I'm confused when I get modded a troll or flamebate when I'm being a little pessimistic based on reality and reason.
I guess the egg might be still too wet on NASA's face to bust them for wrecking stuff pretty regularly for the past 6 years or so.
NASA needs changing. I've been in a relationship with a PhD that worked at NASA for quite some time. I've been reading NASA publications like Spinoff since about 1977 or 1978. I've known plenty of people that work at NASA that are nervous every 5 to 7 years because they talk about doing massive center closings. I've been involved with research at NASA for a few years. 2 of my closest coworkers worked at NASA for a total of 20 years or so. In other words, I know a little about the agency, but am not as biased or blinded as a direct employee.
NASA needs to change. Their wrecking stuff is embarrassing. They used to be able to put people on the moon with slide rules and "computers" which were typically women that worked out math by long hand with redundancy and double checking conflicting answers. The Space Shuttle was a failure in every respect except some of it was able to be reused. However, the reuse had an unexpected side effect in that it prohibited progress that kept us using 1970s technology for a long time despite the progress in things like material science, chemistry, physics, CAD, and many, many orders of magnitude of computing progress vs doing calculations with slide rules and pencil and paper. They Space Shuttle was also a failure in that it was way too expensive, its cargo capacity was too small and not expandable.
How about space exploration that does not wreck or blow up?
That is a $50k one, not $75k or $400k.
How about either changing the name, or do something with the first 'A' of their name?
Here you go, how about ditching NASA and NSF and joining them?
NASA has turned into a poor version of an employment agency that mismanages contractors at an inflated salaries so that they can dump them easier than dumping a government employee proper. Honestly, this proposal of looking for "Geniuses" and "Visionaries" is similar to NSF grants, but NSF grants pay money. Any scientist or researcher would give NASA a $50k or $75k idea in exchange for a publication. Putting a $50k to $75k open invitation is going to cost much more reading the crap from dumbasses like me and every other dumbass that is looking to get rich off of top prizes from "legalized" gambling from the government.
No, I didn't RTFA. If I were a genius or visionary, I would apply for a job as an imagineer at Disney or a job at Pixar or one of the Lucas spinoff companies. Not for some lottery for a failing government agency.
Exactly, this story completely undermines the entire argument that the patent system somehow benefits small inventors--it doesn't.
SURE, this guy won in the end... AFTER 25 YEARS. How many countless other inventors have simply given up? Would this guy have been able to also patent new ideas or defend other contested patents during this time period?
I'm not sure what he "won". And this just reinforces the patent theory that the person with the most money wins all patent disagreements.
First, being that 8-tracks were introduced into cars in 1966 and not in home units until a year later, there was already a desire and some innovation in the portable music market at the time. This guy made is first walkman like thing in the late '60s to early '70s. To me, there is not too much of a difference between a self contained modular radio and tape player that works off of a battery in a car and plays on slightly larger speakers vs a more portable personal unit. Headphones already existed, the form factor was pretty much there, the media was there, and batteries were there.
I know this is anti-slashdot-groupthink, because this is a little guy who was "wronged" by the big guy and the system, but this is about some guy who was probably getting high, listening to music with his friends, and said, "Dude, it would be cool to be able to walk down the road outside and listen to music". The article does not mention that he ever made anything or had a prototype, but rather had an idea that he was unable to sell to a series of companies. He filed a patent, and got a TV job, and then went after a Japanese company that marked _and_ made the best portable models at a reasonable price. Sony started putting these out in '79, I got my first "walkman" that was GE I believe in '81, and it sucked compared to Sony models, but was cheaper.
Sony was the name in portable media playback and recording. They have always been big in the video and audio market, especially with enthusiasts and professionals. Look here for a late 70s cassette recorder http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sony-TC-153SD-pro-portable-c assette-recorder_W0QQitemZ7568330640QQcategoryZ211 45QQcmdZViewItem Look here for the Sony timeline of electronics http://www.sony.ca/sonyca/about_chronology.shtml For those that don't know, Sony portable cassette recorders and then DATs were the defacto standard for concert recordings for years because of their quality in terms of being rugged and fidelity. I can't tell you how many Grateful Dead recordings I have that were recorded on a Sony cassette recorder or a Sony DAT.
Personally, I don't think this guy deserves a dime for sitting at home thinking of a portable music player, any more than I should get paid for sitting here thinking of traveling of the speed of light or living on the Moon or Mars.
Patents basically mean nothing. If you don't make anything from your patent, you just suck and are inhibiting innovation and the proliferation of the idea into reality. If you do make something and have a patent on it, again you suck because you expect royalties from companies that are being competitive in terms of price for a known item that should be a commodity instead of a monopolized product See this url, http://www.symbol.com/products/barcode_scanners/ba rcode_handheld_ls_4000.html for a good example. Symbol has a patent for bar code readers _with a trigger_. Simply because they patented the obvious, you, me, and every business has to pay an inflated price to read UPC labels on products that are not easily brought up to the counter or for inventory purposes.
To me, intellectual property is no more property than talking shit when drunk or stoned. This guy had the "intellectual property" but could not "sell" it to anybody, nor did he manufacture, market, and sell the product on his own.
Women prance around almost naked in both TV and movies all the time. Nipples and boobs stand out way more than any guy's package.
But we can't see even an indirect indication of male genitals? What's the problem?
There are 2 things here.
1) Men and women are not particularly interested interested in looking at a soft dick. Men get excited to some degree seeing a woman naked or in a revealing outfit. I guess its because there is not too much difference between a woman physically between before after/during sex. Nothing as noticeable or physically significant as the difference between a hard and soft penis. Many women paint themselves to look more like they are having sex by adding blush to their cheeks and red lipstick to their lips.
2) Men are basically in charge of most everything, including movie production, and the quiet smart guy that is paying for or putting together a movie does not want any additional competition for sex by somebody that is already in the limelight. Also, many men for some reason are scared that another man is going to fuck them when they are not looking. This is something I simply do not understand, but homophobia is a pretty common psychological problem for men. Its at least common enough that my spell checker didn't question it.
Gotta remember that citizens of this country no longer are allowed legal representation or even to be charged for a crime to be detained for an indefinite period of time.
What good is "Fuck you, get a warrant" going to do in that situation?
I guess everybody is from another country in this thread. Who the fuck cares about an SSN when this guy was visited by the feds illegally for something as trivial as trying to read a book about an economic and governing system that is going away on its own.
I'm paranoid that I'm going to get a visit from the feds for some of the stuff I post here, and I don't really think its paranoia but rather a reality after hearing about citizens of this country being detained for years without even being charged with a crime, due process has been basically disappeared and fucktards are talking about SSNs.
Now I know why this shit is going on, people like it.
What about the fact that consumers are becomming sick of being treated as criminals...
Yeah, just yesterday at work I was calling customer support because I was having licensing problems with a piece of software, and I told the guy that I feel less like a criminal stealing software vs buying it.
Point: to make the GUI on windows servers optional.
Not that I like much of MS's junk, I've always thought that naming their OS something as common and obvious as "Windows" was dumb. They expanded this to include the name in things that made no sense like "Windows powered smartcards" which are very simple chips smaller than a penny that sit in a credit card.
Now even their servers named Windows might not even have "windows".
I used a Windows machine last night. Seemed so '90s.
Bush followed all the applicable laws, and members of congress knew about it. I don't see what the problem is.
Yeah, and Clinton didn't have "sexual relations" with an intern.
The problem lies with crap like the Constitution, due process, and all of that other silly stuff that keeps people "with nothing to hide" from being put in jail and/or killed, being searched (like we are talking about here), or having their property seized for doing the normal stuff that most people do.
If the 1 to 2% of the US population already controlled by the penal system isn't enough, maybe people without problems with government actions like this can volunteer for a free residence in a prison or gulag. I'll take my freedom elsewhere thank you very much.
Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
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Google to Buy Opera?
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... in part merely because they are Google. If Google puts out a product, it gets instant exposure to millions by word of mouth if it's good or interesting, which they've pretty much nailed each time. MS can only salivate at that kind of marketing capability.
Yes, Google puts out a product, and AFAIK they do no advertising. Not even hardly on their front page, but yet they get instant exposure to millions by word of mouth like the parent said.
Microsoft has a different mode of operation. I don't know the numbers, but I would assume that their OS products and office products sell most of their copies as bundles with new computers, _and_ through direct advertising, and some by word of mouth, but I'm guessing that most of that is confined to people in the industry (ie, geeks like us).
I know of no other product or service like Google that has the market penetration that they have with the basic absence of marketing. That is too cool.
Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
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Google to Buy Opera?
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Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
So far they are in pretty much different markets.
Microsoft has OSes, office/productivity applications, and video games.
Google is a service to both paying and nonpaying people alike. Advertisers seem to like them (customers). "Regular" people seem to like them (noncustomers). Google also has stuff like mentioned.
I'm not sure if I want Google to be the next Microsoft, any more than I want Microsoft to be the current Microsoft.
Let me know when it's legal to grab people on the street and inject them with chemicals to suggest irresistable urges to buying my company's project.
Been there, done that.
Smells have been used for years to inject chemicals to suggest irresistible urges. If thats not chemical injection, I don't know what is.
Of course other things like sights, sounds, and manipulation of hormones (sex) have been used, but its a little less "injectable" than smell.
I've always thought that smell was kind of an invasive sense. I can't turn it off or easily avoid it. The existence of the perception of smell is entirely from the injection of chemicals onto our nose. Taste is pretty much voluntary (painting with a roller or similar thing is an exception), but I cannot avoid somebody's body oder ("good" or "bad") or any other smell from entering my nose, and its not usually polite to comment on a "bad" smell. (Good vs bad smells are supposedly learned. Animals smell stuff all the time with no apparent judgment of good or bad, but rather just identification.)
For some strange reason, I like many "bad" smells. But there are others which I don't like. Many perfumes and hairsprays bother me. BO and other natural smells usually don't.
New technology being thought of in terms of how much you can make a child coerce its parent into buying cereal?
This has nothing to do with technology. Child product based advertising has been known for promoting things like nagging and other tricks to coerce parents to buy crap for them.
Actually, its been going on for so long that parents don't even need to be coerced, they will preemptively do things like buy TVs and DVD players for their kids rooms and all over their SUVs to shut them up, instigate their acquisition of ADD (an unsupported theory by yours truly), and otherwise pacify them.
Heck, now instead of installing the LCDs in the SUVs, they can just use the cereal box. Its portable, cheap, and can do the job (soon I presume).
It's just like referring to Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. as "web browsers" rather than "HTML viewers." One describes the function, the other describes the implementation
However, the "web browser" is what is displaying the RSS feeds (there is no other term for them AFAIK, and I have no clue what RSS stands for, nor do I use it, but I'm probably in the minority). "Web browsers" have done more than display HTML beginning with Mosaic (images, plugin stuff, javascript, CSS augmented HTML, DHTML and layers, etc.
Honestly, I'm not sure why the favicon.ico cannot be used, and the user can see the site's icon, and look at the rss: as an indicator that its an RSS feed vs html:, ftp:, mailto:, file:, or whatever else there is. Again, it may be my ignorance of the usage of RSS, but from what I've seen its a bunch of hyperlinked data much like a web page.
Microsoft have positioned Internet Explorer as a way of writing in-house applications for years.
IMHO, this is a poor excuse for MS to continue with IE. Their track record, especially with the extra features of their "in-house applications" sucks in terms of security. They were able to create a new programming language (C#) and a new application environment (.NET) with little to no headaches, what would creating a separate "in-house application client" (it could even be IE, without standard web access), and just adopt a standards compliant browser?
Web clients are a dime a dozen now a days, and the compatibility on different sites is becoming less and less of an issue (thankfully). I've never understood the added benefits of integrating a web browser into an operating system. I've heard almost weekly for years the detriments.
Honestly, most people will never notice or care if MS rebrands a standard browser. Throw an icon on the desktop that says something with "Internet" on it, and if it displays web pages and does not crash and does not damage the user's computer, who would complain?
The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports.
I'm not familiar with ebooks or similar, but I'm curious how much data can be stored on such a machine or how long the flash memory will last due to limitations on writing to the disk.
There are always networks and USB storage devices, which may be a solution.
Here is what will happen when those laptops hit the street of those impoverished nations:
First, 3rd world nations are not impoverished. They are very similar to uneducated rural people in more developed countries. They both typically depend on others for their livelihood by things like doing simple labor or simple agriculture, often for primary benefit of others.
4th world countries are impoverished.
1) They will be sold to local pawn shops or richer people for food, clothing or medical treatments that these people need more than this type of technology. 2) The ones that are used, will be used very little or mis-understood, because technology with out proper training is utter folley. 3) They will end up in secondary or used markets and provide litte to no benifit to those that have them due to the reasons listed above. sad but true
Nope. You underestimate people that are given basic forms of charity.
Look at the success of government subsidies in 1st world countries. None of these things become true, and more often than not, those people that receive subsidies quickly escape the dependance on them and "better themselves"./sarcasm
I would like to be more optimistic about helping others out, but everywhere I look there are two ends of the bell curve with most being at the middle. I guess the goal might be to shift the mean, median, and mode of the bell curve to a higher level, which seems to be happening anyway. I wish I could be more optimistic in general, but I tend to be more of a realist.
Guys, I'd wonder what are the ramifications if a company or organization actually murder a person? The chief executive goes to jail and that's it (like mafia)?
Its easy and common to knock off one person, its difficult to knock off multiple people that are affiliated with each other and get away with it.
can someone give me an example of a widget that is better in this way because being used to Apple's Dashboard widgets and using them many times every day it's hard for me to imagine why you would want them to be "...on the internet" except for their obviously patentable new nature
I'd like to know the inverse. What do the Apple widgets get you?
I have Tiger on a machine for about 6 months now, and I have used the widgets maybe a dozen times, most of which were trying to figure out what good they were, and I have yet to of seen their benefit.
A clock. A weather app (I personally use http://www.bainsware.com/sonofgrok/ because its just as fast and works on older releases of OS X), a calculator that I believe you cannot cut and paste the answers into another application (or easily see the application), etc.
I'm happy with many of Apple's innovations, but I don't see this as one of them. The dashboard thing is merely a bunch of applications that can be launched at one time via a mouse click or a keyboard key that are in some kind of weird MDI that does not interface with the rest of the OS, it runs all the time (does not appear to use too many resources though), and most all of the widgets are available as separate applications that do interface with the rest of the OS.
I'm not trying to complain just to complain, I'm just interested in what someone finds useful with dashboard. I personally don't know of anyone that is particularly impressed with it.
The law, of course, is about forcing someone to behave in a certain manner
In the US at least, the law is to control poor people and minorities through fear and incarceration and parole and probation. Unfortunately, sometimes others find themselves wrapped up in the system as well, but typically with enough money anybody can get off of any charge. I guess it could be characterized as forcing someone to behave in a certain manner, but the getting caught and punished part seems completely separate.
On a more optimistic look, we do have some laws, especially with businesses/corps that control them in terms like employment standards and environmental regulations. However, little else is done to force business or corporations to behave in a certain manner.
Dude, Wikiagra is for the neverending hardon due to a community of people contributing to the cause. All of the increase length and girth stuff is for suckers.
Its people like this that keeps my spam filter busy.
Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one can you go back to and correct?
Unfortunately, humans have selective memory and there will never be one version of a story. Everybody has experienced this to the "he said, she said" thing, to conspiracy theories, padded and/or disinformation from the government to the press, etc. (I bet you never read in a mainstream newspaper that Reagan was a crack dealer, right? And the government recently killed the king Crip.) Also, its a common saying with lawyers that an eye witness is the worst witness.
As if the past really existed anyway. It certainly does not exist anymore.
Contrary to popular belief, humans actually go through developmental changes over their lives, and these developments directly influence their ability to learn and reason.
A simple example that anybody can relate to is sex. Try to explain sex to a 7 or 8 year old. They don't have the hormones yet, and they simply do not "get it".
Another simple example is that humans do not "learn to walk". It happens as soon as they are strong enough and have the coordination to walk. Just like other animals. Some of which "learn to walk" within minutes of being born.
The children in the study were 3 to 4 years old. To summarize that period according to Piaget:
Preoperational Phase (2-4 years old) Increased use of verbal representation but speech is egocentric. The beginnings of symbolic rather than simple motor play. Transductive reasoning. Can think about something without the object being present by use of language.
Intuitive Phase (4-7 years years old) Speech becomes more social, less egocentric. The child has an intuitive grasp of logical concepts in some areas. However, there is still a tendency to focus attention on one aspect of an object while ignoring others. Concepts formed are crude and irreversible. Easy to believe in magical increase, decrease, disappearance. Reality not firm. Perceptions dominate judgment. In moral-ethical realm, the child is not able to show principles underlying best behavior. Rules of a game not develop, only uses simple do's and don'ts imposed by authority.
This agrees with the parent's assertion that, "In addition to that, human children are conditioned to do exactly what they're told. This will have an influence on things."
This is not to say that Piaget's theories are the end all be all, but I would imagine that no adult would disagree that there are at least some developmental effects on human reasoning. Personally, I can't believe that a spacial puzzle like this was given to 3 and 4 year olds, and reprinted in the New York Times, but oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused when I get modded a troll or flamebate when I'm being a little pessimistic based on reality and reason.
I guess the egg might be still too wet on NASA's face to bust them for wrecking stuff pretty regularly for the past 6 years or so.
NASA needs changing. I've been in a relationship with a PhD that worked at NASA for quite some time. I've been reading NASA publications like Spinoff since about 1977 or 1978. I've known plenty of people that work at NASA that are nervous every 5 to 7 years because they talk about doing massive center closings. I've been involved with research at NASA for a few years. 2 of my closest coworkers worked at NASA for a total of 20 years or so. In other words, I know a little about the agency, but am not as biased or blinded as a direct employee.
NASA needs to change. Their wrecking stuff is embarrassing. They used to be able to put people on the moon with slide rules and "computers" which were typically women that worked out math by long hand with redundancy and double checking conflicting answers. The Space Shuttle was a failure in every respect except some of it was able to be reused. However, the reuse had an unexpected side effect in that it prohibited progress that kept us using 1970s technology for a long time despite the progress in things like material science, chemistry, physics, CAD, and many, many orders of magnitude of computing progress vs doing calculations with slide rules and pencil and paper. They Space Shuttle was also a failure in that it was way too expensive, its cargo capacity was too small and not expandable.
I dunno.
How about space exploration that does not wreck or blow up?
That is a $50k one, not $75k or $400k.
How about either changing the name, or do something with the first 'A' of their name?
Here you go, how about ditching NASA and NSF and joining them?
NASA has turned into a poor version of an employment agency that mismanages contractors at an inflated salaries so that they can dump them easier than dumping a government employee proper. Honestly, this proposal of looking for "Geniuses" and "Visionaries" is similar to NSF grants, but NSF grants pay money. Any scientist or researcher would give NASA a $50k or $75k idea in exchange for a publication. Putting a $50k to $75k open invitation is going to cost much more reading the crap from dumbasses like me and every other dumbass that is looking to get rich off of top prizes from "legalized" gambling from the government.
No, I didn't RTFA. If I were a genius or visionary, I would apply for a job as an imagineer at Disney or a job at Pixar or one of the Lucas spinoff companies. Not for some lottery for a failing government agency.
Exactly, this story completely undermines the entire argument that the patent system somehow benefits small inventors--it doesn't.
c assette-recorder_W0QQitemZ7568330640QQcategoryZ211 45QQcmdZViewItem Look here for the Sony timeline of electronics http://www.sony.ca/sonyca/about_chronology.shtml For those that don't know, Sony portable cassette recorders and then DATs were the defacto standard for concert recordings for years because of their quality in terms of being rugged and fidelity. I can't tell you how many Grateful Dead recordings I have that were recorded on a Sony cassette recorder or a Sony DAT.
a rcode_handheld_ls_4000.html for a good example. Symbol has a patent for bar code readers _with a trigger_. Simply because they patented the obvious, you, me, and every business has to pay an inflated price to read UPC labels on products that are not easily brought up to the counter or for inventory purposes.
SURE, this guy won in the end... AFTER 25 YEARS. How many countless other inventors have simply given up? Would this guy have been able to also patent new ideas or defend other contested patents during this time period?
I'm not sure what he "won". And this just reinforces the patent theory that the person with the most money wins all patent disagreements.
First, being that 8-tracks were introduced into cars in 1966 and not in home units until a year later, there was already a desire and some innovation in the portable music market at the time. This guy made is first walkman like thing in the late '60s to early '70s. To me, there is not too much of a difference between a self contained modular radio and tape player that works off of a battery in a car and plays on slightly larger speakers vs a more portable personal unit. Headphones already existed, the form factor was pretty much there, the media was there, and batteries were there.
I know this is anti-slashdot-groupthink, because this is a little guy who was "wronged" by the big guy and the system, but this is about some guy who was probably getting high, listening to music with his friends, and said, "Dude, it would be cool to be able to walk down the road outside and listen to music". The article does not mention that he ever made anything or had a prototype, but rather had an idea that he was unable to sell to a series of companies. He filed a patent, and got a TV job, and then went after a Japanese company that marked _and_ made the best portable models at a reasonable price. Sony started putting these out in '79, I got my first "walkman" that was GE I believe in '81, and it sucked compared to Sony models, but was cheaper.
Sony was the name in portable media playback and recording. They have always been big in the video and audio market, especially with enthusiasts and professionals. Look here for a late 70s cassette recorder http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sony-TC-153SD-pro-portable-
Personally, I don't think this guy deserves a dime for sitting at home thinking of a portable music player, any more than I should get paid for sitting here thinking of traveling of the speed of light or living on the Moon or Mars.
Patents basically mean nothing. If you don't make anything from your patent, you just suck and are inhibiting innovation and the proliferation of the idea into reality. If you do make something and have a patent on it, again you suck because you expect royalties from companies that are being competitive in terms of price for a known item that should be a commodity instead of a monopolized product See this url, http://www.symbol.com/products/barcode_scanners/b
To me, intellectual property is no more property than talking shit when drunk or stoned. This guy had the "intellectual property" but could not "sell" it to anybody, nor did he manufacture, market, and sell the product on his own.
Am I the only one slightly pissed off by this?
Women prance around almost naked in both TV and movies all the time. Nipples and boobs stand out way more than any guy's package.
But we can't see even an indirect indication of male genitals? What's the problem?
There are 2 things here.
1) Men and women are not particularly interested interested in looking at a soft dick. Men get excited to some degree seeing a woman naked or in a revealing outfit. I guess its because there is not too much difference between a woman physically between before after/during sex. Nothing as noticeable or physically significant as the difference between a hard and soft penis. Many women paint themselves to look more like they are having sex by adding blush to their cheeks and red lipstick to their lips.
2) Men are basically in charge of most everything, including movie production, and the quiet smart guy that is paying for or putting together a movie does not want any additional competition for sex by somebody that is already in the limelight. Also, many men for some reason are scared that another man is going to fuck them when they are not looking. This is something I simply do not understand, but homophobia is a pretty common psychological problem for men. Its at least common enough that my spell checker didn't question it.
Gotta remember that citizens of this country no longer are allowed legal representation or even to be charged for a crime to be detained for an indefinite period of time.
What good is "Fuck you, get a warrant" going to do in that situation?
I guess everybody is from another country in this thread. Who the fuck cares about an SSN when this guy was visited by the feds illegally for something as trivial as trying to read a book about an economic and governing system that is going away on its own.
I'm paranoid that I'm going to get a visit from the feds for some of the stuff I post here, and I don't really think its paranoia but rather a reality after hearing about citizens of this country being detained for years without even being charged with a crime, due process has been basically disappeared and fucktards are talking about SSNs.
Now I know why this shit is going on, people like it.
What about the fact that consumers are becomming sick of being treated as criminals...
Yeah, just yesterday at work I was calling customer support because I was having licensing problems with a piece of software, and I told the guy that I feel less like a criminal stealing software vs buying it.
Point: to make the GUI on windows servers optional.
Not that I like much of MS's junk, I've always thought that naming their OS something as common and obvious as "Windows" was dumb. They expanded this to include the name in things that made no sense like "Windows powered smartcards" which are very simple chips smaller than a penny that sit in a credit card.
Now even their servers named Windows might not even have "windows".
I used a Windows machine last night. Seemed so '90s.
Bush followed all the applicable laws, and members of congress knew about it. I don't see what the problem is.
Yeah, and Clinton didn't have "sexual relations" with an intern.
The problem lies with crap like the Constitution, due process, and all of that other silly stuff that keeps people "with nothing to hide" from being put in jail and/or killed, being searched (like we are talking about here), or having their property seized for doing the normal stuff that most people do.
If the 1 to 2% of the US population already controlled by the penal system isn't enough, maybe people without problems with government actions like this can volunteer for a free residence in a prison or gulag. I'll take my freedom elsewhere thank you very much.
... in part merely because they are Google. If Google puts out a product, it gets instant exposure to millions by word of mouth if it's good or interesting, which they've pretty much nailed each time. MS can only salivate at that kind of marketing capability.
Yes, Google puts out a product, and AFAIK they do no advertising. Not even hardly on their front page, but yet they get instant exposure to millions by word of mouth like the parent said.
Microsoft has a different mode of operation. I don't know the numbers, but I would assume that their OS products and office products sell most of their copies as bundles with new computers, _and_ through direct advertising, and some by word of mouth, but I'm guessing that most of that is confined to people in the industry (ie, geeks like us).
I know of no other product or service like Google that has the market penetration that they have with the basic absence of marketing. That is too cool.
Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
So far they are in pretty much different markets.
Microsoft has OSes, office/productivity applications, and video games.
Google is a service to both paying and nonpaying people alike. Advertisers seem to like them (customers). "Regular" people seem to like them (noncustomers). Google also has stuff like mentioned.
I'm not sure if I want Google to be the next Microsoft, any more than I want Microsoft to be the current Microsoft.
My favorite thing about Slashdot is that the article summaries are so objective.
I can't begin to imagine why.
Let me know when it's legal to grab people on the street and inject them with chemicals to suggest irresistable urges to buying my company's project.
Been there, done that.
Smells have been used for years to inject chemicals to suggest irresistible urges. If thats not chemical injection, I don't know what is.
Of course other things like sights, sounds, and manipulation of hormones (sex) have been used, but its a little less "injectable" than smell.
I've always thought that smell was kind of an invasive sense. I can't turn it off or easily avoid it. The existence of the perception of smell is entirely from the injection of chemicals onto our nose. Taste is pretty much voluntary (painting with a roller or similar thing is an exception), but I cannot avoid somebody's body oder ("good" or "bad") or any other smell from entering my nose, and its not usually polite to comment on a "bad" smell. (Good vs bad smells are supposedly learned. Animals smell stuff all the time with no apparent judgment of good or bad, but rather just identification.)
For some strange reason, I like many "bad" smells. But there are others which I don't like. Many perfumes and hairsprays bother me. BO and other natural smells usually don't.
New technology being thought of in terms of how much you can make a child coerce its parent into buying cereal?
This has nothing to do with technology. Child product based advertising has been known for promoting things like nagging and other tricks to coerce parents to buy crap for them.
Actually, its been going on for so long that parents don't even need to be coerced, they will preemptively do things like buy TVs and DVD players for their kids rooms and all over their SUVs to shut them up, instigate their acquisition of ADD (an unsupported theory by yours truly), and otherwise pacify them.
Heck, now instead of installing the LCDs in the SUVs, they can just use the cereal box. Its portable, cheap, and can do the job (soon I presume).
It's just like referring to Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. as "web browsers" rather than "HTML viewers." One describes the function, the other describes the implementation
However, the "web browser" is what is displaying the RSS feeds (there is no other term for them AFAIK, and I have no clue what RSS stands for, nor do I use it, but I'm probably in the minority). "Web browsers" have done more than display HTML beginning with Mosaic (images, plugin stuff, javascript, CSS augmented HTML, DHTML and layers, etc.
Honestly, I'm not sure why the favicon.ico cannot be used, and the user can see the site's icon, and look at the rss: as an indicator that its an RSS feed vs html:, ftp:, mailto:, file:, or whatever else there is. Again, it may be my ignorance of the usage of RSS, but from what I've seen its a bunch of hyperlinked data much like a web page.
Microsoft have positioned Internet Explorer as a way of writing in-house applications for years.
IMHO, this is a poor excuse for MS to continue with IE. Their track record, especially with the extra features of their "in-house applications" sucks in terms of security. They were able to create a new programming language (C#) and a new application environment (.NET) with little to no headaches, what would creating a separate "in-house application client" (it could even be IE, without standard web access), and just adopt a standards compliant browser?
Web clients are a dime a dozen now a days, and the compatibility on different sites is becoming less and less of an issue (thankfully). I've never understood the added benefits of integrating a web browser into an operating system. I've heard almost weekly for years the detriments.
Honestly, most people will never notice or care if MS rebrands a standard browser. Throw an icon on the desktop that says something with "Internet" on it, and if it displays web pages and does not crash and does not damage the user's computer, who would complain?
In adidtion, many of the text books will be re-designed to work on this.
From http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html:
The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports.
I'm not familiar with ebooks or similar, but I'm curious how much data can be stored on such a machine or how long the flash memory will last due to limitations on writing to the disk.
There are always networks and USB storage devices, which may be a solution.
Here is what will happen when those laptops hit the street of those impoverished nations:
/sarcasm
First, 3rd world nations are not impoverished. They are very similar to uneducated rural people in more developed countries. They both typically depend on others for their livelihood by things like doing simple labor or simple agriculture, often for primary benefit of others.
4th world countries are impoverished.
1) They will be sold to local pawn shops or richer people for food, clothing or medical treatments that these people need more than this type of technology. 2) The ones that are used, will be used very little or mis-understood, because technology with out proper training is utter folley. 3) They will end up in secondary or used markets and provide litte to no benifit to those that have them due to the reasons listed above. sad but true
Nope. You underestimate people that are given basic forms of charity.
Look at the success of government subsidies in 1st world countries. None of these things become true, and more often than not, those people that receive subsidies quickly escape the dependance on them and "better themselves".
I would like to be more optimistic about helping others out, but everywhere I look there are two ends of the bell curve with most being at the middle. I guess the goal might be to shift the mean, median, and mode of the bell curve to a higher level, which seems to be happening anyway. I wish I could be more optimistic in general, but I tend to be more of a realist.
Guys, I'd wonder what are the ramifications if a company or organization actually murder a person? The chief executive goes to jail and that's it (like mafia)?
Its easy and common to knock off one person, its difficult to knock off multiple people that are affiliated with each other and get away with it.
can someone give me an example of a widget that is better in this way because being used to Apple's Dashboard widgets and using them many times every day it's hard for me to imagine why you would want them to be "...on the internet" except for their obviously patentable new nature
I'd like to know the inverse. What do the Apple widgets get you?
I have Tiger on a machine for about 6 months now, and I have used the widgets maybe a dozen times, most of which were trying to figure out what good they were, and I have yet to of seen their benefit.
A clock. A weather app (I personally use http://www.bainsware.com/sonofgrok/ because its just as fast and works on older releases of OS X), a calculator that I believe you cannot cut and paste the answers into another application (or easily see the application), etc.
I'm happy with many of Apple's innovations, but I don't see this as one of them. The dashboard thing is merely a bunch of applications that can be launched at one time via a mouse click or a keyboard key that are in some kind of weird MDI that does not interface with the rest of the OS, it runs all the time (does not appear to use too many resources though), and most all of the widgets are available as separate applications that do interface with the rest of the OS.
I'm not trying to complain just to complain, I'm just interested in what someone finds useful with dashboard. I personally don't know of anyone that is particularly impressed with it.
The law, of course, is about forcing someone to behave in a certain manner
In the US at least, the law is to control poor people and minorities through fear and incarceration and parole and probation. Unfortunately, sometimes others find themselves wrapped up in the system as well, but typically with enough money anybody can get off of any charge. I guess it could be characterized as forcing someone to behave in a certain manner, but the getting caught and punished part seems completely separate.
On a more optimistic look, we do have some laws, especially with businesses/corps that control them in terms like employment standards and environmental regulations. However, little else is done to force business or corporations to behave in a certain manner.
Use Wikiagra - increase length and girth
Dude, Wikiagra is for the neverending hardon due to a community of people contributing to the cause. All of the increase length and girth stuff is for suckers.
Its people like this that keeps my spam filter busy.
Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one can you go back to and correct?
Unfortunately, humans have selective memory and there will never be one version of a story. Everybody has experienced this to the "he said, she said" thing, to conspiracy theories, padded and/or disinformation from the government to the press, etc. (I bet you never read in a mainstream newspaper that Reagan was a crack dealer, right? And the government recently killed the king Crip.) Also, its a common saying with lawyers that an eye witness is the worst witness.
As if the past really existed anyway. It certainly does not exist anymore.
So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?
No, you need to spell it correctly to increase the accuracy.
Fsckin nubes.
Contrary to popular belief, humans actually go through developmental changes over their lives, and these developments directly influence their ability to learn and reason.
i aget.shtml.
A simple example that anybody can relate to is sex. Try to explain sex to a 7 or 8 year old. They don't have the hormones yet, and they simply do not "get it".
Another simple example is that humans do not "learn to walk". It happens as soon as they are strong enough and have the coordination to walk. Just like other animals. Some of which "learn to walk" within minutes of being born.
Piaget was a biologist, turned developmental psychologist. Take a look here http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/development/p
The children in the study were 3 to 4 years old. To summarize that period according to Piaget:
Preoperational Phase (2-4 years old) Increased use of verbal representation but speech is egocentric. The beginnings of symbolic rather than simple motor play. Transductive reasoning. Can think about something without the object being present by use of language.
Intuitive Phase (4-7 years years old) Speech becomes more social, less egocentric. The child has an intuitive grasp of logical concepts in some areas. However, there is still a tendency to focus attention on one aspect of an object while ignoring others. Concepts formed are crude and irreversible. Easy to believe in magical increase, decrease, disappearance. Reality not firm. Perceptions dominate judgment. In moral-ethical realm, the child is not able to show principles underlying best behavior. Rules of a game not develop, only uses simple do's and don'ts imposed by authority.
This agrees with the parent's assertion that, "In addition to that, human children are conditioned to do exactly what they're told. This will have an influence on things."
This is not to say that Piaget's theories are the end all be all, but I would imagine that no adult would disagree that there are at least some developmental effects on human reasoning. Personally, I can't believe that a spacial puzzle like this was given to 3 and 4 year olds, and reprinted in the New York Times, but oh well.