I agree with you that there is a lot of alarmism, fear mongering and blowing-out-of-proportions spinning on this planet. Much of it can very likely be traced back to
a)incompetent journalism b)fraudulent journalism, financed or somehow approved by interested parties c)irrationality or rationatality distorted by false information
If one strips the "frankenfood" keyword of its emotional/irrational connotations, you still could find a very real potential problem with implications we still don't understand completely: is genetically modified food safe for LONG TERM consumption ? We probably -simply don't know- because IF some testing was done it was probably done on a limited population. Also, we would like to know each detail of the tests, names and surnames of the people who ate that food and for how much time. To keep it short, we need tons of information and testing BEFORE we hit the market with a new product : you know that companies limited responsability encourages them both to risk money into innovation, but also encourages them to take other risks, in the form of -cutting costs on test- or -launching a product before a rigorous testing is done.
Now one thing is to produce a car that is unsafe, you may endanger maybe one million drivers ? That's still not acceptable - NOT AT ALL- but the damage is likely to be contained. When you start producing food, you may hit many millions of people and tracking which food did what is a nightmare.
Don't be fooled by statements about religion by a politician ; he may as well believe in what he said, but if there was an atheist majority in USA he wouldn't have expressed his tought for fear of losing votes. And votes are what really make or destroy politicans.
As long as the handwriting is readable, nobody cares if it reaches calligraphy quality or if it bareley readable. The important thing is , you MUST be able to write. You could forget your PC at home, it may break down and anything else can happen but you still would be able to write if needed.
Also, each handwriting style has distinctive features that makes authentication a lot easier then authenticating a "digitally signed" document, or you could use both for additional security.
350K$ "value" is just the expense one would sustain to licence the engine, it's not like you can sell it for that price or expect to resell it. So it's monopoly money you're winning. While the expenses that would be involved into producing "The next Counter Strike" are well above $1 million in developers time alone.
Licence you creation to Epic Games for real money / stock / cut on balance statement profits after taxes, that's _real_ money.
The data comes from 1996-2001, still well inside the "new economy bubble" (or shall we say financial institutions driven "scam") that drived a lot of investors into totally insane multimillion projects. No wonder that the growth of the IT sector looks so good, when you look at 1996-2001 data.
Also pay attention to the "Hungary success story". U$ 729 Million increase in revenues from 1995 to 2001 and only 9000 new jobs in 6 years. Consider Hungarian average wage, exchange rate , inflation and you see that this revenue are either vaporware or...weren't left in Hungary for investment. If we pay even more attention, job may mean "job position" or "kinds of jobs". Guess that they could have specified that. Even if it's 9000 new "kinds of jobs" that means absolutely nothing, everybody today is an Executive Vice President Junior Senior Major Minor of something.
I could go on but I'd rather read a good comic that this comic (that was probably grossly overpaid too).
Some guy in the Phoenix marketing has a brilliant idea ! Let's "market" the bios so that every year the user is forced to buy a "security upgrade" and let's call it a "security feature". At worse we'll blame either pirates like some other big company does, or we'll blame hackers. I hear the master hacker is hiding in caves...
It seems obvious to me they want to extract more money out of customers by crippling the bios rather then by really improving it.
Thanks for cooperating with us. Unlikely as it may seem, your valuable contribution is no longer needed even if it really is valuable, but we don't really realize it is. Oh we also found some dude named John Doe who will work for half the money. Sorry.
The old adage "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" isn't always true, but it seems to work perfectly in this situation.
How relevant is speed in counting ? One day or one week is irrilevant, given that the old governemt/old president remains in charge until the count is done. There is no power/control void.
How relevant is counting cost ? Nearly zero. One can also reduce cost to zero by drafting people for voting-duty and pay them a symbolic token of presence. If one doesn't like that, maybe he/she could try some other system than democracy, you'll be surprised how good is once you don't have it anymore.
How relevant is potential for fraud ? Enormous, obviously. A machine can be hacked/modified in a thousand different ways to produce the desidered results.
It doesn't require a brain surgeon to draw a cross on a voting symbol on a piece of paper with a permanent marker. It requires a couple of corrupted individuals to change the result of millions of votes collected by computers, remember the credit card database theft that endangered millions of credit card owners ? Same thing.
As long as spammers are paid, they'll find new tricks, much like pushers do with addicted people. Hit the company paying them, make a list of companies using spam as advertising method, destroy their "public image" by pointing out the truth, they're filling you email inbox with tons of useless message you'll never read anyway and wasting precious internet resources that may lead to an increase of ISP subscription costs.
Imagine being blind and being able to access (maybe in a not far away future) the entire Gutenberg ebook library by internet. No need to read the whole book with some kind of Braille device, no need to -own- a text-2-speech program and, maybe, no need to own a computer if the stream is broadcasted with some other equipement.
Blind people will -love- this and I can't but be happy for them.
If you have some info you don't want to become public, you simply don't make it public. You can't trust any technology to keep your info private for more then some time. Sending the pic to your best friend is the best way to make it public and well known in seconds.
And if you don't want your ex to see, maybe she isn't your ex at all, otherwise why should she care about your new girlfriend:) ?
Let's suppose that in the military the little guy always reflects the ethics of the top leadership.
If that's true, it is also true that any change in the ethic of the leadership should be reflected in a change of the little guy's ethic.
So let's suppose that , for any reason, the Leader changes his/her ethics in such a way that the new ethic is the exact opposite of the old ethic (for example, a switch in ethic from kill 1 to save 100 because saving 100 is better then killing one to kill none because killing is bad).
The little guy should immediately change his code of ethic and reflect the new code of ethic. But evidence suggests that's not happening, because human beings aren't programmable robots.
For instace, if platoon leader decides it is ethical to kill all the people in a village to save a comrade, because a comrade is a comrade and must be helped at all costs , the little guy should immediately adapt to what his commander thinks it's ethical. But the little guy code of ethic doesn't switch in a second, in reality he's obeying orders to attack, because he was trained to -immediately- obey orders , because this can save his life on the field.
Imho, no matter how hard is the social pressure or satire , cellphone users will keep on forgetting to turn off their cellphones or to use the much forgotten "silence" mode (check your phone, you probably have it, 99% of modern cellphone have it). The phone doesn't ring anymore but it just vibrates, so that you can have both : silence and a warning that somebody is calling you.
It's not really hard to imagine what could happen if this kind of contract becomes commonly used :
a) Happy Geek registers www.iruleyourlife.com with N.S.
b) Happy Geek becomes gazillionarie and his domain name is suddendly worth U$ 1.000.000
c) N.S realizes you have violated some esotic code of conduict they just invented. Suddendly they take your domain back and ask you $500.000 for it.
d) Happy Geek is no longer so Happy.
If you think that It's ok because of competition, deregulation or other cheap economics mumbo-jumbo I suggest you to start reading comics instead of WSJ.
Just after an important Italian media mogoul has finished registering countless.it domains, the government realized it was time to make some kind of law that could restrict such abuses ; who's going to restrict N.S and other companies from doing the same ?
Ask your representative and watch out, your potential interests are being bought for bargain prices.
Even if Internet is new, that doesn't mean old scams don't work and spam mail is the most important (and relatively harmless) example of what happens when you don't watch your back.
And where there is a significant investment there is money , and of course they expect some kind of return out of the investment. And If the software is free, who's going to pay the bill in the long term ?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you that there is a lot of alarmism, fear mongering and blowing-out-of-proportions spinning on this planet. Much of it can very likely be traced back to
a)incompetent journalism
b)fraudulent journalism, financed or somehow
approved by interested parties
c)irrationality or rationatality distorted by false information
If one strips the "frankenfood" keyword of its emotional/irrational connotations, you still could find a very real potential problem with implications we still don't understand completely: is genetically modified food safe for LONG TERM consumption ? We probably -simply don't know- because IF some testing was done it was probably done on a limited population. Also, we would like to know each detail of the tests, names and surnames of the people who ate that food and for how much time. To keep it short, we need tons of information and testing BEFORE we hit the market with a new product : you know that companies limited responsability encourages them both to risk money into innovation, but also encourages them to take other risks, in the form of -cutting costs on test- or -launching a product before a rigorous testing is done.
Now one thing is to produce a car that is unsafe, you may endanger maybe one million drivers ? That's still not acceptable - NOT AT ALL- but the damage is likely to be contained. When you start producing food, you may hit many millions of people and tracking which food did what is a nightmare.
Don't be fooled by statements about religion by a politician ; he may as well believe in what he said, but if there was an atheist majority in USA he wouldn't have expressed his tought for fear of losing votes. And votes are what really make or destroy politicans.
As long as the handwriting is readable, nobody cares if it reaches calligraphy quality or if it bareley readable. The important thing is , you MUST be able to write. You could forget your PC at home, it may break down and anything else can happen but you still would be able to write if needed.
Also, each handwriting style has distinctive features that makes authentication a lot easier then authenticating a "digitally signed" document, or you could use both for additional security.
News Update : the refill another battery
Fuel Cell Powered Laptops...
What premium would you pay for a Laptop or PDA you can recharge in a snap ?
350K$ "value" is just the expense one would sustain to licence the engine, it's not like
you can sell it for that price or expect to resell it. So it's monopoly money you're winning.
While the expenses that would be involved into producing "The next Counter Strike" are well above $1 million in developers time alone.
Licence you creation to Epic Games for real money / stock / cut on balance statement profits after taxes, that's _real_ money.
The data comes from 1996-2001, still well inside the "new economy bubble" (or shall we say financial institutions driven "scam") that drived a lot of investors into totally insane multimillion projects. No wonder that the growth of the IT sector looks so good, when you look at 1996-2001 data.
Also pay attention to the "Hungary success story". U$ 729 Million increase in revenues from 1995 to 2001 and only 9000 new jobs in 6 years. Consider Hungarian average wage, exchange rate , inflation and you see that this revenue are either vaporware or...weren't left in Hungary for investment. If we pay even more attention, job may mean "job position" or "kinds of jobs". Guess that they could have specified that. Even if it's 9000 new "kinds of jobs" that means absolutely nothing, everybody today is an Executive Vice President Junior Senior Major Minor of something.
I could go on but I'd rather read a good comic that this comic (that was probably grossly overpaid too).
Some guy in the Phoenix marketing has a brilliant idea ! Let's "market" the bios so that every year the user is forced to buy a "security upgrade" and let's call it a "security feature". At worse we'll blame either pirates like some other big company does, or we'll blame hackers. I hear the master hacker is hiding in caves...
It seems obvious to me they want to extract more money out of customers by crippling the bios rather then by really improving it.
Thanks for cooperating with us. Unlikely as it may seem, your valuable contribution is no longer needed even if it really is valuable, but we don't really realize it is. Oh we also found some dude named John Doe who will work for half the money. Sorry.
The old adage "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" isn't always true, but it seems to work perfectly in this situation.
How relevant is speed in counting ? One day or one week is irrilevant, given that the old governemt/old president remains in charge until the count is done. There is no power/control void.
How relevant is counting cost ? Nearly zero. One can also reduce cost to zero by drafting people for voting-duty and pay them a symbolic token of presence. If one doesn't like that, maybe he/she could try some other system than democracy, you'll be surprised how good is once you don't have it anymore.
How relevant is potential for fraud ? Enormous, obviously. A machine can be hacked/modified in a thousand different ways to produce the desidered results.
It doesn't require a brain surgeon to draw a cross on a voting symbol on a piece of paper with a permanent marker. It requires a couple of corrupted individuals to change the result of millions of votes collected by computers, remember the credit card database theft that endangered millions of credit card owners ? Same thing.
As long as spammers are paid, they'll find new
tricks, much like pushers do with addicted people. Hit the company paying them, make a list of companies using spam as advertising method, destroy their "public image" by pointing out the truth, they're filling you email inbox with tons of useless message you'll never read anyway and wasting precious internet resources that may lead to an increase of ISP subscription costs.
Imagine being blind and being able to access (maybe in a not far away future)
the entire Gutenberg ebook library by internet. No need to read the whole book
with some kind of Braille device, no need to -own- a text-2-speech program
and, maybe, no need to own a computer if the stream is broadcasted with some other equipement.
Blind people will -love- this and I can't but be happy for them.
If you have some info you don't want to become public, you simply don't make it public. You can't trust any technology to keep your info private for more then some time. Sending the pic to your best friend is the best way to make
:) ?
it public and well known in seconds.
And if you don't want your ex to see, maybe she isn't your ex at all, otherwise why should she care about your new girlfriend
Let's suppose that in the military the little guy always reflects the ethics of the top leadership.
If that's true, it is also true that any change in the ethic of the leadership should be reflected in a change of the little guy's ethic.
So let's suppose that , for any reason, the Leader changes his/her ethics in such a way that the new ethic is the exact opposite of the old ethic (for example, a switch in ethic from kill 1 to save 100 because saving 100 is better then killing one to kill none because killing is bad).
The little guy should immediately change his code of ethic and reflect the new code of ethic. But evidence suggests that's not happening, because human beings aren't programmable robots.
For instace, if platoon leader decides it is ethical to kill all the people in a village to save a comrade, because a comrade is a comrade and must be helped at all costs , the little guy should immediately adapt to what his commander
thinks it's ethical. But the little guy code of ethic doesn't switch in a second, in reality he's obeying orders to attack, because he was trained to -immediately- obey orders , because this can save his life on the field.
Imho, no matter how hard is the social pressure or satire , cellphone users will keep on forgetting to turn off their cellphones or to use the much forgotten "silence" mode (check your phone, you probably have it, 99% of modern cellphone have it). The phone doesn't ring anymore but it just vibrates, so that you can have both : silence and a warning that somebody is calling you.
It's not really hard to imagine what could happen if this kind of contract becomes commonly used :
.it domains, the government realized it was time to make some kind of law that could restrict such abuses ; who's going to restrict N.S and other companies from doing the same ?
a) Happy Geek registers www.iruleyourlife.com with N.S.
b) Happy Geek becomes gazillionarie and his domain name is suddendly worth U$ 1.000.000
c) N.S realizes you have violated some esotic code of conduict they just invented. Suddendly they take your domain back and ask you $500.000 for it.
d) Happy Geek is no longer so Happy.
If you think that It's ok because of competition, deregulation or other cheap economics mumbo-jumbo I suggest you to start reading comics instead of WSJ.
Just after an important Italian media mogoul has finished registering countless
Ask your representative and watch out, your potential interests are being bought for bargain prices.
Even if Internet is new, that doesn't mean old scams don't work and spam mail is the most important (and relatively harmless) example of what happens when you don't watch your back.
WAKE UP GEEKS !
And where there is a significant investment there is money , and of course they expect some kind of return out of the investment. And If the software is free, who's going to pay the bill in the long term ?