As an employee of Monster.com, I can tell you that ain't so. Monster is a huge company, with things like the largest yellow-pages directory service, military personnel support svcs, you name it. Even my little branch of Tickle.com.:-)
"With the creation of Windows 3.0, an easy-to-use and highly functional operating system, millions of people discover the empowering abilities of personal computers."
You can tell a command-liner is lurking behind the parent poster...:-)
If I'm stuck with a black and white, non-animating screen, it might as well be a newspaper.
It would be like going back to papyrus as far as Mr. and Mrs. Consumer are concerned. Technology will only succeed if it at least maintains existing standards of performance. The whole *point* of a screen is to be pretty, cool, interesting, and so forth.
Why not use existing laws to collect state sales tax sold on goods to customers in your state? Is it really that hard to figure out?
Because it's unconstitutional. A state can't tax a transaction that occurs outside that state. Hence the ludicrous fiction of "use tax" that has gotten to be such the rage.
I think I just received one of these letters. Here's a quote:
Dear Sir/Madam:
Department records indicate that we maynot have received your North Carolina tax return for the year indicated above.... If you have filed a return, please furnish a copy of the return. If you were not required to file a return, please furnish an explanation.
The funny part? It's for 1999, two years before I'd ever set foot in North Carolina. And it was sent April 1st...
COINCIDENCE????
Re:Parallel to William Gibson
on
The Zenith Angle
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Others have said it, but I'll emphasize it. Sterling's characters all have motivations that derive from goals and ideals. ESPECIALLY the "evil" characters. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to have believable, sympathetic enemies in SF.
The world is far too open and transparent for pure-black bad guys to feel real in these days of global information. Those of us who read deeper than Fox News and White House spinmeisters know there are two sides to almost every conflict, and Sterling gets it right.
Can't talk to buckytubes, but back in the day when I worked at Bell Labs (yeah, a LONG time ago) buckyballs looked odd.:-) In powdered form, it was black soot all the way, but what was cool was in solution, it was purple. And when it dried out from being in solution? Yellow. Very strange stuff.
We were making transistors out of the little buggers, just to see what would happen...
At what point does it make sense to start editting Verisign.com out of the internet? The basic ploy here seems to be to ride rough-shod over the concerns of the technical users and administrators who maintain the 'net, in the hopes that uneducated consumers will ignore the issue.
It seems to me that the thousands of sysadmins, ISP admins and so forth who read this site and feel the pain of Verisign's greed have an option here - alter our local DNS registries to point www.verisign.com etc to 127.0.0.1. Given enough people doing this and their business will start to feel the pain.
It would be a fine twist to this whole mess, and perhaps drive home to the PHB's at Verisign exactly how annoyed this makes those of us who understand the ramifications of their actions.
That is taking a very old-fashioned view of the threats to privacy in the world. In the old days, someone would have to read your papers or invade your house to know private things about you. In todays world with linked databases and omnipresent public "security" cameras, there is very little that cannot be known about you from purely public information.
About the only thing you are really free to do is act in your own home. But even there, if someone can find out that you bought Girls Gone Wild, hand lotion and some kleenex, all within the same week, the black box of your home becomes a very thin shell indeed. With enough sample points, the black box of your "privacy" becomes transparent.
Tracking where you go (EZPass, cell phone), what you buy (credit card, buyer's programs, RFIDs), websites you visit (cookies), who your friends are (Friendster), your driving record (DMV, insurance co.), etc, means that although you may *in theory* have privacy, everything anyone could want to know about you is *knowable*.
Sorry to all y'all who are bashing this review, but it's spot-on. I read this book, and it was a betrayal. Very cool universe, good writing style, but the substance was... bland. Pasty. Not satisfying at all.
Problem is, for really bad books, it's hard to be insightful in a review without sounding like a whiner. But this book does *just suck*, and as long as everyone who reads the review takes that point home at the end, it has done its job.
It's just that they only work when they work well.
Google is rolling naked in vats of crispy, crunchy cash right now because they've discovered that small, targeted, relevant *text* ads not only don't annoy people, they actually get better click-thru rates. And the people who click through are actually interested in the advertised products. Go figure.
Targetting is the key. Relevance is the key. Not annoying me with blinking flash crap is the very essense of the key.
I think you're missing a large problem with Anime acceptance in the States, and that is the gore factor.
Anime has some of the most relentlessly overdone gore to be found in any medium. And often, it seems, for no real purpose. Akira, one of the first movies Anime newbies generally see, is a perfect example of this. As is Princess Mononoke, for that matter.
There's a japanese fixation with biologically disturbing imagery that just doesn't fly with large numbers of people in the States. Violence, sure, but pulsing, bleeding, oozing bodies? Um, no thanks.
I'm used to my computers going obsolete while still in transit from the seller, but my vacuum cleaner??? I just bought a "standard" model Roomba last week!
My mom, using Earthlink, has been unable for 4 days to email her business partner. Which is wasting her time. Preventing her from getting work done.
The thing to realize here is that, while punishing an ISP may or may not be a good thing, harming *tens of thousands* of innocent users of that ISP (and Earthlink is a good one, IMHO) is incredibly irresponsible.
The bounce email said basically "Go whine to your ISP" which was, frankly, insulting. Never having been a fan of AOL, I'm not really surprised by this, but I can tell you it's caused her business partner to drop his account damn quick. Hope other AOL customers are doing the same.
Email is critical infrastructure. It's a public communication medium just like telephone lines are. How would you like it if all Bell South customers couldn't call you because your regional Baby Bell didn't like dealing with all the telemarketing coming in from Atlanta?
At a certain point, services become too valuable to play this kind of game with. I think email has passed that threshhold long ago.
What's really interesting is Earthlink is apparently being blocked as a spammer by AOL. That seems to tread dangerously closely to anti-trust action.
I agree spam sux, but preventing the proper functioning of what is arguably the most critical and widely used service on the internet to prevent it is a cure that's worse than the disease.
Re:'Because We Can' good enough reason?
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 1
If you RTFB, or the links to the PDF version of the early report it's based on, they fully address this concern (the cable-falling-from-the-sky scenario) in their work. In short, fast-moving bits burn up, slow moving bits aren't very dangerous.
I've read the Red/Green/Blue Mars series, and the description of the (diamond-based) space elevator crash on Mars is truly something to stop you in your tracks.
But the whole idea behind nanotubes is that they're light for their strength.
Every now and again, after the cynicism and the corruption and the payola and the lobbying... our government comes through.
I get so depressed, reading about DMCA suits & SLAPPs, reading about corporate (*cough* Coble) whores. You get to thinking that the government is just trying to screw us all.
And yet, there are good guys. There are champions of the common man.
Um. How much competition would, say, an "The Great Train Robbery" give, say, "Titanic"?
That would be none.
Once people begin to expect a certain level of realism and polish in their products, only games limited in scope enough to allow such polish can make it. Puzzle games. Board-game ports. Things of this nature.
No indie will crank out something along the lines of Diablo or Baldur's Gate in anything less than 100 years of garage work.
They'll no doubt bring the same fine usability and security features they've perfected in Outlook to my cell phone's address book.
Just think of all the new capabilities we'll have! Helpful users (especially those swell guys in eastern europe!) will no doubt quickly create vbscript autodialers. Heck, my phone will probably call my friends more often that I do!
And that's the Microsoft Promise: "We do things so you don't have to!"
Sounds like a pretty v1.0 idea at this stage, but I'm psyched people are spending brain cycles working on DDoS and flash-flood solutions, since they're both problems that are only going to get worse.
(Gotta love the Slashdot effect getting named explicitly, eh? Nice to be part of the problem for a change... hehe.)
Seems to me the tricky part here is defining the aggregates. After reading the article, it isn't *really* a way to save your site from going down due to overload, more a way to prevent others sharing your pipe/routers from going down with you.;-)
Which is a good goal in itself. It seems like a real tough thing to determine which of the millions of hits to www.yahoo.com (for ex.) are valid users, and which are DDoS bots. So both get restricted (net result: bots win), but the guy in the cage next to yahoo stays up.
Slashdot Mirror
As the devices "run for years off a single battery", seems unlikely to pose much of a threat, even in aggregate.
As an employee of Monster.com, I can tell you that ain't so. Monster is a huge company, with things like the largest yellow-pages directory service, military personnel support svcs, you name it. Even my little branch of Tickle.com. :-)
Even better:
"With the creation of Windows 3.0, an easy-to-use and highly functional operating system, millions of people discover the empowering abilities of personal computers."
I'm just... wow.
I'd be happy to assume the legal liability in this case.
FTP daemons are standing by!
You can tell a command-liner is lurking behind the parent poster... :-)
If I'm stuck with a black and white, non-animating screen, it might as well be a newspaper.
It would be like going back to papyrus as far as Mr. and Mrs. Consumer are concerned. Technology will only succeed if it at least maintains existing standards of performance. The whole *point* of a screen is to be pretty, cool, interesting, and so forth.
COINCIDENCE????
Others have said it, but I'll emphasize it. Sterling's characters all have motivations that derive from goals and ideals. ESPECIALLY the "evil" characters. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to have believable, sympathetic enemies in SF.
The world is far too open and transparent for pure-black bad guys to feel real in these days of global information. Those of us who read deeper than Fox News and White House spinmeisters know there are two sides to almost every conflict, and Sterling gets it right.
YMMV.
Can't talk to buckytubes, but back in the day when I worked at Bell Labs (yeah, a LONG time ago) buckyballs looked odd. :-) In powdered form, it was black soot all the way, but what was cool was in solution, it was purple. And when it dried out from being in solution? Yellow. Very strange stuff.
We were making transistors out of the little buggers, just to see what would happen...
At what point does it make sense to start editting Verisign.com out of the internet? The basic ploy here seems to be to ride rough-shod over the concerns of the technical users and administrators who maintain the 'net, in the hopes that uneducated consumers will ignore the issue.
It seems to me that the thousands of sysadmins, ISP admins and so forth who read this site and feel the pain of Verisign's greed have an option here - alter our local DNS registries to point www.verisign.com etc to 127.0.0.1. Given enough people doing this and their business will start to feel the pain.
It would be a fine twist to this whole mess, and perhaps drive home to the PHB's at Verisign exactly how annoyed this makes those of us who understand the ramifications of their actions.
That is taking a very old-fashioned view of the threats to privacy in the world. In the old days, someone would have to read your papers or invade your house to know private things about you. In todays world with linked databases and omnipresent public "security" cameras, there is very little that cannot be known about you from purely public information.
About the only thing you are really free to do is act in your own home. But even there, if someone can find out that you bought Girls Gone Wild, hand lotion and some kleenex, all within the same week, the black box of your home becomes a very thin shell indeed. With enough sample points, the black box of your "privacy" becomes transparent.
Tracking where you go (EZPass, cell phone), what you buy (credit card, buyer's programs, RFIDs), websites you visit (cookies), who your friends are (Friendster), your driving record (DMV, insurance co.), etc, means that although you may *in theory* have privacy, everything anyone could want to know about you is *knowable*.
Sorry to all y'all who are bashing this review, but it's spot-on. I read this book, and it was a betrayal. Very cool universe, good writing style, but the substance was... bland. Pasty. Not satisfying at all.
Problem is, for really bad books, it's hard to be insightful in a review without sounding like a whiner. But this book does *just suck*, and as long as everyone who reads the review takes that point home at the end, it has done its job.
It's just that they only work when they work well.
Google is rolling naked in vats of crispy, crunchy cash right now because they've discovered that small, targeted, relevant *text* ads not only don't annoy people, they actually get better click-thru rates. And the people who click through are actually interested in the advertised products. Go figure.
Targetting is the key. Relevance is the key. Not annoying me with blinking flash crap is the very essense of the key.
I think you're missing a large problem with Anime acceptance in the States, and that is the gore factor.
Anime has some of the most relentlessly overdone gore to be found in any medium. And often, it seems, for no real purpose. Akira, one of the first movies Anime newbies generally see, is a perfect example of this. As is Princess Mononoke, for that matter.
There's a japanese fixation with biologically disturbing imagery that just doesn't fly with large numbers of people in the States. Violence, sure, but pulsing, bleeding, oozing bodies? Um, no thanks.
I'm used to my computers going obsolete while still in transit from the seller, but my vacuum cleaner??? I just bought a "standard" model Roomba last week!
Dammit.
My mom, using Earthlink, has been unable for 4 days to email her business partner. Which is wasting her time. Preventing her from getting work done.
The thing to realize here is that, while punishing an ISP may or may not be a good thing, harming *tens of thousands* of innocent users of that ISP (and Earthlink is a good one, IMHO) is incredibly irresponsible.
The bounce email said basically "Go whine to your ISP" which was, frankly, insulting. Never having been a fan of AOL, I'm not really surprised by this, but I can tell you it's caused her business partner to drop his account damn quick. Hope other AOL customers are doing the same.
Email is critical infrastructure. It's a public communication medium just like telephone lines are. How would you like it if all Bell South customers couldn't call you because your regional Baby Bell didn't like dealing with all the telemarketing coming in from Atlanta?
At a certain point, services become too valuable to play this kind of game with. I think email has passed that threshhold long ago.
What's really interesting is Earthlink is apparently being blocked as a spammer by AOL. That seems to tread dangerously closely to anti-trust action.
I agree spam sux, but preventing the proper functioning of what is arguably the most critical and widely used service on the internet to prevent it is a cure that's worse than the disease.
If you RTFB, or the links to the PDF version of the early report it's based on, they fully address this concern (the cable-falling-from-the-sky scenario) in their work. In short, fast-moving bits burn up, slow moving bits aren't very dangerous.
I've read the Red/Green/Blue Mars series, and the description of the (diamond-based) space elevator crash on Mars is truly something to stop you in your tracks.
But the whole idea behind nanotubes is that they're light for their strength.
That's the point. It's not written by the guy who is known to be a real zealot.
;-)
Nah, it's written by this other guy, who's just announced himself as one.
"Elegant machines" my butt.
Every now and again, after the cynicism and the corruption and the payola and the lobbying... our government comes through.
I get so depressed, reading about DMCA suits & SLAPPs, reading about corporate (*cough* Coble) whores. You get to thinking that the government is just trying to screw us all.
And yet, there are good guys. There are champions of the common man.
I feel pretty good.
Um. How much competition would, say, an "The Great Train Robbery" give, say, "Titanic"?
That would be none.
Once people begin to expect a certain level of realism and polish in their products, only games limited in scope enough to allow such polish can make it. Puzzle games. Board-game ports. Things of this nature.
No indie will crank out something along the lines of Diablo or Baldur's Gate in anything less than 100 years of garage work.
296 times bitten, 297 times shy, I guess.
They'll no doubt bring the same fine usability and security features they've perfected in Outlook to my cell phone's address book.
Just think of all the new capabilities we'll have! Helpful users (especially those swell guys in eastern europe!) will no doubt quickly create vbscript autodialers. Heck, my phone will probably call my friends more often that I do!
And that's the Microsoft Promise: "We do things so you don't have to!"
Um, can anyone say "camcorder"?
:-)
Sounds like a pretty v1.0 idea at this stage, but I'm psyched people are spending brain cycles working on DDoS and flash-flood solutions, since they're both problems that are only going to get worse.
;-)
(Gotta love the Slashdot effect getting named explicitly, eh? Nice to be part of the problem for a change... hehe.)
Seems to me the tricky part here is defining the aggregates. After reading the article, it isn't *really* a way to save your site from going down due to overload, more a way to prevent others sharing your pipe/routers from going down with you.
Which is a good goal in itself. It seems like a real tough thing to determine which of the millions of hits to www.yahoo.com (for ex.) are valid users, and which are DDoS bots. So both get restricted (net result: bots win), but the guy in the cage next to yahoo stays up.