Their thinking will be "We get the special production tools, and all you theiving scum, er, consumers get are playback systems. We'll just have our lapdogs in congess get that into law." Why would you think that they wouldn't want to keep 'special' tools for themselves, particularly when they see how powerful they can be?
Great! Once the Northwest Passage opens up, we'll be able to do more research to discover wether or not this whole 'global warming' thing is actually happening! You can't be sure, you know. Particularly with the right-wing in control of the US government, perhaps this will shake a little loose change out of their tight pockets for some scientific funding, as long as they know that the results will be inconclusive.
Just so Microsoft can reference something (no matter how desperate) that claims that users want various scripting/macro powers for these 'XDoc' thingies:
"Please, please, oh wonderful Microsoft, please include every possible scripting and macro support in XDocs, and please, please have them all active by default at install, and please, please tie them into every other scripting/macro system in your wonderful universe of OSes/bundled apps with as little control on malware as possible."
Finally! Microsoft is going to do exactly what I ask it to!
If you're interested in the philosophical underpinnings of this type of thought, you should check out the field of phenomonology. There's a bunch of spacy 60's crap out there - so start with the source: Martin Heidigger. (Just to complicate things, he was basically a Nazi (literally!)) His work prior to WWII, e.g. Being and Time, are seriously academic. His work after WWII is more poetic (he was banned from teaching because of his connections with the Nazis). Either way, he has his own take on language and it's a tough nut to crack.
My take on all this stuff is that it's a contrast to Kant. For Kant, the world around us is a bunch of unknowable abstract objects, which we 'know' through our flawed senses. ("Ah, the abstract 'pen' probably exists, but I can only know what my imperfect senses tell me about it.") This is more like the robotic systems that create an abstract construct of the environment and then internally work with that abstracted construct.
As I read Heidegger, he's saying that, yeah, Kant has a point, but it's not very useful in day to day life. When you walk through a door, you don't think about the doorknob, you just turn it, open the door and walk through. It's all what he calls "taken for granted." You don't stand there thinking "Hmm, maybe my perception of the doorknob is flawed, and there is no knob. I can never be sure" (well, some of us have thought thoughts like that, but only after consuming certain molecules).
Essentially, Heidegger's take is much more practical: how do we do the useful everyday stuff? This is a lot more like robotic systems that are based on more reflexive responses.
Yes, Heidegger deals with lots and lots of other stuff ("Language is the house of being" "Death fractures the taken for granted", and the scary stuff about how when you are speaking old German you are more truly in touch with existance!) But the underpinnings of phenomenology is potentially really useful for understanding the "nuts and bolts" of interacting with the world. Oh, and he's the "Velvet Underground" of twentyth century thought (Sartre, Derrida, etc, etc cite him as a critical influence).
Believe it or not/sadly enough Word Perfect/Perfect Office is still chugging along. Dell is shipping it instead of M$ Works on low end machines and it has it's fanatical adherents. We even proposed on a project where the final, complicated, should-be-done in Quark or InDesign report has to be in an editable WP file!
I have a friend in the pharma industry, and I've discussed the limitations of patents with my friend. I can say that from that sampling group of 1, people in the industry have a very strong perspective that patents are all good. My friend just couldn't get that patenting a DNA sequence that exists in everyone is a bad idea. (You know how you look at Microsoft and realize that they're blind to what they're doing... it's like that.)
I think that most people in the pharma industry 1)really want to make money (who doesn't?) and 2) are tied to a specific company at any given time. One looks at the situation and sees that for me to make money, my company must make money and my company can only make money by exercising patents (excluding generics) and my company can make more money by milking the patent system as much as possible (repackaging, etc.) Also, the industry is so 'rules' bound (by the FDA, which I think is a good thing) that they look at rules as a game to be milked as much as possible: first when selling the drugs to doctors regarding labeling and second when manipulating the patent system.
It's not just the patent abuse. Don't forget that the pharma companies have zillions of high-pressure salespeople pounding on your doctor's door every day. Some are low cut top, batting eyelash, some are "Hey buddy, how's yer golf game, let's hit the strip club! Your escort will be at your room when we get back", some are "here's your check, er, honorarium, for your professional leadership speech at the luxury resort in Hawaii" and on and on. Sure, R&D is expensive, but the marketers/salespeople are paid insane amounts and have massive budgets. A big part of our health insurance premiums are being funneled to the pharma marketing/sales monster.
Read the original article closely! (You'll be one of 20 or so people who seem to have done so). The article did not actually contain evidence that the Atkins diet was good. Rather the article talked about the lack of study of the system.
If nothing else, Atkins himself turns me off to anything he puts forth. It may be the product of years of frustration, but he comes across as being anti-scientific. He has closely honed his 'used car salesman' pitch. What I've heard him say, and the way that he propogandistically avoids commenting on real scientific research leads me to not find him trustworth, and by extension I don't find his 'product' trustworthy.
Eat your broccolli and go for a brisk walk.
civil liberties/human rights are not democratic
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
We hold these truths to be self evident...
How many people want to give up their rights? Who cares? (I'm speaking in the abstract, politics trumps truth frequently) It's worth remembering that, in theory, it doesn't matter wether absolutely every American wanted our government to do something anti-Constitutional, without changing the Constitution, any judge should prevent it. Individuals can not 'give up' their human rights, we can only temporarily ingnore them.
Speaking of politics, please excuse my partisan observation: in the US we will be (slightly) better off with Democrats elected than Republicans. There is a major struggle going on - Republicans are fighting hard to keep judges who care about civil rights off our benches, Democrats are fighting to keep/improve a judiciary that recognizes these rights. (Neither party is exclusively good/bad, but there are strong trends) Particularly with our pitiful voter turnouts, your vote counts - remember that this November! (and future elections - President Ashcroft, anyone?)
Ironic, isn't it that the 'anti-big-government' party wants a more intrusive, less limited government and bigger prisons?
I realize that analogies to other types of 'utilities' have their limitations, but perhaps they are becoming more and more valid. If you look at the electricity 'network' (grid) it is 'oversold' - its useful capacity is based not maximum possible utilization, but on utilization predictions.
Think about a brand new house. When you lay out how many amps of electrical service to 'buy' from the electric utility and in terms of the power panel that you install, you don't ask 'what if every outlet in the house was maxed out?' but rather, what is a realistic maximum utilization for the size of the house and the major electrical appliances? The same thinking goes into designing your neighborhood substation and out to your multi-state and international chunks of the grid. Whereas everyone flushing the toilet during the superbowl/world cup halftime won't 'take down' the water system, everyone in a state turing on every electrial appliance in their houses (and firing up all the industrial uses, too) could take down the electrical grid. Yet, with some crafty engineering (peaker plants, pump storage) the system still works with this supply/demand model.
What are the plusses and minuses of the analogy? On the down side, network traffic tends to be less predictable and more 'spikey' than electric demand. On the plus side, too much network use just bogs things down, but too much electrical demand blows the breakers (at various scales).
So does it really matter if an ISP 'realistically' 'oversells' their pipes? Your house/business is on an 'oversold' electrical network, and for most of us, it works pretty damn well. Perhaps it comes down to a realistic expectation of degree of performance.
while I am no fan of competing incompatible formats, I do see a need for improvements over the current DVD. The number one thing I would like to be able to do is back up a miniDV tape to one inexpensive disk. A miniDV tape holds roughly 13.5 GB (4.5min=1 GB, 60 mins per tape). Thus one needs three or four 4.7 GB DVDs to back up the video data. Cutting up the file is a pain, and the disks aren't exactly free. It would be nice to be able to back up multiple tapes!
Of course, the next step would be backing up full HDs, currently 80 to 100 GBs. But given the rate of growth of HDs, I can't imagine anything keeping up.
Is it really useful to group spam and fraud along with porn? Fraud and spam are inherently harmful. Porn may be de facto harmful in its production, but there is an important distinction. Now, if only the porn distributors would stop spamming everyone!
I did some poking around on the Apple store site, and I could only find DVI to VGA adapters. I think that Apple does not sell an ADC to VGA adapter! As much as I am an Apple fan, I suspect that this will be yet another plug that is doomed to be forgotten (like that damn old-style powerbook SCSI port, to name only one)
I'm concerned about the same thing. All of the available cards from Apple's online store are DVI+ADC out-only cards. I would rather buy a second 19" CRT for us$200 to us$350 than us$1000 for an Apple 17" ADC unit.
Dr. Bott has this "VGA Extractor for ADC" for us$35 plus S&H. I can't find any reviews of how well it works or how good the video quality is. On the other hand, I can't find any complaints.
My additional complaint is that the available video cards don't have standard TV Video out! This is becoming standard on equivalent WinTel video cards. I would rather use my Region 2 DVD drive to watch Spaced on my TV through a reliable MacOS box than my wonky WinTel box.
By the way, you're welcome for my Googling "ADC VGA adapter";^)
How could anyone keep a blimp a secret? Skunkworks? Come on! I really doubt the premise that the DoD or a contrator has built a big, secret, triangular, black blimp and has been flying them around. Near populated areas? With running lights? This doesn't add up. I'm feeling a lot of stubble burn when I apply Occam's Razor.
If you watch Good Eats closely, you'll notice Alton reading a particular well-worn, dog eared book from time to time (usually while waiting for something to bake or rise) The book is:
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Cooking, Harold McGee, ISBN: 0684843285
Which is a sort of encyclopedia of food and science. He also wrote:
The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore, ISBN: 0020098014
Which is more 'science project' based. "How much oil can one yolk emulsify into mayonayse?" It turns out to be an absurdly large amount.
If you have an analytical mind and care about being a better cook, Alton makes it entertaining and McGee delves in to the science.
Sounds like the time the hospital said that they were going to operate on my grandmother with the main surgeon 'consulting' on the surgery. It turns out that he was in his car with a cell phone. Ah, telemedicine.
(Always ask lots of questions - even if it pisses people off. If you don't like the setup (as in our situation) refuse to go along. In our case we told them to wait for the surgeon to arrive and be physically present in the operating room during the surgery. Who knows if he was mentally present, though.)
I'm afraid I'm a raytracing freak. I would rather have hardware that does raytracing freaking fast than keeping up with this thing of trying to make non-raytracing look better. It seems that the better long-term solution is hardware accellerated raytracing than trying to make better software for cobbling together models for non-raytracing systems. (Realtime caustics! Realtime raydiosity! Well, I can always dream...)
They will certainly keep it Mac only (at least for a while) in order to sell xserves. An xserve with free streaming software will be competetive with a WinTel box plus expensive streaming software. Thus more xserve sales.
Msft is paranoid, and thus 'cares' about everything. It's just that they are so big and have so much cash rolling around, that they can do stuff to express their paranoid 'caring'. In a sense, I don't think that they care that much - after all, they are just holding bs pr events, rather than doing something obvious and criminal, which is what they do when they 'really care'.
I want to throw out some ideas. Growing up in Chicago, I'm obviously pro-house biased, but something has struck me about the descendants of Chicago House and Detroit Techno.
It seems to me that house became something about merging the mind/soul and the machine in such a way that the mind/soul was elevated, or reached a transcendent place. In comparison mainstream techno (although certainly not Derrick May, et al) is really about surpressing the mind/soul to the machine - to seek oblivion.
You really need to hear Derrick Carter live. His recorded stuff is OK, but his live sets are mind altering.
Actually, I wonder if there is an issue with needing to 'work up to' some music. Would someone who has never heard house before really get what's going on in a Derrick Carter set? Do you need to 'learn the language' before you can understand with some depth?
Most good online vendors offer a phone based ordering system. If they require Passport, then call them up and order with a person - it costs them a lot more to pay the order taker than to take the order via web form. Oh yeah,......... orderrrrrr.......... sloooooowlyyyyyyy........ and...... quadrupleeeeee...... cheeeeeeeeck....... everythinggggggggg.......
I'm amazed that I couldn't (quickly) find a post that listed the name of the ISP in question. Obviously, customers should avoid an ISP that appears to have used the FBI to attack thier customers.
The Toledo Blade article lists the ISP as "Buckeye Express" which appears to be a Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) company. According to thier Corporate Information/Company Overview page they also own Madison Square Garden (and related teams), The WIZ, Radio City Music Hall, and Clearview Cinemas. Think carefully about with whom you do business.
I wish I could remember the exact quote, but Tim of Spaced has some line about "death, taxes and the enevitability that the next Star Trek movie will suck." (if a true Spaced freak can help me out, it's in series one, episode 5 "Chaos" where Tim and his 'boss' are in the comic shop talking.)
Slashdot Mirror
Their thinking will be "We get the special production tools, and all you theiving scum, er, consumers get are playback systems. We'll just have our lapdogs in congess get that into law." Why would you think that they wouldn't want to keep 'special' tools for themselves, particularly when they see how powerful they can be?
Great! Once the Northwest Passage opens up, we'll be able to do more research to discover wether or not this whole 'global warming' thing is actually happening! You can't be sure, you know. Particularly with the right-wing in control of the US government, perhaps this will shake a little loose change out of their tight pockets for some scientific funding, as long as they know that the results will be inconclusive.
"Please, please, oh wonderful Microsoft, please include every possible scripting and macro support in XDocs, and please, please have them all active by default at install, and please, please tie them into every other scripting/macro system in your wonderful universe of OSes/bundled apps with as little control on malware as possible."
Finally! Microsoft is going to do exactly what I ask it to!
My take on all this stuff is that it's a contrast to Kant. For Kant, the world around us is a bunch of unknowable abstract objects, which we 'know' through our flawed senses. ("Ah, the abstract 'pen' probably exists, but I can only know what my imperfect senses tell me about it.") This is more like the robotic systems that create an abstract construct of the environment and then internally work with that abstracted construct.
As I read Heidegger, he's saying that, yeah, Kant has a point, but it's not very useful in day to day life. When you walk through a door, you don't think about the doorknob, you just turn it, open the door and walk through. It's all what he calls "taken for granted." You don't stand there thinking "Hmm, maybe my perception of the doorknob is flawed, and there is no knob. I can never be sure" (well, some of us have thought thoughts like that, but only after consuming certain molecules).
Essentially, Heidegger's take is much more practical: how do we do the useful everyday stuff? This is a lot more like robotic systems that are based on more reflexive responses.
Yes, Heidegger deals with lots and lots of other stuff ("Language is the house of being" "Death fractures the taken for granted", and the scary stuff about how when you are speaking old German you are more truly in touch with existance!) But the underpinnings of phenomenology is potentially really useful for understanding the "nuts and bolts" of interacting with the world. Oh, and he's the "Velvet Underground" of twentyth century thought (Sartre, Derrida, etc, etc cite him as a critical influence).Believe it or not/sadly enough Word Perfect/Perfect Office is still chugging along. Dell is shipping it instead of M$ Works on low end machines and it has it's fanatical adherents. We even proposed on a project where the final, complicated, should-be-done in Quark or InDesign report has to be in an editable WP file!
I think that most people in the pharma industry 1)really want to make money (who doesn't?) and 2) are tied to a specific company at any given time. One looks at the situation and sees that for me to make money, my company must make money and my company can only make money by exercising patents (excluding generics) and my company can make more money by milking the patent system as much as possible (repackaging, etc.) Also, the industry is so 'rules' bound (by the FDA, which I think is a good thing) that they look at rules as a game to be milked as much as possible: first when selling the drugs to doctors regarding labeling and second when manipulating the patent system.
It's not just the patent abuse. Don't forget that the pharma companies have zillions of high-pressure salespeople pounding on your doctor's door every day. Some are low cut top, batting eyelash, some are "Hey buddy, how's yer golf game, let's hit the strip club! Your escort will be at your room when we get back", some are "here's your check, er, honorarium, for your professional leadership speech at the luxury resort in Hawaii" and on and on. Sure, R&D is expensive, but the marketers/salespeople are paid insane amounts and have massive budgets. A big part of our health insurance premiums are being funneled to the pharma marketing/sales monster.
If nothing else, Atkins himself turns me off to anything he puts forth. It may be the product of years of frustration, but he comes across as being anti-scientific. He has closely honed his 'used car salesman' pitch. What I've heard him say, and the way that he propogandistically avoids commenting on real scientific research leads me to not find him trustworth, and by extension I don't find his 'product' trustworthy.
Eat your broccolli and go for a brisk walk.
How many people want to give up their rights? Who cares? (I'm speaking in the abstract, politics trumps truth frequently) It's worth remembering that, in theory, it doesn't matter wether absolutely every American wanted our government to do something anti-Constitutional, without changing the Constitution, any judge should prevent it. Individuals can not 'give up' their human rights, we can only temporarily ingnore them.
Speaking of politics, please excuse my partisan observation: in the US we will be (slightly) better off with Democrats elected than Republicans. There is a major struggle going on - Republicans are fighting hard to keep judges who care about civil rights off our benches, Democrats are fighting to keep/improve a judiciary that recognizes these rights. (Neither party is exclusively good/bad, but there are strong trends) Particularly with our pitiful voter turnouts, your vote counts - remember that this November! (and future elections - President Ashcroft, anyone?)
Ironic, isn't it that the 'anti-big-government' party wants a more intrusive, less limited government and bigger prisons?
Think about a brand new house. When you lay out how many amps of electrical service to 'buy' from the electric utility and in terms of the power panel that you install, you don't ask 'what if every outlet in the house was maxed out?' but rather, what is a realistic maximum utilization for the size of the house and the major electrical appliances? The same thinking goes into designing your neighborhood substation and out to your multi-state and international chunks of the grid. Whereas everyone flushing the toilet during the superbowl/world cup halftime won't 'take down' the water system, everyone in a state turing on every electrial appliance in their houses (and firing up all the industrial uses, too) could take down the electrical grid. Yet, with some crafty engineering (peaker plants, pump storage) the system still works with this supply/demand model.
What are the plusses and minuses of the analogy? On the down side, network traffic tends to be less predictable and more 'spikey' than electric demand. On the plus side, too much network use just bogs things down, but too much electrical demand blows the breakers (at various scales).
So does it really matter if an ISP 'realistically' 'oversells' their pipes? Your house/business is on an 'oversold' electrical network, and for most of us, it works pretty damn well. Perhaps it comes down to a realistic expectation of degree of performance.
Of course, the next step would be backing up full HDs, currently 80 to 100 GBs. But given the rate of growth of HDs, I can't imagine anything keeping up.
Is it really useful to group spam and fraud along with porn? Fraud and spam are inherently harmful. Porn may be de facto harmful in its production, but there is an important distinction. Now, if only the porn distributors would stop spamming everyone!
I did some poking around on the Apple store site, and I could only find DVI to VGA adapters. I think that Apple does not sell an ADC to VGA adapter! As much as I am an Apple fan, I suspect that this will be yet another plug that is doomed to be forgotten (like that damn old-style powerbook SCSI port, to name only one)
Dr. Bott has this "VGA Extractor for ADC" for us$35 plus S&H. I can't find any reviews of how well it works or how good the video quality is. On the other hand, I can't find any complaints.
My additional complaint is that the available video cards don't have standard TV Video out! This is becoming standard on equivalent WinTel video cards. I would rather use my Region 2 DVD drive to watch Spaced on my TV through a reliable MacOS box than my wonky WinTel box.
By the way, you're welcome for my Googling "ADC VGA adapter" ;^)
How could anyone keep a blimp a secret? Skunkworks? Come on! I really doubt the premise that the DoD or a contrator has built a big, secret, triangular, black blimp and has been flying them around. Near populated areas? With running lights? This doesn't add up. I'm feeling a lot of stubble burn when I apply Occam's Razor.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Cooking, Harold McGee, ISBN: 0684843285
Which is a sort of encyclopedia of food and science. He also wrote:
The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore, ISBN: 0020098014
Which is more 'science project' based. "How much oil can one yolk emulsify into mayonayse?" It turns out to be an absurdly large amount.
If you have an analytical mind and care about being a better cook, Alton makes it entertaining and McGee delves in to the science.
(Always ask lots of questions - even if it pisses people off. If you don't like the setup (as in our situation) refuse to go along. In our case we told them to wait for the surgeon to arrive and be physically present in the operating room during the surgery. Who knows if he was mentally present, though.)
I'm afraid I'm a raytracing freak. I would rather have hardware that does raytracing freaking fast than keeping up with this thing of trying to make non-raytracing look better. It seems that the better long-term solution is hardware accellerated raytracing than trying to make better software for cobbling together models for non-raytracing systems. (Realtime caustics! Realtime raydiosity! Well, I can always dream...)
They will certainly keep it Mac only (at least for a while) in order to sell xserves. An xserve with free streaming software will be competetive with a WinTel box plus expensive streaming software. Thus more xserve sales.
Msft is paranoid, and thus 'cares' about everything. It's just that they are so big and have so much cash rolling around, that they can do stuff to express their paranoid 'caring'. In a sense, I don't think that they care that much - after all, they are just holding bs pr events, rather than doing something obvious and criminal, which is what they do when they 'really care'.
It seems to me that house became something about merging the mind/soul and the machine in such a way that the mind/soul was elevated, or reached a transcendent place. In comparison mainstream techno (although certainly not Derrick May, et al) is really about surpressing the mind/soul to the machine - to seek oblivion.
Actually, I wonder if there is an issue with needing to 'work up to' some music. Would someone who has never heard house before really get what's going on in a Derrick Carter set? Do you need to 'learn the language' before you can understand with some depth?
Claro?
Most good online vendors offer a phone based ordering system. If they require Passport, then call them up and order with a person - it costs them a lot more to pay the order taker than to take the order via web form. Oh yeah, ......... orderrrrrr .......... sloooooowlyyyyyyy ........ and ...... quadrupleeeeee ...... cheeeeeeeeck ....... everythinggggggggg .......
The Toledo Blade article lists the ISP as "Buckeye Express" which appears to be a Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) company. According to thier Corporate Information/Company Overview page they also own Madison Square Garden (and related teams), The WIZ, Radio City Music Hall, and Clearview Cinemas. Think carefully about with whom you do business.
I wish I could remember the exact quote, but Tim of Spaced has some line about "death, taxes and the enevitability that the next Star Trek movie will suck." (if a true Spaced freak can help me out, it's in series one, episode 5 "Chaos" where Tim and his 'boss' are in the comic shop talking.)