Only now I realized that the only affordable way to transport different goods across the ocean is using a ship (airplanes can't be used to transport everything, they are too expensive). This only way usually takes 21 days and this is a great waste of time. FastShips will be able to change this situation - using them even at the very beginning will be 10 times cheaper than using an airplane. The company is going to manufacture four sea monsters and start the trial operations in the second half of 2002. The commercial operations will begin in early 2003.
This ship can hustle that emergency aid out to poor people faster and cheaper than in a plane, man. Much higher aid costs/transportation costs ratio with a Fastship.
Think about how much better earthquake-beleaguered India would be doing if 100 fastships made a beeline for it the day of.
I know that games on the traditional, stand alone dreamcast box will still be available, but what upsets me is that more and more of the console gaming in the US and the world is going to take place in a connected environment, either on the internet model or on the pay per view model.
A parent can feel safe letting their child play videogames without supervision because, unlike the internet, a parent can currently control all the access to specific videogames that a child might have. It costs a lot to buy the game, one need's parental permission to get it at the rental place.
A parent cannot feel safe when a kid can go home and download the latest new thing, without having to check with parents. Yes there are passwords and safety features, but this is a far lower level of safety than the level afforded when a clerk at the video store requires adult presence to rent certain games.
But deja vu evokes such subtle, inexplicable emotions from the strangest things.
How do these recognition patterns work? I dispute the fact that our recognition is based on something as simple and easily broken down as individual visual moments.
I think there is a uniqueness to everyone's interpretation of the world, and that it is probably a mistake to put so much emphasis on recognition cues picked up from others. I don't want to get mystical here (unless you consider psychology mystical) but the very act of recognition can be fraught with psychological connotations, provoking memories and associations.
People who have sexual fetishes, for instance, get a sexual response to contact with certain items or materials. For them, certain items are associated with things that usually have nothing to do with their original purpose. How could this happen if our communication, and the meaning of things in the outside world, comes entirely from other people?
My last sentence was about a cornered cat. I am worried about criminals who are in a situation like that cat; they are still "free" but they are so restricted in their movement that they become defensive, organized, and dangerous.
if there is a reliable video technology in every store, and if the databases and indexes of faces are used proactively as well as after a crime has been committed, I can imagine many groups of citizens that will be living in fear, forcibly isolated from the mainstream of American society and economy.
To get a job in Puerto Rico, one must present a "certificado de buen conducto" or a certificate of good conduct, which you can only get if you have no arrest record in the state. Not conviction: arrest. This certificate divides the working population into those who have a certificate and can work under protection of the law, and those who do not- and can't find decent work, since all work they are offered is itinerant or under-the-table work.
The technology will not identify criminals; it will train cameras on the faces of those who merit suspicion. Poor people and people of color are likely to be especially targeted.
any LAWYAs in the house? I would love to hear their opinions on this. How can we approve something like this, which picks faces out of a crowd according to a few indicators of similarity, when we question the constitutionality of police profiling, in which humans categorize large numbers of people for potential crimes?
The sociological effects are enormous. People will refuse to go to places because their faces may pop up as criminal. Faces are not fingerprints, people! Is a similarity of face probable cause to stop someone?
Even if the technology were accurate, it will create an underclass of people who darts around in old buildings, old cities; who are afraid of coming to the public centers of the cities because of something in their past.
It is dangerous to corner a cat, to remove its freedom of motion. Do we want to corner all of the criminals of society in blind holes, hiding from cameras?
What do they need to meet for? that's what IRC is for.
If everything is so open source, the developers should put all their discussion online, in newsgroups, and in mailing lists, rather than having undocumented and unaccountable conferences in places over half of the free software developers can't afford to visit.
I would think that companies and developers would rather let the sunshine in on all their deliberations, than be accused of congregating in a smoke-filled room.
It's interesting to speclate what a process, for example software design, looks in different environments- open and closed environments.
Like the stuff about budgets. It's not like trotting out to a venture capitalist and raising funds.
You also rightly point out that one thing about something "classified" is you can't make a profit out of it the same way as if you are a private company designing some software for word processing, or something. I don't think you can put a dollar value on some forms of extreme security.
I am a big fan of rigorous testing, but that might bring in a different time table than ordinary software design and development would.
One could compare it to, say, a closed source company, who is keeping stuff secret for reasons of pure profit. They have an interest in licensing their code, on their terms, to as many sub-developers as possible so they can cover the market damn fast. which they did.
A government, designing classified software, mayhaps for the same thing. A word processor, perhaps. The thing might be designed to work on as few computers on earth as possible. But there is always a question about whether it is best to use ordinary commercial software, and protect information with encryption, or to produce "unique" software that can itself be enumerated and controlled.
well I am rambling.. amateur sociology.:)
Classified Code and Open Source
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· Score: 2
/me is fascinated...
That is a model I have never considered- the code used by real mission critical people, as in in the government and the firms that provide it.
I am not prying for classified information, so don't worry about that. I am wondering if you could say anything on the point of "open source culture" and how it would be impacted by a classified military culture?
You say your code is free as in beer and free as in open. It's also secret code, which means that only a few people can see it.
Does this mean that folks use the program who don't have the security clearance to see the code? If a user has a problem with the code, will the people with the clearance to respond on it work on it quickly? Or do bug fixes have to go through six months of government red tape?
Answer here, in email, or not at all as you see fit. Thank you,
-perdida
The article doesn't say much.
on
eWeek on Linux
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· Score: 5
It says what every single article about linux says every time, say, a new kernel comes out?
1) Linux is much more stable than comparable Windows solution for insert something you want a computer(s) to do.
2) However, it still doesn't have all of the security features that Sun or *BSD has.
3)There are assorted problems with kernel x.x, which will be fixed soon with the release of the next kernel.
And before you say, "It's moving up to mission critical!" Tell me what the heck does mission critical mean, anyway? I for one think that the artificially imposed heirarchy over what is "mission critical" or not causes the problems that both the producers of computer services and the consumers of those services feel. For instance, it is very mission critical to keep the cookies rolling in, so you can incessantly market to a new stream of hapless email addresses, but it is NOT mission critical to respond to the angry email from these same addresses when a user encounters a compatibility problem or has damaged equipment, etc.
The mission is profit, or at least survival, keeping that cash flowing. THAT is what is mission critical.
I would think that some journalism which steps outside the boilerplate model mentioned above, something that would actually relate these firms' ACTUAL priorities to their choice of operating systems, software, hardware, etc., all of these debates we have here at/. about such things would be far more fruitful.
THIS BRINGS "CONSOLE-QUALITY gaming to the digital TV industry," said Andrew Wallace, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Pace, in a conference call this morning. It "addresses the casual gaming market," he noted, while providing lower costs than actually going out and buying a game.
Wallace said that the box, called the Games Gateway, can store up to 60 games at a time, and will play any and all of the 350 or so games developed for the Dreamcast platform. The box will ship next year, though Wallace declined to speculate whether it would ship in the U.S. or U.K. first. The deal is mutually non-exclusive; the box itself has been a year in development.
God. I don't want forced interactivity on my game console. What's more, I do not want to have to subject my child to a.NET model to play games, even if it is a proprietary net, there will definitely be chat and dcc functions. I buy my child a game console so they don't have to go online to play video games. They might be punching people on the video game, but they are safe from pedophiles, etc.
Furthermore, what the hell is the casual gaming market? I have over 200 games for various platforms, many of which run on emulators on my PC, and this thing only will allow 60 games to be stored? Where can I store the rest? Is it pirating if I store the rest on my hard drive?
Maybe we should sue Sega for monopoly behavior. If it wants to separate the deck from the games, fine! We will treat it like two different products. It's bullshit to force ten million parents to go out and buy the new console just so their children can get the new Pokemon for their game, and then to sit there for the hours on end while they play video games just to make sure they aren't talking to anyone unsavory!
How much free web content, technical, cultural and otehrwise, is available just by reading slashdot...? so many people bitch about this site but it is quoted everywhere.
Jon: stop by #trolls on irc.slash.net and we shall give you some 31337 trolling tips. Or maybe you already know cause YOU are Anne Marie!
You know, if you are going to imposter-ize me, you should wear ankle guards, because when I find you I am going to unleash an army of rabid she-gnomes on you.
Yay, yay. I loved Evangelion. Myn friend went to Japan on an internship and brought home grainy and badly fan-dubbed vhs cassettes, each an episode long, and we sat there and watched the whole thing one evening.
I was extremely snotty about any hard science fiction, in print or on the screen, that incorporated religious, mystical or apocalyptic themes until I saw Evangelion.
Anime cartoons (even the silliest ones!) have an element of cultural shock and camp, which attracts many viewers. And the plot lines on most everything, excepting Pokemon and its family of ripoffs, is excellent. Dragon Ball Z will carry on a quest or a plot line for weeks on end, promoting much more attention span then the half-hour, encapsulated, interchangeable episodes of many modern cartoons.
Anime seems to me to have a sensibility that is distinctly non-American, and a fascination for the details of everyday life that can sometimes make its characters surprisingly realistic. Evangelion, for example, sometimes focuses on the sibling rivalry among children who were recruited, trained and in one case actually bred for the job of fending off alien Angels.
They have lawyers who wrote a EULA which goes against common sense, this is a news flash! Lawyers make EULAs and patents and things that are utterly absurd all the time.
When something in the black market becomes widespread, it goes into the grey market. When something in the grey market becoms widepread, a smart corporation will license and control this something in order to regulate and reap profit from a previously revenue-draining service.
Sony should verify character sales and have its own market for them, instead of putting it on E-Bay and letting E-Bay get all the profit that could come from such sales.
By the way does anyone have an approx. aggregate cash value of sales of Everquest characters on E-Bay?
You free marketers, come to these peoples' aid. Anything that is deemed as having value and does not damage an individual or the corporation should be salable.
Furthermore, these sales should increase the value of Everquest, because more people will play and play more often if it seems lucrative. They should contract out to brokers of these goods!
Oh, HOORAY! There is another reader of real science fiction in the house.
CJ Cherryh also considers that when you are manufacturing a population, wholesale, why not go whole-hog and mold psychologies towards obedient, specialized individuals?
Julian May, who wrote the Galactic Milieu and Pliocene Exile trilogies, also explores the issue with the idea of "nonborns" which are people cloned for reasons similar to those in the Merchanter world, those being war and space colonization.
Labor history is the history of new technologies coming up, corporations racing to take advantage of them, and claiming that they want to have a direct relationship with their employees.
Railroad trusts operated camps of Chinese workers who came to the United States to do the jobs that there were not nearly enough Americans in that region to do.
Why deny dot-com employees the right to organize? Management organizes its institution as it sees fit, often ignoring the technical knowledge of their employees, to the detriment of the employees and the company.
Customer service employees-tech support staff, sales staff, and even web designers and sysadmins get overworked and underpaid.
Furthermore, the fact that real wages have been declining for decades has finally borne fruit in a growing group of disgruntled, disaffected people in many industries.
I feel that this peremptory statement dot-coms make about unions, which presumes to know the attitude of employees, misses the point: Dot-coms have good reason to be afraid of their employees!
IT employees realize that their skills are crucial to the operation of these businesses. What was once a tiny, specialized field has become the marketplace for more and more people. Unlike the drivers of a fleet of trucks, if IT workers go on strike, all they have to do is make a few keystrokes to disable a system. Only a lack of coordinated effort among these employees prevents them from having this kind of bargaining power.
If you will be living abroad for a while, you have to look at the rate of inflation that you will be dealing with. To figure out if you are adequately compensated, may I suggest this resource of a measurement that accounts for inflation and other forms of currency fluctuation.
The Purchasing Power Parity measurement, or PPP, measures productivity and standard of living while factoring elements such as varying standards of living in different countries. Find out how to calculate it for any country at the above link.
Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a theory which states that exchange rates between currencies are in equilibrium when their purchasing power is the same in each of the two countries. This means that the exchange rate between two countries should equal the ratio of the two countries' price level of a fixed basket of goods and services. When a country's domestic price level is increasing (i.e., a country experiences inflation), that country's exchange rate must depreciated in order to return to PPP.
Unless you are paid in dollars, you will experience the dramatic fluctuations in PPP experienced by native IT workers and for that matter all workers in that country. This is, of course, not the case for those countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar.
Perhaps, IT workers, due to their crucial role in all global economies, can work to give countries whose currencies are especially unstable a bit more stability. Take the risk, ask to be paid in the native currency, and the company you work for will have an incentive towards building stability in its foreign posts. Also, shoot for more long-term work rather than projects of a few months. It would be a good thing for information technology folks from the West to get some understanding of the perspective of the rest of the world.
WAVE is administered by Pinkerton's, Inc., which is a rather nasty business intelligence firm that morphed into its spy-happy self from its previous incarnation as a union-busting, railroad-protecting gang of thugs. Katz has previously noted this connection.
It is hard to be a reporter, to take a very complicated bunch of information and process it into something that carries some sort of meaning. It's even harder when your story is really thousands of stories, and thousands of people can, in turn, reply to those stories and to your analysis and presentation of them.
You have done a good job putting the voices forward, and the response has been mixed. I think that's fine, controversy is a good thing.
No matter who invented it, I am definitely thankful for it.
Radio has an intimacy, based on all of the associations humans have with the voice and the spoken word, that television and the Net can't surpass. It is also a low-cost technology that anyone can learn to use for communication.
I can listen to National Public Radio and hear all the news I want without having to train my eyes on one location, or hear (many) ads. I especially like the BBC world service when I am pulling an allnighter.
I participated in a live webradio broadcast at the Independent Media Center in Cincinnatti, and people from Prague, Los Angeles and London tuned in.
This is a cheap, ubiquitous technology that is easy to learn to use. I also had a low power (40 watt) FM transmitter with a few co-conspirators, we attached a 20 foot antenna to a 6 story building and reached 3 counties.
The FCC which has long kept the airwaves private, "legalized" low power FM but made the paperwork and technological threshholds insurmountable for community and home users. We want real free radio.
Tahing it further, the FCC screwed shit up royally when it allowed the same person to own radio stations and TV stations in the same market. Monopoly ownership breeds..well, what you probably have on most of your dial-
Top forty, Christian, country, and crap.
Patronize independently owned, low power, nonprofit and community radio and cable access TV in your town.
as I recall, the whole problem with the US carbon sinks argument was that the effect of those carbon sinks that already exist must be factored into the current emissions variables.
The US used some good science about carbon sinks to justify a policy that is the equivalent of the fictitious budget surplus.
How can the United States claim it should have less of an emissions reduction burden because it has more forests? The US still is responsible for more pollution than any other country.
In terms of pollution credits, remember that that isn't a perfect model. Market allocation does not always work. For example, a lot of the power plants that shut down in California this summer for "maintenance" actually had run out of emissions credits and shut down instead of paying staggering fines.
By the way on the nuclear power question discussed in some posts I think we should explore it too, but let's make sure its safe and find a suitable way of disposing radioactive waste.
The vertical keyboard can't be bought anywhere, it has never gone out of the lab. But if you feel like an ergonomics researcher and want to carry out your own experiment, you can always cut up any horizontal keyboard and try to assemble something better. Any other ideas about this keyboard? Don't forget about the discussion board at the bottom of the page:-)
Is it even possible to mod it into this configuration at home?
I am not a huge gamer- I get very involved in certain >role playing games but do not play them except at home.
I am very interested in the phone as a little computer, and the possibility of sharing data alongside voice conversation.
I am imagining someone driving around, using such a phone to find the personal ad of someone looking for a date,
traveling performers and sales people beaming a peddler's pitch to the computers of homes and businesses as they head into town,
live, coordinated field research between distant scientists, and group work between students in different countries.
All stuff we have now, in a much cruder form.
When intranets and the internet shift primary focus onto telephones and away from desk and laptop machines, there will be a subtle, slightly magical transformation. It won't be just more convenient- much of the information added to the net will be localized, much more intensely than it was before.
A person's computers are their individual "nodes" in the "ether" right now, but most computers are not tied to the home phone number or cell phone number. What happens if most consumer connections to the Internet go through a telephone?
Of course, the "fingerprint IP" or IPv6 technology is perfectly suited to a world in which everyone is connected, but everyone is potentially visible.
All that is needed to extract DNA is one cell - a speck of blood, a swab of saliva or a miniscule fragment of skin that clings to a strand of hair.
DNA samples can be taken without consent from people who are arrested if there are "reasonable grounds for believing they are involved in a recordable offence (ie one for which they could serve a custodial sentence)".
Few refuse because to do so may encourage police suspicions about their guilt.
At present authorisation for the forcible removal of a sample - usually using a mouth swab - has to be given by a superintendent.
But Mr Straw is proposing reducing this to an officer of inspector rank.
My goodness. I do not want the police oin control of databanks like this! Nobody should have them.. DNA charts should be maintained by the families that possess them, and perhaps by doctors.
Obviously, more people have to refuse when officers demand a DNA search! Make it a political stand, not an admission of guilt- because DNA not only links you like a fingerprint would to a crime scene, it also provides information on your medical history and that of your family.
I do not know the UK law system very well, but does the system have a fifth amendment type protection against self incrimination? Then again, the right not to self-incriminate does not prevent law enforcement from encroaching upon DNA privacies in this country as well...
Slashdot Mirror
Only now I realized that the only affordable way to transport different goods across the ocean is using a ship (airplanes can't be used to transport everything, they are too expensive). This only way usually takes 21 days and this is a great waste of time. FastShips will be able to change this situation - using them even at the very beginning will be 10 times cheaper than using an airplane. The company is going to manufacture four sea monsters and start the trial operations in the second half of 2002. The commercial operations will begin in early 2003.
This ship can hustle that emergency aid out to poor people faster and cheaper than in a plane, man. Much higher aid costs/transportation costs ratio with a Fastship.
Think about how much better earthquake-beleaguered India would be doing if 100 fastships made a beeline for it the day of.
-perdida
I know that games on the traditional, stand alone dreamcast box will still be available, but what upsets me is that more and more of the console gaming in the US and the world is going to take place in a connected environment, either on the internet model or on the pay per view model.
A parent can feel safe letting their child play videogames without supervision because, unlike the internet, a parent can currently control all the access to specific videogames that a child might have. It costs a lot to buy the game, one need's parental permission to get it at the rental place.
A parent cannot feel safe when a kid can go home and download the latest new thing, without having to check with parents. Yes there are passwords and safety features, but this is a far lower level of safety than the level afforded when a clerk at the video store requires adult presence to rent certain games.
This must be where deja vu comes from.
But deja vu evokes such subtle, inexplicable emotions from the strangest things.
How do these recognition patterns work? I dispute the fact that our recognition is based on something as simple and easily broken down as individual visual moments.
I think there is a uniqueness to everyone's interpretation of the world, and that it is probably a mistake to put so much emphasis on recognition cues picked up from others. I don't want to get mystical here (unless you consider psychology mystical) but the very act of recognition can be fraught with psychological connotations, provoking memories and associations.
People who have sexual fetishes, for instance, get a sexual response to contact with certain items or materials. For them, certain items are associated with things that usually have nothing to do with their original purpose. How could this happen if our communication, and the meaning of things in the outside world, comes entirely from other people?
My last sentence was about a cornered cat. I am worried about criminals who are in a situation like that cat; they are still "free" but they are so restricted in their movement that they become defensive, organized, and dangerous.
if there is a reliable video technology in every store, and if the databases and indexes of faces are used proactively as well as after a crime has been committed, I can imagine many groups of citizens that will be living in fear, forcibly isolated from the mainstream of American society and economy.
To get a job in Puerto Rico, one must present a "certificado de buen conducto" or a certificate of good conduct, which you can only get if you have no arrest record in the state. Not conviction: arrest. This certificate divides the working population into those who have a certificate and can work under protection of the law, and those who do not- and can't find decent work, since all work they are offered is itinerant or under-the-table work.
The technology will not identify criminals; it will train cameras on the faces of those who merit suspicion. Poor people and people of color are likely to be especially targeted.
any LAWYAs in the house? I would love to hear their opinions on this. How can we approve something like this, which picks faces out of a crowd according to a few indicators of similarity, when we question the constitutionality of police profiling, in which humans categorize large numbers of people for potential crimes?
The sociological effects are enormous. People will refuse to go to places because their faces may pop up as criminal. Faces are not fingerprints, people! Is a similarity of face probable cause to stop someone?
Even if the technology were accurate, it will create an underclass of people who darts around in old buildings, old cities; who are afraid of coming to the public centers of the cities because of something in their past.
It is dangerous to corner a cat, to remove its freedom of motion. Do we want to corner all of the criminals of society in blind holes, hiding from cameras?
What is going on here?
What do they need to meet for? that's what IRC is for.
If everything is so open source, the developers should put all their discussion online, in newsgroups, and in mailing lists, rather than having undocumented and unaccountable conferences in places over half of the free software developers can't afford to visit.
I would think that companies and developers would rather let the sunshine in on all their deliberations, than be accused of congregating in a smoke-filled room.
-perdida
It's interesting to speclate what a process, for example software design, looks in different environments- open and closed environments.
:)
Like the stuff about budgets. It's not like trotting out to a venture capitalist and raising funds.
You also rightly point out that one thing about something "classified" is you can't make a profit out of it the same way as if you are a private company designing some software for word processing, or something. I don't think you can put a dollar value on some forms of extreme security.
I am a big fan of rigorous testing, but that might bring in a different time table than ordinary software design and development would.
One could compare it to, say, a closed source company, who is keeping stuff secret for reasons of pure profit. They have an interest in licensing their code, on their terms, to as many sub-developers as possible so they can cover the market damn fast. which they did.
A government, designing classified software, mayhaps for the same thing. A word processor, perhaps. The thing might be designed to work on as few computers on earth as possible. But there is always a question about whether it is best to use ordinary commercial software, and protect information with encryption, or to produce "unique" software that can itself be enumerated and controlled.
well I am rambling.. amateur sociology.
/me is fascinated...
That is a model I have never considered- the code used by real mission critical people, as in in the government and the firms that provide it.
I am not prying for classified information, so don't worry about that. I am wondering if you could say anything on the point of "open source culture" and how it would be impacted by a classified military culture?
You say your code is free as in beer and free as in open. It's also secret code, which means that only a few people can see it.
Does this mean that folks use the program who don't have the security clearance to see the code? If a user has a problem with the code, will the people with the clearance to respond on it work on it quickly? Or do bug fixes have to go through six months of government red tape?
Answer here, in email, or not at all as you see fit. Thank you,
-perdida
It says what every single article about linux says every time, say, a new kernel comes out?
1) Linux is much more stable than comparable Windows solution for insert something you want a computer(s) to do.
2) However, it still doesn't have all of the security features that Sun or *BSD has.
3)There are assorted problems with kernel x.x, which will be fixed soon with the release of the next kernel.
And before you say, "It's moving up to mission critical!" Tell me what the heck does mission critical mean, anyway? I for one think that the artificially imposed heirarchy over what is "mission critical" or not causes the problems that both the producers of computer services and the consumers of those services feel. For instance, it is very mission critical to keep the cookies rolling in, so you can incessantly market to a new stream of hapless email addresses, but it is NOT mission critical to respond to the angry email from these same addresses when a user encounters a compatibility problem or has damaged equipment, etc.
The mission is profit, or at least survival, keeping that cash flowing. THAT is what is mission critical.
I would think that some journalism which steps outside the boilerplate model mentioned above, something that would actually relate these firms' ACTUAL priorities to their choice of operating systems, software, hardware, etc., all of these debates we have here at
THIS BRINGS "CONSOLE-QUALITY gaming to the digital TV industry," said Andrew Wallace, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Pace, in a conference call this morning. It "addresses the casual gaming market," he noted, while providing lower costs than actually going out and buying a game.
Wallace said that the box, called the Games Gateway, can store up to 60 games at a time, and will play any and all of the 350 or so games developed for the Dreamcast platform. The box will ship next year, though Wallace declined to speculate whether it would ship in the U.S. or U.K. first. The deal is mutually non-exclusive; the box itself has been a year in development.
God. I don't want forced interactivity on my game console. What's more, I do not want to have to subject my child to a
Furthermore, what the hell is the casual gaming market? I have over 200 games for various platforms, many of which run on emulators on my PC, and this thing only will allow 60 games to be stored? Where can I store the rest? Is it pirating if I store the rest on my hard drive?
Maybe we should sue Sega for monopoly behavior. If it wants to separate the deck from the games, fine! We will treat it like two different products. It's bullshit to force ten million parents to go out and buy the new console just so their children can get the new Pokemon for their game, and then to sit there for the hours on end while they play video games just to make sure they aren't talking to anyone unsavory!
How much free web content, technical, cultural and otehrwise, is available just by reading slashdot...? so many people bitch about this site but it is quoted everywhere.
Jon: stop by #trolls on irc.slash.net and we shall give you some 31337 trolling tips. Or maybe you already know cause YOU are Anne Marie!
*duck*
-perdida
You know, if you are going to imposter-ize me, you should wear ankle guards, because when I find you I am going to unleash an army of rabid she-gnomes on you.
-perdida
Yay, yay. I loved Evangelion. Myn friend went to Japan on an internship and brought home grainy and badly fan-dubbed vhs cassettes, each an episode long, and we sat there and watched the whole thing one evening.
I was extremely snotty about any hard science fiction, in print or on the screen, that incorporated religious, mystical or apocalyptic themes until I saw Evangelion.
Anime cartoons (even the silliest ones!) have an element of cultural shock and camp, which attracts many viewers. And the plot lines on most everything, excepting Pokemon and its family of ripoffs, is excellent. Dragon Ball Z will carry on a quest or a plot line for weeks on end, promoting much more attention span then the half-hour, encapsulated, interchangeable episodes of many modern cartoons.
Anime seems to me to have a sensibility that is distinctly non-American, and a fascination for the details of everyday life that can sometimes make its characters surprisingly realistic. Evangelion, for example, sometimes focuses on the sibling rivalry among children who were recruited, trained and in one case actually bred for the job of fending off alien Angels.
They have lawyers who wrote a EULA which goes against common sense, this is a news flash! Lawyers make EULAs and patents and things that are utterly absurd all the time.
When something in the black market becomes widespread, it goes into the grey market. When something in the grey market becoms widepread, a smart corporation will license and control this something in order to regulate and reap profit from a previously revenue-draining service.
Sony should verify character sales and have its own market for them, instead of putting it on E-Bay and letting E-Bay get all the profit that could come from such sales.
By the way does anyone have an approx. aggregate cash value of sales of Everquest characters on E-Bay?
You free marketers, come to these peoples' aid. Anything that is deemed as having value and does not damage an individual or the corporation should be salable.
Furthermore, these sales should increase the value of Everquest, because more people will play and play more often if it seems lucrative. They should contract out to brokers of these goods!
Oh, HOORAY! There is another reader of real science fiction in the house.
CJ Cherryh also considers that when you are manufacturing a population, wholesale, why not go whole-hog and mold psychologies towards obedient, specialized individuals?
Julian May, who wrote the Galactic Milieu and Pliocene Exile trilogies, also explores the issue with the idea of "nonborns" which are people cloned for reasons similar to those in the Merchanter world, those being war and space colonization.
-perdida
Labor history is the history of new technologies coming up, corporations racing to take advantage of them, and claiming that they want to have a direct relationship with their employees.
Railroad trusts operated camps of Chinese workers who came to the United States to do the jobs that there were not nearly enough Americans in that region to do.
Why deny dot-com employees the right to organize? Management organizes its institution as it sees fit, often ignoring the technical knowledge of their employees, to the detriment of the employees and the company.
Customer service employees-tech support staff, sales staff, and even web designers and sysadmins get overworked and underpaid.
Furthermore, the fact that real wages have been declining for decades has finally borne fruit in a growing group of disgruntled, disaffected people in many industries.
I feel that this peremptory statement dot-coms make about unions, which presumes to know the attitude of employees, misses the point: Dot-coms have good reason to be afraid of their employees!
IT employees realize that their skills are crucial to the operation of these businesses. What was once a tiny, specialized field has become the marketplace for more and more people. Unlike the drivers of a fleet of trucks, if IT workers go on strike, all they have to do is make a few keystrokes to disable a system. Only a lack of coordinated effort among these employees prevents them from having this kind of bargaining power.
If you will be living abroad for a while, you have to look at the rate of inflation that you will be dealing with. To figure out if you are adequately compensated, may I suggest this resource of a measurement that accounts for inflation and other forms of currency fluctuation.
The Purchasing Power Parity measurement, or PPP, measures productivity and standard of living while factoring elements such as varying standards of living in different countries. Find out how to calculate it for any country at the above link.
Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a theory which states that exchange rates between currencies are in equilibrium when their purchasing power is the same in each of the two countries. This means that the exchange rate between two countries should equal the ratio of the two countries' price level of a fixed basket of goods and services. When a country's domestic price level is increasing (i.e., a country experiences inflation), that country's exchange rate must depreciated in order to return to PPP.
Unless you are paid in dollars, you will experience the dramatic fluctuations in PPP experienced by native IT workers and for that matter all workers in that country. This is, of course, not the case for those countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar.
Perhaps, IT workers, due to their crucial role in all global economies, can work to give countries whose currencies are especially unstable a bit more stability. Take the risk, ask to be paid in the native currency, and the company you work for will have an incentive towards building stability in its foreign posts. Also, shoot for more long-term work rather than projects of a few months. It would be a good thing for information technology folks from the West to get some understanding of the perspective of the rest of the world.
WAVE is administered by Pinkerton's, Inc., which is a rather nasty business intelligence firm that morphed into its spy-happy self from its previous incarnation as a union-busting, railroad-protecting gang of thugs. Katz has previously noted this connection.
Thank you, Jon Katz.
It is hard to be a reporter, to take a very complicated bunch of information and process it into something that carries some sort of meaning. It's even harder when your story is really thousands of stories, and thousands of people can, in turn, reply to those stories and to your analysis and presentation of them.
You have done a good job putting the voices forward, and the response has been mixed. I think that's fine, controversy is a good thing.
No matter who invented it, I am definitely thankful for it.
Radio has an intimacy, based on all of the associations humans have with the voice and the spoken word, that television and the Net can't surpass. It is also a low-cost technology that anyone can learn to use for communication.
I can listen to National Public Radio and hear all the news I want without having to train my eyes on one location, or hear (many) ads. I especially like the BBC world service when I am pulling an allnighter.
I participated in a live webradio broadcast at the Independent Media Center in Cincinnatti, and people from Prague, Los Angeles and London tuned in.
This is a cheap, ubiquitous technology that is easy to learn to use. I also had a low power (40 watt) FM transmitter with a few co-conspirators, we attached a 20 foot antenna to a 6 story building and reached 3 counties.
The FCC which has long kept the airwaves private, "legalized" low power FM but made the paperwork and technological threshholds insurmountable for community and home users. We want real free radio.
Tahing it further, the FCC screwed shit up royally when it allowed the same person to own radio stations and TV stations in the same market. Monopoly ownership breeds..well, what you probably have on most of your dial-
Top forty, Christian, country, and crap.
Patronize independently owned, low power, nonprofit and community radio and cable access TV in your town.
as I recall, the whole problem with the US carbon sinks argument was that the effect of those carbon sinks that already exist must be factored into the current emissions variables.
The US used some good science about carbon sinks to justify a policy that is the equivalent of the fictitious budget surplus.
How can the United States claim it should have less of an emissions reduction burden because it has more forests? The US still is responsible for more pollution than any other country.
In terms of pollution credits, remember that that isn't a perfect model. Market allocation does not always work. For example, a lot of the power plants that shut down in California this summer for "maintenance" actually had run out of emissions credits and shut down instead of paying staggering fines.
By the way on the nuclear power question discussed in some posts I think we should explore it too, but let's make sure its safe and find a suitable way of disposing radioactive waste.
The vertical keyboard can't be bought anywhere, it has never gone out of the lab. But if you feel like an ergonomics researcher and want to carry out your own experiment, you can always cut up any horizontal keyboard and try to assemble something better. Any other ideas about this keyboard? Don't forget about the discussion board at the bottom of the page :-)
Is it even possible to mod it into this configuration at home?
I am not a huge gamer- I get very involved in certain >role playing games but do not play them except at home.
I am very interested in the phone as a little computer, and the possibility of sharing data alongside voice conversation.
I am imagining someone driving around, using such a phone to find the personal ad of someone looking for a date,
traveling performers and sales people beaming a peddler's pitch to the computers of homes and businesses as they head into town,
live, coordinated field research between distant scientists, and group work between students in different countries.
All stuff we have now, in a much cruder form.
When intranets and the internet shift primary focus onto telephones and away from desk and laptop machines, there will be a subtle, slightly magical transformation. It won't be just more convenient- much of the information added to the net will be localized, much more intensely than it was before.
A person's computers are their individual "nodes" in the "ether" right now, but most computers are not tied to the home phone number or cell phone number. What happens if most consumer connections to the Internet go through a telephone?
Of course, the "fingerprint IP" or IPv6 technology is perfectly suited to a world in which everyone is connected, but everyone is potentially visible.
All that is needed to extract DNA is one cell - a speck of blood, a swab of saliva or a miniscule fragment of skin that clings to a strand of hair.
DNA samples can be taken without consent from people who are arrested if there are "reasonable grounds for believing they are involved in a recordable offence (ie one for which they could serve a custodial sentence)".
Few refuse because to do so may encourage police suspicions about their guilt.
At present authorisation for the forcible removal of a sample - usually using a mouth swab - has to be given by a superintendent.
But Mr Straw is proposing reducing this to an officer of inspector rank.
My goodness. I do not want the police oin control of databanks like this! Nobody should have them.. DNA charts should be maintained by the families that possess them, and perhaps by doctors.
Obviously, more people have to refuse when officers demand a DNA search! Make it a political stand, not an admission of guilt- because DNA not only links you like a fingerprint would to a crime scene, it also provides information on your medical history and that of your family.
I do not know the UK law system very well, but does the system have a fifth amendment type protection against self incrimination? Then again, the right not to self-incriminate does not prevent law enforcement from encroaching upon DNA privacies in this country as well...