Man, can you BELIEVE this bullshit? This guy really wants us to believe that the Earth revolves around the SUN. It's unbelievable - I can practially watch the Sun go around the Earth, not to mention the pure and simple blasphemy that his statements bring with them.
Excommunicate this bastard NOW. Make it quick, painful, and public. We don't need a whole rash of people believing in this hogwash, undoing years of education about the creation of this planet and the Sun's role in God's plan for mankind.
Stomp him out now.
(P.S., I do believe it's hogwash, but a first-round verification can't hurt anyone but dumb-ass investors. If they've been "running it in the lab" for years, they obviously don't need cash to assemble a prototype, so let the verification go through. No harm, no foul - to us at least.)
Ya know, our (yours, mine,/. in general) skepticism is unquestionably well placed - free energy would collapse some economies, invigorate others, bring about new business opportunities, advance the living conditions of people stuck in third world countries - the actual ramifications are impossible to really get a grasp on.
My thoughts are twofold:
1) Man, if it's true, how awesome would that BE?! I'm the kind of person that - as skeptical as I am - always holds out hope for discoveries like this. There is more clean energy in this universe than we'll ever need - harvesting it is the difficulty. If someone discovered a way to do it - man alive that'd be sweet.
2) If it's true, someone will patent it and it won't be free - on the contrary, it will still somehow cost me as much as energy does now, as greed seems to outpace progress these days.
Since it's probably BS, I don't really have to worry about either one of those two thoughts, but seriously - #1 - how cool would that BE??
Re:Unfounded Criticism
on
iPods at War
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· Score: 4, Insightful
GP wasn't out of line - but neither was ARS. ARS is basically reporting that "piracy" which is touted as a crime worse than murder these days by the RIAA/MPAA is actually one of the few comforts that soldiers putting their lives on the line for us (for who knows what, but still, for us) have - sometimes in their last minutes of their lives.
ARS has always been a pretty heavy critic of the RIAA/MPAA and their anti-piracy rants (they recently ran an article about how the RIAA is moving on from online piracy to "playground piracy" - kids sharing their CDs with eachother - as the number one threat to the industry) and I believe this particular article is showing that if every copyright law paid for by the RIAA were followed, the soldiers may have a modicum less of the comforts of home to enjoy while on the front lines.
For me, a little piracy for our men and women in uniform is just fine, and any person attempting to crack down on a soldier for playing their IPOD over the loudspeaker for the enjoyment of their fellow soldiers as an illegal peformance under US copyright law is a traitor to this country and the men and women defending it.
There's a difference between a vaccine and a cure.
Well, over a couple generations, the difference becomes less obvious. Look at Smallpox - a vaccine that - over generations, practically wiped out the disease. Yeah, it's still a threat, but a vaccine now could see a practially AIDS-free world in 50-100 years. That's not a bad thing.
Not to mention that you're discussing a product that creates said documents, not the actual documents themselves. If ODF becomes the worldwide standard GP predicts, MS will support the standard in their product, and MS Office will continue to prevail.
ODF is fine and all, but you're talking about file formats. Word 2003 can save to about 10 different formats, including WordPerect and AppleWorks file formats. You think that saving to ODF is going to cause them that much pain?
Office is a huge money maker for MS, and the new version (in beta now) is a pretty big paradigm shift in terms of UI and usability, which will uptick the amount of sales for MS. Releasing for Linux can only hurt Windows sales, but most of that is through OEMs, so that's doubtful. More likely, it will hurt adoption of OOo, which IS on MS's short list of competitors to crush.
The restrictions on flights have been lifted, and have for days. Laptops along with everything else are perfectly fine.
<annoyed troll>That's because the government already had the effect they wanted - up the security threat level, annoy everyone, throw some FUD around, make everyone go "ahhh, yeah, terror, good thing we have this invasive security" and GWB gets a bump in his abysmal 3x% approval rating.<annoyed troll>
On a slightly different note, I can't say for sure, but the "market" is that more people fly your airline. With airlines cutting back to an unbelievable degree on food, service, charging for headphone rental, etc., and then wanting to charge what I can only assume is $3/minute or more to be logged on, even the travelers with the biggest of expense accounts is gonna know they can wait 2-3 hours to get their email.
The stupid in-flight phones never really took off either (except as a novelty - "hey kids, Dad's calling from in the air!") because they were so rediculously expensive.
Thanks, but until it's like $5 for internet access for the whole flight, I'll just wait until we land and hit up the nearest Starbucks or Panera Bread for my wifi.
Here are some round figures. It's absolutely amazing to me that so many people actually support warrantless taps. That's why this country will eventually decend into some totalitarian government reign - because the people don't really have any will to stop it - rather they accept it.
Right, because what I really want is my OSX installation to have a registry, installers that put files in 40 different paths, APIs that enable viruses and trojans, and of course, no real.NET support, even though more and more software for Windows is being written in.NET.
Yeah, but so what they use Skype? DARPA will figure out a way to break the encryption.
It's not about being uncomfortable with wiretaps. It's about being uncomfortable will illegal, non-FISA approved wire taps. If these guys were in a terror cell (and in the US) and FISA was asked for a warrant, it would be granted.
The general public isn't worried about wiretapping. They're worried about an executive branch that thinks it's a dictatorship, free from the laws that govern this land.
So the 9/11 plane that hit the pentagon wasn't terrorism?
Honestly, if it hadn't been in conjunction with the WTC attacks and hadn't used a civilian-loaded plane, it probably would have been seen as an act of war or provocation of war, and less as terrorism. However, because it was one of a series of attacks in a single action that killed many more civilians than military, it was touted as terrorism - or so I have come to believe.
My fault, I meant 8"... I have one hanging on my wall - they were so massive. I don't even remember drives for them... even the 286 (I had) and the Commodore 64's used 5.25".
No, that's not an important difference. The important difference is the exploitation of those actions. Terrorism is in definition the destruction of innocent life - not military. Any attack on any military is considered a military action and not terrorism.
What we're talking about is full-scale exploitation of fear to control the masses. It wasn't even this bad during the cold war.
You've got to love how the Brits and Americans had information about using liquids to blow up planes, but it's not until AFTER this information is made public, AFTER the arrests had been made, that liquids are suddenly banned from planes - that people have to dispose of toothpaste and lipstick before boarding a flight. This is simply a tactic to make flying a scarier experience, which keeps terrorism "real" as a threat on the forefront of people's minds. By doing so, it becomes exponentially easier to exploit that fear to remove civil liberties.
If 10 planes DID blow up over the ocean, less people would have died that day in airplane incidents than on the roads of the United States. You take more of a risk driving one day than flying 20 or 30 times.
But fear supresses the masses, allows for the removal of liberties, and the introduction of full-scale tracking of citizens.
And it works. How many times on the news have I heard people say "whatever, as long as I'm safe." Fucking sheep.
Look, whatever the article says, it probably makes sense to ban all liquid or gell substances from any building that has Windows PCs, make all people stand in rediculously long lines to have their pocket books and napsacks security-checked for 8.5" floppy disks carrying said exploit, and even perhaps start a secret list of people who are banned by name from actually accessing a PC at all. I recommend the first name be John Smith, that bastard.
Further, we should probably ban anyone that has dirt on their shoes, because I hear worms like dirt.
Saftey first people. It may be an inconvenience, but it's all about your saftey, and the saftey of democracy across the world. We will prevail over the security-exploiters.
This is just all hogwash until the products are delivered - marketing will sling poo just like political campaigns, and both will come out, and neither will be revolutionary.
I'll use OSX at home, Vista at work, and so on.
But let's not go crazy about Paul being a MS fanboy. Let's not forget that he just recently destroyed Vista with a "is it ready? No, God no."
So Paul gets my respect on both sides of the OS war isle.
(P.S. - when I say both sides of the isle, I'm assuming Linux is the independent party;)
People cannot be allowed to set fire to police cars!
No, but police should not be allowed to sieze anything they want in an investigation, especially from someone who is not a suspect in said suspected crime. Siezing my car because it may have driven past the flaming police car is (or should be) illegal.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
Also, I'd have to clarify that Flash video is only good for streaming content.
That was my point, if not well made... Downloaded video looks damn nice in QuickTime formats IMHO.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 0
Well, if it is cross-platform and support is the tops, why does Adobe tell me to screw myself when I ask for a port of flash for my Linux64 system?
For the same reason that they tell me to go screw myself when I want Flash to play on my DOS 6.1 OS.
You can't support EVERY SINGLE OS all the time. But Linux 32bit, OSX, OS9, Windows, and others I'm not aware of is a pretty good percentage of the market.
Is there a video player/format that embeds in a browser that has better coverage? Bitching about an OS that.01% of the population uses as "not ubiquitous" is pedantic at best. Name any other player that not only comes installed on 98% of the OSes that people use, but is installable on another 1-1.9% of the other OSes and we'll discuss why Flash video isn't the right solution.
I'm surprised they haven't started handing out speeding tickets via EZPass.
They haven't done that, but they are handing out speeding tickets using radar/camera setups. Buddy of mine got 5 in the mail in one day from one week of commuting down in DC. 5 $100 tickets, one for each morning he commuted to work - and since he's not a speed demon, you've gotta figure they sent out tickets to 80% of the people on the road that week.
Now that's easy money.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Right, but there's almost no SVG adoption.
On the Flash side, flash's serious, serious advantage is one of its most recent - it's really the best video-on-the-web delivery platform available. It's almost ubiquitos distribution, and cross-platform support is the tops.
Then there are other advantages - Flash has a brilliant, mature buffering mechanism that can be programmatically controlled.
And the creme-de-la-creme (that's TOTALLY spelled wrong I'm sure) is that you can build your own player! For instance, at my last job, we built a player that would actually detect dropped packets, missing files, etc - handle everything brilliantly. For larger files, we could run a small proprietary animation instead of stupid buffering messages in QT or WMP - and if the buffer were too slow or suddenly dropped, that could all be handled programmatically. Oh - and the video compression was on par with QT or WMP.
All that was done with Flash 7. Flash 8 and especially 9 add fantastic video-speicific features that weren't in 6 or 7.
Video is where Flash shines so brightly above the competition. I mean - I love QT HD trailers of movies at 400mb, but Flash video on the web is Flash's major advantage right now, and doing video in any other format is really pointless.
(Note: Most companies are picking up on this too - YouTube and Google Video for one, but ESPN moved all their stuff as well, as did ABC (owns ESPN) etc.)
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not information being free - it's information being collected to control the masses - thus being a complete solution for the removal of freedoms.
A total surveillance society is a mere 10-20 years away. Every traffic light I approach I am taped. My face is scanned every time I go to a baseball game. The SCOTUS already upheld that I do indeed have to provide ID to a police officer even if I am not suspected of any wrong doing, at their whim.
Biometrics are the rage. Biometrics and RFID will be on my passport, in my license. The REAL ID act officially creates a national ID in the US. And so on...
While the US is behind the UK in terms of true overall survellance, it's not that far. 20 years from now, when facial recognition is perfected - or some new technology that can ready our DNA from a small distance exists - you won't need customer loyalty cards anymore.
And people will accept it all - because it will all happen slowly, over time, and add seeming convenience to everything. Why carry an ID or a credit card? The police car will instantly recognize you, know exactly where you've been in public in the past few days, weeks, months... Everywhere your car travels, RFID tags or your cell phone will give away your location and be recorded.
See, aside from the DNA sniffer... all of this is reality now. 1984 was a little ambitious - we needed a few more years to totally accept living in a police state, but that's because there was no MySpace back then to distract us from the realities of government total awareness.
Yeah, lable me a tin foil hat person, but I'm going to hold out as long as I can - no EZPass, no customer loyalty cards, a new non-RFID passport, etc., etc. I may go down, but not without some degree of a fight.
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Man, can you BELIEVE this bullshit? This guy really wants us to believe that the Earth revolves around the SUN. It's unbelievable - I can practially watch the Sun go around the Earth, not to mention the pure and simple blasphemy that his statements bring with them.
Excommunicate this bastard NOW. Make it quick, painful, and public. We don't need a whole rash of people believing in this hogwash, undoing years of education about the creation of this planet and the Sun's role in God's plan for mankind.
Stomp him out now.
(P.S., I do believe it's hogwash, but a first-round verification can't hurt anyone but dumb-ass investors. If they've been "running it in the lab" for years, they obviously don't need cash to assemble a prototype, so let the verification go through. No harm, no foul - to us at least.)
Ya know, our (yours, mine, /. in general) skepticism is unquestionably well placed - free energy would collapse some economies, invigorate others, bring about new business opportunities, advance the living conditions of people stuck in third world countries - the actual ramifications are impossible to really get a grasp on.
My thoughts are twofold:
1) Man, if it's true, how awesome would that BE?! I'm the kind of person that - as skeptical as I am - always holds out hope for discoveries like this. There is more clean energy in this universe than we'll ever need - harvesting it is the difficulty. If someone discovered a way to do it - man alive that'd be sweet.
2) If it's true, someone will patent it and it won't be free - on the contrary, it will still somehow cost me as much as energy does now, as greed seems to outpace progress these days.
Since it's probably BS, I don't really have to worry about either one of those two thoughts, but seriously - #1 - how cool would that BE??
GP wasn't out of line - but neither was ARS. ARS is basically reporting that "piracy" which is touted as a crime worse than murder these days by the RIAA/MPAA is actually one of the few comforts that soldiers putting their lives on the line for us (for who knows what, but still, for us) have - sometimes in their last minutes of their lives.
ARS has always been a pretty heavy critic of the RIAA/MPAA and their anti-piracy rants (they recently ran an article about how the RIAA is moving on from online piracy to "playground piracy" - kids sharing their CDs with eachother - as the number one threat to the industry) and I believe this particular article is showing that if every copyright law paid for by the RIAA were followed, the soldiers may have a modicum less of the comforts of home to enjoy while on the front lines.
For me, a little piracy for our men and women in uniform is just fine, and any person attempting to crack down on a soldier for playing their IPOD over the loudspeaker for the enjoyment of their fellow soldiers as an illegal peformance under US copyright law is a traitor to this country and the men and women defending it.
Well, over a couple generations, the difference becomes less obvious. Look at Smallpox - a vaccine that - over generations, practically wiped out the disease. Yeah, it's still a threat, but a vaccine now could see a practially AIDS-free world in 50-100 years. That's not a bad thing.
Not to mention that you're discussing a product that creates said documents, not the actual documents themselves. If ODF becomes the worldwide standard GP predicts, MS will support the standard in their product, and MS Office will continue to prevail.
ODF is fine and all, but you're talking about file formats. Word 2003 can save to about 10 different formats, including WordPerect and AppleWorks file formats. You think that saving to ODF is going to cause them that much pain?
Office is a huge money maker for MS, and the new version (in beta now) is a pretty big paradigm shift in terms of UI and usability, which will uptick the amount of sales for MS. Releasing for Linux can only hurt Windows sales, but most of that is through OEMs, so that's doubtful. More likely, it will hurt adoption of OOo, which IS on MS's short list of competitors to crush.
Duh, patents. They didn't "forgo", they "prevented a giant lawsuit they were sure to lose."
Not to mention, is Comcast, DirecTV, Roadrunner, Cablevision, or Microsoft next?
<annoyed troll>That's because the government already had the effect they wanted - up the security threat level, annoy everyone, throw some FUD around, make everyone go "ahhh, yeah, terror, good thing we have this invasive security" and GWB gets a bump in his abysmal 3x% approval rating.<annoyed troll>
On a slightly different note, I can't say for sure, but the "market" is that more people fly your airline. With airlines cutting back to an unbelievable degree on food, service, charging for headphone rental, etc., and then wanting to charge what I can only assume is $3/minute or more to be logged on, even the travelers with the biggest of expense accounts is gonna know they can wait 2-3 hours to get their email.
The stupid in-flight phones never really took off either (except as a novelty - "hey kids, Dad's calling from in the air!") because they were so rediculously expensive.
Thanks, but until it's like $5 for internet access for the whole flight, I'll just wait until we land and hit up the nearest Starbucks or Panera Bread for my wifi.
Here are some round figures. It's absolutely amazing to me that so many people actually support warrantless taps. That's why this country will eventually decend into some totalitarian government reign - because the people don't really have any will to stop it - rather they accept it.
Still can't get me head 'round that one...
Right, because what I really want is my OSX installation to have a registry, installers that put files in 40 different paths, APIs that enable viruses and trojans, and of course, no real .NET support, even though more and more software for Windows is being written in .NET.
Na, I'm good, but thanks.
Thank you - belief or not in Evolution or ID or Creationism or Xenu and Scientology - I hate that "The problem with religious people" statement.
Why is my belief in a higher power automatically classify me as inferior?
Yeah, but so what they use Skype? DARPA will figure out a way to break the encryption.
It's not about being uncomfortable with wiretaps. It's about being uncomfortable will illegal, non-FISA approved wire taps. If these guys were in a terror cell (and in the US) and FISA was asked for a warrant, it would be granted.
The general public isn't worried about wiretapping. They're worried about an executive branch that thinks it's a dictatorship, free from the laws that govern this land.
Honestly, if it hadn't been in conjunction with the WTC attacks and hadn't used a civilian-loaded plane, it probably would have been seen as an act of war or provocation of war, and less as terrorism. However, because it was one of a series of attacks in a single action that killed many more civilians than military, it was touted as terrorism - or so I have come to believe.
Believe it baby. ;)
My fault, I meant 8"... I have one hanging on my wall - they were so massive. I don't even remember drives for them... even the 286 (I had) and the Commodore 64's used 5.25".
No, that's not an important difference. The important difference is the exploitation of those actions. Terrorism is in definition the destruction of innocent life - not military. Any attack on any military is considered a military action and not terrorism.
What we're talking about is full-scale exploitation of fear to control the masses. It wasn't even this bad during the cold war.
You've got to love how the Brits and Americans had information about using liquids to blow up planes, but it's not until AFTER this information is made public, AFTER the arrests had been made, that liquids are suddenly banned from planes - that people have to dispose of toothpaste and lipstick before boarding a flight. This is simply a tactic to make flying a scarier experience, which keeps terrorism "real" as a threat on the forefront of people's minds. By doing so, it becomes exponentially easier to exploit that fear to remove civil liberties.
If 10 planes DID blow up over the ocean, less people would have died that day in airplane incidents than on the roads of the United States. You take more of a risk driving one day than flying 20 or 30 times.
But fear supresses the masses, allows for the removal of liberties, and the introduction of full-scale tracking of citizens.
And it works. How many times on the news have I heard people say "whatever, as long as I'm safe." Fucking sheep.
Look, whatever the article says, it probably makes sense to ban all liquid or gell substances from any building that has Windows PCs, make all people stand in rediculously long lines to have their pocket books and napsacks security-checked for 8.5" floppy disks carrying said exploit, and even perhaps start a secret list of people who are banned by name from actually accessing a PC at all. I recommend the first name be John Smith, that bastard.
Further, we should probably ban anyone that has dirt on their shoes, because I hear worms like dirt.
Saftey first people. It may be an inconvenience, but it's all about your saftey, and the saftey of democracy across the world. We will prevail over the security-exploiters.
And he'll be the only one releasing software under GPLv3.
This is just all hogwash until the products are delivered - marketing will sling poo just like political campaigns, and both will come out, and neither will be revolutionary.
;)
I'll use OSX at home, Vista at work, and so on.
But let's not go crazy about Paul being a MS fanboy. Let's not forget that he just recently destroyed Vista with a "is it ready? No, God no."
So Paul gets my respect on both sides of the OS war isle.
(P.S. - when I say both sides of the isle, I'm assuming Linux is the independent party
No, but police should not be allowed to sieze anything they want in an investigation, especially from someone who is not a suspect in said suspected crime. Siezing my car because it may have driven past the flaming police car is (or should be) illegal.
That was my point, if not well made... Downloaded video looks damn nice in QuickTime formats IMHO.
For the same reason that they tell me to go screw myself when I want Flash to play on my DOS 6.1 OS.
You can't support EVERY SINGLE OS all the time. But Linux 32bit, OSX, OS9, Windows, and others I'm not aware of is a pretty good percentage of the market.
Is there a video player/format that embeds in a browser that has better coverage? Bitching about an OS that .01% of the population uses as "not ubiquitous" is pedantic at best. Name any other player that not only comes installed on 98% of the OSes that people use, but is installable on another 1-1.9% of the other OSes and we'll discuss why Flash video isn't the right solution.
They haven't done that, but they are handing out speeding tickets using radar/camera setups. Buddy of mine got 5 in the mail in one day from one week of commuting down in DC. 5 $100 tickets, one for each morning he commuted to work - and since he's not a speed demon, you've gotta figure they sent out tickets to 80% of the people on the road that week.
Now that's easy money.
Right, but there's almost no SVG adoption.
On the Flash side, flash's serious, serious advantage is one of its most recent - it's really the best video-on-the-web delivery platform available. It's almost ubiquitos distribution, and cross-platform support is the tops.
Then there are other advantages - Flash has a brilliant, mature buffering mechanism that can be programmatically controlled.
And the creme-de-la-creme (that's TOTALLY spelled wrong I'm sure) is that you can build your own player! For instance, at my last job, we built a player that would actually detect dropped packets, missing files, etc - handle everything brilliantly. For larger files, we could run a small proprietary animation instead of stupid buffering messages in QT or WMP - and if the buffer were too slow or suddenly dropped, that could all be handled programmatically. Oh - and the video compression was on par with QT or WMP.
All that was done with Flash 7. Flash 8 and especially 9 add fantastic video-speicific features that weren't in 6 or 7.
Video is where Flash shines so brightly above the competition. I mean - I love QT HD trailers of movies at 400mb, but Flash video on the web is Flash's major advantage right now, and doing video in any other format is really pointless.
(Note: Most companies are picking up on this too - YouTube and Google Video for one, but ESPN moved all their stuff as well, as did ABC (owns ESPN) etc.)
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not information being free - it's information being collected to control the masses - thus being a complete solution for the removal of freedoms.
A total surveillance society is a mere 10-20 years away. Every traffic light I approach I am taped. My face is scanned every time I go to a baseball game. The SCOTUS already upheld that I do indeed have to provide ID to a police officer even if I am not suspected of any wrong doing, at their whim.
Biometrics are the rage. Biometrics and RFID will be on my passport, in my license. The REAL ID act officially creates a national ID in the US. And so on...
While the US is behind the UK in terms of true overall survellance, it's not that far. 20 years from now, when facial recognition is perfected - or some new technology that can ready our DNA from a small distance exists - you won't need customer loyalty cards anymore.
And people will accept it all - because it will all happen slowly, over time, and add seeming convenience to everything. Why carry an ID or a credit card? The police car will instantly recognize you, know exactly where you've been in public in the past few days, weeks, months... Everywhere your car travels, RFID tags or your cell phone will give away your location and be recorded.
See, aside from the DNA sniffer... all of this is reality now. 1984 was a little ambitious - we needed a few more years to totally accept living in a police state, but that's because there was no MySpace back then to distract us from the realities of government total awareness.
Yeah, lable me a tin foil hat person, but I'm going to hold out as long as I can - no EZPass, no customer loyalty cards, a new non-RFID passport, etc., etc. I may go down, but not without some degree of a fight.