Well, I suppose it's partly preaching to the choir here, but let me break out the Bible and thump it for a bit.
We can easily trace the increasing power of patents back to a presise historical moment and even a figurehead --Ronald Reagan. The Repblican Revolution of the 1980s brang a whole new court called the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit whose sole jurisdiction was patent law.
This was a reversal of the anti-patent holder legal system that was in existance since the reforms of the 1930s. The Republicans promised that by strenthening patents, we'd bring the whole country into a new era where Americans would all attain greater personal wealth across the board as the rest of the world looked to America for innovation.
Well, here we are almost thirty years later. Hoping that trickle down economics would work, we cut taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals from over seventy percent to less than thirty percent and we've brought patents and intellectual property of all kinds to historical heights of legal protection.
The question is, has this experiment been an advantage to the people of the United States? Obviously, I say no and cases like this and the RIAA's shenanigans all seem to point in the same direction. It's time to change.
Well I know better than to whine about moderation, and perhaps I'm being too dismissive of Franklin's scientific contributions, but I hope people will wake up --pun intended-- to the notion that he lived off of collections of aphorisms and many of them were exceedingly unscientific.
The study of sleep is something that he felt free to completely dismiss in favor of his own personal opinions on the matter. His opinions have been proven wrong, but I bet you ten to one you can ask people in the States whether they believe it is true that going to sleep early and waking up early is the basis of a healthy lifestyle and they'll be sure to agree and even assume that there is some scientific basis to the idea.
I live in Asia and people here tend to sleep all around the clock. It's no problem for me to tell my boss I won't be in till three because I'm going to be sleeping. He wouldn't think twice. Imagine saying that in the States. Now look at the health of the average American compared to the average Asian. Perhaps you can dismiss all of this out of hand, but I feel stronngly about it because it's what I know from first hand experience and I was shocked to realize how backwardws Americans can be about incredibly simple things like sleep patterns. When I ask myself why, I have to imagine that idolship of figures like Franklin is a big part of it.
The almanac is the legacy of Franklin and it was nothing but a collection of sayings directed towards simple-minded, conservative, church going farmers that were often misleading and which he himself did not follow by any means.
The one that particularly pisses me off is "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, welathy and wise."
It is a fact that this is completely contrary to the sleep requirements of human beings. Here was can see a good example of where Franklin was not a scientist at all, his primary focus was on coining, or borrowing and touching up, aphorisms that would appeal the lifestyle of a gullible, poorly educated rural audiance.
Researchers who actually study sleep cycles rather than just making up sayings for the popular press have found that the human sleep cycle tends towards adding an hour or so of time to each day so that the time a person becomes tired and is properly prepared to sleep is constantly changing relative to the previous night's sleep.
Early to bed and early to rise most likely leads to a kind of mental depression from inadequate sleep that infects the majority of nine to fivers and no doubt may partly account for American's political apathy, obsesity and need to buy products like viagra. And for what? So this shady book publisher can be remembered as an icon of American scientific prowess?
No kidding. When I first saw the ST article at EET the first thing I did was go over to the Spheral home page to see if anything ever appeared. Not much.
Apparently they're going to some trade shows, but nothing significant enough to update their web page in the age of the ubiquitous blog.
It bums me out because I bought the hype and told a lot of people about it and now here I am going uhm yeah really it's parent is a big global automation company . . . really. They're way into mass production. I swear.
The results so far are rather disappointing given that their whole premise was that they were using automated mass production techniques and were going to be producing in volume any day now. That was early last year. I thought they were going to be all over Home Depot by now.
Nice point and it inspired me to go check out the wording of the DMCA to see exactly what it does say about subpoenas.
In preface to the quote, I'll add my opinion that this paper on spoofed addresses is probably even more relevant to the pending appeals of the ISPs than to the cases against individuals.
As you can see for yourself, this paper would allow the ISP to simply deny that they have a reliable response to the subpoena and so cannot provide any data. Here's the quote from Title 17, Chapter 5, Section 512
(3) Contents of subpoena. -
The subpoena shall authorize and order the service provider receiving the notification and the subpoena to expeditiously disclose to the copyright owner or person authorized by the copyright owner information sufficient to identify the alleged infringer of the material described in the notification to the extent such information is available to the service provider.
If it's not feasible for the ISP to provide evidence "sufficient to identify the alleged infringer" then how can the ISP be compelled to compy? Note that the law does not say that the ISP must simply provide any records they have, it specifically states that they must provide records that identify the alleged infringer. If their records cannot reliably identify any individual, then why should they be compelled to provide information that they, themselves know to be quite likely false and misleading. How would such actions serve justice when the ISP is already aware that the records are misleading and cannot be considered identifying data.
If this report of spoofed identities on P2P is true, then providing such records would make the ISPs liable for misrepresenting their data as identifying alleged infringers when they can't actually verify that this is the information that the data provides.
Exactly. The security problem with the closed source model doesn't go away because they show you SOME source code. So what? They can show you whatever they please and you'll never be the wiser. The only way around that would be if they allowed the Chinese government to handle distribution as well. That would be interesting.
Hmm. There ya go. Give the Chinese government the Windows source code and let them distribute it for free. And then, they could let people modify it and enhance it without costing Redmond a thing. It would be like a global coperative effort. We'll call it distributed source. No, something more like free source. No let's see there's got to be a good name for this.
At least in the electricity market this is clearly a problem.
It has long been accepted and promoted by internationally minded people within the electrical utilities that power could be shared internationally in a global HVDC grid that would be both technically and economically superior to the primitive, isolated systems that predominate today.
The obstacles have nothing to do with technical or efficiency problems. Quite the contrary, the proposed system would be technically superior in the sense of being less prone to blackouts and without a doubt would lower electricity prices globally.
The problems arise when some countries have a slavish, not conicidentally religous fervor for "free markets" while others take a progressive attitude. This leads to a form of international competition that is not productive at all in the sense of the over-used market metaphor. This is highly destructive competion of the cold war sort in which destruction of the "enemy" at all costs displaces the goal of efficiency.
Well I said willfully ignorant, as in deceptive to large shareholders who are mostly older individuals who don't really pay much attention to newfangled gadgetry.
But I have three web cameras sitting around that don't get used and my point was that this stuff has been hyped before. The only difference this time is that the emphasis is on freedom. Well, if you're an adult that kinda flies right by ya because you already have freedom and cameras and it's just an extension of that in a slightly more convenient form.
But what is slighyly more convenient to you or I is a world away to a twelve year old.
Although you are apparently blissfully unfamiliar with the treachery of the adolescent mind, I assure you that the lack of trust between adults and their children when it comes to sexual matters already is, has been, and will persist in being a great obstacle to the proliferation of gadgets that seem to be perfectly innocuous to you or I.
Again, I'm not opposed to these things and I think they could be fun, but the same is true of marijuana. My opinion doesn't change the big wide world. It's not logical to get so hysterical about such harmless things, but the fact is people freak over little things like kids fucking on camera.
Okay, I'm an American born and raised. Grew up with full insurance and as I got into my twenties I worked overseas.
Well, you know as you get older you start to fall apart in little ways and I had a bad tooth upon coming back to the States one year from where I lived in this little country called Taiwan that has socialized medicine.
I didn't have insurance and my tooth was hurting while I was in the States on vacation. So wanting to take care of my own affairs, I told my Dad I was going to wait and have my tooth done in Taiwan. But both of us were a bit concerned about how safe it really was. The ol' man insisted I go to my childhood dentist and ask him what he thought first.
So, I go in and this good ol' American dentist says yep you waitied too long. It looks like you're going to need a root canal. It'll cost about $1300. I can do it this week.
I told him my plan to go back and have it done in Taiwan and boy oh boy did he tell me some horror stories. Well, I don't remember all the exact details, but the sum of the story was that I was risking my life. If I insisted on doing this insane suicidal act, the least he would insist on is giving me clean needles because it was well known that those Taiwan doctors were notorious for re-using their needles to save costs!
Dear God. My father was so depressed that his son insisted on certain death, but after hearing that line of crap coming out of that old fucker's mouth, I was determined to see how bad it really was.
Well sure enough, I went back to Taiwan and had my root canal for thirty bucks. I got the same titanium post they use in the States. I got the same artsy fartsy thing where they send out the blank to be custom sculpted to match your other teeth and best of all it was almost completely painless. This is contrast to a root canal ol Dr. Lying bastard had given me as a kid when I busted one on the sidewalk. That sonofabitch let my novacaine wear off and gave me the ol Dustin Hoffman treatment.
The moral of the story is, you're full of shit. I'm an American and I can testify that I've gotten way better medical service outside of the US and was lied to by American physicians when I suggested I would try such a thing.
I also happen to know that the people struggling to get to American often ARE doctors. They're dying to get on the goddam gracy train.
You are misinformed.
It seems like the problem was quite clearly stated and then simply dismissed as unadressable --capitalism is not a just system of distribution.
Why is the answer to that problem to "make work?" That's a rhetorical question because obviously the reason is the author is unwilling to consider an alternative to winner-take-all as the only way for society to operate.
The answer to inequality in the face of hyper efficiency is to distribute wealth in an equitable manner? Abundance is only a problem if you slavishly assume that hard core capitalism is the only answer. But that's a personal issue, not a logical problem.
I think it's worth considering the amount of hype surrounding anything to do with children and sexuality.
Way back when at the time 56K modems were just coming on, I installed a modem based video conferencing system for a small rural school. Everybody was so excited about the potential and the quality of the signal wasn't a big issue because it was so exciting and isn't technology great. All in all, it was not too different from what you're hearing right now in the latest frothy bubble of video conferencing hype.
But, despite all the good intentions and hopeful exuberance and pats on the back for a job well done and gosh isn't technology great type of wide-eyed speculation at the time, the system was pulled for entirely non-technical reasons.
In the process of testing the system, we hooked into the, then cutting edge, CU-See-Me network to test it out and right away it was chicks flashing tits, guys holding their dicks and all this fun stuff that might be real groovy for adult users looking for a cheap thrill, but a major problem in an elementary school setting.
Ever since then, I've seen the same old hype just continue over and over. I laughed out loud when I read an article a few months ago with the CEO of AT&T suggesting video conferencing was just about to take off and save his company along with on-line music sales. I have to speculate that there is a bit of willful ignorance going on here.
Most of the older people I know tend to be quite camera shy and then a lot of the younger people are depending on the older people to pay for their toys. I think the combo, along with the fact that almost everyone has a web cam and nobody uses them is quite suggestive of some fundamental problems with the marketing of camera enabled wireless devices.
That's not to say they're not cool and everybody should grow up and stop worrying about kids getting some cheap thrills. I agree one thousand percent. But, if everybody agreed with me, the world would be a very nice place and nobody would watch prime time TV. But obviously that's not the world we live in.
Oh, you're right. Nevermind. That's more than a shrub. Indeed, that's almost as big as the Lepidodendron's ancestors. I thought it was only four meters. I saw the story elsewhere a while back and I thought they said it was smaller than that.
I stand corrected.
But, the club moss is misnamed. It's not a moss. It's a shrub. It looks cool too. The reason many people consider it a pest is because it grows partially underground and it's full or thorns so it's miserable to try and remove. That semi-underground growth is also why it was mistaken for a moss.
Indeed, the plant of the Rockies are generally quite a trip. Aspens are also known to have shared root systems extending for miles. The original Internet.
While it's neat and all, I think it's worth considering that the common club moss that is considered a pest all over the Rockies is a descendent of the Lepidodendrons from the Carboniferous period which is almost twice as far back as the Jurassic.
It's true that the modern club moss is nothing but a shrub while its ancient ancestor that produced much of the coal we use today was a great big monster tree, but this Australian plant doesn't seem to be all that big either.
to the insanity created by the perversion of sleep cycles that the so-called work week creates.
Sleep studies have shown that if people are allowed to follow their natural cycles, they'll still sleep about eight hours a night. But what they won't do is go to sleep and get up the same time every day. That's totally artificial and there is no evidence that it is healthy or normal behavior for humans.
What happens is that people with unrestrained sleep cycles tend to go asleep an hour later every day. So, in the course of 24 days they will naturally form a complete cycle and return to their original bedtime.
Ben Franklin was an asshole and a hypocrite who loved to party and spent most of his life in France.
Speaking of that, my browser pulled up a banner for just such a beast when I was checking out the mini-itx site. Apparently a company called i-tuner sells little power supply daughter boards from 40 to 100 watts. Looks like the way to go if space is that precious, but they're a bit pricey starting at around fifty bucks. Cool for the car though, and they sell little car adapters as well.
Maybe the battery-less DIY notebook isn't so far off after all.
When I first saw the blurb for this MS child protection blurb, I was also looking at ads from this year's Computex trade show.
The two side-by-side struck an interesting contrast. On the one hand we've got MS talking about how we can't trust kids to use text chatting because they're so obsessed with sex. On the other hand we've got dozens of consumer electronics firms partnering with MS to make this the year of the camera enabled wireless devices. So, what's the deal?
If kids can't be trusted not to use the keyboards for text based sex --I mean how hard up can you get-- how are wireless cameras going to be the runaway product this year?
There seems to be a real contradition between these two lines of thought. I suspect from my own memories of childhood that the answer is: yes kida are obsessed with sex and no, the camera enabled devices are not going to sell well.
Most older adults tend to be camera shy and while kids tend to love the idea of posing for the camera, there's the definite possibility they might like too much.
"Work with Title companies who have huge databases . . . "
That's right. Realtors don't have these things at all, they just work WITH people who do. That's still not coming from the realtors themselves, is it? I mean, isn't it theoretically possible that a land management branch of Google could also work with a title company?
It's like implying that travel agents work WITH the airlines so you can only buy tickets from them. But that's not the case. Why should real estate, and expecially raw land, be any different.
That would be a trip.
I tried the search and it failed on my quite a few times, but the potential is huge. The first thing that came to my mind was real estate.
I've gone out looking for land with realtors that can't even find the lots they're supposed to be showing, and look how much they take in transaction fees for their "service." It' not like they do the Escrow themselves. I suppose it's a bit different for houses, but for land sales they act like they're doing you a favor.
Not only that, but I've gone in with aerial photos and maps from the County that all come off of county maintained computer databases and the realtors inevitably insist their little hand drawn map that doesn't even accurately map the parcels is the more accurate solution.
This could be the beginning of something huge for Google.
Re:Knoppix still king of bootable CDs
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Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
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· Score: 1
I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised really. The politics of Open Source --and from my own experience its fair to say politics in general-- in Germany is quite serious.
I think it's fair to say the political implications of Open Source are also larger in Germany than in the US. Of course this may simply be an extension of the different attitudes towards politics.
As a youth in California in the eighties I hung out with a fairly wild and assorted bunch and I thought I could hang with anybody. In those same years I travelled to Berlin on my own and I walked by a group of skinheads. I thought, oh yeah these are just some hipster types like California skins. You know, looking all bad, but more often than not more harm to themselves than others. So, although I had a long pony tail I thought, yeah, I'll go up and ask these guys if there's any shows going down.
Holy cripes. I coudln't even get close to them. As soon as I started walking towards them they jumped all fiercesome like giving me the evil eye. Although I didn't know what they were muttering, it was apparent from their body language that I was no longer in Kansas.
Re:Knoppix still king of bootable CDs
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Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
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· Score: 1
Well, oddly enough I just went and looked in the forums to verify what I'm about to say and found that the thread I was referring to seems to be gone.
But, there's a guy with a screen name of FabianX and I'm pretty sure it was he who wrote the script to load the whole distro into RAM, or at least he wrote an early version of it and posted in the forums.
Odd I can't find it now. I've gone back and looked for updates a few times in the past. It's not that important, but I'm fairly certain there are other people who are closely associated with the development. And if you give credit to the people in the forums answering questions and checking for bugs, which is seems fair, then it's a big team.
Hey, just for the record as I sometimes reply to my own posts as an AC, that wasn't me.
But speaking of personal issues, I would like to clarify that I have an MA in Rhetoric and my thesis chair was the head of the Philosophy Department. So, yeah I have a fairly decent background in philosophy as a matter of fact and I obviously don't see any conflicts between "philosophy" and my position. I think you're confusing philosophy with moralism.
This is the kind of research I like to see.
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The Oldest Mouse Contest
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've long been disappointed that biotech is so damn conservative about trying to just go for it and take some chances. We're all dying after all. It's like the absurdity of cancer therapies that can't be tried on terminally patients because they might have side effects. Jesus Christ on a crutch, that's like some kind of absurd joke
Indeed, I'm testing the waters of bionformatics myself lately so I can stop compaining and do something about it. But that's another story.
What caught my eye was the thing about being able to use stem cells. The whole stem cell story is so amazing and yet it seems that there's this amazing potential and nobody wants to try anything amazing with it. The attitude is like, yes this is amazing but we can't use it in amazing ways because it's experimental and we don't know what might happen.
If I had a research budget and I was in this competition, my idea would be to create embryonic stem cells of my mouse and just inject them into the thing like it was a pin cushion. Damn the torpedos.
So what's the worse things that's going to happen? A dead lab rat? What if the thing stays young forever? Let's pick up the pace people!
Re:Not to ruin the mood...
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Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, you know D. Buddy, it's not always necessary to look at these things as a zero sum game. That's the strict, unwavering market based thought process where competition is distorted into a kind of moral value. In a market scenario, it's kill or be killed, one man take all. Go ahead and hate your neighbor. Go ahead and cheat a friend. As long as you get that money, you are righteous and damn the means.
But a Debian distro like Knoppix isn't in the market. It's outside of that mundane game and on a higher plane. It's like Obi Wan: you may strike it down today, but it will return more powerful than you will ever know.
There is no need for contingency when you have faith that you're doing the right thing. You simply persist and in persistence there is joy, peace and maybe even euphoria.
Re:What you don't look at the page first?
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I haven't been connection to Knopper.net, but I've been using the forums at Knoppix.net for the last few days and have had a lot of trouble connecting since last week. Sourceforge and PostNuke sites all seemed to be slow lately.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I suppose it's partly preaching to the choir here, but let me break out the Bible and thump it for a bit.
We can easily trace the increasing power of patents back to a presise historical moment and even a figurehead --Ronald Reagan. The Repblican Revolution of the 1980s brang a whole new court called the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit whose sole jurisdiction was patent law.
This was a reversal of the anti-patent holder legal system that was in existance since the reforms of the 1930s. The Republicans promised that by strenthening patents, we'd bring the whole country into a new era where Americans would all attain greater personal wealth across the board as the rest of the world looked to America for innovation.
Well, here we are almost thirty years later. Hoping that trickle down economics would work, we cut taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals from over seventy percent to less than thirty percent and we've brought patents and intellectual property of all kinds to historical heights of legal protection.
The question is, has this experiment been an advantage to the people of the United States? Obviously, I say no and cases like this and the RIAA's shenanigans all seem to point in the same direction. It's time to change.
Well I know better than to whine about moderation, and perhaps I'm being too dismissive of Franklin's scientific contributions, but I hope people will wake up --pun intended-- to the notion that he lived off of collections of aphorisms and many of them were exceedingly unscientific.
The study of sleep is something that he felt free to completely dismiss in favor of his own personal opinions on the matter. His opinions have been proven wrong, but I bet you ten to one you can ask people in the States whether they believe it is true that going to sleep early and waking up early is the basis of a healthy lifestyle and they'll be sure to agree and even assume that there is some scientific basis to the idea.
I live in Asia and people here tend to sleep all around the clock. It's no problem for me to tell my boss I won't be in till three because I'm going to be sleeping. He wouldn't think twice. Imagine saying that in the States. Now look at the health of the average American compared to the average Asian. Perhaps you can dismiss all of this out of hand, but I feel stronngly about it because it's what I know from first hand experience and I was shocked to realize how backwardws Americans can be about incredibly simple things like sleep patterns. When I ask myself why, I have to imagine that idolship of figures like Franklin is a big part of it.
The almanac is the legacy of Franklin and it was nothing but a collection of sayings directed towards simple-minded, conservative, church going farmers that were often misleading and which he himself did not follow by any means.
The one that particularly pisses me off is "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, welathy and wise."
It is a fact that this is completely contrary to the sleep requirements of human beings. Here was can see a good example of where Franklin was not a scientist at all, his primary focus was on coining, or borrowing and touching up, aphorisms that would appeal the lifestyle of a gullible, poorly educated rural audiance.
Researchers who actually study sleep cycles rather than just making up sayings for the popular press have found that the human sleep cycle tends towards adding an hour or so of time to each day so that the time a person becomes tired and is properly prepared to sleep is constantly changing relative to the previous night's sleep.
Early to bed and early to rise most likely leads to a kind of mental depression from inadequate sleep that infects the majority of nine to fivers and no doubt may partly account for American's political apathy, obsesity and need to buy products like viagra. And for what? So this shady book publisher can be remembered as an icon of American scientific prowess?
No kidding. When I first saw the ST article at EET the first thing I did was go over to the Spheral home page to see if anything ever appeared. Not much.
Apparently they're going to some trade shows, but nothing significant enough to update their web page in the age of the ubiquitous blog.
It bums me out because I bought the hype and told a lot of people about it and now here I am going uhm yeah really it's parent is a big global automation company . . . really. They're way into mass production. I swear.
The results so far are rather disappointing given that their whole premise was that they were using automated mass production techniques and were going to be producing in volume any day now. That was early last year. I thought they were going to be all over Home Depot by now.
Nice point and it inspired me to go check out the wording of the DMCA to see exactly what it does say about subpoenas.
In preface to the quote, I'll add my opinion that this paper on spoofed addresses is probably even more relevant to the pending appeals of the ISPs than to the cases against individuals.
As you can see for yourself, this paper would allow the ISP to simply deny that they have a reliable response to the subpoena and so cannot provide any data. Here's the quote from Title 17, Chapter 5, Section 512
If it's not feasible for the ISP to provide evidence "sufficient to identify the alleged infringer" then how can the ISP be compelled to compy? Note that the law does not say that the ISP must simply provide any records they have, it specifically states that they must provide records that identify the alleged infringer. If their records cannot reliably identify any individual, then why should they be compelled to provide information that they, themselves know to be quite likely false and misleading. How would such actions serve justice when the ISP is already aware that the records are misleading and cannot be considered identifying data.
If this report of spoofed identities on P2P is true, then providing such records would make the ISPs liable for misrepresenting their data as identifying alleged infringers when they can't actually verify that this is the information that the data provides.
Exactly. The security problem with the closed source model doesn't go away because they show you SOME source code. So what? They can show you whatever they please and you'll never be the wiser. The only way around that would be if they allowed the Chinese government to handle distribution as well. That would be interesting.
Hmm. There ya go. Give the Chinese government the Windows source code and let them distribute it for free. And then, they could let people modify it and enhance it without costing Redmond a thing. It would be like a global coperative effort. We'll call it distributed source. No, something more like free source. No let's see there's got to be a good name for this.
At least in the electricity market this is clearly a problem.
It has long been accepted and promoted by internationally minded people within the electrical utilities that power could be shared internationally in a global HVDC grid that would be both technically and economically superior to the primitive, isolated systems that predominate today.
The obstacles have nothing to do with technical or efficiency problems. Quite the contrary, the proposed system would be technically superior in the sense of being less prone to blackouts and without a doubt would lower electricity prices globally.
The problems arise when some countries have a slavish, not conicidentally religous fervor for "free markets" while others take a progressive attitude. This leads to a form of international competition that is not productive at all in the sense of the over-used market metaphor. This is highly destructive competion of the cold war sort in which destruction of the "enemy" at all costs displaces the goal of efficiency.
Well I said willfully ignorant, as in deceptive to large shareholders who are mostly older individuals who don't really pay much attention to newfangled gadgetry.
But I have three web cameras sitting around that don't get used and my point was that this stuff has been hyped before. The only difference this time is that the emphasis is on freedom. Well, if you're an adult that kinda flies right by ya because you already have freedom and cameras and it's just an extension of that in a slightly more convenient form.
But what is slighyly more convenient to you or I is a world away to a twelve year old.
Although you are apparently blissfully unfamiliar with the treachery of the adolescent mind, I assure you that the lack of trust between adults and their children when it comes to sexual matters already is, has been, and will persist in being a great obstacle to the proliferation of gadgets that seem to be perfectly innocuous to you or I.
Again, I'm not opposed to these things and I think they could be fun, but the same is true of marijuana. My opinion doesn't change the big wide world. It's not logical to get so hysterical about such harmless things, but the fact is people freak over little things like kids fucking on camera.
Okay, I'm an American born and raised. Grew up with full insurance and as I got into my twenties I worked overseas.
Well, you know as you get older you start to fall apart in little ways and I had a bad tooth upon coming back to the States one year from where I lived in this little country called Taiwan that has socialized medicine.
I didn't have insurance and my tooth was hurting while I was in the States on vacation. So wanting to take care of my own affairs, I told my Dad I was going to wait and have my tooth done in Taiwan. But both of us were a bit concerned about how safe it really was. The ol' man insisted I go to my childhood dentist and ask him what he thought first.
So, I go in and this good ol' American dentist says yep you waitied too long. It looks like you're going to need a root canal. It'll cost about $1300. I can do it this week.
I told him my plan to go back and have it done in Taiwan and boy oh boy did he tell me some horror stories. Well, I don't remember all the exact details, but the sum of the story was that I was risking my life. If I insisted on doing this insane suicidal act, the least he would insist on is giving me clean needles because it was well known that those Taiwan doctors were notorious for re-using their needles to save costs!
Dear God. My father was so depressed that his son insisted on certain death, but after hearing that line of crap coming out of that old fucker's mouth, I was determined to see how bad it really was.
Well sure enough, I went back to Taiwan and had my root canal for thirty bucks. I got the same titanium post they use in the States. I got the same artsy fartsy thing where they send out the blank to be custom sculpted to match your other teeth and best of all it was almost completely painless. This is contrast to a root canal ol Dr. Lying bastard had given me as a kid when I busted one on the sidewalk. That sonofabitch let my novacaine wear off and gave me the ol Dustin Hoffman treatment.
The moral of the story is, you're full of shit. I'm an American and I can testify that I've gotten way better medical service outside of the US and was lied to by American physicians when I suggested I would try such a thing.
I also happen to know that the people struggling to get to American often ARE doctors. They're dying to get on the goddam gracy train.
You are misinformed.
It seems like the problem was quite clearly stated and then simply dismissed as unadressable --capitalism is not a just system of distribution.
Why is the answer to that problem to "make work?" That's a rhetorical question because obviously the reason is the author is unwilling to consider an alternative to winner-take-all as the only way for society to operate.
The answer to inequality in the face of hyper efficiency is to distribute wealth in an equitable manner? Abundance is only a problem if you slavishly assume that hard core capitalism is the only answer. But that's a personal issue, not a logical problem.
I think it's worth considering the amount of hype surrounding anything to do with children and sexuality.
Way back when at the time 56K modems were just coming on, I installed a modem based video conferencing system for a small rural school. Everybody was so excited about the potential and the quality of the signal wasn't a big issue because it was so exciting and isn't technology great. All in all, it was not too different from what you're hearing right now in the latest frothy bubble of video conferencing hype.
But, despite all the good intentions and hopeful exuberance and pats on the back for a job well done and gosh isn't technology great type of wide-eyed speculation at the time, the system was pulled for entirely non-technical reasons.
In the process of testing the system, we hooked into the, then cutting edge, CU-See-Me network to test it out and right away it was chicks flashing tits, guys holding their dicks and all this fun stuff that might be real groovy for adult users looking for a cheap thrill, but a major problem in an elementary school setting.
Ever since then, I've seen the same old hype just continue over and over. I laughed out loud when I read an article a few months ago with the CEO of AT&T suggesting video conferencing was just about to take off and save his company along with on-line music sales. I have to speculate that there is a bit of willful ignorance going on here.
Most of the older people I know tend to be quite camera shy and then a lot of the younger people are depending on the older people to pay for their toys. I think the combo, along with the fact that almost everyone has a web cam and nobody uses them is quite suggestive of some fundamental problems with the marketing of camera enabled wireless devices.
That's not to say they're not cool and everybody should grow up and stop worrying about kids getting some cheap thrills. I agree one thousand percent. But, if everybody agreed with me, the world would be a very nice place and nobody would watch prime time TV. But obviously that's not the world we live in.
Oh, you're right. Nevermind. That's more than a shrub. Indeed, that's almost as big as the Lepidodendron's ancestors. I thought it was only four meters. I saw the story elsewhere a while back and I thought they said it was smaller than that.
I stand corrected.
But, the club moss is misnamed. It's not a moss. It's a shrub. It looks cool too. The reason many people consider it a pest is because it grows partially underground and it's full or thorns so it's miserable to try and remove. That semi-underground growth is also why it was mistaken for a moss.
Indeed, the plant of the Rockies are generally quite a trip. Aspens are also known to have shared root systems extending for miles. The original Internet.
While it's neat and all, I think it's worth considering that the common club moss that is considered a pest all over the Rockies is a descendent of the Lepidodendrons from the Carboniferous period which is almost twice as far back as the Jurassic.
It's true that the modern club moss is nothing but a shrub while its ancient ancestor that produced much of the coal we use today was a great big monster tree, but this Australian plant doesn't seem to be all that big either.
to the insanity created by the perversion of sleep cycles that the so-called work week creates.
Sleep studies have shown that if people are allowed to follow their natural cycles, they'll still sleep about eight hours a night. But what they won't do is go to sleep and get up the same time every day. That's totally artificial and there is no evidence that it is healthy or normal behavior for humans.
What happens is that people with unrestrained sleep cycles tend to go asleep an hour later every day. So, in the course of 24 days they will naturally form a complete cycle and return to their original bedtime.
Ben Franklin was an asshole and a hypocrite who loved to party and spent most of his life in France.
Speaking of that, my browser pulled up a banner for just such a beast when I was checking out the mini-itx site. Apparently a company called i-tuner sells little power supply daughter boards from 40 to 100 watts. Looks like the way to go if space is that precious, but they're a bit pricey starting at around fifty bucks. Cool for the car though, and they sell little car adapters as well.
Maybe the battery-less DIY notebook isn't so far off after all.
When I first saw the blurb for this MS child protection blurb, I was also looking at ads from this year's Computex trade show.
The two side-by-side struck an interesting contrast. On the one hand we've got MS talking about how we can't trust kids to use text chatting because they're so obsessed with sex. On the other hand we've got dozens of consumer electronics firms partnering with MS to make this the year of the camera enabled wireless devices. So, what's the deal?
If kids can't be trusted not to use the keyboards for text based sex --I mean how hard up can you get-- how are wireless cameras going to be the runaway product this year?
There seems to be a real contradition between these two lines of thought. I suspect from my own memories of childhood that the answer is: yes kida are obsessed with sex and no, the camera enabled devices are not going to sell well.
Most older adults tend to be camera shy and while kids tend to love the idea of posing for the camera, there's the definite possibility they might like too much.
Ouch! Hey, that wasn't supposed to be AC. That was me. I posted it. Go ahead call me a commie. I don't care. I'm so far left I'm on the far right too.
"Work with Title companies who have huge databases . . . "
That's right. Realtors don't have these things at all, they just work WITH people who do. That's still not coming from the realtors themselves, is it? I mean, isn't it theoretically possible that a land management branch of Google could also work with a title company?
It's like implying that travel agents work WITH the airlines so you can only buy tickets from them. But that's not the case. Why should real estate, and expecially raw land, be any different.
That would be a trip.
I tried the search and it failed on my quite a few times, but the potential is huge. The first thing that came to my mind was real estate.
I've gone out looking for land with realtors that can't even find the lots they're supposed to be showing, and look how much they take in transaction fees for their "service." It' not like they do the Escrow themselves. I suppose it's a bit different for houses, but for land sales they act like they're doing you a favor.
Not only that, but I've gone in with aerial photos and maps from the County that all come off of county maintained computer databases and the realtors inevitably insist their little hand drawn map that doesn't even accurately map the parcels is the more accurate solution.
This could be the beginning of something huge for Google.
I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised really. The politics of Open Source --and from my own experience its fair to say politics in general-- in Germany is quite serious.
I think it's fair to say the political implications of Open Source are also larger in Germany than in the US. Of course this may simply be an extension of the different attitudes towards politics.
As a youth in California in the eighties I hung out with a fairly wild and assorted bunch and I thought I could hang with anybody. In those same years I travelled to Berlin on my own and I walked by a group of skinheads. I thought, oh yeah these are just some hipster types like California skins. You know, looking all bad, but more often than not more harm to themselves than others. So, although I had a long pony tail I thought, yeah, I'll go up and ask these guys if there's any shows going down.
Holy cripes. I coudln't even get close to them. As soon as I started walking towards them they jumped all fiercesome like giving me the evil eye. Although I didn't know what they were muttering, it was apparent from their body language that I was no longer in Kansas.
Well, oddly enough I just went and looked in the forums to verify what I'm about to say and found that the thread I was referring to seems to be gone.
But, there's a guy with a screen name of FabianX and I'm pretty sure it was he who wrote the script to load the whole distro into RAM, or at least he wrote an early version of it and posted in the forums.
Odd I can't find it now. I've gone back and looked for updates a few times in the past. It's not that important, but I'm fairly certain there are other people who are closely associated with the development. And if you give credit to the people in the forums answering questions and checking for bugs, which is seems fair, then it's a big team.
Hey, just for the record as I sometimes reply to my own posts as an AC, that wasn't me.
But speaking of personal issues, I would like to clarify that I have an MA in Rhetoric and my thesis chair was the head of the Philosophy Department. So, yeah I have a fairly decent background in philosophy as a matter of fact and I obviously don't see any conflicts between "philosophy" and my position. I think you're confusing philosophy with moralism.
I've long been disappointed that biotech is so damn conservative about trying to just go for it and take some chances. We're all dying after all. It's like the absurdity of cancer therapies that can't be tried on terminally patients because they might have side effects. Jesus Christ on a crutch, that's like some kind of absurd joke
Indeed, I'm testing the waters of bionformatics myself lately so I can stop compaining and do something about it. But that's another story.
What caught my eye was the thing about being able to use stem cells. The whole stem cell story is so amazing and yet it seems that there's this amazing potential and nobody wants to try anything amazing with it. The attitude is like, yes this is amazing but we can't use it in amazing ways because it's experimental and we don't know what might happen.
If I had a research budget and I was in this competition, my idea would be to create embryonic stem cells of my mouse and just inject them into the thing like it was a pin cushion. Damn the torpedos.
So what's the worse things that's going to happen? A dead lab rat? What if the thing stays young forever? Let's pick up the pace people!
Well, you know D. Buddy, it's not always necessary to look at these things as a zero sum game. That's the strict, unwavering market based thought process where competition is distorted into a kind of moral value. In a market scenario, it's kill or be killed, one man take all. Go ahead and hate your neighbor. Go ahead and cheat a friend. As long as you get that money, you are righteous and damn the means.
But a Debian distro like Knoppix isn't in the market. It's outside of that mundane game and on a higher plane. It's like Obi Wan: you may strike it down today, but it will return more powerful than you will ever know.
There is no need for contingency when you have faith that you're doing the right thing. You simply persist and in persistence there is joy, peace and maybe even euphoria.
I haven't been connection to Knopper.net, but I've been using the forums at Knoppix.net for the last few days and have had a lot of trouble connecting since last week. Sourceforge and PostNuke sites all seemed to be slow lately.