No, that's grounds to debunk the illusion people have that owning a weapon makes them safe.
Look. In other countries with similar population densities (e.g. Japan, the UK) you have no firearms, and still civil liberties on par with the US in almost many respects. At the same time you have a single digit number of hand gun deaths a year.
In the US, you have well over 10,000 deaths by handgun and about 10x that many assults, meaning somoene was only shot at or wounded. I refuse to believe that this level of destruction of human life is "the price of liberty".
And it's not that we're that much more or less violent than other cultures, it's simpy that it's really easy for people to get lethal weapons in this country. The barrier for purchase is so low, it's almost assumed that you need a gun: "you gotta have steel just to feel relaxation."
That's no way to live, people. They have just as many bar fights and street gangs in the UK as we do here. The only salient difference is that they battle with fists, bats, clubs and knives. The result is a far greater preservation of human life.
Nice quote list. Note that all those people have been dead for about 150 years at least.
In the context of an agrarian revolution, this makes a lot of sense. In the context of a modern urbanized society, it does not. Simply banning guns, of course, is not an answer to the problem: you have to look at how to get rid of the guns that are out there, then disarming many of the police, etc etc etc.
It's a long process with an idealistic goal, but doesn't it make sense to live peacefully?
The entire point is to put weapons that can easily kill people (e.g. soldiers in service to an evil government) in the hands of an informal militia made up of common citizens.
Yes but don't you think we've gone a little beyond that? The hard truth is that the progressin millitary technology over the past 220 years has made this sort of idea a thing of the past. You need look no further than the conflict between the Isrial and Palestine to see this: Isrial, which has a millitary on par with our own, is only held back from crushing the palestinian resistance by wanting to seem less murderous. They could just kill 'em all if they really wanted to.
Small arms alone cannot stand up to tanks and close air support except in the most hairy of gurilla conflicts. Even then the resiliance of the resistance is dependent on using civilians as cover.
Beyond that, to say we should legally be allowed to own hunting rifles so that one day we might wage an effective gurilla war against our own government... I think that's a little on the batty side. If it ever came to that, you'd need a lot more than the legal right to buy a glock to stand a chance.
Murdering someone is already a crime, why do we need laws to ban assault rifles?
Because they have no other legitimate use. Contrast this with knives and piano strings, which also can be used to kill, but also have plenty of non-murderous applications.
This is precisely what makes the NRA's arguments so rediculous: they seriously state that one needs a 50-round semi-automatic.75 mm bore weapon to hunt deer with. If hunting and shooting are to be condidered a legitimate sport (a dubious notion), then we aught to make like the british and make you leave your guns at the hunting lodge and shooting range.
This would take a lot of the stuffing out of the 2nd-amendment lobby, unless you really buy that "home defense" stuff. Poopycock! I mean, it's been shown that a gun in your home is more likely to kill you or a family member than an intruder. Moreover, if people really do legitimately need guns in this day and age, there's something much more fundimentally wrong with the society we're living in. Something, I might add, that is best solved with other tools than guns.
But with digital content and the Internet, a home computer user can share a perfect copy of any content with potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort.
I think this came out in a lower post. The law CAN be effective in cracking down on the mass distribution of pirate digital material. Napster is dead. The fact that there are other services more or less emulating napster (e.g. gnutell, kazaa) simply refelcts that the industry concerns havn't been litigating strenuously enough. If they wanted to, they could shut down both of these services. Admittedly freenet would be a little more difficult, but the ease of use theshold there is high enough that it probably won't ever get enough of a following to really hurt profits.
And now I'm going to get ranty...
Beyond that: the far more salient point is that there's no credible research suggesting that people are purchasing less music, books, or movies as a result of digitalization! Surprise surprise, people will still pay for reliable access to quality content. If you want to have a nice evening with friends, do you hit up bloackbuster for a DVD, or spend 8 hours trying to download some crappy divix rip of the same movie?
Likewise, if there were a service that allowed me to pay a reasonable monthly subscription and get reliable access to the music I wanted, I would be all over it. The truth is that the entertainment business has failed to innovate and has dropped the ball when it comes to responding to changing consumer desires. Now they're looking to the government to bail them out. What will be the public cost of creating these security measures let alone enforcing them? This is not something I want my tax dollars being spent on!
Actually, to back out of rant-mode, that's another good point: who pays for the development and enforement mandated by this legislation. Forget for a second that whatever they come up with will probably be emminantly crackable, how much will it cost taxpayers? How much will it cost business to implement? Has anyone done any numbers on this? What are the penalties looking like? What would the added overhead to the criminal justice system be?
A purely fiscal argument might be a strong one to make.
Because in a bustling restaurant or bar, the staff has to make rounds and get close to all the tables (which can be a slow process) to see who needs what. This product would give them the "eye in the sky" so to speak.
Come on. You look at a table. Glass is either full or empty. Or, if you are smart, you sold them a pitcher. That was probably the last technological update that any beer pouring establishment needed.
Obviously you've never been in a high-end restaurant in the midst of a dinner rush (or a popular bar at the peak of partytime, like 2 or 3am). It can be murder to get the pretty lady who brings the magic jump juice to come around. If they can make a cocktail and wineglass version (and I don't see why not) they might just have something to contribute to the future of the service industry.
Most establishments in NYC (my base of experience) already run their ordering off a touch-screen system, eliminating errors, waste and such. The next logical step is a bluetooth-enabled waiter PDA that maps the floor, the tables, and shows the frazzles server whos glasses are empty at a strategic level. She/he can then plan her/his serving game plan.
Trust me, keeping track of 5 or more tables eatch with large parties and seperate orders spread out over a large floor plan is a headache even for a seasoned server. Sure, if I'm talking about my sleepy corner bar, this is the most frivilous thing in the world, but for a hectic place like the W or Soho Grand (or some of the more classy clubs) this could be a big sell.
This is probably too late in the comment thread to get any attention, but...
I am part of a theater company that travels to colleges in the US to do a non-judgemental artistic residency on the topic of addiction. In a series of workshops and a professional theatrical productions, we present the issue from all angles, using verbatum text of interviews with real people as the source for all our dialogue.
The show is called "the Quick Fix" (pardon the website: I'm remodeling), and it primaraly seeks to examine the underlying causes of compulsive/addictive behavior. As I said before, we don't make judgements or present ourselves as having an 'answer'. We just listen to people (via interviews) and re-tell the stories, albeit with a little theatricalization thrown on top (music, dance, lighting, a bit of humor) to make it all a bit more interesting.
As an active participant in the online world, I've been trying to find an EQ or other online-activity addict to interview for some time. If anyone would like to talk to me (IM, email, irc, whatever) and maybe tell their story, contact me through my homepage (outlandishjosh.com) or at joshk(at)thequickfix.com. Your anonymitity will be respected.
get it straight, bucko. your problem is with the javascript, not the css... javascript being a non-standardized product invented with very little forethought or attention to extendability. If it hadn't been adopted so fast and so widely, we might have a good standard browser scripting language. But no. We have javascript. Poop on that.
Ok, you're obviously "with it" if you know about molecular manufacturing (nano fabs and such).
I'm curoious, what does it mean to "read like a weblog". The 'blog being a rather new literaty incantation and my experience with it being slim, I don't really know what you mean. I'd love it if you could define what would you say the properties of readling like a weblog are. In all candor, I'm seroious.
Hmm... this sounds like nervous system hacking to me. It's kind of a "man in the middle" type infiltration for recon purposes. Makes one wonder exactly how the communication that lets me type this message is getting passed around my body.
If we can decode the human nervous system, that would be a huge step. I'm not sure if it's a good one or bad one, but a step.
However, I don't know how successful we will be at integrating computers and the body. As far as I understand it, the nervous system while based on electrochemical energy circuits, is not a binary system. Each nuron has many possible states, not just on/off. These various neuron states cause different neurotransmitters to be released at synnapses (where they connect) and somehow a super-complex net of this leads to consciousness. Hopefully this research will eventually shed some light on that "somehow".
In the mean time, the most succeess will probably come from just letting the human body adapt to computerized input, like that optical sonar implant they did a while back.
Offtopic: I did some research on neurotransmitters recently. It's fascinating stuff... makes one realize that taking drugs is really just a crude (though often entertaining) way of hacking your own body/mind. But then agan, so is any activity you take designed to have some effect of yourself.
Your shitty little suburban lot in California doesn't look so good from here.
Actually, I live in Brooklyn, in a semi-shitty little apartment (I sleep in a 6x8 room). But I enjoy my life because this is where things are happening.
While I'll cop to a certain amount of envy for your big farm in indiana, I would also be bored to tears in the long haul. The are many "high tech job markets" around the world, but none of them are SV. It's a nexus, and has inherant value as such, a place where things can get moving.
Some of the employees have even decided to spend time with their children reading books printed on actual paper.
Yes yes yes! This is offtopic, but very important: the way tech is currently being implemented is highly anti-experiential. If the trend continues, we'll all be in little boxes watching video on demand, secreting bodily fluids for the purpose of reproduction when necessary to refresh the stock.
It doesn't need to be this way. Community online can become community offline. Information can activate (agit-prop) as well as pacify (television). Rock out IRL.
Actually, I did read the article. And at the time I was composing my post there were no comments at an above 0 value. While it's not surprising that my sentiments were similar to many other early posters, I didn't just read and rephrase them.
I'll be the first to admit that my reaction was less than groundbreaking. If I got mod points, it would be for more clearly and insightfully articulating my sentiments.
Yeah, Broadway and Wall Street and Silicon Valley are centers of their industries, but there's a reason the real players eventually move away from them, too.
Granted. And in the long run, "where it's at" will change and "it will be happening" somewhere else. However, disused/rural areas of the globe with little proximity to other cultural/economic/business activity are rather unlikely to ever be a hot spot.
I could take a wild guess and say that you're probably getting older or more mature or married or having kids. That's not a flame, by the way. It's a beautiful thing. But as ones changing priorities lead one more and more into a life of comfort, privacy, and (as you put it) "liviing like a king", one is less and less likely to effect massive change.
Not that effecting massive change is ever all that likely, but if you move to North Florida (beautiful country by the way) you're really taking yourself out of the game. But, again, if that's not a priority -- and why should it be compared to family and such -- I say cheers to you. Just don't expect a little known North Florida company to re-make the future of computing.
To dismiss smaller cities as enclaves of NASCAR-watching idiots forgets a fundamental truth: the people in other cities are just as idiotic but in different ways.
Point taken. I live in NYC (brooklyn) and I think most of the people can be hugely idiotic. They just have a lot more money to throw around than your typical resident of Tampa Bay. I honestly don't think it's the people who are stupid, but rather the culture. If it really came down to it, there's a lot more to like in the culture of babecue and auto-racing then there is in NYC clubland.
There's nothing like driving across Florida/Gerogia, no shirt on, back sticking to cracked vinyl upholstry, a bottle of sun tea coming to fruition on the dashboard, blasting Creedence. Livin' the dream, I tells ya.
I've always been somewhat mystified at the way AOL has been able to sell inferior services (slow service, high downtime, poor chat/email feature) to millions of users. Testiment to the power of marketing I suppose. On the other hand, that "community" stuff is a real thing...
Of course, now that they're in the business arena where a few hours of downtime means more than wating till tomorrow to send that email to grandma, and lo and behold they just can't cut it. MSN has the same problems. No credible business can put up with their downtimes and outages.
Now the executive level is beginning to understand how important these issues are. Someone could make a nice bundle of money by creating a credible business-class isp that doesn't suck (e.g. worldcom... generation d? yeah right).
why would any company try and cripple it's self with the plysical location of being in Silicon Valley?
Because location matters. It matters when you have to get people to move somewhere to work for you. It matters what the culture surrounding your business is. It matters what your employees do when their off work. Are they bing stimulated and engaged by other bright people with hip new ideas or are they at home with a miller high life watching NASCAR?
I personally have a soft spot for High Life, but in all seriousness location is a key factor if you want to have a great company. There's a lot more to making a breakthrough than the bottom line of rents and such. It's the difference between turning a profit and being "insanely great".
Most high tech companies on the cutting edge are going to fail no matter what. The Edge [c.f. William Gibson] that pushes them over the top is not the ability to cut costs on rent and equipment, it's highly talented people that are motivated to work for your company. With all due respect for both geographic regions, that's a hard sell in the Midwest and the South. If you're looking to take an already proven idea and turn some profit, the Midwest, South and Northwest are where it's at. AOL started out in Virginia for a reason.
To conlclude, there's only one Broadway, there's only one Wall Street, and there's only one Sillicon Valley. You're either there, or your not really in the game. It's one of the many things that doesn't make economic sense, (love, charity, punk rock, etc) yet it is a real phenomina.
I'm aware of this, but it does not explicitly allow for complex legal and contractual procedures to be carried out online. The e-signature law is nice, but we also need precident, precident, precident.
If you care to actually look into it, increased funding in alternative power sources is central to the Bush energy plan.
No, if you actually look at it as opposed to taking good old Ari Fleischer's word for it, you'll see that while it does provide for a modest boost in funding for fuel cell research, it scraps regulations encouraging auto manufacturers to increase fuel efficiency, aims to slash and burn EPA regulations on power plant emissions, and includes a whole dump-truck full of money for re-opening closed coal-burning power plants that are still under a grandfather clause (e.g. no emmissions restrictions) in the southeast.
I'm curious why so many posters seem to think this is a Really Bad Thing, or a Really Stupid Thing. Are we all just eager to stay one step ahead of the law?
I for one think this is a Very Good Thing.
1) It's a big step toward legitimizing legal transactions online.This is something that needs to occur for the internet revolution to relaly take hold. The ability for people to make binding agreements virtually would usher in the next generation of e-business. Got an e-summons? Get an e-lawyer! If you can legally serve someone with an email, how long before you can represent someone online?
2) Of course, there are a lot of security issues to work though, but that's good to. Why? Jobs for geeks.
3) They're going to be able to serve a process against this scam artist. That's always nice.
Truth is, if you're actually being served a process, either someone bad is after you or you've done something wrong, like skip out on child support. Making virtual process serving possible doesn't make it easier to file lawsuits, it just makes it easier to let people know about them.
Though this design is nothing new (I remember a theoretical drawing in a high school textbook), it's excellent to hear that some medium scale implementations are going though.
I can't help but think how this compares to the US energy policy, which basically boils down to "clean coal" and scrapping regulations that would mandade fuel efficency and pollution reductions. As troubling as this is from an environmental perspective, what's more troubling is the lack of desire within the leadership of this nation to actively invest in and pursue technology.
We as a nation seem to be more than willing to let our technological advantages slip away in our moment of decadence.
Iceland is buiding fuel-cell technology into their public buses and merchant/fishing fleet. Scotland is making power from the waves. East Germany has an all-fiber telecom network, and we have... "clean coal" and SUVs that get less than 18mpg.
Hmmmm... I don't like where this is going in the long run. The US government has the biggest bankroll of any nation. We should be putting it to better use if you ask me.
I would respectfully disagree, there, buddy. Surely the arbitrary partitioning and rapacious natural-resource sucking of the colonial era is enough to send any region into a downturn. To say that there's a genetic basis for the current state of the African Continent is to ignore history.
Human social evolution has happened far too quickly for any real genetic influence to be a factor. Why do european immigrants dominate North America? Because Columbus et al arrived at an opportune moment in terms of how the Native Americans were doing. There's reliable archeological evidence that in the 1100 - 1300 ACE era there were cities in the mid and southwest that supported more than 50,000 people, well over 5 times the size of London at the time.
Likewise in South America. Where would Cortez have gotten without the European Flu? Not very far.
Similarly, the African continent has a rich history of learning and culture, much of it occurring at a time when northern europe was nothing but wandering barbarian tribes.
So in conclusion: cram it, you racist bastard.
Weblog Advertising Network
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Google Juice
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· Score: 2
Maybe this has already been mentioned, but...
It wouldn't be too hard, or too inconcievable, for some enterprising advertising agency to make personal contact with a wide array of bloggers and offer to support their blogging habbit in return for one or two links a week. They wouldn't need to be featured heavily on the weblog site (it could be a small sidebar link) and a company that contracted with the weblog advertising network could enjoy high google rankings for a steady monthly fee.
This would be the online equivalent to what is currently known as "gorilla" or "viral" marketing. It doesn't have anything to do with outlook and vbs files though. Essentailly, it amounts to paying an agency to get you the two most valuable things in the marketing world: "street cred" and word-of-mouth.
Pepsi recently had an incredible success with their "Code Red" Mountain Dew product. They generated high sales with almost no mass media support by employing a series of viral marketing agencies in urban areas. They basically hired a bunch of kids to hang out, drink soda and talk it up. It worked.
Online gorilla marketing would be expensive (say $5000 a week for 1000 links), but that's very little compared to running a series of large print ads nationwide. And the results would be worth it: high search engine rankings, plus "word of mouth" links.
The truth is that online advertising and marketing now rely on either tired old crap that doesn't really work (e.g. spam) or incredibly immature -- as in not yet developed -- techniques (click-throughs and such). As web searches and e-commerce become more and more the de facto way of finding and purchasing goods and services, look for more intellegent marketing strategies like this as well as smart datamining and true one-to-one promotions to dominate the future of advertising.
There may come a time when the very idea of launching a hugely expensive mass-market promotion starring a soon-to-be-played-out pop icon will be a laughable marketing scheme...
Anyone find it ironic that most of these phones are available in Africa prior to the US? Now, I'll bet that basically means South Africa and maybe some of the horn-area urban centers, but still.
I for one, think it's heartening. In 100 years, the so-called "dark continent" could be a major center for tech, if they can get some decent leadership in place and stop all the civil wars.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is grounds to make them illegal?
No, that's grounds to debunk the illusion people have that owning a weapon makes them safe.
Look. In other countries with similar population densities (e.g. Japan, the UK) you have no firearms, and still civil liberties on par with the US in almost many respects. At the same time you have a single digit number of hand gun deaths a year.
In the US, you have well over 10,000 deaths by handgun and about 10x that many assults, meaning somoene was only shot at or wounded. I refuse to believe that this level of destruction of human life is "the price of liberty".
And it's not that we're that much more or less violent than other cultures, it's simpy that it's really easy for people to get lethal weapons in this country. The barrier for purchase is so low, it's almost assumed that you need a gun: "you gotta have steel just to feel relaxation."
That's no way to live, people. They have just as many bar fights and street gangs in the UK as we do here. The only salient difference is that they battle with fists, bats, clubs and knives. The result is a far greater preservation of human life.
Nice quote list. Note that all those people have been dead for about 150 years at least.
In the context of an agrarian revolution, this makes a lot of sense. In the context of a modern urbanized society, it does not. Simply banning guns, of course, is not an answer to the problem: you have to look at how to get rid of the guns that are out there, then disarming many of the police, etc etc etc.
It's a long process with an idealistic goal, but doesn't it make sense to live peacefully?
The entire point is to put weapons that can easily kill people (e.g. soldiers in service to an evil government) in the hands of an informal militia made up of common citizens.
Yes but don't you think we've gone a little beyond that? The hard truth is that the progressin millitary technology over the past 220 years has made this sort of idea a thing of the past. You need look no further than the conflict between the Isrial and Palestine to see this: Isrial, which has a millitary on par with our own, is only held back from crushing the palestinian resistance by wanting to seem less murderous. They could just kill 'em all if they really wanted to.
Small arms alone cannot stand up to tanks and close air support except in the most hairy of gurilla conflicts. Even then the resiliance of the resistance is dependent on using civilians as cover.
Beyond that, to say we should legally be allowed to own hunting rifles so that one day we might wage an effective gurilla war against our own government... I think that's a little on the batty side. If it ever came to that, you'd need a lot more than the legal right to buy a glock to stand a chance.
Murdering someone is already a crime, why do we need laws to ban assault rifles?
.75 mm bore weapon to hunt deer with. If hunting and shooting are to be condidered a legitimate sport (a dubious notion), then we aught to make like the british and make you leave your guns at the hunting lodge and shooting range.
Because they have no other legitimate use. Contrast this with knives and piano strings, which also can be used to kill, but also have plenty of non-murderous applications.
This is precisely what makes the NRA's arguments so rediculous: they seriously state that one needs a 50-round semi-automatic
This would take a lot of the stuffing out of the 2nd-amendment lobby, unless you really buy that "home defense" stuff. Poopycock! I mean, it's been shown that a gun in your home is more likely to kill you or a family member than an intruder. Moreover, if people really do legitimately need guns in this day and age, there's something much more fundimentally wrong with the society we're living in. Something, I might add, that is best solved with other tools than guns.
But with digital content and the Internet, a home computer user can share a perfect copy of any content with potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort.
I think this came out in a lower post. The law CAN be effective in cracking down on the mass distribution of pirate digital material. Napster is dead. The fact that there are other services more or less emulating napster (e.g. gnutell, kazaa) simply refelcts that the industry concerns havn't been litigating strenuously enough. If they wanted to, they could shut down both of these services. Admittedly freenet would be a little more difficult, but the ease of use theshold there is high enough that it probably won't ever get enough of a following to really hurt profits.
And now I'm going to get ranty...
Beyond that: the far more salient point is that there's no credible research suggesting that people are purchasing less music, books, or movies as a result of digitalization! Surprise surprise, people will still pay for reliable access to quality content. If you want to have a nice evening with friends, do you hit up bloackbuster for a DVD, or spend 8 hours trying to download some crappy divix rip of the same movie?
Likewise, if there were a service that allowed me to pay a reasonable monthly subscription and get reliable access to the music I wanted, I would be all over it. The truth is that the entertainment business has failed to innovate and has dropped the ball when it comes to responding to changing consumer desires. Now they're looking to the government to bail them out. What will be the public cost of creating these security measures let alone enforcing them? This is not something I want my tax dollars being spent on!
Actually, to back out of rant-mode, that's another good point: who pays for the development and enforement mandated by this legislation. Forget for a second that whatever they come up with will probably be emminantly crackable, how much will it cost taxpayers? How much will it cost business to implement? Has anyone done any numbers on this? What are the penalties looking like? What would the added overhead to the criminal justice system be?
A purely fiscal argument might be a strong one to make.
Because in a bustling restaurant or bar, the staff has to make rounds and get close to all the tables (which can be a slow process) to see who needs what. This product would give them the "eye in the sky" so to speak.
Obviously you've never been in a high-end restaurant in the midst of a dinner rush
Whoops! s/been/worked
I assume most people have been in a busy place, but not many people know what it's like from the other end of the equation.
Come on. You look at a table. Glass is either full or empty. Or, if you are smart, you sold them a pitcher. That was probably the last technological update that any beer pouring establishment needed.
Obviously you've never been in a high-end restaurant in the midst of a dinner rush (or a popular bar at the peak of partytime, like 2 or 3am). It can be murder to get the pretty lady who brings the magic jump juice to come around. If they can make a cocktail and wineglass version (and I don't see why not) they might just have something to contribute to the future of the service industry.
Most establishments in NYC (my base of experience) already run their ordering off a touch-screen system, eliminating errors, waste and such. The next logical step is a bluetooth-enabled waiter PDA that maps the floor, the tables, and shows the frazzles server whos glasses are empty at a strategic level. She/he can then plan her/his serving game plan.
Trust me, keeping track of 5 or more tables eatch with large parties and seperate orders spread out over a large floor plan is a headache even for a seasoned server. Sure, if I'm talking about my sleepy corner bar, this is the most frivilous thing in the world, but for a hectic place like the W or Soho Grand (or some of the more classy clubs) this could be a big sell.
This is probably too late in the comment thread to get any attention, but...
I am part of a theater company that travels to colleges in the US to do a non-judgemental artistic residency on the topic of addiction. In a series of workshops and a professional theatrical productions, we present the issue from all angles, using verbatum text of interviews with real people as the source for all our dialogue.
The show is called "the Quick Fix" (pardon the website: I'm remodeling), and it primaraly seeks to examine the underlying causes of compulsive/addictive behavior. As I said before, we don't make judgements or present ourselves as having an 'answer'. We just listen to people (via interviews) and re-tell the stories, albeit with a little theatricalization thrown on top (music, dance, lighting, a bit of humor) to make it all a bit more interesting.
As an active participant in the online world, I've been trying to find an EQ or other online-activity addict to interview for some time. If anyone would like to talk to me (IM, email, irc, whatever) and maybe tell their story, contact me through my homepage (outlandishjosh.com) or at joshk(at)thequickfix.com. Your anonymitity will be respected.
Which version will have CSS that works?
get it straight, bucko. your problem is with the javascript, not the css... javascript being a non-standardized product invented with very little forethought or attention to extendability. If it hadn't been adopted so fast and so widely, we might have a good standard browser scripting language. But no. We have javascript. Poop on that.
Ok, you're obviously "with it" if you know about molecular manufacturing (nano fabs and such).
I'm curoious, what does it mean to "read like a weblog". The 'blog being a rather new literaty incantation and my experience with it being slim, I don't really know what you mean. I'd love it if you could define what would you say the properties of readling like a weblog are. In all candor, I'm seroious.
If we can decode the human nervous system, that would be a huge step. I'm not sure if it's a good one or bad one, but a step.
However, I don't know how successful we will be at integrating computers and the body. As far as I understand it, the nervous system while based on electrochemical energy circuits, is not a binary system. Each nuron has many possible states, not just on/off. These various neuron states cause different neurotransmitters to be released at synnapses (where they connect) and somehow a super-complex net of this leads to consciousness. Hopefully this research will eventually shed some light on that "somehow".
In the mean time, the most succeess will probably come from just letting the human body adapt to computerized input, like that optical sonar implant they did a while back.
Your shitty little suburban lot in California doesn't look so good from here.
Actually, I live in Brooklyn, in a semi-shitty little apartment (I sleep in a 6x8 room). But I enjoy my life because this is where things are happening.
While I'll cop to a certain amount of envy for your big farm in indiana, I would also be bored to tears in the long haul. The are many "high tech job markets" around the world, but none of them are SV. It's a nexus, and has inherant value as such, a place where things can get moving.
Some of the employees have even decided to spend time with their children reading books printed on actual paper.
Yes yes yes! This is offtopic, but very important: the way tech is currently being implemented is highly anti-experiential. If the trend continues, we'll all be in little boxes watching video on demand, secreting bodily fluids for the purpose of reproduction when necessary to refresh the stock.
It doesn't need to be this way. Community online can become community offline. Information can activate (agit-prop) as well as pacify (television). Rock out IRL.
Actually, I did read the article. And at the time I was composing my post there were no comments at an above 0 value. While it's not surprising that my sentiments were similar to many other early posters, I didn't just read and rephrase them.
I'll be the first to admit that my reaction was less than groundbreaking. If I got mod points, it would be for more clearly and insightfully articulating my sentiments.
Yeah, Broadway and Wall Street and Silicon Valley are centers of their industries, but there's a reason the real players eventually move away from them, too.
Granted. And in the long run, "where it's at" will change and "it will be happening" somewhere else. However, disused/rural areas of the globe with little proximity to other cultural/economic/business activity are rather unlikely to ever be a hot spot.
I could take a wild guess and say that you're probably getting older or more mature or married or having kids. That's not a flame, by the way. It's a beautiful thing. But as ones changing priorities lead one more and more into a life of comfort, privacy, and (as you put it) "liviing like a king", one is less and less likely to effect massive change.
Not that effecting massive change is ever all that likely, but if you move to North Florida (beautiful country by the way) you're really taking yourself out of the game. But, again, if that's not a priority -- and why should it be compared to family and such -- I say cheers to you. Just don't expect a little known North Florida company to re-make the future of computing.
To dismiss smaller cities as enclaves of NASCAR-watching idiots forgets a fundamental truth: the people in other cities are just as idiotic but in different ways.
Point taken. I live in NYC (brooklyn) and I think most of the people can be hugely idiotic. They just have a lot more money to throw around than your typical resident of Tampa Bay. I honestly don't think it's the people who are stupid, but rather the culture. If it really came down to it, there's a lot more to like in the culture of babecue and auto-racing then there is in NYC clubland.
There's nothing like driving across Florida/Gerogia, no shirt on, back sticking to cracked vinyl upholstry, a bottle of sun tea coming to fruition on the dashboard, blasting Creedence. Livin' the dream, I tells ya.
I've always been somewhat mystified at the way AOL has been able to sell inferior services (slow service, high downtime, poor chat/email feature) to millions of users. Testiment to the power of marketing I suppose. On the other hand, that "community" stuff is a real thing...
Of course, now that they're in the business arena where a few hours of downtime means more than wating till tomorrow to send that email to grandma, and lo and behold they just can't cut it. MSN has the same problems. No credible business can put up with their downtimes and outages.
Now the executive level is beginning to understand how important these issues are. Someone could make a nice bundle of money by creating a credible business-class isp that doesn't suck (e.g. worldcom... generation d? yeah right).
why would any company try and cripple it's self with the plysical location of being in Silicon Valley?
Because location matters. It matters when you have to get people to move somewhere to work for you. It matters what the culture surrounding your business is. It matters what your employees do when their off work. Are they bing stimulated and engaged by other bright people with hip new ideas or are they at home with a miller high life watching NASCAR?
I personally have a soft spot for High Life, but in all seriousness location is a key factor if you want to have a great company. There's a lot more to making a breakthrough than the bottom line of rents and such. It's the difference between turning a profit and being "insanely great".
Most high tech companies on the cutting edge are going to fail no matter what. The Edge [c.f. William Gibson] that pushes them over the top is not the ability to cut costs on rent and equipment, it's highly talented people that are motivated to work for your company. With all due respect for both geographic regions, that's a hard sell in the Midwest and the South. If you're looking to take an already proven idea and turn some profit, the Midwest, South and Northwest are where it's at. AOL started out in Virginia for a reason.
To conlclude, there's only one Broadway, there's only one Wall Street, and there's only one Sillicon Valley. You're either there, or your not really in the game. It's one of the many things that doesn't make economic sense, (love, charity, punk rock, etc) yet it is a real phenomina.
I'm aware of this, but it does not explicitly allow for complex legal and contractual procedures to be carried out online. The e-signature law is nice, but we also need precident, precident, precident.
If you care to actually look into it, increased funding in alternative power sources is central to the Bush energy plan.
No, if you actually look at it as opposed to taking good old Ari Fleischer's word for it, you'll see that while it does provide for a modest boost in funding for fuel cell research, it scraps regulations encouraging auto manufacturers to increase fuel efficiency, aims to slash and burn EPA regulations on power plant emissions, and includes a whole dump-truck full of money for re-opening closed coal-burning power plants that are still under a grandfather clause (e.g. no emmissions restrictions) in the southeast.
Sorry, sir, I don't believe your hype.
I'm curious why so many posters seem to think this is a Really Bad Thing, or a Really Stupid Thing. Are we all just eager to stay one step ahead of the law?
I for one think this is a Very Good Thing.
1) It's a big step toward legitimizing legal transactions online.This is something that needs to occur for the internet revolution to relaly take hold. The ability for people to make binding agreements virtually would usher in the next generation of e-business. Got an e-summons? Get an e-lawyer! If you can legally serve someone with an email, how long before you can represent someone online?
2) Of course, there are a lot of security issues to work though, but that's good to. Why? Jobs for geeks.
3) They're going to be able to serve a process against this scam artist. That's always nice.
Truth is, if you're actually being served a process, either someone bad is after you or you've done something wrong, like skip out on child support. Making virtual process serving possible doesn't make it easier to file lawsuits, it just makes it easier to let people know about them.
Though this design is nothing new (I remember a theoretical drawing in a high school textbook), it's excellent to hear that some medium scale implementations are going though.
I can't help but think how this compares to the US energy policy, which basically boils down to "clean coal" and scrapping regulations that would mandade fuel efficency and pollution reductions. As troubling as this is from an environmental perspective, what's more troubling is the lack of desire within the leadership of this nation to actively invest in and pursue technology.
We as a nation seem to be more than willing to let our technological advantages slip away in our moment of decadence.
Iceland is buiding fuel-cell technology into their public buses and merchant/fishing fleet. Scotland is making power from the waves. East Germany has an all-fiber telecom network, and we have... "clean coal" and SUVs that get less than 18mpg.
Hmmmm... I don't like where this is going in the long run. The US government has the biggest bankroll of any nation. We should be putting it to better use if you ask me.
I would respectfully disagree, there, buddy. Surely the arbitrary partitioning and rapacious natural-resource sucking of the colonial era is enough to send any region into a downturn. To say that there's a genetic basis for the current state of the African Continent is to ignore history.
Human social evolution has happened far too quickly for any real genetic influence to be a factor. Why do european immigrants dominate North America? Because Columbus et al arrived at an opportune moment in terms of how the Native Americans were doing. There's reliable archeological evidence that in the 1100 - 1300 ACE era there were cities in the mid and southwest that supported more than 50,000 people, well over 5 times the size of London at the time.
Likewise in South America. Where would Cortez have gotten without the European Flu? Not very far.
Similarly, the African continent has a rich history of learning and culture, much of it occurring at a time when northern europe was nothing but wandering barbarian tribes.
So in conclusion: cram it, you racist bastard.
Maybe this has already been mentioned, but...
It wouldn't be too hard, or too inconcievable, for some enterprising advertising agency to make personal contact with a wide array of bloggers and offer to support their blogging habbit in return for one or two links a week. They wouldn't need to be featured heavily on the weblog site (it could be a small sidebar link) and a company that contracted with the weblog advertising network could enjoy high google rankings for a steady monthly fee.
This would be the online equivalent to what is currently known as "gorilla" or "viral" marketing. It doesn't have anything to do with outlook and vbs files though. Essentailly, it amounts to paying an agency to get you the two most valuable things in the marketing world: "street cred" and word-of-mouth.
Pepsi recently had an incredible success with their "Code Red" Mountain Dew product. They generated high sales with almost no mass media support by employing a series of viral marketing agencies in urban areas. They basically hired a bunch of kids to hang out, drink soda and talk it up. It worked.
Online gorilla marketing would be expensive (say $5000 a week for 1000 links), but that's very little compared to running a series of large print ads nationwide. And the results would be worth it: high search engine rankings, plus "word of mouth" links.
The truth is that online advertising and marketing now rely on either tired old crap that doesn't really work (e.g. spam) or incredibly immature -- as in not yet developed -- techniques (click-throughs and such). As web searches and e-commerce become more and more the de facto way of finding and purchasing goods and services, look for more intellegent marketing strategies like this as well as smart datamining and true one-to-one promotions to dominate the future of advertising.
There may come a time when the very idea of launching a hugely expensive mass-market promotion starring a soon-to-be-played-out pop icon will be a laughable marketing scheme...
Anyone find it ironic that most of these phones are available in Africa prior to the US? Now, I'll bet that basically means South Africa and maybe some of the horn-area urban centers, but still.
I for one, think it's heartening. In 100 years, the so-called "dark continent" could be a major center for tech, if they can get some decent leadership in place and stop all the civil wars.