Call me in a few years when the phone system upgrades to a fiber plant with enough bandwidth that we never have to purchase hardware upgrades, we can just lease access to more memory/a better CPU/a better video card from the central peripheral farm.
IMHO, this is a dangerous technical precedent to set. With the rapid increase and proliferation of DNA technology (ever since James Watson and Francis Crick stole the idea of its helix structure from Rosalind Franklin), how long will it be until devices like this modified cuecat are used in conjunction with vast, government-operated databases purchased from corporations to allow anyone to 'dig up dirt' on anyone else just by scanning a strand of their hair, or fingernail clipping?
Portions of our genome are already being patented and copyrighted. That's a start. We need a large corporation to underwrite the copyrighting of the entire genome, so that it can be declared intellectual property and be safe from these kinds of intrusions. It might even be a good idea to encrypt the genome so it can't be stolen (since modern encryption technologies like SDMI have proven to be unbreakable), and so that no one can identify us from our cells without our private key.
When will Python support for JavaScript and HTML? I would like to use it and create PHP web pages for my Apache computer. Now it make use only for FrontPage plug-in?
I think JonKatz (and the author from whose book I'm assuming his post is informed by) has hit it right on the nose. Artists need access to creative 'raw material', or else they cannot create! This all goes back to the absolute fact that the human mind can create nothing new, just rehash what it's already experienced into an infinite amount of permutations and combinations. What a new and thoroughly stimulating collection of half-baked revelations from our in-house pontificator.
I fully expect that we will soon begin to hear alarmist ravings from Mr. Katz and his tremendous intellectual capactiy about children needing to pay royalties to the copyright holder of the human genome when they enter puberty and begin producing haploid cells, and then again when they have a child. Forget about legalization of masturbation in public, the public display licensing fees would be a bitch!
I just wish for once the U.S. and Russia would end their petty obsession with eachother's space programs and work to further the interests of humankind rather than comparing notes years after the fact of any of their supposed "accomplishments". The moon? Hah! That distance on the scale of something the size of our solar system (which we know is still nothing compared to the size of our galaxy) is like me bragging every time I get up to grab another Bawls from my ThinkGeek.com fridge! (gotta do my part to promote the shameless mainstream commercialization of what was once a proud subculture)
The real scandal here is not how many alcoholic Russian cosmonauts died beating us into space (as much as we'd all love to obsess over ourselves for awhile), it's about how many more over-educated government-salaried pseudo-intellectuals our two nations will need to execute in the name of humanity's most worthy cause since the persecution and successful murder of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ: Global access to space exploration technology!
Instead of exporting our culture of blasphemous atom-manipulation, shameless sexuality, fast food, and stereotype gangster rappers to the developing nations of our Earth, it is imperative that we provide them with the intense education, technology, and intellectual masturbation resources they need to start sending their best and brightest up in flames.
Once again I am dismayed at the prevalence of our self-centered American attitudes that space exploration is best left only to countries with nuclear weapons (and even then only because they could bomb the shit out of us if we fuck with them). Only through subversively destroying the other nations of the world can we hope to better ourselves.
Allowing tax breaks for using Open Source software will just encourage Big Evil Corporations to use things like Linux and The Gimp (because we all know that you can get quality work done with The Gimp) to further their tax evasion practices! We need the money we get from taxing the sale of Microsoft software to fund programming etiquette workshops for inner-city children (and locking up potheads).
We need equal opportunity! We need to level the playing field! First it was just the rich that got tax breaks, now it's the educated!?!?!? Don't you think we're going a little too far?
Big Company aggregates personal data. Big Company sells data to government. Data is stolen from said government by spies working for an Evil Communist Power. Evil Communist Power uses knowledge of consumer purchase habits to destroy economy of aforementioned nation in which said Big Company resides.
Rinse, repeat.
In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, John Percival Hackworth, a distinguished nanotech engineer, gets his daily 'paper' as a dynamically generated composite of articles that suit his interests. As the story went, this was not true of the highest upper-classmen who all read the same newspaper printed on an actual dead tree instead of delivered electronically.
The idea was, the higher class you were (the more money/power you had?), the more consistent your media consumption should be with that of your peers. It seems to me that if someone is already arrogant, exposing them to new ideas won't make a scrap of difference. Those who are open-minded (my what a jaded term) will continue to use the information systems to their advantage and edification. The real issue should be censorship in our libraries, not people with customized slashboxes =)
I'm thrilled that you were able to get "one of the coolest development environments" you could ask for, and I'm not trashing OS X or Macintoshes, but I feel compelled to point out that you're not doing anything that you couldn't do before (except maybe running iMovie).
If you already had a Dual PIII 800, why are you paying through the nose for an Apple box just so you can run the same applications and have it "stay out of [your] way and let [you] work"?
When you ask for innovations that "came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it", I think you'd be pretty narrow-minded to list PCs (which are still far from ubiquitous) and of all things web browsers? Give me a break.
The last innovation that meets your criteria is probably the advent of a global telephone network, or maybe sattelite communication. Web browsers go into the same category of 'incremental improvement' which you say has stagnated recently. What percentage of people in the world do you think "can't live without" their copy of IE 5.5?
what the heck is with the remark about single girls at the end? Is that a joke? I don't see the contextual relevance...
The poor/. posters are so sexually frustrated and neurotic that it's spilling over into news posts about atom-sized transistors! Now if only I could get that girl's phone number. . . .
Given the number of times I've been mistaken for someone else by other humans, I don't know how I feel about this sort of thing. Even if you're innocent, being hassled because a piece of software that thinks you look like a felon would be pretty annoying (to say the least).
Slashdot Mirror
Call me in a few years when the phone system upgrades to a fiber plant with enough bandwidth that we never have to purchase hardware upgrades, we can just lease access to more memory/a better CPU/a better video card from the central peripheral farm.
Portions of our genome are already being patented and copyrighted. That's a start. We need a large corporation to underwrite the copyrighting of the entire genome, so that it can be declared intellectual property and be safe from these kinds of intrusions. It might even be a good idea to encrypt the genome so it can't be stolen (since modern encryption technologies like SDMI have proven to be unbreakable), and so that no one can identify us from our cells without our private key.
When will Python support for JavaScript and HTML? I would like to use it and create PHP web pages for my Apache computer. Now it make use only for FrontPage plug-in?
I fully expect that we will soon begin to hear alarmist ravings from Mr. Katz and his tremendous intellectual capactiy about children needing to pay royalties to the copyright holder of the human genome when they enter puberty and begin producing haploid cells, and then again when they have a child. Forget about legalization of masturbation in public, the public display licensing fees would be a bitch!
The real scandal here is not how many alcoholic Russian cosmonauts died beating us into space (as much as we'd all love to obsess over ourselves for awhile), it's about how many more over-educated government-salaried pseudo-intellectuals our two nations will need to execute in the name of humanity's most worthy cause since the persecution and successful murder of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ: Global access to space exploration technology!
Instead of exporting our culture of blasphemous atom-manipulation, shameless sexuality, fast food, and stereotype gangster rappers to the developing nations of our Earth, it is imperative that we provide them with the intense education, technology, and intellectual masturbation resources they need to start sending their best and brightest up in flames.
Once again I am dismayed at the prevalence of our self-centered American attitudes that space exploration is best left only to countries with nuclear weapons (and even then only because they could bomb the shit out of us if we fuck with them). Only through subversively destroying the other nations of the world can we hope to better ourselves.
We need equal opportunity! We need to level the playing field! First it was just the rich that got tax breaks, now it's the educated!?!?!? Don't you think we're going a little too far?
Big Company aggregates personal data. Big Company sells data to government. Data is stolen from said government by spies working for an Evil Communist Power. Evil Communist Power uses knowledge of consumer purchase habits to destroy economy of aforementioned nation in which said Big Company resides. Rinse, repeat.
The idea was, the higher class you were (the more money/power you had?), the more consistent your media consumption should be with that of your peers. It seems to me that if someone is already arrogant, exposing them to new ideas won't make a scrap of difference. Those who are open-minded (my what a jaded term) will continue to use the information systems to their advantage and edification. The real issue should be censorship in our libraries, not people with customized slashboxes =)
I'm thrilled that you were able to get "one of the coolest development environments" you could ask for, and I'm not trashing OS X or Macintoshes, but I feel compelled to point out that you're not doing anything that you couldn't do before (except maybe running iMovie). If you already had a Dual PIII 800, why are you paying through the nose for an Apple box just so you can run the same applications and have it "stay out of [your] way and let [you] work"?
The last innovation that meets your criteria is probably the advent of a global telephone network, or maybe sattelite communication. Web browsers go into the same category of 'incremental improvement' which you say has stagnated recently. What percentage of people in the world do you think "can't live without" their copy of IE 5.5?
what the heck is with the remark about single girls at the end? Is that a joke? I don't see the contextual relevance... The poor /. posters are so sexually frustrated and neurotic that it's spilling over into news posts about atom-sized transistors! Now if only I could get that girl's phone number. . . .
All moderators should be required to have seen at least 75% of all the episodes of The Simpsons ever created, and pass a test proving so.
a beowulf cluster of these things?
. . .a beowulf cluster of these?
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
Pure research useless? Boy, what planet you from?
Given the number of times I've been mistaken for someone else by other humans, I don't know how I feel about this sort of thing. Even if you're innocent, being hassled because a piece of software that thinks you look like a felon would be pretty annoying (to say the least).
A post about a post about an EETimes story. . .no, I'm sorry, what did you call it? An "article"?