Not to complain: It's a well-done review, to be sure. But why now--has the book recently been reprinted or something? If we're going to review books that have been out for a while, we could also go back to Drexler's Engines of Creation.
Whoops, forgot that all-important power source. Did I fail to mention the combination of solar, biothermal, nano fuel cells, and mechanical generation from swinging my arms while I walk?
I guess we're getting off toward quantum nanocomputing, though, aren't we? Sorry for the tangent.
Come to think of it, wearing that leather jacket in South Carolina in August is gonna be murder...
...my 256-bit 64-processor wearable -- the one that's integrated into my leather jacket, with the wireless 100 Tbps Internet connection and the little plastic tiara of electrodes for direct neural I/O. (paging William Gibson, white courtesy telephone, please...)
"'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd."
What about domain parking?
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 1
I just parked the domain www.billmcclain.com in case I get around to setting up that humble little ol' Linux box in my bedroom. (Wife wants it GONE. I'll have to stick it under dresser for now.)
So now I get to be a federal felon, maybe? Gee, I'd never have dared to dream...
here's a larger social problem I see it's indicative of: Way too many parents aren't taking as much interest and control in their kids' upbringing, and this vacuum gets filled by legislators, school officials, and even movie ushers having to step in and make decisions.
I hope that when my little guy is 17, I can take him to movies like these and actually talk to him about them afterward. I think that's the intent of the MPAA rating system, anyway.
No way, you don't want kids seeing something like Saving Private Ryan before they could actually experience it.
I hope you're just being sarcastic. I sure as hell would want my kid to get a damn good look at it. (Not just yet. He's four years old, his granddad was a WWII combat veteran, and we're largely a military family. He wants to be fire fighter, thank God.) I want him to be provoked into thinking before he joins up because he likes the uniform.
For that matter, I'd like anybody who thinks drugs are cool to take a good look at Trainspotting, High Art, or Drugstore Cowboy. Then maybe we'd get a cop friend to drive with us to the nearest crack house.
I hate conspiracy theories, but do you have any idea how much the CIA actually does?
Don't sweat the CIA, baby. Ever since the Church Commission hearings, their wings are clipped, domestically anyway. Instead, why not worry about the NSA? They're the outfit with the capabilities.
The most recent example that comes to my mind are the McCarthy era commie witchhunts, although there are other much less publicized and more recent examples.
I think this is heavily overshadowed by The War On (Some) Drugs, too. Thanks to the people's right to be protected from personal and property crimes inherent to drug dealing and consumption, we get to live in a frickin' police state.
...will not come to pass until it is conventional wisdom that Linux will inevitably win.
Could happen sooner if Microsoft can turn it into a cash cow without worrying about the concept of "winning."
Which is not to say they won't stoop to a marketing campaign whose unsubtle subtext is "Do you want your mission-critical desktop OS to be supported part-time by 250,000 bearded, sandaled weirdos or by us, the people who brought you Office?"
MS to release their own version of Linux would be perceived as their conceding the ultimate victory of Linux over Windows.
MS is a business. For the most part, they won't be as concerned about "conceding" a "victory" as they'll be about profits and investors.
They will not participate in the destruction of Windows...
Not destruction per se, but they will make sure they've covered all their bases. When you eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken instead of Pizza Hut, you're just choosing one PepsiCo subsidiary over another.
...until there is nothing left to save.
Even then, they probably won't "participate in the destruction" -- more likely, they'll just quietly drop support for it and hope that by then, no one cares. "Nothing left to save" sounds like software evaporates, and of course it doesn't do that.
If I found a copy of QuickC available at a dealer and bought it, Microsoft would still get a portion of the purchase price.
If I understand how these things usually run, the FBI will backpedal when the furor starts, then lean hard on Congress to get legislation introduced -- or maybe just get the the FCC to write new regulations -- requiring that these point-to-point sat phones be licensed, maybe with a tagged signal that indicates the phone's license number. (Of course, if I were a terrorist, I'd just grease somebody to get their Iridium, or buy one through several layers of cutouts.) We'll have the satphone technology available to us, but at the cost of Big Brother listening in. BTW, anybody wanna bet on whether the NSA can break PGP? Wouldn't put it past 'em.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." The United States of America, 1776 - 1999 R.I.P.
Yeah, right. If the worst fears of Y2K are realize (hah!), there'll be such chaos that the People in Uniforms will overreact and make everything worse.
At least, this sets another dangerous precedent of the Fedrul Govmint thinking they're supposed to control the populace instead of the other way round.
Thinkin' hard about Canada or Ireland...or maybe Fiji.
It's continually surprised me that nobody's produced a Quicken workalike/clone for Linux yet. That's one of the stumbling blocks I have to selling Mrs. Alumshubby on the idea of switching to Linux.
OBTW, apropos of USB, WinPeripherals, etc., I use a Logitech Trackman Marble FX trackball both at home and at work...anybody know if there's a suitable Linux driver for this li'l gem?
We have an awful lot of software-development jobs going begging down here for a metro area of about 200K people. For 13 years, I've made a pretty good career at various shops around here writing documentation.
Columbia's a university town; kids come here from the Northeast because school's relatively affordable, and many of them like the mild winters so much that they don't leave.
I'm living in a 1.4K sq.ft. 3br/2ba ranch on 1/3 acre; I paid $69K for it in 1991. I wonder how that compares to the Valley.
OBTW, we got wings places until your eyes cross, too. There are endless good-natured water-cooler arguments about where the best wings are to be had. I personally can vouch for Carolina Wings & Ale on St. Andrews and D's Wings on the River.
for which e.g. pedophiles can design their own 3D child models to play with (or animal sex scenes or any other weird fantasy world).
I for one wonder what the legal ramifications of this will be:
If I'm making child porn based on images of one kid or a composite of several kids, at what point does it stop being digitized kiddie porn and become too fantastic or unrecognizable as a "child" for a district attorney to get a true bill of indictment from a grand jury?
I've noticed that a lot of anime is basically little-girl faces on grown-up bodies. So when they're rendered photorealistically, kinesethesiologically correctly, etc., but there's no way Sailor Moon could be eight feet tall with enlongated thunder thighs, is it still porn? What if she has no nipples and a little tiny heart down there instead of externa? Is that an 'out'?
If I had a thing for Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz ("Surrender, Dorothy!"), and my custom remake of certain scenes were to get passed around to others with the same fetish, MGM (I think that's the studio that owns the rights) would move heaven and earth to find me and sue me, wouldn't they?
A congenital cataract in my right eye (i.e., a birth defect) rendered me monocular before it could have been identified & fixed. So even though I wouldn't get the benefit of any 3-D simulation technology, at least I can't get my depth perception screwed up from using these relatively primitive headsets.
When we get to headsets we can wear all day long and count of for high-rez apps like photo retouching, CAD, and DTP, I'll pester my boss for a pair -- it'd be nice to get my desk back. Until then, this is all expensive proof-of-concept looking for a niche market.
Each with a different combination of color depth and resolution, for that matter...
...and the beauty of this kind of setup was/is that for Mac users, it's nice to have a horkin' big monitor for DTP or image editing while using an old, cheap monitor on the side for holding palattes, "tear-off" menus if you've got tear-off support, email window, etc.
I'm obliged to use NT and one lousy 17" monitor here, and I'm jealous as hell.:)
Never knew that tasty factoid abt the STAR. I got to "play" with a STAR/Mesa system once, but it only had the single-monitor config. I stand (sit?) corrected.
The STAR "imitation by flattery" is well known, but a single 21" monitor is not quite the same thing as multiple-monitor arrangements. When you have three monitors, you can arrange them around your work area port, stbd and center so it's more natural to just turn your eyes/head as you mouse laterally. That's why I keep wishing for a really large concave "flat" display.
Slashdot Mirror
Weird...misread part of Deborah's post, thought that instead of of "population dynamics" she'd written "copulation dynamics"....
If you use a screen-capture utility like PrintKey, you use it plenty, believe you me.
Not to complain: It's a well-done review, to be sure. But why now--has the book recently been reprinted or something? If we're going to review books that have been out for a while, we could also go back to Drexler's Engines of Creation.
Whoops, forgot that all-important power source. Did I fail to mention the combination of solar, biothermal, nano fuel cells, and mechanical generation from swinging my arms while I walk?
I guess we're getting off toward quantum nanocomputing, though, aren't we? Sorry for the tangent.
Come to think of it, wearing that leather jacket in South Carolina in August is gonna be murder...
...my 256-bit 64-processor wearable -- the one that's integrated into my leather jacket, with the wireless 100 Tbps Internet connection and the little plastic tiara of electrodes for direct neural I/O. (paging William Gibson, white courtesy telephone, please...)
"'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd."
So now I get to be a federal felon, maybe? Gee, I'd never have dared to dream...
Well, that explains a TV commercial that had a Saab Viggen fighter in it. I was wondering how the heck the RSwAF got into the ad business.
here's a larger social problem I see it's indicative of: Way too many parents aren't taking as much interest and control in their kids' upbringing, and this vacuum gets filled by legislators, school officials, and even movie ushers having to step in and make decisions.
I hope that when my little guy is 17, I can take him to movies like these and actually talk to him about them afterward. I think that's the intent of the MPAA rating system, anyway.No way, you don't want kids seeing something like Saving Private Ryan before they could actually experience it.
I hope you're just being sarcastic. I sure as hell would want my kid to get a damn good look at it. (Not just yet. He's four years old, his granddad was a WWII combat veteran, and we're largely a military family. He wants to be fire fighter, thank God.) I want him to be provoked into thinking before he joins up because he likes the uniform.
For that matter, I'd like anybody who thinks drugs are cool to take a good look at Trainspotting, High Art, or Drugstore Cowboy. Then maybe we'd get a cop friend to drive with us to the nearest crack house.
I hate conspiracy theories, but do you have any idea how much the CIA actually does?
Don't sweat the CIA, baby. Ever since the Church Commission hearings, their wings are clipped, domestically anyway. Instead, why not worry about the NSA? They're the outfit with the capabilities.
The most recent example that comes to my mind are the McCarthy era commie witchhunts, although there are other much less publicized and more recent examples.
I think this is heavily overshadowed by The War On (Some) Drugs, too. Thanks to the people's right to be protected from personal and property crimes inherent to drug dealing and consumption, we get to live in a frickin' police state.
Could happen sooner if Microsoft can turn it into a cash cow without worrying about the concept of "winning."
Which is not to say they won't stoop to a marketing campaign whose unsubtle subtext is "Do you want your mission-critical desktop OS to be supported part-time by 250,000 bearded, sandaled weirdos or by us, the people who brought you Office?"
MS to release their own version of Linux would be perceived as their conceding the ultimate victory of Linux over Windows.
MS is a business. For the most part, they won't be as concerned about "conceding" a "victory" as they'll be about profits and investors.
They will not participate in the destruction of Windows...
Not destruction per se, but they will make sure they've covered all their bases. When you eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken instead of Pizza Hut, you're just choosing one PepsiCo subsidiary over another.
Even then, they probably won't "participate in the destruction" -- more likely, they'll just quietly drop support for it and hope that by then, no one cares. "Nothing left to save" sounds like software evaporates, and of course it doesn't do that.
If I found a copy of QuickC available at a dealer and bought it, Microsoft would still get a portion of the purchase price.
If I understand how these things usually run, the FBI will backpedal when the furor starts, then lean hard on Congress to get legislation introduced -- or maybe just get the the FCC to write new regulations -- requiring that these point-to-point sat phones be licensed, maybe with a tagged signal that indicates the phone's license number. (Of course, if I were a terrorist, I'd just grease somebody to get their Iridium, or buy one through several layers of cutouts.) We'll have the satphone technology available to us, but at the cost of Big Brother listening in. BTW, anybody wanna bet on whether the NSA can break PGP? Wouldn't put it past 'em.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." The United States of America, 1776 - 1999 R.I.P.
Yeah, right. If the worst fears of Y2K are realize (hah!), there'll be such chaos that the People in Uniforms will overreact and make everything worse.
At least, this sets another dangerous precedent of the Fedrul Govmint thinking they're supposed to control the populace instead of the other way round.
Thinkin' hard about Canada or Ireland...or maybe Fiji.
Long live rock.
That being said, an entirely different three-word phrase:
Johann Sebastian Bach.
It's continually surprised me that nobody's produced a Quicken workalike/clone for Linux yet. That's one of the stumbling blocks I have to selling Mrs. Alumshubby on the idea of switching to Linux.
OBTW, apropos of USB, WinPeripherals, etc., I use a Logitech Trackman Marble FX trackball both at home and at work...anybody know if there's a suitable Linux driver for this li'l gem?
Can you say "Linux for Windows"?
Let the stampede to Columbia, SC begin...
We have an awful lot of software-development jobs going begging down here for a metro area of about 200K people. For 13 years, I've made a pretty good career at various shops around here writing documentation.
Columbia's a university town; kids come here from the Northeast because school's relatively affordable, and many of them like the mild winters so much that they don't leave.
I'm living in a 1.4K sq.ft. 3br/2ba ranch on 1/3 acre; I paid $69K for it in 1991. I wonder how that compares to the Valley.
OBTW, we got wings places until your eyes cross, too. There are endless good-natured water-cooler arguments about where the best wings are to be had. I personally can vouch for Carolina Wings & Ale on St. Andrews and D's Wings on the River.
for which e.g. pedophiles can design their own 3D child models to play with (or animal sex scenes or any other weird fantasy world).
I for one wonder what the legal ramifications of this will be:
If I'm making child porn based on images of one kid or a composite of several kids, at what point does it stop being digitized kiddie porn and become too fantastic or unrecognizable as a "child" for a district attorney to get a true bill of indictment from a grand jury?
I've noticed that a lot of anime is basically little-girl faces on grown-up bodies. So when they're rendered photorealistically, kinesethesiologically correctly, etc., but there's no way Sailor Moon could be eight feet tall with enlongated thunder thighs, is it still porn? What if she has no nipples and a little tiny heart down there instead of externa? Is that an 'out'?
If I had a thing for Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz ("Surrender, Dorothy!"), and my custom remake of certain scenes were to get passed around to others with the same fetish, MGM (I think that's the studio that owns the rights) would move heaven and earth to find me and sue me, wouldn't they?
FWIW, Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 also.
Microsoft Linux.
A congenital cataract in my right eye (i.e., a birth defect) rendered me monocular before it could have been identified & fixed. So even though I wouldn't get the benefit of any 3-D simulation technology, at least I can't get my depth perception screwed up from using these relatively primitive headsets.
When we get to headsets we can wear all day long and count of for high-rez apps like photo retouching, CAD, and DTP, I'll pester my boss for a pair -- it'd be nice to get my desk back. Until then, this is all expensive proof-of-concept looking for a niche market.
Each with a different combination of color depth and resolution, for that matter...
:)
...and the beauty of this kind of setup was/is that for Mac users, it's nice to have a horkin' big monitor for DTP or image editing while using an old, cheap monitor on the side for holding palattes, "tear-off" menus if you've got tear-off support, email window, etc.
I'm obliged to use NT and one lousy 17" monitor here, and I'm jealous as hell.
Never knew that tasty factoid abt the STAR. I got to "play" with a STAR/Mesa system once, but it only had the single-monitor config. I stand (sit?) corrected.
The STAR "imitation by flattery" is well known, but a single 21" monitor is not quite the same thing as multiple-monitor arrangements. When you have three monitors, you can arrange them around your work area port, stbd and center so it's more natural to just turn your eyes/head as you mouse laterally. That's why I keep wishing for a really large concave "flat" display.