I want to see Syfy continue right along its current trajectory. Same goes for all the cable channels. Here's why: The entire business model is a failure. The business is the selling of eyeballs to advertisers... quality, small-brain-behind-the-eyeballs eyeballs belonging to humans who buy the advertised products and services. When that business model delivers high quality art that's only appreciated by those with sufficient depth of mind... that is an accident, and they remedy such accidents with a quickness.
Subscription channels without ads still don't get it right... We live in a totally new age compared to a couple decades ago. We can have direct financial relationships with artists, artistic teams... content producers. Middlemen who "manage" and arrange and stream content are dinosaurs, and their time is up.
Let's take another look at an ancient method of funding the arts: the patronage system. Wealthy nobles, at the dawn of the middle class, would fund a favorite artist, commissioning works, keeping the artist on a retainer of sorts. Well, now we have a world of PayPal and BitCoin, and a larger middle class. We have the Internet. If an artist solicits funds so he or she can pursue his or her craft... to fund a specific project or just to do more work... They'll get paid in pennys, dollars, and other fractionals... from a ton of fans. The more impressed the consumers are with the art they've already seen by that artist (for free), the more likely they will be to pay to feed their craving for more. And if not, not. This revolution is already underway. When mainstream artists of the prior business models start switching over, this will get even more pronounced. Distribution, funding, filtering... we, the viewers, the listeners, et al have replaced the middlemen with much better, little robots.
Because the trial, and the subsequent trials for Rumsfield and Cheney, would have been huge, scandalous attention grabbers, and might have resulted in gutting the military-industrial complex, killing off lucrative porno-scanner machine contracts, etc...
Removing the not-too-much-of-a-stretch tinfoil hat... At the very least, it would postpone and dilute Obama's ability to ride this news to some leverage in his goals.
Sprawl allowing more exercise? I wondered WTF you were on about but then I saw "Portland" in your address. If you're in Portland, OR, you certainly see the positive walking experience afforded by decent city planning. I've been there, and plan to move there permanently. I currently live in Memphis, in the "Midtown" area, our most walkable area, which is kinda like Portland in terms of mixing business and residential. Outside of Midtown, the scene is nothing like the non-downtown parts of Portland though... miles of residential with *nothing* else mixed in... not a couple extra blocks to walk to something... think nothing to walk to within an hour or more besides more McMansions. And maybe sidewalk connecting the McMansions in a subdivision, but no sidewalks outside of it leading to the nearest stores or restaurants. Sprawl so far beyond infrastructure that it's rural-style ditches on either side of the road, and lots of narrows that are unsafe to walk or even bike. Our Cordova and Collierville make Gresham and Beaverton look like active-walking-person-paradise. Cordova was farmland in the '90s. Now it's miles of one central road with businesses, and a miles of depth of residential to either side, with hardly any safe walking or biking routes between. The places locals lived before at least had some mixed zones, and things on parallel streets. This has happened all over the US... Portland did some rare forward thinking to stop that crap there, so its worst cases of "sprawl" look like central areas of the cities that grew through the 80's 90's and 00's. Also, scientific studies here and here.
I'd love to see better caloric information, awareness, and data spread... that may help quite a bit. Meanwhile, some things changed in the US a few decades ago and there was an obesity explosion. Some pre-existing, high awareness of caloric intake didn't disappear, but other things certainly happened. If and when there's a serious effort to solve this problem on a wide scale (ahem), that effort needs to include these and/or other well-linked causal factors.
So why are Americans generally so damn fat in the last few decades and growing? Negative reinforcement does very little in absence of identified causality. Especially when "being fat" is already a negative reinforcement in and of itself that obviously hasn't hindered most US Citizens from continuing to grow.
Here's the few major causes that I'm aware of, and none of them are easy to fix on an individual level:
Suburban Sprawl - Less and less sidewalk, less and less "walk to the ____" in anyone's life means more sitting still and more weight gain. The design of even urban areas becoming more car-centric means even when there's a sidewalk, there's little incentive to walk. To change this on an individual level?? Move to another city seems to be one of the few answers.
High Fructose Corn Syrup - It's in all sorts of foods it doesn't belong in. Start reading Ingredients lists for everything you pick up, sweet or savory and you'll see it there. Why? It masks poor quality, it increases appetite, and it's cheap.
Sensation - It's a sensual pleasure that people in the US aren't hung up over. Good sex has been deprecated: the dominant religion hates it, the diseases are scary, abortion and even contraception are discouraged by society and law, and if you're already fat, it's harder to do well and enjoy
If we want to tackle obesity as a social, collective problem, we need to aim at larger, causal targets. Individual-level negative reinforcement is in place already and a complete fail.
The golden age of sci-fi movies is OVER. It is unlikely ever to return with current distribution and marketing methods.
Actually, the current distribution and marketing methods are beginning to see competition... which means a golden age might just be ahead of us. Iron Sky may or may not represent the dawn of that age (not released yet), but the mechanisms are falling into place.
I look forward to the day that the current distribution and marketing methods are the ones who are OVER. We'll get much better quality on everything, all the way around, thereafter.
I haven't tried readyboost yet. I'll probably install Fraps to measure game framerates and then do exactly that sometime soon.
As for Win7 Starter: I am pleased that MS produced a netbook-friendly, low-bloat alternative... I think all of those extra bloat things can be turned off in Services or Windows Components in any edition, but having those features absent for a lower cost product / turned off from the start are great concepts. What MS did that is completely sad and lame was the intentional, extra hobbling, not for delivering an appropriate value for netbooks, but to induce netbook owners to purchase Home Premium with all the bloat you cited. The most computer-illiterate people in the world like to change their desktop background. Not a performance issue... instead a "buy more from us because we intentionally broke Starter" issue. The 3.5GB limit on 32-bit OSes was already in place due to a technical limit, so if you want a lean, mean machine running with maximum memory and a lack of the bloat that comes with other Windows editions, they spent engineering time, resources, and money to ensure that you can't have that. They deserve to have these things noted, and that's what I've done, along with plenty of other people. All the conceptual things, like "less bloat for lower-powered hardware" are absolutely great ideas, and I'm totally with you on those. The extra resources they spent on hobbling the OS had nothing to do with customer demand on anyone's part.
I bought an Acer Aspire One 522 recently. It's a netbook with a 10.1" screen, 1280x720 resolution, and the new Fusion chip, so it has a Radeon 3250... I can actually run games on this device. I installed StarCraft II, dropped all the settings to minimal, and received playable framerates (after upgrading to 2GB ram). I blogged about it for those wanting more info. I need to make another post about Linux, because I have Ubuntu running near perfectly on it now.
I have no idea what business this new architecture has going against powerful desktop rigs, but for low-power applications, like a netbook, this offers a balance of computing power and energy consumption that's really nice, and beats what I've seen before.
When serving on a jury, you can use jury nullification to actually change how laws are enforced, by helping establish precedent, and by helping people being harassed with unjust laws. It happened all the time during alcohol prohibition, and its re-surging right now, as more citizens get sicker of the direct and indirect negative results from drug prohibition.
Direct bribery / campaign contributions / money from corporations was recently deregulated further than before under the guise of the First Amendment protecting citizens freedom of speech. So, the "representative" parts of our government are even less so than they ever were. The executive and bureaucratic realms are, of course, completely unaccountable, and most directors of regulatory agencies have lovely jobs awaiting them after retirement in the industries they regulated.
Serving on a jury is the last and only power afforded the citizens by the government. Any citizen actually aware of this power is a citizen the government doesn't want there. Any citizen capable of rational thought, or with a real sense of right and wrong versus "legal==right, illegal==wrong" is not someone a lawyer wants on a jury... lawyers and prosecutors both work in emotional manipulation and have no use for logical jurors.
During voire dire, if you want on that jury, you keep your eyes wide and your head nodding whatever direction the lawyer / prosecutor wants. Keep your answers in the form that Joe-sixpack would provide. Do not friend them on Facebook. They will take that power away from you with a quickness if they think you are anyone other than Joe-sixpack. You might be someone's only hope of justice prevailing, and you might just impact the enforcement plans or even the validity of an unjust law while you serve on that case.
Joe Lieberman and/or Hillary Clinton will clamor for the same in our "free" country next, because they think it's just no fair that these other countries get to wreck their people's computer use while the US citizens have no such interference.
Lieberman's "kill switch" request and the two of them grandstanding over the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee mod showed them to be exactly this disgusting and sinister, belonging absolutely nowhere near having domestic powers in the "land of the free."
And those two are just the obvious and outspoken ones...
You know, the guys with bombs and anthrax who want to kill us in droves.
Fun Fact! Although the anthrax mailings were played up in the media as a possible example of Hussein's use of WMDs in the lead-up to Iraq-super-fun-time, they were actually sent out by a US Federal Government scientist, from stock held at a US Government lab. When the "investigation" closed in on this bio-medical researcher, he suffered a misfortune: It was reported that he commited suicide by overdosing on acetaminophen. The drug where an overdose causes a slow, painful liver-failure death. So everyone packed up the "investigation" and went home.
Look it up; I'm not exaggerating, lying, or joking.
Those guys you refer to, with bombs and anthrax... they're closer than you think, they don't yell "Allahu Ackbar," and you're required to sign their paycheck every April 15th.
Not only is that evil, but it's also realllly stupid. Anyone remember IBM's attempt at desktop and server control called Microchannel? Was this another horrible bit of Carly Fiorina damage that just hasn't been cleaned up yet, or is HP truly about to sink to the bottom?
After a person's basic Maslow-level needs are taken care of, finding a mate and mating are realllly strong drives. These drives are at the core of evolution... every function of every bit of DNA in every sexually reproducing organism is about successful sexual reproduction, indirectly at least.
So, people who seek to control humans.... and evolved systems that benefit from controlling humans... they have this easy as can be way of grabbing humans by the gonads: Claim to define proper and improper inter-gender relations. Act as an intermediary for the "proper" inter-gender relations, and condemn, attack, and fight "improper" inter-gender relations. Also condemn and attack anyone circumventing this control by way of a natural attraction to the same gender (yeah, they have a "legitimate" self-interest in the anti-gay stuff). Most religions, not just the Abrahamic ones are all about this, as are non-religious yet power-hungry organizations. If you're shopping for a religion, this is a quick and easy test to see if it is about empowering the individual or empowering the organization: does it seek to divide the genders? It doesn't have to divide physically either... if there is an encouraged "philosophy" that pits men against women, it's just more subtle and better competing against the option of "no religious affiliation" available in some countries.
If anyone thinks this sexual segregation thing is Muslim-specific, step back a bit. Sexually segregated schools were entirely common in the US for its first century, and they still exist in number today. Pay attention to the motivations of the big proponents: they seek to control other people, either personally, or to strengthen their favorite non-human entity/organization.
I just bought an Acer Aspire One 522... it's a new 10.1" screen netbook with higher than usual resolution and a real GPU (compared to most in this class). It's a great machine. It needs extra memory, which was an oversight on Acer's part... but the biggest failure of Acer on this machine is the crapware. Windows 7 Starter is deliberately crippled crapware. Office Starter is a fat, jiggling pile of crapware. McAfee is a festering, system-resource devouring mass of crapware. Wild Tangent, one of the pioneers in ad-ware style crapware makes the "Acer Games" which is tedious to uninstall. If I left all this crap (and there's a lot more) on this little machine, it would c r a w l. I installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot option, and it's kinda funny how night and day the contrast is.
So, when someone like me goes to review this machine, I'm at least aware of its virtues and can reveal the pros and cons. The average person is getting a slowwwww machine which is already full of adware and crapware, and will be full of viruses as soon as McAfee stops updating. I'm giving it less than 5 stars, and part of that is due to the crapware. The average person is likely going to give a lot less than 5 stars. And the reviews directly impact sales.
Must be nice when you can use a free site and expect to get paid when they cut you off.
There's tons of confusion about who Facebook's customers are. This kind of confusion goes back to television and radio stations, and popular magazines.
The participants, the readers, the viewers... these people are not the customers of these companies. They are a resource being mined and sold. Media companies, and entities like Facebook do have customers: Advertisers.
With broadcast, one-way media of yesteryear, these companies had no quality-control on the product they offered. They couldn't deactivate someone's access to a TV station because he or she routinely walked away during commercial breaks. The newspaper company couldn't identify and stop delivering papers to the person who read only the comics and used the rest as bird cage liner. Likewise, these companies could only promise "eyeballs" to their customers. Facebook, on the other hand, is offering "personae" to their customers. Each resource is not merely a potential viewer/listener, but now consists of that and a photograph, a name, a location, an age, interests, lists of friends, education level, and various other biographical data. They're offering a lot more "product" to their real customers now, and so they have a lot more interest in quality control of that product. No advertiser wants to pay for such a premium service as having a viewer's friend's photo appear next to their ad with the declaration that the friend "Liked" that product, when the friend's photo is goatse or Hitler.
Facebook is just being responsive to its customer base. The real question: How should the human users of Facebook understand, quantify, and describe their relationship with Facebook? They're certainly not just "getting to use a free site." Are they employees being paid in a product-use benefit instead of cash? What are their employee rights then? This guy's issue is less of an aggrieved customer situation than it is a wrongful termination suit. There might be analogies that make even more sense. Perhaps it's even possible that these cases be discussed clearly in the realm of what they really are, and the terms will evolve from that, rather than ill-fitting, borrowed terms... Might take a few decades.
Example.com/.net/.org has been extremely valuable over the years for documentation purposes... I remember people who didn't know about this picking some random idea of a website, and occasionally running into the porn or satire running on whitehouse.com and whitehouse.org. Good times.
My even more frequent use of those domains will also not suffer from this: shitware websites who want my email address for no valid reason. "Enter your email to download the driver for our hardware you purchased." That kind of thing. WebEx sessions... like I really want spam from them too. They get an @example.com email address. And not I nor anyone else gets spammed by the bastards.:-)
Or the CONSTANT number of times the title card beneath someone is "somehow" the wrong party - so a Republican in trouble is shown as a "Democrat". Funny how these mistakes are always in the GOP's favor
Between 2006 and 2008, I saw, on so many occasions, Fox News swapping the names Obama and Osama, verbally and in text labels. I'm sure these were all just mistakes. It was cute.
Now is the time to remember the old phrase, "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." More actions like this are needed. The UK is going hog wild with such domain seizure activity too right now. This is absolutely great. All they need to do is hit something that will piss off Average Joe. Much like the TSA wanting to grab on our genitals and/or get nude film of us, at some point soon, there is a tipping point where a large number of people get pissed.
In the physical world, where things like air travel require resources and government cooperation, pushing back on the TSA is nigh impossible, and progress will be slow if at all.
In the realm of the Internet, new technologies take off like wildfire after *one* clever person spends a few days or weeks coding up an innovation and throwing it out there to be used and improved. What these government actions will cause is a distributed, unkillable replacement for DNS... one that cures government interference, along with corporate money-based abuses (like stealing $company-sucks.com domains).
Good job, you police-state corporate lackeys! You are stimulating progress in ways you cannot comprehend.:-)
You refer to people with half a brain who can see through this nonsense... Where the hell are those people? What percentage of the voting and purchasing public do they make up? All of your points are perfectly logical. Therefore, the big hump in the bell-curve... the normal person... the body of voters in our democratic republic... they will not get it. They have been trained, since birth, to distrust logic... to know that nonsense is truth and rationality is evil. Mix in some fear, and in their cowardice, they do not get more rational. Ms. Napolitano is speaking to her audience. Whether she understands how stupid her statements are, or her handlers understand the stupidity... or if there's no one intelligent at all at the wheel... it just does not matter. Morons are the majority, and they vote for and fund this stupidity. Rational alternatives have zero chance against the existing Fear & Stupidity machine.
The only reason there is protest and a 20+% public dislike of the new Scope Or Grope policy is that they have also been trained since birth to have more body shame than nature provides, and regardless, they feel a natural fear and disgust about being sexually assaulted. It's not about how inneffective the scanners are, or the fact that they're entirely a way for beurocrats and manufacturers to steal tax dollars.... it's about fear vs fear, so it's actually getting mainstream press.
This will get expanded to railroads. It will be completely pointless in terms of security. It will enrich the important people who actually matter and that is all that matters. Chertoff et al, I salute your villainy.
Blood was way ahead of its time... protagonist was some kind of undead... setting was rather steam-punk... the sense of humor was lovely, and the gameplay mechanics were some of the best. The engine was Doom or Duke3D... it would go great with an update!
If you can do any type of programming that hits URLS, you can program the Rovio... it's whole interface is HTTP Puts and Gets with custom URLs, and it's well documented. After Wowwee released some of the advanced documentation, someone published the commands to brighten the camera within a week, solving a problem of way-too-dark video that had existed since the beginning. With this level of control, throwing together an interface you can operate from your cell-phone becomes very plausible... no laptop needed.
The person the article is about is actually the author of RoboDance, which is a complex application that controls a bunch of robots, with an emphasis on the infrared controlled kinds like RoboSapien. His next version of RoboDance is the one that will include Rovio control and probably all the capabilities described in the article.
I've been really impressed with the Rovio... my only complaint is that the battery life is pretty weak, right out of the box.
Good point. Any surprising new attack method can imperil innocent bystanders, etc...
However, within about 1 hour, air passengers of the world learned the methodology of that surprise attack and precluded it from ever being effective again. The fourth plane didn't hit a building due to this factor. No government measures of any kind whatsoever were necessary to effect this change. Zero cost to tax payers.
The framers of the Constitution of the US had a lively debate on whether or not to include the Bill of Rights. They felt that such an enumeration would lead to damaged thinking about how people get a specific set of rights, listed by a government, and anything else is "not a right." Your post is evidence that the concern was well founded.
I have the absolute and sovereign right to conduct transactions with any other party as I see fit. That includes paying an airline to provide travel services... or a boat company, or a train company, or gasoline vendors so I might power my car. These are my rights, just as providing those services are the rights of those individuals or entities.
The US federal government and its child governments have made decrees that our rightful ability to make such transactions should be hindered or outright prohibited (see drug and prostitution laws).
A free people, in a free country, could easily go about choosing to purchase travel services from whichever entities they choose, and be subject to agreed upon security arrangements with those entities. Some airlines could specialize in extensive strip-searchy, genital-feely security theatrics, and some could specialize on a more distributed "hand every non-drinking passenger a little baseball bat as they board" approach. Then you could exercise your "right to feel" safe, while the rest of us exercise our rights, sans conflict.
What you seek is less and less respect from government, in exchange for absolutely nothing other than a baseless "feeling" of security. Plenty of cowards felt the liquid ban made them safer... until the wannabe crotch-bomber showed them it meant nothing... Plenty of cowards will feel safer now that everyones genitals are felt or photographed, until the next elevation in this arms race. Then the cowards will be ready for the next bit of demeaning, useless, costly garbage, further hindering our freedoms and rights, such as travel at will within the borders of "our" supposed country.
Slashdot Mirror
Add dry ice.
I want to see Syfy continue right along its current trajectory. Same goes for all the cable channels. Here's why: The entire business model is a failure. The business is the selling of eyeballs to advertisers... quality, small-brain-behind-the-eyeballs eyeballs belonging to humans who buy the advertised products and services. When that business model delivers high quality art that's only appreciated by those with sufficient depth of mind... that is an accident, and they remedy such accidents with a quickness.
Subscription channels without ads still don't get it right... We live in a totally new age compared to a couple decades ago. We can have direct financial relationships with artists, artistic teams... content producers. Middlemen who "manage" and arrange and stream content are dinosaurs, and their time is up.
Let's take another look at an ancient method of funding the arts: the patronage system. Wealthy nobles, at the dawn of the middle class, would fund a favorite artist, commissioning works, keeping the artist on a retainer of sorts. Well, now we have a world of PayPal and BitCoin, and a larger middle class. We have the Internet. If an artist solicits funds so he or she can pursue his or her craft... to fund a specific project or just to do more work... They'll get paid in pennys, dollars, and other fractionals... from a ton of fans. The more impressed the consumers are with the art they've already seen by that artist (for free), the more likely they will be to pay to feed their craving for more. And if not, not. This revolution is already underway. When mainstream artists of the prior business models start switching over, this will get even more pronounced. Distribution, funding, filtering... we, the viewers, the listeners, et al have replaced the middlemen with much better, little robots.
Goodbye Syfy. Hello Iron Sky.
Because the trial, and the subsequent trials for Rumsfield and Cheney, would have been huge, scandalous attention grabbers, and might have resulted in gutting the military-industrial complex, killing off lucrative porno-scanner machine contracts, etc...
Removing the not-too-much-of-a-stretch tinfoil hat... At the very least, it would postpone and dilute Obama's ability to ride this news to some leverage in his goals.
Sprawl allowing more exercise? I wondered WTF you were on about but then I saw "Portland" in your address. If you're in Portland, OR, you certainly see the positive walking experience afforded by decent city planning. I've been there, and plan to move there permanently. I currently live in Memphis, in the "Midtown" area, our most walkable area, which is kinda like Portland in terms of mixing business and residential. Outside of Midtown, the scene is nothing like the non-downtown parts of Portland though... miles of residential with *nothing* else mixed in... not a couple extra blocks to walk to something... think nothing to walk to within an hour or more besides more McMansions. And maybe sidewalk connecting the McMansions in a subdivision, but no sidewalks outside of it leading to the nearest stores or restaurants. Sprawl so far beyond infrastructure that it's rural-style ditches on either side of the road, and lots of narrows that are unsafe to walk or even bike. Our Cordova and Collierville make Gresham and Beaverton look like active-walking-person-paradise. Cordova was farmland in the '90s. Now it's miles of one central road with businesses, and a miles of depth of residential to either side, with hardly any safe walking or biking routes between. The places locals lived before at least had some mixed zones, and things on parallel streets. This has happened all over the US... Portland did some rare forward thinking to stop that crap there, so its worst cases of "sprawl" look like central areas of the cities that grew through the 80's 90's and 00's. Also, scientific studies here and here.
As for what High Fructose Corn Syrup does to appetite: John Hopkins and Iberaki study discussed and linked here. Princeton study here. HFCS also has the business benefits you mentioned... but increasing appetite in your consumer audience is one hell of a business incentive to include it too.
I'd love to see better caloric information, awareness, and data spread... that may help quite a bit. Meanwhile, some things changed in the US a few decades ago and there was an obesity explosion. Some pre-existing, high awareness of caloric intake didn't disappear, but other things certainly happened. If and when there's a serious effort to solve this problem on a wide scale (ahem), that effort needs to include these and/or other well-linked causal factors.
So why are Americans generally so damn fat in the last few decades and growing? Negative reinforcement does very little in absence of identified causality. Especially when "being fat" is already a negative reinforcement in and of itself that obviously hasn't hindered most US Citizens from continuing to grow.
Here's the few major causes that I'm aware of, and none of them are easy to fix on an individual level:
If we want to tackle obesity as a social, collective problem, we need to aim at larger, causal targets. Individual-level negative reinforcement is in place already and a complete fail.
Actually, the current distribution and marketing methods are beginning to see competition... which means a golden age might just be ahead of us. Iron Sky may or may not represent the dawn of that age (not released yet), but the mechanisms are falling into place.
I look forward to the day that the current distribution and marketing methods are the ones who are OVER. We'll get much better quality on everything, all the way around, thereafter.
Bitcoin is the future you seek.
I haven't tried readyboost yet. I'll probably install Fraps to measure game framerates and then do exactly that sometime soon.
As for Win7 Starter: I am pleased that MS produced a netbook-friendly, low-bloat alternative... I think all of those extra bloat things can be turned off in Services or Windows Components in any edition, but having those features absent for a lower cost product / turned off from the start are great concepts. What MS did that is completely sad and lame was the intentional, extra hobbling, not for delivering an appropriate value for netbooks, but to induce netbook owners to purchase Home Premium with all the bloat you cited. The most computer-illiterate people in the world like to change their desktop background. Not a performance issue... instead a "buy more from us because we intentionally broke Starter" issue. The 3.5GB limit on 32-bit OSes was already in place due to a technical limit, so if you want a lean, mean machine running with maximum memory and a lack of the bloat that comes with other Windows editions, they spent engineering time, resources, and money to ensure that you can't have that. They deserve to have these things noted, and that's what I've done, along with plenty of other people. All the conceptual things, like "less bloat for lower-powered hardware" are absolutely great ideas, and I'm totally with you on those. The extra resources they spent on hobbling the OS had nothing to do with customer demand on anyone's part.
I bought an Acer Aspire One 522 recently. It's a netbook with a 10.1" screen, 1280x720 resolution, and the new Fusion chip, so it has a Radeon 3250... I can actually run games on this device. I installed StarCraft II, dropped all the settings to minimal, and received playable framerates (after upgrading to 2GB ram). I blogged about it for those wanting more info. I need to make another post about Linux, because I have Ubuntu running near perfectly on it now.
I have no idea what business this new architecture has going against powerful desktop rigs, but for low-power applications, like a netbook, this offers a balance of computing power and energy consumption that's really nice, and beats what I've seen before.
When serving on a jury, you can use jury nullification to actually change how laws are enforced, by helping establish precedent, and by helping people being harassed with unjust laws. It happened all the time during alcohol prohibition, and its re-surging right now, as more citizens get sicker of the direct and indirect negative results from drug prohibition.
Direct bribery / campaign contributions / money from corporations was recently deregulated further than before under the guise of the First Amendment protecting citizens freedom of speech. So, the "representative" parts of our government are even less so than they ever were. The executive and bureaucratic realms are, of course, completely unaccountable, and most directors of regulatory agencies have lovely jobs awaiting them after retirement in the industries they regulated.
Serving on a jury is the last and only power afforded the citizens by the government. Any citizen actually aware of this power is a citizen the government doesn't want there. Any citizen capable of rational thought, or with a real sense of right and wrong versus "legal==right, illegal==wrong" is not someone a lawyer wants on a jury... lawyers and prosecutors both work in emotional manipulation and have no use for logical jurors.
During voire dire, if you want on that jury, you keep your eyes wide and your head nodding whatever direction the lawyer / prosecutor wants. Keep your answers in the form that Joe-sixpack would provide. Do not friend them on Facebook. They will take that power away from you with a quickness if they think you are anyone other than Joe-sixpack. You might be someone's only hope of justice prevailing, and you might just impact the enforcement plans or even the validity of an unjust law while you serve on that case.
Joe Lieberman and/or Hillary Clinton will clamor for the same in our "free" country next, because they think it's just no fair that these other countries get to wreck their people's computer use while the US citizens have no such interference.
Lieberman's "kill switch" request and the two of them grandstanding over the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee mod showed them to be exactly this disgusting and sinister, belonging absolutely nowhere near having domestic powers in the "land of the free."
And those two are just the obvious and outspoken ones...
Fun Fact!
Although the anthrax mailings were played up in the media as a possible example of Hussein's use of WMDs in the lead-up to Iraq-super-fun-time, they were actually sent out by a US Federal Government scientist, from stock held at a US Government lab. When the "investigation" closed in on this bio-medical researcher, he suffered a misfortune: It was reported that he commited suicide by overdosing on acetaminophen. The drug where an overdose causes a slow, painful liver-failure death. So everyone packed up the "investigation" and went home.
Look it up; I'm not exaggerating, lying, or joking.
Those guys you refer to, with bombs and anthrax... they're closer than you think, they don't yell "Allahu Ackbar," and you're required to sign their paycheck every April 15th.
Not only is that evil, but it's also realllly stupid. Anyone remember IBM's attempt at desktop and server control called Microchannel? Was this another horrible bit of Carly Fiorina damage that just hasn't been cleaned up yet, or is HP truly about to sink to the bottom?
After a person's basic Maslow-level needs are taken care of, finding a mate and mating are realllly strong drives. These drives are at the core of evolution... every function of every bit of DNA in every sexually reproducing organism is about successful sexual reproduction, indirectly at least.
So, people who seek to control humans.... and evolved systems that benefit from controlling humans... they have this easy as can be way of grabbing humans by the gonads: Claim to define proper and improper inter-gender relations. Act as an intermediary for the "proper" inter-gender relations, and condemn, attack, and fight "improper" inter-gender relations. Also condemn and attack anyone circumventing this control by way of a natural attraction to the same gender (yeah, they have a "legitimate" self-interest in the anti-gay stuff). Most religions, not just the Abrahamic ones are all about this, as are non-religious yet power-hungry organizations. If you're shopping for a religion, this is a quick and easy test to see if it is about empowering the individual or empowering the organization: does it seek to divide the genders? It doesn't have to divide physically either... if there is an encouraged "philosophy" that pits men against women, it's just more subtle and better competing against the option of "no religious affiliation" available in some countries.
If anyone thinks this sexual segregation thing is Muslim-specific, step back a bit. Sexually segregated schools were entirely common in the US for its first century, and they still exist in number today. Pay attention to the motivations of the big proponents: they seek to control other people, either personally, or to strengthen their favorite non-human entity/organization.
I just bought an Acer Aspire One 522... it's a new 10.1" screen netbook with higher than usual resolution and a real GPU (compared to most in this class). It's a great machine. It needs extra memory, which was an oversight on Acer's part... but the biggest failure of Acer on this machine is the crapware. Windows 7 Starter is deliberately crippled crapware. Office Starter is a fat, jiggling pile of crapware. McAfee is a festering, system-resource devouring mass of crapware. Wild Tangent, one of the pioneers in ad-ware style crapware makes the "Acer Games" which is tedious to uninstall. If I left all this crap (and there's a lot more) on this little machine, it would c r a w l. I installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot option, and it's kinda funny how night and day the contrast is.
So, when someone like me goes to review this machine, I'm at least aware of its virtues and can reveal the pros and cons. The average person is getting a slowwwww machine which is already full of adware and crapware, and will be full of viruses as soon as McAfee stops updating. I'm giving it less than 5 stars, and part of that is due to the crapware. The average person is likely going to give a lot less than 5 stars. And the reviews directly impact sales.
There's tons of confusion about who Facebook's customers are. This kind of confusion goes back to television and radio stations, and popular magazines.
The participants, the readers, the viewers... these people are not the customers of these companies. They are a resource being mined and sold. Media companies, and entities like Facebook do have customers: Advertisers.
With broadcast, one-way media of yesteryear, these companies had no quality-control on the product they offered. They couldn't deactivate someone's access to a TV station because he or she routinely walked away during commercial breaks. The newspaper company couldn't identify and stop delivering papers to the person who read only the comics and used the rest as bird cage liner. Likewise, these companies could only promise "eyeballs" to their customers. Facebook, on the other hand, is offering "personae" to their customers. Each resource is not merely a potential viewer/listener, but now consists of that and a photograph, a name, a location, an age, interests, lists of friends, education level, and various other biographical data. They're offering a lot more "product" to their real customers now, and so they have a lot more interest in quality control of that product. No advertiser wants to pay for such a premium service as having a viewer's friend's photo appear next to their ad with the declaration that the friend "Liked" that product, when the friend's photo is goatse or Hitler.
Facebook is just being responsive to its customer base. The real question: How should the human users of Facebook understand, quantify, and describe their relationship with Facebook? They're certainly not just "getting to use a free site." Are they employees being paid in a product-use benefit instead of cash? What are their employee rights then? This guy's issue is less of an aggrieved customer situation than it is a wrongful termination suit. There might be analogies that make even more sense. Perhaps it's even possible that these cases be discussed clearly in the realm of what they really are, and the terms will evolve from that, rather than ill-fitting, borrowed terms... Might take a few decades.
Example.com/.net/.org has been extremely valuable over the years for documentation purposes... I remember people who didn't know about this picking some random idea of a website, and occasionally running into the porn or satire running on whitehouse.com and whitehouse.org. Good times.
My even more frequent use of those domains will also not suffer from this: shitware websites who want my email address for no valid reason. "Enter your email to download the driver for our hardware you purchased." That kind of thing. WebEx sessions... like I really want spam from them too. They get an @example.com email address. And not I nor anyone else gets spammed by the bastards. :-)
Between 2006 and 2008, I saw, on so many occasions, Fox News swapping the names Obama and Osama, verbally and in text labels. I'm sure these were all just mistakes. It was cute.
I have it installed on my Nintendo Wii. You can read about and acquire the port here.
They apparently used the source of a DS port as a starting point.
All of these require homebrew enablement hacks.
Now is the time to remember the old phrase, "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." More actions like this are needed. The UK is going hog wild with such domain seizure activity too right now. This is absolutely great. All they need to do is hit something that will piss off Average Joe. Much like the TSA wanting to grab on our genitals and/or get nude film of us, at some point soon, there is a tipping point where a large number of people get pissed.
In the physical world, where things like air travel require resources and government cooperation, pushing back on the TSA is nigh impossible, and progress will be slow if at all.
In the realm of the Internet, new technologies take off like wildfire after *one* clever person spends a few days or weeks coding up an innovation and throwing it out there to be used and improved. What these government actions will cause is a distributed, unkillable replacement for DNS... one that cures government interference, along with corporate money-based abuses (like stealing $company-sucks.com domains).
Good job, you police-state corporate lackeys! You are stimulating progress in ways you cannot comprehend. :-)
You refer to people with half a brain who can see through this nonsense... Where the hell are those people? What percentage of the voting and purchasing public do they make up? All of your points are perfectly logical. Therefore, the big hump in the bell-curve... the normal person... the body of voters in our democratic republic... they will not get it. They have been trained, since birth, to distrust logic... to know that nonsense is truth and rationality is evil. Mix in some fear, and in their cowardice, they do not get more rational. Ms. Napolitano is speaking to her audience. Whether she understands how stupid her statements are, or her handlers understand the stupidity... or if there's no one intelligent at all at the wheel... it just does not matter. Morons are the majority, and they vote for and fund this stupidity. Rational alternatives have zero chance against the existing Fear & Stupidity machine.
The only reason there is protest and a 20+% public dislike of the new Scope Or Grope policy is that they have also been trained since birth to have more body shame than nature provides, and regardless, they feel a natural fear and disgust about being sexually assaulted. It's not about how inneffective the scanners are, or the fact that they're entirely a way for beurocrats and manufacturers to steal tax dollars.... it's about fear vs fear, so it's actually getting mainstream press.
This will get expanded to railroads. It will be completely pointless in terms of security. It will enrich the important people who actually matter and that is all that matters. Chertoff et al, I salute your villainy.
Blood was way ahead of its time... protagonist was some kind of undead... setting was rather steam-punk... the sense of humor was lovely, and the gameplay mechanics were some of the best. The engine was Doom or Duke3D... it would go great with an update!
If you can do any type of programming that hits URLS, you can program the Rovio... it's whole interface is HTTP Puts and Gets with custom URLs, and it's well documented. After Wowwee released some of the advanced documentation, someone published the commands to brighten the camera within a week, solving a problem of way-too-dark video that had existed since the beginning. With this level of control, throwing together an interface you can operate from your cell-phone becomes very plausible... no laptop needed.
The person the article is about is actually the author of RoboDance, which is a complex application that controls a bunch of robots, with an emphasis on the infrared controlled kinds like RoboSapien. His next version of RoboDance is the one that will include Rovio control and probably all the capabilities described in the article.
I've been really impressed with the Rovio... my only complaint is that the battery life is pretty weak, right out of the box.
Good point. Any surprising new attack method can imperil innocent bystanders, etc...
However, within about 1 hour, air passengers of the world learned the methodology of that surprise attack and precluded it from ever being effective again. The fourth plane didn't hit a building due to this factor. No government measures of any kind whatsoever were necessary to effect this change. Zero cost to tax payers.
The framers of the Constitution of the US had a lively debate on whether or not to include the Bill of Rights. They felt that such an enumeration would lead to damaged thinking about how people get a specific set of rights, listed by a government, and anything else is "not a right." Your post is evidence that the concern was well founded.
I have the absolute and sovereign right to conduct transactions with any other party as I see fit. That includes paying an airline to provide travel services... or a boat company, or a train company, or gasoline vendors so I might power my car. These are my rights, just as providing those services are the rights of those individuals or entities.
The US federal government and its child governments have made decrees that our rightful ability to make such transactions should be hindered or outright prohibited (see drug and prostitution laws).
A free people, in a free country, could easily go about choosing to purchase travel services from whichever entities they choose, and be subject to agreed upon security arrangements with those entities. Some airlines could specialize in extensive strip-searchy, genital-feely security theatrics, and some could specialize on a more distributed "hand every non-drinking passenger a little baseball bat as they board" approach. Then you could exercise your "right to feel" safe, while the rest of us exercise our rights, sans conflict.
What you seek is less and less respect from government, in exchange for absolutely nothing other than a baseless "feeling" of security. Plenty of cowards felt the liquid ban made them safer... until the wannabe crotch-bomber showed them it meant nothing... Plenty of cowards will feel safer now that everyones genitals are felt or photographed, until the next elevation in this arms race. Then the cowards will be ready for the next bit of demeaning, useless, costly garbage, further hindering our freedoms and rights, such as travel at will within the borders of "our" supposed country.