It costs a huge amount to send a human onto another planet, so we can and do use robots.
Many people miss the point in the humans vs. robots in space debate. The underlining point is that there is no sense in spending tons of money to put anything on other planets. We have other more urgent priorities here. Interplanetary exploration is, deserves to be, and will remain science fiction for another 200-300 years. The initial space explorations of the 1960s were a historical fluke that is unlikely to be repeated or expanded for a LONG time to come.
I hardly think anyone predicting global environmental catastrophies in forty years should be making potshots at others for making broad predictions based on a little data and a lot of guesswork.
The environmental catastrophies of the 2050-2100 era are not based on little data and lots of guesswork. They are based on real science, proven and repeatable. The spin that this is all guesswork and junk-science is generated by people who much to lose if the steps necessary to minimize the effects are begun now. It won't change the fact that these events will happen.
Why spend billions to create synthetic robotic psuedo lifeforms when the actual humans themselves are so absurdly cheap Because if you send them to another planet they'll either explode (no atmosphere) or disolve (corrosive atmosphere).
Nobody's going to be sending anybody to other planets (outside of few stunts like the moon landings of the 1970s).
The only countries that have the technology and government structures to do anything even remotely like that are the USA, Russia, and China. Russia's broke, China's poor, and the USA's racking up huge unpayable deficits in order to pursue hopeless military adventures. All three will see their economies decline at the same time that global environmental catastrophies begin to happen in the mid-21st century.
This 'colonies of humans in space' stuff is just science fiction from the mid 20th century. Hollywood stuff. Slashdotters are the last people in the world that still take it seriously.
So how come when I type a Slashdot message in Word in order to use the spell checker and then paste it to Slashdot, the quote marks become question marks?
Why is are there such stupid and embarassing bugs in the simple ASCII section of program that that gone through many releases, used by millions of people, and released by a software company that spends billions on Research & Development?
What the fuck is wrong with Microsoft?
This stuff makes me look stupid to the Slashdot readers.
What the fuck is wrong with Intel?
I tried to send a resume to their website. I tried three different browsers. I attempted to make it work for a half an hour, just to try to upload a simple resume. I received a quarter of a million bytes from their fucked up website during the period that I tried to do something as simple as send them a resume.
Intel used to be the most important company in the world. Now they can't even get resumes from the people that even still want to work for them. No wonder their stock price fell 50% in the past three months! What the fuck is wrong with these people???
There will be a long period of transition in the music industry where they will go from being the distributors of music on disk to being the people that filter all the crap music being released by amateurs.
Today being a filter of bad music is a small part of the what the music companies do. But it will grow into being their most important function in the future. The future music corporations will be responsible for ensuring that musicians find their audience, globally. This is where they will make most of their money tomorrow, not ?owning product?. Copyright becomes meaningless in an era of near-infinite, near-perfect copies simply because it can?t be enforced.
I say we start a movement against the purchasing of music from any label associated with the RIAA. Yeah, knock yourself out. Let us know how it goes, will you?
It's going very well, thank you. We have millions of people freely getting music from KaZaa and other file sharing networks. All without anyone purchasing any music, RIAA affiliate or not. Today much the most popular music of the Western world from the past 30 years is available freely from the file sharing networks. In the future, the music recordings from the rest of the world will be too.
This is a global movement that is one of the first of its kind in history: millions of people freely sharing the music that is the most important to them.
The fact that much of the music that is being shared came to the people through the for-profit music recording distribution corporations of the last century is irrelevant. The fact that it is now being widely and freely shared by millions is what's NOW important. not not important
I say we start a movement against the purchasing of music from any label associated with the RIAA. Yeah, knock yourself out. Let us know how it goes, will you?
It's going very well, thank you. We have millions of people freely getting music from KaZaa and other file sharing networks. All without anyone purchasing any music, RIAA affiliate or not. Today much the most popular music of the Western world from the past 30 years is available freely from the file sharing networks. In the future, the music recordings from the rest of the world will be too.
This is a global movement that is one of the first of its kind in history: millions of people freely sharing the music that is the most important to them.
The fact that much of the music that is being shared came to the people through the for-profit music recording distribution corporations of the last century is irrelavent. The fact that it is now being widely and freely shared by millions is what's not important.
There's way too much work on insect-level locomotion.
First spend tens of million studying insect motion. Then spend hundreds of millions researching motion of higher lifeforms. Then billions to develop a factory manufacturing system to make copies of moving animals.
Why?
Every year we generate many millions of the most perfect and adaptive biological being the world have ever seen... babies...humans. Yet most of them get nothing but shit and are doomed to live on a dollar a day for their entire lives.
Why spend billions to create synthetic robotic psuedo lifeforms when the actual humans themselves are so absurdly cheap, Cost next to nothing, and are self-replicating? Give 'em burgers, Allah, and heroin; they'll do whatever you need...you don't need to spend billions creating robots. Not today, not in the 21st century, not on earth.
Using microcontrollers, relays, and fuel cells to control the allocation and distribution of raw electrical power has a great future.
I will become one of the fastest, if not the fastest, growing areas of electronics within 5 to 10 years.
So all you electronic technicians out there...be sure to keep up with lastest developments when you come home from your jobs at the Burger King. I realize that you're all trying to learn Spanish as fast as you can in order to advance to fry cook, but don't slack on power electronics.
Things will get better, honestly....hang in there.
But by removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, such a device would cause more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
I believe that the statement above assumes that conflict is often minimized because the sides don't understand the verbal provocations from the other side. If you don't understand the 'fighting words' then it's not fighting words, it's just gibberish.
A universal communicator would force people to put a lot more emphasis on analysing the words spoken before taking action. Plus most wars are fought for economic or population reasons; the insults are just triggers. In theory, universal language translators would increase financial interaction, which should work to decrease warfare.
The current war between Islam and the USA is founded on the two facts that the USA needs the Islamic oil more than anything, and two, the population of Islam is growing four times faster than the economies of Islam. Millions of Islamic young people enter the work force each year with no prospects ever for gainful employment. It's easy for the mullahs to convince them that the USA is responsible for the situation, and that by killing Americans will improve the situation. Americans spend billions of dollars keeping backward corrupt Islamic regimes in place militarily.
The Islamic war will end when the Americans develop a new low-cost energy source that doesn't consume large amounts of Islamic oil, and when Islam controls their population growth and reforms their economies. The only people who are doing anything in these directions are the Iranians, who have a massive and successful birth-control program in place, and the Malaysians, who are the only people in Islam to restructure their economy to modern times.
Lots of things can cause mushroom clouds. It may even be the case that NK is blowing up something...
Agreed. Most likely this is a huge ammunition and munitions storage dump exploding as the result of an attempt to relocate it given the typical level of North Korean paranoia and unpredictability.
Why are we hearing about this today? Any large explosion can be detected through vibrations.
The nuclear powers of the area are undoubtedly monitoring the North Koreans as closely as possible for nuclear activity. Unannounced nuclear events are very sensitive because they can very quickly lead to an unbalance of the present truce between the nuclear powers. Any change in the global nuclear status can lead to runaway positive feedback loop which still could result in an nuclear exchange if not controlled. The scenarios portrayed in the films The Sum of All Fears and Crimson Tide are examples of this, although they were perhaps a little overplayed for purposes of making a good entertainment.
It's hard to understand exactly why the North Koreans are announcing to world that they are completing development of a nuclear device. Generally countries that do this try to keep the knowledge of research as secret as possible, and will avoid confirming possession of such devices at all costs. If you admit that you have a nuclear device, then you are responsible for whatever happens to it.
Say there are three countries near to each other, countries A, B, and C. Neither of them likes the other and each of them has a history of seriously bad behavior to each of the other. Suppose country B has developed a nuclear device in total secret and country A announces to the world that it is ready to test a device that they have just developed. If country B were to trigger its secret nuclear device in country C, then country A would get the blame for it. Countries C and A would have a big war to the benefit of country B alone, who remained neutral and undamaged.
This is one example of a scenario that can get seriously complicated very quickly. Since the stated goal of all countries is to NOT have anyone use these devices in any conflict, no one wants to have small regional conflicts promote a runaway nuclear escalation.
If this was a nuclear detonation today in North Korea (which I doubt), all the countries in the area would sort out amongst themselves the situation before confirming that it was a nuclear event in the global news media.
In today's climate, any small country that deliberately precipitates an unannounced nuclear event runs the serious risk of losing its sovereignty. In other words, it would be invaded by everyone else in the world and its government disbanded in the interest of preserving the present nuclear truce and balance.
The Internet needs to change, yes. The people who have the technological understanding of how the Internet works need to make a systematic and concerted effort to CRUSH the spammers. The spammers are a cancer that is destroying the web by absorbing all of its bandwidth. Even if that were not so due to some massive increase in capacity, they still need to be crushed because they are polluting the web environment with unwanted commercial messages.
In other media, advertisments are tolerated because they pay the cost of the development of the content and the fixed cost of delivering the content to the audience (primarily the TV and radio broadcasting costs, and magazine paper and distribution costs). That is not so with the Internet. They are getting the medium for free and filling it with content specifically oriented to their private financial gain.
Governments and laws can not and will not stop them due the transnational nature of the medium. It is up to the technological community to stop them, even if the spammers have manipulated the legal structure to make attempts to stop them illegal.
It is up to the technological community that created the web to set enforced guidelines for its use. No one else has the ability to do it.
Most new computers these days do have front USB ports
When one gets a new computer, the old one gets passed down to someone else.
This is the main way that PC technology gets propagated through society, especially to groups that don't get new PCs through their work.
So all this 'old' technology, subject of so many stupid 'death of' articles, is actually new to people who don't have the money to buy new computers every 18-month Moore's cycle. Everyone in the tech community is excited that the PCs are spreading throughout segments of society who have never experienced the joys of interactive machines before, then they insult this new group with articles that the PC technology that is new to them is 'obsolete' and 'dead'.
So what happens when all the people who are using these old PCs (that are several generations prior to current) store all their valuable work on the floppy technology that is available to them and find that a few years later they can't retrieve it? Will they get hit with a huge bill to retrieve their data from 'obsolete' media formats?
Basically we're telling people who are new to computers, 'hey, here is all this great free computer stuff that works fine but is just not brand new. Check it out. Then when you fill all the storage media with your important data such as letters, journals, and photos, we'll charge you a ton of money to get it off of the media that we gave to you for free (because we made it obsolete).'
Everyone will just start to think of the tech community as just a gaggle of cheap sleezy hustlers.
Behind this scenario is the reality that millions of floppy disks are being used by small and medium-sized companies for long-term corporate storage of business records of the years 1985 to 2000. People are just assuming that someone else is transfering and maintaining these records but that is often not true in smaller businesses. Without floppy drives, these records will disappear because they can't be read.
The tech community must wake up to the realization that any new storage medium that can't read the data from a previous storage medium is not an advance, but a step backward.
A music recording price shouldn't be measured in dollars which are constantly decreasing in value. A better measurement is 'minimum wage units'; that is, the number of hours a person would have to work at the minimum wage rate (in the year in question) to buy a certain product.
In the mid 1960s, a recording of a hit pop song (in 45RPM single vinyl format - the 7-inch disk with the big hole) would cost $0.79 in Walmart-like discount stores. The minimum wage of the period was about $1.20/hr. The cost of a song was roughly 0.7 MWU. An album of usually two or three hit songs and eight filler songs would cost $2.60 for the mono version and $3.60 for the stereo. Let's say 2.5 MWU for convenience.
Today the Federal minimum wage in the USA is $5.15, but many states push it to $6. Let's use $6. A single hit recording of today in disk format would cost $4.20 in mid-1960s prices using MWU units and an album (in portable disk format) would cost $15 today at 60s prices in MWU units.
P2P downloaders have forced the price of a single song down in real terms but at the cost to the consumer of not having the content on a physical portable disk. The price of albums has remained roughly constant in MWU terms in the past 40 years.
It shouldn't cost 90% of my $17 to edit the tracks, produce the album art, make the product, and advertise it.
I certainly doesn't cost that much. Half or so of the $17 goes to the retailer. A few dollars of the remaining $10 goes to the wholesale distributor. A dollar or so remaining goes to the 'artist' in theory, but in reality record contracts are written so that almost all of the money that would go to the 'artist' goes to record company support companies or individuals. These are the CD pressers, the insert printers, the recording studios, and the record producers. All the money for these people comes out of the 'artist's' royalities.
As a consequence, these support people have no reason not to charge insane amounts of money for their 'necessary services'. Books old and new on the recording industry from a band's perspective document vast amounts of the 'artist's' advance money be wasted by these people. Both the books "Star Maker Machinery" and the recent "So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star" describe how a record producer forced on the group by the record company at many hundreds of dollars per hour would spend days adjusting the snaps on a snare drum to get the 'perfect' sound - burning up thousands of dollars of the band's studio budget. These are the people who are responsible for the absurd cost of RIAA product, not the MP3 downloaders.
In fact, by altering the financial framework of the music industry, the P2P downloaders are actually revitalizing the music industry by forcing them to cut out all fat and waste that that has built up in the product generation process since the beginning of the pop music album era in the 1960s.
Phew, so the artists aren't really starving, but we still can't all go back to "borrowing" music from our friends instead of each purchasing our own copy. (original post)
No, we should start purchasing our own copy from our friends instead of the RIAA. That way our friends will remain our friends and we won't be giving our money to monopoly cartels who will be using it to extort us and to put us and our friends in prison for the crime of listening to music.
There does come a point in every middle-class person's life where they have to put aside the illusion that they are Star Fleet officers for a minute and start thinking and acting like Ferengee in order to ensure the survival of themselves, their friends, their dreams, and their culture.
This is not really such a good idea..
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The biggest fear of the developed world is that someone will explode a 'dirty bomb' in one of their cities.
These are bombs that disperse radioactive material into the local environment. This material makes the area unfit for habitation because the radioactive material will cause cancer and have other bad long-term health effects. The cost of cleaning up the area (even if that were possible) would be so prohibitively expensive that the location when the bomb is exploded is abandoned and quarantined.
Now someone comes up with the idea that shipping a bunch of ten-meter-high boxes filled with dangerous (to health) nuclear material just to generate electricity would be a good idea.
This is an excellent example of engineers coming up with a solution that would work well in the lab or in 'a perfect world' (or outer space) but would be completely insane to actually implement in the real-world that is filled with fanatics and crazies.
I have seen friends of mine bring in entire stacks of recordable CDs containing ripped movies they downloaded from the net. By "stack" I don't mean 3 or 4 but more like 100. They chat about it and trade them openly - there is no guilt there, while they know it's illegal they just don't care. It's easy to be amoral when everybody else is.
In the old business model, the public gave the MPAA companies money and watched the product in an MPAA-controlled environment, a movie theatre.
In the new business model, the public distributes the product themselves and gives the MPAA their focused attention span instead of money as pay-per-view.
It isn't the public's fault that the MPAA companies haven't figured out how to make money off the new business model. Perhaps the MPAA companies (the film studios) should consider more advanced product placement techniques. Or consider making the product placement an integral part of the plot of the film. Or,...something.
The MPAA has the most important element for making money in the new media age: the focused and undivided attention of a mass audience. If they lose this, then they will find it quite difficult and expensive to get it back when they actually do figure out how to make money off their ability to deliver the undivided attention of a mass audience to an advertiser client.
The worst thing that could happen to the MPAA companies is the one thing that they are demanding: payment for each and every viewing of their product. People will use this new digital technology to develop far more advanced interactive cinema/video game hybrids that are more exciting than passively-viewed 20th-century movies. And do it far cheaper than the film studios can.
The MPAA doesn't quite understand the digital age and its termendous growth potential in new media formats. New media formats that are distributed and modified by the consumers themselves, using P2P and disk image copying.
I keep all 'my' CDs at the public library where they can be physically shared with anyone with a library card.
I keep my backups of 'my' CDs at home in MP3 files on the hard disk. It is wise to keep backups at a different location from the originals.
If the public library loses the CD that they have purchased with my tax money, then I will be happy to make them a replacement copy from my home backup. That's what libraries are all about.
Well, you could always play a ringtone on an old phone and record that.
That's an interesting idea. But what do you mean by 'old phone'. Would it be the 1960's-style rotary dial phone (Ma Bell standard) or an even earlier 1920's-style microwave-oven-sized wooden box. The kind with the earpiece on a thick black wire.
And where would you get a recording of one of these phones ringing tones? The physical phones aren't around anymore. Maybe taking a sound sample from the sound tracks of movies from the desired period.
Personally, I hate ring tones. Vicious little piezos blasting synthetic Bach for looooong times in inappropriate places. The only decent ring tone would only be one second long at most and consist of a precise musical phrase of three or four notes that would let the owner know a call was waiting but not bother all the other people around that don't want to know about it. I may be old, but I find that having ordinary normal-like people suddenly pick up a screaching little plastic box, hold it to their ear, go into totally spaced out mode with their eyes unfocused and staring into space, and spend minutes talking to themselves speaking disconnected nonsense, then clicking the little plastic box shut and rejoining the group while acting like nothing unusual happened...well I find this to be extraordinarily weird. On the same level of weirdness as any of the behavior of the burned-out acid head hippies in the 1970's.
Maybe it's just me....
When a serial killer is caught, they should be incarcerated and every attempt should be made, in good faith, to help them deal with what's inside of them.
I believe that people who feel an overwhelming urge to murder without any specific reason why should in all good faith submit themselves to this process before they start murdering people. After they've been caught for having murdered people, they should be punished rather than cured. It probably too late by then.
If human life were rare, difficult to create, and reliably redeemable and each person endowed with a unique talent, then, yes, it would be best to put a lot of resources into behavior modification and rehabilation.
But, uh, human life is rather common and cheap these days. The world's population is exploding and that means that there's a lot of surplus people around. So perhaps it's best just to execute the serial killers rather than spend too much time trying to understand why they do what they do. They aren't going to be missed and there's a lot of people who aren't serial killers around to take their place.
There are religious objections to this point of view, of course. But the religious laws were formulated thousands of years ago when there weren't many people around,it wasn't easy to bring infants into adults, people died mysteriously (from disease and accident), and no one lived very long anyway (average life span about 3000 years ago was about 35-40 years).
Things are different now. Just the opposite in fact. People can just reproduce like bunnies now and expect that with nutrition and medical advances all their children will grow to maturity and live to be 80. It's time to completely rethink the religious laws and customs and toss out the ones that are stupid and crazy in the modern age.
The Western Christian countries do this quite a lot. Many Europeans, especially in the North, have even tossed out the church itself as unnecessary and backward.
The Islamic world changes very little. The religion celebrates murdering anyone who tries to change the religion to adapt to current world realities. The belief is that the world must change to meet the God's plan, not the other way around. But since men invented gods (and God) so that they could explain how the world works and impose an accepted means of social control over people that stay in effect even when the police and solders weren't around, religion has to change to meet real world conditions that are constantly changing.
Basically the entire Iraqi war is an attempt on the part of the Christian fundamentalists who are now running the USA to force the Muslems to change and adapt to the new conditions in the world that technology has created in the past century. They are doing this primarily for two reasons. One, because the Muslems live on top of the largest reserves of the precious resource in the modern age, the oil. And two, because the Moslems have declared war on the Western modern society and fight this war on the West through focused acts of random mass murder in the West.
For the Americans to win this war against Islam (this 'crusade' is the right word, although political incorrect at the moment) they need to convince the Moslems that they can live better and be closer to Allah by adopting modern technology and abandoning mass murder of non-Moslems. The Americans have to convince the Moslems to modernize their religion. Failing that, they have to kill enough Moslems that the ones remaining alive will be convinced that it is in the best interest for the survival of their way of life and religion to stop murdering Westerners and surrender control of the oil reserves.
Neither of these are likely to happen, so the war will just continue as has for the past year indefinitely or for another ten years until the Americans run out of money or something else happens in another part of the world that is more important.
The only way that Moslems
Since you liked BR, I suggest Chinatown1973 if you haven't already seen it. It's not futuristic, but it does have the same errie feeling to it that BR does
Actually Blade Runner didn't seem all that special. It was a 1940's detective story with a few 22nd century visuals. It is Humphrey Bogart film set in the future with Harrison Ford as Bogart. Rutger Hauer and Daryhl Hannah looked great in the film, the best-looking film for either of them.
My favorite scene is Harrison Ford talking to the computer to examine in great detail the random digital photograph for clues. Each time I consider buying a digital camera, I wonder if it can get a level of detail described in that scene.
The greatest science-fiction film ever is La Jetee (1964) by French director Chris Marker. This was the inspiration for 12 Monkeys, but it is a much better film. It's quite short at 29 minutes, but still leaves people in deep cinema shock whenever it gets shown in festivals or on campus. It's widely available in video and may be at your local library for checkout. It's a collage of black and white photos zoomed and panned like Ken Burn's documentaries with narration and music. French with English subtitles. It was written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when the Americans and Soviets came far too close to nuclear war than anyone wants to talk about.
2001 was OK, but extremely slow. It does hold up after 35 years only if you have a lot of patience and are not expecting a Star Wars type of movie.
Science Fiction is always better in books than it is in film. It's a genre that needs one's individual imagination projecting imagery from written text.
The only problem with this approach is hard drive space - it starts to get expensive after a few rounds of trading.
Try getting one of those $80 8X DVD writers from PriceWatch or other places.
Many places like Fry's on the west coast have sales on spindles of DVD blanks with each DVD disk selling for fifty cents or so. Each blank DVD holds 4.7 Gig or 7 CDRs worth of music; roughly about 80 albums in highest-quality variable-rate MP3 format.
DVDs can be oriented to certain genres of music, say all of 70's classic Rock on one DVD, the best 80 heavy metal albums on another, or the best 80 orchestral classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) on another. Then trade by hand or mail genre DVDs. Or offload onto DVDs the stuff on the hard disk that takes lots of space but doesn't get played much.
I'm into collections also. It's far more advanced than downloading. If you live in a large city, don't forget to use the local library to fill any holes in your collections. Don't slack on indexing and cataloging the collections with spreadsheets like Excel or Access also. Perhaps in the future people will use P2P primarily to trade the listing files of their collections and then use parcel post or UPS to trade the actual collection itself on media like hard disk.
I clearly, openly, and honestly maintain that since the RIAA (and Disney) stole the public domain by indefinitely extending the copyright period, any and all downloading, copying, and sharing of anything, anywhere is morally and ethically justified. By using overwhelming financial resources to destroy the legal balance between copyright and public domain, they have abrograted their legal 'right' to own anything. Their claim to legal ownership is meaningless given their felonious actions. Any act that they do against us is a crime: extorting money from us and stealing our property.
They are the ones who have destroyed the copyright laws, not us. We are only protecting the public domain for future generations. It is right and proper that we do so.
You've got to be joking. A grammar checker? Anyone else here just dying for a grammar checker?
Actually the hundreds of millions of people who use Word and are not native English speakers and have not fully mastered the hundreds of weird little intricacies of the English language find the Grammer checker quite useful.
Slashdot Mirror
It costs a huge amount to send a human onto another planet, so we can and do use robots.
Many people miss the point in the humans vs. robots in space debate. The underlining point is that there is no sense in spending tons of money to put anything on other planets. We have other more urgent priorities here. Interplanetary exploration is, deserves to be, and will remain science fiction for another 200-300 years. The initial space explorations of the 1960s were a historical fluke that is unlikely to be repeated or expanded for a LONG time to come.
I hardly think anyone predicting global environmental catastrophies in forty years should be making potshots at others for making broad predictions based on a little data and a lot of guesswork.
The environmental catastrophies of the 2050-2100 era are not based on little data and lots of guesswork. They are based on real science, proven and repeatable. The spin that this is all guesswork and junk-science is generated by people who much to lose if the steps necessary to minimize the effects are begun now. It won't change the fact that these events will happen.
Why spend billions to create synthetic robotic psuedo lifeforms when the actual humans themselves are so absurdly cheap
Because if you send them to another planet they'll either explode (no atmosphere) or disolve (corrosive atmosphere).
Nobody's going to be sending anybody to other planets (outside of few stunts like the moon landings of the 1970s).
The only countries that have the technology and government structures to do anything even remotely like that are the USA, Russia, and China. Russia's broke, China's poor, and the USA's racking up huge unpayable deficits in order to pursue hopeless military adventures. All three will see their economies decline at the same time that global environmental catastrophies begin to happen in the mid-21st century.
This 'colonies of humans in space' stuff is just science fiction from the mid 20th century. Hollywood stuff. Slashdotters are the last people in the world that still take it seriously.
So how come when I type a Slashdot message in Word in order to use the spell checker and then paste it to Slashdot, the quote marks become question marks?
Why is are there such stupid and embarassing bugs in the simple ASCII section of program that that gone through many releases, used by millions of people, and released by a software company that spends billions on Research & Development?
What the fuck is wrong with Microsoft?
This stuff makes me look stupid to the Slashdot readers.
What the fuck is wrong with Intel?
I tried to send a resume to their website. I tried three different browsers. I attempted to make it work for a half an hour, just to try to upload a simple resume. I received a quarter of a million bytes from their fucked up website during the period that I tried to do something as simple as send them a resume.
Intel used to be the most important company in the world. Now they can't even get resumes from the people that even still want to work for them.
No wonder their stock price fell 50% in the past three months! What the fuck is wrong with these people???
There will be a long period of transition in the music industry where they will go from being the distributors of music on disk to being the people that filter all the crap music being released by amateurs.
Today being a filter of bad music is a small part of the what the music companies do. But it will grow into being their most important function in the future. The future music corporations will be responsible for ensuring that musicians find their audience, globally. This is where they will make most of their money tomorrow, not ?owning product?. Copyright becomes meaningless in an era of near-infinite, near-perfect copies simply because it can?t be enforced.
I say we start a movement against the purchasing of music from any label associated with the RIAA.
Yeah, knock yourself out. Let us know how it goes, will you?
It's going very well, thank you. We have millions of people freely getting music from KaZaa and other file sharing networks. All without anyone purchasing any music, RIAA affiliate or not. Today much the most popular music of the Western world from the past 30 years is available freely from the file sharing networks. In the future, the music recordings from the rest of the world will be too.
This is a global movement that is one of the first of its kind in history: millions of people freely sharing the music that is the most important to them.
The fact that much of the music that is being shared came to the people through the for-profit music recording distribution corporations of the last century is irrelevant. The fact that it is now being widely and freely shared by millions is what's NOW important. not not important
I say we start a movement against the purchasing of music from any label associated with the RIAA.
Yeah, knock yourself out. Let us know how it goes, will you?
It's going very well, thank you. We have millions of people freely getting music from KaZaa and other file sharing networks. All without anyone purchasing any music, RIAA affiliate or not. Today much the most popular music of the Western world from the past 30 years is available freely from the file sharing networks. In the future, the music recordings from the rest of the world will be too.
This is a global movement that is one of the first of its kind in history: millions of people freely sharing the music that is the most important to them.
The fact that much of the music that is being shared came to the people through the for-profit music recording distribution corporations of the last century is irrelavent. The fact that it is now being widely and freely shared by millions is what's not important.
There's way too much work on insect-level locomotion.
First spend tens of million studying insect motion. Then spend hundreds of millions researching motion of higher lifeforms. Then billions to develop a factory manufacturing system to make copies of moving animals.
Why?
Every year we generate many millions of the most perfect and adaptive biological being the world have ever seen... babies...humans. Yet most of them get nothing but shit and are doomed to live on a dollar a day for their entire lives.
Why spend billions to create synthetic robotic psuedo lifeforms when the actual humans themselves are so absurdly cheap, Cost next to nothing, and are self-replicating? Give 'em burgers, Allah, and heroin; they'll do whatever you need...you don't need to spend billions creating robots. Not today, not in the 21st century, not on earth.
Using microcontrollers, relays, and fuel cells to control the allocation and distribution of raw electrical power has a great future.
I will become one of the fastest, if not the fastest, growing areas of electronics within 5 to 10 years.
So all you electronic technicians out there...be sure to keep up with lastest developments when you come home from your jobs at the Burger King. I realize that you're all trying to learn Spanish as fast as you can in order to advance to fry cook, but don't slack on power electronics.
Things will get better, honestly....hang in there.
But by removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, such a device would cause more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
I believe that the statement above assumes that conflict is often minimized because the sides don't understand the verbal provocations from the other side. If you don't understand the 'fighting words' then it's not fighting words, it's just gibberish.
A universal communicator would force people to put a lot more emphasis on analysing the words spoken before taking action. Plus most wars are fought for economic or population reasons; the insults are just triggers. In theory, universal language translators would increase financial interaction, which should work to decrease warfare.
The current war between Islam and the USA is founded on the two facts that the USA needs the Islamic oil more than anything, and two, the population of Islam is growing four times faster than the economies of Islam. Millions of Islamic young people enter the work force each year with no prospects ever for gainful employment. It's easy for the mullahs to convince them that the USA is responsible for the situation, and that by killing Americans will improve the situation. Americans spend billions of dollars keeping backward corrupt Islamic regimes in place militarily.
The Islamic war will end when the Americans develop a new low-cost energy source that doesn't consume large amounts of Islamic oil, and when Islam controls their population growth and reforms their economies. The only people who are doing anything in these directions are the Iranians, who have a massive and successful birth-control program in place, and the Malaysians, who are the only people in Islam to restructure their economy to modern times.
Lots of things can cause mushroom clouds. It may even be the case that NK is blowing up something...
Agreed. Most likely this is a huge ammunition and munitions storage dump exploding as the result of an attempt to relocate it given the typical level of North Korean paranoia and unpredictability.
Why are we hearing about this today? Any large explosion can be detected through vibrations.
The nuclear powers of the area are undoubtedly monitoring the North Koreans as closely as possible for nuclear activity. Unannounced nuclear events are very sensitive because they can very quickly lead to an unbalance of the present truce between the nuclear powers. Any change in the global nuclear status can lead to runaway positive feedback loop which still could result in an nuclear exchange if not controlled. The scenarios portrayed in the films The Sum of All Fears and Crimson Tide are examples of this, although they were perhaps a little overplayed for purposes of making a good entertainment.
It's hard to understand exactly why the North Koreans are announcing to world that they are completing development of a nuclear device. Generally countries that do this try to keep the knowledge of research as secret as possible, and will avoid confirming possession of such devices at all costs. If you admit that you have a nuclear device, then you are responsible for whatever happens to it.
Say there are three countries near to each other, countries A, B, and C. Neither of them likes the other and each of them has a history of seriously bad behavior to each of the other. Suppose country B has developed a nuclear device in total secret and country A announces to the world that it is ready to test a device that they have just developed. If country B were to trigger its secret nuclear device in country C, then country A would get the blame for it. Countries C and A would have a big war to the benefit of country B alone, who remained neutral and undamaged.
This is one example of a scenario that can get seriously complicated very quickly. Since the stated goal of all countries is to NOT have anyone use these devices in any conflict, no one wants to have small regional conflicts promote a runaway nuclear escalation.
If this was a nuclear detonation today in North Korea (which I doubt), all the countries in the area would sort out amongst themselves the situation before confirming that it was a nuclear event in the global news media.
In today's climate, any small country that deliberately precipitates an unannounced nuclear event runs the serious risk of losing its sovereignty. In other words, it would be invaded by everyone else in the world and its government disbanded in the interest of preserving the present nuclear truce and balance.
The Internet needs to change, yes. The people who have the technological understanding of how the Internet works need to make a systematic and concerted effort to CRUSH the spammers. The spammers are a cancer that is destroying the web by absorbing all of its bandwidth. Even if that were not so due to some massive increase in capacity, they still need to be crushed because they are polluting the web environment with unwanted commercial messages.
In other media, advertisments are tolerated because they pay the cost of the development of the content and the fixed cost of delivering the content to the audience (primarily the TV and radio broadcasting costs, and magazine paper and distribution costs). That is not so with the Internet. They are getting the medium for free and filling it with content specifically oriented to their private financial gain.
Governments and laws can not and will not stop them due the transnational nature of the medium. It is up to the technological community to stop them, even if the spammers have manipulated the legal structure to make attempts to stop them illegal.
It is up to the technological community that created the web to set enforced guidelines for its use. No one else has the ability to do it.
Most new computers these days do have front USB ports
When one gets a new computer, the old one gets passed down to someone else.
This is the main way that PC technology gets propagated through society, especially to groups that don't get new PCs through their work.
So all this 'old' technology, subject of so many stupid 'death of' articles, is actually new to people who don't have the money to buy new computers every 18-month Moore's cycle. Everyone in the tech community is excited that the PCs are spreading throughout segments of society who have never experienced the joys of interactive machines before, then they insult this new group with articles that the PC technology that is new to them is 'obsolete' and 'dead'.
So what happens when all the people who are using these old PCs (that are several generations prior to current) store all their valuable work on the floppy technology that is available to them and find that a few years later they can't retrieve it? Will they get hit with a huge bill to retrieve their data from 'obsolete' media formats?
Basically we're telling people who are new to computers, 'hey, here is all this great free computer stuff that works fine but is just not brand new. Check it out. Then when you fill all the storage media with your important data such as letters, journals, and photos, we'll charge you a ton of money to get it off of the media that we gave to you for free (because we made it obsolete).'
Everyone will just start to think of the tech community as just a gaggle of cheap sleezy hustlers.
Behind this scenario is the reality that millions of floppy disks are being used by small and medium-sized companies for long-term corporate storage of business records of the years 1985 to 2000. People are just assuming that someone else is transfering and maintaining these records but that is often not true in smaller businesses. Without floppy drives, these records will disappear because they can't be read.
The tech community must wake up to the realization that any new storage medium that can't read the data from a previous storage medium is not an advance, but a step backward.
A music recording price shouldn't be measured in dollars which are constantly decreasing in value.
A better measurement is 'minimum wage units'; that is, the number of hours a person would have to work at the minimum wage rate (in the year in question) to buy a certain product.
In the mid 1960s, a recording of a hit pop song (in 45RPM single vinyl format - the 7-inch disk with the big hole) would cost $0.79 in Walmart-like discount stores. The minimum wage of the period was about $1.20/hr. The cost of a song was roughly 0.7 MWU. An album of usually two or three hit songs and eight filler songs would cost $2.60 for the mono version and $3.60 for the stereo. Let's say 2.5 MWU for convenience.
Today the Federal minimum wage in the USA is $5.15, but many states push it to $6. Let's use $6. A single hit recording of today in disk format would cost $4.20 in mid-1960s prices using MWU units and an album (in portable disk format) would cost $15 today at 60s prices in MWU units.
P2P downloaders have forced the price of a single song down in real terms but at the cost to the consumer of not having the content on a physical portable disk. The price of albums has remained roughly constant in MWU terms in the past 40 years.
It shouldn't cost 90% of my $17 to edit the tracks, produce the album art, make the product, and advertise it.
I certainly doesn't cost that much. Half or so of the $17 goes to the retailer. A few dollars of the remaining $10 goes to the wholesale distributor. A dollar or so remaining goes to the 'artist' in theory, but in reality record contracts are written so that almost all of the money that would go to the 'artist' goes to record company support companies or individuals. These are the CD pressers, the insert printers, the recording studios, and the record producers. All the money for these people comes out of the 'artist's' royalities.
As a consequence, these support people have no reason not to charge insane amounts of money for their 'necessary services'. Books old and new on the recording industry from a band's perspective document vast amounts of the 'artist's' advance money be wasted by these people. Both the books "Star Maker Machinery" and the recent "So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star" describe how a record producer forced on the group by the record company at many hundreds of dollars per hour would spend days adjusting the snaps on a snare drum to get the 'perfect' sound - burning up thousands of dollars of the band's studio budget.
These are the people who are responsible for the absurd cost of RIAA product, not the MP3 downloaders.
In fact, by altering the financial framework of the music industry, the P2P downloaders are actually revitalizing the music industry by forcing them to cut out all fat and waste that that has built up in the product generation process since the beginning of the pop music album era in the 1960s.
Phew, so the artists aren't really starving, but we still can't all go back to "borrowing" music from our friends instead of each purchasing our own copy. (original post)
No, we should start purchasing our own copy from our friends instead of the RIAA. That way our friends will remain our friends and we won't be giving our money to monopoly cartels who will be using it to extort us and to put us and our friends in prison for the crime of listening to music.
There does come a point in every middle-class person's life where they have to put aside the illusion that they are Star Fleet officers for a minute and start thinking and acting like Ferengee in order to ensure the survival of themselves, their friends, their dreams, and their culture.
The biggest fear of the developed world is that someone will explode a 'dirty bomb' in one of their cities.
These are bombs that disperse radioactive material into the local environment. This material makes the area unfit for habitation because the radioactive material will cause cancer and have other bad long-term health effects. The cost of cleaning up the area (even if that were possible) would be so prohibitively expensive that the location when the bomb is exploded is abandoned and quarantined.
Now someone comes up with the idea that shipping a bunch of ten-meter-high boxes filled with dangerous (to health) nuclear material just to generate electricity would be a good idea.
This is an excellent example of engineers coming up with a solution that would work well in the lab or in 'a perfect world' (or outer space) but would be completely insane to actually implement in the real-world that is filled with fanatics and crazies.
I have seen friends of mine bring in entire stacks of recordable CDs containing ripped movies they downloaded from the net. By "stack" I don't mean 3 or 4 but more like 100. They chat about it and trade them openly - there is no guilt there, while they know it's illegal they just don't care. It's easy to be amoral when everybody else is.
...something.
In the old business model, the public gave the MPAA companies money and watched the product in an MPAA-controlled environment, a movie theatre.
In the new business model, the public distributes the product themselves and gives the MPAA their focused attention span instead of money as pay-per-view.
It isn't the public's fault that the MPAA companies haven't figured out how to make money off the new business model. Perhaps the MPAA companies (the film studios) should consider more advanced product placement techniques. Or consider making the product placement an integral part of the plot of the film. Or,
The MPAA has the most important element for making money in the new media age: the focused and undivided attention of a mass audience. If they lose this, then they will find it quite difficult and expensive to get it back when they actually do figure out how to make money off their ability to deliver the undivided attention of a mass audience to an advertiser client.
The worst thing that could happen to the MPAA companies is the one thing that they are demanding: payment for each and every viewing of their product. People will use this new digital technology to develop far more advanced interactive cinema/video game hybrids that are more exciting than passively-viewed 20th-century movies. And do it far cheaper than the film studios can.
The MPAA doesn't quite understand the digital age and its termendous growth potential in new media formats. New media formats that are distributed and modified by the consumers themselves, using P2P and disk image copying.
I keep all 'my' CDs at the public library where they can be physically shared with anyone with a library card.
I keep my backups of 'my' CDs at home in MP3 files on the hard disk. It is wise to keep backups at a different location from the originals.
If the public library loses the CD that they have purchased with my tax money, then I will be happy to make them a replacement copy from my home backup. That's what libraries are all about.
Well, you could always play a ringtone on an old phone and record that.
That's an interesting idea. But what do you mean by 'old phone'. Would it be the 1960's-style rotary dial phone (Ma Bell standard) or an even earlier 1920's-style microwave-oven-sized wooden box. The kind with the earpiece on a thick black wire.
And where would you get a recording of one of these phones ringing tones? The physical phones aren't around anymore. Maybe taking a sound sample from the sound tracks of movies from the desired period.
Personally, I hate ring tones. Vicious little piezos blasting synthetic Bach for looooong times in inappropriate places. The only decent ring tone would only be one second long at most and consist of a precise musical phrase of three or four notes that would let the owner know a call was waiting but not bother all the other people around that don't want to know about it.
I may be old, but I find that having ordinary normal-like people suddenly pick up a screaching little plastic box, hold it to their ear, go into totally spaced out mode with their eyes unfocused and staring into space, and spend minutes talking to themselves speaking disconnected nonsense, then clicking the little plastic box shut and rejoining the group while acting like nothing unusual happened...well I find this to be extraordinarily weird. On the same level of weirdness as any of the behavior of the burned-out acid head hippies in the 1970's.
Maybe it's just me....
When a serial killer is caught, they should be incarcerated and every attempt should be made, in good faith, to help them deal with what's inside of them.
I believe that people who feel an overwhelming urge to murder without any specific reason why should in all good faith submit themselves to this process before they start murdering people.
After they've been caught for having murdered people, they should be punished rather than cured. It probably too late by then.
If human life were rare, difficult to create, and reliably redeemable and each person endowed with a unique talent, then, yes, it would be best to put a lot of resources into behavior modification and rehabilation.
But, uh, human life is rather common and cheap these days. The world's population is exploding and that means that there's a lot of surplus people around. So perhaps it's best just to execute the serial killers rather than spend too much time trying to understand why they do what they do. They aren't going to be missed and there's a lot of people who aren't serial killers around to take their place.
There are religious objections to this point of view, of course. But the religious laws were formulated thousands of years ago when there weren't many people around,it wasn't easy to bring infants into adults, people died mysteriously (from disease and accident), and no one lived very long anyway (average life span about 3000 years ago was about 35-40 years).
Things are different now. Just the opposite in fact. People can just reproduce like bunnies now and expect that with nutrition and medical advances all their children will grow to maturity and live to be 80. It's time to completely rethink the religious laws and customs and toss out the ones that are stupid and crazy in the modern age.
The Western Christian countries do this quite a lot. Many Europeans, especially in the North, have even tossed out the church itself as unnecessary and backward.
The Islamic world changes very little. The religion celebrates murdering anyone who tries to change the religion to adapt to current world realities. The belief is that the world must change to meet the God's plan, not the other way around. But since men invented gods (and God) so that they could explain how the world works and impose an accepted means of social control over people that stay in effect even when the police and solders weren't around, religion has to change to meet real world conditions that are constantly changing.
Basically the entire Iraqi war is an attempt on the part of the Christian fundamentalists who are now running the USA to force the Muslems to change and adapt to the new conditions in the world that technology has created in the past century. They are doing this primarily for two reasons. One, because the Muslems live on top of the largest reserves of the precious resource in the modern age, the oil. And two, because the Moslems have declared war on the Western modern society and fight this war on the West through focused acts of random mass murder in the West.
For the Americans to win this war against Islam (this 'crusade' is the right word, although political incorrect at the moment) they need to convince the Moslems that they can live better and be closer to Allah by adopting modern technology and abandoning mass murder of non-Moslems. The Americans have to convince the Moslems to modernize their religion. Failing that, they have to kill enough Moslems that the ones remaining alive will be convinced that it is in the best interest for the survival of their way of life and religion to stop murdering Westerners and surrender control of the oil reserves.
Neither of these are likely to happen, so the war will just continue as has for the past year indefinitely or for another ten years until the Americans run out of money or something else happens in another part of the world that is more important.
The only way that Moslems
Since you liked BR, I suggest Chinatown 1973 if you haven't already seen it. It's not futuristic, but it does have the same errie feeling to it that BR does
Actually Blade Runner didn't seem all that special. It was a 1940's detective story with a few 22nd century visuals. It is Humphrey Bogart film set in the future with Harrison Ford as Bogart. Rutger Hauer and Daryhl Hannah looked great in the film, the best-looking film for either of them.
My favorite scene is Harrison Ford talking to the computer to examine in great detail the random digital photograph for clues. Each time I consider buying a digital camera, I wonder if it can get a level of detail described in that scene.
The greatest science-fiction film ever is La Jetee (1964) by French director Chris Marker. This was the inspiration for 12 Monkeys, but it is a much better film. It's quite short at 29 minutes, but still leaves people in deep cinema shock whenever it gets shown in festivals or on campus. It's widely available in video and may be at your local library for checkout. It's a collage of black and white photos zoomed and panned like Ken Burn's documentaries with narration and music. French with English subtitles. It was written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when the Americans and Soviets came far too close to nuclear war than anyone wants to talk about.
2001 was OK, but extremely slow. It does hold up after 35 years only if you have a lot of patience and are not expecting a Star Wars type of movie.
Science Fiction is always better in books than it is in film. It's a genre that needs one's individual imagination projecting imagery from written text.
The only problem with this approach is hard drive space - it starts to get expensive after a few rounds of trading.
Try getting one of those $80 8X DVD writers from PriceWatch or other places.
Many places like Fry's on the west coast have sales on spindles of DVD blanks with each DVD disk selling for fifty cents or so. Each blank DVD holds 4.7 Gig or 7 CDRs worth of music; roughly about 80 albums in highest-quality variable-rate MP3 format.
DVDs can be oriented to certain genres of music, say all of 70's classic Rock on one DVD, the best 80 heavy metal albums on another, or the best 80 orchestral classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) on another. Then trade by hand or mail genre DVDs. Or offload onto DVDs the stuff on the hard disk that takes lots of space but doesn't get played much.
I'm into collections also. It's far more advanced than downloading. If you live in a large city, don't forget to use the local library to fill any holes in your collections. Don't slack on indexing and cataloging the collections with spreadsheets like Excel or Access also. Perhaps in the future people will use P2P primarily to trade the listing files of their collections and then use parcel post or UPS to trade the actual collection itself on media like hard disk.
I clearly, openly, and honestly maintain that since the RIAA (and Disney) stole the public domain by indefinitely extending the copyright period, any and all downloading, copying, and sharing of anything, anywhere is morally and ethically justified. By using overwhelming financial resources to destroy the legal balance between copyright and public domain, they have abrograted their legal 'right' to own anything. Their claim to legal ownership is meaningless given their felonious actions. Any act that they do against us is a crime: extorting money from us and stealing our property.
They are the ones who have destroyed the copyright laws, not us. We are only protecting the public domain for future generations. It is right and proper that we do so.
You've got to be joking. A grammar checker? Anyone else here just dying for a grammar checker?
Actually the hundreds of millions of people who use Word and are not native English speakers and have not fully mastered the hundreds of weird little intricacies of the English language find the Grammer checker quite useful.