Was the Tibetan Govt in Exile really worried that they couldn't get hosted in - oh, I dunno - the USA?
While it sounds like they think of themselves as a bunch of white knights, I doubt it's primarily a lofty speech issue - these guys will end up hosting the lunatic fringe that no one else would touch largely for legal reasons that are grey at best in most countries where they answer the phones.
If all they do is host annoying clients - gambling and the like, then it's a real non-story and these guys are just amusing themselves.
And if someone really wants to drop the hammer on one of their clients, they can always go upstream - this is satellite linked after all, and Sealand doesn't have any control over that.
Plus, anyone can sue the companies doing the business with Sealand - it doesn't seem to offer incorporation for these businesses - so there's still a base of business and people obviously in charge that can get the law sic'd on them, no matter where the servers are.
About the time they went from LEDs to LCDs, there was a persistent bug in most TI handheld calculators - I seem to remember it into the 1980s - calculate 2^3, minus 8 and you didn't get zero - you got a very small decimal. Doh!
A check of many calculators today can give you some measure of internal accuracy - I use 123.456, take the square root, then square it. You get 123.456 - no surprise. Then do it sqrt twice, then sq twice, then three times each, and so on - many calculators can do seven down, then seven back up and still end up with 123.456 again. Some crap out after just two. I think the most I've seen is 11.
According to the McAfee entry, you need not only the payload in the jpeg file (that sounds reasonable) but an extractor to be on the computer already (also reasonable). But it's also ridiculous design. All the payloads in the world will be useless without the extractor, and that's the 'real' virus here - as long as you protect / remove the extractor, the payloaded jpegs will lie there just being slightly stranger jpegs. Nobody's said so far if the jpegs are simply inserted, meshed, or even one-bit stego'd with the payload - that would render a slightly - maybe imperceptibly - altered jpeg - the entry says the jpegs they saw were 11K bloated with the payload. I remember basically not being able to discern a pretty substantial stash of data in PICT files with the old Stego program on the Mac.
I still have a question with them seeming to have a harem of virus authors who send them stuff - hoping this is a collection of trusted white hats. But if you wanted to employ a stable of kiddies who can think up some pretty far-fetched schemes like this one to keep you rolling in definition updates, it would look a lot like this.
Sure, jpegs are all over the place in the web, but that's negated by the sheer number of different images - the reliability of getting a particular jpeg to deliver your particular payload are astronomical, and without doing the math, the delivery method can seem very close to moot. IMHO this is a real stretch in terms of eventual effectiveness as a virus. But it's late on a friday - braver souls might do the math and correct all these conjectures.
I think nuclear engineering is fascinating. I also think using a nuclear weapon is the single most destructive thing we could even imagine doing (thought a sequence of dumb mistakes could snowball into worse). The ability to hold those two seemingly contradictory ideas in the same mind is what makes "The Curve of Binding Energy" one of the best technology reads around. You appreciate the allure of the science and the folly of forcing new technologies as a fix for fundamental human nature issues.
After 50+ years of nuclear weapon development, let's face it. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. We are the only country ever to use the device in a non-test, and there are two countries with far less than an escalating world war at stake who are apparently toying with the idea of tossing a few of these around in the name of God(s).
"The valley is an emerald set in pearls; a land of lakes, clear streams, green turf, magnificient trees and mighty mountains where the air is cool, and the water sweet, where men are strong, and women vie with the soil in fruitfulness. " (Walter Lawrence) which India and Pakistan are willing to use as their nuclear badminton court. Nice.
We'd better know how they work and how to handle them.
Additionally, this is the sort of research that also allowed us to spend enough money to make the USSR play catch-up and collapse their regime. Forcing the Soviets into the poor house and then getting them towards a market economy, a seat outside the door at NATO and increasingly open communication is also far better than blowing them (and likely ourselves) off the map. If simulations got us along this path, then fine.
Do I agree that this was all the best way to do things? Nope. Were there scary possibilities that were minutes from happening along the way? Devastatingly so.
Does saber-rattling with nukes suck? Yes. But saber-rattling with virtual nukes sucks far less.
As you live longer, one of the things you realize is that all to often you're lucky if it's only two evils you have to choose the lesser of.
Sobering, sad, but often true.
Show2Book - Old wine in New Bottles
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From the start, this guy struck me as a self-promoting, cloying whiner. He still does. Of course so do Bezos, Jobs and Gates, but with them it's a side-effect of changing the world.
In interviews, he's almost unwatchable - think Quentin Tarantino meets Eddie Haskell - waaaaay too much energy for the pedestrian content and waaaaay to sickly-sweet-cute for anyone who's not got an insulin pump and extra batteries for it.
This guy's apparently doing it just to hear his himself talk, because there are far better stories to be told. As Rob Reiner once related, Don't say it's a hot day today - everyone already knows it's hot and you just reminded us. Don't say you like pie - everyone likes pie and you didn't bring any with you. But say something true, say something original, and the world will beat a path to your door.
As for desks made of doors - what's to wonder about? Could you imagine the Amazon bottom line if every employee had the full Herman Miller setup?
See how annoying one man's superfluous rant can be?;-)
They tried this a while back - get to work, go to a window, get your laptop and cell phone, head off to work in your 'office', the caf, outside, etc. They ditched it after finding it was hell to find anyone to have a meeting, which is still necessary no matter how much cyber you want to throw at a situation. One manager had a two-around rule - if he had to walk around the campus twice to find someone he needed, screw them - go on to something workable.
I had a 'clear" IIIe, and early m100, both of which I gave away to colleagues and are still working just fine. Can't remember recalibrating them more than a time or two, they sync right up, though I think the IR on the m100 is shot - honestly? most of what I did with it was impress other people by frivolously beaming something to another Palm just to show it can be done.
I'm now on a Visor Neo - which I'll prolly give to my fiancee now that the Edge is so cheap. (plus, next to my iBook, the Smoke colored Neo looks like it was made by Black -) and the dirt-colored Wintel box).
As for the 'third time' - um, your implied choices are "maybe more crap" and "DEFINITELY NO PDA"
Right now you can get a Visor Neo for $147 at any WalMart. Sturdier, far more expandable, a screen that mops the floor with the m1xx series.
I've decided I need a minimal PDA given the 4-lb iBook - when I was on my 7-lb PB1400 I used the Palms far more than now - and the greyscale 8MB does 80% of what I need to know/do/see walking around. I know the Treo communicators combine two useful things, but I have yet to actually see one being used.
I figure I'm going to sit on it or drop kick it sooner or later, so I won't sink major bucks into such a thing. Same reason Ihaven't gotten an iPod - there's a detente about heft and size that seems to determine dropability - I've dropped my eMap a lot, but never lost my GPS12 - never booted a CD Player, but my MP3 player is hard to keep ahold of. The iBook has yet to slip loose, but the Palms are always being saved by a quick stab. In the same vein, I've cut myself with every keychain-sized knife or tool I've ever tried to carry, but never so much as a nick from my trusty Victorinox Soldier.
To be fair, he gave it two stars after seeing a lousily-projected screening - with worse image quality than even net-based trailers. And a lot of the review is well above the level of discussing the film, but rather discusses the experience of his expectations, backstory, and lots of things that have little if anything to do with sitting in the theatre and experiencing the film *per se*.
I saw TPM three times in the theatre - yes, it was flawed, but visually stunning, a new set of characters and stories, two new sterling actors, and - maybe you missed this - but they told four stories simultaneously in the last 'act' - pretty amazing.
I am usually on the same rail as Ebert, but there are times when he just doesn't know how to have enough fun - go read his review of Raising Arizona - he has little if any idea how funny and infectious the movie is. So I reserve the right to take his reviews of 'fun; movies with a grain of salt.
No way this comapny was going to see the light of day under BMG (or any tradition-bound record co's) stewardship: from the Dataplay story a while back, I repeat:
"The RIAA should kiss Shawn's nappy little ass for providing the only true breakthru in music marketing since the music video. But as usual, the industry has figured out how to tie the whole relaunch up in knots because even BMG really doesn't like the whole thing but they smell money. I doubt it was a sanctified "we should be honestly representing our artist's interest" but rather a pant-wetting "holy crap - see these DL logs? can you imagine a dollar sign in front of each of these?" I mean please - it's taken them a year to not get ready, and from the get go they won't be able to write a MacOS client (no mention of any other platforms) and they can't for the life of them figure out how to take credit AND debit cards at the same time. There are one-man roasted cashew operations in East Rainbucket, Maine who can do this. I gotta go.
I'd sell my soul (or what's left of it after 16 years of parochial education) for a stylus that has something in it that makes the iBook trackpad think it's my finger.
Who's going to lug a tablet around just to have handwriting recogntion? If we can get by with graffiti on a teenie input space, perhaps we can get by with Inkwell if we had a stylus that can write on the area of a typical apple trackpad.
is this pie in the sky or within the realm...?
(yikes - i see now even my 1400's trackpad is about the size of the palm m1xx series lcd...)
Cupertino CA - Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, and Bill Atkinson, members of the original Macintosh team committed mass seppuku today on DeAnza Blvd. When asked why, they replied "we'd read this article on slashdot about stuffing a PeeCee into a classic Mac, and we thought someone must be rolling over in their grave. But then we remebered we're not dead yet, so we had to push the project along..."
Possible? Yes. Realistic? No.
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Since it's still way too expensive to even assemble and use geosync. PV satellites as described by Glaser et. al., then how could it ever be productive to launch something just as large to sit there and RELAY power coming from another more expsnsive installation 240,000 miles away? It's not.
Once upon a time we made ourrsleves believe that we could build lots of safe, effective, cheap nuclear power plants. In theory - yes. Practically - no. Why? Becasue when you look at things as a physicist, anything within the bounds of the laws of physics can be classified as a good idea. Hand it to an engineer, and you run up against a whole new set of limits that fall into the category of 'practical'. Then try to sell it to the public, and you have to address the realistic needs and wants of real people who you were supposed to be helping in the first place.
Please remember that our largest excursion series to the moon - Apollo - simply moved about 100 tons of equipment (16 tons six times) - and that was just to tool around for a few days each time. This power plan entails mining, smelting, metals purification, HIGH PRECISION manufacturing (you esssentially have to build a semiconductor factory to make PVs), etc... it's one thing to ask people to assemble fully debugged building blocks on Station, and if we can do that. why bother launching it to the moon?
And how you gonna get that much-ballyhooed railgun in place and working on the moon? They are another high precision, high maintenance piece of work. The Lunar Module Ascent Stage engines had exactly two working parts and a backup for each, and talk to the moon walkers about how much sweating they did over that simple little detail. I've seen a simple testbed railgun (firing mere bricks) go south, and would not want to be nearby in an EVA suit when it happens. There are far more practical details to doing this than the theory suggests.
I envision many large boxes marked "ACME" whenever people start spouting things like "get a railgun" , "go to the moon", "shoot stuff back". I spoke with Gerry O'Neill about these schemes several times when he was still with us - and while I admired him as a visionary, you still have to place all these use-the-moon schemes as Velikofsky in the 40s. Yes, it eventually worked. Yes, it was exciting. Is anyone going to the moon since for any practical reasons? No. Were there valuable spin-offs? Many. But no-one at NASA ever deluded themselves into thinking that the Apollo missions were worth billions of dollars as a geology field trip. And no one will go to the moon to build power stations simply because we need energy. We have energy. We need a better financial model and a better distribution network.
WTF is a terrawatt?
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If it's a goof - frag'em. (I know - we all mis-spell, but this is a Big Deal Scientist and this article made it past a science writer and an editor, eh?)
If it's a pun- frag'em then frag the fragments.
We'll give the author and the researcher the houses right next to the microwave receivers so they can then deal with the inherent problems in controlling a 240,000 mile long MASER beam when there's a 2+ second lag in your feedback loop for aiming those TERAwatts back to a constantly moving hand-off receiver network. (the moon may always show the same face to the earth, but it don't work the other way around - no spot on earth can see the moon all day - and for much of THAT time the geometry sucks)
OK - so go to a TDRS type satellite network - geostationary final leg - then tell me that it's more efficient to develop a microwave receiver farm from scratch (rectennas still only exist as science-fair-sized demos - this is like launching an estes Big Bertha then asking NASA to let you build the next gen shuttle...) than to just ramp up production on terrestrial PV cells?
The original PV geosynchronous satellite plan (Glaser et. al.,) is still too expensive to be implemented - and that would just be the final leg - imagine getting a manufacturing plant to the moon! We only put 16 tons of stuff on the moon six (ok we tried a 7th) times. And that was just to scott around for a weekend.
We're already getting upwards of a kilowatt-hour per square meter in most places on earth that need it - why not use what's here?
5 Britney Spears album on one un-erasable disk? Oh, the humanity.
Napster comes in, CD sales go up 8%. Napster goes OUT, CD sales go DOWN 5%.
What in the Sam Hill are they putting in the water coolers at the RIAA?
If I can hear the music first, I'll buy it. If, like in central CT, there are two dozen candy-ass radio stations all following maybe four godforsaken formats, there's a better likelyhood that I'll hemorrhage from hearing "Rock The Boat" seventeen times a day before I'll hear something I want to try.
Of course, if MTV would try playing music again, maybe we'd have another venue for music that wasn't an inch wide and a mile deep. Not convinced? Here's the show list for the plucky little channel...
Andy Dick / Becoming / Celebrity Deathmatch / Cribs / Daria / Diary / Dismissed / Fashionably Loud: Swimsuit 2002 Fear / Icon: Aerosmith / Making The Band / Making the Video Movie Awards 2002 / National Sex Quiz / Now What The Osbournes / The Real World / Road Rules / Real World/Road Rules Challenge / Rock N Jock Señor Moby's House of Music / Spring Break / TRL / Unplugged / Video Music Awards 2001 / WWF Tough Enough
Any channel that has The Osbornes, Andy Dick, the Real World and the WWF needs a name change, a new mission statement, and a prescription pad.
Like most people who can afford the necesary bandwidth in the first place, I have more money than time. I haven't the hours nor the inclination to burn everything I want to own. I go buy it. HMV and Borders are on my commute. Or I click and three days later it's in my mailbox, total extra investment of time - about 3 minutes.
I've downloaded much gig of music, and deleted nearly all of it once purchased. It's an iBook, not a server farm. I believe I have at most a half dozen CD-R keepers - mostly the stuff I'd gotten and paid for on mp3.com back when they were sane, and a whole bunch of rare tracks and but-wait-there's-more - the entire TIAA-CREF investment primer library so I can afford all this stuff in the first place (lousy beat, but you can dance to it all the way to the bank).
If I burned everything I ever downloaded to sample, I'd have a large, substandard collection of badly labeled CD-Rs, no life, dead tropical fish, and Howard-Hughes-league fingernails. Not to mention a cataloging system nowhere near the intuitiveness and familiarity of a bookcase, alphabetical by artist.
The RIAA should kiss Shawn's nappy little ass for providing the only true breakthru in music marketing since the music video. But as usual, the industry has figured out how to tie the whole relaunch up in knots because even BMG really doesn't like the whole thing but they smell money. I doubt it was a sanctified "we should be honestly representing our artist's interest" but rather a pant-wetting "holy crap - see these DL logs? can you imagine a dollar sign in front of each of these?" I mean please - it's taken them a year to not get ready, and from the get go they won't be able to write a MacOS client (no mention of any other platforms) and they can't for the life of them figure out how to take credit AND debit cards at the same time. There are one-man roasted cashew operations in East Rainbucket, Maine who can do this.
The "national ID" talk is irresponsible - given that we just passed the 50% point on who has net access in the US. It's just as useless as using Driver Licenses. Please .
Ah, the titanium spork - a glimpse of the sacred within the profane.
Seriously, i trust the spork - I don't trust many of the titanium bike builders out there - do it right (Tom Kellogg) and you have a dream to ride. Do it wrong, and you've got something that will leave you cursing technology and send you right back to your trusty CroMo or Aluminum steed. And it's very very easy to do it wrong.
...there is a solution that is simple, obvious, elegant, and wrong.
Eventually I'll get to Soros, but for now let's look at the choice of words in the post:
Our invasive American culture is THEIR choice - last time I checked, the McDonald's franchise punch list did not include armed invasion. Soneone in every place where there's a McD's, Coca Cola, Polo, or US motion picure - the locals had to make it so. You don't get too many US franchises without someone on the receiving end, real estate, vendors, zoning, import & export officials letting if not inviting you to do it.
Also - let's not cross the line and infer by omission that 9/11 was or is any indication of the opinion of anyone but the perpetrators of the terrorism. "Others" is far too unbounded a term to us to describe the marginal combatants who sent two flying bombs into the financial center of the US.
The world has been "globalized" in the modern sense since WWI. This all is nothing new. What is new is the speed at which it can happen, and the facility with which anyone can get their nose in front of a camera. Giant puppets don't mean anything except that they are easier to see and therefore take advantage of the technology of video cameras and the individual predelictions of the TV news producers.
We say "globalization" as if there were any other choice for the only known planet filled with one race of planet-shaping beings.
The real action point comes down to individuals and entities that make the decisions. Nike is responsible for what they do, not America. And before you say it's our laws that let Nike (as an example) do (whatever), it takes two to tango. Is a Nike factory a forced invasion? Is Nike removing Asian teens from their six-figure suites and putting them in a factory? Fill in your favorite offender. The country they're in wanted them there - if they didn't, they wouldn't be there. They decided that this was the best offer they could get. Just like we all decide that minimum wage is right where we want it. If it weren't, we'd vote out anyone who disagreed with it right? Again. Individual choice. The politician's to vote a certain way and ours to sack them. But we have yet to learn the ppower of our (voting) choices, even after the 2000 elections.
And it works both ways. The upper south is now an annex of Asian auto manufacturers. Fuji Heavy makes tanks, but they didn't need them to raise their Subaru plants. Alabama just gave away the store to Hyundai to get them in the state. It was a company and a state government who did this.
Point is, hammering away at an abstract called 'globalization' will do little to change whatever someone wants changed. Put down the puppets, become someone who can make a decision in the direction you wish to, and do something real.
I teach. Every day I make sure that at least in part, my aid to my students includes the messsage that doing is better than wishing, that action is more effective than mentalism, that if you don't work for what you want you will get what someone else wants you to have.
None of this involves carnage against living beings for living as they do. 9/11 is not the untinkable thought in the minds of the rest of the world. While I think Dubya is a little too fond of hearing himself say 'evildoers', it does boil down to individuals who decide to make war, or who design or agree to a sweatshop. Someone has to decide to do these things. We need to make individuals more congizant, enlightened of their actions and consequences.
Globalization's not inherently evil, it's not inherently good. It's inevitable. Consider it as a technology and realize that it only is considerable in specific instances. We learned this lesson at Trinity, but alas, teachers know that that wonderful mental agent called transference never works the way its supposed to.
OK - SUPPOSE there's a US Govt agency with $1B SUPPOSE that $ is in a black budget SUPPOSE they built this thing. So... Exactly WHAT is an agency of the US Gov going to crack that will allow it to gain exactly WHAT money to amortize it's $1B that won't be missed?
We did external research for Apple, and we had a dozen or so elementary students testing pre-release hardware and software for Apple ATG... they realized the kids couldn't sign a meaningful, binding contract,so we sorta shrugged over it, I read the kids the riot act, made them stand on one leg, raise their right hands, etc... and we all made it through - the lead time to rollout was only about a quarter, so it went OK - but we all held our breath for 90 days. One of the Apple employees on a site visit mentioned that on the flight out, he was seated next to a woman who found out he worked for Apple and was supremely interested in what he did, questioning him incessantly for most of the trip. When they landed, she handed him her business card - an intellectual property lawyer who had recently worked for Apple and decided to see how much of a secret he could keep. She congratulated him on passing with flying colors.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the Tibetan Govt in Exile really worried that they couldn't get hosted in - oh, I dunno - the USA?
While it sounds like they think of themselves as a bunch of white knights, I doubt it's primarily a lofty speech issue - these guys will end up hosting the lunatic fringe that no one else would touch largely for legal reasons that are grey at best in most countries where they answer the phones.
If all they do is host annoying clients - gambling and the like, then it's a real non-story and these guys are just amusing themselves.
And if someone really wants to drop the hammer on one of their clients, they can always go upstream - this is satellite linked after all, and Sealand doesn't have any control over that.
Plus, anyone can sue the companies doing the business with Sealand - it doesn't seem to offer incorporation for these businesses - so there's still a base of business and people obviously in charge that can get the law sic'd on them, no matter where the servers are.
What a tangled web (sorry - had to). Not as pretty as Bill Cheswick's map, but certainly just as enlightening.
About the time they went from LEDs to LCDs, there was a persistent bug in most TI handheld calculators - I seem to remember it into the 1980s - calculate 2^3, minus 8 and you didn't get zero - you got a very small decimal. Doh!
A check of many calculators today can give you some measure of internal accuracy - I use 123.456, take the square root, then square it. You get 123.456 - no surprise. Then do it sqrt twice, then sq twice, then three times each, and so on - many calculators can do seven down, then seven back up and still end up with 123.456 again. Some crap out after just two. I think the most I've seen is 11.
According to the McAfee entry, you need not only the payload in the jpeg file (that sounds reasonable) but an extractor to be on the computer already (also reasonable). But it's also ridiculous design. All the payloads in the world will be useless without the extractor, and that's the 'real' virus here - as long as you protect / remove the extractor, the payloaded jpegs will lie there just being slightly stranger jpegs. Nobody's said so far if the jpegs are simply inserted, meshed, or even one-bit stego'd with the payload - that would render a slightly - maybe imperceptibly - altered jpeg - the entry says the jpegs they saw were 11K bloated with the payload. I remember basically not being able to discern a pretty substantial stash of data in PICT files with the old Stego program on the Mac.
I still have a question with them seeming to have a harem of virus authors who send them stuff - hoping this is a collection of trusted white hats. But if you wanted to employ a stable of kiddies who can think up some pretty far-fetched schemes like this one to keep you rolling in definition updates, it would look a lot like this.
Sure, jpegs are all over the place in the web, but that's negated by the sheer number of different images - the reliability of getting a particular jpeg to deliver your particular payload are astronomical, and without doing the math, the delivery method can seem very close to moot. IMHO this is a real stretch in terms of eventual effectiveness as a virus. But it's late on a friday - braver souls might do the math and correct all these conjectures.
I think nuclear engineering is fascinating. I also think using a nuclear weapon is the single most destructive thing we could even imagine doing (thought a sequence of dumb mistakes could snowball into worse). The ability to hold those two seemingly contradictory ideas in the same mind is what makes "The Curve of Binding Energy" one of the best technology reads around. You appreciate the allure of the science and the folly of forcing new technologies as a fix for fundamental human nature issues.
After 50+ years of nuclear weapon development, let's face it. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. We are the only country ever to use the device in a non-test, and there are two countries with far less than an escalating world war at stake who are apparently toying with the idea of tossing a few of these around in the name of God(s).
"The valley is an emerald set in pearls; a land of lakes, clear streams, green turf, magnificient trees and mighty mountains where the air is cool, and the water sweet, where men are strong, and women vie with the soil in fruitfulness. " (Walter Lawrence) which India and Pakistan are willing to use as their nuclear badminton court. Nice.
We'd better know how they work and how to handle them.
Additionally, this is the sort of research that also allowed us to spend enough money to make the USSR play catch-up and collapse their regime. Forcing the Soviets into the poor house and then getting them towards a market economy, a seat outside the door at NATO and increasingly open communication is also far better than blowing them (and likely ourselves) off the map. If simulations got us along this path, then fine.
Do I agree that this was all the best way to do things? Nope. Were there scary possibilities that were minutes from happening along the way? Devastatingly so.
Does saber-rattling with nukes suck? Yes.
But saber-rattling with virtual nukes sucks far less.
As you live longer, one of the things you realize is that all to often you're lucky if it's only two evils you have to choose the lesser of.
Sobering, sad, but often true.
From the start, this guy struck me as a self-promoting, cloying whiner. He still does. Of course so do Bezos, Jobs and Gates, but with them it's a side-effect of changing the world.
;-)
In interviews, he's almost unwatchable - think Quentin Tarantino meets Eddie Haskell - waaaaay too much energy for the pedestrian content and waaaaay to sickly-sweet-cute for anyone who's not got an insulin pump and extra batteries for it.
This guy's apparently doing it just to hear his himself talk, because there are far better stories to be told. As Rob Reiner once related, Don't say it's a hot day today - everyone already knows it's hot and you just reminded us. Don't say you like pie - everyone likes pie and you didn't bring any with you. But say something true, say something original, and the world will beat a path to your door.
As for desks made of doors - what's to wonder about? Could you imagine the Amazon bottom line if every employee had the full Herman Miller setup?
See how annoying one man's superfluous rant can be?
Bless their hearts. gnupod, anyone?
They tried this a while back - get to work, go to a window, get your laptop and cell phone, head off to work in your 'office', the caf, outside, etc. They ditched it after finding it was hell to find anyone to have a meeting, which is still necessary no matter how much cyber you want to throw at a situation. One manager had a two-around rule - if he had to walk around the campus twice to find someone he needed, screw them - go on to something workable.
I had a 'clear" IIIe, and early m100, both of which I gave away to colleagues and are still working just fine. Can't remember recalibrating them more than a time or two, they sync right up, though I think the IR on the m100 is shot - honestly? most of what I did with it was impress other people by frivolously beaming something to another Palm just to show it can be done.
I'm now on a Visor Neo - which I'll prolly give to my fiancee now that the Edge is so cheap. (plus, next to my iBook, the Smoke colored Neo looks like it was made by Black -) and the dirt-colored Wintel box).
As for the 'third time' - um, your implied choices are "maybe more crap" and "DEFINITELY NO PDA"
Right now you can get a Visor Neo for $147 at any WalMart. Sturdier, far more expandable, a screen that mops the floor with the m1xx series.
I've decided I need a minimal PDA given the 4-lb iBook - when I was on my 7-lb PB1400 I used the Palms far more than now - and the greyscale 8MB does 80% of what I need to know/do/see walking around. I know the Treo communicators combine two useful things, but I have yet to actually see one being used.
I figure I'm going to sit on it or drop kick it sooner or later, so I won't sink major bucks into such a thing. Same reason Ihaven't gotten an iPod - there's a detente about heft and size that seems to determine dropability - I've dropped my eMap a lot, but never lost my GPS12 - never booted a CD Player, but my MP3 player is hard to keep ahold of. The iBook has yet to slip loose, but the Palms are always being saved by a quick stab. In the same vein, I've cut myself with every keychain-sized knife or tool I've ever tried to carry, but never so much as a nick from my trusty Victorinox Soldier.
Go figure.
Twice as many messages about kazaa than about this (posting time nonwithstanding).
Fraud? Hunh.
Financial ruin? Feh.
Futz with my free junk? Aiiiiiiii!
To be fair, he gave it two stars after seeing a lousily-projected screening - with worse image quality than even net-based trailers. And a lot of the review is well above the level of discussing the film, but rather discusses the experience of his expectations, backstory, and lots of things that have little if anything to do with sitting in the theatre and experiencing the film *per se*.
I saw TPM three times in the theatre - yes, it was flawed, but visually stunning, a new set of characters and stories, two new sterling actors, and - maybe you missed this - but they told four stories simultaneously in the last 'act' - pretty amazing.
I am usually on the same rail as Ebert, but there are times when he just doesn't know how to have enough fun - go read his review of Raising Arizona - he has little if any idea how funny and infectious the movie is. So I reserve the right to take his reviews of 'fun; movies with a grain of salt.
No way this comapny was going to see the light of day under BMG (or any tradition-bound record co's) stewardship: from the Dataplay story a while back, I repeat:
"The RIAA should kiss Shawn's nappy little ass for providing the only true breakthru in music marketing since the music video. But as usual, the industry has figured out how to tie the whole relaunch up in knots because even BMG really doesn't like the whole thing but they smell money. I doubt it was a sanctified "we should be honestly representing our artist's interest" but rather a pant-wetting "holy crap - see these DL logs? can you imagine a dollar sign in front of each of these?" I mean please - it's taken them a year to not get ready, and from the get go they won't be able to write a MacOS client (no mention of any other platforms) and they can't for the life of them figure out how to take credit AND debit cards at the same time. There are one-man roasted cashew operations in East Rainbucket, Maine who can do this.
I gotta go.
I'd sell my soul (or what's left of it after 16 years of parochial education) for a stylus that has something in it that makes the iBook trackpad think it's my finger.
Who's going to lug a tablet around just to have handwriting recogntion? If we can get by with graffiti on a teenie input space, perhaps we can get by with Inkwell if we had a stylus that can write on the area of a typical apple trackpad.
is this pie in the sky or within the realm...?
(yikes - i see now even my 1400's trackpad is about the size of the palm m1xx series lcd...)
Cupertino CA - Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, and Bill Atkinson, members of the original Macintosh team committed mass seppuku today on DeAnza Blvd. When asked why, they replied "we'd read this article on slashdot about stuffing a PeeCee into a classic Mac, and we thought someone must be rolling over in their grave. But then we remebered we're not dead yet, so we had to push the project along..."
Since it's still way too expensive to even assemble and use geosync. PV satellites as described by Glaser et. al., then how could it ever be productive to launch something just as large to sit there and RELAY power coming from another more expsnsive installation 240,000 miles away? It's not.
Once upon a time we made ourrsleves believe that we could build lots of safe, effective, cheap nuclear power plants. In theory - yes. Practically - no. Why? Becasue when you look at things as a physicist, anything within the bounds of the laws of physics can be classified as a good idea. Hand it to an engineer, and you run up against a whole new set of limits that fall into the category of 'practical'. Then try to sell it to the public, and you have to address the realistic needs and wants of real people who you were supposed to be helping in the first place.
Please remember that our largest excursion series to the moon - Apollo - simply moved about 100 tons of equipment (16 tons six times) - and that was just to tool around for a few days each time. This power plan entails mining, smelting, metals purification, HIGH PRECISION manufacturing (you esssentially have to build a semiconductor factory to make PVs), etc... it's one thing to ask people to assemble fully debugged building blocks on Station, and if we can do that. why bother launching it to the moon?
And how you gonna get that much-ballyhooed railgun in place and working on the moon? They are another high precision, high maintenance piece of work. The Lunar Module Ascent Stage engines had exactly two working parts and a backup for each, and talk to the moon walkers about how much sweating they did over that simple little detail. I've seen a simple testbed railgun (firing mere bricks) go south, and would not want to be nearby in an EVA suit when it happens. There are far more practical details to doing this than the theory suggests.
I envision many large boxes marked "ACME" whenever people start spouting things like "get a railgun" , "go to the moon", "shoot stuff back". I spoke with Gerry O'Neill about these schemes several times when he was still with us - and while I admired him as a visionary, you still have to place all these use-the-moon schemes as Velikofsky in the 40s. Yes, it eventually worked. Yes, it was exciting. Is anyone going to the moon since for any practical reasons? No. Were there valuable spin-offs? Many. But no-one at NASA ever deluded themselves into thinking that the Apollo missions were worth billions of dollars as a geology field trip. And no one will go to the moon to build power stations simply because we need energy. We have energy. We need a better financial model and a better distribution network.
If it's a goof - frag'em.
(I know - we all mis-spell, but this is a Big Deal Scientist and this article made it past a science writer and an editor, eh?)
If it's a pun- frag'em then frag the fragments.
We'll give the author and the researcher the houses right next to the microwave receivers so they can then deal with the inherent problems in controlling a 240,000 mile long MASER beam when there's a 2+ second lag in your feedback loop for aiming those TERAwatts back to a constantly moving hand-off receiver network. (the moon may always show the same face to the earth, but it don't work the other way around - no spot on earth can see the moon all day - and for much of THAT time the geometry sucks)
OK - so go to a TDRS type satellite network - geostationary final leg - then tell me that it's more efficient to develop a microwave receiver farm from scratch (rectennas still only exist as science-fair-sized demos - this is like launching an estes Big Bertha then asking NASA to let you build the next gen shuttle...) than to just ramp up production on terrestrial PV cells?
The original PV geosynchronous satellite plan (Glaser et. al.,) is still too expensive to be implemented - and that would just be the final leg - imagine getting a manufacturing plant to the moon! We only put 16 tons of stuff on the moon six (ok we tried a 7th) times. And that was just to scott around for a weekend.
We're already getting upwards of a kilowatt-hour per square meter in most places on earth that need it - why not use what's here?
5 Britney Spears album on one un-erasable disk? Oh, the humanity.
Napster comes in, CD sales go up 8%.
Napster goes OUT, CD sales go DOWN 5%.
What in the Sam Hill are they putting in the water coolers at the RIAA?
If I can hear the music first, I'll buy it. If, like in central CT, there are two dozen candy-ass radio stations all following maybe four godforsaken formats, there's a better likelyhood that I'll hemorrhage from hearing "Rock The Boat" seventeen times a day before I'll hear something I want to try.
Of course, if MTV would try playing music again, maybe we'd have another venue for music that wasn't an inch wide and a mile deep. Not convinced? Here's the show list for the plucky little channel...
Andy Dick / Becoming / Celebrity Deathmatch / Cribs / Daria / Diary / Dismissed / Fashionably Loud: Swimsuit 2002
Fear / Icon: Aerosmith / Making The Band / Making the Video Movie Awards 2002 / National Sex Quiz / Now What
The Osbournes / The Real World / Road Rules / Real World/Road Rules Challenge / Rock N Jock
Señor Moby's House of Music / Spring Break / TRL / Unplugged / Video Music Awards 2001 / WWF Tough Enough
Any channel that has The Osbornes, Andy Dick, the Real World and the WWF needs a name change, a new mission statement, and a prescription pad.
Like most people who can afford the necesary bandwidth in the first place, I have more money than time. I haven't the hours nor the inclination to burn everything I want to own. I go buy it. HMV and Borders are on my commute. Or I click and three days later it's in my mailbox, total extra investment of time - about 3 minutes.
I've downloaded much gig of music, and deleted nearly all of it once purchased. It's an iBook, not a server farm. I believe I have at most a half dozen CD-R keepers - mostly the stuff I'd gotten and paid for on mp3.com back when they were sane, and a whole bunch of rare tracks and but-wait-there's-more - the entire TIAA-CREF investment primer library so I can afford all this stuff in the first place (lousy beat, but you can dance to it all the way to the bank).
If I burned everything I ever downloaded to sample, I'd have a large, substandard collection of badly labeled CD-Rs, no life, dead tropical fish, and Howard-Hughes-league fingernails. Not to mention a cataloging system nowhere near the intuitiveness and familiarity of a bookcase, alphabetical by artist.
The RIAA should kiss Shawn's nappy little ass for providing the only true breakthru in music marketing since the music video. But as usual, the industry has figured out how to tie the whole relaunch up in knots because even BMG really doesn't like the whole thing but they smell money. I doubt it was a sanctified "we should be honestly representing our artist's interest" but rather a pant-wetting "holy crap - see these DL logs? can you imagine a dollar sign in front of each of these?" I mean please - it's taken them a year to not get ready, and from the get go they won't be able to write a MacOS client (no mention of any other platforms) and they can't for the life of them figure out how to take credit AND debit cards at the same time. There are one-man roasted cashew operations in East Rainbucket, Maine who can do this.
I gotta go.
A. It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine.
Ah! Then spot-welding the Windows CD to the case will work just fine.
The "national ID" talk is irresponsible - given that we just passed the 50% point on who has net access in the US. It's just as useless as using Driver Licenses. Please
.
the more i love my mac. none of this did a bloody thing on osx / ie 5.1.4
maybe it's the fix we got today, though
...when you pry it from my cold dead hands!
http://www.snowpeak.com/gear/sct004.html
Ah, the titanium spork - a glimpse of the sacred within the profane.
Seriously, i trust the spork - I don't trust many of the titanium bike builders out there - do it right (Tom Kellogg) and you have a dream to ride. Do it wrong, and you've got something that will leave you cursing technology and send you right back to your trusty CroMo or Aluminum steed. And it's very very easy to do it wrong.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling - er - hacking - is going on in here!
...there is a solution that is simple, obvious, elegant, and wrong.
Eventually I'll get to Soros, but for now let's look at the choice of words in the post:
Our invasive American culture is THEIR choice - last time I checked, the McDonald's franchise punch list did not include armed invasion. Soneone in every place where there's a McD's, Coca Cola, Polo, or US motion picure - the locals had to make it so. You don't get too many US franchises without someone on the receiving end, real estate, vendors, zoning, import & export officials letting if not inviting you to do it.
Also - let's not cross the line and infer by omission that 9/11 was or is any indication of the opinion of anyone but the perpetrators of the terrorism. "Others" is far too unbounded a term to us to describe the marginal combatants who sent two flying bombs into the financial center of the US.
The world has been "globalized" in the modern sense since WWI. This all is nothing new. What is new is the speed at which it can happen, and the facility with which anyone can get their nose in front of a camera. Giant puppets don't mean anything except that they are easier to see and therefore take advantage of the technology of video cameras and the individual predelictions of the TV news producers.
We say "globalization" as if there were any other choice for the only known planet filled with one race of planet-shaping beings.
The real action point comes down to individuals and entities that make the decisions. Nike is responsible for what they do, not America. And before you say it's our laws that let Nike (as an example) do (whatever), it takes two to tango. Is a Nike factory a forced invasion? Is Nike removing Asian teens from their six-figure suites and putting them in a factory? Fill in your favorite offender. The country they're in wanted them there - if they didn't, they wouldn't be there. They decided that this was the best offer they could get. Just like we all decide that minimum wage is right where we want it. If it weren't, we'd vote out anyone who disagreed with it right? Again. Individual choice. The politician's to vote a certain way and ours to sack them. But we have yet to learn the ppower of our (voting) choices, even after the 2000 elections.
And it works both ways. The upper south is now an annex of Asian auto manufacturers. Fuji Heavy makes tanks, but they didn't need them to raise their Subaru plants. Alabama just gave away the store to Hyundai to get them in the state. It was a company and a state government who did this.
Point is, hammering away at an abstract called 'globalization' will do little to change whatever someone wants changed. Put down the puppets, become someone who can make a decision in the direction you wish to, and do something real.
I teach. Every day I make sure that at least in part, my aid to my students includes the messsage that doing is better than wishing, that action is more effective than mentalism, that if you don't work for what you want you will get what someone else wants you to have.
None of this involves carnage against living beings for living as they do. 9/11 is not the untinkable thought in the minds of the rest of the world. While I think Dubya is a little too fond of hearing himself say 'evildoers', it does boil down to individuals who decide to make war, or who design or agree to a sweatshop. Someone has to decide to do these things. We need to make individuals more congizant, enlightened of their actions and consequences.
Globalization's not inherently evil, it's not inherently good. It's inevitable. Consider it as a technology and realize that it only is considerable in specific instances. We learned this lesson at Trinity, but alas, teachers know that that wonderful mental agent called transference never works the way its supposed to.
OK -
SUPPOSE there's a US Govt agency with $1B
SUPPOSE that $ is in a black budget
SUPPOSE they built this thing.
So...
Exactly WHAT is an agency of the US Gov going to crack
that will allow it to gain exactly WHAT money
to amortize it's $1B
that won't be missed?
We did external research for Apple, and we had a dozen or so elementary students testing pre-release hardware and software for Apple ATG... they realized the kids couldn't sign a meaningful, binding contract,so we sorta shrugged over it, I read the kids the riot act, made them stand on one leg, raise their right hands, etc... and we all made it through - the lead time to rollout was only about a quarter, so it went OK - but we all held our breath for 90 days. One of the Apple employees on a site visit mentioned that on the flight out, he was seated next to a woman who found out he worked for Apple and was supremely interested in what he did, questioning him incessantly for most of the trip. When they landed, she handed him her business card - an intellectual property lawyer who had recently worked for Apple and decided to see how much of a secret he could keep. She congratulated him on passing with flying colors.