Radio revolutionized communications, especially as it became more available to smaller companies. It made a wider range of ideas, music, and personalities available to the common person. Radios eventually became omnipresent - a nearly free (minor cost for a radio and power/batteries) outlet for on-demand contact with the outside world.
Radio's core problem, though, is that there is only a limited spectrum that's both electromagnetically effective and safe for human exposure at high power levels. Otherwise we'd be pulling power from the air instead of wire.
It's still in it's infancy, but I wouldn't be at all suprised if today's clumsy fledgling attempts at digital network-based radio will later be seen as heralding the birth of a whole new medium - same concept as radio, but even more available.
Cable tv, encrypted compressed signals over wire, made it possible to host hundreds (thousands?) of channels, and far cheaper to run them (no broadcasting, less infrastructure per station, etc). The end result: hundreds of channels of purile crap. And mixed in with all that crap are a good number of true gems that never would have seen the light of day in a world of pure airwave broadcasting. The public is now exposed to history, culture, technologies, and news that it never would have had access to before.
I think wifi radio is just one more step in the direction of providing a denser and low-cost medium for propagation of signal. Satelite radio as well (I say let em target regions - even neighborhoods, and let Clear Channel and others be-damned).
Any broadcast medium that brings down the cost of operation for the same general service is inherently a good thing - while it will introduce new content that isn't worth much, it will also allow a wider range of content, and make large-scale advertising income less of a driving survival requirement.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. KORP radio: 30 minutes of continuous top 10 big-studio hits, every hour on the hour.
What do we do for the disabled now? People can mail in their votes, under a variety of circumstances (being out of the country, serving in the military, not being in the regional vicinity of your specified polling station, etc).
I wouldn't have a problem with a controlled and limited home-voting system... something available in hardship cases only, much like mail-in votes. If someone has to apply and qualify for it, that's as good as someone who's willing to get out and cast their vote.
I just don't want to see whole sectors of the population kicking back at home and casting a quick vote. I don't oppose the concept of web voting, just the idea of it being commonplace.
There was a lot more to it than the Dean Scream. He constantly put his foot in his mouth, didn't think before he spoke, contradicted himself, changed his posi... errr, wait, is this about Bush or Dean? Either way, he was the "cool" candidate, the one that people would say they'd vote for in polls because they didn't think about it as hard. Once it came down to actually going somewhere with other people and deciding, they thought differently.
I believe people would put less thought into their votes if they were sitting back in an easy chair bouncing between their email, ICQ, and a voting site. It would also bring out all the idiots who don't care enough to vote, but find it so easy that they drop a few minutes of effort into it.
I can understand that people in obscure backwoods areas and unpopulated regions might find it a hardship to go vote... but the vast majority of the population is just squeamish about having to actually go out and do something like the generations before (who voted en masse back when it was much more of a hassle). If people don't care enough to go out and vote, do we really want them involved in the process?
We don't have to allow UN inspectors, because they're free to enter the country and observe the process first-hand. They might have trouble entering the polling stations, not being registered to vote, but they can sure as hell watch through the windows (where available), or talk to people as they leave.
Now, talking to people *before* they go in could cause some trouble. But we have a fairly transparent voting process compared to most countries, and observation is simply a matter of being in this country while it happens.
Every time the subject of electronic voting comes up, you hear people saying that polling stations themselves are part of the problem, or that we should be able to vote from the convenience of home or office.
I disagree. Vehemently.
Voting is somewhat of a ritual in many countries, especially the US. People will gladly talk about their politics, but ask them who they voted for and you usually get the cold shoulder. It's a private matter. You'd have better luck asking them how their bowels are doing. The polls themselves are nice and curtained or secluded, so no one can see. People bring their kids and let them watch, even let them do the final act of pressing the lever or button. There aren't many companies that aren't willing to let their people take a long lunch in order to go vote, and those that don't are not looked upon highly.
When it is your civic duty to periodically go to your official polling station, when you have to go to a specific place that you probably never go for any other reason, where you're around a large spectrum of people of all types that you might not otherwise be exposed to, and go specifically to cast your vote... it means a little more than simply hitting a website and picking the guy who you'd like to have lead.
The percentage of people who vote is truly sad, but it's not a good idea to fix it by making it TOO easy to vote. There must be at least a minimum of effort involved - a place to go, as long as it's reasonably easy to get to. The same place as all your neighbors. When you have to make an event of it, it tends to focus you more on what you're doing, and I've found that people become far less extreme in their politics when faced with this fact.
If you could vote from home, you'd put less thought into it. It would be one step closer to a news site poll, except THIS poll would make our final official selections. People wouldn't take it seriously enough. More people would vote, but the quality of those votes would not carry the same weight.
If the Primaries had been run over the web, I'm willing to bet Dean would have outdone his competition. But people were at an event, a political ritual, and that sobered them into making a more mature choice (though I think there were better people they could have chosen).
Voting should be readily available to the masses. It should be quick, efficient, and as infallible as we can safely make it. But it should also be an official civic act not taken lightly, and deffinitely never done from home.
All technical questions of security and validation aside, the concept of a quick and easy home solution for choosing our national leaders is not a good idea.
I don't think they ever went to full scale war against the Klingons... it was always more of a cold war, nothing too overt.
But, there was a war against the Romulans. And no telling who else there could have been a war against (looking at the world today, only knowing patches of history, who'd have thought we went to war with England not just once, but twice?)
All the best ST movies have (with one exception) been their darkest - and even Voyage Home had a pretty bleak undertone (goodbye Earth). On the other hand, their "cute" movies have also been their worst - and Nemesis proves they shouldn't try for a core bad guy until they can give us a good one (I was not impressed with Nemesis, but at least it helped drive away the bad taste of Insurrection's diarrhetic implosion).
As for Enterprise, regardless of it's ratings I think it's the best effort they've made since TNG's final season. It has the best characters (all have distinct flaws that aren't cute, which makes their finer aspects shine a little more). It has a dark and slightly twisted sense of humor I like. They do not always make the moral choice in the end, instead of always figuring out what's right by the end of the show. Their doctor is the first alien ST crewmember who seems to fit in as a castmember instead of the token alien.
And... it brings back some of the Blood, Booze, and Babes element that made the original last so long. When they fight, they fight like they mean it. Bodies fly out of gaping holes in the ship, there are redshirts all over the place, and sometimes they have to be cold and brutal just to survive, not to make a highhanded point.
I want to see a Star Trek movie that makes your brain twist... something approaching hard sci-fi, but not enough to drive people away. I want Arthur C Clarke to make me a Star Trek. Or, if they can ever get him to talk to them again, Harlan Ellison (who wrote their best episode, period). Something dark and bleak, where instead of being preachy, they tear their entire world apart and let them climb out of the wreckage.
I don't want a happy Star Trek movie. I don't want to hear Picard soliliquizing on philosophical matters like it was a pleasant tea party, or Riker worrying about his love life, or La Forge being bored with his job. I want to see all hell break loose, and characters who ACT like they're not having fun. And if the TNG guys get one more go, kill some of them off in acts of violence, not dramatic self-sacrifice. I want Shakespearean Tragedy, not As The Federation Turns.
Or maybe... just maybe... I'll be impressed if I see a title like "Star Trek: Holy War" or "Star Trek: Apocalypse"... not "Star Trek: Earl Grey, Hot".
People have been using webmail for years, and from what I've seen, it's become a great percentage of the email going back and forth. People leave a fairly good bit of mail there, going back pretty far if it's all text. The amount of space allocated has increased over time, which means they're being used... commonly... more and more as standard mail archives rather than just quickie anonymous email services.
All Google is doing is taking what people have already been doing, including many of the people on here, and expanding it beyond any reasonable sense of proportion.
And it will work. Because geeks love proportional reasonability failures.
While electronic voting may be the way of the future, I'm a lot more inclined to be conservative about the entire process. We're in far too great a rush to revolutionize a system that has always had problems, and always will (in one form or another).
The recent near-tie's and questionable results are more a matter of our own political divisiveness and extreme political stances.
That, and a publicly-audited voting system dashes all my hopes of winning the 2012 elections by underhanded means.
We're not allowed to export some of the mainstream encryption out there for national security reasons...
So does this mean that, Australian or not, if a US individual or company exports this technology themselves, they get the thumbscrews?
What kind of a position is this, exactly?
on
Our Man In Black
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So is this guy considered a respectable functionary at Nasa who provides insurance over an uncertain but scientifically-possible threat?...
Or is he the guy who got stuck with the weird job? The sort of post they give someone who got caught stinking of the restroom one time too many?
I noticed this feature on Rackspace some time ago, and while I never felt the need to make use of it myself, I always thought it was a great idea.
What I want to know is, what do you guys think of it... not as something many of the people here would want, but as a way to help guide potential customers. I've got a webhost I'm working on setting up, with my own infrastructure (doing my own code, and being utterly obsessive over it), and this is one of the features I have been seriously considering implementing (for as long as a year now?). If abused, it can be a bad thing, but if the policy is to simply answer questions and help potential clients work out what they need and if we have what they need, I see it as an excellent idea that can be made to serve the customer as much as the company investing time and manpower into it.
Didn't Microsoft enter into a fairly large investment in the newly remade SCO earlier this year, after the transfer? Last I heard, they're a fairly major investor in them right now, but do not claim to be involved in their new helmsman's business practices... which is reasonable.
Aren't they already a major stockholder in SCO, since not long before they licensed Unix, the whole shebang, from SCO?
For that matter, why would Microsoft, a company not often known for noticing that companies have rights, ever make a show of shelling out money to small dying recently-purchased companies over then-obscure licensing of questionable legal standing?
I do not say MS is involved in this... it's risky as hell for a company of their standing, and doesn't quite fit their profile. But there's plenty of ammo for people who are already suspicious of the folks up in Redmond.
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Radio revolutionized communications, especially as it became more available to smaller companies. It made a wider range of ideas, music, and personalities available to the common person. Radios eventually became omnipresent - a nearly free (minor cost for a radio and power/batteries) outlet for on-demand contact with the outside world.
Radio's core problem, though, is that there is only a limited spectrum that's both electromagnetically effective and safe for human exposure at high power levels. Otherwise we'd be pulling power from the air instead of wire.
It's still in it's infancy, but I wouldn't be at all suprised if today's clumsy fledgling attempts at digital network-based radio will later be seen as heralding the birth of a whole new medium - same concept as radio, but even more available.
Cable tv, encrypted compressed signals over wire, made it possible to host hundreds (thousands?) of channels, and far cheaper to run them (no broadcasting, less infrastructure per station, etc). The end result: hundreds of channels of purile crap. And mixed in with all that crap are a good number of true gems that never would have seen the light of day in a world of pure airwave broadcasting. The public is now exposed to history, culture, technologies, and news that it never would have had access to before.
I think wifi radio is just one more step in the direction of providing a denser and low-cost medium for propagation of signal. Satelite radio as well (I say let em target regions - even neighborhoods, and let Clear Channel and others be-damned).
Any broadcast medium that brings down the cost of operation for the same general service is inherently a good thing - while it will introduce new content that isn't worth much, it will also allow a wider range of content, and make large-scale advertising income less of a driving survival requirement.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. KORP radio: 30 minutes of continuous top 10 big-studio hits, every hour on the hour.
What do we do for the disabled now? People can mail in their votes, under a variety of circumstances (being out of the country, serving in the military, not being in the regional vicinity of your specified polling station, etc).
I wouldn't have a problem with a controlled and limited home-voting system... something available in hardship cases only, much like mail-in votes. If someone has to apply and qualify for it, that's as good as someone who's willing to get out and cast their vote.
I just don't want to see whole sectors of the population kicking back at home and casting a quick vote. I don't oppose the concept of web voting, just the idea of it being commonplace.
There was a lot more to it than the Dean Scream. He constantly put his foot in his mouth, didn't think before he spoke, contradicted himself, changed his posi... errr, wait, is this about Bush or Dean? Either way, he was the "cool" candidate, the one that people would say they'd vote for in polls because they didn't think about it as hard. Once it came down to actually going somewhere with other people and deciding, they thought differently.
I believe people would put less thought into their votes if they were sitting back in an easy chair bouncing between their email, ICQ, and a voting site. It would also bring out all the idiots who don't care enough to vote, but find it so easy that they drop a few minutes of effort into it.
I can understand that people in obscure backwoods areas and unpopulated regions might find it a hardship to go vote... but the vast majority of the population is just squeamish about having to actually go out and do something like the generations before (who voted en masse back when it was much more of a hassle). If people don't care enough to go out and vote, do we really want them involved in the process?
We don't have to allow UN inspectors, because they're free to enter the country and observe the process first-hand. They might have trouble entering the polling stations, not being registered to vote, but they can sure as hell watch through the windows (where available), or talk to people as they leave.
Now, talking to people *before* they go in could cause some trouble. But we have a fairly transparent voting process compared to most countries, and observation is simply a matter of being in this country while it happens.
Every time the subject of electronic voting comes up, you hear people saying that polling stations themselves are part of the problem, or that we should be able to vote from the convenience of home or office.
I disagree. Vehemently.
Voting is somewhat of a ritual in many countries, especially the US. People will gladly talk about their politics, but ask them who they voted for and you usually get the cold shoulder. It's a private matter. You'd have better luck asking them how their bowels are doing. The polls themselves are nice and curtained or secluded, so no one can see. People bring their kids and let them watch, even let them do the final act of pressing the lever or button. There aren't many companies that aren't willing to let their people take a long lunch in order to go vote, and those that don't are not looked upon highly.
When it is your civic duty to periodically go to your official polling station, when you have to go to a specific place that you probably never go for any other reason, where you're around a large spectrum of people of all types that you might not otherwise be exposed to, and go specifically to cast your vote... it means a little more than simply hitting a website and picking the guy who you'd like to have lead.
The percentage of people who vote is truly sad, but it's not a good idea to fix it by making it TOO easy to vote. There must be at least a minimum of effort involved - a place to go, as long as it's reasonably easy to get to. The same place as all your neighbors. When you have to make an event of it, it tends to focus you more on what you're doing, and I've found that people become far less extreme in their politics when faced with this fact.
If you could vote from home, you'd put less thought into it. It would be one step closer to a news site poll, except THIS poll would make our final official selections. People wouldn't take it seriously enough. More people would vote, but the quality of those votes would not carry the same weight.
If the Primaries had been run over the web, I'm willing to bet Dean would have outdone his competition. But people were at an event, a political ritual, and that sobered them into making a more mature choice (though I think there were better people they could have chosen).
Voting should be readily available to the masses. It should be quick, efficient, and as infallible as we can safely make it. But it should also be an official civic act not taken lightly, and deffinitely never done from home.
All technical questions of security and validation aside, the concept of a quick and easy home solution for choosing our national leaders is not a good idea.
I don't think they ever went to full scale war against the Klingons... it was always more of a cold war, nothing too overt.
But, there was a war against the Romulans. And no telling who else there could have been a war against (looking at the world today, only knowing patches of history, who'd have thought we went to war with England not just once, but twice?)
All the best ST movies have (with one exception) been their darkest - and even Voyage Home had a pretty bleak undertone (goodbye Earth). On the other hand, their "cute" movies have also been their worst - and Nemesis proves they shouldn't try for a core bad guy until they can give us a good one (I was not impressed with Nemesis, but at least it helped drive away the bad taste of Insurrection's diarrhetic implosion).
As for Enterprise, regardless of it's ratings I think it's the best effort they've made since TNG's final season. It has the best characters (all have distinct flaws that aren't cute, which makes their finer aspects shine a little more). It has a dark and slightly twisted sense of humor I like. They do not always make the moral choice in the end, instead of always figuring out what's right by the end of the show. Their doctor is the first alien ST crewmember who seems to fit in as a castmember instead of the token alien.
And... it brings back some of the Blood, Booze, and Babes element that made the original last so long. When they fight, they fight like they mean it. Bodies fly out of gaping holes in the ship, there are redshirts all over the place, and sometimes they have to be cold and brutal just to survive, not to make a highhanded point.
I want to see a Star Trek movie that makes your brain twist... something approaching hard sci-fi, but not enough to drive people away. I want Arthur C Clarke to make me a Star Trek. Or, if they can ever get him to talk to them again, Harlan Ellison (who wrote their best episode, period). Something dark and bleak, where instead of being preachy, they tear their entire world apart and let them climb out of the wreckage.
I don't want a happy Star Trek movie. I don't want to hear Picard soliliquizing on philosophical matters like it was a pleasant tea party, or Riker worrying about his love life, or La Forge being bored with his job. I want to see all hell break loose, and characters who ACT like they're not having fun. And if the TNG guys get one more go, kill some of them off in acts of violence, not dramatic self-sacrifice. I want Shakespearean Tragedy, not As The Federation Turns.
Or maybe... just maybe... I'll be impressed if I see a title like "Star Trek: Holy War" or "Star Trek: Apocalypse"... not "Star Trek: Earl Grey, Hot".
What is all this fuss about?
People have been using webmail for years, and from what I've seen, it's become a great percentage of the email going back and forth. People leave a fairly good bit of mail there, going back pretty far if it's all text. The amount of space allocated has increased over time, which means they're being used... commonly... more and more as standard mail archives rather than just quickie anonymous email services.
All Google is doing is taking what people have already been doing, including many of the people on here, and expanding it beyond any reasonable sense of proportion.
And it will work. Because geeks love proportional reasonability failures.
While electronic voting may be the way of the future, I'm a lot more inclined to be conservative about the entire process. We're in far too great a rush to revolutionize a system that has always had problems, and always will (in one form or another).
The recent near-tie's and questionable results are more a matter of our own political divisiveness and extreme political stances.
That, and a publicly-audited voting system dashes all my hopes of winning the 2012 elections by underhanded means.
Naw, I think Thomas Edison still holds the patent on that, at least for the next few decades.
We're not allowed to export some of the mainstream encryption out there for national security reasons... So does this mean that, Australian or not, if a US individual or company exports this technology themselves, they get the thumbscrews?
So is this guy considered a respectable functionary at Nasa who provides insurance over an uncertain but scientifically-possible threat? ...
Or is he the guy who got stuck with the weird job? The sort of post they give someone who got caught stinking of the restroom one time too many?
I noticed this feature on Rackspace some time ago, and while I never felt the need to make use of it myself, I always thought it was a great idea. What I want to know is, what do you guys think of it... not as something many of the people here would want, but as a way to help guide potential customers. I've got a webhost I'm working on setting up, with my own infrastructure (doing my own code, and being utterly obsessive over it), and this is one of the features I have been seriously considering implementing (for as long as a year now?). If abused, it can be a bad thing, but if the policy is to simply answer questions and help potential clients work out what they need and if we have what they need, I see it as an excellent idea that can be made to serve the customer as much as the company investing time and manpower into it.
Didn't Microsoft enter into a fairly large investment in the newly remade SCO earlier this year, after the transfer? Last I heard, they're a fairly major investor in them right now, but do not claim to be involved in their new helmsman's business practices... which is reasonable.
Aren't they already a major stockholder in SCO, since not long before they licensed Unix, the whole shebang, from SCO? For that matter, why would Microsoft, a company not often known for noticing that companies have rights, ever make a show of shelling out money to small dying recently-purchased companies over then-obscure licensing of questionable legal standing? I do not say MS is involved in this... it's risky as hell for a company of their standing, and doesn't quite fit their profile. But there's plenty of ammo for people who are already suspicious of the folks up in Redmond.