The problem is that often these regimes have the top educated or trained people working directly or indirectly for them, such that getting rid of them would entail crippling the country. I seem to recall that in the U.S. after the civil war, you did not round up former slave owners or confederate officers, because doing so would have set the south back quite a bit. Love them or hate them, the white elites ran most of the businesses and governments, so throwing them out completely would have meant starting virtually from scratch.
The same for 'de-Baathication', 'de-Nazification', or any other post-revolutionary/war purges. You get rid of the most hard-core guys and make sure the rest don't get too high up in politics, but it's impossible to actually liquidate them. In fact, I think one of the reasons why communist countries tend to be so badly governed is that they tend to purge non-communist elements after the revolution, so you end up with a bunch of amatuers and political hacks running the show.
In either case, I think a revolution is rather unlikely in China for the forseeable future.
Wha? I agree that individual rights are important, but where does this shit about 'countries have no rights' come from?
Let me guess, an American who wonders why foreigners want their little countries protected from being trampled by the global capitalist Jihad, and thinks the "American Way" is all about individualism and "Fuck t3h n4nny state!!" Well, maybe you should realize that the documents you seem to worship as protecting your "inalianable rights" were written in order to create a new government, separate from the British one. While the government supposedly exists to serve the people, the concept of "America" as a nation (and the state identities, in 1776) undoubtedly exists independently. Violations of American soverignty are considered rather serious, and are not looked upon kindly in the states.
While I applaud people for helping to spread information to people in China, you should not pretend that you are not violating the soverignty of a nation in the process. This could actually become a legal problem if the U.S. government ever decides to go after 'eeevil hackers' that do such things, for then you might get extradicted to China. Which would not be very pleasant.
Oh, bullshit. It sounds even stupider to non-gamers or very casual gamers(which I consider myself to be).
Unlike Playstation, Dreamcast, Famicom, Genesis, or Xbox, which I've heard people say are also "bad names", "Wii" is a horrible name on a purely viceral level as well as having bad puns. At least every other console has more than one syllable, sounds like an acutal product name instead of a squeal, and has some 'character' to it. "Wii" doesn't even sound like a name, it sounds like part of a name that got chopped off.
How would you even say it in normal sentences? "Have you gotten a wii yet?", "Is this game coming out for the wii?", "Hey check out the graphics on the wii", "Wanna play some wii games?", "Wii rocks!", "Do you have any wiis in stock?", "I think my kid wants a wii for christmas", "Wii is way cooler than the PS3". It just feels wrong, somehow - maybe because it sounds like "we", and "The we", "we's", "wes", and "a we" are ungrammatical in English. I suspect most people will just end up calling it "the Nintendo".
I was looking around for the Japanese reaction to it, and at least on Slashdot Japan, there seems to be about as much bewilderment at the name as there is over here. The name doesn't have any bad meaning in Japan, but it still sounds wierd.
Interesting that you would consider Greenpeace to be "terrorists". I'm taking a course on terrorism right now from a extremely right-wing professor, and even he nor the book we're using(which has whole sections on ecoterror) would consider Greenpeace to be terrorists.
Perhaps you're confusing them with Earth Liberation Front, who commit arson, or Animal Liberation Front, who are the reason many biology labs have tighter security than datacenters these days.
Greenpeace may be a bunch of annoying holier-than-thou hippies, but they are basically a activist org, not a full terrorist or revolutionary one.
What you don't know is, Steve Jobs is actually a military equipment fetishist. All of his OS X releases have been named after German tanks while cleverly disguised to the public as merely being named after big cats.
Say hello to the new Mac OS X 10.5 - Sturmpanzer.
Come on, it's obvious once you know where to look - his obsessive attention to details; his penchant for holding large rallies where he wows the crowd with his oratory and presentation; and of course, his dictating of the single mouse button on Macs, a symbol of the unified Reich of Mac users all striving for a single purpose. Steve is one big Third Reich Otaku.
Nah, just go find some old Usenet post where he glorifies HURD and claims it'll be complete "in about a year", and tells those Linux guys to quit wasting their time. Have him sign that, see if he twitches at all when he does.
Or dig up some old "SCO Unixware" manuals - better yet, source code. Ask him if he's willing to have it entered into evidence if he signs it.
Or ask him to sign your boobs. Especially if you're a man.
I remember reading in a statistics textbook(late 90s or so), about the way RIAA or ASCAP calculated royalties for broadcast radio.
Instead of having people keep track of every single song played at every radio station, they randomly chose one day of the year to listen to a station, and listened to it for a full 24 hours. Then, they figured out which record companies owned the works by the artists who were broadcast and how much they charged, and calculated the yearly fees for that station based on the statistics.
They would do this for every station in the country, so that the record companies would be paid royalties on a statistical basis that was roughly the same as if they actually recorded which songs were played and calculated it exactly, but much easier. Nowadays, with computer-controlled playlists and whatnot, they might actually track all the songs that are played, I don't know.
Anyways, I think this kind of thing might be where the RIAA is trying to push the internet. They might start charging a fee to every ISP/network owner, based on a sample of what is downloaded illegally over a certain period of time. Certainly easier than going after each individual downloader, and it avoids messsy PR battles like sueing 14-year olds over Britney tracks. Just let the net admin handle things, and even charge him for the priveledge of enforcing your copyright!
I'm not saying they actually have this planned, but I suspect this is the direction we're going.
This is something that comes up every time product names are debated here on Slashdot, whether it's "Ubuntu Breezy Badger" or "Mandriva". People seem to want to argue quality of names as if they have a objective right or wrong to them which should be the determining factor regardless of what people think it sounds like. See the comments arguing that 'Jazz' should be considered dirty, or that
Names merely carry connotations, which can vary depending on the listener. 'Cymbaline', for example, sounds very feminine to modern English speakers, but is actually a old English king's name, and the title of a Shakespeare play. You can argue that it "should" be a boy's name for ages, but that isn't going to change the fact that it sounds like a girl's name to people. Names are about suitability, not right or wrong.
The point is, whether the name is acceptable varies depending on the listener. I'm sure that to the MTV demographic, "Igor International" and "The Urge" are perfectly fine. They love Linkin Park, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent after all. If anything, it shows that the guy knows how to market to a specific demographic group.
Now, as far as 'Wii' goes - of course it's an unsuitable name, at least for the traditional gamer demographic. The fact that so many gamers are making fun of it shows that it is. You can argue that it has meaning beyond what people are thinking of and aestheics that are good, but you can't control people's minds to erase the fact that, to most English speakers, it leaves a bad first impression.
What I would want to know is how it sounds to the non-gaming adult group, which is supposedly the group Nintendo wants to grow their marketshare in. Does it make it sound frivoulos or fun? I guess we'll see in a year or two.
Whoa, it's not nessacerily legal. Sony may own the actual design or have a exclusive license on it, and it may be a breach of contract for them to sell them to you. In the U.S., inducing someone into breach of contract is illegal. In fact, his friend may get in more trouble than the Chinese factory, since they don't really prosecute for those kinds of things over there.
I find it hard to believe a company as anal and controlling as Sony would not have a exclusivity contract with the manufacturer, even if everything in the player (minus shell and logo) are generic or non-Sony.
And second, TM violations are wrong because you're taking advantage of the marketing, reputation and customer relations of the company you're ripping off. The Sony/Lite-On branding is okay because they have an actual contract/agreement with each other letting them do so. It's not wrong for Lite-On to sell their drives as Lite-On or for Sony to sell licenced drives as Sony; what WOULD be wrong is if Lite-On sold their drives as 'Sony' or Sony sold their own products as 'Lite-On' WITHOUT permission. For one thing, if some of them break (as a certain % inevitably do), they'll end up going to the other company for support and burdening the other company with support and bad public relations.
If the Chinese want the same level of profits, they should try to build their own brand reputations. IIRC, Lamborghini(sp?) was originally a tractor manufacturer, and started making sports cars after they found out Ferrari used the same transmissions in their cars as Lamborghini tractors, and making big bucks(Lire?) doing so. What they did NOT do is start selling cheap knockoff Ferraris. Instead, they worked on their own brand and built up their own reputation.
I'm a big supporter of Free/Open source software, but I strongly believe in protections of trademark. It's what makes companies/brands improve themselves instead of mooching off the reputation of others. I'm really glad Lycoris is trying to win customers over with their own product instead of trying to make it sound like a "off-brang Windows", ie, Lindows. That sort of thing really hurts F/OSS's image among the public.
It's not as if other news outlets can't be a bit biased, either - here's a funny story from CNN crowing about the fact that a Washington Post reporter asked for CNN instead of Fox News to be on the TVs on Air Force One link. Maybe that's responsible journalism, or maybe it's just shameless self-promotion?
I'm not entirely suprised to hear that Fox News is the preferred news outlet on Air Force One, though.
I've always wondered what it would be like if a country like North Korea caught up to modern levels of surveilance and IT infrastructure. Not just a country communist in name like China or really corrupt like Zimbabwe, really Orwellian in E. German or N. Korean-style surveilance state mode.
With modern tech, there's really nothing you could hide from a state like that. The main problem old totalitarians had was that their data was kept on paper, so it was hard to search, cross-reference and review. If those countires had tech like Google, on the other hand...
With this cashless system, you oculd keep track of all transactions that happen. Only barters and personal favors could slip past, and it'd be hard to have a black market based on that. Even better for a communist country, you could stop individuals exchanging cash for foreign currency by making all exchanges go through the central bank.
A-men. One of the main appeals of the original C&C was that it was set in a very real-feeling setting; not reality, obviously, but plausible in a good sci-fi way. You could actually believe such a world would come about, if something like Tiberium fell to Earth. There were military types fighting narco-cult-terrorist types with modern weapons on a post-cold war battlefield, and it had a very cyberpunk/speculative fiction feel to it.
It felt like it was taking place "40 minutes into the future". I especially loved the intro sequence and side selection, where you get flashes of TV channels until you get the GDI or NOD channel - very postmodern and cool, IMHO.
Then, you had RedAlert - good game, better graphics and gameplay, but WTF? Einstein goes back in time and assasinates Hitler, and that's how the C&C world came to be? The plot of the game totally ruined things for me. I didn't even bother with Tiberian Sun, which looked like total Star Wars/Trek sci-fi, without the 'here and now' feel of C&C. If I wanted that crap, there are countless sci-fi themed RTSes out there, including StarCraft, BattleTech, Dark Reign, etc.
Now, it's good that they're going back to the near future, and hopefully making it feel 'gritty' and '10 minutes into the future' again. Oh, and I hope they keep the rock music. The music in C&C rocked, the first PC games I wanted the soundtrack to.
Heh, it just goes to show how obsessed some geeks get. I loved this last part: "I've been drinking Mountain Dew and eating Easter Jelly Bellies to sharpen my mind," he says.
He says the new information was the equivalent of throwing a steak into shark-infested water. "There's going to be a frenzy of action around this for months because it's the first real bit of data we've been able to get. We don't know what it means. But it's very exciting."
Yeah, sharpening his mind with Jelly Bellies and going into a frenzy because someone added an 'x' to a cyphertext... nope, no dorkyness here...
Are you kidding me? The Mac community is composed of 30% latte-sipping wannabe 'artists', 50% trendsters with too much money, 25% hippies, 4% Hollywood actors, and 1% Steve Jobs. And Steve is the least arrogant one of the bunch.
That's why I Switched(tm) to OpenBSD, the least arrogant OS community!
I can go up to the head development guy, Theo, and he answers all my questions!! Usually the answer is how evil George Bush and Richard Stallman are, and how stupid I am for being a stupid American that supports stupid people and asks stupid questions because I am stupid. I don't know how that solves my problems, but at least he answers!!!!
Stupid Steve Jobs never answered my love letters. Arrogant bastard!!!
Hooray, I just got out of linguistics class and happen to have my book on me. According to my "Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction 5th Edition" by O'Grady, et al, there are 49 phonemes in American English. Keep in mind that variants and dialects of English can vary quite a bit, and the book itself says some speakers may be missing a few of the phonemes.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine Windows Vista - Forever."
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:
'And remember that it is for ever. The PC will always be there to be installed upon. The hacker, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The espionage,, the spyware, the betrayals, the lawsuits, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more Microsoft is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the competition, the tighter the despotism. Stallman and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic hacker here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, installing Windows and crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, sale after sale, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.' --- Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said weakly.
'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It is impossible to found a Operating System on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no stability. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that patching is more exhausting than making it secure in the first place. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to lose stability faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of spyware and bloat till computers are useless at thirty months. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual install is not death? The Company is immortal.'
'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Apple will defeat you.'
'We control the market, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called market forces which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create market forces. Consumers are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the consumers or the hackers will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Company. The others are outside -- irrelevant.'
Actually, this story has kind of a law angle that no one seems to be asking: what is the online pr0n industry's attitude towards copyright infringement?
Looking at porn sites, I don't think I've ever seen a disclaimer that said you could keep the pics for later viewing, but the people running sites must be aware that free sample images are saved for later, uh, 'perusal'. This would technically be copyright infringement (piracy). While we might laugh at the issue, most estimates say pr0n is a bigger industry online than legit music downloads, and the free stuff must be cutting into their profits.
Did you and other online pr0n merchants see it as a nessecary part of doing business, or did you guys curse every dude who saved 'your' images to his hard drive?
I have taken an introdctory Anthropology class, and I should note that Dawkins quote uses the term 'cultural relativism' in a way different from what Anthropologists mean. A bit ironic, since IDers often misuse scientific terminology to suit their ends.
An anthropologist would say that the story of Icarus is equivalent to other cultural mythologies of flying people, not to actual airplanes.
Caution: Happy Fun Box 360 may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Individual units may vary, and some Happy Fun Box 360s may have less than 360 degrees.
Ingredients of Happy Fun Box 360 include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
End-users are responsible for following any religious edicts, fatwas, or commandments proscribing use, contact, or depictions of Happy Fun Box 360.
Keep Happy Fun Box 360 locked in order to keep out homeless persons.
Happy Fun Box 360 should not be used as housing or shelter, and end-user is resposible for paying rent and/or property tax on land required to house Happy Fun Box 360.
Failure to do so relieves the distributor, Happy Fun Products of Japan, and its parent company MicroSoft Corporation, of any and all liabilities.
Do not handle Happy Fun Box 360 before preparing uncooked food such as sushi or salad.
Happy Fun Box 360 has been shipped to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is the official position of the U.S. Government that it is not a violation of the Geneva Conventions to use Happy Fun Box 360 on unlawful combatents.
It is illegal under the International Trade in Arms Regulations of the U.S. State Department to export Happy Fun Box 360 outside of the U.S. and selected partner countries, including Japan.
Personally, I would just get one of the first-generation "fruity" iBooks and put a fluffy toilet seat cover on it. It even comes with its own carry handle! I know I've never broken a toilet by dropping it, have you?
Actually, a case made of Duplo or Lego blocks would be cool. Or Lincoln logs.
Yes, but Haliburton cases are also good for storing One Million Dollars (in Dr. Evil voice) in Benjamins. How many dorky laptop cases would look good with a dark suit and sunglasses, handcuffed to your wrist? When I bring my laptop out, the case had better make a nice 'prrrrrup' sound, and make people think I'm going to pull out a million dollars, a brick of coke, or a pair of Uzis.
Seriously, I wonder if they're designed to hold just the right amount of bills for drug deals and arms sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, she's much more likely to end up being President after the revolution, just like Vladimir Putin, former KGB monitor at Leningrad State University.
The problem is that often these regimes have the top educated or trained people working directly or indirectly for them, such that getting rid of them would entail crippling the country. I seem to recall that in the U.S. after the civil war, you did not round up former slave owners or confederate officers, because doing so would have set the south back quite a bit. Love them or hate them, the white elites ran most of the businesses and governments, so throwing them out completely would have meant starting virtually from scratch.
The same for 'de-Baathication', 'de-Nazification', or any other post-revolutionary/war purges. You get rid of the most hard-core guys and make sure the rest don't get too high up in politics, but it's impossible to actually liquidate them. In fact, I think one of the reasons why communist countries tend to be so badly governed is that they tend to purge non-communist elements after the revolution, so you end up with a bunch of amatuers and political hacks running the show.
In either case, I think a revolution is rather unlikely in China for the forseeable future.
Wha? I agree that individual rights are important, but where does this shit about 'countries have no rights' come from?
Let me guess, an American who wonders why foreigners want their little countries protected from being trampled by the global capitalist Jihad, and thinks the "American Way" is all about individualism and "Fuck t3h n4nny state!!" Well, maybe you should realize that the documents you seem to worship as protecting your "inalianable rights" were written in order to create a new government, separate from the British one. While the government supposedly exists to serve the people, the concept of "America" as a nation (and the state identities, in 1776) undoubtedly exists independently. Violations of American soverignty are considered rather serious, and are not looked upon kindly in the states.
While I applaud people for helping to spread information to people in China, you should not pretend that you are not violating the soverignty of a nation in the process. This could actually become a legal problem if the U.S. government ever decides to go after 'eeevil hackers' that do such things, for then you might get extradicted to China. Which would not be very pleasant.
Oh, bullshit. It sounds even stupider to non-gamers or very casual gamers(which I consider myself to be).
Unlike Playstation, Dreamcast, Famicom, Genesis, or Xbox, which I've heard people say are also "bad names", "Wii" is a horrible name on a purely viceral level as well as having bad puns. At least every other console has more than one syllable, sounds like an acutal product name instead of a squeal, and has some 'character' to it. "Wii" doesn't even sound like a name, it sounds like part of a name that got chopped off.
How would you even say it in normal sentences? "Have you gotten a wii yet?", "Is this game coming out for the wii?", "Hey check out the graphics on the wii", "Wanna play some wii games?", "Wii rocks!", "Do you have any wiis in stock?", "I think my kid wants a wii for christmas", "Wii is way cooler than the PS3". It just feels wrong, somehow - maybe because it sounds like "we", and "The we", "we's", "wes", and "a we" are ungrammatical in English. I suspect most people will just end up calling it "the Nintendo".
I was looking around for the Japanese reaction to it, and at least on Slashdot Japan, there seems to be about as much bewilderment at the name as there is over here. The name doesn't have any bad meaning in Japan, but it still sounds wierd.
Interesting that you would consider Greenpeace to be "terrorists". I'm taking a course on terrorism right now from a extremely right-wing professor, and even he nor the book we're using(which has whole sections on ecoterror) would consider Greenpeace to be terrorists.
Perhaps you're confusing them with Earth Liberation Front, who commit arson, or Animal Liberation Front, who are the reason many biology labs have tighter security than datacenters these days.
Greenpeace may be a bunch of annoying holier-than-thou hippies, but they are basically a activist org, not a full terrorist or revolutionary one.
What you don't know is, Steve Jobs is actually a military equipment fetishist. All of his OS X releases have been named after German tanks while cleverly disguised to the public as merely being named after big cats.
Say hello to the new Mac OS X 10.5 - Sturmpanzer.
Come on, it's obvious once you know where to look - his obsessive attention to details; his penchant for holding large rallies where he wows the crowd with his oratory and presentation; and of course, his dictating of the single mouse button on Macs, a symbol of the unified Reich of Mac users all striving for a single purpose. Steve is one big Third Reich Otaku.
Nah, just go find some old Usenet post where he glorifies HURD and claims it'll be complete "in about a year", and tells those Linux guys to quit wasting their time. Have him sign that, see if he twitches at all when he does.
Or dig up some old "SCO Unixware" manuals - better yet, source code. Ask him if he's willing to have it entered into evidence if he signs it.
Or ask him to sign your boobs. Especially if you're a man.
I remember reading in a statistics textbook(late 90s or so), about the way RIAA or ASCAP calculated royalties for broadcast radio.
Instead of having people keep track of every single song played at every radio station, they randomly chose one day of the year to listen to a station, and listened to it for a full 24 hours. Then, they figured out which record companies owned the works by the artists who were broadcast and how much they charged, and calculated the yearly fees for that station based on the statistics.
They would do this for every station in the country, so that the record companies would be paid royalties on a statistical basis that was roughly the same as if they actually recorded which songs were played and calculated it exactly, but much easier. Nowadays, with computer-controlled playlists and whatnot, they might actually track all the songs that are played, I don't know.
Anyways, I think this kind of thing might be where the RIAA is trying to push the internet. They might start charging a fee to every ISP/network owner, based on a sample of what is downloaded illegally over a certain period of time. Certainly easier than going after each individual downloader, and it avoids messsy PR battles like sueing 14-year olds over Britney tracks. Just let the net admin handle things, and even charge him for the priveledge of enforcing your copyright!
I'm not saying they actually have this planned, but I suspect this is the direction we're going.
This is something that comes up every time product names are debated here on Slashdot, whether it's "Ubuntu Breezy Badger" or "Mandriva". People seem to want to argue quality of names as if they have a objective right or wrong to them which should be the determining factor regardless of what people think it sounds like. See the comments arguing that 'Jazz' should be considered dirty, or that
Names merely carry connotations, which can vary depending on the listener. 'Cymbaline', for example, sounds very feminine to modern English speakers, but is actually a old English king's name, and the title of a Shakespeare play. You can argue that it "should" be a boy's name for ages, but that isn't going to change the fact that it sounds like a girl's name to people. Names are about suitability, not right or wrong.
The point is, whether the name is acceptable varies depending on the listener. I'm sure that to the MTV demographic, "Igor International" and "The Urge" are perfectly fine. They love Linkin Park, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent after all. If anything, it shows that the guy knows how to market to a specific demographic group.
Now, as far as 'Wii' goes - of course it's an unsuitable name, at least for the traditional gamer demographic. The fact that so many gamers are making fun of it shows that it is. You can argue that it has meaning beyond what people are thinking of and aestheics that are good, but you can't control people's minds to erase the fact that, to most English speakers, it leaves a bad first impression.
What I would want to know is how it sounds to the non-gaming adult group, which is supposedly the group Nintendo wants to grow their marketshare in. Does it make it sound frivoulos or fun? I guess we'll see in a year or two.
Whoa, it's not nessacerily legal. Sony may own the actual design or have a exclusive license on it, and it may be a breach of contract for them to sell them to you. In the U.S., inducing someone into breach of contract is illegal. In fact, his friend may get in more trouble than the Chinese factory, since they don't really prosecute for those kinds of things over there.
I find it hard to believe a company as anal and controlling as Sony would not have a exclusivity contract with the manufacturer, even if everything in the player (minus shell and logo) are generic or non-Sony.
And second, TM violations are wrong because you're taking advantage of the marketing, reputation and customer relations of the company you're ripping off. The Sony/Lite-On branding is okay because they have an actual contract/agreement with each other letting them do so. It's not wrong for Lite-On to sell their drives as Lite-On or for Sony to sell licenced drives as Sony; what WOULD be wrong is if Lite-On sold their drives as 'Sony' or Sony sold their own products as 'Lite-On' WITHOUT permission. For one thing, if some of them break (as a certain % inevitably do), they'll end up going to the other company for support and burdening the other company with support and bad public relations.
If the Chinese want the same level of profits, they should try to build their own brand reputations. IIRC, Lamborghini(sp?) was originally a tractor manufacturer, and started making sports cars after they found out Ferrari used the same transmissions in their cars as Lamborghini tractors, and making big bucks(Lire?) doing so. What they did NOT do is start selling cheap knockoff Ferraris. Instead, they worked on their own brand and built up their own reputation.
I'm a big supporter of Free/Open source software, but I strongly believe in protections of trademark. It's what makes companies/brands improve themselves instead of mooching off the reputation of others. I'm really glad Lycoris is trying to win customers over with their own product instead of trying to make it sound like a "off-brang Windows", ie, Lindows. That sort of thing really hurts F/OSS's image among the public.
It's not as if other news outlets can't be a bit biased, either - here's a funny story from CNN crowing about the fact that a Washington Post reporter asked for CNN instead of Fox News to be on the TVs on Air Force One link. Maybe that's responsible journalism, or maybe it's just shameless self-promotion?
I'm not entirely suprised to hear that Fox News is the preferred news outlet on Air Force One, though.
Wii Nintendo, Wii?
Oui, Monsieur, Oui.
I've always wondered what it would be like if a country like North Korea caught up to modern levels of surveilance and IT infrastructure. Not just a country communist in name like China or really corrupt like Zimbabwe, really Orwellian in E. German or N. Korean-style surveilance state mode.
With modern tech, there's really nothing you could hide from a state like that. The main problem old totalitarians had was that their data was kept on paper, so it was hard to search, cross-reference and review. If those countires had tech like Google, on the other hand...
With this cashless system, you oculd keep track of all transactions that happen. Only barters and personal favors could slip past, and it'd be hard to have a black market based on that. Even better for a communist country, you could stop individuals exchanging cash for foreign currency by making all exchanges go through the central bank.
A-men. One of the main appeals of the original C&C was that it was set in a very real-feeling setting; not reality, obviously, but plausible in a good sci-fi way. You could actually believe such a world would come about, if something like Tiberium fell to Earth. There were military types fighting narco-cult-terrorist types with modern weapons on a post-cold war battlefield, and it had a very cyberpunk/speculative fiction feel to it.
It felt like it was taking place "40 minutes into the future". I especially loved the intro sequence and side selection, where you get flashes of TV channels until you get the GDI or NOD channel - very postmodern and cool, IMHO.
Then, you had RedAlert - good game, better graphics and gameplay, but WTF? Einstein goes back in time and assasinates Hitler, and that's how the C&C world came to be? The plot of the game totally ruined things for me. I didn't even bother with Tiberian Sun, which looked like total Star Wars/Trek sci-fi, without the 'here and now' feel of C&C. If I wanted that crap, there are countless sci-fi themed RTSes out there, including StarCraft, BattleTech, Dark Reign, etc.
Now, it's good that they're going back to the near future, and hopefully making it feel 'gritty' and '10 minutes into the future' again. Oh, and I hope they keep the rock music. The music in C&C rocked, the first PC games I wanted the soundtrack to.
Heh, it just goes to show how obsessed some geeks get. I loved this last part:
"I've been drinking Mountain Dew and eating Easter Jelly Bellies to sharpen my mind," he says.
He says the new information was the equivalent of throwing a steak into shark-infested water. "There's going to be a frenzy of action around this for months because it's the first real bit of data we've been able to get. We don't know what it means. But it's very exciting."
Yeah, sharpening his mind with Jelly Bellies and going into a frenzy because someone added an 'x' to a cyphertext... nope, no dorkyness here...
Are you kidding me? The Mac community is composed of 30% latte-sipping wannabe 'artists', 50% trendsters with too much money, 25% hippies, 4% Hollywood actors, and 1% Steve Jobs. And Steve is the least arrogant one of the bunch.
That's why I Switched(tm) to OpenBSD, the least arrogant OS community!
I can go up to the head development guy, Theo, and he answers all my questions!! Usually the answer is how evil George Bush and Richard Stallman are, and how stupid I am for being a stupid American that supports stupid people and asks stupid questions because I am stupid. I don't know how that solves my problems, but at least he answers!!!!
Stupid Steve Jobs never answered my love letters. Arrogant bastard!!!
Hooray, I just got out of linguistics class and happen to have my book on me. According to my "Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction 5th Edition" by O'Grady, et al, there are 49 phonemes in American English. Keep in mind that variants and dialects of English can vary quite a bit, and the book itself says some speakers may be missing a few of the phonemes.
But wait! This could mean Oracle will start shipping with pictures of naked people!
"Say hello to Oracle 11xxx"
I can't wait 'til admins have to explain the nude models on the enterprise servers to the CEOs...
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine Windows Vista - Forever."
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:
'And remember that it is for ever. The PC will always be there to be installed upon. The hacker, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The espionage,, the spyware, the betrayals, the lawsuits, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more Microsoft is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the competition, the tighter the despotism. Stallman and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic hacker here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, installing Windows and crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, sale after sale, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.'
---
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said weakly.
'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It is impossible to found a Operating System on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no stability. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that patching is more exhausting than making it secure in the first place. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to lose stability faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of spyware and bloat till computers are useless at thirty months. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual install is not death? The Company is immortal.'
'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Apple will defeat you.'
'We control the market, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called market forces which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create market forces. Consumers are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the consumers or the hackers will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Company. The others are outside -- irrelevant.'
Where do you want to go today?
Actually, this story has kind of a law angle that no one seems to be asking: what is the online pr0n industry's attitude towards copyright infringement?
Looking at porn sites, I don't think I've ever seen a disclaimer that said you could keep the pics for later viewing, but the people running sites must be aware that free sample images are saved for later, uh, 'perusal'. This would technically be copyright infringement (piracy). While we might laugh at the issue, most estimates say pr0n is a bigger industry online than legit music downloads, and the free stuff must be cutting into their profits.
Did you and other online pr0n merchants see it as a nessecary part of doing business, or did you guys curse every dude who saved 'your' images to his hard drive?
pick up lose women
I can't tell if you meant to type 'loose' or 'loser'. Either one works for Myspace, I suppose...
I have taken an introdctory Anthropology class, and I should note that Dawkins quote uses the term 'cultural relativism' in a way different from what Anthropologists mean. A bit ironic, since IDers often misuse scientific terminology to suit their ends.
An anthropologist would say that the story of Icarus is equivalent to other cultural mythologies of flying people, not to actual airplanes.
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Personally, I would just get one of the first-generation "fruity" iBooks and put a fluffy toilet seat cover on it. It even comes with its own carry handle! I know I've never broken a toilet by dropping it, have you?
Actually, a case made of Duplo or Lego blocks would be cool. Or Lincoln logs.
Yes, but Haliburton cases are also good for storing One Million Dollars (in Dr. Evil voice) in Benjamins. How many dorky laptop cases would look good with a dark suit and sunglasses, handcuffed to your wrist? When I bring my laptop out, the case had better make a nice 'prrrrrup' sound, and make people think I'm going to pull out a million dollars, a brick of coke, or a pair of Uzis.
Seriously, I wonder if they're designed to hold just the right amount of bills for drug deals and arms sales.
Dear sir,
I find your analysis of my literary works to be quite imaginative and deeply insightful.
I wish to subscribe to your newsletter, if one is available.
Sincerely,
identity0