I just don't understand loyalty to companies based on anything other than price and product/service quality.
It's actually very easy to be loyal to smaller companies that still have a human face. As companies grow they usually jump off the cluetrain and become impersonal assholes in order to extract maximum profit. Google is set to do that.
I'm sure COSCO is your kind of company though... cheap slave-products.
Not even a totalitarian world government could prevent the inevitability of increasingly advanced tech from falling into psychopaths' hands.
So no, our best hope isn't in trying to relinquish or limit the technology, but rather in coming up with equally advanced defenses. i.e. we'll need molecular nanotechnology in order to create artificial immune systems for both bio-based humans, AND as an active shield for the planet as a whole. Hopefully these all-encompassing systems are under democratic control, otherwise government could actually prevent drugs from reaching your brain, etc.
they deserve the fruits of their labour, and to keep the rights to their own creations.
It would be interesting to see how many people choose the standard "AllMineMineMine!" copyright vs. the other more open licenses. You would think open source's share and share-alike would flourish except in cases where the object creator is especially selfish, or in cases where someone wanted to sell temporarily unique data on Ebay for cash in the real world.
Heh - funny thought: Imagine a gameworld divided up into zones depending on how the objects in it are licensed. Which zone would become the most successful?
create a panel that evaluates potential additions to the game
The "A Tale in the Desert" MMORPG has a great Lawmaking system built into the game.
Once you become a citizen of the gameworld -- which takes a little time and effort, to limit ballot stuffing with crap-accounts -- you can create a bill/petition, gather signatures, and have everyone VOTE on it. There's two types of laws, which makes sense: 1) Changes to the game itself, which the developers have to implement currently, and 2) the in-game rule of law, which would include things like zoning laws, and punishment for player killing (of which there isn't any this particular MMOG).
I really hope this kind of democracy spreads in future MMORPGS, because I can't stand fascist authoritian rule.:)
But what's the point of respecting their corpses? It's not like they're in there anymore.
Because most people, being people, have emotional attachments to the body of the person which used to house the mind. Of course the body is a worthless shell after brain death, but on a simple human level the body *is* the person we remember, and that's what most s[t]uperstitions grew out of.
Not all cultures are alike though. To the Taiwanese, digging up their dead is the highest form of respect, and there's a sect of indians who eat the flesh, piss and shit of their dead.
Should I not live to see immortality at Singularity, my Living Will states that my body is to be cremated and that there is to be no funeral held. This is to spare my family an expensive funeral con job, and to free up wasted cemetery realestate for more useful purposes.
And this is the main reason I'll be moving from RH9 to Mandrake, instead of Fedora. With RH9 I got a cheap desktop distro with RedHat's standard QA behind up2date so I didn't have to worry about it (unless I chose to spend my time doing so). By moving to Mandrake -- which is arguably more user-friendly -- I'll get the support, but only lose the familiarlity of working with a redhat-ish desktop that is/was the gateway to the enterprise.
Why should a company flood the market when they're likely to overlap and kill off their own product line without ever selling anything.
This also helps explain why OLED displays will replace LCDs later, rather than sooner: they haven't broken even on their LCD manufacturing investments yet. The only company really pushing OLED forward is Kodak (who also discovered it), both because they don't have anything sunk into LCD so there's nothing to canibalize, and because they've got to innovate now that film is dying (netcraft confirms it).:)
I was going to nominate Asimo, but their FormMail script seems to be broken ATM.
Asimo is one of the first bipedal walking robots that really scared the crap out of a lot of people. How many generations of advancing tech before their bodies and AI are up to snuff for jobs like: construction work, plumbing, McJob customer service, worldcup soccer, sucky-fucky,... world domination?:)
Who are those 12% and 13% of users that like the popups?
Those are the folks who don't really use their computer much, but who probably have a lot of money invested in the market, and cynically think that being evil == more money. Or Occam says... they're just stupid.
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Re:Bad for users of alternative browsers?
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IE To Block Pop-Ups
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· Score: 1
I didn't know 'subvertising' already had an established definition. I used the word in the sense that advertisers are going to be increasingly trying to subvert honest word of mouth with lying shills.
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Re:Bad for users of alternative browsers?
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IE To Block Pop-Ups
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· Score: 2, Interesting
or worse, figure out some more annoying method of advertising.
The absolute worst kind of advertising, IMNSHO, is stealth marketing (aka: viral marketing). It's not as overtly annoying, but it makes my skin crawl and my blood boil to know that the growth of "subertising" is inevitable - the only defense being trust networks, which aren't really used well yet.
Right now, the only thing that gets through my adfilter (privoxy) are stealth shills and those floating DHTML ads (like this one). I'm sure if this trend continues these will be filtered out by default as well.
comes down to whether there are enough people who don't mind paying for good content to support the creators.
In real life you often get to personally meet those starving artists when you buy their wares or pay for performances; there's a real emotional connection there - not so online (usually). In Real Life you get a feelgood for supporting local artists, and you get a more meaningful "Thank You" when handing over your cash - online it's more antiseptic.
I would be 100 times more likely to pay for really great online content if:
I was recognized as more than a number (or a/. '*') for my contribution.
I had some idea of the artist's bottom line so I knew how badly they needed it vs. some other artist who's just as worthy but not as arbitrarily popular/rich. Call it an OpenBottomline, kind of like this. I don't like sending my money down paypal blackholes.
The content was released under a more open license that allows everyone to stand on others' shoulders, rather than the default Disney "AllMineMineMine!" copyright.
If there was some easy mechanism to pool my money with others to finance the creation of works we want.
I remember watching Minority Report and thinking "people don't like computers now. Do you think they'll be willing to learn such an obviously unintuitive and totally new interface?"
Funny. I remember thinking, "Boy would my arms and shoulders be sore after a few hours of that!"
I'll take the "lazy" keyboard/mouse interface any day of the week; I only have to twitch my fingers and wrists to get something done. The only interface lazier and more effective than the keyboard has got to be direct BCI (Brain Computer Interfaces).
Short-term greed in our pre-abundance society is already fueling companies, governments, and research scientists to develop nanotechnology. Long-term, this tech will be the great equalizer, with even food and hardware being open sourced. Can't keep the genie in the bottle.
I hope you did the right thing by turning your daughter's subversive friend in to the proper authorities! We've got nip this copywrong trend in the bud by setting an example: jailtime! Worked for drugs and alcohol!
Hey, if you *know* it's propaganda, and you don't agree with it, it can be even more amusing. Just shake your head and dismiss everything with a righteous scoff at the end.:)
I, for one, don't empathize with lower-animals' simple brains operating on instinct (except puppies!), and find their flesh very tasty. Agribiz is a necessary evil which could be nicer to the environment; but there's no going back to family farming.
I'm looking forward to lab-grown meat. I look forward even more to the day when we can molecularly scan a perfect steak (or anything) once, then freely distribute the "blueprint" and manufacture cheap copies by recyling local resources cheaply, easily, and cleanly. (dooo do dooo do... twighlight zone right).
I, being a cheap-labor conservative, am shocked and outraged that some film-monkey projectionist would dare subvert his masters carefully crafted propaganda!
Those expensive projectionists will be replaced by our new AUTO-PROJECTOR 3000 next year anyway. I got in early and bought 10,000 shares. To use the slang of the colored proles: "Mo' money! Mo' money!"
Have you ever considered the likelyhood that exponentually advancing technology will allow us humans to transcend our fragile biological bodies long before any bio-friendly terraforming completes?
I'd much rather see more articles like this - it's very entertaining reading when the zealots come out of the woodwork to defend the "obvious FUD". Each kind of zealot - Apple, MS, linux, vi, etc. - has their own distinctive flavor, but Apple's is the creamiest.:)
The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as "Moore's Law." Gordon Moore, one of the inventors of integrated circuits, and then Chairman of Intel, noted in the mid 1970s that we could squeeze twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every 24 months. Given that the electrons have less distance to travel, the circuits also run twice as fast, providing an overall quadrupling of computational power.
After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no later than the year 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just a few atoms in width, and the strategy of ever finer photolithography will have run its course. So, will that be the end of the exponential growth of computing?
Don't bet on it.
If we plot the speed (in instructions per second) per $1000 (in constant dollars) of 49 famous calculators and computers spanning the entire twentieth century, we note some interesting observations.
Moore's Law Was Not the First, but the Fifth Paradigm To Provide Exponential Growth of Computing
Each time one paradigm runs out of steam, another picks up the pace
It is important to note that Moore's Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to Turing's relay-based "Robinson" machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer which I used to dictate (and automatically transcribe) this essay.
I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to ad-blocking capability in the real world. Once augmented vision systems become practical and ubiquitous, one of the killer apps will most certainly be the removal of eyesores with overlays. Billboards, stadium logos, smokestacks, factories, etc., could be recognized by a combination of GPS location and pattern recognition.
(the other killer app would be not having to use your imagination to remove womens clothing.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually very easy to be loyal to smaller companies that still have a human face. As companies grow they usually jump off the cluetrain and become impersonal assholes in order to extract maximum profit. Google is set to do that.
I'm sure COSCO is your kind of company though... cheap slave-products.
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--
So no, our best hope isn't in trying to relinquish or limit the technology, but rather in coming up with equally advanced defenses. i.e. we'll need molecular nanotechnology in order to create artificial immune systems for both bio-based humans, AND as an active shield for the planet as a whole. Hopefully these all-encompassing systems are under democratic control, otherwise government could actually prevent drugs from reaching your brain, etc.
--
It would be interesting to see how many people choose the standard "AllMineMineMine!" copyright vs. the other more open licenses. You would think open source's share and share-alike would flourish except in cases where the object creator is especially selfish, or in cases where someone wanted to sell temporarily unique data on Ebay for cash in the real world.
Heh - funny thought: Imagine a gameworld divided up into zones depending on how the objects in it are licensed. Which zone would become the most successful?
--
The "A Tale in the Desert" MMORPG has a great Lawmaking system built into the game.
Once you become a citizen of the gameworld -- which takes a little time and effort, to limit ballot stuffing with crap-accounts -- you can create a bill/petition, gather signatures, and have everyone VOTE on it. There's two types of laws, which makes sense: 1) Changes to the game itself, which the developers have to implement currently, and 2) the in-game rule of law, which would include things like zoning laws, and punishment for player killing (of which there isn't any this particular MMOG).
I really hope this kind of democracy spreads in future MMORPGS, because I can't stand fascist authoritian rule. :)
--
Because most people, being people, have emotional attachments to the body of the person which used to house the mind. Of course the body is a worthless shell after brain death, but on a simple human level the body *is* the person we remember, and that's what most s[t]uperstitions grew out of.
Not all cultures are alike though. To the Taiwanese, digging up their dead is the highest form of respect, and there's a sect of indians who eat the flesh, piss and shit of their dead.
Should I not live to see immortality at Singularity, my Living Will states that my body is to be cremated and that there is to be no funeral held. This is to spare my family an expensive funeral con job, and to free up wasted cemetery realestate for more useful purposes.
--
--
This also helps explain why OLED displays will replace LCDs later, rather than sooner: they haven't broken even on their LCD manufacturing investments yet. The only company really pushing OLED forward is Kodak (who also discovered it), both because they don't have anything sunk into LCD so there's nothing to canibalize, and because they've got to innovate now that film is dying (netcraft confirms it). :)
--
Asimo is one of the first bipedal walking robots that really scared the crap out of a lot of people. How many generations of advancing tech before their bodies and AI are up to snuff for jobs like: construction work, plumbing, McJob customer service, worldcup soccer, sucky-fucky, ... world domination? :)
--
Those are the folks who don't really use their computer much, but who probably have a lot of money invested in the market, and cynically think that being evil == more money. Or Occam says ... they're just stupid.
--
--
The absolute worst kind of advertising, IMNSHO, is stealth marketing (aka: viral marketing). It's not as overtly annoying, but it makes my skin crawl and my blood boil to know that the growth of "subertising" is inevitable - the only defense being trust networks, which aren't really used well yet.
Right now, the only thing that gets through my adfilter (privoxy) are stealth shills and those floating DHTML ads (like this one). I'm sure if this trend continues these will be filtered out by default as well.
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Is there no video/flash demo available?
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In real life you often get to personally meet those starving artists when you buy their wares or pay for performances; there's a real emotional connection there - not so online (usually). In Real Life you get a feelgood for supporting local artists, and you get a more meaningful "Thank You" when handing over your cash - online it's more antiseptic.
I would be 100 times more likely to pay for really great online content if:
--
--
Funny. I remember thinking, "Boy would my arms and shoulders be sore after a few hours of that!"
I'll take the "lazy" keyboard/mouse interface any day of the week; I only have to twitch my fingers and wrists to get something done. The only interface lazier and more effective than the keyboard has got to be direct BCI (Brain Computer Interfaces).
--
Pfft. Realtime raytracing should be a piece of cake! :)
--
Short-term greed in our pre-abundance society is already fueling companies, governments, and research scientists to develop nanotechnology. Long-term, this tech will be the great equalizer, with even food and hardware being open sourced. Can't keep the genie in the bottle.
--
--
I, for one, don't empathize with lower-animals' simple brains operating on instinct (except puppies!), and find their flesh very tasty. Agribiz is a necessary evil which could be nicer to the environment; but there's no going back to family farming.
I'm looking forward to lab-grown meat. I look forward even more to the day when we can molecularly scan a perfect steak (or anything) once, then freely distribute the "blueprint" and manufacture cheap copies by recyling local resources cheaply, easily, and cleanly. (dooo do dooo do ... twighlight zone right).
--
Those expensive projectionists will be replaced by our new AUTO-PROJECTOR 3000 next year anyway. I got in early and bought 10,000 shares. To use the slang of the colored proles: "Mo' money! Mo' money!"
--
Have you ever considered the likelyhood that exponentually advancing technology will allow us humans to transcend our fragile biological bodies long before any bio-friendly terraforming completes?
--
--
--
(the other killer app would be not having to use your imagination to remove womens clothing. :)
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