You can get a 3G plan (with data card) for your laptop for 10gbp/month here which is a bit more convenient than hooking up a cell phone.
I use my N95 as a modem (it's faster than my home DSL! 10gb/mo transfer for $25) as well as streaming BBC radio (the on demand service) over the internet direct to the phone. However most people are not geeks and don't use the software toys that come with the handset.
However they will have problems if they think they can charge for ring tones here (especially 2gbp/4usd each, which would be 2* the iTunes price as per the US). Unlike the US devices are *much less* locked down in the UK - USB mass storage mode is enabled by default and a cable comes in the box etc. This is true even of many sub $100 cheap phones. While people aren't geeks this doesn't extend to copying on/off ring tones where suddenly the most undereducated yob seems to acquire the technical skills of an IT expert. It must be something to do with motivation.
Checking the release date it seems that it has actually only been 8 years and 17,520 hours of use. Which is still 17,499 hours longer than my copy of Win95 went without a critical failure.
Given that a typical mouse of the era has a tracking speed of 10 in/s that's actually enough time to have pushed the thing 9,955 miles - which by some amazing co-incidence is exactly the distance from my current location to 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond and back again.
Microsoft WIRED Mice and Keyboards are pretty good.
Too true. I have a first gen MS optical intellimouse that has seen 6+ hours of use per day for about 11 years now without failure. Hell the thing is so old that I didn't even dislike Microsoft when I bought it! Fortunately the logo rubbed off around 1999 and these days no one can recognise it.
In fact when it was new my top-end machine was a blistering 400mhz PII with 64mb of ram running Win95. Who the hell knew that that Microsoft could make anything good for 24,000 hours of use with no faults.
1) The BSD licensed guys are pissed because someone took some code and locked them out of it, despite being rabidly pro the freedom to do exactly this.
2) The Linux guys are technically in the right but still taking dual licensed GPL/BSD code and locking it up is a pretty shitty thing to do.
3) Hot heads on both sides have managed to turn what should have been a quiet chat about a moderate, considered approach and with the magic described most eloquently as the PA Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory ensured that relations remain as hostile as possible.
The only conclusion can be that the idiots on both sides (Theo included) actually work for Microsoft and are puppets dancing to the compelling dark tunes of their evil and cunning masters.
Ever tried it with Slashdot? The *light* version of the front page is 600k!
The only alternative is the mobile interface, which is horribly crippled (top five comments only? the only good thing about slashdot is the comments!).
The content on Slashdot *should* be ideal for reading on the way to work on my mobile - content that can be laid out easily in a linear fashion, lots of content on a single page so I can keep on reading through blackspots, no pictures - but the way it's laid out makes it way too annoying (and this is with an unlimited 3G data plan).
So the conflict is that Apple wants to maximize the number of iPods sold, which means getting people to buy the maximum number of songs to fill up their iPods, thus requiring a bigger iPod.
There is already enough stuff out there to do that. There is also enough television that you could start watching now and never come to the end of it. There are certainly enough books that even attempting to read just the good ones would be a fairly impossible goal for one human lifetime.
So when will copyright no longer be needed? Will it always really be necessary to keep offering such strong protections to creators at a cost to society? At what point could we look to patronage and ego to supply enough new works to keep things fresh, without needing copyright law at all?
It's a mistake to think of libertarianism as a right wing concept. It *can* be right wing (and that is who the name is currently associated with) but there are also left wing libertarians.
How much of an ass do you have to be to argue against individual freedom, at least as an ideal?
Most of the people here are smart enough to realise that ideals are something you work towards, not a binary condition. So, in a word where established authority seems to be committed to totalitarianism (not a huge surprise) why wouldn't even fairly moderate people want a shift towards individual freedom as a priority?
So, if you look at the political compass putting a large number of geeks in the bottom half is as expected.
More interesting is the *other* spectrum - left (social welfare) vs right (opportunity to win or lose).Note that this is *not* communism vs capitalism - it is communism or capitalism to the extent that is compatible with personal freedom - neither mega state nor mega corp should be allowed to run your life or know everything about you. There seems to be a much bigger range of opinion here.
Personally I fall somewhere in the middle. People should be free, and the role of the government is to regulate effectively to maintain that freedom without forcing anyone below a certain (low) standard of living. However I would gladly vote for *anyone* on the libertarian side of the line, despite left or right ideology, because pretty much every candidate in recent history has been in favour of totalitarianism - at least once they get into power.
The good thing about being forced to get a TV is that a condition of me doing so was that I get to install a Myth TV setup. I'm thinking satellite + cable + OTA inputs to a small cluster in the basement, new fibre runs all over the house, speakers in every wall, projectors in hidden drop down ceiling mounts, touch screen controls in every room, integration of every form of entertainment known to man and a user interface that delights and astounds.
By the time I'm finished, of course, it'll be obsolete and I shall have to start over, just like the fourth bridge paint job. Perpetual geeking if you like.
E-mail works fine, with the various hacks that have been added on to fight entropy. Dealing with normal spam is no worse than the annoyances of closed networks - you still get spam on facebook etc!
Compare and contrast e-mail with the alternatives - you get instant messaging, which solves a different problem and *still* sucks, or you place yourself at the mercy of a third party. No thanks.
If you can't use e-mail chances are you don't:
Run an well configured server (or pay an insignificant amount of money to the people at tuffmail to run one for you) Have a mail client with decent filtering
However NDRs are a major problem. My domain was spoofed this week and I received 30k+ NDR responses. 2k+ ended up in my inbox... and unlike regular spam they are really hard to filter. I normally get 2k~ spam per week and max 1-2 end up in my inbox.
Everyone thinks they are special. It's a fundamental human attribute.
How else would you explain the people who play the lottery? Gamble at casinos? Think that out of all the millions of oppressed masses, _they_ are the ones who will live the American dream and become someone?
It makes life more interesting; without that drive there would be little innovation, little hard work and drive, few no obsessively hard workers spending three years of nights in a garage writing software, no interest in going for American Idol... ok, scratch that last one.
In the same way companies, which are only an aggregation of people, will think that they can be the one out of a million who will benefit from patents. Even if you can empirically and theoretically show that they are being taken up the arse by a banana. Human nature. Infuriating, isn't it?
My data account with t-mobile in the UK costs less than $30 per month and covers 3gb of data*. 10gb would be less than $50 per month. Speeds are over 100k/sec. Do the first sync by popping the SD card into your laptop, install rsync, set up a scheduled task to run while the thing is on the charger at night and then forget about it.
If you are at home it can even discover and use WiFi saving you some bandwidth - if you think it's worth the hassle.
Of course you might have problems with this if your smart phone doesn't run Linux, but it'll only cost you about $300 to fix that:)
*More is not charged for, but you can't do it too often.
...and if you think that the little ones wiped out the dinosaurs, imagine what creatures must have been wiped out by the meteor that created the Pacific!
I thought getting an iPhone might be interesting, but to be honest the barrage of media coverage has been *so* excessive I'm already sick of the damn thing and it hasn't even been released!
So, the answer would be no. Besides it's only pretend geek phone - a real geek phone would fit in a CF socket so you could drop it into any device you like, and come with an unlimited high speed data plan as standard.
May I just add that Wile E Coyote wished me to clarify that, while he is the sole suppliers of sophisticated counter measures to Microsoft on behalf of the ACME corporation, he had nothing to do with the design of the original XBox controllers. That was all their fault.
10,000 volt capacitor (triggered by Live Smack Talk interpretation device). Instant set concrete foam spray (triggered by the pirate Windows install seismometer). Mustard gas dispenser (triggered by the mod chip detection unit). Flamethrower (triggered by the iPod spectrometer). VHF location transponder tied to IRBM launch site (triggered by the GPL sens-o-matic).
I really am. It took me a lot of kicks in the head to realize what I was doing was stupid.
In term of failed platforms, I think I have a long list. I invested time in:
mIRC script NWN1 scripting engine Win 95 era Visual Basic Access 97 era VBA
Notice anything in common about these platforms?
The final kick was Labview. It was a fun language and, as a student, I didn't have to pay for it. Now of course I'm not a student so to update and reuse some nifty things I wrote as a student I would need to pay hundreds for a run time. Not smart.
Of course it's not useless. A lot of the things I learned have helped when programming in proper languages (C/perl/java/occam etc), and leaning for learning's sake is never a waste. But all of the things I wrote are now useless because someone else owns the platform they run on and I can't get or afford the environment.
Older and smarter I would have to be getting a healthy wage to write anything in a closed tool. I might be interested in learning DirectX 10 to steal the best ideas, but if I decide I want to do some 3D visualisation I'll do it on openGL thank you. I will also write my tools in the UNIX style, with exposed APIs and designed in the most modular fashion possible, since it makes them far more valuable in the long run.
I actually liked Elephant's Dream... but it was a bit high brow. A few car crashes/pirate ships would have broadened the appeal of the movie and gained a wider audience, which is the point of a tech demo, no?
Slashdot Mirror
You can get a 3G plan (with data card) for your laptop for 10gbp/month here which is a bit more convenient than hooking up a cell phone.
I use my N95 as a modem (it's faster than my home DSL! 10gb/mo transfer for $25) as well as streaming BBC radio (the on demand service) over the internet direct to the phone. However most people are not geeks and don't use the software toys that come with the handset.
However they will have problems if they think they can charge for ring tones here (especially 2gbp/4usd each, which would be 2* the iTunes price as per the US). Unlike the US devices are *much less* locked down in the UK - USB mass storage mode is enabled by default and a cable comes in the box etc. This is true even of many sub $100 cheap phones. While people aren't geeks this doesn't extend to copying on/off ring tones where suddenly the most undereducated yob seems to acquire the technical skills of an IT expert. It must be something to do with motivation.
11 years
Checking the release date it seems that it has actually only been 8 years and 17,520 hours of use. Which is still 17,499 hours longer than my copy of Win95 went without a critical failure.
Given that a typical mouse of the era has a tracking speed of 10 in/s that's actually enough time to have pushed the thing 9,955 miles - which by some amazing co-incidence is exactly the distance from my current location to 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond and back again.
Microsoft WIRED Mice and Keyboards are pretty good.
Too true. I have a first gen MS optical intellimouse that has seen 6+ hours of use per day for about 11 years now without failure. Hell the thing is so old that I didn't even dislike Microsoft when I bought it! Fortunately the logo rubbed off around 1999 and these days no one can recognise it.
In fact when it was new my top-end machine was a blistering 400mhz PII with 64mb of ram running Win95. Who the hell knew that that Microsoft could make anything good for 24,000 hours of use with no faults.
1) The BSD licensed guys are pissed because someone took some code and locked them out of it, despite being rabidly pro the freedom to do exactly this.
2) The Linux guys are technically in the right but still taking dual licensed GPL/BSD code and locking it up is a pretty shitty thing to do.
3) Hot heads on both sides have managed to turn what should have been a quiet chat about a moderate, considered approach and with the magic described most eloquently as the PA Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory ensured that relations remain as hostile as possible.
The only conclusion can be that the idiots on both sides (Theo included) actually work for Microsoft and are puppets dancing to the compelling dark tunes of their evil and cunning masters.
The end.
Police have neither confirmed nor denied they placed the devices.
...followed shortly by...
A Trade Me spokesman said the listing was removed yesterday afternoon "at the request of the New Zealand Police".
I write books for ego, and my day job *is* essentially the same as patronage (list most people's)! I get paid to do what my employer wants me to do.
So, the answer to your question is yes, I would.
Ever tried it with Slashdot? The *light* version of the front page is 600k!
The only alternative is the mobile interface, which is horribly crippled (top five comments only? the only good thing about slashdot is the comments!).
The content on Slashdot *should* be ideal for reading on the way to work on my mobile - content that can be laid out easily in a linear fashion, lots of content on a single page so I can keep on reading through blackspots, no pictures - but the way it's laid out makes it way too annoying (and this is with an unlimited 3G data plan).
So the conflict is that Apple wants to maximize the number of iPods sold, which means getting people to buy the maximum number of songs to fill up their iPods, thus requiring a bigger iPod.
There is already enough stuff out there to do that. There is also enough television that you could start watching now and never come to the end of it. There are certainly enough books that even attempting to read just the good ones would be a fairly impossible goal for one human lifetime.
So when will copyright no longer be needed? Will it always really be necessary to keep offering such strong protections to creators at a cost to society? At what point could we look to patronage and ego to supply enough new works to keep things fresh, without needing copyright law at all?
It's a mistake to think of libertarianism as a right wing concept. It *can* be right wing (and that is who the name is currently associated with) but there are also left wing libertarians.
How much of an ass do you have to be to argue against individual freedom, at least as an ideal?
Most of the people here are smart enough to realise that ideals are something you work towards, not a binary condition. So, in a word where established authority seems to be committed to totalitarianism (not a huge surprise) why wouldn't even fairly moderate people want a shift towards individual freedom as a priority?
So, if you look at the political compass putting a large number of geeks in the bottom half is as expected.
More interesting is the *other* spectrum - left (social welfare) vs right (opportunity to win or lose).Note that this is *not* communism vs capitalism - it is communism or capitalism to the extent that is compatible with personal freedom - neither mega state nor mega corp should be allowed to run your life or know everything about you. There seems to be a much bigger range of opinion here.
Personally I fall somewhere in the middle. People should be free, and the role of the government is to regulate effectively to maintain that freedom without forcing anyone below a certain (low) standard of living. However I would gladly vote for *anyone* on the libertarian side of the line, despite left or right ideology, because pretty much every candidate in recent history has been in favour of totalitarianism - at least once they get into power.
He was less than an inch from "Carly 'HP... is that some kind of sauce?' Fiorina and didn't beat her to death with an RPN calculator. He is obviously some kind of business weenie or something.
The good thing about being forced to get a TV is that a condition of me doing so was that I get to install a Myth TV setup. I'm thinking satellite + cable + OTA inputs to a small cluster in the basement, new fibre runs all over the house, speakers in every wall, projectors in hidden drop down ceiling mounts, touch screen controls in every room, integration of every form of entertainment known to man and a user interface that delights and astounds.
By the time I'm finished, of course, it'll be obsolete and I shall have to start over, just like the fourth bridge paint job. Perpetual geeking if you like.
I used to be a Gateway customer - when they were good...
But then again I got a PDA in 2004 that was faster than my last Gateway computer. Guess they haven't been good for a while.
I respectfully disagree.
... and unlike regular spam they are really hard to filter. I normally get 2k~ spam per week and max 1-2 end up in my inbox.
E-mail works fine, with the various hacks that have been added on to fight entropy. Dealing with normal spam is no worse than the annoyances of closed networks - you still get spam on facebook etc!
Compare and contrast e-mail with the alternatives - you get instant messaging, which solves a different problem and *still* sucks, or you place yourself at the mercy of a third party. No thanks.
If you can't use e-mail chances are you don't:
Run an well configured server (or pay an insignificant amount of money to the people at tuffmail to run one for you)
Have a mail client with decent filtering
However NDRs are a major problem. My domain was spoofed this week and I received 30k+ NDR responses. 2k+ ended up in my inbox
But the charge you $15/page for the bill!
Everyone thinks they are special. It's a fundamental human attribute.
How else would you explain the people who play the lottery? Gamble at casinos? Think that out of all the millions of oppressed masses, _they_ are the ones who will live the American dream and become someone?
It makes life more interesting; without that drive there would be little innovation, little hard work and drive, few no obsessively hard workers spending three years of nights in a garage writing software, no interest in going for American Idol... ok, scratch that last one.
In the same way companies, which are only an aggregation of people, will think that they can be the one out of a million who will benefit from patents. Even if you can empirically and theoretically show that they are being taken up the arse by a banana. Human nature. Infuriating, isn't it?
My data account with t-mobile in the UK costs less than $30 per month and covers 3gb of data*. 10gb would be less than $50 per month. Speeds are over 100k/sec. Do the first sync by popping the SD card into your laptop, install rsync, set up a scheduled task to run while the thing is on the charger at night and then forget about it.
:)
If you are at home it can even discover and use WiFi saving you some bandwidth - if you think it's worth the hassle.
Of course you might have problems with this if your smart phone doesn't run Linux, but it'll only cost you about $300 to fix that
*More is not charged for, but you can't do it too often.
You could try buying a bulb that was <br><br>
Seriously your complaint is as outdated as the one about Linux being fine apart from RPM hell. Hasn't been true since the last millennium. Next you will be complaining about the mercury content!
If your comment appeared before this post, you didn't watch the entire video.
...and if you think that the little ones wiped out the dinosaurs, imagine what creatures must have been wiped out by the meteor that created the Pacific!
I thought getting an iPhone might be interesting, but to be honest the barrage of media coverage has been *so* excessive I'm already sick of the damn thing and it hasn't even been released!
So, the answer would be no. Besides it's only pretend geek phone - a real geek phone would fit in a CF socket so you could drop it into any device you like, and come with an unlimited high speed data plan as standard.
May I just add that Wile E Coyote wished me to clarify that, while he is the sole suppliers of sophisticated counter measures to Microsoft on behalf of the ACME corporation, he had nothing to do with the design of the original XBox controllers. That was all their fault.
10,000 volt capacitor (triggered by Live Smack Talk interpretation device).
Instant set concrete foam spray (triggered by the pirate Windows install seismometer).
Mustard gas dispenser (triggered by the mod chip detection unit).
Flamethrower (triggered by the iPod spectrometer).
VHF location transponder tied to IRBM launch site (triggered by the GPL sens-o-matic).
I really am. It took me a lot of kicks in the head to realize what I was doing was stupid.
In term of failed platforms, I think I have a long list. I invested time in:
mIRC script
NWN1 scripting engine
Win 95 era Visual Basic
Access 97 era VBA
Notice anything in common about these platforms?
The final kick was Labview. It was a fun language and, as a student, I didn't have to pay for it. Now of course I'm not a student so to update and reuse some nifty things I wrote as a student I would need to pay hundreds for a run time. Not smart.
Of course it's not useless. A lot of the things I learned have helped when programming in proper languages (C/perl/java/occam etc), and leaning for learning's sake is never a waste. But all of the things I wrote are now useless because someone else owns the platform they run on and I can't get or afford the environment.
Older and smarter I would have to be getting a healthy wage to write anything in a closed tool. I might be interested in learning DirectX 10 to steal the best ideas, but if I decide I want to do some 3D visualisation I'll do it on openGL thank you. I will also write my tools in the UNIX style, with exposed APIs and designed in the most modular fashion possible, since it makes them far more valuable in the long run.
Finally, a profitable application of the peter principle.
I actually liked Elephant's Dream... but it was a bit high brow. A few car crashes/pirate ships would have broadened the appeal of the movie and gained a wider audience, which is the point of a tech demo, no?