1) A Avalon like API for SOAP controled GUI's. Kind of like GLADE, but more flexible. A way of designing user interfaces, where the logic is almost totaly seperated to the server side.
2) SVG.... realy, why isn't this already in by default? In fact, if the SVG were made scriptable then #1 would be made almost trivial.
3) Sandbox Security. The ability to run plugins or "activex" controls in a restricted sudo account or sudo style sandbox. This could free up allot of design issues, while leveraging an inherently stable security model.
While I'm sure everyone is ready to scream "it's the age of the one man TV Station!", we may not be entirely there just yet.
Media distribution is a technological problem, and there for inenvitably solvable.
But content is not. It still takes Talent, Money and Training (or 2 of the 3:) to produce content on the level that people expect. You can look to modern day BLOGs as a paradime. Everybody and his brother has a BLOG, but how many of them have regular readers? Only a few people have the tallent to write anything that the rest of us care to read.
The situation is made worse with a peercast network because:
1) you need the tallent
2) You need a host of OTHER people with tallent (say actors)
3) You need people to watch it. Lot's of people, a traditional BLOG doesn't require ramp up, to scale. But you need a following to get a following. Chicken and the egg.
Until problems like "Bad Actors" get solved it may be some time before peercasts acomplish anything more than syndicating otherpeoples (read comercial/stolen/porn) media.
I no longer live in the US, and I left as the cyber-cafe trend was not taking off.
Cyber cafe's are operating on a different model all together. 1st, renting a PC, that is properly maintained, is dirt cheap. And you make hand over fist. I spent a year studying aramaic, and charged other students $5 an hour to use a beat up old thinkpad, outside my dorm room. 1 computer(a P1), with 40 potential customers and I made $30 bruto a day, the laptop cost me $16 once, and the network connection cost me $1 a day. Scaling that to a commercial setting is just awsome to think about.
Making coffee just seems like a good way to wreck keyboards, have more expenses, and have more equipment to maintain.
People going to a cafe are also there for a reason. Their there on a mission (at least in Israel), and they have some place to go afterwords. Starbucks you go for coffee, enviroment. And your settling in to an extent.
Again, electricity is CHEAP, and battery power devices are not particularly hungry. Keep them in there seats, keep them buying coffee and cookies.
Loss is always weighed against gain. In America most people don't smoke now.
I kick out one smoker, who sits next to 8 other people (sides+corners) who don't want to smell the smoke, how many customers have I gained?
A non-smoker(who isn't a harping twit) doesn't offend anyone, or drive away customers. People never say "Oh I like that resteraunt, except for all the non-smokers, the air is just too clear there"
Smoking and Non-Smoking sections were always a joke. As if those 3 plants you put in between really are filtering the air, and stoping the smoke.
1 resteraunt can't ban smokers because allot of buisness comes from buisness group lunches (group night outings, etc). 1 smoker can complain, and change the plans of the entire group. You loose buisness.
But if it is understood, defacto, that smoking is not done indoors in any resteraunt we can kick all your stinky butts out with impunity. Because reality is that resteraunts make money much more on groups, and less on single patrons (note:more than linear scale, peope in groups buy beer, deserts, appetizers). If any where you go you can't smoke, then you have no more voice on the group.
PS: Harping anti smokers suck. Quiting is hard, I know, I did it (allot of times, the last one seems to have taken). But that doesn't meen you give up. Go get a bag of sucking candies and quit. Every day you can't breath is one day of your life you won't enjoy. The only thing all succesfull quiters have in common is that they all wanted too , for real.
I spent 20 years doing everything in resteraunts from cleaning toilets to managing.
Now I was never fond of customers who would sit there smoking for 4hrs after their meal. But I'd kill to keep those bar flies stuck to their stools for another 2 beers.
When the vote came up to ban smoking in public places in Florida, every resteraunt owner (not the bars)was tripping over him/herself to pass it (one resteraunt couldn't do it, cause smokers would leave, but if they all did it at the same time.. It's not just cause we were tired if scrubbing tar off the ceilngs, or it stinking the place up. It was that smokers hands and mouths are bussy as they smoke. There for there is nothing for them to buy. And they are still sucking up space, air, and waitresses.
Now some guy on a laptop is a different matter all together. They take frequent breaks, and are continuously buying coffee, and snacks.
In one case we had a russian buisness man (I kid you not) called Borris. He made us his office. From 10am till 7pm he was there every day. Yelling and cursing on his cellphone, playing his game boy, and pounding at his note book. He must have been into us for $75 a day. We made the food and coffee to order for him. We named a sandwich after him. We added an espresso machine for him. (ok so other customers drank the espresso too). Borris is not that unusuall, especialy with the Starbucks example. And what ever it took to make him happy we did, because we never would spend more than he did.
Electricity is cheap. And 10 laptops will cost me less than running 1 big screen TV.
It's not stealing, if your a patron. If you come in, clog the toilet, juice your laptop, and don't leave a single cent behind, then your a leach. But your in the minority, by far. It's worth it.
Polymers, to the Internet, to Spaceships. The one thing that is absolutly universal about every new technology is that it's most profound use will be somehow related to sex.
'69 was the year they launched birth control. It's not hailed as the year of women's lib (where woman can get married, fall in love, and NOT have 20 kids), it's the summer of love.
The automobile, at least in America, is synonimous with sex.
The telephone, probably the greatest single invention of potential in the history of man since the wheel: Phone sex.
Nothing wrong with a trust fund baby buying a $5k dollar deck of cards either. Still would rather that money go to the family down the street strugeling to put their genius child through colege.
An abitious project to bring back some of the most amazing and majestic technology humanity has ever concieved... turned... into... a... theme park...
I remember this feeling. It's the same feeling I had when I was a young nerd, trying to save up enough money for a 4 generation old computer, watching my clients use their top of the line $5,000 machines to play solitare....
Next youre going tell me they are using space shuttles for tourists; and advanced cybernetics for robotic pets...
Ladies and gentelmen: The dark side of capitalism.
But I'm still holding out for "the Patch". Not the kind of patch that get's you to stop something, but the kind you slap on in the morning to FEED THE ADICTION. Keep it comming babey!
Here's how it goes: **Beeeeeeep*** (slap around for snooze button, hit volume instead) (Grab patch, with easy tear tab) **Rip** **Slap** "Sorry dear" **Rip** **Slap** (patch goes on, you predictably roll back over to go to sleep) >> 45 seconds latter "Jumping Jeasus on a Pogo Stick! It's time to get to work!"
I want this and disposable underwear. And I don't think I'm alone in this!
I was thinking 2 or 3 parabolic mirrors to reflect it to it's finaly destination point under the grownd. You loose upto 5% for each reflector, depending on the quality of it, but you would loose allot more in terms of insolation by trying to spot heat it above ground and then pump it down. Moveing it as light, is more cumbersome, but much more efficient, and in the end uses less equpimpent.
Most solar researchers in this veign are using Sodium Cloride (table salt). It has a much higher specific heat than water. Tends to be less explosive when heated to 600c (you really want to build your house on top of an aging steam boiler with the equivalent energy of dynamite?), and is even cheaper than water and dirt (water aint cheap where I come from)! When molten it's conduction of heat is so efficient you don't even need pumps, it's own confection currents do the work for you.
Now you just need a near perfect insulator and your all set. (say an underground tank insulated with airogel)
The real trick isn't in just heating homes though. It's also running things like ovens and stoves. For that your going to need a liquid that stays a liquid between -10c and 250c, without dangerous pressure build up, freezing, corroding or screwing up your pumps. (and it can't pollute the environment when it leaks)
Once you can safely transport high temperatures 2-3 times boiling point, you can do some pretty amazing things. Like running your A/C from the heat well. (two sterling engines hooked up to eachoter in reverse) Water pumps, air tools, and electrical generators (40-50% efficient in sealed systems like sterlings, but much higher for open ended boilers. The trick as you put it is to avoid converting the energy from one form to another untill it's absolutly necesary.
Asymetricly encrypted emails are rarely actually encrypted. They are signed. which is that I mearly provide an encrypted hash of the email, to prove that whoever sent it, has access to the private key.
The keys themselves can be signed by a master key, by o' say PGP's new website. (this does not require the PGP website to have a copy of the private key)
What this meens is they could give the signing service away for free to individuals, in order to create a defacto standard. But then charge legitimate bulk emailers for the privlege of their service. PGP becomes the arbiter of who is spam and who is not. In exchange they get to charge for permission to send bulk/commercial mail.
Sounds like a good buisness plan.
Of course, I'll have to RTFA once the/.'ing stops.
A) use IR instead, it's cheap and easy for CCD's and it's invisable to humans (therefore not disorienting)
B) to get the basic data, I could have someone walk down a halway with these cameras (or just one high rez-with a fish eye lense).
I know have images of you from 360 degrees, and I know from what angle each of those photos were taken.
It's not just edge detection, it's a simplification of the process that allows you to process it from 3 dozen angles in the same ammount of time. So I don't have to chose the front facial, no smilling, data rich sample. I can use a bunch of data-poor samples and correlate the results. Since the pool of data samples is larger, and from a wide degree of angles, it becomes more dificult to mask all the different details that are being sampled.
And it's not just edge detection. Say it's the distance from your nose to your ear when viewed from 20degrees behind your head to the right. Or the indentation of the nape of your kneck (shoulder, etc) to the to front of your forhead.
The fact that you can process dozens, and include calculations over time (giving orientation data), would alow you to collect hundreds of lower value data points, that when combined can give you the same or greater level of acuracy as one complex shot of the face.
The reason why I think it's so usefull to this type of camera, is that the camera achievs it's effect with much less processing overhead (of say an adobe/imagemagick filter).
I wonder if such a technogology could be used for biometric facial recognition. Since the lightsources are internal, it would be relatively simple get consistent refrence points from it.
Also, it would not be *AS* processor intensive, so you could take more photos from more angles.
Using autofocus, and a short depth of focus, you isolate figures even in crouds. Isolate the target from multiple photos, so you have more than one agle for a biometric.
If we can track the target in motion, we can assume that FRONT is aproxomately the direction they are traveling. Use and IR flash so that people don't get all paranoid (not saying they don't have a reason).
Even with glasses and a beard change it would be tough to fool the system.
If a company is based around training and services then it shouldn't matter much how many copies are stollen. It should actually help. Example: You can download and use NXServer/Client for free, but if you are looking to run an office on it, your going to need their help. Same with Redhat. Most installations go smooth (a credit to their product) but if your doing something on an enterprise scale you want the comfort of knowing that you can blame the folks in the fedora, and they WILL fix your problems as they come up.
Since small jobs don't require much support it allows service companies to ignore the nickle and dime stuff and focus on the high rollers. So steel it all you like, your just increasing the number of people who are comfortable with the product, and decreasing the cost of finding good employees.
Of couse RH and Novel will need to find tech support workers who can cost effectively service India and China............ uh the Congo is nice this time of year isn't it?
Well it's all quite convienent you see. In addition to gettin the lattest music through a proprietary p2p sharing network (is that an oxymoron?), and helping the major record lables save on bandwidth; They will even scan your hard drive and remove the illegal mp3's that you accidentaly put on your system. Isn't that nice?
BTW: I wonder if you can actually engage in sharing of files, ie: This song rocks, here check it out before you buy it. Or you just lend your DSL to MGM.
Here's a novel concept: Maybe sharing is about amongst equals, not helping to lower the costs of multi-billion dollar industries who will otherwise sue you.
Oh, and for what it's worth: I do kinda like aestbetics of mini-cooper, and never understood the "bigger is better" angle (big screen tvs, SUVs). But that's probably just my european upbringing.:-)
It's just not.......... falec enough... But I ride a bike. So I'm not one to talk.
; and a few other stereotypical prejudices
let's count them off:
1) Arrogant, we'll the whole west takes this one.
2) Loud, hang out with some russians some time. That's loud
3) Fat, true in any wealthy country. Even China's catching up.
4) Bad Geography... ok it's true. I have no idea where I am at this very moment...
5) Litigious: lawyers, every year, are the #1 contributors to both campaigns. American's are as sick with this nonsense as they can get, but the blood suckers never loose no matter who wins.
6) Violent, 48% of our voting population voted for a pacifist. 80% couldn't care less. But this is natural in any democracy. That's why the last 2 democracies/republics to go to war were Sparta and Athens.
7) Stupid, I've spent the last 2 years seeing the world. And I've never seen anything to make me think that the USA has a monopoly on this.
8) More money than sense. Yes. And we share this distinciton with most of the EU.
9) Cowboys/Vigilanties. True. It's part of the culture. We emphasize individual initiative as the primary virtue. And while this is not EXCLUSIVE to Americans, it is unique in that it is a primary feature of the culture, rather than surfacing in special individuals or groups.
10) Insular; America is one of the few places on earth you can drive, drive, drive, drive, and drive, and still be in a place that speaks your language, is completley culturally, and geographicaly different. It's a big country. Most of us have time just taking it in. And let's face it, there is a certain self assuance that comes from being the worlds most popular and argualbly difficult immigration destination.
"but isn't that better than USA that doesn't even want to try it? "
There are plenty of domestic initiatives in the USA. From target efficiency goals for autos to emisions regulations, to waste handling. The US was one of the first nations to ban Ozone depeleting chems, and is often times a little to quick to ban various pestacides. Don't even get me started on the overly ambitions wild life protection in places like Florida (where I'm from).
As yet there is no CO2 regulation. And while there is serious research backing these theorys,they still have major oposition. It will take some more reasearch and a public effort to convince the general population that this is a real issue. And Americans will eventually vote with their pocketbooks.
In Europe it's FASHIONABLE to "be green".
Yeah, I've seen the minicooper.. uh... yuk.
It's not unfashionable in the states. Americans are primarily libritarian in nature, and have a hard time understanding the European notion of colectivism. anything that smacks of the exapansion of Gov't powers, or gov't regulation will get an imediat knee jerk deffensive reaction. The only reason things like the DMCA and INDUCE acts were passed was because they got everyone too look the other way for 2 seconds. This has much less to do with attitudes toward the environment and more to do with basic ideas about the role gov't.
Lastly, there is a distinct impression amongst Americans that they are being talked down to from Europe. Told there stupid. Told there cowboys. Told to just be quite and follow daddy Europe's lead. Don't expect this to ever win favor.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see a version of geko that enables:
1) A Avalon like API for SOAP controled GUI's. Kind of like GLADE, but more flexible. A way of designing user interfaces, where the logic is almost totaly seperated to the server side.
2) SVG.... realy, why isn't this already in by default? In fact, if the SVG were made scriptable then #1 would be made almost trivial.
3) Sandbox Security. The ability to run plugins or "activex" controls in a restricted sudo account or sudo style sandbox. This could free up allot of design issues, while leveraging an inherently stable security model.
While I'm sure everyone is ready to scream "it's the age of the one man TV Station!", we may not be entirely there just yet.
Media distribution is a technological problem, and there for inenvitably solvable.
But content is not. It still takes Talent, Money and Training (or 2 of the 3:) to produce content on the level that people expect. You can look to modern day BLOGs as a paradime. Everybody and his brother has a BLOG, but how many of them have regular readers? Only a few people have the tallent to write anything that the rest of us care to read.
The situation is made worse with a peercast network because:
1) you need the tallent
2) You need a host of OTHER people with tallent (say actors)
3) You need people to watch it. Lot's of people, a traditional BLOG doesn't require ramp up, to scale. But you need a following to get a following. Chicken and the egg.
Until problems like "Bad Actors" get solved it may be some time before peercasts acomplish anything more than syndicating otherpeoples (read comercial/stolen/porn) media.
I just thought it was all in the internet?
I no longer live in the US, and I left as the cyber-cafe trend was not taking off.
Cyber cafe's are operating on a different model all together. 1st, renting a PC, that is properly maintained, is dirt cheap. And you make hand over fist. I spent a year studying aramaic, and charged other students $5 an hour to use a beat up old thinkpad, outside my dorm room. 1 computer(a P1), with 40 potential customers and I made $30 bruto a day, the laptop cost me $16 once, and the network connection cost me $1 a day. Scaling that to a commercial setting is just awsome to think about.
Making coffee just seems like a good way to wreck keyboards, have more expenses, and have more equipment to maintain.
People going to a cafe are also there for a reason. Their there on a mission (at least in Israel), and they have some place to go afterwords. Starbucks you go for coffee, enviroment. And your settling in to an extent.
Again, electricity is CHEAP, and battery power devices are not particularly hungry. Keep them in there seats, keep them buying coffee and cookies.
Loss is always weighed against gain. In America most people don't smoke now.
I kick out one smoker, who sits next to 8 other people (sides+corners) who don't want to smell the smoke, how many customers have I gained?
A non-smoker(who isn't a harping twit) doesn't offend anyone, or drive away customers. People never say "Oh I like that resteraunt, except for all the non-smokers, the air is just too clear there"
Smoking and Non-Smoking sections were always a joke. As if those 3 plants you put in between really are filtering the air, and stoping the smoke.
1 resteraunt can't ban smokers because allot of buisness comes from buisness group lunches (group night outings, etc). 1 smoker can complain, and change the plans of the entire group. You loose buisness.
But if it is understood, defacto, that smoking is not done indoors in any resteraunt we can kick all your stinky butts out with impunity. Because reality is that resteraunts make money much more on groups, and less on single patrons (note:more than linear scale, peope in groups buy beer, deserts, appetizers). If any where you go you can't smoke, then you have no more voice on the group.
PS: Harping anti smokers suck. Quiting is hard, I know, I did it (allot of times, the last one seems to have taken). But that doesn't meen you give up. Go get a bag of sucking candies and quit. Every day you can't breath is one day of your life you won't enjoy. The only thing all succesfull quiters have in common is that they all wanted too , for real.
dig it brother:
I spent 20 years doing everything in resteraunts from cleaning toilets to managing.
Now I was never fond of customers who would sit there smoking for 4hrs after their meal. But I'd kill to keep those bar flies stuck to their stools for another 2 beers.
When the vote came up to ban smoking in public places in Florida, every resteraunt owner (not the bars)was tripping over him/herself to pass it (one resteraunt couldn't do it, cause smokers would leave, but if they all did it at the same time.. It's not just cause we were tired if scrubbing tar off the ceilngs, or it stinking the place up. It was that smokers hands and mouths are bussy as they smoke. There for there is nothing for them to buy. And they are still sucking up space, air, and waitresses.
Now some guy on a laptop is a different matter all together. They take frequent breaks, and are continuously buying coffee, and snacks.
In one case we had a russian buisness man (I kid you not) called Borris. He made us his office. From 10am till 7pm he was there every day. Yelling and cursing on his cellphone, playing his game boy, and pounding at his note book. He must have been into us for $75 a day. We made the food and coffee to order for him. We named a sandwich after him. We added an espresso machine for him. (ok so other customers drank the espresso too). Borris is not that unusuall, especialy with the Starbucks example. And what ever it took to make him happy we did, because we never would spend more than he did.
Electricity is cheap. And 10 laptops will cost me less than running 1 big screen TV.
It's not stealing, if your a patron. If you come in, clog the toilet, juice your laptop, and don't leave a single cent behind, then your a leach. But your in the minority, by far. It's worth it.
Polymers, to the Internet, to Spaceships. The one thing that is absolutly universal about every new technology is that it's most profound use will be somehow related to sex.
'69 was the year they launched birth control. It's not hailed as the year of women's lib (where woman can get married, fall in love, and NOT have 20 kids), it's the summer of love.
The automobile, at least in America, is synonimous with sex.
The telephone, probably the greatest single invention of potential in the history of man since the wheel: Phone sex.
http://www.robrob8.com/rude_and_crude/barbie_sex.
Not complaining mind you. No, not at all. Anything that can drive a geeks imagination to get us into space is fine by me.
Nothing wrong with a trust fund baby buying a $5k dollar deck of cards either. Still would rather that money go to the family down the street strugeling to put their genius child through colege.
But nothing wrong with it no.
An abitious project to bring back some of the most amazing and majestic technology humanity has ever concieved... turned... into... a ... theme park...
I remember this feeling. It's the same feeling I had when I was a young nerd, trying to save up enough money for a 4 generation old computer, watching my clients use their top of the line $5,000 machines to play solitare....
Next youre going tell me they are using space shuttles for tourists; and advanced cybernetics for robotic pets...
Ladies and gentelmen: The dark side of capitalism.
bio fule cells
p os .htm
http://www.automation.hut.fi/research/bio/sfc00
Every party has a pooper, that's why we invited you!
I predict a resounding win for Google!
Of course I also predicted that DOS would beet windows.... I meen realy, who would want to waste 90% of their machine to just make things look pretty?
I got 2 bars of the stuff and tried it. I agree it has no noticable effect; and worse it tastse like cr@p!
But I'm still holding out for "the Patch". Not the kind of patch that get's you to stop something, but the kind you slap on in the morning to FEED THE ADICTION. Keep it comming babey!
Here's how it goes:
**Beeeeeeep***
(slap around for snooze button, hit volume instead)
(Grab patch, with easy tear tab)
**Rip** **Slap**
"Sorry dear"
**Rip** **Slap**
(patch goes on, you predictably roll back over to go to sleep)
>> 45 seconds latter
"Jumping Jeasus on a Pogo Stick! It's time to get to work!"
I want this and disposable underwear. And I don't think I'm alone in this!
I was thinking 2 or 3 parabolic mirrors to reflect it to it's finaly destination point under the grownd. You loose upto 5% for each reflector, depending on the quality of it, but you would loose allot more in terms of insolation by trying to spot heat it above ground and then pump it down. Moveing it as light, is more cumbersome, but much more efficient, and in the end uses less equpimpent.
Most solar researchers in this veign are using Sodium Cloride (table salt). It has a much higher specific heat than water. Tends to be less explosive when heated to 600c (you really want to build your house on top of an aging steam boiler with the equivalent energy of dynamite?), and is even cheaper than water and dirt (water aint cheap where I come from)! When molten it's conduction of heat is so efficient you don't even need pumps, it's own confection currents do the work for you.
Now you just need a near perfect insulator and your all set. (say an underground tank insulated with airogel)
The real trick isn't in just heating homes though. It's also running things like ovens and stoves. For that your going to need a liquid that stays a liquid between -10c and 250c, without dangerous pressure build up, freezing, corroding or screwing up your pumps. (and it can't pollute the environment when it leaks)
Once you can safely transport high temperatures 2-3 times boiling point, you can do some pretty amazing things. Like running your A/C from the heat well. (two sterling engines hooked up to eachoter in reverse) Water pumps, air tools, and electrical generators (40-50% efficient in sealed systems like sterlings, but much higher for open ended boilers. The trick as you put it is to avoid converting the energy from one form to another untill it's absolutly necesary.
Asymetricly encrypted emails are rarely actually encrypted. They are signed. which is that I mearly provide an encrypted hash of the email, to prove that whoever sent it, has access to the private key.
/.'ing stops.
The keys themselves can be signed by a master key, by o' say PGP's new website. (this does not require the PGP website to have a copy of the private key)
What this meens is they could give the signing service away for free to individuals, in order to create a defacto standard. But then charge legitimate bulk emailers for the privlege of their service. PGP becomes the arbiter of who is spam and who is not. In exchange they get to charge for permission to send bulk/commercial mail.
Sounds like a good buisness plan.
Of course, I'll have to RTFA once the
A) use IR instead, it's cheap and easy for CCD's and it's invisable to humans (therefore not disorienting)
B) to get the basic data, I could have someone walk down a halway with these cameras (or just one high rez-with a fish eye lense).
I know have images of you from 360 degrees, and I know from what angle each of those photos were taken.
It's not just edge detection, it's a simplification of the process that allows you to process it from 3 dozen angles in the same ammount of time. So I don't have to chose the front facial, no smilling, data rich sample. I can use a bunch of data-poor samples and correlate the results. Since the pool of data samples is larger, and from a wide degree of angles, it becomes more dificult to mask all the different details that are being sampled.
And it's not just edge detection. Say it's the distance from your nose to your ear when viewed from 20degrees behind your head to the right. Or the indentation of the nape of your kneck (shoulder, etc) to the to front of your forhead.
The fact that you can process dozens, and include calculations over time (giving orientation data), would alow you to collect hundreds of lower value data points, that when combined can give you the same or greater level of acuracy as one complex shot of the face.
The reason why I think it's so usefull to this type of camera, is that the camera achievs it's effect with much less processing overhead (of say an adobe/imagemagick filter).
I wonder if such a technogology could be used for biometric facial recognition. Since the lightsources are internal, it would be relatively simple get consistent refrence points from it.
Also, it would not be *AS* processor intensive, so you could take more photos from more angles.
Using autofocus, and a short depth of focus, you isolate figures even in crouds. Isolate the target from multiple photos, so you have more than one agle for a biometric.
If we can track the target in motion, we can assume that FRONT is aproxomately the direction they are traveling. Use and IR flash so that people don't get all paranoid (not saying they don't have a reason).
Even with glasses and a beard change it would be tough to fool the system.
If a company is based around training and services then it shouldn't matter much how many copies are stollen. It should actually help. Example: You can download and use NXServer/Client for free, but if you are looking to run an office on it, your going to need their help. Same with Redhat. Most installations go smooth (a credit to their product) but if your doing something on an enterprise scale you want the comfort of knowing that you can blame the folks in the fedora, and they WILL fix your problems as they come up.
.... .... uh the Congo is nice this time of year isn't it?
Since small jobs don't require much support it allows service companies to ignore the nickle and dime stuff and focus on the high rollers. So steel it all you like, your just increasing the number of people who are comfortable with the product, and decreasing the cost of finding good employees.
Of couse RH and Novel will need to find tech support workers who can cost effectively service India and China....
Well it's all quite convienent you see. In addition to gettin the lattest music through a proprietary p2p sharing network (is that an oxymoron?), and helping the major record lables save on bandwidth; They will even scan your hard drive and remove the illegal mp3's that you accidentaly put on your system. Isn't that nice?
BTW: I wonder if you can actually engage in sharing of files, ie: This song rocks, here check it out before you buy it. Or you just lend your DSL to MGM.
Here's a novel concept: Maybe sharing is about amongst equals, not helping to lower the costs of multi-billion dollar industries who will otherwise sue you.
Maybe... it's just an idea.
You realize of course that this puts us one step closer to Smell-O-Vision.
Of course the pottential for abuse seems even greater with Taste-O-Vision.
Flood them with /.'ers that will suck down all there bandwidth viewing the freebies, while never buying anything!
Yes! The power of Slashdot!
Oh, and for what it's worth: I do kinda like aestbetics of mini-cooper, and never understood the "bigger is better" angle (big screen tvs, SUVs). But that's probably just my european upbringing. :-)
.... ... falec enough...
It's just not...
But I ride a bike. So I'm not one to talk.
; and a few other stereotypical prejudices
let's count them off:
1) Arrogant, we'll the whole west takes this one.
2) Loud, hang out with some russians some time. That's loud
3) Fat, true in any wealthy country. Even China's catching up.
4) Bad Geography... ok it's true. I have no idea where I am at this very moment...
5) Litigious: lawyers, every year, are the #1 contributors to both campaigns. American's are as sick with this nonsense as they can get, but the blood suckers never loose no matter who wins.
6) Violent, 48% of our voting population voted for a pacifist. 80% couldn't care less. But this is natural in any democracy. That's why the last 2 democracies/republics to go to war were Sparta and Athens.
7) Stupid, I've spent the last 2 years seeing the world. And I've never seen anything to make me think that the USA has a monopoly on this.
8) More money than sense. Yes. And we share this distinciton with most of the EU.
9) Cowboys/Vigilanties. True. It's part of the culture. We emphasize individual initiative as the primary virtue. And while this is not EXCLUSIVE to Americans, it is unique in that it is a primary feature of the culture, rather than surfacing in special individuals or groups.
10) Insular; America is one of the few places on earth you can drive, drive, drive, drive, and drive, and still be in a place that speaks your language, is completley culturally, and geographicaly different. It's a big country. Most of us have time just taking it in. And let's face it, there is a certain self assuance that comes from being the worlds most popular and argualbly difficult immigration destination.
But we've digressed. It's been a pleasure, realy.
"but isn't that better than USA that doesn't even want to try it? "
... yuk.
There are plenty of domestic initiatives in the USA. From target efficiency goals for autos to emisions regulations, to waste handling. The US was one of the first nations to ban Ozone depeleting chems, and is often times a little to quick to ban various pestacides. Don't even get me started on the overly ambitions wild life protection in places like Florida (where I'm from).
As yet there is no CO2 regulation. And while there is serious research backing these theorys,they still have major oposition. It will take some more reasearch and a public effort to convince the general population that this is a real issue. And Americans will eventually vote with their pocketbooks.
In Europe it's FASHIONABLE to "be green".
Yeah, I've seen the minicooper.. uh
It's not unfashionable in the states. Americans are primarily libritarian in nature, and have a hard time understanding the European notion of colectivism. anything that smacks of the exapansion of Gov't powers, or gov't regulation will get an imediat knee jerk deffensive reaction. The only reason things like the DMCA and INDUCE acts were passed was because they got everyone too look the other way for 2 seconds. This has much less to do with attitudes toward the environment and more to do with basic ideas about the role gov't.
Lastly, there is a distinct impression amongst Americans that they are being talked down to from Europe. Told there stupid. Told there cowboys. Told to just be quite and follow daddy Europe's lead. Don't expect this to ever win favor.