Many pundits in this long line of posts have repeatedly pointed out that bluetooth is intended to be a PAN technology (Personal Area Networking) And that the author is greviously wrong for thinking that bluetooth should be more robust at connecting to the internet.
To these many people, i must say your very very wrong. While bluetooth's focus should certainly be on nothing more than connecting to devices within it's limited range, it should also be VERY high on it's priorities to be highly compatable with the web in any and every respect possible. This functionality will allow bluetooth to gateway beyond it's limited scope. And lets face it folks the idea is to have your cell phone accesible from anywhere on the net given that you have proper authentication.
I should be able to leave my cell on my desk at home, go to work, or a friends, and if i need to connect to it remotly to dig up whatever i want.
The concept behind the address spac of IPv6 (really IPng) is to have address's for every device imaginable no matter how small it's role. And bluetooth would be wise to provide that functionality at least conceptualy. To treat the computer(s) it has access to as gateway's, and to offer it's (authorized) services beyond them or through them. The model for the internet addressing is two-tierd (network/host) and this has been found to be inefficient for the exact reasons why PAN networking needs to be fully functional and logisticly compatible with the entire internet.
Their are already plans and implementations floating around about how to deal with free form routing with wireless objects. Networks that create themselves automaticly... discovering gateways through each other without user interventions... so that if you walk into a room with a bunch of friends, your bluetooth cellphone has already discovered how to access the net through your buddies music player which routes through another cellphone upstairs, which bridges through a 802.11x base station (for whatever reason) which has also dynamicly located a WAN wireless station.
Oh i know the above is plagued with all kinds of technical difficulties at the moment, and some parts are non-sensible, but thats not the idea. The idea is everything is connected to everything else automaticly and wirelessly, while remaining secure... and while utilizing whatever transport medium is appropriate for them. Bluetooth for small close hand devices, 802.11x for LAN's etc.... wired systems for back bone data... and so on...
You may as well be in a library reading the books on yur own... your simply spending your time paying bucks to get a "degree". Education is supposed to be a much more immersive experience, in which your entire world is focused upon whatever subjects your learning for certain spans of time. From the chalk-board to the many students to the profesor and all the hands on materials along with real hands on lab projects you can show to your fellow classmates and teachers in TRUE real-time.
When your simply posting and returning data from a web-page, and reading material be it online or off... you are not recieving an education, you are paying for the right to research and to attain a degree from it.
There are reasons why test taking is done in a class without access to the net and other such things. It is because you are supposed to test the actual mind and skills of a human without those resources at hand. This enables you to learn what you DONT know and to sharpen those skillsets.
Hence online education is kinda a joke. Ilearned a long time ago, i can learn anything i want without a piece of paper that says i did. So if your gonna go to school... make sure you go to the one with the biggest name.... cause thats all that matters in the end, youll learn what you want to know no matter what.
I give them about 3 years before they've either made good on their threats and actualy seem to be going after this goal, or are shown to have simply issued another boast.
If in 3 years they have indeed begun the initiative to colonize the moon, you can be certain the US will get off it's collective ass and either infuse NASA with massive amounts of bucks and initiative, or simply kill them and replace them with a new goverment entity to acomplish the same goal.
there are two reasons for this.. A: if china sets up a weapons base on the moon we would be at a serious disadvantage the moment they develop anti-ICBM type defenses. Although this isnt near to happening now... it is an inevitability as far as the progression of tech in nearly all major societies.
The second reason... The US has one of the greatest attitudes possesed by man. Out right jealousy. If they do it, then we damn well WILL do it too AND better. Who cares about the expense... it's important simply because it is.
The reason NASA is grounded right now ISNT because they fucked up.... it's cause they fucked up and dont have much of a purpose thats beneficial to the miltary/social/economical intrests of the US corporations or populace. Put china upstairs.... and you can garentee our space program will geta shot in the arm well beyond anything we could imagine about the star wars project or otherwise.
nothing like good old economic/political rivalry to get the inovation engines running.
the number one thing about voting in booths... etc.... is you have to walk up and actualy look someone in the face.... present ID to proove your who you are... and you must do so with another human being.
you can tell me a lot of things... retinal scans, and voice recognition.... but nothing is gonna beat a face to face confirmation.
1 in 56.5 is far more than acceptable given the field of work.
when you consider these VOLUNTEERS enter the most dangerous and inhospitable of environments known to man (a vacum), and return safely in nearly 99% of missions, then the risk becomes more acceptable.
To ground the program due to what seems to me an exceptional track record given the extreme nature of their work is beyond senseless, a disaster occured in which information can be garnered to prevent such catastrophies from occuring again. Because a ship was lost does not justify reasoning that the entire organization is flawed. This is high risk work people, and generaly high risk work runs into intermittent tragedies that illuminate problems to be prevented int the future.
Now at this point im sure plenty of people will chime in, that what if these tragedies can be averted by further research and development... etc.... This logic however falls short because we cant prepare for every possible imaginable disaster, we cant protect ourselves from millions of potential disasters that are beyond boundless in scope and possibilities. An ill timed solar flare on a certain region of the sun could wreck ireprable damage on all the electrical systems on earth, so should we just not go into space at all considering that may happen (and trust me, we dont have the tech to protect ourselves from a strong enough flare)
so then the real question becomes acceptable risk. is a 1-2% failure rate acceptable? I would have to say yes, and most risk-analysers would agree.
the second question is risk vs profit. this is far more tricky, as many have mentioned what THEY believe to be pointless or fruitless expiraments done in space, which provide little benfit given the risk and cost of the endeavor. In my honest opinion almost any reasonable research in space is at this point priceless, even manned research is of an in-estimable value to mankind. The results may not lend any imediatly profitable outcomes to buisness ventures, but on the whole the entire endeavor does many things, it first of all provides a wealth of knowledge otherwise completly unattainable on earth to the scientific knowledge of all humanity. We are talking about research that is impossible to obtain otherwise. Second of all it gives us, humans, a goal beyond this planet, a sense of a greater direction, a destiny of sorts that we can all build towards. I know that sounds grandiose and over the top, but look at our cultures far back into time, breaking boundries and pushing limits to find new things has been the legacy of humans since we could write on walls. And lets face it folks, as far as earth goes we're begging to reach the boundries here-in.... the space program has been giving us a new frontier that is important for the well-fare of the human psyche and our global culture. Thirdly the program creates jobs on more levels than NASA, there are contractors, and the companies that support the contractors, most people in the end are somehow connected to NASA through the MANY companies that support, supply, or buy from her.
while no-one has seriously proposed to stop NASA, grounding her is a similar action in that it would kill a great amount of drive behind her development. And in my opinion NASA's development is one of THE MOST IMPORTANT things earth should be doing right now.
i agree that reviewing the processes behind how NASA operates should happen frequently, but hampering her as well is worse than foolish, it is counter-productive, and potentialy catostrophic in it's own right. If anything we should be pumping more money into appropriate portions of NASA and concentrating on creating and achieving even grander goals in shorter spans of time.
a manned mission to mars should have been accomplished years ago.... there should have been a manned (or at least unmanned) station ON the moon decades ago, there should have been hundreds more probes sent through our measly solar system, and many more things.
the space race has died, and needs to be revived for the greater good of all.
If commercial space ventures can get a jump-start soon (as they seem nearly there), then we may find ourselves finaly advancing at an acceptable rate.
and with their perceieved flagship product (soon to be since it is predicted hand-held devices and dedicated hardware that use CE will begin outselling traditional boxes by 2005)
ive got a lot of bridges back-ordered, ill be seeing you guys soon.
--Enter The Sig--
Re:A chance to make up for past injustices
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
"AMERICA has WMD and AMERICA has used them against civilian populations twice - in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
That is hardly a valid reason for iraq to have or use WMD (weapons of mass destruction). The use of the atomic bomb in 1945 was unprecedented and wasn't banned by international treaties and/or laws, nor had the US signed any regulations/resolutions banning their use of said weapons, AND The US happened to be involved in a WORLD WAR that the japanese dispite their loosing at that point werent going to give up.
To equate the US using Nukes in the conclusion of a WORLD WAR (WWII) to saddams possesing of WMD or his willingness to use them is ludricris.
I as well feel that bush makes any US intrests sound ridiculous.... but dont help him.
The real key here is the US is doing the dirty work of fifty or more years of mistakes that need cleaning.... And the US is doing them for nothing more than oil. We all know it, even if we dont want to talk about it. Saddam needs to go if anything is to get even slightly better for the iraqi people... and the only ones willing to do this dirty little job are the greedy americans... us...
Im proud to be a US citizen, and i believe that this war as sad as it may be, is necesary, i think our president is a moron, but i also think the world should step back and realize something.
At least saddam will be removed
At least the Iraqi people will have a slightly better ruler.... and a chance at a democratic republic to respresent the needs of THEIR people.
Beware.... I will no doubt piss off some people with the following statements dispite my libralist leanings.
F*&K any company pushing it's work off-shore to sell products to US citizens... Hell i know those people deserve jobs just as much as we do, but when you really get down to it, the companies are screwing us BOTH over... they pay off shore workers a fifth of our wages, and sell it back to us at a 4x markup. Seriously, work that involves using your brain shouldnt be valued at the same value as collecting garbage or pushing paper... or doing grunt work in general... The hours programmers put in now-adays to finish projects is discusting and worthy of far more compensation.
I agree there was a time when certain skillsets were over-valued... including my own... But these jobs ARENT that cheap. Now i can make more money doing stupid shit...
Meanwhile weve got morons in goverment fighting over oil supplies that'll be gone in 20 years while our economy takes a big shit on us all.
It's time for us to return to high tariffs on off-shore compition used to undermine american workers, time to NOT have undercutting agreements such as NAFTA (imagine if mexico had a tech sector, wed really be screwed), and it's time to build, buy, and use American products.
This country hasn't been remotly close to self-sufficient for quite some time.... maybe we all oughta take a look at trying to get closer to that. Our dependancies on the rest of the world are killing us, hampering our livelihoods, and setting us up for wars we shouldn't be involved in.
i know it sounds extremist, but weve had our hands so deeply in world affairs and trading out our own wealth of labor for cheap off-shore labor that intrests in foriegn politics (that are really just the intrests of cost cutting corps) are dictating the actions of our goverment, pissing off cultures that shouldnt be involved with us, and causing a general mess all over.
Thats my rant for now.
on a side note, I do believe that american entrepeneurism is what really fuels our economy, and it wont be too long before the next big thing comes along that is american made/only, and we'll sell it well until some other country learns to copy it for less. Looking at japan, they used to be the guys copying our shit and selling it for less, until they became almost as "first world" and high wage as us.... And although india has a billion people if they get enough high tech and skilled labor going on... they too will be too advanced to be cheaper than other countries (which the article mentions), where then? Africa?
It's deceptive because their name doesnt sat AMD 1.7 Ghz performs like a 2.1 PIV.... Their name implies that THEIR chip IS a 2.1Ghz Chip....
To give your product a name that implies it ITSELF is of that Mhz is misleading... although it may perform as well as a competing product of said MHZ the joe consumer is being led to believe that he has a chip that runs at THAT Mhz.
half a year ago and prior to that id give AMD the advantage over Intel for their chips (except for the deceptivity of 2100+ chips being 1.73 Ghz).... even accepting their tendancy to overheat.
but lately Intel has been steadily ahead with clock cycles that even AMD's "2800+" marketing cant compete with.
luckily Intel has had a Looooooooonnnnnnnggggg track record of power hungry chips which i suppose allows AMD to give more muscle for less juice in laptops....
but to say this is "yet another case of AMD one upping intel" is a bit too much.
clock cycles from a computer are worth Cents on the day.... hell we leave our comp on all day and it costs us jack-nothing almost.
You can sell that distributed power to firms and even they are going to realize how much the true cost/value of such a net is.
which in turn is going to make the value of selling such power go down... the revenue from even selling 80% of Kazzaa's distributed computing wouldn't match the "lost" sales of even just the TOP 40 artists or so "traded" on the P2P network. Much less the huge amount of other artists who become.... traded....
the real solution is to stay ahead of the RIAA , MPAA, DRM, and paladium/itanium by cracking their shit quickly until the media industry is forced to re-shape itself into a more communal buisness model which would award the artists more and promote the local talent more.
I can't think of any invention to have lived so long without some huge revision....
back in the 50's the light-bulb manufacturers invented a method that would allow them to work indefinitly..... and the blue-prints were consequently disposed of immediatly.
They are advertising themselves as being these speeds "on-line, all-the time" if they didnt mean that in its fullest... they shouldnt advertise it.... Thats misleading.
ISP's should eat the costs.... If you provide me with a service that claims to provide me with a certain bandwidth.... then that is what i get.
Because YOUR (isp) system of delivering bandwidth is faulty or doesnt account for abuse potentials is NOT my (consumer) fault.
If you decide to enforce a D/L cap, i myself will not be your customer....
If i was the average joe who opted to take on that bandwidth cost then i would blame YOU the ISP for allowing malicous data to be replicated at obvious expense.... as in if a port is responsible for great amounts of malicous (repetitive, near obvious redundant packet exchanges indicitive of an attack, worm, or virus).
The whole thing is, as an isp... the service you provide should be a fully enclosed package... no hidden/additional costs. And bandwidth capping should not incur automatic additonal costs to the consumer after a limit is reached, it should result in a great limiting of bandwidth (after a certain amount is reached) or in a blocked connection (allow only the company's IP until the customer buys more bandwidth).
My personal opinion, we are getting dicked by the tele-comunications industry from the top down... everything from home phones, cable, cell phones, broadband, T1's and more are greviously over-priced at a near basement cost to the mother companies. By the time a consumer recieves their data the fixed price of hardware and the cost of ELECTRICTY has been multiplied ten-fold. Mid-Range ISP's are being squeezed by the big players, and in turn are having to offer misleadingly high "bandwidth" speeds with BullShit Capping.
Downloading megabytes into your cell-phone doesnt cost sprint shit, but youll have to pay 1.00 per DL.
Of course the tel-co's are screaming bloody murder about their losses, but it isn't from data rates.
As a last note.... when we were all using 56kbps modems you could DL for days on end... you could call your local BBS and be charged a phone call while DLing full-speed for hours.... No extra cost... didn't cost them a thing since we payed for the phone-call.... Now that High-Speed is in the home.... and the tel-co's found they could save even more money by offering bandwidth speeds based on diluted averages of many users, they think it's fair to make more money by punishing those who ACTUALY USE THEIR bandwidth. Bandwidth which is only ELECTRICTY. Do you honestly think Time warner can offer 500 channels of digital cable, with "on demand" channels (where you can choose a movie and play it immedietly) for 60$ bucks a month and not provide that same (nearly continuous) data rate to internet connections?
luckily.... with the advent of online movies, music and application servers and such, soon even joe email will be needing a constant high-speed connection.
Your foot, sebastian "seb the asshole" coover's balls, kick him really really hard, I mean
AS HARD AS YOU CAN, and do it right around 3rd period..... oh yea..... and then run....
Rendevous is certainly a humungoesly great piece of software... however... i do NOT see it as a redmond killer even mixed with it's many abilities and supporters.
why?
because its open source...
Ironicly this is in redmond favor.... since if they ever see it as a threat to themselves due to their lack of such a feature, they'll simply incorporate it... And with that the advantage apple had over MS is gone.
With the major printers on board amongst others begining to support it.... I highly doubt it will take Bill long to make sure MS also supports it AND adds their own special "windows enhanced" features to it.
This whole situation is anologous to when apple made the USB only imac.... in a time when USB was common, but USB products weren't.... Apple suddenly created a greatly under-supported market.... which suddenly rushed to fill the whole with plethras of USB devices.... that didn't even take a year to become predominatly PC.
The answer here is simply that the japanese are probably the only culture on earth that spend their money "fruitlessly" on disposable or short term products.
Personaly i love both manga and american comics, I have found no lack of artistry in either side, and no lack of inteligent, thought provoking plots in both. As such i dont see how the issue lies there.
Culturaly the japanese are more prone to buying and getting rid of larger bulks of lower quality products... Which allows the consumer a greater pick of cheaper comics. Americans dispite their increased disposable income do not like to buy anything they cant use for the next 60 years or give to their kids. This of course tends to stagnate markets that arent entirely disposable such as comics.
I have always preferred american storylines and alternative artistry mixed with the manga precision, and i cannot stand the gimmicy short-cuts common in many manga series (such as the water drop by the eye, or the simplified cartooning used to show a character is emotionaly outraged or excited) and this may be due to the fact that most manga is probably working off of smaller margins.
However, i dare say americans need to take the emphasis off of collecting since most collecting doesn't amount to anything, and allow these markets to flourish.
The Similarities between the former greatness of both star trek and star wars are astounding when put in regards to their current demise. Both Series initiated with a great breadth of depth and intricacies in either plot or charcters. However they've devolved into explosions on the screen in place of humanity threatening wars of grander scales.
Granted the first star wars movis and star trek series had their fair share of campy and goofy moments, but these were almost always counter-baleneced by an enormous weight of responsibility to mankind. And never the grandois responsibility of saving humanity, but the responsibility of LEARNING to do whats right in your small piece of the universe and hope that the effects of that piece of good will ripple out to the benefit of all.
Look deeply into the better aspects of both series and you will find the characters and struggles alike are all centered around our heroes fighting with themselves or with their respective goverments to save only a small portion of the universe, which turns out to do more good than ever expected.
But now both series are more about the adventure, and how cool it looks to go along. How much resonance is there after their missions are acomplished? almost none. The darkness of struggle and REAL pain are almost non-existant, and the brutal consequences of failure are rarely made a reality in either series. Why is this?
Marketing
a bunch of marketting clowns got their hands on both enterprises and said to themselves "short time gain, short time gain". They figured out how to pack the most glitz onto the least amount of "dangerous" themes to provide the greatest immediate bang to their bucks. What we have been consistently handed are pre-packaged formulated products with little more soul in them than green money can fill in.
Darkness and potential evil crowd our lives everyday, the majority of us have trained ourselves in how to be good. We ARENT good, we just act good. And we are Painfully aware of how easy it is for us to "go to the dark side". Yet we dont, and what we look for in all our stories and films alike are the reasons WHY we dont go over. These franchises are supposed to serve to remind us of our own innate good which is only apparent after realizing how easy it is not to be good.
Star trk and star wars no longer remind us why our moral compasses are unexplainably good for the most part. And as such they present no significant worthwhile struggle thats memorable for the satisfaction of vanquishing the darker aspects of life. They are just explosions in space with pretty women on the hood.
the guy violates terms of agreement to iTools, is ordered to back off, decides to push his code into stand-alone functionality and gets more coverage as it seems he was "forced" to do this ?
what the hell does he get such coverage for? the app he made while cool is hardly worth all this attention. The app he's creating to be independant of iTools is no more special, and he is only doing what he was supposed to in the first place, write an app that doesnt violate the Terms Of Agreement he signed, and make it work as best as he can.
Of course the real issue is everyone wants to make apple look like the bad guy that forced this developer to rework his entire code base, and to withdraw an existing product from the market place only because apple legal had a hard-on for him. Come on, he was promoting illicit use of apple's freely distributed product. And he was specificly asked NOT to do that. He doesnt deserve all this undo attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Many pundits in this long line of posts have repeatedly pointed out that bluetooth is intended to be a PAN technology (Personal Area Networking) And that the author is greviously wrong for thinking that bluetooth should be more robust at connecting to the internet.
To these many people, i must say your very very wrong. While bluetooth's focus should certainly be on nothing more than connecting to devices within it's limited range, it should also be VERY high on it's priorities to be highly compatable with the web in any and every respect possible. This functionality will allow bluetooth to gateway beyond it's limited scope. And lets face it folks the idea is to have your cell phone accesible from anywhere on the net given that you have proper authentication.
I should be able to leave my cell on my desk at home, go to work, or a friends, and if i need to connect to it remotly to dig up whatever i want.
The concept behind the address spac of IPv6 (really IPng) is to have address's for every device imaginable no matter how small it's role. And bluetooth would be wise to provide that functionality at least conceptualy. To treat the computer(s) it has access to as gateway's, and to offer it's (authorized) services beyond them or through them. The model for the internet addressing is two-tierd (network/host) and this has been found to be inefficient for the exact reasons why PAN networking needs to be fully functional and logisticly compatible with the entire internet.
Their are already plans and implementations floating around about how to deal with free form routing with wireless objects. Networks that create themselves automaticly... discovering gateways through each other without user interventions... so that if you walk into a room with a bunch of friends, your bluetooth cellphone has already discovered how to access the net through your buddies music player which routes through another cellphone upstairs, which bridges through a 802.11x base station (for whatever reason) which has also dynamicly located a WAN wireless station.
Oh i know the above is plagued with all kinds of technical difficulties at the moment, and some parts are non-sensible, but thats not the idea. The idea is everything is connected to everything else automaticly and wirelessly, while remaining secure... and while utilizing whatever transport medium is appropriate for them. Bluetooth for small close hand devices, 802.11x for LAN's etc.... wired systems for back bone data... and so on...
You may as well be in a library reading the books on yur own... your simply spending your time paying bucks to get a "degree". Education is supposed to be a much more immersive experience, in which your entire world is focused upon whatever subjects your learning for certain spans of time. From the chalk-board to the many students to the profesor and all the hands on materials along with real hands on lab projects you can show to your fellow classmates and teachers in TRUE real-time.
When your simply posting and returning data from a web-page, and reading material be it online or off... you are not recieving an education, you are paying for the right to research and to attain a degree from it.
There are reasons why test taking is done in a class without access to the net and other such things. It is because you are supposed to test the actual mind and skills of a human without those resources at hand. This enables you to learn what you DONT know and to sharpen those skillsets.
Hence online education is kinda a joke. Ilearned a long time ago, i can learn anything i want without a piece of paper that says i did. So if your gonna go to school... make sure you go to the one with the biggest name.... cause thats all that matters in the end, youll learn what you want to know no matter what.
I give them about 3 years before they've either made good on their threats and actualy seem to be going after this goal, or are shown to have simply issued another boast.
If in 3 years they have indeed begun the initiative to colonize the moon, you can be certain the US will get off it's collective ass and either infuse NASA with massive amounts of bucks and initiative, or simply kill them and replace them with a new goverment entity to acomplish the same goal.
there are two reasons for this.. A: if china sets up a weapons base on the moon we would be at a serious disadvantage the moment they develop anti-ICBM type defenses. Although this isnt near to happening now... it is an inevitability as far as the progression of tech in nearly all major societies.
The second reason... The US has one of the greatest attitudes possesed by man. Out right jealousy. If they do it, then we damn well WILL do it too AND better. Who cares about the expense... it's important simply because it is.
The reason NASA is grounded right now ISNT because they fucked up.... it's cause they fucked up and dont have much of a purpose thats beneficial to the miltary/social/economical intrests of the US corporations or populace. Put china upstairs.... and you can garentee our space program will geta shot in the arm well beyond anything we could imagine about the star wars project or otherwise.
nothing like good old economic/political rivalry to get the inovation engines running.
the number one thing about voting in booths... etc.... is you have to walk up and actualy look someone in the face.... present ID to proove your who you are... and you must do so with another human being.
you can tell me a lot of things... retinal scans, and voice recognition.... but nothing is gonna beat a face to face confirmation.
sorry guys... but im not with it yet
when you consider these VOLUNTEERS enter the most dangerous and inhospitable of environments known to man (a vacum), and return safely in nearly 99% of missions, then the risk becomes more acceptable.
To ground the program due to what seems to me an exceptional track record given the extreme nature of their work is beyond senseless, a disaster occured in which information can be garnered to prevent such catastrophies from occuring again. Because a ship was lost does not justify reasoning that the entire organization is flawed. This is high risk work people, and generaly high risk work runs into intermittent tragedies that illuminate problems to be prevented int the future.
Now at this point im sure plenty of people will chime in, that what if these tragedies can be averted by further research and development... etc.... This logic however falls short because we cant prepare for every possible imaginable disaster, we cant protect ourselves from millions of potential disasters that are beyond boundless in scope and possibilities. An ill timed solar flare on a certain region of the sun could wreck ireprable damage on all the electrical systems on earth, so should we just not go into space at all considering that may happen (and trust me, we dont have the tech to protect ourselves from a strong enough flare)
so then the real question becomes acceptable risk. is a 1-2% failure rate acceptable? I would have to say yes, and most risk-analysers would agree.
the second question is risk vs profit. this is far more tricky, as many have mentioned what THEY believe to be pointless or fruitless expiraments done in space, which provide little benfit given the risk and cost of the endeavor. In my honest opinion almost any reasonable research in space is at this point priceless, even manned research is of an in-estimable value to mankind. The results may not lend any imediatly profitable outcomes to buisness ventures, but on the whole the entire endeavor does many things, it first of all provides a wealth of knowledge otherwise completly unattainable on earth to the scientific knowledge of all humanity. We are talking about research that is impossible to obtain otherwise. Second of all it gives us, humans, a goal beyond this planet, a sense of a greater direction, a destiny of sorts that we can all build towards. I know that sounds grandiose and over the top, but look at our cultures far back into time, breaking boundries and pushing limits to find new things has been the legacy of humans since we could write on walls. And lets face it folks, as far as earth goes we're begging to reach the boundries here-in.... the space program has been giving us a new frontier that is important for the well-fare of the human psyche and our global culture. Thirdly the program creates jobs on more levels than NASA, there are contractors, and the companies that support the contractors, most people in the end are somehow connected to NASA through the MANY companies that support, supply, or buy from her.
while no-one has seriously proposed to stop NASA, grounding her is a similar action in that it would kill a great amount of drive behind her development. And in my opinion NASA's development is one of THE MOST IMPORTANT things earth should be doing right now.
i agree that reviewing the processes behind how NASA operates should happen frequently, but hampering her as well is worse than foolish, it is counter-productive, and potentialy catostrophic in it's own right. If anything we should be pumping more money into appropriate portions of NASA and concentrating on creating and achieving even grander goals in shorter spans of time.
a manned mission to mars should have been accomplished years ago.... there should have been a manned (or at least unmanned) station ON the moon decades ago, there should have been hundreds more probes sent through our measly solar system, and many more things.
the space race has died, and needs to be revived for the greater good of all.
If commercial space ventures can get a jump-start soon (as they seem nearly there), then we may find ourselves finaly advancing at an acceptable rate.
it is far easier to mount images on a mac than any other OS.... has been since os 8 or so. just double click a .img or .dmg
microsoft just went open source?
and with their perceieved flagship product (soon to be since it is predicted hand-held devices and dedicated hardware that use CE will begin outselling traditional boxes by 2005)
ive got a lot of bridges back-ordered, ill be seeing you guys soon.
--Enter The Sig--
That is hardly a valid reason for iraq to have or use WMD (weapons of mass destruction). The use of the atomic bomb in 1945 was unprecedented and wasn't banned by international treaties and/or laws, nor had the US signed any regulations/resolutions banning their use of said weapons, AND The US happened to be involved in a WORLD WAR that the japanese dispite their loosing at that point werent going to give up.
To equate the US using Nukes in the conclusion of a WORLD WAR (WWII) to saddams possesing of WMD or his willingness to use them is ludricris.
I as well feel that bush makes any US intrests sound ridiculous.... but dont help him.
The real key here is the US is doing the dirty work of fifty or more years of mistakes that need cleaning.... And the US is doing them for nothing more than oil. We all know it, even if we dont want to talk about it. Saddam needs to go if anything is to get even slightly better for the iraqi people... and the only ones willing to do this dirty little job are the greedy americans... us...
Im proud to be a US citizen, and i believe that this war as sad as it may be, is necesary, i think our president is a moron, but i also think the world should step back and realize something.
At least saddam will be removed
At least the Iraqi people will have a slightly better ruler.... and a chance at a democratic republic to respresent the needs of THEIR people.
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F*&K any company pushing it's work off-shore to sell products to US citizens... Hell i know those people deserve jobs just as much as we do, but when you really get down to it, the companies are screwing us BOTH over... they pay off shore workers a fifth of our wages, and sell it back to us at a 4x markup. Seriously, work that involves using your brain shouldnt be valued at the same value as collecting garbage or pushing paper... or doing grunt work in general... The hours programmers put in now-adays to finish projects is discusting and worthy of far more compensation.
I agree there was a time when certain skillsets were over-valued... including my own... But these jobs ARENT that cheap. Now i can make more money doing stupid shit...
Meanwhile weve got morons in goverment fighting over oil supplies that'll be gone in 20 years while our economy takes a big shit on us all.
It's time for us to return to high tariffs on off-shore compition used to undermine american workers, time to NOT have undercutting agreements such as NAFTA (imagine if mexico had a tech sector, wed really be screwed), and it's time to build, buy, and use American products.
This country hasn't been remotly close to self-sufficient for quite some time.... maybe we all oughta take a look at trying to get closer to that. Our dependancies on the rest of the world are killing us, hampering our livelihoods, and setting us up for wars we shouldn't be involved in.
i know it sounds extremist, but weve had our hands so deeply in world affairs and trading out our own wealth of labor for cheap off-shore labor that intrests in foriegn politics (that are really just the intrests of cost cutting corps) are dictating the actions of our goverment, pissing off cultures that shouldnt be involved with us, and causing a general mess all over.
Thats my rant for now.
on a side note, I do believe that american entrepeneurism is what really fuels our economy, and it wont be too long before the next big thing comes along that is american made/only, and we'll sell it well until some other country learns to copy it for less. Looking at japan, they used to be the guys copying our shit and selling it for less, until they became almost as "first world" and high wage as us.... And although india has a billion people if they get enough high tech and skilled labor going on... they too will be too advanced to be cheaper than other countries (which the article mentions), where then? Africa?
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It's deceptive because their name doesnt sat AMD 1.7 Ghz performs like a 2.1 PIV.... Their name implies that THEIR chip IS a 2.1Ghz Chip....
To give your product a name that implies it ITSELF is of that Mhz is misleading... although it may perform as well as a competing product of said MHZ the joe consumer is being led to believe that he has a chip that runs at THAT Mhz.
This my fried is deceptive...
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half a year ago and prior to that id give AMD the advantage over Intel for their chips (except for the deceptivity of 2100+ chips being 1.73 Ghz).... even accepting their tendancy to overheat.
but lately Intel has been steadily ahead with clock cycles that even AMD's "2800+" marketing cant compete with.
luckily Intel has had a Looooooooonnnnnnnggggg track record of power hungry chips which i suppose allows AMD to give more muscle for less juice in laptops....
but to say this is "yet another case of AMD one upping intel" is a bit too much.
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clock cycles from a computer are worth Cents on the day.... hell we leave our comp on all day and it costs us jack-nothing almost.
.... traded....
You can sell that distributed power to firms and even they are going to realize how much the true cost/value of such a net is.
which in turn is going to make the value of selling such power go down... the revenue from even selling 80% of Kazzaa's distributed computing wouldn't match the "lost" sales of even just the TOP 40 artists or so "traded" on the P2P network. Much less the huge amount of other artists who become
the real solution is to stay ahead of the RIAA , MPAA, DRM, and paladium/itanium by cracking their shit quickly until the media industry is forced to re-shape itself into a more communal buisness model which would award the artists more and promote the local talent more.
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I can't think of any invention to have lived so long without some huge revision.... back in the 50's the light-bulb manufacturers invented a method that would allow them to work indefinitly..... and the blue-prints were consequently disposed of immediatly.
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They are advertising themselves as being these speeds "on-line, all-the time" if they didnt mean that in its fullest... they shouldnt advertise it.... Thats misleading.
--vision
ISP's should eat the costs.... If you provide me with a service that claims to provide me with a certain bandwidth.... then that is what i get.
Because YOUR (isp) system of delivering bandwidth is faulty or doesnt account for abuse potentials is NOT my (consumer) fault.
If you decide to enforce a D/L cap, i myself will not be your customer....
If i was the average joe who opted to take on that bandwidth cost then i would blame YOU the ISP for allowing malicous data to be replicated at obvious expense.... as in if a port is responsible for great amounts of malicous (repetitive, near obvious redundant packet exchanges indicitive of an attack, worm, or virus).
The whole thing is, as an isp... the service you provide should be a fully enclosed package... no hidden/additional costs. And bandwidth capping should not incur automatic additonal costs to the consumer after a limit is reached, it should result in a great limiting of bandwidth (after a certain amount is reached) or in a blocked connection (allow only the company's IP until the customer buys more bandwidth).
My personal opinion, we are getting dicked by the tele-comunications industry from the top down... everything from home phones, cable, cell phones, broadband, T1's and more are greviously over-priced at a near basement cost to the mother companies. By the time a consumer recieves their data the fixed price of hardware and the cost of ELECTRICTY has been multiplied ten-fold. Mid-Range ISP's are being squeezed by the big players, and in turn are having to offer misleadingly high "bandwidth" speeds with BullShit Capping.
Downloading megabytes into your cell-phone doesnt cost sprint shit, but youll have to pay 1.00 per DL.
Of course the tel-co's are screaming bloody murder about their losses, but it isn't from data rates.
As a last note.... when we were all using 56kbps modems you could DL for days on end... you could call your local BBS and be charged a phone call while DLing full-speed for hours.... No extra cost... didn't cost them a thing since we payed for the phone-call.... Now that High-Speed is in the home.... and the tel-co's found they could save even more money by offering bandwidth speeds based on diluted averages of many users, they think it's fair to make more money by punishing those who ACTUALY USE THEIR bandwidth. Bandwidth which is only ELECTRICTY. Do you honestly think Time warner can offer 500 channels of digital cable, with "on demand" channels (where you can choose a movie and play it immedietly) for 60$ bucks a month and not provide that same (nearly continuous) data rate to internet connections?
luckily.... with the advent of online movies, music and application servers and such, soon even joe email will be needing a constant high-speed connection.
Just my two cents.... VISION
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Your foot, sebastian "seb the asshole" coover's
balls, kick him really really hard, I mean
AS HARD AS YOU CAN, and do it right
around 3rd period..... oh yea..... and then run....
Trust me, youll never be picked on again....
how did this get to five?
Sigh
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why?
because its open source...
Ironicly this is in redmond favor.... since if they ever see it as a threat to themselves due to their lack of such a feature, they'll simply incorporate it... And with that the advantage apple had over MS is gone.
With the major printers on board amongst others begining to support it.... I highly doubt it will take Bill long to make sure MS also supports it AND adds their own special "windows enhanced" features to it.
This whole situation is anologous to when apple made the USB only imac.... in a time when USB was common, but USB products weren't.... Apple suddenly created a greatly under-supported market.... which suddenly rushed to fill the whole with plethras of USB devices.... that didn't even take a year to become predominatly PC.
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lol...
Personaly i love both manga and american comics, I have found no lack of artistry in either side, and no lack of inteligent, thought provoking plots in both. As such i dont see how the issue lies there.
Culturaly the japanese are more prone to buying and getting rid of larger bulks of lower quality products... Which allows the consumer a greater pick of cheaper comics. Americans dispite their increased disposable income do not like to buy anything they cant use for the next 60 years or give to their kids. This of course tends to stagnate markets that arent entirely disposable such as comics.
I have always preferred american storylines and alternative artistry mixed with the manga precision, and i cannot stand the gimmicy short-cuts common in many manga series (such as the water drop by the eye, or the simplified cartooning used to show a character is emotionaly outraged or excited) and this may be due to the fact that most manga is probably working off of smaller margins.
However, i dare say americans need to take the emphasis off of collecting since most collecting doesn't amount to anything, and allow these markets to flourish.
just my 2c.
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The Similarities between the former greatness of both star trek and star wars are astounding when put in regards to their current demise. Both Series initiated with a great breadth of depth and intricacies in either plot or charcters. However they've devolved into explosions on the screen in place of humanity threatening wars of grander scales.
Granted the first star wars movis and star trek series had their fair share of campy and goofy moments, but these were almost always counter-baleneced by an enormous weight of responsibility to mankind. And never the grandois responsibility of saving humanity, but the responsibility of LEARNING to do whats right in your small piece of the universe and hope that the effects of that piece of good will ripple out to the benefit of all.
Look deeply into the better aspects of both series and you will find the characters and struggles alike are all centered around our heroes fighting with themselves or with their respective goverments to save only a small portion of the universe, which turns out to do more good than ever expected.
But now both series are more about the adventure, and how cool it looks to go along. How much resonance is there after their missions are acomplished? almost none. The darkness of struggle and REAL pain are almost non-existant, and the brutal consequences of failure are rarely made a reality in either series. Why is this?
Marketing
a bunch of marketting clowns got their hands on both enterprises and said to themselves "short time gain, short time gain". They figured out how to pack the most glitz onto the least amount of "dangerous" themes to provide the greatest immediate bang to their bucks. What we have been consistently handed are pre-packaged formulated products with little more soul in them than green money can fill in.
Darkness and potential evil crowd our lives everyday, the majority of us have trained ourselves in how to be good. We ARENT good, we just act good. And we are Painfully aware of how easy it is for us to "go to the dark side". Yet we dont, and what we look for in all our stories and films alike are the reasons WHY we dont go over. These franchises are supposed to serve to remind us of our own innate good which is only apparent after realizing how easy it is not to be good.
Star trk and star wars no longer remind us why our moral compasses are unexplainably good for the most part. And as such they present no significant worthwhile struggle thats memorable for the satisfaction of vanquishing the darker aspects of life. They are just explosions in space with pretty women on the hood.
In other words... Star marketing
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
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why does he get an article for this.
the guy violates terms of agreement to iTools, is ordered to back off, decides to push his code into stand-alone functionality and gets more coverage as it seems he was "forced" to do this ?
what the hell does he get such coverage for? the app he made while cool is hardly worth all this attention. The app he's creating to be independant of iTools is no more special, and he is only doing what he was supposed to in the first place, write an app that doesnt violate the Terms Of Agreement he signed, and make it work as best as he can.
Of course the real issue is everyone wants to make apple look like the bad guy that forced this developer to rework his entire code base, and to withdraw an existing product from the market place only because apple legal had a hard-on for him. Come on, he was promoting illicit use of apple's freely distributed product. And he was specificly asked NOT to do that. He doesnt deserve all this undo attention.
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SNL nowadays is barely funny on TV, and in text isnt worth the reading the two pages this one took. What happened to /. editing?
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