Yamamoto is a veteran builder of lasers and atom smashers... He expects to beat 25 kilowatts by Christmas and double it early next year.
Chris Knight: "Just what is it you want, Jerry?" Jerry Hathaway: "I want 5 megawatts by mid-May." Chris Knight: "Jerry, and I'm only saying this because I care, there are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market now that are just as tasty as the real thing."
If Yamamoto doubles his output every 3 months he *will* get 5 megawatts by Christmas 2 years from now. Holy Crap!
The foregoing exchange was one of those interesting Slashdot arguments that someone invariably caps with a nitpick about grammar, spelling or phraseology. I'm one of those dolts who always thought "begs the question" was synonymous with "raises the question." After reading your page I'm afraid I still don't understand the correct usage. Do you mind giving an example?
Yes the headline and other aspects of the story are misleading, but look below the surface and you will see more. The crux of the dad's lawsuit is that he objects to his child merely being forced to hear the pledge, even if reciting it is voluntary. A ruling in his favor would amount to banning the pledge being conducted in an organized fashion in schools, as the article states. It wouldn't ban anyone individually saying the pledge whenever they want, but who does that?
I am an atheist myself and I'm raising my daughters to be atheists. I know they will eventually go their own ways, but I want them at least to have a healthy skepticism about unsubstantiated beliefs in general, and to recognize that religious beliefs in particular have a long history of inflicting conflict and suffering. I don't want them to have to hide from religion or pretend it doesn't exist. I want them to be able to hear two words in the pledge of allegiance and not feel uncomfortable about it. That's why I think the dad in this case is going in the wrong direction.
This ruling could have vast consequences in terms of how religion can or can't be talked about in school. Could different religious belief systems, or even the fact that they exist, be discussed in schools without infringing on the rights in question? I want religion to go away, but what I want is for people to reject it, not for the government to suppress it. The last thing I want is for religion to go underground and do its persecuted underdog routine, which it does very well.
It's kind of ironic that with an issue that hits so many people's hot buttons as this does, the hearing of the case depends on the details of one couple's divorce and child custody status. If the court refuses to hear the case because the dad has no legal standing to bring it on the kid's behalf, a huge segment of the general public will interpret that as a rejection of the claim itself, which will be completely wrong (but sort of typical of the way our system operates).
Been in the family the whole time. Still runs like new.
Oh, and I drag out a 1990 dot matrix printer once a year to print some 3-part forms for my daughters' school auction. They better graduate before the ribbon wears out.
I don't feel particularly comfortable about being watched and tracked by an invisible network. But I can't help looking at it in the same light as file-sharing. Just as that technology can't be stopped and will radically change life for copyright holders, neither can tracking technology be stopped, and likewise will it change life for "privacy rights holders." Whether we like it or not, other people eventually are going to be able to know where we are and what we are doing pretty much all the time. Maybe first the government, but eventually anybody who can plug the pieces together. Not because we let them but because they can.
The alternative to adjusting to a new level of privacy is to whine like the RIAA, and fight the same no-win battle. We've seen in the past that new technology tends to have many faces, and that not all of them are likable. But as we continue to push ahead into new territory I think we have to accept the demise of some aspects of life that we cherish. Instead of trying to stop the use of things like surveillance cams and RFID tags, it would be smarter in the long run to embrace these things and make sure everyone can do them as well as the government can.
Shadowlore, you are obviously a telemarketer afraid of losing your job. But the fact that other people are eating dinner while you are working doesn't mean they are living off the fruits of your labor or that you work harder than they do. It just means you work a shift that is deliberately set up to butt in on them after they've already done their own jobs and are relaxing on their own time.
As for taking the food out of your children's mouths, all I can say is this: There are other jobs that pay the same as telemarketing and require no more skills. Go get one. Now. Don't wait for axe to fall, or you will have to violate your own principles and live off the fruits of other people's labor.
The 50 million of us who signed up for the do-not-call list didn't have to be called at home and prodded to do it. We did it on our own time and initiative, and we meant it. So quit whining and deal with it.
No attacks until after the patch?
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
Something Ballmer said about halfway through his speech baffles me: "I think most people in this room probably understand that we've had very few attacks, very few exploits that actually preceded the patch."
Is he smoking a cheaper brand of crack now? Aren't Windows exploits a history of attacks followed by patches? Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not until a 3rd party has publicized the vulnerability (at the risk of getting DMCAstrated)?
Sometimes it's fun to read a technology article written by someone who has no clue. I especially liked the bits about the "spray of magic wellness molecules," and the researchers "demonstrating the technology device." Alas, I know and work with many people who already have their own personal scent bubbles.
Wow, Canopy sounds like another PanIP. "They've played this very cleverly." Yeah, hooray for them, for being clever little weasels and hiring top grade lawyers. That's what business is all about. Yay!
But anyway, any IP issues SCO may have had in the past are not relevant to their current legal claims, and won't deter them looking like asses making them. Companies don't worry about corporate image in the same way you and I might worry about our personal reputations. Businesses customers don't care much whether their suppliers are playing the good guys or the bad guys, and the consumer public's memory can be erased by time, advertising and low prices. Corporate image is just another asset, like landscaping. For "embarrassment" substitute "the cost of damage control."
A toy company called LeapFrog that makes talking books has filed a tactical lawsuit against Mattel for patent infringement. LeapFrog is a growing company that has rapidly climbed to third place in the toy industry behind Mattel and Hasbro. They're asking for an injunction against their biggest competitor, just in time for the Xmas toy-shopping season. This is so transparent you could put it in a bottle and call it vodka.
Is to look at it as a necessary evolutionary step. The patent system is broken, in fact the whole IP system is broken. It isn't going to be fixed smoothly and painlessly. It's going to be ripped out by the roots and replaced. But to make that process happen the system has to reach a breaking point in the public's tolerance.
The public is historically slow to act, and is never good at acting on obscure issues, as is the IP world for the most part. Some good things the file-sharing debacle has done are to educate a lot of ordinary people about intellectual property, to demonstrate their willingness to ignore IP laws they don't agree with, and to give people some actual experience breaking those laws and getting away with it. This is surprising and encouraging behavior for an American public that has successfully been dumbed down and convenience-addicted to the point of virtual sheephood.
But it's going to take a lot more pain to get people's butts off their comfy couches in the IP arena, to the point where politicians find their constituents threatening enough to start representing them again. That point is years away, and I want to live through it and into the next Golden Age. So for me, anything that pushes this process along is a good thing, in its own way.
Maybe this is a naive question, but I don't understand why the theft of some of the source code forces them to rewrite the game. Was the game going to be late anyway and this is just a handy excuse? Or am I just clueless?
Why should the content industry alone enjoy the privilege of dictating what customers can or can't do with products? If the principle of licensing vs purchasing succeeds with media, why not apply it to everything else? Shouldn't ANY manufacturer be able to license its products to you and forbid you sharing them with your neighbors?
Borrowing is a tremendous threat to our economy! Think of the jobs and profits that are lost because of lazy freeloaders who borrow things from other people instead of buying their own. We need legislation and technology NOW to stop this economy-sapping usage piracy.
Using RFID and mandatory net-enabled base stations installed in every home and vehicle, the location of all licensed products would be tracked constantly and violations reported instantly. Every product would essentially be under house arrest. You would have a day-use permit for anything you wanted to wear or carry with you. If you needed to take something somewhere for repair, you would temporarily transfer the license to an authorized service center. Violate your license and the rights police would swoop in and slap you with a fine.
More gasping and thrashing as the death throes of the recording industry continue... These inept attempts of the desperately greedy and self-important to maintain their obsolete roles are somewhere between amusing and pathetic.
Too bad they aren't as endearing as the penniless former aristocrats who were more or less kept as pets by the wealthy after World War One swept away most of the European monarchies. Watch for them in any old B&W movie that features millionaires and mansions. There's always a Count or a Baron or a Duchess at the dinner table. In a few years, after the recording industry is gone, maybe every fashionable Silcon Valley party will include a Geffen or a Rosen.
Short Answer: Because VoIP is only superficially like telephone service in the sense that people talk through it.
The purpose of regulating telephone companies was spelled out explicitly in the 1934 Communications Act, the year the FCC was created: "For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, nationwide, and worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."
The whole basis for regulation was to ensure that rural customers (and independent phone companies) would pay about the same for phone service as people who live in urban areas, where the service is cheaper to provide. Rather than let the actual cost of the service create vast differences in pricing, regulation ensures more even pricing. In exchange for submitting to regulation, phone companies were guaranteed a profit.
None of this applies to VoIP in any way, because it is not a basic telecommunications service. It's merely one of many services available through the Internet. Someone might make an argument that ISPs should be regulated, on the same principle as the Communications Act, but the differences between urban and rural service pricing would have to be a lot greater than they are. To single out VoIP makes no more sense than to regulate any other individual service available on the web.
I agree with you that equating "a massive computer mixup" with terrorism is stretching it, but I'm also getting tired of seeing the WTC be a benchmark of disaster. More than 3000 people got killed in the WTC, but in the 2 years since then drunk drivers have killed more than 10 times that many people. We've been tolerating that source of carnage for decades, so it's hard for me to see a single, Spielberg-scale event as the icon of death and national trauma (let alone a reason to jump up and spend 100 Billion dollars and burn down two countries).
This guy is just repeating the usual libertarian litany. Okay, yeeeee-haaaww for personal freedom, boooooo to big gubmint. Fine, but the only practical advice he offers is to obfuscate email addresses on the web. That may work for a while, but email harvesters are just going to get better and better at deciphering common obfuscations. It will get harder and harder to fool them. Why bother?
"We need an internet culture that encourages spam killers."
Dude, we already have that culture. More than fifty million people signed up for the National Do-Not-Call list. It's no stretch to figure out that most of those people probably feel pretty much the same about spam. Given that level of public sentiment, banning spam seems to me a very legitimate use of the legal system, not a trampling of our individual rights. Sure, some spammers will simply move offshore. Many already have. But criminalizing spam will force them to hide in places where their traffic will be easier to block, and creating risk for their ISPs will raise the cost of spam.
"It was a thought that came up a long time ago about almost a year ago, and it did not come from the Wachowskis, it actually came from inside the studio," says Veronica Kwan-Rubinek, president of international distribution at the studio.
People working for a major studio actually generated a creative thought.
The author does make a convincing case that this feature is there. But if I had ES5, I would want to do one of two things: either try to come up with a patch that disables the delete feature, or use it to delete es5.exe from as many other computers as I could before removing it from my own.
For me it's mostly the web (via Google) for news, events (tv, local movies and theater), recipes, how-to questions and random info. Kazaa for songs, BitTorrent for missed tv episodes, and FTP sites for Old Time Radio shows which I collect.
Notice that to find out if other people depend on the Internet for information, I post on Slashdot instead of bothering to ask my friends (which if I did do I would probably do through email). Is that irony or recursion?
At our house we call it "The source of all knowledge." Amazing! But I feel guilty not teaching my two daughters (9 and 12) what research the old fashioned way means. Only a small fraction of what has been written is online, and a lot of what is online is absolute crap. I'm not talking about pr0n, just unfiltered blathering by whoever. On the other hand, the difference in effort between typing a couple words into Google and going to the library is huge.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's an in-home "buy" button for the LabelGate service. Great. One more scheme to perpetuate the myth that record companies are still necessary.
On the positive side, one more potentially nifty piece of hackable home media center hardware that will be available cheap when it's discontinued.
Yamamoto is a veteran builder of lasers and atom smashers... He expects to beat 25 kilowatts by Christmas and double it early next year.
Chris Knight: "Just what is it you want, Jerry?"
Jerry Hathaway: "I want 5 megawatts by mid-May."
Chris Knight: "Jerry, and I'm only saying this because I care, there are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market now that are just as tasty as the real thing."
If Yamamoto doubles his output every 3 months he *will* get 5 megawatts by Christmas 2 years from now. Holy Crap!
The foregoing exchange was one of those interesting Slashdot arguments that someone invariably caps with a nitpick about grammar, spelling or phraseology. I'm one of those dolts who always thought "begs the question" was synonymous with "raises the question." After reading your page I'm afraid I still don't understand the correct usage. Do you mind giving an example?
Yes the headline and other aspects of the story are misleading, but look below the surface and you will see more. The crux of the dad's lawsuit is that he objects to his child merely being forced to hear the pledge, even if reciting it is voluntary. A ruling in his favor would amount to banning the pledge being conducted in an organized fashion in schools, as the article states. It wouldn't ban anyone individually saying the pledge whenever they want, but who does that?
I am an atheist myself and I'm raising my daughters to be atheists. I know they will eventually go their own ways, but I want them at least to have a healthy skepticism about unsubstantiated beliefs in general, and to recognize that religious beliefs in particular have a long history of inflicting conflict and suffering. I don't want them to have to hide from religion or pretend it doesn't exist. I want them to be able to hear two words in the pledge of allegiance and not feel uncomfortable about it. That's why I think the dad in this case is going in the wrong direction.
This ruling could have vast consequences in terms of how religion can or can't be talked about in school. Could different religious belief systems, or even the fact that they exist, be discussed in schools without infringing on the rights in question? I want religion to go away, but what I want is for people to reject it, not for the government to suppress it. The last thing I want is for religion to go underground and do its persecuted underdog routine, which it does very well.
It's kind of ironic that with an issue that hits so many people's hot buttons as this does, the hearing of the case depends on the details of one couple's divorce and child custody status. If the court refuses to hear the case because the dad has no legal standing to bring it on the kid's behalf, a huge segment of the general public will interpret that as a rejection of the claim itself, which will be completely wrong (but sort of typical of the way our system operates).
Been in the family the whole time. Still runs like new.
Oh, and I drag out a 1990 dot matrix printer once a year to print some 3-part forms for my daughters' school auction. They better graduate before the ribbon wears out.
I don't feel particularly comfortable about being watched and tracked by an invisible network. But I can't help looking at it in the same light as file-sharing. Just as that technology can't be stopped and will radically change life for copyright holders, neither can tracking technology be stopped, and likewise will it change life for "privacy rights holders." Whether we like it or not, other people eventually are going to be able to know where we are and what we are doing pretty much all the time. Maybe first the government, but eventually anybody who can plug the pieces together. Not because we let them but because they can.
The alternative to adjusting to a new level of privacy is to whine like the RIAA, and fight the same no-win battle. We've seen in the past that new technology tends to have many faces, and that not all of them are likable. But as we continue to push ahead into new territory I think we have to accept the demise of some aspects of life that we cherish. Instead of trying to stop the use of things like surveillance cams and RFID tags, it would be smarter in the long run to embrace these things and make sure everyone can do them as well as the government can.
Shadowlore, you are obviously a telemarketer afraid of losing your job. But the fact that other people are eating dinner while you are working doesn't mean they are living off the fruits of your labor or that you work harder than they do. It just means you work a shift that is deliberately set up to butt in on them after they've already done their own jobs and are relaxing on their own time.
As for taking the food out of your children's mouths, all I can say is this: There are other jobs that pay the same as telemarketing and require no more skills. Go get one. Now. Don't wait for axe to fall, or you will have to violate your own principles and live off the fruits of other people's labor.
The 50 million of us who signed up for the do-not-call list didn't have to be called at home and prodded to do it. We did it on our own time and initiative, and we meant it. So quit whining and deal with it.
Something Ballmer said about halfway through his speech baffles me: "I think most people in this room probably understand that we've had very few attacks, very few exploits that actually preceded the patch."
Is he smoking a cheaper brand of crack now? Aren't Windows exploits a history of attacks followed by patches? Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not until a 3rd party has publicized the vulnerability (at the risk of getting DMCAstrated)?
Sometimes it's fun to read a technology article written by someone who has no clue. I especially liked the bits about the "spray of magic wellness molecules," and the researchers "demonstrating the technology device." Alas, I know and work with many people who already have their own personal scent bubbles.
Wow, Canopy sounds like another PanIP. "They've played this very cleverly." Yeah, hooray for them, for being clever little weasels and hiring top grade lawyers. That's what business is all about. Yay!
But anyway, any IP issues SCO may have had in the past are not relevant to their current legal claims, and won't deter them looking like asses making them. Companies don't worry about corporate image in the same way you and I might worry about our personal reputations. Businesses customers don't care much whether their suppliers are playing the good guys or the bad guys, and the consumer public's memory can be erased by time, advertising and low prices. Corporate image is just another asset, like landscaping. For "embarrassment" substitute "the cost of damage control."
A toy company called LeapFrog that makes talking books has filed a
tactical lawsuit against Mattel for patent infringement. LeapFrog is a growing company that has rapidly climbed to third place in the toy industry behind Mattel and Hasbro. They're asking for an injunction against their biggest competitor, just in time for the Xmas toy-shopping season. This is so transparent you could put it in a bottle and call it vodka.
Is to look at it as a necessary evolutionary step. The patent system is broken, in fact the whole IP system is broken. It isn't going to be fixed smoothly and painlessly. It's going to be ripped out by the roots and replaced. But to make that process happen the system has to reach a breaking point in the public's tolerance.
The public is historically slow to act, and is never good at acting on obscure issues, as is the IP world for the most part. Some good things the file-sharing debacle has done are to educate a lot of ordinary people about intellectual property, to demonstrate their willingness to ignore IP laws they don't agree with, and to give people some actual experience breaking those laws and getting away with it. This is surprising and encouraging behavior for an American public that has successfully been dumbed down and convenience-addicted to the point of virtual sheephood.
But it's going to take a lot more pain to get people's butts off their comfy couches in the IP arena, to the point where politicians find their constituents threatening enough to start representing them again. That point is years away, and I want to live through it and into the next Golden Age. So for me, anything that pushes this process along is a good thing, in its own way.
Maybe this is a naive question, but I don't understand why the theft of some of the source code forces them to rewrite the game. Was the game going to be late anyway and this is just a handy excuse? Or am I just clueless?
A lot of what's on tv now is already "indistinguishable as actual channels."
Why should the content industry alone enjoy the privilege of dictating what customers can or can't do with products? If the principle of licensing vs purchasing succeeds with media, why not apply it to everything else? Shouldn't ANY manufacturer be able to license its products to you and forbid you sharing them with your neighbors?
Borrowing is a tremendous threat to our economy! Think of the jobs and profits that are lost because of lazy freeloaders who borrow things from other people instead of buying their own. We need legislation and technology NOW to stop this economy-sapping usage piracy.
Using RFID and mandatory net-enabled base stations installed in every home and vehicle, the location of all licensed products would be tracked constantly and violations reported instantly. Every product would essentially be under house arrest. You would have a day-use permit for anything you wanted to wear or carry with you. If you needed to take something somewhere for repair, you would temporarily transfer the license to an authorized service center. Violate your license and the rights police would swoop in and slap you with a fine.
Sounds like a great world to live in.
More gasping and thrashing as the death throes of the recording industry continue... These inept attempts of the desperately greedy and self-important to maintain their obsolete roles are somewhere between amusing and pathetic.
Too bad they aren't as endearing as the penniless former aristocrats who were more or less kept as pets by the wealthy after World War One swept away most of the European monarchies. Watch for them in any old B&W movie that features millionaires and mansions. There's always a Count or a Baron or a Duchess at the dinner table. In a few years, after the recording industry is gone, maybe every fashionable Silcon Valley party will include a Geffen or a Rosen.
Short Answer: Because VoIP is only superficially like telephone service in the sense that people talk through it.
The purpose of regulating telephone companies was spelled out explicitly in the 1934 Communications Act, the year the FCC was created:
"For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication
by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people
of the United States a rapid, efficient, nationwide, and worldwide wire and
radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."
The whole basis for regulation was to ensure that rural customers (and independent phone companies) would pay about the same for phone service as people who live in urban areas, where the service is cheaper to provide. Rather than let the actual cost of the service create vast differences in pricing, regulation ensures more even pricing. In exchange for submitting to regulation, phone companies were guaranteed a profit.
None of this applies to VoIP in any way, because it is not a basic telecommunications service. It's merely one of many services available through the Internet. Someone might make an argument that ISPs should be regulated, on the same principle as the Communications Act, but the differences between urban and rural service pricing would have to be a lot greater than they are. To single out VoIP makes no more sense than to regulate any other individual service available on the web.
I agree with you that equating "a massive computer mixup" with terrorism is stretching it, but I'm also getting tired of seeing the WTC be a benchmark of disaster. More than 3000 people got killed in the WTC, but in the 2 years since then drunk drivers have killed more than 10 times that many people. We've been tolerating that source of carnage for decades, so it's hard for me to see a single, Spielberg-scale event as the icon of death and national trauma (let alone a reason to jump up and spend 100 Billion dollars and burn down two countries).
This guy is just repeating the usual libertarian litany. Okay, yeeeee-haaaww for personal freedom, boooooo to big gubmint. Fine, but the only practical advice he offers is to obfuscate email addresses on the web. That may work for a while, but email harvesters are just going to get better and better at deciphering common obfuscations. It will get harder and harder to fool them. Why bother?
"We need an internet culture that encourages spam killers."
Dude, we already have that culture. More than fifty million people signed up for the National Do-Not-Call list. It's no stretch to figure out that most of those people probably feel pretty much the same about spam. Given that level of public sentiment, banning spam seems to me a very legitimate use of the legal system, not a trampling of our individual rights. Sure, some spammers will simply move offshore. Many already have. But criminalizing spam will force them to hide in places where their traffic will be easier to block, and creating risk for their ISPs will raise the cost of spam.
"It was a thought that came up a long time ago about almost a year ago, and it did not come from the Wachowskis, it actually came from inside the studio," says Veronica Kwan-Rubinek, president of international distribution at the studio.
People working for a major studio actually generated a creative thought.
Whoa.
The author does make a convincing case that this feature is there. But if I had ES5, I would want to do one of two things: either try to come up with a patch that disables the delete feature, or use it to delete es5.exe from as many other computers as I could before removing it from my own.
Another way of looking at it:
8 movies per month, chosen from the Netflix catalog of 15,000 titles: $20.
8 movies per month, chosen from Disney's catalog of 100 titles: more than $30.
Getting the Samsung box cheap after the service folds, and turning it into a home media system: Priceless.
They are mp3's ("threes").
For me it's mostly the web (via Google) for news, events (tv, local movies and theater), recipes, how-to questions and random info. Kazaa for songs, BitTorrent for missed tv episodes, and FTP sites for Old Time Radio shows which I collect.
Notice that to find out if other people depend on the Internet for information, I post on Slashdot instead of bothering to ask my friends (which if I did do I would probably do through email). Is that irony or recursion?
At our house we call it "The source of all knowledge." Amazing! But I feel guilty not teaching my two daughters (9 and 12) what research the old fashioned way means. Only a small fraction of what has been written is online, and a lot of what is online is absolute crap. I'm not talking about pr0n, just unfiltered blathering by whoever. On the other hand, the difference in effort between typing a couple words into Google and going to the library is huge.