That is a great idea; my brother (who has his own [very] small indie label) has repeatedly looked into finding the kind of support you're talking about. The RIAA is definitely NOT looking out for his interests, nor does he want to have anything to do with supporting them / being endorsed by them.
And yes, looking at his record, Orrin Hatch is either (1) a complete tool (in the best sense of the word) or (2) completely disingenuous - ah, screw it, he's probably both!
"Here are short profiles of the three most important voting-systems companies in the United States:
ELECTION SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE
By far the largest vote-counting company in the United States, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Neb., was founded in 1980 by brothers Todd and Bob Urosevich. According to internet journalist Bev Harris of Talion.com, the company, originally known as American Information Systems, was controlled in the 1980s by the hard-right, fundamentalist-leaning Ahmanson family of California, heirs to the Home Savings of America fortune. In the nineties, the company could boast future U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) as its chairman; Hagel still owns stock in the McCarthy Group, which currently has a stake in ES&S. Since ES&S enjoys an exclusive contract with the state of Nebraska and counts 80 percent of the state's votes (the rest are hand-counted), Hagel is effectively part owner of the firm responsible for counting his own votes.
ES&S has been involved in voting-related scandals across the country, particularly in the South. In April 2002, Arkansas secretary of state Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks in voting-machine scandals, part of which involved Business Records Corp. (BRC), now merged into ES&S. A BRC executive, Tom Eschberger, accepted immunity from prosecution in return for cooperating in the investigation, and has since become a Vice President of ES&S.
According to The Tallahassee Democrat, Sandra Mortham, Florida's top election official from 1995 to 1999, lobbies for both ES&S and the Florida Association of Counties, which endorsed ES&S in return for a commission. Mortham herself received commissions for ES&S touch-screen machines purchased by Florida counties (see "The Re-Election of Jim Crow," Southern Exposure Election 2002 Special Edition).
In another revolving-door scandal, the state of California has begun an investigation into Louis Dedier, the state's director of voting systems. Dedier accepted a job with ES&S, then made recommendations without disclosing the potential conflict of interest.
Breakdowns and other problems have plagued ES&S machines since at least the late 1990s. When the company's new ballot-reading machines malfunctioned in Hawaii in 1998, Tom Eschberger admitted there were difficulties, but protested to the Honolulu Star Bulletin that "in all fairness, there were 7,000 machines in Venezuela and 500 machines in Dallas that did not have problems." However, during that same election season, the Dallas devices initially failed to count 41,000 votes. And two years later, massive breakdowns and technical difficulties with ES&S systems rocked the Venezuelan national elections, causing the vote to be suspended. Pres. Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan election officials accused the company of "trying to destabilize the country's electoral process," while protesters chanted "Gringos go home!" at ES&S technicians.
ES&S-related problems continued in 2002, as Bev Harris has documented:
In the primaries, Union County, Florida, used ES&S machines for the first time. According to The Bradenton Herald, under old methods of hand counting, election workers usually finished tallying the county's votes by the end of the day. This time, when a programming error corrupted the machine count, officials had to resort to the old method. Altogether the process took more than twice as long as manual counting.
During early voting in Dallas County, Texas, voters complained that ES&S touch-screen devices were recording Democratic votes as votes for Republicans. Similar problems were reported in Florida.
Twenty percent of ES&S machines in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, malfunctioned on election day. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate, the state committee that chose ES&S ignored the wishes of local officials
Honestly, just installed Fedora Core 1.0 on a Dell GX260; it went more smoothly out of the box (so to say) than any other distro I've thrown on the thing. Been using yum to keep it up to date, and haven't had a problem yet...
I couldn't agree more - JMS, in a nod to 1984, had a great sequence in a Babylon5 episode called The Deconstruction of Falling Stars in which a regime promotes 'good-facts' in order to sell their pertinant propaganda - you wouldn't want those 'real-facts' to get in the way, would you? Changing your mind is one thing - trying and change the reality of recent history to better suit your current position is quite another!
I competely agree - a Windows port of Ximian Evolution would go a long, long way towards solving this problem... I need to go do some research as to why this hasn't happened (or maybe why it can't?) but regardless, for Linux, it's a great mail client/PIM that's a breeze to pick up for an Outlook user.
Damn, I'll bite - Honestly, there's something else the matter with that box - maybe you should check out the Linux Documentation Project for some help... and you may not want to brag about the fact that your XP box is so screwed up that it takes it 2 minutes to make a copy of a 17Mb file on the same disk! Come to think of it, sounds like I've had to clean up after the mess you've made 'freelancing' on some poor bastard's system...
This is a great move; and, within the framework for getting these things done, which is even better. The real problem here, though, as all the./ers know, centers around reforming our institutions that govern this type of patent / copyright / IP fun - it's become a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic and will probably become and increasingly pressing issue with each new development (and each new assertion that the development be protected / exploited / utilized in an economically beneficial - to some? - manner). The solution? You tell me, but I believe that the grass-roots type of education and promotion of the issues that/. and other websites facilitate represent a great start - how do we break through to the masses?
That is pretty damn funny - for how long (and in what wierd ways) will this archaic, accidental key stroke combination manifest itself? I started wondering about the implementation - does the unit have a 'CTRL-ALT-DEL' button, or three separate ones? Kinda reminds me of the reset button on the back of my Jornada paper wieght. In case you didn't follow the above link, from the Antelope site: Buttons: CTRL-ALT-DEL, Left/Right mouse, On/Off
I agree with you that a decline in demand for Middle-Eastern oil will probably be a Good Thing for those people in the long run. The only caveat I would add to your comment is that Western (and I am an American who loves America) powers, American and European, have absolutely created the mess you see in that region today! Who's demand for oil has continuously fed the cash that provides the power that results in the oppression? Who set up those crazy boundaries in the first place? And who CONTINUES to look the other way when it is politically convienient to the oil and oil-dependent big business interests world wide? America is great, and the dream is alive, but we as Americans must shrug off our general ignorance of would history (and out place in it) and hold ourselves and our leaders accountable! Sorry about the rant - where I completely agree with you is in the fact that the declining demand for oil should - in the long run - help remove many of the obstacles and much of the meddling that is in the way of these people being able to live their lives in peace.
ICHAEL N. LIEBMAN knows his limitations. Even with a Ph.D. and a long career in medical research, he cannot keep up with all the developments in his area of interest, breast cancer. Medline, the database that already houses more than 10 million abstracts for journal articles, is adding 7,000 to 8,000 abstracts per week. Only a fraction of these are about cancer, but the volume of information is daunting nonetheless.
Advertisement
"There is just too much literature to be able to go through it all," said Dr. Liebman, the director of biomedical informatics at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yet Dr. Liebman is convinced that new cures could someday emerge for breast cancer if only someone could read all the literature and synthesize it. So he has found a solution: enlisting a computer program to read the articles for him.
"The software is not going to get tired," he said. It also happens to be a speed reader: The product he is using, from a Chicago-based software company called SPSS, can zip through 250,000 pages an hour. Another product, from the text-mining company ClearForest, boasts a speed of 15,000 pages an hour, still far surpassing the human rate of a mere 60 pages.
Of course, no one, Dr. Liebman included, is arguing that these products are actually reading anything. What they are engaged in is "text mining,'' a technique that academics have been experimenting with for years but for which tools have only recently become commercially available. The prospect of rapidly scanning through reams of documents is stirring interest among researchers and analysts faced with more material than they can handle.
To the uninitiated, it may seem that Google and other Web search engines do something similar, since they also pore through reams of documents in split-second intervals. But, as experts note, search engines are merely retrieving information, displaying lists of documents that contain certain keywords.
Text-mining programs go further, categorizing information, making links between otherwise unconnected documents and providing visual maps (some look like tree branches or spokes on a wheel) to lead users down new pathways that they might not have been aware of.
Currently these programs are used by academic researchers and companies, but information scientists expect that to change. Lower-cost text-mining tools eventually will be offered to ordinary people who want to dig into medical or political issues using public documents. Madan Pandit, an expert in text analysis in Bangalore, India, who runs a Web site called K-Praxis (k-praxis.com), has suggested that text mining could help people make sense of voluminous documents that are already on the Web, like the 858-page report on the congressional inquiry into intelligence failures regarding the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"There is a need to make these technologies available for publicly available information," he wrote at his site.
In most cases, text-mining software is built upon the foundations of data mining, which uses statistical analysis to pull information out of structured databases like product inventories and customer demographics. But text mining starts with information that doesn't come in neat rows and columns. It works on unstructured data - e-mail messages, news articles, internal reports, transcripts of phone calls and the like.
To make sense of what it is reading, the software uses algorithms to examine the context behind words. If someone is doing research on computer modeling, for example, it not only knows to discard documents about fashion models but can also extract important phrases, terms, names and locations. It can then categorize them and draw connections among the categories.
How well computers truly make sense of what they are reading is, of course, highly questionable, and most of those who use text-mining software say that it works best when guided by smart people with knowledge of the particular subject.
I've always wanted to ask the computer to find all references to some complex interplay of topics at hand the way those Star Fleet engineers were always able to in TNG...
/. the National High Magnetic Field Lab...
on
Silicon Artwork
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Uh-oh, looks like the Los Alamos NHMFL at FSU has been taken down... is that considered an act of terrorism?!?
You've got a point in that they are NOW - I meant that the EPA was set up to protect the interests of the average American and help prevent the further unplanned overexploitatoin of our natural resources... because people bought into the propaganda back when they WERE doing a good job, we're stuck with the impotent organization we have today because people UNDERESTIMATED it's importance as well as the capabilities of big industry to trash our backyards at in incredible rate!!! People need to understand the reasons for creating and supporting organizations such as the FSF and the EFF, etc. or we may be left with no advocate looking out for the law abiding little guy. Please think about it!
This is propaganda from the world of the 'haves', make no mistake. This is the same type of BS people heard about the EPA back in the 80's - that they were militant, annoying buearocrats that are just looking to cause trouble for others for basically no good reason. Of course, that's crap - and the propaganda war fought on these issues has resulted in (1) DMCA, (2) PATRIOT Act, (3) 'Clear Skies' initiatives that sour our air and water... The point being: we must understand the enemy, we must understand his message, we must make our message heard, and we need to let your average American (or whereever you may be) make an informed, rational decision about who's speaking up for your better interests...
What's worse, idiot tech. boss or non-tech. idiot?
on
Is Your Boss An Idiot?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Of all the annoying bosses I've had, the 'technical' bosses were the worst... Early in my career, I had a boss who would want to try and 'fugure out' my code. He would stay all night and call me at 4:00 am because my code was 'broken' and I had to fix it be the open of business THAT DAY... would turn out he had changed the code to see what it would do, broke it, deployed it to check if it was broke, and then couldn't remember what he had changed! Source control saved me many many hours of work during that stretch...
I know, slightly off-topic, but this story on CNN talks a little about the 'improved' Asimo making an appearance at a state dinner in the Czech Republic today. Sounds impressive, and seems that the guests enjoyed his (?) company.
I couldn't agree more. This idea of charging by the mile (instead of by the gallon) seems like a way of appeasing (1) Oil Companies and (2) ON ROAD SUV drivers, both of which are selfish bastards anyway. Yes, you should be taxed more for driving a vehicle that gets 1/3 the milage of a little four-banger. It's a consumption tax, pure and simple. If someone's going to make the arguement that the road use is the issue, this mileage idea is even more useless as the actual damage done to the road has far more to do with vehicle weight (especially weight/tire - it's a surface pressure issue). Guess what - heavy vehicles use more gas!!! What a moronic waste of time. These guys should worry about some of the PROBLEMS facing their state...
I just started using SuSE OpenExchange at my shop, didn't want to deal with MS Exchange or Outlook for that matter. The product is nice; my users are mostly medical types and newbies, and they seem to really like (and to be able to figure out and use) the group calendaring and resource management aspects of the groupware. It's a web based app, so you've got your choice of clients. It's pretty straight forward to set up and install (YaST2) and then administer (web based). My only (very minor) complaint would be that the labels and terminology are a little different than your typical US English ISP's web based email client (probably a translation thing - not wrong or even awkward, just a little different), so I had to explain a few things to the users. Really though, it's definitely worth a look. It appears to be the best complete web based groupware solution right now.
Damn strait!!! My cats like Farscape as much as the Cmdr's, how about an all-cat stand-in cast... we'll get one of them hairless ones to play Scorpy...
Besides all of the good points you've just made, these new formats don't offer any additional functionality to the end user. CD's are (were?) cool because you can skip directly to the track you want to hear, and the thing sounds great even after you've played your favorite track about 200 times (remember what that did to your tapes?). DVD's didn't appeal to me all that much until I realized the advantages they offered an anime fan such as myself - multiple languages and the ability to toggle subtitles - all on one disk! I also do love the fact that DVDs don't wear out like my old VHS collection did. Ok, kinda roundabaout, but how about offering new features like the ability to select a single (or set of) instrument at a time, so you can listen to just the rippin' baseline (or maybe the just the strings section)... oh, and nice digital outs, of course. Since when are we all criminals before the fact? Jeez...
Slashdot Mirror
That is a great idea; my brother (who has his own [very] small indie label) has repeatedly looked into finding the kind of support you're talking about. The RIAA is definitely NOT looking out for his interests, nor does he want to have anything to do with supporting them / being endorsed by them.
And yes, looking at his record, Orrin Hatch is either (1) a complete tool (in the best sense of the word) or (2) completely disingenuous - ah, screw it, he's probably both!
These are all for the USA -
From April 2003: Broadband adoption races ahead in US
A little older, 2002: More consumers hooked on broadband
I think you get the idea...
From WHO COUNTS THE VOTES?:
"Here are short profiles of the three most important voting-systems companies in the United States:
ELECTION SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE
By far the largest vote-counting company in the United States, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Neb., was founded in 1980 by brothers Todd and Bob Urosevich. According to internet journalist Bev Harris of Talion.com, the company, originally known as American Information Systems, was controlled in the 1980s by the hard-right, fundamentalist-leaning Ahmanson family of California, heirs to the Home Savings of America fortune. In the nineties, the company could boast future U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) as its chairman; Hagel still owns stock in the McCarthy Group, which currently has a stake in ES&S. Since ES&S enjoys an exclusive contract with the state of Nebraska and counts 80 percent of the state's votes (the rest are hand-counted), Hagel is effectively part owner of the firm responsible for counting his own votes.
ES&S has been involved in voting-related scandals across the country, particularly in the South. In April 2002, Arkansas secretary of state Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks in voting-machine scandals, part of which involved Business Records Corp. (BRC), now merged into ES&S. A BRC executive, Tom Eschberger, accepted immunity from prosecution in return for cooperating in the investigation, and has since become a Vice President of ES&S.
According to The Tallahassee Democrat, Sandra Mortham, Florida's top election official from 1995 to 1999, lobbies for both ES&S and the Florida Association of Counties, which endorsed ES&S in return for a commission. Mortham herself received commissions for ES&S touch-screen machines purchased by Florida counties (see "The Re-Election of Jim Crow," Southern Exposure Election 2002 Special Edition).
In another revolving-door scandal, the state of California has begun an investigation into Louis Dedier, the state's director of voting systems. Dedier accepted a job with ES&S, then made recommendations without disclosing the potential conflict of interest.
Breakdowns and other problems have plagued ES&S machines since at least the late 1990s. When the company's new ballot-reading machines malfunctioned in Hawaii in 1998, Tom Eschberger admitted there were difficulties, but protested to the Honolulu Star Bulletin that "in all fairness, there were 7,000 machines in Venezuela and 500 machines in Dallas that did not have problems." However, during that same election season, the Dallas devices initially failed to count 41,000 votes. And two years later, massive breakdowns and technical difficulties with ES&S systems rocked the Venezuelan national elections, causing the vote to be suspended. Pres. Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan election officials accused the company of "trying to destabilize the country's electoral process," while protesters chanted "Gringos go home!" at ES&S technicians.
ES&S-related problems continued in 2002, as Bev Harris has documented:
In the primaries, Union County, Florida, used ES&S machines for the first time. According to The Bradenton Herald, under old methods of hand counting, election workers usually finished tallying the county's votes by the end of the day. This time, when a programming error corrupted the machine count, officials had to resort to the old method. Altogether the process took more than twice as long as manual counting.
During early voting in Dallas County, Texas, voters complained that ES&S touch-screen devices were recording Democratic votes as votes for Republicans. Similar problems were reported in Florida.
Twenty percent of ES&S machines in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, malfunctioned on election day. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate, the state committee that chose ES&S ignored the wishes of local officials
Honestly, just installed Fedora Core 1.0 on a Dell GX260; it went more smoothly out of the box (so to say) than any other distro I've thrown on the thing. Been using yum to keep it up to date, and haven't had a problem yet...
My bad, that crack was looking pretty good today, I couldn't resist it!
First good looking proce I found was at Amazon, 39.99 + free shipping ...
Looks cool, I'm gonna get it...
I couldn't agree more - JMS, in a nod to 1984, had a great sequence in a Babylon5 episode called The Deconstruction of Falling Stars in which a regime promotes 'good-facts' in order to sell their pertinant propaganda - you wouldn't want those 'real-facts' to get in the way, would you? Changing your mind is one thing - trying and change the reality of recent history to better suit your current position is quite another!
I competely agree - a Windows port of Ximian Evolution would go a long, long way towards solving this problem... I need to go do some research as to why this hasn't happened (or maybe why it can't?) but regardless, for Linux, it's a great mail client/PIM that's a breeze to pick up for an Outlook user.
Damn, I'll bite - Honestly, there's something else the matter with that box - maybe you should check out the Linux Documentation Project for some help... and you may not want to brag about the fact that your XP box is so screwed up that it takes it 2 minutes to make a copy of a 17Mb file on the same disk! Come to think of it, sounds like I've had to clean up after the mess you've made 'freelancing' on some poor bastard's system...
This is a great move; and, within the framework for getting these things done, which is even better. The real problem here, though, as all the ./ers know, centers around reforming our institutions that govern this type of patent / copyright / IP fun - it's become a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic and will probably become and increasingly pressing issue with each new development (and each new assertion that the development be protected / exploited / utilized in an economically beneficial - to some? - manner). The solution? You tell me, but I believe that the grass-roots type of education and promotion of the issues that /. and other websites facilitate represent a great start - how do we break through to the masses?
That is pretty damn funny - for how long (and in what wierd ways) will this archaic, accidental key stroke combination manifest itself? I started wondering about the implementation - does the unit have a 'CTRL-ALT-DEL' button, or three separate ones? Kinda reminds me of the reset button on the back of my Jornada paper wieght.
In case you didn't follow the above link, from the Antelope site:
Buttons: CTRL-ALT-DEL, Left/Right mouse, On/Off
I agree with you that a decline in demand for Middle-Eastern oil will probably be a Good Thing for those people in the long run. The only caveat I would add to your comment is that Western (and I am an American who loves America) powers, American and European, have absolutely created the mess you see in that region today! Who's demand for oil has continuously fed the cash that provides the power that results in the oppression? Who set up those crazy boundaries in the first place? And who CONTINUES to look the other way when it is politically convienient to the oil and oil-dependent big business interests world wide? America is great, and the dream is alive, but we as Americans must shrug off our general ignorance of would history (and out place in it) and hold ourselves and our leaders accountable!
Sorry about the rant - where I completely agree with you is in the fact that the declining demand for oil should - in the long run - help remove many of the obstacles and much of the meddling that is in the way of these people being able to live their lives in peace.
Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom
By LISA GUERNSEY
Published: October 16, 2003
ICHAEL N. LIEBMAN knows his limitations. Even with a Ph.D. and a long career in medical research, he cannot keep up with all the developments in his area of interest, breast cancer. Medline, the database that already houses more than 10 million abstracts for journal articles, is adding 7,000 to 8,000 abstracts per week. Only a fraction of these are about cancer, but the volume of information is daunting nonetheless.
Advertisement
"There is just too much literature to be able to go through it all," said Dr. Liebman, the director of biomedical informatics at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yet Dr. Liebman is convinced that new cures could someday emerge for breast cancer if only someone could read all the literature and synthesize it. So he has found a solution: enlisting a computer program to read the articles for him.
"The software is not going to get tired," he said. It also happens to be a speed reader: The product he is using, from a Chicago-based software company called SPSS, can zip through 250,000 pages an hour. Another product, from the text-mining company ClearForest, boasts a speed of 15,000 pages an hour, still far surpassing the human rate of a mere 60 pages.
Of course, no one, Dr. Liebman included, is arguing that these products are actually reading anything. What they are engaged in is "text mining,'' a technique that academics have been experimenting with for years but for which tools have only recently become commercially available. The prospect of rapidly scanning through reams of documents is stirring interest among researchers and analysts faced with more material than they can handle.
To the uninitiated, it may seem that Google and other Web search engines do something similar, since they also pore through reams of documents in split-second intervals. But, as experts note, search engines are merely retrieving information, displaying lists of documents that contain certain keywords.
Text-mining programs go further, categorizing information, making links between otherwise unconnected documents and providing visual maps (some look like tree branches or spokes on a wheel) to lead users down new pathways that they might not have been aware of.
Currently these programs are used by academic researchers and companies, but information scientists expect that to change. Lower-cost text-mining tools eventually will be offered to ordinary people who want to dig into medical or political issues using public documents. Madan Pandit, an expert in text analysis in Bangalore, India, who runs a Web site called K-Praxis (k-praxis.com), has suggested that text mining could help people make sense of voluminous documents that are already on the Web, like the 858-page report on the congressional inquiry into intelligence failures regarding the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"There is a need to make these technologies available for publicly available information," he wrote at his site.
In most cases, text-mining software is built upon the foundations of data mining, which uses statistical analysis to pull information out of structured databases like product inventories and customer demographics. But text mining starts with information that doesn't come in neat rows and columns. It works on unstructured data - e-mail messages, news articles, internal reports, transcripts of phone calls and the like.
To make sense of what it is reading, the software uses algorithms to examine the context behind words. If someone is doing research on computer modeling, for example, it not only knows to discard documents about fashion models but can also extract important phrases, terms, names and locations. It can then categorize them and draw connections among the categories.
How well computers truly make sense of what they are reading is, of course, highly questionable, and most of those who use text-mining software say that it works best when guided by smart people with knowledge of the particular subject.
I've always wanted to ask the computer to find all references to some complex interplay of topics at hand the way those Star Fleet engineers were always able to in TNG...
Uh-oh, looks like the Los Alamos NHMFL at FSU has been taken down... is that considered an act of terrorism?!?
Good to see more people writing about the ins-and-outs of one of the finest linux-based consumer products ever created. Kudos!
You've got a point in that they are NOW - I meant that the EPA was set up to protect the interests of the average American and help prevent the further unplanned overexploitatoin of our natural resources... because people bought into the propaganda back when they WERE doing a good job, we're stuck with the impotent organization we have today because people UNDERESTIMATED it's importance as well as the capabilities of big industry to trash our backyards at in incredible rate!!! People need to understand the reasons for creating and supporting organizations such as the FSF and the EFF, etc. or we may be left with no advocate looking out for the law abiding little guy. Please think about it!
This is propaganda from the world of the 'haves', make no mistake. This is the same type of BS people heard about the EPA back in the 80's - that they were militant, annoying buearocrats that are just looking to cause trouble for others for basically no good reason. Of course, that's crap - and the propaganda war fought on these issues has resulted in (1) DMCA, (2) PATRIOT Act, (3) 'Clear Skies' initiatives that sour our air and water...
The point being: we must understand the enemy, we must understand his message, we must make our message heard, and we need to let your average American (or whereever you may be) make an informed, rational decision about who's speaking up for your better interests...
Of all the annoying bosses I've had, the 'technical' bosses were the worst... Early in my career, I had a boss who would want to try and 'fugure out' my code. He would stay all night and call me at 4:00 am because my code was 'broken' and I had to fix it be the open of business THAT DAY... would turn out he had changed the code to see what it would do, broke it, deployed it to check if it was broke, and then couldn't remember what he had changed! Source control saved me many many hours of work during that stretch...
I know, slightly off-topic, but this story on CNN talks a little about the 'improved' Asimo making an appearance at a state dinner in the Czech Republic today. Sounds impressive, and seems that the guests enjoyed his (?) company.
I couldn't agree more. This idea of charging by the mile (instead of by the gallon) seems like a way of appeasing (1) Oil Companies and (2) ON ROAD SUV drivers, both of which are selfish bastards anyway. Yes, you should be taxed more for driving a vehicle that gets 1/3 the milage of a little four-banger. It's a consumption tax, pure and simple. If someone's going to make the arguement that the road use is the issue, this mileage idea is even more useless as the actual damage done to the road has far more to do with vehicle weight (especially weight/tire - it's a surface pressure issue). Guess what - heavy vehicles use more gas!!! What a moronic waste of time. These guys should worry about some of the PROBLEMS facing their state...
I just started using SuSE OpenExchange at my shop, didn't want to deal with MS Exchange or Outlook for that matter. The product is nice; my users are mostly medical types and newbies, and they seem to really like (and to be able to figure out and use) the group calendaring and resource management aspects of the groupware. It's a web based app, so you've got your choice of clients. It's pretty straight forward to set up and install (YaST2) and then administer (web based). My only (very minor) complaint would be that the labels and terminology are a little different than your typical US English ISP's web based email client (probably a translation thing - not wrong or even awkward, just a little different), so I had to explain a few things to the users. Really though, it's definitely worth a look. It appears to be the best complete web based groupware solution right now.
Damn strait!!! My cats like Farscape as much as the Cmdr's, how about an all-cat stand-in cast... we'll get one of them hairless ones to play Scorpy...
Besides all of the good points you've just made, these new formats don't offer any additional functionality to the end user. CD's are (were?) cool because you can skip directly to the track you want to hear, and the thing sounds great even after you've played your favorite track about 200 times (remember what that did to your tapes?). DVD's didn't appeal to me all that much until I realized the advantages they offered an anime fan such as myself - multiple languages and the ability to toggle subtitles - all on one disk! I also do love the fact that DVDs don't wear out like my old VHS collection did.
Ok, kinda roundabaout, but how about offering new features like the ability to select a single (or set of) instrument at a time, so you can listen to just the rippin' baseline (or maybe the just the strings section)... oh, and nice digital outs, of course. Since when are we all criminals before the fact? Jeez...