I think that you'd be surprised at how interested people in the future might be about who lived where when. My parents recently moved to an old farmhouse (built ~1750) in western New Jersey. In the corner of the lot is a little old cemetary and we all found it just fascinating to clear the brush away from that area and dig out the mostly buried tombstones from that area. Most of the stones were pretty worn down but by taking rubbings of them we were able to make out the people's names and determine that they had been buried sometime around the beginning of the 19th century.
These were fairly average people who seemed to have spent their days raising dairy cows (or so we assume, based on the general history of the area) they didn't build huge fancy monuments, but rather, were buried in their own back yard. Just because you aren't the most important in the society of your time doesn't mean that people in the future won't find some of the details of your life interesting. Carving your details into a piece of rock seems like a very tangible way to leave a record of your existance to the future, especially in this digital age where all of our records are stored in such a vaporous state.
In answer to the question posed, I believe that there are some synthetic rock like compounds that should prove to be quite lasting. _____________
Were you lucky enough that when you were finished you got to dump it to one of those comically large 8" floppy disks? Or did you have to output your results to paper tape? _____________
So you figure the most profitable plan is to compete with the NYT? Go ahead!
That's not what I said at all. I just said that they had the business model I thought was most likely to be successful. If you think that your content is time critical, unavaliable from other sources and your customers are not likely to be concerned about price then the subscription plan may be useful. To have people be really unconcerned about price your content needs to serve a direct business need and provide the opportunity for financial gain. The Gartner group and WSJ are good examples of this. If you have news and opinions about fairly general topics there are a lot of free options and you're going to have a hard time getting people to pay (reference slate and salon).
I certianly don't advocate that anyone try to compete with the New York Times in the area of respected worldwide journalism centered in New York City. That would be a futile endevor. What I do suggest is looking at how they have a working business plan for providing content. _____________
If it met your needs then it was probably the best tool for the job. My recommendation is just that you double check the results and evaluate them against your priorities. This is good advice for most of your life, but especially taxes. _____________
I've tried them the last couple of years, but I've always found that they didn't get me as big of a refund as filling out the tax forms by hand. My taxes are easy, I just take the standard deduction. There's not much excuse for getting them wrong. _____________
Most US people tend to think of themselves as northamericans, or even only americans, which is sometimes annoying. Mexicans are americans. Canadians are americans. Canadians are northamericans, Mexicans are northamericans.
It's really not our fault, we Americans just got stuck with a really crappy name for our country. So we just had to name ourselves after the best word in the name of our country.
_____________
That said, I've been baffled by Windows installs when they get... odd. The thing most people forget is that 99% of the time, when you're installing Windows you're doing so on a system that was meant to run Windows. When you try to install Windows on a home-grown system with a blend of old and new parts, it can be a refreshing dream to install Linux on it;-)
I've got to agree with you there. I've been very confused on my last couple tries at installing Win98.
I was thinking that it might be nice to have my home machine dual boot so I tried to install Win98 on an unused partition (vfat formatted even). Turns out that it's impossible to install Win98 anywhere but/dev/hda1. So I just can't do it at all without wiping my hard drive. Needless to say, it's still a Linux only box.
Then last week, I was upgrading from 95 to 98 on my work machine (I develop Windows apps. I'd love to have linux at work but it's not practical.) After the 6th reboot I got an error message stating that my display was configured incorrectly and would I like to choose the correct driver from the list below. Only thing in the list was PCI bus.
I find that to be quite unacceptable, especially for a supposedly userfriendly piece of technology. How can you not properly identify something as basic as a PCI bus in less than 6 reboots? And why would you misidentify the problem as a misconfigured display adaptor? And why must Windows assume that it is a monopoly and refuse to take the back seat to any other OS? I'll take Mandrake on my desktop anyday. It's much easier to install than Windows and works better once you've done that. _____________
Make more money that way cuz really people pay for news... the only ones that go to archives are people writing reports.
While you have an interesting hypothesis there, I doubt that it's exactly true. There are many different (free even) ways of getting the news and have been for a long time. What is difficult is finding what was news a while ago when you're doing research. People are not ever going to be willing to pay very much for the convenience of getting today's news, that's what TV and the paper are for. The only people who are going to pay for news are the people digging through the archives to write reports.
If you take a look at most news sites you'll see that this model is how they actually charge. The New York times is a good example. Somehow, they manage to sell what they give away for free (today's news, free online you can buy it on dead trees) and then sell what other people throw away (charge for news from the online archive while others charge to haul away yesterday's paper).
The future of all things dealing with the internet is going to be giving away content and selling some additional service. This service may be advertising or the convenience of searching the archive or something else or a combination of these things. This is how Ameritrade et. al. make money too. They give away content (stock quotes, research etc.) and charge for the service (dumping tech stocks).
The web has changed things, content has a marginal cost of zero on the web therefore the price that is charged for it is going to tend towards zero. The only way to get income in that environment is to charge for a service that would be more difficult to obtain elsewhere. _____________
I agree with you, usually it is possible to get what you need by asking and that should always be your first step. I had a lot of trouble at school when I was in elementary school my parents finally gave up on the public neighborhood school being the solution that I needed and sent me to a private school. This was exactly the kind of environment that I needed for a few years and helped me immensely. I went back to public school for junior high and high school and did fine. I'm very lucky that my parents had the means to find other alternatives for me when the state provided ones didn't work out. I also know that it was a really big struggle for them and that they would have really appreciated it if some of the tax money they were spending to fund the schools had gone to help them pay for my private school. I also know someone that I attended this school with whose parents did have to sue the public school district in order to get her needs provided for.
The question to consider is what are we funding with our taxes. I'd hope that we are funding the education of students because that's what we really want. More and more often though I get the impression that we are funding schools for the sake of schools and that's not the point at all. It doesn't matter one bit to me if we have great schools or not. What matters to me is that the children in this country receive a good education in one way or another. _____________
Pretty much the deal is that, if I want, I am free to say to you
"Shut the fuck up or get the hell out of my house."
This is a restriction on your speach, but it is not regulated by the US constitution since it is a transaction between private individuals and we are free to conduct our affairs in pretty much anyway that we choose. This is very different from having a federal judge say:
"You may speak no more of these matters or we will have you deported."
Also bear in mind that though you are free to say pretty much anything you want in the United States others may still hold you accountable for what you say. If you speak too frequently about hot grits in your pants, I'm free to tell you to piss off and ignore you. If you tell lies about me that damage my reputation or career, I'm free to sue you. If you say things that are threatening in nature, I'm free to have you held criminaly accountable for them.
The thing to remember is that just because your speach is free doesn't mean that it is consequence free.
These kids kind of forgot about that. Pretty much, it's never a good idea to say bad things about your boss (school administration in this case) in a public place. The internet is a public place. Therefore you shouldn't say bad things on the net about people who are in a position to make your real life miserable. It's too bad that these kids had to learn that lesson in a really hard way, but it's one that we all have to learn sooner or later. _____________
You are living in a dream world if you think the little tax break for vouchers is really going to help the low-income family. You really are.
If you don't think that this would really help people you're living in a dream world, you really are. I personally know several families who have kids that are struggling in school and have had the administration tell them, "If you don't like what we're doing for your son go to school somewhere else." If there were a way for them to pay for it I'm sure that they would.
People with money have more choices in educating their children, they also have the resources to sue the school district to force the district to pay for their kid to attend private school. It really sucks when you know that the schools could do a better job helping your kid to succeed, but you can't afford to make them do it and you can't afford to take your kid somewhere else. _____________
Actually it's probably a good idea to fsck your system before making changes to your harddrive setting anyway.;) _____________
Re:Who's their targetted audience?
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
That means tourists and criminals, and I'm not sure which one is worse.
You forgot one more important group. Those with bad credit. Granted they are probably the prople who can least afford to pay for convenience, but when has that stopped anyone from taking advantage of them. I suspect that there are lots of people who would like the convenience of a cell phone but can't get a contract. There must be someone who buys into those prepaid cell phone plans that are avaliable now and it certianly isn't anyone who's got any sense about money. _____________
The only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter: one's on our side. The assorted Palestinian groups are freedom fighters, but because "our side" happens to be Israel, the US media brands them as terrorists.
The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is that the freedom fighter fights against military and political targets while a terrorist attacks innocents. When someone blows up people standing in a crosswalk it's terrorism. Not that I'm excusing the fundamentally racist government that is in place in Isael, not am I condoning the generally poor way in which the Arabs are treated by the Jews in that region. There are two sides to every story, but they can both be in the wrong. _____________
I'd have to agree with you here. I actually see a few other benefits to this system. In general I've noticed that at stores which have those pads the clerks are better about actually looking at your signature sinceit appears on their screen. This protects me and I like that. In addition, you don't leave the clerk with your credit card number, expiriation date and your ink signature. Once you've signed the pad and the clerk pushes the enter button your signature is gone from them forever. If I'm going to give trust over a copy of my signature and credit card information to anyone, I'd rather trust the database admin than some poor kid who works for minimum wage selling very expensive things to yuppies. _____________
I'm surprised and the US Cellular claims of PCS coverage in comparison to the Sprint PCS claims. I wonder why companies wouldn't mutally negotiate terms for sharing PCS access. Unless PCS is some general term and TDMA and CDMA in no way like one-another.
PCS is actually a general term for any sort of digital cell phone service. The difference between CDMA and TDMA is actually pretty similar to the difference between Ethernet and Token ring. They both get the same job done but they can't talk to each other directly. There's a good description of the differences at this page. The various phone companies are actually pretty good about sharing their customers as they go roaming about. When I travel to Chicago or Minneapolis there isn't any service from US Cellular, but AT&T picks up my phone transparently to me and it still rings if someone calls. But Sprint is never going to pick up my calls for me because they can't talk to my TDMA phone. _____________
We've all known that the end of Napster was coming since it started. The whole Napster movement is based on people not having any respect for the wishes of the artists and copyright holders. People around here got awfully excited when Katz suggested publishing a book with some comments from/. quoted in in. Did you really expect the music industry to react differently when you went around willy-nilly handing out copies of their work.
I'm not saying that Napster isn't cool and fun. And I'm not saying that the RIAA isn't a bunch of assholes. But honestly, did you really think that Napster had a workable business model? _____________
I'm quite confident that Sprint PCS or a GSM from Iowa Wireless are not going to be appropriate solutions for covering all of Iowa. The "race" in question here goes winding all over rural Iowa and pretty much tends to avoid the interstate system where the national carriers like Sprint provide service. The only carrier I'm aware of that even comes close to providing digital coverage to all of Iowa is TDMA service from US Cellular. I have a phone from them and they really do a good job of providing digital service to even the most rural areas in the state (except for my apartment, grrrr). I don't think that they offer CDPD service, although I haven't really checked into it since I don't have a laptop. _____________
Companies should be required to test their chips rigorously and explicitly label them correctly as to their performance capabilities.
Companies do test and correctly label their chips. When you buy a chip it has a clock value stamped on it. What that means is that the company has tested it at that speed and certifies that it is capable of running at at least that speed. The fact that there is a saftey margin built into this measurement is irrelevant. Everyone knows that there is some degree of saftey margin involved we would consider the product to be faulty if it were rated at 800MHz and burst into flames at 801HMz. The only question is how big is that margin for a given chip and you know that it's going to vary somewhat between different chips, even ones that came from the same wafer. When you make a guarentee on something you'd better be pretty certian that the product you're delivering is actually a bit better than you promise or expect to get a lot of warranty repair work. _____________
That could be pretty sweet. Work for them a few years, then I could resign and go back to grad school for the life of the non-compete!
Yeah, but then you'd have to live in New Jersey and work for Dendrite. I don't see either of those things as very attractive. But maybe that's just because I worked in the call center there. Almost anything is better than working in a call center. _____________
. I need to find the guy, who does never ever use bogo-sort but learned programming on the fly. I don't know him yet.
You go to a liberal arts school and learn computer science so that you know that Joseph Leibnitz defined God in terms of the many worlds theory described in the second paragraph of the bogo-sort definition. While you're there you take classes in logic, physics, math, chemistry and computer science so that you know better than to use the bogo-sort. There's a lot more to going to college than getting job training. If all you want is some job training go to a community college for a couple of years and learn to program or repair electronics or whatever. _____________
Isn't that sort of like saying, "Real Chemical Scientists don't use chemicals?"
My experience from my days as a student slave in the chemistry stockrook taught me that most real chemists shouldn't be allowed anywhere near chemicals, especially the organic chemists. Damnit, all they ever do is make really dangerous things that smell bad. _____________
Slashdot Mirror
These were fairly average people who seemed to have spent their days raising dairy cows (or so we assume, based on the general history of the area) they didn't build huge fancy monuments, but rather, were buried in their own back yard. Just because you aren't the most important in the society of your time doesn't mean that people in the future won't find some of the details of your life interesting. Carving your details into a piece of rock seems like a very tangible way to leave a record of your existance to the future, especially in this digital age where all of our records are stored in such a vaporous state.
In answer to the question posed, I believe that there are some synthetic rock like compounds that should prove to be quite lasting.
_____________
And I could do this back in 1993 with my HP calculator. At a much better range too.
_____________
Were you lucky enough that when you were finished you got to dump it to one of those comically large 8" floppy disks? Or did you have to output your results to paper tape?
_____________
That's not what I said at all. I just said that they had the business model I thought was most likely to be successful. If you think that your content is time critical, unavaliable from other sources and your customers are not likely to be concerned about price then the subscription plan may be useful. To have people be really unconcerned about price your content needs to serve a direct business need and provide the opportunity for financial gain. The Gartner group and WSJ are good examples of this. If you have news and opinions about fairly general topics there are a lot of free options and you're going to have a hard time getting people to pay (reference slate and salon).
I certianly don't advocate that anyone try to compete with the New York Times in the area of respected worldwide journalism centered in New York City. That would be a futile endevor. What I do suggest is looking at how they have a working business plan for providing content.
_____________
If it met your needs then it was probably the best tool for the job. My recommendation is just that you double check the results and evaluate them against your priorities. This is good advice for most of your life, but especially taxes.
_____________
I've tried them the last couple of years, but I've always found that they didn't get me as big of a refund as filling out the tax forms by hand. My taxes are easy, I just take the standard deduction. There's not much excuse for getting them wrong.
_____________
It's really not our fault, we Americans just got stuck with a really crappy name for our country. So we just had to name ourselves after the best word in the name of our country.
_____________
I've got to agree with you there. I've been very confused on my last couple tries at installing Win98.
I was thinking that it might be nice to have my home machine dual boot so I tried to install Win98 on an unused partition (vfat formatted even). Turns out that it's impossible to install Win98 anywhere but /dev/hda1. So I just can't do it at all without wiping my hard drive. Needless to say, it's still a Linux only box.
Then last week, I was upgrading from 95 to 98 on my work machine (I develop Windows apps. I'd love to have linux at work but it's not practical.) After the 6th reboot I got an error message stating that my display was configured incorrectly and would I like to choose the correct driver from the list below. Only thing in the list was PCI bus.
I find that to be quite unacceptable, especially for a supposedly userfriendly piece of technology. How can you not properly identify something as basic as a PCI bus in less than 6 reboots? And why would you misidentify the problem as a misconfigured display adaptor? And why must Windows assume that it is a monopoly and refuse to take the back seat to any other OS? I'll take Mandrake on my desktop anyday. It's much easier to install than Windows and works better once you've done that.
_____________
While you have an interesting hypothesis there, I doubt that it's exactly true. There are many different (free even) ways of getting the news and have been for a long time. What is difficult is finding what was news a while ago when you're doing research. People are not ever going to be willing to pay very much for the convenience of getting today's news, that's what TV and the paper are for. The only people who are going to pay for news are the people digging through the archives to write reports.
If you take a look at most news sites you'll see that this model is how they actually charge. The New York times is a good example. Somehow, they manage to sell what they give away for free (today's news, free online you can buy it on dead trees) and then sell what other people throw away (charge for news from the online archive while others charge to haul away yesterday's paper).
The future of all things dealing with the internet is going to be giving away content and selling some additional service. This service may be advertising or the convenience of searching the archive or something else or a combination of these things. This is how Ameritrade et. al. make money too. They give away content (stock quotes, research etc.) and charge for the service (dumping tech stocks).
The web has changed things, content has a marginal cost of zero on the web therefore the price that is charged for it is going to tend towards zero. The only way to get income in that environment is to charge for a service that would be more difficult to obtain elsewhere.
_____________
The question to consider is what are we funding with our taxes. I'd hope that we are funding the education of students because that's what we really want. More and more often though I get the impression that we are funding schools for the sake of schools and that's not the point at all. It doesn't matter one bit to me if we have great schools or not. What matters to me is that the children in this country receive a good education in one way or another.
_____________
"Shut the fuck up or get the hell out of my house."
This is a restriction on your speach, but it is not regulated by the US constitution since it is a transaction between private individuals and we are free to conduct our affairs in pretty much anyway that we choose. This is very different from having a federal judge say:
"You may speak no more of these matters or we will have you deported."
Also bear in mind that though you are free to say pretty much anything you want in the United States others may still hold you accountable for what you say. If you speak too frequently about hot grits in your pants, I'm free to tell you to piss off and ignore you. If you tell lies about me that damage my reputation or career, I'm free to sue you. If you say things that are threatening in nature, I'm free to have you held criminaly accountable for them.
The thing to remember is that just because your speach is free doesn't mean that it is consequence free.
These kids kind of forgot about that. Pretty much, it's never a good idea to say bad things about your boss (school administration in this case) in a public place. The internet is a public place. Therefore you shouldn't say bad things on the net about people who are in a position to make your real life miserable. It's too bad that these kids had to learn that lesson in a really hard way, but it's one that we all have to learn sooner or later.
_____________
If you don't think that this would really help people you're living in a dream world, you really are. I personally know several families who have kids that are struggling in school and have had the administration tell them, "If you don't like what we're doing for your son go to school somewhere else." If there were a way for them to pay for it I'm sure that they would.
People with money have more choices in educating their children, they also have the resources to sue the school district to force the district to pay for their kid to attend private school. It really sucks when you know that the schools could do a better job helping your kid to succeed, but you can't afford to make them do it and you can't afford to take your kid somewhere else.
_____________
Actually it's probably a good idea to fsck your system before making changes to your harddrive setting anyway. ;)
_____________
You forgot one more important group. Those with bad credit. Granted they are probably the prople who can least afford to pay for convenience, but when has that stopped anyone from taking advantage of them. I suspect that there are lots of people who would like the convenience of a cell phone but can't get a contract. There must be someone who buys into those prepaid cell phone plans that are avaliable now and it certianly isn't anyone who's got any sense about money.
_____________
The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is that the freedom fighter fights against military and political targets while a terrorist attacks innocents. When someone blows up people standing in a crosswalk it's terrorism. Not that I'm excusing the fundamentally racist government that is in place in Isael, not am I condoning the generally poor way in which the Arabs are treated by the Jews in that region. There are two sides to every story, but they can both be in the wrong.
_____________
I don't know. Seems like a fitting way to send certain data if you ask me.
Don't click on the link...
See, I told you not to do it.
_____________
I'd have to agree with you here. I actually see a few other benefits to this system. In general I've noticed that at stores which have those pads the clerks are better about actually looking at your signature sinceit appears on their screen. This protects me and I like that. In addition, you don't leave the clerk with your credit card number, expiriation date and your ink signature. Once you've signed the pad and the clerk pushes the enter button your signature is gone from them forever. If I'm going to give trust over a copy of my signature and credit card information to anyone, I'd rather trust the database admin than some poor kid who works for minimum wage selling very expensive things to yuppies.
_____________
Likewise with me. I've got an RCA DVD player both my old crappy emerson VCR and my new Panasonic VCR work fine unless I try to record.
_____________
PCS is actually a general term for any sort of digital cell phone service. The difference between CDMA and TDMA is actually pretty similar to the difference between Ethernet and Token ring. They both get the same job done but they can't talk to each other directly. There's a good description of the differences at this page. The various phone companies are actually pretty good about sharing their customers as they go roaming about. When I travel to Chicago or Minneapolis there isn't any service from US Cellular, but AT&T picks up my phone transparently to me and it still rings if someone calls. But Sprint is never going to pick up my calls for me because they can't talk to my TDMA phone.
_____________
I'm not saying that Napster isn't cool and fun. And I'm not saying that the RIAA isn't a bunch of assholes. But honestly, did you really think that Napster had a workable business model?
_____________
I'm quite confident that Sprint PCS or a GSM from Iowa Wireless are not going to be appropriate solutions for covering all of Iowa. The "race" in question here goes winding all over rural Iowa and pretty much tends to avoid the interstate system where the national carriers like Sprint provide service. The only carrier I'm aware of that even comes close to providing digital coverage to all of Iowa is TDMA service from US Cellular. I have a phone from them and they really do a good job of providing digital service to even the most rural areas in the state (except for my apartment, grrrr). I don't think that they offer CDPD service, although I haven't really checked into it since I don't have a laptop.
_____________
Companies do test and correctly label their chips. When you buy a chip it has a clock value stamped on it. What that means is that the company has tested it at that speed and certifies that it is capable of running at at least that speed. The fact that there is a saftey margin built into this measurement is irrelevant. Everyone knows that there is some degree of saftey margin involved we would consider the product to be faulty if it were rated at 800MHz and burst into flames at 801HMz. The only question is how big is that margin for a given chip and you know that it's going to vary somewhat between different chips, even ones that came from the same wafer. When you make a guarentee on something you'd better be pretty certian that the product you're delivering is actually a bit better than you promise or expect to get a lot of warranty repair work.
_____________
Yeah, but then you'd have to live in New Jersey and work for Dendrite. I don't see either of those things as very attractive. But maybe that's just because I worked in the call center there. Almost anything is better than working in a call center.
_____________
You go to a liberal arts school and learn computer science so that you know that Joseph Leibnitz defined God in terms of the many worlds theory described in the second paragraph of the bogo-sort definition. While you're there you take classes in logic, physics, math, chemistry and computer science so that you know better than to use the bogo-sort. There's a lot more to going to college than getting job training. If all you want is some job training go to a community college for a couple of years and learn to program or repair electronics or whatever.
_____________
My experience from my days as a student slave in the chemistry stockrook taught me that most real chemists shouldn't be allowed anywhere near chemicals, especially the organic chemists. Damnit, all they ever do is make really dangerous things that smell bad.
_____________