Who wants to be responsible for the organization of such an event?
I'm certainly willing to help out with this. If it starts looking like there could be a lot of interest, I suppose I could try to set up a mail list or something.
Do we have any/.ers living in KC that would be willing to coordinate the logistics of the event?
Maybe Hole and/or other "screw the man" type bands would want to perform music during the demonstration/cookout. Perhaps the pork farmers would want to divert some of the money from their "other white meat" ads to help pay for some of the costs. The more I think about it, the more fun I think it could be.
(A celebration of Animal Flesh and Freedom of Expression... my heart is bursting with patriotism at the thought of it; not to mention, with cholesterol.)
Step 1. We all write nice letters to PETA expressing our concern.
Step 2: After they blow us off, we write to ICANN, and suggest that any organization that has such a disdain for free expression does not require similar protection for themselves. Refund their registration fees, and then remove all iterations of PETA from the DNS server lists. No peta.com, no peta.org, no peta-online.org, nothing. They could cry all they want, but since ICANN is an international body, they would have no right to act through the courts over it.
In otherwords, I say PETA should be hoisted upon its own pitard.
(By the way, please support the Humane Society, who is doing a great job of protecting domestic animals from abuse. If you have been a PETA supporter in the past, they may be a good alternative for your donations if you care about the First Amendment.)
You might have been kidding around, but I think you are on to something.
Why don't we (by which I mean/.ers and other concerned citizens) get together once a year for a "First Amendment Defense Barbeque"?
Kansas City seems like the ideal spot, since it is pretty much half-way between the coasts and known for its BBQ. We could make it a huge event, let the caterers pocket half the profits and donate the rest to the EFF. We could put out a press statement, mentioning that it was PETA's crushing blow against Free Speech that inspired us to gather annually, kill a lot of animals, and eat them.
If you go back to the/. archive of when the questions were asked, there were probably about two dozen people that asked "what is your next book likely to be, and is it coming anytime soon?"
Since the mod points were split up between them, none of them rose as high as the question about his favorite cheese.
There were several other really good potential questions, but instead we get two questions about the same upcoming film. Alas.
Perhaps the method of moderating and selecting/. interview questions should be re-examined.
If you want a long-running laptop and don't want to wait for Transmetta, I would suggest looking into the iBook. (Anti-Apple folks, please read on before you turn on the flame-throwers...)
Sure, it's butt-ugly (white with your choice of blue or orange), big (11.6" x 13.5" x 2.1"), and weighs a lot (6.6 pounds with the battery), but it's...
fairly cheap ($1599, last time I checked), fairly fast (G3 chip w/ full cache... much faster than most PIII notebooks, which are crippled to reduce heat), has a really nice-looking LCD screen, has the cheapest wireless networking option of anybody out there, and has a battery that lasts 5-6 hours (ymmv).
Best of all, thanks to LinuxPPC, they are great Linux portables.
No PCMCIA, but most of the stuff that you would use cards for (Ethernet, wireless networking, modem, USB) are already built in, so that's no great loss for most users.
Of course, if you can't get past how goofy it looks, maybe the Transmetta laptops are worth the wait.
Either way, I would hate to pay much for a Pentium-based laptop. They are slow, hot, and suck power too quickly.
"Be had a good idea, they wanted to make a media OS. It's obviously a hybrid between MacOS and AmigaOS. When it was there and ready, nobody came. It's a bit of a pity really, because it's not a bad OS at all."
Well, setting aside the fact that lots of vendors jumped into business relationships with Be, it seems like he could be describing his own future here. AmigaOS, 2001 Edition, will probably be "not a bad OS at all", but will anybody care?
He mentions the ability to run on older, cheaper hardware as a big advantage, but when I can slap together a killer NT or Linux box that costs little more than the change found in my sofa, or get one of those firewire-based Digital Video iMacs for a little more than a grand, is price really such a massive consideration anymore?
"Back in the day", what made everybody drool over the Amigas, above all else, was the Video Toaster. That's no longer enough to set them apart, because the void that was created by the "death" of the old Amiga has been filled.
This is great news for hard-core Amiga fans, who will finally get to play with their favorite OS on new hardware. The rest of us are happy for you. This will not change our lives much.
Most socialists are (or, I should say "were"... there are few socialists left outside of Ivy League faculty lounges) also fascists, including Hitler and Stalin. You can't really get people to go for the idea of state-ownership-of-everything without first whipping everybody up into a psychotic nationalistic frenzy.
Just because you might think someone's conception of a certain technology is ill thought out doesn't mean you want to destroy all machinery and live in a pre-Industrial Revolution utopia.
That is no longer the only proper application of the term Luddite. From Webster:
Luddite Pronunciation: 'l&-"dIt Function: noun Etymology: perhaps from Ned Ludd, 18th century Leicestershire workman who destroyed machinery Date: 1811 : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
(bold added by me)
Fine... Grimmer's Extention of Godwin's Law: In any on-line debade, anybody who labels the opposition in a jingoistic manner (such as calling them a "Nazi") automatically loses the debate unless somebody claims victory by citing Godwin's Law with equal thoughtlessness.
Wll, first of all, there are some geeks here who like his stuff, so he still fits under the "news for nerds" banner.
Secondly, he can't "go back to Wired". In spite of his boasting about being inspired to become an "open source" content provider, the truth is that he became a free-lance writer (and then a/. writer) because Wired layed him off. The Wired News web page chose to change their focus to tech business news, and Katz did not fit with their new direction, or so the story goes.
I'm simply saying I wish consumers would wake up and realize that every time they use an ATM it's a net savings for the bank (tellers are expensive).
For the cash machine just inside the door of the bank, that is true... but when you use a third-party ATM at the Kwik-E-Mart they are forced to pay for that service, and they are pass that cost on to you. If you don't like it, don't use the third-party machine and walk to your bank, where the better ones charge nothing to their customers who use their machine.
You go to the ATM, you pay a fee. Stand in line for a teller inside, and... you still get hit with a fee. Now given that the bank exists because they're making a profit off the money I deposit with them, where do they get off charging me to get access to my money?
Nobody is forcing you to bank with people like that. Feel free to put all your money in a bank that hides the cost of service from you by simply offering a lower interest rate. People who never use bank tellers might prefer to be charged on a per-visit basis and get the better rate.
One way or another, if you want the service you will end up paying for it.
ikewise, one person with a photographic memory walking through a mall one day can most likely harvest more credit card numbers than a script kiddie with a packet sniffer and a brute force keygen can crack.
You are right, just like a waiter at TGI Fridays can steal your credit card number much easier than anybody trying to get it on-line... but a bureaucrat or waiter is far less likely to commit a felony than some dumb kid with nothing to lose and no idea how much trouble he could get into.
Actually, an SSN is enough to use as proof of identity in some casual settings, which may lead to a theif eventually getting better "proof" that they are you, opening credit lines under your name, and having all kinds of illicit fun. It happens.
Jon Katz is probably going to remain here, for an obvious reason:
Unlike most of the writers on/., he is a publushed journalist. He has written for print publications, and has authored books. While he might not have much geek cred as a techie, the fact that he's a former Wired writer means he makes/. look good to a lot of casual viewers.
Also, he covers a beat that the other/. writers don't: the impact of us geeks on society. While you might not be terribly interested in it, it seems like they want it covered.
Look at it this way... if Dan Rather called/. and said he wanted to be a regular writer, do you think they would turn him down, just because he knows little or nothing about technology? With Katz, it is like that on a much, much smaller scale. Katz is one of the mini-celebrities of tech journalism... sort of a Cringley Lite./. is paying him for his by-line, not the stories that are under them. It's business.
(Note: all this is just opinion, so don't have a cow, moderators.)
Jon, what are you talking about? Which Government (there are some non-US readers here, I think)?
Slashdot is hosted in Michigan, USA. Jon Katz is American. Pretty much everybody involved in the creation of/. is American. The majority of readers here are American. When the writers of/. say "our government" or "the government", they mean American Government, because it is an American-published web-page.
No matter how many people from other parts of the world chose to read Slashdot, it still comes from America.
There are people in England who read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, too, but that mean that they always speak in "global" terms, or spell "color" with a "u".
Labelling others may be an overused rhetorical tool, but sometimes it's valid. You don't always automatically lose the argument just because you call somebody a Luddite, Communist, Isolationist, Zealot, or even Katz's favorite, "Corporatist". Sometimes the label fits.
For that matter, it's about time that we dump that law outright... For example, it's okay to call some of Pat Buchannan supporters "Nazis". They are Nazis. Some of them come right out and call themselves Nazis.
Also, when P.J. O'Rourke coined the term "Safty Nazis", in reference to people who seek to protect us from ourselves, he had a good point.
1.Going to an ATM -- any ATM -- without paying a surcharge.
Yes. The pixies from the magic fairyland should pay for installing those machines and paying the insurance, maintenence, and infrastructure costs. They can use the resources from the money trees to pay for them.
One city in California (I think it was SD) had an ordinance imposed on them: They could not charge ATM fees to military personnel from the nearby base. Guess what? Lots of the machines were pulled out. Turns out that a lot of those machines were put there to make money off the fees. Tell them they can't charge, and they have no reason to keep it there. It's called economics... all price controls create shortages.
If you want an ATM on every corner, you have to let somebody make a buck off putting one there. If you want no-fee ATM banking, then walk your lazy butt to a machine from your bank. (If you pass a "no fees - ever" law, they will just charge your bank for the transaction, and the bank will make up for it by offering you a lower interest rate. There's no such thing as a free lunch... or a free cash machine.)
Gee.. sounds alot like how the FCC allocates bandwidth - good luck finding a slab of frequency for less than a million bucks! I personally would like to have the ability to launch my own satellite without having to be a multi-million dollar corporation.
I assume you would want other people to stay out of your orbit, so you are talking about having property rights to the orbital position of your craft for free. In other words, you are saying you would like access to somehting that is worth money without paying for it. Must be nice living in that magical fairyland of yours.
News flash: If you are not a multi-million dollar corporation, you can't afford to launch a satelite anyway.
Cleaning the space junk up now is cheaper than not letting it go during the early days of space travel. If we can put it off another decade, it will probably become even cheaper. Costs of orbital space missions have gone down considerably in the past 40 years.
Also, if you would remember basic physics, all objects at the same altitude share the same velocity
No, all objects in a stable orbit at the same altitude share the same velocity. The shuttle is not in a stable orbit... it goes up, then it comes back.
Also, being at the same velocity does not protect objects who's paths intersect. By your logic, you could safely drive on the wrong side of the highway, as long as you were going the speed limit.
I say.. we put it there, we clean it up. Simple as that.
Gotta say that I agree. Since the vast majority of launches so far has been from France, Russia, and the USA, we should pitch in to cover most of this cost.
I'm not big on glabalism, but unless one country or another decides to "claim" space (an unpopular move, to be sure), I think an international treaty of space exploring nations would be a Good Thing.
We could form a controlling body, and call it DIAOSC (for "DIAOSC Is An Orbital Satelite Committee").
A hamster cage with the back of a CRT monitor in the middle of it... that does not sound like a very good idea to me, unless you really don't like hamsters.
Re:Live action "Tick" a disaster waiting to happen
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 2
Ben Edlund is talented, but I doubt even he could save this horrible idea.
1. Given that it was his "horrible idea", I think he will do his best with it.
2. The cast they chose is fantastic.
There is no Chairface in the series so far, nor talking buildings, but there is a Red Scare and a lot of other villians that they could not have gotten away with in an animated series, since the cartoon was aimed mainly at children. (The fact that it was good enough for teens and adults to enjoy was bonus, as far as they were concerned.)
As for live-action Dilbert... what difference would it make? The animated version sucks! Dilbert was clearly never meant to be anything more than a three-pannel comic strip.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certainly willing to help out with this. If it starts looking like there could be a lot of interest, I suppose I could try to set up a mail list or something.
Do we have any /.ers living in KC that would be willing to coordinate the logistics of the event?
Maybe Hole and/or other "screw the man" type bands would want to perform music during the demonstration/cookout. Perhaps the pork farmers would want to divert some of the money from their "other white meat" ads to help pay for some of the costs. The more I think about it, the more fun I think it could be.
(A celebration of Animal Flesh and Freedom of Expression... my heart is bursting with patriotism at the thought of it; not to mention, with cholesterol.)
Count me in on that project! I think it would be cool to have a competing registry... maybe we could set up one that sticks to standards.
Step 1. We all write nice letters to PETA expressing our concern.
Step 2: After they blow us off, we write to ICANN, and suggest that any organization that has such a disdain for free expression does not require similar protection for themselves. Refund their registration fees, and then remove all iterations of PETA from the DNS server lists. No peta.com, no peta.org, no peta-online.org, nothing. They could cry all they want, but since ICANN is an international body, they would have no right to act through the courts over it.
In otherwords, I say PETA should be hoisted upon its own pitard.
(By the way, please support the Humane Society, who is doing a great job of protecting domestic animals from abuse. If you have been a PETA supporter in the past, they may be a good alternative for your donations if you care about the First Amendment.)
Why don't we (by which I mean /.ers and other concerned citizens) get together once a year for a "First Amendment Defense Barbeque"?
Kansas City seems like the ideal spot, since it is pretty much half-way between the coasts and known for its BBQ. We could make it a huge event, let the caterers pocket half the profits and donate the rest to the EFF. We could put out a press statement, mentioning that it was PETA's crushing blow against Free Speech that inspired us to gather annually, kill a lot of animals, and eat them.
That oughta raise a few eyebrows. :)
Since the mod points were split up between them, none of them rose as high as the question about his favorite cheese.
There were several other really good potential questions, but instead we get two questions about the same upcoming film. Alas.
Perhaps the method of moderating and selecting /. interview questions should be re-examined.
Sure, it's butt-ugly (white with your choice of blue or orange), big (11.6" x 13.5" x 2.1"), and weighs a lot (6.6 pounds with the battery), but it's...
fairly cheap ($1599, last time I checked),
fairly fast (G3 chip w/ full cache... much faster than most PIII notebooks, which are crippled to reduce heat),
has a really nice-looking LCD screen,
has the cheapest wireless networking option of anybody out there,
and has a battery that lasts 5-6 hours (ymmv).
Best of all, thanks to LinuxPPC, they are great Linux portables.
No PCMCIA, but most of the stuff that you would use cards for (Ethernet, wireless networking, modem, USB) are already built in, so that's no great loss for most users.
Of course, if you can't get past how goofy it looks, maybe the Transmetta laptops are worth the wait.
Either way, I would hate to pay much for a Pentium-based laptop. They are slow, hot, and suck power too quickly.
Well, setting aside the fact that lots of vendors jumped into business relationships with Be, it seems like he could be describing his own future here. AmigaOS, 2001 Edition, will probably be "not a bad OS at all", but will anybody care?
He mentions the ability to run on older, cheaper hardware as a big advantage, but when I can slap together a killer NT or Linux box that costs little more than the change found in my sofa, or get one of those firewire-based Digital Video iMacs for a little more than a grand, is price really such a massive consideration anymore?
"Back in the day", what made everybody drool over the Amigas, above all else, was the Video Toaster. That's no longer enough to set them apart, because the void that was created by the "death" of the old Amiga has been filled.
This is great news for hard-core Amiga fans, who will finally get to play with their favorite OS on new hardware. The rest of us are happy for you. This will not change our lives much.
Actually, he was both.
Most socialists are (or, I should say "were"... there are few socialists left outside of Ivy League faculty lounges) also fascists, including Hitler and Stalin. You can't really get people to go for the idea of state-ownership-of-everything without first whipping everybody up into a psychotic nationalistic frenzy.
Damn, Hitler. You're just a goddammed Nazi!
Yea, yea.. Godwin's Law says blah blah blah... it felt good to say it anyway. :)
That is no longer the only proper application of the term Luddite. From Webster:
Luddite
Pronunciation: 'l&-"dIt
Function: noun
Etymology: perhaps from Ned Ludd, 18th century Leicestershire workman who destroyed machinery
Date: 1811 : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
(bold added by me)
Fine... Grimmer's Extention of Godwin's Law: In any on-line debade, anybody who labels the opposition in a jingoistic manner (such as calling them a "Nazi") automatically loses the debate unless somebody claims victory by citing Godwin's Law with equal thoughtlessness.
Secondly, he can't "go back to Wired". In spite of his boasting about being inspired to become an "open source" content provider, the truth is that he became a free-lance writer (and then a /. writer) because Wired layed him off. The Wired News web page chose to change their focus to tech business news, and Katz did not fit with their new direction, or so the story goes.
For the cash machine just inside the door of the bank, that is true... but when you use a third-party ATM at the Kwik-E-Mart they are forced to pay for that service, and they are pass that cost on to you. If you don't like it, don't use the third-party machine and walk to your bank, where the better ones charge nothing to their customers who use their machine.
You go to the ATM, you pay a fee. Stand in line for a teller inside, and... you still get hit with a fee. Now given that the bank exists because they're making a profit off the money I deposit with them, where do they get off charging me to get access to my money?
Nobody is forcing you to bank with people like that. Feel free to put all your money in a bank that hides the cost of service from you by simply offering a lower interest rate. People who never use bank tellers might prefer to be charged on a per-visit basis and get the better rate.
One way or another, if you want the service you will end up paying for it.
You are right, just like a waiter at TGI Fridays can steal your credit card number much easier than anybody trying to get it on-line... but a bureaucrat or waiter is far less likely to commit a felony than some dumb kid with nothing to lose and no idea how much trouble he could get into.
Actually, an SSN is enough to use as proof of identity in some casual settings, which may lead to a theif eventually getting better "proof" that they are you, opening credit lines under your name, and having all kinds of illicit fun. It happens.
Unlike most of the writers on /., he is a publushed journalist. He has written for print publications, and has authored books. While he might not have much geek cred as a techie, the fact that he's a former Wired writer means he makes /. look good to a lot of casual viewers.
Also, he covers a beat that the other /. writers don't: the impact of us geeks on society. While you might not be terribly interested in it, it seems like they want it covered.
Look at it this way... if Dan Rather called /. and said he wanted to be a regular writer, do you think they would turn him down, just because he knows little or nothing about technology? With Katz, it is like that on a much, much smaller scale. Katz is one of the mini-celebrities of tech journalism... sort of a Cringley Lite. /. is paying him for his by-line, not the stories that are under them. It's business.
(Note: all this is just opinion, so don't have a cow, moderators.)
Slashdot is hosted in Michigan, USA. Jon Katz is American. Pretty much everybody involved in the creation of /. is American. The majority of readers here are American. When the writers of /. say "our government" or "the government", they mean American Government, because it is an American-published web-page.
No matter how many people from other parts of the world chose to read Slashdot, it still comes from America.
There are people in England who read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, too, but that mean that they always speak in "global" terms, or spell "color" with a "u".
Labelling others may be an overused rhetorical tool, but sometimes it's valid. You don't always automatically lose the argument just because you call somebody a Luddite, Communist, Isolationist, Zealot, or even Katz's favorite, "Corporatist". Sometimes the label fits.
For that matter, it's about time that we dump that law outright... For example, it's okay to call some of Pat Buchannan supporters "Nazis". They are Nazis. Some of them come right out and call themselves Nazis.
Also, when P.J. O'Rourke coined the term "Safty Nazis", in reference to people who seek to protect us from ourselves, he had a good point.
Yes. The pixies from the magic fairyland should pay for installing those machines and paying the insurance, maintenence, and infrastructure costs. They can use the resources from the money trees to pay for them.
One city in California (I think it was SD) had an ordinance imposed on them: They could not charge ATM fees to military personnel from the nearby base. Guess what? Lots of the machines were pulled out. Turns out that a lot of those machines were put there to make money off the fees. Tell them they can't charge, and they have no reason to keep it there. It's called economics... all price controls create shortages.
If you want an ATM on every corner, you have to let somebody make a buck off putting one there. If you want no-fee ATM banking, then walk your lazy butt to a machine from your bank. (If you pass a "no fees - ever" law, they will just charge your bank for the transaction, and the bank will make up for it by offering you a lower interest rate. There's no such thing as a free lunch... or a free cash machine.)
World Domination might not be the ideal goal for Linux. A free UNIX for geeks may be all that Linux ever really needs to be.
I assume you would want other people to stay out of your orbit, so you are talking about having property rights to the orbital position of your craft for free. In other words, you are saying you would like access to somehting that is worth money without paying for it. Must be nice living in that magical fairyland of yours.
News flash: If you are not a multi-million dollar corporation, you can't afford to launch a satelite anyway.
Cleaning the space junk up now is cheaper than not letting it go during the early days of space travel. If we can put it off another decade, it will probably become even cheaper. Costs of orbital space missions have gone down considerably in the past 40 years.
No, all objects in a stable orbit at the same altitude share the same velocity. The shuttle is not in a stable orbit... it goes up, then it comes back.
Also, being at the same velocity does not protect objects who's paths intersect. By your logic, you could safely drive on the wrong side of the highway, as long as you were going the speed limit.
Gotta say that I agree. Since the vast majority of launches so far has been from France, Russia, and the USA, we should pitch in to cover most of this cost.
I'm not big on glabalism, but unless one country or another decides to "claim" space (an unpopular move, to be sure), I think an international treaty of space exploring nations would be a Good Thing.
We could form a controlling body, and call it DIAOSC (for "DIAOSC Is An Orbital Satelite Committee").
A hamster cage with the back of a CRT monitor in the middle of it... that does not sound like a very good idea to me, unless you really don't like hamsters.
1. Given that it was his "horrible idea", I think he will do his best with it.
2. The cast they chose is fantastic.
There is no Chairface in the series so far, nor talking buildings, but there is a Red Scare and a lot of other villians that they could not have gotten away with in an animated series, since the cartoon was aimed mainly at children. (The fact that it was good enough for teens and adults to enjoy was bonus, as far as they were concerned.)
As for live-action Dilbert... what difference would it make? The animated version sucks! Dilbert was clearly never meant to be anything more than a three-pannel comic strip.