I know the blackberry- along with many/most other phones I'm sure- has voice recognition to allow you to assign a name to various phone numbers as you wish. Despite phone numbers having to be unique, this system lets everyone use "home" as the name as their home phone number, and everyone with a friend named Dave can call a different Dave. Not to mention you can use whatever name you would find easy to remember. I would rather use a similar, user-defined naming system on top of a unique number standardized system. Among other things I don't think we need another batch of domain squatters and squabbling over what company gets what common names, so I favor making this numbering system and leaving it at that.
I don't see the harm in standardizing a number system to use, then adding a name-based system on top of that- exactly the way DNS works in the first place. Not to mention I don't care to have a new version of domain squatters rush in just yet.
I don't expect there's much surprise that the Chinese government was behind the attacks, but usually we can't do anything about it because we can't prove they did it. Google is saying they can, which suddenly brings this from muttering about China to companies and governments being forced to confront the issue in fear of explicitly giving in to China's every whim, as opposed to the implicit submission we've seen so far.
We need a site where all information you put on your account is defaulted to private to everyone until you say otherwise, where people can at best invite you to tag yourself in a photo, and where you can remain unsearchable- your profile page should be blocked unless the person is logged on and friended. I'm not so paranoid to think being tagged in a harmless photo or having my name on the internet is going to get me harmed, but I certainly see no benefit to putting my information out there without my direct consent.
When you step into a car either you are driving and have significant control over your fate, or you know the driver and can assess your safety from there. At worst your fate depends on three other people in the car, all of whom you can largely determine yourself how much of a risk they are. In a plane, you have little to no control over your fate, and your safety depends on hundreds of people, most of whom you will never talk to. Planes aren't designed to take much more than what they handle in a typical flight, so they are easy to take down, and unlike a car crash the survival rate of a plane crash isn't an optimistic thought when you're in one.
That said, reducing car accidents is still important, and the security theater is a bit over the top, but I do think these body scanners are a good idea. Assuming you don't have a problem with your doctor seeing you naked, clearly we can train people so they can view these scanner images without complaints.
If the point of copyright is to let people make money, and the point of big media is to make money, it makes sense big media will try to acquire all of the money-making works and therefore hold most long-term copyrights. They would be bad at their job if that wasn't the case. As much as I support the little guy, it isn't very likely the little guy will have millions to gain from media he creates without being picked up by a big media company.
To swing this back to the little guy, the problem lies in the one-sided contracts and overall poor compensation of the artist. That would not be addressed by copyright terms.
I like this idea, as it would be easier to put into law and keep the Mickey Mouse effect from distorting it.
Conventional units are all based on rule of thumb measurements. Not precise. Not accurately measured into tenths. Using rule of thumb and eying it, you can accurately enough divide things into twos, threes and fours (see the conversions between units). Now that rulers and tape measures and whatnot that agree with each other are readily available, the metric system makes more sense.
As for the mile, it comes out to 1609 meters or so, which is no nicer than 5280 feet, so I don't see your complaint. A mile is 1000 paces of the Roman legions (mile comes from mille just like milli- does). Given the Romans built the extensive road system and their legions made good use of their long distances, it was a convenient rule of thumb measurement to use.
The conventional system wasn't meant to measure to 5 significant figures, more like 1 or occasionally 2. I agree it is obsolete given widespread education, and support the use of metric. My point is it is very useful when kept in context, and it still maintains its intuitive use (again, when using 1 or 2 sig figs)- it will understandably be hard to move away from it.
"Exclusive photos of photons caught mingling with electrons", "Quantum sex scandal!", "Proton threatens divorce, electron believed gone after excitement with photon"
The people spending money on the games likely are motivated by the idea that they'll be beating all these other people at the game. If the game is perceived as unpopular, why bother spending money to win when no one cares? I agree free players have minimal effect, but it sounds like their boycott can draw large enough numbers that it could discourage paying players from spending more.
Be sure to contact those representing you. Just one country has to push for openness to get this out for the whole world to see. I'm as cynical as the next person about my government, but I can't complain about the system if I don't try to use it.
Until my GPS stops sending me to people's houses when looking for an IHOP I'd rather get a picture and evaluate for myself what's going on. 95%+ of the time I could just follow the directions unquestioningly and not have problems, but if there are detours, new roads or it has addresses wrong, it suddenly becomes useless unless I can use it as a map to figure out the directions for myself.
Maybe you have to hit a button to temporarily display a map, or park the car to keep the map up- the map could stay up as you move if you aren't being given directions. I'd value a reduction in the distraction it creates, but it shouldn't lose functionality in the process.
I've never known a politician to be thick or outdated, so I'm sure these guys are just concerned for our rights. They must be intentionally invoking the Streisand effect upon realizing how important this information is to have spread further across the internet.
My first thought was this TED video: http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/sixth_sense_demo.php. It would be interesting to have a heavyweight like Google developing tools to bring such a product to consumers.
According to the RIAA's statistics vinyl was a $60 million/year business in 2008- over double what it was in 2007. Last time vinyl was around $60M annually was in 1998.
I have their 1997-2007 pdf, but they recently put up a paywall on historical data, so I guess I must be a pirate for giving you the 1998 figure.
In general/. seems to support the easy spread of information. Slashdot isn't inherently against copyright, just cases where it restricts the flow of information (basically everything but GPL). Of course many people like to over generalize and take sides for or against copyright without boiling it down to the basic issues.
If your comment is taking a stab at those who over generalize, you understand this already. I realize I'm generalizing too.
A lot of gamers have played Runescape, Diablo 2 or similar and experienced enough "why am I wasting my time", "but it's so addicting" to learn to resist starting a new addicting game. A lot of Farmville players likely haven't experienced this, so they have no built up immunity and will waste their time without a second thought.
While you could argue any game is a waste of time, Farmville's grind only earns you the opportunity to continue grinding- no end goal, no endgame sandbox. At least when you have a goal in sight you can tell when it isn't getting any closer.
Charge for internet like electricity. You get charged for the power used, not the power available, and you get charged less during off-peak hours. If bandwidth hogs insist on running torrents during peak hours, they are just helping to pay for system upgrades. I don't trust the ISPs, so the government would have to enforce the rate of a basic connection (such as 256k with 20GB/month), and the government would have to enforce some amount of expenditure on system upgrades. In theory, the upgrades would allow the basic package to improve without much change in price.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the blackberry- along with many/most other phones I'm sure- has voice recognition to allow you to assign a name to various phone numbers as you wish. Despite phone numbers having to be unique, this system lets everyone use "home" as the name as their home phone number, and everyone with a friend named Dave can call a different Dave. Not to mention you can use whatever name you would find easy to remember. I would rather use a similar, user-defined naming system on top of a unique number standardized system. Among other things I don't think we need another batch of domain squatters and squabbling over what company gets what common names, so I favor making this numbering system and leaving it at that.
I don't see the harm in standardizing a number system to use, then adding a name-based system on top of that- exactly the way DNS works in the first place. Not to mention I don't care to have a new version of domain squatters rush in just yet.
I don't expect there's much surprise that the Chinese government was behind the attacks, but usually we can't do anything about it because we can't prove they did it. Google is saying they can, which suddenly brings this from muttering about China to companies and governments being forced to confront the issue in fear of explicitly giving in to China's every whim, as opposed to the implicit submission we've seen so far.
We need a site where all information you put on your account is defaulted to private to everyone until you say otherwise, where people can at best invite you to tag yourself in a photo, and where you can remain unsearchable- your profile page should be blocked unless the person is logged on and friended. I'm not so paranoid to think being tagged in a harmless photo or having my name on the internet is going to get me harmed, but I certainly see no benefit to putting my information out there without my direct consent.
Also, no more spammy apps.
When you step into a car either you are driving and have significant control over your fate, or you know the driver and can assess your safety from there. At worst your fate depends on three other people in the car, all of whom you can largely determine yourself how much of a risk they are. In a plane, you have little to no control over your fate, and your safety depends on hundreds of people, most of whom you will never talk to. Planes aren't designed to take much more than what they handle in a typical flight, so they are easy to take down, and unlike a car crash the survival rate of a plane crash isn't an optimistic thought when you're in one.
That said, reducing car accidents is still important, and the security theater is a bit over the top, but I do think these body scanners are a good idea. Assuming you don't have a problem with your doctor seeing you naked, clearly we can train people so they can view these scanner images without complaints.
Also, an unmanned spaceship couldn't have fixed the life support systems like in the one Apollo mission.
If the point of copyright is to let people make money, and the point of big media is to make money, it makes sense big media will try to acquire all of the money-making works and therefore hold most long-term copyrights. They would be bad at their job if that wasn't the case. As much as I support the little guy, it isn't very likely the little guy will have millions to gain from media he creates without being picked up by a big media company.
To swing this back to the little guy, the problem lies in the one-sided contracts and overall poor compensation of the artist. That would not be addressed by copyright terms.
I like this idea, as it would be easier to put into law and keep the Mickey Mouse effect from distorting it.
Conventional units are all based on rule of thumb measurements. Not precise. Not accurately measured into tenths. Using rule of thumb and eying it, you can accurately enough divide things into twos, threes and fours (see the conversions between units). Now that rulers and tape measures and whatnot that agree with each other are readily available, the metric system makes more sense.
As for the mile, it comes out to 1609 meters or so, which is no nicer than 5280 feet, so I don't see your complaint. A mile is 1000 paces of the Roman legions (mile comes from mille just like milli- does). Given the Romans built the extensive road system and their legions made good use of their long distances, it was a convenient rule of thumb measurement to use.
The conventional system wasn't meant to measure to 5 significant figures, more like 1 or occasionally 2. I agree it is obsolete given widespread education, and support the use of metric. My point is it is very useful when kept in context, and it still maintains its intuitive use (again, when using 1 or 2 sig figs)- it will understandably be hard to move away from it.
"Exclusive photos of photons caught mingling with electrons", "Quantum sex scandal!", "Proton threatens divorce, electron believed gone after excitement with photon"
If the birthdate is just for adult material, they may as well just ask for the month and year- or only let the month and year be used in algorithms.
Bedbug. Perfect name for this device.
The people spending money on the games likely are motivated by the idea that they'll be beating all these other people at the game. If the game is perceived as unpopular, why bother spending money to win when no one cares? I agree free players have minimal effect, but it sounds like their boycott can draw large enough numbers that it could discourage paying players from spending more.
Be sure to contact those representing you. Just one country has to push for openness to get this out for the whole world to see. I'm as cynical as the next person about my government, but I can't complain about the system if I don't try to use it.
Until my GPS stops sending me to people's houses when looking for an IHOP I'd rather get a picture and evaluate for myself what's going on. 95%+ of the time I could just follow the directions unquestioningly and not have problems, but if there are detours, new roads or it has addresses wrong, it suddenly becomes useless unless I can use it as a map to figure out the directions for myself.
Maybe you have to hit a button to temporarily display a map, or park the car to keep the map up- the map could stay up as you move if you aren't being given directions. I'd value a reduction in the distraction it creates, but it shouldn't lose functionality in the process.
I've never known a politician to be thick or outdated, so I'm sure these guys are just concerned for our rights. They must be intentionally invoking the Streisand effect upon realizing how important this information is to have spread further across the internet.
We would need some way to make our bodies act like water and cornstarch, but that probably would induce a whole new set of dangerous problems.
Exactly why I advocate adopting a monetary system in base 7.
You'd draw less suspicion if you change your fingerprints rather than just get rid of them entirely.
My first thought was this TED video: http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/sixth_sense_demo.php. It would be interesting to have a heavyweight like Google developing tools to bring such a product to consumers.
According to the RIAA's statistics vinyl was a $60 million/year business in 2008- over double what it was in 2007. Last time vinyl was around $60M annually was in 1998.
I have their 1997-2007 pdf, but they recently put up a paywall on historical data, so I guess I must be a pirate for giving you the 1998 figure.
In general /. seems to support the easy spread of information. Slashdot isn't inherently against copyright, just cases where it restricts the flow of information (basically everything but GPL). Of course many people like to over generalize and take sides for or against copyright without boiling it down to the basic issues.
If your comment is taking a stab at those who over generalize, you understand this already. I realize I'm generalizing too.
Rule #1 of playing addicting games: once the game starts negatively* affecting things outside of the game, it is time to quit.
*I would omit a qualifier but some games have positive social interaction.
A lot of gamers have played Runescape, Diablo 2 or similar and experienced enough "why am I wasting my time", "but it's so addicting" to learn to resist starting a new addicting game. A lot of Farmville players likely haven't experienced this, so they have no built up immunity and will waste their time without a second thought.
While you could argue any game is a waste of time, Farmville's grind only earns you the opportunity to continue grinding- no end goal, no endgame sandbox. At least when you have a goal in sight you can tell when it isn't getting any closer.
Charge for internet like electricity. You get charged for the power used, not the power available, and you get charged less during off-peak hours. If bandwidth hogs insist on running torrents during peak hours, they are just helping to pay for system upgrades. I don't trust the ISPs, so the government would have to enforce the rate of a basic connection (such as 256k with 20GB/month), and the government would have to enforce some amount of expenditure on system upgrades. In theory, the upgrades would allow the basic package to improve without much change in price.
The other option is to be annexed by Finland.
a Commission dependent of the Ministry of Culture to take down websites without a court order, in cases of Intellectual Property piracy.
Quickly, more than 50,000 blogs and sites re-published the manifesto
Such a waste of potential irony.