All those "#G" designations are all pretty much bald-faced marketing lies... that barely even correspond to the (pretty useful) table at the bottom of that wikipedia page.
FWIW, the "3.5G" HSDPA network that T-Mobile has deployed works pretty damn well on my HTC Slide Android phone (running CyanogenMOD 6.0 ~= Froyo 2.2). The latency is noticeably lower than EDGE or 3G, and the Xtremelabs Speedtest routinely returns over 1Mbps downlink on their network.
They're probably "rounding up" for marketing purposes, but regardless of that, I'm pretty happy with T-Mobile's relatively cheap plans and just-enough-to-work technology deployment and service. Not to mention that they throw most features in by default and don't nickle-and-dime you to death for call forwarding, blocking, and voicemail features like some other carriers *cough*Verizon*cough*
Nice. Too many colors, though. They all kinda get lost at the bottom. I'd keep it to a few biggies (interest, medicare, military, social-sec, and then maybe all of the others combined).
Actually, if you download the spreadsheet, it's more useful to do just the opposite... filter out SSA & Medicare (hell, they're even listed separately on all your income tax docs), Defense, and interest on national debt (those ought to be listed separately too), and then you can see "the rest" . I already jumbled a lot of things into a "misc" category, I just wanted to see how much we've spent on NASA, Education, Transportation, Agricultural subsidies, etc. over the years (they used to be a much bigger proportion back in the day).
As someone mentioned earlier, during the Clinton years, there was a big spike in "Misc" that counterbalanced the corresponding drop in defense spending... ostensibly "borrowing" from SSA to pay down the deficit. But would have to dig deeper into the source data.
Now that you're motivated to crunch numbers on your own, go make a graph of federal spending and federal revenue over time. You'll find that, when taxes go up, spending goes down and, when taxes go down, spending goes up. Kinda blows the "tax-n-spend" label out of the water. At first, it doesn't make sense, because the GOP would have you believe that, if we cut federal revenue, then the gov't will have to decrease spending, but we know that that's simply not the case, because deficit-spending is always an option.
Maybe I could be somewhat motivated to do that later this evening. Maybe:P The way the debt graph people explained it was that Clinton instituted a policy where the Republican congress couldn't pass tax cuts unless they also cut spending... which worked well, and of course went away as soon as Bush took office.
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. As far as I can tell, the US has largely moved from manufacturing to an "intellectual property" based economy. Which means that a lot of the money tied up here is purely imaginary.
So that's why there's a lot of effort in preserving copyright royalty and software license revenues both here and abroad. We'll pretty much sit here and collect "western culture tax" on everything the world does when they listen to music or run software, or even through broad patent licenses if they just want to invent something of their own. And if the world doesn't comply, we'll give you a stern warning. OUR WORDS OUR BACKED BY NUCLEAR MISSLES!!
But as long as the rest of the world is eager to buy into western culture and technological DRM, and tie their currency into ours, this house of cards stands on nothing but some legal documents.
Here's the version I made a few years ago from White House OMB data (sorry it's a bit dated, though I have to hand it to GWBush as being the first to get me motivated on politics. All my sources and spreadsheets are in the parent directory... so feel free to download and update it!)
I'm still not sure whether this news is devastating or awesome, but I'd totally want to be raised by one of those critters. The summary makes it sound like they're going to replace human teachers, but looks like they're just going to replace those little language-learner tape recorder thingies.
I don't usually vote (I made exceptions for Bush Jr.) because all I really want is for my fellow Americans to be happy. And if that makes their votes count the tiniest miniscule bit more, then so be it.
But I certainly wouldn't contribute to campaign funds. Politics is all administrative overhead... something most businesses and organizations try to minimize. You don't necessarily get more out of it the more you feed it. Plus, paying into campaign funds is sort of like paying to convince other people to see things your way, which I kinda find offensive. You've got your vote, they've got their vote, any marketing you might pay for to change their minds is somewhat unethical. Sure they might be morans, but then why do you live in a constituency full of morans?
More people tend to show up to vote politicians out of office than into office... that arrangement is probably fine. Politicians will employ corruption and lies as best they can, until they get found out by the other party. So a two-party system isn't really all that bad, as far as maintaining balance goes and keeping things from getting too corrupt. When one party is in power, you simply start getting your news from the other party. If you can cope with the news feeds, then the incumbent party is probably doing OK.
The rest of the time, politics is just for entertainment value, something George Carlin, TDS, and others capitalize on to hilarious effect. "Life is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think" - Horace Walpole.
-- I support public education -- I married a teacher.
No... I admit the Facebook games were pretty much an addiction. Other games I played for fun. Actually, a lot of them were sims so I learned a lot of stuff and now work with several large Linux-based training simulators.
The Zynga games, on the other hand, were not fun... down to the Pavlovian "hit this button repeatedly, and we'll occasionally reward you with a random bitmap!".
It was actually remarkable how many other effective psychological techniques they used to keep you coming back, though... random rewards vs. fixed (mice would click on buttons much faster and longer if they were rewarded randomly vs. at fixed intervals). Peer pressure by repeatedly comparing your "progress" to others'. "Altruism" hacks (a lot of games I simply joined just because I knew it might help my friends by accepting their requests). Energy timers that keep you coming back at regular intervals, or you'll be wasting progress and falling behind.
Really, it would be awesome if someone could apply a lot of those techniques to education or something;-P
Interesting "backflip" analogy, Mr. Somersault . Kinda reminded me a bit of the parkour culture... one of their core philosophies was to become a more useful person by being able to overcome physical obstacles (one of the founder's fathers was a firefighter). Also that they sort of turn their noses up at the more acrobatic stunts done for show, like gymnastic flips and stuff, that don't really aid with getting to your objective. Interestingly, though, some flips (e.g. forward somersaults to dissipate energy from a high fall) are part of the core techniques.
I was hooked on MafiaWars and Starfleet Commander for a spell. Quit cold turkey a few months back. I do have a whole new understanding of my hamsters on their treadmills now.
That's actually kind of offensive. The liberals in this country have done most of the freedom-damaging legislating in this country. Big government etc.
The conservative base is about all we have protecting our freedom at this point.
True, that. To quote TDS, this entire country was founded by the puritans for the freedom to practice the most restrictive form of religion in England at the time.
Oh the irony! It's like goldy and bronzey, except it's made of iron!
Also, it's usually the conservatives that ingrain us with a deep respect for authority. Besides, I thought "big government" was about employing bus drivers and postal workers so the poor people don't rob you property-rights-respecting folks blind. I try real hard not to get oppressed by those "big government" types.
Should be easier to tie in dopamine receptor genes to one or more of those traits:
1. Care for others, protecting them from harm. (He also referred to this dimension as Harm.)
2. Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
3. Loyalty to your group, family, nation. (He also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
4. Respect for tradition and legitimate authority. (He also referred to this dimension as Authority.)
5. Purity, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.
Strange about the introvert vs. extrovert thing... I would have surmised just the opposite... being an introverted engineer liberal type myself. And conservatives are the ones that typically go out to church to collect as a community.
Meh, I mostly play for entertainment value. For example, I just about never ragequit... I enjoy just hanging on for the amusement of others. Even griefers:P
But esp. with the flight sims and maybe even the open world games like GTA, there are not really always solid goals or "win" conditions... you're just poking around exploring the environment.
Anyway, I appreciate the games that you can accumulate innate skills in, and not fake "stat skillz", so you can pick it up later sometime and immediately start pwning in it without grinding up a character.
But yes, I do play the occasional RPG for the story. But mostly I stick to sims (flying / racing / construction puzzles / turret defense / maybe the occasional RTS / compelling FPS with compelling mechanics and/or non-twitch-based multiplayer dynamics).
Yep, he's certainly playing the wrong kind of games.
Try getting through Left4Dead on Expert Realism. It's a whole different style of gameplay from even the Advanced setting. I can see why people these days might not have the patience for that sort of thing.
On the other end of the spectrum is the relentless advance of the multiplayer versus mode. I think it's notable because once you figure out the basic game mechanics, your success as a team actually has more to do with how well you coordinate than with your skill level. A good leader can actually talk a novice player to success even against a modestly competent opponent.
Hmm, what qualifies as solid evidence to you people?
If the record for past environmental legislation is any indication, no one will feel compelled to do anything until some kind of mass death occurs (as was the case with the London Fog and the Clean Air act of 1956 ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog
Or maybe it could be done sort of like when we found the ozone hole over the arctic and managed to regulate CFCs out of the atmosphere before it grew over populated areas in the late 80s.
But hell, let's go do it like it was done in the 50s! And as long as we can cast "reasonable" doubt on the science, it's not like they can blame us for not taking action sooner... in fact, we can turn it around and blame the alarmists for not doing a better job on convincing us with the science in the first place! And no one's going to give *ME* a tax break for doing things more efficiently! Why, if everyone lived more efficiently, we'd be doing more with less, and less is bad for the economy! Plus it might make room for more people, and we don't want more people. But if anyone tries to regulate population growth through limiting our God-given reproductive rights, they're obviously just trying to outbreed us into a voting minority to further their agenda.
I made sure the Android phone I got for myself a few months later (myTouch Slide) was well-supported by CyanogenMOD, so I'm all set. I picked up both of them from Craigslist (no doubt by people who wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest Android or expected something more like an iPhone)
As for my wife, she loves her "little red phone" just the way it is. It does everything she wants it to, and really not that much less than my phone. So barring an automatic update (heck, she never even updates any of her apps from the market unless I sneak in and do it), she's not going to submit to the CyanogenMOD flashing procedure:P
Yeah, I'm pretty sure T-Mobile is lying (and there were some pretty big ads on their website and in print promising OTA updates) just to keep their older inventory moving off the shelves... that and that the "latest Android" is a swift moving target (how apt the gingerbread man reference).
Anyway, some lawyer-types ought to take them on for truth-in-advertising, prolly more money to be made there than with silly RIAA john doe suits:P
Probably not incredibly ergonomic, but I've always had it in the back of my mind for situations where I'd need a one-handed keyboard. If people weren't so paranoid about texting, I'd try to replace my car's stickshift knob with one of these;-P
Actually, I kinda wish OKCupid went this route a long time ago, rather than the "this is sort of a joke dating site" approach.
I really liked the matchmaking algorithms, and wish I could run it against some of my representatives to see how much of a fit our belief systems fall (rather than just rely on a handful of soundbites on rather irrelevant divisive subjects).
But having real data obviously dilutes the amount of weaseling you can do to secure votes and negotiate.
True true, but no reason it would have to work like that. We're not talking about voting people off the island. We're talking about collecting data so you know what people want in the first place and can come up with arrangements that please most of the people 51% of the time, some of the rest of the people 30% of the time, and some of the rest for 15% of the time, and the remainder could go off and start their own community somewhere with their own bylaws or just sit tight and pretend to be content or too busy like most of us do now.
But hey, I'm not a political scientist or King Solomon. Just pointing out that a lot of political decisions are made in the absence of any kind of data on what's actually in the people's hearts and minds, more from what is reported by the media based on informal telephone polls. What harm could more concrete data straight from the subjects produce? (well, plenty if you're one of the people who can claim to represent the populace)
Sorry, can't help you there:P That's why I'm still using E16 as opposed to the betas of E17 or this OpenGEU thing that I haven't even had heard of until you brought it up:)
Maybe someday if they could throw together a LiveCD with everything working... might be useful for a movie set or something;)
I like a lot of Rasterman's ideas... eagerly waiting for the per-application "TOP" display in the titlebar.
Office work is boring:-P (automated data collection, mining, and reporting, OTOH, is neat... hence Google kinda focuses on those things and sort of runs GDocs as a sideshow).
The only reason I started using Chrome is because of javascript performance (admittedly on those silly Facebook games, which I have long since gone cold turkey). Firefox4 catches up on all that. I am looking forward to returning to all my extensions.
But to stay on your point, I'd love to see Mozilla get into direct digital democracy platforms... and not just "e-voting" for "elected representatives," but full polling of how individuals would decide on each issue that was important to them, rankings of their priorities, designated allocations of their tax dollars directly towards departments, organizations, and programs they felt were worthy... essentially an open platform for secure collaborative decision-making.
No need to shoot for federal government in the first incarnation, my roommates and I sort of used a similar system on a spreadsheet back in college. So it could grow from the household level to the community and local government level first until eventually plugging into higher levels of hierarchy using the same open protocols.
I've used KDE in KNOPPIX... I guess I like the execution, but it reminds me too much of Windows. Gnome seems simpler for the most part.
I never really liked XFCE... I was more of a fan of NeXT-ish interfaces like WindowMaker.
The GNOME bloat is well-documented, so I know my way around all the settings in gconf-editor and elsewhere. That also ends up helping out with all the CentOS machines at work.
To the AC above this, I do like Nautilus in browser mode, but yeah, the "spatial mode" is pretty frustrating. And I like Gnome-terminal because I'm pretty much a sucker for composited translucency:P
If I didn't have an obscene amount of RAM, I'd probably be running LXDE, but its lack of compositing annoys my sensibilities. My eeebuntu netbook runs the full compiz + GNOME with nary a hiccup, though.
And on low res displays such as the VNC session I run to connect to from my Palm / Android PDA, I tend to use icewm with a plain theme.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G
All those "#G" designations are all pretty much bald-faced marketing lies... that barely even correspond to the (pretty useful) table at the bottom of that wikipedia page.
FWIW, the "3.5G" HSDPA network that T-Mobile has deployed works pretty damn well on my HTC Slide Android phone (running CyanogenMOD 6.0 ~= Froyo 2.2). The latency is noticeably lower than EDGE or 3G, and the Xtremelabs Speedtest routinely returns over 1Mbps downlink on their network.
They're probably "rounding up" for marketing purposes, but regardless of that, I'm pretty happy with T-Mobile's relatively cheap plans and just-enough-to-work technology deployment and service. Not to mention that they throw most features in by default and don't nickle-and-dime you to death for call forwarding, blocking, and voicemail features like some other carriers *cough*Verizon*cough*
Oh, I don't know... does Netflix run on anything other than IE and maybe Safari and PS3 yet? Aren't all those platforms dying out?
Maybe Netflix will save computers as we know it! Oh, wait, looks like they have an iphone app. We're doomed.
Seriously, is there a way to stream Netflix under Linux yet (aside from in a VM?)
Nice. Too many colors, though. They all kinda get lost at the bottom. I'd keep it to a few biggies (interest, medicare, military, social-sec, and then maybe all of the others combined).
Actually, if you download the spreadsheet, it's more useful to do just the opposite... filter out SSA & Medicare (hell, they're even listed separately on all your income tax docs), Defense, and interest on national debt (those ought to be listed separately too), and then you can see "the rest" . I already jumbled a lot of things into a "misc" category, I just wanted to see how much we've spent on NASA, Education, Transportation, Agricultural subsidies, etc. over the years (they used to be a much bigger proportion back in the day).
As someone mentioned earlier, during the Clinton years, there was a big spike in "Misc" that counterbalanced the corresponding drop in defense spending... ostensibly "borrowing" from SSA to pay down the deficit. But would have to dig deeper into the source data.
Now that you're motivated to crunch numbers on your own, go make a graph of federal spending and federal revenue over time. You'll find that, when taxes go up, spending goes down and, when taxes go down, spending goes up. Kinda blows the "tax-n-spend" label out of the water. At first, it doesn't make sense, because the GOP would have you believe that, if we cut federal revenue, then the gov't will have to decrease spending, but we know that that's simply not the case, because deficit-spending is always an option.
Maybe I could be somewhat motivated to do that later this evening. Maybe :P The way the debt graph people explained it was that Clinton instituted a policy where the Republican congress couldn't pass tax cuts unless they also cut spending... which worked well, and of course went away as soon as Bush took office.
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. As far as I can tell, the US has largely moved from manufacturing to an "intellectual property" based economy. Which means that a lot of the money tied up here is purely imaginary.
So that's why there's a lot of effort in preserving copyright royalty and software license revenues both here and abroad. We'll pretty much sit here and collect "western culture tax" on everything the world does when they listen to music or run software, or even through broad patent licenses if they just want to invent something of their own. And if the world doesn't comply, we'll give you a stern warning. OUR WORDS OUR BACKED BY NUCLEAR MISSLES!!
But as long as the rest of the world is eager to buy into western culture and technological DRM, and tie their currency into ours, this house of cards stands on nothing but some legal documents.
So, look at debt-as-a-percentage-of-GDP here: (http://zfacts.com/p/1195.html).
Here's the version I made a few years ago from White House OMB data (sorry it's a bit dated, though I have to hand it to GWBush as being the first to get me motivated on politics. All my sources and spreadsheets are in the parent directory... so feel free to download and update it!)
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/misc/USbudget/hist/US_Historical_budget,_1962_-_2008.html
Historically, the economy has always done well with a Republican congress and a Democrat president...
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/245/982/Divided_we_make_money:_Why_the_stock_market_wants_a_Republican_victory.html
A more data-based representation:
http://cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm
'ahem' I for one, welcome our robotic overl-...
<clicks on link />
Awww, they're SOOOOOo CUTE! Like little penguins!
I'm still not sure whether this news is devastating or awesome, but I'd totally want to be raised by one of those critters.
The summary makes it sound like they're going to replace human teachers, but looks like they're just going to replace those little language-learner tape recorder thingies.
Damn I miss that man...
I don't usually vote (I made exceptions for Bush Jr.) because all I really want is for my fellow Americans to be happy. And if that makes their votes count the tiniest miniscule bit more, then so be it.
But I certainly wouldn't contribute to campaign funds. Politics is all administrative overhead... something most businesses and organizations try to minimize. You don't necessarily get more out of it the more you feed it. Plus, paying into campaign funds is sort of like paying to convince other people to see things your way, which I kinda find offensive. You've got your vote, they've got their vote, any marketing you might pay for to change their minds is somewhat unethical. Sure they might be morans, but then why do you live in a constituency full of morans?
More people tend to show up to vote politicians out of office than into office... that arrangement is probably fine. Politicians will employ corruption and lies as best they can, until they get found out by the other party. So a two-party system isn't really all that bad, as far as maintaining balance goes and keeping things from getting too corrupt. When one party is in power, you simply start getting your news from the other party. If you can cope with the news feeds, then the incumbent party is probably doing OK.
The rest of the time, politics is just for entertainment value, something George Carlin, TDS, and others capitalize on to hilarious effect. "Life is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think" - Horace Walpole.
--
I support public education -- I married a teacher.
No... I admit the Facebook games were pretty much an addiction. Other games I played for fun. Actually, a lot of them were sims so I learned a lot of stuff and now work with several large Linux-based training simulators.
The Zynga games, on the other hand, were not fun... down to the Pavlovian "hit this button repeatedly, and we'll occasionally reward you with a random bitmap!".
It was actually remarkable how many other effective psychological techniques they used to keep you coming back, though... random rewards vs. fixed (mice would click on buttons much faster and longer if they were rewarded randomly vs. at fixed intervals). Peer pressure by repeatedly comparing your "progress" to others'. "Altruism" hacks (a lot of games I simply joined just because I knew it might help my friends by accepting their requests). Energy timers that keep you coming back at regular intervals, or you'll be wasting progress and falling behind.
Really, it would be awesome if someone could apply a lot of those techniques to education or something ;-P
Interesting "backflip" analogy, Mr. Somersault . Kinda reminded me a bit of the parkour culture... one of their core philosophies was to become a more useful person by being able to overcome physical obstacles (one of the founder's fathers was a firefighter). Also that they sort of turn their noses up at the more acrobatic stunts done for show, like gymnastic flips and stuff, that don't really aid with getting to your objective. Interestingly, though, some flips (e.g. forward somersaults to dissipate energy from a high fall) are part of the core techniques.
My obligatory response to any mention of Zynga games:
"Addicted to Fake Achievement" :
http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html
I was hooked on MafiaWars and Starfleet Commander for a spell. Quit cold turkey a few months back.
I do have a whole new understanding of my hamsters on their treadmills now.
That's actually kind of offensive. The liberals in this country have done most of the freedom-damaging legislating in this country. Big government etc.
The conservative base is about all we have protecting our freedom at this point.
True, that. To quote TDS, this entire country was founded by the puritans for the freedom to practice the most restrictive form of religion in England at the time.
Oh the irony! It's like goldy and bronzey, except it's made of iron!
Also, it's usually the conservatives that ingrain us with a deep respect for authority. Besides, I thought "big government" was about employing bus drivers and postal workers so the poor people don't rob you property-rights-respecting folks blind. I try real hard not to get oppressed by those "big government" types.
Just wanted to bring Jonathan Haidt's "5 Moral Foundations" theory into the conversation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt
Or watch the TED video if you're too lazy to read
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/341
Should be easier to tie in dopamine receptor genes to one or more of those traits:
1. Care for others, protecting them from harm. (He also referred to this dimension as Harm.)
2. Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
3. Loyalty to your group, family, nation. (He also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
4. Respect for tradition and legitimate authority. (He also referred to this dimension as Authority.)
5. Purity, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.
Strange about the introvert vs. extrovert thing... I would have surmised just the opposite... being an introverted engineer liberal type myself. And conservatives are the ones that typically go out to church to collect as a community.
Meh, I mostly play for entertainment value. For example, I just about never ragequit... I enjoy just hanging on for the amusement of others. Even griefers :P
But esp. with the flight sims and maybe even the open world games like GTA, there are not really always solid goals or "win" conditions... you're just poking around exploring the environment.
Anyway, I appreciate the games that you can accumulate innate skills in, and not fake "stat skillz", so you can pick it up later sometime and immediately start pwning in it without grinding up a character.
Huh, I never really liked RPGs for the same reason quoted by subby... with enough grinding /anyone/ can W1N!
http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html
But yes, I do play the occasional RPG for the story. But mostly I stick to sims (flying / racing / construction puzzles / turret defense / maybe the occasional RTS / compelling FPS with compelling mechanics and/or non-twitch-based multiplayer dynamics).
Yep, he's certainly playing the wrong kind of games.
Try getting through Left4Dead on Expert Realism. It's a whole different style of gameplay from even the Advanced setting. I can see why people these days might not have the patience for that sort of thing.
On the other end of the spectrum is the relentless advance of the multiplayer versus mode. I think it's notable because once you figure out the basic game mechanics, your success as a team actually has more to do with how well you coordinate than with your skill level. A good leader can actually talk a novice player to success even against a modestly competent opponent.
Hmm, what qualifies as solid evidence to you people?
If the record for past environmental legislation is any indication, no one will feel compelled to do anything until some kind of mass death occurs (as was the case with the London Fog and the Clean Air act of 1956 )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog
Or maybe it could be done sort of like when we found the ozone hole over the arctic and managed to regulate CFCs out of the atmosphere before it grew over populated areas in the late 80s.
But hell, let's go do it like it was done in the 50s! And as long as we can cast "reasonable" doubt on the science, it's not like they can blame us for not taking action sooner... in fact, we can turn it around and blame the alarmists for not doing a better job on convincing us with the science in the first place! And no one's going to give *ME* a tax break for doing things more efficiently! Why, if everyone lived more efficiently, we'd be doing more with less, and less is bad for the economy! Plus it might make room for more people, and we don't want more people. But if anyone tries to regulate population growth through limiting our God-given reproductive rights, they're obviously just trying to outbreed us into a voting minority to further their agenda.
I made sure the Android phone I got for myself a few months later (myTouch Slide) was well-supported by CyanogenMOD, so I'm all set. I picked up both of them from Craigslist (no doubt by people who wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest Android or expected something more like an iPhone)
As for my wife, she loves her "little red phone" just the way it is. It does everything she wants it to, and really not that much less than my phone. So barring an automatic update (heck, she never even updates any of her apps from the market unless I sneak in and do it), she's not going to submit to the CyanogenMOD flashing procedure :P
Yeah, I'm pretty sure T-Mobile is lying (and there were some pretty big ads on their website and in print promising OTA updates) just to keep their older inventory moving off the shelves... that and that the "latest Android" is a swift moving target (how apt the gingerbread man reference).
Anyway, some lawyer-types ought to take them on for truth-in-advertising, prolly more money to be made there than with silly RIAA john doe suits :P
Heh, still waiting for OTA updates from T-mobile for my wife's Android 1.6 myTouch 3G. They've been promising it "just next month" since February :P
This one-handed chorded keyboard used to be a Slashdot favourite:
http://www.handykey.com/
Probably not incredibly ergonomic, but I've always had it in the back of my mind for situations where I'd need a one-handed keyboard. If people weren't so paranoid about texting, I'd try to replace my car's stickshift knob with one of these ;-P
Actually, I kinda wish OKCupid went this route a long time ago, rather than the "this is sort of a joke dating site" approach.
I really liked the matchmaking algorithms, and wish I could run it against some of my representatives to see how much of a fit our belief systems fall (rather than just rely on a handful of soundbites on rather irrelevant divisive subjects).
But having real data obviously dilutes the amount of weaseling you can do to secure votes and negotiate.
True true, but no reason it would have to work like that. We're not talking about voting people off the island. We're talking about collecting data so you know what people want in the first place and can come up with arrangements that please most of the people 51% of the time, some of the rest of the people 30% of the time, and some of the rest for 15% of the time, and the remainder could go off and start their own community somewhere with their own bylaws or just sit tight and pretend to be content or too busy like most of us do now.
But hey, I'm not a political scientist or King Solomon. Just pointing out that a lot of political decisions are made in the absence of any kind of data on what's actually in the people's hearts and minds, more from what is reported by the media based on informal telephone polls. What harm could more concrete data straight from the subjects produce? (well, plenty if you're one of the people who can claim to represent the populace)
Sorry, can't help you there :P That's why I'm still using E16 as opposed to the betas of E17 or this OpenGEU thing that I haven't even had heard of until you brought it up :)
Maybe someday if they could throw together a LiveCD with everything working... might be useful for a movie set or something ;)
I like a lot of Rasterman's ideas... eagerly waiting for the per-application "TOP" display in the titlebar.
Office work is boring :-P (automated data collection, mining, and reporting, OTOH, is neat... hence Google kinda focuses on those things and sort of runs GDocs as a sideshow).
The only reason I started using Chrome is because of javascript performance (admittedly on those silly Facebook games, which I have long since gone cold turkey). Firefox4 catches up on all that. I am looking forward to returning to all my extensions.
But to stay on your point, I'd love to see Mozilla get into direct digital democracy platforms... and not just "e-voting" for "elected representatives," but full polling of how individuals would decide on each issue that was important to them, rankings of their priorities, designated allocations of their tax dollars directly towards departments, organizations, and programs they felt were worthy... essentially an open platform for secure collaborative decision-making.
No need to shoot for federal government in the first incarnation, my roommates and I sort of used a similar system on a spreadsheet back in college. So it could grow from the household level to the community and local government level first until eventually plugging into higher levels of hierarchy using the same open protocols.
I've used KDE in KNOPPIX... I guess I like the execution, but it reminds me too much of Windows. Gnome seems simpler for the most part.
I never really liked XFCE... I was more of a fan of NeXT-ish interfaces like WindowMaker.
The GNOME bloat is well-documented, so I know my way around all the settings in gconf-editor and elsewhere. That also ends up helping out with all the CentOS machines at work.
To the AC above this, I do like Nautilus in browser mode, but yeah, the "spatial mode" is pretty frustrating. And I like Gnome-terminal because I'm pretty much a sucker for composited translucency :P
If I didn't have an obscene amount of RAM, I'd probably be running LXDE, but its lack of compositing annoys my sensibilities. My eeebuntu netbook runs the full compiz + GNOME with nary a hiccup, though.
And on low res displays such as the VNC session I run to connect to from my Palm / Android PDA, I tend to use icewm with a plain theme.