And I suspect the narrative that's put out by them in PR will change drastically as well. They will use Occupy as long as it's convenient and drop it like a dead mouse as soon as it isn't.
Just like how the Republicans assimilated and neutralized the Tea Party, then. Have you noticed the coverage recently about Tea Party Republicans finding out how much they have in common with the Occupiers? My feeling is that the movement will end up being less partisan than the media currently makes them out to be.
What's even weirder is one of them is a corporate lawyer for a mega-corp. Oh well.
I agree, that is very weird. I guess I'm like you in that I don't know what to make of them either. Best thing I can think of was the Daily Show segment on the protests, where John Oliver asserts they are terrible at protesting...
I believe it was. Actually, there a couple other addresses (nicknames) that redirect to my mailbox that I never set up myself, so they apparently got that right too. The only downside is it turns out there are two "John A. Smith"s who work for NASA, one down the hall and one in another state, and because the middle initial is the same it won't autocomplete to the right one. That's a problem we didn't used to have. *sigh*
Who said Soros has a get-out-of-jail-free card? The only thing he has going for him is his news organizations that do something other than parrot the corporate talking points and fabricate total lies to defame those they disagree with. But you can't deny that it takes somewhat less than $22 billion to live comfortably. Heck, Warren Buffet wants to be taxes more, but he's apparently not man enough to just donate money to the government (there is a number to call for that, actually).
Hey, guess what, NASA is in the process of doing something like this, and it appears to be working. In the last 12 months I've gone from having like 10 different passwords to only 3 or 4, and I love it. Everybody's email addresses went from @blah.derp.nasa.gov to just @nasa.gov. Sure, I have to call the consolidated help line in Mississippi for tech support half the time, but they are well-trained and at least I can actually get some work done instead of constantly resetting passwords and resending emails. The old systems got the job done, but they were far from convenient, and too often I was tempted to work around the system and open security holes. I have no doubt that the 21 Ag department systems don't "just work"--there are 21 different sets of bugs that the users have to remember, and when they switch from one system to another they have to relearn, causing admins headaches every time.
Henry Ford must have got the "If it ain't broke don't fix it" response to his "horseless carriages" for a long time, right up until people realized just how much of a pain horses really are.
Minor correction: I can't put words in the mouths of the protestors, since there are many things they themselves disagree on. The majority of reports I've heard are that they are not protesting wealth in general, simply the gap between the rich and the poor and the irresponsibility of the rich. I should have said "nobody should be that filthy rich at the expense of everyone else."
Wealth, in general, is a good thing. It improves productivity and reduces fertility to manageable rates. Which is why letting 1% of the population HOARD ALL OF IT and not letting anybody else have some is a BAD thing, hence the protests. An individual needs a relatively finite amount of wealth to achieve the desired effect. The protestors not trying to say everybody should be poor. They're saying nobody should be that filthy rich.
Re:John Henry, please answer the white courtesy ph
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 1
Exactly. The looming automatic cuts after the "supercommittee" fails to fix all our problems are being described as not fatal to the military itself but "devastating" to military contractors, and industry lobbyists and local politicians are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
And the extent to which it is true that military contracts are a "jobs program" is hilarious: I hear stories from friends in certain large companies about how certain incompetent people get passed from project to project, never actually contributing anything, and their managers make no attempts to fire them. They just get thrown on whatever has the most money so they won't notice. Sometimes the amount of waste is astonishing.
If the goal is a welfare program with some "meaningful" activity to keep idle hands busy, then buying the machines would be a waste of money. You could pay dozens more people for the cost of machines and fuel. If there is anything else on the table, like other unfunded tasks that need doing, then yes, the machines make more sense.
You forgot to mention that the reason no one wanted your feature was that in spite of its awesome potential, you were so excited to see it working that you did not polish it enough to be usable. Then Apple comes along, does the polishing, and everybody loves it. The copycats think they can do the same thing cheaper without the polishing, and discover that the polish is the most important part of the whole thing.
Honestly, I love to bash Apple's policies as much as the next guy, but you have to admit they do one thing almost nobody else does: wait for a product to fully mature before releasing it. It seems they are the only ones with enough time/money/developers/balls/brains/whatever to suck it up and delay the release by the extra 6 months needed to get 99.99% of the bugs out, not just 99% of them. The comments above all point out how lots of Android tablets best the iPad on paper, but in reality totally suck to use. The fact that Apple consistently puts in the effort to make their software user friendly is what gives them their status in the market today.
(My first and only experience with tablets and Android was a Viewsonic G-tablet I bought a few weeks ago, and have since returned because of a bad sound card. But even so, the stock interface was total crap, and it was only reasonably usable under Cyanogenmod. It's not hard to see how an iPad could beat that.)
Some satellites are one-offs, but things like the GPS and NOAA constellations have dozens of virtually identical models. And speaking from experience, the space industry is moving (although ever so slowly) toward interchangeable parts to reduce costs. If they knew there were five or ten usable solar arrays for the taking, they could design the interface to accept them as well as a new parts.
The other interesting thing is that being able to salvage satellite parts would mean they would be less of a sunk cost and more of an investment. If they have a resale value after they are retired, that adds profit motive to the launching company.
At least then they can't stick a magnetic box on your car for no reason and expect you to give it back to them when you find it. But that means the law achieves only half of its stated purpose. I don't think they can resolve the TOS loophole without tackling the broader issue of warrantless police data requests, which include cell phone location. Then there is tracking by the cell phone provider itself, which they will no doubt claim is necessary "for network analysis and reliability improvements" or whatever and fight tooth and nail if anything ever mentions them in legislation.
Completely ignoring the political consequences of this effort, I'd like to comment on the technological implementation of the site. It's very pretty and all that, but it makes it almost impossible to browse through all the petitions. Every time to click on one to view and sign it, when you go back the list has reset itself to the beginning (and cleared any search terms you entered) so you have to click through to where you were all over again. And it will only show 8 results per page. Seems like it's designed to make things get lost in the shuffle and its users frustrated.
But guess what, if you have so many people working for the TSA, you're going to need MORE employees to watch/search the other employees! I put the plateau at maybe 83% of the population...and the other 17% will never be able to get any work done because they get stopped every 20 feet for another pat-down.
Like the ripples in an ocean as it collapses into the vacuum left when a volume of water suddenly vanishes...I should probably stop before this gets to poetic.
It would be funnier if they let you pick a celebrity and then it would give you the same ad stream that they see. I'm sure some of them get things I'd rather not know about...
Because normal people have ghosts just like the Jedi, they just don't persist as long. It was their ghosts called out in the Force, during the seconds after their death. How's that for a made-up explanation?
They're going to have to do more new author acquisitions, as that's the only way they will continue to remain useful and viable.
That said, in a way, I think that publishers also see electronic publishing as a great way of doing just that. By accepting more new authors and taking advantage of electronic publishing and print-on-demand services (but under their imprint), they can maintain smaller inventories (thus mitigating the costs of accepting more works) while still providing a useful filtering service. Thus, I see the long-term role of publishers as more of a highly selective advertising and finishing service... and in a way, this is what they have always done.
Hear hear. This is exactly what I was thinking in my reply to your comment just above. I think that if publishing houses can adapt, they will make themselves much more relevant in the 21st century than, say, the music labels (who appear to have forgotten that they are a value-added service, not a troll under the bridge to stardom). Editorial services in particular will never become obsolete (though they may be neglected, at the writer's peril).
But why exactly is pre-printing thousands of copies a requirement for anybody in this day and age? If ebooks drive that much sales from print, why not just print less, or move to wider-scale print-on-demand? We've seen it before on Slashdot, the idea of bookstores being nothing more than fronts for print-on-demand shops. Obviously, they could stock a certain number of pre-printed copies of popular titles, but the old model of printing lots of copies at once on large centralized presses has been eclipsed by miniaturization and digital presses, not just the Internet. I think that anyone making major business decisions based on the limitations of an outmoded supply chain needs to take a serious look at where to start changing things.
This is an interesting proposition. It basically means that if you're going to use DRM, it's you're own damn fault if it doesn't work and gets copied anyways. Then since it doesn't actually work, they'll stop using it so that they can collect statutory damages again. People still get screwed for torrenting etc, but now at least we can copy in peace for legal purposes.
Until they try mass threats to random people trying to convince them that copying CDs to their iPod was illegal, and sue cloud music servies out of existence. Nope, still don't see it doing much.
That reminds me of a story I heard from one of my friends at NASA. He was doing some maintenance on a production weather satellite ground station and got done early. There was plenty of time left before they were scheduled to switch back from the redundant ground station, so he hooked up his amateur transceiver and made some Earth-Moon-Earth contacts with 1500 watts into a 20-meter steerable dish . That was probably the only day in recent memory when anyone got their front-end saturated from EME transmissions!
Slashdot Mirror
And I suspect the narrative that's put out by them in PR will change drastically as well. They will use Occupy as long as it's convenient and drop it like a dead mouse as soon as it isn't.
Just like how the Republicans assimilated and neutralized the Tea Party, then. Have you noticed the coverage recently about Tea Party Republicans finding out how much they have in common with the Occupiers? My feeling is that the movement will end up being less partisan than the media currently makes them out to be.
What's even weirder is one of them is a corporate lawyer for a mega-corp. Oh well.
I agree, that is very weird. I guess I'm like you in that I don't know what to make of them either. Best thing I can think of was the Daily Show segment on the protests, where John Oliver asserts they are terrible at protesting...
I believe it was. Actually, there a couple other addresses (nicknames) that redirect to my mailbox that I never set up myself, so they apparently got that right too. The only downside is it turns out there are two "John A. Smith"s who work for NASA, one down the hall and one in another state, and because the middle initial is the same it won't autocomplete to the right one. That's a problem we didn't used to have. *sigh*
Who said Soros has a get-out-of-jail-free card? The only thing he has going for him is his news organizations that do something other than parrot the corporate talking points and fabricate total lies to defame those they disagree with. But you can't deny that it takes somewhat less than $22 billion to live comfortably. Heck, Warren Buffet wants to be taxes more, but he's apparently not man enough to just donate money to the government (there is a number to call for that, actually).
Hey, guess what, NASA is in the process of doing something like this, and it appears to be working. In the last 12 months I've gone from having like 10 different passwords to only 3 or 4, and I love it. Everybody's email addresses went from @blah.derp.nasa.gov to just @nasa.gov. Sure, I have to call the consolidated help line in Mississippi for tech support half the time, but they are well-trained and at least I can actually get some work done instead of constantly resetting passwords and resending emails. The old systems got the job done, but they were far from convenient, and too often I was tempted to work around the system and open security holes. I have no doubt that the 21 Ag department systems don't "just work"--there are 21 different sets of bugs that the users have to remember, and when they switch from one system to another they have to relearn, causing admins headaches every time.
Henry Ford must have got the "If it ain't broke don't fix it" response to his "horseless carriages" for a long time, right up until people realized just how much of a pain horses really are.
Minor correction: I can't put words in the mouths of the protestors, since there are many things they themselves disagree on. The majority of reports I've heard are that they are not protesting wealth in general, simply the gap between the rich and the poor and the irresponsibility of the rich. I should have said "nobody should be that filthy rich at the expense of everyone else."
Wealth, in general, is a good thing. It improves productivity and reduces fertility to manageable rates. Which is why letting 1% of the population HOARD ALL OF IT and not letting anybody else have some is a BAD thing, hence the protests. An individual needs a relatively finite amount of wealth to achieve the desired effect. The protestors not trying to say everybody should be poor. They're saying nobody should be that filthy rich.
Exactly. The looming automatic cuts after the "supercommittee" fails to fix all our problems are being described as not fatal to the military itself but "devastating" to military contractors, and industry lobbyists and local politicians are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
And the extent to which it is true that military contracts are a "jobs program" is hilarious: I hear stories from friends in certain large companies about how certain incompetent people get passed from project to project, never actually contributing anything, and their managers make no attempts to fire them. They just get thrown on whatever has the most money so they won't notice. Sometimes the amount of waste is astonishing.
If the goal is a welfare program with some "meaningful" activity to keep idle hands busy, then buying the machines would be a waste of money. You could pay dozens more people for the cost of machines and fuel. If there is anything else on the table, like other unfunded tasks that need doing, then yes, the machines make more sense.
Nah, they'd probably just pay the fines and go about business as usual. It's not like the FCC would do anything about it.
It might get somewhere if somebody in Congress notices it and runs out of things to complain about while trying to not fix the economy.
Except the RIAA will gladly cut off its nose to spite it's face.
I'm pretty sure they did the nose a while ago, now they're working on the major organ groups.
You forgot to mention that the reason no one wanted your feature was that in spite of its awesome potential, you were so excited to see it working that you did not polish it enough to be usable. Then Apple comes along, does the polishing, and everybody loves it. The copycats think they can do the same thing cheaper without the polishing, and discover that the polish is the most important part of the whole thing.
Honestly, I love to bash Apple's policies as much as the next guy, but you have to admit they do one thing almost nobody else does: wait for a product to fully mature before releasing it. It seems they are the only ones with enough time/money/developers/balls/brains/whatever to suck it up and delay the release by the extra 6 months needed to get 99.99% of the bugs out, not just 99% of them. The comments above all point out how lots of Android tablets best the iPad on paper, but in reality totally suck to use. The fact that Apple consistently puts in the effort to make their software user friendly is what gives them their status in the market today.
(My first and only experience with tablets and Android was a Viewsonic G-tablet I bought a few weeks ago, and have since returned because of a bad sound card. But even so, the stock interface was total crap, and it was only reasonably usable under Cyanogenmod. It's not hard to see how an iPad could beat that.)
Some satellites are one-offs, but things like the GPS and NOAA constellations have dozens of virtually identical models. And speaking from experience, the space industry is moving (although ever so slowly) toward interchangeable parts to reduce costs. If they knew there were five or ten usable solar arrays for the taking, they could design the interface to accept them as well as a new parts.
The other interesting thing is that being able to salvage satellite parts would mean they would be less of a sunk cost and more of an investment. If they have a resale value after they are retired, that adds profit motive to the launching company.
At least then they can't stick a magnetic box on your car for no reason and expect you to give it back to them when you find it. But that means the law achieves only half of its stated purpose. I don't think they can resolve the TOS loophole without tackling the broader issue of warrantless police data requests, which include cell phone location. Then there is tracking by the cell phone provider itself, which they will no doubt claim is necessary "for network analysis and reliability improvements" or whatever and fight tooth and nail if anything ever mentions them in legislation.
Completely ignoring the political consequences of this effort, I'd like to comment on the technological implementation of the site. It's very pretty and all that, but it makes it almost impossible to browse through all the petitions. Every time to click on one to view and sign it, when you go back the list has reset itself to the beginning (and cleared any search terms you entered) so you have to click through to where you were all over again. And it will only show 8 results per page. Seems like it's designed to make things get lost in the shuffle and its users frustrated.
But guess what, if you have so many people working for the TSA, you're going to need MORE employees to watch/search the other employees! I put the plateau at maybe 83% of the population...and the other 17% will never be able to get any work done because they get stopped every 20 feet for another pat-down.
Like the ripples in an ocean as it collapses into the vacuum left when a volume of water suddenly vanishes...I should probably stop before this gets to poetic.
It would be funnier if they let you pick a celebrity and then it would give you the same ad stream that they see. I'm sure some of them get things I'd rather not know about...
Because normal people have ghosts just like the Jedi, they just don't persist as long. It was their ghosts called out in the Force, during the seconds after their death. How's that for a made-up explanation?
On October 20th, Microsoft will open its 14th store in Seattle's popular University Village shopping center...
Why do they need 14 stores in one shopping center?
The solution to people getting paid to do useless work is to pay them to do useful work.
The problem is their employer doesn't want to pay them at all.
Mount one on both sides to balance the impulse!
They're going to have to do more new author acquisitions, as that's the only way they will continue to remain useful and viable.
That said, in a way, I think that publishers also see electronic publishing as a great way of doing just that. By accepting more new authors and taking advantage of electronic publishing and print-on-demand services (but under their imprint), they can maintain smaller inventories (thus mitigating the costs of accepting more works) while still providing a useful filtering service. Thus, I see the long-term role of publishers as more of a highly selective advertising and finishing service... and in a way, this is what they have always done.
Hear hear. This is exactly what I was thinking in my reply to your comment just above. I think that if publishing houses can adapt, they will make themselves much more relevant in the 21st century than, say, the music labels (who appear to have forgotten that they are a value-added service, not a troll under the bridge to stardom). Editorial services in particular will never become obsolete (though they may be neglected, at the writer's peril).
But why exactly is pre-printing thousands of copies a requirement for anybody in this day and age? If ebooks drive that much sales from print, why not just print less, or move to wider-scale print-on-demand? We've seen it before on Slashdot, the idea of bookstores being nothing more than fronts for print-on-demand shops. Obviously, they could stock a certain number of pre-printed copies of popular titles, but the old model of printing lots of copies at once on large centralized presses has been eclipsed by miniaturization and digital presses, not just the Internet. I think that anyone making major business decisions based on the limitations of an outmoded supply chain needs to take a serious look at where to start changing things.
This is an interesting proposition. It basically means that if you're going to use DRM, it's you're own damn fault if it doesn't work and gets copied anyways. Then since it doesn't actually work, they'll stop using it so that they can collect statutory damages again. People still get screwed for torrenting etc, but now at least we can copy in peace for legal purposes.
Until they try mass threats to random people trying to convince them that copying CDs to their iPod was illegal, and sue cloud music servies out of existence. Nope, still don't see it doing much.
That reminds me of a story I heard from one of my friends at NASA. He was doing some maintenance on a production weather satellite ground station and got done early. There was plenty of time left before they were scheduled to switch back from the redundant ground station, so he hooked up his amateur transceiver and made some Earth-Moon-Earth contacts with 1500 watts into a 20-meter steerable dish . That was probably the only day in recent memory when anyone got their front-end saturated from EME transmissions!