I remember way back when, around when CD-R's first came out, they had a type of organic dye that appeared gold whos purpose was for data archival. I have a few of these and quite a few of the old blue Verbatims and some no-name green media. All of these are still quite readable, and they were burned in 1996. Perhaps one of the reseachers in the article left their CD-R's on the dashboard of their car and didn't own up to it.
The other thing to consider is that DVD-R/+R technology is dropping though the floor. I bought a Pioneer A05 for $320 in January and today the A06 is going for $229., and remember I bought this thing from the same place I linked to. I don't know how DVD-R is for archival, but my point is that at the rate the technology is falling in price, CD-R may not be around much longer anyway.
In any case, I found a rather excellent guide on the different tyes of CD-R media. It goes over all the dyes, their manufacturers, theoretical lifespans of the dyes, etc. I recommend a visit...
Seems like all the responsible people seem to fuck up anyways. Isn't it the current CA governor who fucked up the state's energy supplies one way or another? But that's okay, because he's a stereotype politician who answers question with surgical precision and comfortably drones out word by word the speeches prepared for him by his staff of marketers, jurists and various other yesheads. I mean, being able to pay someone to write up speeches with ideal answers is so much more important then a 26 year old who might be naive but at least genuine.
Seriously, haven't you noticed a trend among politicians and CEOs?......
You are correct on both counts. I don't dispute for the need for fresh blood in politics. I don't think anyone else does either. That's why I think Schwartzeneggar will win, if only to slap the faces of the career politicians. Believe me I have no love for Davis or any other of those talking heads. Honestly though, I don't think the answer is to install someone who's "one of us". Let's talk about leadership. I would like to use the military hierarchy as an example. Would you install a private into a colonel's command position? Of course not. This is because it takes time, experience, and yes, age, to get to that kind of position where people will take you seriously. Such leaders are also quite stoic, which makes people feel more comfortable. I mean, if your leader is going "OMFG we're screwed LOL" there's going to be a morale problem.
Well, maybe it had something to do with Goergy having most answers on her site already? Maybe she was interviewed only PARTLY because she's a politician, but more so because she's "one of us" who is currently in the public spotlight? Sure, the fact she's a governor candidate is important too and some questions were related to that, but the standard "What are you going to do about (healthcare|education|infrastructure|financial shortcomings|the energy crisis)?" should be left to journalists who wants the same answers over and over. NO ONE can solve something as serious as any of the aforementioned subject on a short notice. Georgy can't, Arnold can't, the porn peddler can't either. Solving healthcare is going to take more then a few years in office and a few worthless promises.
I'm the last person who thinks the next governor will be able to fix all of California's problems. There is no magic bullet. And maybe you're right, the levity was entertaining...But it did nothing to secure my vote. Quite the opposite in fact. But we can beat this horse all day long. My opinion is that the questions should have been more serious, and you obviously have no problem with it.
Oh yes, all we've got to deal with are silly little things like rising sea levels, (major bummer if most of your country is below sea level) declining ground water levels and our own energy crisis as rivers run too warm so we cant use cooling water anymore. Yet we still manage to survive with a Prime Minister who wouldn't look out of place in a christian-fundamentalist version The Muppet Show.
Come now don't be harping on environmental issues. Everyone knows that the only time Americans give a crap about anything is when it costs them money. And besides here in the states only Florida will be underwater if the level rises. Not a problem in my book:>
Anal? Short-sighted? THIS WOMAN WANTS TO BE OUR GOVERNOR AND THE QUESTIONS WERE NOT ASKED OR REPLIED TO SERIOUSLY.
The next time you can't find a job, are opening your wallet to pay for a royal fuck-up by the powers that be, or can't take the classes you want because they've been disolved due to budget cuts, remember that politics should be "fun". We don't need to deal with serious issues here. A geek is running for Governor. Whoo hoo! Who cares that no one seems to think the responsibility is serious?
The selections were ridiculous. I would have liked to see "How are you going to dig California out of debt?" But all I got was "Can you deal with dselect?" When the DoJ prosecutors answered our questions did they say "h4h4h4h4, copyright ownz your a55!!!!" Did anyone say "Fuck you, lawyer! Do you jack off to gay porn or what?" No. Slashdotters clearly understood they were dealing with somebody important, something they obviously didn't feel about Georgy Russell when they were asking or moderating these questions. The fault does not all lie on the Slashdotters' heads, but also those who selected the questions.
Maybe you live in some nice cooshy state or perhaps another country where you are blissfully unaware of the problems California has, but I live here and I'd rather not have a potential governor who thinks she's on an IRC channel answering questions for junior high schoolers doing some kind of political project.
Yes everyone...Vote with your dick. She's young and cute after all. And she can use BOTH vi and emacs!
Boxers or briefs? vi or emacs? What kind of questions are those? When I'm paying out of my ass for car registration and funding for higher education is being cut left and right I don't want to hear about these asinine topics. I don't want to see a:q!:q!:q! at the end of a response from someone who could potentially be ruling over me. She's 26. We don't even know if she can balance her checkbook, let alone run an economy worth 100 billion a year. I don't give a crap if she's a geek, I want someone who is capable of running a large business and can make informed decisions across a wide range of topics. NOT someone who's biggest decision of the day is whether to write a program in Perl or Python.
So how does Community Power's BioMax work? In one end you pour a sack of wood chips, nut shells or pellets (considered the optimal fuel because they are small and dense) into an oxygen-starved tank- shaped gasifier, which heats the solid fuel until it forms a combustible gas (up to 800 degrees Celsius, or 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit). The so-called producer gas is a mixture of fuel gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane.
Where exactly does the energy come from to generate a temperature of 1,472 degrees?
The mess you describe is probably not something you'd want to tackle yourself. My advice: Get an electrician. You are probably looking at a major rewiring.
If you MUST do it yourself, then for God's sake cut the feed to that panel. If it's a subpanel then find the breaker that controls it and turn it off. If it's a main panel then pulling the electric meter should do the job. They make contactless devices that buzz or light up when they get near the presence of an AC field. Get one of those in case some yahoo decided to bring wires into the panel from some other place other than where you would expect and run it along the panel to make sure it's dead. Back it up with a voltmeter and test all the breakers.
It took them two years to decide they wanted to add a "One" to their name? What exactly do they hope to accomplish by changing the name, anyway? Everyone's still going to call them "Palm"
I respect your counter arguments on items 1-4, but on 5 by "production environment" I did not mean just working in a network, I meant in an environment like a machine shop, or in engineering, which is the current industry in which I work. When was the last time you walked into an engineering/drafing department and saw Apples? How many businesses can you walk into and see an Apple running as the server? Scan the http response headers of a class A network sometime, what do you think you'll see? I did on-site tech work for 10 years, and I have NEVER seen a shop running completely on Apple. Sorry if I seem a little biased in this argument, but those are the facts.
Every company has some kind of entrenched system with which compatibility must be maintained, and that system is usually Windows. That is the whole reason you bought Windows 2000 SBS.
As for hacks, yeah I hear you there. I don't like the patch game either, but I have my stuff locked up tight. I removed all extraenous bullcrap that we don't use and only allow the most necessary ports though the firewall. Just in case I have my systems listening for people blowing by with a port scan.
Well perhaps I should have been more specific. Quickbooks simply isn't beefy enough to run our company. We are a manufacturer, so we need to do material requirements planning, job costing, inventory control across two warehouses, material pick sheets, and a bunch of other custom stuff that goes with being a manufacturer. We simply can't do most of that with Quickbooks. We are running Mas200, which is geared towards Windows environments. Were we to switch to Mac, we'd have to throw a $100,000 investment (cost of software, cost of setup, continued support, etc) out the window and start from scratch. Then I would have to swim uncharted territory and find something in the Mac world that can do the same. This would fly like a lead brick with management. And without Mas200 my company will not run. As I said, an unmitigated disaster. As for support, I am the only tech...I handle programming, WAN, LAN, DB, Mas200 support, and systems administration. And I run about 50 computers, with 12 of them in Mexico. Don't give me this you need 5 techs to keep your Windows boxes up FUD. I'm no big fan of Microsoft, but if you set up the network right you need very few people to administrate a Windows network.
Maybe the REAL reason IT doesn't recommend Apple is because:
1. They cost three times what a comparable PC does.
2. Less variety of software
3. Highly proprietary systems whose replacement parts can only be bought though Apple.
4. Most users are already experienced with Windows.
5. Not geared towards engineering/computational/production environments. All that leaves left is the art geeks.
Bottom line...I work for a relatively small company 50 employees, and if I deployed Apples here it would be an unmitigated disaster. Accounting, payroll, the software that controls our machines, etc would all be broken. Imagine what kind of problems a company several times larger than us would face. I don't buy this tinfoil hat ranting from Cringely. Apple is not getting a break not only for the reasons mentioned above, but because people already have a tremendous investment in existing infrastructure that they would have to scrap and start from scratch if they wanted Apples.
Diamonds = Love, pah!
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
I invite Mr Van Royen to visit his local pawn shop.
Well I wouldn't go so far as Armageddon. Right now we are just going though McCarthyism 2000. Except instead of "communists" we talk of "terrorists". You can bet your ass that civil liberties were stepped on left and right during the commie hunt.
How about the constant threat of nuclear war? Russia and the US had their fingers on the button, man. It's a miracle the world didn't end during the Cold War. While we still have to worry about bio warfare and "dirty bombs", it beats the hell out of nothing left of the planet but a radioactive wasteland.
Then you had the feds monitoring peace activists during the Vietnam war. You had imprisonment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
Every generation has had its share of stupid government. Most of that stupidity has since gone away, only to be replaced by new stupidity. So now we have things like the the CDBPA (or whatever the hell it's called), the DMCA, the PATRIOT Act (a misnomer if I have ever heard one, but I'm preaching to the choir), etc. So here we are. All you have to do is try to stay out of jail and wait for the next wave of government stupidity:)
Don't be so depressed, buddy...Let's break it down:
9/11, Iraq, WMD's, terrorist, with us/against us/PATRIOT - Get Bush's ass out of office next term. At worst he will be in office for another 5 years. Hopefully he won't be able to turn our country into a ball of glowing nuclear slag in that time.
Microsoft - Currently being punked left and right by Linux. They won't die, but their market will be chipped away bit by bit as more people get tired of their shenanigans. I believe the current worldwide sentiment against the US is causing other countries to move away from US tech. Notice all the "Country X to move to Linux" articles lately?
SCO - They are as good as dead. The execs are unloading their stocks like mad. It was pump and dump from the beginning. I just wish those fuckers would go to prison.
DMCA, DRM - Unresolved. But the way I see it is this...The US is encumbering itself with all of these ridiculous laws so entrenched industry can be guaranteed their business model and continue to live out their worthless existance. IP laws are shackling innovation, and that's going to let other countries move ahead of us in many fields. At that point hopefully the US will go WTF and mobilize to be #1 again. That will include copyright and patent reform. Hopefully. If not, my advice is to learn Chinese.
The first red flag went up when you have this guy saying that inside of a century you'll have people able to live 5,000 years. This article already has the faint odor of that cult that supposedly cloned a human.
Second red flag: Assuming that if you can extend the life of roundworms by six times you can do the same for humans. Bzzzzt.
Third red flag: Sure, our organs may give out. But scientists are now breeding special kinds of pigs that may be able to grow replacement hearts and lungs What, are we cars now? When an organ starts acting flaky we go down to the corner store, buy a new one, open the hood and drop it in? So in order to live however ungodly amount of years they say, we have to piece ourselves together when something goes out? And that's just organs, what about stuff like bones? Something tells me that if you lived 600 years by these guys' terms, it'd be such a hellish existance you would WANT to die.
Here's another Quote of the Day: Consider dogs. DNA tests show that all modern dogs evolved from wolves and were initially bred by cavemen who knew nothing about the genome. Yet the dogs were rapidly transformed into everything from toy poodles to Great Danes. If we begin to reshape our own genetic code, we could presumably achieve even greater variation among our human descendants.
I'm sorry. Homo Sapiens didn't appear until around 130,000 years ago. The first dog species appeared 40 million years ago. Modern dogs as we know them are evolved from a species that appeared 7 million years ago. I'm afraid diversification of dogs happened long before man appeared. Certain traits of dogs were exaggerated by selective breeding, but mankind certainly wasn't responsible for creating everything from rat dogs to St. Bernards in the short space they have walked the earth. Evolution takes time. Lots of time. Try again.
That is true but as the old joke goes, you don't have to be a brain to be the boss...just an asshole.
When was the last time you had a manager who knew squat about what you are doing? When was the last time you had a boss younger than you are? Would you be happy taking orders from someone half your age? And why should things be any different in government? Government is, after all, the largest corporation minus accountability.
Could you see a 20-something geek girl, probably just out of college, heading up a 117 billion dollar a year corporation as CEO? This is what we are asked to swallow with the Georgy Russell for Governor campaign.
It's very difficult to find a person holding a public office who isn't 40+. From your picture I judge you are well below that. For most people, age symbolic of maturity, wisdom, and life experience. Do you think your age might be a problem in appealing to the constituency?
The constituency aside, should you get voted governor, do you believe the older California lawmakers will take you seriously? How do you intend to gain their respect?
Definitely a major problem. Not surprising though. Power lines are huge antennas. Whenever you put any kind of alternating current though a wire it will generate a propogating EM wave at the same frequency. Right now, all the power lines are "broadcasting" at 60Hz (50 for those of you who do not live in North America), but you start puting other frequencies in there, it will start broadcasting those too. I'm sure the FCC would have something to say about this. And no doubt they will since ham radio operators have documented interference problems.
On the PC side, we have some very interesting projects:
AGI/SCI Remember all those old Sierra games? Well a few people were able to reverse engineer the interpreter language. The result is that you can now make your own Sierra games, and even take apart existing ones, look at the code, screens, etc, and even modify them if you want. Truly and old schooler's paradise.
SCUMM VM So times have changed, and you can't play your LucasArts games on whatever OS you happen to be running now? ScummVM will fix that. Compatibility is not 100% but give them time.
The people behind these projects are very dedicated to saving the classics. With these kinds of people around, we should have no worries about the games we loved so much fading into obscurity.
Slashdot Mirror
It's quite simple. We don't like computers telling US what to do.
I remember way back when, around when CD-R's first came out, they had a type of organic dye that appeared gold whos purpose was for data archival. I have a few of these and quite a few of the old blue Verbatims and some no-name green media. All of these are still quite readable, and they were burned in 1996. Perhaps one of the reseachers in the article left their CD-R's on the dashboard of their car and didn't own up to it.
. shtml
The other thing to consider is that DVD-R/+R technology is dropping though the floor. I bought a Pioneer A05 for $320 in January and today the A06 is going for $229., and remember I bought this thing from the same place I linked to. I don't know how DVD-R is for archival, but my point is that at the rate the technology is falling in price, CD-R may not be around much longer anyway.
In any case, I found a rather excellent guide on the different tyes of CD-R media. It goes over all the dyes, their manufacturers, theoretical lifespans of the dyes, etc. I recommend a visit...
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_dye
Your post may have been modded as funny, but you can bet your ass if she owns the system bad enough they'll try to get her thrown in jail.
Perhaps this is in response to Bruce Perens' analysis of the "stolen" code that SCO had obfusticated.
"Oh no they got though our Greek Font encryption! IBM HAS to be behind it!!"
Seems like all the responsible people seem to fuck up anyways. Isn't it the current CA governor who fucked up the state's energy supplies one way or another? But that's okay, because he's a stereotype politician who answers question with surgical precision and comfortably drones out word by word the speeches prepared for him by his staff of marketers, jurists and various other yesheads. I mean, being able to pay someone to write up speeches with ideal answers is so much more important then a 26 year old who might be naive but at least genuine.
......
:>
Seriously, haven't you noticed a trend among politicians and CEOs?
You are correct on both counts. I don't dispute for the need for fresh blood in politics. I don't think anyone else does either. That's why I think Schwartzeneggar will win, if only to slap the faces of the career politicians. Believe me I have no love for Davis or any other of those talking heads. Honestly though, I don't think the answer is to install someone who's "one of us". Let's talk about leadership. I would like to use the military hierarchy as an example. Would you install a private into a colonel's command position? Of course not. This is because it takes time, experience, and yes, age, to get to that kind of position where people will take you seriously. Such leaders are also quite stoic, which makes people feel more comfortable. I mean, if your leader is going "OMFG we're screwed LOL" there's going to be a morale problem.
Well, maybe it had something to do with Goergy having most answers on her site already? Maybe she was interviewed only PARTLY because she's a politician, but more so because she's "one of us" who is currently in the public spotlight? Sure, the fact she's a governor candidate is important too and some questions were related to that, but the standard "What are you going to do about (healthcare|education|infrastructure|financial shortcomings|the energy crisis)?" should be left to journalists who wants the same answers over and over. NO ONE can solve something as serious as any of the aforementioned subject on a short notice. Georgy can't, Arnold can't, the porn peddler can't either. Solving healthcare is going to take more then a few years in office and a few worthless promises.
I'm the last person who thinks the next governor will be able to fix all of California's problems. There is no magic bullet. And maybe you're right, the levity was entertaining...But it did nothing to secure my vote. Quite the opposite in fact. But we can beat this horse all day long. My opinion is that the questions should have been more serious, and you obviously have no problem with it.
Oh yes, all we've got to deal with are silly little things like rising sea levels, (major bummer if most of your country is below sea level) declining ground water levels and our own energy crisis as rivers run too warm so we cant use cooling water anymore. Yet we still manage to survive with a Prime Minister who wouldn't look out of place in a christian-fundamentalist version The Muppet Show.
Come now don't be harping on environmental issues. Everyone knows that the only time Americans give a crap about anything is when it costs them money. And besides here in the states only Florida will be underwater if the level rises. Not a problem in my book
Anal? Short-sighted? THIS WOMAN WANTS TO BE OUR GOVERNOR AND THE QUESTIONS WERE NOT ASKED OR REPLIED TO SERIOUSLY.
The next time you can't find a job, are opening your wallet to pay for a royal fuck-up by the powers that be, or can't take the classes you want because they've been disolved due to budget cuts, remember that politics should be "fun". We don't need to deal with serious issues here. A geek is running for Governor. Whoo hoo! Who cares that no one seems to think the responsibility is serious?
The selections were ridiculous. I would have liked to see "How are you going to dig California out of debt?" But all I got was "Can you deal with dselect?" When the DoJ prosecutors answered our questions did they say "h4h4h4h4, copyright ownz your a55!!!!" Did anyone say "Fuck you, lawyer! Do you jack off to gay porn or what?" No. Slashdotters clearly understood they were dealing with somebody important, something they obviously didn't feel about Georgy Russell when they were asking or moderating these questions. The fault does not all lie on the Slashdotters' heads, but also those who selected the questions.
Maybe you live in some nice cooshy state or perhaps another country where you are blissfully unaware of the problems California has, but I live here and I'd rather not have a potential governor who thinks she's on an IRC channel answering questions for junior high schoolers doing some kind of political project.
Yes everyone...Vote with your dick. She's young and cute after all. And she can use BOTH vi and emacs!
:q!:q!:q! at the end of a response from someone who could potentially be ruling over me. She's 26. We don't even know if she can balance her checkbook, let alone run an economy worth 100 billion a year. I don't give a crap if she's a geek, I want someone who is capable of running a large business and can make informed decisions across a wide range of topics. NOT someone who's biggest decision of the day is whether to write a program in Perl or Python.
Boxers or briefs? vi or emacs? What kind of questions are those? When I'm paying out of my ass for car registration and funding for higher education is being cut left and right I don't want to hear about these asinine topics. I don't want to see a
Everyone knows that the best way to let a company know about a security hole is to write a worm that exploits it and release it into the wild.
The mess you describe is probably not something you'd want to tackle yourself. My advice: Get an electrician. You are probably looking at a major rewiring.
If you MUST do it yourself, then for God's sake cut the feed to that panel. If it's a subpanel then find the breaker that controls it and turn it off. If it's a main panel then pulling the electric meter should do the job. They make contactless devices that buzz or light up when they get near the presence of an AC field. Get one of those in case some yahoo decided to bring wires into the panel from some other place other than where you would expect and run it along the panel to make sure it's dead. Back it up with a voltmeter and test all the breakers.
It took them two years to decide they wanted to add a "One" to their name? What exactly do they hope to accomplish by changing the name, anyway?
Everyone's still going to call them "Palm"
I respect your counter arguments on items 1-4, but on 5 by "production environment" I did not mean just working in a network, I meant in an environment like a machine shop, or in engineering, which is the current industry in which I work. When was the last time you walked into an engineering/drafing department and saw Apples? How many businesses can you walk into and see an Apple running as the server? Scan the http response headers of a class A network sometime, what do you think you'll see? I did on-site tech work for 10 years, and I have NEVER seen a shop running completely on Apple. Sorry if I seem a little biased in this argument, but those are the facts.
Every company has some kind of entrenched system with which compatibility must be maintained, and that system is usually Windows. That is the whole reason you bought Windows 2000 SBS.
As for hacks, yeah I hear you there. I don't like the patch game either, but I have my stuff locked up tight. I removed all extraenous bullcrap that we don't use and only allow the most necessary ports though the firewall. Just in case I have my systems listening for people blowing by with a port scan.
Well perhaps I should have been more specific. Quickbooks simply isn't beefy enough to run our company. We are a manufacturer, so we need to do material requirements planning, job costing, inventory control across two warehouses, material pick sheets, and a bunch of other custom stuff that goes with being a manufacturer. We simply can't do most of that with Quickbooks. We are running Mas200, which is geared towards Windows environments. Were we to switch to Mac, we'd have to throw a $100,000 investment (cost of software, cost of setup, continued support, etc) out the window and start from scratch. Then I would have to swim uncharted territory and find something in the Mac world that can do the same. This would fly like a lead brick with management. And without Mas200 my company will not run. As I said, an unmitigated disaster. As for support, I am the only tech...I handle programming, WAN, LAN, DB, Mas200 support, and systems administration. And I run about 50 computers, with 12 of them in Mexico. Don't give me this you need 5 techs to keep your Windows boxes up FUD. I'm no big fan of Microsoft, but if you set up the network right you need very few people to administrate a Windows network.
Maybe the REAL reason IT doesn't recommend Apple is because:
1. They cost three times what a comparable PC does.
2. Less variety of software
3. Highly proprietary systems whose replacement parts can only be bought though Apple.
4. Most users are already experienced with Windows.
5. Not geared towards engineering/computational/production environments. All that leaves left is the art geeks.
Bottom line...I work for a relatively small company 50 employees, and if I deployed Apples here it would be an unmitigated disaster. Accounting, payroll, the software that controls our machines, etc would all be broken. Imagine what kind of problems a company several times larger than us would face. I don't buy this tinfoil hat ranting from Cringely. Apple is not getting a break not only for the reasons mentioned above, but because people already have a tremendous investment in existing infrastructure that they would have to scrap and start from scratch if they wanted Apples.
Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
I invite Mr Van Royen to visit his local pawn shop.
You had imprisonment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
My bad. That should read "You had the imprisonment of Japanese US citizens during World War II".
Well I wouldn't go so far as Armageddon. Right now we are just going though McCarthyism 2000. Except instead of "communists" we talk of "terrorists". You can bet your ass that civil liberties were stepped on left and right during the commie hunt.
:)
How about the constant threat of nuclear war? Russia and the US had their fingers on the button, man. It's a miracle the world didn't end during the Cold War. While we still have to worry about bio warfare and "dirty bombs", it beats the hell out of nothing left of the planet but a radioactive wasteland.
Then you had the feds monitoring peace activists during the Vietnam war. You had imprisonment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
Every generation has had its share of stupid government. Most of that stupidity has since gone away, only to be replaced by new stupidity. So now we have things like the the CDBPA (or whatever the hell it's called), the DMCA, the PATRIOT Act (a misnomer if I have ever heard one, but I'm preaching to the choir), etc. So here we are. All you have to do is try to stay out of jail and wait for the next wave of government stupidity
Don't be so depressed, buddy...Let's break it down:
9/11, Iraq, WMD's, terrorist, with us/against us/PATRIOT - Get Bush's ass out of office next term. At worst he will be in office for another 5 years. Hopefully he won't be able to turn our country into a ball of glowing nuclear slag in that time.
Microsoft - Currently being punked left and right by Linux. They won't die, but their market will be chipped away bit by bit as more people get tired of their shenanigans. I believe the current worldwide sentiment against the US is causing other countries to move away from US tech. Notice all the "Country X to move to Linux" articles lately?
SCO - They are as good as dead. The execs are unloading their stocks like mad. It was pump and dump from the beginning. I just wish those fuckers would go to prison.
DMCA, DRM - Unresolved. But the way I see it is this...The US is encumbering itself with all of these ridiculous laws so entrenched industry can be guaranteed their business model and continue to live out their worthless existance. IP laws are shackling innovation, and that's going to let other countries move ahead of us in many fields.
At that point hopefully the US will go WTF and mobilize to be #1 again. That will include copyright and patent reform. Hopefully. If not, my advice is to learn Chinese.
Scratch Pac Man the movie off the list. Apparently another immortal is already on it.
The first red flag went up when you have this guy saying that inside of a century you'll have people able to live 5,000 years. This article already has the faint odor of that cult that supposedly cloned a human.
Second red flag: Assuming that if you can extend the life of roundworms by six times you can do the same for humans. Bzzzzt.
Third red flag: Sure, our organs may give out. But scientists are now breeding special kinds of pigs that may be able to grow replacement hearts and lungs What, are we cars now? When an organ starts acting flaky we go down to the corner store, buy a new one, open the hood and drop it in? So in order to live however ungodly amount of years they say, we have to piece ourselves together when something goes out? And that's just organs, what about stuff like bones? Something tells me that if you lived 600 years by these guys' terms, it'd be such a hellish existance you would WANT to die.
Here's another Quote of the Day: Consider dogs. DNA tests show that all modern dogs evolved from wolves and were initially bred by cavemen who knew nothing about the genome. Yet the dogs were rapidly transformed into everything from toy poodles to Great Danes. If we begin to reshape our own genetic code, we could presumably achieve even greater variation among our human descendants.
I'm sorry. Homo Sapiens didn't appear until around 130,000 years ago. The first dog species appeared 40 million years ago. Modern dogs as we know them are evolved from a species that appeared 7 million years ago. I'm afraid diversification of dogs happened long before man appeared. Certain traits of dogs were exaggerated by selective breeding, but mankind certainly wasn't responsible for creating everything from rat dogs to St. Bernards in the short space they have walked the earth. Evolution takes time. Lots of time. Try again.
That is true but as the old joke goes, you don't have to be a brain to be the boss...just an asshole.
When was the last time you had a manager who knew squat about what you are doing? When was the last time you had a boss younger than you are? Would you be happy taking orders from someone half your age? And why should things be any different in government? Government is, after all, the largest corporation minus accountability.
Could you see a 20-something geek girl, probably just out of college, heading up a 117 billion dollar a year corporation as CEO? This is what we are asked to swallow with the Georgy Russell for Governor campaign.
It's very difficult to find a person holding a public office who isn't 40+. From your picture I judge you are well below that. For most people, age symbolic of maturity, wisdom, and life experience. Do you think your age might be a problem in appealing to the constituency?
The constituency aside, should you get voted governor, do you believe the older California lawmakers will take you seriously? How do you intend to gain their respect?
Mr. RFID tag, meet Mr. Taser.
Definitely a major problem. Not surprising though. Power lines are huge antennas. Whenever you put any kind of alternating current though a wire it will generate a propogating EM wave at the same frequency. Right now, all the power lines are "broadcasting" at 60Hz (50 for those of you who do not live in North America), but you start puting other frequencies in there, it will start broadcasting those too. I'm sure the FCC would have something to say about this.
And no doubt they will since ham radio operators have documented interference problems.
The classics will stay alive, as long as there are people out there who care about them.
This is evidenced in the dozens of emulators out there. Here's a small sample:
Stella (Atari)
FCE Ultra (Nintendo)
Freeze SMS (Sega Master System)
Gens(Genesis)
and, of course:
MAME (Every arcade game we know and love)
On the PC side, we have some very interesting projects:
AGI/SCI Remember all those old Sierra games? Well a few people were able to reverse engineer the interpreter language. The result is that you can now make your own Sierra games, and even take apart existing ones, look at the code, screens, etc, and even modify them if you want. Truly and old schooler's paradise.
SCUMM VM So times have changed, and you can't play your LucasArts games on whatever OS you happen to be running now? ScummVM will fix that. Compatibility is not 100% but give them time.
The people behind these projects are very dedicated to saving the classics. With these kinds of people around, we should have no worries about the games we loved so much fading into obscurity.