After I installed Leopard I logged in to my account and the Finder wouldn't load. In fact, no applications would launch. I searched the net and discovered I was not alone. Eventually I found the answer in one of Apple's Discussion Forums. The solution is to move or rename the folder/Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks and reboot. You can do this in single-user mode or boot from another system disk. In my case I booted from Jaguar on an external drive and moved the folder to/Users/Shared.
Since I got that out of the way the system has been running amazingly well.
Spotlight is so much faster, and I like the way it shows "All Results" as a Finder search. Much better.
The Translation widget is much better!
Spaces is nice, but I want more: Named spaces and per-space desktop backgrounds, to name two wishes.
The new Network prefpane is just about perfect.
The new Finder is much, much better. And QuickLook is already indispensable.
The new Safari is excellent - and so fast! Oddly the Next Window shortcut (Command-`) is gone. Doesn't seem to work properly in the Finder either, hmm...
Time Machine: Haven't tried it yet.
Tabs in Terminal!
Font rendering seems to be improved throughout the system. Much sharper. And automatic font activation... it's about time!
GrowlMail isn't working... *snif*
PubSub wants my keychain password again.
iChat screen sharing is great! I tried it over Bonjour at home. Very nice. However, it took two tries before my requests would pop up on the target machine.
Stacks aren't very pretty. I don't like the concatenated file names. I'm glad Apple added a ~/Downloads folder though.
Icon previews in the Finder aren't very useful. What good is a 16x16 PDF preview in column view? I'd rather see the application document icons most of the time so I know which app opens them.
Cover Flow is cool, but too touchy with my scroll wheel. Some kind of acceleration algorithm - like mouse motion - would help here. I'm not sure how much I'll be using Cover Flow view.
Where do I set the default View Options for columns, icons, list...? Finder views are still somewhat confusing, but then most of the time I just keep two column-view Finder windows open and work with those. Not often do I double-click a folder on the desktop or elsewhere to open it up to its own view.
Still no native support for AVI files. No QuickLook for AVIs.
Rounded corners on menus are pretty nice looking.
Overall I find the system faster and much improved. I look forward to playing with XCode 3 next!
Tendonitis, more likely. It's an imbalance of the muscles, tendons, and nerves of the upper-back. The pain manifests in the hands, wrists, the upper back, and neck. I suffered a huge blast of tendonitis a couple years ago as a result of poor posture, too much hunched guitar-playing, a permanent shoulder injury (torn ligament), and finally overexerting myself during a rapid lawn-mowing session. The next morning I woke up with a paralyzing pain all the way from my neck down to my left thumb. My left side became useless. The nerves passing under the clavicle were definitely implicated.
I had to remain lying down most of the time for a good month and I was unable to do my computer work effectively for more than 2 hours a day even lying down. I forced myself to do yoga stretches despite the pain because it was the only thing that provided any relief, and after a time my balance returned. I've kept up the yoga on a casual basis, so my muscles are a lot less tight, and so far I have never had another attack despite long hours at the computer and continuing to play guitar.
Posture seems to be the key thing. Muscles shorten and autonomous nerves try to develop a balance to keep things from pulling too far one way or the other. When things get too far out of whack or nerves get pinched this mechanism goes crazy and muscles contract and spasm. I've heard similar things happen in a stroke - muscles spasm so violently they can break bones. Yikes!
Existence versus nonexistence... as if there were either one of these things!
Why should nonexistence even be brought up?
Show me nonexistence first, then we'll talk.
In terms of some thing existing...
Conditions arise, relate, and cease.
Show me something that exists, yet has no effect. It is a meaningless idea. That which exists, only does so by being an effect on some other existent thing. Thus, to affect is to exist. To have no effect is to not-exist.
In this sense things go in and out of existence all the time.
That is the nature of things.
Does a thing exist if you aren't physically affected by it?
No. Not in your universe.
To receive a report of some thing or event - assuming an accurate report - is to be part of a physical chain of effects.
You have been touched by an event.
I believe it would be most accurate to say that only causality exists, and everything else is inference.
In the early 90's I lived in Cambridge, MA with a buddy of mine, and one night we came back to our little apartment to discover his car is gone. Just happens he used to do a little gofering for a prominent Irish fella when he was in high school. So my friend makes a phone call to his old boss and we're instructed to go for a long walk. When we get back an hour later there's his car - sans steering column cover. I am still in awe to this day.
True story, I shit you not.
Sometimes it's good to have a friend in low places.
The TiVo is sitting on the dresser. It's the old one, the hobbyist has a newer one too. So he decides to try and get Linux to talk to the TiVo hardware by shoehorning. Lo and behold, he can get most of the hardware - the network ports, the hard drive (of course), and the video input hardware too after a bit of fiddling. The system it turns out is fairly easy to control.
If it's possible, the hobbyist will try to do it, and why shouldn't he? After you get a shoe box at the shoe store, you can take it home and mark it up inside, cut holes in it, use it how you like. I see no moral or ethical difference between the shoe box and the TiVo. And I wonder if the TiVo company is worried about it, really. Every device can be used for evil, potentially, but I don't see bands of pirate TiVos marauding across the Internet... yet.
By our right of free expression and free exchange, given that no harm is done, once Linux kernels for TiVo exist, people must be free to share them with their friends. Let the chips fall where they may... call it an experiment.
If the hardware vendor is concerned he can attempt to prevent access by technical means - for example using an exotic processor architecture with elaborate fail-safe devices. Smart hobbyists will overcome the countermeasures inevitably. The manufacturer ought to accept such events gracefully.
I just don't see how courts would ever prosecute people for spawning shells on their household appliances. It sounds too much like the movie Brazil. (Damn, but that movie is prescient...)
I know you're joking, but let me reply seriously anyway.
In my theory of evolution, it's not so much that "the fittest survive," but that "those that fit survive." There's a feedback loop that occurs in the environment. Those that benefit themselves, others, and the environment as a whole tend to survive and evolve more readily than those that form an adversarial relationship to others and the environment.
Monkeys still exist because there have been - and remain - plenty of habitats that are beneficial to them, and they're very adaptable to new environments. Long after Humans have engineered all remaining environments into complete unsuitability, monkeys will likely still remain, because they manage to survive on just the detritus of our habitats. And being smaller, their energy needs are far less.
In the present case of "tool users" versus "upright walkers" other posts have been spot-on. They had little effect on one another and each adapted well to their given environment. And as the lined article points out just fine, tool use and upright walking were not mutually exclusive developments. It's hardly a big stretch for any being of a certain level of sentience to see the parallel between the hands at the ends of their arms and the tools in their hands. From the point of view of any being of reasonable sentience, they are both automatically objectified into things-to-be-used.
It has long been understood that evolution tends towards less specialization and more generalization as environments rapidly change and become more diverse and challenging, and as species range further. The necessity of mental abstraction and self-alienation will become more evident as we delve into our more recent evolution. (And from this will come insights into the need for our so-called "religious practices" that semi-moderate this alienation. But that's a topic for another day!)
And it's reprinted in "The Mind's I" by Hofstaedter and Dan Dennett. Check out Dan Dennett, he knows the philosophical thing inside-out-backwards-forwards... and he's lent a lot to our understanding of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon.
Politicians.... well yes, but not in the better sense of the word. Politics used to be about advocacy and effective expression. Now it means - and I guess you mean - packaging up your corporate supporters' agendas into something people can swallow without choking. Ah, but I do miss the concept of noblesse oblige!
So, some people believe that everything Bush does is for an ulterior motive, and that by supporting "moderate" positions on the surface he is able to gain subtle advantages for the hard-line right-wing fascist agenda of his handlers. For example, the "no child left behind" program, which on the surface seems all well and good, has been hobbled and twisted up in its actual implementation. And as for Bush's stance on immigration, well that seems like an obvious way to drive down wages across the board and continue to prop up a privatized state.
And I don't know much about Hillary, but is it "socialized medicine" she wants, or is she like most politicos completely ignoring the "single-payer" option (which when most common people understand it, seems to be what they'd most want) in favor of other models that favor private insurance companies? That would put her a bit to the right in my book, but it's not clear from her page on the subject.
Microsoft has a right to innovate. And if it so-happens that most of what they do is duplication of effort long ago solved on *nix systems and creates a nightmare of obfuscation, well the important thing is that they were allowed to be "innovative" in their OS design.
So, humanity could be wiped out by a giant earth-fart? Actually that's pretty funny.
Vast Desktop...
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, as I looked at the demo, I couldn't help feeling like all that virtual space was looking like a damn nice desktop environment. Nevermind the part of the demo with a flat-on scrolly-zoomy desktop, as nice as that would be (Seems obvious in a way too... And wouldn't it be nice if Leopard had that instead of "Spaces" ?). But imagine the notion of opening up an application and instead of just popping up a new window it creates a new space - within the desktop virtual space - and brings you into it. You can always pull back and move around to another window or workspace, but while in it you'd be totally immersed.
I dunno, I just like the notion of immersive environments, especially for conceptual learning. I think we're going to see a prevalence of this kind of interface in the near future.
It's okay to eat at McDonald's sometimes if you like it.
I know you mean just in the context of personal health. But really, it's just not okay to eat at McDonald's.
Of course "we like" McDonald's. The food is engineered to be "liked." But a fully conscious being makes choices based on deeper criteria than just the sensations it enjoys.
When you eat at McDonald's or any other restaurant that uses factory-farmed animals you support evil practices that bring a high degree of suffering to billions of animals. And if you eat meat more than is necessary for your sustenance, you may be living a rewarding life of "free choice" but you are enslaving others in order to live it. Meanwhile you are acting to perpetuate dehumanizing and highly destructive agricultural and labor practices throughout the world.
I urge everyone who cares about animals on any level to refrain from eating meat and dairy products as much as you can. I urge everyone who understands the nature of coercion and coercive institutions to stop blindly taking part and to take up the cause of animal welfare.
The oppression, abuse, and exploitation of animals is not something we want to be practicing as a species in perpetuity. The success of fast food is directly proportional to our level of denial. This is the advantage they take, both by projecting images to distract us from the truth and by chemically doping the food to make us not care. It demeans us to take part.
Whether you like meat or not, boycott McDonald's. Your 99c will be worth a lot more in the long run.
(Shameless plug) I had this tablet I'd spent $500 on back when it first came out, and I was going to be damned if I didn't get support for it on my favorite OS. It took something like 3 years to get it into shape, but now I have this project with a life of its own. Most recently I was prompted to add support for TabletPC computers running Mac OS X unsupported. All along the way, I've had people interested in the results, who have helped me to add support for their tablets. The internet has made it possible to collaborate instantly with people you've only just connected with for the first time, and do in a matter of days what might have taken weeks.
So it doesn't surprise me that this guy's driver works for so many cameras. So many of these hardware devices with different brand names use the same off-the-shelf chip-sets. And serial devices are all very similar in their protocols, so new drivers are easier to make.
I don't think my driver for their old serial tablets has cost Wacom much in sales, and that was never the intent. Their new USB tablets are thinner and totally hassle-free, which makes them attractive for most people. There have been a few people who told me they had specifically held out on buying a new Wacom USB tablet, and who either had put the old one away or were using it with Mac OS 9. And there were a few people who had bought USB-Serial adapters only to find that no driver existed to make their tablets work. I sympathized with both situations somewhat, and this also spurred me on.
As an open source developer I have the advantage of total loyalty to my project, and not to any other parasitic motive. So when I get a feature working in my driver or control panel, it remains available. A company may remove features to encourage upgrades, and reducing functionality for non-technical reasons is evil.
I propose a new holiday: Driver Writers' Day. It could co-incide with the date of the first shipment of Mountain Dew.
I worked at a place where our floor, 7 1/2, had been left too short, so everyone had to crouch down all the time, and I was relatively tall. In an emergency the quickest way out was through a hole that led to being John Malkovich for ten minutes. You can imagine all the mayhem. It was hellish.
Philosophically speaking, you're correct about reality requiring observers... someone to experience events. However, I think it's philosophically valid to consider the possibility that things continue to exist even without anyone to observe them. Such a reality may not seem useful, but I think that's a short-term view. After all, there may be no living beings (i.e., composite entities having conditioned requirements for their continued coherence) now, but there may be some tomorrow. And who is to say whether our particular brand of information-processing is the end of experience? After all, you and I may only be neurons in some larger mind (the internet??) which has experiences and is forever altered by them. Heck, the universe itself may only be a single self-aware entity, and why shouldn't it be?
The universe has been "observed" all along, just not by thinking entities. Your fallacy is that you place special emphasis on our particular style of observation, which involves distillation of patterns and their subsequent translation into thought, reflection, coherence, and meaningful action. However, our particular machinery is not required for the universe to operate. Everything that comes into contact with - or otherwise affects - anything else "observes" and "experiences" it.
The key thing is not to look for some way in which we are special (because we're not!) but to focus on the ways in which we are just like any elementary particle or material system. Then we begin to understand that our habitual sense of "experience" is highly conditioned and extremely narrow - just one particular interpretive system suited to our survival.
So, sorry to say, your house and all its furnishings do cease to exist... not just when you look away but all the time. Well, sort of. They don't really cease anything, because they never really were anything to begin with. Just a lot of energy flowing along. You call a house a "house" and so when you look twice you see the same "thing." But that's just your conventional utilitarian brain doing its thing. In reality, nothing is fixed or named or whole. Nothing "exists" except the indestructible quanta, and even they don't hold still long enough to be said to "exist" in any way our minds conventionally understand.
Aristotle famously said "A=A" and this is called the "Law of Identity." But Aristotle overreached. "A=A" is a fine definition for the equals sign, but it says nothing about "A" whatsoever. And although this law works just fine in the abstract, it's impossible to apply to reality when you get down to the really real stuff. (Besides, most people commute it to "A=B" by ignoring all the differences between A and B, which is... ignorant.) The thing is, by the time you get around to comparing "A" to itself, you've undertaken a process of comparison. This takes time, and "A" refuses to sit still for the photo. So, try as we might, there's no fixing reality using the sword of identity.
My point in bringing this all up is just this: It's safe to say what you say about going to bed at night. It's fine for everyday gross experience. Just don't say that in a room full of physicists or philosophers or you're going to find your whole house turned upside-down in the morning.
Funny thing is, being told about something requires a direct physical connection to the original event... assuming it's the truth. Because in order for an event to be observed, a photon must bounce from the material of the event to the eye of the observer. If the person types an email about the event, atoms of his fingers contact the keys, which then transmit electrons to the computer, and those electrons contact others in the circuitry, and then on and on, chains of atoms, electrons, photons... all physically interacting until they reach you. The information conveyed by ink on the paper or spoken words are of one sort, but there may very well be more - if not all - of the information about every event tangled up in one single electron that bounces off your eardrum.
If only we could freeze that electron and ask it...
Slashdot Mirror
After I installed Leopard I logged in to my account and the Finder wouldn't load. In fact, no applications would launch. I searched the net and discovered I was not alone. Eventually I found the answer in one of Apple's Discussion Forums. The solution is to move or rename the folder /Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks and reboot. You can do this in single-user mode or boot from another system disk. In my case I booted from Jaguar on an external drive and moved the folder to /Users/Shared.
Since I got that out of the way the system has been running amazingly well.
Spotlight is so much faster, and I like the way it shows "All Results" as a Finder search. Much better.
The Translation widget is much better!
Spaces is nice, but I want more: Named spaces and per-space desktop backgrounds, to name two wishes.
The new Network prefpane is just about perfect.
The new Finder is much, much better. And QuickLook is already indispensable.
The new Safari is excellent - and so fast! Oddly the Next Window shortcut (Command-`) is gone. Doesn't seem to work properly in the Finder either, hmm...
Time Machine: Haven't tried it yet.
Tabs in Terminal!
Font rendering seems to be improved throughout the system. Much sharper. And automatic font activation... it's about time!
GrowlMail isn't working... *snif*
PubSub wants my keychain password again.
iChat screen sharing is great! I tried it over Bonjour at home. Very nice. However, it took two tries before my requests would pop up on the target machine.
Stacks aren't very pretty. I don't like the concatenated file names. I'm glad Apple added a ~/Downloads folder though.
Icon previews in the Finder aren't very useful. What good is a 16x16 PDF preview in column view? I'd rather see the application document icons most of the time so I know which app opens them.
Cover Flow is cool, but too touchy with my scroll wheel. Some kind of acceleration algorithm - like mouse motion - would help here. I'm not sure how much I'll be using Cover Flow view.
Where do I set the default View Options for columns, icons, list...? Finder views are still somewhat confusing, but then most of the time I just keep two column-view Finder windows open and work with those. Not often do I double-click a folder on the desktop or elsewhere to open it up to its own view.
Still no native support for AVI files. No QuickLook for AVIs.
Rounded corners on menus are pretty nice looking.
Overall I find the system faster and much improved. I look forward to playing with XCode 3 next!
Mac OS X 10.0 doesn't count. 10.1 is the first version I will acknowledge too.
1010 1110 1001 1111 1100 1100 1001 0011 0110 1010 1011 1100?? 1101 1011 0001 0011 0000!
Tendonitis, more likely. It's an imbalance of the muscles, tendons, and nerves of the upper-back. The pain manifests in the hands, wrists, the upper back, and neck. I suffered a huge blast of tendonitis a couple years ago as a result of poor posture, too much hunched guitar-playing, a permanent shoulder injury (torn ligament), and finally overexerting myself during a rapid lawn-mowing session. The next morning I woke up with a paralyzing pain all the way from my neck down to my left thumb. My left side became useless. The nerves passing under the clavicle were definitely implicated.
I had to remain lying down most of the time for a good month and I was unable to do my computer work effectively for more than 2 hours a day even lying down. I forced myself to do yoga stretches despite the pain because it was the only thing that provided any relief, and after a time my balance returned. I've kept up the yoga on a casual basis, so my muscles are a lot less tight, and so far I have never had another attack despite long hours at the computer and continuing to play guitar.
Posture seems to be the key thing. Muscles shorten and autonomous nerves try to develop a balance to keep things from pulling too far one way or the other. When things get too far out of whack or nerves get pinched this mechanism goes crazy and muscles contract and spasm. I've heard similar things happen in a stroke - muscles spasm so violently they can break bones. Yikes!
... It's a Total Recall!
Sorry, but yes, you can burn this bridge too!
Existence versus nonexistence... as if there were either one of these things!
Why should nonexistence even be brought up?
Show me nonexistence first, then we'll talk.
In terms of some thing existing...
Conditions arise, relate, and cease.
Show me something that exists, yet has no effect. It is a meaningless idea. That which exists, only does so by being an effect on some other existent thing. Thus, to affect is to exist. To have no effect is to not-exist.
In this sense things go in and out of existence all the time.
That is the nature of things.
Does a thing exist if you aren't physically affected by it?
No. Not in your universe.
To receive a report of some thing or event - assuming an accurate report - is to be part of a physical chain of effects.
You have been touched by an event.
I believe it would be most accurate to say that only causality exists, and everything else is inference.
Talk about happenstance!
In the early 90's I lived in Cambridge, MA with a buddy of mine, and one night we came back to our little apartment to discover his car is gone. Just happens he used to do a little gofering for a prominent Irish fella when he was in high school. So my friend makes a phone call to his old boss and we're instructed to go for a long walk. When we get back an hour later there's his car - sans steering column cover. I am still in awe to this day.
True story, I shit you not.
Sometimes it's good to have a friend in low places.
The TiVo is sitting on the dresser. It's the old one, the hobbyist has a newer one too. So he decides to try and get Linux to talk to the TiVo hardware by shoehorning. Lo and behold, he can get most of the hardware - the network ports, the hard drive (of course), and the video input hardware too after a bit of fiddling. The system it turns out is fairly easy to control.
... yet.
If it's possible, the hobbyist will try to do it, and why shouldn't he? After you get a shoe box at the shoe store, you can take it home and mark it up inside, cut holes in it, use it how you like. I see no moral or ethical difference between the shoe box and the TiVo. And I wonder if the TiVo company is worried about it, really. Every device can be used for evil, potentially, but I don't see bands of pirate TiVos marauding across the Internet
By our right of free expression and free exchange, given that no harm is done, once Linux kernels for TiVo exist, people must be free to share them with their friends. Let the chips fall where they may... call it an experiment.
If the hardware vendor is concerned he can attempt to prevent access by technical means - for example using an exotic processor architecture with elaborate fail-safe devices. Smart hobbyists will overcome the countermeasures inevitably. The manufacturer ought to accept such events gracefully.
I just don't see how courts would ever prosecute people for spawning shells on their household appliances. It sounds too much like the movie Brazil. (Damn, but that movie is prescient...)
.
I know you're joking, but let me reply seriously anyway.
In my theory of evolution, it's not so much that "the fittest survive," but that "those that fit survive." There's a feedback loop that occurs in the environment. Those that benefit themselves, others, and the environment as a whole tend to survive and evolve more readily than those that form an adversarial relationship to others and the environment.
Monkeys still exist because there have been - and remain - plenty of habitats that are beneficial to them, and they're very adaptable to new environments. Long after Humans have engineered all remaining environments into complete unsuitability, monkeys will likely still remain, because they manage to survive on just the detritus of our habitats. And being smaller, their energy needs are far less.
In the present case of "tool users" versus "upright walkers" other posts have been spot-on. They had little effect on one another and each adapted well to their given environment. And as the lined article points out just fine, tool use and upright walking were not mutually exclusive developments. It's hardly a big stretch for any being of a certain level of sentience to see the parallel between the hands at the ends of their arms and the tools in their hands. From the point of view of any being of reasonable sentience, they are both automatically objectified into things-to-be-used.
It has long been understood that evolution tends towards less specialization and more generalization as environments rapidly change and become more diverse and challenging, and as species range further. The necessity of mental abstraction and self-alienation will become more evident as we delve into our more recent evolution. (And from this will come insights into the need for our so-called "religious practices" that semi-moderate this alienation. But that's a topic for another day!)
* Dennis Kucinich and possibly Mike Gravel excluded
** I'd add John Conyers to that list too.
And it's reprinted in "The Mind's I" by Hofstaedter and Dan Dennett. Check out Dan Dennett, he knows the philosophical thing inside-out-backwards-forwards... and he's lent a lot to our understanding of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon.
Politicians.... well yes, but not in the better sense of the word. Politics used to be about advocacy and effective expression. Now it means - and I guess you mean - packaging up your corporate supporters' agendas into something people can swallow without choking. Ah, but I do miss the concept of noblesse oblige!
So, some people believe that everything Bush does is for an ulterior motive, and that by supporting "moderate" positions on the surface he is able to gain subtle advantages for the hard-line right-wing fascist agenda of his handlers. For example, the "no child left behind" program, which on the surface seems all well and good, has been hobbled and twisted up in its actual implementation. And as for Bush's stance on immigration, well that seems like an obvious way to drive down wages across the board and continue to prop up a privatized state.
And I don't know much about Hillary, but is it "socialized medicine" she wants, or is she like most politicos completely ignoring the "single-payer" option (which when most common people understand it, seems to be what they'd most want) in favor of other models that favor private insurance companies? That would put her a bit to the right in my book, but it's not clear from her page on the subject.
Microsoft has a right to innovate. And if it so-happens that most of what they do is duplication of effort long ago solved on *nix systems and creates a nightmare of obfuscation, well the important thing is that they were allowed to be "innovative" in their OS design.
Viva la innovation!
Hmm, sounds like Adam and Eve, but in reverse.
So, humanity could be wiped out by a giant earth-fart? Actually that's pretty funny.
Actually, as I looked at the demo, I couldn't help feeling like all that virtual space was looking like a damn nice desktop environment. Nevermind the part of the demo with a flat-on scrolly-zoomy desktop, as nice as that would be (Seems obvious in a way too... And wouldn't it be nice if Leopard had that instead of "Spaces" ?). But imagine the notion of opening up an application and instead of just popping up a new window it creates a new space - within the desktop virtual space - and brings you into it. You can always pull back and move around to another window or workspace, but while in it you'd be totally immersed.
I dunno, I just like the notion of immersive environments, especially for conceptual learning. I think we're going to see a prevalence of this kind of interface in the near future.
If anyone wants to put Steve Ballmer in a cabinet I'm all for that.
It's okay to eat at McDonald's sometimes if you like it.
I know you mean just in the context of personal health. But really, it's just not okay to eat at McDonald's.
Of course "we like" McDonald's. The food is engineered to be "liked." But a fully conscious being makes choices based on deeper criteria than just the sensations it enjoys.
When you eat at McDonald's or any other restaurant that uses factory-farmed animals you support evil practices that bring a high degree of suffering to billions of animals. And if you eat meat more than is necessary for your sustenance, you may be living a rewarding life of "free choice" but you are enslaving others in order to live it. Meanwhile you are acting to perpetuate dehumanizing and highly destructive agricultural and labor practices throughout the world.
I urge everyone who cares about animals on any level to refrain from eating meat and dairy products as much as you can. I urge everyone who understands the nature of coercion and coercive institutions to stop blindly taking part and to take up the cause of animal welfare.
The oppression, abuse, and exploitation of animals is not something we want to be practicing as a species in perpetuity. The success of fast food is directly proportional to our level of denial. This is the advantage they take, both by projecting images to distract us from the truth and by chemically doping the food to make us not care. It demeans us to take part.
Whether you like meat or not, boycott McDonald's. Your 99c will be worth a lot more in the long run.
(Shameless plug) I had this tablet I'd spent $500 on back when it first came out, and I was going to be damned if I didn't get support for it on my favorite OS. It took something like 3 years to get it into shape, but now I have this project with a life of its own. Most recently I was prompted to add support for TabletPC computers running Mac OS X unsupported. All along the way, I've had people interested in the results, who have helped me to add support for their tablets. The internet has made it possible to collaborate instantly with people you've only just connected with for the first time, and do in a matter of days what might have taken weeks.
So it doesn't surprise me that this guy's driver works for so many cameras. So many of these hardware devices with different brand names use the same off-the-shelf chip-sets. And serial devices are all very similar in their protocols, so new drivers are easier to make.
I don't think my driver for their old serial tablets has cost Wacom much in sales, and that was never the intent. Their new USB tablets are thinner and totally hassle-free, which makes them attractive for most people. There have been a few people who told me they had specifically held out on buying a new Wacom USB tablet, and who either had put the old one away or were using it with Mac OS 9. And there were a few people who had bought USB-Serial adapters only to find that no driver existed to make their tablets work. I sympathized with both situations somewhat, and this also spurred me on.
As an open source developer I have the advantage of total loyalty to my project, and not to any other parasitic motive. So when I get a feature working in my driver or control panel, it remains available. A company may remove features to encourage upgrades, and reducing functionality for non-technical reasons is evil.
I propose a new holiday: Driver Writers' Day. It could co-incide with the date of the first shipment of Mountain Dew.
I worked at a place where our floor, 7 1/2, had been left too short, so everyone had to crouch down all the time, and I was relatively tall. In an emergency the quickest way out was through a hole that led to being John Malkovich for ten minutes. You can imagine all the mayhem. It was hellish.
Scotty and Captain Pike launched in the same week!
Philosophically speaking, you're correct about reality requiring observers... someone to experience events. However, I think it's philosophically valid to consider the possibility that things continue to exist even without anyone to observe them. Such a reality may not seem useful, but I think that's a short-term view. After all, there may be no living beings (i.e., composite entities having conditioned requirements for their continued coherence) now, but there may be some tomorrow. And who is to say whether our particular brand of information-processing is the end of experience? After all, you and I may only be neurons in some larger mind (the internet??) which has experiences and is forever altered by them. Heck, the universe itself may only be a single self-aware entity, and why shouldn't it be?
Tricky stuff, ontology.
The universe has been "observed" all along, just not by thinking entities. Your fallacy is that you place special emphasis on our particular style of observation, which involves distillation of patterns and their subsequent translation into thought, reflection, coherence, and meaningful action. However, our particular machinery is not required for the universe to operate. Everything that comes into contact with - or otherwise affects - anything else "observes" and "experiences" it.
The key thing is not to look for some way in which we are special (because we're not!) but to focus on the ways in which we are just like any elementary particle or material system. Then we begin to understand that our habitual sense of "experience" is highly conditioned and extremely narrow - just one particular interpretive system suited to our survival.
So, sorry to say, your house and all its furnishings do cease to exist... not just when you look away but all the time. Well, sort of. They don't really cease anything, because they never really were anything to begin with. Just a lot of energy flowing along. You call a house a "house" and so when you look twice you see the same "thing." But that's just your conventional utilitarian brain doing its thing. In reality, nothing is fixed or named or whole. Nothing "exists" except the indestructible quanta, and even they don't hold still long enough to be said to "exist" in any way our minds conventionally understand.
Aristotle famously said "A=A" and this is called the "Law of Identity." But Aristotle overreached. "A=A" is a fine definition for the equals sign, but it says nothing about "A" whatsoever. And although this law works just fine in the abstract, it's impossible to apply to reality when you get down to the really real stuff. (Besides, most people commute it to "A=B" by ignoring all the differences between A and B, which is... ignorant.) The thing is, by the time you get around to comparing "A" to itself, you've undertaken a process of comparison. This takes time, and "A" refuses to sit still for the photo. So, try as we might, there's no fixing reality using the sword of identity.
My point in bringing this all up is just this: It's safe to say what you say about going to bed at night. It's fine for everyday gross experience. Just don't say that in a room full of physicists or philosophers or you're going to find your whole house turned upside-down in the morning.
Funny thing is, being told about something requires a direct physical connection to the original event... assuming it's the truth. Because in order for an event to be observed, a photon must bounce from the material of the event to the eye of the observer. If the person types an email about the event, atoms of his fingers contact the keys, which then transmit electrons to the computer, and those electrons contact others in the circuitry, and then on and on, chains of atoms, electrons, photons... all physically interacting until they reach you. The information conveyed by ink on the paper or spoken words are of one sort, but there may very well be more - if not all - of the information about every event tangled up in one single electron that bounces off your eardrum.
If only we could freeze that electron and ask it...