is the dang set-top box. They're on the wrong side of a hardware fence from being able to get to the right channel at the right time. Yeah, yeah, I know, they have those "IR Blaster" things to control the boxes. But there's just something about those things that SEEMS failure-bound - whether they really are or not, it's enough to generate resistance.
The interface on my DishPVR sucks compared to a ReplayTV or Tivo. But it has what they never will - integrated direct control of all channels, and accurate schedule info.
It doesn't have to be like that. I lived in a city once where the cable company put the controls over what you were allowed to see into their phone-pole boxes. You just plugged your cable into your TV or VCR, no dorky little box required. But then, it was a small local cable company, too. And no longer exists. Insert usual moral here.
First thing we do, let's learn to spell
on
The Internet Backlash
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The word is "losing", not "loosing". I don't have a lot of confidence in anything that can't even make it through its subtitle without getting a word wrong.
Re:Lessig, Litman, and Schneier
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 1
But what kind of "involvement" is actually possible for lusers like us? Do we have large sums of money to donate to Congressional campaigns? No we do not. Who does Congress work for? They work for the people who pay them, like anybody else.
Most people don't care about these issues. The details are too complex and seem too remote from daily life. Those of us who do care are easily dismissed as wackos. C'mon, there is at the moment one Congressman who is even coming close to presenting the other side of the argument on copyrights, etc., and he's doing it because it will get his name in the papers (and because AOL likes it in a short-term tactical sense).
Democracy sounds good on paper but not so much in practice. It particularly is not so good at preventing stupid policies that don't affect the majority of the population - example #1, the drug laws in this country.
I know that relying on technical solutions to political problems is a loser strategy, but I can understand why people pursue it anyway. What else - realistically - can any of us do?
Well for sure I know this isn't the future it was supposed to be. But consider one of the offhand observations made in the article - for 28 years, no one has even left Earth orbit. Now, could we have? Of course. Our political structure decided not to, for all kinds of reasons.
I think this is an example of one of the sources of tension between the innovations everyone here is mentioning, and the article's sense of a lack of same. The social space for change in this country has shrunk dramatically since 1950. Why is there no bullet train between San Francisco and LA? Technology? Maybe a bit. But it's mostly the social obstacles. If we were willing to just throw people out of the way wholesale, the way that (say) the big irrigation projects in mid-century did, it wouldn't be a problem. But we're not. It's a country of lawyers now. (Which ties back to other points made here, that the big changes since 1950 have been legal and political, not technological - the expansion of civil rights, for instance.)
Unrelated second point: how different is life for the average person in the world now than it was in 1900? Not nearly so much as it is in the USA, I'd wager. There's a lot of room for all of this stuff to spread out yet.
I worked for Ingres in the 80s and early 90s,
and we sold software that let customers develop their own applications exactly like this - X-based frontend, going through a template-language-interpreting middleware bit to an Ingres DBMS backend. I can't remember the name because it was something horrible like VisualIngres, but I do remember seeing a customer demo a StarWars-related app he had built (SDI not the movie), so it must have been around the time you're asking about or earlier.
Uh, this certainly doesn't sound like a typical liberal to me:
"Vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard' leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day."
But then, some people think Bill Clinton is a Socialist. I guess to them, "liberal" means "not right-wing fundie gun-bearing flag-preserver."
Slashdot Mirror
Though that did lead serendipitously to
aubergine: <jargon> A secret term used to refer to computers in the presence of computerphobic third parties.
I like that a lot.
As of beta version 4, PHP 5 still has a few shortcomings, including its lack of exceptions [...]
PHP 5's major new achievements come in the area of its exception handling [...]
Uh... George? Is that you?
Also - he's basing this on the December 2003 release? Why is this article even here?
Co-sponsor of this piece of foolishness: Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.
Co-sponsor of the INDUCE Act: Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California
Yeah, let's take power away from those old white Republican males! Because then everything will change! Except not!
In the Bizarro universe. Whereas in ours, it's the other way around.
is the dang set-top box. They're on the wrong side of a hardware fence from being able to get to the right channel at the right time. Yeah, yeah, I know, they have those "IR Blaster" things to control the boxes. But there's just something about those things that SEEMS failure-bound - whether they really are or not, it's enough to generate resistance.
The interface on my DishPVR sucks compared to a ReplayTV or Tivo. But it has what they never will - integrated direct control of all channels, and accurate schedule info.
It doesn't have to be like that. I lived in a city once where the cable company put the controls over what you were allowed to see into their phone-pole boxes. You just plugged your cable into your TV or VCR, no dorky little box required. But then, it was a small local cable company, too. And no longer exists. Insert usual moral here.
The word is "losing", not "loosing". I don't have a lot of confidence in anything that can't even make it through its subtitle without getting a word wrong.
But what kind of "involvement" is actually possible for lusers like us? Do we have large sums of money to donate to Congressional campaigns? No we do not. Who does Congress work for? They work for the people who pay them, like anybody else.
Most people don't care about these issues. The details are too complex and seem too remote from daily life. Those of us who do care are easily dismissed as wackos. C'mon, there is at the moment one Congressman who is even coming close to presenting the other side of the argument on copyrights, etc., and he's doing it because it will get his name in the papers (and because AOL likes it in a short-term tactical sense).
Democracy sounds good on paper but not so much in practice. It particularly is not so good at preventing stupid policies that don't affect the majority of the population - example #1, the drug laws in this country.
I know that relying on technical solutions to political problems is a loser strategy, but I can understand why people pursue it anyway. What else - realistically - can any of us do?
I think this is an example of one of the sources of tension between the innovations everyone here is mentioning, and the article's sense of a lack of same. The social space for change in this country has shrunk dramatically since 1950. Why is there no bullet train between San Francisco and LA? Technology? Maybe a bit. But it's mostly the social obstacles. If we were willing to just throw people out of the way wholesale, the way that (say) the big irrigation projects in mid-century did, it wouldn't be a problem. But we're not. It's a country of lawyers now. (Which ties back to other points made here, that the big changes since 1950 have been legal and political, not technological - the expansion of civil rights, for instance.)
Unrelated second point: how different is life for the average person in the world now than it was in 1900? Not nearly so much as it is in the USA, I'd wager. There's a lot of room for all of this stuff to spread out yet.
I worked for Ingres in the 80s and early 90s, and we sold software that let customers develop their own applications exactly like this - X-based frontend, going through a template-language-interpreting middleware bit to an Ingres DBMS backend. I can't remember the name because it was something horrible like VisualIngres, but I do remember seeing a customer demo a StarWars-related app he had built (SDI not the movie), so it must have been around the time you're asking about or earlier.
that neither Le Monde or La Tribune have any stories about this - and it supposedly happened Monday?
Uh, this certainly doesn't sound like a typical
liberal to me:
"Vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The
only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard'
leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain
peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day."
But then, some people think Bill Clinton is a Socialist. I guess to them, "liberal" means
"not right-wing fundie gun-bearing flag-preserver."