Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma Bomber for those who first programmed in java) was around long before the "Arab terrorists" reared their heads and surprisingly enough had nothing to do with Islam.
I wasn't aware- he must have been a really old man by the time he did the Oklahoma City Bombing to have been older than al Wahhabi and al Saud- the two "Arab terrorists" that George W Bush's grandpa Prescott armed to create Saudi Arabia (and got a major oil deal signed in the proccess). That's what started all of this- that is what caused the attack on the Twin Towers.
Of course, going further back in history, there's the Turkish Ottoman Empire- a Caliphate that threatened most of Europe and invaded as far north as Poland before being turned back. They were terrorists too- just ask the Armenians or the Kurds. There's a long history of this sort of action in Arabia- going back thousands of years. It won't end until the very cultures are wiped from human memory.
Total Number of Suspected Terrorists in the Muslim World divided by Total Population of Muslims.
I'm sorry- but my reading of the Koran suggests that this would be 100%. But then again- I think the same thing of Christian Fundamentalists.....I don't know any truly moderate Muslims. Anybody who thinks being called "People of the Book" isn't an insult is far more fundamentalist than most Christians I know, for instance.
I wonder- if the same sentence applied to a woman who drives was applied to a preacher in the mosque who criticizes the United States, how many fundamentalists or radicals would be left?
No, but we're talking about class, which by definition is hereditary.
The whole social experiment of the United States was to destroy the link between economic class and heredity. From your list above (three out of nine) it would appear that the experiment is working- until you notice that the ENTIRE list was extremely wealthy before 1975, and that all of these men spent millions on their campaigns that had to come from someplace. Let me know when a guy who spends $100,000 on his campaign gets elected to a national office again, and then I'll believe that the experiment has worked (hint- you'll have to go back before the Civil War to find such a man).
Depends on the version of Windows- but remember, that's a million writes PER BYTE. Turn off the virtual memory and most of what Windows does is reads. Also, even if you have the virtual memory on, a good flash chip controller will fragment the file (remember, fragmentation means NOTHING in terms of read/write speed on a SSD) to spread it across the disk- which means instead of 5000 writes, you get maybe one or two writes per byte.
Further than I thought- and I missed that this phrase was a comparison to laptop drives, as opposed to "traditional hard drives", which would be more like a 3.5" form factor.
I own a 2GB 1.8 inch drive- but I didn't catch the idea that they were comparing form factors. 1.8 inch drives are usually used in smaller-than-notebook devices- PDAs, MP3 players, and the like. It's also known as the Compact Flash form factor, because the first drives of this size were all Solid State (and the majority still are- though 32GB is a HUGE leap forward in this respect. I use my 2GB drive to store TV shows to watch on my train commute- I can fit about 10-12 hours worth at a low resolution, or 5 hours worth at the highest resolution my PDA will display- 320x240. In 32GB, I could fit around 80 hours worth.....about a week's worth of waking hours....
Ah, that's what I missed- 1.8 inch form factor. Thank you. You're quite correct- I've seen it in 3.5" form factor, and drives up to 160GB in the 2.5" form factor that used to be the standard for laptops.
RTFA- their write speed is reasonable (at about half that of current hard drives, supposedly, though see below for questions about this) and on a 32GB drive with a reasonable usage pattern- well, how often do you reformat an entire drive? With over a million writes on modern flash memory, it's going to take you a while to use up all the writes this drive has.
And now for that questionable bit, from the article: While the SSD's capacity of 32 GB cannot compete with traditional hard drives that currently offers up to 80 GB space,
I don't know abut you, but I've seen hard drives in this price range offering up to 500GB and one USB/Ethernet external that offers 1TB at less than 2x the price. Which throws the write speed into question- if 80GB drives are considered their max.
After all, under their current procedures, people in India who were hired at Indian Minimum Wage already have access to your information. All it takes is a good memory to steal your identity. Which is why I used TurboTax previous to this- and may be switching next year if their EULA doesn't include a privacy clause.
The problem- RTFA- is that we have a short section of time within the big bang itself that can't be explained by this cycle- and it's now verified to actually exist. The Cosmic Expansion phase has the bang actually using more energy than the Big Crunch would create as heat- thus pushing out matter at many times the speed of light, which eventually slowed and created the universe we know. Thus, while the Big Bang-Big Crunch cycle was good enough at one point, it's now been *slightly* disproven (Asimov put forth a theory in one of his short stories that oould explain the discrepancy- but that theory required a God of a type, if you can call a computer storing the output and consciousness of a 36 billion year evolution of a species God).
For all we know, the big bang was a side effect of God stubbing Her toe on a 12-space pebble. Description of the big bang is unlikely to reveal anything about the nature or reality of God, nor the infinite multiverses which seem to imply Her existence.
Random vs ordered effect- this universe has definite constants that seem to imply a design.
Far, immeasurably far is She above that which they attribute to Her.
Mathmatically modeling human actions. That's an interesting one. How would one model a humans thinking?
I can't even prove that human beings think, let alone model it. But if it exists, theoretically it's possible to model it.
Free thinking.
Free thinking is highly rare in the human species- what most people call free thought is really reaction to given stimuli in view of personal experience.
Willingly making bad descisions when a more beneficial outcome is clearly evident.
The problem there is that "clearly evident" is different for different people- what is clearly evident to you is not clearly evident to me, nor is what is beneficial to you always beneficial to me.
How do you model that mathmatically?
As a function- stimuli + experience = action.
And emotions; how do you model them?
As stimuli/response, just like anything else.
What's the mathmatical formula for Love?
Define Love first, then you'll see it's just another stimulous/response.
Is there an algorithm to model anger?
Anger and Love are just flip sides of the same coin. Without love, there is no anger. Just reverse the sign on the stimulation.
There may very well be math for such things, but there is overwhelming complexity involved in discovering it.
Ah, yes, the overwhelming complexity argument. Welcome to Intelligent Design.
There are things about us that no one understands.
No HUMAN understands- that does not mean no one understands it or that there isn't an infinite being out there that does understand it and then some. It's just a different level of technology.
But what you don't seem to understand is that the Christian god is simply human make-believe, like all gods in all religions, there is no difference. Anything that is not disprovable, repeatable, and predictable is not real.
Well, for that matter so is the scientific method- it's not disprovable, only about 50% repeatable, and as an axiom, is not predictable, it just is. So is the basis of all human thought when you come right down to it- all sorts of things can interfere with human observation to the point that we don't know what is repeatable and what isn't. The logical end of skepticism and solipsism is that nothing is real at all- because we can't trust anybody.
Let's make this even more clear, especially with consideration to one point, if the universe was created by the Christian god, who created the Christian god?
Why the hell do you care?
Do you just make up new, non-logical make-believe answers to that question such as "he exists beyond the laws of the universe" or there are an infinite number of creators?
More that "he IS the laws of the universe- to know those laws is to know him". Quantum physics suggests that there may very well be an infinite number of creators- one per universe in the multiverse. But I repeat, why do you care? You've already chosen to be skeptical instead- so take your skepticism to the inevitable logical end- we can't believe in anything we don't experience ourselves personally, and even then, we can't be sure that the controls on an experiment aren't affecting the outcome of the experiment to the point that nothing is real.
And on and on. Again, religion is completely fantasy.
Absolutely- including the religion of no-religion and the religion known as science.
Hey, if the Christian god could have simply existed, so could the universe, without a god.
Well, if you truly understood the idea of a God to begin with, no, the universe couldn't exist without a god because the universe is a part and parcel of the concept of God. Or rather, God can't exist without a universe- the two concepts are equal. First, you've got to figure out if a reality external to your brain exists at all- it too may well be complete fantasy. All depends on the myth you grew up with.
Do you simply choose to ignore the completely, blatantly obvious fact that humans simply invented religion for their own needs?
Not at all- I'm just not as willing as you are to abandon that need. The need still exists today- even in yourself- but because you don't recognize the need you're likely going to end up like Madalyn O'Hare- suiciding in a ditch because you finally realize that your entire life is a lie, and that nothing is real.
That the universe is exactly as it appears.
Yes, and as it appears to me it's a wonderfully complex system that required the selection of certain constants in the model that cannot be adequately represented in our mathematics, only approximated. From PI to the cosmic expansion to Planck time to the mass of an electron to the universal gravitational constant- none of these can be expressed by our current mathematical models, YET it all works together. I don't make a god out of chaos to explain the unexplainable, like you do, I don't try to claim that an infinite universe/God is knowable to a finite brain. But I find most atheists really have a problem with parents, rather than the actual concept of infinity.
The one point people do not understand is that science and the scientific process applies to everything in this universe, not just want they want to pick and choose to apply it to.
I'd agree with that- I've often said there are no miracles. HOWEVER, the scientific process- the scientific method- is just another description of God, no different than Odin, Thor, Zeus, or Yahweh. It's just another way of looking at reality- and is just as imperfect as any other way human beings look at reality- and equal
That's why I put the E on the end- GUFT is a subset thereof. To find God, you've got to go the extra step to examining what forces were in effect during the cosmic inflation. Oh, and while I don't think God is "just" a set of mathematical constructs, for God to be true AND mathematical modeling to be true we must be able to mathematically model God's actions, just as we can mathematically model human actions.
Of course, I'm from the school of thought that a miracle doesn't neccessarily need to be supernatural either- it can be just a fortunate coincidence for you.
Or rather more likely a COLONY of bacteria can have a few members survive the trip, then I'd say it's highly likely that they are mutating fast enough to adapt to local conditions. The bolders would have been radiating heat the entire way out, so temperature wouldn't bother them. They'd land softly enough. And from there on out, it's just survival of the fittest.
But- what's really exciting about this isn't confirmation of the big bang, but rather evidence of the cosmic inflation idea of the big bang. This is the one that theistic evolutionists (that is, those who believe God plays pool with the universe and set it all up to run just as it has) point to and say "There is an injection of energy, and better yet ordered energy, that proves God's existance". Up until now, though, there's been nothing other than mathematical proof for cosmic inflation itself- only theories that seemed impossible (matter moving at several million times the speed of light?!?!?). This gets us a step closer to a GUFTE- a grand unified field theory of everything that would be as close as science could come to describing God.
A reasonable option in this situation is to give the experts who will use the industry specific software their own subnet; and save all files to a shared server that then backs up to a server on the regular LAN. The only point of contact should be that file transfer protocol- NOTHING else should be allowed through. Then hire an IT guy to help out the experts, and leave it at that.
I remember the first failed experiments towards this being back in 1982. Since then great strides have been made, and fall into one of four broad categories:
Input from inert materials that don't really interface- the RFID in the hand trick, with three sensors that inform the computer of hand position and interpret movement. A similar think to this is the middle-mouse-button macro stuff that Mentor Graphics was doing in their CAD programs back in the early 1990s.
Direct interface to nerve endings through Bluetooth- this was pioneered by England's famous cyborg-scientist. This is similar to the first method, but intercepts the signal before actual movement, so can detect much smaller nerve impulses, and does not require three dimensions of external sensors for the computer to interface. Only good for input.
Input and still not quite possible output, the EKG Keyboard- I've been hearing about this one since the early 1990s as well- basically you take a EKG skullcap and hook it up to a digitizing sound card input and try to interpret the result. I always thought it was a bit flaky- but a story I missed actually reading recently here or on technocrat, I forget which, claimed success with this method.
Output- implanted piston microsubwoofers, and eyeglass lasers, are now old tech- I first heard about them on Scientific American Frontiers in 1986, and since then they've become smaller, lighter, and easier to recharge using inductive power. But the only form of this tech that has achieved common usage is the permanent implant adaptive pacemaker- a pacemaker that is tied to a simple pedometer that regulates heartbeat to the activity level of the wearer.
Bringing these technologies all together would be a killer app, but the next big thing? I don't think it will ever see widespread usage.
And ring tones from the Sirius Cybernetics Corp are now outselling Genuine People Personalities.....just listen to the BBC's update of the last two books.
All of these are just reworks of old tech- we've had the capability to do this for 10 years or more, and it hasn't sold yet. Most people don't want to be cyborgs.
It's a new laptop, and I hadn't done that yet. At any rate, TCMP is a MUCH better media player for my purposes- especially since it has a user setable skip ahead/skip back for missing those nasty comercials.
The Internet won't help here -- it isn't here to educate, it is here to help people meet each other's needs. The people using the Internet to better themselves are already living in an economy that enables them to find opportunities to better themselves. That realization is enough to give the average person the desire to make their lives better.
Funny, I thought that the Internet was here to enable the US Military and ARPAnet research laboratories to communicate even when two or three cities have been taken out by nukes. Anything beyond that is a complete bolt-on to the original purpose.
It'd be more like the Rural Electrification Act. They'd be required to string dark fiber everywhere, but to light up that fiber you'd still have to buy the computer (or if the government regulated monopolies are smart about it, will rent you a cheap internet appliance at $5/month, with a MSN/hotmail account). In the end, the people who will really make money off of this are the.coms that need people to have high bandwidth to buy from their horribly graphics-heavy websites.
Slashdot Mirror
Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma Bomber for those who first programmed in java) was around long before the "Arab terrorists" reared their heads and surprisingly enough had nothing to do with Islam.
I wasn't aware- he must have been a really old man by the time he did the Oklahoma City Bombing to have been older than al Wahhabi and al Saud- the two "Arab terrorists" that George W Bush's grandpa Prescott armed to create Saudi Arabia (and got a major oil deal signed in the proccess). That's what started all of this- that is what caused the attack on the Twin Towers.
Of course, going further back in history, there's the Turkish Ottoman Empire- a Caliphate that threatened most of Europe and invaded as far north as Poland before being turned back. They were terrorists too- just ask the Armenians or the Kurds. There's a long history of this sort of action in Arabia- going back thousands of years. It won't end until the very cultures are wiped from human memory.
Total Number of Suspected Terrorists in the Muslim World divided by Total Population of Muslims.
I'm sorry- but my reading of the Koran suggests that this would be 100%. But then again- I think the same thing of Christian Fundamentalists.....I don't know any truly moderate Muslims. Anybody who thinks being called "People of the Book" isn't an insult is far more fundamentalist than most Christians I know, for instance.
I wonder- if the same sentence applied to a woman who drives was applied to a preacher in the mosque who criticizes the United States, how many fundamentalists or radicals would be left?
Beer is only working fuel if you need to be dumber to do your job.
You mean the concept of underemployment hasn't hit Jordan yet?
No, but we're talking about class, which by definition is hereditary.
The whole social experiment of the United States was to destroy the link between economic class and heredity. From your list above (three out of nine) it would appear that the experiment is working- until you notice that the ENTIRE list was extremely wealthy before 1975, and that all of these men spent millions on their campaigns that had to come from someplace. Let me know when a guy who spends $100,000 on his campaign gets elected to a national office again, and then I'll believe that the experiment has worked (hint- you'll have to go back before the Civil War to find such a man).
Depends on the version of Windows- but remember, that's a million writes PER BYTE. Turn off the virtual memory and most of what Windows does is reads. Also, even if you have the virtual memory on, a good flash chip controller will fragment the file (remember, fragmentation means NOTHING in terms of read/write speed on a SSD) to spread it across the disk- which means instead of 5000 writes, you get maybe one or two writes per byte.
Further than I thought- and I missed that this phrase was a comparison to laptop drives, as opposed to "traditional hard drives", which would be more like a 3.5" form factor.
I own a 2GB 1.8 inch drive- but I didn't catch the idea that they were comparing form factors. 1.8 inch drives are usually used in smaller-than-notebook devices- PDAs, MP3 players, and the like. It's also known as the Compact Flash form factor, because the first drives of this size were all Solid State (and the majority still are- though 32GB is a HUGE leap forward in this respect. I use my 2GB drive to store TV shows to watch on my train commute- I can fit about 10-12 hours worth at a low resolution, or 5 hours worth at the highest resolution my PDA will display- 320x240. In 32GB, I could fit around 80 hours worth.....about a week's worth of waking hours....
Ah, that's what I missed- 1.8 inch form factor. Thank you. You're quite correct- I've seen it in 3.5" form factor, and drives up to 160GB in the 2.5" form factor that used to be the standard for laptops.
RTFA- their write speed is reasonable (at about half that of current hard drives, supposedly, though see below for questions about this) and on a 32GB drive with a reasonable usage pattern- well, how often do you reformat an entire drive? With over a million writes on modern flash memory, it's going to take you a while to use up all the writes this drive has.
And now for that questionable bit, from the article: While the SSD's capacity of 32 GB cannot compete with traditional hard drives that currently offers up to 80 GB space,
I don't know abut you, but I've seen hard drives in this price range offering up to 500GB and one USB/Ethernet external that offers 1TB at less than 2x the price. Which throws the write speed into question- if 80GB drives are considered their max.
After all, under their current procedures, people in India who were hired at Indian Minimum Wage already have access to your information. All it takes is a good memory to steal your identity. Which is why I used TurboTax previous to this- and may be switching next year if their EULA doesn't include a privacy clause.
The problem- RTFA- is that we have a short section of time within the big bang itself that can't be explained by this cycle- and it's now verified to actually exist. The Cosmic Expansion phase has the bang actually using more energy than the Big Crunch would create as heat- thus pushing out matter at many times the speed of light, which eventually slowed and created the universe we know. Thus, while the Big Bang-Big Crunch cycle was good enough at one point, it's now been *slightly* disproven (Asimov put forth a theory in one of his short stories that oould explain the discrepancy- but that theory required a God of a type, if you can call a computer storing the output and consciousness of a 36 billion year evolution of a species God).
For all we know, the big bang was a side effect of God stubbing Her toe on a 12-space pebble. Description of the big bang is unlikely to reveal anything about the nature or reality of God, nor the infinite multiverses which seem to imply Her existence.
Random vs ordered effect- this universe has definite constants that seem to imply a design.
Far, immeasurably far is She above that which they attribute to Her.
Ah, you believe in metanature then. I don't.
Mathmatically modeling human actions. That's an interesting one. How would one model a humans thinking?
I can't even prove that human beings think, let alone model it. But if it exists, theoretically it's possible to model it.
Free thinking.
Free thinking is highly rare in the human species- what most people call free thought is really reaction to given stimuli in view of personal experience.
Willingly making bad descisions when a more beneficial outcome is clearly evident.
The problem there is that "clearly evident" is different for different people- what is clearly evident to you is not clearly evident to me, nor is what is beneficial to you always beneficial to me.
How do you model that mathmatically?
As a function- stimuli + experience = action.
And emotions; how do you model them?
As stimuli/response, just like anything else.
What's the mathmatical formula for Love?
Define Love first, then you'll see it's just another stimulous/response.
Is there an algorithm to model anger?
Anger and Love are just flip sides of the same coin. Without love, there is no anger. Just reverse the sign on the stimulation.
There may very well be math for such things, but there is overwhelming complexity involved in discovering it.
Ah, yes, the overwhelming complexity argument. Welcome to Intelligent Design.
There are things about us that no one understands.
No HUMAN understands- that does not mean no one understands it or that there isn't an infinite being out there that does understand it and then some. It's just a different level of technology.
But what you don't seem to understand is that the Christian god is simply human make-believe, like all gods in all religions, there is no difference. Anything that is not disprovable, repeatable, and predictable is not real.
Well, for that matter so is the scientific method- it's not disprovable, only about 50% repeatable, and as an axiom, is not predictable, it just is. So is the basis of all human thought when you come right down to it- all sorts of things can interfere with human observation to the point that we don't know what is repeatable and what isn't. The logical end of skepticism and solipsism is that nothing is real at all- because we can't trust anybody.
Let's make this even more clear, especially with consideration to one point, if the universe was created by the Christian god, who created the Christian god?
Why the hell do you care?
Do you just make up new, non-logical make-believe answers to that question such as "he exists beyond the laws of the universe" or there are an infinite number of creators?
More that "he IS the laws of the universe- to know those laws is to know him". Quantum physics suggests that there may very well be an infinite number of creators- one per universe in the multiverse. But I repeat, why do you care? You've already chosen to be skeptical instead- so take your skepticism to the inevitable logical end- we can't believe in anything we don't experience ourselves personally, and even then, we can't be sure that the controls on an experiment aren't affecting the outcome of the experiment to the point that nothing is real.
And on and on. Again, religion is completely fantasy.
Absolutely- including the religion of no-religion and the religion known as science.
Hey, if the Christian god could have simply existed, so could the universe, without a god.
Well, if you truly understood the idea of a God to begin with, no, the universe couldn't exist without a god because the universe is a part and parcel of the concept of God. Or rather, God can't exist without a universe- the two concepts are equal. First, you've got to figure out if a reality external to your brain exists at all- it too may well be complete fantasy. All depends on the myth you grew up with.
Do you simply choose to ignore the completely, blatantly obvious fact that humans simply invented religion for their own needs?
Not at all- I'm just not as willing as you are to abandon that need. The need still exists today- even in yourself- but because you don't recognize the need you're likely going to end up like Madalyn O'Hare- suiciding in a ditch because you finally realize that your entire life is a lie, and that nothing is real.
That the universe is exactly as it appears.
Yes, and as it appears to me it's a wonderfully complex system that required the selection of certain constants in the model that cannot be adequately represented in our mathematics, only approximated. From PI to the cosmic expansion to Planck time to the mass of an electron to the universal gravitational constant- none of these can be expressed by our current mathematical models, YET it all works together. I don't make a god out of chaos to explain the unexplainable, like you do, I don't try to claim that an infinite universe/God is knowable to a finite brain. But I find most atheists really have a problem with parents, rather than the actual concept of infinity.
The one point people do not understand is that science and the scientific process applies to everything in this universe, not just want they want to pick and choose to apply it to.
I'd agree with that- I've often said there are no miracles. HOWEVER, the scientific process- the scientific method- is just another description of God, no different than Odin, Thor, Zeus, or Yahweh. It's just another way of looking at reality- and is just as imperfect as any other way human beings look at reality- and equal
That's why I put the E on the end- GUFT is a subset thereof. To find God, you've got to go the extra step to examining what forces were in effect during the cosmic inflation. Oh, and while I don't think God is "just" a set of mathematical constructs, for God to be true AND mathematical modeling to be true we must be able to mathematically model God's actions, just as we can mathematically model human actions.
Of course, I'm from the school of thought that a miracle doesn't neccessarily need to be supernatural either- it can be just a fortunate coincidence for you.
Or rather more likely a COLONY of bacteria can have a few members survive the trip, then I'd say it's highly likely that they are mutating fast enough to adapt to local conditions. The bolders would have been radiating heat the entire way out, so temperature wouldn't bother them. They'd land softly enough. And from there on out, it's just survival of the fittest.
But- what's really exciting about this isn't confirmation of the big bang, but rather evidence of the cosmic inflation idea of the big bang. This is the one that theistic evolutionists (that is, those who believe God plays pool with the universe and set it all up to run just as it has) point to and say "There is an injection of energy, and better yet ordered energy, that proves God's existance". Up until now, though, there's been nothing other than mathematical proof for cosmic inflation itself- only theories that seemed impossible (matter moving at several million times the speed of light?!?!?). This gets us a step closer to a GUFTE- a grand unified field theory of everything that would be as close as science could come to describing God.
A reasonable option in this situation is to give the experts who will use the industry specific software their own subnet; and save all files to a shared server that then backs up to a server on the regular LAN. The only point of contact should be that file transfer protocol- NOTHING else should be allowed through. Then hire an IT guy to help out the experts, and leave it at that.
I remember the first failed experiments towards this being back in 1982. Since then great strides have been made, and fall into one of four broad categories:
Input from inert materials that don't really interface- the RFID in the hand trick, with three sensors that inform the computer of hand position and interpret movement. A similar think to this is the middle-mouse-button macro stuff that Mentor Graphics was doing in their CAD programs back in the early 1990s.
Direct interface to nerve endings through Bluetooth- this was pioneered by England's famous cyborg-scientist. This is similar to the first method, but intercepts the signal before actual movement, so can detect much smaller nerve impulses, and does not require three dimensions of external sensors for the computer to interface. Only good for input.
Input and still not quite possible output, the EKG Keyboard- I've been hearing about this one since the early 1990s as well- basically you take a EKG skullcap and hook it up to a digitizing sound card input and try to interpret the result. I always thought it was a bit flaky- but a story I missed actually reading recently here or on technocrat, I forget which, claimed success with this method.
Output- implanted piston microsubwoofers, and eyeglass lasers, are now old tech- I first heard about them on Scientific American Frontiers in 1986, and since then they've become smaller, lighter, and easier to recharge using inductive power. But the only form of this tech that has achieved common usage is the permanent implant adaptive pacemaker- a pacemaker that is tied to a simple pedometer that regulates heartbeat to the activity level of the wearer.
Bringing these technologies all together would be a killer app, but the next big thing? I don't think it will ever see widespread usage.
And ring tones from the Sirius Cybernetics Corp are now outselling Genuine People Personalities.....just listen to the BBC's update of the last two books.
All of these are just reworks of old tech- we've had the capability to do this for 10 years or more, and it hasn't sold yet. Most people don't want to be cyborgs.
It's a new laptop, and I hadn't done that yet. At any rate, TCMP is a MUCH better media player for my purposes- especially since it has a user setable skip ahead/skip back for missing those nasty comercials.
The Internet won't help here -- it isn't here to educate, it is here to help people meet each other's needs. The people using the Internet to better themselves are already living in an economy that enables them to find opportunities to better themselves. That realization is enough to give the average person the desire to make their lives better.
Funny, I thought that the Internet was here to enable the US Military and ARPAnet research laboratories to communicate even when two or three cities have been taken out by nukes. Anything beyond that is a complete bolt-on to the original purpose.
It'd be more like the Rural Electrification Act. They'd be required to string dark fiber everywhere, but to light up that fiber you'd still have to buy the computer (or if the government regulated monopolies are smart about it, will rent you a cheap internet appliance at $5/month, with a MSN/hotmail account). In the end, the people who will really make money off of this are the .coms that need people to have high bandwidth to buy from their horribly graphics-heavy websites.