Reference this post that I wrote in reply to someone else. In a free society, the burden is on you to learn how to properly defend yourself. Let's say you play the pacifist approach and hand over you wallet. Who's to say the guy isn't going to cut you anyhow? How many convenience store clerks get shot after they hand over the contents of the register? In a close quarters confrontation with an opponent wielding a weapon, you had better be prepared to act first. It takes practice, but probably not as much as you'd think.
While I agree with calling the police as soon as possible, I have absolutely no problem with inflicting severe pain on an assailant. It's pretty easy to make the guy wish to hell he hadn't tried anything in the first place, in ways that he won't soon forget, without leaving any permanent (or even identifiable) marks on his person.
Take that whole idea and reverse it. It's not about being a Rambo style super kung-fu Billy Badass type. Here are the simple facts of the matter:
* Most people who are dumb enough to pull a knife actually don't really know how to use it. Provided you are in a situation where you see the knife first and the guy hasn't actually stuck you with it yet, he's at a disadvantage.
* Even when dealing with someone who has some experience with knives, disarming a knife-wielding assailant is relatively simple, and becomes automatic with practice.
* With little additional effort, said individual can be made extremely uncomfortable without inflicting permanent damage on his person.
These are things you can learn from being in the military, asking a cop you're on a friendly basis with, or many self defense courses. I encourage you to educate yourself; I've unfortunately had to deal with a creep with a knife who also happened to be hopped up.
So if a guy walks up to you, grabs you by the collar, pulls out a knife and says "gimme your money, bitch-boy" you're *not* gonna beat the shit out of him? Damn dude, you might just be a bitch.
If that's not some funny shit, I don't know what is. Somebody please mod parent up. I'm ass-deep in that bottle of whiskey now, typing at about 20 words per minute trying hard not to make a typo. My wife has informed me that she would like some lovin', and I'm off to bed shortly. Goodnight, all, and Merry Christmas!
I'm sure you meant the specs for the Flash protocol, not the player... that's beside the point. Here's the PDF I wanted to to browse through: AMF spec. It's a good start for Adobe. More should be encouraged. In the meantime, reverse engineering is producing good work.
It's Christmas Eve. How many bored and lonely guys are posting to Slashdot?
What's worse is the fact that my wife is next door at the neighbors', I have a brand new bottle of whiskey downstairs, and I'm posting to Slashdot. Wow.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your post. If I had to make up a short list of things Peru might need to better their educational system, it might include such novelties as:
* More teachers.
* Better educated teachers.
* Better teaching facilities (nice laptop, too bad you don't have a desk).
* Improved teaching materials (textbooks from 1843 don't really cut it, although good books don't have to be this year's edition, either).
I could always be wrong, but I don't think I am. Sadly, the short list above describes what's also needed in many inner-city school systems in the United States. Ever visited a public high school in south Atlanta? They probably need as much help as some third-world nations.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that many people gifted with truly exceptional intellects are frequently so discouraged by life that they essentially withdraw from society, functioning at what might be considered a "bare minimum" for most of their lives. I guess you could say the lucky ones find themselves in the right place, at the right time, with the right opportunities to excel presented to them. Sometimes all it takes is one opportunity.
On the other hand, the world has always been this way, and always will be as long as we're human in terms of how the word is defined now. It's sad to think about what might have been lost already in our brief history, so I like to focus on the good in this world. In my opinion, any efforts geared toward bettering the education of a society are worthwhile.
"I fear living in a world where the only things a government has to worry about are citizen journalists and internal leaks."
What, online news media outlets don't count? The fact that they convey their message with bits and bytes instead of dead trees doesn't make much difference to me. Also, do you seriously believe governments don't exert huge amounts of influence over traditional media "regimes"?
Take China, for example. State-run newspapers, state-run newscasts, etc. Hell, one of the only ways free-thinking Chinese journalists have of getting the word out on "interesting" stories is via the Internet. I'd be focused on helping those folks find reliable ways of breaking through the Great Firewall of China if I were you. It's technologies like that, and social network interfaces that allow groups of journalists to rapidly form their own publishing groups that will shape how news is delivered in the near future.
I fear living in a world where all public communications networks are state controlled, and encryption technologies that circumvent federal measures for intercepting comms are outlawed.
Quoth the headline: "Peru made the single biggest order to date -- more than 272,000 machines -- in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed."
I suspect there may be other issues at play here aside from lack of computing resources. Many nations have fewer technological resources than the USA, for example, but somehow manage to maintain reasonably well educated populaces.
Most of the useful stuff I've seen Flash used for has been related to intranet applications, not stuff that's meant for "public consumption." A huge amount of programming is used behind the scenes for business applications... it's just that customer-side applications get the most attention.
I don't think you're familiar with the way things work when it comes to technological advances. With each new advance comes a whole new barrel of ways to use the newly available computing power. Many times, people don't even know they want something until it becomes possible.
I wager advances in computing and communications technology will start to slow when virtually everything on this planet is a computing device of some sort, massively interconnected with everyone and everything else in a sort of global mesh. Whether this gives you warm fuzzies or nightmares from a social sciences perspective is largely irrelevant, as it's already starting to happen. Reference "computronium" for additional ideas on this topic (credit to Charles Stross).
I don't generally agree with the idea that advanced civilizations would travel across the galaxy in the first place, at least not in any recognizable biological form. That said, our society may very well reach a point where discrete beings are encapsulated in pure information, as opposed to being represented by self-aware sacks of bio-soup.
This mode of existence makes it much easier to travel long distances, as it drastically reduces the requirements for "life support" as it were. Charles Stross explores this idea in his book Accelerando, which is written in a Gibsonesque style in my opinion. If only for fun, give it a read.
It's all about the lobsters and their slow takeoff. Oh, by the way... why do you insist on attaching human failings to hypothetical alien intelligences? Dude, the Matrix has you.
With all the push by the various arms of media industry to keep finding ways to continue to generate revenue from their products, I'm sure they'll be pushing the envelope with long-term storage solutions. Large capacity storage used to be considered anything greater than 1 GB with technology that was available "way back when" (not that long ago, really). Nowadays, that's a ridiculously small amount of storage that I can (and do) carry around in my shirt pocket.
Computing power used to be awfully expensive, too. Now we've got desktops that are capable of scientific computing sitting around at 99% idle all day. If it weren't for Vista, we wouldn't even be using a tenth of the memory built into them (sorry, had to stick a dig in there somewhere).
My point is that as the market demands new capabilities, technologies emerge that satisfy those needs. As time goes on, the efficiency of these technologies increases while costs decrease. It's just how things work. Today's data retention problems for studios will contribute to tomorrow's advances in long-term storage technology.
I can think of at least a couple of major companies that also have a vested interest in long term archival... Google... cough... Google...
As have I:). The sad part is the fact that I knew a couple of people personally who had such sites designed for them, and I know how much they paid for that garbage... $$$
I'd like to see specific, documented evidence of Gnash causing Firefox to crash on a page that doesn't contain Flash content. You can provide that, right?
Flash done right can be extremely useful, as a tool for adding a dynamic interface to a site. Unfortunately, Flash is (in my opinion) usually done horribly wrong, and implemented in a manner that doesn't give site visitors any alternate means of using the site. I've seen good implementations where Flash was used only for a particular application, and the rest of the site was done in standard-compliant HTML/CSS. I've also seen really scary work on countless occasions where the entire site was one big Flash presentation. Ugly stuff.
Quoth the headline: "that's the price to pay for depending on proprietary solutions..."
There are open source implementations of the Flash protocol; I'm running Gnash as my SWF player on Ubuntu 64, and it works just fine. Your mileage may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
Reference this post that I wrote in reply to someone else. In a free society, the burden is on you to learn how to properly defend yourself. Let's say you play the pacifist approach and hand over you wallet. Who's to say the guy isn't going to cut you anyhow? How many convenience store clerks get shot after they hand over the contents of the register? In a close quarters confrontation with an opponent wielding a weapon, you had better be prepared to act first. It takes practice, but probably not as much as you'd think.
While I agree with calling the police as soon as possible, I have absolutely no problem with inflicting severe pain on an assailant. It's pretty easy to make the guy wish to hell he hadn't tried anything in the first place, in ways that he won't soon forget, without leaving any permanent (or even identifiable) marks on his person.
Take that whole idea and reverse it. It's not about being a Rambo style super kung-fu Billy Badass type. Here are the simple facts of the matter:
* Most people who are dumb enough to pull a knife actually don't really know how to use it. Provided you are in a situation where you see the knife first and the guy hasn't actually stuck you with it yet, he's at a disadvantage.
* Even when dealing with someone who has some experience with knives, disarming a knife-wielding assailant is relatively simple, and becomes automatic with practice.
* With little additional effort, said individual can be made extremely uncomfortable without inflicting permanent damage on his person.
These are things you can learn from being in the military, asking a cop you're on a friendly basis with, or many self defense courses. I encourage you to educate yourself; I've unfortunately had to deal with a creep with a knife who also happened to be hopped up.
So if a guy walks up to you, grabs you by the collar, pulls out a knife and says "gimme your money, bitch-boy" you're *not* gonna beat the shit out of him? Damn dude, you might just be a bitch.
If that's not some funny shit, I don't know what is. Somebody please mod parent up. I'm ass-deep in that bottle of whiskey now, typing at about 20 words per minute trying hard not to make a typo. My wife has informed me that she would like some lovin', and I'm off to bed shortly. Goodnight, all, and Merry Christmas!
I'll get right on that.
I'm sure you meant the specs for the Flash protocol, not the player... that's beside the point. Here's the PDF I wanted to to browse through: AMF spec. It's a good start for Adobe. More should be encouraged. In the meantime, reverse engineering is producing good work.
It's Christmas Eve. How many bored and lonely guys are posting to Slashdot?
What's worse is the fact that my wife is next door at the neighbors', I have a brand new bottle of whiskey downstairs, and I'm posting to Slashdot. Wow.
Read this.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your post. If I had to make up a short list of things Peru might need to better their educational system, it might include such novelties as:
* More teachers.
* Better educated teachers.
* Better teaching facilities (nice laptop, too bad you don't have a desk).
* Improved teaching materials (textbooks from 1843 don't really cut it, although good books don't have to be this year's edition, either).
I could always be wrong, but I don't think I am. Sadly, the short list above describes what's also needed in many inner-city school systems in the United States. Ever visited a public high school in south Atlanta? They probably need as much help as some third-world nations.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that many people gifted with truly exceptional intellects are frequently so discouraged by life that they essentially withdraw from society, functioning at what might be considered a "bare minimum" for most of their lives. I guess you could say the lucky ones find themselves in the right place, at the right time, with the right opportunities to excel presented to them. Sometimes all it takes is one opportunity.
On the other hand, the world has always been this way, and always will be as long as we're human in terms of how the word is defined now. It's sad to think about what might have been lost already in our brief history, so I like to focus on the good in this world. In my opinion, any efforts geared toward bettering the education of a society are worthwhile.
"I fear living in a world where the only things a government has to worry about are citizen journalists and internal leaks."
What, online news media outlets don't count? The fact that they convey their message with bits and bytes instead of dead trees doesn't make much difference to me. Also, do you seriously believe governments don't exert huge amounts of influence over traditional media "regimes"?
Take China, for example. State-run newspapers, state-run newscasts, etc. Hell, one of the only ways free-thinking Chinese journalists have of getting the word out on "interesting" stories is via the Internet. I'd be focused on helping those folks find reliable ways of breaking through the Great Firewall of China if I were you. It's technologies like that, and social network interfaces that allow groups of journalists to rapidly form their own publishing groups that will shape how news is delivered in the near future.
I fear living in a world where all public communications networks are state controlled, and encryption technologies that circumvent federal measures for intercepting comms are outlawed.
Quoth the headline: "Peru made the single biggest order to date -- more than 272,000 machines -- in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed."
I suspect there may be other issues at play here aside from lack of computing resources. Many nations have fewer technological resources than the USA, for example, but somehow manage to maintain reasonably well educated populaces.
Most of the useful stuff I've seen Flash used for has been related to intranet applications, not stuff that's meant for "public consumption." A huge amount of programming is used behind the scenes for business applications... it's just that customer-side applications get the most attention.
Think in extra dimensions.
I don't think you're familiar with the way things work when it comes to technological advances. With each new advance comes a whole new barrel of ways to use the newly available computing power. Many times, people don't even know they want something until it becomes possible.
I wager advances in computing and communications technology will start to slow when virtually everything on this planet is a computing device of some sort, massively interconnected with everyone and everything else in a sort of global mesh. Whether this gives you warm fuzzies or nightmares from a social sciences perspective is largely irrelevant, as it's already starting to happen. Reference "computronium" for additional ideas on this topic (credit to Charles Stross).
I don't generally agree with the idea that advanced civilizations would travel across the galaxy in the first place, at least not in any recognizable biological form. That said, our society may very well reach a point where discrete beings are encapsulated in pure information, as opposed to being represented by self-aware sacks of bio-soup.
This mode of existence makes it much easier to travel long distances, as it drastically reduces the requirements for "life support" as it were. Charles Stross explores this idea in his book Accelerando, which is written in a Gibsonesque style in my opinion. If only for fun, give it a read.
It's all about the lobsters and their slow takeoff. Oh, by the way... why do you insist on attaching human failings to hypothetical alien intelligences? Dude, the Matrix has you.
With all the push by the various arms of media industry to keep finding ways to continue to generate revenue from their products, I'm sure they'll be pushing the envelope with long-term storage solutions. Large capacity storage used to be considered anything greater than 1 GB with technology that was available "way back when" (not that long ago, really). Nowadays, that's a ridiculously small amount of storage that I can (and do) carry around in my shirt pocket.
Computing power used to be awfully expensive, too. Now we've got desktops that are capable of scientific computing sitting around at 99% idle all day. If it weren't for Vista, we wouldn't even be using a tenth of the memory built into them (sorry, had to stick a dig in there somewhere).
My point is that as the market demands new capabilities, technologies emerge that satisfy those needs. As time goes on, the efficiency of these technologies increases while costs decrease. It's just how things work. Today's data retention problems for studios will contribute to tomorrow's advances in long-term storage technology.
I can think of at least a couple of major companies that also have a vested interest in long term archival... Google... cough... Google...
Quoth the headline: " ACMA to send 'take down' notices to offending sites . . . "
You send any of my sites a take-down notice and I'll send you a nice photo of my middle finger.
Sounds like a strong case for private registrations and offshores hosting.
As have I :). The sad part is the fact that I knew a couple of people personally who had such sites designed for them, and I know how much they paid for that garbage... $$$
I'd like to see specific, documented evidence of Gnash causing Firefox to crash on a page that doesn't contain Flash content. You can provide that, right?
The parent post actually stated what I really wanted to say, instead of my polite reply post below. Someone please mod it up, if only as funny :).
Flash done right can be extremely useful, as a tool for adding a dynamic interface to a site. Unfortunately, Flash is (in my opinion) usually done horribly wrong, and implemented in a manner that doesn't give site visitors any alternate means of using the site. I've seen good implementations where Flash was used only for a particular application, and the rest of the site was done in standard-compliant HTML/CSS. I've also seen really scary work on countless occasions where the entire site was one big Flash presentation. Ugly stuff.
Oh, and by the way, those who wish to create Flash content may want to have a look at this site.
Quoth the headline: "that's the price to pay for depending on proprietary solutions..."
There are open source implementations of the Flash protocol; I'm running Gnash as my SWF player on Ubuntu 64, and it works just fine. Your mileage may vary.
Apple: Think Lawsuit