Because kids who go around calling themelves libertarian do so for the shock value and to be little intellectual rebels. When the shit hits the fan everyone runs back to the nanny-state. Luckily for everyone else theres the middle moderate position which lets us pick and choose policies without having to conform to fadish titles.
There's no shortage of "Chicago School" Economists and other academic types who will fight any regulation tooth and nail screaming "Lassiez-fair or death." He seems to be one of those people who thinks business will solve all problems if only pesky regulations and laws would get out of the way.
But there's no shortage of people with Memory Stick slots in their expensive VAIOs but no SD card reader in there, and when they price out memory sticks they gasp.
They really have no mp3 player. They were so caught up with minidisc they lagged behind in the world of mp3. Im sure there are no shortages of kids who got minidisc players instead of mp3 players for xmas. Granted, this is the buyers fault but lets not pretend sony's attitude toward the consumer and non-sony standards doesnt have a negative effect.
"Mom and Pop" dont know much, they rely on their more tuned in kids to tell them which brands are any good. This younger group of influencial opinion makers are going against sony. That cant be good for Sony in the long run.
Right. But in reality most people just say things like "Those idiots in IT upgraded to XP just for the pretty colors!!!" and then breathlessly demand to have Vista, IE7, or whatever new pretty app just came out without any cares to testing, cost, etc. This is why we dont let watercooler janes and joes run IT.
>Unlike Microsoft products, it's not like many of us are locked into using Google. Just the way I see it.
Bullshit. You dont have to use IE or WMP but lots of people do. Why? Because they have no idea there are alternatives, where to get them, or how to install them. Grandma, grandpa, and technophobe teenage jimmy dont remember why IE has a google toolbar installed (they now piggypack on whoever lets them just like google), why google is the default search, how pagerank violates privacym how to remove it or even why they would remove it. They are google customers until the next upgrade cycle.
This isnt exactly microsoft but its close. Blake's complaint is valid. Fanboyism will most likely win this fight, which is kinda sad.
The list is full of things like these. Its not really a list of discovery but of off-beat and interesting news. Panspeemia is an old idea, usually held up by discoving tough bacteria that might survive and interstellar trip on an asteroid, fossils, and now this 'red rain.' They also didnt just discover how to say 666 fear in greek, etc.
The 27" sony trinitron I just moved from the car to a second floor apartment (almost dying in the process) weighs 98lbs. Thats 62lbs less than what you weigh. Moving these things is a serious pain and with no good grips.
I dont think the old metric will make much sense with these new HD players. When released they'll probably be able to play both HD (bluray, hddvd, whahever) and standard DVDs. There will be no reason to keep a stand-alone DVD player. They'll just end up as hand me downs to the kids or collect dust.
After a while the HD players will be cheap enough that it will be smart futureproofing to buy a HD player without a HDtv, in the hopes that your next tv will be HD. Hell, there's no shortage of component out dvd players plugged in with composite cables or through RF converter boxes.
First off, its encrypted. The key is written on the inside of the passport. Unless theyres some flaw with key generation then that AES will be difficult to crack.
Secondly, when the passport is closed the chip is enclosed in a layer of tin-foil making it pretty much impossible to read.
Its not perfect but its not the security nightmare some people make it out to be. Personally, I'd much prefer they use something that requires a physical contact.
>Perhaps the MySpace people are at least subconsciously reacting in the same way to the growing threats to our privacy--by getting it all out there, so if anyone tries to use it against them they are effectively immunized.
>Meanwhile, they're building an alternate set of "education railroad tracks" that lead to a land where illiteracy is the norm and 'the masses' (We the People) are easy to trick and control.
You honestly think this is all some conspiracy? Universal education stems from a time when most people were illiterate and forced to work in the family (usually hard labor agrarian ) business. Just because public education doesnt meet your standards does not mean that there's some conspiracy afoot. Obviously you do need more education if you're buying conspiracy theories on face value.
I still blame parents. Where I live the schools are now serving breakfast because kids come to school hungry and then send them off with food because they dont eat. I live in a big city in a mixed neighborhood, nothing like the stereotype of poverty. Parents believe they can just breed without the consequences. Now these poor kids are everyone's problems and schools are not designed to handle the family care kids used to get. Fix families, fix unresponsbile breeders and the schools will fix themselves.
Schools are not a social fix-all. They're schools. Once people accept that they'll begin to point the finger at the real people who are causing all these problems: the parents.
>Otherwise they become superhumans and why would they want us around?
Why wouldnt want us around? If someone constructed some kind of sci-fi-like AI, why wouldnt it understand (along with all the bazillion things it understands) tolerance and consequences? I'd be more concerned about people trying to get rid of AI (economic reasons, religious reasons, general hillbillyism) than the other way around.
Aside from the academic curiousity of buildng a self-determined AI, I could see robotic insects and animals "free" to act just like their organic peers to fill in an ecological niche opened by extinction or keep real animals company in a zoo.
My understanding of wimax (is there even a consensus on this stuff?) isnt as a last-mile solution as much as it is a wireless infrastructure. Its not going to replace home/corporate wifi but it will bring T1+ speeds between nodes without paying for the monthly t1, etc. So for rural this may be a godsend. In areas too expensive to lay down more copper or fiber it might make economic sense to use wimax like a Motorola Canopy/WISP as well as "wireless t1." Your grandpas laptop wont be able to get on wimax, but the box mounted to the side of his house can. From there he can plug in a cheapo linksys wireless router.
Job Security? Because things are so centralized and locked down means we have a very lean IT staff. If we opened the floodgates then we'd need to hire more than few extra people. Don't be silly.
1. Your symantec doesnt catch everything, even if its in its definitions files. It may run before the av can scan it. It may come encrypted. It may be part of a larger spyware payload. "Edge" is buzzwords for "buy our scanning proxy." Its not 100% protection.
2. Your system is locked down not because the "helpdesk monkey" enjoys visiting self-entitled misanthropes like yourself but to keep unauthorized software off your machine. Your manager doesnt want you playing games all day, IT doesnt want to image your computer every week because of all the spyware you download, and the helpdesk doesnt need more of your whiney complaints. Not to mention legal/finance dont want to get stuck with a bill/lawsuit for the software you pirate and put on a machine that isnt yours.
3. The partition idea has already been done. Its called network drives. You still are responsible for the PC.
At the end of the day, when you screw up a perfectly good machine because youre so much smarter than your IT deparment and its monkeys, you end up calling them, expecting them to fix it, and blaming them. Now multiply yourself x250 people and think about why you have to wait so long for service or why some of these policies exist.
>Get a clue and a plan and have a modicum of control - not the communist variety of control.
Lastly, this isn't soviet russia. Dont like the work environment? Quit.
>To bill yourself as a cheap console and nickel and dime your users is a bit hypocritical I think.
Well, the 360 doesnt have a browser. The PS3 does. You're always going to get more from a monopolist behemoth like Sony. They can afford to bundle all sorts of crap and pay for it themselves. Think Bluray. Sony is so wealthy they can take a loss on this console for years until the game sales make up the price. Nintendo isn't wealthy enough to take such a chance.
Its 'unfair' or 'nickel and dimed' to pay for extra features. In a fair world these consoles should be sold unsubsidized. Heh, if you think the pS3 is expensive now... Yet, the Wii would be at the same pricepoint. Someone's buying from a huge over-protected unregulated monopoly from Japan has its benefits. Hope the "free" browser is worth fattening up their bottom line which only helps them put more DRM on CDs, push proprietary formats, and generally act like an unresponsible member of the business community.
I'll just take a Wii and browse on my laptop, thanks.
>The 3 cable companies ALL have franchise rights with the accompanying requirements
Chicago is a mess. There's one company that gives any decent coverage of the city and that's comcast. RCN is strictly gold coast, lincoln park, and affluent north side. Comcast's pricing is monopoly pricing. I was paying up to 70 dollars for a friggin cable modem capped at 2 or 3 megs just last year. 59 for service, taxes, and 'modem rental.'
I tried their video service after being told by my new landord I can't install a dish into his fugly building. I believe they want 59 dollars for what used to be called basic cable in this area. (basic cable now means broadcast tv channels + public access over coax). Toss in tax and 'box and remote rental' and you're pushing 70 dollars just for comedy central and a couple of other decent channels. This is ridiculous. I cancelled after a few months.
Im not sure who the 3rd provider in chicago is. Do you means at&t's barely here iptv offerings over dsl? This presupposes a landline and at&t dsl. Two huge barriers to entry. if you want cable service you can go with comcast or rcn if you live in certain neighborhoods. Not exactly comeptitive.
I also do not understand your complaints about right-of-way. Are you just trolling or one of those kooks who has a beef with evertyhing the federal government does? In Chicago there is almost no chance anyone would even need your land. The entire city is served via running wire around the poles. The infrastructure system here is old. We're not talking new development in barrington or anything. Hell, 30 feet from the curb is the citys property anyway and this is where you find most utility equipment. Everything else is run underground under the streets or under the sidewalk, which you don't own either.
Depends on the television shows of course. I dont like this general dismissal of an entire medium. When peope say it about the web, the geeks get all up in arms, but the geeks do the same thing to tv.
TV is mostly entertainment. So its really not that different than me driving my ass to the comedy clubs downtown. I'm "engaged" in the same way, yet we dont see so much PC hysteria about this or other forms of entertainment. Well, we do with videogames, but again its a double standard depending on who is complaining. I am much more concerned about the pacing than the content myself. Arguably, too much tv or videogames given to too young of a person can lead to mild attention problems.
Also I think a lot of this "brain strength" and what may or may not come up on some EEG somewhere is a lot of hair-spliting. If one part of the brain lights up more than another that doesnt mean anything if we don't see a correlated human behavior. What if I found a dozen musicians who don't light up the EEG like someone in your example? Are they lesser musicians?
The brain isnt like a muscle. Nor is it like a computer. Its complex enough and not well understood enough to the point where our analogies are more trouble than they are worth. The Mark I brain is surprisingly resilient and the various fearmongering about damaging one's brain through culturally dis-approved activities borders on silliness.
Seconded. I love the idea of a free software advocate coming up with 'unbiased' opinions on MS. By definition they're biased against non-free software. This isn't exactly consumer reports. This is propaganda.
Right, and if an admin gives full-control to the local firewall to the local user then his nightmares should be about his shoddy work, not apps requesting an open port. Something tells me heise security doesnt sell too many impressions or get on the front page of slashdot without all the alarmist language.
Pennis is a start. Nickels too. The lowest coin we should have is the dime, and we can just round up or down to a dime. After a while even that will be pretty worthless (if it isnt already) and we can use quarters as our smallest change.
Slashdot Mirror
Because kids who go around calling themelves libertarian do so for the shock value and to be little intellectual rebels. When the shit hits the fan everyone runs back to the nanny-state. Luckily for everyone else theres the middle moderate position which lets us pick and choose policies without having to conform to fadish titles.
There's no shortage of "Chicago School" Economists and other academic types who will fight any regulation tooth and nail screaming "Lassiez-fair or death." He seems to be one of those people who thinks business will solve all problems if only pesky regulations and laws would get out of the way.
Maybe,
But there's no shortage of people with Memory Stick slots in their expensive VAIOs but no SD card reader in there, and when they price out memory sticks they gasp.
They really have no mp3 player. They were so caught up with minidisc they lagged behind in the world of mp3. Im sure there are no shortages of kids who got minidisc players instead of mp3 players for xmas. Granted, this is the buyers fault but lets not pretend sony's attitude toward the consumer and non-sony standards doesnt have a negative effect.
And theres the little stuff. The fake movie critic sony made to promote sony movies. The rootkit. The opening prices of the ps3 or the bluray player. etc. These things do add up.
"Mom and Pop" dont know much, they rely on their more tuned in kids to tell them which brands are any good. This younger group of influencial opinion makers are going against sony. That cant be good for Sony in the long run.
You think this is going to be free or something?
Right. But in reality most people just say things like "Those idiots in IT upgraded to XP just for the pretty colors!!!" and then breathlessly demand to have Vista, IE7, or whatever new pretty app just came out without any cares to testing, cost, etc. This is why we dont let watercooler janes and joes run IT.
>Unlike Microsoft products, it's not like many of us are locked into using Google. Just the way I see it.
Bullshit. You dont have to use IE or WMP but lots of people do. Why? Because they have no idea there are alternatives, where to get them, or how to install them. Grandma, grandpa, and technophobe teenage jimmy dont remember why IE has a google toolbar installed (they now piggypack on whoever lets them just like google), why google is the default search, how pagerank violates privacym how to remove it or even why they would remove it. They are google customers until the next upgrade cycle.
This isnt exactly microsoft but its close. Blake's complaint is valid. Fanboyism will most likely win this fight, which is kinda sad.
The list is full of things like these. Its not really a list of discovery but of off-beat and interesting news. Panspeemia is an old idea, usually held up by discoving tough bacteria that might survive and interstellar trip on an asteroid, fossils, and now this 'red rain.' They also didnt just discover how to say 666 fear in greek, etc.
The 27" sony trinitron I just moved from the car to a second floor apartment (almost dying in the process) weighs 98lbs. Thats 62lbs less than what you weigh. Moving these things is a serious pain and with no good grips.
I dont think the old metric will make much sense with these new HD players. When released they'll probably be able to play both HD (bluray, hddvd, whahever) and standard DVDs. There will be no reason to keep a stand-alone DVD player. They'll just end up as hand me downs to the kids or collect dust.
After a while the HD players will be cheap enough that it will be smart futureproofing to buy a HD player without a HDtv, in the hopes that your next tv will be HD. Hell, there's no shortage of component out dvd players plugged in with composite cables or through RF converter boxes.
First off, its encrypted. The key is written on the inside of the passport. Unless theyres some flaw with key generation then that AES will be difficult to crack.
Secondly, when the passport is closed the chip is enclosed in a layer of tin-foil making it pretty much impossible to read.
Its not perfect but its not the security nightmare some people make it out to be. Personally, I'd much prefer they use something that requires a physical contact.
>Perhaps the MySpace people are at least subconsciously reacting in the same way to the growing threats to our privacy--by getting it all out there, so if anyone tries to use it against them they are effectively immunized.
Umm no. They're just trolling for booty.
>Meanwhile, they're building an alternate set of "education railroad tracks" that lead to a land where illiteracy is the norm and 'the masses' (We the People) are easy to trick and control.
You honestly think this is all some conspiracy? Universal education stems from a time when most people were illiterate and forced to work in the family (usually hard labor agrarian ) business. Just because public education doesnt meet your standards does not mean that there's some conspiracy afoot. Obviously you do need more education if you're buying conspiracy theories on face value.
I still blame parents. Where I live the schools are now serving breakfast because kids come to school hungry and then send them off with food because they dont eat. I live in a big city in a mixed neighborhood, nothing like the stereotype of poverty. Parents believe they can just breed without the consequences. Now these poor kids are everyone's problems and schools are not designed to handle the family care kids used to get. Fix families, fix unresponsbile breeders and the schools will fix themselves.
Schools are not a social fix-all. They're schools. Once people accept that they'll begin to point the finger at the real people who are causing all these problems: the parents.
>Otherwise they become superhumans and why would they want us around?
Why wouldnt want us around? If someone constructed some kind of sci-fi-like AI, why wouldnt it understand (along with all the bazillion things it understands) tolerance and consequences? I'd be more concerned about people trying to get rid of AI (economic reasons, religious reasons, general hillbillyism) than the other way around.
Aside from the academic curiousity of buildng a self-determined AI, I could see robotic insects and animals "free" to act just like their organic peers to fill in an ecological niche opened by extinction or keep real animals company in a zoo.
My understanding of wimax (is there even a consensus on this stuff?) isnt as a last-mile solution as much as it is a wireless infrastructure. Its not going to replace home/corporate wifi but it will bring T1+ speeds between nodes without paying for the monthly t1, etc. So for rural this may be a godsend. In areas too expensive to lay down more copper or fiber it might make economic sense to use wimax like a Motorola Canopy/WISP as well as "wireless t1." Your grandpas laptop wont be able to get on wimax, but the box mounted to the side of his house can. From there he can plug in a cheapo linksys wireless router.
Job Security? Because things are so centralized and locked down means we have a very lean IT staff. If we opened the floodgates then we'd need to hire more than few extra people. Don't be silly.
A few points:
1. Your symantec doesnt catch everything, even if its in its definitions files. It may run before the av can scan it. It may come encrypted. It may be part of a larger spyware payload. "Edge" is buzzwords for "buy our scanning proxy." Its not 100% protection.
2. Your system is locked down not because the "helpdesk monkey" enjoys visiting self-entitled misanthropes like yourself but to keep unauthorized software off your machine. Your manager doesnt want you playing games all day, IT doesnt want to image your computer every week because of all the spyware you download, and the helpdesk doesnt need more of your whiney complaints. Not to mention legal/finance dont want to get stuck with a bill/lawsuit for the software you pirate and put on a machine that isnt yours.
3. The partition idea has already been done. Its called network drives. You still are responsible for the PC.
At the end of the day, when you screw up a perfectly good machine because youre so much smarter than your IT deparment and its monkeys, you end up calling them, expecting them to fix it, and blaming them. Now multiply yourself x250 people and think about why you have to wait so long for service or why some of these policies exist.
>Get a clue and a plan and have a modicum of control - not the communist variety of control.
Lastly, this isn't soviet russia. Dont like the work environment? Quit.
You're mirroring Opera.com? Um, thanks.
>To bill yourself as a cheap console and nickel and dime your users is a bit hypocritical I think.
Well, the 360 doesnt have a browser. The PS3 does. You're always going to get more from a monopolist behemoth like Sony. They can afford to bundle all sorts of crap and pay for it themselves. Think Bluray. Sony is so wealthy they can take a loss on this console for years until the game sales make up the price. Nintendo isn't wealthy enough to take such a chance.
Its 'unfair' or 'nickel and dimed' to pay for extra features. In a fair world these consoles should be sold unsubsidized. Heh, if you think the pS3 is expensive now... Yet, the Wii would be at the same pricepoint. Someone's buying from a huge over-protected unregulated monopoly from Japan has its benefits. Hope the "free" browser is worth fattening up their bottom line which only helps them put more DRM on CDs, push proprietary formats, and generally act like an unresponsible member of the business community.
I'll just take a Wii and browse on my laptop, thanks.
Because usability and features trumps ideology, as it should in any project that wants to succeed.
>The 3 cable companies ALL have franchise rights with the accompanying requirements
Chicago is a mess. There's one company that gives any decent coverage of the city and that's comcast. RCN is strictly gold coast, lincoln park, and affluent north side. Comcast's pricing is monopoly pricing. I was paying up to 70 dollars for a friggin cable modem capped at 2 or 3 megs just last year. 59 for service, taxes, and 'modem rental.'
I tried their video service after being told by my new landord I can't install a dish into his fugly building. I believe they want 59 dollars for what used to be called basic cable in this area. (basic cable now means broadcast tv channels + public access over coax). Toss in tax and 'box and remote rental' and you're pushing 70 dollars just for comedy central and a couple of other decent channels. This is ridiculous. I cancelled after a few months.
Im not sure who the 3rd provider in chicago is. Do you means at&t's barely here iptv offerings over dsl? This presupposes a landline and at&t dsl. Two huge barriers to entry. if you want cable service you can go with comcast or rcn if you live in certain neighborhoods. Not exactly comeptitive.
I also do not understand your complaints about right-of-way. Are you just trolling or one of those kooks who has a beef with evertyhing the federal government does? In Chicago there is almost no chance anyone would even need your land. The entire city is served via running wire around the poles. The infrastructure system here is old. We're not talking new development in barrington or anything. Hell, 30 feet from the curb is the citys property anyway and this is where you find most utility equipment. Everything else is run underground under the streets or under the sidewalk, which you don't own either.
Depends on the television shows of course. I dont like this general dismissal of an entire medium. When peope say it about the web, the geeks get all up in arms, but the geeks do the same thing to tv.
TV is mostly entertainment. So its really not that different than me driving my ass to the comedy clubs downtown. I'm "engaged" in the same way, yet we dont see so much PC hysteria about this or other forms of entertainment. Well, we do with videogames, but again its a double standard depending on who is complaining. I am much more concerned about the pacing than the content myself. Arguably, too much tv or videogames given to too young of a person can lead to mild attention problems.
Also I think a lot of this "brain strength" and what may or may not come up on some EEG somewhere is a lot of hair-spliting. If one part of the brain lights up more than another that doesnt mean anything if we don't see a correlated human behavior. What if I found a dozen musicians who don't light up the EEG like someone in your example? Are they lesser musicians?
The brain isnt like a muscle. Nor is it like a computer. Its complex enough and not well understood enough to the point where our analogies are more trouble than they are worth. The Mark I brain is surprisingly resilient and the various fearmongering about damaging one's brain through culturally dis-approved activities borders on silliness.
Your post makes too much sense. This is slashdot. We prefer 'OMG bgates is giming my OS and trying to steal my ubuntu install disk.'
>No really, this might be a new low for the FSF.
Seconded. I love the idea of a free software advocate coming up with 'unbiased' opinions on MS. By definition they're biased against non-free software. This isn't exactly consumer reports. This is propaganda.
Right, and if an admin gives full-control to the local firewall to the local user then his nightmares should be about his shoddy work, not apps requesting an open port. Something tells me heise security doesnt sell too many impressions or get on the front page of slashdot without all the alarmist language.
Pennis is a start. Nickels too. The lowest coin we should have is the dime, and we can just round up or down to a dime. After a while even that will be pretty worthless (if it isnt already) and we can use quarters as our smallest change.