The international wealthy have their wealth invested in the current petroleum based economy. If there really is a viable new technology, or one comes around, they would do everything they can to prevent it from getting a foothold and stopping the profit from the petroleum economy. They have made the investment in oil, and they have no interest in suddenly not making a profit off of it. We will be using oil, and they will be profitting from it, until the very last drop is used up. There's no sense in them throwing away their investment. Once the oil is all used up, and all the profit has been made from the investment in oil, then, and only then, will they change.
These international cartels don't care about middle classes, poor people, political stability, or any country in particular. In fact, it's easier to make money in collapsed, unstable countries with corrupt politicians. There are no pesky laws, labor unions, middle class, or people's champion politicians getting in the way of profits.
If war breaks out in the Congo, they can raise prices in response. Unstable markets mean windfall profits with little accountability. If there is a steady, consistent stream of product and revenue, people start getting suspicious about profitability and start wanting to audit the books. They want to get paid more for working in the fields, and politicians start wanting to tax the profitability of the oil. It's bad for business.
I'm not saying that we have any advanced extra-terrestrial tech or anything, but getting people to jump on board new technology is a problem. We already have tech for more fuel-effecient and alternative fuel cars, but we have a whole fleet that runs on gasoline, and all of the car factories are designed to produce gas cars, etc.
All of the wealthy people have their wealth invested in the oil economy, and they are steadily growing richer with the way things are now. If some new tech came along that made all of this obsolete, you can bet it would go nowhere, because the movers and shakers would lose their investments. And there is no way they are going to let that happen.
I'm sick and tired of all those slashdot articles that extol the virtues of Legos in a child's intellectual development, and how it trained generations of engineers, architects and programmers to think logically, discretely, and modularly.
Finally, we give praise to the medium that created all of us Liberal Arts majors: Play-Doh. Folks, it doesn't get any fuzzier than this stuff. There is no formula, design, or strategy. Anything you make can be anything you want; a bird is a blob is a bunny. Anything goes -- nobody can say you are wrong. Take your masterpiece and pinch it here and there and its totally different. What an exercise in hermeneutical phenomology! It's everything yet nothing at once! Take all the colors, mix them together, and you get a wonderful, muddied brown. Who can argue with that?
As a film geek, I have a couple of questions for you:
1. Is there a director's cut version of Being John Malkovich? I remember a scene about the captain re-arranging letters, claiming that they were an anagram, but they weren't. I've found the scene in online scripts, but not on DVD.
2. The film Erik the Viking. I recall a part when Erik visits Freya in the cave, Freya gives Erik a lodestone compass. She explains that it fell from the sky from the star Polaris, because it points northward to its home.
This part was not in the recently released DVD. I looked up scripts online, and found several references to a lodestone compass, none of which appear on the DVD:
"He goes to the ship's lodestone, which is hanging from the mast."
"He steels himself, takes down the lodestone"
"Erik has his fish-lodestone and is trying the direction, but
the lodestone is just swinging round uselessly."
I even went and ordered an original VHS copy from a rare video house,
and these scenes are also missing. Are they? Or am I confusing this with another film?
The reason that movie makers do stupid things like show a big envelope flying off into the ether is that your average movie-goer could not recognize email being sent even if the screen read "Your email has been sent". All they would see is someone pecking at a keyboard. Then they would wonder "What just happened?" Without the envelope, you would need the character to turn around and announce, "Okay, the email's been sent!"
Average movie-goers still don't get computers, and probably won't for a while.
I think you are changing your argument a bit here. You were originally railing against extra features that phones have, such as cameras and PIM features. I don't think these features really are imparing cell networks. The first thing you should realize is that PIMs and Cameras in the phone are developed by manufacturers, such as Nokia and Samsung, not Service Providers, like like Cingular and AT&T.
So if your phone has a calendar on it, but gets lousy reception, and you're thinking that Cingular is wasting its money developing calendar apps instead of buliding its infrastructure, you're mistaken. It's Nokia, the manufacture, that made the camera, and they're not taking resources from Cingular's network development to do so.
That's like blaming your local road-building municipal government for problems that you're having with your car. "Darn it, if only the Car People would stop wasting money putting signs on the roads and improve this gas mileage!" Sorry, they're two seperate entities.
"
When they're designing these phones, and these networks, and what and how the phones work, does anyone in the room bring up the notion these phones first and foremost should be phones?
"
First off, like I said above, it is seperate entities who are developing phones and maintaining networks.
Second, They are phones, first and foremost. Every cell phone I have seen, you can just pick up, dial a number, and hear ringing.
" It's money grabbing, and let the chips fall where they may, as long as the manufacturer is first and fastest with the latest new features. Sick."
Again, manufacturers are not service providers.
" I'm waiting for the next great headlines where someone discovered the newest and fastest way to communicate with one of these devices -- you can actually dial a number and talk to the other person!!! " [Emph. mine]
This is a strawman argument -- Name one model of phone where you can't do that. All the cell phones I have seen in the past 10 years, you can just type 7 digits, hit the call button, and wait for the other party to pick up.
If you're talking about network reliability, I can see your point, although it is muddled. You are blaming the wrong people. However, as far as network development, the solution is more towers, and that has all kinds of political ramifications.
From a larger perspective, do you seriously think the cell phone network, with moving transmitters in contention for bandwidth with other units, could ever provide similar levels of quality with land lines, where copper wires are run from point to point? I think you are expecting too much.
I have Cingular service, and I have never had the problems you've described. To be fair, your complaints about the UI are not Cingular's fault, but the manufactuers. I have a Nokia 3360, and I find the UI simple and intuitive. Your complaints about reception could also be a problem with tower coverage and again, the model of phone you are using.
"When they're designing these phones, and these networks, and what and how the phones work, does anyone in the room bring up the notion these phones first and foremost should be phones?"
What the hell device[s] are you ranting against that are sold as cell phones and can't make calls? Every cell phone I've seen in the past year can make calls. Nobody is going to manufacture a cell phone that can't make calls.
The reason some idiot engineer doesn't raise his hand at the meeting and say "What about making calls? What ever happened to the time when cell phones were about the calls?" Is because all cell phones make calls, and they all do it about as well as you can at this point. Could they do a better job of making calls? Sure they could. And trust me, I have no specific information, but they are working on reliability. However, for the average consumer, cell phone reliability is good enough. They don't want more reliable phones. They want text messaging and cameras. So if you want to stay in the cell phone business, you should make cell phones with features that people want.
Sure, there are eccentrics and oddballs, and everyone gets sad and down from time to time. However, that's not what we're talking about. People who are severely depressed can't even get out of bed. I think the key is they would rather *not* feel like this -- but if they are severely depressed, soemtimes they feel like they deserve to feel like this, or that there is no hope for anything better, etc.
In the olden days, that person probably would have been bedridden for their short miserable life. Now we can treat them and offer them a shot at having a life similar to other people's -- you know, job, friends, plans on the weekend, instead of hours of uninterrupted crying.
That doesn't strike me as forcing too much conformity on people, anymore than innoculation would prevent people from getting polio or measles.
"I think everyone is reading way too much into these crappy films. Lets try a simpler explanation. Ever heard of the Roman colleseium? How about people like to watch violence. They will cheer for the violence itself."
This simpler explanation fails because there aren't films of plain old violence without any plot whatsoever. If people really didn't care about plot, and wanted violence only, studios wouldn't waste money hiring actors and writing scripts, etc. They would just have violent scene after violent scene. While such movie might exist, slasher films with plots earn a lot more money, so the simple explanation is too simple. It doesn't explain why people are willing to spend money and time to watch a slasher film with a plot rather than a simple series of violent scenes.
"I don't think the audience members really care who it is thats being hacked to bits... is it the bad boy or the naughty girl. Whatever, its somebody being hacked up."
Why is it never the good guy or good girl? It is not just "whatever", as you claim, but there is a pattern.
"Honestly, I think the "final girl theory" more explains the formula of the writters than the actual responses of the audience."
What does it explain? It sounds more like a description to me.
I disagree. In _How the Mind Works_, Stephen Pinker goes into how cheating plays out in small huter-gatherer human groups. Cheating benefits the cheater, but hurts the cheated. While people do try to cheat, they also try to detect and expose cheaters. This creates an arms-race of cheating and cheat-detecting. What results is an equilibrium of fairly ethical behavior.
The human mind has complex built-in cheating detection algorithms. Anger is a feeling that is directed towards percieved unfairness. It has a component of righteousness. "That's not fair" is one of the first full sentences that children say.
So rather than slasher films being a fairy tale of the "be good, children", I think it's a big dose of righteous justice, like a cowboy film.
"Thousands of young men were trooping into theaters to cheer wildly as masked psychos hacked apart screaming young women... Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance -- and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho."
Maybe the men weren't cheering for the psycho or the woman, but for the violence itself .
When they say "self-rating", they are talking about who is going to do the work of rating individual sites, not developing a rating standard.
They're not saying, "Make up your own rating standard, apply it to your website, and then tell us how it rates, according to your system". They are saying, "All of you website owners, check out these new federal guidelines for rating websites, rate your accordingly and put the rating on the site. It's mandatory, so go ahead and do it yourself right now, we're not going to rate your site for you. If we find that you haven't rated your site according to our standard by the deadline, you'll be in trouble. "
"
Self rating yet mandatory? Is it me or is there an inherent contradiction in this? "
It is just you. They are telling you that you must rate your website, rather than having, say, the Federal Internet Ratings Board (FIRB) rating your website for you.
But you are correct in your assesment of the long-term goals. This new anti-pronography crusade is a front to garner public support for wide-spread monitoring of the internet.
Well, a lot of animals have life cycles under a year. Even bears don't often live past 20, right? And they become sexually mature and reproduce within a few years.
The radiation wouldn't interrupt the life of short-lived animals.
So, not everyone living in an irradiated area will have their flesh falling off, but for us long-lifed humans, the life would be filled with more misery and an early ending. Maybe cancer at 20. And for normal human socities, "old farts" (those over 30) are really what drive the society.
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 1
"... I can feel my feet as well as anyone I know..."
"The first claims that Digg is the editor's playground- it explains how a few users control Digg, and that it's not really the 'Democracy' that they claim it to be. Personally I think this is all totally within the rights of their editors to choose content however they like."
Well, it is possible to exercise your rights and not be a dick about it.
Of course, the admins of digg can do whatever they want. They are within their rights to have a heavy, silent editorial control over content -- but don't then turn around and say you are a democracy. That's a dickweed move. Again, you are well within your rights to lie and mispresent editorial policy, but it doesn't foster community.
"At this point, the active 3 or 4 users in the channel have decided I was a "nuisance" and though that their best course of action would be to place me on ignore. Why? "
They considered you a nuisance because you wanted them to drop whatever they were doing at that point and troubleshoot your problem -- did you offer to pay them?
If the solution isn't in documentation, I've had the most success with mailing lists. It will be read by many more people, and some helpful person with advice or a solution can answer on *thier* timetable, not *yours*.
Otherwise, if you want someone to jump when you say 'jump', pay for support. It sounds like that's what you did.
"[H]ow good this news is will depend on how complete a subset of its product Solid opens."
While the community would receieve greater benefit from more Solid products coming under open source, the real good news here is that MySQL will offer a transaction engine that cannot be pulled out from under it by Oracle. That transaction engine happens to have been developed by Solid.
"I work in Information Security for a Fortune 5 company"
Do you work out of a tent with no AC? Do you get to work in a car or on a camel?
Think about the field conditions in Afganistan. Any given area may not have electricity, let alone internet hook-ups or a limitless supply of CD-Rs. If you have to get 700 MB of data from one place to another continuously, this is probably the most effective way of doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly the investment I'm talking about.
The international wealthy have their wealth invested in the current petroleum based economy. If there really is a viable new technology, or one comes around, they would do everything they can to prevent it from getting a foothold and stopping the profit from the petroleum economy. They have made the investment in oil, and they have no interest in suddenly not making a profit off of it. We will be using oil, and they will be profitting from it, until the very last drop is used up. There's no sense in them throwing away their investment. Once the oil is all used up, and all the profit has been made from the investment in oil, then, and only then, will they change.
These international cartels don't care about middle classes, poor people, political stability, or any country in particular. In fact, it's easier to make money in collapsed, unstable countries with corrupt politicians. There are no pesky laws, labor unions, middle class, or people's champion politicians getting in the way of profits.
If war breaks out in the Congo, they can raise prices in response. Unstable markets mean windfall profits with little accountability. If there is a steady, consistent stream of product and revenue, people start getting suspicious about profitability and start wanting to audit the books. They want to get paid more for working in the fields, and politicians start wanting to tax the profitability of the oil. It's bad for business.
I'm not saying that we have any advanced extra-terrestrial tech or anything, but getting people to jump on board new technology is a problem. We already have tech for more fuel-effecient and alternative fuel cars, but we have a whole fleet that runs on gasoline, and all of the car factories are designed to produce gas cars, etc.
All of the wealthy people have their wealth invested in the oil economy, and they are steadily growing richer with the way things are now. If some new tech came along that made all of this obsolete, you can bet it would go nowhere, because the movers and shakers would lose their investments. And there is no way they are going to let that happen.
Hey, but I did get 'hermeneutical' right.
No, I spelled it Legos. How do you pluralize 'Lego'?
I'm sick and tired of all those slashdot articles that extol the virtues of Legos in a child's intellectual development, and how it trained generations of engineers, architects and programmers to think logically, discretely, and modularly.
Finally, we give praise to the medium that created all of us Liberal Arts majors: Play-Doh. Folks, it doesn't get any fuzzier than this stuff. There is no formula, design, or strategy. Anything you make can be anything you want; a bird is a blob is a bunny. Anything goes -- nobody can say you are wrong. Take your masterpiece and pinch it here and there and its totally different. What an exercise in hermeneutical phenomology! It's everything yet nothing at once! Take all the colors, mix them together, and you get a wonderful, muddied brown. Who can argue with that?
You really had me going until you made the correction... I like my illuminati to be above such petty mistakes, thank you very much!
1. Is there a director's cut version of Being John Malkovich? I remember a scene about the captain re-arranging letters, claiming that they were an anagram, but they weren't. I've found the scene in online scripts, but not on DVD.
2. The film Erik the Viking. I recall a part when Erik visits Freya in the cave, Freya gives Erik a lodestone compass. She explains that it fell from the sky from the star Polaris, because it points northward to its home.
This part was not in the recently released DVD. I looked up scripts online, and found several references to a lodestone compass, none of which appear on the DVD:
- "He goes to the ship's lodestone, which is hanging from the mast."
- "He steels himself, takes down the lodestone"
- "Erik has his fish-lodestone and is trying the direction, but
the lodestone is just swinging round uselessly."
I even went and ordered an original VHS copy from a rare video house, and these scenes are also missing. Are they? Or am I confusing this with another film?TIA!
The reason that movie makers do stupid things like show a big envelope flying off into the ether is that your average movie-goer could not recognize email being sent even if the screen read "Your email has been sent". All they would see is someone pecking at a keyboard. Then they would wonder "What just happened?" Without the envelope, you would need the character to turn around and announce, "Okay, the email's been sent!"
Average movie-goers still don't get computers, and probably won't for a while.
I think you are changing your argument a bit here. You were originally railing against extra features that phones have, such as cameras and PIM features. I don't think these features really are imparing cell networks. The first thing you should realize is that PIMs and Cameras in the phone are developed by manufacturers, such as Nokia and Samsung, not Service Providers, like like Cingular and AT&T.
So if your phone has a calendar on it, but gets lousy reception, and you're thinking that Cingular is wasting its money developing calendar apps instead of buliding its infrastructure, you're mistaken. It's Nokia, the manufacture, that made the camera, and they're not taking resources from Cingular's network development to do so.
That's like blaming your local road-building municipal government for problems that you're having with your car. "Darn it, if only the Car People would stop wasting money putting signs on the roads and improve this gas mileage!" Sorry, they're two seperate entities.
" When they're designing these phones, and these networks, and what and how the phones work, does anyone in the room bring up the notion these phones first and foremost should be phones? "
First off, like I said above, it is seperate entities who are developing phones and maintaining networks. Second, They are phones, first and foremost. Every cell phone I have seen, you can just pick up, dial a number, and hear ringing.
" It's money grabbing, and let the chips fall where they may, as long as the manufacturer is first and fastest with the latest new features. Sick."
Again, manufacturers are not service providers.
" I'm waiting for the next great headlines where someone discovered the newest and fastest way to communicate with one of these devices -- you can actually dial a number and talk to the other person!!! " [Emph. mine]
This is a strawman argument -- Name one model of phone where you can't do that. All the cell phones I have seen in the past 10 years, you can just type 7 digits, hit the call button, and wait for the other party to pick up.
If you're talking about network reliability, I can see your point, although it is muddled. You are blaming the wrong people. However, as far as network development, the solution is more towers, and that has all kinds of political ramifications.
From a larger perspective, do you seriously think the cell phone network, with moving transmitters in contention for bandwidth with other units, could ever provide similar levels of quality with land lines, where copper wires are run from point to point? I think you are expecting too much.
I have Cingular service, and I have never had the problems you've described. To be fair, your complaints about the UI are not Cingular's fault, but the manufactuers. I have a Nokia 3360, and I find the UI simple and intuitive. Your complaints about reception could also be a problem with tower coverage and again, the model of phone you are using.
"When they're designing these phones, and these networks, and what and how the phones work, does anyone in the room bring up the notion these phones first and foremost should be phones?"
What the hell device[s] are you ranting against that are sold as cell phones and can't make calls? Every cell phone I've seen in the past year can make calls. Nobody is going to manufacture a cell phone that can't make calls.
The reason some idiot engineer doesn't raise his hand at the meeting and say "What about making calls? What ever happened to the time when cell phones were about the calls?" Is because all cell phones make calls, and they all do it about as well as you can at this point. Could they do a better job of making calls? Sure they could. And trust me, I have no specific information, but they are working on reliability. However, for the average consumer, cell phone reliability is good enough. They don't want more reliable phones. They want text messaging and cameras. So if you want to stay in the cell phone business, you should make cell phones with features that people want.
Sure, there are eccentrics and oddballs, and everyone gets sad and down from time to time. However, that's not what we're talking about. People who are severely depressed can't even get out of bed. I think the key is they would rather *not* feel like this -- but if they are severely depressed, soemtimes they feel like they deserve to feel like this, or that there is no hope for anything better, etc.
In the olden days, that person probably would have been bedridden for their short miserable life. Now we can treat them and offer them a shot at having a life similar to other people's -- you know, job, friends, plans on the weekend, instead of hours of uninterrupted crying.
That doesn't strike me as forcing too much conformity on people, anymore than innoculation would prevent people from getting polio or measles.
"I think everyone is reading way too much into these crappy films. Lets try a simpler explanation. Ever heard of the Roman colleseium? How about people like to watch violence. They will cheer for the violence itself."
This simpler explanation fails because there aren't films of plain old violence without any plot whatsoever. If people really didn't care about plot, and wanted violence only, studios wouldn't waste money hiring actors and writing scripts, etc. They would just have violent scene after violent scene. While such movie might exist, slasher films with plots earn a lot more money, so the simple explanation is too simple. It doesn't explain why people are willing to spend money and time to watch a slasher film with a plot rather than a simple series of violent scenes.
"I don't think the audience members really care who it is thats being hacked to bits... is it the bad boy or the naughty girl. Whatever, its somebody being hacked up."
Why is it never the good guy or good girl? It is not just "whatever", as you claim, but there is a pattern.
"Honestly, I think the "final girl theory" more explains the formula of the writters than the actual responses of the audience."
What does it explain? It sounds more like a description to me.
I disagree. In _How the Mind Works_, Stephen Pinker goes into how cheating plays out in small huter-gatherer human groups. Cheating benefits the cheater, but hurts the cheated. While people do try to cheat, they also try to detect and expose cheaters. This creates an arms-race of cheating and cheat-detecting. What results is an equilibrium of fairly ethical behavior.
The human mind has complex built-in cheating detection algorithms. Anger is a feeling that is directed towards percieved unfairness. It has a component of righteousness. "That's not fair" is one of the first full sentences that children say.
So rather than slasher films being a fairy tale of the "be good, children", I think it's a big dose of righteous justice, like a cowboy film.
What about a slasher movie being something more like a comedy -- something outrageous and over-the-top -- than a more serious action movie?
"Thousands of young men were trooping into theaters to cheer wildly as masked psychos hacked apart screaming young women... Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance -- and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho."
Maybe the men weren't cheering for the psycho or the woman, but for the violence itself .
I think it is just you.
When they say "self-rating", they are talking about who is going to do the work of rating individual sites, not developing a rating standard.
They're not saying, "Make up your own rating standard, apply it to your website, and then tell us how it rates, according to your system". They are saying, "All of you website owners, check out these new federal guidelines for rating websites, rate your accordingly and put the rating on the site. It's mandatory, so go ahead and do it yourself right now, we're not going to rate your site for you. If we find that you haven't rated your site according to our standard by the deadline, you'll be in trouble. "
" Self rating yet mandatory? Is it me or is there an inherent contradiction in this? "
It is just you. They are telling you that you must rate your website, rather than having, say, the Federal Internet Ratings Board (FIRB) rating your website for you.
But you are correct in your assesment of the long-term goals. This new anti-pronography crusade is a front to garner public support for wide-spread monitoring of the internet.
Well, a lot of animals have life cycles under a year. Even bears don't often live past 20, right? And they become sexually mature and reproduce within a few years. The radiation wouldn't interrupt the life of short-lived animals.
So, not everyone living in an irradiated area will have their flesh falling off, but for us long-lifed humans, the life would be filled with more misery and an early ending. Maybe cancer at 20. And for normal human socities, "old farts" (those over 30) are really what drive the society.
"... I can feel my feet as well as anyone I know..."
Now how could you know that?
"The first claims that Digg is the editor's playground- it explains how a few users control Digg, and that it's not really the 'Democracy' that they claim it to be. Personally I think this is all totally within the rights of their editors to choose content however they like."
Well, it is possible to exercise your rights and not be a dick about it.
Of course, the admins of digg can do whatever they want. They are within their rights to have a heavy, silent editorial control over content -- but don't then turn around and say you are a democracy. That's a dickweed move. Again, you are well within your rights to lie and mispresent editorial policy, but it doesn't foster community.
"At this point, the active 3 or 4 users in the channel have decided I was a "nuisance" and though that their best course of action would be to place me on ignore. Why? "
They considered you a nuisance because you wanted them to drop whatever they were doing at that point and troubleshoot your problem -- did you offer to pay them?
If the solution isn't in documentation, I've had the most success with mailing lists. It will be read by many more people, and some helpful person with advice or a solution can answer on *thier* timetable, not *yours*.
Otherwise, if you want someone to jump when you say 'jump', pay for support. It sounds like that's what you did.
"[H]ow good this news is will depend on how complete a subset of its product Solid opens."
While the community would receieve greater benefit from more Solid products coming under open source, the real good news here is that MySQL will offer a transaction engine that cannot be pulled out from under it by Oracle. That transaction engine happens to have been developed by Solid.
"I work in Information Security for a Fortune 5 company" Do you work out of a tent with no AC? Do you get to work in a car or on a camel?
Think about the field conditions in Afganistan. Any given area may not have electricity, let alone internet hook-ups or a limitless supply of CD-Rs. If you have to get 700 MB of data from one place to another continuously, this is probably the most effective way of doing it.