>I don't understand why people doubt the technological capability of scientists and engineers to create a defensive system
They do. They also trust the defense firm down the street to find a way to get past these missiles. Can you say, "another arms race?" I thought you could.
This is why non-proliferation and a treaty against missile defense are excellent ideas. It keeps world powers from wasting all their money on competing technologies when they already can blow everything up. Whatever missile shield you concoct will be broken. Its actually that simple. There's just too much riding on having one nuclear proof nation.
>And yet, you think I would want to put all my trust the sanity of other world leaders to not fire nuclear weapons at the U.S.?
Lets not forget the US has had its plans for first strikes released to the public also.
Actually, I do agree that the submitter is wrong. A pork-barrel weapon system gets a lot more testing and funding than some ex-soviet aging lifeboat.
Definately driving games. Afterall driving is mostly a sub-conscious effort (who's driving when you're playing with your radio or cell phone?) and suspectible to influence.
Everytime I bring this up, most people agree. No, this isn't some lame "outlaw violent games now," argument but a reminder that media affects us in powerful ways. Like every male who walked out of a Rocky movie, he's sure he can beat up the guy next to him. At least until the post-coital media glow wears off. Political rallys, pep rallys, etc do the same thing. Best to know what you're getting into and how psychologically tricky these situations really are.
MUDs get me, probably because the combo of lack of sleep and losing equipment/points I worked for months to get is a real downer. I don't even bother with games that want a huge part of my life anymore (even if I had the time). Good games are played in a few hours at most, with the option to play with real-life opponents.
>BUT. That would put an end to SCO FUD, but MS FUD will start right thereafter.
Sadly, the MS FUD has already started. In the wonderfully written "Code Red for Open Source" article at Cnet which is fair and balanced (in that Fox News kind of way) Balmer is quoted as saying something to the effect, "See, you dont know who's writing your OSS software." I'm sure that little quote doesn't sit too well with IT managers debating adopting OSS. Certainly, MS's list of crimes is volumes long, but the fear of being sued because the product your using was written by 'shady individuals' as Balmer seems to be suggesting can have a real chilling effect.
Yeah, it is a lose-lose situation depending on how people interpret what is going on. I think its fairly obvious there's a strong attempt at getting a buy-out here which makes their moral position regarding the supposed theft of IP a bit suspect. I hope others see it this way.
Its like me going up to the guy who broke into my house and stole my stereo and telling him, "Okay, we'll leave the cops out of this if you take over my payments and buy out my equity. I can't afford this place anymore and I dont want to go bankrupt."
What really gets me, and I'm not even a linux advocate (i use it when I need a free server), is that SCO is trashing Linux's reputation left and right in its attempt to get bought out. I'm surprised there aren't names, addresses, and phone numbers of the SCO people listed here for harassment a la spam king style.
>In any case, welcome to the Real World, where 95% of all systems will be Windows.
Exactly. I couldn't imagine how nasty the AT&T/Comcast network would be with ports 137-139 open for sniffing and cracking, especially now that XP defaults to a sharing folder. The determined will at least learn how to setup ftp, apache, IIS, etc.
As for the patch/virus server. More power to them. Every ISP should have a link to some free AV (AVG comes to mind) and windowsupdate.com. Toss in a link to Ad Aware for good measure. Make this page their starting page on IE on install.
Acting like your customers know what they are doing is probably the best way to destroy this little project or pretty much *any* project.
Also you can meet people half-way, no need to be a nazi admin. If someone wants their netbios ports open and they ask nicely then do it (assuming your equipment allows it). Only those in the know would probably ask and you could nicely ask them to make sure they have a strong password.
>y Oh Shit, and think twice next time they want to get a track off a p2p network.
I wouldn't think it would deter downloaders as much as it would potential P2P software writers. Remember, these students wrote software that one reporter described as "mini-Napster."
If anything P2P will move more underground (compromised servers, encryption, passwords, etc) which will serve the RIAA pretty well as Joe User will probably not be able to keep up with the newest 'warez sites.' A barrier to entry was just erected today.
> With this settlement, the RIAA maintains the status quo.
Yep, but I bet the working equation was more like this:
At what price can we get them to pay out and scare everyone else without the students going into bankrupcy and making us look the fool?
A few grand nailed it. No one goes to court and the students can look forward to dreams of home ownership. The RIAA has a nice propaganda win and everyone else goes home sad.
Divest in RIAA artists if you don't like it. I did. I goto 8-12 dollar concerts, hear great music, and pay 10 dollars per CD at shows. And the best part is that no one gets sued at the end of the day.
This probably isn't the best advice in the world (being under 21 really sucks for indie music fans) but I can't imagine walking into my local Best Buy and picking up 'Today's Hot Artists!'
Thank you war on drugs
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
>The Patriot Act and Patriot II (return of the civil liberty abuses)
Its not just about secuity per se. Employee screening got ridiculously out of hand during the beginging of the "war on some drugs." An applicant in the US today is expected to go through a background check, written psychological tests, and a urine/hair sample. We lost our privacy rights long ago and this could be the next step. On what legal ground could anyone fight this when they're already giving their piss away?
Sure, there are some decent pro-testing arguments, like for machine operators, drivers, etc, but drug testing is usually a cheap and effective way to avoid paying for competency testing and to clean out "undesirables." Be it the "freethinker," the member of some minority, etc. Interesting how white collar drugs are so difficult to detect.
Are the anti-brain scan, anti-genetic scan people going to get in bed with the anti-drug test people? I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, but Joe and Jane Sixpack need get over their political hobgoblins and realize that this is all part of the same package. Want drug testing? Then you'll get brain testing. Its almost that simple.
Worse, what do we do with this new class of undesirables? You need to work to get health insurance in the US.
"Sorry Ted, you're a borderline schizo according to our tests, you better see a doctor. You may be functional now. but something, sometime could happen and now that we know we can't hire you. Its HR policy, my hands are tied, buddy."
"I cant afford a p-doctor without some health insurance and job and even then its pushing it."
"Sorry, thats your problem."
*slam*
Funny how homelessness, unemployment, lack of health care is all our problems. Eventually everyone is going to run up against these walls. I really don't want to get delivered the "sorry my hands are tied, buddy" line because of degradation of basic civil rights in the US.
I'm not a privacy lunatic, I would be all for this screening in children to help discover faults and provide *free* therapy, etc to help them have good lives, but waiting until you're in the job market to be scrwed over is beyond ridiculous.
>Please, NVIDIA, can you come up with some names that actually convey to people whether they're buying
I could forgive this is if the gaming industry would include suggested resolution, bit-depth, etc for each game. Say I have a GF3 TI200 and want to play some new game. I don't want to screw around with the settings to get the game to a FPS/Color combo that is usable, the game should tell me this by looking at my GPU and CPU combo.
Now release this information publically and people shopping around for cards will be stunned at how their MX is worse than the card dell put in their computer for them. "What? I can only play Jedi Knight at 256 colors with this damn thing?"
I would think this kind of information is easier to swallow than highly-technical benchmarks or even the best product naming convention. At least for casual gamers and non-technophiles.
>I've been using Mozilla so long it's always a harsh shock when I use IE and pop-ups start cluttering everything.
Preach on brother.
What I think is inexcusable, or just really ignorant, is when people refuse to try new software because, "its different." People complain about pop-ups and poorly written pop-up blockers (think panicware), but in my experience when I recommend Mozilla they won't even bother. But they'll still keep complaining.
Or if I recommend Trillian to people running three IM clients.
At a certain point it has to be decided that people deserve the ads, privacy intrusions, crashes, etc that they get. I know that sounds elitist, but when they know about the alternatives but refuse to use them because these products do not have the Microsoft or AOL stamp-of-approval then they're sleeping in the bed they made. Branding is powerful, granted, but if it makes you act stupidly then its your own fault.
Sadly, I think a lot of people have faith that MS or AOL will eventually give them what they want if they wait long enough for the next version, or the version after that.
I don't like the fact that the web has turned into a technological arms race, but its still a very new medium and this kind of thing is to be expected. Ignore new tools at your peril.
Am I the only one who just fired up Kazaalite, hoping to get one of these messages? The firewall is all set, I'd love an authentic RIAA tongue-lashing to screencap.
Maybe it'll be worth something twenty years from now on ebay.
---
"Dude, I'll trade you a cease-and-desist by Harry Fox for that"
> It's not like a switch was flipped and all the sudden society is headed downhill.
Exactly, but there may be more here than just a sudden realization that you're up to your knees in nonsense. We're living in an age of cheap/free information, yet people are still getting their media and other information from the same traditional outlets. I can sympathize with the people who are net-savy and know they can do a google search for "new york post crediblity" but their friends just read the tabloid and go with it.
There's this assumption, well its more like idealism, that easy access to differening viewpoints e.g. more information, will create a person with less bias and a love of the truth, but frankly it may never happen on a mass scale.
In my Dad's day there was the local papers and if you were lucky an alternative weekly. Now you've got everything at your fingertips yet many are still reading the same old paper.
Worse, there hasn't been a significant dent in the celebrity star system, which more or less reinforces the idea that celebrities are part of human nature. From the Illiad onwards we seem to want a hero and truth be damned, the story is more important than the fact. Sure X celebrity worked his/her way up from the streets with no shameless marketing, backroom deals, etc. Do people really want to know how the TV/Movie/Music businesses really work? I doubt it. Some do, but not enough to cause some kind of critical mass.
In the end, there probably isn't a solution to these "problems." As humans we have needs and one of those needs is the hero/celebrity and information that doesn't threaten our worldview too much. Think religion.
At best, we can come to a self-realization of what we're doing, but fighing human-nature on a mass-scale may take centuries of effort if its even possible. Plus, there's the hairy question of when to start. Sure we can toss out J-Lo but what about Odysseus?
>Name an application, or a feature of the operating system, that is truly innovative?
Tough question, the desktop model of computing was concieved of in the 50's and in the 60's there were working demonstrations with mice, cut-and-paste, word processing, etc.
Innovation is now just a business buzzword like proactive or synergy. For a short time I worked for a company whose full name was Proactive Inc/Synergy. Innovation is what you say to the jury when you're going to ream an industry.
I have a pretty modern computer, but here I am at a keyboard, monitor, mouse, etc attached to a loud beige box. Why doesn't it integrate with my TV/Entertainment center. Why can't I just tell it to do something or have it read me my email in the bathroom? Why isn't it on wheels roaming around the apartment?
I'll be screaming "innovation" from the mountaintops when someone produces something other than the further tweaking of the 50 year old desktop model. In the meantime its a code-word to appease those in the know like "family values" or "tough on drugs."
> they can't kill the makers of the weapon -- they will now turn their resources to the people pulling the trigger.
Sounds fair to me. First off, there's a reason why most companies don't go after petty theivery - the return to cost ratio is ridiculous. In every form of business there will be x amount of fraud because stopping that fraud just isn't worth the time or money. Hell, the software industry lives on fraud.
So what does this ruling mean for the little guy? Plenty. The RIAA can go after the real thieves, those who burn CDs by the hundreds and put them in cases with copied cover art and sell in many parts of the world - usually right in the open.
Most importantly, The RIAA can invest in a secure replacement for CD technology. Why the hell should my tax dollars go towards subsidizing their bad decision to go with the CD format? Sure at the time it was a good idea, but times change and business needs to adapt. Supporting the RIAA would be like having someone sue the police, the city, and everyone with a criminal record in their neighborhood because they are too cheap to buy door locks. The RIAA may not like it, but its a tech company now. Get cracking with a secure CD format, change your business plan, or eat up the cost. Suing eveyone in the world will accomplish squat.
I really hope they go after Joe and Jane RIAA-music sharer. The chill will send them into the arms of waiting indie labels with arguably much better music. I wonder how many thousands of people are forever off the RIAA/ClearChannel teat thanks to strong-armed tactics like these?
>However, if you intend to hire people as employees
Yep, that's why you should hire "freelancers" and when pressed on the issue claim you are "telecommuning" to your "office."
Millions of people work out of their homes and I don't think its illegal, but as the parent poster pointed out its a problem when you need to define the legal fiction that is your company and when you have customers and investors coming over. All you have to do is incorporate your company elsewhere and not have real meetings at home. No biggie and entirely doable.
>I think we have a new address for every free cd offer, junk ad, and telemarketer list in the world.
Or free samples of "White Powder." If you no longer want to recieve more White Powder please fill out this form and mail it back to us and we will promptly sell all your information to every marketer we can find. Thanks.
>Think 1984 (i know i know i know) for a second and consider Winston's job of rewriting news and, therefore, history.
This is a very valid concern and abuses have already come up. Thememoryhole.org just found a new one at the latimes.
Glance at that and tell me you aren't scared. CNN did the same thing with rewriting Powell's speech (i believe) to make it sound more pro-war. Sadly, no one is demanding that all changes and retractions on the web be disclosed. This is a problem journalists should be fighting tooth and nail right now before its too late.
By too late I mean when DRM will make it impossible to cache, screencap, wget, etc anything from these news sites. These are serious concerns and so far I haven't heard much from those in power regarding doing something about it. The attitude that the web can be changed willy-nilly is disturbing if not sickening.
>And, as you can see from this thread, nobody has posted that they have a TiVo and don't love it.
I have one and, yes, its great but...
First of all, I don't watch that much TV so paying the monthly fee just to get Simpsons reruns and a hodgepodge on new programming I may or may not have the time to watch seems like a waste. Its nice for my roommates, but as the Tivo owner it makes me wonder how much TV you have to watch to truly get your money's worth.
Secondly, the device is digital yet there's no digital out (say an SMB server to copy episodes in their original mpeg format to my PC). This is a real downer as the capture card and encoding take A LOT of time and effort. At least with the old fashioned VCRs your could just connect the two together and make a copy, albeit a lossy copy. The plus side is that someone else probably encoded it and its available on some P2P network (or bittorrent) thus saving me time. Replay had the right idea with their ethernet port.
Tivo's suggestions are crap. Truly crap. Just because I like the Simpson and Futurama does not mean I want kid's cartoons, let alone spanish kid's cartoons. I shut that feature off two or three weeks after I bought the thing.
They still need to be more open about their privacy policy. A legalese free sticker saying "we track what you watch to opt-out call this 800 number" would make everyone happy. Or better yet, "opt-in and get a coupon" or somesuch.
Please design a remote that will not give me a 50% chance of pointing the wrong end of it at the TV. Come on, this is a no brainer. The layout of the remote itself it pretty good, but the shape should suggest a front and a back. Oh, and lets try not to make it look like a little black dildo when its lying upside-down on the bed. Thanks.
Its also is in desperate need of a smarter season pass. I want the daily show once per day, not the rerun two hours later. Sure, I can go into "VCR mode" and tell it what channel and time to record on, but then again the Tivo should be able to do something about this.
They need to optimise the code or do something to avoid the long 20 seconds of lag I get pretty often. Worse, it backlogs all your commands so when the lag ends its going crazy, jumping around from one screen to another.
Lastly, it needs some kind of user level password protection. Something simple like a folder which only I have access to. Keeps the kids away from porn, protects me from accidental deletions, helps categorize, etc.
That's pricey as heck. I wouldnt mind seeing a simple add-on that let users dump shows to VCDs. Most DVD players can play VCDs, the quality is good enough for TV, and can be burned onto cheap-o CDRs.
Here's the advantage: I can't afford AT&T's excellent Natural Voices and other commercial offerings that make the standard free stuff that comes with your OS sound like crap. Its not just aesthetics, the free voices are simply difficult to understand most of the time. Download Coolspeech(share) or Readplease(free) and find out for yourself. Yuck.
Considering the link has been slashdotted already, I can't listen to tell you what kind of voice they're using, but if its a good commercial voice then more power to them. If its just Microsoft Mary, or whomever, then you're right its a waste of effort and bandwidth.
Exactly. If you want to understand any form of art (and yes, movies are art too) you have to be able to both take away and project meaning onto events. If all you take away is a geeky "how-to" on how the Matrix may work then you've really missed the point by a wide margin.
For instance when I first saw it in 1999 I instatnly though of those Carlos Casteneda books and about lucid dreaming, the whole real vs. fake dichotomy. Then as I talked to people about the movie I found that the realness of the Matrix isn't half as interesting as the ethics of the machines. No where is it established that the machines are "evil" and the movie, in my opinion, purposely shows the humans as fanatics as the machines as benevolant dictators.
There are endless explanations you can take from this movie, and the Wachowski brothers aren't telling. Like any good artist they know when to shut up when asked all those questions regarding the "why's," "how's," "meaning," etc.
What do you want to hear from, say, Paul McCartney, that some Beatles song you love so much was a complex labor of love or that he just wrote it down on a napkin at a bar one night? Yeah I thought so.
I wholeheartedly agree. We can shed some mass temporarily and help the earth spin faster by "leaping for leaps." Every few months or so everyone on a given continent will jump up at the same time. I'm sure it'll all work out just fine. Organize a "leaps for leaps" chapter in your town today.
The sidekick is great and does everything you mention and more but...
1. Its T-mobile only. T-Mobile coverage is infamous for being weak and spotty in some/most places and this really makes the phone a pain to use especially while you sit there and watch it attempt to synch up to the GPRS network.
2. The hardware could use some work. Put the thing in your pocket one day and there will be enough dust underneath the screen to annoy the hell out of you. I unscrew mine on a weekly basis just to clean the dust out. You can fight the kipple but it seems you can't stop it.
This is my second sidekick because of dead keys. After a few months of light to moderate use the keys are dying *again*. The M and N keys are going and require a really hard press to get them to work, which is really a shame because when the keyboard works you can really fly with it. Its a great design, but its a shame its a POS in the quality department.
3. Danger is tightly controling its SDK so don't expect anything like the selection of palm apps to arrive anytime soon. What you see is pretty much what you get. I don't mind, but I can see how this could be a problem for some people.
4. Synching apps are non-existant. If the keyboard wasn't such a POS I probably wouldnt mind, but I just avoid the PDA functions altogether.
>unlimited data for $39.95 a month
Actually its unlimited for 12 months only. Then they will begin charging us or come up with a new plan. Also the 39 dollar plan is only 200 phone minutes during the week. That's 10 minutes a business day. You'll want to move up to the 59 dollar plan for 500 minutes.
>No IMAP
It'll do IMAP, but only the inbox. Its an undocumented hack.
Also, there is no telnet/ssh and don't expect one.
I can live with the above and I use my sidekick everyday, but it does have issues.
Call me crazy, but this sounds like an ordinary museum. Perhaps calling it a shrine plays with the "crazy billionare" spin the NYTimes author is playing with.
I'd love to step into a full-size "alternate reality" exhibit. Man in the High Castle, anyone?
>We are willing to handwave aways so many instances of groups of people observing UFOs as weather balloons, swamp gas, ball lightnings or mass hallucinations.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but most of these sightings usually can be explained. The rest cannot be verified one way or the other because of lack of data. A Joe off-the-street eyewitness is probably one of the worst observers out there. Think back to the classic psychological experiments regarding eyewitnesses in surprise situations. Then there's a very small amount of anomolies out there, which are just that.
To take some anomolies and project a whole ET scenario because there were unexplained lights in the sky is simply jumping to a conclusion. Toss in the new religion that has sprung out of UFOs its its hard to get anything close to objective data. Even worse, contactees are completely out there and the supposed messages from the ETs went from "get rid of your A-Bombs" in the 50s to "We will probe your ass" in the 90s. For an amusing read check out Joe Simonton's encounter with a superior race who hands him pancakes.
Why does UFO have to translate over to "spacemen" when its probably more accurate to theorize unexplained weather events or space-time events? Using occam's razor I think its fair to say anyone with a comprehensive alien theory is really pushing it and her work probably has more in common with religion (wish fulfillment) than science.
Beware theories that are easily liked, its way too easy to be duped by them.
> now you can find out with all certainty if you are the lamest and most unpopular person on the Internet.
Sure, but my short list of buddies are people that I actually know. So all the girls on my list are real girls.
I can't wait for the meta-analysis of the BuddyZoo that shows that half these people are bots and the other half are hairy middle-aged men who like to be called something like Jen^^Cutie16.
Slashdot Mirror
>I don't understand why people doubt the technological capability of scientists and engineers to create a defensive system
They do. They also trust the defense firm down the street to find a way to get past these missiles. Can you say, "another arms race?" I thought you could.
This is why non-proliferation and a treaty against missile defense are excellent ideas. It keeps world powers from wasting all their money on competing technologies when they already can blow everything up. Whatever missile shield you concoct will be broken. Its actually that simple. There's just too much riding on having one nuclear proof nation.
>And yet, you think I would want to put all my trust the sanity of other world leaders to not fire nuclear weapons at the U.S.?
Lets not forget the US has had its plans for first strikes released to the public also.
Actually, I do agree that the submitter is wrong. A pork-barrel weapon system gets a lot more testing and funding than some ex-soviet aging lifeboat.
Definately driving games. Afterall driving is mostly a sub-conscious effort (who's driving when you're playing with your radio or cell phone?) and suspectible to influence.
Everytime I bring this up, most people agree. No, this isn't some lame "outlaw violent games now," argument but a reminder that media affects us in powerful ways. Like every male who walked out of a Rocky movie, he's sure he can beat up the guy next to him. At least until the post-coital media glow wears off. Political rallys, pep rallys, etc do the same thing. Best to know what you're getting into and how psychologically tricky these situations really are.
MUDs get me, probably because the combo of lack of sleep and losing equipment/points I worked for months to get is a real downer. I don't even bother with games that want a huge part of my life anymore (even if I had the time). Good games are played in a few hours at most, with the option to play with real-life opponents.
>BUT. That would put an end to SCO FUD, but MS FUD will start right thereafter.
Sadly, the MS FUD has already started. In the wonderfully written "Code Red for Open Source" article at Cnet which is fair and balanced (in that Fox News kind of way) Balmer is quoted as saying something to the effect, "See, you dont know who's writing your OSS software." I'm sure that little quote doesn't sit too well with IT managers debating adopting OSS. Certainly, MS's list of crimes is volumes long, but the fear of being sued because the product your using was written by 'shady individuals' as Balmer seems to be suggesting can have a real chilling effect.
Yeah, it is a lose-lose situation depending on how people interpret what is going on. I think its fairly obvious there's a strong attempt at getting a buy-out here which makes their moral position regarding the supposed theft of IP a bit suspect. I hope others see it this way.
Its like me going up to the guy who broke into my house and stole my stereo and telling him, "Okay, we'll leave the cops out of this if you take over my payments and buy out my equity. I can't afford this place anymore and I dont want to go bankrupt."
What really gets me, and I'm not even a linux advocate (i use it when I need a free server), is that SCO is trashing Linux's reputation left and right in its attempt to get bought out. I'm surprised there aren't names, addresses, and phone numbers of the SCO people listed here for harassment a la spam king style.
A little civil disobedience goes a long way.
>In any case, welcome to the Real World, where 95% of all systems will be Windows.
Exactly. I couldn't imagine how nasty the AT&T/Comcast network would be with ports 137-139 open for sniffing and cracking, especially now that XP defaults to a sharing folder. The determined will at least learn how to setup ftp, apache, IIS, etc.
As for the patch/virus server. More power to them. Every ISP should have a link to some free AV (AVG comes to mind) and windowsupdate.com. Toss in a link to Ad Aware for good measure. Make this page their starting page on IE on install.
Acting like your customers know what they are doing is probably the best way to destroy this little project or pretty much *any* project.
Also you can meet people half-way, no need to be a nazi admin. If someone wants their netbios ports open and they ask nicely then do it (assuming your equipment allows it). Only those in the know would probably ask and you could nicely ask them to make sure they have a strong password.
>y Oh Shit, and think twice next time they want to get a track off a p2p network.
I wouldn't think it would deter downloaders as much as it would potential P2P software writers. Remember, these students wrote software that one reporter described as "mini-Napster."
If anything P2P will move more underground (compromised servers, encryption, passwords, etc) which will serve the RIAA pretty well as Joe User will probably not be able to keep up with the newest 'warez sites.' A barrier to entry was just erected today.
> With this settlement, the RIAA maintains the status quo.
Yep, but I bet the working equation was more like this:
At what price can we get them to pay out and scare everyone else without the students going into bankrupcy and making us look the fool?
A few grand nailed it. No one goes to court and the students can look forward to dreams of home ownership. The RIAA has a nice propaganda win and everyone else goes home sad.
Divest in RIAA artists if you don't like it. I did. I goto 8-12 dollar concerts, hear great music, and pay 10 dollars per CD at shows. And the best part is that no one gets sued at the end of the day.
This probably isn't the best advice in the world (being under 21 really sucks for indie music fans) but I can't imagine walking into my local Best Buy and picking up 'Today's Hot Artists!'
>The Patriot Act and Patriot II (return of the civil liberty abuses)
Its not just about secuity per se. Employee screening got ridiculously out of hand during the beginging of the "war on some drugs." An applicant in the US today is expected to go through a background check, written psychological tests, and a urine/hair sample. We lost our privacy rights long ago and this could be the next step. On what legal ground could anyone fight this when they're already giving their piss away?
Sure, there are some decent pro-testing arguments, like for machine operators, drivers, etc, but drug testing is usually a cheap and effective way to avoid paying for competency testing and to clean out "undesirables." Be it the "freethinker," the member of some minority, etc. Interesting how white collar drugs are so difficult to detect.
Are the anti-brain scan, anti-genetic scan people going to get in bed with the anti-drug test people? I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, but Joe and Jane Sixpack need get over their political hobgoblins and realize that this is all part of the same package. Want drug testing? Then you'll get brain testing. Its almost that simple.
Worse, what do we do with this new class of undesirables? You need to work to get health insurance in the US.
"Sorry Ted, you're a borderline schizo according to our tests, you better see a doctor. You may be functional now. but something, sometime could happen and now that we know we can't hire you. Its HR policy, my hands are tied, buddy."
"I cant afford a p-doctor without some health insurance and job and even then its pushing it."
"Sorry, thats your problem."
*slam*
Funny how homelessness, unemployment, lack of health care is all our problems. Eventually everyone is going to run up against these walls. I really don't want to get delivered the "sorry my hands are tied, buddy" line because of degradation of basic civil rights in the US.
I'm not a privacy lunatic, I would be all for this screening in children to help discover faults and provide *free* therapy, etc to help them have good lives, but waiting until you're in the job market to be scrwed over is beyond ridiculous.
>Please, NVIDIA, can you come up with some names that actually convey to people whether they're buying
I could forgive this is if the gaming industry would include suggested resolution, bit-depth, etc for each game. Say I have a GF3 TI200 and want to play some new game. I don't want to screw around with the settings to get the game to a FPS/Color combo that is usable, the game should tell me this by looking at my GPU and CPU combo.
Now release this information publically and people shopping around for cards will be stunned at how their MX is worse than the card dell put in their computer for them. "What? I can only play Jedi Knight at 256 colors with this damn thing?"
I would think this kind of information is easier to swallow than highly-technical benchmarks or even the best product naming convention. At least for casual gamers and non-technophiles.
>I've been using Mozilla so long it's always a harsh shock when I use IE and pop-ups start cluttering everything.
Preach on brother.
What I think is inexcusable, or just really ignorant, is when people refuse to try new software because, "its different." People complain about pop-ups and poorly written pop-up blockers (think panicware), but in my experience when I recommend Mozilla they won't even bother. But they'll still keep complaining.
Or if I recommend Trillian to people running three IM clients.
At a certain point it has to be decided that people deserve the ads, privacy intrusions, crashes, etc that they get. I know that sounds elitist, but when they know about the alternatives but refuse to use them because these products do not have the Microsoft or AOL stamp-of-approval then they're sleeping in the bed they made. Branding is powerful, granted, but if it makes you act stupidly then its your own fault.
Sadly, I think a lot of people have faith that MS or AOL will eventually give them what they want if they wait long enough for the next version, or the version after that.
I don't like the fact that the web has turned into a technological arms race, but its still a very new medium and this kind of thing is to be expected. Ignore new tools at your peril.
Am I the only one who just fired up Kazaalite, hoping to get one of these messages? The firewall is all set, I'd love an authentic RIAA tongue-lashing to screencap.
Maybe it'll be worth something twenty years from now on ebay.
---
"Dude, I'll trade you a cease-and-desist by Harry Fox for that"
"Deal!"
> It's not like a switch was flipped and all the sudden society is headed downhill.
Exactly, but there may be more here than just a sudden realization that you're up to your knees in nonsense. We're living in an age of cheap/free information, yet people are still getting their media and other information from the same traditional outlets. I can sympathize with the people who are net-savy and know they can do a google search for "new york post crediblity" but their friends just read the tabloid and go with it.
There's this assumption, well its more like idealism, that easy access to differening viewpoints e.g. more information, will create a person with less bias and a love of the truth, but frankly it may never happen on a mass scale.
In my Dad's day there was the local papers and if you were lucky an alternative weekly. Now you've got everything at your fingertips yet many are still reading the same old paper.
Worse, there hasn't been a significant dent in the celebrity star system, which more or less reinforces the idea that celebrities are part of human nature. From the Illiad onwards we seem to want a hero and truth be damned, the story is more important than the fact. Sure X celebrity worked his/her way up from the streets with no shameless marketing, backroom deals, etc. Do people really want to know how the TV/Movie/Music businesses really work? I doubt it. Some do, but not enough to cause some kind of critical mass.
In the end, there probably isn't a solution to these "problems." As humans we have needs and one of those needs is the hero/celebrity and information that doesn't threaten our worldview too much. Think religion.
At best, we can come to a self-realization of what we're doing, but fighing human-nature on a mass-scale may take centuries of effort if its even possible. Plus, there's the hairy question of when to start. Sure we can toss out J-Lo but what about Odysseus?
>Name an application, or a feature of the operating system, that is truly innovative?
Tough question, the desktop model of computing was concieved of in the 50's and in the 60's there were working demonstrations with mice, cut-and-paste, word processing, etc.
Innovation is now just a business buzzword like proactive or synergy. For a short time I worked for a company whose full name was Proactive Inc/Synergy. Innovation is what you say to the jury when you're going to ream an industry.
I have a pretty modern computer, but here I am at a keyboard, monitor, mouse, etc attached to a loud beige box. Why doesn't it integrate with my TV/Entertainment center. Why can't I just tell it to do something or have it read me my email in the bathroom? Why isn't it on wheels roaming around the apartment?
I'll be screaming "innovation" from the mountaintops when someone produces something other than the further tweaking of the 50 year old desktop model. In the meantime its a code-word to appease those in the know like "family values" or "tough on drugs."
> they can't kill the makers of the weapon -- they will now turn their resources to the people pulling the trigger.
Sounds fair to me. First off, there's a reason why most companies don't go after petty theivery - the return to cost ratio is ridiculous. In every form of business there will be x amount of fraud because stopping that fraud just isn't worth the time or money. Hell, the software industry lives on fraud.
So what does this ruling mean for the little guy? Plenty. The RIAA can go after the real thieves, those who burn CDs by the hundreds and put them in cases with copied cover art and sell in many parts of the world - usually right in the open.
Most importantly, The RIAA can invest in a secure replacement for CD technology. Why the hell should my tax dollars go towards subsidizing their bad decision to go with the CD format? Sure at the time it was a good idea, but times change and business needs to adapt. Supporting the RIAA would be like having someone sue the police, the city, and everyone with a criminal record in their neighborhood because they are too cheap to buy door locks. The RIAA may not like it, but its a tech company now. Get cracking with a secure CD format, change your business plan, or eat up the cost. Suing eveyone in the world will accomplish squat.
I really hope they go after Joe and Jane RIAA-music sharer. The chill will send them into the arms of waiting indie labels with arguably much better music. I wonder how many thousands of people are forever off the RIAA/ClearChannel teat thanks to strong-armed tactics like these?
>However, if you intend to hire people as employees
Yep, that's why you should hire "freelancers" and when pressed on the issue claim you are "telecommuning" to your "office."
Millions of people work out of their homes and I don't think its illegal, but as the parent poster pointed out its a problem when you need to define the legal fiction that is your company and when you have customers and investors coming over. All you have to do is incorporate your company elsewhere and not have real meetings at home. No biggie and entirely doable.
>I think we have a new address for every free cd offer, junk ad, and telemarketer list in the world.
Or free samples of "White Powder." If you no longer want to recieve more White Powder please fill out this form and mail it back to us and we will promptly sell all your information to every marketer we can find. Thanks.
>Think 1984 (i know i know i know) for a second and consider Winston's job of rewriting news and, therefore, history.
This is a very valid concern and abuses have already come up. Thememoryhole.org just found a new one at the latimes.
Glance at that and tell me you aren't scared. CNN did the same thing with rewriting Powell's speech (i believe) to make it sound more pro-war. Sadly, no one is demanding that all changes and retractions on the web be disclosed. This is a problem journalists should be fighting tooth and nail right now before its too late.
By too late I mean when DRM will make it impossible to cache, screencap, wget, etc anything from these news sites. These are serious concerns and so far I haven't heard much from those in power regarding doing something about it. The attitude that the web can be changed willy-nilly is disturbing if not sickening.
>And, as you can see from this thread, nobody has posted that they have a TiVo and don't love it.
I have one and, yes, its great but...
First of all, I don't watch that much TV so paying the monthly fee just to get Simpsons reruns and a hodgepodge on new programming I may or may not have the time to watch seems like a waste. Its nice for my roommates, but as the Tivo owner it makes me wonder how much TV you have to watch to truly get your money's worth.
Secondly, the device is digital yet there's no digital out (say an SMB server to copy episodes in their original mpeg format to my PC). This is a real downer as the capture card and encoding take A LOT of time and effort. At least with the old fashioned VCRs your could just connect the two together and make a copy, albeit a lossy copy. The plus side is that someone else probably encoded it and its available on some P2P network (or bittorrent) thus saving me time. Replay had the right idea with their ethernet port.
Tivo's suggestions are crap. Truly crap. Just because I like the Simpson and Futurama does not mean I want kid's cartoons, let alone spanish kid's cartoons. I shut that feature off two or three weeks after I bought the thing.
They still need to be more open about their privacy policy. A legalese free sticker saying "we track what you watch to opt-out call this 800 number" would make everyone happy. Or better yet, "opt-in and get a coupon" or somesuch.
Please design a remote that will not give me a 50% chance of pointing the wrong end of it at the TV. Come on, this is a no brainer. The layout of the remote itself it pretty good, but the shape should suggest a front and a back. Oh, and lets try not to make it look like a little black dildo when its lying upside-down on the bed. Thanks.
Its also is in desperate need of a smarter season pass. I want the daily show once per day, not the rerun two hours later. Sure, I can go into "VCR mode" and tell it what channel and time to record on, but then again the Tivo should be able to do something about this.
They need to optimise the code or do something to avoid the long 20 seconds of lag I get pretty often. Worse, it backlogs all your commands so when the lag ends its going crazy, jumping around from one screen to another.
Lastly, it needs some kind of user level password protection. Something simple like a folder which only I have access to. Keeps the kids away from porn, protects me from accidental deletions, helps categorize, etc.
> I could dump it to DVD.
That's pricey as heck. I wouldnt mind seeing a simple add-on that let users dump shows to VCDs. Most DVD players can play VCDs, the quality is good enough for TV, and can be burned onto cheap-o CDRs.
Here's the advantage: I can't afford AT&T's excellent Natural Voices and other commercial offerings that make the standard free stuff that comes with your OS sound like crap. Its not just aesthetics, the free voices are simply difficult to understand most of the time. Download Coolspeech(share) or Readplease(free) and find out for yourself. Yuck.
Considering the link has been slashdotted already, I can't listen to tell you what kind of voice they're using, but if its a good commercial voice then more power to them. If its just Microsoft Mary, or whomever, then you're right its a waste of effort and bandwidth.
> Can anybody here spell "allegory"?
Exactly. If you want to understand any form of art (and yes, movies are art too) you have to be able to both take away and project meaning onto events. If all you take away is a geeky "how-to" on how the Matrix may work then you've really missed the point by a wide margin.
For instance when I first saw it in 1999 I instatnly though of those Carlos Casteneda books and about lucid dreaming, the whole real vs. fake dichotomy. Then as I talked to people about the movie I found that the realness of the Matrix isn't half as interesting as the ethics of the machines. No where is it established that the machines are "evil" and the movie, in my opinion, purposely shows the humans as fanatics as the machines as benevolant dictators.
There are endless explanations you can take from this movie, and the Wachowski brothers aren't telling. Like any good artist they know when to shut up when asked all those questions regarding the "why's," "how's," "meaning," etc.
What do you want to hear from, say, Paul McCartney, that some Beatles song you love so much was a complex labor of love or that he just wrote it down on a napkin at a bar one night? Yeah I thought so.
> SPEED UP THE EARTH!
I wholeheartedly agree. We can shed some mass temporarily and help the earth spin faster by "leaping for leaps." Every few months or so everyone on a given continent will jump up at the same time. I'm sure it'll all work out just fine. Organize a "leaps for leaps" chapter in your town today.
The sidekick is great and does everything you mention and more but...
1. Its T-mobile only. T-Mobile coverage is infamous for being weak and spotty in some/most places and this really makes the phone a pain to use especially while you sit there and watch it attempt to synch up to the GPRS network.
2. The hardware could use some work. Put the thing in your pocket one day and there will be enough dust underneath the screen to annoy the hell out of you. I unscrew mine on a weekly basis just to clean the dust out. You can fight the kipple but it seems you can't stop it.
This is my second sidekick because of dead keys. After a few months of light to moderate use the keys are dying *again*. The M and N keys are going and require a really hard press to get them to work, which is really a shame because when the keyboard works you can really fly with it. Its a great design, but its a shame its a POS in the quality department.
3. Danger is tightly controling its SDK so don't expect anything like the selection of palm apps to arrive anytime soon. What you see is pretty much what you get. I don't mind, but I can see how this could be a problem for some people.
4. Synching apps are non-existant. If the keyboard wasn't such a POS I probably wouldnt mind, but I just avoid the PDA functions altogether.
>unlimited data for $39.95 a month
Actually its unlimited for 12 months only. Then they will begin charging us or come up with a new plan. Also the 39 dollar plan is only 200 phone minutes during the week. That's 10 minutes a business day. You'll want to move up to the 59 dollar plan for 500 minutes.
>No IMAP
It'll do IMAP, but only the inbox. Its an undocumented hack.
Also, there is no telnet/ssh and don't expect one.
I can live with the above and I use my sidekick everyday, but it does have issues.
Call me crazy, but this sounds like an ordinary museum. Perhaps calling it a shrine plays with the "crazy billionare" spin the NYTimes author is playing with.
I'd love to step into a full-size "alternate reality" exhibit. Man in the High Castle, anyone?
>We are willing to handwave aways so many instances of groups of people observing UFOs as weather balloons, swamp gas, ball lightnings or mass hallucinations.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but most of these sightings usually can be explained. The rest cannot be verified one way or the other because of lack of data. A Joe off-the-street eyewitness is probably one of the worst observers out there. Think back to the classic psychological experiments regarding eyewitnesses in surprise situations. Then there's a very small amount of anomolies out there, which are just that.
To take some anomolies and project a whole ET scenario because there were unexplained lights in the sky is simply jumping to a conclusion. Toss in the new religion that has sprung out of UFOs its its hard to get anything close to objective data. Even worse, contactees are completely out there and the supposed messages from the ETs went from "get rid of your A-Bombs" in the 50s to "We will probe your ass" in the 90s. For an amusing read check out Joe Simonton's encounter with a superior race who hands him pancakes.
Why does UFO have to translate over to "spacemen" when its probably more accurate to theorize unexplained weather events or space-time events? Using occam's razor I think its fair to say anyone with a comprehensive alien theory is really pushing it and her work probably has more in common with religion (wish fulfillment) than science.
Beware theories that are easily liked, its way too easy to be duped by them.
> now you can find out with all certainty if you are the lamest and most unpopular person on the Internet.
Sure, but my short list of buddies are people that I actually know. So all the girls on my list are real girls.
I can't wait for the meta-analysis of the BuddyZoo that shows that half these people are bots and the other half are hairy middle-aged men who like to be called something like Jen^^Cutie16.