All the evidence is consistent with my theory that the entire universe is a big giant peep inside a 10-dimensional microwave oven. See peepresearch.org if you doubt. This is the only theory that can explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. The unavoidable conclusion is that our universe will end in an explosion of hot marshmallow goop.
However, MS also has a distinct advantage when it comes to making sure OSS code doesn't get into any of MS's own software. Since OSS code is open, Microsoft can easily crosscheck all newly written MS code against OSS code to make sure no OSS code gets into MS software. OSS project leaders do not have the same ability to cross-check newly written code against proprietary MS (or SCO, etc.) code because the source code is closed. So if any proprietary code accidentally gets into OSS, it is understandable since there is no good way to make sure that doesn't happen. However, if OSS code gets into MS software, that is completely inexcusable and is due to either criminal negligence or outright theft.
Yes, but wouldn't this mean every privately-owned PC would also have to be fitted with a magnetic stripe reader so that we could all log in to our PCs and our various online accounts? That would take years to roll out.
Also, couldn't the bits flowing out of the magnetic stripe reader be captured the same as a keylogger program captures keystrokes? Or do they work the opposite way (i.e. the PIN/password is sent from the keyboard/PC to the magstripe reader, which then authenticates the PIN/password against the info on the card, and then just reports an encrypted result code back to the system, which decrypts the result code into basically either a thumbs up or thumbs down).
I have seen reports that criminals already use small portable card readers to steal magstripe information from credit cards and then use it to make working card duplicates.
"As the elite get more removed/alienated from the general riff-raff..."
This simply isn't an accurate picture of what has been happening over the centuries and decades. The rich in the past were far more "removed" from the "general riff-raff." In the past, only the rich were literate and educated. Percentage-wise, there were also far fewer rich people, and far more of the general riff-raff. At least in the US today, the general riff-raff by and large are literate and educated. The rich make up a larger percentage of the population than in the past.
The general riff-raff today have a standard of living much closer to the rich than they did in the past. The general riff-raff drive cars, go to high school and college, fly in airplanes, eat in restaurants, go to movies, watch TV, and put dishes in a dishwasher and clothes in a clothes washer. They drop off their clothing to be drycleaned. They live in heated and airconditioned homes and apartments clad with maintenance-free vinyl siding. The general riff-raff today have as much a problem with obesity as the rich!
The rich have always been able to pay others to do things for them, and that hasn't changed. But in the past, the general riff-raff had to do most stuff themselves through back-breaking labor, and do without a lot of stuff. Technology has improved the lives of the general riff-raff more than it has the rich.
Think about it! What does Bill Gates have in life that is truly of so much greater real value than the average member of the large middle class in America? People need to count their blessings and stop envying the mostly illusory luxuries that "the rich" enjoy.
If he's right that most of the menial jobs get taken over by robots, that's great. Other kinds of jobs will be created, some of which we can't even imagine right now. Not to mention the side benefit of how much cheaper the products and services the robots create and perform will be for everybody. Society will never advance or evolve to a better state if we create policies that encourage stagnation. This is a good incentive for every student to make sure they don't waste the educational opportunities that abound in our society.
..then maybe they should freely open up their archives for searching. They can still make money off the damn pop-up ads that will surely accompany the archived articles. They can't really be making much money off paid archive searches anyway.
The Web is rapidly becoming the world library where everybody does their research. If your works aren't easily searchable and downloadable from the web, they are handicapped in terms of the influence they can have on later research and ultimately will get cited less. Peer review for research articles and journalistic standards are still important, but it is a shame to keep the better quality material hidden in a pay-to-search or subscribe-to-search database while upstart web journals slowly take over. As a researcher, I would prefer that the articles I write are published and searchable on the web by a respected, peer-reviewed web journal, rather than stuck in a moldering library stack and downloadable only if you pay the journal publisher a fee.
Isn't this the same thing as if you bought a bunch of building materials from a supplier at price X to build your house with, and then the supplier returns after the house is built to say that they goofed and some of the materials they sent you were more expensive extra-super-duper materials and you need to pay them X+$1500 to make amends (for their own mistake) or else stop living in your house?
Now, I think any court in the land would say that the supplier's claim is at best a laughable bunch of hooey if the supplier actually made an honest goof (it was their own fault for being careless). However if it could be shown that the supplier knew ahead of time that the extra-super-duper materials were being sent but said nothing to the customer about it until after the house was built, a court would call that fraud and possibly extortion on the part of the supplier.
Also, imagine that you make the generous offer to the supplier to return the extra-super-duper materials and replace them with other materials of your own choosing. However, the supplier refuses to identify which materials are the extra-super-duper ones so their is no way for you to return them and replace them with other materials. In this case any court would order the supplier to identify the extra-super-duper materials and give you the chance to replace them with other materials. If the supplier refused to identify the materials, the court would throw it's case out in about 2 seconds (and maybe fine them for wasting the court's time).
I think the main reason they charge a lot up front is that if the game turns out to not be very compelling, and the majority of people let their subscriptions run out after only a month or two, then the company may fail to even recover their development costs if they had sold the game really cheap or even given it away for free. If a company knows it's game is compelling and players will keep their subscriptions going, then it would be in their interest to lower the up-front cost of the software on the store shelf. If they're not sure how good/addictive the game will be, then they hedge their bets by taking a big chunk out of you up front before you've even had a chance to try the game. I do think the $50 cost of the game should also include at least the first 3 months of your subscription, however. That would take some of the pain out of trying to decide whether or not to buy the game.
Since it has sensors to avoid running into things, if your dog attacks it will it run away?:) It might make a good playmate for your bored dog while you're at work:)
It's great that widescreen televisions and the widesceen DVD format is finally catching on, but why aren't there more widescreen computer displays? As a computer gamer, I think games on a widescreen display would rock. However, the existing widesreen displays are generally LCDs and are extremely expensive. I have decided not to go the LCD route until the native pixel resolutions get much better so that non-native, interpolated resolutions don't look so horrible on them.
My theory is on why there doesn't seem to be much hope for large-scale adoption of widescreen computer displays is that for the most frequently used applications (e.g. e-mail, web-browsing, word processing), a widescreen computer display doesn't offer many advantages. Most websites are still built with the 800 pixel-width lowest common denominator in mind.
I even remember some monitors a few years back that were made longer vertically than horizontally in order to approximate the shape and size of a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I think that approach is dead now since standard 4:3 monitors have gotten larger and have better resolutions.
Unfortunately, I don't see much hope of widescreen monitors catching on any time soon. Only a small subset of computer users are hardcore gamers or regularly use their computer to watch widescreen movies.
Finally - a web technology patent I hope succeeds
on
Prince of Pop-ups
·
· Score: 1
Although I hate patents of this kind in general, there is a part of me that hopes he gets the patent and then charges exhorbitant royalty fees for use of pop-ups. Perhaps then advertisers will stop using them:-)
Anybody know if the following concepts have patented? If not they should be, and the patent holders should charge prohibitive fees for their use:-)
spyware
third-party cookies
web bugs
I think Real Media has already patented the concept of having software take over users' computers by putting pieces of itself in the Start menu, quick launch bar, system tray, desktop, and control panel, all while spying on users.
Microsoft has already patented the concepts of selling bugfixes to customers as "upgrades," and stealing ideas from competitors and calling it "innovation."
I believe this system is designed to be deployed in areas where people do not normally go and/or during hours when people should not be present. Thus the presence of any human being in the image would be out of the ordinary. The proposed system isn't designed to monitor pedestrian foot traffic on the street corner or at the shopping mall during business hours. It might be very useful in watching over hundreds of miles of oil pipeline and power transmission lines running through the wilderness, the shores of water reservoirs, and our wilderness/rural borders with Mexico and Canada. It may make surveillance cheap enough to put into places that it was too expensive for in the past. Global time differences would be an asset (e.g. allowing people in other parts of the world to monitor sites during late-night hours).
Clearly Saddam Hussein is hiding his WMD operations on the moon. Just look at all that fine white dust all over the place...it's a sure sign of anthrax production.
Slashdot Mirror
All the evidence is consistent with my theory that the entire universe is a big giant peep inside a 10-dimensional microwave oven. See peepresearch.org if you doubt. This is the only theory that can explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. The unavoidable conclusion is that our universe will end in an explosion of hot marshmallow goop.
Really?
Then how do you explain the cottage industry that exists around teaching Windows stuff?
Umm...because the average user is dumber than a blindfolded monkey? ;-)
However, MS also has a distinct advantage when it comes to making sure OSS code doesn't get into any of MS's own software. Since OSS code is open, Microsoft can easily crosscheck all newly written MS code against OSS code to make sure no OSS code gets into MS software. OSS project leaders do not have the same ability to cross-check newly written code against proprietary MS (or SCO, etc.) code because the source code is closed. So if any proprietary code accidentally gets into OSS, it is understandable since there is no good way to make sure that doesn't happen. However, if OSS code gets into MS software, that is completely inexcusable and is due to either criminal negligence or outright theft.
Yes, but wouldn't this mean every privately-owned PC would also have to be fitted with a magnetic stripe reader so that we could all log in to our PCs and our various online accounts? That would take years to roll out. Also, couldn't the bits flowing out of the magnetic stripe reader be captured the same as a keylogger program captures keystrokes? Or do they work the opposite way (i.e. the PIN/password is sent from the keyboard/PC to the magstripe reader, which then authenticates the PIN/password against the info on the card, and then just reports an encrypted result code back to the system, which decrypts the result code into basically either a thumbs up or thumbs down). I have seen reports that criminals already use small portable card readers to steal magstripe information from credit cards and then use it to make working card duplicates.
"As the elite get more removed/alienated from the general riff-raff..."
This simply isn't an accurate picture of what has been happening over the centuries and decades. The rich in the past were far more "removed" from the "general riff-raff." In the past, only the rich were literate and educated. Percentage-wise, there were also far fewer rich people, and far more of the general riff-raff. At least in the US today, the general riff-raff by and large are literate and educated. The rich make up a larger percentage of the population than in the past.
The general riff-raff today have a standard of living much closer to the rich than they did in the past. The general riff-raff drive cars, go to high school and college, fly in airplanes, eat in restaurants, go to movies, watch TV, and put dishes in a dishwasher and clothes in a clothes washer. They drop off their clothing to be drycleaned. They live in heated and airconditioned homes and apartments clad with maintenance-free vinyl siding. The general riff-raff today have as much a problem with obesity as the rich!
The rich have always been able to pay others to do things for them, and that hasn't changed. But in the past, the general riff-raff had to do most stuff themselves through back-breaking labor, and do without a lot of stuff. Technology has improved the lives of the general riff-raff more than it has the rich.
Think about it! What does Bill Gates have in life that is truly of so much greater real value than the average member of the large middle class in America? People need to count their blessings and stop envying the mostly illusory luxuries that "the rich" enjoy.
If he's right that most of the menial jobs get taken over by robots, that's great. Other kinds of jobs will be created, some of which we can't even imagine right now. Not to mention the side benefit of how much cheaper the products and services the robots create and perform will be for everybody. Society will never advance or evolve to a better state if we create policies that encourage stagnation. This is a good incentive for every student to make sure they don't waste the educational opportunities that abound in our society.
..then maybe they should freely open up their archives for searching. They can still make money off the damn pop-up ads that will surely accompany the archived articles. They can't really be making much money off paid archive searches anyway. The Web is rapidly becoming the world library where everybody does their research. If your works aren't easily searchable and downloadable from the web, they are handicapped in terms of the influence they can have on later research and ultimately will get cited less. Peer review for research articles and journalistic standards are still important, but it is a shame to keep the better quality material hidden in a pay-to-search or subscribe-to-search database while upstart web journals slowly take over. As a researcher, I would prefer that the articles I write are published and searchable on the web by a respected, peer-reviewed web journal, rather than stuck in a moldering library stack and downloadable only if you pay the journal publisher a fee.
Now, I think any court in the land would say that the supplier's claim is at best a laughable bunch of hooey if the supplier actually made an honest goof (it was their own fault for being careless). However if it could be shown that the supplier knew ahead of time that the extra-super-duper materials were being sent but said nothing to the customer about it until after the house was built, a court would call that fraud and possibly extortion on the part of the supplier.
Also, imagine that you make the generous offer to the supplier to return the extra-super-duper materials and replace them with other materials of your own choosing. However, the supplier refuses to identify which materials are the extra-super-duper ones so their is no way for you to return them and replace them with other materials. In this case any court would order the supplier to identify the extra-super-duper materials and give you the chance to replace them with other materials. If the supplier refused to identify the materials, the court would throw it's case out in about 2 seconds (and maybe fine them for wasting the court's time).
I think the main reason they charge a lot up front is that if the game turns out to not be very compelling, and the majority of people let their subscriptions run out after only a month or two, then the company may fail to even recover their development costs if they had sold the game really cheap or even given it away for free. If a company knows it's game is compelling and players will keep their subscriptions going, then it would be in their interest to lower the up-front cost of the software on the store shelf. If they're not sure how good/addictive the game will be, then they hedge their bets by taking a big chunk out of you up front before you've even had a chance to try the game. I do think the $50 cost of the game should also include at least the first 3 months of your subscription, however. That would take some of the pain out of trying to decide whether or not to buy the game.
I'm such a sexist :-)
Ideal autonomous vacuum cleaner
Since it has sensors to avoid running into things, if your dog attacks it will it run away? :) It might make a good playmate for your bored dog while you're at work :)
My theory is on why there doesn't seem to be much hope for large-scale adoption of widescreen computer displays is that for the most frequently used applications (e.g. e-mail, web-browsing, word processing), a widescreen computer display doesn't offer many advantages. Most websites are still built with the 800 pixel-width lowest common denominator in mind.
I even remember some monitors a few years back that were made longer vertically than horizontally in order to approximate the shape and size of a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I think that approach is dead now since standard 4:3 monitors have gotten larger and have better resolutions.
Unfortunately, I don't see much hope of widescreen monitors catching on any time soon. Only a small subset of computer users are hardcore gamers or regularly use their computer to watch widescreen movies.
Anybody know if the following concepts have patented? If not they should be, and the patent holders should charge prohibitive fees for their use :-)
I think Real Media has already patented the concept of having software take over users' computers by putting pieces of itself in the Start menu, quick launch bar, system tray, desktop, and control panel, all while spying on users.
Microsoft has already patented the concepts of selling bugfixes to customers as "upgrades," and stealing ideas from competitors and calling it "innovation."
I believe this system is designed to be deployed in areas where people do not normally go and/or during hours when people should not be present. Thus the presence of any human being in the image would be out of the ordinary. The proposed system isn't designed to monitor pedestrian foot traffic on the street corner or at the shopping mall during business hours. It might be very useful in watching over hundreds of miles of oil pipeline and power transmission lines running through the wilderness, the shores of water reservoirs, and our wilderness/rural borders with Mexico and Canada. It may make surveillance cheap enough to put into places that it was too expensive for in the past. Global time differences would be an asset (e.g. allowing people in other parts of the world to monitor sites during late-night hours).
Clearly Saddam Hussein is hiding his WMD operations on the moon. Just look at all that fine white dust all over the place...it's a sure sign of anthrax production.