Until airports and other high-density pedestrian areas get bluetooth spam senders installed that allow them to saturate the area with periodic bluetooth spam. Yay. Another victory for economic "choice."
Local governments outside of the 5,000 person "small town" have almost never provided any meaningful residential infrastructure outside of water and sewer. The last "high tech" thing they did was to franchise out the cable monopoly. They certainly won't build a massive, big-ticket fiber optic infrastructure. If they do, they'll just farm it out to an outside contractor to build and run, and we'll all get REALLY raped, both on the building and the execution of it. There's little the government does that I want -- too expensive, poorly run, and there's always someone getting rich off of it.
I'll buy into the idea of a new mail infrastructure, but it'll be a decade before SMTP goes away, and the PKI infrastructure has to be something better than the BS we get from Verisign.
I'm surprised that didn't happen 5 years ago or whenever spamming first got started, and it was pretty much a given that there was a fat, lazy dork on the other end with a long track record of getting beat up.
I'm afraid now there's organized or other criminal elements involved, and they know how to play the physical intimidation game a LOT better than you and I, and they play for keeps.
The government is too busy busting bong makers and other "terrorists" destabilizing the American Way of Life.
Big business has done a great job of undermining all aspects of government regulation of business activity -- it took outright criminal theft at Tyco, Worldcom and Enron before the government cared. Microsoft is allowed to run an illegal monopoly with no penality. Fraud, churn and deception at almost every investment bank and mutual fund. The examples go on, but the basic idea is that the government is unwilling to go after massive corporate fraud unless there's a PR risk to the President.
More insidious I think is the level of "responsible" corporate complicity in spam. There was a great article in Sunday's Minneapolis Star Tribune about the level of involvement by businesses one would assume have too much at stake to get involved in spam; they don't spam directly, but they're more than willing to deal in email info, which ultimately leads them to deal with spammers. Equifax, Experion and so on are willing participants in linking email with credit information and other personal data. Anyway, these people are "Platinum Club" members of the Republican political machine. Exposing them to news articles about spam and black-hat activities, even with a degree or two of seperation, is a major political problem for the Republicans.
Republicans also depend heavily on the "car dealer" economic-level entrepenuer, the local bigshots who bankroll house seats. This socioeconomic group more than likely has a lot of involvement in the direct marketing game, and they can't be pissed off, either.
There's also some "legitimate" ideological rationalization. The Republicans are staunch allies of anything associated with corporate free speech. Any limitation on what or how a corporation can send its message runs into a whole gauntlent of Republican ideaologues who insist on the corporation's "right" to free speech in all realms, including the commercial.
The basic problem is that the DOJ is a political institution. It's not a neutral enforcement institution seeking to punish lawbreakers. Who and how it decides to punish people are political decisions, deeply influenced by the political needs and goals of the administration. Spam and spammers have too many growing ties to people important to the Republican administration and its pro-corporate, pro-business financial backers. A real crackdown on spam would have shockwaves that would hurt them financially and politically, and with the election only a 366 days away, you can bet that pissing these guys off is something they don't want.
Unfortunately, I think we have 10-20 more years before we start to see really efficient policing of the Internet. Laws and law enforcement agencies need to be changed and they need time to learn how to efficiently handle electronic crime
What I think we'll end up with is one of two things:
(1) The internet largely hobbled by draconian rules, regulations and laws and left unusable except for EDI among large corporations. Think of "national security", "public morality" and "piracy" as the reasons here.
(2) The "internet" still exists, but most people connect through "super ISPs" that filter, process and protect their users. Unlike AOL, they actually will be responsible for protecting PCs connected to their networks.
...when they're making the kind of money even Google makes? The two founders of Google must be making several million dollars a year (if Google's profits of $150M a year are accurate).
I'd collect $10-20 and then go find something *interesting* to do. I'm sure running google would be interesting, but there's a whole huge world out there to be enjoyed, and $20M would make it very interesting indeed.
It's news because the western news media has done a great job of swallowing the idea that today's China is about being pro-capitalist and pro-Western. Add in a healthy dose of multiculturism and self-criticism of Western democracy, and you have a potent cocktail capable of making you forget that China has jailed, punished or outright killed as many or more of its own citizens in the pursuit of a political goal as any other nation in history -- and continues to do so as a matter of public policy!
You'd think they'd have more success with this if they made it compatibile with sh(1). Even sh(1) isn't the right metaphor for the Windows environment, adding whatever syntactical extensions or new commands that satisfy the Windows environment shouldn't be too hard.
By providing a sh(1) compatible shell, they could much more easily coopt UNIX users, which I think is what they want to begin with.
"We get a lot of mail complaining about people committing crimes via email. But since we're only really interested in arresting terrorists and drug dealers, we don't have the resources to go after these people. And even if we did, we think this is just an aggressive sales model, or so our Wall Street overlords tell us."
But notice all the lame safety information, including the recommended cushy surface surrounding it. "When I was a kid", you were lucky if the thing (and what the fsck are they called?) was surrounded by sand.
I can distinctly remember a couple of them that were in asphalt playgrounds, where falling off meant you went sailing onto good ol' asphalt, scraping the shit out of yourself and knocking a tooth loose if you didn't know how to take a fall right.
I'm always amused (bemused?) when I see these playgrounds that look more like a rubber rooms at the asylum than playgrounds. We played all of our games in elementary school on asphalt or a dirt/crushed-gravel combination. The latter was for football, the former was for kickball. And we were allowed to throw the kickball at people to get them out. I think there might have been the occasional call for "no headhunting", but most of them time that was OK, too.
And if you had recess after lunch, too much riding on the spinning thing made you yak, or at least feel kind of green for a while.
By "spinning thing", I'm referring to a bit of playground equipment that consisted of a round turntable, usually with 4-8 handrails set along the radius of the turntable at equal distances. A couple of people would get on, and one or more people would grab the handrails and run, setting the thing spinning, fast enough that if you were on it you really had to hang on or you'd get thrown off. I'd wager a 10 year old with decent strength could get it going 60 RPM or faster, although it was hard to sustain the speed unless the pusher didn't jump on.
The only ones I've ever seen have been made out of steel, and I haven't seen one in a park or playground in a long time. It's one of those playground toys that one kind in 5000 might get hurt on (falling off, etc), so they're probably not insurable. Which is too bad, since they were a lot of fun.
...are its usage bias of the products they review -- they assume that every product they review is made to satisfy some everyman need, and products built for speciality audiences or specifically designed to do one thing REALLY well and 3 other things just OK get dinged badly in reviews, even though the one thing they do really well may make the difference (eg, 50" HDTV with shitty speakers but FANTASTIC PQ).
This would be easily mitigated if the product reviews were serious articles with a lot more commentary and fact included in them, rather than a half-dozen photos, 4 paragraphs and a ranking table. An entire issue of CR is about 40-50 pages, with photos and tables taking up half the space.
If they reviewed the same amount of stuff every month but the magazine was another 50-100 pages of actual written content discussing the products, the review process, etc, the apparent everyman bias wouldn't be as bothersome AND the magazine would last me longer than the taxi and takeoff of an airplane flight.
I wonder if its not the electronics industry that's slowing HDTV and other standards, but the MPAA and its ilk concerned about high-quality copies of its product.
Although the electronics industry, in true patent-lock-in fashion is waging a war for "its" standards.
I'd love to see NPR documentaries and programs available as downloads from the iTunes music store. It's great that they have audiobooks available, but being able to load up the CD player or player for long trips with a few hours of NPR documentaries or shows would be awesome. The beauty of this is that it wouldn't deprive them of any revenue, and in fact would be a great way for them to make extra money by selling older documentaries that right now are just sitting on some shelf not being aired.
The reason they want to keep pot illegal is that nobody owns a patent on it and it does not serve anyone's power interests to have it legal.
They would much, much rather you take THEIR mind-altering drugs instead -- anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, wakeup drugs, sleeping drugs. These drugs enable them to keep you in line and productive, in addition to the nice, patent-pending profit margins they provide the drug industry.
We've got a good start on it -- kids these days hit the ritalin in elementary school, switch to paxil or prozac in high school, and move on to ativan and others in college and adulthood. It's only a matter of time until you're considered fucked if you're NOT on drugs.
And not running or installing an application because you couldn't install some spyware is a perfectly valid and desirable outcome, since it pushes the whole free-app-with-spyware "model" into the light of day.
No more difficult than it is on any of the cable/sat music channels right now, all of which presumably have the blessing of the recording industry right now.
MIT's system is only marginally different in that someone you know or you might actually get to control what gets played once in a while. For the most part, though, you don't know what's being played and its like taping the radio, albeit with no commercials. Great if you want to put together canned mixes (the commercial variants being more highly genre specific).
Finally, marketing has little to do with the UI in windows.
Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on the claim that marketing has little to do with UI claim. I'd like to believe that a bunch of really smart people -- graphic designers, coders, UI experts -- designed the UI specifically to maximize usability. But I don't.
The steering, placement of MS products and general marketing influence is ALL OVER Windows UI. I think marketing has a HUGE say in what goes where in the Windows OS and how it operates. Furthermore, so much of the OS development is *guided* by marketing wishes that it can't help affect not only UI but operation aspects of the Windows internals.
If they had launched these things on the upswing of the economy, they might have actually caught on as a nitch device, or at least as a "gotta have" for the hip do-nothing maketing technophiles in many companies, leading to at least halfway decent sales.
Instead they were launched at the *bottom* of the economy, nobody had any capital money, and those that did sure as hell weren't dropping it on something like tablet PC, which was a solution in search of a problem.
Notice that most of the ads showed it replacing the cocktail napkin? Note to Microsoft: if there are cocktails, my laptop is at home.
Slashdot Mirror
Until airports and other high-density pedestrian areas get bluetooth spam senders installed that allow them to saturate the area with periodic bluetooth spam. Yay. Another victory for economic "choice."
Local governments outside of the 5,000 person "small town" have almost never provided any meaningful residential infrastructure outside of water and sewer. The last "high tech" thing they did was to franchise out the cable monopoly. They certainly won't build a massive, big-ticket fiber optic infrastructure. If they do, they'll just farm it out to an outside contractor to build and run, and we'll all get REALLY raped, both on the building and the execution of it. There's little the government does that I want -- too expensive, poorly run, and there's always someone getting rich off of it.
I'll buy into the idea of a new mail infrastructure, but it'll be a decade before SMTP goes away, and the PKI infrastructure has to be something better than the BS we get from Verisign.
I'm surprised that didn't happen 5 years ago or whenever spamming first got started, and it was pretty much a given that there was a fat, lazy dork on the other end with a long track record of getting beat up.
I'm afraid now there's organized or other criminal elements involved, and they know how to play the physical intimidation game a LOT better than you and I, and they play for keeps.
The rule of thumb is that if you're not listening to it in the format it came in, you're breaking the law, at least according to "the industry."
Yes, I'm familiar with fair use, but I don't think the industry thinks it applies.
The basic problem is that the DOJ is a political institution. It's not a neutral enforcement institution seeking to punish lawbreakers. Who and how it decides to punish people are political decisions, deeply influenced by the political needs and goals of the administration. Spam and spammers have too many growing ties to people important to the Republican administration and its pro-corporate, pro-business financial backers. A real crackdown on spam would have shockwaves that would hurt them financially and politically, and with the election only a 366 days away, you can bet that pissing these guys off is something they don't want.
Unfortunately, I think we have 10-20 more years before we start to see really efficient policing of the Internet. Laws and law enforcement agencies need to be changed and they need time to learn how to efficiently handle electronic crime
What I think we'll end up with is one of two things:
(1) The internet largely hobbled by draconian rules, regulations and laws and left unusable except for EDI among large corporations. Think of "national security", "public morality" and "piracy" as the reasons here.
(2) The "internet" still exists, but most people connect through "super ISPs" that filter, process and protect their users. Unlike AOL, they actually will be responsible for protecting PCs connected to their networks.
...when they're making the kind of money even Google makes? The two founders of Google must be making several million dollars a year (if Google's profits of $150M a year are accurate).
I'd collect $10-20 and then go find something *interesting* to do. I'm sure running google would be interesting, but there's a whole huge world out there to be enjoyed, and $20M would make it very interesting indeed.
It's news because the western news media has done a great job of swallowing the idea that today's China is about being pro-capitalist and pro-Western. Add in a healthy dose of multiculturism and self-criticism of Western democracy, and you have a potent cocktail capable of making you forget that China has jailed, punished or outright killed as many or more of its own citizens in the pursuit of a political goal as any other nation in history -- and continues to do so as a matter of public policy!
Why does MS insist on reinventing the wheel?
You'd think they'd have more success with this if they made it compatibile with sh(1). Even sh(1) isn't the right metaphor for the Windows environment, adding whatever syntactical extensions or new commands that satisfy the Windows environment shouldn't be too hard.
By providing a sh(1) compatible shell, they could much more easily coopt UNIX users, which I think is what they want to begin with.
"We get a lot of mail complaining about people committing crimes via email. But since we're only really interested in arresting terrorists and drug dealers, we don't have the resources to go after these people. And even if we did, we think this is just an aggressive sales model, or so our Wall Street overlords tell us."
What's truly damning is the corallary message -- nothing can hurt me.
But notice all the lame safety information, including the recommended cushy surface surrounding it. "When I was a kid", you were lucky if the thing (and what the fsck are they called?) was surrounded by sand.
I can distinctly remember a couple of them that were in asphalt playgrounds, where falling off meant you went sailing onto good ol' asphalt, scraping the shit out of yourself and knocking a tooth loose if you didn't know how to take a fall right.
I'm always amused (bemused?) when I see these playgrounds that look more like a rubber rooms at the asylum than playgrounds. We played all of our games in elementary school on asphalt or a dirt/crushed-gravel combination. The latter was for football, the former was for kickball. And we were allowed to throw the kickball at people to get them out. I think there might have been the occasional call for "no headhunting", but most of them time that was OK, too.
And if you had recess after lunch, too much riding on the spinning thing made you yak, or at least feel kind of green for a while.
By "spinning thing", I'm referring to a bit of playground equipment that consisted of a round turntable, usually with 4-8 handrails set along the radius of the turntable at equal distances. A couple of people would get on, and one or more people would grab the handrails and run, setting the thing spinning, fast enough that if you were on it you really had to hang on or you'd get thrown off. I'd wager a 10 year old with decent strength could get it going 60 RPM or faster, although it was hard to sustain the speed unless the pusher didn't jump on.
The only ones I've ever seen have been made out of steel, and I haven't seen one in a park or playground in a long time. It's one of those playground toys that one kind in 5000 might get hurt on (falling off, etc), so they're probably not insurable. Which is too bad, since they were a lot of fun.
...are its usage bias of the products they review -- they assume that every product they review is made to satisfy some everyman need, and products built for speciality audiences or specifically designed to do one thing REALLY well and 3 other things just OK get dinged badly in reviews, even though the one thing they do really well may make the difference (eg, 50" HDTV with shitty speakers but FANTASTIC PQ).
This would be easily mitigated if the product reviews were serious articles with a lot more commentary and fact included in them, rather than a half-dozen photos, 4 paragraphs and a ranking table. An entire issue of CR is about 40-50 pages, with photos and tables taking up half the space.
If they reviewed the same amount of stuff every month but the magazine was another 50-100 pages of actual written content discussing the products, the review process, etc, the apparent everyman bias wouldn't be as bothersome AND the magazine would last me longer than the taxi and takeoff of an airplane flight.
I wonder if its not the electronics industry that's slowing HDTV and other standards, but the MPAA and its ilk concerned about high-quality copies of its product.
Although the electronics industry, in true patent-lock-in fashion is waging a war for "its" standards.
Seen on the back of car yesterday:
"Those who vote change nothing. Those who count the votes change everything."
I'd love to see NPR documentaries and programs available as downloads from the iTunes music store. It's great that they have audiobooks available, but being able to load up the CD player or player for long trips with a few hours of NPR documentaries or shows would be awesome. The beauty of this is that it wouldn't deprive them of any revenue, and in fact would be a great way for them to make extra money by selling older documentaries that right now are just sitting on some shelf not being aired.
It's the ubiquitous "they" that represents the power structure, authority figures.
Also known as "the man".
Wear do ewe won 2 goatee day?
Device responds by opening a browser, and bringing you to "goatse.cx today".
Yay.
The reason they want to keep pot illegal is that nobody owns a patent on it and it does not serve anyone's power interests to have it legal.
They would much, much rather you take THEIR mind-altering drugs instead -- anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, wakeup drugs, sleeping drugs. These drugs enable them to keep you in line and productive, in addition to the nice, patent-pending profit margins they provide the drug industry.
We've got a good start on it -- kids these days hit the ritalin in elementary school, switch to paxil or prozac in high school, and move on to ativan and others in college and adulthood. It's only a matter of time until you're considered fucked if you're NOT on drugs.
And not running or installing an application because you couldn't install some spyware is a perfectly valid and desirable outcome, since it pushes the whole free-app-with-spyware "model" into the light of day.
No more difficult than it is on any of the cable/sat music channels right now, all of which presumably have the blessing of the recording industry right now.
MIT's system is only marginally different in that someone you know or you might actually get to control what gets played once in a while. For the most part, though, you don't know what's being played and its like taping the radio, albeit with no commercials. Great if you want to put together canned mixes (the commercial variants being more highly genre specific).
Finally, marketing has little to do with the UI in windows.
Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on the claim that marketing has little to do with UI claim. I'd like to believe that a bunch of really smart people -- graphic designers, coders, UI experts -- designed the UI specifically to maximize usability. But I don't.
The steering, placement of MS products and general marketing influence is ALL OVER Windows UI. I think marketing has a HUGE say in what goes where in the Windows OS and how it operates. Furthermore, so much of the OS development is *guided* by marketing wishes that it can't help affect not only UI but operation aspects of the Windows internals.
If they had launched these things on the upswing of the economy, they might have actually caught on as a nitch device, or at least as a "gotta have" for the hip do-nothing maketing technophiles in many companies, leading to at least halfway decent sales.
Instead they were launched at the *bottom* of the economy, nobody had any capital money, and those that did sure as hell weren't dropping it on something like tablet PC, which was a solution in search of a problem.
Notice that most of the ads showed it replacing the cocktail napkin? Note to Microsoft: if there are cocktails, my laptop is at home.
Please show me the people who log over 50k miles per year and aren't making over $50k per year.
There may be some weird, tiny set of the population that makes no money and flies a lot, but I kind of doubt it.
Most people who log thousands of miles per year are business travelers, and without exception most business travelers are earning $75k++.