I suspect you wouldn't like Henry James: you may not like long sentences, but they are not automatically wrong; take a look at "The Turn of the Screw," for example; it contains sentences some of which are a page or longer, yet perfectly grammatical.
Well, I registered as melvin666 with a throwaway sneakemail address and totally bogus info including an address somewhere in the Greek netherworld. But, yes, they do spam you for a while trying to get you to sign up for some other nonsense. But at least they don't seem to be too concerned with the length of my organ or the state of my mortgage or my apparently irrepressable urge to use the internet to know everything about everybody or my peculiarly uncontrollable urge to look at some floozy in her underwear.
Not that it matters, though. All this dreck tends to run together in my mind after a while.
It just occurred to me today that I need to move my computer next to my stereo so I can transfer my LPs to CDs. The end is nigh! This is really the major obstacle to convergence--getting everything in the same room. Once somebody solves this problem in a practical manner, it will happen. We're talking furniture design here, not technology!
Have you ever seen some of the tools you need to fix Fords? And of course only Ford sells them. "Remove the #37 Dipso Converter Toggle using the special tool, Ford part #77513549/11, Dipso Converter Torque Demodulater for 1997 Ford Stromboli Engine without Overdrive with Ratchet Attachment. Holding back the Converter Shroud with the Converter Shroud Deconverter Holder, part #767676059.112/2, gently slide the Z-Bolt Extractor, #2343768y7j12/0, past the engine mount...." Bad analogy!;o)
Might I suggest something along the lines of "cost free" vs. "unrestricted"? This is precisely what results from the English tendency to drop modifiers in the name of brevity. Nothing is simply "free." Things can only be free *of something*.
This is exactly what happened when "aurora borialis" (polar dawn) was shortened to "aurora." Now there are school children who think that the Romans had a Goddess of the Aurora. Aaarrghhh! Will the butchering of English never end?
"I'm a faculty member at a public university which the Business Software Alliance contacted in a bulk mailing last Fall. Stupidly, our IT department invited them in to 'explain' licensing to us, and now we are trying to fend off an audit on our computers (public and private)."
Tell them the guy who invited them in wasn't authorized to do so. They'll just have to resubmit their request. "Please send it in triplicate and don't forget to include return postage. Also, please include a detailed description of what this so-called 'explanation' involves, and while you're at it, a description of previously achieved benefits of this kind of 'explanation' would be appreciated. We can't waste our time watching another silly dog and pony show."
Briefly, you need to take back control of your gameboard and, for god's sake, man, stop acting like a kid who has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. They're trying to sucker you. They seem to think that you're a bunch of ivory tower intellectuals (possibly true) who don't have enough real world experience to realize it. From what I can tell from the incomplete description of the original mailing, it was deceptive at least and a bold-faced lie at most. These characters know this. They are banking on what all school-yard bullies bank on--you don't have the balls to call them. Beyond this, do not talk to them. They do not have your interests nor the interests of any other educational institution at heart. They are a bunch of greedy bastards with the morals of a mafia don. Treat them as such.
If they want to make jackasses of themselves, let them sue a public educational institution. These are the same guys who give away free computers to school kids to make themselves look good. Maybe they *are* that stupid. I doubt it.
Just built one with a Lian-Li PC-68 aluminum case. Great heatsink properties. The sides are brushed aluminum and the front is an anodized silver grey. I notice they have colored ones too, but until drives start coming with colored faceplates, black is probably best with a silver case. The PC-67 has a black faceplate, which would probably look even better.
...hang around school yards taking down names and addresses of anyone who swings sideways? They'd lock his sorry Butte up. The scary thing is that they let this guy patent a method of using something that already existed. Imagine patenting the method of turning your steering wheel in the direction of a skid in order to regain control of a vehicle. My mother used to use a big screwdriver like a chisel. Is this patentable? How about using a good steel ruler to scratch your own back? Or squeezing the wide sides of a tube of toothpaste to suck the excess back in? Patents on all of these ideas are not only not enforceable, anybody who tried to enforce them would be laughed out of court and possibly committed to a mental institution. That the government would even consider granting them reflects poorly on their collective grasp of reality. But then we already knew that.;o)
And generally it cheapens the whole value of a patent. Now, my grandfather's uncle patented a "crab-net frame" (#803160) in 1905. The crab-net had been around for quite awhile, especially in Maryland, and nobody in those days would have had the gall to try to patent it, even if there was no such patent in existence at the time. What he did do was invent a better way of attaching the hoop of the net to the handle, and this allowed him to advertize and sell a "patent crab-net" in conjunction with his other blacksmithing and boating-related products, which was a bit of an exaggeration but near enough to the truth. And one could certainly argue that his invention improved the lives of his fellow citizens, especially those engaged in crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay, and that he deserved to be protected from others who might use his invention to unfairly increase their own profits. But what, pray tell me, does this idiotic swinging patent do for anybody? And what possible financial gain could the "inventor" expect to obtain from it? Is he going to sue a movie-maker who shows someone doing it in a film? Like he's going to sue Dreamworks? Or is he going to manufacture swing sets that he will advertize as having the patented ability to swing sideways? Does he think anybody is going to fall for this? Gee, I wonder what the product safety folks would have to say about this.
In the final analysis, somebody needs to teach these characters the meaning of the word "frivolous."
I've been using a Wacom pen since I got one free with a draw program. It beats the stuffing out of any mouse or trackball I've ever used and, despite what others have said about video games, it's great for shooting things if your game supports it, which some don't, unfortunately. It's awesome in the shooting range sequence in Bladerunner, for example. Something about 5000 years of practice with a stylus-like device versus how many years with the Xerox Parc mouse? Were they drinking that day or what?
As a replacement for a keyboard, though--that's another story. Might I suggest a one-handed keyboard for the left (or right if you're a lefty) hand and a pen in the right? Or some kind of popup window with a keyboard in it so you can click on the letters with the pen? Two of these, one for each hand, might be interesting to experiment with. How many people are two finger typists anyhow? The neat thing about the all-in-one concept is that it gives you a whole hand full of fingers to use for something else. It's the moving back and forth that makes the current system so stupid.
What saddens me, though, is the lack of imagination on the part of folks who claim to be on the cutting edge of technology. Reminds of my old man complaining about pocket calculators because they led to a decline in arithmatic ability. One can only imagine what the stone cutters said when somebody showed them their first piece of papyrus. I can hear it now: "They can have my chisel when then pry it out of my cold dead hands." And it always was....
"Books 2000 years old are still accessible and readable."
*Copies* of "books 2000 years old..." These books survived because they were copied and recopied and recopied. Very few actual books survive. None if you are talking about folios. A few scrolls have survived in their original form. The point--always so easy to miss--is that the solution is dynamic and not static. Someone needs to care enough to keep copying this stuff. That's the great thing about digital data. At least it doesn't degrade.
Unfortunately, most of the "solutions" suggested here are the electronic equivalent of just that, an attempt to make data permanent by preserving it in its original form, like the Epic of Gilgamesh pressed into clay tablets, whereas we really should be looking at ways of determining what data needs to be recopied into new formats to insure that it does survive. Lacking that, what survives will continue to fall to the knowledge and whim of the private collector. Aristotle, apparently, just wasn't a good enough writer to warrant collection and preservation of his nonfiction works. The point, for those here who tend to easily miss it, is that there are static solutions and dynamic ones, and it would appear to me that the problem of data loss to changing formats needs a dynamic solution.
As for your pathetic attempt at humor, or was that an attempt at deprecation?--it's so hard to tell when you're dealing with illiterates--I would suggest that the lack of techno-jargon is not always a sign of primitiveness. It is actually sometimes a sign of lack of pretense. This is the worst flaw that I find among the technically "advanced" and the scientifically "enlightened." I am reminded of Oppenheimer giving odds on the possibility that the atom bomb would vaporize the atmosphere.
For those of you who think that print on paper is eternal, you might want to go looking for the novels of Aristotle. Despite the mythology about fires, most of what was lost from the Alexandrian Library was simply not recopied onto new scrolls before it turned to dust. It's an old problem and shows no signs of going away anytime soon.
Like the American Indians who fed the Pilgrims? Do I really have to draw you a picture? "Over here, Cortez! Let us help you land your boats. Here, have some corn and mashed potatoes." Just keep one thing in mind. You don't get to "play again" in the real world. This isn't a video game. If there are as many habitable planets out there as is becoming apparent, a good percentage of them can be expected to be populated by something other than clones of Mother Theresa. In that environment, you don't take off your red long johns and run them up the flag pole. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, "Speak softly and carry a couple of squadrons of star fighters."
But that's really not the issue here. The fact is the geniuses at NASA are still operating in Lavoisier mode. These guys really don't think there *is* anybody out there. They send their little craft out of the solar system and send radio messages to the stars and listen for reruns of alien TV shows, but deep down they're still living in their little perfect Newtonian universe where the sky is unsullied by living organisms. That's how they can presume to endanger the lives of every man, woman, and child on this planet: they still think that any being advanced enough to travel in space must be a god, or at the very least an archangel, i.e., Adamski's "space brothers." No Osama bin Ladens in starships. Perish the thought. Only us lowly earthlings could possibly have monsters like that [irony].
Troll? Well excuse me. I can't express a practical opinion without being called names? Methinks thou art the troll.
Maybe that way it won't pose as much of a threat to anybody who finds it and they won't bother to come and investigate. It still amazes me how a bunch of scientific types can be so naive that they assume anyone they manage to contact will be just oh so friendly and willing to coexist. Kind of like George Adamski's "space brothers," don't you think? Have these characters all lost their blinking minds? Do we really want to advertize our existence before we have a decent sized fleet in orbit? But then again, they *are* engineers.
It seems to me that the problem here is the reading of "dark" in a bit more literal than necessary way. I think the expression is using "dark" to refer to any place that is not visible. Certainly the far side of the Moon is hidden, which is what the Old English "deorc" meant. And the expression "in the dark" means literally "in secret," which is what the far side was until the Soviets orbited it for the first time. Certainly there are folks who draw the conclusion from the expression that there is actually a side that is always dark, but then there are people who can't figure out why there's no ham in hamburger and others who think that peanuts are nuts. These characters will be with us for a while yet and correcting their limited astroinimical knowledge, it seems to me, is a waste of valuable time.
What's being missed in regard to the song title is the feeling it's trying to express, that is, somewhere far far away. This is basically the same meaning expressed when one makes reference to the city of Timbuktu. Certainly Timbuktu isn't any farther away than a lot of other places. The point, though, is that the normal way to get there by those who actually do so is to travel across the Saharu on the back of a camel. The natural question, then, is how do you get to the "dark side of the Moon"? Well, first you have to get to the Moon, though preferably not on the back of camel. And you're certainly not going to land on the side that's not illuminated. So you land on the light side and then travel overland from there. That is indeed a long way away and expresses the intended feeling in a clear enough way. This is about art. It's not about science. People who try to make it about science are, really, missing the point, and need to find a hobby.
What I really can't quite figure out is how these baboons got it into their little pinheads that it's their job to tell other people what to do. Is this a recognized form of delusion?
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect you wouldn't like Henry James: you may not like long sentences, but they are not automatically wrong; take a look at "The Turn of the Screw," for example; it contains sentences some of which are a page or longer, yet perfectly grammatical.
Well, I registered as melvin666 with a throwaway sneakemail address and totally bogus info including an address somewhere in the Greek netherworld. But, yes, they do spam you for a while trying to get you to sign up for some other nonsense. But at least they don't seem to be too concerned with the length of my organ or the state of my mortgage or my apparently irrepressable urge to use the internet to know everything about everybody or my peculiarly uncontrollable urge to look at some floozy in her underwear.
Not that it matters, though. All this dreck tends to run together in my mind after a while.
It just occurred to me today that I need to move my computer next to my stereo so I can transfer my LPs to CDs. The end is nigh! This is really the major obstacle to convergence--getting everything in the same room. Once somebody solves this problem in a practical manner, it will happen. We're talking furniture design here, not technology!
Have you ever seen some of the tools you need to fix Fords? And of course only Ford sells them. "Remove the #37 Dipso Converter Toggle using the special tool, Ford part #77513549/11, Dipso Converter Torque Demodulater for 1997 Ford Stromboli Engine without Overdrive with Ratchet Attachment. Holding back the Converter Shroud with the Converter Shroud Deconverter Holder, part #767676059.112/2, gently slide the Z-Bolt Extractor, #2343768y7j12/0, past the engine mount...." Bad analogy! ;o)
Might I suggest something along the lines of "cost free" vs. "unrestricted"? This is precisely what results from the English tendency to drop modifiers in the name of brevity. Nothing is simply "free." Things can only be free *of something*.
This is exactly what happened when "aurora borialis" (polar dawn) was shortened to "aurora." Now there are school children who think that the Romans had a Goddess of the Aurora. Aaarrghhh! Will the butchering of English never end?
"I'm a faculty member at a public university which the Business Software Alliance contacted in a bulk mailing last Fall. Stupidly, our IT department invited them in to 'explain' licensing to us, and now we are trying to fend off an audit on our computers (public and private)."
Tell them the guy who invited them in wasn't authorized to do so. They'll just have to resubmit their request. "Please send it in triplicate and don't forget to include return postage. Also, please include a detailed description of what this so-called 'explanation' involves, and while you're at it, a description of previously achieved benefits of this kind of 'explanation' would be appreciated. We can't waste our time watching another silly dog and pony show."
Briefly, you need to take back control of your gameboard and, for god's sake, man, stop acting like a kid who has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. They're trying to sucker you. They seem to think that you're a bunch of ivory tower intellectuals (possibly true) who don't have enough real world experience to realize it. From what I can tell from the incomplete description of the original mailing, it was deceptive at least and a bold-faced lie at most. These characters know this. They are banking on what all school-yard bullies bank on--you don't have the balls to call them. Beyond this, do not talk to them. They do not have your interests nor the interests of any other educational institution at heart. They are a bunch of greedy bastards with the morals of a mafia don. Treat them as such.
If they want to make jackasses of themselves, let them sue a public educational institution. These are the same guys who give away free computers to school kids to make themselves look good. Maybe they *are* that stupid. I doubt it.
Just built one with a Lian-Li PC-68 aluminum case. Great heatsink properties. The sides are brushed aluminum and the front is an anodized silver grey. I notice they have colored ones too, but until drives start coming with colored faceplates, black is probably best with a silver case. The PC-67 has a black faceplate, which would probably look even better.
...hang around school yards taking down names and addresses of anyone who swings sideways? They'd lock his sorry Butte up. The scary thing is that they let this guy patent a method of using something that already existed. Imagine patenting the method of turning your steering wheel in the direction of a skid in order to regain control of a vehicle. My mother used to use a big screwdriver like a chisel. Is this patentable? How about using a good steel ruler to scratch your own back? Or squeezing the wide sides of a tube of toothpaste to suck the excess back in? Patents on all of these ideas are not only not enforceable, anybody who tried to enforce them would be laughed out of court and possibly committed to a mental institution. That the government would even consider granting them reflects poorly on their collective grasp of reality. But then we already knew that. ;o)
And generally it cheapens the whole value of a patent. Now, my grandfather's uncle patented a "crab-net frame" (#803160) in 1905. The crab-net had been around for quite awhile, especially in Maryland, and nobody in those days would have had the gall to try to patent it, even if there was no such patent in existence at the time. What he did do was invent a better way of attaching the hoop of the net to the handle, and this allowed him to advertize and sell a "patent crab-net" in conjunction with his other blacksmithing and boating-related products, which was a bit of an exaggeration but near enough to the truth. And one could certainly argue that his invention improved the lives of his fellow citizens, especially those engaged in crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay, and that he deserved to be protected from others who might use his invention to unfairly increase their own profits. But what, pray tell me, does this idiotic swinging patent do for anybody? And what possible financial gain could the "inventor" expect to obtain from it? Is he going to sue a movie-maker who shows someone doing it in a film? Like he's going to sue Dreamworks? Or is he going to manufacture swing sets that he will advertize as having the patented ability to swing sideways? Does he think anybody is going to fall for this? Gee, I wonder what the product safety folks would have to say about this.
In the final analysis, somebody needs to teach these characters the meaning of the word "frivolous."
I've been using a Wacom pen since I got one free with a draw program. It beats the stuffing out of any mouse or trackball I've ever used and, despite what others have said about video games, it's great for shooting things if your game supports it, which some don't, unfortunately. It's awesome in the shooting range sequence in Bladerunner, for example. Something about 5000 years of practice with a stylus-like device versus how many years with the Xerox Parc mouse? Were they drinking that day or what?
As a replacement for a keyboard, though--that's another story. Might I suggest a one-handed keyboard for the left (or right if you're a lefty) hand and a pen in the right? Or some kind of popup window with a keyboard in it so you can click on the letters with the pen? Two of these, one for each hand, might be interesting to experiment with. How many people are two finger typists anyhow? The neat thing about the all-in-one concept is that it gives you a whole hand full of fingers to use for something else. It's the moving back and forth that makes the current system so stupid.
What saddens me, though, is the lack of imagination on the part of folks who claim to be on the cutting edge of technology. Reminds of my old man complaining about pocket calculators because they led to a decline in arithmatic ability. One can only imagine what the stone cutters said when somebody showed them their first piece of papyrus. I can hear it now: "They can have my chisel when then pry it out of my cold dead hands." And it always was....
SF
"Books 2000 years old are still accessible and readable."
*Copies* of "books 2000 years old..." These books survived because they were copied and recopied and recopied. Very few actual books survive. None if you are talking about folios. A few scrolls have survived in their original form. The point--always so easy to miss--is that the solution is dynamic and not static. Someone needs to care enough to keep copying this stuff. That's the great thing about digital data. At least it doesn't degrade.
Unfortunately, most of the "solutions" suggested here are the electronic equivalent of just that, an attempt to make data permanent by preserving it in its original form, like the Epic of Gilgamesh pressed into clay tablets, whereas we really should be looking at ways of determining what data needs to be recopied into new formats to insure that it does survive. Lacking that, what survives will continue to fall to the knowledge and whim of the private collector. Aristotle, apparently, just wasn't a good enough writer to warrant collection and preservation of his nonfiction works. The point, for those here who tend to easily miss it, is that there are static solutions and dynamic ones, and it would appear to me that the problem of data loss to changing formats needs a dynamic solution.
As for your pathetic attempt at humor, or was that an attempt at deprecation?--it's so hard to tell when you're dealing with illiterates--I would suggest that the lack of techno-jargon is not always a sign of primitiveness. It is actually sometimes a sign of lack of pretense. This is the worst flaw that I find among the technically "advanced" and the scientifically "enlightened." I am reminded of Oppenheimer giving odds on the possibility that the atom bomb would vaporize the atmosphere.
For those of you who think that print on paper is eternal, you might want to go looking for the novels of Aristotle. Despite the mythology about fires, most of what was lost from the Alexandrian Library was simply not recopied onto new scrolls before it turned to dust. It's an old problem and shows no signs of going away anytime soon.
Like the American Indians who fed the Pilgrims? Do I really have to draw you a picture? "Over here, Cortez! Let us help you land your boats. Here, have some corn and mashed potatoes." Just keep one thing in mind. You don't get to "play again" in the real world. This isn't a video game. If there are as many habitable planets out there as is becoming apparent, a good percentage of them can be expected to be populated by something other than clones of Mother Theresa. In that environment, you don't take off your red long johns and run them up the flag pole. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, "Speak softly and carry a couple of squadrons of star fighters."
But that's really not the issue here. The fact is the geniuses at NASA are still operating in Lavoisier mode. These guys really don't think there *is* anybody out there. They send their little craft out of the solar system and send radio messages to the stars and listen for reruns of alien TV shows, but deep down they're still living in their little perfect Newtonian universe where the sky is unsullied by living organisms. That's how they can presume to endanger the lives of every man, woman, and child on this planet: they still think that any being advanced enough to travel in space must be a god, or at the very least an archangel, i.e., Adamski's "space brothers." No Osama bin Ladens in starships. Perish the thought. Only us lowly earthlings could possibly have monsters like that [irony].
Troll? Well excuse me. I can't express a practical opinion without being called names? Methinks thou art the troll.
Maybe that way it won't pose as much of a threat to anybody who finds it and they won't bother to come and investigate. It still amazes me how a bunch of scientific types can be so naive that they assume anyone they manage to contact will be just oh so friendly and willing to coexist. Kind of like George Adamski's "space brothers," don't you think? Have these characters all lost their blinking minds? Do we really want to advertize our existence before we have a decent sized fleet in orbit? But then again, they *are* engineers.
It seems to me that the problem here is the reading of "dark" in a bit more literal than necessary way. I think the expression is using "dark" to refer to any place that is not visible. Certainly the far side of the Moon is hidden, which is what the Old English "deorc" meant. And the expression "in the dark" means literally "in secret," which is what the far side was until the Soviets orbited it for the first time. Certainly there are folks who draw the conclusion from the expression that there is actually a side that is always dark, but then there are people who can't figure out why there's no ham in hamburger and others who think that peanuts are nuts. These characters will be with us for a while yet and correcting their limited astroinimical knowledge, it seems to me, is a waste of valuable time.
What's being missed in regard to the song title is the feeling it's trying to express, that is, somewhere far far away. This is basically the same meaning expressed when one makes reference to the city of Timbuktu. Certainly Timbuktu isn't any farther away than a lot of other places. The point, though, is that the normal way to get there by those who actually do so is to travel across the Saharu on the back of a camel. The natural question, then, is how do you get to the "dark side of the Moon"? Well, first you have to get to the Moon, though preferably not on the back of camel. And you're certainly not going to land on the side that's not illuminated. So you land on the light side and then travel overland from there. That is indeed a long way away and expresses the intended feeling in a clear enough way. This is about art. It's not about science. People who try to make it about science are, really, missing the point, and need to find a hobby.
And he who has a time machine controls everything.
What I really can't quite figure out is how these baboons got it into their little pinheads that it's their job to tell other people what to do. Is this a recognized form of delusion?