"Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!"
Men: Better at orientation and navigation.
Women: Better social skills.
Right. In the unlikely event that I get lost if I'm driving somewhere with my girlfriend, she can get out of the car and ask for directions!
Doesn't have to be online... Remember when Office XP decided to lock out users because the hardware had changed? (Some users had merely swapped a battery for a CD player in a laptop).
The cause of the potential problems in this area when using DRM and online product activation is not the same as the registration thingy in Office 2000, but the result is the same: you are locked out of the product. Tell people about how product activation may lock you out of your own computer or data, and often you get the reply "surely they won't screw up that badly, and surely they wouldn't lock you out completely?". If they tell you that, counter with this example.
This is one good reason why things like online registration and verification (like Windows XP has), and certain flavours of DRM, are flawed. There's the obvious privacy concerns as well, but this is a good example to show your friends, family and bosses why this stuff is bad. They might care less about privacy and rights, but they will care that, when a registration or DRM scheme will screw up, you will not get the benefit of the doubt!. Instead you will be locked out of your system and/or data.
This is a problem that PHBs, legislators and your dear old granny can understand, so spread the word.
"I'm still waiting for a phone that will actually tell you how many minutes you've used peak/off-peak instead of forcing you to go to there website"
That would be hard to do technically. Phone charges are determined by the rating & guiding system, not the phone network. The network tells the rating & guiding system when you called and for how long; this system then assigns a fee to be charged and "guides" the charge to your account for billing.
Letting the phone know when peak hours start and end is difficult because
1) Very few rating & guiding systems are build to send information like this back into the phone network. Mostly they receive data only.
2) There's no protocol in the GSM or 3G standards (as far as I know) to convey this sort of information. If handset manufacturers could agree on one, it'd be a simple matter of sending a (silent) SMS.
"Oh, and why to some companies still charge $0.10 for you to send a 100 byte message when one minute of phone time is several kilobytes?"
Because they can. Rate schedules have very little to do with actual costs. People often just want to let someone know they are running late for dinner or whatever, and a single SMS gets the message across more cheaply than a phone call. The consumer saves money even at $0,10/message, and the phone company is happy since he now has a smaller amount of traffic netting him the same revenue.
It's both... by applying restrictions, DRM manages content rights. "Rights" in this case means the rights that the content provider bestows on you, it has nothing to do with any legal right you may have.
The rest of the world refers to DRM as Digital Rights Management. Spending your energy to try and get people to assign a different meaning is like trying to get people to use words like "womyn" and "freedom fries". It's wasted energy
Ugh you are right, I did get my facts mixed up somehow. They were not voted in, however they were rather popular amongst the people, especially during the early years when they established their rule.
Some of them can't even read mail by themselves. A few years back, the Dutch prime minister (on national TV) showed off his mad computer skillz, and picked up a mouse giving it a baffled look, completely clueless about what it was for. Kind of like Scotty speaking into a mouse, in that Star Trek movie (nr 4 I believe). As an excuse he stated "well, I have people who do that for me". In other words, "I am not just clueless, but also too lazy to try and learn".
I don't think he's progressed to the point where he can actually read his own mail. Somehow I am unconvinced the country is in good hands.
"A communist country explicitly subordinates the economic interests of an individual to the economic interests of the people as a whole."
Whereas in a democracy, individual interests may be subjugated to the interests of the mob, the interests of elected representatives (or their pals), or the fad of the day ("protection against terrorists"). Democracy does not equal freedom; one can imagine a democracy where everything is decided by majority vote: laws, policies, but also what clothes will appear in the stores this summer, and what will be for dinner this evening. I exxagerate, but the point is that freedom does not follow automatically from democracy, but is derived only from limitations placed on what the government can and cannot do. Look at Afghanistan where an oppressive government of religious fanatics was voted in, by a majority who knew full well what they were voting for. If you happened to be a woman in that country who did not wish to have to cover her head in public, you'd be shit out of luck despite the fact you'd be living in a democracy.
Democracies tend to place the emphasis on individualism, as opposed to communism favouring collectivism. But democracies can and do go overboard sometimes on regulations and laws that severly limit our personal freedom in favour of a (sometimes very tenuously) alledged Greater Good.
"What kind of "freedom" does a citizen have in a communist country?"
The same freedoms that citizens enjoy in every other country: everything, except those things forbidden by the laws made by your government. We citizens of democratic countries can choose our own governments and thus have some influence over what laws are passed, but that influence is very limited. Politicians do not necessarily always have our interests at heart, or your individual interests may be different to those of the voting mob.
The US is an excellent example of a country where laws are being passed (DMCA etc.) that seem to benefit a small special interest rather than the general public. You have the freedom to choose your own government, a freedom that the Chinese lack. But I bet that in China you are free to publish any paper on Xbox modding that you can come up with. The Chinese government could forbid it and there would be little that their citizens could do about it, but they haven't done so.
There's some middle ground between "thinking it's totally benign", and "halting all development until exhaustive health studies are conducted". An overblown reaction like that makes the guy sound either like a luddite or someone after a healthy grant.
Bedrock times, 2003AD. Again, plans to develop a promising invention called "the wheel" are suspended pending investigation into health risks. Opponents point out that we cannot take the slightest risk, lest we suffer another disaster like that "fire" invention which destroyed an entire wheat field and badly burnt Zog's hand."
"Don't give research grants to study dangerous nanotechnology, give the grants to me and I will conduct a study into why many more health studies are required to determine the risk."
Stop all research, bleh. Nano stuff isn't dangerous like gen-enged germs (unless you believe in the grey goo catastrophe), it is dangerous like many other fine particles, like asbestos and such. It warrants careful handling, not banning.
I have played both male and female characters, and I never noticed much of a difference in other people's attitudes towards me. There was some difference but not a lot. I guess it all depends on the crowd you hang out with.
I do know a case of a female playing a male character. I was rather surprised when I met her in real life, expecting a 'him' instead.
Will EA shoot themselves in the foot by making their games run badly on all boards made by ATI, which is after all a major graphics card manufacturer? That does not seem to be in their best interest unless they see NVidia as the clear and uncontested winner of the graphics card wars.
That hardly matters for corporate users, at whom this product is aimed. The idea is that employees use it mainly for interoffice messaging, not yapping all day to their pals.
True. There are actually two reasons for not having number portability between land lines and mobiles:
- Land line phones and mobile phones were seen as two sufficiently different products, at least where switching between the two is concerned.
- Calling charges to mobiles are generally higher than calling to land lines. Retaining the ability to recognise a mobile number by its prefix is better than having a taped message play before every call to a mobile "This is a mobile nr, and higher caller charges apply".
We've had it for a few years in Holland, and it works wonderfully well. All you need is to sign a release form with your new provider, and (provided all your bills with the previous provider are settled), the number is transferred within 10 days. This is one of the few actual successes of our Competitive Practices Watchdog.
I had the dubious pleasure of working on the NP project for corporate customers of one of our telco's. The telcos' claim that NP is an expensive requirement that will bring zero ROI is true... this was not a simple project to do, and the marketing guys explained that NP allows you to steal customers from competitors but that it does little for your bottom line, as you'll have to lower prices.
We are already working on the next step: number portability for bank accounts!! Oh yes, finally I can go to my bank and tell them to get stuffed, while keeping my bank account nr. Switching bank accounts is an even bigger pain than switching telephone numbers, especially in the Netherlands where people tend to use lots of direct debit invoicing. The banks know this, and banking service in Holland is generally dismal compared to other countries.
Where are the days of, say, the Commodore 64? That thing came with the freakin' schematics in the back of the manual, practically begging you to take a soldering iron to it and modify it in interesting ways.
Don't you find it annoying to have to constantly be aware of what you do with your e-mail address? Wouldn't it be nice if you could safely post your address on your website so that people who need to can contact you easily? Wouldn't it be nice if there was no need to obfusciate your address on this site and on Usenet? How about not having to set up a new address on your domain or on Hotmail whenever you want to sign up for something?
Also... remember that your e-mail address only has to appear once in the wrong place. Once it is harvested and verified to be correct by people who sell lists of known-good addresses, it will get reused and resold again and again. And even trustworthy-looking or not-so-weird sites may leak your address or sell it.
"It is also a sick reminder to see how they could fathom using radioactive materials for power. As the decade wears on I imagine we will see plenty more of these last gasp efforts to legitimize outdated, unsafe, 20th Century technologies and mindsets."
I sure hope we'll see more... nuclear technology has advanced significantly since Chernobyl, and through research and application will advance further still in the coming years.
As for mindsets: yours is the only outdated one. Nuclear technology is a relatively recent development, and we have only seen the start of it so far. And you are already going to give up on it.
"You hear about this happening in other countries and to immigrants and then to American citizens," Mr. McGeady went on. "And finally you hear about it happening to someone you know. It's scary."
Of course the next step is that they will come for you. Food for thought for those people who think that the end justifies the means when it comes to fighting terrorism.
Heh, that looks like a handy-dandy model, for the time! I remember most cell phones 15 years ago were far bulkier than that: a black box the size of a small car battery, with a long antenna and a handle to carry it around, with a separate handset connected by a curly wire. (Here's a picture)
Slashdot Mirror
"Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!"
Men: Better at orientation and navigation.
Women: Better social skills.
Right. In the unlikely event that I get lost if I'm driving somewhere with my girlfriend, she can get out of the car and ask for directions!
Doesn't have to be online... Remember when Office XP decided to lock out users because the hardware had changed? (Some users had merely swapped a battery for a CD player in a laptop).
The cause of the potential problems in this area when using DRM and online product activation is not the same as the registration thingy in Office 2000, but the result is the same: you are locked out of the product. Tell people about how product activation may lock you out of your own computer or data, and often you get the reply "surely they won't screw up that badly, and surely they wouldn't lock you out completely?". If they tell you that, counter with this example.
This is one good reason why things like online registration and verification (like Windows XP has), and certain flavours of DRM, are flawed. There's the obvious privacy concerns as well, but this is a good example to show your friends, family and bosses why this stuff is bad. They might care less about privacy and rights, but they will care that, when a registration or DRM scheme will screw up, you will not get the benefit of the doubt!. Instead you will be locked out of your system and/or data.
This is a problem that PHBs, legislators and your dear old granny can understand, so spread the word.
"I'm still waiting for a phone that will actually tell you how many minutes you've used peak/off-peak instead of forcing you to go to there website"
That would be hard to do technically. Phone charges are determined by the rating & guiding system, not the phone network. The network tells the rating & guiding system when you called and for how long; this system then assigns a fee to be charged and "guides" the charge to your account for billing.
Letting the phone know when peak hours start and end is difficult because
1) Very few rating & guiding systems are build to send information like this back into the phone network. Mostly they receive data only. 2) There's no protocol in the GSM or 3G standards (as far as I know) to convey this sort of information. If handset manufacturers could agree on one, it'd be a simple matter of sending a (silent) SMS.
"Oh, and why to some companies still charge $0.10 for you to send a 100 byte message when one minute of phone time is several kilobytes?"
Because they can. Rate schedules have very little to do with actual costs. People often just want to let someone know they are running late for dinner or whatever, and a single SMS gets the message across more cheaply than a phone call. The consumer saves money even at $0,10/message, and the phone company is happy since he now has a smaller amount of traffic netting him the same revenue.
It's both... by applying restrictions, DRM manages content rights. "Rights" in this case means the rights that the content provider bestows on you, it has nothing to do with any legal right you may have.
The rest of the world refers to DRM as Digital Rights Management. Spending your energy to try and get people to assign a different meaning is like trying to get people to use words like "womyn" and "freedom fries". It's wasted energy
Ugh you are right, I did get my facts mixed up somehow. They were not voted in, however they were rather popular amongst the people, especially during the early years when they established their rule.
Some of them can't even read mail by themselves. A few years back, the Dutch prime minister (on national TV) showed off his mad computer skillz, and picked up a mouse giving it a baffled look, completely clueless about what it was for. Kind of like Scotty speaking into a mouse, in that Star Trek movie (nr 4 I believe). As an excuse he stated "well, I have people who do that for me". In other words, "I am not just clueless, but also too lazy to try and learn".
I don't think he's progressed to the point where he can actually read his own mail. Somehow I am unconvinced the country is in good hands.
"A communist country explicitly subordinates the economic interests of an individual to the economic interests of the people as a whole."
Whereas in a democracy, individual interests may be subjugated to the interests of the mob, the interests of elected representatives (or their pals), or the fad of the day ("protection against terrorists"). Democracy does not equal freedom; one can imagine a democracy where everything is decided by majority vote: laws, policies, but also what clothes will appear in the stores this summer, and what will be for dinner this evening. I exxagerate, but the point is that freedom does not follow automatically from democracy, but is derived only from limitations placed on what the government can and cannot do. Look at Afghanistan where an oppressive government of religious fanatics was voted in, by a majority who knew full well what they were voting for. If you happened to be a woman in that country who did not wish to have to cover her head in public, you'd be shit out of luck despite the fact you'd be living in a democracy.
Democracies tend to place the emphasis on individualism, as opposed to communism favouring collectivism. But democracies can and do go overboard sometimes on regulations and laws that severly limit our personal freedom in favour of a (sometimes very tenuously) alledged Greater Good.
"What kind of "freedom" does a citizen have in a communist country?"
The same freedoms that citizens enjoy in every other country: everything, except those things forbidden by the laws made by your government. We citizens of democratic countries can choose our own governments and thus have some influence over what laws are passed, but that influence is very limited. Politicians do not necessarily always have our interests at heart, or your individual interests may be different to those of the voting mob.
The US is an excellent example of a country where laws are being passed (DMCA etc.) that seem to benefit a small special interest rather than the general public. You have the freedom to choose your own government, a freedom that the Chinese lack. But I bet that in China you are free to publish any paper on Xbox modding that you can come up with. The Chinese government could forbid it and there would be little that their citizens could do about it, but they haven't done so.
There's some middle ground between "thinking it's totally benign", and "halting all development until exhaustive health studies are conducted". An overblown reaction like that makes the guy sound either like a luddite or someone after a healthy grant.
Bedrock times, 2003AD. Again, plans to develop a promising invention called "the wheel" are suspended pending investigation into health risks. Opponents point out that we cannot take the slightest risk, lest we suffer another disaster like that "fire" invention which destroyed an entire wheat field and badly burnt Zog's hand."
"Don't give research grants to study dangerous nanotechnology, give the grants to me and I will conduct a study into why many more health studies are required to determine the risk."
Stop all research, bleh. Nano stuff isn't dangerous like gen-enged germs (unless you believe in the grey goo catastrophe), it is dangerous like many other fine particles, like asbestos and such. It warrants careful handling, not banning.
I have played both male and female characters, and I never noticed much of a difference in other people's attitudes towards me. There was some difference but not a lot. I guess it all depends on the crowd you hang out with.
I do know a case of a female playing a male character. I was rather surprised when I met her in real life, expecting a 'him' instead.
I wonder...
Will EA shoot themselves in the foot by making their games run badly on all boards made by ATI, which is after all a major graphics card manufacturer? That does not seem to be in their best interest unless they see NVidia as the clear and uncontested winner of the graphics card wars.
That hardly matters for corporate users, at whom this product is aimed. The idea is that employees use it mainly for interoffice messaging, not yapping all day to their pals.
True. There are actually two reasons for not having number portability between land lines and mobiles:
- Land line phones and mobile phones were seen as two sufficiently different products, at least where switching between the two is concerned.
- Calling charges to mobiles are generally higher than calling to land lines. Retaining the ability to recognise a mobile number by its prefix is better than having a taped message play before every call to a mobile "This is a mobile nr, and higher caller charges apply".
We've had it for a few years in Holland, and it works wonderfully well. All you need is to sign a release form with your new provider, and (provided all your bills with the previous provider are settled), the number is transferred within 10 days. This is one of the few actual successes of our Competitive Practices Watchdog.
I had the dubious pleasure of working on the NP project for corporate customers of one of our telco's. The telcos' claim that NP is an expensive requirement that will bring zero ROI is true... this was not a simple project to do, and the marketing guys explained that NP allows you to steal customers from competitors but that it does little for your bottom line, as you'll have to lower prices.
We are already working on the next step: number portability for bank accounts!! Oh yes, finally I can go to my bank and tell them to get stuffed, while keeping my bank account nr. Switching bank accounts is an even bigger pain than switching telephone numbers, especially in the Netherlands where people tend to use lots of direct debit invoicing. The banks know this, and banking service in Holland is generally dismal compared to other countries.
*sigh*
Where are the days of, say, the Commodore 64? That thing came with the freakin' schematics in the back of the manual, practically begging you to take a soldering iron to it and modify it in interesting ways.
Don't you find it annoying to have to constantly be aware of what you do with your e-mail address? Wouldn't it be nice if you could safely post your address on your website so that people who need to can contact you easily? Wouldn't it be nice if there was no need to obfusciate your address on this site and on Usenet? How about not having to set up a new address on your domain or on Hotmail whenever you want to sign up for something?
Also... remember that your e-mail address only has to appear once in the wrong place. Once it is harvested and verified to be correct by people who sell lists of known-good addresses, it will get reused and resold again and again. And even trustworthy-looking or not-so-weird sites may leak your address or sell it.
"...something nifty called the Josephson effect"
Isn't it called the Josephon effect? (without the 's') Just a nitpick.
"It is also a sick reminder to see how they could fathom using radioactive materials for power. As the decade wears on I imagine we will see plenty more of these last gasp efforts to legitimize outdated, unsafe, 20th Century technologies and mindsets."
I sure hope we'll see more... nuclear technology has advanced significantly since Chernobyl, and through research and application will advance further still in the coming years.
As for mindsets: yours is the only outdated one. Nuclear technology is a relatively recent development, and we have only seen the start of it so far. And you are already going to give up on it.
Well you have to admire his dedication.
And who knows... perhaps that Space Shuttle part #B1565.23 'solid booster aft telemetry cable retainer' is really a paper clip.
"You hear about this happening in other countries and to immigrants and then to American citizens," Mr. McGeady went on. "And finally you hear about it happening to someone you know. It's scary."
Of course the next step is that they will come for you. Food for thought for those people who think that the end justifies the means when it comes to fighting terrorism.
Heh, that looks like a handy-dandy model, for the time! I remember most cell phones 15 years ago were far bulkier than that: a black box the size of a small car battery, with a long antenna and a handle to carry it around, with a separate handset connected by a curly wire. (Here's a picture)
"a nice GUI where things just work."
;-)
Is that supposed to describe the IIS GUI? Dude, you need to set some higher standards for yourself
Uh, it does actually. May I refer you to these dictionaries?
Since you already seem to have a dictionary, I suggest you use it next time.