Actually, internet trolling started out back in the early '90s as "trolling for newbies". Trolling for fish was the origin of the term. Ah the good old days of alt.religion.kibology.
In related news, France has decided to tax car dealerships to help cover the losses insurance companies suffer as a result of car theft.
Your analogy is flawed. That would be the equivalent of taxing computer stores. The proposal in question is more like taxing roadside billboards because the stolen cars are driven on those roads.
Not all "urban" areas have super-high population density. There's a big difference between a city like NYC with lots of high-rise apartments, brownstones, and mass transit, and the big cities in Texas, where most of the population is in neighborhoods with houses and yards, and people drive themselves to work.
If you're taking mass-transit, you have the time to do stuff on your way to and back from work. If you're driving, you don't. Not that watching live television on a cell phone is such a great thing anyhow. Sure, you might get some news shows in the morning, but on your way home you'll get Judge Judy and TMZ. You're better off dumping something from your DVR to a handheld device or laptop before you leave.
And this isn't even considering how well ATSC's modulation will or won't work in a mobile environment. From what I've heard, not all that great. (Not that Japan's 1seg is said to be all that great either when your receiver is moving.)
Thanks for posting the list. Unfortunately it only made me want to read the article to see what the hell they were thinking.
First of all, I think they were wrong by narrowing down things to specific models. That led to three of the spots being taken up by cell phones. This should have been a list of what types of gadgets defined the decade. After reading all the posts here, and thinking a bit about it, here's what I've come up with:
Digital Cameras - No more having to get your film developed, though this did lead to the downfall of Polaroid. And the digital camera was made possible because of...
Flash Memory - Both USB and cards, this allowed a lot of storage in a small space with low power requirements. The idea goes all the way back to Star Trek, though it took a bit longer to become reality than automatic doors. This also enabled...
iPod Nano and flash MP3 players in general - While disk-based players were pretty revolutionary on their own, flash memory players were small, had no moving parts aside from the controls, and had much better battery life. In a package smaller than most TV remotes, you can store hours of music with enough battery to play it most of the day.
The Xbox - The Xbox was the first game console with an Ethernet port built in. In an era when broadband was rapidly becoming important, none of the other consoles of the day had built-in Ethernet. The worst was that the Dreamcast's Ethernet module was canceled as soon as it was released, making it rare as hell, and it also wasn't supported very well. Xbox Live set standards on how a game console should interact with the internet, and the current generation of systems all have some kind of online support. The Xbox also started the trend of large amounts of storage in a console with its now laughable eight megabyte hard drive.
DVD - Killed off tape as a format for pre-recorded video. Video tapes and players will wear out with use, but a well-cared-for DVD will last forever. "Be Kind - Rewind" is sooo '90s. Sorry, Sony fanboys, Blu-Ray is nowhere near as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD was over VHS.
Tivo and the DVR in general - Killing off tape as a format for video time-shifting, thanks to digital video compression, big hard drives, and regularly updated schedules. And, oh yeah, it can pause and reverse live shows and skip commercials. DVR use is now an important part of television ratings.
Wireless Networking - WiFi freed us from needing a wire to connect to the internet. This helped with the rise of...
Laptops - This was the decade in which laptops took over from desktops. They range from netbooks (which themselves haven't quite become a fixture of the decade) to enormous desktop replacements. But they couldn't have been so important without...
Cheap LCD displays - Sure, they were around in the '90s, but they were small and expensive. Making them big and cheap has led to the near-extinction of the CRT, and the only people crying are graphic artists who appreciate the color precision of CRT and people who like to play gun games on old video game consoles. They've even been killing off the plasma display.
Cell Phones - More specifically, handheld cellphones. They've made the pay phone nearly extinct. Nobody noticed when the pay phone went up to 50 cents a call.
DSL/Cable Modem - Hey, my list goes to eleven. DSL and cable modems freed the internet from the analog phone network. Always connected, and sometimes even with an assigned fixed IP. I've had fixed IP DSL since early 2000. This basically killed off the dial-up BBS overnight. The much higher speeds, combined with MP3 audio and MPEG video, made first Napster, then Bittorrent possible.
One might argue that Telebit's spoofing of the UUCP-g protocol (about as inefficient as XMODEM when not spoofed) let the uucp folks get lazy and not bother to implement a real streaming protocol (such as ZMODEM), thus marginalizing uucp to those who could afford that one particular expensive brand of modems. Fidonet, on the other hand, went as far as what was called the "Janus" protocol, which was the equivalent of having independent ZMODEM sessions in each direction.
One thing I forgot to mention was that apparently (from what I heard back in the day), Telebit was popular among uucp sites. HST was big with the BBS scene because of USR's special offer to sysops (you had to have a dedicated-line BBS, and being a Fidonet node was almost an instant qualifier). V.32/V.34 took over because nobody ever sold anything compatible with Telebit, and USR insisted on making HST an extra cost feature for Courier modems only, never putting it in their consumer Sportster line.
I had forgotten completely about Telebit. I never got to hear its modulation, though I've heard it described as sounding like "whalesong". I just did a check on Youtube to see if something about it may have been uploaded, and it thought I misspelled "Telebid". Sheesh.
HST was originally 9600, with a later upgrade to 16.8k. But it lost to V.32 because USR kept it as a "premium" feature in Courier modems and didn't include it at all in their Sportster modems. The first nail in the coffin was "V.32terbo" at 19.2k, and by the time of V.34 28.8k, HST was essentially dead.
Of course the coolest Couriers to have were the ones with the little gold plate that said "NOT FOR RESALE" or something like that, because they were bought by sysops. I still have a small stack of assorted Couriers, some my original, others found at thrift stores back in the '90s, just in case I need one. I even applied the "enable HST" hack on some of the ones I found at thrift stores, and I remember that I had to patch the Russian-written downloader program to increase a delay loop to get it to work on my Tandy 1000.
But not in the United States. We pretty much went directly from 300 baud to 1200 baud full duplex (212) in the States in the heyday of BBSes in the early '80s. I do recall reading that 1200/75 was used for those French terminals (Minitel?), so that probably helped to make it more popular in Europe.
Of course one of the problems with 1200/75 is that the other end has to be 75/1200, so it's more useful for a commercial online information service than for a BBS, especially one with a warez section.
Depends on how you define an "airplane incident". I count 499 just on that list alone*. None (or very few) of those car accidents or cancer cases were caused by terrorism, or even more generally someone intentionally making them happen. Or was there some reason you were afraid to use the T-word and re-defined "incident" to be an euphemism thereof?
*of course those who died in general aviation accidents are not listed; just last month two died near Austin, TX when a Cessna crashed.
now that's all europe only. for usa, so i hear, i have to fill forms where required level of stupidity to create them just is not comprehensible to me (do you plan to commit acts of terrorism ?), give fingerprints, subject oneself to arrogant and rude questioning, possibly give out all passwords for any it related devices and maybe even have them confiscated, without any compensation.
I should also add that if an American citizen so much looks in the direction of a US VISIT terminal, a rude man* instantly says "This is not for you. Go away!"
*presumably the same man who is hired to be rude to furriners
In American usage, companies are generally considered to be singular nouns. But the BBC is, err, I mean the bbc are British, therfore they should be considered a plural noun, as per British usage.
You make it sound like the DRM in iTMS was all Apple's idea. Guess what? The labels required it. All Apple did was say "this DRM format is ours and ours only". They never prevented you from playing un-DRMed music. Nor did they default to ripping CDs in DRM format like (IIRC) Windows Media Player did. Apple took longer to remove DRM music than other music stores simply because they had to wait for existing contracts to expire.
Are you so sure that Apple's plan was to make themselves a (pseudo-) monopoly through their DRM? Or maybe the plan all along was to make the DRM distasteful enough for the labels that eventually they would give it up?
This could be made moot by providing a means for copyright renewals on a sliding scale. Then the companies that care enough about certain properties to bri...er, lobby Congress into extending the limit every time Steamboat Willie almost becomes public domain will be able to keep them copyrighted. It doesn't even have to be a lot of money for decades worth of renewals, it just has to be an effort by the copyright owner. Even every ten years after the first twenty or thirty should be often enough.
(Of course a work going into public domain also shouldn't mean that every element of that work becomes public domain. Mickey Mouse should still be a trademark no matter the status of Steamboat Willie.)
It's mostly because Xbox hardware is a piece of crap that dies easily. And the Japanese don't take that kind of shit lightly, especially when a company tries to hide he magnitude of the problem.
It doesn't help any that in Japanese culture, the "X" symbol indicates failure, and there is also a kanji with an "X" in a box (unicode 51F6) that means "bad luck" and "disaster".
Except if Hollywood did it, they would make the CGI so shiny as if to say "HEY YOU PUDS IN THE AUDIENCE LOOK AT MY AWESOME CGI YOU CAN EVEN SEE THE PENIS ON THIS ROBOT", and not hidden it behind a bunch of fog.
Huckabee is getting flak because one man he let out early has shot and killed 4 police officers.
And what you said there that I bolded is a big part of his problem. He didn't "let him out". The Arkansas governor doesn't even have the power to just let someone out of prison. He commuted the sentence from 100+ years to forty-something years. That made him eligible for parole, which let someone else let him out due to assorted fuckups (and nobody opposing his parole hearings).
Actually, that's the point where hydrogen (via electrolysis) becomes a viable fuel. The problem of storing hydrogen on the vehicle with enough density will probably be easier than that of battery energy density.
Weather is not climate. Many weather patterns are driven by oceanic oscillations. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes Alaska to be warm and cool on a sixty-year cycle, with the current warm phase placed just right for the AGW types to show polar bears stuck on ice floes.
I live in Texas, where El Nino/La Nina can flip the weather suddenly from drought to flood. In fact, that happened just this year, where about two months ago, central Texas went from a drought and heat wave to sufficient rain that I've barely had a good chance to mow the back lawn since it started. There is a prediction of snow tomorrow, so I plan to mow the lawn this afternoon in 40F temperatures, below normal here in December. At least the drought killed off a patch of some nasty clump grass that I had been trying to get rid of for years.
I heard years ago about the weather in the Australian outback. A given area could be all nice for farming for years, then once farmers had time to settle in, bam, there's a ten year drought. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this could happen to other parts of Australia every now and then. This sounds very much like there are some ocean current oscillations that affect precipitation there. Once they flip back, the rain will return. I haven't heard any of these named, so maybe you folks need to learn more about what's going on in the southern hemisphere oceans.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, internet trolling started out back in the early '90s as "trolling for newbies". Trolling for fish was the origin of the term. Ah the good old days of alt.religion.kibology.
Did someone just say...
In related news, France has decided to tax car dealerships to help cover the losses insurance companies suffer as a result of car theft.
Your analogy is flawed. That would be the equivalent of taxing computer stores. The proposal in question is more like taxing roadside billboards because the stolen cars are driven on those roads.
Not all "urban" areas have super-high population density. There's a big difference between a city like NYC with lots of high-rise apartments, brownstones, and mass transit, and the big cities in Texas, where most of the population is in neighborhoods with houses and yards, and people drive themselves to work.
If you're taking mass-transit, you have the time to do stuff on your way to and back from work. If you're driving, you don't. Not that watching live television on a cell phone is such a great thing anyhow. Sure, you might get some news shows in the morning, but on your way home you'll get Judge Judy and TMZ. You're better off dumping something from your DVR to a handheld device or laptop before you leave.
And this isn't even considering how well ATSC's modulation will or won't work in a mobile environment. From what I've heard, not all that great. (Not that Japan's 1seg is said to be all that great either when your receiver is moving.)
The other rule is: that's the expiration date.
(correction: the Xbox had an eight gigabyte hard drive)
Thanks for posting the list. Unfortunately it only made me want to read the article to see what the hell they were thinking.
First of all, I think they were wrong by narrowing down things to specific models. That led to three of the spots being taken up by cell phones. This should have been a list of what types of gadgets defined the decade. After reading all the posts here, and thinking a bit about it, here's what I've come up with:
Digital Cameras - No more having to get your film developed, though this did lead to the downfall of Polaroid. And the digital camera was made possible because of...
Flash Memory - Both USB and cards, this allowed a lot of storage in a small space with low power requirements. The idea goes all the way back to Star Trek, though it took a bit longer to become reality than automatic doors. This also enabled...
iPod Nano and flash MP3 players in general - While disk-based players were pretty revolutionary on their own, flash memory players were small, had no moving parts aside from the controls, and had much better battery life. In a package smaller than most TV remotes, you can store hours of music with enough battery to play it most of the day.
The Xbox - The Xbox was the first game console with an Ethernet port built in. In an era when broadband was rapidly becoming important, none of the other consoles of the day had built-in Ethernet. The worst was that the Dreamcast's Ethernet module was canceled as soon as it was released, making it rare as hell, and it also wasn't supported very well. Xbox Live set standards on how a game console should interact with the internet, and the current generation of systems all have some kind of online support. The Xbox also started the trend of large amounts of storage in a console with its now laughable eight megabyte hard drive.
DVD - Killed off tape as a format for pre-recorded video. Video tapes and players will wear out with use, but a well-cared-for DVD will last forever. "Be Kind - Rewind" is sooo '90s. Sorry, Sony fanboys, Blu-Ray is nowhere near as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD was over VHS.
Tivo and the DVR in general - Killing off tape as a format for video time-shifting, thanks to digital video compression, big hard drives, and regularly updated schedules. And, oh yeah, it can pause and reverse live shows and skip commercials. DVR use is now an important part of television ratings.
Wireless Networking - WiFi freed us from needing a wire to connect to the internet. This helped with the rise of...
Laptops - This was the decade in which laptops took over from desktops. They range from netbooks (which themselves haven't quite become a fixture of the decade) to enormous desktop replacements. But they couldn't have been so important without...
Cheap LCD displays - Sure, they were around in the '90s, but they were small and expensive. Making them big and cheap has led to the near-extinction of the CRT, and the only people crying are graphic artists who appreciate the color precision of CRT and people who like to play gun games on old video game consoles. They've even been killing off the plasma display.
Cell Phones - More specifically, handheld cellphones. They've made the pay phone nearly extinct. Nobody noticed when the pay phone went up to 50 cents a call.
DSL/Cable Modem - Hey, my list goes to eleven. DSL and cable modems freed the internet from the analog phone network. Always connected, and sometimes even with an assigned fixed IP. I've had fixed IP DSL since early 2000. This basically killed off the dial-up BBS overnight. The much higher speeds, combined with MP3 audio and MPEG video, made first Napster, then Bittorrent possible.
One might argue that Telebit's spoofing of the UUCP-g protocol (about as inefficient as XMODEM when not spoofed) let the uucp folks get lazy and not bother to implement a real streaming protocol (such as ZMODEM), thus marginalizing uucp to those who could afford that one particular expensive brand of modems. Fidonet, on the other hand, went as far as what was called the "Janus" protocol, which was the equivalent of having independent ZMODEM sessions in each direction.
One thing I forgot to mention was that apparently (from what I heard back in the day), Telebit was popular among uucp sites. HST was big with the BBS scene because of USR's special offer to sysops (you had to have a dedicated-line BBS, and being a Fidonet node was almost an instant qualifier). V.32/V.34 took over because nobody ever sold anything compatible with Telebit, and USR insisted on making HST an extra cost feature for Courier modems only, never putting it in their consumer Sportster line.
I had forgotten completely about Telebit. I never got to hear its modulation, though I've heard it described as sounding like "whalesong". I just did a check on Youtube to see if something about it may have been uploaded, and it thought I misspelled "Telebid". Sheesh.
HST was originally 9600, with a later upgrade to 16.8k. But it lost to V.32 because USR kept it as a "premium" feature in Courier modems and didn't include it at all in their Sportster modems. The first nail in the coffin was "V.32terbo" at 19.2k, and by the time of V.34 28.8k, HST was essentially dead.
Of course the coolest Couriers to have were the ones with the little gold plate that said "NOT FOR RESALE" or something like that, because they were bought by sysops. I still have a small stack of assorted Couriers, some my original, others found at thrift stores back in the '90s, just in case I need one. I even applied the "enable HST" hack on some of the ones I found at thrift stores, and I remember that I had to patch the Russian-written downloader program to increase a delay loop to get it to work on my Tandy 1000.
The 1200/75 modem was a workhorse for a long time
But not in the United States. We pretty much went directly from 300 baud to 1200 baud full duplex (212) in the States in the heyday of BBSes in the early '80s. I do recall reading that 1200/75 was used for those French terminals (Minitel?), so that probably helped to make it more popular in Europe.
Of course one of the problems with 1200/75 is that the other end has to be 75/1200, so it's more useful for a commercial online information service than for a BBS, especially one with a warez section.
Number of people dead from an airplane incident this year: 0
List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft - 2009
Depends on how you define an "airplane incident". I count 499 just on that list alone*. None (or very few) of those car accidents or cancer cases were caused by terrorism, or even more generally someone intentionally making them happen. Or was there some reason you were afraid to use the T-word and re-defined "incident" to be an euphemism thereof?
*of course those who died in general aviation accidents are not listed; just last month two died near Austin, TX when a Cessna crashed.
now that's all europe only. for usa, so i hear, i have to fill forms where required level of stupidity to create them just is not comprehensible to me (do you plan to commit acts of terrorism ?), give fingerprints, subject oneself to arrogant and rude questioning, possibly give out all passwords for any it related devices and maybe even have them confiscated, without any compensation.
I should also add that if an American citizen so much looks in the direction of a US VISIT terminal, a rude man* instantly says "This is not for you. Go away!"
*presumably the same man who is hired to be rude to furriners
Is that as in "They'll be damned" or "I'll be damned"?
In American usage, companies are generally considered to be singular nouns. But the BBC is, err, I mean the bbc are British, therfore they should be considered a plural noun, as per British usage.
You make it sound like the DRM in iTMS was all Apple's idea. Guess what? The labels required it. All Apple did was say "this DRM format is ours and ours only". They never prevented you from playing un-DRMed music. Nor did they default to ripping CDs in DRM format like (IIRC) Windows Media Player did. Apple took longer to remove DRM music than other music stores simply because they had to wait for existing contracts to expire.
Are you so sure that Apple's plan was to make themselves a (pseudo-) monopoly through their DRM? Or maybe the plan all along was to make the DRM distasteful enough for the labels that eventually they would give it up?
I hear he'll eat anything.
This could be made moot by providing a means for copyright renewals on a sliding scale. Then the companies that care enough about certain properties to bri...er, lobby Congress into extending the limit every time Steamboat Willie almost becomes public domain will be able to keep them copyrighted. It doesn't even have to be a lot of money for decades worth of renewals, it just has to be an effort by the copyright owner. Even every ten years after the first twenty or thirty should be often enough.
(Of course a work going into public domain also shouldn't mean that every element of that work becomes public domain. Mickey Mouse should still be a trademark no matter the status of Steamboat Willie.)
It's mostly because Xbox hardware is a piece of crap that dies easily. And the Japanese don't take that kind of shit lightly, especially when a company tries to hide he magnitude of the problem.
It doesn't help any that in Japanese culture, the "X" symbol indicates failure, and there is also a kanji with an "X" in a box (unicode 51F6) that means "bad luck" and "disaster".
Except if Hollywood did it, they would make the CGI so shiny as if to say "HEY YOU PUDS IN THE AUDIENCE LOOK AT MY AWESOME CGI YOU CAN EVEN SEE THE PENIS ON THIS ROBOT", and not hidden it behind a bunch of fog.
Huckabee is getting flak because one man he let out early has shot and killed 4 police officers.
And what you said there that I bolded is a big part of his problem. He didn't "let him out". The Arkansas governor doesn't even have the power to just let someone out of prison. He commuted the sentence from 100+ years to forty-something years. That made him eligible for parole, which let someone else let him out due to assorted fuckups (and nobody opposing his parole hearings).
...and thus the circle is complete.
And FYI, Galaxy Quest, while a genre parody, was mostly based on the cliches of Star Trek and its fandom. And especially its actors.
Actually, that's the point where hydrogen (via electrolysis) becomes a viable fuel. The problem of storing hydrogen on the vehicle with enough density will probably be easier than that of battery energy density.
Weather is not climate. Many weather patterns are driven by oceanic oscillations. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes Alaska to be warm and cool on a sixty-year cycle, with the current warm phase placed just right for the AGW types to show polar bears stuck on ice floes.
I live in Texas, where El Nino/La Nina can flip the weather suddenly from drought to flood. In fact, that happened just this year, where about two months ago, central Texas went from a drought and heat wave to sufficient rain that I've barely had a good chance to mow the back lawn since it started. There is a prediction of snow tomorrow, so I plan to mow the lawn this afternoon in 40F temperatures, below normal here in December. At least the drought killed off a patch of some nasty clump grass that I had been trying to get rid of for years.
I heard years ago about the weather in the Australian outback. A given area could be all nice for farming for years, then once farmers had time to settle in, bam, there's a ten year drought. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this could happen to other parts of Australia every now and then. This sounds very much like there are some ocean current oscillations that affect precipitation there. Once they flip back, the rain will return. I haven't heard any of these named, so maybe you folks need to learn more about what's going on in the southern hemisphere oceans.