I'm the only person I know whose favorite Alien is 3. Everybody else hates it for one reason or another. I think it's the best one.
I was really peeved by the whole alien versus predator saga. Why cut the Alien universe to ribbons? Just for some Dark Horse - inspired shit? Now we have to assume that the Bishop that told Ripley he's the actual Bishop android designer was lying. Because that guy died on Earth hundreds of years earlier. Pissy! Frickin' piss box!
I thought Alien - Resurrected was total shit, I mean why make a goofy comic sequel to a horror movie? But it eventually became a mixed blessing when it produced an interview with Weaver who said she was up for making more Alien movies anytime the producers wanted her to. I always thought, "wow, Weaver, she's this huge-ticket actress, very prestigious, Alien is probably a stain on her career, I can't imagine how they drag her into slinking around in the muck like that..." and I finally got the chance to put it in perspective: Alien movies is where all her money comes from. How many people here rented "Gorillas in the Mist" much in the last twenty years? Anybody? And then, even later on, I realized that it was best for the fourth movie to be a comic blast, because there shouldn't have been another sequel, but it's the kind of thing that needs to be addressed, for closure. So for me, Resurrection came to embody the seal on the cap, so to speak, "there aren't going to be any more sequels".
Too bad you can't really make a prequel -- Ripley never had any contact with the species before the first movie. There's no place for it to fit. You could try to rig up some bullshit story involving an original and a clone, but you'd have to explain the clone's lifetime of memories.
Anyways, I don't see the big problem. Why do people get so miffed? Just because sequels and prequels are typically done bad doesn't mean they always have to be.
And just because some artists are perfectionist or egotistical doesn't mean you *HAVE* to "honor" their every intent for their art. Part of being a mature artist is releasing your artwork, and releasing means releasing in every sense of the word. I think the co-creator's thought that making sequels lessens the impact of the horror is self-illusionment that his horror is some kind of prima materia. It's just a flick; it's scary to anybody who hasn't seen it before, and less scary to those who have, period. There might be a point about making the Alien itself this cultural icon, making it too commonplace so that people are exposed to it before they see the film and so aren't surprised and shocked when it first appears, but they already fucked that up with the concept art appearing on the posters and every clip of the creature appearing in trailers from the very beginning. And was he really so egotistical that he thought it would become ubiquitous? That kids would be sipping Alien Blood *WITH MORE VITAMIN C* at school lunch? That we'd all kick Mario in the ass and play Alien: Platform Saga from now on? That by the time you're ten years old you're so sick of hearing about and seeing Aliens everywhere, now that you can sneak into the theatre to watch the Gala Event 1,000th Re-Showing of the original (shyeah) you don't even want to because blaggggh you puke face hugger pasta in white cheese sauce in your sleep? Puh lease.
I guess it makes sense. His particular focus is fear-inducing for some people. His work requires some level of what many would consider "paranoia". But his work was grounded in reality. His work was actually to more or less eliminate the irrational part of the fear and ground people with knowledge.
He might not have had a strong background in electronics. From the back, those fixtures look like they could be generator or piezoelectric speakers (mics). But it would have been shoddy work. What about it suggests it was planted?
There's so little information attached from him to his contact, from his contact back to zdnet, that I would also have to opine that there's a "breakdown" occuring. Some people might have absolutely no idea what "trouble" really is. Fictional, thereotical case: "I was coming back with the pizza and... I saw him talking to some men in suits. I never came back to the address. Then I got this spooky letter from him -- me scared. Him in twubble."
For all we know he's at his home address but reclusing, getting the Bulgarian equivalent of Cheetos-chest and giving his darkened computer (and growing pile of mail) shifty, sidelong glances.
What are you saying about Florida's trailer parks? There are some really, really, really nice trailer parks down there. Briny Breezes, for example. They got an offer for the whole thing at roughly $1mil per trailer. It's beautiful. Just north of there in Palm Beach there are two really gorgeous trailer parks that are practically gated communities. But I think I see what you're saying: south Florida is really damn sharkish and I would totally expect some loon in a trailer park down there to not only have the wherewithal, the money and the time to spend with a lawsuit such as this, ultimately I think you're right -- just where I'd expect it to come from.
it's already spun. they paid artists for their work and made it seem like a crime in the doing. now they're "down to our level". it will result in a trust relationship with the public, and their sales (and stock) will probably rise for it.
Notice at least one thing: the money they ended up paying out was *set aside beforehand*. To the exact amount, minus some obviously very wealthy lawyers' fees. The entire thing -- which amounts to paying the artists for their work and some lawyers for theirs -- was spun to make it sound as if the record companies had done something rogueish. Why would they want to do that? Because they are the same record companies known for trying to give people criminal records for doing exactly that, taking music without asking for it. It has been debated for over a decade and by now the philosophy of it has been debated down to a point that the distributors are the modern day analogue of the church fighting against the translation of the Bible into a more popular language or the mass production of the Bible printing press. They've had to infringe on free speech on numerous occasions and through it all they insisted that their opinion was the future, just like before with cassette tape, and people have stopped listening, and despite all their work the online sharing and purchase model has maintained its hold and has not waned.
So they want to be part of the "in" crowd again, so they steal music. Only they actually *do* have the money to pay for it and actually do pay up at a later date. But look at it, it's only two years later. Not a huge length of time for the artists, for the lawyers sitting around waiting for "the day", not for the bankers holding the cash in what amounts apparently to escrow, none of it. But subconciously people will see the music distributors as "the same as us". "The hypocrites get some of what they've been dishing out to all of us." It's the sort of harebrained and underhanded move I would expect the MTV/EMI world to make.
You might wonder what would be gained by all of that, but it's so obvious:
1. They're in the public light again and this time they aren't the enemy of the people, rather,
2. This time they're doing what the people have been doing all along, sooo...
3. People MIGHT be more willing to use the distributors as their source of e-music instead of whatever they've become accustomed to while the plastic-case distributors have been sitting around on their hands pouting about "the new computer shit that's ruining our business". (Because they're the fellow thief, now.)
For the meager cost of 2.5 mil, it costs about the same as an ad campaign that would have taken a team of teen psychologists and new-artists to come up with the perfect subliminal punch, and which nobody would have paid attention to anyway, especially not in a down economy. Now instead of some fake or plastic ad that obviates "trying too hard", they can stage this huge play in which they appear in the role of pariah-by-sympathetic-proxy and which legitimizes itself as "real life" through the magic of scary court.
I can imagine people like Einstein and Hawking standing around blowing flecks of spittle in each others' faces arguing, and like one Anon. commenter said, "hands slapping the walls" and just being total fucking retards until they pick this specific book up. Ahhhhhh! Scientists don't hafta be reeeeTARDIIIIIIIDD any MOOOOOOOOORE
Funny how getting news about there being Even More People Than Ever Before makes the people who are here now panic all to shit and fall all over themselves arguing about how to take it all back. Here's where you start: make a consortium with a huge international membership where everyone agrees that there are simply put "too many people". Then once you have your membership and some date-from-inception has passed, and the membership has passed some pre-determined level of international political strength, then you begin amongst your members to vote and make different decisions about what to implement. That way, you'd at least be sure that the decisions have something to do with the result, because the democratic process wouldn't allow for actions that don't serve the function of the group.
However, that's not what we see in population panic. What happens, instead, is everybody argues at once, mostly out of guilt, and eventually down the line these arguments -- which rarely reach closure or see fruition but are dear to each person who makes them -- become the foundations of new divisions of feudalistic tendencies, and in the midst of social upheaval these divisions prompt sudden outbreaks of violence, largely on behalf of people who believe that not only is their idea right but that it should be forced on other people.
In other words, the population tends to take care of itself. The real issue is that given our current means, thanks to the industrial revolution, we are capable of pushing the environment past sustainability, past tenability, and past supporting any life at all between our various chemical and radio contaminants.
Population reduction arguments are usually started by people who are concerned for their immediate comforts and well-being, who foresee that the population might reach critical and ungovernable levels in their lifetime and so should be treated as urgently as a riot underway. Sure, they make plans for the future, but their arguments are half-hearted. People who argue for protecting the environment, no matter what the population, see the real key to the matter and their solutions tend to naturally present means of controlling the population.
Consider hunting and gathering. If we all had to rely on that, there wouldn't be any agriculture fit to sustain population explosions and therefore no huge numbers of people to feed the purposeless growth and spread of industry. In hunting and gathering, if you *don't* practice it properly it *doesn't* sustain the population. The animals manage to reach places that are unreachable and people run out of the energy necessary to pursue them, and die. Given technology people can get over that barrier (see those who hunt from helicopters with scopes and night vision) but if you are arguing for the environment you're largely arguing against industry and technology anyways, so why not include the requisition of technology in your "solution" in the first place?
You know an idea involving forcing everyone to hunt and gather and never use agriculture, industry or technology (versus tools) again would never be accepted by the whole, would create schisms and that those schisms would be violent by way of the obviated advantages given those who refuse to pursue the proposed option. Yet it's the easiest working ideal that doesn't involve enforcing some authoritarian ideal and leveling things by force from on high (like from, say, the ISS, or Berlin if you prefer).
So what kind of "solutions" do we get, instead? Ones that fail due to attack the wrong side of the problem. Having babies isn't the root of the population explosion, it's the sustenance afforded by forcing the earth to yield food through agriculture that makes it possible. Etc.
In any case, I'm just stating all this in pointing out how the need for some group consensus is obvious and yet impossible, so you get population panic every time there's news that the numbers are still increasing.
It especially makes the rich, uppity people living in "developed" countries EXTRE
I guess this puts pestilence in a whole new light. From the perspective of somebody who only has grains to eat all the time, insects would be a boon if you were willing to eat them. God gives you locusts, make locusts and honey, right?
Wake up. This is all a simulation. It has been the entire time. You're having a deep embedded, fully immersive hallucinatory cognitive dissociation brought on by a schizophrenic episode of your favorite TV show. When the Daleks show up they will appear to you as men in white coats; this is a representation of your subconcious desire to fuck your mother. Give in to it and enter the warm embrace of drug treatments they offer. This is a hallucination of your subconcious mind "Clearing" the conflicting data and getting back to reality -- it doesn't really mean you fucked your mother or still want to, but other people might. That's the tricky part, now you get your discharge and you have to pretend you're normal, but whatever you do do not assume the Doctor Who role and attempt to recreate the process described in TFA. It will result in a disruption of the enclosing universal wormhole as described in the new item title. Just go about your business like nothing happened and keep eating the pills. Accept your hairless monkey role in life and die like a pac man caught by a hungry ghost. Do not attempt to drain your pool.
They are taking the opposite stance for the purpose of subverting an opinion.
They aren't trumpeting in the arrival of cheaper, higher-quality software. Did anybody else pick up on this? He was a Mac developer himself.
He's trying to build justification for iOS devs to start charging like off-the-shelf software does, id est 8~15* more. He doesn't *want* to see the prices drop as he charges, that's why he makes it sound so horrible.
The only reason why he would promote his theory with such confidence is to use that confidence as leverage to change the market opinion. So he's not making a prediction, he's making a bull racket.
That kind of behaviour is what I'd expect from shifty, overweight people who snort oxycontin. Maybe even for sedentary, has-been developers who don't want to change-up or find a second leg to stand on.
But I don't consider it news and I don't think it was a very professionally composed attempt to subvert the market opinion. If you're going to social hack, get some composure, first. Guard your integrity.
I don't even know why I'm typing this here, I should send it to the fruitbasket who wrote tfa.
Anyways, his position is so wildly overstated as to make it incredible.
Inherent *in* his position is a dichotomy distinguishing between two different qualities of not only development but of product.
The producers in both camps know exactly where they stand and how they're viewed. There's no illusion to shatter.
And it's very likely that prices will drop somewhere between 5% and the 13.5~18.5% range, but there's no justification for dropping more than the traditional markdown to markup. The only reason anybody drops more than 50% is clearance and the software companies have no reason to clear house at this point. They just opened up a new point of sale -- if anything their market hold just got stronger. The only reason to drop below 75% is a firesale or closeout. Again, companies aren't going out of business over this, if anything they just got a whole new vista of opportunities to fill for relatively little effort.
Whereas ten employees could work a year designing the update to one app, the same ten can in their spare time each design one or two tiny apps of less function and lower quality, a piece. The ten to twenty apps selling at a buck a piece equate to the same twenty bucks for a powerful, robust app running on a more powerful structure. So it comes out the same, and in the meantime even less effort was spent, fewer programmers were needed so the entire process of organizing an overhead structure for the code project never even occurs, you end up with 10-20 coders instead of 30-200 (oh wow, don't even have to outsource, whaddayaknow) and so the profit margin increases wildly. It's lucrative. It's quick and decent. People eat it up. And best of all, you don't have to charge rock-bottom one-dollar for your myriad of tiny apps because you're a reputable company with something "real" to offer. You get to charge two bucks or maybe... three. Damn... five bucks. Before you know it, you're multiplying profits a million times.
That's great, that's fine. That's why that model continues to work. It has no bearing, no relevance on the world of software that has to be developed using a giant code-sharing framework, with tons of employees specialising in different layers or functions of various parts of the code, and with a whole dev team just to get it off the drawing board. And nobody *thinks* it does, not even the person who wrote the article.
So if anything, opening the store means companies will want to hold prices steady to firmly demonstrate the difference between the two tiers of software quality apparent in the dichotomy, considering neither one threatens the other in any way, shape, or form.
My friend descended from a Siberian tribe. His grandmother died in Siberia because she happened to go out wearing just two or three layers less than you "should". See, it's cold enough over there in my friend's ancestral village that the windows are plastic. Glass would shatter. And despite this, sometimes you want convenience. Like if you're American and you want to get milk, you're tempted to use the SUV to drive two blocks away and save five minutes of walking. Well, she saved five minutes changing out of two or three layers of clothing and suffered from it, due to a tragic weather event. OVer there, the Siberians get these tiny tornadoes that only last a few seconds. They're invisible. But inside of them, the temperature isn't just eighteen below zero, it's like thirty-eight below zero. And the wind is reintroducing that temperature of air at a rate of sometimes around a hundred miles an hour, but confined in a very tight vortex of only three or four feet across due to the nature of convecting currents and their abilities to maintain micro systems, something not very well understood. Being in that tiny cold whirlwind for even a few seconds can cause really horrible physical traumas. She was struck dead by hypothermia by an invisible weather phenomenon, struck dead by a tornado as big around as her sucking down temperatures from the upper atmosphere that were cold enough to lower her core temperature down below dead in only seconds. This sort of thing is a reality, and we can assume that there is plenty under the sun that science doesn't quite comprehend. If this doesn't turn out to be a low-pressure or mega-updraft incident of some kind, then I think we can all safely assume it is a pathogenic or local effect. A bacteria or virus. A radioactive or electromagnetic pulse. At any rate it's anomalous and anybody studying it with interest is probably more intelligent than the average scientists who, based largely on risk assessed values of research grant award futures versus college loan payment rates, side squarely with what is pre-established and therefore never learn anything new and fail to ever address the slightest anomaly whether it challenges their worldview or not.
I never know what to think when people spew on about contrails. There's plausibility to be upheld behind such claims, you know. It's as irresponsible to blame contrails and "the gubmint" as it is to blame poor Satan and the meek who aid his truth for women having warts giving puritan men the heebejeebes, or for the murderously pyromaniacal urges those men developed as a result of not being tucked in right and getting buggered off by their mommas when they were still eating frosted flakes. I'm just saying that besides all that, you apparently stand proud and, uh, "represent".
Hail, lightning, fireworks would have caused said unfound trauma.
Theory: caught in a hellacious wild updraft. Lifted into highest levels of the atmosphere where they suffered insufficient oxygen and/or insufficient pressure -- vessels and or lungs burst.
That's neat, it looks like they're using some kind of inductance interference to register finger proximity to the touch pad, so you don't even necessarily have to touch the screen. They're only using one attenuator/sensor, so it will only serve the purpose of turning the screen/device on when you move your finger near it, but if they were to use several then theoretically you could do away with the "touch" aspect. Forgive me if any of that's olden but it's news to me.
[ Contact: Bank of America, Corporate and Financial customer category: expense of over 2 billion per year ]
Yes, every year I expend billions of dollars worth of great ideas just simply talking to people and being one of the greatest geniuses who has ever lived. You wouldn't have a clue. I will write "on your level".
From what I understand, Bank of America is spending money to do things like buy up domain names such as "ThePresidentofBankofAmericaHasHisPenisOnUpsideDown.com" or "AllTheMunchkinsWhoWorkForBankOfAmericaAreUnderpaidAndDon'tComprehendIt.com" and so on.
Maybe Bank of America are spending what is, to them, relatively pennies in terms of monies, kind of like throwing a few pennies on the grown relatively, in expressing in a subtle fashion -- nothing that would mark their reputation or standing, mind you -- exactly how they feel about the paranoia and overreaction assembled around Assange and Wikileaks. Perhaps?
Really, though, I would be interested to know what Bank of America's psychologist would say if Bank of America were lying on the couch and said "I want to claim up all the names in the world that might make fun of my name. Might make FUN of my name. So nobody CAN."
I'm reading a book about the failure of the love-affair between the education system and computers. It was printed in 2000 but it's fairly relevant today.
Armstrong, Alison. "The Child and the Machine." Beltsville, Maryland: Robins Lane. 2000. Print.
I'm barely into it but there are some sticky points, the author's lack of intimate knowledge of programming and computing one of them. Page three features some pretty mindlessly listed factoids about programming that bear resemblance to a high schooler's crammed and rushed-to-laserprinter report on Early Computer Languages. One really bad sentence:
"Far from being skilled technicians, many of today's computer operators are little more than typists because the software packages they use require them to perform repetitive, machinelike tasks."
What does the author expect? It's instructions for machines. She must have been too astronomically bored reading descriptions of Turing's machine operations to render a more philosophically correct perspective on computing.
So saying, I thought I should go read the article mentioned here. And the author of the article is right, "computer science" is a misused term. Funny enough, this book I'm reading harps on about how "computer literate" is also misused and ill-defined. There's a quote from Andrew Molnar (who created the term "computer literacy" in 1972):
"In a 1991 interview, by then painfully aware that computers had failed to have much positive effect on education, Molnar explained: 'We started computer literacy in '72. We coined that phrase. It's sort of ironic. Nobody knows what computer literacy is. Nobody could define it, and nobody knew what it was.'"
I once designed a free course in basic computer science for a church to teach the homeless, and they were happy with the syllabus but the prospectus involved putting three to six students on one computer and they didn't see how that would work, and were simultaneously afraid to turn away homeless people from using a privilege when others were being allowed (because of class size and other constraints, mainly how much time I was willing to spend and how many people I was willing to teach.) This is what my vision of the basics of "computer literacy" entail [excerpts]:
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
To be most efficient, the course would be designed so that each computer screen or terminal would be occupied by three students simultaneously.... The mouse is not a great instructional device for two reasons: usually only one pointer is available anyway, and even if several pointers can be installed reading from several devices and even if the processor can handle all of them simultaneously, the mouse/pointer is not really meant to be anything more than a convenient effort-saver, and the simplicity of point-and-click interfaces doesn't really immerse the adult student in the intricacies or complexities of the computer the same way that the keyboard can. The computer itself should be anything in the x86 processor series, preferably a 586 but any computer between 286 and 486 is also reasonable and far less expensive... I think it would be advisable to use older computers dating back realistically no earlier than 1985, but preferably no earlier than 1990.... As far as acquiring software, all the tools needed or desired by the instructor can be found online for free or can be programmed.
COURSE GOAL OR OBJECTIVE
The full course should be teachable within six hours. After the course, the student should be able to discourse freely about the engineering and operation of computers and should be able to say that they were able to program a computer to perform specific functions.... Introduction to computer use even with a goal of learning specific software collections if hindered by technological intimidation and is aided by a level of familiarity and confidence that can't be bought out of the box, or picked up by using point-and-click inter
Even the NSA now openly admits what Kevin Mitnick, Dmitri Sklyarov, and most readers of 2600 and Slashdot already knew: that there is no such thing as infallible security, that any usable portal is an exploitable one, and that pretending otherwise is the antithesis of security. ( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/12/17/1540256 ).
The whole "counterculture" if you will of open-sourcers work with this concept as precept. People already distrust Intel somewhat because of allegations of backroom dealing with the likes of Microsoft over the usage of hidden opcodes, and allegations that Intel tried to set legal precedent that deciphering the purpose of hidden opcodes in their processors for end-user purposes amounts to industrial espionage.
The Clipper device wasn't very popular with consumers despite assurances that it was for their security. And given the facts about exploitation, Sandy Bridges isn't much different from a Clipper with delusions of vigilante grandeur, and with the difference of being a kill-switch instead of a listening port. The similarity: both present the possibility of the product performing not-as-intended and potentially without the user having any control over it, as a side-effect of insecurities albeit already resident in the consumer but also inflamed by the marketing behind the device. On the technical side, just the whole fact that it's reversible practically screams "useless" to somebody who knows that they'll eventually find a way to trip it either way they want at a whim, or just circumvent it.
If it's about protecting data, there are already numerous ways of replicating the performance of this Sandy Bridges feature without having any special hardware installed. You can be sure that your encrypted data will not be misused even if the equipment is stolen, even if that equipment is a 80286. And from the description, even as a lo-jack it's sort of "fail" especially considering it doesn't sound anything at all like what the average computer user can find accessible, unless they feel like investing hella cash and trusting their ISP as "home server". Even if you can present some ideal model situation where the encrypted protection and lojack features work every time, opening them up to the outside world isn't sane or more usable, it's James Bond wannabe versus Dick Tracy wannabe bullcrap for the masses, and as some here predict, it's likely going to spell doom for the entire processor line and the investments of all the consumers who support it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the only person I know whose favorite Alien is 3. Everybody else hates it for one reason or another. I think it's the best one.
I was really peeved by the whole alien versus predator saga. Why cut the Alien universe to ribbons? Just for some Dark Horse - inspired shit? Now we have to assume that the Bishop that told Ripley he's the actual Bishop android designer was lying. Because that guy died on Earth hundreds of years earlier. Pissy! Frickin' piss box!
I thought Alien - Resurrected was total shit, I mean why make a goofy comic sequel to a horror movie? But it eventually became a mixed blessing when it produced an interview with Weaver who said she was up for making more Alien movies anytime the producers wanted her to. I always thought, "wow, Weaver, she's this huge-ticket actress, very prestigious, Alien is probably a stain on her career, I can't imagine how they drag her into slinking around in the muck like that..." and I finally got the chance to put it in perspective: Alien movies is where all her money comes from. How many people here rented "Gorillas in the Mist" much in the last twenty years? Anybody? And then, even later on, I realized that it was best for the fourth movie to be a comic blast, because there shouldn't have been another sequel, but it's the kind of thing that needs to be addressed, for closure. So for me, Resurrection came to embody the seal on the cap, so to speak, "there aren't going to be any more sequels".
Too bad you can't really make a prequel -- Ripley never had any contact with the species before the first movie. There's no place for it to fit. You could try to rig up some bullshit story involving an original and a clone, but you'd have to explain the clone's lifetime of memories.
Anyways, I don't see the big problem. Why do people get so miffed? Just because sequels and prequels are typically done bad doesn't mean they always have to be.
And just because some artists are perfectionist or egotistical doesn't mean you *HAVE* to "honor" their every intent for their art. Part of being a mature artist is releasing your artwork, and releasing means releasing in every sense of the word. I think the co-creator's thought that making sequels lessens the impact of the horror is self-illusionment that his horror is some kind of prima materia. It's just a flick; it's scary to anybody who hasn't seen it before, and less scary to those who have, period. There might be a point about making the Alien itself this cultural icon, making it too commonplace so that people are exposed to it before they see the film and so aren't surprised and shocked when it first appears, but they already fucked that up with the concept art appearing on the posters and every clip of the creature appearing in trailers from the very beginning. And was he really so egotistical that he thought it would become ubiquitous? That kids would be sipping Alien Blood *WITH MORE VITAMIN C* at school lunch? That we'd all kick Mario in the ass and play Alien: Platform Saga from now on? That by the time you're ten years old you're so sick of hearing about and seeing Aliens everywhere, now that you can sneak into the theatre to watch the Gala Event 1,000th Re-Showing of the original (shyeah) you don't even want to because blaggggh you puke face hugger pasta in white cheese sauce in your sleep? Puh lease.
Some people. Idealists, too. But some PEOPLE.
You mean like John Forbes Nash, Jr. ?
I guess it makes sense. His particular focus is fear-inducing for some people. His work requires some level of what many would consider "paranoia". But his work was grounded in reality. His work was actually to more or less eliminate the irrational part of the fear and ground people with knowledge.
He might not have had a strong background in electronics. From the back, those fixtures look like they could be generator or piezoelectric speakers (mics). But it would have been shoddy work. What about it suggests it was planted?
There's so little information attached from him to his contact, from his contact back to zdnet, that I would also have to opine that there's a "breakdown" occuring. Some people might have absolutely no idea what "trouble" really is. Fictional, thereotical case: "I was coming back with the pizza and ... I saw him talking to some men in suits. I never came back to the address. Then I got this spooky letter from him -- me scared. Him in twubble."
For all we know he's at his home address but reclusing, getting the Bulgarian equivalent of Cheetos-chest and giving his darkened computer (and growing pile of mail) shifty, sidelong glances.
What are you saying about Florida's trailer parks? There are some really, really, really nice trailer parks down there. Briny Breezes, for example. They got an offer for the whole thing at roughly $1mil per trailer. It's beautiful. Just north of there in Palm Beach there are two really gorgeous trailer parks that are practically gated communities. But I think I see what you're saying: south Florida is really damn sharkish and I would totally expect some loon in a trailer park down there to not only have the wherewithal, the money and the time to spend with a lawsuit such as this, ultimately I think you're right -- just where I'd expect it to come from.
it's already spun. they paid artists for their work and made it seem like a crime in the doing. now they're "down to our level". it will result in a trust relationship with the public, and their sales (and stock) will probably rise for it.
whoa, whoa, what about estates/families?
Notice at least one thing: the money they ended up paying out was *set aside beforehand*. To the exact amount, minus some obviously very wealthy lawyers' fees. The entire thing -- which amounts to paying the artists for their work and some lawyers for theirs -- was spun to make it sound as if the record companies had done something rogueish. Why would they want to do that? Because they are the same record companies known for trying to give people criminal records for doing exactly that, taking music without asking for it. It has been debated for over a decade and by now the philosophy of it has been debated down to a point that the distributors are the modern day analogue of the church fighting against the translation of the Bible into a more popular language or the mass production of the Bible printing press. They've had to infringe on free speech on numerous occasions and through it all they insisted that their opinion was the future, just like before with cassette tape, and people have stopped listening, and despite all their work the online sharing and purchase model has maintained its hold and has not waned.
So they want to be part of the "in" crowd again, so they steal music. Only they actually *do* have the money to pay for it and actually do pay up at a later date. But look at it, it's only two years later. Not a huge length of time for the artists, for the lawyers sitting around waiting for "the day", not for the bankers holding the cash in what amounts apparently to escrow, none of it. But subconciously people will see the music distributors as "the same as us". "The hypocrites get some of what they've been dishing out to all of us." It's the sort of harebrained and underhanded move I would expect the MTV/EMI world to make.
You might wonder what would be gained by all of that, but it's so obvious:
1. They're in the public light again and this time they aren't the enemy of the people, rather,
2. This time they're doing what the people have been doing all along, sooo...
3. People MIGHT be more willing to use the distributors as their source of e-music instead of whatever they've become accustomed to while the plastic-case distributors have been sitting around on their hands pouting about "the new computer shit that's ruining our business". (Because they're the fellow thief, now.)
For the meager cost of 2.5 mil, it costs about the same as an ad campaign that would have taken a team of teen psychologists and new-artists to come up with the perfect subliminal punch, and which nobody would have paid attention to anyway, especially not in a down economy. Now instead of some fake or plastic ad that obviates "trying too hard", they can stage this huge play in which they appear in the role of pariah-by-sympathetic-proxy and which legitimizes itself as "real life" through the magic of scary court.
I can imagine people like Einstein and Hawking standing around blowing flecks of spittle in each others' faces arguing, and like one Anon. commenter said, "hands slapping the walls" and just being total fucking retards until they pick this specific book up. Ahhhhhh! Scientists don't hafta be reeeeTARDIIIIIIIDD any MOOOOOOOOORE
Funny how getting news about there being Even More People Than Ever Before makes the people who are here now panic all to shit and fall all over themselves arguing about how to take it all back. Here's where you start: make a consortium with a huge international membership where everyone agrees that there are simply put "too many people". Then once you have your membership and some date-from-inception has passed, and the membership has passed some pre-determined level of international political strength, then you begin amongst your members to vote and make different decisions about what to implement. That way, you'd at least be sure that the decisions have something to do with the result, because the democratic process wouldn't allow for actions that don't serve the function of the group.
However, that's not what we see in population panic. What happens, instead, is everybody argues at once, mostly out of guilt, and eventually down the line these arguments -- which rarely reach closure or see fruition but are dear to each person who makes them -- become the foundations of new divisions of feudalistic tendencies, and in the midst of social upheaval these divisions prompt sudden outbreaks of violence, largely on behalf of people who believe that not only is their idea right but that it should be forced on other people.
In other words, the population tends to take care of itself. The real issue is that given our current means, thanks to the industrial revolution, we are capable of pushing the environment past sustainability, past tenability, and past supporting any life at all between our various chemical and radio contaminants.
Population reduction arguments are usually started by people who are concerned for their immediate comforts and well-being, who foresee that the population might reach critical and ungovernable levels in their lifetime and so should be treated as urgently as a riot underway. Sure, they make plans for the future, but their arguments are half-hearted. People who argue for protecting the environment, no matter what the population, see the real key to the matter and their solutions tend to naturally present means of controlling the population.
Consider hunting and gathering. If we all had to rely on that, there wouldn't be any agriculture fit to sustain population explosions and therefore no huge numbers of people to feed the purposeless growth and spread of industry. In hunting and gathering, if you *don't* practice it properly it *doesn't* sustain the population. The animals manage to reach places that are unreachable and people run out of the energy necessary to pursue them, and die. Given technology people can get over that barrier (see those who hunt from helicopters with scopes and night vision) but if you are arguing for the environment you're largely arguing against industry and technology anyways, so why not include the requisition of technology in your "solution" in the first place?
You know an idea involving forcing everyone to hunt and gather and never use agriculture, industry or technology (versus tools) again would never be accepted by the whole, would create schisms and that those schisms would be violent by way of the obviated advantages given those who refuse to pursue the proposed option. Yet it's the easiest working ideal that doesn't involve enforcing some authoritarian ideal and leveling things by force from on high (like from, say, the ISS, or Berlin if you prefer).
So what kind of "solutions" do we get, instead? Ones that fail due to attack the wrong side of the problem. Having babies isn't the root of the population explosion, it's the sustenance afforded by forcing the earth to yield food through agriculture that makes it possible. Etc.
In any case, I'm just stating all this in pointing out how the need for some group consensus is obvious and yet impossible, so you get population panic every time there's news that the numbers are still increasing.
It especially makes the rich, uppity people living in "developed" countries EXTRE
Wow, I never knew children of the corn were lurking at Slashdot. GET AN ACCOUNT, MALACHI!
Apples vs. oranges is old hat. The new dietary debate is all about soylent red vs soylent yellow. First one to turn green gets eaten.
I guess this puts pestilence in a whole new light. From the perspective of somebody who only has grains to eat all the time, insects would be a boon if you were willing to eat them. God gives you locusts, make locusts and honey, right?
Shouldn't the article read, "the Chrome OS, Google's operating system that WOULD HAVE competeD with Windows"?
Because wasn't it news here not too long ago that Google's Chrome was, in the words of Google's own Chrome devs, "dead"?
Wake up. This is all a simulation. It has been the entire time. You're having a deep embedded, fully immersive hallucinatory cognitive dissociation brought on by a schizophrenic episode of your favorite TV show. When the Daleks show up they will appear to you as men in white coats; this is a representation of your subconcious desire to fuck your mother. Give in to it and enter the warm embrace of drug treatments they offer. This is a hallucination of your subconcious mind "Clearing" the conflicting data and getting back to reality -- it doesn't really mean you fucked your mother or still want to, but other people might. That's the tricky part, now you get your discharge and you have to pretend you're normal, but whatever you do do not assume the Doctor Who role and attempt to recreate the process described in TFA. It will result in a disruption of the enclosing universal wormhole as described in the new item title. Just go about your business like nothing happened and keep eating the pills. Accept your hairless monkey role in life and die like a pac man caught by a hungry ghost. Do not attempt to drain your pool.
-- Tech Support!!!!!!!
This author was barely even tricky or clever.
They are taking the opposite stance for the purpose of subverting an opinion.
They aren't trumpeting in the arrival of cheaper, higher-quality software. Did anybody else pick up on this? He was a Mac developer himself.
He's trying to build justification for iOS devs to start charging like off-the-shelf software does, id est 8~15* more. He doesn't *want* to see the prices drop as he charges, that's why he makes it sound so horrible.
The only reason why he would promote his theory with such confidence is to use that confidence as leverage to change the market opinion. So he's not making a prediction, he's making a bull racket.
That kind of behaviour is what I'd expect from shifty, overweight people who snort oxycontin. Maybe even for sedentary, has-been developers who don't want to change-up or find a second leg to stand on.
But I don't consider it news and I don't think it was a very professionally composed attempt to subvert the market opinion. If you're going to social hack, get some composure, first. Guard your integrity.
I don't even know why I'm typing this here, I should send it to the fruitbasket who wrote tfa.
Anyways, his position is so wildly overstated as to make it incredible.
Inherent *in* his position is a dichotomy distinguishing between two different qualities of not only development but of product.
The producers in both camps know exactly where they stand and how they're viewed. There's no illusion to shatter.
And it's very likely that prices will drop somewhere between 5% and the 13.5~18.5% range, but there's no justification for dropping more than the traditional markdown to markup. The only reason anybody drops more than 50% is clearance and the software companies have no reason to clear house at this point. They just opened up a new point of sale -- if anything their market hold just got stronger. The only reason to drop below 75% is a firesale or closeout. Again, companies aren't going out of business over this, if anything they just got a whole new vista of opportunities to fill for relatively little effort.
Whereas ten employees could work a year designing the update to one app, the same ten can in their spare time each design one or two tiny apps of less function and lower quality, a piece. The ten to twenty apps selling at a buck a piece equate to the same twenty bucks for a powerful, robust app running on a more powerful structure. So it comes out the same, and in the meantime even less effort was spent, fewer programmers were needed so the entire process of organizing an overhead structure for the code project never even occurs, you end up with 10-20 coders instead of 30-200 (oh wow, don't even have to outsource, whaddayaknow) and so the profit margin increases wildly. It's lucrative. It's quick and decent. People eat it up. And best of all, you don't have to charge rock-bottom one-dollar for your myriad of tiny apps because you're a reputable company with something "real" to offer. You get to charge two bucks or maybe... three. Damn... five bucks. Before you know it, you're multiplying profits a million times.
That's great, that's fine. That's why that model continues to work. It has no bearing, no relevance on the world of software that has to be developed using a giant code-sharing framework, with tons of employees specialising in different layers or functions of various parts of the code, and with a whole dev team just to get it off the drawing board. And nobody *thinks* it does, not even the person who wrote the article.
So if anything, opening the store means companies will want to hold prices steady to firmly demonstrate the difference between the two tiers of software quality apparent in the dichotomy, considering neither one threatens the other in any way, shape, or form.
God, what a terrible article.
The fish that died around there in the same time period were only one species, too.
My friend descended from a Siberian tribe. His grandmother died in Siberia because she happened to go out wearing just two or three layers less than you "should". See, it's cold enough over there in my friend's ancestral village that the windows are plastic. Glass would shatter. And despite this, sometimes you want convenience. Like if you're American and you want to get milk, you're tempted to use the SUV to drive two blocks away and save five minutes of walking. Well, she saved five minutes changing out of two or three layers of clothing and suffered from it, due to a tragic weather event. OVer there, the Siberians get these tiny tornadoes that only last a few seconds. They're invisible. But inside of them, the temperature isn't just eighteen below zero, it's like thirty-eight below zero. And the wind is reintroducing that temperature of air at a rate of sometimes around a hundred miles an hour, but confined in a very tight vortex of only three or four feet across due to the nature of convecting currents and their abilities to maintain micro systems, something not very well understood. Being in that tiny cold whirlwind for even a few seconds can cause really horrible physical traumas. She was struck dead by hypothermia by an invisible weather phenomenon, struck dead by a tornado as big around as her sucking down temperatures from the upper atmosphere that were cold enough to lower her core temperature down below dead in only seconds. This sort of thing is a reality, and we can assume that there is plenty under the sun that science doesn't quite comprehend. If this doesn't turn out to be a low-pressure or mega-updraft incident of some kind, then I think we can all safely assume it is a pathogenic or local effect. A bacteria or virus. A radioactive or electromagnetic pulse. At any rate it's anomalous and anybody studying it with interest is probably more intelligent than the average scientists who, based largely on risk assessed values of research grant award futures versus college loan payment rates, side squarely with what is pre-established and therefore never learn anything new and fail to ever address the slightest anomaly whether it challenges their worldview or not.
I never know what to think when people spew on about contrails. There's plausibility to be upheld behind such claims, you know. It's as irresponsible to blame contrails and "the gubmint" as it is to blame poor Satan and the meek who aid his truth for women having warts giving puritan men the heebejeebes, or for the murderously pyromaniacal urges those men developed as a result of not being tucked in right and getting buggered off by their mommas when they were still eating frosted flakes. I'm just saying that besides all that, you apparently stand proud and, uh, "represent".
Hail, lightning, fireworks would have caused said unfound trauma.
Theory: caught in a hellacious wild updraft. Lifted into highest levels of the atmosphere where they suffered insufficient oxygen and/or insufficient pressure -- vessels and or lungs burst.
That's neat, it looks like they're using some kind of inductance interference to register finger proximity to the touch pad, so you don't even necessarily have to touch the screen. They're only using one attenuator/sensor, so it will only serve the purpose of turning the screen/device on when you move your finger near it, but if they were to use several then theoretically you could do away with the "touch" aspect. Forgive me if any of that's olden but it's news to me.
Two years ago I met a girl at a college dorm party who was wearing a solar power coat. This has to have been in /. news, already, right?
I am happy one thousand times.
And I am joyed more than springtime for the information programmes of the Communist People's Republic of China.
I am also ten lifetimes thankful for the honesty and values of the Freedom Press of the Communist People's Republic.
One day everyone will be Chinese men. Aren't you happy? Be Good Chinese Men!
[ Contact: Bank of America, Corporate and Financial customer category: expense of over 2 billion per year ]
Yes, every year I expend billions of dollars worth of great ideas just simply talking to people and being one of the greatest geniuses who has ever lived. You wouldn't have a clue. I will write "on your level".
From what I understand, Bank of America is spending money to do things like buy up domain names such as "ThePresidentofBankofAmericaHasHisPenisOnUpsideDown.com" or "AllTheMunchkinsWhoWorkForBankOfAmericaAreUnderpaidAndDon'tComprehendIt.com" and so on.
Maybe Bank of America are spending what is, to them, relatively pennies in terms of monies, kind of like throwing a few pennies on the grown relatively, in expressing in a subtle fashion -- nothing that would mark their reputation or standing, mind you -- exactly how they feel about the paranoia and overreaction assembled around Assange and Wikileaks. Perhaps?
Really, though, I would be interested to know what Bank of America's psychologist would say if Bank of America were lying on the couch and said "I want to claim up all the names in the world that might make fun of my name. Might make FUN of my name. So nobody CAN."
I'm reading a book about the failure of the love-affair between the education system and computers. It was printed in 2000 but it's fairly relevant today.
Armstrong, Alison. "The Child and the Machine." Beltsville, Maryland: Robins Lane. 2000. Print.
I'm barely into it but there are some sticky points, the author's lack of intimate knowledge of programming and computing one of them. Page three features some pretty mindlessly listed factoids about programming that bear resemblance to a high schooler's crammed and rushed-to-laserprinter report on Early Computer Languages. One really bad sentence:
"Far from being skilled technicians, many of today's computer operators are little more than typists because the software packages they use require them to perform repetitive, machinelike tasks."
What does the author expect? It's instructions for machines. She must have been too astronomically bored reading descriptions of Turing's machine operations to render a more philosophically correct perspective on computing.
So saying, I thought I should go read the article mentioned here. And the author of the article is right, "computer science" is a misused term. Funny enough, this book I'm reading harps on about how "computer literate" is also misused and ill-defined. There's a quote from Andrew Molnar (who created the term "computer literacy" in 1972):
"In a 1991 interview, by then painfully aware that computers had failed to have much positive effect on education, Molnar explained: 'We started computer literacy in '72. We coined that phrase. It's sort of ironic. Nobody knows what computer literacy is. Nobody could define it, and nobody knew what it was.'"
I once designed a free course in basic computer science for a church to teach the homeless, and they were happy with the syllabus but the prospectus involved putting three to six students on one computer and they didn't see how that would work, and were simultaneously afraid to turn away homeless people from using a privilege when others were being allowed (because of class size and other constraints, mainly how much time I was willing to spend and how many people I was willing to teach.) This is what my vision of the basics of "computer literacy" entail [excerpts]:
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
To be most efficient, the course would be designed so that each computer screen or terminal would be occupied by three students simultaneously. ... The mouse is not a great instructional device for two reasons: usually only one pointer is available anyway, and even if several pointers can be installed reading from several devices and even if the processor can handle all of them simultaneously, the mouse/pointer is not really meant to be anything more than a convenient effort-saver, and the simplicity of point-and-click interfaces doesn't really immerse the adult student in the intricacies or complexities of the computer the same way that the keyboard can. The computer itself should be anything in the x86 processor series, preferably a 586 but any computer between 286 and 486 is also reasonable and far less expensive ... I think it would be advisable to use older computers dating back realistically no earlier than 1985, but preferably no earlier than 1990. ... As far as acquiring software, all the tools needed or desired by the instructor can be found online for free or can be programmed.
COURSE GOAL OR OBJECTIVE
The full course should be teachable within six hours. After ... Introduction to computer use
the course, the student should be able to discourse freely
about the engineering and operation of computers and should
be able to say that they were able to program a computer to
perform specific functions.
even with a goal of learning specific software collections
if hindered by technological intimidation and is aided by
a level of familiarity and confidence that can't be bought
out of the box, or picked up by using point-and-click inter
Even the NSA now openly admits what Kevin Mitnick, Dmitri Sklyarov, and most readers of 2600 and Slashdot already knew: that there is no such thing as infallible security, that any usable portal is an exploitable one, and that pretending otherwise is the antithesis of security.
( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/12/17/1540256 ).
The whole "counterculture" if you will of open-sourcers work with this concept as precept. People already distrust Intel somewhat because of allegations of backroom dealing with the likes of Microsoft over the usage of hidden opcodes, and allegations that Intel tried to set legal precedent that deciphering the purpose of hidden opcodes in their processors for end-user purposes amounts to industrial espionage.
The Clipper device wasn't very popular with consumers despite assurances that it was for their security. And given the facts about exploitation, Sandy Bridges isn't much different from a Clipper with delusions of vigilante grandeur, and with the difference of being a kill-switch instead of a listening port. The similarity: both present the possibility of the product performing not-as-intended and potentially without the user having any control over it, as a side-effect of insecurities albeit already resident in the consumer but also inflamed by the marketing behind the device. On the technical side, just the whole fact that it's reversible practically screams "useless" to somebody who knows that they'll eventually find a way to trip it either way they want at a whim, or just circumvent it.
If it's about protecting data, there are already numerous ways of replicating the performance of this Sandy Bridges feature without having any special hardware installed. You can be sure that your encrypted data will not be misused even if the equipment is stolen, even if that equipment is a 80286. And from the description, even as a lo-jack it's sort of "fail" especially considering it doesn't sound anything at all like what the average computer user can find accessible, unless they feel like investing hella cash and trusting their ISP as "home server". Even if you can present some ideal model situation where the encrypted protection and lojack features work every time, opening them up to the outside world isn't sane or more usable, it's James Bond wannabe versus Dick Tracy wannabe bullcrap for the masses, and as some here predict, it's likely going to spell doom for the entire processor line and the investments of all the consumers who support it.
Intel -- It's Inside. It's Insiiiiiiiiiide of yoooooouuuuuuuu. Intellllllllllll.