This sounds like a great idea on the surface, but any new drug or treatment still needs to go through a hugely expensive clinical trial process to verify safety and efficacy (at least in the developed nations). No company is going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to put a drug through the clinical trial process (laboratory testing on cultured cells, animal testing, trials with human subjects) if it is not going to be able to have a patent at the end to recoup their costs. The only way for patent-free drug-development to succeed is for governments and international bodies to fund the trial phase. And even then, the allocation of resources will be subject to a political process because there is not enough money to do all of the research that is demanded by every "disease special interest group." Developing new drugs just requires way too much money for it to done using the OSS model. Even outside of researchers' time, there are big costs associated with specialized lab space, equipment, materials, and the costs of compensating human subjects, insurance, etc. In the vast majority of cases, private donations will just not cover all of the costs.
Didn't he also predict that we had entered a new phase of continuous, exponential economic and technological prosperity at the height of the dot-com boom?
I don't want to dump on him too much, because he did also re-emphasize the problems we would face as a species because of technology putting greater and greater power in the hands of individuals (e.g. WMD, the nanotech "grey-goo" problem, etc.)
In a system where disease and aging have been defeated, and population expands to it's maximum, eventually competition for resources (i.e. food) will become so severe that cannibalism is the only possible outcome. The weakest will die as a result of starvation, or be killed for food. Soylent Green would be the solution to overpopulation.
What if we are all just "cells" in a big multicellular organism known as Gaia? If we short circuit our natural "cellular" cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration, from Gaia's perspective couldn't that be considered the equivalent of cells in our own body turning cancerous?
I'm not sure if I could bear that. Lucas would muck them up I think. He already did muck them up a little bit with the Special Editions (Han shooting Greedo first, etc.) I would be all for it if Peter Jackson directed the remakes, though.
A computer can check spelling and even grammar to a certain extent. However, it cannot evaluate factual accuracy, strength of argument. Even with spelling, the computer is not likely to catch improper use of homonyms. I can guarantee you that it will be possible to create a piece of writing that is utter crap that would get an A+ using this or any other possible computerized grading system. Unfortunately, there are probably many teachers out there who make poorer graders than this system does. The answer to the problem of poor-quality teaching is not replacing teachers with computers; the answer is a combination of better teacher pay and putting higher standards in place for our teachers via competency testing.
Obi Wan and Annakin duel each other inside an enormous volcano, jumping around on rocks floating in the bubbling molten lava. Annakin looks down and sees a shiny gold ring sitting on one of the floating rocks. Suddenly he is seized by an irresitible urge to take the ring. He reaches for the ring, but just as he is about to slip it on his finger, the smouldering carcass of Gollum leaps from the lava screaming "Nooooo! My precioussssss!" and leaps onto Annakin, biting off his finger as they both fall back into the lava.
"Birth of the Empire" is a way better title than "Attack of the Clones." And there was no mention of Ewoks, so at least that much has improved. He could have titled it "Return of the Ewok Menace."
Full-priced video games may be on a par with movies in terms of how much total money they are generating, but they are still far less popular than movies. A full-priced video game costs 4 to 5 times as much as a movie ticket, and 2 to 4 times as much as a DVD, despite the fact that the average video game has a much lower production cost than a widely-released Hollywood movie. Maybe if games cost less, the audience would expand, people would buy more games, and there would be less savings to be had by pirating games.
Not to mention that watching one of these displays "May Cause Anal Leakage.":-)
Slashdotted, but here's my wish list anyway
on
G4TechTV Announced
·
· Score: 1
I can't access the new site to find out what shows made the cut but here is what I would do:
Keep:
The Screen Savers
X-play (maybe tone down the infantile goofing a bit)
Judgement Day / Digital Playground (Somehow the infantile goofing on these shows is funny instead of lame. They have done a good job of creating some Siskel/Ebert chemistry between the hosts.)
Tech Live
Deep Thinkers
Invent This
Future Fighting Machines
G4TV.com
Pulse (But revamp/refresh. We already know Ronilyn Reilly is not going to be on anymore)
Icons
Call for Help
Wired for Sex (actually an insightful show besides the obvious attempt at titillation)
Unscrewed (I never thought I would say it, but you have to love the show's shamelessness:)
Coverage of industry events like E3, CES, Tokyo Game Show
Keep but revamp:
Portal (keep Dave, but refresh the concept somehow)
Arena (trash the hosts and use PC games that are popular instead of games that MS or whatever game company is willing to pay the most to get their game used on the show)- put some of the geeks from TechTV TSS in charge of this and maybe make it into a show covering the LANparty scene).
Trash:
Cheat
Starcade
Game On
Cinematech
Robot Wars
Filter (but keep Diane Mizota and use her on another show -- maybe Pulse to replace Ronilyn)
Thunderbirds
Anime Unleashed (I'll probably get flamed, but the only anime I ever got into was the old Star Blazers show)
Umm. Only one difference I would like to mention. I just saw most of the buildings you used as an example for the first time, thanks to your links. My first reaction was that I think they are all beautiful designs. I also just saw the Stata Center for the first time, and my first reaction was that it's an eyesore.
Is it me or does it seem appropriate that a building named after Bill Gates looks like an ugly, haphazard, hodgepodge of random stuff thrown together, kind of like Windows?
Why is it that spyware removal remains a separate category of software. There should be a feature added to AV programs to prevent spyware from ever being installed in the first place.
The times they list for the library searches are bogus because it doesn't include the time needed to walk or drive to the library. With Google or the phone you can start your search immediately right from your desk at work.
Libraries are expensive dinosaurs. All information in book or journal form should be digitized and put on the internet.
I blame political correctness and teacher and faculty unions for gutting standards at all levels of our educational system. We need to get back to the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic) and stop wasting our youths' time with fluff curricula in our schools. We need to take 2 important steps in order to bring quality people back into the teaching profession: 1) Pay teachers more and 2) RIGOROUSLY test and re-certify teachers on a regular basis to weed out the incompetent ones. I am a smart guy and would love to have a career in teaching, but I can't justify the pay cut I would have to take, and quite honestly I am reticent to join a profession in which incompetence runs so rampant.
In other countries, being a K-12 teacher is a highly respected profession. In the US, K-12 teaching has deservedly earned itself a reputation for being a haven for marginally competent individuals. When a profession lowers it's standards far enough, all the smart and competent people bail out because they don't want to be associated with it anymore.
They got out of the consumer "portal" business at the time that Altavista, MSN, Yahoo and Excite were running $100 million ad campaigns to try and capture the "portal" business. They didn't have the ad budget to compete with those guys, and their search function wasn't as clean and easy to use as Google.
I'm firmly on the side of having secure, verifiable voting systems, and making sure everybody has an equal opportunity to vote.
However, if you want to trade in conspiracy theories and try to paint everything bad that happens as some conspiracy by the Republicans, you are not being even-handed. Please do not forget that it was Gore's team that wanted to exclude hundreds of absentee ballots from members of our armed services who were serving overseas. That is a real, true and deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters.
Some of this stuff sounds like auto manufacturers are trying to make sure replacemnt parts can only be ordered from the manufacturer. It the same bullsh*t printer companies were trying to do by sticking smart chips into their replacement printer cartridges. $3000 headlights that the manufacturer has to "activate" are a total scam.
It might make a funny gag to make a little proggie that you could install on your co-workers' machines. The program would hijack the ip address that serves the little pop-up ads in the hosts file so you could set it to whatever ip you wanted. Then it would serve little joke pics (pr0n, etc.) instead of the real ads.
From the way it is described in the article, it sounds like these "spam links" would be distiguishable from regular links. If so, all you would have to do is keep your mouse pointer out of the way to avoid having anything pop up because you scrolled over one of the links.
I think this guy is being naive about what is really going on when he says in the article:
"We've seen response rates 24 times that of banners," Mr. Stevenson said, indicating Web users like IntelliTXT better than other forms of online advertising they encounter.
The response rate is higher only because surfers are not yet familiar with the new format. Over time, response rates will dwindle just like they have for every ad format, including banners and pop-ups.
The only CDs I bought last years were Rammstein's discs and their Berlin concert DVD. I never would have bought them if it wasn't for sampling some of their songs using P2P (actually, downloaded using Google to search for mp3s).
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like a great idea on the surface, but any new drug or treatment still needs to go through a hugely expensive clinical trial process to verify safety and efficacy (at least in the developed nations). No company is going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to put a drug through the clinical trial process (laboratory testing on cultured cells, animal testing, trials with human subjects) if it is not going to be able to have a patent at the end to recoup their costs. The only way for patent-free drug-development to succeed is for governments and international bodies to fund the trial phase. And even then, the allocation of resources will be subject to a political process because there is not enough money to do all of the research that is demanded by every "disease special interest group." Developing new drugs just requires way too much money for it to done using the OSS model. Even outside of researchers' time, there are big costs associated with specialized lab space, equipment, materials, and the costs of compensating human subjects, insurance, etc. In the vast majority of cases, private donations will just not cover all of the costs.
I don't want to dump on him too much, because he did also re-emphasize the problems we would face as a species because of technology putting greater and greater power in the hands of individuals (e.g. WMD, the nanotech "grey-goo" problem, etc.)
In a system where disease and aging have been defeated, and population expands to it's maximum, eventually competition for resources (i.e. food) will become so severe that cannibalism is the only possible outcome. The weakest will die as a result of starvation, or be killed for food. Soylent Green would be the solution to overpopulation.
What if we are all just "cells" in a big multicellular organism known as Gaia? If we short circuit our natural "cellular" cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration, from Gaia's perspective couldn't that be considered the equivalent of cells in our own body turning cancerous?
I'm not sure if I could bear that. Lucas would muck them up I think. He already did muck them up a little bit with the Special Editions (Han shooting Greedo first, etc.) I would be all for it if Peter Jackson directed the remakes, though.
A computer can check spelling and even grammar to a certain extent. However, it cannot evaluate factual accuracy, strength of argument. Even with spelling, the computer is not likely to catch improper use of homonyms. I can guarantee you that it will be possible to create a piece of writing that is utter crap that would get an A+ using this or any other possible computerized grading system. Unfortunately, there are probably many teachers out there who make poorer graders than this system does. The answer to the problem of poor-quality teaching is not replacing teachers with computers; the answer is a combination of better teacher pay and putting higher standards in place for our teachers via competency testing.
Obi Wan and Annakin duel each other inside an enormous volcano, jumping around on rocks floating in the bubbling molten lava. Annakin looks down and sees a shiny gold ring sitting on one of the floating rocks. Suddenly he is seized by an irresitible urge to take the ring. He reaches for the ring, but just as he is about to slip it on his finger, the smouldering carcass of Gollum leaps from the lava screaming "Nooooo! My precioussssss!" and leaps onto Annakin, biting off his finger as they both fall back into the lava.
"Birth of the Empire" is a way better title than "Attack of the Clones." And there was no mention of Ewoks, so at least that much has improved. He could have titled it "Return of the Ewok Menace."
Full-priced video games may be on a par with movies in terms of how much total money they are generating, but they are still far less popular than movies. A full-priced video game costs 4 to 5 times as much as a movie ticket, and 2 to 4 times as much as a DVD, despite the fact that the average video game has a much lower production cost than a widely-released Hollywood movie. Maybe if games cost less, the audience would expand, people would buy more games, and there would be less savings to be had by pirating games.
Not to mention that watching one of these displays "May Cause Anal Leakage." :-)
Keep:
- The Screen Savers
- X-play (maybe tone down the infantile goofing a bit)
- Judgement Day / Digital Playground (Somehow the infantile goofing on these shows is funny instead of lame. They have done a good job of creating some Siskel/Ebert chemistry between the hosts.)
- Tech Live
- Deep Thinkers
- Invent This
- Future Fighting Machines
- G4TV.com
- Pulse (But revamp/refresh. We already know Ronilyn Reilly is not going to be on anymore)
- Icons
- Call for Help
- Wired for Sex (actually an insightful show besides the obvious attempt at titillation)
- Unscrewed (I never thought I would say it, but you have to love the show's shamelessness
:)
- Coverage of industry events like E3, CES, Tokyo Game Show
Keep but revamp:- Portal (keep Dave, but refresh the concept somehow)
- Arena (trash the hosts and use PC games that are popular instead of games that MS or whatever game company is willing to pay the most to get their game used on the show)- put some of the geeks from TechTV TSS in charge of this and maybe make it into a show covering the LANparty scene).
Trash:Umm. Only one difference I would like to mention. I just saw most of the buildings you used as an example for the first time, thanks to your links. My first reaction was that I think they are all beautiful designs. I also just saw the Stata Center for the first time, and my first reaction was that it's an eyesore.
Is it me or does it seem appropriate that a building named after Bill Gates looks like an ugly, haphazard, hodgepodge of random stuff thrown together, kind of like Windows?
Why is it that spyware removal remains a separate category of software. There should be a feature added to AV programs to prevent spyware from ever being installed in the first place.
Libraries are expensive dinosaurs. All information in book or journal form should be digitized and put on the internet.
In other countries, being a K-12 teacher is a highly respected profession. In the US, K-12 teaching has deservedly earned itself a reputation for being a haven for marginally competent individuals. When a profession lowers it's standards far enough, all the smart and competent people bail out because they don't want to be associated with it anymore.
They got out of the consumer "portal" business at the time that Altavista, MSN, Yahoo and Excite were running $100 million ad campaigns to try and capture the "portal" business. They didn't have the ad budget to compete with those guys, and their search function wasn't as clean and easy to use as Google.
However, if you want to trade in conspiracy theories and try to paint everything bad that happens as some conspiracy by the Republicans, you are not being even-handed. Please do not forget that it was Gore's team that wanted to exclude hundreds of absentee ballots from members of our armed services who were serving overseas. That is a real, true and deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters.
Some of this stuff sounds like auto manufacturers are trying to make sure replacemnt parts can only be ordered from the manufacturer. It the same bullsh*t printer companies were trying to do by sticking smart chips into their replacement printer cartridges. $3000 headlights that the manufacturer has to "activate" are a total scam.
Unfortunately I have not yet found a pizza place that will deliver a six-pack of beer along with my pie.
I'm not a hacker, so is this doable, anyone?
I think this guy is being naive about what is really going on when he says in the article:
The response rate is higher only because surfers are not yet familiar with the new format. Over time, response rates will dwindle just like they have for every ad format, including banners and pop-ups.The only CDs I bought last years were Rammstein's discs and their Berlin concert DVD. I never would have bought them if it wasn't for sampling some of their songs using P2P (actually, downloaded using Google to search for mp3s).