You're correct: I do not. I posted regarding those two because it really bothered me that the media, even knowing they'd messed up, often refused to apologize, apparently trying to justify their errors by saying that the events - although false - were somehow illustrative of events that weren't false. That's perverse.
Nor do I have the time or energy to chase after every such rumor. I believe that it's incumbent (no pun intended) on the accuser in such situations to present some evidence. I'm also saddened to see that so few other people seem to agree with me.
By the way - although I'm likely to vote for Gore, I do not consider myself a "Gore supporter" by any stretch of the imagination. I consider him to be the least of four evils. So if you're hoping to bait a Gore fanatic, take it elsewhere.
Just out of curiosity though, why would you say "mildly plausible"? The "Love Canal" bit was pretty obviously skewed against Gore unfairly, and the "Love Story was about Tipper and I" thing seems a lot less unreasonable when you consider that it was, in fact, based on him. Is it that you want to vilify him so much that you simply can't admit the possibility that you might be wrong?
If it's true that Al Gore has a tendency to misstate the truth, it's even more true that the media - and quasi-literate agitprop auteurs such as person who wrote the above post - have a tendency to exaggerate it. To wit:
FICTION: Al Gore said he was the first to discover the Love Canal nuclear accident.
FACT: The incident was already discovered, being investigated, and covered widely in the press for many months before Gore was aware of it.
Al Gore said in a speech to a group of high school students in New Hampshire that he "called for a congressional investigation and a hearing" regarding toxic waste problems in Toone, TN. During the course of the hearings, he said he started looking for other towns that had similar difficulties, which is how he came across Love Canal. I refer you to He's No Pinnochio, an article featured in The Washington Monthly, describing the actual quote, the circumstances surrounding its misinterpretation, and the utter refusal of most media outlets to apologize for the mistake.
FICTION: Al Gore claimed the book "Love Story" was based on his life and Tipper's.
FACT: Author Erich Segal called a press conference to deny his claim. (Couldn't he at least lie about a love story where his sweetheart doesn't die?)
It's true that the female lead in the story wasn't based on Tipper. However, The New York Times reported (December 14, 1997) that Erich Segal based male lead of the story was based on two people: Al Gore, and Gore's roommate (actor Tommy Lee Jones). So, you're right: although Al and Tipper weren't the basis for the male and female leads, Al and Tommy were the inspiration for the male lead, which kinda makes the whole scandal seem a little silly. Check the same article for citations.
I'm not saying that I find Gore to be particularly trustworthy or even credible on all of the issues. (I'm still considering a vote for Nader, the author of the previous post's favorite.) But if there's one thing I can't stand, it's when people accuse others of lying without being in full posession of the facts. Austad: do yourself a favor and provide better (ie: any) citations next time, or just keep your mouth shut.
By the way: Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. Chris Lehane: "[Gore] was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today." And the "widespread use by government and educational institutions since the early 1970's." line is bullshit. According to Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, and a host of other members of the ISOC, ARPANET didn't reach broad usage until the early 80s, and wasn't even using TCP/IP until the mid-eighties. I refer you to their document, A Brief History of the Internet.
...not necessarily, anyway. If you're on a LAN which blocks all un-proxied ports, you can't open a direct HTTPS connection to your provider. You'd have to go through an HTTPS proxy, which means you're back at square one again.
People use these phrases when making the distinction between software that is open source, and software which is merely without monetary cost. It became something of an issue because of Stallman et. al's use of the term "free software" (as in, the Free Software Foundation)to describe software which is not merely free of charge, but is also liberated in terms of source code.
That didn't come out very well. Check out their explanation and see if that makes more sense.
Abrash... goes against the NVidia ratio quote (the one where Gates said the GPU would be 3 times as fast as current NVidia
hardware).
And then, from the actual interview:
MA:I hadn't seen that quote. No, I personally wouldn't say three generations; more like either 1.5 or 2, depending on how you count. Not that it matters; the bottom line is that this is the most powerful chip I could imagine anyone getting into a console in 2001.
<sarcasm>
Ooh. Now there's a juicy scoop for you. The Big Cheese at the company says their technology is three generations ahead, and the lead tech guy on the project says it's more like two. What next?
</sarcasm>
Software engineering methodology isn't really my forte, but your argument still sounds fishy to me.
When people describe bugs in terms of LOC, they're usually doing post-mortem analysis on the bugs. In other words, they find a problem in a line of code, fix it, add a notch to their count, and move on.
I don't know how they're reporting the bugs for RedHat, but I'd be very surprised if they were using the same methodology. If they were, the implication would be that bugs get fixed way faster than they're likely to in the real world. More likely, the bugs they're counting are those that manifest themselves in tangible ways for users.
In other words, the behavior of a particular tool might be wacky in a given situation, I could count that as being one bug (for the weird condition under which the tool breaks), or as several bugs if the behavior could be traced back to several lines of code.
However, I'm really tired and only speaking from casual experience. Ingest with several grains of NaCl.
During the last recession a few years ago studies like this were warning us that we would all work in multiple careers over the course of our lives. What is wrong with this?
Ordinarily, I'd say nothing. I read somewhere (can't remember where) that the average Joe can expect to have a major career change (as opposed to, used to be a DBA, but now I'm a Systems Integrator!) an average of three times in your life. That's healthy and natural, and truth be told, every once in a while I feel an itch get out of IT and into something else.
What we hope, though, is the people leaving the IT field are balanced by people entering. These guys are saying that people are leaving at a faster rate than new blood is entering. The conclusion they've drawn, using bigger words and better arguments, is that this is because a preponderance of IT jobs are No Fun. Make of this what you will.
So what, they drop out of the IT field completely and go dig ditches or flip burgers at McDonalds?
So, are you disputing the chief claim of the study, or did you just not bother to read it?
"What's really unusual about this situation is that so many people are quitting the IT profession," says Cappelli, who is also director of Wharton's center for human resources. "The number of workers who quit the programming field every year, for example, exceeds the number of new programming jobs. It's peculiar to have a field that's thought to be so hot, yet where so many people are leaving in droves." - from the CNET article.
They may not be digging ditches or flipping burgers, but they're not toiling in the code mines, either.
In addition, Cappelli cites an unwillingness on the part of employers to hire older IT workers with more experience. I'm just now leaving the "youthful and hungry" stage of my professional career (translation - I'm 27), but conversations with my elders in the industry seem to bear out that claim.
I won't bother to reproduce the entire remainder of the article here, other than to say that it's pretty evenhanded in that it grants that a certain shortage of IT workers exists, while simultaneously taking employers to task for their hiring practices.
It's worth noting that PNG, the format used natively by Macromedia Fireworks, and PNG, the Portable Network Graphics format, aren't exactly the same. Macromedia embeds all kinds of wacky vector, layer, and texture information inside the PNG file (PNG is a raster format), which in other respects conforms to the standard.
You can export plain vanilla PNG files from Fireworks, though. It's really a pretty nifty program.
I'm not sure how it applies to waveform editing, but it's clear that the technique of converting two Adobe vehicles into one minivan using a putty knife and water comes dangerously close to Macromedia's "graphic element blending" patent.
Oh, Christ, that was lame. I'm sorry. Some days I don't know why I bother.
...I was promised that Bell-Atlantic (now Verizon) would make the necessary connections last Friday. It's Tuesday and nary a Verizon truck in site with my line... we both have been screwed by the local telco.
There's a logical reason for this - not a good one, mind, but a logical one.
Following the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the big telephone companies - called ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers like what was then Bell Atlantic) - were required to essentially open up their facilities to their competitors. The competitors, or CLECs (Replace "Incumbent" with "Competitive"), were thus enabled to offer services like DSL over pre-existing telco infrastructure. In other words, Covad and Rhythms owe their existence to the passage of that law.
Here's where it gets hairy. Without going into too much detail, ILECs (like Verizon) are required to provide CLECs (like Covad) with wholesale discounts to colocation services. And since they own all the phone lines anyway, a good portion of the actual premise work (like loop testing) has to be done by the ILEC anyway. If there's a problem, the ILEC needs to deal with it. Translation: the big entrenched telcos have to provide technical support to their competitors.
Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. The CLECs do have to pay a (nominal) fee to the ILECs to do business in the first place. But ask anyone who does tech support or line work for Verizon which work requests get done first - the ones that pertain to Covad DSL customers, or ones that pertain to Verizon DSL customers. I have friends of friends in that line of business, and they all agree that the ILEC customers get the love first. CLEC clients get sloppy seconds.
One more note: I'm currently waiting for Verizon to fix a loop test problem so that I can have my Covad DSL line installed, so this issue is something of a sore point with me.
If all you want to track is whether a Cat came from Forbes/Wired/RadioShaft then you
don't need a unique ID for each Cat. A simple (Forbes = 1 : Wired = 2 : RS = 3) ID is all
that is necessary. All Forbes users would have an ID of 1, etc., and now there are no
privacy concerns.
Except that then you need to know when you put the device together exactly where it's going to be shipped. If you change your mind about a shipment - "Oh, forget Radio Shack. They're assholes. Send these to Circuit City." - you're screwed. It also doesn't provide any kind of internal tracking for how many of the devices were sent to each vendor, while with their current system, all you need to do is count the unique IDs that were sent to them.
It's entirely reasonable that they'd want to track this kind of information. The problem is that if you know who has which device, and you know which devices made which requests, you basically have to take their word for it that they want cross-reference the data.
Or, as another example: it's your business if you want to click on a banner ad for Playboy. It's your business if you want to log in with a unique userID to a web site. It's in the site's best interest to be able to identify their ad click-through rate. They're on their honor, however, not to cross reference the information (unless you don't mind the site admins knowing that you're too chicken to go to a real porn site).
For instance, connect your soundcard "out" to your "in" and record--there's no getting around that.
I've heard that referred to as "audiojacking". Frankly, I don't see this as a credible solution to the problem: transmitting the signal over an 1/8 inch stereo cable represents conversion to an analog signal, with concomitant signal degredation.
Granted, you only have to do this once to get it into a different audio format. Granted, the signal degredation on that one pass is liable to be pretty minor, espeically given good connections and a short, high-quality cable. But I'm an anal bastard and it bugs me. So there.:)
Why do I always see this argument? Is this supposed to be some kind of game, where you can kill the most people from farthest
away?
In case you've been napping, this conversation was about whether video games are more dangerous to the general population than firearms. I don't think that it's much of a stretch to suggest that firearms are inherently more dangers than, say, hammers. In USMC basic training, you're taught to field-strip and reassemble a rifle in the dark. "Advanced Hammer Combat Tactics" isn't anywhere in the curriculum, to my knowledge.
Yeah, a rifle was made to do that job. But people do gather together every day at the office, the stores, etc. A skilled maniac with a hammer
can kill faster than your typical first person shooter with a rifle.
Phew. Good thing there aren't more "skilled maniacs" running around. If there were, why, I suppose we might see a huge spurt in the crime rate as banks, convenience stores, and supermarkets are held up at hammer-point. Drive by hammerings might become common. And thank god those damn Columbine killers, with their TECDC9s, combat shotguns, and homemade explosives, didn't get their hands on any ball-peen hammers. The carnage could have been... even more carnagey.
With a rifle, you have to carefully aim for each shot, otherwise those high powered
rounds just rapidly punch holes off target. Might as well bludgen the victims with the barrel. Violent video games should teach you this fact.
Whoops. You're right. I'll have to file that away with the other lessons I learned from violent video games, including "dismembered alien arms are great for taking out enemies around corners," (Half-Life) and "a fully loaded marine can just about outrun a LAW projectile."(DOOM)
A rifle is insignificant if that person can kill you with his hands and arbitrary nearby objects.
I'd like to see someone kill me at a range of fifty yards using only his hands and "arbitrary nearby objects." You don't need guns to kill someone. They just make it a whole lot easier.
But, out of deference to your argument, I suppose we should make an effort to destroy all the remaining copies of "Donkey Kong," in the world, just in case some big yahoo walks past a stack of barrels and starts getting ideas.
If it were to be proven that violent video games increase the likelihood of acquiring a violent mindset (which I rather doubt, however) it would be perfectly reasonable to ban them... while keeping the.22 rifles available.
Now there's a fascinating argument. If I understand you correctly, that which can cause me to become violent, or at least, to "acquire a violent mindset," should be banned. Let me ask you a couple of questions, though: is it merely enough to try and attempt to keep people from acquiring such a mindset? If, after all, it's people and not the easy availability of weapons that are the problem, wouldn't it make sense to take a proactive stance to prevent people from becoming violent?
It is a long-held tenet of law in the US that you can't be held accountable for something you're thinking, only for things that you actually do. (Or don't do. Whatever.) To suggest that we start to legislate based on the thoughts or general mental state of the public is to push us a notch closer towards "acceptable beliefs" and "thought police."
A violent individual will make it his goal to hurt you with all available weapons... or even with none. That's something I saw firsthand in the joint.
You're also much more likely to see someone use a shiv fashioned out of a purloined spoon "in the joint" than you are to see someone hold up a convenience store with one. While I concede the possiblity that people who are incarcerated are more prone to violent behavior than the populace at large, I also ask that you consider that the reason people tend not to hold up stores with spoons is because guns make it a whole lot easier.
Isn't there a tradition of keeping
quiet about a patent to let your "victims" build a greater dependence on the technology
before springing the royalty trap?
Indeed. Witness the huge flap when Unisys suddenly decided to enforce their patent on the GIF algorithm. Unisys' official story on the subject was that although in theory, the GIF format should have been free, it contained a patent-protected algorithm (LZW compression), and their failing to charge license fees over it was "an oversight." It wouldn't surprise me if this was actually true (as opposed to a convenient fabrication), but it still sucked.
On the other hand, the Unisys GIF thing at least had the effect of forcing some people towards PNG, which is a good thing. With apologies to Princess Leia, "The harder you grip your intellectual property, the more clients will slip through your fingers."
Sci-Fi doesn't exactly have a huge treasure trove of quality original programming, but give credit where credit is due. For example: Farscape, despite having Wizard of Oz syndrome in the casting room ("Okay - we need an Alien Warrior, Exotic Priestess, Loveable Rogue, and Good 'Ol Boy - get casting!"), cheesy intro-outro music (think closing theme to ST:TOS style wailing), and awful villians (C'mon. A guy named Scorpius?), has some of the best dialogue to ever grace a sci-fi show, some truly mind-fscking plot twists, and some great special effects. Not to mention, many bonus points for Claudia Black. Rrowl.
*sigh* Okay. Now, you're just being contrary. But I have to respond. Why do I have to respond? Because you make it so easy, and because it'll stretch out my lunch break a bit, and because I'm an anal-retentive putz who can't help himself. Why am I such an anal-retentive putz? I don't know. Maybe Katz will do an article on it.
Okay. In order:
So in other words, you've been misquoting your wife...
Not really. All the quotes from my wife are pretty much copy-paste, and after she reviewed the post, she was satisifed with the attribution. The correction I added was to a statement original to me.
...using a general statement of hers about "technology" which is broad enough to include the wheel, to defend statements about modern technology... The post to which I reponded originally stated that technology enabled us to "transition from hunter-gatherer subsistence." If the definition of technology is sufficiently broad to permit the onset of agriculture, I think that I'm safe in including flush toilets.
...and specifically about the capitalist mode of production.
The only conclusion I draw about capitalism is that it can be attributed to technology only as convincingly as the existence of life on Earth can be attributed to the Sun. Sure, one wouldn't exist without the other, but it's such a crass oversimplification that it isn't worth talking about. Plus, it leaves out the fact that technology gave rise to every governing and economic system since... um... well, ever.
Looks like someone's sleeping on the couch tonight....
To the contrary - chicks dig it when I put the smackdown on/.ers.
And in the words of Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that."
Rather than respond myself, I thought I'd ask my wife to defend herself. Her response:
How does he (streetlawyer) reason that the Roman,
Chinese, and Hindu flush toilets aren't examples of technology? Does he mean
to imply that technology is only a USian phenomenon? If technology is only a USian phenomenon, he's quite the ethnocentrist. Bad anthropologist. Bad.
To which, allow me to add the following: just because something is 1500 years old doesn't make it technological.
The trouble with the argument that technology is to blame for a lack of interest in politics is that these are issues that don't
really have a direct causal connection - it's not fair to say that because technology is improving people are paying less and less
attention to politics.
At the risk of invoking a pretty good episode of The West Wing, "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc." Which is the pretentious Latinate way of saying that just because one thing happens after another, doesn't mean it happened as a result.
Unfortunately, this is a lesson I don't think you're taking to heart. For example:
[Technology] has also allowed us to concentrate on acquisitiveness at
the cost of others, the roots of modern capitalism.
This is as silly a piece of luddism as I've ever heard. While I can't claim to actually have been around at the time, I'd be willing to bet that our ancestors were more than willing to beat each other senseless for the sake of food, or a desirable mate, or even plain old obedience. Just about any garden-variety anthropologist will assure you that technology isn't a prerequisite to avarice.
But, it cannot be argued that... technology has, in general, turned people away from the old USian small community ideal... Why would people care about politics in this situation? In fact, they're more likely to come to mistaken views about the evils of "Big Government"
than the true evil - capitalism, and it's partner technology.
I think what you're trying to say that this point can't be disputed, not that it can't be argued. In any case, this is a clasic example of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" at work: because capatilist societies sprang into being after technological innovation, you jump to the conclusion that technology creates capitalism. In doing so, you neglect every other economic and political system that has ever been devised since, as you put it, we "made the transition from hunter-gatherers." If technology causes capitalism, it also causes feudalism, democracy, socialism, communism, facism, and God only knows what else. Technology doesn't just allow us to focus on exploiting others, it allows us to focus on anything other than satisfying the most basic of needs.
Or, as my wife (a Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude - more Latin! - graduate in anthropology) put it, "Technology is what allows you to flush your poop away. So wipe it, bucko, and don't forget to put the lid down." Wisdom for the ages, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
You're correct: I do not. I posted regarding those two because it really bothered me that the media, even knowing they'd messed up, often refused to apologize, apparently trying to justify their errors by saying that the events - although false - were somehow illustrative of events that weren't false. That's perverse.
Nor do I have the time or energy to chase after every such rumor. I believe that it's incumbent (no pun intended) on the accuser in such situations to present some evidence. I'm also saddened to see that so few other people seem to agree with me.
By the way - although I'm likely to vote for Gore, I do not consider myself a "Gore supporter" by any stretch of the imagination. I consider him to be the least of four evils. So if you're hoping to bait a Gore fanatic, take it elsewhere.
Just out of curiosity though, why would you say "mildly plausible"? The "Love Canal" bit was pretty obviously skewed against Gore unfairly, and the "Love Story was about Tipper and I" thing seems a lot less unreasonable when you consider that it was, in fact, based on him. Is it that you want to vilify him so much that you simply can't admit the possibility that you might be wrong?
Al Gore said in a speech to a group of high school students in New Hampshire that he "called for a congressional investigation and a hearing" regarding toxic waste problems in Toone, TN. During the course of the hearings, he said he started looking for other towns that had similar difficulties, which is how he came across Love Canal. I refer you to He's No Pinnochio, an article featured in The Washington Monthly, describing the actual quote, the circumstances surrounding its misinterpretation, and the utter refusal of most media outlets to apologize for the mistake.
It's true that the female lead in the story wasn't based on Tipper. However, The New York Times reported (December 14, 1997) that Erich Segal based male lead of the story was based on two people: Al Gore, and Gore's roommate (actor Tommy Lee Jones). So, you're right: although Al and Tipper weren't the basis for the male and female leads, Al and Tommy were the inspiration for the male lead, which kinda makes the whole scandal seem a little silly. Check the same article for citations.
I'm not saying that I find Gore to be particularly trustworthy or even credible on all of the issues. (I'm still considering a vote for Nader, the author of the previous post's favorite.) But if there's one thing I can't stand, it's when people accuse others of lying without being in full posession of the facts. Austad: do yourself a favor and provide better (ie: any) citations next time, or just keep your mouth shut.
By the way: Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. Chris Lehane: "[Gore] was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today." And the "widespread use by government and educational institutions since the early 1970's." line is bullshit. According to Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, and a host of other members of the ISOC, ARPANET didn't reach broad usage until the early 80s, and wasn't even using TCP/IP until the mid-eighties. I refer you to their document, A Brief History of the Internet.
I'm really disappointed that we didn't see any pictures of the SEATEC Astronomy project. I've heard they're to die for.
Wait - I'm sorry. CEATEC? My bad.
...not necessarily, anyway. If you're on a LAN which blocks all un-proxied ports, you can't open a direct HTTPS connection to your provider. You'd have to go through an HTTPS proxy, which means you're back at square one again.
That didn't come out very well. Check out their explanation and see if that makes more sense.
What about Brian Boitano?
From the original post:
And then, from the actual interview:
<sarcasm>
Ooh. Now there's a juicy scoop for you. The Big Cheese at the company says their technology is three generations ahead, and the lead tech guy on the project says it's more like two. What next?
</sarcasm>
Software engineering methodology isn't really my forte, but your argument still sounds fishy to me.
When people describe bugs in terms of LOC, they're usually doing post-mortem analysis on the bugs. In other words, they find a problem in a line of code, fix it, add a notch to their count, and move on.
I don't know how they're reporting the bugs for RedHat, but I'd be very surprised if they were using the same methodology. If they were, the implication would be that bugs get fixed way faster than they're likely to in the real world. More likely, the bugs they're counting are those that manifest themselves in tangible ways for users.
In other words, the behavior of a particular tool might be wacky in a given situation, I could count that as being one bug (for the weird condition under which the tool breaks), or as several bugs if the behavior could be traced back to several lines of code.
However, I'm really tired and only speaking from casual experience. Ingest with several grains of NaCl.
Ordinarily, I'd say nothing. I read somewhere (can't remember where) that the average Joe can expect to have a major career change (as opposed to, used to be a DBA, but now I'm a Systems Integrator!) an average of three times in your life. That's healthy and natural, and truth be told, every once in a while I feel an itch get out of IT and into something else.
What we hope, though, is the people leaving the IT field are balanced by people entering. These guys are saying that people are leaving at a faster rate than new blood is entering. The conclusion they've drawn, using bigger words and better arguments, is that this is because a preponderance of IT jobs are No Fun. Make of this what you will.
So, are you disputing the chief claim of the study, or did you just not bother to read it?
They may not be digging ditches or flipping burgers, but they're not toiling in the code mines, either.
In addition, Cappelli cites an unwillingness on the part of employers to hire older IT workers with more experience. I'm just now leaving the "youthful and hungry" stage of my professional career (translation - I'm 27), but conversations with my elders in the industry seem to bear out that claim.
I won't bother to reproduce the entire remainder of the article here, other than to say that it's pretty evenhanded in that it grants that a certain shortage of IT workers exists, while simultaneously taking employers to task for their hiring practices.
It's worth noting that PNG, the format used natively by Macromedia Fireworks, and PNG, the Portable Network Graphics format, aren't exactly the same. Macromedia embeds all kinds of wacky vector, layer, and texture information inside the PNG file (PNG is a raster format), which in other respects conforms to the standard.
You can export plain vanilla PNG files from Fireworks, though. It's really a pretty nifty program.
I'm not sure how it applies to waveform editing, but it's clear that the technique of converting two Adobe vehicles into one minivan using a putty knife and water comes dangerously close to Macromedia's "graphic element blending" patent.
Oh, Christ, that was lame. I'm sorry. Some days I don't know why I bother.
There's a logical reason for this - not a good one, mind, but a logical one.
Following the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the big telephone companies - called ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers like what was then Bell Atlantic) - were required to essentially open up their facilities to their competitors. The competitors, or CLECs (Replace "Incumbent" with "Competitive"), were thus enabled to offer services like DSL over pre-existing telco infrastructure. In other words, Covad and Rhythms owe their existence to the passage of that law.
Here's where it gets hairy. Without going into too much detail, ILECs (like Verizon) are required to provide CLECs (like Covad) with wholesale discounts to colocation services. And since they own all the phone lines anyway, a good portion of the actual premise work (like loop testing) has to be done by the ILEC anyway. If there's a problem, the ILEC needs to deal with it. Translation: the big entrenched telcos have to provide technical support to their competitors.
Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. The CLECs do have to pay a (nominal) fee to the ILECs to do business in the first place. But ask anyone who does tech support or line work for Verizon which work requests get done first - the ones that pertain to Covad DSL customers, or ones that pertain to Verizon DSL customers. I have friends of friends in that line of business, and they all agree that the ILEC customers get the love first. CLEC clients get sloppy seconds.
One more note: I'm currently waiting for Verizon to fix a loop test problem so that I can have my Covad DSL line installed, so this issue is something of a sore point with me.
Except that then you need to know when you put the device together exactly where it's going to be shipped. If you change your mind about a shipment - "Oh, forget Radio Shack. They're assholes. Send these to Circuit City." - you're screwed. It also doesn't provide any kind of internal tracking for how many of the devices were sent to each vendor, while with their current system, all you need to do is count the unique IDs that were sent to them.
It's entirely reasonable that they'd want to track this kind of information. The problem is that if you know who has which device, and you know which devices made which requests, you basically have to take their word for it that they want cross-reference the data.
Or, as another example: it's your business if you want to click on a banner ad for Playboy. It's your business if you want to log in with a unique userID to a web site. It's in the site's best interest to be able to identify their ad click-through rate. They're on their honor, however, not to cross reference the information (unless you don't mind the site admins knowing that you're too chicken to go to a real porn site).
I've heard that referred to as "audiojacking". Frankly, I don't see this as a credible solution to the problem: transmitting the signal over an 1/8 inch stereo cable represents conversion to an analog signal, with concomitant signal degredation.
Granted, you only have to do this once to get it into a different audio format. Granted, the signal degredation on that one pass is liable to be pretty minor, espeically given good connections and a short, high-quality cable. But I'm an anal bastard and it bugs me. So there. :)
In case you've been napping, this conversation was about whether video games are more dangerous to the general population than firearms. I don't think that it's much of a stretch to suggest that firearms are inherently more dangers than, say, hammers. In USMC basic training, you're taught to field-strip and reassemble a rifle in the dark. "Advanced Hammer Combat Tactics" isn't anywhere in the curriculum, to my knowledge.
Phew. Good thing there aren't more "skilled maniacs" running around. If there were, why, I suppose we might see a huge spurt in the crime rate as banks, convenience stores, and supermarkets are held up at hammer-point. Drive by hammerings might become common. And thank god those damn Columbine killers, with their TECDC9s, combat shotguns, and homemade explosives, didn't get their hands on any ball-peen hammers. The carnage could have been... even more carnagey.
Whoops. You're right. I'll have to file that away with the other lessons I learned from violent video games, including "dismembered alien arms are great for taking out enemies around corners," (Half-Life) and "a fully loaded marine can just about outrun a LAW projectile."(DOOM)
I'd like to see someone kill me at a range of fifty yards using only his hands and "arbitrary nearby objects." You don't need guns to kill someone. They just make it a whole lot easier.
But, out of deference to your argument, I suppose we should make an effort to destroy all the remaining copies of "Donkey Kong," in the world, just in case some big yahoo walks past a stack of barrels and starts getting ideas.
Now there's a fascinating argument. If I understand you correctly, that which can cause me to become violent, or at least, to "acquire a violent mindset," should be banned. Let me ask you a couple of questions, though: is it merely enough to try and attempt to keep people from acquiring such a mindset? If, after all, it's people and not the easy availability of weapons that are the problem, wouldn't it make sense to take a proactive stance to prevent people from becoming violent?
It is a long-held tenet of law in the US that you can't be held accountable for something you're thinking, only for things that you actually do. (Or don't do. Whatever.) To suggest that we start to legislate based on the thoughts or general mental state of the public is to push us a notch closer towards "acceptable beliefs" and "thought police."
You're also much more likely to see someone use a shiv fashioned out of a purloined spoon "in the joint" than you are to see someone hold up a convenience store with one. While I concede the possiblity that people who are incarcerated are more prone to violent behavior than the populace at large, I also ask that you consider that the reason people tend not to hold up stores with spoons is because guns make it a whole lot easier.
Not sure when LZW expires per se, but according to the article in The Standard, the GIF patent expires in 2003.
Indeed. Witness the huge flap when Unisys suddenly decided to enforce their patent on the GIF algorithm. Unisys' official story on the subject was that although in theory, the GIF format should have been free, it contained a patent-protected algorithm (LZW compression), and their failing to charge license fees over it was "an oversight." It wouldn't surprise me if this was actually true (as opposed to a convenient fabrication), but it still sucked.
On the other hand, the Unisys GIF thing at least had the effect of forcing some people towards PNG, which is a good thing. With apologies to Princess Leia, "The harder you grip your intellectual property, the more clients will slip through your fingers."
Sci-Fi doesn't exactly have a huge treasure trove of quality original programming, but give credit where credit is due. For example: Farscape, despite having Wizard of Oz syndrome in the casting room ("Okay - we need an Alien Warrior, Exotic Priestess, Loveable Rogue, and Good 'Ol Boy - get casting!"), cheesy intro-outro music (think closing theme to ST:TOS style wailing), and awful villians (C'mon. A guy named Scorpius?), has some of the best dialogue to ever grace a sci-fi show, some truly mind-fscking plot twists, and some great special effects. Not to mention, many bonus points for Claudia Black. Rrowl.
*sigh* Okay. Now, you're just being contrary. But I have to respond. Why do I have to respond? Because you make it so easy, and because it'll stretch out my lunch break a bit, and because I'm an anal-retentive putz who can't help himself. Why am I such an anal-retentive putz? I don't know. Maybe Katz will do an article on it.
Okay. In order:
Not really. All the quotes from my wife are pretty much copy-paste, and after she reviewed the post, she was satisifed with the attribution. The correction I added was to a statement original to me.
The post to which I reponded originally stated that technology enabled us to "transition from hunter-gatherer subsistence." If the definition of technology is sufficiently broad to permit the onset of agriculture, I think that I'm safe in including flush toilets.
The only conclusion I draw about capitalism is that it can be attributed to technology only as convincingly as the existence of life on Earth can be attributed to the Sun. Sure, one wouldn't exist without the other, but it's such a crass oversimplification that it isn't worth talking about. Plus, it leaves out the fact that technology gave rise to every governing and economic system since... um... well, ever.
To the contrary - chicks dig it when I put the smackdown on
And in the words of Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that."
To which, allow me to add the following: just because something is 1500 years old doesn't make it technological.
At the risk of invoking a pretty good episode of The West Wing, "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc." Which is the pretentious Latinate way of saying that just because one thing happens after another, doesn't mean it happened as a result.
Unfortunately, this is a lesson I don't think you're taking to heart. For example:
This is as silly a piece of luddism as I've ever heard. While I can't claim to actually have been around at the time, I'd be willing to bet that our ancestors were more than willing to beat each other senseless for the sake of food, or a desirable mate, or even plain old obedience. Just about any garden-variety anthropologist will assure you that technology isn't a prerequisite to avarice.
I think what you're trying to say that this point can't be disputed, not that it can't be argued. In any case, this is a clasic example of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" at work: because capatilist societies sprang into being after technological innovation, you jump to the conclusion that technology creates capitalism. In doing so, you neglect every other economic and political system that has ever been devised since, as you put it, we "made the transition from hunter-gatherers." If technology causes capitalism, it also causes feudalism, democracy, socialism, communism, facism, and God only knows what else. Technology doesn't just allow us to focus on exploiting others, it allows us to focus on anything other than satisfying the most basic of needs.
Or, as my wife (a Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude - more Latin! - graduate in anthropology) put it, "Technology is what allows you to flush your poop away. So wipe it, bucko, and don't forget to put the lid down." Wisdom for the ages, I think.