Whatever the reason that the 'guard' was searching handbags, the fact remains that discovering that someone has a gun puts you in the position of immediately deciding what you are going to do if the person with the gun doesn't want you to know about it or inform anyone else about it.
If they have the gun and you don't have one, all the more reason to just be cool about the situation. If you find someone with a gun in America and they are white middle-class, then there's a good chance that you could lose your job by hassling them about it. If you find someone with a gun in America and they are not white middle-class, then there's a good chance that you could lose your life by hassling them about it.
Either way, it's easier to be Mr. Righteous Bad Ass Security Guard with someone with illegal potato chips than someone with a gun. At least it is for me.
Can you elaborate on this? Maybe some links or tips. I realize that an open Slashdot forum is the worst possible place to go into any detail about this subject. But millions of us need this service and are completely in the dark about to go about getting it. Any further input or comment would be appreciated.
If the so-called guardians of our culture all decide to go bat-shit crazy over who 'owns' a musical recording, then the best thing to do is to learn to play music yourself. Learn to read music. After all, you learned to read English, you learned C++, you can learn to read music if it's so important to your life.
Remember the scene in Amadeus where Salliari picks up one of Mozart's score from the piano; looks at it and says 'it started like a rusty squeezebox, and then, from heaven, a beautiful oboe note appeared, took a melody, and transformed into a glorious clarinet'? He was looking at the musical score and hearing it in his head. Now, That's reading music!
If you get to the point where you can do this and actually play on a musical instrument what you see on the sheet music or what you remember from all the other times that you played a song, then it doesn't matter if some pig cop steals your iPod. Because he can't steal your music. It's in you, it's a part of you.
"How would border guards be able to tell an illegal song on an iPod" If it's in the AAC format with Apple's Fairplay DRM - which they license to nobody and all that.. then it's probably legit.
It's pretty unlikely that any border guard is going to be checking the format of any random song on any random traveler's iPod. Most will most likely happen in the worst case is that the border crosser will have to get a 'certificate of compliance' from a record store or Apple store. You'd bring your iPod to the Apple store, they'd run a check of the DRM on all the songs, seal it somehow (maybe in a plastic bag), and then give you a 'certificate of compliance', all at a hefty Apple fee. You would show this to border guard. They might or might not let the iPod through. They might or might not let you through. You might have to pay a supplemental fee (in cash of course) to get either you and/or your iPod through the border.
Then you would do all the same routine on your way back home.
Please don't tell me I'm crazy. My friends and I have had a lot of experiences with the US/Canada border and the meatheads in uniform who work on it. Nothing is too weird and crazy to not be true. Especially now.
One thing that may develop is a program that takes standard MP3 songs and reformats them into the Apple configuation, along with the Apple DRM signatures on the files and reloads them onto your iPod. Everything is now 'legal'.
My gut feeling is that the Border guards will just start charging an iPod fee of $50 or so to bring your iPod across the border. Then the Border Patrol will work out a certain percentage of this fee that would go to the American RIAA, a percentage to the Canadian RIAA, and a majority of it kept by themselves for adminstration costs.
Seriously, how are they going to take my ipod of 8,000+ songs, mp3s, ogg files, Linux.iso images, podcasts, etc.,
They would just take the iPod. Their opinion would be "fuck you and your 8,000+ songs, mp3s, ogg files, Linux.iso images, podcasts, etc.,"...
All your base belong to us.
Sounds like (bad pun I know) that the Canadian customs and border patrol is going into the used iPod business. Just taking them away from people and then reselling them, maybe erased, maybe not (for a little extra charge). Or maybe if you slip them a hundred dollar bill, they will let you keep your iPod of 8,000+ songs, mp3s, ogg files, Linux.iso images, podcasts, etc...that would cost you much more than that to replace.
Sounds rather profitable for the right border guards. Apple will love it too because people will have an incentive to be constantly buying smaller and smaller iPods that will be more difficult to detect.
One good thing about the situation. The drug dogs can't sniff out a hidden iPod. But don't worry, Steve Jobs will come out with a way for the dogs to detect them through smell. After all, every time the Canadians steal someone's iPod, he makes another sale. And a resale of all of the songs on it too!!!
Go Steve. He's probably behind the whole idea in the first place. After all, it's not like any corrupt Customs shithead is going to mess with his iPod!
All the Indiana Jones movies are overblown remakes of the serials made for adolescents in the 1940s, like Flash Gordon. They were never meant to be taken seriously. They have flimsy plots, wooden underdeveloped characters, contrived settings, and an endless series of film grammar clichés passing as a movie.
Now we have the latest $200 million remake of the same boring movie. Yawn!
The saddest thing about the Indiana Jones movies is that they are taken so seriously. This is because the art of making real important films has been essentially lost. The movies that are made now as 'serious' or 'art' are all stupid, boring, incomprehensible, and insufferable. So the comic book movies look good in comparison. That doesn't make them good. It just makes them overblown eye-candy fests.
The art of making movies that are good, engrossing, serious, relevant, important, and that are watchable decades into the future reached its peak in the 1940s. Even though the titles seem dated today, the year of 1939 is shaping up to be the peak of movie-making throughout the world. The advent of television in the 1950s and the development of bet-the-studio-on-one-film mentality of the 1950s and 1960s seriously hurt the movie art and industry. There was an era of great films to come from Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it died off in the 1980s as state subsidies paid to pseudo-intellectual directors resulted in a flood of drek that led to the destruction of European film industry.
The ability to watch any individual film title at the convenience of the viewer that resulted from the VCR and the DVD didn't help the moviemaking art. Great for the movie product business, but not so great for the advancement of the art. It led to a homogenization of product and an oversupply of mediocrity.
So, yeah, I not impressed by the latest Indiana Jones or anything that George Lucas makes. He has made a profitable career applying CGI and film effects to recycled schlock for the past thirty-five years. I felt the same way about Star Wars when it came out in 1977. It's fun, sure, and watchable. But it's nothing that hasn't been seen before and done better in the past.
All this endless nonsense about Mars...does it have water? Does it have life? Can we establish a base, colony, scientific observation platform, there?
Seriously, guys, just go pay the $100 and some pretty sweet professional sex worker give you relief to your misguided obsessions. Scientific studies have proven that males who have regular ejaculations are 42% less likely to obsess about Mars than males who don't.
And about your questions. Water on Mars? Who knows? You want water, pal, we got water right here. Two thirds of the planet surface is covered with water. Plenty for everyone. You want life? We got 6.666 billion people right here. Half of them have vaginas. Figure out what to do with them and you won't be so interested in Mars. Guys, seriously, there are no vaginas on Mars. The billion dollar robots that have gone there are reporting back that there is nothing on Mars. You want rocks and endless desert, go to Nevada. When you get tired of rocks and endless desert (and you probably will) then you can just leave and go to Vegas. Cold beer, hot sex workers, computers, and entertainment. There's none of that on Mars.
Guys, Mars is just a dot in the night sky. That's all it has ever been. That's all it is ever going to be. There's nothing there. Really. And it's a billion miles more or less away. You aren't going to go there. No one's going to go there.
Ah, but the science,... the pure science, the challenge, the mystery, the... the... the...urge! Pal, go get laid and forget about Mars. You are beginning to embarrass all the rest of us who have undertaken the serious responsibility of preserving, protecting, defending, and improving live for mentally-balanced humans here on Earth.
A more useful robot would be one that kills the sniper, or snakes its way out of the rubble (who said that the robot must be humanoid?) in order to lead rescuers to your exact location.
But (duh) people who live in places where snipers are a problem, or places where buildings don't have to be constructed to 100-year earthquake codes, tend not to have the disposable income to spend on personal robots.
Is a vibrator a 'personal robot'? Maybe, if it tells you that it loves you.
Is this Slashdot story a joke? Did I miss April First again? I thought that it was May, maybe I'm just ahead of my time.
This whole project is just welfare for nerds. It should be defunded immediately. The US government is trillions of dollars in debt. The country is recession. The financial stability of the middle class is falling due to the collapse of the housing bubble. The end of cheap oil is decimating the transportation industries. Millions are starving due to mismanaged food stocks. The president-selected-by-the-pre-programmed-voting-machines is promising 'permanent endless war' that does nothing but make his campaign contributors rich.
And the only people whom the world can turn to for help and guidance, the technical/scientific community, is obsessed with moronic chickenshit fantasies like 'could there have been life on Mars?'. Folks, Mars is just a dot in the night sky. Your life, your future, your destiny, your challenge is right here on Earth. Forget this Mars madness. It just makes you look bad to the people who believe and depend on you. It's not 1969 anymore.
The oldest code still running is the code that transfers several million dollars a month to secret bank accounts set up by the USA and USSR at the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. This code was initiated when it was discovered that renegade forces in the Soviet armed forces launched hydrogen bombs into space with instructions to stay harmlessly in space as long as money was transferred to certain numbered accounts.
After a long investigation, the Soviets executed the persons in their armed forces responsible but not before the Soviet scientists were able to lock codes into place that prevented the system from being disabled without triggering. The source code was destroyed and the computers programmed to rain the bombs down on the US if the large space vessels didn't regularly receive coded instructions to stay in space, or if the program stopped running. It was right out of 'Dr.Stranglove', and an example of the paranoid doomsday thinking that prevailed among the superpowers at the time. This incident was one of the most important events that led to coup in the USSR that drove Khrushchev (and his Stalinist apparatchiks) from power and led to the installation of the pro-Detent Breshnev/Khosgin regime in 1964.
Both the USA and USSR decided to keep the incident secret and it was determined that a continued stream of payments would be the cheapest, simplest, and easiest way to deal with a messy situation. A secret NASA space shuttle mission in 1994 attempted to adjust the orbits of the bomb-holding vehicles, but it is still unclear how successful this mission was.
This is an example of the legacy of insane situations and institutions that are left over from the cold war of the 20th century for us and future generations to have to deal with. Nevertheless, I believe that it is the oldest piece of code that has been running since its installation nearly fifty years ago.
This reminds me of the joke that the last message relayed from the space shuttle Challenger before the explosion was the Teacher-in-space asking "What's this button do?"
A more useful application would be to use the cellphone to record or transmit video of criminal incidents that may occur to you. If you are accosted on the street by someone or a group, press the 'panic button' on your phone and the video from the phone's camera will be transmitted to a storage site. The phone will dial 911 and transmit your GPS coordinates to the police as well.
Although this may not help to defend you during the criminal activity being committed against you as it happens, it will provide a document of the incident that can be used in court later. A video of the incident will document crime in order to prevent the criminals from lying against you and having the case dismissed. Should you have to defend yourself by using violence against the people who are attacking you, a recording of the incident will reduce the possibility of having charges being brought against you. Self-defense can be very difficult to prove in court.
High quality photos and video will help the police identify the attackers for arrest and provide a record of the incident for the district attorney to prosecute the case. Having the video transmitted as the crime occurs prevents the attackers from taking the camera phone and destroying the recording, as would be the case if the video were only stored in the memory of the camera phone.
I suspect that this is well beyond the capabilities of the video cellphones of today. However this type of incident-monitoring-and-recording service would be a profitable option to provide wealthy and upper-middle-class people as the technology becomes available.
Thank you, It's a challenge to get the geeks to consider you bizarre. I try and try again, but often get overlooked. It helps to prepare. I have a degree in economics and I write firmware.
I challenge you to write stuff on Slashdot that is more bizarre than anything that I can write. It's hard at first, but, like all things worth doing, it gets easier with practice. A touch of advice? Get a speech-to-text program and a microphone. That way you won't be limited by your typing skills. Ranting makes better comments.
There are two seperate issues between the ISPs and the P2Ps. The details of the two issues tend to get mixed according to the perspective of the person making the argument.
The first issue is the amount of data (the bandwidth issue) that the P2P downloader is using relative to the amount of bandwidth that the other ISP users are consuming. The other issue is the ability of the so-called owners the downloaded information to legally extort money from P2P users.
The P2P users are the best customers of the ISPs. In time, the technology improves to handle the growing needs of the P2P community, and the P2P'ers are willing to pay (within reason) for faster access and greater bandwidth. P2P'ers will pay $30-$50 more a month to the ISPs than the dial-up'ers who are mostly checking e-mail, reading specialized websites, and doing eBay trading. This makes the P2P'ers a significant revenue source to the ISPs.
"Significant revenue source", in case you didn't know, is the most important three word phrase in the English language. "You're Under Arrest" is the second-most significant phrase in English. And, of course, the more 'sig rev source' that you have, the less you have to concern yourself with hearing "You're U A!" But, nevertheless, it can still happen. Especially in the current times of great change such as the present when one former source of sig revenue (the music industry) is evaporating and others like the P2P community are rising.
Generally the law follows the money. The golden rule states that he who hath the gold maketh the rule. But, in the real world, money and law tend to be 90 degrees out of phase. Situations arise where a disappearing revenue source has, for a certain period of time, the ability to envoke the legal system to extort money from people in greater proportion than its social usefullness would have it deserve. The music industry, and its extortion arm - the RIAA, is in that position. This industry is entering its 'zombie' phase, in that it is already dead but doesn't seem to know it. Death for a business is a different concept than it is in biology. Zombie businesses are basically unsustainable in the long run because their economic model has been broken, but their structures are still functioning. Basically the RIAA is just the music industry running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It can't last, but you don't want to be in its way before it just falls over.
Since the RIAA uses the ISPs to identify the P2P'ers that it has selected for random extortion, the P2P'ers don't trust the ISPs to come up with a working technical solution to the bandwidth problem. So we have the current situation that is bad for everyone. Personally I work around this by not downloading industry product: I get it in disc format from the local library and copy it from the disc onto my home PC. Then I return the disc to the library for the next person to use.
The music industry insists that this is illegal in their parallel universe. And, there was a time when it appeared that the RIAA was going to take on the US Library Association. But the librarians have been dealing with assholes like this for 300 years and have their arguments in order. It always come down to this point: yes, library users copy the most popular music recordings. Which does cut sales to a minor degree. But the 50,000 libraries buy (at full retail cost) one copy each of thousands of titles that wouldn't be selling 50,000 copies if the libraries weren't buying it. Basically, the library makes available music for people to copy. But the libraries pay off the music industry to ignore it. Everybody is happy.
The P2P'ers need to adopt this model for distribution. They should find out who they are in their local areas, like a university, and then trade physical copies of the materials that they are interested in. Like having ALL the recent music of particular genre or favorite films on a single USB 500Gi
The music industry is a business and extortion is a very successful newly-emerging form of that business. Business Week is the mouthpiece of successful business strategies.
So why should anyone assume that a story in Business Week about an unsuccessful attempt by the music industry to extort money from a random citizen is written from the side of the citizen? Business Week is more congratulating the music industry for successfully creating a new profit center by extorting millions of dollars from random former customers than they are defending the rights of citizens to be subjected to random extortion from powerful corporations.
People seem to be reading this story wrong. Business Week is lamenting the incompetence of this individual case rather than condemning the music industry's practice of supplementing its core business through random extortion of its former customers.
Ebay is finally beginning to realize that they pissed away all the money that they have ever made and all the money that they ever will make by buying Skype for billions of dollars. Jesus, I'd love just one toke of whatever they were smoking when they thought that was a good idea. They just threw several billion dollars at the first wild-ass idea that walked into the room.
First they tried to convince themselves (no one outside the company would ever believe it) that this could be turned into a smart business move, somehow. No luck there.
Then they tried to raise prices on their eBay customers and give lots of hints about how well Skype could be 'integrated' into the eBay 'experience'. This only resulted in lots of pissed off eBay customers because selling used junk from your closet is very low profit-margin 'business' to begin with. So now they come to the conclusion that the only way to avoid the consequences of being stupid is to sue your competitors.
Well, that isn't going to work either.
Ebay should just bite-the-bullet and accept that they did something really stupid by buying Skype. First, find and fire everyone in the company who thought that it was a good idea (hint: start with Meg!). Second, expand your core business, which is providing a means for people to sell their second-hand junk easily. Post the StarTrek Ferengi rules-of-profit everywhere. Then go out and buy or rent any big-box store in the vast wasteland of American suburbs that becomes available. Have people bring their unwanted secondhand stuff to the big-box and either sell it like a 'garage sale', consign it, or hold either standard auctions or eBay auctions.
The difference between Craig's_List and eBay is that CL is basically local and eBay is very specialized. I've used both to sell MIDI tone modules. With CgList, you set a price and sell the item to the first person who shows up with the money. With eBay, you write a detailed description, wait for registered bids, and at an agreeed-upon time, the person who submitted the highest bid (and actually pays) gets shipped the item being sold.
Very few eBay sales are local; almost all CgLst sales are local. I use CgList for inexpensive items that would cost a lot to ship and I use eBay for speciality items that I'm willing to ship anywhere in the world. I usually meet the actual buyer when using Craig's List. With eBay, I've sold to people in distant lands who don't speak English (by using web-translator cut-and-paste-text programs on international e-mails.)
Craig's List is a lot cheaper than eBay, but it is much shorter in the amount of time that the listing remains in view. If an item doesn't sell (or attract interested buyers) within six to eight hours on Craig's List, then it most likely won't sell at all. Everything on eBay (usually) sells, but you might not get a high price for it. I've found that most things on eBay (especially electronic musical instruments) will bring the same price (within 10%) as identical items sold within the past month, regardless of how low the starting bid is or how long the auction period is.
Ebay is also an excellent place to sell microchips and electronic components that can be bought for good discount in lots of 25 or 100 from electronic distributors with minimum orders. The surplus chips can be sold on eBay in lots of two or three each (Dutch auction style) for what you paid for them and shipped by mail in padded envelopes inexpensively.
Basically, Ebay is a world marketplace for very specialized goods. It has high fees but it is very efficient. Craig's List is a local expansion of a garage sale that can use the internet to position sales in distant markets.
In related news, Safeway announced that it is suing Starbucks because Starbucks is seriously undercutting its coffee sales. Safeway's public relations manager announced, "The American people deserve the opportunity to have a good cup of coffee in the morning, it's a god-given right! Starbucks is undermining that right by introducing mass confusion into the coffee marketplace. Before Starbucks, people always knew that they get their good, dependable, all-American coffee at the same store, at the same place, year after year. Now that Starbucks has appeared, they aren't sure. We have to put a stop to them. It's what Jesus would do."
Here in Portland Oregon we have manditory garbage recycling. Everybody has to seperate their plastic from the glass from the newspaper and so forth. It's a sham because it requires three times as many garbage trucks to collect the seperate catagories. There's three times as much diesel consumption to run these garbage trucks and three times as much noise pollution in the early-morning hours when they are collecting. The energy saved by the Mickey Mouse recycling schemes is less than the extra energy expended to truck out the seperated garbage to the distant landfills. So what's presented as advanced Green lifestyle is just more brown horseshit designed to make the latte-Volvo bohemenian boozhwah crowd feel good. Sad but true.
I've been reading a lot of James Howard Kunstler and the Peak-Oil writers lately. They claim that after the half-way point of the consumption of the world's petroleum, the cost of obtaining and distributing the rest will not be worth the benefits from using petroleum-based transportation. In other words, keeping the airlines, the interstate highway system, and the diesel truck based distribution system going is going to be unsystainable within ten years. And biodiesel is no solution because it takes more oil to grow the 'bio' than is returned by using the diesel. The recent 300% increase in the price of rice and food staples in the undeveloped world is a direct result of the biodiesel sham game played by the developed countries.
So these people claim $1 a gallon gas when their system is running at 100% and it's about 50% efficient now. So is this a linear relationship and they are capable of producing $2 a gallon gas now? Or is their cost presently $10+ a gallon.
One of the indirect consequences of $120 a barrel oil is the freezing of the financial system. Which means that there isn't going to be capital funding available for the development and conversion of present oil refineries to produce current levels of gasoline and/or other bio auto fuel regardless of whether the process works (and works efficiently). The massive funds needed for the conversion are not going to be available. The trillions of dollars have already been spent on things like the SUV network, the expansion of the subprime suburbs, and the permanent endless war. And the debt from the US federal budget deficits from previous years.
The money needed for fuel system conversion isn't there to spend anymore. So, we need to face a certain reality and get used to the concept that the 20th century is over and so is the era of Happy Motoring (and most likely, the era of globalization).
It could get as bad as the 19th century with 64-bit microprocessors. Having advanced electronic, computer, and communication technology is not the same thing as having energy! They aren't related other than the development of advanced electronics and communications was only possible in the era of super-cheap oil. There's a lot of oil still out there, but the energy needed to get it out of shale, or out of a hole that is 100 miles offshore and under a mile of water in hurricane alley is nearly the amount of energy that the oil can provide. So there is no net energy gain that can systain current American lifestyles and future global development. Sad news. Perpare yourself for it. And there are going to be no Mars or Moon colonies, either, despite the grandiose promises of presidents.
We're going to be doing well if we can keep the electricity running and the food growing.
This is an ROM chip, for a defunct platform (long gone), for a 'game' designed for very young children, that was determined to be so mediocre that it was never commercially released. So why is this a headline story on a site that claims to be a news forum on the leading edge of technological developments?
Open Source actually does have serious problems, but taking money from secret-code companies is not one of them.
The biggest problem with open source is the assumption on the part of the code writers that the users know as much about the code subject that they do. In other words, a serious lack of documentation oriented towards users who aren't going to be contributing to the code upkeep, who don't care how it works, and simply want to use the code as a tool to get a particular job finished quickly and easily. And with open source, the more specialized the application that it was written for, the more likely that the user interface is incomprehensible and the more likely that the code authors assume that the users know as much as they do.
These problems exist in commercial code but they get solved much quicker because the code's sales depend on its ability to be effective and to be easily used. Open source programs get presented and distributed as completed 'products' when their level of completion is roughly half of what commercial code presents for the same solution.
Basically the value of the money that you save by using open source is more or less equal to the time that you have to spend researching and learning all the things that the code's writing group assume that you already know.
For example, take a program to edit video copied from a DVD. The commercial code is expensive, but relatively easy to use and has extensive Help sections. The open source versions are screens full of randomly placed buttons and selection boxes that are labeled with acronyms. Help files, if they exist at all and are not simply URLs, are written with the assumption that you are already a professional digital video editor.
And yet open source advocates will claim that the programs are equal in ability because a skilled and experienced professional can figure out how to get them both to work.
These problems are much less in the open-source applications that attempting to position themselves as direct competitors to commercial software: programs like GIMP, LINUX, and OpenOffice. In a few cases, like FireFox, the open source is as transparently good as (to the average user, to the power user, they are much better than) the Windows browser.
The idea that there is a financial number that quantifies the extent that open-source has directed sales away from from commercial software is absurd. The numbers that they cite have been (to coin a phrase) 'pulled out of their ass'. Completely meaningless. The more open source software that becomes available, the more that the management of commercial software companies will have to understand that they are providing a support service and not a tangible product.
A global blog forum open to any subject is an appealing idea, but it is only as good as its search engine. Say you want to enlighten the world about your boss or company. There are a hundred million other people who are interested in doing the same thing. So how do you tell the world about your idiot boss John Smith and differenciate him from all the other idiot John Smiths (my apologies to all readers named John Smith, but you must run into this situation all the time).
And how do you change the blog when the situation has changed? And what do you do about the douchebag (an American term meaning a person whose obsession with a particular topic has made them insufferable, not a French term for a camping solar-shower) who attempts to post 10000000 full copies of the Qu'ran or the ancient scrolls of BaBeezoo-Bub and take up a teraByte of Pirate Bay blog space?
And who oversees this new global medium: who becomes the Pirate Bay's Rupert Murdoch? And how do we get rid of the Pirate Bay's new gossip site's overlord when he or she becomes hopelessly corrupt? When it becomes obvious that their personal tastes are affecting their editing decisions?
And why don't Slashdot posters address the real issues that arise from each topic? The ratio of horseshit to insightful commentary is extremely high for such a smart group of readers.
African Americans spend more money and time playing video games than whites...
This is a bullshit statement. African Americans in the USA are only 9-12% of the population and half of them are in the very low-income bracket. In the target demographic (15-34 year old males), 5-10% of African Americans are in jail. They don't have Play Stations in their cells.
Whites (including Spanish speakers) are 80% of the USA population. They are concentrated in the high income brackets. The highest percentage of video game media and equipment
So how the hell could a population that is only 12% be spending more money in an area where the other 88% has more money to spend? Even if all the blacks were spending ALL their time and money they wouldn't be spending more money and time on video games than all the whites.
The statement must mean that African Americans spend a higher percentage of individually disposable money and time playing video games than white people do. But it doesn't say that. It says African Americans spend more money... This statement is totally transparently bullshit. So why is it a Slashdot headline?
In USA, every thing on work PCs belongs to the company that owns the PC. Well, yes, in legalese. But in fact many employees are finding out about the web by exploring the browser and web link that is often available in their work area. In electronics, it's common for people to have a PC linked to the network in order that assemblers and technicians (test and repair of the product before shipping) can enter data using the serial number of the piece (often a bar-code).
In fact, I would say that this method is how the vast majority of adults get initial exposure to the internet in the USA. So during their coffee break, they explore the web. And like all adults learning new and important things, they will always overstep the boundaries set by lawyers (who are basically Puritans left over from the Salem Witch burning days on the 1680s.)
And if they are guys, then they will, yes, at least once, type some sexual reference into the Google search line to see what happens. Face it, you did too, while you were learning and you thought that no one was looking.
Well for this 'crime' the company lawyers insist that they have the right and obligation to destroy the life of the person that they manage to actually catch doing this. Or they warn the employees not to ever do things on the web under penalty of job loss. Which means that the older employees will never go on the web out of fear of being fired for something that they don't understand. This also means that you will never get these employees to use the PC voluntarily.
What the company is only worried about is being extorted by one of the several schemes used to defraud using the web. They don't really care about Inez in bench 7b of PCB stuffing has discovered that she can send an instant message to her sister is Guadalajara for free. But this is VERY big news to Inez. And the only way that she knows how to do it is through the PC at the end of the table in her workplace. And she is going to use it. She doesn't realize that everything most likely gets saved. It's a super telephone to her.
So even though the legal wording says that the work PC and all the things on it belongs to the company, in reality the situation is far more complicated. The company should realize that even though their lawyers tell them that they can do anything, it would be best to be very flexible about this.
The USA is the European Union. The USA is the first and only successful long-term attempt of the European peoples to create an economic and political union. The fact that the people forming the union were all thrown of Europe, and that there were significant numbers of non-European people in their union, doesn't change the essential nature of the first successful European Union. In fact the USA was of minor importance in world affairs until all the little European countries decided to commit mass suicide in the years 1914 to 1945.
Whether the survivors and new generations of Europeans can sustain this new European Union remains to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever the reason that the 'guard' was searching handbags, the fact remains that discovering that someone has a gun puts you in the position of immediately deciding what you are going to do if the person with the gun doesn't want you to know about it or inform anyone else about it.
If they have the gun and you don't have one, all the more reason to just be cool about the situation. If you find someone with a gun in America and they are white middle-class, then there's a good chance that you could lose your job by hassling them about it. If you find someone with a gun in America and they are not white middle-class, then there's a good chance that you could lose your life by hassling them about it.
Either way, it's easier to be Mr. Righteous Bad Ass Security Guard with someone with illegal potato chips than someone with a gun. At least it is for me.
Can you elaborate on this? Maybe some links or tips. I realize that an open Slashdot forum is the worst possible place to go into any detail about this subject. But millions of us need this service and are completely in the dark about to go about getting it. Any further input or comment would be appreciated.
Thank you.
If the so-called guardians of our culture all decide to go bat-shit crazy over who 'owns' a musical recording, then the best thing to do is to learn to play music yourself. Learn to read music. After all, you learned to read English, you learned C++, you can learn to read music if it's so important to your life.
Remember the scene in Amadeus where Salliari picks up one of Mozart's score from the piano; looks at it and says 'it started like a rusty squeezebox, and then, from heaven, a beautiful oboe note appeared, took a melody, and transformed into a glorious clarinet'? He was looking at the musical score and hearing it in his head. Now, That's reading music!
If you get to the point where you can do this and actually play on a musical instrument what you see on the sheet music or what you remember from all the other times that you played a song, then it doesn't matter if some pig cop steals your iPod. Because he can't steal your music. It's in you, it's a part of you.
"How would border guards be able to tell an illegal song on an iPod"
If it's in the AAC format with Apple's Fairplay DRM - which they license to nobody and all that.. then it's probably legit.
It's pretty unlikely that any border guard is going to be checking the format of any random song on any random traveler's iPod. Most will most likely happen in the worst case is that the border crosser will have to get a 'certificate of compliance' from a record store or Apple store. You'd bring your iPod to the Apple store, they'd run a check of the DRM on all the songs, seal it somehow (maybe in a plastic bag), and then give you a 'certificate of compliance', all at a hefty Apple fee. You would show this to border guard. They might or might not let the iPod through. They might or might not let you through. You might have to pay a supplemental fee (in cash of course) to get either you and/or your iPod through the border.
Then you would do all the same routine on your way back home.
Please don't tell me I'm crazy. My friends and I have had a lot of experiences with the US/Canada border and the meatheads in uniform who work on it. Nothing is too weird and crazy to not be true. Especially now.
One thing that may develop is a program that takes standard MP3 songs and reformats them into the Apple configuation, along with the Apple DRM signatures on the files and reloads them onto your iPod. Everything is now 'legal'.
My gut feeling is that the Border guards will just start charging an iPod fee of $50 or so to bring your iPod across the border. Then the Border Patrol will work out a certain percentage of this fee that would go to the American RIAA, a percentage to the Canadian RIAA, and a majority of it kept by themselves for adminstration costs.
Seriously, how are they going to take my ipod of 8,000+ songs, mp3s, ogg files, Linux .iso images, podcasts, etc.,
.iso images, podcasts, etc.,"...
.iso images, podcasts, etc...that would cost you much more than that to replace.
They would just take the iPod. Their opinion would be "fuck you and your 8,000+ songs, mp3s, ogg files, Linux
All your base belong to us.
Sounds like (bad pun I know) that the Canadian customs and border patrol is going into the used iPod business. Just taking them away from people and then reselling them, maybe erased, maybe not (for a little extra charge). Or maybe if you slip them a hundred dollar bill, they will let you keep your iPod of 8,000+ songs, mp3s, ogg files, Linux
Sounds rather profitable for the right border guards. Apple will love it too because people will have an incentive to be constantly buying smaller and smaller iPods that will be more difficult to detect.
One good thing about the situation. The drug dogs can't sniff out a hidden iPod. But don't worry, Steve Jobs will come out with a way for the dogs to detect them through smell. After all, every time the Canadians steal someone's iPod, he makes another sale. And a resale of all of the songs on it too!!!
Go Steve. He's probably behind the whole idea in the first place. After all, it's not like any corrupt Customs shithead is going to mess with his iPod!
All the Indiana Jones movies are overblown remakes of the serials made for adolescents in the 1940s, like Flash Gordon. They were never meant to be taken seriously. They have flimsy plots, wooden underdeveloped characters, contrived settings, and an endless series of film grammar clichés passing as a movie.
Now we have the latest $200 million remake of the same boring movie. Yawn!
The saddest thing about the Indiana Jones movies is that they are taken so seriously. This is because the art of making real important films has been essentially lost. The movies that are made now as 'serious' or 'art' are all stupid, boring, incomprehensible, and insufferable. So the comic book movies look good in comparison. That doesn't make them good. It just makes them overblown eye-candy fests.
The art of making movies that are good, engrossing, serious, relevant, important, and that are watchable decades into the future reached its peak in the 1940s. Even though the titles seem dated today, the year of 1939 is shaping up to be the peak of movie-making throughout the world. The advent of television in the 1950s and the development of bet-the-studio-on-one-film mentality of the 1950s and 1960s seriously hurt the movie art and industry. There was an era of great films to come from Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it died off in the 1980s as state subsidies paid to pseudo-intellectual directors resulted in a flood of drek that led to the destruction of European film industry.
The ability to watch any individual film title at the convenience of the viewer that resulted from the VCR and the DVD didn't help the moviemaking art. Great for the movie product business, but not so great for the advancement of the art. It led to a homogenization of product and an oversupply of mediocrity.
So, yeah, I not impressed by the latest Indiana Jones or anything that George Lucas makes. He has made a profitable career applying CGI and film effects to recycled schlock for the past thirty-five years. I felt the same way about Star Wars when it came out in 1977. It's fun, sure, and watchable. But it's nothing that hasn't been seen before and done better in the past.
All this endless nonsense about Mars...does it have water? Does it have life? Can we establish a base, colony, scientific observation platform, there?
... the... the...urge! Pal, go get laid and forget about Mars. You are beginning to embarrass all the rest of us who have undertaken the serious responsibility of preserving, protecting, defending, and improving live for mentally-balanced humans here on Earth.
Seriously, guys, just go pay the $100 and some pretty sweet professional sex worker give you relief to your misguided obsessions. Scientific studies have proven that males who have regular ejaculations are 42% less likely to obsess about Mars than males who don't.
And about your questions. Water on Mars? Who knows? You want water, pal, we got water right here. Two thirds of the planet surface is covered with water. Plenty for everyone. You want life? We got 6.666 billion people right here. Half of them have vaginas. Figure out what to do with them and you won't be so interested in Mars. Guys, seriously, there are no vaginas on Mars. The billion dollar robots that have gone there are reporting back that there is nothing on Mars. You want rocks and endless desert, go to Nevada. When you get tired of rocks and endless desert (and you probably will) then you can just leave and go to Vegas. Cold beer, hot sex workers, computers, and entertainment. There's none of that on Mars.
Guys, Mars is just a dot in the night sky. That's all it has ever been. That's all it is ever going to be. There's nothing there. Really. And it's a billion miles more or less away. You aren't going to go there. No one's going to go there.
Ah, but the science,... the pure science, the challenge, the mystery, the
A more useful robot would be one that kills the sniper, or snakes its way out of the rubble (who said that the robot must be humanoid?) in order to lead rescuers to your exact location.
But (duh) people who live in places where snipers are a problem, or places where buildings don't have to be constructed to 100-year earthquake codes, tend not to have the disposable income to spend on personal robots.
Is a vibrator a 'personal robot'? Maybe, if it tells you that it loves you.
Is this Slashdot story a joke? Did I miss April First again? I thought that it was May, maybe I'm just ahead of my time.
This whole project is just welfare for nerds. It should be defunded immediately. The US government is trillions of dollars in debt. The country is recession. The financial stability of the middle class is falling due to the collapse of the housing bubble. The end of cheap oil is decimating the transportation industries. Millions are starving due to mismanaged food stocks. The president-selected-by-the-pre-programmed-voting-machines is promising 'permanent endless war' that does nothing but make his campaign contributors rich.
And the only people whom the world can turn to for help and guidance, the technical/scientific community, is obsessed with moronic chickenshit fantasies like 'could there have been life on Mars?'. Folks, Mars is just a dot in the night sky. Your life, your future, your destiny, your challenge is right here on Earth. Forget this Mars madness. It just makes you look bad to the people who believe and depend on you. It's not 1969 anymore.
The oldest code still running is the code that transfers several million dollars a month to secret bank accounts set up by the USA and USSR at the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. This code was initiated when it was discovered that renegade forces in the Soviet armed forces launched hydrogen bombs into space with instructions to stay harmlessly in space as long as money was transferred to certain numbered accounts.
After a long investigation, the Soviets executed the persons in their armed forces responsible but not before the Soviet scientists were able to lock codes into place that prevented the system from being disabled without triggering. The source code was destroyed and the computers programmed to rain the bombs down on the US if the large space vessels didn't regularly receive coded instructions to stay in space, or if the program stopped running. It was right out of 'Dr.Stranglove', and an example of the paranoid doomsday thinking that prevailed among the superpowers at the time. This incident was one of the most important events that led to coup in the USSR that drove Khrushchev (and his Stalinist apparatchiks) from power and led to the installation of the pro-Detent Breshnev/Khosgin regime in 1964.
Both the USA and USSR decided to keep the incident secret and it was determined that a continued stream of payments would be the cheapest, simplest, and easiest way to deal with a messy situation. A secret NASA space shuttle mission in 1994 attempted to adjust the orbits of the bomb-holding vehicles, but it is still unclear how successful this mission was.
This is an example of the legacy of insane situations and institutions that are left over from the cold war of the 20th century for us and future generations to have to deal with. Nevertheless, I believe that it is the oldest piece of code that has been running since its installation nearly fifty years ago.
This reminds me of the joke that the last message relayed from the space shuttle Challenger before the explosion was the Teacher-in-space asking "What's this button do?"
A more useful application would be to use the cellphone to record or transmit video of criminal incidents that may occur to you. If you are accosted on the street by someone or a group, press the 'panic button' on your phone and the video from the phone's camera will be transmitted to a storage site. The phone will dial 911 and transmit your GPS coordinates to the police as well.
Although this may not help to defend you during the criminal activity being committed against you as it happens, it will provide a document of the incident that can be used in court later. A video of the incident will document crime in order to prevent the criminals from lying against you and having the case dismissed. Should you have to defend yourself by using violence against the people who are attacking you, a recording of the incident will reduce the possibility of having charges being brought against you. Self-defense can be very difficult to prove in court.
High quality photos and video will help the police identify the attackers for arrest and provide a record of the incident for the district attorney to prosecute the case. Having the video transmitted as the crime occurs prevents the attackers from taking the camera phone and destroying the recording, as would be the case if the video were only stored in the memory of the camera phone.
I suspect that this is well beyond the capabilities of the video cellphones of today. However this type of incident-monitoring-and-recording service would be a profitable option to provide wealthy and upper-middle-class people as the technology becomes available.
Thank you, It's a challenge to get the geeks to consider you bizarre. I try and try again, but often get overlooked. It helps to prepare. I have a degree in economics and I write firmware.
I challenge you to write stuff on Slashdot that is more bizarre than anything that I can write. It's hard at first, but, like all things worth doing, it gets easier with practice. A touch of advice? Get a speech-to-text program and a microphone. That way you won't be limited by your typing skills. Ranting makes better comments.
There are two seperate issues between the ISPs and the P2Ps. The details of the two issues tend to get mixed according to the perspective of the person making the argument.
The first issue is the amount of data (the bandwidth issue) that the P2P downloader is using relative to the amount of bandwidth that the other ISP users are consuming. The other issue is the ability of the so-called owners the downloaded information to legally extort money from P2P users.
The P2P users are the best customers of the ISPs. In time, the technology improves to handle the growing needs of the P2P community, and the P2P'ers are willing to pay (within reason) for faster access and greater bandwidth. P2P'ers will pay $30-$50 more a month to the ISPs than the dial-up'ers who are mostly checking e-mail, reading specialized websites, and doing eBay trading. This makes the P2P'ers a significant revenue source to the ISPs.
"Significant revenue source", in case you didn't know, is the most important three word phrase in the English language. "You're Under Arrest" is the second-most significant phrase in English. And, of course, the more 'sig rev source' that you have, the less you have to concern yourself with hearing "You're U A!" But, nevertheless, it can still happen. Especially in the current times of great change such as the present when one former source of sig revenue (the music industry) is evaporating and others like the P2P community are rising.
Generally the law follows the money. The golden rule states that he who hath the gold maketh the rule. But, in the real world, money and law tend to be 90 degrees out of phase. Situations arise where a disappearing revenue source has, for a certain period of time, the ability to envoke the legal system to extort money from people in greater proportion than its social usefullness would have it deserve. The music industry, and its extortion arm - the RIAA, is in that position. This industry is entering its 'zombie' phase, in that it is already dead but doesn't seem to know it. Death for a business is a different concept than it is in biology. Zombie businesses are basically unsustainable in the long run because their economic model has been broken, but their structures are still functioning. Basically the RIAA is just the music industry running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It can't last, but you don't want to be in its way before it just falls over.
Since the RIAA uses the ISPs to identify the P2P'ers that it has selected for random extortion, the P2P'ers don't trust the ISPs to come up with a working technical solution to the bandwidth problem. So we have the current situation that is bad for everyone. Personally I work around this by not downloading industry product: I get it in disc format from the local library and copy it from the disc onto my home PC. Then I return the disc to the library for the next person to use.
The music industry insists that this is illegal in their parallel universe. And, there was a time when it appeared that the RIAA was going to take on the US Library Association. But the librarians have been dealing with assholes like this for 300 years and have their arguments in order. It always come down to this point: yes, library users copy the most popular music recordings. Which does cut sales to a minor degree. But the 50,000 libraries buy (at full retail cost) one copy each of thousands of titles that wouldn't be selling 50,000 copies if the libraries weren't buying it. Basically, the library makes available music for people to copy. But the libraries pay off the music industry to ignore it. Everybody is happy.
The P2P'ers need to adopt this model for distribution. They should find out who they are in their local areas, like a university, and then trade physical copies of the materials that they are interested in. Like having ALL the recent music of particular genre or favorite films on a single USB 500Gi
The music industry is a business and extortion is a very successful newly-emerging form of that business. Business Week is the mouthpiece of successful business strategies.
So why should anyone assume that a story in Business Week about an unsuccessful attempt by the music industry to extort money from a random citizen is written from the side of the citizen? Business Week is more congratulating the music industry for successfully creating a new profit center by extorting millions of dollars from random former customers than they are defending the rights of citizens to be subjected to random extortion from powerful corporations.
People seem to be reading this story wrong. Business Week is lamenting the incompetence of this individual case rather than condemning the music industry's practice of supplementing its core business through random extortion of its former customers.
Ebay is finally beginning to realize that they pissed away all the money that they have ever made and all the money that they ever will make by buying Skype for billions of dollars. Jesus, I'd love just one toke of whatever they were smoking when they thought that was a good idea. They just threw several billion dollars at the first wild-ass idea that walked into the room.
First they tried to convince themselves (no one outside the company would ever believe it) that this could be turned into a smart business move, somehow. No luck there.
Then they tried to raise prices on their eBay customers and give lots of hints about how well Skype could be 'integrated' into the eBay 'experience'. This only resulted in lots of pissed off eBay customers because selling used junk from your closet is very low profit-margin 'business' to begin with. So now they come to the conclusion that the only way to avoid the consequences of being stupid is to sue your competitors.
Well, that isn't going to work either.
Ebay should just bite-the-bullet and accept that they did something really stupid by buying Skype. First, find and fire everyone in the company who thought that it was a good idea (hint: start with Meg!). Second, expand your core business, which is providing a means for people to sell their second-hand junk easily. Post the StarTrek Ferengi rules-of-profit everywhere. Then go out and buy or rent any big-box store in the vast wasteland of American suburbs that becomes available. Have people bring their unwanted secondhand stuff to the big-box and either sell it like a 'garage sale', consign it, or hold either standard auctions or eBay auctions.
The difference between Craig's_List and eBay is that CL is basically local and eBay is very specialized. I've used both to sell MIDI tone modules. With CgList, you set a price and sell the item to the first person who shows up with the money. With eBay, you write a detailed description, wait for registered bids, and at an agreeed-upon time, the person who submitted the highest bid (and actually pays) gets shipped the item being sold.
Very few eBay sales are local; almost all CgLst sales are local. I use CgList for inexpensive items that would cost a lot to ship and I use eBay for speciality items that I'm willing to ship anywhere in the world. I usually meet the actual buyer when using Craig's List. With eBay, I've sold to people in distant lands who don't speak English (by using web-translator cut-and-paste-text programs on international e-mails.)
Craig's List is a lot cheaper than eBay, but it is much shorter in the amount of time that the listing remains in view. If an item doesn't sell (or attract interested buyers) within six to eight hours on Craig's List, then it most likely won't sell at all. Everything on eBay (usually) sells, but you might not get a high price for it. I've found that most things on eBay (especially electronic musical instruments) will bring the same price (within 10%) as identical items sold within the past month, regardless of how low the starting bid is or how long the auction period is.
Ebay is also an excellent place to sell microchips and electronic components that can be bought for good discount in lots of 25 or 100 from electronic distributors with minimum orders. The surplus chips can be sold on eBay in lots of two or three each (Dutch auction style) for what you paid for them and shipped by mail in padded envelopes inexpensively.
Basically, Ebay is a world marketplace for very specialized goods. It has high fees but it is very efficient. Craig's List is a local expansion of a garage sale that can use the internet to position sales in distant markets.
In related news, Safeway announced that it is suing Starbucks because Starbucks is seriously undercutting its coffee sales. Safeway's public relations manager announced, "The American people deserve the opportunity to have a good cup of coffee in the morning, it's a god-given right! Starbucks is undermining that right by introducing mass confusion into the coffee marketplace. Before Starbucks, people always knew that they get their good, dependable, all-American coffee at the same store, at the same place, year after year. Now that Starbucks has appeared, they aren't sure. We have to put a stop to them. It's what Jesus would do."
Here in Portland Oregon we have manditory garbage recycling. Everybody has to seperate their plastic from the glass from the newspaper and so forth. It's a sham because it requires three times as many garbage trucks to collect the seperate catagories. There's three times as much diesel consumption to run these garbage trucks and three times as much noise pollution in the early-morning hours when they are collecting. The energy saved by the Mickey Mouse recycling schemes is less than the extra energy expended to truck out the seperated garbage to the distant landfills. So what's presented as advanced Green lifestyle is just more brown horseshit designed to make the latte-Volvo bohemenian boozhwah crowd feel good. Sad but true.
I've been reading a lot of James Howard Kunstler and the Peak-Oil writers lately. They claim that after the half-way point of the consumption of the world's petroleum, the cost of obtaining and distributing the rest will not be worth the benefits from using petroleum-based transportation. In other words, keeping the airlines, the interstate highway system, and the diesel truck based distribution system going is going to be unsystainable within ten years. And biodiesel is no solution because it takes more oil to grow the 'bio' than is returned by using the diesel. The recent 300% increase in the price of rice and food staples in the undeveloped world is a direct result of the biodiesel sham game played by the developed countries.
So these people claim $1 a gallon gas when their system is running at 100% and it's about 50% efficient now. So is this a linear relationship and they are capable of producing $2 a gallon gas now? Or is their cost presently $10+ a gallon.
One of the indirect consequences of $120 a barrel oil is the freezing of the financial system. Which means that there isn't going to be capital funding available for the development and conversion of present oil refineries to produce current levels of gasoline and/or other bio auto fuel regardless of whether the process works (and works efficiently). The massive funds needed for the conversion are not going to be available. The trillions of dollars have already been spent on things like the SUV network, the expansion of the subprime suburbs, and the permanent endless war. And the debt from the US federal budget deficits from previous years.
The money needed for fuel system conversion isn't there to spend anymore. So, we need to face a certain reality and get used to the concept that the 20th century is over and so is the era of Happy Motoring (and most likely, the era of globalization).
It could get as bad as the 19th century with 64-bit microprocessors. Having advanced electronic, computer, and communication technology is not the same thing as having energy! They aren't related other than the development of advanced electronics and communications was only possible in the era of super-cheap oil. There's a lot of oil still out there, but the energy needed to get it out of shale, or out of a hole that is 100 miles offshore and under a mile of water in hurricane alley is nearly the amount of energy that the oil can provide. So there is no net energy gain that can systain current American lifestyles and future global development. Sad news. Perpare yourself for it. And there are going to be no Mars or Moon colonies, either, despite the grandiose promises of presidents.
We're going to be doing well if we can keep the electricity running and the food growing.
This is an ROM chip, for a defunct platform (long gone), for a 'game' designed for very young children, that was determined to be so mediocre that it was never commercially released. So why is this a headline story on a site that claims to be a news forum on the leading edge of technological developments?
Open Source actually does have serious problems, but taking money from secret-code companies is not one of them.
The biggest problem with open source is the assumption on the part of the code writers that the users know as much about the code subject that they do. In other words, a serious lack of documentation oriented towards users who aren't going to be contributing to the code upkeep, who don't care how it works, and simply want to use the code as a tool to get a particular job finished quickly and easily. And with open source, the more specialized the application that it was written for, the more likely that the user interface is incomprehensible and the more likely that the code authors assume that the users know as much as they do.
These problems exist in commercial code but they get solved much quicker because the code's sales depend on its ability to be effective and to be easily used. Open source programs get presented and distributed as completed 'products' when their level of completion is roughly half of what commercial code presents for the same solution.
Basically the value of the money that you save by using open source is more or less equal to the time that you have to spend researching and learning all the things that the code's writing group assume that you already know.
For example, take a program to edit video copied from a DVD. The commercial code is expensive, but relatively easy to use and has extensive Help sections. The open source versions are screens full of randomly placed buttons and selection boxes that are labeled with acronyms. Help files, if they exist at all and are not simply URLs, are written with the assumption that you are already a professional digital video editor.
And yet open source advocates will claim that the programs are equal in ability because a skilled and experienced professional can figure out how to get them both to work.
These problems are much less in the open-source applications that attempting to position themselves as direct competitors to commercial software: programs like GIMP, LINUX, and OpenOffice. In a few cases, like FireFox, the open source is as transparently good as (to the average user, to the power user, they are much better than) the Windows browser.
The idea that there is a financial number that quantifies the extent that open-source has directed sales away from from commercial software is absurd. The numbers that they cite have been (to coin a phrase) 'pulled out of their ass'. Completely meaningless. The more open source software that becomes available, the more that the management of commercial software companies will have to understand that they are providing a support service and not a tangible product.
A global blog forum open to any subject is an appealing idea, but it is only as good as its search engine. Say you want to enlighten the world about your boss or company. There are a hundred million other people who are interested in doing the same thing. So how do you tell the world about your idiot boss John Smith and differenciate him from all the other idiot John Smiths (my apologies to all readers named John Smith, but you must run into this situation all the time).
And how do you change the blog when the situation has changed? And what do you do about the douchebag (an American term meaning a person whose obsession with a particular topic has made them insufferable, not a French term for a camping solar-shower) who attempts to post 10000000 full copies of the Qu'ran or the ancient scrolls of BaBeezoo-Bub and take up a teraByte of Pirate Bay blog space?
And who oversees this new global medium: who becomes the Pirate Bay's Rupert Murdoch? And how do we get rid of the Pirate Bay's new gossip site's overlord when he or she becomes hopelessly corrupt? When it becomes obvious that their personal tastes are affecting their editing decisions?
And why don't Slashdot posters address the real issues that arise from each topic? The ratio of horseshit to insightful commentary is extremely high for such a smart group of readers.
African Americans spend more money and time playing video games than whites...
... This statement is totally transparently bullshit. So why is it a Slashdot headline?
This is a bullshit statement. African Americans in the USA are only 9-12% of the population and half of them are in the very low-income bracket. In the target demographic (15-34 year old males), 5-10% of African Americans are in jail. They don't have Play Stations in their cells.
Whites (including Spanish speakers) are 80% of the USA population. They are concentrated in the high income brackets. The highest percentage of video game media and equipment
So how the hell could a population that is only 12% be spending more money in an area where the other 88% has more money to spend? Even if all the blacks were spending ALL their time and money they wouldn't be spending more money and time on video games than all the whites.
The statement must mean that African Americans spend a higher percentage of individually disposable money and time playing video games than white people do. But it doesn't say that. It says African Americans spend more money
In USA, every thing on work PCs belongs to the company that owns the PC. Well, yes, in legalese. But in fact many employees are finding out about the web by exploring the browser and web link that is often available in their work area. In electronics, it's common for people to have a PC linked to the network in order that assemblers and technicians (test and repair of the product before shipping) can enter data using the serial number of the piece (often a bar-code).
In fact, I would say that this method is how the vast majority of adults get initial exposure to the internet in the USA. So during their coffee break, they explore the web. And like all adults learning new and important things, they will always overstep the boundaries set by lawyers (who are basically Puritans left over from the Salem Witch burning days on the 1680s.)
And if they are guys, then they will, yes, at least once, type some sexual reference into the Google search line to see what happens. Face it, you did too, while you were learning and you thought that no one was looking.
Well for this 'crime' the company lawyers insist that they have the right and obligation to destroy the life of the person that they manage to actually catch doing this. Or they warn the employees not to ever do things on the web under penalty of job loss. Which means that the older employees will never go on the web out of fear of being fired for something that they don't understand. This also means that you will never get these employees to use the PC voluntarily.
What the company is only worried about is being extorted by one of the several schemes used to defraud using the web. They don't really care about Inez in bench 7b of PCB stuffing has discovered that she can send an instant message to her sister is Guadalajara for free. But this is VERY big news to Inez. And the only way that she knows how to do it is through the PC at the end of the table in her workplace. And she is going to use it. She doesn't realize that everything most likely gets saved. It's a super telephone to her.
So even though the legal wording says that the work PC and all the things on it belongs to the company, in reality the situation is far more complicated. The company should realize that even though their lawyers tell them that they can do anything, it would be best to be very flexible about this.
The USA is the European Union. The USA is the first and only successful long-term attempt of the European peoples to create an economic and political union. The fact that the people forming the union were all thrown of Europe, and that there were significant numbers of non-European people in their union, doesn't change the essential nature of the first successful European Union. In fact the USA was of minor importance in world affairs until all the little European countries decided to commit mass suicide in the years 1914 to 1945.
Whether the survivors and new generations of Europeans can sustain this new European Union remains to be seen.