After Vista, you have to wonder what Microsoft thinks it can do to revive its fortunes. A modular OS? Hello, meet *nix.
I've been an exclusive linux user for ~10 years. I know more than some, less than many. But friends, relatives, and co-workers are suddenly coming up to me and asking about "Ubuntu." And three days ago I read an article in CIO magazine posing the question, "Is is time to dump Vista?" to which many replied, "switch to Ubuntu."
That's significant. I've been happy to be ahead of the curve in terms of usability, stability, and security. And I can't lie--it gives me pleasure still to hear about people having problems with Windows issues while knowing I'm immune. But when people who've previously given me blank stares when I extolled the virtues of FOSS come to me and ask about a distro whose name is based on an African language, I can't help but wonder at the exigency that drove them to such extremes.
I look forward to the era of the 2nd coming of Apple, and the underlying gospel of *nix. For a time, Apple will collect those who have money and favor dead-easy implementation. But eventually they too will succumb to the ineluctable realities of *nix.
Congress won't defend the Constitution or Rule of Law anymore. The Supreme Court has been compromised.
Perhaps the states are our last hope. If California, New York, and just a few of the other big states say no to all the nonsense, the federal government shall have to back down or stage a coup.
It would be great to see them band together and take a very strong, pro-Constitutionalist stance on RealID, as well as the other recent intrusions on states' rights (I mean it in the Constitutional sense, not the neo-con sense).
For instance, the deployment of National Guard overseas at the expense of Civil Defense; the National Guard units belong to their respective states and actually answer to the governors, not the President. Or take the Medical Marijuana initiatives that passed all around the country in 2006 and which the Federal Government has been trying to countermand--it's not my issue but the states have the right under the Constitution to regulate such matters within their own borders.
Maybe, just maybe, if the states lead the way Congress will grow a pair.
and all the other "top" institutions as well. They're too expensive, and having a piece of paper from one of them helps you not at all in getting a job or once in the workplace.
Having that $120K piece of paper gets you a blank stare from the person who got an associate's degree from a community college who is actually the one screening resumes at the HR dept. of the company you're applying to; he or she works from a list of keywords like "C++" or "Java" and I guarantee you "MIT/Harvard/Yale/Princeton" ain't on that list.
If the person looking at your $120K piece of paper also went to a "top" institution, all your time/money/debt/effort will earn you exactly one *shrug*. "So what if the kid went to M.I.T?" the manager says to himself, "I went to CalTech. M.I.T.? Big whoop."
As for the classmates you'd have at a "top" institution, you wouldn't have time to waste socializing. Would they raise the in-class discussion $120K's worth? No. Especially not if you're in a lecture-class. In a seminar, they'd be competing with you and not so likely to share ideas with you. After all, they all think they're going to be the next Bill Gates too. Lastly, the "top" institutions disproportionally attract the maladjusted, neurotic, and just plain nuts.
Having no degree does hold you back, though, so go to a decent affordable school, bang it out in four years if you're taking it easy, less if you're not. Write them a check for $10K and call it a day. The FOSS work you've done is far more material and important to a potential employer.
I live in NYC, perhaps the most anti-gun city in America. But in the last month many of my friends and associates, who are also quite anti-gun and quite peaceable, have started taking shooting lessons and going about the arduous licensing required here to become gun owners. They even started a club, ShootingLiberally (shootingliberally.org).
Yes, it's anecdotal. But it's striking because of the turnaround it represents. If these kinds of people start learning the arts of war, then there must be a deep aversion out there to what's happening to freedom in the United States.
Perhaps not every American cares that much about it, but neither did they at the time of the American Revolution. In fact, less than 5% of the colonists took up arms against the British. But those were the important 5%, and they changed the course of history.
I'm furious that Pelosi and the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives would agree to a secret session. The FISA bill represents the greatest threat to our freedom, the rule of law, and the Constitution of the United States, and I demand to know every word that every Congressman says on the subject so we'll know exactly whose ass to kick if they grant immunity to the telcos for committing crimes.
Those fuckers are supposed to work for us, and I for one have lost patience waiting for them to remember that.
A secret session on this topic, especially this topic, is nothing but a big Fuck You to the American public.
I do use my broadband connection every day to get the news, read scientific journals, waste time on/., what-have-you.
I don't listen to RIAA music any more, much less download their crappy tracks, buy them from iTunes, or heaven forbid buy CDs, because I want nothing to do with them whatsoever.
Assessing a $5/mo. fee to every broadband user is the last thing that should happen. 10 years ago, OK, that was something we could have talked about. And did talk about. But the music industry wanted no part of it.
Now it's too late. The world and its musicians and its fans have all moved on.
But that's the point. Eventually, they're all up for re-election, and they know it. Beyond money or lobbyists, that is the primary motivation for all representatives and senators: they want to be re-elected.
Luckily, that's the one thing that you and I have the most influence over.
I agree with you that this is what they've been doing--posturing while the country and Constitution burn. Perhaps they think it will help them win the Whitehouse.
And it is frustrating to watch them do that when they were elected to a majority to put a stop to the run-away corruption and incompetence of the other side.
But the FISA fight is not partisan. Bush and the neoconservative leaders in Congress want a free pass to break the law and spy on all Americans. But Americans, left, right, and center, don't want to give it to them. As much as we have lost the last 8 years, there still is a core of decency in the American soul, and enough paranoia to give government, any government, carte blanche.
See, it's fine to have those powers when your party is in power, but the trouble is that only works as long as your party is in power. The fear is that your party will lose power, and then those powers will be turned against you. The thought of Hillary Clinton, for instance, in the Whitehouse with the powers Bush and Cheney have arrogated to the Executive branch makes my blood run cold.
That the House even put something like this out there at all. If we hadn't been sending many, passionate letters demanding Congress deny amnesty to the telcos for illegally spying on us, then they wouldn't have bothered to float this proposal.
So to all those out there who think that there's nothing anyone can do to change the course of government, this is evidence you can; you just have to take a little time to write a letter or make a phone call to your representative.
Relevant Ad targeting is in many ways a good thing. I cannot stand to watch TV because of the commercials, but the commercials are for things that I will never be in the market for as a man living in NYC such as feminine hygiene products or cars, cars, cars. If, however, the commercials were for, I dunno, home energy kits or wearable computing, I just might watch them.
That in turn helps the websites like Slashdot and Tom's Hardware that are not for mass-market media consumers to make enough money in ad revenue to operate, because high-degrees of targeting and great click-throughs mean you can make more money with a smaller total audience. That's good, because I like Slashdot and Tom's Hardware and don't want them to go away.
It's also good for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, because you can get more bang for your advertising buck if you can tightly target your fancy new, say, cybernetic implant to the transhumanist crowd.
The game companies get great music without the hugely inflated licensing fees charged by the Big Labels. The artists get intensive exposure to the very demographics they hope to reach without selling their souls. The gaming fans get to hear great music without supporting the Labels or simply suffering through corporate pop retreads.
It's interesting, because while this is happening through the medium of videogames, it's also happening through the medium of advertising. I worked on an in-house indy artist sourcing system at one of the big Ad firms on Madison Avenue, and they were trying to solve this same problem from their own angle--how to supply music in Ads more affordably and also promote independent artists.
Between iTunes, videogames, and advertising it seems like they'll each seize on the carcass of the music industry and tear it to pieces.
This/. article follows closely on the heels of the reports that the FBI has continued to abuse the National Security Letters, despite being caught the first time about 5 years ago. (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Senate-FBI.html?ex=1362373200&en=64cbc1e08db5f5bf&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)
Consider that the national security letter abuse and data dragnet are concurrent with illegal government wiretaps and recent concerns about DNA profiling (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/health/24dna.html).
Observe, also, that Congress, no matter which party holds the majority there, is clearly uninterested in checking the excesses of the executive branch that oversees the FBI/CIA/NSA/Homeland Security. And it's not a partisan issue, since Bill Clinton began some of the steps that Bush has expanded on, and which either Hillary or McCain would continue.
I submit, fellow citizens, that we are quickly approaching a crisis in our democracy, when we each shall have to decide how important our freedom is to us, and what we're going to do about it.
The government will certainly misuse this technology too, no matter the legal protections. We have something called the Constitution that supposedly protects us against the government spying on us, but we're all seeing how much good that does.
So it's not out of luddism that I hope they belay this advance; rather, I want to wait until we've rebalanced our government and society to ensure our freedom and rights will not be abused.
In the meantime, why not cure cancer? That's an unambiguous good. Go work on that!
They're even fun for adults to visit. We went to the Brooklyn Superhero supply store and had a blast with the invisibility powder and Hero or Villain? quiz.
That's what this is. The best way to teach a subject is through the medium of something the student is interested in and cares about. What better way to instruct a generation of legal professionals on the previously arcane area of copyright law than to enlist them in the fight to bring down the RIAA/MPAA?
It seems to me that every law school clinic in the country should be doing the same thing--there'd be no shortage of students willing to participate. But if every law school doesn't do this, the ones that do should play it up in their marketing material to prospective students. Most kids go to law school because they want to help others; imagine how exciting it would be to lead the fight to help your peers against the most hated company and industry in the world.
I saw something on the Discovery Channel a long time ago where Ballard proposed artificial islands. Wave-propulsion would be an ideal way to move the beasts around.
3D printers that build structures with plastic beads exist. We also already know that it's possible to arrange molecules with a scanning-tunneling microscope. Why is it such a leap to imagine that process for complex structures could be automated?
Yes, there are significant hurdles to overcome, but comparing the concept of 3D molecular deposition to a belief in magic dragons is off-base.
It's important to strike a balance between luddism and vaporware, to be sure, but you're refusing to extrapolate logical successors to existing technologies because they exceed your personal sense of the possible. But others do believe it's possible, and they will keep trying to achieve it until one day they succeed.
when you can get Kimchi in orbit, but not on the Upper East Side? My Korean girlfriend and I once went on a quest to find kimchi at a store near her apartment on 72nd and Lexington. The response from every store (Gristedes, D'Ag, etc.) was "Kim-what?"
Slashdot Mirror
After Vista, you have to wonder what Microsoft thinks it can do to revive its fortunes. A modular OS? Hello, meet *nix.
I've been an exclusive linux user for ~10 years. I know more than some, less than many. But friends, relatives, and co-workers are suddenly coming up to me and asking about "Ubuntu." And three days ago I read an article in CIO magazine posing the question, "Is is time to dump Vista?" to which many replied, "switch to Ubuntu."
That's significant. I've been happy to be ahead of the curve in terms of usability, stability, and security. And I can't lie--it gives me pleasure still to hear about people having problems with Windows issues while knowing I'm immune. But when people who've previously given me blank stares when I extolled the virtues of FOSS come to me and ask about a distro whose name is based on an African language, I can't help but wonder at the exigency that drove them to such extremes.
I look forward to the era of the 2nd coming of Apple, and the underlying gospel of *nix. For a time, Apple will collect those who have money and favor dead-easy implementation. But eventually they too will succumb to the ineluctable realities of *nix.
Congress won't defend the Constitution or Rule of Law anymore. The Supreme Court has been compromised.
Perhaps the states are our last hope. If California, New York, and just a few of the other big states say no to all the nonsense, the federal government shall have to back down or stage a coup.
It would be great to see them band together and take a very strong, pro-Constitutionalist stance on RealID, as well as the other recent intrusions on states' rights (I mean it in the Constitutional sense, not the neo-con sense).
For instance, the deployment of National Guard overseas at the expense of Civil Defense; the National Guard units belong to their respective states and actually answer to the governors, not the President. Or take the Medical Marijuana initiatives that passed all around the country in 2006 and which the Federal Government has been trying to countermand--it's not my issue but the states have the right under the Constitution to regulate such matters within their own borders.
Maybe, just maybe, if the states lead the way Congress will grow a pair.
and all the other "top" institutions as well. They're too expensive, and having a piece of paper from one of them helps you not at all in getting a job or once in the workplace.
Having that $120K piece of paper gets you a blank stare from the person who got an associate's degree from a community college who is actually the one screening resumes at the HR dept. of the company you're applying to; he or she works from a list of keywords like "C++" or "Java" and I guarantee you "MIT/Harvard/Yale/Princeton" ain't on that list.
If the person looking at your $120K piece of paper also went to a "top" institution, all your time/money/debt/effort will earn you exactly one *shrug*. "So what if the kid went to M.I.T?" the manager says to himself, "I went to CalTech. M.I.T.? Big whoop."
As for the classmates you'd have at a "top" institution, you wouldn't have time to waste socializing. Would they raise the in-class discussion $120K's worth? No. Especially not if you're in a lecture-class. In a seminar, they'd be competing with you and not so likely to share ideas with you. After all, they all think they're going to be the next Bill Gates too. Lastly, the "top" institutions disproportionally attract the maladjusted, neurotic, and just plain nuts.
Having no degree does hold you back, though, so go to a decent affordable school, bang it out in four years if you're taking it easy, less if you're not. Write them a check for $10K and call it a day. The FOSS work you've done is far more material and important to a potential employer.
1. Buy a large caliber weapon
2. Learn how to shoot well
3. Stockpile ammunition
Seriously. It's past the "Oh I'm gonna write a letter to my congressman" or "I'm gonna vote 3rd party!" stage.
Young Einstein invented beer, and he was the smartest man in the world. I saw it in a movie, so it's a fact.
I live in NYC, perhaps the most anti-gun city in America. But in the last month many of my friends and associates, who are also quite anti-gun and quite peaceable, have started taking shooting lessons and going about the arduous licensing required here to become gun owners. They even started a club, ShootingLiberally (shootingliberally.org).
Yes, it's anecdotal. But it's striking because of the turnaround it represents. If these kinds of people start learning the arts of war, then there must be a deep aversion out there to what's happening to freedom in the United States.
Perhaps not every American cares that much about it, but neither did they at the time of the American Revolution. In fact, less than 5% of the colonists took up arms against the British. But those were the important 5%, and they changed the course of history.
I'm furious that Pelosi and the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives would agree to a secret session. The FISA bill represents the greatest threat to our freedom, the rule of law, and the Constitution of the United States, and I demand to know every word that every Congressman says on the subject so we'll know exactly whose ass to kick if they grant immunity to the telcos for committing crimes.
Those fuckers are supposed to work for us, and I for one have lost patience waiting for them to remember that.
A secret session on this topic, especially this topic, is nothing but a big Fuck You to the American public.
I do use my broadband connection every day to get the news, read scientific journals, waste time on /., what-have-you.
I don't listen to RIAA music any more, much less download their crappy tracks, buy them from iTunes, or heaven forbid buy CDs, because I want nothing to do with them whatsoever.
Assessing a $5/mo. fee to every broadband user is the last thing that should happen. 10 years ago, OK, that was something we could have talked about. And did talk about. But the music industry wanted no part of it.
Now it's too late. The world and its musicians and its fans have all moved on.
Let the RIAA die, and rot.
But that's the point. Eventually, they're all up for re-election, and they know it. Beyond money or lobbyists, that is the primary motivation for all representatives and senators: they want to be re-elected.
Luckily, that's the one thing that you and I have the most influence over.
I agree with you that this is what they've been doing--posturing while the country and Constitution burn. Perhaps they think it will help them win the Whitehouse.
And it is frustrating to watch them do that when they were elected to a majority to put a stop to the run-away corruption and incompetence of the other side.
But the FISA fight is not partisan. Bush and the neoconservative leaders in Congress want a free pass to break the law and spy on all Americans. But Americans, left, right, and center, don't want to give it to them. As much as we have lost the last 8 years, there still is a core of decency in the American soul, and enough paranoia to give government, any government, carte blanche.
See, it's fine to have those powers when your party is in power, but the trouble is that only works as long as your party is in power. The fear is that your party will lose power, and then those powers will be turned against you. The thought of Hillary Clinton, for instance, in the Whitehouse with the powers Bush and Cheney have arrogated to the Executive branch makes my blood run cold.
That the House even put something like this out there at all. If we hadn't been sending many, passionate letters demanding Congress deny amnesty to the telcos for illegally spying on us, then they wouldn't have bothered to float this proposal.
So to all those out there who think that there's nothing anyone can do to change the course of government, this is evidence you can; you just have to take a little time to write a letter or make a phone call to your representative.
Relevant Ad targeting is in many ways a good thing. I cannot stand to watch TV because of the commercials, but the commercials are for things that I will never be in the market for as a man living in NYC such as feminine hygiene products or cars, cars, cars. If, however, the commercials were for, I dunno, home energy kits or wearable computing, I just might watch them.
That in turn helps the websites like Slashdot and Tom's Hardware that are not for mass-market media consumers to make enough money in ad revenue to operate, because high-degrees of targeting and great click-throughs mean you can make more money with a smaller total audience. That's good, because I like Slashdot and Tom's Hardware and don't want them to go away.
It's also good for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, because you can get more bang for your advertising buck if you can tightly target your fancy new, say, cybernetic implant to the transhumanist crowd.
The game companies get great music without the hugely inflated licensing fees charged by the Big Labels. The artists get intensive exposure to the very demographics they hope to reach without selling their souls. The gaming fans get to hear great music without supporting the Labels or simply suffering through corporate pop retreads.
It's interesting, because while this is happening through the medium of videogames, it's also happening through the medium of advertising. I worked on an in-house indy artist sourcing system at one of the big Ad firms on Madison Avenue, and they were trying to solve this same problem from their own angle--how to supply music in Ads more affordably and also promote independent artists.
Between iTunes, videogames, and advertising it seems like they'll each seize on the carcass of the music industry and tear it to pieces.
The other day I overheard my neighbor two cubes over say the following in syncopated fashion: "teens," "threesome," "bukkake."
This /. article follows closely on the heels of the reports that the FBI has continued to abuse the National Security Letters, despite being caught the first time about 5 years ago. (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Senate-FBI.html?ex=1362373200&en=64cbc1e08db5f5bf&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)
Consider that the national security letter abuse and data dragnet are concurrent with illegal government wiretaps and recent concerns about DNA profiling (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/health/24dna.html).
Observe, also, that Congress, no matter which party holds the majority there, is clearly uninterested in checking the excesses of the executive branch that oversees the FBI/CIA/NSA/Homeland Security. And it's not a partisan issue, since Bill Clinton began some of the steps that Bush has expanded on, and which either Hillary or McCain would continue.
I submit, fellow citizens, that we are quickly approaching a crisis in our democracy, when we each shall have to decide how important our freedom is to us, and what we're going to do about it.
The government will certainly misuse this technology too, no matter the legal protections. We have something called the Constitution that supposedly protects us against the government spying on us, but we're all seeing how much good that does.
So it's not out of luddism that I hope they belay this advance; rather, I want to wait until we've rebalanced our government and society to ensure our freedom and rights will not be abused.
In the meantime, why not cure cancer? That's an unambiguous good. Go work on that!
They're even fun for adults to visit. We went to the Brooklyn Superhero supply store and had a blast with the invisibility powder and Hero or Villain? quiz.
for tax reasons. Worked like a charm until they assessed the estate tax.
--Desiato HotBlack
That's what this is. The best way to teach a subject is through the medium of something the student is interested in and cares about. What better way to instruct a generation of legal professionals on the previously arcane area of copyright law than to enlist them in the fight to bring down the RIAA/MPAA?
It seems to me that every law school clinic in the country should be doing the same thing--there'd be no shortage of students willing to participate. But if every law school doesn't do this, the ones that do should play it up in their marketing material to prospective students. Most kids go to law school because they want to help others; imagine how exciting it would be to lead the fight to help your peers against the most hated company and industry in the world.
If we just annexed Mexico we'd only have to build half as much fence to keep the Guatamalans and Hondurans out. Plus, they have margaritas.
Somehow I don't think the first use of a fully-autonomous robot will be for war.
It will be for sex.
Lucas saved a ton of money on makeup costs by casting Tori Spelling to play Admiral Ackbar. It's a fact--look it up.
I saw something on the Discovery Channel a long time ago where Ballard proposed artificial islands. Wave-propulsion would be an ideal way to move the beasts around.
3D printers that build structures with plastic beads exist. We also already know that it's possible to arrange molecules with a scanning-tunneling microscope. Why is it such a leap to imagine that process for complex structures could be automated?
Yes, there are significant hurdles to overcome, but comparing the concept of 3D molecular deposition to a belief in magic dragons is off-base.
It's important to strike a balance between luddism and vaporware, to be sure, but you're refusing to extrapolate logical successors to existing technologies because they exceed your personal sense of the possible. But others do believe it's possible, and they will keep trying to achieve it until one day they succeed.
And you will work for them.
when you can get Kimchi in orbit, but not on the Upper East Side? My Korean girlfriend and I once went on a quest to find kimchi at a store near her apartment on 72nd and Lexington. The response from every store (Gristedes, D'Ag, etc.) was "Kim-what?"