If we can get all of these things available for viewing, then overcoming the login will be the trivial aspect.
I respectfully and humbly disagree. There is nothing trival about overcoming any login or technologically-based restriction for the vast majority of educated and interested people who could be persuaded to use and download on-line books.
Unless people have a solid background in computer systems and network software techniques and stategies, they will be blocked by even the simplest digital restriction.
Authors and artists are going to have to adjust to a world of massive digital copying by learning to massively increase their output, or finding private wealthy patrons and sponsors as in the middle ages. Or, they can publish full works as books and then also maintain nearly daily blogs and weekly commentaries on their books such as James Howard Kunstler does at www.kunstler.com.
As far as learning to massively increase their output goes, are there any authors who actually use speech-to-text software to create their works? Or are most of them still grappling with the issue of whether to use computers or typewriters to do their writing? I heard a talk by author Gay Talese last week where he mentioned that he writes out everything that he published in longhand script and sends it to his publisher a hundred pages at a time. But he's nearly eighty years old and still traveling and writing, so we should give him some slack. But some 25 year old writer should definitely be just dictating prose to her laptop and have it immediately uploaded to her website.
I've scanned about ten of my favorite books a few years ago and have put them into my Kazaa shared folder for anyone to download.
In three years there hasn't been one single download of any of these books. Maybe my tastes are completely different from the people who use Kazaa, or, maybe it hasn't occurred to the KaZaaistanis to actually look for books on what is primarily a music downloading library.
I've offered Gore Vidal, P.J. O'Rourke, Trevanian, Harry Turtledove, and others, but again, no one has the slightest interest.
So whenever you hear a book publisher claim that putting books online for download for free would devastate the industry, just remember that the people who read books are definitely not the people who download files from P2P resource libraries. The claim that online downloading of so-called e-books for low price or even free would hurt the book publishing industry seems on its face to be reasonable and prudent, but in reality it is totally without merit. The people who buy books and read them don't download files from Kazaa and the P2P filesharers don't read anything without having some teacher require it as part of their final grade. They'll download comic books, yes, maybe, but actual books of coherent text and prose, not a chance.
Such it is as it is. And I don't believe that this situation will change in the coming years as more people outside of the geek community discover the P2P global library resources that are available.
I am a test technician for a small-sized medical equipment company. Our entire database system for products and production has been written in Java by a single skilled programmer.
However I can't get this programmer to correct all the spelling errors that permeate the user interface. Sometimes there are two or three on each page. I've made a spreadsheet of the mispelled words and their corrected spelling and their locations in the various user screens. No luck. This guy just doesn't care. I've tried to explain that presenting interfaces with misspelled words compromises his code and the confidence that all of the employees of the company have in his code. "The code works," he says, "that's the important thing."
'It's a sad, sad situation. And it's getting more and more absurd', as the Elton John song goes.
Not only that, but also assumes that the sales coming as a direct result of the publicity gained by "piracy" would still be there, if there was no "piracy".
Good point. But they won't pay taxes on the phantom $6.3 billion in sales that they have lost, will they? Or will each person 'caught' downloading be charged with 'theft' of $6.3 billion and also charged with tax evasion on the money that they 'stole'?
The RIAA group of companys are going down the tube because they can't figure out how to price their product at various levels that people are actually willing to pay for their product. If they are truly serious about stopping 'piracy', then they would offer a low-resolution DIVx of a big hit movie for $2 in the video stores and big-box outlets (like Walmart) along with the high resolution DVD for $15 and the ultra high-definition version of the same film at $25, all at the same time.
But they won't do this. They expect everyone will buy the most expensive offering that they believe that they can offer.
This isn't good business sense, it's just stupid. It's becoming clear that the RIAA/MPAA doesn't really want to fight piracy. They just want more money for less work.
I went to Quebec for a week a few years ago. After a weekend in Quebec City, I drove back to Montreal on the main highway (the southern one) on monday morning. About 30 kilometers outside of Montreal (or Montréal, s'il vous voulez), traffic came to a dead stop. In one lane. The other lane of the two lane highway was empty. After ten minutes I climbed out onto the roof of the car and saw traffic stopped as far as I could see; and the left lane was completely empty.
I got in the car and drove into empty left lane. Going slowly at first and then up to 40 KPM, I passed thousands of cars. After a few kilometers, I came to a couple of orange rubber cones put up across the left lane of the highway. And all of the highway "repair" crew were just sitting around talking at the side of the road. I stopped in the left lane, got out, moved one of the orange rubber cones aside wide enough for my car, and drove through. The a couple of guys stood up and raised their arms. Déjeuné? (Lunchtime?) I asked. Urgence! I said. I jumped into the car and drove away. Pulled off the next off-ramp in case they had radioed the QPP (highway patrol).
No one followed me. Maybe it was the Oregon license plates (extremely rare in Quebec) or just the chutzpah. I don't know.
All I could think all the rest of way to the city was: Who the fuck would allow closing the main highway between the capital and the largest city on Monday morning just so four guys could have an unhassled lunch?
And how the fuck could these people actually believe that they could actually run an independent (meaning NO more federal welfare checks coming from Ottawa) country?
I like Quebec. I like Quebec people. But please stop with all the independence fantasies. They're fun, I know, and useful to a certain extent.
But in the real world (i.e. with the Americans a few hundred kilometers away), they are a luxury that Quebec can't really afford.
Please feel free to share your own Quebec stories below:
Why do you want to work for these BOZOS? Nothing is going to get any better on the job in an individual company than the process of getting a job in that individual company. You aren't going to get paid jack shit. You aren't going to be learning anything. You aren't going to be gaining any valuable experience. You aren't going to have health insurance. Ever. As long as you work there. (You will be elegible, after a year, to join the company plan for employees at 1/3 of your take-home pay. And have $1000 a year deductable and $50 doctor visit co-pays. No dental, though)
Are you young? Under thirty? Reasonable intelligent and educated? No criminal record? Healthy? If yes to all, then you should consider the idea of getting the FUCK out of the USA and relocating in a country that gives you a reasonable chance at a future.
Are you reading this so far? Yes, good, you are relatively fluent in English. You have a major advantage over all the other locals looking for the same job.
Jeez, don't work for Krueger's - Korger's - Target - Walmart - McDonald's - or whatever. Get a life. Get a real job. Did the schmuck who 'interviewed' you have a polyester blazer with a little American flag button? That's a warning. Sign up with them and you will be wasting your life. There is absolutely no future working for people like that.
For a period of time, Americans will be the only ones who will have RFID passports.
Plus, this concept that Americans can be distinguished from locals immediately on sight is by now a myth. In the 1950's and 1960's, it was true to a certain degree. But no longer. Besides, that statement assumes that all Americans are white, fat, and unstylish boobs who can't speak anything but English. It's hardly the situation today. Nowdays, everyone looks their social and economic class regardless of their specific nationality. So a machine that can detect Americans on the street of overseas city is extremely dangerous to those American travelers who are nearly indistingishable from the other people in the city.
It doesn't matter if the passport generates a random number, any number reflected from an RFID embedded passport identifies an American.
A passport that emits RFID information from any distance more than a few inches would be a serious danger to Americans traveling. Criminals can set up a cluster of RFID readers on a busy street and identify Americans by the RFID signals received. Then these people can be targeted for kidnapping, robbery, extortion, or murder specifically because of their nationality.
Even a RFID passport that emits only a few inches can be a danger if the criminals use more powerful amplifiers on their RFID receivers.
This idea is totally insane from the standpoint of individual security for travelers using a USA passport. But of course the nitwit fucks that run the USA 'Homeland Security' Department can't understand this. I'll be the first to buy a lead-threaded passport cover.
There are really only two real-world solutions to this so-called bandwidth problem. One is to increase the bandwidth. There is much unused 'dark fiber' that was installed during the dot-com boom. It was installed for this very reason; which is to deliver high-definition entertainment and informational content to homes and businesses. High-definition being something that you can watch for several hours, not the formal television standard.
But this is unlikely to happen because the dark fiber isn't owned by the ISPs, and, two, because the content creators have unreasonable expectations of the amount of money that they believe that they should receive from people viewing the product that they have created. The telecommunications conglomerates want the ISPs to go broke so that they can absorb the business. Hollywood is locked in a death spiral of creating $100,000,000 products for people who are increasing reluctant to pay more than a dollar to view each product. So don't expect anything (much) to happen on the corporate entertainment front. Except for endless press releases about how this and that BozoCom company is 'rising to the challenge of the information age' and all the other horseshit that you've come to know and love. Expect nothing more than mediocre entertainments loaded with expensive DRM from clueless Walter Yetnikoff-like bonehead entertainment execs.
The other alternative is to get away from the atomistic PC and its webs and find others in the section of the city that you live in who are also downloading their entertainment. Then pool your downloads together into a community library. Get your content from this library instead of taking such a huge chunk of the web's bandwidth downloading the same individual content title. This is all so illegal but I don't give a fuck and I know that you really don't either. So let's be reasonable about it instead of slithering around in our rooms. Building a community has many benefits that range far beyond unchoking the bandwidth spectrum.
There are many ways to do this, but no one in the IT community has any experience with either flesh-and-blood community development or the protection of illegal community digital libraries. But it can be done. Start by doing two things: talking about what you want, and just doing it. I recommend using DVD-ROMs because they hold 4.7 gigabytes of content for 25 cents. Others recommend using older 10-50 gigabyte hard disks loaded with content as a community library exchange medium. Do both. Or whatever works.
Just do... something...besides sitting in your chair downloading.
I must agree with the above post. Few are going to spend $2000 for an Apple when they can get almost the same spec laptop for 60% of the price.
Besides, people have been pissed at Microsoft's lack of quality software since the company's first offerings pre-PC. Few have actually switched to Apple. Most accept the limitations of the PC and do other things with their life.
Apple's advertisments alienate as many people as Microsoft's mediocre software. I can't imagine myself or any of my friends contributing to Steven Jobs' bank account.
At only 17 Megabytes, join the 21st century. Put the whole system on Flash EEPROM instead of a BIOS chip. Put the 'standard' Bozo BIOS on the Flash in a manner that it appears 'normal' on power-up, but have an option that if any key is pressed, the Chinese Linux boots on power-up.
Then promise Gates anything, sign any contract or treaty, do whatever these dinosaur Americans need to keep them within their illusion that they still control the world, and ignore them in the real world.
Physical PCs running Linux OS is the real world in the lands outside of the region where Microsoft has managed to bribe enough politicians to give it the illusion of legal control. Inside those regions, however, the PC community remains SOL and hostage to Microsoft's fantasies.
It takes forever to start Linux on a PC compared to Windows98. And after giving the command to shut down, it scrolls dozens of lines of incomprehensible text showing its 'shut down process'. And all the distributions that I've tried work like this. I feels like I'm shutting down the entire Pentagon.
Jeez, guys, this is supposed to be an appliance. It doesn't take three to five minutes to shut of a color TV set.
Linux isn't going to be taken seriously until you'all fix this shit. A PC should be ready to work with within five seconds of power on and should shut off within three seconds. This is not an unreasonable goal. It just seems that way because everyone that is the Linux headspace is still thinking in terms of 1970's Unix mainframe mentality. Like "this is a computer system, it is very complex, it runs very important things, it is very powerful, it must not be fucked with for any trival reason, it does not shut down, it does not go down, it does not fail, it is a manifestation of the power of the gods, kneel, peasent!"
This is a horseshit attitude nowdays when 32-bit processors cost less than an hour of minimum wage. But it lingers on and on. We all have fast hard disks that load megabytes in seconds, so it's no big deal to load what we need only when we need it. And we all have flash disks that hold 256 Megabytes in non-volatile memory in a chip the size of a toenail. So there's no reason to wait and wait and wait while megabyte after megabyte is transfered from one computer memory section to another every time the power is turned on.
Negroponte is right. Linux is too fat. And it loads too slowly, and takes forever to shut down. And if we can actually fix this situation, then you'll be able to count on your fingers and toes the number of quarters before Microsoft evaporates like the memory of vile fart.
Buying an RIAA-approved MP3 player is like flying on an Al-Qaida approved jetliner. It's guaranteed to have unwanted consequences and side effects that are the exact opposite of the experience that you are paying for. Basically you're giving extra money to extortionists in advance in order to be assured by the extortionists that the bad things that they do to people for money won't happen to you. But these organizations exist not to extort money, but to do nasty things to people. So by using equipment 'approved' by them only ensures that the bad things that these people do are going to happening to you.
An Al-Qaida airliner can be expected to blow up in mid-flight, because that's what they do. They aren't in it for the money or to sell 'Allah-approved' transportation, they do what they do in order to murder as many people as possible. An RIAA-approved MP3 player can be fully expected to stop playing your music randomly until you plug it into a phone line and automaticilly transfer more funds from your bank account to the RIAA's 'copyright and artist's protection' account. It's a guaranteed hassle from a band of assholes. It's hard to imagine any intelligent person buying it. It's like setting up an automatic bank transfer to extortionists and then being shocked and amazed that they are demanding more money each month.
Al-Qaida is a criminal organization obsessed with the murder of randomly selected individuals. The RIAA is a criminal organization that gets its money by using vast legal resources to extort money from randomly selected individuals. You can't fight criminal organizations or defend yourself from them by giving them the money that they demand. They just get stronger and meaner. You have to band together with others who are being extorted to defend each other and as a group refuse to pay the extortionists and then defend yourself against the violence (either physical or legal) that they bring against your group.
That's the only defense against the RIAA or the mafia. With Al-Qaida the only defense to be willing and able to kill everyone who aids and supports them, regardless of how cruel that these actions will make you appear to the world or history. It is their religious fanatisism that has put them into a mindset to where they can't be reasoned with or bought off like normal criminals. And they use the common people to hide them, like Mao's fish guerrillas in a sea of peasants. So to fight them, we are forced to kill everyone in the lands where they excape. They force us to be insanely cruel in order to defend ourselves. It is like Golda Meir's observation that the worst thing that the Palestinian terrorists do is force us to kill their children. But since they live to be martyrs anyway, we have no choice but to deliver this onto them.
Anyway, don't buy any 'RIAA approved' MP3 players. They're just a box of DRM hell.
Apple is in it only for the money. And they are a particularily nasty company to any customers who are trying to save on the money that they must give to Apple.
The true nature of the company was revealed to me at the beginning of the Mac era in 1984. The original Mac had the circuitry for 512K RAM and was stuffed with 128K RAM. It was straightforward to remove the soldered 128K RAM chip bank and replace it with a 512K RAM bank. Apple charged four times the going computer shop rate for doing this. Then, if anyone had the upgrade done at a non-Apple (cheaper but professional) shop, Apple would refuse to allow the bug-ridden version 1.0 ROM chip to be upgraded by Apple's representatives. You had to get an 'illegal' upgrade since Apple refused to extend service to its customers who didn't feel the need to pay four times the going rate for a necessary RAM upgrade.
This is a sleazy company. They have always been and always will be. They spend a LOT of money on advertisements and propaganda attempting to convince the world that they are special and different. They are different; they are sleazier than anyone else. Apple customers tend to have lots of money and that goes a long way towards convincing themselves that they are part of a special group of people in the world; the Apple customer base. But, Jobs is a billionaire and they remain stylish peasants with their illusions that they have a special relationship with Apple simply because they have the ability to throw lots of money their way.
Apple is a creepy, sleazy company. And their customers are fools.
Theaters should deal with the real problem. Which is that the film distributors, and film is what the theaters do, demand 90% of their box office receipts for the first two-three weeks of any new movie that shows in the theater. With this type of arrangement, there is no way in hell that any theater can make any money from showing films. Which, as mentioned eariler, is what they do. So there is all this desperate nonsense, er... explorations into alternative revenue sources like 3D sports and digital film image projection.
Problem is, these other things aren't revenue generators. Au Contraire, they are revenue burners because the theaters have to absorb the costs of this new presentation technology without any assurances that the public will be willing to pay more for film and video services that they already get from their 'home theaters'. In fact it is unlikely that the people who put up many thousands of dollars for 'home theaters' (which are just big screen televisions and loud stereos) can be brought back into the theaters by anything that the theaters offer because the people who bought the 'home theaters' don't have any money left.
So that just leaves the people who used to go to movies but don't anymore. And usually why they don't is because the films are either too expensive or too stupid. And the reason that the films are too expensive is because Hollywood has lost the ability to make high-quality reasonably priced entertainment products.
We are at the end of Hollywood cycle now; this one has been the 'BlockBuster' era that started in 1977 with the original Star Wars movie. So there is going to be a period of contraction in the industry and the same time that there will be bursts of huge amounts of money thrown at projects of truly dubious artistic and commercial merit. Huge projects with no realistic expectation generating any real profit [stuff like Peter Jackson's King Kong, Disney's Treasure Planet, and Oliver Stone's Alexander] will continue to pop out of Hollywood as the industry goes into its final crash-and-burn cycle.
This has all happened before. The most recent Hollywood down cycle started in the mid-1950s and lasted until the mid 1970s. The defining bomb movie of that era was Cleopatra(1964) staring Elizabeth Taylor, who was the Lindsay Lohan of the 1950's. Cleopatra cost about $500-$600 million in today's equivalent dollars and brought in about 1/10th of its cost in box office. Check it out on DVD or VHS if you want to get an idea of what kind of projects are being currently planned in Hollywood for the 2007-2009 season.
Anyway, the theaters are the only people who can stop the Hollywood descent in madness by demanding a much better return schedule on box office receipts and forcing Hollywood into developing higher quality, less-expensive product.
But the theaters are unlikely to take this opportunity because they are run by mediocre, narrow-minded, business and marketing majors who would be challenged should they ever have be called to operate anything as complex as a K-Mart Men's department. You know these guys; they're the ones with the white shirts, bad haircuts, and vaguely worried looks on their faces that you see when you stop at McDonald's for a MuffinBurger before going to work in the morning. These guys are not going to be generating solutions to Hollywood's basic problems.
All projections of the future are based on a continuation of middle-class life in the USA, Japan, and Europe as it is today only more so.
Probably won't be that way. Oil is peaking. Which means that the easy oil is gone and what's left won't be easy to get to. Or easy to pump out. Or protect from pirates, terrorists, or religious fanatics.
Plus...
The world's population continues to explode. Billions of more young people are becoming mature (15-20 years old) and find that there are no jobs available. It will be easy to blame everything on the 'rich' (which means, you and me). For the young, learning that there are no jobs and no futures and no money means they have nothing to lose by joining up for a big war 'against the infidels' (again, me and you).
This means MASSIVE price and supply distruptions in the oil markets. Since we use oil for everything: food, clothing, shelter, transportion, communications, financial structure, and electronics: then there will be major distruptions in everything.
That includes science and computing.
Major disruptions means that things are not going to get a whole lot better in the next 30 to 50 years. The people who tell you differently are either dreamers or fools, or they don't understand the implications of Peak Oil.
And the world's population continues to explode and billions of more young people continue to mature to adulthood while all this is happening.
Good to get a reply from someone who is actually affected by the original news story. Slashdotters go on and on with irrelevant scientific trivia and poor attempts at wit. None of that means anything to the people who actually live in the hurricane zone.
I'm a former resident of New Orleans. I lived in one of the buffer areas between the black and white checkerboard sections where the rent was cheap in Uptown Garden District (Between St. Charles and Carrellton Ave). Or to be more realistic, on the flood line between the above-sea-level ground and below-sea-level ground.
Now permit me to be cruel: I don't believe that New Orleans should be rebuilt. If the flood areas are subject to destruction as a result of broken levees and strong hurricanes can break the levees, then we are creating a cycle of destruction and rebuilding. New Orleans is a great city sure, but the money that is to be spent rebuilding the city would better be spent lowering the Gulf Coast offshore oil platforms below the surface. This would be better for USA in general. The USA needs the oil from these platforms; it doesn't need New Orleans or its hair-trigger lunatic suburbs. The port functions of New Orleans can be moved to Baton Rouge, with the river dredged or deepened as necessary.
If the prevailing science indicates that the hurricanes are going to get more frequent and stronger in the coming decades, we need to start planning for the consequences now. I'm even open to wild ideas, like dragging huge icebergs from the Arctic and placing them in the path of an on-coming CAT-5 storm, hopefully diverting it to someplace inconsequencial, like Cuba.
Always use pre-compiled binaries. It's a no-brainer. Source code is only for modifing something that the developers forgot or refused to do. And it's only for professionals with a lot of time on their hands. It is never cost or time-efficient to do your own compiling.
Any good reason for having the users of a program compile their own binaries is a good reason not to consider using Linux at all for anything serious. Because if there is any good reason to compile binaries then it means that the program is not stable or finished or even well-planned. And these kind of programs are ones that you don't want to mess around with unless you're getting paid for it or have some unusual emotional attachment to the application.
I am not talking about any kind of rubbing out except bankruptcy for Murdock's corporations. And I am using his metaphor. If he didn't mean it, then why did he say it? He's simply raising false alarms and is trying to get his people to think about the impact of new technology. That's all.
I do wish people would learn to be a little more careful with the words that they choose in their public speeches. Murdock's newspapers and media are far to eager to sensationalize small and aberrant (however abhorrent) events.
Rupert Murdock is a serious creep. It would be worth going without MP3, internet, and mobile phones for a while just to get rid of this guy. Unless, of course, he's just blowing smoke. Who knows? Maybe he does seriously believe what he's saying. If so, he's the only one who believes anything that he says.
Sometimes I wonder whether the people who work for MPAA style companies are stupid, or whether they simply are from some alternate universe where logic actually works that way.
The people in Hollywood are not stupid, but they are under a lot of pressure to deliver a product that is profitable. However, in the words of screenwriter William Goldman, "Nobody knows anything". Meaning making movies is an extremely risky business. The best way to assure a profit is to make a big $100,000,000+ movie with big stars and a known subject/title. The audience likes what they have seen before, only slightly different. Cliches work, and sequels work. A $100,000,000 remake of The return of the son of 70's TV show staring Tom Cruise and the latest blonde slut-de-jour has a better chance of making $200,000,000 in box office and DVD receipts than ten $10,000,000 fantastic indie films. It's the business as it is today, and how it has mostly been since the 1920's. The movie business is in need of a new way to distribute films to theaters, but $100,000 per screen for digital projection is way out of range and unlikely to happen. The high cost of the popcorn is due to the fact that the studio and distributor takes about 90% of the box office from the theater for the first two weeks, and 70-50% in the weeks after for the first six-to-eight weeks. High prices for food and drink is the only way that the theater chains can stay in business.
Trust Hollywood. The people there are smart. But it's not a normal business. It can make anyone look stupid. But in the end, they do deliver the goods.
How much for a pair of reproducing "mice" that are a big as beavers, can chew through the aluminium siding, rip arms and legs off with their paws, and can run 100 yards in 10 seconds?
What is stopping anyone from making these ecological monsters? Is there some kind of scientific oversight group? Or a set of defined ethical and/or ecological guidelines? Like in Pierre Ouilette's sci-fi novel about plant-animal genetic hybrids that was published in 1993 and whose name excapes me.
Vista will ALWAYS have a backdoor.
on
No Backdoor in Vista
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Vista will ALWAYS have a backdoor. This the showcase product of the richest man in the world. His and his companie's continued prosperity depends on the good graces of governments. And the governments will always demand a back door to spy on their people.
This is the way that the world works. MS will always deny that there is a backdoor. But it will always be there. If you don't believe it, go to China or any other crypto-fascist dictatorship with advanced technology. Start sending e-mails to foreign websites about subjects like democracy and freedom in general. Request information about local massacres of protesters in freedom demonstrations. Be sure to use encoded with Microsoft's bundled encryption. See how long it takes for the local secret police to arrest you. A week, a month?
Don't gamble your life and freedom on a sucker's bet. Microsoft will always cooperate with local authorities to ensure that Vista will not shield political dissidents. The only people who can be assured that their correspondence actually is private will be Microsoft employees. This is a trade-off that giant monopolistic global corporations always make with the totaltarian governments in the countries that they operate. Regardless of how much they deny it, Microsoft will act no differently.
You can improve your chances of getting a good, high-paying, and interesting job in the technology and IT sectors by learning to use a spell checker.
Try practicing with it on your resume first. Having misspelled words on a resume is the fastest way to a long career in the fast-food customer service industry regardless of your college degree.
This device will become very useful as hundreds of thousands of Americans go abroad to get health care needs met. The Medical Industry in the USA is in meltdown from greed and stupidity. Millions of people have no health care access at all and tens of millions of working-people (like you and me) have only limited access to medicial care.
To meet their needs for major surgery and so forth, they will be going to other countries with more rational health care services. Some doctors in these places will be bilingual, but many of them and most of the support staff will not be.
So yes, this machine will be very useful for Americans. Especially the large group of people who were born between 1945 and 1965 who will be at their greatest medical need stage at the same time that the American medical industry collapses.
Slashdot Mirror
If we can get all of these things available for viewing, then overcoming the login will be the trivial aspect.
I respectfully and humbly disagree. There is nothing trival about overcoming any login or technologically-based restriction for the vast majority of educated and interested people who could be persuaded to use and download on-line books.
Unless people have a solid background in computer systems and network software techniques and stategies, they will be blocked by even the simplest digital restriction.
Authors and artists are going to have to adjust to a world of massive digital copying by learning to massively increase their output, or finding private wealthy patrons and sponsors as in the middle ages. Or, they can publish full works as books and then also maintain nearly daily blogs and weekly commentaries on their books such as James Howard Kunstler does at www.kunstler.com.
As far as learning to massively increase their output goes, are there any authors who actually use speech-to-text software to create their works? Or are most of them still grappling with the issue of whether to use computers or typewriters to do their writing? I heard a talk by author Gay Talese last week where he mentioned that he writes out everything that he published in longhand script and sends it to his publisher a hundred pages at a time. But he's nearly eighty years old and still traveling and writing, so we should give him some slack. But some 25 year old writer should definitely be just dictating prose to her laptop and have it immediately uploaded to her website.
I've scanned about ten of my favorite books a few years ago and have put them into my Kazaa shared folder for anyone to download.
In three years there hasn't been one single download of any of these books. Maybe my tastes are completely different from the people who use Kazaa, or, maybe it hasn't occurred to the KaZaaistanis to actually look for books on what is primarily a music downloading library.
I've offered Gore Vidal, P.J. O'Rourke, Trevanian, Harry Turtledove, and others, but again, no one has the slightest interest.
So whenever you hear a book publisher claim that putting books online for download for free would devastate the industry, just remember that the people who read books are definitely not the people who download files from P2P resource libraries. The claim that online downloading of so-called e-books for low price or even free would hurt the book publishing industry seems on its face to be reasonable and prudent, but in reality it is totally without merit. The people who buy books and read them don't download files from Kazaa and the P2P filesharers don't read anything without having some teacher require it as part of their final grade. They'll download comic books, yes, maybe, but actual books of coherent text and prose, not a chance.
Such it is as it is. And I don't believe that this situation will change in the coming years as more people outside of the geek community discover the P2P global library resources that are available.
I am a test technician for a small-sized medical equipment company. Our entire database system for products and production has been written in Java by a single skilled programmer.
However I can't get this programmer to correct all the spelling errors that permeate the user interface. Sometimes there are two or three on each page. I've made a spreadsheet of the mispelled words and their corrected spelling and their locations in the various user screens. No luck. This guy just doesn't care. I've tried to explain that presenting interfaces with misspelled words compromises his code and the confidence that all of the employees of the company have in his code. "The code works," he says, "that's the important thing."
'It's a sad, sad situation. And it's getting more and more absurd', as the Elton John song goes.
Not only that, but also assumes that the sales coming as a direct result of the publicity gained by "piracy" would still be there, if there was no "piracy".
Good point. But they won't pay taxes on the phantom $6.3 billion in sales that they have lost, will they? Or will each person 'caught' downloading be charged with 'theft' of $6.3 billion and also charged with tax evasion on the money that they 'stole'?
The RIAA group of companys are going down the tube because they can't figure out how to price their product at various levels that people are actually willing to pay for their product. If they are truly serious about stopping 'piracy', then they would offer a low-resolution DIVx of a big hit movie for $2 in the video stores and big-box outlets (like Walmart) along with the high resolution DVD for $15 and the ultra high-definition version of the same film at $25, all at the same time.
But they won't do this. They expect everyone will buy the most expensive offering that they believe that they can offer.
This isn't good business sense, it's just stupid. It's becoming clear that the RIAA/MPAA doesn't really want to fight piracy. They just want more money for less work.
I went to Quebec for a week a few years ago. After a weekend in Quebec City, I drove back to Montreal on the main highway (the southern one) on monday morning. About 30 kilometers outside of Montreal (or Montréal, s'il vous voulez), traffic came to a dead stop. In one lane. The other lane of the two lane highway was empty. After ten minutes I climbed out onto the roof of the car and saw traffic stopped as far as I could see; and the left lane was completely empty.
I got in the car and drove into empty left lane. Going slowly at first and then up to 40 KPM, I passed thousands of cars. After a few kilometers, I came to a couple of orange rubber cones put up across the left lane of the highway. And all of the highway "repair" crew were just sitting around talking at the side of the road. I stopped in the left lane, got out, moved one of the orange rubber cones aside wide enough for my car, and drove through. The a couple of guys stood up and raised their arms. Déjeuné? (Lunchtime?) I asked. Urgence! I said. I jumped into the car and drove away. Pulled off the next off-ramp in case they had radioed the QPP (highway patrol).
No one followed me. Maybe it was the Oregon license plates (extremely rare in Quebec) or just the chutzpah. I don't know.
All I could think all the rest of way to the city was: Who the fuck would allow closing the main highway between the capital and the largest city on Monday morning just so four guys could have an unhassled lunch?
And how the fuck could these people actually believe that they could actually run an independent (meaning NO more federal welfare checks coming from Ottawa) country?
I like Quebec. I like Quebec people. But please stop with all the independence fantasies. They're fun, I know, and useful to a certain extent.
But in the real world (i.e. with the Americans a few hundred kilometers away), they are a luxury that Quebec can't really afford.
Please feel free to share your own Quebec stories below:
Why do you want to work for these BOZOS? Nothing is going to get any better on the job in an individual company than the process of getting a job in that individual company. You aren't going to get paid jack shit. You aren't going to be learning anything. You aren't going to be gaining any valuable experience. You aren't going to have health insurance. Ever. As long as you work there. (You will be elegible, after a year, to join the company plan for employees at 1/3 of your take-home pay. And have $1000 a year deductable and $50 doctor visit co-pays. No dental, though)
Are you young? Under thirty? Reasonable intelligent and educated? No criminal record? Healthy? If yes to all, then you should consider the idea of getting the FUCK out of the USA and relocating in a country that gives you a reasonable chance at a future.
Are you reading this so far? Yes, good, you are relatively fluent in English. You have a major advantage over all the other locals looking for the same job.
Jeez, don't work for Krueger's - Korger's - Target - Walmart - McDonald's - or whatever. Get a life. Get a real job. Did the schmuck who 'interviewed' you have a polyester blazer with a little American flag button? That's a warning. Sign up with them and you will be wasting your life. There is absolutely no future working for people like that.
Seriously, consider emigrating....
For a period of time, Americans will be the only ones who will have RFID passports.
Plus, this concept that Americans can be distinguished from locals immediately on sight is by now a myth. In the 1950's and 1960's, it was true to a certain degree. But no longer. Besides, that statement assumes that all Americans are white, fat, and unstylish boobs who can't speak anything but English. It's hardly the situation today. Nowdays, everyone looks their social and economic class regardless of their specific nationality. So a machine that can detect Americans on the street of overseas city is extremely dangerous to those American travelers who are nearly indistingishable from the other people in the city.
It doesn't matter if the passport generates a random number, any number reflected from an RFID embedded passport identifies an American.
A passport that emits RFID information from any distance more than a few inches would be a serious danger to Americans traveling. Criminals can set up a cluster of RFID readers on a busy street and identify Americans by the RFID signals received. Then these people can be targeted for kidnapping, robbery, extortion, or murder specifically because of their nationality.
Even a RFID passport that emits only a few inches can be a danger if the criminals use more powerful amplifiers on their RFID receivers.
This idea is totally insane from the standpoint of individual security for travelers using a USA passport. But of course the nitwit fucks that run the USA 'Homeland Security' Department can't understand this. I'll be the first to buy a lead-threaded passport cover.
There are really only two real-world solutions to this so-called bandwidth problem. One is to increase the bandwidth. There is much unused 'dark fiber' that was installed during the dot-com boom. It was installed for this very reason; which is to deliver high-definition entertainment and informational content to homes and businesses. High-definition being something that you can watch for several hours, not the formal television standard.
But this is unlikely to happen because the dark fiber isn't owned by the ISPs, and, two, because the content creators have unreasonable expectations of the amount of money that they believe that they should receive from people viewing the product that they have created. The telecommunications conglomerates want the ISPs to go broke so that they can absorb the business. Hollywood is locked in a death spiral of creating $100,000,000 products for people who are increasing reluctant to pay more than a dollar to view each product. So don't expect anything (much) to happen on the corporate entertainment front. Except for endless press releases about how this and that BozoCom company is 'rising to the challenge of the information age' and all the other horseshit that you've come to know and love. Expect nothing more than mediocre entertainments loaded with expensive DRM from clueless Walter Yetnikoff-like bonehead entertainment execs.
The other alternative is to get away from the atomistic PC and its webs and find others in the section of the city that you live in who are also downloading their entertainment. Then pool your downloads together into a community library. Get your content from this library instead of taking such a huge chunk of the web's bandwidth downloading the same individual content title. This is all so illegal but I don't give a fuck and I know that you really don't either. So let's be reasonable about it instead of slithering around in our rooms. Building a community has many benefits that range far beyond unchoking the bandwidth spectrum.
There are many ways to do this, but no one in the IT community has any experience with either flesh-and-blood community development or the protection of illegal community digital libraries. But it can be done. Start by doing two things: talking about what you want, and just doing it. I recommend using DVD-ROMs because they hold 4.7 gigabytes of content for 25 cents. Others recommend using older 10-50 gigabyte hard disks loaded with content as a community library exchange medium. Do both. Or whatever works.
Just do... something...besides sitting in your chair downloading.
I must agree with the above post. Few are going to spend $2000 for an Apple when they can get almost the same spec laptop for 60% of the price.
Besides, people have been pissed at Microsoft's lack of quality software since the company's first offerings pre-PC. Few have actually switched to Apple. Most accept the limitations of the PC and do other things with their life.
Apple's advertisments alienate as many people as Microsoft's mediocre software. I can't imagine myself or any of my friends contributing to Steven Jobs' bank account.
Chinese Linux on CD? No...
At only 17 Megabytes, join the 21st century. Put the whole system on Flash EEPROM instead of a BIOS chip. Put the 'standard' Bozo BIOS on the Flash in a manner that it appears 'normal' on power-up, but have an option that if any key is pressed, the Chinese Linux boots on power-up.
Then promise Gates anything, sign any contract or treaty, do whatever these dinosaur Americans need to keep them within their illusion that they still control the world, and ignore them in the real world.
Physical PCs running Linux OS is the real world in the lands outside of the region where Microsoft has managed to bribe enough politicians to give it the illusion of legal control. Inside those regions, however, the PC community remains SOL and hostage to Microsoft's fantasies.
It takes forever to start Linux on a PC compared to Windows98. And after giving the command to shut down, it scrolls dozens of lines of incomprehensible text showing its 'shut down process'. And all the distributions that I've tried work like this. I feels like I'm shutting down the entire Pentagon.
Jeez, guys, this is supposed to be an appliance. It doesn't take three to five minutes to shut of a color TV set.
Linux isn't going to be taken seriously until you'all fix this shit. A PC should be ready to work with within five seconds of power on and should shut off within three seconds. This is not an unreasonable goal. It just seems that way because everyone that is the Linux headspace is still thinking in terms of 1970's Unix mainframe mentality. Like "this is a computer system, it is very complex, it runs very important things, it is very powerful, it must not be fucked with for any trival reason, it does not shut down, it does not go down, it does not fail, it is a manifestation of the power of the gods, kneel, peasent!"
This is a horseshit attitude nowdays when 32-bit processors cost less than an hour of minimum wage. But it lingers on and on. We all have fast hard disks that load megabytes in seconds, so it's no big deal to load what we need only when we need it. And we all have flash disks that hold 256 Megabytes in non-volatile memory in a chip the size of a toenail. So there's no reason to wait and wait and wait while megabyte after megabyte is transfered from one computer memory section to another every time the power is turned on.
Negroponte is right. Linux is too fat. And it loads too slowly, and takes forever to shut down. And if we can actually fix this situation, then you'll be able to count on your fingers and toes the number of quarters before Microsoft evaporates like the memory of vile fart.
Buying an RIAA-approved MP3 player is like flying on an Al-Qaida approved jetliner. It's guaranteed to have unwanted consequences and side effects that are the exact opposite of the experience that you are paying for. Basically you're giving extra money to extortionists in advance in order to be assured by the extortionists that the bad things that they do to people for money won't happen to you. But these organizations exist not to extort money, but to do nasty things to people. So by using equipment 'approved' by them only ensures that the bad things that these people do are going to happening to you.
An Al-Qaida airliner can be expected to blow up in mid-flight, because that's what they do. They aren't in it for the money or to sell 'Allah-approved' transportation, they do what they do in order to murder as many people as possible. An RIAA-approved MP3 player can be fully expected to stop playing your music randomly until you plug it into a phone line and automaticilly transfer more funds from your bank account to the RIAA's 'copyright and artist's protection' account. It's a guaranteed hassle from a band of assholes. It's hard to imagine any intelligent person buying it. It's like setting up an automatic bank transfer to extortionists and then being shocked and amazed that they are demanding more money each month.
Al-Qaida is a criminal organization obsessed with the murder of randomly selected individuals. The RIAA is a criminal organization that gets its money by using vast legal resources to extort money from randomly selected individuals. You can't fight criminal organizations or defend yourself from them by giving them the money that they demand. They just get stronger and meaner. You have to band together with others who are being extorted to defend each other and as a group refuse to pay the extortionists and then defend yourself against the violence (either physical or legal) that they bring against your group.
That's the only defense against the RIAA or the mafia. With Al-Qaida the only defense to be willing and able to kill everyone who aids and supports them, regardless of how cruel that these actions will make you appear to the world or history. It is their religious fanatisism that has put them into a mindset to where they can't be reasoned with or bought off like normal criminals. And they use the common people to hide them, like Mao's fish guerrillas in a sea of peasants. So to fight them, we are forced to kill everyone in the lands where they excape. They force us to be insanely cruel in order to defend ourselves. It is like Golda Meir's observation that the worst thing that the Palestinian terrorists do is force us to kill their children. But since they live to be martyrs anyway, we have no choice but to deliver this onto them.
Anyway, don't buy any 'RIAA approved' MP3 players. They're just a box of DRM hell.
Apple is in it only for the money. And they are a particularily nasty company to any customers who are trying to save on the money that they must give to Apple.
The true nature of the company was revealed to me at the beginning of the Mac era in 1984. The original Mac had the circuitry for 512K RAM and was stuffed with 128K RAM. It was straightforward to remove the soldered 128K RAM chip bank and replace it with a 512K RAM bank. Apple charged four times the going computer shop rate for doing this. Then, if anyone had the upgrade done at a non-Apple (cheaper but professional) shop, Apple would refuse to allow the bug-ridden version 1.0 ROM chip to be upgraded by Apple's representatives. You had to get an 'illegal' upgrade since Apple refused to extend service to its customers who didn't feel the need to pay four times the going rate for a necessary RAM upgrade.
This is a sleazy company. They have always been and always will be. They spend a LOT of money on advertisements and propaganda attempting to convince the world that they are special and different. They are different; they are sleazier than anyone else. Apple customers tend to have lots of money and that goes a long way towards convincing themselves that they are part of a special group of people in the world; the Apple customer base. But, Jobs is a billionaire and they remain stylish peasants with their illusions that they have a special relationship with Apple simply because they have the ability to throw lots of money their way.
Apple is a creepy, sleazy company. And their customers are fools.
Theaters should deal with the real problem. Which is that the film distributors, and film is what the theaters do, demand 90% of their box office receipts for the first two-three weeks of any new movie that shows in the theater. With this type of arrangement, there is no way in hell that any theater can make any money from showing films. Which, as mentioned eariler, is what they do. So there is all this desperate nonsense, er... explorations into alternative revenue sources like 3D sports and digital film image projection.
Problem is, these other things aren't revenue generators. Au Contraire, they are revenue burners because the theaters have to absorb the costs of this new presentation technology without any assurances that the public will be willing to pay more for film and video services that they already get from their 'home theaters'. In fact it is unlikely that the people who put up many thousands of dollars for 'home theaters' (which are just big screen televisions and loud stereos) can be brought back into the theaters by anything that the theaters offer because the people who bought the 'home theaters' don't have any money left.
So that just leaves the people who used to go to movies but don't anymore. And usually why they don't is because the films are either too expensive or too stupid. And the reason that the films are too expensive is because Hollywood has lost the ability to make high-quality reasonably priced entertainment products.
We are at the end of Hollywood cycle now; this one has been the 'BlockBuster' era that started in 1977 with the original Star Wars movie. So there is going to be a period of contraction in the industry and the same time that there will be bursts of huge amounts of money thrown at projects of truly dubious artistic and commercial merit. Huge projects with no realistic expectation generating any real profit [stuff like Peter Jackson's King Kong, Disney's Treasure Planet, and Oliver Stone's Alexander] will continue to pop out of Hollywood as the industry goes into its final crash-and-burn cycle.
This has all happened before. The most recent Hollywood down cycle started in the mid-1950s and lasted until the mid 1970s. The defining bomb movie of that era was Cleopatra(1964) staring Elizabeth Taylor, who was the Lindsay Lohan of the 1950's. Cleopatra cost about $500-$600 million in today's equivalent dollars and brought in about 1/10th of its cost in box office. Check it out on DVD or VHS if you want to get an idea of what kind of projects are being currently planned in Hollywood for the 2007-2009 season.
Anyway, the theaters are the only people who can stop the Hollywood descent in madness by demanding a much better return schedule on box office receipts and forcing Hollywood into developing higher quality, less-expensive product.
But the theaters are unlikely to take this opportunity because they are run by mediocre, narrow-minded, business and marketing majors who would be challenged should they ever have be called to operate anything as complex as a K-Mart Men's department. You know these guys; they're the ones with the white shirts, bad haircuts, and vaguely worried looks on their faces that you see when you stop at McDonald's for a MuffinBurger before going to work in the morning. These guys are not going to be generating solutions to Hollywood's basic problems.
All projections of the future are based on a continuation of middle-class life in the USA, Japan, and Europe as it is today only more so.
Probably won't be that way. Oil is peaking. Which means that the easy oil is gone and what's left won't be easy to get to. Or easy to pump out. Or protect from pirates, terrorists, or religious fanatics.
Plus...
The world's population continues to explode. Billions of more young people are becoming mature (15-20 years old) and find that there are no jobs available. It will be easy to blame everything on the 'rich' (which means, you and me). For the young, learning that there are no jobs and no futures and no money means they have nothing to lose by joining up for a big war 'against the infidels' (again, me and you).
This means MASSIVE price and supply distruptions in the oil markets. Since we use oil for everything: food, clothing, shelter, transportion, communications, financial structure, and electronics: then there will be major distruptions in everything.
That includes science and computing.
Major disruptions means that things are not going to get a whole lot better in the next 30 to 50 years.
The people who tell you differently are either dreamers or fools, or they don't understand the implications of Peak Oil.
And the world's population continues to explode and billions of more young people continue to mature to adulthood while all this is happening.
Good to get a reply from someone who is actually affected by the original news story. Slashdotters go on and on with irrelevant scientific trivia and poor attempts at wit. None of that means anything to the people who actually live in the hurricane zone.
I'm a former resident of New Orleans. I lived in one of the buffer areas between the black and white checkerboard sections where the rent was cheap in Uptown Garden District (Between St. Charles and Carrellton Ave). Or to be more realistic, on the flood line between the above-sea-level ground and below-sea-level ground.
Now permit me to be cruel: I don't believe that New Orleans should be rebuilt. If the flood areas are subject to destruction as a result of broken levees and strong hurricanes can break the levees, then we are creating a cycle of destruction and rebuilding. New Orleans is a great city sure, but the money that is to be spent rebuilding the city would better be spent lowering the Gulf Coast offshore oil platforms below the surface. This would be better for USA in general. The USA needs the oil from these platforms; it doesn't need New Orleans or its hair-trigger lunatic suburbs. The port functions of New Orleans can be moved to Baton Rouge, with the river dredged or deepened as necessary.
If the prevailing science indicates that the hurricanes are going to get more frequent and stronger in the coming decades, we need to start planning for the consequences now. I'm even open to wild ideas, like dragging huge icebergs from the Arctic and placing them in the path of an on-coming CAT-5 storm, hopefully diverting it to someplace inconsequencial, like Cuba.
Always use pre-compiled binaries. It's a no-brainer. Source code is only for modifing something that the developers forgot or refused to do. And it's only for professionals with a lot of time on their hands. It is never cost or time-efficient to do your own compiling.
Any good reason for having the users of a program compile their own binaries is a good reason not to consider using Linux at all for anything serious. Because if there is any good reason to compile binaries then it means that the program is not stable or finished or even well-planned. And these kind of programs are ones that you don't want to mess around with unless you're getting paid for it or have some unusual emotional attachment to the application.
It's just common sense.
I am not talking about any kind of rubbing out except bankruptcy for Murdock's corporations. And I am using his metaphor. If he didn't mean it, then why did he say it? He's simply raising false alarms and is trying to get his people to think about the impact of new technology. That's all.
I do wish people would learn to be a little more careful with the words that they choose in their public speeches. Murdock's newspapers and media are far to eager to sensationalize small and aberrant (however abhorrent) events.
Rupert Murdock is a serious creep. It would be worth going without MP3, internet, and mobile phones for a while just to get rid of this guy. Unless, of course, he's just blowing smoke. Who knows? Maybe he does seriously believe what he's saying. If so, he's the only one who believes anything that he says.
Sometimes I wonder whether the people who work for MPAA style companies are stupid, or whether they simply are from some alternate universe where logic actually works that way.
The people in Hollywood are not stupid, but they are under a lot of pressure to deliver a product that is profitable. However, in the words of screenwriter William Goldman, "Nobody knows anything". Meaning making movies is an extremely risky business. The best way to assure a profit is to make a big $100,000,000+ movie with big stars and a known subject/title. The audience likes what they have seen before, only slightly different. Cliches work, and sequels work. A $100,000,000 remake of The return of the son of 70's TV show staring Tom Cruise and the latest blonde slut-de-jour has a better chance of making $200,000,000 in box office and DVD receipts than ten $10,000,000 fantastic indie films. It's the business as it is today, and how it has mostly been since the 1920's. The movie business is in need of a new way to distribute films to theaters, but $100,000 per screen for digital projection is way out of range and unlikely to happen. The high cost of the popcorn is due to the fact that the studio and distributor takes about 90% of the box office from the theater for the first two weeks, and 70-50% in the weeks after for the first six-to-eight weeks. High prices for food and drink is the only way that the theater chains can stay in business.
Trust Hollywood. The people there are smart. But it's not a normal business. It can make anyone look stupid. But in the end, they do deliver the goods.
How much for a pair of reproducing "mice" that are a big as beavers, can chew through the aluminium siding, rip arms and legs off with their paws, and can run 100 yards in 10 seconds?
What is stopping anyone from making these ecological monsters? Is there some kind of scientific oversight group? Or a set of defined ethical and/or ecological guidelines? Like in Pierre Ouilette's sci-fi novel about plant-animal genetic hybrids that was published in 1993 and whose name excapes me.
Vista will ALWAYS have a backdoor. This the showcase product of the richest man in the world. His and his companie's continued prosperity depends on the good graces of governments. And the governments will always demand a back door to spy on their people.
This is the way that the world works. MS will always deny that there is a backdoor. But it will always be there. If you don't believe it, go to China or any other crypto-fascist dictatorship with advanced technology. Start sending e-mails to foreign websites about subjects like democracy and freedom in general. Request information about local massacres of protesters in freedom demonstrations. Be sure to use encoded with Microsoft's bundled encryption. See how long it takes for the local secret police to arrest you. A week, a month?
Don't gamble your life and freedom on a sucker's bet. Microsoft will always cooperate with local authorities to ensure that Vista will not shield political dissidents. The only people who can be assured that their correspondence actually is private will be Microsoft employees. This is a trade-off that giant monopolistic global corporations always make with the totaltarian governments in the countries that they operate. Regardless of how much they deny it, Microsoft will act no differently.
Count on it.
You can improve your chances of getting a good, high-paying, and interesting job in the technology and IT sectors by learning to use a spell checker.
Try practicing with it on your resume first. Having misspelled words on a resume is the fastest way to a long career in the fast-food customer service industry regardless of your college degree.
This device will become very useful as hundreds of thousands of Americans go abroad to get health care needs met. The Medical Industry in the USA is in meltdown from greed and stupidity. Millions of people have no health care access at all and tens of millions of working-people (like you and me) have only limited access to medicial care.
To meet their needs for major surgery and so forth, they will be going to other countries with more rational health care services. Some doctors in these places will be bilingual, but many of them and most of the support staff will not be.
So yes, this machine will be very useful for Americans. Especially the large group of people who were born between 1945 and 1965 who will be at their greatest medical need stage at the same time that the American medical industry collapses.