I just lost 10 years of my life by reading your post. Of course this will not become obvious until I die, and it's impossible to prove that I died 10 years earlier than I would have otherwise. Compensate me anyway.
(Subtitle: and not a diatribe on global warming like the rest of the posts.)
The reason no one cares about global warming is that it hasn't touched them directly yet. It's the inverse of the NIMBY factor: If it's not in my backyard it's irrelevant. Global warming has not yet provably hurt individual human beings; anyone they have direct contact with in their daily lives. It took a while for AIDS to catch the public eye, but once friends and celebrities started dying it became noticed, and now everyone uses condoms, or at least know it's a good idea. Wait until people start selling their coastal homes in droves, or until everyone around you has skin cancer, or until NYC becomes uninhabitable (well, more so).
The fruit flies are an incomplete system. You can buy a sealed glass globe containing water, brine shrimp, and everything else needed to keep it going apparently for months or years (if light is provided).
Why not have some industry-wide cooperative system to piggyback content payments on your ISP bill? Say that right now you are paying $20 a month for access. Raise that to $30 and let your ISP keep $20, leaving $10 for distributed payments. When you visit a site that recieves payments under this new system, it tracks how much you have used it and sends this information back to your ISP. Your ISP keeps track of what you have visited and how much, and at the end of the month divides up the $10 among all the pay sites according to these weights and sends that data to their ISPs, who then deduct that from the pay site's bill that month.
The important concept here is to make the payment completely transparent to the user; no one would use cable TV if they had to drop a quarter in their cable box every time they turned it on. The privacy problems could be avoided through heavy use of encryption ("100 hits to [unique ID corresponding to www.goatse.cx] for customer [unique ID consisting of encrypted account information understood only by the payment server] on [encrypted]/[encrypted], 2001").
Technic was halfway between Lego and Meccano/Erector: It had the standard Lego modular pieces (it's easy to mix Technic and Lego parts in the same item), but it also had elements much more geared towards engineering like gears, shafts, and motors. And then there was the Technic Control Centre. It was the ancestor of Mindstorms, a console that could record and play back sequences of actions involving up to 3 motors. It came with enough parts to build a programmable vector plotter (among other things).
Construx was by Fisher-Price (sadly it seems to be discontinued now), and it was sort of a plastic version of the Erector set minus the annoying nuts and bolts. It was on a much larger scale than most of the toys that have been discussed so far: it was easy to build items several feet tall (aside from structural problems), and the motors were beefier than the ones Technic used.
I know all that. But those Z80s were bought on the commodity parts market and they have an open spec. How can I take this proprietary chip, whose info is available only to licensees, rip it out of the custom-built hardware that supports it, and get it to process your own programs?
I accept that the emotion engine may have sufficient mflops for scientific application, but it's hardwired into a device that can do nothing but play games and its interface is a custom-built gamepad. How does one turn this into a weapon or weapons research device? Can anyone outline how, in theory, one would use a PS2 to do this?
Actually they come from the equally talented and equally non-Japanese mind of Craig McCraken. But I wouldn't be surprised if they used a Japanese/Asian production studio, like many other modern cartoons.
(Trying not to troll too overtly, but this will be unpopular)
Have they considered that the GPL may hinder the adoption of GNUCash by other projects/companies? They can't use any GNUCash-derived code without GLPing their entire product. Perhaps it should be switched to the LGPL?
The problem of a short attention span or information overload will not be solved at the organizational or technological level.
It will be solved by every single person individually.
Next time your TV goes to commercial, mute it, get up, and go get a glass of water. You have just cut off all the meaningless advertisements the TV is pouring at you. It is far easier than Katz seems to think to just ignore the "bombardment" of information. The advertising and media industries have not (yet) tied us to chairs and taped our eyes open, Clockwork Orange-style.
And as someone else pointed out, if there is demand for alternative, someone will provide it. MSNBC and friends have huge pointless affiliate sidebars and banner ads displacing the article text, Slashdot has ONE banner ad per page (and usually better content to boot).
In short, this article attributes far too much power to the media and far too little willpower to the audience. Just walk away.
The first generation of Power Macs had these development codenames: The 6100 was Piltdown Man, the 7100 was Carl Sagan, and the 8100 was Cold Fusion. Note that #1 and #3 are famous hoaxes. Carl Sagan was not happy about the implications and demanded that his name be removed. Apple changed the codename to BHA, told him it was "random letters", and Sagan backed off. Later it became known, probably not directly from Apple, that BHA stood for Butt Head Astronomer.
A fun way to protest this would be to put wanted posters in view of all the cameras.
During the Princess Di feeding frenzy, some mention was made of a device that interfered with cameras, that was used by celebs to prevent unauthorized photography. Does this really exist? If so, would it work on these video cameras?
Very bad example. The freedom being discussed here (freedom to control your financial records) will not result in people getting killed by bad drivers.
::gets buried under piles of flamebaits and offtopics::
Attention, We-Want-Linux-On-The-Desktop crowd: Support this and help out, it is a big step in the right direction. To a consumer, diagnostic messages are confusing and pointless. Admit that Apple did something right, for once (interpret that as you will): the Mac OS, up to and including X, will never show cryptic messages or break out of the GUI unless you give it a direct order to do so (launch Terminal or Console, hold down key sequences during boot) or a fatal error occurs. This is a good thing, it makes the experience seamless and friendly. Remember that consumers don't care about what drivers got loaded when (and isn't improving the drivers themselves a much more important goal than improving the error messages?) and similar arcane knowledge of the computer's internals, and saying "learn it anyway because it's good for you" will not win you any friends or customers.
This is standard SEC policy; I believe it is meant to prevent stock prices being manipulated. Whenever a major announcement is made that involves a publically traded company, trading of that company's shares is frozen for a short time before and after the (scheduled) announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
I just lost 10 years of my life by reading your post. Of course this will not become obvious until I die, and it's impossible to prove that I died 10 years earlier than I would have otherwise. Compensate me anyway.
(Subtitle: and not a diatribe on global warming like the rest of the posts.)
The reason no one cares about global warming is that it hasn't touched them directly yet. It's the inverse of the NIMBY factor: If it's not in my backyard it's irrelevant. Global warming has not yet provably hurt individual human beings; anyone they have direct contact with in their daily lives. It took a while for AIDS to catch the public eye, but once friends and celebrities started dying it became noticed, and now everyone uses condoms, or at least know it's a good idea. Wait until people start selling their coastal homes in droves, or until everyone around you has skin cancer, or until NYC becomes uninhabitable (well, more so).
The fruit flies are an incomplete system. You can buy a sealed glass globe containing water, brine shrimp, and everything else needed to keep it going apparently for months or years (if light is provided).
Why not have some industry-wide cooperative system to piggyback content payments on your ISP bill? Say that right now you are paying $20 a month for access. Raise that to $30 and let your ISP keep $20, leaving $10 for distributed payments. When you visit a site that recieves payments under this new system, it tracks how much you have used it and sends this information back to your ISP. Your ISP keeps track of what you have visited and how much, and at the end of the month divides up the $10 among all the pay sites according to these weights and sends that data to their ISPs, who then deduct that from the pay site's bill that month.
The important concept here is to make the payment completely transparent to the user; no one would use cable TV if they had to drop a quarter in their cable box every time they turned it on. The privacy problems could be avoided through heavy use of encryption ("100 hits to [unique ID corresponding to www.goatse.cx] for customer [unique ID consisting of encrypted account information understood only by the payment server] on [encrypted]/[encrypted], 2001").
Lego Technic and Construx
Technic was halfway between Lego and Meccano/Erector: It had the standard Lego modular pieces (it's easy to mix Technic and Lego parts in the same item), but it also had elements much more geared towards engineering like gears, shafts, and motors. And then there was the Technic Control Centre. It was the ancestor of Mindstorms, a console that could record and play back sequences of actions involving up to 3 motors. It came with enough parts to build a programmable vector plotter (among other things).
Construx was by Fisher-Price (sadly it seems to be discontinued now), and it was sort of a plastic version of the Erector set minus the annoying nuts and bolts. It was on a much larger scale than most of the toys that have been discussed so far: it was easy to build items several feet tall (aside from structural problems), and the motors were beefier than the ones Technic used.
The ibook is $1300 ($1800 including CDRW/DVD drive). An Inspiron I tried configuring to your specs was $2200.
iTunes has been able to burn audio CDs since OS X 10.0.2 IIRC, but it still can't do data discs.
I know all that. But those Z80s were bought on the commodity parts market and they have an open spec. How can I take this proprietary chip, whose info is available only to licensees, rip it out of the custom-built hardware that supports it, and get it to process your own programs?
I accept that the emotion engine may have sufficient mflops for scientific application, but it's hardwired into a device that can do nothing but play games and its interface is a custom-built gamepad. How does one turn this into a weapon or weapons research device? Can anyone outline how, in theory, one would use a PS2 to do this?
The word from the source
Xbox. No dash, not all caps either.
C:\> C:\spot> C:\spot>run run spot run!
Note that that is the FIRST tutorial. What was the first program you ever wrote? Hello world?
And you must admit it's a hell of a lot better than the kid trying to get started by cracking sites and turning into a script kiddie.
Actually they come from the equally talented and equally non-Japanese mind of Craig McCraken. But I wouldn't be surprised if they used a Japanese/Asian production studio, like many other modern cartoons.
(Trying not to troll too overtly, but this will be unpopular)
Have they considered that the GPL may hinder the adoption of GNUCash by other projects/companies? They can't use any GNUCash-derived code without GLPing their entire product. Perhaps it should be switched to the LGPL?
Obviously the real mission statement of the OpenNet coalition is "Open my competitors' net, let me in, close it behind me".
Let's hope that, as rumored, the Cube is being killed to make way for new stuff at MWNY.
The problem of a short attention span or information overload will not be solved at the organizational or technological level.
It will be solved by every single person individually.
Next time your TV goes to commercial, mute it, get up, and go get a glass of water. You have just cut off all the meaningless advertisements the TV is pouring at you. It is far easier than Katz seems to think to just ignore the "bombardment" of information. The advertising and media industries have not (yet) tied us to chairs and taped our eyes open, Clockwork Orange-style.
And as someone else pointed out, if there is demand for alternative, someone will provide it. MSNBC and friends have huge pointless affiliate sidebars and banner ads displacing the article text, Slashdot has ONE banner ad per page (and usually better content to boot).
In short, this article attributes far too much power to the media and far too little willpower to the audience. Just walk away.
::activates information leafblower::
::deactivates::
The first generation of Power Macs had these development codenames: The 6100 was Piltdown Man, the 7100 was Carl Sagan, and the 8100 was Cold Fusion. Note that #1 and #3 are famous hoaxes. Carl Sagan was not happy about the implications and demanded that his name be removed. Apple changed the codename to BHA, told him it was "random letters", and Sagan backed off. Later it became known, probably not directly from Apple, that BHA stood for Butt Head Astronomer.
A fun way to protest this would be to put wanted posters in view of all the cameras.
During the Princess Di feeding frenzy, some mention was made of a device that interfered with cameras, that was used by celebs to prevent unauthorized photography. Does this really exist? If so, would it work on these video cameras?
Where do you work? :P
A whole lot of dead spammers! COOL!
Very bad example. The freedom being discussed here (freedom to control your financial records) will not result in people getting killed by bad drivers.
::gets buried under piles of flamebaits and offtopics::
Attention, We-Want-Linux-On-The-Desktop crowd: Support this and help out, it is a big step in the right direction. To a consumer, diagnostic messages are confusing and pointless. Admit that Apple did something right, for once (interpret that as you will): the Mac OS, up to and including X, will never show cryptic messages or break out of the GUI unless you give it a direct order to do so (launch Terminal or Console, hold down key sequences during boot) or a fatal error occurs. This is a good thing, it makes the experience seamless and friendly. Remember that consumers don't care about what drivers got loaded when (and isn't improving the drivers themselves a much more important goal than improving the error messages?) and similar arcane knowledge of the computer's internals, and saying "learn it anyway because it's good for you" will not win you any friends or customers.
This is standard SEC policy; I believe it is meant to prevent stock prices being manipulated. Whenever a major announcement is made that involves a publically traded company, trading of that company's shares is frozen for a short time before and after the (scheduled) announcement.
I also agree... This is what "hacking" is really about, solving complex problems through ingenuity and diligence.