"It is a testament to the quality of my opinions that people attack my grammar and spelling."
Actually I would think that it would be a testament to the quality of the grammar and spell checker being used.
Sarcasm aside, it seems that venture companies will throw money at any project that has a well-formatted proposal. For example, all the VCO funds that were given to Santa Cruz Operation SCO when they claimed that they owned Linux. They did this after Microsoft gave them a lot of money in the background.
Like the old saying: " If architects designed buildings in the same way that programmers built software, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. "
Actually they're only buying a computer because you never write to them. Plus they would like to keep in touch with all their friends who haven't died yet.
So what would a computer designed for the elderly with money be like?
Do you think that they went out and actually asked anyone over 70 years old what they would want in a computer? Not likely. Probably just had a few focus groups of five or six 20-somethings with coffee and doughnuts throwing stupid suggestions at each other. Like "Let's make it real easy to use!" (meaning: "Let's make it real easy to buy!").
If I were really old then my body would be not functioning well, and I would not be happy about it. So what would I want in a computer?
Well, since no young people like to live the old and the middle aged people are too busy and have enough money to get away from them, the elderly tend to live alone and lonely. They have fragile bones and if they fall down they tend to stay down a lot longer than they would forty years ago.
So how about a PC with a microphone that will dial (the number that connects any telephone line to the authorities in the USA) and pre-recorded message requesting help to come to their address when they yell a specific phrase from the floor? A phrase like "Help! I've fallen and I can't move!". Or, "Help! I'm having a heart attack".
How about if the PC could interface with the medical equipment that they have bought with your inheritance money? So they could just buy the sensor part and have this $400 PC do all the digital work that all expensive microprocessors inside each piece of expensive home medical equipment is now doing?
How about an autodialer for the phone so that they can just say "Mildred? Are you home?" at the PC and have the PC dial Mildred and act like a telephone instead of having painful arthritic fingers trying to stab at little buttons that they can't see anyway on a cheap plastic phone that doesn't work well because it's been dropped so many times because it's so hard for an old person to hold?
How about a good fast flatbed scanner interface so that they can put a paper or letter on the scanner surface and actually be able to read it on PC screen in big, big letters that can be seen with eighty-year-old eyes?
If you are seriously trying to make a PC that old people will buy, then make a PC that is seriously helpful to older people.
Someone could go to jail for life without parole for:
1) Getting into a fight in the schoolyard when they're 16...
2) Getting caught with the microscopic resin of cannibus on a pipe that they found on the ground..
3) Listening to music on an iPod or Walkman...
Of course, it goes without saying that no rich, white, republican kid will ever be bothered by this type of insanity that passes for justice in the USA. Only blacks, latinos, and middle-class whites will be subjected to the guiding light of the American justice system.
It also goes without saying that the legislators who are pushing for these insane laws to be passed are being paid thousands of dollars in bribes ('campaign contributions') from the private prison corporations who will be making $30,000 a year for each new 'dangerous criminal' serving life-in-prison-without-parole in a corporate prison.
If you are a citizen of the European Community or some other stable country with a basic tradition of justice, don't come to the USA. Don't even visit here. It's just too dangerous. The republicans have just gone fucking nuts. Visit Canada (in the summer) or Mexico (in the winter). Avoid the USA. Seriously.
Innovation happens when it's needed. The Japanese have a need for robots because they are in the process of reducing their population to appropriate levels.
Japan is small country that is very mountainous. There is not a lot of good land available. Everything is very crowded. There are too many people. Two hundred years ago, the samurai would keep the population at good levels by simply killing anyone and everyone they felt like killing. Didn't bow low enough? Zip... You too ugly? zip...
Japan was also closed. No non-Japanese in Japan from the late 1600s until the early 1850s. You leave Japan, you didn't go back. If you did you were killed by the samurai. If you went there, you were killed. This long period created a society that became insular and guarded to foreigners.
Then there was that misguided empire of the 1920s to 1940, followed by the unfortunate decisions and events of 1942 to 1945. The boom years after the occupation ended led to prosperity and population growth.
Now there are too many people. The robots are necessary for the transistion of the Japanese population from the current 100 million to a comfortable 40 to 50 million.
I don't see that this is anything for non-Japanese to be concerned about. Europe is going through the same process but it is bringing in millions of Muslims instead of using robots for its transition. Which doesn't really reduce the population. It just sets the stage for conflict in fifty years between the backward Muslim countries of the middle east and the progressive Muslim-Christian-Humanist hybrid countries of the European Union.
The North Americans are solving their population transformation by allowing the migration of millions of Mexicans and Central Americans to the USA. Americans have always been able to adapt to mass migrations of immigrants better than any other people in the world. They think, if it worked before, do it again.
Robots will eventually pay for themselves if they can be made flexible, reliable, and cheap enough. They will make great killing machines for when it becomes necessary to begin systematically depopulating the third world of surplus young males. Plus they can do the 'shitwork' that no one else wants to do. Or clean up areas that have become unsafe for humans due to use of toxic chemicals, genetically-engineered diseases, ultra-intelligent landmines, or low level radiation from depleted uranium or dirty bombs.
When the RIAA gives all the money back that they extorted (oh Hell, let's make it double all the money back for 'pain and suffering') from ordinary people, then we will begin to consider if and where they will fit in to the new digital world order.
Until then we will continue to copy and distribute OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE freely to whoever asks for it.
They stole the public domain by bribing legislators to pass laws indefinitely extending the old idea of copyright. By doing this, they have shown themselves to be cultural thieves of the highest order and they forfeit all claims to any copyrights that they 'possessed' before deciding to do this crime against the world's cultural resources.
They need to beg for our mercy; we don't need to beg for theirs. They need us a lot more then we need them.
The people here at Slashdot who don't understand this are simply misguided.
Who needs this data transmission over power lines? No one in North America!
There are millions of meters of 'dark fiber' in the ground already. This is the ultra high bandwidth fiber optic cable that was put in place quietly by the utilities during the boom years of the 1990s. It was all this unused fiber-optic capacity that gave rise to all the talk about video-on-demand and other high bandwidth predictions at the time.
Maybe somewhere, someday, somebody could make use of this technology. But for the present, it's just an academic exercise.
The problem with getting bandwidth into use in North America isn't technological, nor is it the lack of installed cable. It's political. Everybody involved is just too damned greedy and the end result is that nothing much happens. It's like crabs pulling each other back to the bottom of the bucket.
On my first trip to Hong Kong in 1967, I found that it was common for the record stores to make a tape with recordings of customer's selected albums on it. For a 1800ft Reel-to-reel tape, you would select about five albums. The store would record the albums onto the tape. You would pay for the blank tape and about $1 or $2 US for each album's recording. The albums cost about $5 US in Hong Kong at that time.
This was quite common and accepted business practice at every record store except the poorest, smallest ones. I never realized that it wasn't standard practice world-wide until I came to America.
Hello,
Thank you for the reply and information. I was actually going by what I read in an American magazine long ago.
Thank goodness that the tragic European war of 1914-1945 (it was really one long war with a break) is over and the damage is finally being healed by time. All serious people both in North America and Europe wish that the European Union lasts hundreds of years. If only to prevent future European wars like the ones that have plagued Europe every 120 - 150 years since the Roman Empire days.
Hopefully we will not fall under the spell of monsters like Stalin, Hitler, and Napolean again and be tricked into supporting insane wars anymore.
Here in the USA we get a new war every ten years or so. They are absurdly expensive and waste a lot of money. But for most people, these wars are avoidable by simply chosing not to take part in them.
With this kind of complexity, you have to wonder what kind of tools are being used to write a project like Windows.
For example, I do microcontroller coding in assembly language. I find that anything that has more than, say, a hundred instructions requires a formal written diagrammed algorythm.
In these situations I revert back to the Warnier-Orr diagramming techniques that we were taught in Community College Computer classes back in the 1980s. I have no idea if this kind of thing is still taught or encouraged in computer school. But after a certain level of complexity, I would be lost and unable to get anything to work, especially in assembly language where you count processor clock cycles and everything runs 'pedal to the metal' on processors that cost 2 cents per MIP.
For example, I did an interface that takes the keystrokes of a standard PS-2 keyboard and turns them into MIDI note on/off. The Warnier-Orr algorthm covered six pages for what eventually came to a few hundred bytes of code.
I can't imagine what Microsoft uses to keep something as complex as Windows organized and working.
For example, a first-time novelist may, in a good year, sell a few hundred copies of a great first novel. But a good review in a journal read by librarians will cause sales to the libraries to reach thousands. If the libraries are buying the majority of the copies, then it doesn't matter how many people read the book at the library 'for free'. Book publishers and librarians have had this symbionic relationship since Ben Franklin opened his first public library before the American Revolution.
The RIAA and MPAA is made up from a different class of people than the book readers and publishers. They tend to be meaner, sleazier, and far more short-sighted and narrow-minded. The RIAA/MPAA are the kind of people who would demand that the libraries of the world buy multiple copies of music and DVD disks at inflated prices and then pass laws forcing them to be removed from the shelves of the libraries. They would do this as 'fair compensation' to themselves in response for the libraries unwillingness to conform to the new standard of 'one person, one view, one full payment, forever' that they feel that they are owed by the public.
I really don't think that we should underestimate how sleazy and greedy the RIAA/MPAA people really are. That way we'll never be surprised by what they do; and we'll be able to predict what they will do in any given new situation.
The RIAA/MPAA is not MicroSoft, where the corporate tone is set by a character defects in its charismatic leadership. It's a true sleazy and greedy mentality that has always been and continues to be at the heart and soul of the entertainment industry. Just because they consolidated into five single global corporations doesn't mean they developed a sense of global noblesse oblige.
When Hogan's Heroes finally came to German television, it was very well received and popular. However there was one slight problem: a stiff-armed "Heil Hitler" salutes are banned under German law.
So on German TV, whenever Col. Klink answers the telephone, his arm goes straight up into the air, and he says, "Look how high the corn grows!".
If tens of thousands of people were using bootleg copies of this game before it's official release, then it wasn't the 'pirates' who were at fault, it's the software developers.
Here is a situation where thousands of people would have paid some money for copy of the product while it was still in development.
The software publishers should have identified this market and sold to them a copy of the game in its pre-release under-development state. That way they would have been able to actually sell the game (at a reduced price) multiple times over the course of its development and received valuable feedback from its most committed and enthusiastic fan base during the development of the final product.
Instead the game developers ended up receiving next to nothing from the thousands of people who actual took the time and effort to track down a copy of the product while under development.
Software Games are not movies! Until software companies realize this important difference then they will continue to lose money. Not due to 'piracy', but to missed marketing opportunities resulting from their refusal to understand exactly what their best customers want and are willing to pay for.
Since WaReZ dudes only copy and distribute big Hollywood releases they are actually an unpaid part of the actual promotional and marketing department of the Hollywood studio that released the film in the first place.
I'll take WaReZ dudes seriously when they collectively refuse to copy and distibute much of the junk that comes from Hollywood on aesthetic grounds, and copy and distribute a masterpiece from outside the Hollywood framework that would have disappeared without their promotion.
Or better yet, if they actually used their technology, organization, and energy to create a film masterpiece themselves and then distribute it freely outside the Hollywood framework.
Until then, they're just part of Hollywood, regardless of how illegal they happen to be at the moment.
Sure is a good thing that Hollywood people never read books. It means that they would never go into a public library and see that even the smallest suburban branch has hundreds of video and DVD titles available for private home viewing at no charge at all! Which means they ain't gettin' no money from all those people who go to the free libraries instead of waiting in the snow to pay $20 to watch some inane Ben Afflick-Drew Barrymore brainrot.
I wonder how long it will be before the MPAA makes a serious attempt to shut down the public libraries. Given their cement-head mentality, it seems inevitable that they will attempt to do so. In the meantime, I gotta go. I just received an e-mail from the little library down the street in old Garden Home elementary school that the 6-CD set of The Sopranos Fifth Season that I put on hold last month has arrived.
Could be actually be possible that after two generations of anti-Nazism and true democratic institutional framework that the Germans have actually changed? No more the violent, bloodlusting Huns screaming into the east to the pounding chords of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song?
The Americans offered then the opportunity to join in the Iraqi invasion, kill anyone and everyone they want to, set up the most delicious camps, grab all the cheap oil that they want, letting Uncle Sam pick up the whole tab...and they turned it down?
Whatever happened to the good old Germany that we grew up with? Watching Combat on television and The Dirty Dozen at the movies?
After six weeks of Oregon's "Winter Sunshine" even a vacation to a well-lighted Safeway store looks good. Time spent in a place with another flourescent light bulb every two feet on the ceiling actually helps what gets called 'Seasonal Affective Disorder'. We're not even that far North so it's not the overly long nights that get to you, it's the endless number of days with heavy cloud cover coupled with the short winter solar exposures.
The television weather teams have worn out their thesaurui trying to find new terms to describe water falling from the sky. A typical winter weather report in Cascadia will be "Look for morning drizzle, followed by afternoon showers, with periods of rain in the evening."
Forget space elevators, I want to see a giant fiber optic light pipe that that will rise 10000 feet in the air (that's 3000 meters, ya'all), point a giant reflector at the sun, and bring the light down to the mountaintop like Moses and shine it like a giant torch onto the city, relieving the winter gloom. Better than Daylight Savings Time, and cheaper than a big stupid foreign war that we're guaranteed to lose anyway.
Given the absolute corrupt nature of the American and especially the California legislative process, it must be assumed that any bill (the USA term for proposed law) goes through a strict corporate analysis and review and anything even remotely critical or of possible concern to the benefit of the corporate structure will be removed or neutralized by admendment.
If you can accept this idea then you can realize that it is now impossible to get any progressive or consumer friendly bills passed into law or signed uber-menschen killer robot corporate-controlled governor of California.
Forget about using the legislative branch to get laws passed to protect your interests. In the new, corporate-controlled America, it's just not going to happen.
Consumer protection will only come now from concerned and active private groups. And more often than not, these groups and their activities that go against any corporate interests will be declared illegal by corporate-controlled legislatures and the people involved will be labeled 'terrorists' by the corporate-controlled media.
Just get used to it because it is the way that it is going to be. Here's a simple rule-of-thumb for cutting through the Fox News BS about who is and who isn't a terrorist: people who do things that result in the murder of other random innocent people are real terrorists. People that just make work for corporate lawyers through meaningless symbolic protests are not.
Just remember the old Soviet expression: "Pravda nyet Isvestia, Isvestia nyet Pravda" (Truth is not News, News is not Truth)[ - a pun on the two top Soviet newspapers of the cold war era].
A 'Great Leap Forward' is happening now in microcontroller chips. These are processors that have internal flash ROM for their programs and also have most of their peripherals on the controller itself instead of external chip sets.
For example the Atmel AVR Tiny13 chip has four channels of 10-bit ADC, runs at 25 MIPS, and sells for 88 cents (each in 25 unit lots) on DigiKey. Other companies are introducing other chips that are impressive in different ways.
The PC system may be peaking but the controller chip world is as exciting as ever.
Not to mention that the big daily newspapers 'of record' are always the most backward and conservative institution in any city.
In my city, whenever the cops shoot somebody for no reason at all, the newspaper is always 100% behind the police regardless of the circumstances or evidence. When there was an anti-war demonstration and people brought their children, the police blocked off all street exits and went in spraying everyone (including little children) with Mace and pepper spray. The newspaper was behind the police 100% and demanded in an editorial that parents who brought their children to a legal anti-war demonstration be arrested for child abuse and have the kids put into foster homes. Nor did they change when all the video tapes of police macing and beating people resulted in a judgement against the police totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. The local newspaper kept secret their own investigation into the story that the governor had a long sexual affair with a 14-year-old girl.
The newspaper is the most backward, 'cement-head' knee-jerk, mean and stupid institution in any city. They deserve to be tossed into the ash-can of history. If this happens through the classified ads, then fine.
I wish that I could find the Fry's Electronics newspaper ads online someplace. It's a real hassle to find a newspaper on Fridays to see exactly what is going on sale and for how much.
It seems like this would be a natural thing for posting on an internet site. But Fry's Electronics is way behind the times when it comes to electronic commerce. I know that they do have a lame website, but it doesn't list the same specials that the newspaper does.
I also wish that there was a site that listed all the items in the various grocery stores in the city. So I could shop for sales without having to mess with finding/buying/getting a newspaper. For example: Tortino' Pizza Safeway ThrillMart 10.3 Oz Combo $1.78 4/$5.00
Listing the thousands of items on the shelves and their prices for various supermarket chains, updated weekly.
These stores go on and on about customer service but their totally clueless on how to use advanced ten-year-old 20th-century technology to actually provide a service to their customers, like listing the prices of everything they sell in downloadable ZIP file. They already have this information in their computers to facilite bar-code point-of-sale checkouts. They should make it available to the customers on-line. At least they should have the newspaper ad supplement available for downloading as a JPG file, even that would be nice.
I'm just amazed that retailers have ALL this computer equipment in their stores but are completely clueless about ways to use it for marketing and promotion. Imagine a grocery store that allows you to bid like eBay on perishable items, instead of just paying people to throw away perfectly good fruit because it's not brainwashed-housewife perfect.
I wish all these people who ran retail stores would just start to 'think outside the box'. Maybe I'm just wishing for too much.
Spam is a form of pollution that results from an inappropriate pricing of a common resource. In this case the resource is the attention span of millions of literate intelligent internet users throughout the world.
In other forms of pollution, a common resource is used for private gain because it is not correctly priced. For example, air pollution comes from a factory being able to dump its waste into the atmosphere for no cost.
The solution to pollution is first decrease it and then ending it by making alternatives less costly than using what used to be a free resource. The commonly accepted way to reduce air pollution now is to sell the right to dump exact amounts of contaminants into the atmosphere. These pollution permits are traded on the free market. Companies are market encouraged to develop alternative ways to deal with factory waste other than dumping it into the air. Then they can sell their 'rights to pollute' to the highest bidder.
While this seems backward and counterproductive, it does reduce the amount of air pollution in the real world.
The same approach to spam would be to sell the right to send a precise number of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to internet users. The right to send X number of Spam e-mails could be bought and sold on the international market. Then over time, the absolute number of spam e-mails would be reduced. This would reduce spam by forcing the spammers to start doing market research and focusing their advertisments to specific audiences. This will make the internet advertising medium cost the same as other advertising mediums.
Spam exists because the net is free for spammers. It is an inappropriately priced resource.
I'm reminded of the film Brainstorm1983 (Natalie Wood's last film).
It's about a super virtual reality machine that can record the brain's sensory input and play it back to another person. In the film the machine used special 4-inch-wide silver videotape to do this.
Anyway there's this scene where a scientist convinces a young lady to have sex with him while he is wearing this brain-recording headset. So naturally, after she leaves he cuts the tape into an endless loop and spends hours playing it back; sexing himself into the cosmos.
He then quits his job, saying that he had a religious experience that went far beyond 'just sex'.
By the way, the movie 'climaxes' with another researcher actually dying while wearing this super brain life recorder, and it is Christopher Walken (who else?) who plays back this tape to find out what is actually to actually die. There's lots of cheezy late '70s Hollywood light show effects from the same team that did 2001:A Space Odyssey thirteen years previously.
Oh, and I remember a scene where an executive shows off 'the chips that make it all possible'; these were a couple of 40-pin DIPs without any conductive foam around the pins.
Bizarre, the pseudo-technical movies that we remember. Hook a life recorder to my head and you are going to get a lot of really dumb movies. Now if I could only get stuff like El Topo out of my head! That would be a machine that would really be worth buying!
Everything that isn't copyrighted would probably fit on a floppy disk.
More ammo for Osama
on
Re-Pet a Reality
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Underneath all the sarcastic and funny comments about pet cloning lies the truth that our enemies will widely publicize the fact that a woman from George Bush's home state paid to $50,000 to make a copy of her cat, while they and their people live in great poverty.
This example will be used as proof that the 'infidels' have no respect for human life while are willing to spend many lifetime's wages on a selfish and childish thing like a small animal companion. It will be used as justification for murdering westerners and Americans in particular, in the name of their god.
Twenty years ago this kind of story would have just been a novelty in the human-interest, weird science category, but those days are gone.
Now every story should be examined by editors in regards to how it will be used by the enemies of the West as proof for the necessity of our destruction. C'mon guys, there's a real war going on: a war of civilizations between the secular, technological values of the West and fundamentalist Islam. If it seems distant and irrelevant from the perspective of your global media corporation's interest in modern New York, then look out the window of your media corporation's skyscraper and remember the giant skyscraper that is no longer there. You remember, the one that was destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists who seriously want to kill you and everything that you stand for and believe in?
Start thinking about the long term consequences of the stories that you print.
And while you're at it, you might suggest to your nit-wit rich friends with far too much money that spending $50,000 to clone a pet cat is not really in their best long-run interest. And if they absolutely insist on doing this kind of stupid stuff anyway (rich people can be most adamant about their need and right to do truly stupid things), ask them to please be more discrete.
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"It is a testament to the quality of my opinions that people attack my grammar and spelling."
Actually I would think that it would be a testament to the quality of the grammar and spell checker being used.
Sarcasm aside, it seems that venture companies will throw money at any project that has a well-formatted proposal. For example, all the VCO funds that were given to Santa Cruz Operation SCO when they claimed that they owned Linux. They did this after Microsoft gave them a lot of money in the background.
Like the old saying: " If architects designed buildings in the same way that programmers built software, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. "
Actually they're only buying a computer because you never write to them. Plus they would like to keep in touch with all their friends who haven't died yet.
So what would a computer designed for the elderly with money be like?
Do you think that they went out and actually asked anyone over 70 years old what they would want in a computer? Not likely. Probably just had a few focus groups of five or six 20-somethings with coffee and doughnuts throwing stupid suggestions at each other. Like "Let's make it real easy to use!" (meaning: "Let's make it real easy to buy!").
If I were really old then my body would be not functioning well, and I would not be happy about it. So what would I want in a computer?
Well, since no young people like to live the old and the middle aged people are too busy and have enough money to get away from them, the elderly tend to live alone and lonely. They have fragile bones and if they fall down they tend to stay down a lot longer than they would forty years ago.
So how about a PC with a microphone that will dial (the number that connects any telephone line to the authorities in the USA) and pre-recorded message requesting help to come to their address when they yell a specific phrase from the floor? A phrase like "Help! I've fallen and I can't move!". Or, "Help! I'm having a heart attack".
How about if the PC could interface with the medical equipment that they have bought with your inheritance money? So they could just buy the sensor part and have this $400 PC do all the digital work that all expensive microprocessors inside each piece of expensive home medical equipment is now doing?
How about an autodialer for the phone so that they can just say "Mildred? Are you home?" at the PC and have the PC dial Mildred and act like a telephone instead of having painful arthritic fingers trying to stab at little buttons that they can't see anyway on a cheap plastic phone that doesn't work well because it's been dropped so many times because it's so hard for an old person to hold?
How about a good fast flatbed scanner interface so that they can put a paper or letter on the scanner surface and actually be able to read it on PC screen in big, big letters that can be seen with eighty-year-old eyes?
If you are seriously trying to make a PC that old people will buy, then make a PC that is seriously helpful to older people.
This is so true.
Someone could go to jail for life without parole for:
1) Getting into a fight in the schoolyard when they're 16...
2) Getting caught with the microscopic resin of cannibus on a pipe that they found on the ground..
3) Listening to music on an iPod or Walkman...
Of course, it goes without saying that no rich, white, republican kid will ever be bothered by this type of insanity that passes for justice in the USA. Only blacks, latinos, and middle-class whites will be subjected to the guiding light of the American justice system.
It also goes without saying that the legislators who are pushing for these insane laws to be passed are being paid thousands of dollars in bribes ('campaign contributions') from the private prison corporations who will be making $30,000 a year for each new 'dangerous criminal' serving life-in-prison-without-parole in a corporate prison.
If you are a citizen of the European Community or some other stable country with a basic tradition of justice, don't come to the USA. Don't even visit here. It's just too dangerous. The republicans have just gone fucking nuts. Visit Canada (in the summer) or Mexico (in the winter). Avoid the USA. Seriously.
Innovation happens when it's needed. The Japanese have a need for robots because they are in the process of reducing their population to appropriate levels.
Japan is small country that is very mountainous. There is not a lot of good land available. Everything is very crowded. There are too many people. Two hundred years ago, the samurai would keep the population at good levels by simply killing anyone and everyone they felt like killing. Didn't bow low enough? Zip... You too ugly? zip...
Japan was also closed. No non-Japanese in Japan from the late 1600s until the early 1850s. You leave Japan, you didn't go back. If you did you were killed by the samurai. If you went there, you were killed. This long period created a society that became insular and guarded to foreigners.
Then there was that misguided empire of the 1920s to 1940, followed by the unfortunate decisions and events of 1942 to 1945. The boom years after the occupation ended led to prosperity and population growth.
Now there are too many people. The robots are necessary for the transistion of the Japanese population from the current 100 million to a comfortable 40 to 50 million.
I don't see that this is anything for non-Japanese to be concerned about. Europe is going through the same process but it is bringing in millions of Muslims instead of using robots for its transition. Which doesn't really reduce the population. It just sets the stage for conflict in fifty years between the backward Muslim countries of the middle east and the progressive Muslim-Christian-Humanist hybrid countries of the European Union.
The North Americans are solving their population transformation by allowing the migration of millions of Mexicans and Central Americans to the USA. Americans have always been able to adapt to mass migrations of immigrants better than any other people in the world. They think, if it worked before, do it again.
Robots will eventually pay for themselves if they can be made flexible, reliable, and cheap enough. They will make great killing machines for when it becomes necessary to begin systematically depopulating the third world of surplus young males. Plus they can do the 'shitwork' that no one else wants to do. Or clean up areas that have become unsafe for humans due to use of toxic chemicals, genetically-engineered diseases, ultra-intelligent landmines, or low level radiation from depleted uranium or dirty bombs.
When the RIAA gives all the money back that they extorted (oh Hell, let's make it double all the money back for 'pain and suffering') from ordinary people, then we will begin to consider if and where they will fit in to the new digital world order.
Until then we will continue to copy and distribute OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE freely to whoever asks for it.
They stole the public domain by bribing legislators to pass laws indefinitely extending the old idea of copyright. By doing this, they have shown themselves to be cultural thieves of the highest order and they forfeit all claims to any copyrights that they 'possessed' before deciding to do this crime against the world's cultural resources.
They need to beg for our mercy; we don't need to beg for theirs. They need us a lot more then we need them.
The people here at Slashdot who don't understand this are simply misguided.
Who needs this data transmission over power lines? No one in North America!
There are millions of meters of 'dark fiber' in the ground already. This is the ultra high bandwidth fiber optic cable that was put in place quietly by the utilities during the boom years of the 1990s. It was all this unused fiber-optic capacity that gave rise to all the talk about video-on-demand and other high bandwidth predictions at the time.
Maybe somewhere, someday, somebody could make use of this technology. But for the present, it's just an academic exercise.
The problem with getting bandwidth into use in North America isn't technological, nor is it the lack of installed cable. It's political. Everybody involved is just too damned greedy and the end result is that nothing much happens. It's like crabs pulling each other back to the bottom of the bucket.
On my first trip to Hong Kong in 1967, I found that it was common for the record stores to make a tape with recordings of customer's selected albums on it.
For a 1800ft Reel-to-reel tape, you would select about five albums. The store would record the albums onto the tape. You would pay for the blank tape and about $1 or $2 US for each album's recording. The albums cost about $5 US in Hong Kong at that time.
This was quite common and accepted business practice at every record store except the poorest, smallest ones. I never realized that it wasn't standard practice world-wide until I came to America.
Hello,
Thank you for the reply and information. I was actually going by what I read in an American magazine long ago.
Thank goodness that the tragic European war of 1914-1945 (it was really one long war with a break) is over and the damage is finally being healed by time. All serious people both in North America and Europe wish that the European Union lasts hundreds of years. If only to prevent future European wars like the ones that have plagued Europe every 120 - 150 years since the Roman Empire days.
Hopefully we will not fall under the spell of monsters like Stalin, Hitler, and Napolean again and be tricked into supporting insane wars anymore.
Here in the USA we get a new war every ten years or so. They are absurdly expensive and waste a lot of money. But for most people, these wars are avoidable by simply chosing not to take part in them.
With this kind of complexity, you have to wonder what kind of tools are being used to write a project like Windows.
For example, I do microcontroller coding in assembly language. I find that anything that has more than, say, a hundred instructions requires a formal written diagrammed algorythm.
In these situations I revert back to the Warnier-Orr diagramming techniques that we were taught in Community College Computer classes back in the 1980s. I have no idea if this kind of thing is still taught or encouraged in computer school. But after a certain level of complexity, I would be lost and unable to get anything to work, especially in assembly language where you count processor clock cycles and everything runs 'pedal to the metal' on processors that cost 2 cents per MIP.
For example, I did an interface that takes the keystrokes of a standard PS-2 keyboard and turns them into MIDI note on/off. The Warnier-Orr algorthm covered six pages for what eventually came to a few hundred bytes of code.
I can't imagine what Microsoft uses to keep something as complex as Windows organized and working.
Yes, I've noticed this.
For example, a first-time novelist may, in a good year, sell a few hundred copies of a great first novel. But a good review in a journal read by librarians will cause sales to the libraries to reach thousands. If the libraries are buying the majority of the copies, then it doesn't matter how many people read the book at the library 'for free'. Book publishers and librarians have had this symbionic relationship since Ben Franklin opened his first public library before the American Revolution.
The RIAA and MPAA is made up from a different class of people than the book readers and publishers. They tend to be meaner, sleazier, and far more short-sighted and narrow-minded. The RIAA/MPAA are the kind of people who would demand that the libraries of the world buy multiple copies of music and DVD disks at inflated prices and then pass laws forcing them to be removed from the shelves of the libraries. They would do this as 'fair compensation' to themselves in response for the libraries unwillingness to conform to the new standard of 'one person, one view, one full payment, forever' that they feel that they are owed by the public.
I really don't think that we should underestimate how sleazy and greedy the RIAA/MPAA people really are. That way we'll never be surprised by what they do; and we'll be able to predict what they will do in any given new situation.
The RIAA/MPAA is not MicroSoft, where the corporate tone is set by a character defects in its charismatic leadership. It's a true sleazy and greedy mentality that has always been and continues to be at the heart and soul of the entertainment industry. Just because they consolidated into five single global corporations doesn't mean they developed a sense of global noblesse oblige.
When Hogan's Heroes finally came to German television, it was very well received and popular. However there was one slight problem: a stiff-armed "Heil Hitler" salutes are banned under German law.
So on German TV, whenever Col. Klink answers the telephone, his arm goes straight up into the air, and he says, "Look how high the corn grows!".
If tens of thousands of people were using bootleg copies of this game before it's official release, then it wasn't the 'pirates' who were at fault, it's the software developers.
Here is a situation where thousands of people would have paid some money for copy of the product while it was still in development.
The software publishers should have identified this market and sold to them a copy of the game in its pre-release under-development state. That way they would have been able to actually sell the game (at a reduced price) multiple times over the course of its development and received valuable feedback from its most committed and enthusiastic fan base during the development of the final product.
Instead the game developers ended up receiving next to nothing from the thousands of people who actual took the time and effort to track down a copy of the product while under development.
Software Games are not movies! Until software companies realize this important difference then they will continue to lose money. Not due to 'piracy', but to missed marketing opportunities resulting from their refusal to understand exactly what their best customers want and are willing to pay for.
Since WaReZ dudes only copy and distribute big Hollywood releases they are actually an unpaid part of the actual promotional and marketing department of the Hollywood studio that released the film in the first place.
I'll take WaReZ dudes seriously when they collectively refuse to copy and distibute much of the junk that comes from Hollywood on aesthetic grounds, and copy and distribute a masterpiece from outside the Hollywood framework that would have disappeared without their promotion.
Or better yet, if they actually used their technology, organization, and energy to create a film masterpiece themselves and then distribute it freely outside the Hollywood framework.
Until then, they're just part of Hollywood, regardless of how illegal they happen to be at the moment.
Sure is a good thing that Hollywood people never read books. It means that they would never go into a public library and see that even the smallest suburban branch has hundreds of video and DVD titles available for private home viewing at no charge at all! Which means they ain't gettin' no money from all those people who go to the free libraries instead of waiting in the snow to pay $20 to watch some inane Ben Afflick-Drew Barrymore brainrot.
I wonder how long it will be before the MPAA makes a serious attempt to shut down the public libraries. Given their cement-head mentality, it seems inevitable that they will attempt to do so.
In the meantime, I gotta go. I just received an e-mail from the little library down the street in old Garden Home elementary school that the 6-CD set of The Sopranos Fifth Season that I put on hold last month has arrived.
Could be actually be possible that after two generations of anti-Nazism and true democratic institutional framework that the Germans have actually changed? No more the violent, bloodlusting Huns screaming into the east to the pounding chords of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song?
The Americans offered then the opportunity to join in the Iraqi invasion, kill anyone and everyone they want to, set up the most delicious camps, grab all the cheap oil that they want, letting Uncle Sam pick up the whole tab...and they turned it down?
Whatever happened to the good old Germany that we grew up with? Watching Combat on television and The Dirty Dozen at the movies?
Achtung!..you pussies
After six weeks of Oregon's "Winter Sunshine" even a vacation to a well-lighted Safeway store looks good. Time spent in a place with another flourescent light bulb every two feet on the ceiling actually helps what gets called 'Seasonal Affective Disorder'. We're not even that far North so it's not the overly long nights that get to you, it's the endless number of days with heavy cloud cover coupled with the short winter solar exposures.
The television weather teams have worn out their thesaurui trying to find new terms to describe water falling from the sky. A typical winter weather report in Cascadia will be "Look for morning drizzle, followed by afternoon showers, with periods of rain in the evening."
Forget space elevators, I want to see a giant fiber optic light pipe that that will rise 10000 feet in the air (that's 3000 meters, ya'all), point a giant reflector at the sun, and bring the light down to the mountaintop like Moses and shine it like a giant torch onto the city, relieving the winter gloom. Better than Daylight Savings Time, and cheaper than a big stupid foreign war that we're guaranteed to lose anyway.
Given the absolute corrupt nature of the American and especially the California legislative process, it must be assumed that any bill (the USA term for proposed law) goes through a strict corporate analysis and review and anything even remotely critical or of possible concern to the benefit of the corporate structure will be removed or neutralized by admendment.
If you can accept this idea then you can realize that it is now impossible to get any progressive or consumer friendly bills passed into law or signed uber-menschen killer robot corporate-controlled governor of California.
Forget about using the legislative branch to get laws passed to protect your interests. In the new, corporate-controlled America, it's just not going to happen.
Consumer protection will only come now from concerned and active private groups. And more often than not, these groups and their activities that go against any corporate interests will be declared illegal by corporate-controlled legislatures and the people involved will be labeled 'terrorists' by the corporate-controlled media.
Just get used to it because it is the way that it is going to be. Here's a simple rule-of-thumb for cutting through the Fox News BS about who is and who isn't a terrorist: people who do things that result in the murder of other random innocent people are real terrorists. People that just make work for corporate lawyers through meaningless symbolic protests are not.
Just remember the old Soviet expression: "Pravda nyet Isvestia, Isvestia nyet Pravda" (Truth is not News, News is not Truth)[ - a pun on the two top Soviet newspapers of the cold war era].
A 'Great Leap Forward' is happening now in microcontroller chips. These are processors that have internal flash ROM for their programs and also have most of their peripherals on the controller itself instead of external chip sets.
For example the Atmel AVR Tiny13 chip has four channels of 10-bit ADC, runs at 25 MIPS, and sells for 88 cents (each in 25 unit lots) on DigiKey. Other companies are introducing other chips that are impressive in different ways.
The PC system may be peaking but the controller chip world is as exciting as ever.
Not to mention that the big daily newspapers 'of record' are always the most backward and conservative institution in any city.
In my city, whenever the cops shoot somebody for no reason at all, the newspaper is always 100% behind the police regardless of the circumstances or evidence. When there was an anti-war demonstration and people brought their children, the police blocked off all street exits and went in spraying everyone (including little children) with Mace and pepper spray. The newspaper was behind the police 100% and demanded in an editorial that parents who brought their children to a legal anti-war demonstration be arrested for child abuse and have the kids put into foster homes. Nor did they change when all the video tapes of police macing and beating people resulted in a judgement against the police totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. The local newspaper kept secret their own investigation into the story that the governor had a long sexual affair with a 14-year-old girl.
The newspaper is the most backward, 'cement-head' knee-jerk, mean and stupid institution in any city. They deserve to be tossed into the ash-can of history. If this happens through the classified ads, then fine.
I wish that I could find the Fry's Electronics newspaper ads online someplace. It's a real hassle to find a newspaper on Fridays to see exactly what is going on sale and for how much.
It seems like this would be a natural thing for posting on an internet site. But Fry's Electronics is way behind the times when it comes to electronic commerce. I know that they do have a lame website, but it doesn't list the same specials that the newspaper does.
I also wish that there was a site that listed all the items in the various grocery stores in the city. So I could shop for sales without having to mess with finding/buying/getting a newspaper. For example:
Tortino' Pizza Safeway ThrillMart
10.3 Oz Combo $1.78 4/$5.00
Listing the thousands of items on the shelves and their prices for various supermarket chains, updated weekly.
These stores go on and on about customer service but their totally clueless on how to use advanced ten-year-old 20th-century technology to actually provide a service to their customers, like listing the prices of everything they sell in downloadable ZIP file. They already have this information in their computers to facilite bar-code point-of-sale checkouts. They should make it available to the customers on-line. At least they should have the newspaper ad supplement available for downloading as a JPG file, even that would be nice.
I'm just amazed that retailers have ALL this computer equipment in their stores but are completely clueless about ways to use it for marketing and promotion. Imagine a grocery store that allows you to bid like eBay on perishable items, instead of just paying people to throw away perfectly good fruit because it's not brainwashed-housewife perfect.
I wish all these people who ran retail stores would just start to 'think outside the box'. Maybe I'm just wishing for too much.
Spam is a form of pollution that results from an inappropriate pricing of a common resource. In this case the resource is the attention span of millions of literate intelligent internet users throughout the world.
In other forms of pollution, a common resource is used for private gain because it is not correctly priced. For example, air pollution comes from a factory being able to dump its waste into the atmosphere for no cost.
The solution to pollution is first decrease it and then ending it by making alternatives less costly than using what used to be a free resource. The commonly accepted way to reduce air pollution now is to sell the right to dump exact amounts of contaminants into the atmosphere. These pollution permits are traded on the free market. Companies are market encouraged to develop alternative ways to deal with factory waste other than dumping it into the air. Then they can sell their 'rights to pollute' to the highest bidder.
While this seems backward and counterproductive, it does reduce the amount of air pollution in the real world.
The same approach to spam would be to sell the right to send a precise number of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to internet users. The right to send X number of Spam e-mails could be bought and sold on the international market. Then over time, the absolute number of spam e-mails would be reduced. This would reduce spam by forcing the spammers to start doing market research and focusing their advertisments to specific audiences. This will make the internet advertising medium cost the same as other advertising mediums.
Spam exists because the net is free for spammers. It is an inappropriately priced resource.
I'm reminded of the film Brainstorm 1983 (Natalie Wood's last film).
It's about a super virtual reality machine that can record the brain's sensory input and play it back to another person. In the film the machine used special 4-inch-wide silver videotape to do this.
Anyway there's this scene where a scientist convinces a young lady to have sex with him while he is wearing this brain-recording headset. So naturally, after she leaves he cuts the tape into an endless loop and spends hours playing it back; sexing himself into the cosmos.
He then quits his job, saying that he had a religious experience that went far beyond 'just sex'.
By the way, the movie 'climaxes' with another researcher actually dying while wearing this super brain life recorder, and it is Christopher Walken (who else?) who plays back this tape to find out what is actually to actually die. There's lots of cheezy late '70s Hollywood light show effects from the same team that did 2001:A Space Odyssey thirteen years previously.
Oh, and I remember a scene where an executive shows off 'the chips that make it all possible'; these were a couple of 40-pin DIPs without any conductive foam around the pins.
Bizarre, the pseudo-technical movies that we remember. Hook a life recorder to my head and you are going to get a lot of really dumb movies. Now if I could only get stuff like El Topo out of my head! That would be a machine that would really be worth buying!
Everything that isn't copyrighted would probably fit on a floppy disk.
Underneath all the sarcastic and funny comments about pet cloning lies the truth that our enemies will widely publicize the fact that a woman from George Bush's home state paid to $50,000 to make a copy of her cat, while they and their people live in great poverty.
This example will be used as proof that the 'infidels' have no respect for human life while are willing to spend many lifetime's wages on a selfish and childish thing like a small animal companion. It will be used as justification for murdering westerners and Americans in particular, in the name of their god.
Twenty years ago this kind of story would have just been a novelty in the human-interest, weird science category, but those days are gone.
Now every story should be examined by editors in regards to how it will be used by the enemies of the West as proof for the necessity of our destruction. C'mon guys, there's a real war going on: a war of civilizations between the secular, technological values of the West and fundamentalist Islam. If it seems distant and irrelevant from the perspective of your global media corporation's interest in modern New York, then look out the window of your media corporation's skyscraper and remember the giant skyscraper that is no longer there. You remember, the one that was destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists who seriously want to kill you and everything that you stand for and believe in?
Start thinking about the long term consequences of the stories that you print.
And while you're at it, you might suggest to your nit-wit rich friends with far too much money that spending $50,000 to clone a pet cat is not really in their best long-run interest. And if they absolutely insist on doing this kind of stupid stuff anyway (rich people can be most adamant about their need and right to do truly stupid things), ask them to please be more discrete.