People shouldn't look at porn in public libraries -- at least, not where there's a significant chance of it disturbing other patrons, including children.
That idea is not incompatible with the view that the federal government has no place policing this. It's not hypocritical to say that something is bad while also thinking the government shouldn't police it.
But please, people, a $50 computer and a $10-a-month dial-up connection will get you all the porn you want at your house. Stop making this an issue.
Here's the thought that blew me away: someday the walls of all our homes will be that stuff, once it's really cheap. Or at least whole walls, somewhere, will be screens like that.
Imagine thinking "I want a poster of this picture I have, and I want it on THIS part of the wall" and reaching up and sliding your other posters to the side, right-clicking, and pulling it from the background, resizing it, and arranging it with your hand.
And then imagine thinking "I want my room to look like a Parisian coffeshop!" and just hitting a button. All your posters vanish and your room has windows overlooking the Eiffel tower (as all windows in Paris do).
And then you invite friends over, clear the back wall, and start watching TV. Though come to think of it, none of this really requires a touch-screen (though it's cool). So I guess this, though prompted by the touch-screen, would work for wall-sized LCD/plasma displays. So someone get me one of those plzthx.
No. They're run by people, and they're unpredictable, and they could one day decide to do something pretty bad.
But it's convenient to do so, so we take the risk and have fun arguing to ourselves one way or the other, making arguments that make us feel more secure or more paranoid, depending on which frame of mind we tend toward in the first place.
Every day, I wake up. I get a drink and read the paper, I check my blog feed, and then I look at Slashdot. Across the board I see headlines like "Microsoft hires person X" and "GM cuts this and that" and "Drought in Borneo" and "Economic growth at risk". Or even the supreme dullness indicator, the dreaded "trade summit".
Suffice it to say I've been waiting to see a headline like "brain-controlling parasites control 50% of the human population" for a long time. Thank you, Slashdot editors.
Oh, sweet, this is exactly what I was looking for. I've been using encryption plug-ins for security. What I always felt was missing, though, was a server that "can archive copies of all messages to satisfy provisions of compliance regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act." I like secure communication, but I don't like it to be TOO secure. I like encrypting things, but knowing that someone might still be able to read them.
Of course, this is entirely reasonable -- it's not that they're debuting a service that does do that on their central servers. Their package includes a server, so you could turn on these operations if you wanted. Not useful to me, but useful to companies and the like. So no real privacy problems here, and we shouldn't have any real arguments. Corporate systems that log messages are the norm, and no one'll be made to use this for their personal stuff.
I was just looking at forwarding mail from my domain (just to me) through GMail, because I like their interface and I like not having to handle spam filters myself. I was sitting here literally moments ago thinking "how well will GMail handle auto-forwarded spam? It'd be nice if I could use the GMail interface for mail in my own domain." when they come out with this.
So it's as I suspected. The Google Desktop privacy infringements now include picking up my brain waves. That, and time travel, because they couldn't have developed this in 15 seconds.
And, you know, the scary thing is that I just spent a moment thinking "Google reaching into my mind and indexing my memory wouldn't necessarially be evil. It might be helpful, and --" And then I had to splash cold water on my face.
the team also found wildlife that were remarkably unafraid of humans
That's what happens whenever you find animals that haven't encountered humans before. Thing is, the after the first few encounters they'll sort themselves into two groups.
One group is the ones who learn to be afraid of us. The other, well . . .
don't you realise that soon this will be duped several times on Digg and then other Diggers will post it to their blogs, while others look for someone (or a cell phone company) to blame, and will start wrapping their phones or heads in tinfoil - heck, some Diggers will probably TRY and cook an egg and may get salmonella from the eggs on their fingers, which they will transfer to their mouths when they suck their thumbs and so will end up needing antibiotics.
Don't ruin the free entertianment for the rest of us.
The big problem I see with this is that if my car stayed level on roads, I know that it wouldn't be long before I was climbing into the backseat to get at things, drifting off to sleep, reading books, etc, and then getting in accidents when we hit suddenly unhandleable conditions and I can't get back in control in time.
It doesn't have to happen often, it just has to happen enough to make CNN.
I give it a 50% chance there's a huge backlash within a year of these being introduced.
I've always wanted a steering cruise-control, ever since seeing the first research on these. I just think we're gonna have a lot of trouble introducing them.
Continuing with the idea that cell phones, PDAs, and eventually laptops are going to merge. When you've got enough power in a wallet-sized device to do all your email, messaging, web browsing, and music playing, it'll just be a matter of snapping in different peripherals.
I'm shopping for a laptop right now, and what I really want is something small. I don't need a whole lot of power, I just need something I can slip in a handbag or backpack pocket (maybe a Fujitsu Lifebook P-series). With Verizon wireless broadband it could sit in my backpack/briefcase and, via skype, serve as a cell phone. It'd also be my PDA.
There are a lot of different approaches to reaching that convergence, and it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Poor me, living here in Virginia, where I don't necessarially have access to the algorithms used to encode state documents, even though all commercial algorithms can handle it.
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely, and this is certainly important. But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so, and we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future. Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard? And there will always be people implementing decoders on their own, for either standard. It just feels like we have bigger problems; it's good OSS PR, but not a huge deal. Though of course, I could be wrong.
And on a side note, Romney's presidental prospects are dismal. As a Virginian, let me warn you all about Mark Warner. He's gonna sweep y'all away. Romney, with this, is setting himself up as a pro-tech president. But I was working on a VR project at the NASA research center down here, and in one demonstration at the Southern Governor's Conference, Governor Warner tried out the equipment. He looked around in the simulator for a while, then took off the glasses and started asking some incredibly hard-hitting technical questions about the engineering behind the system. He really knows his stuff. So he's a moderate and charismatic southern Democrat with a strong fiscal record, and definitely strong on the technology front. I'd like to see Hillary run myself, but I think Warner's gonna take the nomination. And Romney doesn't have a chance.
marginally increased control over VeriSign's ability to introduce changes to the existing dotcom business model.
The business model here being the sale of dotcom names, which wasn't immediately clear to me. So it means "VeriSign will be able to raise prices on dotcom domains, though not quite as fast as they WANT to."
This might be a wise time to buy a long-term plan on your domain, if you own one. A lot of services have a feature where you can buy X years at a low price. It's unlikely that prices would inflate fast enough to make it seriously obnoxious, but it gives a nice feeling of security to know that your domain is yours, all paid off for the next X years.
(Well, safely yours with the exception of things like that locking snafu a couple years back. But nothing you won't hear holy hell raised about.)
Speech-to-text is cool, but for 30 years they've been predicting it's the next new thing in interfaces, and it's remained a niche thing as it gets better and better. Maybe it'll hit the point where it's flawless and suddenly find new markets, but we'll see.
What really bothers me is the state of Windows text-to-speech. The TTS that ships with the most popular operating system on Earth is easily trumped in understandability by a small third-party program I downloaded literally TWELVE YEARS AGO. I really wonder if M$ made some pact to give out crappy TTS so as not to stifle sales of some business partner's application.
This seems pretty ridiculous, but I'm at a loss as to why their text-to-speech programs are of 12-year-old quality.
I'm glad people are doing good speech research, (I know I've seen a demo of good IBM TTS somewhere) but I hope it finds its way into Windows someday.
Robert X. Cringely presents some interesting factoids he uncovered
I couldn't help but laugh when I learned, earlier today, that the word "factoid" technically refers to an untrue piece of information that is accepted as true due to repetition in the media.
In a profound stroke of irony, the incorrect definition of 'factoid' (a small piece of information) has become the prevailing one through repetition in the media.
It doesn't appear to have the moderation that I consider helpful. Aside from that, it looks decent; 1999 was before the blog/wiki boom (see the complaints about "what is left of a painting when everyone is allowed to add to it?"). I think such a thing would be much more accepted now.
as an internet community gets larger . . . if you don't do something to discourage them, they'll continue being idiots.
Generally, you can't fix other people. Specifically, you definitely can't stop anonymous interent people from being idiots by calling them idiots.
Arguing with strangers trolling online is like getting in a boxing match with a giant wall of flowing molasses -- it feels good to throw the first few punches, but then you realize you're getting all this gunk on your hands, and then you're stuck, and then you're slowly dragged down, and then you become part of the flood, careering into other people . . . it gets messy, and you're not gonna do anything to the molasses.
Argue to practice expressing yourself, argue to share information, argue to correct people on factual or logical errors, and sure, argue if you enjoy it. But don't argue just to try to stop people from being idiots. It's hard to think of anything less effective.
Slashdot Mirror
People shouldn't look at porn in public libraries -- at least, not where there's a significant chance of it disturbing other patrons, including children.
That idea is not incompatible with the view that the federal government has no place policing this. It's not hypocritical to say that something is bad while also thinking the government shouldn't police it.
But please, people, a $50 computer and a $10-a-month dial-up connection will get you all the porn you want at your house. Stop making this an issue.
if they had Spamming as one of the events in the Olympics.
"The 300-meter penis"?
What are these "editorial standards" of which you speak?
robust, kid-proof, and easy to clean
Here's the thought that blew me away: someday the walls of all our homes will be that stuff, once it's really cheap. Or at least whole walls, somewhere, will be screens like that.
Imagine thinking "I want a poster of this picture I have, and I want it on THIS part of the wall" and reaching up and sliding your other posters to the side, right-clicking, and pulling it from the background, resizing it, and arranging it with your hand.
And then imagine thinking "I want my room to look like a Parisian coffeshop!" and just hitting a button. All your posters vanish and your room has windows overlooking the Eiffel tower (as all windows in Paris do).
And then you invite friends over, clear the back wall, and start watching TV. Though come to think of it, none of this really requires a touch-screen (though it's cool). So I guess this, though prompted by the touch-screen, would work for wall-sized LCD/plasma displays. So someone get me one of those plzthx.
Can We Trust Google?
No. They're run by people, and they're unpredictable, and they could one day decide to do something pretty bad.
But it's convenient to do so, so we take the risk and have fun arguing to ourselves one way or the other, making arguments that make us feel more secure or more paranoid, depending on which frame of mind we tend toward in the first place.
Every day, I wake up. I get a drink and read the paper, I check my blog feed, and then I look at Slashdot. Across the board I see headlines like "Microsoft hires person X" and "GM cuts this and that" and "Drought in Borneo" and "Economic growth at risk". Or even the supreme dullness indicator, the dreaded "trade summit".
Suffice it to say I've been waiting to see a headline like "brain-controlling parasites control 50% of the human population" for a long time. Thank you, Slashdot editors.
Oh, sweet, this is exactly what I was looking for. I've been using encryption plug-ins for security. What I always felt was missing, though, was a server that "can archive copies of all messages to satisfy provisions of compliance regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act." I like secure communication, but I don't like it to be TOO secure. I like encrypting things, but knowing that someone might still be able to read them.
Of course, this is entirely reasonable -- it's not that they're debuting a service that does do that on their central servers. Their package includes a server, so you could turn on these operations if you wanted. Not useful to me, but useful to companies and the like. So no real privacy problems here, and we shouldn't have any real arguments. Corporate systems that log messages are the norm, and no one'll be made to use this for their personal stuff.
I was just looking at forwarding mail from my domain (just to me) through GMail, because I like their interface and I like not having to handle spam filters myself. I was sitting here literally moments ago thinking "how well will GMail handle auto-forwarded spam? It'd be nice if I could use the GMail interface for mail in my own domain." when they come out with this.
So it's as I suspected. The Google Desktop privacy infringements now include picking up my brain waves. That, and time travel, because they couldn't have developed this in 15 seconds.
And, you know, the scary thing is that I just spent a moment thinking "Google reaching into my mind and indexing my memory wouldn't necessarially be evil. It might be helpful, and --" And then I had to splash cold water on my face.
You're a seductive one, Google.
the team also found wildlife that were remarkably unafraid of humans
That's what happens whenever you find animals that haven't encountered humans before. Thing is, the after the first few encounters they'll sort themselves into two groups.
One group is the ones who learn to be afraid of us. The other, well . . .
don't you realise that soon this will be duped several times on Digg and then other Diggers will post it to their blogs, while others look for someone (or a cell phone company) to blame, and will start wrapping their phones or heads in tinfoil - heck, some Diggers will probably TRY and cook an egg and may get salmonella from the eggs on their fingers, which they will transfer to their mouths when they suck their thumbs and so will end up needing antibiotics.
Don't ruin the free entertianment for the rest of us.
The big problem I see with this is that if my car stayed level on roads, I know that it wouldn't be long before I was climbing into the backseat to get at things, drifting off to sleep, reading books, etc, and then getting in accidents when we hit suddenly unhandleable conditions and I can't get back in control in time.
It doesn't have to happen often, it just has to happen enough to make CNN.
I give it a 50% chance there's a huge backlash within a year of these being introduced.
I've always wanted a steering cruise-control, ever since seeing the first research on these. I just think we're gonna have a lot of trouble introducing them.
Continuing with the idea that cell phones, PDAs, and eventually laptops are going to merge. When you've got enough power in a wallet-sized device to do all your email, messaging, web browsing, and music playing, it'll just be a matter of snapping in different peripherals.
I'm shopping for a laptop right now, and what I really want is something small. I don't need a whole lot of power, I just need something I can slip in a handbag or backpack pocket (maybe a Fujitsu Lifebook P-series). With Verizon wireless broadband it could sit in my backpack/briefcase and, via skype, serve as a cell phone. It'd also be my PDA.
There are a lot of different approaches to reaching that convergence, and it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Poor me, living here in Virginia, where I don't necessarially have access to the algorithms used to encode state documents, even though all commercial algorithms can handle it.
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely, and this is certainly important. But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so, and we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future. Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard? And there will always be people implementing decoders on their own, for either standard. It just feels like we have bigger problems; it's good OSS PR, but not a huge deal. Though of course, I could be wrong.
And on a side note, Romney's presidental prospects are dismal. As a Virginian, let me warn you all about Mark Warner. He's gonna sweep y'all away. Romney, with this, is setting himself up as a pro-tech president. But I was working on a VR project at the NASA research center down here, and in one demonstration at the Southern Governor's Conference, Governor Warner tried out the equipment. He looked around in the simulator for a while, then took off the glasses and started asking some incredibly hard-hitting technical questions about the engineering behind the system. He really knows his stuff. So he's a moderate and charismatic southern Democrat with a strong fiscal record, and definitely strong on the technology front. I'd like to see Hillary run myself, but I think Warner's gonna take the nomination. And Romney doesn't have a chance.
Congressional trolls. This idea amuses me deeply.
I wonder if any of the trolls we've got on here are working for Congress.
Perhaps, somehow, Natalie Portman is a matter of national security.
marginally increased control over VeriSign's ability to introduce changes to the existing dotcom business model.
The business model here being the sale of dotcom names, which wasn't immediately clear to me. So it means "VeriSign will be able to raise prices on dotcom domains, though not quite as fast as they WANT to."
This might be a wise time to buy a long-term plan on your domain, if you own one. A lot of services have a feature where you can buy X years at a low price. It's unlikely that prices would inflate fast enough to make it seriously obnoxious, but it gives a nice feeling of security to know that your domain is yours, all paid off for the next X years.
(Well, safely yours with the exception of things like that locking snafu a couple years back. But nothing you won't hear holy hell raised about.)
Speech-to-text is cool, but for 30 years they've been predicting it's the next new thing in interfaces, and it's remained a niche thing as it gets better and better. Maybe it'll hit the point where it's flawless and suddenly find new markets, but we'll see.
What really bothers me is the state of Windows text-to-speech. The TTS that ships with the most popular operating system on Earth is easily trumped in understandability by a small third-party program I downloaded literally TWELVE YEARS AGO. I really wonder if M$ made some pact to give out crappy TTS so as not to stifle sales of some business partner's application.
This seems pretty ridiculous, but I'm at a loss as to why their text-to-speech programs are of 12-year-old quality.
I'm glad people are doing good speech research, (I know I've seen a demo of good IBM TTS somewhere) but I hope it finds its way into Windows someday.
IBM Strives For 'Superhuman' Speech Tech
The project was originally conceived to translate, into flawless English, the slurred speach of Christopher Reeve.
. . . *rim shot*
How do you Slashdot readers keep up with your continuing education, while still maintaining a personal life?
Your question implies a misunderstanding.
Countdown to the first Sparkle Ad.
The more modern use it that of a small interesting fact:
I believe the word was only coined in 1973.
Robert X. Cringely presents some interesting factoids he uncovered
I couldn't help but laugh when I learned, earlier today, that the word "factoid" technically refers to an untrue piece of information that is accepted as true due to repetition in the media.
In a profound stroke of irony, the incorrect definition of 'factoid' (a small piece of information) has become the prevailing one through repetition in the media.
Something about this headline makes me go all groggy. The words start to swim in front of my eyes . . .
Acquiring Motorola-developed embedded IPTV-Linux
Linux developers acquire embedded Motorola IPTVs
Embedded Linux-developed IPTVs acquired by Motorola
IPTV acquires Motorola, develops embedded Linux
Either this is the most generic Slashdot headline in recent memory or I need to get some sleep. Or it could be both.
It doesn't appear to have the moderation that I consider helpful. Aside from that, it looks decent; 1999 was before the blog/wiki boom (see the complaints about "what is left of a painting when everyone is allowed to add to it?"). I think such a thing would be much more accepted now.
If you build it, I'll get you the bandwidth.
as an internet community gets larger . . . if you don't do something to discourage them, they'll continue being idiots.
Generally, you can't fix other people. Specifically, you definitely can't stop anonymous interent people from being idiots by calling them idiots.
Arguing with strangers trolling online is like getting in a boxing match with a giant wall of flowing molasses -- it feels good to throw the first few punches, but then you realize you're getting all this gunk on your hands, and then you're stuck, and then you're slowly dragged down, and then you become part of the flood, careering into other people . . . it gets messy, and you're not gonna do anything to the molasses.
Argue to practice expressing yourself, argue to share information, argue to correct people on factual or logical errors, and sure, argue if you enjoy it. But don't argue just to try to stop people from being idiots. It's hard to think of anything less effective.