Do we really want the government to compete with private enterprise? How would you feel if you just spent millions installing wi-fi equipment in Philly? And hired employees to manage it?
Do we want the government jumping in and taking over these kinds of things? When does it get upgraded? Have you ever seen a government-owned cable company? It really becomes a corrupt monopoly. It truly is one of the most deplorable things. Do a google search for government owned cable companies. Dig deep. Listen to what the subscribers say if you want to stay current. How do you think the government could run a Wi-Fi network? Politicians appoint committees to "research" and spend money. They hire consultants for millions of dollars, and tell them exactly what the taxpayers have been telling them for years. Government (and mafia-controlled) commissioner(s) sit back and issue press releases. Nothing gets done, yet the government wastes billions on contracts that the private sector wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. Then, when it's all done, someone like Comcast comes in and sues because it infringes on their rights to operate a business.
Meanwhile, taxpayers live with the same junk they had last year, and the year before that. Government-owned "businesses" rarely work because they try to please everyone all the time, and they rarely please anyone some of the time. Water, power, sewer are the exceptions.
Ok, let's look at it this way: How many people think that the government can do a good job?
If you said yes, when was the last time you were at the DMV?
Why don't you go to a government doctor? How about going to a government emergency room?
How about getting government medical insurance? How about letting the government decide on the best way to treat a disease for you or your family members?
How about government housing?
Lastly, what do you do when there's a problem on a holiday, or at night, or on a weekend? Or after 4pm? Let's say you started a business, and you depend on that Wi-Fi to stay up and running? What kind of service guarantees are you going to get? Imagine calling the City of Philadelphia and trying to get something fixed?
I can't believe that people are excited about this. The government is probably the last provider I'd trust.
Lastly, what happens in a few years (or months) when the politicians are short of cash for their social agenda, and they decide they need "new revenue streams?"
Taxes. And not just a property tax levy. It'll be use taxes. Suddenly, you're going to have to register to keep access. Someone will monitor your activity. You'll pay by the megabyte. You'll pay by the clock. You'll pay for prime time use. You'll pay more for certain sites or types of communication.
Who trusts a politician? Anyone? They're right up there with lawyers.
And you think this will attract "young professionals?" Businesses with jobs attract young professionals. Cool stuff to do attracts young professionals. Good schools, museums, restaurants, sports events, crime-free neighborhoods attract young professionals.
The legal team won't bail. Not until they've bled SCO for every last nickel. THEY'RE LAWYERS!
I can't believe that anyone thinks that the legal team would ever quit. If a lawyer said to a client, "Hey, we can't win." And the client responds, "I've got $30 million dollars," the lawyer is going to turn around and go back to work. They will figure out a way to stretch it out. They'll exhaust every last option, they'll go over everything one more time. They'll re-file. They'll appeal.
The biggest thing SCO and their legal team can do is issue press releases. Press releases are treated like news. Newspapers print them and treat them as news. The average citizen doesn't discern "news" from PR. They lump it all together, and the sad thing? People believe everything they read.
Let's see. I use Google 20 times a day, and that's just a ballpark guess. Some days, way more, some days, very little.
It takes 2 seconds to use, it's free, I read the news, I use Froogle, and I occasionally do newsgroup searches for some stuff.
Hmmm. I mine a relational database probably less than once a month. Although I was part of a data warehousing project for 6 months, my SQL abilities have quickly deteriorated. I'd say that occasionally, I still use Excel to figure out some formulas, add some numbers, or use Text to Columns to occasionally get a bunch of text to line up nice and neat. Let's say that Excel gets used about once per week.
My needs for a graphical data mining tool are far less than once a week... probably on the order of twice per year, and that's being generous.
Will I be shelling out $1000 for Tableau's product? Doubtful. In fact, I doubt that my former employer would buy any more than a dozen licenses to help a small minority within a group of several hundred people.
With that in mind, I wonder why you think that Tableau could be the next Google? I know people that are computer illiterate, but yet they've at least heard of Google.com. That same thing won't be said for Tableau.
So Microsoft got a vendor to make something new. Who thought this was great news?
To me, it looks like they copied an Apple mouse.
Nothing to see here...
I'm all about functional. I'm not about "museum" pieces. By functional, I'm talking at least 5 programmable buttons, a wheel, and a laser/LED. It better fit my hand too! After that, I don't care what it looks like.
My favorite marketing examples take place in movie advertising:
You see quotes like,
"Fantastic!" -- Boston Globe
Then you see the movie, and you realize that the critic said, "Fantastic waste of money!" and the marketing types couldn't be bothered to include the entire statement in their ad blurb.
Marketing pukes that do this stuff should be taken out to Death Valley during high season and left there. Tell them to be creative, and maybe they'll get out alive.
$399 for an iPod?
Buy a firewire enclosure for $60, pick up a couple of $100 Western Digital special edition 160 gig hard drives. I have 4 of them. When one is full, I swap it out with an empty one. I store miniDV and RAW pics from my digital SLR on them. It takes less time to back up than a DVD-R, it's a lot less work, and when I want to access large chunks of data, it's a lot easier than switching CD/DVDs for hours at a time.
I wouldn't trust the government to run nuclear power. Scratch that... there is one way I'd trust the government to run nuclear power:
All elected officials (and bureaucrats) need to live in the immediate vicinity of a power plant. Nuclear, coal, wind, hydro, solar, etc. They need to live with (and provide budget for) the plants that supply them with power, and they need to live in the immediate vicinity of the risk too! Chalk it up to their elected (or appointed) "duty."
On the flip side, you've got celebrities and politicians voting down clean power: http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20030811_1031.html/ If everyone used their arguments, we'd never put any power plants anywhere.
In Minnesota, Progressive Insurance started a program that allows a savings of up to 25%. The monitor measures acceleration, braking, distance, time, and some other factors. If you avoid rush hour, and aren't peeling out at stop signs or traffic lights, and aren't slamming on the brakes, they give you a variable discount. If you don't drive at all, you get the maximum discount. Progressive is test-marketing this program now.
Need Tivo on my Cell Phone.
Someone should start writing Tivo software for cell phone TVs. I know I don't want to watch 15 minutes of commercials while trying to watch 1 hour of TV.
Is there a scorecard out there? If so, I'd like to see it... maybe summarized in baseball terms... by inning?
Anyone?
The reason I ask is that I've purposely ignored any mention of SCO, Darl McBride, and lawsuits for at least the past 10 months. It seems that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'd like to catch up.
This was so bad that it was funny. The flying saucers, the cemetary. Didn't Bela Lugosi die during filming, and they replaced him with a guy who used a cape to hide his face? The cheap sets and even cheaper special effects. It's so bad that it's funny. Horrible story line. Bad acting.
Patents are designed to defend against inventions. If I patent something useful, but don't actually have an implementation, I'm using the system to stifle others, and not really giving anything back. In order for something to be an invention, it needs to have an implementable form.Sure, I could patent something that I can't make, but if someone else comes along and figures it out independent of me, then I really shouldn't be able to sue them for having the same idea that I did, unless I actually built it.
Patents are all about time. It's a race, and the first one to think up a product wins the patent. If you think that JPEG is not implementable, you might think again. It's everywhere. And there's money to be made from it, or Sony and others would be in court, laughing at Forgent. A patent on JPEG doesn't stifle innovation. Look how many other formats we have? The problem is that everyone thought JPEG was free to use, and it turns out that's not the case.
I think this will end with someone buying Forgent... someone like Adobe, Canon, Sony, or... Microsoft.
I'm curious... How long will the JPEG patent last? I can't remember patent law.
You don't have a choice. But, if you remember reading the news, the government just indicated that VoIP is going to be tapped, just like regular landlines. What are you going to do then? Who's approving the methods they're plannign to use? The governement?
You people love big government. I trust a big corporation far more than big government. I have a lot more power against a big corporation than I do against the government.
Also, the fact that everyone forgot about them 160+ years ago only means that they are even less worthwhile today. Unless some desperate soul is anxious to hunker down for a fun Friday night of reading burnt, forgotten, and expired patents. ??
They also weren't attempting to make a "real" plane - this is still an UAV
By "real", do you also mean a plane that will carry passengers? Do you plan to tell these passengers that the plane is powered by Microsoft?
How do you propose to get people on board? I guess even if you don't tell the passengers, the pilot(s) will know. How will you get someone to fly the damned thing? Cattle prods? Money? Booze? Naked women? Get-out-of-jail free?
How would you make money with a Microsoft airplane? Who would invest in the thing? (I mean other than Intel, Dell, Microsoft, and other Microsoft cronies).
Wait... I have it. Get a second "chase" plane, normal in every way, you know... safe!
Sell tickets on the chase plane and follow the Microsoft-powered plane. The passengers would be paying to see the possible... scratch that... probable crash. Can you imagine the party onboard the chase plane? Bookmakers would have a good time too!
Just think, you could charge double for the "window" seat on the 2nd airplane! You'd get a birds' eye view of a Microsoft-powered plane crash!
I would imagine that TV repairmen were originally regulated because they had to know how to safely work on open TV cabinets containing dangerous high voltages, operate test equipment on those high voltage circuits, and install suitable replacement parts that wouldn't catch on fire.
So you're saying that the government should require anyone who cracks open a TV set to have a license? No more fix-it-at-home episodes? Billy Bob can't drink a six-pack, get out the screwdriver and augment his gymnastics skills with the flyback transformer?
Licenses are required to protect consumers from ripoff artists. Otherwise, you'd have corner shops with con artists "fixing" TVs.
Back in the old days of tube TVs, it was very easy to take a damaged TV from a naive client, declare it a total loss by "demonstrating" how badly the TV was broken, and offer to buy it for $25 as a "parts" chassis.
Then, put all the tubes back in, fix the original minor problem for $10, tune it up a little and sell it for $200 to someone else. Then wait for the next moron to walk through the door and attempt to swindle them too! A state agency with a licensing plan has a complaint system. Several complaints, and an inspector stops in, maybe to suspend the license.
Back in the 60's and 70's, you could find tube testers at the hardware and grocery stores. Anyone with a screwdriver and some patience could at least get their TV up and running by bringing in dead tubes, checking them in the tube tester, and replacing them. Tuning was a bit more tricky, but it was possible if you learned a few tricks.
Editorial Mode: ON
PCs are simply a pain-in-the-ass. After chasing hardware and software problems for other people for the past 15+ years, I tell you, it's not worth $75 an hour to do it. The calls never stop, and most people generally believe that each incident is directly related to the first service call. They feel that they should only have to pay $75 once, and that everything after that is free. If you enjoy peace and quiet, strict enforcement of the $75/hour fee is required. If you perform one favor, somehow, everyone hears about it and you've got dozens of others who expect the same treatment. It's not worth it.
The only thing worse than fixing PCs is fixing someone else's stovepipe network!
I think it just shows us how predictions rarely come true.
Flying buses? Flying cars?
It's all a bunch of balloney. Yet people ask for predictions.
How about the Segway? The only big news on the Segway was the rush for local governments to restrict their use. Pedestrians don't want them on the sidewalks, and motorists don't want them on the streets.
Sure, a Segway would be cool to drive, but they're expensive. Put it this way: they're more expensive than the TOTAL cost of my first 3 automobiles, and they're not nearly as functional.
Next time you want to ask visionaries about the future, I think you should also take a 1/2 dozen science fiction writers, give them several cases of beer, lock them in a room, and ask them to predict the future! I bet the science fiction writers are more accurate than the visionaries, and I'll tell you why:
Most visionaries are ideallists and ideallists have a tough time living in the real world. They don't grasp reality, they always think in terms of what should be, and not what's practical. Sure, it'd be cool to drive a flying car, but look at the logistics. Who would control them? Where could you fly? How would you handle some moron flying drunk, and crashing into your home? Or, the moron who flies drunk, passes out, and wakes up over the Gulf of Mexico? The idea is great, but there are so many problems with it.
We'd definitely need more ambulance chasers... I mean lawyers.
I don't mind advertising, as long as it's agreeable to me. I hate popups, popunders, tracking cookies, nasty scripts, and other assorted gimmicks. I will not support those advertisers or sites. In fact, I'll do everything possible to filter or ignore the advertising, but still read the content. In fact, I hope that all who support this bad advertising go under. I'll continue to block, filter, and stop anything that I don't like. Sorry, but that's my choice, and I don't feel guilty about it. Look at google! They're responsible. They aren't obnoxious. I think it's the only way I'd ever respond to an advertisement.
The advertising world has always had this notion that "annoying" sells. Frankly, it makes me angry, and that will backfire. Someone clearly got mad at Doubleclick and started this DOS business. I'm glad. Maybe they'll change their business model.
No... this just shows that they rolled the dice, and created a disease. It might take years before they figure out the full effect of what they've done. Who knows... we might have something like the Andromeda Strain going on and no one would know for years.
That might be why the article is kind of thin. Do you really want someone like Castro sinking time and money to duplicate this stuff? And then inflicting is upon his own citizens? Or whoever happens to be on his bad side that week? I just think this whole thing is a bad idea... right up there with gene-splicing. Someday, someone is going to create a really nasty bacteria or virus by accident, and we'll have a nasty go of it.
I guess the cat is out of the bag. The dictators/terrorists know that this stuff is possible... it's just a matter of time.
Who wants to put nuclear waste on a ship, and then risk any number of bad things happening to that ship? Where's the guy who drove the Exxon Valdez? Let's dig him out of mothballs.
It is a sign of the music industry getting desperate. They're going after each and every tiny little revenue stream. Dentists will just pass the $30/month cost for Muzak down to the their clients. Most dentists pay 10 times that monthly amount for a company to install and maintain an aquarium.
The music industry is hurting, and it's due to the big greedy labels.
Slashdot Mirror
You want a PDA to bring kayaking? What happened to "roughing it?"
I've got it. Hire some Sherpas. Have them lug your microwave, curling iron, hair dryer, refrigerator, and your PDA to your next stop.
I read the list... at least the English part... Bitch is in there twice. At the top and bottom of the english list.
I wonder how many people have hacked that DLL?
Do we really want the government to compete with private enterprise?
How would you feel if you just spent millions installing wi-fi equipment in Philly? And hired employees to manage it?
Do we want the government jumping in and taking over these kinds of things? When does it get upgraded? Have you ever seen a government-owned cable company? It really becomes a corrupt monopoly. It truly is one of the most deplorable things. Do a google search for government owned cable companies. Dig deep. Listen to what the subscribers say if you want to stay current. How do you think the government could run a Wi-Fi network? Politicians appoint committees to "research" and spend money. They hire consultants for millions of dollars, and tell them exactly what the taxpayers have been telling them for years. Government (and mafia-controlled) commissioner(s) sit back and issue press releases. Nothing gets done, yet the government wastes billions on contracts that the private sector wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.
Then, when it's all done, someone like Comcast comes in and sues because it infringes on their rights to operate a business.
Meanwhile, taxpayers live with the same junk they had last year, and the year before that.
Government-owned "businesses" rarely work because they try to please everyone all the time, and they rarely please anyone some of the time. Water, power, sewer are the exceptions.
Ok, let's look at it this way:
How many people think that the government can do a good job?
If you said yes, when was the last time you were at the DMV?
Why don't you go to a government doctor? How about going to a government emergency room?
How about getting government medical insurance? How about letting the government decide on the best way to treat a disease for you or your family members?
How about government housing?
Lastly, what do you do when there's a problem on a holiday, or at night, or on a weekend? Or after 4pm? Let's say you started a business, and you depend on that Wi-Fi to stay up and running? What kind of service guarantees are you going to get? Imagine calling the City of Philadelphia and trying to get something fixed?
I can't believe that people are excited about this. The government is probably the last provider I'd trust.
Lastly, what happens in a few years (or months) when the politicians are short of cash for their social agenda, and they decide they need "new revenue streams?" Taxes. And not just a property tax levy. It'll be use taxes. Suddenly, you're going to have to register to keep access. Someone will monitor your activity. You'll pay by the megabyte. You'll pay by the clock. You'll pay for prime time use. You'll pay more for certain sites or types of communication.
Who trusts a politician? Anyone? They're right up there with lawyers.
And you think this will attract "young professionals?" Businesses with jobs attract young professionals. Cool stuff to do attracts young professionals. Good schools, museums, restaurants, sports events, crime-free neighborhoods attract young professionals.
The legal team won't bail. Not until they've bled SCO for every last nickel. THEY'RE LAWYERS!
I can't believe that anyone thinks that the legal team would ever quit. If a lawyer said to a client, "Hey, we can't win." And the client responds, "I've got $30 million dollars," the lawyer is going to turn around and go back to work. They will figure out a way to stretch it out. They'll exhaust every last option, they'll go over everything one more time. They'll re-file. They'll appeal.
The biggest thing SCO and their legal team can do is issue press releases. Press releases are treated like news. Newspapers print them and treat them as news. The average citizen doesn't discern "news" from PR. They lump it all together, and the sad thing? People believe everything they read.
Let's see. I use Google 20 times a day, and that's just a ballpark guess. Some days, way more, some days, very little.
It takes 2 seconds to use, it's free, I read the news, I use Froogle, and I occasionally do newsgroup searches for some stuff.
Hmmm. I mine a relational database probably less than once a month. Although I was part of a data warehousing project for 6 months, my SQL abilities have quickly deteriorated. I'd say that occasionally, I still use Excel to figure out some formulas, add some numbers, or use Text to Columns to occasionally get a bunch of text to line up nice and neat. Let's say that Excel gets used about once per week.
My needs for a graphical data mining tool are far less than once a week... probably on the order of twice per year, and that's being generous.
Will I be shelling out $1000 for Tableau's product? Doubtful. In fact, I doubt that my former employer would buy any more than a dozen licenses to help a small minority within a group of several hundred people.
With that in mind, I wonder why you think that Tableau could be the next Google? I know people that are computer illiterate, but yet they've at least heard of Google.com. That same thing won't be said for Tableau.
Hey, I got a tip for ya. When using it outside... make sure the optics are facing down.
So Microsoft got a vendor to make something new. Who thought this was great news? To me, it looks like they copied an Apple mouse.
Nothing to see here...
I'm all about functional. I'm not about "museum" pieces. By functional, I'm talking at least 5 programmable buttons, a wheel, and a laser/LED. It better fit my hand too! After that, I don't care what it looks like.
My favorite marketing examples take place in movie advertising:
You see quotes like,
"Fantastic!" -- Boston Globe
Then you see the movie, and you realize that the critic said, "Fantastic waste of money!" and the marketing types couldn't be bothered to include the entire statement in their ad blurb.
Marketing pukes that do this stuff should be taken out to Death Valley during high season and left there. Tell them to be creative, and maybe they'll get out alive.
$399 for an iPod? Buy a firewire enclosure for $60, pick up a couple of $100 Western Digital special edition 160 gig hard drives. I have 4 of them. When one is full, I swap it out with an empty one. I store miniDV and RAW pics from my digital SLR on them. It takes less time to back up than a DVD-R, it's a lot less work, and when I want to access large chunks of data, it's a lot easier than switching CD/DVDs for hours at a time.
I wouldn't trust the government to run nuclear power. Scratch that... there is one way I'd trust the government to run nuclear power:
l /
All elected officials (and bureaucrats) need to live in the immediate vicinity of a power plant. Nuclear, coal, wind, hydro, solar, etc. They need to live with (and provide budget for) the plants that supply them with power, and they need to live in the immediate vicinity of the risk too! Chalk it up to their elected (or appointed) "duty."
On the flip side, you've got celebrities and politicians voting down clean power:
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20030811_1031.htm
If everyone used their arguments, we'd never put any power plants anywhere.
In Minnesota, Progressive Insurance started a program that allows a savings of up to 25%. The monitor measures acceleration, braking, distance, time, and some other factors. If you avoid rush hour, and aren't peeling out at stop signs or traffic lights, and aren't slamming on the brakes, they give you a variable discount. If you don't drive at all, you get the maximum discount. Progressive is test-marketing this program now.
Need Tivo on my Cell Phone. Someone should start writing Tivo software for cell phone TVs. I know I don't want to watch 15 minutes of commercials while trying to watch 1 hour of TV.
Is there a scorecard out there? If so, I'd like to see it... maybe summarized in baseball terms... by inning?
Anyone?
The reason I ask is that I've purposely ignored any mention of SCO, Darl McBride, and lawsuits for at least the past 10 months. It seems that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'd like to catch up.
This was so bad that it was funny. The flying saucers, the cemetary. Didn't Bela Lugosi die during filming, and they replaced him with a guy who used a cape to hide his face? The cheap sets and even cheaper special effects. It's so bad that it's funny. Horrible story line. Bad acting.
Patents are designed to defend against inventions. If I patent something useful, but don't actually have an implementation, I'm using the system to stifle others, and not really giving anything back. In order for something to be an invention, it needs to have an implementable form.Sure, I could patent something that I can't make, but if someone else comes along and figures it out independent of me, then I really shouldn't be able to sue them for having the same idea that I did, unless I actually built it.
Patents are all about time. It's a race, and the first one to think up a product wins the patent.
If you think that JPEG is not implementable, you might think again. It's everywhere. And there's money to be made from it, or Sony and others would be in court, laughing at Forgent. A patent on JPEG doesn't stifle innovation. Look how many other formats we have? The problem is that everyone thought JPEG was free to use, and it turns out that's not the case.
I think this will end with someone buying Forgent... someone like Adobe, Canon, Sony, or... Microsoft.
I'm curious... How long will the JPEG patent last? I can't remember patent law.
You don't have a choice. But, if you remember reading the news, the government just indicated that VoIP is going to be tapped, just like regular landlines. What are you going to do then? Who's approving the methods they're plannign to use? The governement?
You people love big government. I trust a big corporation far more than big government. I have a lot more power against a big corporation than I do against the government.
Why all the hoopla? Aren't they expired?
Also, the fact that everyone forgot about them 160+ years ago only means that they are even less worthwhile today.
Unless some desperate soul is anxious to hunker down for a fun Friday night of reading burnt, forgotten, and expired patents. ??
They also weren't attempting to make a "real" plane - this is still an UAV
By "real", do you also mean a plane that will carry passengers? Do you plan to tell these passengers that the plane is powered by Microsoft?
How do you propose to get people on board? I guess even if you don't tell the passengers, the pilot(s) will know. How will you get someone to fly the damned thing? Cattle prods? Money? Booze? Naked women? Get-out-of-jail free?
How would you make money with a Microsoft airplane? Who would invest in the thing? (I mean other than Intel, Dell, Microsoft, and other Microsoft cronies).
Wait... I have it. Get a second "chase" plane, normal in every way, you know... safe!
Sell tickets on the chase plane and follow the Microsoft-powered plane. The passengers would be paying to see the possible... scratch that... probable crash. Can you imagine the party onboard the chase plane? Bookmakers would have a good time too!
Just think, you could charge double for the "window" seat on the 2nd airplane! You'd get a birds' eye view of a Microsoft-powered plane crash!
I would imagine that TV repairmen were originally regulated because they had to know how to safely work on open TV cabinets containing dangerous high voltages, operate test equipment on those high voltage circuits, and install suitable replacement parts that wouldn't catch on fire.
So you're saying that the government should require anyone who cracks open a TV set to have a license? No more fix-it-at-home episodes? Billy Bob can't drink a six-pack, get out the screwdriver and augment his gymnastics skills with the flyback transformer?
Licenses are required to protect consumers from ripoff artists. Otherwise, you'd have corner shops with con artists "fixing" TVs.
Back in the old days of tube TVs, it was very easy to take a damaged TV from a naive client, declare it a total loss by "demonstrating" how badly the TV was broken, and offer to buy it for $25 as a "parts" chassis.
Then, put all the tubes back in, fix the original minor problem for $10, tune it up a little and sell it for $200 to someone else. Then wait for the next moron to walk through the door and attempt to swindle them too! A state agency with a licensing plan has a complaint system. Several complaints, and an inspector stops in, maybe to suspend the license.
Back in the 60's and 70's, you could find tube testers at the hardware and grocery stores. Anyone with a screwdriver and some patience could at least get their TV up and running by bringing in dead tubes, checking them in the tube tester, and replacing them. Tuning was a bit more tricky, but it was possible if you learned a few tricks.
Editorial Mode: ON
PCs are simply a pain-in-the-ass. After chasing hardware and software problems for other people for the past 15+ years, I tell you, it's not worth $75 an hour to do it. The calls never stop, and most people generally believe that each incident is directly related to the first service call. They feel that they should only have to pay $75 once, and that everything after that is free. If you enjoy peace and quiet, strict enforcement of the $75/hour fee is required. If you perform one favor, somehow, everyone hears about it and you've got dozens of others who expect the same treatment. It's not worth it.
The only thing worse than fixing PCs is fixing someone else's stovepipe network!
I think it just shows us how predictions rarely come true.
Flying buses?
Flying cars?
It's all a bunch of balloney. Yet people ask for predictions.
How about the Segway? The only big news on the Segway was the rush for local governments to restrict their use. Pedestrians don't want them on the sidewalks, and motorists don't want them on the streets.
Sure, a Segway would be cool to drive, but they're expensive. Put it this way: they're more expensive than the TOTAL cost of my first 3 automobiles, and they're not nearly as functional.
Next time you want to ask visionaries about the future, I think you should also take a 1/2 dozen science fiction writers, give them several cases of beer, lock them in a room, and ask them to predict the future! I bet the science fiction writers are more accurate than the visionaries, and I'll tell you why:
Most visionaries are ideallists and ideallists have a tough time living in the real world. They don't grasp reality, they always think in terms of what should be, and not what's practical. Sure, it'd be cool to drive a flying car, but look at the logistics. Who would control them? Where could you fly? How would you handle some moron flying drunk, and crashing into your home? Or, the moron who flies drunk, passes out, and wakes up over the Gulf of Mexico? The idea is great, but there are so many problems with it.
We'd definitely need more ambulance chasers... I mean lawyers.
I don't mind advertising, as long as it's agreeable to me. I hate popups, popunders, tracking cookies, nasty scripts, and other assorted gimmicks. I will not support those advertisers or sites. In fact, I'll do everything possible to filter or ignore the advertising, but still read the content. In fact, I hope that all who support this bad advertising go under. I'll continue to block, filter, and stop anything that I don't like. Sorry, but that's my choice, and I don't feel guilty about it. Look at google! They're responsible. They aren't obnoxious. I think it's the only way I'd ever respond to an advertisement.
The advertising world has always had this notion that "annoying" sells. Frankly, it makes me angry, and that will backfire. Someone clearly got mad at Doubleclick and started this DOS business. I'm glad. Maybe they'll change their business model.
No... this just shows that they rolled the dice, and created a disease. It might take years before they figure out the full effect of what they've done. Who knows... we might have something like the Andromeda Strain going on and no one would know for years.
That might be why the article is kind of thin. Do you really want someone like Castro sinking time and money to duplicate this stuff? And then inflicting is upon his own citizens? Or whoever happens to be on his bad side that week? I just think this whole thing is a bad idea... right up there with gene-splicing. Someday, someone is going to create a really nasty bacteria or virus by accident, and we'll have a nasty go of it.
I guess the cat is out of the bag. The dictators/terrorists know that this stuff is possible... it's just a matter of time.
Who wants to put nuclear waste on a ship, and then risk any number of bad things happening to that ship? Where's the guy who drove the Exxon Valdez? Let's dig him out of mothballs.
It is a sign of the music industry getting desperate. They're going after each and every tiny little revenue stream. Dentists will just pass the $30/month cost for Muzak down to the their clients. Most dentists pay 10 times that monthly amount for a company to install and maintain an aquarium.
The music industry is hurting, and it's due to the big greedy labels.
That thing is huge! In fact, it's so big I think if you just added a glass top, you could call it a coffee table.
Oh, before you think about putting wheels on it, you might ask the police if they'll tag you for not having license plates on the thing.
Does it have its' own chair?
How about air conditioning?