Please folks, read the damn article before you post. You just come off like idiots otherwise.
I read the damn article, and he sounds like a bullshitter to me.
Whenever I ask a businessman what his service cost and I get a lot of hee-hawing about how "it depends", red lights immediately start flashing.
So you get credit for content that you put online. Seriously people, how much content do I have that I created myself that anyone would want to see? Want some cool jpgs of my summer beach vacation? No, you want the lastest Quake demo. Guess what, Id has that online. If I want it, I'll go there to get it. The little game this guy is playing with "Mojo" was tried with the old BBS. People immediately slam the board with trash in order to get points to download the good stuff. This will be no different. People will flood the system with 3 gig files titled 'nakedgirl.mpg' in order to cash in. The people who download the file will be upset, but the perpetrators will be out cashing in their Mojo (remember the system doesn't know that 'nakedgirls.mpg' is an encrypted core dump, and you have to pay for what you download regardless).
And of course there is no incentive to put new content into the system. "Heh, people are nice and they'll pay me for my work, just because people are nice." Sounds like a road to the poor house for anyone that actually wants to make a living creating content.
No. This 'utopian vision' will fall flat on its face.
Whenever people can't think for themselves, they look to their political leaders to protect them. The politicos always see this as a chance to grab for power.
Case in point. Shyesters go around selling magical elixers that cure everything from snoring to herpes. Usually, the potions do more harm than good. Foolish people fall for the shenanigans time after time after time.
The super-amazing, ever-vigilent Congress comes to the rescue. Their solution? No one is allowed to sell anything as a drug that isn't approved by the FDA. The shyesters disappear, but as a side effect innovation is shot full of holes. If I am a cancer victim with 3 months to live, I have to find a way to Mexico in order to try a new experimental drug, since the FDA hasn't determined if the drug will kill me or not. The point isn't that the Mexican cure most likely will, but that the FDA now has the power to make the choice for me.
The better solultion, IMHO, would be for the FDA to have an approval process. No one be allowed to claim FDA Approval, with the approval signifying that the medicine has been proven to be safe and effective. Now, as soon as the shyester rolls in, you ask to see his seal of approval. When he can't produce it, you walk away. I still get to decide if the guy is legite, but I do have some authority from knowledgeable people to guide me.
Now we are saying the same thing about computer networks. Some people are misrepresenting themselves. Be on the lookout for politicos to pass laws that will limit our choice and freedoms while increasing their power in order to save us from these miscreants.
BTW, the shyesters are still in operation, despite the FDA. If in doubt, visit a health food store or your local gym and read the labels of some of products they sell.
You shield and direct the magnetic field such that it is flat, then you turn is sideways to the magnetic wind. Just as in sailing, instead of going straight out in front of the wind, you will tend to drift sideways. You can use this effect to decrease your orbital velocity and then let gravity pull you home.
I'd have to agree so much here. It's ridiculous how meaningless raw speed data is thrown about in this industry. For most sights, the ability to handle an astronomical number of hits doesn't really mean anything since they'll never see that sort of traffic. Other things are much more important.
First, ask your boss if your company realistically ever expects to get within more than a few percentage points of either supported hit rate. The idea here is that those numbers are meaningless.
Second, ask about failover support. With the cost of NT/IIS, you could afford another server to provide backup support.
Third, ask about reliability. The throughput of a computer is exactly 0 when it is rebooting, blue screening, or otherwise taking a break from reality.
Finally, if your boss insist that one small narrow view of the world is all that is necessary to make an important decision, then consider posting your resume on one of the many internet job sites. Your prospects look good in the current economy.
Bwhahahaha. You haven't been paying attention have you. It's nice that you could come visit us. Where is it you are from again?
Seriously though, patents gives more power to a small group of people who already have a lot of power, and keeps lawyers busy. This bill will have a VERY hard time getting through. Remember, most politicians are lawyers. There's nothing like expanding the market to guarantee yourself a job.
Ok, the Amazon 1-Click. What is the "analog-world" equivalent of one click? Is there is one...
Ever heard of a bar tab?
How about Priceline? Is there an "analog-world" equivalent? Not really...
All of those people in Middle Eastern countries and other places where haggling is a way of life will be suprised to hear this. Name your price is new?
Me: Hey bud, I'll give you $1500 for that bass boat.
Bud:Deal.
So far at least, virtual communities suggest a Middle Kingdom, existing somewhere in the middle between the utopian fantasies and Lockard's dismissive jeers.
With nearly all utopian fantasies and dismissive jeers. The never seem to be as good as the utopiast envision, but never as bad as the alarmist worry about. It's always a mediocre medium and humanity trudges on.
You know, I don't consider myself a sandal wearing tree-hugging nut, but I do really think it is stupid that environmentalism is considered radical. It really is dumb. Environmental soundness should not be percieved as radical, but should be the *default* modus operandi.
Unfortunately, common sense is often overruled in the average joe by a reaction to overbearing, sandal wearing, tree-hugging nuts in positions of power in our government. The radicals push to hard in one direction, declaring every piece of ground that has ever been rained on a 'wetland', for instance, or prosecuting an old farmer for killing a rat. Or banning deer hunting on federal lands so that the population spikes and disease and starvation set in to kill the deer. Or peoples private property are confiscated without renumeration in order to save the 'snail dart'.
These questionably overbearing examples bother the average joe gives the PR, everything-should-disposable shills an opening. The intelligent environmentalist are dismissed with the nuts and everyone's worse off.
The capitalist have determined that disposable is profitable. The population have determined that disposable is easy. The intelligent have determined that disposable is going to kill us all, but since they don't make a profit and half of them look and act crazy anyway, nobody is listening to them.
I had an email conversation about this exact problem with one of the editors last year sometime. The way I see it, many moderators don't have time to browse at -1 when there are 400 post. So they head to the story that was just submitted and only has 10 post.
My suggestion was to give the option to have Slashdot serve up a random subset of the stories when I have moderator points. I would then choose to de/promote the ones I was presented with.
The editors rejected the ideas, saying that it would break up the flow of the conversation, and that the current system works good enough.
The article says a wireless modem. You can read that as a $30/month subscription to a crappy 9.6Kbs connection.
It seems that all these companies can think of is a way to lock consumers into a ridiculous pay-me-for-a-year contract. I want a base station with all the connectivity options of a standard PC. I want 802.11 wireless networking in the pad and X windows or a functional replacement that would allow anyone to log in and get their personal desktop. NT doesn't cut it since it downloads and stores a bunch of crap on the client. I don't want to waste money on a HD, powerful processor, >4 Megs of memory. I just want to pay for the bare minimum of a remote "display", not a remote "PC".
Another story put the projected price of this thing at $1100(US). I can get last years laptop much cheaper than that, and have much more functionality. The point of cutting out the functionality is to get a lower price, so the Airboard doesn't cut it in this case.
Someone here is bound to have better insight than me. How much would it cost to design a display that has a 9 inch screen, 802.11 modem, minimal memory processor and ROM, and that boots off the network? The price for the first unit would have to include a wireless NIC for the base station PC. Could this design be open-sourced and built cheaply? Could a small office, around 2 to 10 people, benefit from a system with one central server and several portable, remote displays?
The army might be able to print a tank trak or cylinder head, but could they print a piston? The point being that the metallurgy of a piston is VERY different than a cylinder head or tank track.
Reproducing the shape and size of an object is not the same as reproducing the object (as Arthur Dent soon discovered about replicated tea). Things are made out of expensive/cheap/hard/soft/strong/weak materials, because it is a critical part of the design. Of course things could be redesigned to use the 128 materials that your printer contains.
On second thought, maybe I'm in the wrong industry...
And on Oct25 some guy says Ready,Set,Go, and on the 26th, 500,000 units are ready to ship?
They've probably go 2,000,000 sitting in a warehouse already. Like the Kernel said, "Never give them too much." (or something like that, I never was a big Elvis fan).
They were afraid of change alright -- a change from a fairly comfortable middle-class lifestyle, to that of working class.
Throughout history, revolutions tend to be brought on as the middle-class grows and starts to thirst for power. This makes sense, in that the lower-class is to beaten down to see the light and the upper class has enough control that no significant portion ever raises its head to see what else is in the world. But once the pressure is lifted a little they can see that there is an end to the tunnel.
The Luddites were led by fairly well-off leaders that feared for their position in the world. In that they are no different that todays Luddites.
Personally, I don't think it's such a bad thing. A lit resistance tends to focus the technophiles eyes on the social implications of what they're doing.
Why are the patches being rejected? Couldn't they be conditionally compiled in?
There is a patch out there that stores the computer's state to disk before shutdown and then give you an instant boot. My home machine is used that much, and my UPS needs repair. This patch would be useful for me, but I'd have to patch it in by hand and then I'd be out of sync with the official Mandrake kernel. That means I'd have to patch in security update by hand.
The problem is, this patch is as useless to Big Iron as support for 256GB of memory is to me (right now). But why can't both Big Blue and I have our way with conditional compiles? All it would take are a couple of more menu selections in xconfig.
Do you have more that 2G of memory?
Would you like instant-on?
Are you so blind as to idly click through anything that pops up on your screen?
Have you ever sat down and worked with a clueless newbie? My wife's neice just started college locally, and she wanted me to put a network card in her computer and her roomates (the college wanted $150 to do it.) They brought me their computers and network cards. I open the roomate's box, and there is a NIC staring at me. Booted it up, and there is an error message saying that the network card needed to be configured. The roomate didn't think she had a network card, even though the error message that she had been clicking on for months was telling her that it needed to be configured. So while I may read a message before clicking OK, most cluebies will not.
For me, next time I will check for the presence of a NIC when a cluebie brings me a computer to install a NIC. Don't know why I let this one catch me off guard.
Sometimes I would rather look at http://goatse.cx then read these inane posts.
Just another example of lock-in techniques from the monopolist. I get an offer for a free month of MSN, so I say, "Heh, it's free. Let's see why everyone trashes MSN so much." I install it, then everyone get a notice to change how they reach me.
Once I discover why everyone has been dissing the service, I have to either manually inform everyone that the previous message was bogus spam generated by MS crapware, that I was only testing out their service to see how bad it was, that it was so bad that I'll never use it again and that they should send emails to my real address, or I keep the service since that is how everyone knows how to reach me.
It's a testament to my cynicism that I believe most people would opt for the second choice.
Fill in a section of your resume in a misleading way just like sites do with meta tags.
I am familiar with programs written in Visual Basic, Java and C++. I have 10 years experience with languages that look like C#. I have extensive experience with embrace-and-extinquish architectures such as Microsoft's latest.NET architecture.
Salary Requirements: Competitive rate
You have to BS past HR.
Re:I like this show, but TLC never reruns it
on
More Junkyard Wars
·
· Score: 2
I agree. I thought satellite TV would be the answer for this. With 900 channels they could let me order Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and run one episode continuously for a week. I could watch it at my convience. I missed the episode in the first season where she fought the Master and died. Sort of leaves a hole in my life, you know. $20 for an episode is a little much. $2 to $5 would be acceptable. Even at this rate subscriptions would be much more valuable than just the revenue from advertisements. Of course, if the execs cared about improving the customers experience, we would have had text annotations in the CD format.
I also agree with JYW being a bit staged. Remember the amphibious vehicle episode. They were still plugging away and fixing up the next day. And in nearly every episode there was still someone welding/tying/painting while the commentater had called time and was explaining that there time was up. OTOH, if they didn't allow that last fixup, the show would be fairly boring.
Extremely bloated commercial software may contain full fledged flight simulators and pictures of the software designers. It is also suspected that some software may harbor dancing blue elephants.
Seriously folks, does it take 30Megs of software to read email. Not only is it likely that large software houses are cooperating with the US gov, it is probable.
I was working at an AT&T plant as a technician several years ago, and one of our projects was a device about the size of a Palm Pilot. You plug your handset into it, then plug it into your telephone. The person on the other end used a similar device, and with one button press you got instant voice encryption. We built hundreds. I tested a large portion personally. Then I personally helped tear them apart and install the clipper chip after the FEDS moved in. Funny, but we didn't build anymore after that.
We also built another telephone. It's the one that Harrison Ford uses on Air Force One. Not the little satellite phone, the big white desk phone. We had to count the ICs that did the cryptography for that every morning and evening. The phones had to stay under lock and key at all time. Not that it has any relevancy here, just to note that the FEDs will control cryptography and if you trust anything they approve of, you're going to be tracked.
What we are currently seeing is a situation that has never happened in the history of man.
The talking heads constantly bring us minute by minute tit-for-tat news of every misstep and foible of our leaders. And what, exactly, does the average citizen get to do about it? Absolutely nothing.
The eye tends to ignore static if favor of the quick moving bauble. By trying to satisfy the desire for 'news', we have 15 channels of gossip. The network execs don't care, it's cheap to produce, but the result is that it tends to get ignored over time.
This actually has little to do with the Internet, which only a small (but growing) portion of the population are really involved with other than looking up the next corporate offering. (Does cruising AOL to look at stocks really qualify as utilizing the Net to its fullest?) This has to do with people realizing that they are really only a small part of the universe that their small local problems are more important to them than national problems that they have no effect on.
the guy at the counter said, "We're giving these away in exchange for your name and address."
I gave my name and address. I was even truthful and gave my real name and address. The counter guys statement was a verbal contract and I was not required to sign anything.
BOOM. The deal is done. My state (NC) has not passed UCITA, so the software that is on a CD that will not see inside of my drive has a bogus EULA that means nothing.
Even if you got your CC at RadioShack, the DC letters are legal posturing that amounts to so much hot air.
Repeat it over and over, and shout it from the rooftop:
"A binding agreement other than provided in by common law requires a signature from both parties after ample opportunity to review it."
Some text hidden inside a box that can only be viewed under certain conditions after an item is bought and paid for does not qualify. Whether technically true or not, convince everyone you know that this is fact. Then we can watch CC and its ilk roll over and die.
Slashdot Mirror
Please folks, read the damn article before you post. You just come off like idiots otherwise.
I read the damn article, and he sounds like a bullshitter to me.
Whenever I ask a businessman what his service cost and I get a lot of hee-hawing about how "it depends", red lights immediately start flashing.
So you get credit for content that you put online. Seriously people, how much content do I have that I created myself that anyone would want to see? Want some cool jpgs of my summer beach vacation? No, you want the lastest Quake demo. Guess what, Id has that online. If I want it, I'll go there to get it. The little game this guy is playing with "Mojo" was tried with the old BBS. People immediately slam the board with trash in order to get points to download the good stuff. This will be no different. People will flood the system with 3 gig files titled 'nakedgirl.mpg' in order to cash in. The people who download the file will be upset, but the perpetrators will be out cashing in their Mojo (remember the system doesn't know that 'nakedgirls.mpg' is an encrypted core dump, and you have to pay for what you download regardless).
And of course there is no incentive to put new content into the system. "Heh, people are nice and they'll pay me for my work, just because people are nice." Sounds like a road to the poor house for anyone that actually wants to make a living creating content.
No. This 'utopian vision' will fall flat on its face.
the onslaught of bad laws.
Whenever people can't think for themselves, they look to their political leaders to protect them. The politicos always see this as a chance to grab for power.
Case in point. Shyesters go around selling magical elixers that cure everything from snoring to herpes. Usually, the potions do more harm than good. Foolish people fall for the shenanigans time after time after time.
The super-amazing, ever-vigilent Congress comes to the rescue. Their solution? No one is allowed to sell anything as a drug that isn't approved by the FDA. The shyesters disappear, but as a side effect innovation is shot full of holes. If I am a cancer victim with 3 months to live, I have to find a way to Mexico in order to try a new experimental drug, since the FDA hasn't determined if the drug will kill me or not. The point isn't that the Mexican cure most likely will, but that the FDA now has the power to make the choice for me.
The better solultion, IMHO, would be for the FDA to have an approval process. No one be allowed to claim FDA Approval, with the approval signifying that the medicine has been proven to be safe and effective. Now, as soon as the shyester rolls in, you ask to see his seal of approval. When he can't produce it, you walk away. I still get to decide if the guy is legite, but I do have some authority from knowledgeable people to guide me.
Now we are saying the same thing about computer networks. Some people are misrepresenting themselves. Be on the lookout for politicos to pass laws that will limit our choice and freedoms while increasing their power in order to save us from these miscreants.
BTW, the shyesters are still in operation, despite the FDA. If in doubt, visit a health food store or your local gym and read the labels of some of products they sell.
You shield and direct the magnetic field such that it is flat, then you turn is sideways to the magnetic wind. Just as in sailing, instead of going straight out in front of the wind, you will tend to drift sideways. You can use this effect to decrease your orbital velocity and then let gravity pull you home.
I'd have to agree so much here. It's ridiculous how meaningless raw speed data is thrown about in this industry. For most sights, the ability to handle an astronomical number of hits doesn't really mean anything since they'll never see that sort of traffic. Other things are much more important.
First, ask your boss if your company realistically ever expects to get within more than a few percentage points of either supported hit rate. The idea here is that those numbers are meaningless.
Second, ask about failover support. With the cost of NT/IIS, you could afford another server to provide backup support.
Third, ask about reliability. The throughput of a computer is exactly 0 when it is rebooting, blue screening, or otherwise taking a break from reality.
Finally, if your boss insist that one small narrow view of the world is all that is necessary to make an important decision, then consider posting your resume on one of the many internet job sites. Your prospects look good in the current economy.
I don't see how it could possibly *not* pass.
Bwhahahaha. You haven't been paying attention have you. It's nice that you could come visit us. Where is it you are from again?
Seriously though, patents gives more power to a small group of people who already have a lot of power, and keeps lawyers busy. This bill will have a VERY hard time getting through. Remember, most politicians are lawyers. There's nothing like expanding the market to guarantee yourself a job.
Ok, the Amazon 1-Click. What is the "analog-world" equivalent of one click? Is there is one...
Ever heard of a bar tab?
How about Priceline? Is there an "analog-world" equivalent? Not really...
All of those people in Middle Eastern countries and other places where haggling is a way of life will be suprised to hear this. Name your price is new?
Me: Hey bud, I'll give you $1500 for that bass boat.
Bud:Deal.
So far at least, virtual communities suggest a Middle Kingdom, existing somewhere in the middle between the utopian fantasies and Lockard's dismissive jeers.
With nearly all utopian fantasies and dismissive jeers. The never seem to be as good as the utopiast envision, but never as bad as the alarmist worry about. It's always a mediocre medium and humanity trudges on.
You know, I don't consider myself a sandal wearing tree-hugging nut, but I do really think it is stupid that environmentalism is considered radical. It really is dumb. Environmental soundness should not be percieved as radical, but should be the *default* modus operandi.
Unfortunately, common sense is often overruled in the average joe by a reaction to overbearing, sandal wearing, tree-hugging nuts in positions of power in our government. The radicals push to hard in one direction, declaring every piece of ground that has ever been rained on a 'wetland', for instance, or prosecuting an old farmer for killing a rat. Or banning deer hunting on federal lands so that the population spikes and disease and starvation set in to kill the deer. Or peoples private property are confiscated without renumeration in order to save the 'snail dart'.
These questionably overbearing examples bother the average joe gives the PR, everything-should-disposable shills an opening. The intelligent environmentalist are dismissed with the nuts and everyone's worse off.
The capitalist have determined that disposable is profitable. The population have determined that disposable is easy. The intelligent have determined that disposable is going to kill us all, but since they don't make a profit and half of them look and act crazy anyway, nobody is listening to them.
is that no one makes what I really want, a wireless X display terminal in the $300 dollar range.
Otherwise, will this list be comprised of anything other than the latest electronic gee-gaw from the mega-corps?
I had an email conversation about this exact problem with one of the editors last year sometime. The way I see it, many moderators don't have time to browse at -1 when there are 400 post. So they head to the story that was just submitted and only has 10 post.
My suggestion was to give the option to have Slashdot serve up a random subset of the stories when I have moderator points. I would then choose to de/promote the ones I was presented with.
The editors rejected the ideas, saying that it would break up the flow of the conversation, and that the current system works good enough.
The article says a wireless modem. You can read that as a $30/month subscription to a crappy 9.6Kbs connection.
It seems that all these companies can think of is a way to lock consumers into a ridiculous pay-me-for-a-year contract. I want a base station with all the connectivity options of a standard PC. I want 802.11 wireless networking in the pad and X windows or a functional replacement that would allow anyone to log in and get their personal desktop. NT doesn't cut it since it downloads and stores a bunch of crap on the client. I don't want to waste money on a HD, powerful processor, >4 Megs of memory. I just want to pay for the bare minimum of a remote "display", not a remote "PC".
Another story put the projected price of this thing at $1100(US). I can get last years laptop much cheaper than that, and have much more functionality. The point of cutting out the functionality is to get a lower price, so the Airboard doesn't cut it in this case.
Someone here is bound to have better insight than me. How much would it cost to design a display that has a 9 inch screen, 802.11 modem, minimal memory processor and ROM, and that boots off the network? The price for the first unit would have to include a wireless NIC for the base station PC. Could this design be open-sourced and built cheaply? Could a small office, around 2 to 10 people, benefit from a system with one central server and several portable, remote displays?
I'm trying to hire Router engineers and UNIX hacks, and there is a real genuine shortage out there.
Where is it and what is it paying? Now, put up or shut up.
The army might be able to print a tank trak or cylinder head, but could they print a piston? The point being that the metallurgy of a piston is VERY different than a cylinder head or tank track.
Reproducing the shape and size of an object is not the same as reproducing the object (as Arthur Dent soon discovered about replicated tea). Things are made out of expensive/cheap/hard/soft/strong/weak materials, because it is a critical part of the design. Of course things could be redesigned to use the 128 materials that your printer contains.
On second thought, maybe I'm in the wrong industry...
And on Oct25 some guy says Ready,Set,Go, and on the 26th, 500,000 units are ready to ship?
They've probably go 2,000,000 sitting in a warehouse already. Like the Kernel said, "Never give them too much." (or something like that, I never was a big Elvis fan).
I will always love, honor and respect my high school wrestling coach for the greatest wisdom ever imparted to me:
"If that is the worst problem you ever have, you will be a lucky person."
They were afraid of change alright -- a change from a fairly comfortable middle-class lifestyle, to that of working class.
Throughout history, revolutions tend to be brought on as the middle-class grows and starts to thirst for power. This makes sense, in that the lower-class is to beaten down to see the light and the upper class has enough control that no significant portion ever raises its head to see what else is in the world. But once the pressure is lifted a little they can see that there is an end to the tunnel.
The Luddites were led by fairly well-off leaders that feared for their position in the world. In that they are no different that todays Luddites.
Personally, I don't think it's such a bad thing. A lit resistance tends to focus the technophiles eyes on the social implications of what they're doing.
Why are the patches being rejected? Couldn't they be conditionally compiled in?
There is a patch out there that stores the computer's state to disk before shutdown and then give you an instant boot. My home machine is used that much, and my UPS needs repair. This patch would be useful for me, but I'd have to patch it in by hand and then I'd be out of sync with the official Mandrake kernel. That means I'd have to patch in security update by hand.
The problem is, this patch is as useless to Big Iron as support for 256GB of memory is to me (right now). But why can't both Big Blue and I have our way with conditional compiles? All it would take are a couple of more menu selections in xconfig.
Do you have more that 2G of memory?
Would you like instant-on?
Are you so blind as to idly click through anything that pops up on your screen?
Have you ever sat down and worked with a clueless newbie? My wife's neice just started college locally, and she wanted me to put a network card in her computer and her roomates (the college wanted $150 to do it.) They brought me their computers and network cards. I open the roomate's box, and there is a NIC staring at me. Booted it up, and there is an error message saying that the network card needed to be configured. The roomate didn't think she had a network card, even though the error message that she had been clicking on for months was telling her that it needed to be configured. So while I may read a message before clicking OK, most cluebies will not.
For me, next time I will check for the presence of a NIC when a cluebie brings me a computer to install a NIC. Don't know why I let this one catch me off guard.
Sometimes I would rather look at http://goatse.cx then read these inane posts.
So don't. Bye.
Just another example of lock-in techniques from the monopolist. I get an offer for a free month of MSN, so I say, "Heh, it's free. Let's see why everyone trashes MSN so much." I install it, then everyone get a notice to change how they reach me.
Once I discover why everyone has been dissing the service, I have to either manually inform everyone that the previous message was bogus spam generated by MS crapware, that I was only testing out their service to see how bad it was, that it was so bad that I'll never use it again and that they should send emails to my real address, or I keep the service since that is how everyone knows how to reach me.
It's a testament to my cynicism that I believe most people would opt for the second choice.
I new way to play Buzzword Bingo.
.NET architecture.
Fill in a section of your resume in a misleading way just like sites do with meta tags.
I am familiar with programs written in Visual Basic, Java and C++. I have 10 years experience with languages that look like C#. I have extensive experience with embrace-and-extinquish architectures such as Microsoft's latest
Salary Requirements: Competitive rate
You have to BS past HR.
I agree. I thought satellite TV would be the answer for this. With 900 channels they could let me order Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and run one episode continuously for a week. I could watch it at my convience. I missed the episode in the first season where she fought the Master and died. Sort of leaves a hole in my life, you know. $20 for an episode is a little much. $2 to $5 would be acceptable. Even at this rate subscriptions would be much more valuable than just the revenue from advertisements. Of course, if the execs cared about improving the customers experience, we would have had text annotations in the CD format.
I also agree with JYW being a bit staged. Remember the amphibious vehicle episode. They were still plugging away and fixing up the next day. And in nearly every episode there was still someone welding/tying/painting while the commentater had called time and was explaining that there time was up. OTOH, if they didn't allow that last fixup, the show would be fairly boring.
Extremely bloated commercial software may contain full fledged flight simulators and pictures of the software designers. It is also suspected that some software may harbor dancing blue elephants.
Seriously folks, does it take 30Megs of software to read email. Not only is it likely that large software houses are cooperating with the US gov, it is probable.
I was working at an AT&T plant as a technician several years ago, and one of our projects was a device about the size of a Palm Pilot. You plug your handset into it, then plug it into your telephone. The person on the other end used a similar device, and with one button press you got instant voice encryption. We built hundreds. I tested a large portion personally. Then I personally helped tear them apart and install the clipper chip after the FEDS moved in. Funny, but we didn't build anymore after that.
We also built another telephone. It's the one that Harrison Ford uses on Air Force One. Not the little satellite phone, the big white desk phone. We had to count the ICs that did the cryptography for that every morning and evening. The phones had to stay under lock and key at all time. Not that it has any relevancy here, just to note that the FEDs will control cryptography and if you trust anything they approve of, you're going to be tracked.
What we are currently seeing is a situation that has never happened in the history of man.
The talking heads constantly bring us minute by minute tit-for-tat news of every misstep and foible of our leaders. And what, exactly, does the average citizen get to do about it? Absolutely nothing.
The eye tends to ignore static if favor of the quick moving bauble. By trying to satisfy the desire for 'news', we have 15 channels of gossip. The network execs don't care, it's cheap to produce, but the result is that it tends to get ignored over time.
This actually has little to do with the Internet, which only a small (but growing) portion of the population are really involved with other than looking up the next corporate offering. (Does cruising AOL to look at stocks really qualify as utilizing the Net to its fullest?) This has to do with people realizing that they are really only a small part of the universe that their small local problems are more important to them than national problems that they have no effect on.
the guy at the counter said, "We're giving these away in exchange for your name and address."
I gave my name and address. I was even truthful and gave my real name and address. The counter guys statement was a verbal contract and I was not required to sign anything.
BOOM. The deal is done. My state (NC) has not passed UCITA, so the software that is on a CD that will not see inside of my drive has a bogus EULA that means nothing.
Even if you got your CC at RadioShack, the DC letters are legal posturing that amounts to so much hot air.
Repeat it over and over, and shout it from the rooftop:
"A binding agreement other than provided in by common law requires a signature from both parties after ample opportunity to review it."
Some text hidden inside a box that can only be viewed under certain conditions after an item is bought and paid for does not qualify. Whether technically true or not, convince everyone you know that this is fact. Then we can watch CC and its ilk roll over and die.
Down on the corner,
Out in the street,
Billy and the Poor Boys are playin',
Ringin' nickels at their feet.