Do you Americans realize that you are heading towards a totalitarian regime? Yes. And pay attention, Carnivore: it's only a matter a time before the Queen says "let them eat cake!" The last time that happened, a few VIPs lost their heads.
It's a model, not a literal interpretation of what's going on. There's actually some scientific basis for my post, believe it or not. I read such magazines as Scientific American Mind and such. The brain often works on a subconscious level when the conscious mind won't or can't allow a particular thought pattern to occur. Some of the greatest minds on the planet -- including Einstein -- have been said to have found solutions to complex problems in their sleep by dreaming about them.
All kidding aside, the technology needed for the Internet was 'invented' in 1973-1974 timeframe. The Internet, as it were, was officially rolled out in 1983.
Last night while I was dreaming of playing poker with Einstein and Hawking and an anthropomorphic Zebra, I stopped and thought "This is really a great simulation of reality!" It got really interesting when the dancing elephants started circling our table. I feel far better prepared for life now Hmm.. Well, I'm not really a dream interpretation expert, but I play one on the Net. Anyway, many dreams are just the mind's way of working out problems -- or calling attention to problems -- that are currently occurring in our lives. Most of what occurs in people's dreams is more of a metaphor for something else.
Take, for example, the oft-cited 'I dreamt that I showed up to work/school/whatever naked/wearing only underwear.' Showing up to work naked isn't actually the real problem the brain is trying work out. The real problem is that the person is a afraid of being unprepared or being caught in an embarassing situation. They are usually insecure about something or other when they have dreams like this. This is the brain trying say "Hey, you! You're insecure about this or that, what are you doing to fix that?"
Of course, the imagery of dreams isn't always that universal. In your case, what do Einstein and Hawking represent for you? What about zebras? What does playing poker mean to you? Do you bluff a lot in poker? Or do you play on the merits of your cards? If you're a physicist, and just making guesses here about the zebra, I'd say that you that see Einstein and Hawking as a black-and-white dichotomy that needs to somehow be resolved. Maybe you think one of Hawking's theories and another of Einstein's are in deep conflict and maybe you see yourself as trying to resolve that. Of course, if you're not a physicist, the dream could mean something else entirely.
Easy. They already track revenues on each work, like an album or movie or a book, which they have to do for paying out royalties anyhow.
So, there ya go. Make them pay a percentage of 5-year revenues for each 5-year renewal period. And no cooking the books, either. Make sure SOX applies to all corporate copyright holders.
If they don't make much revenue, they won't renew anyway.
10. MS-DOS 4.0 will ship, finally, by mid-year. It will be so buggy and crash so much that Microsoft will be forced to release an update, MS-DOS 4.01, by year's end. 9. Liquid crystal will be discovered by Frederick Reintzer. 8. Someone will introduce a simple network management protocol, probably called SNMP. Nobody will care. 7. An alternative bus to IBM's Micro Channel Architecture will be introduced. Expect it to be called something like EISA -- Extended Industry Standard Architecture. 6. An Internet Relay Chat system called IRC will be developed. 5. A company called Creative Labs will introduce a sound card called the SoundBlaster, which will establish defacto standards for years to come. 4. People obsessed with clocks will introduce the Network Time Protocol, which will allow computers to sync their clocks over the Internet. 3. The first T-1 backbone will be added to ARPANET. 2. Motorola will release a new processor, the 88000. No one will care. 1. Apple will sue Microsoft over the trash can icon.
Hmmmm... A few thoughts, not really having seen the service: I have plenty of IRL and online friends and acquaintances. Some I trust more than others on certain topics. I have one friend who's an expert in cars. I would implicitly trust anything he had to say about cars. His computer knowledge is okay, but I don't consider him any sort of expert in any field of technology other than cars. So I would want results from him ranked high on cars, but somewhat lower on IT, computers or networking, yet above my clueless friends.
This is definitely one of the must-have features that I would need in any sort of social aggregation tool like the one you describe. I have other thoughts, but I'm interested in what others have to say.
In Finland we switched over to purely digital terrestrial broadcasting last year. And most people did indeed have to get a DVB-T STB (Set Top Box) in order to watch TV. Despite of this, the government did not subsidize this this switchover in any way. Right. In the U.S., we've had over-the-air television in more or less its current form since around 1950 or so. Sure, we added color and all that crap, but there have always been the same "big three networks", (well, four now with FOX since the 1990s)
The reason the government subsidizes such things is quite simple: Americans have come to believe that television is some sort of 'right' and that they should be able to get it for free if they need to.
Now, most American households have cable or satellite in some form. Most of the people who don't are older people who are either on fixed incomes or are just so old-fashioned that they still have rotary telephones. (I personally know of at least a few people in the latter category and several more in the former).
So, the general prevailing consensus amongst the populace is that not subsidizing this move would be considered 'cruel to old people.'
Hmph. I disagree, but no one listens to me anyhow.
Honestly the only really innovative and new thing I can bring to mind is the Wii -- a successful console, wildly successful, that uses a non-traditional control mechanism? Now that's a miracle. Even that's nothing new. It's just an extension fo existing technologies that have been created for use by the disabled for years.
It's just an example. I'm not saying that at all. The point was that I was demonstrating that platform differences do indeed still exist. Python tries to smooth them over to some extent by providing modules that work cross-platform, but not all modules are cross-platform nor can they be and I used this program as an example to show that. IOW, if you care about being cross-platform, you still end up having to write compatibility layers just like you would do in C -- an example being Mozilla's cross platform toolkit. I don't actually give that much of a rat's ass whether Stylus Toolbox works on OSes other the major Linux distros. It would be nice if it also worked well on BSD with full functionality like device autodetection, but this isn't strictly required.
Speaking as a fairly competent Python programmer (you may look at my code and disagree, but I digress:), I have to say that while Python does smooth over some of the differences between platforms and distributions, it doesn't solve all the problems.
Here's an example: I have a program for Epson Stylus printers that is a GUI front-end for escputil called Stylus Toolbox. Stylus Toolbox reads things like ink status from the printer. In order to do that, it must pass the raw printer device to escputil.
Now, the user shouldn't have to configure Stylus Toolbox with the raw printer device. Stylus Toolbox should be able to get this information from CUPS (which escputil already relies upon). So, imagine a USB printer. Unfortunately, CUPS used to give information like usb:/dev/usb/lp0, but now it gives information like usb://vendor/identifier, so a single Stylus C88 connected to the box looks like usb://EPSON/Stylus%20/C88 (I have no idea what it returns if there's more than one C88. Anyone who knows let me know! It's not in the docs!)
So, you have to get it from the USB port. Now there are multiple ways to do this. You could shell out to external commands like 'lsusb' and some combination of sending/receiving commands from the USB device, but this doesn't work well and isn't platform independent. You can also get the information from HAL, but this is only platform independent to a point -- what if a particular platform isn't supported by HAL? You're kinda screwed. And on Windows -- well, you gotta do it some other way.
So, you get the idea. My latest dev version is getting the information from HAL, because that's an open standard, but that means new versions won't work on platforms that don't use HAL -- or at least the user will have to manually specify the raw printer device.
At this point, I'd like to announce my new project -- ClippyBashGL! You type 'ls' and the 3D rendered paperclip says things like "It looks like you are trying to get a directory listing! Would you like help with that?" In the newest CVS, when you type 'rm -rf', the paperclip says "You are trying to delete a lot stuff! Continue or Allow?" and so on.
Vista has a ridiculously large footprint. I've seen systems with 2GB of RAM and fairly decent processor (Athlon 64 x2 4200) run Vista and it's sllllooowwww. Much slower than XP on the system.
OTOH, give Mac OS X Leopard or Ubuntu Gutsy that much RAM and CPU and watch it sing.
Sorry for anyone who feels like Vista is great, but facts are facts. Vista is slow and bloated.
As opposed to those wonderfully written standards implemented by products that nobody uses that I'm not sure if I'd call the 36,000 employees of Sun Microsystems, the employees of Novell, Inc., Ernie Ball Guitars, the 6,000 employees of Health First, Inc., the City of Largo, FL, the State of Nevada, the State University of New York, IBM, and the University of South Denmark, among others, nobody. A little company called SCO once mistook IBM for being nobody, and after they sent their Nazgul after them, they ended up filing for bankruptcy.
There is actually another mitigating factor present here that we didn't include in the bulletin because we could not authoritatively say that it was true in every case. The vulnerable code path only executes if your machine has a primary DNS suffix. Most of the time, only domain-joined machines have a primary DNS suffix. So it would have been great to say in the bulletin: "Machines not joined to a domain are safe" but that is not 100% accurate so we did not include that. Technically, an administrator could manually set a primary DNS suffix on a non-domain-joined machine. Okay...
We periodically identify workarounds or mitigations like this that we can't use for official guidance because they're either too nuanced. How, exactly, is this 'too nuanced'? Why not just say "if your machine doesn't have a primary DNS suffix, you are not vulnerable"?
I'll tell you why...because they assume that Windows administrators are idiots. Now, I've known some stupid Windows administrators in my day, but I wouldn't go so far as to think that most of them are idiots.
I've worked in IT for nearly 15 years now, and I can tell you that 1) I've had my own private office exactly once and 2) I've always been given a small cubicle, shoved in as close to the server room as you can get. In two jobs, I didn't even have my own cubicle -- just a workstation in a big common area with other IT folks.
Not that I really care. Give me a laptop and I'll make any place I want my 'office.'
If your family is going to 'out' you because of your beliefs, why would you want to be 'in' with them anyway? Doesnt sound like much of a family. Well, and that's exactly what I've counseled to plenty of my students and others who have sought my help in the past. Unfortunately, for some, this may not be much of an option. Some are dependent upon their families for financial support, for example. Others need to keep in contact with family members who are sympathetic to them, but the rest of the family may actively attempt to prevent contact because the pagan family member is a member of an 'evil Satanic cult' (despite having no belief in Satan, yada yada). There can be a lot of intriticate politics involved in being a pagan when your family won't support you in those beliefs, so Google outing these people in this way can be extremely painful for them.
Well, OK: if you were using webmail before GMail, I can see why you'd switch to GMail. But to me, that still begs the question of: why were you using webmail in the first place? or IMAP. With GMail, you can have it both ways -- a webmail client and IMAP access.
I use Thunderbird + IMAP with Gmail so that when I'm at home, I can read my mail on Thunderbird. But, when I'm away at work, I can access my GMail account over webmail.
Okay. Let's say you're a pagan or a Wiccan or a Druid or something like that. Your fundamentalist Christian family, all of which have gmail accounts because you sent them invitations because you thought it was soo cool, has no idea of your alternative religious beliefs. You've subscribed to feeds from Witchvox.com and a number of similar sites.
What Google essentially did just 'outed' you to them.
Speaking as neopagan practitioner and priest (out of the closet), I can say that this situation would be not be unlikely at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a model, not a literal interpretation of what's going on. There's actually some scientific basis for my post, believe it or not. I read such magazines as Scientific American Mind and such. The brain often works on a subconscious level when the conscious mind won't or can't allow a particular thought pattern to occur. Some of the greatest minds on the planet -- including Einstein -- have been said to have found solutions to complex problems in their sleep by dreaming about them.
Al Gore? Is that you?
All kidding aside, the technology needed for the Internet was 'invented' in 1973-1974 timeframe. The Internet, as it were, was officially rolled out in 1983.
Take, for example, the oft-cited 'I dreamt that I showed up to work/school/whatever naked/wearing only underwear.' Showing up to work naked isn't actually the real problem the brain is trying work out. The real problem is that the person is a afraid of being unprepared or being caught in an embarassing situation. They are usually insecure about something or other when they have dreams like this. This is the brain trying say "Hey, you! You're insecure about this or that, what are you doing to fix that?"
Of course, the imagery of dreams isn't always that universal. In your case, what do Einstein and Hawking represent for you? What about zebras? What does playing poker mean to you? Do you bluff a lot in poker? Or do you play on the merits of your cards? If you're a physicist, and just making guesses here about the zebra, I'd say that you that see Einstein and Hawking as a black-and-white dichotomy that needs to somehow be resolved. Maybe you think one of Hawking's theories and another of Einstein's are in deep conflict and maybe you see yourself as trying to resolve that. Of course, if you're not a physicist, the dream could mean something else entirely.
Easy. They already track revenues on each work, like an album or movie or a book, which they have to do for paying out royalties anyhow.
So, there ya go. Make them pay a percentage of 5-year revenues for each 5-year renewal period. And no cooking the books, either. Make sure SOX applies to all corporate copyright holders.
If they don't make much revenue, they won't renew anyway.
My predictions for 1988:
10. MS-DOS 4.0 will ship, finally, by mid-year. It will be so buggy and crash so much that Microsoft will be forced to release an update, MS-DOS 4.01, by year's end.
9. Liquid crystal will be discovered by Frederick Reintzer.
8. Someone will introduce a simple network management protocol, probably called SNMP. Nobody will care.
7. An alternative bus to IBM's Micro Channel Architecture will be introduced. Expect it to be called something like EISA -- Extended Industry Standard Architecture.
6. An Internet Relay Chat system called IRC will be developed.
5. A company called Creative Labs will introduce a sound card called the SoundBlaster, which will establish defacto standards for years to come.
4. People obsessed with clocks will introduce the Network Time Protocol, which will allow computers to sync their clocks over the Internet.
3. The first T-1 backbone will be added to ARPANET.
2. Motorola will release a new processor, the 88000. No one will care.
1. Apple will sue Microsoft over the trash can icon.
Hmmmm... A few thoughts, not really having seen the service: I have plenty of IRL and online friends and acquaintances. Some I trust more than others on certain topics. I have one friend who's an expert in cars. I would implicitly trust anything he had to say about cars. His computer knowledge is okay, but I don't consider him any sort of expert in any field of technology other than cars. So I would want results from him ranked high on cars, but somewhat lower on IT, computers or networking, yet above my clueless friends.
This is definitely one of the must-have features that I would need in any sort of social aggregation tool like the one you describe. I have other thoughts, but I'm interested in what others have to say.
The reason the government subsidizes such things is quite simple: Americans have come to believe that television is some sort of 'right' and that they should be able to get it for free if they need to.
Now, most American households have cable or satellite in some form. Most of the people who don't are older people who are either on fixed incomes or are just so old-fashioned that they still have rotary telephones. (I personally know of at least a few people in the latter category and several more in the former).
So, the general prevailing consensus amongst the populace is that not subsidizing this move would be considered 'cruel to old people.'
Hmph. I disagree, but no one listens to me anyhow.
Now quit yer bitchin'.
Your friend is SICK. Really SICK. And demented even!
Did you know that you can install this in Ubuntu or Debian from Universe?
that's just sick.
It's just an example. I'm not saying that at all. The point was that I was demonstrating that platform differences do indeed still exist. Python tries to smooth them over to some extent by providing modules that work cross-platform, but not all modules are cross-platform nor can they be and I used this program as an example to show that. IOW, if you care about being cross-platform, you still end up having to write compatibility layers just like you would do in C -- an example being Mozilla's cross platform toolkit. I don't actually give that much of a rat's ass whether Stylus Toolbox works on OSes other the major Linux distros. It would be nice if it also worked well on BSD with full functionality like device autodetection, but this isn't strictly required.
Speaking as a fairly competent Python programmer (you may look at my code and disagree, but I digress :), I have to say that while Python does smooth over some of the differences between platforms and distributions, it doesn't solve all the problems.
Here's an example: I have a program for Epson Stylus printers that is a GUI front-end for escputil called Stylus Toolbox. Stylus Toolbox reads things like ink status from the printer. In order to do that, it must pass the raw printer device to escputil.
Now, the user shouldn't have to configure Stylus Toolbox with the raw printer device. Stylus Toolbox should be able to get this information from CUPS (which escputil already relies upon). So, imagine a USB printer. Unfortunately, CUPS used to give information like usb:/dev/usb/lp0, but now it gives information like usb://vendor/identifier, so a single Stylus C88 connected to the box looks like usb://EPSON/Stylus%20/C88 (I have no idea what it returns if there's more than one C88. Anyone who knows let me know! It's not in the docs!)
So, you have to get it from the USB port. Now there are multiple ways to do this. You could shell out to external commands like 'lsusb' and some combination of sending/receiving commands from the USB device, but this doesn't work well and isn't platform independent. You can also get the information from HAL, but this is only platform independent to a point -- what if a particular platform isn't supported by HAL? You're kinda screwed. And on Windows -- well, you gotta do it some other way.
So, you get the idea. My latest dev version is getting the information from HAL, because that's an open standard, but that means new versions won't work on platforms that don't use HAL -- or at least the user will have to manually specify the raw printer device.
At this point, I'd like to announce my new project -- ClippyBashGL! You type 'ls' and the 3D rendered paperclip says things like "It looks like you are trying to get a directory listing! Would you like help with that?" In the newest CVS, when you type 'rm -rf', the paperclip says "You are trying to delete a lot stuff! Continue or Allow?" and so on.
Vista has a ridiculously large footprint. I've seen systems with 2GB of RAM and fairly decent processor (Athlon 64 x2 4200) run Vista and it's sllllooowwww. Much slower than XP on the system.
OTOH, give Mac OS X Leopard or Ubuntu Gutsy that much RAM and CPU and watch it sing.
Sorry for anyone who feels like Vista is great, but facts are facts. Vista is slow and bloated.
I'll tell you why...because they assume that Windows administrators are idiots. Now, I've known some stupid Windows administrators in my day, but I wouldn't go so far as to think that most of them are idiots.
Not only that, but he's been asked to design it.
I've worked in IT for nearly 15 years now, and I can tell you that 1) I've had my own private office exactly once and 2) I've always been given a small cubicle, shoved in as close to the server room as you can get. In two jobs, I didn't even have my own cubicle -- just a workstation in a big common area with other IT folks.
Not that I really care. Give me a laptop and I'll make any place I want my 'office.'
In Soviet Russia, Information problems overload YOU!!!
I think they already did.
Slashdot just needs to follow redirects on links. Unfortunately, this has been a problem for a number of years and so far Taco & Co. have refused to fixed it.
Once, again, you're right. And once again, that's what I tell people who ask me. Unfortunately, not everyone will follow your advice.
I use Thunderbird + IMAP with Gmail so that when I'm at home, I can read my mail on Thunderbird. But, when I'm away at work, I can access my GMail account over webmail.
I get it both ways.
Okay. Let's say you're a pagan or a Wiccan or a Druid or something like that. Your fundamentalist Christian family, all of which have gmail accounts because you sent them invitations because you thought it was soo cool, has no idea of your alternative religious beliefs. You've subscribed to feeds from Witchvox.com and a number of similar sites.
What Google essentially did just 'outed' you to them.
Speaking as neopagan practitioner and priest (out of the closet), I can say that this situation would be not be unlikely at all.