Oh wow, "Electronic Voice phenomenon?" Spare me. All this page needed was a midi playing "Age of Aquarius."
PKD's writing are strongly rationalist with an intelligent approach to figuring out the strange phenomenon in his life. I think its insulting to turn him into a new age "John Edwards" bullshit spiritual medium commodity.
> Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays.
No shit. Maybe because the "voice" he heard on the tape was nothing more than the subconscious projecting quotes hes read elsewhere onto nothing more than tape static and other ambigious sounds from the original recording.
Maybe next week slashdot can expose how Ozzy put all those satanic messages into his albums.
It was also found that in the real life MMOG women rarely wear sexy armor, don't say "Mi'Lord", don't have a supermodel's figure, and most importantly do not have a penis.
The price of a sample of a biological agent is actually very cheap and a few small loans to work on the program (which the US gave iraq) doesn't add much financially, but can create a weapon that's worth 100,000 soviet tanks.
In other words its not the bottom line that matters but what was actually sold.
Also, just about every nation was against the war until it became obvious that going against the US meant less financial aid. You simply have a large sample set to construct a conspiracy theory with.
Blog is short for Weblog. Slashdot is a weblog with comments. How is robotwisdom.com (site of the guy who coined the word weblog) anything like a traditional journal or a diary?
Reverse chronological links updated every so often does not make a journal.
>He'll lose, but he'll guarantee no other democrats win either.
Oh please, this early in the game and you're announcing that the dems are going to lose if they chose Dean?
Lets face facts and agree that more or less the votes are going to come out as they did in 2000. About half the country will knee-jerk vote GOP and about the other half will knee-jerk vote Dem. Swing voters will probably be the biggest factor in 2004.
What Bush can't do is repackage himself. He can't play the "compassionate conservative" card now that his extreme-right wing agenda has been revealed. He can't keep agreeing with his opponent like he did with Gore during the debates.
Also, lets face facts and also agree that a significant number of swing voters are politically apathetic. They'll vote on hot-button issues and this presidency and the events of the last three years have not been "boring old politics." The GOP is going to be on the defensive for a lot of things.
I don't think it matters who the dems go with, the fight is already laid out: Dem challenger will call Bush on his controversial administration and Bush will play the "stay the course" card.
That's ignoring things like Iraqgate, Perle, Enron, Haliburon, secret energy meetings, the SOTU speech, etc.
I have no idea who will win, but its not going to be a shoo-in for anyone. Hell, they could run Jimmy Carter and still get a good fight.
According to all the chicken-littles here in the US, Europe should have went broke ten years ago and all its people starving in the streets.
Universal healthcare can be done, either through traditional UH like in Europe, single payer/voucher plans, or expanding medicare to include children and the poor (Dean's Plan).
You can argue this point until the cows come how but the wealthiest country in the world is also the only western nation not to have some kind of universal healthcare system. That's simply wrong and these doctors agree.
>Americans fear and loath Managed health care and the right to see their own doctor.
Much of the democratic base is part of that 40 million of uninsured Americans. Yeah, managed is a scary word yet what does the M in HMO stand for? Maintence/Management its the same thing. What plan does your company offer you? What plans do most companies offer? Highly managed plans.
Public healthcare, especially in a wealthy country like the US, is very doable. Its not just Europe's way or the US's way. From what I understand Dean's plan is more about expanding medicare to include children and poor people up till age 25 and helping small business insure its employees. Not exactly Denmark.
> Canadians prefer our system to their's in critical care
That's a pretty general statement. I'm sure they would be scared shitless if faced with the real possibility of not having insurance for years. Not to mention they have money in their pocket to spend on American specialists because they aren't paying through the nose on every doctor's visit or saddled with debt after some accident. The number 1 cause of bankrupcy is medical bills. Its also fiscally responsible to insure as many people as possible. Either way you're paying for it. Might as well get something in return.
>. The Democrats are desperate for the voters that went Green last time, because they know they need them.
The dems don't want him, they want their boy Gephart or *shudder* Lieberman. The DLC publically flogged Dean supporters by calling them "the activist elite" and tried to compare them to politcally impotent ultra-lefties. Dean supports responded back here.
The green vote simply isn't important. I'm sure that more than half of those votes are permanent third-party protest votes and regardless of what the Dems want you to think it was a bad ballot and a piss-poor Gore campaign that got Bush into office.
Regardless, everyone who isn't in the GOP wants an electable Democrat. I can't see why Dean wouldn't fit the bill, especially with Iraq turing out to be a quite the quagmire for Bush.
Sorry, but there's no ploy. Dean is fighting influencial (read: very wealthy and very connected) members of his own party right now and in interesting ways (appeal to the populace, net-based action, etc) just to get heard.
Sean Connery warns people not to view LXG unless they want to get into a fight with the manager about getting a refund.
Jennifer Connely advises taking some NoDoze or at least a double cappucino before attempting to view the Hulk.
and Johnnie Depp warns ladies not to see Pirates of the Caribbean unless you want to fall in love with in all over again since you just recently got over your obsession with him after viewing Chocolate for the 20th time.
>Star Wars ---> Dreamed up in the 70's continues today. Even Clinton continued to fund it.
Funded quite and pushed more than quite a bit by the Reagan administration. Somewhere on the order of tens of billions of dollars for what is essentially a pork project that wasn't capable of shooting down another plane let alone a hypersonic missile.
"Clinton did it too!!" Err, that righty tagline is meaningless. Two wrongs don't make a right and criticizing Reagan has nothing to do with criticizing Clinton. That's a topic for another day.
>Grenada
Ah yes, the grudge match between the US and Cuba in which a Marxist uprising was used as an excuse to invade a country the size of my neighborhood. There were no winners here.
>War on Drugs - The war is 'lost' because we (people and government) lost focus not because it could not be won.
Oh please. Receational drug use has been a part of human history since before any established culture. Putting kids in jail for possesing or growing pot isn't focus, its stupid and counterproductive. More right-wing Jesus-isms.
>Central America ---> What part?
El Salvador - 75,000 murdered
Nicaragua - 50,000 murdered
BTW, Slashdot favorite Admiral Poindexter had a hand in a lot of the Latin American interventions. I won't mention Panama as that was Bush Sr not Reagan, but Poindexter was there too.
>The defining characteristic of this country is the orderly transfer of power. When someone starts calling people "fascists" - intimating that they are dictators -- they are trashing the fundamental principle of this country.
When certain "someones" put a chill on civil liberties, demand executive protection over energy meetings, cook intellegence to start wars, etc. Well, you're kind stuck with only a few words to describe this behavoir.
Worse, this administration can really be seen as a power grab to appease the hard-right conservatives that put Bush in office.
Your assertion is just another logical fallacy along the lines of "Support the troops, thus support the war."
>they are trashing the fundamental principle of this country.
No, they're criticizing those who they feel are violating these principles. Big difference.
>o a Ukranian, a 3 year warrenty means that in 2 years, 11.5 months you bring your product back in for a replacement no matter what.
That is horrible. They don't have to spend 90+ minutes talking to a level one script reader to be escalated to level two support who will curtly cut you off and make you fill out a form demanding everything from the the original reciept (you do keep those in a fire-proof safe right?) to promises of handing over your first born if the product isn't really damaged or the damage was found to be your fault.
Or those retail scams to buy 'Super-warranty service' from the retailer only to find it means they ship your laptop off to the local "service center" where their tech monkeys poke at it with a stick for two weeks before just sending it to the manufacturer.
It gets worse from there.
>for example, the ass-backward EU and their mandated product warrenties
Business 101: the customer ends up paying for everything anyway. This means foreign companies are simply going to up the price for a localized version of that product. Problem solved. It happens all the time.
Also, internationalism costs money regardless of what the local law is. Your organization still need to get hire regional experts/lawyers, translation services, beefier insurance, etc. Many Eastern European countries are not only havens for fraud but just poor to begin with; thus its still a niche and its not in the interest of many companies to even bother.
Yep, its the old causation vs. correlation fallacy.
America has already been through this when Dr. Frederick Wertham (a popular quack-ish psychologist from the 50's) wrote a book arguing that comics caused all sorts of deviant behavoir. This killed the comic industry by turning it into kid's stuff, more or less. More info here.Better details here.
I think this is the favorite meme for hack journalists. If a kid goes psycho then make sure to print how he dressed, what music he listened to, and what games he plays and start the witch-hunt! I was very surprised to see that almost 1/3rd of a AP/Reuters article was about these things and not what actually happened.
I doubt a "Comics Code Authority" self-censorship will take place again, but the kneejerk mentality is still there with some people. Hopefully we've learned something in the fifty or so years since the Comics Code was created.
Isn't this always the case? Something exists for a small community and then it hits the mainstream, but the mainstream can't handle the sudden change.
I'm afraid the sims players who can't handle a group of people pee'ing on their lawns will have to develop a thicker skin if they choose to play online games with strangers. If you think that's bad, wait until you play a PvP game.
There's room for argument about what to do with harrasment, but that's up to the game admins and management to fix. If the sims is that bad, then quit. A simple vote with your dollar will get the message across.
What really gets me is the suggestion of law to control MMO*s. Really now, its just a game.
My cynical side sees the lowest common denominator, at least here in the US/Midwest area, as being extremely thin-skinned. A parent complains about something being "offensive" and the school board jumps through hoops to please them. An opinion that goes against the mainstream is now "traitorous" etc.
I think the interconnecting the net does either through the web or online games will really force some people to simply grow up, for the lack of a better term, and realize that even virtual worlds cannot be completely controled or fall in-line with their Xtian-Judeo ethics. Its a big world out there, you're better off learning to deal with your problems in an intelligent way and develop tolerance than running to the first authority figure and complain about how people aren't being "nice."
>If it's in fact true that there is no real user consent to the gator-driven pop-ups, tend to think that the owners of websites defaced by the popups have a reasonable claim for damages.
What about those of us who block ads, run junkbuster, proximation, etc? Your proposal would force us to render pages as the webmaster sees fit. Err, no thanks. If you publish HTML you take your chance at how the end user renders it. Don't like it? Then publish with something else.
I run an ad blocking project here, and I would not like to be grouped with gator, et al. Obviously, the problem here has to do with stealth installs (exploiting default activex settings) and ridiculously unreadable legalese.
For the record, I have met people who run spyware and who don;t care. So even if you dragged Gator into court, you'd have a hard time pushing for some kind of punishment when there are customers who don't care about privacy as much as we do.
I think this problem could easily be solved if Antivirus companies had a "treat spyware as a virus" setting. Why isn't Norton et al putting their necks on the line for their customers?
Spyware seems ripe for the next "scare meme." It does steal information and your chances of getting it compared to a virus is something like 10000 to 1. I hope to see some enterprising anti-virus upstart bundle this service and kick Norton and McAfee out of the market.
This is the wrong attitude to have; keeping silent until election day out of cynicism of the system because the wealthy have better access than you.
Join a political organization, the ACLU and NORML could always use more members. *two organization I'm part of.
Local government: There are many opportunities to make your voice heard. *I've done a little regarding the local school system, but I hope to exploit this more
Keep in touch with your congress person: fax and phone them over issues and pending legislation. *A little ackward at first, but now I feel very comfortable calling up and saying "Yes I'm a constituent and I would like my congressman to vote against..."
Cyber-politics: web-based form letters, forwarding emails/links, mature discourse on poltics on web forums, etc *this is probably the most accessible way to get involved and will probably change government/citizen interaction in considerable ways in the next couple years.
I do all of the above, and yes it has its downsides, but en masse getting involved in politics is very healthy for a democracy and when real results come out of it (and they do) then it hard to justify the complete apathetic stance of 'all we get is a vote, they're in charge.' Why not become "them?"
Regardless of all the examples of cronyism and corruption you can think of, X amount of government will be little people making their voices heard. The question is do you want to be part of that X amount, thus influencing it with your views, or not?
Lastly, all of the above really doesn't take much time. I think at one time the apathetic stance could have been defended a bit more easily, but with advances in politics on the web its almost a crime not to do something as simple as point-and-click donate or point-and-click fax.
>It would stain your teeth some ugly color like #006666, and you would never get a date and you would die cold and alone, a pitiful 30 year old virgin.
Which of course makes you wonder the true cost of other things, oh like sex.
Date 1: Fairly cheap lunch/coffee: $20-30
Date 2: Evening movie, dinner: $60-70
Date 3: Concert and light bar hopping (parking, tickmaster tax): $50-70
Non-Date: did relative/friend a favor to get on her good side: roughly $30-50 lost opportunity cost (more if you include your hourly rate)
Date 4: Simple night in, beer/recreational drugs: $25
Score.
Not only shouldn't you drink the ink, you should at least have $200 if hoping to score.
As a rule of thumb the higher the frequency the shorter the range. Range and wall penetration are going to be much more important factors than thoroughput for almost all residental installs and many business applications. I believe the current estimate is you'll get 1/4 the range. Err, no thanks.
What I think is starting to happen, that is if everyone doesn't just switch to a/b/g multicards, is that 'a' has a better chance of getting business sales. Businesses can afford to put up more APs to handle the range problems and could really use the extra bandwidth.
Home users will probably stick to 'a' (or 'g') as its range and penetration is a big plus. Bandwidth isn't much of a consideration when 99% of these users will just be connecting to a slow WAN pipe like a DSL line or a cable modem.
>Thats not much of a connection to share in the first place.
I would think its doable if you could throttle speeds. It would be nice to be able to tell my linksys, "Okay give the people with this MAC address 128up and 128k down." Now two guys running Kazaa won't make everything slow down to a crawl.
Unless Speakeasy is going to send me a kick ass router/wireless AP that can manage connections like this it just sounds like a headache.
Speakeasy knows that x amount of people will not pay 50 bucks a month for broadband no matter what. They might pay ten or twenty dollars. That's where "kid with too much bandwidth" steps in. He gets customers because he's going to save/make money. He has an incentive to find these people e.g. bug his neighbors. Speakeasy will get 50% AND payment for the line no matter what.
Also, people are sharing anyway too. So Speakeasy legitimizes it and hopes greed will turn Bob the computer geek downstairs into Bob the money-making netadmin. Bob wakes up one day and realizes that even though he gives the two blondes upstairs free internet access they still won't go out with him. Might as well make a buck.
Plus, it fits in with their "do what you want with your pipe, we'll mostly leave you alone" corporate philosophy.
Even if it turns out they lose some money, they're breaking ground, getting press, and getting more techie cred. I'm sure they reserve the right to cancel the program anytime.
Exactly. I would much rather see browsers considered mature technology while getting their standards correct then more tacked on 'enhancements.'
I don't want a browser that's secretly a P2P app.
I don't want embedded media and plug-ins crashing it.
I don't want a browser that is also a PIM.
I don't want a little avatar asking me if I want to go to shamelessmarketers.com.
etc.
Why does everything have to be attached to the browser? A simple interface and a stable platform is what companies should be aiming for, with the exception of tweaks and minor enhancements like pop-up blocking, tabs, etc.
The Mozilla team has learned from this mistake. People kept complaining about the "Mozilla Suite" and the bloat and they responded by announcing plans to seperate the browser from the suite.
Microsoft in the meantime continues its "the browser is the desktop" nonsense which mixes WAN data with the OS. As we've seen with ActiveX, vbs, etc this is a security nightmare.
I'm not sure what Andreesen was secretly planning, but an url box, back/forward buttons, and a stop button are surprisingly effecient when dealing with html-based technologies.
Great point, I'm surprised this didn't come up earlier. We like to think we're past the stage where a small team or even an individual can change everything and only a mega-corporation or a world power can do anything we currently consider difficult or impossible.
The various designs for the X-Prize ships reminds of that famous newsreel showing all these wacky attempts at making the first airplane. These people really wanted it. They lived in a time where many still, even the highly educated, believed that manned heavier than air flight was impossible.
I really don't like the question, "Who is deserving of spaceflight?" The question is just wrong. There should be no top-down decree regarding such things. The more contributors the better.
> Danger did not remove the games. T-Mobile did. If this is true then why do I have to hear it third-hard from someone not on the official hiptop.com site?
The problem here is communication. The OTA text was very terse and actually used the words "You may notice the arcade icon is missing," like its a cosmetic fix.
Danger made no attempt to pacify their customers or defend their actions, they just sent the OTA update and took the heat. Perhaps they couldn't due to some NDA, but that seems doubtful. I can't imagine a situation where there would be an NDA regarding whether or not someone has a license to run a videogame on a PDA. Danger is notorious for being secrative and largely ignoring its customers complaints.
Obviously, someone was caught with their pants down and I was hoping to get more information when I submitted this story, but everything still seems up in the air regarding why this happened.
Regardless, in the end you have a situation of bad faith. The color SK is $300 with a 12 month contract and no one at either company seems to understand PR. No explanation, no option to pay for the games, no "sugar with the medicine" e.g. giving users something else to make up for it, etc.
Tmobile/Danger are too hush-hush about the device and Danger has a vested interest in not allowing us to buy software from third-parties. We can only buy from pre-approved vendors and Danger decides who and when. This is the ultimate vendor lock-in nightmare scenario. This is why open development is a good thing and why this device has been called the new Newton more times than I care to remember.
Maybe all this will change when they start hand-picking what developer projects they *might* consider selling or supporting and product has had another year to "break in". But one thing is clear: the client/server relationship can easily be abused into a master/slave relationship when the clients own nothing but licenses that can be revoked at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wow, "Electronic Voice phenomenon?" Spare me. All this page needed was a midi playing "Age of Aquarius."
PKD's writing are strongly rationalist with an intelligent approach to figuring out the strange phenomenon in his life. I think its insulting to turn him into a new age "John Edwards" bullshit spiritual medium commodity.
> Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays.
No shit. Maybe because the "voice" he heard on the tape was nothing more than the subconscious projecting quotes hes read elsewhere onto nothing more than tape static and other ambigious sounds from the original recording.
Maybe next week slashdot can expose how Ozzy put all those satanic messages into his albums.
It was also found that in the real life MMOG women rarely wear sexy armor, don't say "Mi'Lord", don't have a supermodel's figure, and most importantly do not have a penis.
The price of a sample of a biological agent is actually very cheap and a few small loans to work on the program (which the US gave iraq) doesn't add much financially, but can create a weapon that's worth 100,000 soviet tanks.
In other words its not the bottom line that matters but what was actually sold.
Also, just about every nation was against the war until it became obvious that going against the US meant less financial aid. You simply have a large sample set to construct a conspiracy theory with.
Soon they'll be asking us to tithe our coding time.
Not encouraging OSS on Mac or Windows is simply shooting your self in the foot. Not that the fundamentalists care. So how's Hurd coming along, guys?
Blog is short for Weblog. Slashdot is a weblog with comments. How is robotwisdom.com (site of the guy who coined the word weblog) anything like a traditional journal or a diary?
Reverse chronological links updated every so often does not make a journal.
>He'll lose, but he'll guarantee no other democrats win either.
Oh please, this early in the game and you're announcing that the dems are going to lose if they chose Dean?
Lets face facts and agree that more or less the votes are going to come out as they did in 2000. About half the country will knee-jerk vote GOP and about the other half will knee-jerk vote Dem. Swing voters will probably be the biggest factor in 2004.
What Bush can't do is repackage himself. He can't play the "compassionate conservative" card now that his extreme-right wing agenda has been revealed. He can't keep agreeing with his opponent like he did with Gore during the debates.
Also, lets face facts and also agree that a significant number of swing voters are politically apathetic. They'll vote on hot-button issues and this presidency and the events of the last three years have not been "boring old politics." The GOP is going to be on the defensive for a lot of things.
I don't think it matters who the dems go with, the fight is already laid out: Dem challenger will call Bush on his controversial administration and Bush will play the "stay the course" card.
That's ignoring things like Iraqgate, Perle, Enron, Haliburon, secret energy meetings, the SOTU speech, etc.
I have no idea who will win, but its not going to be a shoo-in for anyone. Hell, they could run Jimmy Carter and still get a good fight.
According to all the chicken-littles here in the US, Europe should have went broke ten years ago and all its people starving in the streets.
Universal healthcare can be done, either through traditional UH like in Europe, single payer/voucher plans, or expanding medicare to include children and the poor (Dean's Plan).
You can argue this point until the cows come how but the wealthiest country in the world is also the only western nation not to have some kind of universal healthcare system. That's simply wrong and these doctors agree.
>Americans fear and loath Managed health care and the right to see their own doctor.
Much of the democratic base is part of that 40 million of uninsured Americans. Yeah, managed is a scary word yet what does the M in HMO stand for? Maintence/Management its the same thing. What plan does your company offer you? What plans do most companies offer? Highly managed plans.
Public healthcare, especially in a wealthy country like the US, is very doable. Its not just Europe's way or the US's way. From what I understand Dean's plan is more about expanding medicare to include children and poor people up till age 25 and helping small business insure its employees. Not exactly Denmark.
> Canadians prefer our system to their's in critical care
That's a pretty general statement. I'm sure they would be scared shitless if faced with the real possibility of not having insurance for years. Not to mention they have money in their pocket to spend on American specialists because they aren't paying through the nose on every doctor's visit or saddled with debt after some accident. The number 1 cause of bankrupcy is medical bills. Its also fiscally responsible to insure as many people as possible. Either way you're paying for it. Might as well get something in return.
>. The Democrats are desperate for the voters that went Green last time, because they know they need them.
The dems don't want him, they want their boy Gephart or *shudder* Lieberman. The DLC publically flogged Dean supporters by calling them "the activist elite" and tried to compare them to politcally impotent ultra-lefties. Dean supports responded back here.
The green vote simply isn't important. I'm sure that more than half of those votes are permanent third-party protest votes and regardless of what the Dems want you to think it was a bad ballot and a piss-poor Gore campaign that got Bush into office.
Regardless, everyone who isn't in the GOP wants an electable Democrat. I can't see why Dean wouldn't fit the bill, especially with Iraq turing out to be a quite the quagmire for Bush.
Sorry, but there's no ploy. Dean is fighting influencial (read: very wealthy and very connected) members of his own party right now and in interesting ways (appeal to the populace, net-based action, etc) just to get heard.
Sean Connery warns people not to view LXG unless they want to get into a fight with the manager about getting a refund.
Jennifer Connely advises taking some NoDoze or at least a double cappucino before attempting to view the Hulk.
and Johnnie Depp warns ladies not to see Pirates of the Caribbean unless you want to fall in love with in all over again since you just recently got over your obsession with him after viewing Chocolate for the 20th time.
>Star Wars ---> Dreamed up in the 70's continues today. Even Clinton continued to fund it.
Funded quite and pushed more than quite a bit by the Reagan administration. Somewhere on the order of tens of billions of dollars for what is essentially a pork project that wasn't capable of shooting down another plane let alone a hypersonic missile.
"Clinton did it too!!" Err, that righty tagline is meaningless. Two wrongs don't make a right and criticizing Reagan has nothing to do with criticizing Clinton. That's a topic for another day.
>Grenada
Ah yes, the grudge match between the US and Cuba in which a Marxist uprising was used as an excuse to invade a country the size of my neighborhood. There were no winners here.
>War on Drugs - The war is 'lost' because we (people and government) lost focus not because it could not be won.
Oh please. Receational drug use has been a part of human history since before any established culture. Putting kids in jail for possesing or growing pot isn't focus, its stupid and counterproductive. More right-wing Jesus-isms.
>Central America ---> What part?
El Salvador - 75,000 murdered
Nicaragua - 50,000 murdered
BTW, Slashdot favorite Admiral Poindexter had a hand in a lot of the Latin American interventions. I won't mention Panama as that was Bush Sr not Reagan, but Poindexter was there too.
>The defining characteristic of this country is the orderly transfer of power. When someone starts calling people "fascists" - intimating that they are dictators -- they are trashing the fundamental principle of this country.
When certain "someones" put a chill on civil liberties, demand executive protection over energy meetings, cook intellegence to start wars, etc. Well, you're kind stuck with only a few words to describe this behavoir.
Worse, this administration can really be seen as a power grab to appease the hard-right conservatives that put Bush in office.
Your assertion is just another logical fallacy along the lines of "Support the troops, thus support the war."
>they are trashing the fundamental principle of this country.
No, they're criticizing those who they feel are violating these principles. Big difference.
>o a Ukranian, a 3 year warrenty means that in 2 years, 11.5 months you bring your product back in for a replacement no matter what.
That is horrible. They don't have to spend 90+ minutes talking to a level one script reader to be escalated to level two support who will curtly cut you off and make you fill out a form demanding everything from the the original reciept (you do keep those in a fire-proof safe right?) to promises of handing over your first born if the product isn't really damaged or the damage was found to be your fault.
Or those retail scams to buy 'Super-warranty service' from the retailer only to find it means they ship your laptop off to the local "service center" where their tech monkeys poke at it with a stick for two weeks before just sending it to the manufacturer.
It gets worse from there.
>for example, the ass-backward EU and their mandated product warrenties
Business 101: the customer ends up paying for everything anyway. This means foreign companies are simply going to up the price for a localized version of that product. Problem solved. It happens all the time.
Put that Ayn Rand book down and you'll find that some of the real issues regarding the financial problems of Eastern Europe is fraud and lack of accountability.
Also, internationalism costs money regardless of what the local law is. Your organization still need to get hire regional experts/lawyers, translation services, beefier insurance, etc. Many Eastern European countries are not only havens for fraud but just poor to begin with; thus its still a niche and its not in the interest of many companies to even bother.
>It's a very simple logical fallacy.
Yep, its the old causation vs. correlation fallacy.
America has already been through this when Dr. Frederick Wertham (a popular quack-ish psychologist from the 50's) wrote a book arguing that comics caused all sorts of deviant behavoir. This killed the comic industry by turning it into kid's stuff, more or less. More info here. Better details here.
I think this is the favorite meme for hack journalists. If a kid goes psycho then make sure to print how he dressed, what music he listened to, and what games he plays and start the witch-hunt! I was very surprised to see that almost 1/3rd of a AP/Reuters article was about these things and not what actually happened.
I doubt a "Comics Code Authority" self-censorship will take place again, but the kneejerk mentality is still there with some people. Hopefully we've learned something in the fifty or so years since the Comics Code was created.
Isn't this always the case? Something exists for a small community and then it hits the mainstream, but the mainstream can't handle the sudden change.
I'm afraid the sims players who can't handle a group of people pee'ing on their lawns will have to develop a thicker skin if they choose to play online games with strangers. If you think that's bad, wait until you play a PvP game.
There's room for argument about what to do with harrasment, but that's up to the game admins and management to fix. If the sims is that bad, then quit. A simple vote with your dollar will get the message across.
What really gets me is the suggestion of law to control MMO*s. Really now, its just a game.
My cynical side sees the lowest common denominator, at least here in the US/Midwest area, as being extremely thin-skinned. A parent complains about something being "offensive" and the school board jumps through hoops to please them. An opinion that goes against the mainstream is now "traitorous" etc.
I think the interconnecting the net does either through the web or online games will really force some people to simply grow up, for the lack of a better term, and realize that even virtual worlds cannot be completely controled or fall in-line with their Xtian-Judeo ethics. Its a big world out there, you're better off learning to deal with your problems in an intelligent way and develop tolerance than running to the first authority figure and complain about how people aren't being "nice."
>If it's in fact true that there is no real user consent to the gator-driven pop-ups, tend to think that the owners of websites defaced by the popups have a reasonable claim for damages.
What about those of us who block ads, run junkbuster, proximation, etc? Your proposal would force us to render pages as the webmaster sees fit. Err, no thanks. If you publish HTML you take your chance at how the end user renders it. Don't like it? Then publish with something else.
I run an ad blocking project here, and I would not like to be grouped with gator, et al. Obviously, the problem here has to do with stealth installs (exploiting default activex settings) and ridiculously unreadable legalese.
For the record, I have met people who run spyware and who don;t care. So even if you dragged Gator into court, you'd have a hard time pushing for some kind of punishment when there are customers who don't care about privacy as much as we do.
I think this problem could easily be solved if Antivirus companies had a "treat spyware as a virus" setting. Why isn't Norton et al putting their necks on the line for their customers?
Spyware seems ripe for the next "scare meme." It does steal information and your chances of getting it compared to a virus is something like 10000 to 1. I hope to see some enterprising anti-virus upstart bundle this service and kick Norton and McAfee out of the market.
>The rest of us just have our one vote.
..."
This is the wrong attitude to have; keeping silent until election day out of cynicism of the system because the wealthy have better access than you.
Join a political organization, the ACLU and NORML could always use more members. *two organization I'm part of.
Local government: There are many opportunities to make your voice heard. *I've done a little regarding the local school system, but I hope to exploit this more
Keep in touch with your congress person: fax and phone them over issues and pending legislation. *A little ackward at first, but now I feel very comfortable calling up and saying "Yes I'm a constituent and I would like my congressman to vote against
Cyber-politics: web-based form letters, forwarding emails/links, mature discourse on poltics on web forums, etc *this is probably the most accessible way to get involved and will probably change government/citizen interaction in considerable ways in the next couple years.
I do all of the above, and yes it has its downsides, but en masse getting involved in politics is very healthy for a democracy and when real results come out of it (and they do) then it hard to justify the complete apathetic stance of 'all we get is a vote, they're in charge.' Why not become "them?"
Regardless of all the examples of cronyism and corruption you can think of, X amount of government will be little people making their voices heard. The question is do you want to be part of that X amount, thus influencing it with your views, or not?
Lastly, all of the above really doesn't take much time. I think at one time the apathetic stance could have been defended a bit more easily, but with advances in politics on the web its almost a crime not to do something as simple as point-and-click donate or point-and-click fax.
>It would stain your teeth some ugly color like #006666, and you would never get a date and you would die cold and alone, a pitiful 30 year old virgin.
Which of course makes you wonder the true cost of other things, oh like sex.
Date 1: Fairly cheap lunch/coffee: $20-30
Date 2: Evening movie, dinner: $60-70
Date 3: Concert and light bar hopping (parking, tickmaster tax): $50-70
Non-Date: did relative/friend a favor to get on her good side: roughly $30-50 lost opportunity cost (more if you include your hourly rate)
Date 4: Simple night in, beer/recreational drugs: $25
Score.
Not only shouldn't you drink the ink, you should at least have $200 if hoping to score.
>detail any downsides of using the 5Ghz band?
I'm no radio geek but...
As a rule of thumb the higher the frequency the shorter the range. Range and wall penetration are going to be much more important factors than thoroughput for almost all residental installs and many business applications. I believe the current estimate is you'll get 1/4 the range. Err, no thanks.
Its not exactly that simple. At the same distance 802.11a outperforms b. So if, and this is a big if, an 'a' client and a 'b' client are both at 175 feet or so then 'b' will get 2mbs and 'a' will get 6mbs.
What I think is starting to happen, that is if everyone doesn't just switch to a/b/g multicards, is that 'a' has a better chance of getting business sales. Businesses can afford to put up more APs to handle the range problems and could really use the extra bandwidth.
Home users will probably stick to 'a' (or 'g') as its range and penetration is a big plus. Bandwidth isn't much of a consideration when 99% of these users will just be connecting to a slow WAN pipe like a DSL line or a cable modem.
Neat little comparision chart here.
>Thats not much of a connection to share in the first place.
I would think its doable if you could throttle speeds. It would be nice to be able to tell my linksys, "Okay give the people with this MAC address 128up and 128k down." Now two guys running Kazaa won't make everything slow down to a crawl.
Unless Speakeasy is going to send me a kick ass router/wireless AP that can manage connections like this it just sounds like a headache.
Speakeasy knows that x amount of people will not pay 50 bucks a month for broadband no matter what. They might pay ten or twenty dollars. That's where "kid with too much bandwidth" steps in. He gets customers because he's going to save/make money. He has an incentive to find these people e.g. bug his neighbors. Speakeasy will get 50% AND payment for the line no matter what.
Also, people are sharing anyway too. So Speakeasy legitimizes it and hopes greed will turn Bob the computer geek downstairs into Bob the money-making netadmin. Bob wakes up one day and realizes that even though he gives the two blondes upstairs free internet access they still won't go out with him. Might as well make a buck.
Plus, it fits in with their "do what you want with your pipe, we'll mostly leave you alone" corporate philosophy.
Even if it turns out they lose some money, they're breaking ground, getting press, and getting more techie cred. I'm sure they reserve the right to cancel the program anytime.
>But what if someone breaks the Terms of Service
That's a tough one, worse is being everyone's "tech support guy."
Things you WILL hear:
The internet is slow!
The laptop doesn't work in the kitchen/bedroom/toilet/outside.
I can't play SOME_ONLINE_GAME, open up these ports.
My buddy is staying for a while, can you hook him up?
Can you get a stronger antenna for that thing?
Who the hell is messenger service and why does he keep asking me to buy crap?
Hey is it cool if I download porn? I won't tell anyone. *replace porn with unregistered software, movies, etc
Virus scanners are for chumps right?
Yeah, I'll pay you next week. I'm low on funds now. (or I can pay you in pot, beer, outside art, etc)
Can you really read my email from your apartment?
Is it cool if I resale my connection to the guy upstairs? You know, like Amway.
--
I'll take peace of mind over saving a few bucks on broadband anyday.
Exactly. I would much rather see browsers considered mature technology while getting their standards correct then more tacked on 'enhancements.'
I don't want a browser that's secretly a P2P app.
I don't want embedded media and plug-ins crashing it.
I don't want a browser that is also a PIM.
I don't want a little avatar asking me if I want to go to shamelessmarketers.com.
etc.
Why does everything have to be attached to the browser? A simple interface and a stable platform is what companies should be aiming for, with the exception of tweaks and minor enhancements like pop-up blocking, tabs, etc.
The Mozilla team has learned from this mistake. People kept complaining about the "Mozilla Suite" and the bloat and they responded by announcing plans to seperate the browser from the suite.
Microsoft in the meantime continues its "the browser is the desktop" nonsense which mixes WAN data with the OS. As we've seen with ActiveX, vbs, etc this is a security nightmare.
I'm not sure what Andreesen was secretly planning, but an url box, back/forward buttons, and a stop button are surprisingly effecient when dealing with html-based technologies.
Great point, I'm surprised this didn't come up earlier. We like to think we're past the stage where a small team or even an individual can change everything and only a mega-corporation or a world power can do anything we currently consider difficult or impossible.
The various designs for the X-Prize ships reminds of that famous newsreel showing all these wacky attempts at making the first airplane. These people really wanted it. They lived in a time where many still, even the highly educated, believed that manned heavier than air flight was impossible.
I really don't like the question, "Who is deserving of spaceflight?" The question is just wrong. There should be no top-down decree regarding such things. The more contributors the better.
> Danger did not remove the games. T-Mobile did.
If this is true then why do I have to hear it third-hard from someone not on the official hiptop.com site?
The problem here is communication. The OTA text was very terse and actually used the words "You may notice the arcade icon is missing," like its a cosmetic fix.
Danger made no attempt to pacify their customers or defend their actions, they just sent the OTA update and took the heat. Perhaps they couldn't due to some NDA, but that seems doubtful. I can't imagine a situation where there would be an NDA regarding whether or not someone has a license to run a videogame on a PDA. Danger is notorious for being secrative and largely ignoring its customers complaints.
Obviously, someone was caught with their pants down and I was hoping to get more information when I submitted this story, but everything still seems up in the air regarding why this happened.
Regardless, in the end you have a situation of bad faith. The color SK is $300 with a 12 month contract and no one at either company seems to understand PR. No explanation, no option to pay for the games, no "sugar with the medicine" e.g. giving users something else to make up for it, etc.
Tmobile/Danger are too hush-hush about the device and Danger has a vested interest in not allowing us to buy software from third-parties. We can only buy from pre-approved vendors and Danger decides who and when. This is the ultimate vendor lock-in nightmare scenario. This is why open development is a good thing and why this device has been called the new Newton more times than I care to remember.
Maybe all this will change when they start hand-picking what developer projects they *might* consider selling or supporting and product has had another year to "break in". But one thing is clear: the client/server relationship can easily be abused into a master/slave relationship when the clients own nothing but licenses that can be revoked at any time.