The difference here is in details, not being able to practice your profession is bad but justifiable in the cases you name. But should a dokter be prohibited to use knives? prohibiting mitnick to use computers is similar to a dokter not allowed to use metal tools. He should have been prohibited to use computers for software development and programming. That would be stopping him from practicing his profession. Now the justice department is stopping a guy who probably has a lot of on-line friends (despite what he's done to them) to communicate with those friends. That is definitely draconian.
Just days after Kevin Mitnick got sent back to jail for using an atm several strange events occured.....
A guy begging for a cup of coffee got a dollar instead from a friendly stranger. He was subsequently arrested and put to jail for life. Reason? He was a convicted bank robber no longer allowed to come near money.
Another guy was found just outside his house frozen to death in a snowstorm. Apperently the man was an ex-burglar who wasn't allowed to touch doors.
An old lady got the shock of her life when a woman fell on the street out of nowhere just in front of her. The woman was convicted of several traffic offenses and she was apperently using the roofs of buildings to get to her appartment cause she was no longer allowed to come near roads.
On a more positive note, the traffic in the newsgroup alt.people.armed-robbers is rapidly increasing. This is mainly attributed to the fact that more and more armed robbers may no longer come near people and as such must seek their social contacts elsewhere.
And I thought chopping of a thiefs hand was medieval......
Asking several interesting poll questions to the average cnn reading user:
Do you trust linux security? Average users thoughts: "hmm that's internet isn't it? that must be insecure" result: yes : 25% no : 75%
Do you trust *BSD? "huh, *BSD? that must be something I don't know result: yes : 5% no : 95%
Do you hand a waiter you don't know your credit card to pay the bill? "what would they mean by that? why not?" result: yes : 95% no : 5%
Again I feel forced to criticize this "poll". Ppeople don't trust internet.. why? no reason really. They trust the mailman with postcards but they don't trust a server with their boring e-mail message. They trust waiters in tiny restaurants in the most corrupt nations in the world with their credit card yet they have doubts about using that card in a way that actually transmits their number/expiry date encrypted.
So what do we learn from this poll? Well, the only thing I learn is that people don't want to do or use stuff for irrational reasons until told by those people who are least knowledgable about said stuff (their neighbours-brothers- second cousin) that doing/using it is ok.
The internet is just as secure as any shopping street, but you need a college level education to be a pickpocket.
Re:Will this really be the future?
on
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· Score: 1
I am(and most of my friends are) college students with high bandwidth. I'm making a rough estimate here, but I think I've got 100 Mbit access to more than 500 Gb of.mp3 and.vqf files. Nearly everything is on the campus network and if I can't find something I could use getright and any search engine to find it on the web. Even if it takes a day to download I couldn't care less. That does not give me the biggest music collection in the world just because it doesn't feel that way. I don't claim owning the biggest library in the world either even though I can access more than 1 billion seperate documents from my home. It just isn't the same.
Sure, I can't hear the difference in quality between CD and 160k + mp3, and sure, the jewel case is evil and breaks when looked at. It's all beside the point I was trying to make. When buying certain stuff I in part do it for a feeling of owning something cool. Downloading a bunch of mp3's doesn't give me that feeling and, as such, lacks in user experience. And that's why I'll keep spending money on lame booklets and easy breakable plastic cases.
I'm still not so very sure if this is going to be the future of music. Even though I can download every piece of music I might ever want from the internet I keep on coming back to my (on-line or not) music store to buy my favorite music in hardcopy, complete with a nice booklet maybe for once not a diamond box and a few pictures of my (at that moment) favorite artist. I want to be able to hold that box, look at it while listening to the music on my home stereo for the first time. I'd be hard pressed to find an attractive software equivalent for that. Now I suppose there are a lot of people out there that don't need that physical representation of their music but I do and a lot of my friends agree with me. The day that the only way to obtain the newest music of any of my favorite artists is by downloading an MP3 (or something like that) will be a sad day for me indeed.
My guess is that on-line music will perform a function similar to pay-tv, you subscribe to get a nice selection of music sent to you instead of some lame DJ's selection. Or a live registration of a good concert or a pop-festival.
Maybe they'll even cut back on the commercials if you pay them a little.
This seems a pretty weird combination of hardware specifications... DSL ready or ready for an upgrade, phone line ready... sounds ok but sort of double, a tv that can also receive radio while displaying a test image sort of thing. And a flat panel screen included for $300 to $700? wow! they must be expecting to earn a lot from the monthly subscription then. To me this device spells even more advertising in the homes of unsuspecting customers that buy it. I'm not going to spend money on any of those webpad-web appliance-set top box-things that require me to look at thousands of banners per day of surfing. I'll switch to a service like that when somebody provides me with a free T3 connection to the internet and a monthly bonus of say $100,- in exchange for looking at a small selection of exclusive "offers" once a week. It's time all those marketing dollars ended up in a place where the customer actually has a use for them, in his own wallet.
I feel the need to bitch about some of the numbers is see, I'd like to know what job those systems are doing, BSD computers more often than not are a network server or something similar, you don't just turn that off. On the other hand, I turn my win NT machine at work off every evening (uptime roughly 8.5 hours?) or does uptime count the number of hours the system is running between crashes? In that case my BeOS machine at home must now be somewhere around 500 days or so. I upgraded it a few times but it never ever crashed on me. Putting win2k in this statistic is of course ridiculous, the OS that has been out for 50 days has a maximum uptime of 49 days well..*duh* To make a statistcally valid comparison of uptimes you'd have to use the same number of systems for each OS, not well over 500 for one and just under 20 for several others. In a larger population you are naturally going to see more extremes. I bet the record for shortest uptime can also be found in either the linux or freeBSD groups. The averages of course tell us something, but in the really small populations they too are irrelevant. I'd like to see this uptime project become bigger amongst users of less uptime centered operating systems so that the statistics become a bit more valid.
The only thing this chart tells me is that *BSD and Linux users are more concerned with statistics like this than users of other operating systems. What would psychologists make of that?
I'm really curious about the other names listed in that top 100, can anybody post a link? As a comment, it does seem a bit "the thing you have to do" these days to give awards like this to people busy in the hyped up field of linux development. I've heard of quite a lot of significant breakthroughs this year in a variety of scientific disciplines. The human genome project comes to mind as one, but there must be a lot of others too. It seems a bit weird to give this award to a guy working on a window manager in 1999. Can anybody tell me about the innovative aspects of his work?
I've been using opera for the BeOS on and off the last few months cause it's still buggy. But it's getting better with every new release and I sure am happy with the look and feel of it.
Now for linux too yay! Together with the deal with Be for being it's browser on BeOS and Stinger (A lean version of BeOS for webpads) This should generate enough revenue and attract enough investors to allow them to seriously speed up development. On to a version that doesn't crash when you change too much preferences!:-)
Of course I don't know this for sure, but if I were a lawyer, what I'd be doing all day is looking for potential lawsuits. I'd find two companies with similar names or something and then I'd go to the one with the best case and I'd tell them: "Hey, you can go on doing whatever you do right, but I can make a few bucks extra on the side if you give me a fair advance payment" Maybe I'd even work on a no cure no pay basis. This problem is of course biggest in America with it's "sue-culture", but the fact that that "give in to me cause I'm bigger or I'll sue you" thing is now spilling over it's borders is plain wrong. European patent offices are in general way more carefull with dealing out patents, even though they too make mistakes, and european courts also tend to show more signs of sanity. But they are sort of forced to do it the "American way". What I'm getting at here is the fact that the internet is a worldwide thing, it has no borders, yet it's still being governed by any local law that somebody wants. Want to force a site out of existence? Just find a country where material on that site is illegal and go to court there seems to be the way to go. same goes for patents. Get something patented in one country and you can sue anyone using that technology on the internet even if the other party is not from that country. Internet is a country in and of itself, it should therefore get al the things a country has, and that includes it's own legal system. That way you don't have to know the laws of all the countries in the world when you do business on the internet, just the internet law. I see a few problems with this idea too, the main problem is: "who is going to make those laws?" But if we could get it to work (and work more efficiently than the UN and the WTO and more democratically it would be a good thing.
I'm still looking for proof. The tv program was dutch (since I'm from Holland) but the research was done in Amerika somewhere at a university hospital or something. The guy with the implant had a....(sorry guys don't know the english word, spinal problem where you can't move the part of your body that's below a certain damaged point in your spine)....He couldn't move anything below his mouth I believe. Dokters implanted a sort of "electrode" (translation from dutch commentary) in his brain that was very sensitive to the electrical signals produced by the brain tissue directly surrounding it. After progressing through several stages of "translating" those signals they were now able to let the guy control the movement of a cursor over a picture of a keyboard on a monitor and he could also "think" a "click". He could actually type his name this way.
I don't think this will be really "in vogue" for a long time. I recently saw a tv program about a man that had had a sort of electrode implanted in his head that allowed him to control a pointer on a screen simply by thinking. Together with a chip attached to one of my optical sinews instead of a monitor and a wireless link to my home computer I could play quake during all boring periods of my life.
Just another step towards making it impossible for normal people to do the right thing.... I'd really like to make sure that my kid if and when it comes into this world, has no avoidable disease or handicap, but where is the line between handicap and ugliness. Thirty years from now my adult kid comes to me and says "thanks a lot paps, if you'd have had me checked back then my health-insurance plan would have been much cheaper now." Or he comes to me and says "Way to go dad, I can't have a kid the normal way with anyone on the northern hemisphere cause it'll probably be an imbred" Healthy people is okay, but i'd like to know just how healthy we are supposed to be. After all, you only feel healthy as long as you know how it feels to be sick. No happiness without sorrow, no rich without poor, no beautifull without ugly, no "good" genes without "bad" ones.
I experienced a lot of pain e few moths ago due to extensive mouse/keyboard work, particularly using photoshop. After consulting a few people I had my sysadmin buy me a wacom pen tablet and it works wonerfully after you get used to it. Holding a pen is much more natural for your hand and wrist than holding a mouse and you get special sections on the tablet that simulate keyboard shortkuts. While you're waiting for the tablet try these things my physical therapist told me: -switch mouse arm, this might be difficult for all but the most ambidexterous but in all situations where I don't have my wacom I switch every hour. This gives both your arms a bit of essential rest. -Make sure you sit behind your desk in a proper way, sit straight with your seat/desk adjusted so that your elbows hoover just above the level of your desk when you let your shoulders hang with your upper arms along your body and your hands resting on your desk where your keyboard/mouse should be.
I hope this works for you, whatever rout you take make sure it stops hurting soon even if that means you have to stop working, I've been very close t real carpal tunnel and I'm never going there again ever!
Now we wait for the introduction of AI. I think I'll have to reinvent myself as martial artist. or possibly as sidekick of keanu Reeves.
Aaahh, there are green letters scrolling down my screen!!!
The idea is really cool though, I can see a lot of possibilities here, Biogas driven lawnmowers, dust driven vacuum cleaners.... I'd equip my car with a few brushes and it'd run on the stuff other people throw out of their window (and I'd have a turbo boost during fall!)
one to six minute films? wow, I could watch mtv for that.
but seriously, what would be the fun in that, seeing a one minute clip of what? a frustrated cubicle employee kicking his pc aroud and hitting it with his keyboard? I would be interested in things starting at around 15 minutes or more but then I'd probably be downloading an additional 30 minutes of commercials and "comming up next" announcements.
Redhat donating to the FSF, isn't that sort of like saying that microsoft donates money to it's software developers?
MS press release:
"Bill Gates anounced today that from now on we'll not only be paying our consumer support staff, salespeople and marketing department. We'll also be donating $1,- to our programmers' pension fund for each copy of windows sold."
That is really the isue here I think. People aren't that good at agreeing with each other, that's a fact of life. What bothers me is the truly agressive way in wich some people disagree with each other. Threatening to kill people or actually killing people has become just another way of telling someone you don't agree with him/her.
Humanity has to keep on talking about every issue that bothers us and killing the debate wether through censorship or through murder does not really help us in any way.
6 Billion is way too many, true. But that's no reason to go around bleeding the last money from poor third-worlders. I'm thinking of something like: -Thirdworlder buys expensive but quality seeds. -Thirdworlder grows good crops and gets to eat good and sell some of his crops -Thirdworlder saves some money and therfore: -Thirdworlder does not need a gazilion kids to support him in old age, two will do just fine.
then we have two people making two new people and the population stabilizes.
Now to get all religious people to support the notion that true celibacy is the only true way (and I mean true celibacy, not the "celibacy when not making kids" kind) And the world might actually become a little less crowded.
This would mean that the "high-tech" genetically engineered plants are also available to third world farmers who could benefit very much from some properties of those plants such as resistance to certain diseases and insects. That in turn would benefit the environment because they would need less chemicals.
Everybody happy, including Monsanto, they get a better image
The swedish show was called expedition robinson as someone already pointed out earlier and it also was on a tropical island, the price there was a measly $50,000.-
In holland (wich is where I happen to live) we are now enjoying a really fun show called (as pointed out) Big brother but their concept is a little different. It goes like this: Nine people live in a house without any connection to the outside world other than a voice over. no TV, no newspaper etc. They stay in that house (wich, by the way is a sort of pre-fab single story building) for 100 days.
There are some fun elements added too: Every few weeks each of the inhabitants has to nominate two housemates for removal from the house. After that the viewers (that's us!) get to vote on the nominee's and the one with the most votes has to leave the (and spend the next few weeks in talk shows) and he or she gets nothing. In the end there will be three left and then the public votes for the most popular and that person gets $125,00.- and the other two get nothing. end of show. They get to spend $250.- every week (with nine people!) but they can raise their budget by succesfully completing assignments such as: cycling 1300km on a hometrainer in five days.
Every day there is a "prime time" summary of all the fun things they did that day on TV and at night it (sometimes) replaces the shopping channel (wich is good). there are also four webcams running all day and night (remember the time-difference)
That's something experience taught me, whenever two parties are fighting over something they both take their own opinion to the extreme and the truth ends somewhere between them.
Microsoft is probably right about a part of the claims they make in that article otherwise it would be too easy to prove them wrong wich would be very bad from a marketing point of view.
The response of the linux community is pobably less truthfull (more flame-full) but at the end of the day a summary of all the reasonable responses will probably create a document exactly like the MS article only comparing linux and NT on points where linux wins.
The Operating System war has become more of a war of tastes that will probably have no real end. Something like ferrari drivers bitchin to Volvo drivers about their stupid slow boxy cars and the Volvo drivers shouting back that their cars are safer and more comfortable and run on less fuel.
Drive the car you like, run the OS you like, there is no more need for this discussion.
In Holland,(where I happen to live) there is already a $0.15 tax on CD-R/CD-RW 's. This tax is so small that few people actually noticed it's introduction. The distribution of that money is handled really fair here though, and aside from a percent or two in administration fee's for the government you'll at least be sure that your 15 cents will be distributed via a certain rating-system to all artists who had a song in the dutch hitlists in the last few months. Actually, if the canadian tax system would be put to effect, and distribution of the money would be handled in the same way as in holland. Then an average artist would earn more money from a CD-R on wich his album was (might have been) copied than from an album sold by his or her record company.
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The difference here is in details,
not being able to practice your profession is bad but justifiable in the cases you name. But should a dokter be prohibited to use knives?
prohibiting mitnick to use computers is similar to a dokter not allowed to use metal tools. He should have been prohibited to use computers for software development and programming. That would be stopping him from practicing his profession. Now the justice department is stopping a guy who probably has a lot of on-line friends (despite what he's done to them) to communicate with those friends.
That is definitely draconian.
And that is where my sarcasm was aimed at.
Just days after Kevin Mitnick got sent back to jail for using an atm several strange events occured.....
A guy begging for a cup of coffee got a dollar instead from a friendly stranger. He was subsequently arrested and put to jail for life. Reason? He was a convicted bank robber no longer allowed to come near money.
Another guy was found just outside his house frozen to death in a snowstorm. Apperently the man was an ex-burglar who wasn't allowed to touch doors.
An old lady got the shock of her life when a woman fell on the street out of nowhere just in front of her. The woman was convicted of several traffic offenses and she was apperently using the roofs of buildings to get to her appartment cause she was no longer allowed to come near roads.
On a more positive note, the traffic in the newsgroup alt.people.armed-robbers is rapidly increasing. This is mainly attributed to the fact that more and more armed robbers may no longer come near people and as such must seek their social contacts elsewhere.
And I thought chopping of a thiefs hand was medieval......
Asking several interesting poll questions to the average cnn reading user:
Do you trust linux security?
Average users thoughts: "hmm that's internet isn't it? that must be insecure"
result:
yes : 25%
no : 75%
Do you trust *BSD?
"huh, *BSD? that must be something I don't know
result:
yes : 5%
no : 95%
Do you hand a waiter you don't know your credit card to pay the bill?
"what would they mean by that? why not?"
result:
yes : 95%
no : 5%
Again I feel forced to criticize this "poll". Ppeople don't trust internet.. why? no reason really.
They trust the mailman with postcards but they don't trust a server with their boring e-mail message.
They trust waiters in tiny restaurants in the most corrupt nations in the world with their credit card yet they have doubts about using that card in a way that actually transmits their number/expiry date encrypted.
So what do we learn from this poll?
Well, the only thing I learn is that people don't want to do or use stuff for irrational reasons until told by those people who are least knowledgable about said stuff (their neighbours-brothers- second cousin) that doing/using it is ok.
The internet is just as secure as any shopping street, but you need a college level education to be a pickpocket.
I am(and most of my friends are) college students with high bandwidth. .mp3 and .vqf files.
I'm making a rough estimate here, but I think I've got 100 Mbit access to more than 500 Gb of
Nearly everything is on the campus network and if I can't find something I could use getright and any search engine to find it on the web. Even if it takes a day to download I couldn't care less. That does not give me the biggest music collection in the world just because it doesn't feel that way. I don't claim owning the biggest library in the world either even though I can access more than 1 billion seperate documents from my home. It just isn't the same.
Sure, I can't hear the difference in quality between CD and 160k + mp3, and sure, the jewel case is evil and breaks when looked at. It's all beside the point I was trying to make. When buying certain stuff I in part do it for a feeling of owning something cool. Downloading a bunch of mp3's doesn't give me that feeling and, as such, lacks in user experience. And that's why I'll keep spending money on lame booklets and easy breakable plastic cases.
I'm still not so very sure if this is going to be the future of music. Even though I can download every piece of music I might ever want from the internet I keep on coming back to my (on-line or not) music store to buy my favorite music in hardcopy, complete with a nice booklet maybe for once not a diamond box and a few pictures of my (at that moment) favorite artist.
I want to be able to hold that box, look at it while listening to the music on my home stereo for the first time. I'd be hard pressed to find an attractive software equivalent for that.
Now I suppose there are a lot of people out there that don't need that physical representation of their music but I do and a lot of my friends agree with me.
The day that the only way to obtain the newest music of any of my favorite artists is by downloading an MP3 (or something like that) will be a sad day for me indeed.
My guess is that on-line music will perform a function similar to pay-tv, you subscribe to get a nice selection of music sent to you instead of some lame DJ's selection. Or a live registration of a good concert or a pop-festival.
Maybe they'll even cut back on the commercials if you pay them a little.
This seems a pretty weird combination of hardware specifications... DSL ready or ready for an upgrade, phone line ready... sounds ok but sort of double, a tv that can also receive radio while displaying a test image sort of thing.
And a flat panel screen included for $300 to $700? wow! they must be expecting to earn a lot from the monthly subscription then.
To me this device spells even more advertising in the homes of unsuspecting customers that buy it.
I'm not going to spend money on any of those webpad-web appliance-set top box-things that require me to look at thousands of banners per day of surfing.
I'll switch to a service like that when somebody provides me with a free T3 connection to the internet and a monthly bonus of say $100,- in exchange for looking at a small selection of exclusive "offers" once a week.
It's time all those marketing dollars ended up in a place where the customer actually has a use for them, in his own wallet.
I feel the need to bitch about some of the numbers is see, I'd like to know what job those systems are doing, BSD computers more often than not are a network server or something similar, you don't just turn that off. On the other hand, I turn my win NT machine at work off every evening (uptime roughly 8.5 hours?) or does uptime count the number of hours the system is running between crashes? In that case my BeOS machine at home must now be somewhere around 500 days or so. I upgraded it a few times but it never ever crashed on me.
Putting win2k in this statistic is of course ridiculous, the OS that has been out for 50 days has a maximum uptime of 49 days well..*duh*
To make a statistcally valid comparison of uptimes you'd have to use the same number of systems for each OS, not well over 500 for one and just under 20 for several others. In a larger population you are naturally going to see more extremes. I bet the record for shortest uptime can also be found in either the linux or freeBSD groups. The averages of course tell us something, but in the really small populations they too are irrelevant.
I'd like to see this uptime project become bigger amongst users of less uptime centered operating systems so that the statistics become a bit more valid.
The only thing this chart tells me is that *BSD and Linux users are more concerned with statistics like this than users of other operating systems.
What would psychologists make of that?
I'm really curious about the other names listed in that top 100, can anybody post a link?
As a comment, it does seem a bit "the thing you have to do" these days to give awards like this to people busy in the hyped up field of linux development. I've heard of quite a lot of significant breakthroughs this year in a variety of scientific disciplines. The human genome project comes to mind as one, but there must be a lot of others too. It seems a bit weird to give this award to a guy working on a window manager in 1999. Can anybody tell me about the innovative aspects of his work?
I've been using opera for the BeOS on and off the last few months cause it's still buggy.
:-)
But it's getting better with every new release and I sure am happy with the look and feel of it.
Now for linux too yay!
Together with the deal with Be for being it's browser on BeOS and Stinger (A lean version of BeOS for webpads) This should generate enough revenue and attract enough investors to allow them to seriously speed up development.
On to a version that doesn't crash when you change too much preferences!
Happy holidays everyone!
Of course I don't know this for sure, but if I were a lawyer, what I'd be doing all day is looking for potential lawsuits. I'd find two companies with similar names or something and then I'd go to the one with the best case and I'd tell them: "Hey, you can go on doing whatever you do right, but I can make a few bucks extra on the side if you give me a fair advance payment"
Maybe I'd even work on a no cure no pay basis.
This problem is of course biggest in America with it's "sue-culture", but the fact that that "give in to me cause I'm bigger or I'll sue you" thing is now spilling over it's borders is plain wrong. European patent offices are in general way more carefull with dealing out patents, even though they too make mistakes, and european courts also tend to show more signs of sanity. But they are sort of forced to do it the "American way". What I'm getting at here is the fact that the internet is a worldwide thing, it has no borders, yet it's still being governed by any local law that somebody wants. Want to force a site out of existence? Just find a country where material on that site is illegal and go to court there seems to be the way to go. same goes for patents. Get something patented in one country and you can sue anyone using that technology on the internet even if the other party is not from that country.
Internet is a country in and of itself, it should therefore get al the things a country has, and that includes it's own legal system. That way you don't have to know the laws of all the countries in the world when you do business on the internet, just the internet law.
I see a few problems with this idea too, the main problem is: "who is going to make those laws?" But if we could get it to work (and work more efficiently than the UN and the WTO and more democratically it would be a good thing.
I'm still looking for proof.
The tv program was dutch (since I'm from Holland) but the research was done in Amerika somewhere at a university hospital or something. The guy with the implant had a....(sorry guys don't know the english word, spinal problem where you can't move the part of your body that's below a certain damaged point in your spine)....He couldn't move anything below his mouth I believe. Dokters implanted a sort of "electrode" (translation from dutch commentary) in his brain that was very sensitive to the electrical signals produced by the brain tissue directly surrounding it. After progressing through several stages of "translating" those signals they were now able to let the guy control the movement of a cursor over a picture of a keyboard on a monitor and he could also "think" a "click". He could actually type his name this way.
I don't think this will be really "in vogue" for a long time. I recently saw a tv program about a man that had had a sort of electrode implanted in his head that allowed him to control a pointer on a screen simply by thinking.
Together with a chip attached to one of my optical sinews instead of a monitor and a wireless link to my home computer I could play quake during all boring periods of my life.
Just another step towards making it impossible for normal people to do the right thing....
I'd really like to make sure that my kid if and when it comes into this world, has no avoidable disease or handicap, but where is the line between handicap and ugliness.
Thirty years from now my adult kid comes to me and says "thanks a lot paps, if you'd have had me checked back then my health-insurance plan would have been much cheaper now."
Or he comes to me and says "Way to go dad, I can't have a kid the normal way with anyone on the northern hemisphere cause it'll probably be an imbred"
Healthy people is okay, but i'd like to know just how healthy we are supposed to be.
After all, you only feel healthy as long as you know how it feels to be sick. No happiness without sorrow, no rich without poor, no beautifull without ugly, no "good" genes without "bad" ones.
I experienced a lot of pain e few moths ago due to extensive mouse/keyboard work, particularly using photoshop. After consulting a few people I had my sysadmin buy me a wacom pen tablet and it works wonerfully after you get used to it. Holding a pen is much more natural for your hand and wrist than holding a mouse and you get special sections on the tablet that simulate keyboard shortkuts.
While you're waiting for the tablet try these things my physical therapist told me:
-switch mouse arm, this might be difficult for all but the most ambidexterous but in all situations where I don't have my wacom I switch every hour. This gives both your arms a bit of essential rest.
-Make sure you sit behind your desk in a proper way, sit straight with your seat/desk adjusted so that your elbows hoover just above the level of your desk when you let your shoulders hang with your upper arms along your body and your hands resting on your desk where your keyboard/mouse should be.
I hope this works for you, whatever rout you take make sure it stops hurting soon even if that means you have to stop working, I've been very close t real carpal tunnel and I'm never going there again ever!
Now we wait for the introduction of AI. I think I'll have to reinvent myself as martial artist.
or possibly as sidekick of keanu Reeves.
Aaahh, there are green letters scrolling down my screen!!!
The idea is really cool though, I can see a lot of possibilities here, Biogas driven lawnmowers, dust driven vacuum cleaners....
I'd equip my car with a few brushes and it'd run on the stuff other people throw out of their window (and I'd have a turbo boost during fall!)
one to six minute films?
wow, I could watch mtv for that.
but seriously, what would be the fun in that, seeing a one minute clip of what? a frustrated cubicle employee kicking his pc aroud and hitting it with his keyboard? I would be interested in things starting at around 15 minutes or more but then I'd probably be downloading an additional 30 minutes of commercials and "comming up next" announcements.
Redhat donating to the FSF, isn't that sort of like saying that microsoft donates money to it's software developers?
MS press release:
"Bill Gates anounced today that from now on we'll not only be paying our consumer support staff, salespeople and marketing department. We'll also be donating $1,- to our programmers' pension fund for each copy of windows sold."
Disagree less agressive!
That is really the isue here I think.
People aren't that good at agreeing with each other, that's a fact of life. What bothers me is the truly agressive way in wich some people disagree with each other.
Threatening to kill people or actually killing people has become just another way of telling someone you don't agree with him/her.
Humanity has to keep on talking about every issue that bothers us and killing the debate wether through censorship or through murder does not really help us in any way.
6 Billion is way too many, true.
But that's no reason to go around bleeding the last money from poor third-worlders.
I'm thinking of something like:
-Thirdworlder buys expensive but quality seeds.
-Thirdworlder grows good crops and gets to eat good and sell some of his crops
-Thirdworlder saves some money and therfore:
-Thirdworlder does not need a gazilion kids to support him in old age, two will do just fine.
then we have two people making two new people and the population stabilizes.
Now to get all religious people to support the notion that true celibacy is the only true way (and I mean true celibacy, not the "celibacy when not making kids" kind) And the world might actually become a little less crowded.
This is truly a good thing.
This would mean that the "high-tech" genetically engineered plants are also available to third world farmers who could benefit very much from some properties of those plants such as resistance to certain diseases and insects.
That in turn would benefit the environment because they would need less chemicals.
Everybody happy, including Monsanto, they get a better image
The swedish show was called expedition robinson as someone already pointed out earlier and it also was on a tropical island, the price there was a measly $50,000.-
In holland (wich is where I happen to live) we are now enjoying a really fun show called (as pointed out) Big brother but their concept is a little different. It goes like this:
Nine people live in a house without any connection to the outside world other than a voice over. no TV, no newspaper etc. They stay in that house (wich, by the way is a sort of pre-fab single story building) for 100 days.
There are some fun elements added too:
Every few weeks each of the inhabitants has to nominate two housemates for removal from the house. After that the viewers (that's us!) get to vote on the nominee's and the one with the most votes has to leave the (and spend the next few weeks in talk shows) and he or she gets nothing. In the end there will be three left and then the public votes for the most popular and that person gets $125,00.- and the other two get nothing. end of show.
They get to spend $250.- every week (with nine people!) but they can raise their budget by succesfully completing assignments such as: cycling 1300km on a hometrainer in five days.
Every day there is a "prime time" summary of all the fun things they did that day on TV and at night it (sometimes) replaces the shopping channel (wich is good). there are also four webcams running all day and night (remember the time-difference)
http://www.big-brother.nl
(Sorry, I'm no good at HTML)
That's something experience taught me, whenever two parties are fighting over something they both take their own opinion to the extreme and the truth ends somewhere between them.
Microsoft is probably right about a part of the claims they make in that article otherwise it would be too easy to prove them wrong wich would be very bad from a marketing point of view.
The response of the linux community is pobably less truthfull (more flame-full) but at the end of the day a summary of all the reasonable responses will probably create a document exactly like the MS article only comparing linux and NT on points where linux wins.
The Operating System war has become more of a war of tastes that will probably have no real end.
Something like ferrari drivers bitchin to Volvo drivers about their stupid slow boxy cars and the Volvo drivers shouting back that their cars are safer and more comfortable and run on less fuel.
Drive the car you like, run the OS you like, there is no more need for this discussion.
In Holland,(where I happen to live) there is already a $0.15 tax on CD-R/CD-RW 's. This tax is so small that few people actually noticed it's introduction. The distribution of that money is handled really fair here though, and aside from a percent or two in administration fee's for the government you'll at least be sure that your 15 cents will be distributed via a certain rating-system to all artists who had a song in the dutch hitlists in the last few months. Actually, if the canadian tax system would be put to effect, and distribution of the money would be handled in the same way as in holland. Then an average artist would earn more money from a CD-R on wich his album was (might have been) copied than from an album sold by his or her record company.