These Slashdot people are merciless when it comes to typos. This 5 MB reference must be 5 Gigabytes.
But, 5 Gig, So what?
If it is going to be more expensive than an iPod it will fail because NO ONE is going to pay a higher-than-Apple price for a Apple product that doesn't have an Apple design and logo. And an iPod is an Apple product in the public mind. Even if it's not made by Apple. The only way that anyone can compete with Apple is to have a product that is functionally identical, but without the graceful design style or high price (1/3 the Apple price tops).
Please excuse me for asking, but what the fuck would anyone do with a 1.5 inch LCD video screen? It's too small for anything except be a three minute novelity. It's too small to watch and it's an eyeball-catching annoyance when it's on and not being watched.
Is there someone in Korea who thought that this was a good idea? Let him (has to be a guy - no woman would be this dumb I mean no woman could rise to a position of management authority in a Korean company and be this dumb, but you knew that) stand up and take a bow. What did he think people were going to do with a 1.5 inch screen on an MP3 player. "Ah...people will put on headphones and...ah... hold the unit in front of their face and...uh... dance like this to the karaoke video on the screen..." Gee, Mr. Kim, maybe they will, but I donno... [I realize that I'm taking a real risk here by assuming that the designer's name was Mr. Kim, but since half the people in Korea have the same last name, it's not a real stretch.]
I hate to come across like a clueless retard to the Slashdot techno diaspora, but please, in all seriousness, tell me if you can...
Why would anyone buy this thing?
And,...uh...If you fire the guy who came up with this idea in the first place, can I have his job?
The commodity price of bulk coffee has fallen over the past ten years to its lowest price ever. That makes Starbucks far too expensive for the product that they offer.
In Oregon we have a Starbucks on every second corner and a Fred Meyer grocery store every half mile. Each one has the weirdest collection of old people that you are likely to see anywhere.
But Fred Meyer is also selling one kilo (2.2 lbs) tins of ground primo Columbian and dark French roast expresso for $2.99US each. Put twice as much ground Freddie's coffee into the coffee maker as you would normally put $12-a-pound Tanzanian Pea organic mocha-heaven blend, add an extra packet of blue, red, yellow package sweetener or an extra spoon of sugar, and you have the 20-cent rocket-ship equivalent of Starbucks' $3 double-expresso with syrup.
Use your excess energy to learn the "Fred Meyer Blues":
"Well, I woke up this morning and I had the Fred Meyer Blues,
I woke up this morning and I had the Fred Meyer Blues,
I couldn't even find, my ten-dollar Fred Meyer shoes"
"Well, Mister Fred Meyer, he got a funny brain,
Whippin' on his mama with a bicycle chain;
I heard him moanin' and howlin',
beneath the Stadium store,
and if I get lucky,
I won't need Fred Meyer no more"
The website in Finland should have arranged a way to have dozens of Finnish works available on their site, both modern and classical national works. It would also help if they also acted as a home site for a Finnish language open-source translation program [Suomi-English; Suomi-Chinese; Suomi-Spanish; etc...].
The local police would be far less willing to shut down a website that was acting as a global outlet for national culture.
Even if they did shut down the site at the insistence of the five global media corporations, the newspapers would pick up the story and play it as cultural imperialist corporations smashing a 'grass-roots' patriotic web portal.
Although it might seem transparent pandering to the flag-waving mentality that is out-of-tune with the geek mind-set, these tactics should not be ignored when setting up a cultural library (a file-sharing website) on the web.
I heard on NPR (National Public Radio, a non-commercial broadcast network in the USA) that the city of Salinas, California decided to shut down their public libraries in order to save some money. This will become increasingly common in the USA.
The closed library facility should be used as a place where people can come and trade CDs, CD-Rs, and DVDs that they freely copy and trade. When global media corporations, several that are based in California, lobby governments to lower their taxes to the point where communities are forced to close the libraries, they lose all moral and ethical authority to claim that they have a right to prevent people from copying and freely distributing books, music, and movies. People obey laws not only to avoid punishment, but because they believe in the legitimacy of the laws. Closing the libraries removes all legitimacy of the copyright laws. There is no longer any moral or ethical reason for honest citizens to uphold them.
If the government is serious about fixing problems in supposedly secure and sensitive systems, then they should reward not punish people who find holes.
Instead of going to the courts with a trumped up case about supposed damages in hundreds of thousands of dollars, they should give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the people who document holes in the security of sensitive systems.
And tax-free, too, if you please.
And give this kid the job of special intern for security at a decent salary. Loyal Americans and allies of the American corporate empire should be rewarded for tracking down, finding, and documenting security problems.
Suppose YOU found a hole in some NASA computer that allowed you to endanger a shuttle launch or mission. Suppose that if you took it to NASA there was a good chance that you would get thrown into some secret third-world hellhole prison like Guantanamo with no release or no record of your imprisonment. This might happen if you're Muslim instead of being some 18-year-old, rich, white, suburban, Computer Science community college student harmless geek.
Suppose that you mentioned your discovery to someone at the mosque and they came back a month later with an offer of several hundred thousand dollars for all the details on how to blow up a NASA mission along with a new identity and citizenship to some quiet Muslim community in a country not monitored by the FBI.
What would you do?
There are holes in every major on-line computer system. It is better that we have our geeks get rewarded for finding and reporting them, rather than have our enemies find them and use them to kill our people.
In other words, Homeland 'Security' agents, stop putting harmless hackers in jail for finding weaknesses in your chickenshit computer security systems.
There's a good chance that they didn't tell you everything that they found out about your pathetic security systems, and they won't be 'harmless hackers' when they get out of an American prison.
This young naïve fool should have just stood up and told the judge that he was working on a special secret project for national security and that he couldn't say any more about it.
Since the prosecuter wouldn't be able to prove him wrong, he would have gotten off and had the case dismissed.
Should this happen to you, I suggest that you try it. You have nothing to lose and every reason to believe that you can get away with it.
Most western countries including the US, even though Europes situation is considerably worse have birthrates that will barely sustain the current population without immigration,...
Europe has always previously generated many more people than were needed. Now they aren't.
Previously Europeans dealt with the excess number of people by periodically having giant wars that killed hundreds of thousands. Now there is a European Community and having giant wars within the community to kill the excess population is no longer an option. So the Europeans have taken to use birth control technologies in a big way to keep the population levels manageable.
It's not that the Europeans are having fewer children that is the problem, it's the fact that they are surrounded by backward people who still believe that having ten to twelve children is the best way get ahead in the world.
Consider the Palestinians. They are a people in a land with NO natural resources and limited farming potential. For fifty years they have lived, presently live, and will continue to live for the foreseeable future under military occupation with little real control over their government and destiny.
Yet your average Palestinian family has twelve children! No wonder they are so happy to wrap their kids in plastic explosives and send them out to the nearest bus stop! What else are they going to do with them?
Palestinians seriously talk about how they will eventually gain their independence through simple demographics. They seriously think that if they can't fight their way to Tel Aviv then they can fuck their way there.
This is completely delusional madness. All that they are really doing is locking themselves into a condition of permanent and endless misery. They should start discretely learning from their Iranian friends how to effectively limit their population growth, without madness and bloodshed.
Have you ever considered that maybe those foreign workers are simply *better*?
If you accept that the inherent genetic traits for making an excellent programmer are distributed equally among all humans, regardless of culture and national origin, then yes the foreign programmers who make it to the USA are generally better than American-born programmers.
There is a bell-curve of programming skills for every country. India has 900 million people, the USA has 250 million. That means of the best 0.1% of the population, there are going to be almost four times as many brilliant Indian programmers than American.
If your corporation wants to hire the best programmers available AND there are few restrictions for hiring the best people from anywhere in the world, then yes there are going to be more Indian and Chinese programmers working in the best American corporate IT positions in the USA. This will remain so as long as the best programmers in the world are ready, willing, and eager to relocate to the USA.
By the way, consider the enormous hassle that it is to learn a completely different language. And be glad that it is the Chinese programmers who must master English to get the IT job in global corporation instead of you having to master Chinese language to get the IT job in the global corporation.
stereotyped as drunk, violent, stupid, and Not Like Us.
At the time that the stereotype formed, a disproportionate number of the immigrant group were 'drunk, violent, stupid, and Not Like Us.' Being drunk, violent, and stupid is a general characteristic of any culture's underclass. Until HB-1, immigrants often were the underclass. It was the immigrant's children who were obsessed with becoming middle class and breaking the stereotype.
There was a religious aspect, as well, of course; Catholicism...
Very true. Anti-Catholicism was a strong belief of the Ku-Klux Klan. But it was only directed at poor Catholics. Wealthy Catholic families, like Scarlet O'Hara's in Gone With The Wind were always accepted by upper-class society, even hundreds of years ago.
It was the general movement to de-emphasize religion in society (that started after World War II) that led to general religious tolerance.
Look at that Arab terrorist / job-stealing Indian / ____ ____ over there! The names change; the attitudes don't.
It will be much easier for "job-stealers" to find acceptance in the US because no one really wants to work anyway and the novelty of having many advanced, educated, and civilized co-workers from distant lands will soon relieve the fear of job losses.
Unfortunately, the Arabs will find it extremely difficult to shake the 'terrorist' image that they have. The legacy of hundreds of horrible terrorist incidents, mostly done in the name of Islam or 'anti-Zionism', will haunt the relationships between Arabs and the rest of the world's people for many, many years to come.
Of course, if the Arabs would actually stop committing horrible terrorist events, then this would make the whole process of dissolving hateful stereotypes much easier for everyone.
P2P is the marijuana of the 21st century
on
P2P In 15 Lines of Code
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
P2P is the marijuana of the 21st century in the sense that it is an activity done by millions of people who don't think there is anything wrong with doing it. And it has been (actually in this case, will be) made illegal by clueless legislators prompted by outlandish claims by business groups.
Now you have a classic situation where a vague law can be focused on a large group of people for political reasons. Individuals can be selected either randomly or because of their unrelated political activities or beliefs and be fed into the legal machinery for the 'criminal' activity of using P2P.
Given the for-profit corporate prison industry in the USA and the oversupply of greedy lawyers, this looks like a new profit center focused on young people in the same way that the marijuana industry turned out to be extremely profitable for the lawyer-corporate prison coalition.
Make P2P vaguely illegal.
Make it incredibly easy to do.
Select 100 young people at random.
Check for P2P activity.
If yes, offer them a deal:
go to prison for your 'crime'
(the corporate prison makes $30,000 per year)
-or-
pay a $10,000 fine to the RIAA and turn in several friends doing P2P. (keeps the chain going).
-or-
pay a lawyer $20,000 and get probation. ($10,000 goes to the lawyer and $10,000 goes to the judge), along with turning in several friends using P2P.
You can see how this can become very profitable for the lawyers, RIAA, and prison corporations. Each will make sizable bribes (campaign contributions) to politicians to keep the laws against P2P quite strict, in the name of fairness to musicians and artists.
... it's a 286 running a basic app that no longer runs on new hardware...
I'm confused about why a basic app (either something written in BASIC language or meaning 'essential - low level') won't run on new hardware.
If the Windows PC is run with the 'cmd' program, it makes a DOS screen. Doing Alt-Enter makes the system look and feel like 286-era DOS, only running 30 times faster.
There might be a problem with legacy ISA bus expansion cards. This bus is being abandoned on all 21st century motherboards.
An approach to dealing with this problem is to use inexpensive microcontrollers to emulate early PCs. An Atmel AVR Mega that sells for about $8 can provide about 25 MIPS of 16-bit processing power. A major disadvantage is this approach is that microcontrollers rarely have address and data busses.
Anyway, I don't understand why legacy PC applications fail due to hardware reasons.
I am always amazed at how the Europeans and Euro-Americans can go on and on about how the people who live 100 kilometers away are of a different species, and then refer to ALL the native Americans as 'Indians'. Or how they can refer to all the people of South Asia as 'Indians', as if there were not ancient differences between the hundreds of tribes and cultures living in both places.
Your command of English language is good and will get even better and easier with usage.
Permit me to suggest a rewording of one of your sentences for fluent clarity:
The most extreme case until this present one happened during the Irish EU presidency. The EU president took a 180 degree turn from the decision that the EU Parliament had issued on software patents only six months earlier.
The government (anybody's government) is a huge bureaucratic organization that is comprised of people who primarily want stability. They want nothing to threaten their position, pension, and job security.
Given a choice of spending other people's money (your's, the taxpayer) or going with a group that has no formal organization that can take legal responsibility when systems break down, the bureaucrats will always chose buying the service from another large organization. That way they are protected. The fact that Linux Open Source is a better situation for the taxpayers and government information systems is secondary.
There are three ways to deal with this situation: Pass laws requiring the use of open-source. This won't work because bureaucrats will always twist the law to fit their needs, which in this case is to 'cover their ass' when (not if) the information system breaks down. Make Microsoft unaffordable Stop paying taxes in a big way so that the government doesn't have the money available to afford the Microsoft solution. This won't work because the government can use any amount violence to take your money from you, and because Microsoft can lower the initial offering price to almost nothing to secure the contract. This will work in developing countries, eventually, but not in the EU or USA. Have open source so widely used that Microsoft can't link into the established framework This won't work because Microsoft will always allow free limited distribution of its product (by technically permitting unpaid copies to be made of Windows and Office) enough to keep itself being the defacto standard in use.
The only way that the open source community can win against Microsoft in government procurement contracts is to be so transparently better that the government buyers will be willing to overlook its stark disadvantages (to the bureaucrats) in order to have a greatly superior product.
This can't happen because great software is mostly the result of great individual programmers. Microsoft has the funds to buy their work, talents, and focus for its exclusive use in Windows. The only way that Microsoft can fail here is if they refuse to pay their most highly productive 'superstar' programmers enough, or refuse to make the necessary effort to recruit them in the first place. Given that MS is run by super programmers (even if he is retired from actual coding) like Bill Gates, this too is unlikely.
The only way to beat Microsoft is convince them to hire mediocre executive leadership. This is the only way to beat any large powerful organization.
Japan and the USA are the world's two remaining super powers.
Japan concentrates on making the world's best consumer goods. America concentrates on making the world's best military goods.
When you want to entertain people and improve their lives, buy Japanese things.
If you want to kill people, buy American things.
As a result of truly horrible and brutal war, the Americans decided to include the Japanese in their sphere of protection. In return the Japanese agreed not to fuck with people anymore. It has been a good working arrangement for the past fifty years.
But the Americans now spend far too much on military goods and they have lost their ability to make innovative and popular consumer goods. Americans are always looking for someone to fuck with, because their military-based economy demands it. They have structured their economy so that they simply can't go more than ten years without a major war. They don't really have any choice anymore. They have to go out and fuck with someone, anyone, anywhere, for any reason. The only way to deal with the situation is to do whatever you can to convince the Americans to destoy your enemies and leave you and your customers alone.
Fortunately for the Japanese, the Americans have started a major war with the Arabs, many of whom have been infected with a brain-rotting virus called Islam. Since there are so many of them, the Americans will be occupied with this war for MANY years into the future. This war will continue until they run out of money (and since they have 20000 atomic bombs, your money is their money), run out of expendable people to fight the war, or just get worn out until they leave and the last helicopter is thrown off the side of the last aircraft carrier. Which is how the Vietnam War ended and is how the current Islam war will likely end about ten years from now.
Although no one will actually come out and say so, most countries are glad that the Americans decided on Islam as the 'enemy du jour'. As a result of their brain-rotting disease, no one can trust the Arabs not to send their children out to blow up their shopping malls and day-care centers. They are happy to have the Americans deal with the situation.
They can concentrate on making world-class consumer goods without distraction. It's a good situation for everyone except for the American weekend-warrior National Guard who find themselves in situation they can't get out of, can't understand, and can't believe is actually happening to them. Well, they signed up for it and then re-elected the guy who sent them there. It has to be what they really want.
Better them than us.
I don't know about the programming language itself but this would be great for documentation.
Speech to text is big but necessary step to creating a universal translator.
Don't get discouraged. Keep trying to make it work. It is important.
Talking to a machine and expecting a serious response is probably the most unnatural thing that a human can do.
Speech to text is the emblem of the new 21st century information age in the way that the atomic bomb was the emblem of the Super Power - Cold War age of the 20th century.
While it is easy to make fun of Eubonics, I believe that it should be taken seriously.
Eubonics is special language. It is a 'pidgin' language that is entirely based on English.
When the African people were brought to America, they were captives. They came from a wide variety of tribes and languages. They were enslaved and seperated from others who spoke their language. They were forced to learn English not only to understand their captors but to communicate among themselves.
As the Africans became African-Americans over a four hundred year period, they developed a special language that had to be transparent, childlike, and seemingly harmless to the captors and still be able to communicate as adults in captivity to each other. The language that evolved, African-American English, is very different from standard English in sense that it is always changing; constantly recycling standard English into completely new phrases that expressed hidden meanings that were understood by the African Americans but appeared to be harmless childish gibberish to the European Americans. This has become the primary characteristic of the language. No other language in the world changes as fast as African American English. As soon as the EuroAmericans start using a term or phrase from AfroAmerican, it goes out of fashion in AfroAmerican communities.
While this language is excellent for maintaining cultural identity and spirit in the face of long-term enslavement and systematic cultural disintegration, its hyper-fluid nature makes it not good for science and middle-class stability. As the African-American people move out of the era of enslavement and cultural isolation and into the American middle class, Eubonics will probably pass also. It was a powerful and useful tool, and it served its purpose well. Jive talkin' deserves to be taken seriously as a linguistic discipline.
...maybe a central DB of all the songs that you have legally purchased and the ability to get them from there at any time, anywhere, in any format, for any reason...
This central global music database already exists, it's called Kazaa.
I respectfully disagee with the idea that the format with the strongest DRM will be the most widely used in the future. I believe that the MP3 revolution has created an entire new way of thinking about recordings, copyright, and who owns music. MP3 caused the control of music recordings to shift from the corporate producers of the recordings to the consumers who listen to them. It will never shift back because corporate control depended upon having the music tied totally to the distribution media (the disk). Once digital technology seperated the content from the medium, it changed the financial equation for the entire music industry. The record companies remind me of the makers of typewriter ribbons, who really, really wish that all these word-processing computers would 'just...fucking...go...away!' In the long run, adding bulletproof DRM to a recording will only guarantee that the recording will only reach a tiny percentage of its possible audience. Just because the global music corporations are so big now doesn't mean that they can halt or turn back the MP3 revolution.
In the future the format that provides the easiest,fastest, and most reliable way to copy whole libraries of thousands of albums at one time will be the most widely used format, regardless of any copyright law.
My linguistics professor in college mentioned this characteristic about English.
French and German don't have this ability. These are the languages that I have studied on your list. Swedish seems to be similar to German. I would have no idea about Finnish, which is different from the common European legacy languages.
I suspect that it is true that English is the only major language that allows words to 'morph' between nouns, verbs, and adjectives according to their position in the sentence. It makes the language flexible enough to be widely used. But it will also make impossible to understand over time. English is the vacuum cleaner of languages. It inhales words by the hundreds from other languages.
I don't think that people who will be speaking English in 200 years from now will be able to understand the dialog in Hollywood movies that are made today. The language will have changed too much by that time. I suspect that most of the common words will be the same, but the sentence structure and phrases will have changed enough to make the old movies difficult if not impossible to understand. I don't think that this kind of fast language change will happen to Finnish, because it is a language that is only used by people in Finland.
The real question today is whether the languages will change more through natural human interaction or by the technical limitations of digital speech translators. These are computers that are fast, powerful, and small enough to do real-time language processing. They don't exist yet, but they probably will within twenty years.
We do offshore the results of the failed and stupid education system.
Those who can't hack the bullshit of school are given the choice of WalMart, prison, or the military. If (and when) they chose the military, they are shipped off to distant lands where their deaths will bring the most profit and least cost to the corporations that own them (by proxy).
This is the offshoring of the American education system.
English is the only language in the world that allows any word to be any part-of-speach by changing it position in the sentence word order. In no other language could the word 'offshore' be used unchanged as a verb, noun, adjective in the same paragraph and make any sense. Part of the reason that America has such a flexible and adaptive culture is because it has such a flexible and adaptive language.
Before we berate ourselves for not being good at math, we should ask "Why do we need to learn math?".
Ask a thousand people if they remember studying algebra in school. Almost everyone says yes. Ask if anyone has ever used algebra even once since leaving school. Maybe one in a thousand will say yes.
The real problem is not that people are not good at math. The real problem is that the people entrusted to run the schools are obsessed by judging their success by having people master a subject that they will NEVER need or use. Algebra is an arbitrary discipline. It could just as easily be some other useless topic mastered for no real reason except for the shared assumption among educators that this is an important subject that must be learned.
When I grew up in Massachusetts this type of subject was Latin language. I refused to study it and was held back a grade until my parents were able to pull some strings and have me placed in a French language class. (another absurd subject like Latin and algebra, as it turned out). Eventually even educators have an collective "Emperor's New Clothes" moment and stop investing prestige in absurd subjects. Algebra is most likely the next on that list.
This would be a good place to remind all you good clean young suburban Americans yearning for the stars that your country is bankrupt, trillions of dollars in debt to foreign banks, and increasingly hated by billions of people throughout the world because you're unwilling to deal with actual world problems, preferring instead to spend billions of dollars of other people's money on outer space fantasies best left to Hollywood.
Don't worry or concern yourself too much. This is just a standard reality check notice that I add to all Slashdot subjects about the necessity of wasting more and more money on space exploration. You can just ignore it and go back to your space fantasy now.
Don't worry or concern yourself too much. This is just a standard reality check notice that I add to all Slashdot subjects about the necessity of wasting more and more money on space exploration. You can just ignore it and go back to your space fantasy now.
But there's a big problem with the concept of legalizing even such specific vigilante acts. Where does the line in the sand get drawn?
Thank you for your interesting comment.
The spam problem has been inadvertently created by the internet designers and should be addressed and eventually solved by the web designers. This is not an area where legislators need concern themselves. They don't have to pass laws about everything. After all, that would only perpetuate the illusion that technical problems can be solved by passing laws.
In the long run, the spammers will only win if they can convince the smartest web programmers to concentrate their efforts on the enrichment of the spammers. They could only do this by giving the best web programmers insane amounts of money. But spammers are too greedy themselves to do this. So they will eventually be driven off the web. Why they should be driven off is because they consume too much bandwidth for whatever service they provide to people who use the web. How they will be eventually be driven off is the question of the hour.
But it is the technical community, the open source geeks, that will eventually get rid of them. Since getting rid of the spammers is in the global public interest, we should give the people who are devising experiments to drive out the spammers the benefit of the doubt.
Getting rid of assholes is not the first step down any slippery slope.
Jeez, I sound like an economist playing with a cliche-generation program.
This copper 'bullet' is intended to strike the comet at approximately 23,000 mph and hit with a force equivalent to 4.7 tons of TNT. Scientists hope to discover what exactly the comet is made of and what changes have occurred to the outer layers with reference to the core."
You Americans always find it so easy to forget with your amazing (and amazingly expensive) projects and stunts that your country is broke, trillions of dollars in debt, and living primarily on the welfare of international bankers (primarily Asian).
Wake up and take a sober and realistic accounting of your new relative position in the world. And leave the expensive and worthless stunts to Hollywood.
These things have the potential of being extremely dangerous. Unknown viruses that have become harmless to the animal may be lethal to humans. In a chimera, the virus may mutate to be able to pass from one human to another, even through airborn contact.
This is the greatest nightmare of the Centers for Disease Control. They strongly discourage experimentation and research involving chimeras, even (and especially) research using animal organs for human transplant.
This is not a joke, or poorly written science fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
These Slashdot people are merciless when it comes to typos. This 5 MB reference must be 5 Gigabytes.
...ah... hold the unit in front of their face and ...uh... dance like this to the karaoke video on the screen..." Gee, Mr. Kim, maybe they will, but I donno... [I realize that I'm taking a real risk here by assuming that the designer's name was Mr. Kim, but since half the people in Korea have the same last name, it's not a real stretch.]
But, 5 Gig, So what?
If it is going to be more expensive than an iPod it will fail because NO ONE is going to pay a higher-than-Apple price for a Apple product that doesn't have an Apple design and logo. And an iPod is an Apple product in the public mind. Even if it's not made by Apple. The only way that anyone can compete with Apple is to have a product that is functionally identical, but without the graceful design style or high price (1/3 the Apple price tops).
Please excuse me for asking, but what the fuck would anyone do with a 1.5 inch LCD video screen? It's too small for anything except be a three minute novelity. It's too small to watch and it's an eyeball-catching annoyance when it's on and not being watched.
Is there someone in Korea who thought that this was a good idea? Let him (has to be a guy - no woman would be this dumb I mean no woman could rise to a position of management authority in a Korean company and be this dumb, but you knew that) stand up and take a bow. What did he think people were going to do with a 1.5 inch screen on an MP3 player. "Ah...people will put on headphones and
I hate to come across like a clueless retard to the Slashdot techno diaspora, but please, in all seriousness, tell me if you can...
Why would anyone buy this thing?
And,...uh...If you fire the guy who came up with this idea in the first place, can I have his job?
The commodity price of bulk coffee has fallen over the past ten years to its lowest price ever.
That makes Starbucks far too expensive for the product that they offer.
In Oregon we have a Starbucks on every second corner and a Fred Meyer grocery store every half mile. Each one has the weirdest collection of old people that you are likely to see anywhere.
But Fred Meyer is also selling one kilo (2.2 lbs) tins of ground primo Columbian and dark French roast expresso for $2.99US each. Put twice as much ground Freddie's coffee into the coffee maker as you would normally put $12-a-pound Tanzanian Pea organic mocha-heaven blend, add an extra packet of blue, red, yellow package sweetener or an extra spoon of sugar, and you have the 20-cent rocket-ship equivalent of Starbucks' $3 double-expresso with syrup.
Use your excess energy to learn the "Fred Meyer Blues":
"Well, I woke up this morning and I had the Fred Meyer Blues,
I woke up this morning and I had the Fred Meyer Blues,
I couldn't even find, my ten-dollar Fred Meyer shoes"
"Well, Mister Fred Meyer, he got a funny brain,
Whippin' on his mama with a bicycle chain;
I heard him moanin' and howlin',
beneath the Stadium store,
and if I get lucky,
I won't need Fred Meyer no more"
The website in Finland should have arranged a way to have dozens of Finnish works available on their site, both modern and classical national works. It would also help if they also acted as a home site for a Finnish language open-source translation program [Suomi-English; Suomi-Chinese; Suomi-Spanish; etc...].
The local police would be far less willing to shut down a website that was acting as a global outlet for national culture.
Even if they did shut down the site at the insistence of the five global media corporations, the newspapers would pick up the story and play it as cultural imperialist corporations smashing a 'grass-roots' patriotic web portal.
Although it might seem transparent pandering to the flag-waving mentality that is out-of-tune with the geek mind-set, these tactics should not be ignored when setting up a cultural library (a file-sharing website) on the web.
I heard on NPR (National Public Radio, a non-commercial broadcast network in the USA) that the city of Salinas, California decided to shut down their public libraries in order to save some money. This will become increasingly common in the USA.
The closed library facility should be used as a place where people can come and trade CDs, CD-Rs, and DVDs that they freely copy and trade. When global media corporations, several that are based in California, lobby governments to lower their taxes to the point where communities are forced to close the libraries, they lose all moral and ethical authority to claim that they have a right to prevent people from copying and freely distributing books, music, and movies. People obey laws not only to avoid punishment, but because they believe in the legitimacy of the laws. Closing the libraries removes all legitimacy of the copyright laws. There is no longer any moral or ethical reason for honest citizens to uphold them.
If the government is serious about fixing problems in supposedly secure and sensitive systems, then they should reward not punish people who find holes.
Instead of going to the courts with a trumped up case about supposed damages in hundreds of thousands of dollars, they should give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the people who document holes in the security of sensitive systems.
And tax-free, too, if you please.
And give this kid the job of special intern for security at a decent salary. Loyal Americans and allies of the American corporate empire should be rewarded for tracking down, finding, and documenting security problems.
Suppose YOU found a hole in some NASA computer that allowed you to endanger a shuttle launch or mission. Suppose that if you took it to NASA there was a good chance that you would get thrown into some secret third-world hellhole prison like Guantanamo with no release or no record of your imprisonment. This might happen if you're Muslim instead of being some 18-year-old, rich, white, suburban, Computer Science community college student harmless geek.
Suppose that you mentioned your discovery to someone at the mosque and they came back a month later with an offer of several hundred thousand dollars for all the details on how to blow up a NASA mission along with a new identity and citizenship to some quiet Muslim community in a country not monitored by the FBI.
What would you do?
There are holes in every major on-line computer system. It is better that we have our geeks get rewarded for finding and reporting them, rather than have our enemies find them and use them to kill our people.
In other words, Homeland 'Security' agents, stop putting harmless hackers in jail for finding weaknesses in your chickenshit computer security systems.
There's a good chance that they didn't tell you everything that they found out about your pathetic security systems, and they won't be 'harmless hackers' when they get out of an American prison.
Dumb schmucks!
This young naïve fool should have just stood up and told the judge that he was working on a special secret project for national security and that he couldn't say any more about it.
Since the prosecuter wouldn't be able to prove him wrong, he would have gotten off and had the case dismissed.
Should this happen to you, I suggest that you try it. You have nothing to lose and every reason to believe that you can get away with it.
Most western countries including the US, even though Europes situation is considerably worse have birthrates that will barely sustain the current population without immigration,...
Europe has always previously generated many more people than were needed. Now they aren't.
Previously Europeans dealt with the excess number of people by periodically having giant wars that killed hundreds of thousands. Now there is a European Community and having giant wars within the community to kill the excess population is no longer an option. So the Europeans have taken to use birth control technologies in a big way to keep the population levels manageable.
It's not that the Europeans are having fewer children that is the problem, it's the fact that they are surrounded by backward people who still believe that having ten to twelve children is the best way get ahead in the world.
Consider the Palestinians. They are a people in a land with NO natural resources and limited farming potential. For fifty years they have lived, presently live, and will continue to live for the foreseeable future under military occupation with little real control over their government and destiny.
Yet your average Palestinian family has twelve children! No wonder they are so happy to wrap their kids in plastic explosives and send them out to the nearest bus stop! What else are they going to do with them?
Palestinians seriously talk about how they will eventually gain their independence through simple demographics. They seriously think that if they can't fight their way to Tel Aviv then they can fuck their way there.
This is completely delusional madness. All that they are really doing is locking themselves into a condition of permanent and endless misery.
They should start discretely learning from their Iranian friends how to effectively limit their population growth, without madness and bloodshed.
Have you ever considered that maybe those foreign workers are simply *better*?
If you accept that the inherent genetic traits for making an excellent programmer are distributed equally among all humans, regardless of culture and national origin, then yes the foreign programmers who make it to the USA are generally better than American-born programmers.
There is a bell-curve of programming skills for every country. India has 900 million people, the USA has 250 million. That means of the best 0.1% of the population, there are going to be almost four times as many brilliant Indian programmers than American.
If your corporation wants to hire the best programmers available AND there are few restrictions for hiring the best people from anywhere in the world, then yes there are going to be more Indian and Chinese programmers working in the best American corporate IT positions in the USA. This will remain so as long as the best programmers in the world are ready, willing, and eager to relocate to the USA.
By the way, consider the enormous hassle that it is to learn a completely different language. And be glad that it is the Chinese programmers who must master English to get the IT job in global corporation instead of you having to master Chinese language to get the IT job in the global corporation.
stereotyped as drunk, violent, stupid, and Not Like Us.
At the time that the stereotype formed, a disproportionate number of the immigrant group were 'drunk, violent, stupid, and Not Like Us.' Being drunk, violent, and stupid is a general characteristic of any culture's underclass. Until HB-1, immigrants often were the underclass. It was the immigrant's children who were obsessed with becoming middle class and breaking the stereotype.
There was a religious aspect, as well, of course; Catholicism...
Very true. Anti-Catholicism was a strong belief of the Ku-Klux Klan. But it was only directed at poor Catholics. Wealthy Catholic families, like Scarlet O'Hara's in Gone With The Wind were always accepted by upper-class society, even hundreds of years ago.
It was the general movement to de-emphasize religion in society (that started after World War II) that led to general religious tolerance.
Look at that Arab terrorist / job-stealing Indian / ____ ____ over there! The names change; the attitudes don't.
It will be much easier for "job-stealers" to find acceptance in the US because no one really wants to work anyway and the novelty of having many advanced, educated, and civilized co-workers from distant lands will soon relieve the fear of job losses.
Unfortunately, the Arabs will find it extremely difficult to shake the 'terrorist' image that they have. The legacy of hundreds of horrible terrorist incidents, mostly done in the name of Islam or 'anti-Zionism', will haunt the relationships between Arabs and the rest of the world's people for many, many years to come.
Of course, if the Arabs would actually stop committing horrible terrorist events, then this would make the whole process of dissolving hateful stereotypes much easier for everyone.
P2P is the marijuana of the 21st century in the sense that it is an activity done by millions of people who don't think there is anything wrong with doing it. And it has been (actually in this case, will be) made illegal by clueless legislators prompted by outlandish claims by business groups.
Now you have a classic situation where a vague law can be focused on a large group of people for political reasons. Individuals can be selected either randomly or because of their unrelated political activities or beliefs and be fed into the legal machinery for the 'criminal' activity of using P2P.
Given the for-profit corporate prison industry in the USA and the oversupply of greedy lawyers, this looks like a new profit center focused on young people in the same way that the marijuana industry turned out to be extremely profitable for the lawyer-corporate prison coalition.
Make P2P vaguely illegal.
Make it incredibly easy to do.
Select 100 young people at random.
Check for P2P activity.
If yes, offer them a deal:
go to prison for your 'crime'
(the corporate prison makes $30,000 per year)
-or-
pay a $10,000 fine to the RIAA and turn in several friends doing P2P. (keeps the chain going).
-or-
pay a lawyer $20,000 and get probation. ($10,000 goes to the lawyer and $10,000 goes to the judge), along with turning in several friends using P2P.
You can see how this can become very profitable for the lawyers, RIAA, and prison corporations. Each will make sizable bribes (campaign contributions) to politicians to keep the laws against P2P quite strict, in the name of fairness to musicians and artists.
... it's a 286 running a basic app that no longer runs on new hardware ...
I'm confused about why a basic app (either something written in BASIC language or meaning 'essential - low level') won't run on new hardware.
If the Windows PC is run with the 'cmd' program, it makes a DOS screen. Doing Alt-Enter makes the system look and feel like 286-era DOS, only running 30 times faster.
There might be a problem with legacy ISA bus expansion cards. This bus is being abandoned on all 21st century motherboards.
An approach to dealing with this problem is to use inexpensive microcontrollers to emulate early PCs. An Atmel AVR Mega that sells for about $8 can provide about 25 MIPS of 16-bit processing power. A major disadvantage is this approach is that microcontrollers rarely have address and data busses.
Anyway, I don't understand why legacy PC applications fail due to hardware reasons.
I am always amazed at how the Europeans and Euro-Americans can go on and on about how the people who live 100 kilometers away are of a different species, and then refer to ALL the native Americans as 'Indians'. Or how they can refer to all the people of South Asia as 'Indians', as if there were not ancient differences between the hundreds of tribes and cultures living in both places.
Hello,
Your command of English language is good and will get even better and easier with usage.
Permit me to suggest a rewording of one of your sentences for fluent clarity:
The most extreme case until this present one happened during the Irish EU presidency. The EU president took a 180 degree turn from the decision that the EU Parliament had issued on software patents only six months earlier.
Good luck with your language studies.
The government (anybody's government) is a huge bureaucratic organization that is comprised of people who primarily want stability. They want nothing to threaten their position, pension, and job security.
Given a choice of spending other people's money (your's, the taxpayer) or going with a group that has no formal organization that can take legal responsibility when systems break down, the bureaucrats will always chose buying the service from another large organization. That way they are protected. The fact that Linux Open Source is a better situation for the taxpayers and government information systems is secondary.
There are three ways to deal with this situation:
Pass laws requiring the use of open-source. This won't work because bureaucrats will always twist the law to fit their needs, which in this case is to 'cover their ass' when (not if) the information system breaks down.
Make Microsoft unaffordable Stop paying taxes in a big way so that the government doesn't have the money available to afford the Microsoft solution. This won't work because the government can use any amount violence to take your money from you, and because Microsoft can lower the initial offering price to almost nothing to secure the contract. This will work in developing countries, eventually, but not in the EU or USA.
Have open source so widely used that Microsoft can't link into the established framework This won't work because Microsoft will always allow free limited distribution of its product (by technically permitting unpaid copies to be made of Windows and Office) enough to keep itself being the defacto standard in use.
The only way that the open source community can win against Microsoft in government procurement contracts is to be so transparently better that the government buyers will be willing to overlook its stark disadvantages (to the bureaucrats) in order to have a greatly superior product.
This can't happen because great software is mostly the result of great individual programmers.
Microsoft has the funds to buy their work, talents, and focus for its exclusive use in Windows. The only way that Microsoft can fail here is if they refuse to pay their most highly productive 'superstar' programmers enough, or refuse to make the necessary effort to recruit them in the first place. Given that MS is run by super programmers (even if he is retired from actual coding) like Bill Gates, this too is unlikely.
The only way to beat Microsoft is convince them to hire mediocre executive leadership. This is the only way to beat any large powerful organization.
Japan and the USA are the world's two remaining super powers.
Japan concentrates on making the world's best consumer goods. America concentrates on making the world's best military goods.
When you want to entertain people and improve their lives, buy Japanese things.
If you want to kill people, buy American things.
As a result of truly horrible and brutal war, the Americans decided to include the Japanese in their sphere of protection. In return the Japanese agreed not to fuck with people anymore.
It has been a good working arrangement for the past fifty years.
But the Americans now spend far too much on military goods and they have lost their ability to make innovative and popular consumer goods. Americans are always looking for someone to fuck with, because their military-based economy demands it. They have structured their economy so that they simply can't go more than ten years without a major war. They don't really have any choice anymore. They have to go out and fuck with someone, anyone, anywhere, for any reason.
The only way to deal with the situation is to do whatever you can to convince the Americans to destoy your enemies and leave you and your customers alone.
Fortunately for the Japanese, the Americans have started a major war with the Arabs, many of whom have been infected with a brain-rotting virus called Islam. Since there are so many of them, the Americans will be occupied with this war for MANY years into the future. This war will continue until they run out of money (and since they have 20000 atomic bombs, your money is their money), run out of expendable people to fight the war, or just get worn out until they leave and the last helicopter is thrown off the side of the last aircraft carrier. Which is how the Vietnam War ended and is how the current Islam war will likely end about ten years from now.
Although no one will actually come out and say so, most countries are glad that the Americans decided on Islam as the 'enemy du jour'. As a result of their brain-rotting disease, no one can trust the Arabs not to send their children out to blow up their shopping malls and day-care centers. They are happy to have the Americans deal with the situation.
They can concentrate on making world-class consumer goods without distraction. It's a good situation for everyone except for the American weekend-warrior National Guard who find themselves in situation they can't get out of, can't understand, and can't believe is actually happening to them. Well, they signed up for it and then re-elected the guy who sent them there. It has to be what they really want.
Better them than us.
I don't know about the programming language itself but this would be great for documentation.
Speech to text is big but necessary step to creating a universal translator.
Don't get discouraged. Keep trying to make it work. It is important.
Talking to a machine and expecting a serious response is probably the most unnatural thing that a human can do.
Speech to text is the emblem of the new 21st century information age in the way that the atomic bomb was the emblem of the Super Power - Cold War age of the 20th century.
While it is easy to make fun of Eubonics, I believe that it should be taken seriously.
Eubonics is special language. It is a 'pidgin' language that is entirely based on English.
When the African people were brought to America, they were captives. They came from a wide variety of tribes and languages. They were enslaved and seperated from others who spoke their language. They were forced to learn English not only to understand their captors but to communicate among themselves.
As the Africans became African-Americans over a four hundred year period, they developed a special language that had to be transparent, childlike, and seemingly harmless to the captors and still be able to communicate as adults in captivity to each other. The language that evolved, African-American English, is very different from standard English in sense that it is always changing; constantly recycling standard English into completely new phrases that expressed hidden meanings that were understood by the African Americans but appeared to be harmless childish gibberish to the European Americans. This has become the primary characteristic of the language.
No other language in the world changes as fast as African American English. As soon as the EuroAmericans start using a term or phrase from AfroAmerican, it goes out of fashion in AfroAmerican communities.
While this language is excellent for maintaining cultural identity and spirit in the face of long-term enslavement and systematic cultural disintegration, its hyper-fluid nature makes it not good for science and middle-class stability.
As the African-American people move out of the era of enslavement and cultural isolation and into the American middle class, Eubonics will probably pass also. It was a powerful and useful tool, and it served its purpose well. Jive talkin' deserves to be taken seriously as a linguistic discipline.
...maybe a central DB of all the songs that you have legally purchased and the ability to get them from there at any time, anywhere, in any format, for any reason...
This central global music database already exists, it's called Kazaa.
I respectfully disagee with the idea that the format with the strongest DRM will be the most widely used in the future. I believe that the MP3 revolution has created an entire new way of thinking about recordings, copyright, and who owns music. MP3 caused the control of music recordings to shift from the corporate producers of the recordings to the consumers who listen to them. It will never shift back because corporate control depended upon having the music tied totally to the distribution media (the disk). Once digital technology seperated the content from the medium, it changed the financial equation for the entire music industry. The record companies remind me of the makers of typewriter ribbons, who really, really wish that all these word-processing computers would 'just...fucking...go...away!' In the long run, adding bulletproof DRM to a recording will only guarantee that the recording will only reach a tiny percentage of its possible audience. Just because the global music corporations are so big now doesn't mean that they can halt or turn back the MP3 revolution.
In the future the format that provides the easiest,fastest, and most reliable way to copy whole libraries of thousands of albums at one time will be the most widely used format, regardless of any copyright law.
My linguistics professor in college mentioned this characteristic about English.
French and German don't have this ability. These are the languages that I have studied on your list. Swedish seems to be similar to German. I would have no idea about Finnish, which is different from the common European legacy languages.
I suspect that it is true that English is the only major language that allows words to 'morph' between nouns, verbs, and adjectives according to their position in the sentence. It makes the language flexible enough to be widely used. But it will also make impossible to understand over time. English is the vacuum cleaner of languages. It inhales words by the hundreds from other languages.
I don't think that people who will be speaking English in 200 years from now will be able to understand the dialog in Hollywood movies that are made today. The language will have changed too much by that time. I suspect that most of the common words will be the same, but the sentence structure and phrases will have changed enough to make the old movies difficult if not impossible to understand. I don't think that this kind of fast language change will happen to Finnish, because it is a language that is only used by people in Finland.
The real question today is whether the languages will change more through natural human interaction or by the technical limitations of digital speech translators. These are computers that are fast, powerful, and small enough to do real-time language processing. They don't exist yet, but they probably will within twenty years.
We do offshore the results of the failed and stupid education system.
Those who can't hack the bullshit of school are given the choice of WalMart, prison, or the military. If (and when) they chose the military, they are shipped off to distant lands where their deaths will bring the most profit and least cost to the corporations that own them (by proxy).
This is the offshoring of the American education system.
English is the only language in the world that allows any word to be any part-of-speach by changing it position in the sentence word order. In no other language could the word 'offshore' be used unchanged as a verb, noun, adjective in the same paragraph and make any sense. Part of the reason that America has such a flexible and adaptive culture is because it has such a flexible and adaptive language.
Before we berate ourselves for not being good at math, we should ask "Why do we need to learn math?".
Ask a thousand people if they remember studying algebra in school. Almost everyone says yes. Ask if anyone has ever used algebra even once since leaving school. Maybe one in a thousand will say yes.
The real problem is not that people are not good at math. The real problem is that the people entrusted to run the schools are obsessed by judging their success by having people master a subject that they will NEVER need or use.
Algebra is an arbitrary discipline. It could just as easily be some other useless topic mastered for no real reason except for the shared assumption among educators that this is an important subject that must be learned.
When I grew up in Massachusetts this type of subject was Latin language. I refused to study it and was held back a grade until my parents were able to pull some strings and have me placed in a French language class. (another absurd subject like Latin and algebra, as it turned out).
Eventually even educators have an collective "Emperor's New Clothes" moment and stop investing prestige in absurd subjects. Algebra is most likely the next on that list.
This would be a good place to remind all you good clean young suburban Americans yearning for the stars that your country is bankrupt, trillions of dollars in debt to foreign banks, and increasingly hated by billions of people throughout the world because you're unwilling to deal with actual world problems, preferring instead to spend billions of dollars of other people's money on outer space fantasies best left to Hollywood.
Don't worry or concern yourself too much. This is just a standard reality check notice that I add to all Slashdot subjects about the necessity of wasting more and more money on space exploration. You can just ignore it and go back to your space fantasy now.
Don't worry or concern yourself too much. This is just a standard reality check notice that I add to all Slashdot subjects about the necessity of wasting more and more money on space exploration. You can just ignore it and go back to your space fantasy now.
But there's a big problem with the concept of legalizing even such specific vigilante acts. Where does the line in the sand get drawn?
Thank you for your interesting comment.
The spam problem has been inadvertently created by the internet designers and should be addressed and eventually solved by the web designers. This is not an area where legislators need concern themselves. They don't have to pass laws about everything. After all, that would only perpetuate the illusion that technical problems can be solved by passing laws.
In the long run, the spammers will only win if they can convince the smartest web programmers to concentrate their efforts on the enrichment of the spammers. They could only do this by giving the best web programmers insane amounts of money. But spammers are too greedy themselves to do this. So they will eventually be driven off the web. Why they should be driven off is because they consume too much bandwidth for whatever service they provide to people who use the web. How they will be eventually be driven off is the question of the hour.
But it is the technical community, the open source geeks, that will eventually get rid of them. Since getting rid of the spammers is in the global public interest, we should give the people who are devising experiments to drive out the spammers the benefit of the doubt.
Getting rid of assholes is not the first step down any slippery slope.
Jeez, I sound like an economist playing with a cliche-generation program.
This copper 'bullet' is intended to strike the comet at approximately 23,000 mph and hit with a force equivalent to 4.7 tons of TNT. Scientists hope to discover what exactly the comet is made of and what changes have occurred to the outer layers with reference to the core."
You Americans always find it so easy to forget with your amazing (and amazingly expensive) projects and stunts that your country is broke, trillions of dollars in debt, and living primarily on the welfare of international bankers (primarily Asian).
Wake up and take a sober and realistic accounting of your new relative position in the world. And leave the expensive and worthless stunts to Hollywood.
These things have the potential of being extremely dangerous. Unknown viruses that have become harmless to the animal may be lethal to humans. In a chimera, the virus may mutate to be able to pass from one human to another, even through airborn contact.
This is the greatest nightmare of the Centers for Disease Control. They strongly discourage experimentation and research involving chimeras, even (and especially) research using animal organs for human transplant.
This is not a joke, or poorly written science fiction.