The greatest impediment to adoption of Linux on the desktop in the home or office is the Linux community themselves.
Linux and Unix in general forces a transformation of the entire approach towards the computer in its users. People become Linux followers and boosters only after this transformation takes place.
Basically, Windows users see the PC as an analogue' ( a model with controllable parameters and comfortable guidelines) to the tasks for which they use the machines. Windows, to be functional and useful, mirrors and reflects the world and this elaborate and expensive interface is the key to the PC's productivity.
Unix on the other hand, demands that its users master a highly symbolic computing environment based primarily on the motif of arbitrary symbols linearly placed on a command line. When Linux/Unix users complete the process of changing their entire approach to computing to fit this 1970's era approach, they find that they can do many things with command line manipulation that can't be done easily or at all with Window's GUI interface.
This gives them the illusion that their OS is more powerful. However in reality the Windows GUI analogue interface is more powerful because it is easier to learn and therefore easier to manipulate. This makes it more productive and profitable for its users.
Linux/Unix will start to make strides on the desktop when its users begin to realize how seriously far behind Microsoft they are in the areas that computers are actually used for and where they deliver the most productivity gains.
The Linux/Unix community needs to discard the entire command line mentality and start paying serious attention to ease-of-use and interface issues before ordinary people will take seriously their claim that they and their computer environment is somehow actually better than Windows.
A businessman in NYC could wake up in the morning, drive to some sort of aero bus depot and be transported through the air to California in 3 or 4 hours!
A business traveler would wake up in their crappy little overpriced 'Day's Inn' hotel, walk out to their rented Saturn, and drive past the Wendy's, MacDonald's, Chevron, and Radio Shack on the corner.
Then they would spend four hours on an expensive transportation vehicle being 'entertained' by dumb Hollywood product with vacant-eyed celebrities, rent a Saturn and drive to their crappy little 'Day's Inn' hotel with the Wendy's, MacDonald's, Chevron, and Radio Shack on the corner.
What's the fucking point? It's like "Dune"; folding space - travel without movement.
Maglev trains like the Transrapid are VERY expensive to build.
Maglev trains may be also an option for emerging economies, which don't have yet a complete traffic system in place...
I do believe that you are showing your rich-world blindness with the two contradictory statements above. In the USA, citizens are conditioned to believe that money is no object when developing new technology.
This is the weakest point in the entire American perspective of the world and will in the not too distant future lead to the revision of their status in the world.
Money is always the primary consideration when deciding how to solve problems or improve conditions in the emerging economies. Foolish decisions involving the allocation of very limited resources will determine the countrie's future status and the living conditions of its people.
If maglev transportation is so expensive, then it should be ignored until such time in the future that it will be less so.
Saying that the most expensive approach to solving a problem is an option for poor countries is foolish and displays an unconscious elitism that the leaders in poor countries are quick to recognize but usually totally escapes their advisors from the wealthy nations.
I think that the government should give me a million dollars!
I would spend it all and help the economy create jobs! Economists tell us that the muliplier effect of consumer spending in the market is many times the actual initial expense.
Giving me a milllion dollars will go a long way to solving the individual problem (mine) of underemployment, poverty, and you-name-it. It will definitely not be wasted by jacking it off into space! Even if you can't solve all of society's problems by throwing money at them you can make a damn-good all-American try by starting with giving me a million dollars!
And it's ONLY one-millionth of the federal budget!! Where else can you get such a bargain?
The real underlining problem in Hollywood is not whether someone somewhere is watching a movie in some format for free...
The real issue that Hollywood won't face is that their audience (the people who stand in line to give their money away) has stopped growing while the cost of producing the movies continues to grow unchecked every year.
Movies have become a saturated business. Last year the actual number of paid admissions actually fell 4% for the first time in since 1991 (according to NPR - the USA public radio network). Only half of the big blockbuster productions of last summer earned back their production and advertising costs from USA box office receipts. All the profit from Hollywood is coming from overseas ticket sales, video and DVD rentals, and syndication to other media.
And this is from a good year...
Hollywood has written off all the people over 30 years old in their demographic targetting for their product. If young adults decide to stop going to the movies and do other things with their disposable income, they will go bankrupt on their movie product. And young adults are turning away from television in record numbers, a bad sign for this industry.
All the while film budgets continue to go up and up. Each 150 million dollar movie is a giant three year gamble on the fickleness of the audience for the first two or three weeks after its release. Three or four big bombs like 'Gigli' in one season and the studio is history. Especially if the interest rates start to go up again.
DVD screeners is just a smoke-screen. It gives the industry something to collectively pretend is a problem without forcing them to acknowledge the real situation that they're in.
Every time the subject of space exploration comes up on Slashdot, I just have to take a few minutes to point out the obvious:
There is nothing in space.
There is no reason to spend billions of dollars to go there.
Abvocating the expenditure of billions of dollars to go to a place where there is nothing and no reason to go there makes you look like idiots to all of the rest of the people who have more important ways that these billions of dollars could be spent to benefit humanity instead of indulging the fantasies of NASA twits with StarTrek fetishes.
In other words, you'all make us techies look bad to all the other civilized people in the world.
I'm not against space exploration. I simply believe that it needs to be put into a realistic priority schedule.
Let's set a goal of putting the first human on Mars to match the 1000th anniversary of the unveiling of Botticelli's Birth of Venus painting (you know, the babe on clam shell from the software box). It was unveiled in 1484, that would put the Mars landing goal at 2484.
This would give us enough time and money to address real issues like global overpopulation, ecological deterioation, climate change, and omicide technology (technologies that can destroy all human life on earth if released. Stuff like genetically engineered smallpox or the near-syncronous detonation of thousands of thermonuclear warheads from an all-out nuclear war, and other stuff that I shouldn't mention in a public forum).
A five-hundred year deadline for going to Mars would give us some time to deal with real problems without exposing us to the charge that we 'abandoned' the space program and its supposed long term benefits.
Thank you,
Re:This is NOT right - Please DONATE to his fund
on
Adrian Lamo Pleads Guilty
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In the United States the punishment for a crime is always inversely proportional to the damage that the crime did to society.
For example, a Chief Financial Officer of a major Forbes-500 corporation who does a pump-and-dump on the stock, collects $100 million dollars and wipes out the pension funds of thousands of employees MAY get six months if caught.
A cracker who breaks into a 'secure' corporate network and has the opportunity to view home phone numbers of op-ed page contibutors will LIKELY get three years.
A black or working-class white teenager found with 25 cents worth of marijuana in his pocket will get a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.
In the USA the punishment for your 'crime' (and everybody is guilty of something) is determined by the amount of money that you spend on your lawyer. The lawyer acts as the intermediary between you and the 'justice' system. He/she ensures that the court takes your social class into consideration when the prosecutor is determining what 'crime' that you will be charged with, and that any applicable pay-offs are delivered to the right parties with all deniable discression.
In the USA many prisons are run by private corporations that receive a set fee for each convict delivered to them. Often these prison corporations (such as CCA and Wackenhut) are publicly traded on the stock exchanges and their stock price depends on how many people they have in their camps. These corporations set up Political Action Committees to lobby for prision sentences that are much longer than the same activities would bring in other countries where the activity is considered a felony offence.
The most common cause for long prison sentences in the USA is getting high differently than drinking whiskey like the ruling class does. Major drug dealers are routinely set free in exchange for supplying the prison industry with hundreds of individual users who supply more bodies for the prison and ensure high profits and stock prices for the prison corporation. Since these people are often poor, they don't have the money to buy 'legal services' like bribes that would keep them out of the camps. Once in prison these people are sold by the prison corporation to drug companies as test subjects for corporate drugs that will then be sold to middle-class people through television ads at enormous profit for imaginary diseases like shyness.
As a result the USA has more people in prison for longer periods than any other country.
Realistically speaking, the only big problem with FM radio quality is that it attenuates above 16kHz
I find that the biggest problem with radio is the enormous amount of compression that is applied to the music to make it sound more 'alive' and 'in your face'.
Listen to an FM recording of an old song and then a high bandwidth MP3 conversion of the same song from the CD. The FM version sounds as if someone has pushed all the sliders to the max on a graphic equalizer (like when Tom Cruise plays Bob Segar in 'Risky Business'). There is zero difference between the lowest and highest volume level in a compressed FM broadcast.
Plus FM stations will speed up the song maybe 1-2 percent to get more time for the commercials.
As far as I can tell there are only three radio stations in the USA: KBOO or other small community independent radio stations, NPR, and Clear Channel. What difference does it make if radio goes high-definition?
End users currently don't have any place to suggest improvement to open-source programs that they would use.
We should set up a web site for each major open source application where people can e-mail suggestions for improvement. [And do it without derision from the hard-core nerds].
I agree. We need fewer idiot laws that don't do anything to address the underlying cause of the problem, but throw people into corporate-owned private prisons for chickenshit offenses.
When I was reviewing films for a small magazine, I would often bring a small hand-held microcassette recorder to capture the thoughts and opinions that I had on a scene or sequence as it was playing on the screen. I would review the taped comments afterwards and type up a detailed and helpful movie review.
Now this is a felony?
Plus if theatres are going to put twenty minutes of commercials and psuedo-news about the entertainment industry before showing the movie that we have paid for, then we should certainly be allowed to bring our own entertainment devices like portable DVD players and laptops to make productive use of this time. And since all digital devices today record as easily as playback data, then doing this is now a felony?
Threatening people with serious jail time for engaging in an activity is not really the best way to encourage people to want to do that activity. So why are people that depend on having other people putting their butts into seats watching a movie threatening jail time to people who come to theatres to watch movies? Whether or not they want to record a movie that they're watching is really the concern of the viewer and the theatre owner.
If the theatre owner were more concerned about providing the optimum movie-going experience to his paying customers, he wouldn't have to worry about anyone wanting to duplicate the experience outside of his venue.
The core problem of Hollywood is not how people chose to consume its product, it is that amount of time and money that people are willing to spend to consume its product is beginning to fall while the price of producing this product continues to rise uncontrollably.
Passing horseshit laws about camcorders in theatres doesn't address this core issue, and therefore will do nothing to solve it.
I feel that the record companies (is there still more than three or four companies that control the global music industry?) are losing a massive income opportunity by not taking advantage of the eighty-to-one price differencial between the old model of $18 CDs and $0.18CD-Rs filled with 700MB of MP3 music (at roughly 1.2MegaBytes per minute of 160-192kbps MP3 encoding).
Whenever any medium goes through a digital transformation, it opens giant income generation possibilities after the massive development costs are met. This is not wealth transfer (such as people 'stealing' music by not buying the same dollar amount of music-per-minute as the RIAA claims) but actual wealth generation (the dollar value of the MP3s in $0.18/CDR format that people would have paid to the RIAA companies if the record companies had made this music available in the MP3/CDR custom selection format).
My wild ass guess as to the price point for a CD-R with 13 albums (even assuming that half of the albums would have been the buyer's selection and the other half chosen by the record companies as a forced promotion of new bands) would have been about $3 per disk.
This revenue of $0.25 - $0.50 per album (times the number of downloaded and copied songs - divided by the number of songs average per album) is the closest actual real amount of money that the record industry is allowing to slip away as a result of not embracing the MP3/CD-R format at a price that 'illegal' song downloaders would be willing to pay for product.
So let's try a little thought experiment, a government bureaucrat goes to each and every one of these taxpayers and says,
"I'm gonna drop a ten dollar bill on the floor and walk away. I'll come back in fifteen minutes and if it is still there I'll use it to buy a big-ass telescope that will things like...uh...take pictures of stars and shit like that. If you reach down and pick up the money well then it's yours and you can do whatever you want with it. After all it came out of your taxes anyway...
But you won't have any big-ass telescope and no pictures of...uh... stars and shit."
So would you not just pick up your money and leave? Would anyone not do that?
In that case, who decided that a billion dollars should be spent to buy a big-ass telescope?
If you want a big telescope, buy your own big telescope. Don't take taxpayers money for this kind of thing. You guys are making it difficult to convince the civilized people of the world that middle-aged white men should be taken seriously.
To other naysayers in this thread, can you name another time NASA has successfully grabbed SPACE DUST from a flying comet? Thought not.
Looking for dust? Try the shelves in your room.
Looking for specks of ice crystals? Look outside your window or in the refrigerator.
Looking for microscopic life? Check any breath you take.
Looking for intelligent life? Talk to the first person that you see.
Looking for a way to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find something a million miles away that already exists in abundance right here and now? Work for NASA.
Space Exploration sucks. It's a giant waste of money. It's just welfare for the nerds who can't understand why any civilized person fails to be impressed by their stupid worthless stunts. Like spending hundreds of millions of dollars to collect a few particles of dust.
But it's dust from a real comet! It will give us valuable insight into the origins of the universe!
Get real, amigos, no one gives a shit. It's just dust and ice crystals. It's another hundred million dollars pissed away on the fetishes of white male fools, pretending to be scientists.
I bought an Atari ST system at about the same time that I bought my first IBM PC system, both in 1989. Before that I used the Commodore 64 for about four years.
After about two weeks of playing around with the Atari ST, I realized that I had 'thrown away' a huge amount of money on a computer that was practically worthless. Fortunately I was able to sell it for no loss to someone on the Atari corporate BBS system that had a different opinion.
Eventually I was able to get low-cost development tools for MSDOS and learn to program and become a productive member of society. The fact that my first PC program tools were 'pirate' copies were of no consequence to anyone because (pay attention - this is important!) the amount of benefit that I contibuted to society with these programs was far greater than the loss to society that resulted from my not paying for them.
What drove Commodore and Atari out of the PC business was that they were not able to provide a platform for focusing and multipling the productivity of their users. I once traded a pirate copy of a spreadsheet program for a pirated copy of a schematic capture program. [I used the spreadsheet once (to model the currents and voltages of a pair of transistors) and the other person had no idea of what a schematic capture program was used for.] No one ever did this with Amiga or Ataris.
Without widespread program sharing, whether pirate or not, the hardware platform will always quickly die. I'm amazed that Apple is still around (I assume that Apple is also amazed that people who think like me are still around also).
Amazon grows because it partners (only English lets you make a verb out of a noun, or modify one type of word into another easily. That's why it's the most flexible and most important language in the world) with its customers to create a service that is more valuable than the retailing alone.
By allowing its customers to contribute on-line feedback about its products (that is, people can upload their opinions about the books that they have bought; positive or negative), Amazon has created the model internet business. Customers work with Amazon to deliver better product and service to other customers.
It helps that Amazon is big enough now that it doesn't have to worry about Betelsman sueing it out of existance every time someone writes a less-than-positive book review. Compare that the dasmo (Dumb-As-Shit MOtherf---ers) Anti-virus company that included a clause in it EULA that prohibited anyone from saying anything less-than-positive about the product in any public forum (including a web site with ten hits in a year).
Generally internet companies take the first step to success when they have the epiphany that their customers are all smarter than they are. But since that happens to so few companies, internet successes remain few and far between.
The defeat of American military forces in Iraq (shown endlessly on CNN with footage of hundreds of helicopters being tossed over the sides of aircraft carriers) will be blamed on 'alpha particles' from 'solar flares' destroying the memory structures of the Total Information Awareness network.
My vote for the biggest tech flop (with the exception of all the tech stocks that went from $100 to $1 a share in the crash of 2001) has got to be the 'Pen Computer' of the early 1990s.
This was going to be huge! A handheld PC that used a stylus instead of a keyboard. It would read your handwriting; It would communicate telepathicly. It would be bigger than free beer and chicken!
Imagine...doctors would rush out to buy a machine that take their scribbles and convert it into clear word-processor ready text. So what if the software couldn't tell a handwritten prescription of Lysergic Acid Dythelemide from Lysterine and Diet Coke!
Imagine...Restraunts would flock to buy these $3000 plastic boxes for each and every one of their $3.50/hr plus tips waitresses. They would do it because it would be so much more efficient than constantly buying 59 cent order pad booklets once a week.
So here's a hearty cheer to all those people who listened to this insanity, opened their wallets, and showered money on these bozos.
Here's to GO!, Here's to Milliennia!, Here's to Pi Systems!, Here's to IO!, and an especially grand huzzah to Apple, who spent several several hundred millions of dollars in the biggest positive-feedback bullshit loop in the tech industry history!
The clearest parallel in the traditional world is the pollution of the environment. A hundred years ago anyone could dump anything into the air or water and claim that it was 'no one else's concern', 'the dump area belonged to no one', 'it was good for the economy', ect...
Now no one (outside bribed officials in the developing world) accepts those arguments and there are strong and often enforced laws against destroying public spaces.
The bandwidth of the internet is a public space (even if most or all of the ground fiber is owned by giant corporations). Grabbing huge chunks of it for marginal private gain is the same as the Mafia driving up and down the New Jersey Turnpike dumping hazardous waste out of the back of a truck.
Plus to fight spam on an individual PC basis we have to have programs that open and parse every e-mail message arriving at the machine, which defeats the privacy that any individual person-to-person mail (either e-mail or snail mail) legally implicitly owns.
Spammers should be shut down and shut down hard. When they go overseas and spam from the third world, the government should declare a temporary trade embargo on the country. They should give the ambassador the name and location of the spammer in their country, the evidence collected, and the assurance that the embargo will be lifted within an hour of the spammer being shut down.
It isn't working for a 'tainted' company that's the problem in the today's 'restructuring' of the tech industry, it's the former managers or bosses that can be a real obstacle to future gainful and productive work.
For example, during the 1990's I worked for a small five person company that was the North American distributor of a computer-controlled machine made by a German company. I got good performance reviews all the time. Then one partner retired and the other decided to cut back on the work. The German company sent over a guy to run the North American 'division'. After about six months he had fired all the previous employees.
Now whenever I apply for a new job, the HR people call this guy and he goes on about what a worthless jerk I was to them. I'm not sure why he continues to do this nor do I know how to get around the situation.
I suspect that it's a German:American cultural dissonance. Do your job well 99.9% of the time and the Americans will exclaim what a valuable and productive employee you were: fuck up 0.01% of the time and the Germans will focus on this forever.
The Americans of European background are usually indentical in appearance to Europeans and this often masks deep and strong cultural differences. Most of the European-Americans are decended from people who were told a hundred years ago on no uncertain terms to either get the fuck out of town or be killed. Or, they were so poor that they we just as good as dead so they had nothing to lose by moving to the other side of the world. This is the primary foundation of the deep differences between German-Americans and Germans (and European-Americans and Europeans in general).
European companies should not post managers to America for their first overseas posting because there are so many superficial simularities between the two countries that it tends to encourage blindness to the strong cultural differences beneath the surface. They should first go somewhere where the cultural differences are all on the surface. After they get experience and expertise in different business climates then they should take command of the American divisions. Of course, the other way (Americans managing European divisions) also applies equally as well.
If European-Americans and Europeans were as actually simular in culture and outlook as they are in appearance then they would have not fought two giant wars with each other in thirty years.
I dropped into an Apple store at the local mall for the first exposure to Apple products in five years. Very impressive: the monitors, the computers, and the store itself. All white and frosted glass and tons of recessed florescent white light. It was like a museum. I was very respectful.
I haven't been trusting or interested in Apple since the RAM expansion debacle of 1984. [If your bought a 512K RAM expansion from Apple, it cost you $400+. If you bought the RAM chips yourself for $80 and soldered them yourself (or had a qualfied technician do it with proper static-proof chip desoldering equipment) onto the motherboard, Apple would not only void your warranty, it would refuse to allow you to have access to ROM upgrades to the buggy first release operating system. This has been their basic corporate attitude since the Mac introduction and is the primary reason why they've never been more than a distant 'also-ran' in the personal computer marketplace (regardless of how beloved they are by their fanatical customers.)
As for 'damn the price', I'd say that too if I weren't one of the millions of technicians unemployed. So when I need to upgrade my 800 MHz Duron, I'll be buying a 2.2GigHz AthlonXP with video, sound, LAN, and USB2 integrated on the motherboard for $100 on PriceWatch.
Do the US and UK need all those submarines, planes, helicopters, destroyers, etc? Nope,...
I completely agree.
The purpose of the military is to provide for a national defense. The problem of keeping the other guy's military out of your country has been solved since the mid 1950s by nuclear bombs and intercontinental missles.
No one can invade the USA anymore and therefore they don't need a military. It does make a lot of money for the companies that make weapons and it also gives the politicians the illusion that they run the world.
Our agreement doesn't change my argument that expenditures on space exploration is premature and will continue to be for the next few hundred years.
One of my points (and I apologise for not making it clearly. I'm new at the pundit game) is that the level of technology now and in the next few hundred years is capable of getting people off the earth but not capable of sustaining them without support from the home planet. Something will always go wrong. Therefore it would be better to address the situation on Earth now rather than putting hope and public funds in a premature attempt to deal with home world problems by leaving.
Plus we don't know enough about psychology and sociology yet to ensure that the occupants on repopulated planets won't be as stupid and ignorant as the folks on the home world.
and for the negative press to cause stock prices in the various RIAA member companies to plummet. Ah, I can dream.
Actually your dream is coming true.
The RIAA companies are all owned by five global media corporations that are obsessed with both merging with each other for the benefit only of their chief executives, and the dumping of their music divisions onto one of the other chumps who still believe that these divisions can continue to be profitable in the future.
As a result their stock prices have fallen almost as much as the companies in the tech sector in the past three years. Tech will probably bounce back somewhat, but these jokers?
To give them some credit, they were able to get rid of Steve Case and Jean '5-M'(Jean Marie Messier - Moi-Meme - Maitre de Merde). Maybe Time magazine will go back to being the world's master of the five word sentence and Vivendi can ensure that people in France get the water that they've paid for (which might prevent thousands of people dying in next summer's heat wave).
Don't waste any time wishin' and hopin' for bad luck on the world's giant media corporations. They're ready, willin' and able to destroy themselves automatically.
First get your own money out and then just sit back and enjoy the show!
I can understand why DVD region codes would be such a big issue in Canada since (according to those Canadian government tourist brochures that we get here in the USA) everyone is bilingual in English and one of those silly European legacy languages (I can't remenber which one). Not having the correct code on the DVD player set means that the thousands of titles from the advanced and prolific European film industry that are flown to Canada as soon ast they hit the theatres in Europe are unable to be viewed.
If this is a real problem, and since DVD players are relatively inexpensive, why not just buy two of them and set the region codes differently on each one?
Perhaps it's not Hollywood who's behind the region code debacle, maybe it's the DVD makers themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
The greatest impediment to adoption of Linux on the desktop in the home or office is the Linux community themselves.
Linux and Unix in general forces a transformation of the entire approach towards the computer in its users. People become Linux followers and boosters only after this transformation takes place.
Basically, Windows users see the PC as an analogue' ( a model with controllable parameters and comfortable guidelines) to the tasks for which they use the machines. Windows, to be functional and useful, mirrors and reflects the world and this elaborate and expensive interface is the key to the PC's productivity.
Unix on the other hand, demands that its users master a highly symbolic computing environment based primarily on the motif of arbitrary symbols linearly placed on a command line. When Linux/Unix users complete the process of changing their entire approach to computing to fit this 1970's era approach, they find that they can do many things with command line manipulation that can't be done easily or at all with Window's GUI interface.
This gives them the illusion that their OS is more powerful. However in reality the Windows GUI analogue interface is more powerful because it is easier to learn and therefore easier to manipulate. This makes it more productive and profitable for its users.
Linux/Unix will start to make strides on the desktop when its users begin to realize how seriously far behind Microsoft they are in the areas that computers are actually used for and where they deliver the most productivity gains.
The Linux/Unix community needs to discard the entire command line mentality and start paying serious attention to ease-of-use and interface issues before ordinary people will take seriously their claim that they and their computer environment is somehow actually better than Windows.
Seriously.
Thank you,
A businessman in NYC could wake up in the morning, drive to some sort of aero bus depot and be transported through the air to California in 3 or 4 hours!
A business traveler would wake up in their crappy little overpriced 'Day's Inn' hotel, walk out to their rented Saturn, and drive past the Wendy's, MacDonald's, Chevron, and Radio Shack on the corner.
Then they would spend four hours on an expensive transportation vehicle being 'entertained' by dumb Hollywood product with vacant-eyed celebrities, rent a Saturn and drive to their crappy little 'Day's Inn' hotel with the Wendy's, MacDonald's, Chevron, and Radio Shack on the corner.
What's the fucking point? It's like "Dune"; folding space - travel without movement.
Maglev trains like the Transrapid are VERY expensive to build.
Maglev trains may be also an option for emerging economies, which don't have yet a complete traffic system in place...
I do believe that you are showing your rich-world blindness with the two contradictory statements above. In the USA, citizens are conditioned to believe that money is no object when developing new technology.
This is the weakest point in the entire American perspective of the world and will in the not too distant future lead to the revision of their status in the world.
Money is always the primary consideration when deciding how to solve problems or improve conditions in the emerging economies. Foolish decisions involving the allocation of very limited resources will determine the countrie's future status and the living conditions of its people.
If maglev transportation is so expensive, then it should be ignored until such time in the future that it will be less so.
Saying that the most expensive approach to solving a problem is an option for poor countries is foolish and displays an unconscious elitism that the leaders in poor countries are quick to recognize but usually totally escapes their advisors from the wealthy nations.
Thank you,
I think that the government should give me a million dollars!
I would spend it all and help the economy create jobs! Economists tell us that the muliplier effect of consumer spending in the market is many times the actual initial expense.
Giving me a milllion dollars will go a long way to solving the individual problem (mine) of underemployment, poverty, and you-name-it. It will definitely not be wasted by jacking it off into space! Even if you can't solve all of society's problems by throwing money at them you can make a damn-good all-American try by starting with giving me a million dollars!
And it's ONLY one-millionth of the federal budget!! Where else can you get such a bargain?
The real underlining problem in Hollywood is not whether someone somewhere is watching a movie in some format for free...
The real issue that Hollywood won't face is that their audience (the people who stand in line to give their money away) has stopped growing while the cost of producing the movies continues to grow unchecked every year.
Movies have become a saturated business. Last year the actual number of paid admissions actually fell 4% for the first time in since 1991 (according to NPR - the USA public radio network). Only half of the big blockbuster productions of last summer earned back their production and advertising costs from USA box office receipts. All the profit from Hollywood is coming from overseas ticket sales, video and DVD rentals, and syndication to other media.
And this is from a good year...
Hollywood has written off all the people over 30 years old in their demographic targetting for their product. If young adults decide to stop going to the movies and do other things with their disposable income, they will go bankrupt on their movie product. And young adults are turning away from television in record numbers, a bad sign for this industry.
All the while film budgets continue to go up and up. Each 150 million dollar movie is a giant three year gamble on the fickleness of the audience for the first two or three weeks after its release. Three or four big bombs like 'Gigli' in one season and the studio is history. Especially if the interest rates start to go up again.
DVD screeners is just a smoke-screen. It gives the industry something to collectively pretend is a problem without forcing them to acknowledge the real situation that they're in.
Every time the subject of space exploration comes up on Slashdot, I just have to take a few minutes to point out the obvious:
There is nothing in space.
There is no reason to spend billions of dollars to go there.
Abvocating the expenditure of billions of dollars to go to a place where there is nothing and no reason to go there makes you look like idiots to all of the rest of the people who have more important ways that these billions of dollars could be spent to benefit humanity instead of indulging the fantasies of NASA twits with StarTrek fetishes.
In other words, you'all make us techies look bad to all the other civilized people in the world.
I'm not against space exploration. I simply believe that it needs to be put into a realistic priority schedule.
Let's set a goal of putting the first human on Mars to match the 1000th anniversary of the unveiling of Botticelli's Birth of Venus painting (you know, the babe on clam shell from the software box). It was unveiled in 1484, that would put the Mars landing goal at 2484.
This would give us enough time and money to address real issues like global overpopulation, ecological deterioation, climate change, and omicide technology (technologies that can destroy all human life on earth if released. Stuff like genetically engineered smallpox or the near-syncronous detonation of thousands of thermonuclear warheads from an all-out nuclear war, and other stuff that I shouldn't mention in a public forum).
A five-hundred year deadline for going to Mars would give us some time to deal with real problems without exposing us to the charge that we 'abandoned' the space program and its supposed long term benefits.
Thank you,
In the United States the punishment for a crime is always inversely proportional to the damage that the crime did to society.
For example, a Chief Financial Officer of a major Forbes-500 corporation who does a pump-and-dump on the stock, collects $100 million dollars and wipes out the pension funds of thousands of employees MAY get six months if caught.
A cracker who breaks into a 'secure' corporate network and has the opportunity to view home phone numbers of op-ed page contibutors will LIKELY get three years.
A black or working-class white teenager found with 25 cents worth of marijuana in his pocket will get a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.
In the USA the punishment for your 'crime' (and everybody is guilty of something) is determined by the amount of money that you spend on your lawyer. The lawyer acts as the intermediary between you and the 'justice' system. He/she ensures that the court takes your social class into consideration when the prosecutor is determining what 'crime' that you will be charged with, and that any applicable pay-offs are delivered to the right parties with all deniable discression.
In the USA many prisons are run by private corporations that receive a set fee for each convict delivered to them. Often these prison corporations (such as CCA and Wackenhut) are publicly traded on the stock exchanges and their stock price depends on how many people they have in their camps. These corporations set up Political Action Committees to lobby for prision sentences that are much longer than the same activities would bring in other countries where the activity is considered a felony offence.
The most common cause for long prison sentences in the USA is getting high differently than drinking whiskey like the ruling class does. Major drug dealers are routinely set free in exchange for supplying the prison industry with hundreds of individual users who supply more bodies for the prison and ensure high profits and stock prices for the prison corporation. Since these people are often poor, they don't have the money to buy 'legal services' like bribes that would keep them out of the camps. Once in prison these people are sold by the prison corporation to drug companies as test subjects for corporate drugs that will then be sold to middle-class people through television ads at enormous profit for imaginary diseases like shyness.
As a result the USA has more people in prison for longer periods than any other country.
Realistically speaking, the only big problem with FM radio quality is that it attenuates above 16kHz
I find that the biggest problem with radio is the enormous amount of compression that is applied to the music to make it sound more 'alive' and 'in your face'.
Listen to an FM recording of an old song and then a high bandwidth MP3 conversion of the same song from the CD. The FM version sounds as if someone has pushed all the sliders to the max on a graphic equalizer (like when Tom Cruise plays Bob Segar in 'Risky Business'). There is zero difference between the lowest and highest volume level in a compressed FM broadcast.
Plus FM stations will speed up the song maybe 1-2 percent to get more time for the commercials.
As far as I can tell there are only three radio stations in the USA: KBOO or other small community independent radio stations, NPR, and Clear Channel. What difference does it make if radio goes high-definition?
End users currently don't have any place to suggest improvement to open-source programs that they would use.
We should set up a web site for each major open source application where people can e-mail suggestions for improvement. [And do it without derision from the hard-core nerds].
I agree. We need fewer idiot laws that don't do anything to address the underlying cause of the problem, but throw people into corporate-owned private prisons for chickenshit offenses.
When I was reviewing films for a small magazine, I would often bring a small hand-held microcassette recorder to capture the thoughts and opinions that I had on a scene or sequence as it was playing on the screen. I would review the taped comments afterwards and type up a detailed and helpful movie review.
Now this is a felony?
Plus if theatres are going to put twenty minutes of commercials and psuedo-news about the entertainment industry before showing the movie that we have paid for, then we should certainly be allowed to bring our own entertainment devices like portable DVD players and laptops to make productive use of this time. And since all digital devices today record as easily as playback data, then doing this is now a felony?
Threatening people with serious jail time for engaging in an activity is not really the best way to encourage people to want to do that activity. So why are people that depend on having other people putting their butts into seats watching a movie threatening jail time to people who come to theatres to watch movies? Whether or not they want to record a movie that they're watching is really the concern of the viewer and the theatre owner.
If the theatre owner were more concerned about providing the optimum movie-going experience to his paying customers, he wouldn't have to worry about anyone wanting to duplicate the experience outside of his venue.
The core problem of Hollywood is not how people chose to consume its product, it is that amount of time and money that people are willing to spend to consume its product is beginning to fall while the price of producing this product continues to rise uncontrollably.
Passing horseshit laws about camcorders in theatres doesn't address this core issue, and therefore will do nothing to solve it.
I feel that the record companies (is there still more than three or four companies that control the global music industry?) are losing a massive income opportunity by not taking advantage of the eighty-to-one price differencial between the old model of $18 CDs and $0.18CD-Rs filled with 700MB of MP3 music (at roughly 1.2MegaBytes per minute of 160-192kbps MP3 encoding).
Whenever any medium goes through a digital transformation, it opens giant income generation possibilities after the massive development costs are met. This is not wealth transfer (such as people 'stealing' music by not buying the same dollar amount of music-per-minute as the RIAA claims) but actual wealth generation (the dollar value of the MP3s in $0.18/CDR format that people would have paid to the RIAA companies if the record companies had made this music available in the MP3/CDR custom selection format).
My wild ass guess as to the price point for a CD-R with 13 albums (even assuming that half of the albums would have been the buyer's selection and the other half chosen by the record companies as a forced promotion of new bands) would have been about $3 per disk.
This revenue of $0.25 - $0.50 per album (times the number of downloaded and copied songs - divided by the number of songs average per album) is the closest actual real amount of money that the record industry is allowing to slip away as a result of not embracing the MP3/CD-R format at a price that 'illegal' song downloaders would be willing to pay for product.
A billion dollar telescope...
...uh...take pictures of stars and shit like that. ...uh... stars and shit."
One hundred million taxpayers in the USA...
So let's try a little thought experiment, a government bureaucrat goes to each and every one of these taxpayers and says,
"I'm gonna drop a ten dollar bill on the floor and walk away. I'll come back in fifteen minutes and if it is still there I'll use it to buy a big-ass telescope that will things like
If you reach down and pick up the money well then it's yours and you can do whatever you want with it. After all it came out of your taxes anyway...
But you won't have any big-ass telescope and no pictures of
So would you not just pick up your money and leave? Would anyone not do that?
In that case, who decided that a billion dollars should be spent to buy a big-ass telescope?
If you want a big telescope, buy your own big telescope. Don't take taxpayers money for this kind of thing. You guys are making it difficult to convince the civilized people of the world that middle-aged white men should be taken seriously.
To other naysayers in this thread, can you name another time NASA has successfully grabbed SPACE DUST from a flying comet? Thought not.
Looking for dust? Try the shelves in your room.
Looking for specks of ice crystals? Look outside your window or in the refrigerator.
Looking for microscopic life? Check any breath you take.
Looking for intelligent life? Talk to the first person that you see.
Looking for a way to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find something a million miles away that already exists in abundance right here and now? Work for NASA.
Space Exploration sucks. It's a giant waste of money. It's just welfare for the nerds who can't understand why any civilized person fails to be impressed by their stupid worthless stunts. Like spending hundreds of millions of dollars to collect a few particles of dust.
But it's dust from a real comet! It will give us valuable insight into the origins of the universe!
Get real, amigos, no one gives a shit. It's just dust and ice crystals. It's another hundred million dollars pissed away on the fetishes of white male fools, pretending to be scientists.
Thank you,
I bought an Atari ST system at about the same time that I bought my first IBM PC system, both in 1989. Before that I used the Commodore 64 for about four years.
After about two weeks of playing around with the Atari ST, I realized that I had 'thrown away' a huge amount of money on a computer that was practically worthless. Fortunately I was able to sell it for no loss to someone on the Atari corporate BBS system that had a different opinion.
Eventually I was able to get low-cost development tools for MSDOS and learn to program and become a productive member of society. The fact that my first PC program tools were 'pirate' copies were of no consequence to anyone because (pay attention - this is important!) the amount of benefit that I contibuted to society with these programs was far greater than the loss to society that resulted from my not paying for them.
What drove Commodore and Atari out of the PC business was that they were not able to provide a platform for focusing and multipling the productivity of their users. I once traded a pirate copy of a spreadsheet program for a pirated copy of a schematic capture program. [I used the spreadsheet once (to model the currents and voltages of a pair of transistors) and the other person had no idea of what a schematic capture program was used for.] No one ever did this with Amiga or Ataris.
Without widespread program sharing, whether pirate or not, the hardware platform will always quickly die. I'm amazed that Apple is still around (I assume that Apple is also amazed that people who think like me are still around also).
Thank you,
Amazon grows because it partners (only English lets you make a verb out of a noun, or modify one type of word into another easily. That's why it's the most flexible and most important language in the world) with its customers to create a service that is more valuable than the retailing alone.
By allowing its customers to contribute on-line feedback about its products (that is, people can upload their opinions about the books that they have bought; positive or negative), Amazon has created the model internet business. Customers work with Amazon to deliver better product and service to other customers.
It helps that Amazon is big enough now that it doesn't have to worry about Betelsman sueing it out of existance every time someone writes a less-than-positive book review. Compare that the dasmo (Dumb-As-Shit MOtherf---ers) Anti-virus company that included a clause in it EULA that prohibited anyone from saying anything less-than-positive about the product in any public forum (including a web site with ten hits in a year).
Generally internet companies take the first step to success when they have the epiphany that their customers are all smarter than they are. But since that happens to so few companies, internet successes remain few and far between.
Thank you,
The defeat of American military forces in Iraq (shown endlessly on CNN with footage of hundreds of helicopters being tossed over the sides of aircraft carriers) will be blamed on 'alpha particles' from 'solar flares' destroying the memory structures of the Total Information Awareness network.
My vote for the biggest tech flop (with the exception of all the tech stocks that went from $100 to $1 a share in the crash of 2001) has got to be the 'Pen Computer' of the early 1990s.
This was going to be huge! A handheld PC that used a stylus instead of a keyboard. It would read your handwriting; It would communicate telepathicly. It would be bigger than free beer and chicken!
Imagine...doctors would rush out to buy a machine that take their scribbles and convert it into clear word-processor ready text. So what if the software couldn't tell a handwritten prescription of Lysergic Acid Dythelemide from Lysterine and Diet Coke!
Imagine...Restraunts would flock to buy these $3000 plastic boxes for each and every one of their $3.50/hr plus tips waitresses. They would do it because it would be so much more efficient than constantly buying 59 cent order pad booklets once a week.
So here's a hearty cheer to all those people who listened to this insanity, opened their wallets, and showered money on these bozos.
Here's to GO!, Here's to Milliennia!, Here's to Pi Systems!, Here's to IO!, and an especially grand huzzah to Apple, who spent several several hundred millions of dollars in the biggest positive-feedback bullshit loop in the tech industry history!
Hello,
The clearest parallel in the traditional world is the pollution of the environment. A hundred years ago anyone could dump anything into the air or water and claim that it was 'no one else's concern', 'the dump area belonged to no one', 'it was good for the economy', ect...
Now no one (outside bribed officials in the developing world) accepts those arguments and there are strong and often enforced laws against destroying public spaces.
The bandwidth of the internet is a public space (even if most or all of the ground fiber is owned by giant corporations). Grabbing huge chunks of it for marginal private gain is the same as the Mafia driving up and down the New Jersey Turnpike dumping hazardous waste out of the back of a truck.
Plus to fight spam on an individual PC basis we have to have programs that open and parse every e-mail message arriving at the machine, which defeats the privacy that any individual person-to-person mail (either e-mail or snail mail) legally implicitly owns.
Spammers should be shut down and shut down hard. When they go overseas and spam from the third world, the government should declare a temporary trade embargo on the country. They should give the ambassador the name and location of the spammer in their country, the evidence collected, and the assurance that the embargo will be lifted within an hour of the spammer being shut down.
This would work. I'm not sure what else would.
Thank you,
It isn't working for a 'tainted' company that's the problem in the today's 'restructuring' of the tech industry, it's the former managers or bosses that can be a real obstacle to future gainful and productive work.
For example, during the 1990's I worked for a small five person company that was the North American distributor of a computer-controlled machine made by a German company. I got good performance reviews all the time. Then one partner retired and the other decided to cut back on the work. The German company sent over a guy to run the North American 'division'. After about six months he had fired all the previous employees.
Now whenever I apply for a new job, the HR people call this guy and he goes on about what a worthless jerk I was to them. I'm not sure why he continues to do this nor do I know how to get around the situation.
I suspect that it's a German:American cultural dissonance. Do your job well 99.9% of the time and the Americans will exclaim what a valuable and productive employee you were: fuck up 0.01% of the time and the Germans will focus on this forever.
The Americans of European background are usually indentical in appearance to Europeans and this often masks deep and strong cultural differences. Most of the European-Americans are decended from people who were told a hundred years ago on no uncertain terms to either get the fuck out of town or be killed. Or, they were so poor that they we just as good as dead so they had nothing to lose by moving to the other side of the world. This is the primary foundation of the deep differences between German-Americans and Germans (and European-Americans and Europeans in general).
European companies should not post managers to America for their first overseas posting because there are so many superficial simularities between the two countries that it tends to encourage blindness to the strong cultural differences beneath the surface. They should first go somewhere where the cultural differences are all on the surface. After they get experience and expertise in different business climates then they should take command of the American divisions. Of course, the other way (Americans managing European divisions) also applies equally as well.
If European-Americans and Europeans were as actually simular in culture and outlook as they are in appearance then they would have not fought two giant wars with each other in thirty years.
Anyone have any insights into this situation?
Hello,
I dropped into an Apple store at the local mall for the first exposure to Apple products in five years. Very impressive: the monitors, the computers, and the store itself. All white and frosted glass and tons of recessed florescent white light. It was like a museum. I was very respectful.
I haven't been trusting or interested in Apple since the RAM expansion debacle of 1984. [If your bought a 512K RAM expansion from Apple, it cost you $400+. If you bought the RAM chips yourself for $80 and soldered them yourself (or had a qualfied technician do it with proper static-proof chip desoldering equipment) onto the motherboard, Apple would not only void your warranty, it would refuse to allow you to have access to ROM upgrades to the buggy first release operating system. This has been their basic corporate attitude since the Mac introduction and is the primary reason why they've never been more than a distant 'also-ran' in the personal computer marketplace (regardless of how beloved they are by their fanatical customers.)
As for 'damn the price', I'd say that too if I weren't one of the millions of technicians unemployed. So when I need to upgrade my 800 MHz Duron, I'll be buying a 2.2GigHz AthlonXP with video, sound, LAN, and USB2 integrated on the motherboard for $100 on PriceWatch.
Thank you,
Do the US and UK need all those submarines, planes, helicopters, destroyers, etc? Nope,...
I completely agree.
The purpose of the military is to provide for a national defense. The problem of keeping the other guy's military out of your country has been solved since the mid 1950s by nuclear bombs and intercontinental missles.
No one can invade the USA anymore and therefore they don't need a military. It does make a lot of money for the companies that make weapons and it also gives the politicians the illusion that they run the world.
Our agreement doesn't change my argument that expenditures on space exploration is premature and will continue to be for the next few hundred years.
Thank you for your reply,
Greetings from the up side of the bell curve!
One of my points (and I apologise for not making it clearly. I'm new at the pundit game) is that the level of technology now and in the next few hundred years is capable of getting people off the earth but not capable of sustaining them without support from the home planet. Something will always go wrong. Therefore it would be better to address the situation on Earth now rather than putting hope and public funds in a premature attempt to deal with home world problems by leaving.
Plus we don't know enough about psychology and sociology yet to ensure that the occupants on repopulated planets won't be as stupid and ignorant as the folks on the home world.
Thank you,
My favorite Clarke novel is "Songs of A Distant Earth" from the mid-1980s.
It is radiant and brilliant.
and for the negative press to cause stock prices in the various RIAA member companies to plummet. Ah, I can dream.
Actually your dream is coming true.
The RIAA companies are all owned by five global media corporations that are obsessed with both merging with each other for the benefit only of their chief executives, and the dumping of their music divisions onto one of the other chumps who still believe that these divisions can continue to be profitable in the future.
As a result their stock prices have fallen almost as much as the companies in the tech sector in the past three years. Tech will probably bounce back somewhat, but these jokers?
To give them some credit, they were able to get rid of Steve Case and Jean '5-M'(Jean Marie Messier - Moi-Meme - Maitre de Merde). Maybe Time magazine will go back to being the world's master of the five word sentence and Vivendi can ensure that people in France get the water that they've paid for (which might prevent thousands of people dying in next summer's heat wave).
Don't waste any time wishin' and hopin' for bad luck on the world's giant media corporations. They're ready, willin' and able to destroy themselves automatically.
First get your own money out and then just sit back and enjoy the show!
I can understand why DVD region codes would be such a big issue in Canada since (according to those Canadian government tourist brochures that we get here in the USA) everyone is bilingual in English and one of those silly European legacy languages (I can't remenber which one). Not having the correct code on the DVD player set means that the thousands of titles from the advanced and prolific European film industry that are flown to Canada as soon ast they hit the theatres in Europe are unable to be viewed.
If this is a real problem, and since DVD players are relatively inexpensive, why not just buy two of them and set the region codes differently on each one?
Perhaps it's not Hollywood who's behind the region code debacle, maybe it's the DVD makers themselves.