The US is shifting slightly harsh-authoritarian, rather than touchy-feely authoritarian, which is a shame. I don't want to move countries that much.
Give it a bit of time, first. One of the natural balancing mechanisms in our system seems to be that once one party is in charge, they inevitably over-reach and fall out of favor. Even as I support our President and believe in the foreign policy quite strongly (and note that I say this to establish my bias, not as some sort of subtle request to be "corrected" as some knee-jerkers seem inevitably to intrepret that as...), I see a lot of signs this is happening on domestic issues quite a bit. The polls and my general sense is that the President, for better or for worse, is not convincing people there is a Social Security problem. They're over-reaching on "decency" issues that really only a few loud people care about. A side effect of all this stuff in the Middle East is that in another year or so I expect people to start being able to ask whether we really need all this abusive airline security and other Patriot-Act-esque other things without it being political suicide.
The pendulum swings. The only reason it seems hopeless right now is that the Democratic Party itself seems to be dying, but that's ultimately not a big deal. The interests it represents aren't going anywhere and something will effectively replace it. (I'm still on the fence as to whether it will bear the name "Democratic Party"... it's still not looking good, but in the end it's of little consequence.) Were it not for that it might already have started to swing back. Hang tight for a bit.
(But brace for 2006; I see no reason to believe that the Dems aren't going to lose yet more seats and they are already nearly out of time to put into motion the necessary changes to avert that outcome. But "the worst" is over, I think, in most regards; I don't think we're going to get much more authoritarian. Right now our problem is the ways in which both parties are happy to sell us out, like patent issues and the way that "small government" seems to be MIA.)
The exception makes the rule stronger, is this familiar?
The phrase is "the exception that proves the rule", but what people like you don't seem to realize is that the phrase is very old and it uses the word prove to mean "test", not "demonstrate" or "show the opposite can't be true".
Why so many people believe that "exceptions prove rules" simply because a phrase (that they don't understand!) says so, when it is obviously counter to all logic or reason, is something I won't understand.
Bah. I'd much rather see the movie that I would have seen if I was alive in 1953 and popped on down to the movie theatre, not what's left of it after 52 years of degrading.
You want to de-saturate the colors, add dirt spots, and make the audio wobbly, run it through a filter on your own player. The rest of us would rather see an old movie as if it were made yesterday.
(Even stuff from the 80s is breaking down, I've even seen degradation in stuff from the early 90s, and the DVD is the best way to view it. My wife just bought Thelma and Louise on DVD yesterday (not a bad movie, really, even if there are no space fights:-) ), and it could well have been made yesterday; the colors were right, the detail was sharp, the audio's quality was sharp enough that my audio setup was the limiting factor. It's way better than what I've seen on TV... which surprises me nowadays, how many times the TV will play some crappy version of a movie with an outstanding DVD.)
There is an IETF standard, XMPP. And as it is rather extensible, I'm sure it can do whatever AOL thinks they want to make their protocol do.
The problem is, other than Jabber, nobody (AFAIK) has implemented it. Ever so slowly, but ever so surely, it is sinking in that there is no longer any point to having your own "gated community" when everybody just has an account on all of the services and uses a multi-network IM client that still doesn't show your commercials.
If AOL chooses to release something other than XMPP that tries to solve the same problems, only in AOL's way, developers should shun the new protocol and insist that AOL implement the standard instead of creating their own. Things that can connect to XMPP exist today. Nothing today exists that can use Tomorrow's Yet Another Proprietary AOL Protocol.
Until this occurs, it still won't have fully sunk in. IM is commoditizing. Actually, it's already a commodity, and only by artificially locking up the market have the large networks made it even this far, and that is an unnatural, unstable accomplishment that will inevitably break down, not something to build a business on.
Well, three, eight, and six consecutively is a pretty distinct pattern. I don't know about you tin-foil hatters out there, but '386' is unique enough to claim as a trademark.
That's a nice opinion, but the court's opinion was the opposite of yours, and the two uses of the word "opinion" in this sentence have quite different meanings. Hint: You don't win.
Hence, the "Pentium", which was trademarkable. (Even if it was a rather wierd time to jump into that naming scheme, what with Sexium or Hexium (depending on who you ask) coming up next, which is also why we still have Pentiums. Think about how silly the name "Pentium 4" is if taken literally....)
Read that page, knew everything on it, assumption of ignorance wrong, mind not changed by pop-science overview.
I think the "problems" you wave away with such glibness are exponential, and the most power we'll ever be able to being to bear on the problem is polynomial. Current research has done nothing to dissuade me of this, and the fact that such computers remain "small" are exactly what I mean; for small values we can hold it together, but it says little about our ability to build at large values. When someone builds a 100-qubit machine that works (i.e., solves a problem significantly faster than a conventional computer could) reliably, I'll concede I was wrong. In the meantime, I see the current strides as people vigorously clearing brush in the jungle away... while all the while trying to get to the moon.
Ref that other paper someone linked on skepticism about QM. I am aware of the fact that a couple of his numbers have been found wrong, actually, but his argument doesn't suffer for just bumping his lower limit by a factor of 3 or 4, which isn't a good sign for QC.
I don't see Quake 10 on the list, so what's the point?
The point, of course, is to solve the factoring, discrete log, and quantum physics simulation problems.
Whether that is worth the resources being thrown at it is an exercise for the reader.
(The more I learn about quantum computing, the less likely I think it is and the more I wonder what all the fury is about. I expect this will collapse in about two years and be remembered right next to the "great" AI era of the 80's. Hey, maybe I'm wrong... and hey, maybe 80's style AI programming really is the path to strong AI and we just didn't try hard enough... but I'm not holding my breath and the burden of proof remains on the researchers.
It reminds me of FTL or teleportation; with every little "advance" physics fanboys crow about how much "closer" we are, whereas I see an ever-refined understanding of why the thing we are looking for is still impossible and the potential loopholes slamming shut.
Preparing for "-1, troll" from physics fanboys in five... four... three...)
Like this? (Except you start in Javascript... why throw away the value of a perfectly good programming language?)
Note that it currently works only in Mozilla, but I think that's just because I use some array methods that IE doesn't have. As it happens I'll be fixing that today. Look for a.3 release later this week.
(Also, I don't do anything to address the async XML retrieval, but that's because so far, unless you're willing to commit to a server backend as other projects have, there just isn't much more you can do to help the developer. But we can get started writing rich widgets with no server dependence pretty easily.)
There are four fundamental inventions that I can see:
Fire, giving us access to energy not coming directly from us
The Wheel, using energy in a way other than brute force
The Written Word, extending communication beyond our body's immediate physical vicinity, and
The Computer, mechanically extending our minds. (Certainly there were a lot of intellectual expansions, and things from before the computer that could help, but the Computer was a difference of kind, not just degree.)
Most everything is an extension of those, although it is also extremely obvious that comprehending the full richness of current technology requires more than just understanding those four things. Still, it is a useful way to organize technology. (And I emphasize, "a" useful way, not "the" useful way.)
I think there is only one more Fundamental Invention left, the Virtual Body, which will use all four to free us from our physical bodies entirely. After that, the fun of civilization really begins.
Were I going to make a Top 100 list, I would start by organizing it along these categories, then each combination of categories (there's only 20 combinations and some are pretty sparse and not worth noting). But hey, I don't get paid to write articles, right? (Maybe I'll do it anyhow for kicks on my weblog.)
I don't know... it might end up being a good thing.
this throws the door wide open for "concerned mothers" to start lobbying for state-, county-, or city-wide controls on the content.
Actually, it slams the doors shut all the harder. The First Amendment applies to the government(s). It does not apply to businesses. Anybody who is doing content filtering is not doing it as the government.
I'd think twice before doing something actively illegal on a government net (although I'd think twice period), but it might be easier to defend against draconian filtering from a government provider.
The Government also has the other provisions, like the necessity of due process before collecting data, that private companies do not. If the Government were running more ISPs, the FBI wouldn't have been able to toss out Carnivore and just buy the data they are looking for from the private companies providing Internet services; that private data doesn't seem to be covered by due process. (Now, that's debatable, certainly, but that seems to be the current legal theory from the FBI, and while I can't speak for the Supremes, a lot of Circuits would quite clearly back them on that.)
I'd want to keep an eye on them, but there's much stronger avenues of attack to force the government to stop doing the various Nasty Things (TM) that we all hate than there are private businesses. Think FOIA (and the business equivalent is... getting your ass sued for spilling a trade secret), the Constitution, etc. It could be a lot better, on almost every level you're concerned about. Heck, even the accountability is better if there are enough customers; without the need to profit and if it's clearly become an infrastructure issue that can break local politicians as badly as "bad roads" can, then even the QOS could be much higher than a private provider.
Regretably, as my machine is a Duron, I doubt I can go much further to help. I don't have one of the Athlon 64 machines, I merely lust for them.
I would just suggest slapping every PowerNow option to "Yes" in the kernel and double-checking that you are rebooting to the correct one (no offense intended, I screw this up all the time). If that doesn't work, I'm out of ideas, as that Worked For Me.
Although, come to think of it, you might also try a kernel version or two back; compiling a kernel on your XP-M 2.xGHz machine is probably just a wee bit less painful than compiling a new kernel on my 500MHz-locked Duron. I try to avoid that when possible. I'm probably nuts for using Gentoo on this thing, but I so love the rest of the distro...
This laptop, due to it being one of the worst heat laptops known to man, needs to be locked to the slowest speed for me to have a chance of using it without it overheating and shutting down just browsing the web. (No exaggeration; I've watched it overhead and shut down in Windows just idling.) Fortunately in Linux I can do this. (I've finally figured out how to mostly manage this thing, and running Linux only is a big part of it.)
In Windows, I can't, and as a result XP is almost unusable. I pity the poor saps that bought this cheapass laptop and use it only for XP. In fact, I bet there aren't a whole lot of these cheapass laptops in current use as a result. (Compaq Presario 730, if you're wondering.)
Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere in Windows to lock the speed down. I've even found screenshots online of a screen on the Power setting control panel where you're supposed to be able to tell the processor what heat priorities to have when plugged in and when on battery, and my Windows refuses to show that screen to me, even after I installed a Powernow driver that explicitly claimed to have that feature.
About your linux system... are you sure you have the right PowerNow driver in the kernel? Can you go to/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ and use 'echo performance > scaling_governor' to lock your processor to high speed? If not, double check your kernel. If so, you'll want to use acpid and set it up to change the speed for you according to your desires. If you already know this, my apologies; I'm just trying to help.
The evening (TV) news has been redundant for a long time, anyway.
I don't mean it the way you mean it; I mean that I saw the stories and more angles on it than the news will have, two or three days before the news has it.
Did you know that it is common practice to "release" news on Friday evening so it gets buried? I didn't, until blogs started to help that not work anymore.
I can't think of any stories where blogs have been the source, though.
Oh, yes, the mainstream news makes sure to credit the blogs, every single time.
Let's see, the "big" ones have been: Trent Lott's comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party; the reason the scandel in the news started several days after the party is that the blogs were keeping the story alive. (Of the ones I'm about to mention, this is the only one I strongly disagree with; everyone praises people at a birthday party. It's a party for Pete's sake! Praising somebody at a birthday party doesn't mean, at least to me, that the praiser was endorsing every racist thing that Strom ever did.) The massively damaging forgery of National Guard documents at CBS; again, the delay in the news was a result of nobody in the main media wanting to touch it, but the blogs forced their hands by raising very good, and ultimately unanswerable, questions. That story was 100% blog for about a week. The fake journalist accredited to attend Bush press conferances and toss softballs to the President. A lot of Iraq stories that still haven't gotten into the press because they don't involve anybody bleeding.
I know there have been a couple of others, but my memory doesn't work well this way. It's an average of maybe one every three months for the last couple of years, but it's a start. There have also been a lot of little retractions and corrections forced by the blogs that wouldn't have happened ten years ago; the LA Times has been hit by this a lot. Of course, you don't hear about those either unless you obsessively read the corrections part of the paper and there generally is no equivalent video.
News and current affairs coverage like BBC Radio 4 - "From our own correspondent", "PM", "Today in Parliament" - and Channel 4 - "Unreported World" - are the kind of real coverage that I don't believe blogs come near to.
Are you just saying that because it makes sense? I've read way more stuff about Iraq from bloggers who live there than the so-called correspondants, who are definately doing something out there, but I'm not sure I can call it reporting.
Did you know that there are like 3 "mainstream media" correspondants in Afghanistan, total? (I don't recall the actual number, but I do recall that if look at the distribution, it's like 1 AP, 0 for all of the TV networks except maybe 1 for Fox, etc. It's not a big number out there.) Don't overestimate the degree of actual information gathering the media is doing, as opposed to waiting for people to feed them. It's pretty well established, for instance, that the "correspondants" in Baghdad mostly cower in one particular hotel, and that all the bombings you hear about are deliberately conducted within several blocks of the hotel, at the optimal time to get into the main news flow in the US. Personally, I consider it a dereliction of duty to continue to just mindlessly report these bombings as if the media had nothing to do with them, when their complicity almost completely controls where and when they occur. (Loaded terms chosen advisedly.)
I wouldn't have known this, but for people living in Iraq actually pointing this out in their blogs, and I see no reason to disbelieve them, since it makes perfect sense in the light of the facts I have. (In fact, terrorists would be stupid to not do it that way.) So before someone says I don't know that 100%, all I can say is, no shit, but neither do you know 100% I'm wrong... and if I'm drawing on blogs from Iraqis living in Iraq (which is to say, Iraqis, regardless of the medium) +
So I'm watching this ABC broadcast I believe it was and they had some story about an Iraqi girl some army unit saving a little girl.. and the source quoted was "A blog". Now this is where I get problems, as soon as blogs become "well known media" we start to see them corrupting.
I don't see blog corruption in your example, I see a Major News Organization who either didn't research the story enough to verify it, or convey the fact that they did that research well enough to convince you.
All stories start out as uncorraborated rumors, unless the media has people and cameras directly on the site of the story. But ultimately, whether or not a story starts out as video footage or something I mumbled in my sleep last night is utterly irrelevant... the question is, is it true?
By the way, if you honestly think you've been getting "no media bullshit", you're nuts, absolutely nuts, and grossly misinformed. I had no idea that there were still so many people who still thought the media was some sort of mystically holy and unbiased source of news until I read the comments for this article. I mean, isn't the history of the term "yellow journalism" part of the standard history course in school still? An entire war largely manufactured by journalists? This isn't news, people...
But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.
No-one's asking you to believe that. However, "the blogosphere" becoming the source of an increasing number of stories, increasingly able to set the agenda (to an extent you may not even realize if you're not reading blogs; the evening news has been worthless for a while but for me it's now redundant for a lot of stories), and taking down various importent entities should be enough to believe that the blogosphere is having an impact.
"Revolution" may be a bit strong at the moment, but the evidence that it can get there is pretty strong.
At this point, trying to pretend that the blogosphere is having no impact is just willful ignorance, whether because you're too elitist to believe "the masses" can have anything to say (actually, it's all individuals, you know...) or because you think the word "blog" is stupid or whatever reason you have. It doesn't change what's happening.
I hate to say it, but the best thing Lucas could do would be to turn the whole Star Wars universe over to some decent science fiction writers and film directors, then stand back.
(Sorry, vze3try7, stole your joke. By the way, I think you got the fields backwards when you signed onto Slashdot. "vze3try7" goes in the password slot, and CaptainPicard or something goes in the account name.)
For another, the fact that policing is, for the most part, an aberration of history. You can also be prevented by your captor from summoning police. Rather than a universal constant it's more a rare exception.
Another thing you missed was that I wasn't trying to feed anybody an answer, I was trying to show something you need to think about to understand the law. For more food for thought, consider the form of prostitution legal in Nevada. Why do they still ban it in cities? Might that have something to do with your points?
One thing I'd point out is that whatever answer/theory you settle on, it must take into account the indisputable historical data that women have been forced to be prostitutes in the past, basically for all of recorded history right up to today and beyond. If your final answer comes up with "Prostitution is harmless in all ways", you need to go back to the drawing board, because your theory does not explain reality.
(Why give you a fish when I can teach you how to fish? But I'll start you off with, "Anything you are allowed to do for money, you can be forced to do for money by someone in power over you... even if that forcing is itself illegal. See also 'MMORPG sweat shops'... same forces, same first-order arguments ('why should that be banned?'), same second-order effects, same basic result, although a somewhat less disturbing outcome.")
Arguments and understandings about public policy that are based only on first order effects are almost always flawed... a law to do X will almost inevitably have some other effect or counter-force, quite frequently resulting in a net negative accomplishment. You have to learn to take that into account.
An undergraduate psychology degree doesn't really qualify you to make games 'addictive'.
I strongly disagree. In fact, I can qualify you in every way that matters in just one sentence: "One of the most addictive reward patterns is intermittent rewards." There you go, apply that with gusto and you can create an addictive game. (I recommend that you also make the game itself good, you need them playing long enough to get addicted.)
For one of the most pure examples of this I know, check out the Roguelike "Angband" and its various children. (No, really, it's way more addictive than Nethack. Whether or not it is more fun is another question, but based on this standard Angband is almost empirically more addictive.)
Think about what a "rare" drop means. Think about what the random aspect of almost everything does. Even the social interactions will have intermittent rewards.
An undergrad degree in psychology is extreme overqualification. You only need a minute or two to read this post, a moment to internalize it, and some practice at applying it, and you're ready to make an addictive game, or an already addictive genre (RPGs) even more addicting.
(Note that a lot of things are addictive; ultimately, mere addictiveness is not enought to condemn something. It must also interfere with your life. We deal with this sort of thing all the time in some domains, like food, whereas in others it can blindside us... there is no "satiety" built into us for MMORPGs with a physical limit.)
Sure, but I've been playing that since I was conceived. It's kinda played out and definately lacking in some simple features that make Final Fantasy fun. On the other hand, the ability to travel a mile without a significant chance of being attacked is probably a good thing, given the stakes of "Still Reality".
(And this general joke has been done to death, so I'll just refer people to the other fine treatments of "Reality" as a role-playing game. Regrettably, I can't seem to pull up any on Google, but poke around for RPG humor and even if you don't find it, you'll be geekily(/guiltily?) amused for quite a while.)
Oh, you wanna play that game? Thanks to Dawn of Souls on the Gameboy, I'm still working my way through Final Fantasy. You see the lack of a Roman Numeral? That's because it's the first one.
Slashdot Mirror
The US is shifting slightly harsh-authoritarian, rather than touchy-feely authoritarian, which is a shame. I don't want to move countries that much.
Give it a bit of time, first. One of the natural balancing mechanisms in our system seems to be that once one party is in charge, they inevitably over-reach and fall out of favor. Even as I support our President and believe in the foreign policy quite strongly (and note that I say this to establish my bias, not as some sort of subtle request to be "corrected" as some knee-jerkers seem inevitably to intrepret that as...), I see a lot of signs this is happening on domestic issues quite a bit. The polls and my general sense is that the President, for better or for worse, is not convincing people there is a Social Security problem. They're over-reaching on "decency" issues that really only a few loud people care about. A side effect of all this stuff in the Middle East is that in another year or so I expect people to start being able to ask whether we really need all this abusive airline security and other Patriot-Act-esque other things without it being political suicide.
The pendulum swings. The only reason it seems hopeless right now is that the Democratic Party itself seems to be dying, but that's ultimately not a big deal. The interests it represents aren't going anywhere and something will effectively replace it. (I'm still on the fence as to whether it will bear the name "Democratic Party"... it's still not looking good, but in the end it's of little consequence.) Were it not for that it might already have started to swing back. Hang tight for a bit.
(But brace for 2006; I see no reason to believe that the Dems aren't going to lose yet more seats and they are already nearly out of time to put into motion the necessary changes to avert that outcome. But "the worst" is over, I think, in most regards; I don't think we're going to get much more authoritarian. Right now our problem is the ways in which both parties are happy to sell us out, like patent issues and the way that "small government" seems to be MIA.)
The exception makes the rule stronger, is this familiar?
The phrase is "the exception that proves the rule", but what people like you don't seem to realize is that the phrase is very old and it uses the word prove to mean "test", not "demonstrate" or "show the opposite can't be true".
Why so many people believe that "exceptions prove rules" simply because a phrase (that they don't understand!) says so, when it is obviously counter to all logic or reason, is something I won't understand.
Bah. I'd much rather see the movie that I would have seen if I was alive in 1953 and popped on down to the movie theatre, not what's left of it after 52 years of degrading.
:-) ), and it could well have been made yesterday; the colors were right, the detail was sharp, the audio's quality was sharp enough that my audio setup was the limiting factor. It's way better than what I've seen on TV... which surprises me nowadays, how many times the TV will play some crappy version of a movie with an outstanding DVD.)
You want to de-saturate the colors, add dirt spots, and make the audio wobbly, run it through a filter on your own player. The rest of us would rather see an old movie as if it were made yesterday.
(Even stuff from the 80s is breaking down, I've even seen degradation in stuff from the early 90s, and the DVD is the best way to view it. My wife just bought Thelma and Louise on DVD yesterday (not a bad movie, really, even if there are no space fights
Remember, Slashdot, thou art mortal.
There is an IETF standard, XMPP. And as it is rather extensible, I'm sure it can do whatever AOL thinks they want to make their protocol do.
The problem is, other than Jabber, nobody (AFAIK) has implemented it. Ever so slowly, but ever so surely, it is sinking in that there is no longer any point to having your own "gated community" when everybody just has an account on all of the services and uses a multi-network IM client that still doesn't show your commercials.
If AOL chooses to release something other than XMPP that tries to solve the same problems, only in AOL's way, developers should shun the new protocol and insist that AOL implement the standard instead of creating their own. Things that can connect to XMPP exist today. Nothing today exists that can use Tomorrow's Yet Another Proprietary AOL Protocol.
Until this occurs, it still won't have fully sunk in. IM is commoditizing. Actually, it's already a commodity, and only by artificially locking up the market have the large networks made it even this far, and that is an unnatural, unstable accomplishment that will inevitably break down, not something to build a business on.
Well, three, eight, and six consecutively is a pretty distinct pattern. I don't know about you tin-foil hatters out there, but '386' is unique enough to claim as a trademark.
That's a nice opinion, but the court's opinion was the opposite of yours, and the two uses of the word "opinion" in this sentence have quite different meanings. Hint: You don't win.
Hence, the "Pentium", which was trademarkable. (Even if it was a rather wierd time to jump into that naming scheme, what with Sexium or Hexium (depending on who you ask) coming up next, which is also why we still have Pentiums. Think about how silly the name "Pentium 4" is if taken literally....)
Read that page, knew everything on it, assumption of ignorance wrong, mind not changed by pop-science overview.
I think the "problems" you wave away with such glibness are exponential, and the most power we'll ever be able to being to bear on the problem is polynomial. Current research has done nothing to dissuade me of this, and the fact that such computers remain "small" are exactly what I mean; for small values we can hold it together, but it says little about our ability to build at large values. When someone builds a 100-qubit machine that works (i.e., solves a problem significantly faster than a conventional computer could) reliably, I'll concede I was wrong. In the meantime, I see the current strides as people vigorously clearing brush in the jungle away... while all the while trying to get to the moon.
Ref that other paper someone linked on skepticism about QM. I am aware of the fact that a couple of his numbers have been found wrong, actually, but his argument doesn't suffer for just bumping his lower limit by a factor of 3 or 4, which isn't a good sign for QC.
I don't see Quake 10 on the list, so what's the point?
The point, of course, is to solve the factoring, discrete log, and quantum physics simulation problems.
Whether that is worth the resources being thrown at it is an exercise for the reader.
(The more I learn about quantum computing, the less likely I think it is and the more I wonder what all the fury is about. I expect this will collapse in about two years and be remembered right next to the "great" AI era of the 80's. Hey, maybe I'm wrong... and hey, maybe 80's style AI programming really is the path to strong AI and we just didn't try hard enough... but I'm not holding my breath and the burden of proof remains on the researchers.
It reminds me of FTL or teleportation; with every little "advance" physics fanboys crow about how much "closer" we are, whereas I see an ever-refined understanding of why the thing we are looking for is still impossible and the potential loopholes slamming shut.
Preparing for "-1, troll" from physics fanboys in five... four... three...)
Fair enough. Happens to me about 125% of the time. :-)
Like this? (Except you start in Javascript... why throw away the value of a perfectly good programming language?)
.3 release later this week.
Note that it currently works only in Mozilla, but I think that's just because I use some array methods that IE doesn't have. As it happens I'll be fixing that today. Look for a
(Also, I don't do anything to address the async XML retrieval, but that's because so far, unless you're willing to commit to a server backend as other projects have, there just isn't much more you can do to help the developer. But we can get started writing rich widgets with no server dependence pretty easily.)
And that implies Dell isn't a smart company, how? Like the guy said, sounds like a good business model to me.
- Fire, giving us access to energy not coming directly from us
- The Wheel, using energy in a way other than brute force
- The Written Word, extending communication beyond our body's immediate physical vicinity, and
- The Computer, mechanically extending our minds. (Certainly there were a lot of intellectual expansions, and things from before the computer that could help, but the Computer was a difference of kind, not just degree.)
Most everything is an extension of those, although it is also extremely obvious that comprehending the full richness of current technology requires more than just understanding those four things. Still, it is a useful way to organize technology. (And I emphasize, "a" useful way, not "the" useful way.)I think there is only one more Fundamental Invention left, the Virtual Body, which will use all four to free us from our physical bodies entirely. After that, the fun of civilization really begins.
Were I going to make a Top 100 list, I would start by organizing it along these categories, then each combination of categories (there's only 20 combinations and some are pretty sparse and not worth noting). But hey, I don't get paid to write articles, right? (Maybe I'll do it anyhow for kicks on my weblog.)
I don't know... it might end up being a good thing.
this throws the door wide open for "concerned mothers" to start lobbying for state-, county-, or city-wide controls on the content.
Actually, it slams the doors shut all the harder. The First Amendment applies to the government(s). It does not apply to businesses. Anybody who is doing content filtering is not doing it as the government.
I'd think twice before doing something actively illegal on a government net (although I'd think twice period), but it might be easier to defend against draconian filtering from a government provider.
The Government also has the other provisions, like the necessity of due process before collecting data, that private companies do not. If the Government were running more ISPs, the FBI wouldn't have been able to toss out Carnivore and just buy the data they are looking for from the private companies providing Internet services; that private data doesn't seem to be covered by due process. (Now, that's debatable, certainly, but that seems to be the current legal theory from the FBI, and while I can't speak for the Supremes, a lot of Circuits would quite clearly back them on that.)
I'd want to keep an eye on them, but there's much stronger avenues of attack to force the government to stop doing the various Nasty Things (TM) that we all hate than there are private businesses. Think FOIA (and the business equivalent is... getting your ass sued for spilling a trade secret), the Constitution, etc. It could be a lot better, on almost every level you're concerned about. Heck, even the accountability is better if there are enough customers; without the need to profit and if it's clearly become an infrastructure issue that can break local politicians as badly as "bad roads" can, then even the QOS could be much higher than a private provider.
Regretably, as my machine is a Duron, I doubt I can go much further to help. I don't have one of the Athlon 64 machines, I merely lust for them.
I would just suggest slapping every PowerNow option to "Yes" in the kernel and double-checking that you are rebooting to the correct one (no offense intended, I screw this up all the time). If that doesn't work, I'm out of ideas, as that Worked For Me.
Although, come to think of it, you might also try a kernel version or two back; compiling a kernel on your XP-M 2.xGHz machine is probably just a wee bit less painful than compiling a new kernel on my 500MHz-locked Duron. I try to avoid that when possible. I'm probably nuts for using Gentoo on this thing, but I so love the rest of the distro...
Somewhat ironically, I have the opposite problem.
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ and use 'echo performance > scaling_governor' to lock your processor to high speed? If not, double check your kernel. If so, you'll want to use acpid and set it up to change the speed for you according to your desires. If you already know this, my apologies; I'm just trying to help.
This laptop, due to it being one of the worst heat laptops known to man, needs to be locked to the slowest speed for me to have a chance of using it without it overheating and shutting down just browsing the web. (No exaggeration; I've watched it overhead and shut down in Windows just idling.) Fortunately in Linux I can do this. (I've finally figured out how to mostly manage this thing, and running Linux only is a big part of it.)
In Windows, I can't, and as a result XP is almost unusable. I pity the poor saps that bought this cheapass laptop and use it only for XP. In fact, I bet there aren't a whole lot of these cheapass laptops in current use as a result. (Compaq Presario 730, if you're wondering.)
Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere in Windows to lock the speed down. I've even found screenshots online of a screen on the Power setting control panel where you're supposed to be able to tell the processor what heat priorities to have when plugged in and when on battery, and my Windows refuses to show that screen to me, even after I installed a Powernow driver that explicitly claimed to have that feature.
About your linux system... are you sure you have the right PowerNow driver in the kernel? Can you go to
The evening (TV) news has been redundant for a long time, anyway.
I don't mean it the way you mean it; I mean that I saw the stories and more angles on it than the news will have, two or three days before the news has it.
Did you know that it is common practice to "release" news on Friday evening so it gets buried? I didn't, until blogs started to help that not work anymore.
I can't think of any stories where blogs have been the source, though.
Oh, yes, the mainstream news makes sure to credit the blogs, every single time.
Let's see, the "big" ones have been: Trent Lott's comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party; the reason the scandel in the news started several days after the party is that the blogs were keeping the story alive. (Of the ones I'm about to mention, this is the only one I strongly disagree with; everyone praises people at a birthday party. It's a party for Pete's sake! Praising somebody at a birthday party doesn't mean, at least to me, that the praiser was endorsing every racist thing that Strom ever did.) The massively damaging forgery of National Guard documents at CBS; again, the delay in the news was a result of nobody in the main media wanting to touch it, but the blogs forced their hands by raising very good, and ultimately unanswerable, questions. That story was 100% blog for about a week. The fake journalist accredited to attend Bush press conferances and toss softballs to the President. A lot of Iraq stories that still haven't gotten into the press because they don't involve anybody bleeding.
I know there have been a couple of others, but my memory doesn't work well this way. It's an average of maybe one every three months for the last couple of years, but it's a start. There have also been a lot of little retractions and corrections forced by the blogs that wouldn't have happened ten years ago; the LA Times has been hit by this a lot. Of course, you don't hear about those either unless you obsessively read the corrections part of the paper and there generally is no equivalent video.
News and current affairs coverage like BBC Radio 4 - "From our own correspondent", "PM", "Today in Parliament" - and Channel 4 - "Unreported World" - are the kind of real coverage that I don't believe blogs come near to.
Are you just saying that because it makes sense? I've read way more stuff about Iraq from bloggers who live there than the so-called correspondants, who are definately doing something out there, but I'm not sure I can call it reporting.
Did you know that there are like 3 "mainstream media" correspondants in Afghanistan, total? (I don't recall the actual number, but I do recall that if look at the distribution, it's like 1 AP, 0 for all of the TV networks except maybe 1 for Fox, etc. It's not a big number out there.) Don't overestimate the degree of actual information gathering the media is doing, as opposed to waiting for people to feed them. It's pretty well established, for instance, that the "correspondants" in Baghdad mostly cower in one particular hotel, and that all the bombings you hear about are deliberately conducted within several blocks of the hotel, at the optimal time to get into the main news flow in the US. Personally, I consider it a dereliction of duty to continue to just mindlessly report these bombings as if the media had nothing to do with them, when their complicity almost completely controls where and when they occur. (Loaded terms chosen advisedly.)
I wouldn't have known this, but for people living in Iraq actually pointing this out in their blogs, and I see no reason to disbelieve them, since it makes perfect sense in the light of the facts I have. (In fact, terrorists would be stupid to not do it that way.) So before someone says I don't know that 100%, all I can say is, no shit, but neither do you know 100% I'm wrong... and if I'm drawing on blogs from Iraqis living in Iraq (which is to say, Iraqis, regardless of the medium) +
So I'm watching this ABC broadcast I believe it was and they had some story about an Iraqi girl some army unit saving a little girl.. and the source quoted was "A blog". Now this is where I get problems, as soon as blogs become "well known media" we start to see them corrupting.
I don't see blog corruption in your example, I see a Major News Organization who either didn't research the story enough to verify it, or convey the fact that they did that research well enough to convince you.
All stories start out as uncorraborated rumors, unless the media has people and cameras directly on the site of the story. But ultimately, whether or not a story starts out as video footage or something I mumbled in my sleep last night is utterly irrelevant... the question is, is it true?
By the way, if you honestly think you've been getting "no media bullshit", you're nuts, absolutely nuts, and grossly misinformed. I had no idea that there were still so many people who still thought the media was some sort of mystically holy and unbiased source of news until I read the comments for this article. I mean, isn't the history of the term "yellow journalism" part of the standard history course in school still? An entire war largely manufactured by journalists? This isn't news, people...
But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.
No-one's asking you to believe that. However, "the blogosphere" becoming the source of an increasing number of stories, increasingly able to set the agenda (to an extent you may not even realize if you're not reading blogs; the evening news has been worthless for a while but for me it's now redundant for a lot of stories), and taking down various importent entities should be enough to believe that the blogosphere is having an impact.
"Revolution" may be a bit strong at the moment, but the evidence that it can get there is pretty strong.
At this point, trying to pretend that the blogosphere is having no impact is just willful ignorance, whether because you're too elitist to believe "the masses" can have anything to say (actually, it's all individuals, you know...) or because you think the word "blog" is stupid or whatever reason you have. It doesn't change what's happening.
I hate to say it, but the best thing Lucas could do would be to turn the whole Star Wars universe over to some decent science fiction writers and film directors, then stand back.
ZHAAAN!
(Sorry, vze3try7, stole your joke. By the way, I think you got the fields backwards when you signed onto Slashdot. "vze3try7" goes in the password slot, and CaptainPicard or something goes in the account name.)
What am I missing?
For one thing, history.
For another, the fact that policing is, for the most part, an aberration of history. You can also be prevented by your captor from summoning police. Rather than a universal constant it's more a rare exception.
Another thing you missed was that I wasn't trying to feed anybody an answer, I was trying to show something you need to think about to understand the law. For more food for thought, consider the form of prostitution legal in Nevada. Why do they still ban it in cities? Might that have something to do with your points?
One thing I'd point out is that whatever answer/theory you settle on, it must take into account the indisputable historical data that women have been forced to be prostitutes in the past, basically for all of recorded history right up to today and beyond. If your final answer comes up with "Prostitution is harmless in all ways", you need to go back to the drawing board, because your theory does not explain reality.
Why is prostitution illegal?
Second-order effects.
(Why give you a fish when I can teach you how to fish? But I'll start you off with, "Anything you are allowed to do for money, you can be forced to do for money by someone in power over you... even if that forcing is itself illegal. See also 'MMORPG sweat shops'... same forces, same first-order arguments ('why should that be banned?'), same second-order effects, same basic result, although a somewhat less disturbing outcome.")
Arguments and understandings about public policy that are based only on first order effects are almost always flawed... a law to do X will almost inevitably have some other effect or counter-force, quite frequently resulting in a net negative accomplishment. You have to learn to take that into account.
An undergraduate psychology degree doesn't really qualify you to make games 'addictive'.
I strongly disagree. In fact, I can qualify you in every way that matters in just one sentence: "One of the most addictive reward patterns is intermittent rewards." There you go, apply that with gusto and you can create an addictive game. (I recommend that you also make the game itself good, you need them playing long enough to get addicted.)
For one of the most pure examples of this I know, check out the Roguelike "Angband" and its various children. (No, really, it's way more addictive than Nethack. Whether or not it is more fun is another question, but based on this standard Angband is almost empirically more addictive.)
Think about what a "rare" drop means. Think about what the random aspect of almost everything does. Even the social interactions will have intermittent rewards.
An undergrad degree in psychology is extreme overqualification. You only need a minute or two to read this post, a moment to internalize it, and some practice at applying it, and you're ready to make an addictive game, or an already addictive genre (RPGs) even more addicting.
(Note that a lot of things are addictive; ultimately, mere addictiveness is not enought to condemn something. It must also interfere with your life. We deal with this sort of thing all the time in some domains, like food, whereas in others it can blindside us... there is no "satiety" built into us for MMORPGs with a physical limit.)
The "Still Reality" series? Now THAT'S oldschool.
Sure, but I've been playing that since I was conceived. It's kinda played out and definately lacking in some simple features that make Final Fantasy fun. On the other hand, the ability to travel a mile without a significant chance of being attacked is probably a good thing, given the stakes of "Still Reality".
(And this general joke has been done to death, so I'll just refer people to the other fine treatments of "Reality" as a role-playing game. Regrettably, I can't seem to pull up any on Google, but poke around for RPG humor and even if you don't find it, you'll be geekily(/guiltily?) amused for quite a while.)
Coral cache.
Oh, you wanna play that game? Thanks to Dawn of Souls on the Gameboy, I'm still working my way through Final Fantasy. You see the lack of a Roman Numeral? That's because it's the first one.
:-)
You can't beat that without leaving the series
(OK, it's a remake, but still...)