See, the only reason this is even an issue is because the premise of SL was not open to begin with. Personally this is why I thought it was a typical lame half-ass closed approach from the start. If it was really worth creating a virtual community worthy of the title "Second Life", it would certainly be worth doing it as open source. It's not called Second Dreary Business World now is it? If it started off free and open then these issues wouldn't be disruptive because the system would have started with the premise that the whole world was free as it should be in a virtual space. The premise was flawed. Life is not about money. Life is about love, knowledge, food and sex. And sleep. And a few other things but if you think money is a crucial part you're a loser in the most dismal sense.
In response to the RIAA President, this Slashdot user would offer the anaology of prostitution. Aristotle, I believe it was Aristotle, said that teaching was akin to prostitution because a prostitute sells love for money and a teacher sells wisdom for money. Aristotle wasn't necessarily opposed to prostitution, he was just pointing out the analogy.
But the analogy hits upon a very important point. Love, knowledge and wisdom are all best when shared freely. A society composed of decent moral individuals is by necessity that society that is most willing to share amongst its members. This is true for material goods to some extent, but in these immaterial goods it is fundamentally important.
Fair use is not merely an uncontestable good in the context of our times, it is easy to argue that copyrights, patents and trademarks absolutely must be struck back by force of law with the utmost expedience. Furthermore, those, like the President of the RIAA, who would argue otherwise must realize that they can, should and hopefully will be held accountable for their anti-social and irresponsible behavior.
Who do you think you are anyway?
I'm seeing a lot of criticism in this thread that seems to read like --it's all been tried and there is no question it's a complete failure, let's move on.
In light of this defeatism, I'd like to remind the readership that the first time in the history of recorded human research that a human embryonic stem cell was induced to reproduce outside of the human body was in . . .
1998
1998. The advent of this technology that could potentially transform human existnce far beyond anything remotely close is about as old as the Linux 2.2 kernel.
I'd say it's a bit transparently political to go around touting the failure of embryonic stem cell therapy.
Some people's famlies depend on them to make damn sure the internet is working day in and day out and they get in deep shit whenever something goes wrong with it. Indeed, I met my wife by helping her connect her modem to the internet years ago and to this day one of the only thing that drags my out of bed early is when the freakin' connection goes down.
This real world situation hardly fits into the scenario they were trying to paint with this "study".
Fittingly, since we're at/. the concept of so-called intellectual property is at the heart of the GM debate.
With an issues like this, it's all about keeping the issues straight. It's nice to see that people in this thread so far mostly don't see the problem with clones. After all, naturally formed human clones, identical twins, are around us all the time so who cares if cows are cloned for food. Indeed, you'd think cloning opponents would be happy to hear that all the cloned cows are going to be butchered.
The problem with the GM debate is that a bunch of distinct issues get garbled together and it gets spun as the technophiles versus the luddites when it is potentially far more subtle than that. This is not too different to what happens with the issue of adults producing and distributing child pornography and the completely separate issue of children being exposed to sexually explicit images. The first is obviously problematic because it involves an abuse of power, the second issue is far more complex and is generally considered a normal part of growing into an adult. Despite being two separate issues, these two things almost always get balled into one as soon as debates get started and it ends up being the sexually liberal versus the sexually conservative people arguing about irrelevant side issues using one-liners and ad hominem attacks when the real issue is far more subtle and complex than that style of debate allows.
With GM the problem lies in the distinction between the people opposed to GM products for two different reasons. First, there are those who do, in fact, fear any kind of tampering with the genetic code. Quite separate from those people are another group who merely fear the fact that genetically manipulated organisms can result in products that are protected by patents, copyrights and trademarks. These two groups are worlds apart in mind-set and yet they both get painted with the same brush of being technophobic or anti-intellectual while this is actually almost the opposite of the case for the latter group.
Yeah, I remember. The first time I came across XP's activation was the last time I used Microsoft products in my home. Prior to that I had worked as a Windows developer for five years.
It was kinda coincidental timing. The business was on the rocks anyway and I, along with my boss, had come to the conclusion that the whole MS business model was just an outrageous scam. So, you could say I had a grudge, but the XP activation thing was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I was helping a friend transfer a big video project that he needed before he caught a flight and time was tight. I pulled my brand new XP drive where we had copied the project off of a stack of CDRs a few days earlier. We needed to copy it into another machine with an empty hard drive he had just bought for the flight and assumed he was going to take with him on his trip.
What's this? Product what? . . . Call Microsoft support? Fuck man.
The guy was bummed. It was a huge uncompressed 3D animation he had been working of for months and he needed it for a grad school interview two days later and three thousand miles away on the other side of the Pacific. Sorry dude. Maybe you could cancel your flight and apply to grad school again next year.
At first I was just disappointed and irritated but then later I realized this meant that if I had a virus I couldn't pull the drive and scan it in another machine like I had been doing for years prior to that point. That's when I said no freaking way.
I happened to stumble upon Knoppix about that time and to make a long story short I'm on a Knoppix machine at this very moment.
So, for some people, XP's product activation was indeed the last straw.
I was gonna say somebody might want to send ice breakers up there and try to keep it open, but apparently this has all been considered at length and billions of dollars put into it and it aint happening. That rings quite true to me and it even gives me pause to further reflect on the real basis of our current period of globalization.
I use this phrase "current period of globalization" to make the disctinction between events in the last seventy years or so and the globalization that occured in earlier centuries that is referred to as mercantilism. Proponents of our current globalization like to emphasize the distinction between that earlier period by saying that our modern globalization is the enemy of tariffs and doesn't see global trade as a zero-sum game: the implication being that everybody can win in this new game. While I enthusiastically support the idea of everybody being a winner, I think this story about the rusting Soviet ice breaker does reveal some of the frayed edges in this rhetoric of globalization.
If the globalization game was really so simple and straightforward then you'd think that any geographic advantage such as Russia's proximity to North America and the presence of an open sea route across the north pole would have led directly to huge trade growth between the two regions. And yet, the advantages of globalizations have fallen primarily on Asian nations which are about as geographically distant from North America as is possible to be on the globe. The recent rise of China muddles the picture a bit, but when you consider China's ethnic diaspora in the countries of the north and south Asian Pacific Rim that were in large part former military allies of the United States things seem a bit clearer.
But this does all get off the point. After all, there is the Bering Strait. If geographical proximity was so important then why isn't the Bering Strait used. That would seem to benefit Russia, China and Japan after all. So perhaps it's all just plain old practical considerations.
Hmm, went and looked at Wikipedia to see what it said about the Bering Strait. I guess a tunnel under the strait seems line an interesting way to go but the main problems are environmental and cultural. The area is basically in a pristine state and there's a lot of resistance to development.
So who knows. Perhaps this open ice passage is all pretty irrelevant.
I couldn't disagree more with the common misunderstanding that life is somehow naturally focused on competition.
Let me give you one example of which I could add thousands. Let's look at the food pyramid. This is a classic example because it's probably where you're thinking your argument finds its strength. In fact, the food pyramid proves that competition is insignificant in the big picture.
Measured in calories, where do you think the vast majority of the nutrition on the Earth comes from? That's right. It comes from plants --annuals in particular. Where do the annual plants come from? They come from the previous generation in the form of seeds, spores and shoots. Where do those seeds get the energy to grow? Do they fight each other for it? No, they get it from the sun. If the animals that eat those plants fight over the plants, will the result be more plants? I don't think so.
It's not to say that competition doesn't exist. It does even in the plant world. A certain group of plants in a given area might compete for sunlight. So, the point isn't to deny that there is such a thing as compeition. What I would hope to teach you is simply that a wise person ought to consider the larger picture of how before the world works before assuming that competition is such a central focus of life. It simply is not. That's a fact.
I grew up on NPR in the seventies and eighties so it really saddens me to listen to it today. The Republicans in the Bush administration made a specific decision to drop the long-standing call to cut funding to NPR and to, instead, take over editorial control. That is so freaking obvious to anyone who has been a long-time listener of NPR.
So, the analogy to Slashdot is actually quite fitting. Slashdot started off as a site where people were actively advocating open source and zealously prostletyzing free software. Over the years, it has become the center of a community more likely to criticize open source and the principles of free software movement than any sort of advocacy resource. The resentment towards free and open source software in the comments here at Slashdot is really disapointing to a long-time user.
If you want something similar to what NPR used to be, you need to go with Pacifica Network. Democracy Now! is archived at Archive.org in both audio and video formats. Indymedia.org's torrent site is another nice resource for the kind of news coverage you used to get at NPR. Personally, I still listen to NPR streams in order to keep up on the latest Republican spin but I find the degree of propaganda apparent in the editorial decisions disturbing. You can hear the strain and hesitation in the voices as they read some of those scripts.
While Digg isn't really analogous to Slashdot, at least you see more of a gee-whiz enthusiastic attitude towards free and open source and DIY technology in the kinds of stories that get featured. For that reason, I have come to prefer Digg although I rarely bother with the comments on Digg except to find mirrors and the like. My personal opinion is that Slashdot could be redeemed with a moderation system that gets away from numeric scores and offers something more like what educators refer to as portfolio assessment.
This might sound mysterious and abstract, but it doesn't have to be a huge difference. It could be as simple as adding new sorts of descriptive moderation categories like "activist", "funny man", "coder" or "solder monkey". This would allow people to customize their view of the comments in accordance to their interests rather than converting everything to a single numeric value from -1 to 5 that becomes meaningless as various interests battle to draft its definition in a big competition.
Furthermore, these descriptive categories can have sub-categories. Take the "activist" mod for instance. Perhaps you have sub-categories like "free market fuckhead" and "liberal god" --okay, that was just a little joke. But you get the idea. The "coder" descriptive mod might have a list of programming languages that the person actually has experience with or has previously discussed on Slashdot.
Anybody who reads Slashdot for any period of time knows the mod system is clearly the biggest source of complaints. It was great for a community of a few thousand users, but it was pretty much trash long before I opened an account. The inaction on this aspect of the site is really disappointing since there are real opportunities to be had here. While the original idea of a competitive mod system modeled on the crust old educational A-F grading system was fine when the idea of a web-based technical news forum was new, it no longer serves a meaningful purpose. Schools, and I happen to be well aware that this is true even at ETS, are getting away from score based reporting. It's about time Slashdot got with the program. Let's move to descriptive moderation rather than a score based system.
There was a time when people thought their posts at Slashdot could help them get a job. Well, instead of just ridiculing that notion, why not run with it? Remake Slashdot as a portfolio based site where people are really motivated to make genuine contributions instead of just gaming a tired system that even mainstream education is putting behind it.
First, for people who just need a quick formatting tool, it's good enough with the MyDSL extensions making it nice and simple to use for a lot of USB boot type applications.
Second I have found many non Linux users who think DSL sounds like a good way to start because they're so sick of bloat. Could be that a lot of them download it just to see what it's like. This second reason is probably somewhat unfortunate since DSL can be a bit frustrating for someone unfamiliar with FOSS distros.
I used to have some machines using DSL, but I found that Knoppix with fluxbox just made it so much simpler.
Here's a quote from a guy who considered himself qualified to discuss politics with authority. He seems to think that if we had automated means of producing objects of desire and need that we would essentially be in a position to do away with class in society.
There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation; as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.
Let's resubmit this one like, "Hi I'm automating my house using a CAN based network and I'm wondering what kind of devices people are using in their systems."
For those who don't know, CAN is what most modern automobiles use as a network. The advantage over something like TCP/IP is that it allows you to resolve conflicts between devices at the network level. To use the car analogy, it would help to prevent a prolem with the stereo from screwing up the ignition timing despite having both of them tied to a common network. It's also used in all sorts of industrial machines, robots and the like.
This seems like a decent first step for serious home automation. Anybody gone this route? Care to provide details like what brand controllers you used so such things?
I'm sure most of us are too young to recall the Get Clean for Gene campaign in 1968. But, I think the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention speaks volumes about where these calls to cut the hair end up. Certainly that time and place was a locus of dozens if not hundreds of millions of factors but whether or not to grow long hair is a deeply personal and passionate subject and that's because even more than the clothes one wears the style and length of one's hair speaks volumes about one's political position.
This is not a simple algebra of long hair equals liberal while short hair equals conservative. That sort of generalization is generalized enough to be as good as saying nothing at all. But within the delicate and complex intricacies of personal politics that are as unique and varied as each individual on Earth, we can say one thing --it does mean something. The style in which one wear's one's hair means something to that individual. What it means exactly cannot be generalized. But it does mean something to the individual who chooses to wear that hair style and that's the whole point. People absolutely have the right to make their own choices about how they want to appear.
When someone comes along and says you can't choose that style because I don't like it or I'm saying that society doesn't like it so you better not choose that --that's looking for trouble. THat's oppression. Even if people go along with it, the results get ugly nonethless. The problem is not how much hair people do or don't have, the problem is oppression and the addiction to controlling other people's appearance and behavior.
But this guy is just an old geezer ready to retire. He looks old enough to have voted for Johnson. So, whatever.
What he doesn't know is that there is actually a trend in the United States today towards long hair that hasn't happened in many years. I notice these things as I haven't cut my hair since I was eighteen and I'm almost forty now. For many years it was rare for me to see a fellow long hair. But since the war started I've seen crowds of younger kids go from shaggy to little ponytails and I'm starting to see some braids out there.
Now, you might think I'm biased, I am, but if you don't believe there's a trend then I have a little Google for ya. Go to Google news and look for Regis. Regis is a parent company of Vidal Sassoon, The Hair Club and dozens of hair salon chains located around the country. This quarter they didn't make their numbers. Their official explanation was that there is a nationwide trend towards growing long hair which is cutting into their profits.
Don't believe it? Go look for yourself.
Well, I'm not going to pretend I know all things about all motors. But you are definitely wrong when it comes to my particular area of expertise which is the Toyota R series. The reason I like the R series motors so much is precisely because the same engine was used across platforms (trucks and Celicas have identical motors) over several decades and you most certainly can take a fuel injector from a late model and directly bolt it onto an older head. No problemo. You can even mix and match heads across different displacement blocks. Google for 20R head on a 22R block it if you're interested.
So no problem there. Well, just one little bitty problem which is that it is illegal in California because of CARB's visual inspection requirements. Just that little minor issue. It's fucking insane. See, I'm getting pissed just thinking about it.
No question mark because it's a rehetorical question. I saw this as an interesting confirmation of my theory that the last place we'll see FOSS is in the schools. I find it fascinating that the earliest adopters of fOSS are in the business community. No surprise there, business is cut-throat. You've got to take every advantage you can. The first wave f public sector adoption is taking place in governmental administative agencies. Again no surprise. As the article pointed out even the Governator was pushing agencies to make the move to cut costs. But the last place we'll ever see FOSS is in the schools. It will get there eventually, and that will be check-mate but it will be the last move on the board as is appropriate for a check-mate.
What I find so intriguing is that I see this comclusion as an inevitable outcome of the culture of open source development. Why do people develop open source after all? For many, certainly not all but a substantial proportion, it's simply a matter of pride. In open source, anybody can jump to the front. Everybody wants to be a kernel hacker and anything that isn't written in C, C++ or at least Java is considered a trivial aside. I'm not saying that's wrong. Quite the contrary, that's right and the success of FOSS is the best proof that this is indeed the right way to do things. Dumbing it down is dumb after all. But that hot-shot look at my mad skillz approach doesn't fit into education. The irony of education is that it's actually about dumbing things down and that's tedious boring work that few people are going to appreciate.
What was supposed to happen in the closed source world of education was that the teachers were going to be given a set of tools to create their own content since they were the ones in the trenches who knew how to create relevant content. Originally, Macromedia thrived on this market with products like Director and Authorware. Unfortunately, those tools were all very expensive and teachers didn't see any motivation to make it work as there was no compensation for even working with those "simplified" tools. The result was that a few large companies began to dominate the educational content market and now the market for educational technology is completely owned. Prying it out of the grips of the owners is only going to happen when open source versions of those early tools are put into the classrooms that teachers can actually use and when teachers are compensated for creating content using those tools.
It can be done, but I'm telling ya, it's going to be the last place we'll see the success of FOSS. Furthermore, when it does happen it will be the beginning of the end of schools as we know them which is undoubtedly a good thing.
This is such a frustrating topic for a person who works on old cars it's hard for me to even address it without going into seizures and throwing the keyboard against the wall.
There is a huge problem with your "I heart CARB" sentiment if you really do want cleaner air. Yeah, sure you can buy overpriced aftermarket stuff that is CARB approved. But what you can't do is adapt used modern cleaner technology onto an older car by upgrading to more efficient used technology. See, that "used" part is extremely important in the reality of car parts.
The problem isn't with people who are buying overpriced aftermarket stuff that gets the CARB approval. After all, people who can afford that crap probably have newer cars and then have a hobby car they hardly ever drive. They're not the polluters. The polluters are the folks driving old beaters on a day-today basis that can't afford that stuff. Those are the people that are shit out of luck. It is simply not the case that these people get rid of their cars becaue of these regulations. Au contraire, they are forced by the regulations to stick with the original outdated equipment if they want to have their cars running at a price they can afford. That economic reality that CARB glosses over is the real source of pollution.
If you were to allow that segment of the market to "upgrade" using used parts you would see genuine improvements in air quality. Far more efficient parts for older cars are available in spades at prices that make them extremely attractive to owners of older cars.
Take the example of an older car that uses a carburetor instead of EFI. In many cases there is no technical reason a mechanic could not upgrade that older car to EFI at a price even cheaper than rebuilding the carb by grabbing an EFI from a newer model out of a junkyard. The reason it can't be done is not technical, it is regulatory. Hence, carburetors are still being rebuilt by the tens of thousands. How does that help clean the air?
But while I'm not at all surprised by this, I think the fact is that the US will eventually have cheap broadband like it or not.
The problem with broadband for many Americans is that they don't see the advantage in it. Many Americans can afford to pay for many of the things that people in other countries might only be able to get by downloading them freely off the net. So, in a way Americans have blinders on with regards to the possibilities of the Internet.
An excellent, and I would even say profound, example is academic journals. An American could be forgiven for thinking that all universities across the globe have libraries with stacks and stacks of academic journals just like the local state university library does. In fact, that's not the case at all. In many nations, broadband is enabling a great leap in educational quality that gives millions of students the chance to study meaningful cutting-edge research for the first time in their local academic history. Americans naturally have a hard time imagining what that means or how important it is because they already have practically free access to these things. Anybody in the States can use the university library after all. So, for an American, the issue of getting journals on the Internet seems somewhat irrelevant.
So, broadband is definitely something that the US is only going to accept reluctantly, but slowly or not it is most certainly going to come even if the US is the last place on earth to get decent broadband penetration which I could easily imagine having just visited there and having been forced to use a modem on a number of occasions.
Well, Fukuyama's theories had a lot to do with biotechnology and from my perspective he's on the far right as far as biotechnology is concerned. He's a member of Bush's Council on Bioethics, if that doesn't tell you the man's ideas are seriously fucked up then your views are probably closer to his than my own.
I would agree that we are at the end of history, although I'd like to think of it as the beginning of the new history rather than the end of the old history, but for technological reasons rather than economic or political ones. The issue of whether or not some thing referred to as "liberal democracy" has displaced some other political game is totally irrelevant.
Buckmister Fuller, among many others, liked to emphasize that real social changes are driven by technologies not by politics. Certainly the two are related, but there are endless clear examples throughout history where technology has driven changes in society that were only subsequently politicized.
This is not too different from the idea that in creation myths you inevitably find that the oldest parts of the myth are, in fact, the most recently authored elements. Politicians constantly attempt to play off their own efforts as somehow being linked to the creation of technologies when the fact is that their rhetoric come many years after the technology was developed. Certainly Al Gore's Internet comes to mind, but on the other side of the political spectrum this is a favorite tactic of Milton Friedman as well. Politicians love to pretend their personal points of view give rise to technologies while it is usually the other way around.
But whether or not this is the end of history, or whether that is a meaningful statement at all, is not the point. The point is that your analysis draws upon too lage of a timeline. It's not particularly helpful to look at things on the scale of ancient Chinese dynasties or the history of the Catholic Church. I mean it's fun to speculate, but we live in rapidly changing times to say the lease. Indeed, that statement was true even by the eighteenth century which you could think of as the dawn of our current round of globalization. Drawing historical parallels to the world we live in today to those ancient regimes that covered many centuries is really just an idle speculation becuase our world is changing much faster than it ever did before. It's really not appropriate to make one-to one comparisons because they operate on different scales.
If you want to see where the world is changing and how fast it is changing, look no further than the monitor right in front of you. We are not merely in times of rapid change, we are in times of Overclocked UltraChange V4.0 Extreme Edition. Change is happening so fast people aren't even aware that it is happening. Part of it is that people in the US are seeing the least of it. To people in the States, it seems like hardly anything is going down. There has always been a glut of data for Americans born after World War II. But in other parts of the world there is no question that the changes taking place since the advent of what you might call the Video Game Generation are very real. I would cite as one instance the major decline in foreign students studying in the US and the huge surge in University attendance in what were formerly considered more or less useless third world colleges and universities offering degrees in attendance and citizenship with no real academic substance and definitely no technical savy.
People tend to think this shift has to do with the Department of Homeland Security and visa restrictions since 911, but that doesn't explain the surge in local university attendance in poor rural countries which is even more huge than the decline taking place in the US. It's quite telling to separate the two and look at them individually. On the one hand, you have a decline in overseas students
actually really simple.
It's nothing more than a DVD or Xvid file with subtitles and two PCs.
You take one PC with the subtitles or the audio in your native tongue and another in the language you're trying to learn. As you go through the movie, re-type the subtitles in the target language repeating the spoken phrases in the target language. The re-typing and reciting part is to drill it into your head since just watching the movie tends to leave you forgetting everything a minute later. If you have the discipline to sit down and do it, this is a really fast technique and you're working with complete sentences is context with body language so it really helps you remember phrases in context rather than vocabulary which is practically useless by itself.
You could do the same thing with two DVD players and two TVs, but I find the controls on a PC are much easier to work with for the constant back and forth it requires and I think the re-typing part is essential so you need at least one PC anyway and of course a keyboard with the target language keyboard layout. If your target is Chinese, you can get fonts with phonetic symbols for your subtitles that will allow you to key in the characters even if you don't know the pronunciation. All those things are available on a Debian system.
However, although this technique rocks, I think the only way to really learn a foreign language is to get a lover who speaks that language. Almost every English native speaker I know who has learned spoken Chinese well has taken this path and it's definitely the way to go. I took classes for years and could hardly open my mouth, much less be understood. But after a year of living with a Chinese girlfriend it became second nature without even trying. Of course you risk ending up married and living in China, but that's not as bad as it sounds.
I just what I felt was a fine job of this on the phone with one of my family members who was not pro P2P, but was upset about this Sony thing.
The whole situation is quite simple to explain really. It's merely a conflict over privacy.
The biggest privacy advocates in the world are corporate interests really and by extension their Republican or so-called neo liberal supporters which would include other political factions such as libertarians. This emphasis on the fundamental importance of privacy is clear in the fact that big business and its Republican advocates are hell bent on privatizing all sorts of things that have traditionally been public. Private is about as close as you can get to the opposite of public. It's like two sides of the same coin, or two edges to the sword if you like.
So, the private sector is totally dependent for its existence upon technologies that allow privacy. Who is the biggest user of virtual LAN technology? This is obviously an essential tool for modern corporations. SSL is another privacy protocol essential for e-commerce. If the public sector had no privacy it would cease to be the private sector, it would be the public sector. That's what the public sector is, those things which are not private.
Which brings us to the issue at hand. It's not that companies like Sony are saying that people shouldn't have privacy. That's totally in opposition to their very nature. Corporations can't exist without privacy and technologies that enforce and defend privacy. The problem is they are saying that their privacy is essential and the consumer's privacy is not.
That's quite a simple explanation of what's going on that anybody can understand. Good one to bring up this Thanksgiving while the family is all together.
Yeah, perhaps but consider this, once you get to resolutions of around 4000 lines horizontal, which isn't too many generations past this, certainly within reach of the stuff they're doing at InPhase and Optware you come up on architecture issues. I mean architecture as in buildings, not chips. Most residential homes have eight foot ceilings. If you assume that you max out the height of the wall in monitor then you divide an eight foot ceiling into 4000 lines you're getting about forty pixels every inch of height. So, if the resolution was like 4000X6000 you'd have inch grids containing 2400 pixels per square inch. That might not sound excessively fine for the human eye from a few feet, but if you sit a few feet from an eight foot tall and twelve foot wide wall-sized screen you won't see the picture too well. You'll have to stand back at least five feet and probably more like ten to be comfortable. From ten feet back, I would think that 2400 pixels per square inch is going to be more than the eye can discern.
In fact, I just did an experiment to see how my eyes could do. I took an old video card that has a surface mount chip in the middle of it that's about an inch square. It has about sixty pins on each side of the chip. I sat it on the other side of the room about ten feet away and tried to focus on the pins. I definitely can't discern them individually from here.
So, there are limits simply in the sense that displays can only get so large without requiring a massive re-build of the world's residential architecture in order to accomodate huge fifty foot wide theater screens in every home.
And this is a key point that the author overlooked in the economic analysis. It's similar to saying the world's space programs have all been a total economic waste and reaching that conclusion by eliminating all of the economic side effects that have resulted from the technology that went into those space programs. That's a political statement, not an analysis.
The large-scale production of NiMh battery arrays that go into hybrids is rapidly reducing the unit price of these high energy density storage devices. Now, is it really a great lap of logic to think that low-cost high energy density rechargeable electricity packs might find use in other products besides hybrid vehicles once the price is right?
Not only has the price of large arrays of NiMh cells gone down dramatically in a short time, but the early stages of an upramp in large arrays of Li-Ion batteries is beginning as well.
But wait, there's more!
Supercapacitors. Did you know that the regenerative braking system in Japanese hybrids uses arrays of supercapacitors? Again, the technology has been around for a long time, the real issue is price and the price doesn't come down until we get economies of scale and we don't get economies of scale until we get a consumer grade product that uses masses of these devices.
The availability of these high energy density devices at low prices is almost guaranteed to have fall-over effects in all sorts of different consumer markets. Unless you take those significant advantages into consideration, it's really just a snipe to draw a conclusion about the lack of economic value in a hybrid car.
Back in 1999 or so I bought a portable CD based MP3 player that also plays VCDs! And it works great till this very day. Plugs into any TV or VCR or whatever is connected to your TV that has some sort of imput with RCA video jacks. Works in hotels even. Plays crispy MPEG2 video no problem. Even back then when digital video was cutting edge and DVD was just coming on this product cost forty bucks in Taiwan which conveniently happened to be a place where you could rent VCDs.
Now, it had no built-in screen and obviously it didn't have gobs of flash memory since it was a CD based device. But it was extemely cheap both in terms of initial cost and in terms of blank media. Most importantly it didn't have any DRM. Moreover, that seven year-old el cheapo Taiwan toy has far better video resolution than this new iPod.
What I'd like to emphaize is that if this ultra cheap DRM free portable video player device was already done at a cheap price seven years ago, it will most likely be done again with flash storage, and an MP4 codec support. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this from Samsung and even as an OEM through BanQ Compal Foxconn etc branded as Dell or HP. This is the same group of generic OEMs, by the way, that already produce Apple's hardware to begin with so it's not really a quality or even a design issue as much as it is a branding and marketing issue. This is not about tech, this is about marketing.
The final point then is that the DRM tie-in is a huge mistake. Apple is following Sony's missteps here and Sony is clearly losing its way due to its relentless insistence on DRM across the product line. The video iPod is a great opportunity --for every CE company except Apple.
The question is a bit too broad. Linux can mean a hell of a lot of things.
Personally, I've helped many people kick Windows for Knoppix because once you walk them past the perceived limitations of a read-only OS, they get to a point and a light goes off and they're like --bling! Oh yeah, why do I want my personal files mixed in with all that OS crap anyway? It's not like you can't save files. You just don't have to worry about someone else's files screwing with your system. It's like condom for the Internet data orgy. Once your OS is read-only it's like yeah, bring it on. I'll click that pop-up. What-me-worry?
A read-only OS is the ultimate answer for security and system maintenance. For most people those issues are what makes computing a drag. For most people coming from Windows, just having a working browser and a set of basic productivity tools that simply don't break is more than enough to convince them.
and I was disappointed.
Sometimes an angry rant means someone has put some real thought into their position and is willing to go out on a limb to defend it. Not always, and this definitely was not one of those cases.
Aside from being long, which is a plus in my opinion, and having a nicely narrated build-up, the conclusion was a total disappointment.
The gist of his argument is that there are commercial interest on the web and so that means that it's really no different from any other media. That's such an incredible oversimplification I was disappointed I had read it.
I host a dozen web sites on my home DSL connection that can be accessed by thousands of readers a month all over the world at very low costs to either myself as the publisher or my the users of those cites. That fact alone stands in direct contradiction to his claims that there is no real distinction between conventional media like broadcast or print and internet media. There's no way you can support thousands of users in dozens of countries as a hobby in the print world. No freakin' way. There is, indeed a huge difference and as upstream bandwidth gets inevitably cheaper at the consumer level this fact will only become more and more glaring.
Slashdot Mirror
See, the only reason this is even an issue is because the premise of SL was not open to begin with. Personally this is why I thought it was a typical lame half-ass closed approach from the start. If it was really worth creating a virtual community worthy of the title "Second Life", it would certainly be worth doing it as open source. It's not called Second Dreary Business World now is it? If it started off free and open then these issues wouldn't be disruptive because the system would have started with the premise that the whole world was free as it should be in a virtual space. The premise was flawed. Life is not about money. Life is about love, knowledge, food and sex. And sleep. And a few other things but if you think money is a crucial part you're a loser in the most dismal sense.
In response to the RIAA President, this Slashdot user would offer the anaology of prostitution. Aristotle, I believe it was Aristotle, said that teaching was akin to prostitution because a prostitute sells love for money and a teacher sells wisdom for money. Aristotle wasn't necessarily opposed to prostitution, he was just pointing out the analogy.
But the analogy hits upon a very important point. Love, knowledge and wisdom are all best when shared freely. A society composed of decent moral individuals is by necessity that society that is most willing to share amongst its members. This is true for material goods to some extent, but in these immaterial goods it is fundamentally important.
Fair use is not merely an uncontestable good in the context of our times, it is easy to argue that copyrights, patents and trademarks absolutely must be struck back by force of law with the utmost expedience. Furthermore, those, like the President of the RIAA, who would argue otherwise must realize that they can, should and hopefully will be held accountable for their anti-social and irresponsible behavior.
Who do you think you are anyway?
I'm seeing a lot of criticism in this thread that seems to read like --it's all been tried and there is no question it's a complete failure, let's move on.
In light of this defeatism, I'd like to remind the readership that the first time in the history of recorded human research that a human embryonic stem cell was induced to reproduce outside of the human body was in . . .
1998
1998. The advent of this technology that could potentially transform human existnce far beyond anything remotely close is about as old as the Linux 2.2 kernel.
I'd say it's a bit transparently political to go around touting the failure of embryonic stem cell therapy.
Some people's famlies depend on them to make damn sure the internet is working day in and day out and they get in deep shit whenever something goes wrong with it. Indeed, I met my wife by helping her connect her modem to the internet years ago and to this day one of the only thing that drags my out of bed early is when the freakin' connection goes down.
This real world situation hardly fits into the scenario they were trying to paint with this "study".
Fittingly, since we're at /. the concept of so-called intellectual property is at the heart of the GM debate.
With an issues like this, it's all about keeping the issues straight. It's nice to see that people in this thread so far mostly don't see the problem with clones. After all, naturally formed human clones, identical twins, are around us all the time so who cares if cows are cloned for food. Indeed, you'd think cloning opponents would be happy to hear that all the cloned cows are going to be butchered.
The problem with the GM debate is that a bunch of distinct issues get garbled together and it gets spun as the technophiles versus the luddites when it is potentially far more subtle than that. This is not too different to what happens with the issue of adults producing and distributing child pornography and the completely separate issue of children being exposed to sexually explicit images. The first is obviously problematic because it involves an abuse of power, the second issue is far more complex and is generally considered a normal part of growing into an adult. Despite being two separate issues, these two things almost always get balled into one as soon as debates get started and it ends up being the sexually liberal versus the sexually conservative people arguing about irrelevant side issues using one-liners and ad hominem attacks when the real issue is far more subtle and complex than that style of debate allows.
With GM the problem lies in the distinction between the people opposed to GM products for two different reasons. First, there are those who do, in fact, fear any kind of tampering with the genetic code. Quite separate from those people are another group who merely fear the fact that genetically manipulated organisms can result in products that are protected by patents, copyrights and trademarks. These two groups are worlds apart in mind-set and yet they both get painted with the same brush of being technophobic or anti-intellectual while this is actually almost the opposite of the case for the latter group.
Yeah, I remember. The first time I came across XP's activation was the last time I used Microsoft products in my home. Prior to that I had worked as a Windows developer for five years.
It was kinda coincidental timing. The business was on the rocks anyway and I, along with my boss, had come to the conclusion that the whole MS business model was just an outrageous scam. So, you could say I had a grudge, but the XP activation thing was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I was helping a friend transfer a big video project that he needed before he caught a flight and time was tight. I pulled my brand new XP drive where we had copied the project off of a stack of CDRs a few days earlier. We needed to copy it into another machine with an empty hard drive he had just bought for the flight and assumed he was going to take with him on his trip.
What's this? Product what? . . . Call Microsoft support? Fuck man.
The guy was bummed. It was a huge uncompressed 3D animation he had been working of for months and he needed it for a grad school interview two days later and three thousand miles away on the other side of the Pacific. Sorry dude. Maybe you could cancel your flight and apply to grad school again next year.
At first I was just disappointed and irritated but then later I realized this meant that if I had a virus I couldn't pull the drive and scan it in another machine like I had been doing for years prior to that point. That's when I said no freaking way.
I happened to stumble upon Knoppix about that time and to make a long story short I'm on a Knoppix machine at this very moment.
So, for some people, XP's product activation was indeed the last straw.
I was gonna say somebody might want to send ice breakers up there and try to keep it open, but apparently this has all been considered at length and billions of dollars put into it and it aint happening. That rings quite true to me and it even gives me pause to further reflect on the real basis of our current period of globalization.
I use this phrase "current period of globalization" to make the disctinction between events in the last seventy years or so and the globalization that occured in earlier centuries that is referred to as mercantilism. Proponents of our current globalization like to emphasize the distinction between that earlier period by saying that our modern globalization is the enemy of tariffs and doesn't see global trade as a zero-sum game: the implication being that everybody can win in this new game. While I enthusiastically support the idea of everybody being a winner, I think this story about the rusting Soviet ice breaker does reveal some of the frayed edges in this rhetoric of globalization.
If the globalization game was really so simple and straightforward then you'd think that any geographic advantage such as Russia's proximity to North America and the presence of an open sea route across the north pole would have led directly to huge trade growth between the two regions. And yet, the advantages of globalizations have fallen primarily on Asian nations which are about as geographically distant from North America as is possible to be on the globe. The recent rise of China muddles the picture a bit, but when you consider China's ethnic diaspora in the countries of the north and south Asian Pacific Rim that were in large part former military allies of the United States things seem a bit clearer.
But this does all get off the point. After all, there is the Bering Strait. If geographical proximity was so important then why isn't the Bering Strait used. That would seem to benefit Russia, China and Japan after all. So perhaps it's all just plain old practical considerations.
Hmm, went and looked at Wikipedia to see what it said about the Bering Strait. I guess a tunnel under the strait seems line an interesting way to go but the main problems are environmental and cultural. The area is basically in a pristine state and there's a lot of resistance to development.
So who knows. Perhaps this open ice passage is all pretty irrelevant.
I couldn't disagree more with the common misunderstanding that life is somehow naturally focused on competition.
Let me give you one example of which I could add thousands. Let's look at the food pyramid. This is a classic example because it's probably where you're thinking your argument finds its strength. In fact, the food pyramid proves that competition is insignificant in the big picture.
Measured in calories, where do you think the vast majority of the nutrition on the Earth comes from? That's right. It comes from plants --annuals in particular. Where do the annual plants come from? They come from the previous generation in the form of seeds, spores and shoots. Where do those seeds get the energy to grow? Do they fight each other for it? No, they get it from the sun. If the animals that eat those plants fight over the plants, will the result be more plants? I don't think so.
It's not to say that competition doesn't exist. It does even in the plant world. A certain group of plants in a given area might compete for sunlight. So, the point isn't to deny that there is such a thing as compeition. What I would hope to teach you is simply that a wise person ought to consider the larger picture of how before the world works before assuming that competition is such a central focus of life. It simply is not. That's a fact.
I grew up on NPR in the seventies and eighties so it really saddens me to listen to it today. The Republicans in the Bush administration made a specific decision to drop the long-standing call to cut funding to NPR and to, instead, take over editorial control. That is so freaking obvious to anyone who has been a long-time listener of NPR.
So, the analogy to Slashdot is actually quite fitting. Slashdot started off as a site where people were actively advocating open source and zealously prostletyzing free software. Over the years, it has become the center of a community more likely to criticize open source and the principles of free software movement than any sort of advocacy resource. The resentment towards free and open source software in the comments here at Slashdot is really disapointing to a long-time user.
If you want something similar to what NPR used to be, you need to go with Pacifica Network. Democracy Now! is archived at Archive.org in both audio and video formats. Indymedia.org's torrent site is another nice resource for the kind of news coverage you used to get at NPR. Personally, I still listen to NPR streams in order to keep up on the latest Republican spin but I find the degree of propaganda apparent in the editorial decisions disturbing. You can hear the strain and hesitation in the voices as they read some of those scripts.
While Digg isn't really analogous to Slashdot, at least you see more of a gee-whiz enthusiastic attitude towards free and open source and DIY technology in the kinds of stories that get featured. For that reason, I have come to prefer Digg although I rarely bother with the comments on Digg except to find mirrors and the like. My personal opinion is that Slashdot could be redeemed with a moderation system that gets away from numeric scores and offers something more like what educators refer to as portfolio assessment.
This might sound mysterious and abstract, but it doesn't have to be a huge difference. It could be as simple as adding new sorts of descriptive moderation categories like "activist", "funny man", "coder" or "solder monkey". This would allow people to customize their view of the comments in accordance to their interests rather than converting everything to a single numeric value from -1 to 5 that becomes meaningless as various interests battle to draft its definition in a big competition.
Furthermore, these descriptive categories can have sub-categories. Take the "activist" mod for instance. Perhaps you have sub-categories like "free market fuckhead" and "liberal god" --okay, that was just a little joke. But you get the idea. The "coder" descriptive mod might have a list of programming languages that the person actually has experience with or has previously discussed on Slashdot.
Anybody who reads Slashdot for any period of time knows the mod system is clearly the biggest source of complaints. It was great for a community of a few thousand users, but it was pretty much trash long before I opened an account. The inaction on this aspect of the site is really disappointing since there are real opportunities to be had here. While the original idea of a competitive mod system modeled on the crust old educational A-F grading system was fine when the idea of a web-based technical news forum was new, it no longer serves a meaningful purpose. Schools, and I happen to be well aware that this is true even at ETS, are getting away from score based reporting. It's about time Slashdot got with the program. Let's move to descriptive moderation rather than a score based system.
There was a time when people thought their posts at Slashdot could help them get a job. Well, instead of just ridiculing that notion, why not run with it? Remake Slashdot as a portfolio based site where people are really motivated to make genuine contributions instead of just gaming a tired system that even mainstream education is putting behind it.
First, for people who just need a quick formatting tool, it's good enough with the MyDSL extensions making it nice and simple to use for a lot of USB boot type applications.
Second I have found many non Linux users who think DSL sounds like a good way to start because they're so sick of bloat. Could be that a lot of them download it just to see what it's like. This second reason is probably somewhat unfortunate since DSL can be a bit frustrating for someone unfamiliar with FOSS distros.
I used to have some machines using DSL, but I found that Knoppix with fluxbox just made it so much simpler.
Here's a quote from a guy who considered himself qualified to discuss politics with authority. He seems to think that if we had automated means of producing objects of desire and need that we would essentially be in a position to do away with class in society.
There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation; as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.
Aristotle, The Politics 350 BCE
Let's resubmit this one like,
"Hi I'm automating my house using a CAN based network and I'm wondering what kind of devices people are using in their systems."
For those who don't know, CAN is what most modern automobiles use as a network. The advantage over something like TCP/IP is that it allows you to resolve conflicts between devices at the network level. To use the car analogy, it would help to prevent a prolem with the stereo from screwing up the ignition timing despite having both of them tied to a common network. It's also used in all sorts of industrial machines, robots and the like.
This seems like a decent first step for serious home automation. Anybody gone this route? Care to provide details like what brand controllers you used so such things?
I'm sure most of us are too young to recall the Get Clean for Gene campaign in 1968. But, I think the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention speaks volumes about where these calls to cut the hair end up. Certainly that time and place was a locus of dozens if not hundreds of millions of factors but whether or not to grow long hair is a deeply personal and passionate subject and that's because even more than the clothes one wears the style and length of one's hair speaks volumes about one's political position.
This is not a simple algebra of long hair equals liberal while short hair equals conservative. That sort of generalization is generalized enough to be as good as saying nothing at all. But within the delicate and complex intricacies of personal politics that are as unique and varied as each individual on Earth, we can say one thing --it does mean something. The style in which one wear's one's hair means something to that individual. What it means exactly cannot be generalized. But it does mean something to the individual who chooses to wear that hair style and that's the whole point. People absolutely have the right to make their own choices about how they want to appear.
When someone comes along and says you can't choose that style because I don't like it or I'm saying that society doesn't like it so you better not choose that --that's looking for trouble. THat's oppression. Even if people go along with it, the results get ugly nonethless. The problem is not how much hair people do or don't have, the problem is oppression and the addiction to controlling other people's appearance and behavior.
But this guy is just an old geezer ready to retire. He looks old enough to have voted for Johnson. So, whatever.
What he doesn't know is that there is actually a trend in the United States today towards long hair that hasn't happened in many years. I notice these things as I haven't cut my hair since I was eighteen and I'm almost forty now. For many years it was rare for me to see a fellow long hair. But since the war started I've seen crowds of younger kids go from shaggy to little ponytails and I'm starting to see some braids out there.
Now, you might think I'm biased, I am, but if you don't believe there's a trend then I have a little Google for ya. Go to Google news and look for Regis. Regis is a parent company of Vidal Sassoon, The Hair Club and dozens of hair salon chains located around the country. This quarter they didn't make their numbers. Their official explanation was that there is a nationwide trend towards growing long hair which is cutting into their profits.
Don't believe it? Go look for yourself.
Well, I'm not going to pretend I know all things about all motors. But you are definitely wrong when it comes to my particular area of expertise which is the Toyota R series. The reason I like the R series motors so much is precisely because the same engine was used across platforms (trucks and Celicas have identical motors) over several decades and you most certainly can take a fuel injector from a late model and directly bolt it onto an older head. No problemo. You can even mix and match heads across different displacement blocks. Google for 20R head on a 22R block it if you're interested.
So no problem there. Well, just one little bitty problem which is that it is illegal in California because of CARB's visual inspection requirements. Just that little minor issue. It's fucking insane. See, I'm getting pissed just thinking about it.
No question mark because it's a rehetorical question. I saw this as an interesting confirmation of my theory that the last place we'll see FOSS is in the schools. I find it fascinating that the earliest adopters of fOSS are in the business community. No surprise there, business is cut-throat. You've got to take every advantage you can. The first wave f public sector adoption is taking place in governmental administative agencies. Again no surprise. As the article pointed out even the Governator was pushing agencies to make the move to cut costs. But the last place we'll ever see FOSS is in the schools. It will get there eventually, and that will be check-mate but it will be the last move on the board as is appropriate for a check-mate.
What I find so intriguing is that I see this comclusion as an inevitable outcome of the culture of open source development. Why do people develop open source after all? For many, certainly not all but a substantial proportion, it's simply a matter of pride. In open source, anybody can jump to the front. Everybody wants to be a kernel hacker and anything that isn't written in C, C++ or at least Java is considered a trivial aside. I'm not saying that's wrong. Quite the contrary, that's right and the success of FOSS is the best proof that this is indeed the right way to do things. Dumbing it down is dumb after all. But that hot-shot look at my mad skillz approach doesn't fit into education. The irony of education is that it's actually about dumbing things down and that's tedious boring work that few people are going to appreciate.
What was supposed to happen in the closed source world of education was that the teachers were going to be given a set of tools to create their own content since they were the ones in the trenches who knew how to create relevant content. Originally, Macromedia thrived on this market with products like Director and Authorware. Unfortunately, those tools were all very expensive and teachers didn't see any motivation to make it work as there was no compensation for even working with those "simplified" tools. The result was that a few large companies began to dominate the educational content market and now the market for educational technology is completely owned. Prying it out of the grips of the owners is only going to happen when open source versions of those early tools are put into the classrooms that teachers can actually use and when teachers are compensated for creating content using those tools.
It can be done, but I'm telling ya, it's going to be the last place we'll see the success of FOSS. Furthermore, when it does happen it will be the beginning of the end of schools as we know them which is undoubtedly a good thing.
cue Pink Floyd. . .
This is such a frustrating topic for a person who works on old cars it's hard for me to even address it without going into seizures and throwing the keyboard against the wall.
There is a huge problem with your "I heart CARB" sentiment if you really do want cleaner air. Yeah, sure you can buy overpriced aftermarket stuff that is CARB approved. But what you can't do is adapt used modern cleaner technology onto an older car by upgrading to more efficient used technology. See, that "used" part is extremely important in the reality of car parts.
The problem isn't with people who are buying overpriced aftermarket stuff that gets the CARB approval. After all, people who can afford that crap probably have newer cars and then have a hobby car they hardly ever drive. They're not the polluters. The polluters are the folks driving old beaters on a day-today basis that can't afford that stuff. Those are the people that are shit out of luck. It is simply not the case that these people get rid of their cars becaue of these regulations. Au contraire, they are forced by the regulations to stick with the original outdated equipment if they want to have their cars running at a price they can afford. That economic reality that CARB glosses over is the real source of pollution.
If you were to allow that segment of the market to "upgrade" using used parts you would see genuine improvements in air quality. Far more efficient parts for older cars are available in spades at prices that make them extremely attractive to owners of older cars.
Take the example of an older car that uses a carburetor instead of EFI. In many cases there is no technical reason a mechanic could not upgrade that older car to EFI at a price even cheaper than rebuilding the carb by grabbing an EFI from a newer model out of a junkyard. The reason it can't be done is not technical, it is regulatory. Hence, carburetors are still being rebuilt by the tens of thousands. How does that help clean the air?
But while I'm not at all surprised by this, I think the fact is that the US will eventually have cheap broadband like it or not.
The problem with broadband for many Americans is that they don't see the advantage in it. Many Americans can afford to pay for many of the things that people in other countries might only be able to get by downloading them freely off the net. So, in a way Americans have blinders on with regards to the possibilities of the Internet.
An excellent, and I would even say profound, example is academic journals. An American could be forgiven for thinking that all universities across the globe have libraries with stacks and stacks of academic journals just like the local state university library does. In fact, that's not the case at all. In many nations, broadband is enabling a great leap in educational quality that gives millions of students the chance to study meaningful cutting-edge research for the first time in their local academic history. Americans naturally have a hard time imagining what that means or how important it is because they already have practically free access to these things. Anybody in the States can use the university library after all. So, for an American, the issue of getting journals on the Internet seems somewhat irrelevant.
So, broadband is definitely something that the US is only going to accept reluctantly, but slowly or not it is most certainly going to come even if the US is the last place on earth to get decent broadband penetration which I could easily imagine having just visited there and having been forced to use a modem on a number of occasions.
Well, Fukuyama's theories had a lot to do with biotechnology and from my perspective he's on the far right as far as biotechnology is concerned. He's a member of Bush's Council on Bioethics, if that doesn't tell you the man's ideas are seriously fucked up then your views are probably closer to his than my own.
I would agree that we are at the end of history, although I'd like to think of it as the beginning of the new history rather than the end of the old history, but for technological reasons rather than economic or political ones. The issue of whether or not some thing referred to as "liberal democracy" has displaced some other political game is totally irrelevant.
Buckmister Fuller, among many others, liked to emphasize that real social changes are driven by technologies not by politics. Certainly the two are related, but there are endless clear examples throughout history where technology has driven changes in society that were only subsequently politicized.
This is not too different from the idea that in creation myths you inevitably find that the oldest parts of the myth are, in fact, the most recently authored elements. Politicians constantly attempt to play off their own efforts as somehow being linked to the creation of technologies when the fact is that their rhetoric come many years after the technology was developed. Certainly Al Gore's Internet comes to mind, but on the other side of the political spectrum this is a favorite tactic of Milton Friedman as well. Politicians love to pretend their personal points of view give rise to technologies while it is usually the other way around.
But whether or not this is the end of history, or whether that is a meaningful statement at all, is not the point. The point is that your analysis draws upon too lage of a timeline. It's not particularly helpful to look at things on the scale of ancient Chinese dynasties or the history of the Catholic Church. I mean it's fun to speculate, but we live in rapidly changing times to say the lease. Indeed, that statement was true even by the eighteenth century which you could think of as the dawn of our current round of globalization. Drawing historical parallels to the world we live in today to those ancient regimes that covered many centuries is really just an idle speculation becuase our world is changing much faster than it ever did before. It's really not appropriate to make one-to one comparisons because they operate on different scales.
If you want to see where the world is changing and how fast it is changing, look no further than the monitor right in front of you. We are not merely in times of rapid change, we are in times of Overclocked UltraChange V4.0 Extreme Edition. Change is happening so fast people aren't even aware that it is happening. Part of it is that people in the US are seeing the least of it. To people in the States, it seems like hardly anything is going down. There has always been a glut of data for Americans born after World War II. But in other parts of the world there is no question that the changes taking place since the advent of what you might call the Video Game Generation are very real. I would cite as one instance the major decline in foreign students studying in the US and the huge surge in University attendance in what were formerly considered more or less useless third world colleges and universities offering degrees in attendance and citizenship with no real academic substance and definitely no technical savy.
People tend to think this shift has to do with the Department of Homeland Security and visa restrictions since 911, but that doesn't explain the surge in local university attendance in poor rural countries which is even more huge than the decline taking place in the US. It's quite telling to separate the two and look at them individually. On the one hand, you have a decline in overseas students
actually really simple.
It's nothing more than a DVD or Xvid file with subtitles and two PCs.
You take one PC with the subtitles or the audio in your native tongue and another in the language you're trying to learn. As you go through the movie, re-type the subtitles in the target language repeating the spoken phrases in the target language. The re-typing and reciting part is to drill it into your head since just watching the movie tends to leave you forgetting everything a minute later. If you have the discipline to sit down and do it, this is a really fast technique and you're working with complete sentences is context with body language so it really helps you remember phrases in context rather than vocabulary which is practically useless by itself.
You could do the same thing with two DVD players and two TVs, but I find the controls on a PC are much easier to work with for the constant back and forth it requires and I think the re-typing part is essential so you need at least one PC anyway and of course a keyboard with the target language keyboard layout. If your target is Chinese, you can get fonts with phonetic symbols for your subtitles that will allow you to key in the characters even if you don't know the pronunciation. All those things are available on a Debian system.
However, although this technique rocks, I think the only way to really learn a foreign language is to get a lover who speaks that language. Almost every English native speaker I know who has learned spoken Chinese well has taken this path and it's definitely the way to go. I took classes for years and could hardly open my mouth, much less be understood. But after a year of living with a Chinese girlfriend it became second nature without even trying. Of course you risk ending up married and living in China, but that's not as bad as it sounds.
I just what I felt was a fine job of this on the phone with one of my family members who was not pro P2P, but was upset about this Sony thing.
The whole situation is quite simple to explain really. It's merely a conflict over privacy.
The biggest privacy advocates in the world are corporate interests really and by extension their Republican or so-called neo liberal supporters which would include other political factions such as libertarians. This emphasis on the fundamental importance of privacy is clear in the fact that big business and its Republican advocates are hell bent on privatizing all sorts of things that have traditionally been public. Private is about as close as you can get to the opposite of public. It's like two sides of the same coin, or two edges to the sword if you like.
So, the private sector is totally dependent for its existence upon technologies that allow privacy. Who is the biggest user of virtual LAN technology? This is obviously an essential tool for modern corporations. SSL is another privacy protocol essential for e-commerce. If the public sector had no privacy it would cease to be the private sector, it would be the public sector. That's what the public sector is, those things which are not private.
Which brings us to the issue at hand. It's not that companies like Sony are saying that people shouldn't have privacy. That's totally in opposition to their very nature. Corporations can't exist without privacy and technologies that enforce and defend privacy. The problem is they are saying that their privacy is essential and the consumer's privacy is not.
That's quite a simple explanation of what's going on that anybody can understand. Good one to bring up this Thanksgiving while the family is all together.
Yeah, perhaps but consider this, once you get to resolutions of around 4000 lines horizontal, which isn't too many generations past this, certainly within reach of the stuff they're doing at InPhase and Optware you come up on architecture issues. I mean architecture as in buildings, not chips. Most residential homes have eight foot ceilings. If you assume that you max out the height of the wall in monitor then you divide an eight foot ceiling into 4000 lines you're getting about forty pixels every inch of height. So, if the resolution was like 4000X6000 you'd have inch grids containing 2400 pixels per square inch. That might not sound excessively fine for the human eye from a few feet, but if you sit a few feet from an eight foot tall and twelve foot wide wall-sized screen you won't see the picture too well. You'll have to stand back at least five feet and probably more like ten to be comfortable. From ten feet back, I would think that 2400 pixels per square inch is going to be more than the eye can discern.
In fact, I just did an experiment to see how my eyes could do. I took an old video card that has a surface mount chip in the middle of it that's about an inch square. It has about sixty pins on each side of the chip. I sat it on the other side of the room about ten feet away and tried to focus on the pins. I definitely can't discern them individually from here.
So, there are limits simply in the sense that displays can only get so large without requiring a massive re-build of the world's residential architecture in order to accomodate huge fifty foot wide theater screens in every home.
And this is a key point that the author overlooked in the economic analysis. It's similar to saying the world's space programs have all been a total economic waste and reaching that conclusion by eliminating all of the economic side effects that have resulted from the technology that went into those space programs. That's a political statement, not an analysis.
The large-scale production of NiMh battery arrays that go into hybrids is rapidly reducing the unit price of these high energy density storage devices. Now, is it really a great lap of logic to think that low-cost high energy density rechargeable electricity packs might find use in other products besides hybrid vehicles once the price is right?
Not only has the price of large arrays of NiMh cells gone down dramatically in a short time, but the early stages of an upramp in large arrays of Li-Ion batteries is beginning as well.
But wait, there's more!
Supercapacitors. Did you know that the regenerative braking system in Japanese hybrids uses arrays of supercapacitors? Again, the technology has been around for a long time, the real issue is price and the price doesn't come down until we get economies of scale and we don't get economies of scale until we get a consumer grade product that uses masses of these devices.
The availability of these high energy density devices at low prices is almost guaranteed to have fall-over effects in all sorts of different consumer markets. Unless you take those significant advantages into consideration, it's really just a snipe to draw a conclusion about the lack of economic value in a hybrid car.
Back in 1999 or so I bought a portable CD based MP3 player that also plays VCDs! And it works great till this very day. Plugs into any TV or VCR or whatever is connected to your TV that has some sort of imput with RCA video jacks. Works in hotels even. Plays crispy MPEG2 video no problem. Even back then when digital video was cutting edge and DVD was just coming on this product cost forty bucks in Taiwan which conveniently happened to be a place where you could rent VCDs.
Now, it had no built-in screen and obviously it didn't have gobs of flash memory since it was a CD based device. But it was extemely cheap both in terms of initial cost and in terms of blank media. Most importantly it didn't have any DRM. Moreover, that seven year-old el cheapo Taiwan toy has far better video resolution than this new iPod.
What I'd like to emphaize is that if this ultra cheap DRM free portable video player device was already done at a cheap price seven years ago, it will most likely be done again with flash storage, and an MP4 codec support. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this from Samsung and even as an OEM through BanQ Compal Foxconn etc branded as Dell or HP. This is the same group of generic OEMs, by the way, that already produce Apple's hardware to begin with so it's not really a quality or even a design issue as much as it is a branding and marketing issue. This is not about tech, this is about marketing.
The final point then is that the DRM tie-in is a huge mistake. Apple is following Sony's missteps here and Sony is clearly losing its way due to its relentless insistence on DRM across the product line. The video iPod is a great opportunity --for every CE company except Apple.
The question is a bit too broad. Linux can mean a hell of a lot of things.
Personally, I've helped many people kick Windows for Knoppix because once you walk them past the perceived limitations of a read-only OS, they get to a point and a light goes off and they're like --bling! Oh yeah, why do I want my personal files mixed in with all that OS crap anyway? It's not like you can't save files. You just don't have to worry about someone else's files screwing with your system. It's like condom for the Internet data orgy. Once your OS is read-only it's like yeah, bring it on. I'll click that pop-up. What-me-worry?
A read-only OS is the ultimate answer for security and system maintenance. For most people those issues are what makes computing a drag. For most people coming from Windows, just having a working browser and a set of basic productivity tools that simply don't break is more than enough to convince them.
and I was disappointed.
Sometimes an angry rant means someone has put some real thought into their position and is willing to go out on a limb to defend it. Not always, and this definitely was not one of those cases.
Aside from being long, which is a plus in my opinion, and having a nicely narrated build-up, the conclusion was a total disappointment.
The gist of his argument is that there are commercial interest on the web and so that means that it's really no different from any other media. That's such an incredible oversimplification I was disappointed I had read it.
I host a dozen web sites on my home DSL connection that can be accessed by thousands of readers a month all over the world at very low costs to either myself as the publisher or my the users of those cites. That fact alone stands in direct contradiction to his claims that there is no real distinction between conventional media like broadcast or print and internet media. There's no way you can support thousands of users in dozens of countries as a hobby in the print world. No freakin' way. There is, indeed a huge difference and as upstream bandwidth gets inevitably cheaper at the consumer level this fact will only become more and more glaring.