We are all of us self-absorbed hypocrites who ignore or dismiss uncomfortable parts of our reality because we must believe in accountability to have order in society and discourage parasitism. When the lines between personal responsibility, moral failings and mental health get blurred, people around the problematic person can fail badly. Can we blame them?
You can't empathize with an emotion you have never felt. How many of you would empathize with someone who truly enjoys torturing and killing babies? How about someone who truly enjoys and fullfills a need by slapping his wife occasionally? Just a few slaps here and then, no hospital visits..ya know, is that ok? How about the guy in your work team who spends half his time obsessively reading the news instead of working and earns as much as you?
If you keep going on, at some point, you will reach your personal frontier and start wavering. Everybody does. It's simply a matter of degree. I'll leave you with those cheerful thoughts.
I repeat: religions should NOT NOT NOT have confidential texts.
Everything about a religion should be open, no matter how nutty it might seem to an outside observer. There are tens of thousands of people who believe in a thunder god today. There is no excuse to have hidden agendas and Xenu "fun surprises" when the vast majority of religious people out there today believe in completely open (catholics, shia) and even completely decentralized religions (protestants, sunni muslims, jews, buddhists, etc.) that some argue are "a bunch of crazy fairy tales".
Any secrecy promotes wrongful manipulation of a religion and abuse of its believers. The idea of it should be intolerable and immediately rejected.
The kindle does have margin notes, dictionary and encyclopedia lookup. It comes with free wikipedia access if memory serves me right.
It is smaller than 1000 books. It's easy to keep bookmarks. You can buy books anytime for under 10 bucks wherever there is evdo or gsm coverage (not sure about gsm).
It includes googlemaps with fake GPS positionning.
Indeed, it's sad how quickly some people lose sight of the big picture.
DRM is bad. Less DRM is still bad. No DRM is the only good. Let companies know they should stop acting like greedy paranoid entities and make DRM a feature if you must (like WoW and xbox live so). Just make sure your game is worth playing and a good value and you'll be successful.
1-It should have a touchscreen, an iPhone-like gui and double as a Wacom-quality tablet with a nice stylus so people can actually use it like real paper to take notes and draw on.
2-It should have a letter-sized or A4-sized screen.
3-It should run in two modes: reader using little battery and tablet with heavier consumption upon demand. In that mode, it should have photoshop for visual artists and Scrivr for writers and note-taking. This means it'd have to run OSX.
4-It would have 1 mini-USB and one mini-Firewire 800 ports, Optional keyboard which will also act as a 2-Port USB hub. The screen can display a full sized qwerty keyboard. One expresscard slot will be available.
5-It should have advanced, fine-grain force feedback for typing and "feeling" buttons in the UI.
6-It would support multitouch of course.
7-It would have about 64GB solid state HD and 4GB ram.
8-Reading battery should last 24H+, writing can cut that to 12H+, drawing can make it 8H+ and random computer tasks should run for at least 4H.
9-It should have a 12MP camera that doubles as an HD webcam.
10- It should come in rugged and sleek models
11- It should have GPS and google maps integration.
If you plug the internet into televisions and 20 million people decide to pay a penny each to watch "Leave Britney Alone!", then someone just made $200,000.
You mean a penny + bandwidth costs. Other than this minor nitpick, I agree with you. That's the way to go for media providers: ease of use (no DRM, great GUI) + quantity (comprehensive universal catalog) + quality + cheapness (however much people will happily pay) = success. It's not enough to make money in the long term, you have to be loved.
Pirates can beat them in cheapness and compete in quantity but would be way behind in ease of use and cannot improve media quality (unless media providers gimp it with ads and drm).
Well, Farid is actually a common moroccan name. Thankfully, internet penetration in Morocco is low enough that the ISP was able to identify him easily among the 4 guys and a camel* that have a DSL line.
*The camel's internet service was cancelled for non-payment after the first month.
I agree that $200 computers are more good than bad. Software is cheap to replicate and if you sell 300 million copies at $99 a pop, you make more than if you sell 100 million at $199. In fact, that's the very logic behind OEM pricings vs retail.
I disagree that microsoft can't create a superior product to OSX or Linux. Microsoft is still very popular, especially outside the U.S, and they can pay well and have a good system in place to find young talent as they partner with countless learning institutes around the world.
Furthermore, there are many O.S dogs at M$. They might have been leashed by compatibility policies (What a stupid idea. If people want to run their old software, let them keep the same old O.S or allow them to use a virtual environment a la Parallels to run it. Microsoft have all their source code so it should be easy to match or exceed what Parallels and others have achieved. Problem solved damnit!) but they are still champs and if management really tries to make a great O.S first and money second, I have no doubt that the microsofties will give Apple and Linux hell and my money would be on them.
If Microsoft can come up with win7 or win8 and make something that runs applications as well as directX runs games (including directsound, networking and directInput) compared to openGL, Cocoa, glide, etc, we will all bow and shut up.
I can't be certain you're not telling the truth but the story you tell sounds caricatural and simplistic. Machiavelical Ballmer and foolish Gates? Nah. I don't buy it.
PS: To Gates/Ballmer: You owe me. Send me some money. I'm tired of being poor. If you don't, I will bash you on Slashdot and bring about the year of Linux on the desktop. You don't want that, do you?
You're wrong. Cellphone Sound quality is much worse than in-person. Furthermore, there is no lip reading or body language available to assist you. As a general trend, people NEED to speak louder and clearer on a cellphone and sure enough, they do, to the dismay of some people in their vicinity sometimes.
Stop wasting time nitpicking and talking about exceptions. They ALWAYS exist, we know already. They aren't the norm for sound technical reasons that you cannot ignore. Also, human memory is horribly unreliable and so is your recall of personal experiences.
This has happened to me using a linksys router a few years ago. Hexadecimal values equivalent to my internal IP (and another nonexistent internal IP, oddly enough) would get corrupted on large files consistently until I figured it out.
No such problems on the Tomato firmware I'm using now:)
He sent a letter to the mother telling her that her son's game got perfect reviews. I stopped reading the article after that but I can only assume the remainder of the letter were Thompson's heartfelt congratulations and good wishes.
Sheesh, can't Jack Thompson do nice things every once in a while?
1-Admitting you did something WRONG. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: Mistakes were made.) 2-Admitting it was YOUR fault. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: I blame society!) 3-Asking what you can do to MAKE UP for it, and do it if it's reasonable. (Example: Earl's Karma list)
Metallica should have no problem doing all 3 at small enough a cost to satisfy most filesharers who care.
You are an imbecile for spreading those harmful ideas and a fool because you do not understand what an apology is. I shall include tv example to clarify:
An apology contains three parts:
-Admitting you did something WRONG. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: Mistakes were made.) -Admitting it was YOUR fault. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: I blame society!) -Asking what you can do to MAKE UP for it, and do it if it's reasonable. (Example: Earl's Karma list)
Saying that Metallica shouldn't give a real apology is harmful and that is why you are an imbecile.
What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use.
This is not accurate, however. The standard procedure when you are Comcast and are peering with Tier1 people like ATT and Cogent is to pay them money for each gig of data you send on to their network and vice versa. So you always want people to be sending packets to your network and you hate those pesky uploaders who are sending them out packets out of it.
In effect, packet flow is money flow and it flows to and from Comcast at the whim of the users. That's why upload bandwidth is insultingly low compared to download bandwidth and business connections cost so much. When comcast prohibits running servers and interferes with p2p, there is an immediate, concrete and CONTROLLABLE effect on the money they make.
Greed is now seeking a balance with customer acceptance.
Indeed. I remember a/. article on plastic fiber actually and I thought about that when writing my post but I didn't want to start rambling so I kept it simple and less accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
We are all of us self-absorbed hypocrites who ignore or dismiss uncomfortable parts of our reality because we must believe in accountability to have order in society and discourage parasitism. When the lines between personal responsibility, moral failings and mental health get blurred, people around the problematic person can fail badly. Can we blame them?
You can't empathize with an emotion you have never felt. How many of you would empathize with someone who truly enjoys torturing and killing babies? How about someone who truly enjoys and fullfills a need by slapping his wife occasionally? Just a few slaps here and then, no hospital visits..ya know, is that ok? How about the guy in your work team who spends half his time obsessively reading the news instead of working and earns as much as you?
If you keep going on, at some point, you will reach your personal frontier and start wavering. Everybody does. It's simply a matter of degree. I'll leave you with those cheerful thoughts.
Why would anyone listen to someone who *publically* uses hotmail? You're clearly either a microsoftie or a crazy person.
slashdot poster...no girlfriend...enough with the lies.
I agree with the parent. Give credit where credit is due, and this judge did well. Good judge! Good judge! /gives judge a seat on the supreme court.
And here I thought it was a mediocre show with a stupid plot and second-rate actors!
I should know, I forced myself to finish the first season before I abandonned it.
Religions should not have confidential texts.
I repeat: religions should NOT NOT NOT have confidential texts.
Everything about a religion should be open, no matter how nutty it might seem to an outside observer. There are tens of thousands of people who believe in a thunder god today. There is no excuse to have hidden agendas and Xenu "fun surprises" when the vast majority of religious people out there today believe in completely open (catholics, shia) and even completely decentralized religions (protestants, sunni muslims, jews, buddhists, etc.) that some argue are "a bunch of crazy fairy tales".
Any secrecy promotes wrongful manipulation of a religion and abuse of its believers. The idea of it should be intolerable and immediately rejected.
The kindle does have margin notes, dictionary and encyclopedia lookup. It comes with free wikipedia access if memory serves me right.
:)
It is smaller than 1000 books. It's easy to keep bookmarks. You can buy books anytime for under 10 bucks wherever there is evdo or gsm coverage (not sure about gsm).
It includes googlemaps with fake GPS positionning.
And don't forget minesweeper!
Indeed, it's sad how quickly some people lose sight of the big picture.
DRM is bad. Less DRM is still bad. No DRM is the only good. Let companies know they should stop acting like greedy paranoid entities and make DRM a feature if you must (like WoW and xbox live so). Just make sure your game is worth playing and a good value and you'll be successful.
Do the right thing. Good things happen.
1-It should have a touchscreen, an iPhone-like gui and double as a Wacom-quality tablet with a nice stylus so people can actually use it like real paper to take notes and draw on.
2-It should have a letter-sized or A4-sized screen.
3-It should run in two modes: reader using little battery and tablet with heavier consumption upon demand. In that mode, it should have photoshop for visual artists and Scrivr for writers and note-taking. This means it'd have to run OSX.
4-It would have 1 mini-USB and one mini-Firewire 800 ports, Optional keyboard which will also act as a 2-Port USB hub. The screen can display a full sized qwerty keyboard. One expresscard slot will be available.
5-It should have advanced, fine-grain force feedback for typing and "feeling" buttons in the UI.
6-It would support multitouch of course.
7-It would have about 64GB solid state HD and 4GB ram.
8-Reading battery should last 24H+, writing can cut that to 12H+, drawing can make it 8H+ and random computer tasks should run for at least 4H.
9-It should have a 12MP camera that doubles as an HD webcam.
10- It should come in rugged and sleek models
11- It should have GPS and google maps integration.
It'll probably cost a lot more than
If you plug the internet into televisions and 20 million people decide to pay a penny each to watch "Leave Britney Alone!", then someone just made $200,000.
You mean a penny + bandwidth costs. Other than this minor nitpick, I agree with you. That's the way to go for media providers: ease of use (no DRM, great GUI) + quantity (comprehensive universal catalog) + quality + cheapness (however much people will happily pay) = success. It's not enough to make money in the long term, you have to be loved.
Pirates can beat them in cheapness and compete in quantity but would be way behind in ease of use and cannot improve media quality (unless media providers gimp it with ads and drm).
Well, Farid is actually a common moroccan name. Thankfully, internet penetration in Morocco is low enough that the ISP was able to identify him easily among the 4 guys and a camel* that have a DSL line.
*The camel's internet service was cancelled for non-payment after the first month.
I agree that $200 computers are more good than bad. Software is cheap to replicate and if you sell 300 million copies at $99 a pop, you make more than if you sell 100 million at $199. In fact, that's the very logic behind OEM pricings vs retail.
I disagree that microsoft can't create a superior product to OSX or Linux. Microsoft is still very popular, especially outside the U.S, and they can pay well and have a good system in place to find young talent as they partner with countless learning institutes around the world.
Furthermore, there are many O.S dogs at M$. They might have been leashed by compatibility policies (What a stupid idea. If people want to run their old software, let them keep the same old O.S or allow them to use a virtual environment a la Parallels to run it. Microsoft have all their source code so it should be easy to match or exceed what Parallels and others have achieved. Problem solved damnit!) but they are still champs and if management really tries to make a great O.S first and money second, I have no doubt that the microsofties will give Apple and Linux hell and my money would be on them.
If Microsoft can come up with win7 or win8 and make something that runs applications as well as directX runs games (including directsound, networking and directInput) compared to openGL, Cocoa, glide, etc, we will all bow and shut up.
Til then, i'm getting a crunchy, delicious Mac.
I can't be certain you're not telling the truth but the story you tell sounds caricatural and simplistic. Machiavelical Ballmer and foolish Gates? Nah. I don't buy it.
PS: To Gates/Ballmer: You owe me. Send me some money. I'm tired of being poor. If you don't, I will bash you on Slashdot and bring about the year of Linux on the desktop. You don't want that, do you?
You're wrong. Cellphone Sound quality is much worse than in-person. Furthermore, there is no lip reading or body language available to assist you. As a general trend, people NEED to speak louder and clearer on a cellphone and sure enough, they do, to the dismay of some people in their vicinity sometimes.
Stop wasting time nitpicking and talking about exceptions. They ALWAYS exist, we know already. They aren't the norm for sound technical reasons that you cannot ignore. Also, human memory is horribly unreliable and so is your recall of personal experiences.
Let me reiterate for emphasis: You're wrong.
This has happened to me using a linksys router a few years ago. Hexadecimal values equivalent to my internal IP (and another nonexistent internal IP, oddly enough) would get corrupted on large files consistently until I figured it out.
:)
No such problems on the Tomato firmware I'm using now
He sent a letter to the mother telling her that her son's game got perfect reviews. I stopped reading the article after that but I can only assume the remainder of the letter were Thompson's heartfelt congratulations and good wishes.
Sheesh, can't Jack Thompson do nice things every once in a while?
An apology contains three parts:
1-Admitting you did something WRONG. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: Mistakes were made.)
2-Admitting it was YOUR fault. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: I blame society!)
3-Asking what you can do to MAKE UP for it, and do it if it's reasonable. (Example: Earl's Karma list)
Metallica should have no problem doing all 3 at small enough a cost to satisfy most filesharers who care.
You are an imbecile for spreading those harmful ideas and a fool because you do not understand what an apology is. I shall include tv example to clarify:
An apology contains three parts:
-Admitting you did something WRONG. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: Mistakes were made.)
-Admitting it was YOUR fault. (Counterexample by Homer Simpson: I blame society!)
-Asking what you can do to MAKE UP for it, and do it if it's reasonable. (Example: Earl's Karma list)
Saying that Metallica shouldn't give a real apology is harmful and that is why you are an imbecile.
You are the reason I read slashdot. A delicious post in many ways and I agree completely with everything you have said.
Thank you.
You're absolutely right about QoS.
What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use.
This is not accurate, however. The standard procedure when you are Comcast and are peering with Tier1 people like ATT and Cogent is to pay them money for each gig of data you send on to their network and vice versa. So you always want people to be sending packets to your network and you hate those pesky uploaders who are sending them out packets out of it.
In effect, packet flow is money flow and it flows to and from Comcast at the whim of the users. That's why upload bandwidth is insultingly low compared to download bandwidth and business connections cost so much. When comcast prohibits running servers and interferes with p2p, there is an immediate, concrete and CONTROLLABLE effect on the money they make.
Greed is now seeking a balance with customer acceptance.
We can't sustain ourselves without torturing and killing weaker lifeforms*.
We need to experiment on them because the alternative is experimenting on humans and it is wasteful or immoral.
Lifeforms may include animals or AIs in the future (a fully simulated rat must feel pain too).
*Native americans behaved in the closest way to "animal" behavior and their culture was just too weak to compete and thrive.
Tasty steak, but never having been exposed to parasites, virus, pesticides, herbicides, etc.
etc. = bovine antibiotics and excessive growth hormones.
Fascinating stuff. Thank you.
Note: "Fairly accessible" might be a more accurate description ^_^U. It deals with some fairly complex optics towards the middle.
Indeed. I remember a /. article on plastic fiber actually and I thought about that when writing my post but I didn't want to start rambling so I kept it simple and less accurate.
Thanks for the follow up info!
Buy a really crappy laptop that nobody would steal, and when it gets stolen anyways, shrug and go buy another one off ebay.
If you want a fancy laptop, insure it against theft, encrypt the HD and have everything backed up daily.
Those are the only useful measures you can take.