Amen! An Atari was THE status symbol of that ara. My kid just doesn't have an appriciation of where video games come from. Sure the PS2 and Xbox have all of the flashy 3D graphics and stereo surround sound, but those systems, and a lot of the games that run on them are missing the one thing that the old games had....a soul! The imagination wasn't done for you back then. I think that's what what made our generation feel so connected to those games. The game provided the action and game play. Having to use some imagination was what bonded us with those games.
Granted, it looks really cool. I'm sure it has all kinds of gee-whiz new technology. But who is going to buy it? The airline industry is in the toilet. Most of the big airlines are on the brink of bancruptcy and have to turn to the feds to co-sign on their loans. Five years ago would have been the perfect time for this plane. Hopefully the economy will do a turn-around soon. I'd like to see these at the airports and in the skies soon.
I work for one of the telcos, fortunately not worldcom. But these clowns are going to bury the whole market. Between the former CEO and CFO, these fuck-witts have managed to further erode what little confidence the market had left in the sector, and most likely, the stock market and economy as a whole. I hate seeing the feds overstep their bounds, but they need to make an example out of these assholes. It needs to involve time in prison....and a lot of it...and I don't mean club fed, either, where their biggest worry is getting enough time on the driving range. No, I mean prison with Bubba and all of his sexually frustrated cell-mates. These guys deserve to someone's prison-bitch for the better part of a decade. Oh, and don't forget to conficate everything that these pricks own, so they actually have to go out and get a j-o-b when they are released.
I'm not into the whole 'who's bad mouthed who this week' thing, but it seems like eminem summed up moby pretty well. Moby's latest isn't selling for the same reason that pearl jam dropped into the abyss....the cd's SUCKED! Here's what usually happens....a band comes out with a cd that sells millions and makes piles of money for everyone involved. Then the dim-witts in the band get a big ego, start believing that THEY know everything and leave the label for one that will let the the band produce the next cd or two. Then when the crap they produce doesn't sell, they look for scapegoats. We can thank the wankers in metallica for this 'blame the thieving techies' bullshit. There is a reason that the good producers make a small fortune. You can clean up anything in the studio...especially when there is someone in the studio that knows how to put lipstick on a pig and make the pig look pretty damn good in the process. Now for eminem, he's a goofy little asshole that makes me laugh every now and then. By the way...who the hell is debbie and why did he go so far out of his way to say 'fuck you' to her on his new cd?
You are not truely a geek until you let the smoke out of an expensive piece of hardware. I learned to build systems at the end of the 486/dawn of the Pentium age, and the best mistakes that I learned from were usually the costly ones. You know, the hard drive dropped on the concrete floor, the AT power supply switch that I wired wrong (now that REALLY was a smoker!), the motherboard that flexed too much while installing an old ISA sound card in a case with brackets that didn't line up....I could go on and on. Just build it yourself, and don't be afraid to scan the hardware newsgroups and ask questions if you can't find the answers you need. Oh and one last bit of advice....brass threaded stand-offs for mounting the motherboard...these are your friends!
Re:Very much a model of how it should be done.
on
Inside the Cult of TiVo
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I wonder if Tivo has tried to recruit any of the people that have developed any of the more popular hacks, be they "legal" or not. If I were running a company and found someone who had the skill to come up with good hacks on the hardware that I was manufacturing, I would want them on the payroll.
Technology and the jobs that it creates has always been subject to boom and bust times. Examples:
Railroads....not really high tech by todays standards, but it was once "the next big thing." Once there were a lot of railroad companies, then the bottom fell out. A lot of them went away, and a lot of jobs with them. The strong companies survived and went on.
Automobiles...there were once dozens of car companies in the US. Now there are but a handful, but those companies provide tens of thousands of jobs, many of them very high-skilled.
Calculators...The calculator revolution in the 1970's popped up after Intel produced, almost accidentally, the first microprocessor. Initially it was just going to be a calculator-on-a-chip, but later they realized just what they had produced was more than just something that they hoped one manufacturer would use to make calculators. The calculator business grew very big, very fast, and crashed about as quickly.
There is something, skill-wise, in each of those times that workers were able to adapt for later use. Just give it some time and you will notice the door opening for the next opportunity, even though they all appear to be closed for good right now.
Re:I got started on the original IMSAI...
on
IMSAI Series Two
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· Score: 2
I envy you for the time and environment that you grew up in, tech-wise, at least. My first introduction to computers was an Atari 1200xl. I was 13 and didn't have clue about how it worked. Wish I had been just a little more curious, at least enough to have really jumped into the whole scene at the time. I read 'Fire In The Valley' and 'Infinate Loop' last year and became nothing short of utterly fascinated with the early years of the PC, before the empires were built around the OS and Micro$oft. I just about kicked myself for being alive during that time in history and was oblivious to the "good-old-days" that were happening around me while I was dropping quarters into various Space Invaders and Pac-Man machines The IMSAI, Osbourne, Altair and PET were marvels of their day but now are looked down upon and scoffed at. Those were the days when anyone who could put together their own system had way more than a clue and a "Build Your Own PC" book from Amazon.com. Ye Gods!, a trained seal could put one together today.
My hat is off to you, Sir. It sounds like you were paying attention while soon-to-be gen x'ers like me were asleep.
was what changing the pricing structure would do to their subscriber base. When the ecconomy took a nose-dive, many people started to get rid of things that were not essencial, broadband access being one of those things. There were a lot of cable modem users who decided that the extra money was worth not having to dial up and tie up their phone line or even deal with the chance of getting busy signals while attempting to dial in. If all of a sudden, they see that there is a chance that some spy-ware that crept onto their system that runs 24/7 could end up sticking them with a massive cable bill, they may either change to DSL or drop it entirely and go back to dial up. Lower speed would be okay for most, but charging per MB over a certain limit will chase away a lot of customers to other services.
With the financial difficulties that the cable and telco's are having, they will fight tooth and nail to keep this new flavor of broadband access in obscurity. Broadband and related services are one of the few parts of their companies that have potential for future revenue growth. Where else are they going to be able to expand their revenue base....? Digital cable? Not likely. Too many people don't want to pay the premium over standard cable service. Long distance? Hardly. There is no real margin in that anymore. Cellular phone service? Possibly, but almost everyone already has a cell phone of some kind. The companies that get more maket share will be the ones who can package better deals.
The telecom/ISP industry is very weak right now and will remain so until demand increases and after some more consolidation in the industry.
....all of the lame attempts at DRM etc. With the continued increase in computing power to the hardware that the consumer can buy, IMHO any "copy protection" or encription scheme the powers that be come up with will be broken within a year of it's introduction. It happened with DSS and Dish Network, it's only a matter of time ( and probably not much time) before it's cracked.
Also, if they are taking this long to come up with the initial standard, it will take another decade before they would be able to deploy an new standard to replace the one that will be cracked.
If M$ really does have $40 billion in cash on hand, think about how that sontributes to their bottom line. Assuming that this is all in cash and not stocks or bonds, the annual interest income on $40 billion even at 2% in a standard savings account is about $800 million. If it's in higher yield securities (T-Bills, or other US Treasury backsed securities, this could very well generate over $1 billion annually.
If any "alternative" browser is going to succeed it has to have some kind of edge over IE. This is only MY opinion, but unless Opera, Mozilla and the like are going to be a serious contender for the MS desktop, it will have to offer some more than just being faster. MS has a BIG advantage....IE is free (even though there is the "making a deal with the Devil factor involved with IE).
I don't know too much about Opera, but are there any other "features" that it offers that IE doesn't, or at least doesn't do as well as Opera? I like competition in any market, but if it doesn't have anything substantially additional with it that IE doesn't, then I can see it gaining much market share, especially since one has to pay for the ad-free version? Maybe someone here can shed some light in this.
...vote with your wallet. If there is DSL or some other high speed option in your area and you're with ATT, drop them like a hot potato. Make sure you tell them WHY you are leaving. When you call to install the new service, tell THEM why you left ATT. If you do nothing and take it up the ass, the rest of the companies will follow suit. I get cable modem service through Time/Warner Communists...er, I mean communications. If they start charging me extra for downloading big files (Hal-Life patches, MP3's or the like, I'm lucky enough to have access to Ameritech/SBC DSL. If they pull a stunt like ATT, then I might go w/satellite. I know that everyone doesn't have another option, but those who do should look view tactics like ATT's the same way the average person would if a dead rat was thrown onto their kitchen table.
They have a whole lot of ground to cover in episode 3. Anakin is well down the path to the dark side but has a lot further to go. I don't know if or how Lucas and company will take him from having just lost an arm to being the mask-and-helmet-wearing "more machine than man" who has a flair for choking people a distance when they displease him ("I find your lack of faith disturbing").
The storyline would imply that Amidala will be pregnant by the start of episode 3. She'll have to come to believe that Anakin is so out of control that she must hide the children from him. (Vader didn't know about Leia until the end of 'Jedi' but did he even know about Luke before 'Empire'?)
From episode 4, 5 and 6, it would appear that in episode 3, all of the Jedi are killed with the help of Anakin, except for Yoda and Kenobi. If there were any others, then they would have been been "recalled to action" during or after episode 4.
They have a lot of things to cover and only one film left to do it in. Episode 3 might have have to have a running time of Kevin Costner magnatude to get it all in.
This was the scene that made the entire movie worth the admission price. The crowd in the theater where I saw the movie just about went nuts at three points of the fight. The first was when Yoda struck his "bring it on" pose after trading energy bolts with Dooku. The second was when Yoda pulled his light-saber out, making it jump off of his belt and into his hand. The third was after the fight when he picked up his walking stick in the same manner as he did the light saber, then just hobbled away like nothing had happened.
Personally I would have liked to have seen him do some serious thrashing on Dooku before the Count had to resort to playing dirty just to escape. But it was nice to see just why everyone always stepped very lightly around the old master. Lucas had always left it at "he's a very wise and powerful Jedi who's not to be toyed with." It was fun to see exactly why that was so accepted among the lesser Jedi.
OK, when the "Mars meteorite" was announces a few years ago I could possible see how they could claim to know that it originated from the 4th planet. We've send a few space probes to Mars and have been able to study (at least remotely) the make-up of certain regions on that planet. But to say that this chunk of rock is from Mercury is a bit of a streatch, IMHO. Those minerals are also abundant in asteroids. It's times like these that showcase how boundless our ignorance of our own solar system truly is.
Instead, CAPITALIST individuals (or their legal constructions) take personal risks to later return a profit. If a CAPITALIST has the means to launch a moon-mining project (including obtaining some precedent for mineral rights on Luna) and the fervent belief that they will make money (BENEFIT). This is all well and good and moral, and all who contribute do so voluntarily.
The main reason that capitalists have not taken up mining on either the moon or nearby asteroids is the price of admission. It costs about $10,000 for every pound that goes into orbit. Taking that same pound to the moon increases the cost even higher. And what is on the moon that could be mined right now anyway? Sure, it's a rich source of helium 3, but how many power plants are there currently that use helium 3 as a fuel?
The cost of getting men and material into orbit, let alone to the moon, has to come down dramically and the possibility or extracting a profitable material would have to really go up before such an operation would ever be seriously considered by industry. Any corporation that would spend billions of dollars on something with almost no profit potential would last about as long as Enron or Global Crossing.
Good points made on the call for calm regarding the destructive potential of nanotech. A hammer can classified as a very useful tool to drive nails, pound things into place, etc. It can also be considered as a dangerous weapon when employed to bash in a human skull...ANYTHING can be used for good as well as bad.
I'm sure there are some (ok, many) who tire of hearing me saying this, but I believe that it is worth repeating: There are a small handfull of technologies that are going to mature from the laboratory to commercial use very soon, prabably in about three or four years. Nanotechnology will be one of them, probably the first one. This will be like the micro-processor was to "the information age." It will happen fast, too fast by the standards of the chicken littles of the world.
Most people don't have a good grasp on what this will mean to the world. Materials will be able to be designed atom-by-atom, producing materials that are now thought to be impossible to make. Imagine being able to make an alloy that is harder than steel, more resilliant than titanium, and weigh less than aluminum. If you really want to show off, you can make it superconducting at room temperature. Suddenly things like fusion reactors (ones that actually produce more power than they consume) will seem within reach.
There will be a lot of changes resulting from this technology. It's best to make "change" your friend, otherwise, someone else will.
These guys are burning bridges with the zeal of a pyromaniac. First they Actually had the stones to go public about Micro$oft's policies towards OEM's. Now they're basically toilet papering the RIAA's front yard. I'm no Gateway supporter. Like mentioned in an earlier post, they cater to the lowest common denominator. But I haven't seen Dell or Compact saying anything publicly about the way MS bullies the OEM's.
Maybe they'll start doing commercials that show the Gateway cow taking a dump on the Dell-dudes front yard (Dude, what's that smell?!) or commercials having some fun with the internal pissing match at Compaq/HP.
If these guys want to have even a chance of surviving past this year, they need to be socking the other companies in right in the chops every time they get a chance, because I don't know of too many success stories providing content like they're planning to.
Most people, even a lot of the technically minded don't a grasp on just what this technology will be capable of. "Oh big deal, a bunch of Little robots!" some might say. It it MUCH more than that. I firmly believe that in the next five or six years, a small handful of new technologies are going to be refined and introduced , with nanotech being one of them. Imagine what this could do for materials research, developement and production. Nanotech could realistically allow us to custom make material with extreme precision at the atomic level. So you want an alloy that is lighter than aluminum, harder than diamond, more resiliant than titanium and a hidiously high melting point, all in one material? No problem, we've got ya' covered! How about a near room-temperature superconductor? No problem. Nanotech is a tool that will usher in a new age of technological developement, making things like quantum computers a reality. It's impact on medicine will be just as, if not more, profound than the discovery of anti-biotics. Imagine going to the doctor and having your DNA re-sequenced to eliminate any number of ilnesses. In short, imagine the entire microchip/microprocessor revolution happening, only twice as intense and occurring in the span of five or six years.
When did it happen? When did I get old? 20 years ago I was in my element while in front of an arcade game. Those machines are primative, archaic by todays standards. No 3D graphics, no stereo sound, no 32 bit or 64 bit processors. Hell, I have calculators with more processing power then a lot the old arcade games. But those old games have something a lot of the new games have...a soul. Back then the technology was so raw that the people who created them had to concentrate on game play and couldn't fall back on pretty pictures.
My daughter is about to turn 13. Over the past few years I've taken her to just about every arcade within driving distance. She always had fun, except for the times when we went to arcades with a row of the old classics. My eyes would glaze over and I'd wander over them. One time I really embarrassed her when another 30-something dad and I got into a Pac Man grudge match (Poor fool, couldn't last past the 2nd key). One day she was endured the agony of watching the old man flip the score on a Star Trek (I used to own one until the 3rd monitor went out). I only was able to play it for 5 minutes after that because the vector monitor finally burned out as I was playing it, setting off one of the building's smoke detectors (If you've ever owned a vector game, you probably know what this is like).
I'm sure that exercise has it's place, but some people take it too far. I will never understand runners/joggers. Whenever someone tries to tell me how running is so great and good for you, I have a two-word reply....."Jim Fix."
Weight-lifting is another one that I just don't get. I mean, the reason that I went to college was so I wouldn't have to pick up heavy things anymore, let alone do it for free or even pay to pick up heavy things at a gym.
one shot nyquil (The icky green liquid stuff, not Gelcaps), $2
NyQuil, the night-time coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, why the hell am I laying on my kitchen floor medicine.
When I was in college we would occationally make a rather nasty mixed drink that we called a "grizzly-gator"; Gatoraide, vodka and NyQuil. We usually saved those for the end of the party.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen! An Atari was THE status symbol of that ara. My kid just doesn't have an appriciation of where video games come from. Sure the PS2 and Xbox have all of the flashy 3D graphics and stereo surround sound, but those systems, and a lot of the games that run on them are missing the one thing that the old games had....a soul! The imagination wasn't done for you back then. I think that's what what made our generation feel so connected to those games. The game provided the action and game play. Having to use some imagination was what bonded us with those games.
Granted, it looks really cool. I'm sure it has all kinds of gee-whiz new technology. But who is going to buy it? The airline industry is in the toilet. Most of the big airlines are on the brink of bancruptcy and have to turn to the feds to co-sign on their loans. Five years ago would have been the perfect time for this plane. Hopefully the economy will do a turn-around soon. I'd like to see these at the airports and in the skies soon.
I work for one of the telcos, fortunately not worldcom. But these clowns are going to bury the whole market. Between the former CEO and CFO, these fuck-witts have managed to further erode what little confidence the market had left in the sector, and most likely, the stock market and economy as a whole. I hate seeing the feds overstep their bounds, but they need to make an example out of these assholes. It needs to involve time in prison....and a lot of it...and I don't mean club fed, either, where their biggest worry is getting enough time on the driving range. No, I mean prison with Bubba and all of his sexually frustrated cell-mates. These guys deserve to someone's prison-bitch for the better part of a decade. Oh, and don't forget to conficate everything that these pricks own, so they actually have to go out and get a j-o-b when they are released.
I'm not into the whole 'who's bad mouthed who this week' thing, but it seems like eminem summed up moby pretty well. Moby's latest isn't selling for the same reason that pearl jam dropped into the abyss....the cd's SUCKED! Here's what usually happens....a band comes out with a cd that sells millions and makes piles of money for everyone involved. Then the dim-witts in the band get a big ego, start believing that THEY know everything and leave the label for one that will let the the band produce the next cd or two. Then when the crap they produce doesn't sell, they look for scapegoats. We can thank the wankers in metallica for this 'blame the thieving techies' bullshit. There is a reason that the good producers make a small fortune. You can clean up anything in the studio...especially when there is someone in the studio that knows how to put lipstick on a pig and make the pig look pretty damn good in the process. Now for eminem, he's a goofy little asshole that makes me laugh every now and then. By the way...who the hell is debbie and why did he go so far out of his way to say 'fuck you' to her on his new cd?
You are not truely a geek until you let the smoke out of an expensive piece of hardware. I learned to build systems at the end of the 486/dawn of the Pentium age, and the best mistakes that I learned from were usually the costly ones. You know, the hard drive dropped on the concrete floor, the AT power supply switch that I wired wrong (now that REALLY was a smoker!), the motherboard that flexed too much while installing an old ISA sound card in a case with brackets that didn't line up....I could go on and on. Just build it yourself, and don't be afraid to scan the hardware newsgroups and ask questions if you can't find the answers you need. Oh and one last bit of advice....brass threaded stand-offs for mounting the motherboard...these are your friends!
I wonder if Tivo has tried to recruit any of the people that have developed any of the more popular hacks, be they "legal" or not. If I were running a company and found someone who had the skill to come up with good hacks on the hardware that I was manufacturing, I would want them on the payroll.
Railroads....not really high tech by todays standards, but it was once "the next big thing." Once there were a lot of railroad companies, then the bottom fell out. A lot of them went away, and a lot of jobs with them. The strong companies survived and went on.
Automobiles...there were once dozens of car companies in the US. Now there are but a handful, but those companies provide tens of thousands of jobs, many of them very high-skilled.
Calculators...The calculator revolution in the 1970's popped up after Intel produced, almost accidentally, the first microprocessor. Initially it was just going to be a calculator-on-a-chip, but later they realized just what they had produced was more than just something that they hoped one manufacturer would use to make calculators. The calculator business grew very big, very fast, and crashed about as quickly.
There is something, skill-wise, in each of those times that workers were able to adapt for later use. Just give it some time and you will notice the door opening for the next opportunity, even though they all appear to be closed for good right now.
I envy you for the time and environment that you grew up in, tech-wise, at least. My first introduction to computers was an Atari 1200xl. I was 13 and didn't have clue about how it worked. Wish I had been just a little more curious, at least enough to have really jumped into the whole scene at the time. I read 'Fire In The Valley' and 'Infinate Loop' last year and became nothing short of utterly fascinated with the early years of the PC, before the empires were built around the OS and Micro$oft. I just about kicked myself for being alive during that time in history and was oblivious to the "good-old-days" that were happening around me while I was dropping quarters into various Space Invaders and Pac-Man machines The IMSAI, Osbourne, Altair and PET were marvels of their day but now are looked down upon and scoffed at. Those were the days when anyone who could put together their own system had way more than a clue and a "Build Your Own PC" book from Amazon.com. Ye Gods!, a trained seal could put one together today. My hat is off to you, Sir. It sounds like you were paying attention while soon-to-be gen x'ers like me were asleep.
was what changing the pricing structure would do to their subscriber base. When the ecconomy took a nose-dive, many people started to get rid of things that were not essencial, broadband access being one of those things. There were a lot of cable modem users who decided that the extra money was worth not having to dial up and tie up their phone line or even deal with the chance of getting busy signals while attempting to dial in. If all of a sudden, they see that there is a chance that some spy-ware that crept onto their system that runs 24/7 could end up sticking them with a massive cable bill, they may either change to DSL or drop it entirely and go back to dial up. Lower speed would be okay for most, but charging per MB over a certain limit will chase away a lot of customers to other services.
With the financial difficulties that the cable and telco's are having, they will fight tooth and nail to keep this new flavor of broadband access in obscurity. Broadband and related services are one of the few parts of their companies that have potential for future revenue growth. Where else are they going to be able to expand their revenue base....? Digital cable? Not likely. Too many people don't want to pay the premium over standard cable service. Long distance? Hardly. There is no real margin in that anymore. Cellular phone service? Possibly, but almost everyone already has a cell phone of some kind. The companies that get more maket share will be the ones who can package better deals. The telecom/ISP industry is very weak right now and will remain so until demand increases and after some more consolidation in the industry.
Also, if they are taking this long to come up with the initial standard, it will take another decade before they would be able to deploy an new standard to replace the one that will be cracked.
If M$ really does have $40 billion in cash on hand, think about how that sontributes to their bottom line. Assuming that this is all in cash and not stocks or bonds, the annual interest income on $40 billion even at 2% in a standard savings account is about $800 million. If it's in higher yield securities (T-Bills, or other US Treasury backsed securities, this could very well generate over $1 billion annually.
I don't know too much about Opera, but are there any other "features" that it offers that IE doesn't, or at least doesn't do as well as Opera? I like competition in any market, but if it doesn't have anything substantially additional with it that IE doesn't, then I can see it gaining much market share, especially since one has to pay for the ad-free version? Maybe someone here can shed some light in this.
...vote with your wallet. If there is DSL or some other high speed option in your area and you're with ATT, drop them like a hot potato. Make sure you tell them WHY you are leaving. When you call to install the new service, tell THEM why you left ATT. If you do nothing and take it up the ass, the rest of the companies will follow suit. I get cable modem service through Time/Warner Communists...er, I mean communications. If they start charging me extra for downloading big files (Hal-Life patches, MP3's or the like, I'm lucky enough to have access to Ameritech/SBC DSL. If they pull a stunt like ATT, then I might go w/satellite. I know that everyone doesn't have another option, but those who do should look view tactics like ATT's the same way the average person would if a dead rat was thrown onto their kitchen table.
The storyline would imply that Amidala will be pregnant by the start of episode 3. She'll have to come to believe that Anakin is so out of control that she must hide the children from him. (Vader didn't know about Leia until the end of 'Jedi' but did he even know about Luke before 'Empire'?)
From episode 4, 5 and 6, it would appear that in episode 3, all of the Jedi are killed with the help of Anakin, except for Yoda and Kenobi. If there were any others, then they would have been been "recalled to action" during or after episode 4.
They have a lot of things to cover and only one film left to do it in. Episode 3 might have have to have a running time of Kevin Costner magnatude to get it all in.
Personally I would have liked to have seen him do some serious thrashing on Dooku before the Count had to resort to playing dirty just to escape. But it was nice to see just why everyone always stepped very lightly around the old master. Lucas had always left it at "he's a very wise and powerful Jedi who's not to be toyed with." It was fun to see exactly why that was so accepted among the lesser Jedi.
OK, when the "Mars meteorite" was announces a few years ago I could possible see how they could claim to know that it originated from the 4th planet. We've send a few space probes to Mars and have been able to study (at least remotely) the make-up of certain regions on that planet. But to say that this chunk of rock is from Mercury is a bit of a streatch, IMHO. Those minerals are also abundant in asteroids. It's times like these that showcase how boundless our ignorance of our own solar system truly is.
The main reason that capitalists have not taken up mining on either the moon or nearby asteroids is the price of admission. It costs about $10,000 for every pound that goes into orbit. Taking that same pound to the moon increases the cost even higher. And what is on the moon that could be mined right now anyway? Sure, it's a rich source of helium 3, but how many power plants are there currently that use helium 3 as a fuel?
The cost of getting men and material into orbit, let alone to the moon, has to come down dramically and the possibility or extracting a profitable material would have to really go up before such an operation would ever be seriously considered by industry. Any corporation that would spend billions of dollars on something with almost no profit potential would last about as long as Enron or Global Crossing.
While I believe that it should not cost more for one TLD than it does another, it couldn't happen to a nice group than lawyers.
Good points made on the call for calm regarding the destructive potential of nanotech. A hammer can classified as a very useful tool to drive nails, pound things into place, etc. It can also be considered as a dangerous weapon when employed to bash in a human skull...ANYTHING can be used for good as well as bad. I'm sure there are some (ok, many) who tire of hearing me saying this, but I believe that it is worth repeating: There are a small handfull of technologies that are going to mature from the laboratory to commercial use very soon, prabably in about three or four years. Nanotechnology will be one of them, probably the first one. This will be like the micro-processor was to "the information age." It will happen fast, too fast by the standards of the chicken littles of the world. Most people don't have a good grasp on what this will mean to the world. Materials will be able to be designed atom-by-atom, producing materials that are now thought to be impossible to make. Imagine being able to make an alloy that is harder than steel, more resilliant than titanium, and weigh less than aluminum. If you really want to show off, you can make it superconducting at room temperature. Suddenly things like fusion reactors (ones that actually produce more power than they consume) will seem within reach. There will be a lot of changes resulting from this technology. It's best to make "change" your friend, otherwise, someone else will.
These guys are burning bridges with the zeal of a pyromaniac. First they Actually had the stones to go public about Micro$oft's policies towards OEM's. Now they're basically toilet papering the RIAA's front yard. I'm no Gateway supporter. Like mentioned in an earlier post, they cater to the lowest common denominator. But I haven't seen Dell or Compact saying anything publicly about the way MS bullies the OEM's. Maybe they'll start doing commercials that show the Gateway cow taking a dump on the Dell-dudes front yard (Dude, what's that smell?!) or commercials having some fun with the internal pissing match at Compaq/HP. If these guys want to have even a chance of surviving past this year, they need to be socking the other companies in right in the chops every time they get a chance, because I don't know of too many success stories providing content like they're planning to.
Most people, even a lot of the technically minded don't a grasp on just what this technology will be capable of. "Oh big deal, a bunch of Little robots!" some might say. It it MUCH more than that. I firmly believe that in the next five or six years, a small handful of new technologies are going to be refined and introduced , with nanotech being one of them. Imagine what this could do for materials research, developement and production. Nanotech could realistically allow us to custom make material with extreme precision at the atomic level. So you want an alloy that is lighter than aluminum, harder than diamond, more resiliant than titanium and a hidiously high melting point, all in one material? No problem, we've got ya' covered! How about a near room-temperature superconductor? No problem. Nanotech is a tool that will usher in a new age of technological developement, making things like quantum computers a reality. It's impact on medicine will be just as, if not more, profound than the discovery of anti-biotics. Imagine going to the doctor and having your DNA re-sequenced to eliminate any number of ilnesses. In short, imagine the entire microchip/microprocessor revolution happening, only twice as intense and occurring in the span of five or six years.
My daughter is about to turn 13. Over the past few years I've taken her to just about every arcade within driving distance. She always had fun, except for the times when we went to arcades with a row of the old classics. My eyes would glaze over and I'd wander over them. One time I really embarrassed her when another 30-something dad and I got into a Pac Man grudge match (Poor fool, couldn't last past the 2nd key). One day she was endured the agony of watching the old man flip the score on a Star Trek (I used to own one until the 3rd monitor went out). I only was able to play it for 5 minutes after that because the vector monitor finally burned out as I was playing it, setting off one of the building's smoke detectors (If you've ever owned a vector game, you probably know what this is like).
Weight-lifting is another one that I just don't get. I mean, the reason that I went to college was so I wouldn't have to pick up heavy things anymore, let alone do it for free or even pay to pick up heavy things at a gym.
No pain......no pain!
NyQuil, the night-time coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, why the hell am I laying on my kitchen floor medicine.
When I was in college we would occationally make a rather nasty mixed drink that we called a "grizzly-gator"; Gatoraide, vodka and NyQuil. We usually saved those for the end of the party.