Bullshit. The American Dream has ALLWAYS been to get rich.
The Spaniards came to the Americas for God, Gold, and Glory. But most of all for Gold.
American immigration has always been advertised with the idea that "in America, the streets are paved with gold."
California gold rush.
Manifest destiny (read as: one big land grab)
Capitalism, itself is about nothing more than individual wealth. Hell, you could define capitalism as the philosophy that we can let everyone be greedy and get rich as long as their struggle to get rich enriches others.
Listen to Hollywood and Disney if you want, but the reality is that the American Dream is and always has been about getting rich and not having to work. ('Little' house with white picket fence my ass).
I'm just glad to see that someone was able to realize their dream at Microsoft's expense.
So with a new ia32 back end concentrating on Pentium II performance, has anyone done any benchmarks to see what kind of improvement we can get from nothing more than a recompile?
I was talking about this with my brother-in-law just the other day (I have my house on the market). Realtors are on their way out along with all the other information gatekeepers, unless they change their business models.
Realtors serve a purpose (or at least they used, to). Buying/selling a home is expensive, complicated and seldom done (most people will only do it a few times at most in their entire lives). It was cost effective to pay someone to lead you through the paperwork landmines and insure that you didn't land in the worst house in town. 6% was a fair shake for what you got.
Problem is that the realtors got used to their position as the gatekeepers. They came to believe that they deserved $12,000 for showing someone a house, and they worked on ways to both keep other people from entering the business as realtors and to keep people from finding out about what is available on their own.
The same thing has happened with entertainment. A few distributor got big enough to force everyone else out, and then became comfortable as the gatekeepers. Problem is, the Net doesn't just tear down the gate, it burns the whole fence.
It used to be that the only effective way to advertise a house was through a multiple listing service. Which amount to collusion among brokers to keep everyone else out of the brokerage market.
Fortunately, the rise of the Net and other means have allowed people to bypass realtors. For-Sale-By-Owner, which basically is just a advertising service like the auto mags at the gas station has grown tremendously as people have started looking at the ridiculous rates charged by brokers. And brokers are responding. Many have much lower rates, and I've heard scare-mongering commercials on the radio ("Jim is enjoying his new home, while John is readjusting his asking price for the third time. Jim is smart. He listed with us (doesn't mention that Jim payed $12,000)"). The most productive thing I've seen from realtors is the change toward being 'buyer's agents'. This is basically paying someone to find a house for you. This is still attractive because it's hard to know what the good side of town is when your moving >300miles and you've seen the town once.
Right now, the Net doesn't provide a lot, but the Net has only been popular a few years. Brokers have been around for 100s, and they have a lot of consumer confidence. As the Net matures, people will find it valuable as the information resource it is and recognize that they don't have to spend the $12000. But it will take time.
I usually try to stay out of flame wars, but you just make such a tempting target.
LA and Gary, Indiana are bad, you say. Well, how would you know. If you hiked from between them and Alaska, then Kudos and hats of to you. But I don't think that likely. If you have a solar powered car, then Kudos and hats of to you. But I don't think that likely. If I had to put money on it, I would say that you drove around in a big iron shell powered by OIL. I bet you drove that huge monstrosity to the ANWR so that you could see the wilderness. Probably took along some camping gear like a tent made of artificial materials and a camp stove the burn LP gas which comes from OIL.
I would also put money on you sitting in front of a big, power hungry CRT with nothing better to do than post useless drivel to/. (forgive me if you are using a hand-powered computer). Hell, I bet you even use deodorant, and were shoes, you nasty polluting fucker. (again, forgive me if you stink and only make your clothes from dead animals you find on the side of the road).
We're not 'all' fucked if a few oil wells are drilled. If the oil companies put up all they could afford, you'd still be able to walk for days in the reserve without seeing one. And no one gives a shit if you don't want to see it because it might desecrate your idea of wilderness.
I agree that drilling for oil is a nasty sort of business. But unless you go to sleep at sundown so that you don't have to use electric lights, you'll have to agree that we owe our current standard of living to burning the stuff.
I'll say it one more time for the hard of hearing. Knowing that a plane is in the air and gathering telementry accurate enough for targetting a missile are not necessarilly the same thing.
1) wait at least 4 weeks before making your purchase
I find that this is still not enough. It seems that the "indy" sites and the people who get the newest stuff in the first 4 weeks can only either say that "it works great!! Here are my benchmarks!!" or "#$%$% thing won't install". It usually takes quite a bit of time before all the incompatibilities of hardware show up, and no one seems to compare 6month old boards to find out what is truly reliable.
My personal preference is not to buy anything younger than 6months old. Living on the bleeding edge might be nice for those who can make a little cash at it, but for the rest of us actually have to get some 'work' done every now and then. The latest motherboard combined with the latest video card and the latest super-pipelined-caching-enhanced IDE controller may give an.00003 speed increase, but it's not worth the.00005% decrease in my lifespan that the stress of them not working together will cause.
I find that all the hardware sites, 'indy' or not, are useless except to 1)explain how the hardware works and 2)tell if it will install or not. It's not until a user base congregates somewhere that you can actually learn if it's worth a shit or not.
How would even cable handle the necessary bandwidth to give everyone two way communication and what would amount to their own channel? Will this boil down to what DTV does with their movies ("your movie will be starting in 15minutes")? And if so, won't this be a blow to what makes TIVO so attractive (watch what you like, WHEN you like)? How would the pause and rewind work (a few megs of local storage)?
I just don't see how this could get far. Media companies keep thinking that they can make a business of NOT giving people what they want. They're doomed.
(of course, I didn't read the article. How am I supposed to get modded up if I take time to read the article?)
You seem to be a very intelligent and well spoken 17-year-old (I say "seem to be", because on the internet no one knows that your a dog 8*). I'd like to answer your allegation with something that will apply to a lot of areas of your life. As you get older and enter the world at large, look for how many times this rule will apply.
Most people are stupid. The law is made of the people, by the people, and (most importantly) for the people.
Laws for this short is defined as codified and semi-codified ethics and social norms. Hence, there doesn't necessarily have to be a statue against goat sex in middle Kansas for it to be considered by the locals to be the law.
Now, why is porn bad. Because it exploits women? This is ridiculous bullshit put forth by the 70's women's liberation movement in order to get conservative women on their side. The strippers I know make more money than I do, while I've known several men go home broke from strip clubs. Tell me again who is being exploited.
The fact is that men are being exploited. Which would be fine if only single men were being given the treatment, but the fact is that a large number of married men frequent sex facilities. This is bad.
Consider that the fraction of a family traditionally responsible for paying the bills spending a large amount of what should be spent on the family on a fantasy instead. Now, refer back to the part about 'most people are stupid'. This includes a large number of those bread winners.
Now consider that Mister Daddyo spends a lot of time looking at overly done-up naked models. "Why doesn't my wife look like that?", he thinks (ignoring the fact that his 45yr old wife and mother or 4 kids has just spent 8hours cooking and cleaning instead of lounging at the day spa like the 20yr old model). "Damn-it, she must not care to look nice for me", he thinks (ignoring the flabby paunch around his belly). "Damn-it, I'm going to drop this lazy hag and go find me a good wife," he decides. He gets a divorce, breaking up a family. There are plenty of other sources for the effects of divorce on society. I'll summarize the effects as "not good".
The 'powers-that-be' recognize this sort of thing happening in large numbers. Instead of educating the populace, as in saying to fat-old-men, "Heh, you, fat-old-man! Your wife has worked hard for you, and that porn star is fake. You're an idiot to drop her, because you'll never find anything better." (Remember, especially in America, we are all trained to believe that fantasy can be reality. Trying to break the fantasy of the porn star with a dose of reality goes against the grain here.) It is much easier to say "porn bad. Will hurt you. Ugh!" Such a statement is much more understandable by the people at large. No need to actually understand cause-and-effect and other such complicated things.
So as you go about your life, remember that a lot of laws and conventions aren't aimed at fixing a problem, they're just trying to cover a root cause enough to keep it down to a point where most won't notice. The good thing about this is (if you understand the concept) most laws can be ignored with impunity as long as you are discreet (unless you piss off someone powerful). Remember, 1) most people aren't capable of presenting an argument to the town council at any age, let alone 17, and 2) the laws are made for most people.
So, to answer your post, porn is harmful, but only to stupid people.
The thing that always tickles me is that people complain about the 100mW of power at a frequency high enough to NEVER overcome the hysteresis of moving a molecule, and yet they'll stick a speaker in their ear (in fact one of the 'solutions' to the 'problem'). Take a speaker apart and what do you have? Basically, a transformer!! And it operates at a frequency that is MUCH more likely to create actual currents in brain tissue.
At least where it counts. Knowing that you have stealth fighters on the way is one thing. Being able to knock them down before their missiles blow you up is another can of fish entirely. The radars that count are TARGETTING radars. Those small radars mounted on the missle launchers and on the tip of homing missles. These require a strong return signal, so the stealth aircraft are still effective here.
Saddam knew our planes were coming in the Gulf War, hell for PR reasons, he was counting on it. He didn't know exactly where or when, but he had his men on alert at all times. But even after we dropped a few bombs, alerting him to exactly what we were hitting, he was still unable to knock a single stealth plane down, because the TARGETTING radars were ineffective.
After saying that, I find it difficult to imagine that this system would be able to provide enough resolution of the exact position of a single plane to provide targetting information. Think about the geographic dispersal of the towers, echo effects of the signals, the speed of the craft, the non-military grade of the equipment (specifically, temperature variation effects), and the accuracy needed for targetting information.
All this system will do is let a leader know that he has been hit.
It's not to hard to get a city to approve the movement of a few power lines and some police escorts in order to move some BUF. But can you imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that asking to be able to float a McDonald's over a residential neighborhood would produce? Would you want them floating the first one over YOUR house?
Like a lot of other things, the biggest problems are technological (that only takes a litle talent and money to solve forever). The big problems are social.
Excuse me?! Are you saying that you don't have the right to inspect the work that a contractor does on your house? Are you saying that he should be able to do whatever he damn well pleases inside your walls, and as long as the sheetrock is smooth and flat when he's finished you have know right to know what he did? Are you saying that you don't have the right to have the tires that Ford put on your SUV inspected by and expert? Are you saying that you have no right to have your food inspected by a third party? Do you have a right to get a used car inspected by a expert third party before deciding to buy it?
I'll agree with you. You do not have a constitutional right to any of these things. But any company that expected to survive in a competive marketplace would not dare stand in the way of any of it. The question I proferred would point out to the public in general that software vendors have been getting away with something that most other industries only dream of, foisting untested/uninspected product onto the market, and that there is an alternative that is more like the rest of the marketplace. There is no FOIA to guarantee that your contractor does good work, but there is a lot of market power that provides the same effect. I'd like it pointed out that closed software is not covered by laws or market effects, and that PHBs should fear this.
If I rearend your car with mine, am I liable? Can I explain it away with, "Sorry. Didn't mean to do that. I'll get you a bumper fix in 3 months or so."
No, Tivo knew or should have known what their software would do to older boxen. PC Software companies can get away with the "We didn't know there were bugs excuse" simply due to consumer ignorance and apathy, and to the extreme complexity of a market with so many OEMs. Tivo is the sole source for Tivo boxes, and so have complete control over what they produce. Such a flagrant bug may not be attributable to malice, but it is definitely attributable to neglect. Hence, they are liable for damages.
Background: Politicians passed the Freedom of Information Act, after a LOT of pressure from news organizations, because people wanted to know what their government, which they are paying for, is up to. The government doesn't know who will request what information, but the general consensus is that if anything bad is happening, someone will request the right information and expose it.
Open Source code provides for the same thing to happen with computer programs. Closed source is like a closed government in that people we don't really know or trust are able to do things that we would rather they not with impunity and on our dime.
Again with open source, not everyone will look at the source code, in fact, very few will, but the code is open to review by whoever would request it. If there is something underhanded going on, someone who has not signed a NDA will discover it and proclaim what is found from the mountain tops.
Mr. Mundie, how can the public be assured that Microsoft is not doing underhanded things if no one is allowed to review the code except for Microsoft employees and those hand picked by Microsoft.
Re:Consider the limitations
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You mean I didn't really run XWindows on that 386 with only 4Megs? Damn-it! Damn-it all! These hallucinations just won't stop!
Really, though. You need to take a breather and check a little history. You can have a very nice windowing system with a very small footprint that would do everything that most people will ever need. Just refere back to GEOS, that ran on a 8086 (that was 640KB for you young'uns out there). The X system itself is quite sparse. It's all the extensions and window managers that eat up memory like it's on firesale.
I don't know the particulars of the technology, only what the article states, but this would seem fairly easy to blow off. M$ can't put their little squiggly lines under hyperlinks. That would cause of 'click collision'. What I mean is, a hyperlink were 'tagged' then when the user clicked on the tag would it mean that they wanted to follow the hyperlink or the tag. The only SANE thing that M$ could do (which in no way guarantees that they will do this) is skip over the words in hyperlinks when deciding what to tag.
The solution is to change the color of a link in your page to the same color as the text, and then surround all the text with a hyperlink back to your page.
Problem solved.
Now we just have to solve all the problems that this will cause 8*)
So, the guy has invented a glorified IR transmitter. Only problem is that it is one-way comunication. There is no way to transmit back to the flourescent light.
He claims that an application would be a data network on an airplane, saving the need to run miles of wire. But what would you do with such a network? Get rid of the intercom? ('Heh, honey! I got mail!' [open laptop] 'The captain says to put our trays in the upright position and that the no smoking light is now on.')
And while I ranting on the comparative uselessness of this otherwise neat hack, why is every semi-useless device targetted at the 'disabled' market. Is it because they expect that the cost of these contraptions will be carried by insurance companies and non-profit organizations and therefore more likely to be accepted? Or would it be that they figure people in desperate situations will pay for anything. Think about it. Here is a device that delivers a low-bandwidth (it uses ELECTRICAL WIRING, FGS), shared-medium network. A standard wireless network would provide for bandwidth overhead, would probably be cheaper (compare the range of a wireless base station to the number of flourescents in your average hospital hallway) and provide TWO-way communications. While it's nice that they have a device that will help Tommy Braindamage find his way to an appointment, shouldn't someone be keeping closer tabs on Tommy if he is this brain damaged? Shouldn't there be a way of finding Tommy in case he exceeded the flourescents range. (Tommy: "Gee, where am I. My PDA doesn't give directions anymore. Look at that pretty big truck coming right at me" [further brain damage insues])
It's nice to see some good hacks, but not every hack can be a commercial success.
If Copy Control Doomsday happened tomorrow, we'd have about 25 years before we had to worry.
Good thought, but... No. You wouldn't have 25 years. You see, electronics don't like to sit around unused. All sorts of weird things start happening to them. One thing that happens is that electrolytic capacitors dry out. Battery backed clock and memory circuits die. And then there is the truly weird stuff like circuits that maintain a small charge when turned off that acts as a pre-charge on the next startup to reduce startup current. Leave it off for 10yr, start it up, and it fries itself.
Some equipment might survive, but without a true hacker around to babysit it, most will just die. Older systems tend to last longer than what is made today, because they were over/better engineered (depending upon your POV). Just look at the difference between the casing on a 70s era electrolytic and what you might find today. They may be using better materials now, but instead of making the cap better they just use less material.
Wouldn't it be easier to just asign a date a number based upon it's distance from a starting date, say a Sunday sometime early in the century, and then just mod7 that date?
Anyone remember getting the catalogues for shareware, back in the day...
This is a must have application. It features and innovative graphical interface that allows you to balance your checkbook in only minutes.
Only 5.95 per disk, and you still were supposed to pay the shareware author (which very few people actually did). The point is, everything in the catalogue was the greatest thing since sliced bread according to the people who are trying to get money for it.
I actually had an email conversation with one of the guys running./ (sorry, can't remember which one), about 2 years ago. My suggestion was that moderators be given the choice to moderate a set of randomly picked comments, rather than having to read an entire response to an article. My theory was that no one with a life has time to read an entire 200 comments. His reply was that it would take away from the flow of the conversation. My response now is , "See?" Probably the most informative post of the whole article is lost in the flotsom. What a waste.
You may not care, but venture capitalist and the PHBs sure do. He wasn't talking to us anyway. We're just the guys who implement the solutions that the PHBs buy from the guy they're golfing with. We're just the guys who need some investment capital to run a company for a year so that we can deliver the Next Big Thing. Ballmer doesn't give a shit about us, 'cause we don't have any money.
He's lying to the PHBs and the rest of the business community, and we'll be the ones to suffer for it if we don't tell them the lie in Ballmer's story (which, as technologist, is also part of our jobs).
MS was able to dis OS/2 with a smear campaign which IBM chose to ignore. MS is trying to do the same to Linux. We will not ignore them. Every time they lie or mislead, we will cry to truth loudly from every roof top.
MS: The GPL is bad for business.
Linux: Tell them who's business it is bad for!!
MS: The GPL is a cancer that will eat up your IP.
Linux: Only if you distribute a derivative. You are free to take and use a GPL program for your own purposes!!
MS: Linux is not a stable, supported solution for corporate infrastructure.
Linux: Tell that to IBM, Burlington Mills, The Home Depot and others who are using it as a stable, supported solution for corporate infrastructure!!
MS: Linux will fork.
Linux: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP...
MS: Linux will require retraining staff.
Linux: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP...
Anytime we let them get away with a misleading statement or outright lie, we suffer and our society suffers. If they tell the truth, so be it. But do not let lies stand unchallenged.
That said, our best response is to point out the hypocrisy of thier statements. That is something that resonates.
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The Spaniards came to the Americas for God, Gold, and Glory. But most of all for Gold.
American immigration has always been advertised with the idea that "in America, the streets are paved with gold."
California gold rush.
Manifest destiny (read as: one big land grab)
Capitalism, itself is about nothing more than individual wealth. Hell, you could define capitalism as the philosophy that we can let everyone be greedy and get rich as long as their struggle to get rich enriches others.
Listen to Hollywood and Disney if you want, but the reality is that the American Dream is and always has been about getting rich and not having to work. ('Little' house with white picket fence my ass).
I'm just glad to see that someone was able to realize their dream at Microsoft's expense.
Isn't this analogous to having a 6-lane driveway to a two lane country road dotted with single lane bridges?
So with a new ia32 back end concentrating on Pentium II performance, has anyone done any benchmarks to see what kind of improvement we can get from nothing more than a recompile?
Realtors serve a purpose (or at least they used, to). Buying/selling a home is expensive, complicated and seldom done (most people will only do it a few times at most in their entire lives). It was cost effective to pay someone to lead you through the paperwork landmines and insure that you didn't land in the worst house in town. 6% was a fair shake for what you got.
Problem is that the realtors got used to their position as the gatekeepers. They came to believe that they deserved $12,000 for showing someone a house, and they worked on ways to both keep other people from entering the business as realtors and to keep people from finding out about what is available on their own.
The same thing has happened with entertainment. A few distributor got big enough to force everyone else out, and then became comfortable as the gatekeepers. Problem is, the Net doesn't just tear down the gate, it burns the whole fence.
It used to be that the only effective way to advertise a house was through a multiple listing service. Which amount to collusion among brokers to keep everyone else out of the brokerage market.
Fortunately, the rise of the Net and other means have allowed people to bypass realtors. For-Sale-By-Owner, which basically is just a advertising service like the auto mags at the gas station has grown tremendously as people have started looking at the ridiculous rates charged by brokers. And brokers are responding. Many have much lower rates, and I've heard scare-mongering commercials on the radio ("Jim is enjoying his new home, while John is readjusting his asking price for the third time. Jim is smart. He listed with us (doesn't mention that Jim payed $12,000)"). The most productive thing I've seen from realtors is the change toward being 'buyer's agents'. This is basically paying someone to find a house for you. This is still attractive because it's hard to know what the good side of town is when your moving >300miles and you've seen the town once.
Right now, the Net doesn't provide a lot, but the Net has only been popular a few years. Brokers have been around for 100s, and they have a lot of consumer confidence. As the Net matures, people will find it valuable as the information resource it is and recognize that they don't have to spend the $12000. But it will take time.
LA and Gary, Indiana are bad, you say. Well, how would you know. If you hiked from between them and Alaska, then Kudos and hats of to you. But I don't think that likely. If you have a solar powered car, then Kudos and hats of to you. But I don't think that likely. If I had to put money on it, I would say that you drove around in a big iron shell powered by OIL. I bet you drove that huge monstrosity to the ANWR so that you could see the wilderness. Probably took along some camping gear like a tent made of artificial materials and a camp stove the burn LP gas which comes from OIL.
I would also put money on you sitting in front of a big, power hungry CRT with nothing better to do than post useless drivel to /. (forgive me if you are using a hand-powered computer). Hell, I bet you even use deodorant, and were shoes, you nasty polluting fucker. (again, forgive me if you stink and only make your clothes from dead animals you find on the side of the road).
We're not 'all' fucked if a few oil wells are drilled. If the oil companies put up all they could afford, you'd still be able to walk for days in the reserve without seeing one. And no one gives a shit if you don't want to see it because it might desecrate your idea of wilderness.
I agree that drilling for oil is a nasty sort of business. But unless you go to sleep at sundown so that you don't have to use electric lights, you'll have to agree that we owe our current standard of living to burning the stuff.
I'll say it one more time for the hard of hearing. Knowing that a plane is in the air and gathering telementry accurate enough for targetting a missile are not necessarilly the same thing.
I find that this is still not enough. It seems that the "indy" sites and the people who get the newest stuff in the first 4 weeks can only either say that "it works great!! Here are my benchmarks!!" or "#$%$% thing won't install". It usually takes quite a bit of time before all the incompatibilities of hardware show up, and no one seems to compare 6month old boards to find out what is truly reliable.
My personal preference is not to buy anything younger than 6months old. Living on the bleeding edge might be nice for those who can make a little cash at it, but for the rest of us actually have to get some 'work' done every now and then. The latest motherboard combined with the latest video card and the latest super-pipelined-caching-enhanced IDE controller may give an .00003 speed increase, but it's not worth the .00005% decrease in my lifespan that the stress of them not working together will cause.
I find that all the hardware sites, 'indy' or not, are useless except to 1)explain how the hardware works and 2)tell if it will install or not. It's not until a user base congregates somewhere that you can actually learn if it's worth a shit or not.
I just don't see how this could get far. Media companies keep thinking that they can make a business of NOT giving people what they want. They're doomed.
(of course, I didn't read the article. How am I supposed to get modded up if I take time to read the article?)
Most people are stupid. The law is made of the people, by the people, and (most importantly) for the people.
Laws for this short is defined as codified and semi-codified ethics and social norms. Hence, there doesn't necessarily have to be a statue against goat sex in middle Kansas for it to be considered by the locals to be the law.
Now, why is porn bad. Because it exploits women? This is ridiculous bullshit put forth by the 70's women's liberation movement in order to get conservative women on their side. The strippers I know make more money than I do, while I've known several men go home broke from strip clubs. Tell me again who is being exploited.
The fact is that men are being exploited. Which would be fine if only single men were being given the treatment, but the fact is that a large number of married men frequent sex facilities. This is bad.
Consider that the fraction of a family traditionally responsible for paying the bills spending a large amount of what should be spent on the family on a fantasy instead. Now, refer back to the part about 'most people are stupid'. This includes a large number of those bread winners.
Now consider that Mister Daddyo spends a lot of time looking at overly done-up naked models. "Why doesn't my wife look like that?", he thinks (ignoring the fact that his 45yr old wife and mother or 4 kids has just spent 8hours cooking and cleaning instead of lounging at the day spa like the 20yr old model). "Damn-it, she must not care to look nice for me", he thinks (ignoring the flabby paunch around his belly). "Damn-it, I'm going to drop this lazy hag and go find me a good wife," he decides. He gets a divorce, breaking up a family. There are plenty of other sources for the effects of divorce on society. I'll summarize the effects as "not good".
The 'powers-that-be' recognize this sort of thing happening in large numbers. Instead of educating the populace, as in saying to fat-old-men, "Heh, you, fat-old-man! Your wife has worked hard for you, and that porn star is fake. You're an idiot to drop her, because you'll never find anything better." (Remember, especially in America, we are all trained to believe that fantasy can be reality. Trying to break the fantasy of the porn star with a dose of reality goes against the grain here.) It is much easier to say "porn bad. Will hurt you. Ugh!" Such a statement is much more understandable by the people at large. No need to actually understand cause-and-effect and other such complicated things.
So as you go about your life, remember that a lot of laws and conventions aren't aimed at fixing a problem, they're just trying to cover a root cause enough to keep it down to a point where most won't notice. The good thing about this is (if you understand the concept) most laws can be ignored with impunity as long as you are discreet (unless you piss off someone powerful). Remember, 1) most people aren't capable of presenting an argument to the town council at any age, let alone 17, and 2) the laws are made for most people.
So, to answer your post, porn is harmful, but only to stupid people.
The thing that always tickles me is that people complain about the 100mW of power at a frequency high enough to NEVER overcome the hysteresis of moving a molecule, and yet they'll stick a speaker in their ear (in fact one of the 'solutions' to the 'problem'). Take a speaker apart and what do you have? Basically, a transformer!! And it operates at a frequency that is MUCH more likely to create actual currents in brain tissue.
Saddam knew our planes were coming in the Gulf War, hell for PR reasons, he was counting on it. He didn't know exactly where or when, but he had his men on alert at all times. But even after we dropped a few bombs, alerting him to exactly what we were hitting, he was still unable to knock a single stealth plane down, because the TARGETTING radars were ineffective.
After saying that, I find it difficult to imagine that this system would be able to provide enough resolution of the exact position of a single plane to provide targetting information. Think about the geographic dispersal of the towers, echo effects of the signals, the speed of the craft, the non-military grade of the equipment (specifically, temperature variation effects), and the accuracy needed for targetting information.
All this system will do is let a leader know that he has been hit.
Like a lot of other things, the biggest problems are technological (that only takes a litle talent and money to solve forever). The big problems are social.
I'll agree with you. You do not have a constitutional right to any of these things. But any company that expected to survive in a competive marketplace would not dare stand in the way of any of it. The question I proferred would point out to the public in general that software vendors have been getting away with something that most other industries only dream of, foisting untested/uninspected product onto the market, and that there is an alternative that is more like the rest of the marketplace. There is no FOIA to guarantee that your contractor does good work, but there is a lot of market power that provides the same effect. I'd like it pointed out that closed software is not covered by laws or market effects, and that PHBs should fear this.
No, Tivo knew or should have known what their software would do to older boxen. PC Software companies can get away with the "We didn't know there were bugs excuse" simply due to consumer ignorance and apathy, and to the extreme complexity of a market with so many OEMs. Tivo is the sole source for Tivo boxes, and so have complete control over what they produce. Such a flagrant bug may not be attributable to malice, but it is definitely attributable to neglect. Hence, they are liable for damages.
Background: Politicians passed the Freedom of Information Act, after a LOT of pressure from news organizations, because people wanted to know what their government, which they are paying for, is up to. The government doesn't know who will request what information, but the general consensus is that if anything bad is happening, someone will request the right information and expose it.
Open Source code provides for the same thing to happen with computer programs. Closed source is like a closed government in that people we don't really know or trust are able to do things that we would rather they not with impunity and on our dime.
Again with open source, not everyone will look at the source code, in fact, very few will, but the code is open to review by whoever would request it. If there is something underhanded going on, someone who has not signed a NDA will discover it and proclaim what is found from the mountain tops.
Mr. Mundie, how can the public be assured that Microsoft is not doing underhanded things if no one is allowed to review the code except for Microsoft employees and those hand picked by Microsoft.
You mean I didn't really run XWindows on that 386 with only 4Megs? Damn-it! Damn-it all! These hallucinations just won't stop! Really, though. You need to take a breather and check a little history. You can have a very nice windowing system with a very small footprint that would do everything that most people will ever need. Just refere back to GEOS, that ran on a 8086 (that was 640KB for you young'uns out there). The X system itself is quite sparse. It's all the extensions and window managers that eat up memory like it's on firesale.
The solution is to change the color of a link in your page to the same color as the text, and then surround all the text with a hyperlink back to your page.
Problem solved.
Now we just have to solve all the problems that this will cause 8*)
He claims that an application would be a data network on an airplane, saving the need to run miles of wire. But what would you do with such a network? Get rid of the intercom? ('Heh, honey! I got mail!' [open laptop] 'The captain says to put our trays in the upright position and that the no smoking light is now on.')
And while I ranting on the comparative uselessness of this otherwise neat hack, why is every semi-useless device targetted at the 'disabled' market. Is it because they expect that the cost of these contraptions will be carried by insurance companies and non-profit organizations and therefore more likely to be accepted? Or would it be that they figure people in desperate situations will pay for anything. Think about it. Here is a device that delivers a low-bandwidth (it uses ELECTRICAL WIRING, FGS), shared-medium network. A standard wireless network would provide for bandwidth overhead, would probably be cheaper (compare the range of a wireless base station to the number of flourescents in your average hospital hallway) and provide TWO-way communications. While it's nice that they have a device that will help Tommy Braindamage find his way to an appointment, shouldn't someone be keeping closer tabs on Tommy if he is this brain damaged? Shouldn't there be a way of finding Tommy in case he exceeded the flourescents range. (Tommy: "Gee, where am I. My PDA doesn't give directions anymore. Look at that pretty big truck coming right at me" [further brain damage insues])
It's nice to see some good hacks, but not every hack can be a commercial success.
Good thought, but ... No. You wouldn't have 25 years. You see, electronics don't like to sit around unused. All sorts of weird things start happening to them. One thing that happens is that electrolytic capacitors dry out. Battery backed clock and memory circuits die. And then there is the truly weird stuff like circuits that maintain a small charge when turned off that acts as a pre-charge on the next startup to reduce startup current. Leave it off for 10yr, start it up, and it fries itself.
Some equipment might survive, but without a true hacker around to babysit it, most will just die. Older systems tend to last longer than what is made today, because they were over/better engineered (depending upon your POV). Just look at the difference between the casing on a 70s era electrolytic and what you might find today. They may be using better materials now, but instead of making the cap better they just use less material.
Wouldn't it be easier to just asign a date a number based upon it's distance from a starting date, say a Sunday sometime early in the century, and then just mod7 that date?
This is a must have application. It features and innovative graphical interface that allows you to balance your checkbook in only minutes.
Only 5.95 per disk, and you still were supposed to pay the shareware author (which very few people actually did). The point is, everything in the catalogue was the greatest thing since sliced bread according to the people who are trying to get money for it.
If you complete the project, submit a /. story. I'd like to know your results before rob all the inline fuse holders from my friends car radios 8*).
I actually had an email conversation with one of the guys running ./ (sorry, can't remember which one), about 2 years ago. My suggestion was that moderators be given the choice to moderate a set of randomly picked comments, rather than having to read an entire response to an article. My theory was that no one with a life has time to read an entire 200 comments. His reply was that it would take away from the flow of the conversation. My response now is , "See?" Probably the most informative post of the whole article is lost in the flotsom. What a waste.
He's lying to the PHBs and the rest of the business community, and we'll be the ones to suffer for it if we don't tell them the lie in Ballmer's story (which, as technologist, is also part of our jobs).
MS was able to dis OS/2 with a smear campaign which IBM chose to ignore. MS is trying to do the same to Linux. We will not ignore them. Every time they lie or mislead, we will cry to truth loudly from every roof top.
MS: The GPL is bad for business.
Linux: Tell them who's business it is bad for!!
MS: The GPL is a cancer that will eat up your IP.
Linux: Only if you distribute a derivative. You are free to take and use a GPL program for your own purposes!!
MS: Linux is not a stable, supported solution for corporate infrastructure.
Linux: Tell that to IBM, Burlington Mills, The Home Depot and others who are using it as a stable, supported solution for corporate infrastructure!!
MS: Linux will fork.
Linux: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP...
MS: Linux will require retraining staff.
Linux: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP...
Anytime we let them get away with a misleading statement or outright lie, we suffer and our society suffers. If they tell the truth, so be it. But do not let lies stand unchallenged.
That said, our best response is to point out the hypocrisy of thier statements. That is something that resonates. Linux