So they've got a technology to scan inside RAR files with obfuscated names now? If they start putting password lock so you have to have the password to even see the archive content what then? These courts really don't bother consulting actual Internet people, just some lawyer doing intern clerk duty on the way to their own judicial posting who happened to use the Internet a few times to try to score on craigslist. Oh well, good luck enforcing it.
"At least we can count on Hollywood to find some actress that will match Faye's rockin' tits."
Unfortunately, Savannah committed suicide YEARS ago and took those with her.
I'm worried that someone will do some superficial research, come across the more deranged otaku, and think that Ed's character will attract perverts and hence need a redo. Ten years older, male, and with green hair instead, and then offer the part to Billy Mumy. I'd actually pay money to see his reaction to that.
Ein... man, you're asking for the people who thought Garfield was perfectly believable to come into play and CGI it all up and on top of it give him a human voice.
As far as Keanu goes, if ever anyone decides to do Clay Aiken Stands In For K.D. Lang, that would be right up Keanu's alley.
Given that the system is inherently tilted towards those with money to pay politicians off, and that the courts are used to get things pushed into law backhandedly rather than through the political process (by both sides), the common folk are left with not a lot of options. Between political/social correctness on the left and fear mongering from the right, both sides seek to use government to infringe on the rights of the people. What happens when you push people into a corner? They fight back. It is perfectly human.
A smash-up distributed network that crosses torrent, freenet, anonymous remailer chains, proxies, and encryption is slowly growing in pieces and will come together eventually. Due to ongoing refusal of those who govern to even attempt to reason with the governed, and due to the governed running from responsibility and intellectual labor, it is inevitable that other systems of communication and information transfer will grow organically to stymie every system of control.
The fault lies with everybody because the governed must in the end give consent to those who govern, whether a democracy or tyranny, for a non-compliant populace cannot be controlled by anything short of a god, as revolutions throughout history prove. As long as the people continue to allow the government and business to do whatever strikes their fancy, they will do so. But their nature circumscribes their will and demands them to actions that flow around obstacles and it will happen. As a result, a system will come about allowing totally untraceable transmission of all kind of information, not just music and movies but illegal materials, spy communications, and terrorist dispatches, and all of it will be beyond anyone's reach to identify who put it out into the cloud and unable to make it go away.
You gotta take the good with the bad in life, but there's a whole lot of bad that is going to be enabled by this, all because no one could get along and come to an understanding.
...can't last forever. As in, the Mac platform is no longer a minor niche thing, and with the fundamental change to a BSD/*nix base which opens the architecture to creative accessibility, viruses were a matter of time on the Mac. About damn time they came clean and did the responsible thing and admit it isn't invulnerable. If you want a large market share, it will come with a price of making it a target for miscreants.
It all depends on how fast it hits and how much of it makes it to impact. If the future's projected computing power is what we think, it would be possible to project the course of a parabolic orbit that intersects Earth, and then aim it out away from Earth to loop back and meet up head on, taking into account the gravity wells of known entities. THAT would be a serious problem. It may take a while, but if the rocks sent also had self-destruct devices on board or rocket systems to move them off course (or keep them on course) they would essentially be like time bombs. Give in to demands or the rock is gonna hit.
...could only ever be a problem waiting to happen if undifferentiated application of it were made to totally dissimilar media. This is the problem, and as long as congress allows itself to be bought cheaply and what politician doesn't, it won't change.
We're lucky actually. They could go stupid^2 and say that since the bits must stream through our CD player's circuitry, that it amounts to an unavoidable copying of the data, however temporary and ephemeral, because theoretically you could modify the buffer to copy the stream to another storage device. In that case, they'd demand a per-play fee each and every time. Make no mistake the **AA are equally moronic outfits.
The problem is not that the industry is rightfully defending against losses to thieves, it is that they are defending against theoretical losses based on unreasonable definitions, illogical reasoning, and just plain grandiose imagining. They imagine the most generous and profitable definitions and reasoning, like the insane example above, and then count those imagined might-have-been profits as losses.
They truly are insane. And they are unabashedly greedy in terms of artist abuse, making no secret of the pathetic share allotted to those who truly originate the intellectual property without whom the *AA people would have no income whatsoever. I have no problems ripping off slave-owners with delusions of grandeur.
...that Tor is in and of itself not secure enough. Any traffic passing over it needs intermediary obfuscation of origination and destination of traffic as well as encryption of traffic by the origination and destination separate from the Tor network similar to anonymous remailer chains.
Oh well, thanks to the government, the **AA people, and idiots like this, such networks are coming... and where once terrorists, organized crime, and other ne'er do wells had to pay some geeks for serious work to make secure communications a done deal, they will be able to download an open source package off the net with point and click simplicity that does everything they need and more. Just because the aforementioned dipsticks pushing the trend refused to listen to Princess Leia in Star Wars when she told off Grand Moff Tarkin.
You remember, tighter grip, more systems through your fingers. As in, oppression is counterproductive and carries the seeds of your downfall, and everyone else's...
Drop-in replacements are needed for certain. You can't have a massive method shift without massive headache. Just doesn't work without eliminating freedom and free will and people kind of don't take to that. Organic grown into place in parallel and weaning of the original until it is gone is the way. Like putting in temporary columns up while replacing a foundation, and then permanent new foundation segments and finally finish. One step at a time without dropping the house into the basement.
However, the end result is still the same. We're burning things. The problem with burning things is not the so-called greenhouse effect which is perfectly natural, cyclical, and guaranteed to keep on going and happening no matter what we do and when it reverses and goes cold we won't be able to stop that either.
The problem is that the processes which led to those unburnt materials invested energy of some kind in the process and further energy was invested in making them so compact and dense. Coal and oil and all that don't happen overnight and neither for that matter does corn or grass. All of it goes back to the sun, and the various novae that spat the elements into space that Earth formed from.
Energy was invested. We recoup the energy by burning. But we have no mechanism for taking the burnt results and un-burning them, investing energy back in the process. That's all that chemical fuels are. An energy storage device not different than a non-recyclable chemical battery that we toss away except we toss the results into the air.
Solar? No. Too diffuse and inefficient and not a storage medium. Batteries? Why when we can do what the sun does to make that energy?
From what I've seen, solid state fusion will be the future but in the meantime I fully expect hysterical superstitious defeatists nonsense to mess up most of my days in between.
But the last thing that should be done is to give one bit more power to government. I find it hysterically tragic that many of the same people who are ready to march on congress to secure rights to pirate DVDs, want every kind of porn unregulated and uncensored, who want the government as far away from them as possible every April like clockwork, still reflexively turn to government and taxation to solve the problems of high fuel prices.
Like the same people who sold you nonexistent solutions to misstated problems over and over for the last several thousand years are going to somehow magically come through and fix this. If you believe that, then why don't you believe in Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the DMCA, and every other idea of theirs you excoriate?
Because you're selfish and hypocritical. You want someone else to fix it, you want someone else to pay the price, you want your way, and you see no problem with wielding the cudgel of government to get your way when it is something you want. Otherwise, you're damn near libertarian anarachists. Hypocrisy thy name is homo sapiens.
Well, the world is not going to go the way you want and it never did and it will be that what happens will do so while you were making other plans. Instead of relying on sleight-of-hand, nonsensical claims, and idiot economics, try relying on your intelligence and cleverness.
You built pyramids with copper saws and wooden mallets. You built rockets to fling yourselves to the moon. I swear, you say you want a Star Trek future of plenty, but you cling to the apron strings of Little House on the Prairie.
...I would have sat up straight and eaten my vegetables but that DLL was corrupted and since you grounded me and took away my Internet privileges so I can't get a replacement from Windows Update. Also, since Tommy hit my hand with the hammer yesterday, my fingers don't work right so I can't enter in the Windows product key to authenticate. Not to mention that little stuck up sister of mine thought it would be soooo funny to take a razor and scape the key sticker off the box and put a Brittney Spears sticker in its place.
I think the future will see the use of trojan/virus techniques to send data. It's already been fairly well proven that stopping botnets is next to impossible given current technologies, attitudes and ideas on the part of administrators and engineers, and most importantly that AI bears not a candle compared to Natural Stupidity.
Forget just VoIP. In the future we'll hide communications networks under multiple layers of encryption inside trojan'd everything that is awfully hard to tell innocent user data from something else. We'll probably also host websites and files that way in a coalescence and then expansion of BT/P2P and anonymous remailer methods but not so much with identifiable clients but instead viral ware that people choose to allow on their machines so as to prevent privacy invasion by government and business.
Let's see this precious "evidence that System V is in Linux" that SCO claims they have. Maybe if they put their money where their mouth is, they'd get to keep more of it.
This is like asking someone to prove the genius of Uwe Boll.
Which is why we need legislation that will fine them for releasing that information.
With a government which already holds itself at immune to its own courts and its own laws as inapplicable to itself, this would be useful exactly how?
The government is impotent and powerless. WalMart can get away with contempt of court as easy as you get away with jaywalking and everyone increasingly knows it.
Tax money shouldn't be pumped to the telcos to yet again waste instead of rebuilding critical infrastructure. Instead, the U.S. government should build its own national, public infrastructure to replace the crap that the telcos are trying to pass off as acceptable.
So you'd do this despite the fact that you'd not want all your communications copied by AT&T to the NSA? Despite eight years of privacy invasion by the current administration? Despite Carnivore? Despite initiatives by our government to make all your information open to them whenever? Despite that all of the above happens with the Internet being carried by private companies now? Despite that what you're proposing would mean they'd own the lines, routers, switches, etc. and thus they'd have total control of all information passing on the net within America? Despite 200 plus years of proof that even in our own representative democracy the state absolutely cannot be trusted to do the right thing without eternal vigilance on the part of the citizenry?
What are you smoking and where can I get a loan to afford it?
Yeah, I want to give my Internet infrastructure over to the state where they already abuse their police powers at whimsical will.
Keep spreading the truth people, encryption can make you safer and even if you have nothing to hide, it is still your nothing to hide. If they don't like you hiding your nothing, then that only tells you the truth: the powers that be and the powers that would be don't trust the people in any way and any form of governance which will not trust its people cannot be trusted by its people. Therefore, hide your nothing. Hide it all, jealously guard your privacy and keep on at it until they go into paroxysms of fear, insecurity, and anxiety. Keep it up people. It's your life to lose.
Once again, altogether with Princess Danish-head: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
That boids research in one shot puts to shame all the feeble crap on the Science Channel lately about robotic space exploration attempts. More rugged tools were made by hand by colonials two centuries ago, and knowing the machine trade, I know damn well that we make machine tools capable of withstanding the punishment of the moon or Mars, and with these simple examples, we know we can make them behave intelligently if not actually be intelligent. We have such a bleak and depressing science future mindset compared to the 70s... Thanks for the trip down memory lane though. I loved the use in that short seen on Night Flight.
Foresight has its place, but pandering to a manufactured culture of fear is not foresight.
However, having the foresight to be the one who manufactures the culture of fear can be very profitable if you're also heavily invested in the manufactured solutions to the fears...
Ooops. Did I just state in a single sentence the actual method and practice of politics since time immemorial?
We watch Science Channel and History Channel programs all the time showing off our prodigious engineering and design ingenuity and what do we get? We get disincentives and perverse incentives one after the other from the people who think the popularity contests we call elections are licenses to do whatever they want to the people.
We the people put them there more and more as if we expect and masochistically want them to do us up the backside so we can get angry and rebel more.
The whole shebang is headed for disaster and revolution and everyone involved is intelligent enough to see it, but not wise enough to stop it.
On the contrary, the middle class is vanishing, such that of all the things you listed, perhaps only the beer and the TV with football are still affordable for many, many Americans. The SUV and the white picket fence are far out of reach.
Either you don't have a serious job because you won't work hard and smart or you have plenty of money. If you're really middle class, you know this is horsesh*t.
I have an SUV, partially fenced yard, working on the 2.2 kids part, and busting my ass to do so. No one said it would be easy, especially not my dad who did it before me. Just because I don't have money spilling out of my pockets left over after bills does not mean it is unaffordable. I'm doing it AND on a variable mortgage which just jumped a couple months back. AND on a salary well under professional average.
Stop spreading this claptrap about which you know nothing people. We in the middle class are not disappearing. We're doing fine. It could be better, especially if you social theorists went elsewhere and bothered someone else, but we're just fine thank you. At least, we will be till the inevitable tax increases you shove down our throats to pay for everyone else's universal health care making us unable to afford our own...
Oddly, this firewall entry: Date: 10/25 00:27:30 Name: spp_portscan: portscan status from 66.35.250.150: 13 connections across 1 hosts: TCP(13), UDP(0) Priority: n/a Type: n/a IP info: n/a:n/a -> n/a:n/a References: none found
Led to: [someone@somebox ~]$ host 66.35.250.150 150.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa is an alias for 150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa. 150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer slashdot.org. [someone@somebox ~]$ whois 66.35.250.150 [Querying whois.arin.net] [whois.arin.net] Savvis SAVVIS (NET-66-35-192-0-1)
66.35.192.0 - 66.35.255.255 VA Software SAVV-S234813-4 (NET-66-35-250-0-1)
66.35.250.0 - 66.35.250.255
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-10-23 19:10 # Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
"A 2006 study and review of existing literature, published in Nature, determined that there has been no net increase in solar brightness since the mid 1970s, and that changes in solar output within the past 400 years are unlikely to have played a major part in global warming."
I love how you left out...
It should be stressed, the same report cautions that "Apart from solar brightness, more subtle influences on climate from cosmic rays or the Sun's ultraviolet radiation cannot be excluded, say the authors. However, these influences cannot be confirmed, they add, because physical models for such effects are still too poorly developed."
It isn't the visible brightness, but higher energy radiation, specifically charged particles, that are associated with cloud cover variations on Earth.
If at first you can't succeed in the constitutionally proper venue, use the courts to get your way.
If NY is so serious about wanting to improve the environment, let them shut down NYC and if it is global warming, then let Albany be shuttered to stop the hot air.
Slashdot Mirror
...would be when people gathered around a telegraph. Amazon is quite a bit late.
So they've got a technology to scan inside RAR files with obfuscated names now? If they start putting password lock so you have to have the password to even see the archive content what then? These courts really don't bother consulting actual Internet people, just some lawyer doing intern clerk duty on the way to their own judicial posting who happened to use the Internet a few times to try to score on craigslist. Oh well, good luck enforcing it.
"At least we can count on Hollywood to find some actress that will match Faye's rockin' tits."
Unfortunately, Savannah committed suicide YEARS ago and took those with her.
I'm worried that someone will do some superficial research, come across the more deranged otaku, and think that Ed's character will attract perverts and hence need a redo. Ten years older, male, and with green hair instead, and then offer the part to Billy Mumy. I'd actually pay money to see his reaction to that.
Ein... man, you're asking for the people who thought Garfield was perfectly believable to come into play and CGI it all up and on top of it give him a human voice.
As far as Keanu goes, if ever anyone decides to do Clay Aiken Stands In For K.D. Lang, that would be right up Keanu's alley.
Given that the system is inherently tilted towards those with money to pay politicians off, and that the courts are used to get things pushed into law backhandedly rather than through the political process (by both sides), the common folk are left with not a lot of options. Between political/social correctness on the left and fear mongering from the right, both sides seek to use government to infringe on the rights of the people. What happens when you push people into a corner? They fight back. It is perfectly human.
A smash-up distributed network that crosses torrent, freenet, anonymous remailer chains, proxies, and encryption is slowly growing in pieces and will come together eventually. Due to ongoing refusal of those who govern to even attempt to reason with the governed, and due to the governed running from responsibility and intellectual labor, it is inevitable that other systems of communication and information transfer will grow organically to stymie every system of control.
The fault lies with everybody because the governed must in the end give consent to those who govern, whether a democracy or tyranny, for a non-compliant populace cannot be controlled by anything short of a god, as revolutions throughout history prove. As long as the people continue to allow the government and business to do whatever strikes their fancy, they will do so. But their nature circumscribes their will and demands them to actions that flow around obstacles and it will happen. As a result, a system will come about allowing totally untraceable transmission of all kind of information, not just music and movies but illegal materials, spy communications, and terrorist dispatches, and all of it will be beyond anyone's reach to identify who put it out into the cloud and unable to make it go away.
You gotta take the good with the bad in life, but there's a whole lot of bad that is going to be enabled by this, all because no one could get along and come to an understanding.
...can't last forever. As in, the Mac platform is no longer a minor niche thing, and with the fundamental change to a BSD/*nix base which opens the architecture to creative accessibility, viruses were a matter of time on the Mac. About damn time they came clean and did the responsible thing and admit it isn't invulnerable. If you want a large market share, it will come with a price of making it a target for miscreants.
It all depends on how fast it hits and how much of it makes it to impact. If the future's projected computing power is what we think, it would be possible to project the course of a parabolic orbit that intersects Earth, and then aim it out away from Earth to loop back and meet up head on, taking into account the gravity wells of known entities. THAT would be a serious problem. It may take a while, but if the rocks sent also had self-destruct devices on board or rocket systems to move them off course (or keep them on course) they would essentially be like time bombs. Give in to demands or the rock is gonna hit.
"Hello? Is someone already using this line?"
"Oh yeah, put your tongue right there."
"Where?"
"Who is this?"
You'd expect him to be interrupted at this more.
...could only ever be a problem waiting to happen if undifferentiated application of it were made to totally dissimilar media. This is the problem, and as long as congress allows itself to be bought cheaply and what politician doesn't, it won't change.
We're lucky actually. They could go stupid^2 and say that since the bits must stream through our CD player's circuitry, that it amounts to an unavoidable copying of the data, however temporary and ephemeral, because theoretically you could modify the buffer to copy the stream to another storage device. In that case, they'd demand a per-play fee each and every time. Make no mistake the **AA are equally moronic outfits.
The problem is not that the industry is rightfully defending against losses to thieves, it is that they are defending against theoretical losses based on unreasonable definitions, illogical reasoning, and just plain grandiose imagining. They imagine the most generous and profitable definitions and reasoning, like the insane example above, and then count those imagined might-have-been profits as losses.
They truly are insane. And they are unabashedly greedy in terms of artist abuse, making no secret of the pathetic share allotted to those who truly originate the intellectual property without whom the *AA people would have no income whatsoever. I have no problems ripping off slave-owners with delusions of grandeur.
...that Tor is in and of itself not secure enough. Any traffic passing over it needs intermediary obfuscation of origination and destination of traffic as well as encryption of traffic by the origination and destination separate from the Tor network similar to anonymous remailer chains.
Oh well, thanks to the government, the **AA people, and idiots like this, such networks are coming... and where once terrorists, organized crime, and other ne'er do wells had to pay some geeks for serious work to make secure communications a done deal, they will be able to download an open source package off the net with point and click simplicity that does everything they need and more. Just because the aforementioned dipsticks pushing the trend refused to listen to Princess Leia in Star Wars when she told off Grand Moff Tarkin.
You remember, tighter grip, more systems through your fingers. As in, oppression is counterproductive and carries the seeds of your downfall, and everyone else's...
are generally found on Earth.
Drop-in replacements are needed for certain. You can't have a massive method shift without massive headache. Just doesn't work without eliminating freedom and free will and people kind of don't take to that. Organic grown into place in parallel and weaning of the original until it is gone is the way. Like putting in temporary columns up while replacing a foundation, and then permanent new foundation segments and finally finish. One step at a time without dropping the house into the basement.
However, the end result is still the same. We're burning things. The problem with burning things is not the so-called greenhouse effect which is perfectly natural, cyclical, and guaranteed to keep on going and happening no matter what we do and when it reverses and goes cold we won't be able to stop that either.
The problem is that the processes which led to those unburnt materials invested energy of some kind in the process and further energy was invested in making them so compact and dense. Coal and oil and all that don't happen overnight and neither for that matter does corn or grass. All of it goes back to the sun, and the various novae that spat the elements into space that Earth formed from.
Energy was invested. We recoup the energy by burning. But we have no mechanism for taking the burnt results and un-burning them, investing energy back in the process. That's all that chemical fuels are. An energy storage device not different than a non-recyclable chemical battery that we toss away except we toss the results into the air.
Solar? No. Too diffuse and inefficient and not a storage medium. Batteries? Why when we can do what the sun does to make that energy?
From what I've seen, solid state fusion will be the future but in the meantime I fully expect hysterical superstitious defeatists nonsense to mess up most of my days in between.
But the last thing that should be done is to give one bit more power to government. I find it hysterically tragic that many of the same people who are ready to march on congress to secure rights to pirate DVDs, want every kind of porn unregulated and uncensored, who want the government as far away from them as possible every April like clockwork, still reflexively turn to government and taxation to solve the problems of high fuel prices.
Like the same people who sold you nonexistent solutions to misstated problems over and over for the last several thousand years are going to somehow magically come through and fix this. If you believe that, then why don't you believe in Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the DMCA, and every other idea of theirs you excoriate?
Because you're selfish and hypocritical. You want someone else to fix it, you want someone else to pay the price, you want your way, and you see no problem with wielding the cudgel of government to get your way when it is something you want. Otherwise, you're damn near libertarian anarachists. Hypocrisy thy name is homo sapiens.
Well, the world is not going to go the way you want and it never did and it will be that what happens will do so while you were making other plans. Instead of relying on sleight-of-hand, nonsensical claims, and idiot economics, try relying on your intelligence and cleverness.
You built pyramids with copper saws and wooden mallets. You built rockets to fling yourselves to the moon. I swear, you say you want a Star Trek future of plenty, but you cling to the apron strings of Little House on the Prairie.
...I would have sat up straight and eaten my vegetables but that DLL was corrupted and since you grounded me and took away my Internet privileges so I can't get a replacement from Windows Update. Also, since Tommy hit my hand with the hammer yesterday, my fingers don't work right so I can't enter in the Windows product key to authenticate. Not to mention that little stuck up sister of mine thought it would be soooo funny to take a razor and scape the key sticker off the box and put a Brittney Spears sticker in its place.
I think the future will see the use of trojan/virus techniques to send data. It's already been fairly well proven that stopping botnets is next to impossible given current technologies, attitudes and ideas on the part of administrators and engineers, and most importantly that AI bears not a candle compared to Natural Stupidity.
Forget just VoIP. In the future we'll hide communications networks under multiple layers of encryption inside trojan'd everything that is awfully hard to tell innocent user data from something else. We'll probably also host websites and files that way in a coalescence and then expansion of BT/P2P and anonymous remailer methods but not so much with identifiable clients but instead viral ware that people choose to allow on their machines so as to prevent privacy invasion by government and business.
...who thinks the most amazing part of this is that Autodesk products are still being used?
Let's see this precious "evidence that System V is in Linux" that SCO claims they have. Maybe if they put their money where their mouth is, they'd get to keep more of it.
This is like asking someone to prove the genius of Uwe Boll.
Which is why we need legislation that will fine them for releasing that information.
With a government which already holds itself at immune to its own courts and its own laws as inapplicable to itself, this would be useful exactly how?
The government is impotent and powerless. WalMart can get away with contempt of court as easy as you get away with jaywalking and everyone increasingly knows it.
Welcome to breaking point.
Tax money shouldn't be pumped to the telcos to yet again waste instead of rebuilding critical infrastructure. Instead, the U.S. government should build its own national, public infrastructure to replace the crap that the telcos are trying to pass off as acceptable.
So you'd do this despite the fact that you'd not want all your communications copied by AT&T to the NSA? Despite eight years of privacy invasion by the current administration? Despite Carnivore? Despite initiatives by our government to make all your information open to them whenever? Despite that all of the above happens with the Internet being carried by private companies now? Despite that what you're proposing would mean they'd own the lines, routers, switches, etc. and thus they'd have total control of all information passing on the net within America? Despite 200 plus years of proof that even in our own representative democracy the state absolutely cannot be trusted to do the right thing without eternal vigilance on the part of the citizenry?
What are you smoking and where can I get a loan to afford it?
Yeah, I want to give my Internet infrastructure over to the state where they already abuse their police powers at whimsical will.
Keep spreading the truth people, encryption can make you safer and even if you have nothing to hide, it is still your nothing to hide. If they don't like you hiding your nothing, then that only tells you the truth: the powers that be and the powers that would be don't trust the people in any way and any form of governance which will not trust its people cannot be trusted by its people. Therefore, hide your nothing. Hide it all, jealously guard your privacy and keep on at it until they go into paroxysms of fear, insecurity, and anxiety. Keep it up people. It's your life to lose.
Once again, altogether with Princess Danish-head: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
That boids research in one shot puts to shame all the feeble crap on the Science Channel lately about robotic space exploration attempts. More rugged tools were made by hand by colonials two centuries ago, and knowing the machine trade, I know damn well that we make machine tools capable of withstanding the punishment of the moon or Mars, and with these simple examples, we know we can make them behave intelligently if not actually be intelligent. We have such a bleak and depressing science future mindset compared to the 70s... Thanks for the trip down memory lane though. I loved the use in that short seen on Night Flight.
Foresight has its place, but pandering to a manufactured culture of fear is not foresight.
However, having the foresight to be the one who manufactures the culture of fear can be very profitable if you're also heavily invested in the manufactured solutions to the fears...
Ooops. Did I just state in a single sentence the actual method and practice of politics since time immemorial?
to Grand Moff Tarkin here.
We watch Science Channel and History Channel programs all the time showing off our prodigious engineering and design ingenuity and what do we get? We get disincentives and perverse incentives one after the other from the people who think the popularity contests we call elections are licenses to do whatever they want to the people.
We the people put them there more and more as if we expect and masochistically want them to do us up the backside so we can get angry and rebel more.
The whole shebang is headed for disaster and revolution and everyone involved is intelligent enough to see it, but not wise enough to stop it.
Wait, you're saying they weren't already the same outfit?
On the contrary, the middle class is vanishing, such that of all the things you listed, perhaps only the beer and the TV with football are still affordable for many, many Americans. The SUV and the white picket fence are far out of reach.
Either you don't have a serious job because you won't work hard and smart or you have plenty of money. If you're really middle class, you know this is horsesh*t.
I have an SUV, partially fenced yard, working on the 2.2 kids part, and busting my ass to do so. No one said it would be easy, especially not my dad who did it before me. Just because I don't have money spilling out of my pockets left over after bills does not mean it is unaffordable. I'm doing it AND on a variable mortgage which just jumped a couple months back. AND on a salary well under professional average.
Stop spreading this claptrap about which you know nothing people. We in the middle class are not disappearing. We're doing fine. It could be better, especially if you social theorists went elsewhere and bothered someone else, but we're just fine thank you. At least, we will be till the inevitable tax increases you shove down our throats to pay for everyone else's universal health care making us unable to afford our own...
...Slashdot probes you!
Oddly, this firewall entry:
Date: 10/25 00:27:30 Name: spp_portscan: portscan status from 66.35.250.150: 13 connections across 1 hosts: TCP(13), UDP(0)
Priority: n/a Type: n/a
IP info: n/a:n/a -> n/a:n/a
References: none found
Led to:
[someone@somebox ~]$ host 66.35.250.150
150.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa is an alias for 150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa.
150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer slashdot.org.
[someone@somebox ~]$ whois 66.35.250.150
[Querying whois.arin.net]
[whois.arin.net]
Savvis SAVVIS (NET-66-35-192-0-1)
66.35.192.0 - 66.35.255.255
VA Software SAVV-S234813-4 (NET-66-35-250-0-1)
66.35.250.0 - 66.35.250.255
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-10-23 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
"A 2006 study and review of existing literature, published in Nature, determined that there has been no net increase in solar brightness since the mid 1970s, and that changes in solar output within the past 400 years are unlikely to have played a major part in global warming."
I love how you left out...
It should be stressed, the same report cautions that "Apart from solar brightness, more subtle influences on climate from cosmic rays or the Sun's ultraviolet radiation cannot be excluded, say the authors. However, these influences cannot be confirmed, they add, because physical models for such effects are still too poorly developed."
It isn't the visible brightness, but higher energy radiation, specifically charged particles, that are associated with cloud cover variations on Earth.
If at first you can't succeed in the constitutionally proper venue, use the courts to get your way.
If NY is so serious about wanting to improve the environment, let them shut down NYC and if it is global warming, then let Albany be shuttered to stop the hot air.