I work as an IT consultant at a small but growing company, and there's a lot of nitpicking and culling before applicants even get a response to their resumes. One person took his rejection poorly and actually spends all day combing Craigslist and flagging our job postings. An employee left a post specifically aimed at him, which was responded to within -minutes-, with much ado and name-calling.
These people exist, and they can make your lives more difficult for no better reason than...unemployment.
Actually, the original proposed rise in temperature has been off by over 300%. We SHOULD act to reduce emissions, don't get me wrong. But even changes like the Kyoto Protocol are set to reduce warming by.04 degrees by 2100. That's 4 hundredths of a degree. Still important, to be sure. But not the end of life as we know it.
See, the great part of the eco argument is that if we reduce emissions and the planet keeps warming, it's cause we're too late. If we do or don't and the planet cools instead, that too is because of greenhouse emissions. If it stays just the way it is, its because we're balanced precariously and the next person to buy an SUV will push us over the cliff. Guess what? The climate will change next year. And the year after. And the next one. Up, down, side-to-side, etc. Sometimes it will be favorable to various people and places. Other times, not so much. Sometimes cute, furry animals will die or be displaced. Sometimes some random species of moss will dissapear. But the idea that the earth is gonna cook like an egg on a sidewalk because of emissions is rediculous. Even the disaster scenario of the jet stream and trade winds grinding to a halt has happenned before, naturally, many times. The planet recovered.
Again, there's a difference between 'allowing' (as if we have a choice) the earth to go through its natural cycles and 'preserving' it in exactly the state that it's been in for the past 200 years. Even if we had the choice to, it probably wouldn't be a good idea. Ever heard of oversteer? People watching the climate year by year and making sweeping assumptions are like the uninformed in the stock market - jumpy. Because all they have to look at are the past few weeks of trades, when in fact the patterns are much grander than that. People speak of 'permanent' glaciers and ice sheets - as if anything in our planet's history has been permanent.
Lastly, you have to look at the big picture in terms of humanity. It's hard to be more clear about this, because people seem to think that because our records stretch back 200 years, our initiative does too: probably the only thing that's growing faster than greenhouse gasses are the methods being used to combat the problem. It takes more than a year or two to make sweeping economic, social, and political transitions. I know that it's incredibly hard to grasp, but abandoning our economy overnight to preserve a future that we'll no longer have access to because our infrastructure will collapse is NOT a viable answer. These things take time, and we're closer now than we've ever been to sustainability. The only problem is that industry has been growing exponentially in the meantime. As the effects and technologies that have been put into place over the past few years sink in, and as the younger generation grows up in a way that's aware of and sensitive to emissions, things will change. We ARE acting. You think you could market a car shaped like a jellybean just because it was eco-freindly 20 years ago? (and don't say the VW Beetle - those things burned oil like their owners burned joints) But it takes time, and all the kicking and screaming in the world won't change that. Finger-pointing doesn't help the cause either.
As an aside (read: not in response to you, but others), I think that preserving the planet as best we can is our duty as (arguably) intelligent creatures. But I also think that there's a big difference between 'preservation' and natural states. What we want, in theory, is for the earth to continue as if we had no impact. That's NOT preservation. Change is the only constant, and if we're to accept our roles as 'brothers and sisters of our planet's other inhabitants' then we have to accept that things may change, and not always for the better.
But I absolutely agree that our impact needs to be minimized, and that global warming IS occuring. I just don't think we know what the causes are, or how they fit into the natural scheme of cooling and warming cycles. However, I'd prefer that my kids could enjoy swimming and, oh I dunno, BREATHING without decreasing their lifespan due to chemical pollutants. But demonizing industry is no better than demonizing eco-freaks.
Frankly, the way that we (collectively) were doing things 100 years ago, we COULD have gone on almost incessently WITHOUT causing too much damage to the earth. Take stripmining for instance. Horrible stuff, to be sure. But if it was all men with picks and shovels, our impact would be minimal. What we're grappling with now is the RECENT understanding that our technology gives us the potential for widespread destruction and, as a world and an economy, we're trying to deal with that. You've got people at GE spending BILLIONS of dollars to look into alternative energy, and people complain that it's not going fast enough. These things take time, and we should all be reasonable. This is humanity's first and (hopefully, but not necessarily) last time grappling with problems of impact. Everyone's learning along the way, and no one has definitive answers. That's all I'm saying.
Seriously guys. If you get a chance, look at the real data. Statistics are skewed on both sides of the battle. The major polluters have us NEVER causing any issue, and the eco-folks have the world ending in 10 years. Guess what - neither's really the case. Big shocker. We don't know NEARLY enough about climate to take stabs at the end result of all this. Several things are certain though: that last 'little ice age' was less than 200 years ago, and the current overall warming trend began before the industrial revolution, back when agrarian farming was the average way of life. Also, in many places around the globe, glaciers are still advancing...
...and, as far as 'accurate temperature recording' goes, the industrialized world account for about 90% of the monitoring equipment that figures like these are taken from - and yet comprises a small portion of overall landmass and population. We may be on a warming trend, but in a few (read:quite a few) years, everyone'll be wringing their hands as it gets cooler...
...and, as I tried to get posted to Slashdot proper, this is coming up before the Senate on this coming Tuesday, the 24th! According to the EFF's Analysis of the bill, "The broadcast flag would place TV shows in a DRM ghetto, where your right to copy, back-up, sell, time-shift or convert them into formats convenient to you would be at the whim of the broadcasters [while the] audio flag would give the FCC matching powers over "digital audio broadcasting," [possibly including podcasts and internet radio as well]. Fair use would be frozen into "customary historical use".
However, in response to this horrific proposal, the EFF has launched an action site where you can easily email your Senator and remind them that "users' rights zealots" pay their taxes just like everyone else. This is especially important for residents of "Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Massachussetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, or West Virginia." There are only days left, so drop a mail to your Senator! It won't take a minute, and could help sway some opinions. There's even a pre-typed form letter available (with a typo in paragraph 3), for those of you in a big hurry. I hate to bypass the Slashdot editorial process, but I think that the situation warrants it!
Ugh. Remind me never to eat anything out of your microwave.
MIT's already shown us some of the clandestine cell-phone tracking options available. With all the cameras, phones, retinal scanners, ID cards and genetic fingerprinting available in the coming years, why would they need RFID tags?
Hell, windows are a privacy risk. Just don't go outside, speak loudly, or use anything made later than Atari and you should be fine.
Robot recognizes self in mirror! Scientists jump gun! People astounded by misleading headlines!
I mean *I* recognize myself in the mirror, and I've been told plenty of times that I don't know how to express or interpret emotions.
Drugs kill. Sex kills. Rock kills. Hell, rocks kill. Poor health kills. Worrying about health kills. War, creation, experimentation, secession, religion and compulsion, they all kill. I'm killing Roberta Flack softly with my song. Name an activity, and SOMEone's died doing, pursuing, or in some cases directly after having done it. A few gamers go +2 berserk, and everyone gets all upset.
"Man drives racecar and is killed - drunk white people get all snot-nosed on each other!" sounds fine, but for some reason "Man dies because the glowing poisonous sword that was propping up the last remnants of his self-esteem was stolen by a freind," raises eyebrows. I've wanted to bludgeon my freinds over the head with a controller before for less.
I don't think it's quite as easy as us resting on our laurels and taking privacy for granted. You act as if people's privacy has never been an issue, and perhaps rightly so; mass, structured invasion of personal lives on this kind of scale has never been technologically feasible before. After all, it's not about their ability to tap the phones of 'evil doers' - they can do those things as it stands now. We're talking about the systematic profiling of every citizen. Of course, it's for 'our own protection.' We should be happy to have a government who wants to help us better ourselves on an individual basis, right? Like Santa...but creepy. Creepier.
We'll never have total privacy. God-willing, they'll never have uniform control. However, to act as if it doesn't matter because some control is deemed 'necessary' is pathetic. Privacy of this kind just hasn't been an issue before, and it doesn't take more than a glance at previous privacy infringements to know that it's easier to head these little 'protection' programs off before they gain too much steam.
Now, I don't think it's some conspiracy to control all the free-thinkers and transform us in pencil-pushing proles, but the argument is not with how these systems are ostensibly meant to be used. The fear has to do with likely misuse and mismanagement. Think about the witchhunts of the past. Sure, it's all well and good when there's total civilian transparency and it's being used to fight your enemies. But public favor is a fickle thing. What happens when it's turned on you?
Yes, a terrorist-seeking-whatchamajig sounds excellent. But even by today's standards, 99% of leads in any capacity are false. Do you really want some suit knowing your kids' school schedules and where you buy your coffee in the morning because you downloaded the Anarchist's Cookbook in 5th grade and got put on some watchlist? Giving up on privacy now ensures that by the time your own children are grown, they won't know any other way. Once we give it up, at least in a bureaucracy, it'll be gone for the interim, come hell or high water.
The way I figure it, most legal controls come down not even to ideals, but to attainable levels of human right. They're in constant shift based on public demand and political revision, but the fact is that you can usually ignore the letter of the law as long as you're obeying the spirit. You can go 5 miles over the limit, you can smoke a joint if you're careful about it. But why? Certainly not because bad things don't happen to good people. It has more to do with the fact that watching all the people all of the time is impossible, and so little fish get away as chaff while the mackerels draw all the attention. However, if you raise every fish with a hook in its mouth already, there's nothing to prevent you from pulling at will. And history tells us that whenever Joe Masses needs a scapegoat, we'll pull as many little fish as it takes to satisfy his blood-lust. That kind of power has NEVER been used to further people's individual freedoms.
You could argue that freedom does not demand privacy (nor vice-versa). Historically though, they've consistently grown in the same soil. Like I said, it'll never be perfect. But to ignore our own part in the balancing act between control and suppression will open us up to a world of hurt. Dismissing it is about the worst thing we could do.
You're forgetting that "our brave astronauts" are God-fearing, Freedom-spreading, flag-waving, hotdog-eating Nascar-watching honest-to-God American Christian space-missionaries...or so the story goes, depending on which administration's sending them up. Hence, if we don't put a chaplain onboard to marry them, they couldn't possibly be so vile as to have unwed sexual relations...right?
Oh, and who's worried about the logistics of sex in space? I'm more worried about the logistics of the cleanup. 30 months without sex is nothing compared to 30 months with "used" bedsheets...
First off, let me say that I agree that some shiny window borders aren't going to save Vista. However...
1)No wonder the experience with a stardock clone wears thin quickly. It's a stardock clone. It substitutes simple transparancy for DX9 shading techniques. I'm not suprised it's somewhat boring. While MS could definately be depending upon AeroGlass and some cluttered visual elements to draw people to Vista, I would argue that things are not what they seem. Not only will there surely be a lot of time spent polishing the look and feel of the final product including support for (and hopefully inclusion of) additional themes, the fact of the matter is that they're busy creating a graphical desktop standard that could be used in countless numbers of ways. You can argue that look-n-feel is a poor foot to sell an OS on, but the fact that you (and millions of others) have downloaded stardock says otherwise. "Oh, widgets and shiny buttons and transparancy are stupid and unnecessary for an OS! I get mine from 3rd party vendors! OSX is prettier!" is not a good argument.
2)Speaking of OSX, it's a solid, beautiful OS with many subtle advantages. But subtle customization and stability is not why it's sold so well. Argue this all you want, but the reality is that the vast majority of people flock to it for its beautiful layout (this does include ease of use and user experience, of course). The stability argument has been made, but anyone who has consistent trouble with pc stability is doing something wrong.
3)I can give you a darned good reason why most media players are minimalist - because they have to be. Running visual effects on the player while pushing video is problematic when it's all a hacked software-powered schema. With additional hardware comes additional options. WMP will of course come with many different skins, some of which will be big and bright to attract Joe User, and others which will surely use the Glass technique to become even more minimalistic and unobtrusive. Again, argue all you want that media player looks don't matter, and then go check out the hundreds of thousands of skins available - many of them attempting said software-based transparancy hacks. (Magic pink, anyone?)
I guess overall, I'm saying that Vista's going to be Microsoft's next entry into the OS market. Whether you think visual effects are necessary, cool, or just plain stupid doesn't matter - they're coming in next-gen OS's. If they didn't, you'd be pissed. The hardware-based visual schema will also allow for MUCH more effective and beautiful 3rd-party desktop apps. I agree that I'll spend much of my time with Vista disabling random stuff, and I AM scared to death that they'll bloat it without allowing me to disable enough elements, but I don't blame them for trying to deliver a better-looking product along with what is (finally) shaping up to be a faster, sleeker addition to the Windows family. Kudos, I say.
Now if they could only do something about that ugly taskbar...maybe a, I dunno, 'dock' or something... : D
People complaining about the greyscale and 'lack' of other various ding-dongs and features have got it all wrong. If you wanna play Doom3, you'll need a laptop (or better yet, a desktop:P). If you wanna watch movies, the same thing goes, or one of the many portable movie players now available. These devices are not FOR that kind of thing.
The point is that reading text in notepad or from a pdf file should NOT require my laptop to be plugging along, wasting precious battery life on ubiquitous yet completely unimportant colors and movement. It's text. E-paper will open up a VAST new range of functionality, AND people seem to be forgetting that it is viewable from all angles, can (eventually) be rolled or scrolled up when not in use, and (perhaps most importantly) combats the horrible eyestrain that comes from attempting to read a full-text novel on an lcd screen. This is basically solid-state text, a book that's only one page long yet contains all the works of Tolstoy. Haven't you been lusting for this forever? Its the future, people! How long before these things are equipped with Wi-Fi, and can download the day's New York Times automatically and without the environmental and industrial cost of millions of wasted sheets of paper? How long before you're checking your email in a format that's actually READABLE at small screen sizes? How long before e-paper ASCII porn becomes the bee's knees?:P
Also, its important to note that in those other towering industrial countries (ahem, you know, OUTSIDE of the US, where we got so much of our tech to begin with), small one-application devices are MUCH more common than full-out computers for the user-on-the-go. Considering that our cell phones can do basically anything BUT display readable text, having a device that can fill that gap is beautiful. And speaking of cell phones, I'd gladly go to a monochrome e-paper display for a phone that would last me 50hrs on a charged battery...while you're clapping all 'special-needs' at your 16-kajillion color screen for the first 5 hours of the road trip, I'll be functional till we're back home. All of this goes to combat the rediculous bass-ackwards element of high-end technology - that the simple things are many times as difficult and power-consuming as the complex.
We look at technology right now in terms of best and brightest. But e-paper is a tremendous step towards what technology WILL be - an integrated, scalable, and subtle extension of our biological lives. I have NO doubt that we've got a humanistic renaissance coming up in a few years here, and we'll look back on widescreen displays and "gotta-have-it" superficial devices in the same way we shake our heads at the oily, pastelled veneer of the 80's. When technology TRULY becomes a part of our lives, when function overtakes form, wasting timeenergymoney so that we can watch Scary Movie between classes is going to seem pretty sophomoric, yes?
...and making ebooks more popular will have resonating effects on the all-important world of copyright, so even you color-luvin' movie fetishists should take note.
Luckily, dolphins are notoriously poor dart-hunters...thank god they weren't armed with their requisite slingshots, which they've been known to use for highly ritualized "ethnic cleansings." Why do you think that most large semitic populations are inland?
Ahem...trained to shoot terrorists?! Is part of their plan to break our collective will coordinated attacks on Sea World and the nation's beaches?
"Sir, Officer Toodles noticed that you were wearing an especially bulky overcoat this July..."
Well that's the real danger, isn't it? I've thought about this a lot myself lately, and the conslusions are pretty obvious. People have noted before, usually in reference to bizzarre sexual fetishes, that the internet can justify people's otherwise off-kilter personality quirks by allowing them to contact groups that support the same beliefs. That's an easy one, but it obviously doesn't stop there.
Take, for instance, my ex-girlfriend (no really, take her! Ha.Yeah. Anyway...): she considered herself to be a huge environmental activist, and we were constantly arguing about the legitimacy of human behavior. She would, in essence, go to the library or online source, find a bunch of books by people who agreed with her opinions, read them, and use that as legitimacy of her thought process. Ya know, because a "Dr." prefix makes them right, automatically. There are plenty of intelligent people on all sides of most issues, and reading only the research by those who've come to the same conclusion of you is not only short-sighted - it's counter-productive to the learning process. The truth is almost always somewhere between the extremes of those who you agree with and those you don't.
Being in a cynical period for my feelings about people in general, this self-applauding tendency worries me. In a recent class on governmental comparison, our teacher used a chart to refute the idea that computers would someday irrevocably separate people from one another. It was a study of Brits, who were asked (gotta love those self-reporting studies) whether they felt effective in and informed about their government. The study compared their feelings to internet usage, and found that people who used the internet for long periods of time felt more efficacy when it came to their control over national government. In my opinion, this is a fallicy. Sure, it's easy to be better-informed because of access to online news, both national and international, but when it comes to efficacy itself, I find it hard to believe that people in newsgroups are (necessarily) more politically active than those that aren't.
Without going into the feelings of self-importance and pseudo-intellectualism that distant interaction allows people, my main fear is that so much energy is going into agreeing with one another that (this sounds Marxist, I know) the energy required to engage the government in a revolutionary sense may never build up! Will the anger and dissapointment ever reach critical mass when we're so busy applauding eachother's homogenous opinions? After all, in the case of environmentalism, how many oil tycoons are reading 'open letters to the industry?' Probably not a whole hulluva lot. So isn't that, in some sense, completely wasted energy? As another example, isn't the allowance of peaceful protest (which is a very important right, I agree) just a way to legitimize the current regime? When I see a group of teenagers playing guitar and bongo drums to get a political point across, I can't help but think that they're playing right into the WASP's hands. "There. You played yer guitar, you smoked yer reefer, now go home and feel like you can sleep easy because you've 'done something about it.'" In other words, I fear that small bursts of political energy may take away from the potency of what would, eventually, be a mass outcry.
While I agree that the 'net is a perfect social vehicle, I also think that way too much time is spent patting eachother's backs and accumulating whuffie, under the impression that it's actually making a difference to anyone but ourselves. The people that we intend to sting with our barbs have no idea we exist. Why? Because they're all busy on their own forums, agreeing with one another.
(By the way, I think that peaceful protest and the right to share and build upon one-another's opinions are very important things; I just also happen to think that we're too easy on ourselves and avoid exploring the benefits/costs of things that we've already made up our minds against because we don't get the same social/neurochemical kickback when people don't agree with us.)
Mom? Dad? It's time that I tell you guys something that, well, I'm frankly a little bit ashamed of.
You see, Oregon and I have been...freinds for a long time now, and recently we took our relationship to the next level. Despite our best contraceptive precautions (me wearing latex and her being, um, inanimate) we have concieved a magma-based bastard lovechild which, it is assumed, will be ostracized by the other kids in Oregon's public school system. This will probably be due to their single-minded "earth-science" courses, which can't possibly explain the existence of the overwhelming variation seen in today's geology! However, for now there are more pressing matters than the fight for Intelligent Topography.
According to modern psychogeological child-rearing theory, this peer rejection may set a course for him/her to become a raging, city-destroying monster. Or a stoned computer afficionado. As Kermit said, it's not easy being a glowing mass of illegitimate molton earth-spume.
Any help you can give will be appreciated. We will be registered at Saks Fifth Avenue and the Yellowstone Gift Shop.
Is that like the Futurama episode where the giant brains destroy the universe so that no more information can...ah. Of course, if history is any guide, "Groening's done it."
Slashdot Mirror
I work as an IT consultant at a small but growing company, and there's a lot of nitpicking and culling before applicants even get a response to their resumes. One person took his rejection poorly and actually spends all day combing Craigslist and flagging our job postings. An employee left a post specifically aimed at him, which was responded to within -minutes-, with much ado and name-calling. These people exist, and they can make your lives more difficult for no better reason than...unemployment.
Yeah, that caught my eye too. Who needs voice recognition when it can so obviously read you rinterest level/emotions. Maybe it reads lips as well?
See, the great part of the eco argument is that if we reduce emissions and the planet keeps warming, it's cause we're too late. If we do or don't and the planet cools instead, that too is because of greenhouse emissions. If it stays just the way it is, its because we're balanced precariously and the next person to buy an SUV will push us over the cliff. Guess what? The climate will change next year. And the year after. And the next one. Up, down, side-to-side, etc. Sometimes it will be favorable to various people and places. Other times, not so much. Sometimes cute, furry animals will die or be displaced. Sometimes some random species of moss will dissapear. But the idea that the earth is gonna cook like an egg on a sidewalk because of emissions is rediculous. Even the disaster scenario of the jet stream and trade winds grinding to a halt has happenned before, naturally, many times. The planet recovered.
Again, there's a difference between 'allowing' (as if we have a choice) the earth to go through its natural cycles and 'preserving' it in exactly the state that it's been in for the past 200 years. Even if we had the choice to, it probably wouldn't be a good idea. Ever heard of oversteer? People watching the climate year by year and making sweeping assumptions are like the uninformed in the stock market - jumpy. Because all they have to look at are the past few weeks of trades, when in fact the patterns are much grander than that. People speak of 'permanent' glaciers and ice sheets - as if anything in our planet's history has been permanent.
Lastly, you have to look at the big picture in terms of humanity. It's hard to be more clear about this, because people seem to think that because our records stretch back 200 years, our initiative does too: probably the only thing that's growing faster than greenhouse gasses are the methods being used to combat the problem. It takes more than a year or two to make sweeping economic, social, and political transitions. I know that it's incredibly hard to grasp, but abandoning our economy overnight to preserve a future that we'll no longer have access to because our infrastructure will collapse is NOT a viable answer. These things take time, and we're closer now than we've ever been to sustainability. The only problem is that industry has been growing exponentially in the meantime. As the effects and technologies that have been put into place over the past few years sink in, and as the younger generation grows up in a way that's aware of and sensitive to emissions, things will change. We ARE acting. You think you could market a car shaped like a jellybean just because it was eco-freindly 20 years ago? (and don't say the VW Beetle - those things burned oil like their owners burned joints) But it takes time, and all the kicking and screaming in the world won't change that. Finger-pointing doesn't help the cause either.
As an aside (read: not in response to you, but others), I think that preserving the planet as best we can is our duty as (arguably) intelligent creatures. But I also think that there's a big difference between 'preservation' and natural states. What we want, in theory, is for the earth to continue as if we had no impact. That's NOT preservation. Change is the only constant, and if we're to accept our roles as 'brothers and sisters of our planet's other inhabitants' then we have to accept that things may change, and not always for the better.
But I absolutely agree that our impact needs to be minimized, and that global warming IS occuring. I just don't think we know what the causes are, or how they fit into the natural scheme of cooling and warming cycles. However, I'd prefer that my kids could enjoy swimming and, oh I dunno, BREATHING without decreasing their lifespan due to chemical pollutants. But demonizing industry is no better than demonizing eco-freaks.
Frankly, the way that we (collectively) were doing things 100 years ago, we COULD have gone on almost incessently WITHOUT causing too much damage to the earth. Take stripmining for instance. Horrible stuff, to be sure. But if it was all men with picks and shovels, our impact would be minimal. What we're grappling with now is the RECENT understanding that our technology gives us the potential for widespread destruction and, as a world and an economy, we're trying to deal with that. You've got people at GE spending BILLIONS of dollars to look into alternative energy, and people complain that it's not going fast enough. These things take time, and we should all be reasonable. This is humanity's first and (hopefully, but not necessarily) last time grappling with problems of impact. Everyone's learning along the way, and no one has definitive answers. That's all I'm saying.
Seriously, take the time to do some real reading.
...and, as far as 'accurate temperature recording' goes, the industrialized world account for about 90% of the monitoring equipment that figures like these are taken from - and yet comprises a small portion of overall landmass and population. We may be on a warming trend, but in a few (read:quite a few) years, everyone'll be wringing their hands as it gets cooler...
However, in response to this horrific proposal, the EFF has launched an action site where you can easily email your Senator and remind them that "users' rights zealots" pay their taxes just like everyone else. This is especially important for residents of "Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Massachussetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, or West Virginia." There are only days left, so drop a mail to your Senator! It won't take a minute, and could help sway some opinions. There's even a pre-typed form letter available (with a typo in paragraph 3), for those of you in a big hurry. I hate to bypass the Slashdot editorial process, but I think that the situation warrants it!
Ugh. Remind me never to eat anything out of your microwave. MIT's already shown us some of the clandestine cell-phone tracking options available. With all the cameras, phones, retinal scanners, ID cards and genetic fingerprinting available in the coming years, why would they need RFID tags? Hell, windows are a privacy risk. Just don't go outside, speak loudly, or use anything made later than Atari and you should be fine.
Robot recognizes self in mirror! Scientists jump gun! People astounded by misleading headlines! I mean *I* recognize myself in the mirror, and I've been told plenty of times that I don't know how to express or interpret emotions.
"Man drives racecar and is killed - drunk white people get all snot-nosed on each other!" sounds fine, but for some reason "Man dies because the glowing poisonous sword that was propping up the last remnants of his self-esteem was stolen by a freind," raises eyebrows. I've wanted to bludgeon my freinds over the head with a controller before for less.
I don't think it's quite as easy as us resting on our laurels and taking privacy for granted. You act as if people's privacy has never been an issue, and perhaps rightly so; mass, structured invasion of personal lives on this kind of scale has never been technologically feasible before. After all, it's not about their ability to tap the phones of 'evil doers' - they can do those things as it stands now. We're talking about the systematic profiling of every citizen. Of course, it's for 'our own protection.' We should be happy to have a government who wants to help us better ourselves on an individual basis, right? Like Santa...but creepy. Creepier.
We'll never have total privacy. God-willing, they'll never have uniform control. However, to act as if it doesn't matter because some control is deemed 'necessary' is pathetic. Privacy of this kind just hasn't been an issue before, and it doesn't take more than a glance at previous privacy infringements to know that it's easier to head these little 'protection' programs off before they gain too much steam.
Now, I don't think it's some conspiracy to control all the free-thinkers and transform us in pencil-pushing proles, but the argument is not with how these systems are ostensibly meant to be used. The fear has to do with likely misuse and mismanagement. Think about the witchhunts of the past. Sure, it's all well and good when there's total civilian transparency and it's being used to fight your enemies. But public favor is a fickle thing. What happens when it's turned on you?
Yes, a terrorist-seeking-whatchamajig sounds excellent. But even by today's standards, 99% of leads in any capacity are false. Do you really want some suit knowing your kids' school schedules and where you buy your coffee in the morning because you downloaded the Anarchist's Cookbook in 5th grade and got put on some watchlist? Giving up on privacy now ensures that by the time your own children are grown, they won't know any other way. Once we give it up, at least in a bureaucracy, it'll be gone for the interim, come hell or high water.
The way I figure it, most legal controls come down not even to ideals, but to attainable levels of human right. They're in constant shift based on public demand and political revision, but the fact is that you can usually ignore the letter of the law as long as you're obeying the spirit. You can go 5 miles over the limit, you can smoke a joint if you're careful about it. But why? Certainly not because bad things don't happen to good people. It has more to do with the fact that watching all the people all of the time is impossible, and so little fish get away as chaff while the mackerels draw all the attention. However, if you raise every fish with a hook in its mouth already, there's nothing to prevent you from pulling at will. And history tells us that whenever Joe Masses needs a scapegoat, we'll pull as many little fish as it takes to satisfy his blood-lust. That kind of power has NEVER been used to further people's individual freedoms.
You could argue that freedom does not demand privacy (nor vice-versa). Historically though, they've consistently grown in the same soil. Like I said, it'll never be perfect. But to ignore our own part in the balancing act between control and suppression will open us up to a world of hurt. Dismissing it is about the worst thing we could do.
Oh, and who's worried about the logistics of sex in space? I'm more worried about the logistics of the cleanup. 30 months without sex is nothing compared to 30 months with "used" bedsheets...
1)No wonder the experience with a stardock clone wears thin quickly. It's a stardock clone. It substitutes simple transparancy for DX9 shading techniques. I'm not suprised it's somewhat boring. While MS could definately be depending upon AeroGlass and some cluttered visual elements to draw people to Vista, I would argue that things are not what they seem. Not only will there surely be a lot of time spent polishing the look and feel of the final product including support for (and hopefully inclusion of) additional themes, the fact of the matter is that they're busy creating a graphical desktop standard that could be used in countless numbers of ways. You can argue that look-n-feel is a poor foot to sell an OS on, but the fact that you (and millions of others) have downloaded stardock says otherwise. "Oh, widgets and shiny buttons and transparancy are stupid and unnecessary for an OS! I get mine from 3rd party vendors! OSX is prettier!" is not a good argument.
2)Speaking of OSX, it's a solid, beautiful OS with many subtle advantages. But subtle customization and stability is not why it's sold so well. Argue this all you want, but the reality is that the vast majority of people flock to it for its beautiful layout (this does include ease of use and user experience, of course). The stability argument has been made, but anyone who has consistent trouble with pc stability is doing something wrong.
3)I can give you a darned good reason why most media players are minimalist - because they have to be. Running visual effects on the player while pushing video is problematic when it's all a hacked software-powered schema. With additional hardware comes additional options. WMP will of course come with many different skins, some of which will be big and bright to attract Joe User, and others which will surely use the Glass technique to become even more minimalistic and unobtrusive. Again, argue all you want that media player looks don't matter, and then go check out the hundreds of thousands of skins available - many of them attempting said software-based transparancy hacks. (Magic pink, anyone?)
I guess overall, I'm saying that Vista's going to be Microsoft's next entry into the OS market. Whether you think visual effects are necessary, cool, or just plain stupid doesn't matter - they're coming in next-gen OS's. If they didn't, you'd be pissed. The hardware-based visual schema will also allow for MUCH more effective and beautiful 3rd-party desktop apps. I agree that I'll spend much of my time with Vista disabling random stuff, and I AM scared to death that they'll bloat it without allowing me to disable enough elements, but I don't blame them for trying to deliver a better-looking product along with what is (finally) shaping up to be a faster, sleeker addition to the Windows family. Kudos, I say.
Now if they could only do something about that ugly taskbar...maybe a, I dunno, 'dock' or something... : D
The point is that reading text in notepad or from a pdf file should NOT require my laptop to be plugging along, wasting precious battery life on ubiquitous yet completely unimportant colors and movement. It's text. E-paper will open up a VAST new range of functionality, AND people seem to be forgetting that it is viewable from all angles, can (eventually) be rolled or scrolled up when not in use, and (perhaps most importantly) combats the horrible eyestrain that comes from attempting to read a full-text novel on an lcd screen. This is basically solid-state text, a book that's only one page long yet contains all the works of Tolstoy. Haven't you been lusting for this forever? Its the future, people! How long before these things are equipped with Wi-Fi, and can download the day's New York Times automatically and without the environmental and industrial cost of millions of wasted sheets of paper? How long before you're checking your email in a format that's actually READABLE at small screen sizes? How long before e-paper ASCII porn becomes the bee's knees? :P
Also, its important to note that in those other towering industrial countries (ahem, you know, OUTSIDE of the US, where we got so much of our tech to begin with), small one-application devices are MUCH more common than full-out computers for the user-on-the-go. Considering that our cell phones can do basically anything BUT display readable text, having a device that can fill that gap is beautiful. And speaking of cell phones, I'd gladly go to a monochrome e-paper display for a phone that would last me 50hrs on a charged battery...while you're clapping all 'special-needs' at your 16-kajillion color screen for the first 5 hours of the road trip, I'll be functional till we're back home. All of this goes to combat the rediculous bass-ackwards element of high-end technology - that the simple things are many times as difficult and power-consuming as the complex.
We look at technology right now in terms of best and brightest. But e-paper is a tremendous step towards what technology WILL be - an integrated, scalable, and subtle extension of our biological lives. I have NO doubt that we've got a humanistic renaissance coming up in a few years here, and we'll look back on widescreen displays and "gotta-have-it" superficial devices in the same way we shake our heads at the oily, pastelled veneer of the 80's. When technology TRULY becomes a part of our lives, when function overtakes form, wasting timeenergymoney so that we can watch Scary Movie between classes is going to seem pretty sophomoric, yes?
Ahem...trained to shoot terrorists?! Is part of their plan to break our collective will coordinated attacks on Sea World and the nation's beaches?
"Sir, Officer Toodles noticed that you were wearing an especially bulky overcoat this July..."
Take, for instance, my ex-girlfriend (no really, take her! Ha.Yeah. Anyway...): she considered herself to be a huge environmental activist, and we were constantly arguing about the legitimacy of human behavior. She would, in essence, go to the library or online source, find a bunch of books by people who agreed with her opinions, read them, and use that as legitimacy of her thought process. Ya know, because a "Dr." prefix makes them right, automatically. There are plenty of intelligent people on all sides of most issues, and reading only the research by those who've come to the same conclusion of you is not only short-sighted - it's counter-productive to the learning process. The truth is almost always somewhere between the extremes of those who you agree with and those you don't.
Being in a cynical period for my feelings about people in general, this self-applauding tendency worries me. In a recent class on governmental comparison, our teacher used a chart to refute the idea that computers would someday irrevocably separate people from one another. It was a study of Brits, who were asked (gotta love those self-reporting studies) whether they felt effective in and informed about their government. The study compared their feelings to internet usage, and found that people who used the internet for long periods of time felt more efficacy when it came to their control over national government. In my opinion, this is a fallicy. Sure, it's easy to be better-informed because of access to online news, both national and international, but when it comes to efficacy itself, I find it hard to believe that people in newsgroups are (necessarily) more politically active than those that aren't.
Without going into the feelings of self-importance and pseudo-intellectualism that distant interaction allows people, my main fear is that so much energy is going into agreeing with one another that (this sounds Marxist, I know) the energy required to engage the government in a revolutionary sense may never build up! Will the anger and dissapointment ever reach critical mass when we're so busy applauding eachother's homogenous opinions? After all, in the case of environmentalism, how many oil tycoons are reading 'open letters to the industry?' Probably not a whole hulluva lot. So isn't that, in some sense, completely wasted energy? As another example, isn't the allowance of peaceful protest (which is a very important right, I agree) just a way to legitimize the current regime? When I see a group of teenagers playing guitar and bongo drums to get a political point across, I can't help but think that they're playing right into the WASP's hands. "There. You played yer guitar, you smoked yer reefer, now go home and feel like you can sleep easy because you've 'done something about it.'" In other words, I fear that small bursts of political energy may take away from the potency of what would, eventually, be a mass outcry.
While I agree that the 'net is a perfect social vehicle, I also think that way too much time is spent patting eachother's backs and accumulating whuffie, under the impression that it's actually making a difference to anyone but ourselves. The people that we intend to sting with our barbs have no idea we exist. Why? Because they're all busy on their own forums, agreeing with one another.
(By the way, I think that peaceful protest and the right to share and build upon one-another's opinions are very important things; I just also happen to think that we're too easy on ourselves and avoid exploring the benefits/costs of things that we've already made up our minds against because we don't get the same social/neurochemical kickback when people don't agree with us.)
You see, Oregon and I have been...freinds for a long time now, and recently we took our relationship to the next level. Despite our best contraceptive precautions (me wearing latex and her being, um, inanimate) we have concieved a magma-based bastard lovechild which, it is assumed, will be ostracized by the other kids in Oregon's public school system. This will probably be due to their single-minded "earth-science" courses, which can't possibly explain the existence of the overwhelming variation seen in today's geology! However, for now there are more pressing matters than the fight for Intelligent Topography.
According to modern psychogeological child-rearing theory, this peer rejection may set a course for him/her to become a raging, city-destroying monster. Or a stoned computer afficionado. As Kermit said, it's not easy being a glowing mass of illegitimate molton earth-spume.
Any help you can give will be appreciated. We will be registered at Saks Fifth Avenue and the Yellowstone Gift Shop.
Is that like the Futurama episode where the giant brains destroy the universe so that no more information can...ah. Of course, if history is any guide, "Groening's done it."
--------
Spacemen won't be green. They'll be white...and Republican.
(...so I really WILL need a giant, luminescent keyboard to communicate with them.)
(1) Where do these...um, wary consumers live?
and
(2) Do they secure the lids to their dumpsters?
I call dibs.
-----------
One man's trash is another man's server...
Scary...reminds me of Tachikomas...
waits patiently for Sun's servers to recover
I say we change it to SlashDDoS.