Sorry, I was just trying to shortcut an entirely different discussion by conceding one of the original poster's points. I'm not actually convinced Wal-Mart is Bad and Wrong, commercially.
I like the ability to buy a shower curtain at 2 AM, something my local mom&pop stores don't do. But that's the only time I go there; otherwise, I'm willing to pay a bit more to get out of line in less than an hour.
I just didn't think that this was the forum in which to discuss Wal-Mart's worker practices, local relations practices, etc. I just wanted to concede it and move on to my real point.
I am concerned about what happens to the RFID chips after they leave the store. Are they on the packaging, or the object. If I can leave the chip as soon as I leave the store, I'm perfectly content to be letting Wal-Mart track it any way they like in the store.
But even though I'm not a tinfoil-hat type, I'd just as soon my sneakers not be permanently broadcasting my location. Putting me under surveillance is one thing; it requires work. But I'd just as soon not be tracked quite so casually as just putting up RFID readers all over the place.
Actually, I do grow a lot of my own vegetables. By the time you reckon all the costs (water, fertilizer, dirt, stakes, seeds, tools), and the fairly low yield, it's probably cheaper to buy them at the store. I'm not even talking about the labor.
For some vegetables, the farmers even do a better job. I've never gotten perfect Romaine lettuce; mine's always bitter. Even after it's been picked and sent to a store, theirs is better than mine.
But oh, the tomatoes. A tomato is perfect right off the vine and even a farmer's market tomato just isn't the same.
They're even better with homemade mozzarella cheese, but who has time to raise their own buffalo?
I'm really, really hoping Mapquest will start sending out maps in SVG format. Being able to put on all the street names (when you print it on a 300DPI printer instead of a 75DPI screen) will make it a lot easier to find places than the dead reckoning system you currently have to use. The location maps are nearly useless.
Sadly, Americans are pretty bad about voting their consciences with their dollars. That's why Wal-Mart does so well to begin with. They know, at least abstractly, that Wal-Mart is Bad and Wrong. But when they they want to buy a shower curtain they'd rather buy it for $7.95 at Wal-Mart than $12.99 at the local design store.
The problem, unfortunately, is pervasiveness. I don't think anybody much cares whether somebody is tracking their Aggressive Sports gear or not, so they buy it where it's cheap. They do care, in the abstract, about the idea that somebody is tracking _all_ of their purchases, but somehow that doesn't translate down to each individual action.
In addition, many people are of the mind that they're not doing anything wrong, so why not allow yourself to be tracked? They'd rather save a few bucks today than worry about an ill-defined threat in the future. Short-term thinking, I know, but it's really, really hard to stop.
The software is a good start, but you can't walk up to a city/county/state government and sell them a CD-ROM full of software and claim, "This is your voting booth".
Diebold's software is almost completely irrelevant. They're the guys who make safes, ATMs, and other high-physical-security objects. The fact that the software makes the machines unreliable...well, what state/county/city ever actually looked inside the mechanical voting machine to see if it worked properly? The machines were supposed to be physically tamper-reistant.
There's also the "blame" issue. Companies have some sort of identity that cn be held responsible. (The fact that corporate structure generally hides the actions of individuals is...a nice benefit, especially if you're in the business of rigging elections. But I digress.)
So the only way for this to work is to become the enemy. Build a physical infrastructure (a hell of a lot more expensive than banging out some software) and find a progressive city willing to use it instead of Diebold. Pick up a track record, and perhaps you can compete. Then, perhaps, the conspiracy theorists will have something to point to when the state of Florida chooses Diebold at twice the price.
Re:Problem that doesn't exist big time...
on
Passport to Nowhere
·
· Score: 1
I think that token-based authentication (your floppy is effectively a token) is a strong possibility. But there are problems. I just ordered a new computer, and it doesn't even come with a floppy.
Nor do most kiosks. It's nice to be able to check my mail from the airport or internet cafe.
Also, since you have to install software, you couldn't use it from most computers not under your control.
Re:Problem that doesn't exist big time...
on
Passport to Nowhere
·
· Score: 1
What happens if your computer crashes? Or if you use a different computer?
Re:Problem that doesn't exist big time...
on
Passport to Nowhere
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The problem isn't managing passwords for a web site. The problem is managing passwords for ALL web sites.
How many accounts do you have, between eBay and paypal and Amazon and slashdot and...? Do you use a different password for each one? Aren't you the least bit worried that the Slashdot editors will use your Slashdot password against your Amazon account?
The idea of Single Sign-On is to put all of your eggs in one basket, then make sure it's a really good basket. Nobody trusts Microsoft to make that really good basket, but it doesn't mean that they're not trying to solve a real problem. It's a tricky one, because the trust factor is scary, and the stakes are very high.
Unlike the Romans, the Americans elect their government. If you hate Bush, there's good reason to dislike Americans. At the moment well over 40% of Americans plan to vote for him in the fall, and due to the vagaries of the system that could be enough to subject the world to four more years of his warmongering.
My argument is that those Americans who are voting for him are voting for what they hope is safety, not for colonization. They want world dominance economically more than they want it militarily. They consider the military a last resort. The question now is, is are we down to our last resort?
Actually, Americans deserve some blame for him: nearly 50% voted for him last time, and by all accounts nearly 50% will do so this time. Whether he wins again will be determined by the precise distribution of that 50%. It's unpleasant to have the country so deeply divided.
But the world's anger goes much further back than the present President. In some senses that's justified, and in some it's not. I'd rather have the world blame America for the 48% who voted for George Bush four years ago than for the mistakes we made in Vietnam 1963, Iran 1954, Cuba 1888,...
Anti-Americanism goes way back, for a lot of different reasons, many of them deserved, many not.
Past American screwups in foreign policy have left deep scars. Americans are frequently accused of imperialism. That was true in many ways, in the 1880s in Latin America and Africa (just as the rest of the world was pulling back its colonial powers).
More recently, during the Cold War America fought a variety of proxy wars with the Soviets, often backing one set of ruthless dictators against the Russian-backed ruthless dictators. These wars caused a lot of pain and grief, and because America was trying to establish client-states (or at least, keep the Soviets from establishing their client-states), it looked like more imperialism.
The CIA, in particular, is less effective fighting terrorism today than it might be because it has screwed up so badly in the past that a host of restrictions were placed on its power. It still hasn't effectively integrated its intelligence with the FBI, for example. That wall was put into place because the CIA had badly, badly misused the FBI to abuse American citizens in the 60's and 70's.
I live in America, and I'm not sure the rest of the world believes me when I say that the American people really don't want to run your country or own the world. The worst I can accuse us of is being willing to take advantage of less-developed countries, to use cheap jobs and nonexistent worker and environmental regulations to our advantage. But we don't want to colonize those countries, nor are we particulary intent on forcing them to continue those practices. We just take advantage of what we see. (I do not approve of this, mind you, and many will see this as worse than plain-old imperialism, but I'm just trying to lay out my observations as best I can.)
When Americans want to invade a foreign country, it's always out of fear. When we fear for our safety, we become aware of our strength. Other than that, we'd rather be economic than military.
Except, perhaps, for GW Bush, and his dad. The first Gulf War was clearly about oil, though we were able to play it as being about a small, oppresed country (as opposed to all those other small, oppressed, non-oil-bearing countries that we ignore). The President played it for oil, and sold it to Americans as freedom.
The same thing happened again last year. Americans, worried for their safety, were plenty ready to fight whomever the President said, with secret intelligence, was a danger. But the intelligence was wrong, or false, and the President misled America. Last time it worked, because the war was cheap, and he lied less. This time, there could be serious repercussions for American foreign policy.
But I believe that Americans, as individuals, had no interest in stealing Iraqi oil, even if the President did.
I've allowed myself to get drawn rather off-topic, so mod me down if you must, and I apologize in advance.
Lawyers try very hard to be unambiguous and consistent. They produce pages and pages of prose full of technical terms trying to narrow down exactly who owns what.
(I'm talking about lawyers working in good faith, which is most of them. It's the creeps that make the news, but most lawyers are just trying to be clear.)
Unfortunately, the additional verbiage causes problems of its own. First, the technical terms aren't always accessible until you've had background. You do the same thing as a computer programmer; just because you know the difference between an "icon" and an "operating system" without thinking doesn't mean the difference is readily apparent to somebody who has unfamiliar with computers.
Second, the additional verbiage makes inconsitencies more likely. As a programmer you know perfectly well that adding code to a program makes it buggier. Same thing: the more lawyers try to clarify your rights, the more likely it is that they're accidentally creating loopholes.
(Again, remember that I'm talking about the good ones, not the assholes. Actually, the assholes create a whole new difficulty, because everybody has to assume everybody else is an asshole and fight tooth and nail for their rights, so you end up acting like an asshole yourself. But that's a different point; I'm going for the point that it's hard even without the assholes.)
Unlike software, people are difficult. Who really knows if Apple Computer should be prevented from going into music by Apple Records? The number of "corner cases" is extraordinary. I wish it were always possible to make rules that were simple, unambiguous, consistent, and _fair_ (something you left out, but which is crucial). But often it simply isn't.
I once found that hard to take. In computers, there's always a solution. It's not always practical (you can't really rewrite the operating system because you found a bug in it), but it's at least possible, or you can show why it's impossible. In managing people there's an ugly gray area that's always bigger than you want it to be. Lawyers attack the problem with words. I wish I had a better solution.
That sounds slightly more cumbersome than the Windows standard, which is that ALT-letter always takes you to the menu beginning with that letter (and with some disambiguation rules). I use this all the time: I get to Slashdot with ALT-B s (Bookmarks->Slashdot). It's an incredibly concise gesture.
I'm a Java programmer; the standard Java Look and Feel also uses the same approach.
OS X does seem to have dialogue-box navigation enabled by default, which is an excellent start. It can be tricky to get right: you have to make sure that labels are properly associated with fields, or the fields are useless in a screen reader. And a bunch of other small but crucial considerations. I hope that the standard tools that you use to build a dialogue box on OS X support that sort of thing, and that the screen reader ties into it. (Somebody posted a reply to my original text that implies that it does.)
Even then, it's still a pain. I try to use keyboard navigation in web pages, but the usual link order means that I have to go through dozens or hundreds of links in the left and top nav bars before I can follow the link in, say, a Slashdot story. I'm a sighted user, but I always keep the idea of a headless terminal in mind, if for no other reason than that it means I don't have to take my fingers off the home row. (I don't even like using the arrow keys.)
There's more to operating a computer blind than just having a screen reader. Reading a web page is the easy part; if you have to see an icon and point a mouse at it, you can't even open the browser.
It needs to be operated either solely by keyboard, or have special modifications to support a force-feedback mouse.
The Macintosh has always supported accelerators, but when I last looked I couldn't find any way to access non-accelerated menu items without a mouse. Windows has supported mouseless operation from the beginning (not out of compassion for the blind, but because Windows 1.0 couldn't assume that you even owned a mouse.)
I'm a huge fan of the section 508 guidelines. Even non-disabled users can benefit from a display which is clear enough to be used by blind users. It forces the developer to think out a bit further ahead, but the end-user gains.
There's even more than paper and bookstores. A lot of other people go into writing a book. My book, which goes for about $40, had an editor, a copy editor, a typesetter, an indexer, an artist for the cover, and a small army of reviewers who received honoraria. The postage alone when we were doing the final phases of reviewing ran into the hundreds of dollars. In the end, yeah, I get about five bucks a copy.
Mind you, this is a technical book from a major reputable publisher (Addison-Wesley), so it got the luxe treatment. Fiction would get a different treatment.
It's smaller than a portable DVD player. It presumably pulls movies from the Internet. Maybe it's even got a CSS license and is capable of legally ripping DVDs onto itself. Supposedly it's capable of storing several movies in a space smaller than the stack of DVDs themselves. (Presumably you can compress them further if you're planning on displaying them on a screen smaller than TV resolution.)
It costs so much because it's got a large-capacity small-format hard disk plus a color LCD plus a bunch of software. Not that I'm rushing out to buy one, but I do see a technological niche.
Slashdot is more a point-of-view than a news gathering organization. This story originated at Reuters, which is a news gathering organization.
Slashdot is more like your local newspaper: it takes stories from a variety of locations (often wire services) which are relevant to you (determined by geography in the case of your local newspaper, or technical interest in the case of Slashdot). Yahoo does the same, but it's pretty catholic in its tastes. Slashdot gets its stories from a variety of sources: wire reports (often via other media), journals, blogs, press releases, and sometimes just people finding out interesting web sites (though that hardly counts as nes most of the time)
In all likelihood, the story originated as a press release from Microsoft, rewritten by Reuters into a news article, and then rewritten again as a Slashdot story. Slashdot adds very little: a bit of commentary, and sub-categorizations (Microsoft, Music, Business, Media).
The commentary is biased, but you wanted it biased: you came here for the Slashdot-esque view of things. You could read the Reuters feed yourself, but you'll probably read a lot of stuff you don't care about. You could even subscribe to get the press releases directly, but you'd really hate that.
Is it a standard DTV decoder? If so, I'd buy one just to have plain-old DTV decoding. I can't afford an HDTV, but I'd be happy to be able to receive the existing digital signals over the air for plain-old TV.
Unfortunately, such devices seem to cost more in the $250 and up range than the $100 range.
Earthsea's characters are much better developed than LotR's. I think that's an opportunity for them, not a predicament. The script for LotR is tricky because the dialogue, which reads beautifully as an epic poem, sounds silly coming out of the mouths of actual characters. Additional plots were written in to give the characters some depth. They used distressingly little of the original dialogue.
If the writers, director, and actors of Earthsea can use this to their advantage, they have an opportunity to give strong, interesting performances.
The strength of LotR is the depth of its background material. That allowed them to create extraordinary visuals, and that's the real reason for the success of the films. Not that I have any particular faith in the Academy, but they roughly reflected its strengths: many awards for visual elements, zero for acting. Not that the actors were bad, but the roles don't give them many opportunities to really succeed.
Earthsea, on the other hand, was written more like a modern story and less like an ancient epic. They've got a real opportunity here, a great work by a master storyteller. I hope it works out.
There's a lot of talent there, but he's mostly using it to make cheap^H^H^H^H^Hexpensive action movies and some not-very-good dramas (Ali, Bagger Vance).
He's got a lot of on-screen charisma, which is actually one of the most important skills an actor can have. People respond well to him, and that's a hard thing to teach. (I'm a director, and I've tried.) He's got some range, though he's at his best when it's light-hearted (his rap career, his sitcom, Men in Black).
But I keep looking for him to follow up his very good (not brilliant, but very very good) performance in Six Degrees. I haven't seen that yet.
Keanu... well, Keanu tries. I was actually the only one on the world who liked him in Much Ado About Nothing. He was interesting in My Own Private Idaho. He was actually rather good in that awful Something's Gotta Give. He really, really wants to be a Good Actor, but he'll have to settle for being charismatic.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I was just trying to shortcut an entirely different discussion by conceding one of the original poster's points. I'm not actually convinced Wal-Mart is Bad and Wrong, commercially.
I like the ability to buy a shower curtain at 2 AM, something my local mom&pop stores don't do. But that's the only time I go there; otherwise, I'm willing to pay a bit more to get out of line in less than an hour.
I just didn't think that this was the forum in which to discuss Wal-Mart's worker practices, local relations practices, etc. I just wanted to concede it and move on to my real point.
I am concerned about what happens to the RFID chips after they leave the store. Are they on the packaging, or the object. If I can leave the chip as soon as I leave the store, I'm perfectly content to be letting Wal-Mart track it any way they like in the store.
But even though I'm not a tinfoil-hat type, I'd just as soon my sneakers not be permanently broadcasting my location. Putting me under surveillance is one thing; it requires work. But I'd just as soon not be tracked quite so casually as just putting up RFID readers all over the place.
Actually, I do grow a lot of my own vegetables. By the time you reckon all the costs (water, fertilizer, dirt, stakes, seeds, tools), and the fairly low yield, it's probably cheaper to buy them at the store. I'm not even talking about the labor.
For some vegetables, the farmers even do a better job. I've never gotten perfect Romaine lettuce; mine's always bitter. Even after it's been picked and sent to a store, theirs is better than mine.
But oh, the tomatoes. A tomato is perfect right off the vine and even a farmer's market tomato just isn't the same.
They're even better with homemade mozzarella cheese, but who has time to raise their own buffalo?
I'm really, really hoping Mapquest will start sending out maps in SVG format. Being able to put on all the street names (when you print it on a 300DPI printer instead of a 75DPI screen) will make it a lot easier to find places than the dead reckoning system you currently have to use. The location maps are nearly useless.
Sadly, Americans are pretty bad about voting their consciences with their dollars. That's why Wal-Mart does so well to begin with. They know, at least abstractly, that Wal-Mart is Bad and Wrong. But when they they want to buy a shower curtain they'd rather buy it for $7.95 at Wal-Mart than $12.99 at the local design store.
The problem, unfortunately, is pervasiveness. I don't think anybody much cares whether somebody is tracking their Aggressive Sports gear or not, so they buy it where it's cheap. They do care, in the abstract, about the idea that somebody is tracking _all_ of their purchases, but somehow that doesn't translate down to each individual action.
In addition, many people are of the mind that they're not doing anything wrong, so why not allow yourself to be tracked? They'd rather save a few bucks today than worry about an ill-defined threat in the future. Short-term thinking, I know, but it's really, really hard to stop.
The software is a good start, but you can't walk up to a city/county/state government and sell them a CD-ROM full of software and claim, "This is your voting booth".
Diebold's software is almost completely irrelevant. They're the guys who make safes, ATMs, and other high-physical-security objects. The fact that the software makes the machines unreliable...well, what state/county/city ever actually looked inside the mechanical voting machine to see if it worked properly? The machines were supposed to be physically tamper-reistant.
There's also the "blame" issue. Companies have some sort of identity that cn be held responsible. (The fact that corporate structure generally hides the actions of individuals is...a nice benefit, especially if you're in the business of rigging elections. But I digress.)
So the only way for this to work is to become the enemy. Build a physical infrastructure (a hell of a lot more expensive than banging out some software) and find a progressive city willing to use it instead of Diebold. Pick up a track record, and perhaps you can compete. Then, perhaps, the conspiracy theorists will have something to point to when the state of Florida chooses Diebold at twice the price.
I think that token-based authentication (your floppy is effectively a token) is a strong possibility. But there are problems. I just ordered a new computer, and it doesn't even come with a floppy.
Nor do most kiosks. It's nice to be able to check my mail from the airport or internet cafe.
Also, since you have to install software, you couldn't use it from most computers not under your control.
What happens if your computer crashes? Or if you use a different computer?
The problem isn't managing passwords for a web site. The problem is managing passwords for ALL web sites.
...? Do you use a different password for each one? Aren't you the least bit worried that the Slashdot editors will use your Slashdot password against your Amazon account?
How many accounts do you have, between eBay and paypal and Amazon and slashdot and
The idea of Single Sign-On is to put all of your eggs in one basket, then make sure it's a really good basket. Nobody trusts Microsoft to make that really good basket, but it doesn't mean that they're not trying to solve a real problem. It's a tricky one, because the trust factor is scary, and the stakes are very high.
Unlike the Romans, the Americans elect their government. If you hate Bush, there's good reason to dislike Americans. At the moment well over 40% of Americans plan to vote for him in the fall, and due to the vagaries of the system that could be enough to subject the world to four more years of his warmongering.
My argument is that those Americans who are voting for him are voting for what they hope is safety, not for colonization. They want world dominance economically more than they want it militarily. They consider the military a last resort. The question now is, is are we down to our last resort?
Actually, Americans deserve some blame for him: nearly 50% voted for him last time, and by all accounts nearly 50% will do so this time. Whether he wins again will be determined by the precise distribution of that 50%. It's unpleasant to have the country so deeply divided.
...
But the world's anger goes much further back than the present President. In some senses that's justified, and in some it's not. I'd rather have the world blame America for the 48% who voted for George Bush four years ago than for the mistakes we made in Vietnam 1963, Iran 1954, Cuba 1888,
Anti-Americanism goes way back, for a lot of different reasons, many of them deserved, many not.
Past American screwups in foreign policy have left deep scars. Americans are frequently accused of imperialism. That was true in many ways, in the 1880s in Latin America and Africa (just as the rest of the world was pulling back its colonial powers).
More recently, during the Cold War America fought a variety of proxy wars with the Soviets, often backing one set of ruthless dictators against the Russian-backed ruthless dictators. These wars caused a lot of pain and grief, and because America was trying to establish client-states (or at least, keep the Soviets from establishing their client-states), it looked like more imperialism.
The CIA, in particular, is less effective fighting terrorism today than it might be because it has screwed up so badly in the past that a host of restrictions were placed on its power. It still hasn't effectively integrated its intelligence with the FBI, for example. That wall was put into place because the CIA had badly, badly misused the FBI to abuse American citizens in the 60's and 70's.
I live in America, and I'm not sure the rest of the world believes me when I say that the American people really don't want to run your country or own the world. The worst I can accuse us of is being willing to take advantage of less-developed countries, to use cheap jobs and nonexistent worker and environmental regulations to our advantage. But we don't want to colonize those countries, nor are we particulary intent on forcing them to continue those practices. We just take advantage of what we see. (I do not approve of this, mind you, and many will see this as worse than plain-old imperialism, but I'm just trying to lay out my observations as best I can.)
When Americans want to invade a foreign country, it's always out of fear. When we fear for our safety, we become aware of our strength. Other than that, we'd rather be economic than military.
Except, perhaps, for GW Bush, and his dad. The first Gulf War was clearly about oil, though we were able to play it as being about a small, oppresed country (as opposed to all those other small, oppressed, non-oil-bearing countries that we ignore). The President played it for oil, and sold it to Americans as freedom.
The same thing happened again last year. Americans, worried for their safety, were plenty ready to fight whomever the President said, with secret intelligence, was a danger. But the intelligence was wrong, or false, and the President misled America. Last time it worked, because the war was cheap, and he lied less. This time, there could be serious repercussions for American foreign policy.
But I believe that Americans, as individuals, had no interest in stealing Iraqi oil, even if the President did.
I've allowed myself to get drawn rather off-topic, so mod me down if you must, and I apologize in advance.
Lawyers try very hard to be unambiguous and consistent. They produce pages and pages of prose full of technical terms trying to narrow down exactly who owns what.
(I'm talking about lawyers working in good faith, which is most of them. It's the creeps that make the news, but most lawyers are just trying to be clear.)
Unfortunately, the additional verbiage causes problems of its own. First, the technical terms aren't always accessible until you've had background. You do the same thing as a computer programmer; just because you know the difference between an "icon" and an "operating system" without thinking doesn't mean the difference is readily apparent to somebody who has unfamiliar with computers.
Second, the additional verbiage makes inconsitencies more likely. As a programmer you know perfectly well that adding code to a program makes it buggier. Same thing: the more lawyers try to clarify your rights, the more likely it is that they're accidentally creating loopholes.
(Again, remember that I'm talking about the good ones, not the assholes. Actually, the assholes create a whole new difficulty, because everybody has to assume everybody else is an asshole and fight tooth and nail for their rights, so you end up acting like an asshole yourself. But that's a different point; I'm going for the point that it's hard even without the assholes.)
Unlike software, people are difficult. Who really knows if Apple Computer should be prevented from going into music by Apple Records? The number of "corner cases" is extraordinary. I wish it were always possible to make rules that were simple, unambiguous, consistent, and _fair_ (something you left out, but which is crucial). But often it simply isn't.
I once found that hard to take. In computers, there's always a solution. It's not always practical (you can't really rewrite the operating system because you found a bug in it), but it's at least possible, or you can show why it's impossible. In managing people there's an ugly gray area that's always bigger than you want it to be. Lawyers attack the problem with words. I wish I had a better solution.
That sounds slightly more cumbersome than the Windows standard, which is that ALT-letter always takes you to the menu beginning with that letter (and with some disambiguation rules). I use this all the time: I get to Slashdot with ALT-B s (Bookmarks->Slashdot). It's an incredibly concise gesture.
I'm a Java programmer; the standard Java Look and Feel also uses the same approach.
OS X does seem to have dialogue-box navigation enabled by default, which is an excellent start. It can be tricky to get right: you have to make sure that labels are properly associated with fields, or the fields are useless in a screen reader. And a bunch of other small but crucial considerations. I hope that the standard tools that you use to build a dialogue box on OS X support that sort of thing, and that the screen reader ties into it. (Somebody posted a reply to my original text that implies that it does.)
Even then, it's still a pain. I try to use keyboard navigation in web pages, but the usual link order means that I have to go through dozens or hundreds of links in the left and top nav bars before I can follow the link in, say, a Slashdot story. I'm a sighted user, but I always keep the idea of a headless terminal in mind, if for no other reason than that it means I don't have to take my fingers off the home row. (I don't even like using the arrow keys.)
There's more to operating a computer blind than just having a screen reader. Reading a web page is the easy part; if you have to see an icon and point a mouse at it, you can't even open the browser.
It needs to be operated either solely by keyboard, or have special modifications to support a force-feedback mouse.
The Macintosh has always supported accelerators, but when I last looked I couldn't find any way to access non-accelerated menu items without a mouse. Windows has supported mouseless operation from the beginning (not out of compassion for the blind, but because Windows 1.0 couldn't assume that you even owned a mouse.)
I'm a huge fan of the section 508 guidelines. Even non-disabled users can benefit from a display which is clear enough to be used by blind users. It forces the developer to think out a bit further ahead, but the end-user gains.
There's even more than paper and bookstores. A lot of other people go into writing a book. My book, which goes for about $40, had an editor, a copy editor, a typesetter, an indexer, an artist for the cover, and a small army of reviewers who received honoraria. The postage alone when we were doing the final phases of reviewing ran into the hundreds of dollars. In the end, yeah, I get about five bucks a copy.
Mind you, this is a technical book from a major reputable publisher (Addison-Wesley), so it got the luxe treatment. Fiction would get a different treatment.
Redmond.
It's smaller than a portable DVD player. It presumably pulls movies from the Internet. Maybe it's even got a CSS license and is capable of legally ripping DVDs onto itself. Supposedly it's capable of storing several movies in a space smaller than the stack of DVDs themselves. (Presumably you can compress them further if you're planning on displaying them on a screen smaller than TV resolution.)
It costs so much because it's got a large-capacity small-format hard disk plus a color LCD plus a bunch of software. Not that I'm rushing out to buy one, but I do see a technological niche.
Slashdot is more a point-of-view than a news gathering organization. This story originated at Reuters, which is a news gathering organization.
Slashdot is more like your local newspaper: it takes stories from a variety of locations (often wire services) which are relevant to you (determined by geography in the case of your local newspaper, or technical interest in the case of Slashdot). Yahoo does the same, but it's pretty catholic in its tastes. Slashdot gets its stories from a variety of sources: wire reports (often via other media), journals, blogs, press releases, and sometimes just people finding out interesting web sites (though that hardly counts as nes most of the time)
In all likelihood, the story originated as a press release from Microsoft, rewritten by Reuters into a news article, and then rewritten again as a Slashdot story. Slashdot adds very little: a bit of commentary, and sub-categorizations (Microsoft, Music, Business, Media).
The commentary is biased, but you wanted it biased: you came here for the Slashdot-esque view of things. You could read the Reuters feed yourself, but you'll probably read a lot of stuff you don't care about. You could even subscribe to get the press releases directly, but you'd really hate that.
Is it a standard DTV decoder? If so, I'd buy one just to have plain-old DTV decoding. I can't afford an HDTV, but I'd be happy to be able to receive the existing digital signals over the air for plain-old TV.
Unfortunately, such devices seem to cost more in the $250 and up range than the $100 range.
Earthsea's characters are much better developed than LotR's. I think that's an opportunity for them, not a predicament. The script for LotR is tricky because the dialogue, which reads beautifully as an epic poem, sounds silly coming out of the mouths of actual characters. Additional plots were written in to give the characters some depth. They used distressingly little of the original dialogue.
If the writers, director, and actors of Earthsea can use this to their advantage, they have an opportunity to give strong, interesting performances.
The strength of LotR is the depth of its background material. That allowed them to create extraordinary visuals, and that's the real reason for the success of the films. Not that I have any particular faith in the Academy, but they roughly reflected its strengths: many awards for visual elements, zero for acting. Not that the actors were bad, but the roles don't give them many opportunities to really succeed.
Earthsea, on the other hand, was written more like a modern story and less like an ancient epic. They've got a real opportunity here, a great work by a master storyteller. I hope it works out.
Careful. They're easy to breed but a real bitch to feed. Priced inkjet cartridges lately?
Besides, nobody wants to watch Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, or Angelina Jolie.
Actually he was very good in Six Degrees of Separation.
There's a lot of talent there, but he's mostly using it to make cheap^H^H^H^H^Hexpensive action movies and some not-very-good dramas (Ali, Bagger Vance).
He's got a lot of on-screen charisma, which is actually one of the most important skills an actor can have. People respond well to him, and that's a hard thing to teach. (I'm a director, and I've tried.) He's got some range, though he's at his best when it's light-hearted (his rap career, his sitcom, Men in Black).
But I keep looking for him to follow up his very good (not brilliant, but very very good) performance in Six Degrees. I haven't seen that yet.
Keanu... well, Keanu tries. I was actually the only one on the world who liked him in Much Ado About Nothing. He was interesting in My Own Private Idaho. He was actually rather good in that awful Something's Gotta Give. He really, really wants to be a Good Actor, but he'll have to settle for being charismatic.
In this man's army the programmers count in binary.
Sound off!
1! 10!
Sound off!
11! 100!
The city-states of ancient Greece were true Democracies, for the most part since women couldn't vote.
Or slaves.
Or those without land.
Or children.
"Democracy" has always defined "demos" a bit less generally than I'd like.