it is made clear that Microsoft is watching what you are listening to
because they are watching what you are listening to
Does anyone know where I can get this plug-in? I'd like to watch my music too, instead of just listening to it. Or do I need to purchase an extra license for viewing rights?
Now Joe Public starts understanding and disliking DRM
How often do you think Joe Public backs up his files, reformats and copies it all back? 99.9% of Joe Publics don't do this unless they are buying a new computer and want to move their programs and data to the new machine.
What happens when you try to move most Windows programs directly from one machine to a new one without a reinstall? They don't work! These DRM files won't work either, and most people will figure they just did something wrong. A smaller percentage of people will assume Windows screwed it up, but only a handful of people will believe Windows disabled their music on purpose. Those that actually call Microsoft for tech support will probably be told that they must have forgotten a dll somewhere, and that they should always reinstall and re-register.
So they'll shrug it off, like BSODs and popup ads, and assume it's just the price they pay for being so technologically advanced.
There's a detailed, three-dimensional, interactive map of New York City which captures the five boroughs down to the square foot...
Sounds good in principle, but will anyone be able to read this map? Will it be in a useful format, or will it be in the photocopy-esque, scanned-in format government agencies like to use for PDFs?
Will we have to install Flash 9 or RealThree to view it? Or is it "safely" tucked away in a Visio document? I just hope it's not built with FrontPage.
Citizen 1: "Where are we going to find food to eat?" Citizen 2: "What about the radiation?" Citizen 3: "Don't worry about that. Our first order of business is to get the Empire State Building back up. We're Americans! We have to show 'em we're not afraid! Give me a hand with this girder... c'mon! We've got to get all these building back up before they come back and bomb us again!"
As a NYC native, I must concede the discussion would probably wind down to an argument over which to rebuild first: Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium. And the survivors would kill each other trying to work it out.
Certainly you shouldn't be excepted to adhere to the contract if you work for Advance Micro Devices making motherboards and your invention has to do with a way to improve lipstick - your employer should have NO claim to your invention since it in no way had anything whatsoever to do with your employment or even your employers industry.
I don't think you realize just how much trouble you caused. Tomorrow morning, AMD is going to pull every one of its employees off the job to discretely ask them if they've ever considered overclocking lipstick. Of course, when they all say no, they'll all be terminated and all their future contacts with patent lawyers will be scrutinized by AMD private investigators in search of the lucrative breakthrough in lipstick overclocking.
Couldn't you have at least said "if you work for Intel making motherboards...?"
Rumor has it the Bush administration is looking at the possibility of folding NASA and Amtrak into the new Department of Homeland Security. This is part of Mr. Bush's greater effort to make the federal government more like a corporation by consolidating all government organizations that are crippled by cracks in the system into one, easily-ignorable department.
I think that's a little too close to product placement for my taste. I'd rather have Brown tell us which of the following he says at fast food restaurants:
I wasn't happy with my IT job, so I sat down with her and said I might be happier doing something else.
HR Director: So, what do you want to do? Me: I don't know. I was thinking I like... animals. Maybe I'd be a vet? HR Director: An evil vet? Me: [long pause]...No... Maybe like work in a petting zoo... HR Director: An evil petting zoo? Me: You always do that!!! HR Director: What?
perhaps one day they will be able to develop one that will allow politicians to talk to normal folks and be understood
You don't need a new invention to translate politician speak. Simply pipe the text of the politician-speak to the following shell script:
#!/bin/sh
echo "All I'm saying is that I keep my options open."
A "good politician" (good as in "successful," not "responsible") is intentionally vague whenever possible because that allows him to keep his options open. A vague statement that is commonly interpreted one way can later be interpreted a different way. The more details the politician provides, the greater the number of people who will disagree with him.
half of those folks would chuck it in for a cushy job in an office park with a keyboard and juice vending machine down the hall
Office parks are the factories of the modern age. If you think they're cushy, you need to stop drinking the Kool-Ade.
I worked in one Silicon Valley office park that was built on top of a dump -- we had various gas meters in the building to measure the noxious fumes that were seeping from the decomposing waste up into the building and flashing warning lights no one understood that would blink for weeks until an inspector showed up. You fight your way down the parking-lot freeway every morning, spend five minutes looking for a parking space, and ultimately you end up parking several buildings away and hope you don't get towed. Your boss says "we're working on it" every single time you ask about it, until you realize that the only thing you're likely to influence by asking is your future employment with the company. You "clock in" by swiping your access card at the door and wander through a beige cubicle farm to the cloth-walled space your boss refers to as "your office."
Management tells you that your cubicle is a gift of privacy from them, but there's nothing private about it. It's designed to make you face the wall so anyone can walk up and look over your shoulder for several minutes before you notice the cheaply-constructed floor quiver a bit when the person shifts his weight. You turn around and ask how long he was standing there. "Only a person who has something to hide would be concerned about people looking over their shoulder," management says, despite the fact they told you the cubicle was a valued gift of privacy.
On an assembly line, you sit/stand with a person on either side of you. That arrangement is inefficient because you could turn to your neighbor and socialize to break the hours of monotony. Worse yet, you might find out that you're doing the same work as your neighbor for half the pay. In a cubicle, you are intentionally isolated -- you can't look someone in the eye without turning around and coercing them to do the same.
If factory workers on the assembly line had cubicles, they would never have organized unions. By isolating employees in their own, mass-produced boxes the company gains the advantage to trample the employees individually. You can flatten one worker bee without a problem, but you'd have some respect for an organized hive. The company calls its flyswatters "policies" and tout them as though they have the force of law.
"Company policy is that we don't pay anyone more than X. You have to do X because it's company policy. You have to provide your own computer because it's company policy. And when we terminate you, you have to leave the computer with us. Everyone else is doing it. It's company policy. No we don't travel expenses, you must have misunderstood company policy."
You generally don't see anyone unless it's a social engineer who has had the word "manager" appended to his title (product manager, account manager, project manager, etc.). Sixty percent of the people in my company had the word "manager" appended to their title to scare the 30% who had "engineer" in their title into acquiescence. Thus, a "manager" who really has no authority over an "engineer" can go to an engineer's cubicle at 5:30 and demand an all-nighter, threatening to call the engineer "uncooperative" if his plate is already full. Meanwhile, the "manager" goes out to dinner, to a bar, home to sleep and comes in the next day at 9, at which point he turns his cell phone back on. Most of these "managers" know nothing about the work that needs to be done, but they make up for that as masters of office politics, often dumping insufficient information on the engineer's desk to shift the blame for a "slipped" deadline.
Office parks are not posh. They are simply designed with the bare minimum needed to present the appearance of complicity with labor laws and ensnare workers who fear the stigma of a traditional factory. I wouldn't go back to a cubicle farm if the company actually paid me.
Humor and sarcasm noted... with that out of the way, there was a serious statement in your post I'd like to comment on:
...given very large numbers of N, and incredible lengths of time, Congress might actually write something worth reading...
It's disturbing to see how trendy this position has become. "Congress doesn't write anything worth reading, so I'll ignore them." Wrong.
Regardless of the quality of the bills Congress writes; regardless of your opinion of those bills; regardless of whether you are an American citizen who feels a need to keep an eye on his elected representatives... you should make a habit of checking in from time to time to read the material written by Congress.
Ultimately that material becomes U.S. law. That translates into U.S. policy and U.S. spending, which directly or indirectly affects most people on this planet -- and certainly everyone who has the technical and economic means to read Slashdot, whether you like it or not. This makes everything Congress writes "worth reading."
It is incumbent upon you as a free-thinking individual to read, understand and evaluate the writings of Congress. The alternative is wandering across a busy street with your eyes closed because you can't get hit by a bus you can't see.
Lucent's results for the third quarter ended June 30 include $162 million in costs for its part of the settlement, spokesman John Skalko said. AT&T, the largest U.S. long-distance phone company, is paying $130 million before taxes, spokeswoman Sue Fleming said.
So how much are our friends at AT&T making in profit on this settlement after taxes? You have to realize that being AT&T, the company will get a special tax break for agreeing to the settlement, another tax break to cover the lost business it expects as a result of the bad PR from this settlement, a tax break for having the word American in its name, a tax break for being AOL, a tax break for not being NTT, plus revenue for providing the months of teleconferencing service that allowed the parties involved to come to a mutually beneficial settlement.
Note that comparatively tiny Lucent actually had to pay money in its part of the settlement.
I'm addicted to reading and researching conspiracy theories, and discovering that about a third of them are true. It takes a lot of time to figure out which ones are true. Often conspiracy stories are half true, where "half" can apply in a number of different ways -- half the facts are correct, half the statements are substantiated, or the sources are halfway reliable.
A story that is "half true" is still half false. Is this your basis for claiming that you've "discovered that about a third of the conspiracies out there are true?" Because you don't seem to be backing up this serious claim with any other information. You would be performing a greater service if you filtered out the things that aren't true and posted purely factual accounts to set the record straight. But I don't think you want to do that.
From looking at your blog, I don't see evidence of conspiracies. All I see in your blog are the angry ramblings of a self-righteous individual who thinks the news media is playing up the wrong stories.
For real evidence of real conspiracies, read through the documents at The George Washington University's National Security Archive of declassified documents, like the proposal to incite world opinion against Cuba through propaganda, staged riots, staged attacks on the U.S., mock funerals and more.
If I had mod points, your comment would be at least as high as the troll you're responding to. But under the circumstances, I'll use my +1 bonus to get you some attention, and if someone wants to waste their mod points modding my comment down later, fine.
ABC News story obtained by googling for "Operation Northwood":
[In the early 1960s,] America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe. Like Mel Gibson's character Graham Hess in M. Night Shyamalan's new movie "Signs," we want to feel that our lives are governed by a grand plan.
The need is especially strong in an age when paranoia runs rampant. "Coincidence feels like a loss of control perhaps," says John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of "Innumeracy," the improbable best seller about how Americans don't understand numbers. Finding a reason or a pattern where none actually exists "makes it less frightening," he says, because events get placed in the realm of the logical. "Believing in fate, or even conspiracy, can sometimes be more comforting than facing the fact that sometimes things just happen."
No. It's the same topic, but not the same story. The May story referenced globeandmail.com, which was perpetuating the rumor. The NYTimes Magazine story debunks the rumor by pointing out the facts and explaining why everyone gets irrationally excited about these things.
Rumor has it Disney is lobbying against the Maglev train in favor of a variant of the patented, copyrighted, lunch-box-marketed monorail system at Epcot.
So DARPA is taking a page from Google's book. Does the winner get $10,000 in cash, a VIP visit to the Pentagon in Arlington, VA and the possibility of running their prize winning code on DARPA's supercomputers?
It's really quite simple when you think like a snake. The rationale lies in profiling.
By doing things on the Internet that can be monitored, you are unknowingly taking an ongoing personality test. If "I like chocolate" people are three times more likely to commit robbery than "I like strawberry" people, Ashcroft can probably produce "statistics" showing that people who swap songs illegally are three times as likely to be anarchists who have no respect for the law or the establishment, and therefore are more likely to be terrorists.
Re:Quote from their jet brochure
on
Penguin Airlines
·
· Score: 2
Shouldn't Airbus be using aircraft carbon-fiber composites?
It's just unnecessary fluff -- they should just say aluminum and assume people will figure out that it's aircraft aluminum. Otherwise, it's like the Marines saying "we're using military-grade kevlar in our bulletproof vests." Duh.
When a laptop manufacturer says it's using aircraft aluminum, or when a bicycle tire manufacturer says it's using military-grade kevlar, or when Jack-in-the-Box says it's using military-grade titanium 99-cent buttons on its cash registers, then it's a bit more appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when you try to move most Windows programs directly from one machine to a new one without a reinstall? They don't work! These DRM files won't work either, and most people will figure they just did something wrong. A smaller percentage of people will assume Windows screwed it up, but only a handful of people will believe Windows disabled their music on purpose. Those that actually call Microsoft for tech support will probably be told that they must have forgotten a dll somewhere, and that they should always reinstall and re-register.
So they'll shrug it off, like BSODs and popup ads, and assume it's just the price they pay for being so technologically advanced.
Will we have to install Flash 9 or RealThree to view it? Or is it "safely" tucked away in a Visio document? I just hope it's not built with FrontPage.
Citizen 2: "What about the radiation?"
Citizen 3: "Don't worry about that. Our first order of business is to get the Empire State Building back up. We're Americans! We have to show 'em we're not afraid! Give me a hand with this girder... c'mon! We've got to get all these building back up before they come back and bomb us again!"
As a NYC native, I must concede the discussion would probably wind down to an argument over which to rebuild first: Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium. And the survivors would kill each other trying to work it out.
Couldn't you have at least said "if you work for Intel making motherboards...?"
I'll worry when the University makes the C# class mandatory for English majors.
Rumor has it the Bush administration is looking at the possibility of folding NASA and Amtrak into the new Department of Homeland Security. This is part of Mr. Bush's greater effort to make the federal government more like a corporation by consolidating all government organizations that are crippled by cracks in the system into one, easily-ignorable department.
- "I'll have a Number One."
- "I'll have a Number Two."
- "I'll have a Number Three."
- "I'll have a Number Four."
- "I'll have a Number Five."
- "I'll have a Number Six."
It's sufficiently non-denominational.HR Director: So, what do you want to do?
Me: I don't know. I was thinking I like... animals. Maybe I'd be a vet?
HR Director: An evil vet?
Me: [long pause]...No... Maybe like work in a petting zoo...
HR Director: An evil petting zoo?
Me: You always do that!!!
HR Director: What?
#! /bin/sh
echo "All I'm saying is that I keep my options open."
A "good politician" (good as in "successful," not "responsible") is intentionally vague whenever possible because that allows him to keep his options open. A vague statement that is commonly interpreted one way can later be interpreted a different way. The more details the politician provides, the greater the number of people who will disagree with him.
I worked in one Silicon Valley office park that was built on top of a dump -- we had various gas meters in the building to measure the noxious fumes that were seeping from the decomposing waste up into the building and flashing warning lights no one understood that would blink for weeks until an inspector showed up. You fight your way down the parking-lot freeway every morning, spend five minutes looking for a parking space, and ultimately you end up parking several buildings away and hope you don't get towed. Your boss says "we're working on it" every single time you ask about it, until you realize that the only thing you're likely to influence by asking is your future employment with the company. You "clock in" by swiping your access card at the door and wander through a beige cubicle farm to the cloth-walled space your boss refers to as "your office."
Management tells you that your cubicle is a gift of privacy from them, but there's nothing private about it. It's designed to make you face the wall so anyone can walk up and look over your shoulder for several minutes before you notice the cheaply-constructed floor quiver a bit when the person shifts his weight. You turn around and ask how long he was standing there. "Only a person who has something to hide would be concerned about people looking over their shoulder," management says, despite the fact they told you the cubicle was a valued gift of privacy.
On an assembly line, you sit/stand with a person on either side of you. That arrangement is inefficient because you could turn to your neighbor and socialize to break the hours of monotony. Worse yet, you might find out that you're doing the same work as your neighbor for half the pay. In a cubicle, you are intentionally isolated -- you can't look someone in the eye without turning around and coercing them to do the same.
If factory workers on the assembly line had cubicles, they would never have organized unions. By isolating employees in their own, mass-produced boxes the company gains the advantage to trample the employees individually. You can flatten one worker bee without a problem, but you'd have some respect for an organized hive. The company calls its flyswatters "policies" and tout them as though they have the force of law.
"Company policy is that we don't pay anyone more than X. You have to do X because it's company policy. You have to provide your own computer because it's company policy. And when we terminate you, you have to leave the computer with us. Everyone else is doing it. It's company policy. No we don't travel expenses, you must have misunderstood company policy."
You generally don't see anyone unless it's a social engineer who has had the word "manager" appended to his title (product manager, account manager, project manager, etc.). Sixty percent of the people in my company had the word "manager" appended to their title to scare the 30% who had "engineer" in their title into acquiescence. Thus, a "manager" who really has no authority over an "engineer" can go to an engineer's cubicle at 5:30 and demand an all-nighter, threatening to call the engineer "uncooperative" if his plate is already full. Meanwhile, the "manager" goes out to dinner, to a bar, home to sleep and comes in the next day at 9, at which point he turns his cell phone back on. Most of these "managers" know nothing about the work that needs to be done, but they make up for that as masters of office politics, often dumping insufficient information on the engineer's desk to shift the blame for a "slipped" deadline.
Office parks are not posh. They are simply designed with the bare minimum needed to present the appearance of complicity with labor laws and ensnare workers who fear the stigma of a traditional factory. I wouldn't go back to a cubicle farm if the company actually paid me.
Regardless of the quality of the bills Congress writes; regardless of your opinion of those bills; regardless of whether you are an American citizen who feels a need to keep an eye on his elected representatives... you should make a habit of checking in from time to time to read the material written by Congress.
Ultimately that material becomes U.S. law. That translates into U.S. policy and U.S. spending, which directly or indirectly affects most people on this planet -- and certainly everyone who has the technical and economic means to read Slashdot, whether you like it or not. This makes everything Congress writes "worth reading."
It is incumbent upon you as a free-thinking individual to read, understand and evaluate the writings of Congress. The alternative is wandering across a busy street with your eyes closed because you can't get hit by a bus you can't see.
In any case, make that:
Note that comparatively tiny Lucent actually had to pay money in its part of the settlement.
From looking at your blog, I don't see evidence of conspiracies. All I see in your blog are the angry ramblings of a self-righteous individual who thinks the news media is playing up the wrong stories.
For real evidence of real conspiracies, read through the documents at The George Washington University's National Security Archive of declassified documents, like the proposal to incite world opinion against Cuba through propaganda, staged riots, staged attacks on the U.S., mock funerals and more.
If I had mod points, your comment would be at least as high as the troll you're responding to. But under the circumstances, I'll use my +1 bonus to get you some attention, and if someone wants to waste their mod points modding my comment down later, fine.
No. It's the same topic, but not the same story. The May story referenced globeandmail.com, which was perpetuating the rumor. The NYTimes Magazine story debunks the rumor by pointing out the facts and explaining why everyone gets irrationally excited about these things.
Rumor has it Disney is lobbying against the Maglev train in favor of a variant of the patented, copyrighted, lunch-box-marketed monorail system at Epcot.
So DARPA is taking a page from Google's book. Does the winner get $10,000 in cash, a VIP visit to the Pentagon in Arlington, VA and the possibility of running their prize winning code on DARPA's supercomputers?
By doing things on the Internet that can be monitored, you are unknowingly taking an ongoing personality test. If "I like chocolate" people are three times more likely to commit robbery than "I like strawberry" people, Ashcroft can probably produce "statistics" showing that people who swap songs illegally are three times as likely to be anarchists who have no respect for the law or the establishment, and therefore are more likely to be terrorists.
It's just unnecessary fluff -- they should just say aluminum and assume people will figure out that it's aircraft aluminum. Otherwise, it's like the Marines saying "we're using military-grade kevlar in our bulletproof vests." Duh.
When a laptop manufacturer says it's using aircraft aluminum, or when a bicycle tire manufacturer says it's using military-grade kevlar, or when Jack-in-the-Box says it's using military-grade titanium 99-cent buttons on its cash registers, then it's a bit more appropriate.