I enjoy my privacy, too, but too much anonymity can be a bad thing. We all enjoy an abundance of anonymity on the net, and look how people behave: rampant copyrighht infringement, unregulated drug sales, rampant cheating (which has destroyed the value of online gaming for many), spam, truly offensive porn (not just harmless pinups, which I wholeheartedly endorse, but really deviant crap that caters to whole communities of bottom feeders), hate sites, etc...
I doubt you'd see all of that if the people involved were stripped of their cloak of anonymity.
It's sort of ironic, really. Most of the US government is perpetually hounded by the media every moment of the day, yet we all seem to be perpetually lamenting their secretive behaviour. The rest of us all enjoy almost complete obscurity, and complain when we are forced to surrender our address to the people WE elected to protect us.
I think the fear is that this information will somehow be abused, and it is a potential danger. But until they start making note of your race, religious preference or political affiliation, I wouldn't worry too much. About the worst thing they are likely to do with your address is send you coupons. All they want to do is run the names against a list of known troublemakers and keep an eye on them.
Ever watch the show "Airline"? 10 minutes of that, and you'll begin to wonder why they let as many people fly as they do. Airports attract a wide cross-secton of humanity, and rival bus stations for the circus-like quality of their crowds. Drunks, drifters, morally outraged consumers, people who are so fat they can barely fit in the plane, enough denizens of trailer parks to keep the Jerry Springer show on the air for an entire season, really...it is amazing to me how cavalier some people are when it comes to flying. Anyone with even the slightest idea of what a delicate balance of tremendous forces are involved in getting them to Disneyland in two hours would, I think, behave a little more respectfully than many people seem to do on airplanes. I definitely think they need to ban the sale of alcohol on them altogether. If they want to throw a few "high-risk" passengers off, fine by me. I recommend the obese woman complaining about having to buy two tickets. More runway for me...
That being said, I'm still glad their are some naysayers out there watching the proceedings with a skeptical eye. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
But if we fear our own government more than some guy on a 777 with an Uzi, then maybe we need to be starting our own database, eh?
You could probably obtain the same results easily and inexpensively with your existing case by simply picking up a role of self-adhesive wood grain decal sheets, which you could find at almost any large hardware store, and in a wide variety of grains.
This was actually the reasoning behind the pre-OSX Mac interface. It was not nearly as customizable as the Windows interface, which was both a blessing and a curse. But it was consistent, and stayed largely unchanged for years.
Unfortunately, while OSX took a big leap forward in stability and functionality, it took a few steps backward in usability. It is not quite as intuitive as the old OS, and the company likes to reinvent it every release.
Hopefully it will mature into something as predictable as the old OS.
It will take you that long to transfer your domain away from them, anyway!
A 100 years is easy with Verisign...it will take you that long to pry your domain name away from them.
No kidding. The worst customer service experience I've ever had was with Verisign during the Network Solutions days. It took me months of phone calls, faxes and legal threats just to get them to update my domain information so that I could transfer it to another registrar. No company has ever made me that miserable.
If they were an airline, I'd be stuck in Antarctica without my luggage, listening to elevator music on the dwindling battery of my cell phone...
Ebay, Paypal, spam...all of it can be traced to the one inherwent flaw of the internet that, ironically, people continue to outspokenly defend: the anonymity of the net.
You cannot have a well-behaved global village without personal accountability for it's citizens.
Relax guys...it's no different than moving the stuff to the special rack behind the counter where the kids can't see it.
Personally, I'd like to see a better organized internet, which starts with properly assigned domain names. For one thing, they should move all the dang associate booksellers into their own TLD. I don't know how many searches for useful information have yielded me nothing but endless lists of table of contents of some book someone is selling. Works my nerve.
They made a rather mediocre real-time startegy game of it, too, but it flopped. It had some interesting remixes of Jeff Wayne's music in it, though, and a pretty, if clumsy, interface. But it was mind-bogglingly dull to play, and obviously had some play balancing issues. (Aha, now the army of WWI vintage tanks I have been building for the past fifty turns will advance on the martians and...oh, drat.)
I used to have the LP, which had one of those nice, album-sized books you could page through with lots of cool artwork. All of this is gone now, replaced by plastic jewel cases and tiny booklets filled with microscopic type.
For a complete list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the human condition, please press one...
Make sure your box is hooked up properly. Sometimes the installers are not quite up to Mensa's standards. I've had a Satellite installer spend twenty minutes hooking up my nifty digital tuner to my TV with a coax cable and then try to tell me that all digital signals have crappy audio. (He also managed to crush my gutters with his ladder while putting up my dish)
After five minutes and two pages of the user's manual, I had it hooked up with the proper cables and it sounded as good as advertised.
Poor quality lines or equipment in your area can also result in poor signal strength, which will manifest itself as lots of pixelation, especially on certain channels. Keep bugging their support until they fix it.
It looks like good fun, although I believe the effectiveness of a few fifty caliber machine guns against alien giant robot spaceship alloys may have been wildly overrated in the movie...
"Little Lost Robot" by Isaac Asimov. Only the radiation did not fry the robots...they were simply led to believe it would. (Why trash a perfectly good robot?)
I know exactly what it feels like. I am a practicing illustrator, and copyright is my bread and butter. Until computers transformed anyone with a copy of Photoshop into an "artist" and anyone with an HTML editor a "publisher", your could not exist as a professional without a firm understanding of copyright law. There were few abuses as a result. Since the revolution, theft of images is commonplace. However, as a fledgling illustrator with little to lose but my pride, I braved the web early and learned a lot about intellectual property and business. I learned:
1) Most people are decent and generally ask permission before reproducing my graphics 2) Many people are ignorant of copyright law altogether, but they are not the ones you need worry about 3) Contracts don't mean dink unless you can afford a good attorney 4) The best protection from those who steal intellectual property is your intellect itself. That is, I feel secure that I will survive as an artist even if one of my pieces is reproduced illegally. I can, after all, always make create more work. So I am not militant about copyright enforcement. Trespasses are rare, and do as much to promote my work as they diminish it.
The crooks, on the other hand, need to keep stealing to survive. Those with the most interest in copyright are the non-creators, whose only substinence is their parasitical relationship with creative people. They deal in commodities, exploiting the works of others, and without copyright protection they have no product at all.
Copyright is useful to an artist in the sense that it can permit us to make enough money to do our work full-time. A copyright is actually a bundle of rights, which can be parcelled out to various publishers for far more money than any one publisher is likely to pay. But copyright laws that are two restrictive can also hamper creativity and induce laziness. Personally, I'd love to see the stupid Sonny Bono act (the name says it all) repealed. There is no value in copyrights that last for decades...not to their creators, anyway.
Has it happened to me? Yes, and the law offered me no protection at all. Justice in this country goes to the highest bidder.
Like most parasites, though, I think those who would exploit the creativity of others will soon learn that a good parasite does not suck it's host dry and survive. Already, the RIAA is feeling the backlash of consumers fed up with manufactured music and strongarm tactics. Local animation houses have learned that if Americans can't get quality animation here, they will import it. (Animators are a very exploited breed of artist, who traditionally work long hours for low wages.) Disney is biting at it's own wounds after unwisely deciding that they had no use for traditional artists anymore (Pixar hired most of them...guess whose laughing now?). I think the MPAA and the endless guilds in Hollywood will soon learn that the Independents are numerous, talented and fully capable of distributing their own films, thankyou.
So, how does it feel? It feels lousy, but not nearly as bad signing those rights away to some exploitive corporation who may never get around to cutting you a check anyway.
Screw copyright. Only criminals need rules for morality spelled out on paper.
I love reading, and read constantly, but I never go to the library anymore. Most local libraries are poorly funded, and rely primarily on donated material...which means that they have a selection comparable to a small used book store. Why not just GO to a small used book store and own the stuff?
And you simply cannot beat the internet for selection of both new and used books. In fact, I have found that the internet has replaced my need for most magazines and newspapers, libraries and even some reference books.
The last time I went to a library, I simply went to check my email (I was vacationing). There was a big line at the computers...
I think the library of today may ultimately become the cybercafe of the future, for good or ill.
This is part of the reason Paypal has gained a reputation for heavy handed fraud countermeasures. They want new business, so they have reduced barriers of entry for new customers to next to nothing. That translates into lots of customers, but also lots of shady customers. The account freezing and other draconian methods are the result of security playing catchup on the back end of things...
They really do need to be regulated. Right now they are playing bank, but are not regulated as one. I'm amazed the FTC has let them get this far.
For the record, though, I use them, and haven't had any trouble. I keep my balance pretty low, though.
Looks like we finally have the global village everyone was raving about twenty years ago. Welcome to our little town, where everyone knows your name....and your age, and your birthdate, and your favorite foods, and your last girlfriend, and why she dumped you, and all your weird little habits, ad nauseum.
It's just like living in East Jesus, North Dakota, pop. 450...except now you have a chance to be famous for fifteen minutes.
What's the big deal? The more things change, the more they stay the same...
And, for any of the above, there is a 100% chance that the event will result in the FAA creating new airspace regulations designed to make pilots even more miserable.
That's an interesting postition. The fine art world often defends their art on the same grounds. Tome Wolfe has a rather scathing but fascintating book on the subject called "The Painted Word", which I recommend to art lovers.
I think there are as many definitions of what constitutes "art" as there are aspiring artists (or their parasitical campfollowers, art critics).
I'm a traditionally trained commercial artist. (You are welcome to slashdot my site at spanishcastle.com to confirm that pronouncement). I also have done a limited amount of programming. I find them to be two distinctly different experiences, but not altogether different. I think any act of creation done in the pursuit of excellence can be considered art.
However, I tend to prefer my own simple formula for answering the age old question: is it art? They are:
1) Is it beautiful? (which is a loaded question, too, really) 2) Would you have it in your home? (or, in the case of large works, in your town?) 3) Five hundred years from now, when some future archeologist digs it up, will it still be recognizable as art?
Obviously, some art forms are simply too ephemeral (like music or dance) to meet these conditions completely...although you could also argue that the best of them are preserved in one fashion or another (symphonies are committed to paper, and dances are taught to the next generation)
I think programming might be considered more akin to graphic art than fine art.
Fine art is a form of expression. I am not sure how well programming does this. Were it not for commented code, I don't how one could discern the author of a great piece of code from another.
Graphic art is a form of communication, which programming is designed to do, after a fashion. It is a means whereby a person may communicate with a machine.
Perhaps only machines know the difference? Perhaps we are bearing witness to a new form of art: machine art. Maybe one day, sentient machines will look and marvel at the elegance and simplicity of some tidy bit of code with the same fascination and admiration we might admire an artist's rendering of our own universe today.
I'm still waiting for both hardware and software manufacturers to address the issue of permanence, though...
Actually, there are some pretty nasty pile-ups in Europe. That's what happens when your cross foggy terrain with the Autobahn.
Personally, I've been involved in one way or another in a half-dozen or so accidents in my life. Every single time, someone was violating a traffic law, and in most cases they were speeding.
1) Took out a lane marker...speeding 2) Broad-sided by a Caddy...high 3) Hit by a cop...HE was speeding, and passing in the oncoming lane on his way to a silent bank alarm. (no sirens) 4) Ran off the road...speeding 5) Did it again...speeding 6) Friend of mine did it, too...speeding 7) Broadsided a Triumph Spitfire, which careened head-on into another car...sneaking through an intersection on "orange", when the Spitfire decided to time the light and speed on through (same friend) 8) Hit a tree...speeding 9) Rear-ended by another car...speeding
Speed may not kill, but it makes it really hard to get affordable insurance:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Amen.
I enjoy my privacy, too, but too much anonymity can be a bad thing. We all enjoy an abundance of anonymity on the net, and look how people behave: rampant copyrighht infringement, unregulated drug sales, rampant cheating (which has destroyed the value of online gaming for many), spam, truly offensive porn (not just harmless pinups, which I wholeheartedly endorse, but really deviant crap that caters to whole communities of bottom feeders), hate sites, etc...
I doubt you'd see all of that if the people involved were stripped of their cloak of anonymity.
It's sort of ironic, really. Most of the US government is perpetually hounded by the media every moment of the day, yet we all seem to be perpetually lamenting their secretive behaviour. The rest of us all enjoy almost complete obscurity, and complain when we are forced to surrender our address to the people WE elected to protect us.
I think the fear is that this information will somehow be abused, and it is a potential danger. But until they start making note of your race, religious preference or political affiliation, I wouldn't worry too much. About the worst thing they are likely to do with your address is send you coupons. All they want to do is run the names against a list of known troublemakers and keep an eye on them.
Ever watch the show "Airline"? 10 minutes of that, and you'll begin to wonder why they let as many people fly as they do. Airports attract a wide cross-secton of humanity, and rival bus stations for the circus-like quality of their crowds. Drunks, drifters, morally outraged consumers, people who are so fat they can barely fit in the plane, enough denizens of trailer parks to keep the Jerry Springer show on the air for an entire season, really...it is amazing to me how cavalier some people are when it comes to flying. Anyone with even the slightest idea of what a delicate balance of tremendous forces are involved in getting them to Disneyland in two hours would, I think, behave a little more respectfully than many people seem to do on airplanes. I definitely think they need to ban the sale of alcohol on them altogether. If they want to throw a few "high-risk" passengers off, fine by me. I recommend the obese woman complaining about having to buy two tickets. More runway for me...
That being said, I'm still glad their are some naysayers out there watching the proceedings with a skeptical eye. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
But if we fear our own government more than some guy on a 777 with an Uzi, then maybe we need to be starting our own database, eh?
You could probably obtain the same results easily and inexpensively with your existing case by simply picking up a role of self-adhesive wood grain decal sheets, which you could find at almost any large hardware store, and in a wide variety of grains.
Why kill a tree?
This was actually the reasoning behind the pre-OSX Mac interface. It was not nearly as customizable as the Windows interface, which was both a blessing and a curse. But it was consistent, and stayed largely unchanged for years.
Unfortunately, while OSX took a big leap forward in stability and functionality, it took a few steps backward in usability. It is not quite as intuitive as the old OS, and the company likes to reinvent it every release.
Hopefully it will mature into something as predictable as the old OS.
It will take you that long to transfer your domain away from them, anyway!
A 100 years is easy with Verisign...it will take you that long to pry your domain name away from them.
No kidding. The worst customer service experience I've ever had was with Verisign during the Network Solutions days. It took me months of phone calls, faxes and legal threats just to get them to update my domain information so that I could transfer it to another registrar. No company has ever made me that miserable.
If they were an airline, I'd be stuck in Antarctica without my luggage, listening to elevator music on the dwindling battery of my cell phone...
Ebay, Paypal, spam...all of it can be traced to the one inherwent flaw of the internet that, ironically, people continue to outspokenly defend: the anonymity of the net.
You cannot have a well-behaved global village without personal accountability for it's citizens.
Relax guys...it's no different than moving the stuff to the special rack behind the counter where the kids can't see it.
Personally, I'd like to see a better organized internet, which starts with properly assigned domain names. For one thing, they should move all the dang associate booksellers into their own TLD. I don't know how many searches for useful information have yielded me nothing but endless lists of table of contents of some book someone is selling. Works my nerve.
I have that CD, too. IT's awesome.
They made a rather mediocre real-time startegy game of it, too, but it flopped. It had some interesting remixes of Jeff Wayne's music in it, though, and a pretty, if clumsy, interface. But it was mind-bogglingly dull to play, and obviously had some play balancing issues. (Aha, now the army of WWI vintage tanks I have been building for the past fifty turns will advance on the martians and...oh, drat.)
I used to have the LP, which had one of those nice, album-sized books you could page through with lots of cool artwork. All of this is gone now, replaced by plastic jewel cases and tiny booklets filled with microscopic type.
For a complete list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the human condition, please press one...
You're a lot of fun at parties, aren't you?
Make sure your box is hooked up properly. Sometimes the installers are not quite up to Mensa's standards. I've had a Satellite installer spend twenty minutes hooking up my nifty digital tuner to my TV with a coax cable and then try to tell me that all digital signals have crappy audio. (He also managed to crush my gutters with his ladder while putting up my dish)
After five minutes and two pages of the user's manual, I had it hooked up with the proper cables and it sounded as good as advertised.
Poor quality lines or equipment in your area can also result in poor signal strength, which will manifest itself as lots of pixelation, especially on certain channels. Keep bugging their support until they fix it.
It looks like good fun, although I believe the effectiveness of a few fifty caliber machine guns against alien giant robot spaceship alloys may have been wildly overrated in the movie...
"Little Lost Robot" by Isaac Asimov. Only the radiation did not fry the robots...they were simply led to believe it would. (Why trash a perfectly good robot?)
Looks like Lucasarts will be able to reuse those old stormtrooper uniforms, after all...
I know exactly what it feels like. I am a practicing illustrator, and copyright is my bread and butter. Until computers transformed anyone with a copy of Photoshop into an "artist" and anyone with an HTML editor a "publisher", your could not exist as a professional without a firm understanding of copyright law. There were few abuses as a result. Since the revolution, theft of images is commonplace. However, as a fledgling illustrator with little to lose but my pride, I braved the web early and learned a lot about intellectual property and business. I learned:
1) Most people are decent and generally ask permission before reproducing my graphics
2) Many people are ignorant of copyright law altogether, but they are not the ones you need worry about
3) Contracts don't mean dink unless you can afford a good attorney
4) The best protection from those who steal intellectual property is your intellect itself. That is, I feel secure that I will survive as an artist even if one of my pieces is reproduced illegally. I can, after all, always make create more work. So I am not militant about copyright enforcement. Trespasses are rare, and do as much to promote my work as they diminish it.
The crooks, on the other hand, need to keep stealing to survive. Those with the most interest in copyright are the non-creators, whose only substinence is their parasitical relationship with creative people. They deal in commodities, exploiting the works of others, and without copyright protection they have no product at all.
Copyright is useful to an artist in the sense that it can permit us to make enough money to do our work full-time. A copyright is actually a bundle of rights, which can be parcelled out to various publishers for far more money than any one publisher is likely to pay. But copyright laws that are two restrictive can also hamper creativity and induce laziness. Personally, I'd love to see the stupid Sonny Bono act (the name says it all) repealed. There is no value in copyrights that last for decades...not to their creators, anyway.
Has it happened to me? Yes, and the law offered me no protection at all. Justice in this country goes to the highest bidder.
Like most parasites, though, I think those who would exploit the creativity of others will soon learn that a good parasite does not suck it's host dry and survive. Already, the RIAA is feeling the backlash of consumers fed up with manufactured music and strongarm tactics. Local animation houses have learned that if Americans can't get quality animation here, they will import it. (Animators are a very exploited breed of artist, who traditionally work long hours for low wages.) Disney is biting at it's own wounds after unwisely deciding that they had no use for traditional artists anymore (Pixar hired most of them...guess whose laughing now?). I think the MPAA and the endless guilds in Hollywood will soon learn that the Independents are numerous, talented and fully capable of distributing their own films, thankyou.
So, how does it feel? It feels lousy, but not nearly as bad signing those rights away to some exploitive corporation who may never get around to cutting you a check anyway.
Screw copyright. Only criminals need rules for morality spelled out on paper.
I agree. But how would you know what your favorite shows were, if you couldn't see them on TV?
I love reading, and read constantly, but I never go to the library anymore. Most local libraries are poorly funded, and rely primarily on donated material...which means that they have a selection comparable to a small used book store. Why not just GO to a small used book store and own the stuff?
And you simply cannot beat the internet for selection of both new and used books. In fact, I have found that the internet has replaced my need for most magazines and newspapers, libraries and even some reference books.
The last time I went to a library, I simply went to check my email (I was vacationing). There was a big line at the computers...
I think the library of today may ultimately become the cybercafe of the future, for good or ill.
This is part of the reason Paypal has gained a reputation for heavy handed fraud countermeasures. They want new business, so they have reduced barriers of entry for new customers to next to nothing. That translates into lots of customers, but also lots of shady customers. The account freezing and other draconian methods are the result of security playing catchup on the back end of things...
They really do need to be regulated. Right now they are playing bank, but are not regulated as one. I'm amazed the FTC has let them get this far.
For the record, though, I use them, and haven't had any trouble. I keep my balance pretty low, though.
I LIKED Starship Troopers.It's good, popcorn-eating fun. Any movie with epic space battles, alien bugs and Denise Richards is OK by me.
But I like Godzilla movies, too...
Looks like we finally have the global village everyone was raving about twenty years ago. Welcome to our little town, where everyone knows your name....and your age, and your birthdate, and your favorite foods, and your last girlfriend, and why she dumped you, and all your weird little habits, ad nauseum.
It's just like living in East Jesus, North Dakota, pop. 450...except now you have a chance to be famous for fifteen minutes.
What's the big deal? The more things change, the more they stay the same...
More likely, the result would be "Work for Hire", and the company that hired you would end up owning the software.
The digital revolution hasn't changed the way people do business as much as some would like to think...
Yes, but...in a real emergency, there wouldn't be much RF interference, would there?
And, for any of the above, there is a 100% chance that the event will result in the FAA creating new airspace regulations designed to make pilots even more miserable.
That's an interesting postition. The fine art world often defends their art on the same grounds. Tome Wolfe has a rather scathing but fascintating book on the subject called "The Painted Word", which I recommend to art lovers.
I suppose all art rather depends on context...
I think there are as many definitions of what constitutes "art" as there are aspiring artists (or their parasitical campfollowers, art critics).
I'm a traditionally trained commercial artist. (You are welcome to slashdot my site at spanishcastle.com to confirm that pronouncement). I also have done a limited amount of programming. I find them to be two distinctly different experiences, but not altogether different. I think any act of creation done in the pursuit of excellence can be considered art.
However, I tend to prefer my own simple formula for answering the age old question: is it art? They are:
1) Is it beautiful? (which is a loaded question, too, really)
2) Would you have it in your home? (or, in the case of large works, in your town?)
3) Five hundred years from now, when some future archeologist digs it up, will it still be recognizable as art?
Obviously, some art forms are simply too ephemeral (like music or dance) to meet these conditions completely...although you could also argue that the best of them are preserved in one fashion or another (symphonies are committed to paper, and dances are taught to the next generation)
I think programming might be considered more akin to graphic art than fine art.
Fine art is a form of expression. I am not sure how well programming does this. Were it not for commented code, I don't how one could discern the author of a great piece of code from another.
Graphic art is a form of communication, which programming is designed to do, after a fashion. It is a means whereby a person may communicate with a machine.
Perhaps only machines know the difference? Perhaps we are bearing witness to a new form of art: machine art. Maybe one day, sentient machines will look and marvel at the elegance and simplicity of some tidy bit of code with the same fascination and admiration we might admire an artist's rendering of our own universe today.
I'm still waiting for both hardware and software manufacturers to address the issue of permanence, though...
Actually, there are some pretty nasty pile-ups in Europe. That's what happens when your cross foggy terrain with the Autobahn.
:-)
Personally, I've been involved in one way or another in a half-dozen or so accidents in my life. Every single time, someone was violating a traffic law, and in most cases they were speeding.
1) Took out a lane marker...speeding
2) Broad-sided by a Caddy...high
3) Hit by a cop...HE was speeding, and passing in the oncoming lane on his way to a silent bank alarm. (no sirens)
4) Ran off the road...speeding
5) Did it again...speeding
6) Friend of mine did it, too...speeding
7) Broadsided a Triumph Spitfire, which careened head-on into another car...sneaking through an intersection on "orange", when the Spitfire decided to time the light and speed on through (same friend)
8) Hit a tree...speeding
9) Rear-ended by another car...speeding
Speed may not kill, but it makes it really hard to get affordable insurance
If no one buys the products without reading objective reviews or talking to other product users first, then who will be doing the obbjective reviews?