Because that would take away from precious time ogling the latest Star Trek film or signing petitions to stop Uwe Boll from making movies. d:
It's surprising - I just read a transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky titled Here Comes Everybody which talks about the 'cognitive surplus' that we have these days - and how the potential exists for large-scale distributed social projects to grow, given the rampant free time which exists with our four/five day working weeks.
Once you have a rough plan, you would have to find people with the talents you need who are willing to help on their free time. Projects like this (ones where people don't get paid) often have staff members that abandon ship faster than a rowboat full of Cuban refugees at the Florida coast. Anyone working on it would have to document/comment everything appropriately so their inevitable successor can continue their work.
More important than the underlying technology would definitely be planning for and accomodating the 'rowboat nature' of this project, yes.
What can you do? Well, if you wanted to fill the ambiguous position of "Project Lead", you can start by registering a.com and getting some decent hosting for the site. Again, you'll need a plan ahead of time aside from a few paragraphs in a/. comment to get some people to get on board with the project.
Well, for me,/personally/, it's not completely out of the blue - it's really the culmination of plenty of thought on copyright and the desire to do _something_, but never really knowing how my limited HTML/CSS skills could take on teh mighty Empire!
If anybody's interested, do chime in - I have some hosting and I could afford to register a.com/.org.
Reading through this story, it continues to shock me -- not what asshats the RIAA etc are -- but that we here, at the collective hive-mind that is Slashdot, haven't already come up with a way to help people wrongly being prosecuted by them and their sleazy lawyers.
There seems to be a clear pattern to their targets - people who know relatively little about technology and who are more likely to settle than battle it out in courts. I'd argue that we need to help these people out.
About halfway down the story, the defendant, Tanya Andersen is said to have looked up information online, hoping to find information on similiar cases.
Why don't we, through/., set up a site, aggregate information about similiar cases and build up a body of evidence to "[...] show that the RIAA engaged in serial bad-faith lawsuits [...]". In the long run, the space could serve as a place for debate on the current copyright regime, the inflated monetary value assigned to the songs/movies downloaded, etc.
I'm sure that some of us here are lawyers as well - maybe some time could be spent decoding the various court documents/legal stuff that the RIAA sends out - a distributed legal advice centre (cue Beowulf joke)...
This is just an idea, of course - but I'd be happy to get involved in whatever way I can. I have some small amount of expertise in building websites - perhaps that's the first place to start...
For the longest time, I've been using Firefox's Tabbrowser preferences to use the mouse focus rather than a mouse click to switch between tabs. I've grown really used to it, and it's one of the first things I miss when I have to use someone else's machine.
I think that alternative ways of navigating need to be looked at carefully - clicking is not the optimal way of interacting with computers *all* the time. The above site needs to be looked at as a proof of concept, rather than as an optimally designed experience.
Gas maybe price-inelastic, but SUV-sales are, IMHO, very much price elastic, or perhaps cross-elastic in terms of gas prices.
Did I just say gas instead of petrol?
Well, Sheep No. 11898, you don't have a huge amount of credibility. However, perhaps you'd like to read some of Monbiots writing, look at the sources he quotes, do a little of your own research and then come back?
The Economist, while containing very well-written material, is decidedly slanted to the right. What lapses would you quote, or what mistakes could you point out that the Guardian has recently/not-recently made, to support your statement?
An earlier comment stated that it would look rather strange if the tobacco companies merely funded research into the effects of second-hand smoke, so this research into global warming will give THEM some standing as members of the "impartial-serious-enquirers-into-important-issues " group.
I was at a talk that he gave at our college. He was quite irritated by people referring to GNU as Linux, and made the distinction very clear. He did get rather irritated with people, and he did have to ask the crowd (completely uninformed students for the most part) to keep quiet.
I'm a college student, so yes, the equivalent of ramen here, but I must say, that $1100 ($1000 after a student rebate) is a bloody good deal. Yes, yes , it's 30% over priced, yes, yes, no lightscribe DVD+- whatever, but my god, it's a fucking Mac. At the very least, it'll make women sleep with me.
Also, I don't know that megahertz really matters too much to me anymore. Apple I think sees this - though a dual-core 1.8gig chip is no laughing matter. I figure I'll top up to a gig/gig and a half of ram, and maybe I'll need to bump up the internal drive.
PS to everybody not in the US: Buy in the US and get someone coming over to bring it for you. That way you save a bunch of bucks (enough of a price difference to make it worth the hassle, if you're on a budget).
Oh, BTW, i can dial up AT&T customer support ANYTIME and speak to a REAL person on third ring, because if they don;t pick up, i will be switching to another provider AND carry my number with e (yeah portability)..
Secondly, there is no mandated one-rate, one-country. BSNL/MTNL (the nationalised phone company) introduced calls to any BSNL phone at Re. 1/min (1/40th of a dollar:-) ), but there was no compulsion on the governments part for the private companies to do so. An Economics 101 class will tell you why they decided to follow suit.
I'm all for taunting those poor people in the rest of the world about their call charges. However, ensure that you're truthful while doing so.
...one of the promises of the present government was that it would make broadband affordable.
What happened was pretty decent, for a government programme. 256 kbps broadband was rolled out in all the larger cities, at Rs. 500 (USD 10) per month - however, there was a rider - a 1 GiB transfer limit.
This scheme, however, was sufficient to start a major price war, and broadband prices have been steadily falling, upto the point where it's now being pushed way more heavily than dial-up.
The problems:
Lack of heavy-usage plans
Nightmarish problems with free-usage hours, and subsequent billing
Billing
Last mile hasn't been unbundled, so each company has to lay their own cables, resulting in private companies being unable to offer their lower prices/higher usage plans to customers who want it
However,
Since the government monopoly has to, by law service rural areas, the problem of a lack of access, that one hears about so much on/. is really not a problem
Cheap!
Excellent (personal experience) service, downtime of about a week in the last year of my having it
Technical support, while incredibly hard to actually *find*, is remarkably well informed - came home, and was happily using the command line on my linux server, to which the line was connected
Typing from it right now;-)
Whether it was the best idea, whether it helped starving people...those are all debatable points. But surely, it is hardly an incredibly expensive project, which will kill off the American economy?
Even if the government doesn't offer fiber-connections to the rest of America, 256k broadband is perfectly capable of accessing Wikipedia, joining and taking part in mailing groups...there will be a section of the society whom it will help.
yes, yes, slashdot and all, but please RTFA. The pictures were on a different website. Repeat after me, one cannot set a robots.txt on an external website.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're using leopard, Address Book syncs with your gmail account for free.
See: this article on Lifehacker.
Because that would take away from precious time ogling the latest Star Trek film or signing petitions to stop Uwe Boll from making movies. d:
It's surprising - I just read a transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky titled Here Comes Everybody which talks about the 'cognitive surplus' that we have these days - and how the potential exists for large-scale distributed social projects to grow, given the rampant free time which exists with our four/five day working weeks.
Once you have a rough plan, you would have to find people with the talents you need who are willing to help on their free time. Projects like this (ones where people don't get paid) often have staff members that abandon ship faster than a rowboat full of Cuban refugees at the Florida coast. Anyone working on it would have to document/comment everything appropriately so their inevitable successor can continue their work.
More important than the underlying technology would definitely be planning for and accomodating the 'rowboat nature' of this project, yes.
What can you do? Well, if you wanted to fill the ambiguous position of "Project Lead", you can start by registering a .com and getting some decent hosting for the site. Again, you'll need a plan ahead of time aside from a few paragraphs in a /. comment to get some people to get on board with the project.
Well, for me, /personally/, it's not completely out of the blue - it's really the culmination of plenty of thought on copyright and the desire to do _something_, but never really knowing how my limited HTML/CSS skills could take on teh mighty Empire!
If anybody's interested, do chime in - I have some hosting and I could afford to register a .com/.org.
Oh, and ;-)
Reading through this story, it continues to shock me -- not what asshats the RIAA etc are -- but that we here, at the collective hive-mind that is Slashdot, haven't already come up with a way to help people wrongly being prosecuted by them and their sleazy lawyers.
There seems to be a clear pattern to their targets - people who know relatively little about technology and who are more likely to settle than battle it out in courts. I'd argue that we need to help these people out.
About halfway down the story, the defendant, Tanya Andersen is said to have looked up information online, hoping to find information on similiar cases.
Why don't we, through /., set up a site, aggregate information about similiar cases and build up a body of evidence to "[...] show that the RIAA engaged in serial bad-faith lawsuits [...]". In the long run, the space could serve as a place for debate on the current copyright regime, the inflated monetary value assigned to the songs/movies downloaded, etc.
I'm sure that some of us here are lawyers as well - maybe some time could be spent decoding the various court documents/legal stuff that the RIAA sends out - a distributed legal advice centre (cue Beowulf joke)...
This is just an idea, of course - but I'd be happy to get involved in whatever way I can. I have some small amount of expertise in building websites - perhaps that's the first place to start...
I've got a frickin' shotgun.
GrassPipe.
For the longest time, I've been using Firefox's Tabbrowser preferences to use the mouse focus rather than a mouse click to switch between tabs. I've grown really used to it, and it's one of the first things I miss when I have to use someone else's machine.
I think that alternative ways of navigating need to be looked at carefully - clicking is not the optimal way of interacting with computers *all* the time. The above site needs to be looked at as a proof of concept, rather than as an optimally designed experience.
- Rahul.
Gas maybe price-inelastic, but SUV-sales are, IMHO, very much price elastic, or perhaps cross-elastic in terms of gas prices. Did I just say gas instead of petrol?
Well, Sheep No. 11898, you don't have a huge amount of credibility. However, perhaps you'd like to read some of Monbiots writing, look at the sources he quotes, do a little of your own research and then come back?
s " group.
The Economist, while containing very well-written material, is decidedly slanted to the right. What lapses would you quote, or what mistakes could you point out that the Guardian has recently/not-recently made, to support your statement?
An earlier comment stated that it would look rather strange if the tobacco companies merely funded research into the effects of second-hand smoke, so this research into global warming will give THEM some standing as members of the "impartial-serious-enquirers-into-important-issue
[1] http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=AnyColumnLong est
I was at a talk that he gave at our college. He was quite irritated by people referring to GNU as Linux, and made the distinction very clear. He did get rather irritated with people, and he did have to ask the crowd (completely uninformed students for the most part) to keep quiet.
It's a well-known, but meagerly documented problem.
9 1835.htmlSee here for more.
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1
Regards,
Rahul.
...I'm buying a Mac.
I'm a college student, so yes, the equivalent of ramen here, but I must say, that $1100 ($1000 after a student rebate) is a bloody good deal. Yes, yes , it's 30% over priced, yes, yes, no lightscribe DVD+- whatever, but my god, it's a fucking Mac. At the very least, it'll make women sleep with me.
Also, I don't know that megahertz really matters too much to me anymore. Apple I think sees this - though a dual-core 1.8gig chip is no laughing matter. I figure I'll top up to a gig/gig and a half of ram, and maybe I'll need to bump up the internal drive.
PS to everybody not in the US: Buy in the US and get someone coming over to bring it for you. That way you save a bunch of bucks (enough of a price difference to make it worth the hassle, if you're on a budget).
I love their new logo.
Why create an annoying additional campaign. Use an existing one:
http://browsehappy.com/
R.
Anybody else see this? It's not hard to see, that form doesn't have to take precedence over function, but can actually add to it.
http://www.thebignoob.com/Blog/367/craigslist--des ign-eye-for-the-list-guy
Plus, it was done by a group called "Design Eye for the List Guy". Can you beat that?
http://craigslist.thebignoob.com/ here's the redone site.
Regards,Rahul.
Emphasis mine.
I rest my case.
Regards, Rahul.
With a nickname like "Freedom India" you must be an objective source.
I'm also from India, and I'm not quite sure where you're getting your news.
Number Portability
This was merely recommended by the TRAI, not implemented - indeed, if I might quote from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2003/11/19/sto ries/2003111900090900.htmthis article, number portability will only be introduced maybe in a year.
Secondly, there is no mandated one-rate, one-country. BSNL/MTNL (the nationalised phone company) introduced calls to any BSNL phone at Re. 1/min (1/40th of a dollar :-) ), but there was no compulsion on the governments part for the private companies to do so. An Economics 101 class will tell you why they decided to follow suit.
I'm all for taunting those poor people in the rest of the world about their call charges. However, ensure that you're truthful while doing so.
...torrents?
...one of the promises of the present government was that it would make broadband affordable.
What happened was pretty decent, for a government programme. 256 kbps broadband was rolled out in all the larger cities, at Rs. 500 (USD 10) per month - however, there was a rider - a 1 GiB transfer limit.
This scheme, however, was sufficient to start a major price war, and broadband prices have been steadily falling, upto the point where it's now being pushed way more heavily than dial-up.
The problems:
However,
Whether it was the best idea, whether it helped starving people...those are all debatable points. But surely, it is hardly an incredibly expensive project, which will kill off the American economy?
Even if the government doesn't offer fiber-connections to the rest of America, 256k broadband is perfectly capable of accessing Wikipedia, joining and taking part in mailing groups...there will be a section of the society whom it will help.
Cheers,
Rahul.
I mean, this is Slashdot and all, but still!
Ah - well, but it says that it's an invalid page if you try and login.
Nice try though.
yes, yes, slashdot and all, but please RTFA. The pictures were on a different website. Repeat after me, one cannot set a robots.txt on an external website.
In South Korea...only Microsoft faces deadlines!
R.
Do consider us poor readers on RSS, when writing your titles out.
Thanks,
R.
Worst Analogy, Ever.
I usually make it a policy not to be completely negative, but this HAD to be said.
kthxbye.