Patents have ALWAYS been a way of saying "fuck you" to the competition but with the patenting of processes and components, software and class libraries, we run the risk of killing the very industry that spawned the whole mess in the first place.
I think I'll patent a means of recording information about a customer. That will mean that NOBODY ELSE will ever again be able to have a customer. That would dispose of the problem.
Not new. Imagine a roll-up screen.
on
Paintable LCDs
·
· Score: 2
Now imagine a paint-on wall-size screen.
Imagine you had the money to pay for the research into rapid deployment of high-tech command centers to remote locations. Get the picture?
Who needs CRTs when you have tent walls.
The only hard part of LCDs these days is getting the line resolution and registration down to 1/100 of an inch. Its not the material. If you don't need wires 1/200th of an inch thin every 1/100th of an inch, it a LOT easier and cheaper.
If you can weave the support and control lines into cloth and slather on the LCD goo in a controlled thickness, seal it all in clear, weather-proof plastic with good UV reactant properties, its gets a lot cheaper.
The only hard parts are seperating pixels (weave in regularly spaced thick insulating/isolating thread,) and getting the signal to the LCD material (which requires regularly-spaced "fuzzy" knots in the metalic "signal carrier" thread.
The technology has been around for a while.
Anybody remember pictures of women slipping magnetic doughnuts onto wires and threading a third wire into 'em to make "core" memory?
This tells why Digital Broadcast and HDTV is dead in the water:
"... Unlike DVD movies, which are encrypted on the disk and decrypted every time they?re played, digital broadcast television has to be unencrypted. For one thing, the Federal Communications Commission requires that broadcast television be sent "in the clear." (The rationale is that broadcasters are custodians of a public resource -- the part of the electromagnetic spectrum used for television -- and therefore have to make whatever they pump into that spectrum available to everyone.) Then, too, digital TV has to reach existing digital television sets, which cannot decode encrypted broadcasts"
HDTV and digital "over the air broadcast" will never be accepted by the industry. They are trying to get a direct "named" pipe into your house (and wallet.)
The xxAAs mist be so proud. No copyrights to pay, no original thought to interfere with the ads. And its all gravy as far as they're concerned.
Look forward to the annoying theme music to play in the next elevator you ride. Look for the posters to be in front of your face at the urinal next time you take a piss in a bar.
And its so great. Computer animation... Like computers don't go on strikes or demand a salary. And its not like the Transformers are likely to demand a Union is it?
Look forward for Final Fantasy 2 through N as soon as production costs come down and Squaresoft's copyright has lapsed or been bought for a off-key song.
And as for plot, writers, cartoonists and any of those creative PainsInTheAss. Well they can just starve in the street. And if their clothes rot off, they'll just be arrested and carted off to somewhere where they won't cut off the view of the billboards.
You have NO IDEA of how much retro sucks or how well it plays into the hands of the xxAAs.
Are we so unimaginative, so bereft of creativity that we have to revisit Gilligan's fuckin' Island every fuckin' year while he original cast and crew drop fuckin' dead of old age? Is someone building a fuckin' shrine to Burt fuckin' Ward yet? Are they playing William Shatner's greatest hit in the chapel?
And some moron is trying to get Elvis a (post-humous) honorary degree in MUSIC. Like give me a fuckin' break already. I didn't like him all that much when he was alive. He was mouthing along with the Check Records list. He couldn't sing that well either. Like Billy Idol with his sneer and his failure to properly pronounce the title on "White Wedding."
Jeez... Got a fuckin' hand-basket? Lets set it on fire and climb the fuck in.
I still listen to "Paraniomia" by "Art of Noise"
on
Back on TV: Max Headroom
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I absolutely loved/hated Max Head room when it came out.
There was something so John Brunner's "Stand On Zanzibar"-ish about it.
"20 minutes into the future" is a dystopia of our own making and it is so predictably so.
"Chanel 23" was a microcosm of the greed and prevarication that's reflected in every AOL/Time Warner's share-holder's balance sheet.
"Twenty minutes into the future" the world is in an stop-motion/jaggy flow because its in an accelerating downward spiral.
"Chanel 23"/"EngLRlaySatlServ" Same shit. There was something so depressing about watching that show. It was wrist slitting time. Urban terorism on par with anything Phillip K Dick ever feared up.
Now we only Muslim barbarians shooting parents for trying to educate their kids to worry about.
All fundamentalism is destructive. Blow up all the churches, mosques, temples and any other breeding grounds for fanaticism. Its the only sane response.
Those who would decare war on you should realize that they have just painted a target on their foreheads. We should send out our own homicidal maniacs to kill them. Better than keeping those nuts here.
The xxAA's onky exist because of inertia. And they are the heaviest contributors to this inertia.
They have fought (and lost) against EVERY technological device since the invention of the player piano. They have NEVER won. Not even ONCE.
And the people who were supposed to benefit from this went around them and founded entire industries around the products that were supposed to bring doom and desolation to the industries they were alleging to protect.
The industries who need protection need protection from the xxAAs not the technology. That technology has in EVERY case turned into a profit center for somebody in the industry.
I suspect that the fight will now be brought back home to the xxAAs since they have NEVER won a case but instead have stood at every turn between people and profits.
The xxAAs are about as useful as a dose of clap and about as pleasant. Cover Jack Valente with Piperazine and he'd wither away like a slug covered with salt.
The xxAAs put music and ads in elevators. But its such an abomination that its called "Muzak." Muzak is to music as a can of dog food is to a steak.
Some people prefer chicken. FINE... But THEY get to make the choice of their meal.
Most music is of the Muzak variety. If bought by people who don't like it and don't listen to it but have been sold on structured noise as a background. Its part of an architectural motif on par with the plastic chairs in airport lounges and its about as comfortable to be around. Personally, I prefer silence. And its FREE!
Hey! Let 'em go into content production for a change.
We know TV's already full of crap. M$ can't do any harm there. Its already down to the lowest common denominator. Let M$ go broke trying to get into HDTV. Its just a mirage as far as I can tell.
There are still no real standards.
The competition is already there and its dog-eat-dog.
The margins are razor thin.
It'd be something else they'd give up on eventually. (I haven't seen any plans for X-Box][ or X-Box ]|[. Have you?:-)
And they'd be at the whim of their advertisers. It'd be great to see M$ pandering instead of patronizing. M$s share holders will watch the share values drop like a stone but since Bill's still richer than Creosus, he won't care and he still holds the majority so their opinion counts for squat.
I can see it now:
"Debby Does Redmond!"
"M$ Where more that you system goes down!"
"Digitized 'Chech & Chong' in:
'Gotta Crash' "
"MSNBC and CNet television in HDTV.
Boredom with a 9x16 aspect ratio."
I gave up on TV years ago. Don't even own one anymore. Waste of time. When I found yourself flipping through 50+ channels trying to see if there's anything on that caught my attention for more that a second, it was time to abandon it (I just didn't pack it a couple of ago,) and get a life.
Maybe the world'd get usable software instead of Win-doze.
It stopped being for everyone when the government got out and left it in private hands.
All those ass-holes want to do is to get you to buy more shit. They don't give a fuck about content except that its something that the media companies use to string the ads together.
As for the copyright scamming content providers they don't make money one all the new shit, the old stuff that they own the copyright to makes them money. They only reason for promoting the new artists du jour is to churn the inventory and screw the consumer.
There is NO room for originality, creativity or for the artist to make a dime from it.
Might as well throw in the towel on the media outlet controlled web and use an alternate channel of what's left.
There is an article at Radio Free Nation about creating and using collaborative spaces (wikis) to wrest control away from the media giants who want to destroy fair use, individual's copyright and access to unfettered media.
This might be a way to do it and it uses the same "waste not want not" approach as Seti@home. Wikis set up to serve an artistic community using only excess capacity.
Got a some disk space and some bandwidth to spare on a Linux box with a DSL link? You can be a benevelent media mogul helping the creative community in your area.
I'm starting to host small community wikis on my home box ( http://wage.packet.org ) for writers, poets, musicians and others who stand about as much of a chance to land a contract with a media outlet as they have of contracting diseases of the rich.
Its a place for them to put their stuff so it gets out there and, being a wiki, they can collaborate on editing and enhancing the content.
Content that the xxAAs doesn't control and squeeze every possible dime out of. Content that's not constantly churned in an effort to wipe out the creative source by limiting their exposure while fostering a feeding frenzy for whatever's NEW NEW NEW while its really the same old whine in the same old bottle with a new label that really doesn't really look any different.
And who knows? I may have the next Stephen King, Emily Post or Nirvana putting their stuff on my box just to have a back-up and to register a copyright date.
Or I may be starting an entirely new form of collaborative writing.
The sad fact is that most "hardware" ventures, regardless of the industry, are short-lived.
The X-Box will have had a "shelf-life"/"existence in the retail space," about the same as any other consumer product.
In our own industry: Remember the Altair 8080? The Osborne-1? The Bernouli Drive? Data General- Keronics/EDS? DEC PDPs & Vaxes? Packard-Bell?
In other industries: The Packard automobile? Erie-Bucyrus & cable bucket excavators? Pet Rocks? The original Sony Walk-man before it became a profitless knock-off sold in a blister-pack for ten bucks by brothers on the street. The list grows daily of products relegated to the ash-can of consumer oblivion. The disappearace is hastened by corporate pressures to perform.
The bigger the corporation, the higher the pressure. A lot of smaller companies would be quite happy with the X-Box's sales volume but it won't do for a Microsoft. The X-Box team need a lot more money coming in to stay alive as a budget line item.
The producers are using this in an attempt to shirk their responsabilities.
Nobody reads these pieces of ass-wad because there is no negotiation and no alternative. Basically, they are meaningless, unenforcable and totally useless.
We all know that there is only ONE recourse and that is to burn Redmond to cinders and lynch Gates' minions. When that becomes an inevitable alternative, we'll do it. Until then, we'll put up with the crap we get because a) its not our software, its not important and we don't give a shit b) we don't have any choice.
You could place clauses in there that would indicate that you wish to sell the user's better looking daughters into sexual slavery and render the rest of the family for the fat content and nobody would bat an eye because nobody would notice.
But I'd have to ask for a front row seat to watch when the lawyers come to your door to cart away your daughters and melt the rest for lard. Can you say "bullets flying?"
You work for middle managers who are even more stressed out than you are because they're held responsable for everything that goes wrong when the higher-ups keep pulling resources.
Meanwhile you keep getting it in the shorts because "nothing is impossible to the guy who doesn't have to do it."
And when things finally cave, YOUR ass is grass.
Looks like it takes a normal handset phone.
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
·
· Score: 2
So that would take care of the usual audio quality problem of "sounds like you're talking from the bottom of a garbage can."
I'm more concerned with "choppy"-ness. There IS a solution to this. The Telcos have been doing "voice over IP" multiplexing on their own X.25 packet trunk lines for years.
I'm less concerned about encryption than most (Its a lousy way to maintain security anyway unless you're using biometric keys [double encrypt with the receiver's and the sender's keys for really private conversations]) which is a lot of work to ask my machine to do just to talk with the ex-wife once or twice a month.
otherwise you're not programming. You're just coding. I get my machine to grind out code.
Since I program in Smalltalk and write code generators for other languages (or even for Smaltalk,) you're obviously talking about a lower level of productivity that I have progressed far beyond.
I some letter to the editor of some computer magazine.
Now I own a 20MB & some 4.5, 6, 10, 15s, 19 & 30 GB drives, and you know what? I still can't backup my stuff worth crap.
I have one CR-RW drive for my Linux box (which IS backing up my domain,:-) and one CD-RW drive on my TiBook which I would use for backup except that the drivers from Retrospect don't seem to quite be working.
Its never been IF the drives fail (I've hung lots of opened up drives on my cubicle wall,) but WHEN. And nobody has EVER addressed that issue properly.
in the sixties and early seventies called "The Price for Security if Freedom."
Fact is that in the 'States, you have the perfect to privacy on your OWN property. In most other places in this world, you don't even have that. If somebody can see in, they can see in. That's IT.
You DON'T have ANY rights anywhere else.
You NEVER DID. Specially on some public commons. Yes... You ARE being watched so don't be ashamed of anything you do and don't do anything you'd be ashamed of because you ARE being watched.
At least the system in the 'States is not preemptive. You CAN go out to rob a liquor store or murder the neighbor's kids. Its just that you can never again expect to get away with it. You WILL be caught.
An entire genre of crime fiction will become "passé." The rationale for the cerebration and observation of Sherlock Holmes will disappear when we can all go to the instant replay.
And surveillance cuts both ways.
Your rights will never again be blithely ignored by some bully with a badge who tries to re-arange your facial features with a door frame. (But then again YOU'll never again be able to blame somebody ELSE for your own stupidity.)
Get over it. There a 1.2 trillion dollar hole in the economy, a hole in the New York skyline and in downtown New York filled with damn near three thousand people killed there. And I was almost one of 'em.
Driving is a privilege and a responsability. Too many people kill and maim too many other people because they can't behave responsably.
You want to rant. I've got a cemetery full of ranters for you and hospital wards and prosthetic companies solely filled and supported by morons who think they can handle a few tons of hurtling metal when they are so mentally deficient they shouldn't be allowed to walk home alone at night.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents have ALWAYS been a way of saying "fuck you" to the competition but with the patenting of processes and components, software and class libraries, we run the risk of killing the very industry that spawned the whole mess in the first place.
I think I'll patent a means of recording information about a customer. That will mean that NOBODY ELSE will ever again be able to have a customer. That would dispose of the problem.
Now imagine a paint-on wall-size screen.
Imagine you had the money to pay for the research into rapid deployment of high-tech command centers to remote locations. Get the picture?
Who needs CRTs when you have tent walls.
The only hard part of LCDs these days is getting the line resolution and registration down to 1/100 of an inch. Its not the material. If you don't need wires 1/200th of an inch thin every 1/100th of an inch, it a LOT easier and cheaper.
If you can weave the support and control lines into cloth and slather on the LCD goo in a controlled thickness, seal it all in clear, weather-proof plastic with good UV reactant properties, its gets a lot cheaper.
The only hard parts are seperating pixels (weave in regularly spaced thick insulating/isolating thread,) and getting the signal to the LCD material (which requires regularly-spaced "fuzzy" knots in the metalic "signal carrier" thread.
The technology has been around for a while.
Anybody remember pictures of women slipping magnetic doughnuts onto wires and threading a third wire into 'em to make "core" memory?
These are refinements and cost-cutting.
This tells why Digital Broadcast and HDTV is dead in the water:
"... Unlike DVD movies, which are encrypted on the disk and decrypted every time they?re played, digital broadcast television has to be unencrypted. For one thing, the Federal Communications Commission requires that broadcast television be sent "in the clear." (The rationale is that broadcasters are custodians of a public resource -- the part of the electromagnetic spectrum used for television -- and therefore have to make whatever they pump into that spectrum available to everyone.) Then, too, digital TV has to reach existing digital television sets, which cannot decode encrypted broadcasts"
HDTV and digital "over the air broadcast" will never be accepted by the industry. They are trying to get a direct "named" pipe into your house (and wallet.)
The xxAAs mist be so proud. No copyrights to pay, no original thought to interfere with the ads. And its all gravy as far as they're concerned.
Look forward to the annoying theme music to play in the next elevator you ride. Look for the posters to be in front of your face at the urinal next time you take a piss in a bar.
And its so great. Computer animation... Like computers don't go on strikes or demand a salary. And its not like the Transformers are likely to demand a Union is it?
Look forward for Final Fantasy 2 through N as soon as production costs come down and Squaresoft's copyright has lapsed or been bought for a off-key song.
And as for plot, writers, cartoonists and any of those creative PainsInTheAss. Well they can just starve in the street. And if their clothes rot off, they'll just be arrested and carted off to somewhere where they won't cut off the view of the billboards.
You have NO IDEA of how much retro sucks or how well it plays into the hands of the xxAAs.
Are we so unimaginative, so bereft of creativity that we have to revisit Gilligan's fuckin' Island every fuckin' year while he original cast and crew drop fuckin' dead of old age? Is someone building a fuckin' shrine to Burt fuckin' Ward yet? Are they playing William Shatner's greatest hit in the chapel?
And some moron is trying to get Elvis a (post-humous) honorary degree in MUSIC. Like give me a fuckin' break already. I didn't like him all that much when he was alive. He was mouthing along with the Check Records list. He couldn't sing that well either. Like Billy Idol with his sneer and his failure to properly pronounce the title on "White Wedding."
Jeez... Got a fuckin' hand-basket? Lets set it on fire and climb the fuck in.
I absolutely loved/hated Max Head room when it came out.
There was something so John Brunner's "Stand On Zanzibar"-ish about it.
"20 minutes into the future" is a dystopia of our own making and it is so predictably so.
"Chanel 23" was a microcosm of the greed and prevarication that's reflected in every AOL/Time Warner's share-holder's balance sheet.
"Twenty minutes into the future" the world is in an stop-motion/jaggy flow because its in an accelerating downward spiral.
"Chanel 23"/"EngLRlaySatlServ" Same shit. There was something so depressing about watching that show. It was wrist slitting time. Urban terorism on par with anything Phillip K Dick ever feared up.
Now we only Muslim barbarians shooting parents for trying to educate their kids to worry about.
All fundamentalism is destructive. Blow up all the churches, mosques, temples and any other breeding grounds for fanaticism. Its the only sane response.
Those who would decare war on you should realize that they have just painted a target on their foreheads. We should send out our own homicidal maniacs to kill them. Better than keeping those nuts here.
The xxAA's onky exist because of inertia. And they are the heaviest contributors to this inertia.
They have fought (and lost) against EVERY technological device since the invention of the player piano. They have NEVER won. Not even ONCE.
And the people who were supposed to benefit from this went around them and founded entire industries around the products that were supposed to bring doom and desolation to the industries they were alleging to protect.
The industries who need protection need protection from the xxAAs not the technology. That technology has in EVERY case turned into a profit center for somebody in the industry.
I suspect that the fight will now be brought back home to the xxAAs since they have NEVER won a case but instead have stood at every turn between people and profits.
The xxAAs are about as useful as a dose of clap and about as pleasant. Cover Jack Valente with Piperazine and he'd wither away like a slug covered with salt.
The xxAAs put music and ads in elevators. But its such an abomination that its called "Muzak." Muzak is to music as a can of dog food is to a steak.
Some people prefer chicken. FINE... But THEY get to make the choice of their meal.
Most music is of the Muzak variety. If bought by people who don't like it and don't listen to it but have been sold on structured noise as a background. Its part of an architectural motif on par with the plastic chairs in airport lounges and its about as comfortable to be around.
Personally, I prefer silence. And its FREE!
Backup the data and backup the backup. Then have redundant hardware and a service contract.
Its not IF the system fails but WHEN.
The folks at Wilkes Barre are idiots and their mayor should fire their CIO, COO or department head IMMEDIATELY.
No excuses.
An MIS shop is no place for tyros.
Hey! Let 'em go into content production for a change.
:-)
We know TV's already full of crap. M$ can't do any harm there. Its already down to the lowest common denominator. Let M$ go broke trying to get into HDTV. Its just a mirage as far as I can tell.
There are still no real standards.
The competition is already there and its dog-eat-dog.
The margins are razor thin.
It'd be something else they'd give up on eventually. (I haven't seen any plans for X-Box][ or X-Box ]|[. Have you?
And they'd be at the whim of their advertisers. It'd be great to see M$ pandering instead of patronizing. M$s share holders will watch the share values drop like a stone but since Bill's still richer than Creosus, he won't care and he still holds the majority so their opinion counts for squat.
I can see it now:
"Debby Does Redmond!"
"M$ Where more that you system goes down!"
"Digitized 'Chech & Chong' in:
'Gotta Crash' "
"MSNBC and CNet television in HDTV.
Boredom with a 9x16 aspect ratio."
I gave up on TV years ago. Don't even own one anymore. Waste of time. When I found yourself flipping through 50+ channels trying to see if there's anything on that caught my attention for more that a second, it was time to abandon it (I just didn't pack it a couple of ago,) and get a life.
Maybe the world'd get usable software instead of Win-doze.
All those ass-holes want to do is to get you to buy more shit. They don't give a fuck about content except that its something that the media companies use to string the ads together.
As for the copyright scamming content providers they don't make money one all the new shit, the old stuff that they own the copyright to makes them money. They only reason for promoting the new artists du jour is to churn the inventory and screw the consumer.
There is NO room for originality, creativity or for the artist to make a dime from it.
Might as well throw in the towel on the media outlet controlled web and use an alternate channel of what's left.
There is an article at Radio Free Nation about creating and using collaborative spaces (wikis) to wrest control away from the media giants who want to destroy fair use, individual's copyright and access to unfettered media.
This might be a way to do it and it uses the same "waste not want not" approach as Seti@home. Wikis set up to serve an artistic community using only excess capacity.
Got a some disk space and some bandwidth to spare on a Linux box with a DSL link? You can be a benevelent media mogul helping the creative community in your area.
I'm starting to host small community wikis on my home box ( http://wage.packet.org ) for writers, poets, musicians and others who stand about as much of a chance to land a contract with a media outlet as they have of contracting diseases of the rich.
Its a place for them to put their stuff so it gets out there and, being a wiki, they can collaborate on editing and enhancing the content.
Content that the xxAAs doesn't control and squeeze every possible dime out of. Content that's not constantly churned in an effort to wipe out the creative source by limiting their exposure while fostering a feeding frenzy for whatever's NEW NEW NEW while its really the same old whine in the same old bottle with a new label that really doesn't really look any different.
And who knows? I may have the next Stephen King, Emily Post or Nirvana putting their stuff on my box just to have a back-up and to register a copyright date.
Or I may be starting an entirely new form of collaborative writing.
And what happened to the team?
And what happened to Data General eventually?
The sad fact is that most "hardware" ventures, regardless of the industry, are short-lived.
The X-Box will have had a "shelf-life"/"existence in the retail space," about the same as any other consumer product.
In our own industry: Remember the Altair 8080? The Osborne-1? The Bernouli Drive? Data General- Keronics/EDS? DEC PDPs & Vaxes? Packard-Bell?
In other industries: The Packard automobile? Erie-Bucyrus & cable bucket excavators? Pet Rocks? The original Sony Walk-man before it became a profitless knock-off sold in a blister-pack for ten bucks by brothers on the street.
The list grows daily of products relegated to the ash-can of consumer oblivion. The disappearace is hastened by corporate pressures to perform.
The bigger the corporation, the higher the pressure. A lot of smaller companies would be quite happy with the X-Box's sales volume but it won't do for a Microsoft. The X-Box team need a lot more money coming in to stay alive as a budget line item.
The producers are using this in an attempt to shirk their responsabilities.
Nobody reads these pieces of ass-wad because there is no negotiation and no alternative. Basically, they are meaningless, unenforcable and totally useless.
We all know that there is only ONE recourse and that is to burn Redmond to cinders and lynch Gates' minions. When that becomes an inevitable alternative, we'll do it. Until then, we'll put up with the crap we get because a) its not our software, its not important and we don't give a shit b) we don't have any choice.
You could place clauses in there that would indicate that you wish to sell the user's better looking daughters into sexual slavery and render the rest of the family for the fat content and nobody would bat an eye because nobody would notice.
But I'd have to ask for a front row seat to watch when the lawyers come to your door to cart away your daughters and melt the rest for lard. Can you say "bullets flying?"
You work for middle managers who are even more stressed out than you are because they're held responsable for everything that goes wrong when the higher-ups keep pulling resources.
Meanwhile you keep getting it in the shorts because "nothing is impossible to the guy who doesn't have to do it."
And when things finally cave, YOUR ass is grass.
So that would take care of the usual audio quality problem of "sounds like you're talking from the bottom of a garbage can."
I'm more concerned with "choppy"-ness. There IS a solution to this. The Telcos have been doing "voice over IP" multiplexing on their own X.25 packet trunk lines for years.
I'm less concerned about encryption than most (Its a lousy way to maintain security anyway unless you're using biometric keys [double encrypt with the receiver's and the sender's keys for really private conversations]) which is a lot of work to ask my machine to do just to talk with the ex-wife once or twice a month.
If you've got the dough and want something that'll last with some "ooo" factor, get a TiBook with OS9, OS X and YellowDog Linux.
That's what I got in January when they finally started to deliver a CD-R & RW burner in 'em. (I HATE not being able to back-up.)
I can only recommend it. My G4/667MHz 512MB RAM 30GB disk is great.
otherwise you're not programming. You're just coding. I get my machine to grind out code.
Since I program in Smalltalk and write code generators for other languages (or even for Smaltalk,) you're obviously talking about a lower level of productivity that I have progressed far beyond.
God, it must suck to be you.
no comment
and get up and go to work at 07:30. I never knew there was a name for it.
But it catches up with you.
My idea of geting up late on Saturday morning was 04:00 Sunday morning.
That really fucks up you biorythms.
I some letter to the editor of some computer magazine.
:-) and one CD-RW drive on my TiBook which I would use for backup except that the drivers from Retrospect don't seem to quite be working.
Now I own a 20MB & some 4.5, 6, 10, 15s, 19 & 30 GB drives, and you know what? I still can't backup my stuff worth crap.
I have one CR-RW drive for my Linux box (which IS backing up my domain,
Its never been IF the drives fail (I've hung lots of opened up drives on my cubicle wall,) but WHEN. And nobody has EVER addressed that issue properly.
How long does it take a politician to stumble over the very obvious? To damn long it seems.
The segregation of sites into different domains is NOT censorship. Its rational.
Agents are great. They roam the net looking for porn and gather it all in one convenient site for you.
http://www.sensibleerection.com/
in the sixties and early seventies called "The Price for Security if Freedom."
Fact is that in the 'States, you have the perfect to privacy on your OWN property. In most other places in this world, you don't even have that. If somebody can see in, they can see in. That's IT.
You DON'T have ANY rights anywhere else.
You NEVER DID. Specially on some public commons.
Yes... You ARE being watched so don't be ashamed of anything you do and don't do anything you'd be ashamed of because you ARE being watched.
At least the system in the 'States is not preemptive. You CAN go out to rob a liquor store or murder the neighbor's kids. Its just that you can never again expect to get away with it. You WILL be caught.
An entire genre of crime fiction will become "passé." The rationale for the cerebration and observation of Sherlock Holmes will disappear when we can all go to the instant replay.
And surveillance cuts both ways.
Your rights will never again be blithely ignored by some bully with a badge who tries to re-arange your facial features with a door frame. (But then again YOU'll never again be able to blame somebody ELSE for your own stupidity.)
Get over it. There a 1.2 trillion dollar hole in the economy, a hole in the New York skyline and in downtown New York filled with damn near three thousand people killed there. And I was almost one of 'em.
I feel your pain.
Now smile for the camera and shut the fuck up.
a fender bender with some idiot who was DWI.
Driving is a privilege and a responsability. Too many people kill and maim too many other people because they can't behave responsably.
You want to rant. I've got a cemetery full of ranters for you and hospital wards and prosthetic companies solely filled and supported by morons who think they can handle a few tons of hurtling metal when they are so mentally deficient they shouldn't be allowed to walk home alone at night.
Its going to be YOUR licence for REAL. Nobody will EVER be able to steal your wallet or car and get into some form of legal shit and stick YOU in it.
Biometrics is security based on what you ARE not what you (and anybody else can) know.
I'm a shit-load more paranoid about 'em NOT using biometrics and making all kinds of (in)human errors.