"Would it help people distribute critical information?"
Critical like Jon Katz's opinion on the latest shite movie he saw?
"Would it help people keep in touch with their friends and enemies?"
Why would you want to keep in touch with your enemies? Do you think warring nations would use Slashdot to negotiate a peace treaty or something?
"Would it help to prevent a war?"
More likely cause one... some super geek war over what OS/browser/chip is the best. Come on though, did I really just read this? Slashdot prevent a war? Do you really think there is anyone out there actually capable of starting a war that would be influenced (either directly or indirectly) by something posted on Slashdot??
"So far it seems no person in extreme need has submitted to Slashdot, but if they do, how would we respond?"
Pending it actually got posted before the war was over, A handful of people would frantically vie for first post, a few would come up with some funny and clever response to it, there'd likely be a few off-topic posts. And after sifting through all that BS, maybe one or two genuinely useful posts.
what do you expect? not to bash Slashdot (heaven forbid) but this is hardly a place to read some objective news about 'nerd-related stuff, or stuff that matters'... I mean, they posted a movie review about 'Snatch' for god's sake, something that is in no way, shape or form related to anything that matters, imo.
I sincerely doubt you could find a site that actually has updated objective and unbiased information about technology-related issues... unless it was created by a machine.
My wife works there (was at the conference in Ottawa today), and they're supposedly not selling off Corel Linux outright - it's going to be more of a spinoff, or some sort of partnership with another company.
Oh yeah, and they also have a new logo now (so you might want to change they one at the top).
I was an avid suck fan for a long time, then they starting printing pure shite a couple years ago(ie: incessant inside jokes, irellevant commentaries, etc..) and I lost interest, along with a lot of my friends who were just sick of not having a clue what the hell they were talking about.
The beautiful thing about a browser is that if they release a crappy version of something, or change/add something you really hate, you can use an older version of it usually without too much hassle, or do what most people seem to do anyway today; use more than one browser.
People make mistakes, yes. Look at Cherry Coke, Clear Pepsi and Guinness light (ugh!). But companies fix/get rid of these things, eventually producing better or more consistent products and services, and people forgive and forget.
I'll believe Mozilla's dead when I see it. If Macs can survive and thrive again as they have, I'm sure Mozilla can as well.
Technology eats leisure time for breakfast. It eats work time too, regurgitating it into a sort of pseudo-leisure time where we are constantly on the border of 'keeping up with the latest technology related to our work' and just plain goofing off. (that would make an interesting poll - in your opinion is responding to posts on Slashdot and checking back fifty times a day to see how many points we got and what people's reactions are work or play?)
I remember when Vectrex, Atari, C64, Nintendo, etc.. came out, and I would sit in front of the TV/monitor playing the shittiest games on earth (ok the action was decent but the graphics were crap) with my eyes and hands sweating profusely as the sun was shining outside or the first snow of the year fell. It's only gotten worse since then.
We don't get enough fresh air and/or exercise. Not enough natural light. It's too easy to sit down in front of the TV/PC and veg out. People are naturally lazy, and technology makes it super easy to be lazy.
Another reason technology eats leisure time is that you either feel guilty for having played all day on the net and want to try and get a bit of work done so you stay late, or you're like me and work best under pressure so you procrastinate all day then have to stay late/work extra high-stress hours to meet a deadline.
I'm Canadian, working in Dublin for over a year now. You can write your own ticket here, especially if you're a programmer or do database stuff, but almost any computer skills make you quite employable due to a sever shortage of workers.
I'm working on my second job... not because I didn't like the first place I worked at, but the opportunity just came up out of the blue, and the offer was too good to pass up. Getting here (work visa-wise) is easy if you're a student (I enrolled in a cheap online course to get my student status), but a company can get a Visa for you with fairly little hassle. And I've heard they're trying to make it even easier due to the labor shortage.
Pay is good, though cost of living's kind of high. But you can golf all year round! And the culture here is great - great music, beer and of course plenty of Red Bull.
New Zealand's quite brilliant too, from what I've heard (got some family there)... pay's super... but it's a bit far, eh?
Does this have any relation to freedom of speech? I mean, by linking to something, you are effectively just telling people where to find something, aren't you? You don't have the actual file on your server.
Would it be any different if the click didn't actually take you there? If you just provided the URL?
What about sites that have links to 'the terrorist's handbook' and information like that... do they fall into the same category?
What about sites that provide illegal passwords and backdoors into pay porn sites? Surely those poor hard-working porn site developers (and poor college girls just trying to make it through university) are getting nailed as hard (excuse the pun) as the poor musicians?
I can't even imagine the amount of legal BS and semantics that a case like this would involve.
Video on existent removable storage is the way to go. I never really got excited about stills on a floppy or other removable storage, because of the image quality.
Don't get me wrong... I used a DVC at work all the time and marvelled at how I could just take the PCMCA card with the 4mb flash chip in it out of camera and plug it into the laptop without friggin around with any software... but I would still rather use my 35mm camera and scan the pics; they take better photos, and photos are much more portable than.jpgs.
But with video, you don't really see the final product like you do with a picture; it's almost always a pain in the ass to transfer the files from the camera to wherever you want it, regardless of whether it's to VHS or to a computer. And cameras that do record directly to VHS are bulky as hell compared to the digital cams.
Perhaps even more fun than Easter eggs is tricking people into trying ridiculous things in order to access an Easter egg.
This was particularily effective with Nintendo, cause all their games were pretty much riddled with secret levels that you could only access by some foolish carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing sequence of movements.
I remember one time I convinced a friend of mine who was in the second to last level of 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' that if he deliberately lost all his lives that a portal would appear that lead to a special level where you could get a magic sword (or something like that.. it's been a while). It was a pretty brutal game, and if I remember correctly, you couldn't save..
I use SMS messages all the time (Mostly cause I hate talking on the phone) and while it is slower than a keyboard, you can get a decent speed going once you've the hang of it. I can see this taking off like mad.. esp. if you add a human element to it.
Something like L.O.R.D. would be highly addictive on a mobile. Plus, text adventures suit themselves much better to a mobile phone than arcade games or FPS's... you don't move your arms and tilt your head to the game like a spaz typing something in like you do with a game controller.
On an unrelated topic.. why hasn't anyone made a portable real-time chat, like IRC or ICQ/AIM, either through a cell phone or other dedicated device yet? or have they? I'd assume the technology is there for it already? I think that would be insanely popular... hell, I'd buy it. It's be good for deaf folks too.
- drug/bio-weapon sniffing at the airport - sensitive smoke alarm/carbon monoxide alarm - security/burglar alarm - an apparatus that knows when not to approach a female
"More realistic, he says, is connecting electronic devices such as mobile phones directly into our brains."
For god's sake lads... enough with the mobile phones! Playstations, Toasters, Fridges, watches. I have a mobile phone, but only because I am running from the phone company (long story) and it was the only phone I could get without an ID (hooray, that should generate some flames). And while it is handy, yes... It is also the bane of my existence. I have a friend who is obsessed with her phone who will actually talk to her boyfriend long distance on the way to the movie theater, totally ignoring anyone she is with, and almost getting hit by cars/other pedestrians in her little phone trance.
This is a bit of a ramble, yeah.. but does anyone else think the whole connectivity thing is going a bit far? I mean, would anyone actually want a frickin mobile phone in their head? Like I don't have enough distractions in my brain without suddenly sensing 'neural rhythms inspired by the uk's top dj's'
IMHO, a mobile phone should be just that... a mobile phone that I can ignore/turn off/leave home/smash into a million pieces if I want to. If someone called you and you didn't want to talk to them and it was like wired into your brain, you couldn't exactly tell them 'oh sorry.. didn't get your call, my phone was dead'
Slashdot Mirror
"Would it help people distribute critical information?" Critical like Jon Katz's opinion on the latest shite movie he saw? "Would it help people keep in touch with their friends and enemies?" Why would you want to keep in touch with your enemies? Do you think warring nations would use Slashdot to negotiate a peace treaty or something? "Would it help to prevent a war?" More likely cause one... some super geek war over what OS/browser/chip is the best. Come on though, did I really just read this? Slashdot prevent a war? Do you really think there is anyone out there actually capable of starting a war that would be influenced (either directly or indirectly) by something posted on Slashdot?? "So far it seems no person in extreme need has submitted to Slashdot, but if they do, how would we respond?" Pending it actually got posted before the war was over, A handful of people would frantically vie for first post, a few would come up with some funny and clever response to it, there'd likely be a few off-topic posts. And after sifting through all that BS, maybe one or two genuinely useful posts.
FYI - numbers aren't caps. 2001-03-15 01:11:11
what do you expect? not to bash Slashdot (heaven forbid) but this is hardly a place to read some objective news about 'nerd-related stuff, or stuff that matters'... I mean, they posted a movie review about 'Snatch' for god's sake, something that is in no way, shape or form related to anything that matters, imo. I sincerely doubt you could find a site that actually has updated objective and unbiased information about technology-related issues... unless it was created by a machine.
My wife works there (was at the conference in Ottawa today), and they're supposedly not selling off Corel Linux outright - it's going to be more of a spinoff, or some sort of partnership with another company. Oh yeah, and they also have a new logo now (so you might want to change they one at the top).
I was an avid suck fan for a long time, then they starting printing pure shite a couple years ago(ie: incessant inside jokes, irellevant commentaries, etc..) and I lost interest, along with a lot of my friends who were just sick of not having a clue what the hell they were talking about.
The beautiful thing about a browser is that if they release a crappy version of something, or change/add something you really hate, you can use an older version of it usually without too much hassle, or do what most people seem to do anyway today; use more than one browser.
People make mistakes, yes. Look at Cherry Coke, Clear Pepsi and Guinness light (ugh!). But companies fix/get rid of these things, eventually producing better or more consistent products and services, and people forgive and forget.
I'll believe Mozilla's dead when I see it. If Macs can survive and thrive again as they have, I'm sure Mozilla can as well.
put one in your sister
Technology eats leisure time for breakfast. It eats work time too, regurgitating it into a sort of pseudo-leisure time where we are constantly on the border of 'keeping up with the latest technology related to our work' and just plain goofing off. (that would make an interesting poll - in your opinion is responding to posts on Slashdot and checking back fifty times a day to see how many points we got and what people's reactions are work or play?)
I remember when Vectrex, Atari, C64, Nintendo, etc.. came out, and I would sit in front of the TV/monitor playing the shittiest games on earth (ok the action was decent but the graphics were crap) with my eyes and hands sweating profusely as the sun was shining outside or the first snow of the year fell. It's only gotten worse since then.
We don't get enough fresh air and/or exercise. Not enough natural light. It's too easy to sit down in front of the TV/PC and veg out. People are naturally lazy, and technology makes it super easy to be lazy.
Another reason technology eats leisure time is that you either feel guilty for having played all day on the net and want to try and get a bit of work done so you stay late, or you're like me and work best under pressure so you procrastinate all day then have to stay late/work extra high-stress hours to meet a deadline.
I'm Canadian, working in Dublin for over a year now. You can write your own ticket here, especially if you're a programmer or do database stuff, but almost any computer skills make you quite employable due to a sever shortage of workers.
I'm working on my second job... not because I didn't like the first place I worked at, but the opportunity just came up out of the blue, and the offer was too good to pass up. Getting here (work visa-wise) is easy if you're a student (I enrolled in a cheap online course to get my student status), but a company can get a Visa for you with fairly little hassle. And I've heard they're trying to make it even easier due to the labor shortage.
Pay is good, though cost of living's kind of high. But you can golf all year round! And the culture here is great - great music, beer and of course plenty of Red Bull.
New Zealand's quite brilliant too, from what I've heard (got some family there)... pay's super... but it's a bit far, eh?
Does this have any relation to freedom of speech? I mean, by linking to something, you are effectively just telling people where to find something, aren't you? You don't have the actual file on your server.
Would it be any different if the click didn't actually take you there? If you just provided the URL?
What about sites that have links to 'the terrorist's handbook' and information like that... do they fall into the same category?
What about sites that provide illegal passwords and backdoors into pay porn sites? Surely those poor hard-working porn site developers (and poor college girls just trying to make it through university) are getting nailed as hard (excuse the pun) as the poor musicians?
I can't even imagine the amount of legal BS and semantics that a case like this would involve.
Video on existent removable storage is the way to go. I never really got excited about stills on a floppy or other removable storage, because of the image quality.
.jpgs.
Don't get me wrong... I used a DVC at work all the time and marvelled at how I could just take the PCMCA card with the 4mb flash chip in it out of camera and plug it into the laptop without friggin around with any software... but I would still rather use my 35mm camera and scan the pics; they take better photos, and photos are much more portable than
But with video, you don't really see the final product like you do with a picture; it's almost always a pain in the ass to transfer the files from the camera to wherever you want it, regardless of whether it's to VHS or to a computer. And cameras that do record directly to VHS are bulky as hell compared to the digital cams.
Perhaps even more fun than Easter eggs is tricking people into trying ridiculous things in order to access an Easter egg.
This was particularily effective with Nintendo, cause all their games were pretty much riddled with secret levels that you could only access by some foolish carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing sequence of movements.
I remember one time I convinced a friend of mine who was in the second to last level of 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' that if he deliberately lost all his lives that a portal would appear that lead to a special level where you could get a magic sword (or something like that.. it's been a while). It was a pretty brutal game, and if I remember correctly, you couldn't save..
I use SMS messages all the time (Mostly cause I hate talking on the phone) and while it is slower than a keyboard, you can get a decent speed going once you've the hang of it. I can see this taking off like mad.. esp. if you add a human element to it.
Something like L.O.R.D. would be highly addictive on a mobile. Plus, text adventures suit themselves much better to a mobile phone than arcade games or FPS's... you don't move your arms and tilt your head to the game like a spaz typing something in like you do with a game controller.
On an unrelated topic.. why hasn't anyone made a portable real-time chat, like IRC or ICQ/AIM, either through a cell phone or other dedicated device yet? or have they? I'd assume the technology is there for it already? I think that would be insanely popular... hell, I'd buy it. It's be good for deaf folks too.
- drug/bio-weapon sniffing at the airport
- sensitive smoke alarm/carbon monoxide alarm
- security/burglar alarm
- an apparatus that knows when not to approach a female
"More realistic, he says, is connecting electronic devices such as mobile phones directly into our brains."
For god's sake lads... enough with the mobile phones! Playstations, Toasters, Fridges, watches. I have a mobile phone, but only because I am running from the phone company (long story) and it was the only phone I could get without an ID (hooray, that should generate some flames). And while it is handy, yes... It is also the bane of my existence. I have a friend who is obsessed with her phone who will actually talk to her boyfriend long distance on the way to the movie theater, totally ignoring anyone she is with, and almost getting hit by cars/other pedestrians in her little phone trance.
This is a bit of a ramble, yeah.. but does anyone else think the whole connectivity thing is going a bit far? I mean, would anyone actually want a frickin mobile phone in their head? Like I don't have enough distractions in my brain without suddenly sensing 'neural rhythms inspired by the uk's top dj's'
IMHO, a mobile phone should be just that... a mobile phone that I can ignore/turn off/leave home/smash into a million pieces if I want to. If someone called you and you didn't want to talk to them and it was like wired into your brain, you couldn't exactly tell them 'oh sorry.. didn't get your call, my phone was dead'