It has always been the case that once the computer's competency is there, the applications arrive... Way back in the mid-60's my father took me to an open house at IBM, and proudly demonstrated that the computer could add 2+2 lightning-fast. I asked why that was necessary, since I could do the same thing (ok, I was young once, too!)....
If you want to know what the new processors will be used for (in series, no less!), keep up with math! Learn about the complexities of modeling visual information (animation on a G4!), exploring "chaotic" (or "complex") domains, etc.
It's the new stuff we'll be able to DO that make new processors (and etc.) so exciting!
You're behind the times! No backpack is needed; wearables fit on clothes (see http://www.cellcomputing.com for a couple of examples of credit-card-sized motherboards; there are plenty more), and instead of HMD, there are eyeglasses with invisible tiny projection cells embedded in them (see http://www.microopticalcorp.com for an example). I for one want to make one as soon as Transmeta releases its new 5400 chip.
The wearable should function, for me, in two different modes:
When I'm walking around, I need access only to my PIM (Ecco, so there!), the Web (any XHTML-ready browser), and my WP (I'm a writer -- using XyWrite).
I want a lightweight, vertical, divided (hinged) keyboard hanging from my neck -- it might only be for physical reference for a glove that transmits the actual keystroke locations, though. I'll need all the RAM "on," but only limited storage, for this first mode.
Obviously I need reliable wireless Web access (perhaps Ricochet?), which means a modem of sorts, too.
When I am ready to settle in one place, I need to add (plug'n'play) my main storage box (PCMCIA, or PC-card format?), boot other programs (various; I consult a lot), flatten the keyboard, and access a printer and perhaps other peripherals.
With a wearable, I will never again have to scramble around for tiny bits of paper to hold ephemeral information -- then lose it. This alone will transform my life. I'll probably also be even more prolific as a writer, since I won't be "down" any time I happen to want to write, or revise, or take notes about something. Then there's the way access to the "universal information utility" will transform my currently inept shopping, searching for suitable restaurants, etc.
I don't want to be a gargoyle, but wearables are coming much sooner than anyone thinks!
Actually, one of the best things you could do is to bring in a truly competent documentation specialist. Competent ones are very rare, but you will need to identify your market BEFORE you create the features of your software, and phrase ALL product descriptions (beginning with the spec's!) to appeal to your market! So many great products had really useful features they failed to communicate compellingly to their proper audience, and then they died... On the other hand, we have MS, which ALWAYS promotes features simple to describe and sure to appeal to its audience (i.e., mostly dumb corporate drones). The very best way to be sure of success these days is to identify your best (projected) customers and make a deal with them BEFORE going through the expense of fully spec'ing and coding (and testing) your concept. For example, if your software compressed signals for delivery via a specific medium, you might want to cooperate with another company which is (or plans to) offer that medium. That way, you can be sure you are tailoring your product properly for the customers. You might even find this helpful in raising the capital you might need as you go along. Find your market, identify the major players there, then cooperate to provide something that is needed by those players, fully informing them of your intentions.
I often (all right, almost always these days) access the Web from my local library (a branch of the wonderful NYPL, best bargain in NYC). Sometimes, I happen to walk past a man reading porn. So what?
I spend my time online reading about hardware, techie news, scifi, and other interests, reading my own e-mail, exploring the Web... also solving various research problems (my own and others), trying to design the Perfect Keyboard (or research whether the new Transmeta CPU will need a chipset), reviewing sites of companies or non-profit groups for which I might be willing to work... even reading nineteenth-century English literature. I really couldn't care less what other persons do with their time online, no more than I want others prying into what I do online. (It may be innocuous now, but who's to say what I might not do in even more repressive times???)
The whole point of the First Amendment is that, in a society run under the pretense that we should all obey laws, the only safe law (protecting us from tyrants) with regard to information is that ALL information must be uncensored, because censorship is always a creeping phenomenon. We ought to (and don't) have a right to privacy covering use of personal information, but apart from that, no-one can really be trusted to judge what everyone else ought to be allowed to read. Or write.
In the good old days of computing, those of us who knew what we were doing went out of our way -- sometimes WAY, WAY out of our way -- to help what this community might call "newbies." We who understood the terminology, and were thus competent to evaluate possibly fraudulent claims, debunked outrageous computer salesmen, steered users away from buggy or more-than-usually dysfunctional software, and otherwise protected the innocent (i.e., ignorant) from the dangers to their pocketbooks.
Now, although many of you seem not to know this, most lawyers, investors, and other non-geeks (including teachers and ordinary folks) STILL know practically nothing about computers/software/OS's/Internet -- or any other "hi-tech" stuff. I am not at all surprised a "real" lawyer is using Hotmail, for example... take a look at most lawyers' sites and they are still basically poorly designed 'brochures'... doctors are equally ignorant/incompetent in this arena, which is why so many patients have taken to carrying along the latest from Medline to their appointments. (Or perhaps doctors are just too busy to keep up with new discoveries?)
Some of the folks burned if this apparently bogus company -- which is at a minimum violating the generous license which permits its own existence -- would also be "innocents," regardless of their expertise in other matters. I think we should still continue to regard our own expertise as entailing a duty to protect and assist the innocent. (Btw, being able to read a balance sheet and judge a business plan has never implied competence at the actual "business" of the company being evaluated.) Thus, I believe those of us who have information about scams should in fact come forward in situations such as this; however, the proper entity to notify may not be the SEC, but a state or federal Attorney General, since fraud is a criminal, not civil, matter.
A few years ago I read about a single Web site in one of the Midwestern states which was revolutionizing politics in that state. The person or organization (I think the latter, but don't really remember) which ran it merely posted contributions from all legislators, their committeee memberships, and their votes. Of course, the pattern of donations for votes -- including the way committee memberships only go to those without any lack of "self-interest" -- became very obvious. Several hundred outraged voters wrote vexed letters; reform was being bruited about at the time I ran across this story.
Just a bit less obviously, the 'Net will transform politics because, even if candidates don't post all their speeches on their own "official" Web sites, you can bet someone somewhere will. And that means society has an effective memory. And that means they can't say one thing to one constituency and the opposite to the next constituency.
It's a media effect, a structural effect, but it's sufficient to alter politics all by itself!
When I entered opinions into the "selector" URL, I was amazed and very pleased to see that the coming election has three candidates with relatively high matches for my choices -- and the third one actually has what I consider a real chance to be elected! Now, how do I find out his stance on 'Net-related issues? We can't really just extrapolate from opinions on traditional values, tax reform, and free trade, can we?
Even if we could, those are all quite complex issues, and I'm not comfortable taking one single (strongly support/strongly deny) stance on any of them. Then, there's a certain kind of synergy that introducing 'Net issues brings about. For example, I favor free trade across the 'Net, but do not favor allowing corporations to do anything they want just because they are large and "multinational." Also, tax reform cannot really be taken up without working out how the economy is supposed to function in the post-WWW era: What services will states provide? Come to that, what will comprise the "state?" Will it still be a geographic entity, partially based on ethnic considerations ("nation-state")? "Defense" issues, also, are going to change as our formerly geographic notions of place, trade, etc. are updated... As I expect we will see in the next week, international organizations will be needed to help ordinary Netizens with several fairly new global issues (viruses, trade-related fraud, bandwidth/allocation).
There was this great concept article on "corporatism" about a week ago -- wasn't that on this site? Going for money ONLY (or sex only, or power only) makes for evil. That's why "Love of money is the root of all evil."
I can't imagine the degree of naivete necessary to "wonder" if the government offers more services to the rich than to the poor. Of course they do! Just try having your $750 bike ripped off and see what the police do (yawn, if they don't accuse you of wasting police time) compared to having your $7 million dollar painting ripped off.
Or, try having asthma (largely a disease of the urban poor, and on the increase) and hoping for effective, affordable medical treatment, versus needing the latest in open-heart surgery. Who pays for the extremely expensive medical treatments increasingly needed to keep much older people alive after they've abused their bodies for 50-70 years? Yeah, we do -- the cost of the expensive new machinery & research is amortized (read: paid for by all medical consumers).
Government generates and enforces laws written by the wealthy to transfer wealth to the wealthy, and I don't know how you can not realize that. Look into banking in this country if you need an education!
The guy who proved the link between ulcers and bacteria was, if I recall correctly, a pharmacist in Texas, but I don't recall his name. It is interesting, though, that almost noone got the news about this... Most writers, even good ones, are still using ulcers as a character trait (indicating stress), like _Clockers_ (Richard Price). Oh, and of course the FDA immediately allowed all those previously prescription drugs (developed at great cost to fight the symptoms of ulcers) to post the new "indication" of acid/stomach indigestion, etc., without prescription.
If a doctor had done the research and posted the proof, I think we'd all have heard a lot more about it.
I am a touch-typist, but I agree with your basic premise: we need feedback to use a keyboard.
Here's what I want:
A lightweight, roughly rectangular "board" which hangs on an adjustable cord around my neck (smaller than 3"x4"x 1/2").
It's two-sided, but can be used one-handed if a small "button" on the bottom of the slab is touched (in which case it becomes a chording keyboard).
The inner and upper sides of the slab are one-button thick, for special keys (normally accessed by thumb).
Normal key placement is optimized for two-handed operation, with the most common (in English) 2-letter combinations coded for alternate hand/strongest finger usage.
The "home key" positions are marked with dots, for feedback.
To further reduce RSI & carpel tunnel syndrome, it remains vertical for common use (as part of a wearable PC), but can be unfolded and placed on a desktop for positional variety.
Btw, if someone offers those chips, I want them -- but I would put on thin, cut-out gloves (or rubber fingertips) before sticking the chips to my "fingernails" -- unless they're supposed to be discarded, like contact lenses. Even then, ecologically speaking, I'd prefer to use them as long as possible.
I think your transcript must be a hoax; nothing like this could have been written by a single person. Nope, it had to have been written by a committee. A committee of network studio writers. After they got their pink slips.
As all headline writers know, most people don't even read the whole article on the front page... Creating misleading headlines and lead graphs is a well-known strategy for, well, disinformation (propoganda?). If anyone objects, there's an obvious rebuttal ("the information in your objection was addressed in my original article").
You seem to have missed the point, my dear... The "salt" march was chosen specifically because it was highly disruptive. Being disruptive to business-as-usual is, in fact, essential to non-violent movements (otherwise, they're just ignored).
Of course, the very best disruption, for any corporation, is a highly visible and effective boycott of their product(s). Surely, that's a no-brainer?
One more thing, while I'm on this subject: The Seattle WTO protests (complete with property-specific violence) were a great success, measured just about any way you like. Somehow nobody seems to ever explain that the 60's were a time of change in part just because there were so many different -- even divergent -- goals and strategies. So, some of us can boycott, some can be messing about with DoS, others can hire lawyers... that's what "do your own thing" meant.
This is New York, the city that greed built... It will be a short time before somebody figures out that there's a box attached to all those antennae, and grabs it. Very shortly thereafter, all the boxes will disappear.
Seriously, some other guy had a franchise to put kiosks out on sidewalks here, and that never got off, ur, on the ground, either 8-). New York is like a prisoner's dilemma game where the players are always new; there's no such thing as the public interest anymore.
Yup -- back when I was running Working Writers, Inc. (online) I designed a whole system for publishing books AFTER a bunch of readers (of initial chapters online) ordered them, at cost plus author's markup. I described this system, plus variations, and implemented the initial workings of it online. (A lawyer told me I should patent it. I said "Ideas can't be patented, only implementations." I guess that was a joke, huh?)
But since I published the whole design in 1994 (even though the pages are currently off-line), this idea is still freely available to any person -- writer, publisher, whatever -- who wants to take advantage of it. And that's the way I want it!
So if you ever see anyone trying to patent backwards-publishing, or do batch subscription publishing, whether or not online, or if anyone tries to patent displaying a library/bookshop, clicking to view shelves, clicking further to display of a specific book, let me know and we'll stop them (prior art).
I think what we really need is to establish a center for posting "prior art" publications of ideas related to the Web or Internet or networking, etc.
Although a lot of Americans don't realize this, they have no basis in law for a right to privacy. In Europe, on the other hand, privacy laws do exist. This is a major issue -- one reason the U.S. gov't. tried to get Internet types to agree on privacy rules is that European Economic Union (do I have that right? EEU?) has stringent privacy laws which U.S. commercial entities violate constantly. This is seen as a threat to U.S. trade, since European Union may lawfully forbid U.S. companies (or European affiliates of them) to use data in ways taken for granted by U.S. In fact, unless EEU passed an extension, a ban would have gone into effect either just recently or in the near future (I'm the techwatcher; I don't track politics!) preventing most U.S. firms from engaging in commerce in much of Europe.
Re:I find this sort of thing fascinating
on
Cybernauts Awake!
·
· Score: 1
I gather you are American, or at least not English. Let me explain why "Church" and "State" were separated in the colonies by those leaving England, and what "established religion" really means.
This will probably shock you, but having a national religion (i.e., the Church of England) meant, until very recently, that all residents of a parish were taxed to support the official (i.e., established) church -- that is, the Church of England, or Anglican Church (what Americans call "Episcopal" -- though that word doesn't appear in its actual title).
When the colonists ordered a separation of Church and State for freedom of religion, they merely meant that each man (alas, it was men only) should be free to support his own chosen organized religious institution, rather than be forced to pay for a specific church by the State. The current American understanding of the concept is grotesquely expanded: We are free to believe whatever we like, but not to propose our beliefs be adopted, or follow through on them with action, in public!
Really, they only had an economic freedom in mind -- and isn't that what we all wish when we object to a so-called "moral majority" spending to enforce its "morals" or "family values" on the rest of us?
Reading without the filter of our own interests is (I would have said "obviously") impossible. Further, most persons learn a lot more from a book or any writing in which they are actively engaged, interrogating it in light of what interests them. In fact, this is (or used to be?) a technique taught to improve reading comprehension!
The virtue of being able to look at something with one's own interests in mind, yet remaining open-minded about it, is called "detachment" (just thought I'd pass that along, seeing as we're supposedly talking of morality and virtue (-8.)
Re:Brief History - badge of intelligence?
on
Cybernauts Awake!
·
· Score: 1
It's been a few years -- omigod, about 12! -- since I read it, but what I remember most is that in a very early chapter, he decided to "beg the question" -- the most important questions, I mean. The ones about facts appearing to have implications beyond the physical world.
Basically, he said, "Well, it may look as if extremely rare events had to come together in order for the universe to be inhabitable, but let's ignore this and look for another explanation." When I reached the end of the book, I realized he didn't actually have another explanation.
I didn't like that! Here I dutifully plowed through all those possible theories (like string theory) without any evidence for them, only to discover he wasn't proposing a complete explanation at all. So why did he write it?
Re:Conversational space and technology non-neutral
on
Cybernauts Awake!
·
· Score: 1
You are quite right about the way telephones interrupt personal (or f2f) conversation, but I can't agree with your position on written communication. Sociologists/psychologists know that most people are "blocked" in their ability to express varying emotions -- i.e., many persons always look as if they are locked into a certain emotion, no matter what they are feeling. Some of us are also disabled in ways that make it hard for others to "read" us. At the same time, some of us are incapable of reading emotion.
Many years ago I worked (in NYC) at a global company, headquartered in Toronto, with a very flat structure -- everyone had access to what was in effect a private network (since purchased by a large news organization for that network). What immediately struck me was how well I came to know certain persons having never met them, just from their writing! After I left the company, I met two of these "friends" (and they met me) and we were all amazed at how much we were just as we had imagined.
It is true that we can misunderstand one another online. But more often (because there is just more of it) this happens offline, too. Irony, for example, is usually misinterpreted by young people, or those who are not terribly intelligent.
One final point: if you want to increase intimacy in a relationship, or just learn more about another person, go for written communications over telephoned ones every time. The cues that come with "spoken" conversation are apparently far less important than the media effect of committing to print! (Perhaps we tend not to bother writing something that doesn't matter to us, whereas phone conversation usually is dominated by the trivial?)
I absolutely agree that everyone ought to be anonymous -- even have two or three (or unlimited numbers of) anonymous identities... But I might like to get some sense of a specific poster by reviewing other posts. A relative newbie to this community, I hadn't realized I could use the user info feature this way, but will explore it now.
I trust Slashdot (shouldn't I?) to keep my privacy, but always post under my nick here. If I could as easily be anonymous in print -- if I could trust publishers, I mean -- there are several books (fiction and non-) I've written, or partly written, which I would have probably published by now. For me, the privacy issue is most important. I have a thick skin (that is, I care little what others -- especially strangers -- think of me), but in our culture, I believe becoming a celebrity (however minor) is toxic for writers. It tends to twist their view of the world, as evidenced by what typically happens between first and third novels, esp. regarding what is treated as an important issue, increasingly "conservative" political views, etc....
Thank you. It's a good article, well worth reading, and since I'm reading in a public library (not my own system with Acrobat on it), you've given me access to something I might not otherwise have been able to read.
Slashdot Mirror
It has always been the case that once the computer's competency is there, the applications arrive... Way back in the mid-60's my father took me to an open house at IBM, and proudly demonstrated that the computer could add 2+2 lightning-fast. I asked why that was necessary, since I could do the same thing (ok, I was young once, too!)....
If you want to know what the new processors will be used for (in series, no less!), keep up with math! Learn about the complexities of modeling visual information (animation on a G4!), exploring "chaotic" (or "complex") domains, etc.
It's the new stuff we'll be able to DO that make new processors (and etc.) so exciting!
- The wearable should function, for me, in two different modes:
- When I'm walking around, I need access only to my PIM (Ecco, so there!), the Web (any XHTML-ready browser), and my WP (I'm a writer -- using XyWrite).
- I want a lightweight, vertical, divided (hinged) keyboard hanging from my neck -- it might only be for physical reference for a glove that transmits the actual keystroke locations, though. I'll need all the RAM "on," but only limited storage, for this first mode.
- Obviously I need reliable wireless Web access (perhaps Ricochet?), which means a modem of sorts, too.
- When I am ready to settle in one place, I need to add (plug'n'play) my main storage box (PCMCIA, or PC-card format?), boot other programs (various; I consult a lot), flatten the keyboard, and access a printer and perhaps other peripherals.
With a wearable, I will never again have to scramble around for tiny bits of paper to hold ephemeral information -- then lose it. This alone will transform my life. I'll probably also be even more prolific as a writer, since I won't be "down" any time I happen to want to write, or revise, or take notes about something. Then there's the way access to the "universal information utility" will transform my currently inept shopping, searching for suitable restaurants, etc.I don't want to be a gargoyle, but wearables are coming much sooner than anyone thinks!
Actually, one of the best things you could do is to bring in a truly competent documentation specialist. Competent ones are very rare, but you will need to identify your market BEFORE you create the features of your software, and phrase ALL product descriptions (beginning with the spec's!) to appeal to your market! So many great products had really useful features they failed to communicate compellingly to their proper audience, and then they died... On the other hand, we have MS, which ALWAYS promotes features simple to describe and sure to appeal to its audience (i.e., mostly dumb corporate drones). The very best way to be sure of success these days is to identify your best (projected) customers and make a deal with them BEFORE going through the expense of fully spec'ing and coding (and testing) your concept. For example, if your software compressed signals for delivery via a specific medium, you might want to cooperate with another company which is (or plans to) offer that medium. That way, you can be sure you are tailoring your product properly for the customers. You might even find this helpful in raising the capital you might need as you go along. Find your market, identify the major players there, then cooperate to provide something that is needed by those players, fully informing them of your intentions.
I spend my time online reading about hardware, techie news, scifi, and other interests, reading my own e-mail, exploring the Web... also solving various research problems (my own and others), trying to design the Perfect Keyboard (or research whether the new Transmeta CPU will need a chipset), reviewing sites of companies or non-profit groups for which I might be willing to work... even reading nineteenth-century English literature. I really couldn't care less what other persons do with their time online, no more than I want others prying into what I do online. (It may be innocuous now, but who's to say what I might not do in even more repressive times???)
The whole point of the First Amendment is that, in a society run under the pretense that we should all obey laws, the only safe law (protecting us from tyrants) with regard to information is that ALL information must be uncensored, because censorship is always a creeping phenomenon. We ought to (and don't) have a right to privacy covering use of personal information, but apart from that, no-one can really be trusted to judge what everyone else ought to be allowed to read. Or write.
Now, although many of you seem not to know this, most lawyers, investors, and other non-geeks (including teachers and ordinary folks) STILL know practically nothing about computers/software/OS's/Internet -- or any other "hi-tech" stuff. I am not at all surprised a "real" lawyer is using Hotmail, for example... take a look at most lawyers' sites and they are still basically poorly designed 'brochures'... doctors are equally ignorant/incompetent in this arena, which is why so many patients have taken to carrying along the latest from Medline to their appointments. (Or perhaps doctors are just too busy to keep up with new discoveries?)
Some of the folks burned if this apparently bogus company -- which is at a minimum violating the generous license which permits its own existence -- would also be "innocents," regardless of their expertise in other matters. I think we should still continue to regard our own expertise as entailing a duty to protect and assist the innocent. (Btw, being able to read a balance sheet and judge a business plan has never implied competence at the actual "business" of the company being evaluated.) Thus, I believe those of us who have information about scams should in fact come forward in situations such as this; however, the proper entity to notify may not be the SEC, but a state or federal Attorney General, since fraud is a criminal, not civil, matter.
Just a bit less obviously, the 'Net will transform politics because, even if candidates don't post all their speeches on their own "official" Web sites, you can bet someone somewhere will. And that means society has an effective memory. And that means they can't say one thing to one constituency and the opposite to the next constituency.
It's a media effect, a structural effect, but it's sufficient to alter politics all by itself!
Even if we could, those are all quite complex issues, and I'm not comfortable taking one single (strongly support/strongly deny) stance on any of them. Then, there's a certain kind of synergy that introducing 'Net issues brings about. For example, I favor free trade across the 'Net, but do not favor allowing corporations to do anything they want just because they are large and "multinational." Also, tax reform cannot really be taken up without working out how the economy is supposed to function in the post-WWW era: What services will states provide? Come to that, what will comprise the "state?" Will it still be a geographic entity, partially based on ethnic considerations ("nation-state")? "Defense" issues, also, are going to change as our formerly geographic notions of place, trade, etc. are updated... As I expect we will see in the next week, international organizations will be needed to help ordinary Netizens with several fairly new global issues (viruses, trade-related fraud, bandwidth/allocation).
There was this great concept article on "corporatism" about a week ago -- wasn't that on this site? Going for money ONLY (or sex only, or power only) makes for evil. That's why "Love of money is the root of all evil."
Or, try having asthma (largely a disease of the urban poor, and on the increase) and hoping for effective, affordable medical treatment, versus needing the latest in open-heart surgery. Who pays for the extremely expensive medical treatments increasingly needed to keep much older people alive after they've abused their bodies for 50-70 years? Yeah, we do -- the cost of the expensive new machinery & research is amortized (read: paid for by all medical consumers).
Government generates and enforces laws written by the wealthy to transfer wealth to the wealthy, and I don't know how you can not realize that. Look into banking in this country if you need an education!
If a doctor had done the research and posted the proof, I think we'd all have heard a lot more about it.
- Here's what I want:
- A lightweight, roughly rectangular "board" which hangs on an adjustable cord around my neck (smaller than 3"x4"x 1/2").
- It's two-sided, but can be used one-handed if a small "button" on the bottom of the slab is touched (in which case it becomes a chording keyboard).
- The inner and upper sides of the slab are one-button thick, for special keys (normally accessed by thumb).
- Normal key placement is optimized for two-handed operation, with the most common (in English) 2-letter combinations coded for alternate hand/strongest finger usage.
- The "home key" positions are marked with dots, for feedback.
- To further reduce RSI & carpel tunnel syndrome, it remains vertical for common use (as part of a wearable PC), but can be unfolded and placed on a desktop for positional variety.
Btw, if someone offers those chips, I want them -- but I would put on thin, cut-out gloves (or rubber fingertips) before sticking the chips to my "fingernails" -- unless they're supposed to be discarded, like contact lenses. Even then, ecologically speaking, I'd prefer to use them as long as possible.I think your transcript must be a hoax; nothing like this could have been written by a single person. Nope, it had to have been written by a committee. A committee of network studio writers. After they got their pink slips.
I thought it was "code blew" -- not code in C!
As all headline writers know, most people don't even read the whole article on the front page... Creating misleading headlines and lead graphs is a well-known strategy for, well, disinformation (propoganda?). If anyone objects, there's an obvious rebuttal ("the information in your objection was addressed in my original article").
Of course, the very best disruption, for any corporation, is a highly visible and effective boycott of their product(s). Surely, that's a no-brainer?
One more thing, while I'm on this subject: The Seattle WTO protests (complete with property-specific violence) were a great success, measured just about any way you like. Somehow nobody seems to ever explain that the 60's were a time of change in part just because there were so many different -- even divergent -- goals and strategies. So, some of us can boycott, some can be messing about with DoS, others can hire lawyers... that's what "do your own thing" meant.
Well, I thought it was funny.
Seriously, some other guy had a franchise to put kiosks out on sidewalks here, and that never got off, ur, on the ground, either 8-). New York is like a prisoner's dilemma game where the players are always new; there's no such thing as the public interest anymore.
But since I published the whole design in 1994 (even though the pages are currently off-line), this idea is still freely available to any person -- writer, publisher, whatever -- who wants to take advantage of it. And that's the way I want it!
So if you ever see anyone trying to patent backwards-publishing, or do batch subscription publishing, whether or not online, or if anyone tries to patent displaying a library/bookshop, clicking to view shelves, clicking further to display of a specific book, let me know and we'll stop them (prior art).
I think what we really need is to establish a center for posting "prior art" publications of ideas related to the Web or Internet or networking, etc.
Although a lot of Americans don't realize this, they have no basis in law for a right to privacy. In Europe, on the other hand, privacy laws do exist. This is a major issue -- one reason the U.S. gov't. tried to get Internet types to agree on privacy rules is that European Economic Union (do I have that right? EEU?) has stringent privacy laws which U.S. commercial entities violate constantly. This is seen as a threat to U.S. trade, since European Union may lawfully forbid U.S. companies (or European affiliates of them) to use data in ways taken for granted by U.S. In fact, unless EEU passed an extension, a ban would have gone into effect either just recently or in the near future (I'm the techwatcher; I don't track politics!) preventing most U.S. firms from engaging in commerce in much of Europe.
This will probably shock you, but having a national religion (i.e., the Church of England) meant, until very recently, that all residents of a parish were taxed to support the official (i.e., established) church -- that is, the Church of England, or Anglican Church (what Americans call "Episcopal" -- though that word doesn't appear in its actual title).
When the colonists ordered a separation of Church and State for freedom of religion, they merely meant that each man (alas, it was men only) should be free to support his own chosen organized religious institution, rather than be forced to pay for a specific church by the State. The current American understanding of the concept is grotesquely expanded: We are free to believe whatever we like, but not to propose our beliefs be adopted, or follow through on them with action, in public!
Really, they only had an economic freedom in mind -- and isn't that what we all wish when we object to a so-called "moral majority" spending to enforce its "morals" or "family values" on the rest of us?
The virtue of being able to look at something with one's own interests in mind, yet remaining open-minded about it, is called "detachment" (just thought I'd pass that along, seeing as we're supposedly talking of morality and virtue (-8 .)
Basically, he said, "Well, it may look as if extremely rare events had to come together in order for the universe to be inhabitable, but let's ignore this and look for another explanation." When I reached the end of the book, I realized he didn't actually have another explanation.
I didn't like that! Here I dutifully plowed through all those possible theories (like string theory) without any evidence for them, only to discover he wasn't proposing a complete explanation at all. So why did he write it?
Many years ago I worked (in NYC) at a global company, headquartered in Toronto, with a very flat structure -- everyone had access to what was in effect a private network (since purchased by a large news organization for that network). What immediately struck me was how well I came to know certain persons having never met them, just from their writing! After I left the company, I met two of these "friends" (and they met me) and we were all amazed at how much we were just as we had imagined.
It is true that we can misunderstand one another online. But more often (because there is just more of it) this happens offline, too. Irony, for example, is usually misinterpreted by young people, or those who are not terribly intelligent.
One final point: if you want to increase intimacy in a relationship, or just learn more about another person, go for written communications over telephoned ones every time. The cues that come with "spoken" conversation are apparently far less important than the media effect of committing to print! (Perhaps we tend not to bother writing something that doesn't matter to us, whereas phone conversation usually is dominated by the trivial?)
I trust Slashdot (shouldn't I?) to keep my privacy, but always post under my nick here. If I could as easily be anonymous in print -- if I could trust publishers, I mean -- there are several books (fiction and non-) I've written, or partly written, which I would have probably published by now. For me, the privacy issue is most important. I have a thick skin (that is, I care little what others -- especially strangers -- think of me), but in our culture, I believe becoming a celebrity (however minor) is toxic for writers. It tends to twist their view of the world, as evidenced by what typically happens between first and third novels, esp. regarding what is treated as an important issue, increasingly "conservative" political views, etc....
Thank you. It's a good article, well worth reading, and since I'm reading in a public library (not my own system with Acrobat on it), you've given me access to something I might not otherwise have been able to read.