The answer is that Xenu would round up his coworkers, put them on some starships shaped like DC-8 airliners, ship them to the distant reaches of the galaxy, and then nuke them into oblivion.
Sounds like good advice to me
The second issue with the "WWXD?" philosophy is more practical. Xenu was an evil galactic overlord. As a galactic overlord, he had lots of resources, in particular, lots of minions and henchmen to round people up and put them on spaceships, and lots of spaceships shaped like DC-8s, and lots of thermonuclear bombs. Unless you have access to similar resources, "WWXD?" is just not practical to apply to your everyday life.
ye of little faith, practice megalomania for enough lifetimes and your turn will come.
But now they know that you entertain the notion of planning terrorism in your brain.... You could be first on the list when they have the mind readers.
If the government suspected someone of plotting in a virtual world they could probably subpoena logs from the ISP, find who else was habitually on line at similar times and monitor future access.
Virtual worlds come about last in the list of options. If you were a terrorist and you wanted to communicates would you:
Talk in a virtual world, where you could be monitored if suspected
Talk in the real world in some random location
Use a off prepaid mobiles, brought for cash
Use heavily encrypted emails, where they would know who you were talking too but not what you said
Post stenographic encrypted images on Flicr (images which hold a hidden coded message, not visible to normal users), where they could not tell what you said or who you sait it to. Possibility of finding out people who regularly checked images, though if it was good porn....
Get a spam company to send a message to millions of people with stenographic encrypted messages or pre-arranged phrases. (other terrorists don't need to regualrly check images)
I am sure that most of you can think up some more "better than second life" means of covert communication.
In Europe we have had locking fuel caps, or flaps only openable from inside the car, for years. In the USA until recently fuel has been so cheap that it wasn't worth the effort of stealing. That's why until recently many cars there did not have lockable fuel caps.
They would have been behind their time literally, at least when they tried to make a pendulum clock! using T=2 *Pi * Sqrt(l/g) they would have produced a pendulum which was too long and therefore slow.
Of course the other agenda they have been working on is to ensure that everyone has done something wrong. Let someone borrow a DVD? Watched a match in a church hall on a big screen? Sorted out a neighbour's computer, and his wife gives you some cakes in return... and neither of you declare the payment in kind on your tax return.
They can always find some excuse to bring you in if they look hard enough.
From TFA: So what would be the destiny of Yahoo's own servers? It's difficult to tell, but it's possible that a switchover would be inevitable.
In other words switchover is not inevitable.... I hate these phrases like the sport commentators' favourate "victory for XXX could be a certainty", and so on.
The RIAA said that the collected to ensure that future artists would receive their incentive to perform. Now we can see that this is just a Maffia cartel, wanting the right to extort money on behalf of the firm.
He may be sort of right about this in that Microsoft probably won't want to fight because as soon as they reveal specifically what code infringes which patents the code will be removed, or prior art found. This has a potential of becoming a "McLibel" with poor programmers visibly stamped on by a multi-billion dollar company.... but with thousands of helpers in the background finding prior art, preparing cases that the patent is obvious etc. It could severely dent Microsoft's war-chest that is much more effectively used against commercial companies.
You should never let people know hen you don't understand an abbreviation. To impress the geeks you should express an opinon even if you don't understand what the hell TFA is going on about. Examples
Could an ejabbered XMMP server really be said to be Twitter-like?
I don't think that Twitter-like systems are the way to go here.
That's really cool, we could really use a Twitter-like enjabered XMMP server here. It will revolutionise computing!
People can switch search-engines every day, but groups not so. How many groups or mailing lists do you belong to? How many of those are yahoo groups. I would be very surprised if anyone belonged to half a dozen groups or more without at least one being yahoo.
Moving a group is difficult, and it need the owner to want to. If you are a member you could set up a rival, but the chances are you would end up talking to yourself. Now suppose those groups switched to Silverlight (for a richer user experience) and required IE7 running on windows to access. This would be a big downer for any competitive desktops.
"In talks" probably mean that no agreement has been reached. They are hoping that the idea of a Google/Yahoo consortium will be worrying enough for Microsoft to increase the offer.
In a place (bank) I worked a branch had a new trainee employee start and forgot to notify the IT department. When they phoned up and let us know we said we would do it as soon as possible. The answer we got was "That's OK, the branch manager has let him use his password for now".
While this really was a clueless trainee someone with the manager's password could authorise over-limit cash withdrawals, reverse transactions, see all sorts of files and make queries on customers that ordinary staff cannot do.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is that Xenu would round up his coworkers, put them on some starships shaped like DC-8 airliners, ship them to the distant reaches of the galaxy, and then nuke them into oblivion.
Sounds like good advice to me
The second issue with the "WWXD?" philosophy is more practical. Xenu was an evil galactic overlord. As a galactic overlord, he had lots of resources, in particular, lots of minions and henchmen to round people up and put them on spaceships, and lots of spaceships shaped like DC-8s, and lots of thermonuclear bombs. Unless you have access to similar resources, "WWXD?" is just not practical to apply to your everyday life.
ye of little faith, practice megalomania for enough lifetimes and your turn will come.
As did many Indians.
Unlike Churchill he did not live in an independent country at the time. Shall we condemn the Tibetans for not resisting Bin Laden?
Is that to prevent people developing an alternative to petrol?
All you need to do is look for the person who appears to write nonsense on Slashdot.... Oh.
But now they know that you entertain the notion of planning terrorism in your brain.... You could be first on the list when they have the mind readers.
Sure ... See you there later .... oops we've given the game away
My bad!
I suppose there is always the time that you must be in a London in the morning and a Sydney meeting in the afternoon.
Virtual worlds come about last in the list of options. If you were a terrorist and you wanted to communicates would you:
- Talk in a virtual world, where you could be monitored if suspected
- Talk in the real world in some random location
- Use a off prepaid mobiles, brought for cash
- Use heavily encrypted emails, where they would know who you were talking too but not what you said
- Post stenographic encrypted images on Flicr (images which hold a hidden coded message, not visible to normal users), where they could not tell what you said or who you sait it to. Possibility of finding out people who regularly checked images, though if it was good porn....
- Get a spam company to send a message to millions of people with stenographic encrypted messages or pre-arranged phrases. (other terrorists don't need to regualrly check images)
I am sure that most of you can think up some more "better than second life" means of covert communication.Combining both posts gives the obvious solution. Let them introduce global ID numbers
Then get your state to legislate that your ID is just the first digit.
Trademark law isn't hard and fast but the basis of it is that when you register a mark, people can't use one that is similar to it.
This happened near me - a local kebab shop called itself "McDoner Kebab" and was forced to change the name by a rather larger outfit.
In Europe we have had locking fuel caps, or flaps only openable from inside the car, for years. In the USA until recently fuel has been so cheap that it wasn't worth the effort of stealing. That's why until recently many cars there did not have lockable fuel caps.
They would have been behind their time literally, at least when they tried to make a pendulum clock! using T=2 *Pi * Sqrt(l/g) they would have produced a pendulum which was too long and therefore slow.
Of course the other agenda they have been working on is to ensure that everyone has done something wrong. Let someone borrow a DVD? Watched a match in a church hall on a big screen? Sorted out a neighbour's computer, and his wife gives you some cakes in return ... and neither of you declare the payment in kind on your tax return.
They can always find some excuse to bring you in if they look hard enough.
Shopworkers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your change.
From TFA: So what would be the destiny of Yahoo's own servers? It's difficult to tell, but it's possible that a switchover would be inevitable.
... I hate these phrases like the sport commentators' favourate "victory for XXX could be a certainty", and so on.
In other words switchover is not inevitable.
The RIAA said that the collected to ensure that future artists would receive their incentive to perform. Now we can see that this is just a Maffia cartel, wanting the right to extort money on behalf of the firm.
It still rules out people on linux, OS-X, etc. This is the main aim, to make the web a "microsoft" web.
He may be sort of right about this in that Microsoft probably won't want to fight because as soon as they reveal specifically what code infringes which patents the code will be removed, or prior art found. This has a potential of becoming a "McLibel" with poor programmers visibly stamped on by a multi-billion dollar company .... but with thousands of helpers in the background finding prior art, preparing cases that the patent is obvious etc. It could severely dent Microsoft's war-chest that is much more effectively used against commercial companies.
You should never let people know hen you don't understand an abbreviation. To impress the geeks you should express an opinon even if you don't understand what the hell TFA is going on about. Examples
Could an ejabbered XMMP server really be said to be Twitter-like?
I don't think that Twitter-like systems are the way to go here.
That's really cool, we could really use a Twitter-like enjabered XMMP server here. It will revolutionise computing!
I prefer the slavic czemp.
People can switch search-engines every day, but groups not so. How many groups or mailing lists do you belong to? How many of those are yahoo groups. I would be very surprised if anyone belonged to half a dozen groups or more without at least one being yahoo.
Moving a group is difficult, and it need the owner to want to. If you are a member you could set up a rival, but the chances are you would end up talking to yourself. Now suppose those groups switched to Silverlight (for a richer user experience) and required IE7 running on windows to access. This would be a big downer for any competitive desktops.
"In talks" probably mean that no agreement has been reached. They are hoping that the idea of a Google/Yahoo consortium will be worrying enough for Microsoft to increase the offer.
In a place (bank) I worked a branch had a new trainee employee start and forgot to notify the IT department. When they phoned up and let us know we said we would do it as soon as possible. The answer we got was "That's OK, the branch manager has let him use his password for now".
While this really was a clueless trainee someone with the manager's password could authorise over-limit cash withdrawals, reverse transactions, see all sorts of files and make queries on customers that ordinary staff cannot do.