So the UN should be ruled by the potent? How about an insect master race?
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
The UN shouldn't be "ruled". The World shouldn't be "ruled." Even "governed" is a strong word. Ruled by the ruled, governed by the governed is perhaps the way to say the opposite meaning of it.
Yep. This is a core issue with voting - majority opresses minority. One way to become a majority, for the US at least, would be to split into 50 states, each represented separately. GDP as a measure to voting weight isn't fair either. But if you consider it really, it's fair, because even though the US is a single voter, everyone else sucks up to it for cash, so GDP has quite an effect in that picture. Dare you vote against the US? Ultimately any forum where you throw world problems openly on the table still comes down to human beings, elders of the tribe, coming together, working together. I for one love to see the UN, where in a room full of 500 "educated" people you can make speeches, though I don't see enough feedback and rebuttals, it should be livened up, with pro and contra speeches to anything, just like in a courtroom. There are always 2 sides to any story, and the jury, the 500 people, need to hear them. If something is horribly wrong with a speech, you should hear roars. However there were no such roars when Collin Powell made his speeches, partly because nobody really knew the truth, and partly because nobody wants to openly roar against the US, because the US has money, and you'd rather have the US as a buddy, than an outright foe. So your argument is technically true, that the US gets outnumbered in voting, but it's wrong about its core message, that it's completely unfair, because there is a balancing effect going on here. Having the UN beats not having a forum at all, and I don't think the G8 makes a good replacement, because there is no sense of checks and balances there, just power running rampant completely uncontrolled. And doing concerts, and lowballing sweet messages like end poverty in Africa, can only fool people for so long. The G8 is nothing more than a push back toward colonial powers. Perhaps a globally elected body, without being representatives of their own nations, would work better - kind of like jury selection, you get to work on topics where your personal biases cannot enter into the picture. But even with what we have now, when two parties are at disagreement, out of the 500 in the UN, at least you have 498 people looking at the issue at hand with a lot less bias, even though they form these minigangs and coherent packs pushing mini-agendas.
Extra: Maybe 500 is too many people, and ganging up becomes pronounced - maybe you need 100, or 50, or at least many layers of leadership, one global president, like Kofi Annan, 12 supreme court judges, 29 something else, 55 something else, 200, 500, 1000. The house full of 1000 should be the least noisy, where issues are presented, and laid down for record, from both sides. Then there is a 1 week or 4 week digestion period, then it passes up to the 200's and higher. The 500 would compete directly with the 1000 house, and try to do a better job. The 1/12/29/55/200 should all have veto power over each other, neither having full authority over the rest. Would it be a mess? You bet!
Yes, profit. If you recall Google was completely privately held since 1998 til about their recent IPO. Why? Because that's when the owners decided the value was fully generated, and it can no longer grow, or (gasp) even fall. Time to dump and get cash while it's hot.
For all the wonder that Google is - and many thanks to its precious inventors, you are forever in our hearts - it's core technology is severely limited, because it's based on a centralized system, and there is something better on the horizon. The real answer is distributed computing, where you can locally do the indexing and only send up the index, but this means giving up control, thus giving up sharevalue. I wonder how long will it be possible for this next wonder-genie be kept tight in a bottle. It could be quite sometime til the cork is pulled - a few thousand years? - but sooner or later it happens.
UN, Leauge of Nations, whatever you wanna call it. The concept of League of Nations is what ended WWI relatively calmly, but it was a lie, so there was a WWII. So there was UN and much rejoicing, until there was no longer a UN. So how long til WWIII?
Let me be first to refute this straw-man argument.:)
Actually, I don't know of any technologies that can compress analog signals the way you can compress digital signals into things such as zip files, mp3 files, jpeg images, mpeg movies. Compression is the key here.
Just to put things into perspective, a 1920x1080 resolution HDTV image at 30 frames/second would take up 1500 megabit/second. Let's not forget that the digitizing or quantizing the analog signal is already a lossy process, where you do throw away some information, and you're "only" left with 1500 megabit/s worth of data. Yet an HDTV channel only gets a bandwidth of 6 MHz analog, which can only carry 19.2 megabit/s. That's 1.28% of original data, 98.72% is compressed away.
This is the reason for the move, compression technology, that only works with quantized/digital signals.
So you can understand where the FCC is coming from, but what are the costs to your freedom? When everything is fully digital, it's a hell of a world, because you're setting up yourself for utter exploitation. You can no longer turn on your VCR and excersize fair use by recording a tv show. Soon such notions as going to public libraries and reading a book without paying for it will be crimes. If your grandfathers that built the libraries could only see what kind of world we are ending up with.
So even though technology justifies the moves, you just simply can't trust the government or the "people with money in the government who are like foxes loose in a hencage." Exemples are recent decisions such as the DMCA, copyright term extensions to 90 years, or not having to share data cables lines like utility lines to create competition and level playing field. Every power is concentrating in the hands of a few, and the way it goes those who already "own" the power, get to own more, and those who are in "debt" they are just sinking deeper into exponential compound interest. This "property" world, that's nice because it motivates people to care, it is still not a self equilibrating world, but an exponentially unstable one - I wonder when they'll change the tax laws into flat taxation, because they are already eliminating dividend and property taxes. The end result of letting the instability get out of hand is that only a single "owner" controls everything, and everyone else is resentful. Way to create wars and revolutions. Which is how history has happened so far - get a democracy (like the greeks,) get invaded by a dictator (persians), then all you have is emperors from there on (Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Elizabeth) from there on, who either get murdered and the cycle goes on, or have a dynasty for a while keep vassals and rule by utter force. Wash, rinse and repeat - french revolution, Napoleon, back to Louis the who knows what. So how is this cycle gonna go for the US? Independence war, Nixon, then whi? Wait, they stopped Nixon, with his secret service above the secret service, cuz there were still Russians around, but what about next time? Is rule by iron-fist the only way for a stable, peaceful world, where everybody except a single ruler gets to suffer? This is the bigger issue with such changes.
While there is analog tv, there is such a thing as a concept of "free" content, that you can even legally record via your VCR. What a change from 20 years ago.
Instead of opening the comics section of the newspaper, you can instead read the freshly approved patents each morning. Unlike in the newspapers anymore, at least there is plenty of humor in these, and what's even funnier, is that the people who produce this humor are all serious and think they are producing something holy.
These days it's hard to buy matches, you get 10 butane filled pocket lighters for a buck instead. You need a more sophisticated mechanism to get your butane rocket flying.
An achilles-heel of all organic polymers is UV radiation. While crystalline silicon can be UV-irradiated as much as you want (even so its performance degrades a few 10% over 20 years), just think of what happens to organic polymers. It will be hard to balance UV resistance AND photovoltaic efficiency at the same time. Even if you load it up with UV absorbers and only let it deal with the visible/infrared spectrum, I'm still guessing it still can't come nowhere near the longevity of raw metallic silicon. Before I put something on my rooftop, I wanna know that it will last 15 years, without performance dropping to 30% after only 5 years. The technology of electrodepositing into template is a very smart one, though not something radically new. This way you can get "closer" to your generated charge, and reduce the internal resistance of the "battery."
That reminds me of what sports hunters say about people that go hunting with machine guns. Or sport fishermen about commercial-net-everything-in-your-sight and leave-an-ocean-desert-behind fisheries. How about them native american boat and woodden spear whale hunters about the industrialized lazerguided profithungry supermachine. There is just a basic sense of "fairness" that creeps up. And if not that, in case of food, because low food prices do matter, at least sustainable development, where if you're too efficient at what you do you get to ruin your future.
I hold on to dialup because it gives me freedom. There is currently SBC/yahoo DSL for 14.95 promo for 1 year, which sounds great but: - only the Lord knows how much after 1 year (probably $50 if cable price increases are any indicator to how monopolies behave.) Promotional offers are like drugs - we just want to get you hooked then we milk you dry. And I'm a human being, once hooked on DSL, I don't think I could tolerate dialup anymore. Of course one could be a dick and just cancel it after 1 year, if you have willpower. - with dialup there is real competition - check www.freedomlist.com, there are hundreds of companies offering. Cable and dsl are natural monopolies and looks like they will stay so, especially since the supreme court decided they are not forced to share their wires with anyone. - I got 2 cheap dialup accounts - one stops working, get the other. - Reading slashdot and news, playing chess, go, it's fast enough. It's not fast enough to download linux images, or porn, but so what. Linux images you only need once every 6 months, and I don't like redhat update, apt-get update, or gentoo. I prefer downloading what's needed by hand, then installing. I think the artificial dependency hell is created for the very purpose of pushing broadband. - Having a slow line is secure, secure even against Microsoft Windows Update, MS Messenger, or even gov't snooping - if anyone wants to hack me, go ahead, but you won't have the patience to download gigabytes of my data, with my intermittent dialup connections. - most importantly the price is not guaranteed, and with lack of competition it's not going to drop. It's like buying DSL for $50/mo, except the promo period. Like no money down no interest til 2006! 0.9% Intro APR credit card offers, fine print: 24.99% afterwards, or sooner, if you are delinquent, or if we just feel like it because the wind blows from the right direction. Am I holding on to a dying technology? You bet!
I guess PBS that doesn't depend on ad revenue - wait, it does. Have you seen the 'nice' commercials from huge companies like Microsoft on PBS? I guess they too are fed up with the sleazy loud craziness on normal commercial TV's, so they look for some more 'reasonable and serious' channel, where they can excersize manners, and they find it in PBS, for a while, until they completely squat this one too, and twist it inside out and leave the carcass behind. Also PBS too depends on viewership purchasing power, since people who can't afford new sets, can't donate either, no matter how much membership-drive-time you shove down their throat.
For one I'd welcome a cutoff of the british imperial measurement system to the metric SI system. Even the brits use metric anymore. Not using metric is just dumb. THEN you should mess with NTSC. Get your priorities straight if you want to implement change that's useful. Unfortunately this is just a new scam to 'boost the economy' by forcing everyone to buy new sets.
Right. I don't care about trademark infringement suits, losing information is something horrible.
Having an Archive that's exempt from these IP infringement things is like still having the Library of ancient Alexandria today, before it was burned down by an idiot. Humanity lost immense amount of knowledge, it's like you and me of today got ripped off when the library was burned down millenia ago. Stopping archiving now, or driving these sites out of business is like ripping off our kids. Imagine if Euclid's Geometry didn't survive from ancient times. How about if we had a real archive of Fermat's last theorem, was he wrong about his proof for sure?
I think caching and archiving sites should be allowed to cache anything at all, and then deal with the providing-to-the-public part. You looked at porn and there is record of it, or said something you later regretted? How many of us did stuff we later regretted? Everybody. Even that gets recorded, so what. It's on record now, for historians to look at 2000 years later. While it affects your life, and your kids life, there should be limits on how it's displayed, depending on your requests, but gathering the info is something sacred, and if you can't be honest and comfortable about your thoughts, mistakes and shortcomings getting examined by future generations that come thousands years later, you need to step back and examine things for yourself. It's a lot nicer to know that Plato wasn't perfect, Socrates wasn't perfect, etc. Talk about the first thing Bush did when he entered office - presidential records no longer enter public domain after certain years expire - the biggest crime he ever did.
These sites invest the effort and resources into this sacred process, and they should be treated with more respect than the highest religious priests. The last thing they need is being driven out of business, when they are already doing public goodwill work, at their own expense, that hardly qualifies as something high profit.
bee-nest-stirring-stories, to see how hard you zzzzzz. Nice way to pick out those who still care, and put them on a list, because, those that don't care you don't have to worry about, in your quest for _ _ _ _ _ (fill in the blanks.)
The more sophisticated something gets, the harder it is to secure it, or make sure everything works right - space shuttle, human body, city society. Look at your body - you have a ton of white blood cells and all kinds of invader detectors, but you still have cancer cells, and illnesses that bypass these measures. Even meter-long worms can pass through your body/muscles without properly setting off the alarms and crawl out by your ankles or knees. Yes, security measures are needed, but there are always ways to get around them. All you can do is just do things better, like your body does, and fight back, come up with better tricks, but you're dreaming if you think you can ever eliminate security threats. Life is a risk, live it. And often it may take a lot less effort to look at the causes of why people resort to what they resort to, and doctor that instead.
Can't you smell sarcasm? Like half billion dollar injunctions in the Ford Pinto case, yeah, I tell you, they sure do work on regulating corporate behavior. They just appealed and the sentence was reduced to a few cents, by a more 'reasonable' jury.
I agree with your last point especially. It's hard enough to teach a kid, let alone fight the onslaught of the dumbing down campaign from the media. I think infomercials and stupidity from the media should be banned, especially from tv/cable and radio. If you do infomercials/commercials, make them witty and educational. "4 out of 5 doctors say mentodent is better (better than friggin what?), so I choose mentodent for my kids" is neither funny, nor witty, nor educational. "Can you hear me now? good." Freedom of speech and expression in the media? How about we give you to freedom to educate someone, but forbid you from making them dumb. If we find you're a dumb reporter/anchorman (or not dumb but forced to say dumb things on command of your boss) out the door you go, because what you're wasting is just too precious.
Since no two violines sound exactly alike, the thing that I OWN is the protection of any intellectual ungraspable entity coming out of this violin, whose derivative works I also OWN. You may not have a high enough fidelity ear to detect differences between violins, but there are computers that can. Beethoven might be free, but anything that's MY vocal cords, MY violin, MY brain pattern producing this text, is MINE, and GET OFF MY PROPERTY, you friggin TRESSPASSER! I forbid you to have the same thoughs that I have while you read this text, unless you properly license it and pay me my 2 cents for it. I'd like to share my toys with you, but I can't, because they are MINE! Even when we can both have two identical copies of the same toy, I'm happier if only I have it, and you don't, so I can say, neener-neener, I got what you don't have, neener-neener.
Cristmas lights remind me of the "chat live with this naked babe" videos. There is no live thing on the other end, it's just a set of pictures taken for each "dropdown-box" scenario. When your options can be fit into a dropdown box, then the tree of possibilities can be fully spanned and an image provided for. Now on the other hand, if you had a freeform text input, that would get displayed in the cam picture, that's a whole different ballpark.
Actually, I did some research, and I realize I wasn't completely on the mark with my comments. I think the big two chip companies are moving somewhat in the right direction, with dual-core chips, though there is certainly a need for low power Transmeta chips for reading Slashdot, or at least the big players should drop the clockspeed to 1 Mhz when the CPU is idle, and only crank it to 5GHz when needed.
As far as off the mark goes, did you know that the human brain consumes humongous amounts of power? More exactly 20 Watts out of a 100 Watts resting pace, so even though it makes up only 2% of the body's weight, it consumes 20% of total energy/oxygen needs? So even this ever-perfected life runs the cpu "hot" relative to the rest of the system.
Also, by 2020-2050 we can expect real artificial intelligence if things keep up they way they do. We better start thinking about the consequences of what happens when machines are smarter, more intelligent, can hold wittier conversations, and make better supreme court judges than human beings. Is that something we can deal with, or trust?
How about sending a few soldiers to get oil and ching ching - profit! I wonder what the pricetag there averages out to, according to the "powers that be." If their assumptions work out right it's surely a "worthwhile" investment as they might see it. "Unfortunately" the assumptions are not always valid, because human spirit is not so easy to subdo. Though not impossible. But at least the effort required is sometimes surprising, enough to throw off your "profit" calculations. Ugh.
On other fronts, human life does carry a pricetag even by your own policies, as long as it's about risk, not definite cases. Examples are mountain climbing for fun, driving your car 60 mph instead of 20. You could argue that sending soldiers into battle falls into this category, where you only have a statistical chance to die, but no certainty.
So, if you must have executions in general, for whatever crime, how about introducing risk instead of certainty? How about execution by russian rulette - you get to spin the barrel yourself if you want? Deterrent enough? It should be at least as scary as a real death penalty, yet it should be "more humane" than this "most humane" way we have now, the absolutely 100% certain lethal injection, and if it doesn't work for whatever reason, we'll just club you to death anyway. If you must have executions, at least give criminals a chance too, like sports-hunters do, and if they don't die, then "God showed his will" and we should be accepting. The downside is that people would be condemned by a jury much more light-heartedly, the jury thinking, well, I didn't sign his death penalty, he can still luck out, and thus not feel fully responsible and agonized as properly in a decision over someone's life, as they should be.
I'm personally opposed to any kind of death penalty though, because ethics is so relative. I don't think there are rotten apples - just think of the Australians, what would be of them if their ancestors were just simply hanged? Wasn't them getting shipped there just an infinitely better choice? Yeah, getting shipped and fed on the boat cost a lot more than a piece of rope and a shovel, but they were human beings. There is always hope when human beings are concerned, they can be changed, or given an opportunity at least - though executing them is the lazy, easy and shameful way out. Maybe when we need to colonize Mars, these supersmart computer criminals will make nice candidates - and they'll love the punishment anyway. Imagine all those cool technologies you have to hack daily, in order to have your urine recycled for fresh water! Everybody wins! The downside is that there are enough good moral citizens who'd love to go and be the pioneers to live on Mars themselves, so taking away their reward and handing it to someone else as punishment, well, that's not fair either.
Slashdot Mirror
ahahahahaha! what do you call slashdotting? urinating?
So the UN should be ruled by the potent? How about an insect master race?
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
The UN shouldn't be "ruled". The World shouldn't be "ruled." Even "governed" is a strong word. Ruled by the ruled, governed by the governed is perhaps the way to say the opposite meaning of it.
Yep. This is a core issue with voting - majority opresses minority. One way to become a majority, for the US at least, would be to split into 50 states, each represented separately. GDP as a measure to voting weight isn't fair either. But if you consider it really, it's fair, because even though the US is a single voter, everyone else sucks up to it for cash, so GDP has quite an effect in that picture. Dare you vote against the US?
Ultimately any forum where you throw world problems openly on the table still comes down to human beings, elders of the tribe, coming together, working together. I for one love to see the UN, where in a room full of 500 "educated" people you can make speeches, though I don't see enough feedback and rebuttals, it should be livened up, with pro and contra speeches to anything, just like in a courtroom. There are always 2 sides to any story, and the jury, the 500 people, need to hear them. If something is horribly wrong with a speech, you should hear roars. However there were no such roars when Collin Powell made his speeches, partly because nobody really knew the truth, and partly because nobody wants to openly roar against the US, because the US has money, and you'd rather have the US as a buddy, than an outright foe.
So your argument is technically true, that the US gets outnumbered in voting, but it's wrong about its core message, that it's completely unfair, because there is a balancing effect going on here.
Having the UN beats not having a forum at all, and I don't think the G8 makes a good replacement, because there is no sense of checks and balances there, just power running rampant completely uncontrolled. And doing concerts, and lowballing sweet messages like end poverty in Africa, can only fool people for so long. The G8 is nothing more than a push back toward colonial powers. Perhaps a globally elected body, without being representatives of their own nations, would work better - kind of like jury selection, you get to work on topics where your personal biases cannot enter into the picture. But even with what we have now, when two parties are at disagreement, out of the 500 in the UN, at least you have 498 people looking at the issue at hand with a lot less bias, even though they form these minigangs and coherent packs pushing mini-agendas.
Extra: Maybe 500 is too many people, and ganging up becomes pronounced - maybe you need 100, or 50, or at least many layers of leadership, one global president, like Kofi Annan, 12 supreme court judges, 29 something else, 55 something else, 200, 500, 1000. The house full of 1000 should be the least noisy, where issues are presented, and laid down for record, from both sides. Then there is a 1 week or 4 week digestion period, then it passes up to the 200's and higher. The 500 would compete directly with the 1000 house, and try to do a better job. The 1/12/29/55/200 should all have veto power over each other, neither having full authority over the rest. Would it be a mess? You bet!
Yes, profit. If you recall Google was completely privately held since 1998 til about their recent IPO. Why? Because that's when the owners decided the value was fully generated, and it can no longer grow, or (gasp) even fall. Time to dump and get cash while it's hot. For all the wonder that Google is - and many thanks to its precious inventors, you are forever in our hearts - it's core technology is severely limited, because it's based on a centralized system, and there is something better on the horizon. The real answer is distributed computing, where you can locally do the indexing and only send up the index, but this means giving up control, thus giving up sharevalue. I wonder how long will it be possible for this next wonder-genie be kept tight in a bottle. It could be quite sometime til the cork is pulled - a few thousand years? - but sooner or later it happens.
UN, Leauge of Nations, whatever you wanna call it. The concept of League of Nations is what ended WWI relatively calmly, but it was a lie, so there was a WWII. So there was UN and much rejoicing, until there was no longer a UN. So how long til WWIII?
Let me be first to refute this straw-man argument. :)
Actually, I don't know of any technologies that can compress analog signals the way you can compress digital signals into things such as zip files, mp3 files, jpeg images, mpeg movies. Compression is the key here.
Just to put things into perspective, a 1920x1080 resolution HDTV image at 30 frames/second would take up 1500 megabit/second. Let's not forget that the digitizing or quantizing the analog signal is already a lossy process, where you do throw away some information, and you're "only" left with 1500 megabit/s worth of data. Yet an HDTV channel only gets a bandwidth of 6 MHz analog, which can only carry 19.2 megabit/s. That's 1.28% of original data, 98.72% is compressed away.This is the reason for the move, compression technology, that only works with quantized/digital signals.
So you can understand where the FCC is coming from, but what are the costs to your freedom? When everything is fully digital, it's a hell of a world, because you're setting up yourself for utter exploitation. You can no longer turn on your VCR and excersize fair use by recording a tv show. Soon such notions as going to public libraries and reading a book without paying for it will be crimes. If your grandfathers that built the libraries could only see what kind of world we are ending up with.
So even though technology justifies the moves, you just simply can't trust the government or the "people with money in the government who are like foxes loose in a hencage." Exemples are recent decisions such as the DMCA, copyright term extensions to 90 years, or not having to share data cables lines like utility lines to create competition and level playing field. Every power is concentrating in the hands of a few, and the way it goes those who already "own" the power, get to own more, and those who are in "debt" they are just sinking deeper into exponential compound interest. This "property" world, that's nice because it motivates people to care, it is still not a self equilibrating world, but an exponentially unstable one - I wonder when they'll change the tax laws into flat taxation, because they are already eliminating dividend and property taxes. The end result of letting the instability get out of hand is that only a single "owner" controls everything, and everyone else is resentful. Way to create wars and revolutions. Which is how history has happened so far - get a democracy (like the greeks,) get invaded by a dictator (persians), then all you have is emperors from there on (Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Elizabeth) from there on, who either get murdered and the cycle goes on, or have a dynasty for a while keep vassals and rule by utter force. Wash, rinse and repeat - french revolution, Napoleon, back to Louis the who knows what. So how is this cycle gonna go for the US? Independence war, Nixon, then whi? Wait, they stopped Nixon, with his secret service above the secret service, cuz there were still Russians around, but what about next time? Is rule by iron-fist the only way for a stable, peaceful world, where everybody except a single ruler gets to suffer? This is the bigger issue with such changes.
While there is analog tv, there is such a thing as a concept of "free" content, that you can even legally record via your VCR. What a change from 20 years ago.
Carcass is a better term.
Instead of opening the comics section of the newspaper, you can instead read the freshly approved patents each morning. Unlike in the newspapers anymore, at least there is plenty of humor in these, and what's even funnier, is that the people who produce this humor are all serious and think they are producing something holy.
These days it's hard to buy matches, you get 10 butane filled pocket lighters for a buck instead. You need a more sophisticated mechanism to get your butane rocket flying.
You can't even fit something 17 ft through your studio apartment, let alone your landlord allowing you to install it outside your window.
An achilles-heel of all organic polymers is UV radiation. While crystalline silicon can be UV-irradiated as much as you want (even so its performance degrades a few 10% over 20 years), just think of what happens to organic polymers. It will be hard to balance UV resistance AND photovoltaic efficiency at the same time. Even if you load it up with UV absorbers and only let it deal with the visible/infrared spectrum, I'm still guessing it still can't come nowhere near the longevity of raw metallic silicon. Before I put something on my rooftop, I wanna know that it will last 15 years, without performance dropping to 30% after only 5 years.
The technology of electrodepositing into template is a very smart one, though not something radically new. This way you can get "closer" to your generated charge, and reduce the internal resistance of the "battery."
That reminds me of what sports hunters say about people that go hunting with machine guns. Or sport fishermen about commercial-net-everything-in-your-sight and leave-an-ocean-desert-behind fisheries. How about them native american boat and woodden spear whale hunters about the industrialized lazerguided profithungry supermachine. There is just a basic sense of "fairness" that creeps up. And if not that, in case of food, because low food prices do matter, at least sustainable development, where if you're too efficient at what you do you get to ruin your future.
I hold on to dialup because it gives me freedom. There is currently SBC/yahoo DSL for 14.95 promo for 1 year, which sounds great but:
- only the Lord knows how much after 1 year (probably $50 if cable price increases are any indicator to how monopolies behave.) Promotional offers are like drugs - we just want to get you hooked then we milk you dry. And I'm a human being, once hooked on DSL, I don't think I could tolerate dialup anymore. Of course one could be a dick and just cancel it after 1 year, if you have willpower.
- with dialup there is real competition - check www.freedomlist.com, there are hundreds of companies offering. Cable and dsl are natural monopolies and looks like they will stay so, especially since the supreme court decided they are not forced to share their wires with anyone.
- I got 2 cheap dialup accounts - one stops working, get the other.
- Reading slashdot and news, playing chess, go, it's fast enough. It's not fast enough to download linux images, or porn, but so what. Linux images you only need once every 6 months, and I don't like redhat update, apt-get update, or gentoo. I prefer downloading what's needed by hand, then installing. I think the artificial dependency hell is created for the very purpose of pushing broadband.
- Having a slow line is secure, secure even against Microsoft Windows Update, MS Messenger, or even gov't snooping - if anyone wants to hack me, go ahead, but you won't have the patience to download gigabytes of my data, with my intermittent dialup connections.
- most importantly the price is not guaranteed, and with lack of competition it's not going to drop. It's like buying DSL for $50/mo, except the promo period. Like no money down no interest til 2006! 0.9% Intro APR credit card offers, fine print: 24.99% afterwards, or sooner, if you are delinquent, or if we just feel like it because the wind blows from the right direction.
Am I holding on to a dying technology? You bet!
I guess PBS that doesn't depend on ad revenue - wait, it does. Have you seen the 'nice' commercials from huge companies like Microsoft on PBS? I guess they too are fed up with the sleazy loud craziness on normal commercial TV's, so they look for some more 'reasonable and serious' channel, where they can excersize manners, and they find it in PBS, for a while, until they completely squat this one too, and twist it inside out and leave the carcass behind. Also PBS too depends on viewership purchasing power, since people who can't afford new sets, can't donate either, no matter how much membership-drive-time you shove down their throat.
For one I'd welcome a cutoff of the british imperial measurement system to the metric SI system. Even the brits use metric anymore. Not using metric is just dumb. THEN you should mess with NTSC. Get your priorities straight if you want to implement change that's useful. Unfortunately this is just a new scam to 'boost the economy' by forcing everyone to buy new sets.
Right. I don't care about trademark infringement suits, losing information is something horrible.
Having an Archive that's exempt from these IP infringement things is like still having the Library of ancient Alexandria today, before it was burned down by an idiot. Humanity lost immense amount of knowledge, it's like you and me of today got ripped off when the library was burned down millenia ago. Stopping archiving now, or driving these sites out of business is like ripping off our kids. Imagine if Euclid's Geometry didn't survive from ancient times. How about if we had a real archive of Fermat's last theorem, was he wrong about his proof for sure?
I think caching and archiving sites should be allowed to cache anything at all, and then deal with the providing-to-the-public part. You looked at porn and there is record of it, or said something you later regretted? How many of us did stuff we later regretted? Everybody. Even that gets recorded, so what. It's on record now, for historians to look at 2000 years later. While it affects your life, and your kids life, there should be limits on how it's displayed, depending on your requests, but gathering the info is something sacred, and if you can't be honest and comfortable about your thoughts, mistakes and shortcomings getting examined by future generations that come thousands years later, you need to step back and examine things for yourself. It's a lot nicer to know that Plato wasn't perfect, Socrates wasn't perfect, etc. Talk about the first thing Bush did when he entered office - presidential records no longer enter public domain after certain years expire - the biggest crime he ever did.
These sites invest the effort and resources into this sacred process, and they should be treated with more respect than the highest religious priests. The last thing they need is being driven out of business, when they are already doing public goodwill work, at their own expense, that hardly qualifies as something high profit.
bee-nest-stirring-stories, to see how hard you zzzzzz. Nice way to pick out those who still care, and put them on a list, because, those that don't care you don't have to worry about, in your quest for _ _ _ _ _ (fill in the blanks.)
The more sophisticated something gets, the harder it is to secure it, or make sure everything works right - space shuttle, human body, city society. Look at your body - you have a ton of white blood cells and all kinds of invader detectors, but you still have cancer cells, and illnesses that bypass these measures. Even meter-long worms can pass through your body/muscles without properly setting off the alarms and crawl out by your ankles or knees. Yes, security measures are needed, but there are always ways to get around them. All you can do is just do things better, like your body does, and fight back, come up with better tricks, but you're dreaming if you think you can ever eliminate security threats. Life is a risk, live it. And often it may take a lot less effort to look at the causes of why people resort to what they resort to, and doctor that instead.
Can't you smell sarcasm? Like half billion dollar injunctions in the Ford Pinto case, yeah, I tell you, they sure do work on regulating corporate behavior. They just appealed and the sentence was reduced to a few cents, by a more 'reasonable' jury.
I agree with your last point especially. It's hard enough to teach a kid, let alone fight the onslaught of the dumbing down campaign from the media. I think infomercials and stupidity from the media should be banned, especially from tv/cable and radio. If you do infomercials/commercials, make them witty and educational. "4 out of 5 doctors say mentodent is better (better than friggin what?), so I choose mentodent for my kids" is neither funny, nor witty, nor educational. "Can you hear me now? good." Freedom of speech and expression in the media? How about we give you to freedom to educate someone, but forbid you from making them dumb. If we find you're a dumb reporter/anchorman (or not dumb but forced to say dumb things on command of your boss) out the door you go, because what you're wasting is just too precious.
stir-the-beenest-stories and see how hard they zzzzzzzzz.
Since no two violines sound exactly alike, the thing that I OWN is the protection of any intellectual ungraspable entity coming out of this violin, whose derivative works I also OWN. You may not have a high enough fidelity ear to detect differences between violins, but there are computers that can. Beethoven might be free, but anything that's MY vocal cords, MY violin, MY brain pattern producing this text, is MINE, and GET OFF MY PROPERTY, you friggin TRESSPASSER! I forbid you to have the same thoughs that I have while you read this text, unless you properly license it and pay me my 2 cents for it.
I'd like to share my toys with you, but I can't, because they are MINE! Even when we can both have two identical copies of the same toy, I'm happier if only I have it, and you don't, so I can say, neener-neener, I got what you don't have, neener-neener.
Cristmas lights remind me of the "chat live with this naked babe" videos. There is no live thing on the other end, it's just a set of pictures taken for each "dropdown-box" scenario. When your options can be fit into a dropdown box, then the tree of possibilities can be fully spanned and an image provided for. Now on the other hand, if you had a freeform text input, that would get displayed in the cam picture, that's a whole different ballpark.
Actually, I did some research, and I realize I wasn't completely on the mark with my comments. I think the big two chip companies are moving somewhat in the right direction, with dual-core chips, though there is certainly a need for low power Transmeta chips for reading Slashdot, or at least the big players should drop the clockspeed to 1 Mhz when the CPU is idle, and only crank it to 5GHz when needed.
As far as off the mark goes, did you know that the human brain consumes humongous amounts of power? More exactly 20 Watts out of a 100 Watts resting pace, so even though it makes up only 2% of the body's weight, it consumes 20% of total energy/oxygen needs? So even this ever-perfected life runs the cpu "hot" relative to the rest of the system.
Also, by 2020-2050 we can expect real artificial intelligence if things keep up they way they do. We better start thinking about the consequences of what happens when machines are smarter, more intelligent, can hold wittier conversations, and make better supreme court judges than human beings. Is that something we can deal with, or trust?
How about sending a few soldiers to get oil and ching ching - profit! I wonder what the pricetag there averages out to, according to the "powers that be." If their assumptions work out right it's surely a "worthwhile" investment as they might see it. "Unfortunately" the assumptions are not always valid, because human spirit is not so easy to subdo. Though not impossible. But at least the effort required is sometimes surprising, enough to throw off your "profit" calculations. Ugh.
On other fronts, human life does carry a pricetag even by your own policies, as long as it's about risk, not definite cases. Examples are mountain climbing for fun, driving your car 60 mph instead of 20. You could argue that sending soldiers into battle falls into this category, where you only have a statistical chance to die, but no certainty.
So, if you must have executions in general, for whatever crime, how about introducing risk instead of certainty? How about execution by russian rulette - you get to spin the barrel yourself if you want? Deterrent enough? It should be at least as scary as a real death penalty, yet it should be "more humane" than this "most humane" way we have now, the absolutely 100% certain lethal injection, and if it doesn't work for whatever reason, we'll just club you to death anyway. If you must have executions, at least give criminals a chance too, like sports-hunters do, and if they don't die, then "God showed his will" and we should be accepting. The downside is that people would be condemned by a jury much more light-heartedly, the jury thinking, well, I didn't sign his death penalty, he can still luck out, and thus not feel fully responsible and agonized as properly in a decision over someone's life, as they should be.
I'm personally opposed to any kind of death penalty though, because ethics is so relative. I don't think there are rotten apples - just think of the Australians, what would be of them if their ancestors were just simply hanged? Wasn't them getting shipped there just an infinitely better choice? Yeah, getting shipped and fed on the boat cost a lot more than a piece of rope and a shovel, but they were human beings. There is always hope when human beings are concerned, they can be changed, or given an opportunity at least - though executing them is the lazy, easy and shameful way out. Maybe when we need to colonize Mars, these supersmart computer criminals will make nice candidates - and they'll love the punishment anyway. Imagine all those cool technologies you have to hack daily, in order to have your urine recycled for fresh water! Everybody wins! The downside is that there are enough good moral citizens who'd love to go and be the pioneers to live on Mars themselves, so taking away their reward and handing it to someone else as punishment, well, that's not fair either.