Well, that's sort of what I was trying to say in a backwards sort of way.
The TSA couldn't find their butts with a flashlight and a map. Outside of no-fly list which, laughably, treats names as a unique key, I can't imagine they track much of anything meaningful. But of course, when they get it wrong, innocent people are screwed, and that's the worst problem with decreasing privacy.
Eventually there will be no channel to change to for "family" programming.
There will always be the perfect "family" programming channel. It's called "OFF".
Also, we personally find tons of perfect family-appropriate material on DVD's of shows released in the 60's and even the 70's.
At some point, you need to realize that TV is not only getting worse, but is beyond the point of being saved. You can complain all you want, and it might even do some good (although it almost never does). Your only defense is to quit the game. Network TV as we knew it is practically gone, and what little good that is left won't be long for this world.
Give up. Find alternatives. It's a better use of your time.
You're correct about the "melodrama" aspect of the movies of the time. But more specifically, films like "Metropolis", "Nosferatu", and "Cabinet" owe as much to the zeitgeist of German culture at the time as to the state of the art of cinematography or their very creative directors. Despite those flaws related largely to the movies being silent and still a novel art form in any case, these movies hold up extremely well. I can't imagine any movie released this decade that will be so highly regarded in 2090.
This is something that I don't think anyone in the bloated, banal Hollywood of today, with its near-contempt for American culture and its audience could ever achieve. Hollywood is too busy trying to create the culture to be any kind of reflection of what is really going on, and could never achieve the level of introspection necessary to create a movie that can reflect reality by distorting it so severely.
That isn't to say there aren't good movies around, but I cannot imagine an Oscar-winning or otherwise successful movie these days being worthy of even being mentioned in the same sentence as the best of what was being done in the early 20th century. Very little ground is being broken and there is less creativity than ever, which is a shame given the tools that are available.
You've got a point, but if the game development companies could manage their projects in a way that lets the employees work normal jobs without an unreasonable amount of overtime and still deliver in a reasonably timely manner, don't you think they would?
More to the point, if they thought they could do it, wouldn't they try? I don't doubt that it's possible, but there are few people capable of managing such a project. Of course, this also assumes something that American management is no longer willing to accept: Employees aren't commodities to be used up and thrown out. Nurturing an employee, allowing him to grow and benefit from experience is no longer seen as having any value at many companies. A lot of places see a warm seat as a warm seat, and an employee (excuse me, a headcount) is at best a collection of keywords on a text-indexed resume. This might be popular, but these companies are no better than the factory owners of the late 19th century and will fall into the 10% or 3% categories I described above regardless of their sizes.
Skills and experience are only worth something to those who recognize their value.
If he is saying that it couldn't fool a human, I would agree. While I've seen static images that are startingly realistic-looking, I have yet to see animation that gets anywhere near the far edge of the Uncanny Valley.
That's why we will continue, for a long time, to see animation like The Incredibles, who don't look even the slightest real, but have very convincing expressions and poses.
People will keep trying, and eventually succeed to duplicate photorealistic animated human expression, but I give it 10 years or more until that happens.
By the way, that's an excellent movie. Although the story (and acting in particular) are somewhat melodramatic, the visuals are some of the best ever captured on celluloid (or CCD)... and have remained so for 80 years.
This is any large business. After my 20 or so years of experience working at companies of all sizes I would plot a chart like this:
Number of employees vs. Efficiency of the company as a whole
1 employee - 100%
4 employees - 95%
10 employees - 90%
100 employees - 50%
1000 employees - 25%
10000 employees - 10%
The U.S. Government - 3%
We simply do not have the collective wisdom to manage large groups of people. Maybe that's the next breakthrough that will allow us to make quantum leaps in productivity in the 21st century. Or maybe we'll just invent robots to do it all for us.
By the way, those numbers are flexible. I once worked in a division of 80 - 100 people who achieved about 5% efficiency for over a year thanks to exceptionally clueless management. By the same token, I would imagine Google doesn't quite fit this scale either.
My fear is that someone will have something on me that they believe is true, but isn't.
I'm not afraid of lack of privacy... I'm afraid when the information they have on me is wrong. If we lose our privacy, I can guarantee that most or all of us will have incorrect data associated with our identities.
The only alternative is to keep my privacy, thank you very much.
I should have said "much greater than 99.99% participation".
Hey,/., would it kill you to join the 21st century and let us edit our posts?
p.s. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment
Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form.
No, chances are I'm an intelligent person who can type fast, but/. will never consider that. Believe it or not, guys, we can compose a meaningful posting in less than 2 minutes. Please stop punishing good typists.
For thew boycott to be effective, you would need 99.99% participation because if one person out of 10000 hits on a spam message, it's worth the spammers' time and money. The boycott will never, ever, work.
Nevertheless, you _should_ boycott spammers. I don't do business with spammers, and try not to do business with anyone who uses advertising tactics I find intrusive, offensive or just plain annoying. Of course, you can't boycott every business that does something to which you object or you would end up living in a shack somewhere in the woods living off of wild game and probably writing anti-technology screeds as well, but you can at least target the worst offenders.
The only solution that has any chance of working is to ditch SMTP, and that will happen about the time Duke Nukem Forever switches and shortly after we all switch to IPv6 and shortly before Microsoft goes open source.
These are great devices and are used in a lot of places around the U.S., including some of our major airports. I haven't been involved with Hirsch in over 4 years, but I always figured they'd be around for a long time. It's not particularly high-tech, but it's solid, flexible technology, which after all, is all anyone should really want.
The problem is that I didn't drink all that much in college. I'm finding more and more that while my memory doesn't seem to be really decreasing, it takes me significantly longer to pull up names (especially of places or people) that I haven't thought of in a while. I also have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to appointments and other mundane details, but I can't blame that on age, as I've always been that way. I was late for my own birth.
I worked for a company, now part of Honeywell, that made access control keypads that work exactly how you describe. It was a really good product, but for the life of me, I can't remember the name of it.
Apparently you've never used XP with SP2. The Security Center, or whatever its called, monitors for a registered virus scanner and tells you if one is not there. This _is_ a Microsoft thing, although I can't say whether or not it will interrupt a full-screen application.
The thing is, good luck finding one. I have a BS in Computer Science from 1987, and while my education served me well, I was rarely required to so much as write a paper throughout my years in college. I don't feel it was a particularly well-rounded education (although I tried to make it so by my choice of electives).
It depends. If we are in a debate and trying to make and defend points, then we should be doing so with utmost vigor and diligence. If however, we are just having a pleasant little chat then, sure, we can be informal.
But no one should expect to win any arguments that way.
The problem comes that with some issues, people are likely to assume "everyone agrees with me" or "everyone knows..." or "it's common knowledge..." when in fact none of these are ever the case. Thus, if I make a flippant comment to the effect of "Of course the government is screwed up, those corrupt Republicans and that idiot George W. Bush is in charge." a lot of people will not only agree with me and take that as a given, when in fact a lot of people (like me) would not agree with that statement.
For the record, I would say, "The government is screwed up because both parties are rife with corruption. George W. Bush is a pretty smart guy who has been faced with some tough decisions the likes of which this country hasn't seen in some decades, and while he made some good decisions, he also made some very bad ones. The biggest root problem with our government is probably the poorly-educated electorate. The Founding Fathers didn't restrict the vote to only landowners out of racism, sexism or to maintain some kind of plutocracy; they restricted the vote to those voters who would most likely be capable of making educated choices. Now that we as a society have advanced to the point where it is recognized that it is appropriate for all citizens of a certain age to be able to vote, we suffer from the fact that a large number of them do not make educated choices, but are rather swayed by the most base of negative advertising and outright bribery."
But, if we want to remain casual, we can settle for "George W. Bush is an idiot."
Re:any real users of this tech ?
on
A GUI For Books
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The technology will be there soon. For instance, 600dpi ePaper with optional (but not necessary) backlighting. A display that looks as good as the output of a decent laser printer will be around in the next decade or so. The capacity to store any amount of reading material you would ever want on a device the size of a pocket paperback is there now.
The reason it will never take off is because for the same price as a paperback + $1.99, you will get a single eBook that's encrusted with DRM, can't be transferred to a different device and, if the capriciousness of content providers continues on the path it is now, will expire (and self-delete) in a month.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's sort of what I was trying to say in a backwards sort of way.
The TSA couldn't find their butts with a flashlight and a map. Outside of no-fly list which, laughably, treats names as a unique key, I can't imagine they track much of anything meaningful. But of course, when they get it wrong, innocent people are screwed, and that's the worst problem with decreasing privacy.
Eventually there will be no channel to change to for "family" programming.
There will always be the perfect "family" programming channel. It's called "OFF".
Also, we personally find tons of perfect family-appropriate material on DVD's of shows released in the 60's and even the 70's.
At some point, you need to realize that TV is not only getting worse, but is beyond the point of being saved. You can complain all you want, and it might even do some good (although it almost never does). Your only defense is to quit the game. Network TV as we knew it is practically gone, and what little good that is left won't be long for this world.
Give up. Find alternatives. It's a better use of your time.
Network TV deserves to die.
You're correct about the "melodrama" aspect of the movies of the time. But more specifically, films like "Metropolis", "Nosferatu", and "Cabinet" owe as much to the zeitgeist of German culture at the time as to the state of the art of cinematography or their very creative directors. Despite those flaws related largely to the movies being silent and still a novel art form in any case, these movies hold up extremely well. I can't imagine any movie released this decade that will be so highly regarded in 2090.
This is something that I don't think anyone in the bloated, banal Hollywood of today, with its near-contempt for American culture and its audience could ever achieve. Hollywood is too busy trying to create the culture to be any kind of reflection of what is really going on, and could never achieve the level of introspection necessary to create a movie that can reflect reality by distorting it so severely.
That isn't to say there aren't good movies around, but I cannot imagine an Oscar-winning or otherwise successful movie these days being worthy of even being mentioned in the same sentence as the best of what was being done in the early 20th century. Very little ground is being broken and there is less creativity than ever, which is a shame given the tools that are available.
You've got a point, but if the game development companies could manage their projects in a way that lets the employees work normal jobs without an unreasonable amount of overtime and still deliver in a reasonably timely manner, don't you think they would?
More to the point, if they thought they could do it, wouldn't they try? I don't doubt that it's possible, but there are few people capable of managing such a project. Of course, this also assumes something that American management is no longer willing to accept: Employees aren't commodities to be used up and thrown out. Nurturing an employee, allowing him to grow and benefit from experience is no longer seen as having any value at many companies. A lot of places see a warm seat as a warm seat, and an employee (excuse me, a headcount) is at best a collection of keywords on a text-indexed resume. This might be popular, but these companies are no better than the factory owners of the late 19th century and will fall into the 10% or 3% categories I described above regardless of their sizes.
Skills and experience are only worth something to those who recognize their value.
If he is saying that it couldn't fool a human, I would agree. While I've seen static images that are startingly realistic-looking, I have yet to see animation that gets anywhere near the far edge of the Uncanny Valley.
That's why we will continue, for a long time, to see animation like The Incredibles, who don't look even the slightest real, but have very convincing expressions and poses.
People will keep trying, and eventually succeed to duplicate photorealistic animated human expression, but I give it 10 years or more until that happens.
By the way, that's an excellent movie. Although the story (and acting in particular) are somewhat melodramatic, the visuals are some of the best ever captured on celluloid (or CCD)... and have remained so for 80 years.
This is any large business. After my 20 or so years of experience working at companies of all sizes I would plot a chart like this:
Number of employees vs. Efficiency of the company as a whole
1 employee - 100%
4 employees - 95%
10 employees - 90%
100 employees - 50%
1000 employees - 25%
10000 employees - 10%
The U.S. Government - 3%
We simply do not have the collective wisdom to manage large groups of people. Maybe that's the next breakthrough that will allow us to make quantum leaps in productivity in the 21st century. Or maybe we'll just invent robots to do it all for us.
By the way, those numbers are flexible. I once worked in a division of 80 - 100 people who achieved about 5% efficiency for over a year thanks to exceptionally clueless management. By the same token, I would imagine Google doesn't quite fit this scale either.
I have nothing to hide.
My fear is that someone will have something on me that they believe is true, but isn't.
I'm not afraid of lack of privacy... I'm afraid when the information they have on me is wrong. If we lose our privacy, I can guarantee that most or all of us will have incorrect data associated with our identities.
The only alternative is to keep my privacy, thank you very much.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
;-)
Plus you're more of a stud using a tool that's likely to lop off one of your limbs if you mishandle it.
(p.s. I use OSX, SUSE and Windows, so I know what of I speak.)
Replying to myself, blah, blah, blah...
/., would it kill you to join the 21st century and let us edit our posts?
/. will never consider that. Believe it or not, guys, we can compose a meaningful posting in less than 2 minutes. Please stop punishing good typists.
I should have said "much greater than 99.99% participation".
Hey,
p.s. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment
Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form.
No, chances are I'm an intelligent person who can type fast, but
For thew boycott to be effective, you would need 99.99% participation because if one person out of 10000 hits on a spam message, it's worth the spammers' time and money. The boycott will never, ever, work.
Nevertheless, you _should_ boycott spammers. I don't do business with spammers, and try not to do business with anyone who uses advertising tactics I find intrusive, offensive or just plain annoying. Of course, you can't boycott every business that does something to which you object or you would end up living in a shack somewhere in the woods living off of wild game and probably writing anti-technology screeds as well, but you can at least target the worst offenders.
The only solution that has any chance of working is to ditch SMTP, and that will happen about the time Duke Nukem Forever switches and shortly after we all switch to IPv6 and shortly before Microsoft goes open source.
"chroot jail"? Is that something for incarcerating cigars?
BWAHAHAHAHAH!
(It's 4 p.m. on a Friday, cut me some slack).
But according to a book I read, Alice and Bob are using quantum encryption. Besides, I though the only person they had to worry about was Eve.
These are great devices and are used in a lot of places around the U.S., including some of our major airports. I haven't been involved with Hirsch in over 4 years, but I always figured they'd be around for a long time. It's not particularly high-tech, but it's solid, flexible technology, which after all, is all anyone should really want.
The problem is that I didn't drink all that much in college. I'm finding more and more that while my memory doesn't seem to be really decreasing, it takes me significantly longer to pull up names (especially of places or people) that I haven't thought of in a while. I also have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to appointments and other mundane details, but I can't blame that on age, as I've always been that way. I was late for my own birth.
Thank you. Hirsch was one of our clients and the one for whom I worked. I even went there in 2001. They are nice folks with some neat products.
Are you allowed senior moments when you are only 41?
I worked for a company, now part of Honeywell, that made access control keypads that work exactly how you describe. It was a really good product, but for the life of me, I can't remember the name of it.
Um... what about Dungeon Master... and, even further back, Wizardry?
In Soviet Russia, I for one welcome the departure of our old desktop overlords.
In less stupid terms, they'll have to pry my desktop/laptop from my cold, dead fingers.
Don't worry. SciFi shows mostly low-budget horror. Science Fiction-based shows usually have to go somewhere else.
(Although I admit that's changed a lot in the last 5 years.)
Apparently you've never used XP with SP2. The Security Center, or whatever its called, monitors for a registered virus scanner and tells you if one is not there. This _is_ a Microsoft thing, although I can't say whether or not it will interrupt a full-screen application.
Curricula.
The thing is, good luck finding one. I have a BS in Computer Science from 1987, and while my education served me well, I was rarely required to so much as write a paper throughout my years in college. I don't feel it was a particularly well-rounded education (although I tried to make it so by my choice of electives).
It depends. If we are in a debate and trying to make and defend points, then we should be doing so with utmost vigor and diligence. If however, we are just having a pleasant little chat then, sure, we can be informal.
But no one should expect to win any arguments that way.
The problem comes that with some issues, people are likely to assume "everyone agrees with me" or "everyone knows..." or "it's common knowledge..." when in fact none of these are ever the case. Thus, if I make a flippant comment to the effect of "Of course the government is screwed up, those corrupt Republicans and that idiot George W. Bush is in charge." a lot of people will not only agree with me and take that as a given, when in fact a lot of people (like me) would not agree with that statement.
For the record, I would say, "The government is screwed up because both parties are rife with corruption. George W. Bush is a pretty smart guy who has been faced with some tough decisions the likes of which this country hasn't seen in some decades, and while he made some good decisions, he also made some very bad ones. The biggest root problem with our government is probably the poorly-educated electorate. The Founding Fathers didn't restrict the vote to only landowners out of racism, sexism or to maintain some kind of plutocracy; they restricted the vote to those voters who would most likely be capable of making educated choices. Now that we as a society have advanced to the point where it is recognized that it is appropriate for all citizens of a certain age to be able to vote, we suffer from the fact that a large number of them do not make educated choices, but are rather swayed by the most base of negative advertising and outright bribery."
But, if we want to remain casual, we can settle for "George W. Bush is an idiot."
The technology will be there soon. For instance, 600dpi ePaper with optional (but not necessary) backlighting. A display that looks as good as the output of a decent laser printer will be around in the next decade or so. The capacity to store any amount of reading material you would ever want on a device the size of a pocket paperback is there now.
The reason it will never take off is because for the same price as a paperback + $1.99, you will get a single eBook that's encrusted with DRM, can't be transferred to a different device and, if the capriciousness of content providers continues on the path it is now, will expire (and self-delete) in a month.
But it was flamebait. The moderation was fair.
His follow up wasn't flamebait, although he oversimplifies the issues as badly as he claims the religious people do.