I pretty much skipped Comdex throughout the 90s (hotels too expensive, not enough interesting stuff, big rip-offs all around), but it was bad in the late 80s. I never took a Taxi anywhere; it was just a huge waste of time. I can only imagine that it got worse.
Monorail from the Airport? Man, that would ROCK HARD. No having to take the shuttles with endless stops or taxis with 20 years of grime built up.
I do feel a bit sorry for the taxi drivers: this is going to kill 80% of them. Apparently the union is not that powerful in Vegas.:) [which is yet another lesson why union's suck and why they tend to retard progress, but that's a rant for another day]
So what we have here is a glorified Palm running linux or WinXP.
A glorified Palm with an 800x600 screen... which is actually practical for web browsing. I've wanted for a long-ass time a small, cheap portable I could toss around the living room ready for instant web browsing when needed. The MS Tablet PCs are cool, but way overkill/overpriced for a "throw around" tablet.
Go read the Federalist Papers, as well as some of the other early documents before the constitution. The meaning of "free speech" has been GREATLY expanded since the founding fathers. Originally, free speech applied to political speech, which still is pretty much unabridged.
The other key point is that the first amendment does not supercede other laws and rights. For example, if you come into my living room spouting your political views, you can still be arrested for trespassing even though your free speech rights are being abridged.
Lastly, it's important to note that the first amendment does not guarantee you a forum for your speech.
Read the 1st amendment. "Congress shall make no law abridging". That means no laws abridging.
Except that's NOT what it means. The first amendment was not intended to say that anyone, anywhere, anytime can say anything he/she wants, and there's nothing the government can do about it. Fire/Crowded/Theatre, public nuisance, etc, etc.
There are a number of people who might feel embarrassed/ashamed asking a complete stranger for permission to access websites on legitimate, protected adult speech
That would only be a concern if there was a requirement to tell the librarian the reason for disabling the controls. Since the librarian obviously wouldn't care about the reason, there's no issue.
The other point is that simply standing in the "non-fiction sex" section of library is potentially embarrasing. Does that mean that the library is abridging those reader's rights because the books they are browsing are potentially identifiable?
A right that you have to beg for isnt a right, its a privelage.
Yeah, and you also have to ask permission to see rare books, and to climb ladders to get at the tall shelves. And of course, let's not forget about midgets who can't reach the tall shelves.
By your logic, any abridgement of "instant access" is an abridgement of your rights, which is just silly.
Will the librarian turn off the controls at the legitimate request of an adult or child. If so, there's no debate and no abridgement of free access.
Otherwise, I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.
Does Leibniz's God, being omniscient, know about worlds that he/she/it cannot make, worlds which are impossible? If so, God is not omnipotent.
The nature of omnipotence isn't being able to do the impossible. That's like saying, since God can't add 1 and 1 and get 3, therefore he's not omnipotent. Omnipotence doesn't imply that you can perform logical contradictions.
I notice that they don't really include the old Byte magazines. Well, I suppose there's a good reason for that: hard drives aren't big enough yet for the "telephone book" editions.:)
I guess what I'm aiming at is the Big Question of whether Homo Sapiens Sapiens killed off all the other species, or if they died out "naturally". The latter seems unlikely, since even a less human would have a lot of advantages over the rest of the animal kingdom. I mean, we have lots of simian species still surviving, so it seems likely that we conquered any competitors. I was wondering if the fossil record shows anything like that. But as you say, it's a pretty sparse record, so we'll probably never know.
It just brings up the big question that what was it about us that was the big advantage? Were we just lucky (seems unlikely), or did some relatively small change produce a big advantage? Similar to the book's point (from my original quote), it may be that simple throat or jaw changes started an evolutionary chain reaction that optimized toward complex language that our already existing symbolic brain was finally able to utilize. A small physical change to produced a big result seems more likely to me than the book's contention that actual complex changes to the brain that gave new capabilities.
Let me ask a slightly different question. Obviously there are great variations in the skulls of various pre-humans. Does that give any evidence that the brains were very different or is it possible that the braincase was just a different shape, but the brains were more or less the same? My gut feeling is that the latter is the most likely, and as I said above, it's physical changes that allowed the brain to be used more effectively that gave us the big advantage.
I mean, I know that Mr. Gates is heavy into the cause of fighting global diseases but wouldn't it have made more sense to donate to the #1 country (Africa) dealing with an AIDS epidemic than #2 (India)?
Sheesh, what make you think they aren't? Here's a clue: type "gates foundation aids africa" into Google. OH MY GOD! Look what pops up: A whole section devotes to Africa.
But it's probably all about those African software developers, right?
In the past, he said that after he died, that contributions would start. For some reason, he changed his mind.
No, in the past he said that he wasn't going to invest his money until later in life, not after life. His point at the time was that he just didn't know what to do with the money. He could have just done what a lot of people do and just dump money into holes that don't do anything, but I give him big props for actually thinking about the problem before just spraying money everywhere.
It's kind of difficult for a child to "learn to immunize himself", which is where most of the Gates Foundation's funds go it.
But beyond that, you might look at how much of the foundation's money goes to education.
You might read through the the Foundation's Web Site sometime. Gates agrees with you -- he invests his money in things that have long-term payouts, not single day handouts.
These days there's a lot more in the middle there.
Indeed, and what concerns me in particular is this quote:
Luis Arsuaga includes just a little bit of abstract philosophy of mind in an overview of debates over consciousness, sentience, language, and their evolutionary origins; he argues that Neanderthals had language and self-awareness, but lacked our more advanced symbolic abilities and vocal anatomy
This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're only talking a few hundred thousand years, I don't think that's enough time to really make significant changes to the brain, unless simply a bigger brain gave us more capability. I think it's much more likely that the "big change" that gave us sentience and self-awareness came a long time ago, and then we got a large number of branches until things got fine-tuned enough to give us the advantage over everyone else.
On the other hand (and this is where I contradict my last statement), maybe it took one key random change to give us such an overwhelming advantage that we were able to wipe everyone else out.
Maybe you can tell me this... does the fossil record seem to indicate that there were a lot of human variations milling around until Boom! they all went extinct, or does it look like a long, gradual process? Or do we simply don't have enough evidence to make the call?
Abstract mathematical thought isn't patentable and all software is abstract mathematical thought.
Nope, you're wrong. Software is the electronic equivalent of gears and pulleys. Put it this way: I can take any program and make a mechanical equivalent. That mechanical equivalent would be patentable. So why shouldn't software?
The cotton gin was nothing but an algorithm expressed in mechanics. If you can patent cotton gins, then you can patent software.
That said, my take on software patents is that it's such a new science that patents should be suspended until all the "obvious" inventions have clear prior art, say 2050. By then, anything new should be novel enough to deserve a patent.
I know that this has been discussed a lot, but let me cast my vote again: stories must be moderated too.
If you want that, you know where to go. Of course, you only have to look at the site to see what happens when the lunatics run the asylum.
Personally, even though I don't always agree with the story selection (like this one), there's no doubt that a small group of focused, full-time editors picking stories is way better than the masses picking stories.
Sheesh, this is the paranoia that I'm talking about. Did you read the link? Microsoft comes out and says that DRM can be based on Palladium. But so what? That's like saying that DRM can be based on encryption, therefore all encryption packages must be evil.
Once again, I have to say: Explain to me how ANY rights or capabilities are going to be taken away by Palladium. Explain to me how they are going to maintain backward compatibility if everything is under Palladium and can't be turned off.
So the point is (in case you still haven't gotten it) that Microsoft has a history of lying too. [...] Do you get it now? Jesus, I can't believe I wasted that much time in explaining this to someone who probably isn't going to get it anyway...
I get your point perfectly. Unfortunately, it's YOU who are missing the bigger point here. There is no doubt that Microsoft has a certain amount of history (although, comparing them to the level of the soviet union is absolute absurdity, but moving on), and that creates well-founded suspicion in people.
But well-founded suspicion is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people TURNING OFF THEIR BRAIN and assuming that a piece of software does something that it absolutely cannot do. That's what I'm talking about: the ability for people, because they distrust something (the government, in the case of the moon landings) creating absolutely illogical scenerios to try and justify their paranoia.
The extent of your argument seems to be that since Microsoft has a history, therefore any belief about Palladium is justified, no matter how illogical. Suspicion is fine and healthy. Paranoia and suspension of logic is not.
I'm sorry if I'm more rational than that.
I don't know if you get it now or not, but I tried.
Slashdotters' distrust of Palladium is more akin to doubting the old Soviet space agency's rather vehement denials that personnel were killed every time there was a mysterious explosion at Baikonur.
See? Exactly my point. You can't refute the fact that it's impossible for Palladium to be what the paranoids claim it to be, therefore you just have to fall back on "Microsoft is so evil that it has to be bad, even if this belief is entirely illogical".
If people *want* to believe something, nothing they say or do can prove otherwise.
Dare I say that it reminds of... many slashdotter's opinion of Palladium?
Microsoft haters *want* to believe that Palladium is a conspiracy to allow Microsoft to only allow software signed by Microsoft, despite the fact that it's utterly impossible for Microsoft to implement that and maintain backward compatibility with unsigned software and/or music.
Yet, no matter how much I make this point, which the paranoids never both to refute, their only answer is "Microsoft so eeevil that it can only be a conspiracy."
If you want to know how people can be so delusional that they can believe the moon landing was a conspiracy, look no further than the Palladium Paranoids.
My vision for something like this is a small, thin unit maybe 1/2" thick that I can toss around the living room and grab when I want to do some surfing. Wireless, long battery life, etc.
To this end, I find this other product that Microsoft is developing more interesting: the Smart Display.
Microsoft hasn't been hyping it as much, presumably to avoid confusion with the Tablet PC, but in a nutshell it's a remote display that connects "PCAnywhere-style" to your desktop computer. This seems WAY closer to my vision of a "toss anywhere" remote computer.
It should be a lot cheaper, too, along with better battery life. I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing how these units shake out.
Slashdot Mirror
I pretty much skipped Comdex throughout the 90s (hotels too expensive, not enough interesting stuff, big rip-offs all around), but it was bad in the late 80s. I never took a Taxi anywhere; it was just a huge waste of time. I can only imagine that it got worse.
Monorail from the Airport? Man, that would ROCK HARD. No having to take the shuttles with endless stops or taxis with 20 years of grime built up.
I do feel a bit sorry for the taxi drivers: this is going to kill 80% of them. Apparently the union is not that powerful in Vegas. :) [which is yet another lesson why union's suck and why they tend to retard progress, but that's a rant for another day]
So what we have here is a glorified Palm running linux or WinXP.
A glorified Palm with an 800x600 screen... which is actually practical for web browsing. I've wanted for a long-ass time a small, cheap portable I could toss around the living room ready for instant web browsing when needed. The MS Tablet PCs are cool, but way overkill/overpriced for a "throw around" tablet.
Small nuclear power plants? We had those back in the 1970s.
(best -- show -- ever, except for when they "jumped the aliens")
Go read the Federalist Papers, as well as some of the other early documents before the constitution. The meaning of "free speech" has been GREATLY expanded since the founding fathers. Originally, free speech applied to political speech, which still is pretty much unabridged.
The other key point is that the first amendment does not supercede other laws and rights. For example, if you come into my living room spouting your political views, you can still be arrested for trespassing even though your free speech rights are being abridged.
Lastly, it's important to note that the first amendment does not guarantee you a forum for your speech.
Read the 1st amendment. "Congress shall make no law abridging". That means no laws abridging.
Except that's NOT what it means. The first amendment was not intended to say that anyone, anywhere, anytime can say anything he/she wants, and there's nothing the government can do about it. Fire/Crowded/Theatre, public nuisance, etc, etc.
There are a number of people who might feel embarrassed/ashamed asking a complete stranger for permission to access websites on legitimate, protected adult speech
That would only be a concern if there was a requirement to tell the librarian the reason for disabling the controls. Since the librarian obviously wouldn't care about the reason, there's no issue.
The other point is that simply standing in the "non-fiction sex" section of library is potentially embarrasing. Does that mean that the library is abridging those reader's rights because the books they are browsing are potentially identifiable?
A right that you have to beg for isnt a right, its a privelage.
Yeah, and you also have to ask permission to see rare books, and to climb ladders to get at the tall shelves. And of course, let's not forget about midgets who can't reach the tall shelves.
By your logic, any abridgement of "instant access" is an abridgement of your rights, which is just silly.
Will the librarian turn off the controls at the legitimate request of an adult or child. If so, there's no debate and no abridgement of free access.
Otherwise, I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.
Does Leibniz's God, being omniscient, know about worlds that he/she/it cannot make, worlds which are impossible? If so, God is not omnipotent.
The nature of omnipotence isn't being able to do the impossible. That's like saying, since God can't add 1 and 1 and get 3, therefore he's not omnipotent. Omnipotence doesn't imply that you can perform logical contradictions.
I notice that they don't really include the old Byte magazines. Well, I suppose there's a good reason for that: hard drives aren't big enough yet for the "telephone book" editions. :)
That answer your question a bit?
I guess what I'm aiming at is the Big Question of whether Homo Sapiens Sapiens killed off all the other species, or if they died out "naturally". The latter seems unlikely, since even a less human would have a lot of advantages over the rest of the animal kingdom. I mean, we have lots of simian species still surviving, so it seems likely that we conquered any competitors. I was wondering if the fossil record shows anything like that. But as you say, it's a pretty sparse record, so we'll probably never know.
It just brings up the big question that what was it about us that was the big advantage? Were we just lucky (seems unlikely), or did some relatively small change produce a big advantage? Similar to the book's point (from my original quote), it may be that simple throat or jaw changes started an evolutionary chain reaction that optimized toward complex language that our already existing symbolic brain was finally able to utilize. A small physical change to produced a big result seems more likely to me than the book's contention that actual complex changes to the brain that gave new capabilities.
Let me ask a slightly different question. Obviously there are great variations in the skulls of various pre-humans. Does that give any evidence that the brains were very different or is it possible that the braincase was just a different shape, but the brains were more or less the same? My gut feeling is that the latter is the most likely, and as I said above, it's physical changes that allowed the brain to be used more effectively that gave us the big advantage.
I mean, I know that Mr. Gates is heavy into the cause of fighting global diseases but wouldn't it have made more sense to donate to the #1 country (Africa) dealing with an AIDS epidemic than #2 (India)?
Sheesh, what make you think they aren't? Here's a clue: type "gates foundation aids africa" into Google. OH MY GOD! Look what pops up: A whole section devotes to Africa.
But it's probably all about those African software developers, right?
his market-oriented wife
What's a "market-oriented" wife??
In the past, he said that after he died, that contributions would start. For some reason, he changed his mind.
No, in the past he said that he wasn't going to invest his money until later in life, not after life. His point at the time was that he just didn't know what to do with the money. He could have just done what a lot of people do and just dump money into holes that don't do anything, but I give him big props for actually thinking about the problem before just spraying money everywhere.
It's kind of difficult for a child to "learn to immunize himself", which is where most of the Gates Foundation's funds go it.
But beyond that, you might look at how much of the foundation's money goes to education.
You might read through the the Foundation's Web Site sometime. Gates agrees with you -- he invests his money in things that have long-term payouts, not single day handouts.
But what do they do when the money runs out?
The foundation has around 21 BILLION dollars. Invested properly, they will never run out of money.
Free information doesn't run out.
But that doesn't mean most information is valuable. And almost no information is valuable without resources to use it.
These days there's a lot more in the middle there.
Indeed, and what concerns me in particular is this quote:
This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're only talking a few hundred thousand years, I don't think that's enough time to really make significant changes to the brain, unless simply a bigger brain gave us more capability. I think it's much more likely that the "big change" that gave us sentience and self-awareness came a long time ago, and then we got a large number of branches until things got fine-tuned enough to give us the advantage over everyone else.
On the other hand (and this is where I contradict my last statement), maybe it took one key random change to give us such an overwhelming advantage that we were able to wipe everyone else out.
Maybe you can tell me this... does the fossil record seem to indicate that there were a lot of human variations milling around until Boom! they all went extinct, or does it look like a long, gradual process? Or do we simply don't have enough evidence to make the call?
I love me saw so much that I had my wife get a tattoo in a private place that I won't mention.
Did I mention how much my saw rules over other saws? It cuts at least twice as fast over those cheaper brands that all the other idiots use.
Can't you tell how superior I am because of the saw I use? Can't you tell how much a part of the intellectual elite I am?
God, it's great to be me.
Abstract mathematical thought isn't patentable and all software is abstract mathematical thought.
Nope, you're wrong. Software is the electronic equivalent of gears and pulleys. Put it this way: I can take any program and make a mechanical equivalent. That mechanical equivalent would be patentable. So why shouldn't software?
The cotton gin was nothing but an algorithm expressed in mechanics. If you can patent cotton gins, then you can patent software.
That said, my take on software patents is that it's such a new science that patents should be suspended until all the "obvious" inventions have clear prior art, say 2050. By then, anything new should be novel enough to deserve a patent.
I know that this has been discussed a lot, but let me cast my vote again: stories must be moderated too.
If you want that, you know where to go. Of course, you only have to look at the site to see what happens when the lunatics run the asylum.
Personally, even though I don't always agree with the story selection (like this one), there's no doubt that a small group of focused, full-time editors picking stories is way better than the masses picking stories.
Sheesh, this is the paranoia that I'm talking about. Did you read the link? Microsoft comes out and says that DRM can be based on Palladium. But so what? That's like saying that DRM can be based on encryption, therefore all encryption packages must be evil.
Once again, I have to say: Explain to me how ANY rights or capabilities are going to be taken away by Palladium. Explain to me how they are going to maintain backward compatibility if everything is under Palladium and can't be turned off.
So the point is (in case you still haven't gotten it) that Microsoft has a history of lying too. [...] Do you get it now? Jesus, I can't believe I wasted that much time in explaining this to someone who probably isn't going to get it anyway ...
I get your point perfectly. Unfortunately, it's YOU who are missing the bigger point here. There is no doubt that Microsoft has a certain amount of history (although, comparing them to the level of the soviet union is absolute absurdity, but moving on), and that creates well-founded suspicion in people.
But well-founded suspicion is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people TURNING OFF THEIR BRAIN and assuming that a piece of software does something that it absolutely cannot do. That's what I'm talking about: the ability for people, because they distrust something (the government, in the case of the moon landings) creating absolutely illogical scenerios to try and justify their paranoia.
The extent of your argument seems to be that since Microsoft has a history, therefore any belief about Palladium is justified, no matter how illogical. Suspicion is fine and healthy. Paranoia and suspension of logic is not.
I'm sorry if I'm more rational than that.
I don't know if you get it now or not, but I tried.
Slashdotters' distrust of Palladium is more akin to doubting the old Soviet space agency's rather vehement denials that personnel were killed every time there was a mysterious explosion at Baikonur.
See? Exactly my point. You can't refute the fact that it's impossible for Palladium to be what the paranoids claim it to be, therefore you just have to fall back on "Microsoft is so evil that it has to be bad, even if this belief is entirely illogical".
If people *want* to believe something, nothing they say or do can prove otherwise.
Dare I say that it reminds of ... many slashdotter's opinion of Palladium?
Microsoft haters *want* to believe that Palladium is a conspiracy to allow Microsoft to only allow software signed by Microsoft, despite the fact that it's utterly impossible for Microsoft to implement that and maintain backward compatibility with unsigned software and/or music.
Yet, no matter how much I make this point, which the paranoids never both to refute, their only answer is "Microsoft so eeevil that it can only be a conspiracy."
If you want to know how people can be so delusional that they can believe the moon landing was a conspiracy, look no further than the Palladium Paranoids.
My vision for something like this is a small, thin unit maybe 1/2" thick that I can toss around the living room and grab when I want to do some surfing. Wireless, long battery life, etc.
To this end, I find this other product that Microsoft is developing more interesting: the Smart Display.
Microsoft hasn't been hyping it as much, presumably to avoid confusion with the Tablet PC, but in a nutshell it's a remote display that connects "PCAnywhere-style" to your desktop computer. This seems WAY closer to my vision of a "toss anywhere" remote computer.
It should be a lot cheaper, too, along with better battery life. I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing how these units shake out.