Imagine a cable running from the top of a 50 km tower into geo-stationary Earth orbit. Travelling on the cable is made through electromagnetic propulsion. Nasa is considering a 50 years timeframe for the space elevator to become real.
Maybe I'll go in space after all.
the newton is dead, you know.
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
Yes apple made the newton but they stopped it what seems a long time ago. So now, they are not making a pda (obviously, the post is fake). So my IF in "However, I don't know what they will invent IF apple really makes a pda one day." remains.
It's the same thing evey quarter, pffffff. Long live apple and their fanatics, they add a bit of fun to this serious world. However, I don't know what they will invent IF apple really makes a pda one day.
who manipulates the market ?
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
You can't retain the ability to arbitrarily manipulate commerce like that and expect a powerful united economy to rival the USA.
I agree with you that one must work to earn living but when you are homeless, very poor or ill, it is very hard or impossible to get a job so that even the most decided person would fail.
I saw the other day someone in Paris who was too cold to even walk. What are you supposed to tell him ? Hey get a job ? Silly. Fortunately, an ambulance came and took charge of him regardless he had no credit card.
My point is that some people fail in our societies (their fault or not) and it is a duty of those societies to help them overcome their failures, espescially when the society is rich enough to do it.
Giving money away to the lazy is not the solution, of course but do not let the opportunists hide the benefits of a system.
The prices are as free in EU than in US. What is not allowed is to fool customers by setting different prices in and in local currency. This was enforced in some places by freezing the prices for a limited time. You must see it as a very exceptional practice. In other places, the retailers themselves chose to freeze prices to keep the trust of their customers.
Don't forget that in a free market, there are rules anyway so that the freedom of everyone (not only the merchants but also the customers) is real. That is why there are anti-trust laws for example. And in that case, it seems that the US are not very good at keeping their market free (from microsoft monopoly, I mean).
To be more precise, I would say that the US are very good at enduring the freedom of those who have the most money or weapons but not for the poors or the weaks.
Re:UBE = spam [Re:How ... what is and isn't spam?]
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 2
This is targeted advertising and if the email is on your site then I think it's legitimate...
Do not post your email on a website or in newsgroups.
Use a separate email address for subscribing to web sites. If that email gets spammed, change your email on web sites you want to continue to use, delete your second email and create a new one.
Use 2 emails, one for your job and one for your private use. That way, you won't get porn or stupid jokes at your job and your company won't monitor your private emails.
Never reply to a spam. If you have to unsubscribe, do it on the web.
If you want to put your email on the web or in newsgroups or on any system that can be digitally scanned for emails, disguise your email so that only a human can read it. Example myname@isp.com becomes myname(AT)isp(DOT)com.
Use a tool for filtering your incoming email.
Never forward an email chain letter. They are all scams. If you absolutely want to forward one, check the information before.
If you have subscribed to mailing-lists, check or ask if it is indexed on the web and if your email is diclosed there. Ask for removal or dedicate another email to that list that you will delete/change when it gets spammed.
If you have time, read the headers of spam emaiks and complain to the ISP that the spammer used.
There are many tools and advice on the web:
abuse.net cauce
UBE = spam [Re:How ... what is and isn't spam?]
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 2
Spam is better described as UBE : Unsolicited Bulk Email.
Unsolicited : you have not opted in to receive that kind of information or never had a contact with the sender. The problem is when you have had a previous relationship with a company and that company sends you advertisement. My opinion is that they should be allowed to send you ONE ad and make the removal of your email in their database easy with that ad.
Bulk : email is sent in large quantities, to many people. The question is, how did they get your email ? Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists), but if your email is public (web, news) then no one can be forbidden to send you an email !
Note that all UBE is not commercial, it could be a virus or a bad joke.
Considering annoying emails from friends and relatives, that is a very different problem, I think, that should not be mixed with UBE.
I am gonna write a template email to complain to the companies who hope to sell products with those ads. It will be something like :
Dear sir, madam,
I recently viewed an advertisement for your product XXX on the site YYY. This advertisement was very annoying and obtrusive and, although I support advertisement, I feel that annoying your customers is NOT a good commercial practice.
Therefore, as you chose to annoy me, I choose to boycott your products. I will also send an email to the 278 friends in my address book calling them to do the same. I will also post a call to boycott your products on my weblog.
...
I will only do this to the most annoying ads so that it has a real value.
Reading the article, I have to give credit to the way Salon deal with their readers.
1. Even the free site is not overwhelmed by ads like those flash based ones that run around the page on wired, or those poping pages on yahoo.
2. The price for the site is really low, compared to the price you would pay for a daily newspaper. They understood that internet users CAN pay for content but at a reasonable price.
3. They give premium content, not only ads-free stories.
This is ridiculous. I am surprised that so many slashdot readers agree with the idea of a court FORCING a software company to develop a program.
All software developers who read slashdot, how would you react if you were FORCED to make your program do something, even if you are guilty somewhere ?
And even if it was to be done, why only linux ? Why not for AIX, Amoeba, AtheOS, BeOS,... ok I stop here, you see the point.
As much as I hate m$, I would never stand for that idea.
The motivation is right anyway : if I have to use office, I have to use windows or mac. This situation is anti-competitive for the OSes that do not run office. But instead of FORCING m$ to MAKE office for linux, I think the solution is FORCING m$ to OPEN the windows APIs or I don't know what so that ANY m$ program can run on linux with a proper API translator or something.
the same way you can run linux on an INTEL or AMD cpu with an IBM or QUANTUM hard-drive, you should be able to run a windows program on ANY os (provided of course that the os developers have coded an interface or something, which can be a terrible task).
a new kind of digital citizen,
[empowered by all the information the Net would bring him by the Net's distributed architecture. The digital citizen would be smart, civil and rational, outgrowing labels like "liberal" or "conservative", engaged in civics, technology, business and government; transcending dogma and cant.],
that tool is education. The internet can be a great chance for education but it's not a starting point, the human transmission of knowledge is still a must. We are not computers, we are humans. Open mindness does not come de facto with an open network but has to be learnt by human ways (at least for now).
Societies and individuals who invest massively and intelligently in education are and will be the most successful ones.
Unfortunately, those two services are not what a music enthusiast expects : e-compil is pure crap (at this time), windows only, very limited choice. emusic is better. The only problem is that they only have the music that the big bussiness has left them and that is sure not enough for a music fan : we choose music we like, not music produced by X or Y.
We'll see what pressplay and musicnet will offer but I praise you to never, never commit to a service that use windows media. Microsoft has already a insane grip on the computing world, don't let it come to the music world.
It gets more and more difficult to get music.
on
Rent Music Over the Net
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The great advantage of the internet is that we can have a huge content available for a little (distribution) price. With napster, we typed the name of an artist and had a lot of content from that artist. Now, it's more and more difficult to hear the music we like. The street stores can't have everything. We can buy a CD online but we have to wait and of course, we have to buy the whole cd.
The music distributors are in fact putting restrictions on what we can hear. They select what we have to hear, and how to hear it (windows media player, not on a cd, not on a portable device, not if your rental expires) and then promote and distribute it. It is well known that independent distributors can't survive in front of the big ones. No wonder the EU commission is planning a lawsuit.
Smaller artists are getting screwed because they can't get to their public as easily as they could with the internet.
If you want to support them, go to their concerts.
Something any US citizen can do tomorr... NO today
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is not necessary to go abroad to make something useful for the world.
As you live in a democracy, you can encourage the people you voted for to change some politics that the USA have and that are the source of a lot of pain in the poor countries.
The first things that come to my mind are the number of international treaties that the USA have not signed :
1. the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
2. the Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC). All countries except for the United States and Somalia have ratified it.
NOTE : Don't get me wrong, I am not your basic anti-US socialist european. In the numerous talks I had with people after the 11th september, I was always blaming those who said "It's their fault ! Good for them". I was (am) also defending the action against the taliban (except for the use of some nasty bombs).
But, being a supporter of the US must not hide that it's a BIG SHAME to have not signed, ratified and applied those treaties at least !
PS : sorry if some info is outdated, do not hesitate to notify me.
A friend of mine has left Europe for Burundi this september. He enrolled with doctors without borders. He is absolutely not a doctor but a computer engineer (we were together at the university). His job will not mainly be computer oriented but he will be supporting the doctors, organizing transports, communications, I don't know exactly in fact !
If you want to know more, you can send me an email and I will forward it to him.
You do not seem to realize the success that sms has in Europe. If we follow you, why send an email when you can call the person on a phone ? Ridiculous. I am not an avid sms user but I see it can be useful in many situations :
- If you cannot talk or do not want to talk, in a lecture for example, you can still type.
- If you want to send a phone number or a complex address, it is easier for the receiver to read it than to have to write it when you talk.
- You can reuse the same message as many times as you want.
- You can type a message and send it later.
- If the network is poor and audio not working, sms still works. (I only use sms with why brother, the antenna of his phone is broken). It even saved a man's life in England.
- With sms, you can see the number of the sender and ignore it.
- you can receive personal news and services that way.
- you can have your email forwarded etc.
- etc.
Finally if you find a place where 802.11b works everywhere with phones as cheap as current ones, I will go live there !
I have already discovered a bug in the old and rather basic nokia 3210 [see below]. I can't imagine how many of these there will be in a more complex phone like the nokia 7650. A sms worm anyone ?
I think some bugs are inevitable but I hope the developers will pay more attention to the the sofware they design than Bill Gates did in the early PC years - and even in the not early years ! And those new combined phone/pockeptPC will be fun to hack I bet.
But I don't think the users are ready to accept too many bugs in a mobile phone/pda like they did with the windows OS.
Responsability is not only on the shoulders of developers. A friend of mine crashed his visor and lost all the data he had difficultly typed in. He had no backup ! So there will be a lot of work to make the users more aware of security concerns about the digital tools.
I hope the laws will also be appropriate to this new digital era. No way am I gonna tolerate sms spam !
The nokia 3210 bug :
When you type a message, then want to send it but go back to the typing screen before entering the phone number of the recipient, the T9 completion system is messed up : if you want to change a word, it doesn't use the one you have selected.
from your comment :
VCRs were supposed to be the end of movie theatres, Photocopy machines were supposed to be the end of books
Yeah, and books were supposed to be the end of people stupidity. It didn't succeed.
Humour aside, any tool that gives more power to the average people regarding the way they use information is a progress. Books - printing, in fact - mark the start of the renaissance, this computing age is the start of God knows what.
From the text :
[...]
Content is selected by placing a smart 'pebble' into the bedside pocket. Each pebble corresponds to a different topic or theme. For example, a 'cloud' pebble produces content related to clouds [...]
Pebbles can also contain games, such as ping-pong, which will only be revealed when a particular combination of sleeping positions has been assumed. Once the positions have been discovered and the game is revealed, the couple can activate the game at any time [...]
Need I say more about other games than ping pong ? Your personal kamasuta director is now alive !
Once you use the logitech optical wireless mouse, you won't ever want to go back using another mouse. Price is 65 dolls on thinkgeek but you can find cheaper.
Also don't forget a battery charger and another set of batteries as this mouse eats them FAST.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a cable running from the top of a 50 km tower into geo-stationary Earth orbit. Travelling on the cable is made through electromagnetic propulsion. Nasa is considering a 50 years timeframe for the space elevator to become real.
Maybe I'll go in space after all.
Yes apple made the newton but they stopped it what seems a long time ago. So now, they are not making a pda (obviously, the post is fake). So my IF in "However, I don't know what they will invent IF apple really makes a pda one day." remains.
It's the same thing evey quarter, pffffff. Long live apple and their fanatics, they add a bit of fun to this serious world. However, I don't know what they will invent IF apple really makes a pda one day.
You can't retain the ability to arbitrarily manipulate commerce like that and expect a powerful united economy to rival the USA.
9 .html
Excuse me but if the US are so strong and so keen to enforce free commerce, why do they tax 20% steel imports ?
http://www.uksteel.org.uk/nw73.htm
http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/speeches/ct-dg02259
I agree with you that one must work to earn living but when you are homeless, very poor or ill, it is very hard or impossible to get a job so that even the most decided person would fail.
I saw the other day someone in Paris who was too cold to even walk. What are you supposed to tell him ? Hey get a job ? Silly. Fortunately, an ambulance came and took charge of him regardless he had no credit card.
My point is that some people fail in our societies (their fault or not) and it is a duty of those societies to help them overcome their failures, espescially when the society is rich enough to do it.
Giving money away to the lazy is not the solution, of course but do not let the opportunists hide the benefits of a system.
The prices are as free in EU than in US. What is not allowed is to fool customers by setting different prices in and in local currency. This was enforced in some places by freezing the prices for a limited time. You must see it as a very exceptional practice. In other places, the retailers themselves chose to freeze prices to keep the trust of their customers.
Don't forget that in a free market, there are rules anyway so that the freedom of everyone (not only the merchants but also the customers) is real. That is why there are anti-trust laws for example. And in that case, it seems that the US are not very good at keeping their market free (from microsoft monopoly, I mean).
To be more precise, I would say that the US are very good at enduring the freedom of those who have the most money or weapons but not for the poors or the weaks.
This is targeted advertising and if the email is on your site then I think it's legitimate ...
abuse.net
cauce
Updates to this list are in my journal.
Spam is better described as UBE : Unsolicited Bulk Email.
Unsolicited : you have not opted in to receive that kind of information or never had a contact with the sender. The problem is when you have had a previous relationship with a company and that company sends you advertisement. My opinion is that they should be allowed to send you ONE ad and make the removal of your email in their database easy with that ad.
Bulk : email is sent in large quantities, to many people. The question is, how did they get your email ? Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists), but if your email is public (web, news) then no one can be forbidden to send you an email !
Note that all UBE is not commercial, it could be a virus or a bad joke.
Considering annoying emails from friends and relatives, that is a very different problem, I think, that should not be mixed with UBE.
That would be because the 3 laws of robotics don't actually contain any new words, just a bunch of ones the OED already has.
I also thought that but the list contains Clarke laws and Sturgeon law, that's what motivated my post.
I was surprised that Asimov's three laws of robotics were not included in the list. They had such an impact on future s-f stories about robots or A.I.
Dan Simmons even coined the word asimotif (quote from the french edition) in his book "Endymion".
For those who have never heard of these laws, here they are :
The 1940 Laws of Robotics
First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law:
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
If you want to see how Asimov dealt with these, I suggest reading "I, Robot", a little old but still interesting.
Yes those ads are obtrusive and annoying.
I am gonna write a template email to complain to the companies who hope to sell products with those ads. It will be something like :
Dear sir, madam,
I recently viewed an advertisement for your product XXX on the site YYY. This advertisement was very annoying and obtrusive and, although I support advertisement, I feel that annoying your customers is NOT a good commercial practice.
Therefore, as you chose to annoy me, I choose to boycott your products. I will also send an email to the 278 friends in my address book calling them to do the same. I will also post a call to boycott your products on my weblog.
...
I will only do this to the most annoying ads so that it has a real value.
What do they think ? That we are sheep ?
This month, Salon launched a monthly subscription program for 6$.
Reading the article, I have to give credit to the way Salon deal with their readers.
1. Even the free site is not overwhelmed by ads like those flash based ones that run around the page on wired, or those poping pages on yahoo.
2. The price for the site is really low, compared to the price you would pay for a daily newspaper. They understood that internet users CAN pay for content but at a reasonable price.
3. They give premium content, not only ads-free stories.
Thumbs up, Salon.
This is ridiculous. I am surprised that so many slashdot readers agree with the idea of a court FORCING a software company to develop a program.
... ok I stop here, you see the point.
All software developers who read slashdot, how would you react if you were FORCED to make your program do something, even if you are guilty somewhere ?
And even if it was to be done, why only linux ? Why not for AIX, Amoeba, AtheOS, BeOS,
As much as I hate m$, I would never stand for that idea.
The motivation is right anyway : if I have to use office, I have to use windows or mac. This situation is anti-competitive for the OSes that do not run office. But instead of FORCING m$ to MAKE office for linux, I think the solution is FORCING m$ to OPEN the windows APIs or I don't know what so that ANY m$ program can run on linux with a proper API translator or something.
the same way you can run linux on an INTEL or AMD cpu with an IBM or QUANTUM hard-drive, you should be able to run a windows program on ANY os (provided of course that the os developers have coded an interface or something, which can be a terrible task).
Internet or not, the best tool for a making
a new kind of digital citizen,
[empowered by all the information the Net would bring him by the Net's distributed architecture. The digital citizen would be smart, civil and rational, outgrowing labels like "liberal" or "conservative", engaged in civics, technology, business and government; transcending dogma and cant.],
that tool is education. The internet can be a great chance for education but it's not a starting point, the human transmission of knowledge is still a must. We are not computers, we are humans. Open mindness does not come de facto with an open network but has to be learnt by human ways (at least for now).
Societies and individuals who invest massively and intelligently in education are and will be the most successful ones.
There are already some working sites for downloading music with a monthly fee. I will here analyze two of them :
1 e-compil (universal)
- prices : 8 for 10 downloads or 15.5 for 20 downloads (per month, min. 6 month)
- audio format : windows media ! quality unknown
- choice : ridiculously small, few artists, only one or two song per artist. (Example : only 45 titles in the techno/dance category !)
- ability to transfer songs to a portable device : limited, you have to use microsoft active sync.
- interface : minimum
- artists retribution : unknown
- no search engine
- url : http://www.e-compil.fr/
2 emusic
- prices : 14.99$ a month (3month) or 9.99$ (12 month min.), unlimited download
- audio format : mp3
- choice : large number of artists but many of them obscure; many full albums.
- ability to transfer files : maximum, they trust the customer.
- interface : good
- Artists are paid per download.
- url : http://www.emusic.com/
Conclusion
Unfortunately, those two services are not what a music enthusiast expects : e-compil is pure crap (at this time), windows only, very limited choice. emusic is better. The only problem is that they only have the music that the big bussiness has left them and that is sure not enough for a music fan : we choose music we like, not music produced by X or Y.
We'll see what pressplay and musicnet will offer but I praise you to never, never commit to a service that use windows media. Microsoft has already a insane grip on the computing world, don't let it come to the music world.
The great advantage of the internet is that we can have a huge content available for a little (distribution) price. With napster, we typed the name of an artist and had a lot of content from that artist. Now, it's more and more difficult to hear the music we like. The street stores can't have everything. We can buy a CD online but we have to wait and of course, we have to buy the whole cd.
The music distributors are in fact putting restrictions on what we can hear. They select what we have to hear, and how to hear it (windows media player, not on a cd, not on a portable device, not if your rental expires) and then promote and distribute it. It is well known that independent distributors can't survive in front of the big ones. No wonder the EU commission is planning a lawsuit.
Smaller artists are getting screwed because they can't get to their public as easily as they could with the internet.
If you want to support them, go to their concerts.
It is not necessary to go abroad to make something useful for the world.
As you live in a democracy, you can encourage the people you voted for to change some politics that the USA have and that are the source of a lot of pain in the poor countries.
The first things that come to my mind are the number of international treaties that the USA have not signed :
1. the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
2. the Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC). All countries except for the United States and Somalia have ratified it.
3. the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
4. the ban on antipersonnel landmines (the Ottawa Treaty)
5. the Kyoto Protocol
6. the Law of the Sea Treaty
All those treaties, if signed and applied, can make the world a better place for poor citizens of poor countries.
There are also a number of treaties thatthe US has stripped to signe them.
NOTE : Don't get me wrong, I am not your basic anti-US socialist european. In the numerous talks I had with people after the 11th september, I was always blaming those who said "It's their fault ! Good for them". I was (am) also defending the action against the taliban (except for the use of some nasty bombs).
But, being a supporter of the US must not hide that it's a BIG SHAME to have not signed, ratified and applied those treaties at least !
PS : sorry if some info is outdated, do not hesitate to notify me.
A friend of mine has left Europe for Burundi this september. He enrolled with doctors without borders. He is absolutely not a doctor but a computer engineer (we were together at the university). His job will not mainly be computer oriented but he will be supporting the doctors, organizing transports, communications, I don't know exactly in fact !
If you want to know more, you can send me an email and I will forward it to him.
You do not seem to realize the success that sms has in Europe. If we follow you, why send an email when you can call the person on a phone ? Ridiculous. I am not an avid sms user but I see it can be useful in many situations :
- If you cannot talk or do not want to talk, in a lecture for example, you can still type.
- If you want to send a phone number or a complex address, it is easier for the receiver to read it than to have to write it when you talk.
- You can reuse the same message as many times as you want.
- You can type a message and send it later.
- If the network is poor and audio not working, sms still works. (I only use sms with why brother, the antenna of his phone is broken). It even saved a man's life in England.
- With sms, you can see the number of the sender and ignore it.
- you can receive personal news and services that way.
- you can have your email forwarded etc.
- etc.
Finally if you find a place where 802.11b works everywhere with phones as cheap as current ones, I will go live there !
I have already discovered a bug in the old and rather basic nokia 3210 [see below]. I can't imagine how many of these there will be in a more complex phone like the nokia 7650. A sms worm anyone ?
I think some bugs are inevitable but I hope the developers will pay more attention to the the sofware they design than Bill Gates did in the early PC years - and even in the not early years ! And those new combined phone/pockeptPC will be fun to hack I bet.
But I don't think the users are ready to accept too many bugs in a mobile phone/pda like they did with the windows OS.
Responsability is not only on the shoulders of developers. A friend of mine crashed his visor and lost all the data he had difficultly typed in. He had no backup ! So there will be a lot of work to make the users more aware of security concerns about the digital tools.
I hope the laws will also be appropriate to this new digital era. No way am I gonna tolerate sms spam !
The nokia 3210 bug :
When you type a message, then want to send it but go back to the typing screen before entering the phone number of the recipient, the T9 completion system is messed up : if you want to change a word, it doesn't use the one you have selected.
from your comment :
VCRs were supposed to be the end of movie theatres, Photocopy machines were supposed to be the end of books
Yeah, and books were supposed to be the end of people stupidity. It didn't succeed.
Humour aside, any tool that gives more power to the average people regarding the way they use information is a progress. Books - printing, in fact - mark the start of the renaissance, this computing age is the start of God knows what.
From the text :
[...]
Content is selected by placing a smart 'pebble' into the bedside pocket. Each pebble corresponds to a different topic or theme. For example, a 'cloud' pebble produces content related to clouds
[...]
Pebbles can also contain games, such as ping-pong, which will only be revealed when a particular combination of sleeping positions has been assumed. Once the positions have been discovered and the game is revealed, the couple can activate the game at any time
[...]
Need I say more about other games than ping pong ? Your personal kamasuta director is now alive !
Once you use the logitech optical wireless mouse, you won't ever want to go back using another mouse. Price is 65 dolls on thinkgeek but you can find cheaper.
Also don't forget a battery charger and another set of batteries as this mouse eats them FAST.
2. XP is for eXPires
Microsoft has invented the software that eXPires as the customer can only install the software a certain number of times.
> There is no limit to the number of times you can install. Just as long as you're not installing it on different computers every time.
Wow, looks like I messed up my mind with that. Anyway it still expires but later.