Re:The question is not whether there is a problem
on
Information Poisoning
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· Score: 2
Hell, I hope to god you're a troll. Government is certainly not perfect, but there are many problems which would now be much, much worse without government intervention.
How about this: name a problem that private enterprise or individual action has solved, with no recourse to government intervention. Food safety? No. Child labor? No. Environmental degradation? No. Humane working conditions? No.
The worst possible situation for most people is to be completely controlled by an institution that has no regard whatsoever for their welfare. Sound like a prison? Sound like a sweatshop? Sound like a country where industry runs amok, or even worse, where industry owns government?
That's the battle; that's the choice. You haven't addressed it: choose between government or corporate regulation, or provide a realistic scenario where neither is necessary.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
FYI, here's the complete text of the Gutenberg Alice license. Summary: what Adobe's doing is perfectly within their rights (although, of course, it sucks ass).
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Project Gutenberg is one of my favorite things on the web. I've downloaded numerous books and read them on my laptop, or Visor.
This shows better than anything how shady Adobe really is. To take a free, and classic, work and then smother it in some gnarly rights-restriction shrinkwrap... have they no shame?
Ok, sure, Paradise Lost is by any measure one of the greatest literary achievements. I've read it several times, and despair of ever understanding what Milton wanted me to. First, of course, I don't share his beliefs. Secondly, however, Milton had a good 100 IQ points on me, and a near-photographic memory to boot. He assumes, actually demands, that his readers are well-versed (no pun intended, of course) in a stunning catalog of literature. Having said that, it's worth reading for the language alone.
But, if you take that quote of mine and drop it back into context, I'm pretty clearly talking about the New Testament, for which no prequel has been written (AFAIK). You could argue that the OT is prequel, but it's so far removed in time as to stretch the definition of "prequel" to breaking point.
I don't know much about secret societies (just what I see on the backs of dollar bills;), so I'll let that go. It wouldn't surprise me, however.
Blasphemer! Ok, I you meant "Herbert," but you did say "Hubbard." That's scary, man.
What I'm saying is that Dune is complete. Frank Herbert invented the story and characters, set them in time and space, and let them loose. The only meaningful addition to the series would be something like The Silmarillion (sp?) - very dense mythology and history.
What these dolts (Brian Herbert and Whatshisfuck) don't realize is that you don't have to write everything down. Ernest Hemingway always said (paraphrase), "I write on the principle of the iceberg. I know much more about the story than I write down. Everything you know about a story that you don't write down makes the story stronger." Stronger as in coffee - for a given amount of coffee beans, the less coffee you make from it the stronger it is.
Frank's son is participating in the willful dilution of his father's work. Brian's stuff is nothing new. He's trying to flesh out notes that his father left, and doing a sorry job. Exactly how sorry a job? Well, he needed to bring in a ghost writer to help him. If he were capable of writing the thing himself, I'm sure the publishing company would have preferred that.
(An example of how to do this well is Christopher Tolkien, who's made a life's work of studying his father's writings. Christopher is generally recognized as one of the foremost Tolkien scholars in the world. He illuminates JRR's work better than anyone. Of course, Frank didn't leave 10% as much unfinished as JRR did, so Christopher had more material to work with. More talent, too.)
Yes, Dune should be required reading for anyone interested in politics. Paul went from breaking up over killing Jamis (can't exactly remember his name) in Sietch Tabr, to dismissing with a wave of his hand the billions that his Jihad had killed. And no, I wouldn't want him for a friend.:)
Granted, Frank Herbert wasn't the greatest writer of all time. Like many science fiction authors, his ideas were sometimes better than his execution. The rest of the Dune series, however, is fascinating. If you stopped after Dune Messiah I don't blame you - it's easily the weakest of the 6. Many people don't know that he wrote the first 3 books more or less at the same time. He's written (in the intro to Children of Dune, and elsewhere) that he spent 6 years researching and plotting the story before he laid pen to paper to begin writing. I think this shows - Messiah feels a little like a stepping stone to Children.
The last 3 are very different. God Emperor of Dune, for all its faults, is one of the most fascinating character studies ever put to paper. It's a good book, too, and worth a read. The last 2 focus very strongly on the Bene Gesserit, and make up somewhat for the 2D female characters in the first 3 books.
No one before or since Frank Herbert has realized such a coherent (I don't mean, of course, "correct") vision of the future. His books are political, economic, ecological, religious. Most science fiction ignores this as background noise, but he correctly believes that it drives character motivation to a great degree.
So yeah, leave Messiah alone. I re-read the series earlier this year, and I couldn't get through more than 40 pages of it. So I skipped it. Children is better. And I think you owe it to yourself to at least give God Emperor a try.
I read House Atreides and yeah, it sucked. Brian Herbert and Anderson obviously spent a lot of time studying Frank's style, but they got precious little of his substance. Frank Herbert was a passionate and educated ecologist, as strong a scientist in his own right as Asimov and Clarke (regardless of what you think of their writing). The new books (I haven't read "Harkonnen" yet, nor do I plan to) have people acting and talking similarly, but with little coherent motivation.
Also, who really gives a rat's ass? Dune is a messiah story. Writing prequels would be like writing prequels to the Bible. Who cares how Joseph and Mary met? Who their parents were?
Of course, some people do, and these people are buying the new book. But I suspect that most people who buy these books are pining for the old days, wishing Herbert himself had continued the Dune series. My answer: go read something else of Frank's. Dragon in the Sea/Under Pressure, The Green Brain, Hellstrom's Hive, The Sanataroga Barrier, The Eyes of Heisenburg. Frank wrote many great novels, and there's something to learn from each of them.
Also, notice my sig - I love Frank Herbert.:) His son's a sorry hack, though, and Dune isn't the sum total of his work.
It's a lot more like saying, "This old Mercedes will only run on hi-test gasoline, but the new one burns any old crap you put in the tank and runs just as well."
And if that doesn't impress management, take your faulty DIMM and throw it in a Win2k box. Sit back and watch the fireworks.
Yes, it's very late, and may be even later than they think. But I'm inclined not to believe those who say that the window has closed for a successful launch. It's certainly going to be a while, years maybe, before Mozilla takes any significant market share (unless AOL starts distributing it - they might be good for something).
Micros~1 hasn't done anything "innovative" with a browser for years. Even Mac IE5.5, which has awesome standards support, is just a re-bloat^H^H^H^H^Hwrite of IE4 - it's what they should have released as IE4 in the first place.
Once Mozilla is released and stable (events which I hope will coincide) it's going to be much, much easier to modify and update for future standards support, look-and-feel, rebranding (AOL) than IE5. Mozilla is "front-loading" future work into this release, while Micros~2 is stuck making little patches and calling them new versions.
Imagine a web development shop landing a large Intranet contract. "Hey - how'd you like us to whip up a custom version of Mozilla for you? Not just a lame-ass IE 'rebrand' with a couple different icons, but a serious web application with support for your [insert buzzword here]?"
It's going to be a beautiful day, folks. Micros~3 has the technical resources to do something like that, but they never will. Geeks have run the web for a long time, and Mozilla's going to make it easier.
On a web development note, it's very nice to use a free (and Free) browser to check bugs in my pages, rather than the reverse (using my pages to check bugs in a free - not Free - browser).:)
Why isn't there a link to M2 on my index.pl?
There seems to be a bug in the Slashcode that prevents the appearance of the M2 link if you've never M2ed. It will also not appear if you aren't logged in. To meta-moderate, log in and head to/metamod.pl After that, the link should appear on the top of your index page.
Personally, I don't believe for a minute that it's a "bug." I think it's carefully planned that way, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Also, IIRC, your UID must be in the lower 75% before you can M2 (that's not in the FAQ, it's in the code).
I've been using Win2k at work for a few weeks, and this is exactly what they're doing to us. I've yet to find a way to rename that
"C:\Documents and Settings plus some other files and whatever else we feel like storing here getting tired of typing yet you fucking geek?"
directory^Hfolder. It's completely ridiculous.
They can name it whatever they want right out of the box, but c'mon - what possible reason could they have for forcing such stupid names on everyone, forever?
News Flash ! Attention Bill Gates ! There are still plenty of things in Windows that you can only do on the command line. Why make it so hard to use?
They're so close. They're starting to realize that hackers are valuable, but they've forgotten that hackers aren't stupid. Stand together on this, maybe we can embarrass them just like the poor FBI's been embarrassed by no Uni rubber-stamping Carnivore.
Speech is NOT free in this country, nor is it ever likely to be. The 1st Amendment has attracted considerable judicial review, and IMHO some of it is justified.
This is (theoretically) a democracy, and we're supposed to have more civilized ways of public discourse than assassination. Or advocating it. It is not and should not be legal to threaten publically the life of another human being or advocate their demise. What sort of pathetic, empty "right" is that? What's the 1st Amendment for, if not the protection of human rights, chief among them the human right to life?
This is not a slippery slope. There are many methods of disagreement and speech. You're still free to disagree with anybody. But democratic states are founded on one principal: We're stronger together than alone. The purpose of a group is to protect its members. We do that with laws. Your right to run your mouth is not more valuable to the group than my right to breath.
The two images he shows for comparison (original MPEG-2 and MPEG-4) are at wildly different JPEG compression levels. The original is compressed at "7" and the MPEG-4 is compressed at "2." So of freaking course one's going to look shitty.
If you don't like it, don't use the service. They don't have a right to your private (although anonymous, they say) information anymore than you have a right to TV.
Please Note: Our privacy policy may change over time. In addition to posting any changes on our web site, www.tivo.com,
we will provide or send a notice to each TiVo customer before any changes are implemented. You have our commitment that, regardless of any changes that might be made in the future, you will remain in complete control of your personal viewing information.
Bold is mine. This is light years ahead of most privacy policies, and they seem to be upfront about what info they use and what they don't.
Truly anonymous targeted ads are a Good Thing, as long as they are (let's repeat that) truly anonymous. They bring revenue for the company and are perhaps even useful to the consumer. (How much revenue is another thing - he flat-out admits that 80% of people fast-forward the ads.)
Well, if you use "normal" mathematically, he's probably correct. If/. posted every story about CC #s getting cracked, we wouldn't have time for Napster stories.
Speaking from experience, it's a major pain in the ass to cancel a credit/debit card and get a new one, not to mention trying to figure out how to live without one for a week. (Heck, I buy coffee in the morning with my debit card.) Never mind the nightmare of straightening out the false charges with your bank.
So is Western Union liable for this time/expense/pain in the ass? Should you have an expectation, visiting an e-commerce site of some sort, that your CC# will be kept private against the ravages of crackers?
If someone with a mask and gun steals a bag full of CC receipts from Sears, then uses the numbers, is Sears at all liable for their misuse? Should they be? How does this change for e-commerce stores? You can't really stop someone coming into your store with a gun and robbing you, but you can take much better precautions against someone hacking your site like this.
I see both sides of this - as an admin and a CC user. Should we have a zero-tolerance law? No mistakes, no excuses - the store that got hacked should just pay up, whatever its customer's expenses are? Honestly, I lean towards "yes." There have been enough public cracks in the last year to encourage even the most brain-dead (heh: "westernunion.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98" - NetCraft) to really secure their stores and databases.
If you can't secure it, don't connect it to the web.
...is create a mouse that I didn't have to click so damn hard. No - really. My carpal is bad, and Logitech doesn't help.
I ended up hacking the damn thing (MouseMan Wheel) apart and finding the little copper spring (very little - 8mm x 2mm x ~.2mm) the controls the click force. Bend it just so - viola - touch-sensitive mouse. It's good, but not perfect. It took me a couple hours to get it just right, and although there's no appreciable click point, there's still too much motion for my tastes (2 or 3 mm at the end of the button).
But it sure would be nice, as some people posted here before, to have a true touch-sensitive mouse. Maybe with one big "button" that could be programmed in zones. This is one area where having source code does you very little good.;)
This is scary, and perhaps inevitable, and scarier because of that. Philip K. Dick would have nodded and said, "Told ya so."
Quote:
But I was already beginning to suppose in my head the growing domination of machines over man, especially the machines we voluntarily surround ourselves with, which should, by logic, be the most harmless. I never assumed that some huge clanking monster would stride down Fifth Avenue, devouring New York; I always feared that my own TV or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey.
(Interview in 1955)
One of the recurring themes in his fiction is the Autofac (automatic factory). Little factories that literally breed, starting off tiny as flies (AFAIK, far before people started talking about nanotechnology). Several of his stories center on a post-apocolyptic civilization where the Autofacs are the only things left fighting. Humans, by and large, have been bombed back into the stone age, except for supply drops by the Autofacs. Which just keep fighting, because they weren't programmed to stop, and they're too efficient to break down.
Dick's biggest criticism of machines was that they have no compassion, no charity (in the biblical sense). He said that there's something ineffable about humans that machines will be never be able to duplicate, only mimic.
Machines don't stop. Ob. Frank Herbert quote (hope rob hasn't instituted that "Frank Herbert filter" yet): "Mercy is the ability to stop, if only for a moment." Same idea, really. How does a robot guard know when you've surrendered? Or does it matter? If a human is shot in a forest of robots, does his death make a sound?
it's just selfish to think about yourself before an event that brings the whole world together.
Yeah, it brings the whole world together, just like a nice refreshing can of Coke! C'mon - sing with me:
I'd like to buy the world a Coke
and keep it company...
You can't be serious - can you? The Olympics have degenerated from an amateur competition into a gigantic marketing blitz for multi-nationals. Amateur - when they lost that, they lost something very important. There are already many arenas in the world for paid athletes, and they get press all the time. How much of the "Sports" section in your local paper is devoted to paid athletics: 80%? 95% of the front page?
Furthermore, what part of the Olympics do you really see? The events in which the US is favored to win, pretty much. The events which generate the most advertising dollars. It's pretty clear - if NBC can't sell ads for it, they won't show it. For most people, the Olympics is a feverish contest in which the good old US of A wins a bunch of medals from countries no one's ever heard of.
Maybe this is ok with you. Maybe you're happy to have your little slice of Olympics served up courtesy of Giganto, Inc., complete with the same professional athletes you know and love from home. Personally, it make me want to puke. If NBC had real broadcast competition they'd have to show more than the top 3 events. That's what this is about: a really profitable Olympics or a really interesting one. Take your pick.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I hope to god you're a troll. Government is certainly not perfect, but there are many problems which would now be much, much worse without government intervention.
How about this: name a problem that private enterprise or individual action has solved, with no recourse to government intervention. Food safety? No. Child labor? No. Environmental degradation? No. Humane working conditions? No.
The worst possible situation for most people is to be completely controlled by an institution that has no regard whatsoever for their welfare. Sound like a prison? Sound like a sweatshop? Sound like a country where industry runs amok, or even worse, where industry owns government?
That's the battle; that's the choice. You haven't addressed it: choose between government or corporate regulation, or provide a realistic scenario where neither is necessary.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Actually, all it implies is that the first name of the guy who submitted it - and who hosts it - is "Art." Duh - check the submission.
Project Gutenberg is one of my favorite things on the web. I've downloaded numerous books and read them on my laptop, or Visor.
... have they no shame?
This shows better than anything how shady Adobe really is. To take a free, and classic, work and then smother it in some gnarly rights-restriction shrinkwrap
Ok, sure, Paradise Lost is by any measure one of the greatest literary achievements. I've read it several times, and despair of ever understanding what Milton wanted me to. First, of course, I don't share his beliefs. Secondly, however, Milton had a good 100 IQ points on me, and a near-photographic memory to boot. He assumes, actually demands, that his readers are well-versed (no pun intended, of course) in a stunning catalog of literature. Having said that, it's worth reading for the language alone.
;), so I'll let that go. It wouldn't surprise me, however.
But, if you take that quote of mine and drop it back into context, I'm pretty clearly talking about the New Testament, for which no prequel has been written (AFAIK). You could argue that the OT is prequel, but it's so far removed in time as to stretch the definition of "prequel" to breaking point.
I don't know much about secret societies (just what I see on the backs of dollar bills
Blasphemer! Ok, I you meant "Herbert," but you did say "Hubbard." That's scary, man.
What I'm saying is that Dune is complete. Frank Herbert invented the story and characters, set them in time and space, and let them loose. The only meaningful addition to the series would be something like The Silmarillion (sp?) - very dense mythology and history.
What these dolts (Brian Herbert and Whatshisfuck) don't realize is that you don't have to write everything down. Ernest Hemingway always said (paraphrase), "I write on the principle of the iceberg. I know much more about the story than I write down. Everything you know about a story that you don't write down makes the story stronger." Stronger as in coffee - for a given amount of coffee beans, the less coffee you make from it the stronger it is.
Frank's son is participating in the willful dilution of his father's work. Brian's stuff is nothing new. He's trying to flesh out notes that his father left, and doing a sorry job. Exactly how sorry a job? Well, he needed to bring in a ghost writer to help him. If he were capable of writing the thing himself, I'm sure the publishing company would have preferred that.
(An example of how to do this well is Christopher Tolkien, who's made a life's work of studying his father's writings. Christopher is generally recognized as one of the foremost Tolkien scholars in the world. He illuminates JRR's work better than anyone. Of course, Frank didn't leave 10% as much unfinished as JRR did, so Christopher had more material to work with. More talent, too.)
Yes, Dune should be required reading for anyone interested in politics. Paul went from breaking up over killing Jamis (can't exactly remember his name) in Sietch Tabr, to dismissing with a wave of his hand the billions that his Jihad had killed. And no, I wouldn't want him for a friend. :)
Granted, Frank Herbert wasn't the greatest writer of all time. Like many science fiction authors, his ideas were sometimes better than his execution. The rest of the Dune series, however, is fascinating. If you stopped after Dune Messiah I don't blame you - it's easily the weakest of the 6. Many people don't know that he wrote the first 3 books more or less at the same time. He's written (in the intro to Children of Dune, and elsewhere) that he spent 6 years researching and plotting the story before he laid pen to paper to begin writing. I think this shows - Messiah feels a little like a stepping stone to Children.
The last 3 are very different. God Emperor of Dune, for all its faults, is one of the most fascinating character studies ever put to paper. It's a good book, too, and worth a read. The last 2 focus very strongly on the Bene Gesserit, and make up somewhat for the 2D female characters in the first 3 books.
No one before or since Frank Herbert has realized such a coherent (I don't mean, of course, "correct") vision of the future. His books are political, economic, ecological, religious. Most science fiction ignores this as background noise, but he correctly believes that it drives character motivation to a great degree.
So yeah, leave Messiah alone. I re-read the series earlier this year, and I couldn't get through more than 40 pages of it. So I skipped it. Children is better. And I think you owe it to yourself to at least give God Emperor a try.
Dammit, I previewed, too. Should be Santaroga Barrier. Very interesting novel about ecological and psychological dependence.
I read House Atreides and yeah, it sucked. Brian Herbert and Anderson obviously spent a lot of time studying Frank's style, but they got precious little of his substance. Frank Herbert was a passionate and educated ecologist, as strong a scientist in his own right as Asimov and Clarke (regardless of what you think of their writing). The new books (I haven't read "Harkonnen" yet, nor do I plan to) have people acting and talking similarly, but with little coherent motivation.
:) His son's a sorry hack, though, and Dune isn't the sum total of his work.
Also, who really gives a rat's ass? Dune is a messiah story. Writing prequels would be like writing prequels to the Bible. Who cares how Joseph and Mary met? Who their parents were?
Of course, some people do, and these people are buying the new book. But I suspect that most people who buy these books are pining for the old days, wishing Herbert himself had continued the Dune series. My answer: go read something else of Frank's. Dragon in the Sea/Under Pressure, The Green Brain, Hellstrom's Hive, The Sanataroga Barrier, The Eyes of Heisenburg. Frank wrote many great novels, and there's something to learn from each of them.
Also, notice my sig - I love Frank Herbert.
It's a lot more like saying, "This old Mercedes will only run on hi-test gasoline, but the new one burns any old crap you put in the tank and runs just as well."
And if that doesn't impress management, take your faulty DIMM and throw it in a Win2k box. Sit back and watch the fireworks.
Yes, it's very late, and may be even later than they think. But I'm inclined not to believe those who say that the window has closed for a successful launch. It's certainly going to be a while, years maybe, before Mozilla takes any significant market share (unless AOL starts distributing it - they might be good for something).
:)
Micros~1 hasn't done anything "innovative" with a browser for years. Even Mac IE5.5, which has awesome standards support, is just a re-bloat^H^H^H^H^Hwrite of IE4 - it's what they should have released as IE4 in the first place.
Once Mozilla is released and stable (events which I hope will coincide) it's going to be much, much easier to modify and update for future standards support, look-and-feel, rebranding (AOL) than IE5. Mozilla is "front-loading" future work into this release, while Micros~2 is stuck making little patches and calling them new versions.
Imagine a web development shop landing a large Intranet contract. "Hey - how'd you like us to whip up a custom version of Mozilla for you? Not just a lame-ass IE 'rebrand' with a couple different icons, but a serious web application with support for your [insert buzzword here]?"
It's going to be a beautiful day, folks. Micros~3 has the technical resources to do something like that, but they never will. Geeks have run the web for a long time, and Mozilla's going to make it easier.
On a web development note, it's very nice to use a free (and Free) browser to check bugs in my pages, rather than the reverse (using my pages to check bugs in a free - not Free - browser).
They can name it whatever they want right out of the box, but c'mon - what possible reason could they have for forcing such stupid names on everyone, forever?
News Flash ! Attention Bill Gates ! There are still plenty of things in Windows that you can only do on the command line. Why make it so hard to use?
They're so close. They're starting to realize that hackers are valuable, but they've forgotten that hackers aren't stupid. Stand together on this, maybe we can embarrass them just like the poor FBI's been embarrassed by no Uni rubber-stamping Carnivore.
Speech is NOT free in this country, nor is it ever likely to be. The 1st Amendment has attracted considerable judicial review, and IMHO some of it is justified.
This is (theoretically) a democracy, and we're supposed to have more civilized ways of public discourse than assassination. Or advocating it. It is not and should not be legal to threaten publically the life of another human being or advocate their demise. What sort of pathetic, empty "right" is that? What's the 1st Amendment for, if not the protection of human rights, chief among them the human right to life?
This is not a slippery slope. There are many methods of disagreement and speech. You're still free to disagree with anybody. But democratic states are founded on one principal: We're stronger together than alone. The purpose of a group is to protect its members. We do that with laws. Your right to run your mouth is not more valuable to the group than my right to breath.
The two images he shows for comparison (original MPEG-2 and MPEG-4) are at wildly different JPEG compression levels. The original is compressed at "7" and the MPEG-4 is compressed at "2." So of freaking course one's going to look shitty.
If you don't like it, don't use the service. They don't have a right to your private (although anonymous, they say) information anymore than you have a right to TV.
Bold is mine. This is light years ahead of most privacy policies, and they seem to be upfront about what info they use and what they don't.
Truly anonymous targeted ads are a Good Thing, as long as they are (let's repeat that) truly anonymous. They bring revenue for the company and are perhaps even useful to the consumer. (How much revenue is another thing - he flat-out admits that 80% of people fast-forward the ads.)
Well, if you use "normal" mathematically, he's probably correct. If /. posted every story about CC #s getting cracked, we wouldn't have time for Napster stories.
Speaking from experience, it's a major pain in the ass to cancel a credit/debit card and get a new one, not to mention trying to figure out how to live without one for a week. (Heck, I buy coffee in the morning with my debit card.) Never mind the nightmare of straightening out the false charges with your bank.
So is Western Union liable for this time/expense/pain in the ass? Should you have an expectation, visiting an e-commerce site of some sort, that your CC# will be kept private against the ravages of crackers?
If someone with a mask and gun steals a bag full of CC receipts from Sears, then uses the numbers, is Sears at all liable for their misuse? Should they be? How does this change for e-commerce stores? You can't really stop someone coming into your store with a gun and robbing you, but you can take much better precautions against someone hacking your site like this.
I see both sides of this - as an admin and a CC user. Should we have a zero-tolerance law? No mistakes, no excuses - the store that got hacked should just pay up, whatever its customer's expenses are? Honestly, I lean towards "yes." There have been enough public cracks in the last year to encourage even the most brain-dead (heh: "westernunion.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98" - NetCraft ) to really secure their stores and databases.
If you can't secure it, don't connect it to the web.
...is create a mouse that I didn't have to click so damn hard. No - really. My carpal is bad, and Logitech doesn't help.
;)
I ended up hacking the damn thing (MouseMan Wheel) apart and finding the little copper spring (very little - 8mm x 2mm x ~.2mm) the controls the click force. Bend it just so - viola - touch-sensitive mouse. It's good, but not perfect. It took me a couple hours to get it just right, and although there's no appreciable click point, there's still too much motion for my tastes (2 or 3 mm at the end of the button).
But it sure would be nice, as some people posted here before, to have a true touch-sensitive mouse. Maybe with one big "button" that could be programmed in zones. This is one area where having source code does you very little good.
Quote: One of the recurring themes in his fiction is the Autofac (automatic factory). Little factories that literally breed, starting off tiny as flies (AFAIK, far before people started talking about nanotechnology). Several of his stories center on a post-apocolyptic civilization where the Autofacs are the only things left fighting. Humans, by and large, have been bombed back into the stone age, except for supply drops by the Autofacs. Which just keep fighting, because they weren't programmed to stop, and they're too efficient to break down.
Dick's biggest criticism of machines was that they have no compassion, no charity (in the biblical sense). He said that there's something ineffable about humans that machines will be never be able to duplicate, only mimic.
Machines don't stop. Ob. Frank Herbert quote (hope rob hasn't instituted that "Frank Herbert filter" yet): "Mercy is the ability to stop, if only for a moment." Same idea, really. How does a robot guard know when you've surrendered? Or does it matter? If a human is shot in a forest of robots, does his death make a sound?
You can't be serious - can you? The Olympics have degenerated from an amateur competition into a gigantic marketing blitz for multi-nationals. Amateur - when they lost that, they lost something very important. There are already many arenas in the world for paid athletes, and they get press all the time. How much of the "Sports" section in your local paper is devoted to paid athletics: 80%? 95% of the front page?
Furthermore, what part of the Olympics do you really see? The events in which the US is favored to win, pretty much. The events which generate the most advertising dollars. It's pretty clear - if NBC can't sell ads for it, they won't show it. For most people, the Olympics is a feverish contest in which the good old US of A wins a bunch of medals from countries no one's ever heard of.
Maybe this is ok with you. Maybe you're happy to have your little slice of Olympics served up courtesy of Giganto, Inc., complete with the same professional athletes you know and love from home. Personally, it make me want to puke. If NBC had real broadcast competition they'd have to show more than the top 3 events. That's what this is about: a really profitable Olympics or a really interesting one. Take your pick.
Point the second, RE "whatever that means": I didn't know either, so I used a search engine.
- Here's RMS's take on MPL.
- An alternate view.
- And a nice list of license types from gnu.org
Point the third: your post was as nearly content-free as possible. Do a little brain work next time.