Not exactly. The Boucher Bill was passed in 1993; TBL invented the WWW in 1991 (the first work was in 1989; the publication of the CERN httpd was in 1991, though, and that publication - particularly these [w3.org] emails [w3.org], dated 9 Aug 1991, offering the code for free and providing the first public http links I know of - should constitute the birth of the WWW.
What the Boucher Bill did was provide a policy framework for the public Web/Internet as we know it. Still worthy of mention in the annals of history, regardless of how Algore might have [mis?]characterized it.
Yeah, yeah, blah blah, I read Tim's book too. But I read it when it came out in '99 so many of the details were a bit lost to the odd bong hit here and there. Thanks for refreshing my memory. But within about two or three years is what I had in mind with the phrase roughly contemperaneous. If I had meant at they happened simultaneously, I would have said as such!
Although in the span of those two years (91-93) I dated 3 women, I consider all of those relationships to have been roughly contemperaneous!!
So what you are saying is that Gore supported a bill on the back end that gave the nod to what was completely obvious.
Another thing to consider is that the commercial appeal of the Internet was anything but obvious in '93. At that point the arpanet was wholly owned by the US government, it was developed as a fail-safe means of transmitting information in a de-centralized environment so that in the case of a nuclear war it could still funciton.
If at any point before the Boucher bill was signed there was the potential (though unlikely) scenario of some demagog deciding that the civillian use of the Arpanet was so out of control it posed a serious misuse of government resources and therefore should be shutdown! It was definitely not impossible for the government to just pull the plug on the then fledgeling internet. Again, this would be highly unlikely and very tough to actually do. But then did we ever expect anything as outrageous as the DMCA to infect the lives of average people in the connected social universe in which we now find ourselves? Just something to think about...
So what you are saying is that Gore supported a bill on the back end that gave the nod to what was completely obvious.
Yes, it was completely obvious as you have so perspicaciously pointed out. However, it is useful to note how small the technology community was in the early 90's vs. the size it is today. Did you read Slashdot back in '93? Why, of course not! It didn't bloody well exist yet, genius!
Add to that how technologically clueless most politicians are even in this day and age, let alone way back then, I believe that Gore does indeed deserve credit for his vote on this issue.By the way, how have your elected officials voted on the DMCA?
To reiterate, it was completely obvious at that point, but only to a select few. It was a day when the internet (nee, arpanet!) was in use only by UNIX die-hards and nary a Windows user (unless she was already a Unix user).
...Instead, he got kindof serious, and said, "Well, no, he (Al Gore) didn't create the internet, and I think he's been quoted out of context, but he was absolutely responsible for creating the legislative environment that allowed that type of research to be done, and lead to the creation of the internet."
Yes, I would agree that Gore's supposed statement that he "Invented the Internet" was taken out of context. Despite being so seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin in public speaches, I would tend to credit the man with enough intelligence to *NOT* have made that claim.
What I supposed that Gore could have been referring to was his support of the Boucher Bill which was solely (AFAIK) responsible for opening up the internet to general use by the public. Up until the point of this bill being signed, the internet was supposed to be used solely for "official" government use. Of course, by this time many private citizens were already using it to buy and sell things to one another, proposition one another, display ASCII Art and whatnot. But this bill was the official nod that the internet wasn't just for breakfast anymore and was ripe for the picking to anyone interested. Of course, this was roughly contemperaneous with Tim Berners Lee's development of the WWW so both factors probably worked together towards making the 'net what it is in this day and age.
So, while Gore of course was not "responsible for the invention of the internet", he can with a straight face lay claim to being a key supporter of the bill that brought it to the masses.
well, the mac community is probably larger than the perot community.;)
If Jobs got to be the president of the USA, that would not be the first time that Perot got burned by Jobs. Perot was one of the largest investors in a little venture which was at one time known as NeXT.
Hey, have you heard about this new guy William Gibson? New guy? Up & comer? Yeah, he's good, yeah, he pretty much invented a genre, but I've beed reading his stuff for a good 10 years. And liking it btw.
Actually, I was totally joking and operating under the assumption that almost anyone on this site would be very familiar with his work. I've loved Gibson's work since I first read Nueromancer back in 1986, also I read Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero, All Tomorrow's Parties, Burning Chrome and Idoru. I've loved every single one of his books, and can just dive into the pages and not even realize I'm on a crowded bus or subway. Burning Chrome, however stands out for me the most because as effective as he is as a writer of novels, his short stories just spin your head far more. His use of language is what hooks you, but the dramatic tension and pacing and characterization will hold you and hold you well. You'll be cranking through the pages of any of his works, I feel.
Some people have criticized Gibson for the fact that he pretty much sticks to his formula and doesn't much stray (though the formula he uses is 100% his own invention IMO) too far into territory a Gibson fan won't find familiar. I see this point, but enjoy the books too care much about it.
Neal Stevenson played very effectively on the immersive virtuality theme, similar in the broad strokes to Gibson, but only in the loosest sense. Snowcrash was pure Stephenson, and read like a very enjoyable "Teen Reader" aimed at adults. It was very not like my usual fair, but I enjoyed it immensely. However, Cryptonomicon was by far Stephenson's best work. I've read that book about 4 times and devoured it each time.
But, I just wanted to point out that I was totally kidding about the "up and comer" line regarding Gibson.
Hey, have you heard about this new guy William Gibson? He has this new style that people are calling "cyber-punk" and has written a few books taht are pretty good, but I don't think anyone has heard of him yet. Keep your eye on this up and comer!
A number of years ago when I decided I would finally buckle down and start learning languages one of my main motivations was that I was naive enough at the time to believe that right behind the wheels, gears and pulleys (which is how I thought of the OS) was the guts of the machine.
Of course, once I became acquainted with C and C++ what did I find? More gears and pulleys- in other words yet another layer of abstraction. I am comfortable enough in C++ and Java to think of them as OSes.
I never found a need on a personal level to become profficient in Assembly language, but after a while I finally became acuanted with that as well- at least enough to learn that this was the final destination- what I had been after as my initial motivation to learn how to program.
I had an interesting discussion today, with someone who immigrated here (the U.S.A., Hoboken;) from Russia. Of course, we ethnic Americans are taught to believe that freedom and democracy are our highest ideals so carefully that it becomes a very low-level functioning and pervasive element (or agent) of our psyches.
But the person I was speaking to claimed that America does not "deserve" democracy because in order to wield such self-determinative power effectively, one has to be capable of forming an informed opinion. This is something she apparently thought little of the American public's ability to do.
But is she right? She may actually have a point. How are we to form opinions regarding the direction of our communities, states and the country at large? By reading the newspapers? Well, that certainly helps more than watching the five o'clock news, but is that even as good as reading publications like the Foreign Affairs quarterly or watching the BBC World News? Personally speaking, I think these are a better source of information on the world scene than most newspapers that I am personally aware of. I also don't think these sources of information are quite on the scale of the five o'clock news. But even I don't have the will or wherewithal of time and energy to acquaint myself with all of the issues facing my own elected officials. I certainly consider myself no activist, but more aware than the average "USA Today" reader.
So, what she had to say made me think of Robert D. Kaplan's view that democracies require a few basic elements in order to function, and without them they fail as they have repeatedly in places like Africa and South America:
High Literacy Rate
Functioning Beureaucracy
Functioning Economy
I would agree with all three of his requisite conditions, but how can we have it work and work really well if the all of the major news media organs of our culture are owned by fewer and fewer multinational corporations as author Ben Bagdikian pointed out with such ominous presciense? What company would allow one subsidiary openly criticize another subsidary, both of which are funneling money upwards? If you ask me, we are neither a true democracy nor a republic, but a coropate oligarchy.
Cracking is the stupidest term. Why are people so insistent and making themselves look like morons. It's called hacking. It always has been, and it always will be.
It's called Hacking by WHOM? Usually by the news media, but they are almost entirely clueless. The meaning of a word depends as much on the person who uses it as the person who hears it. When I say "I wrote a cool hack" I DON'T mean that I've broken into the Bank of America. I will usually mean that I figured out a recursive algorithm that had been eluding me, or else something along those lines that don't have A THING to do with hitting another box (on my own, or any other netwr0k). ANd my friends will understand this and so will I when they use the term in this way.
This couldn't possiible have ANYTHING to do with the fact that Verisign is EVIL and computer people know it, could it? And when I say "EVIL" I mean EEEEEEEE-VAH-HIL as in the FROO-IT of the DEV-IL!
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Yeah, maybe there are a few millionares in NJ, but there is a higher percentage of them in Mississippi. How does that make you feel. We have the highest percentage of millionares in the country. Of course we are also one of the poorest states in the country...
--Forest C. Adcock--
I'm not exactly sure of the percentage of Millionaires in NJ. But for argument's sake, I accept the fact that there is a higher percentage of them in Mississippi. However, if Mississippi is one of the poorest states, and NJ one of the richest all this tells me is that someone isn't exactly pulling their weight, now are they?
I know if *I* lived in NJ I would want to move elsewhere as soon as possible!
You fail to mention however, what's so frikkin' terrific about where you live! And this comment gets modded up! I'm not a liberator, just a meta-moderator!;)
Any hare-brain can take a crack at the garden state. That's easy. It is the home to much industrial pollution, Frank Sinatra and Joe Piscopo. And it is the most populated state in the union which is why auto insurance is so overpriced and almost impossible to get; even if you have a perfect driving record, and even then it's no guarantee!
But one thing to consider in the fact that NJ is the most poulated state in the US is how diverse its population is. It is also has a large population of extremely wealthy people (including Ex-Presidents and CEOs of multinational corporations) who would ostensibly have enough money to live anywhere they choose.
People drive down the NJ Turnpike and think they have a sense of what the whole state is about. But if you venture out of Edison NJ you'd realize that NJ has some of the best beaches in the country. The ONLY state in US that has better beachesis Hawaii. I've been to many California beaches, including Newport Beach, Balboa and Dayna Point but I haven't found a single one that I would consider to be better than Long Beach Island.
One thing to understand about NJ is that it is almost a miniature representation of the entire United States. The north is densely populated, industrial and with a diverse ethnic population. The south is primarily agricultural, rural and tourism oriented. NJ is in almost as important a farming state as anywhere in the midwest, and has a larger population (per capita) of horses than Montana!
So you and all you ignorant ass moderators who modded this comment UP can put that THAT in your crack-pipes and smoke it!
YO! COWBOY NEAL! WHERE THE FREAKIN' HELL ARE MY MODERATOR POINTS WHEN I NEED THEM!!!!
Me...I'm old sk00l...I'd certainly love to pay 5G$ for my fave Trekalicious star, but I'm way too |*0...However I could see myself driving proudly around in my new Mustang with my badndy-spankin'(!!!) new inflatable Yoeman Rand or (droo-h00h00h00-h0001)Yoeman Barrows (making them wave and make hand gestures to passers by) if I could get them for a more reasonable 2 b1llz...
and before all tha "You don't get laid- Hah HAhahaA! I'm so original posts" to that I say...ANATOMICALLY CORRECT PLEASE!...Yoeman RAND! Position seven!
...OKay, I occasionally get MOD points which I really enjoy using. I usually focus on modding up/rather than down. It is completely solipsistic to use mod points to mod someone down just because you don't like what they have to say, just for expressing an opinion. Y0w! Isn't that what we're all here for?
The original post0r was doing just that. Exprssing an opinion, not intentionally fanning the flames of ignorance. Apparently that was the moderator's job in t1hs instance. Offopic? That shit was about as on-topic as you could want, tho brief, and not terribly expressive. That too is/should not be cause for an Offtopic mod. And if your MOD turns up on my meta-mod list, trust me my f1rend you will feel The Stark Fist of Removal.
Oh well. Moderating/Meta-Modding was phUn while it lasted but I felt it had to be said.
Thanks, that was my point. Since computer keyboards of today are not slowed by the clackity-clack of victorian age machinery, the only logical reason for using qwerty (which as you pointed out was to slow the user down to prevent the machine from seizing) is that it is a deeply entrenched habit of society. Dvorak style typing made sense since they did not realize the limitations of the machinery they were building. Not that those limitations are gone, the only reasons are socialogical, not technological.
Very interesting, and thought provoking. While we're at it, why qwerty and not Dvorak? Trinary may make sense, but we are to deep into binary to even think of changing. Interesting to think that the ENIAC was based on something called Bi-Quinary ( I think we've talked about this before). So apparently was the IBM-650.
It seems that the debate between binary and bi-quinary was a topic of hot debate in the computing field as to the furutre of digital circuitry at one point in history. As the article states: "Each digit was represented in seven bit "bi-quinary" notation: one bit out of 5 represented a value from zero to four; one bit out of two indicated whether or not to add 5 to that value, giving the electronic equivalent of the abacus.
It seems that massively parallel computing has gone the way of the Dinosaur what with the advent of more powerful CPUs. But I read that Danny Hillis of MIT and Thinking Machines fame had built a supercomputer called the Connection Machine which housed 65,536 procs each of which lived on the same wafer with dynamic ram and were arranged in a 16-dimensional hypercube array. I don't think the old beastie had nearly as much ram as the new SGI (of course, this machine was 80's vintage). But depending on the physical size of the old box, could this have not been the world's densest computer ever?
It's true that there were once attractive women who knew a thing or two about computers. Now, all you get are pretty woman, who think that they do apparently, and trumpet their own greatness with absolutely nothing to back it up!
Actually, here I am kidding that I believe there are no attractive women who know technology really well. I actually know some who do. But, as the old Confucian proverb says, "A wise man (or in this case, a wise woman) knows much but says little, while a fool knows little but says much".
Many in this community are dog people, but is it my imagination that a higher percentage of geeks are cat people? It's either a startling coincidence or my life represents a real Nielsen-style rating as to the percentage of computer volken who like the furry little beasts...
This observation began for me when once I lived in an apartment complex with an exclusive population of nerds. It was the mid 90s at that time. Before I got there it was just a couple of Mac II-Ci's with phone-net (!!!) flowing out of the windows. I'm pretty sure we had the first network in the little beach-town of Seaside Park, NJ.
Eventually, there were 7 units each with Ethernet dangling from window-sill to window-sill. And only 500 feet from the beach! With a tremendous view of the Ocean from a kickin' deck upon which we would regularly grill mahi-mahi and the like whilst imbibing on food-breaks from endless network gaming and hacken (and more imbibing). It was bloody Nirvana!...but I digress.
All were tiny little cracker box apartments (we were beginning our tech careers at that point) that at the peak of geek occupancy housed a motley collection of Macintoshen, NT boxen, 1 NeXT machine (mine, a slab serving a 400dpi laser printer and also playing the part of a shuh-WEETNIS server), a couple of Linux box0rz and an Amiga 2000. PowerBooks galore. All nic'd and sharing the the love.
Nearly every apartment was populated with at least one cat, and in one case at least a bloody-stinkin' (emphasis on the "stinkin'" pheeeyew!) cat colony! I, resident mac-geek with a love of code and 3-d, had two...Lumpy and Jake. Neighbor James, who was an NT tech with a penchant for work-related travels to Kazakhstan on occasion, had two as well...Simba (a 22 pound orange basketball with legs and a tail) and Mim (tiny little fucker, even as a full-grown feline).
My friend Ian had a cat named Mr. Beau... Mr. Beau's special talent was vomiting on technology. Yup. If the thing flipped bits in some manner, and it was in Ian's apartment, that shit was getting vomited on. No negotiations. Also, beer was likely to have been spilled on said equipment at some point, but that I believe was (mostly)the fault of the humans about the place.
My friend Mark who also lived there was a 300lb pro wrestler who could lift full grown men over his head in addition to his impressive geek abilities. Adding to those formidable(and imposing)wrestling talents was a steady gig as Mac/NT/Network tech. The guy was also a 3-d rendering guru who made valuable additions to the old Ambrosia game Escape Velocity. He and his (then pre-) wife housed the afore mentioned (sHt1nKeN!) colony of kitties who (despite their numbers...and lovely odor!) managed to not vomit on the tech nearly so often. All the other guys had cats too. Not nearly as smelly.
Since those days, I've worked with a fair number of techs and the sampling of overlap between the cat-ownership and tech communities seemed to grow larger with the more tech-geeks I've met as time passed.
If I might posit a guess, I'd say it had something to do with the independant nature of both beasties. Here I speak of techie cr3tins (myself included) the race of kitt33z. Both seem to have a strongly independant sense of self. The solitary nature of bit-dribbling andromorphs is evinced most strongly by the the noticeable high percentage of said who also play musical instruments. When you think about it, in order to develop ability in either (music or tech), you have to spend a lot of time with yourself thinking, playing, experimenting. Cats, while not much on the thinking or tip seem to be quite competent at being on their own. Far more than dogs anyway in that respect...
Speaking as a Briton: no we don't, yes we do, yes we do and no we don't, respectively. I've never heard anyone say "configurate" or "street furniture." Maybe it's a German thing?
That's interesting, and I do stand corrected. Maybe I was assuming on the part of 'configurate' ( anytime someone ads the suffix '-ate' to a word, it always sounds more British to me for some reason).
But as to 'street furniture' I read that in an interview with the author J.G. Ballard in this issue of Re/Search where he was talking about the differences in English between here and across the pond. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he is English, isn't he? Could it be he was talking out of his ass or maybe just putting the interviewer on?
I'm not picking on you, but shouldn't that be 'configurationize'?
...Okay, maybe this point is a little subtle, but there is a difference between the way English is spoken over here vs. over there. (Since i live in New Jersey as opposed to Jersey I will refer to the US as 'here' and UK as 'there').
Here, we say 'confugure', there they say 'configurate'. Here we say 'commercial'. There, they say 'advert'. Here, we say 'color', there they say 'colour'. Here we say 'street sign'. There, they say 'street furniture'. Have some respect for cultural diversity, why don't you?;)
And we should probably expect a lot of British posters on this topic, as it seems that Amiga was always a lot more popular in England and the rest of Europe than the US.
The only sector of the market they seemed to have sewn up in the US for a while was the video production market because of the platform's awesome level of integreation with video and sound (very advanced for the time).
But you've gotta love the names of those old AV DSPs...Paula? Agnes? Denise? Fun 5tuph. Wonder why they had such odd names...
Ah youth... After working on Win2000 all day, I still love to old skool it when I get home and pop in an old game and futz with old Amiga hardware. To me playing with toasters and toccatas is still a phun way to pass the tiem. NT is work. But Amiga is play.
Will I check into the new hardware? Maybe. I'd have to think about that one. But really what's in it for me in this time and place except for the nostalgia I feel for the days when computing was truly new and (okay, I have to be honest with myself here) exciting?
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly. The Boucher Bill was passed in 1993; TBL invented the WWW in 1991 (the first work was in 1989; the publication of the CERN httpd was in 1991, though, and that publication - particularly these [w3.org] emails [w3.org], dated 9 Aug 1991, offering the code for free and providing the first public http links I know of - should constitute the birth of the WWW.
What the Boucher Bill did was provide a policy framework for the public Web/Internet as we know it. Still worthy of mention in the annals of history, regardless of how Algore might have [mis?]characterized it.
Yeah, yeah, blah blah, I read Tim's book too. But I read it when it came out in '99 so many of the details were a bit lost to the odd bong hit here and there. Thanks for refreshing my memory. But within about two or three years is what I had in mind with the phrase roughly contemperaneous. If I had meant at they happened simultaneously, I would have said as such!
Although in the span of those two years (91-93) I dated 3 women, I consider all of those relationships to have been roughly contemperaneous!!
So what you are saying is that Gore supported a bill on the back end that gave the nod to what was completely obvious.
Another thing to consider is that the commercial appeal of the Internet was anything but obvious in '93. At that point the arpanet was wholly owned by the US government, it was developed as a fail-safe means of transmitting information in a de-centralized environment so that in the case of a nuclear war it could still funciton.
If at any point before the Boucher bill was signed there was the potential (though unlikely) scenario of some demagog deciding that the civillian use of the Arpanet was so out of control it posed a serious misuse of government resources and therefore should be shutdown! It was definitely not impossible for the government to just pull the plug on the then fledgeling internet. Again, this would be highly unlikely and very tough to actually do. But then did we ever expect anything as outrageous as the DMCA to infect the lives of average people in the connected social universe in which we now find ourselves? Just something to think about...
So what you are saying is that Gore supported a bill on the back end that gave the nod to what was completely obvious.
Yes, it was completely obvious as you have so perspicaciously pointed out. However, it is useful to note how small the technology community was in the early 90's vs. the size it is today. Did you read Slashdot back in '93? Why, of course not! It didn't bloody well exist yet, genius!
Add to that how technologically clueless most politicians are even in this day and age, let alone way back then, I believe that Gore does indeed deserve credit for his vote on this issue.By the way, how have your elected officials voted on the DMCA?
To reiterate, it was completely obvious at that point, but only to a select few. It was a day when the internet (nee, arpanet!) was in use only by UNIX die-hards and nary a Windows user (unless she was already a Unix user).
...Instead, he got kindof serious, and said, "Well, no, he (Al Gore) didn't create the internet, and I think he's been quoted out of context, but he was absolutely responsible for creating the legislative environment that allowed that type of research to be done, and lead to the creation of the internet."
Yes, I would agree that Gore's supposed statement that he "Invented the Internet" was taken out of context. Despite being so seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin in public speaches, I would tend to credit the man with enough intelligence to *NOT* have made that claim.
What I supposed that Gore could have been referring to was his support of the Boucher Bill which was solely (AFAIK) responsible for opening up the internet to general use by the public. Up until the point of this bill being signed, the internet was supposed to be used solely for "official" government use. Of course, by this time many private citizens were already using it to buy and sell things to one another, proposition one another, display ASCII Art and whatnot. But this bill was the official nod that the internet wasn't just for breakfast anymore and was ripe for the picking to anyone interested. Of course, this was roughly contemperaneous with Tim Berners Lee's development of the WWW so both factors probably worked together towards making the 'net what it is in this day and age.
So, while Gore of course was not "responsible for the invention of the internet", he can with a straight face lay claim to being a key supporter of the bill that brought it to the masses.
well, the mac community is probably larger than the perot community. ;)
If Jobs got to be the president of the USA, that would not be the first time that Perot got burned by Jobs. Perot was one of the largest investors in a little venture which was at one time known as NeXT.
Hey, have you heard about this new guy William Gibson? New guy? Up & comer? Yeah, he's good, yeah, he pretty much invented a genre, but I've beed reading his stuff for a good 10 years. And liking it btw.
Actually, I was totally joking and operating under the assumption that almost anyone on this site would be very familiar with his work. I've loved Gibson's work since I first read Nueromancer back in 1986, also I read Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero, All Tomorrow's Parties, Burning Chrome and Idoru. I've loved every single one of his books, and can just dive into the pages and not even realize I'm on a crowded bus or subway. Burning Chrome, however stands out for me the most because as effective as he is as a writer of novels, his short stories just spin your head far more. His use of language is what hooks you, but the dramatic tension and pacing and characterization will hold you and hold you well. You'll be cranking through the pages of any of his works, I feel.
Some people have criticized Gibson for the fact that he pretty much sticks to his formula and doesn't much stray (though the formula he uses is 100% his own invention IMO) too far into territory a Gibson fan won't find familiar. I see this point, but enjoy the books too care much about it.
Neal Stevenson played very effectively on the immersive virtuality theme, similar in the broad strokes to Gibson, but only in the loosest sense. Snowcrash was pure Stephenson, and read like a very enjoyable "Teen Reader" aimed at adults. It was very not like my usual fair, but I enjoyed it immensely. However, Cryptonomicon was by far Stephenson's best work. I've read that book about 4 times and devoured it each time.
But, I just wanted to point out that I was totally kidding about the "up and comer" line regarding Gibson.
Hey, have you heard about this new guy William Gibson? He has this new style that people are calling "cyber-punk" and has written a few books taht are pretty good, but I don't think anyone has heard of him yet. Keep your eye on this up and comer!
A number of years ago when I decided I would finally buckle down and start learning languages one of my main motivations was that I was naive enough at the time to believe that right behind the wheels, gears and pulleys (which is how I thought of the OS) was the guts of the machine.
Of course, once I became acquainted with C and C++ what did I find? More gears and pulleys- in other words yet another layer of abstraction. I am comfortable enough in C++ and Java to think of them as OSes.
I never found a need on a personal level to become profficient in Assembly language, but after a while I finally became acuanted with that as well- at least enough to learn that this was the final destination- what I had been after as my initial motivation to learn how to program.
But the person I was speaking to claimed that America does not "deserve" democracy because in order to wield such self-determinative power effectively, one has to be capable of forming an informed opinion. This is something she apparently thought little of the American public's ability to do.
But is she right? She may actually have a point. How are we to form opinions regarding the direction of our communities, states and the country at large? By reading the newspapers? Well, that certainly helps more than watching the five o'clock news, but is that even as good as reading publications like the Foreign Affairs quarterly or watching the BBC World News? Personally speaking, I think these are a better source of information on the world scene than most newspapers that I am personally aware of. I also don't think these sources of information are quite on the scale of the five o'clock news. But even I don't have the will or wherewithal of time and energy to acquaint myself with all of the issues facing my own elected officials. I certainly consider myself no activist, but more aware than the average "USA Today" reader.
So, what she had to say made me think of Robert D. Kaplan's view that democracies require a few basic elements in order to function, and without them they fail as they have repeatedly in places like Africa and South America:
I would agree with all three of his requisite conditions, but how can we have it work and work really well if the all of the major news media organs of our culture are owned by fewer and fewer multinational corporations as author Ben Bagdikian pointed out with such ominous presciense? What company would allow one subsidiary openly criticize another subsidary, both of which are funneling money upwards? If you ask me, we are neither a true democracy nor a republic, but a coropate oligarchy.
Cracking is the stupidest term. Why are people so insistent and making themselves look like morons. It's called hacking. It always has been, and it always will be.
It's called Hacking by WHOM? Usually by the news media, but they are almost entirely clueless. The meaning of a word depends as much on the person who uses it as the person who hears it. When I say "I wrote a cool hack" I DON'T mean that I've broken into the Bank of America. I will usually mean that I figured out a recursive algorithm that had been eluding me, or else something along those lines that don't have A THING to do with hitting another box (on my own, or any other netwr0k). ANd my friends will understand this and so will I when they use the term in this way.
This couldn't possiible have ANYTHING to do with the fact that Verisign is EVIL and computer people know it, could it? And when I say "EVIL" I mean EEEEEEEE-VAH-HIL as in the FROO-IT of the DEV-IL!
This is disturbing. How can a headline with the phrase Drone On NOT include a story about the Spacemen 3 or Alpha Stone???
Yeah, maybe there are a few millionares in NJ, but there is a higher percentage of them in Mississippi. How does that make you feel. We have the highest percentage of millionares in the country. Of course we are also one of the poorest states in the country ...
--Forest C. Adcock--
I'm not exactly sure of the percentage of Millionaires in NJ. But for argument's sake, I accept the fact that there is a higher percentage of them in Mississippi. However, if Mississippi is one of the poorest states, and NJ one of the richest all this tells me is that someone isn't exactly pulling their weight, now are they?
So you admit that you are a hare-brain...?
I know if *I* lived in NJ I would want to move elsewhere as soon as possible!
;)
You fail to mention however, what's so frikkin' terrific about where you live! And this comment gets modded up! I'm not a liberator, just a meta-moderator!
Any hare-brain can take a crack at the garden state. That's easy. It is the home to much industrial pollution, Frank Sinatra and Joe Piscopo. And it is the most populated state in the union which is why auto insurance is so overpriced and almost impossible to get; even if you have a perfect driving record, and even then it's no guarantee!
But one thing to consider in the fact that NJ is the most poulated state in the US is how diverse its population is. It is also has a large population of extremely wealthy people (including Ex-Presidents and CEOs of multinational corporations) who would ostensibly have enough money to live anywhere they choose.
People drive down the NJ Turnpike and think they have a sense of what the whole state is about. But if you venture out of Edison NJ you'd realize that NJ has some of the best beaches in the country. The ONLY state in US that has better beachesis Hawaii. I've been to many California beaches, including Newport Beach, Balboa and Dayna Point but I haven't found a single one that I would consider to be better than Long Beach Island.
One thing to understand about NJ is that it is almost a miniature representation of the entire United States. The north is densely populated, industrial and with a diverse ethnic population. The south is primarily agricultural, rural and tourism oriented. NJ is in almost as important a farming state as anywhere in the midwest, and has a larger population (per capita) of horses than Montana!
So you and all you ignorant ass moderators who modded this comment UP can put that THAT in your crack-pipes and smoke it!
YO! COWBOY NEAL! WHERE THE FREAKIN' HELL ARE MY MODERATOR POINTS WHEN I NEED THEM!!!!
Me...I'm old sk00l...I'd certainly love to pay 5G$ for my fave Trekalicious star, but I'm way too |*0...However I could see myself driving proudly around in my new Mustang with my badndy-spankin'(!!!) new inflatable Yoeman Rand or (droo-h00h00h00-h0001) Yoeman Barrows (making them wave and make hand gestures to passers by) if I could get them for a more reasonable 2 b1llz...
...yah, I'm d1s+00r'b|)
and before all tha "You don't get laid- Hah HAhahaA! I'm so original posts" to that I say...ANATOMICALLY CORRECT PLEASE!...Yoeman RAND! Position seven!
...OKay, I occasionally get MOD points which I really enjoy using. I usually focus on modding up/rather than down. It is completely solipsistic to use mod points to mod someone down just because you don't like what they have to say, just for expressing an opinion. Y0w! Isn't that what we're all here for?
The original post0r was doing just that. Exprssing an opinion, not intentionally fanning the flames of ignorance. Apparently that was the moderator's job in t1hs instance. Offopic? That shit was about as on-topic as you could want, tho brief, and not terribly expressive. That too is/should not be cause for an Offtopic mod. And if your MOD turns up on my meta-mod list, trust me my f1rend you will feel The Stark Fist of Removal.
Oh well. Moderating/Meta-Modding was phUn while it lasted but I felt it had to be said.
Thanks, that was my point. Since computer keyboards of today are not slowed by the clackity-clack of victorian age machinery, the only logical reason for using qwerty (which as you pointed out was to slow the user down to prevent the machine from seizing) is that it is a deeply entrenched habit of society. Dvorak style typing made sense since they did not realize the limitations of the machinery they were building. Not that those limitations are gone, the only reasons are socialogical, not technological.
Very interesting, and thought provoking. While we're at it, why qwerty and not Dvorak? Trinary may make sense, but we are to deep into binary to even think of changing. Interesting to think that the ENIAC was based on something called Bi-Quinary ( I think we've talked about this before). So apparently was the IBM-650.
It seems that the debate between binary and bi-quinary was a topic of hot debate in the computing field as to the furutre of digital circuitry at one point in history. As the article states: "Each digit was represented in seven bit "bi-quinary" notation: one bit out of 5 represented a value from zero to four; one bit out of two indicated whether or not to add 5 to that value, giving the electronic equivalent of the abacus.
It seems that massively parallel computing has gone the way of the Dinosaur what with the advent of more powerful CPUs. But I read that Danny Hillis of MIT and Thinking Machines fame had built a supercomputer called the Connection Machine which housed 65,536 procs each of which lived on the same wafer with dynamic ram and were arranged in a 16-dimensional hypercube array. I don't think the old beastie had nearly as much ram as the new SGI (of course, this machine was 80's vintage). But depending on the physical size of the old box, could this have not been the world's densest computer ever?
It's true that there were once attractive women who knew a thing or two about computers. Now, all you get are pretty woman, who think that they do apparently, and trumpet their own greatness with absolutely nothing to back it up!
Actually, here I am kidding that I believe there are no attractive women who know technology really well. I actually know some who do. But, as the old Confucian proverb says, "A wise man (or in this case, a wise woman) knows much but says little, while a fool knows little but says much".
Many in this community are dog people, but is it my imagination that a higher percentage of geeks are cat people? It's either a startling coincidence or my life represents a real Nielsen-style rating as to the percentage of computer volken who like the furry little beasts...
This observation began for me when once I lived in an apartment complex with an exclusive population of nerds. It was the mid 90s at that time. Before I got there it was just a couple of Mac II-Ci's with phone-net (!!!) flowing out of the windows. I'm pretty sure we had the first network in the little beach-town of Seaside Park, NJ.
Eventually, there were 7 units each with Ethernet dangling from window-sill to window-sill. And only 500 feet from the beach! With a tremendous view of the Ocean from a kickin' deck upon which we would regularly grill mahi-mahi and the like whilst imbibing on food-breaks from endless network gaming and hacken (and more imbibing). It was bloody Nirvana!...but I digress.
All were tiny little cracker box apartments (we were beginning our tech careers at that point) that at the peak of geek occupancy housed a motley collection of Macintoshen, NT boxen, 1 NeXT machine (mine, a slab serving a 400dpi laser printer and also playing the part of a shuh-WEET NIS server), a couple of Linux box0rz and an Amiga 2000. PowerBooks galore. All nic'd and sharing the the love.
Nearly every apartment was populated with at least one cat, and in one case at least a bloody-stinkin' (emphasis on the "stinkin'" pheeeyew!) cat colony! I, resident mac-geek with a love of code and 3-d, had two...Lumpy and Jake. Neighbor James, who was an NT tech with a penchant for work-related travels to Kazakhstan on occasion, had two as well...Simba (a 22 pound orange basketball with legs and a tail) and Mim (tiny little fucker, even as a full-grown feline).
My friend Ian had a cat named Mr. Beau... Mr. Beau's special talent was vomiting on technology. Yup. If the thing flipped bits in some manner, and it was in Ian's apartment, that shit was getting vomited on. No negotiations. Also, beer was likely to have been spilled on said equipment at some point, but that I believe was (mostly)the fault of the humans about the place.
My friend Mark who also lived there was a 300lb pro wrestler who could lift full grown men over his head in addition to his impressive geek abilities. Adding to those formidable(and imposing)wrestling talents was a steady gig as Mac/NT/Network tech. The guy was also a 3-d rendering guru who made valuable additions to the old Ambrosia game Escape Velocity. He and his (then pre-) wife housed the afore mentioned (sHt1nKeN!) colony of kitties who (despite their numbers...and lovely odor!) managed to not vomit on the tech nearly so often. All the other guys had cats too. Not nearly as smelly.
Since those days, I've worked with a fair number of techs and the sampling of overlap between the cat-ownership and tech communities seemed to grow larger with the more tech-geeks I've met as time passed.
If I might posit a guess, I'd say it had something to do with the independant nature of both beasties. Here I speak of techie cr3tins (myself included) the race of kitt33z. Both seem to have a strongly independant sense of self. The solitary nature of bit-dribbling andromorphs is evinced most strongly by the the noticeable high percentage of said who also play musical instruments. When you think about it, in order to develop ability in either (music or tech), you have to spend a lot of time with yourself thinking, playing, experimenting. Cats, while not much on the thinking or tip seem to be quite competent at being on their own. Far more than dogs anyway in that respect...
Speaking as a Briton: no we don't, yes we do, yes we do and no we don't, respectively. I've never heard anyone say "configurate" or "street furniture." Maybe it's a German thing?
That's interesting, and I do stand corrected. Maybe I was assuming on the part of 'configurate' ( anytime someone ads the suffix '-ate' to a word, it always sounds more British to me for some reason).
But as to 'street furniture' I read that in an interview with the author J.G. Ballard in this issue of Re/Search where he was talking about the differences in English between here and across the pond. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he is English, isn't he? Could it be he was talking out of his ass or maybe just putting the interviewer on?
I'm not picking on you, but shouldn't that be 'configurationize'?
Here, we say 'confugure', there they say 'configurate'. Here we say 'commercial'. There, they say 'advert'. Here, we say 'color', there they say 'colour'. Here we say 'street sign'. There, they say 'street furniture'. Have some respect for cultural diversity, why don't you?
And we should probably expect a lot of British posters on this topic, as it seems that Amiga was always a lot more popular in England and the rest of Europe than the US.
The only sector of the market they seemed to have sewn up in the US for a while was the video production market because of the platform's awesome level of integreation with video and sound (very advanced for the time).
But you've gotta love the names of those old AV DSPs...Paula? Agnes? Denise? Fun 5tuph. Wonder why they had such odd names...
Ah youth... After working on Win2000 all day, I still love to old skool it when I get home and pop in an old game and futz with old Amiga hardware. To me playing with toasters and toccatas is still a phun way to pass the tiem. NT is work. But Amiga is play.
Will I check into the new hardware? Maybe. I'd have to think about that one. But really what's in it for me in this time and place except for the nostalgia I feel for the days when computing was truly new and (okay, I have to be honest with myself here) exciting?