Perhaps I am just responding to propaganda, but it seems to me that apple has always tried to be accessible out of the box. The single button mouse is great help to people with limited hand movements. The ability to zoom the screen helps people without perfect vision. Voice control to start applications. Reading of text on the screen. Talking alerts.
I don't know the full array of available windows modifications, but I've always wondered how MS products end up in public locations that are supposed to be 100% accessible.
A full screen reader will be a nice improvement. Now all we have to do educate web developers, or more specifically web site development applications, to make accessible web sites. Of course, if the screen readers skip the advertisement, the differently abed will be accused of stealing content and probably become listed as terrorists.
I was thinking the same thing. Anyone remember those nuclear warning thingies from grade school. I barely do. You know, dig a hole. Or was it duck and cover?
Those that would do this voluntarily already take appropriate steps to control access to their sites. The mark their content as adult, they register with various filters. A sex domain would do little else than likely raise their operating costs, and, for those sites that provide adult content but not pornography, negatively affect their business image.
A sex domain would do three things. It would give kids a centralized location to look for porn. This may be a good thing. It would save bandwidth as the would be less likely to download content that have nothing to do with naked people having sex.
Second, it would create any number of security risks. Spammers would likely register their domains in the.sex tld to provide validity to their claim that the user will receive pornography or sex drugs instead of just malware. It may also be that some otherwise innocent websites might include link to.sex sites, which may cause embarrassment to innocent people.
Third, due to the fact that these newer domains cost more that the original set, the registrars might be tempted to make any volunteer program mandatory. Also, there is adult content that is not pornography, and other content that some might consider adult but other would not. It is likely that the.sex tld will be blocked at all public terminals and most homes with children. This means that the content will be unavailable to children. Under the current system, such content is not universally block. It would seem probable that those religious fundamentalist that consider ignorant children to be the blessed ideal would try to force all remotely adult content to the.sex domain to keep any content opposed by the fundamentalist away from all kids.
In the old days we used to turn on the computer, enter into the BIOS, and do all our editing at that level. Real programs would go directly to the assembler, but if were lazy the code could be interpreted by the Basic in the BIOS. We could send the data off to tape or the line printer or the serial port or whereever. Sure, sometimes we would have to put a 8" disk in, spend an hour or so getting the switches right, and then wait another day to load in the dos. But mostly we just played at the Bios, mostly.
On a more serious note, couldn't something like this be done in open firmware. Boot up to the prompt and go:
" Hello, wanted to check on the tickets
tickets
" nowhere@nowhere.net
" nothere@nothere.net
dup
over
" send
mail
Anyway we all know the problem isn't MS, the problem is C. It is such a 1970 type of language. Back when programmers were randomly jumping from place to place, casting memory as whatever type of data pleased them, recasting the data in function calls, copying blocks of data without a care of whether the blocks really existed, and, in this case, assigning NULL pointers all willy nilly. I mean really. No programmer educated in the past 15 years actually has the skill to remember that the void pointer pointer which in the last call has the value of the beginning of a three dimensional array, now points to the beginning of four dimensional array, which, of course, is complicated by the fact that such beasts only exist in the mind of the programmer, and not in any specific language construct, pointer math being one of those fictional things beat into the heads of the unfortunate programmers trained 20 years ago. And let's not even talk about the infinite loop idiom.
Anyway, we need to rewrite the entire thing in the elegant languages of the 21st century. I suggest this
You are comparing apples and oranges. For instance, a GPC is a totally different thing from a specialized device like a phone. A more proper comparison would be a manufacturer putting Raid support in a PDA. A phone is a phone. It is, for many people, a critical piece of technology that must work. Features that do not directly increase that core functionality adds unnecessary complexity and reduces reliability. As other have mentioned, it also poses risks that many find unacceptable, and limits the places in which the device may be used.
We have very few camera phones connected to land lines. The technology has been available for years and the additional cost is minimal. Ask yourself why? It has little value to the consumer or phone company. OTOH, there is value to a camera phone. First, there is a population, mostly women, who like to have constant record of the things going on around them, particularly the children. There are many other groups the need occasional visual records. Such groups traditionally have kept an instamatic in the glove box to satisfy such a need. However the biggest benefit of the camera phone is to the telephone companies who can charge for the air time
The problem is that it is become increasingly difficult to get a plain phone. Basic phones will likely become a product that phone companies will charge a premium on to offset the loss of future air time.
To complete you example list, it is cheaper to buy a computer that plays pong and does spreadsheets. I probably have four or so in my closet. I can, until monsanto patents rocks, go out and pick up a rock for free.
Chalk it up to another misunderstanding of units. Some engineer must have confused ft and km again. We really must insist that the aggie colleges start a remidial unit analysis class.
I think this is about maintaining long term control of the desktop. As long as MS has this control, they can also control the protocols. As long as they can control the protocols, they can minimize threats from competitors.
For instance, if China were to start using OSS, that would mean that IE would not be dominant browser. This would mean that web designer would not just be able to buy a copy of Frontpage and use the templates to design a site, but would have use tools that could create effective content for open standards compliant browsers. Many of these designers might choose to leave MS OS and tools altogether and just use OSS. This could lead to defections in other areas as MS protocols become less dominant.
It is quite arguable that MS can afford to give away software to every person in Asia just to make sure that it's monopoly is maintained. This however would be dumping, and illegal. So, like in the 80's, they turn a blind eye to unlicensed software until the day they decide they need the money.
I have worked on a couple projects that allowed language localization. If the code is designed with modern standards in mind, it was quite easy to localize (at least for western languages) as all text was kept kept in separate resource files. The same for icons, et al. On the Mac such things could be changed, from day one, by resedit, a free and very usable application. This resulted in various themes based on Bloom County and other topics. It also allowed offensive icons to be modified. Of course, Unix has been providing packages at customizable levels of complexity for more years than MS has exists.
So one wonders what kind of antiquated practices MS is using that requires a 'special' program to allow localization. Could it be that perhaps MS is not competing against OSS, but is continuing it's fight against best software engineering practices. [And I know that many at MS know how to write code. I have their books. OTOH, we see many cases where corporate and monopoly market interests contraindicate best practices.]
Unfortunately the long term may not be so long. Over the past 10 years or so my U.S. city has increasingly resembled my third world city. The well off people are getting more well off, and increasingly afraid of the less well off people. Where up to the 80's the very rich, the middle class, and lower class lived relitively peacefully within walking distance of each other, we now have a situation where the very rich continue to live in thier castles, but the middle class have built gated bunkers on the rubble of lower class housing. These middle class persons emerge in thier assult vehicles to venture to work or the new trendy club. They complain about the ice houses, one of the few relics of the old neighborhood.
In first world countries we feel safe and classes live together with minimal bloodshed. In third world countries the rich are safe, the poor do what they can to eat, and the middle class, under attack from both directions, bunker down with whatever stuff they can acquire.
Just one of trivia. Back in the late 90's, the USPS made a rule that said you cannot list a drop box as a suite. The intent was to prevent just this type of behavior. Listing a drop box as suite is useful, especially when the real place of business is a residence or shared space, but I believe it is illigal.
So, if nothing else, he may be guilty of mail fraud. I can't find the memo. Maybe someone else remembers the rule.
We have to remember that OSS products are immature. All the problems we see were at least as bad in MS products. Reboots when hardware changed. Seperate device drivers needed at the application level. Custom programming needed to do anything special. And when windows came out, POS GUI with POS applications and POS support.
It was ok because it was cheap. This is the common model. Build something cheaper and people will buy it even if quality sucks. Over time, improve the quality and raise prices as the market will bear. MS is still trying and failing to meet what many of us would consider acceptable quality standards, and yet it is the market leader.
Which would indicate that MS provides something else that bussiness want. This most likely is predicatability and 'security.' It is the 'no got fired for buying IBM' syndrome. It is my accounting is ok because I pay the accounts and lawyer millions of dollars to say it is ok and they will take the fall. The testing is not such a big deal. The quality is not such a big deal. Knowing that one organization is ultimately responsible and that organization has known standards is. Knowing that an organization has done suffieceint testing to fell confortable enough to take that responsibility is the big deal.
Which is why IBM doing OSS is a big deal. It is why Red Hat and the others need to make clear that if a firm spends money on thier services, they will be responsible for everything. It is just like any other manufacturer. Parts may come from all over, but the firm that puts everything together is the one place where the buck stops. Of course, this is only ture to an extent, but the idea is that firms need to know where to go when something goes wrong. An account manage at IBM or whereever makes it easier to sleep at night, even if you do use the POS software from MS.
One more thing. I have seen time and time again that people have a tolerance for certain computer products because these products are percieved as the standard, and therefore must be the best. I have seen people demand Wintel machines and then assume they have an especially defective machine when something goes wrong. I have seen people use perfectly good non-wintel and then focus on a single issue as proof that the entire line of machines are poorly built. The battle is totally uphill, and competators must be 10X as good to suceed. I don't think it is any particular flaw in the OSS community. I think the current sucees indicates that many of the player are much better than the market leaders.
You guys are the reason geeks have such a bad reputation. Y'all would probably be the ones that go straight for the clitoris without a care about whether the women is actualy ready done there.
So, if you get out the mode that the world revolves around the male sensibilities, you will see that it is easy for a male to move the printer form place to place, big hands and all, but smaller hands have more trouble. Therefore a handle to get the printer into position is brilliant. This is what is called industrial design. It is why MS uses Apple machines in it's ads instead of PC machines. It is why many macs have handles. It is why so much of the software designed by people with the spatial sense of A Square sucks so much.
Gaming is the one place where payment has always seemed to be important. On the old Apple ][, one of the few copy-protected things were games. One of the nice thing about console systems is that it defines the customer base and tend they are designed to discourage casual coping. The PC is popular platform because nearly everyone has one, and even if you sell only sell copy to every people how play it still results in a good chunk of change.
So the question is can the games be sold on a *nix platform. Yes people do pay for *nix software, and people do make money off it, but can *nix games generate the types of profit that will attract the top game developer? Even if the engines are cheap or free, even if *nix market share rise to 20%, is this enough of a customer base to warrant the effort?
Then there is the question of marketing entertainment on a platform that potentially has no possibility of viable copy protection.
Just to be clear, I think that *nix products in general can be sold and generate a profit. However, games and the like seem to follow a more complex set of economic rules.
These are the enduring issues of technology. All the computer stuff we are going through is just a phase. Few other than historians will remeber or care. How many of you know there was a tiny part of the steam engine that had significant effects on the course of history due to it's legal ambiguity? How many of you talk about the technological wonder of a shovel or sewage pipes even though both of these had profound effects on the course of civilization. Does anyone even think of tube television as a technological marvel?
These two issues are important. There are physical appearance clauses in contacts. As medical technology advances, those clauses will likely become more stringant. Television has dealt with these clauses, for instance in Murphy Brown. I suspect that we will also see cases where athletes are required to take certain drugs, perhaps even in middle school.
And cloning is on everyones mind. Even if we never have a situation where a human is cloned for harvesting, the purpose of sci-fi is to create a dialogue about the issues so we have some understanding of the key points before a crisis situation develops.
I think the coolest technological plot would be a kid wanted to get a computer implant, but the school rules forbid it. Believe it. It will happen.
The pitch was simple. Technology has made the females skinnier, the breasts bigger, and the hemlines higher, and the go go boots taller, not to mention the rubber tighter.
Haven't you been watching tv for the past 10 years. Anyone can get a wonderful apartment in Manhattan, with bedrooms and large kitchens, and never have to work! All you need are acquantances.
The interesting thing is we deal with the soul issue every day. For instance, how fast can the soul travel. Can it travel as fast as a car? Can it travel as fast as a plane? If we get too far away from out soul do we lose it?
And then there there are issues of transplant. Is the sould localized or dispersed. If a person has an organ transplant, has he or she lost part of the soul? Does that person get part of another soul? if we lose a body part do we lose part of our soul. How much soul can we lose before we fall under a critical mass?
These and other question indicate we should not be living in our modern way. However even most of those who really believe in souls do live with all the modern perks. I suspect that trransport will fall under the same clasification as rapid travel. Probably not good for the soul, but not worth worrying about. It seems our soul, like the dog tossed out of the truck in the woods, is pretty good at finding it's way back home. And there are certainly not a limited number of souls. Otherwise we would have a lot of people without souls. I am sure a sould can be found for any cloned person.
The issue is only partly monopoly. From a customer point of view, there is also an issue of being able to acquire a machine that is suited to business or personal needs. On of the benefits of the Linux distributions is that the much maligned installers allow that customized machine. In fact distros like Mandrake will warn you if you are installing something that might be a security problem.
Therefore, if your business has a machine that simply needs open office, and not an media player, or web server, or net sniffing tools, it will take less than five minutes to select that machine from the installer. There is no issue of violating licensing agreements, DCMA, or whatever. You have made a business decision that you do not want this stuff on the machine, in the case of the media player perhaps to minimize your exposure to copyright violation, and there is not reason to impose opportunity costs to implement those decisions.
Because these products are not integrated directly into the OS. It is possible to go into the Applications folder and, with a single move of the mouse, remove the bundle of files that make up the app. If you wanted to you could also go into your library/preferences and remove the files from there. There would be no dialog that asks if you want to do this, or telling you these files are critical for the functionility of the production machine on your assembly line floor. Of course not every functionality is removed, but enough of it is so that it is not easy to use or exploit the remaining functionality
Apple and MS both have an issue with closed protocols, but at least with Apple you are not forced to use these consumer level toys on a profesional machine
I think many are willing to die to protect freedom. When we oppose the Patriot act, we are saying that the we are not willing to die by a terrorist attack rather than allow the government to have unfettered access to our lives. When we oppose laws that require us to carry identification at all times, we are saying that we value our freedom to move as we please more than our life. Many will often oppose laws that decrease the chances of death in an effort to protect these freedoms for thier children.
OTOH, many in government have shown conclusively that theyd do not vlaue the laws. They will value thier own lives, and own financial well being, over the freedoms that have become our birthright. These are the people that will sell military equipment to questionable parties, and then, like the cowards they are, hide behind technicalities.
I will go a bit further and say the thing to look at here is the process. What has been learned, what has been contributed to the nation, and how has it benefited the world. In this light the fact that there was no 'winner' or the race was not 'finished' may of little or no significance. This is why many research projects have a series of goals in which the 'answer' is only one of the many achievement that are pursued.
If you tru to do something significant that no one has done before, that is a success in itself. We hear all the time about people doing trivial things, or something that has been done 100 times before, and fawn over those achievements simply because a finish line was crossed. We too often forget about the process that went to make those things happen, and that many things are much easier today than even a year ago because the process was refined by people who perhaps never bother worried about crossing a finish line.
This is pretty much it. I hate to say it, but when you are a teenager, at the top 5% of the population in terms of critical thinking skills, the rest of the world is really just there for your entertainment. It is little different than being a star athlete, except that no one wants to be your friend, you generally are not willing to date someone stupid just for sex, and you will generally not be invited to parties in which you will be invited to rape women, unless perhaps you are in the top 1%, in which you will have groupies.
The above is of course facetious. There will be many people who want to be your friend. You will just have almost nothing in common with them, so, even though you do not have to be alone, you will choose to do so. And of course the athletes that do behave badly do so for the same reason that slaves in ancient time fought each other for their owners entertainment.
And by this point, the few normal friends I had around me would be rolling their eyes wondering when I was going to stop this pseudo intellectual chain of thought babble and say something important like the football scores, or who was the first babe who would get Martha Stewert, or the like.
So, in one's native environment one does fine. Otherwise, we just make people think, which is very uncomfortable for 95% of the population. I tend to send those people back to their WSJ and USA Today and Macfood while I go and act pompous.
Oh, and if I can be on topic, dancing. It is the classic courtship ritual, it builds a sense of where body parts are, and it forces the adolescent to focus attention on another person, which might lead to other beneficial developments.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, that pirating is going on on/. There are businesses out there that must bill 15 or 20 minutes to pay for their yearly subscription to this fine journal. There are hardworking impoverished MBA candidates that, after paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and fees every year, pay tens of dollars for online access.
We must find this so-called anonymous coward. We must file to full extent of the DCMA. We must have Ashcroft personally lead the force to take this miscreant down. We must put the full force of the homeland security office to insure that he is disappeared to Cuba.
To add insult to injury, the bastard did not even post a link to subscription page. This may be, of course, because anyone smart enough to block doubleclick cannot get to it without committing further crimes against humanity in the form of hacking the URL. With the link posted, I see no reason why we should not reward the journals generousity by having everyone on/. ask for the two weeks free.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know the full array of available windows modifications, but I've always wondered how MS products end up in public locations that are supposed to be 100% accessible.
A full screen reader will be a nice improvement. Now all we have to do educate web developers, or more specifically web site development applications, to make accessible web sites. Of course, if the screen readers skip the advertisement, the differently abed will be accused of stealing content and probably become listed as terrorists.
I was thinking the same thing. Anyone remember those nuclear warning thingies from grade school. I barely do. You know, dig a hole. Or was it duck and cover?
A sex domain would do three things. It would give kids a centralized location to look for porn. This may be a good thing. It would save bandwidth as the would be less likely to download content that have nothing to do with naked people having sex.
Second, it would create any number of security risks. Spammers would likely register their domains in the .sex tld to provide validity to their claim that the user will receive pornography or sex drugs instead of just malware. It may also be that some otherwise innocent websites might include link to .sex sites, which may cause embarrassment to innocent people.
Third, due to the fact that these newer domains cost more that the original set, the registrars might be tempted to make any volunteer program mandatory. Also, there is adult content that is not pornography, and other content that some might consider adult but other would not. It is likely that the .sex tld will be blocked at all public terminals and most homes with children. This means that the content will be unavailable to children. Under the current system, such content is not universally block. It would seem probable that those religious fundamentalist that consider ignorant children to be the blessed ideal would try to force all remotely adult content to the .sex domain to keep any content opposed by the fundamentalist away from all kids.
On a more serious note, couldn't something like this be done in open firmware. Boot up to the prompt and go:
" Hello, wanted to check on the tickets
tickets
" nowhere@nowhere.net
" nothere@nothere.net
dup
over
" send
mail
Anyway, we need to rewrite the entire thing in the elegant languages of the 21st century. I suggest this
We have very few camera phones connected to land lines. The technology has been available for years and the additional cost is minimal. Ask yourself why? It has little value to the consumer or phone company. OTOH, there is value to a camera phone. First, there is a population, mostly women, who like to have constant record of the things going on around them, particularly the children. There are many other groups the need occasional visual records. Such groups traditionally have kept an instamatic in the glove box to satisfy such a need. However the biggest benefit of the camera phone is to the telephone companies who can charge for the air time
The problem is that it is become increasingly difficult to get a plain phone. Basic phones will likely become a product that phone companies will charge a premium on to offset the loss of future air time.
To complete you example list, it is cheaper to buy a computer that plays pong and does spreadsheets. I probably have four or so in my closet. I can, until monsanto patents rocks, go out and pick up a rock for free.
Chalk it up to another misunderstanding of units. Some engineer must have confused ft and km again. We really must insist that the aggie colleges start a remidial unit analysis class.
For instance, if China were to start using OSS, that would mean that IE would not be dominant browser. This would mean that web designer would not just be able to buy a copy of Frontpage and use the templates to design a site, but would have use tools that could create effective content for open standards compliant browsers. Many of these designers might choose to leave MS OS and tools altogether and just use OSS. This could lead to defections in other areas as MS protocols become less dominant.
It is quite arguable that MS can afford to give away software to every person in Asia just to make sure that it's monopoly is maintained. This however would be dumping, and illegal. So, like in the 80's, they turn a blind eye to unlicensed software until the day they decide they need the money.
So one wonders what kind of antiquated practices MS is using that requires a 'special' program to allow localization. Could it be that perhaps MS is not competing against OSS, but is continuing it's fight against best software engineering practices. [And I know that many at MS know how to write code. I have their books. OTOH, we see many cases where corporate and monopoly market interests contraindicate best practices.]
In first world countries we feel safe and classes live together with minimal bloodshed. In third world countries the rich are safe, the poor do what they can to eat, and the middle class, under attack from both directions, bunker down with whatever stuff they can acquire.
So, if nothing else, he may be guilty of mail fraud. I can't find the memo. Maybe someone else remembers the rule.
A sucessful pathogen cannot kill every host. Therefore such a pathogen might randomly choose 1 in 10 user to beat.
It was ok because it was cheap. This is the common model. Build something cheaper and people will buy it even if quality sucks. Over time, improve the quality and raise prices as the market will bear. MS is still trying and failing to meet what many of us would consider acceptable quality standards, and yet it is the market leader.
Which would indicate that MS provides something else that bussiness want. This most likely is predicatability and 'security.' It is the 'no got fired for buying IBM' syndrome. It is my accounting is ok because I pay the accounts and lawyer millions of dollars to say it is ok and they will take the fall. The testing is not such a big deal. The quality is not such a big deal. Knowing that one organization is ultimately responsible and that organization has known standards is. Knowing that an organization has done suffieceint testing to fell confortable enough to take that responsibility is the big deal.
Which is why IBM doing OSS is a big deal. It is why Red Hat and the others need to make clear that if a firm spends money on thier services, they will be responsible for everything. It is just like any other manufacturer. Parts may come from all over, but the firm that puts everything together is the one place where the buck stops. Of course, this is only ture to an extent, but the idea is that firms need to know where to go when something goes wrong. An account manage at IBM or whereever makes it easier to sleep at night, even if you do use the POS software from MS.
One more thing. I have seen time and time again that people have a tolerance for certain computer products because these products are percieved as the standard, and therefore must be the best. I have seen people demand Wintel machines and then assume they have an especially defective machine when something goes wrong. I have seen people use perfectly good non-wintel and then focus on a single issue as proof that the entire line of machines are poorly built. The battle is totally uphill, and competators must be 10X as good to suceed. I don't think it is any particular flaw in the OSS community. I think the current sucees indicates that many of the player are much better than the market leaders.
So, if you get out the mode that the world revolves around the male sensibilities, you will see that it is easy for a male to move the printer form place to place, big hands and all, but smaller hands have more trouble. Therefore a handle to get the printer into position is brilliant. This is what is called industrial design. It is why MS uses Apple machines in it's ads instead of PC machines. It is why many macs have handles. It is why so much of the software designed by people with the spatial sense of A Square sucks so much.
So the question is can the games be sold on a *nix platform. Yes people do pay for *nix software, and people do make money off it, but can *nix games generate the types of profit that will attract the top game developer? Even if the engines are cheap or free, even if *nix market share rise to 20%, is this enough of a customer base to warrant the effort?
Then there is the question of marketing entertainment on a platform that potentially has no possibility of viable copy protection.
Just to be clear, I think that *nix products in general can be sold and generate a profit. However, games and the like seem to follow a more complex set of economic rules.
These two issues are important. There are physical appearance clauses in contacts. As medical technology advances, those clauses will likely become more stringant. Television has dealt with these clauses, for instance in Murphy Brown. I suspect that we will also see cases where athletes are required to take certain drugs, perhaps even in middle school.
And cloning is on everyones mind. Even if we never have a situation where a human is cloned for harvesting, the purpose of sci-fi is to create a dialogue about the issues so we have some understanding of the key points before a crisis situation develops.
I think the coolest technological plot would be a kid wanted to get a computer implant, but the school rules forbid it. Believe it. It will happen.
The pitch was simple. Technology has made the females skinnier, the breasts bigger, and the hemlines higher, and the go go boots taller, not to mention the rubber tighter.
Haven't you been watching tv for the past 10 years. Anyone can get a wonderful apartment in Manhattan, with bedrooms and large kitchens, and never have to work! All you need are acquantances.
And then there there are issues of transplant. Is the sould localized or dispersed. If a person has an organ transplant, has he or she lost part of the soul? Does that person get part of another soul? if we lose a body part do we lose part of our soul. How much soul can we lose before we fall under a critical mass?
These and other question indicate we should not be living in our modern way. However even most of those who really believe in souls do live with all the modern perks. I suspect that trransport will fall under the same clasification as rapid travel. Probably not good for the soul, but not worth worrying about. It seems our soul, like the dog tossed out of the truck in the woods, is pretty good at finding it's way back home. And there are certainly not a limited number of souls. Otherwise we would have a lot of people without souls. I am sure a sould can be found for any cloned person.
Therefore, if your business has a machine that simply needs open office, and not an media player, or web server, or net sniffing tools, it will take less than five minutes to select that machine from the installer. There is no issue of violating licensing agreements, DCMA, or whatever. You have made a business decision that you do not want this stuff on the machine, in the case of the media player perhaps to minimize your exposure to copyright violation, and there is not reason to impose opportunity costs to implement those decisions.
Apple and MS both have an issue with closed protocols, but at least with Apple you are not forced to use these consumer level toys on a profesional machine
OTOH, many in government have shown conclusively that theyd do not vlaue the laws. They will value thier own lives, and own financial well being, over the freedoms that have become our birthright. These are the people that will sell military equipment to questionable parties, and then, like the cowards they are, hide behind technicalities.
If you tru to do something significant that no one has done before, that is a success in itself. We hear all the time about people doing trivial things, or something that has been done 100 times before, and fawn over those achievements simply because a finish line was crossed. We too often forget about the process that went to make those things happen, and that many things are much easier today than even a year ago because the process was refined by people who perhaps never bother worried about crossing a finish line.
The above is of course facetious. There will be many people who want to be your friend. You will just have almost nothing in common with them, so, even though you do not have to be alone, you will choose to do so. And of course the athletes that do behave badly do so for the same reason that slaves in ancient time fought each other for their owners entertainment.
And by this point, the few normal friends I had around me would be rolling their eyes wondering when I was going to stop this pseudo intellectual chain of thought babble and say something important like the football scores, or who was the first babe who would get Martha Stewert, or the like.
So, in one's native environment one does fine. Otherwise, we just make people think, which is very uncomfortable for 95% of the population. I tend to send those people back to their WSJ and USA Today and Macfood while I go and act pompous.
Oh, and if I can be on topic, dancing. It is the classic courtship ritual, it builds a sense of where body parts are, and it forces the adolescent to focus attention on another person, which might lead to other beneficial developments.
We must find this so-called anonymous coward. We must file to full extent of the DCMA. We must have Ashcroft personally lead the force to take this miscreant down. We must put the full force of the homeland security office to insure that he is disappeared to Cuba.
To add insult to injury, the bastard did not even post a link to subscription page. This may be, of course, because anyone smart enough to block doubleclick cannot get to it without committing further crimes against humanity in the form of hacking the URL. With the link posted, I see no reason why we should not reward the journals generousity by having everyone on /. ask for the two weeks free.