The Sheep Look Up is indeed grim, not least because of the way that reality increasingly resembles the world it depicts. Most depressingly, the eminently practical solution it arrives at to allows human life's continuation (in a still-ghastly dystopian world) is unlikely to be adopted in the real world.
Stand on Zanzibar isn't particularly upbeat either. Or The Jagged Orbit.
Certainly MS's attitude to patent abuse deserves to be punished. However, it is not as if this money is returned to the people from whom it was extracted in the first place. Rather, it goes to yet another bunch of thieving lowlife scumbags.
The patent system is so messed up that it can support multiple tiers of extortionists, each preying on the one below, but for MS to unilaterally moderate their own abuses of the system (which would be nice, admittedly) would have little effect on the overall state of affairs, where the entire business model of numerous companies is based upon extortionate patent litigation (though generally against much smaller, more vulnerable companies than MS).
More to the point, this being Norfolk (right here, where I am), the job of tracking the entire county police force could be done by a single suitably-inclined human without computer assistance. (Someone with the right sort of Aspergers Syndrome, say.)
For example, in the small hours of the morning, (I have been reliably informed by a serving member of the Norfolk Constabulary) there are precisely two officers on patrol.
And MS expects some preteen in Singapore to know better? Good luck with that.
That's an unfortunate example to choose, preteens in Singapore being likely to be both better educated and more law-abiding than their US equivalents. (And quite possibly more affluent too.)
How Microsoft made the mistake of "borrowing" their design, adding "Clippy" and the rest of his idiotic designs, and thinking it would go anywhere still amazes me.
As far as Bill was concerned, MS Bob was a big success, as he got to marry the project manager, which might not have been an option if the project had been ignominiously canned as it deserved to be.
Regrettably, it is only now that those people who mistakenly thought Nicholas Negroponte's brother John (noted particularly for his humitarian work as a death squad organizer in Central America and Iraq) was the evil sibling, begin to realise that in fact the gene for acts of monstrous evil is probably present in all members of the family.
With a working Amstrad (with a working 3" drive) it's easy.
All you need to do is (literally) hack it open and install a 3.5" floppy on its second drive (I think a standard PC floppy needs a bit of rewiring, but it's certainly possible).
Then save the files to an Amstrad CP/M formatted 3.5" floppy and then read them on a PC using this software: http://8bit.yarek.pl/tool/pc.22disk/
Sadly working 3" drives are rather rare these days and tend to command 3-figure prices.
3" disks don't seem to survive well in my experience. (I tried to retrieve some stuff from my 8256/my fathers 9256) about the turn of the century, from disks that were only a few years old, with a drive that did work at the time, with very little success).
If they were only in Amstrad format on 3.5"/5.25" disks, or if you had a 3" drive (somehow) plugged into a PC, there is a DOS program called 22disk which can read the files (and write them to somewhere usable).
Regrettably these commercial services charge quite a bit to read the floppies and may well still charge you for a stack of unreadable media (it's probably an idea to ask them about this).
Another 128MB or so of RAM should make all the difference required here. Hardly a major investment, especially considering the alternatives.
I'm still happily running Windows 98SE, btw (dual-booting with SimplyMEPIS). There are a couple of (non-vital) things that I'd switch to XP for, but I find the way that XP connects to the Internet and 15 seconds later your PC is full of crap a little offputting.
Farmed fish (in addition to not tasting as nice as the wild stuff), is typically produced (in the West at least - third world subsistence fish farms are not quite as bad) by an catastrophically wasteful, unclean, unsound process.
Fish excrement (and masses of uneaten food pellets) typically poison huge areas of water downstream from the farms. The fishes - treated with hormones to make them grow and chemicals to keep them alive - nevertheless are almost universally unhealthy - sick, deformed, rotting on the outside. It is a race to get the fish to saleable size before the conditions under which they are farmed kill them. Given the choice of being a farmed salmon or a battery chicken, I'll choose to be the chicken every time...
Even so, industrial fish-farming is today only economically viable for the scarcest, most expensive species. Given the limited area of suitable locations for aquaculture (ideally sheltered, close to shore, and with a perceptible current to sweep away all the by-products), fish-farming cannot be seen as a solution to the world's imminent food problems, or as a replacement for destroyed natural fish stocks.
Opera seems to get a poor press from people who don't use it and who don't know it. Inside its compact footprint there are awesome quantities of built-in browsery goodness, frequently not supplied as standard with any other browser (and hence generally ignored when comparisons are being made)...
User javascript in Firefox runs via a dodgy extension. In Opera, the same scripts can run direct from the main application.
Mouse gestures: again, in FF via a extension - in Opera built-in. The capability for Mouseless browsing is also built-in.
Content blocking. In FF, via an extension - in Opera built-in.
Built-in mail, news, chat, RSS, and now BitTorrent. (But only if you want them.)
Custom searches that can be added with a couple of mouse clicks.
Menus, toolbars, themes, all very easily customised.
I'm finding Opera's widgets to be almost superfluous, because of the range of things the main browser can already be set up to do.
Unless they get connected to the internet. Then they get 0wned, and something must be done.
Doesn't seem to happens to my 98SE machine. Whereas pretty much every XP machine I see seems to be heaving with malware. Run a firewall, antispyware, antivirus, and don't use any MS apps on the Internet; and 98SE is pretty safe.
However, it will have to go, not because it's insecure, but because lots of stuff is coming out now that doesn't run on 98 (and as far as I can see, there is no good reason why this should be). And some recent 98 drivers have been a bit iffy too.
This excuse of insecurity that's being used by MS to dump their support for W98 just doesn't ring true.
(Of course Microsoft already tried to ditch 98 support a while back.)
While I typically find peoples XP systems infested by (literally) hundreds of instances of malware, I rarely get any at all. Despite internet habits that really ought to expose me to a lot of bad stuff, W98+firewall+anti-virus+non-MS browser+non-MS email seems to provide pretty solid protection, that I can't expect XP or Vista matching without a lot of work (and quite possibly not even then).
In fact, 98SE is as close as Microsoft have ever come to making a functional OS. Until they can do better, and while I have to use Windows-based applications (well...games, mostly), I'll stick with it.
(I did have to install Linux as well though, now that my HDD is too big for W98 to access it all...)
Some sort of penalty for wasting the courts time (probably financial, although I'd happily consider capital punishment as an option in this particular case), would seem a not inappropriate form of compulsion to apply to get this resolved.
Though I expect the lawyers concerned would just pass this on to their clients, and carry on arguing.
"If we don't supply the information to the United States authorities then we're liable to fines of up to $6,000 per passenger and the loss of landing rights," he said.
Are the airlines going to have to completely suspend flights to the United States if neither side backs down?
That would get in the way of their profits somewhat. (Though various US airlines would probably welcome a little less competition...)
I suspect that the airlines will demand the information themselves as a precondition of flying with them. In other words no actual change at all in the situation, apart from the responsibility for collecting the data no longer being a governmental thing. Technically, it becomes voluntary... though the airline won't let you onto the plane if you don't give it.
It's a win-win situation: The EU get to wash their hands of any dodgy legal issues, and everybody else is still precisely as happy about the situation as they were before.
Using the dry valleys of Antarctica would push up the cost of testing considerably. While they do approach Martian temperatures more closely than most terrestrial sites, the environment is predominantly bare rock, and the atmospheric pressure is normal for Earth.
So they only really (approximately) satisfy one of the conditions (temperature) that needs to be tested, which can probably be dealt with just as well (and much more cost-effectively) in a large refrigerator. The suit's handling of Martian atmospheric pressure can't really be tested in any natural terrestrial environment. I suspect North Dakota probably provides an adequate facsimile of Martian terrain, though (and at a reasonable price).
Slashdot Mirror
Opera, too.
The Sheep Look Up is indeed grim, not least because of the way that reality increasingly resembles the world it depicts. Most depressingly, the eminently practical solution it arrives at to allows human life's continuation (in a still-ghastly dystopian world) is unlikely to be adopted in the real world. Stand on Zanzibar isn't particularly upbeat either. Or The Jagged Orbit.
Certainly MS's attitude to patent abuse deserves to be punished. However, it is not as if this money is returned to the people from whom it was extracted in the first place. Rather, it goes to yet another bunch of thieving lowlife scumbags.
The patent system is so messed up that it can support multiple tiers of extortionists, each preying on the one below, but for MS to unilaterally moderate their own abuses of the system (which would be nice, admittedly) would have little effect on the overall state of affairs, where the entire business model of numerous companies is based upon extortionate patent litigation (though generally against much smaller, more vulnerable companies than MS).
More to the point, this being Norfolk (right here, where I am), the job of tracking the entire county police force could be done by a single suitably-inclined human without computer assistance. (Someone with the right sort of Aspergers Syndrome, say.)
For example, in the small hours of the morning, (I have been reliably informed by a serving member of the Norfolk Constabulary) there are precisely two officers on patrol.
And MS expects some preteen in Singapore to know better? Good luck with that.
That's an unfortunate example to choose, preteens in Singapore being likely to be both better educated and more law-abiding than their US equivalents. (And quite possibly more affluent too.)
OMG. It's got me. It's sucking me in. Aaargh.
I wondered when Clippy would resurface...
Not so much Clippy (though I'm sure he'll be making an appearance) as an unholy hybrid of Microsoft Bob and the Vista Aero interface.
In fact, the future of the Internet will consist of repackaged versions of all of Microsoft's most failsome products from the past.
Perhaps they could make
"The Indiana Jones Holiday Special"
as an interim measure.
Maybe if you spelt it "Guernsey"...? Though an illiteracy filter would admittedly be a handy thing for a search engine to have.
How Microsoft made the mistake of "borrowing" their design, adding "Clippy" and the rest of his idiotic designs, and thinking it would go anywhere still amazes me.
As far as Bill was concerned, MS Bob was a big success, as he got to marry the project manager, which might not have been an option if the project had been ignominiously canned as it deserved to be.
Like he won't be getting one of those crazy person websites, the ones with the big text, lots of animated .gifs and liberal use of the <blink> tag.
Admittedly he probably won't be quite so much in the public eye after this though.
Regrettably, it is only now that those people who mistakenly thought Nicholas Negroponte's brother John (noted particularly for his humitarian work as a death squad organizer in Central America and Iraq) was the evil sibling, begin to realise that in fact the gene for acts of monstrous evil is probably present in all members of the family.
With a working Amstrad (with a working 3" drive) it's easy. All you need to do is (literally) hack it open and install a 3.5" floppy on its second drive (I think a standard PC floppy needs a bit of rewiring, but it's certainly possible). Then save the files to an Amstrad CP/M formatted 3.5" floppy and then read them on a PC using this software: http://8bit.yarek.pl/tool/pc.22disk/ Sadly working 3" drives are rather rare these days and tend to command 3-figure prices.
3" disks don't seem to survive well in my experience. (I tried to retrieve some stuff from my 8256/my fathers 9256) about the turn of the century, from disks that were only a few years old, with a drive that did work at the time, with very little success). If they were only in Amstrad format on 3.5"/5.25" disks, or if you had a 3" drive (somehow) plugged into a PC, there is a DOS program called 22disk which can read the files (and write them to somewhere usable).
Regrettably these commercial services charge quite a bit to read the floppies and may well still charge you for a stack of unreadable media (it's probably an idea to ask them about this).
I'm still happily running Windows 98SE, btw (dual-booting with SimplyMEPIS). There are a couple of (non-vital) things that I'd switch to XP for, but I find the way that XP connects to the Internet and 15 seconds later your PC is full of crap a little offputting.
Farmed fish (in addition to not tasting as nice as the wild stuff), is typically produced (in the West at least - third world subsistence fish farms are not quite as bad) by an catastrophically wasteful, unclean, unsound process.
Fish excrement (and masses of uneaten food pellets) typically poison huge areas of water downstream from the farms. The fishes - treated with hormones to make them grow and chemicals to keep them alive - nevertheless are almost universally unhealthy - sick, deformed, rotting on the outside. It is a race to get the fish to saleable size before the conditions under which they are farmed kill them. Given the choice of being a farmed salmon or a battery chicken, I'll choose to be the chicken every time...
Even so, industrial fish-farming is today only economically viable for the scarcest, most expensive species. Given the limited area of suitable locations for aquaculture (ideally sheltered, close to shore, and with a perceptible current to sweep away all the by-products), fish-farming cannot be seen as a solution to the world's imminent food problems, or as a replacement for destroyed natural fish stocks.
You cannot tell the difference between a DRMd file and a non DRMd file all else being equal.
...Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them...
l
Oh, but you can, though...
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-6462771-1.htm
Inside its compact footprint there are awesome quantities of built-in browsery goodness, frequently not supplied as standard with any other browser (and hence generally ignored when comparisons are being made)...
User javascript in Firefox runs via a dodgy extension. In Opera, the same scripts can run direct from the main application.
Mouse gestures: again, in FF via a extension - in Opera built-in. The capability for Mouseless browsing is also built-in.
Content blocking. In FF, via an extension - in Opera built-in.
Built-in mail, news, chat, RSS, and now BitTorrent. (But only if you want them.)
Custom searches that can be added with a couple of mouse clicks.
Menus, toolbars, themes, all very easily customised.
I'm finding Opera's widgets to be almost superfluous, because of the range of things the main browser can already be set up to do.
Oh, and it's portable too: http://www.opera-usb.com/operausben.htm/
Then they get 0wned, and something must be done.
Doesn't seem to happens to my 98SE machine. Whereas pretty much every XP machine I see seems to be heaving with malware. Run a firewall, antispyware, antivirus, and don't use any MS apps on the Internet; and 98SE is pretty safe.
However, it will have to go, not because it's insecure, but because lots of stuff is coming out now that doesn't run on 98 (and as far as I can see, there is no good reason why this should be). And some recent 98 drivers have been a bit iffy too.
Oh my god, they killed Kenny!
Does Opera support Windows 98?
Runs very happily in 98SE.
This excuse of insecurity that's being used by MS to dump their support for W98 just doesn't ring true. (Of course Microsoft already tried to ditch 98 support a while back.)
While I typically find peoples XP systems infested by (literally) hundreds of instances of malware, I rarely get any at all. Despite internet habits that really ought to expose me to a lot of bad stuff, W98+firewall+anti-virus+non-MS browser+non-MS email seems to provide pretty solid protection, that I can't expect XP or Vista matching without a lot of work (and quite possibly not even then).
In fact, 98SE is as close as Microsoft have ever come to making a functional OS. Until they can do better, and while I have to use Windows-based applications (well...games, mostly), I'll stick with it.
(I did have to install Linux as well though, now that my HDD is too big for W98 to access it all...)
Some sort of penalty for wasting the courts time (probably financial, although I'd happily consider capital punishment as an option in this particular case), would seem a not inappropriate form of compulsion to apply to get this resolved.
Though I expect the lawyers concerned would just pass this on to their clients, and carry on arguing.
Are the airlines going to have to completely suspend flights to the United States if neither side backs down?
That would get in the way of their profits somewhat. (Though various US airlines would probably welcome a little less competition...)
I suspect that the airlines will demand the information themselves as a precondition of flying with them. In other words no actual change at all in the situation, apart from the responsibility for collecting the data no longer being a governmental thing. Technically, it becomes voluntary... though the airline won't let you onto the plane if you don't give it.
It's a win-win situation: The EU get to wash their hands of any dodgy legal issues, and everybody else is still precisely as happy about the situation as they were before.
So they only really (approximately) satisfy one of the conditions (temperature) that needs to be tested, which can probably be dealt with just as well (and much more cost-effectively) in a large refrigerator. The suit's handling of Martian atmospheric pressure can't really be tested in any natural terrestrial environment. I suspect North Dakota probably provides an adequate facsimile of Martian terrain, though (and at a reasonable price).
This is true, but for a lot of places where I've worked, nobody at all will come in to work if a rule like this gets implemented...