Well, I am opposed to the enforced use of the V-Chip, but I am not opposed to broadcasts putting hidden ratings on tv to trigger the chip.
If TV networks want to broadcast this extra information and add a service to their broadcast for the use of consumers, that's fine.
I warn all the slashdotters that want to quash this technology that in many other cases you are fanatically supportive of including more information in media. "Information wants to be free."
The screening technology is not very accurate right now, or maybe it doesn't reflect your libertarian social mores. But the more people use it, the more refined it will be.
Multiple ratings systems using a variety of rubrics might be useful. Christian groups can develop ratings systems based on their beliefs, and Muslim groups can develop theirs. This gives viewers more control over what they watch, not less.
It's good for productivity that more of the innovative, flexible firms are being bought up by more traditional, "staid" firms, and that the culture inside of the smaller firms is changing.
If someone decides to stay on at the place even when they have to wear a suit and come in 9 to 5 instead of having a food and soda filled, T-shirt and Nerf office, that means that they are really committed to the place and the product that the place is selling.
The folks who drop out in the buyout process are the ones who aren't committed to the product but to a certain lifestyle. Over time, they would lose interest and motivation even if the smaller, "creative" firm weren't getting bought out. The ones who stick it out eventually combine the creativity of the smaller firm with the knowledge, power and reach of the larger one. I guess that's what PR rats mean when they talk about "synergy" in the merger process.
One outcome of this is that when the big fish eats the little fish it shouldn't lay people off- let the process happen by attrition. The ones who don't want to stay are the ones who couldn't cut the mustard anyway..
1) Mir was built, maintained and repaired by a much poorer space agency than the US's, and they kept a functional station in space for over twice its projected lifespan.
2) Over the years cosmonauts at Mir have gathered much unglamorous data about the most efficient and comfortable ways to live in space station conditions for an extended period of time. The physiology and psychology of this is not dramatic or technical but it is crucial.
3) There are many groups trying to profit off of the station's demise, which i think is a bit callous. Is it thrillseeking or morbid interest? At least they could donate money to the Russian space program from these commercial ventures, without some funds the Russian ISS-Alpha committment may not be passed over by the budget-makers axe next time around.
They are trying to limit and mutate the definition of prior art. Once they have something defined as a test case that will create precedent for the rest of the industry, lawyers pour lots of money into it.
Consider the future this will have judicially. All this does is raise the amount of capital you have to get togethr to start an e-business of this type- by increasing the level of liability you have to insure against. That hurts the dot economy, all those "entrepreneurs" you are always talking about, guys.
Ironically, the lawyers glom onto the juiciest cows, the ideas most likely to revolutionize some aspect of our computing experience and thus to justly make money. Thus they retard progress.
Just another note from the Ban the Lawyers foundation..;)
They have several servers up in Seattle and host interactive news and discussion-sites all over the world, and go down sometimes. They get back up very quickly and are responsive to user complaints.
The best way to help them is to contribute funds, equipment and expertise. They are very committed to Open Source philosophy and a few of their chief technical experts are active on Slashdot and Kuro5hin.
Or, more broadly, do you feel that the increasing accessibility of digital cameras and other tools, which lower the cost of putting a strong Web-based newsroom together, might challenge the increasingly corporate system of mainstream news?
Interestingly, you don't mention Indymedia in that article, but we're a collective of people who gets equipment out to intereted people, to cover the protests on the inside.
They have connected live, streaming news about protests all over the world, including the recent UN climate talks, the WTO, the World Economic Forum, and the march of the Zapatistas to Mexico City.
Although Indymedia started in Seattle, there are IMC bureaus all over the world now.
I think they've done two important things- popularized the "movement against corporate globalization," and created a forum for debate.
The debate you talk about- between the protesters who want to fix institutions like the WTO and the ones who want to abolish them- is taking place in the discussion rooms of Indymedia. Check it out!
Unless you are going to be running a little kiosk or whatever using EBAY as a platform you are fuck'd, my friend.
The overhead starting this up, anywhere in meatspace where people will come and buy the stuff, is staggering.
That is why most games for "leet people" e.g. classic cult favorite games etc. get sold on the Net.
Niche market.
If you are selling the latest thing, then you have to compete with Best Buy.
I wish you the best of luck, though. Perhaps you can find a meatspace location where the little kids down the street have industrious, thrifty parents who have not yet upgraded from their SNES and Atari systems, and thus are looking for games for them.
Otherwise your market's folks who would be looking on the Net for convenience's sake in the first place. and they havent the overhead so their prices are lower too.
GOSH I need this. I have been waiting for this for years.
We do not need to clog up our infrastructures anymore by locating the offices in the few widely dispersed areas with the high bandwith..
we can decentralize these operations, saving space, energy, commute time, the air, preventing sprawl.
As a journalist I would love to be able to step into my car and have all my databases, research and editing tools at my fingertips.
I am aware this will come with an accompanying loss of speed. It's not my fat university T-1. But who's to say that people might not turn away from the flash, shockwave, and heavy, slow websites and towards a lightweight, text oriented, rapid delivery system? A fast-downloading site will become marketable again if its market is wireless.
We should all SLOW THE HELL DOWN for a bit, anyway.
There is a notion called the precautionary principle. It means that, since we know comparatively little about our environment, we should err on the side of caution.
Don't open a possibly unique environmental record until we are close to 100 percent sure that we won't contaminate it.
Or maybe some corporations involved in genetic research want to get access to these prehistoric genesets... in which case we should question our motivations in opening the sealed lake.
I must say I do have a little sheeple strain, which is why when I loaded up Slashdot and saw that first post just sitting there, I couldn't help picking the first relevant thing that came to my head and typing that.
I'm a marxist and all that;), and this seemed to me like a case of alienated labor; you are sitting there being creative with code, and your corporation just happens to have a client that could use the code.. coincidence does not property make. In this case, the clients had not contributed software, hardware or other resources to the guy who came up with the code, but they just happen to think that they hve a right to it, or more specifically they think they could get a lawyer to say that they have a right to it, when they don't and I believe shouldn't.
I explained myself a bit in the second post... and sorry about the moderation-bitching, but I've had enough bad moderation in the past that that's the reaction I came to.. Perhaps I shall have to revise my views of moderators.
A pro-creativity workspace is like my editor, who will help me, sometimes even materially, with stories that her publication could not print if it wanted to, but because it improves me as a writer and journalist. It's not jargon imo, it's a reality in a very few cases. I am lucky.:)
Thanks for having enough interest in the actual discussion, rather than the moderation, to post in the thread.
Why don't you read the post, just cause it is a first post does not mean it is off topic.
I believe that people should try to get into a work life where all their work is motivating for them, and where they and their employer have a common interest, if they have an employer. Thedre shoudl not be this kind of situation where a boss is going to lift the creative work of an employee just because it happens to fit into the boss's firm's business plan.
Pro creativity workspaces enable people to produce value for both the firm and for themselves. There is no need to create a false dichotomy here.
I am older than the founder of napster, even though I am just in college. He is of the generation whose culture it is to believe that there is a distinction between material and intellectual property.
Hence, no injunction will save that.
Napster will do many things that can clearly be intepreted as an effort to curb piracy issues. People who want to deliberately avoid piracy can use the protections. Napster is essentially setting guidelines that if followed will prevent accidental commission of illegal behavior.
However, they will still leave the loopholes (misspellings, etc.) for folks who choose to define IP differently than the government and RIAA do.
napster is rightfully shifting blame for piracy away from the technology and towards the pirates- the users.
Where does "free" as in open information end, and private information begin?
The ISP is doing this service: connects me to the internet, hosts a lot of the sites I am reading, protects me from spam.
Knowing traffic on certain sites helps my ISP do that.
This information, if properly anonymized, is a useful commodity to other net firms as well, and helps them to provide us with better service.
If someone responsible can find out who is visiting a site that posts illegal information, then they can get better data on how to fight that particular crime.
It is up to users to determine where this technology is applicable. But I wouldn't dismiss web-bugging as a tactic out of hand.
downloadable and printable hardware, if it develops to fruition, will destroy the need for a computer hardware insdustry in certain sectors.
the gamers, the kids, everyone who uses their computers as a hot rod and doesn't have mission critical stuff running on them, will pirate hardware.
There could be a licensing agreement, but how do you track pirated hardware? use it on the Net and it sends out a call signal? I don't think so. Even if it could be traced, people would just set up parallel intranet networks with the stuff instead of using it on the Internet, where cops, et al could track it.
All in all, opening the doors to terrorists, foreign intelligence agencies, and anybody else who wants to reliably gather information without much expenditure and without being traced.
What it's not
If you're looking for hard-core information on early circuit designs, or code snippets from the programs which launched the rise of the PC, this is probably the wrong book -- though there is a satisfyingly large reproduction of the circuit board of the Apple I. The infectuous spirit of invention and a strange ort of aggressive computer-based fun comes through clearly, because Freiberger and Swaine concentrate on the personalities and business realities of the early days of the PC more than they do the technological advances which made it possible. Whether you find this more engaging or annoying is of course up to you; I found the stories and interactions of the early PC pioneers fascinating, less so the business machinations of the 80s and 90s.
I think that the stories of the 1950s, when science was very important to nearly everybody in the government and intellectual life for the purpose of competint with the Societs, will only be tantalizing and painful to modern inventors who battle in todays world of tanking dot-coms.
I do however think that it would be instructive to see how people write code on machines with the limitations these machines had... what kind of code is written for machines which were, for all their great size and expense, orders of magnitude less powerful than today's machines?
Furthermore, any real tale of Silicon Valley should be as much a tale of poverty as a tale of success and prosperity. The place changed from a place of farms to a place of silicon factories to a place of dot coms, and the descendants of the "original" inhabitants of Silicon Valley (well, the original inhabitants were Indians but never mind that), Mexican-American families that settled there in the 16th and 17th centuries, now have jobs as janitors, gardeners, mainentance people and construction workers in the new economy buildings, and they live in converted U-Stor garages 'cause they can't afford the rent.
In fact, the dot com economy is now beginning to displace people in San Francisco, as the high rent spiral they created further south forces growth north, where dot-coms have begun to gentrify the Mission District.
This is a wonderful breakthrough, and will be useful to athletes, those with degenerative bone disease and the aged.
Unfortunately, however, I feel there is a predisposition in the medical research industry to focus on those diseases which the aging, affluent baby boomers will contract; baldness, impotence, type II diabetes, heart problems, osteoporosis, etc.
I hope they also move their focus closer to diseases that prevent people in less developed countries from reaching the age at which many of these diseases develop.
AIDS, trachoma, hepatitis, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, and tuberculosis still rage. With climactic change and increased travel, they will continue to spread.
A balanced priority schedule in medical research takes these important social and ecological factors into account.
This is off topic. Please don't mod me down. If you feel I must lose karma over this comment, go mod down another one of my comments.
Should we mirror?
Bandwith is expensive and you are OSS freaks. I sure wish you would either compensate the sites you slashdot, or warn them, or mirror them. There are multiple options.
Yes, other sites link to things too, but they usually warn them first. and not even CNN.com has as many bored people with fast computers looking at it as does Slashdot.
Heavy use is expensive, but a slashdotting is even more expensive. You pay for bandwith plus fried equipment of various sorts.
Slashdot editors, please have some netiquette, especially when you link some proud little website from a proud little geek.
Otherwise somebody will sue someday and claim that it is no better than a DOS attack.
You can end much schooling, really, if you can organize an index of information online that will teach people the context of everything they may read or look up.
Let's say i look up a piece of code. if I do not understand something I can look it up, and heave the thing teach me, from first principles using anti-crypt methods if necessary, everything I need to know, starting with addition or even with basic literacy if necessary.
Sterling's The Diamond Age sci fi novel had a computerized book in it like that. It was a book manufactured in a nanotechnology era that was meant to contain everything that a child might want to know, organized in a way that it would start with what the kid was interested in, and then work backwards, idenfitying the skills needed to get to that point.
you fuxors slashdotted the pictures of the magnetite crystal comparison on the NASA website.
Second of all,
The researchers found that the magnetite crystals embedded in the meteorite are arranged in long chains, which they say could have been formed only by once-living organisms. Their results are reported in the Feb. 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Uh, don't magnets normally form chains, orien ting north poles to south poles?
Oh, whatever. I think that these people need to form a political union and push for this stupid change like so many Lincoln bedrooms sleeping PAC lobbyists, because they realize deep down that they really DON'T have the power.
Who has the power is the geeks who make the system work, make their stupid ads load, and edit those ads out when they get home, with a little script. The ad companies are at the beck and call of these people, really.
What costs all the damn money that makes websites need ads? You need expensive business software that a few companies including Microsoft promulgated as standards and then jacked up the price for.
Labor costs are also high, and those need to be reduced as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I can write stuff that I can't read on a $2,000 laptop instead of on a $1.50 legal tablet.
Well, I am opposed to the enforced use of the V-Chip, but I am not opposed to broadcasts putting hidden ratings on tv to trigger the chip.
If TV networks want to broadcast this extra information and add a service to their broadcast for the use of consumers, that's fine.
I warn all the slashdotters that want to quash this technology that in many other cases you are fanatically supportive of including more information in media. "Information wants to be free."
The screening technology is not very accurate right now, or maybe it doesn't reflect your libertarian social mores. But the more people use it, the more refined it will be.
Multiple ratings systems using a variety of rubrics might be useful. Christian groups can develop ratings systems based on their beliefs, and Muslim groups can develop theirs. This gives viewers more control over what they watch, not less.
It's good for productivity that more of the innovative, flexible firms are being bought up by more traditional, "staid" firms, and that the culture inside of the smaller firms is changing.
If someone decides to stay on at the place even when they have to wear a suit and come in 9 to 5 instead of having a food and soda filled, T-shirt and Nerf office, that means that they are really committed to the place and the product that the place is selling.
The folks who drop out in the buyout process are the ones who aren't committed to the product but to a certain lifestyle. Over time, they would lose interest and motivation even if the smaller, "creative" firm weren't getting bought out. The ones who stick it out eventually combine the creativity of the smaller firm with the knowledge, power and reach of the larger one. I guess that's what PR rats mean when they talk about "synergy" in the merger process.
One outcome of this is that when the big fish eats the little fish it shouldn't lay people off- let the process happen by attrition. The ones who don't want to stay are the ones who couldn't cut the mustard anyway..
submissions != donations.
Like, I can donate as much money i want to a magazine but that doesn't mean they will take the article I just submitted.
:)
1) Mir was built, maintained and repaired by a much poorer space agency than the US's, and they kept a functional station in space for over twice its projected lifespan.
2) Over the years cosmonauts at Mir have gathered much unglamorous data about the most efficient and comfortable ways to live in space station conditions for an extended period of time. The physiology and psychology of this is not dramatic or technical but it is crucial.
3) There are many groups trying to profit off of the station's demise, which i think is a bit callous. Is it thrillseeking or morbid interest? At least they could donate money to the Russian space program from these commercial ventures, without some funds the Russian ISS-Alpha committment may not be passed over by the budget-makers axe next time around.
They are trying to limit and mutate the definition of prior art. Once they have something defined as a test case that will create precedent for the rest of the industry, lawyers pour lots of money into it.
;)
Consider the future this will have judicially. All this does is raise the amount of capital you have to get togethr to start an e-business of this type- by increasing the level of liability you have to insure against. That hurts the dot economy, all those "entrepreneurs" you are always talking about, guys.
Ironically, the lawyers glom onto the juiciest cows, the ideas most likely to revolutionize some aspect of our computing experience and thus to justly make money. Thus they retard progress.
Just another note from the Ban the Lawyers foundation..
They have several servers up in Seattle and host interactive news and discussion-sites all over the world, and go down sometimes. They get back up very quickly and are responsive to user complaints.
The best way to help them is to contribute funds, equipment and expertise. They are very committed to Open Source philosophy and a few of their chief technical experts are active on Slashdot and Kuro5hin.
After reading your piece on the WTO, I have a question for you.
What do you think of the Indymedia phenomenon?
Or, more broadly, do you feel that the increasing accessibility of digital cameras and other tools, which lower the cost of putting a strong Web-based newsroom together, might challenge the increasingly corporate system of mainstream news?
Interestingly, you don't mention Indymedia in that article, but we're a collective of people who gets equipment out to intereted people, to cover the protests on the inside.
They have connected live, streaming news about protests all over the world, including the recent UN climate talks, the WTO, the World Economic Forum, and the march of the Zapatistas to Mexico City.
Although Indymedia started in Seattle, there are IMC bureaus all over the world now.
I think they've done two important things- popularized the "movement against corporate globalization," and created a forum for debate.
The debate you talk about- between the protesters who want to fix institutions like the WTO and the ones who want to abolish them- is taking place in the discussion rooms of Indymedia. Check it out!
-perdida
Unless you are going to be running a little kiosk or whatever using EBAY as a platform you are fuck'd, my friend.
The overhead starting this up, anywhere in meatspace where people will come and buy the stuff, is staggering.
That is why most games for "leet people" e.g. classic cult favorite games etc. get sold on the Net.
Niche market.
If you are selling the latest thing, then you have to compete with Best Buy.
I wish you the best of luck, though. Perhaps you can find a meatspace location where the little kids down the street have industrious, thrifty parents who have not yet upgraded from their SNES and Atari systems, and thus are looking for games for them.
Otherwise your market's folks who would be looking on the Net for convenience's sake in the first place. and they havent the overhead so their prices are lower too.
I for one intend to introduce extra salacious material onto my video games.
Anatomically correct Mario, anyone?
GOSH I need this. I have been waiting for this for years.
We do not need to clog up our infrastructures anymore by locating the offices in the few widely dispersed areas with the high bandwith..
we can decentralize these operations, saving space, energy, commute time, the air, preventing sprawl.
As a journalist I would love to be able to step into my car and have all my databases, research and editing tools at my fingertips.
I am aware this will come with an accompanying loss of speed. It's not my fat university T-1. But who's to say that people might not turn away from the flash, shockwave, and heavy, slow websites and towards a lightweight, text oriented, rapid delivery system? A fast-downloading site will become marketable again if its market is wireless.
We should all SLOW THE HELL DOWN for a bit, anyway.
There is a notion called the precautionary principle. It means that, since we know comparatively little about our environment, we should err on the side of caution.
Don't open a possibly unique environmental record until we are close to 100 percent sure that we won't contaminate it.
Or maybe some corporations involved in genetic research want to get access to these prehistoric genesets... in which case we should question our motivations in opening the sealed lake.
I must say I do have a little sheeple strain, which is why when I loaded up Slashdot and saw that first post just sitting there, I couldn't help picking the first relevant thing that came to my head and typing that.
;), and this seemed to me like a case of alienated labor; you are sitting there being creative with code, and your corporation just happens to have a client that could use the code.. coincidence does not property make. In this case, the clients had not contributed software, hardware or other resources to the guy who came up with the code, but they just happen to think that they hve a right to it, or more specifically they think they could get a lawyer to say that they have a right to it, when they don't and I believe shouldn't.
:)
I'm a marxist and all that
I explained myself a bit in the second post... and sorry about the moderation-bitching, but I've had enough bad moderation in the past that that's the reaction I came to.. Perhaps I shall have to revise my views of moderators.
A pro-creativity workspace is like my editor, who will help me, sometimes even materially, with stories that her publication could not print if it wanted to, but because it improves me as a writer and journalist. It's not jargon imo, it's a reality in a very few cases. I am lucky.
Thanks for having enough interest in the actual discussion, rather than the moderation, to post in the thread.
Why don't you read the post, just cause it is a first post does not mean it is off topic.
I believe that people should try to get into a work life where all their work is motivating for them, and where they and their employer have a common interest, if they have an employer. Thedre shoudl not be this kind of situation where a boss is going to lift the creative work of an employee just because it happens to fit into the boss's firm's business plan.
Pro creativity workspaces enable people to produce value for both the firm and for themselves. There is no need to create a false dichotomy here.
Fuck you, moderator who jumps to conclusions.
labor should not be alienated, you all know the best projects for anyone come when you are motivated to do them whetehr paid or unpaid.
No injunction will ever CHANGE that. not "save."
need coffee.
woot!
I am older than the founder of napster, even though I am just in college. He is of the generation whose culture it is to believe that there is a distinction between material and intellectual property.
Hence, no injunction will save that.
Napster will do many things that can clearly be intepreted as an effort to curb piracy issues. People who want to deliberately avoid piracy can use the protections. Napster is essentially setting guidelines that if followed will prevent accidental commission of illegal behavior.
However, they will still leave the loopholes (misspellings, etc.) for folks who choose to define IP differently than the government and RIAA do.
napster is rightfully shifting blame for piracy away from the technology and towards the pirates- the users.
Where does "free" as in open information end, and private information begin?
The ISP is doing this service: connects me to the internet, hosts a lot of the sites I am reading, protects me from spam.
Knowing traffic on certain sites helps my ISP do that.
This information, if properly anonymized, is a useful commodity to other net firms as well, and helps them to provide us with better service.
If someone responsible can find out who is visiting a site that posts illegal information, then they can get better data on how to fight that particular crime.
It is up to users to determine where this technology is applicable. But I wouldn't dismiss web-bugging as a tactic out of hand.
downloadable and printable hardware, if it develops to fruition, will destroy the need for a computer hardware insdustry in certain sectors.
the gamers, the kids, everyone who uses their computers as a hot rod and doesn't have mission critical stuff running on them, will pirate hardware.
There could be a licensing agreement, but how do you track pirated hardware? use it on the Net and it sends out a call signal? I don't think so. Even if it could be traced, people would just set up parallel intranet networks with the stuff instead of using it on the Internet, where cops, et al could track it.
All in all, opening the doors to terrorists, foreign intelligence agencies, and anybody else who wants to reliably gather information without much expenditure and without being traced.
Another popular science compu-worship tome.
What it's not
If you're looking for hard-core information on early circuit designs, or code snippets from the programs which launched the rise of the PC, this is probably the wrong book -- though there is a satisfyingly large reproduction of the circuit board of the Apple I. The infectuous spirit of invention and a strange ort of aggressive computer-based fun comes through clearly, because Freiberger and Swaine concentrate on the personalities and business realities of the early days of the PC more than they do the technological advances which made it possible. Whether you find this more engaging or annoying is of course up to you; I found the stories and interactions of the early PC pioneers fascinating, less so the business machinations of the 80s and 90s.
I think that the stories of the 1950s, when science was very important to nearly everybody in the government and intellectual life for the purpose of competint with the Societs, will only be tantalizing and painful to modern inventors who battle in todays world of tanking dot-coms.
I do however think that it would be instructive to see how people write code on machines with the limitations these machines had... what kind of code is written for machines which were, for all their great size and expense, orders of magnitude less powerful than today's machines?
Furthermore, any real tale of Silicon Valley should be as much a tale of poverty as a tale of success and prosperity. The place changed from a place of farms to a place of silicon factories to a place of dot coms, and the descendants of the "original" inhabitants of Silicon Valley (well, the original inhabitants were Indians but never mind that), Mexican-American families that settled there in the 16th and 17th centuries, now have jobs as janitors, gardeners, mainentance people and construction workers in the new economy buildings, and they live in converted U-Stor garages 'cause they can't afford the rent.
In fact, the dot com economy is now beginning to displace people in San Francisco, as the high rent spiral they created further south forces growth north, where dot-coms have begun to gentrify the Mission District.
This is a wonderful breakthrough, and will be useful to athletes, those with degenerative bone disease and the aged.
Unfortunately, however, I feel there is a predisposition in the medical research industry to focus on those diseases which the aging, affluent baby boomers will contract; baldness, impotence, type II diabetes, heart problems, osteoporosis, etc.
I hope they also move their focus closer to diseases that prevent people in less developed countries from reaching the age at which many of these diseases develop.
AIDS, trachoma, hepatitis, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, and tuberculosis still rage. With climactic change and increased travel, they will continue to spread.
A balanced priority schedule in medical research takes these important social and ecological factors into account.
This is off topic. Please don't mod me down. If you feel I must lose karma over this comment, go mod down another one of my comments.
Should we mirror?
Bandwith is expensive and you are OSS freaks. I sure wish you would either compensate the sites you slashdot, or warn them, or mirror them. There are multiple options.
Yes, other sites link to things too, but they usually warn them first. and not even CNN.com has as many bored people with fast computers looking at it as does Slashdot.
Heavy use is expensive, but a slashdotting is even more expensive. You pay for bandwith plus fried equipment of various sorts.
Slashdot editors, please have some netiquette, especially when you link some proud little website from a proud little geek.
Otherwise somebody will sue someday and claim that it is no better than a DOS attack.
-perdida
anti-crypt is a teaching technique.
You can end much schooling, really, if you can organize an index of information online that will teach people the context of everything they may read or look up.
Let's say i look up a piece of code. if I do not understand something I can look it up, and heave the thing teach me, from first principles using anti-crypt methods if necessary, everything I need to know, starting with addition or even with basic literacy if necessary.
Sterling's The Diamond Age sci fi novel had a computerized book in it like that. It was a book manufactured in a nanotechnology era that was meant to contain everything that a child might want to know, organized in a way that it would start with what the kid was interested in, and then work backwards, idenfitying the skills needed to get to that point.
you fuxors slashdotted the pictures of the magnetite crystal comparison on the NASA website.
Second of all,
The researchers found that the magnetite crystals embedded in the meteorite are arranged in long chains, which they say could have been formed only by once-living organisms. Their results are reported in the Feb. 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Uh, don't magnets normally form chains, orien ting north poles to south poles?
Just wondering..
dammit.
Oh, whatever. I think that these people need to form a political union and push for this stupid change like so many Lincoln bedrooms sleeping PAC lobbyists, because they realize deep down that they really DON'T have the power.
Who has the power is the geeks who make the system work, make their stupid ads load, and edit those ads out when they get home, with a little script. The ad companies are at the beck and call of these people, really.
What costs all the damn money that makes websites need ads? You need expensive business software that a few companies including Microsoft promulgated as standards and then jacked up the price for.
Labor costs are also high, and those need to be reduced as well.