Exactly. "True AI" is a far cry from a customer service system that assists in formulating appropriate responses. The applications of "True AI" are so vast as to be unimaginable. Games, military, production... a system capable of understanding is a tremendous accomplishment. At a minimum, an AI system must be capable of crafting solutions to situations it wasn't specifically designed for.
You thought you might like to contribute to Free Software, you'd never set up a build environment before and the first package you thought of was.. Mozilla? And by the sounds of it, on Windows too.
I have setup other build envirionments and contributed to other projects. Mozilla was not the first project I tried, but it is a perfect example of a stupidly complex project to get involved in. Every project is always a lengthy process, and very little of the preperation is transferrible between projects.
I use both Windows and Linux, I use Windows more because it's pure gaming here. I like to think I have pretty decent programming skills. But that's just it, I enjoy programming, not system configuration.
Maybe you're just a genius and you can always do it perfectly. Build instructions seep into your mind like no other mortal. But that's not me, when I setup build environments, no matter what platform it is, I make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes take time to correct. All for the sake of contributing to a project which wants my help but doesn't want to make it easy for me to help them.
I love OSS. At least half the applications on my computer are OSS, I'm writing this from FireFox, in the background I have Eclipse and OpenOffice open too. But I still have some issues with OSS.
It's not the quality of what OSS projects produce, it's the difficulty of getting involved. It's like a rite of passage. You can't just open up a compiler, read the source, and start typing code. Getting started is a complicated process. There are numerous OSS projects I'd love to get involved in, but actually setting up my computer to have a functional environment is frequently more work than I can stomach. In comparison, designing and writing code is far easier than configuring my system to prepare to join an OSS project. Some people have said that it's no more difficult than understanding the system at a commercial project, but I disagree. Any commercial projects I've been involved in usually have their computers already configured so you can just start working, no break in stride.
For the most part, the thought of how much work it's going to be to get started keeps me from even taking the first step to get involved. I spent many hours just trying to configure my system to get involved with the Mozilla project, and didn't even get to the point I could review the code because of build problems. And of course real life intervenes so the amount of time I can spend at once trying to configure my system is limited.
Maybe this is a necessary hazing ritual, but in my opinion, the day that software developers don't also need to be System Configuration Experts, the progress of OSS will skyrocket. If there were simply an executable file that you run and it setup a complete environment where you can just start typing code and contribute, OSS would progress at light speed because much less capable developers could still contribute with small bug fixes, or even clarifying comments, adding comments, or just restructuring code modules.
Some people might think that's a bad idea because complete idiots could try to participate, but there's numerous ways around that like ranking/priority systems attached to code reviews (i.e. Positively ranked developers would have their code reviews take precedence over unknown developers, and trolls who not only didn't produce anything valuable, but even wasted reviewers time with complete nonsense pseudo code could have rankings knocked down so they wouldn't even be visible to review)
That's exactly the problem. Shielding the employees from lawsuits. At the same time you shield them against petty lawsuits, you shield them from legitimate lawsuits. No accountability. The employees are free to work with impunity. They can rape countries for resources (cheap labor, environmentally unsound harvesting), illegally dispose of toxic waste, and not have to answer for it, because the employees are shielded.
1. A body that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members.
In other words, the only reason to form a corporation is to legally do things that their conscience and the law would otherwise prevent them from doing.
Whether or not Google has done anything wrong is debatable, but the fact remains, when they do something wrong, the owners can't be held liable. The ability to operate with impunity is evil, without regard to whether or not that ability is exploited.
This concept can be related to people not wanting certain parties to have nuclear weapons. Whether or not they'd use them is not the issue, it is simply evil to have the power.
So if being a geek has really become cool, why has interest in CS as a major dropped among incoming freshmen and women are still a minority in computer and engineering fields?
I'll assume by "geek" you mean "nerd".
Being a nerd and being a CS major aren't mutually inclusive things. You can be a nerd with absolutely no interest in computers, and you can be a CS major without being a nerd. There are all kinds of nerds. Ham radio, model airplanes/vehicles, wrestling fanatics, movies, music, civil war buffs... A nerd can be anyone who pursues virtually any interest to a technical depth that your average person doesn't even dream of. I think being a nerd is all about embracing the scientific method and the vast array of scientific disciplines.
As for why being a nerd has become mainstream, it's simple. People like experts. If you have a question, the person you want answering that question is whoever has the most accurate information to offer you. Being a nerd is popular because the alternative is being mediocre or worse in your field. Being a nerd became mainstream when society realized people like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are sitting on top of piles of cash so big they can crush a man. Ask a girl who she wants to be with: the overweight has-been high school football quarterback nursing his 11th beer of the day, or the guy who's got NASA, Microsoft, and the DOD on different lines?
Yeah! Lets go all out! Antrhax, ebola, a little flesh-eating bacteria, throw in some influenze for good measure to balance out the portfolio. I mean these days skillsets are all about diversity, lets not short-change this guy by making him a one-trick pony. I mean, how is that going to sound in 25 years?
"Hey, I cured HIV!" and everyone else is like "Yeah, we heard, big deal, what else can you do?"
That whole "no taking it apart" section of EULAs I always thought was horse crap. I should be able to disassemble, examine, rebuild, and reverse engineer ANYTHING I buy. I don't care if I want to analyze a loaf of bread, my VCR, or my software. Software should not be in a special category that specifies what I'm allowed to do with it after I buy it. If I want to use a toothbrush to scrub the toilet, godammit I will. If I want to use my finance software to keep track of my urine count I will. They can tell me how it was intended to be used, but don't tell me how I must use it.
Obviously that makes sense from a human point of view. But corporations aren't human. They have one goal, to make money. Telling a corporation it has moral obligations is figuratively, and literally, like talking to a brick wall.
We can't even point a finger at the person responsible for denying the request to switch to safer manufacturing methods, because the people who disapprove it most likely have no idea what they were disapproving. Director x denied an application for a xxx million dollar budget shift, and Director y denied a request to open a new facility that would have a, b, and c operationg costs and liabilities. No one told either of the directors the request was to open a new manufacturing plant to make things safer, and chances are it's not even his job to know what it was for, it's his job to analyze figures and decide if the bottom line matches their next quarter's projections.
I've actually read articles in the past (none of which I know a reference to) that stated it was a completely financial decision. It's not the cost of manufacturing that prevents them from switching processes, it's the fact that they're not legally allowed to advertise it even if they did produce a safer cigarette.
What's the point of making something safer if the government tells you that you're not allowed to tell people you did it? Would cars have airbags if there was a restriction against telling people they're installed?
You make it sound like someone went out and got someone pregnant for beer money. You don't actually fuck someone at a sperm bank. There's plenty of horrible parents in the worldI think people donating to sperm banks are somewhere at the end of the list of parenting problems.
Kids aren't changing the language, but an all-consuming pursuit for validation and individuality lead them to passionately believe that every act of self-expression is far more important than it really is. Slang and poor usage don't evolve the language. 50 years from now, the rules of formal grammar will most likely be identical. Kids will have adopted new slang, a new way to compose sentences so they sound "cool" to their ears, and even then they'll argue that they're helping evolve the language.
"Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine. Linux stands on its own merits. Anti-Microsoft sentiment comes from Microsoft's paranoia, which results in quotes like the one that had Bill Gates saying he'd put Linux in the Computer museum like he has other competitors."
That's a barrel full of chuckles. Every single time there's any poll, study, or report about Linux, there's always an obligation to clarify "these results weren't skewed by anti-Microsoft sentiment". Unfortunately the person clarifying always goes off on an anti-Microsoft tangent.
If you're programming with the right mindset and correct methodology, Visual Studio no more rots your brain than your oven makes you forget how to cook.
Programming is all about the programmer's choices. When you confront a problem, you design a solution. The IDE (in this case Visual Studio) is meant to provide a number of easy ways to implement your solution. It shouldn't be controlling your code directly, you control how the IDE controls your code.
Whenever I use a new IDE, I probably spend more initial time setting options than writing code. It's the programmer's job to make the IDE work the way they need it to. If you're using it right, the IDE should pump out code exactly the way you intend it to.
Programming and Tool Usage are two seperate disciplines (although deeply intertwined). Visual Studio doesn't make a programmer stupid or make a programmer write bad code, a lack of knowledge about the tool at hand makes the person write bad code. I've witnessed just as many terrible JavaScripts written in a text editor as I've seen bad applications pumped out of Visual Studio.
When programming in C++, I use MSVC, because it's simply the most capable IDE/compiler available for developing applications for the Win32 platform. When I use it, I don't magically forget everything about data structures, algorithms, or object-orientation. When I've finished a program, every single line of code is precisely the way I intended it to be. If it weren't, then I wouldn't be programming I'd be haphazardly hacking my way to an end.
I think one way to come to grips with it is to try thinking about a seperation between an online identity and a character's name in a game. You can retain your online identity using it with accounts and such. But mentally speaking, when you cross the border into a game, your identity can be the one controlling the character, not the character itself.
That's how I've always viewed my identity. Maybe I'm Jekler here and everywhere else, but my character's names in games aren't usually named Jekler even if my account name/ID is.
Of course people should be proud of what they accomplish. But the pride can be internal. A father has pride in his kids when they learn to walk, but he doesn't call CNN.
I still use the beta versions and a lot of other pre-release versions of OSS, I think it's more of a perception thing. The versioning systems really aren't much of an indicator of progress, I see plenty of projects which go from version 0.1 to 0.9 in 6 months, then spend half a decade with 0.9 Beta 2.xxxx versions.
It's not that the software isn't usable, likeable, functional or anything like that. It's that the versioning is misleading. That Wine has reached 0.9 Beta doesn't tell us anything because there could still be a few dozen versions before it gets to 1.0. Even when it gets to version 1.0, it could likely be 1.0 beta 1, beta 2, rc1, rc2, etc.
I've got nothing against the software itself. I'm using Flock 0.5pre right now (although the actual version information also says it's 0.4.9, so even THEY aren't sure what version they're releasing)
It's not about the software and how it works, it's about this versioning system and announcements everytime a program makes it to a new arbitrary double-type number.
Meh, I have a very sour taste in my mouth from the time where "beta" has started to mean "release version". I dislike how things "officially" go to beta... then they officially enter the "beta 2" stage. Then release candidate 1, 2... then preview release... It's just a shame that every damn stage of development warrants an announcement and celebration, as opposed to opening the champagne when you actually hit production. That and the fact that every application has a few hundred version numbers. If AOL did nothing else right, I at least like their 1.0, 2.0, 3.0... versioning
Of course developers should celebrate internally on their progress. But along this path and there will be an announcement everytime we change a line of code.
"Hey everyone, my app has just entered pre-pre-pre-alpha! That is to say, I finished typing the include lines!"
I like that OSS makes so much progress, but I think it would be a benefit to us if they, publicly, treated it like any other application.
Yes, as much as marketing gurus have abused the word "paradigm", it is actually a word in the english dictionary, and is applicable when referring to a new type of World Wide Web (or at least what I'd define as being Web 2).
I was in the same boat. It was like 07:30 UTC or so, I was trying to play a game, but my ping was high and I'd intermittently get disconnected from it every few minutes. It was the weirdest outage I'd seen because I could get to some web sites, google, yahoo, excite (at first I thought it might just be cache so I went to excite which I don't think I've ever visited with this computer). But I couldn't get to slashdot, guildwars page, or update my antivirus. It was like my connection was down for anything except the major search engines.
Even as of about 12:00 UTC my connection was still slow.
I don't know why the parent is modded a troll. I happen to agree that the vision of the internet falls short of its potential. In my opinion, Web 2.0 means a whole new paradigm, a revolution. Not the sort of thing that comes with fancier graphics, but the kind of thing where you suddenly realize there would have been no way to accomplish this with the previous version of the Web. It's like the day you realize that you use the internet every day, that the whole internet thing has become more than a luxury. Having an internet connected computer is as essential to relating to the modern world as having a TV was in the 80s and 90s. Web 2.0 will be the day where you go online and think "Wow, this is just amazing, I can do x, y, and z... none of that was even possible back with the first Web!"
It'll take a lot more than a slew of fancier looking applications with built-in-but-already-existing functions. I'm thinking a new protocol, new data compression methods, faster code. The kind of stuff you see on Firefly or Star Trek.
I strongly feel that patents should be tied to one's ability to implement the idea. Any jackass can sit around and think up ideas. I really don't like the "I thought of it first!" patent system in the U.S. If you're going to have a patent system, it should be based on who does it first not who sat on the toilet longer.
That reasoning isn't logical. Your reasoning works both ways, it neither proves or disproves anything.
You reason that:
Because no artist has announced getting money, artists do not get money as a result of the RIAA's proceedings.
By identical logic you could also say:
Because no artist has announced not getting money, artists do get money as a result of the RIAA's proceedings.
Your logic can be used against your own argument. It could be to argued that it makes more sense for an artist to announce that he has not been given the money he's due. If everything is going smoothly and he's getting paid as usual, why would he make an announcement to that effect?
If you already made up your own answer, why even ask a question? Whether or not you think they give money to artists doesn't change reality. I know we'd all love it if our personal beliefs actually shaped the fabric of the universe, but for most of us that doesn't work. For those of us living in reality, instead of making up answers, we research them.
Like I said, my opinion on it is neutral. I have no reason to believe they do give money to the artists, and I have no reason to believe they don't. Without facts, I don't form conclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. "True AI" is a far cry from a customer service system that assists in formulating appropriate responses. The applications of "True AI" are so vast as to be unimaginable. Games, military, production... a system capable of understanding is a tremendous accomplishment. At a minimum, an AI system must be capable of crafting solutions to situations it wasn't specifically designed for.
You thought you might like to contribute to Free Software, you'd never set up a build environment before and the first package you thought of was.. Mozilla? And by the sounds of it, on Windows too.
I have setup other build envirionments and contributed to other projects. Mozilla was not the first project I tried, but it is a perfect example of a stupidly complex project to get involved in. Every project is always a lengthy process, and very little of the preperation is transferrible between projects.
I use both Windows and Linux, I use Windows more because it's pure gaming here. I like to think I have pretty decent programming skills. But that's just it, I enjoy programming, not system configuration.
Maybe you're just a genius and you can always do it perfectly. Build instructions seep into your mind like no other mortal. But that's not me, when I setup build environments, no matter what platform it is, I make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes take time to correct. All for the sake of contributing to a project which wants my help but doesn't want to make it easy for me to help them.
I love OSS. At least half the applications on my computer are OSS, I'm writing this from FireFox, in the background I have Eclipse and OpenOffice open too. But I still have some issues with OSS.
It's not the quality of what OSS projects produce, it's the difficulty of getting involved. It's like a rite of passage. You can't just open up a compiler, read the source, and start typing code. Getting started is a complicated process. There are numerous OSS projects I'd love to get involved in, but actually setting up my computer to have a functional environment is frequently more work than I can stomach. In comparison, designing and writing code is far easier than configuring my system to prepare to join an OSS project. Some people have said that it's no more difficult than understanding the system at a commercial project, but I disagree. Any commercial projects I've been involved in usually have their computers already configured so you can just start working, no break in stride.
For the most part, the thought of how much work it's going to be to get started keeps me from even taking the first step to get involved. I spent many hours just trying to configure my system to get involved with the Mozilla project, and didn't even get to the point I could review the code because of build problems. And of course real life intervenes so the amount of time I can spend at once trying to configure my system is limited.
Maybe this is a necessary hazing ritual, but in my opinion, the day that software developers don't also need to be System Configuration Experts, the progress of OSS will skyrocket. If there were simply an executable file that you run and it setup a complete environment where you can just start typing code and contribute, OSS would progress at light speed because much less capable developers could still contribute with small bug fixes, or even clarifying comments, adding comments, or just restructuring code modules.
Some people might think that's a bad idea because complete idiots could try to participate, but there's numerous ways around that like ranking/priority systems attached to code reviews (i.e. Positively ranked developers would have their code reviews take precedence over unknown developers, and trolls who not only didn't produce anything valuable, but even wasted reviewers time with complete nonsense pseudo code could have rankings knocked down so they wouldn't even be visible to review)
That's exactly the problem. Shielding the employees from lawsuits. At the same time you shield them against petty lawsuits, you shield them from legitimate lawsuits. No accountability. The employees are free to work with impunity. They can rape countries for resources (cheap labor, environmentally unsound harvesting), illegally dispose of toxic waste, and not have to answer for it, because the employees are shielded.
A corporation is, by definition, evil:
In other words, the only reason to form a corporation is to legally do things that their conscience and the law would otherwise prevent them from doing.
Whether or not Google has done anything wrong is debatable, but the fact remains, when they do something wrong, the owners can't be held liable. The ability to operate with impunity is evil, without regard to whether or not that ability is exploited.
This concept can be related to people not wanting certain parties to have nuclear weapons. Whether or not they'd use them is not the issue, it is simply evil to have the power.
So if being a geek has really become cool, why has interest in CS as a major dropped among incoming freshmen and women are still a minority in computer and engineering fields? I'll assume by "geek" you mean "nerd".
Being a nerd and being a CS major aren't mutually inclusive things. You can be a nerd with absolutely no interest in computers, and you can be a CS major without being a nerd. There are all kinds of nerds. Ham radio, model airplanes/vehicles, wrestling fanatics, movies, music, civil war buffs... A nerd can be anyone who pursues virtually any interest to a technical depth that your average person doesn't even dream of. I think being a nerd is all about embracing the scientific method and the vast array of scientific disciplines.
As for why being a nerd has become mainstream, it's simple. People like experts. If you have a question, the person you want answering that question is whoever has the most accurate information to offer you. Being a nerd is popular because the alternative is being mediocre or worse in your field. Being a nerd became mainstream when society realized people like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are sitting on top of piles of cash so big they can crush a man. Ask a girl who she wants to be with: the overweight has-been high school football quarterback nursing his 11th beer of the day, or the guy who's got NASA, Microsoft, and the DOD on different lines?
Yeah! Lets go all out! Antrhax, ebola, a little flesh-eating bacteria, throw in some influenze for good measure to balance out the portfolio. I mean these days skillsets are all about diversity, lets not short-change this guy by making him a one-trick pony. I mean, how is that going to sound in 25 years? "Hey, I cured HIV!" and everyone else is like "Yeah, we heard, big deal, what else can you do?"
That whole "no taking it apart" section of EULAs I always thought was horse crap. I should be able to disassemble, examine, rebuild, and reverse engineer ANYTHING I buy. I don't care if I want to analyze a loaf of bread, my VCR, or my software. Software should not be in a special category that specifies what I'm allowed to do with it after I buy it. If I want to use a toothbrush to scrub the toilet, godammit I will. If I want to use my finance software to keep track of my urine count I will. They can tell me how it was intended to be used, but don't tell me how I must use it.
Obviously that makes sense from a human point of view. But corporations aren't human. They have one goal, to make money. Telling a corporation it has moral obligations is figuratively, and literally, like talking to a brick wall.
We can't even point a finger at the person responsible for denying the request to switch to safer manufacturing methods, because the people who disapprove it most likely have no idea what they were disapproving. Director x denied an application for a xxx million dollar budget shift, and Director y denied a request to open a new facility that would have a, b, and c operationg costs and liabilities. No one told either of the directors the request was to open a new manufacturing plant to make things safer, and chances are it's not even his job to know what it was for, it's his job to analyze figures and decide if the bottom line matches their next quarter's projections.
I've actually read articles in the past (none of which I know a reference to) that stated it was a completely financial decision. It's not the cost of manufacturing that prevents them from switching processes, it's the fact that they're not legally allowed to advertise it even if they did produce a safer cigarette.
What's the point of making something safer if the government tells you that you're not allowed to tell people you did it? Would cars have airbags if there was a restriction against telling people they're installed?
You make it sound like someone went out and got someone pregnant for beer money. You don't actually fuck someone at a sperm bank. There's plenty of horrible parents in the worldI think people donating to sperm banks are somewhere at the end of the list of parenting problems.
Kids aren't changing the language, but an all-consuming pursuit for validation and individuality lead them to passionately believe that every act of self-expression is far more important than it really is. Slang and poor usage don't evolve the language. 50 years from now, the rules of formal grammar will most likely be identical. Kids will have adopted new slang, a new way to compose sentences so they sound "cool" to their ears, and even then they'll argue that they're helping evolve the language.
"Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine. Linux stands on its own merits. Anti-Microsoft sentiment comes from Microsoft's paranoia, which results in quotes like the one that had Bill Gates saying he'd put Linux in the Computer museum like he has other competitors." That's a barrel full of chuckles. Every single time there's any poll, study, or report about Linux, there's always an obligation to clarify "these results weren't skewed by anti-Microsoft sentiment". Unfortunately the person clarifying always goes off on an anti-Microsoft tangent.
If you're programming with the right mindset and correct methodology, Visual Studio no more rots your brain than your oven makes you forget how to cook.
Programming is all about the programmer's choices. When you confront a problem, you design a solution. The IDE (in this case Visual Studio) is meant to provide a number of easy ways to implement your solution. It shouldn't be controlling your code directly, you control how the IDE controls your code.
Whenever I use a new IDE, I probably spend more initial time setting options than writing code. It's the programmer's job to make the IDE work the way they need it to. If you're using it right, the IDE should pump out code exactly the way you intend it to.
Programming and Tool Usage are two seperate disciplines (although deeply intertwined). Visual Studio doesn't make a programmer stupid or make a programmer write bad code, a lack of knowledge about the tool at hand makes the person write bad code. I've witnessed just as many terrible JavaScripts written in a text editor as I've seen bad applications pumped out of Visual Studio.
When programming in C++, I use MSVC, because it's simply the most capable IDE/compiler available for developing applications for the Win32 platform. When I use it, I don't magically forget everything about data structures, algorithms, or object-orientation. When I've finished a program, every single line of code is precisely the way I intended it to be. If it weren't, then I wouldn't be programming I'd be haphazardly hacking my way to an end.
I think one way to come to grips with it is to try thinking about a seperation between an online identity and a character's name in a game. You can retain your online identity using it with accounts and such. But mentally speaking, when you cross the border into a game, your identity can be the one controlling the character, not the character itself.
That's how I've always viewed my identity. Maybe I'm Jekler here and everywhere else, but my character's names in games aren't usually named Jekler even if my account name/ID is.
Of course people should be proud of what they accomplish. But the pride can be internal. A father has pride in his kids when they learn to walk, but he doesn't call CNN.
I still use the beta versions and a lot of other pre-release versions of OSS, I think it's more of a perception thing. The versioning systems really aren't much of an indicator of progress, I see plenty of projects which go from version 0.1 to 0.9 in 6 months, then spend half a decade with 0.9 Beta 2.xxxx versions.
It's not that the software isn't usable, likeable, functional or anything like that. It's that the versioning is misleading. That Wine has reached 0.9 Beta doesn't tell us anything because there could still be a few dozen versions before it gets to 1.0. Even when it gets to version 1.0, it could likely be 1.0 beta 1, beta 2, rc1, rc2, etc.
I've got nothing against the software itself. I'm using Flock 0.5pre right now (although the actual version information also says it's 0.4.9, so even THEY aren't sure what version they're releasing)
It's not about the software and how it works, it's about this versioning system and announcements everytime a program makes it to a new arbitrary double-type number.
Meh, I have a very sour taste in my mouth from the time where "beta" has started to mean "release version". I dislike how things "officially" go to beta... then they officially enter the "beta 2" stage. Then release candidate 1, 2... then preview release... It's just a shame that every damn stage of development warrants an announcement and celebration, as opposed to opening the champagne when you actually hit production. That and the fact that every application has a few hundred version numbers. If AOL did nothing else right, I at least like their 1.0, 2.0, 3.0... versioning
Of course developers should celebrate internally on their progress. But along this path and there will be an announcement everytime we change a line of code.
"Hey everyone, my app has just entered pre-pre-pre-alpha! That is to say, I finished typing the include lines!"
I like that OSS makes so much progress, but I think it would be a benefit to us if they, publicly, treated it like any other application.
Yes, as much as marketing gurus have abused the word "paradigm", it is actually a word in the english dictionary, and is applicable when referring to a new type of World Wide Web (or at least what I'd define as being Web 2).
I was in the same boat. It was like 07:30 UTC or so, I was trying to play a game, but my ping was high and I'd intermittently get disconnected from it every few minutes. It was the weirdest outage I'd seen because I could get to some web sites, google, yahoo, excite (at first I thought it might just be cache so I went to excite which I don't think I've ever visited with this computer). But I couldn't get to slashdot, guildwars page, or update my antivirus. It was like my connection was down for anything except the major search engines. Even as of about 12:00 UTC my connection was still slow.
I'm in the same boat. I had no idea Quake 4 was out or that it was even being made. I'll have to check it out.
I don't know why the parent is modded a troll. I happen to agree that the vision of the internet falls short of its potential. In my opinion, Web 2.0 means a whole new paradigm, a revolution. Not the sort of thing that comes with fancier graphics, but the kind of thing where you suddenly realize there would have been no way to accomplish this with the previous version of the Web. It's like the day you realize that you use the internet every day, that the whole internet thing has become more than a luxury. Having an internet connected computer is as essential to relating to the modern world as having a TV was in the 80s and 90s. Web 2.0 will be the day where you go online and think "Wow, this is just amazing, I can do x, y, and z... none of that was even possible back with the first Web!"
It'll take a lot more than a slew of fancier looking applications with built-in-but-already-existing functions. I'm thinking a new protocol, new data compression methods, faster code. The kind of stuff you see on Firefly or Star Trek.
I strongly feel that patents should be tied to one's ability to implement the idea. Any jackass can sit around and think up ideas. I really don't like the "I thought of it first!" patent system in the U.S. If you're going to have a patent system, it should be based on who does it first not who sat on the toilet longer.
That reasoning isn't logical. Your reasoning works both ways, it neither proves or disproves anything.
You reason that:
Because no artist has announced getting money, artists do not get money as a result of the RIAA's proceedings.
By identical logic you could also say:
Because no artist has announced not getting money, artists do get money as a result of the RIAA's proceedings.
Your logic can be used against your own argument. It could be to argued that it makes more sense for an artist to announce that he has not been given the money he's due. If everything is going smoothly and he's getting paid as usual, why would he make an announcement to that effect?
If you already made up your own answer, why even ask a question? Whether or not you think they give money to artists doesn't change reality. I know we'd all love it if our personal beliefs actually shaped the fabric of the universe, but for most of us that doesn't work. For those of us living in reality, instead of making up answers, we research them.
Like I said, my opinion on it is neutral. I have no reason to believe they do give money to the artists, and I have no reason to believe they don't. Without facts, I don't form conclusions.