"By recognizing the problem and finding a solution. Street cars, subways and eventually motor vehicles."
First of all, if you think about it, horse crap could not have gotten that bad. There were far more people than horses when this article was written and they weren't worried about people crap. Somehow they could deal with that, but horses? If they had a problem it was a problem with perception. Dealing with horse manure was actually a trivial problem. And they did it. There was never instances of horse manure piling up; they had, at worst, an economic problem of how to pay for removal.
More importantly, the automobile, subways and street cars were not invented as a reaction to a horse problem. They were invented because it's in the nature of mankind to invent things and they become popular if they solve a want or need. Horses aren't a preferred means of transportation; they were used because they were the best we had. People wanted to go faster, in better comfort, without regard to weather, not worry about feeding or caring for animals, and sure, didn't want to deal with crap.
">I didn't realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace these days
How clueless can you be? This guy almost makes me feel good about the other news of the day (Microsoft to laying off 5,000)." ----
This jumped out at me as well. I suspect he was being both sarcastic and a little clueless. That was one of the last questions that was asked, many of them questioning the business model, pricing, DRM. This guy was looking for the "gee, what an exciting service!" kind of non-question. I suspect he was fed up with the questioner by this point.
I'm assuming he must understand the churn rate for phone, right? It's probably more than a year, less than two. But I can't imagine he would expect people to pay about $3.50 (1.79 pounds) for songs to throw away; at least he couldn't expect people to buy many songs at this price.
Perhaps he's counting on the phones being so locked down that you must buy the songs from MS?
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank is a far better book and better researched.
The book you mention is interesting, but the author in that book appears to have an agenda that the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary; I would submit that the Americans insisting on unconditional surrender is the key factor in both Germany and Japan's peaceful re-emergence as a major economic power rather than a military power.
Mostly I reject the thesis that the use of an atomic bomb in WW2 was ex facie immoral. Remember, this was the war that produced genocide against Jews, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Chinese and other peoples on the basis of ethnicity. The firebombing of Tokyo produced more causalities than the atomic bomb, so I think the historical context supports the idea that the Americans did not break any legal or moral taboos of the time (such as the ban on chemical warfare).
Remember, the atomic bomb was developed for use against the Nazi's; they had the good (or bad depending on your viewpoint) luck of surrendering to the Allies first, rendering the use of the A-bomb unnecessary.
I think the discussion at this point is just that. No one really understands why the war ended how or when it did; in my opinion, the use of these weapons was warranted and in retrospect left Japan infinitely better off 20 years after the war was over.
TV. It seems to work everywhere. I'm guessing it will be broadcast live in several countries, and even when it's not, the evening news will have the summary.
And of course, YouTube will have the speech later today.
I don't think waiting a few hours presents any sort of hardship.
" She doesn't know that she doesn't need to install any "Verizon High Speed Internet CD" in order for her Verizon DSL to function
She doesn't know that OpenOffice.org can handle her needs for "Microsoft Word" just fine"
I'm mainly surprised she didn't call Verizon to find out how she could set up her internet connection with her computer. She just sat there and said "oh dear it failed"? I'm surprised she didn't call up the university to say "oh dear, I have openoffice, will that be okay?". I have a funny feeling 10 minutes of calls (well, to be fair, Verizon's tech support line would be a 30 minute wait) would have solved her problems.
But people do funny things all the time in real life, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
I think we'll see more tools to support.mkv once it reaches critical mass. A few months ago I hadn't heard of mkv, and now it doesn't seem so esoteric. Perhaps in another year, you'll see more/better support in standard tools.
I could see Apple, Microsoft, or even Adobe challenging mkv by updating their proprietary standards, but to do it, they may have to swallow some corporate pride and agree to support a format they don't control. Nobody makes money from MKV, so it's never going to have the backing of AVI, MOV, or even MP3, so if it succeeds it will be on the merits.
...is because it shows up on their balance sheets. Investors like it because instead of R&D being a cost to a company, it now becomes a profit center because R&D creates "IP", much like a shovel and pick create/discover "minerals" that can be sold or exploited.
Never mind that IP is nothing like actual property; they'll keep passing more laws to make an idea seem more like a thing for investment purposes.
Plus, then IP shows up in GDP, can be bought and sold, and "creates wealth". Never mind that it's the equivalent of eating your seed corn to lock away knowlege, the human condition always values being satisfied now versus building for the future.
"Rootkits? You wish. Microsoft was trying to prevent people from doing sneaky things like rip DVDs and record the audio output from programs like Windows Media Player to "rip" DRMed files."
Vista x64 does not prevent people from ripping audio streams, DVD disks or Blu-Ray disks. Almost all the tools that allow this on 32 bit windows work on 64 bit windows. Even the Slysoft people don't have a problem with 64 bit windows.
Their 64 bit version of Vista is actually the best consumer level OS they've done so far. It's the version that should become Windows 7. It's stable, fast (way faster than the 32 bit version on my machine), and its backwards compatible with almost every application that I've tried.
If they made the default install 64 bits, they'd actually be pushing forward an improvement in their consumer OS. As it is, we'll be living with Vista mk. II.
I'll bet the folks who work on the 64 bit version are scratching their heads wondering why they bother!
"and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction. "
Internet Addiction users probably also suffer from sex addiction, money addiction and food addiction.
I personally suffer from addictophobia, so let me assure everyone that internet addiction is real. So all of you stop snickering out there. In fact, if you're reading slashdot, you're probably an internet addict. Here are the symptoms:
1) Constantly have a browser window up in your computer 2) Check your email more than once a day 3) Know browser shortcut keys. You know what cntl-D does, alt (or apple) backspace does, how to quit your browser without using the mouse. 4) Understand the importance of metatags 5) Knows how to spell URL 6) Users Ad Block Plus
This is a serious addiction.
Next week, we'll be covering work addiction (a tragic state where most of your waking hours are spent at a business doing stuff that some person tells you), water addiction (heart breaking... you require water every time your mouth gets dry. You end up in a condition known as "thirsty").
Finally, we'll be covering sleep addiction. Some of those addicts are known to spend 1/3 of their day in a completely motionless catatonic state. Tears are staining my browser as I type.
I have all 3 consoles, so I have no favorite (not really). So let me point you to this post which points to a WSJ article which makes the PS3 seem irrelevant for the new generation of conole.
"No violence associated with the stomping and burning of an effigy of someone? Wow, you freepers sure are dense."
You must come from an exceptional, er, "gentle" people to think that burning CDs is an act of violence. I've heard some some students stick them in microwave. We should call PETA. Or somebody. It seems wrong.
Anyway, as I mentioned, the evidence is that free speech, even in the extremely dangerous, violent, and psychopathic method of burning CDs, appears to have no lasting impact. I mean, aside from the CDs being damaged. Jefferson was right!
"I emailed him and invited him to hear my bad things to say, but I never heard back from him. Pussy."
Well, he was probably afraid you'd run to the store, buy all his CDs and burn them. That would sure show him.
I hadn't thought about it that way. So your theory is that people sat down and worked out their differences until 9/11 which somehow tapped into a vein in the American public in a way that led them to act in a way contrary to those ideals. This culminated in a few dozen people burning CD's of the Dixie Chicks.
At the same time, the government implicitly endorsed behavior which led to an "us versus them" mentality which might've been used to trick the American people to back international behavior which was contrary to everyone's interest, save the current administration.
So can one assume that Dick Cheney himself was behind this? Or something even more unspeakably evil?
Anyway, I do have a question. Who was less rational? The people who burned the Dixie Chicks CD's, or the Dixie Chicks when they worse the F.U.T.K T-Shirts on TV (http://top40-charts.com/news.php?nid=3488&compag=11). Do you think they were aiding in rational discussion? Were they being eloquent?
Or is your entire hypothesis wrong? What I mean, isn't more likely that when people burned the CD's, it was a peaceful protest that allowed people to share their feelings with a famous person? There was no violence associated with it, it allowed people to say how they really felt, and after the passion of the moment died down, people are back to the way they always were? Isn't it extremely unlikely that the government had anything to do with encouraging anybody to say or do anything? And contrary to what you're trying to show, doesn't this prove that free speech is actually best because it allowed both sides to express their feelings, get them out in the open and let issue pass?
I ask that because the evidence would appear to be against you both in terms of the cause and effect of the Dixie Chick episode.
"Six years ago a radio station had children stomping on and setting fire to Dixie Chicks albums because they were ashamed of the president"
I think private citizens organized that. Generally, that's considered "freedom of speech".
You'd have a point if the government organized it, but I've not heard of that sort of thing happening. Perhaps what you're saying is that this radio station had people doing and saying things that you didn't agree with?
"and said the worst case scenario was 3 months work: apparently they underestimated the BD+ developers"
Okay, so they said worst case scenario was 3 months work [presumably in case BD+ was changed in some way]. And the developer said February 2009 was their date for "fixing" things. Let me do the math slowly:
December 2008 - 0.5 month (half-way through) January 2009 - 1.0 month February 2009 - 1.0 month TOTAL - 2.5 months
So since 2.5 months is less than 3 months, how did they "underestimate" anything?
"lawyers, doctors, talent agents, sitcom writers, fighter pilots, traders, salespeople etc, fill out status reports?"
Yes, actually they do. Lawyers need to document what they do to bill their clients. Doctors need to write down everything they do for patient treatments and for insurance companies. You don't think a military fighter pilot has to fill out paperwork on what they do in flight? You think the military lets just lets guys buzz around in the sky with no explanation? Salespeople have to fill out sales reports. Those are all status reports.
Everybody fills out some sort of paperwork for what they do. It varies, but it inevitably is something that tell their boss (customer, person they report to, some company they do business with) what they did to deserve to be paid. If your boss isn't asking your for a status report, you should do one anyway and send it to him as a reminder of the value you add every day to your company.
I wasn't assuming copyright violations. What I was pointing out was that there are a wide variety of applications available for purchase on the Internet (much like the iTMS) and that the availability of legal, free software doesn't preclude a developer from making a $5,000 application and being successful with it.
Many years ago, back when we still used punch cards, in our early CompSci classes, we were asked to do small programs as assignments. Typical stuff. If the program did what was asked, it was roughly the same, either a "B" or a "C". Well, we fancied ourselves pretty good programmers, and wondered who was getting the "A"'s, and it was a couple kids who would print out asterisks around their answer. It was stupid. And it turned out that it was TA's grading the papers, so some lousy sophomore who valued a row of stars around the answer more than elegant algorithm was hurting our GPA.
We complained to the professor, but he refused to do anything about it, so we started printing *FTSATO* around the output
as such:
*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*
THE ANSWER IS 3.1416 (Note this looked way cooler, but the lameness filter is preventing me from showing it)
*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*
And the TA was so impressed she started giving us A's.
After our final grade was done, the professor pulled me aside and asked me "Why did you put FTSATO around your output all the time?" And I said, "because you made us do something ridiculous, I decided to reply in kind. It means "F*ck the stars around the output"
FORTUNATELY, he had already entered my final grade. And they decided that putting stars around the output was okay, but there was no extra credit for it.
Slashdot Mirror
"So the population problem is taking care of itself too."
That is absolutely true. Overpopulation *always* takes care of itself.
"By recognizing the problem and finding a solution. Street cars, subways and eventually motor vehicles."
First of all, if you think about it, horse crap could not have gotten that bad. There were far more people than horses when this article was written and they weren't worried about people crap. Somehow they could deal with that, but horses? If they had a problem it was a problem with perception. Dealing with horse manure was actually a trivial problem. And they did it. There was never instances of horse manure piling up; they had, at worst, an economic problem of how to pay for removal.
More importantly, the automobile, subways and street cars were not invented as a reaction to a horse problem. They were invented because it's in the nature of mankind to invent things and they become popular if they solve a want or need. Horses aren't a preferred means of transportation; they were used because they were the best we had. People wanted to go faster, in better comfort, without regard to weather, not worry about feeding or caring for animals, and sure, didn't want to deal with crap.
"Perhaps because the theory of evolution has had a profound impact on Western thought"
Whereas Eastern thought says "yeah, we knew that all along"???
">I didn't realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace these days
How clueless can you be? This guy almost makes me feel good about the other news of the day (Microsoft to laying off 5,000)."
----
This jumped out at me as well. I suspect he was being both sarcastic and a little clueless. That was one of the last questions that was asked, many of them questioning the business model, pricing, DRM. This guy was looking for the "gee, what an exciting service!" kind of non-question. I suspect he was fed up with the questioner by this point.
I'm assuming he must understand the churn rate for phone, right? It's probably more than a year, less than two. But I can't imagine he would expect people to pay about $3.50 (1.79 pounds) for songs to throw away; at least he couldn't expect people to buy many songs at this price.
Perhaps he's counting on the phones being so locked down that you must buy the songs from MS?
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank is a far better book and better researched.
The book you mention is interesting, but the author in that book appears to have an agenda that the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary; I would submit that the Americans insisting on unconditional surrender is the key factor in both Germany and Japan's peaceful re-emergence as a major economic power rather than a military power.
Mostly I reject the thesis that the use of an atomic bomb in WW2 was ex facie immoral. Remember, this was the war that produced genocide against Jews, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Chinese and other peoples on the basis of ethnicity. The firebombing of Tokyo produced more causalities than the atomic bomb, so I think the historical context supports the idea that the Americans did not break any legal or moral taboos of the time (such as the ban on chemical warfare).
Remember, the atomic bomb was developed for use against the Nazi's; they had the good (or bad depending on your viewpoint) luck of surrendering to the Allies first, rendering the use of the A-bomb unnecessary.
I think the discussion at this point is just that. No one really understands why the war ended how or when it did; in my opinion, the use of these weapons was warranted and in retrospect left Japan infinitely better off 20 years after the war was over.
TV. It seems to work everywhere. I'm guessing it will be broadcast live in several countries, and even when it's not, the evening news will have the summary.
And of course, YouTube will have the speech later today.
I don't think waiting a few hours presents any sort of hardship.
"but espn.com is basically a IE only site."
I've been using firefox on espn.com for many years and I'm a subscriber. What's so IE about it/what doesn't work in FF? Even ESPN360 works in Firefox.
" She doesn't know that she doesn't need to install any "Verizon High Speed Internet CD" in order for her Verizon DSL to function
She doesn't know that OpenOffice.org can handle her needs for "Microsoft Word" just fine"
I'm mainly surprised she didn't call Verizon to find out how she could set up her internet connection with her computer. She just sat there and said "oh dear it failed"? I'm surprised she didn't call up the university to say "oh dear, I have openoffice, will that be okay?". I have a funny feeling 10 minutes of calls (well, to be fair, Verizon's tech support line would be a 30 minute wait) would have solved her problems.
But people do funny things all the time in real life, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
If they can make UAV's cheaper than the missles to shoot them down, then it changes air warfare completely.
I think we'll see more tools to support .mkv once it reaches critical mass. A few months ago I hadn't heard of mkv, and now it doesn't seem so esoteric. Perhaps in another year, you'll see more/better support in standard tools.
I could see Apple, Microsoft, or even Adobe challenging mkv by updating their proprietary standards, but to do it, they may have to swallow some corporate pride and agree to support a format they don't control. Nobody makes money from MKV, so it's never going to have the backing of AVI, MOV, or even MP3, so if it succeeds it will be on the merits.
You're only saying that because your spine needs to be aligned.
... by inventing new characters.
Seems to me that it doesn't advance the sciences or arts by relying on copyrights that have been around longer than anybody who works at King.
...is because it shows up on their balance sheets. Investors like it because instead of R&D being a cost to a company, it now becomes a profit center because R&D creates "IP", much like a shovel and pick create/discover "minerals" that can be sold or exploited.
Never mind that IP is nothing like actual property; they'll keep passing more laws to make an idea seem more like a thing for investment purposes.
Plus, then IP shows up in GDP, can be bought and sold, and "creates wealth". Never mind that it's the equivalent of eating your seed corn to lock away knowlege, the human condition always values being satisfied now versus building for the future.
"Rootkits? You wish. Microsoft was trying to prevent people from doing sneaky things like rip DVDs and record the audio output from programs like Windows Media Player to "rip" DRMed files."
Vista x64 does not prevent people from ripping audio streams, DVD disks or Blu-Ray disks. Almost all the tools that allow this on 32 bit windows work on 64 bit windows. Even the Slysoft people don't have a problem with 64 bit windows.
Their 64 bit version of Vista is actually the best consumer level OS they've done so far. It's the version that should become Windows 7. It's stable, fast (way faster than the 32 bit version on my machine), and its backwards compatible with almost every application that I've tried.
If they made the default install 64 bits, they'd actually be pushing forward an improvement in their consumer OS. As it is, we'll be living with Vista mk. II.
I'll bet the folks who work on the 64 bit version are scratching their heads wondering why they bother!
"and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction. "
Internet Addiction users probably also suffer from sex addiction, money addiction and food addiction.
I personally suffer from addictophobia, so let me assure everyone that internet addiction is real. So all of you stop snickering out there. In fact, if you're reading slashdot, you're probably an internet addict. Here are the symptoms:
1) Constantly have a browser window up in your computer
2) Check your email more than once a day
3) Know browser shortcut keys. You know what cntl-D does, alt (or apple) backspace does, how to quit your browser without using the mouse.
4) Understand the importance of metatags
5) Knows how to spell URL
6) Users Ad Block Plus
This is a serious addiction.
Next week, we'll be covering work addiction (a tragic state where most of your waking hours are spent at a business doing stuff that some person tells you), water addiction (heart breaking... you require water every time your mouth gets dry. You end up in a condition known as "thirsty").
Finally, we'll be covering sleep addiction. Some of those addicts are known to spend 1/3 of their day in a completely motionless catatonic state. Tears are staining my browser as I type.
I have all 3 consoles, so I have no favorite (not really). So let me point you to this post which points to a WSJ article which makes the PS3 seem irrelevant for the new generation of conole.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1077325&cid=26281577
Why would you answer the question?
"No violence associated with the stomping and burning of an effigy of someone? Wow, you freepers sure are dense."
You must come from an exceptional, er, "gentle" people to think that burning CDs is an act of violence. I've heard some some students stick them in microwave. We should call PETA. Or somebody. It seems wrong.
Anyway, as I mentioned, the evidence is that free speech, even in the extremely dangerous, violent, and psychopathic method of burning CDs, appears to have no lasting impact. I mean, aside from the CDs being damaged. Jefferson was right!
"I emailed him and invited him to hear my bad things to say, but I never heard back from him. Pussy."
Well, he was probably afraid you'd run to the store, buy all his CDs and burn them. That would sure show him.
I hadn't thought about it that way. So your theory is that people sat down and worked out their differences until 9/11 which somehow tapped into a vein in the American public in a way that led them to act in a way contrary to those ideals. This culminated in a few dozen people burning CD's of the Dixie Chicks.
At the same time, the government implicitly endorsed behavior which led to an "us versus them" mentality which might've been used to trick the American people to back international behavior which was contrary to everyone's interest, save the current administration.
So can one assume that Dick Cheney himself was behind this? Or something even more unspeakably evil?
Anyway, I do have a question. Who was less rational? The people who burned the Dixie Chicks CD's, or the Dixie Chicks when they worse the F.U.T.K T-Shirts on TV (http://top40-charts.com/news.php?nid=3488&compag=11). Do you think they were aiding in rational discussion? Were they being eloquent?
Or is your entire hypothesis wrong? What I mean, isn't more likely that when people burned the CD's, it was a peaceful protest that allowed people to share their feelings with a famous person? There was no violence associated with it, it allowed people to say how they really felt, and after the passion of the moment died down, people are back to the way they always were? Isn't it extremely unlikely that the government had anything to do with encouraging anybody to say or do anything? And contrary to what you're trying to show, doesn't this prove that free speech is actually best because it allowed both sides to express their feelings, get them out in the open and let issue pass?
I ask that because the evidence would appear to be against you both in terms of the cause and effect of the Dixie Chick episode.
"Six years ago a radio station had children stomping on and setting fire to Dixie Chicks albums because they were ashamed of the president"
I think private citizens organized that. Generally, that's considered "freedom of speech".
You'd have a point if the government organized it, but I've not heard of that sort of thing happening. Perhaps what you're saying is that this radio station had people doing and saying things that you didn't agree with?
"and said the worst case scenario was 3 months work: apparently they underestimated the BD+ developers"
Okay, so they said worst case scenario was 3 months work [presumably in case BD+ was changed in some way]. And the developer said February 2009 was their date for "fixing" things. Let me do the math slowly:
December 2008 - 0.5 month (half-way through)
January 2009 - 1.0 month
February 2009 - 1.0 month
TOTAL - 2.5 months
So since 2.5 months is less than 3 months, how did they "underestimate" anything?
"lawyers, doctors, talent agents, sitcom writers, fighter pilots, traders, salespeople etc, fill out status reports?"
Yes, actually they do. Lawyers need to document what they do to bill their clients. Doctors need to write down everything they do for patient treatments and for insurance companies. You don't think a military fighter pilot has to fill out paperwork on what they do in flight? You think the military lets just lets guys buzz around in the sky with no explanation? Salespeople have to fill out sales reports. Those are all status reports.
Everybody fills out some sort of paperwork for what they do. It varies, but it inevitably is something that tell their boss (customer, person they report to, some company they do business with) what they did to deserve to be paid. If your boss isn't asking your for a status report, you should do one anyway and send it to him as a reminder of the value you add every day to your company.
I wasn't assuming copyright violations. What I was pointing out was that there are a wide variety of applications available for purchase on the Internet (much like the iTMS) and that the availability of legal, free software doesn't preclude a developer from making a $5,000 application and being successful with it.
Many years ago, back when we still used punch cards, in our early CompSci classes, we were asked to do small programs as assignments. Typical stuff. If the program did what was asked, it was roughly the same, either a "B" or a "C". Well, we fancied ourselves pretty good programmers, and wondered who was getting the "A"'s, and it was a couple kids who would print out asterisks around their answer. It was stupid. And it turned out that it was TA's grading the papers, so some lousy sophomore who valued a row of stars around the answer more than elegant algorithm was hurting our GPA.
We complained to the professor, but he refused to do anything about it, so we started printing *FTSATO* around the output
as such:
*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*
THE ANSWER IS 3.1416 (Note this looked way cooler, but the lameness filter is preventing me from showing it)
*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*FTSATO*
And the TA was so impressed she started giving us A's.
After our final grade was done, the professor pulled me aside and asked me "Why did you put FTSATO around your output all the time?"
And I said, "because you made us do something ridiculous, I decided to reply in kind. It means "F*ck the stars around the output"
FORTUNATELY, he had already entered my final grade. And they decided that putting stars around the output was okay, but there was no extra credit for it.