lot of bad neighborhoods, including the congo and places where intervention is a lost cause.
i nfo/2302.html
The answer to your rhetorical question (usually I don't answer these) is that at some point in the globalization process, a nation needs to assess it's own as being worth more than others. To protect it's own integrity. Anything else is unrealistic hyberbole by people who want to assume the moral highground as long as it doesn't affect their own pocket books and doesn't get their kids killed.
To further answer your question, Hussein had slaughtered Kurds under Bush I and he did nothing. In fact, the movie Three Kings with Clooney and Mark Wahlberg is largely about that. Somalia was a mess, and we had to wait until Adid died to make progress. In China, there are untold human rights violations as documented by Amnesty International and yet they retain most favored trade status. Get your head out of your ass and wake up. Not very fight is worth fighting. Innocents die, sometimes horribly and brutally. Win the war not each battle. We don't win the war by staying in a situation that is financially so unviable, it's causing the U.S.A. to incur record deficits and go bankrupt. Bin Laden himself said the way to break the West is to cause it to spend itself into a death spiral, just as Reagan did to the Soviets. The military arms race cost them their soviet union and the federated states broke up and sank or swam by themselves.
As for "we need to stay" being the common line by politicians... Kerry went with it and it was a big problem. Now that he's off the hook for winning a national election he is finally saying what he really thinks, which is that we need to start withdrawing... and fast. If you put him with Kennedy and the far left, then how about some Republicans like McCain who are fairly blunt when saying that once the security forces are trained, we need an immediate exit policy because the costs are too high. I mean, who do want to say it?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/
Frontline on how Rumsfeld's folly has cost us in terms of the deficit.
Conservatives like Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic who say an exit strategy is the most important thing the U.S. needs to do.
But not you. You are "hey, we are there, it's gonna cost us $80B a year for a decade or so, so just get used to having less, Hmmm'kay?"
It's not rhetoric, Goat. It's lament.
Did you know that Stratfor has stated in their position paper that we do NOT have to be in Iraq? That it would make more financial sense to step back to the borders and allow the Sunni-Shite-Kurd war to happen, and then move to secure the Basra area up the Euphrates towards Baghdad after the war exhausts the means of war?
There is nothing holding in place, yet we continue to assign a military designed to conduct war and be offensive to a police action, and the result is we incur needless casualties and get planes and helos shot down daily.
That NASA can't get $1B to launch a mission to fix equipment which is bringing hard science to the table on a daily basis in this context is a joke.
You are a joke for citing useless casualty statistics under Hussein. He was a brutal dictator who oppressed his people. His sons were thugs of the lowest order who used to rape and pillage like Vikings, and were twisted and evil. He gassed Kurds. He gassed Iraqis.
He also kept oil flowing because he needed to, and it didn't cost American lives. You want to face reality? Face that. He was much more useful as he was than what we have going now, which incites Islamic radicals to unify under one banner against the West (not just the U.S.) and destabilizes the relationship with Iran and pushes them toward nuclear acquisition so they won't get invaded.
I'm so sick of the attitude of "what's done is done" that I can't stand it. The fact that you carp the party line that "ok, we're there we need to stay." is so typical of the right. Meanwhile, hard science goes to the back of the bus.
A more common scenario - A junkie tells a fellow junkhead where to score drugs. Should he be charged under minimum sentencing guidelines for selling drugs?
The people that cooperating are not from Acxiom. They are from snipermail. This scumbag Scott Levine and his half-brother, Miguel Castro (Jesus, you can't make these names up, truth is stranger than fiction) created a directed marketing "opt-in" scheme to sell email addresses. They hired a sysadmin by the name of William Clinton (ok, now this is getting positively 'Office Space' like. I'm suprised they didn't have Michael Bolton working there as well.) and good 'ol Billy found that Acxiom ran an unsecured FTP site, which you could CD to /etc and get the password file. He grabbed it and ran crack on it. He decoded 40% of the passwords. They started looging in with those usernames & passwords.
They weren't clever enough to grab root and cover their tracks or overwrite logfiles, though. These toads remind me of Chris Cooper in Adaptation. Schemin Florida bums without too much upstairs.
Acxiom hired a security firm to run an audit regarding the PREVIOUS break-in, and the team found that these morons were stealing reams of credit card data with the logins from companies like Microsoft and others. They were then selling the credit card numbers on the black market, mostly overseas.
This whole sordid tale is laid out in the court documents, which are online and make for a great read. This Scott Levine reminds me of Scott Peterson, in sort of that creepy stupid way, where you know he did it just by the smirk on his face.
Anyhow, these guys are going to federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison, and hopefully Bill Clinton will cooperate and get off since I doubt with a name like that, he would fare too well in prison.
These are the actions of a company that realizes they are no longer a growth stock and is no longer looking to finance things via the market but rather reward consistent investors and enter into a "slow, continuous growth" mode instead of acting like a start-up. Investors will like quarterly dividends and the buyback will shore up the flagging stock price.
Now, if only Cisco would buyback their stock (way too many shares floating), start expensing their options like a proper company and start paying some dividends, maybe they could be considered a grown-up stock as well.
I can confirm the Tivo issue. The Cisco ATA186 that Vonage ships, is not setup to support T.37 or T.38. for FAX machines or V.Moip using G.711 and therefore my Tivo cannot phone home. I have now gone 300 days without my Hughes Tivo/Rcvr combo phoning home. Since the program guide is pulled from the air, there seems to be no downside to it but tech support gets upset when they hear this. I tell them I only own a cell phone, I don't mention Vonage. They tell me if I have broadband, to get the ethernet enabled version of my Tivo/Rcvr but unless they are going to ship it to me for free, I'm not paying for it.
I heard Vonage converted to a Motorola gateway for the home, but I still don't think it uses any form of Modem-pass through over G711, I doubt even you turn all the compression settings off you get a modem to handshake with anything. And the Hughes Tivo doesn't allow you access to the modem settings inside the unit anyhow.
This pretty much leaves me out on an island until I get a Hughes unit that has the ethernet and IP built in. I like the unit, it is far superior to the Sony unit I used to have, as Sony's used crappy Quantum Fireball hard drives that quickly fragmented and got bad sectors, causing the Tivo unit to stutter and even the pause function would get porked. This unit supports dual-LMB dish and you can watch one show and Tivo the other, other than the fact it can't call home over Vonage, it's ok.
As to the E911 issue, Vonage has you fill out a form and send it in. I am moving and taking my Vonage with me, I need to fill out a new one. It routes 911 to the local PSAP and works just fine. Once Vonage send me confirmation I picked up the phone and dialed 911 and calmly told the operator that I was testing to see if PSAP routing was working over my IP phone. She confirmed my address and all was fine. So, don't let them FUD you on that.
He's using the Sveasoft and two Linksys devices to accomplish something that would be much easier to do using the radio management features of a Cisco 1200 AP and Cisco PCMCIA NIC card. You can measure path loss directly from the utilities that ship with the firmware.
The TNC connectors support a huge variety of antennas with different dbm characteristics and the radio wattage adjustments in the 1200 mean he could keep himself entertained for days. He's going to spend a grand in fuel just taking off, landing, adjusting, and taking off again. Spend it on a device that does the job better instead of going for the cheap shit.
This Cringely, is he the guy on PBS? He doesn't seem real bright.
How about the zombie police officers in resident evil? No historical obfuscation there. It IS a public law enforcement officer, no question about that. It just happens to not want to serve and protect, unless it means serving up your brains for lunch.
What about a film noir story that depicts a corrupt cop? Is it ok to kill him, because he is corrupt? What defines his corruption? What if he just performs vigiliante actions, like killing robbers and then planting guns on them? Can he be killed?
Would it be okay to make a game in which I could be allowed to...oh....say.... rob a hooker after doing her? Carjack innocent people? Oh....wait
The parent article might actually have posted the laws, instead of directing us to a poorly organized website. Here they are:
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The website deals with the mile wide gaps in these laws. Let's take it right from the top - Robots as functional as the ones in the film would be very good as soldiers, thus taking that first rule and chucking it right out. In fact, it's the defense industry that would most like robots like the ones in the film.
But let's stay on course, and assume these are robots meant as domestic servants. Does the robot take non-lethal contradictory rules and simply process them in order, taking the last order? Two children would amuse themselves for hours telling the robot "pick up that broom", "don't pick up that broom" and keeping the robot in limbo. The robot should tell the children to behave and go pick up their rooms. Directly violating rule 2.
How about the running into the burning building scenario? It's unclear that there is anybody in the building left alive to save, or if everyone has escaped or not. Does the robot violate Rule 3 in order to *possibly* meet Rule 1?
Anyhow, the website has more papers on the subject that examine the issue in a moral framework. These are super simple examples to show the issues.
In his biography of Feynman, "Genius", James Gleick basically comes out and states that there is a cult of personality around Hawking. I need to grab the book and find the exact passage, but he states that some physicists and cosmologists have gotten way too much pub due to their personal afflictions. And that many others who are perfectly healthy have had their work overlooked because they aren't in a wheelchair.
I don't know if it's quite that vitriolic, but I remember reading it and thinking "wow, he's no fan of Hawking."
Gleick's new biography is on Issac Newton, so perhaps he will have something else to say about modern physicists in there, I haven't read it yet.
hedless man:
1. My take on it is that they mean "not trivially removeable", like a wristwatch. It's under the skin, I doubt it's grafted to the bone.
2. His RFID code can be read to allow him access to the bank. It's a heck of a lot better than a driver's license as ID.
3. Kidnapping is a HUGE problem in Mexico. huge. Hollywood put Denzel Washington in a movie, "Man on Fire" - about the kidnapping rings in Mexico. Vincente Fox has been asked to crack down on the issue. Mexican police are shot at about as often as U.S. forces in Baghdad, i.e. just about daily. You just don't read about it unless you read Spanish newspapers, like La Raza or others. At this point, RFID might be a minor deterrent to kidnapping. But it might just persuade potential enemies to just kill him outright in the street. In fact, they may put a hit on the guy JUST TO SEND A MESSAGE.
I see a world like the one in Minority Report within my lifetime, and I'm 35. The Gap has a electronic voice that greets you as you walk in. Every subway car you board goes into a database. Every transaction your credit card makes goes through a heuristic filter for abnormal pattern matching, and certain kinds of deviations get you reported automatically to the government. RFID is just the means to make it happen.
They scheduled me for surgery and a short time later I had widened sinus passages, no adenoids, no tonsils, and much less of a palette in the back of my throat. The two weeks after the surgery really sucked, I couldn't even drink water for 4 days. I was constantly coughing up blood and required an IV and home health to administer the much desired pain medication.
Man, that sounds severe. Really severe. I was thinking of having minor nasal surgery to stop snoring, but that sounds downright dissuading.
There's a very good reason that Mike didn't want to give the BBC his real name. These guys are like the mafia, I don't think they appreciate being made fools of. Many Nigerians believe in "Sharia" - or the death penalty for all kinds of transgressions. Source link
Probably not good people to have your home address and phone.
C) Learning Martial arts is about self disaplin not violence.
The original poster states this was a joke after he said it, but it betrayed his true intentions. The fact is, swimming or tennis or any sport can teach discipline. Martial arts has done a good job wrapping itself in Oriental mysticism, when Jet Li can utter some tripe about "to defeat your enemy, you must first know yourself." Fact is, it is interpersonal combat, in the same way boxing is. Boxing has a purer spirit, and it's place in American history especially is more pronounced. If i was going to teach my kid anything about combat, it would be to box. May not help him much in a street or bar fight, but that's what guns are for. Oh wait.... just kidding.
You are a coward. And a fucktard. Is that all you got?
Will your kids be born because you fixed some hooker's motherboard?
Hey, maybe my kids and your kids can get together and play, and my kids can beat up your kids! Wouldnt that be fun!?
I'll tell ya what, you teach your kids all that, I'll teach my kids skills that don't involve violence. Then, your kids can come over and wash my kids cars for some pocket change, ok?
I recently biught a Trek 5200. I could have easily gone with a Trek 2300 or smaller, because I am no power rider. I ride about 10-20 miles in the morning. Every other day. That's it. Many of you could destroy probably cream me on a $99 Huffy.
But the bike is a joy to ride. I owned a crappy Schwinn most of my road bike riding days and so I splurged a bit and got some Sidi shoes and this bike. I enjoy riding it, esp. going up hills.
Maybe I overspent, but I enjoy the bike. The OLCV Carbon is damn light. And if I enjoy riding, I'll ride more. I had my fill of heavy steel bikes, this really is a whole different league. I've read a few responses that mock people for spending too much on the bike. Most of those people have a iPod and a $500 video card just to play counterstrike.