Watch The Slashdot Cynicism Flow...
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Free as in Books?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Jesus, watching the display of jaundiced and paranoiac viewpoints in this thread is enough to make me want to never read this forum again.
This isn't a damn privacy rights thing. Nor is it about how people should be donating these books to libraries, or whether they should or shouldn't be tracking them, or if some publisher is going to game the system for nefarious means. It's just harmless fun -- an all-volunteer effort by a group of people who love to read.
I mean, kick ass. Buona sera. I love it. More power to them. Can't some of you just revel in one of the wonders of the 'net without reaching for your tinfoil hats? Can't you just stop being critical asses long enough to see something that's really, truly good? Are you all that cynical?
Maybe I should drop a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking in a comic book store somewhere and try to help one of you.
the article hits the nail on the head on alot of things, especially about Linux on the desktop being mainly for geeks.
Listen, I don't care how many of your friends run Linux or how long you have or whether or not you consider yourself a geek. Linux is STILL, barring any serious work on the matter in the short term, an OS for people who like to customize, toodle, and otherwise explore & learn about their computers. People who like to compile source & install their own programs without a wizard. People who like being able to configure their shell.
It's been said here before, but you-all need to wake up & smell the ozone. 90% of people just want to turn on their machine and get something done. Many find computers foreign & scary. Most hate having to read anything before using a program. Most feel that if it's not self-explanatory it's not worth it.
I run Linux at home, though I'm a user, not a programmer. Though parts are very user-friendly much of it isn't and needs to be fixed. Linux is losing on the desktop because the geeks don't feel it's worthwhile to stick training wheels on Linux -- it's boring and takes time that could be used adding support for some feature we know is more worthwhile but doesn't matter to John & Jane Computeruser. Things like wizards, installation scripts that do./configure / make / make install for you, decent documentation, etc. The community standards for user accessability are fine for us geeks, but far too high for Mom & Dad.
It's a serious tension point for Linux -- how do the geeks, as developers, maintain the freedom of all the customization of Linux and yet create add-ons that make newbies comfortable? KDE3 is a good step. Mandrake Linux is a good step. But more definitely needs to be done, and if it is to be done it'll have to be on individual geek time, because unlike the competition they're not sitting on a pile of cash.
It's nice to finally see Russia shedding the democratic veneer it's been wearing for the past decade like so much bad makeup.
"Communist-turned-democratic" my ass. Yeltsin turned the Russian gov't into a virtual dictatorship then handed it over to a former KGB spook. An uninformed populus is fed bullshit through state-owned media outlets while Putin pays lip-service to a castrated Duma and does whatever he wants. It looks alot more like Napoleonic France than any sort of democracy to me.
I've just gotten & installed StarOffice after having Open Office for a while and damn, it makes me believe. I think it stands an excellent chance of doing real, deep damage to MS if only sysadmins & CTOs will wake the hell up and smell the gains in cost of operations.
Amongst the big benefits:
Application-independent file format based on XML lets you know you'll always be able to get at your data, even if you switch applications again in the future.
OO is FREE and OPEN. As in no-payee-no-money, change all you want, and know exactly how data gets handled in your organization.
If you're scared about "support" (as if MS ever gave any, really) StarOffice gives you that AND the Adabas DB app to use, for tons less $ than the MS guys who're treating you like a beggar at their door with the licensing and contract headaches.
No other office suite of this quality is available in Linux, Solaris, Windows, AND (around the corner) Mac versions. In a mixed computer environment this is heavenly.
And those are just the beginning of what the software is. Talking now about what it isn't, it IS NOT getting roped into a 3-year plan where you get to continue to pay money, but may or may not ever see a new version or any bug fixes. It IS NOT continually mutating file formats. It IS NOT macro viruses screwing with your systems here and there all the time. These are real problems with real costs attached, and to fix them the "nobody ever got fired for buying MS" status quo must change. Give it a serious look. Try it out. Do your jobs, for God's sake, and you'll see it's better.
It's not an option. If you don't do it your competitors will.
The dumb thing about celebrating Watergate now, the 30th anniversary of the break-in, is that 99.999% of the public had set it aside in their minds soon after it happened. Celebrating this week is like celebrating our own stupidity. Except for two police beat reporters for the Washington Post nobody gave a shit for a good 1.5 years. We should celebrate sometime in late 2003, the 30th anniversary of when we collectively woke the fuck up.
I'd also like to direct everyone to Woodstein's fantastic book, All the President's Men. Quick & easy read, and it captures like nothing else the discovery of the thing in all its surreal glory.
Back in my HS days, what sucked about the food & beverage options was that they weren't even remotely on a fair footing.
For drinks, I could either choose from ice-cold soda or a lukewarm milk/juice from the lunch counter. For food, it was either the pizza hut pizzas they had brought in each day, or whatever semi-edible nastiness was being pushed out of the cafeteria. The choice between eating barely edible crap vs. good-tasting food that's bad for you isn't any choice at all.
The problem is two-fold. First, that school budgets are so fucked that administrators feel the need to profit off of kids' expanding waistlines, and second that the budget's so fucked that the school cafeteria system makes absolute crap & calls it food. Also, forced to buy through gov't food surplus programs, local vendors, etc, they're basically dictated what they can & can't make and what they can make it with. Force cooks to use only certain ingredients and there isn't much they can do. Either way, the schools have to be giving kids healthy food -- it;s as important as anything else in school. I don't see any place for soda in schools without soda company profits playing a role.
I heard a story on NPR about a guy who has a milk vending machine -- he goes begging for space at schools, putting his machines in at a loss trying to generate business. Why? Because Coke & Pepsi get exclusive contracts for a school, throwing in fat "sponsorship" checks to boot & shutting other, possibly healthier options out. On top of this, principals are rated higher based on their ability to generate such funding in-house without having to go through the district.
It's called graft, and it's as bad as if a school took the republican or democratic party's money to teach kids from their free history book. It should stop. Kids can have all the soda they want in their lives, but schools should set the example.
I'm currently studying film history, and it's interesting to see how similar patent issues that effect the technology were causing problems on the technology use during the early days of cinema.
By 1907, Edison and his Vitascope (which BTW he did NOT invent, but licensed with Thomas Arnat et al) had alot of patents on movie camera & projector technology, including the crucial "latham loop" that relieved tension in the film. Since 1897, Edison had sought to force competitors out of business using these patents. One company, American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) refused to cooperate, and won against Edison in 1908. Edison, refusing to give up, continued to sue AM&B based on the latham loop. The 2 parties negotiated a settlement, forming the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in 1908, headed by Edison, AM&B, and a number of other smaller movie companies. The purpose of the MPPC was two-fold. First, to prevent the entry to market of new competitors to the field, and second, to limit encroachment of foreign films on the US market. It was collusive protectionism all the way -- the formation of a self-perpetuating oligopoly. With the patents the MPPC held, anyone who picked up a camera to make a film had to pay them or be sued. Ditto for exhibitors, 'cause the MPPC had patents on projectors as well.
Once they'd solidified their hold on projection & filming, they went for distribution, forming the General Film Company (GFC) in 1910. The GFC was the sole contractor for all MPPC companies' films. With this move, the only place to go for movies was the MPPC/GFC, controlled by the oligopolists.
In 1912 the US gov't finally began going after the MPPC as an illegal trust. They won in 1915 & broke it up, invalidating a number of the patents in the process, with the resulting companies devolving into the number of smaller movie studios we know from the 20's through the middle of the century. In the end, what was lost? Nothing less than all of the innovation small players could have brought to the technical end of the movie industry in its infancy. That's the problem with such tight patent restrictions in nascent technology -- the first out of the gate, not the best, tends to win.
Hear Hear, this is more real history than the post this guy was responding to.
May I add that nobody wanted to use a nuke, least of all Truman, but allied analysts recognized that there was no way the war was going to end for good without displacement of the Emperor, that before the atom bomb strikes the Japanese were adamant about not displacing the Emperor they revered as a god in any way, and even if a halt to hostilities was mediated they'd strike back again soon to recover lands & honor. In the classic 1970's miniseries "The World At War" Japanese ex-military leaders from the time explain in exact terms that they and the Emperor's government were trying to get a pause in the fighting from Russia and/or the US in order to regroup & counterattack. It was only after the Hiroshima hit that the Emperor met with his subordinates and started to talk about stepping down from supreme leadership. The historical record shows that it WAS the bomb that ended that war right then & there.
We had to alter the regime in Japan to insure a lasting peace with the country. Leaving the Emperor with power would have been too dangerous and could have resulted in a pacific war redux. It was war dammit, a dirty business and a far cry from what we're calling "war" today. I'm a pretty liberal guy, but pretending we commited some damned atrocity by dropping that bomb is an insult to the multitudes of men killed by the Japanese in that war. You think dropping the bomb was beyond the pale? Try beheading men en-masse who fucking surrendered to you because your culture tells you men who surrender don't deserve their lives. Try working men to death. Try torture for kicks. Try dragging out every single battle needlessly by fighting to the last fucking man even when you know you're beat. All these things the Japanese did, and each one is as horrendous as dropping those bombs.
BTW, there's no better source of WWII history on film than the miniseries The World at War. 24 hour-long episodes that kick anything on the History Channel's ass.
Jesus people, cut the knee-jerking and think for a second. Having additional charges for those who exceed a certain bandwidth point CAN be a very good thing for most of us. Setting it in the context of "shutting down file swappers" though is a red herring. It comes down to paying for what you use, nothing more or less.
Look at the data. In the linked article, it cites AT&T's data that 1% of users use 16% of the service's bandwidth. Elsewhere, I've seen numbers like 5% of users consuming 30% of available bandwidth. Part of my monthly DSL/cable bill, and yours, goes to supporting these bandwidth hogs. If implemented correctly and regulated as a public utility like the phone / gas / electricity, having the mega-users pay for excess bandwidth can make it less expensive for casual users to access the internet with a fat pipe. At least in CA, electricity consumers like wasteful home owners or power-intensive companies that use more electricity than others pay more for it because, like broadband, it's a limited resource that they're using more of than others. Why should broadband be exempt from similar controls, if implemented and regulated reasonably?
What sort of guidelines should be in place? Primarily, there should be a mandated minimum amount of bandwidth one gets for the flat rate so that broadband ISPs can't turn it into something analogous to basic cable service -- I would expect regulation such that the per-capita amount of bandwidth used by around 95% of a service's users would set the minimum flat rate. Also, I'd advocate against speed limitations wherever possible - the purpose of broadband is the fat pipe, so why have it if you can't use it?
I believe such a pricing scheme can be implemented fairly and work as a benefit to both us and the continued implementation of broadband service. There just needs to be adequate rules to prevent the broadband carriers from using it to screw us over. But the people who see everything AT&T or SBC says as part of a sinister plot to double everyone's rates and halve their download speed are just a part of the bloviating tinfoil hat crowd, not really deserving to be listened to.
Decide you'd rather be safe than free, or at least don't complain when others make that decision for you. Submit voluntarily to a random search because it makes the streets safer. Get frisked at the door. Carry a national ID. Get strip-searched before you get on the plane. Piss in the test cup and interoffice mail it to your boss. Don't write your congressman because we all know it doesn't make any difference. Stop reading the newspaper because it's so depressing. Don't vote. Use the supermarket's "discount card" so they can track everything you eat. Stop at the exit to the store when the employee tells you to and show them your receipt so they can be sure you're not stealing. Smile at the camera. Accept the software license that makes it illegal to use the program in ways the software company doesn't like. Receive information but don't create any. Watch TV because books are too thought-intensive. If you do read, have the FBI check your library's records to make sure nobody's checking out too many flagged books. Accept what you're told. Let the government gut the fifth amendment because it makes it too hard to get the bad guys. Let the FBI go back to spying on political organizations & religious groups again because "everything's changed." Let your bank share your personal data with anyone it wants because you're too busy to bother opting out. Mandate location chips in your cell phones so anyone who pays the phone company or gets a court order can know where you are 24/7. Fill out this survey for a chance at big prizes. Put a bio-locator chip in your kid's arm. Don't talk to strangers, they may think differently than you. Go from place to place in a metal box that prevents you from meeting or talking to anyone new or weird. Perpetuate the status quo. Pay more attention to how much money is in your pocket and how safe your investments are than how free you are, how creative you can be, and what the shape of the future is. Get yours - fuck the next guy.
Excuse the drama, but I don't know how else to express the feelings building up in me over the way the US is going. And I'm talking about the past 5-10 years, not just since September. If what our Declaration of Independence referred to as "certain inalienable rights" are no more than a greasy coin we can trade for a modicum of safety, 10% off our groceries, or a chance at winning a speedboat, what are they worth? Does a nation of people that would trade such liberty for these things deserve it? I simply no longer understand a large number of my fellow Americans who seem to think the above is basically OK. More than depressing, it's dangerous, and bodes ill for the long-term future of the nation.
C'mon, people, don't let them get you so head-up over a stupid piece of paper written stupidly. Check the site, especially their "touted accomplishments". It's a hard-right group for hire making hay with a good-sounding name and a crappy website. Nobody who knows the industry pays any attention to these morons, it's just red meat for the pro-MS crowd, bought & paid for.
God, how one can look at the painful stupidity of their arguments and not laugh is amazing. It's the most tortured piece of predetermined reasoning I've seen in a while. It's sad, when there are real think tanks that do real thorough work ala Rand Corp, that fly-by-nighters like this can give the industry a bad name so easily.
All the birth/death/anniversary/etc dates he'd know, especially children or parents.
Prominent words or phrases displayed in his office.
A selection of words germane to his profession.
Combine that with the dictionary, mix well, apply cracking script and, most likely, open sesame.
As Richard Feynman used to say about safes, 99.9% of what keeps people from getting in is the perception of security, not real security. This from a guy who used to sneak in & out of Los Alamos at will during the Manhattan project.
...go for Fujitsu's P-2000 Laptop with a 7-hour high capacity battery, DVDROM, and a wireless LAN card.
IMO, pads do and shall always suck, primarily because of the inherent frailty of an exposed screen. Sure, the screens on notebooks fail all the time too, but at least when not used they're folded shut & semi-protected. In this specific comparison, I see no reason to use some frail theoretical webpad when I can rely on existent notebook technology to carry around a computer so fucking small (10.6"(w) x 7"(d) x 1.59"(h)), smaller than the form design for most webpads, that lets me do anything my desktop does.
And everyone seems to bitch about wanting a "more natural" interface. From an anthropological perspective, there is no "more natural", there's just what you're used to -- the human animal can express ideas in multitudes of ways, and when it come to writing what I'm used to is thinking as I type about 90wpm. Writing with a pen on a notepad anymore feels feels like I've got a 25mph governor on a Ferrari. It's infuriating, and it doesn't get any better when you're dealing with some shit handwriting software - I haven't seen a single handwriting recognition program that wasn't a bitch to use and didn't make constant mistakes. Blah blah Graffiti blah blah - Graffiti isn't handwriting recognition software in the true sense of the term. Too many hardware people are obsessed with producing something because they thought of it in a Star Trek wet dream. People LIKE the keyboard. Look at the Blackberry. Look at the new Handspring Treos. How many people still peck at the keyboard with the stylus on their Palm PDAs? We have PDA makers trying to fit keyboards into tiny-ass PDAs & phones, people like them so much. Except for a few niche areas webpads are still a product looking for a market. Except for being bigger and having less battery life, what is a webpad going to do that a good color PDA doesn't? I may be being contrary, but these are serious questions that manufacturers need to consider before going to market with another damned Audrey.
No electronic pad has ever been made so far that didn't suck. Who knows? Maybe I'll be proved wrong, but I think the notebook is always going to be a league ahead of the notepad, and for the reasons above. Until I see a pad that alot of people prefer to notebooks, it's still vapor.
Libraries are public property, for the public benefit, be that benefit in the form of knowledge or air conditioning. Those "homeless degenerates" as you call them have as much of a right to be there as you or your kids do. I've ducked int the local library on swelteringly hot days to avoid the sun - does that make me a degenerate?
Of course not, jive turkey -- and don't go looking for a fight. I never said the filthy, mentally unbalanced, and/or homeless shouldn't be allowed in the library, just that that's the sort of element you can, and in my neighborhood will, find in a local branch. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's not the best sort of environment to leave you child alone in. Because it is a public venue, you're an idiot to leave a kid there thinking it's safe because it's quiet and there's lots of books around.
Of course the library should be free & open to everyone as you say. I'm just trying to promote respect for such a public place - it is yours in the communal sense, not the personal sense. Others will use what your using, so treat it with respect and leave it in the same condition, if not better, than when you found it. Just 'cause everyone can use it doesn't mean you get to trash it.
And not to be the grammar police, but hypocrisy isn't spelled like that.
Part of the problem with people wanting to sanitize the library, at least in my neck of the woods, is that you get some no-good parents who treat it as a damned daycare facility. This is slightly O/T, but germane to the perception people have of libraries.
The main branch of the library in my town is located downtown in a shopping district that also has a certain amount of homelessness, etc. I've been in the library and seen these moron parents walk their kids in the front door, kiss them on the forehead, and leave them for a good 1-2 hours. I could understand this behavior in a small town, but this isn't one. Nevermind that it's no librarian's job to look after your kids. Combine that with the homeless degenerates that skulk about it for hours to escape the summer heat and it's not a place I'd consider leaving my kid alone in for a second. In addition, unattended children damage library property. I've had librarians tell me that they get about 20 kids who spend the time between school and when their parents arrive to pick them up there. There have been fights, the police have had to come, take kids to the station & call their parents to come get them, but they keep coming back. It's ridiculous.
The library is a public accomodation, not your private accomodation to control or do with as you will. To me, the people who seek either to abuse or control the content of libraries are on the same level as those who defile public toilets.
That's the simple, God's honest truth about it. There's been alot of talk here comparing going to Mars to the Moon landings in the 60's / 70's, talk about how we did it "not because it was easy, but because it was hard", etc. Make no mistake that any objective reading of history will show that the race to the Moon was a high-tech form of cultural feather-ruffling between superpowers. Two nations, in the absence of direct armed conflict, were contending with each other on the fields of engineering and science rather than weaponry.
We fed ourselves alot of hype about doing things for all mankind, to boldy go where no man has gone before, etc, but the truth, the real truth, is that Sputnik scared the shit out of us. Snug in our belief that the USA was the best at everything and that the Rooskies would soon see the errors of their ways, we were taken aback when they acheived such a feat before we'd even really pushed for it. And everyone could hear it, that beeping above our very own skies proudly declaring the technological prowess of the Russian state.
In response, we jumped on science and technology spending & education with a ferocity rarely ever seen on a national scale. The Moon-shots were our attempt to catch up & surpass the USSR, nothing more & nothing less. Once we'd beaten them to the goal, the Moon program died of ennui.
What gets lost in our debates on things like going to Mars is that there's a time and place for everything. Without the partitioning of Europe and the ensuing Cold War, we likely would have never landed on the Moon. Why not? Because there would have been no reason to. We need a reason to go to Mars, a good reason. And a reason is only as good as the number & quality of the people who believe in it. Perhaps to bring the world together in a uniting effort is a good reason, I don't know. But I do know that the missing reason for doing it, for trying to overcome the monstrous scientific challenges to such an endeavour, is what's preventing it from happening.
Such lofty science & engineering goals as the Moon landings or the Panama Canal all derive from a need to solve real problems -- to show we're superior to the Russians technologically (and thus militarily), or to drastically lower the costs of trade & improve the ability to defend ourselves on the high seas. It's insipid to do anything "not because it is easy, but because it is hard". Under that rationale you can justify anything.
I differ from your opinion so I'm not a "Real" American? Now who's trolling.
There are, quite simply, better places to put our money than needless manned space exploration. As it is now, there is nothing being done in space by a human that a machine cannot do. Nothing. We put people up there to make it look good. It's dangerous and a waste, and neither you nor I will leave the planet in our lifetimes, so put down the Star Trek comic book & get over it.
Sending instruments & experiments into space that can operate automatically is exponentially cheaper and much safer. Should we have goals that include getting people living in space? That's a political question we all have opinions about. I'm just saying that if, for a mission or experiment, a human does not have to be sent, then do not send a human. That's not trolling and it's not cowardice. If you're being a good engineer and looking at costs & safety it's fucking common sense.
If you're interested in the sort of thing (and you live in the U.S.), contact your representative and let them know!
Sure, reply & tell them NOT to consider the measure.
First of all, look at the sponsors - almost all Lampson and a bunch of other Texans looking for a pile of cash ($50 mil next year & $200 mil in 2004, if you care to read the bill) to pour into Houston, Huntsville, Canaveral et al. I can smell the pork from here.
Second, $250 mil is NOT sufficient to get us to the aims of the bill (orbit an asteroid, orbit mars, etc), so this is just the key opening the door to more expenditures. This also relies on the idea that, for whatever reason, we NEED bipeds making orbits around asteroids & Mars.
Why? If anyone can tell me what in hell a human is going to do while orbiting an asteroid or Mars, other than look out the window and say "Cool" they win a cupie doll. I believe in sending up good satellites. I believe in innovative instrumentation. What I don't believe in is risking human life and probably tens of billions of dollars in toto for a damned boondoggle while we've got terrorists bombing buildings and one in six of us without health care.
Between the stupidity in general of hurtling someone out to Mars to do things machines to do very well without him and the whif of ham drifting across the plains of Texas I'm completely against it. Looks like Houston wants to beef up the space program to make up for the loss of Enron.
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Jesus, watching the display of jaundiced and paranoiac viewpoints in this thread is enough to make me want to never read this forum again.
This isn't a damn privacy rights thing. Nor is it about how people should be donating these books to libraries, or whether they should or shouldn't be tracking them, or if some publisher is going to game the system for nefarious means. It's just harmless fun -- an all-volunteer effort by a group of people who love to read.
I mean, kick ass. Buona sera. I love it. More power to them. Can't some of you just revel in one of the wonders of the 'net without reaching for your tinfoil hats? Can't you just stop being critical asses long enough to see something that's really, truly good? Are you all that cynical?
Maybe I should drop a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking in a comic book store somewhere and try to help one of you.
I think anime's shit, but Salzer's Video is the mecca of it for Ventura County, CA, just NW of LA. If you need to see it, it's there.
Great foreign/mystery/TV/art video stuff in general.
MS preventing MAME for XBox is like smacking your grandmother so she'll shut up about living through WWII.
Glad someone's at least TRYING to keep the old games around.
"It is unconstitutional for the government to promote an establishment of religion. Except when we really want to."
Sure, it sounds like a joke now. Wait a year.
the article hits the nail on the head on alot of things, especially about Linux on the desktop being mainly for geeks.
Listen, I don't care how many of your friends run Linux or how long you have or whether or not you consider yourself a geek. Linux is STILL, barring any serious work on the matter in the short term, an OS for people who like to customize, toodle, and otherwise explore & learn about their computers. People who like to compile source & install their own programs without a wizard. People who like being able to configure their shell.
It's been said here before, but you-all need to wake up & smell the ozone. 90% of people just want to turn on their machine and get something done. Many find computers foreign & scary. Most hate having to read anything before using a program. Most feel that if it's not self-explanatory it's not worth it.
I run Linux at home, though I'm a user, not a programmer. Though parts are very user-friendly much of it isn't and needs to be fixed. Linux is losing on the desktop because the geeks don't feel it's worthwhile to stick training wheels on Linux -- it's boring and takes time that could be used adding support for some feature we know is more worthwhile but doesn't matter to John & Jane Computeruser. Things like wizards, installation scripts that do ./configure / make / make install for you, decent documentation, etc. The community standards for user accessability are fine for us geeks, but far too high for Mom & Dad.
It's a serious tension point for Linux -- how do the geeks, as developers, maintain the freedom of all the customization of Linux and yet create add-ons that make newbies comfortable? KDE3 is a good step. Mandrake Linux is a good step. But more definitely needs to be done, and if it is to be done it'll have to be on individual geek time, because unlike the competition they're not sitting on a pile of cash.
It's nice to finally see Russia shedding the democratic veneer it's been wearing for the past decade like so much bad makeup.
"Communist-turned-democratic" my ass. Yeltsin turned the Russian gov't into a virtual dictatorship then handed it over to a former KGB spook. An uninformed populus is fed bullshit through state-owned media outlets while Putin pays lip-service to a castrated Duma and does whatever he wants. It looks alot more like Napoleonic France than any sort of democracy to me.
"Looka that great heead! It's a virtual planitoid, 'tis! Got its own weather system!"
I've just gotten & installed StarOffice after having Open Office for a while and damn, it makes me believe. I think it stands an excellent chance of doing real, deep damage to MS if only sysadmins & CTOs will wake the hell up and smell the gains in cost of operations.
Amongst the big benefits:
And those are just the beginning of what the software is. Talking now about what it isn't, it IS NOT getting roped into a 3-year plan where you get to continue to pay money, but may or may not ever see a new version or any bug fixes. It IS NOT continually mutating file formats. It IS NOT macro viruses screwing with your systems here and there all the time. These are real problems with real costs attached, and to fix them the "nobody ever got fired for buying MS" status quo must change. Give it a serious look. Try it out. Do your jobs, for God's sake, and you'll see it's better.
It's not an option. If you don't do it your competitors will.
The dumb thing about celebrating Watergate now, the 30th anniversary of the break-in, is that 99.999% of the public had set it aside in their minds soon after it happened. Celebrating this week is like celebrating our own stupidity. Except for two police beat reporters for the Washington Post nobody gave a shit for a good 1.5 years. We should celebrate sometime in late 2003, the 30th anniversary of when we collectively woke the fuck up.
I'd also like to direct everyone to Woodstein's fantastic book, All the President's Men. Quick & easy read, and it captures like nothing else the discovery of the thing in all its surreal glory.
Back in my HS days, what sucked about the food & beverage options was that they weren't even remotely on a fair footing.
For drinks, I could either choose from ice-cold soda or a lukewarm milk/juice from the lunch counter. For food, it was either the pizza hut pizzas they had brought in each day, or whatever semi-edible nastiness was being pushed out of the cafeteria. The choice between eating barely edible crap vs. good-tasting food that's bad for you isn't any choice at all.
The problem is two-fold. First, that school budgets are so fucked that administrators feel the need to profit off of kids' expanding waistlines, and second that the budget's so fucked that the school cafeteria system makes absolute crap & calls it food. Also, forced to buy through gov't food surplus programs, local vendors, etc, they're basically dictated what they can & can't make and what they can make it with. Force cooks to use only certain ingredients and there isn't much they can do. Either way, the schools have to be giving kids healthy food -- it;s as important as anything else in school. I don't see any place for soda in schools without soda company profits playing a role.
I heard a story on NPR about a guy who has a milk vending machine -- he goes begging for space at schools, putting his machines in at a loss trying to generate business. Why? Because Coke & Pepsi get exclusive contracts for a school, throwing in fat "sponsorship" checks to boot & shutting other, possibly healthier options out. On top of this, principals are rated higher based on their ability to generate such funding in-house without having to go through the district.
It's called graft, and it's as bad as if a school took the republican or democratic party's money to teach kids from their free history book. It should stop. Kids can have all the soda they want in their lives, but schools should set the example.
I'm currently studying film history, and it's interesting to see how similar patent issues that effect the technology were causing problems on the technology use during the early days of cinema.
By 1907, Edison and his Vitascope (which BTW he did NOT invent, but licensed with Thomas Arnat et al) had alot of patents on movie camera & projector technology, including the crucial "latham loop" that relieved tension in the film. Since 1897, Edison had sought to force competitors out of business using these patents. One company, American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) refused to cooperate, and won against Edison in 1908. Edison, refusing to give up, continued to sue AM&B based on the latham loop. The 2 parties negotiated a settlement, forming the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in 1908, headed by Edison, AM&B, and a number of other smaller movie companies. The purpose of the MPPC was two-fold. First, to prevent the entry to market of new competitors to the field, and second, to limit encroachment of foreign films on the US market. It was collusive protectionism all the way -- the formation of a self-perpetuating oligopoly. With the patents the MPPC held, anyone who picked up a camera to make a film had to pay them or be sued. Ditto for exhibitors, 'cause the MPPC had patents on projectors as well.
Once they'd solidified their hold on projection & filming, they went for distribution, forming the General Film Company (GFC) in 1910. The GFC was the sole contractor for all MPPC companies' films. With this move, the only place to go for movies was the MPPC/GFC, controlled by the oligopolists.
In 1912 the US gov't finally began going after the MPPC as an illegal trust. They won in 1915 & broke it up, invalidating a number of the patents in the process, with the resulting companies devolving into the number of smaller movie studios we know from the 20's through the middle of the century. In the end, what was lost? Nothing less than all of the innovation small players could have brought to the technical end of the movie industry in its infancy. That's the problem with such tight patent restrictions in nascent technology -- the first out of the gate, not the best, tends to win.
Screw the whackaloons who're too stupid to know what it is they're buying before they buy it.
Same goes for companies that want to use deception to sell their product.
The way I see it, both will get exactly what they deserve.
Hear Hear, this is more real history than the post this guy was responding to.
May I add that nobody wanted to use a nuke, least of all Truman, but allied analysts recognized that there was no way the war was going to end for good without displacement of the Emperor, that before the atom bomb strikes the Japanese were adamant about not displacing the Emperor they revered as a god in any way, and even if a halt to hostilities was mediated they'd strike back again soon to recover lands & honor. In the classic 1970's miniseries "The World At War" Japanese ex-military leaders from the time explain in exact terms that they and the Emperor's government were trying to get a pause in the fighting from Russia and/or the US in order to regroup & counterattack. It was only after the Hiroshima hit that the Emperor met with his subordinates and started to talk about stepping down from supreme leadership. The historical record shows that it WAS the bomb that ended that war right then & there.
We had to alter the regime in Japan to insure a lasting peace with the country. Leaving the Emperor with power would have been too dangerous and could have resulted in a pacific war redux. It was war dammit, a dirty business and a far cry from what we're calling "war" today. I'm a pretty liberal guy, but pretending we commited some damned atrocity by dropping that bomb is an insult to the multitudes of men killed by the Japanese in that war. You think dropping the bomb was beyond the pale? Try beheading men en-masse who fucking surrendered to you because your culture tells you men who surrender don't deserve their lives. Try working men to death. Try torture for kicks. Try dragging out every single battle needlessly by fighting to the last fucking man even when you know you're beat. All these things the Japanese did, and each one is as horrendous as dropping those bombs.
BTW, there's no better source of WWII history on film than the miniseries The World at War. 24 hour-long episodes that kick anything on the History Channel's ass.
...about the cheaper downloads.
*looks up from Kazaa* "Huh?"
Jesus people, cut the knee-jerking and think for a second. Having additional charges for those who exceed a certain bandwidth point CAN be a very good thing for most of us. Setting it in the context of "shutting down file swappers" though is a red herring. It comes down to paying for what you use, nothing more or less.
Look at the data. In the linked article, it cites AT&T's data that 1% of users use 16% of the service's bandwidth. Elsewhere, I've seen numbers like 5% of users consuming 30% of available bandwidth. Part of my monthly DSL/cable bill, and yours, goes to supporting these bandwidth hogs. If implemented correctly and regulated as a public utility like the phone / gas / electricity, having the mega-users pay for excess bandwidth can make it less expensive for casual users to access the internet with a fat pipe. At least in CA, electricity consumers like wasteful home owners or power-intensive companies that use more electricity than others pay more for it because, like broadband, it's a limited resource that they're using more of than others. Why should broadband be exempt from similar controls, if implemented and regulated reasonably?
What sort of guidelines should be in place? Primarily, there should be a mandated minimum amount of bandwidth one gets for the flat rate so that broadband ISPs can't turn it into something analogous to basic cable service -- I would expect regulation such that the per-capita amount of bandwidth used by around 95% of a service's users would set the minimum flat rate. Also, I'd advocate against speed limitations wherever possible - the purpose of broadband is the fat pipe, so why have it if you can't use it?
I believe such a pricing scheme can be implemented fairly and work as a benefit to both us and the continued implementation of broadband service. There just needs to be adequate rules to prevent the broadband carriers from using it to screw us over. But the people who see everything AT&T or SBC says as part of a sinister plot to double everyone's rates and halve their download speed are just a part of the bloviating tinfoil hat crowd, not really deserving to be listened to.
...is to stop demanding them.
Decide you'd rather be safe than free, or at least don't complain when others make that decision for you. Submit voluntarily to a random search because it makes the streets safer. Get frisked at the door. Carry a national ID. Get strip-searched before you get on the plane. Piss in the test cup and interoffice mail it to your boss. Don't write your congressman because we all know it doesn't make any difference. Stop reading the newspaper because it's so depressing. Don't vote. Use the supermarket's "discount card" so they can track everything you eat. Stop at the exit to the store when the employee tells you to and show them your receipt so they can be sure you're not stealing. Smile at the camera. Accept the software license that makes it illegal to use the program in ways the software company doesn't like. Receive information but don't create any. Watch TV because books are too thought-intensive. If you do read, have the FBI check your library's records to make sure nobody's checking out too many flagged books. Accept what you're told. Let the government gut the fifth amendment because it makes it too hard to get the bad guys. Let the FBI go back to spying on political organizations & religious groups again because "everything's changed." Let your bank share your personal data with anyone it wants because you're too busy to bother opting out. Mandate location chips in your cell phones so anyone who pays the phone company or gets a court order can know where you are 24/7. Fill out this survey for a chance at big prizes. Put a bio-locator chip in your kid's arm. Don't talk to strangers, they may think differently than you. Go from place to place in a metal box that prevents you from meeting or talking to anyone new or weird. Perpetuate the status quo. Pay more attention to how much money is in your pocket and how safe your investments are than how free you are, how creative you can be, and what the shape of the future is. Get yours - fuck the next guy.
Excuse the drama, but I don't know how else to express the feelings building up in me over the way the US is going. And I'm talking about the past 5-10 years, not just since September. If what our Declaration of Independence referred to as "certain inalienable rights" are no more than a greasy coin we can trade for a modicum of safety, 10% off our groceries, or a chance at winning a speedboat, what are they worth? Does a nation of people that would trade such liberty for these things deserve it? I simply no longer understand a large number of my fellow Americans who seem to think the above is basically OK. More than depressing, it's dangerous, and bodes ill for the long-term future of the nation.
C'mon, people, don't let them get you so head-up over a stupid piece of paper written stupidly. Check the site, especially their "touted accomplishments". It's a hard-right group for hire making hay with a good-sounding name and a crappy website. Nobody who knows the industry pays any attention to these morons, it's just red meat for the pro-MS crowd, bought & paid for.
God, how one can look at the painful stupidity of their arguments and not laugh is amazing. It's the most tortured piece of predetermined reasoning I've seen in a while. It's sad, when there are real think tanks that do real thorough work ala Rand Corp, that fly-by-nighters like this can give the industry a bad name so easily.
The following info would help:
Combine that with the dictionary, mix well, apply cracking script and, most likely, open sesame.
As Richard Feynman used to say about safes, 99.9% of what keeps people from getting in is the perception of security, not real security. This from a guy who used to sneak in & out of Los Alamos at will during the Manhattan project.
...go for Fujitsu's P-2000 Laptop with a 7-hour high capacity battery, DVDROM, and a wireless LAN card.
IMO, pads do and shall always suck, primarily because of the inherent frailty of an exposed screen. Sure, the screens on notebooks fail all the time too, but at least when not used they're folded shut & semi-protected. In this specific comparison, I see no reason to use some frail theoretical webpad when I can rely on existent notebook technology to carry around a computer so fucking small (10.6"(w) x 7"(d) x 1.59"(h)), smaller than the form design for most webpads, that lets me do anything my desktop does.
And everyone seems to bitch about wanting a "more natural" interface. From an anthropological perspective, there is no "more natural", there's just what you're used to -- the human animal can express ideas in multitudes of ways, and when it come to writing what I'm used to is thinking as I type about 90wpm. Writing with a pen on a notepad anymore feels feels like I've got a 25mph governor on a Ferrari. It's infuriating, and it doesn't get any better when you're dealing with some shit handwriting software - I haven't seen a single handwriting recognition program that wasn't a bitch to use and didn't make constant mistakes. Blah blah Graffiti blah blah - Graffiti isn't handwriting recognition software in the true sense of the term. Too many hardware people are obsessed with producing something because they thought of it in a Star Trek wet dream. People LIKE the keyboard. Look at the Blackberry. Look at the new Handspring Treos. How many people still peck at the keyboard with the stylus on their Palm PDAs? We have PDA makers trying to fit keyboards into tiny-ass PDAs & phones, people like them so much. Except for a few niche areas webpads are still a product looking for a market. Except for being bigger and having less battery life, what is a webpad going to do that a good color PDA doesn't? I may be being contrary, but these are serious questions that manufacturers need to consider before going to market with another damned Audrey.
No electronic pad has ever been made so far that didn't suck. Who knows? Maybe I'll be proved wrong, but I think the notebook is always going to be a league ahead of the notepad, and for the reasons above. Until I see a pad that alot of people prefer to notebooks, it's still vapor.
...that these are the same people who can make a bong out of anything?
"OK, get me a broomstick, some PVC pipe and a cantaloupe."
Libraries are public property, for the public benefit, be that benefit in the form of knowledge or air conditioning. Those "homeless degenerates" as you call them have as much of a right to be there as you or your kids do. I've ducked int the local library on swelteringly hot days to avoid the sun - does that make me a degenerate?
Of course not, jive turkey -- and don't go looking for a fight. I never said the filthy, mentally unbalanced, and/or homeless shouldn't be allowed in the library, just that that's the sort of element you can, and in my neighborhood will, find in a local branch. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's not the best sort of environment to leave you child alone in. Because it is a public venue, you're an idiot to leave a kid there thinking it's safe because it's quiet and there's lots of books around.
Of course the library should be free & open to everyone as you say. I'm just trying to promote respect for such a public place - it is yours in the communal sense, not the personal sense. Others will use what your using, so treat it with respect and leave it in the same condition, if not better, than when you found it. Just 'cause everyone can use it doesn't mean you get to trash it.
And not to be the grammar police, but hypocrisy isn't spelled like that.
Part of the problem with people wanting to sanitize the library, at least in my neck of the woods, is that you get some no-good parents who treat it as a damned daycare facility. This is slightly O/T, but germane to the perception people have of libraries.
The main branch of the library in my town is located downtown in a shopping district that also has a certain amount of homelessness, etc. I've been in the library and seen these moron parents walk their kids in the front door, kiss them on the forehead, and leave them for a good 1-2 hours. I could understand this behavior in a small town, but this isn't one. Nevermind that it's no librarian's job to look after your kids. Combine that with the homeless degenerates that skulk about it for hours to escape the summer heat and it's not a place I'd consider leaving my kid alone in for a second. In addition, unattended children damage library property. I've had librarians tell me that they get about 20 kids who spend the time between school and when their parents arrive to pick them up there. There have been fights, the police have had to come, take kids to the station & call their parents to come get them, but they keep coming back. It's ridiculous.
The library is a public accomodation, not your private accomodation to control or do with as you will. To me, the people who seek either to abuse or control the content of libraries are on the same level as those who defile public toilets.
...we went to beat the Russians.
That's the simple, God's honest truth about it. There's been alot of talk here comparing going to Mars to the Moon landings in the 60's / 70's, talk about how we did it "not because it was easy, but because it was hard", etc. Make no mistake that any objective reading of history will show that the race to the Moon was a high-tech form of cultural feather-ruffling between superpowers. Two nations, in the absence of direct armed conflict, were contending with each other on the fields of engineering and science rather than weaponry.
We fed ourselves alot of hype about doing things for all mankind, to boldy go where no man has gone before, etc, but the truth, the real truth, is that Sputnik scared the shit out of us. Snug in our belief that the USA was the best at everything and that the Rooskies would soon see the errors of their ways, we were taken aback when they acheived such a feat before we'd even really pushed for it. And everyone could hear it, that beeping above our very own skies proudly declaring the technological prowess of the Russian state.
In response, we jumped on science and technology spending & education with a ferocity rarely ever seen on a national scale. The Moon-shots were our attempt to catch up & surpass the USSR, nothing more & nothing less. Once we'd beaten them to the goal, the Moon program died of ennui.
What gets lost in our debates on things like going to Mars is that there's a time and place for everything. Without the partitioning of Europe and the ensuing Cold War, we likely would have never landed on the Moon. Why not? Because there would have been no reason to. We need a reason to go to Mars, a good reason. And a reason is only as good as the number & quality of the people who believe in it. Perhaps to bring the world together in a uniting effort is a good reason, I don't know. But I do know that the missing reason for doing it, for trying to overcome the monstrous scientific challenges to such an endeavour, is what's preventing it from happening.
Such lofty science & engineering goals as the Moon landings or the Panama Canal all derive from a need to solve real problems -- to show we're superior to the Russians technologically (and thus militarily), or to drastically lower the costs of trade & improve the ability to defend ourselves on the high seas. It's insipid to do anything "not because it is easy, but because it is hard". Under that rationale you can justify anything.
Real Americans
I differ from your opinion so I'm not a "Real" American? Now who's trolling.
There are, quite simply, better places to put our money than needless manned space exploration. As it is now, there is nothing being done in space by a human that a machine cannot do. Nothing. We put people up there to make it look good. It's dangerous and a waste, and neither you nor I will leave the planet in our lifetimes, so put down the Star Trek comic book & get over it.
Sending instruments & experiments into space that can operate automatically is exponentially cheaper and much safer. Should we have goals that include getting people living in space? That's a political question we all have opinions about. I'm just saying that if, for a mission or experiment, a human does not have to be sent, then do not send a human. That's not trolling and it's not cowardice. If you're being a good engineer and looking at costs & safety it's fucking common sense.
If you're interested in the sort of thing (and you live in the U.S.), contact your representative and let them know!
Sure, reply & tell them NOT to consider the measure.
First of all, look at the sponsors - almost all Lampson and a bunch of other Texans looking for a pile of cash ($50 mil next year & $200 mil in 2004, if you care to read the bill) to pour into Houston, Huntsville, Canaveral et al. I can smell the pork from here.
Second, $250 mil is NOT sufficient to get us to the aims of the bill (orbit an asteroid, orbit mars, etc), so this is just the key opening the door to more expenditures. This also relies on the idea that, for whatever reason, we NEED bipeds making orbits around asteroids & Mars.
Why? If anyone can tell me what in hell a human is going to do while orbiting an asteroid or Mars, other than look out the window and say "Cool" they win a cupie doll. I believe in sending up good satellites. I believe in innovative instrumentation. What I don't believe in is risking human life and probably tens of billions of dollars in toto for a damned boondoggle while we've got terrorists bombing buildings and one in six of us without health care.
Between the stupidity in general of hurtling someone out to Mars to do things machines to do very well without him and the whif of ham drifting across the plains of Texas I'm completely against it. Looks like Houston wants to beef up the space program to make up for the loss of Enron.