Hooray! I learned cursive by staring at the cursive alphabet above the blackboard while being bored to death in 2nd grade. I recall that I got in trouble for using it on a spelling test too, since we weren't supposed to know cursive until 3rd grade... what a wonderful school system we have (I live in the US, can you tell?).
Probably because of this, my handwriting is pretty bad... so if laptops help kill off cursive, I'm all for them! It will help save the eyesight of millions of postal workers and beaurocrats all around the world who no longer have to try to read that stuff.
Besides, there are plenty of cursive fonts if you're feeling nostalgic, and they have much better handwriting than I ever did.
Hmmmm... does that mean that cursive will eventually become an encryption? If so, you reading it might be a violation of the DMCA... and faxing it would be illegal here in Michigan.
Hmmm, actually chek refers more to the word's use as a verb, as in chess, or hockey.
My guess is that cheque may have been che-queue, which is writ-in-line. Hence, you'd place a writ in the queue at the bank, and they'd hand you currancy after it had been processed.
Of course, since this is slashdot, it's appropriate for me not the post any valid reosources for this wild theory (which means, I'm too lazy to go look it up).
Absolutely right. If you can't find ways to profit within the framework of a limited copyright, then either your work isn't that valuable to the rest of society (sorry! tough rocks!), or you aren't clever enough to do so.
My question to you is... did you spend thousands of hours toiling over a book to get rich? Or did you invest that time because you wanted to tell a story, and it took that much effort to get it out? If the latter, than you obviously love writing and hopefully will write other works as well, problem solved. If the former, then you really shouldn't count on luck as your source of income.
The idea of a limited copyright is not just to protect the author and give them a chance to profit from their work (the copyright part), but to protect society from having traditional and cherished icons become tools of corporate monopolies (the limited part). How would you feel if you had to pay --insert megacorp here-- every time the national anthem was performed? In theory, you should be paying someone (I forget whom) every time you sing happy birthday as well.
Once a limited timeframe elapses, a work should become public domain so that, IF it's still popular, it can be used as the basis of other works. If it's not popular, it will probably be forgotten, copyright or no.
Once your main download is going, it keeps track of bytes uploaded and downloaded, and if you're leeching or seeding. You gain points for uploading, and 1.5 times as many for seeding. You lose points for downloading. I don't know if it's enabled yet, but the plan is to not let you download if your point total drops below 0.
Good way to circumvent the anti-leech algorithms that are already in place in the protocol. It's also a great way to punish people who are on an asymmetrical connection (IE: cable modems, ADSL, 90% of the people using it), or who share the line with other people in the house and don't want to hear them bitch about lag in their subscription online games.
Typically, my household has a cable modem with a 1.5Mbps download rate and a measly 256Kbps upload rate. I find I can download from several fast sites at a time with little or no impact on interactive gaming, but one instance of bit-torrent or Kazaa that isn't capped down around 8k/sec upload speed and ping times rise into the hundreds of milliseconds.
I love BT, it's a fantastic protocol, and the unofficial client with the bandwidth caps makes it friendly to my network. If everyone is going to be offline, we can let people leech and get amazing download speeds ourselves... if someone wants to game or ssh somewhere, we can cap it brutally and still have mostly-acceptable performance on both sides. Quota systems like this belong back in the dark ages of 1200 baud dialup BBS's when you only had 4 phone lines to use at a time.
It [science] will be gone (from your perspective) when you die. God and the essence of you, on the other hand, are presumed by religion to last forever. So, what is the point in studying a system that will be obsolete in 100 years when you could be studying one that will be useful for eons?
Well, for one thing... if science will be gone in 100 years, then now is the only real chance you'll have to study it.. and you'll have eons to study religion. OTOH, if you can't study religion in the eons that follow, then what's the point?
A few decades of asking the wrong questions and then poof, or a few decades of asking the right questions but an eternity of never getting the answers? I'll take door number 3, thanks. I don't want an afterlife career chip.
Expanding on one point, I would like to see control on the client side for bandwidth Quality-of-Service. Most file-transfer applications either lack any way to control bandwidth use, or simply provide caps for upload/download rates. Caps are better than nothing, but what I'd really like is a maximum latency threshold.
Ideally, this is a setting where you provide a maximum acceptable ping time, and an IP address to use for that test. If the ping time rises above that threshold, data transfers are slowed until it drops low enough again.
Obviously, you need to choose a site with a well-known ping response time, and it would be nice to use one that won't object (perhaps your ISP's gateway?). This would allow your bandwidth to dynamically adjust itself as other things (perhaps not under your control) use the same wires.
As you might have guessed, this will be most popular with those of us who play online games at home, but I think it's also eaiser to shape traffic than trying to guess how much of an asynchronus 768K/256K stream will result in slower web browsing.
However, directly from their quarterly earnings page...
"
About The SCO Group
The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the UNIX operating system, helps millions of customers in more than 82 countries to grow their businesses. Headquartered in Lindon, Utah, SCO has a worldwide network of more than 11,000 resellers and 8,000 developers. SCO Global Services provides reliable, localized support and services to all partners and customers. For more information on SCO products and services, visit http://www.sco.com .
SCO and the associated SCO logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The SCO Group, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. All other brand or product names are or may be trademarks of, and are used to identify products or services of, their respective owners."
I'll assume that "The Open Group" is something which Novell belongs to, so the trademark claim is probably OK. But they clearly claim ownership of UNIX in that opening paragraph.
For years now, I've wondered just why anyone would choose to stick with SCO Unix when so many other versions existed, most of which are cheaper and/or more stable. When I heard that they were releasing their own Linux distro, I figured they had finally seen the end of the tunnel, and were migrating their apps to move into the application market... Of course, I didn't realize they were so bad off that trying to sue the next quarter's revenue was all they had left!
SCO should be given the same respect that they so clearly show the rest of the community. I hope IBM's 400-pound gorilla legal-team squashes them into jelly.
If the movie was leaked from a film or digital source, then it seems to me that the MPAA needs to settle down and take care of itself before they start wagging fingers at everyone else.
How do movies get leaked? Who has access to them? What potential fines/penalties/criminal charges can and should be levied aginast people who actually have physical access to prints or digital copies?
If it was a digital copy leak... how was it done? If it was copied over a network, why wasn't it secured? Why wasn't in ecncrypted to prevent this in the first place?
Seems to me that the MPAA has much bigger problems than a few people who want to copy semi-decent quality rips of their products to watch on little tiny desktop monitors after they've already gone to see it in the theatres and helped make the movie a huge sucess.
If an ISP wants to have a tiered rate system, that's fine... but don't try to fool the customers by calling it a flat rate when it isn't. That's like saying the US income tax system is a flat tax, because people making $X pay a flat Y%.
Wow, so now I can put a pr0n magazine behind my monitor while I surf pr0n? Cool, my desktop wallpaper now takes 0% CPU, but it does occasionally move if the fan gets pointed the right way.
I graciously acknowledge your patent by reminding all humans of my own patent on the use of hemoglobin as an oxygen transfer mechanism between your own device and other organic tissues within the human body.
I feel the rate of $0.005USD/payload to be both sufficient and fair compensation. Those who cannot afford to pay this amount have the option of removing body parts until their consumption is below their budget.
Too late, they've been irrelevant for years. The ONLY reason anyone buys SCO these days, instead of using one of the many free unix-clones, is because they have legacy apps that won't run elsewhere.
Ok, so maybe that's a bit over generalizing, but give me some reasons why SCO is better than, say, FreeBSD? Linux? even Solaris?
Randomly throwing law suits around, which can only hurt an already troubled industry, is the last effort of a dying company to squeeze that last nickel out of its customers before the creditors come for them.
Buh-bye Caldera... it was fun while it lasted, eh?
for overseas companies! I know lots of people who will now be happy to order new computer components directly from the overseas manufacturers, rather than having to pay California's (what is it, 8%?) sales tax. When buying large quantities, the shipping costs are negligable compared to that.
Sales tax violates the founding principles of the United States anyways. It's a double-taxation for anyone who also pays income tax. We should have one XOR the other, not both.
"Then along came the NES, which truly revolutionized the home gaming phenomenon..."
You must mean the Atari 2600 (1977), which predated the NES (1995) by a good 18 years. There were home game system before this (the Magnevox Odyssey, 1972), but it was the 2600 that captured most of my generation. I remember dragging my parents the 45-minute trip from my small town to the mall in the city so that I could stand in line and get the 2600 version of pac-man the day it came out (and boy, did that one suck! The Sword-Quest series, OTOH, was facinating).
I must say that, as addictive as the Atari might have been, it did nothing to prevent me from watching the classic hours of Saturday morning cartoons each week. Yes, I did also watch Thundercats, G.I. Joe, and the others of that period, but of the after-school cartoons I throw my hat to Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato in Japan) as the best. It would be considered Anime today, but we knew nothing about that back then.
Wandering back to the topic again, I think home computers have helped pull viewers away from cartoons, but if you want to point the finger, point it at the network execs who decided to (a) "dumb down" the cartoons so parents wouldn't have to explain anything to their children (mistake! valuable opportunity for interaction lost!), (b) save money be replacing quality animators with computers (hey... I'm all for CGI, but you still have to have artists with talent, or you end up with abominations like "Transformers: Beast Wars"), and (c) appease the activists who whine about comic violence in cartoons, but then go flip on the pay-channels and watch totally realistic violence, or the news for the daily homicide roster.
To repeat what others have said, kids are not stupid. Kids lack knowledge and experience, not intelligence. Don't insult them by assuming they can't get it. Think about this, if the newscasters all started talking r-e-a-l s-l-o-w at you and had to explain things like gravity without using big-words when reporting about someone falling off a bridge, would YOU keep watching?
Microsoft doesn't do innovation... they copy what they see other people doing, but they do it with the backing of $40 billion dollars, and the R&D staff that can support. If they can't write it themselves after seeing it, they buy whomever made it in the first place.
IF Microsoft were making an integrated hardware/software package for the end-user's benefit, they would do it in such a way that it becomes easy to override. Why lock down a machine so you can't replace parts unless you want to lock the users into your way of doing things -- like sheep in a corral.
It is to Microsoft's advantage to keep the sheep eating their grass. As they do so, they can gradually move away from a one-time purchase model to a per-use license model. You already "lease" the use of their software, and it already has to "phone home" every so often to validate your license. How long before it asks you to enter your username and credit-card number?
They also have a powerful advantage, economics of scale. For every geek user who wants to put one of those terrorist un*x-type OS's onto their hardware, there are 100 folks buying lawn ornaments at Wal-Mart who'll chuck a WinPC in their carts if it'll just "work". They don't care about expandability, or freedom, or standards... they want to plug it in, flip it on, and download pr0n and play Squirrel Hunter 3 when it comes out. Guess what? 100 x $599 > 1 x $2499. That's the bottom line, 100 copies of WinXP sold with a PC is worth waaaay more than 1 unused copy sold with a geek PC.
Bill is smart. Never forget that. He knows that if he can lock consumers into a subscription model, his company will live on forever, and will have the freedom to adjust and splinter their product lines into as many independant revenue streams as they want.
So, it's not that I object to a WinPC which is designed to work more smoothly with Windows... THAT is a good idea. I object to a black-box WinPC which works ONLY with Windows, and which is designed to prevent any other use. It's the same kind of evil as making a television that only tunes into NBC stations, or a microwave oven which will only cook General Mills food products.
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I pity the fool who doesn't watch the A+ Team!
Hooray! I learned cursive by staring at the cursive alphabet above the blackboard while being bored to death in 2nd grade. I recall that I got in trouble for using it on a spelling test too, since we weren't supposed to know cursive until 3rd grade... what a wonderful school system we have (I live in the US, can you tell?).
Probably because of this, my handwriting is pretty bad... so if laptops help kill off cursive, I'm all for them! It will help save the eyesight of millions of postal workers and beaurocrats all around the world who no longer have to try to read that stuff.
Besides, there are plenty of cursive fonts if you're feeling nostalgic, and they have much better handwriting than I ever did.
Hmmmm... does that mean that cursive will eventually become an encryption? If so, you reading it might be a violation of the DMCA... and faxing it would be illegal here in Michigan.
It might be, but I'm not sure we can talk about it under the DMCA, since knowing it's encrypted is the first step towards circumvention... :)
Hmmm, actually chek refers more to the word's use as a verb, as in chess, or hockey.
My guess is that cheque may have been che-queue, which is writ-in-line. Hence, you'd place a writ in the queue at the bank, and they'd hand you currancy after it had been processed.
Of course, since this is slashdot, it's appropriate for me not the post any valid reosources for this wild theory (which means, I'm too lazy to go look it up).
Old fashion courtesy masseuse?
I think I'll take the cute hotel-staff masseuse, you can keep the chair of the future.
So, what's the going jail term for pirating sharks with friggin lasers on their heads?
My question to you is... did you spend thousands of hours toiling over a book to get rich? Or did you invest that time because you wanted to tell a story, and it took that much effort to get it out? If the latter, than you obviously love writing and hopefully will write other works as well, problem solved. If the former, then you really shouldn't count on luck as your source of income.
The idea of a limited copyright is not just to protect the author and give them a chance to profit from their work (the copyright part), but to protect society from having traditional and cherished icons become tools of corporate monopolies (the limited part). How would you feel if you had to pay --insert megacorp here-- every time the national anthem was performed? In theory, you should be paying someone (I forget whom) every time you sing happy birthday as well.
Once a limited timeframe elapses, a work should become public domain so that, IF it's still popular, it can be used as the basis of other works. If it's not popular, it will probably be forgotten, copyright or no.
Microsoft Products are optimized for 100% stability in idle time operation.
Good way to circumvent the anti-leech algorithms that are already in place in the protocol. It's also a great way to punish people who are on an asymmetrical connection (IE: cable modems, ADSL, 90% of the people using it), or who share the line with other people in the house and don't want to hear them bitch about lag in their subscription online games.
Typically, my household has a cable modem with a 1.5Mbps download rate and a measly 256Kbps upload rate. I find I can download from several fast sites at a time with little or no impact on interactive gaming, but one instance of bit-torrent or Kazaa that isn't capped down around 8k/sec upload speed and ping times rise into the hundreds of milliseconds.
I love BT, it's a fantastic protocol, and the unofficial client with the bandwidth caps makes it friendly to my network. If everyone is going to be offline, we can let people leech and get amazing download speeds ourselves... if someone wants to game or ssh somewhere, we can cap it brutally and still have mostly-acceptable performance on both sides. Quota systems like this belong back in the dark ages of 1200 baud dialup BBS's when you only had 4 phone lines to use at a time.
Well, for one thing... if science will be gone in 100 years, then now is the only real chance you'll have to study it.. and you'll have eons to study religion. OTOH, if you can't study religion in the eons that follow, then what's the point?
A few decades of asking the wrong questions and then poof, or a few decades of asking the right questions but an eternity of never getting the answers? I'll take door number 3, thanks. I don't want an afterlife career chip.
So would the deluxe model have two "joysticks" in the center, and would they be efficient enough to only protrude once you started to use them?
:)
As with all technology, if they can be used by the pr0n industry, the market will bear them.
Ideally, this is a setting where you provide a maximum acceptable ping time, and an IP address to use for that test. If the ping time rises above that threshold, data transfers are slowed until it drops low enough again.
Obviously, you need to choose a site with a well-known ping response time, and it would be nice to use one that won't object (perhaps your ISP's gateway?). This would allow your bandwidth to dynamically adjust itself as other things (perhaps not under your control) use the same wires.
As you might have guessed, this will be most popular with those of us who play online games at home, but I think it's also eaiser to shape traffic than trying to guess how much of an asynchronus 768K/256K stream will result in slower web browsing.
For years now, I've wondered just why anyone would choose to stick with SCO Unix when so many other versions existed, most of which are cheaper and/or more stable. When I heard that they were releasing their own Linux distro, I figured they had finally seen the end of the tunnel, and were migrating their apps to move into the application market... Of course, I didn't realize they were so bad off that trying to sue the next quarter's revenue was all they had left!
SCO should be given the same respect that they so clearly show the rest of the community. I hope IBM's 400-pound gorilla legal-team squashes them into jelly.
If the movie was leaked from a film or digital source, then it seems to me that the MPAA needs to settle down and take care of itself before they start wagging fingers at everyone else.
How do movies get leaked? Who has access to them? What potential fines/penalties/criminal charges can and should be levied aginast people who actually have physical access to prints or digital copies?
If it was a digital copy leak... how was it done? If it was copied over a network, why wasn't it secured? Why wasn't in ecncrypted to prevent this in the first place?
Seems to me that the MPAA has much bigger problems than a few people who want to copy semi-decent quality rips of their products to watch on little tiny desktop monitors after they've already gone to see it in the theatres and helped make the movie a huge sucess.
It doesn't matter if there's a spoon or not.
flat Fixed; unvarying: a flat rate.
If an ISP wants to have a tiered rate system, that's fine... but don't try to fool the customers by calling it a flat rate when it isn't. That's like saying the US income tax system is a flat tax, because people making $X pay a flat Y%.
60% of the remaining bandwidth, after all the SPAM email traffic, right?
Microsoft should release their new High Security Language, B#, any day now. It's secure, because there are very few keys that can make it work.
Wow, so now I can put a pr0n magazine behind my monitor while I surf pr0n? Cool, my desktop wallpaper now takes 0% CPU, but it does occasionally move if the fan gets pointed the right way.
The internet must die, now that BSD is dead.
:)
Yeah, if I'd seen this one live, someone would have found it amusing.
I graciously acknowledge your patent by reminding all humans of my own patent on the use of hemoglobin as an oxygen transfer mechanism between your own device and other organic tissues within the human body.
I feel the rate of $0.005USD/payload to be both sufficient and fair compensation. Those who cannot afford to pay this amount have the option of removing body parts until their consumption is below their budget.
So, which came first, the patent, or the whois utility?
Too late, they've been irrelevant for years. The ONLY reason anyone buys SCO these days, instead of using one of the many free unix-clones, is because they have legacy apps that won't run elsewhere.
Ok, so maybe that's a bit over generalizing, but give me some reasons why SCO is better than, say, FreeBSD? Linux? even Solaris?
Randomly throwing law suits around, which can only hurt an already troubled industry, is the last effort of a dying company to squeeze that last nickel out of its customers before the creditors come for them.
Buh-bye Caldera... it was fun while it lasted, eh?
for overseas companies! I know lots of people who will now be happy to order new computer components directly from the overseas manufacturers, rather than having to pay California's (what is it, 8%?) sales tax. When buying large quantities, the shipping costs are negligable compared to that.
Sales tax violates the founding principles of the United States anyways. It's a double-taxation for anyone who also pays income tax. We should have one XOR the other, not both.
"Then along came the NES, which truly revolutionized the home gaming phenomenon..."
You must mean the Atari 2600 (1977), which predated the NES (1995) by a good 18 years. There were home game system before this (the Magnevox Odyssey, 1972), but it was the 2600 that captured most of my generation. I remember dragging my parents the 45-minute trip from my small town to the mall in the city so that I could stand in line and get the 2600 version of pac-man the day it came out (and boy, did that one suck! The Sword-Quest series, OTOH, was facinating).
I must say that, as addictive as the Atari might have been, it did nothing to prevent me from watching the classic hours of Saturday morning cartoons each week. Yes, I did also watch Thundercats, G.I. Joe, and the others of that period, but of the after-school cartoons I throw my hat to Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato in Japan) as the best. It would be considered Anime today, but we knew nothing about that back then.
Wandering back to the topic again, I think home computers have helped pull viewers away from cartoons, but if you want to point the finger, point it at the network execs who decided to (a) "dumb down" the cartoons so parents wouldn't have to explain anything to their children (mistake! valuable opportunity for interaction lost!), (b) save money be replacing quality animators with computers (hey... I'm all for CGI, but you still have to have artists with talent, or you end up with abominations like "Transformers: Beast Wars"), and (c) appease the activists who whine about comic violence in cartoons, but then go flip on the pay-channels and watch totally realistic violence, or the news for the daily homicide roster.
To repeat what others have said, kids are not stupid. Kids lack knowledge and experience, not intelligence. Don't insult them by assuming they can't get it. Think about this, if the newscasters all started talking r-e-a-l s-l-o-w at you and had to explain things like gravity without using big-words when reporting about someone falling off a bridge, would YOU keep watching?
Microsoft doesn't do innovation... they copy what they see other people doing, but they do it with the backing of $40 billion dollars, and the R&D staff that can support. If they can't write it themselves after seeing it, they buy whomever made it in the first place.
IF Microsoft were making an integrated hardware/software package for the end-user's benefit, they would do it in such a way that it becomes easy to override. Why lock down a machine so you can't replace parts unless you want to lock the users into your way of doing things -- like sheep in a corral.
It is to Microsoft's advantage to keep the sheep eating their grass. As they do so, they can gradually move away from a one-time purchase model to a per-use license model. You already "lease" the use of their software, and it already has to "phone home" every so often to validate your license. How long before it asks you to enter your username and credit-card number?
They also have a powerful advantage, economics of scale. For every geek user who wants to put one of those terrorist un*x-type OS's onto their hardware, there are 100 folks buying lawn ornaments at Wal-Mart who'll chuck a WinPC in their carts if it'll just "work". They don't care about expandability, or freedom, or standards... they want to plug it in, flip it on, and download pr0n and play Squirrel Hunter 3 when it comes out. Guess what? 100 x $599 > 1 x $2499. That's the bottom line, 100 copies of WinXP sold with a PC is worth waaaay more than 1 unused copy sold with a geek PC.
Bill is smart. Never forget that. He knows that if he can lock consumers into a subscription model, his company will live on forever, and will have the freedom to adjust and splinter their product lines into as many independant revenue streams as they want.
So, it's not that I object to a WinPC which is designed to work more smoothly with Windows... THAT is a good idea. I object to a black-box WinPC which works ONLY with Windows, and which is designed to prevent any other use. It's the same kind of evil as making a television that only tunes into NBC stations, or a microwave oven which will only cook General Mills food products.