I commend to you the Monty Python movie "Brazil" from around...1984 (!) or so.
There is nothing humorous about this movie, rather it is a chilling look at a world that I hope never comes. Something along the lines of "Trust no one, suspect everyone".
The good part is that if everyone has a camera, the sheer volume of video footage will render all but the most talented videographers and well-connected unwatched. Just like the myriad blogs are today.
Besides, aren't some cities and municipalities bragging that they are installing fixed video cameras in key public areas? I feel soooo much safer now that my every move can be watched. I guess I can't pick my nose any more.:-(
These kids hang out with their Che Guevara t-shirts, and talk about how 'everything should be free'.
How dare you talk about slashdot readers like that?
Anyway, I don't understand this move to wire wireless access points everywhere at public taxpayer expense. The Government has proven its incompetence at so many other endeavors in the past, why should we expect this to be any different, particularly in a technical matter?
Verizon is building out its EV-DO network as we speak, so before you know it you will have reliable, broad Net access in many major cities. Other U.S. carriers are planning or implementing similar efforts. Yes, it won't be 'free', but you get what you pay for, usually. My money is on private industry.
This occurred in Broward County, Florida where, for better than half of the time since the last election, they have been fooling around ousting Miriam Oliphant, supervisor of elections.
She was accused of squandering money in her office, diverting funds, malfeasance, other acts. I know a well-connected friend of mine who once supported her fully and changed his tune 180 degrees in this time, so between that and what the news reported it sounds like she gummed up the works pretty well.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it is doubtful that anybody left in the office really cared about the voting machine issue. When the new staff came in, which turned out to be some of the old staff who had been there before Oliphant, they didn't have a whole lot of time to get their house in order.
Note that I am not an apologist for any of these people. Whoever decided that it would be OK to start the early polling process using only computers without any paper backup of voter lists was a friggin MORON! Any of the polling places can be used by any registered voter; you need not go to the one located in your voting district. So, you could go to one closest to work, even if it is located on the other side of the county. This only works if the remote computers had access to the voter rolls at the downtown office; they did not.
I guess Florida wasn't satisfied with being the state with the most corrupt elections, they also wanted the title of least reliable elections.
The animators working for Disney, Sony, and (I think) I.L.M. draw from real live Human figures every so often in order to keep their renderings realistic and believable by their audiences.
I'm not sure that these people can be called artists or not, but my favorite figure drawing instructor loves quoting from a text that reads "Artists don't find solutions, they find problems".
I have no idea what that means, but this notion of a computer rendering "perfect" images is utter rubbish. If all you want to do is replace artistry with a machine, Spock, then you will have terabytes of generic crap to look at. If you really think that Humans can create something wondrous through the mistakes that they make as they draw, then you are on to something, but your perfect computer will never do that. Ever.
Where do you draw the line of "veneer of stupidity"?
As I read the introduction to this article, when I read that phrase my mind immediately thought of the programming advertised on U.P.N. as I watched Enterprise push the Magic Reset Button again. Shows like "America's Top Model" and "WWE Smackdown" would qualify as having at least a veneer of stupidity. These shows might be 100% stupid through and through.
On the other hand, those who can explain complex systems and theories in understandable ways without compromising their essential functions would have to be rather intelligent folks. If they could produce or inform the producers of science and technology shows a lot of viewers would be better off.
Perhaps this show qualifies: I don't remember the name, but it's on a cable channel like Discovery or similar. These two guys go around either debunking or proving commonly held beliefs. For example the episode I saw dealt with whether tooth brushes would pick up airborne contaminants from the toilet bowl. They explained what they did, why they did it, what assumptions they made, and why those assumptions did not hold up. This demonstrated an application of the scientific method and actually dispensed some useful information to viewers. They were quite straightforward with the viewers as to when they were stumped and admitted mistakes that they made, so as not to mislead the viewer.
I would be very hard to pressed to find any veneer of stupidity in this show. I still miss Mr. Wizard, even so.
Remember when recreation meant escape from the physical or mental pressures of work? So that one could re-create oneself?
Now, thanks to modern technology and ingenuity, you can't even recreate without bringing your work with you, at least if you buy this overpriced contraption.
Don't you dare mod this as funny, since recreation is as essential to life as food and air, only the effects of a lack of recreation are more difficult to discern and take longer to manifest.
This really pisses me off...I'm gonna go ride my bike now!
Consider that these days they might be the ones high-tailing it back to their native countries to employ those skills which no longer earn them jobs in the U.S., thus putting them head and shoulders above their countrymen who did not receive such education.
Even so, if I were the h.r. guy interviewing them versus some (not all) of their U.S. counterparts, I would have had no problem hiring the immigrant students for all the reasons I mentioned in my original post. That works for them in both domestic job competition as well as in the outsourcing situation. Better is better, no matter where it is found.
In my engineering courses at George Washington University a full generation ago, some of the best and brightest students were from Iran, India, and Korea. They were studious, focused, usually polite and articulate, and generally had more going for them than a scary good percantage of my fellow engineering students from the good ol' U.S. of A.
This process has been advancing for some time and we are now feeling the effects of such a subtle change. Turning this huge aircraft carrier called the United States is going to take quite some time even at full [left|right] rudder.
The "typical" slashdotter is torn between hating big, bad WalMart and hating the Big, Bad Record Company.
The fact is that businesses operate to make a profit. Despite the fact that profit is considered a dirty word here, I would wager that anybody reading this article would certainly not turn down money handed to him. In this case, WalMart knows that it has bargaining power and is using it. That's business.
It would be foolish of them to ignore this bargaining power to get better prices (which might not necessarily show up on the retail sticker price), and foolish of us to expect them not to use it.
Unfortunately, the same mentality that seeks to unwrap the death grip held by such giants as MicroSoft also abhors anything resembling sensible rules emanating from authority figures, even when it makes things better for the masses.
So, by this logic it's OK to squash nearby wireless Net signals with your alligator amplifier. So what if you just took out half the mesh network in the neighborhood? It's (automatic) for the people...or something.
Let me give you folks a clue: you can always tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving.
They say whatever it takes to get elected, then they will do whatever they bloody well please once in office. In four years, they know that our short attention spans will have forgotten what they did longer than 15 minutes prior.
Many telcos are using VoIP in parallel with their PSTN backbones, and this is ok - most users don't even notice this behind the scenes VoIP application.
I noticed it tonight calling domestically within the U.S. when there was a very noticeable "burp" artifact at the end of each ringback tone from whatever cheapskate carrier hauled my call from Florida to D.C. The call did not supervise so I don't know what the voice quality is like, however.
It will take some time for the general population to get accustomed to the vagaries of packetized voice, such as additional latency and echo problems, etc.
Believe you me, these carriers are not doing this in order to provide "pin drop" clarity to voice calls. They will squeeze every last bit out of their pipes in order to maximize revenue, voice quality be damned in the process.
Ask anyone who actually knows the facts about this hot-button topic and you will learn that the huge majority of offenders are known to the child, typically a family member. They are not meeting each other online in the first place.
Yes, this evil, murky boogey man lurking around every chat room corner is overblown. But, because it makes parents' blood boil the law makers and authorities can get away with murder by bringing it up.
And of course we know that these keys cannot be spoofed or duplicated. Verisign says so.
Another poorly thought-out technical solution to a Human problem.
Then call it Crossbar. You know, the key in the lower right corner of 12-button TouchTone pads. Or the name taken from a #5 crossbar central office switch. Or some variation that is sexier for the digital-or-die crowd.
For email, things eventually changed. SMTP is king, and RFC 822 is the gold standard for email formats. Modern mailers are a lot less complex because they *CAN* be. Will the future hold something similar for telephone service? Who knows. Check back in a decade, but for now, use Asterisk.
I predict that the ILECs will be merged into one unified operating company, call it...oh I don't know, say AT&T, thus providing a unified body of specifications for interconnection and call processing.
But seriously folks, is there a nexus where discussion of Asterisk lives? Please don't tell me it's IRC, I don't need to be involved in up-to-the-millisecond development efforts, but this seems right up my alley and I'd would love to lend my experience and participate.
Boyz today need these graphics-laden games so that they can perfect blasting everything in sight into a bloody mass of disgusting pulp. Nobody wants to bother thinking, particularly about maneuvering space ships.
Re:Real life pong
on
Mechanical Pong
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It could also be called 'air hockey', requiring no computer and providing a true tactile experience to the players.
My brother had an RCA color television with built-in PONG on it. You pushed a mechanical button to activate the PONG game and hooked up the controller(s) to go to town. What will they think of next?
Amazing how such a stupidly simple game could be so captivating to a primitive audience. Are we smarter these days or just more jaded?
Pixel-perfect design is a myth propogated by the CSS religionists. Those people want to use CSS to brew their coffee in the morning. What a bunch! The problem is that they are corrupting newbies to CSS into thinking this way, leading them to spend time needlessly chasing down quirks between Firefox, IE, and others, rather than getting the customer's web site up and viewable.
As long as text doesn't slop over top of graphics or other text, then you are doing fine. That's my biggest incompatibility gripe.
Also, keep in mind that it's not just Firefox versus IE viewing your site. There are lots of disparate viewers out there on cell phones, Blackberries, Treos, and whatnot, so coding to one browser running on one operating system is business suicide.
I just got an XM radio and have been looking up biographies of the bands I have been listening to from the 1980s and 1990s. Invariably they talk about "getting a record deal" or "signed with a label".
What exactly does this mean? Who gets what and who is obligated to do what? Why were they so eager? This is the old model, of course.
A post farther down here states that support staff don't get their cut if you download off iTunes Music Store and similar under the new model, so maybe some insight there would be +5, informative.
Why would bands sign with the big, bad record companies if these stories of indentured servitude that have been promulgated by earlier bands were true?
I'd be happy for an auto-update notification system that actually works.
I had to use the advice from the Firefox f.a.q. that basically instructs you to disable the auto-update notification, else it constantly tells you to upgrade to the version that you are already running.
Yes, I'm still on 0.93 but like a few others have mentioned, I don't schedule my entire life around updating my web browser. I like a controlled upgrade path to keep me on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.
Slashdot Mirror
I commend to you the Monty Python movie "Brazil" from around...1984 (!) or so.
:-(
There is nothing humorous about this movie, rather it is a chilling look at a world that I hope never comes. Something along the lines of "Trust no one, suspect everyone".
The good part is that if everyone has a camera, the sheer volume of video footage will render all but the most talented videographers and well-connected unwatched. Just like the myriad blogs are today.
Besides, aren't some cities and municipalities bragging that they are installing fixed video cameras in key public areas? I feel soooo much safer now that my every move can be watched. I guess I can't pick my nose any more.
These kids hang out with their Che Guevara t-shirts, and talk about how 'everything should be free'.
How dare you talk about slashdot readers like that?
Anyway, I don't understand this move to wire wireless access points everywhere at public taxpayer expense. The Government has proven its incompetence at so many other endeavors in the past, why should we expect this to be any different, particularly in a technical matter?
Verizon is building out its EV-DO network as we speak, so before you know it you will have reliable, broad Net access in many major cities. Other U.S. carriers are planning or implementing similar efforts. Yes, it won't be 'free', but you get what you pay for, usually. My money is on private industry.
This occurred in Broward County, Florida where, for better than half of the time since the last election, they have been fooling around ousting Miriam Oliphant, supervisor of elections.
She was accused of squandering money in her office, diverting funds, malfeasance, other acts. I know a well-connected friend of mine who once supported her fully and changed his tune 180 degrees in this time, so between that and what the news reported it sounds like she gummed up the works pretty well.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it is doubtful that anybody left in the office really cared about the voting machine issue. When the new staff came in, which turned out to be some of the old staff who had been there before Oliphant, they didn't have a whole lot of time to get their house in order.
Note that I am not an apologist for any of these people. Whoever decided that it would be OK to start the early polling process using only computers without any paper backup of voter lists was a friggin MORON! Any of the polling places can be used by any registered voter; you need not go to the one located in your voting district. So, you could go to one closest to work, even if it is located on the other side of the county. This only works if the remote computers had access to the voter rolls at the downtown office; they did not.
I guess Florida wasn't satisfied with being the state with the most corrupt elections, they also wanted the title of least reliable elections.
The animators working for Disney, Sony, and (I think) I.L.M. draw from real live Human figures every so often in order to keep their renderings realistic and believable by their audiences.
I'm not sure that these people can be called artists or not, but my favorite figure drawing instructor loves quoting from a text that reads "Artists don't find solutions, they find problems".
I have no idea what that means, but this notion of a computer rendering "perfect" images is utter rubbish. If all you want to do is replace artistry with a machine, Spock, then you will have terabytes of generic crap to look at. If you really think that Humans can create something wondrous through the mistakes that they make as they draw, then you are on to something, but your perfect computer will never do that. Ever.
Where do you draw the line of "veneer of stupidity"?
As I read the introduction to this article, when I read that phrase my mind immediately thought of the programming advertised on U.P.N. as I watched Enterprise push the Magic Reset Button again. Shows like "America's Top Model" and "WWE Smackdown" would qualify as having at least a veneer of stupidity. These shows might be 100% stupid through and through.
On the other hand, those who can explain complex systems and theories in understandable ways without compromising their essential functions would have to be rather intelligent folks. If they could produce or inform the producers of science and technology shows a lot of viewers would be better off.
Perhaps this show qualifies: I don't remember the name, but it's on a cable channel like Discovery or similar. These two guys go around either debunking or proving commonly held beliefs. For example the episode I saw dealt with whether tooth brushes would pick up airborne contaminants from the toilet bowl. They explained what they did, why they did it, what assumptions they made, and why those assumptions did not hold up. This demonstrated an application of the scientific method and actually dispensed some useful information to viewers. They were quite straightforward with the viewers as to when they were stumped and admitted mistakes that they made, so as not to mislead the viewer.
I would be very hard to pressed to find any veneer of stupidity in this show. I still miss Mr. Wizard, even so.
Remember when recreation meant escape from the physical or mental pressures of work? So that one could re-create oneself?
Now, thanks to modern technology and ingenuity, you can't even recreate without bringing your work with you, at least if you buy this overpriced contraption.
Don't you dare mod this as funny, since recreation is as essential to life as food and air, only the effects of a lack of recreation are more difficult to discern and take longer to manifest.
This really pisses me off...I'm gonna go ride my bike now!
In fact, it did occur to me.
Consider that these days they might be the ones high-tailing it back to their native countries to employ those skills which no longer earn them jobs in the U.S., thus putting them head and shoulders above their countrymen who did not receive such education.
Even so, if I were the h.r. guy interviewing them versus some (not all) of their U.S. counterparts, I would have had no problem hiring the immigrant students for all the reasons I mentioned in my original post. That works for them in both domestic job competition as well as in the outsourcing situation. Better is better, no matter where it is found.
In my engineering courses at George Washington University a full generation ago, some of the best and brightest students were from Iran, India, and Korea. They were studious, focused, usually polite and articulate, and generally had more going for them than a scary good percantage of my fellow engineering students from the good ol' U.S. of A.
This process has been advancing for some time and we are now feeling the effects of such a subtle change. Turning this huge aircraft carrier called the United States is going to take quite some time even at full [left|right] rudder.
Oh, how delicious this is!
The "typical" slashdotter is torn between hating big, bad WalMart and hating the Big, Bad Record Company.
The fact is that businesses operate to make a profit. Despite the fact that profit is considered a dirty word here, I would wager that anybody reading this article would certainly not turn down money handed to him. In this case, WalMart knows that it has bargaining power and is using it. That's business.
It would be foolish of them to ignore this bargaining power to get better prices (which might not necessarily show up on the retail sticker price), and foolish of us to expect them not to use it.
BAH!
When I was your age I had to paint the web page on cardboard with watercolors using my fingers...uphill--BOTH WAYS!!
Young whippersnappers!
Unfortunately, the same mentality that seeks to unwrap the death grip held by such giants as MicroSoft also abhors anything resembling sensible rules emanating from authority figures, even when it makes things better for the masses.
So, by this logic it's OK to squash nearby wireless Net signals with your alligator amplifier. So what if you just took out half the mesh network in the neighborhood? It's (automatic) for the people...or something.
I am voting against Asscroft before it's too late for us all!
It's not just the candidate on the ballot you are voting for, it's all his lieutenants who will come into office along with him. Think about it.
What's all this carping about?
Let me give you folks a clue: you can always tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving.
They say whatever it takes to get elected, then they will do whatever they bloody well please once in office. In four years, they know that our short attention spans will have forgotten what they did longer than 15 minutes prior.
Many telcos are using VoIP in parallel with their PSTN backbones, and this is ok - most users don't even notice this behind the scenes VoIP application.
I noticed it tonight calling domestically within the U.S. when there was a very noticeable "burp" artifact at the end of each ringback tone from whatever cheapskate carrier hauled my call from Florida to D.C. The call did not supervise so I don't know what the voice quality is like, however.
It will take some time for the general population to get accustomed to the vagaries of packetized voice, such as additional latency and echo problems, etc.
Believe you me, these carriers are not doing this in order to provide "pin drop" clarity to voice calls. They will squeeze every last bit out of their pipes in order to maximize revenue, voice quality be damned in the process.
I'm selling these bumper stickers that read:
"Kill Your Computer"
Ask anyone who actually knows the facts about this hot-button topic and you will learn that the huge majority of offenders are known to the child, typically a family member. They are not meeting each other online in the first place.
Yes, this evil, murky boogey man lurking around every chat room corner is overblown. But, because it makes parents' blood boil the law makers and authorities can get away with murder by bringing it up.
And of course we know that these keys cannot be spoofed or duplicated. Verisign says so.
Another poorly thought-out technical solution to a Human problem.
Fine.
Then call it Crossbar. You know, the key in the lower right corner of 12-button TouchTone pads. Or the name taken from a #5 crossbar central office switch. Or some variation that is sexier for the digital-or-die crowd.
For email, things eventually changed. SMTP is king, and RFC 822 is the gold standard for email formats. Modern mailers are a lot less complex because they *CAN* be. Will the future hold something similar for telephone service? Who knows. Check back in a decade, but for now, use Asterisk.
I predict that the ILECs will be merged into one unified operating company, call it...oh I don't know, say AT&T, thus providing a unified body of specifications for interconnection and call processing.
But seriously folks, is there a nexus where discussion of Asterisk lives? Please don't tell me it's IRC, I don't need to be involved in up-to-the-millisecond development efforts, but this seems right up my alley and I'd would love to lend my experience and participate.
Thank you for your links.
Wasn't Sony the box of genius that made the marketing decisions that led to the utter dominance of the Sony Betamax videotape format some years ago?
This is hopeless!
Boyz today need these graphics-laden games so that they can perfect blasting everything in sight into a bloody mass of disgusting pulp. Nobody wants to bother thinking, particularly about maneuvering space ships.
It could also be called 'air hockey', requiring no computer and providing a true tactile experience to the players.
My brother had an RCA color television with built-in PONG on it. You pushed a mechanical button to activate the PONG game and hooked up the controller(s) to go to town. What will they think of next?
Amazing how such a stupidly simple game could be so captivating to a primitive audience. Are we smarter these days or just more jaded?
How will that detect whether the useragent string has been modified by, say an Opera or Firefox user?
Pixel-perfect design is a myth propogated by the CSS religionists. Those people want to use CSS to brew their coffee in the morning. What a bunch! The problem is that they are corrupting newbies to CSS into thinking this way, leading them to spend time needlessly chasing down quirks between Firefox, IE, and others, rather than getting the customer's web site up and viewable.
As long as text doesn't slop over top of graphics or other text, then you are doing fine. That's my biggest incompatibility gripe.
Also, keep in mind that it's not just Firefox versus IE viewing your site. There are lots of disparate viewers out there on cell phones, Blackberries, Treos, and whatnot, so coding to one browser running on one operating system is business suicide.
I just got an XM radio and have been looking up biographies of the bands I have been listening to from the 1980s and 1990s. Invariably they talk about "getting a record deal" or "signed with a label".
What exactly does this mean? Who gets what and who is obligated to do what? Why were they so eager? This is the old model, of course.
A post farther down here states that support staff don't get their cut if you download off iTunes Music Store and similar under the new model, so maybe some insight there would be +5, informative.
Why would bands sign with the big, bad record companies if these stories of indentured servitude that have been promulgated by earlier bands were true?
Thank you for any insight.
I'd be happy for an auto-update notification system that actually works.
I had to use the advice from the Firefox f.a.q. that basically instructs you to disable the auto-update notification, else it constantly tells you to upgrade to the version that you are already running.
Yes, I'm still on 0.93 but like a few others have mentioned, I don't schedule my entire life around updating my web browser. I like a controlled upgrade path to keep me on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.