What about letters to the editor? What about traditional magazine articles, newspaper columns, and books? People for centuries have been publishing their opinions and ideas and we have a whole body of laws to deal with the consequences--slander (calumny, in the old days), truth in reporting, copyrights, and so forth. Then, we also have 30 years of usenet and website publishing which preceded the Facebook/Myspace/Twitter model. Society seems to have adapted pretty well to this technology.
There is nothing about social networking to distinguish it from previous publishing modalities except that it is faster and easier to publish something far and wide than it ever was before. It's accelerated information distribution, and that's what society is reacting to.
If a tenant can complain about a landlord in a matter of seconds and have an audience of hundreds of thousands, the landlord will be more upset than if the tenant just mentions it to her friends at the golf course or knitting circle or watering hole. However, nothing particularly revolutionary is happening.
"We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization". That sums it up. It's just another lawsuit-happy guy who ought to get his wrist slapped for a frivolous case, unless the defendant rolls over and pays some symbolic fine, which is likely to happen, a la RIAA.
How many people would feel comforted knowing that the resident assigned to them has practiced mainly in a virtual reality setting? There's no substitute for sitting at someone's bedside, taking their hand, feeling their pulse, and looking at their face for signs of distress. You can't avoid human contact at some point. You are going to have to go in that real, physical room and come face to face with a real, physical person who is perhaps suffering, giving off vibes of distress and pain, or crumping and about to die. The way for a student doctor to develop good instincts is to be around real patients, not fancy graphical representations thereof.
You can't gain good doctoring skills in an online chatroom. In fact, I would venture that the opposite would occur. The common complaint is that doctors are too inhuman, too distant from their patients, seated behind an imposing desk with a computer monitor and lots of medical texts. Doctors don't get enough face time with patients as it is. Now we are seeing a proposal to reduce that face time even more. This is not going to fly.
As for the expense of training facilities--ridiculous! The avatars represent real people, so every hour a student spends in this system is an hour they have to pay real practitioners, and practitioners don't come cheap. Facilities already exist--they're called hospitals, and medical students spend two years doing full time clinical rotations through the various specialties.
Regarding taking risks--medical students don't take risks. They don't practice medicine. Their job is to stand and watch while licensed professionals do the clinical work. The most a med student might do is run to the lab for test results, or help take vital signs, or answer quiz questions by attendings. Why this needs to be virtualized is simply beyond me.
Seriously, a wifi-equipped laptop can be had for less than $400, and with a 15" screen and decent storage, why would someone want a limited, single-purpose crippled laptop such as a Kindle?
The Kindle would make sense if it were under $100; it would fall into the nice Christmas gift or Father's Day gadget category for someone who has everything. But for $500? That's a lot of books.
You could buy a laptop and download thousands of free books from Gutenberg.org or wherever, and spend the rest on used books and have more than you can ever hope to read.
Alternatively, you can spend $350-$500 on one of these Amazon gadgets and then have to pay to read books on it.
I think Amazon should move to the inkjet approach of giving away the initial hardware and then making money on the refills. I wouldn't mind paying $5-$10 for a new bestseller (as long as it didn't crash/timeout and disappear on me) but the initial investment is rather daunting.
Plus, physical books are kinda cool; they don't need to be recharged, you can drop them from amazing heights and they still work, they're infinitely reusable and lendable, and they effortlessly multitask--leave one in the bathroom, one on the nightstand, one in the car, etc.
The reader who complained should simply bookmark washingtonpost.com and skim it daily for content that is not provided in the print edition. For example, many of their articles have very active talkback forums or blogs that obviously are not possible in the print edition.
Really, today's news market is subdivided into many categories--traditional print readers, casual online skimmers, and serious online readers come to mind. Then there are news aggregators such as Yahoo and Google that present a portal format to readers (like myself).
I read the online WaPo just about every day, plus WSJ, NYT, and a couple of the prominent aggregators. That's about all I need and have time for. I wouldn't have time to read a paper edition, and plus it's full of junk that I wouldn't normally click on. I suspect there are millions of others with needs similar to mine.
Probably print will shrink while online grows and diversifies. Ultimately we'll likely have news feeds into our handhelds that will be aggregations of various news syndications. There will still be plenty of demand for "deep" reporting, but it likely will not be in print eventually. And the trees will celebrate this fact.
People on the job seem to get irrationally angry when it comes to computers and networks. Some of it is justified when they are being blocked from getting their own work done, and they will absolutely take it out on you when they don't have a good explanation for why things don't work. Those stupid IT guys messed it up again. It's the department everyone loves to hate.
The professional approach is to leave your ego at the door when you clock in, and be sure to log all questions and complaints and your responses. If something escalates into a problem where your job is threatened, you can show the paper trail to your management.
If someone is constantly berating you about computer problems that really are PEBCAK, just log each and every complaint plus your response. It can become quite an amusing read after a while, and you can share it with your management. It makes the other guy look bad. Of course, your goal shouldn't be to screw the other guy, but if they are being kind of childish and vindictive, it's very useful for deflection and self-defense should you be called on the carpet later on.
Also, good communication is the key to defusing people's annoyance. When people are sitting around waiting for the network to come back up, or the departmental printer keeps not working right, or the web is really slow--if there's an explanation forthcoming quickly, people can understand that you're working like mad to fix it. When an IT department has a stand-offish attitude and refuses to answer phone calls and emails in a timely way, people will assume the worst.
Bing's OK. But it's nothing special. Even if it's technically superior in certain ways to Google--I can't tell so I'll leave that for the intellectuals to tease out--there's no particular reason to switch.
I have NEVER had a problem finding stuff on Google. Usually what I'm looking for appears in the first 10 hits. About 10% of the time, I need to rephrase my search, or add some "-" keywords to weed out some signal noise. But Google does the job, I'm used to it, and it seems to just keep getting better.
There is so much power hidden inside Google's engine--stock quotes, mathematical calculations, language translation, mapping, document conversion, caches of deleted pages, paid links that I actually find useful, typo correction--the list goes on and on and on!
What can Microsoft's search engine add to this stunningly rich resource that millions of us can't live without? What killer features does Microsoft give us? Some little tweaks here and there in the UI that may or may not make much difference. Some good ideas on supplemental information such as the "related searches" column on the left.
Sorry, Microsoft, but Bing looks like MSN Search that's been tweaked a little. If Google didn't exist, you might have a winner on your hands, but this is just another "me, too" search system that will survive only as a niche product, funded by profits from the MS Office and Windows divisions.
Any market penetration by Bing will probably come from super-glueing it to the Windows 7 desktop and Windows mobile handhelds, defaulting it on IE searching, and otherwise forcing it down customers' throats in whatever way they can, hoping a large enough population will be ignorant enough to just use the defaults. But now that "google" is a verb in the dictionary, Microsoft has its work cut out for it to hold and expand its little piece of the search market.
Well, the London underground CCTV cameras helped them identify the subway bombers and locate their helpers and arms stashes. I don't know if even this heinous a crime merits losing one's anonymity, but it proves that such technology can help the good guys when applied correctly.
As someone above pointed out, however, it's questionable that the Turkish government is benevolent enough to use this technology wisely and correctly. It's doubtful that any government can, actually.
But, if you were to ask me whether I would sacrifice my life and/or my loved ones in the name of freedom, I would probably say no, go ahead and mount the cameras. I'd rather live.
A friend of mine is a licensed carpenter with broad experience. He's been in the home renovation business for years and can do just about anything. Got laid off recently and he's had no difficulty picking up work--welding outdoor gates, installing bathroom bath/cabinets, putting up marble tiles, wood work, you name it he can do it and there's a lot of demand even in this sluggish economy in a city full of foreclosures.
Another friend is an electrician in his 50s. There are few young electricians coming up; young people seem to prefer other trades. The only new electricians are the ones coming up from Brazil these days. Yet, it's a really good profession to be in, never lacking for work.
I wish I had those skills. Computer skills are a passing thing, too many folks with laundry lists of technologies on their resumes so that even if I know my stuff, my resume gets lost in the stack.
Agreed, the blogger makes some rather opinionated statements but misses the forest for the trees in this case.
It's a good trend that low cost hardware manufacturers are getting into the netbook game and featuring systems like Android. Backed by a mega corporation and open sourced, Android is bound to keep getting better. I think it's going to give the iPhone a run for its money eventually.
As for netbooks, it seems like a good idea for some purposes--a handy little sub laptop. If it works with Skype--and given that the manufacturer makes Skype headsets, and Android does support Skype, you would expect it to--it would be a sweet travel laptop to replace the brick (albeit, a fun Ubuntu brick but still rather hot and energy hungry).
I'm just a little worried about the origin of the hardware. I've bought several gadgets direct from Chinese resellers or factory sites via Ebay, and I've been underwhelmed by their quality.
For example, recently I got a little 4 gig MP3 player that turned out to have terrible firmware, a nonstandard headset jack, a very poor battery, crappy UI, and just plain didn't work very well. I later got a Sansa MP3 player that was approximately the same price but much, much better engineered. This pattern has played out several times.
I think the Chinese copycat manufacturers have some good ideas but their execution, especially their engineering, is nowhere close to American, Japanese, or Korean standards. It's ironic because they make great products when they are spec'd by Americans (e.g., the iPod family and millions of other things), but on their own they seem not to pay the same close attention to detail. Or else, could it be that I've just had bad luck? But I don't think so, or we'd be seeing more Chinese-branded products on local store shelves. Sooner or later, of course, like the Japanese, they'll get it right, and they'll blow the foreign manufacturers out of the water, but not yet.
In the meantime I think I would tend to trust a unit that was designed by Apple, or Google, or some Taiwanese or American manufacturer rather than one of these homegrown models.
Don't worry, they'll be joined shortly by many other states hungry for revenue. The problem with this bill (well, one of many problems, actually) is that it will damage the nascent e-book and e-music industry just as they're struggling to get established, even as paper and CD publishers flounder. Also, it will largely tax the teens and 20-30-somethings who actually purchase these kinds of products. A rather regressive tax.
It should be easy enough to get around this law. If you read the bill, it spells out the precise types of electronic "products" that are taxable. So the vendors can simply convert these products to non-ebooks and non-music and non-videos, and provide a little converter that allows the buyer to change them back into ebooks and music and videos at his/her discretion. We don't sell music, we sell blobs of binary data. If you find a way to transform it miraculously into your favorite music, more power to you!
Good point. I don't even own a TV. But I do like watching some shows from time to time, when I choose to and not just during a broadcaster's arbitrarily chosen time slot. My "prime time" is most people's sleepy time.
I just wish the major networks would get it together with internet broadcasting. Out of the big four websites (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX), so far I have found that only CBS webcasts are even playable on my linux computers. The rest just sit there, trying to load some DRM-encumbered IE plugin or something. Why can't they be more like Youtube, simple, works well at low bandwidth? I'll put up with commercials in return for the convenience of watching shows whenever I like. There are a few good shows on the air.
As it is, I generally will check out a full season from the library or Netflix, watch'em all over a few days, and return it. Done. But web casting would obviously be simpler and more convenient.
An enterprising, forward thinking network should have long since thought of putting all their shows on the web, paid for with commercials and online ads, and they would just dominate. Youtube and its ilk might not even exist if it weren't for the near absence of the traditional entertainment networks from the internet. My siblings, friends, and I used to just sit in front of the TV for hours and hours, watching one syndicated show after another. Today they could be doing the same thing, but they're not... why?
A box on top of my (nonexistent) television? I don't think so. It's just not the 'net lifestyle that I (and probably quite a few others) would prefer.
Well, Spain and China are nations with borders, passports, and distinctive languages; relocating to another nation (outside of the E.U. in the case of Spain) is a rather big deal. China doesn't even allow people to leave without permission.
Employers are entities that require your services temporarily. It may be for 3 weeks, 3 months, or 3 decades, but it's temporary. You the employee have entered into a contractual agreement to do a certain amount of work in return for a certain amount of money.
Depending on the country, the government forces the employer to do all sorts of social welfare tasks like arrange for your retirement, health care, disability, maternity leave, and gender-and-ethnic quota fulfillment, but other than this it's a simple relationship. You are free to leave at any time, and they are free to stop using your services at any time. That's how the free market economies work.
During your contractual time at the company, you have agreed not to do certain things--leave the workplace without permission, disobey your supervisor, enter into conflict with other employees. You can do all this stuff on your own time but while on the clock, you are a professional purveyor of your services, not as a free spirited individual doing whatever he/she likes. The employer owes you nothing beyond this relationship, and you owe them nothing, either.
So how is this a democratic system? The fact that you the employee are completely free to leave and go start your very own company, hire your very own employees or else be a free agent employed by yourself, and make your own way in the world. Every company had to start somewhere. Even the great megacorporations of our time started as an individual in a living room with a good idea. Bill Gates founded Microsoft, for example.
This is how people express themselves democratically in a capitalistic society. Yes, you are encouraged to conform and submerge your personality at most companies, but at any instant you can break free and start a company that more completely expresses your own ideals and aspirations. You may sink and you may swim. Hopefully, you will succeed, and then you'll some day be sitting there grumbling about your pesky employees who don't do what they're told, and of course a few of them will eventually break off and start their own firms.
That's the very nature of a dynamic, successful economy, one in which people have an outlet for the pent-up pressure in the form of rebelling legally and peacefully.
The freedom and lack of legacy feudal constraints in American society for most of its citizens is what set it apart in the 19th and early 20th centuries and allowed it to grow so quickly into the dominant economy. The fact that other economies are mimicking our dynamism today is a testament to its validity. Hopefully, we will remember our roots as we attempt to compete with these very energetic economies across the water over the next few decades.
Try one of the pay as you godeals. You can get a phone for $10 or $20 and just pay about $0.25/minute to use it. AT&T has free calling to AT&T customers. It's a lot cheaper than the average monthly plan that will run you upwards of $400/year.
(sigh) so much of the President's economic program is based on taxation of corporations and "the rich" that it seems bound to fail. While these policies have a populist ring to them that is currently rather popular after years of a Republican pro-business slant, ultimately the citizenry will come to realize that they are simply being taxed indirectly. Or, if they do not, then they are stupid and deserve what they get.
To prevent this, I think mobile phone operators should make it clear to consumers what percentage of their bill is directly tied to government corporate tax levies, just as the airlines do--when you look for a ticket, some of the airline websites like Southwest Airlines don't actually add in the taxes until the end, so that you get to watch that nice, cheap ticket suddenly get a lot more expensive thanks to Uncle Sam.
I suspect that in the end, the Dems will be forced to scale back their ambitious taxation program and the tax structure will be reshaped to resemble the Republican approach. Industry lobbyists will flock to Washington DC and make their case to members of Congress in terms of how it affects their constituencies (and chances for re-election), Congress will begin amending Obama's budget to alleviate the burden on constituency businesses, and we'll basically be back at square one. That, or we're probably going to have quite a prolonged recession as it gets even more expensive to start and operate a business in this country.
On the bright side, as cellular charges rise, wifi becomes a compelling alternative. We are seeing a lot of Skype-capable handhelds coming on the market, notably Android-powered phones, and one can foresee the day (hopefully soon) when dozens of generic Android handsets are available for cheap, that can make Skype calls at any hotspot. That may spell the end of the cellular industry's dominance in this country. If I were AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile, I would be investing in wi-fi so as to be on the winning side of that game.
The EC is demanding that Microsoft "redesign" its OS to allow equal competition of browsers on the desktop. This is sort of like the FTC ordering GM to allow a free choice of stereos in its cars, rather than ship cars with only its (former) in-house brand of Delco.
Yet, knowledgeable users are not restricted from installing their own choice of browser, e.g. Firefox, and just ignoring IE completely. So, the main thrust of the EC's argument is that ignorant users need to have a choice put right in front of them, to force them to not be sheep.
This decision by the EC comes at a time when Microsoft's stock price has dipped under $18, which is where it was in the late 1990s. Bill Gates, the founder of the company and chief executive throughout MSFT's monopolistic phase, has left the company and is busily donating his great wealth to charities all over the world. Microsoft's revenue is down, and its grip on the browser market is slipping in the face of natural and normal competition by products like Firefox, Safari, and--soon, perhaps--Chrome. Increasingly, mobile devices are incorporating browsers and IE is not number one in this market; Opera for example has focused strongly on the handheld market, and Apple, Google, and Palm are attempting to dominate this niche with their new non-Microsoft products.
All in all, it seems like a silly time to implement a monopoly-busting decision that had its roots in a bygone era when Microsoft was truly dominant. Today Microsoft is increasingly looking like a dinosaur, like GM, its products coasting along on past momentum with some slick non-Windows OS's coming up fast on some of these new netbooks and handhelds. It's a new era and the stodgy bureaucrats of the European Commission need to get a brain transplant to keep up. I wouldn't bet on Microsoft going away any time soon, but they are no longer the threat they once appeared to be, just as that previous behemoth IBM was swamped by the competition in the 1980s and 1990s with no need for government intervention.
In researching this situation a bit, I came across an interesting proposal for unbundling future versions of IE from Windows for the sake of better security. This is a far more intelligent thing to do than the stupid, simple minded idea of adding extra icons to the desktop.
Flash is pretty ubiquitous. It comes on every Windows PC loaded with Internet Explorer, and it's an easy download for Macs and Linux machines. The Android phone OS from Google supports Flash, and Adobe has announced a working Flash for iPhone, simply awaiting Apple's go-ahead. The new Palm Pre phone will have Flash. Windows Mobile has Flash Lite. Probably, Apple will allow Flash if Pre and Android phone sales take off.
Youtube pretty much ensured Flash's predominance. Suddenly, there was an easy, painless way to watch video and listen to audio without having to mess with Realplayer and Windows Multimedia codecs and stupid digital rights management code that only works in certain versions of MS Windows.
It's interesting how Flash took the web app market away from Java. Flash is the big player in interactive web apps, while Java is a bit player. Java is still huge in server side apps but it's dead on the desktop. I can't even get Java applets to run on my current home machine with Firefox and Suse Linux, but I have no incentive to get it working. There are still a couple of web sites out there that use java applets for their user interface widgets, but these are few and far between.
Who forces people to click on Google.com when they want to do a search? Last I checked, Internet Explorer which comes on every Windows computer defaults to MSN search until you specifically set it otherwise.
And who is losing money because of Google's size? Certainly not the consumer, who has benefited tremendously from Google's innovations, which are free.
Once upon a time, Yahoo Email charged an annual fee for POP3 and anything larger than a few megabytes of storage. Then Google came along and offered a free email with POP3 and huge storage and changed the whole game. Yahoo (and Hotmail) was forced to counter with added storage and reduced/eliminated fees. That's not monopolism, it's innovation!
I'm not scared by some dumb bureaucrat like Christina Varney. What's frightening is the apparent lack of appreciation by the Obama Administration for capitalism as a force for economic growth.
With a presidency that is socialist-leaning and big-government-oriented, it seems we are backsliding into a kind of pre-Reagan era where business is viewed as a necessary evil, the best and brightest should work for the Feds or community organizations, and we shouldn't even try to compete with our ultra-capitalistic competitors in East Asia and elsewhere.
One can hypothesize that certain actions lead to genomic changes that will be replicated in the germ line (oocytes or spermatocytes).
We already know that mutations can introduce genomic changes that are propagated to the offspring. It could be as simple as a replication error in the spermatocyte.
We also know that hormones activate parts of the genome that may be inactive. Depending on the type of hormone, they enter the cell or effect a change in the cell that causes activation of a segment of DNA in the nucleus that will induce the production of a protein or enzyme. It's possible (but I am not sure--perhaps a biologist here can confirm) that some of the activation mechanisms are actual mutations rather than the removal of inhibitory substances on the chain.
Given the huge amount of stuff we don't know, it's reasonable to suppose that mutations that propagate to the offspring might be caused by the development of traits in the parent such as enhanced learning. After studying some genetics, I have come to believe that almost any of these things is possible, and we have a ton left to learn.
The theory some are offering here that behavior is passed on via non-genetic pathways is of course also plausible but would not be necessarily a permanent alteration in the population. Have they looked at the 3rd and 4th generations yet?
Obviously, an improvement in intellectual abilities that results in a permanent germline change would have huge ramifications for humans. Yet, smart people don't necessarily have smart offspring. A mediocre person who manages to uplift themselves to a high level of intellectual achievement might be expected to have smarter kids, but this doesn't seem to be a trend. Then again, a massive study might confirm or disconfirm this.
Luckily, we have a more science-friendly administration and hopefully they will start throwing more money at this kind of basic research, our general national bankruptcy notwithstanding. Friends at NIH and NIST have told me their budgets are going up, so something new is happening, at least. I'm not a fan of big government, but (depoliticized) science funding is definitely a good thing that benefits the country and the entire world.
I think the AOL system was pretty much what the op is suggesting--a gated, fee-driven system that is safe for the kids and spam-free.
The problem is that systems like AOL are inherently limited, with a corporate team that decides its content and direction from week to week.
The Internet is amazingly varied and dynamic by comparison and it's little wonder that AOLers eventually left to join the greater outside world.
Comparing a Net 2.0 to a gated community is an intriguing concept, but in reality it would probably be too self-limiting for people.
It's possible today to stay in your own backyard on the wild and woolly Net 1.0. Just don't publish your email address, or else change it whenever you start getting junk mail. A lot of unsophisticated users just use the email assigned to them by their broadband vendors anyway, xxxx@verizon.net for example, and whenever they move or switch services their addresses change, too.
Also, just stick to a few trusted web sites, don't browse promiscuously, and you'll be fine. But life will be boring.
I thought courts were a sort of mecca for low tech methods. They use court stenographers, video taping is very limited, and it's all based on the spoken word. It's not like the prosecutor is going to talk through a Powerpoint presentation to make his/her case. Or do they allow this these days? I don't go to courtrooms very often....
From the article:
The $10 million effort by Maximus Inc. to bring the courtâ(TM)s activities online was immediately troublesome to judges, clerks and prosecutors and delayed court proceedings in 2006. After threatening litigation, the city reached a $5 million settlement with Maximus and may seek another vendor.
It sounds like this whole computerization effort was poorly executed from the get-go. Many such projects have problems, since they typically pit bumbling bureaucrats against shark-like consultants.
Anyway maybe they ought to take the database and just pull out the pending cases using ad hoc queries, and send the print-outs to the courthouse so they can get on with their work. This can't be rocket science here.
Can't someone post an oppositional opinion on slashdot without being modded "troll" or "flamebait" or the even more senseless "overrated"? The guy's got a right to an opinion, however off the beaten path he may be.
The entire publishing industry--magazines, newspapers, and books--is in trouble these days; the traditional hard copy distribution system is breaking down and there's no clear alternative that will provide authors and publishers a similar level of employment.
Millions of us have basically switched from reading books (or watching TV, which is the original book-and-magazine killer) during evenings and weekends to interactive media--cable/satellite TV and, increasingly, the internet.
Probably a majority of people now get their daily news hit from the internet, and after a couple of hours of surfing there's just not much mental space left to sit down with a magazine, except maybe on the toilet.
I foresee a time when hard copy is basically a thing of the past, with some kind of cheap, reusable or recyclable programmable paper replacing grab-and-read magazines at the supermarket check-out line (if indeed we will still have supermarkets). I think Neal Stephenson in "The Diamond Age" did a great job describing future books and magazines with multimedia graphics dancing on the pages in place of plain old static ink.
Since there's still a huge market for creating compelling content, it stands to reason that we'll find a way to charge for it. Maybe in the end it will come down to advertising or else a pay-if-you-like-it approach that will probably eliminate the large production houses that make movies and TV shows today.
I used to love taking home a science fiction magazine--Analog was my favorite--but today there's just so much stuff available for free, and real life has caught up with so much of science fiction today that it seems more interesting to read about real world developments. Isaac Asimov in an introduction to one of his collections wrote about growing up in the 1920s and 1930s when real world science progressed at a much slower pace, and every new issue of Analog had this special glow around it as he retrieved it from the magazine rack and paid his ten cents. Now that was a time!
Ogg as an audio format is pretty good. I investigated it a few years back for a voicemail application I was working on. It worked pretty well and obviously comes unencumbered by patents or copyrights, unlike MP3.
I think the main problem is the public's conception of MP3 as the gold standard for music formats. MP3 players have pretty well saturated the standalone market, though flash multimedia and other kinds of streaming formats have made inroads in connected media.
At this point, for ogg to achieve some kind of inroads in the mass audio market, the MP3 owners would need to really jack up their rates, because presently it's priced into every product already. If you save $1 by leaving MP3 out of your player, is it worth it?
But, I am glad to see Mozilla at least making a symbolic effort to keep Ogg (and Theora) alive. As a poster above points out, $100K is not much money in the grand scheme of things, but it is a lot better than nothing and it might keep Ogg on life support a while longer until that killer application comes along (e.g., support for Ogg on iPod and similar players (probably would never happen on Zune, but that particular player looks like it's circling the drain anyway....).
Unfortunately, the internet is also a splendid tool for radical groups to communicate and share techniques for murdering people. The Islamist terror sites are a case in point. MEMRI monitors a lot of these sites and provides translations of some of their materials. The ideas they espouse are disgusting, and yet they manage to obtain web hosting services in the United States.
If political activism is allowed in Egypt, it may unfortunately mean a conversion from a relatively secular government to an Islamic government which will be even less tolerant toward the Coptic Christian minority. Already, they are not allowed to build new churches and are kept out of government positions. Many in Egypt fear that if free elections were allowed, the Muslim Brotherhood would quickly achieve a dominant position in their legislature. The MB is opposed to the peace treaty with Israel and their rise would probably lead to a major new war or, at minimum, new Egyptian support for Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas, which is an offshoot of the MB.
No, I fear that freedom of expression on the internet is a luxury that only the stable Western democracies and a few non-Islamic dictatorships can afford. Places like China and most of the Muslim world have very low tolerance for online organizing. Probably China could survive a democratic revolution and would emerge as an ally of the West if it did, but the Muslim world appears unready to put such power in the hands of the people.
Late for what, though? I initially tried KDE4 because it came with the OpenSuse 11 upgrade and discovered it had a number of broken features. They also said that it was still in beta. I moved back to 3.5 and have had no problems. KDE 3.5 still works great and has plenty of eye candy for when you're bored.
Sometimes I get annoyed with something in Linux, and then I stop and think, wait a minute, this stuff is all free and people have volunteered their time to write a lot of it, so why should I be complaining. I'm just glad that it exists!
At this point, I use almost all open source software--browser, word processor, database, spreadsheet. I'm using H&R Taxcut this year, probably the only software I still purchase on a regular basis.
KDE (and Gnome, too, for that matter--on my Ubuntu laptop) is a fantastic system, very flexible and customizable. I find Windows annoying these days when I am forced to use it--everything's so fixed and locked down. It lacks so much stuff out of the box--you mean I can't just read pdf documents? or have virtual desktops? I need to download Firefox? I find the Mac only a bit better, but on the other hand the Mac allows you to use a nice Unix shell window and that makes everything all better:)
My next step is to extend my computing experience to the handheld, probably replacing my Palm T3 with an iPhone or Android phone over the next year or so. I have great confidence that I'll be able to synchronize and interoperate very well with a KDE/Gnome environment, less so in Windows (which will likely come with a rigid set of drivers and dependencies). But in using stuff on Linux, I find myself wrapping things up in convenient scripts and customizations that in the long run work better than Windows. Linux usually is "late" with stuff but the wait is usually worth it.
Yahoo has pretty good email actually and its filtering features are more flexible than gmail's. Yahoo's folders make sense. There's a lot to commend Yahoo mail.
Furthermore, you can't reasonably expect millions of people with Yahoo mail addresses to suddenly switch to gmail simply because it's incrementally better in certain ways. Yes, back when Yahoo had a 10 megabyte limit and made you pay for more space, it made sense to switch. It makes a lot less sense to switch today because Yahoo has caught up.
Yahoo search has been marginalized by Google. But its mapping, news, financial, sports, games, and shopping sites are still used by hundreds millions of people. Yahoo is still a huge franchise and would be a rich prize for whoever acquires it.
Microsoft attempted to acquire Yahoo for a premium price of over $40/share a while back (woe that I didn't sell my damn Yahoo shares at that time!!!) and now they *might* pick it up for fire sale prices. It seems that despite himself, Ballmer might yet pull off a coup by having waited for Yahoo's stock to go down.
I personally will be sad to see Yahoo go, because it was such a formative part of my own internet experiences back in the day. To this day I still have Yahoo stock quotes, news, and weather on my browser tool bar and I go there many times a day. I only wish their multimedia worked better in Linux, the one failing of Yahoo in my book. I'd rather see Google get them because Google might preserve the good stuff, while Microsoft is more likely to absorb and rebrand.
Slashdot Mirror
What about letters to the editor? What about traditional magazine articles, newspaper columns, and books? People for centuries have been publishing their opinions and ideas and we have a whole body of laws to deal with the consequences--slander (calumny, in the old days), truth in reporting, copyrights, and so forth. Then, we also have 30 years of usenet and website publishing which preceded the Facebook/Myspace/Twitter model. Society seems to have adapted pretty well to this technology.
There is nothing about social networking to distinguish it from previous publishing modalities except that it is faster and easier to publish something far and wide than it ever was before. It's accelerated information distribution, and that's what society is reacting to.
If a tenant can complain about a landlord in a matter of seconds and have an audience of hundreds of thousands, the landlord will be more upset than if the tenant just mentions it to her friends at the golf course or knitting circle or watering hole. However, nothing particularly revolutionary is happening.
"We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization". That sums it up. It's just another lawsuit-happy guy who ought to get his wrist slapped for a frivolous case, unless the defendant rolls over and pays some symbolic fine, which is likely to happen, a la RIAA.
How many people would feel comforted knowing that the resident assigned to them has practiced mainly in a virtual reality setting? There's no substitute for sitting at someone's bedside, taking their hand, feeling their pulse, and looking at their face for signs of distress. You can't avoid human contact at some point. You are going to have to go in that real, physical room and come face to face with a real, physical person who is perhaps suffering, giving off vibes of distress and pain, or crumping and about to die. The way for a student doctor to develop good instincts is to be around real patients, not fancy graphical representations thereof.
You can't gain good doctoring skills in an online chatroom. In fact, I would venture that the opposite would occur. The common complaint is that doctors are too inhuman, too distant from their patients, seated behind an imposing desk with a computer monitor and lots of medical texts. Doctors don't get enough face time with patients as it is. Now we are seeing a proposal to reduce that face time even more. This is not going to fly.
As for the expense of training facilities--ridiculous! The avatars represent real people, so every hour a student spends in this system is an hour they have to pay real practitioners, and practitioners don't come cheap. Facilities already exist--they're called hospitals, and medical students spend two years doing full time clinical rotations through the various specialties.
Regarding taking risks--medical students don't take risks. They don't practice medicine. Their job is to stand and watch while licensed professionals do the clinical work. The most a med student might do is run to the lab for test results, or help take vital signs, or answer quiz questions by attendings. Why this needs to be virtualized is simply beyond me.
Seriously, a wifi-equipped laptop can be had for less than $400, and with a 15" screen and decent storage, why would someone want a limited, single-purpose crippled laptop such as a Kindle?
The Kindle would make sense if it were under $100; it would fall into the nice Christmas gift or Father's Day gadget category for someone who has everything. But for $500? That's a lot of books.
You could buy a laptop and download thousands of free books from Gutenberg.org or wherever, and spend the rest on used books and have more than you can ever hope to read.
Alternatively, you can spend $350-$500 on one of these Amazon gadgets and then have to pay to read books on it.
I think Amazon should move to the inkjet approach of giving away the initial hardware and then making money on the refills. I wouldn't mind paying $5-$10 for a new bestseller (as long as it didn't crash/timeout and disappear on me) but the initial investment is rather daunting.
Plus, physical books are kinda cool; they don't need to be recharged, you can drop them from amazing heights and they still work, they're infinitely reusable and lendable, and they effortlessly multitask--leave one in the bathroom, one on the nightstand, one in the car, etc.
The reader who complained should simply bookmark washingtonpost.com and skim it daily for content that is not provided in the print edition. For example, many of their articles have very active talkback forums or blogs that obviously are not possible in the print edition.
Really, today's news market is subdivided into many categories--traditional print readers, casual online skimmers, and serious online readers come to mind. Then there are news aggregators such as Yahoo and Google that present a portal format to readers (like myself).
I read the online WaPo just about every day, plus WSJ, NYT, and a couple of the prominent aggregators. That's about all I need and have time for. I wouldn't have time to read a paper edition, and plus it's full of junk that I wouldn't normally click on. I suspect there are millions of others with needs similar to mine.
Probably print will shrink while online grows and diversifies. Ultimately we'll likely have news feeds into our handhelds that will be aggregations of various news syndications. There will still be plenty of demand for "deep" reporting, but it likely will not be in print eventually. And the trees will celebrate this fact.
People on the job seem to get irrationally angry when it comes to computers and networks. Some of it is justified when they are being blocked from getting their own work done, and they will absolutely take it out on you when they don't have a good explanation for why things don't work. Those stupid IT guys messed it up again. It's the department everyone loves to hate.
The professional approach is to leave your ego at the door when you clock in, and be sure to log all questions and complaints and your responses. If something escalates into a problem where your job is threatened, you can show the paper trail to your management.
If someone is constantly berating you about computer problems that really are PEBCAK, just log each and every complaint plus your response. It can become quite an amusing read after a while, and you can share it with your management. It makes the other guy look bad. Of course, your goal shouldn't be to screw the other guy, but if they are being kind of childish and vindictive, it's very useful for deflection and self-defense should you be called on the carpet later on.
Also, good communication is the key to defusing people's annoyance. When people are sitting around waiting for the network to come back up, or the departmental printer keeps not working right, or the web is really slow--if there's an explanation forthcoming quickly, people can understand that you're working like mad to fix it. When an IT department has a stand-offish attitude and refuses to answer phone calls and emails in a timely way, people will assume the worst.
Bing's OK. But it's nothing special. Even if it's technically superior in certain ways to Google--I can't tell so I'll leave that for the intellectuals to tease out--there's no particular reason to switch.
I have NEVER had a problem finding stuff on Google. Usually what I'm looking for appears in the first 10 hits. About 10% of the time, I need to rephrase my search, or add some "-" keywords to weed out some signal noise. But Google does the job, I'm used to it, and it seems to just keep getting better.
There is so much power hidden inside Google's engine--stock quotes, mathematical calculations, language translation, mapping, document conversion, caches of deleted pages, paid links that I actually find useful, typo correction--the list goes on and on and on!
What can Microsoft's search engine add to this stunningly rich resource that millions of us can't live without? What killer features does Microsoft give us? Some little tweaks here and there in the UI that may or may not make much difference. Some good ideas on supplemental information such as the "related searches" column on the left.
Sorry, Microsoft, but Bing looks like MSN Search that's been tweaked a little. If Google didn't exist, you might have a winner on your hands, but this is just another "me, too" search system that will survive only as a niche product, funded by profits from the MS Office and Windows divisions.
Any market penetration by Bing will probably come from super-glueing it to the Windows 7 desktop and Windows mobile handhelds, defaulting it on IE searching, and otherwise forcing it down customers' throats in whatever way they can, hoping a large enough population will be ignorant enough to just use the defaults. But now that "google" is a verb in the dictionary, Microsoft has its work cut out for it to hold and expand its little piece of the search market.
Well, the London underground CCTV cameras helped them identify the subway bombers and locate their helpers and arms stashes. I don't know if even this heinous a crime merits losing one's anonymity, but it proves that such technology can help the good guys when applied correctly.
As someone above pointed out, however, it's questionable that the Turkish government is benevolent enough to use this technology wisely and correctly. It's doubtful that any government can, actually.
But, if you were to ask me whether I would sacrifice my life and/or my loved ones in the name of freedom, I would probably say no, go ahead and mount the cameras. I'd rather live.
A friend of mine is a licensed carpenter with broad experience. He's been in the home renovation business for years and can do just about anything. Got laid off recently and he's had no difficulty picking up work--welding outdoor gates, installing bathroom bath/cabinets, putting up marble tiles, wood work, you name it he can do it and there's a lot of demand even in this sluggish economy in a city full of foreclosures.
Another friend is an electrician in his 50s. There are few young electricians coming up; young people seem to prefer other trades. The only new electricians are the ones coming up from Brazil these days. Yet, it's a really good profession to be in, never lacking for work.
I wish I had those skills. Computer skills are a passing thing, too many folks with laundry lists of technologies on their resumes so that even if I know my stuff, my resume gets lost in the stack.
$100 isn't very much.
As low spec as that is, it's very good for $100.
I don't know why they were bashing it so much.
Agreed, the blogger makes some rather opinionated statements but misses the forest for the trees in this case.
It's a good trend that low cost hardware manufacturers are getting into the netbook game and featuring systems like Android. Backed by a mega corporation and open sourced, Android is bound to keep getting better. I think it's going to give the iPhone a run for its money eventually.
As for netbooks, it seems like a good idea for some purposes--a handy little sub laptop. If it works with Skype--and given that the manufacturer makes Skype headsets, and Android does support Skype, you would expect it to--it would be a sweet travel laptop to replace the brick (albeit, a fun Ubuntu brick but still rather hot and energy hungry).
I'm just a little worried about the origin of the hardware. I've bought several gadgets direct from Chinese resellers or factory sites via Ebay, and I've been underwhelmed by their quality.
For example, recently I got a little 4 gig MP3 player that turned out to have terrible firmware, a nonstandard headset jack, a very poor battery, crappy UI, and just plain didn't work very well. I later got a Sansa MP3 player that was approximately the same price but much, much better engineered. This pattern has played out several times.
I think the Chinese copycat manufacturers have some good ideas but their execution, especially their engineering, is nowhere close to American, Japanese, or Korean standards. It's ironic because they make great products when they are spec'd by Americans (e.g., the iPod family and millions of other things), but on their own they seem not to pay the same close attention to detail. Or else, could it be that I've just had bad luck? But I don't think so, or we'd be seeing more Chinese-branded products on local store shelves. Sooner or later, of course, like the Japanese, they'll get it right, and they'll blow the foreign manufacturers out of the water, but not yet.
In the meantime I think I would tend to trust a unit that was designed by Apple, or Google, or some Taiwanese or American manufacturer rather than one of these homegrown models.
Mississippi stays at the bottom of the heap
Don't worry, they'll be joined shortly by many other states hungry for revenue. The problem with this bill (well, one of many problems, actually) is that it will damage the nascent e-book and e-music industry just as they're struggling to get established, even as paper and CD publishers flounder. Also, it will largely tax the teens and 20-30-somethings who actually purchase these kinds of products. A rather regressive tax.
It should be easy enough to get around this law. If you read the bill, it spells out the precise types of electronic "products" that are taxable. So the vendors can simply convert these products to non-ebooks and non-music and non-videos, and provide a little converter that allows the buyer to change them back into ebooks and music and videos at his/her discretion. We don't sell music, we sell blobs of binary data. If you find a way to transform it miraculously into your favorite music, more power to you!
Good point. I don't even own a TV. But I do like watching some shows from time to time, when I choose to and not just during a broadcaster's arbitrarily chosen time slot. My "prime time" is most people's sleepy time.
I just wish the major networks would get it together with internet broadcasting. Out of the big four websites (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX), so far I have found that only CBS webcasts are even playable on my linux computers. The rest just sit there, trying to load some DRM-encumbered IE plugin or something. Why can't they be more like Youtube, simple, works well at low bandwidth? I'll put up with commercials in return for the convenience of watching shows whenever I like. There are a few good shows on the air.
As it is, I generally will check out a full season from the library or Netflix, watch'em all over a few days, and return it. Done. But web casting would obviously be simpler and more convenient.
An enterprising, forward thinking network should have long since thought of putting all their shows on the web, paid for with commercials and online ads, and they would just dominate. Youtube and its ilk might not even exist if it weren't for the near absence of the traditional entertainment networks from the internet. My siblings, friends, and I used to just sit in front of the TV for hours and hours, watching one syndicated show after another. Today they could be doing the same thing, but they're not... why?
A box on top of my (nonexistent) television? I don't think so. It's just not the 'net lifestyle that I (and probably quite a few others) would prefer.
Well, Spain and China are nations with borders, passports, and distinctive languages; relocating to another nation (outside of the E.U. in the case of Spain) is a rather big deal. China doesn't even allow people to leave without permission.
Employers are entities that require your services temporarily. It may be for 3 weeks, 3 months, or 3 decades, but it's temporary. You the employee have entered into a contractual agreement to do a certain amount of work in return for a certain amount of money.
Depending on the country, the government forces the employer to do all sorts of social welfare tasks like arrange for your retirement, health care, disability, maternity leave, and gender-and-ethnic quota fulfillment, but other than this it's a simple relationship. You are free to leave at any time, and they are free to stop using your services at any time. That's how the free market economies work.
During your contractual time at the company, you have agreed not to do certain things--leave the workplace without permission, disobey your supervisor, enter into conflict with other employees. You can do all this stuff on your own time but while on the clock, you are a professional purveyor of your services, not as a free spirited individual doing whatever he/she likes. The employer owes you nothing beyond this relationship, and you owe them nothing, either.
So how is this a democratic system? The fact that you the employee are completely free to leave and go start your very own company, hire your very own employees or else be a free agent employed by yourself, and make your own way in the world. Every company had to start somewhere. Even the great megacorporations of our time started as an individual in a living room with a good idea. Bill Gates founded Microsoft, for example.
This is how people express themselves democratically in a capitalistic society. Yes, you are encouraged to conform and submerge your personality at most companies, but at any instant you can break free and start a company that more completely expresses your own ideals and aspirations. You may sink and you may swim. Hopefully, you will succeed, and then you'll some day be sitting there grumbling about your pesky employees who don't do what they're told, and of course a few of them will eventually break off and start their own firms.
That's the very nature of a dynamic, successful economy, one in which people have an outlet for the pent-up pressure in the form of rebelling legally and peacefully.
The freedom and lack of legacy feudal constraints in American society for most of its citizens is what set it apart in the 19th and early 20th centuries and allowed it to grow so quickly into the dominant economy. The fact that other economies are mimicking our dynamism today is a testament to its validity. Hopefully, we will remember our roots as we attempt to compete with these very energetic economies across the water over the next few decades.
Try one of the pay as you go deals. You can get a phone for $10 or $20 and just pay about $0.25/minute to use it. AT&T has free calling to AT&T customers. It's a lot cheaper than the average monthly plan that will run you upwards of $400/year.
(sigh) so much of the President's economic program is based on taxation of corporations and "the rich" that it seems bound to fail. While these policies have a populist ring to them that is currently rather popular after years of a Republican pro-business slant, ultimately the citizenry will come to realize that they are simply being taxed indirectly. Or, if they do not, then they are stupid and deserve what they get.
To prevent this, I think mobile phone operators should make it clear to consumers what percentage of their bill is directly tied to government corporate tax levies, just as the airlines do--when you look for a ticket, some of the airline websites like Southwest Airlines don't actually add in the taxes until the end, so that you get to watch that nice, cheap ticket suddenly get a lot more expensive thanks to Uncle Sam.
I suspect that in the end, the Dems will be forced to scale back their ambitious taxation program and the tax structure will be reshaped to resemble the Republican approach. Industry lobbyists will flock to Washington DC and make their case to members of Congress in terms of how it affects their constituencies (and chances for re-election), Congress will begin amending Obama's budget to alleviate the burden on constituency businesses, and we'll basically be back at square one. That, or we're probably going to have quite a prolonged recession as it gets even more expensive to start and operate a business in this country.
On the bright side, as cellular charges rise, wifi becomes a compelling alternative. We are seeing a lot of Skype-capable handhelds coming on the market, notably Android-powered phones, and one can foresee the day (hopefully soon) when dozens of generic Android handsets are available for cheap, that can make Skype calls at any hotspot. That may spell the end of the cellular industry's dominance in this country. If I were AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile, I would be investing in wi-fi so as to be on the winning side of that game.
The EC is demanding that Microsoft "redesign" its OS to allow equal competition of browsers on the desktop. This is sort of like the FTC ordering GM to allow a free choice of stereos in its cars, rather than ship cars with only its (former) in-house brand of Delco.
Yet, knowledgeable users are not restricted from installing their own choice of browser, e.g. Firefox, and just ignoring IE completely. So, the main thrust of the EC's argument is that ignorant users need to have a choice put right in front of them, to force them to not be sheep.
This decision by the EC comes at a time when Microsoft's stock price has dipped under $18, which is where it was in the late 1990s. Bill Gates, the founder of the company and chief executive throughout MSFT's monopolistic phase, has left the company and is busily donating his great wealth to charities all over the world. Microsoft's revenue is down, and its grip on the browser market is slipping in the face of natural and normal competition by products like Firefox, Safari, and--soon, perhaps--Chrome. Increasingly, mobile devices are incorporating browsers and IE is not number one in this market; Opera for example has focused strongly on the handheld market, and Apple, Google, and Palm are attempting to dominate this niche with their new non-Microsoft products.
All in all, it seems like a silly time to implement a monopoly-busting decision that had its roots in a bygone era when Microsoft was truly dominant. Today Microsoft is increasingly looking like a dinosaur, like GM, its products coasting along on past momentum with some slick non-Windows OS's coming up fast on some of these new netbooks and handhelds. It's a new era and the stodgy bureaucrats of the European Commission need to get a brain transplant to keep up. I wouldn't bet on Microsoft going away any time soon, but they are no longer the threat they once appeared to be, just as that previous behemoth IBM was swamped by the competition in the 1980s and 1990s with no need for government intervention.
In researching this situation a bit, I came across an interesting proposal for unbundling future versions of IE from Windows for the sake of better security. This is a far more intelligent thing to do than the stupid, simple minded idea of adding extra icons to the desktop.
Flash is pretty ubiquitous. It comes on every Windows PC loaded with Internet Explorer, and it's an easy download for Macs and Linux machines. The Android phone OS from Google supports Flash, and Adobe has announced a working Flash for iPhone, simply awaiting Apple's go-ahead. The new Palm Pre phone will have Flash. Windows Mobile has Flash Lite. Probably, Apple will allow Flash if Pre and Android phone sales take off.
Youtube pretty much ensured Flash's predominance. Suddenly, there was an easy, painless way to watch video and listen to audio without having to mess with Realplayer and Windows Multimedia codecs and stupid digital rights management code that only works in certain versions of MS Windows.
It's interesting how Flash took the web app market away from Java. Flash is the big player in interactive web apps, while Java is a bit player. Java is still huge in server side apps but it's dead on the desktop. I can't even get Java applets to run on my current home machine with Firefox and Suse Linux, but I have no incentive to get it working. There are still a couple of web sites out there that use java applets for their user interface widgets, but these are few and far between.
Who forces people to click on Google.com when they want to do a search? Last I checked, Internet Explorer which comes on every Windows computer defaults to MSN search until you specifically set it otherwise.
And who is losing money because of Google's size? Certainly not the consumer, who has benefited tremendously from Google's innovations, which are free.
Once upon a time, Yahoo Email charged an annual fee for POP3 and anything larger than a few megabytes of storage. Then Google came along and offered a free email with POP3 and huge storage and changed the whole game. Yahoo (and Hotmail) was forced to counter with added storage and reduced/eliminated fees. That's not monopolism, it's innovation!
I'm not scared by some dumb bureaucrat like Christina Varney. What's frightening is the apparent lack of appreciation by the Obama Administration for capitalism as a force for economic growth.
With a presidency that is socialist-leaning and big-government-oriented, it seems we are backsliding into a kind of pre-Reagan era where business is viewed as a necessary evil, the best and brightest should work for the Feds or community organizations, and we shouldn't even try to compete with our ultra-capitalistic competitors in East Asia and elsewhere.
One can hypothesize that certain actions lead to genomic changes that will be replicated in the germ line (oocytes or spermatocytes).
We already know that mutations can introduce genomic changes that are propagated to the offspring. It could be as simple as a replication error in the spermatocyte.
We also know that hormones activate parts of the genome that may be inactive. Depending on the type of hormone, they enter the cell or effect a change in the cell that causes activation of a segment of DNA in the nucleus that will induce the production of a protein or enzyme. It's possible (but I am not sure--perhaps a biologist here can confirm) that some of the activation mechanisms are actual mutations rather than the removal of inhibitory substances on the chain.
Given the huge amount of stuff we don't know, it's reasonable to suppose that mutations that propagate to the offspring might be caused by the development of traits in the parent such as enhanced learning. After studying some genetics, I have come to believe that almost any of these things is possible, and we have a ton left to learn.
The theory some are offering here that behavior is passed on via non-genetic pathways is of course also plausible but would not be necessarily a permanent alteration in the population. Have they looked at the 3rd and 4th generations yet?
Obviously, an improvement in intellectual abilities that results in a permanent germline change would have huge ramifications for humans. Yet, smart people don't necessarily have smart offspring. A mediocre person who manages to uplift themselves to a high level of intellectual achievement might be expected to have smarter kids, but this doesn't seem to be a trend. Then again, a massive study might confirm or disconfirm this.
Luckily, we have a more science-friendly administration and hopefully they will start throwing more money at this kind of basic research, our general national bankruptcy notwithstanding. Friends at NIH and NIST have told me their budgets are going up, so something new is happening, at least. I'm not a fan of big government, but (depoliticized) science funding is definitely a good thing that benefits the country and the entire world.
I think the AOL system was pretty much what the op is suggesting--a gated, fee-driven system that is safe for the kids and spam-free.
The problem is that systems like AOL are inherently limited, with a corporate team that decides its content and direction from week to week.
The Internet is amazingly varied and dynamic by comparison and it's little wonder that AOLers eventually left to join the greater outside world.
Comparing a Net 2.0 to a gated community is an intriguing concept, but in reality it would probably be too self-limiting for people.
It's possible today to stay in your own backyard on the wild and woolly Net 1.0. Just don't publish your email address, or else change it whenever you start getting junk mail. A lot of unsophisticated users just use the email assigned to them by their broadband vendors anyway, xxxx@verizon.net for example, and whenever they move or switch services their addresses change, too.
Also, just stick to a few trusted web sites, don't browse promiscuously, and you'll be fine. But life will be boring.
From the article:
It sounds like this whole computerization effort was poorly executed from the get-go. Many such projects have problems, since they typically pit bumbling bureaucrats against shark-like consultants.
Anyway maybe they ought to take the database and just pull out the pending cases using ad hoc queries, and send the print-outs to the courthouse so they can get on with their work. This can't be rocket science here.
Can't someone post an oppositional opinion on slashdot without being modded "troll" or "flamebait" or the even more senseless "overrated"? The guy's got a right to an opinion, however off the beaten path he may be.
The entire publishing industry--magazines, newspapers, and books--is in trouble these days; the traditional hard copy distribution system is breaking down and there's no clear alternative that will provide authors and publishers a similar level of employment.
Millions of us have basically switched from reading books (or watching TV, which is the original book-and-magazine killer) during evenings and weekends to interactive media--cable/satellite TV and, increasingly, the internet.
Probably a majority of people now get their daily news hit from the internet, and after a couple of hours of surfing there's just not much mental space left to sit down with a magazine, except maybe on the toilet.
I foresee a time when hard copy is basically a thing of the past, with some kind of cheap, reusable or recyclable programmable paper replacing grab-and-read magazines at the supermarket check-out line (if indeed we will still have supermarkets). I think Neal Stephenson in "The Diamond Age" did a great job describing future books and magazines with multimedia graphics dancing on the pages in place of plain old static ink.
Since there's still a huge market for creating compelling content, it stands to reason that we'll find a way to charge for it. Maybe in the end it will come down to advertising or else a pay-if-you-like-it approach that will probably eliminate the large production houses that make movies and TV shows today.
I used to love taking home a science fiction magazine--Analog was my favorite--but today there's just so much stuff available for free, and real life has caught up with so much of science fiction today that it seems more interesting to read about real world developments. Isaac Asimov in an introduction to one of his collections wrote about growing up in the 1920s and 1930s when real world science progressed at a much slower pace, and every new issue of Analog had this special glow around it as he retrieved it from the magazine rack and paid his ten cents. Now that was a time!
Ogg as an audio format is pretty good. I investigated it a few years back for a voicemail application I was working on. It worked pretty well and obviously comes unencumbered by patents or copyrights, unlike MP3.
I think the main problem is the public's conception of MP3 as the gold standard for music formats. MP3 players have pretty well saturated the standalone market, though flash multimedia and other kinds of streaming formats have made inroads in connected media.
At this point, for ogg to achieve some kind of inroads in the mass audio market, the MP3 owners would need to really jack up their rates, because presently it's priced into every product already. If you save $1 by leaving MP3 out of your player, is it worth it?
But, I am glad to see Mozilla at least making a symbolic effort to keep Ogg (and Theora) alive. As a poster above points out, $100K is not much money in the grand scheme of things, but it is a lot better than nothing and it might keep Ogg on life support a while longer until that killer application comes along (e.g., support for Ogg on iPod and similar players (probably would never happen on Zune, but that particular player looks like it's circling the drain anyway....).
Unfortunately, the internet is also a splendid tool for radical groups to communicate and share techniques for murdering people. The Islamist terror sites are a case in point. MEMRI monitors a lot of these sites and provides translations of some of their materials. The ideas they espouse are disgusting, and yet they manage to obtain web hosting services in the United States.
If political activism is allowed in Egypt, it may unfortunately mean a conversion from a relatively secular government to an Islamic government which will be even less tolerant toward the Coptic Christian minority. Already, they are not allowed to build new churches and are kept out of government positions. Many in Egypt fear that if free elections were allowed, the Muslim Brotherhood would quickly achieve a dominant position in their legislature. The MB is opposed to the peace treaty with Israel and their rise would probably lead to a major new war or, at minimum, new Egyptian support for Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas, which is an offshoot of the MB.
No, I fear that freedom of expression on the internet is a luxury that only the stable Western democracies and a few non-Islamic dictatorships can afford. Places like China and most of the Muslim world have very low tolerance for online organizing. Probably China could survive a democratic revolution and would emerge as an ally of the West if it did, but the Muslim world appears unready to put such power in the hands of the people.
"In short, KDE4 is basically a year late."
Late for what, though? I initially tried KDE4 because it came with the OpenSuse 11 upgrade and discovered it had a number of broken features. They also said that it was still in beta. I moved back to 3.5 and have had no problems. KDE 3.5 still works great and has plenty of eye candy for when you're bored.
Sometimes I get annoyed with something in Linux, and then I stop and think, wait a minute, this stuff is all free and people have volunteered their time to write a lot of it, so why should I be complaining. I'm just glad that it exists!
At this point, I use almost all open source software--browser, word processor, database, spreadsheet. I'm using H&R Taxcut this year, probably the only software I still purchase on a regular basis.
KDE (and Gnome, too, for that matter--on my Ubuntu laptop) is a fantastic system, very flexible and customizable. I find Windows annoying these days when I am forced to use it--everything's so fixed and locked down. It lacks so much stuff out of the box--you mean I can't just read pdf documents? or have virtual desktops? I need to download Firefox? I find the Mac only a bit better, but on the other hand the Mac allows you to use a nice Unix shell window and that makes everything all better :)
My next step is to extend my computing experience to the handheld, probably replacing my Palm T3 with an iPhone or Android phone over the next year or so. I have great confidence that I'll be able to synchronize and interoperate very well with a KDE/Gnome environment, less so in Windows (which will likely come with a rigid set of drivers and dependencies). But in using stuff on Linux, I find myself wrapping things up in convenient scripts and customizations that in the long run work better than Windows. Linux usually is "late" with stuff but the wait is usually worth it.
Yahoo has pretty good email actually and its filtering features are more flexible than gmail's. Yahoo's folders make sense. There's a lot to commend Yahoo mail.
Furthermore, you can't reasonably expect millions of people with Yahoo mail addresses to suddenly switch to gmail simply because it's incrementally better in certain ways. Yes, back when Yahoo had a 10 megabyte limit and made you pay for more space, it made sense to switch. It makes a lot less sense to switch today because Yahoo has caught up.
Yahoo search has been marginalized by Google. But its mapping, news, financial, sports, games, and shopping sites are still used by hundreds millions of people. Yahoo is still a huge franchise and would be a rich prize for whoever acquires it.
Microsoft attempted to acquire Yahoo for a premium price of over $40/share a while back (woe that I didn't sell my damn Yahoo shares at that time!!!) and now they *might* pick it up for fire sale prices. It seems that despite himself, Ballmer might yet pull off a coup by having waited for Yahoo's stock to go down.
I personally will be sad to see Yahoo go, because it was such a formative part of my own internet experiences back in the day. To this day I still have Yahoo stock quotes, news, and weather on my browser tool bar and I go there many times a day. I only wish their multimedia worked better in Linux, the one failing of Yahoo in my book. I'd rather see Google get them because Google might preserve the good stuff, while Microsoft is more likely to absorb and rebrand.