Regarding the hypothetical ad-ripping machine and commercial-skipping VCR, the publishers and networks certainly _would_ care. When the assumption that every magazine read by a consumer also contains ads is nullified, circulation figures will become meaningless, and the advertisers will stop buying.
If lots of people started blocking TV commercials, the Nielsen ratings most definitely _would_ take it into account.
Similar situation here. They're not really worried about people taking their own content, they're worried about people taking it without the lucrative ads that go with it. And if the advertisers conclude that there's a lot of deep linking going on, they'll stop advertising.
I've always been baffled at the multiple contradictory definitions of adulthood in the United States. Most countries agree that only adults should be legally allowed to:
Vote Marry/have sex Operate a motorized vehicle Join the military Consume alcohol and tobacco View "adult" material
Well then, wouldn't it make sense to simply say, "OK, at this age, you are legally an adult, and are allowed to do all of the following"? I think practically every civilized country does just that, and they set the age sensibly at eighteen.
Except the United States. Sixteen to drive, seventeen to join the army, eighteen to vote and smoke, twenty-one to drink. It's completely absurd.
And the worse ones are at the ends of the scale. I think if the driving age and drinking age were both set to eighteen, it would go a long way to reduce drunk driving among the young.
I agree with your point that the main problem is lack of understanding of how to wisely use what we do have, and that if that were possible, most of the current global problems -- in their current state -- could be solved.
But there are limits -- absolute limits. I don't think anyone would reasonably argue that the planet earth could sustain a population of fifty billion humans, without destroying practically the whole ecology or else drastically cutting back the material lifestyle of the industrialized world. No matter how efficient society gets, no matter how advanced technology gets, there is only so much raw matter to go around. And getting back to the original point, having more than four children in this day and age and society isn't helping in this regard.
If "sophism" means believing that imperfect scientists and politicians, studying the world that they live in, are more qualified to solve modern mankind's complex problems than wise old men from thousands of years ago, I'm a sophist.
Hope? Let's not confuse hope with complacency. I think that taking an informed and realistic, perhaps even pessimistic and grim, view of the matter, and using that as motivation to improve things, goes a lot farther than glibly throwing out a scripture verse and trusting God to take care of things somehow.
Oh, give me a break. In case you haven't noticed, we are six months away from the twenty-first century, and the earth ain't getting any bigger. Pardon me for being facetious, but I don't think even God forsaw a world population of _six_billion_ people (within a few decades from now). I can assure you the apostles and the writers of the Bible didn't.
Have you ever been outside of the United States and the industrialized "first world"? Spend some time in East Africa and tell the locals that food shortages are a lie. Go to India and tell them overpopulation is "120% false". These aren't lies, they are _truths_ perpetuated by those who love and worship money, and those who are too complacent to realize their own complicity. (Yes, that includes myself and almost every other American.)
Here's some "sophist" propaganda you might find interesting. I invite you to participate.
> it should be a privilege that one elects to > exercise, not a 'right' that is imposed by the > system.
A privilege is something you must earn, which allows you to voluntarily do something. Driving is a privilege (not a right, as many Americans might think!)
A right is something which you innately have, which allows you to voluntarily do something. Voting is a right.
A responsibility/obligation is something which is imposed on you (either voluntarily or involuntarily) which requires you to do something even if you don't want to. Obeying the law is a responsibility.
Rights can't be imposed. Obligations can't be waived.
Just give people a little financial incentive and they'll be lining up to get national - no, INTERnational - ID cards. Multiple ones, in fact.
Because we already have such a thing. No single number, but trackable nonetheless. Without it, you can't "live a normal life and do the everyday things most Americans take for granted", as the Wired article says. And with far more intrusive and pernicious uses and abuses available to those who issue them, who are less accountable and more power-hungry than the goverment could ever be.
You have some sort of state-issued ID card, though, don't you? Same thing. Driver's licence == Identification.
Or so we assume. A few years ago in Washington state some local banks said they would stop accepting state DMV-issued identification cards as valid ID. Only actual driver's licenses were acceptable. Apparently they thought that anyone who doesn't drive a car (such as myself at the time) was automatically less trustworthy. Even though it's possible to get a driver's licence which is designated as "invalid for identification". (We don't know who you really are, but sure, you can drive...) Whereas a non-license ID card requires positive proof of identity (passport, birth cert., etc.) to obtain.
Fortunately, people (many senior citizens, for example) opposed the idea, and the banks dropped it.
BTW, I don't think the DMV has your fingerprint. I know I never gave them mine.
> I like to build my computers from the ground > up and compile my kernel to the exact > specifications that I like.
So you fabricate your own chips? Wow.
> I'm not saying that the iMac and iBook don't > have their places I'm just saying they are not > for me.
Yes, I know that. We all know that. Apple knows that. You don't want to buy an iBook. Well guess what, Apple doesn't want to sell iBooks to Slashdot geeks like you/us either! It sounds as if you think there's something wrong with that.
> If you think I'm on a high horse let me set you > straight. The approach I take is hard. I > spend many frustrated hours trying to > figure out simple things that Mac's do > automatically. But > when I'm done I am happy because I have learned > how the computer actually works.
Fine. Just realize that for the typical iBook user, and most computer users in general, who don't care to learn how the computer actually works and have different interests, a "hard approach" with "many frustrated hours" is synonymous with "ridiculous waste of time."
The same thing actually happened to me the first time I used a Mac.Until then the only GUI I had used was the Amiga. (This was over ten years ago, so Windows was still pretty much nonexistent).
In the Amiga Workbench GUI, you renamed a file by selecting the icon, then selecting the File/Rename command.You got a dialog with an edit field, and in it you typed the new name.That was what I was used to, that was what I expected to find on the Mac, and that's what I _should_have_ found, because that's actually consistent with every other "non-dragging" file operation, Mac or Amiga. You select the icon, then you select a command from the File menu.
When I discovered that you could actually edit the file label on the Mac,I was impressed, sure,but it didn't strike me as "intuitive" within the context of the Mac GUI. It still doesn't.
Why? Because there is absolutely no indication that an icon's text label is editable until you double-click it. Everywhere else, editable text fields have clear visual cues (i.e., frames). And _nowhere_ else can you double-click a seemingly static text field and make it editable.
Yes, overall,this scheme is a good thing (Win95 copied it), and once you learn it, it's so simple that you'll never forget it. But for the beginning user (which every single CS student - yes, you too - was at one time), tiny inconsistencies like that can be puzzling roadblocks.
Note that even the oh-so-advanced KDE doesn't let you rename icon labels directly.
Do they even use canned (prerecorded) laughter on sitcoms any more? I thought all current sitcoms are taped in front of a studio audience, and so the laughter is real.
Or are you still watching "Bewitched" and "M.A.S.H."?
I found Lucas' argument that Jar-Jar doesn't speak like a "real Jamaican" ("I know real Jamaicans and they don't talk like that") interesting. And a cop-out.
The trade federation aliens whom everyone accuses of sounding Japanese didn't sound like real Japanese either (and as a native speaker, I should know).
But what they did most definitely sound like is the Hollywood stereotype of Japanese, that irritating fake Asian accent used over and over in movies and sitcoms by non-native speaker actors. (Geez, isn't there a single native speaker of Japanese in the entire Screen Actors' Guild??) There's no way an accent like that is natural to the actor (because no one really speaks like that), nor could it be coincidental.
I'm not going to jump to conclusions that Lucas is racist, or is trying to ridicule an ethnic group, but to deny that the accents (both Jar-Jar and the trade feds) were deliberate and to pass it off as coincidence is just disingenuous.
And as for the rest of the interview, man, what a whiner!
Yes! Support brick & mortar, independent bookstores!
Powell's in Portland, U-Bookstore and Elliott Bay in Seattle.
Re:What about underweight hackers?!
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 1
I'm underweight (60kg at 173cm), but I get enough exercise (lots of bicycling) and have a very healthy diet (mostly vegetarian). I shudder at the sight of co-workers who start off the morning with a Coke or eat McDonald's every day.
Anyway, I had a minor epiphany the other day about the stereotypical hacker's (bad) diet. I was installing TurboLinux 3.0J on my Toshiba laptop, it was about 10 in the evening, and I still hadn't eaten dinner (which isn't that unusual). I was really getting hungry, but I was too absorbed with the computer to do anything about it (also not unusual). But the thing is, I rarely consume junk food, and _never_ buy any or have any sort of snacks in my kitchen. When I make dinner, it usually takes almost an hour, since I enjoy cooking and don't have a microwave oven, so it involves cooking rice or boiling pasta and preparing the rest of the stuff too.
I was getting really hungry, and I thought, "what do all those other hackers do in a situation like this", and I realized that most of them would open a bag of potato chips or drive down to McDonald's and call it dinner, and get on with the hacking.
I realized that I could never become a true uber-wizard hacker as long as I valued my health. (Hunger always wins.) Or at least until I got a wife/live-in GF who would either a) cook for me, or b) yell at me to pull myself away from the damn computer and start cooking dinner or else!
I actually prefer b).
Re:Why Americans are fat!
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 1
There was a fascinating "Frontline" documentary on PBS a few months ago on obesity among Americans and its causes. Yes, laziness (automobile addiction) contributes to it, but the main thing was, as one doctor put it, "a toxic diet". It's junk food, which is relentlessly marketed to Americans starting at childhood, combined with some people's lack of willpower, and in a few cases, yes, genetic factors, that causes most obesity.
What's disturbing is that American junk food, along with crappy music and all the rest of American pop culture, is what people in developing coutries crave, and the mega-corporations are only too glad to sell it to them.
Not that it makes any difference in the final percentage or the point you're making, but you might want to replace the term "Earth" with something like "industrialized countries of the world" and adjust the numbers accordingly. Start with, say, 2 billion instead of six billion.
It just bugs me when people assume that North America/Western Europe/Japan etc. is in any way representative of the way the vast majority of people on this planet live.
Point 1: Sure, but it doesn't bother me. I guess I'm never frantically mousing around all the time. Moving my hand an extra 5 centimeters is no big deal.
Point 2: Clutter isn't a problem with the interface. It's a problem with the user.;)
Point 3: I must be one of the 10 Windows users who actually does place frequently used apps in proper folders in the Start Menu. And the only shortcuts I place on the desktop are apps that I can drag and drop text or multimedia files onto (plus a binary file editor for everything else). Seeing a zillion icons on a Windows desktop really irritates me.
Point 4: Agreed. But I wouldn't say that WindowMaker's menu configuration (the included one and wmakerconf) is any better in its current state.
One thing bothered me about those screenshots: the sloppy text descriptions. In particular, the "Select Root Partition" screen includes the sentence "It contains the core Linux system... Therefore it cannot really be big enough."
I could easily imagine a non-English speaker misinterpreting that to mean "Your disk is not big enough to hold the core Linux system".
Going back and reading my previous post, I see that I kind of missed your point about "anything less than free", since in this case it might it would actually cost extra to limit access, and that's certainly a bad idea.Perhaps if you had phrased it "I refuse to pay MORE money to get LESS..."
On the other hand, considering the cost of fighting silly lawsuits and that would no doubt emerge from unfettered access...
So don't flame me too strongly about that stuff.
I still do react strongly against the "not with my tax money" mantra, though. And I do think a voluntary, bilateral, server-side filtering scheme is a good idea. And I still think the page-ripping analogy is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
James Cameron on Mars? Good, let's leave him there!
Regarding the hypothetical ad-ripping machine and commercial-skipping VCR, the publishers and networks certainly _would_ care. When the assumption that every magazine read by a consumer also contains ads is nullified, circulation figures will become meaningless, and the advertisers will stop buying.
If lots of people started blocking TV commercials, the Nielsen ratings most definitely _would_ take it into account.
Similar situation here. They're not really worried about people taking their own content, they're worried about people taking it without the lucrative ads that go with it. And if the advertisers conclude that there's a lot of deep linking going on, they'll stop advertising.
Yes, but an intoxicated person is far more likely to accidentally harm or kill others than a smoking person, especially if driving a car.
Of course, a smoking person is more likely to cause long-term damage to the health of nearby people through second-hand smoke.
Like I said before, they should all be the same age.
I've always been baffled at the multiple contradictory definitions of adulthood in the United States. Most countries agree that only adults should be legally allowed to:
Vote
Marry/have sex
Operate a motorized vehicle
Join the military
Consume alcohol and tobacco
View "adult" material
Well then, wouldn't it make sense to simply say, "OK, at this age, you are legally an adult, and are allowed to do all of the following"? I think practically every civilized country does just that, and they set the age sensibly at eighteen.
Except the United States. Sixteen to drive, seventeen to join the army, eighteen to vote and smoke, twenty-one to drink. It's completely absurd.
And the worse ones are at the ends of the scale. I think if the driving age and drinking age were both set to eighteen, it would go a long way to reduce drunk driving among the young.
I agree with your point that the main problem is lack of understanding of how to wisely use what we do have, and that if that were possible, most of the current global problems -- in their current state -- could be solved.
But there are limits -- absolute limits. I don't think anyone would reasonably argue that the planet earth could sustain a population of fifty billion humans, without destroying practically the whole ecology or else drastically cutting back the material lifestyle of the industrialized world. No matter how efficient society gets, no matter how advanced technology gets, there is only so much raw matter to go around. And getting back to the original point, having more than four children in this day and age and society isn't helping in this regard.
If "sophism" means believing that imperfect scientists and politicians, studying the world that they live in, are more qualified to solve modern mankind's complex problems than wise old men from thousands of years ago, I'm a sophist.
Hope? Let's not confuse hope with complacency. I think that taking an informed and realistic, perhaps even pessimistic and grim, view of the matter, and using that as motivation to improve things, goes a lot farther than glibly throwing out a scripture verse and trusting God to take care of things somehow.
Umm, Janus head, what's that??
:)
Don't forget, not only are we Americans morally confused, we're also culturally illiterate...
Oh, give me a break. In case you haven't noticed, we are six months away from the twenty-first century, and the earth ain't getting any bigger. Pardon me for being facetious, but I don't think even God forsaw a world population of _six_billion_ people (within a few decades from now). I can assure you the apostles and the writers of the Bible didn't.
Have you ever been outside of the United States and the industrialized "first world"? Spend some time in East Africa and tell the locals that food shortages are a lie. Go to India and tell them overpopulation is "120% false". These aren't lies, they are _truths_ perpetuated by those who love and worship money, and those who are too complacent to realize their own complicity. (Yes, that includes myself and almost every other American.)
Here's some "sophist" propaganda you might find interesting. I invite you to participate.
> it should be a privilege that one elects to
> exercise, not a 'right' that is imposed by the
> system.
A privilege is something you must earn, which allows you to voluntarily do something. Driving is a privilege (not a right, as many Americans might think!)
A right is something which you innately have, which allows you to voluntarily do something.
Voting is a right.
A responsibility/obligation is something which is imposed on you (either voluntarily or involuntarily) which requires you to do something even if you don't want to. Obeying the law is a responsibility.
Rights can't be imposed. Obligations can't be waived.
Bah. It's already here.
Just give people a little financial incentive and they'll be lining up to get national - no, INTERnational - ID cards. Multiple ones, in fact.
Because we already have such a thing. No single number, but trackable nonetheless. Without it, you can't "live a normal life and do the everyday things most Americans take for granted", as the Wired article says. And with far more intrusive and pernicious uses and abuses available to those who issue them, who are less accountable and more power-hungry than the goverment could ever be.
It's called a credit card.
You have some sort of state-issued ID card, though, don't you? Same thing. Driver's licence == Identification.
Or so we assume. A few years ago in Washington state some local banks said they would stop accepting state DMV-issued identification cards as valid ID. Only actual driver's licenses were acceptable. Apparently they thought that anyone who doesn't drive a car (such as myself at the time) was automatically less trustworthy. Even though it's possible to get a driver's licence which is designated as "invalid for identification". (We don't know who you really are, but sure, you can drive...) Whereas a non-license ID card requires positive proof of identity (passport, birth cert., etc.) to obtain.
Fortunately, people (many senior citizens, for example) opposed the idea, and the banks dropped it.
BTW, I don't think the DMV has your fingerprint. I know I never gave them mine.
> I like to build my computers from the ground
> up and compile my kernel to the exact
> specifications that I like.
So you fabricate your own chips? Wow.
> I'm not saying that the iMac and iBook don't
> have their places I'm just saying they are not > for me.
Yes, I know that. We all know that. Apple knows that. You don't want to buy an iBook. Well guess what, Apple doesn't want to sell iBooks to Slashdot geeks like you/us either! It sounds as if you think there's something wrong with that.
> If you think I'm on a high horse let me set you
> straight. The approach I take is hard. I
> spend many frustrated hours trying to
> figure out simple things that Mac's do
> automatically. But
> when I'm done I am happy because I have learned
> how the computer actually works.
Fine. Just realize that for the typical iBook user, and most computer users in general, who don't care to learn how the computer actually works and have different interests, a "hard approach" with "many frustrated hours" is synonymous with "ridiculous waste of time."
The whole point of the Mac was to eliminate the need to RTFM. And if you had to RTFM, the software was designed badly.
Gross simplification, but nonetheless...
Whoa, hold it there, flamers.
The same thing actually happened to me the first time I used a Mac.Until then the only GUI I had used was the Amiga. (This was over ten years ago, so Windows was still pretty much nonexistent).
In the Amiga Workbench GUI, you renamed a file by selecting the icon, then selecting the File/Rename command.You got a dialog with an edit field, and in it you typed the new name.That was what I was used to, that was what I expected to find on the Mac, and that's what I _should_have_ found, because that's actually consistent with every other "non-dragging" file operation, Mac or Amiga. You select the icon, then you select a command from the File menu.
When I discovered that you could actually edit the file label on the Mac,I was impressed, sure,but it didn't strike me as "intuitive" within the context of the Mac GUI. It still doesn't.
Why? Because there is absolutely no indication that an icon's text label is editable until you double-click it. Everywhere else, editable text fields have clear visual cues (i.e., frames). And _nowhere_ else can you double-click a seemingly static text field and make it editable.
Yes, overall,this scheme is a good thing (Win95 copied it), and once you learn it, it's so simple that you'll never forget it. But for the beginning user (which every single CS student - yes, you too - was at one time), tiny inconsistencies like that can be puzzling roadblocks.
Note that even the oh-so-advanced KDE doesn't let you rename icon labels directly.
Do they even use canned (prerecorded) laughter on sitcoms any more? I thought all current sitcoms are taped in front of a studio audience, and so the laughter is real.
Or are you still watching "Bewitched" and "M.A.S.H."?
I found Lucas' argument that Jar-Jar doesn't speak like a "real Jamaican" ("I know real Jamaicans and they don't talk like that") interesting. And a cop-out.
The trade federation aliens whom everyone accuses of sounding Japanese didn't sound like real Japanese either (and as a native speaker, I should know).
But what they did most definitely sound like is the Hollywood stereotype of Japanese, that irritating fake Asian accent used over and over in movies and sitcoms by non-native speaker actors. (Geez, isn't there a single native speaker of Japanese in the entire Screen Actors' Guild??) There's no way an accent like that is natural to the actor (because no one really speaks like that), nor could it be coincidental.
I'm not going to jump to conclusions that Lucas is racist, or is trying to ridicule an ethnic group, but to deny that the accents (both Jar-Jar and the trade feds) were deliberate and to pass it off as coincidence is just disingenuous.
And as for the rest of the interview, man, what a whiner!
Yes! Support brick & mortar, independent bookstores!
Powell's in Portland, U-Bookstore and Elliott Bay in Seattle.
I'm underweight (60kg at 173cm), but I get enough exercise (lots of bicycling) and have a very healthy diet (mostly vegetarian). I shudder at the sight of co-workers who start off the morning with a Coke or eat McDonald's every day.
Anyway, I had a minor epiphany the other day about the stereotypical hacker's (bad) diet. I was installing TurboLinux 3.0J on my Toshiba laptop, it was about 10 in the evening, and I still hadn't eaten dinner (which isn't that unusual). I was really getting hungry, but I was too absorbed with the computer to do anything about it (also not unusual). But the thing is, I rarely consume junk food, and _never_ buy any or have any sort of snacks in my kitchen. When I make dinner, it usually takes almost an hour, since I enjoy cooking and don't have a microwave oven, so it involves cooking rice or boiling pasta and preparing the rest of the stuff too.
I was getting really hungry, and I thought, "what do all those other hackers do in a situation like this", and I realized that most of them would open a bag of potato chips or drive down to McDonald's and call it dinner, and get on with the hacking.
I realized that I could never become a true uber-wizard hacker as long as I valued my health. (Hunger always wins.) Or at least until I got a wife/live-in GF who would either a) cook for me, or b) yell at me to pull myself away from the damn computer and start cooking dinner or else!
I actually prefer b).
There was a fascinating "Frontline" documentary on PBS a few months ago on obesity among Americans and its causes. Yes, laziness (automobile addiction) contributes to it, but the main thing was, as one doctor put it, "a toxic diet". It's junk food, which is relentlessly marketed to Americans starting at childhood, combined with some people's lack of willpower, and in a few cases, yes, genetic factors, that causes most obesity.
What's disturbing is that American junk food, along with crappy music and all the rest of American pop culture, is what people in developing coutries crave, and the mega-corporations are only too glad to sell it to them.
Um, isn't that what singles are for??
Not that it makes any difference in the final percentage or the point you're making, but you might want to replace the term "Earth" with something like "industrialized countries of the world" and adjust the numbers accordingly. Start with, say, 2 billion instead of six billion.
It just bugs me when people assume that North America/Western Europe/Japan etc. is in any way representative of the way the vast majority of people on this planet live.
It's legit. There's a link to tce.co.jp on the Toshiba site (http://www.toshiba.co.jp/group/index_j.htm)
Point 1: Sure, but it doesn't bother me. I guess I'm never frantically mousing around all the time. Moving my hand an extra 5 centimeters is no big deal.
;)
Point 2: Clutter isn't a problem with the interface. It's a problem with the user.
Point 3: I must be one of the 10 Windows users who actually does place frequently used apps in proper folders in the Start Menu. And the only shortcuts I place on the desktop are apps that I can drag and drop text or multimedia files onto (plus a binary file editor for everything else). Seeing a zillion icons on a Windows desktop really irritates me.
Point 4: Agreed. But I wouldn't say that WindowMaker's menu configuration (the included one and wmakerconf) is any better in its current state.
>>>
The start menu is about the worst UI concept I've ever seen.
>>>
...which is why MacOS has had it in its original form (the Apple menu) for fifteen years,and KDE and GNOME have their own versions of it?
Come on, tell us why the start menu is such a bad concept."Because it's Microsoft" doesn't count.
One thing bothered me about those screenshots: the sloppy text descriptions. In particular, the "Select Root Partition" screen includes the sentence "It contains the core Linux system... Therefore it cannot really be big enough."
I could easily imagine a non-English speaker misinterpreting that to mean "Your disk is not big enough to hold the core Linux system".
Going back and reading my previous post, I see that I kind of missed your point about "anything less than free", since in this case it might it would actually cost extra to limit access, and that's certainly a bad idea.Perhaps if you had phrased it "I refuse to pay MORE money to get LESS..."
On the other hand, considering the cost of fighting silly lawsuits and that would no doubt emerge from unfettered access...
So don't flame me too strongly about that stuff.
I still do react strongly against the "not with my tax money" mantra, though. And I do think a voluntary, bilateral, server-side filtering scheme is a good idea. And I still think the page-ripping analogy is absurd.