This is yet another case where debate now will lead to frameworks that can be used to address the question once the necessary information is there. This is important, because the earlier we start thinking about something, the less likely it is we'll mess it up once we can do it. If only they started this kind of debate sooner for other technologies... nuclear weapons/energy, for example...
I had an interesting idea in this regard. If (when) we keep losing privacy, won't we need to be a bit more forgiving? I mean, how many of us have absolutely no dirty little secrets we wouldn't want our knowing about? Maybe in a society where we can know everything about someone, it will be more appealing to know nothing at all, and we just won't look.
The problem with your article defending junk faxers and spammers is this: Their business is illegal. They are not allowed to do what they do. Is it so wrong that people are taking measures to protect themselves from a glut of advertising in an already saturated market; to save their time and money for things more productive or fufilling than sorting through marketing tripe? I think not. Making legal recourse easy and affordable for people without access to million dollar lawyers is commendable. If Fax.com and other junk companies were following the laws governing their business, they'd have nothing to worry about.
This is the field I work in. Policy research in nano- and bio-tech. With biotech, the technology arrived before we had policy in place to deal with it. This was a Very Bad Thing as it led to rushed decisions, inadequate planning, and general nastiness. (Gene patents anyone?)
With nanotech, the policy people are trying to stay ahead of the curve. This will mean that once the technology is ready, we will already have the details taken care of. There will be some changes, but the methods of shaping the arguments and the policies will be established, making things much easier, safer, and more productive for everyone.
Personally I think it's productive and mature to be able to criticize your own products. We all know there are parts of every piece of software that could be better. To hear the dominant force in the industry claiming that they still have room for improvement is refreshing.
How could a group of terrorists want us to invade their home countries?
Because invading their home countries stirs up more anti-American sentiment, further destabalizes the region, and generally creates a culture that incourages international terrorism? Do you really think bin Laden and his mob thought the US would do anything but react violently?
Not only is the legal grounds for their case shakey, it's stupid for the same reason the RIAA is stupid for using legal means to stop P2P. If your technology is broken, fix it. RIAA making Madonna's vulgar language look like the real fucking song? Fix your software so it can properly tell the difference. People would rather download music for free than pay for a cd? Find a way to profit from music downloading, either by using it as marketing or by charging, like Apple. Don't resort to legal means when innovation should suffice.
Do you really want them to go away? I am perfectly content with Intel having a deathgrip on #1 and setting standards, with smaller companies like AMD providing price/performance competition to keep them honest.
This is one of those inventions that makes technology easier a bit more fun and a lot more personal. It doesn't make sense for every day use - you wouldn't want to use it to store office documents or your taxes - but imagine the sentimental possibilities. Associating a ring that belonged to your mother with pictures of her and a slideshow, or the seashell in question with video and music from your romantic beach vacation.
So before you go off saying how complicated and pointless a system like this would be, remember that it won't just be geeks using it. But of course, it could make a very interesting password system in the right hands...
If they are kind/foolish enough to give a pre-paid envelope, you tape the envelope to a brick, address and bar code visible, and drop it in a mail box. This trick used to work in Canada, not sure if it still does.
Obviously you've never worked on a big storytelling project.
There are a lot of things within the story world that the creators spend a lot of time thinking about. When it's well done, that thinking goes well beyond "wouldn't red or blue pills be cool?" to actual thought about how the people in the real world could track down people in an immense simulation. Obviously the science won't be perfect, but don't think for a second that the creators of the Matrix of lots of other scifi films don't have a good idea how their world operates.
Projects like The Matrix start out with "woah man, what if the world were just a simulation?" and from there evolve into functional worlds. Machines took over and wired up humans. Why wire them up instead of killing them all? For power. Why not use solar energy or some other source? Sky was darkened. Why not give them a perfect world they wouldn't want to escape from? Their brains won't accept it. This kind of question and answer is what leads to stories.
Storytelling is important. It has been for years. The people who stop to look at how good stories are told are the ones who will be able to tell stories of their own.
Actually, Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt urging him to look at the possibilities of nuclear weapons. This letter resulted in a meeting during which funding was secured for the Manhattan Project.
Einstein was left out not because of his own ethical concerns, but because he was viewed as a security risk because of his socialist leanings, and because he was out of touch with physics. Don't forget that Einstein's most important papers came in the early 1900s. By 1940 he was an old man, and was still holding out against quantum theory.
A better example would be Robert Oppenheimer, who, thought he headed the Los Alamos lab and was in favor of using the bomb on Japan, spoke out against building the hydrogen bomb. He subsequently lost his security clearance when Edward Teller said he was a risk.
This will be one dvd I'm sure to get... but I guess this means we can give up all hope of the show returning to Fox any time in the immediate ever. If they gave it a chance with a timeslot other than Friday night I think it would have done very well. Most people I know who gave it a chance liked it, geek or not.
There are some people who are just as obsessive about clocks as the gamers are about frames per second and neon caselights. Just like a gamer will rig up a cooling system and modded case that seems utterly useless to a normal person , a clock geek will go through great pains to have a cool, accurate clock. Personally, I think I'd rather have a grandfather clock with a camcorder and robotic arm than a tricked out computer system. But that's just me.
FUBAR - The Movie is a mocumentary about the lives of two trailer park metal heads. It features the antics of Terry and Dean, their friend Tron (who isn't allowed to see Terry and Dean anymore) and of course great songs like Terry and Dean's own Woman is a Danger Cat. Well worth the price of a rental.
Every time I see that I get angry. There are some really good gags in it. Too bad they had to mess it up by putting them all in one "ad". They could have made a few of em, and it would have worked much better. It's easy to miss the point this way. The entire piece could be boiled down to just the part where he's talking about having to check dependencies a few times and other unix-speak. A window into the soul of the Linux fanatic. But it's lost under all that other stuff.
I went to see Dreamcatcher too, and I actually enjoyed the Animatrix segment more than I enjoyed the feature. Long ago (longer than my lifetime, anyway) there were always several short films before the feature. I wouldn't mind seeing a return to that.
The simple solution: The first time someone asks you to help them, make the problem worse. Hopelessly mangle their machine. You might have to deal with a few complaints and whispers of ineptitude, but at least you won't have to fix more machines.
The RIAA should be very careful about who they arrest and when. If and when they start going after individual users more actively than they are now, they will start to see more public outcry. When they try to charge some college kid whose father has a bit of cash and friends with the influence to get his story played up in the media and in government, the issue will go from being a geek cause to being a national issue. If the majority of Americans don't believe that downloading a song or album without paying is against the law and the music industry is actively seen to be inforcing said law, the industry will be in even more serious trouble than they already are. I think, more than any technological hurdles, this is why we have not seen more charges against individuals than we have.
So then... how can we clear this up? Say you're buying a car. It comes with most of the stuff you want, but has a shit stereo and bad tires. There's no way around it. You could get someone to strip it out for you before you get the car, or you could just swallow the price and get the parts you want after the fact. But there's no room in Ford's business model to make one or two cars with the stereo or tires you want. Like the 'Microsoft Tax', you or someone else had to pay for a product you didn't really want.
And about time too... the Moore's Law article yesterday pretty much said if they keep using sheer muscle, miniturization, and power to develop faster CPUs, they'd be crushed under steadily rising R&D costs. Maybe someone listened.
Slashdot Mirror
A complete rationale for invasion is available here. Marvin's weapons program must be stopped.
This is yet another case where debate now will lead to frameworks that can be used to address the question once the necessary information is there. This is important, because the earlier we start thinking about something, the less likely it is we'll mess it up once we can do it. If only they started this kind of debate sooner for other technologies... nuclear weapons/energy, for example...
...it would have read "Blizzard uses your bandwidth to subsidize beta costs". But hey... I didn't write the article.
I had an interesting idea in this regard. If (when) we keep losing privacy, won't we need to be a bit more forgiving? I mean, how many of us have absolutely no dirty little secrets we wouldn't want our knowing about? Maybe in a society where we can know everything about someone, it will be more appealing to know nothing at all, and we just won't look.
The problem with your article defending junk faxers and spammers is this: Their business is illegal. They are not allowed to do what they do. Is it so wrong that people are taking measures to protect themselves from a glut of advertising in an already saturated market; to save their time and money for things more productive or fufilling than sorting through marketing tripe? I think not. Making legal recourse easy and affordable for people without access to million dollar lawyers is commendable. If Fax.com and other junk companies were following the laws governing their business, they'd have nothing to worry about.
iPod does photo storage now too. There is an adapter available for reading CF cards and dumping the data from the card to the iPod.
This is the field I work in. Policy research in nano- and bio-tech. With biotech, the technology arrived before we had policy in place to deal with it. This was a Very Bad Thing as it led to rushed decisions, inadequate planning, and general nastiness. (Gene patents anyone?)
With nanotech, the policy people are trying to stay ahead of the curve. This will mean that once the technology is ready, we will already have the details taken care of. There will be some changes, but the methods of shaping the arguments and the policies will be established, making things much easier, safer, and more productive for everyone.
Personally I think it's productive and mature to be able to criticize your own products. We all know there are parts of every piece of software that could be better. To hear the dominant force in the industry claiming that they still have room for improvement is refreshing.
Because invading their home countries stirs up more anti-American sentiment, further destabalizes the region, and generally creates a culture that incourages international terrorism? Do you really think bin Laden and his mob thought the US would do anything but react violently?
Not only is the legal grounds for their case shakey, it's stupid for the same reason the RIAA is stupid for using legal means to stop P2P. If your technology is broken, fix it. RIAA making Madonna's vulgar language look like the real fucking song? Fix your software so it can properly tell the difference. People would rather download music for free than pay for a cd? Find a way to profit from music downloading, either by using it as marketing or by charging, like Apple. Don't resort to legal means when innovation should suffice.
Do you really want them to go away? I am perfectly content with Intel having a deathgrip on #1 and setting standards, with smaller companies like AMD providing price/performance competition to keep them honest.
This is one of those inventions that makes technology easier a bit more fun and a lot more personal. It doesn't make sense for every day use - you wouldn't want to use it to store office documents or your taxes - but imagine the sentimental possibilities. Associating a ring that belonged to your mother with pictures of her and a slideshow, or the seashell in question with video and music from your romantic beach vacation.
So before you go off saying how complicated and pointless a system like this would be, remember that it won't just be geeks using it. But of course, it could make a very interesting password system in the right hands...
If they are kind/foolish enough to give a pre-paid envelope, you tape the envelope to a brick, address and bar code visible, and drop it in a mail box. This trick used to work in Canada, not sure if it still does.
Obviously you've never worked on a big storytelling project.
There are a lot of things within the story world that the creators spend a lot of time thinking about. When it's well done, that thinking goes well beyond "wouldn't red or blue pills be cool?" to actual thought about how the people in the real world could track down people in an immense simulation. Obviously the science won't be perfect, but don't think for a second that the creators of the Matrix of lots of other scifi films don't have a good idea how their world operates.
Projects like The Matrix start out with "woah man, what if the world were just a simulation?" and from there evolve into functional worlds. Machines took over and wired up humans. Why wire them up instead of killing them all? For power. Why not use solar energy or some other source? Sky was darkened. Why not give them a perfect world they wouldn't want to escape from? Their brains won't accept it. This kind of question and answer is what leads to stories.
Storytelling is important. It has been for years. The people who stop to look at how good stories are told are the ones who will be able to tell stories of their own.
Actually, Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt urging him to look at the possibilities of nuclear weapons. This letter resulted in a meeting during which funding was secured for the Manhattan Project.
Einstein was left out not because of his own ethical concerns, but because he was viewed as a security risk because of his socialist leanings, and because he was out of touch with physics. Don't forget that Einstein's most important papers came in the early 1900s. By 1940 he was an old man, and was still holding out against quantum theory.
A better example would be Robert Oppenheimer, who, thought he headed the Los Alamos lab and was in favor of using the bomb on Japan, spoke out against building the hydrogen bomb. He subsequently lost his security clearance when Edward Teller said he was a risk.
This will be one dvd I'm sure to get... but I guess this means we can give up all hope of the show returning to Fox any time in the immediate ever. If they gave it a chance with a timeslot other than Friday night I think it would have done very well. Most people I know who gave it a chance liked it, geek or not.
There are some people who are just as obsessive about clocks as the gamers are about frames per second and neon caselights. Just like a gamer will rig up a cooling system and modded case that seems utterly useless to a normal person , a clock geek will go through great pains to have a cool, accurate clock. Personally, I think I'd rather have a grandfather clock with a camcorder and robotic arm than a tricked out computer system. But that's just me.
FUBAR - The Movie is a mocumentary about the lives of two trailer park metal heads. It features the antics of Terry and Dean, their friend Tron (who isn't allowed to see Terry and Dean anymore) and of course great songs like Terry and Dean's own Woman is a Danger Cat. Well worth the price of a rental.
Who are you to talk about justice when there are terrorists on the loose? Hell, YOU could be a terrorist!
Every time I see that I get angry. There are some really good gags in it. Too bad they had to mess it up by putting them all in one "ad". They could have made a few of em, and it would have worked much better. It's easy to miss the point this way. The entire piece could be boiled down to just the part where he's talking about having to check dependencies a few times and other unix-speak. A window into the soul of the Linux fanatic. But it's lost under all that other stuff.
I went to see Dreamcatcher too, and I actually enjoyed the Animatrix segment more than I enjoyed the feature. Long ago (longer than my lifetime, anyway) there were always several short films before the feature. I wouldn't mind seeing a return to that.
The simple solution: The first time someone asks you to help them, make the problem worse. Hopelessly mangle their machine. You might have to deal with a few complaints and whispers of ineptitude, but at least you won't have to fix more machines.
The RIAA should be very careful about who they arrest and when. If and when they start going after individual users more actively than they are now, they will start to see more public outcry. When they try to charge some college kid whose father has a bit of cash and friends with the influence to get his story played up in the media and in government, the issue will go from being a geek cause to being a national issue. If the majority of Americans don't believe that downloading a song or album without paying is against the law and the music industry is actively seen to be inforcing said law, the industry will be in even more serious trouble than they already are. I think, more than any technological hurdles, this is why we have not seen more charges against individuals than we have.
So then... how can we clear this up? Say you're buying a car. It comes with most of the stuff you want, but has a shit stereo and bad tires. There's no way around it. You could get someone to strip it out for you before you get the car, or you could just swallow the price and get the parts you want after the fact. But there's no room in Ford's business model to make one or two cars with the stereo or tires you want. Like the 'Microsoft Tax', you or someone else had to pay for a product you didn't really want.
And about time too... the Moore's Law article yesterday pretty much said if they keep using sheer muscle, miniturization, and power to develop faster CPUs, they'd be crushed under steadily rising R&D costs. Maybe someone listened.