Are they afraid that someone is going to hijack the statue and fly it into a building?
Of course not, they're afraid that a group of misfits will spray the inside with evil pink ooze, play late 80's pop music and take it for a spin by controlling it with an old Nintendo joypad.
I for one feel their fears are completely justified.
It kinda reminds me of the way my less game savvy parents or cousins would first use a Nintendo controller, by whipping it back and forth in whatever direction they were trying to go. For them, added grip would be quite usefull.
For the most part though the "steady-hand" the submitter mentions comes from, surprise, not moving your hands, it's the fingers that are doing all the work. Expert typists can hit 100 wpm without rubber coated keys or race car style 5-point body restraint systems. It's a zen thing.
Van Allen is no doubt a brilliant man, but his argument isn't all that strong, and in fact goes against what many people view as the basis of what has spread humans across the entire globe.
Van Allen concludes: "I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable."
Just replace human spaceflight with just about anything we do (war, anthropology, underwater exploration, antarctic research, ping-pong, water polo, chess) and it becomes that old easy argument of "it doesn't give me anything immediately, so why should we do it?"
Simply enough, humans want to be in control, and they don't want to be bored waiting around for some fictional utopia.
If you would like to contribute to the SG1Archive.com Legal Defense Fund, please make a paypal donation by clicking the button below.
The FBI claimed that SG1Archive was part of an international conspiracy, raided his home, and used the Patriot Act to obtain his financial records. Man, I'd hate to see what they do to the people that fund this kind of site...
Kidding aside, I'm kind of curious as to what happened. This is definitely a biased article, but what were the official charges brought against him, where do the chargest stand now, and why did the MPAA get the feds instead of just sue?
Let's play with numbers, always fun. Maybe even come up with some statistics* to be afraid of ClearChannel.
There are roughly 11,000 commercial radio stations. Let's look at the breakdown in my area (Cincinnati, OH):
Stations - 42
Commercial Stations - 31 (74% of airwaves)
Commercial Music Stations - 19 (45% of airwaves)
Clearchannel Stations - 8 (19% of airwaves)
ClearChannel Music Stations - 6 (14% of airwaves; 32% of Music Stations)
Now for the fun part:
Commercial Rock Stations - 8 (19% of airwaves)
ClearChannel "Rock" Music Stations - 4 (10% of airwaves; 50% of Rock Stations)
So, yes, ClearChannel owns only 10% of the entire market, but 50% of the "Rock" music stations in my area. That's "Rock" taken loosely, meaning Classic Rock, Alternative, Hard and Contemporary. That's what most of the people I know listen to, young and old.
So I got satellite radio.
*These statistics subject to the same bias and skew as any other slashdot post. i.e. if you like country, around here it's 100% ClearChannel free!
You might want to avoid XM then, ClearChannel bought up a large portion of their programming.
Hasn't kept me from being a subscriber though. Once you get away from their "KISS" and "Top 20" channels they actually have some pretty good alternative and indie stations, some with live college feeds and even a channel that only plays unsigned artists.
(The Top 20 channel, in a humurous response to your post, plays the current top 20 songs in order, repeated every hour)
While the Focus metaphor is a little off (Ford and Sony do the same thing in this case: invalidate your warranty), this all just falls under the old addage; "criminalize the act, not the means."
To use all these gun and knife analogies running around, murder is always classified in the degree which it happened, the adjectives "shot" and "stabbed" are just media hype. You never hear the judge say "you're convicted of murder, but since you shot the guy in the head, which hurts a lot less than stabbed in the gut, you only get 10 years."
I'm just a lowly engineer in a HUGE corporation, so I've always been skeptical and often frustrated with buzzword laden talk about proper decision making strategies and achieving optimum 'cinergy.'
The truth is though, that once a corporation gets to a certain size, the more stuff like this becomes vital. And the only way a hard working engineer is ever going to be able to get his voice heard (or interpret what he is told) is to understand the processes and procedures that upper management uses.
Books like this are invaluable if you want to be a succesful engineer in a corporate environment, because no matter how many times you yell at your boss "this just isn't logical!!!!" your message isn't going to get across unless you can speak their language. Being an engineer isn't about exclusively knowing the numbers and running the experiments (we generally call those people "scientists"), it's about organizing your resources and abilities in a way that the general public will believe and buy into.
My biggest role models haven't been the cynical yet super intelligent underdogs, they've been the cynical yet super intelligent Senior engineers who got there knowing how to play the corporate BS for what it is. I say books like this should be required reading for any engineer who wants to be taken seriously in a corporation, and subsequently getting your inovative ideas across.
Remember, Apple could never start signing their own musicians. Unless they want the other Apple to start suing again.
Kinda strengthens your point, since a member of the music industry (Apple Records) can make sure that Apple Computers is severely limited with what it can do regarding music.
Interestingly enough, the track he downloaded [Somersault (DangerMouse Remix) by Zero7] isn't copyright protected, sine it's a remix. DangerMouse even wanted it to be freely available for download, as mentioned in this article.
In fact, you yourself can have a free copy of that 100,000,000th song here.
So if Apple is selling free music, do they get to pocket that money, with no music labels to pay off? Or was the song free to download, in which case why didn't anyone just sit there downloading free tracks all day trying to hit that 100,000,000th download?
Why don't the British police get off their butts and chase down the instigators of these frauds? Someone who is involved in 419 fraud is likely to be involved in other criminal activities.
I think the point a lot of people have been trying to make, is that giving money in exchange for something illegitimet is, well, illegal. The people involved here are acting illegally on both sides. If I payed the guy on the street corner $1000 for crack, and he didn't give it to me, the police aren't going to give a shit.
Kinda like an FBI raid that occured on campus my freshman year. A group of students went and robbed $15,000 cash and $20,000 worth of weed from some local townie drug dealers. All they got busted for was possession of drugs and firearms. (Great part though, is that the "drug dealers" were undercover FBI waiting to bust another group of drug dealers. When they got robbed, they just had one of the nearby surveillence vehicles follow the students back to their dorm room).
I for one view this as an excellent step in the right direction. I hope to see such features added as DirecTV and XM Radio to further along this budding consumer market.
I was quite surprised when the same thing happened at the corporation I work for. Going from training sessions about how the slightest leak in information can cost us critical market share, how any unwanted paperwork must be shredded and placed into pad-locked trash bins, and magnetic card swipes and combination locks are on all doors leading to sensitive information, every employee was then issued a keychain USB drive.
In the end though, I think it really just comes down to trusting your employees. It would be just as easy to print off a list of the next 5 years of product innovations and drop it in the mail as to copy over the Word file to a USB drive.
On a side note though, the biggest problem with leaked information has been with the competitor randomly calling up inside extensions and asking whoever they got a hold of what the company initiatives are.
The problem that's developed with google is searching for any consumer electronic brings up a ridiculous number of small vendors trying to sell that product, often times even outranking the products official site.
Microsoft's new engine seems to be even more prone to this, just try searching for a Sony Digicam (as soon as it begins working again...)
Is the RAM storage in order to conserve battery life, by quickly buffering 25 minutes of music, and then spinning down the HD for a bit?
Otherwise, I remember getting my first portable CD player with 5 second skip protection, and testing it out by shaking it hard for 5 seconds until it skipped. I don't know if I'd want to do the same to a hard drive....
In that case, why not just set the camera to manual focus, or put some electrical tape over the IR transmitter.
From what I've played with Night Vision, it'd be really hard to discern between the guy holding a soda and the guy holding a camera.
It is fairly amazing that Google gets flack for running a script that picks out keywords, without implying context to those words, and also as the implied agreement as the reason for a free service.
Meanwhile, ISP's will have the ability to dig through mail on their own accord or at the demand of others, implying whatever they want.
If ISP's in America can be held liable for the actions of their users, will ISP's start screening e-mails as a basis for a termination of service, to save their own ass?
Re:Fleecing of America..
on
WiFi Gone Wild
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm from Austin, and go to college in upstate New York. I drive back and forth about 3 times a year, which is about 30 hours on the road one way.
8 of those hours involve just getting out of Texas, and any chance to stop and look at something other than the straight flat interstate around Dallas is definitely welcome.
And you can't complain to much about the taxes, Texas being one of the few states without an income tax. Just enjoy one of the nation's best highway systems, paid for by oil-rich landowners. Trust me, once you have to start driving through Arkansas you're gonna be begging for any sort of technology.
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Of course not, they're afraid that a group of misfits will spray the inside with evil pink ooze, play late 80's pop music and take it for a spin by controlling it with an old Nintendo joypad.
I for one feel their fears are completely justified.
For the most part though the "steady-hand" the submitter mentions comes from, surprise, not moving your hands, it's the fingers that are doing all the work. Expert typists can hit 100 wpm without rubber coated keys or race car style 5-point body restraint systems. It's a zen thing.
- First-person browser: Seventh installment in the ground-breaking NETSCAPE series
- Enhanced storyline; winner of multiple awards for graphics,sound,and action
- Spine-chilling, bloodcurdling, altogether unfriendly environment
- Music by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails
- One of the most highly anticipated titles of 2004
Van Allen concludes: "I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable."
Just replace human spaceflight with just about anything we do (war, anthropology, underwater exploration, antarctic research, ping-pong, water polo, chess) and it becomes that old easy argument of "it doesn't give me anything immediately, so why should we do it?"
Simply enough, humans want to be in control, and they don't want to be bored waiting around for some fictional utopia.
Wow, slap an iPod on there and it could even change channels!
The FBI claimed that SG1Archive was part of an international conspiracy, raided his home, and used the Patriot Act to obtain his financial records. Man, I'd hate to see what they do to the people that fund this kind of site...
Kidding aside, I'm kind of curious as to what happened. This is definitely a biased article, but what were the official charges brought against him, where do the chargest stand now, and why did the MPAA get the feds instead of just sue?
There are roughly 11,000 commercial radio stations. Let's look at the breakdown in my area (Cincinnati, OH):
Stations - 42
Commercial Stations - 31 (74% of airwaves)
Commercial Music Stations - 19 (45% of airwaves)
Clearchannel Stations - 8 (19% of airwaves)
ClearChannel Music Stations - 6 (14% of airwaves; 32% of Music Stations)
Now for the fun part:
Commercial Rock Stations - 8 (19% of airwaves)
ClearChannel "Rock" Music Stations - 4 (10% of airwaves; 50% of Rock Stations)
So, yes, ClearChannel owns only 10% of the entire market, but 50% of the "Rock" music stations in my area. That's "Rock" taken loosely, meaning Classic Rock, Alternative, Hard and Contemporary. That's what most of the people I know listen to, young and old.
So I got satellite radio.
*These statistics subject to the same bias and skew as any other slashdot post. i.e. if you like country, around here it's 100% ClearChannel free!
Hasn't kept me from being a subscriber though. Once you get away from their "KISS" and "Top 20" channels they actually have some pretty good alternative and indie stations, some with live college feeds and even a channel that only plays unsigned artists.
(The Top 20 channel, in a humurous response to your post, plays the current top 20 songs in order, repeated every hour)
To use all these gun and knife analogies running around, murder is always classified in the degree which it happened, the adjectives "shot" and "stabbed" are just media hype. You never hear the judge say "you're convicted of murder, but since you shot the guy in the head, which hurts a lot less than stabbed in the gut, you only get 10 years."
Wow, sorry, that's actually from paying the electric bills today. (Cincinnati's power company is Cinergy).
The truth is though, that once a corporation gets to a certain size, the more stuff like this becomes vital. And the only way a hard working engineer is ever going to be able to get his voice heard (or interpret what he is told) is to understand the processes and procedures that upper management uses.
Books like this are invaluable if you want to be a succesful engineer in a corporate environment, because no matter how many times you yell at your boss "this just isn't logical!!!!" your message isn't going to get across unless you can speak their language. Being an engineer isn't about exclusively knowing the numbers and running the experiments (we generally call those people "scientists"), it's about organizing your resources and abilities in a way that the general public will believe and buy into.
My biggest role models haven't been the cynical yet super intelligent underdogs, they've been the cynical yet super intelligent Senior engineers who got there knowing how to play the corporate BS for what it is. I say books like this should be required reading for any engineer who wants to be taken seriously in a corporation, and subsequently getting your inovative ideas across.
Kinda strengthens your point, since a member of the music industry (Apple Records) can make sure that Apple Computers is severely limited with what it can do regarding music.
In fact, you yourself can have a free copy of that 100,000,000th song here.
So if Apple is selling free music, do they get to pocket that money, with no music labels to pay off? Or was the song free to download, in which case why didn't anyone just sit there downloading free tracks all day trying to hit that 100,000,000th download?
Somersault (Dangermouse remix) by Zero7
I think the point a lot of people have been trying to make, is that giving money in exchange for something illegitimet is, well, illegal. The people involved here are acting illegally on both sides. If I payed the guy on the street corner $1000 for crack, and he didn't give it to me, the police aren't going to give a shit.
Kinda like an FBI raid that occured on campus my freshman year. A group of students went and robbed $15,000 cash and $20,000 worth of weed from some local townie drug dealers. All they got busted for was possession of drugs and firearms. (Great part though, is that the "drug dealers" were undercover FBI waiting to bust another group of drug dealers. When they got robbed, they just had one of the nearby surveillence vehicles follow the students back to their dorm room).
Oh, wait, GPS is more than just a fancy toy?!
In the end though, I think it really just comes down to trusting your employees. It would be just as easy to print off a list of the next 5 years of product innovations and drop it in the mail as to copy over the Word file to a USB drive.
On a side note though, the biggest problem with leaked information has been with the competitor randomly calling up inside extensions and asking whoever they got a hold of what the company initiatives are.
Although, maybe not as surprising as following the signs to the airport and ending up in Kentucky.
The problem that's developed with google is searching for any consumer electronic brings up a ridiculous number of small vendors trying to sell that product, often times even outranking the products official site. Microsoft's new engine seems to be even more prone to this, just try searching for a Sony Digicam (as soon as it begins working again...)
Is the RAM storage in order to conserve battery life, by quickly buffering 25 minutes of music, and then spinning down the HD for a bit? Otherwise, I remember getting my first portable CD player with 5 second skip protection, and testing it out by shaking it hard for 5 seconds until it skipped. I don't know if I'd want to do the same to a hard drive....
In that case, why not just set the camera to manual focus, or put some electrical tape over the IR transmitter. From what I've played with Night Vision, it'd be really hard to discern between the guy holding a soda and the guy holding a camera.
I don't think any slashdot reader should be supporting this, sounds a little too much like a mixed up version of the DMCA...
It is fairly amazing that Google gets flack for running a script that picks out keywords, without implying context to those words, and also as the implied agreement as the reason for a free service. Meanwhile, ISP's will have the ability to dig through mail on their own accord or at the demand of others, implying whatever they want. If ISP's in America can be held liable for the actions of their users, will ISP's start screening e-mails as a basis for a termination of service, to save their own ass?
I'm from Austin, and go to college in upstate New York. I drive back and forth about 3 times a year, which is about 30 hours on the road one way.
8 of those hours involve just getting out of Texas, and any chance to stop and look at something other than the straight flat interstate around Dallas is definitely welcome.
And you can't complain to much about the taxes, Texas being one of the few states without an income tax. Just enjoy one of the nation's best highway systems, paid for by oil-rich landowners. Trust me, once you have to start driving through Arkansas you're gonna be begging for any sort of technology.