There are no Chinese or Indonesian science students. No American, Japanese, Russian, or French ones either.
Studing science in serious way puts the student into a category that transcends nationalism. Especially today as the amount of global scientific knowledge has become so vast. Mastering a speciality to the point where one can add to the knowledge base puts one into a mind-space that goes beyond the limits of nationalism.
The purpose of creating nation-states is primarily to wage war on other nation-states. Nation-states also need to create a political and economic elite in each country that will facilitate the collection of taxes and the other functions needed to define the state. This was an effective means of organizing societies out of tribes and into effective economic wealth generating entities in the industrial age (1750-2010).
But it is passing now. And scientists and science students are in the forefront of the new era - the information age. Nationalism and its collolary, citizenship, will become less and less important to the new transnational elite with each passing year.
So it is becoming more absurd to classify serious science students by nationality. In turn, serious science students have an obligation to their new elites status to NOT engage in destructive behavior like designing omnicide technology (omni-cide being the destruction of all human life through technological means). That means refusing to design things like hydrogen bombs, super-long half-life radioactive poisons, genetically-engineered diseases with no accessable cure for most people (like smallpox varients), and newer technologies like earthquake generation that remain secret and speculative. When scientists do research on omnicide technologies for reasons primarily focused on nationalism or religion, they must be denied access to the most advanced scientific research by the other scientists themselves who have joined and formed the new information-age scientific elite.
So, yes, realistically there are no Chinese or Indonesian science students any more. There are only science students.
Doing the USA National Archives is great. But the real challenge is digitizing the Library of Congress. I fear that a lot of the mid-level literature of the 'greatest generation' will be lost because of the Mickey Mouse copyright law. If the copyright starts roughly around 1925 and continues indefinitely due to roll-over extensions, then the books printed from 1925 through about 1995 will be locked up and possibly lost forever.
No one will risk being sent to gitmo for copyright by republishing 20th century books and the companies that 'own' them won't republish them because there is no profit in it. When the paper dissolves, they will be gone. Gone with them will be the ability of future historians to have insight into what made these people's thoughts, values, and development process that comes from examining literature from the period. There will always be some books from the era kept around, but the bulk will be lost.
I'm not worried about the books from 1995 on because the people from this era realize that copyright laws are just total bullshit. They will digitize and circulate their favorite written literature on P2P networks in the same manner that is already being done with music recordings. Many sci-fi books are available on Kazaa, but very little is there outside the sci-fi genre.
But this won't happen for the literature from the bulk of the 20th century. I've never met a single person who is digitizing (saving for prosperity) pop paperbacks. When they're gone, they're gone as if they had never been written at all.
I first noticed this when looking for a copy of Trevanian's Shibumi from 1979. Great book, but now getting difficult to find. There must be tens of thousands of books in this category.
That's why we should digitize the Library of Congress. A big job, that may not even be possible given the delicate state of many of the older books.
This guy's contributions seem to consist of mostly getting all the store employees to nag customers for the last four digits of their phone number. This has come to epitomise the arrogance of corporate directives worldwide. It has probably driven more people away from Radio Shack than anything else.
For me as a techno-geek, I used to be drawn into a Radio Shack like a magnet. Now I'm repelled from the place in the same manner. They used to have a great selection of just the right parts. In fact, the IC's sold at Radio Shack in the 1980s (like the SN94281 sound generator) are the only chips in the world that have actually gone up in value from that period. I bought my first computer at Radio Shack, a CoCo MC-10. It's still supported on the web by a few die-hards. It was nearly impossible to get information from Radio Shack about the stuff that they would sell.
As for whether this guy's lack of sitting in boring and silly classes for five years had anything to do with Radio Shack's increasing irrelevance, I won't even guess. As for his lying, his big offense is lying to his fellow executives, not to the customers and shareholders. That is common business practice.
What kind of propaganda system do they want? Are they talking about a news service like Voice of America used to be for Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Basically an unbiased news service that brought the same news found in USA newspapers to people who had no access to non-Communist news sources? That service is already provided by CNN and, to a certain extent, the newer-more open Arab news services like al-Jazira.
Or do they want a focused pro-American pro-West service to counter the incessant anti-American message coming from Iran?
Perhaps they are talking about a 'black' propaganda service, where stories that may or may not be true are introduced into the 'Arab street' for the sole purpose of provoking an extreme reaction. The Arabs and the Pakistanis will go into violent riot mode on just rumors now. For example, I doubt that anyone rioting in Libya, Syria, or Pakistan has actually seen any of these editorial cartoons that have whipped them into a frenzy. It is also doubtful that anyone in the west would have started massive street riots without actually seeing the provocative images themselves. It's unlikely that provocative images or unproven news rumors would cause riots in the west anyway.
Having a 'black' propaganda service that could introduce false rumors would allow the controllers of this service to have a 'light switch' to start violent street riots in the Islamic world at any time that is convenient for them.
For us in the real world, the Mac doesn't exist. It's just a beautiful picture in a magazine, like Lindsay Lohan. We have Windows and if we can get it working, Linux.
I understand your concern, but I believe that it is misplaced. All libraries have porn filters for children's machines. But that's quite different from being unable to find information on breast cancer because the local bible thumpers forced the local library to deny any access to a website that has the word 'breast' on it. I've even seen library filters deny me access to Safeway grocery ads because chicken breasts were on sale there.
I typed 'horse pictures' into Google and got pictures of horses. Search engine companies are very sensitive to having children access accidently hard-core porn images when doing innocent searches. This is a concern between the porn industry and the search engine companies. They have to come to an arrangement that prevents this kind of thing from happening. It's very bad for their businesses. Having children innocently and accidently come across porn images will become rare in the near future. It is much less common now than it was five years ago.
But that will happen without over-restrictive filters on websites on public-access computers.
One of the main reasons for designing, building, and programming hundreds of millions of cheap, powerful computers is that they can be used to transform an individual's spelling and grammar into the universal standard and vice-versa.
if i dont spell no good or talk no good it dont make no diffrens if i got a gigahertz pc that can fix my spellin and grammer.
The reason that we don't have spelling and grammar checkers built into the OS is because it is assumed that anyone who can afford a computer has already passed a level of advanced education and literacy. However that isn't true since computers are now so cheap and widespread that they are used regardless of level of academic compentency.
And, don't forget, everyone is rather dim outside of their native language.
So it's our responsibility to make sure that the applications and operating systems that we create have high quality spelling and grammar checkers available and running.
By the way, where's the spelling checker on this Slashdot comment box?
Security, Security, Security
yeah, they're so good at this. The world's richest man wants to 'protect' you from people who will give him more money for the opportunity to sell you junk that you don't need, using commercials on your desktop, or 'jump-outs' in your application.
Plus since we're talking security here, what makes you think that you're going to get any from the guys who bend over backwards to put ordinary people in Chinese concentration-camp prisons. You can be assured that anything from Redmond is going to have plenty of backdoors for the Gitmo Gomers to read and monitor everything that you do on your PC. And Linux won't have this.
Internet Explorer 7: IE gets a much-needed, Firefox-inspired makeover...
So use just FireFox. 'nuff said.
Righteous eye candy...
Do like Steve Jobs and just drop some acid if you...need... eye candy.
Desktop search:...just use Google and Yahoo like you do normally anyway since they're already here and better.
Better updates:
one word...sourceforge....next?
More media
more embedded DRM, you mean.
Parental controls
we are already grown-up, and we don't need any more excuses for library restrictions on web access. Like prohibiting 17-year-olds from getting information on effective birth control, just cause 'Jesus or Allah says no'.
Better backups
the application programmer's responsibility, not the OS.
Peer-to-peer collaboration
they seem to want to make that quite illegal if I recall correctly.
So how much money or honey did they give this guy for writing such a transparent puff-piece about an operation system that doesn't even exist yet?
It actually matters a great amount. There is no shortage of males who are computer literate and are willing to stop what they are doing when you have a question. Because you are female and this is one of the few chances that they get to interact with females. If you were male and had a question, and the other more computer-literate males thought that your question was 'stupid', then they would tell you that you were stupid and to just read the 2000 page manual.
Linux isn't hard to use when it's already installed and configured properly... Maybe so, but it is never distributed already installed and configured properly. And when someone from Windows attempts to do anything remotely technical, they either end up completely lost or in command-line hell. Or someone just tells them to 'read the manual'- all 2000 pages of it.
Why universities and schools are not Linux? Because Linux is extraordinarily difficult to use if you are not a trained computer professional. Granted it's better than it was thirty years ago (when it was called UNIX), but it is not yet good enough to compete with Windows on the user interface level. And in universities and schools (and nearly everywhere else), user interface is the computer.
If Linux/UNIX users want the Windows people to switch, then make a version of Linux that looks like Windows and acts like Windows. Something that is so close to Windows that the average user doesn't know that it is not Windows.
Is it illegal? So what. Do it anyway. Demand to be placed on juries that determine the fate of people who have been caught distributing Linux-as-Windows.
And for God's sake, stop using acronymns for computer terms.
For most people, the computer itself or the computer system under the interface is of little or no importance. They are using the PC as a tool to get other work done. Since Windows is so much more easier to use than Linux/UNIX (please don't tell me that they are different, because they're not) it is the system that will continue to be used by the vast majority of people that use computers. For the vast majority of people, the cost for switching from Windows to Linux is far, far greater in terms of time and energy (learning all the stupid little details of getting things done) than the monetary cost of buying Windows.
If you make Linux look, feel, act, work, and program exactly like Windows and still be near free, then yes, everyone will switch to Linux. In the meantime, people will think that you're crazy for asking why they use Windows instead of Linux. It's obvious to them, it's because Windows is so much better and cheaper.
For example:
$> lms -x38i8 slsil334ss @@ $ (agl -fjldl.or)
is an interesting puzzle to anyone with a Linux/UNIX orientation but scares the shit out of anyone who needs to use a PC to get work done NOW. Sooner or later, Linux dumps everyone onto the command line, because it has been designed that way. Windows never does. Linux people LOVE the command line; Windows people hate it.
There are a million more things that make the user interface of Windows so much better. Nearly all are culturally invisible to Linux users.
I do realize of course that Slashdot is the worse place in the world to point this out, but it is the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. So don't mod me to hell for saying this. Be civilized, and open-minded. Thank you.
to whoever put them on the internet, and then get medeival on them for breach of contract.
Well I'm sure that they would like to do this, in their fantasies. But in the real world it's a music producer vs. Clear Channel, not some individual D.J. And if Clear Channel decides that it is in their best interest that the music go out to the P2P file sharers before the record is released, then there isn't a whole lot that the record producer can do about it.
Clear Channel gets money from every music source except sales of disks and downloads. In other words, it is in their interest to have the 'product' on the file share networks; copyright laws be damned. They own the radio stations, the concert venues, the ticket companies, the artist management companies (in some cases), and the billboards.
Maybe someday the entertainment companies will complain about Clear Channel's cavalier approach to their 'intellectual property'. But don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen. Huge companies tend to avoid harrassing each other over relatively trival things like this unless one is trying to do a hostile takeover of another.
Don't be selfish... Heaven needs many many virgins. After all, every dumbass Palistinian who gets on a bus or walks into a fast food place with a bomb wrapped around his waist expects to get 72 virgins. They got to come from someplace.
What do you expect? That there is a virgin factory in Heaven? That the angels can just crank them out like DVD players? Hell no. They come from earth, just every one of the dumbass shaaheeds who blows himself up.
You just gotta feel sorry for the dumbass shaaheed who blows up a day-care center or a convent. "Yes," the master angel at the gate says, "here are your virgins. First come, first served. Yes, I realize that they are all either 2 years old or 65 years old, but they are virgins. You got what you came for. Don't like it? Well, fool, you should have thought of that before you walked into the day care center with a bomb. and you might want to make yourself scarce when their parents get up here. Paybacks a bitch, and eterity's a long time. Move On! Next!"
We are the ones who are responsable. Because, we, the technological elite, have done nothing to prevent this type of situation from occuring. And we have the power to do so. But we don't have the spine to accept our responsibilities for the technology that we create.
Who should go to jail or at least get tossed out of school? The students of course. For unleashing deliberately an uncontrolled technology for profit without making any preparations for the consequences.
If you are a chemical company and you dump poison into a stream or pump it into the air to get rid of industrial surplus, and this directly causes death and destruction, then you are responsible (at least in the civilized world). You make sure of the effects of what you do before you do it.
Same with software. The days are just about over where people will accept unwanted consequences of bad software as unforseen 'acts of God'. The time is coming to an end where you can publish any junk with a tiny print disclaimer stating that you as the software creator are not responsible for anything that the software does.
Same with malware. The software company that put out this adware program should be sued out of business, and the programmers should be blacklisted for creating an application that was outside of acceptable guidelines. And we as the technical elite should set and enforce the guidelines. This is an idea whose time has come and no one else can do it but us. This is the only way that this type of thing will stop. And if the adware program sellers don't like it, too bad. We created the net; we control the net; we take responsibility for what assholes do on the net; we punish the assholes who don't follow our guidelines. That is the way it should be. It would improve the position and respect that geeks get in society.
Blaming the hospital is like blaming 911 equipment makers for the situations that caused people to call 911 (an emergency telephone code that contacts help in the USA). No one would blame electrical equipment manufacturers for the acts of a criminal deliberately cutting the power in a hospital.
You are a passionate and knowledgeable film consumer and you brought others into a commercial home film distribution center.
The fact that no-one in the store approached you for your advice or asked you how they could meet your film needs indicates that the people who run this store have no idea of what they are doing and shouldn't be in the entertainment business.
They deserve to go bankrupt.
Other businesses, most any other business, would love to have customers like you come into their store.
I agree 100%. I would rather watch one or two movies a night than anyone's television programs.
If Netflix and Hollywood (the industry in general) can't understand that people are beginning to think of their $100,000,000 movies as nothing more than a substitue for two hours of dumb-as-shit television, then they should stop making $100,000,000 movies.
The whole industry needs to stop thinking of their products in terms of a single-story production, and more in terms as just so many half-hour blocks of time that people are watching their product instead of doing something else with the blocked units of time. Then they will stop rolling the dice with their production budgets on just two or three $100,000,000 movies per year.
They need to leave the 20th century behind and adopt newer and more realistic business models. If they don't, then someone else will. Might be Netflix; might be someone smarter than Netflix. There is a lot of undistributed high-quality material out there, along with a lot of people with disposable income that are bored with Hollywood product. It's just a matter of getting them together. I had high hopes for Netflix, but it seems that they too are locked into 20th-century distribution mindsets that are becoming quickly irrelevant.
Do I understand this right? Some local county bureaucrats planned their budget on the assumption that they would be receiving property tax from a entity that went from a $121,000 valuation to a $800,000,000 valuation in a single year?
Wasn't there anyone in the process who had a 'reality' detector working? Are any of these people still working for the county? Can anyone really be that dumb?
How can I take advantage of these morons?
And, please, keep these people out of the federal government. No one there would notice an error of such magnitude, or they would be too scared to make it public.
We take responsibility for the web. We hunt down the criminals. We ensure that the young people understand that it is not cool to write and release viruses. If we can have hundreds of thousands of people searching for non-existant aliens with the SETI program, then we can organize the same hundreds of thousands of people to search for data criminals, who are all too real.
No one takes the geek community seriously because we don't take ourselves seriously. We have no independent review board of the technology that we create before we give it to the politicians or corporations. Then we are free to accept no responsibility for what they do with it.
What I'm proposing is change in consciousness in the geek community. An awareness that we are responsible for what other people do with what we create, and we have the power to control how this technology that we create will be used.
When and if this change in consciousness occurs, then we will be more powerful than the governments and the corporations. The geek community can exist without the governments and corporations, but they can't exist without us.
The emphasis on preventing spyware from infecting a PC is misplaced. The problem is best addressed by defining what is acceptable and what is not. Then punishing the people who exceed the limit.
Who will define what is acceptable? We will, of course. We are the technological elite. It's time that we start making the parameters about what is acceptable behavior on the net.
So the spyware makers pay off the politicians to allow some country to engage in aberant conduct and give them a save haven? Shut off the country from the web.
It's time that we stop assuming that in the evolving information age that the politicians have more control over society than the technical elite. We control the web, and we need to take responsibility for the assholes and criminals who use it to prey on society. That means shutting down the 419 chuckleheads also.
We created the environment that allows viruses and spyware to exist. It's time that we and not the politicians put an end to it. And if what we do goes against some jerks 'right' to sell access to your PC for his own profit, then so be it.
We should not even be thinking about going to the moon. We went before. Been there, done that. There's nothing there that can justify the cost of going there.
It's hard to constantly do this, but it is necessary. Americans need to be reminded that they live in a fantasyland. They are 5 percent or so of the world's population and use 60+ percent of the world's annual resource output. This can't continue forever, or even long enough to sustain the enormous cost long enough to return some credible and tangible worthwhile result from a lunar or extra-planetary space program.
In addition, there is looming on the horizon for the world:
-global warming and the climatic and envirnomental changes which credible scientists tell us may be catastrophic.
-peak oil. Where the energy cost of getting oil into useful form is a significant percentage of the energy returned from that oil's usage. This will drive up the price of oil to the point where typical American lifestyles (including space exploration yearnings) are no longer feasable.
-the switch from the use of the US dollar to either the Euro or a 'currency basket' as the world's medium of wealth storage and exchange. This could cause severe inflation of the US dollar, since the US economy is overextended and its government bankrupt in real terms.
-severe overpopulation and near-free global telecommunications. Everyone can see how rich the Americans live and how poor they are. They can talk to each other and coordinate their responses, either terrorism or more effective economic focus actions.
None of these conditions existed when the Americans went to the moon in the 1960s. They are all too real now.
Best leave your space exploration yearnings to Hollywood or virtual-reality simulators.
This is not a troll. It is serious stuff. Try talking to non-geeks (especially non-Americans) about the need for further space programs to get a more balanced perspective on this issue before making too many technical plans.
What WinAmp really needs is to be very small in footprint. Two: every, yes, every function should have a keyboard combination interface.
With a keyboard combination for each function, a remote can be made for the Winamp player. Use a photodiode that decodes the 38KHz signal sent from all TV remotes. Feed this signal into a microcontroller that replicates the WinAmp keyboard combinations according to button pressed on the remote. Plug this microcontroller into the PC in parallel with the keyboard (use TTL gate ICs). Now you can use your PC as a music server with a remote. Now all we need is either a laptop with an external keyboard input or a very quiet-low power consumption desktop PC.
But none of this is possible if the programmers don't put a keypress combination for every function of the program.
New Orleans' problem wasn't technical
on
Tracking the Cracks
·
· Score: -1, Troll
The news release even says that it could have help engineers predict 'exactly how much pressure the levees protecting New Orleans could withstand before giving way.'
The situation in New Orleans wasn't the lack of precise technical knowledge, it was the unwillingness of federal government to use the allocated funds for levee strengthening and protection.
Studies had been done and money had been allocated for improving the levees that surround the city. But the money was stolen from the city of New Orleans and redirected for use in the Iraqi war instead.
When the 100-year Cat 5 super-hurricane did come to New Orleans, the levee in its weakest places broke. The levee was battered by a huge barge that was illegally anchored in the industrial canal where the levee was breached. That illegal barge still sits in the streets of the 9th ward.
New Orleans was destroyed by a combination of federal illegal reallocation of funds and typical Louisiana corruption, a mean combination.
What happened was a deliberate act to get the Black people out of New Orleans through a multi-stage action. One, levees were not strengthened even though global-warming forecasts indicated a higher than normal probablity of a super-hurricane. Two, the breach in the levees destroyed (in the city of New Orleans) primarily black housing. Given the legacy of strict racial segragation, the outlining areas destroyed were primarily white. Three, the feds determine that the black areas are too damaged and/or polluted (as a result of the refusal to clean up the previous pollution) to be rebuilt. Blacks are offered a 'take it or leave it buy-out' to get out. Four, with the blacks gone, the feds rebuild the levees to the strength that they were supposed to be years ago. Five, the feds sell the cleared black neighborhoods to Bechtel and Haliburton for pennies on the dollar. Bechtel and Haliburton rebuild the housing and bring whites in from other parts of the country, for enormous profit. Blacks lose and get chased out; whites get rich; media ignores story completely; typical corrupt Louisiana business-as-usual.
It doesn't matter if someone finds a new way to analyse the strength of the levees when the power structure is more than happy to use the situation of weak levees for its own gain. When you understand this, you understand Louisiana and the American South in general.
Aren't these the same Bozos who trying to put their own children and yours in prison for listening to downloaded music?
Really, it's time to celibrate Kazaa. They are the world's library, the world's jukebox, and the world's samizdat. There is no difference any more. One country gets all 'upstanding' and upset about some other country ruthlessly suppressing political dissidents or people with a different religion. But that same country will put people in prison for listening to music instead of reading the bible or circulating a political satire.
Face it, they're all jerks. And that's why Kazaa is so important, spyware and all. (KazaaLite is better, though) Kazaa is where people can put anything for download: a pop song, a political satire, the bible, a serious scientific paper, porn. If you want it or need it, Kazaa should be the place to find it.
Along with this realization comes the awareness that there is always going to be something on Kazaa that is going to offend, anger, and annoy you. This too is inevitable. Accept it. Fight it by putting a rebuttal that is better written, better played, better sung, better hung. That's the civilized way of the world, not censorship.
The category is too broad and the timeframe too short to making statements to the effect that young people are '30%' less scientific or technical minded than they were thirty years ago. There are far too many variables that can be changing to make a claim such as this. Usually when someone makes a 'study' like this and comes to these conclusions, there is a hidden agenda that is usually political behind it. A general study is made; an unsupportable but sensational conclusion is drawn, specific remedies are proposed. Remedies that tend to favor the people who initiated the 'study' in the first place.
What are the measurements? What are the controls? Who financed this? Who financed them?
And the real question to ask: What difference does it make?
Slashdot Mirror
There are no Chinese or Indonesian science students. No American, Japanese, Russian, or French ones either.
Studing science in serious way puts the student into a category that transcends nationalism. Especially today as the amount of global scientific knowledge has become so vast. Mastering a speciality to the point where one can add to the knowledge base puts one into a mind-space that goes beyond the limits of nationalism.
The purpose of creating nation-states is primarily to wage war on other nation-states. Nation-states also need to create a political and economic elite in each country that will facilitate the collection of taxes and the other functions needed to define the state. This was an effective means of organizing societies out of tribes and into effective economic wealth generating entities in the industrial age (1750-2010).
But it is passing now. And scientists and science students are in the forefront of the new era - the information age. Nationalism and its collolary, citizenship, will become less and less important to the new transnational elite with each passing year.
So it is becoming more absurd to classify serious science students by nationality. In turn, serious science students have an obligation to their new elites status to NOT engage in destructive behavior like designing omnicide technology (omni-cide being the destruction of all human life through technological means). That means refusing to design things like hydrogen bombs, super-long half-life radioactive poisons, genetically-engineered diseases with no accessable cure for most people (like smallpox varients), and newer technologies like earthquake generation that remain secret and speculative. When scientists do research on omnicide technologies for reasons primarily focused on nationalism or religion, they must be denied access to the most advanced scientific research by the other scientists themselves who have joined and formed the new information-age scientific elite.
So, yes, realistically there are no Chinese or Indonesian science students any more. There are only science students.
Doing the USA National Archives is great. But the real challenge is digitizing the Library of Congress. I fear that a lot of the mid-level literature of the 'greatest generation' will be lost because of the Mickey Mouse copyright law. If the copyright starts roughly around 1925 and continues indefinitely due to roll-over extensions, then the books printed from 1925 through about 1995 will be locked up and possibly lost forever.
No one will risk being sent to gitmo for copyright by republishing 20th century books and the companies that 'own' them won't republish them because there is no profit in it. When the paper dissolves, they will be gone. Gone with them will be the ability of future historians to have insight into what made these people's thoughts, values, and development process that comes from examining literature from the period. There will always be some books from the era kept around, but the bulk will be lost.
I'm not worried about the books from 1995 on because the people from this era realize that copyright laws are just total bullshit. They will digitize and circulate their favorite written literature on P2P networks in the same manner that is already being done with music recordings. Many sci-fi books are available on Kazaa, but very little is there outside the sci-fi genre.
But this won't happen for the literature from the bulk of the 20th century. I've never met a single person who is digitizing (saving for prosperity) pop paperbacks. When they're gone, they're gone as if they had never been written at all.
I first noticed this when looking for a copy of Trevanian's Shibumi from 1979. Great book, but now getting difficult to find. There must be tens of thousands of books in this category.
That's why we should digitize the Library of Congress. A big job, that may not even be possible given the delicate state of many of the older books.
This guy's contributions seem to consist of mostly getting all the store employees to nag customers for the last four digits of their phone number. This has come to epitomise the arrogance of corporate directives worldwide. It has probably driven more people away from Radio Shack than anything else.
For me as a techno-geek, I used to be drawn into a Radio Shack like a magnet. Now I'm repelled from the place in the same manner. They used to have a great selection of just the right parts. In fact, the IC's sold at Radio Shack in the 1980s (like the SN94281 sound generator) are the only chips in the world that have actually gone up in value from that period. I bought my first computer at Radio Shack, a CoCo MC-10. It's still supported on the web by a few die-hards. It was nearly impossible to get information from Radio Shack about the stuff that they would sell.
As for whether this guy's lack of sitting in boring and silly classes for five years had anything to do with Radio Shack's increasing irrelevance, I won't even guess. As for his lying, his big offense is lying to his fellow executives, not to the customers and shareholders. That is common business practice.
What kind of propaganda system do they want? Are they talking about a news service like Voice of America used to be for Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Basically an unbiased news service that brought the same news found in USA newspapers to people who had no access to non-Communist news sources? That service is already provided by CNN and, to a certain extent, the newer-more open Arab news services like al-Jazira.
Or do they want a focused pro-American pro-West service to counter the incessant anti-American message coming from Iran?
Perhaps they are talking about a 'black' propaganda service, where stories that may or may not be true are introduced into the 'Arab street' for the sole purpose of provoking an extreme reaction. The Arabs and the Pakistanis will go into violent riot mode on just rumors now. For example, I doubt that anyone rioting in Libya, Syria, or Pakistan has actually seen any of these editorial cartoons that have whipped them into a frenzy. It is also doubtful that anyone in the west would have started massive street riots without actually seeing the provocative images themselves. It's unlikely that provocative images or unproven news rumors would cause riots in the west anyway.
Having a 'black' propaganda service that could introduce false rumors would allow the controllers of this service to have a 'light switch' to start violent street riots in the Islamic world at any time that is convenient for them.
For us in the real world, the Mac doesn't exist. It's just a beautiful picture in a magazine, like Lindsay Lohan. We have Windows and if we can get it working, Linux.
I understand your concern, but I believe that it is misplaced. All libraries have porn filters for children's machines. But that's quite different from being unable to find information on breast cancer because the local bible thumpers forced the local library to deny any access to a website that has the word 'breast' on it. I've even seen library filters deny me access to Safeway grocery ads because chicken breasts were on sale there.
I typed 'horse pictures' into Google and got pictures of horses. Search engine companies are very sensitive to having children access accidently hard-core porn images when doing innocent searches. This is a concern between the porn industry and the search engine companies. They have to come to an arrangement that prevents this kind of thing from happening. It's very bad for their businesses. Having children innocently and accidently come across porn images will become rare in the near future. It is much less common now than it was five years ago.
But that will happen without over-restrictive filters on websites on public-access computers.
One of the main reasons for designing, building, and programming hundreds of millions of cheap, powerful computers is that they can be used to transform an individual's spelling and grammar into the universal standard and vice-versa.
if i dont spell no good or talk no good it dont make no diffrens if i got a gigahertz pc that can fix my spellin and grammer.
The reason that we don't have spelling and grammar checkers built into the OS is because it is assumed that anyone who can afford a computer has already passed a level of advanced education and literacy. However that isn't true since computers are now so cheap and widespread that they are used regardless of level of academic compentency.
And, don't forget, everyone is rather dim outside of their native language.
So it's our responsibility to make sure that the applications and operating systems that we create have high quality spelling and grammar checkers available and running.
By the way, where's the spelling checker on this Slashdot comment box?
Security, Security, Security
...need... eye candy.
...just use Google and Yahoo like you do normally anyway since they're already here and better.
yeah, they're so good at this. The world's richest man wants to 'protect' you from people who will give him more money for the opportunity to sell you junk that you don't need, using commercials on your desktop, or 'jump-outs' in your application.
Plus since we're talking security here, what makes you think that you're going to get any from the guys who bend over backwards to put ordinary people in Chinese concentration-camp prisons. You can be assured that anything from Redmond is going to have plenty of backdoors for the Gitmo Gomers to read and monitor everything that you do on your PC. And Linux won't have this.
Internet Explorer 7: IE gets a much-needed, Firefox-inspired makeover...
So use just FireFox. 'nuff said.
Righteous eye candy...
Do like Steve Jobs and just drop some acid if you
Desktop search:
Better updates:
one word...sourceforge....next?
More media
more embedded DRM, you mean.
Parental controls
we are already grown-up, and we don't need any more excuses for library restrictions on web access. Like prohibiting 17-year-olds from getting information on effective birth control, just cause 'Jesus or Allah says no'.
Better backups
the application programmer's responsibility, not the OS.
Peer-to-peer collaboration
they seem to want to make that quite illegal if I recall correctly.
So how much money or honey did they give this guy for writing such a transparent puff-piece about an operation system that doesn't even exist yet?
Also, I'm female (as if that should matter).
It actually matters a great amount. There is no shortage of males who are computer literate and are willing to stop what they are doing when you have a question. Because you are female and this is one of the few chances that they get to interact with females. If you were male and had a question, and the other more computer-literate males thought that your question was 'stupid', then they would tell you that you were stupid and to just read the 2000 page manual.
Linux isn't hard to use when it's already installed and configured properly... Maybe so, but it is never distributed already installed and configured properly. And when someone from Windows attempts to do anything remotely technical, they either end up completely lost or in command-line hell. Or someone just tells them to 'read the manual'- all 2000 pages of it.
Why universities and schools are not Linux? Because Linux is extraordinarily difficult to use if you are not a trained computer professional. Granted it's better than it was thirty years ago (when it was called UNIX), but it is not yet good enough to compete with Windows on the user interface level. And in universities and schools (and nearly everywhere else), user interface is the computer.
If Linux/UNIX users want the Windows people to switch, then make a version of Linux that looks like Windows and acts like Windows. Something that is so close to Windows that the average user doesn't know that it is not Windows.
Is it illegal? So what. Do it anyway. Demand to be placed on juries that determine the fate of people who have been caught distributing Linux-as-Windows.
And for God's sake, stop using acronymns for computer terms.
For most people, the computer itself or the computer system under the interface is of little or no importance. They are using the PC as a tool to get other work done. Since Windows is so much more easier to use than Linux/UNIX (please don't tell me that they are different, because they're not) it is the system that will continue to be used by the vast majority of people that use computers. For the vast majority of people, the cost for switching from Windows to Linux is far, far greater in terms of time and energy (learning all the stupid little details of getting things done) than the monetary cost of buying Windows.
If you make Linux look, feel, act, work, and program exactly like Windows and still be near free, then yes, everyone will switch to Linux. In the meantime, people will think that you're crazy for asking why they use Windows instead of Linux. It's obvious to them, it's because Windows is so much better and cheaper.
For example:
$> lms -x38i8 slsil334ss @@ $ (agl -fjldl.or)
is an interesting puzzle to anyone with a Linux/UNIX orientation but scares the shit out of anyone who needs to use a PC to get work done NOW. Sooner or later, Linux dumps everyone onto the command line, because it has been designed that way. Windows never does. Linux people LOVE the command line; Windows people hate it.
There are a million more things that make the user interface of Windows so much better. Nearly all are culturally invisible to Linux users.
I do realize of course that Slashdot is the worse place in the world to point this out, but it is the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. So don't mod me to hell for saying this. Be civilized, and open-minded. Thank you.
The SciFi series that can't be filmed is Harry Turtledove's World War series, where lizard-like aliens land in the middle of World War II.
to whoever put them on the internet, and then get medeival on them for breach of contract.
Well I'm sure that they would like to do this, in their fantasies. But in the real world it's a music producer vs. Clear Channel, not some individual D.J. And if Clear Channel decides that it is in their best interest that the music go out to the P2P file sharers before the record is released, then there isn't a whole lot that the record producer can do about it.
Clear Channel gets money from every music source except sales of disks and downloads. In other words, it is in their interest to have the 'product' on the file share networks; copyright laws be damned. They own the radio stations, the concert venues, the ticket companies, the artist management companies (in some cases), and the billboards.
Maybe someday the entertainment companies will complain about Clear Channel's cavalier approach to their 'intellectual property'. But don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen. Huge companies tend to avoid harrassing each other over relatively trival things like this unless one is trying to do a hostile takeover of another.
Don't be selfish... Heaven needs many many virgins. After all, every dumbass Palistinian who gets on a bus or walks into a fast food place with a bomb wrapped around his waist expects to get 72 virgins. They got to come from someplace.
What do you expect? That there is a virgin factory in Heaven? That the angels can just crank them out like DVD players? Hell no. They come from earth, just every one of the dumbass shaaheeds who blows himself up.
You just gotta feel sorry for the dumbass shaaheed who blows up a day-care center or a convent. "Yes," the master angel at the gate says, "here are your virgins. First come, first served. Yes, I realize that they are all either 2 years old or 65 years old, but they are virgins. You got what you came for. Don't like it? Well, fool, you should have thought of that before you walked into the day care center with a bomb. and you might want to make yourself scarce when their parents get up here. Paybacks a bitch, and eterity's a long time. Move On! Next!"
We are the ones who are responsable. Because, we, the technological elite, have done nothing to prevent this type of situation from occuring. And we have the power to do so. But we don't have the spine to accept our responsibilities for the technology that we create.
Who should go to jail or at least get tossed out of school? The students of course. For unleashing deliberately an uncontrolled technology for profit without making any preparations for the consequences.
If you are a chemical company and you dump poison into a stream or pump it into the air to get rid of industrial surplus, and this directly causes death and destruction, then you are responsible (at least in the civilized world). You make sure of the effects of what you do before you do it.
Same with software. The days are just about over where people will accept unwanted consequences of bad software as unforseen 'acts of God'. The time is coming to an end where you can publish any junk with a tiny print disclaimer stating that you as the software creator are not responsible for anything that the software does.
Same with malware. The software company that put out this adware program should be sued out of business, and the programmers should be blacklisted for creating an application that was outside of acceptable guidelines. And we as the technical elite should set and enforce the guidelines. This is an idea whose time has come and no one else can do it but us. This is the only way that this type of thing will stop. And if the adware program sellers don't like it, too bad. We created the net; we control the net; we take responsibility for what assholes do on the net; we punish the assholes who don't follow our guidelines. That is the way it should be. It would improve the position and respect that geeks get in society.
Blaming the hospital is like blaming 911 equipment makers for the situations that caused people to call 911 (an emergency telephone code that contacts help in the USA). No one would blame electrical equipment manufacturers for the acts of a criminal deliberately cutting the power in a hospital.
You are a passionate and knowledgeable film consumer and you brought others into a commercial home film distribution center.
The fact that no-one in the store approached you for your advice or asked you how they could meet your film needs indicates that the people who run this store have no idea of what they are doing and shouldn't be in the entertainment business.
They deserve to go bankrupt.
Other businesses, most any other business, would love to have customers like you come into their store.
I agree 100%. I would rather watch one or two movies a night than anyone's television programs.
If Netflix and Hollywood (the industry in general) can't understand that people are beginning to think of their $100,000,000 movies as nothing more than a substitue for two hours of dumb-as-shit television, then they should stop making $100,000,000 movies.
The whole industry needs to stop thinking of their products in terms of a single-story production, and more in terms as just so many half-hour blocks of time that people are watching their product instead of doing something else with the blocked units of time. Then they will stop rolling the dice with their production budgets on just two or three $100,000,000 movies per year.
They need to leave the 20th century behind and adopt newer and more realistic business models. If they don't, then someone else will. Might be Netflix; might be someone smarter than Netflix. There is a lot of undistributed high-quality material out there, along with a lot of people with disposable income that are bored with Hollywood product. It's just a matter of getting them together. I had high hopes for Netflix, but it seems that they too are locked into 20th-century distribution mindsets that are becoming quickly irrelevant.
Shit, you can eat a real bunny. But what can you do with a cartoon?
(Except drive 10,000,000 people into fits of psychotic violent madness and embassy-burning riots. Just depends on the cartoon.)
Do I understand this right? Some local county bureaucrats planned their budget on the assumption that they would be receiving property tax from a entity that went from a $121,000 valuation to a $800,000,000 valuation in a single year?
Wasn't there anyone in the process who had a 'reality' detector working? Are any of these people still working for the county? Can anyone really be that dumb?
How can I take advantage of these morons?
And, please, keep these people out of the federal government. No one there would notice an error of such magnitude, or they would be too scared to make it public.
We take responsibility for the web. We hunt down the criminals. We ensure that the young people understand that it is not cool to write and release viruses. If we can have hundreds of thousands of people searching for non-existant aliens with the SETI program, then we can organize the same hundreds of thousands of people to search for data criminals, who are all too real.
No one takes the geek community seriously because we don't take ourselves seriously. We have no independent review board of the technology that we create before we give it to the politicians or corporations. Then we are free to accept no responsibility for what they do with it.
What I'm proposing is change in consciousness in the geek community. An awareness that we are responsible for what other people do with what we create, and we have the power to control how this technology that we create will be used.
When and if this change in consciousness occurs, then we will be more powerful than the governments and the corporations. The geek community can exist without the governments and corporations, but they can't exist without us.
The emphasis on preventing spyware from infecting a PC is misplaced. The problem is best addressed by defining what is acceptable and what is not. Then punishing the people who exceed the limit.
Who will define what is acceptable? We will, of course. We are the technological elite. It's time that we start making the parameters about what is acceptable behavior on the net.
So the spyware makers pay off the politicians to allow some country to engage in aberant conduct and give them a save haven? Shut off the country from the web.
It's time that we stop assuming that in the evolving information age that the politicians have more control over society than the technical elite. We control the web, and we need to take responsibility for the assholes and criminals who use it to prey on society. That means shutting down the 419 chuckleheads also.
We created the environment that allows viruses and spyware to exist. It's time that we and not the politicians put an end to it. And if what we do goes against some jerks 'right' to sell access to your PC for his own profit, then so be it.
We should not even be thinking about going to the moon. We went before. Been there, done that. There's nothing there that can justify the cost of going there.
It's hard to constantly do this, but it is necessary. Americans need to be reminded that they live in a fantasyland. They are 5 percent or so of the world's population and use 60+ percent of the world's annual resource output. This can't continue forever, or even long enough to sustain the enormous cost long enough to return some credible and tangible worthwhile result from a lunar or extra-planetary space program.
In addition, there is looming on the horizon for the world:
-global warming and the climatic and envirnomental changes which credible scientists tell us may be catastrophic.
-peak oil. Where the energy cost of getting oil into useful form is a significant percentage of the energy returned from that oil's usage. This will drive up the price of oil to the point where typical American lifestyles (including space exploration yearnings) are no longer feasable.
-the switch from the use of the US dollar to either the Euro or a 'currency basket' as the world's medium of wealth storage and exchange. This could cause severe inflation of the US dollar, since the US economy is overextended and its government bankrupt in real terms.
-severe overpopulation and near-free global telecommunications. Everyone can see how rich the Americans live and how poor they are. They can talk to each other and coordinate their responses, either terrorism or more effective economic focus actions.
None of these conditions existed when the Americans went to the moon in the 1960s. They are all too real now.
Best leave your space exploration yearnings to Hollywood or virtual-reality simulators.
This is not a troll. It is serious stuff. Try talking to non-geeks (especially non-Americans) about the need for further space programs to get a more balanced perspective on this issue before making too many technical plans.
Thank you.
What WinAmp really needs is to be very small in footprint. Two: every, yes, every function should have a keyboard combination interface.
With a keyboard combination for each function, a remote can be made for the Winamp player. Use a photodiode that decodes the 38KHz signal sent from all TV remotes. Feed this signal into a microcontroller that replicates the WinAmp keyboard combinations according to button pressed on the remote. Plug this microcontroller into the PC in parallel with the keyboard (use TTL gate ICs). Now you can use your PC as a music server with a remote. Now all we need is either a laptop with an external keyboard input or a very quiet-low power consumption desktop PC.
But none of this is possible if the programmers don't put a keypress combination for every function of the program.
The news release even says that it could have help engineers predict 'exactly how much pressure the levees protecting New Orleans could withstand before giving way.'
The situation in New Orleans wasn't the lack of precise technical knowledge, it was the unwillingness of federal government to use the allocated funds for levee strengthening and protection.
Studies had been done and money had been allocated for improving the levees that surround the city. But the money was stolen from the city of New Orleans and redirected for use in the Iraqi war instead.
When the 100-year Cat 5 super-hurricane did come to New Orleans, the levee in its weakest places broke. The levee was battered by a huge barge that was illegally anchored in the industrial canal where the levee was breached. That illegal barge still sits in the streets of the 9th ward.
New Orleans was destroyed by a combination of federal illegal reallocation of funds and typical Louisiana corruption, a mean combination.
What happened was a deliberate act to get the Black people out of New Orleans through a multi-stage action. One, levees were not strengthened even though global-warming forecasts indicated a higher than normal probablity of a super-hurricane. Two, the breach in the levees destroyed (in the city of New Orleans) primarily black housing. Given the legacy of strict racial segragation, the outlining areas destroyed were primarily white. Three, the feds determine that the black areas are too damaged and/or polluted (as a result of the refusal to clean up the previous pollution) to be rebuilt. Blacks are offered a 'take it or leave it buy-out' to get out. Four, with the blacks gone, the feds rebuild the levees to the strength that they were supposed to be years ago. Five, the feds sell the cleared black neighborhoods to Bechtel and Haliburton for pennies on the dollar. Bechtel and Haliburton rebuild the housing and bring whites in from other parts of the country, for enormous profit. Blacks lose and get chased out; whites get rich; media ignores story completely; typical corrupt Louisiana business-as-usual.
It doesn't matter if someone finds a new way to analyse the strength of the levees when the power structure is more than happy to use the situation of weak levees for its own gain. When you understand this, you understand Louisiana and the American South in general.
Thank you,
Aren't these the same Bozos who trying to put their own children and yours in prison for listening to downloaded music?
Really, it's time to celibrate Kazaa. They are the world's library, the world's jukebox, and the world's samizdat. There is no difference any more. One country gets all 'upstanding' and upset about some other country ruthlessly suppressing political dissidents or people with a different religion. But that same country will put people in prison for listening to music instead of reading the bible or circulating a political satire.
Face it, they're all jerks. And that's why Kazaa is so important, spyware and all. (KazaaLite is better, though) Kazaa is where people can put anything for download: a pop song, a political satire, the bible, a serious scientific paper, porn. If you want it or need it, Kazaa should be the place to find it.
Along with this realization comes the awareness that there is always going to be something on Kazaa that is going to offend, anger, and annoy you. This too is inevitable. Accept it. Fight it by putting a rebuttal that is better written, better played, better sung, better hung. That's the civilized way of the world, not censorship.
Strive to be civilized, and leave Kazaa alone.
The category is too broad and the timeframe too short to making statements to the effect that young people are '30%' less scientific or technical minded than they were thirty years ago. There are far too many variables that can be changing to make a claim such as this. Usually when someone makes a 'study' like this and comes to these conclusions, there is a hidden agenda that is usually political behind it. A general study is made; an unsupportable but sensational conclusion is drawn, specific remedies are proposed. Remedies that tend to favor the people who initiated the 'study' in the first place.
What are the measurements? What are the controls? Who financed this? Who financed them?
And the real question to ask: What difference does it make?