...can be directly traced to the sudden appearance of strange double-archlike structures built throughout the American landscape.
Most of these "arches" were made out of two pairs of crossed mammoth tusks, and a good deal of butchered mammoth carcasses were found not too far away, either.
One popular theory is that various tribes would expend a great deal of additional energy hunting, butchering, cooking and trading mamomth meat in exchange for other staples of life, such as clothing. A great many mammoth skins with the double-arch "logo" emblazoned on them have been found buried nearby as well.
Evidence indicates that the meat was cut up into large lumps, pressed into discs, and then roasted between two highly-heated rocks. There appears to have been a rivalry between two factions, one who used heated rocks and another who chose to heat the meat directly over the fire...
I think Katz is underestimating the longterm influence of homegrown zines and blogs. I know many people who don't even touch mainstream news anymore because of things like this. The big guys can get as big as they want, but that doesn't mean they are always going to be the last word on anything. Sometimes people want to get word out on something without a financial incentive. Don't tell me you get paid a lot for this...
Why not? After all, it's not like Alex Chiu has demonstrated that he knows jack over shit about anything he's talking about.
Slashdot used to be where I go to get some of my more interesting science news. By giving this obvious hoaxer room to breathe, they have discredited themselves beyond redemption.
What's next, Sun Myung Moon sharing his opinions on open source?
This is in the same category as the folks who believe that the Holocaust was also "faked." Sure, guys -- we rounded up ALLLL those Jews and told them EXACTLY what to say!
It's amazing what nonsense people will believe. Damn Fox -- and damn you too, Mitch Pileggi; I used to have respect for you. Surely you're not that hard up for money?
Check the URL. I've been doing music on my PC for four years now that (IMO) sounds as good as anything in a studio. I've got as many tracks as I need, 96kHz digital recording, etc., etc. Of course, my need may not be everyone's...
>>Yes, let's have the government take care of us some more. They've done such a wonderful job with all their other programs.
Rural electrification, the FDIC, the postal service (bitch all you want, they're still pretty cheap), the GI Bill, the WPA... all abject failures, of course!
This just in... Pluto not a planet...
on
Is Pluto A Planet?
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· Score: 1
...but is instead a giant rogue hunk of green cheese that was believed to have been broken off from the moon when it was bombarded by cosmic debris some millions of years ago.
An unmanned NASA satellite designed to bring tasty water crackers to Pluto is scheduled to launch sometime in 2002.
"President Bush, who outlined his educational initiatives this week without once even mentioning computers or technology..."
I don't know about you, but I'm getting sick and tired of computers being pushed as the catch-all way to "fix" education. How about better pay for teachers? How about fixing some of these crumbling schools? How about textbooks that are up to date (and don't give me the line about computers replacing textbooks, because they don't currently replace regular books in enough of a way to do that effectively either)? How about emphasizing basic literacy and critical thinking?
None of these things come naturally with using a PC. You can use the PC as a way to learn these things -- and if you ask me it's not even the best way -- but to expect kids to pick this stuff up automatically by sticking them in front of a computer is stupid and naive. Also, contrary to popular belief, posting to BBSes and chat rooms does not automatically give you better command of the language. I know too many kids out there who are whizzes with their computers, but can't put together a real-world argument to save their hides.
The emphasis on computers as educational fix-it-alls is misleading and dangerous. They're like antibiotics: powerful and useful, but over-prescribed, and often for the wrong maladies.
I just tried out Freenet for the first time the other day and I was actually very pleased with it. Yes, it's slow -- but getting search results from Gnutella or Napster isn't exactly warp-speed either. And yes, there's not much in there, yet -- but that's because this thing is barely in its infancy. Give it time, people.
Nothing is perfect the first time. There's a lot promise here that hasn't yet been fulfilled, but that's only because it takes WORK to put something of this scope and magnitude together. The biggest promise here is that of a repository of information which can survive just about anything you throw at it. Surely there are things worth putting into such a system, and I've already seen a number of documents inserted into Freenet that are quite in the spirit -- political tracts, the PDF version of the recent, shameful Supreme Court judgment, and so on. And, yeah, there's the usual porn and crap as well, but the best way to deal with such things is not to bother downloading them if you don't care about them.
As a gesture of goodwill, I uploaded one of my own songs to Freenet. I figured it was the least I could do to support the cause. Check the keyindices for "Gline" and you'll see what I mean.
I've heard this is not possible because of the closed hardware config of the O2, but any advice would be appreciated. IRIX hurts.
How about Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head?
on
Non-Stop
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· Score: 2
For me, that was always his finest moment -- a surreal, wholly whacked-out novel about what would happen if World War Three were fought with bombs carrying hallucinogens. The book is written in this crazy, trippy Joycean style that actually works -- one of the few times I've seen the trick pulled off without it turning into a self-important bore.
It's a nice piece of history -- reminds you where all of this really came from. I imagine the first web page or the first encoded MP3 weren't anything great, either, but it would be interesting to know what they were. Kind of like taping up the first dollar you get when you open your restaurant or deli.
Less caloric intake mess you have that many less calories to convert to energy. Sure you'd live longer, but I suspect that would mean you would be doing a whole lot less. I don't particularly like the idea of being able to live for 150 years -- albeit confined to my bed! (Having maybe enough energy to type is cold comfort -- I don't want to spend 100 years surfing the web!)
I seem to remember Stanislaw Lem mentioning something like this in a short story of his, in which the people in question were able to live incredible lifespans, but basically could not DO anything with their time. He called them "imperpetutrons." Does anyone else remember this?
>>they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
I don't think that's wholly correct. For one, law offices tend to be very conservative (pardon the pun) about what they install and use. Most of them are based on DOS or Windows and aren't interested in switching for the sake of running Linux.
>>Corel has been rudderless for far too long.
This, however, I have no argument with. Corel was once a real contender, but they have slowly foundered, no thanks to a lot of me-too strategies.
Anyone remember their Acrobat-style portable-document clone, Envoy? Remember what a gigantic hit that was? I don't know of a single site or service that uses Envoy as a document format, while I can barely avoid banging into sites that use Acrobat.
>>They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
I suspect they were not clear at all who they wanted to sell it too. If they had wanted to sell this to mainstream computer users, then they needed to do so effectively. It's clear they weren't trying to steal away RedHat or Slackware customers.
A friend of mine pointed out something interesting the other day. Why is there now, all of a sudden, this huge flap of interest over what video games are sold to children, and not what books they are trying to buy? I countered this with a couple of real-world arguments:
1. Video games are nowhere nearly as old as books. Books have a grandfather clause of respect that video games don't have and may never get.
2. Kids get access to books censored regularly anyway; we just don't hear very much about it except on Banned Book Week.
Video games are horribly overrated -- both by the people why play them and by the people who obsess over how they're "destroying children's minds" or somesuch foofaraw. The only way they are significant is in how parents and peers react to them, and there's evidence to suggest that children are influenced more by other children their own age than by their parents (provided they are exposed to them, that is). But they're not the world-destroying evil that many finger-waggling self-appointed "moral guardians" think they are -- nor are they the Big Way Out, according to other finger-waggling self-appointed "cultural critics" like Katz.
A personal note: I used to be a game lover, but in the past few years I've come to realize I'm just not that interested in them anymore. Put it this way: How many times do you solve a crossword puzzle, then erase the squares and do it again?
About four years ago I speculated with friends that Linux could be made a real marketplace/desktop force through the help of an applications/software company with clout. The only company I could think of offhand was Corel. Sure enough, when Corel Linux came out, I was excited -- here we would have some really good choices, at last! WordPerfect and Corel Draw in Linux, just for openers...
And, wouldn't you know it, Corel apparently had no idea how to push it. They packaged it right, but they didn't capture the attention of people who were sitting on the Microsoft fence and looking for an excuse to jump. No ad campaigns. No whitepapers. No grassroots motivation. They just dumped it in the marketplace and expected it to catch fire all by itself.
Bad strategy. Maybe their successors won't make the same mistakes.
Katz, as usual, turns a piece of cultural scrap into a rallying cry for a generation that can't find anything better to do with its bored self than glorify video games. OK, maybe it's not THAT bad -- in fact, it's miles better than his usual drivel. But it's still Katz.
So far nanotech is a fascinating batch of lab playthings; I'm holding my breath for the first really public use of a nanotechnology. Even if it's nothing terribly complex, like a new insulating material or a way to desalinate water. I'm not saying those are what should be done, just that it'll be interesting to see what the first buy-off-the-shelf application will be.
"Cyberspace:" used 11 times.
"Politics:" used 8 times.
"Digital:: used only 1 time (thank God).
"Society": used 4 times.
"Techno-": used 3 times.
"Net" or "Internet": used 5 times.
Not as egregiously redundant as most KatzBait, but it's still pretty turgid and dull. It doesn't tell us a single thing we don't already know or that we couldn't wow our luncheon partner with over our V-8 and chicken salad.
Will Jon Katz ever write something that doesn't sound like it was dashed off first thing Saturday morning after watching "Johnny Quest" cartoons?
Especially since DDR SDRAM is now here, and is tearing up some serious shit in benchmarks. It's also less costly to implement, both for memory and motherboard manufacturers.
RAMBUS sounded like a good idea once upon a long, long time ago, but I have the feeling it will wind up joining the EISA bus on the scrap heap of bad ideas gone wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
...can be directly traced to the sudden appearance of strange double-archlike structures built throughout the American landscape.
Most of these "arches" were made out of two pairs of crossed mammoth tusks, and a good deal of butchered mammoth carcasses were found not too far away, either.
One popular theory is that various tribes would expend a great deal of additional energy hunting, butchering, cooking and trading mamomth meat in exchange for other staples of life, such as clothing. A great many mammoth skins with the double-arch "logo" emblazoned on them have been found buried nearby as well.
Evidence indicates that the meat was cut up into large lumps, pressed into discs, and then roasted between two highly-heated rocks. There appears to have been a rivalry between two factions, one who used heated rocks and another who chose to heat the meat directly over the fire...
I think Katz is underestimating the longterm influence of homegrown zines and blogs. I know many people who don't even touch mainstream news anymore because of things like this. The big guys can get as big as they want, but that doesn't mean they are always going to be the last word on anything. Sometimes people want to get word out on something without a financial incentive. Don't tell me you get paid a lot for this...
RCE has been around since the beginning of the year. Wake me when Slashdot stops writing about the invention of fire.
Robert Anton Wilson on Linux.
Why not? After all, it's not like Alex Chiu has demonstrated that he knows jack over shit about anything he's talking about.
Slashdot used to be where I go to get some of my more interesting science news. By giving this obvious hoaxer room to breathe, they have discredited themselves beyond redemption.
What's next, Sun Myung Moon sharing his opinions on open source?
"All your X-rays are belong to us..." Great, looks like aliens have the same stupid humor we do.
This is in the same category as the folks who believe that the Holocaust was also "faked." Sure, guys -- we rounded up ALLLL those Jews and told them EXACTLY what to say!
It's amazing what nonsense people will believe. Damn Fox -- and damn you too, Mitch Pileggi; I used to have respect for you. Surely you're not that hard up for money?
Check the URL. I've been doing music on my PC for four years now that (IMO) sounds as good as anything in a studio. I've got as many tracks as I need, 96kHz digital recording, etc., etc. Of course, my need may not be everyone's...
>>Yes, let's have the government take care of us some more. They've done such a wonderful job with all their other programs.
Rural electrification, the FDIC, the postal service (bitch all you want, they're still pretty cheap), the GI Bill, the WPA... all abject failures, of course!
An unmanned NASA satellite designed to bring tasty water crackers to Pluto is scheduled to launch sometime in 2002.
-- MONEY!!
Dang, people, these questions are utter pushovers.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting sick and tired of computers being pushed as the catch-all way to "fix" education. How about better pay for teachers? How about fixing some of these crumbling schools? How about textbooks that are up to date (and don't give me the line about computers replacing textbooks, because they don't currently replace regular books in enough of a way to do that effectively either)? How about emphasizing basic literacy and critical thinking?
None of these things come naturally with using a PC. You can use the PC as a way to learn these things -- and if you ask me it's not even the best way -- but to expect kids to pick this stuff up automatically by sticking them in front of a computer is stupid and naive. Also, contrary to popular belief, posting to BBSes and chat rooms does not automatically give you better command of the language. I know too many kids out there who are whizzes with their computers, but can't put together a real-world argument to save their hides.
The emphasis on computers as educational fix-it-alls is misleading and dangerous. They're like antibiotics: powerful and useful, but over-prescribed, and often for the wrong maladies.
I just tried out Freenet for the first time the other day and I was actually very pleased with it. Yes, it's slow -- but getting search results from Gnutella or Napster isn't exactly warp-speed either. And yes, there's not much in there, yet -- but that's because this thing is barely in its infancy. Give it time, people.
Nothing is perfect the first time. There's a lot promise here that hasn't yet been fulfilled, but that's only because it takes WORK to put something of this scope and magnitude together. The biggest promise here is that of a repository of information which can survive just about anything you throw at it. Surely there are things worth putting into such a system, and I've already seen a number of documents inserted into Freenet that are quite in the spirit -- political tracts, the PDF version of the recent, shameful Supreme Court judgment, and so on. And, yeah, there's the usual porn and crap as well, but the best way to deal with such things is not to bother downloading them if you don't care about them.
As a gesture of goodwill, I uploaded one of my own songs to Freenet. I figured it was the least I could do to support the cause. Check the keyindices for "Gline" and you'll see what I mean.
I've heard this is not possible because of the closed hardware config of the O2, but any advice would be appreciated. IRIX hurts.
For me, that was always his finest moment -- a surreal, wholly whacked-out novel about what would happen if World War Three were fought with bombs carrying hallucinogens. The book is written in this crazy, trippy Joycean style that actually works -- one of the few times I've seen the trick pulled off without it turning into a self-important bore.
It's a nice piece of history -- reminds you where all of this really came from. I imagine the first web page or the first encoded MP3 weren't anything great, either, but it would be interesting to know what they were. Kind of like taping up the first dollar you get when you open your restaurant or deli.
Less caloric intake mess you have that many less calories to convert to energy. Sure you'd live longer, but I suspect that would mean you would be doing a whole lot less. I don't particularly like the idea of being able to live for 150 years -- albeit confined to my bed! (Having maybe enough energy to type is cold comfort -- I don't want to spend 100 years surfing the web!)
I seem to remember Stanislaw Lem mentioning something like this in a short story of his, in which the people in question were able to live incredible lifespans, but basically could not DO anything with their time. He called them "imperpetutrons." Does anyone else remember this?
>>they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
I don't think that's wholly correct. For one, law offices tend to be very conservative (pardon the pun) about what they install and use. Most of them are based on DOS or Windows and aren't interested in switching for the sake of running Linux.
>>Corel has been rudderless for far too long.
This, however, I have no argument with. Corel was once a real contender, but they have slowly foundered, no thanks to a lot of me-too strategies.
Anyone remember their Acrobat-style portable-document clone, Envoy? Remember what a gigantic hit that was? I don't know of a single site or service that uses Envoy as a document format, while I can barely avoid banging into sites that use Acrobat.
>>They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
I suspect they were not clear at all who they wanted to sell it too. If they had wanted to sell this to mainstream computer users, then they needed to do so effectively. It's clear they weren't trying to steal away RedHat or Slackware customers.
A friend of mine pointed out something interesting the other day. Why is there now, all of a sudden, this huge flap of interest over what video games are sold to children, and not what books they are trying to buy? I countered this with a couple of real-world arguments:
1. Video games are nowhere nearly as old as books. Books have a grandfather clause of respect that video games don't have and may never get.
2. Kids get access to books censored regularly anyway; we just don't hear very much about it except on Banned Book Week.
Video games are horribly overrated -- both by the people why play them and by the people who obsess over how they're "destroying children's minds" or somesuch foofaraw. The only way they are significant is in how parents and peers react to them, and there's evidence to suggest that children are influenced more by other children their own age than by their parents (provided they are exposed to them, that is). But they're not the world-destroying evil that many finger-waggling self-appointed "moral guardians" think they are -- nor are they the Big Way Out, according to other finger-waggling self-appointed "cultural critics" like Katz.
A personal note: I used to be a game lover, but in the past few years I've come to realize I'm just not that interested in them anymore. Put it this way: How many times do you solve a crossword puzzle, then erase the squares and do it again?
About four years ago I speculated with friends that Linux could be made a real marketplace/desktop force through the help of an applications/software company with clout. The only company I could think of offhand was Corel. Sure enough, when Corel Linux came out, I was excited -- here we would have some really good choices, at last! WordPerfect and Corel Draw in Linux, just for openers...
And, wouldn't you know it, Corel apparently had no idea how to push it. They packaged it right, but they didn't capture the attention of people who were sitting on the Microsoft fence and looking for an excuse to jump. No ad campaigns. No whitepapers. No grassroots motivation. They just dumped it in the marketplace and expected it to catch fire all by itself.
Bad strategy. Maybe their successors won't make the same mistakes.
...it were a bunch of Oracle licenses? Somehow, I doubt it.
Katz, as usual, turns a piece of cultural scrap into a rallying cry for a generation that can't find anything better to do with its bored self than glorify video games. OK, maybe it's not THAT bad -- in fact, it's miles better than his usual drivel. But it's still Katz.
"...there's a reserve chute?"
So far nanotech is a fascinating batch of lab playthings; I'm holding my breath for the first really public use of a nanotechnology. Even if it's nothing terribly complex, like a new insulating material or a way to desalinate water. I'm not saying those are what should be done, just that it'll be interesting to see what the first buy-off-the-shelf application will be.
"Cyberspace:" used 11 times.
"Politics:" used 8 times.
"Digital:: used only 1 time (thank God).
"Society": used 4 times.
"Techno-": used 3 times.
"Net" or "Internet": used 5 times.
Not as egregiously redundant as most KatzBait, but it's still pretty turgid and dull. It doesn't tell us a single thing we don't already know or that we couldn't wow our luncheon partner with over our V-8 and chicken salad.
Will Jon Katz ever write something that doesn't sound like it was dashed off first thing Saturday morning after watching "Johnny Quest" cartoons?
Especially since DDR SDRAM is now here, and is tearing up some serious shit in benchmarks. It's also less costly to implement, both for memory and motherboard manufacturers.
RAMBUS sounded like a good idea once upon a long, long time ago, but I have the feeling it will wind up joining the EISA bus on the scrap heap of bad ideas gone wrong.