And no, they DO NOT dress like the 17th century guy on the oats box. That's more of an Amish style.
There are still Quakers who adopt the "plain" style of dress (and speech, for that matter: thee, thou, etc.). It's more of a regional distinction: those Quakers can mostly be found on the West Coast. Nixon was a Quaker, BTW, and his mother was very much one of those West Coast-style Quakers.
But, you're right: the vast majority of modern day Quakers look like regular ol' folk. In fact, you might know a few Quakers right now!
What I gathered from The Architect's monologue was that it was at least several hundreds of years or possibly thousands of years into the future: it was the 6th version of the matrix, and assuming that each time Zion starts fresh with just a handful of people, the time it takes for the population to get up to a quarter of a million would be many, many years, times 6. So the original poster is correct, that it is far into the future. But each time through the matrix has "allowed" itself to be exploited in that way.
You're making the same sort of argument that's always been made against doing anything to bridge the digital divide, like when the issue was mostly about access to a PC. It's easy for you for to say that technology use doesn't really matter, but the fact is its extremely important: it's hard to think of a moderate- to high-paying job that doesn't require a certain baseline of computer competence.
The digital divide is now also about Internet access, and for many low-income communities, broadband isn't an option, even if it were affordable, because the telecoms simply don't bring the product there. Community wireless networks solves the "last mile" problem that's a bit different when your neighborhood's been redlined.
Your argument is condescending and unnecessarily pessimistic, despite your preface of being a "grouch." Geeks and the middle and upper-middle classes may take technology for granted, but it represent just another area of privelege that is quickly slipping past a vast majority of people.
Mesh networking in general is the future of wireless.
Is the protocol that enables mesh networking an open standard? The OpenAP project and the Mesh AP folks use 802.1d, or MAC bridges, to eliminate redundant hops.
Remember, the Sun is our solar system's largest "dirty bomb." While this radiological event has yet to be tied to the Abu Sayyaf or Qaeda groups, be warned that the FBI considers this an act of solar terrorism, President Bush has yet to say if this has been "securitized" for our protection, and the INS reserves the right to fingerprint and mock you.
I find this quite interesting, especially considering the existing controversy over whether blogging, such as Slashdot, is real journalism or not. I still haven't made up my mind.
That's an odd reminder to make; surely it's a settled matter for this audience. Consider whether you'd ask a Catholic monk if he thought Catholicism was "real religion." Of course, it isn't as weighty a domain, but in both cases it's about the concept being defined by the usage, rather opposed to the presupposition required of your point.
Slashdot is no less authoritative than CNN and no more than a journalist's daily diary entires, if you let go the notion of a pure objective journalism. Each fulfills a need and an expectation that in the whole provides us with "journalism." Besides, isn't the "blog: is it or isn't it" debate only being conducted through the proxies of media conglomerates? Is a conservative professor going to change my mind about covering any topic I choose and taking advantage of available technology for delivery?
Instead of providing a field for the self-preservation instincts of a AOL-TW, let's embrace the newly discovered (but always extant) complexities of journalism as a given.
In the Apple Store build-to-order options, you can add an Ultra160 SCSI card to one of the PCI slots for US$200 to connect external SCSI devices. From the description page:
The Ultra 160 SCSI PCI card lets you use external SCSI devices such as tape backup devices and external storage with your Xserve. This card has a single 68-pin connector on it for connection to high-speed external devices. You can connect standard SCSI (SCSI-1), Fast SCSI (SCSI-2), and Ultra SCSI (also called Ultra Narrow SCSI) peripherals to the Ultra 160 SCSI card with proper cabling (not included). With the card installed, you can also start up your server from externally connected drives.
I would say the advantage to the package tools is when you need to manage several machines. Sure, you may have a couple of optimized systems that you spend a lot of attention on and prune unnecessaries, but if you're an admin and you just need this box to do X and this one to do Y, apt-get lets you go home at 5pm.
The most disturbing aspect of this article is that the opponents to the RIAA have as their main argument, essentially, 'What if something goes wrong while they are creeping around? What if they corrupt your hard drive?'
This completely misses the fact that the violation and penetration is on its face reprehensible. What if the RIAA presents to a congressional hearing a supposedly fool-proof method to do what they want?
This places the burden of right-behavior on the wrong party. Compare this to what is required to enter someone's home to retreive stolen property. It requires a search warrant obtained through proper legal channels, and then the searching and reclaiming party would be police or FBI, not the party who was stolen from.
We need to assert strongly that our virtual space (which resides in a place -- hard drives, CPUs, etc that exist in a particular place) can be defended like our physical space.
For a premiere, first rate. No truly awkward or embarrassing (for us) moments that pilots and first episodes typically suffer through (except for the regrettable theme music, of course. Wow. Easily the worst I've ever heard).
They jumped right into the story without a lot of drawn-out exposition, though I do hope they back-fill us in throughout the season more on what the past century has been like. Thankfully it didn't take place right at the point after First Contact -- how boring would that have been, to watch them spend most of their time on Earth and uninhabited local systems.
<hormone filter>
O.K. Big-time yowza on the rubdown scene. Kudos to the writers for contriving a scenario that grants us a thoroughly unexpected but totally hot oil rubdown scene featuring the stunning T'Pol. Whew. And she's so logical!
</hormone filter>
I thought the climactic scene with the mysterious temporally-enhanced Sylloban (sp?) was a bit confusing and hastily edited. It didn't really explain very much -- I can only assume this is a group the crew will encounter again.
This points to an intriguing development in the Star Trek universe (or pre-development, I guess). That of factionalized species -- the Sylloban have their 'good' and 'bad', instead of a species being for the most part wholly one or the other at any one point in time. I never saw much of Voyager, so maybe that occurred there, but at any rate it definitely enriches the complexities of contact and conflict.
Beyond T'Pol being an unmitigated geek babe, she's going to be a great first officer for Archer. They clearly have prejudices that they are working through, and character growth being such a rare quantity in the Star Trek universe, this ensures that the show can hang on interesting inter-personal relationships as well as battles and exploration. (Of course, TNG did this; my point is just that it bodes well for Enterprise).
And, finally, Mr. Bakula. Not much to say, other than they couldn't have casted anyone else. He's a rock-solid choice as captain, he never overwhelms the screen nor seems buried by it.
Bravo, Paramount. High hopes for this one, and they have set the bar high right out of the gate.
Realistically if Ms doesn't add the support to the OS what manufacturers are going to create USB 2.0 items?
I think Microsoft intended to support USB 2 but backed out of including it with the initial rev. of WinXP to ensure, among many other factors, a timely release. I would expect service packs or whatever upgrade vector it is this time will bring it along in due time.
When reporters were threatened with law enforcement pressure and jail during the Watergate and Pentagon Papers cases, whole forests were felled in the pre-digital age with stories, books, even movies about courageous reporters fighting for the First Amendment
Listen up any adventurous reporters out there...tell your editor about the following idea. If it's true that a reporter's jailing can generate a lot of media buzz, then we need a sympathetic reporter to go to the plate for Sklyarov and the anti-DMCA crowd.
Get in touch with a programmer/hacker who can write up a paper or a presentation on an eBook-type copyright-protection-system and its weaknesses. Make sure that -- under the unfortunate existing climate -- it would violate the DMCA, yet break no other law (copyright, etc.) Then, with a lot of fanfare through press releases, support of your media outlet, etc., and having notified the local and federal authorities, present the paper at a news conference.
1. It forces the Federalis' hand: if they don't bite and refuse to arrest, they've rendered enforcement of the law inconsistent and therefore taken all the wind out of the sails of existing and future cases.
2. If they arrest, the resulting media storm -- pretty much guaranteed if you make the above assumptions about jailing newspeople -- will, if nothing else, bring the issue to wide consciousness, but will also likely generate enough pressure to free Sklyarov and drop the charges against him. It might also give a boost to Prof. Felton's case.
The risk to you is imprisonment, so unless you work for a high-profile media outlet that can generate a lot of pressure or you don't mind sittin' in the lockup...
The coolest thing at DeMuDi...
on
DeMuDi Linux
·
· Score: 1
...is by far their logo. The Debian swirl as a bass clef?! Genius.
Re:Fun, Useful, But Hardly A Threat
on
Wireless Freenets
·
· Score: 1
The interesting potential domain of freenets is the so-called digital divide. True, there is a critical mass of cells necessary to make freenets attractive (and possibly threatening to ISPs). One way to overcome this limitation might be to:
target a low-income, low-access neighborhood;
lease a 'fat pipe' (DSL, T1) and set up a 1W antenna;
distribute 802.11b cards to everyone below cost (and cheap PCs for those without);
charge everyone $10-20 a month.
This way you have the blanket coverage necessary for wide-area, overlapping zones. The small monthly fee (dial-up cost for broadband access) pays for the backbone. The PCs could come from recyclers or donations. The additional costs -- staff to maintain the network; servers; support -- could be supported by federal Digital Divide grant funds. In fact, the entire project's costs could be grant supported under the Digital Divide umbrella.
There are several considerations to take into account: training/education for users; redundancy in the network to ensure uninterrupted service; 'load/demand shapes' to determine the amount of backbone bandwidth to buy; etc. But the fundamental concept is: overlapping 'clouds' of wireless internet access served at nominal cost to underserved communities.
Mod this guy down (or the replies up), since clearly his main point has been shown to be false, yet it's getting more 'weight' than the truth of the matter, i.e. that you can cancel out of the MacOS registration and further it does not require a serial number like Windows does.
I read on Webmonkey that a guy who tried the URL hack has determined that despite successfully setting a longer-till-expiration cookie, the 'pop-unders' still happen.
He recommends Popup Killer for you Windows people.
If I'm not mistaken Frank Lloyd Wright had plans for a one-mile high skyscraper for Chicago before he died. He recognized the future need of urban housing for vertical space. And it was architecturally sound...(of course it would sway a bit at the top, probably more than the 8 ft of the Shanghai building).
Good for the poster to check out this story and do a little follow-up. Sounds like good journalistic work. The Slashdot editors should take a note from this, so they can do they work instead of the readers. (But the readers are the reporters! Argh!)
...you complicate the matter with having a legal headache and worrying about enforcing things. Relax, this is supposed to be fun, and don't use a license that reads like a contract...
I appreciate the sentiment of your post and it "feels right", but I can't help think that this attitude allows the good-intentioned to get steamrolled time and again, because it's sort of blissfully ignoring the way things actually happen, i.e. with dispassionate legal onslaughts and unsentimental power grabs.
Any cause that tries to appeal to the public's sense of fairness/"right"ness/rationality is living a fantasy unless this cause can and intends to defend itself as vigorously and with the same language/tactics/methods/etc. as its attackers.
I'm not saying we all become hypervigilant and consumed by "legalese", but we sure as hell best be prepared to fight the fight to protect what we value and depend upon. This is no different than anything you might care about in your life.
What good does having a good attitude about it and "relax"ing do when its been ripped away from you?
Re:Intelligent computers are inevitable and essent
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 1
It's hard for me to believe that AI will ever resemble good old natural intelligence, especially not with our concepts of data storage. It takes an infinite amount of bits to completely digitize analog data, right? CDs and MP3s get by with an approximation, but in the case of consciousness, what would it do to reliability to introduce a "sampling rate"? And if you try to capture everything, the amount of data that needs to be held in memory each second will quickly outstrip any modern data storage device, even any one we can currently conceive of (I don't know the exact numbers, but Dennet has a good example of this in his "Consciousness Explained").
I imagine that you could employ a filtration system, similar to how we humans don't respond to or retain every bit of sensory input. But think for a moment on how subtle and complex that seemingly simple task is; how differently it responds due to context of situation; how sometimes sensory input that seems to be completely unrelated can have a profound impact on decision making (how will a computer reliably determine when it is proper to factor in how quickly someone is blinking their eyes, for instance?).
I know that history often proves the naysayers wrong, but I can't imagine how AI could ever engage more than the tiniest subset of data/memes.
I wonder how technicians will be able to determine the reliability and performance of their machines in any way other than to witness the aggregate effect they have on their host system/medium. Will or can there be some sort of transmitter or other feedback device embedded on these devices?
Considering that nanotechnology is typically designed with "one part == one functionality" in mind -- in other words, each component part (re: atom) is integral to the working of the machine -- will a communication system come along under those constraints? Is it physically possible to build a transmitter of some sort using single atoms?
Slashdot Mirror
There are still Quakers who adopt the "plain" style of dress (and speech, for that matter: thee, thou, etc.). It's more of a regional distinction: those Quakers can mostly be found on the West Coast. Nixon was a Quaker, BTW, and his mother was very much one of those West Coast-style Quakers.
But, you're right: the vast majority of modern day Quakers look like regular ol' folk. In fact, you might know a few Quakers right now!
We entered "Whassup!!!" in only a few keystrokes.
That's great, thanks for showing me how easy it is to scare off all my friends and coworkers.
What I gathered from The Architect's monologue was that it was at least several hundreds of years or possibly thousands of years into the future: it was the 6th version of the matrix, and assuming that each time Zion starts fresh with just a handful of people, the time it takes for the population to get up to a quarter of a million would be many, many years, times 6. So the original poster is correct, that it is far into the future. But each time through the matrix has "allowed" itself to be exploited in that way.
</spoiler>The digital divide is now also about Internet access, and for many low-income communities, broadband isn't an option, even if it were affordable, because the telecoms simply don't bring the product there. Community wireless networks solves the "last mile" problem that's a bit different when your neighborhood's been redlined.
Your argument is condescending and unnecessarily pessimistic, despite your preface of being a "grouch." Geeks and the middle and upper-middle classes may take technology for granted, but it represent just another area of privelege that is quickly slipping past a vast majority of people.
Is the protocol that enables mesh networking an open standard? The OpenAP project and the Mesh AP folks use 802.1d, or MAC bridges, to eliminate redundant hops.
Remember, the Sun is our solar system's largest "dirty bomb." While this radiological event has yet to be tied to the Abu Sayyaf or Qaeda groups, be warned that the FBI considers this an act of solar terrorism, President Bush has yet to say if this has been "securitized" for our protection, and the INS reserves the right to fingerprint and mock you.
That's an odd reminder to make; surely it's a settled matter for this audience. Consider whether you'd ask a Catholic monk if he thought Catholicism was "real religion." Of course, it isn't as weighty a domain, but in both cases it's about the concept being defined by the usage, rather opposed to the presupposition required of your point.
Slashdot is no less authoritative than CNN and no more than a journalist's daily diary entires, if you let go the notion of a pure objective journalism. Each fulfills a need and an expectation that in the whole provides us with "journalism." Besides, isn't the "blog: is it or isn't it" debate only being conducted through the proxies of media conglomerates? Is a conservative professor going to change my mind about covering any topic I choose and taking advantage of available technology for delivery?
Instead of providing a field for the self-preservation instincts of a AOL-TW, let's embrace the newly discovered (but always extant) complexities of journalism as a given.
It was Mel Brooks, but you got the quote verbatim.
tips@news.com
I would say the advantage to the package tools is when you need to manage several machines. Sure, you may have a couple of optimized systems that you spend a lot of attention on and prune unnecessaries, but if you're an admin and you just need this box to do X and this one to do Y, apt-get lets you go home at 5pm.
This completely misses the fact that the violation and penetration is on its face reprehensible. What if the RIAA presents to a congressional hearing a supposedly fool-proof method to do what they want?
This places the burden of right-behavior on the wrong party. Compare this to what is required to enter someone's home to retreive stolen property. It requires a search warrant obtained through proper legal channels, and then the searching and reclaiming party would be police or FBI, not the party who was stolen from.
We need to assert strongly that our virtual space (which resides in a place -- hard drives, CPUs, etc that exist in a particular place) can be defended like our physical space.
They jumped right into the story without a lot of drawn-out exposition, though I do hope they back-fill us in throughout the season more on what the past century has been like. Thankfully it didn't take place right at the point after First Contact -- how boring would that have been, to watch them spend most of their time on Earth and uninhabited local systems.
<hormone filter>
O.K. Big-time yowza on the rubdown scene. Kudos to the writers for contriving a scenario that grants us a thoroughly unexpected but totally hot oil rubdown scene featuring the stunning T'Pol. Whew. And she's so logical!
</hormone filter>
I thought the climactic scene with the mysterious temporally-enhanced Sylloban (sp?) was a bit confusing and hastily edited. It didn't really explain very much -- I can only assume this is a group the crew will encounter again.
This points to an intriguing development in the Star Trek universe (or pre-development, I guess). That of factionalized species -- the Sylloban have their 'good' and 'bad', instead of a species being for the most part wholly one or the other at any one point in time. I never saw much of Voyager, so maybe that occurred there, but at any rate it definitely enriches the complexities of contact and conflict.
Beyond T'Pol being an unmitigated geek babe, she's going to be a great first officer for Archer. They clearly have prejudices that they are working through, and character growth being such a rare quantity in the Star Trek universe, this ensures that the show can hang on interesting inter-personal relationships as well as battles and exploration. (Of course, TNG did this; my point is just that it bodes well for Enterprise).
And, finally, Mr. Bakula. Not much to say, other than they couldn't have casted anyone else. He's a rock-solid choice as captain, he never overwhelms the screen nor seems buried by it.
Bravo, Paramount. High hopes for this one, and they have set the bar high right out of the gate.
I think Microsoft intended to support USB 2 but backed out of including it with the initial rev. of WinXP to ensure, among many other factors, a timely release. I would expect service packs or whatever upgrade vector it is this time will bring it along in due time.
Get in touch with a programmer/hacker who can write up a paper or a presentation on an eBook-type copyright-protection-system and its weaknesses. Make sure that -- under the unfortunate existing climate -- it would violate the DMCA, yet break no other law (copyright, etc.) Then, with a lot of fanfare through press releases, support of your media outlet, etc., and having notified the local and federal authorities, present the paper at a news conference.
1. It forces the Federalis' hand: if they don't bite and refuse to arrest, they've rendered enforcement of the law inconsistent and therefore taken all the wind out of the sails of existing and future cases.
2. If they arrest, the resulting media storm -- pretty much guaranteed if you make the above assumptions about jailing newspeople -- will, if nothing else, bring the issue to wide consciousness, but will also likely generate enough pressure to free Sklyarov and drop the charges against him. It might also give a boost to Prof. Felton's case.
The risk to you is imprisonment, so unless you work for a high-profile media outlet that can generate a lot of pressure or you don't mind sittin' in the lockup...
...is by far their logo. The Debian swirl as a bass clef?! Genius.
- target a low-income, low-access neighborhood;
- lease a 'fat pipe' (DSL, T1) and set up a 1W antenna;
- distribute 802.11b cards to everyone below cost (and cheap PCs for those without);
- charge everyone $10-20 a month.
This way you have the blanket coverage necessary for wide-area, overlapping zones. The small monthly fee (dial-up cost for broadband access) pays for the backbone. The PCs could come from recyclers or donations. The additional costs -- staff to maintain the network; servers; support -- could be supported by federal Digital Divide grant funds. In fact, the entire project's costs could be grant supported under the Digital Divide umbrella.There are several considerations to take into account: training/education for users; redundancy in the network to ensure uninterrupted service; 'load/demand shapes' to determine the amount of backbone bandwidth to buy; etc. But the fundamental concept is: overlapping 'clouds' of wireless internet access served at nominal cost to underserved communities.
Mod this guy down (or the replies up), since clearly his main point has been shown to be false, yet it's getting more 'weight' than the truth of the matter, i.e. that you can cancel out of the MacOS registration and further it does not require a serial number like Windows does.
He recommends Popup Killer for you Windows people.
If I'm not mistaken Frank Lloyd Wright had plans for a one-mile high skyscraper for Chicago before he died. He recognized the future need of urban housing for vertical space. And it was architecturally sound...(of course it would sway a bit at the top, probably more than the 8 ft of the Shanghai building).
Good for the poster to check out this story and do a little follow-up. Sounds like good journalistic work. The Slashdot editors should take a note from this, so they can do they work instead of the readers. (But the readers are the reporters! Argh!)
I appreciate the sentiment of your post and it "feels right", but I can't help think that this attitude allows the good-intentioned to get steamrolled time and again, because it's sort of blissfully ignoring the way things actually happen, i.e. with dispassionate legal onslaughts and unsentimental power grabs.
Any cause that tries to appeal to the public's sense of fairness/"right"ness/rationality is living a fantasy unless this cause can and intends to defend itself as vigorously and with the same language/tactics/methods/etc. as its attackers.
I'm not saying we all become hypervigilant and consumed by "legalese", but we sure as hell best be prepared to fight the fight to protect what we value and depend upon. This is no different than anything you might care about in your life.
What good does having a good attitude about it and "relax"ing do when its been ripped away from you?
Try this: http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/11/27/technology/ 27NET.html
I imagine that you could employ a filtration system, similar to how we humans don't respond to or retain every bit of sensory input. But think for a moment on how subtle and complex that seemingly simple task is; how differently it responds due to context of situation; how sometimes sensory input that seems to be completely unrelated can have a profound impact on decision making (how will a computer reliably determine when it is proper to factor in how quickly someone is blinking their eyes, for instance?).
I know that history often proves the naysayers wrong, but I can't imagine how AI could ever engage more than the tiniest subset of data/memes.
Considering that nanotechnology is typically designed with "one part == one functionality" in mind -- in other words, each component part (re: atom) is integral to the working of the machine -- will a communication system come along under those constraints? Is it physically possible to build a transmitter of some sort using single atoms?