ad . dic . tion, n.: The state or practice of engaging in an activity that does not earn money for one's boss. See antonymns at "well-adjusted" and "slave."
Kelly suggested that 'perhaps it is because of the NYPD's reach into the international arena' that they are being targeted for computer hacking 'in much the way the Pentagon has been.'
OK, let's address this calmly. Who has to be tortured to make things right here?
If IBM were more bold, it would let this trifle go in lieu of richer fields of conquest. Why seek to patent the patenting of possible somethings when the known universe is teeming with so much less -- that is, with so much more of nothing?
Today, there exists a great untapped opportunity that, for mysterious reasons, is still awaiting those pioneers who will man its papery frontiers: I refer, of course, to patenting ideas that do not nor ever shall exist. This area has been called "the ultimate white space."
I do not mean ideas that should not exist -- the so-called Cthulhu Codex (see Cox, J., Von Wolfgut, T., "The Patent Out Of Time," Journal of Patents, Vol. 27, No. 4).
No, far sexier and lucrative are those patents that haven't been devised yet because the ideas at their root are in a highly theoretical state of pre-existence.
Exploiting these synaptic absences is a vast project going forward. Moreover, it is timely. As the American economy reels from the devastating evaporation of fictitious wealth on Wall Street, new imaginary sources of wealth generation are clearly needed if our economy is to return to a robust delusional grandeur.
It is unknown exactly how much wealth can be derived from ideas that do not exist, but it is believed the sum is nearly incalculable, or, alternatively, "huge."
FYI to anyone who hasn't read it: the trilogy is good science fiction.
Bilal's art is easily among the most memorable in comics, but I like his writing as well -- a rich, ironic feast.
With Microsoft having been chosen as the exclusive Homeland Security contractor, what is the point of this pretense over antitrust?
Even before this absurd contract, it was cogently pointed out (by Ralph Nader and Jamie Love; see: http://www.linux.com/feature/23279) that the government shouldn't be putting its eggs and our tax dollars in the Microsoft basket.
Now, of course, Washington is in bed with the devil. And it's pretty hard to tell the devil he's not a good lay.
Stipe's not a bad lyricist, even if he sings like a Budweiser toad. I rate about one out of every ten songs he's released -- again, not bad. He writes a nice kind of oblique look at alienated modern life ("Daysleeper"), a good patch on southern gothic ("Swan Swan H"), silly likable McCartneyesque ditties ("Shiny Happy People") and even Burroughs-like cut ups ("It's The End of The World As We Know It"). Then again he's overly earnest, saccharine, melodramatic and painfully PC. A little of his weepy-eyed frog-voiced honking goes a long way; happily the music is often better than his contribution.
The Beatles have their faults (the early stuff is overly cute, some of the music hall clowning is tiresome) but on the whole their music does what muzak never has been able to do: catalyze imaginations, epitomize and shape their time, seed a movement, score an ethos. You don't have to like their stuff, but you have to be somewhat cleverer than to fall for a minor pop artist's jealous dig.
Anyone wanting to understand the Beatles could do much worse than look at musicologist Allan Pollack's intelligent notes:
1. He supplies crack -- call it Soma -- to techno fetishists. Everybody likes their supplier. Cf. Lou Reed, "I'm Waiting For My Man."
2. Apple stock has made people money. Money good. Money for me from you? You...hero!
In short, the culture gets the heroes it deserves. Five years from now, if we're all living in caves eating roots, the dude who finds a way to make the roots taste better and give us better orgasms gets to be the next Steve Jobs. We the citizens of Nu Urth salute you, Holy Chief Root Dude, and your delicious curried Ball Blasters!
You will always be our generation's Edward R. Murrow.
OK, that's going a bit far.
You will always be our generation's Walter Cronkite!
No. Not that either.
Wait.
You will always be our generation's Mr. Sam-The-New-Product-Man, appearing Saturday mornings on KXFK 104.1 before the farm report!
And in some distant Think Secretless future, when we hear a new Apple product has come out, and we have to make do with that instead of receiving amorphous half-detailed maybe-what-ifs a few hours earlier, we'll pause, and think of you. A tear in our eyes, for Mr. Sam.
What Apple fans need to remember is that Apple is a big corporation that'll do whatever they like to defend what they see as their interest.
Your sig:
Whenever I hear the word activist, I reach for my revolver.
Care to explain why you criticize corporate decisions, yet invoke a (falsely attributed) saying of a chief architect of Nazism in order to imply you would shoot those who criticize corporate decisions?
Oh, really? Well, if you don't want the fundamentalist Christians to surround your office with torches calling for your Evil Mr. Scientist head I suggest comparing your research to even simpler fictional works.
Just tell them: Jesus made a devil galaxy go away.
Isn't it more accurate to compare the time line of Windows XP to Mac OS X? Both were released around the same time, both are their respective publishers most popular desktop OS, both are currently supported, etc. Yet one has received free updates since release, where as the other has had four $129 software updates since release. Since both companies stopped supporting the older versions of their OS, which would you go with? The OS with free updates, or the OS that has cost you over $500 to stay updated?
A valid question and I am in a position to answer it, as I went with both. OS X for work and life, XP for -- what else? -- gaming.
Even though I used my XP box almost solely for gaming, it required the usual ongoing fussy MS-centric maintenance. Windows was reinstalled annually. Patches were researched and then applied as fast as Redmond (more infrequently in recent times) spat them out. I pruned my services list, suspected new entrants, and roamed around the registry. Especially vexing was antivirus and firewall protection, as I had determined some years ago that I would no longer pay the exploitative companies that have developed a symbiotic profit relationship with Microsoft's justly famous crappiness. This free software has required constant care and feeding, drains resources and can't be depended on to play nice with others. To be sure, commercial security software for XP has its griefs, too.
So in short, XP cost much less monetarily but required constant niggling attention that drained my free time -- and this only to keep the system stable and locked down for gaming.
Now, on to the Mac. No bed of clover, either, I assure you. Sure, I felt there was value in paying for the updates as they increasingly refined OS X, and only mildly resented the cost (in my case, two upgrades @ $129 each -- half your $500 figure). What I resented much more was the ongoing decline in dependability in system updates and patches. Some time in the middle of this decade, Apple lost its way. Before patching I came to rely on Macfixit.com, for two reasons: 1) it was brutally honest about problems with OS X; 2) other Mac sites weren't, functioning largely as fanboy group wanks or recyclers of Apple PR. Now, on balance, I would say OS X was much more stable and worry-free than XP over the same period. I generally loved using it. But it has become a quite different beast to the one exalted in the "just works" propaganda. It mostly "just works" if you are careful, stay informed, and don't blindly apply Apple updates or foolishly leap for OS upgrades. A certain trust, it has to be said, has ended. Maybe it can be restored.
Apple has needlessly complicated Leopard because its well-trod vector for coercing new upgraders is selling more "features." In McMansion America, they gotta have features! This has reached a somewhat absurd state, where the least change is now countable in a list of hundreds of these new "features" however trivial. And, judging from the widespread problems, it has been a bad cost-benefit trade. Fanboys, meet feature bloat.
I am happily running the very stable 10.4.9 and will stay right here. Heh: for the moment, it works. Just.
No you can't read books on N800 and iPhone there is too much fiddling.
I call FUD.
It's easy to read ebooks on the N800 using FBReader, which is open source and free. Fiddling? Er, do you mean pressing the nice big round button in the center of the D-pad to turn pages?
At 800x480, the screen resolution is perfectly clear and being backlit has a big advantage over e-ink: I can read at night. Disadvantage: it's poor in direct sunlight. The next gen Nokia device claims to be better.
There are two further advantages, depending on your tastes and eyesight. In FBReader, background and font colors are selectable -- for me this is easily preferable to staring at the grey Etch-a-Sketch setting of an e-ink screen. Further, there is none of the hideous redraw flashing that makes e-ink seem less like a contemporary than a retro technology.
No, the real sticking point is DRM. It's circumventable and that *is* fiddly. But there isn't a soul on this board who couldn't, say, buy an ebook in Microsoft Reader format and within three minutes have it depolluted and up on the N800 screen.
That said, I think the Kindle has a cool delivery mechanism and I'm in favor of anything that makes more books available digitally. It's simply overpriced, klunky and too damn proprietary for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Refurbishers, refurbishers, refurbishers, refurbishers!
ad . dic . tion, n.: The state or practice of engaging in an activity that does not earn money for one's boss. See antonymns at "well-adjusted" and "slave."
How long before I can play Doom on my copy of Entertainment Weekly?
I see you are grieving, and I hurt with you, my brother.
Just, er, don't tell any relatives that you equate them emotionally with a stripper-loving redneck in a canceled video game.
OK, let's address this calmly. Who has to be tortured to make things right here?
...YOU pay Microsoft severance!
the iphone is a toy, not a business tool.
Toy?!
I suppose you think designer clothes, plucked eyebrows and exposed midriffs aren't business tools, too.
If you've developed a "long term relationship" with your iFarting app, it probably isn't because you paid for it.
Today, there exists a great untapped opportunity that, for mysterious reasons, is still awaiting those pioneers who will man its papery frontiers: I refer, of course, to patenting ideas that do not nor ever shall exist. This area has been called "the ultimate white space."
I do not mean ideas that should not exist -- the so-called Cthulhu Codex (see Cox, J., Von Wolfgut, T., "The Patent Out Of Time," Journal of Patents, Vol. 27, No. 4).
No, far sexier and lucrative are those patents that haven't been devised yet because the ideas at their root are in a highly theoretical state of pre-existence.
Exploiting these synaptic absences is a vast project going forward. Moreover, it is timely. As the American economy reels from the devastating evaporation of fictitious wealth on Wall Street, new imaginary sources of wealth generation are clearly needed if our economy is to return to a robust delusional grandeur.
It is unknown exactly how much wealth can be derived from ideas that do not exist, but it is believed the sum is nearly incalculable, or, alternatively, "huge."
Want to save energy? Put energy-inefficient box stores like Bush Buy, er, Best Buy, out of existence.
American capitalists get very excited around these.
FYI to anyone who hasn't read it: the trilogy is good science fiction. Bilal's art is easily among the most memorable in comics, but I like his writing as well -- a rich, ironic feast.
What a lovely idea if the head of the San Diego GOP were revealed as a Marxist!
Indeed, I would say, "There's hope for San Diego yet!"
With Microsoft having been chosen as the exclusive Homeland Security contractor, what is the point of this pretense over antitrust? Even before this absurd contract, it was cogently pointed out (by Ralph Nader and Jamie Love; see: http://www.linux.com/feature/23279) that the government shouldn't be putting its eggs and our tax dollars in the Microsoft basket. Now, of course, Washington is in bed with the devil. And it's pretty hard to tell the devil he's not a good lay.
Stipe's not a bad lyricist, even if he sings like a Budweiser toad. I rate about one out of every ten songs he's released -- again, not bad. He writes a nice kind of oblique look at alienated modern life ("Daysleeper"), a good patch on southern gothic ("Swan Swan H"), silly likable McCartneyesque ditties ("Shiny Happy People") and even Burroughs-like cut ups ("It's The End of The World As We Know It"). Then again he's overly earnest, saccharine, melodramatic and painfully PC. A little of his weepy-eyed frog-voiced honking goes a long way; happily the music is often better than his contribution.
The Beatles have their faults (the early stuff is overly cute, some of the music hall clowning is tiresome) but on the whole their music does what muzak never has been able to do: catalyze imaginations, epitomize and shape their time, seed a movement, score an ethos. You don't have to like their stuff, but you have to be somewhat cleverer than to fall for a minor pop artist's jealous dig.
Anyone wanting to understand the Beatles could do much worse than look at musicologist Allan Pollack's intelligent notes:
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-notes_on.shtml
What, you didn't think your iPhone was yours, did you?
There are two explanations for Jobs-as-hero.
1. He supplies crack -- call it Soma -- to techno fetishists. Everybody likes their supplier. Cf. Lou Reed, "I'm Waiting For My Man."
2. Apple stock has made people money. Money good. Money for me from you? You...hero!
In short, the culture gets the heroes it deserves. Five years from now, if we're all living in caves eating roots, the dude who finds a way to make the roots taste better and give us better orgasms gets to be the next Steve Jobs. We the citizens of Nu Urth salute you, Holy Chief Root Dude, and your delicious curried Ball Blasters!
OK, that's going a bit far.
You will always be our generation's Walter Cronkite!
No. Not that either.
Wait.
You will always be our generation's Mr. Sam-The-New-Product-Man, appearing Saturday mornings on KXFK 104.1 before the farm report!
And in some distant Think Secretless future, when we hear a new Apple product has come out, and we have to make do with that instead of receiving amorphous half-detailed maybe-what-ifs a few hours earlier, we'll pause, and think of you. A tear in our eyes, for Mr. Sam.
What Apple fans need to remember is that Apple is a big corporation that'll do whatever they like to defend what they see as their interest.
Your sig:
Whenever I hear the word activist, I reach for my revolver.
Care to explain why you criticize corporate decisions, yet invoke a (falsely attributed) saying of a chief architect of Nazism in order to imply you would shoot those who criticize corporate decisions?
Just tell them: Jesus made a devil galaxy go away.
A valid question and I am in a position to answer it, as I went with both. OS X for work and life, XP for -- what else? -- gaming.
Even though I used my XP box almost solely for gaming, it required the usual ongoing fussy MS-centric maintenance. Windows was reinstalled annually. Patches were researched and then applied as fast as Redmond (more infrequently in recent times) spat them out. I pruned my services list, suspected new entrants, and roamed around the registry. Especially vexing was antivirus and firewall protection, as I had determined some years ago that I would no longer pay the exploitative companies that have developed a symbiotic profit relationship with Microsoft's justly famous crappiness. This free software has required constant care and feeding, drains resources and can't be depended on to play nice with others. To be sure, commercial security software for XP has its griefs, too.
So in short, XP cost much less monetarily but required constant niggling attention that drained my free time -- and this only to keep the system stable and locked down for gaming.
Now, on to the Mac. No bed of clover, either, I assure you. Sure, I felt there was value in paying for the updates as they increasingly refined OS X, and only mildly resented the cost (in my case, two upgrades @ $129 each -- half your $500 figure). What I resented much more was the ongoing decline in dependability in system updates and patches. Some time in the middle of this decade, Apple lost its way. Before patching I came to rely on Macfixit.com, for two reasons: 1) it was brutally honest about problems with OS X; 2) other Mac sites weren't, functioning largely as fanboy group wanks or recyclers of Apple PR. Now, on balance, I would say OS X was much more stable and worry-free than XP over the same period. I generally loved using it. But it has become a quite different beast to the one exalted in the "just works" propaganda. It mostly "just works" if you are careful, stay informed, and don't blindly apply Apple updates or foolishly leap for OS upgrades. A certain trust, it has to be said, has ended. Maybe it can be restored.
Apple has needlessly complicated Leopard because its well-trod vector for coercing new upgraders is selling more "features." In McMansion America, they gotta have features! This has reached a somewhat absurd state, where the least change is now countable in a list of hundreds of these new "features" however trivial. And, judging from the widespread problems, it has been a bad cost-benefit trade. Fanboys, meet feature bloat.
I am happily running the very stable 10.4.9 and will stay right here. Heh: for the moment, it works. Just.
Sure. Let me just put that reminder in Leopard's iCal and, wait, what's this? Hmm, I think there's some sort of probl
I call FUD.
It's easy to read ebooks on the N800 using FBReader, which is open source and free. Fiddling? Er, do you mean pressing the nice big round button in the center of the D-pad to turn pages?
At 800x480, the screen resolution is perfectly clear and being backlit has a big advantage over e-ink: I can read at night. Disadvantage: it's poor in direct sunlight. The next gen Nokia device claims to be better.
There are two further advantages, depending on your tastes and eyesight. In FBReader, background and font colors are selectable -- for me this is easily preferable to staring at the grey Etch-a-Sketch setting of an e-ink screen. Further, there is none of the hideous redraw flashing that makes e-ink seem less like a contemporary than a retro technology.
No, the real sticking point is DRM. It's circumventable and that *is* fiddly. But there isn't a soul on this board who couldn't, say, buy an ebook in Microsoft Reader format and within three minutes have it depolluted and up on the N800 screen.
That said, I think the Kindle has a cool delivery mechanism and I'm in favor of anything that makes more books available digitally. It's simply overpriced, klunky and too damn proprietary for me.
...so listen to your elders when they tell you college-age nihilists about right 'n wrong.
Sure, you say that now. But funny thing about these Chinese sub sneak-ups: half an hour later, you don't even feel like one crept up on you.