For those of a religious bent, I'd draw your attention to the source of those constitutional rights you just quoted: "They are endowed by their creator..."
That's from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
Maybe the Founders should have included a clause in the Constitution that it was null and void after 100 years and would have to be rewritten by a new constitutional convention.:)
The basic idea is that human societies can function in a communal state as long as the size of the community doesn't exceed Dunbar's number, which represents the most number of people an individual can really know personally before they start stereotyping.
I've often thought that returning to communities of this size would be beneficial for humanity, except then you lose the intellectual cross-pollination that occurs in large cities when there's a huge number of people together. A simple life, working with the community, but somehow still retaining the good parts that modern technology has brought us (electricity, materials science, medicine, public health, the Internet, etc.). I wonder if it's possible.
Civilization is, in the long term, the reduction of tribalism in favor of egalitarianism. Trying to overcome the instinctive us-versus-them mentality that humans always have, and that is so easily exploited by the powerful.
I started having the same thought a couple of years ago; "bin Laden" supposedly released a "new" tape, except the tape's segments consisted either of old video of OBL talking, or new video of him "talking," except the video image froze while the new audio was playing. This happened a couple of times.
It's been years since there's been any verifiably new video of OBL, and as you say, the guy was putting out videos pretty regularly, then suddenly he stops for several years? Riiiight.
We almost considered naming our first son Miles, but ruled it out on the grounds that my wife and I both have named starting with "M" and that would be a mean thing to do to the kid. (We're both very picky about names.)
Angelina Jolie? Really? Nah. There's a lot of other actresses I think would come off better. Angelina's got too many weird associations. She looks inhuman. How about Lena Headey, or Cate Blanchett?
Any story longer than about 50 pages, though, is far too long to be adapted into a movie that isn't a travesty against the original.
Really? The Godfather was a travesty? No Country for Old Men? Lord of the Rings? Sideways? Sense and Sensibility? L.A. Confidential? You consider those movies to all be "travesties"?
the industry has gotten so incompetent that they can not come up with a single idea that can drag you in.
It has nothing to do with competence; the problem is that the major media outlets are all controlled by a small handful of gigantic corporations, which are inherently averse to risk-taking, and so (with rare exception) they go for the lowest-common-denominator garbage.
And they're extremely good at it. Incompetence has very little to do with it.
partly. but the length of copyright in the United Stattes currently lies beyond the powers granted to our federal government by our constitution.
Good luck convincing SCOTUS of that; Larry Lessig wasn't able to (although I think he took the wrong tack by attacking the length; he should have argued that copyright this long in no way "promotes the Progress of Science and the useful Arts").
Oh my Godzilla, that would be colossal. It'd have to be a miniseries, though; those books are way too long for feature films.
However there's still a great deal of them that wouldn't work in visual format. Long stretches of those books are characters thinking about society, politics, philosophy, theology, geology... if you only kept in the action-based parts, you could have something. There's also the fact that the book's chronology spans more than a century, but follows most of the same characters (thanks to life-extension tech), which would be challenging.
The Mars Trilogy is truly one of the most epic things I've ever read, and it might be better left that way.
I knew for a fact the anti-Doctorow-Stross committee would show up, but I had to name someone.:-) Greg Egan's novels could never really be turned into visual fiction, not properly; maybe you could do Quarantine or Permutation City, but Diaspora? Incandescence? Not a chance. Too abstract. (And keeping in mind, Diaspora is my favorite novel ever.)
I've read a couple of the RoF novels; it'd be better as a miniseries (way too many characters to cram into a movie). Most novels in general, actually, are better turned into miniseries rather than feature films.
How about none? There's a million* SF ideas out there that have never gone much beyond the printed word. Why do we have to keep rebooting old franchises? How about turning the Vorkosigan saga into a miniseries? Or something by Cory Doctorow or Charlie Stross, if you want to be a little more up-to-the-minute? How about a miniseries based on Hyperion, or A Deepness in the Sky?
Or even just forget about things that have already been written -- commission Doctorow or Stross (or someone) to create a TV miniseries based on new SF material.
Oh, the firewall already allows outbound everything from the office subnets (but not the server subnets). Except there's a Websense filter running on port 80 (but then, I have an external webhost that I tunnel SSH to when I want to get around it).
I'll look into the Teredo thing, seems right up my alley. Thanks.
I'd like to be able to use IPv6 from my work desktop. I'm behind a huge corporate firewall, so I'm not even sure where to get started. I'm running Ubuntu and my eth0 interface already has an IPv6 address, but any attempt to use ping6 or ssh -6 to reach external IPv6 addresses is met with "Network is unreachable". I'm guessing I need to configure my routes, because the "Next Hop" column when I run "route -nve -A inet6" is "::" for all 5 entries. (I'd paste it here but/. is being bitchy about "too many junk characters".)
I have no idea what route info to add that might work; I'm pretty sure the firewall's configured with IPv6 addresses, but I don't know whether it will forward IPv6 packets, or what, or how to even check that.
I just wish the earthquake data provided by the USGS was available through a web API. XML, JSON, whatever. I poked around and there's some quake data available through various obscure programs or protocols, but nothing easy to get at. Nothing I could find, anyway. Maybe someone else knows of something more useful?
You know, seasonal changes make it more difficult to tell what's going on with the climate. Clearly we need to eliminate the Earth's axial tilt. With a properly constructed world-spanning metallic rail, we can induce an electric current from the solar wind that will create a torque force, rotating the Earth to 0 inclination! As long as we take a few thousand years to do it, lifeforms should have time to adapt. Plus, the difference between when any given person is born and dies will be small enough that no old geezers will complain that winter ain't as cold as it used to be.
All those fancy promises (by the most technically advanced Administration, like, ever, dude) of legislation being posted online for days prior to vote have turned into lies.
Um, Obama promised that there would be a waiting period before he signed legislation. The legislation has to pass Congress before that happens. Obama has no authority to dictate that Congress wait any amount of time before voting on laws.
That aside, he HAS broken that promise at least once already, but at least get the facts straight so you can criticize properly.
Slashdot Mirror
This new concept seems designed to skirt the sensors.
That's impossible! No magazine that small has a cloaking device.
That's from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
Maybe the Founders should have included a clause in the Constitution that it was null and void after 100 years and would have to be rewritten by a new constitutional convention. :)
The basic idea is that human societies can function in a communal state as long as the size of the community doesn't exceed Dunbar's number, which represents the most number of people an individual can really know personally before they start stereotyping.
I've often thought that returning to communities of this size would be beneficial for humanity, except then you lose the intellectual cross-pollination that occurs in large cities when there's a huge number of people together. A simple life, working with the community, but somehow still retaining the good parts that modern technology has brought us (electricity, materials science, medicine, public health, the Internet, etc.). I wonder if it's possible.
Civilization is, in the long term, the reduction of tribalism in favor of egalitarianism. Trying to overcome the instinctive us-versus-them mentality that humans always have, and that is so easily exploited by the powerful.
I started having the same thought a couple of years ago; "bin Laden" supposedly released a "new" tape, except the tape's segments consisted either of old video of OBL talking, or new video of him "talking," except the video image froze while the new audio was playing. This happened a couple of times.
It's been years since there's been any verifiably new video of OBL, and as you say, the guy was putting out videos pretty regularly, then suddenly he stops for several years? Riiiight.
Dude died of kidney failure years ago.
We almost considered naming our first son Miles, but ruled it out on the grounds that my wife and I both have named starting with "M" and that would be a mean thing to do to the kid. (We're both very picky about names.)
Angelina Jolie? Really? Nah. There's a lot of other actresses I think would come off better. Angelina's got too many weird associations. She looks inhuman. How about Lena Headey, or Cate Blanchett?
Given the finite talent pool in the world, I'd rather have all of it dedicated to creating new material rather than rehashing old crap.
Any story longer than about 50 pages, though, is far too long to be adapted into a movie that isn't a travesty against the original.
Really? The Godfather was a travesty? No Country for Old Men? Lord of the Rings? Sideways? Sense and Sensibility? L.A. Confidential? You consider those movies to all be "travesties"?
It has nothing to do with competence; the problem is that the major media outlets are all controlled by a small handful of gigantic corporations, which are inherently averse to risk-taking, and so (with rare exception) they go for the lowest-common-denominator garbage.
And they're extremely good at it. Incompetence has very little to do with it.
partly. but the length of copyright in the United Stattes currently lies beyond the powers granted to our federal government by our constitution.
Good luck convincing SCOTUS of that; Larry Lessig wasn't able to (although I think he took the wrong tack by attacking the length; he should have argued that copyright this long in no way "promotes the Progress of Science and the useful Arts").
I've got it! This time around, the trolls look just like us!
Maybe a Stainless Steel Rat series?
One word:
Retief.
Oh my Godzilla, that would be colossal. It'd have to be a miniseries, though; those books are way too long for feature films.
However there's still a great deal of them that wouldn't work in visual format. Long stretches of those books are characters thinking about society, politics, philosophy, theology, geology... if you only kept in the action-based parts, you could have something. There's also the fact that the book's chronology spans more than a century, but follows most of the same characters (thanks to life-extension tech), which would be challenging.
The Mars Trilogy is truly one of the most epic things I've ever read, and it might be better left that way.
I knew for a fact the anti-Doctorow-Stross committee would show up, but I had to name someone. :-) Greg Egan's novels could never really be turned into visual fiction, not properly; maybe you could do Quarantine or Permutation City, but Diaspora? Incandescence? Not a chance. Too abstract. (And keeping in mind, Diaspora is my favorite novel ever.)
I've read a couple of the RoF novels; it'd be better as a miniseries (way too many characters to cram into a movie). Most novels in general, actually, are better turned into miniseries rather than feature films.
How about none? There's a million* SF ideas out there that have never gone much beyond the printed word. Why do we have to keep rebooting old franchises? How about turning the Vorkosigan saga into a miniseries? Or something by Cory Doctorow or Charlie Stross, if you want to be a little more up-to-the-minute? How about a miniseries based on Hyperion, or A Deepness in the Sky?
Or even just forget about things that have already been written -- commission Doctorow or Stross (or someone) to create a TV miniseries based on new SF material.
* Not precisely 1 million.
Oh, the firewall already allows outbound everything from the office subnets (but not the server subnets). Except there's a Websense filter running on port 80 (but then, I have an external webhost that I tunnel SSH to when I want to get around it).
I'll look into the Teredo thing, seems right up my alley. Thanks.
I'd like to be able to use IPv6 from my work desktop. I'm behind a huge corporate firewall, so I'm not even sure where to get started. I'm running Ubuntu and my eth0 interface already has an IPv6 address, but any attempt to use ping6 or ssh -6 to reach external IPv6 addresses is met with "Network is unreachable". I'm guessing I need to configure my routes, because the "Next Hop" column when I run "route -nve -A inet6" is "::" for all 5 entries. (I'd paste it here but /. is being bitchy about "too many junk characters".)
I have no idea what route info to add that might work; I'm pretty sure the firewall's configured with IPv6 addresses, but I don't know whether it will forward IPv6 packets, or what, or how to even check that.
then every RIR gets one last /8 from the "final five"
And if BSG taught us anything, it's that the final five won't be who you expect!
I just wish the earthquake data provided by the USGS was available through a web API. XML, JSON, whatever. I poked around and there's some quake data available through various obscure programs or protocols, but nothing easy to get at. Nothing I could find, anyway. Maybe someone else knows of something more useful?
Right, because when coming up with a name for its futuristic, intelligent smartphone, they thought it would be a good idea to evoke HOMICIDAL ROBOTS.
You know, seasonal changes make it more difficult to tell what's going on with the climate. Clearly we need to eliminate the Earth's axial tilt. With a properly constructed world-spanning metallic rail, we can induce an electric current from the solar wind that will create a torque force, rotating the Earth to 0 inclination! As long as we take a few thousand years to do it, lifeforms should have time to adapt. Plus, the difference between when any given person is born and dies will be small enough that no old geezers will complain that winter ain't as cold as it used to be.
All those fancy promises (by the most technically advanced Administration, like, ever, dude) of legislation being posted online for days prior to vote have turned into lies.
Um, Obama promised that there would be a waiting period before he signed legislation. The legislation has to pass Congress before that happens. Obama has no authority to dictate that Congress wait any amount of time before voting on laws.
That aside, he HAS broken that promise at least once already, but at least get the facts straight so you can criticize properly.
The "obscurity" of a private key, for instance, isn't the obscurity that we're talking about.
It isn't obscurity at all; the term for that is secrecy.
"The 20th? Sorry, no good, on the 20th I'm having dinner IN HELL!"