I'm getting real tired of China and Pakistan insisting that all encryption be breakable to allow government spying. The US companies should stop doing business there and...Hmm? What's that?
WHAT!?!? it's WHO!?!? No WAY, OUR government?? in the USA!?!?
Because there always has been and there always will be. Believing otherwise shows a naivety of human nature. As long as greed and lust for power remain part of humanity, thuggery will eventually rear it's ugly head. Just because it isn't obvious doesn't mean it isn't happening.
So you would prefer your thuggery occur under the color of authority with the force of government behind it.
No, naturally the corporation will work to further it's end goal of power of profit, regardless of whether or not their is a government agency to help them do so. They will either go through the government or go through private channels. Regardless of the methods, the end results are the same.
The results are NOT the same. Thuggery by private entities may be battled in the legal system. Armed thuggery can be battled by police and by the individuals involved through self defense on one's own property. If some corporate goons break down my door, they won't ever be going home. If the police break down my door I have few options...all bad. Thuggery perpetrated by the government has little recourse.
Must be nice living in free-market land. However, in reality, any entity with the money and will can effectively disappear you. It has happened, and it will continue to happen.
Yeah, I hear all the time about Walmart, Microsoft, and IBM "disappearing" citizens who protest and speak out against them. The government is the one that does the "disappearing" thing.
Also, corporations have been polluting and killing for decades, if not here than in other countries where laws are a bit more lax. Killing people doesn't always mean shooting them in the face with a gun.
Again, you conflate reducing the size of government with eliminating necessary & essential functions to protect the citizens. This is akin to the tactic that politicians have been using' "If you cut our state budget, the first thing we'll cut is firemen and police." instead of cutting other areas not essential.
Government isn't supposed to "make money". It's supposed to provide the services we all need to survive, and aren't efficient to provide on an individual basis.
Government removes money and capital from the private sector making it unavailable or more expensive for the guy running the dry-cleaners down the street to get loans and capital investment so that he might expand his operations and hire more people. It's more accurate to say that government doesn't create wealth or jobs, the private sector does. The larger government is, the less capital & credit there is available for the private sector to create wealth & jobs.
If government restricted itself to providing essential and necessary functions & services, you'd have a point. There are many huge money-gobbling bureaucracies that do not need to exist. The IRS for one, if some form of flat-tax, fair-tax, or other form were enacted and income tax eliminated. And talk about "jack-booted thugs"! The IRS certainly qualifies.
You're right. Instead of an elected government creating the jack-booted thugs you have un-elected private corporations creating the jack-booted thugs. I can see how that is so much better.
So, if you were tasked with making government smaller, you'd be sure to cut things like the Justice Department and FBI that would keep corporations in line and obeying the law, thus preventing what you describe? That makes no sense.
You make it sound like no matter what, there *must* be jack-booted thugs. Although you don't actually make that claim, I will state that I reject that concept. Part of making government smaller means fewer avenues for corporations to buy influence and less reason to do so, as, if there is no government department to do 'X' that favors a corporation, then naturally the corporation doesn't try, so resulting in less corruption. Less corruption means more-even and fair application of law, the creation of new law, and how it's applied to corporations as well as individuals.
Keep in mind also that corporations do not have the ability to use force. They don't have law enforcement divisions nor armies. The government has a monopoly on the use of force. The government is capable of imprisoning or killing you. A corporation is not. It is possible to arrange & organize one's government so as to maximize individual protections as well as guard against abuses by corporations and other private interests while keeping the government "lean & mean".
...When it comes to a national government's size, scope, and powers, smaller & weaker is good. Yes, it makes it harder to get "free government stuff" (that you end up paying for over and over, but I digress). But, it's hard for anyone to be or use a jack-booted thug/enforcer if there is no government department to create a jack-booted-thug/enforcer division or pay the jack-booted thugs/enforcers, or give them lists of targets...err, "citizens" to do the whole "boot crushing a human face...forever" thing on.
And the local authorities, who are the only ones who can prosecute for it (did you know you can't civilly sue these dickholes for harassment of that nature?), refused to do anything even with copies of what they had left on my answering service!
Well, of course not! The detective/Assistant DA had a background check ran on you, and the check revealed you were a deadbeat with a collection agency after you as well as a pending lawsuit for copyright infringement!
With all that going against your credibility they're certainly not going to take some silly accusation of yours seriously. They have much more *serious* criminals to catch and laws to enforce, like busting those pot-smoking kids on skateboards hanging out behind the shopping mall.
I wish I was kidding here, but stuff like that happens every day.
The French ISPs should wipe all the server HDDs, power down the servers/data centers/fiber, lock the doors, toss the keys to Sarkozy, and tell him "Bonne chance mon ami, au revoir!", and hop on the next thing smokin' out of France.
Let's see Sarkozy deal with pretty much the entire population rioting in the streets because the entire French internet infrastructure went dark.
I wish I had mod points right now, Id mod you up. I personally feel one of these fellows could use a good beatdown in a parking lot someplace mafia style, they are taking over our government and buying laws.
Wait...are we talking about Canada or the US here?
What ever happened to being innocent before guilty? In a free society, courts have to prove -you- guilty, not you have to prove your innocence.
Ah, you haven't heard of the glories of civil law. It is, for example, how most drug law forfeitures are done [fear.org] - you have to prove your innocence to get the seized assets back. (I am not a lawyer, and if you have assets seized, you had better get one and not rely on/. for legal advice.)
Why the US Court system bought into this theory is beyond me; I think that they should be ashamed of themselves (but, then, they don't ask for my opinion).
Actually IIRC it's the property itself that is charged, and not a person. Courts could theoretically choose to ignore you as you are not a party to the charge(s) and therefor have no legal standing to affect the case. I guess you could try some witchcraft to animate your property and have it file on it's own behalf, I suppose.
Dude, you missed the point. Apache helicopters or trigger-happy marines are totally not needed in order to report that the Glorious Army of America has saved yet another child - a photo camera and a short press release cleared by the division G2 or G5 office would have been totally sufficient -- if there would have been anything to report, that is...
You have no idea how many children our men & women in the military help/rescue/save the life of every single day in a theater like Afghanistan or Iraq. There wouldn't be enough page space in enough newspapers to list them all. That's not even including those in areas where rescue & assistance is the main mission, like in Haiti.
What so many fail to understand is that the vast majority of the men & women in our military are loving & caring people, many with families of their own, who pray every time they go out that they never have to fire a weapon. Helping children they find in distress is as automatic an impulse for them as it would be for anyone walking down the street in any average US town. They use their own off-duty time to help build shelter and schools and donate out of their own meager pay to help.
Out of the tens of thousands of personnel are there going to be bad apples? Of course there are. No system is perfect, nor are there any perfect people. I'd bet dimes to donuts though that there are proportionately far fewer bad apples per thousand in the military than in the general population. Military training tends to weed out bad apples.
Why do you think one of the tactics that has been used over and over by insurgent type enemies against US troops has been booby-trapped children? I think our enemies are more aware of the kindness, empathy, and willingness to help the helpless of our soldiers than we at home are in far too many instances.
You seem to assume that the US DoD would hide away pictures of children they helped recover...
Sooo...I guess he must think that the US military would normally keep an Apache helicopter on-station orbiting the area for hours to take gun-camera footage of the entire aftermath including the eventual transport of injured civilian children long after the initial events took place?
Does anyone think they just keep an infinite supply of multi-million dollar attack helicopters and their crews in the air just to record a cleanup operation and casualty transport? Does anyone think they would have had an Apache outside the kids' hospital room windows to record the medical treatment too?
I mean, after all, it's not like those Apache helicopters had anything better to do, and they should have known some/. poster in the future would insist they keep valuable & limited military assets engaged in effectively making a documentary instead of...oh, I don't know...supporting US troops under attack elsewhere, maybe.
As a resident of the state of NJ, I beg to differ. The corruption here on the local and state levels is mind-boggling. It is so inefficient to monitor for corruption at the local level that it just doesn't happen much; furthermore, it is too easy to subvert the monitoring when scale demands that the monitoring is done by at most a few people.
Yes, it's a shame things have gotten so bad there, but much of it wouldn't be possible without a complicit or at least blind Federal government. Even discounting that, at least people have the option to move somewhere else which isn't an option with a corrupt and strong Federal government. The locals there can change the local government through the electoral process, and if the Federal government was not corrupt, would enforce fair play in those elections.
Even if both those fail, people and business can leave the state and the corrupt local government will collapse from lack of revenue. That's pretty much what has been happening in Michigan over the past 40 years or so, particularly in Detroit.
The less power a government has and the more distributed & localized its' powers and functions, the less effective & attractive bribery and graft are.
Essential national interstate infrastructure is a proper & Constitutional part of Federal government by definition. Things like how much water my toilet uses or if and what kind of health insurance I choose or what I and my doctor decide to choose as my best treatment and what we agree on for price is not.
The solution is not to get rid of corporations; it's to get rid of the influence of money on the political process
That will never happen because people are not perfect, triply-so for politicians, and human nature is as unavoidable as gravity. There will always be greedy, power-hungry people willing to be corrupted.
The only thing historically that has even partially worked at keeping government corruption reasonably under control while providing a decent balance of power and freedoms between government and the people is keeping the central national authority as weak as possible while making as much governing as possible a local affair.
That makes major bribery/graft unattractive, as bribing someone in the central authority is almost worthless (not enough power to accomplish briber's goals nationally), and local bribery of very limited value, as local authority doesn't control a large enough population/budget, so bribing enough politicians to get something politically major done nationally and/or gaining enough influence to raid enough from public coffers to make the risk worthwhile requires bribing too many small local pols to be a realistic strategy.
"Heinlein was amazing at predicting tech & science advances far, far ahead of any of his contemporaries."
True, except for the proliferation of computers and the radical miniaturization of electronic components we enjoy today. Heinlein missed that completely. It's all tubes and wires in his stories and tasks that are done quickly by computer today (calculating an orbit for example) are nearly always done by hand. It's almost as if he had a blind spot for computers and envisioned a future society where math was the cool subject.
Well, he didn't miss it completely. You have to compensate for his time frame. Heck, he was born in 1907 and discharged from the navy in 1934, well before WW2. Radio was still a relatively new tech then. We're talking 3 years before Amelia Earhart's last famous flight. He did have the co-lead character "Mike" (short for "MYCROFT"), who was a self-aware computer (he "woke up" one day) in Heinlein's 1966 novel "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".
he's still one of my favorite authors of all time.
Same here. My top-three classic sci-fi author list contains Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Vernor Vinge has done some great work more recently. There are many more worthy of mention, too many to list here.
Yes, Heinlein used this tech as a centerpiece enabling technology for Moon->Earth grain shipments (and as a kinetic weapon used against Earth once the rebellion started..."throwing rice") from a lunar penal colony in his superb science fiction novel "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". I highly recommend the story. Heinlein was amazing at predicting tech & science advances far, far ahead of any of his contemporaries.
In the above Heinlein novel, a rail launcher for Earth was proposed for several possible locations. These proposed locations shared certain characteristics, among them was elevation/altitude at the launcher exit point.
NASA could do a lot worse than taking some more inspiration (IIRC he's generally credited with the concept of communications satellites) from such an intellect.
Consulting a lawyer is the only sensible thing to do at this point. Of course if you really want to go out in a blaze of irony, you could also register another domain in the head of HR's name or the CEO's name just as was done to you.:D
If you want heat, then use a heating element. That's what they are designed for. They are more compact than a lightbulb, and don't burn out after a few hundred hours use.
Now you've gone and done it!
You realize, I hope, there are many thousands of little girls with Hasbro Easy-Bake Ovens that hate your guts now...right?
I'd recommend wearing high-velocity-cupcake-proof body armor if you have to pass near any Toys-R-Us stores from now on.
Seriously though, there are still many applications both in the consumer and commercial/industrial areas where an incandescent bulb is the ideal (and sometimes the only practical) solution.
Production of LEDs involves many toxic substances. I expect that if LED lighting takes off in a big way foreign producers will undercut costs of those produced domestically, so there will be another "green industry" project that will produce jobs somewhere else similar to the "stimulus"-funded wind turbine project I read of recently that ended up buying their hardware from China because US regulations made domestic sourcing far too expensive to be practical.
They've been working themselves up to this for a while now, and it appears that the lead-in propaganda campaign has heated up. I can't believe that I haven't seen another post discussing this yet. It fits perfectly with TFA/TFS. Two words.
Here is a paper by Ross Anderson on some of what implementing Trusted Computing will mean.
This had better be nipped before implementation or there won't be another chance. The internet is a tool with more than one use, just as with nearly any tool. While the internet has tremendous power to empower, inform, and enrich, it also has tremendous power to monitor, control, and suppress if Trusted Computing is allowed to be implemented.
It nearly always boils down to a couple of basic principles;
Does the user/owner control a device he has purchased and "owns" by any other legal measure, or does whoever made it? Furthermore, is it fair that the user is told he owns the device when it's advantageous to the maker, but is told they don't own it when it comes to things that the maker is opposed to owners doing or doesn't want to pay/be liable for?
These are the clear issues they'd like to muddy in peoples' minds.
They might find a whole lot more once these scanners are deployed and people look for ways to stop them...
Simply use a backscatter radiation scan detector as one of the vehicle-bomb triggers. Here's what that might be like.
"OK Corporal, this car's clean, just some nice crotch-shots of those pre-teens sitting in the back seat to pass around back at HQ. Pull up to that truck."
"Yessir Lieutenant, proceeding now sir."
"I'm starting my scan...hey!!, there's a shitload of..."
kaBOOOOM!!!
After they lose a few dozen very expensive scanning vans along with the personnel, they may rethink the strategy. Or simply raise taxes and make this particular type of police/security service subject to involuntary and secret draft-by-NSL (unless you're a sufficiently-powerful politician or a member of his/her family/staff, naturally).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm getting real tired of China and Pakistan insisting that all encryption be breakable to allow government spying. The US companies should stop doing business there and...Hmm? What's that?
WHAT!?!? it's WHO!?!? No WAY, OUR government?? in the USA!?!?
Oh. Shit.
We're boned.
Strat
Because there always has been and there always will be. Believing otherwise shows a naivety of human nature. As long as greed and lust for power remain part of humanity, thuggery will eventually rear it's ugly head. Just because it isn't obvious doesn't mean it isn't happening.
So you would prefer your thuggery occur under the color of authority with the force of government behind it.
No, naturally the corporation will work to further it's end goal of power of profit, regardless of whether or not their is a government agency to help them do so. They will either go through the government or go through private channels. Regardless of the methods, the end results are the same.
The results are NOT the same. Thuggery by private entities may be battled in the legal system. Armed thuggery can be battled by police and by the individuals involved through self defense on one's own property. If some corporate goons break down my door, they won't ever be going home. If the police break down my door I have few options...all bad. Thuggery perpetrated by the government has little recourse.
Must be nice living in free-market land. However, in reality, any entity with the money and will can effectively disappear you. It has happened, and it will continue to happen.
Yeah, I hear all the time about Walmart, Microsoft, and IBM "disappearing" citizens who protest and speak out against them. The government is the one that does the "disappearing" thing.
Also, corporations have been polluting and killing for decades, if not here than in other countries where laws are a bit more lax. Killing people doesn't always mean shooting them in the face with a gun.
Again, you conflate reducing the size of government with eliminating necessary & essential functions to protect the citizens. This is akin to the tactic that politicians have been using' "If you cut our state budget, the first thing we'll cut is firemen and police." instead of cutting other areas not essential.
Strat
Government isn't supposed to "make money". It's supposed to provide the services we all need to survive, and aren't efficient to provide on an individual basis.
Government removes money and capital from the private sector making it unavailable or more expensive for the guy running the dry-cleaners down the street to get loans and capital investment so that he might expand his operations and hire more people. It's more accurate to say that government doesn't create wealth or jobs, the private sector does. The larger government is, the less capital & credit there is available for the private sector to create wealth & jobs.
If government restricted itself to providing essential and necessary functions & services, you'd have a point. There are many huge money-gobbling bureaucracies that do not need to exist. The IRS for one, if some form of flat-tax, fair-tax, or other form were enacted and income tax eliminated. And talk about "jack-booted thugs"! The IRS certainly qualifies.
Strat
You're right. Instead of an elected government creating the jack-booted thugs you have un-elected private corporations creating the jack-booted thugs. I can see how that is so much better.
So, if you were tasked with making government smaller, you'd be sure to cut things like the Justice Department and FBI that would keep corporations in line and obeying the law, thus preventing what you describe? That makes no sense.
You make it sound like no matter what, there *must* be jack-booted thugs. Although you don't actually make that claim, I will state that I reject that concept. Part of making government smaller means fewer avenues for corporations to buy influence and less reason to do so, as, if there is no government department to do 'X' that favors a corporation, then naturally the corporation doesn't try, so resulting in less corruption. Less corruption means more-even and fair application of law, the creation of new law, and how it's applied to corporations as well as individuals.
Keep in mind also that corporations do not have the ability to use force. They don't have law enforcement divisions nor armies. The government has a monopoly on the use of force. The government is capable of imprisoning or killing you. A corporation is not. It is possible to arrange & organize one's government so as to maximize individual protections as well as guard against abuses by corporations and other private interests while keeping the government "lean & mean".
Strat
...When it comes to a national government's size, scope, and powers, smaller & weaker is good. Yes, it makes it harder to get "free government stuff" (that you end up paying for over and over, but I digress). But, it's hard for anyone to be or use a jack-booted thug/enforcer if there is no government department to create a jack-booted-thug/enforcer division or pay the jack-booted thugs/enforcers, or give them lists of targets...err, "citizens" to do the whole "boot crushing a human face...forever" thing on.
Just sayin'
Strat
And the local authorities, who are the only ones who can prosecute for it (did you know you can't civilly sue these dickholes for harassment of that nature?), refused to do anything even with copies of what they had left on my answering service!
Well, of course not! The detective/Assistant DA had a background check ran on you, and the check revealed you were a deadbeat with a collection agency after you as well as a pending lawsuit for copyright infringement!
With all that going against your credibility they're certainly not going to take some silly accusation of yours seriously. They have much more *serious* criminals to catch and laws to enforce, like busting those pot-smoking kids on skateboards hanging out behind the shopping mall.
I wish I was kidding here, but stuff like that happens every day.
Strat
...So it begins.
Strat
The French ISPs should wipe all the server HDDs, power down the servers/data centers/fiber, lock the doors, toss the keys to Sarkozy, and tell him "Bonne chance mon ami, au revoir!", and hop on the next thing smokin' out of France.
Let's see Sarkozy deal with pretty much the entire population rioting in the streets because the entire French internet infrastructure went dark.
Strat
I wish I had mod points right now, Id mod you up. I personally feel one of these fellows could use a good beatdown in a parking lot someplace mafia style, they are taking over our government and buying laws.
Wait...are we talking about Canada or the US here?
Never mind. The set intersection is 100%. Sadly.
Strat
What ever happened to being innocent before guilty? In a free society, courts have to prove -you- guilty, not you have to prove your innocence.
Ah, you haven't heard of the glories of civil law. It is, for example, how most drug law forfeitures are done [fear.org] - you have to prove your innocence to get the seized assets back. (I am not a lawyer, and if you have assets seized, you had better get one and not rely on /. for legal advice.)
Why the US Court system bought into this theory is beyond me; I think that they should be ashamed of themselves (but, then, they don't ask for my opinion).
Actually IIRC it's the property itself that is charged, and not a person. Courts could theoretically choose to ignore you as you are not a party to the charge(s) and therefor have no legal standing to affect the case. I guess you could try some witchcraft to animate your property and have it file on it's own behalf, I suppose.
Strat
Dude, you missed the point. Apache helicopters or trigger-happy marines are totally not needed in order to report that the Glorious Army of America has saved yet another child - a photo camera and a short press release cleared by the division G2 or G5 office would have been totally sufficient -- if there would have been anything to report, that is...
You have no idea how many children our men & women in the military help/rescue/save the life of every single day in a theater like Afghanistan or Iraq. There wouldn't be enough page space in enough newspapers to list them all. That's not even including those in areas where rescue & assistance is the main mission, like in Haiti.
What so many fail to understand is that the vast majority of the men & women in our military are loving & caring people, many with families of their own, who pray every time they go out that they never have to fire a weapon. Helping children they find in distress is as automatic an impulse for them as it would be for anyone walking down the street in any average US town. They use their own off-duty time to help build shelter and schools and donate out of their own meager pay to help.
Out of the tens of thousands of personnel are there going to be bad apples? Of course there are. No system is perfect, nor are there any perfect people. I'd bet dimes to donuts though that there are proportionately far fewer bad apples per thousand in the military than in the general population. Military training tends to weed out bad apples.
Why do you think one of the tactics that has been used over and over by insurgent type enemies against US troops has been booby-trapped children? I think our enemies are more aware of the kindness, empathy, and willingness to help the helpless of our soldiers than we at home are in far too many instances.
Strat
You seem to assume that the US DoD would hide away pictures of children they helped recover...
Sooo...I guess he must think that the US military would normally keep an Apache helicopter on-station orbiting the area for hours to take gun-camera footage of the entire aftermath including the eventual transport of injured civilian children long after the initial events took place?
Does anyone think they just keep an infinite supply of multi-million dollar attack helicopters and their crews in the air just to record a cleanup operation and casualty transport? Does anyone think they would have had an Apache outside the kids' hospital room windows to record the medical treatment too?
I mean, after all, it's not like those Apache helicopters had anything better to do, and they should have known some /. poster in the future would insist they keep valuable & limited military assets engaged in effectively making a documentary instead of...oh, I don't know...supporting US troops under attack elsewhere, maybe.
Strat
As a resident of the state of NJ, I beg to differ. The corruption here on the local and state levels is mind-boggling. It is so inefficient to monitor for corruption at the local level that it just doesn't happen much; furthermore, it is too easy to subvert the monitoring when scale demands that the monitoring is done by at most a few people.
Yes, it's a shame things have gotten so bad there, but much of it wouldn't be possible without a complicit or at least blind Federal government. Even discounting that, at least people have the option to move somewhere else which isn't an option with a corrupt and strong Federal government. The locals there can change the local government through the electoral process, and if the Federal government was not corrupt, would enforce fair play in those elections.
Even if both those fail, people and business can leave the state and the corrupt local government will collapse from lack of revenue. That's pretty much what has been happening in Michigan over the past 40 years or so, particularly in Detroit.
The less power a government has and the more distributed & localized its' powers and functions, the less effective & attractive bribery and graft are.
Essential national interstate infrastructure is a proper & Constitutional part of Federal government by definition. Things like how much water my toilet uses or if and what kind of health insurance I choose or what I and my doctor decide to choose as my best treatment and what we agree on for price is not.
Strat
The solution is not to get rid of corporations; it's to get rid of the influence of money on the political process
That will never happen because people are not perfect, triply-so for politicians, and human nature is as unavoidable as gravity. There will always be greedy, power-hungry people willing to be corrupted.
The only thing historically that has even partially worked at keeping government corruption reasonably under control while providing a decent balance of power and freedoms between government and the people is keeping the central national authority as weak as possible while making as much governing as possible a local affair.
That makes major bribery/graft unattractive, as bribing someone in the central authority is almost worthless (not enough power to accomplish briber's goals nationally), and local bribery of very limited value, as local authority doesn't control a large enough population/budget, so bribing enough politicians to get something politically major done nationally and/or gaining enough influence to raid enough from public coffers to make the risk worthwhile requires bribing too many small local pols to be a realistic strategy.
Strat
Hay, i like cows
And cows like hay, so the feeling is mutual.
So..
I can has cheezburger?
Strat
"Heinlein was amazing at predicting tech & science advances far, far ahead of any of his contemporaries."
True, except for the proliferation of computers and the radical miniaturization of electronic components we enjoy today. Heinlein missed that completely. It's all tubes and wires in his stories and tasks that are done quickly by computer today (calculating an orbit for example) are nearly always done by hand. It's almost as if he had a blind spot for computers and envisioned a future society where math was the cool subject.
Well, he didn't miss it completely. You have to compensate for his time frame. Heck, he was born in 1907 and discharged from the navy in 1934, well before WW2. Radio was still a relatively new tech then. We're talking 3 years before Amelia Earhart's last famous flight. He did have the co-lead character "Mike" (short for "MYCROFT"), who was a self-aware computer (he "woke up" one day) in Heinlein's 1966 novel "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".
he's still one of my favorite authors of all time.
Same here. My top-three classic sci-fi author list contains Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Vernor Vinge has done some great work more recently. There are many more worthy of mention, too many to list here.
Strat
IIRC he's generally credited with the concept of communications satellites
Nope. That was Arthur C. Clarke [lakdiva.org], another of the grand masters of hard science-fiction.
Ahh, right you are! Clarke and Heinlein are two of my favorite sci-fi authors. I really should have gotten that right. :/
Strat
Ah, Heinlein, may you never cease to spin
Yes, Heinlein used this tech as a centerpiece enabling technology for Moon->Earth grain shipments (and as a kinetic weapon used against Earth once the rebellion started..."throwing rice") from a lunar penal colony in his superb science fiction novel "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". I highly recommend the story. Heinlein was amazing at predicting tech & science advances far, far ahead of any of his contemporaries.
In the above Heinlein novel, a rail launcher for Earth was proposed for several possible locations. These proposed locations shared certain characteristics, among them was elevation/altitude at the launcher exit point.
NASA could do a lot worse than taking some more inspiration (IIRC he's generally credited with the concept of communications satellites) from such an intellect.
Strat
Consulting a lawyer is the only sensible thing to do at this point. Of course if you really want to go out in a blaze of irony, you could also register another domain in the head of HR's name or the CEO's name just as was done to you. :D
Strat
If you want heat, then use a heating element. That's what they are designed for. They are more compact than a lightbulb, and don't burn out after a few hundred hours use.
Now you've gone and done it!
You realize, I hope, there are many thousands of little girls with Hasbro Easy-Bake Ovens that hate your guts now...right?
I'd recommend wearing high-velocity-cupcake-proof body armor if you have to pass near any Toys-R-Us stores from now on.
Seriously though, there are still many applications both in the consumer and commercial/industrial areas where an incandescent bulb is the ideal (and sometimes the only practical) solution.
Production of LEDs involves many toxic substances. I expect that if LED lighting takes off in a big way foreign producers will undercut costs of those produced domestically, so there will be another "green industry" project that will produce jobs somewhere else similar to the "stimulus"-funded wind turbine project I read of recently that ended up buying their hardware from China because US regulations made domestic sourcing far too expensive to be practical.
Strat
They've been working themselves up to this for a while now, and it appears that the lead-in propaganda campaign has heated up. I can't believe that I haven't seen another post discussing this yet. It fits perfectly with TFA/TFS. Two words.
Trusted Computing.
Here is a paper by Ross Anderson on some of what implementing Trusted Computing will mean.
This had better be nipped before implementation or there won't be another chance. The internet is a tool with more than one use, just as with nearly any tool. While the internet has tremendous power to empower, inform, and enrich, it also has tremendous power to monitor, control, and suppress if Trusted Computing is allowed to be implemented.
Strat
I didnt realise you can watch porn with just the linux kernel
You apparently haven't read some of the comments in the source code. The linux kernel IS pr0n by many standards.
Strat
Clearly, we need to relax copyright law in order to hurt the porn industry, for the sake of the children.
If you support strong copyright law now you hate children, right?
You do realize that the cognitive dissonance of this would literally dissolve the brains of many Congresspeople?
Of course, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"Mars Attacks!" style?
Cool!
Wait...this doesn't involve Ron Paul doing C&W yodeling at high volumes, does it?
Please, $DEITY, tell me it doesn't!
Strat
My set-top box upgraded without asking me.
This ^^^
It nearly always boils down to a couple of basic principles;
Does the user/owner control a device he has purchased and "owns" by any other legal measure, or does whoever made it? Furthermore, is it fair that the user is told he owns the device when it's advantageous to the maker, but is told they don't own it when it comes to things that the maker is opposed to owners doing or doesn't want to pay/be liable for?
These are the clear issues they'd like to muddy in peoples' minds.
Strat
They might find a whole lot more once these scanners are deployed and people look for ways to stop them...
Simply use a backscatter radiation scan detector as one of the vehicle-bomb triggers. Here's what that might be like.
"OK Corporal, this car's clean, just some nice crotch-shots of those pre-teens sitting in the back seat to pass around back at HQ. Pull up to that truck."
"Yessir Lieutenant, proceeding now sir."
"I'm starting my scan...hey!!, there's a shitload of..."
kaBOOOOM!!!
After they lose a few dozen very expensive scanning vans along with the personnel, they may rethink the strategy. Or simply raise taxes and make this particular type of police/security service subject to involuntary and secret draft-by-NSL (unless you're a sufficiently-powerful politician or a member of his/her family/staff, naturally).
Strat