AT&T Broadband says on its system, 1% percent of users account for 16% of bandwidth consumption.
What they fail to realize is that probably 16% or more of their customers are connected to those "heavy" users downloading songs from these generous sharers.
While it is true that there are many 56k users that download from cable and t1/t3 users exclusively and who are probably leaching some bandwidth from the cable network, these are the very people who will become fed up with their slow connections and switch to cable so they can download copyrighted songs faster.
I don't see slower service stopping p2p though, but metered bandwith would shut p2p down.
Don't buy one! CDs are of perfect audio quality as it is! You can't NOTICE better quality than CD quality.
The recording industry wants us all to replace our CD players with players for this format so they can prevent you from ripping music. Arstechnica has a piece on how they want to rid our homes of devices ( like cd players ) that can convert a digital signal to analog.
If enough people buy these players, they'll stop making CDs for 'security reasons'.
I agree: Need free X Server for Windows
on
X11 Alternatives?
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· Score: 1
It would be SO cool if there were a free ( as in Gnuish ) port of the X Server to Windows.
I don't mean like Cygwin which is too bloated, and is basically all of Unix running on Windows. I mean a lightweight well integrated client like eXceed or Reflection X. This would enable developers to write intranet apps as X clients without forcing users of Dumb Windows Terminals to stop using Windows.
When 90% of the programs people use are X Clients and they are still running Windows, the case for switching to Linux as a desktop OS becomes much stronger.
I would do this myself, if I didn't think it was completely beyond my abilities. ( I don't know much about either X or Windows programming, so I don't think I could port it - heck I doubt I could even install it from scratch without weeks of tinkering )
Anyone who decides they are too good to reproduce exponentially like the rest of us just leaves more room for the remorseless to occupy. Trying to excersize population self-control is a farce.. Population control is and will always be something one does to someone else, either through force or by giviing them an environmental morality complex.
I think that M$ will fight with every last dime in their Money Bin for the game console market because whoever owns the console market will eventually own the internet and business desktop markets as well.
This is because game consoles are looking more and more like PCs every day. People will buy their consoles and use them to connect to the net to play online games, browse the internet, and do every task that the average Joe would use a computer for. Soon it will not make sense to buy a console and a PC because console makers will have added all the functionality unique to PCs to their consoles. Consoles will BE the PC's of the future. Maybe they'll be connected to the lights and the thermostat and we'll name them HAL too.
Once the game console/PC is ubiquitous what is to stop them from running something other than Windows? Can't the PS2 run Linux? Of course it is well within the abilities of a Sony to provide their own closed source general purpose OS if they wanted to. If every day Joes are already familiar with their Console OS why should busineses use Windows PCs on their desktops? A console would suffice as a client for any Intranet App I've seen.
M$ knows that it's OS monopoly is the core of it's profitablity. They will do anything to guarantee that they control the hardware and the software that most people run at home.
Re: Cancellations
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Both my girlfriend and my neighbor have been telemarketers for a major telemarketing company.
The telemarketing company she worked for had been contracted by a credit card company ( Citibank I think but I'm not sure ) to take calls from people requesting that their credit protection insurance be cancelled. This is the insurance that will pay your monthly minimum balance for a period of time should you get fired or layed off, but not if you quit your job. The credit card companies charge a fee that is often more than the principle payed on your minimum monthly balance to your card so you do not see a big difference on your monthly bill, yet the balance increases even though you've been paying your minimum and not charging anything.
According to her most people who called had been shnookered into signing up by a fast talker when they signed up for the card and didn't even know they'd signed up for the insurance until they examined the bill closely-often years after being signed up.
The telemarkers that take the calls have minimum quotas ( make this or get fired or lose hours ) and incentives ( state lottery tickets and cheesy prizes ) to make 'saves'. A 'save' is a customer they've convinced or confused into keeping the insurance. Often this is done by saying to a customer that's been on the phone a long time and is tired some statements like that 'they would be happy to cancel the service if that is what you want' to get the customer saying yes and then 'We are glad to be of help in answering your questions and would be pleased to confirm that you have chosen to keep this service' the cusomer says 'yup' and then *CLICK* a few seconds later the customer sometimes realizes that they have to call the number again because they've been schnookered or they discover on their next bill that they are still signed up if they bother to look.
Being pissed off at a telemarketer and acting rudely is a good way to get them to say yes to everything you say yet keep you signed up. They can just claim that they hit the wrong key, and the job isn't worth much to them anyway. The telemarketing company doesn't have an interest in keeping this to a minimum as long as they have a scapegoat employee to 'discipline' if anything serious happens, and telemarketers know they can earn $6.50 - $7.00 / hr anywhere. About a third come in to work stoned and most are teenagers.
I'm sure AOL and Earthlink either contract this out or pay their own minions to do this. And since these kinds of tactics keep people signed up.
Side note: The guy who invented the revolver licensed his patent to a gun company that wrote into the license that the INVENTOR was responsible for defending the idea from patent infringers. There were so many infringers that dispite millions in royalties, the inventor died broke.
It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside to know that the record/movie companies would be broke if they tried to defend their copyrights. I think it's time for them to go the way of the dodo and quit deciding what's on my tv and radio.
Then I shouldn't have tried to go head to head with IBM and Microsoft in the widget business, and stupidly wasted my time inventing the 'next big widget'. Now IBM manufactures my widget without having to pay an engineer. Maybe I should have spent my time gardening or worked for IBM as an engineer and got paid by them.
Broad catalog WILL be provided regardless even if bands have to post their own mp3s to usenet. Record companies no longer are the only way to distribute music.
The RIIA(sp?) wants taxpayers to pay for the cost of tracking down those who 'diminish the incentive to invest in creating music'
First of all: Most of the money from sales of music goes to marketing of music. This is because the music listening public are too stupid and sheepish to be immune from being convinced to buy whatever crap BMG wants to sell. This marketing machine payed for by record companies does more to stifle the creation of music than CD pirates ever could. Since local bands could never spend so much to convince the public to buy their stuff, it takes a back seat to the stuff on MTV. Most of the value of the music IP that the RIIA is worried about is not in the music itself but in the marketing investment that the record company has made in pushing the music. For example: Britanny Spears mad diddly off her first album, but could command huge $$ for another one since the record company had already invested mega $$ in marketing her.
Is this maketing a service? Should we thank the record companies for bringing us music we might not otherwise know about? I think not. I think that especially with the internet, bands can show the world what they've got easily, and people can find it on their own. In this wired age record companies who once were the only way to distribute music find that they no longer serve a useful purpose and are nothing more than leaches on society. They control what is on the radio, so that's what I hear, and that's all I know to buy. Without them the radio would play other stuff by artists who have placed their stuff on the internet for free, and who would be happy if I listened so I would want to go to one of their concerts. Music would continue to be created even if there were no such thing as record companies. Maybe artists would not get rich by leveraging the record company's marketing investment, but maybe lesser known artists would make a better living if they could get a little airplay.
Second of all: Do we want an IP police to tell us what we are allowed to think without paying a fee?
Do you think the cops can shut down p2p file trading of copyrighted material without snooping on everything that is traded on p2p? If the FBI can't stop illegal IP traffic on it's budget and using it's existing powers, then it still has use in stopping kidnappers and terrorists, in fact that 'failure' doesn't tarnish the public's image of the FBI because most people who want music and would rather wait for it to download than pay the money for it at the store download it guiltlessly, and don't want the FBI to stop them.
But if there is a special agency who's only purpose is to stop illegal IP trading, they will called before congress if their agency is innefectual, and they will explain that the task is impossible, and that to enforce the law they need an SSSCA type law, and that Freenet should be banned, and that so should most p2p, and gpl software too.
I would be willing to give up the notion of copyright and the patent systems altogether. What moral right does someone who creates an artifact that represents an idea to the very eternal notion itself? They should own only the artifact itself. Why should we subsidise the creation of such artifacts by granting copyright? I don't think the value of what is created in that way warrants the subsidy since the material created is mostly created with the express purpose of making $$ and not with enriching my life. Why is fostering technological growth good in and of itself? Is the car really a good thing? Has it actually benefitted mankind? If patents are granted to compete with other countries then maybe we should stop the war and sign a peace treaty outlawing patents.
User interface 'experts' design software by statistics in order to maximize the average rating of the software by their sample set of users.
This leads to software lacking the advanced features needed to make myriad specialized tasks efficient because availability of those features is confusing to those who don't need them.
Sociologists seem to think they can engineer society this way too, and wonder why 'don't tread on me' types complain when they try to take the spice out of their taco of life. People are alergic to peanuts? We don't need no stinking peanuts! Ban them!... but I LIKE peanuts.
User interface design should not concentrate so much on the novice: For how much of your time using a computer are you actually a novice? In five years you won't be a novice, so why would you want a user interface designed around that small class of users?
Software designers ought to create tools that once learned can be applied to many problems. This enables users to become more productive over time as they are able to reuse previously used tools. Regular expressions are such a tool that is available in many Linux programs, even gui ones that every computer user, even my mom should learn a little about if they do a lot of text searching. On Windows where they are afraid of confusing someone who searches for myf*e.text and doesn't find myfile.txt because they should have typed myf.*txt, you will never be able to find anything like myf[a-qA-Q]+.txt no matter how much you learn about searching or how many times a day your job requires you to find stuff like that in text files.
I can see why the casual user might want something like PageMaker or even Word to format their text, but if it was my job to do it every day I'd learn LaTeX because I'd know that it would do anything I could imagine, and that day by day my abilities would grow, and that I could use the text processing tools I know to work on tex files and that eventually I would be more efficent and have a wider range of capabilities than if I had messed with a gui.
I knew a graphic artist who worked in Adobe GoLive. He was an expert in that program, and really knew his way around it, but he would always ask me stuff like 'What box do I click on to make my tables look 'just so'. ( As if I knew how to use GoLive I did html in vi! ) so I'd tell him to fire up his text editor and we'd fix the problem. Eventually he had learned HTML and was able to fix most of that stuff by hand himself, and even some javascript too. He still used golive because for some things it was easy, and it could 'save images for web'. Now if he'd have learned make, and we'd found a little command line utility that could compress images to web-appropriate levels he could have stopped using the program altogether, and become a programmer which is more fun anyway.
While I appreciate being able to write a somewhat formatted document using a word processor, and like having both KDE's paint program AND the Gimp installed so I can quickly edit a lil' picture or go hog-wild with the Gimp, and I can even see the allure of GoLive for quick javascript rollovers for static content, I know that guis that hide what's really going on are bad for my soul.
Because most people do not want to learn a bunch of stuff just to sit down at a machine and use it, the default should be simple, but I like being able to configure colors to soothe my eyes, or configure how many virtual desktops I have. Nifty features are useful once you take the time to get used to them but they are annoying if you don't want to take the time to use them just to send an email or something simple.
They should attach lazers or machine guns to these equipped with face recognition that could automatically crispy-fry any troublemakers
Re:user agent. Who want's to vew optimized pages
on
Cloaking Detection?
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· Score: 1
The optimized pages are probably just tons of keywords that you would not be interested in viewing anyway. Every concievable synonym for 'Nude' for instance.
My buying habits might be something I care deeply about keeping secret ( for instance if I work ar Ford and buy only Chevys ) let's treat all data as sensitive.
It's worse manners to charge $5.99 for an all you can eat buffet and then not put out enough food for the customers to fill up on. In fact that's false advertizing.
Time Warner is one of the Big Media Corporations.. Hmm.. This sounds like a microsoft-esque tactic. I doubt it will succeed because it is so obnoxious that even Joe User would start looking at local ISP alternatives.
This means that I would rather have my connection speed slowed to an agreed upon minimum when traffic is heavy, and I want blazing fast speeds at 3AM when nobody is downloading anything in my neighborhood.
Time Warner et al. are afraid that P2P which is going to be the 'next big thing' on the internet with consequences comperable to the invention of http and which is going to be immensely popular as new applications are developed and which has the potential to use enormous bandwidth is going to eat into their profits by making their infrastructure which they have still not recouped their costs for obsolete.
These ISPs are trying to quelch the demand for P2P by making people afraid to leave anything running that would let people use the unused resources on their computers. Nobody would host a web page on their machine that could be accessed zillions of times if they could be charged for over quota bandwidth. Users need to switch ISPs when they try to pull this kind of stunt.
This has probably been said, but I don't want any gubmint/FUD of lawsuits to decide what should/shouldn't go in the.prn domain.
But if it does go through, then I would put any non-pornographic content there that I had access to. When enough valuable non-porn was available under the.prn TLD, simply blocking the.prn TLD would be as ineffective as blocking all pages that contained the word 'sex'
If the law REQUIRED that material under.prn be offensive, and imposed both sanctions for being too offensive for non.prn and for being not offensive enough for.prn, then any 'slightly offensive stuff would have no home on the net.
This is a dumb idea.
N=1 means that we don't know WHAT life requires
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 1
A large close moon, a mix of land and ocean, phooey. Sure there are probably Earth DOES require these things for life, but not every planet is in the same situation as Earth.
We wouldn't need a Jupiter to protect us from ASSteroids if there was no ASSteroid belt, right? And earth was supposedly a snowball once, and it remelted from CO2 given off by Volcaones + Greenhouse effect. Basically we don't know crap.
Maybe it wouldn't appear if you were intent on grabbing that one to send back?
If you sent a different one, say a granny smith instead of a red delicious, where did the red delicious come from? Maybe you would need to have the apple in hand in order to promise to send it back and have a copy appear? Would a copy appear if you promised to send the copy back? Wouldn't it eventually rot into dust? Then what would you send back? Eventually there would be nothing left to send, not even a mouldy fruit and you'd have to break your promise. If you sent the original on that iteration, only then would the recursive loop unroll. What a way to age wine!
High school algebra teachers should do problems like this ( and the 1=sqrt(1)*sqrt(1) thing ) on the board and get the class to try and figure out what happened. I remember beating my head over results like 4=5 and not even knowing what I did wrong. Then when I asked the teacher they would just do it the right way and not show me exactly where the division by zero was. They always magically avoided these kinds of things but never would tell us how to avoid them ourselves, I think they had learned 'habits' that they did not themselves understand to avoid this kind of thing. They would just say that it takes lots of 'practice' [to learn these habits]. Answers like 4=5 can destroy any confidence in adding linear equations that a novice might have, and make them think that they naturally suck at math!
In the 'proof' above there are two errors. One is a real mathematical error: the division by zero, but the other is a legal math move which is a strategic error ( adding the equations so that all three variables are on both sides gets you further from a solution ). This should be discussed explicitly in high school algebra class.
I don't even blame the teachers! I doubt I would do much better!
I now have a BA in math from a good school, and I was not a bad student either, but I still don't know any straight forward algorithm for doing basic high school algebra! I know that mathematica and other computer programs can solve equations, and simplify stuff. I've used them. They're awesome! But when I've browsed the web to find out how they work, I haven't found much.
Basically all the info I've found says that automatic algebra has to do with Groebner Bases, and a lot of abstract algebra. Sure I got an A- in Abstract Algebra, but this stuff is kinda thick for bathroom reading.. I need to read a 'Groebner Bases for Dummies' I guess... I think everyone should have an algorithm at their disposal that tey can be confident solves most commonly encountered algebra problems, and they ought to know why it works.
Slashdot Mirror
What they fail to realize is that probably 16% or more of their customers are connected to those "heavy" users downloading songs from these generous sharers.
While it is true that there are many 56k users that download from cable and t1/t3 users exclusively and who are probably leaching some bandwidth from the cable network, these are the very people who will become fed up with their slow connections and switch to cable so they can download copyrighted songs faster.
I don't see slower service stopping p2p though, but metered bandwith would shut p2p down.
The recording industry wants us all to replace our CD players with players for this format so they can prevent you from ripping music. Arstechnica has a piece on how they want to rid our homes of devices ( like cd players ) that can convert a digital signal to analog.
If enough people buy these players, they'll stop making CDs for 'security reasons'.
I don't mean like Cygwin which is too bloated, and is basically all of Unix running on Windows. I mean a lightweight well integrated client like eXceed or Reflection X. This would enable developers to write intranet apps as X clients without forcing users of Dumb Windows Terminals to stop using Windows.
When 90% of the programs people use are X Clients and they are still running Windows, the case for switching to Linux as a desktop OS becomes much stronger.
I would do this myself, if I didn't think it was completely beyond my abilities. ( I don't know much about either X or Windows programming, so I don't think I could port it - heck I doubt I could even install it from scratch without weeks of tinkering )
Anyone who decides they are too good to reproduce exponentially like the rest of us just leaves more room for the remorseless to occupy. Trying to excersize population self-control is a farce.. Population control is and will always be something one does to someone else, either through force or by giviing them an environmental morality complex.
I think that M$ will fight with every last dime in their Money Bin for the game console market because whoever owns the console market will eventually own the internet and business desktop markets as well.
This is because game consoles are looking more and more like PCs every day. People will buy their consoles and use them to connect to the net to play online games, browse the internet, and do every task that the average Joe would use a computer for. Soon it will not make sense to buy a console and a PC because console makers will have added all the functionality unique to PCs to their consoles. Consoles will BE the PC's of the future. Maybe they'll be connected to the lights and the thermostat and we'll name them HAL too.
Once the game console/PC is ubiquitous what is to stop them from running something other than Windows? Can't the PS2 run Linux? Of course it is well within the abilities of a Sony to provide their own closed source general purpose OS if they wanted to. If every day Joes are already familiar with their Console OS why should busineses use Windows PCs on their desktops? A console would suffice as a client for any Intranet App I've seen.
M$ knows that it's OS monopoly is the core of it's profitablity. They will do anything to guarantee that they control the hardware and the software that most people run at home.
The telemarketing company she worked for had been contracted by a credit card company ( Citibank I think but I'm not sure ) to take calls from people requesting that their credit protection insurance be cancelled. This is the insurance that will pay your monthly minimum balance for a period of time should you get fired or layed off, but not if you quit your job. The credit card companies charge a fee that is often more than the principle payed on your minimum monthly balance to your card so you do not see a big difference on your monthly bill, yet the balance increases even though you've been paying your minimum and not charging anything.
According to her most people who called had been shnookered into signing up by a fast talker when they signed up for the card and didn't even know they'd signed up for the insurance until they examined the bill closely-often years after being signed up.
The telemarkers that take the calls have minimum quotas ( make this or get fired or lose hours ) and incentives ( state lottery tickets and cheesy prizes ) to make 'saves'. A 'save' is a customer they've convinced or confused into keeping the insurance. Often this is done by saying to a customer that's been on the phone a long time and is tired some statements like that 'they would be happy to cancel the service if that is what you want' to get the customer saying yes and then 'We are glad to be of help in answering your questions and would be pleased to confirm that you have chosen to keep this service' the cusomer says 'yup' and then *CLICK* a few seconds later the customer sometimes realizes that they have to call the number again because they've been schnookered or they discover on their next bill that they are still signed up if they bother to look.
Being pissed off at a telemarketer and acting rudely is a good way to get them to say yes to everything you say yet keep you signed up. They can just claim that they hit the wrong key, and the job isn't worth much to them anyway. The telemarketing company doesn't have an interest in keeping this to a minimum as long as they have a scapegoat employee to 'discipline' if anything serious happens, and telemarketers know they can earn $6.50 - $7.00 / hr anywhere. About a third come in to work stoned and most are teenagers.
I'm sure AOL and Earthlink either contract this out or pay their own minions to do this. And since these kinds of tactics keep people signed up.
Gees this is better than the cigarrette industry. They really ought to be fined down to size.
Some cool places:
Have fun..
Side note: The guy who invented the revolver licensed his patent to a gun company that wrote into the license that the INVENTOR was responsible for defending the idea from
patent infringers. There were so many infringers that dispite millions in royalties, the inventor died broke.
It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside to know that the record/movie companies would be broke if they tried to defend their copyrights. I think it's time for them to go the way of the dodo and quit deciding what's on my tv and radio.
Then I shouldn't have tried to go head to head with IBM and Microsoft in the widget business, and stupidly wasted my time inventing the 'next big widget'. Now IBM manufactures my widget without having to pay an engineer. Maybe I should have spent my time gardening or worked for IBM as an engineer and got paid by them.
Broad catalog WILL be provided regardless even if bands have to post their own mp3s to usenet. Record companies no longer are the only way to distribute music.
First of all: Most of the money from sales of music goes to marketing of music. This is because the music listening public are too stupid and sheepish to be immune from being convinced to buy whatever crap BMG wants to sell. This marketing machine payed for by record companies does more to stifle the creation of music than CD pirates ever could. Since local bands could never spend so much to convince the public to buy their stuff, it takes a back seat to the stuff on MTV. Most of the value of the music IP that the RIIA is worried about is not in the music itself but in the marketing investment that the record company has made in pushing the music. For example: Britanny Spears mad diddly off her first album, but could command huge $$ for another one since the record company had already invested mega $$ in marketing her.
Is this maketing a service? Should we thank the record companies for bringing us music we might not otherwise know about? I think not. I think that especially with the internet, bands can show the world what they've got easily, and people can find it on their own. In this wired age record companies who once were the only way to distribute music find that they no longer serve a useful purpose and are nothing more than leaches on society. They control what is on the radio, so that's what I hear, and that's all I know to buy. Without them the radio would play other stuff by artists who have placed their stuff on the internet for free, and who would be happy if I listened so I would want to go to one of their concerts. Music would continue to be created even if there were no such thing as record companies. Maybe artists would not get rich by leveraging the record company's marketing investment, but maybe lesser known artists would make a better living if they could get a little airplay.
Second of all: Do we want an IP police to tell us what we are allowed to think without paying a fee?
Do you think the cops can shut down p2p file trading of copyrighted material without snooping on everything that is traded on p2p? If the FBI can't stop illegal IP traffic on it's budget and using it's existing powers, then it still has use in stopping kidnappers and terrorists, in fact that 'failure' doesn't tarnish the public's image of the FBI because most people who want music and would rather wait for it to download than pay the money for it at the store download it guiltlessly, and don't want the FBI to stop them.
But if there is a special agency who's only purpose is to stop illegal IP trading, they will called before congress if their agency is innefectual, and they will explain that the task is impossible, and that to enforce the law they need an SSSCA type law, and that Freenet should be banned, and that so should most p2p, and gpl software too.
I would be willing to give up the notion of copyright and the patent systems altogether. What moral right does someone who creates an artifact that represents an idea to the very eternal notion itself? They should own only the artifact itself. Why should we subsidise the creation of such artifacts by granting copyright? I don't think the value of what is created in that way warrants the subsidy since the material created is mostly created with the express purpose of making $$ and not with enriching my life. Why is fostering technological growth good in and of itself? Is the car really a good thing? Has it actually benefitted mankind? If patents are granted to compete with other countries then maybe we should stop the war and sign a peace treaty outlawing patents.
This leads to software lacking the advanced features needed to make myriad specialized tasks efficient because availability of those features is confusing to those who don't need them.
Sociologists seem to think they can engineer society this way too, and wonder why 'don't tread on me' types complain when they try to take the spice out of their taco of life. People are alergic to peanuts? We don't need no stinking peanuts! Ban them! ... but I LIKE peanuts.
User interface design should not concentrate so much on the novice: For how much of your time using a computer are you actually a novice? In five years you won't be a novice, so why would you want a user interface designed around that small class of users?
Software designers ought to create tools that once learned can be applied to many problems. This enables users to become more productive over time as they are able to reuse previously used tools. Regular expressions are such a tool that is available in many Linux programs, even gui ones that every computer user, even my mom should learn a little about if they do a lot of text searching. On Windows where they are afraid of confusing someone who searches for myf*e.text and doesn't find myfile.txt because they should have typed myf.*txt, you will never be able to find anything like myf[a-qA-Q]+.txt no matter how much you learn about searching or how many times a day your job requires you to find stuff like that in text files.
I can see why the casual user might want something like PageMaker or even Word to format their text, but if it was my job to do it every day I'd learn LaTeX because I'd know that it would do anything I could imagine, and that day by day my abilities would grow, and that I could use the text processing tools I know to work on tex files and that eventually I would be more efficent and have a wider range of capabilities than if I had messed with a gui.
I knew a graphic artist who worked in Adobe GoLive. He was an expert in that program, and really knew his way around it, but he would always ask me stuff like 'What box do I click on to make my tables look 'just so'. ( As if I knew how to use GoLive I did html in vi! ) so I'd tell him to fire up his text editor and we'd fix the problem. Eventually he had learned HTML and was able to fix most of that stuff by hand himself, and even some javascript too. He still used golive because for some things it was easy, and it could 'save images for web'. Now if he'd have learned make, and we'd found a little command line utility that could compress images to web-appropriate levels he could have stopped using the program altogether, and become a programmer which is more fun anyway.
While I appreciate being able to write a somewhat formatted document using a word processor, and like having both KDE's paint program AND the Gimp installed so I can quickly edit a lil' picture or go hog-wild with the Gimp, and I can even see the allure of GoLive for quick javascript rollovers for static content, I know that guis that hide what's really going on are bad for my soul.
Because most people do not want to learn a bunch of stuff just to sit down at a machine and use it, the default should be simple, but I like being able to configure colors to soothe my eyes, or configure how many virtual desktops I have. Nifty features are useful once you take the time to get used to them but they are annoying if you don't want to take the time to use them just to send an email or something simple.
They should attach lazers or machine guns to these equipped with face recognition that could automatically crispy-fry any troublemakers
The optimized pages are probably just tons of keywords that you would not be interested in viewing anyway. Every concievable synonym for 'Nude' for instance.
My buying habits might be something I care deeply about keeping secret ( for instance if I work ar Ford and buy only Chevys ) let's treat all data as sensitive.
It's worse manners to charge $5.99 for an all you can eat buffet and then not put out enough food for the customers to fill up on. In fact that's false advertizing.
Time Warner is one of the Big Media Corporations.. Hmm.. This sounds like a microsoft-esque tactic. I doubt it will succeed because it is so obnoxious that even Joe User would start looking at local ISP alternatives.
Time Warner et al. are afraid that P2P which is going to be the 'next big thing' on the internet with consequences comperable to the invention of http and which is going to be immensely popular as new applications are developed and which has the potential to use enormous bandwidth is going to eat into their profits by making their infrastructure which they have still not recouped their costs for obsolete.
These ISPs are trying to quelch the demand for P2P by making people afraid to leave anything running that would let people use the unused resources on their computers. Nobody would host a web page on their machine that could be accessed zillions of times if they could be charged for over quota bandwidth. Users need to switch ISPs when they try to pull this kind of stunt.
But if it does go through, then I would put any non-pornographic content there that I had access to. When enough valuable non-porn was available under the .prn TLD, simply blocking the .prn TLD would be as ineffective as blocking all pages that contained the word 'sex'
If the law REQUIRED that material under .prn be offensive, and imposed both sanctions for being too offensive for non .prn and for being not offensive enough for .prn, then any 'slightly offensive stuff would have no home on the net.
This is a dumb idea.
We wouldn't need a Jupiter to protect us from ASSteroids if there was no ASSteroid belt, right? And earth was supposedly a snowball once, and it remelted from CO2 given off by Volcaones + Greenhouse effect. Basically we don't know crap.
In a word: Freenet
If you sent a different one, say a granny smith instead of a red delicious, where did the red delicious come from? Maybe you would need to have the apple in hand in order to promise to send it back and have a copy appear? Would a copy appear if you promised to send the copy back? Wouldn't it eventually rot into dust? Then what would you send back? Eventually there would be nothing left to send, not even a mouldy fruit and you'd have to break your promise. If you sent the original on that iteration, only then would the recursive loop unroll. What a way to age wine!
In the 'proof' above there are two errors. One is a real mathematical error: the division by zero, but the other is a legal math move which is a strategic error ( adding the equations so that all three variables are on both sides gets you further from a solution ). This should be discussed explicitly in high school algebra class.
I don't even blame the teachers! I doubt I would do much better!
I now have a BA in math from a good school, and I was not a bad student either, but I still don't know any straight forward algorithm for doing basic high school algebra! I know that mathematica and other computer programs can solve equations, and simplify stuff. I've used them. They're awesome! But when I've browsed the web to find out how they work, I haven't found much.
Basically all the info I've found says that automatic algebra has to do with Groebner Bases, and a lot of abstract algebra. Sure I got an A- in Abstract Algebra, but this stuff is kinda thick for bathroom reading.. I need to read a 'Groebner Bases for Dummies' I guess... I think everyone should have an algorithm at their disposal that tey can be confident solves most commonly encountered algebra problems, and they ought to know why it works.
I wish I did