This takes me back to my early days on BBSs, before most people had heard of this crazy e-mail thing. The thought of sending a message halfway around the world in a couple of seconds was absurd. Enter the FIDO Net. For those of you who don't remember or weren't in the shit, the FIDO net worked similar to FedEx's ZAPMail idea, which leapfrogged faxes between offices until it got to its destination. FIDO capable BBSs would spend a couple of hours every night calling other local BBSs and synchronizing their FIDO mail. While this wasn't nearly as instantaneous as e-mail, it was certainly much faster than snail mail. Once The Web and E-mail caught on, FIDO drifeted into the annals of history.
I expect the same fate for these SIPhones. They will hit hard and be well used until someone comes up with something better, faster, cheaper, etc. and will then be relegated to the "Hey, you remember *blank* from Back In The Day?" heap. In short, I think they are a great idea whose time has come.
Well put, well spoken and well said. Your points are clear, concise and accurate, for the most part. I do have a slight issue eith one thing you said however.
So a government can be a terrorist organisation and all current governments are except some small ones ruling city states without their armies.
Switzerland does not engage in FUD of any sort, they have a very strong military which has never been mobilized. The Scandanavian nations (Norway, Sweden and Finland) are in the same boat. And us up here in the frozen north (y'know, Canada, the maple syrup "state") specifically told King George II where he could go with his "War on Terrorism". We engage in UN sanctioned peace keeping efforts. The last conflict that we were independantly involved in was the Gulf War, and that was because a country had outright invaded a much smaller country, which is just unfriendly. We were in Afghanistan to support the Americans in preventing the Russians from taking over (and our only casualties were caused by US friendly fire). We are not a military country, and we do our best to protect those we can. Be wary of making such blanket statements, or you risk undermining your whole point about... well, blanket statements...
I see it as a neverending cycle though. They knock off a huge sharer (say 500 GB of shared, copyrighted material). The next in line is someone with 400 GB, who has most of the same files the 500 GB sharer had. The new big fish downloads like mad until he has 600 GB. He gets sued and the next in line already has 500 GB since she was on a DL spree.
The only thing this will accomplish in the end is a slight and temporary vacuum at the top end of file sharing. No one has managed to stamp out crackers (the guys who break copy protection, not the pasty white people) yet, because for every one at the top that gets knocked off, three more rise up and take their place. For serious file sharers, the ammount you have to share is status, just like 0-day warez.
"You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike." --Mentor's Last Words
Then let's remember the bands that heven't been signed to a label, but have some snazzy digital recording HW/SW. Then we can consider all of the albums that have been discontinued.
If this was really about money, then the RIAA would be using P2P as a tool, not a weapon. Send talent scouts out to the networks to see who is actually popular rather than telling us what's popular. Find out if a particular album should be re-issued. Take a page from the book of Lucasberg(TM), and put out "Special Editions" of popular CDs.
It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the RIAA is going after people primarily sharing NON-copyrighted material, with a little bit of copyright material. After all, they discover bands, not us.
I read a while back that their has been a dip in kazaa usage since the start of the lawsuits
On the contrary. Although there was a short dip in Kazaa useage after the RIAA announced their new program of suing the pants off of everyone who even looks at copyrighted material, yesterday WinMX came back on-line with a vengeance. Something in the nature of 4000 trillion (is that a quadrillion?) songs went on-line for download over WinMX. My room-mates and I went on a DL/UL spree, filling many gaps in our respective collections (combined total somewhere in the 50 GB range).
As mschoolbus said (quoting Rage, all hail Rage!!): "You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."
As I understand it, Buddhism is focused on disassociation from the physical realm, thereby freeing the mind and spirit to concentrate on the greater mysteries of the universe. Naturally this is very important for those of us who must keep such nebulous things as IP networks and sounds cards and such running without letting the magic blue smoke out.
However, as a druid, my path is the path of wisdom through knowledge. We strive first to know everything about ourselves through studying the nature of the physical universe. Next we study the nature of the Otherworld through art, song, dance, and numerous other "right-brained" activities (I personally have had many a spiritual epiphany while coding). Finally we study the connection the two, the physical and the spiritual, to understand how they interact with one another, thereby fully integrating our spirits and our bodies.
The end result is enlightenment through understanding the nature of the universe. With that understanding comes some small ammount of control over how things work. It is a long and difficult path (like anything worth doing), but the benefits are astounding.
...but I figured this was the best approach for figuring out exactly what SCO is trying to sell. Nowhere on the SCO page could I find any reference to this new "license" for UnixWare. In fact, the only place I could find any of their EULA information was by trying to download some of there software (I decided to check the EULA on UnixWare 7.1.3).
The only place that I can even see a mention of source code is here:
"Software" is the machine-readable (object) code portion of the Product and any human readable code contained on the media.
which reads to me that they don't give out their source code. Also, they have admitted here:
Caldera, the Caldera logos, Caldera OpenLearning, Caldera Volution, OpenLinux, Lizard, Webmin, SCO, The SCO Group, and associated logo, SCO OpenServer, SCO Open Server, ODT, Open Desktop, AIM Benchmark, and Hot Iron Awards are trademarks or registered trademarks of Caldera International, Inc. in the U.S.A. and other countries. Caldera Global Services is a service mark of Caldera International, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX and UnixWare, used under an exclusive license, are registered trademarks of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.SCO Legal Notice
that Linux is not SCO, and SCO is not Linux. As well as a reference in the EULA that there may be free software adhering to the GNU Public License included with their products.
So unless someone who was authorized to view their code (ie a real SCO developer), there should be no way that SCO Unix code could have found its way into the kernel. They also make no claims about Unix being SCO property in either their legal documentation or their EULA.
Either they haven't drafted this new license, or they're talking out of their asses. Any votes as to which??
Another biggie is the general lack of control over the game environment itself. there are very few ways around this built-in physics engine (which, I must say, is extremely realistic). Perhaps new versions should think of incorporating a "Magic" patch, or perhaps even a "Sorcerer" sub-class for those of us who like to tweak our realitites.
Who said hard work wasn't fun? I work very hard at the office, in my relationships with others, in my time at school... but I love every minute of it. I don't work to have money to pay bills to work. I work, my reward is money, I use the money to pay bills and have fun outside of work so that I can go to work in a good mood, enjoy myself, and be rewarded with more money.
I don't go to college to get a better job and get more money so I can pay higher bills. I go because I enjoy learning new things, because it allows me to grow as a human being and because then I can do bigger, more important and more fun things at my job.
I don't develop relationships with others for self gratification (that's what pr0n and tissues are for *EG*), I do it because people of like interests encourage you to grow in those interests and people with differing interests encourage you to expand your horizons, both giving you more to offer to new friends, thereby increasing your growth as a person.
Life is not about money. Life is not about power. Life is not about keeping up with or one-upping the Joneses. Life is about living every day to make the world a better place for you and the rest of humanity.
The first time I played this ungodly horrifying game, it was about 3am after a long night of substance abuse. My Sig Oth and I were in our living room with a PS2 hooked up, and we decided to plug in this horror, action/adventure survival game. When the first zombie reared its ugly head, I nearly had a heart attack.
What made it even worse, is after we had played for a while, we decided to go down to the Kwik-E-Mart for a squishee and some munchies, and when we exited our apartment building, the downtown streets were dead silent, with not another living being in sight... and a slight mist...
never before or since have I been so ready to bolt inside and barracade the doors. Just glad that I didn't hear radio static... I would have lost it entirely
I've seen a lot of/.ers already talking about not buying the game, not playing the game, etc. The problem I have with this philosophy is that it's like wrapping your face in a towel, figuring that if the problem sees that you can't see it, it won't be able to see you, and will therefore go away. THIS DOESN'T WORK.
The problem is not the people worried about advertising in games. The problem is that this could open up a Pandora's Box of other companies buying advertising time inside games.
"You have cleard the 13th level of monsters, through this door is the Ultimate Evil, all you must do is cross this threshold and defeat him... But first, here's a word from our sponsors..."
I already do everything in my power to eliminate my exposure to mind numbing advertising. If it starts getting put into video games, I won't be able to go for popcorn until the previews start, or to go grab a snack until my show comes back on.
Considering our track record so far with stopping natural disasters, I have adopted an attitude of "Whatever nature wants, nature gets". Floods, tornados, earthquakes, diseases, landslides, ice storms... the list of ways for Mother Nature to kill us off is boundless... and currently unpreventable.
There are far more pressing issues for our top minds to worry about than what to do if a giant space rock is going to fall on us. Pollution is our fault, war is our fault... prejudice, hatred, greed, intolerance... these we can work on. What's the point of blowing up an asteroid to save this world, when many of us are still working as hard as we can to destroy it.
Sports heros are paid millions of dollars a year... each... and most teachers are living hand to mouth. Doctors are taught never to identify with the person behind the disease they're treating. Racism is rampant, keeping certain people from getting ahead just because of where their family comes from. In Ireland, people are killed over how to worship the same god. In China, female children are thrown in the river because of a phallocentric ideology.
We can stop all of these things with hard work. Let's stop trying to figure out solutions for possible scenarios, and start building a world that's actually worth saving.
"Unbeknownst, even to its own employees, the company's massive profits are generated by: military research, genetic engineering, viral weaponry."
Anyone seen the Resident Evil movie?? Anyone else worried about ProdiGene being given a presidential sanction for its activities?? Anyone want to take a quick trip to Racoon City??
I will admit, I'm not much of an alarmist when it comes to this sort of thing, I generally believe that no one is organized enough to do things like create a real life version of the T-Virus, but this scares me. A company that specializes in genetic modification for pharmecutical purposes making an "error" like this.
A word on the Chief Engineer
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 1
I have never seen or heard Seamus spouting of techno-babble, and the "Particle of the week" seems to have recieved the well needed boot as well. Perhaps I will never again hear the words "If we re-calibrate the shield harmonics to defract the phased tetrion emission, it just might work". As much as I love Scotty and LaForge, I think Seamus spends more time doing things rather than talking about them. Huzzah for that.
I guess it's time to redirect those millions spent on developing stealth technology into something else. Free caffein for all geeks perhaps?? *Grin*. Actually, upon reading this article, I thought of a possible solution, current stealth technology is based on scattering radar signals so that they can't return a picture of the aircraft, they use reflective paint with tiny, jagged peices of metal in it and very angular fuselage design to accomplish this. So to conquer this new technique, why not simply have something on the jet that recieves the signals from the phone stations and transmits them on, that way they never have a chance to scatter, and the het should remain undetectable. Of course, this may just be the delusions of one to many cups of coffee. Any input from people who know more about such things??
There is a set of games I play faithfully, the Exile trilogy (which is being ported to Linux). It has very poor graphics, not even any animation until the 3rd game, and I love it... because it has a phenominal story line.
I think the most important thing for the game industry to focus on is story line. Quake was a groundbreaker in graphics and AI, but it also had a decent story line... Q2 not so much, and from what I've heard of Q3, it doesn't even exist anymore. Thief was amazing because it combined story line and graphics to make it, IMHO, a visually stunning mastrpiece of an RPG.
IMHO every game design team should have some writers on the team instead of just artists and developers, get someone to write a plausable (and if you're lucky, good) story, and then write the game around it.
This is not an attempt to make Linux into a desktop OS or something that idiots can use. This tool is being made for systems administrators in order to make it easier to keep your servers in the back end where they belong. Especially once the Win32 client is out, then Linux need never be touched by human hands.
As proof of his statement about Marketing thinking the web is just a gimick. I'm the guy who took over his position at this High Tech company. After he left the website sat dormant. I have the necesary skills (if not the experience) to maintain the site. They didn't notice. When we hired a new marketing person, straight out of college she is, they got her to start working on the website. She has never done a website before. They finally got one of the cobol programmers to work on it with the marketroid designing the site.
This is just a single example in a host of sites where marketing does not realize the full potential of a web based marketing tool. Ahh well, at least Whyte Wolf has the satisfaction of knowing he was right, and all the marketroid, Bill Gates wannabe's in our office were wrong. Aren't I right Whyte Wolf??
He says a lot of really intelligent stuff. This might not be particularily prophetic, but it certainly looks like something I'd like to see. An age where OS's and browsers are outmoded and we are connected through a computer to the information rather than to a computer which is connected to the information.
The real problem I have with this is that the whole thing smacks of Shadowrun. He's talking about having terminals and smart cards to connect to information. He seems to be talking about becoming a truly single card society. Instead of having your ID on one card, your banking info on another, your credit info on another etc., you have everything on a card that you slot into a terminal.
The next step after that is to connect our brains directly to information. Who needs cards when we can download info directly into our brains?
Another point is that we are always going to need interpreters. Raw computer data is a series of 1's and 0's, we're always going to need something between us and the information, just so we can tell what the heck it's telling us.
In short, I agree with many of his points, but I don't think this is truly prophetic. I think a lot of it is wishful thinking and pipe dreams. Who knows, I could be wrong, I have been before after all.
I can see the point of this. This is going to be a tool for those people who think of their pets as family members. "Oh, why should we have all the fun. I'll bet polly would like to get on the internet as well". The real point is, there's just barele enough information for average people, mostly the internet is pr0n, hot grits, and Natalie Portman. With that little of value to humans, what could their possibly be of interest to something that is fascinated by its own image in the mirror. This sounds like just another scheme to bilk pet owners out of a whole lot of money.
I personally do it a different way. I have my absolutely kick ass box (well, it was kick ass at the time I bought it, but you know how those things go) and instead of having either a purely Windoze system (for games, that's it), or a pure Linux system (for EVERYTHING else) I have two hard drives, and a removeable drive bay. When I feel like working with a good operating system or programming or just learning something new, I toss in my Linux hard drive, and when I want some mindless entertainment by way of games, I power down the computer, swap out my Linux drive for my Windows drive, reboot and have at it. It's a very simple and rather inexpensive solution.
(How many other planets can you think of with a single, large moon?)
Pluto springs to mind. But, you're right, we are really the only planet with a single large moon. Pluto is really just a glorified asteroid.
Just like in Star Trek, shouldn't our goal be to seek out and explore (and adapt to) strange new worlds instead of pillaging them and warping them to suit our whims?
Okay, this already brands you as a Trekkie... and on that note... *crackle* We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your vessels. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. *crackle*
Mankind is far more like The Borg, or the aliens from Independance Day than they are like the Vulcans or even the humans of Star Trek. Frankly I don't think we as a race are ready for the responsibility of taking care of our own world, never mind trying to dictate policy for the moon and other planets. Oh well, eventually we, as a race, will mature. Or at least I hope to Gaia that we will...
I've seen a lot of places saying that these are the precursors to nano-machines and thr cure for cancer and many other things. But what else could they mean to us?
From wat I have seen of them both in the article and in the movies that have been linked to in various replies, is that they would appear to make excellent artificial muscle replacements. As everyone here knows, I'm sure, muscles are controlled by electrical impulses sent from the brain. An electric jolt causes them to contract and the removal of that jolt causes them to relax. From what I can tell in the article, this is essentially what these little "fingers" do. Of course, they are nothing more ingenious than a tiny bimetallic strip responding to electricity instead of heat, but I think this technology could well be adapted to make muscle replacements. This application would be a godsend for people who have had motorbike wrecks to sports injuries.
Does anyone have an opinion on why this might not work? Or a better explaination of how it might work?
I like to think of it another way. All technology has been created by men. Why? Well, using a simiar list of examples as above...
Fire - Make meat taste better Club - Hitting mamoths hurts my hand Printing Press - Writing it down takes too long TV - Can sit down and still know what's going on VCR - can sleep while finding out what's going on Internet - Don't have to adress letters anymore
And there you have it, it all comes down to lazyness. Men are lazy, shiftless people, not unlike cats in that aspect. All technology has been created in order to make our lives easier and allow us males to be even more lazy. Gods bless all those who have made it possible. *G*
Slashdot Mirror
This takes me back to my early days on BBSs, before most people had heard of this crazy e-mail thing. The thought of sending a message halfway around the world in a couple of seconds was absurd. Enter the FIDO Net. For those of you who don't remember or weren't in the shit, the FIDO net worked similar to FedEx's ZAPMail idea, which leapfrogged faxes between offices until it got to its destination. FIDO capable BBSs would spend a couple of hours every night calling other local BBSs and synchronizing their FIDO mail. While this wasn't nearly as instantaneous as e-mail, it was certainly much faster than snail mail. Once The Web and E-mail caught on, FIDO drifeted into the annals of history.
I expect the same fate for these SIPhones. They will hit hard and be well used until someone comes up with something better, faster, cheaper, etc. and will then be relegated to the "Hey, you remember *blank* from Back In The Day?" heap. In short, I think they are a great idea whose time has come.
Well put, well spoken and well said. Your points are clear, concise and accurate, for the most part. I do have a slight issue eith one thing you said however.
So a government can be a terrorist organisation and all current governments are except some small ones ruling city states without their armies.
Switzerland does not engage in FUD of any sort, they have a very strong military which has never been mobilized. The Scandanavian nations (Norway, Sweden and Finland) are in the same boat. And us up here in the frozen north (y'know, Canada, the maple syrup "state") specifically told King George II where he could go with his "War on Terrorism". We engage in UN sanctioned peace keeping efforts. The last conflict that we were independantly involved in was the Gulf War, and that was because a country had outright invaded a much smaller country, which is just unfriendly. We were in Afghanistan to support the Americans in preventing the Russians from taking over (and our only casualties were caused by US friendly fire). We are not a military country, and we do our best to protect those we can. Be wary of making such blanket statements, or you risk undermining your whole point about... well, blanket statements...
I see it as a neverending cycle though. They knock off a huge sharer (say 500 GB of shared, copyrighted material). The next in line is someone with 400 GB, who has most of the same files the 500 GB sharer had. The new big fish downloads like mad until he has 600 GB. He gets sued and the next in line already has 500 GB since she was on a DL spree.
The only thing this will accomplish in the end is a slight and temporary vacuum at the top end of file sharing. No one has managed to stamp out crackers (the guys who break copy protection, not the pasty white people) yet, because for every one at the top that gets knocked off, three more rise up and take their place. For serious file sharers, the ammount you have to share is status, just like 0-day warez.
"You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike." --Mentor's Last Words
Then let's remember the bands that heven't been signed to a label, but have some snazzy digital recording HW/SW. Then we can consider all of the albums that have been discontinued.
If this was really about money, then the RIAA would be using P2P as a tool, not a weapon. Send talent scouts out to the networks to see who is actually popular rather than telling us what's popular. Find out if a particular album should be re-issued. Take a page from the book of Lucasberg(TM), and put out "Special Editions" of popular CDs.
It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the RIAA is going after people primarily sharing NON-copyrighted material, with a little bit of copyright material. After all, they discover bands, not us.
I read a while back that their has been a dip in kazaa usage since the start of the lawsuits
On the contrary. Although there was a short dip in Kazaa useage after the RIAA announced their new program of suing the pants off of everyone who even looks at copyrighted material, yesterday WinMX came back on-line with a vengeance. Something in the nature of 4000 trillion (is that a quadrillion?) songs went on-line for download over WinMX. My room-mates and I went on a DL/UL spree, filling many gaps in our respective collections (combined total somewhere in the 50 GB range).
As mschoolbus said (quoting Rage, all hail Rage!!): "You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."
As I understand it, Buddhism is focused on disassociation from the physical realm, thereby freeing the mind and spirit to concentrate on the greater mysteries of the universe. Naturally this is very important for those of us who must keep such nebulous things as IP networks and sounds cards and such running without letting the magic blue smoke out.
However, as a druid, my path is the path of wisdom through knowledge. We strive first to know everything about ourselves through studying the nature of the physical universe. Next we study the nature of the Otherworld through art, song, dance, and numerous other "right-brained" activities (I personally have had many a spiritual epiphany while coding). Finally we study the connection the two, the physical and the spiritual, to understand how they interact with one another, thereby fully integrating our spirits and our bodies.
The end result is enlightenment through understanding the nature of the universe. With that understanding comes some small ammount of control over how things work. It is a long and difficult path (like anything worth doing), but the benefits are astounding.
640K should be good enough for anyone.
...but I figured this was the best approach for figuring out exactly what SCO is trying to sell. Nowhere on the SCO page could I find any reference to this new "license" for UnixWare. In fact, the only place I could find any of their EULA information was by trying to download some of there software (I decided to check the EULA on UnixWare 7.1.3).
The only place that I can even see a mention of source code is here:
"Software" is the machine-readable (object) code portion of the Product and any human readable code contained on the media.
which reads to me that they don't give out their source code. Also, they have admitted here:
Caldera, the Caldera logos, Caldera OpenLearning, Caldera Volution, OpenLinux, Lizard, Webmin, SCO, The SCO Group, and associated logo, SCO OpenServer, SCO Open Server, ODT, Open Desktop, AIM Benchmark, and Hot Iron Awards are trademarks or registered trademarks of Caldera International, Inc. in the U.S.A. and other countries. Caldera Global Services is a service mark of Caldera International, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX and UnixWare, used under an exclusive license, are registered trademarks of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. SCO Legal Notice
that Linux is not SCO, and SCO is not Linux. As well as a reference in the EULA that there may be free software adhering to the GNU Public License included with their products.
So unless someone who was authorized to view their code (ie a real SCO developer), there should be no way that SCO Unix code could have found its way into the kernel. They also make no claims about Unix being SCO property in either their legal documentation or their EULA.
Either they haven't drafted this new license, or they're talking out of their asses. Any votes as to which??
Another biggie is the general lack of control over the game environment itself. there are very few ways around this built-in physics engine (which, I must say, is extremely realistic). Perhaps new versions should think of incorporating a "Magic" patch, or perhaps even a "Sorcerer" sub-class for those of us who like to tweak our realitites.
Who said hard work wasn't fun? I work very hard at the office, in my relationships with others, in my time at school... but I love every minute of it. I don't work to have money to pay bills to work. I work, my reward is money, I use the money to pay bills and have fun outside of work so that I can go to work in a good mood, enjoy myself, and be rewarded with more money.
I don't go to college to get a better job and get more money so I can pay higher bills. I go because I enjoy learning new things, because it allows me to grow as a human being and because then I can do bigger, more important and more fun things at my job.
I don't develop relationships with others for self gratification (that's what pr0n and tissues are for *EG*), I do it because people of like interests encourage you to grow in those interests and people with differing interests encourage you to expand your horizons, both giving you more to offer to new friends, thereby increasing your growth as a person.
Life is not about money. Life is not about power. Life is not about keeping up with or one-upping the Joneses. Life is about living every day to make the world a better place for you and the rest of humanity.
Life is a game, choose to play it well.
The first time I played this ungodly horrifying game, it was about 3am after a long night of substance abuse. My Sig Oth and I were in our living room with a PS2 hooked up, and we decided to plug in this horror, action/adventure survival game. When the first zombie reared its ugly head, I nearly had a heart attack.
What made it even worse, is after we had played for a while, we decided to go down to the Kwik-E-Mart for a squishee and some munchies, and when we exited our apartment building, the downtown streets were dead silent, with not another living being in sight... and a slight mist...
never before or since have I been so ready to bolt inside and barracade the doors. Just glad that I didn't hear radio static... I would have lost it entirely
I've seen a lot of /.ers already talking about not buying the game, not playing the game, etc. The problem I have with this philosophy is that it's like wrapping your face in a towel, figuring that if the problem sees that you can't see it, it won't be able to see you, and will therefore go away. THIS DOESN'T WORK.
The problem is not the people worried about advertising in games. The problem is that this could open up a Pandora's Box of other companies buying advertising time inside games.
"You have cleard the 13th level of monsters, through this door is the Ultimate Evil, all you must do is cross this threshold and defeat him... But first, here's a word from our sponsors..."
I already do everything in my power to eliminate my exposure to mind numbing advertising. If it starts getting put into video games, I won't be able to go for popcorn until the previews start, or to go grab a snack until my show comes back on.
Of course, it's just my opinion.
Considering our track record so far with stopping natural disasters, I have adopted an attitude of "Whatever nature wants, nature gets". Floods, tornados, earthquakes, diseases, landslides, ice storms... the list of ways for Mother Nature to kill us off is boundless... and currently unpreventable.
There are far more pressing issues for our top minds to worry about than what to do if a giant space rock is going to fall on us. Pollution is our fault, war is our fault... prejudice, hatred, greed, intolerance... these we can work on. What's the point of blowing up an asteroid to save this world, when many of us are still working as hard as we can to destroy it.
Sports heros are paid millions of dollars a year... each... and most teachers are living hand to mouth. Doctors are taught never to identify with the person behind the disease they're treating. Racism is rampant, keeping certain people from getting ahead just because of where their family comes from. In Ireland, people are killed over how to worship the same god. In China, female children are thrown in the river because of a phallocentric ideology.
We can stop all of these things with hard work. Let's stop trying to figure out solutions for possible scenarios, and start building a world that's actually worth saving.
"Unbeknownst, even to its own employees, the company's massive profits are generated by: military research, genetic engineering, viral weaponry."
Anyone seen the Resident Evil movie?? Anyone else worried about ProdiGene being given a presidential sanction for its activities?? Anyone want to take a quick trip to Racoon City??
I will admit, I'm not much of an alarmist when it comes to this sort of thing, I generally believe that no one is organized enough to do things like create a real life version of the T-Virus, but this scares me. A company that specializes in genetic modification for pharmecutical purposes making an "error" like this.
I have never seen or heard Seamus spouting of techno-babble, and the "Particle of the week" seems to have recieved the well needed boot as well. Perhaps I will never again hear the words "If we re-calibrate the shield harmonics to defract the phased tetrion emission, it just might work". As much as I love Scotty and LaForge, I think Seamus spends more time doing things rather than talking about them. Huzzah for that.
I guess it's time to redirect those millions spent on developing stealth technology into something else. Free caffein for all geeks perhaps?? *Grin*. Actually, upon reading this article, I thought of a possible solution, current stealth technology is based on scattering radar signals so that they can't return a picture of the aircraft, they use reflective paint with tiny, jagged peices of metal in it and very angular fuselage design to accomplish this. So to conquer this new technique, why not simply have something on the jet that recieves the signals from the phone stations and transmits them on, that way they never have a chance to scatter, and the het should remain undetectable. Of course, this may just be the delusions of one to many cups of coffee. Any input from people who know more about such things??
There is a set of games I play faithfully, the Exile trilogy (which is being ported to Linux). It has very poor graphics, not even any animation until the 3rd game, and I love it... because it has a phenominal story line.
I think the most important thing for the game industry to focus on is story line. Quake was a groundbreaker in graphics and AI, but it also had a decent story line... Q2 not so much, and from what I've heard of Q3, it doesn't even exist anymore. Thief was amazing because it combined story line and graphics to make it, IMHO, a visually stunning mastrpiece of an RPG.
IMHO every game design team should have some writers on the team instead of just artists and developers, get someone to write a plausable (and if you're lucky, good) story, and then write the game around it.
Well, just my two cents.
This is not an attempt to make Linux into a desktop OS or something that idiots can use. This tool is being made for systems administrators in order to make it easier to keep your servers in the back end where they belong. Especially once the Win32 client is out, then Linux need never be touched by human hands.
As proof of his statement about Marketing thinking the web is just a gimick. I'm the guy who took over his position at this High Tech company. After he left the website sat dormant. I have the necesary skills (if not the experience) to maintain the site. They didn't notice. When we hired a new marketing person, straight out of college she is, they got her to start working on the website. She has never done a website before. They finally got one of the cobol programmers to work on it with the marketroid designing the site.
This is just a single example in a host of sites where marketing does not realize the full potential of a web based marketing tool. Ahh well, at least Whyte Wolf has the satisfaction of knowing he was right, and all the marketroid, Bill Gates wannabe's in our office were wrong. Aren't I right Whyte Wolf??
He says a lot of really intelligent stuff. This might not be particularily prophetic, but it certainly looks like something I'd like to see. An age where OS's and browsers are outmoded and we are connected through a computer to the information rather than to a computer which is connected to the information.
The real problem I have with this is that the whole thing smacks of Shadowrun. He's talking about having terminals and smart cards to connect to information. He seems to be talking about becoming a truly single card society. Instead of having your ID on one card, your banking info on another, your credit info on another etc., you have everything on a card that you slot into a terminal.
The next step after that is to connect our brains directly to information. Who needs cards when we can download info directly into our brains?
Another point is that we are always going to need interpreters. Raw computer data is a series of 1's and 0's, we're always going to need something between us and the information, just so we can tell what the heck it's telling us.
In short, I agree with many of his points, but I don't think this is truly prophetic. I think a lot of it is wishful thinking and pipe dreams. Who knows, I could be wrong, I have been before after all.
I can see the point of this. This is going to be a tool for those people who think of their pets as family members. "Oh, why should we have all the fun. I'll bet polly would like to get on the internet as well". The real point is, there's just barele enough information for average people, mostly the internet is pr0n, hot grits, and Natalie Portman. With that little of value to humans, what could their possibly be of interest to something that is fascinated by its own image in the mirror. This sounds like just another scheme to bilk pet owners out of a whole lot of money.
Just my $0.02
I personally do it a different way. I have my absolutely kick ass box (well, it was kick ass at the time I bought it, but you know how those things go) and instead of having either a purely Windoze system (for games, that's it), or a pure Linux system (for EVERYTHING else) I have two hard drives, and a removeable drive bay. When I feel like working with a good operating system or programming or just learning something new, I toss in my Linux hard drive, and when I want some mindless entertainment by way of games, I power down the computer, swap out my Linux drive for my Windows drive, reboot and have at it. It's a very simple and rather inexpensive solution.
This might sound like a flame, but it's not.
(How many other planets can you think of with a single, large moon?)
Pluto springs to mind. But, you're right, we are really the only planet with a single large moon. Pluto is really just a glorified asteroid.
Just like in Star Trek, shouldn't our goal be to seek out and explore (and adapt to) strange new worlds instead of pillaging them and warping them to suit our whims?
Okay, this already brands you as a Trekkie... and on that note... *crackle* We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your vessels. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. *crackle*
Mankind is far more like The Borg, or the aliens from Independance Day than they are like the Vulcans or even the humans of Star Trek. Frankly I don't think we as a race are ready for the responsibility of taking care of our own world, never mind trying to dictate policy for the moon and other planets. Oh well, eventually we, as a race, will mature. Or at least I hope to Gaia that we will...
I've seen a lot of places saying that these are the precursors to nano-machines and thr cure for cancer and many other things. But what else could they mean to us?
From wat I have seen of them both in the article and in the movies that have been linked to in various replies, is that they would appear to make excellent artificial muscle replacements. As everyone here knows, I'm sure, muscles are controlled by electrical impulses sent from the brain. An electric jolt causes them to contract and the removal of that jolt causes them to relax. From what I can tell in the article, this is essentially what these little "fingers" do. Of course, they are nothing more ingenious than a tiny bimetallic strip responding to electricity instead of heat, but I think this technology could well be adapted to make muscle replacements. This application would be a godsend for people who have had motorbike wrecks to sports injuries.
Does anyone have an opinion on why this might not work? Or a better explaination of how it might work?
I like to think of it another way. All technology has been created by men. Why? Well, using a simiar list of examples as above...
Fire - Make meat taste better
Club - Hitting mamoths hurts my hand
Printing Press - Writing it down takes too long
TV - Can sit down and still know what's going on
VCR - can sleep while finding out what's going on
Internet - Don't have to adress letters anymore
And there you have it, it all comes down to lazyness. Men are lazy, shiftless people, not unlike cats in that aspect. All technology has been created in order to make our lives easier and allow us males to be even more lazy. Gods bless all those who have made it possible. *G*