This is another form of robotification: creating plants that will produce more crop. Work less and produce more. But noone knows what influence will they have on the environment.
You are damn right. So much technological progress but we know almost nothing about our brain. We understand how 20 million transistors work together to form a computer but we do not have any idea what makes us love or hate each other.
It is only the environment that changed in the past 100 years not peoples lives. Just take the following basic stuff: love, work, power, friendship, kids, getting old, etc. Now people have the same problems, or similar problems in different context. Technology does not really change our lives, it changes only the circumstances.
Just like hoping to get your favourite pancake in a nicer packaging next year. Lets say easier to open box, instant delivery... is there anyone out there believing this would mean a significant change in his life? Yes, unfortunately...
Maybe longer life will maintain ratios. 100 years ago people started their own life at 18 (living on your own, getting married, etc) and died at 50-60. Today people live 70 and they start their own life at 25.
When we will live 300 years we will not be allowed to have sex until 40...shit dude...
Seriously, though, will we be able to actually pinpoint a time and say 'this is when the Singularity occurred'?
There was a scene in the film Hitchhikers galaxy to the universe where they created a super-super-computer to answer the ultimate question. After waiting a couple billion years, the computer came out with the answer 42. The problem was that they did not even know the ultimate question so the computer came out with a random answer.
Humanity does not know what they want. Just like power, or money: as you have some you want more and more. There is no stop-sign. So there is no Singularity, unless a miracle happens and God proves his existence by sending a mass extintion command to earth (flood, huge fire, etc etc).
The US created it so the US have the right to owe it. [end of sentence]
Freaking capitalist ideology...the US created, offered it to the world and world adopted it. Today the world depends on the internet and it is normal that they just do not want a single political entity to have full control over it.
Youre right. According to/. MS patents are always bad while Google patents bring good future.
Patents are not always bad. Indeed, patents make the economy / technology step forward. Letting companies [inventors] get a patent on their invention is like a guarantee that noone else will steal their idea. Knowing that I will be able to patent my invention, I have the guarantee that noone else will copy that product so I much likely invest a larger amount of money [work] to make it better.
Not being able to patent my work lets me think that I work 5 years to invent something and when its ready other companies just take the whole idea and use it.
Software patents are a little more delicate and this is what the EU government understands. Due to the lack of software patents many European software engineers move to the US: they can patent their work and get more money. I believe that you should be able to patent a cool algorithm (like Googles PageRank or whatever it is called) but you should not be allowed to patent Hello world. The fact that MS could patent so many and so common, widely used ideas is just a weakness of the US patent policy.
The document format does not really matter but open document format would allow companies to easily switch from one editor to another being sure that the new editor will be compatible with all their previous documents.
Many Linux-fans are facing this kind of question when they try to convince their CEO to switch to Linux:
CEO: - Hey dude, what about all of those Word and (s)Excel docs, I will not be able to use them anymore!
Geek: - Yes, you will be able to use them.
CEO: - You stupid asshole, how dare you tell me that Linux can open Windows documents?
The people at the company I work for uses only a browser, IM and text editing soft on their computers: IE/Firefox, Yahoo Messenger, Word and Excel. Though there is no big difference in using similar programs in Linux I could not convince them to switch to Linux. It doesn't really matter if it costs or it's free but they are used to work in Windows.
However, it gave me headache even convincing them to switch to Firefox. I succeeded only when some viruses invaded the network and they lost some data. I said it's because they used IE and if they switch to Firefox this won't happen again. Now they are happy with Firefox and having a hard time when they have to use IE for some reason.
The same with Linux: once convinced to spend a few days / weeks with getting used to Linux, they would be happy with it. But I need a good argument to convince them... and I need a stable and much more user friendly Linux desktop than the ones on the market.
Nature documentaries are gaining more and more attention: Winged migration and Microcosmos were really successful films and the Deep blue was extremely well received in Germany.
Of course the profit of these films will attract more and more producing companies to invest in nature documentaries: I bet there will be no long delay until the next one.
- yeah, i know, my englisk sucks
- my english also
Most of the Slashdot members say that P2P SHOULD be legal. Let's see how somebody working in the film industry sees this.
A VERY low budget film costs around one million euros / dollars, whatever. 5 million is still low budget. Of course every film has a pretty good income, let's say our film has 100 million euros income. Around 65% remains at the exhibitor (the cinema operating company). There is 35% (35 mil) going to the distributor. 50% of this goes to the sales agent (17.5 mil) and around 85% of this goes to the producing companies (~15%). So around 15% of the gross box office reaches the producing companies, which is not that much! It is VERY rare that a 1 mil budget film has 100 mil GBO (100:1), companies are glad even with 1:1. Of course there are other income sources, such as TV sales, DVD rental and sales and many other.
The fact is that most of the European films would mean sure bankruptcy without government's subsidies. In the UK the film industry is subsidied from lottery money, in France from taxpayer's money; every country has different sources and strategies to subsidie the "seventh art".
How is this related to P2P? Don't tell me you don't know. Everbody want to watch / own their favourite films without paying a freaking buck. Divx, Xvid formats are suitable both for quick downloading, storing (6 movies on a dvd), both for home screening (computer, tv, digital projector).
It would be obvious that conclude that P2P and piracy creates the possibility that people watch all the movies at home and don't go to cinema / don't buy dvds, but... last month we released a two year old film, you could find it everywhere on the illegal market (including p2p), it was aired AT THE SAME TIME on TV and...it had pretty good addmissions! This (among other things) led us to the conclusion that people do not go to cinema to see THIS film but to go spend their free time, to go somewhere else than home. Just like coffe or beer: you can drink it at home (with or without your friends) and you can go to a much more expensive cafe or bar to drink it. And don't tell me that bars would have a lot more clients if you couldn't buy beer for home: only the number of beers drank would be much lower.
Sometimes P2P and piracy drives me mad that we have less addmissions, sometimes it makes me glad that people who wouldn't otherwise go to cinema have the possibility to watch that gorgeous film.
The article states that work at home is better than at workplace - you can't generalize like that, it's just that some people perform better at a workplace, others at home.
Though I believe floppies suck, I still got to use them because they do really work everywhere. I wish everybody used usb sticks or something else -- but for the moment I have to use damn floppies.
-- is this valid only for Eastern Europe?
holy shiite, i wanna live in the real world, not in an lcd-covered matrix-like house! i wanna see the sun, the _real_ sun, my freaking neighbours, the dirty street and so on. i want nature to control my life better than me to control nature.
It's nice to get a 5G 'memory card' for just $250. But does this microdrive suck the battery faster than regular flash memory card? This is quite an important issue because - as far as I know - digicams and batteries 'hate each other'.
Why is gambling sinful? Every dumb should have the right to risk his money. Every dumb can see that, in average, those machines will NOT pay more than people put in ("97% slot machines"). Every mature man is supposed to be able to think a little bit and realize that - something like - 97% of the gamblers LOSES and only 3% WINS. Anybody should be free to take this risk.
In China, there are DAILY 154.000 new companies registered and DAILY 150.000 bankrupt. But people still take the risk to start a company and risk everything they have.
You're right, gambling can not be compared with business.
Well I believe routing protocols should be the first to change. And one HTTP request should be able to transmit more than one files, e.g. ten images besides shit.html. And so on and so on and so on...
One of the few failures of the american democracy is that the president has too much power. Noone in the world should be allowed to have too much power, every important decision should be discussed between "many big brains".
Look how Norway has its government structured: there is the parliament - or goverment - and there is the King. The king practically has no word in governing the country; he is just a symbol, to represent the country at important meetings: but not politically.
Americans vote for a party and a president. And because so much depends on the president many of them vote Kerry just because they wanna kick Bush's ass. If if wasn't important who is the president probably at least 30% of the americans would vote their favourite party and probably their favourite party would not be the republican and democrat one. I bet now there are a couple other parties but they can't get more than a few percents in the government because "people vote the republicans just to kick democrat's ass".
Romania does not such a cool government structure as Norway but still the two leading parties have about 30-40% and the other 5 parties share the remaining 30-40%. Well Romanian government structure is fucked up because they made a juicy mixture of the french and the american model. Why? Because they like France so they wanna lick their ass and the wanna lick US ass because the US is the strongest country in the world.
Whatever...I believe it's not good to give somebody so much power as the US president has.
Slashdot Mirror
We tend not to think of negative utopias...see it is already happening...
Do you mean GM organisms? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_ organism
This is another form of robotification: creating plants that will produce more crop. Work less and produce more. But noone knows what influence will they have on the environment.
You are damn right. So much technological progress but we know almost nothing about our brain. We understand how 20 million transistors work together to form a computer but we do not have any idea what makes us love or hate each other.
It is only the environment that changed in the past 100 years not peoples lives. Just take the following basic stuff: love, work, power, friendship, kids, getting old, etc. Now people have the same problems, or similar problems in different context. Technology does not really change our lives, it changes only the circumstances.
Just like hoping to get your favourite pancake in a nicer packaging next year. Lets say easier to open box, instant delivery... is there anyone out there believing this would mean a significant change in his life? Yes, unfortunately...
Maybe longer life will maintain ratios. 100 years ago people started their own life at 18 (living on your own, getting married, etc) and died at 50-60. Today people live 70 and they start their own life at 25.
When we will live 300 years we will not be allowed to have sex until 40...shit dude...
Imagine getting laid with your new 120-year old girlfriend.
You can be lucky to have this young lady!
Seriously, though, will we be able to actually pinpoint a time and say 'this is when the Singularity occurred'?
There was a scene in the film Hitchhikers galaxy to the universe where they created a super-super-computer to answer the ultimate question. After waiting a couple billion years, the computer came out with the answer 42. The problem was that they did not even know the ultimate question so the computer came out with a random answer.
Humanity does not know what they want. Just like power, or money: as you have some you want more and more. There is no stop-sign. So there is no Singularity, unless a miracle happens and God proves his existence by sending a mass extintion command to earth (flood, huge fire, etc etc).
The US created it so the US have the right to owe it. [end of sentence]
Freaking capitalist ideology...the US created, offered it to the world and world adopted it. Today the world depends on the internet and it is normal that they just do not want a single political entity to have full control over it.
The U.S. has shown no signs of censoring the internet at the DNS level.
/ 08/1239221&tid=95&tid=219
If ICANN would be politically independent the iraqi TLD would be operated by an iraqi organization.
See http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09
Youre right. According to /. MS patents are always bad while Google patents bring good future.
Patents are not always bad. Indeed, patents make the economy / technology step forward. Letting companies [inventors] get a patent on their invention is like a guarantee that noone else will steal their idea. Knowing that I will be able to patent my invention, I have the guarantee that noone else will copy that product so I much likely invest a larger amount of money [work] to make it better.
Not being able to patent my work lets me think that I work 5 years to invent something and when its ready other companies just take the whole idea and use it.
Software patents are a little more delicate and this is what the EU government understands. Due to the lack of software patents many European software engineers move to the US: they can patent their work and get more money. I believe that you should be able to patent a cool algorithm (like Googles PageRank or whatever it is called) but you should not be allowed to patent Hello world. The fact that MS could patent so many and so common, widely used ideas is just a weakness of the US patent policy.
The document format does not really matter but open document format would allow companies to easily switch from one editor to another being sure that the new editor will be compatible with all their previous documents.
Many Linux-fans are facing this kind of question when they try to convince their CEO to switch to Linux:
CEO: - Hey dude, what about all of those Word and (s)Excel docs, I will not be able to use them anymore!
Geek: - Yes, you will be able to use them.
CEO: - You stupid asshole, how dare you tell me that Linux can open Windows documents?
The people at the company I work for uses only a browser, IM and text editing soft on their computers: IE/Firefox, Yahoo Messenger, Word and Excel. Though there is no big difference in using similar programs in Linux I could not convince them to switch to Linux. It doesn't really matter if it costs or it's free but they are used to work in Windows.
However, it gave me headache even convincing them to switch to Firefox. I succeeded only when some viruses invaded the network and they lost some data. I said it's because they used IE and if they switch to Firefox this won't happen again. Now they are happy with Firefox and having a hard time when they have to use IE for some reason.
The same with Linux: once convinced to spend a few days / weeks with getting used to Linux, they would be happy with it. But I need a good argument to convince them... and I need a stable and much more user friendly Linux desktop than the ones on the market.
Howl's moving castle is NOT HOLLYWOOD. Would you please not to blame Mr. Hayao Miyazaki with dealing with Crappywood.
There is some Hollywood in the movie, the English dubbing was made by Walt Disney but fortunately that's all.
- yeah, i know, my englisk sucks
- my english also
What makes you think it's mainly children who go see this movie?
I can't prove but I strongly believe 20-40 aged people bought most of the tickets.
- yeah, i know, my englisk sucks
- my english also
Nature documentaries are gaining more and more attention: Winged migration and Microcosmos were really successful films and the Deep blue was extremely well received in Germany.
Of course the profit of these films will attract more and more producing companies to invest in nature documentaries: I bet there will be no long delay until the next one.
- yeah, i know, my englisk sucks
- my english also
Most of the Slashdot members say that P2P SHOULD be legal. Let's see how somebody working in the film industry sees this.
...my english also
A VERY low budget film costs around one million euros / dollars, whatever. 5 million is still low budget. Of course every film has a pretty good income, let's say our film has 100 million euros income. Around 65% remains at the exhibitor (the cinema operating company). There is 35% (35 mil) going to the distributor. 50% of this goes to the sales agent (17.5 mil) and around 85% of this goes to the producing companies (~15%). So around 15% of the gross box office reaches the producing companies, which is not that much! It is VERY rare that a 1 mil budget film has 100 mil GBO (100:1), companies are glad even with 1:1. Of course there are other income sources, such as TV sales, DVD rental and sales and many other.
The fact is that most of the European films would mean sure bankruptcy without government's subsidies. In the UK the film industry is subsidied from lottery money, in France from taxpayer's money; every country has different sources and strategies to subsidie the "seventh art".
How is this related to P2P? Don't tell me you don't know. Everbody want to watch / own their favourite films without paying a freaking buck. Divx, Xvid formats are suitable both for quick downloading, storing (6 movies on a dvd), both for home screening (computer, tv, digital projector).
It would be obvious that conclude that P2P and piracy creates the possibility that people watch all the movies at home and don't go to cinema / don't buy dvds, but... last month we released a two year old film, you could find it everywhere on the illegal market (including p2p), it was aired AT THE SAME TIME on TV and...it had pretty good addmissions! This (among other things) led us to the conclusion that people do not go to cinema to see THIS film but to go spend their free time, to go somewhere else than home. Just like coffe or beer: you can drink it at home (with or without your friends) and you can go to a much more expensive cafe or bar to drink it. And don't tell me that bars would have a lot more clients if you couldn't buy beer for home: only the number of beers drank would be much lower.
Sometimes P2P and piracy drives me mad that we have less addmissions, sometimes it makes me glad that people who wouldn't otherwise go to cinema have the possibility to watch that gorgeous film.
- yeah, i know, my englisk sucks
The article states that work at home is better than at workplace - you can't generalize like that, it's just that some people perform better at a workplace, others at home.
Though I believe floppies suck, I still got to use them because they do really work everywhere. I wish everybody used usb sticks or something else -- but for the moment I have to use damn floppies. -- is this valid only for Eastern Europe?
holy shiite, i wanna live in the real world, not in an lcd-covered matrix-like house! i wanna see the sun, the _real_ sun, my freaking neighbours, the dirty street and so on. i want nature to control my life better than me to control nature.
--yeah, i know, my english sucks
Most digital cameras are able to shot 600x400-like 30 fps movies. You mean this is impossible with this microdrive thing?
--yeah, i know, my english sucks
It's nice to get a 5G 'memory card' for just $250. But does this microdrive suck the battery faster than regular flash memory card? This is quite an important issue because - as far as I know - digicams and batteries 'hate each other'.
-- yeah, i know, my english sucks
Why is gambling sinful? Every dumb should have the right to risk his money. Every dumb can see that, in average, those machines will NOT pay more than people put in ("97% slot machines"). Every mature man is supposed to be able to think a little bit and realize that - something like - 97% of the gamblers LOSES and only 3% WINS. Anybody should be free to take this risk.
In China, there are DAILY 154.000 new companies registered and DAILY 150.000 bankrupt. But people still take the risk to start a company and risk everything they have.
You're right, gambling can not be compared with business.
-- yeah, i know, my english sucks
Well I believe routing protocols should be the first to change. And one HTTP request should be able to transmit more than one files, e.g. ten images besides shit.html. And so on and so on and so on...
Yes, you're right about the PM. This is another bad situation. I still don't agree anybody to have so much power in his hand.
I hate politics.
-- yeah, i know, my english sucks.
This sounds like "death is good because it makes us appreciate life"...
Non-security is a thing we don't like, so of course we want to get rid of it.
-----
yeah, my englisk sucks
One of the few failures of the american democracy is that the president has too much power. Noone in the world should be allowed to have too much power, every important decision should be discussed between "many big brains".
Look how Norway has its government structured: there is the parliament - or goverment - and there is the King. The king practically has no word in governing the country; he is just a symbol, to represent the country at important meetings: but not politically.
Americans vote for a party and a president. And because so much depends on the president many of them vote Kerry just because they wanna kick Bush's ass. If if wasn't important who is the president probably at least 30% of the americans would vote their favourite party and probably their favourite party would not be the republican and democrat one. I bet now there are a couple other parties but they can't get more than a few percents in the government because "people vote the republicans just to kick democrat's ass".
Romania does not such a cool government structure as Norway but still the two leading parties have about 30-40% and the other 5 parties share the remaining 30-40%. Well Romanian government structure is fucked up because they made a juicy mixture of the french and the american model. Why? Because they like France so they wanna lick their ass and the wanna lick US ass because the US is the strongest country in the world.
Whatever...I believe it's not good to give somebody so much power as the US president has.
-----
yeah, i know, my english sucks