You mean a buggy, still-beta, feature-deficient webmail service that's distinguished only by the fact that it offers 1 GB of space? Space that 99% of it's userbase will never come close to using more than a fraction of?
Seems to me that gmail primarily appeals to a) zealot geeks who enshrine Google as something holy, and b) geeks who define the size of their own manhood by the diskspace available in their gmail account.
Everyone's an idiot in a field they know little or nothing about. Computer users want their machines to work; they don't want to know how they work, and why should they? You regularly use devices, or the products of devices, that you can't even begin to describe the manner in which they function, yet I don't see engineers or factory workers or mechanics standing up and calling you an idiot for not knowing how these things work, or for not wanting to learn how these things work.
Computers don't get a special exemption to this rule. They're just tools like any other tool, nothing more.
My, you are a dick-measuring little git, aren't you? And most certainly an expert! Too bad that convenient NDA prevents you from whipping out your willy and showing the rest of us just how big it really is!
So you made you sign the NDA? Your mom, so her friends wouldn't know you're still living in her basement?
The fact that Mrs. Rand was a total lunatic without a shred of empathy or social understanding
Read: "I'm a pseudo-socialist moron who wakes up every morning bitter with jealousy that I'm not rich, and desperately wish to punish everyone who is - in the name of the 'greater good', of course."
her horribly written books that I regret having wasted days of my life actually struggling through.
Read: "This bitch can write well enough to make a living off of her work, while my 1800 page fantasy novel has been summarily rejected by 28 different publishing houses. No doubt because the bastards can't recognize true talent when they see it. Besides, I didn't understand a word Rand said."
Pity that people still go on about her invalid mishmash of misunderstood corporate fascism, social darwinism and her fatally flawed understanding of economic theory
Read: "All corporations are fascist because I'm a morally superior liberal. I like bandying about terms like 'social darwinism' even though I don't have the first clue what they mean; it's a great way to subtlely identify my opponents as Nazis. And as far as economic theory goes, well I flunked Econ 101, and besides Adam Smith was a corporate whore."
before John Nash' then-radical insight into game theory as applied to economics and the advantages of cooperation strategies were validated by advances in molecular biology and evolutionary psychology.
Read: "You have no idea how long I've been waiting to reference game theory and use it in conjunction with big words like 'molecular biology' and 'evolutionary psychology'. I've had that bit saved out as a text file to my hard drive for *years*! Now everyone will see just how smart I am!"
The gp is somewhat correct - a dedicated, patient group of individuals can take out a sitting US president.
This has always been true. A smart, dedicated, knowledgeable individual who's willing to sacrifice his own life in order to take out the target is virtually impossible to stop. Hell, a single madman with no plan whatsoever (John Hinckley Jr.) nearly managed to assassinate a well-protected president.
Flash mobs are irrelevent to security. And in the United States the right to peaceably assemble is already being compromised beyond any rational interpretation of the Constitution (e.g., free speech zones, permits required to gather in groups greater than four in most cities, etc.). We need to roll back these violations of the Constitution, not look for further excuses to piss all over the very document our entire nation is based upon.
You'll never be able to prevent crime without an absolute loss of freedom. You might be able to reduce it but you'll never be able to eliminate it and trying to do so is nonsensical.
Criminals don't need to be treated as patients. The rehabilitation model has failed miserably. Since rehabilitation doesn't work, punishment is a decent alternative. The stricter the punishment the better; even if the punishment doesn't deter the activity, it'll keep the criminal in jail and unable to commit more crimes for a longer period of time.
Ms. Rand's command of the English language was excellent. You missed the fact that the speech in question was given by *the bad guy* in the Fountainhead. He was essentially trying to justify slavery as freedom - a very Orwellian argument.
Thats going to get the opensource community nowhere, because very few people working in it have visibility into what these enterprises are actually doing across the board, and have very little visibility into the kind of big guns MS is readying to be able to meet those needs.
Really? Exactly what do you base this assumption on? Are you personally acquainted with the people working on OpenOffice? Or did you just pull this out of your ass?
OO is, conservatively, five years behind the ball.
Ah, definitely pulling this out of your ass. I just love it when someone fronts a baseless personal opinion as fact; it immediately identifies the egomaniacs amongst us.
But not until, as I said, the people pushing the development of these applications understand where they need to go to really compete.
I'm pretty sure they have a much better idea of what needs to be done than you do.
The future isn't about office suites and file formats, its about having all the business applications working together, so the processes a business has to follow day by day can be automated.
Ah, you're in marketing! No wonder you think your own spew is canon!
OpenOffice has a long ways to go before it offers the sort of functionality that real businesses need
Yet I see you didn't bother to make a list of all of this crucial functionality that seems to be missing.
I'm willing to bet that for 95% of the folks out there OpenOffice will do exactly what they want it to do: create a professional-looking document using the standards set by their place of business. We are talking about a world processor, not a piece of desktop publishing software (which MS Word isn't either, despite what some people try to do with it).
You have to remember that the more radioactive the substance is, the shorter its half-life will be - by definition. There's only so much energy contained in any one unstable atom; the faster you dump that energy, the faster you run out of that energy. The higher the radioactivity the more dangerous the substance - and the shorter it's half-life.
The radioactivity you're talking about is extremely low-level output radiation and not at all dangerous to be around. You're more likely to get sick from the radon in a brick-construction house or a poorly-developed basement in certain areas of the country. Hell, you're more likely to get sick from the radioactive output of *the sun* than you are from the sources you seem to be so concerned about.
The half-life of the waste from a nuclear power plant isn't deadly for very long at all, except when comparing the measure to a human life-span. Most of the energy is dumped fairly quickly. A containment vessel able to trap the waste for 200,000 years is more than sufficient to let the waste run down to safe levels.
But with the Great Satan of nuclear power you're bound to get the environmentalists in an uproar. From the way they react to both current technology and just about every planned development, I've concluded they'll only be happy when humans give up technology altogether and return to a hunter-gatherer tribal structure. Oh, and after slightly less than six billion of us die off in the process of 'returning to our roots' - minus the environmentalists and their friends, of course.
If you want to get a clear idea of how an environmental fanatic thinks, try reading David Brin's "Earth". It's science fantasy, not science fiction, but the whacko environmentalist looney who wipes out the entire population of southeast Asia 'for the good of the ecosphere' captures today's greenie extremist to a 'T'.
Yeah, right. Like the UN is going to be able to enforce that treaty, especially if the country that corporation belongs to tells them to take a flying leap.
As for Mars, of course we want to take life there! The damned ball of rock is utterly lifeless, barring the slimmest possibility of some microbe still eking out a miserable existence underneath the surface. What good is Mars if we don't terraform the place? Only a whack-job would argue *against* terraforming the only viable world in the entire solar system to preserve a fucking microbe!
And *you're* forgetting that there is no one-world government, and that any country with a corporation capable of make a profit off of space will whip out their willy and piss in the U.N.'s general direction.
Do you honestly think the U.S. would bow to any U.N. treaty over something like this? Pause a moment while I laugh my ass off.
With whom? And why should we give a damn what any other country thinks about our elections? What are they going to do about it if they don't like the results? Invade?
now, you might not care, but the rest of the world cares.
Well, I seriously doubt the rest of the world gives much of a damn, but even if they did you haven't explained why this would affect us in any way, shape or form. No country on Earth is capable of doing anything about it, or 'punishing' us for not conducting elections in a manner they see fit, so ultimately it doesn't mean jack.
Having a federal voting system vary from one state to another is lunacy, plain and simple.
No, it isn't. The original idea was to leave the vast majority of the power in the hands of the states, no matter how much that's been corrupted since 1783.
How is the average voter supposed to know how their vote is counted?
Perhaps by learning the fucking law? People are supposedly smart enough to memorize a thick book of traffic laws by the age of 16; I sincerely doubt they'll have trouble learning how their voting system works in their state.
Whatever counting mechanism that is used (winner takes all, instant run-off, approval, etc), the system should be the same everywhere.
Oh, real bright. Make the federal government even more powerful. Nice plan, that.
who don't mind being villainized for the rest of human history.
My guess is that 99% of the people out there could give a shit one way or another if some nameless Mars microbe is wiped out.
And in any event Mars is pretty worthless unless it's eventually terraformed. I'm willing to bet you'd find that the number of people interested in terraforming Mars into brand new real estate (if it becomes possible) is many times greater than the whining losers who'd scream about 'despoiliing the Martian environment'.
I guess you failed to notice that it's PRIVATELY funded. People can do whatever the hell they want with their own money, and it isn't your business to tell them otherwise. Your input only matters when it concerns PUBLIC money, none of which is being spent on this mission.
The first company capable of building ships able to go to the asteroid belt and conduct mining operations, then return to Earth with the bounty will make itself unbelievably rich. There's unimaginable wealth scattered throughout the solar system; the biggest obstacle right now is that it costs more to extract that wealth than you could expect to gain.
To think that this situation will remain forever unchanged is just plain foolish. Affordable space travel will be developed no matter the whining of the naysayers. Each advance puts *someone* that much closer to cashing in on a frontier that'll make the current crop of billionaires look like amateurs in comparison.
It won't be a race between corporations who can't look beyond the quarter, much less strain themselves over a five-year plan. It'll be a race between people with vision and the ability to plan 20, 30 or even 50 years in advance. *They* will be the ones to win, and have the last laugh over everyone who said that it couldn't be done.
Let the MPAA and their buddies in TV-land foist this crap onto the public; it's the sort of thing that'll piss off even Joe Consumer. And seriously, what will happen when Joe Consumer begins to get annoyed? I'd imagine that 'Internet TV shows' will start popping up as an alternative to the headaches and hassles of what modern, regular TV viewing is becoming. And 'ITV' isn't regulated in any sense of the word; ITV is just a streaming or downloadable movie or series installment, no different than any other streaming or downloadable content.
Imagine what will happen if Joe Consumer finds he can watch whatever shows he wants, whenever the hell he wants, never missing any of them, and never having to sit through a single ad. If you're thinking "it'll never happen" because it's on a computer and not on those nifty big-screen TVs, do try to remember that starting with the year 2000 TV viewership fell by nearly 3% in the United States, the first decline in the history of TV. Not only that but viewership has continued to decline with each successive year, much to the consternation of the conglomerates. What are those people doing instead of watching TV? *They're on the internet*. Add what makes TV attractive to the other forms of amusement the internet provides and watch the conglomerates really start to shit a brick....
Max
Re:Flying car will always be available, tomorrow
on
NYT On Flying Cars
·
· Score: 1
Also, what about terrorism?
What about it? With a few hundred pounds of fertilizer and some common cleaning ingredients I can create a bomb capable of leveling a city block, then put it into the back of my pickup under a tarp and drive the whole thing down to city hall without anyone the wiser. A simple cellphone style trigger and I don't even have to go up with the bomb myself - as a driver in an aircar almost certainly would.
The aircar isn't any more viable as a terrorist weapon than what I just described above. And an aircar would be easy to spot with radar, whereas no common radar system on Earth will be able to spot the potential danger of my pickup.
That's why they want to have the cars be largely computer controlled, so that it is difficult or impossible for an inexperienced driver/pilot to make fatal mistakes.
No, that's why you certify the operators. What, were you suffering from the delusion that you'd just be able to walk into DMV, take a ten minute test, and then run off to the store in your flying car? Don't you think certification would be at least as rigorous for air cars as it is for ground cars?
Slashdot Mirror
they seem to have hit a chord with gmail.
You mean a buggy, still-beta, feature-deficient webmail service that's distinguished only by the fact that it offers 1 GB of space? Space that 99% of it's userbase will never come close to using more than a fraction of?
Seems to me that gmail primarily appeals to a) zealot geeks who enshrine Google as something holy, and b) geeks who define the size of their own manhood by the diskspace available in their gmail account.
So far I have *not* been impressed with gmail.
Max
Most users ARE idiots.
Everyone's an idiot in a field they know little or nothing about. Computer users want their machines to work; they don't want to know how they work, and why should they? You regularly use devices, or the products of devices, that you can't even begin to describe the manner in which they function, yet I don't see engineers or factory workers or mechanics standing up and calling you an idiot for not knowing how these things work, or for not wanting to learn how these things work.
Computers don't get a special exemption to this rule. They're just tools like any other tool, nothing more.
Max
My, you are a dick-measuring little git, aren't you? And most certainly an expert! Too bad that convenient NDA prevents you from whipping out your willy and showing the rest of us just how big it really is!
So you made you sign the NDA? Your mom, so her friends wouldn't know you're still living in her basement?
Go back to downloading porn, kid.
Max
The fact that Mrs. Rand was a total lunatic without a shred of empathy or social understanding
Read: "I'm a pseudo-socialist moron who wakes up every morning bitter with jealousy that I'm not rich, and desperately wish to punish everyone who is - in the name of the 'greater good', of course."
her horribly written books that I regret having wasted days of my life actually struggling through.
Read: "This bitch can write well enough to make a living off of her work, while my 1800 page fantasy novel has been summarily rejected by 28 different publishing houses. No doubt because the bastards can't recognize true talent when they see it. Besides, I didn't understand a word Rand said."
Pity that people still go on about her invalid mishmash of misunderstood corporate fascism, social darwinism and her fatally flawed understanding of economic theory
Read: "All corporations are fascist because I'm a morally superior liberal. I like bandying about terms like 'social darwinism' even though I don't have the first clue what they mean; it's a great way to subtlely identify my opponents as Nazis. And as far as economic theory goes, well I flunked Econ 101, and besides Adam Smith was a corporate whore."
before John Nash' then-radical insight into game theory as applied to economics and the advantages of cooperation strategies were validated by advances in molecular biology and evolutionary psychology.
Read: "You have no idea how long I've been waiting to reference game theory and use it in conjunction with big words like 'molecular biology' and 'evolutionary psychology'. I've had that bit saved out as a text file to my hard drive for *years*! Now everyone will see just how smart I am!"
Max
The gp is somewhat correct - a dedicated, patient group of individuals can take out a sitting US president.
This has always been true. A smart, dedicated, knowledgeable individual who's willing to sacrifice his own life in order to take out the target is virtually impossible to stop. Hell, a single madman with no plan whatsoever (John Hinckley Jr.) nearly managed to assassinate a well-protected president.
Flash mobs are irrelevent to security. And in the United States the right to peaceably assemble is already being compromised beyond any rational interpretation of the Constitution (e.g., free speech zones, permits required to gather in groups greater than four in most cities, etc.). We need to roll back these violations of the Constitution, not look for further excuses to piss all over the very document our entire nation is based upon.
Max
I'll take the risk to high-profile targets over millions being stripped of their freedom any day of the week.
Max
You'll never be able to prevent crime without an absolute loss of freedom. You might be able to reduce it but you'll never be able to eliminate it and trying to do so is nonsensical.
Criminals don't need to be treated as patients. The rehabilitation model has failed miserably. Since rehabilitation doesn't work, punishment is a decent alternative. The stricter the punishment the better; even if the punishment doesn't deter the activity, it'll keep the criminal in jail and unable to commit more crimes for a longer period of time.
Max
Ms. Rand's command of the English language was excellent. You missed the fact that the speech in question was given by *the bad guy* in the Fountainhead. He was essentially trying to justify slavery as freedom - a very Orwellian argument.
Max
Thats going to get the opensource community nowhere, because very few people working in it have visibility into what these enterprises are actually doing across the board, and have very little visibility into the kind of big guns MS is readying to be able to meet those needs.
Really? Exactly what do you base this assumption on? Are you personally acquainted with the people working on OpenOffice? Or did you just pull this out of your ass?
OO is, conservatively, five years behind the ball.
Ah, definitely pulling this out of your ass. I just love it when someone fronts a baseless personal opinion as fact; it immediately identifies the egomaniacs amongst us.
But not until, as I said, the people pushing the development of these applications understand where they need to go to really compete.
I'm pretty sure they have a much better idea of what needs to be done than you do.
The future isn't about office suites and file formats, its about having all the business applications working together, so the processes a business has to follow day by day can be automated.
Ah, you're in marketing! No wonder you think your own spew is canon!
Max
OpenOffice has a long ways to go before it offers the sort of functionality that real businesses need
Yet I see you didn't bother to make a list of all of this crucial functionality that seems to be missing.
I'm willing to bet that for 95% of the folks out there OpenOffice will do exactly what they want it to do: create a professional-looking document using the standards set by their place of business. We are talking about a world processor, not a piece of desktop publishing software (which MS Word isn't either, despite what some people try to do with it).
Max
You have to remember that the more radioactive the substance is, the shorter its half-life will be - by definition. There's only so much energy contained in any one unstable atom; the faster you dump that energy, the faster you run out of that energy. The higher the radioactivity the more dangerous the substance - and the shorter it's half-life.
The radioactivity you're talking about is extremely low-level output radiation and not at all dangerous to be around. You're more likely to get sick from the radon in a brick-construction house or a poorly-developed basement in certain areas of the country. Hell, you're more likely to get sick from the radioactive output of *the sun* than you are from the sources you seem to be so concerned about.
The half-life of the waste from a nuclear power plant isn't deadly for very long at all, except when comparing the measure to a human life-span. Most of the energy is dumped fairly quickly. A containment vessel able to trap the waste for 200,000 years is more than sufficient to let the waste run down to safe levels.
Max
But with the Great Satan of nuclear power you're bound to get the environmentalists in an uproar. From the way they react to both current technology and just about every planned development, I've concluded they'll only be happy when humans give up technology altogether and return to a hunter-gatherer tribal structure. Oh, and after slightly less than six billion of us die off in the process of 'returning to our roots' - minus the environmentalists and their friends, of course.
If you want to get a clear idea of how an environmental fanatic thinks, try reading David Brin's "Earth". It's science fantasy, not science fiction, but the whacko environmentalist looney who wipes out the entire population of southeast Asia 'for the good of the ecosphere' captures today's greenie extremist to a 'T'.
Max
Yeah, right. Like the UN is going to be able to enforce that treaty, especially if the country that corporation belongs to tells them to take a flying leap.
As for Mars, of course we want to take life there! The damned ball of rock is utterly lifeless, barring the slimmest possibility of some microbe still eking out a miserable existence underneath the surface. What good is Mars if we don't terraform the place? Only a whack-job would argue *against* terraforming the only viable world in the entire solar system to preserve a fucking microbe!
Max
And *you're* forgetting that there is no one-world government, and that any country with a corporation capable of make a profit off of space will whip out their willy and piss in the U.N.'s general direction.
Do you honestly think the U.S. would bow to any U.N. treaty over something like this? Pause a moment while I laugh my ass off.
Max
usa would lose credibility as a democracy.
With whom? And why should we give a damn what any other country thinks about our elections? What are they going to do about it if they don't like the results? Invade?
now, you might not care, but the rest of the world cares.
Well, I seriously doubt the rest of the world gives much of a damn, but even if they did you haven't explained why this would affect us in any way, shape or form. No country on Earth is capable of doing anything about it, or 'punishing' us for not conducting elections in a manner they see fit, so ultimately it doesn't mean jack.
Max
Having a federal voting system vary from one state to another is lunacy, plain and simple.
No, it isn't. The original idea was to leave the vast majority of the power in the hands of the states, no matter how much that's been corrupted since 1783.
How is the average voter supposed to know how their vote is counted?
Perhaps by learning the fucking law? People are supposedly smart enough to memorize a thick book of traffic laws by the age of 16; I sincerely doubt they'll have trouble learning how their voting system works in their state.
Whatever counting mechanism that is used (winner takes all, instant run-off, approval, etc), the system should be the same everywhere.
Oh, real bright. Make the federal government even more powerful. Nice plan, that.
Max
selection of a president should not be entirely in the hands of the stupid population.
Do try to remember that you're one of the idiots that you're talking about.
Max
Without it, every county in the US would have had a recount. This would be an improvement how?
Without it everybody's vote would hold equal weight? The horror!
Max
who don't mind being villainized for the rest of human history.
My guess is that 99% of the people out there could give a shit one way or another if some nameless Mars microbe is wiped out.
And in any event Mars is pretty worthless unless it's eventually terraformed. I'm willing to bet you'd find that the number of people interested in terraforming Mars into brand new real estate (if it becomes possible) is many times greater than the whining losers who'd scream about 'despoiliing the Martian environment'.
Count me in for terraforming.
Max
I guess you failed to notice that it's PRIVATELY funded. People can do whatever the hell they want with their own money, and it isn't your business to tell them otherwise. Your input only matters when it concerns PUBLIC money, none of which is being spent on this mission.
Max
The first company capable of building ships able to go to the asteroid belt and conduct mining operations, then return to Earth with the bounty will make itself unbelievably rich. There's unimaginable wealth scattered throughout the solar system; the biggest obstacle right now is that it costs more to extract that wealth than you could expect to gain.
To think that this situation will remain forever unchanged is just plain foolish. Affordable space travel will be developed no matter the whining of the naysayers. Each advance puts *someone* that much closer to cashing in on a frontier that'll make the current crop of billionaires look like amateurs in comparison.
It won't be a race between corporations who can't look beyond the quarter, much less strain themselves over a five-year plan. It'll be a race between people with vision and the ability to plan 20, 30 or even 50 years in advance. *They* will be the ones to win, and have the last laugh over everyone who said that it couldn't be done.
Max
Let the MPAA and their buddies in TV-land foist this crap onto the public; it's the sort of thing that'll piss off even Joe Consumer. And seriously, what will happen when Joe Consumer begins to get annoyed? I'd imagine that 'Internet TV shows' will start popping up as an alternative to the headaches and hassles of what modern, regular TV viewing is becoming. And 'ITV' isn't regulated in any sense of the word; ITV is just a streaming or downloadable movie or series installment, no different than any other streaming or downloadable content.
Imagine what will happen if Joe Consumer finds he can watch whatever shows he wants, whenever the hell he wants, never missing any of them, and never having to sit through a single ad. If you're thinking "it'll never happen" because it's on a computer and not on those nifty big-screen TVs, do try to remember that starting with the year 2000 TV viewership fell by nearly 3% in the United States, the first decline in the history of TV. Not only that but viewership has continued to decline with each successive year, much to the consternation of the conglomerates. What are those people doing instead of watching TV? *They're on the internet*. Add what makes TV attractive to the other forms of amusement the internet provides and watch the conglomerates really start to shit a brick....
Max
Also, what about terrorism?
What about it? With a few hundred pounds of fertilizer and some common cleaning ingredients I can create a bomb capable of leveling a city block, then put it into the back of my pickup under a tarp and drive the whole thing down to city hall without anyone the wiser. A simple cellphone style trigger and I don't even have to go up with the bomb myself - as a driver in an aircar almost certainly would.
The aircar isn't any more viable as a terrorist weapon than what I just described above. And an aircar would be easy to spot with radar, whereas no common radar system on Earth will be able to spot the potential danger of my pickup.
Aircars just don't cut it as terrorist weapons.
Max
That's why they want to have the cars be largely computer controlled, so that it is difficult or impossible for an inexperienced driver/pilot to make fatal mistakes.
No, that's why you certify the operators. What, were you suffering from the delusion that you'd just be able to walk into DMV, take a ten minute test, and then run off to the store in your flying car? Don't you think certification would be at least as rigorous for air cars as it is for ground cars?
Oh, wait...
Max
We could have flying cars today, but we don't because they arn't a good thing.
You've somehow confused the words "I" and "we".
Max