I suppose it will be no big deal that the only material available to the growing illiteratti will either be new spoken or older stuff that the literate choose to offer. After all, their ability to read and write should give them the authority to choose material for people.
No, sorry, I was overgeneralizing. I was thinking in terms of using the OS. I prefer shells, etc. Of course stuff that requires graphics works better with a graphical interface.
But that was not my point. My point was that reading and writing seem to be going the same direction as basic math skills.
People used to read. Then came television and people chose to watch the story.
But at least we geeks had computers. They were arcane and baffling to most people. We had JCL. We had 80 column cards. We had numbers in bases 8 and 16 we dared to call "octal" and "hex". We had RCPM and BBSes and MODEMS. And we had nearly everything in text.
Now command lines aren't needed because of GUI interfaces (which seem easier at first but are a pain to use to get anything serious done). Don't get me wrong, I love good graphics (like watching the approaching storm on weather.com), but video weblogs will be another step towards turning the internet into interactive television. Watch screen. Move mouse. Click. Watch screen.
"Back in the day" (1980's) I worked as a component-level repair tech at the end of a production line building circuit boards for arcade games. Same game, over and over again. We built Scramble(tm); Super Cobra (tm), Qix(tm), Frenzy(tm), and a lot of second, third, and fourth tier games.
Eventually I moved up to Games Development and Market Research, where I worked more hours with more games, most of which never got to see the light of day.
The cool factor wears off. Only games I play these days are the type we never built, licensed, or tested: card games, dominoes, tetris-like games. I am so sick to death of shoot-em-ups, pacman-like games, and donkey kong.
Once I thought it was a good idea to get paid to do what you love. Now I'm not so sure. Getting burned out on things you enjoy takes a lot of fun out of life. If your hobby is your career, what do you do to unwind?
...what about the people who never send you anything original, just stuff that's been forwarded 20 times (with indents, attachments within attachments, and the email addresses of people they didn't think to protect by using bcc)? From where does this stuff originate anyway? I always seem to get the stuff that's been forwarded at least five times. Maybe I just don't know any creative people.
I've come up with a name for these emails. It's full of miscellaneous stuff (indents, headers), no one knows where it originally came from, no one seems to really want it, and it gets passed around endlessly (I frequently get several copies of each - often from people who were on the same to: line as I was the first time I got it!).
I call it "fruitcake".
Now here's the question:
Would it be reasonable to write a filtering program that:
Strips out indents, headers, and whitespace
Creates a crc or other signature for the actual cute story or magic "scroll down to see the answer" quiz
Checks a database to see whether this is a known fruitcake and, if so, deletes it
Allows the user to add additional fruitcake references
If no one ever buys anything from spammers, spam will stop.
Unfortunately, the one in ten thousand who buys into this makes it worthwhile to spend a buck to send 10,000,000 emails.
Some people just refuse to believe that unsolicited email offers are a problem. The marketing director at our company keeps pushing to "buy this list of targeted email addresses" or "pump up our ranking in search engines" as offered by the latest spam he receives. These people aren't responsible for spam, but they're responsible for making it profitable.
Like anything else governments try to control (US war on drugs anyone? how about the US prohibition era? prostitution?), spam will continue to exist as long as there is enough demand to justify the low cost of email.
OK, maybe a lot of you are too young to remember the 45 RPM vinyl singles. We used to buy them to get the hit we wanted, without having to buy the rest of the album (33 RPM vinyl recordings). This was the source of many one hit wonders.
There are a lot of situations where I might just want the one song. I'd like to make a CD of my favorite instrumentals (Peaches en Regalia, Green Onions, Tramontane, La Villa Stangiatto, etc.). I might not want to collect all those alb^H^H^HCDs just to get one song per.
Of course, I still have to get over the iPod-only problem (sigh).
I'm very happy to see more wireless communications which don't require people to be chattering all the time. If they're too bored to watch the movie, participate in church, watch the play, etc., now they can busy themselves silently.
OTOH, is this going to be banned from theaters and other venues where cameras are prohibited? At what point do we end up with unenforceable "no camera" rules?
How about we mine the huge amount of spacejunk floating in orbit? That stuff came from Earth in the first place.
Granted, the orbiting spacedump is very dispersed, and there are a lot of things that are too small to track. But what a technological challenge for the world's brightest minds! Capture the stuff we left up there, and bring it back!
After we reuse/recycle what we dumped over our heads, we can see whether we want to bring more stuff here from other chunks of rock.
Having purchased the US Department of Justice, we hope to acquire other judicial assets. This will facilitate our acquisition of other commercial computing entities, such as America Online, Earthlink, AT&T, and the so-called Baby Bells.
Once we have the resources of trademark and patent offices around the globe, we will begin our program to acquire patents and trademarks for existing so-called "Open Source" properties, upon which we will then vigorously enforce our new license fee structure.
Finally, we plan to obtain ownership rights to the chemicals Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine, and to impose licensing fees on anyone who replicates these chemicals in any order.
By obtaining these assets, we shall create a better, more user-friendly world, in which everything will be more Windows-compatible - and much, much more gooey.
When does scc-inc.com get redirected to the DOJ website?
Technical Anachronism
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
How difficult is it to prevent technical anachronism? Early science fiction movies had people being shot to the moon with guns, 2001 would have had us with manned spaceflights to Jupiter, and Star Trek is currently dealing with how to show Starship technology more advanced than year 2003 tech while not being as advanced as the original series' audio intercoms and Motorola cellphone communicators.
Do you have a means of avoiding anachronism? What suggestions do you have for other budding authors regarding this problem?
IIRC, both Kleenex and Coke get pretty peeved about their names being used generically for facial tissue and cola, respectively. Ever order a "coke" in a restaurant and have them ask "Is Pepsi (or RC or Belchy Cola or what have you) OK?"? I have. This happens more often in large chains which stand to get called on by lawyers.
Bayer lost the name Aspirin that way. Anyone can call their acetysalycitic acid "aspirin" nowadays.
I think I shall patent "a means of using a patent to create ownership of an obvious method of using existing devices or methods so as to stifle innovation and help lawyers buy new cars"
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it will be no big deal that the only material available to the growing illiteratti will either be new spoken or older stuff that the literate choose to offer. After all, their ability to read and write should give them the authority to choose material for people.
Hey, that's what the Church used to do!
Or at least that's what I read.
No, sorry, I was overgeneralizing. I was thinking in terms of using the OS. I prefer shells, etc. Of course stuff that requires graphics works better with a graphical interface.
But that was not my point. My point was that reading and writing seem to be going the same direction as basic math skills.
People used to read. Then came television and people chose to watch the story.
But at least we geeks had computers. They were arcane and baffling to most people. We had JCL. We had 80 column cards. We had numbers in bases 8 and 16 we dared to call "octal" and "hex". We had RCPM and BBSes and MODEMS. And we had nearly everything in text.
Now command lines aren't needed because of GUI interfaces (which seem easier at first but are a pain to use to get anything serious done). Don't get me wrong, I love good graphics (like watching the approaching storm on weather.com), but video weblogs will be another step towards turning the internet into interactive television. Watch screen. Move mouse. Click. Watch screen.
I'm tired. Would someone read Slashdot to me?
"Back in the day" (1980's) I worked as a component-level repair tech at the end of a production line building circuit boards for arcade games. Same game, over and over again. We built Scramble(tm); Super Cobra (tm), Qix(tm), Frenzy(tm), and a lot of second, third, and fourth tier games.
Eventually I moved up to Games Development and Market Research, where I worked more hours with more games, most of which never got to see the light of day.
The cool factor wears off. Only games I play these days are the type we never built, licensed, or tested: card games, dominoes, tetris-like games. I am so sick to death of shoot-em-ups, pacman-like games, and donkey kong.
Once I thought it was a good idea to get paid to do what you love. Now I'm not so sure. Getting burned out on things you enjoy takes a lot of fun out of life. If your hobby is your career, what do you do to unwind?
I've come up with a name for these emails. It's full of miscellaneous stuff (indents, headers), no one knows where it originally came from, no one seems to really want it, and it gets passed around endlessly (I frequently get several copies of each - often from people who were on the same to: line as I was the first time I got it!).
I call it "fruitcake".
Now here's the question:
Would it be reasonable to write a filtering program that:
- Strips out indents, headers, and whitespace
- Creates a crc or other signature for the actual cute story or magic "scroll down to see the answer" quiz
- Checks a database to see whether this is a known fruitcake and, if so, deletes it
- Allows the user to add additional fruitcake references
Any thoughts?...is unfortunately not a realistic solution:
If no one ever buys anything from spammers, spam will stop.
Unfortunately, the one in ten thousand who buys into this makes it worthwhile to spend a buck to send 10,000,000 emails.
Some people just refuse to believe that unsolicited email offers are a problem. The marketing director at our company keeps pushing to "buy this list of targeted email addresses" or "pump up our ranking in search engines" as offered by the latest spam he receives. These people aren't responsible for spam, but they're responsible for making it profitable.
Like anything else governments try to control (US war on drugs anyone? how about the US prohibition era? prostitution?), spam will continue to exist as long as there is enough demand to justify the low cost of email.
Just say no to spam?
or Xbox.
OK, maybe a lot of you are too young to remember the 45 RPM vinyl singles. We used to buy them to get the hit we wanted, without having to buy the rest of the album (33 RPM vinyl recordings). This was the source of many one hit wonders.
There are a lot of situations where I might just want the one song. I'd like to make a CD of my favorite instrumentals (Peaches en Regalia, Green Onions, Tramontane, La Villa Stangiatto, etc.). I might not want to collect all those alb^H^H^HCDs just to get one song per.
Of course, I still have to get over the iPod-only problem (sigh).
URL comes up forbidden now. Anyone got a cache reference?
I'm very happy to see more wireless communications which don't require people to be chattering all the time. If they're too bored to watch the movie, participate in church, watch the play, etc., now they can busy themselves silently.
OTOH, is this going to be banned from theaters and other venues where cameras are prohibited? At what point do we end up with unenforceable "no camera" rules?
How about we mine the huge amount of spacejunk floating in orbit? That stuff came from Earth in the first place.
Granted, the orbiting spacedump is very dispersed, and there are a lot of things that are too small to track. But what a technological challenge for the world's brightest minds! Capture the stuff we left up there, and bring it back!
After we reuse/recycle what we dumped over our heads, we can see whether we want to bring more stuff here from other chunks of rock.
Wow. If Windows becomes generic, maybe I'll put Windows in my house and my car. Office buildings will have Windows.
OTOH, if it's ruled a trademark, I'll stick to French Doors to avoid the Windows tax.
Having purchased the US Department of Justice, we hope to acquire other judicial assets. This will facilitate our acquisition of other commercial computing entities, such as America Online, Earthlink, AT&T, and the so-called Baby Bells.
Once we have the resources of trademark and patent offices around the globe, we will begin our program to acquire patents and trademarks for existing so-called "Open Source" properties, upon which we will then vigorously enforce our new license fee structure.
Finally, we plan to obtain ownership rights to the chemicals Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine, and to impose licensing fees on anyone who replicates these chemicals in any order.
By obtaining these assets, we shall create a better, more user-friendly world, in which everything will be more Windows-compatible - and much, much more gooey.
Je ne comprende pas, par-ce que je ne parle pas francais.
Merde.
When does scc-inc.com get redirected to the DOJ website?
How difficult is it to prevent technical anachronism? Early science fiction movies had people being shot to the moon with guns, 2001 would have had us with manned spaceflights to Jupiter, and Star Trek is currently dealing with how to show Starship technology more advanced than year 2003 tech while not being as advanced as the original series' audio intercoms and Motorola cellphone communicators.
Do you have a means of avoiding anachronism? What suggestions do you have for other budding authors regarding this problem?
IIRC, both Kleenex and Coke get pretty peeved about their names being used generically for facial tissue and cola, respectively. Ever order a "coke" in a restaurant and have them ask "Is Pepsi (or RC or Belchy Cola or what have you) OK?"? I have. This happens more often in large chains which stand to get called on by lawyers.
Bayer lost the name Aspirin that way. Anyone can call their acetysalycitic acid "aspirin" nowadays.
I think I shall patent "a means of using a patent to create ownership of an obvious method of using existing devices or methods so as to stifle innovation and help lawyers buy new cars"