Offtopic but... This is the product of recession. People get so desperate for work that they don't care about ethics, so desperate to keep their job they don't ask questions. We're going to be seeing this type of research appearing for the next 5-6 months, stuff that has absolutely no value and is simply a small expenditure by big companies looking to hurt their competition and slow progress.
The nightmare for all manufacturers is longevity. The reason it's "cheap to be rich" is because products are produced and priced high with reliability in mind, this smart appliance angle is just another distraction from the enormous costs in terms of energy, materials and labour that goes into producing consumer products.
The first R in recycling is Reduce, but that's anti-capitalist so it gets chucked out. The second R is of course re-use... also anticapitalist so we're left with recycle.
(Rant)It would be great if this current environmentalism trend produced real results with consumers reducing their consumption but it won't because they're too stupid to follow the original guidelines. They just want that "holier than thou" feeling that comes with "sacrificing for the greater good".
We're going to solve global warming the way big problems are always solved, with big centralized solutions (example: the ships that belch sea-water into the air reflecting sunlight and lowering global temperatures by 2-3%)... in the meantime people will panic buying useless shit that makes them feel good about their contribution and which will be tossed in a wastebin even MORE quickly than the products they replace.(/Rant)
The problem with this model is that the current producers of public TV are funded by advertisers. Advertisers generate good will by pumping money into media and extract value by getting eyeballs onto their brands (and hopefully products).
This good will goes to crap when the people watching the show paid to produce it, fact I suspect many people would be upset about Megacorp taking credit when they dropped $50 to make Firefly 2 a reality... of course knowing that Megacorp dumped $30mln into a show might produce the good will we've forgotten for corporations. This is an ideal business model, it has amazing advantages in terms of being a fair way of producing content but has the problem of seriously hurting start up companies and helping the entrenched... valve would clearly have boat loads of money dropped all over it for whatever project but others might suffer.
Also investors would probably try to encourage development locally, maybe only supporting developers in their home countries, if you're paying their salaries directly it becomes more obvious just how much money you're sending overseas (probably into the U.S.) to produce software.
Becomes easier and easier the more you believe it projects it's power. The CIA, yup that's America, the Rand Corporation yup that's America, Microsoft that's America, Israel pretty much America.
China starts to look really reasonable when you consider how many of their "atrocities" they take responsibility for. America looks really scary when you consider how many of their "atrocities" "aren't really their responsibility".
Look at the lengths women go to not to have sex! It's UNBELIEVABLE! News flash ladies, head is better. Give it instead, throw yourself into relationships and eventually you'll hook someone you like!
And psychopathy, sociopathy, and a whole host of other "bad" conditions, I.E. conditions which cause people to lash out against society (that this sometimes the correct action is a counter-productive thought). Meanwhile the obvious examples of the unfairness of society are in our faces and the notion that strength is best demonstrated by using it's excess to help others falls by the wayside.
Consider the implications of "mutants" the creation of a seperate species within humanity, and it's last occurrence then consider that we've learned absolutely nothing from that experience.
Hello thms,
my name is Zeke. Yours is one of the most insightful posts I've read in a very long time. I hope you check your responses and see this, I can be contacted at zekebaker at googlemail dot c. I am not sure if I can be of any use to you but you seem to have a sane perspective in an increasingly troublesome world. Read through my comments and send me an email, I won't waste your time.
Cheers thms,
Zeke
Perhaps it will create an incentive for an efficient car pooling or bus system.
Nothing we've tried yet has encouraged people to work together in this area.
Then if people had anything INTERESTING to say it would be good, they'll probably just talk about the weather ("No existentialist, politics, business, philanthropy, philosophy, arts, or other meaningful talk... it's impolite!") and hate each other thinking that they have nothing in common with these poor bastards who can't afford cars! It would also allow the less wealthy (people who can't afford chaufeurs) to read or do something else useful during their commutes, while paying a nominal fee to someone to drive.
I think this system is ridiculous. Much more expensive to implement than it'll ever save anyone. However encouraging car pooling is a good idea, I think we should make it men only... nothing is harder on a good man than a scared woman. They get increasingly jumpy the more different they think you are, there's not much risk if you have the vehicle licence #... pretty difficult to register one of those illicitly, much harder than jumping a random person in an alley.
Do you notice those service fees on your cell phone bill? Those go to monitoring your usage, they should probably be divided based on some arbitrary formula surrounding how difficult it is to calculate your bill... but they are ironically flat.
I think people would be amazed what percentage of their costs are spent on simply trying to calculate "fair" pricing, (the price to install and monitor your water meter for example).
Consider tipping, "Server's have a hard job! They have to deal with assholes!" well yea, so now I'm paying so assholes can be assholes? Super DUPER!... it seems every time reasonable people encourage people to act in a better manner than they themselves act they get totally fucked... like smoking, we encourage other people not to smoke, allow ourselves to be pariahed and moved into segregated areas and then as fewer and people smoke we're attacked more and more.
Shrinkage vs increased security... good security helps because it sends theives to your competitors... so it's worth more than it's savings. Same with destroying your excess product instead of shipping it to dollar stores.
China was capitalist for thousands of years, and they remember hating it.
5.7 biotch! And 58% body muscle! Woot!
Tell ladies about the second one:) They'll be impressed! Gentlemen by the first one. Of course if you're a femme with 7% you're um... dead.
Actually the "warhead" concept is a little funky, basically there are several (as many as 21+) nuclear explosives in each "warhead" which seperate above a target and hit individually over a range of 20+ kilometres each explosion is usually quite small (in the order of 5-10mt), but that's not the point. The point is one "warhead" can tear up a country fairly efficiently... nuclear subs typically carry about 20-30...
I'm not some crazy war guy but I find this stuff interesting because it shows the mentality behind their creation and use, reading the themes behind the designs if you will.
They basically read: Our civilians will get no warning, their civilians will get no warning, all the civilians should die.
Actually Israel has blurred the line, they have launched UAVs with no human controlling fire, each of these could probably kill the majority of a city...
By doing this they violated the Geneva convention, just to supress a few dozen arabs with weapons from the 1960s... not to mention the dozens of civilians killed.
Meanwhile the world is distracted by Michael Jackson's death and the weak counter arguement of anti-semitism leveled against anyone who notices that Israel is becoming the biggest problem in the middle east, no notions of compromise whatsoever and no commitment to democracy or human rights.
The U.S. has already used UAVs to identify leaders in political protests, how long until those UAVs are armed and psychologists are employed to identify the real leaders before they can ever gain power.
We are past the point of no return, one person can almost supress all the others... certainly one person can kill the others... when will people learn that we are only seperated by 30,000 years... a bit more than 1000 generations... we're all cousins.
Face it - in the US it is still a tremendous advantage to be a white man.
Observe the ugly face of reverse racism.
Yes you are better liked by racists, but they're morons... I'm not sure that's an advantage. I'd rather have them insult me right away and demonstrate their ignorance then let me wait years to find out they are ignorant.
A lot of what is attributed to racism these days is just anger. If I get angry and I want to say the most hurtful thing I can think of sometimes it will be racial... hopefully I'd know about your real flaws before hating you but people are reactionary.
I am from Canada, white, colourblind and a believer in Eugenics (though I think we don't know enough to know what traits to breed for... we'll let the women figure it out:P). It bothers me that I can't have those opinions because of my ethnicity, it doesn't matter what other people who happened to share my ethnicity believed... I am an individual.
Statistics apply to groups, not to individuals... the solution to the opportunities provided by coming from money can only be solved by something resembling "Brave New World", yea we could go there... but lets not. I like meeting individuals.
they figure out how to remove the nukes buried in each others cities.
ICBM = $2,000,000,000. Bribing a border guard = $50.
Sigh... It's fine if there's only two countries with nukes, but when you New York just blows up and you don't know who did it... well, I'm not sure what you'd do.
Israel attacks Palestine with UAVs which fire without human control, the news talks about the massive amount of casualties... Slashdot talks about how cool robots are... Something got lost in the middle.
Here is my brief summary of the history of their success, I don't think their philosophy has changed much so we'll see what happens next.
They made HL1 off the Quake 2 Engine... when it was initially released the net code was terrible! On dialup pings of 600-800 were normal as there was A LOT of data being transfered back and forth.
Then they got crazy lucky, some brilliant person invented the "I shot you, move backwards" mechanic. Basically if I hit you on my machine the lag differential is compensated for.
Now this is a brilliant innovation, the guy who made this is responsible for most if not all of valve's online success. It should be obvious that this person whoever it is, should get A LOT of money, especially because valve is so unwilling to license this technology.
Then came Counter-Strike, now C-S is popular for several reasons, but what's important is that for a LONG time it was the biggest game in the world. It was created by a small team of modders and if it had been a commercial product they would have made millions... but it wasn't. It was put together by the community and they never got organized enough to sell out.
Que HL2, a great game (art design, balance, level design, dialog, plot, etc)... the engine got A LOT better and now they could release CS as a commercial product, which they did.
Now valve built some interesting tools into HL2 online, one of which allows them to track where players move or any other element of gameplay they choose(I can't find the article but you can find the valve TF2 maps colour coded by where players move). This tool is still in effect and they have used it to essentially break their successful game L4D.
For L4D Valve got in bed with Microsoft, who have made popular "Skill matching." This tool does what it says, it matches people based on previous success or failure and is a huge boon for someone trying to play deathmatch against people of approximately the same skill level (Obvious people will be broken up into tiers and be unable to improve deprived of examples of higher and lower skill levels [Yes, terrible players sometimes innovate]). These objections about the long term effects on players aside (I'm good, we're all good! Yaysy!) this system is unsuited for team VS because one player is known by the game to be the weakest link.
Further, L4D seems to be implementing a system where good players are forced to protect weaker players (this is the point of the game) because when something bad happens (which happens frequently in L4D) it is much worse on a good player than a bad player. Further public games have moved beyond the traditional system of simply changing the teams until a relatively proximate skill level is reached, now players who joining "games in progress" (a situation created when 1 of 3 situations occurs: Someone has to leave, Someone is voted off a team, Someone rage quits) are matched such that each team has good and bad players.
Assuming all players want to win this creates a situation where bad players are cycled endlessly constantly being kicked by the good players they are joining.
This has been "resolved" by hurting good players in several ways, first by implementing a scoring system which has nothing to do with the larger objectives of the game (getting from point A to B or preventing the other team from doing the same) which hurts morale as good players may have many less points than unskilled players who will resist the authority of experienced or skilled players based on the validity of these broken scores. Second by actually making it more difficult for skilled players through several subtle mechanations.
These to enforce a climate of mediocrity, under the guise of equality.
Now Valve, I'm sure the person who designed your net code is still working for you... the mindset which created such a brilliant idea and shared it precludes thoughts of exploitation. That person should be given suffic
AMD has consistently shown that they want to put a computer at every set of hands on the planet. Geode, PIC, OLPC. Now it would be nice if those computers had fast 3D graphics or GPU parralel processing, but that really seems like an easy way to waste the real power of computers.
I have loved many Nvidia products in the past, but stepping away from AMD seems like a poor choice on Nvidia's part.
Apt-Get isn't magic juice. It just solved the dependency issue Linux users were experiencing. This ongoing dependancy tree kludge (which Linux advocates coach as a feature because it assists with forking projects, which is of course useless to package usability) is still ongoing, most libraries are still only used by one package cementing the difference between OS and application. Sourceforge never addressed the fact that it needed a seperate system for users and developers otherwise it would have been the one stop open source shop.
Now if Apt had thought to centralize the config files, maybe wrapping a nice little gui around the more common options (Value sliders, colour palettes, arguement drop downs with little blurbs) it would have been a killer app.
My 10: 1. Windows, without which usability would have never even occured to programmers.
2. BBSs, hey let's get these computer thingies talking.
3. GIF Rendering, well it takes a lot of spae but sometimes an image IS worth a lot of words (millage may vary).
4. GCC, Machine Code, while awsome(!) is hard to read, and libraries would be kinda clunky. GCC just by virtue of having some standardization really brought programming to the masses.
5. IRC, Annonymity on the webs.
6. Microsoft Office(and precursors), Computers can put industries out of work... when was the last time you dictated something.
7. Napster, ideas and information can be free... with some caveats.
8. OpenGL, no no no... fuck YOU microsoft.
9. Databases, building on the difference between information and the concrete.
10. Software kludge, necessitating increases in consumer level computing and using capitalism against conservatives to empower individuals.
There's a bunch more core technologies, but too many of the stuff listed is just about tying shit together and making it work... not the end product or the development of new paradigms.
Electronic Voting: Effects and Pragmatic examination
Electronic voting makes voting more easy, which is useful in that it brings the possibility of direct democracy. Two groups oppose this: The first is selfish and wants to keep power concentrated (for either good or bad purposes). The second recognizes the prevalence of the first and knows that direct democracy leads to voting "the weak" off the island (caught up in an above pop TV refence)(with either good or bad results).
These two groups are constantly against direct democracy and proove an effective counterforce to it's an adoption.
There's not a lot of good reasons for direct democracy, choosing the policies to pursue is barely if at all simpler. For the decision chosen the Chinese proverb "If a million people say a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing" apply.
As a negative, people statistically tend to overreact and have several other group think "issues" with varying lifespans and often horrific results.
Slashdot Mirror
Offtopic but... This is the product of recession. People get so desperate for work that they don't care about ethics, so desperate to keep their job they don't ask questions. We're going to be seeing this type of research appearing for the next 5-6 months, stuff that has absolutely no value and is simply a small expenditure by big companies looking to hurt their competition and slow progress.
The nightmare for all manufacturers is longevity. The reason it's "cheap to be rich" is because products are produced and priced high with reliability in mind, this smart appliance angle is just another distraction from the enormous costs in terms of energy, materials and labour that goes into producing consumer products.
The first R in recycling is Reduce, but that's anti-capitalist so it gets chucked out. The second R is of course re-use... also anticapitalist so we're left with recycle.
(Rant)It would be great if this current environmentalism trend produced real results with consumers reducing their consumption but it won't because they're too stupid to follow the original guidelines. They just want that "holier than thou" feeling that comes with "sacrificing for the greater good".
We're going to solve global warming the way big problems are always solved, with big centralized solutions (example: the ships that belch sea-water into the air reflecting sunlight and lowering global temperatures by 2-3%)... in the meantime people will panic buying useless shit that makes them feel good about their contribution and which will be tossed in a wastebin even MORE quickly than the products they replace.(/Rant)
Stove/Oven. Not if you want to have dinner.
This seems like the opposite of a fridge, you want heat fridge wants to remove heat... 2 birds one stone.
There's a fortune in environmentalism to be made here for the first person to solve this...
The problem with this model is that the current producers of public TV are funded by advertisers. Advertisers generate good will by pumping money into media and extract value by getting eyeballs onto their brands (and hopefully products).
This good will goes to crap when the people watching the show paid to produce it, fact I suspect many people would be upset about Megacorp taking credit when they dropped $50 to make Firefly 2 a reality... of course knowing that Megacorp dumped $30mln into a show might produce the good will we've forgotten for corporations. This is an ideal business model, it has amazing advantages in terms of being a fair way of producing content but has the problem of seriously hurting start up companies and helping the entrenched... valve would clearly have boat loads of money dropped all over it for whatever project but others might suffer.
Also investors would probably try to encourage development locally, maybe only supporting developers in their home countries, if you're paying their salaries directly it becomes more obvious just how much money you're sending overseas (probably into the U.S.) to produce software.
Becomes easier and easier the more you believe it projects it's power. The CIA, yup that's America, the Rand Corporation yup that's America, Microsoft that's America, Israel pretty much America.
China starts to look really reasonable when you consider how many of their "atrocities" they take responsibility for. America looks really scary when you consider how many of their "atrocities" "aren't really their responsibility".
Look at the lengths women go to not to have sex! It's UNBELIEVABLE! News flash ladies, head is better. Give it instead, throw yourself into relationships and eventually you'll hook someone you like!
So fucking stupid, my GOD!
And psychopathy, sociopathy, and a whole host of other "bad" conditions, I.E. conditions which cause people to lash out against society (that this sometimes the correct action is a counter-productive thought). Meanwhile the obvious examples of the unfairness of society are in our faces and the notion that strength is best demonstrated by using it's excess to help others falls by the wayside.
Consider the implications of "mutants" the creation of a seperate species within humanity, and it's last occurrence then consider that we've learned absolutely nothing from that experience.
Hello thms, my name is Zeke. Yours is one of the most insightful posts I've read in a very long time. I hope you check your responses and see this, I can be contacted at zekebaker at googlemail dot c. I am not sure if I can be of any use to you but you seem to have a sane perspective in an increasingly troublesome world. Read through my comments and send me an email, I won't waste your time. Cheers thms, Zeke
Psychology 101, Life IS suffering. By continuing to live you are demonstrating your own insanity, suicides are dangerously close to sane.
This is based upon the idea that your stated intention is to "make the world a better place" or "to achieve happiness" the outcome is the same.
Shove your normal agenda UP YOUR ASS. Control your jealousy of people who ARE able to accept themselves and express themselves.
Perhaps it will create an incentive for an efficient car pooling or bus system.
Nothing we've tried yet has encouraged people to work together in this area.
Then if people had anything INTERESTING to say it would be good, they'll probably just talk about the weather ("No existentialist, politics, business, philanthropy, philosophy, arts, or other meaningful talk... it's impolite!") and hate each other thinking that they have nothing in common with these poor bastards who can't afford cars! It would also allow the less wealthy (people who can't afford chaufeurs) to read or do something else useful during their commutes, while paying a nominal fee to someone to drive.
I think this system is ridiculous. Much more expensive to implement than it'll ever save anyone. However encouraging car pooling is a good idea, I think we should make it men only... nothing is harder on a good man than a scared woman. They get increasingly jumpy the more different they think you are, there's not much risk if you have the vehicle licence #... pretty difficult to register one of those illicitly, much harder than jumping a random person in an alley.
Lol at Americans
Do you notice those service fees on your cell phone bill? Those go to monitoring your usage, they should probably be divided based on some arbitrary formula surrounding how difficult it is to calculate your bill... but they are ironically flat.
I think people would be amazed what percentage of their costs are spent on simply trying to calculate "fair" pricing, (the price to install and monitor your water meter for example).
Consider tipping, "Server's have a hard job! They have to deal with assholes!" well yea, so now I'm paying so assholes can be assholes? Super DUPER!... it seems every time reasonable people encourage people to act in a better manner than they themselves act they get totally fucked... like smoking, we encourage other people not to smoke, allow ourselves to be pariahed and moved into segregated areas and then as fewer and people smoke we're attacked more and more.
Shrinkage vs increased security... good security helps because it sends theives to your competitors... so it's worth more than it's savings. Same with destroying your excess product instead of shipping it to dollar stores.
China was capitalist for thousands of years, and they remember hating it.
5.7 biotch! And 58% body muscle! Woot! :) They'll be impressed! Gentlemen by the first one. Of course if you're a femme with 7% you're um... dead.
Tell ladies about the second one
Actually the "warhead" concept is a little funky, basically there are several (as many as 21+) nuclear explosives in each "warhead" which seperate above a target and hit individually over a range of 20+ kilometres each explosion is usually quite small (in the order of 5-10mt), but that's not the point. The point is one "warhead" can tear up a country fairly efficiently... nuclear subs typically carry about 20-30...
I'm not some crazy war guy but I find this stuff interesting because it shows the mentality behind their creation and use, reading the themes behind the designs if you will.
They basically read: Our civilians will get no warning, their civilians will get no warning, all the civilians should die.
Actually Israel has blurred the line, they have launched UAVs with no human controlling fire, each of these could probably kill the majority of a city...
By doing this they violated the Geneva convention, just to supress a few dozen arabs with weapons from the 1960s... not to mention the dozens of civilians killed.
Meanwhile the world is distracted by Michael Jackson's death and the weak counter arguement of anti-semitism leveled against anyone who notices that Israel is becoming the biggest problem in the middle east, no notions of compromise whatsoever and no commitment to democracy or human rights.
The U.S. has already used UAVs to identify leaders in political protests, how long until those UAVs are armed and psychologists are employed to identify the real leaders before they can ever gain power.
We are past the point of no return, one person can almost supress all the others... certainly one person can kill the others... when will people learn that we are only seperated by 30,000 years... a bit more than 1000 generations... we're all cousins.
Face it - in the US it is still a tremendous advantage to be a white man.
:P). It bothers me that I can't have those opinions because of my ethnicity, it doesn't matter what other people who happened to share my ethnicity believed... I am an individual.
Observe the ugly face of reverse racism.
Yes you are better liked by racists, but they're morons... I'm not sure that's an advantage. I'd rather have them insult me right away and demonstrate their ignorance then let me wait years to find out they are ignorant.
A lot of what is attributed to racism these days is just anger. If I get angry and I want to say the most hurtful thing I can think of sometimes it will be racial... hopefully I'd know about your real flaws before hating you but people are reactionary.
I am from Canada, white, colourblind and a believer in Eugenics (though I think we don't know enough to know what traits to breed for... we'll let the women figure it out
Statistics apply to groups, not to individuals... the solution to the opportunities provided by coming from money can only be solved by something resembling "Brave New World", yea we could go there... but lets not. I like meeting individuals.
they figure out how to remove the nukes buried in each others cities.
ICBM = $2,000,000,000. Bribing a border guard = $50.
Sigh... It's fine if there's only two countries with nukes, but when you New York just blows up and you don't know who did it... well, I'm not sure what you'd do.
Robots with Polaris Missiles?! YAY!
Israel attacks Palestine with UAVs which fire without human control, the news talks about the massive amount of casualties... Slashdot talks about how cool robots are... Something got lost in the middle.
That's what women thought... now cosmetics are a trillion dollar industry.
No Fucking thanks!
Read a book, your conversation will be more appealing.
This is called, "Normal."
Nice Manipulation = Normal.
Angry Honest Confrontation = NOT NORMAL.
Valve made some AMAZING games in HL1 and HL2.
Here is my brief summary of the history of their success, I don't think their philosophy has changed much so we'll see what happens next.
They made HL1 off the Quake 2 Engine... when it was initially released the net code was terrible! On dialup pings of 600-800 were normal as there was A LOT of data being transfered back and forth.
Then they got crazy lucky, some brilliant person invented the "I shot you, move backwards" mechanic. Basically if I hit you on my machine the lag differential is compensated for.
Now this is a brilliant innovation, the guy who made this is responsible for most if not all of valve's online success. It should be obvious that this person whoever it is, should get A LOT of money, especially because valve is so unwilling to license this technology.
Then came Counter-Strike, now C-S is popular for several reasons, but what's important is that for a LONG time it was the biggest game in the world. It was created by a small team of modders and if it had been a commercial product they would have made millions... but it wasn't. It was put together by the community and they never got organized enough to sell out.
Que HL2, a great game (art design, balance, level design, dialog, plot, etc)... the engine got A LOT better and now they could release CS as a commercial product, which they did.
Now valve built some interesting tools into HL2 online, one of which allows them to track where players move or any other element of gameplay they choose(I can't find the article but you can find the valve TF2 maps colour coded by where players move). This tool is still in effect and they have used it to essentially break their successful game L4D.
For L4D Valve got in bed with Microsoft, who have made popular "Skill matching." This tool does what it says, it matches people based on previous success or failure and is a huge boon for someone trying to play deathmatch against people of approximately the same skill level (Obvious people will be broken up into tiers and be unable to improve deprived of examples of higher and lower skill levels [Yes, terrible players sometimes innovate]). These objections about the long term effects on players aside (I'm good, we're all good! Yaysy!) this system is unsuited for team VS because one player is known by the game to be the weakest link.
Further, L4D seems to be implementing a system where good players are forced to protect weaker players (this is the point of the game) because when something bad happens (which happens frequently in L4D) it is much worse on a good player than a bad player. Further public games have moved beyond the traditional system of simply changing the teams until a relatively proximate skill level is reached, now players who joining "games in progress" (a situation created when 1 of 3 situations occurs: Someone has to leave, Someone is voted off a team, Someone rage quits) are matched such that each team has good and bad players.
Assuming all players want to win this creates a situation where bad players are cycled endlessly constantly being kicked by the good players they are joining.
This has been "resolved" by hurting good players in several ways, first by implementing a scoring system which has nothing to do with the larger objectives of the game (getting from point A to B or preventing the other team from doing the same) which hurts morale as good players may have many less points than unskilled players who will resist the authority of experienced or skilled players based on the validity of these broken scores. Second by actually making it more difficult for skilled players through several subtle mechanations.
These to enforce a climate of mediocrity, under the guise of equality.
Now Valve, I'm sure the person who designed your net code is still working for you... the mindset which created such a brilliant idea and shared it precludes thoughts of exploitation. That person should be given suffic
AMD = Value.
SLI = Not Value.
AMD has consistently shown that they want to put a computer at every set of hands on the planet. Geode, PIC, OLPC. Now it would be nice if those computers had fast 3D graphics or GPU parralel processing, but that really seems like an easy way to waste the real power of computers.
I have loved many Nvidia products in the past, but stepping away from AMD seems like a poor choice on Nvidia's part.
Could it also be hardiness? Fingers seem like an obvious avenue for infection.
Apt-Get isn't magic juice. It just solved the dependency issue Linux users were experiencing. This ongoing dependancy tree kludge (which Linux advocates coach as a feature because it assists with forking projects, which is of course useless to package usability) is still ongoing, most libraries are still only used by one package cementing the difference between OS and application. Sourceforge never addressed the fact that it needed a seperate system for users and developers otherwise it would have been the one stop open source shop.
Now if Apt had thought to centralize the config files, maybe wrapping a nice little gui around the more common options (Value sliders, colour palettes, arguement drop downs with little blurbs) it would have been a killer app.
My 10:
1. Windows, without which usability would have never even occured to programmers.
2. BBSs, hey let's get these computer thingies talking.
3. GIF Rendering, well it takes a lot of spae but sometimes an image IS worth a lot of words (millage may vary).
4. GCC, Machine Code, while awsome(!) is hard to read, and libraries would be kinda clunky. GCC just by virtue of having some standardization really brought programming to the masses.
5. IRC, Annonymity on the webs.
6. Microsoft Office(and precursors), Computers can put industries out of work... when was the last time you dictated something.
7. Napster, ideas and information can be free... with some caveats.
8. OpenGL, no no no... fuck YOU microsoft.
9. Databases, building on the difference between information and the concrete.
10. Software kludge, necessitating increases in consumer level computing and using capitalism against conservatives to empower individuals.
There's a bunch more core technologies, but too many of the stuff listed is just about tying shit together and making it work... not the end product or the development of new paradigms.
Can't you simply output some CSS2 and do a web based GUI? That seems to be the best solution to a lot of these programming issues.
Electronic Voting: Effects and Pragmatic examination
Electronic voting makes voting more easy, which is useful in that it brings the possibility of direct democracy.
Two groups oppose this: The first is selfish and wants to keep power concentrated (for either good or bad purposes). The second recognizes the prevalence of the first and knows that direct democracy leads to voting "the weak" off the island (caught up in an above pop TV refence)(with either good or bad results).
These two groups are constantly against direct democracy and proove an effective counterforce to it's an adoption.
There's not a lot of good reasons for direct democracy, choosing the policies to pursue is barely if at all simpler. For the decision chosen the Chinese proverb "If a million people say a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing" apply.
As a negative, people statistically tend to overreact and have several other group think "issues" with varying lifespans and often horrific results.