Has anyone else noticed how "troll" is being used interchangebly with "lawyer" lately?
Come on, let's be fair to the trolls. It's down right insulting to push them that low. You should call someone a lawyer if that's really what they are, don't try to sugar coat it with "troll."
I guess now when I'm showing price comparisons to family & friends who know nothing about computers, it won't be so confusing to try to explain the different architectures to them.
This way, they can look at the specs and compare them. Because 1 GHz on an Intel Core Duo is the same as 1 GHz on an Intel Core Duo. No more, "This is a RISC PowerPC architecture, the numbers on P4 and G5 aren't comparable."
Of course, I'll now have to delve into the finer details about how well OSX versus Windows utilizes the hardware and also the support of the applications/peripherals for these machines.
When you consider suggesting a machine to a friend or relative, you have to be careful. The wrong choice could put you on tech support for the next 3 years of your life. I can't decide which I'd recommend for them but in the end, I'm trying to minimize how many times they're going to call me. If I go Mac, they'll call me about programs they used to use but can't find for Mac. If they use Windows, they'll call me about their blue screens of death. What to do?
First off, this article is pure bullshit spin. They mention several points about a virus and the whole time they attempt to spin it the reader as a "good intentions" virus--even comparing it to Charles Bronson. The Slashdot title reads "Trojan Deletes Your Porn, Music & Warez" but it doesnt, if you RTFA:
The Windows Trojan/Erazer-A Trojan looks at default folders for downloading MP3, AVI, MPEG, WMV, Gif, Zip graphic and video files, and wipes anything it finds with these extensions in the target locations.
Gosh, I have plenty of MP3, AVI, MPEG, WMV, Gif, Zip graphic and video files... that aren't porn, illegal music & warez.
What they fail to mention is that people who use P2P networks often want those files that they've collected. So this virus is destroying something they want.
I mean, who installs eMule or Bit Torrent and then wishes that one day someone would come and save them from the files they've downloaded? The very idea is ludicrous.
I use Bit Torrent. If a virus were to come and delete everything I've gotten from it (trailors, WoW patches, an odd assortment of legal videos and mp3s, etc), I don't know about you, but I would be right pissed. This isn't protection and it doesn't seem to discriminate from virile files and good files so it's pure and utter destruction.
The only thing "beneficial" is seen from the eyes of the RIAA or MPAA.
"I don't think this was written with good intentions because it attempts to turn off security," said Cluley. There would be nothing more dangerous than for people to become accustomed to the idea of "beneficial malware" because that might create a false sense of security.
You "don't think" this was written with good intentions? A virus comes onto your machine, disables security & starts to delete files in directories with a certain naming convention. What more to do you need to say, "holy hell, I've got a freaking virus!"?
After the tests, representatives of Fedora, Linspire and Novell told me that Sony Vaios are known to have compatibility problems with Linux.
Yeah, I'm not impressed with Sony Vaios. It seems like they were designed to run Windows and be really small and light. They happen to be very good at those qualities so they appear attractive to most consumers with deep pockets?
Did this man do any searches for Linux on Vaios? A lot of laptops have special sites out there that aim to make the transition easy for users... the Vaio is no different.
Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't try Mandrake/Mandriva for his laptop. I found that one to be the most friendly for my Dell back in college but perhaps things have changed?
The Linux systems could make sense for users who just want to send and receive email and surf the Web without the need for multimedia programs, or to perform home-office tasks without a lot of interaction with Microsoft systems.
I think the users just have to have the patience to go out there and find the multimedia programs. They doexist, you know.
Claims by some Linux publishers that anybody can easily switch to Linux from Windows seem totally oversold.
I don't think that these claims have been made. I've seen publishers encourage it but I haven't seen a marketing push to claim anyone can do it. Some people don't want to climb more than one learning curve in their life. Those are the people that can't make the switch.
Whether or not we're in the midst of another boom-bust cycle in technology is a matter of fierce debate.
You know what else is in fierce debate?
Whether or not Greenspan does any research before he starts doing is patented 'quarter point shuffle' with the Fed's interest rates.
I'm pretty sure his "research" amounts to nothing more than throwing down chicken bones and reading tea leaves--I hope there's no partisan political agenda behind it.
We saw this "bubble" phenomenon once and now everyone's predicting it again. Unfortunately, economics is so crazy that past performance doesn't dictate future performance on a large scale. There are simply too many variables to try to compare scenarios based on statistics even in the same country during the same era.
Washington Post: Hello, do you have a minute to take a survey? Citizen: Of course I do! Washington Post: Great! We were just wondering whether you're concerned with the recent news of the NSA? Citizen: You mean the fact that they are collecting the phone call records made and recieved by each citizen of the United States? Washington Post: Yes, probably even this very phone call right now... how do you feel about that? Citizen: I'm fuckin' pissed! Washington Post: So you're conncerned? You know, on our last poll about the NSA, the one where we covered them routing and recording phone calls, people sure answered differently. Citizen: Wait a second... you mean they can record transcripts of phone calls? Washington Post: Yes, probably even this very phone call right now... we do use AT&T. Citizen: Ah, I've changed my mine. I am completely fine with this acceptable form of combating terrorism. Sic Heil Bush & all that jazz. I love my country and would sacrifice every bit of privacy for it. Goodbye!
... no definitive link had been proved between mobile phone tower radiation and cancer."
I wouldn't say that's entirely accurate. I seem to remember the problem with the research being a while back that they were exposing cell tissue to thousands or millions of times the amount of radiation that a cell phone produces. I'm not sure if a cell phone tower scales to be thousands of times that of a cell phone but if it does... there might be a legit concern here.
I believe that an SAR (specific absorption rate) of 10 Watts per kilogram is the safety limit set by the NRPB. I guess they need to do tests as to whether the people experienced this from the towers. Cell phones have a SAR of about 0.2 on average. As always, Wikipedia provides a great reference to this subject.
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
And as USA Today reported:
"The board of directors and Wally mutually agreed that his decision to resign at this time for personal reasons was in the best interest of all parties," said John Lauer, Diebold's non-executive chairman of the board.
The announcement was made after the stock market closed. Diebold stock fell nearly 2%, or 73 cents, to $37 in after-hours trading. The stock has traded between $33.10 and $57.81 in the past year.
BBV released a a nice guide to how all this works. There appears to be a software access button (bottom of page 11):
The TSx also has an unmarked button hidden in the casing. On the circuit board, this switch is labeled "battery test". The switch is physically similar to many reset buttons, necessitating application of substantial force to press the button, requiring it to be depressed by about 1/5 - 1/6 inch in order to activate the switch. This switch is also software accessible. It is completely accessible for all voters in the standard voting booth configuration. The logic behind the button is unknown, but for an attacker it presents yet another way to interact with the machine, and an exceptionally convenient button switch for an attack designed to be triggered by a voter.
Well, this seems very insecure to me. BBV criticizes the three layer architecture and states that it would be very easy to target it three different ways (at each layer):
- The application can be imagined as written instructions on a paper. If it is possible to replace these instructions, as it indeed seems, then the attacker can do whatever he wishes as long as the instructions are used.
- The operating system is the man reading the instructions. If he can be brainwashed according to the wishes of the attacker, then even correct instructions on the paper solve nothing. The man can decide to selectively do something different than the instructions. New paper instructions come and go, and the attacker can decide which instructions to follow because the operating system itself is under his control.
- The boot loader is the supreme entity that creates the man, the world and everything in it. In addition to creating, the boot loader also defines what is allowed in the world and delegates part of that responsibility to the operating system. If the attacker can replace the boot loader, trying to change the paper instructions or the man reading them does not work. The supreme entity will always have the power to replace the man with his own favorite, or perhaps he just modifies the man's eyes and ears: Every time the man sees yellow, the supreme being makes him think he is seeing brown. The supreme entity can give the man two heads and a secret magic word to trigger switching the heads.
In the world of the Diebold touch-screen voting terminals, all of these attacks look possible.
The instructions (applications and files) can be changed. The man reading the files (Windows CE Operating System and the libraries) can be changed. Or the supreme entity (boot loader) can be changed, giving total control over the operating system and the files even if they are "clean software."
Specific conceptual information is contained in the report, with details and filenames in the high-security version which is being delivered under cryptographic and/or personal signature controls to the EAC, Diebold CEO Tom Swidarski and CERT.
In addition, the casing of the TSx machines lack basic seals and security, and within the casing additional exploitations are found.
The article talks about a "standard tool you can buy at any computer store" and I believe this is referring to a PCMCIA card (what you use in laptops). I guess these are used to boot, upgrade & ready the machines for use. They do not go into detail but I wager that using a PCMCIA card with a USB port on it, you could load your own data from a thumb/pen drive. This would be small and easy to carry in. If you had access to it outside of the voting window, you could potentially use a PCMCIA card that functions as a NIC (probably with RJ45 cable port) to use cross over cable and a laptop for a 'live' attack.
As well as creating diesel from waste products, the process cleans water...
Correct you are, I was searching around for that local government's PDF on their sewage ponds. I was wondering what the area of pond was exposed to air and whether or not this had any ill effects on residents. What I found was an interesting abstract from the Assets & Services List of the Marlborough District and from P.04/05.665:
In a report presented by Mark Wheeler he advised that residents in the Dillons Point and Hardings Road area had recently been experiencing sewage odour problems. These odours occur when treatment pond dissolved oxygen levels are insufficient to break down the organic wastes. The odour problem had followed this year's wine vintage when the ponds receive their annual peak organic loading.
Growth in wine processing in the Riverlands and Cloudy Bay industrial areas had been forecast. It was noted that winery growth was a key factor in Council's decision to purchase the former PPCS sewerage and water assets. However the speed of that growth and the consequent additional loadings created had exceeded expectations.
Perhaps that algae will also help solve the problem of the annual wine dumpings?
I still haven't found anything that states how large an area/volume of pond they must have in order to produce one million litres/year. It is also interesting to note that they require aerating the pond... how much electricity that consumes, I'm not sure...
Japanese fans are currently being asked to submit their desired characters and themes to Nintendo's website, the most popular of which will be incorporated into the game. It is currently unknown if this will eventually be opened for overseas fans as well.
The site where you can vote (Japanese only I guess) and the IGN article on it.
The XBox 360 had a mild welcome in Japan... Is Nintendo playing favorites in order to win a solid monopoly on the Japanese market?
Maybe I'm just jealous. I want to vote for Bub & Bob (Bubble Bobble) as a counter pair to fight those damned Ice Climbers!
What an awesome tool for a government agency to have!
You know what I love? Scenarios! How about this one: You're arrested as a suspect for a crime you didn't commit. The government doesn't have anything on you except that there are no other suspects or witnesses. What they do have, is a network of vertices (phones) and edges (calls) spanning the past year of your life. They also have a list of "dirty" nodes or telephone users who have a rap sheet or ties to anti-American groups.
Thanks to Dijkstra's & the Bellman-Ford algorithms, it's a hop skip and a jump to a prosecutor saying "we have records showing you called your mother on such and such date prompting her to call her hair dresser who has been forwarding money to his family living in Mexico that has ties to Islamic Extremist groups!"
Farfetched? Maybe. But you don't have to be a Sci-Fi author to imagine crazy abuses of this data.
In the eyes of the government, we are all innocent until proven guilty. This could easily be turned into a data mining tool making some of us "less innocent" than others. And frankly, I'm not looking forward to that day.
<tinhat> Imagine a time and place where you have a security rating... you approach an airport terminal and hand them your ID card (or scan your arm) but you can't board the plane because you've been making too many phone calls to your friends who happen to have a rap sheet. </tinhat>
So initially we used coal to power steam engines. Why? Because there were literally tons of it laying underground. So we strip mined America for a couple centuries.
It's long been known that oil (petroleum or organic) would fuel fire. And it was discovered that refining it lowered it stability and made it explosive. But where was an abundance of oil? Why, also underneath the ground.
The fact of the matter is that our energy concerns can't be solved by anything that requires more energy to make (insert corn ethanol reference here) than it produces.
So now we need to figure out how to use hydrogen and many car companies have done that but the form that hydrogen abounds in is gas--not liquid. And most hydrogen powered cars require refilling a compressed hydrogen tank. But to make this hydrogen requires electricity and this electricity requires some fuel or energy to make in the beginning...
I think the real challenge here should be "just hydrogen" as an alternative fuel but instead "anything we got a lot of lying around in a ready form."
This was posted on Wikipedia quite sometime ago as a rumor. I use them for a lot of my information (old and new).
In addition to Thottbot (quests) and Allakhazam (pricing and searching), a lot of the WoW Wikis out there provide for me a lot of my World of Warcraft information.
It seems they're introducing more "middle styled" races that are akin to the otherside. Perhaps they're planning to allow draenei to be warlock and blood elves to be palladins? This is all speculation but I know that I, for one, am very much looking forward to this expansion.
If I were a customer of a company that had the mentality "anyone that helped developed the code is a threat to its security" then I would find another vendor--and fast!
There are practices and standards for developing secure code. If your programmers follow these, then even their knowledge of the source shouldn't matter if they go rogue or want to have fun in their free time. Look at Linux. An operating system used by millions and every hacker in the world can get their hands on the source code. Why don't we see many viruses for Linux? Because it was implemented well. Perhaps companies should start to realize that if they produce code for Win32 applications, they're going to have to resort to the same tactics that Microsoft uses: Don't let the source code out or its true flaws will be revealed and exploited!
For the consumers of these companies, be wary that your product is only as secure as the company's relationship with its developers--kind of scary considering they're keeping them quiet via threat of lawsuit.
Do I take pride in my code? Sure I do. Is it world class? Probably not.
I'm also a gainfully employed and working on my masters in--you guessed it--computer science. And I log on to Slashdot today to find someone saying that my country failed to 'represent' at some "TopCoder" world-wide coding contest.
Oh well. I don't think I would need to study for this competition, in college I never studied for a computer science exam. It was my theory that if I couldn't deduce the problem on the fly, then I shouldn't be coding at all. Coding isn't about regurgitation or memorization, it's about how you instinctively attack a problem. Certain courses can't make you memorize stuff to be a better coder but they can give you a bag of tricks or arsenol with which to attack problems. The stuff I hate about computer science--documentation, systems integration, etc.--that stuff is memorization.
I'm busy and I would bet that our nations top coders are also busy. We don't have a month of vacation a year and if we did, we'd probably spend it around finals time to relax while our exams are hammering us.
Sorry, Carl Bialik from WSJ (who has had 20 of his own stories posted on Slashdot since March 14! <sarcasm>For Christ's sake, just give Slashdot's frontpage a "Carl RSS news feed" already!</sarcasm>) but I wasn't there to represent my country.
I noticed that it was held in Las Vegas. You know what would be interesting? If they held it the same weekend as DefCon in Las Vegas.
I know this sounds hilarious and backward but I believe most of the best coders thrive on the "bad guy" image and would hate to win a competition that makes them look like an AMD (TopCoder sponser) poster boy tool. They'd rather have their hacking alias spray painted all over the RIAA's frontpage than a blue ribbon at a coding contest. Does anti-social behavior come hand in hand with gifted coding? It would seem so, but I haven't done/seen any studies on it.
So what if I went to this competition and was "Sixth best coder"? I probably wouldn't get much for prizes, my coworkers would just view it as proof that I am utterly socially inept, I would spend money and time on the trip with little to gain. I don't see my employer encouraging it or offering raises based on it. Sounds like fun but I'm not going out of my way to attend it.
The Growing Problem of Alzheimer's
on
Visual Test Diagnosis
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This story might seem insignificant but what you don't realize is that Alzheimer's is a growing problem. Like many things, as the baby boomers begin to retire it will increase. People are living longer and, as a result, the genes responsible for Alzheimer's are being exposed. When evolution shaped us, there was no way to naturally select genes that didn't have Alzheimer's traits as our species was most likely dead by the time we hit that age.
As I understand it, Alzheimer's is caused by a twisted or malformed protein (beta amyloid) that starts to cause synapses of the brain to clump too close or cause their dendrites not to touch other synapses. Resulting in huge cognitive problems. There has also been research linking it to lipids and cholesterol intake.
What makes this research interesting is that I believe the idea in the field was that the gene mutation could be virus induced or suspected to not begin until one cell grew with the characteristics and successfully multiplied (often later in life). I'm not a medical researcher so don't quote me on any of this.
Unfortunately, since many of these baby boomers are fairly wealthy, more research will be going into Alzheimer's disease than AIDS as it will most likely be easier to market in developed nations. You can call me a conspiracy theorist but that's my honest opinion. Michael Chrichton pointed it out in Jarrasic Park when the park was built instead of something more useful like a cure for AIDS. You can charge people whatever you want to see dinosaurs but you can't charge them whatever you want to save their lives, it just looks immoral to do so.
Gene research is often the most politically frowned upon form of medical research but necessity breeds innovation... er... understanding. It will be interesting to see how far stem cell research and the like are allowed to proceed given a vast aging population in the United States. Currently, I've seen Alzheimer's research being done in the form of mammalian brain tissue introduced to a herpes virus that has previously infected cells which had the Alzheimer's gene. They then infect the new brain tissue but do not kill it (as herpes is not normally lethal to cells).
So what you're saying is, you'd prefer that Ragnaros emerge, kill all of the healers in the raid, then begin picking off the DPS one at a time as they die from a lack of heals? Because he keeps a log of what has happened in the past and he realizes that it's the healers keeping the others alive, so logically he would kill them first? Or, he sees the same 40 people as last week, and decides not to emerge at all, thus denying your guild the loot from another kill?
That sounds like fun to you?
Yes, that's precisely what I said... to the letter.
What if Ragnaros changed his strategy (not so that he constantly targeted the healers--because there are rules of aggro in effect in WoW) but what if he followed a markov model built off of spell/counterspell? What if Ragnaros had a little bit of unpredictability built into him?
What if he slowly remembers which characters (yes, by name) are spec'ed and drinks resistance potions according to their specialty class of magic? This would stop people from camping and grind-looting him (I know camping isn't possible in instances but guilds do the same instance run over and over with the difficulty the same everytime).
I don't know who Ragnaros is but if he has the ability to move around, why don't they have him become more frantic or hostile if he's seen the same people and remembers them?
You'll noticed that I said you will find heuristics that make it too hard (like targeting healers first or not emerging) and you have to purposely dumb it down to meet your user's needs.
I said use your imagination and make things interesting--not figure out how to make NPCs afraid of conflict... just more wise in their choice of engagement or more wise in their choice of moves.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will target the two extremes of games. We have game type I in which the game space is very much finite and complete search trees are exploitable and can easily be enumerated.
Let us take the simple game of tic-tac-toe (three by three) as our game space. Not too hard. Tic-tac-toe, checkers, cognac, are popular games that fall in this category. And when you use AI to its full advantage, the computer rarely loses.
As we move towards type II games, we see games like chess or go where the game space is too large to search but still 'algorithms' (or heuristics) can be defined that prune the tree space or match/strive patterns out of raw moves. Look up tables are also useful but not really "AI" in the strictest of sense.
A full fledged type II game would be something like Warcraft or a complex computer game in which the internal engine of the playing board (server in this case) has an innumerable amount of states that it can exist in.
The NPCs and AI in games like Doom or even Halo are still fairly simple. They rely on heuristics and Euclidean distances (conceptually within the game) to overcome their opponents. If they are faced with obstacles, they deviate from their path.
Now you ask me what I would like to see. I have very finite desires and I will list them here:
AI that learns. I am so sick of AI not keeping a log of encounters. There are many learning algorithms out there and none of them apply to full emersion games (like SWG or WoW) and its because there are too many variables--too many parameters to build the small dimensional vector fields of the Win or Learn Fast (WoLF) algorithm. This isn't the only kind of learning though, what about statistical analysis of prior opponents? "I'm a level 54 mage encountering a level 52 warrior, my odds of survival are x% based on past encounters with warriors two levels below me..." Yes, it's pre-canned statistical analysis but things like this could seriously act as a good heuristic for many games.
If you reduce the game space or find some really good heuristic (as in the above), dumb it down. Meet the user's pleasure level. It should be a challenge but not such a challenge that victory is unattainable.
Use your imagination. That's all I'm going to say about that one. There is no cookbook for heuristics... learn to throw things at the user.
Introduce long term "bounty hunter" style AI. I would enjoy an AI that sleeps and is constrained like I am. Introduce simple work parsers to our enemies. The closer you can come to interacting with me on the level of a real human, the more I'm going to like it. I know there are robots out there that understand basic human speech, why can't there be games where we receive phone calls or e-mails from assassins in real life? I know this sounds ridiculous, but make me afraid of my foe outside the game. Get in my head.
Introduce random variables. I don't care if you have to build in mechanisms to your game that are illogical so that the AI sometimes goofs up. All humans are fallible at a certain point and if you have differing levels of predictability in your AI, the user will love it.
In the end, my opinion is that the largest deficiency for game AI is that it fails the Turing Test.
Horribly.
I can easily tell that I'm not playing another human.
I think that the Wiki is really in its infant stage as there's not much on it. A lot of times, don't they take a huge body of documents and then write an ingestor application to seed a serious Wiki?
The most interesting thing on the site is the research style paper entitled "Peer to Patent": Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform by Beth Simone Noveck. There's an insane amount of footnotes on the first opening pages and it is a PDF so I will repost the abstract:
The patent system is broken. The Constitution intended for patents to foster innovation and the promotion of progress in the useful arts. Instead, the Patent Office creates uncertainty and monopoly. Underpaid and overwhelmed examiners struggle under the burden of 350,000 applications per year and a mounting backlog of 600,000. Increasingly patents are approved for unmerited inventions. What if we could make it easier to ensure that only the most worthwhile inventions got twenty years of monopoly rights? What if we could offer a way to protect the inventor's investment while still safeguarding the marketplace of ideas from bad inventions? What if we could make informed decisions about scientifically complex problems before the fact, rather than trying to reform the system ex post? What if we could harness collective intelligence to replace bureaucracy?
This Article argues that we should reform the patent system by re-designing the institution of patent examination. Our existing legal mechanisms for awarding the patent monopoly are constructed around the outdated assumption that only expert bureaucrats can produce dispassionate decisions in the public interest. Building upon what we have learned from online and off-line systems of collaboration, we can now use the tools available to combine the wisdom of expert scientific communities of practice with the legal determinations of a trained Patent Office staff.
This Article proposes the creation of a peer review online system to help the Patent Examiner find the right prior art and access those experts who can advise on how to apply it. This new mechanism for collaborative expertise provides an avenue for reform that requires minimal statutory change while improving the quality of patents. We have arrived at a unique moment in history when four factors converge to make this reform possible: first, the state of patenting has become so problematic as to meet with almost universal opprobrium; second, patent applications are published after eighteen months independent of grant, making it possible to consider open peer review; third, we now have the technology to make peer review on this scale possible; and fourth, we have experience both with offline peer review and with online systems for collaborative decision making that provide the empirical understanding of how to re-construct our intellectual property institutions. This Article not only argues for such an institutional re-design, it provides a blueprint for the pilot that the United States Patent Office has agreed to implement. This proposal has implications beyond the patent process. It may enable us to contribute to the design of other social systems that depend upon the collaboration of experts across a distance, providing ways to improve policymaking, deepen democracy and rethink our fundamental assumptions about governance.
As you can see, it's a pretty far-reaching and very hopeful aim at fixing something that the vast majority of our community, Slashdot, view as a broken system.
So there you have it. Something is broken, here's the proposed solution now let's see if it works. The only possible show stopper I see here is that I'm not so sure it would benefit anyone to join this proposed community of "patent clerks." They are hoping for an army of people to read over patents and notice similarities or infringements for proposed patents. The Wiki's answer to my concer
First off, I wish Warner Brothers would get it through their head that if they are to compete with piracy, they have to price the movies as such.
If they price them as much as the hardcopies, who's going to buy them? Nobody. Your pirates are trying to escape high prices & your regular DVD buyers are going to balk at the offer for the fact that they could order a nice shiny cased DVD off amazon for the same price.
I highly doubt anyone will use this service if they keep the prices on par with the DVDs. If they offer them at even half price, then you might see some movement from both sides (pirates and DVD buyers) to that middle ground and hopefully recoup some of your losses from the pirates.
Offer downloads so cheap that you run the pirates out of business but leave quality lacking so true fans will always buy the DVDs.
I don't really care for coverage of coverage of a device.
For those of you who wish to read the original Time Article I was able to read every page without a log in. Why that wasn't linked in the story, I'm not sure.
Unlike the hollow Gamespot article, this one offers a much more thorough and deeper look into games such as:
Video games are an unusual medium in that they carry a heavy stigma among nongamers. Not everybody likes ballet, but most nonballet fans don't accuse ballet of leading to violent crime and mental backwardness. Video games aren't so lucky. There's a sharp divide between gamers and nongamers, and the result is a market that, while large and devoted--last year video-game software and hardware brought in $27 billion--is also deeply stagnant. Its borders are sharply defined, and they're not expanding.
And:
Of course, hardware is only half the picture. The other half is the games themselves. "We created a task force internally at Nintendo," Iwata says, "whose objective was to come up with games that would attract people who don't play games." Last year they set out to design a game for the elderly. Amazingly, they succeeded. Brain Age is a set of electronic puzzles (including Sudoku) that purports to keep aging minds nimble. It was released for one of Nintendo's portable platforms, the Nintendo DS, last year. So far, it has sold 2 million copies, many of them to people who had never bought a game before.
There's a lot of good original information inside that article that Gamespot doesn't seem to think is interesting.
Frankly, I enjoy the idea of the controller changing. I feel that the industry has been plagued with bad hardware and also the fear to step away from the norm. The name and design of this system both do that... although it may introduce a risk of failure, it sure is a breath of fresh air.
I feel similarly about the music industry and that's why enjoy bands like the Arcade Fire that introduce instruments like the accordion with straight rock music to escape the guitar + bass + drums = band template. I like to think of myself as open-minded and I'll remain that way until I can experience the Wii first hand.
Furthermore, I'm shocked that Slashdot had the courage to post something that wasn't only making fun of the Wii for it's name! Could it be that we're actually going to get to read about its performance and abilities instead of just griping about its poor name choice? That's outlandish!
I'm just relieved that the battle of two bazillion dollar companies turned out well. Phew.
I hope that was sarcasm although it does not convey well over the internet. I'm guessing you either mean that you really didn't care about this case or that you are a genuine fan of Apple (computers) instead of Apple (albums). Either way, that was a peculiar use of the word 'well.'
When two powerful companies go head to head, I'm rarely rooting for either of them as they usually have unlimited funds. If you would have considered a huge settlement or the lawsuit being carried out "bad" then I must wonder why you allow the laws that create these lawsuits to remain in the first place.
I enjoy The Beatles' music but I could honestly care less about their merchandising and music publisher. In fact, I would wager that the material aspects of their lives and the selling of their works are what in the end ruined them. For that reason, I dislike Apple Corps.
I enjoy the fact that OSX has Bourne-Again SHell (BASH) capabilities (correct me if I'm wrong) although I hate their pricing and closed machine mentality--though that may change with x86 architecture. If I want to slap another stick of RAM into my machine, I should be able to without being a licensed Apple technician.
In the end, I suffer the naïve shortcomings of one who has to believe in the justice system. Most countries in the world have laws against breaching restricted agreements. Which is what Apple is charging Apple of doing. I found this excerpt from an article of the original coverage of this case:
It is the third time the two well-known brands have been to court over the computer company's use of the Apple name.
The first dispute was resolved in 1981, when Apple Computer agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to Apple Corps, and Steve Jobs, head of the computer firm, agreed to restrict the use of the brand he founded to computer products only. Jobs is a Beatles fan -- but has never had the rights to sell the band's music on iTunes.
In 1989, Apple Corps again sued Apple Computer, this time over the company's use and sale of music-related software. The case settled in 1991 with a payment of $27m and another restrictive agreement.
However, in September 2003, Apple Corps filed suit again, over "the use by Apple Computer of the word 'Apple' and apple logos in conjunction with its new application for downloading pre-recorded music from the internet".
That new application -- iTunes -- has now sold over a billion downloads.
Apple Corps argues that iTunes is in breach of the restrictive agreement between the two companies and infringes upon its trademarks. Apple Computer argues that iTunes is a mechanism allowing "data transmission" and that downloads are permitted in terms of the agreement as they are "data transfers", according to reports.
This was a valid case and was brought to court, the result was decided and I'm happy that the justice system "works." I would argue that we take this in as unbiased a manner as possible, the case turned out neither 'well' nor 'ill' and would have been just the same to me if the prosecution had won. I think that the former settlements show that Apple Computers knows they are at fault for use of this name. I also think they knew that they did not violate their prior agreements and the court also agreed with them.
If you hate the laws, spend your lives trying to get them changed. Do not hate the companies that use the laws in their favor, hate the government that enforces the laws. I maintain my trust in the system of courts and therefore any case in which a decision is made is just as 'well' for me as if the opposite decision had been found.
I'm going to throw out this warning that this article was not fairly summarized by Slashdot.
I will preemptively state that UFO does not necessarily mean extraterrestrial technology or not from this planet. In the raw form of the acronym, it means simple that there is an Unidentified Flying Object. There are most likely hundreds of types of aircraft that governments around the world would refuse to classify due to a need to keep their enemies in the dark (national security).
From the article:
Gary McKinnon: I was in search of suppressed technology, laughingly referred to as UFO technology. I think it's the biggest kept secret in the world because of its comic value, but it's a very important thing.
He interchangeably uses "suppressed technology" with "UFO technology." I'm certain the United States Government has tons of suppressed technology as well as any other government for obvious reasons.
I should finish the quote, however:
Old-age pensioners can't pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.
Ok, that last bit about free energy, you can go ahead and call him a nut job. And then there's also this:
I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen.
But what came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made.
Yeah, Gary, it sure is crazy how you can mess with the color quality and resolution of an image to make it look like my family picture is really some image a green gelatinous blob that eats people.
Firstly, because of what I was looking for, I think I was morally correct. Even though I regret it now, I think the free energy technology should be publicly available.
Uh, I only heard a story about a blimp above the earth's atmosphere. Where was the story where you saw a device that produced unlimited amounts of energy?
"In my house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer Simpson
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I agree with Whiney.
Has anyone else noticed how "troll" is being used interchangebly with "lawyer" lately?
Come on, let's be fair to the trolls. It's down right insulting to push them that low. You should call someone a lawyer if that's really what they are, don't try to sugar coat it with "troll."
I guess now when I'm showing price comparisons to family & friends who know nothing about computers, it won't be so confusing to try to explain the different architectures to them.
This way, they can look at the specs and compare them. Because 1 GHz on an Intel Core Duo is the same as 1 GHz on an Intel Core Duo. No more, "This is a RISC PowerPC architecture, the numbers on P4 and G5 aren't comparable."
Of course, I'll now have to delve into the finer details about how well OSX versus Windows utilizes the hardware and also the support of the applications/peripherals for these machines.
When you consider suggesting a machine to a friend or relative, you have to be careful. The wrong choice could put you on tech support for the next 3 years of your life. I can't decide which I'd recommend for them but in the end, I'm trying to minimize how many times they're going to call me. If I go Mac, they'll call me about programs they used to use but can't find for Mac. If they use Windows, they'll call me about their blue screens of death. What to do?
What they fail to mention is that people who use P2P networks often want those files that they've collected. So this virus is destroying something they want.
I mean, who installs eMule or Bit Torrent and then wishes that one day someone would come and save them from the files they've downloaded? The very idea is ludicrous.
I use Bit Torrent. If a virus were to come and delete everything I've gotten from it (trailors, WoW patches, an odd assortment of legal videos and mp3s, etc), I don't know about you, but I would be right pissed. This isn't protection and it doesn't seem to discriminate from virile files and good files so it's pure and utter destruction.
The only thing "beneficial" is seen from the eyes of the RIAA or MPAA.
You "don't think" this was written with good intentions? A virus comes onto your machine, disables security & starts to delete files in directories with a certain naming convention. What more to do you need to say, "holy hell, I've got a freaking virus!"?
Did this man do any searches for Linux on Vaios? A lot of laptops have special sites out there that aim to make the transition easy for users
Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't try Mandrake/Mandriva for his laptop. I found that one to be the most friendly for my Dell back in college but perhaps things have changed? I think the users just have to have the patience to go out there and find the multimedia programs. They do exist, you know. I don't think that these claims have been made. I've seen publishers encourage it but I haven't seen a marketing push to claim anyone can do it. Some people don't want to climb more than one learning curve in their life. Those are the people that can't make the switch.
Whether or not Greenspan does any research before he starts doing is patented 'quarter point shuffle' with the Fed's interest rates.
I'm pretty sure his "research" amounts to nothing more than throwing down chicken bones and reading tea leaves--I hope there's no partisan political agenda behind it.
We saw this "bubble" phenomenon once and now everyone's predicting it again. Unfortunately, economics is so crazy that past performance doesn't dictate future performance on a large scale. There are simply too many variables to try to compare scenarios based on statistics even in the same country during the same era.
Let me guess, these polls were done by phone?
... how do you feel about that? ... you mean they can record transcripts of phone calls? ... we do use AT&T.
Washington Post: Hello, do you have a minute to take a survey?
Citizen: Of course I do!
Washington Post: Great! We were just wondering whether you're concerned with the recent news of the NSA?
Citizen: You mean the fact that they are collecting the phone call records made and recieved by each citizen of the United States?
Washington Post: Yes, probably even this very phone call right now
Citizen: I'm fuckin' pissed!
Washington Post: So you're conncerned? You know, on our last poll about the NSA, the one where we covered them routing and recording phone calls, people sure answered differently.
Citizen: Wait a second
Washington Post: Yes, probably even this very phone call right now
Citizen: Ah, I've changed my mine. I am completely fine with this acceptable form of combating terrorism. Sic Heil Bush & all that jazz. I love my country and would sacrifice every bit of privacy for it. Goodbye!
I believe that an SAR (specific absorption rate) of 10 Watts per kilogram is the safety limit set by the NRPB. I guess they need to do tests as to whether the people experienced this from the towers. Cell phones have a SAR of about 0.2 on average. As always, Wikipedia provides a great reference to this subject.
As the article you quoted states: And as USA Today reported:
Well, this seems very insecure to me. BBV criticizes the three layer architecture and states that it would be very easy to target it three different ways (at each layer):
The article talks about a "standard tool you can buy at any computer store" and I believe this is referring to a PCMCIA card (what you use in laptops). I guess these are used to boot, upgrade & ready the machines for use. They do not go into detail but I wager that using a PCMCIA card with a USB port on it, you could load your own data from a thumb/pen drive. This would be small and easy to carry in. If you had access to it outside of the voting window, you could potentially use a PCMCIA card that functions as a NIC (probably with RJ45 cable port) to use cross over cable and a laptop for a 'live' attack.
I still haven't found anything that states how large an area/volume of pond they must have in order to produce one million litres/year. It is also interesting to note that they require aerating the pond
The XBox 360 had a mild welcome in Japan
Maybe I'm just jealous. I want to vote for Bub & Bob (Bubble Bobble) as a counter pair to fight those damned Ice Climbers!
What an awesome tool for a government agency to have!
... you approach an airport terminal and hand them your ID card (or scan your arm) but you can't board the plane because you've been making too many phone calls to your friends who happen to have a rap sheet. </tinhat>
You know what I love? Scenarios! How about this one: You're arrested as a suspect for a crime you didn't commit. The government doesn't have anything on you except that there are no other suspects or witnesses. What they do have, is a network of vertices (phones) and edges (calls) spanning the past year of your life. They also have a list of "dirty" nodes or telephone users who have a rap sheet or ties to anti-American groups.
Thanks to Dijkstra's & the Bellman-Ford algorithms, it's a hop skip and a jump to a prosecutor saying "we have records showing you called your mother on such and such date prompting her to call her hair dresser who has been forwarding money to his family living in Mexico that has ties to Islamic Extremist groups!"
Farfetched? Maybe. But you don't have to be a Sci-Fi author to imagine crazy abuses of this data.
In the eyes of the government, we are all innocent until proven guilty. This could easily be turned into a data mining tool making some of us "less innocent" than others. And frankly, I'm not looking forward to that day.
<tinhat> Imagine a time and place where you have a security rating
So initially we used coal to power steam engines. Why? Because there were literally tons of it laying underground. So we strip mined America for a couple centuries.
...
It's long been known that oil (petroleum or organic) would fuel fire. And it was discovered that refining it lowered it stability and made it explosive. But where was an abundance of oil? Why, also underneath the ground.
The fact of the matter is that our energy concerns can't be solved by anything that requires more energy to make (insert corn ethanol reference here) than it produces.
So now we need to figure out how to use hydrogen and many car companies have done that but the form that hydrogen abounds in is gas--not liquid. And most hydrogen powered cars require refilling a compressed hydrogen tank. But to make this hydrogen requires electricity and this electricity requires some fuel or energy to make in the beginning
I think the real challenge here should be "just hydrogen" as an alternative fuel but instead "anything we got a lot of lying around in a ready form."
This was posted on Wikipedia quite sometime ago as a rumor. I use them for a lot of my information (old and new).
In addition to Thottbot (quests) and Allakhazam (pricing and searching), a lot of the WoW Wikis out there provide for me a lot of my World of Warcraft information.
It seems they're introducing more "middle styled" races that are akin to the otherside. Perhaps they're planning to allow draenei to be warlock and blood elves to be palladins? This is all speculation but I know that I, for one, am very much looking forward to this expansion.
If I were a customer of a company that had the mentality "anyone that helped developed the code is a threat to its security" then I would find another vendor--and fast!
There are practices and standards for developing secure code. If your programmers follow these, then even their knowledge of the source shouldn't matter if they go rogue or want to have fun in their free time. Look at Linux. An operating system used by millions and every hacker in the world can get their hands on the source code. Why don't we see many viruses for Linux? Because it was implemented well. Perhaps companies should start to realize that if they produce code for Win32 applications, they're going to have to resort to the same tactics that Microsoft uses: Don't let the source code out or its true flaws will be revealed and exploited!
For the consumers of these companies, be wary that your product is only as secure as the company's relationship with its developers--kind of scary considering they're keeping them quiet via threat of lawsuit.
I am an American.
I love to code.
Do I take pride in my code? Sure I do. Is it world class? Probably not.
I'm also a gainfully employed and working on my masters in--you guessed it--computer science. And I log on to Slashdot today to find someone saying that my country failed to 'represent' at some "TopCoder" world-wide coding contest.
Oh well. I don't think I would need to study for this competition, in college I never studied for a computer science exam. It was my theory that if I couldn't deduce the problem on the fly, then I shouldn't be coding at all. Coding isn't about regurgitation or memorization, it's about how you instinctively attack a problem. Certain courses can't make you memorize stuff to be a better coder but they can give you a bag of tricks or arsenol with which to attack problems. The stuff I hate about computer science--documentation, systems integration, etc.--that stuff is memorization.
I'm busy and I would bet that our nations top coders are also busy. We don't have a month of vacation a year and if we did, we'd probably spend it around finals time to relax while our exams are hammering us.
Sorry, Carl Bialik from WSJ (who has had 20 of his own stories posted on Slashdot since March 14! <sarcasm>For Christ's sake, just give Slashdot's frontpage a "Carl RSS news feed" already!</sarcasm>) but I wasn't there to represent my country. I noticed that it was held in Las Vegas. You know what would be interesting? If they held it the same weekend as DefCon in Las Vegas.
I know this sounds hilarious and backward but I believe most of the best coders thrive on the "bad guy" image and would hate to win a competition that makes them look like an AMD (TopCoder sponser) poster boy tool. They'd rather have their hacking alias spray painted all over the RIAA's frontpage than a blue ribbon at a coding contest. Does anti-social behavior come hand in hand with gifted coding? It would seem so, but I haven't done/seen any studies on it.
So what if I went to this competition and was "Sixth best coder"? I probably wouldn't get much for prizes, my coworkers would just view it as proof that I am utterly socially inept, I would spend money and time on the trip with little to gain. I don't see my employer encouraging it or offering raises based on it. Sounds like fun but I'm not going out of my way to attend it.
This story might seem insignificant but what you don't realize is that Alzheimer's is a growing problem. Like many things, as the baby boomers begin to retire it will increase. People are living longer and, as a result, the genes responsible for Alzheimer's are being exposed. When evolution shaped us, there was no way to naturally select genes that didn't have Alzheimer's traits as our species was most likely dead by the time we hit that age.
... er ... understanding. It will be interesting to see how far stem cell research and the like are allowed to proceed given a vast aging population in the United States. Currently, I've seen Alzheimer's research being done in the form of mammalian brain tissue introduced to a herpes virus that has previously infected cells which had the Alzheimer's gene. They then infect the new brain tissue but do not kill it (as herpes is not normally lethal to cells).
As I understand it, Alzheimer's is caused by a twisted or malformed protein (beta amyloid) that starts to cause synapses of the brain to clump too close or cause their dendrites not to touch other synapses. Resulting in huge cognitive problems. There has also been research linking it to lipids and cholesterol intake.
What makes this research interesting is that I believe the idea in the field was that the gene mutation could be virus induced or suspected to not begin until one cell grew with the characteristics and successfully multiplied (often later in life). I'm not a medical researcher so don't quote me on any of this.
Unfortunately, since many of these baby boomers are fairly wealthy, more research will be going into Alzheimer's disease than AIDS as it will most likely be easier to market in developed nations. You can call me a conspiracy theorist but that's my honest opinion. Michael Chrichton pointed it out in Jarrasic Park when the park was built instead of something more useful like a cure for AIDS. You can charge people whatever you want to see dinosaurs but you can't charge them whatever you want to save their lives, it just looks immoral to do so.
Gene research is often the most politically frowned upon form of medical research but necessity breeds innovation
What if Ragnaros changed his strategy (not so that he constantly targeted the healers--because there are rules of aggro in effect in WoW) but what if he followed a markov model built off of spell/counterspell? What if Ragnaros had a little bit of unpredictability built into him?
What if he slowly remembers which characters (yes, by name) are spec'ed and drinks resistance potions according to their specialty class of magic? This would stop people from camping and grind-looting him (I know camping isn't possible in instances but guilds do the same instance run over and over with the difficulty the same everytime).
I don't know who Ragnaros is but if he has the ability to move around, why don't they have him become more frantic or hostile if he's seen the same people and remembers them?
You'll noticed that I said you will find heuristics that make it too hard (like targeting healers first or not emerging) and you have to purposely dumb it down to meet your user's needs.
I said use your imagination and make things interesting--not figure out how to make NPCs afraid of conflict
That would be my idea of fun.
Let us take the simple game of tic-tac-toe (three by three) as our game space. Not too hard. Tic-tac-toe, checkers, cognac, are popular games that fall in this category. And when you use AI to its full advantage, the computer rarely loses.
As we move towards type II games, we see games like chess or go where the game space is too large to search but still 'algorithms' (or heuristics) can be defined that prune the tree space or match/strive patterns out of raw moves. Look up tables are also useful but not really "AI" in the strictest of sense.
A full fledged type II game would be something like Warcraft or a complex computer game in which the internal engine of the playing board (server in this case) has an innumerable amount of states that it can exist in.
The NPCs and AI in games like Doom or even Halo are still fairly simple. They rely on heuristics and Euclidean distances (conceptually within the game) to overcome their opponents. If they are faced with obstacles, they deviate from their path.
Now you ask me what I would like to see. I have very finite desires and I will list them here:
- AI that learns. I am so sick of AI not keeping a log of encounters. There are many learning algorithms out there and none of them apply to full emersion games (like SWG or WoW) and its because there are too many variables--too many parameters to build the small dimensional vector fields of the Win or Learn Fast (WoLF) algorithm. This isn't the only kind of learning though, what about statistical analysis of prior opponents? "I'm a level 54 mage encountering a level 52 warrior, my odds of survival are x% based on past encounters with warriors two levels below me..." Yes, it's pre-canned statistical analysis but things like this could seriously act as a good heuristic for many games.
- If you reduce the game space or find some really good heuristic (as in the above), dumb it down. Meet the user's pleasure level. It should be a challenge but not such a challenge that victory is unattainable.
- Use your imagination. That's all I'm going to say about that one. There is no cookbook for heuristics
... learn to throw things at the user.
- Introduce long term "bounty hunter" style AI. I would enjoy an AI that sleeps and is constrained like I am. Introduce simple work parsers to our enemies. The closer you can come to interacting with me on the level of a real human, the more I'm going to like it. I know there are robots out there that understand basic human speech, why can't there be games where we receive phone calls or e-mails from assassins in real life? I know this sounds ridiculous, but make me afraid of my foe outside the game. Get in my head.
- Introduce random variables. I don't care if you have to build in mechanisms to your game that are illogical so that the AI sometimes goofs up. All humans are fallible at a certain point and if you have differing levels of predictability in your AI, the user will love it.
In the end, my opinion is that the largest deficiency for game AI is that it fails the Turing Test.Horribly.
I can easily tell that I'm not playing another human.
The most interesting thing on the site is the research style paper entitled "Peer to Patent": Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform by Beth Simone Noveck. There's an insane amount of footnotes on the first opening pages and it is a PDF so I will repost the abstract:
As you can see, it's a pretty far-reaching and very hopeful aim at fixing something that the vast majority of our community, Slashdot, view as a broken system.
So there you have it. Something is broken, here's the proposed solution now let's see if it works. The only possible show stopper I see here is that I'm not so sure it would benefit anyone to join this proposed community of "patent clerks." They are hoping for an army of people to read over patents and notice similarities or infringements for proposed patents. The Wiki's answer to my concer
First off, I wish Warner Brothers would get it through their head that if they are to compete with piracy, they have to price the movies as such.
If they price them as much as the hardcopies, who's going to buy them? Nobody. Your pirates are trying to escape high prices & your regular DVD buyers are going to balk at the offer for the fact that they could order a nice shiny cased DVD off amazon for the same price.
I highly doubt anyone will use this service if they keep the prices on par with the DVDs. If they offer them at even half price, then you might see some movement from both sides (pirates and DVD buyers) to that middle ground and hopefully recoup some of your losses from the pirates.
Offer downloads so cheap that you run the pirates out of business but leave quality lacking so true fans will always buy the DVDs.
For those of you who wish to read the original Time Article I was able to read every page without a log in. Why that wasn't linked in the story, I'm not sure.
Unlike the hollow Gamespot article, this one offers a much more thorough and deeper look into games such as: And: There's a lot of good original information inside that article that Gamespot doesn't seem to think is interesting.
Frankly, I enjoy the idea of the controller changing. I feel that the industry has been plagued with bad hardware and also the fear to step away from the norm. The name and design of this system both do that
I feel similarly about the music industry and that's why enjoy bands like the Arcade Fire that introduce instruments like the accordion with straight rock music to escape the guitar + bass + drums = band template. I like to think of myself as open-minded and I'll remain that way until I can experience the Wii first hand.
Furthermore, I'm shocked that Slashdot had the courage to post something that wasn't only making fun of the Wii for it's name! Could it be that we're actually going to get to read about its performance and abilities instead of just griping about its poor name choice? That's outlandish!
When two powerful companies go head to head, I'm rarely rooting for either of them as they usually have unlimited funds. If you would have considered a huge settlement or the lawsuit being carried out "bad" then I must wonder why you allow the laws that create these lawsuits to remain in the first place.
I enjoy The Beatles' music but I could honestly care less about their merchandising and music publisher. In fact, I would wager that the material aspects of their lives and the selling of their works are what in the end ruined them. For that reason, I dislike Apple Corps.
I enjoy the fact that OSX has Bourne-Again SHell (BASH) capabilities (correct me if I'm wrong) although I hate their pricing and closed machine mentality--though that may change with x86 architecture. If I want to slap another stick of RAM into my machine, I should be able to without being a licensed Apple technician.
In the end, I suffer the naïve shortcomings of one who has to believe in the justice system. Most countries in the world have laws against breaching restricted agreements. Which is what Apple is charging Apple of doing. I found this excerpt from an article of the original coverage of this case: This was a valid case and was brought to court, the result was decided and I'm happy that the justice system "works." I would argue that we take this in as unbiased a manner as possible, the case turned out neither 'well' nor 'ill' and would have been just the same to me if the prosecution had won. I think that the former settlements show that Apple Computers knows they are at fault for use of this name. I also think they knew that they did not violate their prior agreements and the court also agreed with them.
If you hate the laws, spend your lives trying to get them changed. Do not hate the companies that use the laws in their favor, hate the government that enforces the laws. I maintain my trust in the system of courts and therefore any case in which a decision is made is just as 'well' for me as if the opposite decision had been found.
I will preemptively state that UFO does not necessarily mean extraterrestrial technology or not from this planet. In the raw form of the acronym, it means simple that there is an Unidentified Flying Object. There are most likely hundreds of types of aircraft that governments around the world would refuse to classify due to a need to keep their enemies in the dark (national security).
From the article: He interchangeably uses "suppressed technology" with "UFO technology." I'm certain the United States Government has tons of suppressed technology as well as any other government for obvious reasons.
I should finish the quote, however: Ok, that last bit about free energy, you can go ahead and call him a nut job. And then there's also this: Yeah, Gary, it sure is crazy how you can mess with the color quality and resolution of an image to make it look like my family picture is really some image a green gelatinous blob that eats people. Uh, I only heard a story about a blimp above the earth's atmosphere. Where was the story where you saw a device that produced unlimited amounts of energy?
"In my house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer Simpson