I think part of my post got interpreted as some kind of socialist wishful thinking, the 'isn't is part of their responsiblity...
in fact the point I'm going towards is that the companies are going after the ignorant consumers, not the saavy ones. These products are in best buys and walmarts, not just techie computer stores / websites. For example, I have had a few linksys routers. They all come with some crappy 'wizard' software that tries to make everything work for me, but they do a terrible job and don't ultimately make my experience more secure.
If they're already droppping, say, somewhere between 20 and 100 thousand bucks on a fancy autorun installer / wizard application (i've build large scale distro cd-roms so I can vouch for that as a pretty solid entry level price) that has a bunch of talking heads, why not actually make it useful and have it configure things properly.
The us govt has gone so far as to mandate corporate responsibility beyond the 'throw them to the wolves buyer beware' free market 'if my product is too tough people will buy something else' mentality through things like the americans with disabilites act and other consumer warranty styled laws that require manufacturers to go beyond just the minimum.
Why again is this different? Why can't we expect our corporate citizens to take the same degree of responsibility towards educating their customers as you're suggesting be requisite of the customers themselves?
Further, as a shareholder of some of these companies, I would want to think that an extra 10 - 20k now during the development might save my investment in the company hundreds of thousands in unnecessary customer support time or other troubleshooting, and or possible litigation.
This post sounds a lot like the programmers who bitch incessantly about reasonably adept computer users who nevertheless use GUI's.
"If someone really wants to use a computer they should at least be able to get in behind the little artsy GUI's and do something with the software, GUI's are for pansy's and if you can't code you lose the right to complain"
Isn't there some responsiblity on the part of the manufacturers who are advertising to these ignorant mom and pops to educate them? Isn't it the responsiblity of software desginers to make their GUI's actually work?
There's no correlation between not knowing how to enable WEP / WAP / etc on a wireless router and, for example, being able to survive as you put it. Where on Mazlow's hierarchy of human needs do we see the 'Good with tech gadgets' section? Conversely however, we do expect our corporations to be good citizens, and if they sell an ignorant end user something that doesn't secure itself and the customers data, shouldn't we place some blame on the company targeting people who aren't savvy enough to use their products?
This will go over like a fart in church with corporate america. Wasn't there a huge controversy back when google desktop came out and it was storing corporate info on google servers to make it easier to get your data / searches between computers?
At least it will be easy for google to snoop on board meetings when their software is on the laptops of all the executives chatting away about their next big deal.
Do no evil or not, I just got a new dell and the first thing to go was google desktop despite all it's advertised benefits. I just don't feel comfortable knowing that someone else can flip through my e-mails, search history, advertisments, calendar, spreadsheets, quotes on writely, and now what music or tv show i've got going on in the background.
Many companies now offer technical support on a pay - per - use basis....offering free 'web based' forum support but if you want to call them to get help with something thats not working on their system, you have to pay them for the privilage of getting them to fix whatevers wrong with your system. I tend not to call unless it's already been worked over for a few hours....so it's double irritating.
The point tho that i'm going for is not specifically related to this concept...just a general musing about someones 'god given right' to be able to purchase something.
Why should a company be forced to universally charge for support, or be required to offer a product to everyone, just to satisfy a sense of arbitrary justice that "I should be able to buy whatever I want, whenever I want, at whatever age I happen to be"
Is it any more fair to users with legitimate issues who need support to charge them for the right to call in about a bug than it is to require some categories of users be pre-approved to buy a good / service? They're not exactly comparable on the indignance scale, but nevertheless it's the same core issue....someones being held accountable for another persons (or class of persons) condition.
It's true, and if the reason why I have to pay for technical support as a young pup is because all of the old fogies out there bombard technical support places with questions like "my internet isn't working, why" then it stops being an issue of "Oh how terrible that we have this age discrimination" but "Why am I being forced to pay for service just because other people abuse the resource"
It's not a perfect analogy but it's close. Can a company choose not to service a class of customers, even if those customers could use / benefit from their product, but if providing those customers your product thereby increases your costs exponentially? I suppose it's like the ADA (americans with disabilities act) but is it fair to call age a disability?
The trick with Mozy is that it just works...you don't have to remember to move it to your thumbdrive. Cheapest thumbdrive that I just found at micro center was $15 for 1gig. So twice the space, 15 times less expensive, and auto backups, which is the key....it will find things and store them for you, or you can override it and do it yourself...telling it to ignore your photos and focus on music, or word documents. The key word is auto....no fancy configuration needed and you don't lose your keydrive somewhere with all your data on it.
I don't know anything else about mozy, I did say I was a customer, and I think the product is relevant, but you're for damn sure that I'm enjoying the 5 people who signed up giving me an extra +256 mb per person.
And you're right, not having to do anything but post a link to a relevant / interesting place and getting space for my files from it, most definately priceless.
I use Mozy. It's free, works well, does it's stuff in the background. They have paid options too for more space if you need it...cheap and easy and doesn't seem to get in my way.
I don't work for Mozy or know anything else about them; I was sent to the site and started using it and it seems to work.
From their site:
Mozy Plus
Got lots of stuff to backup? Mozy Plus lets you backup more of your photos, music files, and other important documents.
30GB - $4.95/month
Until you can look at the numbers of a company and know everything about that company with certainty (meaning that a human _could_ do it if they had an infinite amount of time), or until we have computers that are great at telling when people (enron) are bluffing, I'll stick with investmant companies that rely predominantly on humans.
There is a difference between a police officer having a right to privacy and the government operating in secrecy.
The police officer himself or herself is a private individual in a public role. Their public actions are for the most part public record, but their private information, (phone number, wifes workplace, number of children) is not somehow by default taken with them into the general public sphere.
I think there's a difference between taking a picture of your kid in front of a cop on a horse or taking a picture of a police officer carrying a stack of donuts out of a coffee shop, and taking a photo of a police officer cuffing a drug dealer and then flipping it up onto Flickr along with your daily photo stream. I'm willing to bet that there's enough of a difference beween those examples that you can get away with the first kind and not with the second kind, regardless of the need for 'observing the government at work.'
When the police office is acting as an agent of the government, thats when their motives and actions are ironically most in need of public observations but also most in need of private protection. There's also a difference between taking a photo of a cop arresting someone, at a sobriety checkpoint, or whose under cover, and taking a photo of a cop in authority whose breaking the law.
Is it absolutely necessary that I see the dead agents bruised eyeball gazing gently off into some different distance than her bloody one? Does it make it any more real to me that she's dead, or any more true in my head that a little bomb went off in her head and zapped her brain into goo?
My wife has an issue with blood...it makes her faint. She loves movies, but not when she passes out.
I hate the thought of someone censoring a movie, but would be thrilled if there were an option to play a movie on a range of violence or gore settings. If there's a movie thats borderline that I could watch with my kid, but their not mature enough to really deal with the killing parts, why isn't there a way to use the built in tools to do that?
The companies doing this got ahead of themselves legally, but despite the overwhelming sentiment of 34 year old slashdot men who think they're old enough to watch whatever they want and the rest of the world be dammned or be stuck with barney, there are a whole host of people out there who for whatever reason want 90% of the movie and not the last 10%. I can read a book however I want, I could use an MPlayer EDL list, I could just have my wife close her eyes and use fast foward when we get somewhere thats going to make her sick. Whats the point of challening the morality of this and bringing in shit like abortion and drinking laws. It just confuses the issue and trys to rate this problem on another problems scale.
If Hollywood isn't filling a market because it's not big enough, does that make it right? If they could have an alternate track that ran the movie at a G, PG, PG-13, or R setting, why shouldn't they? Directors artistic visions get hosed all the time, and then they come out later with their own version thats 3 times as long and a self indulgent tricked out symphony. If they can make it longer, they can make it shorter.
The government forces companies to service 'unprofitable' markets all the time....I don't know that this one should have fallen to copyright protectionisms and been trounced just because of the same 'I'm the **AA and am going to tell you what you can and can't do with your copy of the file" that everyone on here usually rails against.
It would have been done sooner if a major investor hadn't backed out:
Derek Zoolander: What is this? A nano-research center for ants? How can we expected the researchers to learn about nano-technology... if they can't even fit inside the building?
Canada: Derek, this is just a small...
Derek Zoolander: I don't wanna hear your excuses! The building has to be at least... three times bigger than this!
I don't know that you've had a chance to review the reading lists or participate in the discussions at any MBA courses recently, but I think you'd find your comment off base.
It's not the MBA that makes people insensitive selfish short term profit thinking clods, it just makes them better at being such clods. You have to start that way to begin with is the point I'm making.
Most MBA programs try to infuse a sense of responsibility into their students. A company that pursue's short term profits at the expense of long term planning is not something that is being run by a sucessful MBA. A company that hires people who neglect the human and social capital in the pursuit of increasing revenues will eventually decline as people move on and leave.
Don't allow your personal experience to negatively affect your thoughts on all MBAs. Maybe you had a bad experience with an individual who was an insensitive clod and was also an MBA, but that doesn't mean that going to school to learn how to manage people and business factors is a waste or time, or that hiring those people is equally as short sighted. Perhaps you were cut by someone who had an MBA? Cutting an unprofitable anchor isn't the same as focusing on profits to the detriment of the company...it lets the company grow faster.
From my personal experience, 'small businesses' make the wrong decisions all to often and keep doing the same thing because they have to and don't know how to change. It's hard to look at something you love and have built and acknowedge that it's failing, or at the least, failing to perform. An MBA can't fix that, but they can help by asking hard questions and directing the company to perform in ways that they've been taught will increase productivity. MBA's aren't evil, but maybe what they have to do is evil. For the record, I own a small business and am getting an MBA.
Who knows...maybe you'll enlighten us a bit more on your personal experiences to help everyone understand why MBAs are evil.
wait a minute. You're suggesting that the best defense for a pandemic of BIRD FLU would be to consume CHICKEN Soup?
That smacks of a vaguely Matrix 'human as the incubator' approach to a new 'mass produced' production technique of generating the necessary antibodies quickly, no?
If as a later poster suggests, you're referring to 'atomic' as the smallest possible unit, or something indivisible, then you should do some reading up on cleartype. My understanding is that each visible pixel on your screen is made up of a few (RGB?) sub pixels which turn on in different intensities to create the 'pixel' you see. Microsoft and some others apparently discovered that if you 'steal' some of the sub pixels from adjacent 'pixels' and activate them, you can soften hard edges, effectively an antialiasing effect visually. I'm not an expert, I didn't read the article, and I know very little about how the hubble imagery is created, but I'm putting my money on that half pixel being something like what I described above.
But I think part of his concern is that losing cases on weak lawsuits may negatively impact the chances of a stronger case as once there's established precident that discounts the foundation upon which a subsequent and potentially stronger challenge might arise the threshold or bar is raised and the chance of that subsequent case legitamately having a postive impact on our lives is thusly diminsihed by the earlier case, filed for the sake of fighting the good fight without regard for the greater good achieved by giving ground initially.
Isn't the material produced the nano equivilent of excrement? Isn't it quite likely that the chemistry of the wire in this case then would have similarly negative properties when associated with organic materials?
I think that's along the lines of what Gizmo is trying to do.
I've used it and the sound quality is great, the record call feature is, well, nifty at least, and the mapping is fun if a bit off sometimes for things like cellphones (ohio in texas? wtf)
Anyway, there do seem to be some kinks on the windows side, my connection sometimes won't go through, but that might be related to hibernating and connecting from different places all the time.
Still rough, but fun and definately cheaper than something like a Vonage Soft Phone and in my limited testing every bit as capable, plus its cross platform.
The article is vauge...it's either the subjective "pac man is recoginzed as the number one arcade game" or the "most units shipped." Here the only relevant part of the article...but again, it doesn't say by what means the award is being given.
Namco's popular "Pac Man" has been recognized as the world's No. 1 arcade game, paving the way for it to be included in the Guinness Book of Records, it has been learned.
A total of 293,000 Pac Man arcade machines were sold across the world in the eight years after the game was released in 1980.
Whats missing from this article is the part that actually says which of the many interesting facts the article brings up (perhaps pac man is in the record books because it was the first arcade character inspired by a fast food item) so we're left to guess.
A quick google news search for Guinness and pacman come up with nothing, either.
Eventually someones going to say, well, if you've had two strikes, and you're looking at jail time but its still a minor offence, lets let them walk freely in the general populace as long as they wear their bracelet under the assumption that the simple process of observing them will predispose them to making the right decisions.
They'll string up the wires and blanket the pilot city with recievers, and then extend the idea to parolee's. They're citizens, but still tainted with the association of being in prison.
Then they'll move to Molesters. No one likes them, so people won't bitch too much, and it'll be depicted as a community safety net...if they get w/in 20 feet of the perimiter of a school or daycare a little light goes off at the local PD and inside the schools admin building.
Once we're on the topic of kids, parents will think its a great idea to be able to keep track of their kids. Their just kids you know, and need extra supervision, and since they're not yet 18, they're not technically real people either.
By the time we all catch our breath, the unabomer is going to be the only nutjob who isn't tracked by these things, and, when it comes down to it, he's the one we wanted to protect ourselves from anyway.
I'm not really anti RFID....I think they're pretty cool, but I also don't like the idea of my personal positioning data being treated as carelessly as my SSN #, and the "geez, well no one likes it but there's so much positioning data out there already that the cats out of the bag and how do you regulate it" approach makes me queasy.
Slashdot Mirror
I think part of my post got interpreted as some kind of socialist wishful thinking, the 'isn't is part of their responsiblity...
in fact the point I'm going towards is that the companies are going after the ignorant consumers, not the saavy ones. These products are in best buys and walmarts, not just techie computer stores / websites. For example, I have had a few linksys routers. They all come with some crappy 'wizard' software that tries to make everything work for me, but they do a terrible job and don't ultimately make my experience more secure.
If they're already droppping, say, somewhere between 20 and 100 thousand bucks on a fancy autorun installer / wizard application (i've build large scale distro cd-roms so I can vouch for that as a pretty solid entry level price) that has a bunch of talking heads, why not actually make it useful and have it configure things properly.
The us govt has gone so far as to mandate corporate responsibility beyond the 'throw them to the wolves buyer beware' free market 'if my product is too tough people will buy something else' mentality through things like the americans with disabilites act and other consumer warranty styled laws that require manufacturers to go beyond just the minimum.
Why again is this different? Why can't we expect our corporate citizens to take the same degree of responsibility towards educating their customers as you're suggesting be requisite of the customers themselves?
Further, as a shareholder of some of these companies, I would want to think that an extra 10 - 20k now during the development might save my investment in the company hundreds of thousands in unnecessary customer support time or other troubleshooting, and or possible litigation.
Just my several cents.
This post sounds a lot like the programmers who bitch incessantly about reasonably adept computer users who nevertheless use GUI's.
"If someone really wants to use a computer they should at least be able to get in behind the little artsy GUI's and do something with the software, GUI's are for pansy's and if you can't code you lose the right to complain"
Isn't there some responsiblity on the part of the manufacturers who are advertising to these ignorant mom and pops to educate them? Isn't it the responsiblity of software desginers to make their GUI's actually work?
There's no correlation between not knowing how to enable WEP / WAP / etc on a wireless router and, for example, being able to survive as you put it. Where on Mazlow's hierarchy of human needs do we see the 'Good with tech gadgets' section? Conversely however, we do expect our corporations to be good citizens, and if they sell an ignorant end user something that doesn't secure itself and the customers data, shouldn't we place some blame on the company targeting people who aren't savvy enough to use their products?
This will go over like a fart in church with corporate america. Wasn't there a huge controversy back when google desktop came out and it was storing corporate info on google servers to make it easier to get your data / searches between computers?
At least it will be easy for google to snoop on board meetings when their software is on the laptops of all the executives chatting away about their next big deal.
Do no evil or not, I just got a new dell and the first thing to go was google desktop despite all it's advertised benefits. I just don't feel comfortable knowing that someone else can flip through my e-mails, search history, advertisments, calendar, spreadsheets, quotes on writely, and now what music or tv show i've got going on in the background.
Many companies now offer technical support on a pay - per - use basis....offering free 'web based' forum support but if you want to call them to get help with something thats not working on their system, you have to pay them for the privilage of getting them to fix whatevers wrong with your system. I tend not to call unless it's already been worked over for a few hours....so it's double irritating.
The point tho that i'm going for is not specifically related to this concept...just a general musing about someones 'god given right' to be able to purchase something.
Why should a company be forced to universally charge for support, or be required to offer a product to everyone, just to satisfy a sense of arbitrary justice that "I should be able to buy whatever I want, whenever I want, at whatever age I happen to be"
Is it any more fair to users with legitimate issues who need support to charge them for the right to call in about a bug than it is to require some categories of users be pre-approved to buy a good / service? They're not exactly comparable on the indignance scale, but nevertheless it's the same core issue....someones being held accountable for another persons (or class of persons) condition.
It's true, and if the reason why I have to pay for technical support as a young pup is because all of the old fogies out there bombard technical support places with questions like "my internet isn't working, why" then it stops being an issue of "Oh how terrible that we have this age discrimination" but "Why am I being forced to pay for service just because other people abuse the resource"
It's not a perfect analogy but it's close. Can a company choose not to service a class of customers, even if those customers could use / benefit from their product, but if providing those customers your product thereby increases your costs exponentially? I suppose it's like the ADA (americans with disabilities act) but is it fair to call age a disability?
Curious issue nevertheless.
The trick with Mozy is that it just works...you don't have to remember to move it to your thumbdrive. Cheapest thumbdrive that I just found at micro center was $15 for 1gig. So twice the space, 15 times less expensive, and auto backups, which is the key....it will find things and store them for you, or you can override it and do it yourself...telling it to ignore your photos and focus on music, or word documents. The key word is auto....no fancy configuration needed and you don't lose your keydrive somewhere with all your data on it.
OP was looking for a place to put his MP3's and movies etc.
Notice the (relatively) open disclosure:
And the mozy whoring part:
Try it out
I don't know anything else about mozy, I did say I was a customer, and I think the product is relevant, but you're for damn sure that I'm enjoying the 5 people who signed up giving me an extra +256 mb per person.
And you're right, not having to do anything but post a link to a relevant / interesting place and getting space for my files from it, most definately priceless.
I use Mozy. It's free, works well, does it's stuff in the background. They have paid options too for more space if you need it...cheap and easy and doesn't seem to get in my way.
I don't work for Mozy or know anything else about them; I was sent to the site and started using it and it seems to work.
From their site:
Mozy Plus
Got lots of stuff to backup? Mozy Plus lets you backup more of your photos, music files, and other important documents.
30GB - $4.95/month
Mozy Free
2 GB of 100% free backup space.
And the mozy whoring part:
Try it out
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/2 1/1646238
Until you can look at the numbers of a company and know everything about that company with certainty (meaning that a human _could_ do it if they had an infinite amount of time), or until we have computers that are great at telling when people (enron) are bluffing, I'll stick with investmant companies that rely predominantly on humans.
There is a difference between a police officer having a right to privacy and the government operating in secrecy.
The police officer himself or herself is a private individual in a public role. Their public actions are for the most part public record, but their private information, (phone number, wifes workplace, number of children) is not somehow by default taken with them into the general public sphere.
I think there's a difference between taking a picture of your kid in front of a cop on a horse or taking a picture of a police officer carrying a stack of donuts out of a coffee shop, and taking a photo of a police officer cuffing a drug dealer and then flipping it up onto Flickr along with your daily photo stream. I'm willing to bet that there's enough of a difference beween those examples that you can get away with the first kind and not with the second kind, regardless of the need for 'observing the government at work.'
When the police office is acting as an agent of the government, thats when their motives and actions are ironically most in need of public observations but also most in need of private protection. There's also a difference between taking a photo of a cop arresting someone, at a sobriety checkpoint, or whose under cover, and taking a photo of a cop in authority whose breaking the law.
EK
I think you're on the right track.
Is it absolutely necessary that I see the dead agents bruised eyeball gazing gently off into some different distance than her bloody one? Does it make it any more real to me that she's dead, or any more true in my head that a little bomb went off in her head and zapped her brain into goo?
My wife has an issue with blood...it makes her faint. She loves movies, but not when she passes out.
I hate the thought of someone censoring a movie, but would be thrilled if there were an option to play a movie on a range of violence or gore settings. If there's a movie thats borderline that I could watch with my kid, but their not mature enough to really deal with the killing parts, why isn't there a way to use the built in tools to do that?
The companies doing this got ahead of themselves legally, but despite the overwhelming sentiment of 34 year old slashdot men who think they're old enough to watch whatever they want and the rest of the world be dammned or be stuck with barney, there are a whole host of people out there who for whatever reason want 90% of the movie and not the last 10%. I can read a book however I want, I could use an MPlayer EDL list, I could just have my wife close her eyes and use fast foward when we get somewhere thats going to make her sick. Whats the point of challening the morality of this and bringing in shit like abortion and drinking laws. It just confuses the issue and trys to rate this problem on another problems scale.
If Hollywood isn't filling a market because it's not big enough, does that make it right? If they could have an alternate track that ran the movie at a G, PG, PG-13, or R setting, why shouldn't they? Directors artistic visions get hosed all the time, and then they come out later with their own version thats 3 times as long and a self indulgent tricked out symphony. If they can make it longer, they can make it shorter.
The government forces companies to service 'unprofitable' markets all the time....I don't know that this one should have fallen to copyright protectionisms and been trounced just because of the same 'I'm the **AA and am going to tell you what you can and can't do with your copy of the file" that everyone on here usually rails against.
It would have been done sooner if a major investor hadn't backed out:
Derek Zoolander: What is this? A nano-research center for ants? How can we expected the researchers to learn about nano-technology... if they can't even fit inside the building?
Canada: Derek, this is just a small...
Derek Zoolander: I don't wanna hear your excuses! The building has to be at least... three times bigger than this!
Duke Nukem, Forever Due 'This Year'...
I don't know that you've had a chance to review the reading lists or participate in the discussions at any MBA courses recently, but I think you'd find your comment off base.
It's not the MBA that makes people insensitive selfish short term profit thinking clods, it just makes them better at being such clods. You have to start that way to begin with is the point I'm making.
Most MBA programs try to infuse a sense of responsibility into their students. A company that pursue's short term profits at the expense of long term planning is not something that is being run by a sucessful MBA. A company that hires people who neglect the human and social capital in the pursuit of increasing revenues will eventually decline as people move on and leave.
Don't allow your personal experience to negatively affect your thoughts on all MBAs. Maybe you had a bad experience with an individual who was an insensitive clod and was also an MBA, but that doesn't mean that going to school to learn how to manage people and business factors is a waste or time, or that hiring those people is equally as short sighted. Perhaps you were cut by someone who had an MBA? Cutting an unprofitable anchor isn't the same as focusing on profits to the detriment of the company...it lets the company grow faster.
From my personal experience, 'small businesses' make the wrong decisions all to often and keep doing the same thing because they have to and don't know how to change. It's hard to look at something you love and have built and acknowedge that it's failing, or at the least, failing to perform. An MBA can't fix that, but they can help by asking hard questions and directing the company to perform in ways that they've been taught will increase productivity. MBA's aren't evil, but maybe what they have to do is evil. For the record, I own a small business and am getting an MBA.
Who knows...maybe you'll enlighten us a bit more on your personal experiences to help everyone understand why MBAs are evil.
wait a minute. You're suggesting that the best defense for a pandemic of BIRD FLU would be to consume CHICKEN Soup?
That smacks of a vaguely Matrix 'human as the incubator' approach to a new 'mass produced' production technique of generating the necessary antibodies quickly, no?
If as a later poster suggests, you're referring to 'atomic' as the smallest possible unit, or something indivisible, then you should do some reading up on cleartype. My understanding is that each visible pixel on your screen is made up of a few (RGB?) sub pixels which turn on in different intensities to create the 'pixel' you see. Microsoft and some others apparently discovered that if you 'steal' some of the sub pixels from adjacent 'pixels' and activate them, you can soften hard edges, effectively an antialiasing effect visually. I'm not an expert, I didn't read the article, and I know very little about how the hubble imagery is created, but I'm putting my money on that half pixel being something like what I described above.
cheers
But I think part of his concern is that losing cases on weak lawsuits may negatively impact the chances of a stronger case as once there's established precident that discounts the foundation upon which a subsequent and potentially stronger challenge might arise the threshold or bar is raised and the chance of that subsequent case legitamately having a postive impact on our lives is thusly diminsihed by the earlier case, filed for the sake of fighting the good fight without regard for the greater good achieved by giving ground initially.
Great Scott! Don't you dare bring will smith into this. Let him get jiggy on his own.
Isn't the material produced the nano equivilent of excrement? Isn't it quite likely that the chemistry of the wire in this case then would have similarly negative properties when associated with organic materials?
I think that's along the lines of what Gizmo is trying to do.
I've used it and the sound quality is great, the record call feature is, well, nifty at least, and the mapping is fun if a bit off sometimes for things like cellphones (ohio in texas? wtf)
Anyway, there do seem to be some kinks on the windows side, my connection sometimes won't go through, but that might be related to hibernating and connecting from different places all the time.
Still rough, but fun and definately cheaper than something like a Vonage Soft Phone and in my limited testing every bit as capable, plus its cross platform.
http://www.gizmoproject.com/
EK
For some reason I don't think politicians who went around dispensing "trust me" nasal sprays would be all that popular.
The article is vauge...it's either the subjective "pac man is recoginzed as the number one arcade game" or the "most units shipped." Here the only relevant part of the article...but again, it doesn't say by what means the award is being given.
Namco's popular "Pac Man" has been recognized as the world's No. 1 arcade game, paving the way for it to be included in the Guinness Book of Records, it has been learned.
A total of 293,000 Pac Man arcade machines were sold across the world in the eight years after the game was released in 1980.
Whats missing from this article is the part that actually says which of the many interesting facts the article brings up (perhaps pac man is in the record books because it was the first arcade character inspired by a fast food item) so we're left to guess.
A quick google news search for Guinness and pacman come up with nothing, either.
Eventually someones going to say, well, if you've had two strikes, and you're looking at jail time but its still a minor offence, lets let them walk freely in the general populace as long as they wear their bracelet under the assumption that the simple process of observing them will predispose them to making the right decisions.
They'll string up the wires and blanket the pilot city with recievers, and then extend the idea to parolee's. They're citizens, but still tainted with the association of being in prison.
Then they'll move to Molesters. No one likes them, so people won't bitch too much, and it'll be depicted as a community safety net...if they get w/in 20 feet of the perimiter of a school or daycare a little light goes off at the local PD and inside the schools admin building.
Once we're on the topic of kids, parents will think its a great idea to be able to keep track of their kids. Their just kids you know, and need extra supervision, and since they're not yet 18, they're not technically real people either.
By the time we all catch our breath, the unabomer is going to be the only nutjob who isn't tracked by these things, and, when it comes down to it, he's the one we wanted to protect ourselves from anyway.
I'm not really anti RFID....I think they're pretty cool, but I also don't like the idea of my personal positioning data being treated as carelessly as my SSN #, and the "geez, well no one likes it but there's so much positioning data out there already that the cats out of the bag and how do you regulate it" approach makes me queasy.
Night,
EK
Guess Google got tired of getting beaned all the time at recess so they just bought the whole darned game. EK