The problem is is that the media giants have figured out just how much bullshit we will take and dish it out at just that rate.
They control the access codes and law. We control our wallet. If we were as digilent over the wallet as they are over their control and laws, we would see our viewpoints taken more seriously.
But, as studied in microeconomics, the reason the big guys get away with it is the "little people" are disorganized and do not provide a unified front as large organizations do. The effort to organize is far greater to the individual than the value of the benefits lost. So the big guys just take. And get off scot-free.
There was one heck of a "paradigm shift" ( to use management words ) that took place in the 90's. You must have seen it too.
Engineering wasn't all that got hit. Our factories took it hard. We all got to hear that "whooshing sound" Ross Perot spoke of.
Being able to do something special wasn't valued much anymore as we strove for commodification of the labor market. No-one seems valued much for being able to make things work anymore, what seems valued highly are the "people skills" to tell someone else to do it.
We are spawning off a generation of people who barely know how to use something, much less fix it if it breaks. Who among us can fix a broken TV... or even explain to their kid how it works? ( I pick that because I used to fix TV's at the neighborhood fixit shop for fun when I was a kid.)
I am seeing such a mad rush today to adopt technology without a prerequisite understanding of how that technology works.
I feel it started with the transistor radio, as soon after they came out, it became the norm to just toss it when it breaks. Soon thereafter, nobody included schematics with the purchase of an electronic product.
I still have my old "Technical Manuals" that came with my original PC... Not only did they have the wiring diagram for each card in the book, they also had SOURCE CODE of the BIOS!!!
Things are different today. We are expected to use things without understanding how they work.
I remember well when the "managementization craze" hit our little aerospace company. Everything changed from us understanding exactly what we were doing, and trying our best to do it right the first time, to trying to do it under ever decreasing cost goals.
Ever tried to take a timed test where the instructor gives you a bit more work to do than you have time for? Yes, it is a good way to make sure not a minute is wasted - but then, one is very apt to make mistakes one should have not made.
In the space exploration world, the only passing grade is 100%. Genesis got a point knocked off for some little doodad in its drogue chute system malfunctioning after an otherwise perfect score.
Am I a little bitter... yes.
I was one of those guys who did not go well with management techniques when they got in the way of doing something right. It takes me a lot of time to work with something long enough to understand it to a point I really feel comfortable with it. It became the order of the day to have someone constantly lording over me and goading me on with books full of charge numbers and accounting systems to manage me by the hour on how long I am allocated to work on something.
It became just like that timed test...
How do I tell someone making twice as much money as I am to buzz off? The company has kinda made it obvious whose expertise is more valuable.
There was a day when each of us techies felt we were an indispensable member of a team, and each of us relied on each other much like components of a race car.
As we became commoditized and interchangeable, something happened to my "inner drive". I feel I am just another nut in the box.
I've seen this psychological warfare going on in the workplace, as the manager types strip us of our individuality to make us all look like commodity parts. We have to act the same, dress the same, look the same, and spend our day in identical cubicles like rows of laying hens.
Remember when engineers worked in labs, not cubicles?
RobertB: You are so right about these projects not at all being easy.
They are at the cutting-edge of cutting-edge technology.
I noticed one poster joking about NASA having a 0.500 batting average. You know, when you consider what kind of game NASA is playing and the complexity of the playing field, 0.500 sounds damn good to even me, and they have been doing a helluva lot better than that.
I think you must have worked in the arena in the technical area to have had the insight on just how complex the issues are. Very few can appreciate the job JPL/NASA have done until they have been intimately involved in it. Once someone comes to term with the complexity and the unforgiving realities of natural laws governing mission success or failure, one understands why engineers and scientists cannot always be the obedient underlings the Dan Goldin types would like us to be.
Even with our best work, we cannot guarantee success - all we can do is get the statistical weights of success more in our favor. Even with our utmost care and attention, there are still so many things that can possibly go wrong.
Like anything else though, even if the thing we worked on failed, we still learn a helluva lot on how to do it better next time.
To me, the greatest tragedy is when we lose one of our guys, through accident, layoff, or retirement, because that represents a total loss of all the accumulated experience of that individual. Everything else can be replaced, but the experience and knowledge gained from it is priceless.
I was referring to the change and what appears to be a continual increase in shockwave power.
Otherwise I feel the argument that I cannot sue for damaging my house is just as pointless as saying RIAA cannot sue people for using computers because they knew computers were around when they released their music.
If RIAA can sue people who use their computers in such a way as to damage their property, what happens if I find out that increasing the shockwave power is be damaging to mine.
Yes, Disney has been in business for some time.
So has been the ability to copy files.
Should our courts protect one man's property while telling another to buzz off?
There was quite a flak about deleting the words "Under God" from our pledge of allegiance. If everyone's property is not considered under the law, maybe we should delete "and equal justice for all" from the pledge.
You bring up a very intereting point about more boom.
I wonder how this boom is going to affect all the stucco houses in the area?
Once the stucco is fractured, water gets in, and the stucco rapidly deteriorates.
I've often wondered if a homeowner close by one of these venues which emit loud booms like this can hold the emitter of those booms responsible for damage to their house.
Of course, actually proving the monetary damage to your house may be as much of an inexact science of proving monetary damage from people making mp3's out of the CD's they bought.
I guess one would need several machines for each ledger, so that the uncertainity of which machine the ledger-signer used would foul up any tracebacks.
Damm, this whole idea of trying to replace such a simple thing as a ballot box with a computer really stinks.
Why can't they just have a printer in the kiosk in an enclosure where the only line the voter can see and verify are the lines indicating the result of his vote...
Then it scrolls out of view for the next voter.
Everything would be on one continuous numbered roll. With each vote accounted for in the same manner as those numbered voting slips they give us now.
Anything hackers can do can be sensed, and the appropriate code put in place to stop the leak.
I go to bed peacefully knowing the internet runs on a series of protocols that is just about as secure as knowing the English language will still exist tomorrow. Someone may misuse it, but that does not render the whole shebang moot.
As long as the Internet is the property of the commons, no one can do much harm to it.
We have a really nice series of plumbing in place now to route information, just as we have plumbing in place to route water and power. Enough people understand how it works that any malfunction can be properly addressed.
If anything brings down the internet, it will be politicians, passing law to grant exclusive controls to certain corporations, which can then fund volleys of lawyers to use the court systems to destroy anything in their path.
Yes, you can see planes crashing into towers, and you see rubble where a magnificient building once stood.. and there is lots of evidence scattered all over of the disaster that took place there, but there is little to see after a swarm of lawyers devastate a small business, but the damage is just as real.
If we don't hold our elected officials to the welfare of this country soon, it appears ownership/litigation will become the only viable way of "earning" an income.
I had some of these too. They were known as WORM drives in those days.
The "Tahiti" series was really popular. I had the PRIAM WC-525. Stored around 250 Megabytes. You got one chance to write. You screw it up, you don't write anymore to that disk. And the disks cost about $150 a pop at that time.
I was told at the time the disks would be readable for at least 100 years. However, I cannot get my old drive to read my disks. I think dust got on the lens, and I have yet to figure out how to nondestructively open up the drive to dust it off. These were made before the day of ASIC, so they are full of circuitry.
I was using these things for backup of old DOS CAD drawings, as in that day, I could fit everything me or anyone else in my group had ever done on one disk.
Incidentally, the old DOS CAD programs I was using damn near 20 years ago still work fine. And I still use them. I still have access to all that work I did. I sure miss the cut-to-the-bones simplicity of those old programs. The databases were open, understandable, and the executables ran quite happily on anything I dropped it on. If a program didn't have some little feature you wanted, you could open it up in a debugger and fix it. Or branch to a helper program you wrote in C++. Even if you didn't have the source code.
Grigori Medvedev, one of the Soviet Union's leading nuclear physicists involved with Chernobyl, wrote a very interesting book about the whole accident and coverup. After the Cold War ended, he was finally at peace to write his account. Believe me, its a very interesting read.
I got my copy several years ago when I was researching the politics of obedience and whether engineer subordinates should be responsible to authority or the laws of physics for a course in Ethics.
The book, "The Truth about Chernobyl", by Grigori Medvedev (ISBN 0-465-08775-2) ( English translation - by the way very well done ) Copyright 1991 by Basic Books, Inc.
( Incidentally, from my research in Ethics, I just about got the feeling that if you were gonna toe the line on Ethics, you had better work for yourself.).
This is one thing the producers will always have that we will never have, without blatant and provable violation of copyright law.
The original content producer is the only one who can legally crank out billions of copies of his work.
So, flood the marketing channels, and make it so easy to buy his work that its not worth the trouble to make one for yourself.
Kinda like nails. Who would think of trying to make their own, despite any patent protection that might be involved in making nails?
For most things I buy, the people in the marketing channels have made damn sure its in my best interests to buy the product, even if I could make my own... as they have the tremendous advantage of economy of scale, that by the very laws of nature, I will never have.
In economics parlance, this is called a "natural monopoly", and does quite well, even without any intervention of rights protection groups.
We already have laws in place to go after anyone else trying to replicate oopyrighted works on such a scale to make the economics of mass production profitable.
Yes.. I was trying to be sarcastic. I am rather pissed over how I have been seeing our nation's bureaucracy handling our nation's most prized assets, and implementing laws that discourage production and encourage litigation.
It may be interesting if they tie into the OBD port of your car and determing your driving and braking patterns.
I betcha you will find some interesting correlations between acceleration rates, braking rates, and collisions.
Actually, I consider how fast one has to *change* velocity far more critical than velocity itself. A guy on a city street going only 30MPH can be one helluva accident waiting to happen, than a guy going even 90 on a lonely freeway in the middle of the night. To me, the key is your environment.
There are times when 5MPH is too fast!
By integrating how hard one accelerates and and brakes, a profile of the driver can be generated which could be used to key in rate values. Hell,
they might even throw in lateral g-force sensor to see how fast you take turns or change lanes on the freeway. ( remember, they know you are on the freeway... GPS ).
"but of course the insurance industry lobby shot that idea down real fast."
Can you imagine all the unemployed insurance agents? Drive down nearly any street and you will find several insurance agencies.
Geez, passing a law like that would be tantamount to what all that H1-B and job outsourcing stuff did to high-tech.
Any country with leadership who has any logic at all in their heads knows not to kill off the nation's core skillsets... Do you really want to see insurance agents, along with unemployed information technology workers and engineers out pumping gas and serving fries?
Well, flamebait aside, the main problem I see with this approach is it does nothing to penalize the guy who has poor driving skills who gets onto the public roads with basically a road plow.
Personally, I don't see why insurance companies don't fight like hell to keep the people they have that pay their full premiums year after year and don't generate claims. I was with State Farm and they give me this really measly "loyalty bonus"... even after I have been with them for over ten years. I ended up leaving them because they just kept jacking up my rate to what I considered absurd levels.
There is easily an order of magnitude difference in the risk involved in the insurance of two different people. Some people, by their very nature, are very responsible. Some take a lot of risks. You would think that insurance companies would use the data they already have to make damn sure the "extremely low-risk" driver never leaves them by offering rates to those people that no competitor can match.
A few of us are real gems to the insurance industry. Every six months they rattle my mailbox with a bill of premium due, and promptly receive the check. Is that customer so unimportant to the insurance company that they are willing to risk losing that customer over a rate hike? To me that is like leaving my prize tools on my front lawn for any passerby to take.
If I am leaving anything on the front lawn, its gonna be those tools that give me no end of problems.
Most definitely, if you "swamp cool" the incoming air to the condenser coil.
I am currently building a water sculpture at my house.. with the intention of using it for just that.... an evaporative heat sink so that during the hot summer months, I can dump heat to the water sculpture by a heat exchanger used in place of the outside condenser coil assembly. If things get really hot, I will route irrigation water through the system so as to deliver warmed water to the foliage around the house... the plants are really gonna need water anyway.
I am still experimenting with Lithium Bromide based Absorption units... if I can get my designs to work properly, I might even be able to power the whole shebang from sunlight, using gravitic separators and pumps.
Before you think I just dropped off the deep end, remember our Great Grandparent's Arkla-Servel Gas Refrigerators worked this same way... but they used Ammonia/Hydrogen refrigerant and Gas heat... and I wanna use water/Lithium Bromide/Iodide under vacuum... and solar heat.
But, as with all my projects... things go slow because I am working on a lot of em in parallel.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, employees who don't cover their ass are the first to end up on the street when the companies "right-size" themselves.
Its why plants in adverse areas grow thorns... cause the animals eat those who didn't protect themselves from the predators.
Remember the Microsoft API and how they pre-encapsulated a lot if in in their MFC to try to cut out the tedium of all the minutiae of programming for a GUI?
I thought the concept was really cool!
I no longer had to re-invent the wheel every time I wanted to build an app.
I saw this effort very similar to my construction in electronics where I buy components off the shelf and know what I'm getting. I wouldn't even think of trying to build an IC, resistor, capacitor, or large inductor.. albeit I could if I had to. Or what building contractor would try to make his own lumber or nails.. even windows or doors?
It all comes preassembled - commodity items - and everybody knows how its built - and could build one themselves if they had to, but why? The vendor holds a "natural monopoly" on the things he makes because his "economies of scale" allow him to produce this item and even ship it to you at far less than the cost it would be to you if you had to make your own. Ever tried to build a light bulb? ( well yeh, I have with vacuum pumps and pickle jars..)
I loved the idea that Microsoft released this standard assortment of "objects" which supposedly are standardized. It took Microsoft hundreds of man-years to generate this code, it will take me years to master it, just like spending years to master the keyboard on a piano. I figured that an investment in my time learning Microsoft technology would be time well spent.
So, now where am I... I know an ancient technology . Microsoft keeps changing the keys on their piano keyboard! I can't keep up with their endless changing of things. I can't stay with one technology long enough to understand it thoroughly and avoid striking "sour notes".
This endless changing of things and their efforts to insure I learn only what they will allow is my main reason for avoiding Microsoft products.
I kinda see Microsoft products like fashion trends in pants. Its quite easy to slip one pair of pants off and another on when your pants go out of style. So, if its something where I am not counting on it being there in say three years, and nothing on the old will run on the new, Microsoft products fill the bill nicely.
But if its something like my tools, car, air compressors, home, anything I am counting on to sit there and do what it was designed to do until I dismantle it, then I want some platform where stability of design and maintainability is paramount.
I have no intention spending a helluva lot of time learning to play the piano if I know the piano manufacturer thoroughly intends to mess up the keys all the time so as to give the latest generation pianists an edge over the ones who bought into the plan a couple of years ago. With our playing skills being suddenly rendered obsolete by the change. I know big business can afford this kind of stuff, but as an individual running a small business, I can not.
What is amazing to me is there are a helluva lot of us hardware guys out here looking for a job.
And find people staying awake over nights worrying over something like this.
There are a helluva lot of us out there who know exactly how that stuff works, and can quite easily go to the component level and troubleshoot. Many of us are even very avid hobbyists in this and know where to find damn near ANY part.
We are the type, raised in the 60's, where we often moonlighted fixing anything, whether or not we had a schematic.
I know I could care less that the old test equipment I buy is not "supported". I couldn't afford the "support" anyway. If anything breaks, I fix it. Its just the normal way things were in those days.
That was the standard mode of operation for me when I worked in a Chevron oil refinery in the 70's... if something broke - they would bring it to me, I would open it up, find out what went wrong, and fix it... and didn't think much of it. No more than a mechanic finding a faulty auto part and fixing it.
Very rarely in those days did they have anything really oddball in there. It was too expensive for the manufacturer in those days to do custom part design when commodity parts were so cheap.
Geez... if its that "obsolete", it just had to be made with standard glue logic.
These days, yeh, all custom ASIC and FPGA. If it breaks, you just about have to toss it.
But that old stuff runs the gamut from vacuum tubes, to RTL/DTL/TTL/4000CMOS. All fixable.
Discrete transistors not much problem at all - the ones we have today are so far superior to the older ones that I guarantee I'll find one to do the job. You would be surprised at the garden of analog parts one finds in a discarded PC power supply, or an old monitor.
Consider another problem we face as "the little guy".
We have been trained since inception to be unquestionably submissive to authorities and business. Or we just get labeled as a troublemaker and the person in authority may well see fit to put an end to your inobedience right here and now and make an example of you so others will see and won't offer any resistance to them. Its a variant of "you can't fight city hall".
We are highly trained to be very obedient to the letter from the corporation. You make one screw-up with them and they quickly may run off, tattling on you to TRW-Experian, Equifax, Trans-Union, whatever, as well as initiate legal action if you fail to comply with one of their demands. Failure on our part to comply can cause us a helluva lot of headaches.
So, all the phisherman needs to do is to send out notes just like the ones mentioned here. And take advantage of the unquestioned obedience most people have toward the corporation they mimicked.
Can I call these people stupid? I certainly can't. These were very well-done.
On one small company I had worked for, I tried something very similar. I took their purchase requisition form and re-did the boilerplate "Terms and Conditions" crap printed on the back to include something like "customer reserves the right to modify any hardware/software in order to achieve interoperability with existing equipment." and it flew past all the signatures and the CAD system I ordered was shipped. I wanted to make damm sure I was covered in the event anybody wanted to nail me for after-the-sale modification of my purchased copy of the product if I had to open it up in the debugger and code around any rough edges in it.
I figured as much as Business relies on the sheet full of fine print with a line on the bottom for the obligee to sign, then being able to force the obligee to honor the sheet, I would be safe, for if a court found that a signed sheet was invalid because a businessman didn't read it, then precedent would be set and then no-one would have to pay attention to the words. Unenforcable. The main pry-bar used by business to coerce people into legally binding committment would be broken.
And I did not think they would risk losing their precious pry-bar over a software package.
I am a little late to the post here, but I did want this comment in the archives.
When I first worked with the IBM PC, IBM also made available for purchase ( albeit not cheap ) a complete set of reference manuals, including complete hardware schematics, register operation details, and SOURCE CODE of the BIOS.
Don't get me wrong. We all knew it was copyrighted code and we had no right to go into business ourselves copying off IBM's code and selling it as our own... but there it was - assembler listings. For you folks who think its too good to believe they actually did this in the "good old days", its IBM publication 6361459, System Bios, Section 5. About 100 pages of commented listing of the Complete BIOS.
My set of manuals ( I still have ) comprise six matched 3-ring binders covering every technical aspect of construction and operation of a PC, including schematics and detailed programming info for each I/O card, Video Adapter, Monitor, EVERYTHING!
IBM knew customer's knowledge of the product was essential to get them interested to buy and develop stuff on them. So it was in their interests to make their product as usable as possible in the hands of their customer. IBM was happy enough to churn out machines for us, without worrying about how to fabricate all sorts of legal "animal traps" to ensure lock-in.
I can see this ruling as fair only if Sony would now be *required* to replace *any* damaged media with its exact replacement - indefinitely - free of charge - postage paid both ways, etc. as a way of compensating the public for stripping them of their right to protect their investment by backing up their legally purchased product.
Sony's viewpoint was honored.
The consumer's viewpoint was not.
Remember the hubris resulting from trying to delete "Under God" from the US Pledge of Allegiance? I think its high time we strike the words "Justice for All" from this pledge, and cite things like the DMCA as proof why. ( Yes, I know this instance is UK, but here we have the DMCA, which is worse. )
Businessmen have no problem directing subordinates to do something or he will find someone else who will.
Its high time the public used similar tactics with politicians and other lawmakers.
( Well, actually, we did... its gonna be interesting how our new Governor of California, Arnold Swartzenegger, deals with the decades-old inbred bureaucracy here. They don't appear to be co-operating with him. This is gonna get interesting. Very interesting. Money's running out and the receding of the economic tide is gonna reveal a lot of stuff. This is gonna get as interesting as a Terminator flick, but this time its real for some of these gangsters masquerading as politicians. )
Re:I think it hasn't been explored enough
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Game with God
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Interesting take on it, Stormcrow...
It seems to me some good games based on theology may finally ignite some critical thinking on religion dogma. Just *what* is 'religion' and what is of God himself?
It is a strong belief of mine that earthly religions are the work of man and they are just using the name of God to bolster power for themselves. Even the Bible states Jesus had to throw the Scribes and Pharisees ( yeh, all those loud moaning prayer-sayers and interpreters of the Word that pontificate profusely in public so as to appear holy ) out of the temple.
There is a human condition called "cognitive dissonance", which is a strong drive within us to know we made the correct decision. The last thing a guy who just bought a car wants to hear is that he made a big mistake by doing so. He wants positive affirmation he made an intelligent choice. I see religious congregations in a similar light - once 'converted' to that religion, those members push it because if others join, that bolsters their belief that they were correct. Its a human condition we form religions - but I don't see these as really having anything much to do with God. Its just a gang of people - and they can be very dangerous if they are ever led to believe that doing violence in the name of God is acceptable.
I have a hard time distinguishing earthly religion from cult and superstition. Like I am not aware of any proof that Zeus or Thor do NOT exist, yet I have no faith in their power. Well, are things any different today?
Maybe some good games where a "supreme power" did indeed create us, and our goal is to find out about him, but along the way are all these people who have formed these little gangs to feed us misinformation and make us waste time until our lifetime runs out.
You know these little 'pyramid' schemes that run around every so often, where a few guys organize this financial ponzi scheme that require the contributions of lots of suckers so the guys at the top can get fabulously wealthy? Yeh, they print up these little business plans and have rows of lines for people to sign up for a measly donation of $1000 to get a $64,000 tax-free return. Their heads begin yammering like air compressors as their mouths begin spewing streams of words like "outpouring of wealth", "faith", "make a committment", etc.
But, once you've seen it, you recognize it for what it is. A ponzi scheme. A way for people to get money for just jabbering. A quick way for you to lose your resources.
I see earthly manmade religions in exactly the same way. This is not to say I don't believe in God - its just I know that Man will lie. And Man can be very cruel if he's ever led to believe he is just being an instrument of God ( as if the God who created the universe needed the services of Man! I think of it like asking my cat to fix a leaky faucet. ).
Please don't tell me I've got it wrong. I most likely do have it wrong. I may never find what I am looking for. I know Man will lie. And I know Man , even though he obediently follows all the religious rituals, can do unbelievably cruel things to others - and feel completely guiltless over the trauma left in his wake. ( Southern Baptist )
It would be nice to see a few games where people actually had to *think* about their relationship with our Creator and fellow man, instead of just being led by another man.
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They control the access codes and law. We control our wallet. If we were as digilent over the wallet as they are over their control and laws, we would see our viewpoints taken more seriously.
But, as studied in microeconomics, the reason the big guys get away with it is the "little people" are disorganized and do not provide a unified front as large organizations do. The effort to organize is far greater to the individual than the value of the benefits lost. So the big guys just take. And get off scot-free.
Engineering wasn't all that got hit. Our factories took it hard. We all got to hear that "whooshing sound" Ross Perot spoke of.
Being able to do something special wasn't valued much anymore as we strove for commodification of the labor market. No-one seems valued much for being able to make things work anymore, what seems valued highly are the "people skills" to tell someone else to do it.
We are spawning off a generation of people who barely know how to use something, much less fix it if it breaks. Who among us can fix a broken TV... or even explain to their kid how it works? ( I pick that because I used to fix TV's at the neighborhood fixit shop for fun when I was a kid.)
I am seeing such a mad rush today to adopt technology without a prerequisite understanding of how that technology works.
I feel it started with the transistor radio, as soon after they came out, it became the norm to just toss it when it breaks. Soon thereafter, nobody included schematics with the purchase of an electronic product.
I still have my old "Technical Manuals" that came with my original PC... Not only did they have the wiring diagram for each card in the book, they also had SOURCE CODE of the BIOS!!!
Things are different today. We are expected to use things without understanding how they work.
I remember well when the "managementization craze" hit our little aerospace company. Everything changed from us understanding exactly what we were doing, and trying our best to do it right the first time, to trying to do it under ever decreasing cost goals.
Ever tried to take a timed test where the instructor gives you a bit more work to do than you have time for? Yes, it is a good way to make sure not a minute is wasted - but then, one is very apt to make mistakes one should have not made.
In the space exploration world, the only passing grade is 100%. Genesis got a point knocked off for some little doodad in its drogue chute system malfunctioning after an otherwise perfect score.
Am I a little bitter... yes.
I was one of those guys who did not go well with management techniques when they got in the way of doing something right. It takes me a lot of time to work with something long enough to understand it to a point I really feel comfortable with it. It became the order of the day to have someone constantly lording over me and goading me on with books full of charge numbers and accounting systems to manage me by the hour on how long I am allocated to work on something.
It became just like that timed test...
How do I tell someone making twice as much money as I am to buzz off? The company has kinda made it obvious whose expertise is more valuable.
There was a day when each of us techies felt we were an indispensable member of a team, and each of us relied on each other much like components of a race car.
As we became commoditized and interchangeable, something happened to my "inner drive". I feel I am just another nut in the box.
I've seen this psychological warfare going on in the workplace, as the manager types strip us of our individuality to make us all look like commodity parts. We have to act the same, dress the same, look the same, and spend our day in identical cubicles like rows of laying hens.
Remember when engineers worked in labs, not cubicles?
They are at the cutting-edge of cutting-edge technology.
I noticed one poster joking about NASA having a 0.500 batting average. You know, when you consider what kind of game NASA is playing and the complexity of the playing field, 0.500 sounds damn good to even me, and they have been doing a helluva lot better than that.
I think you must have worked in the arena in the technical area to have had the insight on just how complex the issues are. Very few can appreciate the job JPL/NASA have done until they have been intimately involved in it. Once someone comes to term with the complexity and the unforgiving realities of natural laws governing mission success or failure, one understands why engineers and scientists cannot always be the obedient underlings the Dan Goldin types would like us to be.
Even with our best work, we cannot guarantee success - all we can do is get the statistical weights of success more in our favor. Even with our utmost care and attention, there are still so many things that can possibly go wrong.
Like anything else though, even if the thing we worked on failed, we still learn a helluva lot on how to do it better next time.
To me, the greatest tragedy is when we lose one of our guys, through accident, layoff, or retirement, because that represents a total loss of all the accumulated experience of that individual. Everything else can be replaced, but the experience and knowledge gained from it is priceless.
Otherwise I feel the argument that I cannot sue for damaging my house is just as pointless as saying RIAA cannot sue people for using computers because they knew computers were around when they released their music.
If RIAA can sue people who use their computers in such a way as to damage their property, what happens if I find out that increasing the shockwave power is be damaging to mine.
Yes, Disney has been in business for some time.
So has been the ability to copy files.
Should our courts protect one man's property while telling another to buzz off?
There was quite a flak about deleting the words "Under God" from our pledge of allegiance. If everyone's property is not considered under the law, maybe we should delete "and equal justice for all" from the pledge.
I wonder how this boom is going to affect all the stucco houses in the area?
Once the stucco is fractured, water gets in, and the stucco rapidly deteriorates.
I've often wondered if a homeowner close by one of these venues which emit loud booms like this can hold the emitter of those booms responsible for damage to their house.
Of course, actually proving the monetary damage to your house may be as much of an inexact science of proving monetary damage from people making mp3's out of the CD's they bought.
When you are pissed, slam the door hard enough to fracture the CRT.
It will let the whole floor know you are *really* pissed. ;)
I guess one would need several machines for each ledger, so that the uncertainity of which machine the ledger-signer used would foul up any tracebacks.
Damm, this whole idea of trying to replace such a simple thing as a ballot box with a computer really stinks.
Then it scrolls out of view for the next voter.
Everything would be on one continuous numbered roll. With each vote accounted for in the same manner as those numbered voting slips they give us now.
Anything hackers can do can be sensed, and the appropriate code put in place to stop the leak.
I go to bed peacefully knowing the internet runs on a series of protocols that is just about as secure as knowing the English language will still exist tomorrow. Someone may misuse it, but that does not render the whole shebang moot.
As long as the Internet is the property of the commons, no one can do much harm to it.
We have a really nice series of plumbing in place now to route information, just as we have plumbing in place to route water and power. Enough people understand how it works that any malfunction can be properly addressed.
If anything brings down the internet, it will be politicians, passing law to grant exclusive controls to certain corporations, which can then fund volleys of lawyers to use the court systems to destroy anything in their path.
Yes, you can see planes crashing into towers, and you see rubble where a magnificient building once stood.. and there is lots of evidence scattered all over of the disaster that took place there, but there is little to see after a swarm of lawyers devastate a small business, but the damage is just as real.
If we don't hold our elected officials to the welfare of this country soon, it appears ownership/litigation will become the only viable way of "earning" an income.
The "Tahiti" series was really popular. I had the PRIAM WC-525. Stored around 250 Megabytes. You got one chance to write. You screw it up, you don't write anymore to that disk. And the disks cost about $150 a pop at that time.
I was told at the time the disks would be readable for at least 100 years. However, I cannot get my old drive to read my disks. I think dust got on the lens, and I have yet to figure out how to nondestructively open up the drive to dust it off. These were made before the day of ASIC, so they are full of circuitry.
I was using these things for backup of old DOS CAD drawings, as in that day, I could fit everything me or anyone else in my group had ever done on one disk.
Incidentally, the old DOS CAD programs I was using damn near 20 years ago still work fine. And I still use them. I still have access to all that work I did. I sure miss the cut-to-the-bones simplicity of those old programs. The databases were open, understandable, and the executables ran quite happily on anything I dropped it on. If a program didn't have some little feature you wanted, you could open it up in a debugger and fix it. Or branch to a helper program you wrote in C++. Even if you didn't have the source code.
Damm I miss those days.
I got my copy several years ago when I was researching the politics of obedience and whether engineer subordinates should be responsible to authority or the laws of physics for a course in Ethics.
The book, "The Truth about Chernobyl", by Grigori Medvedev (ISBN 0-465-08775-2) ( English translation - by the way very well done ) Copyright 1991 by Basic Books, Inc.
( Incidentally, from my research in Ethics, I just about got the feeling that if you were gonna toe the line on Ethics, you had better work for yourself.).
The original content producer is the only one who can legally crank out billions of copies of his work.
So, flood the marketing channels, and make it so easy to buy his work that its not worth the trouble to make one for yourself.
Kinda like nails. Who would think of trying to make their own, despite any patent protection that might be involved in making nails?
For most things I buy, the people in the marketing channels have made damn sure its in my best interests to buy the product, even if I could make my own... as they have the tremendous advantage of economy of scale, that by the very laws of nature, I will never have.
In economics parlance, this is called a "natural monopoly", and does quite well, even without any intervention of rights protection groups.
We already have laws in place to go after anyone else trying to replicate oopyrighted works on such a scale to make the economics of mass production profitable.
Yes.. I was trying to be sarcastic. I am rather pissed over how I have been seeing our nation's bureaucracy handling our nation's most prized assets, and implementing laws that discourage production and encourage litigation.
I betcha you will find some interesting correlations between acceleration rates, braking rates, and collisions.
Actually, I consider how fast one has to *change* velocity far more critical than velocity itself. A guy on a city street going only 30MPH can be one helluva accident waiting to happen, than a guy going even 90 on a lonely freeway in the middle of the night. To me, the key is your environment.
There are times when 5MPH is too fast!
By integrating how hard one accelerates and and brakes, a profile of the driver can be generated which could be used to key in rate values. Hell, they might even throw in lateral g-force sensor to see how fast you take turns or change lanes on the freeway. ( remember, they know you are on the freeway... GPS ).
Geez, passing a law like that would be tantamount to what all that H1-B and job outsourcing stuff did to high-tech.
Any country with leadership who has any logic at all in their heads knows not to kill off the nation's core skillsets... Do you really want to see insurance agents, along with unemployed information technology workers and engineers out pumping gas and serving fries?
Well, flamebait aside, the main problem I see with this approach is it does nothing to penalize the guy who has poor driving skills who gets onto the public roads with basically a road plow.
Personally, I don't see why insurance companies don't fight like hell to keep the people they have that pay their full premiums year after year and don't generate claims. I was with State Farm and they give me this really measly "loyalty bonus"... even after I have been with them for over ten years. I ended up leaving them because they just kept jacking up my rate to what I considered absurd levels.
There is easily an order of magnitude difference in the risk involved in the insurance of two different people. Some people, by their very nature, are very responsible. Some take a lot of risks. You would think that insurance companies would use the data they already have to make damn sure the "extremely low-risk" driver never leaves them by offering rates to those people that no competitor can match.
A few of us are real gems to the insurance industry. Every six months they rattle my mailbox with a bill of premium due, and promptly receive the check. Is that customer so unimportant to the insurance company that they are willing to risk losing that customer over a rate hike? To me that is like leaving my prize tools on my front lawn for any passerby to take.
If I am leaving anything on the front lawn, its gonna be those tools that give me no end of problems.
If you read what they actually agree to, its quite obvious that its a poor value for money.
Ever read a EULA?
Its a wonder any software ever gets sold after one reads one of those.
I am currently building a water sculpture at my house.. with the intention of using it for just that.... an evaporative heat sink so that during the hot summer months, I can dump heat to the water sculpture by a heat exchanger used in place of the outside condenser coil assembly. If things get really hot, I will route irrigation water through the system so as to deliver warmed water to the foliage around the house... the plants are really gonna need water anyway.
I am still experimenting with Lithium Bromide based Absorption units... if I can get my designs to work properly, I might even be able to power the whole shebang from sunlight, using gravitic separators and pumps.
Before you think I just dropped off the deep end, remember our Great Grandparent's Arkla-Servel Gas Refrigerators worked this same way... but they used Ammonia/Hydrogen refrigerant and Gas heat... and I wanna use water/Lithium Bromide/Iodide under vacuum ... and solar heat.
But, as with all my projects... things go slow because I am working on a lot of em in parallel.
Its why plants in adverse areas grow thorns... cause the animals eat those who didn't protect themselves from the predators.
I speak from experience.
Trust me.
I thought the concept was really cool!
I no longer had to re-invent the wheel every time I wanted to build an app.
I saw this effort very similar to my construction in electronics where I buy components off the shelf and know what I'm getting. I wouldn't even think of trying to build an IC, resistor, capacitor, or large inductor.. albeit I could if I had to. Or what building contractor would try to make his own lumber or nails.. even windows or doors?
It all comes preassembled - commodity items - and everybody knows how its built - and could build one themselves if they had to, but why? The vendor holds a "natural monopoly" on the things he makes because his "economies of scale" allow him to produce this item and even ship it to you at far less than the cost it would be to you if you had to make your own. Ever tried to build a light bulb? ( well yeh, I have with vacuum pumps and pickle jars..)
I loved the idea that Microsoft released this standard assortment of "objects" which supposedly are standardized. It took Microsoft hundreds of man-years to generate this code, it will take me years to master it, just like spending years to master the keyboard on a piano. I figured that an investment in my time learning Microsoft technology would be time well spent.
So, now where am I... I know an ancient technology . Microsoft keeps changing the keys on their piano keyboard! I can't keep up with their endless changing of things. I can't stay with one technology long enough to understand it thoroughly and avoid striking "sour notes".
This endless changing of things and their efforts to insure I learn only what they will allow is my main reason for avoiding Microsoft products.
I kinda see Microsoft products like fashion trends in pants. Its quite easy to slip one pair of pants off and another on when your pants go out of style. So, if its something where I am not counting on it being there in say three years, and nothing on the old will run on the new, Microsoft products fill the bill nicely.
But if its something like my tools, car, air compressors, home, anything I am counting on to sit there and do what it was designed to do until I dismantle it, then I want some platform where stability of design and maintainability is paramount.
I have no intention spending a helluva lot of time learning to play the piano if I know the piano manufacturer thoroughly intends to mess up the keys all the time so as to give the latest generation pianists an edge over the ones who bought into the plan a couple of years ago. With our playing skills being suddenly rendered obsolete by the change. I know big business can afford this kind of stuff, but as an individual running a small business, I can not.
And find people staying awake over nights worrying over something like this.
There are a helluva lot of us out there who know exactly how that stuff works, and can quite easily go to the component level and troubleshoot. Many of us are even very avid hobbyists in this and know where to find damn near ANY part.
We are the type, raised in the 60's, where we often moonlighted fixing anything, whether or not we had a schematic.
I know I could care less that the old test equipment I buy is not "supported". I couldn't afford the "support" anyway. If anything breaks, I fix it. Its just the normal way things were in those days.
That was the standard mode of operation for me when I worked in a Chevron oil refinery in the 70's... if something broke - they would bring it to me, I would open it up, find out what went wrong, and fix it... and didn't think much of it. No more than a mechanic finding a faulty auto part and fixing it.
Very rarely in those days did they have anything really oddball in there. It was too expensive for the manufacturer in those days to do custom part design when commodity parts were so cheap.
Geez... if its that "obsolete", it just had to be made with standard glue logic.
These days, yeh, all custom ASIC and FPGA. If it breaks, you just about have to toss it.
But that old stuff runs the gamut from vacuum tubes, to RTL/DTL/TTL/4000CMOS. All fixable. Discrete transistors not much problem at all - the ones we have today are so far superior to the older ones that I guarantee I'll find one to do the job. You would be surprised at the garden of analog parts one finds in a discarded PC power supply, or an old monitor.
Geez!!!
We have been trained since inception to be unquestionably submissive to authorities and business. Or we just get labeled as a troublemaker and the person in authority may well see fit to put an end to your inobedience right here and now and make an example of you so others will see and won't offer any resistance to them. Its a variant of "you can't fight city hall".
We are highly trained to be very obedient to the letter from the corporation. You make one screw-up with them and they quickly may run off, tattling on you to TRW-Experian, Equifax, Trans-Union, whatever, as well as initiate legal action if you fail to comply with one of their demands. Failure on our part to comply can cause us a helluva lot of headaches.
So, all the phisherman needs to do is to send out notes just like the ones mentioned here. And take advantage of the unquestioned obedience most people have toward the corporation they mimicked.
Can I call these people stupid? I certainly can't. These were very well-done.
On one small company I had worked for, I tried something very similar. I took their purchase requisition form and re-did the boilerplate "Terms and Conditions" crap printed on the back to include something like "customer reserves the right to modify any hardware/software in order to achieve interoperability with existing equipment." and it flew past all the signatures and the CAD system I ordered was shipped. I wanted to make damm sure I was covered in the event anybody wanted to nail me for after-the-sale modification of my purchased copy of the product if I had to open it up in the debugger and code around any rough edges in it.
I figured as much as Business relies on the sheet full of fine print with a line on the bottom for the obligee to sign, then being able to force the obligee to honor the sheet, I would be safe, for if a court found that a signed sheet was invalid because a businessman didn't read it, then precedent would be set and then no-one would have to pay attention to the words. Unenforcable. The main pry-bar used by business to coerce people into legally binding committment would be broken.
And I did not think they would risk losing their precious pry-bar over a software package.
When I first worked with the IBM PC, IBM also made available for purchase ( albeit not cheap ) a complete set of reference manuals, including complete hardware schematics, register operation details, and SOURCE CODE of the BIOS.
Don't get me wrong. We all knew it was copyrighted code and we had no right to go into business ourselves copying off IBM's code and selling it as our own... but there it was - assembler listings. For you folks who think its too good to believe they actually did this in the "good old days", its IBM publication 6361459, System Bios, Section 5. About 100 pages of commented listing of the Complete BIOS.
My set of manuals ( I still have ) comprise six matched 3-ring binders covering every technical aspect of construction and operation of a PC, including schematics and detailed programming info for each I/O card, Video Adapter, Monitor, EVERYTHING!
IBM knew customer's knowledge of the product was essential to get them interested to buy and develop stuff on them. So it was in their interests to make their product as usable as possible in the hands of their customer. IBM was happy enough to churn out machines for us, without worrying about how to fabricate all sorts of legal "animal traps" to ensure lock-in.
Sony's viewpoint was honored.
The consumer's viewpoint was not.
Remember the hubris resulting from trying to delete "Under God" from the US Pledge of Allegiance? I think its high time we strike the words "Justice for All" from this pledge, and cite things like the DMCA as proof why. ( Yes, I know this instance is UK, but here we have the DMCA, which is worse. )
Businessmen have no problem directing subordinates to do something or he will find someone else who will.
Its high time the public used similar tactics with politicians and other lawmakers.
( Well, actually, we did... its gonna be interesting how our new Governor of California, Arnold Swartzenegger, deals with the decades-old inbred bureaucracy here. They don't appear to be co-operating with him. This is gonna get interesting. Very interesting. Money's running out and the receding of the economic tide is gonna reveal a lot of stuff. This is gonna get as interesting as a Terminator flick, but this time its real for some of these gangsters masquerading as politicians. )
It seems to me some good games based on theology may finally ignite some critical thinking on religion dogma. Just *what* is 'religion' and what is of God himself?
It is a strong belief of mine that earthly religions are the work of man and they are just using the name of God to bolster power for themselves. Even the Bible states Jesus had to throw the Scribes and Pharisees ( yeh, all those loud moaning prayer-sayers and interpreters of the Word that pontificate profusely in public so as to appear holy ) out of the temple.
There is a human condition called "cognitive dissonance", which is a strong drive within us to know we made the correct decision. The last thing a guy who just bought a car wants to hear is that he made a big mistake by doing so. He wants positive affirmation he made an intelligent choice. I see religious congregations in a similar light - once 'converted' to that religion, those members push it because if others join, that bolsters their belief that they were correct. Its a human condition we form religions - but I don't see these as really having anything much to do with God. Its just a gang of people - and they can be very dangerous if they are ever led to believe that doing violence in the name of God is acceptable.
I have a hard time distinguishing earthly religion from cult and superstition. Like I am not aware of any proof that Zeus or Thor do NOT exist, yet I have no faith in their power. Well, are things any different today?
Maybe some good games where a "supreme power" did indeed create us, and our goal is to find out about him, but along the way are all these people who have formed these little gangs to feed us misinformation and make us waste time until our lifetime runs out.
You know these little 'pyramid' schemes that run around every so often, where a few guys organize this financial ponzi scheme that require the contributions of lots of suckers so the guys at the top can get fabulously wealthy? Yeh, they print up these little business plans and have rows of lines for people to sign up for a measly donation of $1000 to get a $64,000 tax-free return. Their heads begin yammering like air compressors as their mouths begin spewing streams of words like "outpouring of wealth", "faith", "make a committment", etc.
But, once you've seen it, you recognize it for what it is. A ponzi scheme. A way for people to get money for just jabbering. A quick way for you to lose your resources.
I see earthly manmade religions in exactly the same way. This is not to say I don't believe in God - its just I know that Man will lie. And Man can be very cruel if he's ever led to believe he is just being an instrument of God ( as if the God who created the universe needed the services of Man! I think of it like asking my cat to fix a leaky faucet. ).
Please don't tell me I've got it wrong. I most likely do have it wrong. I may never find what I am looking for. I know Man will lie. And I know Man , even though he obediently follows all the religious rituals, can do unbelievably cruel things to others - and feel completely guiltless over the trauma left in his wake. ( Southern Baptist )
It would be nice to see a few games where people actually had to *think* about their relationship with our Creator and fellow man, instead of just being led by another man.