Or we could have season 5: The cylon invasion of earth Obviously you are forgetting the Super Scouts. There is plenty of material they could pilfer from Galactica 1980 that would make for an excellent season 5.
You're going to run into a problem with latency in the handsets. There's a noticeable delay on most cellular networks even inside the same city (it's actually pretty remarkable how many times your voice signal is decompressed and re-compressed as it hops from node to node on the network, and each hop adds latency and lower quality). So, if both movies actually were started at exactly the same time, you would both hear each other's reactions anywhere from a 1/10th to 1/2 after the movie you were watching.
There's no liability to the software designer's employer, either, or next to none.
As the old joke goes, Microsoft made IIS susceptible to worms like Melissa and Code Red, costing billions of dollars to companies around the world, and didn't have to spend a dime in restitution, while Intel made the Pentium with a floating point error that affected a handful of people doing extremely precise simulation work, and had to spend a small fortune recalling chips.
Even if we just had software liability, we'd see a much greater focus on quality in our industry. Although we tread a thin line trying to introduce that concept without having horrendous effect on open source.
When you've contracted an engineer to design a bridge, and you want to make several large-scale changes to that bridge, the engineer will come back and say "If you want these changes done, this is how long it will take. If I don't have that much time, I can't make the changes".
In fact, I'd go a step further; software developers tend to say "This is how long it will take to make the change, and this is how long it will take for me to hack something together." Bridge engineers don't say things like that. They don't put that "hack something unsafe together" option out there on the table, and neither should we.
I think one of the biggest problems in our industry is accountability. The engineer would never put the unsafe option on the table, because the engineer knows he'll loose his license and go to prison if the bridge collapses. With software, on the other hand, we just expect our customers to deal with the fact that it fails, and we behave accordingly - and unprofessionally.
I'm not worried about me; I don't need protection from my own mistakes. If I'm writing software for a radiation therapy machine, or a phone switch which handles 911 calls, I want to make sure that the people who literally put their lives in my hands will be protected from my mistakes. And not just my mistakes, but the errors of the hundreds of other people who work in my company.
What guarantees do you have that a disc which doesn't adhere to the UDF format is going to play on a "regular" DVD player? None. It doesn't match the standard.
Why don't DVD manufacturers just get this over with right at the plant; just paint the aluminum layer with black paint so it won't reflect a laser, or scratch it up before coating the disc in plastic. This way the disc will be unreadable on almost all DVD players, and no users will ever have the chance to steal precious content with their DVD drives, or even with their eyeballs.
Since almost all of these are out-of-court settlements, I doubt there is any significant legal overhead involved. Aren't they just churning out form letters here? I suppose they have to get subpoenas to transform IP addresses into billing addresses, but generally we've seen them subpoena a huge number of IPs at one time, presumeably under a single subpoena. Also, I imagine the RIAA has salaried lawyers on staff, so I doubt their legal fees are too atrocious. $250K/year for a small legal team is a small bite out of $100M.
It's a little known fact that 4 out of 5 people killed with nail scissors in the U.S. are killed not by someone else's nail scissors, but by their own.
The problem is, of course, that people are not properly trained in nail scissor use. People think that carrying nail scissors is a way to protect their nails, but they don't understand that those same nail scissors can be turned against them, if they are not prepared to use them when a dreaded hang-nail rears its ugly head.
Tour-de-France is actually pretty anti-technology
on
High Tech Tour de France
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm sorry, but Tour-de-France is the anti-technology race. Wired had a photo gallery listing many technologies that are banned from the tour:
Any bicycle which is too light, or which has excessively good aerodynamics is outright banned. There is very little exciting aerodynamics research going on for Tour-de-France. Recumbents were banned by the Union Cycliste International way back in the 30s because they were way too fast. Every bicycle speed record currently held was taken with a recumbent.
UCI basically felt that racing should be a test of the rider rather that of the technology, and so made the diamond frame the "standard". Since everyone else saw people winning races on diamond frame bikes, these bicycles were much more popular than many other technologically superior bikes, which is pretty much why recumbents are hard to find and overly expensive today.
Even this nearly traditional looking Softride pivotless suspension bike (http://www.bronesbikeshop.com/Softride.jpg) was banned because it "could have an aerodynamic advantage".
The quiz (http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/spyware_0306.h tml) asks questions like "Which of these smiley download sites is safe?" The answer I'd pick is "I don't care which one is safe, I wouldn't ever download something so pointless and high risk to begin with", but that option isn't available.
Seriously, headaches, carpal tunnel, eye strain, etc. aren't worth it for serious work, physical damage is completely unacceptable for play.
You say that as if, somehow, play is less important than work. If I'm going to risk damaging myself, I'd much rather take the risk at play than at work. As the old russian proverb says; "The church is near, but the roads are icy. The pub is far, but I will walk carefully.":)
Afterall, people take larger risks for the sake of "play" than work all the time. Recreational skydivers come to mind, for one.
Odds of an impact are better than you think
on
Golf in Space
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· Score: 1
LDEF taught us a lot about impact damage from space junk, since it was up there for a long time, and was retrieved.
"With a relative impact velocity of 10 km/s, a piece of aluminum debris which is ~0.7 mm in diameter can penetrate through a typical 2.5 mm thick aluminum satellite wall. During its 5.75 year exposure, LDEF saw one (1) impact of this size per 7 [square meters] of exposed surface area in the RAM direction. In addition to this, LDEF experienced ~1 impact [per square meter], on ram-exposed surfaces, which could have penetrated a typical 1.5 mm thick aluminum electronics box." -http://setas-www.larc.nasa.gov/LDEF/MET_DEB/md_im pact.html
1 impact per square meter over 6 years in orbit. So, you need to make your spacecraft really small, or really thick, or you need to go up for very short periods of time and cross your fingers. And that's without golf balls whizzing past.
Also; if you and the golf-ball are in very similar orbits, this means the golf ball will have a speed very close to yours, relatively speaking. ISS is in a very low orbit, going around 7700 m/s. If you and the ball are both travelling 7700 m/s though, having your orbit be off by only 1 degree relative to each other means a 134 m/s impact, or 482 km/h, which is still going to leave a nasty bruise.
Yeah, we don't have enough junk in orbit
on
Golf in Space
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· Score: 1
This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. We already spend a lot of time and effort tracking the junk that's floating around in orbit without putting stuff there intentionally.
Getting hit by a golf ball travelling 27,734 km/h would REALLY suck.
I've certainly seen companies where it wasn't. It's not unheard of for a PHB to promote John over Sally because John puts in more unpaid overtime, even if Sally's productivity far outstrips John's.
'ethical behavior in regards to the use of information technology,'
This would be the part where they teach kids that using technology to build a copyright mechanism that takes over your customer's computer, and creates security holes, such as the recent Sony-BMG scandal, is unethical. Or perhaps this would be teaching kids about the ethics of setting up a cartel wherein labels make a lot of money off record sales, and artists don't.
'the concept, purpose, and significance of a copyright,'
From this page: "By granting the copyright holder exclusive rights over a work for a limited period of time, the system fosters the long-term dissemination of new intellectual works for society as a whole." (emphasis added). This would encourage children to discuss why the current copyright system in the United States, where the period of copyrighted works is continually extended, is fundamentally broken.
'the implications of illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing.'
And finally, children would learn that the big record labels took about 5 years too long to get into the online music distribution buisness, so that by the time they did, there were illegal free alternatives which produce superior (read: not DRMed, and therefore superior from the consumer viewpoint) products. We could teach kids that file sharing networks allow people to hear artists they wouldn't otherwise hear on pop-dominated radio stations and TV, and promote more diverse and creative music. And, we could teach them that illegal file sharing doesn't seem to have an impact on record sales.
Somehow I don't think this is what Chavez had in mind.
Well, most of those are answered in the article links, but;
Second Life is sort of a MMORPG, except without the RPG part. It's a big virtual world, where anyone can create just about anything out of primitive building blocks and scripts (provided you can figure out how to do whatever it is you want to do in the somewhat convoluted Linden Scripting Language). I'd say Second Life is a very close match to Stephenson's metaverse, without any of the rest of what this article is talking about. It's very similar; virtual land owners with shops selling all manner of things, big "Sandboxes" out in the desert where people race huge vehicles and build all manner of crazy things, and people whose avatars resemble just about anything and everything.
Evidently some company is setting up a party, where they've recreated a coffee shop from real life on an island in Second Life. Somehow they're going to make it so people in the coffee shop in real life can see the people in Second Life and vice versa (presumably a big projector and camera in RL, and a streaming video screen and an observer in SL).
I think it's far more likely that kids interested in street racing would go buy a copy of NFS, than it is that kids would buy a copy of NFS and THEN become interested in racing. The article's implied causality is backwards.
low orbit (rather than outer space where the wightlessnes is)
It's a little known fact, but this is why things always fall off the bottom of the moon.
I'm not so sure about this...
on
Why We Fight
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· Score: 1
This is why fascism is inextricably linked with violence: When the individual and the fascist state come in conflict, violence is how the state achieves its aims.
When I played the original Castle Wolfenstein, or for that matter any of the games in his list, I wasn't enjoying it because I thought my political ideals were more righteous than the ideals of the pixel-people I was shooting.
I'll admit I've only played about half the games he lists in his (very cheesy) bit at the beginning, but to be honest my political standpoint comes into a game of Day of Defeat just as much as it does into a game of Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament; not very much at all. I do not play these games to silence my compentition, or win political arguments.
I play these games for the same reason I play Nanaca Crash for hours until I get a 10,000 meter score, and then email the link around to all my friends with a "Beat my 10,000 meter score!". It's fun to compete, either against humans or a computer opponent. It's the same reason I enjoy a good round of ultimate frisbee.
There are certainly games with political themes, such as Half-Life 2 where you're fighting an oppresive government, trying to "save the world - by force", as the author puts it, but this is really just window dressing. The story is interesting, but it isn't what makes the game fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. In Ottawa all the pumps claim to be volume corrected to a specific temperature.
You're going to run into a problem with latency in the handsets. There's a noticeable delay on most cellular networks even inside the same city (it's actually pretty remarkable how many times your voice signal is decompressed and re-compressed as it hops from node to node on the network, and each hop adds latency and lower quality). So, if both movies actually were started at exactly the same time, you would both hear each other's reactions anywhere from a 1/10th to 1/2 after the movie you were watching.
> Perhaps if people died when software was not right like it does with bridges, things might change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
There's no liability to the software designer's employer, either, or next to none.
As the old joke goes, Microsoft made IIS susceptible to worms like Melissa and Code Red, costing billions of dollars to companies around the world, and didn't have to spend a dime in restitution, while Intel made the Pentium with a floating point error that affected a handful of people doing extremely precise simulation work, and had to spend a small fortune recalling chips.
Even if we just had software liability, we'd see a much greater focus on quality in our industry. Although we tread a thin line trying to introduce that concept without having horrendous effect on open source.
When you've contracted an engineer to design a bridge, and you want to make several large-scale changes to that bridge, the engineer will come back and say "If you want these changes done, this is how long it will take. If I don't have that much time, I can't make the changes".
In fact, I'd go a step further; software developers tend to say "This is how long it will take to make the change, and this is how long it will take for me to hack something together." Bridge engineers don't say things like that. They don't put that "hack something unsafe together" option out there on the table, and neither should we.
I think one of the biggest problems in our industry is accountability. The engineer would never put the unsafe option on the table, because the engineer knows he'll loose his license and go to prison if the bridge collapses. With software, on the other hand, we just expect our customers to deal with the fact that it fails, and we behave accordingly - and unprofessionally.
I'm not worried about me; I don't need protection from my own mistakes. If I'm writing software for a radiation therapy machine, or a phone switch which handles 911 calls, I want to make sure that the people who literally put their lives in my hands will be protected from my mistakes. And not just my mistakes, but the errors of the hundreds of other people who work in my company.
What guarantees do you have that a disc which doesn't adhere to the UDF format is going to play on a "regular" DVD player? None. It doesn't match the standard.
Why don't DVD manufacturers just get this over with right at the plant; just paint the aluminum layer with black paint so it won't reflect a laser, or scratch it up before coating the disc in plastic. This way the disc will be unreadable on almost all DVD players, and no users will ever have the chance to steal precious content with their DVD drives, or even with their eyeballs.
Since almost all of these are out-of-court settlements, I doubt there is any significant legal overhead involved. Aren't they just churning out form letters here? I suppose they have to get subpoenas to transform IP addresses into billing addresses, but generally we've seen them subpoena a huge number of IPs at one time, presumeably under a single subpoena. Also, I imagine the RIAA has salaried lawyers on staff, so I doubt their legal fees are too atrocious. $250K/year for a small legal team is a small bite out of $100M.
Wow. 18,000 people sued, settlements between $3K and $11K. That's over $100 million!
It's a little known fact that 4 out of 5 people killed with nail scissors in the U.S. are killed not by someone else's nail scissors, but by their own.
The problem is, of course, that people are not properly trained in nail scissor use. People think that carrying nail scissors is a way to protect their nails, but they don't understand that those same nail scissors can be turned against them, if they are not prepared to use them when a dreaded hang-nail rears its ugly head.
I'm sorry, but Tour-de-France is the anti-technology race. Wired had a photo gallery listing many technologies that are banned from the tour:
http://blog.wired.com/tourtechnology/
Any bicycle which is too light, or which has excessively good aerodynamics is outright banned. There is very little exciting aerodynamics research going on for Tour-de-France. Recumbents were banned by the Union Cycliste International way back in the 30s because they were way too fast. Every bicycle speed record currently held was taken with a recumbent.
UCI basically felt that racing should be a test of the rider rather that of the technology, and so made the diamond frame the "standard". Since everyone else saw people winning races on diamond frame bikes, these bicycles were much more popular than many other technologically superior bikes, which is pretty much why recumbents are hard to find and overly expensive today.
Even this nearly traditional looking Softride pivotless suspension bike (http://www.bronesbikeshop.com/Softride.jpg) was banned because it "could have an aerodynamic advantage".
Why not pause a comercial if the viewer leaves the room while the comercial is on? No one will ever miss a precious moment of comercial ever again.
The new Apple laptops have batteries that buldge and lift and seperate, just sitting there without moving! :P
Is this in any way related to "Bang!" the card game, from mayfair games?
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/3955
The quiz (http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/spyware_0306.h tml) asks questions like "Which of these smiley download sites is safe?" The answer I'd pick is "I don't care which one is safe, I wouldn't ever download something so pointless and high risk to begin with", but that option isn't available.
Seriously, headaches, carpal tunnel, eye strain, etc. aren't worth it for serious work, physical damage is completely unacceptable for play.
:)
You say that as if, somehow, play is less important than work. If I'm going to risk damaging myself, I'd much rather take the risk at play than at work. As the old russian proverb says; "The church is near, but the roads are icy. The pub is far, but I will walk carefully."
Afterall, people take larger risks for the sake of "play" than work all the time. Recreational skydivers come to mind, for one.
LDEF taught us a lot about impact damage from space junk, since it was up there for a long time, and was retrieved.
m pact.html
"With a relative impact velocity of 10 km/s, a piece of aluminum debris which is ~0.7 mm in diameter can penetrate through a typical 2.5 mm thick aluminum satellite wall. During its 5.75 year exposure, LDEF saw one (1) impact of this size per 7 [square meters] of exposed surface area in the RAM direction. In addition to this, LDEF experienced ~1 impact [per square meter], on ram-exposed surfaces, which could have penetrated a typical 1.5 mm thick aluminum electronics box."
-http://setas-www.larc.nasa.gov/LDEF/MET_DEB/md_i
1 impact per square meter over 6 years in orbit. So, you need to make your spacecraft really small, or really thick, or you need to go up for very short periods of time and cross your fingers. And that's without golf balls whizzing past.
Also; if you and the golf-ball are in very similar orbits, this means the golf ball will have a speed very close to yours, relatively speaking. ISS is in a very low orbit, going around 7700 m/s. If you and the ball are both travelling 7700 m/s though, having your orbit be off by only 1 degree relative to each other means a 134 m/s impact, or 482 km/h, which is still going to leave a nasty bruise.
This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. We already spend a lot of time and effort tracking the junk that's floating around in orbit without putting stuff there intentionally.
Getting hit by a golf ball travelling 27,734 km/h would REALLY suck.
The very idea that time > skill is alien.
I've certainly seen companies where it wasn't. It's not unheard of for a PHB to promote John over Sally because John puts in more unpaid overtime, even if Sally's productivity far outstrips John's.
'ethical behavior in regards to the use of information technology,'
This would be the part where they teach kids that using technology to build a copyright mechanism that takes over your customer's computer, and creates security holes, such as the recent Sony-BMG scandal, is unethical. Or perhaps this would be teaching kids about the ethics of setting up a cartel wherein labels make a lot of money off record sales, and artists don't.
'the concept, purpose, and significance of a copyright,'
From this page:
"By granting the copyright holder exclusive rights over a work for a limited period of time, the system fosters the long-term dissemination of new intellectual works for society as a whole." (emphasis added). This would encourage children to discuss why the current copyright system in the United States, where the period of copyrighted works is continually extended, is fundamentally broken.
'the implications of illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing.'
And finally, children would learn that the big record labels took about 5 years too long to get into the online music distribution buisness, so that by the time they did, there were illegal free alternatives which produce superior (read: not DRMed, and therefore superior from the consumer viewpoint) products. We could teach kids that file sharing networks allow people to hear artists they wouldn't otherwise hear on pop-dominated radio stations and TV, and promote more diverse and creative music. And, we could teach them that illegal file sharing doesn't seem to have an impact on record sales.
Somehow I don't think this is what Chavez had in mind.
Well, most of those are answered in the article links, but;
Second Life is sort of a MMORPG, except without the RPG part. It's a big virtual world, where anyone can create just about anything out of primitive building blocks and scripts (provided you can figure out how to do whatever it is you want to do in the somewhat convoluted Linden Scripting Language). I'd say Second Life is a very close match to Stephenson's metaverse, without any of the rest of what this article is talking about. It's very similar; virtual land owners with shops selling all manner of things, big "Sandboxes" out in the desert where people race huge vehicles and build all manner of crazy things, and people whose avatars resemble just about anything and everything.
Evidently some company is setting up a party, where they've recreated a coffee shop from real life on an island in Second Life. Somehow they're going to make it so people in the coffee shop in real life can see the people in Second Life and vice versa (presumably a big projector and camera in RL, and a streaming video screen and an observer in SL).
I think it's far more likely that kids interested in street racing would go buy a copy of NFS, than it is that kids would buy a copy of NFS and THEN become interested in racing. The article's implied causality is backwards.
low orbit (rather than outer space where the wightlessnes is)
It's a little known fact, but this is why things always fall off the bottom of the moon.
This is why fascism is inextricably linked with violence: When the individual and the fascist state come in conflict, violence is how the state achieves its aims.
When I played the original Castle Wolfenstein, or for that matter any of the games in his list, I wasn't enjoying it because I thought my political ideals were more righteous than the ideals of the pixel-people I was shooting.
I'll admit I've only played about half the games he lists in his (very cheesy) bit at the beginning, but to be honest my political standpoint comes into a game of Day of Defeat just as much as it does into a game of Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament; not very much at all. I do not play these games to silence my compentition, or win political arguments.
I play these games for the same reason I play Nanaca Crash for hours until I get a 10,000 meter score, and then email the link around to all my friends with a "Beat my 10,000 meter score!". It's fun to compete, either against humans or a computer opponent. It's the same reason I enjoy a good round of ultimate frisbee.
There are certainly games with political themes, such as Half-Life 2 where you're fighting an oppresive government, trying to "save the world - by force", as the author puts it, but this is really just window dressing. The story is interesting, but it isn't what makes the game fun.