dream:location-based information about the buildings you pass appears in front of you reality:ads for things you can buy in the buildings you pass appear in front of you
dream:a tiny red bullseye appeared to lead you to your vehicle reality:a tiny red bullseye appeared to remind you of the 20% off sale at your local Target store
... professionals who are competently performing their jobs.
Oh come on. Even the USPTO doesn't go out on their own initiative enforcing trademarks. Infringement claims are a civil matter between the trademark holder and the accused infringer, and are resolved by negotiation or in court, not by a passing government agent who sees a window display. Protecting the public from the dangers of trademark infringement at the local retail level has nothing to do with Homeland Security.
There has to be more to this story than we know from this article. It probably boils down to the misbehavior of a particular Homeland Security employee, for reasons we could only guess at. But it's definitely not a case of "professionals who are competently performing their jobs."
Can't spell Y A W N with big enough letters for this one. And imagine sitting through the endless meetings it took to make this completely, UTTERLY useless decision.
Google seems like a volcano about to erupt. Or maybe a sleeping tiger waking up. Whatever their plans are, I'm sure we will be in for quite a few changes in how we use the web, as well as and an entertaining show as the Empire panics and responds.
I repeat my earlier speculation that if Google releases its own Linux distro, with a custom desktop, integrated office suite and web functionality, they could end up Owning The World. Then maybe the sun would shine and the birds would sing, or would we all start hating Google and feeling sorry for MS?
I bought FIVE of them, $85 ea on EBay, including LAN dongle and new image. The tiny speakers are crap but have them hooked into stereos and boom boxes to stream mp3s from my main computer to different parts of the house (large house). My winter project is to learn enough QNX to make the Audreys work as speakerphones and an intercom system.
Interesting. I don't know what sample clearance or Sampling-Plus is. Janis Ian has some detailed essays about the workings of the business on her site. She writes her own songs, but says, "In 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money." Maybe she's been doing something wrong.
Thanks for posting the link to the Wired article. Interesting that she would ask the Oxford students if it pissed them off to have to give up the rights to whatever they create during their studies. Given that this is how the recording industry has been operating for the past century, I wonder where she was going with that.
Another great line: In order for artists to record music, she says, they - and record labels - have to make money.
Not true. Musicians make money by performing live, not by selling CDs. Record companies make money by selling CDs. This is something Hilary knows damn well. In standard recording contracts, the expenses of producing, manufacturing and distributing CDs are all deducted from the Musician's share of the profits, usually leaving ZERO. Musicians do get advances to make records, but that's how venture capital works in any industry. What they get out of CD sales is exposure, which translates to bigger and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether somebody pays for the CD or not, as long as they listen. Hilary know ALL of this.
She also probably knows that the recording industry's century-old business model of demanding all rights to songs in exchange for the publicity that record sales can generate, along with the remote chance of super-stardom, is not the only possible way for the music world to work. Musicians were around for a long time before Thomas Edison.
As recording equipment gets cheaper and Internet access becomes universal, savvy musicians are learning to promote themselves by distributing their music freely online. They can get exposure without giving away the future rights to use their songs in Pepsi commercials or whatever. The mechanisms for doing this have a long way to evolve, but they're coming. Superstardom might become a thing of the past, but it's always been a very low-odds carrot on a stick anyway. Most records flop, as the record company people always point out when they try to justify their own brand of piracy.
Anyway, I don't care whether Hilary Rosen is personally anti-filesharing, or what her personal views are on anything really. In the course of earning her $million+ salary she's done far greater damage to many more people than anybody ever did by sharing music files. The fact that what she does is legal doesn't change that. Hilary Rosen has led a destructive and wasteful life.
Don't flame me for saying the engine in the article is for in-orbit use only. That was based on the Wikipedia article.
The Pratt & Whitney engine looks like a very interesting concept, still underpowered compared to a gas core design but at least do-able right now. They talk about a 180 to 200+ day trip time to get to Mars. Gas core proponents think in terms of half that.
I think Gas Core is the way to go. As the article mentions, a solid core reactor engine is expected to have a specific impulse of only 800-900 seconds, compared with 1500-2000 for a Gas Core engine of the closed loop type (no radioactive emissions). This translates into heavy lifting capability. As the article says, the solid core engine weighs to much it is only useful for vehicles already in orbit, so it would have to be lifted up in pieces by other ships. For really grand-scale work, like putting factories and hotels into space and hauling significant loads to Mars in a reasonable time, we need the big kahuna lifting power of a gaseous core engine.
Here is a highly detailed 12-part article that discusses a Saturn-V size gas core rocket that would lift a payload of 1000 TONS from the ground to orbit and return with an equal payload to a powered landing. Skip the first 5 parts (author's justification of why to build it) if just want to know how it works.
Google has impressed me from the start with their ability to make the right moves. If they were to create their own Linux distro and go from there, I bet they could own the world in 5 years. Longhorn, schlonghorn.
Wow, that's a feature-packed and very useful sounding app! Web browsing, searching, e-mail and newsgroups tightly integrated in one UI. If I were a Google manager (assuming all this is true) I would make a point of calling this a true Internet Browser as opposed to mere web browsers, and promote it as the next step in the evolution of the net.
I love the legal two-steps people have to do nowadays to survive in any business that deals with entertainment content. Check out this defensive buck-pass attempt from Loudeye, when the RIAA was trying to light a fire under their butts:
"We provided content to MIT," Loudeye publicist Stan Raymond said. "We did not provide licenses for them to issue that content."
As in, "Yeah we rented them the car, but we didn't know they were gonna drive it." Do real people really say things like that, or will we one day wake up to find that the whole music copyright fight has been sort of a business version of professional wrestling?
At a place where I worked many years ago there was a funny incident involving a UPS. A car had crashed into a power pole one morning, taking down the company's VAXCluster for a day. The battery in the UPS was bad, or had not been checked or something, at any rate it didn't do its job, so the systems went down hard. Some update processes were running at the time, and some data got screwed up. The UPS would have been unable to keep the company going all day anyway even if it had worked. After a fairly painful data recovery effort, the Ops people decided to have a backup generator installed on the roof.
They scheduled an after-work demo for this new toy and some VPs showed up. Somebody threw a switch or pulled out a big plug or something, I really don't know what, to simulate a power failure. The UPS kicked in as planned, then the generator was supposed to start up. The clock ticked away. No sound from the roof. Wow, that new generator's quiet, isn't it. Isn't it? No. The generator didn't start, because nobody turned it on! They spent 10 minutes figuring this out. Meanwhile the UPS ran out of juice, and down went everything again. It wasn't a disaster this time, just highly embarrassing.
Moral: any power backup is only as good as its ON switch.
What made it funny was that this particular Ops staff was an especially officious bunch, who saw their role largely as protecting the company's valuable systems and data from irresponsible programmers who didn't understand change control. They wouldn't even take a form from your hand, you had to put it in their special in-basket, and they'd find something to do for a minute or two before picking it up and looking at it. It's always perversely amusing to see such hall-monitor types trip over their own shoelaces.
I don't like working for companies. I decided to work for myself instead. To make this personal decision work, I do some jobs for people who suck up bandwidth to annoy everybody with crap. To justify myself to myself I commit petty acts of sabotage, and have rationalized it all with a survival argument. So don't blame me, I have no choice.
Bull. Shit. I wouldn't say "get a job at a gas station" or something sillier, but I would say grow the hell up and accept responsibility for your personal decisions. Like somebody said above, nobody thinks they're bad. They always find a way to justify themselves. You're a classic case.
In my 25 years in IT, about half as a contractor and half as an employee, I've worked for plenty of places that were not run by greedy bastards who screwed me out of raises or made me work 80 hours a week, or any of the other complaints I hear constantly from my peers. I have worked for some crappy places too, and have had dream jobs pulled out from under me because somebody's plans changed. But my personal solution has always been to keep looking, and not to walk the fence of "I know I'm creating shit for other people to step in, but I just can't help it. I have to put food in my fridge. I'm trapped." Like many other talented people who cop out, it's your own version of reality that you've trapped yourself in.
Funny thing, if you put people's money into a pool, and a Central Committee doles it out and dictates what can and can't be done, we call it Socialized Medicine -- EVIL!! But if the people who dictate what can and can't be done also get to own the whole thing and rake off enough to get rich, we call it an Insurance Industry -- GOOD!!
Wow, all the right answers, just like a good little Republican./pat on head.
The fact that drug companies charge many times the price in the US for the same drugs they sell in Europe, doesn't make our health system cost more.
Neither does the fact that US insurance companies charge more and make more profit here than in Europe.
Neither does the fact that the FDA insulates American companies from competition by embargoing cheaper drugs and equipment for years after they are proven and used in Europe.
Nope, everybody knows it's lawyers, liberals and welfare mothers who make our system cost so much. But it's still the best in the world, as anybody who can afford really great insurance will tell you.
If a character or monster or another player (I've never played this particular game, excuse my ignorance) were to come at you swinging a sword, presumably you would react in character and fight back, run away, etc. But you wouldn't stand there and whine, "I paid my money to play this game and I don't expect my character to be physically attacked."
So when somebody verbally abuses your fantasy character, why not draw a weapon, say something like, "I'm no slave, take that back or stand and fight," and let the game proceed? Other like-minded players could join the fight on your side, and you might have a really interesting evening of role-playing rather than a group hissy fit.
The space elevator concept involves a ribbon of carbon nanotubes either bonded or woven together, so not quite as thin as a 1-atom sheet but pretty thin. Others are working on how to make long nanotubes for this purpose. The point of the Russian research seems to be the electrical properties. The article doesn't explain what they mean when they say the sheets are "strong." Probably strong considering it's only 1 atom thick, but not space elevator ribbon strong.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa, we got up on the wrong side of the bed today didn't we?
dream: location-based information about the buildings you pass appears in front of you
reality: ads for things you can buy in the buildings you pass appear in front of you
dream: a tiny red bullseye appeared to lead you to your vehicle
reality: a tiny red bullseye appeared to remind you of the 20% off sale at your local Target store
... professionals who are competently performing their jobs.
Oh come on. Even the USPTO doesn't go out on their own initiative enforcing trademarks. Infringement claims are a civil matter between the trademark holder and the accused infringer, and are resolved by negotiation or in court, not by a passing government agent who sees a window display. Protecting the public from the dangers of trademark infringement at the local retail level has nothing to do with Homeland Security.
There has to be more to this story than we know from this article. It probably boils down to the misbehavior of a particular Homeland Security employee, for reasons we could only guess at. But it's definitely not a case of "professionals who are competently performing their jobs."
I can't wait to read the response to his invitation.
...
...crickets chirping
...
...tumbleweed blows by
You mean the response to, "If you still hate Windows call us so we can keep working on you?"
It goes something like this:
Or, fill a paper bag with dog shit, light it on fire on someone's porch, ring their doorbell and run away.
Can't spell Y A W N with big enough letters for this one. And imagine sitting through the endless meetings it took to make this completely, UTTERLY useless decision.
... oh wait, this isn't Fark. My bad.
Google seems like a volcano about to erupt. Or maybe a sleeping tiger waking up. Whatever their plans are, I'm sure we will be in for quite a few changes in how we use the web, as well as and an entertaining show as the Empire panics and responds.
I repeat my earlier speculation that if Google releases its own Linux distro, with a custom desktop, integrated office suite and web functionality, they could end up Owning The World. Then maybe the sun would shine and the birds would sing, or would we all start hating Google and feeling sorry for MS?
I think you hit this nail exactly on the head.
I bought FIVE of them, $85 ea on EBay, including LAN dongle and new image. The tiny speakers are crap but have them hooked into stereos and boom boxes to stream mp3s from my main computer to different parts of the house (large house). My winter project is to learn enough QNX to make the Audreys work as speakerphones and an intercom system.
Interesting. I don't know what sample clearance or Sampling-Plus is. Janis Ian has some detailed essays about the workings of the business on her site. She writes her own songs, but says, "In 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money." Maybe she's been doing something wrong.
Thanks for posting the link to the Wired article. Interesting that she would ask the Oxford students if it pissed them off to have to give up the rights to whatever they create during their studies. Given that this is how the recording industry has been operating for the past century, I wonder where she was going with that.
Another great line: In order for artists to record music, she says, they - and record labels - have to make money.
Not true. Musicians make money by performing live, not by selling CDs. Record companies make money by selling CDs. This is something Hilary knows damn well. In standard recording contracts, the expenses of producing, manufacturing and distributing CDs are all deducted from the Musician's share of the profits, usually leaving ZERO. Musicians do get advances to make records, but that's how venture capital works in any industry. What they get out of CD sales is exposure, which translates to bigger and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether somebody pays for the CD or not, as long as they listen. Hilary know ALL of this.
She also probably knows that the recording industry's century-old business model of demanding all rights to songs in exchange for the publicity that record sales can generate, along with the remote chance of super-stardom, is not the only possible way for the music world to work. Musicians were around for a long time before Thomas Edison.
As recording equipment gets cheaper and Internet access becomes universal, savvy musicians are learning to promote themselves by distributing their music freely online. They can get exposure without giving away the future rights to use their songs in Pepsi commercials or whatever. The mechanisms for doing this have a long way to evolve, but they're coming. Superstardom might become a thing of the past, but it's always been a very low-odds carrot on a stick anyway. Most records flop, as the record company people always point out when they try to justify their own brand of piracy.
Anyway, I don't care whether Hilary Rosen is personally anti-filesharing, or what her personal views are on anything really. In the course of earning her $million+ salary she's done far greater damage to many more people than anybody ever did by sharing music files. The fact that what she does is legal doesn't change that. Hilary Rosen has led a destructive and wasteful life.
Don't flame me for saying the engine in the article is for in-orbit use only. That was based on the Wikipedia article.
The Pratt & Whitney engine looks like a very interesting concept, still underpowered compared to a gas core design but at least do-able right now. They talk about a 180 to 200+ day trip time to get to Mars. Gas core proponents think in terms of half that.
I think Gas Core is the way to go. As the article mentions, a solid core reactor engine is expected to have a specific impulse of only 800-900 seconds, compared with 1500-2000 for a Gas Core engine of the closed loop type (no radioactive emissions). This translates into heavy lifting capability. As the article says, the solid core engine weighs to much it is only useful for vehicles already in orbit, so it would have to be lifted up in pieces by other ships. For really grand-scale work, like putting factories and hotels into space and hauling significant loads to Mars in a reasonable time, we need the big kahuna lifting power of a gaseous core engine.
Here is a highly detailed 12-part article that discusses a Saturn-V size gas core rocket that would lift a payload of 1000 TONS from the ground to orbit and return with an equal payload to a powered landing. Skip the first 5 parts (author's justification of why to build it) if just want to know how it works.
Google has impressed me from the start with their ability to make the right moves. If they were to create their own Linux distro and go from there, I bet they could own the world in 5 years. Longhorn, schlonghorn.
Wow, that's a feature-packed and very useful sounding app! Web browsing, searching, e-mail and newsgroups tightly integrated in one UI. If I were a Google manager (assuming all this is true) I would make a point of calling this a true Internet Browser as opposed to mere web browsers, and promote it as the next step in the evolution of the net.
I love the legal two-steps people have to do nowadays to survive in any business that deals with entertainment content. Check out this defensive buck-pass attempt from Loudeye, when the RIAA was trying to light a fire under their butts:
"We provided content to MIT," Loudeye publicist Stan Raymond said. "We did not provide licenses for them to issue that content."
As in, "Yeah we rented them the car, but we didn't know they were gonna drive it." Do real people really say things like that, or will we one day wake up to find that the whole music copyright fight has been sort of a business version of professional wrestling?
I don't know, but maybe this explains why I keep hearing HBO since I had that crown put in.
At a place where I worked many years ago there was a funny incident involving a UPS. A car had crashed into a power pole one morning, taking down the company's VAXCluster for a day. The battery in the UPS was bad, or had not been checked or something, at any rate it didn't do its job, so the systems went down hard. Some update processes were running at the time, and some data got screwed up. The UPS would have been unable to keep the company going all day anyway even if it had worked. After a fairly painful data recovery effort, the Ops people decided to have a backup generator installed on the roof.
They scheduled an after-work demo for this new toy and some VPs showed up. Somebody threw a switch or pulled out a big plug or something, I really don't know what, to simulate a power failure. The UPS kicked in as planned, then the generator was supposed to start up. The clock ticked away. No sound from the roof. Wow, that new generator's quiet, isn't it. Isn't it? No. The generator didn't start, because nobody turned it on! They spent 10 minutes figuring this out. Meanwhile the UPS ran out of juice, and down went everything again. It wasn't a disaster this time, just highly embarrassing.
Moral: any power backup is only as good as its ON switch.
What made it funny was that this particular Ops staff was an especially officious bunch, who saw their role largely as protecting the company's valuable systems and data from irresponsible programmers who didn't understand change control. They wouldn't even take a form from your hand, you had to put it in their special in-basket, and they'd find something to do for a minute or two before picking it up and looking at it. It's always perversely amusing to see such hall-monitor types trip over their own shoelaces.
What your post boils down to:
I don't like working for companies.
I decided to work for myself instead.
To make this personal decision work, I do some jobs for people who suck up bandwidth to annoy everybody with crap.
To justify myself to myself I commit petty acts of sabotage, and have rationalized it all with a survival argument.
So don't blame me, I have no choice.
Bull. Shit. I wouldn't say "get a job at a gas station" or something sillier, but I would say grow the hell up and accept responsibility for your personal decisions. Like somebody said above, nobody thinks they're bad. They always find a way to justify themselves. You're a classic case.
In my 25 years in IT, about half as a contractor and half as an employee, I've worked for plenty of places that were not run by greedy bastards who screwed me out of raises or made me work 80 hours a week, or any of the other complaints I hear constantly from my peers. I have worked for some crappy places too, and have had dream jobs pulled out from under me because somebody's plans changed. But my personal solution has always been to keep looking, and not to walk the fence of "I know I'm creating shit for other people to step in, but I just can't help it. I have to put food in my fridge. I'm trapped." Like many other talented people who cop out, it's your own version of reality that you've trapped yourself in.
In the sense that kindergarten gets you closer to a Nobel Prize. But I wouldn't book a caterer for the reception just yet.
Funny thing, if you put people's money into a pool, and a Central Committee doles it out and dictates what can and can't be done, we call it Socialized Medicine -- EVIL!!
But if the people who dictate what can and can't be done also get to own the whole thing and rake off enough to get rich, we call it an Insurance Industry -- GOOD!!
Wow, all the right answers, just like a good little Republican. /pat on head.
The fact that drug companies charge many times the price in the US for the same drugs they sell in Europe, doesn't make our health system cost more.
Neither does the fact that US insurance companies charge more and make more profit here than in Europe.
Neither does the fact that the FDA insulates American companies from competition by embargoing cheaper drugs and equipment for years after they are proven and used in Europe.
Nope, everybody knows it's lawyers, liberals and welfare mothers who make our system cost so much. But it's still the best in the world, as anybody who can afford really great insurance will tell you.
If a character or monster or another player (I've never played this particular game, excuse my ignorance) were to come at you swinging a sword, presumably you would react in character and fight back, run away, etc. But you wouldn't stand there and whine, "I paid my money to play this game and I don't expect my character to be physically attacked."
So when somebody verbally abuses your fantasy character, why not draw a weapon, say something like, "I'm no slave, take that back or stand and fight," and let the game proceed? Other like-minded players could join the fight on your side, and you might have a really interesting evening of role-playing rather than a group hissy fit.
The space elevator concept involves a ribbon of carbon nanotubes either bonded or woven together, so not quite as thin as a 1-atom sheet but pretty thin. Others are working on how to make long nanotubes for this purpose. The point of the Russian research seems to be the electrical properties. The article doesn't explain what they mean when they say the sheets are "strong." Probably strong considering it's only 1 atom thick, but not space elevator ribbon strong.