It turns out some people use computers for other things than work. I know... crazy, but there it is. Some of these people are willing to spend big piles of dollars to enhance the value of this entertainment, and this goes double if the gizmo looks cool.
Now go play some of today's more complicated computer games like WWII Online and you'll stop wondering what the market of this thing is in a heartbeat.
It's better to have our tax dollars spent to pay farmers to grow corn in Idaho, than paid to rich sultans in the Middle East!
The US receives X amount of sunlight per year. With Ethanol, we are spending our money to convert that sunlight into fuel, using corn as solar collectors.
Apparently 1/4 of every dollar has to go to impact research, evaluating whether it will destroy the world.
I think Bill Joy has done more than his fair share of damage, this field of research is hamstrung by paranoia about the possibility of a grey goo which is impossible.
After all, Bacteria would LOVE to be a grey goo, eat everything, reproduce endlessly, destroy the world. That's really what bacteria are all about, they just can't manage it. So how in the hell is mankind supposed to outdo several billion years of evolution's attempt to make grey goo.
It just can't happen, the power consumption is too great, and even if it weren't, lack of heat dissipation would melt the goo from the inside.
Your idea won't stop spamming, but at least it will keep the zombie armies occupied.
Which means that 50% of the desktop computers in the world will now sit around running hashes, causing decreased productivity, increased energy usage, and more upgrading of systems that are already 10x too powerful for the jobs they were bought for.
But maybe fewer DNS attacks, because spammers will be a huge market for zombies.
You do not want to be walking around in the wild with a palmpilot and a GPS unit stuck on the top of it.
Magellan and Garmin make the perfect products for you, USE THEM.
It's tough It's water proof (at least more than a pda) It's battery powered with double A's that you can conceivably find even in underdeveloped nations It has a huge pile of memories and maps already integrated.
Now granted, African maps may not exist, but at least you can put in waypoints for important places and navigate between them.
Just... whatever you do, do not try to trust your computers or pdas. You'll end up paying more in the end, and for a solution that is fragile and needs line voltage or car battery to charge.
I have beat the holy living shit out of my Magellan Meridian for 2 years now and it still works like a champ, and for a price of about $150.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. Our culture is being forced to confront issues of privacy and information ownership that have previously laid under the radar only because violating these issues was inconvenient or expensive.
But the internet is changing that, and now an errant picture or snippet of text can be reproduced and distributed widely for practically zero dollars.
I think eventually we'll settle on some kind of bubble of privacy concept, in which anything inside is legally protected, but anything you distribute outside that bubble is fair game for anyone, forever.
This is generally the case in the real world. If someone wears clothes, they effectively have created a privacy bubble, only allowing limited information about themselves to be distributed (via reflected light) to be seen by others. But what information they do allow to escape is fair game for distribution in photographs.
In a sci- fi series (Neverness et al), Zindell argues that in the future, even identity will be as carefully concealed in public as one's privates. As information technology saturates our culture, even revealing our identity in public is going to be increasingly dangerous.
Of course DRM advocates will try to attach little bubbles of limited privacy to specific bits of content released into the wild. Eventually, I hope, common sense will prevail and such ridiculous notions will be abandoned.
As a player I don't want to be told a story, nor do I want to play one out.
I want to *be* the story.
And rules can be a nice way to put structure that make it feel that way. It depends on your GM really, some can be objective that it feels like you're running around in a universe.
But some GM's have trouble evaluating the actions of their players in the absence of rules. While the GM should have some input in how decisions go, his personal biases, likes and dislikes of certain kind of actions shouldn't completely rule the day. When they do, the players become largely irrelevant and that's no fun for anyone but the GM.
"People from such communities tend to care a great deal more about their fellow man, and on a day to day basis"
While everyone is falling all over themselves to praise the amish, I'd like to bring up a relevant statistic:
The Amish voted for Bush.
And in record numbers.
Their tranquil and idyllic life comes at a huge cost of ignorance of world issues. And their religious beliefs put them right in Bush's pocket, with intolerance of gays and abortion being at the top of their concern list.
Funny, you'd think a peace loving society like the Amish would be upset about a war monger president.
As is usually the case when outsiders look at pocket communities like this, the fantasy is better than the reality.
Right. They don't need to know about "emotional distance," because they live in a society where people from outside an immediate family group actually give a shit about each other. Strange concept, I know.
The Amish, like all societies, have their problems. Gender issues, for example, are a big one. I hear that abused women face huge social stigmas if they try to seek help.
I'm sure there's plenty of emotional distance in the Amish community.
It's like a teeming kazoo symphony, without a conductor.
Actually there are many conductors. What makes cognitive control an especially interesting problem is determining which conductors are in control at any point in time.
This is a fantastically intricate and difficult problem: how to prioritize limited resources to interact with a rapidly changing environment in real time. i.e. What do you ignore at any given point in time?
Our conductors trade off control constantly, over the time course of seconds, minutes, and hours.
I've heard of apologists before but this is bordering on ridiculous.
Here's an analogous idea: the world is going to be full of tyrannical despots, we have to be on our guard against them. So it's not right to blame them, someone was going to murder all those Kurds if Saddam didn't do it. In fact these people are doing us a favor by keeping us on our toes! (and sometimes chopping them off)
The people doing the damage are low life scum who buy Spam packages from other low life scum, and set up their own little mom and pop operations. Or script kiddies who create zombie farms from tips and tricks learned in IRC rooms.
They probably barely know how computers work, and not a lick of programming. But they can surely run a spamming or DOS script.
We should no more blame the hackers for spam and DOS attacks than we should blame Napster for music piracy, or crowbar manufacturers for house breakins.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, I think the fact that the best teams in the entire world only made it 7 miles is the interesting thing. And a little humbling.
Scenario = unnecessary inefficiencies in the production process by selecting the worst possible processing methods.
It turns out some people use computers for other things than work. I know... crazy, but there it is. Some of these people are willing to spend big piles of dollars to enhance the value of this entertainment, and this goes double if the gizmo looks cool.
Now go play some of today's more complicated computer games like WWII Online and you'll stop wondering what the market of this thing is in a heartbeat.
Depends who you believe. Apparently this estimate is based on a gloom and doom scenario by someone with an axe to grind
It's not just throwing a bone.
It's better to have our tax dollars spent to pay farmers to grow corn in Idaho, than paid to rich sultans in the Middle East!
The US receives X amount of sunlight per year. With Ethanol, we are spending our money to convert that sunlight into fuel, using corn as solar collectors.
"Why was Exxon helping the King kill his own people, to protect a contract which was making Exxon executives very rich? "
Exhibit A: a question that contains it's own answer.
He's working on molecular computers or something.
Apparently 1/4 of every dollar has to go to impact research, evaluating whether it will destroy the world.
I think Bill Joy has done more than his fair share of damage, this field of research is hamstrung by paranoia about the possibility of a grey goo which is impossible.
After all, Bacteria would LOVE to be a grey goo, eat everything, reproduce endlessly, destroy the world. That's really what bacteria are all about, they just can't manage it. So how in the hell is mankind supposed to outdo several billion years of evolution's attempt to make grey goo.
It just can't happen, the power consumption is too great, and even if it weren't, lack of heat dissipation would melt the goo from the inside.
Your idea won't stop spamming, but at least it will keep the zombie armies occupied.
Which means that 50% of the desktop computers in the world will now sit around running hashes, causing decreased productivity, increased energy usage, and more upgrading of systems that are already 10x too powerful for the jobs they were bought for.
But maybe fewer DNS attacks, because spammers will be a huge market for zombies.
Wheee
Color LCD displays are hard to read in the sun!
And they use more power!
It's just all bad, go with trusty greyscale LCD.
Buy an Integrated unit!!!
You do not want to be walking around in the wild with a palmpilot and a GPS unit stuck on the top of it.
Magellan and Garmin make the perfect products for you, USE THEM.
It's tough
It's water proof (at least more than a pda)
It's battery powered with double A's that you can conceivably find even in underdeveloped nations
It has a huge pile of memories and maps already integrated.
Now granted, African maps may not exist, but at least you can put in waypoints for important places and navigate between them.
Just... whatever you do, do not try to trust your computers or pdas. You'll end up paying more in the end, and for a solution that is fragile and needs line voltage or car battery to charge.
I have beat the holy living shit out of my Magellan Meridian for 2 years now and it still works like a champ, and for a price of about $150.
Or.... check this out:
you buy 3 or 4 magellans for the same price.
And what is he going to do with a trimble box unit? Plug it into his... palm pilot? Yea, that'll last longer than a Magellan or Garmin.
Of course, I only got 1 to 50 odds, so my profit is a miserly $100.
But it was a sure win.
Can't happen, incompatible with human nature.
Tiny little lies and covering up details is the grease that allows people to work together.
You wear a mask.
If that's not enough, you wear a changing mask.
It'll be YAAR (Yet Another Arms Race)
Again, these are challenges to our accepted way of life brought about by changes in technology.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. Our culture is being forced to confront issues of privacy and information ownership that have previously laid under the radar only because violating these issues was inconvenient or expensive.
But the internet is changing that, and now an errant picture or snippet of text can be reproduced and distributed widely for practically zero dollars.
I think eventually we'll settle on some kind of bubble of privacy concept, in which anything inside is legally protected, but anything you distribute outside that bubble is fair game for anyone, forever.
This is generally the case in the real world. If someone wears clothes, they effectively have created a privacy bubble, only allowing limited information about themselves to be distributed (via reflected light) to be seen by others. But what information they do allow to escape is fair game for distribution in photographs.
In a sci- fi series (Neverness et al), Zindell argues that in the future, even identity will be as carefully concealed in public as one's privates. As information technology saturates our culture, even revealing our identity in public is going to be increasingly dangerous.
Of course DRM advocates will try to attach little bubbles of limited privacy to specific bits of content released into the wild. Eventually, I hope, common sense will prevail and such ridiculous notions will be abandoned.
They don't have a case either way!
Adherence to robots is voluntary, done in good faith by crawlers for the general well being of the web.
I don't know about you, but I read slashdot for the commentary on the wire stories
As a player I don't want to be told a story, nor do I want to play one out.
I want to *be* the story.
And rules can be a nice way to put structure that make it feel that way. It depends on your GM really, some can be objective that it feels like you're running around in a universe.
But some GM's have trouble evaluating the actions of their players in the absence of rules. While the GM should have some input in how decisions go, his personal biases, likes and dislikes of certain kind of actions shouldn't completely rule the day. When they do, the players become largely irrelevant and that's no fun for anyone but the GM.
Can someone in the know fill us in? As I understand it, transmeta's boasting of low power cpus translated into rather meager results in practice.
What's the status of their productline?
"People from such communities tend to care a great deal more about their fellow man, and on a day to day basis"
While everyone is falling all over themselves to praise the amish, I'd like to bring up a relevant statistic:
The Amish voted for Bush.
And in record numbers.
Their tranquil and idyllic life comes at a huge cost of ignorance of world issues. And their religious beliefs put them right in Bush's pocket, with intolerance of gays and abortion being at the top of their concern list.
Funny, you'd think a peace loving society like the Amish would be upset about a war monger president.
As is usually the case when outsiders look at pocket communities like this, the fantasy is better than the reality.
Right. They don't need to know about "emotional distance," because they live in a society where people from outside an immediate family group actually give a shit about each other. Strange concept, I know.
The Amish, like all societies, have their problems. Gender issues, for example, are a big one. I hear that abused women face huge social stigmas if they try to seek help.
I'm sure there's plenty of emotional distance in the Amish community.
It's like a teeming kazoo symphony, without a conductor.
Actually there are many conductors. What makes cognitive control an especially interesting problem is determining which conductors are in control at any point in time.
This is a fantastically intricate and difficult problem: how to prioritize limited resources to interact with a rapidly changing environment in real time. i.e. What do you ignore at any given point in time?
Our conductors trade off control constantly, over the time course of seconds, minutes, and hours.
And our conscious self is only one of them.
That doesn't mean it's not someone's fault!
I've heard of apologists before but this is bordering on ridiculous.
Here's an analogous idea: the world is going to be full of tyrannical despots, we have to be on our guard against them. So it's not right to blame them, someone was going to murder all those Kurds if Saddam didn't do it. In fact these people are doing us a favor by keeping us on our toes! (and sometimes chopping them off)
They just find the holes and make the tools.
The people doing the damage are low life scum who buy Spam packages from other low life scum, and set up their own little mom and pop operations. Or script kiddies who create zombie farms from tips and tricks learned in IRC rooms.
They probably barely know how computers work, and not a lick of programming. But they can surely run a spamming or DOS script.
We should no more blame the hackers for spam and DOS attacks than we should blame Napster for music piracy, or crowbar manufacturers for house breakins.
And we don't... do we? *checks slashthink manual*