I agree. When Microsoft took over fastcounter (where my web counters are, now part of bCentral), they decided that they didn't want it to work with certain browsers. When I tried to access my counter stats in Konquerer, it wouldn't even let he hit the button to log in. I had to boot into Windows and use Opera (which can identify itself as IE) to get at it. That's a likely scenario.
The last version of Media Player I installed was 7. It too had the option to not make it the default player for certain file types. And guess what: It stole them anyway.
Codecs, players, it doesn't matter. What's at issue is proprietary software, and M$'s use of it.
And as for leaving the country, that is only if DRM/DMCA/CBDTPA measures are fully enacted. I firmly believe in fair use, and these three things take that away. I would gladly move to a country that still upholds fair use rights in lieu of avoiding these three things, of which Microsoft has declared itself the #1 Champion of.
Have you read this? While it is purely speculative fiction, it does seem to be the direction we're heading in.
Yep, NIMBY. Not In My Back Yard. The whole reason I use Linux at all is to get away from The Machine. I don't want M$ branded crap bundled in with the next distro I pick up.
I'm gonna venture a guess here, and I'll probably get modded down to the 10th level of hell for it, but here goes. My guess is that, since M$ knows it can't directly attack Linux and the GPL, it figures it'll go along with it, then tear it apart from within. Get inside the game, then start picking it apart. Since they'll more than likely want the source of their apps closed, we won't really know what's going on with it while it's running.
If the current Media Player is any suggestion, it won't be good. Media Player theives all file associations, making you go back in and change them back to the way you had them before you installed it. And who knows to what extent this DRM crap will get to. Would they go so far as to disable anything they don't find "trustworthy" in the Palladium model? Knocking out XMMS, MPTV, and locating and disabling the open OGG format's plugins?
The real problem lies in the obvious. Noone but M$ knows. And you know what they say, Knowledge is Power. Right now, M$ is holding alot (but not all) of the cards. Honsestly, if this gets any worse, I'm more than willing to move outside of the country I love, just to get away from Micro$oft. Extreme, yes. But I enjoy my personal rights and freedoms too much to have them yanked away by the likes of M$, the RIAA and the MPAA...
And somewhere, echoing through the mountains of Norway, the Hallilujia Chorus is heard...
Score one for the good guys. This counts as a big win for Linux users, as we now have a case to cite. While that might not mean much here in the United States, it is a shininhg example that not all circumvention software is intended for use in pirating.
It also marks a major slap in the face for the MPAA, who needs one at the moment. They've been throwing their weight around too much the last few years, and it's about time they got put in their place. Now, all we need is a similar precident here in the US, and our rights to do what we want (privately, of course) with things that we buy will be ever the slightest bit safer.
I happen to have the DeCSS code (and no, I won't send it along, so don't ask). I haven't compiled it yet. I kept it around in the event that my DVD ROM would go to hell (which it did), so that I could boot into Linux and simply watch my DVDs. I wasn't going to rip them, burn them and ship them off to my friends. I was just going to watch them. Now, I happened upon a DVD player for free, so I really don't need it at the moment. It's just nice to have around, just in case.
Now, I like the idea of a library putting out it's books on the internet, and I agree with the lock out date. If you go and check out a physical book, they stamp a return date on the back in the card pocket. Same general idea.
But, there are a few flaws. One, how long will the readable period be? Most libraries I've dealt with have a two week check out period. That's more than enough time to read a decent sized novel (such as one by Crichton, my favorite author, BTW). Will the lockout date correspond to their checkout period? Or will it be shortened in ebook form to prevent piracy?
And while I'm on the subject of piracy, there's a way that all ebooks can fail in their attempts to curb it. Let's say a guy with alot of free time, hard drive space and patience decides to download an ebook. He can't crack the encryption, can't copy the text directly. But what about screenshots? What's to stop him from hitting Alt+PrScr for each page and pasting them into a run of the mill image? He could then create a PDF, HTML or other collection of files and redistribute the book freely.
Is there a charge for these downloads? Then you get into the issue of fair use of something you've purchased. Libraries usually don't charge for check outs (at least not in my experience), and since this ebook model seems to work much the same way, I don't see the need to charge. The only charges I know of for libraries is overdue fees, which are more than reasonable.
And, is there a limit on how many copies can be digitally checked out at one time? If there is, that puts a waiting list into play. If there is a copy limit, then the lock out date makes sense. But let's say a person downloads an ebook and doesn't get the chance to finish it, and there are limited copies. Would they have to wait to download it again? Or could there be a renewal system to extend the lockout a few days to give the reader a chance to finish?
I've never dealt with ebooks, and probably never will (unless they outlaw physical copies). I'm an old school book nut and prefer to have a physical copy when I do my reading (which means I like to pay for my reading enjoyment, thus doing so legally). So, I really don't know if ebook reader programs prevent screenshots or not, or whether there will be charges and such. It seems like a decent idea, but the whole ebook idea is going to be flawed. Just like music (if I can hear it, I can rip/copy it), text will suffer from a similar ailment (if I can see it, I can copy it).
And where the hell did they hide it? I've been trying to figure out the human race (more specifically, the female of the species) for years. Chicks are always telling me to RTFM, so hurry up and fork that thing over so I can get ahead (bad pun intended) in the world!
How about we wire the remote village of Houtzdale, Pennsylvania for broadband? Or any of the many towns and hamlets throughout the United States that don't have anything but dial-up (or aren't even that lucky thanks to no local servers)? Let's get our own nation connected first. They we'll worry about some third world country that needs online.
And hey, before we do that, let's solve some other problems here at home. Let's get the homeless off the streets so we can give them internet access. Let's stop hunger within our borders, so that kids can have something to snack on when we give them internet access. After we've taken care of OUR problems first, THEN we can worry about other little countries and their problems.
We've gotta get our own act together, first, people. We need to take care of our own. Then and only then should we try and help those less fortunate around the world. Chances are they've been suffering for decades. They can wait another year or two, they'll still be there.
Hard to believe that one of these guys came from Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Our county (Clearfield, no less) is proud to have contributed a member of this team!
The day after the Internet was born is also a red letter date in the online world. It brought with it the following historical firsts:
The First Blog. The First Troll The Basic Concept of goatse.cx was allowed to begin forming. A Synapse in Rob Malda's head fired, marking the beginnings of what would become Slashdot. The First Pirate dipped his toe into brave new waters. The First Internet Download Queen, Billie Jean King, was crowned. The Fires of Mount St. Helens rumbled in faraway Washington, signaling the rise of the Dark Lord Gates and the writing of the One OS Al Gore said that the second day of his greatest invention was going very well. The birth of the first newsgroup, alt.news.cultureclub (hey, it was the 80's!) The First "Stephen King, Dead at 35" Post One year later, George Orwell, You Do The Math
Happy New Year, everyone. May your night be moderated +1(Kickass)
So, that means you'ld rather do the Latin Hustle to... which Backstreat Boys song did you say? And with the Tai Chi robot? Interesting choice of music and partners...
Program them to do all those insipid line dances such as the Macarena, Boot Scoot, Electric Slide, etc. Then have a group of them do the dances on international television so the wole world can watch and see how truely stupid they are.
Conversely, they could be programed to do traditional dances from many cultures and preserve these art forms in an extremely interesting way.
Some kid in 2140 wants to know how to do the Latin Hustle? Out comes the Tai-Bot and shows them how. Even play an OGG recording of K.C. And the Shunshine Band at the same time.
I was 9 years old when the Challenger disaster occoured. I look at it as one of those "Where were you when" events you listed above. Even though that's a cloudy time in my life (blame the pot if you want), that moment sticks in my head like my earlier post about a dream.
At the exact moment the Challenger exploded, none of us kids knew what was going on. We were oblivious to the day being anything but normal, sitting in lunch. It was pizzeria day, with green beans and one of those "something suspended in gelatine" deals. It was the year they finally gave us a choice with chocolate milk versus white milk (and the first year I had to wear glasses on a permanent basis). Yep, an exact memory of the menu we had that day, even though I packed my lunch that day. Imagine that.
Before we could all finish, our teacher (who was a lunch monitor on the other side of the cafeteria) Mrs. Kitchen said for all of us to take our trays (or in my case, paper bag) to the trash cans. We had no clue why, as none of us were finished. We took our stuff up to the cans (there were three for a lunch room of about 200 kids) in one large mass instead of in orderly lines like usual, and I remember sticking a pudding cup and spoon I had in my hoodie pocket. There was no way I was tossing that. After we had done that, we were quickly lined up as usual and filed out of the cafeteria in order of grade. Since there was a split lunch period (early for 1-3 (I was in grade 2), later for 4-6), it went from 3 to 1.
By this point, noone had told us why.
Mrs. Kitchen led us back to our classroom, where we first noticed the worried look on her face. She began to fiddle with the TV (being an underfunded small-town school, we had crappy boob tubes), bitching at it to warm up and give us a picture. She tuned it to CBS (channel 10 here at the time), and what we saw took a minute or two to digest. There was the cloud of smoke and two smokey serpents emerging from it as they hung in the sky, what was left of the Shuttle Challenger and her crew. After a few minutes of Dan Rather saying what had happened and how horrible a tragedy it was, they finally showed the full replay from liftoff to the final "go for throttle up" message. By then, we were all in complete shock. We watched as the Shuttle exploded in a huge ball of fire, and close-up, no less.
Now granted, at 9 years old, a kid most likely has a pretty good memory structure in place, so it's no surprise that I remember that. But to have such detail fused into your head and be able to recall it plain as day 16 years later is pretty remarkable. To be able to remember the lunch menu, even though I bagged it that day, and to remember the chaos of the lunch room, the shock of the images being shown to us...
When a person's mind is able to comprehend the historical significance of an event and have memories like that, one has to assume that the sheer shock of the whole event has alot to do with the memory process at that moment. Like today's children will remember the horror of 9-11, like my parents still recall the day JFK was shot, and the way my grandfather used to tell me how he remembered the dropping of bombs on Japan in '45 - Events like that bore themselves their own detailed niche in someone's grey matter. And those memories never go away. Everything immediately before, during, and immediately after the event in question is associated right along with it by default, letting you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when the event happened.
I'm no neurological scientist (I'm a humble digital designer), so that's the best I can come up with. Anyone have any other thoughts on the matter?
While I'm at it, I might as well recount where I was when 9-11 hit. When the first tower was hit, I was walking out the door to go down to my car and head to a job interview. By the time all the planes had run their courses, I was arriving at the interview. When I walked in, my then would-be boss came in and simply said he'd heard that a plane went down near the Pentagon. Nothing unusual, I thought, since accidents do happen, and a few nuts had crashed planes near government buildings before. The interview went fine, and I got the job. I was driving home, jamming out to some Classic Rock tunes on the CD player (I do remember hearing Pink Floyd's "Money" in there somewhere), and didn't give a second thought to the news that my boss had given me.
When I walked in the front door of my house, my Mom was as white as a ghost, and had the door open before I was even on the front porch. "Eric," she said, "you know the World Trade Towers?" "Yeah Mom, what about them?" "Eric, they're gone." "Say that again?" "They're gone." From there, I was glued to the Fox News Channel for the next few days, not to mention extremely pissed off. Any details of the rest of that day were forever lost to that anger. I was more concerned with wanting heads to roll than I was remembering petty details about my own life.
I can remember a dream I had when I was 5. You see, for some reason, it was Christmas in mid-summer. Santa was parachuting presents from his sleigh. I had managed to gather up quite a pile, and when I looked to my left, there was this curious little talking treestump. Yep, talking treestump. Nothing Ent-like, about 2 foot high with your standard blackened holes for an eyes and a mouth. Anyway, I asked it if it wanted to see my goodie stash, and it said "Yeah yeah yeah yeah" really quickly. I started to run to the pile (which I remember was in my Grandmother's yard next door) and that's all. Nothing else comes to mind about the dream, but for some reason, I can replay it perfectly in my head 20 years later.
I have memories of being in Playschool (before there was Headstart), desk hopping with my friend Jim (that was how I met him). Then there were the sit and spins my buddy Charlie and I always played with there. Me doing a maze thing and Adelle (Charlies mom and our teacher's assistant) telling me I was touching the lines. I remember the Charlie Brown statues they had on the tiny windows (this was in the basement of a Polish Catholic church). All of that at age four.
There are other memories, including my first crush (on a girl named Jamie when I was in Kindergarten), a moment where I confused one lady for my mom (similar hair styles was the reason) at Sunday School, other sporradic stuff. Even after all the pot I've smoked since I was a teenager, I still remember all that stuff. Guess I have a decent memory.
We, the US of A, were the first to land people on the moon. We shouldn't have stopped going. And now, the technology used to take us there in the first place is the near equivalent to a pocket calculator. Why the hell aren't we going back?
There are plenty of reasons. Political BS, as Congressfolk just want to line their own pockets. Bumblin' Dubyah and his wannabe wars on Terrorism (not terror, can't have a war against an emotion) and his "you tried to kill my daddy" vendetta with Saddam. Economic breakdown in the wake of Enron and company (BTW, Bushie and Cheney have their hands in that, too). Lack of interest in the Space Program (thanks to all of the above, it can't get any press).
You conspiracy theroy nuts can go to hell. We went. We have the capability to go, stay, and colonize whether you want to believe it or not. That's what we should be doing: spearheading an international effort to get to the moon and establish a permanent human presence there. Once we get there, then we can worry about Mars.
Launching to Mars from the Moon would be cheaper, since the force needed to break the moon's gravity is alot less. The benefits of sitting on the moon extend to the "collision asteroid" alarmists, since we could watch for them from a nifty vantage point. With the ISS as a jump-off point, missions to the moon would go alot smoother (in theory, anyway) than the Apollo missions went.
This is going to sound totally chichè, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the moon is someplace we should be.
Corporations exist to make and process money, in order to return value to their shareholders and/or investor
This isn't always true. Alot of corporations could give a hoot less about what their shareholders think. They're in it to stuff their own pockets and get out as fast as they can.
Can you say Enron? Sure, I knew you could.
Some companies do this different from the accounting fraud used at Enron. Microsoft pays it's lower level employees in stock options, using it as a huge tax break for the higher level execs. How else do you think Billy Boy got his mountain of money, and the company got it's $40 billion cash surplus?
You're probably right about Sony in this case. But in all cases, it's about stuffing pockets. Just wanted to point out a few different methods.
The question was answered in the second paragraph of the article:
The Raelians, a religious cult based in Quebec
They're from Quebec. Obviously, they're crazy. Those people can't even answer a simple oui or non question, let alone clone a human. Next story, please...
What the suits don't realize is that if a person can hear something, they can rip it. The only way they can turely stop piracy is to totally silence music, period. And that just won't happen. If someone wants to circumvent copy protection, they will. It doesn't take that much effort. DRM is a lost cause when it comes to music.
There's nothing to stop someone from hearing a song on the radio and copying it onto a tape or in digital form short of shutting down radio. There's nothing they can do about someone plugging their TV into their computer and copying stuff from DMX or a similar service. Short of sending a "copyright babysitter" into each and every home to monitor every aspect of listening, they can't stop it.
They can install all sorts of DRM equipment into new computers and such, but that still doesn't put a stopgap into older equipment. Technology has given us control of how we get our media intake. And that scares the piss out of the suits. And if they try to curb technology, we'll only go a step backward to fix that problem.
To the RIAA/MPAA: Give it up. You're fighting a hopeless battle. Try lowering the price of a CD and maybe we'll stop pirating. We all know how much it takes to make a CD, there's no pulling the wool over our eyes anymore. Do yourselves a favor and treat your customers the way you should.
'Round here, I've taken to convincing my parents to sit down and watch "The Fellowship of the Ring" (which they're finally doing as I type this). The rest of the time, I'm sitting around, watching TV and chatting online. Nothing different from any other day, really. And the rest of the time will most likely be spent with my nose in my new Crichton novel, "Prey."
For New Years, my band (Tempered Edge, website coming soon) will be playing a party at my Fire Hall, which should be fun. My first time on stage in over 2 years, a place I've missed since my days with my roommate's band in Pittsburgh...
Upon looking at the screenshots, I found one good thing about Xpde: No nasty green, nausea-inducing start button. If they're going to go forward with this, I hope they keep that regular start button standard.
Personally, I'm fond of KDE-3's default look, with backgrounds from Digital Blasphemy.
...the MPAA for the same award. They're just as guilty as thier friends in the RIAA. In fact, I think it should be a co-nomination. Given this co-nomination, they should also get a new name: The EMCAA - Evil Media Corporations Association of America.
An idea for the trophy: I've seen novelty gift catalogs that have what's called the "Horse's Ass" award, and the trophy is exactly that: The backside of a horse. For wanting to hack our machines and launch DoS attacks against us, they deserve nothing less.
...still don't solve the problem of Stupid People.
And besides, what about all of the non-Smart Guns already out there? There are hundreds of millions of these things! People who want weapons will only avoid the Smart Guns and go for the older, "not-so-smart" guns that have been available since our country got its start. Forget all the back and forth hoohaa about "will it crash/malfunction/generally fuck up" when in a crunch situation. It's the old weapons you have to worry about. And there's no way people are going to give up their guns in order to have them made "smart." This idea is doomed to fail before the ink on the bill gets a chance to dry.
As a responsible gun owner, but not an NRA-crazed Hestonite, I have to give this the thumbs down. I have the right to protect life, liberty and property, not to mention I carry the permit to proove it. If I have a gun pointed at me in a hostile act, I want a reliable weapon to defend myself with. "Smart" guns that have the potential to fuck up and not fire will most likely lead to me being on the recieving end of a bullet instead of the sending end. I'd rather keep the number of holes in my body to that which my DNA perscribed...
There's no doubt about it. LotR, when the final chapter closes next year, will be one of the greatest success storys in Cinema history. Period. Apart from the garunteed fame at becoming "The Trilogy that was 'impossible' to make" and made in astounding style (ain't technology grand?), it stands as one of the greatest box office triumphs of all time.
The three LotR films were made simultaniously, then post-produced in the year prior to each film's release. The total cost, in the end, will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Remember years ago when Kevin Costner spent $100 million on Lemonworld? We all know how that turned out. It was considered crazy to give a movie that kind of price tag. Now, here we have three movies at that cost each.
And Peter Jackson hit a god-damned out of the park grand slam. Fellowship's worldwide take since it's release? Over $800 million. Say what you will about film companies and what they do with their money. But $800 million? That paid for all three movies, enough to make three MORE movies, with room to make at least one more (two if they held it to the $100 million average as closely as possible).
One movie did that.
Now, here we are, not even a week into Two Tower's first run. What the hell is this one going to make? By alot of accounts (including my own), Towers is better then Fellowship in many respects. The story becomes darker, and there's plenty more action. And that, scarily enough, will get bigger in Return of the King with the Battle of Pelennor Fields.
Now translate that into dollars. If TTT hits even half of FotR, it will be a box office haul and a half. Plus, you have RotK comingnext year. Fellowship said "hello", TTT said "look at me", and RotK will say "find out how this whole mess ends."
The math is simple. The result? Bucks. What they do with said bucks is questionable, yes. But they made out like bandits. And it's not over yet. The movie they said could never be made has been made, and it's laughing all the way to box office history...
No-brainer, here. Companies, instead of trying to find ways to make lives better/easier, are now focused on trying to sell you something. That simple. Innovation has taken a backseat to profit margins, patent mongering, and pop culture. Innovation just isn't as important to them anymore. If they can't make a quick million or 10 off of an idea, it gets the boot.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. When Microsoft took over fastcounter (where my web counters are, now part of bCentral), they decided that they didn't want it to work with certain browsers. When I tried to access my counter stats in Konquerer, it wouldn't even let he hit the button to log in. I had to boot into Windows and use Opera (which can identify itself as IE) to get at it. That's a likely scenario.
The last version of Media Player I installed was 7. It too had the option to not make it the default player for certain file types. And guess what: It stole them anyway.
Codecs, players, it doesn't matter. What's at issue is proprietary software, and M$'s use of it.
And as for leaving the country, that is only if DRM/DMCA/CBDTPA measures are fully enacted. I firmly believe in fair use, and these three things take that away. I would gladly move to a country that still upholds fair use rights in lieu of avoiding these three things, of which Microsoft has declared itself the #1 Champion of.
Have you read this? While it is purely speculative fiction, it does seem to be the direction we're heading in.
*sits back, waits to be called paranoid*
Yep, NIMBY. Not In My Back Yard. The whole reason I use Linux at all is to get away from The Machine. I don't want M$ branded crap bundled in with the next distro I pick up.
I'm gonna venture a guess here, and I'll probably get modded down to the 10th level of hell for it, but here goes. My guess is that, since M$ knows it can't directly attack Linux and the GPL, it figures it'll go along with it, then tear it apart from within. Get inside the game, then start picking it apart. Since they'll more than likely want the source of their apps closed, we won't really know what's going on with it while it's running.
If the current Media Player is any suggestion, it won't be good. Media Player theives all file associations, making you go back in and change them back to the way you had them before you installed it. And who knows to what extent this DRM crap will get to. Would they go so far as to disable anything they don't find "trustworthy" in the Palladium model? Knocking out XMMS, MPTV, and locating and disabling the open OGG format's plugins?
The real problem lies in the obvious. Noone but M$ knows. And you know what they say, Knowledge is Power. Right now, M$ is holding alot (but not all) of the cards. Honsestly, if this gets any worse, I'm more than willing to move outside of the country I love, just to get away from Micro$oft. Extreme, yes. But I enjoy my personal rights and freedoms too much to have them yanked away by the likes of M$, the RIAA and the MPAA...
Ages 15-22: Years spent being a dog and gettling lots of nookie from numerous ladies.
Ages 23 and beyond: Years spent religiously reading Slashdot.
No study...
And somewhere, echoing through the mountains of Norway, the Hallilujia Chorus is heard...
Score one for the good guys. This counts as a big win for Linux users, as we now have a case to cite. While that might not mean much here in the United States, it is a shininhg example that not all circumvention software is intended for use in pirating.
It also marks a major slap in the face for the MPAA, who needs one at the moment. They've been throwing their weight around too much the last few years, and it's about time they got put in their place. Now, all we need is a similar precident here in the US, and our rights to do what we want (privately, of course) with things that we buy will be ever the slightest bit safer.
I happen to have the DeCSS code (and no, I won't send it along, so don't ask). I haven't compiled it yet. I kept it around in the event that my DVD ROM would go to hell (which it did), so that I could boot into Linux and simply watch my DVDs. I wasn't going to rip them, burn them and ship them off to my friends. I was just going to watch them. Now, I happened upon a DVD player for free, so I really don't need it at the moment. It's just nice to have around, just in case.
Now, I like the idea of a library putting out it's books on the internet, and I agree with the lock out date. If you go and check out a physical book, they stamp a return date on the back in the card pocket. Same general idea.
But, there are a few flaws. One, how long will the readable period be? Most libraries I've dealt with have a two week check out period. That's more than enough time to read a decent sized novel (such as one by Crichton, my favorite author, BTW). Will the lockout date correspond to their checkout period? Or will it be shortened in ebook form to prevent piracy?
And while I'm on the subject of piracy, there's a way that all ebooks can fail in their attempts to curb it. Let's say a guy with alot of free time, hard drive space and patience decides to download an ebook. He can't crack the encryption, can't copy the text directly. But what about screenshots? What's to stop him from hitting Alt+PrScr for each page and pasting them into a run of the mill image? He could then create a PDF, HTML or other collection of files and redistribute the book freely.
Is there a charge for these downloads? Then you get into the issue of fair use of something you've purchased. Libraries usually don't charge for check outs (at least not in my experience), and since this ebook model seems to work much the same way, I don't see the need to charge. The only charges I know of for libraries is overdue fees, which are more than reasonable.
And, is there a limit on how many copies can be digitally checked out at one time? If there is, that puts a waiting list into play. If there is a copy limit, then the lock out date makes sense. But let's say a person downloads an ebook and doesn't get the chance to finish it, and there are limited copies. Would they have to wait to download it again? Or could there be a renewal system to extend the lockout a few days to give the reader a chance to finish?
I've never dealt with ebooks, and probably never will (unless they outlaw physical copies). I'm an old school book nut and prefer to have a physical copy when I do my reading (which means I like to pay for my reading enjoyment, thus doing so legally). So, I really don't know if ebook reader programs prevent screenshots or not, or whether there will be charges and such. It seems like a decent idea, but the whole ebook idea is going to be flawed. Just like music (if I can hear it, I can rip/copy it), text will suffer from a similar ailment (if I can see it, I can copy it).
Who wrote that manual?
And where the hell did they hide it? I've been trying to figure out the human race (more specifically, the female of the species) for years. Chicks are always telling me to RTFM, so hurry up and fork that thing over so I can get ahead (bad pun intended) in the world!
Fuck Laos. Who the hell cares about Laos?
How about we wire the remote village of Houtzdale, Pennsylvania for broadband? Or any of the many towns and hamlets throughout the United States that don't have anything but dial-up (or aren't even that lucky thanks to no local servers)? Let's get our own nation connected first. They we'll worry about some third world country that needs online.
And hey, before we do that, let's solve some other problems here at home. Let's get the homeless off the streets so we can give them internet access. Let's stop hunger within our borders, so that kids can have something to snack on when we give them internet access. After we've taken care of OUR problems first, THEN we can worry about other little countries and their problems.
We've gotta get our own act together, first, people. We need to take care of our own. Then and only then should we try and help those less fortunate around the world. Chances are they've been suffering for decades. They can wait another year or two, they'll still be there.
Hard to believe that one of these guys came from Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Our county (Clearfield, no less) is proud to have contributed a member of this team!
The day after the Internet was born is also a red letter date in the online world. It brought with it the following historical firsts:
The First Blog.
The First Troll
The Basic Concept of goatse.cx was allowed to begin forming.
A Synapse in Rob Malda's head fired, marking the beginnings of what would become Slashdot.
The First Pirate dipped his toe into brave new waters.
The First Internet Download Queen, Billie Jean King, was crowned.
The Fires of Mount St. Helens rumbled in faraway Washington, signaling the rise of the Dark Lord Gates and the writing of the One OS
Al Gore said that the second day of his greatest invention was going very well.
The birth of the first newsgroup, alt.news.cultureclub (hey, it was the 80's!)
The First "Stephen King, Dead at 35" Post
One year later, George Orwell, You Do The Math
Happy New Year, everyone. May your night be moderated +1(Kickass)
So, that means you'ld rather do the Latin Hustle to... which Backstreat Boys song did you say? And with the Tai Chi robot? Interesting choice of music and partners...
Program them to do all those insipid line dances such as the Macarena, Boot Scoot, Electric Slide, etc. Then have a group of them do the dances on international television so the wole world can watch and see how truely stupid they are.
Conversely, they could be programed to do traditional dances from many cultures and preserve these art forms in an extremely interesting way.
Some kid in 2140 wants to know how to do the Latin Hustle? Out comes the Tai-Bot and shows them how. Even play an OGG recording of K.C. And the Shunshine Band at the same time.
I was 9 years old when the Challenger disaster occoured. I look at it as one of those "Where were you when" events you listed above. Even though that's a cloudy time in my life (blame the pot if you want), that moment sticks in my head like my earlier post about a dream.
At the exact moment the Challenger exploded, none of us kids knew what was going on. We were oblivious to the day being anything but normal, sitting in lunch. It was pizzeria day, with green beans and one of those "something suspended in gelatine" deals. It was the year they finally gave us a choice with chocolate milk versus white milk (and the first year I had to wear glasses on a permanent basis). Yep, an exact memory of the menu we had that day, even though I packed my lunch that day. Imagine that.
Before we could all finish, our teacher (who was a lunch monitor on the other side of the cafeteria) Mrs. Kitchen said for all of us to take our trays (or in my case, paper bag) to the trash cans. We had no clue why, as none of us were finished. We took our stuff up to the cans (there were three for a lunch room of about 200 kids) in one large mass instead of in orderly lines like usual, and I remember sticking a pudding cup and spoon I had in my hoodie pocket. There was no way I was tossing that. After we had done that, we were quickly lined up as usual and filed out of the cafeteria in order of grade. Since there was a split lunch period (early for 1-3 (I was in grade 2), later for 4-6), it went from 3 to 1.
By this point, noone had told us why.
Mrs. Kitchen led us back to our classroom, where we first noticed the worried look on her face. She began to fiddle with the TV (being an underfunded small-town school, we had crappy boob tubes), bitching at it to warm up and give us a picture. She tuned it to CBS (channel 10 here at the time), and what we saw took a minute or two to digest. There was the cloud of smoke and two smokey serpents emerging from it as they hung in the sky, what was left of the Shuttle Challenger and her crew. After a few minutes of Dan Rather saying what had happened and how horrible a tragedy it was, they finally showed the full replay from liftoff to the final "go for throttle up" message. By then, we were all in complete shock. We watched as the Shuttle exploded in a huge ball of fire, and close-up, no less.
Now granted, at 9 years old, a kid most likely has a pretty good memory structure in place, so it's no surprise that I remember that. But to have such detail fused into your head and be able to recall it plain as day 16 years later is pretty remarkable. To be able to remember the lunch menu, even though I bagged it that day, and to remember the chaos of the lunch room, the shock of the images being shown to us...
When a person's mind is able to comprehend the historical significance of an event and have memories like that, one has to assume that the sheer shock of the whole event has alot to do with the memory process at that moment. Like today's children will remember the horror of 9-11, like my parents still recall the day JFK was shot, and the way my grandfather used to tell me how he remembered the dropping of bombs on Japan in '45 - Events like that bore themselves their own detailed niche in someone's grey matter. And those memories never go away. Everything immediately before, during, and immediately after the event in question is associated right along with it by default, letting you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when the event happened.
I'm no neurological scientist (I'm a humble digital designer), so that's the best I can come up with. Anyone have any other thoughts on the matter?
While I'm at it, I might as well recount where I was when 9-11 hit. When the first tower was hit, I was walking out the door to go down to my car and head to a job interview. By the time all the planes had run their courses, I was arriving at the interview. When I walked in, my then would-be boss came in and simply said he'd heard that a plane went down near the Pentagon. Nothing unusual, I thought, since accidents do happen, and a few nuts had crashed planes near government buildings before. The interview went fine, and I got the job. I was driving home, jamming out to some Classic Rock tunes on the CD player (I do remember hearing Pink Floyd's "Money" in there somewhere), and didn't give a second thought to the news that my boss had given me.
When I walked in the front door of my house, my Mom was as white as a ghost, and had the door open before I was even on the front porch. "Eric," she said, "you know the World Trade Towers?" "Yeah Mom, what about them?" "Eric, they're gone." "Say that again?" "They're gone." From there, I was glued to the Fox News Channel for the next few days, not to mention extremely pissed off. Any details of the rest of that day were forever lost to that anger. I was more concerned with wanting heads to roll than I was remembering petty details about my own life.
I can remember a dream I had when I was 5. You see, for some reason, it was Christmas in mid-summer. Santa was parachuting presents from his sleigh. I had managed to gather up quite a pile, and when I looked to my left, there was this curious little talking treestump. Yep, talking treestump. Nothing Ent-like, about 2 foot high with your standard blackened holes for an eyes and a mouth. Anyway, I asked it if it wanted to see my goodie stash, and it said "Yeah yeah yeah yeah" really quickly. I started to run to the pile (which I remember was in my Grandmother's yard next door) and that's all. Nothing else comes to mind about the dream, but for some reason, I can replay it perfectly in my head 20 years later.
I have memories of being in Playschool (before there was Headstart), desk hopping with my friend Jim (that was how I met him). Then there were the sit and spins my buddy Charlie and I always played with there. Me doing a maze thing and Adelle (Charlies mom and our teacher's assistant) telling me I was touching the lines. I remember the Charlie Brown statues they had on the tiny windows (this was in the basement of a Polish Catholic church). All of that at age four.
There are other memories, including my first crush (on a girl named Jamie when I was in Kindergarten), a moment where I confused one lady for my mom (similar hair styles was the reason) at Sunday School, other sporradic stuff. Even after all the pot I've smoked since I was a teenager, I still remember all that stuff. Guess I have a decent memory.
We, the US of A, were the first to land people on the moon. We shouldn't have stopped going. And now, the technology used to take us there in the first place is the near equivalent to a pocket calculator. Why the hell aren't we going back?
There are plenty of reasons. Political BS, as Congressfolk just want to line their own pockets. Bumblin' Dubyah and his wannabe wars on Terrorism (not terror, can't have a war against an emotion) and his "you tried to kill my daddy" vendetta with Saddam. Economic breakdown in the wake of Enron and company (BTW, Bushie and Cheney have their hands in that, too). Lack of interest in the Space Program (thanks to all of the above, it can't get any press).
You conspiracy theroy nuts can go to hell. We went. We have the capability to go, stay, and colonize whether you want to believe it or not. That's what we should be doing: spearheading an international effort to get to the moon and establish a permanent human presence there. Once we get there, then we can worry about Mars.
Launching to Mars from the Moon would be cheaper, since the force needed to break the moon's gravity is alot less. The benefits of sitting on the moon extend to the "collision asteroid" alarmists, since we could watch for them from a nifty vantage point. With the ISS as a jump-off point, missions to the moon would go alot smoother (in theory, anyway) than the Apollo missions went.
This is going to sound totally chichè, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the moon is someplace we should be.
Corporations exist to make and process money, in order to return value to their shareholders and/or investor
This isn't always true. Alot of corporations could give a hoot less about what their shareholders think. They're in it to stuff their own pockets and get out as fast as they can.
Can you say Enron? Sure, I knew you could.
Some companies do this different from the accounting fraud used at Enron. Microsoft pays it's lower level employees in stock options, using it as a huge tax break for the higher level execs. How else do you think Billy Boy got his mountain of money, and the company got it's $40 billion cash surplus?
You're probably right about Sony in this case. But in all cases, it's about stuffing pockets. Just wanted to point out a few different methods.
The question was answered in the second paragraph of the article:
The Raelians, a religious cult based in Quebec
They're from Quebec. Obviously, they're crazy. Those people can't even answer a simple oui or non question, let alone clone a human. Next story, please...
What the suits don't realize is that if a person can hear something, they can rip it. The only way they can turely stop piracy is to totally silence music, period. And that just won't happen. If someone wants to circumvent copy protection, they will. It doesn't take that much effort. DRM is a lost cause when it comes to music.
There's nothing to stop someone from hearing a song on the radio and copying it onto a tape or in digital form short of shutting down radio. There's nothing they can do about someone plugging their TV into their computer and copying stuff from DMX or a similar service. Short of sending a "copyright babysitter" into each and every home to monitor every aspect of listening, they can't stop it.
They can install all sorts of DRM equipment into new computers and such, but that still doesn't put a stopgap into older equipment. Technology has given us control of how we get our media intake. And that scares the piss out of the suits. And if they try to curb technology, we'll only go a step backward to fix that problem.
To the RIAA/MPAA: Give it up. You're fighting a hopeless battle. Try lowering the price of a CD and maybe we'll stop pirating. We all know how much it takes to make a CD, there's no pulling the wool over our eyes anymore. Do yourselves a favor and treat your customers the way you should.
'Round here, I've taken to convincing my parents to sit down and watch "The Fellowship of the Ring" (which they're finally doing as I type this). The rest of the time, I'm sitting around, watching TV and chatting online. Nothing different from any other day, really. And the rest of the time will most likely be spent with my nose in my new Crichton novel, "Prey."
For New Years, my band (Tempered Edge, website coming soon) will be playing a party at my Fire Hall, which should be fun. My first time on stage in over 2 years, a place I've missed since my days with my roommate's band in Pittsburgh...
Upon looking at the screenshots, I found one good thing about Xpde: No nasty green, nausea-inducing start button. If they're going to go forward with this, I hope they keep that regular start button standard.
Personally, I'm fond of KDE-3's default look, with backgrounds from Digital Blasphemy.
...is Slashdotting your brother on Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good mug of your favorite brewski!
...the MPAA for the same award. They're just as guilty as thier friends in the RIAA. In fact, I think it should be a co-nomination. Given this co-nomination, they should also get a new name: The EMCAA - Evil Media Corporations Association of America.
An idea for the trophy: I've seen novelty gift catalogs that have what's called the "Horse's Ass" award, and the trophy is exactly that: The backside of a horse. For wanting to hack our machines and launch DoS attacks against us, they deserve nothing less.
...still don't solve the problem of Stupid People.
And besides, what about all of the non-Smart Guns already out there? There are hundreds of millions of these things! People who want weapons will only avoid the Smart Guns and go for the older, "not-so-smart" guns that have been available since our country got its start. Forget all the back and forth hoohaa about "will it crash/malfunction/generally fuck up" when in a crunch situation. It's the old weapons you have to worry about. And there's no way people are going to give up their guns in order to have them made "smart." This idea is doomed to fail before the ink on the bill gets a chance to dry.
As a responsible gun owner, but not an NRA-crazed Hestonite, I have to give this the thumbs down. I have the right to protect life, liberty and property, not to mention I carry the permit to proove it. If I have a gun pointed at me in a hostile act, I want a reliable weapon to defend myself with. "Smart" guns that have the potential to fuck up and not fire will most likely lead to me being on the recieving end of a bullet instead of the sending end. I'd rather keep the number of holes in my body to that which my DNA perscribed...
There's no doubt about it. LotR, when the final chapter closes next year, will be one of the greatest success storys in Cinema history. Period. Apart from the garunteed fame at becoming "The Trilogy that was 'impossible' to make" and made in astounding style (ain't technology grand?), it stands as one of the greatest box office triumphs of all time.
The three LotR films were made simultaniously, then post-produced in the year prior to each film's release. The total cost, in the end, will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Remember years ago when Kevin Costner spent $100 million on Lemonworld? We all know how that turned out. It was considered crazy to give a movie that kind of price tag. Now, here we have three movies at that cost each.
And Peter Jackson hit a god-damned out of the park grand slam. Fellowship's worldwide take since it's release? Over $800 million. Say what you will about film companies and what they do with their money. But $800 million? That paid for all three movies, enough to make three MORE movies, with room to make at least one more (two if they held it to the $100 million average as closely as possible).
One movie did that.
Now, here we are, not even a week into Two Tower's first run. What the hell is this one going to make? By alot of accounts (including my own), Towers is better then Fellowship in many respects. The story becomes darker, and there's plenty more action. And that, scarily enough, will get bigger in Return of the King with the Battle of Pelennor Fields.
Now translate that into dollars. If TTT hits even half of FotR, it will be a box office haul and a half. Plus, you have RotK comingnext year. Fellowship said "hello", TTT said "look at me", and RotK will say "find out how this whole mess ends."
The math is simple. The result? Bucks. What they do with said bucks is questionable, yes. But they made out like bandits. And it's not over yet. The movie they said could never be made has been made, and it's laughing all the way to box office history...
And hey, all you LotR fans. Got a link for ya. Check out The Encyclopedia of Arda. If this site had the , boy could we have fun!
No-brainer, here. Companies, instead of trying to find ways to make lives better/easier, are now focused on trying to sell you something. That simple. Innovation has taken a backseat to profit margins, patent mongering, and pop culture. Innovation just isn't as important to them anymore. If they can't make a quick million or 10 off of an idea, it gets the boot.