Actually, I believe this will work. In my opinion, one of the reasons that driving in traffic sucks so hard is because of the limited amount of information the pilots of automobiles are able to pass to each other, because they are sealed up in big metal and glass boxes, limiting the information transfer to the use of a single-note horn, turn signals, headlights, and brake lights. If you are able to communicate to fellow drivers things like, "Excuse me, may I get in here?", this is a much more nuanced and information-rich set of information than a simple blinking indicator. Allowing for greater information-rich communication between cars on the road will, in my opinion lead to a more pleasant driving experience, because human interactions are heavily dependent on emotional cues, i.e. politeness.
Sometimes I wish there were no TLDs at all. They aren't really necessary. They actually make things worse, since any owner of a domain is forced to buy several TLD versions of their domain. They only make sense if you can actually enforce the meaning of the TLD, such as how.gov TLDs are enforced.
I am surprised that the infamous malfunction of the robotic cannon, Oerlikon GDF-005 in 2007 was not mentioned. This malfunction caused the robot cannon to wildly spray hundreds of high-explosive 0,5kg 35mm cannon shells around the firing range in a South African training exercise, killing 9 and wounding 14. To be fair, it was not clear if it was a software or mechanical glitch that caused the malfunction. In any case, this underscores the growing reliance on automated systems, and the life and death consequences. Could licensing for software developers - similar to that bestowed upon civil engineers - be far away?
Re:Doesn't even have to be live life...
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
What are the chances of puttering around for a few hundred meters on earth and randomly finding a human skeleton?.. I was surprised when I found that Phoenix has no mobility. But then, I have thought about it for all of 5 minutes, while the NASA engineers have thought about it for 5 years, so there must have been a good reason to leave that feature out.
What Google is probably talking about in Congress is their trouble hiring engineering talent from other countries. Before you all start bashing marketing - Google is in great need of good marketers at this time. The engineers have done great work (obviously) to date. But have you ever noticed how many really cool features and applications Google has that only geeks know about? Google could do a lot better getting the word out to the larger public that there is more to their company than just search, maps, and GMail. They could use some good marketers.
At any rate, hiring engineering talent is probably a bit of a different challenge than hiring marketing talent.
I agree with almost everything you say - except for the notion that conversing with a passenger is more distracting than conversing using a hands-free device. Personally, I believe that using a hands-free device is slightly higher on your hierarchy of distractions than talking to a passenger.
The reason, I believe is that when you are talking to a passenger, s/he is able to witness exactly what you are witnessing. Therefore, when there is some tricky bit of maneuvering required, and you break off your conversation in mid-sentence, the other person knows why, and takes a break to let you concentrate. Whereas, in a phone conversation, the person at the other end has no information about what you, the driver, is currently dealing with. Because of something in our instinctive communication habits, I believe it is very hard to ignore someone we are talking to - so we give them the bulk of our attention. Since that other person cannot tell what exactly it is being confronted, the situation tends to be more dangerous.
The shared environment of driver and passenger creates a shared consciousness, which I believe makes for a safer situation of driving and conversing.
Secondly, this particular branch of the thread is a discussion of the creative merit of the piece, not whether or not this is an example of "mix culture". Just because someone took two existing pieces of video and smashed them together does not mean it has any sort of cultural value.
Yes, he did rip off Orwell. Or reference Orwell, depending on your point of view. In my opinion, Scott was clever in using the Orwell reference - since the year that the Mac came out was 1984. And obviously, the visuals that Scott created were very imaginative.
The guy who made the YouTube-hosted video of Clinton just took Scott's work and pasted Clinton's face on it. It was neither clever nor imaginative.
Actually, Ridley Scott showed imagination when he made the ad in the first place. This guy just copied and pasted. This was an extremely weak effort, and had nothing of substance to say about Clinton. It was trite, cheap, and weak.
Actually, I believe this is a good thing. Firefox is an open source project, and it can never be reverted to a closed source one. The money that companies like Google pour into Firefox development goes towards supporting something that will always remain open source. This is a win for everyone. Companies that make their living through the browser, such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, etc. get an open standard that they can all base their work on something that none of them own outright. They are forced to share. Smaller developers such as myself get the benefit of an increasing reliable standard upon which to develop. When the developers, both large and small, are all working on an open, standardized platform, that means that there is more we can do, and this then benefits the users.
Internet Explorer's days are numbered - at least the proprietary parts of it are. As innovation on the web begins to gravitate more and more towards the Firefox platform, I am predicting that Microsoft will be forced to follow in the footsteps of Firefox. The stakes are just too high, and Microsoft does not have a monopoly on the Web, like it does on the desktop. It will really come down to the needs of Microsoft, vs. the needs of Everyone Else. Since Everyone Else is bigger, they will eventually be the ones calling the shots about what direction the Browser takes.
Human's have an illimitable amount of desire. Since humans are physically limited, their desire will always be greater than their ability to satisfy it. Therefore, humans will tend to perpetually be in a state of dissastification. This dissastisfaction will tend to be blamed on those in society that wield more power. In a sense, this is justified. This is why we have always hated our leaders, have a tradition of regicide, and everyone hates their boss.
We humans have always hated our leaders. The Internet has not amplified this, it has only made the voices that were previously silent, heard. This is the price that leaders must pay. If they want to lead, they will have to endure every insult, and be able to deal with the fact that pretty much everyone will think they suck.
Sadly, this seems to be the case. Dan Rather spoke about this in an interview recently.
A quote:
Rather pointed to the pre-Irag war coverage as an example of where the press has fallen down. "It's not very good, bordering on abysmal," he said, including himself in the assessment. Reporters didn't ask enough questions. Access journalism ruled the day. Reporters who asked tough questions were cut off from access to key administration officials, making it difficult to compete professionally with those who tried not to ruffle feathers. "Don't underestimate the pressure to get access and the corrosive effect it has on reporters," Rather said.
The press today is "a wee bit less timid today, perhaps because the President's approval ratings are down, but "American journalism is in desparate need of a spine transplant," he said.
I would have to agree to most of the responses to this post. Yes, it is true that branding is often used to shore up weak products and make them look like there is something there of value.
And it's not only about icons and logos. I would go so far as to say that branding is really the development of clear values and goals for an organization, group of people, or product, and making sure that those values permeate the work that the organization does, and are communicated to their constituents. This not only helps the public at large understand what the organization is trying to do, but can also help the members of the organization maintain a clear vision (something extremely helpful in a distributed organzition such as the Mozilla community), and even help to garner support from the public outside of the organization's members.
Wouldn't it be a shame if most people did not recognize the important aspects of Mozilla, such as it being open source (and what that means - not everyone knows), free, etc., simply because these values were not clearly and consistently communicated?
Branding is a powerful tool, and when used to promote things that are not worthwhile, it is an annoyance. But an organization that has something of real value to contribute to the community would be well advised to clearly communicate that value.
IIRC, Cassini was loaded with plutonium, or some other highly radioactive substance. If the same tactic is used for Cassini when it has finished its work with Saturn, is there reason to be concerned about dropping it into that planet?
It's one thing to be against the abuse of copyright and the leveraging of corporate muscle to force authors to agree to terrible contracts, and another thing to be against copyright altogether.
If you ever wrote a song or made a painting, or wrote a novel, wouldn't you want to prevent that material from ending up in some national ad campaign, or turned into a movie without paying you a dime? Because without copyright, those giant media conglomerates could just as easily use for their own ends the work that you labored for as easily as you download an MP3.
Exactly. How can we make any inferences when we only have one data point?
Also, I often wonder why people so often assume that life requires planets. Just because we appeared on a planet, why does all other life have to? It seems that life evolves in transition areas between chaos and order - like the surface of a planet - but there are plenty of other transition areas out there. How about a star's corona? Or the edge of a nebula? Or even the edge of a black hole? Maybe there are some huge life forms out there swimming around giant gas clouds. Life forms that consist of light. I think we limit our thinking too much about what life is, and assume far too much that life elsewhere will resemble us.
Maybe we should forget waiting for the next boom. A different way of looking at things is that the way things are working now is 'normal'. Of course, then we get into debates about what 'normal' is.;)
But it is interesting to see how the evolution of technology is close to the current theories about evolutionary biology (something I know only a little about) in that there are incremental changes and modifications over long periods, interrupted by sudden large changes.
Sorry, but this simply is not true. Spammers send out bots to surf the web and collect email addresses off of websites. That is only just one of the ways that they collect email addresses. Sometimes they use software to guess an address. Databases can get hacked. There are a host of other ways to get emails illicitly. Once your email address is compromised to the Dark Side, it will very quickly proliferate into all of the unwanted spam databases, since spammers will sell their databases to each other.
Yes, I agree. Except the software I am using automatically adds anyone I email first to my whitelist. No hoops. The only people who have to jump through the hoop are people who have never emailed me before.
True, true. I do realize that it is creating even more email when I get spam.
And like all things that I personally favor, I start to imagine how wonderful the world would be if everyone did things the same way as me. So, it is hard not to imagine a future scenario: Let's say permission-based email becomes a standard feature in almost all email clients. Knowing that their spam was not getting through, wouldn't spam become a less attractive endeavor? If so, eventually the tide of spam may recede, and thus, the extra email traffic I am now creating will actually be contributing to a future lessening of wasted bandwidth.
I am currently using a permission based solution to block spam, called Choicemail. It works great since I know that there are no filters trying to guess what is spam and what is not. People on my white list get in, people who aren't get sent a message asking them to identify themselves.
The only drawback is that some people may possibly feel slighted that they are forced to go through such a process. But so far no one has complained. In fact, most people seem to be intrigued by the concept. If this type of spam blocking catches on, people will begin to expect it. Sort of like having to knock on someone's door before entering their house. It is a custom so pervasive, we feel strange just walking into someone's home, even a friends, without first knocking.
Sorry for the length of this post, and now to the question: How do you feel about this type of spam blocking?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I believe this will work. In my opinion, one of the reasons that driving in traffic sucks so hard is because of the limited amount of information the pilots of automobiles are able to pass to each other, because they are sealed up in big metal and glass boxes, limiting the information transfer to the use of a single-note horn, turn signals, headlights, and brake lights. If you are able to communicate to fellow drivers things like, "Excuse me, may I get in here?", this is a much more nuanced and information-rich set of information than a simple blinking indicator. Allowing for greater information-rich communication between cars on the road will, in my opinion lead to a more pleasant driving experience, because human interactions are heavily dependent on emotional cues, i.e. politeness.
Sometimes I wish there were no TLDs at all. They aren't really necessary. They actually make things worse, since any owner of a domain is forced to buy several TLD versions of their domain. They only make sense if you can actually enforce the meaning of the TLD, such as how .gov TLDs are enforced.
I am surprised that the infamous malfunction of the robotic cannon, Oerlikon GDF-005 in 2007 was not mentioned. This malfunction caused the robot cannon to wildly spray hundreds of high-explosive 0,5kg 35mm cannon shells around the firing range in a South African training exercise, killing 9 and wounding 14. To be fair, it was not clear if it was a software or mechanical glitch that caused the malfunction. In any case, this underscores the growing reliance on automated systems, and the life and death consequences. Could licensing for software developers - similar to that bestowed upon civil engineers - be far away?
It looks like much of the hiring was done in the marketing area, according to Advertising Age: Google's Hiring of Ad Folk Blamed for Missed Earnings Expectations
What Google is probably talking about in Congress is their trouble hiring engineering talent from other countries. Before you all start bashing marketing - Google is in great need of good marketers at this time. The engineers have done great work (obviously) to date. But have you ever noticed how many really cool features and applications Google has that only geeks know about? Google could do a lot better getting the word out to the larger public that there is more to their company than just search, maps, and GMail. They could use some good marketers.
At any rate, hiring engineering talent is probably a bit of a different challenge than hiring marketing talent.
I agree with almost everything you say - except for the notion that conversing with a passenger is more distracting than conversing using a hands-free device. Personally, I believe that using a hands-free device is slightly higher on your hierarchy of distractions than talking to a passenger.
The reason, I believe is that when you are talking to a passenger, s/he is able to witness exactly what you are witnessing. Therefore, when there is some tricky bit of maneuvering required, and you break off your conversation in mid-sentence, the other person knows why, and takes a break to let you concentrate. Whereas, in a phone conversation, the person at the other end has no information about what you, the driver, is currently dealing with. Because of something in our instinctive communication habits, I believe it is very hard to ignore someone we are talking to - so we give them the bulk of our attention. Since that other person cannot tell what exactly it is being confronted, the situation tends to be more dangerous.
The shared environment of driver and passenger creates a shared consciousness, which I believe makes for a safer situation of driving and conversing.
The building is only 275 tons? I am no building engineer, but that seems pretty light weight for a building, doesn't it?
Yes, Microsoft is definitely the ball and chain that holds progress back - but at least they have joined the HTML Working Group.
First of all - it's Lawrence Lessig.
Secondly, this particular branch of the thread is a discussion of the creative merit of the piece, not whether or not this is an example of "mix culture". Just because someone took two existing pieces of video and smashed them together does not mean it has any sort of cultural value.
Yes, he did rip off Orwell. Or reference Orwell, depending on your point of view. In my opinion, Scott was clever in using the Orwell reference - since the year that the Mac came out was 1984. And obviously, the visuals that Scott created were very imaginative.
The guy who made the YouTube-hosted video of Clinton just took Scott's work and pasted Clinton's face on it. It was neither clever nor imaginative.
Actually, Ridley Scott showed imagination when he made the ad in the first place. This guy just copied and pasted. This was an extremely weak effort, and had nothing of substance to say about Clinton. It was trite, cheap, and weak.
I think that was his point.
Actually, I believe this is a good thing. Firefox is an open source project, and it can never be reverted to a closed source one. The money that companies like Google pour into Firefox development goes towards supporting something that will always remain open source. This is a win for everyone. Companies that make their living through the browser, such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, etc. get an open standard that they can all base their work on something that none of them own outright. They are forced to share. Smaller developers such as myself get the benefit of an increasing reliable standard upon which to develop. When the developers, both large and small, are all working on an open, standardized platform, that means that there is more we can do, and this then benefits the users.
Internet Explorer's days are numbered - at least the proprietary parts of it are. As innovation on the web begins to gravitate more and more towards the Firefox platform, I am predicting that Microsoft will be forced to follow in the footsteps of Firefox. The stakes are just too high, and Microsoft does not have a monopoly on the Web, like it does on the desktop. It will really come down to the needs of Microsoft, vs. the needs of Everyone Else. Since Everyone Else is bigger, they will eventually be the ones calling the shots about what direction the Browser takes.
Human's have an illimitable amount of desire. Since humans are physically limited, their desire will always be greater than their ability to satisfy it. Therefore, humans will tend to perpetually be in a state of dissastification. This dissastisfaction will tend to be blamed on those in society that wield more power. In a sense, this is justified. This is why we have always hated our leaders, have a tradition of regicide, and everyone hates their boss.
We humans have always hated our leaders. The Internet has not amplified this, it has only made the voices that were previously silent, heard. This is the price that leaders must pay. If they want to lead, they will have to endure every insult, and be able to deal with the fact that pretty much everyone will think they suck.
Sadly, this seems to be the case. Dan Rather spoke about this in an interview recently.
A quote:
And it's not only about icons and logos. I would go so far as to say that branding is really the development of clear values and goals for an organization, group of people, or product, and making sure that those values permeate the work that the organization does, and are communicated to their constituents. This not only helps the public at large understand what the organization is trying to do, but can also help the members of the organization maintain a clear vision (something extremely helpful in a distributed organzition such as the Mozilla community), and even help to garner support from the public outside of the organization's members.
Wouldn't it be a shame if most people did not recognize the important aspects of Mozilla, such as it being open source (and what that means - not everyone knows), free, etc., simply because these values were not clearly and consistently communicated?
Branding is a powerful tool, and when used to promote things that are not worthwhile, it is an annoyance. But an organization that has something of real value to contribute to the community would be well advised to clearly communicate that value.
IIRC, Cassini was loaded with plutonium, or some other highly radioactive substance. If the same tactic is used for Cassini when it has finished its work with Saturn, is there reason to be concerned about dropping it into that planet?
It's one thing to be against the abuse of copyright and the leveraging of corporate muscle to force authors to agree to terrible contracts, and another thing to be against copyright altogether.
If you ever wrote a song or made a painting, or wrote a novel, wouldn't you want to prevent that material from ending up in some national ad campaign, or turned into a movie without paying you a dime? Because without copyright, those giant media conglomerates could just as easily use for their own ends the work that you labored for as easily as you download an MP3.
Also, I often wonder why people so often assume that life requires planets. Just because we appeared on a planet, why does all other life have to? It seems that life evolves in transition areas between chaos and order - like the surface of a planet - but there are plenty of other transition areas out there. How about a star's corona? Or the edge of a nebula? Or even the edge of a black hole? Maybe there are some huge life forms out there swimming around giant gas clouds. Life forms that consist of light. I think we limit our thinking too much about what life is, and assume far too much that life elsewhere will resemble us.
Just one man's data.
But it is interesting to see how the evolution of technology is close to the current theories about evolutionary biology (something I know only a little about) in that there are incremental changes and modifications over long periods, interrupted by sudden large changes.
Sorry, but this simply is not true. Spammers send out bots to surf the web and collect email addresses off of websites. That is only just one of the ways that they collect email addresses. Sometimes they use software to guess an address. Databases can get hacked. There are a host of other ways to get emails illicitly. Once your email address is compromised to the Dark Side, it will very quickly proliferate into all of the unwanted spam databases, since spammers will sell their databases to each other.
Yes, I agree. Except the software I am using automatically adds anyone I email first to my whitelist. No hoops. The only people who have to jump through the hoop are people who have never emailed me before.
True, true. I do realize that it is creating even more email when I get spam.
And like all things that I personally favor, I start to imagine how wonderful the world would be if everyone did things the same way as me. So, it is hard not to imagine a future scenario: Let's say permission-based email becomes a standard feature in almost all email clients. Knowing that their spam was not getting through, wouldn't spam become a less attractive endeavor? If so, eventually the tide of spam may recede, and thus, the extra email traffic I am now creating will actually be contributing to a future lessening of wasted bandwidth.
I am currently using a permission based solution to block spam, called Choicemail. It works great since I know that there are no filters trying to guess what is spam and what is not. People on my white list get in, people who aren't get sent a message asking them to identify themselves.
The only drawback is that some people may possibly feel slighted that they are forced to go through such a process. But so far no one has complained. In fact, most people seem to be intrigued by the concept. If this type of spam blocking catches on, people will begin to expect it. Sort of like having to knock on someone's door before entering their house. It is a custom so pervasive, we feel strange just walking into someone's home, even a friends, without first knocking.
Sorry for the length of this post, and now to the question: How do you feel about this type of spam blocking?