Why not, instead, increase the size of the Earth's orbit by 20 miles? By placing the world a mere 20 miles further from the sun than it is now, we can decrease the amount of heat coming in by 47 megajoules per day, curbing global warming. This, of course, would be only a stopgap measure put into effect until CO2 emissions are brought back down to reasonable levels.
He tested things like moving files around, compression, decompression... This is all good and fine, but it's probably not the thing that most people "feel" when they use a computer. What I would like to know is how snappy or sluggish does the operating system "feel" when using it for every-day tasks? Does everything halt while the hard drive cranks away when you click a menu? Do the GUI animations help use the computer or do they simply slow you down? That's the sort of thing that matters to most users. How often do you really have to move 100 MB or 2.5 GB of files around?
Absolutely not! There should NOT be such a law because when you make it a pain in the ass for people to provide a service, like free web space, then many people will say it's simply not worth it and won't do it. Laws ALWAYS have unintended consequences. To extend the rental house analogy, in areas where there is rent control (laws designed to prevent people's rent from going up too much in a short amount of time) the rents are higher. Simply because every landlord knows that because they won't be able to raise the rent more than 3% per year, they have to stick a high rent on the place from the beginning. Not because they're the big bad landlord and the renter is the poor proletariat, but because there are costs and risks involved with bring a landlord, costs like insurance, repairs during and between tenants, legal costs every so often, taxes, local fees, etc. and risks such as someone horsing around inside the house falls and breaks their skull and then the landlord gets sued. When these costs go up 10% every year and you can only raise the rent 3%, you have to stick a 25% higher rent price on the place before a tenant moves in at all. Let's continue talking about rent control because it is appropriate to this topic. Some areas have a law that if you have a renter over 65 living in property you own, you MUST continue allowing them to rent indefinitely, or else you must provide them with notice a huge amount of time in advance and pay them huge amounts of money to compensate for the costs they'll incur in looking for a new place and moving there. Laws like this are designed to protect the elderly because it is very difficult for such a person to make a move. Correct. However, because landlords know that they won't be able to kick a tenant (say, if they later decide to occupy the unit themselves), many landlords simply do not rent to people over, say, age 50. They'll choose a younger tenant. So the law designed to protect the elderly ends up harming the elderly. And because the government finds out about this new problem (a problem that never existed before) they now have to create new rules, regulations, bureaucracies, and investigations to find out which landlord may have turned down an elderly person in favor of a younger person. All of which increases landlords' costs and risks, hence increases rents, and hence makes the problem of expensive rents yet even more expensive. All you had to do is never make up these laws in the first place and everything would have been fine. Rents too high? That means some smart landlord will figure out that he can make money by offering cheaper rents. It's called the free market system, and except in the case of powerful monopolies that buy everyone out and charge exorbitant prices, a problem which does need to be addressed by the law, the free market system will win every time with better quality and cheaper prices. I can go on forever about the unintended consequences of laws that seem like such good ideas. But we now stray from the topic. Back to online service providers, let each provider make up its own terms of use. People should be reading the terms of use when they sign up for things anyway, not just clicking "I agree." That's akin to just signing some piece of paper without looking at it. If you want to know why doing so is incredibly dangerous, rent The Spanish Prisoner (or see Wikipedia article about what the term Spanish Prisoner means here). If the terms of use say "we can kick you and your webpage at any time for any reason" and you agreed to it, fine. As the article says, people should not store things on other peoples' servers and simply "expect" it to stay there forever, just as you should not put a treasure chest full of gold and jewels on the street and simply "expect" it to stay there forever. People need to get used to the concept of keeping a copy of any data they produce AND keeping at least one backup copy, preferably at a different site. If
Let's speculate further. It's not an iPod Touch. It's a combination between a Tablet PC (or more correctly a Tablet Mac) and a n*tbook, but without a hinge or mechanical keyboard.
Mod parent up! Despite its shortcomings (which others have outlined so I won't repeat them), Wikipedia is a very useful resource. It's easy to talk about how the Internet "should" be and then wait for someone else to do it. Well it doesn't work that way. If each and every one of us doesn't take ONE small action EACH DAY to improve the world in the way we think fit, nobody else will do it. In light of how badly most of us hate the "in your face" advertising that many sites employ, it's time to put our money where our mouth is and bring the number well above the six million mark. I think the community should try to bring that number to seven or eight million, if only to encourage charity based sites and discourage the ones that contain five square feet of ads for every square inch of useful material.
Story 1 - I had my hair cut once at this fancy shmancy hair salon where there was a receptionist/cashier whose cash register was connected to an IBM computer. She had to fill in all kinds of fields to calculate the price. Totally overkill for that application but nevertheless here's the story. She did something that took her to a wrong screen and spent several minutes trying to figure it out. Being impatient and wanting to leave, I offered to help her find the right screen. She pushed me away rudely and said something to the effect that she took a three-day course in computers and knew everything there was to know about them. I said, "Really? I've been working with computers for twenty years and I still don't know jack."
Story 2 - Well not a story really but something that repeats an awful lot. Because people know that my job is computers, I get a lot of calls for free tech support. Something I really hate to do, but the first or second time that someone asks for help, I'll give it to them. Well invariably it happens that someone calls and says they have some problem, which they cannot define or describe. I ask them to tell me what appears on the screen at the moment and they'll start reading EXACTLY what it says on the screen, like, "It says Phoenix and then a dash and then Award Capital Bee, Capital Eye, Capital Oh, Capital Ess, lower case V, Six decimal point" or "It says My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places..." I try to stop them but they just keep reading the whole damn screen. I really hate when that happens.
It's amazing how many people use Microsoft Word for everything from file management to image editing. Some of these people never even see their "desktop" during the day. Word is their interface.
Reminds me of another text editor [cough] emacs [cough].
We did something crazy funny once. It was in a factory where the computer in the office was VNCed to a computer on the other side of the building. We told a guy who worked by that far computer that it had a new voice interface and that the phone was used to talk to the computer. In reality someone in the office was controlling the keyboard and mouse via VNC. The guy totally fell for it and told the computer what to do in this funny slow monotone voice as if the computer would understand him better that way. We all had a chuckle.
Funny that you should mention this because originally, computer games existed for two purposes. First, to demonstrate the capabilities of the computer, since this was something easy for mere mortals to see. Second, to train users (and reduce their intimidation) by giving them something simple to do. In this case, you used solitaire for the second reason. Actually, I once taught my grandfather how to use a computer, starting with solitaire. Back then the OS most people ran on an IBM PC or compatible was MS-DOS 5 and the desktop environment was Windows 3.0.
This won't work. What about people from out of state? What about people fiddling with the devices? What about privacy issues? I have a better and much simpler idea. Get rid of the per gallon or per mile idea entirely and take the funds out of the state's general sales tax revenue fund, the way it should be anyway. The whole idea of sales tax from the beginning of the nation was that when you buy something, it wouldn't have gotten to you had the infrastructure (like roads) not been there. People traveling through the state go to hotels, eat at restaurants, etc, so they'll pay their fare shair of the mileage they're putting on the roads. There are no privacy issues. And it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to cheat on sales taxes. All problems solved.
I do not think they would knowingly violate the law. Why in the hell would a big company waste its time and take the risk of breaking the law just to sell a few extra printers, when they've obviously got better legal things to do?
What's to prevent this sort of thing from being extended beyond sex offenders to include other types of crime, such as gangs, drugs, theft, etc? Before you know it, anybody convicted of anything is required to hand over everything. And then you accidentally cross the street when it says, "Don't Walk" and you're toast.
I really wish someone would bring back Demon Stalkers, a top-view labyrinth game with 100 levels (similar in style to Gauntlet but much simpler and more enjoyable IMO) The original is by Micro Forte. The beauty and fun of this game is in the simplicity of its structure. It should be ridiculously easy to implement this game with everything that modern computing offers. Back in the day it probably required highly optimized machine code. As I said the structure of this game is very simple. The level is a grid where the spaces between grid "cells" can contain wall, door, or space. There are only five monster types. Each level may contain only two of the five types. There are several color schemes that determine how the level is drawn. And there are several object types that you might find in a level, such as keys to open doors, food to recover from monster damage, stairs and chutes to go between the levels, scrolls containing a short programmable message (up to three distinct messages per level on any number of scrolls), etc. But in this simplicity there is something beautiful which you cannot find in complicated games like, say, Nethack.
Many businesses are accustomed to signing site-wide or per-seat licensing fees for software. Many of the PHBs in these businesses are somewhat put off by free software because they feel kind of weird about simply downloading and using software. For this reason, free software that wants to "go proprietary" should instead do this: keep the free license but add a second license that can, at a user's option, apply simultaneously to the same software. This second license would be the most prohibitive thing you've ever heard of and would require licensing fees in the stratosphere. In return, the customer gets the right to use the software throughout their site and would have also have the right to receive setup assistance, training, and other technical support. Essentially, the price would cover this support, since the software is essentially free, but it would make these PHBs feel warm and fuzzy inside from having to sign an expensive and very official looking licensing contract. They (or anybody else for that matter) could always simply download the same exact software from the Internet and use it free of charge, though it would not come with the warm fuzzy feeling or with the technical support.
Hey dude. I have an even better idea than cutting capital gains: it's called the FairTax plan. Look at fairtax.org for more info. This 300 page bill, if passed, would replace nearly 70,000 pages of convoluted tax code. No income taxes of any kind, including capital gains, income, payroll, the death tax, all that stuff. Sound too good to be true? It replaces those taxes with a 23% nationwide sales tax. Yes, it's high. But unless you're a business that sells products or services, you won't need to file any tax forms. You'll simply pay the tax when you choose to go shopping. Several books have been published about it. I think it's a really great idea. We elected Obama because we wanted change. Well getting rid of this ridiculous tax system and replacing it with the Fairtax would be the most radical change this country could make. You have to tell people about it and more importantly write to your new president, senators, and congressmen. Otherwise if we all just sit around and hope our government does the right thing, talking about taxes is a big waste of time.
More trunk lines. More switching stations. Perhaps a plan within the country to reduce the number of hops from every city to every city by providing many more direct fast links between them. This will cost a fortune and will require millions of additional miles of trunk lines to be installed and it will cost billions of dollars but the government is going to blow that money anyway and at least this way it will be worth it as bandwidth needs are skyrocketing. People want to transfer video, files in the hundreds of megabytes, telecommunications will gradually move away from more "traditional" systems to IP based, more applications will run client-server fashion, I think eventually that families will have private servers in their home holding all their data which they will be able to access from anywhere. In short, the more bandwidth the better.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be machined aluminum and glass with rounded corners. Nothing like that has ever been made before.
Why not, instead, increase the size of the Earth's orbit by 20 miles? By placing the world a mere 20 miles further from the sun than it is now, we can decrease the amount of heat coming in by 47 megajoules per day, curbing global warming. This, of course, would be only a stopgap measure put into effect until CO2 emissions are brought back down to reasonable levels.
He tested things like moving files around, compression, decompression... This is all good and fine, but it's probably not the thing that most people "feel" when they use a computer. What I would like to know is how snappy or sluggish does the operating system "feel" when using it for every-day tasks? Does everything halt while the hard drive cranks away when you click a menu? Do the GUI animations help use the computer or do they simply slow you down? That's the sort of thing that matters to most users. How often do you really have to move 100 MB or 2.5 GB of files around?
Absolutely not! There should NOT be such a law because when you make it a pain in the ass for people to provide a service, like free web space, then many people will say it's simply not worth it and won't do it. Laws ALWAYS have unintended consequences. To extend the rental house analogy, in areas where there is rent control (laws designed to prevent people's rent from going up too much in a short amount of time) the rents are higher. Simply because every landlord knows that because they won't be able to raise the rent more than 3% per year, they have to stick a high rent on the place from the beginning. Not because they're the big bad landlord and the renter is the poor proletariat, but because there are costs and risks involved with bring a landlord, costs like insurance, repairs during and between tenants, legal costs every so often, taxes, local fees, etc. and risks such as someone horsing around inside the house falls and breaks their skull and then the landlord gets sued. When these costs go up 10% every year and you can only raise the rent 3%, you have to stick a 25% higher rent price on the place before a tenant moves in at all. Let's continue talking about rent control because it is appropriate to this topic. Some areas have a law that if you have a renter over 65 living in property you own, you MUST continue allowing them to rent indefinitely, or else you must provide them with notice a huge amount of time in advance and pay them huge amounts of money to compensate for the costs they'll incur in looking for a new place and moving there. Laws like this are designed to protect the elderly because it is very difficult for such a person to make a move. Correct. However, because landlords know that they won't be able to kick a tenant (say, if they later decide to occupy the unit themselves), many landlords simply do not rent to people over, say, age 50. They'll choose a younger tenant. So the law designed to protect the elderly ends up harming the elderly. And because the government finds out about this new problem (a problem that never existed before) they now have to create new rules, regulations, bureaucracies, and investigations to find out which landlord may have turned down an elderly person in favor of a younger person. All of which increases landlords' costs and risks, hence increases rents, and hence makes the problem of expensive rents yet even more expensive. All you had to do is never make up these laws in the first place and everything would have been fine. Rents too high? That means some smart landlord will figure out that he can make money by offering cheaper rents. It's called the free market system, and except in the case of powerful monopolies that buy everyone out and charge exorbitant prices, a problem which does need to be addressed by the law, the free market system will win every time with better quality and cheaper prices. I can go on forever about the unintended consequences of laws that seem like such good ideas. But we now stray from the topic. Back to online service providers, let each provider make up its own terms of use. People should be reading the terms of use when they sign up for things anyway, not just clicking "I agree." That's akin to just signing some piece of paper without looking at it. If you want to know why doing so is incredibly dangerous, rent The Spanish Prisoner (or see Wikipedia article about what the term Spanish Prisoner means here). If the terms of use say "we can kick you and your webpage at any time for any reason" and you agreed to it, fine. As the article says, people should not store things on other peoples' servers and simply "expect" it to stay there forever, just as you should not put a treasure chest full of gold and jewels on the street and simply "expect" it to stay there forever. People need to get used to the concept of keeping a copy of any data they produce AND keeping at least one backup copy, preferably at a different site. If
Let's speculate further. It's not an iPod Touch. It's a combination between a Tablet PC (or more correctly a Tablet Mac) and a n*tbook, but without a hinge or mechanical keyboard.
Mod parent up! Despite its shortcomings (which others have outlined so I won't repeat them), Wikipedia is a very useful resource. It's easy to talk about how the Internet "should" be and then wait for someone else to do it. Well it doesn't work that way. If each and every one of us doesn't take ONE small action EACH DAY to improve the world in the way we think fit, nobody else will do it. In light of how badly most of us hate the "in your face" advertising that many sites employ, it's time to put our money where our mouth is and bring the number well above the six million mark. I think the community should try to bring that number to seven or eight million, if only to encourage charity based sites and discourage the ones that contain five square feet of ads for every square inch of useful material.
Story 2 - Well not a story really but something that repeats an awful lot. Because people know that my job is computers, I get a lot of calls for free tech support. Something I really hate to do, but the first or second time that someone asks for help, I'll give it to them. Well invariably it happens that someone calls and says they have some problem, which they cannot define or describe. I ask them to tell me what appears on the screen at the moment and they'll start reading EXACTLY what it says on the screen, like, "It says Phoenix and then a dash and then Award Capital Bee, Capital Eye, Capital Oh, Capital Ess, lower case V, Six decimal point" or "It says My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places..." I try to stop them but they just keep reading the whole damn screen. I really hate when that happens.
Reminds me of another text editor [cough] emacs [cough].
We did something crazy funny once. It was in a factory where the computer in the office was VNCed to a computer on the other side of the building. We told a guy who worked by that far computer that it had a new voice interface and that the phone was used to talk to the computer. In reality someone in the office was controlling the keyboard and mouse via VNC. The guy totally fell for it and told the computer what to do in this funny slow monotone voice as if the computer would understand him better that way. We all had a chuckle.
Funny that you should mention this because originally, computer games existed for two purposes. First, to demonstrate the capabilities of the computer, since this was something easy for mere mortals to see. Second, to train users (and reduce their intimidation) by giving them something simple to do. In this case, you used solitaire for the second reason. Actually, I once taught my grandfather how to use a computer, starting with solitaire. Back then the OS most people ran on an IBM PC or compatible was MS-DOS 5 and the desktop environment was Windows 3.0.
This won't work. What about people from out of state? What about people fiddling with the devices? What about privacy issues? I have a better and much simpler idea. Get rid of the per gallon or per mile idea entirely and take the funds out of the state's general sales tax revenue fund, the way it should be anyway. The whole idea of sales tax from the beginning of the nation was that when you buy something, it wouldn't have gotten to you had the infrastructure (like roads) not been there. People traveling through the state go to hotels, eat at restaurants, etc, so they'll pay their fare shair of the mileage they're putting on the roads. There are no privacy issues. And it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to cheat on sales taxes. All problems solved.
I do not think they would knowingly violate the law. Why in the hell would a big company waste its time and take the risk of breaking the law just to sell a few extra printers, when they've obviously got better legal things to do?
What's to prevent this sort of thing from being extended beyond sex offenders to include other types of crime, such as gangs, drugs, theft, etc? Before you know it, anybody convicted of anything is required to hand over everything. And then you accidentally cross the street when it says, "Don't Walk" and you're toast.
I really wish someone would bring back Demon Stalkers, a top-view labyrinth game with 100 levels (similar in style to Gauntlet but much simpler and more enjoyable IMO) The original is by Micro Forte. The beauty and fun of this game is in the simplicity of its structure. It should be ridiculously easy to implement this game with everything that modern computing offers. Back in the day it probably required highly optimized machine code. As I said the structure of this game is very simple. The level is a grid where the spaces between grid "cells" can contain wall, door, or space. There are only five monster types. Each level may contain only two of the five types. There are several color schemes that determine how the level is drawn. And there are several object types that you might find in a level, such as keys to open doors, food to recover from monster damage, stairs and chutes to go between the levels, scrolls containing a short programmable message (up to three distinct messages per level on any number of scrolls), etc. But in this simplicity there is something beautiful which you cannot find in complicated games like, say, Nethack.
Many businesses are accustomed to signing site-wide or per-seat licensing fees for software. Many of the PHBs in these businesses are somewhat put off by free software because they feel kind of weird about simply downloading and using software. For this reason, free software that wants to "go proprietary" should instead do this: keep the free license but add a second license that can, at a user's option, apply simultaneously to the same software. This second license would be the most prohibitive thing you've ever heard of and would require licensing fees in the stratosphere. In return, the customer gets the right to use the software throughout their site and would have also have the right to receive setup assistance, training, and other technical support. Essentially, the price would cover this support, since the software is essentially free, but it would make these PHBs feel warm and fuzzy inside from having to sign an expensive and very official looking licensing contract. They (or anybody else for that matter) could always simply download the same exact software from the Internet and use it free of charge, though it would not come with the warm fuzzy feeling or with the technical support.
Hey dude. I have an even better idea than cutting capital gains: it's called the FairTax plan. Look at fairtax.org for more info. This 300 page bill, if passed, would replace nearly 70,000 pages of convoluted tax code. No income taxes of any kind, including capital gains, income, payroll, the death tax, all that stuff. Sound too good to be true? It replaces those taxes with a 23% nationwide sales tax. Yes, it's high. But unless you're a business that sells products or services, you won't need to file any tax forms. You'll simply pay the tax when you choose to go shopping. Several books have been published about it. I think it's a really great idea. We elected Obama because we wanted change. Well getting rid of this ridiculous tax system and replacing it with the Fairtax would be the most radical change this country could make. You have to tell people about it and more importantly write to your new president, senators, and congressmen. Otherwise if we all just sit around and hope our government does the right thing, talking about taxes is a big waste of time.
More trunk lines. More switching stations. Perhaps a plan within the country to reduce the number of hops from every city to every city by providing many more direct fast links between them. This will cost a fortune and will require millions of additional miles of trunk lines to be installed and it will cost billions of dollars but the government is going to blow that money anyway and at least this way it will be worth it as bandwidth needs are skyrocketing. People want to transfer video, files in the hundreds of megabytes, telecommunications will gradually move away from more "traditional" systems to IP based, more applications will run client-server fashion, I think eventually that families will have private servers in their home holding all their data which they will be able to access from anywhere. In short, the more bandwidth the better.