The way I see it, subscribing to slashdot (for example) puts money towards content and away from useless ad people.
And the money the "useless ad people" give to slashdot and other sites in exchange for page space, what does that go towards, spoons?
Chew on this: the "subscription only" model is the elite and priveleged track. Ad-sponsored sites allow anyone with web access, even from a public terminal, to be "empowered." Think of all of Negroponte's poor, starving 100-dollar laptop children; don't they deserve free, legal music too?
Trek's been mined for college papers since Chekhov was in diapers. With -- what, 4, 5, six series, how many movies? -- from which to draw, you could prolly choose a thesis premise via a dartboard and still find enough material in the Star Trek mythos to hang it all on.
The real, industrial-strength pseudo-scholars who want to watch TV rather than crack a book turn their tight-leather-clad attention spans toward Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
And I know from pop culture pseudo-scholarship: I once got an "A" in my "Structuralism and Semiotics" class with an exegesis of an Elric of Melnibone short story.
Now I'm confused. If I want to get my ad on slashdot is or is not Hemos the person I am supposed to contact? If the policy has changed, we should be notified, no?
That's why I play a Fantasy Role Playing Game. He's got an intelligence of 200 sumthin sumthin, so he can do all that runey stuff. My character is also a lot braver than I am, which is why I'm not interested in a game in which my Real-Life chair is wired to jolt me with 500 volts every time the on-screen bad-guy whacks my avatar. My character, he's brave, and that's reflected In his thousands of hit points, so he stays and fights even though he's getting shot by lightning bolts while his nuts are being eaten by zombies. Me, I'd be back in the tavern, ordering a double.
It's Role Playing Game. Not a first-person shooter/twitch game.
Man, I was the PDA king -- back in the day. Original Palm Pilot, Rexx, WinCE, Win Mobile, I forget what all else, latest greatest bestest every year. But when the cellphones began to offer Office functionality that I could barely get in my laptop, let alone my PDA, I re-evaluated my personal electronics. Did I really need to update my spreadsheets on the subway? No. Was I ever really that far away from a PC with a USB port that I couldn't jack into with the thumbdrive on my keychain? Not really. So all the info I need at a glance -- appointments, phone numbers -- are in the phone, and every other file I own is backed up religiously onto my keychain. If you want to be all geeky about it, you can fit an entire Linux distro -- as well as your file folders -- onto your key fob. Sure to impress the co-eds...
More importantly -- and you'll thank me for this in about 10, 15 years -- the arrangement encourages me to think about "computer stuff" when I'm near a computer, and not on line for the ballet or at the beach. Remember, there are other, stealthier ways for the machines to win besides the plotlines for those Terminator or Matrix movies....
I would. In a heartbeat. And the small office that I am setting up for a client this week, they'd use it too. In fact, I'd put them all on Linux today if I could assure my client he could easily get temps and office workers who wouldn't have problems (genuine and imagined) with OO, but I can't.
These people aren't fourteen years old, they don't "hate Microsoft," they just have a job to do and want to do it with reliable and familiar tools. Linux works just fine on the desktop, and I'm happy to recommend it and install it, but outside of geek-dom no one cares about the OS. It's all about the applications.
Microsoft releasing Office for Linux is the greatest thing that could happen to Linux. That's why I am skeptical they will do it...
I am teh Old Skool. Any Debian installation that does not require lamb's blood, sulfur, salt, mercury, a transcription from the original Assyrian, Fermat's Enigma, and a Circle of Power etched in holy chalk consecrated on Michaelmas is a Debian installation for which I have no use.
Simply because humans are predisposed to violence (which is still under debate by our brainy science dudes) does not imply that we should not strive for a world without war.
Which, as history has shown, is best accomplished when the two largest tribes create the biggest, baddest, most honkin' armaments their weaponsmiths can conceive of and point them, point blank, at each other. All the smaller tribes choose up sides, and if you do it right you get a really neat space-race as a dividend.
A world without war is not possible in a world without weapons.
The Good News is that in the time it takes the suite to open and load an infected document the malicious hacker has been captured by the FBI, brought to trial, convicted, and a patch made available.
1. The Sleeper Cell Rule: You may choose up to six countries to place your markers initially,
2. The Kill-Us-All-You-Want-We'll-Make-More Rule: For every three markers of your opponents that you capture you must sacrifice one of your own markers.
3. The Race-Hatred Rule: You get a +3 on the dice roll and two column shifts if you are attacking a predominantly Jewish nation, but if more than two of your markers are adjacent to Jewish-held territory you *must* attack that territory, until either your markers or your opponents are completely eliminated.
Another of our roots is a similar site called Slashdot.org . Slashdot played a formative role as the community voice of Open Source / Free Software during a time of tremendous growth in that community. Unfortunately, Slashdot has more recently abdicated that role to become, in the words of its editors, "a geek culture site". We recognise the lure of the mass-market. As we write this, Slashdot is within the top 300 sites on the web by readership, and we congratulate them. But the serious work is going to need to go on elsewhere. We're taking up that flag.
Another issue with Slashdot is immaturity. It's rife with trolls and other detriments to the signal-to-noise ratio. We start out on a path to improve the level of discussion over that in Slashdot by eschewing the "Anonymous Coward" who is rampant there. If you don't want to take responsibility for your words, they don't belong here. We encourage you to put your full name in your login, and participate in all discussion as a known individual. We will take other measures to maintain the highest possible quality of discussion as they become necessary.
So, whaddya saying, no ACs and if I want to read about Joss Whedon's grocery list I'll have to call his press agent?
I am *SO* there, Bruce! Congratulations!
(But do you kinda sorta think that your new competitive venture against slashdot is why your own dirty laundry got posted here by an AC? I'm just askin'...)
the Dark Ages was helped started by an exceptionally bad plague during which many people ran to the church for reassurace.
Oooh, bad spelling, too: The Trifecta! Anyways, Dr. Hawking, the Dark Ages ran from 476 to about 1000 AD. They were brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire. Oh, and the "light of civilization," if you will (and even if you won't) was kept alive by those e-e-e-evil Christian monks cloistered away in far off monasteries in North West Europe.
Yer basic Black Death-Plague-thingie struck circa 1347.
But hey, don't let little things like facts get in the way of your Bush/Christian bashing. Lord knows nobody else does...
It was called a "cuecat," and it became one of the great punchlines (along with AOL CDs, foosball tables, VRML, and Jon Katz) of the dot-com era. Cuecats presumed that people read magazines alongside their computers, completely missing the point that if anyone was that "wired" he would be reading his magazines online to begin with.
If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser.
These are the generic mass "in-your-face" ads that people, generally, try to avoid but cannot. Ads we "want to see," at least in theory, are, again, those that materialize in the marginalia of our web pages as a result of our search metadata being analyzed. The mobile phone bar scanners are, like the cuecats, already obsolete. If you can't remember the product the billboard is hawking, the billboarder has not done his basic job and does not deserve any gadgetery boost. And if you can remember the product, you can google it.
Anyone running around pointing his cellphone at a billboard so he can capture the barcode and WAP-surf to the company's website should be rounded up, made to serve Nicholas Negroponte his frappe latte mocchachino in bed for a week, ride a segway from Grand Central Station to Wall Street, and have "TOOL" tatooed on his forehead in front of a crowd of 600 fat, drooling, naked, middle-aged "digerati" marketing execs at the next Burning Man festival.
For some reason, I don't think that this is going to get as big as mother's day.
Ya think?
Personally, I'm saving all my Good Will For No Good Reason At All for "Marketing Chippie Day." When is that again... third Thursday in September? Or is that "Accounting Niblet Who Stamps My T&E Day"? I get these three holidays mixed up for some reason...
to say nothing about being completely impossible to enforce globally.
Now. Impossible to enforce globally now. Coupla pesky theocracies to overthrow, a handful of socialist democracies already undermining themselves needing just a teensy-weensy push, that oil/energy thing we got some of our best people working on, and then *BAM* our single global government is good-to-go. One Nation, Under Bilderberg.
Don't know about you, but I, for one, welcome our Barbie-Banishing Overlords.
So you basically just close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ear, and go "can't hear you, can't hear you" instead of facing the fact that the media is *correct* and blogs *do* affect elections and political trends?
You're not listening James. (Perhaps it's you with the fingers in your ears?) Whereas blogs may affect political trends, their reality is skewed. By and large these aren't thoughtful hard-working adults with families who are crap-flooding the Internet cesspools like MySpace, its hormonal kids and lunatics (hope that last one wasn't being redundant).
It's as if somebody suddenly gave a megaphone to every homeless wino, beat poet, mall rat, skin head, and Chavez T-Shirt wearer and said "Listen to them! It's important!"
It's not important, James. It's noise. Crazy, un-funny, sexually-charged, pretentious, blinky-tagged, music-embedded noise from angry and/or confused people with too much time and not enough responsibility.
There's nothing stopping you from living like it's 1965 if you want.
It's the recent J-School graduates writing in newspapers about this "blogging phenomenon" who are the ones who wish they were back in 1965, a "grass roots" time when "young people made a difference." It wasn't, and they didn't, but history in this case has been written by the losers. Now they're all going to Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young concerts, writing about Nicholas Negroponte as if he was Ghandi, and arranging flash mobs to all plug in their USB LEDs at once in the hopes it will raise Atlantis from the depths.
Goddamned, the only thing I hate more than elitist jerks are the people who are SO negative that they can't see anything positive about anything at all.
OK, how's this for positive: The more time these knuckleheads spend figuring out how to duct tape a webcam onto their strap-on genitalia without electrocuting themselves, the less likely I am to run into them on the street. I think that's pretty positive, don't you?
And if all this makes me "elitist," then I don't want to be common-ist.
Go back 10 years, when everyone was talking about the Internet revolution. Remember that?
More like 12-13, at this point, but sure, I remember it. And the only people who thought that it was a good idea that "Everyone can publish their thoughts, make their own site, share photos with their friends, instantly contact anybody!" were the Marketing Tools who wrote crap like that in their bids for venture capital. The rest of us all looked for a place to hide beneath our raised floors, cowering in a cold sweat as the price of megapixel cameras dropped even lower and Microsoft began bundling copies of Frontpage with every box of Cap'n Crunch cereal.
Just around the time that we thought we had survived the worst of it with something resembling a forward-looking culture intact, and even began to hold out some hope that the prevalence of e-mail might revive society's letter-writing skills (despite those fucking smileys through which no one seems able to drive a stake), along comes text-messaging, and vowels make their appearance on the endangered species list, joining semi-colons and initial capitalization.
Bookmark *this*: I don't want to be contacted instantly, and whereas my friend's photos may have some meaning to my friends, they mean jack-all to me. Anyone who wants to publish their thoughts is free to do so (paper diary, clutched tightly to your breast or tucked safely away beneath your pillow, is preferable) but when the media steps in and declares this drivel substantive enough to affect elections and political trends, it becomes my responsibility to point out that the blogosphere is a narcissistic circle-jerk perpetuated by adolescents struggling with their identities and hormones.
Slashdot Mirror
The way I see it, subscribing to slashdot (for example) puts money towards content and away from useless ad people.
And the money the "useless ad people" give to slashdot and other sites in exchange for page space, what does that go towards, spoons?
Chew on this: the "subscription only" model is the elite and priveleged track. Ad-sponsored sites allow anyone with web access, even from a public terminal, to be "empowered." Think of all of Negroponte's poor, starving 100-dollar laptop children; don't they deserve free, legal music too?
Trek's been mined for college papers since Chekhov was in diapers. With -- what, 4, 5, six series, how many movies? -- from which to draw, you could prolly choose a thesis premise via a dartboard and still find enough material in the Star Trek mythos to hang it all on.
The real, industrial-strength pseudo-scholars who want to watch TV rather than crack a book turn their tight-leather-clad attention spans toward Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
And I know from pop culture pseudo-scholarship: I once got an "A" in my "Structuralism and Semiotics" class with an exegesis of an Elric of Melnibone short story.
Ahhhh, college...
...that Hemos was the point person for slashvertisements?
Now I'm confused. If I want to get my ad on slashdot is or is not Hemos the person I am supposed to contact? If the policy has changed, we should be notified, no?
That's why I play a Fantasy Role Playing Game. He's got an intelligence of 200 sumthin sumthin, so he can do all that runey stuff. My character is also a lot braver than I am, which is why I'm not interested in a game in which my Real-Life chair is wired to jolt me with 500 volts every time the on-screen bad-guy whacks my avatar. My character, he's brave, and that's reflected In his thousands of hit points, so he stays and fights even though he's getting shot by lightning bolts while his nuts are being eaten by zombies. Me, I'd be back in the tavern, ordering a double.
It's Role Playing Game. Not a first-person shooter/twitch game.
Man, I was the PDA king -- back in the day. Original Palm Pilot, Rexx, WinCE, Win Mobile, I forget what all else, latest greatest bestest every year. But when the cellphones began to offer Office functionality that I could barely get in my laptop, let alone my PDA, I re-evaluated my personal electronics. Did I really need to update my spreadsheets on the subway? No. Was I ever really that far away from a PC with a USB port that I couldn't jack into with the thumbdrive on my keychain? Not really. So all the info I need at a glance -- appointments, phone numbers -- are in the phone, and every other file I own is backed up religiously onto my keychain. If you want to be all geeky about it, you can fit an entire Linux distro -- as well as your file folders -- onto your key fob. Sure to impress the co-eds...
More importantly -- and you'll thank me for this in about 10, 15 years -- the arrangement encourages me to think about "computer stuff" when I'm near a computer, and not on line for the ballet or at the beach. Remember, there are other, stealthier ways for the machines to win besides the plotlines for those Terminator or Matrix movies....
...and are never heard from again. Maybe they get infected with "virii."
Hey, I can dream, can't I?
Who will use this?
I would. In a heartbeat. And the small office that I am setting up for a client this week, they'd use it too. In fact, I'd put them all on Linux today if I could assure my client he could easily get temps and office workers who wouldn't have problems (genuine and imagined) with OO, but I can't.
These people aren't fourteen years old, they don't "hate Microsoft," they just have a job to do and want to do it with reliable and familiar tools. Linux works just fine on the desktop, and I'm happy to recommend it and install it, but outside of geek-dom no one cares about the OS. It's all about the applications.
Microsoft releasing Office for Linux is the greatest thing that could happen to Linux. That's why I am skeptical they will do it...
I am teh Old Skool. Any Debian installation that does not require lamb's blood, sulfur, salt, mercury, a transcription from the original Assyrian, Fermat's Enigma, and a Circle of Power etched in holy chalk consecrated on Michaelmas is a Debian installation for which I have no use.
Friggin' noobs...
Which is to say, how much of the theft is from true strangers, and how much from wives and girl friends?
Simply because humans are predisposed to violence (which is still under debate by our brainy science dudes) does not imply that we should not strive for a world without war.
Which, as history has shown, is best accomplished when the two largest tribes create the biggest, baddest, most honkin' armaments their weaponsmiths can conceive of and point them, point blank, at each other. All the smaller tribes choose up sides, and if you do it right you get a really neat space-race as a dividend.
A world without war is not possible in a world without weapons.
...that OpenOffice has security flaws.
The Good News is that in the time it takes the suite to open and load an infected document the malicious hacker has been captured by the FBI, brought to trial, convicted, and a patch made available.
Err, make that Zero
Takes a beating, nary a scratch to show for it, and you look like Jack Bauer all the while.
that should even things up a little
Sorry, I'm afraid you're way behind:
Post As An AC: Deduct 2 Points
Be Un-Funny: Deduct 5 Points
Credit The UN With Any Relevance: Lose a Turn
Gee, you sure you still want to play? Your heart just doesn't seem to be in the game...
2. The Kill-Us-All-You-Want-We'll-Make-More Rule: For every three markers of your opponents that you capture you must sacrifice one of your own markers.
3. The Race-Hatred Rule: You get a +3 on the dice roll and two column shifts if you are attacking a predominantly Jewish nation, but if more than two of your markers are adjacent to Jewish-held territory you *must* attack that territory, until either your markers or your opponents are completely eliminated.
hmmmm, did I miss any...?
Let's not give this guy any more publicity than he deserves, which is IMO, none.
Lemme guess... you're a wikipedia editor...?
I wonder if the mousse in my hair will get me a trip to gitmo...
Not if your airplane breaks the time barrier and lands in 1986.
So, whaddya saying, no ACs and if I want to read about Joss Whedon's grocery list I'll have to call his press agent?
I am *SO* there, Bruce! Congratulations!
(But do you kinda sorta think that your new competitive venture against slashdot is why your own dirty laundry got posted here by an AC? I'm just askin'...)
And Code is not "Poetry," in case that needed any clarification.
Happy to help...
the Dark Ages was helped started by an exceptionally bad plague during which many people ran to the church for reassurace.
Oooh, bad spelling, too: The Trifecta! Anyways, Dr. Hawking, the Dark Ages ran from 476 to about 1000 AD. They were brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire. Oh, and the "light of civilization," if you will (and even if you won't) was kept alive by those e-e-e-evil Christian monks cloistered away in far off monasteries in North West Europe.
Yer basic Black Death-Plague-thingie struck circa 1347.
But hey, don't let little things like facts get in the way of your Bush/Christian bashing. Lord knows nobody else does...
It was called a "cuecat," and it became one of the great punchlines (along with AOL CDs, foosball tables, VRML, and Jon Katz) of the dot-com era. Cuecats presumed that people read magazines alongside their computers, completely missing the point that if anyone was that "wired" he would be reading his magazines online to begin with.
If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser.
These are the generic mass "in-your-face" ads that people, generally, try to avoid but cannot. Ads we "want to see," at least in theory, are, again, those that materialize in the marginalia of our web pages as a result of our search metadata being analyzed. The mobile phone bar scanners are, like the cuecats, already obsolete. If you can't remember the product the billboard is hawking, the billboarder has not done his basic job and does not deserve any gadgetery boost. And if you can remember the product, you can google it.
Anyone running around pointing his cellphone at a billboard so he can capture the barcode and WAP-surf to the company's website should be rounded up, made to serve Nicholas Negroponte his frappe latte mocchachino in bed for a week, ride a segway from Grand Central Station to Wall Street, and have "TOOL" tatooed on his forehead in front of a crowd of 600 fat, drooling, naked, middle-aged "digerati" marketing execs at the next Burning Man festival.
For some reason, I don't think that this is going to get as big as mother's day.
Ya think?
Personally, I'm saving all my Good Will For No Good Reason At All for "Marketing Chippie Day." When is that again... third Thursday in September? Or is that "Accounting Niblet Who Stamps My T&E Day"? I get these three holidays mixed up for some reason...
to say nothing about being completely impossible to enforce globally.
Now. Impossible to enforce globally now. Coupla pesky theocracies to overthrow, a handful of socialist democracies already undermining themselves needing just a teensy-weensy push, that oil/energy thing we got some of our best people working on, and then *BAM* our single global government is good-to-go. One Nation, Under Bilderberg.
Don't know about you, but I, for one, welcome our Barbie-Banishing Overlords.
We'd be sitting here marvelling at their innovation and wondering how we ever lived without it.
So you basically just close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ear, and go "can't hear you, can't hear you" instead of facing the fact that the media is *correct* and blogs *do* affect elections and political trends?
You're not listening James. (Perhaps it's you with the fingers in your ears?) Whereas blogs may affect political trends, their reality is skewed. By and large these aren't thoughtful hard-working adults with families who are crap-flooding the Internet cesspools like MySpace, its hormonal kids and lunatics (hope that last one wasn't being redundant).
It's as if somebody suddenly gave a megaphone to every homeless wino, beat poet, mall rat, skin head, and Chavez T-Shirt wearer and said "Listen to them! It's important!"
It's not important, James. It's noise. Crazy, un-funny, sexually-charged, pretentious, blinky-tagged, music-embedded noise from angry and/or confused people with too much time and not enough responsibility.
There's nothing stopping you from living like it's 1965 if you want.
It's the recent J-School graduates writing in newspapers about this "blogging phenomenon" who are the ones who wish they were back in 1965, a "grass roots" time when "young people made a difference." It wasn't, and they didn't, but history in this case has been written by the losers. Now they're all going to Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young concerts, writing about Nicholas Negroponte as if he was Ghandi, and arranging flash mobs to all plug in their USB LEDs at once in the hopes it will raise Atlantis from the depths.
Goddamned, the only thing I hate more than elitist jerks are the people who are SO negative that they can't see anything positive about anything at all.
OK, how's this for positive: The more time these knuckleheads spend figuring out how to duct tape a webcam onto their strap-on genitalia without electrocuting themselves, the less likely I am to run into them on the street. I think that's pretty positive, don't you?
And if all this makes me "elitist," then I don't want to be common-ist.
Go back 10 years, when everyone was talking about the Internet revolution. Remember that?
More like 12-13, at this point, but sure, I remember it. And the only people who thought that it was a good idea that "Everyone can publish their thoughts, make their own site, share photos with their friends, instantly contact anybody!" were the Marketing Tools who wrote crap like that in their bids for venture capital. The rest of us all looked for a place to hide beneath our raised floors, cowering in a cold sweat as the price of megapixel cameras dropped even lower and Microsoft began bundling copies of Frontpage with every box of Cap'n Crunch cereal.
Just around the time that we thought we had survived the worst of it with something resembling a forward-looking culture intact, and even began to hold out some hope that the prevalence of e-mail might revive society's letter-writing skills (despite those fucking smileys through which no one seems able to drive a stake), along comes text-messaging, and vowels make their appearance on the endangered species list, joining semi-colons and initial capitalization.
Bookmark *this*: I don't want to be contacted instantly, and whereas my friend's photos may have some meaning to my friends, they mean jack-all to me. Anyone who wants to publish their thoughts is free to do so (paper diary, clutched tightly to your breast or tucked safely away beneath your pillow, is preferable) but when the media steps in and declares this drivel substantive enough to affect elections and political trends, it becomes my responsibility to point out that the blogosphere is a narcissistic circle-jerk perpetuated by adolescents struggling with their identities and hormones.