Heeheehee, my god man, you actually _believe_ anything a company write in their investor relations pages? Especially something as blatantly obvious as that? In this case, they arent even saying anything; all they're saying is they're using a technique that somene working for them currently pioneered. 20 years ago? 40? Ex scientists in a retirement home kept on retainer so they can actually say the word pioneered without lying? Not that that usually stops companies from spouting bs in investor relations.
Face it, investor relations is about conning the gullible out of their money with nice sounding rethoric, nothing else.
And the frequency at which a processor operates has about as much to do with its speed as a handsets signal frequency does with its cpu frequency. Which, I believe, was the point.
If such a ludicrous patent actually is enforced, maybe its time for some researcher to accidentally mismail the database and have it spread all over the net like DeCSS?
Of course, you are right that a lot of the language expressed on IRC isnt good enough to consistently convey emotion. Most of the time it isnt needed. However, in the cases where emotion has been an essential component I've found it improves a lot. Text; in conjuction with empathy and imagination can accomplish much.
While Im now in a real-life relationship with a woman whom I actually (surprisingly enough) didnt meet on the net (who still lives 18 hours travel away tho, ironic, isnt it?), I had my share of netflings in the good old days, and language sufficed to express a vast range of emotion. Several of them flourished offline too.
There is another point to it tho; in a lot of cases people need other people to listen. Especially people with similar experiences who can relate; something which real world friends (or even 'experts') may be entirely unable to. Sometimes its hard to find people in your social circles who have had loves or friends die in illness or accidents, and experts may only know the theory; on the net you can find others who have had it happen.
Forming and expressing your feelings in words makes you also analyze them and start understanding yourself, something very akin to therapy. Even a well trained therapist can rarely do more than listen.
Of course, Im biased. Most of the people I've associated with have been very expressive people, and most of it before the masses joined up. It has detoriated quite a bit.
The truth is that the expression of emotion through text is not the least crippled. This fundamental error is based on emotionally insensitive cognition problems of those unused to different forms of communicating feelings. Text is far more than adequate to convey the widest range of human emotion; ask any writer or anyone who actually has some experience with text based communication. Text can convey ideas, emotions, abstractions and impressions just as well as face to face communications. You just have to adapt to not lean on the crutches of voice and facial expressions.
Further, on the internet in mediums such as IRC you are not subjected to the same immediate dangers that ordinary life will inflict on you. You can express emotions without the danger of immediate social censure, especially when those emotions are considered 'bad'.
These forms are also far far better than real life in some cases. Sure, someone laying awake in the middle of the night can call a real life friend. How many times do you think they can do that? Every night for a month? Would _you_ enjoy having a depressed friend calling you all the time when he needs to talk and you need to get up for work in the morning?
The sad truth is that real world social support is a pipe dream, and it just cant handle a meeting with reality. Social censure and what is acceptable denies the actual expression of feelings in the real world. Instead of being a supporting network of friends and relatives it is a social pressure acting to have people bottle up their emotions, rather than express them.
Real life is by far overrated. Casual social interaction is held up by some as being a fundamental necessity for humans; in fact its mostly an annoyance. Socializing is not difficult; it is just shallow, disappointing and boring.
You're right of course, its much easier to find remotely interesting people on the net, simply because its far more organized than the real world.
Of course, you may have a problem with your Karma-whoring, which may make you cover your true feelings. You must learn to ignore other people. They are irrelevant. Be as caustic as you wish:). (Oh, ok, its actually a very good trait for socializing).
When it comes to the extreme cases the casuality is probably the other way around. There is a _lot_ of other messups that happen before you get someone deranged enough to become a serial killer.
And on the other hand most crimes are passion and/or drug/alcohol related. Religion has far more than its fair share in the causes of violence too, and some of our historical mass murderers commence their joyous tradition in the name of god.
Ok, bread baking is invented. People stay at home and bake instead of hanging out. Books pop up and people read instead of associating. Radio comes along, people listen to radio instead of meeting other people. TV is invented. People watch TV instead of hanging out with people. Video comes along and people do that too. And then computers, video games and the net.
So do those socializers get THE HINT? Maybe some day they will realize that a lot of people are approximately as interesting as the average mold you'll find in a sink, and that most alternatives will easily be more fun than meeting them? Maybe the problem isnt the distractions, but that a lot of people are boring?
Having a job where I meet people, and a steady girlfriend, I have about as much desire to make random social aquaintances as I have for a solid kick in the head. Im sorry, but my time is far too valuable to waste discussing sports with boring jocks in a bar or art with boring arts drones in a museum for the few neat people you find. Id rather enjoy myself, and go out the few times theres actually something interesting happening.
MS releasing code in the open would be absolutely useless to any projects; it would even be worse than useless. They are not likely to put it under GPL, and if it isnt under GPL, even _looking_ at that code will make you legally unable to work on the project anymore. Clone projects like WINE must be clean room implementations or they risk getting sued out of existence.
The best thing for everyone would be if Microsoft kept their code in a dark basement in Redmond until they disappear.
Id argue that e-commerce very much _needs_ such a setback. What's the use of encrypting with ssl or anything when the real risk is the morons on the recieving end keep the creditcard info accessible for every script kiddie and their dog anyway?
You're perfectly right, of course. Investing in stocks in companies doing what any guy in a basement could do is only playing a pyramid game. Very popular in countries such as Albania, but you'd imagine investors in more industrial parts of the world would have better sense.
Actually, in my opinion, keeping credit card data on any system at all accessible from the net for more than a few minutes should be called criminal negligence. Sue them out of existence _and_ throw them in jail.
Dialup and dynamic IP's dont change anything as far as user tracing goes. Its all logged.
The same reasons for ip changes, masquerading, dialup ips, etc will remain; its not _just_ done because there are too few ip addresses. Corporate security, anonymity, etc, are a lot of reasons not to allow any kind of information on network topology out through the firewalls. Tracing based on any kind of machine network ID wont be possible to reliably tie to a user.
Well, hey, give them a fine based on their market cap value, ranging from 1 to 10 percent, depending on how clear it is they're trying to pull a fast one. That ought to stop even companies like Verio and Microsoft, considering their inflated stock. Especially since it seems the inflatable companies are the ones who do this most.
Ah, so Verio has a corporate policy that employees are not allowed to look things up? Ask any geek and they _will_ look it up. So should anyone else. Its part of the job, and not looking things up when you work with them is worse than gross stupidity.
Indeed, at work we are all clamoring for smaller keyboards and smaller monitors. Hey, I want one of those 3 inch monitors at home! Maybe I can even get a 2 inch! And I definitely want a smaller TV.
Im sorry, but I no more care for webbrowsing in a mobile phone than I crave it for my toaster. It just isnt practical. Yah, sure, order plane tickets and everything straight off the phone. Well, guess what, you have a _phone_. Call them. Its a helluvalot faster than attempting to navigate a micromonitor with itsy bitsy buttons to figure out how their ordering systems work.
Im sure there are a lot of sortof useful things, but a lot of the uses a computer have simply have diametrically opposed demands. And a lot of it would be completely redundant. The mobile device industry is driven by hype, not demand or practicality.
Many people seem to think that its about storage size; it isnt. There will be no problem finding the space.
The problems instead are actually migrating the data. Ideally, the data should be kept in a live state, transferred from old storage media and converted to more modern formats (and classified and indexed!) during the available migration period, when such migration is supported. That, for even a mediumsized organization will be a full time job for a few people.
In the worse case, you're only transferring from old media. Then, recovering any data instead becomes a full time job of locating it and researching storage formats, finding something able to read those formats and eventually converting the documents to something readable.
Of course, it mostly becomes a problem if your organization is using proprietary format on data. Using the simplest most standard format such as ascii or sgml formatted documents makes it far easier.
1) Everything down to the deterministic working of synapses and neurotransmittors. Same stimulus, same response. Yes, it would be complicated, but not outside reach.
Why would you need to go down to a quantum level? The human mind isnt that complicated, altho having emotional vested interest in belief in 'choice' and 'free will' and 'innovation' as other than the deterministic results of biology and interaction with environment will make it tempting to argue otherwise.
If you backed time in your life would you do it differently? I doubt I would. With the exact same circumstances and knowledge I would always make the same choices. If you reran the world all over again, yes, then you may get different results due to quantum interaction with observable phenomena that would change the circumstances, but not through the workings of the human mind.
2) Outside context problem. Better leave someone behind to mind the hearth. Or have a really homicidal home protection system:).
3) Depending on the process a) Neither. If you create two copies, destroying the original.
Or b), of course, in a split-like-amoeba sortof induced progressive cloning, both, with a divergence beginning as most levels of the neural network are severed. That would be perceptually intriguing, Im sure.
How do I know you have a consciousness? How do you know I have one? Unless we accept the concept of a turing test as measure of consciousness, woefully inadequate as far as proof goes as it is, we cant tell. Of course, add to that the problem that there are a lot of people who a) wouldnt be able to tell a clever perl script from another human being and b) would be very hard to differentiate from a clever perl script.
Then again, as a solipsistic nihilist I may not believe in your existence as anything but a figment of my imagination, but now, that doesnt really matter.:)
Considering the fact that Microsoft has lied in court, right in the face of a judge, why should anyone ever believe anything that Microsoft says at all? Im sorry, but anything that Microsoft, or any representative of them, says is about on the same level of trust as The Space Alien Abduction and Cattle Mutilation Magazine. Microsoft has long since entered the trust level of proven pathological liars.
Um, do you mean that every software outfit thats been around for more than two weeks have been violating the law to make profits? That would certainly make the software industry pretty bad.
Then again, maybe you arent breaking the law? Most of Microsofts intellectual property is the result of illegal actions; if you had robbed a bank and bought a house for the money, they could take it from you; if you commited fraud and bought stocks for the money, they could take it from you; why should it be different if you by illegal means destroy competition and use the money you earn to develop intellectual property?
Being a monopoly is not illegal. Using your power as a monopoly to prevent competition or to break into and take over other areas of buisness is. It is consistent.
There are other ways a free man in a free country can be disowned by the state. One is fines, if you commit a crime. Another is damages, also if you commit a crime. And theres always the various laws about property, which can be forcibly bought out if it is in public interest (new roads, etc). There are plenty of ways. Actually, they should probably fine him a couple of billions, award damages to the rest of the computer industry in the range of about a couple of hundred billion. and then run a highway through his house:).
But I agree, unless extremely closely monitored the split wont do much to fix what has been broken. It may make it harder for the new separate companies to kill off competition and a bit harder to use loss-leaders for that, but it wont come close to making up for the damage MS has caused.
...the year of the gigantic non-events. Beginning with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, leaving you with a big 'doh' feeling, going on with the millenium hype and panic, and subsequent non-event newyears eve and ohmigod, a few webpages with 19100 on them. How... exciting.
Maybe we didnt see much of Darth Maul in TPM because he escaped from Hollywood and put lithium in the worlds watersupply (except the medias who seems to have found a supply of mineral water containing high amounts of uppers).
Slashdot Mirror
Heeheehee, my god man, you actually _believe_ anything a company write in their investor relations pages? Especially something as blatantly obvious as that? In this case, they arent even saying anything; all they're saying is they're using a technique that somene working for them currently pioneered. 20 years ago? 40? Ex scientists in a retirement home kept on retainer so they can actually say the word pioneered without lying? Not that that usually stops companies from spouting bs in investor relations.
Face it, investor relations is about conning the gullible out of their money with nice sounding rethoric, nothing else.
And the frequency at which a processor operates has about as much to do with its speed as a handsets signal frequency does with its cpu frequency. Which, I believe, was the point.
If such a ludicrous patent actually is enforced, maybe its time for some researcher to accidentally mismail the database and have it spread all over the net like DeCSS?
What billions made on e-commerce? Is there actually even one e-commerce company that has a profit?
Oh, yes, the stocks. I hear pyramid schemes are still a popular pasttime in Albania...
Of course, you are right that a lot of the language expressed on IRC isnt good enough to consistently convey emotion. Most of the time it isnt needed. However, in the cases where emotion has been an essential component I've found it improves a lot. Text; in conjuction with empathy and imagination can accomplish much.
While Im now in a real-life relationship with a woman whom I actually (surprisingly enough) didnt meet on the net (who still lives 18 hours travel away tho, ironic, isnt it?), I had my share of netflings in the good old days, and language sufficed to express a vast range of emotion. Several of them flourished offline too.
There is another point to it tho; in a lot of cases people need other people to listen. Especially people with similar experiences who can relate; something which real world friends (or even 'experts') may be entirely unable to. Sometimes its hard to find people in your social circles who have had loves or friends die in illness or accidents, and experts may only know the theory; on the net you can find others who have had it happen.
Forming and expressing your feelings in words makes you also analyze them and start understanding yourself, something very akin to therapy. Even a well trained therapist can rarely do more than listen.
Of course, Im biased. Most of the people I've associated with have been very expressive people, and most of it before the masses joined up. It has detoriated quite a bit.
The truth is that the expression of emotion through text is not the least crippled. This fundamental error is based on emotionally insensitive cognition problems of those unused to different forms of communicating feelings. Text is far more than adequate to convey the widest range of human emotion; ask any writer or anyone who actually has some experience with text based communication. Text can convey ideas, emotions, abstractions and impressions just as well as face to face communications. You just have to adapt to not lean on the crutches of voice and facial expressions.
Further, on the internet in mediums such as IRC you are not subjected to the same immediate dangers that ordinary life will inflict on you. You can express emotions without the danger of immediate social censure, especially when those emotions are considered 'bad'.
These forms are also far far better than real life in some cases. Sure, someone laying awake in the middle of the night can call a real life friend. How many times do you think they can do that? Every night for a month? Would _you_ enjoy having a depressed friend calling you all the time when he needs to talk and you need to get up for work in the morning?
The sad truth is that real world social support is a pipe dream, and it just cant handle a meeting with reality. Social censure and what is acceptable denies the actual expression of feelings in the real world. Instead of being a supporting network of friends and relatives it is a social pressure acting to have people bottle up their emotions, rather than express them.
Real life is by far overrated. Casual social interaction is held up by some as being a fundamental necessity for humans; in fact its mostly an annoyance. Socializing is not difficult; it is just shallow, disappointing and boring.
You're right of course, its much easier to find remotely interesting people on the net, simply because its far more organized than the real world.
:). (Oh, ok, its actually a very good trait for socializing).
Of course, you may have a problem with your Karma-whoring, which may make you cover your true feelings. You must learn to ignore other people. They are irrelevant. Be as caustic as you wish
When it comes to the extreme cases the casuality is probably the other way around. There is a _lot_ of other messups that happen before you get someone deranged enough to become a serial killer.
And on the other hand most crimes are passion and/or drug/alcohol related. Religion has far more than its fair share in the causes of violence too, and some of our historical mass murderers commence their joyous tradition in the name of god.
Ok, bread baking is invented. People stay at home and bake instead of hanging out. Books pop up and people read instead of associating. Radio comes along, people listen to radio instead of meeting other people. TV is invented. People watch TV instead of hanging out with people. Video comes along and people do that too. And then computers, video games and the net.
So do those socializers get THE HINT? Maybe some day they will realize that a lot of people are approximately as interesting as the average mold you'll find in a sink, and that most alternatives will easily be more fun than meeting them? Maybe the problem isnt the distractions, but that a lot of people are boring?
Having a job where I meet people, and a steady girlfriend, I have about as much desire to make random social aquaintances as I have for a solid kick in the head. Im sorry, but my time is far too valuable to waste discussing sports with boring jocks in a bar or art with boring arts drones in a museum for the few neat people you find. Id rather enjoy myself, and go out the few times theres actually something interesting happening.
MS releasing code in the open would be absolutely useless to any projects; it would even be worse than useless. They are not likely to put it under GPL, and if it isnt under GPL, even _looking_ at that code will make you legally unable to work on the project anymore. Clone projects like WINE must be clean room implementations or they risk getting sued out of existence.
The best thing for everyone would be if Microsoft kept their code in a dark basement in Redmond until they disappear.
Id argue that e-commerce very much _needs_ such a setback. What's the use of encrypting with ssl or anything when the real risk is the morons on the recieving end keep the creditcard info accessible for every script kiddie and their dog anyway?
You're perfectly right, of course. Investing in stocks in companies doing what any guy in a basement could do is only playing a pyramid game. Very popular in countries such as Albania, but you'd imagine investors in more industrial parts of the world would have better sense.
Actually, in my opinion, keeping credit card data on any system at all accessible from the net for more than a few minutes should be called criminal negligence. Sue them out of existence _and_ throw them in jail.
Not that I ascribe any credibility to anything Microsoft says, but do blatant lies really help their situation?
Dialup and dynamic IP's dont change anything as far as user tracing goes. Its all logged.
The same reasons for ip changes, masquerading, dialup ips, etc will remain; its not _just_ done because there are too few ip addresses. Corporate security, anonymity, etc, are a lot of reasons not to allow any kind of information on network topology out through the firewalls. Tracing based on any kind of machine network ID wont be possible to reliably tie to a user.
Well, hey, give them a fine based on their market cap value, ranging from 1 to 10 percent, depending on how clear it is they're trying to pull a fast one. That ought to stop even companies like Verio and Microsoft, considering their inflated stock. Especially since it seems the inflatable companies are the ones who do this most.
Ah, so Verio has a corporate policy that employees are not allowed to look things up? Ask any geek and they _will_ look it up. So should anyone else. Its part of the job, and not looking things up when you work with them is worse than gross stupidity.
Indeed, at work we are all clamoring for smaller keyboards and smaller monitors. Hey, I want one of those 3 inch monitors at home! Maybe I can even get a 2 inch! And I definitely want a smaller TV.
Im sorry, but I no more care for webbrowsing in a mobile phone than I crave it for my toaster. It just isnt practical. Yah, sure, order plane tickets and everything straight off the phone. Well, guess what, you have a _phone_. Call them. Its a helluvalot faster than attempting to navigate a micromonitor with itsy bitsy buttons to figure out how their ordering systems work.
Im sure there are a lot of sortof useful things, but a lot of the uses a computer have simply have diametrically opposed demands. And a lot of it would be completely redundant. The mobile device industry is driven by hype, not demand or practicality.
Many people seem to think that its about storage size; it isnt. There will be no problem finding the space.
The problems instead are actually migrating the data. Ideally, the data should be kept in a live state, transferred from old storage media and converted to more modern formats (and classified and indexed!) during the available migration period, when such migration is supported. That, for even a mediumsized organization will be a full time job for a few people.
In the worse case, you're only transferring from old media. Then, recovering any data instead becomes a full time job of locating it and researching storage formats, finding something able to read those formats and eventually converting the documents to something readable.
Of course, it mostly becomes a problem if your organization is using proprietary format on data. Using the simplest most standard format such as ascii or sgml formatted documents makes it far easier.
1) Everything down to the deterministic working of synapses and neurotransmittors. Same stimulus, same response. Yes, it would be complicated, but not outside reach.
:).
Why would you need to go down to a quantum level? The human mind isnt that complicated, altho having emotional vested interest in belief in 'choice' and 'free will' and 'innovation' as other than the deterministic results of biology and interaction with environment will make it tempting to argue otherwise.
If you backed time in your life would you do it differently? I doubt I would. With the exact same circumstances and knowledge I would always make the same choices. If you reran the world all over again, yes, then you may get different results due to quantum interaction with observable phenomena that would change the circumstances, but not through the workings of the human mind.
2) Outside context problem. Better leave someone behind to mind the hearth. Or have a really homicidal home protection system
3) Depending on the process a) Neither. If you create two copies, destroying the original.
Or b), of course, in a split-like-amoeba sortof induced progressive cloning, both, with a divergence beginning as most levels of the neural network are severed. That would be perceptually intriguing, Im sure.
Existence isnt magic, its just very complicated.
How do I know you have a consciousness? How do you know I have one? Unless we accept the concept of a turing test as measure of consciousness, woefully inadequate as far as proof goes as it is, we cant tell. Of course, add to that the problem that there are a lot of people who a) wouldnt be able to tell a clever perl script from another human being and b) would be very hard to differentiate from a clever perl script.
:)
Then again, as a solipsistic nihilist I may not believe in your existence as anything but a figment of my imagination, but now, that doesnt really matter.
Considering the fact that Microsoft has lied in court, right in the face of a judge, why should anyone ever believe anything that Microsoft says at all? Im sorry, but anything that Microsoft, or any representative of them, says is about on the same level of trust as The Space Alien Abduction and Cattle Mutilation Magazine. Microsoft has long since entered the trust level of proven pathological liars.
Um, do you mean that every software outfit thats been around for more than two weeks have been violating the law to make profits? That would certainly make the software industry pretty bad.
Then again, maybe you arent breaking the law? Most of Microsofts intellectual property is the result of illegal actions; if you had robbed a bank and bought a house for the money, they could take it from you; if you commited fraud and bought stocks for the money, they could take it from you; why should it be different if you by illegal means destroy competition and use the money you earn to develop intellectual property?
Being a monopoly is not illegal. Using your power as a monopoly to prevent competition or to break into and take over other areas of buisness is. It is consistent.
There are other ways a free man in a free country can be disowned by the state. One is fines, if you commit a crime. Another is damages, also if you commit a crime. And theres always the various laws about property, which can be forcibly bought out if it is in public interest (new roads, etc). There are plenty of ways. Actually, they should probably fine him a couple of billions, award damages to the rest of the computer industry in the range of about a couple of hundred billion. and then run a highway through his house :).
But I agree, unless extremely closely monitored the split wont do much to fix what has been broken. It may make it harder for the new separate companies to kill off competition and a bit harder to use loss-leaders for that, but it wont come close to making up for the damage MS has caused.
...the year of the gigantic non-events. Beginning with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, leaving you with a big 'doh' feeling, going on with the millenium hype and panic, and subsequent non-event newyears eve and ohmigod, a few webpages with 19100 on them. How... exciting.
Maybe we didnt see much of Darth Maul in TPM because he escaped from Hollywood and put lithium in the worlds watersupply (except the medias who seems to have found a supply of mineral water containing high amounts of uppers).