To be fair, who else would conduct the research?
I know it has become the norm to jump on the evil bias of large corporations but perhaps it's worth stopping for a moment to think about it.
If you're totally unrelated to the field, why would you bother to pay to conduct the research? Certainly, the Irish Llama Farming Federation may be completely unbiased but they also have absolutely no reason to pay for it.
Universities generally get flagged as being biased because they get paid by the large companies to conduct the research. Unfortunately, that's the business model of universities - perform research for cash or perform research to gain reputation so the next load of research will get cash. Much as it is nice to believe universities simply do research because it's for the good of mankind, the vast majority of it has to be paid for.
So, that leaves companies involved in the industry either doing the research themselves or paying others to as they're the only ones with enough of an interest to pay for it. What it all comes down to is there's no source that finds the research worth paying for that doesn't have some kind of a vested interest.
But does that really imply a bias? Why did DoubleClick and MSN conduct the research? The alleged bias is that they want to sell annoying adverts. Unfortunately, that's missing the point.
They want to sell [stuff] with advertising. If the most efficient means turns out to be paying Cowboy Neal to come and rub your back while whispering soothing messages - they want to know that so they can do it. This research was done to find out what pays them best - annoying ads - then they released that information because it gets people talking about them (more advertising).
There is plenty of bias in the world, certainly. A large part of it sits right here, moderating OhMyGodItsBias claims up to fives (must remember that for Karma Whoring). It's worth stopping and thinking though - in many cases big companies just do stuff because they want to find out an answer and make money from it, not because they want their existing answers confirmed and somehow justified.
All the article actually says is that content providers (publishers) don't want libraries to give away the perfect copies of their work, that they would normally charge for, for free. I know, try and keep the shocked gasps down in the back there.
As already pointed out, this doesn't say anything whatsoever about traditional books.
The concept is that if publishers offer digital media and that media is freely duplicatable, then potentially libraries could become a means for people to avoid paying for the service. They just don't want libraries to become the book equivalent of Napster.
If everyone'd stop getting in to a flap, it's actually not that serious... If a digital book is distributed as a CD, disc, memory card, secure file, whatever, with adequate copy protection, this isn't even an issue - it still goes out to one user at a time and then the user hands it back.
Yes, potentially publishers may be stupid enough to distribute via a totally unsecure medium (as happened with CDs) but realistically, they're watching the music industry and holding back until they have secure systems themselves.
So, the whole flap is that libraries might become digital book Napsters if publishers start publishing without security. As libraries already tend to carry music and haven't turned in to Napster clones, and as digital publishing is some way behind digital music, it's unlikely to become an issue anyway.
And it still doesn't effect the traditional model of libraries anyway - just in case anyone's still missed that point.
Global Warming unfortunately carries with it the assumption that "the earth must get hotter or it isn't happening." After all, it's warming, right?
Maybe Global Climate Change is a better term. Even as the earth does get warmer, a degree or so either way isn't something we're really going to notice - daily variations tend to be much greater anyway. What we do notice is the weather systems getting screwed up as a result of the small rises knocking the established systems out of whack.
Over the last year or so, we've had the atlantic weather systems reverse themselves; a weather front set itself up over Europe, all summer long, so the north didn't get a summer and the south stayed in the 100s (40s in C); the Mississippi has taken to flooding regularly; Southern California, as opposed to its usual 5 days of rain hardly stopped raining from January through March; and then there's South America that seems to go from one weather related disaster to another.
I'm sure a load of people who know the subject far better than I [or at the very least are convinced they do] can offer other explanations. All I'm attempting to show is that Global Warming [assuming it exists] wouldn't be something that's visible by "Oh cool, extra beach days," but by that extra degree or two screwing up the weather in general.
This is exactly the same sort of false reasoning the gun lobby attempts to use to justify no controls on guns. It's an emotive but ultimately flawed argument here just as it is elsewhere.
The argument is that if you allow one change to be made against something that is unacceptable then you will get itterative changes until nothing is left.
The reality is that any democracy is an equilibrium. Sure, it's not a totally stable one, but it'll still form an equilibrium. Start prohibiting a given right and you'll get support, maybe even go passed the reasonable point but then the counter movement will start getting support and it'll start to swing back towards the 'acceptable' balance point. It won't carry on swinging until it falls off the far end of the scale. Sure, not everyone will get what they want but it will vary roughly around the average acceptable point.
Take a look at smoking which people tried making the same claims for. Smoking isn't illegal. Yes, it's now largely illegal to do the things that make others suffer. Yes, there are some people pushing for it to be completely illegal. There are also growing numbers pushing back against it going any further because it's generally felt that it has gone far enough. California, probably the most anti-smoking state, has commercials all over the radio whinging on about smoking and the end result is that people are so sick of holier than thou anti smokers that their support is dwindling and the pace of change has all but slowed to a halt. That's the point - you reach an equilibrium.
If you try add a tax to SUVs, you'll probably get it supported (though there're so many SUV drivers around I wouldn't guarantee it). If you subsequently tried to ban them, yeah, you may even get that through (especially as the issue may have gained public support by that point). Next you'd try banning cars, only you'd find you've lost public support as they're judged way too useful a concept. Sure you'd end up with them controlled more but not banned. Take a look at the most environmentally active nations on earth - have any of them banned cars? Of course not. So, now we're going to ban power generation of any type, farming and all the rest of it? Don't be ridiculous.
I'm sorry, it's a nice emotive argument to make, and it convinces a lot of people with even relatively reasonable intellects, but it's also just not true. Mind you, everyone has the right to spout crap and try and get people to believe them. That's part of the equilibrium that's democracy too - you may even get support for a while until people start to realise and it too swings back against you.
All this talk of gambling addictions, I'm concerned I may have a slashdot addiction when the first thing that comes in to my head is...
"I wonder if I could write a PHP script that analyses the topic of each new subject then generates a karmawhoring reply for me?"
Definitely time to go cold turkey. I'll just read one more story before I go.....
Unfortunately, legal systems and penalties rarely have much to do with common sense.
There was the famous case of a guy in Britain who was sentenced more stiffly for dropping a crisps (chips) packet in front of a police officer and refusing to pick it up than the guy a few courts down who was found guilty of a sexual assault but managed to avoid jail time.
Then there is the side of the publicity value. If Georgia sued him sanely, they'd have a pointless day in court, persecuting some guy who's not in a position to repeat it. Sue him to hell and back and it'll get on the news, it'll be discussed in every IT dept tied in Georgia and they'll have all of their admins desperately tidying up their systems for the cost of filing a lawsuit. It's not right, it's not fair, but it certainly makes good business sense.
The Vomit Comet - NASA's zero-g training aircraft is what most of us see as being the traditional way of getting genuine zero-g footage. Unfortunately, it turns out that NASA isn't too friendly to film makers wanting to use it (apparently Apollo 13 is the only one to have been allowed to so far). There is a commercial venture being set up by some ex NASA folks but they have been been coming up against a huge amount of resistance.
There is a long article by Penn Jillette (the talking half of Penn and Teller) here. More than just an article on the technology, it talks about how it really feels far better than anything I've seen before.
Besides, it involves fat guys and pneumatic blondes stripping in zero-g along with Billy from ZZ top and a $250,000 guitar - if that doesn't appeal to nerds, I don't know what does.
"the problem with marijuana is that it leads to fucking carpentry"
Well, that explains Jesus then...
"Shit man, like these fish, they're so totally huge, they could feed like five thousand."
"Nah, screw that dude, I feel so light I bet I could walk across that water over there, then float away on a cloud!"
"Yeah bro, I dig what you're saying. All these glowing joints [later recorded as coals] in our mouths and it feels like I can understand every language there ever was!"
In the now lost final book of the new testament, they went on to talk interminably about Star Wars as all stoners seem to do, thinking their every word pure genius. Understandably, when they came down, they realised how stupid it was and destroyed it.
To get the developer downloads, you need a passport. A week ago, it was noticed that part of the EULA binds you to having to download any MS updates. Does this imply that more than just recieving special services, to develop with MS tools at all you now have to have a passport.
So, does this mean that Microsoft tools are now no longer on sale to... well basically any state or nation who won't bend over the Microsoft way? And is this Microsoft's way of punishing those places for their terribly naughtiness or a case of Microsoft putting so many policies in to effect they've just accidently closed themselves off to what's starting to look like the majority of code developing states and nations?
I remember trying to fly cheap kites as a kid, fifteen years ago - it wasn't a very successful pastime. The ones I fly these days have hemp cored carbon fibre poles and all kinds of high tech fabrics which is what makes them so much easier to fly.
Even with the best will in the world, I'm kind of curious how the Egyptians, with their technology, could have got a kite of that size to stay together in thirty mile an hour winds, let alone fly in any controlled fashion. And then have the strength to lift a several hundred ton obelisk?
As Willeke Wendrich, associate professor of Egyptian archeology at the University of California, Los Angeles said in the article, "The kite project seems like a lot of fun, but it doesn't prove the pyramids were built that way."
It is a really cool geek achievement and certainly a lot of fun, but you have to wonder how much would be possible without modern materials?
I guess I'll just go back to believing in the entirely more reasonable Silent Bob and his Jedi Mind Trick moving the stones. "Fly fat boy, fly."
Just checking, now they're making a profit, when do we all officially start hating RedHat? I do so hate to get left behind on these things.
You're actually suggesting that that we compare numbers from a smallish, niche-market company that has been in business for 5 years with those of a vicious, multinational, multi-billion dollar, anticompetitive monopolist that has been in business for 20 years?
So, about 15 more years then? Remember Microsoft was the cool, quirky, little company in a niche market (Home OSs) that stood up to the big imperialist (making Windows on their own, not for IBM).
Do you remember what has happened to the rest of Microsoft's competitors over the past 20 years? They've been either acquired by The Beast, run out of business by The Beast, or beaten so badly into submission by The Beast that they've had to seek government protection. The only real exceptions to this are companies who were already multinational multibillion dollar companies before they began competing with Microsoft.
How many Linux distributors have gone out of business over the last year? How many more will do over the next 15 years (see above) as RedHat becomes the profitable option for investors and the standard one as paranoid executives are only able to feel safe with "the one that makes a profit and will be around to support us"?
As for RedHat not forcing competitors out the way MS did, how long were all the other DOS flavours around for?
A large part of what Microsoft's done, whether we like it or not, is basically act like a large successful business. In a market place where home users and unimaginative senior management want 'the only option', competitors are going to fall by the way. That's negative in the long term but ultimately the product of consumer behaviour. Even in a group like slashdot, how many of you are running a non-MS office suite as your primary suite? At a guess, most of us run MS Office, complain about it endlessly, but still use it.
Yes, RedHat's not doing anything particularly dark and evil (in the way we see MS) yet. How long before natural selection starts to take over, we start installing RedHat because we know it's the most profitable and gets the most investment? How long before, as a profitable company, the shareholders force in a management team that isn't quite so libertarian and starts to figure out ways to corner the market rather than innovate?
I dislike Microsoft's monopoly as much as most people. I just get the impression it's not so much Microsoft being evil as playing well in a system that's set up to ultimately go in a way we don't like. Look at the TelCo industry and the behaviour of the baby Bell monopoly - it's not just IT. At the moment, we like RedHat as they're the little innocent guys but will we continue to see them that way when they become the big innocent guys, then the big maybe not so innocent guys, etc.? Is the problem really in the companies or the system they exist in?
Remember Bill Gates runs a huge charitable foundation that's apparently funded minority scholarships for the next 20 years. View it negatively and, sure, it's a ploy. View it positively though and he's actually trying to do some good with the result of his huge corp. OK, so no one believes that. And what'll happen in ten years if RedHat becomes the only real Linux option? Will we still see their adherance to open source as positive or will it be "Look at the way Red Hat managed to corrupt open source in to a monopoly!"?
So, congratulations to Red Hat for turning a profit. You're currently the little guys and we love you. Just don't make the mistake of continuing to be too successful or we'll have to start seeing the negatives and all learn to hate you.
It has often been quoted that there are 7(?) original stories and everything else is simply a variation of those core themes.
With a desire to see the plagarism, just about any story told can be accused of being heavily copied from an existing one - often without the script writers even being aware of the orginals existence. Take a look at the way, every time Spielberg makes a movie, several people sue him for stealing their ideas (kind of curious how he manages to keep copying the majority of his movie from several places at once).
The way things are going, I wonder how long it'll be before scriptwriting follows the original PC cloning and those working on it are kept in closed environments where the companies can prove they never saw anything from the outside?
Percent of Bipolar people that make up the 1% of total population with Bipolar = ~97%
Percent of people in set A that make up set A? ~97% is fairly accurate, only about 3% off. I would imagine it's fairly difficult for the 1% of the total population with bipolar to be made up with anything but people with bipolar.
Not, of course, that I'm having fun with the numbers of someone who was having fun with the numbers.:)
I've got a scary feeling this is going to turn television in to something like playing the Sims:
"Have you seen the cool Bud frogs advert yet?"
"No?"
"Oh, your ratings must be off. What're your stats?"
"Chat Shows 3, Documentaries 4, Home Shopping 1, News 1, SciFi 5, Soap Operas 2"
"Oh, well that's obviously it, you need to get your Chat Shows up to a 4 and your Documentaries below 2 before you have any chance."
"But there's that cool Evils Of Microsoft documentary on tonight!"
"Too bad, you're watching Springer for double chat show points unless you want to miss the talking frogs."
While you're going through all that, you'll have to read articles on slashdot all day about Taco et al hacking their TiVos to fake their viewing habits just to get the cool commercials that they bought the TiVo units to avoid in the first place.
Half of your customer base is completely paranoid that your product is crashing regularly, but they still insist on using your product.
Do you:
a) Do nothing, listen to them whine. b) "Fix" your product. Get sued when someone "discovers" that it isn't fixed. c) Create a New Technology version that will "protect" the people. If the harm still exists, you are now profiting TWICE on the paranoid people.
So, it looks like the IT industry is filtering in to the rest of the world then.
I came out of Moulin Rouge absolutely loving it, the two people I went in with absolutely hated it. We ended up trying to figure out what it was that caused such complete opposite views, here's pretty much what we came up with:
In day to day life, day to day entertainment, you want something which performs pretty well across the board. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be pretty good and not let you down. Occasionally, you want something that's absolutely perfect, or stunningly original, and you're more than happy to put up with flaws in many of its aspects in exchange for it being truly great in a couple.
Take graphical arts for example. Day to day: we want nice clean layouts; realistic portrayals; easy to find information; smooth shading; whatever makes life easy and comfortable for us in our web layouts, our billboards, our posters. Every so often we go looking for 'art'. In our art we're happy that Van Gough never shades anything smoothly - the effect of his overloaded oils, while by no means realistic, are far more powerful than any airbrushing. In the classic posters of 20s France, the art work on the Can-Can dancers is by no means near-photographic but it is powerful and evocative.
Take the SATs. Someone who gets 700 in each is pretty smart and the kind of person the average company wants to employ. The mathmatics genius who gets 800 in one and 400 in the other probably has none of the social skills, none of the business skills, none of the adaptability we want in the majority of the world, yet having a few of these people is what gives us our geniuses.
Finally, in slashdot terms, take Windows vs Linux. Windows makes every day stuff easy for everyone. Linux makes more stuff possible for a few. Most of the time, most people want Windows but accept it'd be a poorer world without Linux.
That's really what it all comes to. 'Art' generally requires you to accept that you're going to have to work through a lot of the poorer aspects in exchange for some truly incredible ones. Different people have different thresholds - some want the nice safe world and never consider 'art', others like a balance and a few look down at the 'safe' options and only ever consider 'art', even though it's more work for them.
Modern cinema's much the same. Hollywood churns out nice predictable blockbusters - there'll be good SFX, a good sound track, a bunch of photogenic, quite good actors, a quite good story and it'll last a comfortable 90 minutes. They successfully please most of the people, most of the time, which makes them their money and keeps them happy. Occasionally a film has an exceptional story, exceptional acting or exceptional SFX. As a result of all of the work going in to those aspects, it usually falls down everywhere else. To some people that movie's unwatchable for all its failings - they want the nice safe 90 minute hollywood experience. To others it's wonderful, full of discoveries that make the cinema worth going to again and, while it's full of flaws elsewhere, they can overlook them for the exceptional parts.
Moulin Rouge captures the feel of grainy 20s postcards wonderfully, of the cardboard cutout theatre toys children of the era played with. It has intelligent reworkings of just about every piece of modern music (sure, most of it's blasphemous, especially Smells Like Teen Spirit to a Can-Can, but it's also incredibly intelligently done to fit so many different songs in to consistent rhythms and melodies), it has incredible costumes, incredible sets and captures the insanity of the bohemian era. Pretty much everything else is badly done, overblown and under-thought-out.
If you're prepared to forgive a lot of dire points in exchange for a whole set of truly excelent ones, you'll love the movie. If you're the kind of person who wants everything to be nice, safe, and consistently pretty-good, you'll hate it.
Back before Episode 1 was released and it was still a cool concept, I remember reading an interview with the guys working on the CG for it. Paraphrased, it went something along the lines of...
"We have this old SGI box that we've converted in to a beer cooler with holes punched through the front for the taps. Whenever the guys from SGI come to visit, to talk about new hardware, we show it to them and explain this is what happens when their machines don't perform."
It's not just the UK. The Microsoft way seems to be becoming the government way more and more. The American president now comes with a $300 mail in rebate. It kind of makes you wonder if the the Democrat choice for 2004 will come with 3 years free MSN access.
The original CAN was built by NASA in the fifties as the prototype crew module for all of the Apollo missions.
During the late 90s, with the cold war over and budgets dropping, NASA had to make space travel more appealing. As a result, they created the iCAN. Similar to the shuttle, the iCAN's engines, the crew module and all the rest are enclosed in a single module. While it makes upgrading the iCAN harder, it does allow the iCANs to be produced at a lower unit cost. Perhaps the most important advance for the iCAN was the addition of clip on heat shielding that came in a variety of attractive, transulcent shades.
While the iCAN saved NASA at the time, Russia has been coming up with more and more powerful rockets that, while harder to use, have outpaced the once popular iCAN. As a result, NASA have re-released the iCAN in its new iCAN II form. New features include patterned as well as coloured head shielding and the ability for astronauts to listen to and rip MP3s.
Note: You will probably see the iCAN II referred to as the ICAN II. Don't be confused by the capitalisation change, it's simply NASA trying to lose the dated late 90's i feel.
Yes, QWERTY was chosen as it was faster than competing schemes for typewriters, not for the users of them.
Typewriters had metal arms that had to fly up. As the most commonly used keys in an A-Z arangement are near each other, they tended to collide a lot and jam. By moving to QWERTY, the common keys were spread out as much as possible, hence reducing jams and therefore increasing overall speed.
On a modern keyboard, the jams have no reason to occur as there are no metal arms - so the speed gain for QWERTY is lost. A new keyboard design would require people to relearn key positions but, otherwise, there's no reason why QWERTY is still needed.
Certainly there is an urban legend that QWERTY was chosen to slow typists - it wasn't, just to move the keys to more separated positions. But equally, dismissing changes to QWERTY in a non-typewritter environment, because of the urban legend is to miss the point just as much.
Carrying on from the success of Survivor, I think I've come up with the perfect new TV show.
Corporate Survivor
A TV network buys majority holdings in ten different companies. Each week, the management teams are given a set of challenges which can be handled in a variety of ways. At the end of the show, viewers get to phone-vote on which management team performed the worst and the majority holding is then used to fire them all. You could even have speciality series, picture "Corporate Survivor - Telcos" - though "Corporate Survivor - DotComs" would probably fail as the odds of any company making it the full ten weeks anyway are minimal.
On an interesting level, it would decide once and for all whether the US public prefers ethical of financially successful companies (as many arguments claim that the current state of affairs is because most people ultimately want comfort over ethics).
To be fair to Earthlink, I've had almost the exact opposite experience.
I had a load of problems connecting to them [and everyone else]. Earthlink actually caught this in their logs - before I ever complained to them and took to phoning me up regularly to see if they could help. I've never yet met an ISP who's actually taken such a pro-active role in tech support before and they really impressed me with it.
It turns out that my problem _was_ with my PC. I was running an external creative modem blaster (teach me to buy external modems so they'll also work wit that linux box I've never got around to using), connected to a Dell, with ME. Eventually I got so frustrated that the modem had "a little accident" and got replaced with an internal. The problems completely cleared.
The moral of all of this is - if an ISP has technical problems at their end, they'll almost certainly know about it as EVERYONE will be contacting them. In most cases, unless you're hearing every user of the ISP complaining, it's probably either your phone line or with your PC's set up. Considering the ranges of equipment that people use, the cheap phone cables and all the rest of it, it's not suprising there are so many problems - especially with Windows that seems to degrade itself constantly.
Maybe my experiences with Earthlink are unique - or unique to their Southern California offices - but their saying it's probably at your end is probably perfectly true. It's as frustrating as hell, but doesn't actually mean they're not living up to their end.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're totally unrelated to the field, why would you bother to pay to conduct the research? Certainly, the Irish Llama Farming Federation may be completely unbiased but they also have absolutely no reason to pay for it.
Universities generally get flagged as being biased because they get paid by the large companies to conduct the research. Unfortunately, that's the business model of universities - perform research for cash or perform research to gain reputation so the next load of research will get cash. Much as it is nice to believe universities simply do research because it's for the good of mankind, the vast majority of it has to be paid for.
So, that leaves companies involved in the industry either doing the research themselves or paying others to as they're the only ones with enough of an interest to pay for it. What it all comes down to is there's no source that finds the research worth paying for that doesn't have some kind of a vested interest.
But does that really imply a bias? Why did DoubleClick and MSN conduct the research? The alleged bias is that they want to sell annoying adverts. Unfortunately, that's missing the point. They want to sell [stuff] with advertising. If the most efficient means turns out to be paying Cowboy Neal to come and rub your back while whispering soothing messages - they want to know that so they can do it. This research was done to find out what pays them best - annoying ads - then they released that information because it gets people talking about them (more advertising).
There is plenty of bias in the world, certainly. A large part of it sits right here, moderating OhMyGodItsBias claims up to fives (must remember that for Karma Whoring). It's worth stopping and thinking though - in many cases big companies just do stuff because they want to find out an answer and make money from it, not because they want their existing answers confirmed and somehow justified.
Are they going to invent geeks that like sunlight to use the thing too?
All the article actually says is that content providers (publishers) don't want libraries to give away the perfect copies of their work, that they would normally charge for, for free. I know, try and keep the shocked gasps down in the back there.
As already pointed out, this doesn't say anything whatsoever about traditional books.
The concept is that if publishers offer digital media and that media is freely duplicatable, then potentially libraries could become a means for people to avoid paying for the service. They just don't want libraries to become the book equivalent of Napster.
If everyone'd stop getting in to a flap, it's actually not that serious... If a digital book is distributed as a CD, disc, memory card, secure file, whatever, with adequate copy protection, this isn't even an issue - it still goes out to one user at a time and then the user hands it back.
Yes, potentially publishers may be stupid enough to distribute via a totally unsecure medium (as happened with CDs) but realistically, they're watching the music industry and holding back until they have secure systems themselves.
So, the whole flap is that libraries might become digital book Napsters if publishers start publishing without security. As libraries already tend to carry music and haven't turned in to Napster clones, and as digital publishing is some way behind digital music, it's unlikely to become an issue anyway.
And it still doesn't effect the traditional model of libraries anyway - just in case anyone's still missed that point.
Maybe Global Climate Change is a better term. Even as the earth does get warmer, a degree or so either way isn't something we're really going to notice - daily variations tend to be much greater anyway. What we do notice is the weather systems getting screwed up as a result of the small rises knocking the established systems out of whack.
Over the last year or so, we've had the atlantic weather systems reverse themselves; a weather front set itself up over Europe, all summer long, so the north didn't get a summer and the south stayed in the 100s (40s in C); the Mississippi has taken to flooding regularly; Southern California, as opposed to its usual 5 days of rain hardly stopped raining from January through March; and then there's South America that seems to go from one weather related disaster to another.
I'm sure a load of people who know the subject far better than I [or at the very least are convinced they do] can offer other explanations. All I'm attempting to show is that Global Warming [assuming it exists] wouldn't be something that's visible by "Oh cool, extra beach days," but by that extra degree or two screwing up the weather in general.
The argument is that if you allow one change to be made against something that is unacceptable then you will get itterative changes until nothing is left.
The reality is that any democracy is an equilibrium. Sure, it's not a totally stable one, but it'll still form an equilibrium. Start prohibiting a given right and you'll get support, maybe even go passed the reasonable point but then the counter movement will start getting support and it'll start to swing back towards the 'acceptable' balance point. It won't carry on swinging until it falls off the far end of the scale. Sure, not everyone will get what they want but it will vary roughly around the average acceptable point.
Take a look at smoking which people tried making the same claims for. Smoking isn't illegal. Yes, it's now largely illegal to do the things that make others suffer. Yes, there are some people pushing for it to be completely illegal. There are also growing numbers pushing back against it going any further because it's generally felt that it has gone far enough. California, probably the most anti-smoking state, has commercials all over the radio whinging on about smoking and the end result is that people are so sick of holier than thou anti smokers that their support is dwindling and the pace of change has all but slowed to a halt. That's the point - you reach an equilibrium.
If you try add a tax to SUVs, you'll probably get it supported (though there're so many SUV drivers around I wouldn't guarantee it). If you subsequently tried to ban them, yeah, you may even get that through (especially as the issue may have gained public support by that point). Next you'd try banning cars, only you'd find you've lost public support as they're judged way too useful a concept. Sure you'd end up with them controlled more but not banned. Take a look at the most environmentally active nations on earth - have any of them banned cars? Of course not. So, now we're going to ban power generation of any type, farming and all the rest of it? Don't be ridiculous.
I'm sorry, it's a nice emotive argument to make, and it convinces a lot of people with even relatively reasonable intellects, but it's also just not true. Mind you, everyone has the right to spout crap and try and get people to believe them. That's part of the equilibrium that's democracy too - you may even get support for a while until people start to realise and it too swings back against you.
Definitely time to go cold turkey. I'll just read one more story before I go.....
There was the famous case of a guy in Britain who was sentenced more stiffly for dropping a crisps (chips) packet in front of a police officer and refusing to pick it up than the guy a few courts down who was found guilty of a sexual assault but managed to avoid jail time.
Then there is the side of the publicity value. If Georgia sued him sanely, they'd have a pointless day in court, persecuting some guy who's not in a position to repeat it. Sue him to hell and back and it'll get on the news, it'll be discussed in every IT dept tied in Georgia and they'll have all of their admins desperately tidying up their systems for the cost of filing a lawsuit. It's not right, it's not fair, but it certainly makes good business sense.
There is a long article by Penn Jillette (the talking half of Penn and Teller) here. More than just an article on the technology, it talks about how it really feels far better than anything I've seen before.
Besides, it involves fat guys and pneumatic blondes stripping in zero-g along with Billy from ZZ top and a $250,000 guitar - if that doesn't appeal to nerds, I don't know what does.
Well, that explains Jesus then...
"Shit man, like these fish, they're so totally huge, they could feed like five thousand."
"Nah, screw that dude, I feel so light I bet I could walk across that water over there, then float away on a cloud!" "Yeah bro, I dig what you're saying. All these glowing joints [later recorded as coals] in our mouths and it feels like I can understand every language there ever was!"
In the now lost final book of the new testament, they went on to talk interminably about Star Wars as all stoners seem to do, thinking their every word pure genius. Understandably, when they came down, they realised how stupid it was and destroyed it.
Then you get passports being illegal in Maryland and quite possibly Europe too.
So, does this mean that Microsoft tools are now no longer on sale to ... well basically any state or nation who won't bend over the Microsoft way? And is this Microsoft's way of punishing those places for their terribly naughtiness or a case of Microsoft putting so many policies in to effect they've just accidently closed themselves off to what's starting to look like the majority of code developing states and nations?
Even with the best will in the world, I'm kind of curious how the Egyptians, with their technology, could have got a kite of that size to stay together in thirty mile an hour winds, let alone fly in any controlled fashion. And then have the strength to lift a several hundred ton obelisk?
As Willeke Wendrich, associate professor of Egyptian archeology at the University of California, Los Angeles said in the article, "The kite project seems like a lot of fun, but it doesn't prove the pyramids were built that way."
It is a really cool geek achievement and certainly a lot of fun, but you have to wonder how much would be possible without modern materials?
I guess I'll just go back to believing in the entirely more reasonable Silent Bob and his Jedi Mind Trick moving the stones. "Fly fat boy, fly."
You're actually suggesting that that we compare numbers from a smallish, niche-market company that has been in business for 5 years with those of a vicious, multinational, multi-billion dollar, anticompetitive monopolist that has been in business for 20 years?
So, about 15 more years then? Remember Microsoft was the cool, quirky, little company in a niche market (Home OSs) that stood up to the big imperialist (making Windows on their own, not for IBM).
Do you remember what has happened to the rest of Microsoft's competitors over the past 20 years? They've been either acquired by The Beast, run out of business by The Beast, or beaten so badly into submission by The Beast that they've had to seek government protection. The only real exceptions to this are companies who were already multinational multibillion dollar companies before they began competing with Microsoft.
How many Linux distributors have gone out of business over the last year? How many more will do over the next 15 years (see above) as RedHat becomes the profitable option for investors and the standard one as paranoid executives are only able to feel safe with "the one that makes a profit and will be around to support us"?
As for RedHat not forcing competitors out the way MS did, how long were all the other DOS flavours around for?
A large part of what Microsoft's done, whether we like it or not, is basically act like a large successful business. In a market place where home users and unimaginative senior management want 'the only option', competitors are going to fall by the way. That's negative in the long term but ultimately the product of consumer behaviour. Even in a group like slashdot, how many of you are running a non-MS office suite as your primary suite? At a guess, most of us run MS Office, complain about it endlessly, but still use it.
Yes, RedHat's not doing anything particularly dark and evil (in the way we see MS) yet. How long before natural selection starts to take over, we start installing RedHat because we know it's the most profitable and gets the most investment? How long before, as a profitable company, the shareholders force in a management team that isn't quite so libertarian and starts to figure out ways to corner the market rather than innovate?
I dislike Microsoft's monopoly as much as most people. I just get the impression it's not so much Microsoft being evil as playing well in a system that's set up to ultimately go in a way we don't like. Look at the TelCo industry and the behaviour of the baby Bell monopoly - it's not just IT. At the moment, we like RedHat as they're the little innocent guys but will we continue to see them that way when they become the big innocent guys, then the big maybe not so innocent guys, etc.? Is the problem really in the companies or the system they exist in?
Remember Bill Gates runs a huge charitable foundation that's apparently funded minority scholarships for the next 20 years. View it negatively and, sure, it's a ploy. View it positively though and he's actually trying to do some good with the result of his huge corp. OK, so no one believes that. And what'll happen in ten years if RedHat becomes the only real Linux option? Will we still see their adherance to open source as positive or will it be "Look at the way Red Hat managed to corrupt open source in to a monopoly!"?
So, congratulations to Red Hat for turning a profit. You're currently the little guys and we love you. Just don't make the mistake of continuing to be too successful or we'll have to start seeing the negatives and all learn to hate you.
Soylent green is... programmers!
With a desire to see the plagarism, just about any story told can be accused of being heavily copied from an existing one - often without the script writers even being aware of the orginals existence. Take a look at the way, every time Spielberg makes a movie, several people sue him for stealing their ideas (kind of curious how he manages to keep copying the majority of his movie from several places at once).
The way things are going, I wonder how long it'll be before scriptwriting follows the original PC cloning and those working on it are kept in closed environments where the companies can prove they never saw anything from the outside?
Percent of people in set A that make up set A? ~97% is fairly accurate, only about 3% off. I would imagine it's fairly difficult for the 1% of the total population with bipolar to be made up with anything but people with bipolar.
Not, of course, that I'm having fun with the numbers of someone who was having fun with the numbers. :)
97.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
"Have you seen the cool Bud frogs advert yet?"
"No?"
"Oh, your ratings must be off. What're your stats?"
"Chat Shows 3, Documentaries 4, Home Shopping 1, News 1, SciFi 5, Soap Operas 2"
"Oh, well that's obviously it, you need to get your Chat Shows up to a 4 and your Documentaries below 2 before you have any chance."
"But there's that cool Evils Of Microsoft documentary on tonight!"
"Too bad, you're watching Springer for double chat show points unless you want to miss the talking frogs."
While you're going through all that, you'll have to read articles on slashdot all day about Taco et al hacking their TiVos to fake their viewing habits just to get the cool commercials that they bought the TiVo units to avoid in the first place.
Do you:
a) Do nothing, listen to them whine. b) "Fix" your product. Get sued when someone "discovers" that it isn't fixed. c) Create a New Technology version that will "protect" the people. If the harm still exists, you are now profiting TWICE on the paranoid people.So, it looks like the IT industry is filtering in to the rest of the world then.
Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that matters.
Nope, I'm still not with you there. Explain just one more time?
In day to day life, day to day entertainment, you want something which performs pretty well across the board. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be pretty good and not let you down. Occasionally, you want something that's absolutely perfect, or stunningly original, and you're more than happy to put up with flaws in many of its aspects in exchange for it being truly great in a couple.
Take graphical arts for example. Day to day: we want nice clean layouts; realistic portrayals; easy to find information; smooth shading; whatever makes life easy and comfortable for us in our web layouts, our billboards, our posters. Every so often we go looking for 'art'. In our art we're happy that Van Gough never shades anything smoothly - the effect of his overloaded oils, while by no means realistic, are far more powerful than any airbrushing. In the classic posters of 20s France, the art work on the Can-Can dancers is by no means near-photographic but it is powerful and evocative.
Take the SATs. Someone who gets 700 in each is pretty smart and the kind of person the average company wants to employ. The mathmatics genius who gets 800 in one and 400 in the other probably has none of the social skills, none of the business skills, none of the adaptability we want in the majority of the world, yet having a few of these people is what gives us our geniuses.
Finally, in slashdot terms, take Windows vs Linux. Windows makes every day stuff easy for everyone. Linux makes more stuff possible for a few. Most of the time, most people want Windows but accept it'd be a poorer world without Linux.
That's really what it all comes to. 'Art' generally requires you to accept that you're going to have to work through a lot of the poorer aspects in exchange for some truly incredible ones. Different people have different thresholds - some want the nice safe world and never consider 'art', others like a balance and a few look down at the 'safe' options and only ever consider 'art', even though it's more work for them.
Modern cinema's much the same. Hollywood churns out nice predictable blockbusters - there'll be good SFX, a good sound track, a bunch of photogenic, quite good actors, a quite good story and it'll last a comfortable 90 minutes. They successfully please most of the people, most of the time, which makes them their money and keeps them happy. Occasionally a film has an exceptional story, exceptional acting or exceptional SFX. As a result of all of the work going in to those aspects, it usually falls down everywhere else. To some people that movie's unwatchable for all its failings - they want the nice safe 90 minute hollywood experience. To others it's wonderful, full of discoveries that make the cinema worth going to again and, while it's full of flaws elsewhere, they can overlook them for the exceptional parts.
Moulin Rouge captures the feel of grainy 20s postcards wonderfully, of the cardboard cutout theatre toys children of the era played with. It has intelligent reworkings of just about every piece of modern music (sure, most of it's blasphemous, especially Smells Like Teen Spirit to a Can-Can, but it's also incredibly intelligently done to fit so many different songs in to consistent rhythms and melodies), it has incredible costumes, incredible sets and captures the insanity of the bohemian era. Pretty much everything else is badly done, overblown and under-thought-out.
If you're prepared to forgive a lot of dire points in exchange for a whole set of truly excelent ones, you'll love the movie. If you're the kind of person who wants everything to be nice, safe, and consistently pretty-good, you'll hate it.
"We have this old SGI box that we've converted in to a beer cooler with holes punched through the front for the taps. Whenever the guys from SGI come to visit, to talk about new hardware, we show it to them and explain this is what happens when their machines don't perform."
It's not just the UK. The Microsoft way seems to be becoming the government way more and more. The American president now comes with a $300 mail in rebate. It kind of makes you wonder if the the Democrat choice for 2004 will come with 3 years free MSN access.
The original CAN was built by NASA in the fifties as the prototype crew module for all of the Apollo missions.
During the late 90s, with the cold war over and budgets dropping, NASA had to make space travel more appealing. As a result, they created the iCAN. Similar to the shuttle, the iCAN's engines, the crew module and all the rest are enclosed in a single module. While it makes upgrading the iCAN harder, it does allow the iCANs to be produced at a lower unit cost. Perhaps the most important advance for the iCAN was the addition of clip on heat shielding that came in a variety of attractive, transulcent shades.
While the iCAN saved NASA at the time, Russia has been coming up with more and more powerful rockets that, while harder to use, have outpaced the once popular iCAN. As a result, NASA have re-released the iCAN in its new iCAN II form. New features include patterned as well as coloured head shielding and the ability for astronauts to listen to and rip MP3s.
Note: You will probably see the iCAN II referred to as the ICAN II. Don't be confused by the capitalisation change, it's simply NASA trying to lose the dated late 90's i feel.
Typewriters had metal arms that had to fly up. As the most commonly used keys in an A-Z arangement are near each other, they tended to collide a lot and jam. By moving to QWERTY, the common keys were spread out as much as possible, hence reducing jams and therefore increasing overall speed.
On a modern keyboard, the jams have no reason to occur as there are no metal arms - so the speed gain for QWERTY is lost. A new keyboard design would require people to relearn key positions but, otherwise, there's no reason why QWERTY is still needed.
Certainly there is an urban legend that QWERTY was chosen to slow typists - it wasn't, just to move the keys to more separated positions. But equally, dismissing changes to QWERTY in a non-typewritter environment, because of the urban legend is to miss the point just as much.
Corporate Survivor
A TV network buys majority holdings in ten different companies. Each week, the management teams are given a set of challenges which can be handled in a variety of ways. At the end of the show, viewers get to phone-vote on which management team performed the worst and the majority holding is then used to fire them all. You could even have speciality series, picture "Corporate Survivor - Telcos" - though "Corporate Survivor - DotComs" would probably fail as the odds of any company making it the full ten weeks anyway are minimal.
On an interesting level, it would decide once and for all whether the US public prefers ethical of financially successful companies (as many arguments claim that the current state of affairs is because most people ultimately want comfort over ethics).
I had a load of problems connecting to them [and everyone else]. Earthlink actually caught this in their logs - before I ever complained to them and took to phoning me up regularly to see if they could help. I've never yet met an ISP who's actually taken such a pro-active role in tech support before and they really impressed me with it.
It turns out that my problem _was_ with my PC. I was running an external creative modem blaster (teach me to buy external modems so they'll also work wit that linux box I've never got around to using), connected to a Dell, with ME. Eventually I got so frustrated that the modem had "a little accident" and got replaced with an internal. The problems completely cleared.
The moral of all of this is - if an ISP has technical problems at their end, they'll almost certainly know about it as EVERYONE will be contacting them. In most cases, unless you're hearing every user of the ISP complaining, it's probably either your phone line or with your PC's set up. Considering the ranges of equipment that people use, the cheap phone cables and all the rest of it, it's not suprising there are so many problems - especially with Windows that seems to degrade itself constantly.
Maybe my experiences with Earthlink are unique - or unique to their Southern California offices - but their saying it's probably at your end is probably perfectly true. It's as frustrating as hell, but doesn't actually mean they're not living up to their end.