Unless they have drones watching the drones, these things are also great target practice. Not that I'm advocating destruction of public property, I'm just sayin' some problems solve each other.
YES. IA IA HIPSTERCAT FTAGHN.
Honestly though, the last time I was in a grocery store that played music, they rickrolled me. I mostly hit the bulk places for frozen dinners and raw ingredients.
I've used Microsoft upgrade cycles to shift people to FOSS. IE 7? Shifted mom and dad to Firefox. Office 2010? May as well learn OpenOffice. Windows Vista? Full-on Ubuntu install.
^- this, I think. It didn't encourage lots of sales, it encouraged lots of sales when they finally let the proles have it, which would turn a mediocre release into a chart-topper based on weekly sales. Machine Of Death did kind of the same thing on Amazon, except not with holding off on the release or trying to build excitement; they just got everyone to buy the book the day it came out.
I swear to Jeebus, I got to the end of the article summary and had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st. Then I had to check the link to make sure it wasn't the Onion. I know we all thought these guys were dinosaurs, but this goes straight past incompetence, blows past malice, and lands straight in hug-me jacket territory. What sort of insanity is this? I stopped buying, pirating, or listening to Top 40 radio years ago; I get all my tunes from CC-licensed clearinghouses like jamendo.com or searching the Goog for CC licenses. This whole report just sounds like a discussion of 60's era soviet oppression- I know that's melodramatic, but it's got that same weird dissonance of separation of time and culture.
I've never seen a poor person trying to lower his taxes.
I have. Frequently. Garage sales, bartering services, businesses on the side among friends and neighbors, the poor participate in a widespread cash-only or cashless black market that the government cannot reach to tax on sales, increased income, etc. You've maybe never seen them try to dodge taxes with paperwork, but you'll constantly see them do it in other ways.
"Buy" suggests a free market or choice, or at least that men with guns won't put you into a tiny little cage if you don't give them what they want. I'm not saying taxes are universally bad- in fact I think a number of taxes are quite useful- but I've always found that quote to be frustratingly inaccurate. We build civilization with sweat and blood. We pay for organization and public resources with taxes. It's not buying, and it's not related 1:1 with civilization.
Actually, our speeds and cost per megabit are comparable to some post-Soviet states. And yeah, the CRTC is encouraging the ISP to rape customers- these moves are happening about a month after the CRTC officially said it was okay for them to block 3rd party providers from the market and not to worry because it wouldn't affect consumers.
Respectfully, sir, I disagree with some of your pessimism, though I share your optimism about the eventual success of net neutrality.
The infrastructure would be a massive undertaking
Over short distances, cantennas or RONJA. Over long distances, see http://www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca/AlbertaSuperNet.cfm for a successful public utility rollout. We are just about to the point of abandoning the need for tons of copper, or at least for small networks.
decisions about whether to reuse old protocols or create new ones would have to be decided
The beautiful thing about open standards developed by hacker types is that they 1) do what works and 2) fully explain their standard so that other people can communicate with them. The individuals on the networks could decide what they wanted to use. We don't need the ISO, they're just handy experts to rubberstamp de facto into de jure.
hardware support would need to be dealt with
The beautiful thing about open standards developed by hacker types, etc. What hardware support? It's networking. We've been solving this problem for decades. Laser light, radio antennas made from woks or coffee cans, LEDs, they all terminate in an RJ-45 jack. What's the problem?
And at some point, because it's bound to happen, some government(s) are going to want to step in and ruin the work all over again.
More open networks are harder for governments to exploit. All technologies are disruptive, then interesting, then adopted. See Hollywood, radio, and the internet. Yes, eventually an interesting, open, robust, and free peer-to-peer networking solution built by hackers will be taken over by idiots and politicians. But, see, the advantage to being clever hacker types that develop open standards is that it takes us a comparatively insignificant effort to jump to the next, non-exploited, unoccupied technological space that the government/corporations aren't even aware of yet. Yes, sure, in 20 years (or 2), our beautiful new network will be infested with FBI agents posing as little boys and senators looking to write reelection laws. Who cares? We'll be busy establishing interplanetary links built from technologies that don't exist yet and communicating with standards that have been around forever or were developed by a 14-year-old savant who got sick of his mom/government being able to track his network access.
The future isn't perfect, but it's not built by big fat slow organizations that run on power and influence. It's built by nerds with clever ideas and freedom to explore them. By the time the dinosaurs catch up, it's not the future anymore anyway.
I would emphasize that thus far Big Companies get all hot about fiber to the home, which takes backhoes and lots of funding and all sorts of permits. If a small municipality were to build, say, a wireless network, they could probably get it rolled out and running before Big Company knew what was going on. It's harder to legally block a fait accompli. Though I need to emphasize that in Canada, since the CRTC handed the ISPs carte blanche, they'd simply overcharge the city for network access. But you Americans might have an easier time of things.
Alberta built something called the SuperNet, a moderately high-speed network utility owned by the province and built with the express purpose of connecting public institutions and rural areas. http://www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca/AlbertaSuperNet.cfm So it can be done. If one were to combine this network with regional darknets or whatever, we would have, in Alberta, a public utility connecting people who shared information, with little or no corporate involvement.
Warrantless wiretap + browsing history/library checkout history open to state agents + "if you object to invasion of privacy you have something to hide" = perfectly reasonable suspicion of state motives and activities as applied to people's data. "Oh but he was guilty" is not a good argument for promoting what would otherwise be objectionable actions by the state.
We, and our godless/heathen ways, appreciate American funding of the spread of our beliefs. That global cooling thing you've been hearing about? That's us, exporting international coldism to rogue states.
Re:Saw it Sunday
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, I thought the CGI Jeff Bridges was done brilliantly. See, while he did show up a tiny bit in the early 2D sections as "real" Flynn, the majority of his appearances were as the construct, right? Where better to see an uncanny valley version of Flynn than in his imperfect mirror image? That slight creepiness was perfect for the role.
I also think that, while the plot might have been a little thin, the philosophy was pretty heavy on the ground. It's like Tron is for hackers what Avatar was for environmentalists; a beautiful explanation and exploration of the ideas that motivate and guide us as a group. The Taoism, the Grid versus the wilds, nods to real life contests between "free" and "control" information cultures, it all seemed like the movie was explaining to the audience the experience of hacker culture. You and I see such things as obvious, because we have the shared experience, but this is a film I think we can show to other people and say "look, this basically explains why I wear sarcastic T-shirts."
You know, I was going to make a post about how that was likely only if he went after the Russians like he promised, but then I realized that the small-minded petty thugs busy ordering DNS servers and credit card companies to deny service to WikiLeaks aren't long-sighted enough to realize the implications that an assassination would have on their careers- or they are, and are sufficiently insulated to be reasonably sure they won't face consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless they have drones watching the drones, these things are also great target practice. Not that I'm advocating destruction of public property, I'm just sayin' some problems solve each other.
YES. IA IA HIPSTERCAT FTAGHN. Honestly though, the last time I was in a grocery store that played music, they rickrolled me. I mostly hit the bulk places for frozen dinners and raw ingredients.
All of those things worked flawlessly on Win7.
That's a funny way of spelling Vista.
I've used Microsoft upgrade cycles to shift people to FOSS. IE 7? Shifted mom and dad to Firefox. Office 2010? May as well learn OpenOffice. Windows Vista? Full-on Ubuntu install.
^- this, I think. It didn't encourage lots of sales, it encouraged lots of sales when they finally let the proles have it, which would turn a mediocre release into a chart-topper based on weekly sales. Machine Of Death did kind of the same thing on Amazon, except not with holding off on the release or trying to build excitement; they just got everyone to buy the book the day it came out.
I swear to Jeebus, I got to the end of the article summary and had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st. Then I had to check the link to make sure it wasn't the Onion. I know we all thought these guys were dinosaurs, but this goes straight past incompetence, blows past malice, and lands straight in hug-me jacket territory. What sort of insanity is this? I stopped buying, pirating, or listening to Top 40 radio years ago; I get all my tunes from CC-licensed clearinghouses like jamendo.com or searching the Goog for CC licenses. This whole report just sounds like a discussion of 60's era soviet oppression- I know that's melodramatic, but it's got that same weird dissonance of separation of time and culture.
I've never seen a poor person trying to lower his taxes.
I have. Frequently. Garage sales, bartering services, businesses on the side among friends and neighbors, the poor participate in a widespread cash-only or cashless black market that the government cannot reach to tax on sales, increased income, etc. You've maybe never seen them try to dodge taxes with paperwork, but you'll constantly see them do it in other ways.
"Buy" suggests a free market or choice, or at least that men with guns won't put you into a tiny little cage if you don't give them what they want. I'm not saying taxes are universally bad- in fact I think a number of taxes are quite useful- but I've always found that quote to be frustratingly inaccurate. We build civilization with sweat and blood. We pay for organization and public resources with taxes. It's not buying, and it's not related 1:1 with civilization.
^-- This post is exactly why book piracy increases sales.
We're not exactly third world,
Actually, our speeds and cost per megabit are comparable to some post-Soviet states. And yeah, the CRTC is encouraging the ISP to rape customers- these moves are happening about a month after the CRTC officially said it was okay for them to block 3rd party providers from the market and not to worry because it wouldn't affect consumers.
Well, I'd assumed "listening to marketing departments" was a fault of human behavior. :T
Vaccines not so much, but second-generation antipsychotics don't seem to be quite the miracle cures the marketing departments suggested. http://www.nhs.uk/news/2007/January08/Pages/Ineffectiveuseofantipsychotics.aspx
The infrastructure would be a massive undertaking
Over short distances, cantennas or RONJA. Over long distances, see http://www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca/AlbertaSuperNet.cfm for a successful public utility rollout. We are just about to the point of abandoning the need for tons of copper, or at least for small networks.
decisions about whether to reuse old protocols or create new ones would have to be decided
The beautiful thing about open standards developed by hacker types is that they 1) do what works and 2) fully explain their standard so that other people can communicate with them. The individuals on the networks could decide what they wanted to use. We don't need the ISO, they're just handy experts to rubberstamp de facto into de jure.
hardware support would need to be dealt with
The beautiful thing about open standards developed by hacker types, etc. What hardware support? It's networking. We've been solving this problem for decades. Laser light, radio antennas made from woks or coffee cans, LEDs, they all terminate in an RJ-45 jack. What's the problem?
And at some point, because it's bound to happen, some government(s) are going to want to step in and ruin the work all over again.
More open networks are harder for governments to exploit. All technologies are disruptive, then interesting, then adopted. See Hollywood, radio, and the internet. Yes, eventually an interesting, open, robust, and free peer-to-peer networking solution built by hackers will be taken over by idiots and politicians. But, see, the advantage to being clever hacker types that develop open standards is that it takes us a comparatively insignificant effort to jump to the next, non-exploited, unoccupied technological space that the government/corporations aren't even aware of yet. Yes, sure, in 20 years (or 2), our beautiful new network will be infested with FBI agents posing as little boys and senators looking to write reelection laws. Who cares? We'll be busy establishing interplanetary links built from technologies that don't exist yet and communicating with standards that have been around forever or were developed by a 14-year-old savant who got sick of his mom/government being able to track his network access.
The future isn't perfect, but it's not built by big fat slow organizations that run on power and influence. It's built by nerds with clever ideas and freedom to explore them. By the time the dinosaurs catch up, it's not the future anymore anyway.
I would emphasize that thus far Big Companies get all hot about fiber to the home, which takes backhoes and lots of funding and all sorts of permits. If a small municipality were to build, say, a wireless network, they could probably get it rolled out and running before Big Company knew what was going on. It's harder to legally block a fait accompli. Though I need to emphasize that in Canada, since the CRTC handed the ISPs carte blanche, they'd simply overcharge the city for network access. But you Americans might have an easier time of things.
Alberta built something called the SuperNet, a moderately high-speed network utility owned by the province and built with the express purpose of connecting public institutions and rural areas. http://www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca/AlbertaSuperNet.cfm So it can be done. If one were to combine this network with regional darknets or whatever, we would have, in Alberta, a public utility connecting people who shared information, with little or no corporate involvement.
Warrantless wiretap + browsing history/library checkout history open to state agents + "if you object to invasion of privacy you have something to hide" = perfectly reasonable suspicion of state motives and activities as applied to people's data. "Oh but he was guilty" is not a good argument for promoting what would otherwise be objectionable actions by the state.
We, and our godless/heathen ways, appreciate American funding of the spread of our beliefs. That global cooling thing you've been hearing about? That's us, exporting international coldism to rogue states.
Actually, I thought the CGI Jeff Bridges was done brilliantly. See, while he did show up a tiny bit in the early 2D sections as "real" Flynn, the majority of his appearances were as the construct, right? Where better to see an uncanny valley version of Flynn than in his imperfect mirror image? That slight creepiness was perfect for the role.
I also think that, while the plot might have been a little thin, the philosophy was pretty heavy on the ground. It's like Tron is for hackers what Avatar was for environmentalists; a beautiful explanation and exploration of the ideas that motivate and guide us as a group. The Taoism, the Grid versus the wilds, nods to real life contests between "free" and "control" information cultures, it all seemed like the movie was explaining to the audience the experience of hacker culture. You and I see such things as obvious, because we have the shared experience, but this is a film I think we can show to other people and say "look, this basically explains why I wear sarcastic T-shirts."
Yes.
Tremendously, in both expertise and budget.
JQ is ruddy brilliant.
David Drake (and like a thousand other SF writers) beat you to it.
This assumes there is a Gay Gene, which is a scientifically unwarranted and philosophically unpleasant assumption of both genetics and determinism.
And 640K RAM ought to be enough for anybody. Let's not set firm prices on things that get used up more and more rapidly as time passes.
You know, I was going to make a post about how that was likely only if he went after the Russians like he promised, but then I realized that the small-minded petty thugs busy ordering DNS servers and credit card companies to deny service to WikiLeaks aren't long-sighted enough to realize the implications that an assassination would have on their careers- or they are, and are sufficiently insulated to be reasonably sure they won't face consequences.
Good luck, Mr. Assange.