Established law for registration of sex offenders has been applied retroactively to those convicted prior to the laws requiring registration. This has been challenged in court, and the challenges have failed.
I mention this specific issue in this context because the constitution explicitly forbids punishing someone twice for the same crime; the lawmakers and judiciary together came up with the rather creative idea that registration isn't punishment, it's just a matter of record. They reason (and I use the term here in its most sophist character) that since the inevitable further experiences brought on by registration in the form of ostracism, isolation, acts of hatred and so on are applied to the registrant by the citizens -- rather than by the government -- that the government can apply registration without violating the letter of the constitution with specific regard to forbidding applying additional punishment retroactively.
Countering this view is the legislation, quite old now, that forbids posting someone's name on a handbill in the town square, or elsewhere, as a "known criminal" or some such verbiage. These rules apply quite broadly to "public shaming." This used to be common practice amongst the puritans and their ilk, but was made illegal.
It is an interesting set of contrasts; I'm afraid it doesn't speak very well for the lawmaking process.
Almost certainly, the legal system will come up with a similar rationale for tracking. It's not puishment, it's just "locating" or something along those lines, and that'll put the foot in the door.
What one needs to keep in mind here is that if sex offenders can be retroactively registered for life because registration is not punishment, then there is a huge precedent established for the government to register you when you do anything at all, such as get a speeding ticket -- or even if you do nothing at all. It's not punishment according to them, remember that key issue. This is a case where the public's natural (in my view) revulsion for a heinous act has been used against them by the government.
I rather think that if you feel that someone has done something bad enough that you don't trust them out in society, then you shouldn't allow them out in society. Registration, tracking, all of that is locking the barn door after the horse has left, IMHO. And aside from that, I'm sure in my heart that it is constitutionally forbidden, in spirit and in letter. I suspect the founding fathers would have just outright killed anyone caught fooling with their kids and that would have been the end of it right there. Registration, indeed.
For example, how do you address the gravity problem? How can you virtually simulate something that has physical weight, like throwing a virtual ball and catching it?
Compressed air (or pumped water, if you're immersed) vents on the suit. "Ball" hits hand, suit palm stiffens in the appropriate curve, fingers lose the ability to close through the region where the "ball" is supposed to be, and compressed air blows out of the palm, hard. You have to use your muscles to push back or your arm is driven backwards via force local to, and vectored reasonably at, your palm, by the directed emission.
Not easy, not by any means, but not out of the reach of current technology, either.
In any case, no VR has to be perfect. Television isn't a perfect 2d representation either; just look closely and you'll see. Yet we open the theater of the mind and become quite involved. I think that just like television (and video games, and even books for some of us) the mind is more than powerful enough to adequately enhance the experience to a degree that will be more than satisfactory.
But... baseball? Baseball??? Without any possible doubt, the key VR application is sex. If you want to be the next Bill Gates, develop acceptable (to the consumer) VR sexual experiences and the supporting hardware (pun intended) and you'll be there in record time. Complete with a large group of people who hate you for what you've accomplished.
OTOH, if you want to go nowhere fast, develop a VR baseball system. And good luck to you. Make sure you get the chewing tobacco spit to the ground to splash realistically on the player's leg while you're at it. I don't know how you'll work in the feeling of a steroid enhanced musculature, but I'm sure it'll be fabulous when you get it done...:-)
Certainly. As time goes on, costs go up. Inflation and stricter environmental rules and higher cost of transport and all that. The myth, of course, is that consumer earnings go up in such a way as to keep pace. They don't. Purchases become less frequent, prices rise so that the lower number being sold can justify the print run (and yes, of course that includes profits) and this is indeed part of the reason why there is a severe downward spiral. Along with the rise of other media that are perceived as richer by many consumers - DVD's and so on.
I have no solution to offer, at least as far as print goes. We're probably not too far away from a paradigm shift driven by "electronic paper", an "ipod for readers", but we're definitely not there yet. When printing costs are near zero, there will be an opportunity to moderate prices for the actual literary product. The question is, will prices moderate? I'm betting not, because I have great faith in people's greed, but optimists never get along with me anyway so I am obliged to announce YMMV.
I agree that there are other possible paths, and that they may be better paths. Personally, I'd just as soon not have the government involved at all; but you'll find that thread running through almost everything I have to say. As far as I am concerned, the feds should be building infrastructure -- roads, communications, networks, water supplies, that sort of thing -- and guarding the borders, and doing nothing else.
I have found that if you price stuff cheap, people think the product is cheap and won't buy it
I own a company that sells graphics software and we ran head-on into this exact issue. We sell (for PC) high end image manipulation and special effects software, think of Photoshop but faster, deeper and with considerably more features. Very technical, not nearly as warm and fuzzy as Photoshop. It is aimed at image freaks, not just people who like to putter about with photos and graphic art. Just as a for instance, PS supports 20-odd layer modes, we do 70-odd. Definitely a niche product, but a niche product where the niches are large. So anyway, when we originally released it, it was $499 and sold just fine. Later, as we got down the ROI curve, we began to drop the price. Kept selling just fine until we dropped it to below $99.95... then sales dropped off sharply. After a month of just about dead silence, a little bemused, more than a little worried, we raised the price back to $99.95 and zap, sales came right back.
After tossing this issue about for a while, we built an "on sale" automation that offered it for $49.95 if you had (anything at all from Corel, Adobe, JASC, including demo software or free software like a PDF reader... and in fact we don't even check for the presence of such stuff) but "just until 2-3 days from now." Sales went up even further. So $79.95 was a perception threshold we could not cross, but $49.95 is a good as long as the perception was that they should be paying more.
The fact is, we really tried to sell the software for less, but consumers wouldn't allow it. What can you do?
At this point in time, I'd be more than delighted to sell it for $19.95 if I could see a sufficient number of sales to justify it. But I am not at all convinced that those sales would materialize.
People sure are funny.:-)
Re:more censorship, unimpressed
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You're using IQ to argue gullability. Just because you're smart, doesn't mean your not gullable, and just because you are stupid (as to IQ score), doesn't make you gullable.
I disagree with your assertion. It is my impression that there is a very, very high correlation between low intelligence and gullibility. Leaving religion out of it for the moment, because that has a socialization factor added to the mix, I think intelligent people are significantly less likely to buy "Herbal Viagra" or "0v3r 7h3 c0un73r V!c0d1n", for a couple of instances. They're less likely to dial a phone sex line with the idea that some young blonde who will actually be "hot for them" will actually come (literally and figuratively) on the line. And they're considerably less likely to "click on the monkey to win a prize."
every modern web browser (and I use that term liberally; IE is NOT modern)
Leaving out IE from your evalutation is a serious mistake, one that leads to invalidation. The majority of netizens use it, and so it should be your primary consideration, not the one you leave out. You have to evaluate what is, not what you'd prefer things to be.
I agree that Google can provide a good advertising venue, and a decent income stream. I use it both ways, I advertise my software on it and I use it as a revenue stream for my free-to-surf sites. I use text ads only, as I think they are the optimum compromise for buyer and seller. However, my point was that Google is offering more and more of the richer media types of ads all the time. It hasn't been more than a week since I got my email from them telling me they wanted me to do flash ads (which will never happen.) The thing is, some advertisers will jump on that like a politician on a special interest group. And that's because the ads work, and that is the only concern of many advertisters.
Finally, your concept of popup ads that don't work forcing dollars from us to companies is completely wrong.
Company A puts out x $ to advertise. They look at how much revenue those ads bring in. If the revenue is acceptable, the ads will continue. If it is not, the ads will be modified or discontinued. It's just that simple.
The perception that "ads don't work" is simply wrong. They do work. They hit on a small percentage of viewers, true enough, but the point is, that == "working" because that small percentage is sufficient to bring in the revenue the company needs to sell and to survive.
I've been buying advertising space and creating ads for almost thirty years; I know what I'm talking about here, truly.
This isn't an original idea, but I can't remember where I most recently read about the concept, so I'll go ahead and say it's mine:
Well... in that case, I don't trust you. trustrank=0. Next message, please.
Re:more censorship, unimpressed
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"Click here, you may have already won" are just as pointless, as any intellegent user would avoid them like the plague.
The average and median IQ is 100.
As a population statistic, this means that half (or more) of the population is IQ 100 or under, and that means that "any intelligent user" is by no means the population that those popups and banners address. They're not for intelligent users.
Remember that banner ads, popups etc. all cost money to generate. Why do you think they have not gone away? It's simple, really, it is because they work. Advertisers put money into them, and they get money back out.
Google has continuously been adding the more obnoxious ad formats to adsense; what was once a text ad service that most of us geek types welcomed now churns out image ads, flash ads, and so on. Again, why do you think they're doing this? It is because these things sell. No, they don't sell to people like you or me, but we are not the only type of person surfing around, and that's the bottom line.
There was a day when finding out that someone was online was a pretty good indicator that said perrson was fairly sharp. Those days are long gone. Getting online is now simply a matter of pointing a mouse.
So beware when you cast these things in the light of "pointless." They are anything but. It's just that you aren't the point.
So is a wind turbine. You still have to amortize it.
I already adressed that. You weren't talking about longer amotization, you said that the reactor would become uneconomical, which is hardly the same thing - it is simply nonsense. No turning on a dime, here. Go re-read your post.:-)
serious heat
serious pressure
radiation
shock
I was talking about these factors when an accident occurs, not at normal operating levels, which are mostly irrelevant to accident containment, as you say. Containment isn't about day to day running, it's about what can happen when a reactor goes outside of its normal operating profile for whatever reason. PBMRs just quietly shut down. It's a beautiful thing. They don't melt through the floor, they don't explode, and they don't freak out and run away at insanely high power levels. This is their nature. Hence, accident containment is a comparatively small task, yet one that when considered, has to deal with whatever levels there might be of heat, pressure, shock and radiation. Don't convolve operating issues with failure issues. I certainly wasn't. I was directly addressing containment itself.
You mention the reactor leak in Germany. Fine. This is a test/prototyping reactor. Any cows with three heads wandering around? No. Anyone get hurt outside the facility? I'm guessing, but most likely, no. Right? Any issues here other than basic design issues to be dealt with? No. In short, is this incident even worth considering as far as it might apply to a serious commercial reactor design?
No.
It means they need a better pebble feed mechanism. Clue: That's why they test.
the converse can be said about nuclear proponents
I am in no way a blind nuclear fanboy. However, I am visionary enough, and engineer enough, to contemplate a final commercial design rather than a testbed when I consider a reactor's general characteristics, and to take the implied safety issues as face value, knowing they'll be addressed as appropriate in each installation, at least here in the US. Russia, I wouldn't presume to speak for.
Regarding containment issues, graphite and water and so on, if indeed the reactor needs containment, fine, build containment for it. It'll be later down the road when it pays for itself. So what? If the alternative is riding goats, then we need to build reactors. If the alternative is other... for instance, if someone pops up with a viable fusion design -- then we need to stop, change direction, and go that way. It's all this nabmy-pamby "oh my gawd, rad-e-a-shun!" stuff is what is going to put the world economy in the pot, not to mention the environment.
Radiation paranoids are depressingly ignorant. For every leak of a TINY bit of material into the atmosphere, there have been multiple fission explosions let off, which would hardly count as contained and which were far more violent and polluting than any nuclear incident ever, up to and including Chernoble. I think the total number is well over 5000 now. People ride aircraft and get radiation doses they have no clue about, and everyone who lives in (for instance) Denver is getting a significantly better "tan" than I am, since I live 2000+ feet lower than they do. People breathe coal exhaust and have not even an inkling of the types of toxins and even radioactive isotopes that come flying out of a coal plant's stack. I can never decide if it's paranoia that keeps them from learning, or the lack of learning than makes them paranoid.
Yes, there can be accidents. So lets face that. We lost forty one thousand plus people to car accidents in 1999, which was by no means a standout year. And that was just in the USA. Might we lose a few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand to a reactor accident? Sure. It could happen. It's not real likely, but it could happen. And it's b
To be economical, PBMRs require no containment structure.
First of all, a containment structure is primarily a one-time cost, especially when you build it around a reactor that "just sits there." All building one does is extends the time it takes for the reactor to become profitiable. It in no way turns the reactor design into one that is not economical. Secondly, compared to the reactors that are out there running today, a PBMR is more economical almost no matter how you build it.
Containment of a breeder or a 60's-style pile based reactor is absolutely required, because the failure modes for these designs are horrific. But advocating classic dome-style containment of a PBMR based on issues that apply to other reactor types is about as sensible as requiring a ship's watertight hull on a freight train. Yes, the cargo ship will sink without one, still, it makes little (or no) sense on a freight train. You need serious containment when there are serious heat, pressure, radiation and shock issues. Decent PBMR's don't present those issues, and the failure modes are outright fuzzy and friendly by comparison to almost any other reactor design.
I don't have any particular problem with adding containment, though, if it were the straw that causes the average|median 100 level IQ public and the not-much-better media to drop the paranoia. The issue isn't what hoops have to be jumped through, the issue is that no one will do any jumping at all at this point in time.
For something that uses graphite as a moderator (and still calls for air to be used as emergency coolant)
There are many PBMR designs; it is hardly fair to cherry pick the bad ones and tar the entire lot with the faults of the bottom feeders. Why not look over the various information sources on PBMR's and see where the designs are today? You might be pleasantly surprised. These aren't your father's nuclear reactors, to misquote somebody or other.
You're quite right. I was mixing the two issues, mainly because I have no use for standard resolution television -- I don't watch it at all -- and moved to HD formats some time ago for movies. My only current exposure to 480p is the XBox.:-)
This "where do we get the uranium" line is 100% misinformation at best, and hysteria at worst. There is no "fuel shortage" and none is impending in the next few centuries, either. Assuming we needed uranium, transmutation is an established, working technology; go look up fast breeder reactors. Assuming thorium will do (and it almost certainly will) then we've got enough to last a very, very long time. Given the eventual development of fusion reactors, which I am pretty sure is inevitable, even if it takes another couple hundred years, there is no, repeat no forseeable break in our energy supply as imposed upon us by nature.
The only break in our energy supply will come from forces imposed by politicians, radical environmentalists, and corporations protecting their oil cash cows. And those, I think, are inevitable. All three of them.
The only problem I see with Nuclear power is what to do with the waste.
This problem has been solved. The waste is processed into what amount to vitrified glass blocks which have stable storage lifetimes in the thousands of years. There is no way short of intentional refinement for waste stored in this manner to re-enter the environment in the relatively short term, unlike liquid or cannister based storage mechanisms. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that in a thousand years or so, we'll have a lot better idea of what to do with the blocks themselves, if indeed anything need be done. We've only had nuclear power for half a century or so, after all.
The correct choice at this time seems to be a combination of pebble bed reactors, which are highly resistant to serious problems such as meltdown or explosive failure, and vitrified glass waste storage insofar as waste storage turns out to be required. Pebble bed reactors are somewhat different from the reactors we're used to thinking about, particularly in that they repeatedly re-process their own fuel, continually converting "waste" from the previous stage into still more energy.
The primary problem is political and environmentalist fearmongering (to the extent that it is not just ignorance, which I am perfectly will to credit both politicians and environmentalists with.) People will believe anything, especially if it comes with a nice, high energy dose of hysteria.
The secondary problem is that building nuclear power plants -- any kind -- is a long, drawn out proceedure. If we started today, money no object, the public all about supporting it, it'd still be quite a few years before the putative new plants began to benefit the infrastructure. Compound this with the fact that we're not going to start today, or at any time in the foreseeable future, and the fact that money is a severe problem, the public is in no way supportive, and the future for reasonable nuclear energy generation appears mighty bleak.
Frankly, the problem is not on the consumer end of this. The "box" to drive your analog set is not a big deal by any means, and since this is one item that we know in advance will have be made in the many tens of millions, it's going to be inexpensive.
The problem is with studio and transmitter gear. That will not be inexpensive, and the investment is beyond many studios. More importantly, there is no "cheap" fix like a box that converts the signal. They need new everything from antenna arrays to cameras and everything in between.
I know what they're talking about. I was replying to a specific comment that only mentioned tapwater, which pretty much limits your options to electrolysis.
Probably not. Tap water contains all manner of stuff besides h2o. And since the hydrogen results from splitting the h from the o, that basically will leave you with a (tank|filter|general miasma/encrustation) of calcium, nitrates, bacteria, various metallic oxides, chlorine products and worse. The oxygen you might be able to use, but then again, maybe not.
You'll be splitting distilled water just like the rest of us, matey, and leave the tap water going down the drain.:-)
...that while CSS is presently in flux, and requires significant browser-specific code effort to manage maxwidth and other tabular issues across the currently in-vogue browsers, HTML table markup itself is quite stable and almost entirely uniform. I regularly create extremely complex tables and test them in Opera, FF, IE and Safari, and I can barely remember the last time I saw a problem, which was in Netscape, which would not properly render the table on the timeline pages of this site, which uses variable size horizontal cells as bar graphs.:-)
The bottom line is that pages that use tables for detailed control of tabular markup are a lot more likely to remain correct during the transitional period while CSS settles down (and it'll probably be a while... IE is still pretty far back in the back for just vanilla CSS, and CSS2 is no walk in the park for any browser!)
I have in fact sent something very much resembling that to congress (well, to my congressperson and a couple of the more appropriate congressclatches.)
However, we are not publishers, we are a literary agency, and as such, we're not a very important part of the food chain as far as congress is concerned. They listen where the money is concentrated; and that is at/to the publishing (books) or production (movies, video) occurs.
In order to have a serious effect on congress, it takes money and influence. I cannot bring enough of either to bear to be taken seriously.
Let me emphasize again that while the authors are often the focus of discussion of copyright issues, it is not the authors that primarily benefit -- it is the production level operations, publishers and movie production companies. And they, naturally enough, are the ones exerting influence. Lots of it, and quite effectively. Because they have oodles and oodles of money and power to flex.
Sorry, if you want sound/text bites, I'm definitely the wrong person's posts to read.
Not only do I go on at length about issues I am passionate about, I often use run-on sentences, common (to be kind) grammar, and I even reply to AC's who are clearly OT and trolling.
OTOH, an optimist is what a pessimist calls a realist.
perhaps they arent writing because they don't have enough economic insentive on account of those filthy pirates?
I definitely think that is not the case.
Among other things, I own a literary agency. One of the oldest and most prestigious agencies in the US specialized in science fiction and fantasy. My remarks come from that perspective.
There is no shortage of writers. Quite the contrary. In fact, there is no shortage of good stories and good writers.
What there is, is a shortage of readers, more specifically, there has been a major, major downturn of book-buying.
That makes the publishers a lot less likely to buy a book. Especially good ones; the ones that make it to the shelf are the titles that are perceived by the publisher as likely to be "popular", and for reasons that make perfect economic sense: Shelf space is limited (fewer bookstores) and shelf time is limited. If books don't sell, they are remaindered or destroyed for credit (that's a very odd quirk of the publishing industry, and believe me, it has major effects on the publisher's bottom line.)
Americans, at least, are deploying the theatre of the mind upon television, movies in the form of DVDs and other recorded media. Books in general, the writer's bread and butter, are dropping in popularity like stones in the face of the new technologies. I'm not saying this isn't a natural consequence of progress, and I'm not complaining -- I'm just explaining.
The bottom line is that commercial writers are, in fact, having a harder time of it. The environment is such that it is definitely more difficult to sell your work. In this context, most writers welcome the idea that whatever work they do manage to market, will turn income for them for a longer period of time -- facing the idea that there will be less of it, they hope that what there is, can earn more.
Now -- personally -- I think they're mistaken if they take this view. There are other factors, particularly the very short time-to-live in terms of bookstore shelf life for even very, very good titles -- that will prevent long-term copyrights from giving most of them any income. The ones that do succeed, definitely make "enough", IMHO. A movie deal, something that is reprinted several times and is well accepted, those are serious cash cows for a writer. But they are astonishingly few and far between.
But the fact is, writers are not in control of this process. They are for the most part an economically weak class, and cynical or not, I truly believe that the political decisions that drive copyright law are made by money. If you consider who absurdly long-term copyrights and other IP entropy such as software patents do benefit in a consistant, industry wide fashion, you'll inevitably find yourself looking at the publishing industry (not writers -- publishers), the movie production industry, and the commercial software industry. Whatever they can create, they get to hold on to, for longer; charge for, longer; license, longer.
I would submit, not very humbly, that writers, musicians, and software authors (I also own a software company, a very successful one, and I am a musician and recording studio owner) are more than productive enough, generally speaking, to not require these long-term protections. In fact, I rather think that a truly productive author/coder/musician doesn't need them at all. Hardware patents are different, in that the financial outlay to create, and the margins once created, are so represssive to the process itself that there needs to be a follow-on reward, especially for things like chip fab IP where the outlay for the next fab is in the billions at this point in time.
Anyway, this is an issue that I have to deal with not just every day, but every hour of my working day (and I think about it a lot of my off time, too.) I am convinced that the US government, at least, is doing far worse than being "
Many times, market forces leave older technologies high and dry. That's just the way it is. You may have invested thousands of dollars in Betamax tapes or in 8-tracks, yet you cannot buy a new player today. You may have bought a DeLorean, or a Next, or a video disc player. On the company front, investments have been made over and over again in technologies that didn't stay around. Motorola's comm satellites, C-band television broadcasting, etc. Just because a technology exists and people are using it is not sufficient reason to keep it around. This is established fact.
But that's not exactly what is going on here. In this particular case, the technology is dangerous and it is causing trouble all the time. Major trouble; time lost, data lost, people's lives are being disrupted.
Now, you propose to sandbox it so that for FF, the technology becomes non-risky. In the meantime, the IE userbase continues to suffer the slings and arrows of Microsoft's incompetence (and mind you, there is no assurance that a "sandboxed" version of an Active-X control would work properly -- because they can access anything in the system, they are likely to have accessed someting in the system, as the Windows API is like a candy store -- why would you rewrite that functionality if you didn't have to?)
If I were to compare Active-X to a product, I think I'd choose thalidomide. Everything looks fine when you first take it. It seems to be doing what it is supposed to be doing. Until your PC pups out some malformed spyware, that is. Or simply dies without warning. They took Thalidomide off the market. They should do the same with Active-X. It is toxic.
My position is that giving Active-X a longer life span is a bad choice for developers to make. They should work to kill it sooner, rather than later. In the meantime, any company with half a wit will be working to get out of the technological jail they so blindly walked into. Maybe next time, they'll Think, Marketplan and Develop instead of Marketplan, Develop, and finally Think.
The argument being made here is that Active-X is dangerous. You seem to give that a nod by saying it should be off.
Fine.
However, the next implication is that it can be turned on. This is not fine. Why? Because it is dangerous. The average user does not comprehend that it is dangerous. Like the argument here that one should not run as root (which I agree with for most people in most situations) the idea is that if you're not smart enough to handle a tool, you should not be handed that tool.
It's not arrogance to say that it is not a happy worldview to see people's computers being trashed by junkware let in by badly designed software -- Active-X -- it simply isn't a good thing. You can't make it a good thing.
Now, if a company has invested time in developing for this proprietary (but very dangerous) technology, and the marketplace leaves them behind, as it is showing definite signs of doing, then if that company wants to survive, it needs to lose the dangerous technology, get with the program, and use the safe technology. That's called evolutionary pressure. I'm part of that pressure. I don't use IE. If you use IE-specific technologies on your site, you've lost me (and at least 10% of the rest of the world, and more every day.) Now, you can only ignore this for so long before you (a) solve the problem by losing the junkware, or (b) are driven from the business space by competitors who are able to recognize and resolve the problem.
From a user perspective, I'm just one guy. I won't use IE.
From an applications standpoint, I own several companies and we don't use Active-X (or Java, for that matter) as a matter of course. We do server-side apps, because (a) we have total control over them and (b) because all users, that's 100% of them, can use our apps. We give up some glitz, certainly, but we've never, ever had to give up anything important.
So my outlook does have some effect. If Active-X were to go away, it wouldn't touch me at all, other than to make the web more accessible to me and perhaps give my competitors a more stable place to stand. Do I worry about the people who invested in Active-X? No. And, really -- why should I?
Arrogant? No. I'm entitled to my opinion, just as you are entitled to yours. As for putting any thought into it, apparently you didn't notice my sig. This isn't an issue I just picked up on this afternoon. I have indeed thought about it, and this is where I ended up.
Slashdot Mirror
Established law for registration of sex offenders has been applied retroactively to those convicted prior to the laws requiring registration. This has been challenged in court, and the challenges have failed.
I mention this specific issue in this context because the constitution explicitly forbids punishing someone twice for the same crime; the lawmakers and judiciary together came up with the rather creative idea that registration isn't punishment, it's just a matter of record. They reason (and I use the term here in its most sophist character) that since the inevitable further experiences brought on by registration in the form of ostracism, isolation, acts of hatred and so on are applied to the registrant by the citizens -- rather than by the government -- that the government can apply registration without violating the letter of the constitution with specific regard to forbidding applying additional punishment retroactively.
Countering this view is the legislation, quite old now, that forbids posting someone's name on a handbill in the town square, or elsewhere, as a "known criminal" or some such verbiage. These rules apply quite broadly to "public shaming." This used to be common practice amongst the puritans and their ilk, but was made illegal.
It is an interesting set of contrasts; I'm afraid it doesn't speak very well for the lawmaking process.
Almost certainly, the legal system will come up with a similar rationale for tracking. It's not puishment, it's just "locating" or something along those lines, and that'll put the foot in the door.
What one needs to keep in mind here is that if sex offenders can be retroactively registered for life because registration is not punishment, then there is a huge precedent established for the government to register you when you do anything at all, such as get a speeding ticket -- or even if you do nothing at all. It's not punishment according to them, remember that key issue. This is a case where the public's natural (in my view) revulsion for a heinous act has been used against them by the government.
I rather think that if you feel that someone has done something bad enough that you don't trust them out in society, then you shouldn't allow them out in society. Registration, tracking, all of that is locking the barn door after the horse has left, IMHO. And aside from that, I'm sure in my heart that it is constitutionally forbidden, in spirit and in letter. I suspect the founding fathers would have just outright killed anyone caught fooling with their kids and that would have been the end of it right there. Registration, indeed.
Compressed air (or pumped water, if you're immersed) vents on the suit. "Ball" hits hand, suit palm stiffens in the appropriate curve, fingers lose the ability to close through the region where the "ball" is supposed to be, and compressed air blows out of the palm, hard. You have to use your muscles to push back or your arm is driven backwards via force local to, and vectored reasonably at, your palm, by the directed emission.
Not easy, not by any means, but not out of the reach of current technology, either.
In any case, no VR has to be perfect. Television isn't a perfect 2d representation either; just look closely and you'll see. Yet we open the theater of the mind and become quite involved. I think that just like television (and video games, and even books for some of us) the mind is more than powerful enough to adequately enhance the experience to a degree that will be more than satisfactory.
But... baseball? Baseball??? Without any possible doubt, the key VR application is sex. If you want to be the next Bill Gates, develop acceptable (to the consumer) VR sexual experiences and the supporting hardware (pun intended) and you'll be there in record time. Complete with a large group of people who hate you for what you've accomplished.
OTOH, if you want to go nowhere fast, develop a VR baseball system. And good luck to you. Make sure you get the chewing tobacco spit to the ground to splash realistically on the player's leg while you're at it. I don't know how you'll work in the feeling of a steroid enhanced musculature, but I'm sure it'll be fabulous when you get it done... :-)
I have no solution to offer, at least as far as print goes. We're probably not too far away from a paradigm shift driven by "electronic paper", an "ipod for readers", but we're definitely not there yet. When printing costs are near zero, there will be an opportunity to moderate prices for the actual literary product. The question is, will prices moderate? I'm betting not, because I have great faith in people's greed, but optimists never get along with me anyway so I am obliged to announce YMMV.
I agree that there are other possible paths, and that they may be better paths. Personally, I'd just as soon not have the government involved at all; but you'll find that thread running through almost everything I have to say. As far as I am concerned, the feds should be building infrastructure -- roads, communications, networks, water supplies, that sort of thing -- and guarding the borders, and doing nothing else.
I own a company that sells graphics software and we ran head-on into this exact issue. We sell (for PC) high end image manipulation and special effects software, think of Photoshop but faster, deeper and with considerably more features. Very technical, not nearly as warm and fuzzy as Photoshop. It is aimed at image freaks, not just people who like to putter about with photos and graphic art. Just as a for instance, PS supports 20-odd layer modes, we do 70-odd. Definitely a niche product, but a niche product where the niches are large. So anyway, when we originally released it, it was $499 and sold just fine. Later, as we got down the ROI curve, we began to drop the price. Kept selling just fine until we dropped it to below $99.95... then sales dropped off sharply. After a month of just about dead silence, a little bemused, more than a little worried, we raised the price back to $99.95 and zap, sales came right back.
After tossing this issue about for a while, we built an "on sale" automation that offered it for $49.95 if you had (anything at all from Corel, Adobe, JASC, including demo software or free software like a PDF reader... and in fact we don't even check for the presence of such stuff) but "just until 2-3 days from now." Sales went up even further. So $79.95 was a perception threshold we could not cross, but $49.95 is a good as long as the perception was that they should be paying more.
The fact is, we really tried to sell the software for less, but consumers wouldn't allow it. What can you do?
At this point in time, I'd be more than delighted to sell it for $19.95 if I could see a sufficient number of sales to justify it. But I am not at all convinced that those sales would materialize.
People sure are funny. :-)
I disagree with your assertion. It is my impression that there is a very, very high correlation between low intelligence and gullibility. Leaving religion out of it for the moment, because that has a socialization factor added to the mix, I think intelligent people are significantly less likely to buy "Herbal Viagra" or "0v3r 7h3 c0un73r V!c0d1n", for a couple of instances. They're less likely to dial a phone sex line with the idea that some young blonde who will actually be "hot for them" will actually come (literally and figuratively) on the line. And they're considerably less likely to "click on the monkey to win a prize."
Leaving out IE from your evalutation is a serious mistake, one that leads to invalidation. The majority of netizens use it, and so it should be your primary consideration, not the one you leave out. You have to evaluate what is, not what you'd prefer things to be.
I agree that Google can provide a good advertising venue, and a decent income stream. I use it both ways, I advertise my software on it and I use it as a revenue stream for my free-to-surf sites. I use text ads only, as I think they are the optimum compromise for buyer and seller. However, my point was that Google is offering more and more of the richer media types of ads all the time. It hasn't been more than a week since I got my email from them telling me they wanted me to do flash ads (which will never happen.) The thing is, some advertisers will jump on that like a politician on a special interest group. And that's because the ads work, and that is the only concern of many advertisters.
Finally, your concept of popup ads that don't work forcing dollars from us to companies is completely wrong.
Company A puts out x $ to advertise. They look at how much revenue those ads bring in. If the revenue is acceptable, the ads will continue. If it is not, the ads will be modified or discontinued. It's just that simple.
The perception that "ads don't work" is simply wrong. They do work. They hit on a small percentage of viewers, true enough, but the point is, that == "working" because that small percentage is sufficient to bring in the revenue the company needs to sell and to survive.
I've been buying advertising space and creating ads for almost thirty years; I know what I'm talking about here, truly.
Well... in that case, I don't trust you. trustrank=0. Next message, please.
The average and median IQ is 100.
As a population statistic, this means that half (or more) of the population is IQ 100 or under, and that means that "any intelligent user" is by no means the population that those popups and banners address. They're not for intelligent users.
Remember that banner ads, popups etc. all cost money to generate. Why do you think they have not gone away? It's simple, really, it is because they work. Advertisers put money into them, and they get money back out.
Google has continuously been adding the more obnoxious ad formats to adsense; what was once a text ad service that most of us geek types welcomed now churns out image ads, flash ads, and so on. Again, why do you think they're doing this? It is because these things sell. No, they don't sell to people like you or me, but we are not the only type of person surfing around, and that's the bottom line.
There was a day when finding out that someone was online was a pretty good indicator that said perrson was fairly sharp. Those days are long gone. Getting online is now simply a matter of pointing a mouse.
So beware when you cast these things in the light of "pointless." They are anything but. It's just that you aren't the point.
I already adressed that. You weren't talking about longer amotization, you said that the reactor would become uneconomical, which is hardly the same thing - it is simply nonsense. No turning on a dime, here. Go re-read your post. :-)
I was talking about these factors when an accident occurs, not at normal operating levels, which are mostly irrelevant to accident containment, as you say. Containment isn't about day to day running, it's about what can happen when a reactor goes outside of its normal operating profile for whatever reason. PBMRs just quietly shut down. It's a beautiful thing. They don't melt through the floor, they don't explode, and they don't freak out and run away at insanely high power levels. This is their nature. Hence, accident containment is a comparatively small task, yet one that when considered, has to deal with whatever levels there might be of heat, pressure, shock and radiation. Don't convolve operating issues with failure issues. I certainly wasn't. I was directly addressing containment itself.
You mention the reactor leak in Germany. Fine. This is a test/prototyping reactor. Any cows with three heads wandering around? No. Anyone get hurt outside the facility? I'm guessing, but most likely, no. Right? Any issues here other than basic design issues to be dealt with? No. In short, is this incident even worth considering as far as it might apply to a serious commercial reactor design?
No.
It means they need a better pebble feed mechanism. Clue: That's why they test.
I am in no way a blind nuclear fanboy. However, I am visionary enough, and engineer enough, to contemplate a final commercial design rather than a testbed when I consider a reactor's general characteristics, and to take the implied safety issues as face value, knowing they'll be addressed as appropriate in each installation, at least here in the US. Russia, I wouldn't presume to speak for.
Regarding containment issues, graphite and water and so on, if indeed the reactor needs containment, fine, build containment for it. It'll be later down the road when it pays for itself. So what? If the alternative is riding goats, then we need to build reactors. If the alternative is other... for instance, if someone pops up with a viable fusion design -- then we need to stop, change direction, and go that way. It's all this nabmy-pamby "oh my gawd, rad-e-a-shun!" stuff is what is going to put the world economy in the pot, not to mention the environment.
Radiation paranoids are depressingly ignorant. For every leak of a TINY bit of material into the atmosphere, there have been multiple fission explosions let off, which would hardly count as contained and which were far more violent and polluting than any nuclear incident ever, up to and including Chernoble. I think the total number is well over 5000 now. People ride aircraft and get radiation doses they have no clue about, and everyone who lives in (for instance) Denver is getting a significantly better "tan" than I am, since I live 2000+ feet lower than they do. People breathe coal exhaust and have not even an inkling of the types of toxins and even radioactive isotopes that come flying out of a coal plant's stack. I can never decide if it's paranoia that keeps them from learning, or the lack of learning than makes them paranoid.
Yes, there can be accidents. So lets face that. We lost forty one thousand plus people to car accidents in 1999, which was by no means a standout year. And that was just in the USA. Might we lose a few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand to a reactor accident? Sure. It could happen. It's not real likely, but it could happen. And it's b
First of all, a containment structure is primarily a one-time cost, especially when you build it around a reactor that "just sits there." All building one does is extends the time it takes for the reactor to become profitiable. It in no way turns the reactor design into one that is not economical. Secondly, compared to the reactors that are out there running today, a PBMR is more economical almost no matter how you build it.
Containment of a breeder or a 60's-style pile based reactor is absolutely required, because the failure modes for these designs are horrific. But advocating classic dome-style containment of a PBMR based on issues that apply to other reactor types is about as sensible as requiring a ship's watertight hull on a freight train. Yes, the cargo ship will sink without one, still, it makes little (or no) sense on a freight train. You need serious containment when there are serious heat, pressure, radiation and shock issues. Decent PBMR's don't present those issues, and the failure modes are outright fuzzy and friendly by comparison to almost any other reactor design.
I don't have any particular problem with adding containment, though, if it were the straw that causes the average|median 100 level IQ public and the not-much-better media to drop the paranoia. The issue isn't what hoops have to be jumped through, the issue is that no one will do any jumping at all at this point in time.
There are many PBMR designs; it is hardly fair to cherry pick the bad ones and tar the entire lot with the faults of the bottom feeders. Why not look over the various information sources on PBMR's and see where the designs are today? You might be pleasantly surprised. These aren't your father's nuclear reactors, to misquote somebody or other.
My apologies for the confusion.
The only break in our energy supply will come from forces imposed by politicians, radical environmentalists, and corporations protecting their oil cash cows. And those, I think, are inevitable. All three of them.
This problem has been solved. The waste is processed into what amount to vitrified glass blocks which have stable storage lifetimes in the thousands of years. There is no way short of intentional refinement for waste stored in this manner to re-enter the environment in the relatively short term, unlike liquid or cannister based storage mechanisms. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that in a thousand years or so, we'll have a lot better idea of what to do with the blocks themselves, if indeed anything need be done. We've only had nuclear power for half a century or so, after all.
The correct choice at this time seems to be a combination of pebble bed reactors, which are highly resistant to serious problems such as meltdown or explosive failure, and vitrified glass waste storage insofar as waste storage turns out to be required. Pebble bed reactors are somewhat different from the reactors we're used to thinking about, particularly in that they repeatedly re-process their own fuel, continually converting "waste" from the previous stage into still more energy.
The primary problem is political and environmentalist fearmongering (to the extent that it is not just ignorance, which I am perfectly will to credit both politicians and environmentalists with.) People will believe anything, especially if it comes with a nice, high energy dose of hysteria.
The secondary problem is that building nuclear power plants -- any kind -- is a long, drawn out proceedure. If we started today, money no object, the public all about supporting it, it'd still be quite a few years before the putative new plants began to benefit the infrastructure. Compound this with the fact that we're not going to start today, or at any time in the foreseeable future, and the fact that money is a severe problem, the public is in no way supportive, and the future for reasonable nuclear energy generation appears mighty bleak.
The problem is with studio and transmitter gear. That will not be inexpensive, and the investment is beyond many studios. More importantly, there is no "cheap" fix like a box that converts the signal. They need new everything from antenna arrays to cameras and everything in between.
I know what they're talking about. I was replying to a specific comment that only mentioned tapwater, which pretty much limits your options to electrolysis.
You'll be splitting distilled water just like the rest of us, matey, and leave the tap water going down the drain. :-)
The bottom line is that pages that use tables for detailed control of tabular markup are a lot more likely to remain correct during the transitional period while CSS settles down (and it'll probably be a while... IE is still pretty far back in the back for just vanilla CSS, and CSS2 is no walk in the park for any browser!)
Someone actually modded my comment flamebait. Well, I guess that's how I know I'm on slashdot. ;-)
Was that a nod to Tom Lehrer?
<table width=600><tr><td>stuff</td></tr></table>
raw numbers as above are pixels, or you can say 80% and it'll leave 20 percent free. With center, this appears as equal margins:
<center><table width=80%><tr><td>stuff</td></tr></table></center>
However, we are not publishers, we are a literary agency, and as such, we're not a very important part of the food chain as far as congress is concerned. They listen where the money is concentrated; and that is at/to the publishing (books) or production (movies, video) occurs.
In order to have a serious effect on congress, it takes money and influence. I cannot bring enough of either to bear to be taken seriously.
Let me emphasize again that while the authors are often the focus of discussion of copyright issues, it is not the authors that primarily benefit -- it is the production level operations, publishers and movie production companies. And they, naturally enough, are the ones exerting influence. Lots of it, and quite effectively. Because they have oodles and oodles of money and power to flex.
Not only do I go on at length about issues I am passionate about, I often use run-on sentences, common (to be kind) grammar, and I even reply to AC's who are clearly OT and trolling.
OTOH, an optimist is what a pessimist calls a realist.
I definitely think that is not the case.
Among other things, I own a literary agency. One of the oldest and most prestigious agencies in the US specialized in science fiction and fantasy. My remarks come from that perspective.
There is no shortage of writers. Quite the contrary. In fact, there is no shortage of good stories and good writers.
What there is, is a shortage of readers, more specifically, there has been a major, major downturn of book-buying.
That makes the publishers a lot less likely to buy a book. Especially good ones; the ones that make it to the shelf are the titles that are perceived by the publisher as likely to be "popular", and for reasons that make perfect economic sense: Shelf space is limited (fewer bookstores) and shelf time is limited. If books don't sell, they are remaindered or destroyed for credit (that's a very odd quirk of the publishing industry, and believe me, it has major effects on the publisher's bottom line.)
Americans, at least, are deploying the theatre of the mind upon television, movies in the form of DVDs and other recorded media. Books in general, the writer's bread and butter, are dropping in popularity like stones in the face of the new technologies. I'm not saying this isn't a natural consequence of progress, and I'm not complaining -- I'm just explaining.
The bottom line is that commercial writers are, in fact, having a harder time of it. The environment is such that it is definitely more difficult to sell your work. In this context, most writers welcome the idea that whatever work they do manage to market, will turn income for them for a longer period of time -- facing the idea that there will be less of it, they hope that what there is, can earn more.
Now -- personally -- I think they're mistaken if they take this view. There are other factors, particularly the very short time-to-live in terms of bookstore shelf life for even very, very good titles -- that will prevent long-term copyrights from giving most of them any income. The ones that do succeed, definitely make "enough", IMHO. A movie deal, something that is reprinted several times and is well accepted, those are serious cash cows for a writer. But they are astonishingly few and far between.
But the fact is, writers are not in control of this process. They are for the most part an economically weak class, and cynical or not, I truly believe that the political decisions that drive copyright law are made by money. If you consider who absurdly long-term copyrights and other IP entropy such as software patents do benefit in a consistant, industry wide fashion, you'll inevitably find yourself looking at the publishing industry (not writers -- publishers), the movie production industry, and the commercial software industry. Whatever they can create, they get to hold on to, for longer; charge for, longer; license, longer.
I would submit, not very humbly, that writers, musicians, and software authors (I also own a software company, a very successful one, and I am a musician and recording studio owner) are more than productive enough, generally speaking, to not require these long-term protections. In fact, I rather think that a truly productive author/coder/musician doesn't need them at all. Hardware patents are different, in that the financial outlay to create, and the margins once created, are so represssive to the process itself that there needs to be a follow-on reward, especially for things like chip fab IP where the outlay for the next fab is in the billions at this point in time.
Anyway, this is an issue that I have to deal with not just every day, but every hour of my working day (and I think about it a lot of my off time, too.) I am convinced that the US government, at least, is doing far worse than being "
But that's not exactly what is going on here. In this particular case, the technology is dangerous and it is causing trouble all the time. Major trouble; time lost, data lost, people's lives are being disrupted.
Now, you propose to sandbox it so that for FF, the technology becomes non-risky. In the meantime, the IE userbase continues to suffer the slings and arrows of Microsoft's incompetence (and mind you, there is no assurance that a "sandboxed" version of an Active-X control would work properly -- because they can access anything in the system, they are likely to have accessed someting in the system, as the Windows API is like a candy store -- why would you rewrite that functionality if you didn't have to?)
If I were to compare Active-X to a product, I think I'd choose thalidomide. Everything looks fine when you first take it. It seems to be doing what it is supposed to be doing. Until your PC pups out some malformed spyware, that is. Or simply dies without warning. They took Thalidomide off the market. They should do the same with Active-X. It is toxic.
My position is that giving Active-X a longer life span is a bad choice for developers to make. They should work to kill it sooner, rather than later. In the meantime, any company with half a wit will be working to get out of the technological jail they so blindly walked into. Maybe next time, they'll Think, Marketplan and Develop instead of Marketplan, Develop, and finally Think.
Fine.
However, the next implication is that it can be turned on. This is not fine. Why? Because it is dangerous. The average user does not comprehend that it is dangerous. Like the argument here that one should not run as root (which I agree with for most people in most situations) the idea is that if you're not smart enough to handle a tool, you should not be handed that tool.
It's not arrogance to say that it is not a happy worldview to see people's computers being trashed by junkware let in by badly designed software -- Active-X -- it simply isn't a good thing. You can't make it a good thing.
Now, if a company has invested time in developing for this proprietary (but very dangerous) technology, and the marketplace leaves them behind, as it is showing definite signs of doing, then if that company wants to survive, it needs to lose the dangerous technology, get with the program, and use the safe technology. That's called evolutionary pressure. I'm part of that pressure. I don't use IE. If you use IE-specific technologies on your site, you've lost me (and at least 10% of the rest of the world, and more every day.) Now, you can only ignore this for so long before you (a) solve the problem by losing the junkware, or (b) are driven from the business space by competitors who are able to recognize and resolve the problem.
From a user perspective, I'm just one guy. I won't use IE.
From an applications standpoint, I own several companies and we don't use Active-X (or Java, for that matter) as a matter of course. We do server-side apps, because (a) we have total control over them and (b) because all users, that's 100% of them, can use our apps. We give up some glitz, certainly, but we've never, ever had to give up anything important.
So my outlook does have some effect. If Active-X were to go away, it wouldn't touch me at all, other than to make the web more accessible to me and perhaps give my competitors a more stable place to stand. Do I worry about the people who invested in Active-X? No. And, really -- why should I?
Arrogant? No. I'm entitled to my opinion, just as you are entitled to yours. As for putting any thought into it, apparently you didn't notice my sig. This isn't an issue I just picked up on this afternoon. I have indeed thought about it, and this is where I ended up.