I hadn't heard of Rene Rivkin. Thank you for sharing the story.
But then again, I'm also against crap like the "war on drugs" for similar reasons (un-enforceability and the result of trying to).
Touche again. For some ideals, we must try and fail. For others, we should not try at all. Then again I'm not sure prohibition (especially against certain drugs) is even an ideal.
For white collar crime, I grow exceedingly weary of the American double standard - where lowly proletarian criminals do years of hard time for stealing a stereo, versus the feather delicate touch of the law on those who commit financial crimes, often of vastly greater magnitude.
I can't help empathizing with Rene, although at the risk of lowering the tone, I'll speculate that someone who lost years of their life in prison due to a more proletarian crime of even lower dollar value might find a suicide over weekend detentions and a lost professional license practically effete.
Perhaps judicial harshness in general is the problem, although that's a tougher riddle to solve.
Ahhh, Vegas. I really want to buy the casino's mailing lists and try to sell all those people something. It's just so wonderfully democratic - money may not go to the just or the righteous, but (when properly regulated) it usually at least finds its way from the stupid to the intelligent. Flawed as it is, I might wager it's man's best innovation so far.:)
But for serious now, am I supposed to be happier about investing in your insider-trading-friendly market, versus one that does make an attempt to be transparent?
Of course not. I too would be more hesitant, but the purpose of the stock market isn't designed as a form of entertainment.
Well, I am always entertained by the sight of suckers losing money.:D That said, I think if you hesitate less to buy in the more regulated market, and so do I, and so do most people, then governments end up regulating markets in this way, because who doesn't want more capital.:)
People that give false information to "outsiders" to take advantage of them have never worried about insider trading laws. They will continue to operate as usual, and we already have laws and regulation in place to deal with that.
You are right of course. We can't stop all crime, but we do prefer to live in the regions of the world where they try.:)
Good point, but this is more correlation than causation. A country that can afford to regulate, is clearly better off.
Touche. I personally believe such regulations are causative, but I suppose proving it to you will be difficult.:)
And my personal holdings are exclusively in the United States stock market. (My only current position is actually selling calls on Intel.. the calls I sold will expire in four days, and I will look to do something similar again)
Hah! I salute you.
Well, I submit that insiders may trade sooner than everyone else with inside information when allowed to. I'm not sure if this makes a market more efficient. Information becomes public soon enough and then everyone trades on a level playing field and the market gets where it's going anyway. Meanwhile investors would never willingly choose a market where they always get sloppy seconds to the very people that want their money. So my thesis is, money avoids those markets, hence, reduced liquidity. Just a theory.
I'd much prefer if the government just got it's nose out of the market. The only thing insider traders do is lead to a more accurate market..
Just want to be sure I understand. If you were making an equities market, you don't see the value of trying to have a level playing field for information, where all those who would trade an equity have the same information about it (or, if insiders, they'd have some rules on how they can trade)...
But for serious now, am I supposed to be happier about investing in your insider-trading-friendly market, versus one that does make an attempt to be transparent?
Do you propose that your market (where I am virtually guaranteed to get rooked unless I am an "insider") will draw more investors than a more transparent market (were more investors have a more level playing field)?
In fact, you really think the less transparent market is actually more accurate?
I should say I thought the point of your market was for it to be less accurate, and therefore provide more of an opportunity for insiders to take money from outsiders.:)
Do you have any comment on the relative historical success of transparent markets (such as those in first world nations) versus less transparent markets (either in fact and in principle), such as those in the 3rd world, over say, the last 50 or 100 years?
Do you mind if I ask, which kind of market has the majority of your investments?
The summary said network neutrality "is no longer as important as it was a few months ago."
Alarmed, I went and read through the comparison. I'm not so worried - yet.
It's still the first bullet point in the candidate's platform. They call it by name - "network neutrality" - quite specific. It appears to be his biggest specific concern. He put the bullet point on it at the top of his list, both before the change and after.
All they did was trim a description of what it is. That may be significant but you are really reading tea leaves. It may just as easily be good editing (bullet points shouldn't be 500 words long, or no one reads the next bullet).
Something about "Big Claims" needing "Big Evidence"?
The "rah rah" quotes from the reporter make it sound like bullshit, even if it weren't. Without even the barest sensible explanation about what was done here, this is a non-story.
I was about to post this, but I'm glad someone beat me to it.
If you can make cheap fuel from agricultural waste, then you do not need investors.
Given their claims about their existing capacity, these guys are scam artists, prima facie. You don't even need the subtler skills, such as recognizing the smell of a suckered journalist.
As the energy crisis becomes increasingly acute, we will see their kind more and more.
You're right, but the funny thing is, this is probably still big "breaking news" to Republicans in the U.S., just as it was to the Tories as recently as 10 years ago.
That's the problem with unprofessional, biased news media. Often surprising blind spots can develop from a lack of important facts.
The crack about the Fairness Doctrine is particularly illuminating because it is so ignorant.
The Fairness Doctrine. was a pre-internet rule supported by both Conservatives and Liberals, used because the government was controlling who could broadcast television and radio.
Since broadcast mass media "speech" was already totally controlled ("non-free") on the airwaves via the FCC (though for reasons of technology rather than politics), the lucky (and very wealthy) few who had been granted the privilege to broadcast were required to provide time to both sides of any controversial issue. This rule was administered by the FCC, who still performs the same function today with regards to moral standards, language, etc... pretty much everything but politics, where they were instructed by Reagan and Bush (sr. and jr.) to stop (and not yet forced by congress to resume, despite several failed attempts).
The Fairness Doctrine is as irrelevant on the Internet as it is to a newspaper or a public park, since there is no meaningful barrier for anyone to "speak" in these venues.
It will not be thus forever, but today in 2008, TV and radio still have a substantial audience and influence (as evidenced by gross advertising revenues), and it is still only an exclusive, government controlled elite club who can broadcast on these systems. Repealing the Fairness Doctrine essentially allowed the broadcasters as a whole to skew farther to one side of the ideological spectrum or the other legally (where before it would have been very difficult to go too far and stay within the law). Those with wealth and power (and that changes in cycles) can thus use the broadcast media for propaganda purposes, a concept familiar in places like Russia, Italy, etc. and now increasingly familiar here in the USA.
As Rupert Murdoch is now considerably warm towards Barack Obama (see the WSJ), I wonder if Conservatives who previously thought this was a great idea are now beginning to reconsider.
Murdoch himself has a history of switching the political orientation of his propaganda machine; in the U.K., for instance.
Actually, Dreamcast used a proprietary "GD-ROM" with a storage capacity of 1.2GB. You're still right in your main point, although I would have put it differently. It's highly unlikely that game disc swapping had much to do with Dreamcast's end. Sega had had a run of failures, culminating in Saturn, that cost them the confidence of partners and consumers alike. That made them vulnerable to Sony at the outset (with major players like EA publicly stating they would not develop for another Sega platform), but the PS2's capability as an extremely cheap DVD player (not much difference in price to buy a DVD-player or a PS2, in 2000, 2001) was thought by many to be a major factor in its success.
Dreamcast _could_ play games on CD-ROM. Though I'm sure by the end, Sega wished it couldn't. Mid-way through the system's life, crackers discovered a ROM exploit that allowed burned discs to boot in the Dreamcast. CD images were soon all over the net, and playable without a mod-chip. Amusingly, the crackers compensated for the loss of headroom on the 700GB CD-ROMs (from the 1.2GB GD-ROM originals) without too much trouble; in many cases, all the space hadn't been used. In others, they simply downsampled sounds and textures; the results were usually unnoticeable. All but a few games ended up online that way.
As time passes and media decays, this will probably ensure the survival of the Dreamcast catalog for future generations to enjoy. So it goes with all platforms.
Dreamcast was a pretty awesome console for the interregnum between PS/N64 and PS2/XBox. They had about a year of being the best thing on the market in terms of graphics, network connectivity, etc. and sported neat ideas i.e. "tamagotchi" memory cards. They had a few of the best titles of the time as exclusives.
Although it was tragic for Sega and for gamers (I recall in 2001 watching the Jet Grind Radio team bursting into tears on the stage at GDC while accepting an award), its failure did at least put an amazing game system in the hands of many who otherwise couldn't have afforded it. I still recall $50 dreamcasts (the cost of a new PS2 game got you a whole system!) and $5 games... there haven't been many deals like that before or since.
Is it wrong to assume that the containment vessel is not self-contained? Is it really true that if you disrupted the flow of water, electricity, or control signals into and/or out of it, you wouldn't have a problem?
So it is very possible that the people behind 9/11 considered a hit on nuke plants and then found out that they'd need a bunker-buster, so found a different target. True - and I'm aware that the government maintains that the plant can survive being hit by a plane. I don't care to be counted among the optimists who agree it would be such a walk in the park.
Planes are poor missiles, of course: jet fuel fires did the major work of creating the WTC tragedy.
So, let's consider whacking the nuclear power plant with several planes much larger than an F4, and loaded with jet fuel. The containment domes are probably still intact - assuming everything worked as expected, right? Now let's talk about support systems: water supplies, pumps, power, exhaust, control systems, etc. Can the reactors be shut down safely? Will anyone even be able to find out?
I am betting you would not want to be downwind for this experiment.
The best case scenario is a massive "evacuation" (term used loosely when the roads can't handle regular daily commuting demands - read instead: "panic, chaos and anarchy") scenario where the residents of NYC and environs get to return when its over.
Assuming you had no fear of retaliation in kind (by which I mean, WMD), would you really consider this a less effective way to disrupt an enemy, and create terror?
I don't entirely agree with everything the GP is saying, but I do have to make this (very interesting, often overlooked) point:
We know quite empirically that Al Qaeda does not want to blow up nuclear reactors.
How do we know this?
They didn't already.
There are many nuclear reactors in the northeast, but to truly drive the point home, let's consider just one. On the morning of September 11, a jihadi pilot used the Hudson River as a visual navigation aid while flying down towards Manhattan from the north. Just north of the city (24 miles, to be exact - a short drive), they flew directly over the Indian Point nuclear power plant. It's enormous, with large, spheroid containment domes, exhaust plumes, etc. It is unmistakeable what it is, even from far in the air, let alone if you have spent the last several years meticulously planning and researching potential targets.
A strike against Indian Point, rather than the WTC, would have been vastly more devastating. Rather than merely felling two skyscrapers and killing several thousand, the entire New York metro area could be depopulated. Just stop for a moment and imagine it.
It's beyond question that they chose to fly right past it.
There are many reasons. They probably understood that eloquent PR, rather than loss of life, is the real function of terrorism. In a real battle of "who can kill more of the enemy," everybody already knows the answer.
Perhaps more simply, they knew if they hit a reactor and caused damage and loss of life on that scale, they could expect an enraged west to respond with a nuclear/biological/chemical strike in their homelands.
Yup, I remember it - a vast secret society of machine intelligences nervously and elaborately contemplating the best way to serve all mankind. And all of it evolved from the, at various times problematic, but ultimately vindicated and sacred "three laws" (though they did mutate to four, didn't they). You do end up wondering, though, in the end, if the robots have become masters in addition to, or instead of, being servants...
And almost every writer since has smirked at the hubris of hard-wiring love of mankind into the brains of machines. You could almost speculate that, on some level, we prefer our creations to have dignity over such meaningfully enforced servility.
Oh, I haven't mistaken that. I kind of agree with you. I see even our most celebrated, tenured, pipe smoking "futurists" as storytellers, basically the same as makers of action movies or lesser known novelists, and I don't really mean to talk about what any of them claim to believe after their storytelling is finished. I just find it interesting to contemplate this sense of despair about the evolution of machine intelligence in our "collective unconscious."
Academia is falling all over itself in failed attempts to advance AI, but barring a series of harrowing breakthroughs, a Singularity is decades or even lifetimes away. Most of our more sober, grounded and credentialed thinkers appear not to want to consider the consequences - it's a bit too radical an idea, and "we still have plenty of time before we have to worry about it."
Futurists and writers and other folks out on the edge, like Kurzweil... those fanciful enough to take on the thought problem, seem to lean, in the majority, towards believing the human race would be destroyed or at least decimated by hyper-intelligence (Wachowskis, James Cameron, Lem, etc etc - too many to mention, really). An interesting minority are of the school that hyper-intelligences would be largely unconcerned with people, only dangerous where our goals intersected (Gibson, Lethem, Clarke). Very few seem to believe that a Singularity would be a positive development for the human race. Maybe Asimov? I'm not sure. Sometimes it seems like he was the last person who seriously spent time imagining that post-human AI could really be controlled at all (and many of his novels were arguably about the problems around the attempt).
I have been buying nvidia cards for many years. I have avoided ATI primarily because of the driver situation. Among the two closed source drivers, nvidia seems slightly better most of the time. But both vendors had a totally unacceptable policy with respect to openness, documentation, and drivers.
If AMD/ATI follows through and truly does enable a first tier, full featured, fully open driver, you will see all my nvidia cards on ebay, and I will become an ATI customer that same day.
When will the legal system in this country catch on to the fact that DRM is a garden variety fraud, perpetrated by shady "engineers" on gullible content producers?
There has never been a working DRM system in the history of mankind. There will very likely never be a working DRM system. And I only say "very likely" because the rest of history is a very long time - but it is impossible to imagine how any such system can be built in the future, regardless of technological progress.
The roster of DRM vendors is a list of failed charlatans, with a track record of consumer ire, ruined reputations (the vendors' own, and their customers), legal liability (remember Sony?), and of course, enormous costs for their customers - their true victims.
I wonder if the spectacle of AACS' failure will finally begin to wake them to the fact that no one can sell DRM, because it doesn't exist - and the people who claim it does are no better than those selling magic weight loss via email spam.
That's a lot of money. I hope the developers who did all the work don't come to feel taken advantage of through the maneuverings of these foundations and corporations. Transparency is the only way I know to handle this kind of thing.
What's the point of the secrecy in the google deal anyway?
How about Mozilla opens the kimono? If Google likes secrecy more than the deal itself, I'm sure that MSN or Yahoo or another competitor will be happy to take their place...
I promise vehement grass roots activism to defeat any elected official, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, who gets anywhere near voting for this. Full stop.
This will not sneak by in the dead of night. We are watching. You are either against this violent insanity, or you are against the voters.
Thank you for the clarification. It's dismal news. We'd perhaps gotten a more optimistic read on the EU's initial rejection than was warranted on this side of the pond.
To me, the practice of software patents (which in the US, were not even started by policy, but by an arbitrary, almost accidental decision by a judge) is so ridiculous on its very face that it feels like something of a rallying cry for systemic reform.
Watching the issue fly around America's media, one gets the sense that a citizen of a 3rd world nation must have, being sold on some IMF policy or other, privatizing the water supply perhaps...
You don't even have any choice as to whether or not to ignore software patents. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Then there are several thousand new applications a day. I'll give you a hint. It's impossible.
That's why Microsoft ignores software patents. Even they, the richest company on the planet, have no alternative. And that's also why they're getting hit with a few 9-figure verdicts already. But they still play the game and pretend they're legitimate, because they somehow think they'll benefit, in the end, using them to crush current and potential competition with multi-million legal actions and the threat thereof.
It is impossible to tell if any piece of code infringes. By the way, have you read many of these things? Almost every line of code does infringe.
Every line written is a ticking patent timebomb. Every player has to ante up and make their own "patent portfolio" which they can then apply against whoever sues them. If that sounds like it excludes everyone but a few rich, dominant corporations... now you're getting the idea. Only minor fly in the ointment: those patent shell companies that actually don't do any work except suing people, therefore can't be hit with a retaliatory claim. Ooops. And yet even after getting whacked by a few, MS is still winking and continuing to play the game. Shows you how much they hate honest competition.
Software Patents are currently ignored by almost everyone. But to the extent they are enforced, they will categorically end the American software industry, and software will continue to be a business in Europe, Asia, and... well basically every other civilized nation, who have soundly rejected this silly game and are by the way laughing their asses off at us.
It doesn't really matter - it turns out that if you don't like what the IRS decides, you can get your way. All you have to do is mount a campaign of terror against the IRS until they give in.
They just kept at it, year after year. 26 years, actually. They identified and targeted individual civil servants. They sued and blackmailed and swarmed them with PIs. They harassed their friends, families and associates. They spent uncounted millions. They ruined countless lives. Eventually, in '93, it worked. Read more here.
I'm no fan of tax free religion period, but nothing should make you sicker about it than watching these wackadoos sponging off of hard working Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
My pleasure.
I hadn't heard of Rene Rivkin. Thank you for sharing the story.
But then again, I'm also against crap like the "war on drugs" for similar reasons (un-enforceability and the result of trying to).
Touche again. For some ideals, we must try and fail. For others, we should not try at all. Then again I'm not sure prohibition (especially against certain drugs) is even an ideal.
For white collar crime, I grow exceedingly weary of the American double standard - where lowly proletarian criminals do years of hard time for stealing a stereo, versus the feather delicate touch of the law on those who commit financial crimes, often of vastly greater magnitude.
I can't help empathizing with Rene, although at the risk of lowering the tone, I'll speculate that someone who lost years of their life in prison due to a more proletarian crime of even lower dollar value might find a suicide over weekend detentions and a lost professional license practically effete.
Perhaps judicial harshness in general is the problem, although that's a tougher riddle to solve.
Ahhh, Vegas. I really want to buy the casino's mailing lists and try to sell all those people something. It's just so wonderfully democratic - money may not go to the just or the righteous, but (when properly regulated) it usually at least finds its way from the stupid to the intelligent. Flawed as it is, I might wager it's man's best innovation so far. :)
But for serious now, am I supposed to be happier about investing in your insider-trading-friendly market, versus one that does make an attempt to be transparent?
Of course not. I too would be more hesitant, but the purpose of the stock market isn't designed as a form of entertainment.
Well, I am always entertained by the sight of suckers losing money. :D That said, I think if you hesitate less to buy in the more regulated market, and so do I, and so do most people, then governments end up regulating markets in this way, because who doesn't want more capital. :)
People that give false information to "outsiders" to take advantage of them have never worried about insider trading laws. They will continue to operate as usual, and we already have laws and regulation in place to deal with that.
You are right of course. We can't stop all crime, but we do prefer to live in the regions of the world where they try. :)
Good point, but this is more correlation than causation. A country that can afford to regulate, is clearly better off.
Touche. I personally believe such regulations are causative, but I suppose proving it to you will be difficult. :)
And my personal holdings are exclusively in the United States stock market. (My only current position is actually selling calls on Intel .. the calls I sold will expire in four days, and I will look to do something similar again)
Hah! I salute you.
Well, I submit that insiders may trade sooner than everyone else with inside information when allowed to. I'm not sure if this makes a market more efficient. Information becomes public soon enough and then everyone trades on a level playing field and the market gets where it's going anyway. Meanwhile investors would never willingly choose a market where they always get sloppy seconds to the very people that want their money. So my thesis is, money avoids those markets, hence, reduced liquidity. Just a theory.
I'd much prefer if the government just got it's nose out of the market. The only thing insider traders do is lead to a more accurate market..
Just want to be sure I understand. If you were making an equities market, you don't see the value of trying to have a level playing field for information, where all those who would trade an equity have the same information about it (or, if insiders, they'd have some rules on how they can trade)...
Sort of like the SNL all drug olympics, right? Ah, I kid. :D
But for serious now, am I supposed to be happier about investing in your insider-trading-friendly market, versus one that does make an attempt to be transparent?
Do you propose that your market (where I am virtually guaranteed to get rooked unless I am an "insider") will draw more investors than a more transparent market (were more investors have a more level playing field)?
In fact, you really think the less transparent market is actually more accurate?
I should say I thought the point of your market was for it to be less accurate, and therefore provide more of an opportunity for insiders to take money from outsiders. :)
Do you have any comment on the relative historical success of transparent markets (such as those in first world nations) versus less transparent markets (either in fact and in principle), such as those in the 3rd world, over say, the last 50 or 100 years?
Do you mind if I ask, which kind of market has the majority of your investments?
Earthlink also uses a DNS error spam page rather than a real DNS not found error. Very, very lame.
They do have a (little known) method for bypassing this, details here:
http://kb.earthlink.net/case.asp?article=187117
Basically they give you the IP of a non-fucked DNS server, which you can then program into your router, computer etc.
The summary said network neutrality "is no longer as important as it was a few months ago."
Alarmed, I went and read through the comparison. I'm not so worried - yet.
It's still the first bullet point in the candidate's platform. They call it by name - "network neutrality" - quite specific. It appears to be his biggest specific concern. He put the bullet point on it at the top of his list, both before the change and after.
All they did was trim a description of what it is. That may be significant but you are really reading tea leaves. It may just as easily be good editing (bullet points shouldn't be 500 words long, or no one reads the next bullet).
Something about "Big Claims" needing "Big Evidence"?
The "rah rah" quotes from the reporter make it sound like bullshit, even if it weren't. Without even the barest sensible explanation about what was done here, this is a non-story.
I was about to post this, but I'm glad someone beat me to it.
If you can make cheap fuel from agricultural waste, then you do not need investors.
Given their claims about their existing capacity, these guys are scam artists, prima facie. You don't even need the subtler skills, such as recognizing the smell of a suckered journalist.
As the energy crisis becomes increasingly acute, we will see their kind more and more.
You're right, but the funny thing is, this is probably still big "breaking news" to Republicans in the U.S., just as it was to the Tories as recently as 10 years ago.
That's the problem with unprofessional, biased news media. Often surprising blind spots can develop from a lack of important facts.
The crack about the Fairness Doctrine is particularly illuminating because it is so ignorant.
The Fairness Doctrine. was a pre-internet rule supported by both Conservatives and Liberals, used because the government was controlling who could broadcast television and radio.
Since broadcast mass media "speech" was already totally controlled ("non-free") on the airwaves via the FCC (though for reasons of technology rather than politics), the lucky (and very wealthy) few who had been granted the privilege to broadcast were required to provide time to both sides of any controversial issue. This rule was administered by the FCC, who still performs the same function today with regards to moral standards, language, etc... pretty much everything but politics, where they were instructed by Reagan and Bush (sr. and jr.) to stop (and not yet forced by congress to resume, despite several failed attempts).
The Fairness Doctrine is as irrelevant on the Internet as it is to a newspaper or a public park, since there is no meaningful barrier for anyone to "speak" in these venues.
It will not be thus forever, but today in 2008, TV and radio still have a substantial audience and influence (as evidenced by gross advertising revenues), and it is still only an exclusive, government controlled elite club who can broadcast on these systems. Repealing the Fairness Doctrine essentially allowed the broadcasters as a whole to skew farther to one side of the ideological spectrum or the other legally (where before it would have been very difficult to go too far and stay within the law). Those with wealth and power (and that changes in cycles) can thus use the broadcast media for propaganda purposes, a concept familiar in places like Russia, Italy, etc. and now increasingly familiar here in the USA.
As Rupert Murdoch is now considerably warm towards Barack Obama (see the WSJ), I wonder if Conservatives who previously thought this was a great idea are now beginning to reconsider.
Murdoch himself has a history of switching the political orientation of his propaganda machine; in the U.K., for instance.
Actually, Dreamcast used a proprietary "GD-ROM" with a storage capacity of 1.2GB. You're still right in your main point, although I would have put it differently. It's highly unlikely that game disc swapping had much to do with Dreamcast's end. Sega had had a run of failures, culminating in Saturn, that cost them the confidence of partners and consumers alike. That made them vulnerable to Sony at the outset (with major players like EA publicly stating they would not develop for another Sega platform), but the PS2's capability as an extremely cheap DVD player (not much difference in price to buy a DVD-player or a PS2, in 2000, 2001) was thought by many to be a major factor in its success.
Dreamcast _could_ play games on CD-ROM. Though I'm sure by the end, Sega wished it couldn't. Mid-way through the system's life, crackers discovered a ROM exploit that allowed burned discs to boot in the Dreamcast. CD images were soon all over the net, and playable without a mod-chip. Amusingly, the crackers compensated for the loss of headroom on the 700GB CD-ROMs (from the 1.2GB GD-ROM originals) without too much trouble; in many cases, all the space hadn't been used. In others, they simply downsampled sounds and textures; the results were usually unnoticeable. All but a few games ended up online that way.
As time passes and media decays, this will probably ensure the survival of the Dreamcast catalog for future generations to enjoy. So it goes with all platforms.
Dreamcast was a pretty awesome console for the interregnum between PS/N64 and PS2/XBox. They had about a year of being the best thing on the market in terms of graphics, network connectivity, etc. and sported neat ideas i.e. "tamagotchi" memory cards. They had a few of the best titles of the time as exclusives.
Although it was tragic for Sega and for gamers (I recall in 2001 watching the Jet Grind Radio team bursting into tears on the stage at GDC while accepting an award), its failure did at least put an amazing game system in the hands of many who otherwise couldn't have afforded it. I still recall $50 dreamcasts (the cost of a new PS2 game got you a whole system!) and $5 games... there haven't been many deals like that before or since.
Is it wrong to assume that the containment vessel is not self-contained? Is it really true that if you disrupted the flow of water, electricity, or control signals into and/or out of it, you wouldn't have a problem?
Planes are poor missiles, of course: jet fuel fires did the major work of creating the WTC tragedy.
So, let's consider whacking the nuclear power plant with several planes much larger than an F4, and loaded with jet fuel. The containment domes are probably still intact - assuming everything worked as expected, right? Now let's talk about support systems: water supplies, pumps, power, exhaust, control systems, etc. Can the reactors be shut down safely? Will anyone even be able to find out?
I am betting you would not want to be downwind for this experiment.
The best case scenario is a massive "evacuation" (term used loosely when the roads can't handle regular daily commuting demands - read instead: "panic, chaos and anarchy") scenario where the residents of NYC and environs get to return when its over.
Assuming you had no fear of retaliation in kind (by which I mean, WMD), would you really consider this a less effective way to disrupt an enemy, and create terror?
I don't entirely agree with everything the GP is saying, but I do have to make this (very interesting, often overlooked) point:
We know quite empirically that Al Qaeda does not want to blow up nuclear reactors.
How do we know this?
They didn't already.
There are many nuclear reactors in the northeast, but to truly drive the point home, let's consider just one. On the morning of September 11, a jihadi pilot used the Hudson River as a visual navigation aid while flying down towards Manhattan from the north. Just north of the city (24 miles, to be exact - a short drive), they flew directly over the Indian Point nuclear power plant. It's enormous, with large, spheroid containment domes, exhaust plumes, etc. It is unmistakeable what it is, even from far in the air, let alone if you have spent the last several years meticulously planning and researching potential targets.
A strike against Indian Point, rather than the WTC, would have been vastly more devastating. Rather than merely felling two skyscrapers and killing several thousand, the entire New York metro area could be depopulated. Just stop for a moment and imagine it.
It's beyond question that they chose to fly right past it.
There are many reasons. They probably understood that eloquent PR, rather than loss of life, is the real function of terrorism. In a real battle of "who can kill more of the enemy," everybody already knows the answer.
Perhaps more simply, they knew if they hit a reactor and caused damage and loss of life on that scale, they could expect an enraged west to respond with a nuclear/biological/chemical strike in their homelands.
Yup, I remember it - a vast secret society of machine intelligences nervously and elaborately contemplating the best way to serve all mankind. And all of it evolved from the, at various times problematic, but ultimately vindicated and sacred "three laws" (though they did mutate to four, didn't they). You do end up wondering, though, in the end, if the robots have become masters in addition to, or instead of, being servants...
And almost every writer since has smirked at the hubris of hard-wiring love of mankind into the brains of machines. You could almost speculate that, on some level, we prefer our creations to have dignity over such meaningfully enforced servility.
Oh, I haven't mistaken that. I kind of agree with you. I see even our most celebrated, tenured, pipe smoking "futurists" as storytellers, basically the same as makers of action movies or lesser known novelists, and I don't really mean to talk about what any of them claim to believe after their storytelling is finished. I just find it interesting to contemplate this sense of despair about the evolution of machine intelligence in our "collective unconscious."
Academia is falling all over itself in failed attempts to advance AI, but barring a series of harrowing breakthroughs, a Singularity is decades or even lifetimes away. Most of our more sober, grounded and credentialed thinkers appear not to want to consider the consequences - it's a bit too radical an idea, and "we still have plenty of time before we have to worry about it."
Futurists and writers and other folks out on the edge, like Kurzweil... those fanciful enough to take on the thought problem, seem to lean, in the majority, towards believing the human race would be destroyed or at least decimated by hyper-intelligence (Wachowskis, James Cameron, Lem, etc etc - too many to mention, really). An interesting minority are of the school that hyper-intelligences would be largely unconcerned with people, only dangerous where our goals intersected (Gibson, Lethem, Clarke). Very few seem to believe that a Singularity would be a positive development for the human race. Maybe Asimov? I'm not sure. Sometimes it seems like he was the last person who seriously spent time imagining that post-human AI could really be controlled at all (and many of his novels were arguably about the problems around the attempt).
I have been buying nvidia cards for many years. I have avoided ATI primarily because of the driver situation. Among the two closed source drivers, nvidia seems slightly better most of the time. But both vendors had a totally unacceptable policy with respect to openness, documentation, and drivers.
If AMD/ATI follows through and truly does enable a first tier, full featured, fully open driver, you will see all my nvidia cards on ebay, and I will become an ATI customer that same day.
Indeed - I'm sure you're exactly right. This looks like a new low for /. novice "tech" "writing" - and for this site for picking it up as a story.
When will the legal system in this country catch on to the fact that DRM is a garden variety fraud, perpetrated by shady "engineers" on gullible content producers?
There has never been a working DRM system in the history of mankind. There will very likely never be a working DRM system. And I only say "very likely" because the rest of history is a very long time - but it is impossible to imagine how any such system can be built in the future, regardless of technological progress.
The roster of DRM vendors is a list of failed charlatans, with a track record of consumer ire, ruined reputations (the vendors' own, and their customers), legal liability (remember Sony?), and of course, enormous costs for their customers - their true victims.
I wonder if the spectacle of AACS' failure will finally begin to wake them to the fact that no one can sell DRM, because it doesn't exist - and the people who claim it does are no better than those selling magic weight loss via email spam.
That's a lot of money. I hope the developers who did all the work don't come to feel taken advantage of through the maneuverings of these foundations and corporations. Transparency is the only way I know to handle this kind of thing.
What's the point of the secrecy in the google deal anyway?
How about Mozilla opens the kimono? If Google likes secrecy more than the deal itself, I'm sure that MSN or Yahoo or another competitor will be happy to take their place...
Does this go too far?
Yes, this goes too far.
I promise vehement grass roots activism to defeat any elected official, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, who gets anywhere near voting for this. Full stop.
This will not sneak by in the dead of night. We are watching. You are either against this violent insanity, or you are against the voters.
Thank you for the clarification. It's dismal news. We'd perhaps gotten a more optimistic read on the EU's initial rejection than was warranted on this side of the pond.
To me, the practice of software patents (which in the US, were not even started by policy, but by an arbitrary, almost accidental decision by a judge) is so ridiculous on its very face that it feels like something of a rallying cry for systemic reform.
Watching the issue fly around America's media, one gets the sense that a citizen of a 3rd world nation must have, being sold on some IMF policy or other, privatizing the water supply perhaps...
You don't even have any choice as to whether or not to ignore software patents. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Then there are several thousand new applications a day. I'll give you a hint. It's impossible.
That's why Microsoft ignores software patents. Even they, the richest company on the planet, have no alternative. And that's also why they're getting hit with a few 9-figure verdicts already. But they still play the game and pretend they're legitimate, because they somehow think they'll benefit, in the end, using them to crush current and potential competition with multi-million legal actions and the threat thereof.
It is impossible to tell if any piece of code infringes. By the way, have you read many of these things? Almost every line of code does infringe.
Every line written is a ticking patent timebomb. Every player has to ante up and make their own "patent portfolio" which they can then apply against whoever sues them. If that sounds like it excludes everyone but a few rich, dominant corporations... now you're getting the idea. Only minor fly in the ointment: those patent shell companies that actually don't do any work except suing people, therefore can't be hit with a retaliatory claim. Ooops. And yet even after getting whacked by a few, MS is still winking and continuing to play the game. Shows you how much they hate honest competition.
Software Patents are currently ignored by almost everyone. But to the extent they are enforced, they will categorically end the American software industry, and software will continue to be a business in Europe, Asia, and... well basically every other civilized nation, who have soundly rejected this silly game and are by the way laughing their asses off at us.
It doesn't really matter - it turns out that if you don't like what the IRS decides, you can get your way. All you have to do is mount a campaign of terror against the IRS until they give in.
They just kept at it, year after year. 26 years, actually. They identified and targeted individual civil servants. They sued and blackmailed and swarmed them with PIs. They harassed their friends, families and associates. They spent uncounted millions. They ruined countless lives. Eventually, in '93, it worked. Read more here.
I'm no fan of tax free religion period, but nothing should make you sicker about it than watching these wackadoos sponging off of hard working Americans.
Interesting... one other thing. Note the section on Mono and Microsoft's patents.