Sounds like a VCR programming manual to me ("how do we get our customers to stop flashing 12:00 all the time"). I have to agree--deciphering that header wasted a lot of my brain's CPU time.
I see your point, but I'm not sure that research==bloat in every case. It's a cool-sounding idea. I'm not sure if I'll like it in practice, but it would be nice to not even have to look at the subject of that e-mail from HotMusic.com or other sources of low-priority mail I receive each day, except in one quick sweep at a certain time of day.
Do I want a camera pointed at my head all the time? Probably not. But by all means, research this idea, see if lots of people would like it, and then find a way to package it so that its features are customizable and it can be disabled on a whim. I probably won't like it. I hate the paper clip. But research is what software needs, coupled with the discipline to throw out or fix what doesn't work for the users. Not just the how do I shove more giga-packets through a switch kind, but the how can I make this more useable, for geeks and non-geeks type as well. The other nice feature of this software of course, is that you can stick to your Red Hat box and pretend it never existed.
The beauty of this software is that it knows that. If you read the article, you'll find that a main part of the project is AI that tries to figure out how valuable a particular interruption is to you. When the program sees that e-mail from your wife is important, it will do everything in its power to tell you about it, even away from your desktop (the software will be able to send notifications to your cell phone, your pager, etc, and will choose between these based on where you are at the time). If an e-mail is not so important, then it will wait for a good time to inform you.
The downside: big brother will always be watching. They'll have to work pretty darn hard on privacy part of this (which the interviewee acknowledges).
Judging from your post, you seem like a sarcastic user. I'll tell you why that classifies you as a "lower" member of the IT industry, and not truly "advanced".
Hmmmm... I didn't see "sarcastic user" on the scale. Must be the new 6 category.
Pets.com is suing for exclusive use of the words "pet," "pets," or ".com". Similer actions are being taken by other companies to reclaim these words: amazon yahoo vineyards slash dot books real estate wall street journal
All web sites with these words in their names will likely be reclaimed by their rightful owners in the near future. Also, a ban on use of these words in writing and speech is being worked out in the Senate. As a possible solution in the U.S., some are considering changing the official language to German...
For hours of fun, tell them you are doing the orienteering merit badge this weekend. Put together a large, complicated course, all navigable via compass. Set the scouts loose and watch them wander.
Have you watched televised news or read a newspaper ever in your life? Crimes are reported in detail. Should we ban all news of criminal activity?
It's funny how they do that, isn't it? "next up we have more news on the Oklahoma bombing. The gabby gourmet is going to be our special guest to show you how to make fertilizer bombs. Parents, you might want to supervise your kids, since there are hazards..."
Ok, so that's a little exaggerated, but it's true that they really seem to want to go through every salacious detail. It's like modern journalism is doing everything it can to imitate the yellow journalism of the past, without being labeled as such. As to your question about banning, I'd say no, their purpose is to inform, even though they often do it very badly.
Ebay wants a federal judge to ban a user for life for 'using foul language and flouting its own attempts to ban him.'
Here's one of his postings I found on E-Bay. Obviously, it has been removed by now.
128MB SDRAM -- Early bird special
Users have been flocking down to the stores to get their claws on these. Why not just kick back with your feather pillow and get them from me cheep here on e-bay. At this price you're practically robin the bank! Heck, buy four of them and hawk them at your local pawn chop. Chicks really love a guy with a 128MB SDRAM chip. This is one nest egg you do not want to be without!
"...in other news the backstreet boys have decided to split up and accept lucrative offers from several new, but promising Internet $tartup$. When contacted, the group refused to comment, but their agent told us companies have been calling night and day..."
Now I can have my speech recognizer program listen to what the person on the other end is saying, translate it with the babelfish, and speak it out the ear-piece, while rendering animated 3-D flythroughs of the Mandelbrot set and re-compiling my kernel, at the same time! (note: don't drive while doing this)
But that's not enough to make the blanket statement, "Drugs are wrong."
You are right there. I was trying to make the unpopular argument that somewhere, however deep and dark you want it to be, free speech should have a limit. I realize my argument won't convince everyone, but I believe it was thoughtfully made.
Please don't mod me down for saying this. In fact, this whole article is about censorship. In light of that, I ask you to allow my ideas to stand even though I may not be among those with the majority opinion.
I believe drugs are wrong. I could explain why, but I don't have the time and don't want to take the space to do so. I'll just say I believe it is wrong to use drugs, except for positive medical reasons (no, I'm not going to take space to define this).
I respect the opinions of others. In the United States, we have enough of a concencus that drug use is wrong that we as a representational democracy have created laws banning the use, sale, and production of drugs (obviously many drug users and others disagree). I believe in these laws.
The issue is about balancing two different values.
First, any sane person will at some level agree that drug use is wrong. Ask yourself these questions: Is alcohol use wrong? Is marijuana use wrong? Is LSD use wrong? Is LSD use while driving wrong? Is LSD use while performing heart surgery wrong? Is LSD use while piloting a commercial airliner wrong? Is it wrong to use drugs on someone else for the purpose of rape, kidnapping, or any number of other crimes? At some level in this line of questioning, virtually everyone will answer yes.
Second, we value free speech very highly. The constitution protects free speech, and yet the Supreme Court has ruled that free speech is not supreme. Remember the classic court example of screaming "fire" in a crowded movie theater. This is one example of the many times when speech can harm others.
So far, these two values don't seem to contradict. Yet somewhere along the line, the two values meet each other and require compromise. Do you really think we should be publishing books about anything a person might want to do? Think about these titles: How to build your own nuclear weapons. Six steps to drugging and raping your next date. How to poison a city water supply. How to assasinate (I've heard of such a book being published, but I don't know about the others). How to lure children in your neighborhood into your house so you can fulfill all your sexual fantasies.
Do you really think people have a "right" to read these books? I don't. I suspect most people will agree that there is some limit to free speech. In other words, there is a place where free speech begins to tread on other critical values and the two must compromise.
Free speech is not about writing books on how to do something that is generally agreed to be wrong. Free speech is about our right to share ideas and beliefs. If you believe it is ok to poison a city's water supply, please find a good public forum and share your ideas. But writing a how-to book and sending it to the 6 people in the U.S. who might be crazy enough to do it is not necessarily protected speech.
If you believe drugs should be legalized, please make your arguments, lobby your congresspeople, and donate to your favorite activist group. This is healthy free speech. This is how laws are made. But at the moment, there is enough evidence that drug use is wrong, that we as a nation have made laws against it. Until the arguments in the other direction gather enough strength to have them modified, I'm not convinced there is a constitutional right to distribute drug-making manuals.
I remember a local university election where the computer system went down for a day during a critical part of the elections.
There is always the possibility of forged votes or outright modifications to the DB by hackers. But even without getting into the system, could hackers wait until the votes count is just what they want, and then start a denial of service attack. Or the system could go down on its own. You can bet the winning candidate would want to keep the results, while the other would scream for a re-vote. How bad of a system failure do you have to have before you conduct a re-vote? And do you conduct the vote on the Internet again?
One final, facetious question: Do we really trust our political future in the hands of 10 million AOL users?
Slashdot Mirror
1210 megahertz...
That would be 1210 hertz...
It's new: Pay-Per-Thought; :)
Each time you think about it,
We charge your Visa
time-preference characteristics of consumers
Sounds like a VCR programming manual to me ("how do we get our customers to stop flashing 12:00 all the time"). I have to agree--deciphering that header wasted a lot of my brain's CPU time.
I see your point, but I'm not sure that research==bloat in every case. It's a cool-sounding idea. I'm not sure if I'll like it in practice, but it would be nice to not even have to look at the subject of that e-mail from HotMusic.com or other sources of low-priority mail I receive each day, except in one quick sweep at a certain time of day.
Do I want a camera pointed at my head all the time? Probably not. But by all means, research this idea, see if lots of people would like it, and then find a way to package it so that its features are customizable and it can be disabled on a whim. I probably won't like it. I hate the paper clip. But research is what software needs, coupled with the discipline to throw out or fix what doesn't work for the users. Not just the how do I shove more giga-packets through a switch kind, but the how can I make this more useable, for geeks and non-geeks type as well. The other nice feature of this software of course, is that you can stick to your Red Hat box and pretend it never existed.
The beauty of this software is that it knows that. If you read the article, you'll find that a main part of the project is AI that tries to figure out how valuable a particular interruption is to you. When the program sees that e-mail from your wife is important, it will do everything in its power to tell you about it, even away from your desktop (the software will be able to send notifications to your cell phone, your pager, etc, and will choose between these based on where you are at the time). If an e-mail is not so important, then it will wait for a good time to inform you.
The downside: big brother will always be watching. They'll have to work pretty darn hard on privacy part of this (which the interviewee acknowledges).
Judging from your post, you seem like a sarcastic user. I'll tell you why that classifies you as a "lower" member of the IT industry, and not truly "advanced".
Hmmmm... I didn't see "sarcastic user" on the scale. Must be the new 6 category.
...Is this really worth 3 /. stories?
Maybe Slashdot has somehow been getting free software out of this.
(are(languages(These), nice)
(Easy(to_write(code(bug_free))))
(If(can(read(you, them)))))
Pets.com is suing for exclusive use of the words "pet," "pets," or ".com". Similer actions are being taken by other companies to reclaim these words:
amazon
yahoo
vineyards
slash
dot
books
real
estate
wall
street
journal
All web sites with these words in their names will likely be reclaimed by their rightful owners in the near future. Also, a ban on use of these words in writing and speech is being worked out in the Senate. As a possible solution in the U.S., some are considering changing the official language to German...
For hours of fun, tell them you are doing the orienteering merit badge this weekend. Put together a large, complicated course, all navigable via compass. Set the scouts loose and watch them wander.
With a proper search warrant...
Letters were private,
Then e-mail came. Smile, people,
You're on camera!
Have you watched televised news or read a newspaper ever in your life? Crimes are reported in detail. Should we ban all news of criminal activity?
It's funny how they do that, isn't it? "next up we have more news on the Oklahoma bombing. The gabby gourmet is going to be our special guest to show you how to make fertilizer bombs. Parents, you might want to supervise your kids, since there are hazards..."
Ok, so that's a little exaggerated, but it's true that they really seem to want to go through every salacious detail. It's like modern journalism is doing everything it can to imitate the yellow journalism of the past, without being labeled as such. As to your question about banning, I'd say no, their purpose is to inform, even though they often do it very badly.
Remember the Apache? We've had a hard time getting those to stay in the air, even with a pilot and on Earth.
Da Vinci is sure to be turning in his grave.
Ebay wants a federal judge to ban a user for life for 'using foul language and flouting its own attempts to ban him.'
Here's one of his postings I found on E-Bay. Obviously, it has been removed by now.
128MB SDRAM -- Early bird special
Users have been flocking down to the stores to get their claws on these. Why not just kick back with your feather pillow and get them from me cheep here on e-bay. At this price you're practically robin the bank! Heck, buy four of them and hawk them at your local pawn chop. Chicks really love a guy with a 128MB SDRAM chip. This is one nest egg you do not want to be without!
This is exactly the technique as described on the web site. After one minute, put silence, another song, or your choice of other items.
"...in other news the backstreet boys have decided to split up and accept lucrative offers from several new, but promising Internet $tartup$. When contacted, the group refused to comment, but their agent told us companies have been calling night and day..."
Now I can have my speech recognizer program listen to what the person on the other end is saying, translate it with the babelfish, and speak it out the ear-piece, while rendering animated 3-D flythroughs of the Mandelbrot set and re-compiling my kernel, at the same time! (note: don't drive while doing this)
But that's not enough to make the blanket statement, "Drugs are wrong."
You are right there. I was trying to make the unpopular argument that somewhere, however deep and dark you want it to be, free speech should have a limit. I realize my argument won't convince everyone, but I believe it was thoughtfully made.
How cool... Now we can put music on little laser discs and listen to it in our cars and other places too!
I'm curious why you singled out LSD
No specific reason. The list was only meant to show a spectrum of activities.
#define LSD [drug-of-your-choice]
Also, thank you for your thoughts.
Please don't mod me down for saying this. In fact, this whole article is about censorship. In light of that, I ask you to allow my ideas to stand even though I may not be among those with the majority opinion.
I believe drugs are wrong. I could explain why, but I don't have the time and don't want to take the space to do so. I'll just say I believe it is wrong to use drugs, except for positive medical reasons (no, I'm not going to take space to define this).
I respect the opinions of others. In the United States, we have enough of a concencus that drug use is wrong that we as a representational democracy have created laws banning the use, sale, and production of drugs (obviously many drug users and others disagree). I believe in these laws.
The issue is about balancing two different values.
First, any sane person will at some level agree that drug use is wrong. Ask yourself these questions:
Is alcohol use wrong?
Is marijuana use wrong?
Is LSD use wrong?
Is LSD use while driving wrong?
Is LSD use while performing heart surgery wrong?
Is LSD use while piloting a commercial airliner wrong?
Is it wrong to use drugs on someone else for the purpose of rape, kidnapping, or any number of other crimes? At some level in this line of questioning, virtually everyone will answer yes.
Second, we value free speech very highly. The constitution protects free speech, and yet the Supreme Court has ruled that free speech is not supreme. Remember the classic court example of screaming "fire" in a crowded movie theater. This is one example of the many times when speech can harm others.
So far, these two values don't seem to contradict. Yet somewhere along the line, the two values meet each other and require compromise. Do you really think we should be publishing books about anything a person might want to do? Think about these titles: How to build your own nuclear weapons. Six steps to drugging and raping your next date. How to poison a city water supply. How to assasinate (I've heard of such a book being published, but I don't know about the others). How to lure children in your neighborhood into your house so you can fulfill all your sexual fantasies.
Do you really think people have a "right" to read these books? I don't. I suspect most people will agree that there is some limit to free speech. In other words, there is a place where free speech begins to tread on other critical values and the two must compromise.
Free speech is not about writing books on how to do something that is generally agreed to be wrong. Free speech is about our right to share ideas and beliefs. If you believe it is ok to poison a city's water supply, please find a good public forum and share your ideas. But writing a how-to book and sending it to the 6 people in the U.S. who might be crazy enough to do it is not necessarily protected speech.
If you believe drugs should be legalized, please make your arguments, lobby your congresspeople, and donate to your favorite activist group. This is healthy free speech. This is how laws are made. But at the moment, there is enough evidence that drug use is wrong, that we as a nation have made laws against it. Until the arguments in the other direction gather enough strength to have them modified, I'm not convinced there is a constitutional right to distribute drug-making manuals.
You can find them here .
I remember a local university election where the computer system went down for a day during a critical part of the elections.
There is always the possibility of forged votes or outright modifications to the DB by hackers. But even without getting into the system, could hackers wait until the votes count is just what they want, and then start a denial of service attack. Or the system could go down on its own. You can bet the winning candidate would want to keep the results, while the other would scream for a re-vote. How bad of a system failure do you have to have before you conduct a re-vote? And do you conduct the vote on the Internet again?
One final, facetious question: Do we really trust our political future in the hands of 10 million AOL users?