Anyone who is even peripherally involved in visual perception and cognition should be aware that what we perceive consciously is not the limit of what we *process* about our visual environment. There are countless studies showing that people can extract large amounts of information from stimuli that they have not consciously seen. This news item is equivalent to somebody grabbing a highly specific, esoteeric finding in modern physics and posting a slashdot article entitled "DOODZ! GOD MAY BE PLAYING DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE!". That's the level of relevance and insight that's going on here.
>Doesn't that mean that for all applications
>referencing Spamhaus, they need to push out
>patches that use 216.168.30.71 instead of
>http://www.spamhaus.org/ ?
Or they could just inform everybody of the change through some kind of unsolicited mass email.
This entire argument about whether or not technology should be factored into these projections, and how much, has gone off the rails.
The argument against factoring in technology is not that the author of the assessment should be making predictions that will push people in the direction he wants them to go.
The argument against factoring in technology is that the point of the assessment is to describe the direction we are moving in *now*.
An analogy: We are on a spacecraft moving along a particular vector.
This assessment is equivalent to a report saying "hey guys I've run the numbers and we are going to end up in the sun on our present course. We'd better do a correctional burn at some point soon".
The people saying "include technology, dammit!" are equivalent to someone saying "we're GOING to fire the rockets, dammit!".
Those people are probably right, we probably will fire the rockets at some point soon, and change course (whether or not the course correction will be sufficient to keep us all comfortable remains to be seen). But the guy making the assessment is also right to keep pushing the urgency of the course correction, and to keep pointing out that *unless* the rockets are fired, at some point our spacecraft (civilisation) will be destroyed.
This analogy is also appropriate in that the longer we wait the sharper and more violent the correction is likely to be, and personally I'd rather correct our course at 1G instead of 5G.
I quite like the surprise associated with buying a fresh game or downloading a high quality demo after receiving no more information than a few tantalising previews or screenshots.
One of the best gaming experiences I ever had was buying Xcom: Apocalyps hot off the shelf after walking into a game shop and seeing it sitting there with no warning, just BAM, having previously been unaware of its existence.
When you take into account the removal of repeats, the fact that they didn't always broadcast 24hrs per day, and so on, you're probably only looking at a few hundred thousand hours of broadcasting for the entire history of the BBC. Nothing a small Republic full of servers couldn't handle.
Exactly. The other day I was watching the Beeb's news channel on cable in Australia and they carried a report that suggested that America DIDN'T use the power of lollipops and sunshine to expel the demonic Saddam Hussein from Iraq. Imagine!
Do I detect a hint of Randian anti-government bias here? Do you have any data to indicate that nusiness won't even "visit" places that squeeze a buck out of them? Businesses will go wherever there's a profit, and once they're there they'll work to expand the profit by upping their volume and shrinking their costs, which includes lobbying to eliminate as many taxes on their operations as possible.
Brilliant. If one of my friends gives me the number of one of their friends for some reason then I'll have to ring them and get them to call me or put me in their address book before I can text them.
One RFID tag reader may not be "positional" but if it is capable of calculating the DISTANCE between it and a tag then three RFID readers ARE positional.
What if a cop who doesn't like you finds out that you travelled between two RFID stations that were 100 metres apart in a time that indicated you had travelled faster than the speed limmit?
If it ever seems that a project like citywide RFID tracking would be impossible, just stop and think for a minute about how many traffic lights there are in a city. How many post boxes. How many street signs, rubbish bins, hydrants, parking metres and a thousand other thigns built and maintained by various state agencies.
Setting out enough transponders to ensure that, for example, a given person couldn't move from one block to another without being tracked would be a piece of piss by comparison.
>the world isnt a safe place for us anymore
Agreed, sarcasm included.
Was the world a safe place for them when life was dirty, short and brutal? Was the world a safe place for them when RFID stood for "Raise Fire in the Dark"? When a small cut could mean a fatal infection?
I don't particularly like the idea of RFID being used to track people, but the alarmism and panic about it has got to stop. Retreat to your unabomber-style woodland shacks or shut up, people.
If Deep Thought could perform more terraflops than the Earth Simulator Centre then the ultimate computer wouldn't have had to be built. Deep Thought could have emulated it.
First you cry because the tech boom is over and it's hard to get a job, then you cry because business software is overpriced and it's pumping too much valuable money into tech companies.
Make up your mind, people!
I've listened to Radiohead for a *long* time and to see them jumping on the bandwagon with Madonna and the likes has bummed me out.
I won't say I stopped reading there, but I did form my opinion of you with that sentence and the rest of what you said left that opinion unaltered.
You seem to be incapable of thinking about this from any angle other than money. Perhaps you should just accept that Radiohead might object to having their songs downloaded on artistic grounds, just as an author might object to having random chapters of their novels published as short stories.
I felt the same way about A Tale of Two Cities and Robotech. But once I combined still frames of cuttings from Dickens with the giant robot action of Robotech I found a deeper meaning and a more enjoyable reading/watching experience.
If Dickens can't understand that then he has no business serialising his works in newspapers and making it easy for people like me to cut out and recombine half a chapter at a time.
That's the bloody point. You're saying "Radiohead don't need to fear loss of revenue because their albums are woth listening to". I think what they're afraid of is not loss of revenue, but that more people will isten to just the best songs from their albums and not the album as a whole (a carefully ordered and timed whole, designed to add to the pieces within it through their associations with one another).
I wouldn't say that what popcap does really resembles the shareware of old, which often consisted of short teasers for much longer, more elaborate games. The plain old game demo is the closest thing to "Wolfenstein Episode 1" et al.
Slashdot Mirror
A contract system is probably more open to abuse, unless the contract is formulated and then put out to tender (or even auction).
The taxation isn't on the in-game items, it's on the real US dollars earned through a retail affiliate program.
Anyone who is even peripherally involved in visual perception and cognition should be aware that what we perceive consciously is not the limit of what we *process* about our visual environment. There are countless studies showing that people can extract large amounts of information from stimuli that they have not consciously seen. This news item is equivalent to somebody grabbing a highly specific, esoteeric finding in modern physics and posting a slashdot article entitled "DOODZ! GOD MAY BE PLAYING DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE!". That's the level of relevance and insight that's going on here.
>Doesn't that mean that for all applications >referencing Spamhaus, they need to push out >patches that use 216.168.30.71 instead of >http://www.spamhaus.org/ ? Or they could just inform everybody of the change through some kind of unsolicited mass email.
This entire argument about whether or not technology should be factored into these projections, and how much, has gone off the rails.
The argument against factoring in technology is not that the author of the assessment should be making predictions that will push people in the direction he wants them to go.
The argument against factoring in technology is that the point of the assessment is to describe the direction we are moving in *now*.
An analogy: We are on a spacecraft moving along a particular vector.
This assessment is equivalent to a report saying "hey guys I've run the numbers and we are going to end up in the sun on our present course. We'd better do a correctional burn at some point soon".
The people saying "include technology, dammit!" are equivalent to someone saying "we're GOING to fire the rockets, dammit!".
Those people are probably right, we probably will fire the rockets at some point soon, and change course (whether or not the course correction will be sufficient to keep us all comfortable remains to be seen). But the guy making the assessment is also right to keep pushing the urgency of the course correction, and to keep pointing out that *unless* the rockets are fired, at some point our spacecraft (civilisation) will be destroyed.
This analogy is also appropriate in that the longer we wait the sharper and more violent the correction is likely to be, and personally I'd rather correct our course at 1G instead of 5G.
I quite like the surprise associated with buying a fresh game or downloading a high quality demo after receiving no more information than a few tantalising previews or screenshots. One of the best gaming experiences I ever had was buying Xcom: Apocalyps hot off the shelf after walking into a game shop and seeing it sitting there with no warning, just BAM, having previously been unaware of its existence.
Clearly they're looking for those IP addresses stored on the searchee's computer.
When you take into account the removal of repeats, the fact that they didn't always broadcast 24hrs per day, and so on, you're probably only looking at a few hundred thousand hours of broadcasting for the entire history of the BBC. Nothing a small Republic full of servers couldn't handle.
Perhaps some of the IT savings can be ploughed into letting me download more than 3Gb per month.
Exactly. The other day I was watching the Beeb's news channel on cable in Australia and they carried a report that suggested that America DIDN'T use the power of lollipops and sunshine to expel the demonic Saddam Hussein from Iraq. Imagine!
Do I detect a hint of Randian anti-government bias here? Do you have any data to indicate that nusiness won't even "visit" places that squeeze a buck out of them? Businesses will go wherever there's a profit, and once they're there they'll work to expand the profit by upping their volume and shrinking their costs, which includes lobbying to eliminate as many taxes on their operations as possible.
Brilliant. If one of my friends gives me the number of one of their friends for some reason then I'll have to ring them and get them to call me or put me in their address book before I can text them.
Then walk around your house with your keys until you hear the scanner beep.
One RFID tag reader may not be "positional" but if it is capable of calculating the DISTANCE between it and a tag then three RFID readers ARE positional.
What if a cop who doesn't like you finds out that you travelled between two RFID stations that were 100 metres apart in a time that indicated you had travelled faster than the speed limmit?
Yes, facial recognition systems are getting quite good. I try to shield facial emissions by wearing a balaclava whenever I go out in public.
Ban the face!
Setting out enough transponders to ensure that, for example, a given person couldn't move from one block to another without being tracked would be a piece of piss by comparison.
>the world isnt a safe place for us anymore Agreed, sarcasm included. Was the world a safe place for them when life was dirty, short and brutal? Was the world a safe place for them when RFID stood for "Raise Fire in the Dark"? When a small cut could mean a fatal infection? I don't particularly like the idea of RFID being used to track people, but the alarmism and panic about it has got to stop. Retreat to your unabomber-style woodland shacks or shut up, people.
"Pax" is a funny word for the [x] Americana we are about to experience. Also I'm not sure if PaxAmericana is a legitimate portmanteauword.
If Deep Thought could perform more terraflops than the Earth Simulator Centre then the ultimate computer wouldn't have had to be built. Deep Thought could have emulated it.
First you cry because the tech boom is over and it's hard to get a job, then you cry because business software is overpriced and it's pumping too much valuable money into tech companies. Make up your mind, people!
I won't say I stopped reading there, but I did form my opinion of you with that sentence and the rest of what you said left that opinion unaltered.
You seem to be incapable of thinking about this from any angle other than money. Perhaps you should just accept that Radiohead might object to having their songs downloaded on artistic grounds, just as an author might object to having random chapters of their novels published as short stories.
If Dickens can't understand that then he has no business serialising his works in newspapers and making it easy for people like me to cut out and recombine half a chapter at a time.
That's the bloody point. You're saying "Radiohead don't need to fear loss of revenue because their albums are woth listening to". I think what they're afraid of is not loss of revenue, but that more people will isten to just the best songs from their albums and not the album as a whole (a carefully ordered and timed whole, designed to add to the pieces within it through their associations with one another).
I wouldn't say that what popcap does really resembles the shareware of old, which often consisted of short teasers for much longer, more elaborate games. The plain old game demo is the closest thing to "Wolfenstein Episode 1" et al.