Mostly I don't care about these things. The few times I have, it's been a total pain to find out they want some money for this, disabled that, branded and broke this, and so on....
Funny, my kids ended up with a cheap ass Cricket phone plan. Mostly in city, moderate coverage, the usual discount deal. However, all the stuff on their phones just works and guess what? They use the hell out of it!
Most people would explore and play with their phones more, if they didn't fear some bullshit charge at the end of the month.
However, that does not extend to "cutting edge" technologies in general. Of course, with computers it's easy to do stuff as it's mostly virtual.
Other examples include, prototypes for product design, micro controller applications, niche products to be consumed locally, infrastructure things (farming water systems, wireless, your own shop with lots of capability, etc...), a small business of contract work, and others.
Also there is the enabling factor.
Let's say somebody does something simple, like do car mufflers or something. From there, they leverage that income to purchase gear they need to extend the business, or perhaps acquire new skills. That's what I was talking about, more than I was just build DARPA quality things.
What you do, is build stuff and fuck the rest of them.
It's that simple.
Perhaps you can't do it on the job --that's the case with me. You can however, do what you want to on your time and the skills you build will provide value for you later on.
There is absolutely no place on this earth where the simple equation for wealth, which is innovation applied to labor over time, does not apply.
We are being told it does not apply here, that we are a consumer economy and that the world would crash if we quit consuming shit.
Don't believe one word of it.
We have the trade deficits today, the economic trouble we do today, for one reason and one only:
We don't carry our weight as Americans. Until we fix that, we will slowly be owned by the rest of the world perfectly willing to carry theirs.
Use a non-proportional font, that's sans-serif and size it where your 80 column display is where you feel it's easiest to read.
On that font, also go for the 1:1 (square) characters, not skinny ones. That does consume some screen real-estate, but also maximizes character readability. If you've got focus problems, narrow characters will only exacerbate that over time.
For a great example, go look at this IRIX desktop screenshot here:
That's an older screenie, but the colors and fonts are good to look at.
Of all the machines I've used for very long periods of time, the SGI IRIX desktop was the most pleasant. The colors and fonts and overall positioning of things really wasn't the most dense, but it was clear and not stressful.
I've a contributing opinion.
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 2, Insightful
First, let me say I'm far away from this stuff right now. Use Linux where I can, still have my SGI up and running, and it has a SWEET X server...
In this day of virtualization and single user computing, I feel we've missed out on something special by not doing a better job with X.
A Mac, running MacOS and a PC, running winx, is essentially single user computing. Sure, there is terminal server, citrix and other similar things to get more than one user on the box, doing stuff. Really those are hacks though. Hacks we work our asses off trying to improve because we've ignored the hard work done on X.
Like a good Unix is a multi-user environment, so is X. With X, we can have one user using multiple input devices across any number of screens. That user can be connected to any number of machines, running any number of applications, each sending their display data over the wire to where the user actually is! The display is built on the local box, because that's where all the power is too.
Also, one can have the various parts of X running where they make sense. Put your window manager on one box (I like the SGI one still, so I'll run it, just for fun), X server on another, application on another, fonts on yet another still. Damn cool, if somewhat academic.
With X, we don't have to do client server. We can do just application server, and let the user interact with trusted data through the trusted application, never actually seeing the real stuff and only having the level of control we choose to export to the user, through the application. Taken a look at the kludges winx people have to go through to get that done? It's madness, yet that is exactly what they do because they really have no choice in the matter.
Heck, they really don't have simlinks and suid yet. These two things, combined with X, make for some very robust computing options that have very serious advantages on the administration side of things. One copy of some nasty big software, each users settings and environment in their user directory (where it should be, not some global cluster fuck registry), and one admin that handles all of it nicely, from wherever they happen to be.
X is just great. The idea of it is great, the power it holds is great, the utility of it is great, even if it's kind of hard to get your mind wrapped around it. It's still great.
So, what's the deal then?
The deal is mindshare, plain and simple. We have whole generations now that don't actually grok what multi-user computing is all about. They think it's shared resources, or the occasional service running on a box, or remote desktop, or some other largely single user thing.
That's the problem with X.
For those of us, lucky enough to be exposed to multiple computing environments, and who have had those environments be running software that actually knows what X is, why it is, and presents accordingly, we know the score and gladly deal with X to get at the power and leverage that for good results.
The rest simply have no idea. Enter in the applications. Damn near everything that matters is a single user affair. It's gotta be installed on the local machine, talk to another machine maybe, requires administrator permission, root, whatever, and it's just the way it is. We've got software to push software around, software to manage software, software to manage profiles or god forbid a user logs into a different box and all hell breaks loose.
Microsoft Office is a single user deal. CAD, but for those few packages that run on a Unix, is a single user deal. You name it, the most popular stuff is a single user deal.
I got the chance to run a recent build of a CAD system that still knows what X is. Guess what the developers did? They forgot about how to actually write to X, so that X can do what it is supposed to do. Some of those bad mistakes have been mentioned here, and it's all true. Those applications run like shit over the wire because they are not written in such a way as to r
They cannot be trusted even then. eg: How do you know the binary running is the one verified / certified? How about behavioral testing? User Interface issues, misalignment, etc...?
Bottom line is that you, the voter, are forced to trust a proxy in order to cast your vote.
You would do yourself and the voters a big favor by considering BOTH. They are different things.
Voter Fraud is where a voter misrepresents some element of their vote cast. Maybe it's casting more than one vote, a vote in the wrong place, a vote without entitlement to vote, etc...
The GOP seems focused on the latter, BTW. It's a touchy subject for sure. IMHO, you are doing the right thing, and will have the high ground if you are focused on getting as many voters to vote as possible, not keeping as many voters from voting as possible.
The key here is that Voter Fraud is some act on the part of the voter.
Election Fraud is where the result of the election is being manupulated. That difference between preventing as many voters as possible, and promoting as many voters as possible, is one that can be election fraud, as well as being voter fraud. One example that serves to demonstrate election fraud would be to publish information that would disqualify voters that would not otherwise be disqualified. If this is done in a discriminatory fashion, there is a solid case for it potentially being voter fraud. Could be ignorance too, and that's gonna be one for the courts for sure!
Another case of election fraud would be mis-programmed voting machines, or deliberate under / over allocation of them to impact the numbers of votes and the accuracy of the votes. (and I'm getting to the topic of accuracy in a moment) We saw some of this in Ohio big time in 2004, BTW.
Still another would be manipulating the record of the vote. This could be done to impact or prevent a recount, for example. That's totally election fraud, not voter fraud. Maybe every voter did the right thing, but the election is still hosed. That's one way to tell the difference right there.
Now, can you trust the damn things?
No. Absolutely not. I don't care if they have a paper printer fitted or not, and here is why:
When you make a mark on media, as the voter, the chain of trust between your intent and the record of the vote is complete! You know what who you want to vote for, and you can directly see the record of the vote cast. This record does not require any enabling technology to be observed and verified as being true to the intent and therefore the "right" vote cast.
When you vote with electrons, this chain of trust is broken! Really, the voter knows who they want to vote for and does something to tell the machine their intent. So far, so good. Now, here's the kicker and why we should NEVER, EVER use the machines.
What gets recorded is what the machine thinks the voter intent is! Think this part through. Let's say we walk up to the machine and cast a vote for Bob. We push the Bob button, get visual feed back, and a printed piece of paper that shows that the vote was for Bob. Feeling good right?
What if the electronic record of the vote is for Jane? How can we know? We can't actually see the electrons now can we? The machine can easily show us a Bob vote and contain a Jane vote in the record used for the tally and there is absolutely no way we can verify that didn't happen, short of direct observation and a real time tally, keyed to each vote. (and that's just stupid)
Here's another very simple way to look at it. Say I am the voting machine and I'm keeping a mental record of votes cast so that I can contribute them to the final tally. You vote Bob, and I count one for Bob. Then, I change that to Jane, after you have verified it. What evidence is there for that vote having ever been Bob? There is none. Electrons can just change, where paper will show some evidence of having been changed. The physical media is rendered less than perfect in the process of counting votes. Electronic storage devices don't exhibit this same quality on a directly observable human scale.
Put simply, it's a vote by proxy and therefore cannot be trusted.
Some will say the paper can check the electronic results. I would agree, but invoking the check i
I want agents. I want them to have the intelligence of maybe a young kid, but with huge memory and processing power. They can do stuff for me, like:
find out where Bob is,
what is the top opinion surrounding subject X,
purchase this item for me, not cheap ass, but almost cheap ass, and get it here by next week
connect me to Jane, via my internal IRC / Text interface, we need to talk
tell me when Frank is in the building
tell me when Joe does something he normally does not do, and that implies just keeping tabs on joe
what does darglefrabble mean
has anybody done X, if so, deliver me the goods on how, why, when?
etc...
I think it's rapidly becoming doable to embed a computer within us. Nothing fancy. Everybody talks about graphics of some kind, Terminator style. No thanks on that. Serial text interface would be just fine. Link it to the sense of touch, or something, and let me just learn to talk to it, like I learn to talk to all the other stuff connected to my brain.
Make that a two way, and have some storage, and it's golden!
It would be the kind of thing that could be ignored, or used while doing other things. Great for those really ugly meetings huh?
I had an experience similar to this once. Was with a bunch of older HAMs on a field week. We setup all the gear, tents, and such and just played for a week. Once evening, sitting around the fire, I realized I was not completely in the loop. Those guys were watching a blinking light, following another conversation... having an embedded device would be like that.
Oh, make it motion powered or something too. That way, normal activity powers the thing, for the most part, limiting it's overall use. It does not need to be all that quick either. When in the presense of a net connection, it talks to the agent. When not, it can do calcs, retrieve stored info, execute small programs, etc...
There! Wasn't that more interesting than this crap story?
IMHO, most media today leans corporate left and corporate right. This is missed because the one dimensional model is not up to the task of actually helping us quantify and deal with bias.
So, why bother with a service like yours, if it is lacking in this way?
Sure, there is a ton of meta-garbage out there, but there is also a lot of really great commentary and fact checking.
I think you are spot on, in that your statements match my experience.
This current administration has tested my political awareness to an extent I didn't think was possible. It took going to the net and reading, and more importantly, HAVING CONVERSATIONS, to ferret out the reality of things.
The net, being a two way medium really changes the game. It's pretty easy to just consume the traditional media sources and be happy with that. Do it in a casual enough manner and it will all add up too.
Having some conversations with people will just shatter that in an instant, and that's exactly what happened with me and political issues.
Been using the net since '91, pre web. Didn't do politics much at all. My focus was tech and entertainment, just like most everybody else. Those conversations were no different than those I had with real people near me. The primary advantage was a greater body of participants, meaning most any subject matter could be discussed and shared with others of interest. Absolutely great stuff and honestly a nice chunk of how I make my living these days.
That all has moved into more mainstream discourse and the impact is still rippling through. I find it very interesting that we are having the open -vs- closed / smart -vs- dumb network discussions right as these things intersect the greater political discourse! With this administration in particular, we would have seen far greater trouble had we not had the venue to fact check and sanity check what we were being fed.
There is one downside though, and maybe this relates to the topic:
The ability for people to self-select and seek only affirmation is far greater now than it once was. The fairness doctrine was aimed squarely at that, kind of forcing people to consume enough news and commentary diversity to prevent simple affirmation from gestating into bad territory.
With that doctrine removed, we get news-tainment now. On one hand, it's good as in "The Daily Show" kind of good. Younger people can watch that show, stay informed and entertained. On the other hand, we get Hannity! People can watch that show, but get seriously misinformed yet are still entertained.
Right now there is a nice split between older news consumers, still largely depending on the traditional media sources, Gen X'ers like myself who will easily choose the net in fairly significant numbers, and the growing younger class who grew up with it by default.
IMHO, the perception of narrowing, in the spirit of how I think it's being presented here, will diminish as the older crowd moves on.
All this administration needed to do was demonstrate that was warranted and it could have had Congress modify the law on a vote. Maybe it's ok if we do that. Maybe it's possible to do in an accountable way?
Just doing it, with no accountability, is the core problem.
That's a law violation and a crime against the people. That debt needs to be paid.
Hope Dodd is up for another stand or two, because they are not gonna yield on this one.
IMHO, processing power is likely adequate for this right now. Maybe such an intelligence would run more slowly, but it running probably lies within the scope of our current tech.
The only barrier is our understanding, not the available compute power. Lots of interesting discussion here on that part of things, BTW! Thanks everyone.
My worry is that an AI really isn't gonna have much in common with us. Part of what makes us is our bodies and the condition they impose on us. Something running on a machine somewhere is gonna have a different condition and with that, very different motivations! Programming in those things that would make it easier to relate to us, and us to it, really is futile, IMHO. And, if the thing reaches our level of thought, it's gonna know it!
Ok, so there are baddies and pr0n on line. That's reality.
What they are not reporting is how to deal with this as a parent. Two kinds of parents. Geek ones and non-geek ones. From there, you get two more sub-types. Parents who take the time and parents that don't.
Just pulling numbers outta my ass, I think it's safe to day only 1 in 4 parents actually share the Internet with their kids and...
THAT IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM.
So fix that and suddenly we don't have this "but think of the kiddies" scare.
(From that 1 in 4 parents, who has taken the time)
1. Surf with your kids.
2. Build a trust relationship. They need to know you are there to help them and you both are there to learn stuff.
If you hear about them doing something bad, before they tell you about it, they get hammered really hard. On the other hand, if they run into a situation and bring it to you, they get help with it, not harsh judgement.
Kids who are looking at pr0n online have needs that are not being met otherwise. It's ugly, for some parents, but they need to deal with that and the pr0n issue will go away. This is true for most online behaviors. Deal with it.
3. It's ok to lie on the net. Sort all that out with them and establish good behaviors with them. This is why you surf with them --to provide context.
Lots more, but just doing those will bring the kid - parent online relationship to a level that is safe.
We need to see more articles like this, and far fewer scary ones. Nothing worse than scared and ignorant people trying to parent kids.
Take your iPod, and use the ipod e-book formatter to put some nice books on your iPod, for reading while you listen to some great music. You can even make playlists that go with the story line!
Things don't reach a state of running very well without people thinking about how to get there. Your downtime is a chance to explore an idea, setup test environments, write scripts to nail annoying and recurring problems, work on your budget justification, yes --surf some/., etc...
Ongoing investment in these things pays off. You are surprised less, plan better, and leverage your people, hardware and software better.
Don't worry, you won't get all the way there. Software update cockups, user error, and entropy in general will keep you busy. But, having done these things, the real downtime you get after that is rock solid! Listen to a few mp3's, surf/., read about some new tech, etc... you will have earned it.
Moving the dial, watching the paddle move, just hooked me right there. At 9 or so, the idea of the TV being something interactive was really compelling.
After a time, got a VCS, play it to this day. (Yeah, baby! KABOOM! is always good for a quick run or two to wake a person up!)
I quit doing win32 tech support for free sometime in the early '00's. I will, on occasion, setup a new computer, or rebuild one.
When that happens, I load it up with Open Office, etc... and explain the new and free stuff. I also explain why their computer got all hosed up, and that lots of shovelware, freeware, etc... can cause them lots of problems. OSS is reliable, free and useful.
From there, they get to make their own choices, knowing they are largely on their own. (I'm not likely to rebuild again, if they've done that crap.)
If possible, I'll answer the how to question, with an OSS application, as well.
As noted elsewhere, the no license key bit is getting powerful these days. I leverage that a lot.
Goes it's 3-5K miles between oil changes without having to add oil to boot. These standards are totally doable.
If that level of performance was possible then, we really should be seeing ~50 or so MPG now. I don't buy cars all that often. My next one won't be American, just like the last one wasn't. Producing shitty cars does more to harm the environment than anything else we do with cars does.
All this crying and whining about regulations is exactly why almost nothing but American Standard toilets is made in the US anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
and hobbling the phones.
Mostly I don't care about these things. The few times I have, it's been a total pain to find out they want some money for this, disabled that, branded and broke this, and so on....
Funny, my kids ended up with a cheap ass Cricket phone plan. Mostly in city, moderate coverage, the usual discount deal. However, all the stuff on their phones just works and guess what? They use the hell out of it!
Most people would explore and play with their phones more, if they didn't fear some bullshit charge at the end of the month.
I wonder how many of those "suddenly without TV" people will just say, "fuck it" and do other things?
Tried it here in PDX with a DTV capture card. Most all the channels I expect are there and working nicely --and that's on a little goofy antenna.
Picture and sound were great. Too bad there is little on, and a TON of commercials.
and documentation for the file formats. Put this on human readable media, not electronic.
When they open it up, interfacing to the devices will be a straightforward exercise.
If, somehow it goes longer, well you've covered that contingency.
on things at the scale of the DARPA bit.
However, that does not extend to "cutting edge" technologies in general. Of course, with computers it's easy to do stuff as it's mostly virtual.
Other examples include, prototypes for product design, micro controller applications, niche products to be consumed locally, infrastructure things (farming water systems, wireless, your own shop with lots of capability, etc...), a small business of contract work, and others.
Also there is the enabling factor.
Let's say somebody does something simple, like do car mufflers or something. From there, they leverage that income to purchase gear they need to extend the business, or perhaps acquire new skills. That's what I was talking about, more than I was just build DARPA quality things.
What you do, is build stuff and fuck the rest of them.
It's that simple.
Perhaps you can't do it on the job --that's the case with me. You can however, do what you want to on your time and the skills you build will provide value for you later on.
There is absolutely no place on this earth where the simple equation for wealth, which is innovation applied to labor over time, does not apply.
We are being told it does not apply here, that we are a consumer economy and that the world would crash if we quit consuming shit.
Don't believe one word of it.
We have the trade deficits today, the economic trouble we do today, for one reason and one only:
We don't carry our weight as Americans. Until we fix that, we will slowly be owned by the rest of the world perfectly willing to carry theirs.
Most elegant and powerful 8bitter ever.
RIP that incarnation of Moto :(
damn, I thought for sure they could just run the clock out on that one
Now it's clear we've got a very significant fraction of the Congress involved in this stuff. There really is no other reason to do what they just did.
Use a non-proportional font, that's sans-serif and size it where your 80 column display is where you feel it's easiest to read.
On that font, also go for the 1:1 (square) characters, not skinny ones. That does consume some screen real-estate, but also maximizes character readability. If you've got focus problems, narrow characters will only exacerbate that over time.
For a great example, go look at this IRIX desktop screenshot here:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/irix53
That's an older screenie, but the colors and fonts are good to look at.
Of all the machines I've used for very long periods of time, the SGI IRIX desktop was the most pleasant. The colors and fonts and overall positioning of things really wasn't the most dense, but it was clear and not stressful.
First, let me say I'm far away from this stuff right now. Use Linux where I can, still have my SGI up and running, and it has a SWEET X server...
In this day of virtualization and single user computing, I feel we've missed out on something special by not doing a better job with X.
A Mac, running MacOS and a PC, running winx, is essentially single user computing. Sure, there is terminal server, citrix and other similar things to get more than one user on the box, doing stuff. Really those are hacks though. Hacks we work our asses off trying to improve because we've ignored the hard work done on X.
Like a good Unix is a multi-user environment, so is X. With X, we can have one user using multiple input devices across any number of screens. That user can be connected to any number of machines, running any number of applications, each sending their display data over the wire to where the user actually is! The display is built on the local box, because that's where all the power is too.
Also, one can have the various parts of X running where they make sense. Put your window manager on one box (I like the SGI one still, so I'll run it, just for fun), X server on another, application on another, fonts on yet another still. Damn cool, if somewhat academic.
With X, we don't have to do client server. We can do just application server, and let the user interact with trusted data through the trusted application, never actually seeing the real stuff and only having the level of control we choose to export to the user, through the application. Taken a look at the kludges winx people have to go through to get that done? It's madness, yet that is exactly what they do because they really have no choice in the matter.
Heck, they really don't have simlinks and suid yet. These two things, combined with X, make for some very robust computing options that have very serious advantages on the administration side of things. One copy of some nasty big software, each users settings and environment in their user directory (where it should be, not some global cluster fuck registry), and one admin that handles all of it nicely, from wherever they happen to be.
X is just great. The idea of it is great, the power it holds is great, the utility of it is great, even if it's kind of hard to get your mind wrapped around it. It's still great.
So, what's the deal then?
The deal is mindshare, plain and simple. We have whole generations now that don't actually grok what multi-user computing is all about. They think it's shared resources, or the occasional service running on a box, or remote desktop, or some other largely single user thing.
That's the problem with X.
For those of us, lucky enough to be exposed to multiple computing environments, and who have had those environments be running software that actually knows what X is, why it is, and presents accordingly, we know the score and gladly deal with X to get at the power and leverage that for good results.
The rest simply have no idea. Enter in the applications. Damn near everything that matters is a single user affair. It's gotta be installed on the local machine, talk to another machine maybe, requires administrator permission, root, whatever, and it's just the way it is. We've got software to push software around, software to manage software, software to manage profiles or god forbid a user logs into a different box and all hell breaks loose.
Microsoft Office is a single user deal. CAD, but for those few packages that run on a Unix, is a single user deal. You name it, the most popular stuff is a single user deal.
I got the chance to run a recent build of a CAD system that still knows what X is. Guess what the developers did? They forgot about how to actually write to X, so that X can do what it is supposed to do. Some of those bad mistakes have been mentioned here, and it's all true. Those applications run like shit over the wire because they are not written in such a way as to r
They cannot be trusted even then. eg: How do you know the binary running is the one verified / certified? How about behavioral testing? User Interface issues, misalignment, etc...?
Bottom line is that you, the voter, are forced to trust a proxy in order to cast your vote.
You would do yourself and the voters a big favor by considering BOTH. They are different things.
Voter Fraud is where a voter misrepresents some element of their vote cast. Maybe it's casting more than one vote, a vote in the wrong place, a vote without entitlement to vote, etc...
The GOP seems focused on the latter, BTW. It's a touchy subject for sure. IMHO, you are doing the right thing, and will have the high ground if you are focused on getting as many voters to vote as possible, not keeping as many voters from voting as possible.
The key here is that Voter Fraud is some act on the part of the voter.
Election Fraud is where the result of the election is being manupulated. That difference between preventing as many voters as possible, and promoting as many voters as possible, is one that can be election fraud, as well as being voter fraud. One example that serves to demonstrate election fraud would be to publish information that would disqualify voters that would not otherwise be disqualified. If this is done in a discriminatory fashion, there is a solid case for it potentially being voter fraud. Could be ignorance too, and that's gonna be one for the courts for sure!
Another case of election fraud would be mis-programmed voting machines, or deliberate under / over allocation of them to impact the numbers of votes and the accuracy of the votes. (and I'm getting to the topic of accuracy in a moment) We saw some of this in Ohio big time in 2004, BTW.
Still another would be manipulating the record of the vote. This could be done to impact or prevent a recount, for example. That's totally election fraud, not voter fraud. Maybe every voter did the right thing, but the election is still hosed. That's one way to tell the difference right there.
Now, can you trust the damn things?
No. Absolutely not. I don't care if they have a paper printer fitted or not, and here is why:
When you make a mark on media, as the voter, the chain of trust between your intent and the record of the vote is complete! You know what who you want to vote for, and you can directly see the record of the vote cast. This record does not require any enabling technology to be observed and verified as being true to the intent and therefore the "right" vote cast.
When you vote with electrons, this chain of trust is broken! Really, the voter knows who they want to vote for and does something to tell the machine their intent. So far, so good. Now, here's the kicker and why we should NEVER, EVER use the machines.
What gets recorded is what the machine thinks the voter intent is! Think this part through. Let's say we walk up to the machine and cast a vote for Bob. We push the Bob button, get visual feed back, and a printed piece of paper that shows that the vote was for Bob. Feeling good right?
What if the electronic record of the vote is for Jane? How can we know? We can't actually see the electrons now can we? The machine can easily show us a Bob vote and contain a Jane vote in the record used for the tally and there is absolutely no way we can verify that didn't happen, short of direct observation and a real time tally, keyed to each vote. (and that's just stupid)
Here's another very simple way to look at it. Say I am the voting machine and I'm keeping a mental record of votes cast so that I can contribute them to the final tally. You vote Bob, and I count one for Bob. Then, I change that to Jane, after you have verified it. What evidence is there for that vote having ever been Bob? There is none. Electrons can just change, where paper will show some evidence of having been changed. The physical media is rendered less than perfect in the process of counting votes. Electronic storage devices don't exhibit this same quality on a directly observable human scale.
Put simply, it's a vote by proxy and therefore cannot be trusted.
Some will say the paper can check the electronic results. I would agree, but invoking the check i
Set up a mini-casino and have some games running. Be creative with the prizes, and hand everybody their chips at the door.
...happy fun tech!
I want agents. I want them to have the intelligence of maybe a young kid, but with huge memory and processing power. They can do stuff for me, like:
find out where Bob is,
what is the top opinion surrounding subject X,
purchase this item for me, not cheap ass, but almost cheap ass, and get it here by next week
connect me to Jane, via my internal IRC / Text interface, we need to talk
tell me when Frank is in the building
tell me when Joe does something he normally does not do, and that implies just keeping tabs on joe
what does darglefrabble mean
has anybody done X, if so, deliver me the goods on how, why, when?
etc...
I think it's rapidly becoming doable to embed a computer within us. Nothing fancy. Everybody talks about graphics of some kind, Terminator style. No thanks on that. Serial text interface would be just fine. Link it to the sense of touch, or something, and let me just learn to talk to it, like I learn to talk to all the other stuff connected to my brain.
Make that a two way, and have some storage, and it's golden!
It would be the kind of thing that could be ignored, or used while doing other things. Great for those really ugly meetings huh?
I had an experience similar to this once. Was with a bunch of older HAMs on a field week. We setup all the gear, tents, and such and just played for a week. Once evening, sitting around the fire, I realized I was not completely in the loop. Those guys were watching a blinking light, following another conversation... having an embedded device would be like that.
Oh, make it motion powered or something too. That way, normal activity powers the thing, for the most part, limiting it's overall use. It does not need to be all that quick either. When in the presense of a net connection, it talks to the agent. When not, it can do calcs, retrieve stored info, execute small programs, etc...
There! Wasn't that more interesting than this crap story?
Of political alignment?
IMHO, most media today leans corporate left and corporate right. This is missed because the one dimensional model is not up to the task of actually helping us quantify and deal with bias.
So, why bother with a service like yours, if it is lacking in this way?
Sure, there is a ton of meta-garbage out there, but there is also a lot of really great commentary and fact checking.
I think you are spot on, in that your statements match my experience.
This current administration has tested my political awareness to an extent I didn't think was possible. It took going to the net and reading, and more importantly, HAVING CONVERSATIONS, to ferret out the reality of things.
The net, being a two way medium really changes the game. It's pretty easy to just consume the traditional media sources and be happy with that. Do it in a casual enough manner and it will all add up too.
Having some conversations with people will just shatter that in an instant, and that's exactly what happened with me and political issues.
Been using the net since '91, pre web. Didn't do politics much at all. My focus was tech and entertainment, just like most everybody else. Those conversations were no different than those I had with real people near me. The primary advantage was a greater body of participants, meaning most any subject matter could be discussed and shared with others of interest. Absolutely great stuff and honestly a nice chunk of how I make my living these days.
That all has moved into more mainstream discourse and the impact is still rippling through. I find it very interesting that we are having the open -vs- closed / smart -vs- dumb network discussions right as these things intersect the greater political discourse! With this administration in particular, we would have seen far greater trouble had we not had the venue to fact check and sanity check what we were being fed.
There is one downside though, and maybe this relates to the topic:
The ability for people to self-select and seek only affirmation is far greater now than it once was. The fairness doctrine was aimed squarely at that, kind of forcing people to consume enough news and commentary diversity to prevent simple affirmation from gestating into bad territory.
With that doctrine removed, we get news-tainment now. On one hand, it's good as in "The Daily Show" kind of good. Younger people can watch that show, stay informed and entertained. On the other hand, we get Hannity! People can watch that show, but get seriously misinformed yet are still entertained.
Right now there is a nice split between older news consumers, still largely depending on the traditional media sources, Gen X'ers like myself who will easily choose the net in fairly significant numbers, and the growing younger class who grew up with it by default.
IMHO, the perception of narrowing, in the spirit of how I think it's being presented here, will diminish as the older crowd moves on.
Seriously, this is a loaded proposition!
"When is the last time you beat your wife?"
One baseline metric of wealth is quality of life; specifically, free time and the ability to choose what to do with that time.
Being in the board room, may not deliver that as well as it will deliver dollars.
...too!
All this administration needed to do was demonstrate that was warranted and it could have had Congress modify the law on a vote. Maybe it's ok if we do that. Maybe it's possible to do in an accountable way?
Just doing it, with no accountability, is the core problem.
That's a law violation and a crime against the people. That debt needs to be paid.
Hope Dodd is up for another stand or two, because they are not gonna yield on this one.
human intelligence.
IMHO, processing power is likely adequate for this right now. Maybe such an intelligence would run more slowly, but it running probably lies within the scope of our current tech.
The only barrier is our understanding, not the available compute power. Lots of interesting discussion here on that part of things, BTW! Thanks everyone.
My worry is that an AI really isn't gonna have much in common with us. Part of what makes us is our bodies and the condition they impose on us. Something running on a machine somewhere is gonna have a different condition and with that, very different motivations! Programming in those things that would make it easier to relate to us, and us to it, really is futile, IMHO. And, if the thing reaches our level of thought, it's gonna know it!
What are the implications of that?
Totally.
That's the annoyance.
Ok, so there are baddies and pr0n on line. That's reality.
What they are not reporting is how to deal with this as a parent. Two kinds of parents. Geek ones and non-geek ones. From there, you get two more sub-types. Parents who take the time and parents that don't.
Just pulling numbers outta my ass, I think it's safe to day only 1 in 4 parents actually share the Internet with their kids and...
THAT IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM.
So fix that and suddenly we don't have this "but think of the kiddies" scare.
(From that 1 in 4 parents, who has taken the time)
1. Surf with your kids.
2. Build a trust relationship. They need to know you are there to help them and you both are there to learn stuff.
If you hear about them doing something bad, before they tell you about it, they get hammered really hard. On the other hand, if they run into a situation and bring it to you, they get help with it, not harsh judgement.
Kids who are looking at pr0n online have needs that are not being met otherwise. It's ugly, for some parents, but they need to deal with that and the pr0n issue will go away. This is true for most online behaviors. Deal with it.
3. It's ok to lie on the net. Sort all that out with them and establish good behaviors with them. This is why you surf with them --to provide context.
Lots more, but just doing those will bring the kid - parent online relationship to a level that is safe.
We need to see more articles like this, and far fewer scary ones. Nothing worse than scared and ignorant people trying to parent kids.
Books are just excellent.
Another more suggestion:
Take your iPod, and use the ipod e-book formatter to put some nice books on your iPod, for reading while you listen to some great music. You can even make playlists that go with the story line!
You can convert e-books here: http://www.ambience.sk/ipod-ebook-creator/ipod-book-notes-text-conversion.php
Some great books here: http://www.craphound.com/index.php?cat=5
and here: http://www.geocities.com/davidbainaa/
and here: http://www.baen.com/library/
Free, or better Creative Commons books, are regularly mentioned on Boing Boing as well.
Research and Development.
/., etc...
/., read about some new tech, etc... you will have earned it.
Always it's this.
Things don't reach a state of running very well without people thinking about how to get there. Your downtime is a chance to explore an idea, setup test environments, write scripts to nail annoying and recurring problems, work on your budget justification, yes --surf some
Ongoing investment in these things pays off. You are surprised less, plan better, and leverage your people, hardware and software better.
Don't worry, you won't get all the way there. Software update cockups, user error, and entropy in general will keep you busy. But, having done these things, the real downtime you get after that is rock solid! Listen to a few mp3's, surf
Moving the dial, watching the paddle move, just hooked me right there. At 9 or so, the idea of the TV being something interactive was really compelling.
After a time, got a VCS, play it to this day. (Yeah, baby! KABOOM! is always good for a quick run or two to wake a person up!)
I quit doing win32 tech support for free sometime in the early '00's. I will, on occasion, setup a new computer, or rebuild one.
When that happens, I load it up with Open Office, etc... and explain the new and free stuff. I also explain why their computer got all hosed up, and that lots of shovelware, freeware, etc... can cause them lots of problems. OSS is reliable, free and useful.
From there, they get to make their own choices, knowing they are largely on their own. (I'm not likely to rebuild again, if they've done that crap.)
If possible, I'll answer the how to question, with an OSS application, as well.
As noted elsewhere, the no license key bit is getting powerful these days. I leverage that a lot.
...and it's got 275K miles on it!
Goes it's 3-5K miles between oil changes without having to add oil to boot. These standards are totally doable.
If that level of performance was possible then, we really should be seeing ~50 or so MPG now. I don't buy cars all that often. My next one won't be American, just like the last one wasn't. Producing shitty cars does more to harm the environment than anything else we do with cars does.
All this crying and whining about regulations is exactly why almost nothing but American Standard toilets is made in the US anymore.
Depressing really.