I am a good little slashbot. ;)
on
Cool Case
·
· Score: 5
I saw the case,
I said Yay,
I clicked,
I waited for the Chick Hardware page to load for ten minutes while I made my coffee.
Oh, good lord, you people have slashdotted their site.
But let's put that aside for a minute here. Why do you need this kind of case? The free market is a wonderful thing for scientific innovation, but this is the sort of thing that makes me think back to that old notion in Marx that a capitalist economy tends to produce unnecessary stuff, waste, and duplicate efforts.
You can customize a case and make it lots cooler, quieter and cheaper than the flashy case spotlighted here. You eliminate waste and learn something while you work on this intimate level with your machine.
I am all for convenience, but let's see if we can't find some of the more extraneous technology being peddled out there by perfectly intelligeng people and steer them into some really crucial research.
I am currently of the mind that some really useful work would be the development of a battery that can store lots of power for a long period of time, hence reducing the immediate power demand and enabling us to capture massive amounts of solar energy for use in dim places and at night.
Perhaps we could school a few less marketroids and a few more engineers, too. There's another example of waste.
What is wrong with use-value as a measurement of worth? Why should we support the perspective that every animal has value?
Surely, every species plays a role in the ecosystem. That's not to say that that role should outweigh the potential human benefit that could come from taking an action that might threaten a member of a species.
For example, if we were to let up a little bit on the regulations that retard the growth of power plants in california we would not be seeing the potential explosion in consumer costs and direct heating costs. Who is to say that the benefit of cleaner air is not worth less to the actual citizenry than the benefit of cheaper power?
Forget the computers. It's the net that makes the difference in the digital divide.
Giving computers to kids doesn't help them get information. And as Ant points out, the digital divide is regionally based. You need broadband to get games, as well as being able to get information to the degree that it makes a differenece.
Broadband-obsession on the Net, plus lack of broadband in places, equals disenfranchisement for many people.
Also, it's just as bad when there is only one broadband company. If that company doesnt like your piracy or your napster use and cutd you off, there you are, disenfranchised,unable to reach much of the data and art and culture online.
Governments should assume a more controlling role in the development of highspeed internet technologies; the laying of cable is a vital part of the economic interest of each country. This is an area that calls for more regulation, not less. With proper intervention by legitimately elected policymakers, highspeed internet investments won't go to Silicon Alley anymore, but to Utah, Alaska, Montana- places where industry and agriculture are struggling and where, more than ever, young people need the Internet as a way out.
To think intelligently about copyrights, patents or trademarks, you must think about them separately. My views about copyrights are too complex to fit in this article, but one general principle applies: they cannot justify denying the public important freedoms. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail."
I have never heard any coder so frquently invoke the mythological heroes of the American nation.
orwell's 1984 would call this doubleplusgood duckspeaking, i.e. lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
It makes a lot of open sourcers and free software folks feel good about themselves and their movement, when, at least in a small part of their souls, they should be at least somewhat concerned that Allchin's offhanded, unprepared commentary got such widespread press coverage.
The great abolitionists of the 19th century used their wonderful oratory to combat slavers, whose crude cuss words and uncouth bribes beat the orators every time. They had to fight a war to work it out.
RMS has to directly take on Microsoft et al. I work with a third party and I will tell you, high-faluting speech about abe lincoln will not win that war. What will win that war is systemic, on message and practical stuff about pertinent American values- in this case, free enterprise.
There is a lot of it, surely. But when you get into the stratospheric levels there are delicate layers up there. The ozone layer is not just a simple 2 atom thick layer of ozone, there are support layers of other gases that help to keep it stable.
I agree, this technology is vastly superior to using fossil fuels for transportation purposes.
I simply hope that they work out the bugs and take the climactic effects into account, so the cure isn't worse than the disease.
Yes we have rockets all the time, but this is a question of scale. We do not have hundreds of rockets smashing through the stratosphere a day.
Dave Powell is not an officer of the law, but he
prides himself on having a keen sense of where
a man will bend and where he might break. The
casual software pirate will usually respond to a
sternly worded e-mail that appeals to some
sort of universal sense of justice. Stealing,
after all, is wrong and even though the Internet
gives people a sense of anonymity, most
people don't like to think of themselves as
thieves. For the more savvy software pirate,
Powell must appeal to an instinct more powerful
than morality: self-preservation.
"A subpoena will look something like this,"
Powell says, lifting an inch-thick sheaf of
papers off his desk. "A pirate gets this in the
mail and it's like, 'holy s--t.'"
Okay, people. These are obviously people with a great deal of power, law enforcement oprganizations who are only educated about tech to the degree that their governors or congressmen are informed by lobbyists for various causes.
The law enforcement community is using heavy handed techniques against ISP operators and Napster, etc. users- two groups of people who share a common interest in protecting their current "freedom" to make copies of information. These people have the technical knowledge. If law enforcement wants technical knowledge that would help them do their job, they have to buy it from the same group of people that built the infrastructure that allows us to copy information.
Law enforcement is able to get this information because people sell it for money.Why don't people stop selling their services as "ex hackers" to law enforcement?
Of course, then the info-sharing community would have to p0lice itself. But signing contracts with individual contract providers is infinitely better than allowing law enforcement to supervise a process they do not understand.
I do not use Napster, I do not pirate software, I use the Internet as a research tool for various writing that I do. I copy words and occasionally code, and it would suck if law enforcement put a damper on the technologies I use to do this. Musicians need the technology to sample other music for their tracks. To protect the vital usses of file sharing and copying, it is essential that people come to a compromise about stuff like copying Britney Spears music.
Come to an understanding with content providers! Don't let RIAA lobbyists tell governors and congressment to tell their law enforcers to enforce it THEIR way. Find an agreeable solution, and protect the essential freedoms of the internet.
young, committed men and women with a dream of leading the future of internet technology!
Skills: Strong stomach, being able to "recognize pornography when one sees it," penchant for censorship.
Seriously, aussies, if your friend says he or she is taking the Censor job, cut them off and then h4x0r them.
and no, this cannot be done with nanny-ware, we have seen in many other stories how this software is so inaccurate that it would not withstand any substantial constitutional test in any country.
Market failure: the inability of the market to provide for the effective distribution of some goods, especially social goods.
One social good the market will not provide is choice.. the choice to select cheap, independent online service based on telephone lines. Existing telephone lines, which are regulated, not owned by one company or a few companies, like much of the new cable that is laid every day.
The market as it is currently set up will offer us service from a very few providers, each of which will choose its own reaction to government oversight and regulation, copyright protection, file sharing, etc.
The fewer such providers there are, the less options we will have in terms of specialized services, additional security, unorthodox attitudes towards security and privacy, etc.
The standardization of ISP services is at hand...not due to the choices of thousands of Internet users but because of a ruthless economic slowdown which is taking out businesses without a chance to test the true utility of their strategies, technologies and social models.
Once it's safe again to start something up, we will have to re-invent the wheel, to recreate the quality service and specialized perspectives of the small ISP's-- if the regulatory regimes crafted by the monopolies will still allow it.
Problems: the better the plot in terms of literary valuation, the worse the gameplay because it restricts fredom.
FF7, however, rewards systematic and thorough gameplay and does have many periods where you can freely explore theworld map and get hidden stuff, chjaracters and plots.
When it came right down to it, my list of "inventions" looked pretty meager. These "inventions" are not really inventions at all, but rather extensions and adaptations of publicly available software. Using the word "invention" to refer to such extensions is unfortunate; it is an attempt to impose an ownership structure onto software ideas, and contradicts my experience of how software development really works.
One of your civil rights is the right to practice your trade, unless you are breaking the law while doing it. Just because a stupid law comes up that interferes with your trade, doesn't mean your rights aren't being violated either.
Just because corporations would like to change the way most software gets developed does not mean they can hamper the intellectual inquiries of individual software developers in order to glean off every iota of their creativity.
Not free speech case- civil rights case. Try litigation under this approach. Or, does anyone know if such civil rights approaches have worked with intellectual property cases?
IANAL, but this seems to be construing web-log, discussion and news-group management as similar to publishing, thus giving the webmaster or site admin the same liabilities as a book or magazine publisher has.
Of course, this is quite unfair because the webmaster does not have the same rights as a book publisher has. One of the rationalizations for making the publisher liable for what he or she puts out is that in most cases the publisher intends to make money from this endeavor. Thus, any highly marketable libel or slander that a tabloid would publish would be highly prohibited regulated by the government.
I don't see how weblog or newsgroup admins, who profit only indirectly from this work if at all, are in the same boat as publishes. These admins provide what is essentially a non-profit, free speech service in an overall package for their customers. The authors should be liable, not the admins. If they have any responsibilities at all, it should be to loudly notify their customers of applicable laws, thus further absolving themselves of responsibility.
In a letter Dr. Atkinson sent to the University of California's faculty senate today and in a speech he will give here on Sunday to the American Council on Education, an advance copy of which the
school released tonight, Dr. Atkinson criticized the reliance on SAT's to rank students for admission to schools, saying that they are "not compatible with the American view on how merit should be defined and opportunities distributed."
How will they define merit? Will this "holistic" approach consider test scores and gpa's from highschool take differences between schools into account? By no account will that remove bias. Both the schools that grade students and the ways those grades would be weighted in university admissions processes will be biased. That could lead to the wholesale exclusion of students from certain regions from the best schools, due to a lack of any universal ranking factor that disregards the quality of their highschool educational systems.
Furthermore, stuff like advanced placement tests are not a good solution. It takes money to train teachers to teach administer the yearly AP classes.
Unless the poorest schools, in the poorest regions, get federal money to introduce a better universal standard of measuring highschoolers, lets not replace the one we've got.
In terms of the cost benefit analysis that are done by drug departments in police forces, when they are trying to stop the distribution of illegal contraband, they do prioritize their activitiies according to the market value of the supposed contraband. One evidence of this kind of thinking is the fact that drug busts usually announce the value of the drug that was seized.
I sincerely hope that the kids who have been making a joyful noise in Zurich and Davos hightail it to Belgium to give the anti-expression police their due.
I mean, seriously, folks. The value contained on a hard drive of pirated music may be more than it costs to bust the kid, but the actual value there- the kid wasn't intending to sell the music at ALL- makes this operation a huge, expensive waste of time.
The Euro Union loves to rule by fiat, and it loves to show international organizations that it's willing to play by the hard-bitten anti-fair-use rules promulgated in USia. Oh well, so much for enlightenment..
So why does Nick need your help? It's important to him that users get their input in for this project and that he has a better understanding of what to aim for regarding look & feel as well as packaging issues.
I see here a potential problem in the open source philosophy. if this installer is so badly needed, who is going to finally decide what it's going to look and feel like? And who benefits from that decision, especially if something really innovative happens with it.
Nick Betcher, of course, some of u are going to answer. But the whole point of him asking for this input is to get collaboration from other developers.
Linus did something really revolutionary with the help of thousands of developers, and it sent him into demi-godhood. Is that fair? Not everybody wants to hide in the shadows of some charismatic lead software architect. Furthermore, tho nobody can profit directly off the code, there may be profits from the building of packaging and support services for given software. Who has first crack at that project?
That said, good luck, and I wish you all well with these tough choices.
Now, it's just a digital piece of the old economy.
When I shop and communicate online, it is not more convenient than going to the store or making a phone call. It is sometimes faster, sometimes cheaper, and it is always more anonymous.
Let's say you want to order, say, satanic texts. You can go to the bookstore, but then your neighbors might see you do it. Especially if you are well known. If you go on the internet it might take 6 weeks, but nobody will see you do it. They might get a record of it, but you won't have to make any kind of public action, like going into an occult bookstore, that would make people even think to do it.
It's a situational, social kind of anonymity you get on the Internet.
Registration of every email address will destroy the avatars, the characters, the pirates, the trolls, and everybody else who uses situational, social anonymity.
Crime comes from anonymity, but so does creativity, innovation, and the courage to try new things. I know this from experience.:))
I do make attempts to conserve, though they are limited unless I choose to move away from culture completely.
My apt. has no TV, a minifridge style fridge, an electric stove, a microwave i use rarely, a coffeemaker, 3 small lamps, a clock radio (on most of the time), and a computer.
I use a Palm device instead of a laptop for my work because it uses less electricity, and is suitable for my needs.
But I have to use heat and water, trash, recycling, and public transportation, which use more energy. I don't use a car. I do use the streetlights, and all the infrastructure, and of course the Internet, so I am vastly benefitted by a lot of very dirty energy.
I want more people to be able to choose to cheaply and safely get off the grid, and generate their own electricity as much as possible. I have worked for political candidates in the southwestern US that aim to get as many people as possible on Solar power, which is mostly feasible in that sunny area. Espcially since the energy distribution crisis in California could affect the southwest and northwest if enough megawatts are pulled from the grid.
I was really little, and seeing that movie made me go out and learn about the Voyager probes, and the little recorded math and culture messages to aliens that are borne in them.
I can see how they wanted it to be a weighty, high faluting 2001 style space opera, considering the issues they were dealing with.. a group of beings who worshiop a supercomputer as a god! Think about the people seeing this when it came out.. to them it would be like The Matrix is to us.. a film full of mysteries, exploring technologies whose beginnings are contemporary to the film.
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or
three years, he estimated.
First of all, the strategy to slowly replace existing parts with nano-parts is a difficult one. in the laboratory, the electrical responses can be very well regulated. In a car, a downed power line, a bolt of lightning, immersion, and many accident situations that will flip the car off its rubber tires that ground it could expose the parts to electricity, making them solid/liquid when they should not be.
Furthermore, what is to prevent the problems that could come with inconsistent or degraded functioning in nano-parts as the parts age? I don't want something that will only change phase in bits and pieces when I need a fast, rapid-reaction, total phase change. The current non-nanotech parts are cheaper and more reliable.
The application for this stuff is currently in the lab and high level industrial applications- places that have got the money and the people to use these tools in a consistent, well supervised environment.
Geeks, geeks, geeks.. technology is not ALWAYS for the masses. Or lets put it this way; the masses will benefit more by the useful application of new tech by a few, instead of the gimmicky application of new tech to mass consumer goods.
I look forward to going to space through a country which prioritizes space as something truly vital for its future. Maybe countries which are not in the "forefront" of the world economy, such as India, have more incentive in planning for the long term, and investing in things such as a space program.
That said, I would like to hope that India, which claims self-sufficiency, would look over all its expenditures, including space, and see what it can divert to emergency aid for the earthquake and for general poverty.
While space and tech development is a tide that lifts all boats, the poverty in India is a humanitarian catastrophe and should be addressed, first, before considering development investment. Otherwise, development in the long run becomes a greater priority than the alleviation of human suffering.
Ban Fiction in which murder is depicted! Ban wrestling, definitely. It's full of threats!
Seriously, I think the police are using any tactic they can to search for anything they can, and to bust as many people as they can.
Burke discussed how he thought it seemed like the police were searching for something else, possibly drugs, because they searched furniture as well. "They shouldn't be allowed to do that," he said. "It's just not right, especially since they are keeping the guy's computer for a year."
Give everything that the police seize to charity, or to groups like NORML that they don't like. that should cut down on their seizing.
Seriously, though, this model, if it works, will end the current conception of consumer processors as a secret technology as worthy of hiding as much as an Enigma machine would be.
Furthermore, it gives less developed countries a chance to advance with innovative designs. Hardware making is expensive, but with a relatively small investment, a poor country could put out processors on open-source models, perhaps specializing rather than trying to compete with the big boys Intel and AMD.
It is true, that if you allocate any good, that the market cna find some kind of 'efficient' way of distributing that good. For example pollution credits. Of course, we all know that the market, given a free hand, will not necessarily distribute goods in a socially efficient manner. In California, many plants closed because they used up their pollution credits producing extra electricity for a market that would suck up as much as they put out. Now, nobody is profiting and electricity distributors are threatened with bankruptcy. A little government intervention could have forestalled this greed.
Privacy is of value but it is also political. Surely the privacy of many can be protected if privacy is purely a commodity. However, the privacies that are most important- those of the people that would threaten the established order of things- are far less likely to be able to afford that protection.
In a healthy "liberal" society, with at least the basic "freedom of opportunity" that substitutes for real egalitarianism in America, everyone must enjoy a sphere of confidentiality in which he or she can get honest advice and betray his or her real strengths and weaknesses. Only in privacy can you be youraself without fear of exposing your vulnerabilities.
(attention deficit disorder) Diagnosed, but it is simply a subcategory of a whole brace of culturally and biologically derived symptoms. When I was a kid I sure wished I had a laptop and a PDA, so I could read what I wrote, catch everything the teachers said, and not drift off.
That stuff sure helps me now. My brain is so active now because I can stay consistent on something for an extended period of time, without having a teacher to watch over me to do it!
What's wrong with shaping my environment to increase my effectiveness? And who would think that they are the only person who efficiently uses these tools, either? Most people who invest in these tools and continue to use them must find a use for them.
Maybe it's video games that breed stupidity? Some marketer deliberately harnessing eyeballs? Screw video games, lets focus on educational technology. My attention span certainly improved when I figured out all the useful, profitable, and interesting things I could do with a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw the case,
I said Yay,
I clicked,
I waited for the Chick Hardware page to load for ten minutes while I made my coffee.
Oh, good lord, you people have slashdotted their site.
But let's put that aside for a minute here. Why do you need this kind of case? The free market is a wonderful thing for scientific innovation, but this is the sort of thing that makes me think back to that old notion in Marx that a capitalist economy tends to produce unnecessary stuff, waste, and duplicate efforts.
You can customize a case and make it lots cooler, quieter and cheaper than the flashy case spotlighted here. You eliminate waste and learn something while you work on this intimate level with your machine.
I am all for convenience, but let's see if we can't find some of the more extraneous technology being peddled out there by perfectly intelligeng people and steer them into some really crucial research.
I am currently of the mind that some really useful work would be the development of a battery that can store lots of power for a long period of time, hence reducing the immediate power demand and enabling us to capture massive amounts of solar energy for use in dim places and at night.
Perhaps we could school a few less marketroids and a few more engineers, too. There's another example of waste.
What is wrong with use-value as a measurement of worth? Why should we support the perspective that every animal has value?
Surely, every species plays a role in the ecosystem. That's not to say that that role should outweigh the potential human benefit that could come from taking an action that might threaten a member of a species.
For example, if we were to let up a little bit on the regulations that retard the growth of power plants in california we would not be seeing the potential explosion in consumer costs and direct heating costs. Who is to say that the benefit of cleaner air is not worth less to the actual citizenry than the benefit of cheaper power?
Let them decide, not your ideology.
Forget the computers. It's the net that makes the difference in the digital divide.
Giving computers to kids doesn't help them get information. And as Ant points out, the digital divide is regionally based. You need broadband to get games, as well as being able to get information to the degree that it makes a differenece.
Broadband-obsession on the Net, plus lack of broadband in places, equals disenfranchisement for many people.
Also, it's just as bad when there is only one broadband company. If that company doesnt like your piracy or your napster use and cutd you off, there you are, disenfranchised,unable to reach much of the data and art and culture online.
Governments should assume a more controlling role in the development of highspeed internet technologies; the laying of cable is a vital part of the economic interest of each country. This is an area that calls for more regulation, not less. With proper intervention by legitimately elected policymakers, highspeed internet investments won't go to Silicon Alley anymore, but to Utah, Alaska, Montana- places where industry and agriculture are struggling and where, more than ever, young people need the Internet as a way out.
To think intelligently about copyrights, patents or trademarks, you must think about them separately. My views about copyrights are too complex to fit in this article, but one general principle applies: they cannot justify denying the public important freedoms. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail."
I have never heard any coder so frquently invoke the mythological heroes of the American nation.
orwell's 1984 would call this doubleplusgood duckspeaking, i.e. lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
It makes a lot of open sourcers and free software folks feel good about themselves and their movement, when, at least in a small part of their souls, they should be at least somewhat concerned that Allchin's offhanded, unprepared commentary got such widespread press coverage.
The great abolitionists of the 19th century used their wonderful oratory to combat slavers, whose crude cuss words and uncouth bribes beat the orators every time. They had to fight a war to work it out.
RMS has to directly take on Microsoft et al. I work with a third party and I will tell you, high-faluting speech about abe lincoln will not win that war. What will win that war is systemic, on message and practical stuff about pertinent American values- in this case, free enterprise.
It will.
Really.
There is a lot of it, surely. But when you get into the stratospheric levels there are delicate layers up there. The ozone layer is not just a simple 2 atom thick layer of ozone, there are support layers of other gases that help to keep it stable.
I agree, this technology is vastly superior to using fossil fuels for transportation purposes.
I simply hope that they work out the bugs and take the climactic effects into account, so the cure isn't worse than the disease.
Yes we have rockets all the time, but this is a question of scale. We do not have hundreds of rockets smashing through the stratosphere a day.
Dave Powell is not an officer of the law, but he
prides himself on having a keen sense of where
a man will bend and where he might break. The
casual software pirate will usually respond to a
sternly worded e-mail that appeals to some
sort of universal sense of justice. Stealing,
after all, is wrong and even though the Internet
gives people a sense of anonymity, most
people don't like to think of themselves as
thieves. For the more savvy software pirate,
Powell must appeal to an instinct more powerful
than morality: self-preservation.
"A subpoena will look something like this,"
Powell says, lifting an inch-thick sheaf of
papers off his desk. "A pirate gets this in the
mail and it's like, 'holy s--t.'"
Okay, people. These are obviously people with a great deal of power, law enforcement oprganizations who are only educated about tech to the degree that their governors or congressmen are informed by lobbyists for various causes.
The law enforcement community is using heavy handed techniques against ISP operators and Napster, etc. users- two groups of people who share a common interest in protecting their current "freedom" to make copies of information. These people have the technical knowledge. If law enforcement wants technical knowledge that would help them do their job, they have to buy it from the same group of people that built the infrastructure that allows us to copy information.
Law enforcement is able to get this information because people sell it for money.Why don't people stop selling their services as "ex hackers" to law enforcement?
Of course, then the info-sharing community would have to p0lice itself. But signing contracts with individual contract providers is infinitely better than allowing law enforcement to supervise a process they do not understand.
I do not use Napster, I do not pirate software, I use the Internet as a research tool for various writing that I do. I copy words and occasionally code, and it would suck if law enforcement put a damper on the technologies I use to do this. Musicians need the technology to sample other music for their tracks. To protect the vital usses of file sharing and copying, it is essential that people come to a compromise about stuff like copying Britney Spears music.
Come to an understanding with content providers! Don't let RIAA lobbyists tell governors and congressment to tell their law enforcers to enforce it THEIR way. Find an agreeable solution, and protect the essential freedoms of the internet.
young, committed men and women with a dream of leading the future of internet technology!
Skills: Strong stomach, being able to "recognize pornography when one sees it," penchant for censorship.
Seriously, aussies, if your friend says he or she is taking the Censor job, cut them off and then h4x0r them.
and no, this cannot be done with nanny-ware, we have seen in many other stories how this software is so inaccurate that it would not withstand any substantial constitutional test in any country.
Market failure: the inability of the market to provide for the effective distribution of some goods, especially social goods.
One social good the market will not provide is choice.. the choice to select cheap, independent online service based on telephone lines. Existing telephone lines, which are regulated, not owned by one company or a few companies, like much of the new cable that is laid every day.
The market as it is currently set up will offer us service from a very few providers, each of which will choose its own reaction to government oversight and regulation, copyright protection, file sharing, etc.
The fewer such providers there are, the less options we will have in terms of specialized services, additional security, unorthodox attitudes towards security and privacy, etc.
The standardization of ISP services is at hand...not due to the choices of thousands of Internet users but because of a ruthless economic slowdown which is taking out businesses without a chance to test the true utility of their strategies, technologies and social models.
Once it's safe again to start something up, we will have to re-invent the wheel, to recreate the quality service and specialized perspectives of the small ISP's-- if the regulatory regimes crafted by the monopolies will still allow it.
ff7: best plot of all time
1) terrorists
2) Sephiroth
Problems: the better the plot in terms of literary valuation, the worse the gameplay because it restricts fredom.
FF7, however, rewards systematic and thorough gameplay and does have many periods where you can freely explore theworld map and get hidden stuff, chjaracters and plots.
When it came right down to it, my list of "inventions" looked pretty meager. These "inventions" are not really inventions at all, but rather extensions and adaptations of publicly available software. Using the word "invention" to refer to such extensions is unfortunate; it is an attempt to impose an ownership structure onto software ideas, and contradicts my experience of how software development really works.
One of your civil rights is the right to practice your trade, unless you are breaking the law while doing it. Just because a stupid law comes up that interferes with your trade, doesn't mean your rights aren't being violated either.
Just because corporations would like to change the way most software gets developed does not mean they can hamper the intellectual inquiries of individual software developers in order to glean off every iota of their creativity.
Not free speech case- civil rights case. Try litigation under this approach. Or, does anyone know if such civil rights approaches have worked with intellectual property cases?
IANAL, but this seems to be construing web-log, discussion and news-group management as similar to publishing, thus giving the webmaster or site admin the same liabilities as a book or magazine publisher has.
Of course, this is quite unfair because the webmaster does not have the same rights as a book publisher has. One of the rationalizations for making the publisher liable for what he or she puts out is that in most cases the publisher intends to make money from this endeavor. Thus, any highly marketable libel or slander that a tabloid would publish would be highly prohibited regulated by the government.
I don't see how weblog or newsgroup admins, who profit only indirectly from this work if at all, are in the same boat as publishes. These admins provide what is essentially a non-profit, free speech service in an overall package for their customers. The authors should be liable, not the admins. If they have any responsibilities at all, it should be to loudly notify their customers of applicable laws, thus further absolving themselves of responsibility.
In a letter Dr. Atkinson sent to the University of California's faculty senate today and in a speech he will give here on Sunday to the American Council on Education, an advance copy of which the
school released tonight, Dr. Atkinson criticized the reliance on SAT's to rank students for admission to schools, saying that they are "not compatible with the American view on how merit should be defined and opportunities distributed."
How will they define merit? Will this "holistic" approach consider test scores and gpa's from highschool take differences between schools into account? By no account will that remove bias. Both the schools that grade students and the ways those grades would be weighted in university admissions processes will be biased. That could lead to the wholesale exclusion of students from certain regions from the best schools, due to a lack of any universal ranking factor that disregards the quality of their highschool educational systems.
Furthermore, stuff like advanced placement tests are not a good solution. It takes money to train teachers to teach administer the yearly AP classes.
Unless the poorest schools, in the poorest regions, get federal money to introduce a better universal standard of measuring highschoolers, lets not replace the one we've got.
In terms of the cost benefit analysis that are done by drug departments in police forces, when they are trying to stop the distribution of illegal contraband, they do prioritize their activitiies according to the market value of the supposed contraband. One evidence of this kind of thinking is the fact that drug busts usually announce the value of the drug that was seized.
I sincerely hope that the kids who have been making a joyful noise in Zurich and Davos hightail it to Belgium to give the anti-expression police their due.
I mean, seriously, folks. The value contained on a hard drive of pirated music may be more than it costs to bust the kid, but the actual value there- the kid wasn't intending to sell the music at ALL- makes this operation a huge, expensive waste of time.
The Euro Union loves to rule by fiat, and it loves to show international organizations that it's willing to play by the hard-bitten anti-fair-use rules promulgated in USia. Oh well, so much for enlightenment..
So why does Nick need your help? It's important to him that users get their input in for this project and that he has a better understanding of what to aim for regarding look & feel as well as packaging issues.
I see here a potential problem in the open source philosophy. if this installer is so badly needed, who is going to finally decide what it's going to look and feel like? And who benefits from that decision, especially if something really innovative happens with it.
Nick Betcher, of course, some of u are going to answer. But the whole point of him asking for this input is to get collaboration from other developers.
Linus did something really revolutionary with the help of thousands of developers, and it sent him into demi-godhood. Is that fair? Not everybody wants to hide in the shadows of some charismatic lead software architect. Furthermore, tho nobody can profit directly off the code, there may be profits from the building of packaging and support services for given software. Who has first crack at that project?
That said, good luck, and I wish you all well with these tough choices.
That's the end of the new economy, folks.
:))
Now, it's just a digital piece of the old economy.
When I shop and communicate online, it is not more convenient than going to the store or making a phone call. It is sometimes faster, sometimes cheaper, and it is always more anonymous.
Let's say you want to order, say, satanic texts. You can go to the bookstore, but then your neighbors might see you do it. Especially if you are well known. If you go on the internet it might take 6 weeks, but nobody will see you do it. They might get a record of it, but you won't have to make any kind of public action, like going into an occult bookstore, that would make people even think to do it.
It's a situational, social kind of anonymity you get on the Internet.
Registration of every email address will destroy the avatars, the characters, the pirates, the trolls, and everybody else who uses situational, social anonymity.
Crime comes from anonymity, but so does creativity, innovation, and the courage to try new things. I know this from experience.
I wasn't a hypocrite.
:))
:)
I do make attempts to conserve, though they are limited unless I choose to move away from culture completely.
My apt. has no TV, a minifridge style fridge, an electric stove, a microwave i use rarely, a coffeemaker, 3 small lamps, a clock radio (on most of the time), and a computer.
I use a Palm device instead of a laptop for my work because it uses less electricity, and is suitable for my needs.
But I have to use heat and water, trash, recycling, and public transportation, which use more energy. I don't use a car. I do use the streetlights, and all the infrastructure, and of course the Internet, so I am vastly benefitted by a lot of very dirty energy.
I want more people to be able to choose to cheaply and safely get off the grid, and generate their own electricity as much as possible. I have worked for political candidates in the southwestern US that aim to get as many people as possible on Solar power, which is mostly feasible in that sunny area. Espcially since the energy distribution crisis in California could affect the southwest and northwest if enough megawatts are pulled from the grid.
By the way, your sig is great.
I was really little, and seeing that movie made me go out and learn about the Voyager probes, and the little recorded math and culture messages to aliens that are borne in them.
I can see how they wanted it to be a weighty, high faluting 2001 style space opera, considering the issues they were dealing with.. a group of beings who worshiop a supercomputer as a god! Think about the people seeing this when it came out.. to them it would be like The Matrix is to us.. a film full of mysteries, exploring technologies whose beginnings are contemporary to the film.
From the CNN article:
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or
three years, he estimated.
First of all, the strategy to slowly replace existing parts with nano-parts is a difficult one. in the laboratory, the electrical responses can be very well regulated. In a car, a downed power line, a bolt of lightning, immersion, and many accident situations that will flip the car off its rubber tires that ground it could expose the parts to electricity, making them solid/liquid when they should not be.
Furthermore, what is to prevent the problems that could come with inconsistent or degraded functioning in nano-parts as the parts age? I don't want something that will only change phase in bits and pieces when I need a fast, rapid-reaction, total phase change. The current non-nanotech parts are cheaper and more reliable.
The application for this stuff is currently in the lab and high level industrial applications- places that have got the money and the people to use these tools in a consistent, well supervised environment.
Geeks, geeks, geeks.. technology is not ALWAYS for the masses. Or lets put it this way; the masses will benefit more by the useful application of new tech by a few, instead of the gimmicky application of new tech to mass consumer goods.
I look forward to going to space through a country which prioritizes space as something truly vital for its future. Maybe countries which are not in the "forefront" of the world economy, such as India, have more incentive in planning for the long term, and investing in things such as a space program.
That said, I would like to hope that India, which claims self-sufficiency, would look over all its expenditures, including space, and see what it can divert to emergency aid for the earthquake and for general poverty.
While space and tech development is a tide that lifts all boats, the poverty in India is a humanitarian catastrophe and should be addressed, first, before considering development investment. Otherwise, development in the long run becomes a greater priority than the alleviation of human suffering.
Ban Fiction in which murder is depicted! Ban wrestling, definitely. It's full of threats!
Seriously, I think the police are using any tactic they can to search for anything they can, and to bust as many people as they can.
Burke discussed how he thought it seemed like the police were searching for something else, possibly drugs, because they searched furniture as well. "They shouldn't be allowed to do that," he said. "It's just not right, especially since they are keeping the guy's computer for a year."
Give everything that the police seize to charity, or to groups like NORML that they don't like. that should cut down on their seizing.
hehe.
Seriously, though, this model, if it works, will end the current conception of consumer processors as a secret technology as worthy of hiding as much as an Enigma machine would be.
Furthermore, it gives less developed countries a chance to advance with innovative designs. Hardware making is expensive, but with a relatively small investment, a poor country could put out processors on open-source models, perhaps specializing rather than trying to compete with the big boys Intel and AMD.
It is true, that if you allocate any good, that the market cna find some kind of 'efficient' way of distributing that good. For example pollution credits. Of course, we all know that the market, given a free hand, will not necessarily distribute goods in a socially efficient manner. In California, many plants closed because they used up their pollution credits producing extra electricity for a market that would suck up as much as they put out. Now, nobody is profiting and electricity distributors are threatened with bankruptcy. A little government intervention could have forestalled this greed.
Privacy is of value but it is also political. Surely the privacy of many can be protected if privacy is purely a commodity. However, the privacies that are most important- those of the people that would threaten the established order of things- are far less likely to be able to afford that protection.
In a healthy "liberal" society, with at least the basic "freedom of opportunity" that substitutes for real egalitarianism in America, everyone must enjoy a sphere of confidentiality in which he or she can get honest advice and betray his or her real strengths and weaknesses. Only in privacy can you be youraself without fear of exposing your vulnerabilities.
Was chronic marijuana use considered as a factor? What cultural characteristics were prominent in these people studied?
(attention deficit disorder) Diagnosed, but it is simply a subcategory of a whole brace of culturally and biologically derived symptoms. When I was a kid I sure wished I had a laptop and a PDA, so I could read what I wrote, catch everything the teachers said, and not drift off.
That stuff sure helps me now. My brain is so active now because I can stay consistent on something for an extended period of time, without having a teacher to watch over me to do it!
What's wrong with shaping my environment to increase my effectiveness? And who would think that they are the only person who efficiently uses these tools, either? Most people who invest in these tools and continue to use them must find a use for them.
Maybe it's video games that breed stupidity? Some marketer deliberately harnessing eyeballs? Screw video games, lets focus on educational technology. My attention span certainly improved when I figured out all the useful, profitable, and interesting things I could do with a computer.
Wouldn't you think everyone else's would, too?
-perdida