If you want to stay on the home keys more often, consider switching to Dvorak. Whatever else you can say about it good or bad, it is an empicical truth that Dvorak typers get to stay on the home row far, far more than QWERTY typers. In fact, until I switched I didn't really use the home row myself; with Dvorak, the home row is simply the most natural way to type, instead of an artificial imposition.
I've never heard of these services before. It's a fairly safe assumption a lot of other people haven't either.
If you want to use one of these services, I'd recommend doing it sooner rather than later. The lawsuit, based on the my.mp3.com precedent is inevitable, and I'd expect the ripping services to lose. I don't think the courts are going to fail to see this as distribution, if what my.mp3.com was doing was "distribution". The only difference is really transmission method.
Especially as it's a safe bet at least one of them doesn't really rip each time, but instead pulls it from the "cache" whenever possible, removing the last difference from my.mp3.com other than transmission method.
Note, I'm not saying I want them shut down; I think my.mp3.com was perfectly ethical, though the legality is at best dubious. Personally, I don't think you can "distribute" something to somebody who already has it, but I can see how reasonable people differ. (Though I think my opinion is more rational going forward.) I just think that based on the precedent, the ripping services would lose, especially as it will be easy to paint every dollar these services make as something the copyright holder should have gotten (even though they don't offer this service; copyright law doesn't care), which is the Big No-No of copyright law, the whole reason it exists.
Omelettes require good ingredients, especially at the foundation. This was not. The fact that you could summarize basically the entire conversation in one brief paragraph, normally an impossibility for any decent Ask Slashdot, is an effect of that.
On the scale of possible results of 1 to 10, this questioned resulted in a 1 or 2. Pointing out that that is better than zero isn't a very compelling response, when, unless the queue is entirely empty, any number of at least 5s or 6s were available for equal effort. I'm not measuring against 0.
Ah, I do believe you've identified the proper attack vector.
You know, I think I feel a bit of strobe-induced epilepsy coming on now... yes, definately.
(Apologies to real epileptics, but I can and have made the same joke about any number of other things, too. The ADA is a good thing for everybody, not just the disabled.)
I like the "directors editions" for 70s/80s movies, because they actually had to do interesting things to get them. I especially recommend Tron and Star Trek: The Motion Picture for this.
As you move into modern times, all the special effects are done the same way. This is for good reason, and I do like the movies that can be produced that way (though it is sometimes amazing to see millions of dollars frittered away on crap, in the "can't look, must look at the train wreck" sort of way), but it does produce rather dull "behind the scenes" looks. (If I could somehow remove the art assets in a neutral way, I'd challenge you to tell the difference between the "behind-the-special effects" specials for Toy Story, the Incredibles, and the latest Star Wars movie.)
I wish they'd concentrate more on talking about the people, rather than Computer Special Effect #843,282. Stargate actually had a couple of half-way decent specials, but they couldn't figure out if they were said boring special-effect specials, content-free commercials, or a chance to see the people behind the scenes and the real actors, so they ended up kinda scatterbrained and with a lot of unfulfilled potential.
(Not helped by that damn MTV-era "can't show the same thing for more than half-a-second" editing aesthetic. Am I getting old, or has that really gotten over-the-top over the last couple of years? There's this one Discovery Health program I would otherwise watch, but it's edited by this hyperactive spaz with too many digital effects filters at their disposal.)
The Indians that come to the US are usually the brightest 2% or so from the top colleges in the country.... I was a TA for undergrads in the US and I can tell you that Indian students are much more hard working than Americans, who seem pampered by comparison.
You do need to remember to compare fairly, the "top 2%" that constitutes 100% of the Indians you faced and the top 2% of the Americans you faced, which would be somewhat more like 2% than 100%, easy to lose in the crowd.
It is true that the foreign students have a selection process that ensures way more of them are much more highly motivated, but in my experience it was easy to match them 1-for-1 with a motivated American. That leaves you with a lot of Americans left over. Sturgeons law and all that.
(I went to a major U, so while I can't claim to be 100% representative, I'm sure it's not completely unrepresentative, either.)
I recall a couple of sheer genious foreign students I had a hard time keeping up with, but there were some American genious students I had a hard time keeping up with, too. All in all most of the foreign students struck me as fairly normal, though I did tend to hang with the serious crowd, not the party American crowd. (That is to say, my standards are pretty high.)
Either you need to go back and look at some old coverage of the controller, or you are seriously unable to break out of the current controller paradigm.
The controller's motion sensitivity is the controller. It's not as if you'll be playing a FPS, and it'll react to motion and the standard "look up, look down" buttons, as if there's a conflict. It's just the motion.
The controller is designed to enable this, too; it's not just a conventional controller with motion stuff tacked on. You won't hold it like a conventional controller. (Personally, I think the new control is way, way more natural than current controllers, but it's hard to tell; I'm as biased by the current Best Practice as anyone else.)
The controller is supposed to have a shell that looks like a conventional controller; personally I suspect that when this shell is used the game will ignore motion.
I also think a lot of the negative reactions to the Revolution controller ultimately stem from the problem you demonstrate; an inability to just take it as it is, without trying to jam it back into the old paradigm's box. (Yes, a few people have considered and rejected it, but I don't get the sense that's the majority of the naysayers.)
Sorry, no. It's in the class of plans that start "Assume I have infinite resources..."
Reviewers won't do that work for free, and there already isn't enough money in the system to pay them. Even if you forced them somehow, you'd simply cause society to pay a stiff opportunity cost on their work of their otherwise most-productive members.
We already have this -- It's called a Wife. They alert you when you're going over the speed limit and make it increasingly difficult to press on the accelerator.
Mine must be busted; I only get warnings that I'm going "only 5 over".
My answer: "...sales are dismal (down 25% from last year's sales), which seems to be an industry trend..."
Seriously, sell now while you can still get something out of it, if this isn't a hobby. If you're in business for real, you're going to be slaughtered.
This isn't cynicism, this is realism. The industry is growing leaps and bounds, sure, but the brick retail market is not going to grow with it, and will probably continue to decline. (Note how it's already started to.)
Most of the advice I saw before I started writing this is that it boils down to "Cater to the hard core gamer". But the reason there aren't stores that already "cater to the hard core gamer" is that there isn't enough money in it, period, end of line. That's not an option, really.
Sell the stores to one of the people who think catering to hard core gamers will save the business, let them eat the losses.
Background: My degree is in Comp. Sci, and I took a handful of Psych classes. So no, I'm not an expert.
However, if you go and look up the developmental stages of the human being, which are increasingly well documented, I do not find fears that computers may have odd effects a silly one.
Children are not little adults. This is all the more true for toddlers, and even more true for babies. While it is true that there are some things that there is evidence that babies believe/know that are surprisingly sophisticated moral judgements (such as who hit who, and which end of that relationship is scary, at a very young age), it is also true that babies have to learn things like "if you pour all the liquid from one glass into another glass of a different shape, you have the same amount of liquid."
Babies are effectively aliens, if you haven't carefully studied them, and your internal cognition models of other normal adult humans do not apply to them very much, if at all.
I am concerned that during these formative early years (let's call it 0-3 for concreteness), excessive electronic interference could be legitimately damaging on a number of cognitive levels. I could also be wrong. Studying this topic would be very difficult to do ethically.
Of particular concern to me is the learning of the value of effort; I am concerned that a young child given very normal electronic toys that produce entire songs at the press of a button are teaching that miniscule amounts of effort can "produce" that much result. I'd much rather see a kid play with physical toys (like blocks, legos, etc, as age-appropriate) that have a much more normal effort/effect reward.
I think that there's little danger in "playing it safe"; I am concerned without proof about these things, but I do have existential evidence that not being exposed to such things at 0-3 does not result in a adult incapable of understanding electronics. As such, should I ever become a parent one of my plans is to ban any such toys for the first few years in favor of more classic, physical toys, from which one can learn about the physical world much more effectively. (Lest I sound like a Nazi, my kids would probably end up with a computer at the same time as anyone else's; remember, I'm talking 0-3-ish here.)
Take away the flash memory and input devices and replace them with a DVD drive and what you have starts to look a lot like a portable DVD player, something that's manufactured for prices in the same ballpark as the quoted $100.
A portable DVD player can only play DVDs. That is to say, it has custom chips for decoding DVDs (MPEG2, etc.). If it has a truly general purpose computer inside, it's a very, very small one. You can't just throw another 20 cents into a DVD player and have a general purpose computer, you're quite a ways away from one.
TiVos work in a similar way. They do have a general-purpose computer in there, but it's quite slow; I don't know the full specs but think low-level Pentium 1, only without the floating point, and you're probably pretty close. They work because they have a custom chip to decode and play their video, a custom chip to convert a video stream into a video stream (probably the same chip, I'm talking about the tasks here), and probably custom chips to drive the UI (at least to some degree), leaving the primary processor just to drive these custom chips and do the rare (and most behind-the-scenes) indexing. (If they have DMA, the processor may not even be responsible for much I/O beyond dealing with the remote control, but I don't know.) Unlike a DVD-player, you could in theory hack a Tivo into a fully-fledged computer by adding a keyboard and some custom software, but it'd be a bad value for your money (assuming you're paying the real full price for the hardware not subsidized by a TiVo service subscription, which doesn't happen much).
Now extend it so that you can do more than just fight each other ships. Add appropriate minigames etc to incentivise research, exploration, negotiation etc and, most importantly, MAKE IT FUN.
Or you could just play Puzzle Pirates today, and just use your imagination to make it space-themed.
couple of whatever resource unit the game decides to use as currency (which is a major issue in itself)
Yes... especially as it's pretty clear if you actually look that the Federation is communist. (What human, operating within the law, has ever been shown to actually own anything like a shuttlecraft? I admit the linked essay surprised me, but the evidence is simply overwhelming, post-TNG. I'd much rather live now than in the Fed.)
People seem to have confused Memory Access with Memory Allocation. Neither GC nor PC (programmer collected) should allow memory accesses on out-of-scope data.
This is why I mentioned I was talking real-world, not theory. I can conceive of a "safe" (out-of-scope data not accessible by any in-language construct) language that uses manual allocation. But I am aware of no such beast, which doesn't prove it doesn't exist but is pretty strong evidence that it's not very popular if it does.
And going back to the original post, even if it did, it would not be the manual allocation that would be the source of the security, it would be the safety of the language, so OP was still off.
If security was in question, I might opt for manual memory managment
Wha? The evidence is against you. It's not the GC'ed languages that have buffer overflows, and that's the number one security flaw at the moment (though #2, "improperly escaped strings resulting in spilling across a boundary", i.e., XSS, SQL injection, etc. is coming up on it fast as more people use GC'ed languages).
If security is an issue, you want GC and automatic buffer management like Java, Python, Perl, what have you, not manual management and the resulting opportunities for misallocation like in C and C++.
(Yeah, yeah, if you program perfect C++ code it's possible to get it right. But I'm not talking theory, I'm talking about what happens in the real world, and in the real world, there seems to be quite a supply of less-than-perfect C/C++ programmers allocating buffers. You have to be on crack to argue otherwise.)
He certainly seems to be aggressively interested in sharing his innermost feelings to all and sundry.
Quite practiced at it, too.
I would think introverts would tend to avoid analizing at nearly all costs.
Re:Can AJAX finally bring us "push technology"
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
Touché!
Re:Can AJAX finally bring us "push technology"
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
Everything except the last is pretty easy, although your websites will of course have to actually implement it, or you'll have to do a lot of work yourself.
The reason it's easy is that it would work much like old push technology; you'd actually pull the information periodically. You can have some problems with unavoidable memory leaks in the web browser, but other than that it would be easy.
That last one is interesting, and while it is also possible would require a lot more work by a web-based RSS aggregator; at that point I question why you're not just using a current RSS aggregator.
(That's probably the biggest downside of AJAX; web browsers are mighty big hammers now, but many problems still aren't nails.)
But even XML namespaces makes any extension like this pretty much unecessary.
Uh, no. What XML namespaces means is that Microsoft can declare this extension without any revision of the core RSS spec.
It doesn't mean that they don't need to declare what namespace they are using and explain what it means to other people if they expect other people to be using it and building on it, which is exactly what they've done.
XML namespaces isn't some sort of magic that eliminates the need to explain specifications, or whatever other thing it is you think Microsoft doesn't need to have done, since they done pretty much exactly what they needed to do.
"RSS" is not a form of RDF. Only "RSS 1.0" is a form of RDF, and it is, by far, not the commonly-used version. SSE is built on RSS 2.0 which is not RDF at all.
RSS 2.0 supports XML namespaces. This defines such a namespace. RDF is not involved.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "empirical". On Dvorak, "c" and "r" are next to each other. :)
If you want to stay on the home keys more often, consider switching to Dvorak. Whatever else you can say about it good or bad, it is an empicical truth that Dvorak typers get to stay on the home row far, far more than QWERTY typers. In fact, until I switched I didn't really use the home row myself; with Dvorak, the home row is simply the most natural way to type, instead of an artificial imposition.
I've never heard of these services before. It's a fairly safe assumption a lot of other people haven't either.
If you want to use one of these services, I'd recommend doing it sooner rather than later. The lawsuit, based on the my.mp3.com precedent is inevitable, and I'd expect the ripping services to lose. I don't think the courts are going to fail to see this as distribution, if what my.mp3.com was doing was "distribution". The only difference is really transmission method.
Especially as it's a safe bet at least one of them doesn't really rip each time, but instead pulls it from the "cache" whenever possible, removing the last difference from my.mp3.com other than transmission method.
Note, I'm not saying I want them shut down; I think my.mp3.com was perfectly ethical, though the legality is at best dubious. Personally, I don't think you can "distribute" something to somebody who already has it, but I can see how reasonable people differ. (Though I think my opinion is more rational going forward.) I just think that based on the precedent, the ripping services would lose, especially as it will be easy to paint every dollar these services make as something the copyright holder should have gotten (even though they don't offer this service; copyright law doesn't care), which is the Big No-No of copyright law, the whole reason it exists.
Omelettes require good ingredients, especially at the foundation. This was not. The fact that you could summarize basically the entire conversation in one brief paragraph, normally an impossibility for any decent Ask Slashdot, is an effect of that.
On the scale of possible results of 1 to 10, this questioned resulted in a 1 or 2. Pointing out that that is better than zero isn't a very compelling response, when, unless the queue is entirely empty, any number of at least 5s or 6s were available for equal effort. I'm not measuring against 0.
Ah, I do believe you've identified the proper attack vector.
You know, I think I feel a bit of strobe-induced epilepsy coming on now... yes, definately.
(Apologies to real epileptics, but I can and have made the same joke about any number of other things, too. The ADA is a good thing for everybody, not just the disabled.)
"My machine won't work. Here's no relevant details. What's wrong, and how can I fix it?"
Cliff, if this is the best you could find for an Ask Slashdot, it's time to decommission the category.
The only answer this deserves is this. Why don't you read it too, Cliff?
I like the "directors editions" for 70s/80s movies, because they actually had to do interesting things to get them. I especially recommend Tron and Star Trek: The Motion Picture for this.
As you move into modern times, all the special effects are done the same way. This is for good reason, and I do like the movies that can be produced that way (though it is sometimes amazing to see millions of dollars frittered away on crap, in the "can't look, must look at the train wreck" sort of way), but it does produce rather dull "behind the scenes" looks. (If I could somehow remove the art assets in a neutral way, I'd challenge you to tell the difference between the "behind-the-special effects" specials for Toy Story, the Incredibles, and the latest Star Wars movie.)
I wish they'd concentrate more on talking about the people, rather than Computer Special Effect #843,282. Stargate actually had a couple of half-way decent specials, but they couldn't figure out if they were said boring special-effect specials, content-free commercials, or a chance to see the people behind the scenes and the real actors, so they ended up kinda scatterbrained and with a lot of unfulfilled potential.
(Not helped by that damn MTV-era "can't show the same thing for more than half-a-second" editing aesthetic. Am I getting old, or has that really gotten over-the-top over the last couple of years? There's this one Discovery Health program I would otherwise watch, but it's edited by this hyperactive spaz with too many digital effects filters at their disposal.)
The Indians that come to the US are usually the brightest 2% or so from the top colleges in the country.... I was a TA for undergrads in the US and I can tell you that Indian students are much more hard working than Americans, who seem pampered by comparison.
You do need to remember to compare fairly, the "top 2%" that constitutes 100% of the Indians you faced and the top 2% of the Americans you faced, which would be somewhat more like 2% than 100%, easy to lose in the crowd.
It is true that the foreign students have a selection process that ensures way more of them are much more highly motivated, but in my experience it was easy to match them 1-for-1 with a motivated American. That leaves you with a lot of Americans left over. Sturgeons law and all that.
(I went to a major U, so while I can't claim to be 100% representative, I'm sure it's not completely unrepresentative, either.)
I recall a couple of sheer genious foreign students I had a hard time keeping up with, but there were some American genious students I had a hard time keeping up with, too. All in all most of the foreign students struck me as fairly normal, though I did tend to hang with the serious crowd, not the party American crowd. (That is to say, my standards are pretty high.)
This being slashdot, I find sexram-program.eu and varients much more interesting, and suggestive.
Either you need to go back and look at some old coverage of the controller, or you are seriously unable to break out of the current controller paradigm.
The controller's motion sensitivity is the controller. It's not as if you'll be playing a FPS, and it'll react to motion and the standard "look up, look down" buttons, as if there's a conflict. It's just the motion.
The controller is designed to enable this, too; it's not just a conventional controller with motion stuff tacked on. You won't hold it like a conventional controller. (Personally, I think the new control is way, way more natural than current controllers, but it's hard to tell; I'm as biased by the current Best Practice as anyone else.)
The controller is supposed to have a shell that looks like a conventional controller; personally I suspect that when this shell is used the game will ignore motion.
I also think a lot of the negative reactions to the Revolution controller ultimately stem from the problem you demonstrate; an inability to just take it as it is, without trying to jam it back into the old paradigm's box. (Yes, a few people have considered and rejected it, but I don't get the sense that's the majority of the naysayers.)
Do you think it would work?
Sorry, no. It's in the class of plans that start "Assume I have infinite resources..."
Reviewers won't do that work for free, and there already isn't enough money in the system to pay them. Even if you forced them somehow, you'd simply cause society to pay a stiff opportunity cost on their work of their otherwise most-productive members.
4.5 years, 300,000 pedestrians and 150 rainstorms later.
Wow, those are some amazingly precise numbers there.
But then, given your user name, I suspect you've got a lot of experience in making up plausible-sounding numbers.
We already have this -- It's called a Wife. They alert you when you're going over the speed limit and make it increasingly difficult to press on the accelerator.
Mine must be busted; I only get warnings that I'm going "only 5 over".
Is there room for the local gaming store?
My answer: "...sales are dismal (down 25% from last year's sales), which seems to be an industry trend..."
Seriously, sell now while you can still get something out of it, if this isn't a hobby. If you're in business for real, you're going to be slaughtered.
This isn't cynicism, this is realism. The industry is growing leaps and bounds, sure, but the brick retail market is not going to grow with it, and will probably continue to decline. (Note how it's already started to.)
Most of the advice I saw before I started writing this is that it boils down to "Cater to the hard core gamer". But the reason there aren't stores that already "cater to the hard core gamer" is that there isn't enough money in it, period, end of line. That's not an option, really.
Sell the stores to one of the people who think catering to hard core gamers will save the business, let them eat the losses.
Background: My degree is in Comp. Sci, and I took a handful of Psych classes. So no, I'm not an expert.
However, if you go and look up the developmental stages of the human being, which are increasingly well documented, I do not find fears that computers may have odd effects a silly one.
Children are not little adults. This is all the more true for toddlers, and even more true for babies. While it is true that there are some things that there is evidence that babies believe/know that are surprisingly sophisticated moral judgements (such as who hit who, and which end of that relationship is scary, at a very young age), it is also true that babies have to learn things like "if you pour all the liquid from one glass into another glass of a different shape, you have the same amount of liquid."
Babies are effectively aliens, if you haven't carefully studied them, and your internal cognition models of other normal adult humans do not apply to them very much, if at all.
I am concerned that during these formative early years (let's call it 0-3 for concreteness), excessive electronic interference could be legitimately damaging on a number of cognitive levels. I could also be wrong. Studying this topic would be very difficult to do ethically.
Of particular concern to me is the learning of the value of effort; I am concerned that a young child given very normal electronic toys that produce entire songs at the press of a button are teaching that miniscule amounts of effort can "produce" that much result. I'd much rather see a kid play with physical toys (like blocks, legos, etc, as age-appropriate) that have a much more normal effort/effect reward.
I think that there's little danger in "playing it safe"; I am concerned without proof about these things, but I do have existential evidence that not being exposed to such things at 0-3 does not result in a adult incapable of understanding electronics. As such, should I ever become a parent one of my plans is to ban any such toys for the first few years in favor of more classic, physical toys, from which one can learn about the physical world much more effectively. (Lest I sound like a Nazi, my kids would probably end up with a computer at the same time as anyone else's; remember, I'm talking 0-3-ish here.)
Take away the flash memory and input devices and replace them with a DVD drive and what you have starts to look a lot like a portable DVD player, something that's manufactured for prices in the same ballpark as the quoted $100.
A portable DVD player can only play DVDs. That is to say, it has custom chips for decoding DVDs (MPEG2, etc.). If it has a truly general purpose computer inside, it's a very, very small one. You can't just throw another 20 cents into a DVD player and have a general purpose computer, you're quite a ways away from one.
TiVos work in a similar way. They do have a general-purpose computer in there, but it's quite slow; I don't know the full specs but think low-level Pentium 1, only without the floating point, and you're probably pretty close. They work because they have a custom chip to decode and play their video, a custom chip to convert a video stream into a video stream (probably the same chip, I'm talking about the tasks here), and probably custom chips to drive the UI (at least to some degree), leaving the primary processor just to drive these custom chips and do the rare (and most behind-the-scenes) indexing. (If they have DMA, the processor may not even be responsible for much I/O beyond dealing with the remote control, but I don't know.) Unlike a DVD-player, you could in theory hack a Tivo into a fully-fledged computer by adding a keyboard and some custom software, but it'd be a bad value for your money (assuming you're paying the real full price for the hardware not subsidized by a TiVo service subscription, which doesn't happen much).
Or you can shave off and name each of your pubes and just use your imagination to make that space themed.
True, but that's not very multiplayer.
Now extend it so that you can do more than just fight each other ships. Add appropriate minigames etc to incentivise research, exploration, negotiation etc and, most importantly, MAKE IT FUN.
Or you could just play Puzzle Pirates today, and just use your imagination to make it space-themed.
couple of whatever resource unit the game decides to use as currency (which is a major issue in itself)
Yes... especially as it's pretty clear if you actually look that the Federation is communist. (What human, operating within the law, has ever been shown to actually own anything like a shuttlecraft? I admit the linked essay surprised me, but the evidence is simply overwhelming, post-TNG. I'd much rather live now than in the Fed.)
But the MMO can just ignore that, fortunately.
People seem to have confused Memory Access with Memory Allocation. Neither GC nor PC (programmer collected) should allow memory accesses on out-of-scope data.
This is why I mentioned I was talking real-world, not theory. I can conceive of a "safe" (out-of-scope data not accessible by any in-language construct) language that uses manual allocation. But I am aware of no such beast, which doesn't prove it doesn't exist but is pretty strong evidence that it's not very popular if it does.
And going back to the original post, even if it did, it would not be the manual allocation that would be the source of the security, it would be the safety of the language, so OP was still off.
If security was in question, I might opt for manual memory managment
Wha? The evidence is against you. It's not the GC'ed languages that have buffer overflows, and that's the number one security flaw at the moment (though #2, "improperly escaped strings resulting in spilling across a boundary", i.e., XSS, SQL injection, etc. is coming up on it fast as more people use GC'ed languages).
If security is an issue, you want GC and automatic buffer management like Java, Python, Perl, what have you, not manual management and the resulting opportunities for misallocation like in C and C++.
(Yeah, yeah, if you program perfect C++ code it's possible to get it right. But I'm not talking theory, I'm talking about what happens in the real world, and in the real world, there seems to be quite a supply of less-than-perfect C/C++ programmers allocating buffers. You have to be on crack to argue otherwise.)
Introverted people tend to seriously overanalize
Oh, no, I bet Mr. Goatse is quite extroverted.
He certainly seems to be aggressively interested in sharing his innermost feelings to all and sundry.
Quite practiced at it, too.
I would think introverts would tend to avoid analizing at nearly all costs.
Touché!
Everything except the last is pretty easy, although your websites will of course have to actually implement it, or you'll have to do a lot of work yourself.
The reason it's easy is that it would work much like old push technology; you'd actually pull the information periodically. You can have some problems with unavoidable memory leaks in the web browser, but other than that it would be easy.
That last one is interesting, and while it is also possible would require a lot more work by a web-based RSS aggregator; at that point I question why you're not just using a current RSS aggregator.
(That's probably the biggest downside of AJAX; web browsers are mighty big hammers now, but many problems still aren't nails.)
But even XML namespaces makes any extension like this pretty much unecessary.
Uh, no. What XML namespaces means is that Microsoft can declare this extension without any revision of the core RSS spec.
It doesn't mean that they don't need to declare what namespace they are using and explain what it means to other people if they expect other people to be using it and building on it, which is exactly what they've done.
XML namespaces isn't some sort of magic that eliminates the need to explain specifications, or whatever other thing it is you think Microsoft doesn't need to have done, since they done pretty much exactly what they needed to do.
"RSS" is not a form of RDF. Only "RSS 1.0" is a form of RDF, and it is, by far, not the commonly-used version. SSE is built on RSS 2.0 which is not RDF at all.
RSS 2.0 supports XML namespaces. This defines such a namespace. RDF is not involved.