If you'd rather believe science fiction writers than real scientists about science... how long have you been a Republican? While good science fiction writers use the best science available as a basis of speculation, Crichton isn't one of those people.
Hint: StarTrek is fiction. The warp drive (as of 2006) is imaginary, not a realistic source of transportation. The "Mr. Fusion" device is imaginary, not a reliable source of electric power. Microsoft's claims of adequate security are imaginary.
Unfortunately, the consensus of real scientists not on the ExxonMobil payroll are that global warming is for real. It's a shame you aren't smart enough to tell the difference between the bloviation of Exxon PR people from what's going on in the real world.
Accusing Richard Lindzen of being an Exxon-Mobil shill is nothing more or less than the truth. He's also working for a "news source" called TechCentralStation, which is the creation of a lobbying organization called DCI Group. Get the details here.
He's whining because he's been outed and whatever reputation he had as a scientist has been deservedly destroyed.
If he wants a job educating students, perhaps Oral Roberts University will hire him. Or maybe Lindzen's reputation is so screwed that even they'd stay clear of him.
that's what every other First World country on earth did.
The US didn't, and that's why we have both the most expensive health care on the planet and the largest percentage of people who don't have medical coverage at the same time.
Are we better off? Only the people who have major financial interests in medical insurance companies can honestly say "yes".
If anyone thinks that a lobotomized Internet is going to be the information platform that will lead Australia to a strong, healthy economy, and the Australian people are stupid enough to go for it, this mistake will catch up with them sooner or later.
"People always get the kind of local government they deserve." E.E. "Doc" Smith
if you don't object to spending money to buy Linux apps, Turboprint will probably get you almost all the features of your printer, including duplex printing, and Vuescan will probably get you what you're looking for from your scanner... yeah, there's a problem. No, I don't know what to tell you about wireless.
I've been writing mainly Linux desktop how-to pieces for the last year. I run Fedora Core 2, shortly upgrading to 3.
I've found that while in general, adding a capability (e.g. multimedia) to a Linux box takes half an hour to an hour, finding out what to do most of the time takes from a full working day to several weeks worth of full working days.
I'm not talking complicated or obscure, I'm talking things like image and archival backups... I finally gave up on finding OpenSource apps that would do what I was looking for and figured out how to script dar and rsync. Getting multimedia working was a nightmare. It isn't supposed to be.
In my experience, getting the right answer back from the various Linux help forums in response to inquiries almost never works, if you can't find the answer via googling to somebody who ran into the same problem, the options are to invent a solution or give up.
Could Linux multimedia apps that have dependencies that can't be distributed with the distro announce what the problems are and let the user point and click her way to a downloadable solution? Yes, but they don't.
I don't recommend desktop Linux at this point to anyone but companies who can control what apps and peripherals are used and support everything in-house, or to end users who can get computer help in person from local Linux experts, whether out of friendship or for a high hourly consultant rate.
Peripheral drivers are a major issue, having the basic set of apps a desktop user needs (multimedia, backup, etc.) are the other.
means the ability to speak without worrying about who in one's government might find it objectionable.
The 'freedom to speak responsibly' you advocate simply means it's OK to say things your government won't object to. Even the Chinese and North Koreans have that kind of "freedom of speech".
In any case, what you consider to be your right to publically agree with your government is guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an Act of Parliament... and therefore subject to change with the weather. A 9/11 style incident in Canada, your nation's imitation of the disastrous experiment with multiculturalism that has failed the EU finally catching up with Canada... any number of things. Should this happen, I confidently predict you'll be among the first to call for a watered down replacement for the law that 'guarantees' your rights.
Anybody who believes that their government will remain benign forever is taking the wrong end of a sucker bet.
You Canadians have been asserting your moral superiority over Americans and quite a few other nations for quite some time. Now that we are judging you by the standards you say that you deserve to be judged by, you're trying whining and spin control.
While there are a fair number of Canadians I respect, you aren't one of them because you don't deserve respect. You're just a Limbot who happens to live on the wrong side of the border.
We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop
I will tell you what happens when 100 million kids have a smart phone. They surf porn in class and chat with their friends rather than learning. But this is no different form pencil and paper. A kid can take notes or draw naked pictures. Their choice. Unless the smart phone or laptop meets a stated and funded objective, it is a distraction.
No. 99.5 million kids wiill be pr0nsurfing and IMing. 500,000 kids will do something interesting with them, assuming the boxes aren't locked down to prevent this.
Put tools in the hands of enough people, and somebody will do something interesting with them. There wouldn't be an Open Source scene if the price of computing hadn't dropped to the point to make them almost ubiquitous in the industrialized world, even if the average computer user never does anything but e-mail / websurfing / Office documents.
Any definition of freedom of speech that doesn't include the right to be offensive is automatically without meaning, because this changes "free speech" from an absolute to censorship by anybody with the political power to call speech "offensive". This year, it's white supremacists who are under the hammer. A decade from now, it might be anyone who opposes white supremacists.
Justifying the prohibition of hate speech on a basis of the "Fire in a crowded theater" or "clear and present danger" doctrines doesn't apply here, unless you believe that Canada is in so much danger of being converted to Nazism that if pro-Nazi statements are tolerated, that Canadians will be setting fire to non-whites by this time next week. You can believe this if you like, but I know a few Canadians, and I don't think you can sell them on this. People I associate with voluntarily tend to be a bit saner than you are.
If you guys want to follow America on the road to a police state, it's your country. Though it rather looks around here like the sheep are at long last waking up. The smart money is betting on the GOP going out of power in the next two elections. It would be ironic if things tightened up in Canada just as they finally start loosening up in America. But... "people always get the kind of local government they deserve". Usually, that's a grim comment on Americans. This time, it's your turn in the barrel. You don't seem to like it.
If you're going to defend the indefensible in public, you should study the Bush Administration PR people while you can, they've had a lot more practice at it than you have.
Your nation collectively stepped in shit on this one. Just because Bush isn't your President doesn't mean that Canada is perfect. Just admit it, suck it up, and deal, and if your country matters to you, try to fix it.
Other than that, the biggest shock I got out of the article was NASA in the same paragraph as "heritage technologies". Supporting the technologies of the past is NOT what we're paying taxes to support NASA for.
Particularly since we're not going to get space industrialization with launch costs of a few thousand dollars a pound, and that's about as good as we can do with rockets.
The band is pulling an audience of over 260K people without radio airplay or record industry promo.
That sounds like they're either economically viable or will be real soon now using an all-Internet business model... this is proof of concept. They've managed the "fastest selling debut album of all time".
That's news.
Most of us have been saying for years that we'd have a breakout album from an unknown without the help of an record industry label sooner or later. Well, this is now, and the beginning of the end for the record industry as we know it. Even if the band signs up with a label, the word is now out there that one can be an economically viable popular musician without the help of a record industry which is now trying to protect itself by trying to stop technology which might be used to make competing products.
If you can't figure out why that's news... you must be new here.
pulling audiences of over 260K people without the help of radio airplay or any other record company promo, I doubt the band is really going to miss you.
Content that Apple can resell or give away as premiums to iPod or Mac users on any terms that interest them, with or without DRM, and as for the rest that doesn't benefit them, spin out and sell Disney operating units to the highest bidder. I don't see Apple wanting to get into the theme park business, either, though they might be interesting as new media industry players.
It's about time Apple started looking for content providers to buy. Let's face it, the record industry is screwing them with respect to the resale of digital tracks.
produces content for a living, I know that if nobody sees my content, no page views for the advertisers on the corporate tech publishing sites I write Linux how-to articles for, and editors stop buying what I write.
If you're too stupid to understand this idea, please put a robot.txt on your site excluding google so neither I nor anybody else will waste time on your alleged content... because any so-called content provider who actually believes what you just posted is too fucking incompetent to produce content any sane person would want to spend time on.
Now go back to the people you're astroturfing for and tell them you failed.
I'd be happy to pay $100 for an OSX/86 that runs on a reasonable range of x86 hardware. I spend entirely too much time trying to make Linux things work. I usually succeed (working multimedia and my Palm connects just fine to my Linux box, thank you)
The really annoying part is that... one can spend hours to weeks in research and experimenting... and come up with something that would have taken half an hour or less if anybody had put the right information together in a usable form. It took me over a month to get my PDA working at an acceptable level.
I'd rather spend the time on something a bit more productive on a computer that on the whole, Just Works.
I don't think I'm the only one... I think there are millions of us tired of hassling with computer systems and who don't want the Windoze security hassles.
I don't see Apple going out of business over selling a few million copies of OSX to people who otherwise wouldn't be buying Apple products, and their hard core fans will happily keep buying Macs.
the WaPo do a feature on kiddie pr0nographers complete with interviews? They have just as much right to use the Internet for profit as any other megaspammers do.
Of course, the botnets push kiddie pr0n, too. Something that somehow didn't get into the WaPo piece.
that the "copyright education" given under the terms of that legislation will be anything but Hollywood content cartel propaganda in which the concept of "fair use" and legal P2P applications will be somehow missing? Remember that the only demand for this kind of legislation is from the *AA organizations and member companies, no consumer ever woke up and said "Hmmm, I need to have the use of the content I paid Hollywood thugs for to be restricted so I can't screw the suits at content companies out of the money they need to buy their cocaine with.", no consumer technology company has ever said "We need better DRM so we can sell our customers a lot less than they think we're paying for."
I would support this as long as the EFF and similar organizations got to write the educational materials. But those groups are not who legislators are trying to help out in exchange for campaign money.
A preexisting userbase that would love to get our PDA/smartphone products from a company known for good design and good user service without dumping our investments in Palm software? A userbase that's conditioned to paying for software? $15-20 per package doesn't sound like much, but this times the number of packages required to make a Palm usable gets expensive.
There really should be an "astroturf" category for moderation, to give people a category that fits your post. How much does astroturfing pay these days?
Now someone suing someone based on reasonable evidence that they are commtting copyright infringement is a terrorist activity. yeah, ok, whatever.
Your employer's idea of "reasonable evidence" is filenames with vague resemblances to actual RIAA label song names gathered by bot, which has no resemblance to anything anybody asked for on slashdot and everybody around here knows it. Perhaps you can get away with your bullshit on mtv.com forums, but you're going to be called on it here.
I'm more interested in books than music. I buy my SF from Baen Books... because they offer DRM-free e-books in multiple formats, including RTF and Palm PDA at significant cost-savings over their dead-tree product.
I'm sure that I could find their stuff posted to Usenet or P2P, but it's a lot less hassle to simply go to their site, buy, download, and enjoy than it is to do a massive search for a file and then likely as not, find that it contains anything but the content I actually wanted. "Stealing" via P2P only pays if your time isn't worth anything. Perhaps your "1 honest P2P user, there are probably 10 who aren't" sample corresponds to a small minority of people whose time isn't worth anything. The cure? Not mindlessly endorsing *AA propaganda, get smarter friends instead.
BTW, Baen Books also has one other major distinction from the content providers who insist on offering DRM-broken formats that'll only run on the computers they are locked to after one has to download and install their proprietary readers. They are making money off digital content.
Don't ever forget that the boom in CD sales with Napster in 1998-2000 corresponded to the dotcom bubble!
So you're saying that people buy more CDs during boom times than bad times and that P2P availability is irrelevant? Read what you post before hitting "submit".
for $200 (I assume $100 is "at cost") and they won't need UN support, they'll be able to afford to give away plenty of laptops to the poor, possibly more than their current approach will get them. They could probably sell 100K at that price on slashdot alone.
As for the idea itself, the information economy is the biggest game in town, and only the computer-literate (yes, Windoze users are included) get to play. The personal computer is a piece of business capital as well as the toy most people use it for in the home... it's something one can use to make money with once one has acquired the basic skill set.
Slashdot Mirror
Hint: StarTrek is fiction. The warp drive (as of 2006) is imaginary, not a realistic source of transportation. The "Mr. Fusion" device is imaginary, not a reliable source of electric power. Microsoft's claims of adequate security are imaginary.
Unfortunately, the consensus of real scientists not on the ExxonMobil payroll are that global warming is for real. It's a shame you aren't smart enough to tell the difference between the bloviation of Exxon PR people from what's going on in the real world.
Accusing Richard Lindzen of being an Exxon-Mobil shill is nothing more or less than the truth. He's also working for a "news source" called TechCentralStation, which is the creation of a lobbying organization called DCI Group. Get the details here.
He's whining because he's been outed and whatever reputation he had as a scientist has been deservedly destroyed.
If he wants a job educating students, perhaps Oral Roberts University will hire him. Or maybe Lindzen's reputation is so screwed that even they'd stay clear of him.
The US didn't, and that's why we have both the most expensive health care on the planet and the largest percentage of people who don't have medical coverage at the same time.
Are we better off? Only the people who have major financial interests in medical insurance companies can honestly say "yes".
Spammers dehumanize themselves by their actions.
"People always get the kind of local government they deserve." E.E. "Doc" Smith
You know, there's a commercial market for that sort of thing.
Just because America is being dangerously stupid doesn't mean that Canada should immediately follow its example.
I've been writing mainly Linux desktop how-to pieces for the last year. I run Fedora Core 2, shortly upgrading to 3.
I've found that while in general, adding a capability (e.g. multimedia) to a Linux box takes half an hour to an hour, finding out what to do most of the time takes from a full working day to several weeks worth of full working days.
I'm not talking complicated or obscure, I'm talking things like image and archival backups... I finally gave up on finding OpenSource apps that would do what I was looking for and figured out how to script dar and rsync. Getting multimedia working was a nightmare. It isn't supposed to be.
In my experience, getting the right answer back from the various Linux help forums in response to inquiries almost never works, if you can't find the answer via googling to somebody who ran into the same problem, the options are to invent a solution or give up.
Could Linux multimedia apps that have dependencies that can't be distributed with the distro announce what the problems are and let the user point and click her way to a downloadable solution? Yes, but they don't.
I don't recommend desktop Linux at this point to anyone but companies who can control what apps and peripherals are used and support everything in-house, or to end users who can get computer help in person from local Linux experts, whether out of friendship or for a high hourly consultant rate.
Peripheral drivers are a major issue, having the basic set of apps a desktop user needs (multimedia, backup, etc.) are the other.
The 'freedom to speak responsibly' you advocate simply means it's OK to say things your government won't object to. Even the Chinese and North Koreans have that kind of "freedom of speech".
In any case, what you consider to be your right to publically agree with your government is guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an Act of Parliament... and therefore subject to change with the weather. A 9/11 style incident in Canada, your nation's imitation of the disastrous experiment with multiculturalism that has failed the EU finally catching up with Canada... any number of things. Should this happen, I confidently predict you'll be among the first to call for a watered down replacement for the law that 'guarantees' your rights.
Anybody who believes that their government will remain benign forever is taking the wrong end of a sucker bet.
You Canadians have been asserting your moral superiority over Americans and quite a few other nations for quite some time. Now that we are judging you by the standards you say that you deserve to be judged by, you're trying whining and spin control.
While there are a fair number of Canadians I respect, you aren't one of them because you don't deserve respect. You're just a Limbot who happens to live on the wrong side of the border.
No. 99.5 million kids wiill be pr0nsurfing and IMing. 500,000 kids will do something interesting with them, assuming the boxes aren't locked down to prevent this.
Put tools in the hands of enough people, and somebody will do something interesting with them. There wouldn't be an Open Source scene if the price of computing hadn't dropped to the point to make them almost ubiquitous in the industrialized world, even if the average computer user never does anything but e-mail / websurfing / Office documents.
We might actually get that revolution.
Any definition of freedom of speech that doesn't include the right to be offensive is automatically without meaning, because this changes "free speech" from an absolute to censorship by anybody with the political power to call speech "offensive". This year, it's white supremacists who are under the hammer. A decade from now, it might be anyone who opposes white supremacists.
Justifying the prohibition of hate speech on a basis of the "Fire in a crowded theater" or "clear and present danger" doctrines doesn't apply here, unless you believe that Canada is in so much danger of being converted to Nazism that if pro-Nazi statements are tolerated, that Canadians will be setting fire to non-whites by this time next week. You can believe this if you like, but I know a few Canadians, and I don't think you can sell them on this. People I associate with voluntarily tend to be a bit saner than you are.
If you guys want to follow America on the road to a police state, it's your country. Though it rather looks around here like the sheep are at long last waking up. The smart money is betting on the GOP going out of power in the next two elections. It would be ironic if things tightened up in Canada just as they finally start loosening up in America. But... "people always get the kind of local government they deserve". Usually, that's a grim comment on Americans. This time, it's your turn in the barrel. You don't seem to like it.
If you're going to defend the indefensible in public, you should study the Bush Administration PR people while you can, they've had a lot more practice at it than you have.
Your nation collectively stepped in shit on this one. Just because Bush isn't your President doesn't mean that Canada is perfect. Just admit it, suck it up, and deal, and if your country matters to you, try to fix it.
Other than that, the biggest shock I got out of the article was NASA in the same paragraph as "heritage technologies". Supporting the technologies of the past is NOT what we're paying taxes to support NASA for. Particularly since we're not going to get space industrialization with launch costs of a few thousand dollars a pound, and that's about as good as we can do with rockets.
That sounds like they're either economically viable or will be real soon now using an all-Internet business model... this is proof of concept. They've managed the "fastest selling debut album of all time".
That's news.
Most of us have been saying for years that we'd have a breakout album from an unknown without the help of an record industry label sooner or later. Well, this is now, and the beginning of the end for the record industry as we know it. Even if the band signs up with a label, the word is now out there that one can be an economically viable popular musician without the help of a record industry which is now trying to protect itself by trying to stop technology which might be used to make competing products.
If you can't figure out why that's news... you must be new here.
pulling audiences of over 260K people without the help of radio airplay or any other record company promo, I doubt the band is really going to miss you.
we don't hear about the outfits that do it right because they simply don't generate bad news big enough to make the mass media.
It's about time Apple started looking for content providers to buy. Let's face it, the record industry is screwing them with respect to the resale of digital tracks.
If you're too stupid to understand this idea, please put a robot.txt on your site excluding google so neither I nor anybody else will waste time on your alleged content... because any so-called content provider who actually believes what you just posted is too fucking incompetent to produce content any sane person would want to spend time on.
Now go back to the people you're astroturfing for and tell them you failed.
The really annoying part is that... one can spend hours to weeks in research and experimenting... and come up with something that would have taken half an hour or less if anybody had put the right information together in a usable form. It took me over a month to get my PDA working at an acceptable level.
I'd rather spend the time on something a bit more productive on a computer that on the whole, Just Works.
I don't think I'm the only one... I think there are millions of us tired of hassling with computer systems and who don't want the Windoze security hassles.
I don't see Apple going out of business over selling a few million copies of OSX to people who otherwise wouldn't be buying Apple products, and their hard core fans will happily keep buying Macs.
Of course, the botnets push kiddie pr0n, too. Something that somehow didn't get into the WaPo piece.
I would support this as long as the EFF and similar organizations got to write the educational materials. But those groups are not who legislators are trying to help out in exchange for campaign money.
A preexisting userbase that would love to get our PDA/smartphone products from a company known for good design and good user service without dumping our investments in Palm software? A userbase that's conditioned to paying for software? $15-20 per package doesn't sound like much, but this times the number of packages required to make a Palm usable gets expensive.
I'd like to see what an open astroturfer has to say.
Now someone suing someone based on reasonable evidence that they are commtting copyright infringement is a terrorist activity. yeah, ok, whatever.
Your employer's idea of "reasonable evidence" is filenames with vague resemblances to actual RIAA label song names gathered by bot, which has no resemblance to anything anybody asked for on slashdot and everybody around here knows it. Perhaps you can get away with your bullshit on mtv.com forums, but you're going to be called on it here.
I'm more interested in books than music. I buy my SF from Baen Books... because they offer DRM-free e-books in multiple formats, including RTF and Palm PDA at significant cost-savings over their dead-tree product.
I'm sure that I could find their stuff posted to Usenet or P2P, but it's a lot less hassle to simply go to their site, buy, download, and enjoy than it is to do a massive search for a file and then likely as not, find that it contains anything but the content I actually wanted. "Stealing" via P2P only pays if your time isn't worth anything. Perhaps your "1 honest P2P user, there are probably 10 who aren't" sample corresponds to a small minority of people whose time isn't worth anything. The cure? Not mindlessly endorsing *AA propaganda, get smarter friends instead.
BTW, Baen Books also has one other major distinction from the content providers who insist on offering DRM-broken formats that'll only run on the computers they are locked to after one has to download and install their proprietary readers. They are making money off digital content.
Don't ever forget that the boom in CD sales with Napster in 1998-2000 corresponded to the dotcom bubble!
So you're saying that people buy more CDs during boom times than bad times and that P2P availability is irrelevant? Read what you post before hitting "submit".
As for the idea itself, the information economy is the biggest game in town, and only the computer-literate (yes, Windoze users are included) get to play. The personal computer is a piece of business capital as well as the toy most people use it for in the home... it's something one can use to make money with once one has acquired the basic skill set.
Poor people LIKE to make money.