Sorry, I should have said, "environmentalists whose basis is a sacred earth-spirit thing," because I know a whole lot of real people who do fit that stereotype to a tee. Maybe you've decided to stereotype me as a brainwashed fool for the same reason.
Maybe this is just a nitpick, but people tend to overestimate the importance of humans and our impact on the planet. The issue here is our own survival. The opening of the article lays it out plainly:
Global climate change is increasingly recognised as the key threat to the continued development - and even survival - of humanity.
Exactly. The Earth will go on spinning and evolving new land masses and creatures as it has done for billions of years, no matter what we do to it, short of actually blowing it to pieces. Even massive global nuclear contamination would fade away eventually, becoming a mere hiccup on a geological time scale. Our activities might destroy a lot of species in addition to ourselves, but in planetary history mass extinctions are routine non-events.
What motivates my concern is not that we need to preserve this or that for its own sake, but that we want to maintain a pleasant world to live in. For some people that might include spotted owls and obscure mud lizards, for others not. I think the environmental movement might get more attention from the people who make the decisions if they give up on the sacred earth-spirit thing and focus on the fact that nobody wants to think of their great grandchildren living in shelters and subsisting on hydroponic fungi.
Change the perceptions, and you'll go a long way toward improving the scores.
We just went through at least a decade of young nerds becoming millionnaires, and in a few cases billionnaires, yet it failed to change the perception beyond creating a short-lived geek-is-cool phenomenon. The marketing machinery that drives our culture as well as our economy has no problem with telling people to dress or act like nerds, truckers or anything else if it sells more stuff, but there's no short-term profit incentive to convince people to actually improve their minds.
I'm going to take an optimistic shot and say that in 10 years any visual or sound effect whatsoever will be possible and cheap. Independent filmmakers will be able to synthesize entire movies that look as good as anything from a studio. The cost of making movies will drop to the point where the movies themselves will no longer have to make money. They will merely be bait for marketing tie-ins. Studios will shift from making movies to buying the product rights to the work of promising independent directors. They might even realize that it is no longer worth waging war against technology to prevent "piracy," because free exposure means a bigger market for the toys, games, clothes, etc.
As an aside, it's worth noting that Hollywood has already proven its ability to reinvent itself. In the 80s the big studio production machines morphed into an army of specialized subcontractors that supply equipment, costumes, sets, casting, management, effects, etc. Studios tend to form temporary companies that hire dozens of these subs to work together on one movie and then disband.
We haven't yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process. "Cracked the code??" How about hiring more people instead of making your employees work 80-hour weeks?
Having a standardized technology approach will save us from having to re-invent the wheel over and over. Or, you could hire more people instead of making your employees work 80-hour weeks.
We've started a Development Process Improvement Project to get smarter and improve efficiency. Or, you could hire more people instead of...
The award for management doublespeak goes to this paragraph: We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies, the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer. We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.
It isn't that they don't want to pay overtime, they just think creative and skilled professionals relish the flexibility of being required to work 80 hours/week with no overtime.
My brain asplode. I feel truly sorry for anybody who thinks they have to work for EA.
Glad somebody commented on this. I'm not sure which is worse, the guy's belief that past failure implies future failure, or the silly smugness with which he preaches it.
It seems ironic and counterproductive to have a multimillion dollar industry grow up around something that should be illegal in the first place. We wouldn't think it was normal to have service companies routinely come around and patch bullet holes in our walls, paint over graffiti and haul away restroom waste dropped from airliners. If somebody defaces a big website it's a big deal. Why do we individually accept the time and expense of periodically de-vandalizing our computers?
Hiding behind obfuscated EULAs shouldn't work. Partly because it's an obvious abuse, and partly because nothing is done to verify that the person giving permission has any legal status. A great deal of spyware rides in on "free" games and other amusing things aimed at kids. How does a contract "signed" by a 10-year-old have legal weight? One argument is that the adult who lets the kid use the computer is responsible. But then why wouldn't that same reasoning apply if the kid merely borrowed the adult's pen?
Spyware distributors know they're doing something people don't want them to do, or they wouldn't go to such great lengths to disguise it. I personally think they're in the same category as people who hack into banking systems and should be treated accordingly.
Glad somebody mentioned that. I got bored with this SCO crap quite a while ago and have not been keeping up with it. Reading "SCO's intellectual property that is apparently present" made me wonder if they had actually proved any of their claims. But nothing in the article says so. Presumably it's still just all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I was not shown licenses or other installation prompts for any of these programs, and I certainly didn't consent to their installation on my PC.
I would love to see somebody slap some criminal charges against the site owner. Hiding behind an obfuscated EULA is bad enough, but installing software without any permission whatsoever has to be illegal, doesn't it?
This is about labelling printouts, so that an individual document can be traced back to a printer, if necessary. There's a big difference between that and "tracking everything you print," which would imply spying on your printing activities.
In the old days police could often trace documents to individual typewriters because of small defects like nicked or misaligned characters. I have read that a similar technique even worked with some dot matrix printers. What modern printer manufacturers have done is to artificially create this same level of individuality. Nobody is "tracking everything you print." So how about we put away the foil hats and get upset about the truly bad stuff.
The whole "does it have a soul" crowd is going to get a rude awakening in the coming years, as the lines between human and non-human become fuzzier and fuzzier. The religious right definitely has a lot to fear from progress in genetics.
And yes, I think we can use them to test drugs and clean out sewer lines, since we use humans to do such things now.
Oh, you STREAM it. So things like StreamRipper will somehow become impossible?! Earth to Harry Potter...
By limiting music sharing to streams in small groups, Felser said Grouper simply enables "private performances," which is protected by U.S. Copyright Law.
"We're not a public file-sharing network. What we offer is a way to connect to hard drives within a group in a safe, encrypted environment."
I will believe that this doubletalk will fly with the RIAA's and MPAA's lawyers when I see gas stations start giving away free cars.
You're looking at monorail systems the way 1950s visionaries imagined freeways, as vast stretches of asphalt with traffic flowing smoothly and efficiently at high speed. Reality rears its ugly head when the system gets popular. A maxxed out monorail system would be just as crowded as a maxxed out freeway.
A monorail system is itself a road, just a specialized type of road that requires specialized vehicles. The automated car approach says, instead of building a second road network that requires special cars, let's build only the special cars and put them on our existing road network. The advantages of an automated mass transit system like the one described in the article -- small, vehicles that can move fast without getting into accidents and can veer off the main drag with just a few passengers -- can be accomplished on existing roads if we get rid of human drivers.
This will be a political obstacle but I personally don't see it as a show-stopper. People still like to ride horses too, but they aren't allowed to do it on the freeway.
Double Blind Study
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 5, Funny
If you really want a double blind study mix Vladimir and Pepe Lopez Gold tequila.
This is Exactly why we should focus not on rail systems but on smart, self-driving cars that can drive on existing roads. There's no way rail of any kind can handle the volume of traffic in a spread out city the size of say Seattle. It might work fine in super-dense urban areas like New York, but in places where the terrain doesn't permit a simple wheel-spoke travel pattern in and out of the city you need roads.
Behold our modern IP warlords, staking out their territory, taxing us peasants for living on it and dictating how and when we can use it, hiring warriors to defend it against others, and all the while declaring that their property is sacred and their authority comes from God.
What the launch-it-to-the-sun philosophy has going for it is that it rightly assumes space transportation will get cheaper and easier in the future. Nuclear power itself could be the key to getting rid of the waste. For example, here is a detailed article about a rocket design using a Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactor engine that emits no radioactivity itself. [It's a 12-part article. Skip ahead to Part 6 if you just want to know how it works.]
The rocket he describes, based on the Saturn-V form factor, would be able to lift 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit. For comparison, the Space Shuttle carries 30 tons. Such a rocket, capable of hauling up an entire space hotel in one go, could easily carry along a few hundred pounds of encapsulated nuclear waste as incidental cargo on each trip. Once the stuff is in orbit we could periodically send bulk loads to the sun. There's always the possibility of something falling to Earth, but the author mentions that it would take many such incidents to equal the amount of nuclear material released into the atmosphere in a single 1950s bomb test.
Getting nuclear waste away from the planet is not an insurmountable problem, it's just an engineering project that eventually will be tackled and accomplished. Our storage goal should be merely to keep the stuff secure until then. Dreaming up ground storage schemes meant to last thousands and thousands of years is a big waste of effort.
The article focused only on the technology, but think about owning a self-driving car. When you get to work, why should it sit out in the parking lot all day when it could drive itself home and ferry the rest of the family around, then come pick you up? Most families could get rid of one of their cars. Leased auto-driving cars could take themselves out at night for fueling and scheduled maintenance. Taking it a step further, why I foresee a time when few people will actually own cars. Most of us will subscribe to services that maintain fleets of robo-cars, which we flag one down with our cell phones like cabs. If you take the paid driver out of the picture the scheme might be feasible. Especially if the rate of accidents goes way down and insurance rates plummet. The biggest losers from this technology could be the car companies themselves, selling fewer cars, and insurance companies charging lower premiums.
He picks up a stone tool that is already 25,000 years old, which he finds on top of the ground, lying at his feet. Yeah, that's bloody convincing. I'm always having to kick those damned ancient artifacts out of my way when I mow my lawn.
I'm not trying to kill the mood here, but I rate CSI at -zero- for Irrelevant. It's neither good nor bad, it's meaningless. Is the world any different after however many years of L.A. Law? Not that I've noticed. Same deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I should have said, "environmentalists whose basis is a sacred earth-spirit thing," because I know a whole lot of real people who do fit that stereotype to a tee. Maybe you've decided to stereotype me as a brainwashed fool for the same reason.
Maybe this is just a nitpick, but people tend to overestimate the importance of humans and our impact on the planet. The issue here is our own survival. The opening of the article lays it out plainly:
Global climate change is increasingly recognised as the key threat to the continued development - and even survival - of humanity.
Exactly. The Earth will go on spinning and evolving new land masses and creatures as it has done for billions of years, no matter what we do to it, short of actually blowing it to pieces. Even massive global nuclear contamination would fade away eventually, becoming a mere hiccup on a geological time scale. Our activities might destroy a lot of species in addition to ourselves, but in planetary history mass extinctions are routine non-events.
What motivates my concern is not that we need to preserve this or that for its own sake, but that we want to maintain a pleasant world to live in. For some people that might include spotted owls and obscure mud lizards, for others not. I think the environmental movement might get more attention from the people who make the decisions if they give up on the sacred earth-spirit thing and focus on the fact that nobody wants to think of their great grandchildren living in shelters and subsisting on hydroponic fungi.
Change the perceptions, and you'll go a long way toward improving the scores.
We just went through at least a decade of young nerds becoming millionnaires, and in a few cases billionnaires, yet it failed to change the perception beyond creating a short-lived geek-is-cool phenomenon. The marketing machinery that drives our culture as well as our economy has no problem with telling people to dress or act like nerds, truckers or anything else if it sells more stuff, but there's no short-term profit incentive to convince people to actually improve their minds.
a. Our teens lead the world in their knowledge of entertainment celebrities.
b. We have the most nuclear weapons.
I'm going to take an optimistic shot and say that in 10 years any visual or sound effect whatsoever will be possible and cheap. Independent filmmakers will be able to synthesize entire movies that look as good as anything from a studio. The cost of making movies will drop to the point where the movies themselves will no longer have to make money. They will merely be bait for marketing tie-ins. Studios will shift from making movies to buying the product rights to the work of promising independent directors. They might even realize that it is no longer worth waging war against technology to prevent "piracy," because free exposure means a bigger market for the toys, games, clothes, etc.
As an aside, it's worth noting that Hollywood has already proven its ability to reinvent itself. In the 80s the big studio production machines morphed into an army of specialized subcontractors that supply equipment, costumes, sets, casting, management, effects, etc. Studios tend to form temporary companies that hire dozens of these subs to work together on one movie and then disband.
It contains so many insightful points.
...
We haven't yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process.
"Cracked the code??" How about hiring more people instead of making your employees work 80-hour weeks?
Having a standardized technology approach will save us from having to re-invent the wheel over and over.
Or, you could hire more people instead of making your employees work 80-hour weeks.
We've started a Development Process Improvement Project to get smarter and improve efficiency.
Or, you could hire more people instead of
The award for management doublespeak goes to this paragraph:
We are looking at reclassifying some jobs to overtime eligible in the new Fiscal Year. We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies, the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer. We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.
It isn't that they don't want to pay overtime, they just think creative and skilled professionals relish the flexibility of being required to work 80 hours/week with no overtime.
My brain asplode. I feel truly sorry for anybody who thinks they have to work for EA.
Glad somebody commented on this. I'm not sure which is worse, the guy's belief that past failure implies future failure, or the silly smugness with which he preaches it.
It seems ironic and counterproductive to have a multimillion dollar industry grow up around something that should be illegal in the first place. We wouldn't think it was normal to have service companies routinely come around and patch bullet holes in our walls, paint over graffiti and haul away restroom waste dropped from airliners. If somebody defaces a big website it's a big deal. Why do we individually accept the time and expense of periodically de-vandalizing our computers?
Hiding behind obfuscated EULAs shouldn't work. Partly because it's an obvious abuse, and partly because nothing is done to verify that the person giving permission has any legal status. A great deal of spyware rides in on "free" games and other amusing things aimed at kids. How does a contract "signed" by a 10-year-old have legal weight? One argument is that the adult who lets the kid use the computer is responsible. But then why wouldn't that same reasoning apply if the kid merely borrowed the adult's pen?
Spyware distributors know they're doing something people don't want them to do, or they wouldn't go to such great lengths to disguise it. I personally think they're in the same category as people who hack into banking systems and should be treated accordingly.
Dr Spock? You're kidding, right?
Crash Test Cadaver Cleanup Technician.
Eeeewwwww.
Glad somebody mentioned that. I got bored with this SCO crap quite a while ago and have not been keeping up with it. Reading "SCO's intellectual property that is apparently present" made me wonder if they had actually proved any of their claims. But nothing in the article says so.
Presumably it's still just all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I was not shown licenses or other installation prompts for any of these programs, and I certainly didn't consent to their installation on my PC.
I would love to see somebody slap some criminal charges against the site owner. Hiding behind an obfuscated EULA is bad enough, but installing software without any permission whatsoever has to be illegal, doesn't it?
Or you could turn off history.
This is about labelling printouts, so that an individual document can be traced back to a printer, if necessary. There's a big difference between that and "tracking everything you print," which would imply spying on your printing activities.
In the old days police could often trace documents to individual typewriters because of small defects like nicked or misaligned characters. I have read that a similar technique even worked with some dot matrix printers. What modern printer manufacturers have done is to artificially create this same level of individuality. Nobody is "tracking everything you print." So how about we put away the foil hats and get upset about the truly bad stuff.
The whole "does it have a soul" crowd is going to get a rude awakening in the coming years, as the lines between human and non-human become fuzzier and fuzzier. The religious right definitely has a lot to fear from progress in genetics.
And yes, I think we can use them to test drugs and clean out sewer lines, since we use humans to do such things now.
Oh, you STREAM it. So things like StreamRipper will somehow become impossible?!
Earth to Harry Potter...
By limiting music sharing to streams in small groups, Felser said Grouper simply enables "private performances," which is protected by U.S. Copyright Law.
"We're not a public file-sharing network. What we offer is a way to connect to hard drives within a group in a safe, encrypted environment."
I will believe that this doubletalk will fly with the RIAA's and MPAA's lawyers when I see gas stations start giving away free cars.
You're looking at monorail systems the way 1950s visionaries imagined freeways, as vast stretches of asphalt with traffic flowing smoothly and efficiently at high speed. Reality rears its ugly head when the system gets popular. A maxxed out monorail system would be just as crowded as a maxxed out freeway.
A monorail system is itself a road, just a specialized type of road that requires specialized vehicles. The automated car approach says, instead of building a second road network that requires special cars, let's build only the special cars and put them on our existing road network. The advantages of an automated mass transit system like the one described in the article -- small, vehicles that can move fast without getting into accidents and can veer off the main drag with just a few passengers -- can be accomplished on existing roads if we get rid of human drivers.
This will be a political obstacle but I personally don't see it as a show-stopper. People still like to ride horses too, but they aren't allowed to do it on the freeway.
If you really want a double blind study mix Vladimir and Pepe Lopez Gold tequila.
This is Exactly why we should focus not on rail systems but on smart, self-driving cars that can drive on existing roads. There's no way rail of any kind can handle the volume of traffic in a spread out city the size of say Seattle. It might work fine in super-dense urban areas like New York, but in places where the terrain doesn't permit a simple wheel-spoke travel pattern in and out of the city you need roads.
Behold our modern IP warlords, staking out their territory, taxing us peasants for living on it and dictating how and when we can use it, hiring warriors to defend it against others, and all the while declaring that their property is sacred and their authority comes from God.
What the launch-it-to-the-sun philosophy has going for it is that it rightly assumes space transportation will get cheaper and easier in the future. Nuclear power itself could be the key to getting rid of the waste. For example, here is a detailed article about a rocket design using a Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactor engine that emits no radioactivity itself. [It's a 12-part article. Skip ahead to Part 6 if you just want to know how it works.]
The rocket he describes, based on the Saturn-V form factor, would be able to lift 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit. For comparison, the Space Shuttle carries 30 tons. Such a rocket, capable of hauling up an entire space hotel in one go, could easily carry along a few hundred pounds of encapsulated nuclear waste as incidental cargo on each trip. Once the stuff is in orbit we could periodically send bulk loads to the sun. There's always the possibility of something falling to Earth, but the author mentions that it would take many such incidents to equal the amount of nuclear material released into the atmosphere in a single 1950s bomb test.
Getting nuclear waste away from the planet is not an insurmountable problem, it's just an engineering project that eventually will be tackled and accomplished. Our storage goal should be merely to keep the stuff secure until then. Dreaming up ground storage schemes meant to last thousands and thousands of years is a big waste of effort.
The article focused only on the technology, but think about owning a self-driving car. When you get to work, why should it sit out in the parking lot all day when it could drive itself home and ferry the rest of the family around, then come pick you up? Most families could get rid of one of their cars. Leased auto-driving cars could take themselves out at night for fueling and scheduled maintenance. Taking it a step further, why I foresee a time when few people will actually own cars. Most of us will subscribe to services that maintain fleets of robo-cars, which we flag one down with our cell phones like cabs. If you take the paid driver out of the picture the scheme might be feasible. Especially if the rate of accidents goes way down and insurance rates plummet. The biggest losers from this technology could be the car companies themselves, selling fewer cars, and insurance companies charging lower premiums.
He picks up a stone tool that is already 25,000 years old, which he finds on top of the ground, lying at his feet. Yeah, that's bloody convincing. I'm always having to kick those damned ancient artifacts out of my way when I mow my lawn.
I'm not trying to kill the mood here, but I rate CSI at -zero- for Irrelevant. It's neither good nor bad, it's meaningless. Is the world any different after however many years of L.A. Law? Not that I've noticed. Same deal.
I think MEPIS Linux is like that.