The issue here isn't that there's technology that can take your picture without you knowing - no, that technology has been around for the best part of a century, the issue today is that the peasant masses now have access to that technology! Its like giving caveman lighters - they could make fire before, but now they're all gonna be burning down everything in sight! I think governments have to face facts: cameras are not going to go away, forcing them to flash or make noise is going to last as long as one of the commoners discovers that you can put your finger over the flash or speaker, or break it. The thing is, most people don't intend to do anything wrong with their cameras, they have loads of great uses and anyone who does want to do something dodgy is just going to do it anyway, like they have done for years. The greatest privacy issue with camera phones isnt that people have cameras, its that there are situations when you say "i wish i had a camera" and now you do.
I think TiVo are really just covering their asses on this one. Its not exactly intrusive if its just a banner and it will go away as soon as you stop fast-forwarding. I think stations should conspire together to cut the number of hours of advertising - people don't like being constantly interrupted and the laws of supply and demand say that each advert slot will become more valuable if there are less of them, and each advert will have more of an impact if its less drowned out by all the others - so a total net gain for everyone except the advertising companies (but who gives a shit about them?).
On UK terrestrial stations (atleast) theres a break every 15 minutes and in films usually more like one every 30mins, if they tried to push that futher people would do their nut. No-one wants to be constantly bombarded with the same adverts or things that have no interest to them, now the real smart thing TiVo could do is work with stations and get them to allow TiVo to play its own adverts during breaks instead - these would be specially selected to each viewers tastes, would have the 'thumbs up/down' option so people could give their opinion, they wouldn't repeat so much, and they'd make it easy for further interactions - eg instantly buying it (does the one-click patent cover that? oh well) finding out more, or texting the user when they happen to wander near that shop (if they said they were interested) etc. TiVo could even get away with say locking out the skip button for atleast 5 seconds in each advert as long as the user feels that they are being treated well and their input taken - if the user thumbs-down an advert then theres no business reason to waste money trying to show it to them another 15 times! Obviously various people get their cuts including TiVo, the entry level for advertising even on major stations would be low because you could for example, buy only 100 viewers instead of 1000's. everyone is happy, including the advertisers and the stations, and the viewers!
Does anyone remember when Stargate basically consisted of going to a new planet, meeting the locals, discovering something, getting in trouble, getting out of trouble, going home? This is basically the formula for most almost every Star Trek, X-Files, Farscape, Red Dwarf, (WTF is Atlantis?), Quantum Leap episode and anything else out there. Its a great formula and has worked for 50 years! I wish they wouldnt fuck with it because no-one wants to see some stretched-out mushy finding-myself in my muse narrative to-be-continued series of crap where half the characters get so bored they leave and are replaced by people who just cant live up to the memory of the original cast. Writers: if your actors leave because they hate the direction the show is going in, then its probably a good sign that the viewers will be hating it too. I loved all these series because they had a predictable but rich formula and a set of characters that everyone grew up with, every week it was nice to sit down and know that whatever else was happening in the world, Mulder and Scully would be on to some strange new case and would do exactly the same things they always did, it never got old. Although at some point you are going to run out of stuff, its better to just cut the production in half and keep turning out good stuff than to just force it and piss the cast off with poor plots.
OOP was ment to let people program like they think but people never really bothered with it. With object inheritence you can layer everything right down to the simplest easy-to-program interface without a performance hit. The problem is people think messy and that leads to bad code. Even worse, people don't even think tidy enough to modularise/class/layer anything so you have bad code with no structure (good structure with bad code is ok because you can just swap out bad modules/functions with good ones). I think PHP has come far as a natural language and its managed to not be too slow and bloated. C++ with C is also good because you can skip the bullshit for most things (eg string = string + string + number) and when you have a tight loop or bottleneck you can use C to optimise it with some hackery. Do you really need anything else?
Don't just write to your senator, write to them continously. Ask them if they really love you and your country, ask them what was the last thing they did for you - what was the last law they past that was on 'your' side. Tell them that it would be nice once in a while if they called or wrote to you instead of you having to do it all the time. Tell them you don't appreciate being used and abused like this, explain that the little whore corporate lobbyist they are seeing is just after their power and that you will lobby twice as hard for all your friends to vote for someone else. If these cockroaches are taking bribes or doing special favours then you need to make damn sure you and all you're friends give them the bitch treatment, if you're not sure what to write, you'll need to find someone who knows how its done;)
Firstly you can't argue with free. Most people arn't going to pay for a browser unless its hidden in the cost of the OS/PC (never paid for Opera but hey;). Granted the Opera team are working hard but Firefox already has a large base of people writing extensions which is where the features are. Now follow my warped logic here: The war used to be between IE and Netscape (Opera never got a peek). Firefox is Netscapes younger brother, from the same Mozilla code, it is born out of the ashes of the battle of Netscape and rises like a *cough* bird to conqure the beast of IE.
Ok forget that, In the real world, marketing is the most important aspect of software popularity and Firefox is winning here because there is an army of geeks getting everyone and their dog to switch to Firefox so they don't get called out at night to fix someones computer thats been screwed up by IE, Firefox is the hot ticket this year, even the main-stream media is on it, its getting a publicity blitz and most people are only going to switch browsers once.
I switched to Opera back in 2000 and never looked back at IE. But this year I switched to Firefox, technically, Opera is actually the better browser right now, it feels faster, and more stable, has more built-in features, a nicer interface and is generally just a more mature program. I just saw Firefox as being the way to go though - its getting better and better and people are more likely to jump from IE to Firefox because its really a drop-in replacement - it looks so similar to IE most people won't notice the difference, (apart from the sudden lack of annoying adware).
"OK Guys, the top brass are comming down next week, they are going to cancel our funding unless we show them something pretty dope! Ok, call Boeing, ask them if we can get a 747 nose, that way we can atleast make it look like it will fly, next we need to hide those big fat power cables. We can make up for the fact that our laser does jack shit by making it purple, fire for only 1/1000 of a second and turn some of this photo-sensitive cardbord black. Lets see if we can get another 4 years of money for this bullshit"
Most offices aren't very secure, often anyone can get into your company's building just by finding a simple door code (watch someone type it or look the worn out buttons), pretending to be delivering something or just quickly flashing a random ID card at the security guard. Therefore, if offices aren't secure, software doesn't need to be.
That's fine with me, as long as these absolutely ridiculous and draconian prison terms are dropped. 5-10 years? for fucks sake you could be filming yourself raping someone and get less time! If you have camera detection then you certainly don't need any sort of sentence for people who try and get cameras in. BTW didn't the Thunderbirds have a camera detector?
or what you're screwing! can we stick to the donkey metaphor please?: 15 donkeys, all blind-folded and you in the middle wondering which one will jump you first.
Let me put it simply: 1 person having unprotected sex with 1 donkey = no problem. 100 people (some of who may have an STD) sharing eachothers donkeys without protection = not good.
You're using the old Apple argument there - If no-one else is getting jolly with a donkey then obviously there will be little risk of disease, but when everyone starts doing it, STDs start appearing at an alarming rate - same with IE, with so many people using it, and its infamous Microsoft lack of security its like everyone sharing everyone elses donkey!
Knowning Microsofts take on DRM im sure this will be a brilliant advance on current PVRs: Won't let you skip adverts, will only let you record selected programs, will delete recordings after 3 days or less, won't let you give recordings to anyone else or take them off the unit, and will phone home to give your viewing habbits to the FBI for analysis in the War on Terror(r).
If they want to ban customers then let them, it won't stop the other 80% from shopping there! If consumers are ever going to get rights they need to become a union - a company doesn't care if a small disorganised group of people takes their business somewhere else, but they do care if a massive organised mass of customers all stick together and absolutely refuse to shop somewhere, but that doesn't happen because people don't care, they just want some cheap stuff. I noticed this the other day, I was shopping with the lady:P who won't go to M&S because they support Israeli occupation (ok lets not start a flame) so we're in a shop and im looking at something overpriced that looks like it was sewn together by an 8 year old and i see the label 'Made in Guatemala' I look at some top next to it 'Made in Cambodia' and another 'Made in China' - To put a long story short, every single clothes shop in Oxford Street is full of the most expensive cheap-labour produce in the country and she didn't care, people can be fickle - they will try and boycott something, but if there's a deal in it, all too often they will give up. Im just as bad, I hate MS, but I sure as hell ain't gonna piss about trying to get things running in Linux. I hate Starbucks, but when there's nowhere else to go i'll pay for a cup of bad coffee what i usually pay for a big bag of nice beans, and have somewhere dirty to sit, and even though it pains me to give money to O2 and Tiscali, I still do, because I am a consumer whore and you all are too! So, what we should do, instead of boycotting companies, is to tell their competitors exactly how bad they are (if you can give them something they could pass on to the press that would be great) and how much you want them to come and open up their shop instead and how many of your friends would dump Best Buy in a second if someone else made decent deals.
I would have thought the reason why disk-based memory is cheaper per mb than electronic-based memory is actually because of economics, not technology - if disks had never caught on and instead people used various types of RAM for un-powered storage then that would have more mass-production and would get to the point where it was just as cheap as hard-drives are. Remember only a decade ago a 512 mb hard-drive would have cost you an arm and a leg, but today 512 mb of RAM is far cheaper! Hopefully very soon, moving parts will die out in most PCs and data will be exchanged online or direct by wireless or USB memory or by one of those really old CD-RW things as a last resort... im just glad floppies are dead.
Hands up all geeks who would like to leave their well-earning tech job, friends, family, girlfriend/wife, Quake and decent INTERNET connection to go work in a random country with no re-spawn points, a crappy salary and bullets flying at you from both sides?
"You will give your rifle a girls name, because this is the only pussy you are gonna get!"
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The issue here isn't that there's technology that can take your picture without you knowing - no, that technology has been around for the best part of a century, the issue today is that the peasant masses now have access to that technology! Its like giving caveman lighters - they could make fire before, but now they're all gonna be burning down everything in sight! I think governments have to face facts: cameras are not going to go away, forcing them to flash or make noise is going to last as long as one of the commoners discovers that you can put your finger over the flash or speaker, or break it. The thing is, most people don't intend to do anything wrong with their cameras, they have loads of great uses and anyone who does want to do something dodgy is just going to do it anyway, like they have done for years. The greatest privacy issue with camera phones isnt that people have cameras, its that there are situations when you say "i wish i had a camera" and now you do.
So wait, doing this causes SUVs to sink into the ground along with anoying mum and kids??? where do I sign??
I think TiVo are really just covering their asses on this one. Its not exactly intrusive if its just a banner and it will go away as soon as you stop fast-forwarding. I think stations should conspire together to cut the number of hours of advertising - people don't like being constantly interrupted and the laws of supply and demand say that each advert slot will become more valuable if there are less of them, and each advert will have more of an impact if its less drowned out by all the others - so a total net gain for everyone except the advertising companies (but who gives a shit about them?).
On UK terrestrial stations (atleast) theres a break every 15 minutes and in films usually more like one every 30mins, if they tried to push that futher people would do their nut. No-one wants to be constantly bombarded with the same adverts or things that have no interest to them, now the real smart thing TiVo could do is work with stations and get them to allow TiVo to play its own adverts during breaks instead - these would be specially selected to each viewers tastes, would have the 'thumbs up/down' option so people could give their opinion, they wouldn't repeat so much, and they'd make it easy for further interactions - eg instantly buying it (does the one-click patent cover that? oh well) finding out more, or texting the user when they happen to wander near that shop (if they said they were interested) etc. TiVo could even get away with say locking out the skip button for atleast 5 seconds in each advert as long as the user feels that they are being treated well and their input taken - if the user thumbs-down an advert then theres no business reason to waste money trying to show it to them another 15 times! Obviously various people get their cuts including TiVo, the entry level for advertising even on major stations would be low because you could for example, buy only 100 viewers instead of 1000's. everyone is happy, including the advertisers and the stations, and the viewers!
Does anyone remember when Stargate basically consisted of going to a new planet, meeting the locals, discovering something, getting in trouble, getting out of trouble, going home? This is basically the formula for most almost every Star Trek, X-Files, Farscape, Red Dwarf, (WTF is Atlantis?), Quantum Leap episode and anything else out there. Its a great formula and has worked for 50 years! I wish they wouldnt fuck with it because no-one wants to see some stretched-out mushy finding-myself in my muse narrative to-be-continued series of crap where half the characters get so bored they leave and are replaced by people who just cant live up to the memory of the original cast. Writers: if your actors leave because they hate the direction the show is going in, then its probably a good sign that the viewers will be hating it too. I loved all these series because they had a predictable but rich formula and a set of characters that everyone grew up with, every week it was nice to sit down and know that whatever else was happening in the world, Mulder and Scully would be on to some strange new case and would do exactly the same things they always did, it never got old.
Although at some point you are going to run out of stuff, its better to just cut the production in half and keep turning out good stuff than to just force it and piss the cast off with poor plots.
OOP was ment to let people program like they think but people never really bothered with it. With object inheritence you can layer everything right down to the simplest easy-to-program interface without a performance hit. The problem is people think messy and that leads to bad code. Even worse, people don't even think tidy enough to modularise/class/layer anything so you have bad code with no structure (good structure with bad code is ok because you can just swap out bad modules/functions with good ones). I think PHP has come far as a natural language and its managed to not be too slow and bloated. C++ with C is also good because you can skip the bullshit for most things (eg string = string + string + number) and when you have a tight loop or bottleneck you can use C to optimise it with some hackery. Do you really need anything else?
Don't just write to your senator, write to them continously. Ask them if they really love you and your country, ask them what was the last thing they did for you - what was the last law they past that was on 'your' side. Tell them that it would be nice once in a while if they called or wrote to you instead of you having to do it all the time. Tell them you don't appreciate being used and abused like this, explain that the little whore corporate lobbyist they are seeing is just after their power and that you will lobby twice as hard for all your friends to vote for someone else. If these cockroaches are taking bribes or doing special favours then you need to make damn sure you and all you're friends give them the bitch treatment, if you're not sure what to write, you'll need to find someone who knows how its done;)
Firstly you can't argue with free. Most people arn't going to pay for a browser unless its hidden in the cost of the OS/PC (never paid for Opera but hey;). Granted the Opera team are working hard but Firefox already has a large base of people writing extensions which is where the features are. Now follow my warped logic here: The war used to be between IE and Netscape (Opera never got a peek). Firefox is Netscapes younger brother, from the same Mozilla code, it is born out of the ashes of the battle of Netscape and rises like a *cough* bird to conqure the beast of IE.
Ok forget that, In the real world, marketing is the most important aspect of software popularity and Firefox is winning here because there is an army of geeks getting everyone and their dog to switch to Firefox so they don't get called out at night to fix someones computer thats been screwed up by IE, Firefox is the hot ticket this year, even the main-stream media is on it, its getting a publicity blitz and most people are only going to switch browsers once.
I switched to Opera back in 2000 and never looked back at IE. But this year I switched to Firefox, technically, Opera is actually the better browser right now, it feels faster, and more stable, has more built-in features, a nicer interface and is generally just a more mature program. I just saw Firefox as being the way to go though - its getting better and better and people are more likely to jump from IE to Firefox because its really a drop-in replacement - it looks so similar to IE most people won't notice the difference, (apart from the sudden lack of annoying adware).
"OK Guys, the top brass are comming down next week, they are going to cancel our funding unless we show them something pretty dope! Ok, call Boeing, ask them if we can get a 747 nose, that way we can atleast make it look like it will fly, next we need to hide those big fat power cables. We can make up for the fact that our laser does jack shit by making it purple, fire for only 1/1000 of a second and turn some of this photo-sensitive cardbord black. Lets see if we can get another 4 years of money for this bullshit"
Most offices aren't very secure, often anyone can get into your company's building just by finding a simple door code (watch someone type it or look the worn out buttons), pretending to be delivering something or just quickly flashing a random ID card at the security guard. Therefore, if offices aren't secure, software doesn't need to be.
No, but im sure they're working hard to invent such a company for the court.
That's fine with me, as long as these absolutely ridiculous and draconian prison terms are dropped. 5-10 years? for fucks sake you could be filming yourself raping someone and get less time! If you have camera detection then you certainly don't need any sort of sentence for people who try and get cameras in. BTW didn't the Thunderbirds have a camera detector?
What the girls are that ugly these days?
or what you're screwing! can we stick to the donkey metaphor please?: 15 donkeys, all blind-folded and you in the middle wondering which one will jump you first.
Let me put it simply: 1 person having unprotected sex with 1 donkey = no problem. 100 people (some of who may have an STD) sharing eachothers donkeys without protection = not good.
You're using the old Apple argument there - If no-one else is getting jolly with a donkey then obviously there will be little risk of disease, but when everyone starts doing it, STDs start appearing at an alarming rate - same with IE, with so many people using it, and its infamous Microsoft lack of security its like everyone sharing everyone elses donkey!
Can they start teaching in school that using IE is like having un-protected sex with 15 donkeys? or would Microsoft complain?
Knowning Microsofts take on DRM im sure this will be a brilliant advance on current PVRs: Won't let you skip adverts, will only let you record selected programs, will delete recordings after 3 days or less, won't let you give recordings to anyone else or take them off the unit, and will phone home to give your viewing habbits to the FBI for analysis in the War on Terror(r).
All OS 9 installs must be destroyed
If they want to ban customers then let them, it won't stop the other 80% from shopping there! If consumers are ever going to get rights they need to become a union - a company doesn't care if a small disorganised group of people takes their business somewhere else, but they do care if a massive organised mass of customers all stick together and absolutely refuse to shop somewhere, but that doesn't happen because people don't care, they just want some cheap stuff. I noticed this the other day, I was shopping with the lady :P who won't go to M&S because they support Israeli occupation (ok lets not start a flame) so we're in a shop and im looking at something overpriced that looks like it was sewn together by an 8 year old and i see the label 'Made in Guatemala' I look at some top next to it 'Made in Cambodia' and another 'Made in China' - To put a long story short, every single clothes shop in Oxford Street is full of the most expensive cheap-labour produce in the country and she didn't care, people can be fickle - they will try and boycott something, but if there's a deal in it, all too often they will give up. Im just as bad, I hate MS, but I sure as hell ain't gonna piss about trying to get things running in Linux. I hate Starbucks, but when there's nowhere else to go i'll pay for a cup of bad coffee what i usually pay for a big bag of nice beans, and have somewhere dirty to sit, and even though it pains me to give money to O2 and Tiscali, I still do, because I am a consumer whore and you all are too! So, what we should do, instead of boycotting companies, is to tell their competitors exactly how bad they are (if you can give them something they could pass on to the press that would be great) and how much you want them to come and open up their shop instead and how many of your friends would dump Best Buy in a second if someone else made decent deals.
I would have thought the reason why disk-based memory is cheaper per mb than electronic-based memory is actually because of economics, not technology - if disks had never caught on and instead people used various types of RAM for un-powered storage then that would have more mass-production and would get to the point where it was just as cheap as hard-drives are. Remember only a decade ago a 512 mb hard-drive would have cost you an arm and a leg, but today 512 mb of RAM is far cheaper! Hopefully very soon, moving parts will die out in most PCs and data will be exchanged online or direct by wireless or USB memory or by one of those really old CD-RW things as a last resort... im just glad floppies are dead.
Yet again, geeks don't understand the business world: it doesnt need to be true, logical or ethical it just needs to make money.
It has basic packet-networking ability, but incoming packets are often deadly...
Err suicide bots? I wonder if we should tell the terrorist groups that they don't need to kill themselves anymore?.. nah!
Hands up all geeks who would like to leave their well-earning tech job, friends, family, girlfriend/wife, Quake and decent INTERNET connection to go work in a random country with no re-spawn points, a crappy salary and bullets flying at you from both sides?
"You will give your rifle a girls name, because this is the only pussy you are gonna get!"