I'm a member of an antique auto club, and as time passes a lot of the perishable plastic parts from the 50's and 60's are becoming unavailable new. The plastic from those years eventually got brittle and disintegrated. It would be lovely to be able to reproduce these parts using 3d printing tech, but is that even possible given today's state of the art?
I am seriously tempted to carry around a couple of grapefruits in my bag, just so I can stuff them into any exhaust tip that looks big enough to hold one. "Cat back? No, I don't allow animals in my car."
In 1990, I had what I thought was a spiffy NEC Powermate 286/10 with EGA. I thought that a greyscale hand scanner was the height of digital imaging tech. The only (removable?) ram devices I knew of at the time were ISA cards with battery backups, which don't lend themselves to cameras. There was not yet any such thing as PCMCIA ram cards. As far as I know, the first digital camera with a floppy disk was (ta-da) the Sony Mavica, which didn't come around until what, 1996 or 1997? The patent was non-obvious at the time, so +5 for having a good idea and -50 for not doing anything at all to try to implement it and letting other people do all of the hard work.
I bought my Zaurus in August, and Sharp and Trolltech were both saying something along the lines of "OS X Sync Real Soon Now". Well, it's 9 months later and there's still nothing. The Trolltech site says that there's a version of Qtopia Desktop for OS X, but there's no place to actually download it. I like my Zaurus, mostly, but not being able to sync it with my Mac is really annoying.
This is what I'll be doing. Using a GSM phone and my Zaurus with zgps (assuming they ever get the maps feature working, *crosses fingers). Other than basic functions and maybe email at the end of the day, again with the Zaurus and cell phone, I'm not bringing anything. The point of this trip is to cruise across the USA in my car, not, as many have said, to display geekitude that is SO 3 years ago. Na'mean? A full tank of gas and the horizon is what you need for a good road trip. Everything else is bunk.
Does anyone have a link to the announcement in Chinese, or to the Chinese company's site? I'm especially curious to see how they got the name "Godson", since there's no simple Chinese translation for the word "god". If the Chinese term is tian1zi3, which is suspect it is, then it really means "Son of Heaven", another term for the emperor.
Well look, I'm not going to go out and buy A Flock of Seagulls' CD just because I heard it on the GTA commercial and now its stuck in my head, am I? Before mp3's, my only option would be to buy one of those awful compilations off of TV. If I could buy *just that song* for something approaching a reasonable price I might, just to keep A Flock of Seagulls in hair spray for the forseeable future. This is the bit that the RIAA doesn't want to understand, and I think it's interesting that this is exactly the same kind of all-or-nothing bundling of a product that we've seen (and complained about) from PC manufacturers and a certain software company that shall remain nameless.
I remember touring China a few years ago. Everywhere you went, the souveneir stands were selling the same cheap trinkets. Buddhist temples, imperial palaces, whatever - same junk everywhere. The Chinese pop music scene is just about the same. My Chinese friends were SHOCKED that I thought the theme from "Titanic" sucked - they just assumed that all young people in the US swallow the current pop trend without question. Whoever the current model/singer/actress/porn star is, that's who everyone loves, almost without question.
Being different in China is a liability. Few youth subcultures around, and even the ones that do exist (the Beijing rock scene springs to mind) are all different in exactly the same way (and suck in the same way. Seriously.). "Let's all be individuals by doing the same thing!" is the cry going out across the continent.
And meanwhile in Japan this year, hoards of teenagers are dying their hair bright orange and wearing all orange clothes, all trying to rebel by doing the same thing at the same time. Fucking hopeless.
I don't know what will happen to this product. I suppose it will be bad for a lot of people if it simply goes away. I know that I used it a LOT when I first switched to OS X, but the good news (for me at least, and I suspect for others as well) is that I've hardly used it at all recently. OS X has matured enough, and enough software has become available, that my reason for needing VirtualPC in the first place (to run apps that had no equivalent on the Mac) isn't really there anymore.
Good point. The essence of the problem is not that these companies have created these services, it is that the law is so unbelievably complex that these services have become indispensible. We are constantly told that "ignorance of the law is not an excuse", and yet when the law is so impenetrable, and is in turn obscured by case law that no lay person can understand, a society ruled "by law" can suddenly appear to its own citizens to be ruled in a random, arbitrary fashion. The sad fact is that we live in a country ruled by lawyers, and even though none of us seem to trust lawyers, we still overwhelmingly vote lawyers into positions where they can make even more laws, and that's exactly what they do.
Our country is desperately in need of comprehensive legal reform. A nonexpert citizen MUST be able to find out the legality of their actions in a straightforward manner. Having to pay someone $200/hr to interpret the law for you makes us no better than imperial China. The Chinese took it for granted that the law texts would be based on hundreds of years of contradictory, overlapping law documents and rulings written in an impenetrable classical language. And yet here we are in a free country in 2003, and nothing has changed.
Lawyers are the new priests, and the government is God. We need them to intermediate between us and the Lord. But someone's gotta play Martin Luther sooner or later.
That's funny, it seems to me that the people who are stealing the most from companies are the rich bastard executives at the top, who don't actually NEED to steal anything. Most of the rest of the population is just trying to get by as well as we can without causing/getting into trouble. And yet they have the nerve the treat US like criminals.
I am not so desperate for a job that I'd submit to this sort of invasion of privacy. For that matter, I've never once submitted to a drug test either, for the same reason. I'm not smoking pot after work, but know what? Even if I am, it's none of your damned business, unless I come into WORK stoned. Or drunk, for that matter, and yet they're don't give you a blood alcohol test.
My roommate is from Belgium, and she says the same sort of thing. The problem is that in the United States, unlike our friends in the EU, your personal information doesn't actually belong to you. You have no legal right to know who is collecting what information about you, and if you discover that someone IS collecting such information, you have no legal right to tell them to stop. Even if by some miracle you manage to get your name off of one list, they are periodically compared and if your name is on any other lists then it gets on all of them whenever this happens.
This is where all of this marketing crap comes from, essentially, and it is also why none of these schemes will ever be 100% effective. What we need in the USA is a law that says that your personal information is also your personal property, and that no one has the right to spy on you (which is what marketing databases are) without your express consent. (holds breath, turns blue, dies)
I remember I was listening to the local crap-alt-rock station and some poor sap called and requested a song by the Rolling Stones. The DJ laughed at him and hung up. And then played Creed.
Hip hop and hard rock both have a long history, but you'd never know it from listening to the radio. You'd also never know that there are more than 5 or 6 new records out at any one time. I like Missy Eliot, but WTF are you doing playing "Work It" TWICE an hour? Or the latest steaming turd by Ja Rule? Give us a break, please.
I'm hoping that these things work in waves. Eventually someone will realise that there's a huge group of people who aren't being served by this stuff and take advantage of the market with new stations. Radio execs want high listenership numbers, so hopefully someone will get their head out of their ass and figure out that there are many people who aren't being served by the K-Rocks or the Z100's of the world.
Interesting post, and I agree with almost all of it, but just one point: if you think that NPR is "extreme liberal", then you haven't been paying very close attention.
This is a big, big world with a huge spectrum of political thought, but it doesn't take much effort to be "left" of whatever the most popular view in the US is. Americans talked about how "liberal" Al Gore was, while the rest of the world shook their heads in disbelief. Heads up people: there are no nationally known politicians in the US who are on the "extreme left".
If you think NPR is "extreme left" then I advise that you never leave your home state or visit your local communist bookstore because, honestly, NPR ain't shit.
I was scanning through the replies to find one that expressed what I wanted to say anyway so I could tack on my "Me too!".
My car is also made of metal, is 33 years old, and doesn't have a single transistor anywhere that I know of (radio excepted). When something breaks, I have every tool in my garage that I could possibly need to fix it (except perhaps for a welding machine, which I can rent when I need one). Being able to do the work itself has spared me the pain of dealing with car mechanics who are, in my experience, rarely surpassed for sheer unsavoriness. Hell, even with all of that "outdated" tech I still get 35mpg, which last time I checked was better than the current average of cars sold in the US.
I think its worth noting that in the last year more interesting new music was heard on Mitsubishi and Sprite commercials than on the radio. New, great music comes out all of the time, but there's zero interest in promoting it. Not on MTV, not on the radio, not anywhere. The only way I find out about new music is by reading the alternative press or through word of mouth.
The record industry is an industry of parasites. Their business model is based on relentlessly screwing both the producer of their product (the artists) and the customer. The executives themselves, as in most industries, produce nothing and contribute little. Anyone who's ever worked in a big corporate office can attest to this: the highest level of management spends most of their time schmoozing and going to catered "meetings". Their jobs are the least at risk, they work the shortest hours, and yet they make the most money by several orders of magnitude. I think that C. Brown from Leaders of the New School said it best in "Scenario":
"We're all making pennies on our records, so who makes the paper? The man in Manhattan laughing in the skyscraper."
We are all responsible for our own actions, and saying that "it's only business" or "the law compelled me to do it" is not an excuse for rude or immoral behavior. You are one human being, undivided, and the ethical sense that drives you to be a good neighbor and member of your family should also move you to act in a reasonable way to your fellow citizens. We never, ever can excuse our actions by saying "it's not personal, it's only business"; we are people acting on other people in the context of a human society - everything we do is personal.
Oh yeah? Well *I* waited until day two (please hold your applause), drive a car made by a no-longer-existent British manufacturer that gets 35mpg, only drink Safeway(tm) Brand Columbian-Esque Koffi Substitute, and don't get cable so I can only watch fuzzy reruns of "Andromeda" when I get home. So you do you like that!....oh.
Check out OpenZaurus 3.0. Lots of the stuff that was broken in the last release works now, and there are new, easier ways of getting the proprietary apps to move over. In many ways OZ is now superior to the Sharp rom.
they've been rolling out a wireless network for a while now, but it has been wildly unsuccessful for a variety of reasons: 1) low on-campus residency rate. There are too many commuters here, and if your laptop isn't in your dormroom then you're probably going to leave it at home when you commute to school. 2) stupid, incomplete coverage. Some FLOORS of some buildings are covered while other floors are not. The network extends down the central mall (outside) but not into the buildings fronting it, and only covers part of the first floor of the library. I think this kind of thing can only be useful if it exists as part of a real project to cover the entire campus.
I read your page, and remembered that I always meant to join the ACLU, but never got around to it. Well, I'm a member now. Thanks for the link. I find it amazing that belonging to an organization whose only stated purpose is defending the Constitution - the same oath that the President takes, I might add - is considered a legitimate point for attack by many in this country.
Slashdot Mirror
Well sure, but don't forget that they also said:
Speaking of a girl named Susie,
said she'd do anything to soothe me.
Take off clothes or put them back on.
Ain't that right, Wise?
"Word is born!"
And really, isn't that more insightful?
I'm a member of an antique auto club, and as time passes a lot of the perishable plastic parts from the 50's and 60's are becoming unavailable new. The plastic from those years eventually got brittle and disintegrated. It would be lovely to be able to reproduce these parts using 3d printing tech, but is that even possible given today's state of the art?
I am seriously tempted to carry around a couple of grapefruits in my bag, just so I can stuff them into any exhaust tip that looks big enough to hold one.
"Cat back? No, I don't allow animals in my car."
In 1990, I had what I thought was a spiffy NEC Powermate 286/10 with EGA. I thought that a greyscale hand scanner was the height of digital imaging tech. The only (removable?) ram devices I knew of at the time were ISA cards with battery backups, which don't lend themselves to cameras. There was not yet any such thing as PCMCIA ram cards. As far as I know, the first digital camera with a floppy disk was (ta-da) the Sony Mavica, which didn't come around until what, 1996 or 1997? The patent was non-obvious at the time, so +5 for having a good idea and -50 for not doing anything at all to try to implement it and letting other people do all of the hard work.
I bought my Zaurus in August, and Sharp and Trolltech were both saying something along the lines of "OS X Sync Real Soon Now". Well, it's 9 months later and there's still nothing. The Trolltech site says that there's a version of Qtopia Desktop for OS X, but there's no place to actually download it. I like my Zaurus, mostly, but not being able to sync it with my Mac is really annoying.
She might look hot, but she appears to have a white cloud of some kind of noxious vapor escaping from her crotch area. Thanks, but no thanks.
This is what I'll be doing. Using a GSM phone and my Zaurus with zgps (assuming they ever get the maps feature working, *crosses fingers). Other than basic functions and maybe email at the end of the day, again with the Zaurus and cell phone, I'm not bringing anything. The point of this trip is to cruise across the USA in my car, not, as many have said, to display geekitude that is SO 3 years ago. Na'mean? A full tank of gas and the horizon is what you need for a good road trip. Everything else is bunk.
Does anyone have a link to the announcement in Chinese, or to the Chinese company's site? I'm especially curious to see how they got the name "Godson", since there's no simple Chinese translation for the word "god". If the Chinese term is tian1zi3, which is suspect it is, then it really means "Son of Heaven", another term for the emperor.
Well look, I'm not going to go out and buy A Flock of Seagulls' CD just because I heard it on the GTA commercial and now its stuck in my head, am I? Before mp3's, my only option would be to buy one of those awful compilations off of TV. If I could buy *just that song* for something approaching a reasonable price I might, just to keep A Flock of Seagulls in hair spray for the forseeable future. This is the bit that the RIAA doesn't want to understand, and I think it's interesting that this is exactly the same kind of all-or-nothing bundling of a product that we've seen (and complained about) from PC manufacturers and a certain software company that shall remain nameless.
I remember touring China a few years ago. Everywhere you went, the souveneir stands were selling the same cheap trinkets. Buddhist temples, imperial palaces, whatever - same junk everywhere. The Chinese pop music scene is just about the same. My Chinese friends were SHOCKED that I thought the theme from "Titanic" sucked - they just assumed that all young people in the US swallow the current pop trend without question. Whoever the current model/singer/actress/porn star is, that's who everyone loves, almost without question.
Being different in China is a liability. Few youth subcultures around, and even the ones that do exist (the Beijing rock scene springs to mind) are all different in exactly the same way (and suck in the same way. Seriously.). "Let's all be individuals by doing the same thing!" is the cry going out across the continent.
And meanwhile in Japan this year, hoards of teenagers are dying their hair bright orange and wearing all orange clothes, all trying to rebel by doing the same thing at the same time. Fucking hopeless.
I don't know what will happen to this product. I suppose it will be bad for a lot of people if it simply goes away. I know that I used it a LOT when I first switched to OS X, but the good news (for me at least, and I suspect for others as well) is that I've hardly used it at all recently. OS X has matured enough, and enough software has become available, that my reason for needing VirtualPC in the first place (to run apps that had no equivalent on the Mac) isn't really there anymore.
Good point. The essence of the problem is not that these companies have created these services, it is that the law is so unbelievably complex that these services have become indispensible. We are constantly told that "ignorance of the law is not an excuse", and yet when the law is so impenetrable, and is in turn obscured by case law that no lay person can understand, a society ruled "by law" can suddenly appear to its own citizens to be ruled in a random, arbitrary fashion. The sad fact is that we live in a country ruled by lawyers, and even though none of us seem to trust lawyers, we still overwhelmingly vote lawyers into positions where they can make even more laws, and that's exactly what they do.
Our country is desperately in need of comprehensive legal reform. A nonexpert citizen MUST be able to find out the legality of their actions in a straightforward manner. Having to pay someone $200/hr to interpret the law for you makes us no better than imperial China. The Chinese took it for granted that the law texts would be based on hundreds of years of contradictory, overlapping law documents and rulings written in an impenetrable classical language. And yet here we are in a free country in 2003, and nothing has changed.
Lawyers are the new priests, and the government is God. We need them to intermediate between us and the Lord. But someone's gotta play Martin Luther sooner or later.
Don't you know that distributing wireless access to your neighbors supports terrorism!
That's funny, it seems to me that the people who are stealing the most from companies are the rich bastard executives at the top, who don't actually NEED to steal anything. Most of the rest of the population is just trying to get by as well as we can without causing/getting into trouble. And yet they have the nerve the treat US like criminals.
I am not so desperate for a job that I'd submit to this sort of invasion of privacy. For that matter, I've never once submitted to a drug test either, for the same reason. I'm not smoking pot after work, but know what? Even if I am, it's none of your damned business, unless I come into WORK stoned. Or drunk, for that matter, and yet they're don't give you a blood alcohol test.
My roommate is from Belgium, and she says the same sort of thing. The problem is that in the United States, unlike our friends in the EU, your personal information doesn't actually belong to you. You have no legal right to know who is collecting what information about you, and if you discover that someone IS collecting such information, you have no legal right to tell them to stop. Even if by some miracle you manage to get your name off of one list, they are periodically compared and if your name is on any other lists then it gets on all of them whenever this happens.
This is where all of this marketing crap comes from, essentially, and it is also why none of these schemes will ever be 100% effective. What we need in the USA is a law that says that your personal information is also your personal property, and that no one has the right to spy on you (which is what marketing databases are) without your express consent.
(holds breath, turns blue, dies)
I remember I was listening to the local crap-alt-rock station and some poor sap called and requested a song by the Rolling Stones. The DJ laughed at him and hung up. And then played Creed.
Hip hop and hard rock both have a long history, but you'd never know it from listening to the radio. You'd also never know that there are more than 5 or 6 new records out at any one time. I like Missy Eliot, but WTF are you doing playing "Work It" TWICE an hour? Or the latest steaming turd by Ja Rule? Give us a break, please.
I'm hoping that these things work in waves. Eventually someone will realise that there's a huge group of people who aren't being served by this stuff and take advantage of the market with new stations. Radio execs want high listenership numbers, so hopefully someone will get their head out of their ass and figure out that there are many people who aren't being served by the K-Rocks or the Z100's of the world.
Interesting post, and I agree with almost all of it, but just one point: if you think that NPR is "extreme liberal", then you haven't been paying very close attention.
This is a big, big world with a huge spectrum of political thought, but it doesn't take much effort to be "left" of whatever the most popular view in the US is. Americans talked about how "liberal" Al Gore was, while the rest of the world shook their heads in disbelief. Heads up people: there are no nationally known politicians in the US who are on the "extreme left".
If you think NPR is "extreme left" then I advise that you never leave your home state or visit your local communist bookstore because, honestly, NPR ain't shit.
I was scanning through the replies to find one that expressed what I wanted to say anyway so I could tack on my "Me too!".
My car is also made of metal, is 33 years old, and doesn't have a single transistor anywhere that I know of (radio excepted). When something breaks, I have every tool in my garage that I could possibly need to fix it (except perhaps for a welding machine, which I can rent when I need one). Being able to do the work itself has spared me the pain of dealing with car mechanics who are, in my experience, rarely surpassed for sheer unsavoriness. Hell, even with all of that "outdated" tech I still get 35mpg, which last time I checked was better than the current average of cars sold in the US.
I think its worth noting that in the last year more interesting new music was heard on Mitsubishi and Sprite commercials than on the radio. New, great music comes out all of the time, but there's zero interest in promoting it. Not on MTV, not on the radio, not anywhere. The only way I find out about new music is by reading the alternative press or through word of mouth.
The record industry is an industry of parasites. Their business model is based on relentlessly screwing both the producer of their product (the artists) and the customer. The executives themselves, as in most industries, produce nothing and contribute little. Anyone who's ever worked in a big corporate office can attest to this: the highest level of management spends most of their time schmoozing and going to catered "meetings". Their jobs are the least at risk, they work the shortest hours, and yet they make the most money by several orders of magnitude. I think that C. Brown from Leaders of the New School said it best in "Scenario":
"We're all making pennies on our records, so who makes the paper?
The man in Manhattan laughing in the skyscraper."
We are all responsible for our own actions, and saying that "it's only business" or "the law compelled me to do it" is not an excuse for rude or immoral behavior. You are one human being, undivided, and the ethical sense that drives you to be a good neighbor and member of your family should also move you to act in a reasonable way to your fellow citizens. We never, ever can excuse our actions by saying "it's not personal, it's only business"; we are people acting on other people in the context of a human society - everything we do is personal.
Oh yeah? Well *I* waited until day two (please hold your applause), drive a car made by a no-longer-existent British manufacturer that gets 35mpg, only drink Safeway(tm) Brand Columbian-Esque Koffi Substitute, and don't get cable so I can only watch fuzzy reruns of "Andromeda" when I get home. So you do you like that!....oh.
Check out OpenZaurus 3.0. Lots of the stuff that was broken in the last release works now, and there are new, easier ways of getting the proprietary apps to move over. In many ways OZ is now superior to the Sharp rom.
they've been rolling out a wireless network for a while now, but it has been wildly unsuccessful for a variety of reasons:
1) low on-campus residency rate. There are too many commuters here, and if your laptop isn't in your dormroom then you're probably going to leave it at home when you commute to school.
2) stupid, incomplete coverage. Some FLOORS of some buildings are covered while other floors are not. The network extends down the central mall (outside) but not into the buildings fronting it, and only covers part of the first floor of the library.
I think this kind of thing can only be useful if it exists as part of a real project to cover the entire campus.
I read your page, and remembered that I always meant to join the ACLU, but never got around to it. Well, I'm a member now. Thanks for the link.
I find it amazing that belonging to an organization whose only stated purpose is defending the Constitution - the same oath that the President takes, I might add - is considered a legitimate point for attack by many in this country.
To quote:
"If my dog had a face like that, I'd shave his hiney and make him walk backwards."