Your reading comprehension seems a little low, though, as while the wiki statement is accurate, your immediate conclusion jump is not. In what way is my conclusion wrong? Your conclusion is wrong in the ways that I spelled out in the rest of the paragraph you quoted. I can't debate with you, you refuse to read.
Yes, you are correct. Your reading comprehension seems a little low, though, as while the wiki statement is accurate, your immediate conclusion jump is not. By acquiring BellSouth, they acquired 11 of the previous BOCs. This brought them to 24 "Bell" holdings, 2 more than they started with. For your reference, look down a paragraph or two to the section titled '"Doing business as" names', where it lists the 11 they acquired (only 10 are listed, as one was merged prior to acquisition) when they acquired BellSouth. To jog your memory, I believe we were discussing just how many "Baby Bells" AT&T owned...
Yes, you are correct. Your reading comprehension seems a little low, though, as while the wiki statement is accurate, your immediate conclusion jump is not. By acquiring BellSouth, they acquired 11 of the previous BOCs. This brought them to 24 "Bell" holdings, 2 more than they started with. For your reference, look down a paragraph or two to the section titled '"Doing business as" names', where it lists the 11 they acquired (only 10 are listed, as one was merged prior to acquisition) when they acquired BellSouth.
It is also interesting to note that they own Cingular.
Another interesting item to note is the spying they (have been | are | will be) doing.
Yet another item of interest would be that the iPhone that everyone seems to be slobbering over is sold only with a 2-year AT&T service contract.
These people are bad, just like every other major corporate player in this hemisphere. I am sorry, Falcon, but you cannot defend them any longer.
As a reply to another post you made in response to the GP, cellphone is an option for voice communications, yes... but I understand DSL is not available without a land line. Nor, for that matter, are some satellite internet/TV services.
My initial point could bear restatement, I believe. It is as follows: AT&T owns the North American communication lines.
In addition, I would like to thank jc42 for a well thought out, insightful post, over here. It comprises a much better rebuttal of your fallacious arguments than this one you are reading right now. I recommend you read that one after this, and rethink your conclusions.
It might also be a good idea to consider that some of us are quite convinced we are right, and will need actual proof before giving up our ideas.
I'm replying to your sig. Silly, yes, but I feel it requires a response.
"Ubuntu" is an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me"
Slackware is a flavor of Linux, a Unix-like OS. Ubuntu is also a flavor of Linux. Linux has, as I understood it, been trying to "take over the world, one desktop at a time" for over decade now.
The elitist mentality displayed by your sig is your own failure. You have failed to grasp a fundamental truth. That truth is that you, and those like you, are the only real problem with Linux. Any group of sufficient size is going to display diversity in all things. "Intelligence in operating system choice" is one of those factors. I'm sure there are at least a dozen people who are reading this right now and thinking "Man, that dude's bent, Slackware sucks, GenToo is the best". And then there's the RedHat, Mandrake, CentOS, Sabayon, and Debian users who are saying the same thing, with their own OS in the GenToo position. Distro wars were out of style in '05, if not earlier. Get a clue, get with the program, stop being such a sycophantic dweeb.
Speaking as a linux enthusiast with over 10 years' experience with the "alternative OS", I have found Ubuntu to be the first distro that has even a remote shot at being a good desktop choice for "Joe Sixpack". It's certainly the first OS to make a decent try at penetrating that market, and it's doing a damn fine job.
I will freely admit that my main computers run Windows (XP, not Vista, mind you). I will also patiently explain to you that mainstream games don't run natively in your "oh-so-cool" OS, nor can you watch movies or listen to music with the default codec set that comes installed. I will explain to you that Slackware doesn't run "out of the box" any better than any other distro. I will show you how I have been burning ISO's of various linux distros for over a decade, to try them out and see what the community had to offer. I have an Iomega ZipDisk (from back before they labelled them "Zip100") with a copy of ZipSlack on it from back when the first number in the version was a zero. I have tried many of the various flavors of Linux over the years, and found all of them lacking.
Yes, even Ubuntu. It's not perfect, either. On the other hand, it's the first distro that "just works" without ever having to touch the console, and it's the first distro I would feel comfortable handing my mother a LiveCD for, and telling her to click the "install" icon on the desktop. I wouldn't think of handing her the alternative install disk, and I certainly wouldn't recommend any other linux distro to her. I don't have the time to support it.
Nowadays, you'll need to factor in the lowest common denominator (user) in your calculations of how "cool" linux is, or watch your distro of choice fade from use. Use it or lose it. If this is not acceptable, you can turn in your geek card in that bucket next to the door, and go back to being simply a dork with a pc in his mother's basement.
Your elitist bullshit went out of style two years ago, with the rest of the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing neanderthals who think that being a Linux junkie means having to beat each other over the head in "distro wars". That kind of thinking makes me sick, and makes me wonder what you could possibly have ever contributed to the "community" you so cheerfully flame others about.
Now that most of the vitriol is out of my system, I can apologize for coming down on you so harshly. Most of my ire is not directed specifically at you. I am simply sick to death of the mentality you are displaying, and could not take seeing yet another ignorant jerkwad who hasn't even bothered to download anything except their own "holy grail of operating systems" bashing another operating system that they've never bothered to look into because it "has a silly name", or it has been called the "playschool of linux operating systems". Like it or not, Ubuntu is hands-down the most popular linux distro out there, and is the only one I've
My baby figured out how to use her hands and eyes all on her own. All we had to do is provide her with the necessities for life (food and diaper changing and interaction). There, fixed that for you.
But I'm afraid I'm going to have to stick to the no BIOS, no OS thing. People figure out their hardware on their own. Hmm, that's odd. And here I thought my Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) has always 'Just Worked'. I certainly started eating and excreting at a very young age, and as far as I know, I was breathing within moments of exiting my mother's womb. Certainly, my Operating System (OS) has been functional from the very beginning. The first trick was learning to discern usable input from the "noise". From there, I moved on to more complex subjects, such as learning to move my limbs without bashing them into surrounding objects (which took quite some time, I assure you), and object recognition/targetting (such as learning to look at someone when they were speaking, which requires the ability to discern which direction the audio is coming from).
Maybe give it a dictionary on the HDD or something and maybe teach it to read. You must have some way to interact with the computer before you can "teach it to read". This would require, at the very least, a rudimentary BIOS and OS. Without a BIOS, the individual components making up the system aren't a system, because they cannot communicate. You wouldn't be able to "put a dictionary on the hard drive" because you would have no method of doing so without a BIOS. Without an operating system, you might as well leave the thing turned off, because you're just wasting electricity and causing wear and tear on components that could be otherwise employed in a useful capacity.
As for a computer, you give it the necessities for life... power and cooling. Let it figure the rest out. Good thing your parents didn't feel the same way, or you'd never be posting on Slashdot. Some might argue that this wouldn't be a bad thing.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but you are essentially talking about dropping a bag of protoplasm on the sidewalk, and expecting it to begin walking around and talking while chewing bubblegum. It won't. At best, it will die. Quickly.
Your "give it the necessities for life" equates to sticking an IV and a catheter into a lobotomized fetus, and shoving the whole thing into a small box in the closet. You'll never achieve any "intelligent" response from such a creature.
In summary, you haven't a clue what a BIOS or OS actually do, your theories on the development of an intelligence are skewed, at best, and I'm going to take the rest of your commentary as just so much twaddle and drivel. It pains me to think that you are responsible for another entity's well-being.
...perhaps infrastructure co-ops? See, now this is where my thinking was headed some time last year. Wireless and wired infrastructure, done by the local geek, throughout a trailer park, apartment complex, small town, suburb, or what have you.
Buy a big pipe, then defray the cost by offering the use of it to your neighbors. By my thinking, you could support up to 100 people with a single $300/month "business-grade" fios pipe. Add in some money for overhead, ie. paperwork administration and your time as a network admin, and you could be making quite a secondary income for (in essence) running some cable and configuring a linux box as a firewall/router.
Do the math with your own neighborhood, and see what you think. Can you get away with charging your neighbors $10-$25 per month to use the internet? Any "high-speed" ISP can get away with charging them $25-$50 (or more) per month for the same bandwidth and level of service, without even providing a method of walking over and asking the network admin why they can't hit youtube today. Think about it.
Perhaps the best method of fighting these gluttonous monsters is to bring the network size down to small "indy" ISP's, dozens (or more) per town. Make the whole 'net P2P;)
For more information, use your search engine of choice to see what the municipal wireless projects are doing, and then imagine using wires instead. The routing is much the same, I would think, it's just a difference in the media between nodes.
Never heard of Ma Bell and the phone monopoly they used to have? That's right, the entire US used to have only 1 phone company. The bolded portion of the quoted text is false. "Ma Bell" has been reconstituted. All the "Baby Bells" are now under one umbrella again. See here for some more info.
It says there that "While it reconstitutes much of the original parent company, the new AT&T Inc. lacks the vertical integration of the historic AT&T Corp. which prompted the antitrust suit and breakup in 1984." I, personally, do not see the difference between 'owning everything in your market space' and 'owning everything in your market space'.
In other words, this comment does not answer the GP's question of: "If you show me a single instance of u.s. government action against a monopoly that had any meaningful effect".
While this is funny at first glance, it's actually an insightful post. Tin foil hats aside, we're not allowed to say the word "bomb" in an airport. Actually looking up information on how to get a bomb through airport security... Water boarding ftw!
Speaking of intelligence, it looks like I overestimated yours. My post was intended to garner maybe a +2 Funny mod, as a team of Siberian sled dogs is obviously less intelligent than the same number of cats, who would never let themselves be gotten into harness to drag hundreds of pounds through snow and ice while being shouted at and having a whip cracked over their heads.
Ya know, I'm finding it difficult to believe you're not just trolling. My point was that cats (and indeed, most, if not all organisms) have defenses, and are therefore by definition not defenseless.
If someone is holding a gun at you, are you not defenseless against it? As a matter of fact, no. I am not defenseless, merely threatened. As a matter of fact, depending on the level of skill of the gun's holder (and the circumstances wherein I could find myself staring at the wrong end of a weapon), a few moments later might find me holding the firearm, and them nursing a freshly broken wrist. Sorry, but the more you try to argue your (fallacious) point, and still insist on missing mine, the less I feel like I'm having an intelligent discussion, and the more I feel like we're just out in the sandlot having a urination competition.
For those of you who are not intellectually inclined (I won't name names, but the numbers 7, 1, 8, 4, and 9 come to mind), a "urination competition" is simply another way to say "pissing contest". By the way, you win. I will stop trying to correct your accuracy, and just let you be stupid. Happy now? Good.
Cats? Defenseless? ROFL.
I'm unaware of any house cat ever being able to kill a human. If the human is intent on killing the cat, the cat will die. Feline defenses include (but are not limited to) claws, teeth, and speed. Claws to make you let go of them when they decide you should not have snatched them up, teeth to be more aggressive in making you let go, and speed to get away from you when you do let go, now that your arm is bleeding from the wrist to the shoulder.
By your logic, many other animals are "defenseless". After all, humans have guns and napalm.
Poison ivy's effect on epidermis is another example of a defense mechanism. I have yet to see poison ivy kill a human, either... but I watched a marine rip his own tongue out after eating some on a dare.
How nice, a defenseless animal annoys you and you'd like to kill it. Cats? Defenseless? ROFL.
I hope you remember that if you have kids and someone complains how annoying they are. So, you're suggesting homicide as a solution? Interesting neighbor you must be...
That's all well and good of you to do that, but that doesn't mean that everyone should just assume they have permission. On the contrary... unsecured access points with SSIDs of "Free Public Wifi" and "Free Wireless Internet" are growing ever more common. I, personally, tend to avoid them, or button up completely before touching them, as it seems to me that offering "free net access to the world" would be a simply astonishing malware propogation engine.
Your neighbor who simply unknowingly left his AP open may not be so generous, and would be irritated to find people have been freeloading off his service. That's not unreasonable either. Anyone illiterate enough to unknowingly leave their AP open to the world probably left it as the default SSID of "linksys", and if it's still like that when you find it, it would be a courtesy to attempt to log into it with the default password ("admin"), reset it to defaults in case any script kiddies have already found it, then set the new admin password to "i slapped my open hand on my keyboard 5 or 6 times and hit 'ok'". In addition to not noticing that you had done so, said neighbor would probably not notice anything other than 'Gee, the tubes sure are slow tonight' if he had a dozen script kiddies just the other side of his privacy fence, siphoning warez, music, and movies from the P2P networks. He'd be astonished when he received a subpoena from the RIAA, and would never be successfully prosecuted ('I don't have any of them mvp files, or whatever! I never even heard of Snoop Bisquit!')
I guess things like asking permission and common courtesy are just passe anymore. Definitely a sign of this latest generation that has grown up with little respect for other people's property. I don't know what circles you travel in, but speaking for myself and those individuals I call friends, common courtesy is the watchword. We are selfish in that we do things for other people because it makes us feel good. We are lazy in that we do things right the first time, so we don't have to do it again. If you're having permissions issues, maybe you're doing it wrong.;)
"I feel it is unreasonable to expect the end user to determine if he or she should be paying for a service."
It takes an unhealthy dose of willful ignorance to fail to make that determination on your own. Really? To my mind, if you set your radio in your window, it's utterly ridiculous to yell at the neighbors for listening to it. I don't see a publicly available internet URL any differently.
As the parent to your post stated... if it's a pay service, it should have access controls. If it's a publicly available url, it's publicly accessible, and there's no access controls? Anyone who knows the URL can see it. Same could be said for a television on your front porch, or a radio in your window. It's available to the public, end of discuission. Secure it or shut up.
Note: I am the network administrator for a large number of installations, in a 3-state area. If my network is unsecure, it's *my* ass, not the customers'.
As to your little jab about DRM, someone ripping a disk is entirely different from someone visiting a publicly available web link. I hate to be ad hominem, here, but you're an idiot.
I dunno where the 5% came from, but with a GBM, I'd cheerfully accept a treatment method something along the lines of "we're gonna line up this revolver with your forehead, and spin the chambers. given a 50/50 shot at lining up the barrel properly to remove the cancer, and a 1 in 6 chance of actually firing the bullet, regardless of whether we lined everything up perfectly... so you might die of cancer, you might die from the treatment, or there's about an 8% shot (pardon the pun) that you'll be cured, and go on to live a normal, healthy life."
Having even a 30% chance of having rabies "eat my brain", vs a 75%+ mortality rate within 90 days? Sounds like a good plan, doc, let's roll with it.
...excuse my humanitarian attitude, but a technology so great should be applied for those among us that are disabled...
I'm sure this technology will be used to help the "differently abled" among us to live more fulfilling lives, but I'm not interested in that end of things. I'm not disabled. I would assume that a goodly portion of the "typical Slashdot reader" population feels much the same way. There are "humanitarian" groups in this world, they exist solely to help people who are "differently abled", and they're typically fairly good at their jobs. I'm absolutely certain they will pick this up and run with it. As a matter of fact, I'm sure they already have.
Forgive my lack of political correctness, or my perceived greed and selfishness, but I would rather think of ways to extend humanity's reach, regardless of whether someone in a wheelchair (or otherwise disabled) will get any benefit from it. I'm not, by any stretch, saying that this technology shouldn't be used for adaptive difficulties, or prosthesis technology, or in any other way that will help those who are "mobility challenged". What I am saying is that we should not limit ourselves by thinking of this as simply a method for disabled persons to experience gaming.
Imagine putting on this headband, a set of video goggles, and a set of headphones with attached mic... then plugging all of them into a laptop in a backpack. Show up to the LAN party, grab a Bawls or Mountain Dew, plop yourself on the couch, connect to the local wireless, and start fragging your friends. Alternatively, show up to the office, grab a cup of coffee, plop yourself on the couch, connect to the local wireless, and open up that spreadsheet.
I'm not sure of the limitations of the system, despite reading the article (and googling for more coverage, as well). It appears to use facial musculature for some of its input (The demonstrator guy says something along the lines of "I set my jaw for run forward, clench my jaw for jump, and look left and right for strafing"). Depending on how many inputs can be tracked at once (and it looks like an awful lot, considering the guy was playing UT with just a finger and thumb on the mouse, looked like he was simply aiming with the mouse and using the headband for movement and firing. I never saw him touch the mouse buttons), one of the immediate benefits I can think of is changing workspaces at-a-glance. In Ubuntu, for instance, you can "rotate the cube" to get a new workspace. I would think it would be trivial to set "looking right and left" to "rotating the cube right and left", to literally switch desktops at will. Another application might be to set "clench jaw" to "save document with timestamp", to automate versioning (yeah, you could do it with a timer, but then you end up with weird cutoff lines in your code). Wiggle your eyebrows to change the internet radio station. The possibilities are not endless, but could conceivably become "arbitrarily large".
Combine the headband with a multi-touch surface and some speech recognition, and you have an awesome creativity-enabling environment.
Or, think on a smaller and more trivial scale. Use the headband as a remote control for everything in your house. I don't know how much power the headband requires, but if my Logitech G7 Wireless mouse can play WoW or Orange Box for 6+ hours at a stretch on a single matchbox-size battery, this thing out to work for an hour or two on something small enough to be placed inside the headband. The RF signal tech in my mouse works for a good 20-30 feet, in a room containing a half-dozen workstations and a pair of servers, so I can't imagine it would be all that difficult to make this work as a wireless device with a similar range. Remove the wires, and the application possibilities of this device expand to the absolutely silly, without leaving the realm of the plausible... and more importantly, the realm of the possible.
...One of those and a WiiMote-like device, and suddenly gaming looks more like Mickey-the-Sorcerer's-Apprentice commanding the elements... I predict Harry Potter games will make a massive comeback.
One tends to wonder why this wouldn't already have been used in other areas, most notably the defense industry... Who says it's not? I seem to recall seeing something along the same lines in a Time or Omni article, over a decade ago... something along the lines of helicopter pilots, or "super-soldiers". Anyone wanna take the time to do the research for me? I'll cheerfully accept a "You're wrong," even - so long as it comes with a link.
Uhm... just a thought, but... tablet pc, usb wireless input devices, a few bucks at lowes for the bendy-snake piping stuff to mount the tablet on, maybe an old halogen floor lamp, or something similar for a base... and it sounds like you could have just what you're looking for. If you require more of a "desktop" input set, perhaps you should invest in a sheet of plywood, while you're at it.
Might not be pretty (at least, not as I have described it), but using MDF instead of plywood might save money *and* let you sculpt something with a boxknife and a piece of sandpaper to suit your tastes as a worksurface. A little spraypaint can give you some color other than the ugly gray of the MDF stock. Using a wireless trackball instead of a wireless mouse, some glue or zip-ties, and maybe some more of that bendy-snake metal tubing could allow you to make a gravity-defying worksurface, as well.
All in all, not counting the time to acquire the materials... prolly an hour's work, tops. Of course, that's not counting spraypaint drying time, either.
YMMV, this is just a simple off-the-cuff response.
I hereby release this ridiculously simple idea to the public domain, and look forward to purchasing one as a prefab kit in Wal-Mart next month, for the low-low everyday price of $99.82, sans the high-tech 'tronics, with a Hello Kitty or Transformers branded logo.
That's the problem. People aren't going to pay attention to something that sounds like it's straight out of a science fiction movie. It's going to take a while before people accept something like this as possible. Post video to youtube and get it on TV and stuff. Apparently, this is already occurring. move a little faster, you're not keeping up. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2i-W9ncV_0
"Google has announced that they have hired Codeweavers, maker of the popular Wine software to make Photoshop run better on Linux." Uhm... why not pay Adobe to make a linux binary?
Am I just being stupid in thinking that this would be a better solution than (in essence) hiring a team of emulation developers to fix their emulation?
Admittedly, it would probably make wine better, but still... why aren't we pushing Adobe towards making a linux product, instead of paying someone to kludge it in?
I only wish there was some way I could abstain from CNN more than I already do. Easy, throw out your TV.
While I'm sure that I'll be modded "funny", I don't mean it that way. My television hasn't been turned on since before hurricane Rita hit Louisiana. I took it to the road the other day, when I found it while cleaning out my storage room. No sense in having it cluttering up the place, when it's never turned on, or even plugged in.
My cable company expressed surprise that I didn't want their TV service, despite being connected to their internet, and put a trap on my line to keep me from "stealing" the TV service. I laughed at them, and went back to my interactive electronic pursuits.
The zombification of the american populace is due almost directly to the amount of television consumed. The "electronic babysitter" has invaded our homes, turned us into mindless robots, and no one noticed.
The internet is a perfectly functional alternative method of obtaining news, and can result in increased knowledge of world events, due to not being locked into whatever the media company's backers want you to see.
Call me a tin foil hatter, if you'd like, but then find me one thing on television that I can't find on the internet, should I so choose.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you are correct. Your reading comprehension seems a little low, though, as while the wiki statement is accurate, your immediate conclusion jump is not. By acquiring BellSouth, they acquired 11 of the previous BOCs. This brought them to 24 "Bell" holdings, 2 more than they started with. For your reference, look down a paragraph or two to the section titled '"Doing business as" names', where it lists the 11 they acquired (only 10 are listed, as one was merged prior to acquisition) when they acquired BellSouth.
It is also interesting to note that they own Cingular.
Another interesting item to note is the spying they (have been | are | will be) doing.
Yet another item of interest would be that the iPhone that everyone seems to be slobbering over is sold only with a 2-year AT&T service contract.
These people are bad, just like every other major corporate player in this hemisphere. I am sorry, Falcon, but you cannot defend them any longer.
As a reply to another post you made in response to the GP, cellphone is an option for voice communications, yes... but I understand DSL is not available without a land line. Nor, for that matter, are some satellite internet/TV services.
My initial point could bear restatement, I believe. It is as follows:
AT&T owns the North American communication lines.
In addition, I would like to thank jc42 for a well thought out, insightful post, over here. It comprises a much better rebuttal of your fallacious arguments than this one you are reading right now. I recommend you read that one after this, and rethink your conclusions.
It might also be a good idea to consider that some of us are quite convinced we are right, and will need actual proof before giving up our ideas.
"Ubuntu" is an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me"
Slackware is a flavor of Linux, a Unix-like OS. Ubuntu is also a flavor of Linux. Linux has, as I understood it, been trying to "take over the world, one desktop at a time" for over decade now.
The elitist mentality displayed by your sig is your own failure. You have failed to grasp a fundamental truth. That truth is that you, and those like you, are the only real problem with Linux. Any group of sufficient size is going to display diversity in all things. "Intelligence in operating system choice" is one of those factors. I'm sure there are at least a dozen people who are reading this right now and thinking "Man, that dude's bent, Slackware sucks, GenToo is the best". And then there's the RedHat, Mandrake, CentOS, Sabayon, and Debian users who are saying the same thing, with their own OS in the GenToo position. Distro wars were out of style in '05, if not earlier. Get a clue, get with the program, stop being such a sycophantic dweeb.
Speaking as a linux enthusiast with over 10 years' experience with the "alternative OS", I have found Ubuntu to be the first distro that has even a remote shot at being a good desktop choice for "Joe Sixpack". It's certainly the first OS to make a decent try at penetrating that market, and it's doing a damn fine job.
I will freely admit that my main computers run Windows (XP, not Vista, mind you). I will also patiently explain to you that mainstream games don't run natively in your "oh-so-cool" OS, nor can you watch movies or listen to music with the default codec set that comes installed. I will explain to you that Slackware doesn't run "out of the box" any better than any other distro. I will show you how I have been burning ISO's of various linux distros for over a decade, to try them out and see what the community had to offer. I have an Iomega ZipDisk (from back before they labelled them "Zip100") with a copy of ZipSlack on it from back when the first number in the version was a zero. I have tried many of the various flavors of Linux over the years, and found all of them lacking.
Yes, even Ubuntu. It's not perfect, either. On the other hand, it's the first distro that "just works" without ever having to touch the console, and it's the first distro I would feel comfortable handing my mother a LiveCD for, and telling her to click the "install" icon on the desktop. I wouldn't think of handing her the alternative install disk, and I certainly wouldn't recommend any other linux distro to her. I don't have the time to support it.
Nowadays, you'll need to factor in the lowest common denominator (user) in your calculations of how "cool" linux is, or watch your distro of choice fade from use. Use it or lose it. If this is not acceptable, you can turn in your geek card in that bucket next to the door, and go back to being simply a dork with a pc in his mother's basement.
Your elitist bullshit went out of style two years ago, with the rest of the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing neanderthals who think that being a Linux junkie means having to beat each other over the head in "distro wars". That kind of thinking makes me sick, and makes me wonder what you could possibly have ever contributed to the "community" you so cheerfully flame others about.
Now that most of the vitriol is out of my system, I can apologize for coming down on you so harshly. Most of my ire is not directed specifically at you. I am simply sick to death of the mentality you are displaying, and could not take seeing yet another ignorant jerkwad who hasn't even bothered to download anything except their own "holy grail of operating systems" bashing another operating system that they've never bothered to look into because it "has a silly name", or it has been called the "playschool of linux operating systems". Like it or not, Ubuntu is hands-down the most popular linux distro out there, and is the only one I've
Perhaps I am mistaken, but you are essentially talking about dropping a bag of protoplasm on the sidewalk, and expecting it to begin walking around and talking while chewing bubblegum. It won't. At best, it will die. Quickly.
Your "give it the necessities for life" equates to sticking an IV and a catheter into a lobotomized fetus, and shoving the whole thing into a small box in the closet. You'll never achieve any "intelligent" response from such a creature.
In summary, you haven't a clue what a BIOS or OS actually do, your theories on the development of an intelligence are skewed, at best, and I'm going to take the rest of your commentary as just so much twaddle and drivel. It pains me to think that you are responsible for another entity's well-being.
Seriously, though, I'd love to have a look at it.
You mean like AT&T?
--
My bad, didn't know you've been living under a rock.
...perhaps infrastructure co-ops? See, now this is where my thinking was headed some time last year. Wireless and wired infrastructure, done by the local geek, throughout a trailer park, apartment complex, small town, suburb, or what have you.Buy a big pipe, then defray the cost by offering the use of it to your neighbors. By my thinking, you could support up to 100 people with a single $300/month "business-grade" fios pipe. Add in some money for overhead, ie. paperwork administration and your time as a network admin, and you could be making quite a secondary income for (in essence) running some cable and configuring a linux box as a firewall/router.
Do the math with your own neighborhood, and see what you think. Can you get away with charging your neighbors $10-$25 per month to use the internet? Any "high-speed" ISP can get away with charging them $25-$50 (or more) per month for the same bandwidth and level of service, without even providing a method of walking over and asking the network admin why they can't hit youtube today. Think about it.
Perhaps the best method of fighting these gluttonous monsters is to bring the network size down to small "indy" ISP's, dozens (or more) per town. Make the whole 'net P2P
For more information, use your search engine of choice to see what the municipal wireless projects are doing, and then imagine using wires instead. The routing is much the same, I would think, it's just a difference in the media between nodes.
See here for some more info.
It says there that "While it reconstitutes much of the original parent company, the new AT&T Inc. lacks the vertical integration of the historic AT&T Corp. which prompted the antitrust suit and breakup in 1984."
I, personally, do not see the difference between 'owning everything in your market space' and 'owning everything in your market space'.
In other words, this comment does not answer the GP's question of: "If you show me a single instance of u.s. government action against a monopoly that had any meaningful effect".
While this is funny at first glance, it's actually an insightful post.
Tin foil hats aside, we're not allowed to say the word "bomb" in an airport. Actually looking up information on how to get a bomb through airport security... Water boarding ftw!
Speaking of intelligence, it looks like I overestimated yours. My post was intended to garner maybe a +2 Funny mod, as a team of Siberian sled dogs is obviously less intelligent than the same number of cats, who would never let themselves be gotten into harness to drag hundreds of pounds through snow and ice while being shouted at and having a whip cracked over their heads.
Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Ha. Ha. Ha.
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Explaining the joke takes the funny out.
For those of you who are not intellectually inclined (I won't name names, but the numbers 7, 1, 8, 4, and 9 come to mind), a "urination competition" is simply another way to say "pissing contest". By the way, you win. I will stop trying to correct your accuracy, and just let you be stupid. Happy now? Good.
By your logic, many other animals are "defenseless". After all, humans have guns and napalm.
Poison ivy's effect on epidermis is another example of a defense mechanism. I have yet to see poison ivy kill a human, either... but I watched a marine rip his own tongue out after eating some on a dare.
Cats are smarter than dogs. I have proof.
Ever seen a team of Siberian sled cats?
As the parent to your post stated... if it's a pay service, it should have access controls. If it's a publicly available url, it's publicly accessible, and there's no access controls? Anyone who knows the URL can see it. Same could be said for a television on your front porch, or a radio in your window. It's available to the public, end of discuission. Secure it or shut up.
Note: I am the network administrator for a large number of installations, in a 3-state area. If my network is unsecure, it's *my* ass, not the customers'.
As to your little jab about DRM, someone ripping a disk is entirely different from someone visiting a publicly available web link. I hate to be ad hominem, here, but you're an idiot.
I dunno where the 5% came from, but with a GBM, I'd cheerfully accept a treatment method something along the lines of "we're gonna line up this revolver with your forehead, and spin the chambers. given a 50/50 shot at lining up the barrel properly to remove the cancer, and a 1 in 6 chance of actually firing the bullet, regardless of whether we lined everything up perfectly... so you might die of cancer, you might die from the treatment, or there's about an 8% shot (pardon the pun) that you'll be cured, and go on to live a normal, healthy life."
Having even a 30% chance of having rabies "eat my brain", vs a 75%+ mortality rate within 90 days? Sounds like a good plan, doc, let's roll with it.
This is funny, for those of you who can't understand the concept of humor. Please mod it appropriately.
...excuse my humanitarian attitude, but a technology so great should be applied for those among us that are disabled...
I'm sure this technology will be used to help the "differently abled" among us to live more fulfilling lives, but I'm not interested in that end of things. I'm not disabled. I would assume that a goodly portion of the "typical Slashdot reader" population feels much the same way. There are "humanitarian" groups in this world, they exist solely to help people who are "differently abled", and they're typically fairly good at their jobs. I'm absolutely certain they will pick this up and run with it. As a matter of fact, I'm sure they already have.
Forgive my lack of political correctness, or my perceived greed and selfishness, but I would rather think of ways to extend humanity's reach, regardless of whether someone in a wheelchair (or otherwise disabled) will get any benefit from it. I'm not, by any stretch, saying that this technology shouldn't be used for adaptive difficulties, or prosthesis technology, or in any other way that will help those who are "mobility challenged". What I am saying is that we should not limit ourselves by thinking of this as simply a method for disabled persons to experience gaming.
Imagine putting on this headband, a set of video goggles, and a set of headphones with attached mic... then plugging all of them into a laptop in a backpack. Show up to the LAN party, grab a Bawls or Mountain Dew, plop yourself on the couch, connect to the local wireless, and start fragging your friends. Alternatively, show up to the office, grab a cup of coffee, plop yourself on the couch, connect to the local wireless, and open up that spreadsheet.
I'm not sure of the limitations of the system, despite reading the article (and googling for more coverage, as well). It appears to use facial musculature for some of its input (The demonstrator guy says something along the lines of "I set my jaw for run forward, clench my jaw for jump, and look left and right for strafing"). Depending on how many inputs can be tracked at once (and it looks like an awful lot, considering the guy was playing UT with just a finger and thumb on the mouse, looked like he was simply aiming with the mouse and using the headband for movement and firing. I never saw him touch the mouse buttons), one of the immediate benefits I can think of is changing workspaces at-a-glance. In Ubuntu, for instance, you can "rotate the cube" to get a new workspace. I would think it would be trivial to set "looking right and left" to "rotating the cube right and left", to literally switch desktops at will. Another application might be to set "clench jaw" to "save document with timestamp", to automate versioning (yeah, you could do it with a timer, but then you end up with weird cutoff lines in your code). Wiggle your eyebrows to change the internet radio station. The possibilities are not endless, but could conceivably become "arbitrarily large".
Combine the headband with a multi-touch surface and some speech recognition, and you have an awesome creativity-enabling environment.
Or, think on a smaller and more trivial scale. Use the headband as a remote control for everything in your house. I don't know how much power the headband requires, but if my Logitech G7 Wireless mouse can play WoW or Orange Box for 6+ hours at a stretch on a single matchbox-size battery, this thing out to work for an hour or two on something small enough to be placed inside the headband. The RF signal tech in my mouse works for a good 20-30 feet, in a room containing a half-dozen workstations and a pair of servers, so I can't imagine it would be all that difficult to make this work as a wireless device with a similar range. Remove the wires, and the application possibilities of this device expand to the absolutely silly, without leaving the realm of the plausible... and more importantly, the realm of the possible.
In short, don't simply look at this and say "o
...One of those and a WiiMote-like device, and suddenly gaming looks more like Mickey-the-Sorcerer's-Apprentice commanding the elements... I predict Harry Potter games will make a massive comeback.Uhm... just a thought, but... tablet pc, usb wireless input devices, a few bucks at lowes for the bendy-snake piping stuff to mount the tablet on, maybe an old halogen floor lamp, or something similar for a base... and it sounds like you could have just what you're looking for. If you require more of a "desktop" input set, perhaps you should invest in a sheet of plywood, while you're at it.
Might not be pretty (at least, not as I have described it), but using MDF instead of plywood might save money *and* let you sculpt something with a boxknife and a piece of sandpaper to suit your tastes as a worksurface. A little spraypaint can give you some color other than the ugly gray of the MDF stock. Using a wireless trackball instead of a wireless mouse, some glue or zip-ties, and maybe some more of that bendy-snake metal tubing could allow you to make a gravity-defying worksurface, as well.
All in all, not counting the time to acquire the materials... prolly an hour's work, tops. Of course, that's not counting spraypaint drying time, either.
YMMV, this is just a simple off-the-cuff response.
I hereby release this ridiculously simple idea to the public domain, and look forward to purchasing one as a prefab kit in Wal-Mart next month, for the low-low everyday price of $99.82, sans the high-tech 'tronics, with a Hello Kitty or Transformers branded logo.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2i-W9ncV_0
Am I just being stupid in thinking that this would be a better solution than (in essence) hiring a team of emulation developers to fix their emulation?
Admittedly, it would probably make wine better, but still... why aren't we pushing Adobe towards making a linux product, instead of paying someone to kludge it in?
While I'm sure that I'll be modded "funny", I don't mean it that way. My television hasn't been turned on since before hurricane Rita hit Louisiana. I took it to the road the other day, when I found it while cleaning out my storage room. No sense in having it cluttering up the place, when it's never turned on, or even plugged in.
My cable company expressed surprise that I didn't want their TV service, despite being connected to their internet, and put a trap on my line to keep me from "stealing" the TV service. I laughed at them, and went back to my interactive electronic pursuits.
The zombification of the american populace is due almost directly to the amount of television consumed. The "electronic babysitter" has invaded our homes, turned us into mindless robots, and no one noticed.
The internet is a perfectly functional alternative method of obtaining news, and can result in increased knowledge of world events, due to not being locked into whatever the media company's backers want you to see.
Call me a tin foil hatter, if you'd like, but then find me one thing on television that I can't find on the internet, should I so choose.