I cannot believe people are still pushing passive RFID as some sort of security magic bullet. Passive RFID is great for inventory, but for security it is quite possibly the least secure "key" ever conceived. With the proper equipment, a thief can read keys at a distance of maybe a dozen feet and thus can go trolling for key codes with ease in high-class neighborhoods/establishments. There are literally thousands of other options for electronic keys--why on EARTH would someone want to use the only method that can be spied on from many feet away while the keys are still in your pocket? A USB key would be more secure. A magstripe would be more secure. Hell, a fucking barcode stamped on the side of the key would be infinitely more secure.
I'm not saying that this was necessarily how the alleged thieves stole his SUV, but this continued obsession with passive RFID for security (see also: passive RFID home door locks and that company that actually REQUIRED its engineers to implant passive RFID chips in their forearms for access to the server room) is quite possibly the worst example of buzzwords trumping common sense that I've ever seen. A thief need only spend a few thousand dollars on the RFID sniffing/spoofing equipment and he'll have the ability to troll for keys (for cars worth at minimum $20,000+) and clone them with ease. Active (powered) RFID is quite another matter--with a sufficiently large key and a challenge/response mechanism, it can be very secure indeed, but passive RFID blithely broadcasts its code for the entire world to see. RFID of any sort doesn't even make sense in this case--the key has to make contact with the keyhole, so why the hell is there any need to BROADCAST anything? Stick some contacts on it running to a small flash memory chip, or like I said you could even stick a barcode on the damn thing. I guess people simply prefer an expensive, laughably insecure solution over a cheaper, very secure solution so long as the former uses some sexy new technology.
Movie quality as a whole hasn't gotten better or worse. Hollywood has always had a SNR of AT LEAST 85% shit/15% worthwhile--or worse. The thing is, no one remembers the shit of yesterday--no one owns it on DVD, and the cable channels mostly show the worthwhile classic movies, so we wind up comparing today's shit to yesterday's masterpieces. But if I made a top ten list of my favorite movies of all time, I bet half of them would be movies made in the past 10 years--Fight Club, Memento, and Life is Beautiful would definitely be on that list... quite possibly The Matrix (first one only) as well. I would have to agree that I haven't seen any truly awesome movie in the past couple years, but you can't expect Hollywood to produce legendary movies every year--and there are plenty of not-quite-legendary but still very good movies I could name: Brokeback was pretty damn good, Star Wars EP:3 (crappy love sequences and the "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" notwithstanding) was on par with the original trilogy and was a rather scathing satire of our current society, Return of the King was a solid rendition of Tolkien's work, and Serenity was just as good as the series. I also think that Batman Begins beats the crap out of every other Batman movie ever made and most other superhero movies too.
So, in conclusion--if you expect Hollywood to produce awe-inspiring classics every year, you obviously haven't been paying attention. The vast majority of it is shit, most of the rest is only decent enough to see one or twice, and if we're very lucky indeed we might get a single awesome, legendary classic made per year. It's always been that way, and if you doubt this you need to go find and watch some obscure 70s movies that didn't make a bunch of money and weren't lavishly praised by critics.
You're wrong. I've personally seen the question on several job applications, and I hear it's very common question if the job requires a high degree of trust (security guard, etc.)
You know, I think one of the best ways to solve the "everyone wants to play a Jedi" problem would be to release a 100% free version of SWG that allows you to play the Star Wars equivalent of Joe Sixpack. Allow the free players very basic access to everything, but you make it so that e.g. if they try to fire a laser pistol their accuracy is absolutely horrible. No skills (except perhaps some very basic crafting-type skills?), no XP, no way for the Joe Sixpack characters to level up or make a significant amount of money (except perhaps by offering quests? PC-generated quests would be interesting, but I'm not sure if it's doable.) However, if they really want to they can serve as mules or scouts--they just shouldn't expect to live very long if they do that.
Come to think of it, this would be a great addition to any MMORPG (especially City of Heroes/Villains.) A little atmosphere; a little something to combat the feeling that the world is filled with nothing but heroes/villains/adventurers. Plus free advertising. I think it'd be more than worth the extra load placed on the servers, but I could be wrong...
I know this is a naive way of looking at the issue
It's not naive--far from it. It's just not politically correct. What's naive (though it *is* politically correct) is to think that the trillions of dollars spent on (you forgot to include the costs of the Afgan and Iraq wars in your figure-- the total is indeed well over a trillion) will make us safer. In reality, a few million dollars spent on extra security and a few basic improvements with inter-agency communication was all that was needed after 9/11, but I guess politics has always been a game of overreaction.
There are a lot more barriers in the way of the "hydrogen economy" than mere dollars.
That may be true, but a bunch of "mere dollars" would certainly freakin' help. If the government put a hydrogen fueling station in every city and built a few power plants (which don't need to be anywhere near populated areas, and thus can easily be nuclear, solar, wind, or some other form of non-polluting type) dedicated to large-scale hydrogen production via electrolysis of water, I'd wager that the auto companies would work out the technological kinks of hydrogen cars on their own and the "social" issues would be non-existent in the face of 1. Saving money and 2. running 100% non-polluting cars.
But even if they weren't, it's hardly a revolutionary weapon that will stamp out tyranny.
If they eventually create a tool that Chinese dissedents can use to easily communicate with one another without being tracked, it could very well be such a tool.
I've seen reports that record companies aren't "happy" with the royalties they're getting from iTunes.
iTunes has had hundreds of millions of sales, and yet it is still claimed that iTunes exists only to drive iPod sales--that Apple really isn't making all that much off of iTunes. And now you say that the record execs aren't happy with the money they're making, either? If that's true, then who the fuck is getting rich off of iTunes? Clearly, someone has to be making lots of money because the model has virtually no overhead--it's basically just the cost of bandwidth. Either someone's lying or someone's being absurdly greedy... or both...
How the HELL is this deserving of the 'bigbrother' tag? I've always been annoyed that most people associate the Big Brother concept almost exclusively with mass surveillence when the social concepts in 1984 (doublethink, doublespeak, thought police, two minutes' hate, etc.) were infinitely more controlling. Cameras in every home can't hold a candle to the soul-chilling reality of doublethink that surrounds us.
And NOW... now home automation suddenly becomes a sign of Big Brother? What the fuck? I couldn't care less whether the government knows that my jeans are done drying, let alone the people I share my LAN with. On top of this, I don't see any sort of sign that these machines will become commonplace, let alone mandatory and/or mandatorily monitored by the government... and for what, water restriction enforcements maybe? Yeah, I suppose it could be a possibility, but for fuck's sake let's worry about that trivial and unlikely scenario when/if it gets a little closer to becoming reality.
I don't care how dumb this idea is, it's not a sign of Big Brother. You want Big Brother, turn on the fucking 6 o'clock news. It may not be mass surveillence, but it's far more representative of the Big Brother mindset than some gimmicky net-ready home appliance.
Perhaps the Internet is just raising the cost of being a dick. And that's bad how?
Even with my inane example I could think of abuses. I've had a couple extremely conservative Christian bosses before--the type of people that think Harry Potter teaches witchcraft and Metallica is a prime example of Satanic music (yes, I have actually heard both of these things come out a former boss's mouth.) Since I really needed the money I just smiled and nodded and kept my job (though I was still a little too 'weird' to actually get a promotion), but if my boss had been Google-savvy she could have found out that I was into all kinds of 'Satanic' shit e.g. Dungeons and Dragons.
Point is, there are still a lot of extremely stupid/bigoted/evil people in power in this country, and it is for this reason we should not blithely disregard any pretense of privacy.
When I first started messing around on the internet 10+ years ago, I used my first name for a couple things. Very quickly I caught on that this wasn't such a great idea, but what I didn't count on is lifelong archival and the rising power of search engines. You see, my first name and last name are rare to the point that I highly doubt anyone else in America has them both. Not completely weird or a made up word, it's just rather uncommon to encounter either one individually, and that makes the combination unique.
So anyway, you need only type my name into Google and have a complete record of every inane thing I ever said back when I was 15 years old. If there is anyone else in the world with the same name, they haven't ever used it on the net. Ok, so it's not particularly damaging information, but it does allow ANYONE to find out that I like Nirvana and Douglas Adams and RPGs and arguing with people. It's rather embarassing, really, to have your semi-profound adolescent musings completely exposed, availible for anyone to read at any time so long as they know your first and last name, but there's really nothing I can do about it. The original archives have been cached by Google and archive.org. Like it or not, I'm immortalized, and I really pity the fools on Myspace who have unique names, or even the ones with common names but specific addresses (or other identifying personal info) posted. In all liklihood every single trivial fact, every single inane/insane rant has been archived *somewhere* and it'll eventually turn up in a Google search. It's irreversable--it's a gigantic bell that simply can't be un-rung.
I shudder to think what would've happened if I made a truly questionable post under my real name. If some teen posts a rant on Myspace that could be construed as racist or radically anarchist or in any other way offensive or unpopular, that rant will be there perhaps for the rest of his life. It will be there every time he goes to apply for a job, and if he was foolish enough to provide such information as a home address he won't be able to claim it's not him. I don't know what there's any real solution for this except education. A lot of people out there don't see the point in anonymity, or even worse they view it as a weakness, a sign of guilt or triviality. Unfortunately, likely they won't start paying attention until criminals and potential employers/friends/lovers alike start turning to Google every time they get curious about their mark/employee/friend/etc.
As someone else pointed out, there's a vast difference between HD meant for media file storage and HDs meant for OS and application storage. The latter do not need to be nearly as big as the former, but for them speed is much more critical. If MRAM is as fast as today's DDR2, then it will be several orders of magnitude faster than hard drives. That performance difference (as well as the reliability and power improvements) makes your dollar/gigabyte comparisons completely irrelevant. People who need it (businesses) WILL buy it, and that in turn will drive down the cost to the point that hobbyists and gamers will buy it (though likely just as an OS and maybe application disk--not for media file storage.)
I came across an old thread of yours regarding Lyme disease that really interested me--I would greatly appreciate it if you would email me at tbc_42 [at] yahoo [dot com] or failing that, write a journal entry that I may reply to. I don't know that my health problems are Lyme-related (and to be honest I probably couldn't afford to find out--I make $8/hour, am uninsured, and have only a couple $k in the bank), but I'd very much like to hear your thoughts, if you'd be willing to listen.
It's not that the 4th has anything to do with religion, but crazy Christians and crazy Muslims are the ones most likely to draw asinine conclusions from coincidences, especially coincidences that appear to show that the world and/or the USA is headed towards apocalypse or some other lesser downfall. I'm sure there is a handful of crazy Wiccans and crazy Hindus who believe the same kinds of things, but they are much less numerous and much less vocal. Islam and Christianity are by far the top 2 religions in the world by number of practitioners, and they are also have by far the greatest number of fundementalists. The practitioners of most other religions are on average far more liberal, rational, and tolerant (with a few notable exceptions like Hindu's caste system.)
Btw, "there are religious types both Christian and Muslim" doesn't mean "every single Christian and Muslim." If anyone is biased, it's you for not realizing that the vast majority of the world's moral/prophetic bullshit comes from these two religions.
In other words, in all the things you listed (except murder), there was simple stupidity, bad luck, and poor lifestyle choices to blame.
Yes but if tomorrow I get hit by a drunk driver, was that MY stupidity? Is it the fat kid's fault that his mom only feeds him McDonald's? Is it the asthmatic kid's fault that his parents refuse to stop smoking in the house? Initial anger aside, it isn't going to matter to our loved ones whether it was malice or recklessness that took us out of this world. The loss is the same. Evil vs. reckless intent is to an extent an important distinction--but not nearly as important as human lives.
If we wanted to, we could spend a trillion dollars medical research and making our roads better, heck we could ban extremely unhealthy food. Hey, I'm not a huge fan of the idea, but what's a few simple restrictions on fast food places compared to a vast network of domestic surveillence? Let people cook what they want in their own home, but ban restaurants from serving obscenely unhealthy food... at least to kids. I'm sure the libertarians in the audience are screaming bloody murder, but the fact is the free market ISN'T smart enough to make decisions that
The loss of life is secondary to the terrorist, whose primary goal is to strike "terror" into the hearts and minds of his victems will (in time) save millions of lives each year. If you care about saving millions of innocent (if perhaps somewhat stupid, but then again who isn't? I try to eat healthy but often there just isn't the time, so I grab whatever's closest, which is usually shockingly unhealthy) lives, then it's a trivial restriction on our freedom. But don't try to justify (however obliquely) the expenditure of trillions of dollars and countless freedoms sacrificed for less than 3,000 American lives that were lost to terrorism in the past decade.
I'm sorry, but that just ISN'T significant compared to our other problems. Hey it sucks for the guys who died, but I don't personally know any of them because it is such a very small number of fatalities. I've known at least a dozen people who've died of cancer and a dozen more who've died of heart attack. Life > 'fighting the bad guys'. Oh yeah, and:
The loss of life is secondary to the terrorist, whose primary goal is to strike "terror" into the hearts and minds of his victems
Exactly. And by allowing yourself to vastly overreact due to this "terror", you in effect...(drumroll please)...allow the terrorists to win. The only way to effectively fight terrorism is to fight the fear, don't let it take over your mindset, your freedoms, your society... keep living good lives, focus on PROMOTING GOOD instead of fighting evil even when it is painfully cost-ineffective. We improved our interagency communication, we beefed up our airline security, and we cracked down on immigrants who overstay their visa. That was it; that was all that was needed. Everything else is pointless at best and profoundly anti-American (assuming that word still has some fleeting connotations of freedom) at worst.
ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
Well, since this is/. I'm too lazy to RTFA, but the headline says "domestic call monitoring". Why would you then conclude that it would be ineffective against domestic terrorism but effective against international terrorism?
Anyway, 'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe. Murder takes the lives of many more people (as in several orders of magnitude) per year. Suicide takes 4x more than murder, and car accidents take over 5x more. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and smoking-related respitory diseases together claim over 200x the lives that murder claims (which is itself claims several orders of magnitude more lives than terrorism.)
In terms of human lives, terrorism in America isn't even a blip on the radar. It certainly doesn't justify the expenditure of trillions of dollars on wars and "Homeland Security", nor does it justify the wholesale slaughter of our freedoms and even if it did a domestic call tracking program would do jack shit. Despite what the pundits want you to believe, there is no vast centralized network of terrorists. They have no need to keep in constant contact with each other over long distances, and ruthlessly and indiscriminately monitoring law-abiding American citizens (incidentally, none of the 9-11 terrorists were American citizens) will give us nothing but another step towards a police state.
You misunderstand. I don't consider the fact that they were loners or goths or wore trenchcoats to be warning signs. I meant more along the lines of keeping shotguns and other weapons in open view on their dressers or putting up websites describing their plans to shoot up the school.
Also, as I recall they said were persecuted by their teachers/classmates. While this is by no means a rare thing, it is still a warning sign that everyone involved choose to ignore because that's just how high school is supposed to be--individualism is crushed and retarded conformist jocks are the only ones entitled to have a social life and if my observations were any indication the staff is directly responsible for this. Hell, society as a whole is directly responsible for this. Out of the dozen or so kids they killed that day, I only ever heard about three--the good Christian girl who was going to grow up to be a missionary, the football star, and the token black kid ostensibly killed out of racism. It was crazy; here the anchors and the reporters and the pundits were doing the exact thing that pissed off the trenchcoat mafia so much--only caring about the stereotypical, conformist teenagers to the exclusion of everyone else.
There are in the past 20 years several accounts of perfectly normal children appearing at school one day to settle a few scores.
I know this is somewhat tangential, but I can't this one slide. This sentiment is very stupid at best and extremely offensive at worst. You need to stop bithely believing whatever the 6 o'clock news tells you and look at the world around you. Violence of all kinds--including youth violence and school violence specifically--went DOWN all through the 90's and into the 00's. The only somewhat remarkable thing about the Columbine era was the violence shifted a bit (though definitely not completely, or even mostly) from black/latino inner city kids to white suburban kids. But teen violence as a whole went down by quite a bit. Yeah, our kids are probably still more violent than they were in the 50's, but we've actually made GREAT progress in the past 20 years, and I'm sick of racist and/or ignorant asshats such as yourself perpetrating the myth that things are just so much worse in "today's world."
P.S. I wouldn't exactly call the Columbine killers "perfectly normal children." Not that I in any way believe in the gross stereotyping of goth-types as sick individuals, but from what I've heard there were plenty of warning signs about those guys.
I see a lot of surprised responses around here. Well, the USA has this exact system in place, too--it's just not quite as broad in scope. "Data" CD-Rs are not affected, but "music" CD-Rs are affected as well as blank cassette tapes (and VHS tapes? Not sure on that one. I do know that in Canada, "data" CD-Rs are affected as well.) The lovely part is even though you've paid the "tax" to RIAA, that money buys you absolutely no rights--you can still be sued if you actually use the "taxed" media to play unlicensed content, and even if you are using the media strictly for personal use you are still paying guys like RIAA.
In short, it's really fucked up. They want compensation for piracy while simultaneously stamping out all piracy... they want to have their cake and eat it too.
Um, I think you missed the point. The driving force behind the switch wouldn't be advertising--it would be MS pulling out of Europe. I'm sure plenty of people and businesses would continue using outdated or pirated copies of Windows... at least at first. But very large corps and government would immediately turn to Linux or possibly Apple, the only legal options availible, and the people who had always simply used their preinstalled OEM copy of Windows would inevitably migrate to a preinstalled OEM copy of Linux.
Sure, while it would seriously promote alternate OSes in EU, could the EU stand to have the carpet pulled out from under them in this manner considering how entrenched MS is in the world of computing..?
The EU would stand just fine. There would be a lot of grumbling from big business, to be sure, but within a year I guarantee you that they will develop Euro-Linux which would in time completely flatten MS on both sides of the pond. Remember, EU countries tend to have very high tax rates and are extremely protectionist--if MS really wants to play hard ball, I have a feeling Europe will do just fine. Transitioning will be a bit rough, but I'm sure that piracy will help a lot--in such a situation, I'm sure that EU authorities won't be in any big hurry to crack down on MS software piracy.
Microsoft may be a big, bad, successful company with a mighty war chest, but that doesn't mean they can take on an entire continent. Take a look at Ubuntu's latest release and tell me with a straight face that XP/2000 is really soooooo much better for business or personal use (other than heavy gaming.) It's easier to install than XP, and more stuff "just works" out of the box than on XP! (at least it does on all 5 of my machines)
Microsoft's biggest asset is momentum, and if they tried to strongarm the EU they'd be flushing that asset right down the toilet. Personally, I'm really really hoping that they try it.
50 megs is a tad arbitrary. I think that 200~ish would be a better number, as it can fit on mini-CDs (yeah I know business card CDs are 50 megs, but I've never even SEEN one before, whereas I find that mini-CDs are small and handy) and it can fit on cheap 256mb flash drives. I'm not advocating bloat, but if there has to be a hard limit I think 50mb is a tad small. I think that the number of people who use mini CD-Rs or 256+ MB flash drives outnumber the people who use business card CD-Rs or 64 MB flash drives by quite a bit. In a 50 MB setup, extrmely useful apps like the OpenOffice.org suite (I say its "extremely useful" more for its compatibility with MS Office than anything else) will never be included by default. With 200+ megs to play with, suddenly OO.o seems like a very natural inclusion. Yes, I know there's an OO.o DSL package; I just think that there should be a default default distro in the 200~ MB range where it (and other useful-but-somewhat-big apps) is included by default.
I doubt there is actually enough cobalt-59 in the world to render it lifeless, particularly as scattering via nuclear bomb is not the most efficent method for providing ideal dispersal.
I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but basically if you're exposed in close proximity to a couple grams of Cobalt-60 for a few minutes (and I do mean less than 5 minutes), you receive a dose so strong that there's a greater than 50% chance you'll be dead within a month (even if you survive, you'll have a ton of permanent health problems--in particular, your immune system will never regain its former strength and your chance of getting cancer is greatly, greatly increased.)
Now realize that this scales--and it's cumulative. If you're exposed to 1/100 of a gram of Cobalt for a few days, you will receive a similar dose of radiation. 1/1000 of a gram for say, 6 months yields the same deadly result. I could be somewhat off on the numbers (it might not scale linearly, and of course at some point the half-life of the Cobalt-60 becomes significant), but the upshot is if you're going to be exposed for several years (and it takes many years for it to turn back to Cobalt-59), it takes only an extremely small amount, the slightest trace of Cobalt-60 dust to kill you.
Cobalt-60, by the way, will atomize into a rather fine powder. Nuclear detonation probably isn't the *ideal* dispersal method, but it's probably effective enough. The dust can travel quite far on the wind, and the explosion throws up the dust high into the atmosphere. Even if you escape the radition somehow, you'd still have to deal with the fact that the vast majority of plants and animals on earth would be dead within a year.
Well, you're quite right. I didn't phrase that statement right. What I WAS thinking about were issues like racism and sexual assault (while I agree that the hysteria is ridiculous and unreasonable, at least people actually admit that it happens now, whereas 50+ years ago no one talked about that sort of thing, and even if they did they often blamed the woman.) The culture of fear is definitely one of the biggest problems we face today--my point in this case was that even though the early/mid 20th century might at first seem to be a idyllic, in reality the truth was it was merely a culture of willful ignorance and repression, and things weren't better than they are today (in fact in *many* ways, they were worse.) Whether the culture of ignorance was better or worse than the culture of fear... well, that's a debate for another day.
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I cannot believe people are still pushing passive RFID as some sort of security magic bullet. Passive RFID is great for inventory, but for security it is quite possibly the least secure "key" ever conceived. With the proper equipment, a thief can read keys at a distance of maybe a dozen feet and thus can go trolling for key codes with ease in high-class neighborhoods/establishments. There are literally thousands of other options for electronic keys--why on EARTH would someone want to use the only method that can be spied on from many feet away while the keys are still in your pocket? A USB key would be more secure. A magstripe would be more secure. Hell, a fucking barcode stamped on the side of the key would be infinitely more secure.
I'm not saying that this was necessarily how the alleged thieves stole his SUV, but this continued obsession with passive RFID for security (see also: passive RFID home door locks and that company that actually REQUIRED its engineers to implant passive RFID chips in their forearms for access to the server room) is quite possibly the worst example of buzzwords trumping common sense that I've ever seen. A thief need only spend a few thousand dollars on the RFID sniffing/spoofing equipment and he'll have the ability to troll for keys (for cars worth at minimum $20,000+) and clone them with ease. Active (powered) RFID is quite another matter--with a sufficiently large key and a challenge/response mechanism, it can be very secure indeed, but passive RFID blithely broadcasts its code for the entire world to see. RFID of any sort doesn't even make sense in this case--the key has to make contact with the keyhole, so why the hell is there any need to BROADCAST anything? Stick some contacts on it running to a small flash memory chip, or like I said you could even stick a barcode on the damn thing. I guess people simply prefer an expensive, laughably insecure solution over a cheaper, very secure solution so long as the former uses some sexy new technology.
Movie quality as a whole hasn't gotten better or worse. Hollywood has always had a SNR of AT LEAST 85% shit/15% worthwhile--or worse. The thing is, no one remembers the shit of yesterday--no one owns it on DVD, and the cable channels mostly show the worthwhile classic movies, so we wind up comparing today's shit to yesterday's masterpieces. But if I made a top ten list of my favorite movies of all time, I bet half of them would be movies made in the past 10 years--Fight Club, Memento, and Life is Beautiful would definitely be on that list... quite possibly The Matrix (first one only) as well. I would have to agree that I haven't seen any truly awesome movie in the past couple years, but you can't expect Hollywood to produce legendary movies every year--and there are plenty of not-quite-legendary but still very good movies I could name: Brokeback was pretty damn good, Star Wars EP:3 (crappy love sequences and the "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" notwithstanding) was on par with the original trilogy and was a rather scathing satire of our current society, Return of the King was a solid rendition of Tolkien's work, and Serenity was just as good as the series. I also think that Batman Begins beats the crap out of every other Batman movie ever made and most other superhero movies too.
So, in conclusion--if you expect Hollywood to produce awe-inspiring classics every year, you obviously haven't been paying attention. The vast majority of it is shit, most of the rest is only decent enough to see one or twice, and if we're very lucky indeed we might get a single awesome, legendary classic made per year. It's always been that way, and if you doubt this you need to go find and watch some obscure 70s movies that didn't make a bunch of money and weren't lavishly praised by critics.
You're wrong. I've personally seen the question on several job applications, and I hear it's very common question if the job requires a high degree of trust (security guard, etc.)
You know, I think one of the best ways to solve the "everyone wants to play a Jedi" problem would be to release a 100% free version of SWG that allows you to play the Star Wars equivalent of Joe Sixpack. Allow the free players very basic access to everything, but you make it so that e.g. if they try to fire a laser pistol their accuracy is absolutely horrible. No skills (except perhaps some very basic crafting-type skills?), no XP, no way for the Joe Sixpack characters to level up or make a significant amount of money (except perhaps by offering quests? PC-generated quests would be interesting, but I'm not sure if it's doable.) However, if they really want to they can serve as mules or scouts--they just shouldn't expect to live very long if they do that. Come to think of it, this would be a great addition to any MMORPG (especially City of Heroes/Villains.) A little atmosphere; a little something to combat the feeling that the world is filled with nothing but heroes/villains/adventurers. Plus free advertising. I think it'd be more than worth the extra load placed on the servers, but I could be wrong...
I know this is a naive way of looking at the issue
It's not naive--far from it. It's just not politically correct. What's naive (though it *is* politically correct) is to think that the trillions of dollars spent on (you forgot to include the costs of the Afgan and Iraq wars in your figure-- the total is indeed well over a trillion) will make us safer. In reality, a few million dollars spent on extra security and a few basic improvements with inter-agency communication was all that was needed after 9/11, but I guess politics has always been a game of overreaction.
There are a lot more barriers in the way of the "hydrogen economy" than mere dollars.
That may be true, but a bunch of "mere dollars" would certainly freakin' help. If the government put a hydrogen fueling station in every city and built a few power plants (which don't need to be anywhere near populated areas, and thus can easily be nuclear, solar, wind, or some other form of non-polluting type) dedicated to large-scale hydrogen production via electrolysis of water, I'd wager that the auto companies would work out the technological kinks of hydrogen cars on their own and the "social" issues would be non-existent in the face of 1. Saving money and 2. running 100% non-polluting cars.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Tian asquare.jpg
I think they have a right to be a tad dramatic.
But even if they weren't, it's hardly a revolutionary weapon that will stamp out tyranny.
If they eventually create a tool that Chinese dissedents can use to easily communicate with one another without being tracked, it could very well be such a tool.
I've seen reports that record companies aren't "happy" with the royalties they're getting from iTunes.
iTunes has had hundreds of millions of sales, and yet it is still claimed that iTunes exists only to drive iPod sales--that Apple really isn't making all that much off of iTunes. And now you say that the record execs aren't happy with the money they're making, either? If that's true, then who the fuck is getting rich off of iTunes? Clearly, someone has to be making lots of money because the model has virtually no overhead--it's basically just the cost of bandwidth. Either someone's lying or someone's being absurdly greedy... or both...
How the HELL is this deserving of the 'bigbrother' tag? I've always been annoyed that most people associate the Big Brother concept almost exclusively with mass surveillence when the social concepts in 1984 (doublethink, doublespeak, thought police, two minutes' hate, etc.) were infinitely more controlling. Cameras in every home can't hold a candle to the soul-chilling reality of doublethink that surrounds us.
And NOW... now home automation suddenly becomes a sign of Big Brother? What the fuck? I couldn't care less whether the government knows that my jeans are done drying, let alone the people I share my LAN with. On top of this, I don't see any sort of sign that these machines will become commonplace, let alone mandatory and/or mandatorily monitored by the government... and for what, water restriction enforcements maybe? Yeah, I suppose it could be a possibility, but for fuck's sake let's worry about that trivial and unlikely scenario when/if it gets a little closer to becoming reality.
I don't care how dumb this idea is, it's not a sign of Big Brother. You want Big Brother, turn on the fucking 6 o'clock news. It may not be mass surveillence, but it's far more representative of the Big Brother mindset than some gimmicky net-ready home appliance.
Perhaps the Internet is just raising the cost of being a dick. And that's bad how?
Even with my inane example I could think of abuses. I've had a couple extremely conservative Christian bosses before--the type of people that think Harry Potter teaches witchcraft and Metallica is a prime example of Satanic music (yes, I have actually heard both of these things come out a former boss's mouth.) Since I really needed the money I just smiled and nodded and kept my job (though I was still a little too 'weird' to actually get a promotion), but if my boss had been Google-savvy she could have found out that I was into all kinds of 'Satanic' shit e.g. Dungeons and Dragons.
Point is, there are still a lot of extremely stupid/bigoted/evil people in power in this country, and it is for this reason we should not blithely disregard any pretense of privacy.
When I first started messing around on the internet 10+ years ago, I used my first name for a couple things. Very quickly I caught on that this wasn't such a great idea, but what I didn't count on is lifelong archival and the rising power of search engines. You see, my first name and last name are rare to the point that I highly doubt anyone else in America has them both. Not completely weird or a made up word, it's just rather uncommon to encounter either one individually, and that makes the combination unique.
So anyway, you need only type my name into Google and have a complete record of every inane thing I ever said back when I was 15 years old. If there is anyone else in the world with the same name, they haven't ever used it on the net. Ok, so it's not particularly damaging information, but it does allow ANYONE to find out that I like Nirvana and Douglas Adams and RPGs and arguing with people. It's rather embarassing, really, to have your semi-profound adolescent musings completely exposed, availible for anyone to read at any time so long as they know your first and last name, but there's really nothing I can do about it. The original archives have been cached by Google and archive.org. Like it or not, I'm immortalized, and I really pity the fools on Myspace who have unique names, or even the ones with common names but specific addresses (or other identifying personal info) posted. In all liklihood every single trivial fact, every single inane/insane rant has been archived *somewhere* and it'll eventually turn up in a Google search. It's irreversable--it's a gigantic bell that simply can't be un-rung.
I shudder to think what would've happened if I made a truly questionable post under my real name. If some teen posts a rant on Myspace that could be construed as racist or radically anarchist or in any other way offensive or unpopular, that rant will be there perhaps for the rest of his life. It will be there every time he goes to apply for a job, and if he was foolish enough to provide such information as a home address he won't be able to claim it's not him. I don't know what there's any real solution for this except education. A lot of people out there don't see the point in anonymity, or even worse they view it as a weakness, a sign of guilt or triviality. Unfortunately, likely they won't start paying attention until criminals and potential employers/friends/lovers alike start turning to Google every time they get curious about their mark/employee/friend/etc.
As someone else pointed out, there's a vast difference between HD meant for media file storage and HDs meant for OS and application storage. The latter do not need to be nearly as big as the former, but for them speed is much more critical. If MRAM is as fast as today's DDR2, then it will be several orders of magnitude faster than hard drives. That performance difference (as well as the reliability and power improvements) makes your dollar/gigabyte comparisons completely irrelevant. People who need it (businesses) WILL buy it, and that in turn will drive down the cost to the point that hobbyists and gamers will buy it (though likely just as an OS and maybe application disk--not for media file storage.)
Completely OT:
I came across an old thread of yours regarding Lyme disease that really interested me--I would greatly appreciate it if you would email me at tbc_42 [at] yahoo [dot com] or failing that, write a journal entry that I may reply to. I don't know that my health problems are Lyme-related (and to be honest I probably couldn't afford to find out--I make $8/hour, am uninsured, and have only a couple $k in the bank), but I'd very much like to hear your thoughts, if you'd be willing to listen.
Mobile mines vs. Koreans? Bah! That never works. A single sacrificed zergling will take out the entire minefield!
It's not that the 4th has anything to do with religion, but crazy Christians and crazy Muslims are the ones most likely to draw asinine conclusions from coincidences, especially coincidences that appear to show that the world and/or the USA is headed towards apocalypse or some other lesser downfall. I'm sure there is a handful of crazy Wiccans and crazy Hindus who believe the same kinds of things, but they are much less numerous and much less vocal. Islam and Christianity are by far the top 2 religions in the world by number of practitioners, and they are also have by far the greatest number of fundementalists. The practitioners of most other religions are on average far more liberal, rational, and tolerant (with a few notable exceptions like Hindu's caste system.)
Btw, "there are religious types both Christian and Muslim" doesn't mean "every single Christian and Muslim." If anyone is biased, it's you for not realizing that the vast majority of the world's moral/prophetic bullshit comes from these two religions.
In other words, in all the things you listed (except murder), there was simple stupidity, bad luck, and poor lifestyle choices to blame.
...allow the terrorists to win. The only way to effectively fight terrorism is to fight the fear, don't let it take over your mindset, your freedoms, your society... keep living good lives, focus on PROMOTING GOOD instead of fighting evil even when it is painfully cost-ineffective. We improved our interagency communication, we beefed up our airline security, and we cracked down on immigrants who overstay their visa. That was it; that was all that was needed. Everything else is pointless at best and profoundly anti-American (assuming that word still has some fleeting connotations of freedom) at worst.
Yes but if tomorrow I get hit by a drunk driver, was that MY stupidity? Is it the fat kid's fault that his mom only feeds him McDonald's? Is it the asthmatic kid's fault that his parents refuse to stop smoking in the house? Initial anger aside, it isn't going to matter to our loved ones whether it was malice or recklessness that took us out of this world. The loss is the same. Evil vs. reckless intent is to an extent an important distinction--but not nearly as important as human lives.
If we wanted to, we could spend a trillion dollars medical research and making our roads better, heck we could ban extremely unhealthy food. Hey, I'm not a huge fan of the idea, but what's a few simple restrictions on fast food places compared to a vast network of domestic surveillence? Let people cook what they want in their own home, but ban restaurants from serving obscenely unhealthy food... at least to kids. I'm sure the libertarians in the audience are screaming bloody murder, but the fact is the free market ISN'T smart enough to make decisions that The loss of life is secondary to the terrorist, whose primary goal is to strike "terror" into the hearts and minds of his victems will (in time) save millions of lives each year. If you care about saving millions of innocent (if perhaps somewhat stupid, but then again who isn't? I try to eat healthy but often there just isn't the time, so I grab whatever's closest, which is usually shockingly unhealthy) lives, then it's a trivial restriction on our freedom. But don't try to justify (however obliquely) the expenditure of trillions of dollars and countless freedoms sacrificed for less than 3,000 American lives that were lost to terrorism in the past decade.
I'm sorry, but that just ISN'T significant compared to our other problems. Hey it sucks for the guys who died, but I don't personally know any of them because it is such a very small number of fatalities. I've known at least a dozen people who've died of cancer and a dozen more who've died of heart attack. Life > 'fighting the bad guys'. Oh yeah, and:
The loss of life is secondary to the terrorist, whose primary goal is to strike "terror" into the hearts and minds of his victems
Exactly. And by allowing yourself to vastly overreact due to this "terror", you in effect...(drumroll please)
ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
/. I'm too lazy to RTFA, but the headline says "domestic call monitoring". Why would you then conclude that it would be ineffective against domestic terrorism but effective against international terrorism?
Well, since this is
Anyway, 'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe. Murder takes the lives of many more people (as in several orders of magnitude) per year. Suicide takes 4x more than murder, and car accidents take over 5x more. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and smoking-related respitory diseases together claim over 200x the lives that murder claims (which is itself claims several orders of magnitude more lives than terrorism.)
In terms of human lives, terrorism in America isn't even a blip on the radar. It certainly doesn't justify the expenditure of trillions of dollars on wars and "Homeland Security", nor does it justify the wholesale slaughter of our freedoms and even if it did a domestic call tracking program would do jack shit. Despite what the pundits want you to believe, there is no vast centralized network of terrorists. They have no need to keep in constant contact with each other over long distances, and ruthlessly and indiscriminately monitoring law-abiding American citizens (incidentally, none of the 9-11 terrorists were American citizens) will give us nothing but another step towards a police state.
We "accidentally shot" a guy 41 times for reaching for his wallet. I've yet to see that kind of dedication out of you Brits.
You misunderstand. I don't consider the fact that they were loners or goths or wore trenchcoats to be warning signs. I meant more along the lines of keeping shotguns and other weapons in open view on their dressers or putting up websites describing their plans to shoot up the school.
Also, as I recall they said were persecuted by their teachers/classmates. While this is by no means a rare thing, it is still a warning sign that everyone involved choose to ignore because that's just how high school is supposed to be--individualism is crushed and retarded conformist jocks are the only ones entitled to have a social life and if my observations were any indication the staff is directly responsible for this. Hell, society as a whole is directly responsible for this. Out of the dozen or so kids they killed that day, I only ever heard about three--the good Christian girl who was going to grow up to be a missionary, the football star, and the token black kid ostensibly killed out of racism. It was crazy; here the anchors and the reporters and the pundits were doing the exact thing that pissed off the trenchcoat mafia so much--only caring about the stereotypical, conformist teenagers to the exclusion of everyone else.
There are in the past 20 years several accounts of perfectly normal children appearing at school one day to settle a few scores.
I know this is somewhat tangential, but I can't this one slide. This sentiment is very stupid at best and extremely offensive at worst. You need to stop bithely believing whatever the 6 o'clock news tells you and look at the world around you. Violence of all kinds--including youth violence and school violence specifically--went DOWN all through the 90's and into the 00's. The only somewhat remarkable thing about the Columbine era was the violence shifted a bit (though definitely not completely, or even mostly) from black/latino inner city kids to white suburban kids. But teen violence as a whole went down by quite a bit. Yeah, our kids are probably still more violent than they were in the 50's, but we've actually made GREAT progress in the past 20 years, and I'm sick of racist and/or ignorant asshats such as yourself perpetrating the myth that things are just so much worse in "today's world."
P.S. I wouldn't exactly call the Columbine killers "perfectly normal children." Not that I in any way believe in the gross stereotyping of goth-types as sick individuals, but from what I've heard there were plenty of warning signs about those guys.
I see a lot of surprised responses around here. Well, the USA has this exact system in place, too--it's just not quite as broad in scope. "Data" CD-Rs are not affected, but "music" CD-Rs are affected as well as blank cassette tapes (and VHS tapes? Not sure on that one. I do know that in Canada, "data" CD-Rs are affected as well.) The lovely part is even though you've paid the "tax" to RIAA, that money buys you absolutely no rights--you can still be sued if you actually use the "taxed" media to play unlicensed content, and even if you are using the media strictly for personal use you are still paying guys like RIAA.
In short, it's really fucked up. They want compensation for piracy while simultaneously stamping out all piracy... they want to have their cake and eat it too.
And Congress--YOUR Congress--is letting them.
Um, I think you missed the point. The driving force behind the switch wouldn't be advertising--it would be MS pulling out of Europe. I'm sure plenty of people and businesses would continue using outdated or pirated copies of Windows... at least at first. But very large corps and government would immediately turn to Linux or possibly Apple, the only legal options availible, and the people who had always simply used their preinstalled OEM copy of Windows would inevitably migrate to a preinstalled OEM copy of Linux.
Sure, while it would seriously promote alternate OSes in EU, could the EU stand to have the carpet pulled out from under them in this manner considering how entrenched MS is in the world of computing..?
The EU would stand just fine. There would be a lot of grumbling from big business, to be sure, but within a year I guarantee you that they will develop Euro-Linux which would in time completely flatten MS on both sides of the pond. Remember, EU countries tend to have very high tax rates and are extremely protectionist--if MS really wants to play hard ball, I have a feeling Europe will do just fine. Transitioning will be a bit rough, but I'm sure that piracy will help a lot--in such a situation, I'm sure that EU authorities won't be in any big hurry to crack down on MS software piracy.
Microsoft may be a big, bad, successful company with a mighty war chest, but that doesn't mean they can take on an entire continent. Take a look at Ubuntu's latest release and tell me with a straight face that XP/2000 is really soooooo much better for business or personal use (other than heavy gaming.) It's easier to install than XP, and more stuff "just works" out of the box than on XP! (at least it does on all 5 of my machines)
Microsoft's biggest asset is momentum, and if they tried to strongarm the EU they'd be flushing that asset right down the toilet. Personally, I'm really really hoping that they try it.
50 megs is a tad arbitrary. I think that 200~ish would be a better number, as it can fit on mini-CDs (yeah I know business card CDs are 50 megs, but I've never even SEEN one before, whereas I find that mini-CDs are small and handy) and it can fit on cheap 256mb flash drives. I'm not advocating bloat, but if there has to be a hard limit I think 50mb is a tad small. I think that the number of people who use mini CD-Rs or 256+ MB flash drives outnumber the people who use business card CD-Rs or 64 MB flash drives by quite a bit. In a 50 MB setup, extrmely useful apps like the OpenOffice.org suite (I say its "extremely useful" more for its compatibility with MS Office than anything else) will never be included by default. With 200+ megs to play with, suddenly OO.o seems like a very natural inclusion. Yes, I know there's an OO.o DSL package; I just think that there should be a default default distro in the 200~ MB range where it (and other useful-but-somewhat-big apps) is included by default.
I doubt there is actually enough cobalt-59 in the world to render it lifeless, particularly as scattering via nuclear bomb is not the most efficent method for providing ideal dispersal.
I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but basically if you're exposed in close proximity to a couple grams of Cobalt-60 for a few minutes (and I do mean less than 5 minutes), you receive a dose so strong that there's a greater than 50% chance you'll be dead within a month (even if you survive, you'll have a ton of permanent health problems--in particular, your immune system will never regain its former strength and your chance of getting cancer is greatly, greatly increased.)
Now realize that this scales--and it's cumulative. If you're exposed to 1/100 of a gram of Cobalt for a few days, you will receive a similar dose of radiation. 1/1000 of a gram for say, 6 months yields the same deadly result. I could be somewhat off on the numbers (it might not scale linearly, and of course at some point the half-life of the Cobalt-60 becomes significant), but the upshot is if you're going to be exposed for several years (and it takes many years for it to turn back to Cobalt-59), it takes only an extremely small amount, the slightest trace of Cobalt-60 dust to kill you.
Cobalt-60, by the way, will atomize into a rather fine powder. Nuclear detonation probably isn't the *ideal* dispersal method, but it's probably effective enough. The dust can travel quite far on the wind, and the explosion throws up the dust high into the atmosphere. Even if you escape the radition somehow, you'd still have to deal with the fact that the vast majority of plants and animals on earth would be dead within a year.
Well, you're quite right. I didn't phrase that statement right. What I WAS thinking about were issues like racism and sexual assault (while I agree that the hysteria is ridiculous and unreasonable, at least people actually admit that it happens now, whereas 50+ years ago no one talked about that sort of thing, and even if they did they often blamed the woman.) The culture of fear is definitely one of the biggest problems we face today--my point in this case was that even though the early/mid 20th century might at first seem to be a idyllic, in reality the truth was it was merely a culture of willful ignorance and repression, and things weren't better than they are today (in fact in *many* ways, they were worse.) Whether the culture of ignorance was better or worse than the culture of fear... well, that's a debate for another day.