I know you're being facetious, but I think the following idea is important. It's 2005, and religion really needs to catch up with humanity and science. I'm agnostic, but if God existed and wanted to communicate a message to us, wouldn't it make sense to embed any sacred truths in the very fabric of reality?
We're discovering more of them all the time, faster and faster, by studying the properties of the atoms we are made of, the electromagnetic fields that permeate space and time, and the rocks under our feet. Life only makes rational sense when understood from the perspective that science allows.
Why would a supreme being rely on a communicating via language dictated to fallible human beings, who would then translate it and allow it to accumulate errors, inaccuracies, and nonsense.
The Bible-thumpers out there are thumping on the wrong bible. If there actually is a bible, it is the universe itself. We are all reading it together in unison as we speak.
There's something to be said for being conservative with respect to grammar and spelling; using well-established and widely recognized conventions and standards allows one to communicate one's ideas with a greater degree of precision and fidelity. Consider the difference in this sort of "quality" between, say, Charles Dickens and Jack Kerouac. But it would be difficult and somewhat meaningless to argue that either of them is "better". Their audiences are quite different, but both are respected as literature.
We have something today that we never had before, thanks to the Internet. We have numerous snapshots of the current state many of the world's languages, thanks to archived Internet content. I don't think there will be nearly as much ambiguity or difficulty in understanding early 21st century English as there is today when we try to grok exactly what Chaucer or Shakespeare meant.
We ought to let our languages evolve as naturally as possible. Natural selection will always produce something "better". After all, we're "better" than bacteria, aren't we?
And anyway, you can sitll raed Egnlsih txet jsut as qiuklcy as lnog as the frsit and lsat lrttees are lfet in pacle.
This guy is loonier than Robert X. Cringely. I think you can tell somebody has finally lost it when they adopt a pseudonym with a middle initial that occurs late in the alphabet.
place the power supply in a zip-lock baggie that was obviously open at the top to allow the cables to go out, but then the lower half was submerged in a pot of water.
Darwinizing xbox fanboys/girls is not the solution.
Someday, an IE exploit is going to come along that wipes your HD. Then we'll see sparks fly.
The same exact thing *could* happen to firefox. Maybe only on windows, but still... running under your username even in linux an exploit could seriously fuck with your ~/.
I'm waiting for the Sony rootkit exploit that only destroys vaio machines running windows.
It's only a matter of time folks. Many rootkit-infected CDs will be floating around out there for years to come. Somebody somewhere ought to nail 'em. Maybe not wipe the drive, but it could intermittently disable windows and tell the bewildered user how to sign up for the impending class action suit (while blasting out Neil Diamond at max volume).
Fortunately my other PC (a used Sony Vaio) is running linux.
Does anyone know what they are planning on doing to make sure data is up to date?
I can just see things happening like a school putting up all of their course information and not keeping it up to date.
Yes, because the web itself contains no broken links and no outdated information. It would be criminal to pollute such a reliable resource.
--
Kerry/Edwards 2004 !!!!! I love SONY!!!!
It's running so fast, I think I'll download a few extra copies, to hand out to my friends:)
Seriously, more bands need to do this. Release some music for free, if people like it, encourage them to buy a copy from CDBaby or directly from the band. That way the band gets more fans no matter what, and more of the money. The big RIAA corporations (record labels) get squat. That's a win-win for the artist and the consumers.
That's okay -- you pray for us, and we'll think for you.
At least until our posthuman descendants are able to finally get off this rock and get to work colonizing the rest of the galaxy. We'll take our advanced biotechnology and scientific theories with us. We'll need them to continue improving ourselves.
We'll leave you primitive folks to yourselves. You can continue killing each other with your impressive tools.
(Yes, I know AC was being sarcastic -- I, however, am not.)
So who can you trust? Are the days of authoritative encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book behind us? Lexis Nexis is still around, charging outrageous fees for very good information. Does Wikipedia compete with authoritative encyclopedias, or is it just a condensed version of the Internet (which is to say a sometimes useful, sometimes useless collection of random topics)?
Wikipedia in its current state is like the knowledge corpus of a bot that could beat any human at Trivial Pursuit, by knowing correct answers to 99% of the questions. It's like that really smart kid in high school who seemed to know a lot about many things, a little bit about everything else, yet was occasionally, embarrassingly, *dead wrong*.
Wikipedia is great for learning some background information about a topic you're unfamiliar with, but, like slashdot postings, can contain information that's drastically misleading. Instead of debating which is better, print encyclopedias and other more "vetted" sources of information, Internet users need to learn how to use critical thinking and common sense to evaluate the information they find, and make sensible decisions on how reliable that information is, based on its sources, date of publication, etc. Obviously an encyclopedia from 1930 might contain numerous "facts" that are now known to be incorrect.
I heard they're talking to General Mills and Quaker about getting them included in the breakfast cereal boxes, too -- people are quite willing to stick whatever they find in a cereal box into their computer. That's how AOL made it big, isn't it?
When I was young and foolish, before the days when you could back up your entire CD collection, I left a folder containing said collection in the back seat of my car. It was gone an hour later when I returned from a class.
Since then I have managed to replace many of the CDs which were physically STOLEN from me, which I once rightfully owned and paid retail price for. I have a box full of album sleeves and cover art to prove it.
I don't think I'm stealing anything whatsoever by downloading replacement copies of CDs I used to own. I'm not sure I am even guilty of copyright infringement. I used to have a right to play all that music, whenever I pleased. Was that right somehow erased when my car was broken into?
I wonder if my entire CD collection had instead been washed away in a hurricane or destroyed by fire. If we are to believe the RIAA stance that I owned a "license to listen", I would hope that physical loss of my actual media permits me to re-acquire and re-create that media using filesharing.
That's okay--if Unilever doesn't want to use Linux, we geeks will just quit buying their soap, deodorant, and other personal hygiene products. That'll show 'em.
The parent post may or may not be flamebait, but makes a very important point.
Content providers using DRM technology already find themselves in an escalating arms race against information consumers (their customers!) who wish to freely, indefinitely retain copies of "content" in any form which they encounter. The reality is this: 20 years ago, you could check out a library book and if you really wanted to, you could copy it for 5c/page. There was never any way to stop you from doing this, and there never will be. Now you can copy digital information for free. Put some DRM in the way, and you can get around it if you want to. If you have to, you can screen-capture an e-book and OCR the resulting bitmaps if you really, really want to. This sort of activity is only going to get cheaper and easier.
We now have the technology to share unlimited quantities of information worldwide, virtually instantaneously, with perfect fidelity. This is not going away, at least not without a severe, worldwide crackdown on copyright infringement which is probably not feasible anyway. The cat is out of the bag and there's no way for restrictive technology to keep up.
This is great if you're an information consumer, but the outlook is pretty dismal for the business models still embraced by most of the big content marketing corporations today.
What is revolutionary, I believe, is that humanity is on the verge of developing technologies that can be used to manipulate physical matter with the same flexibility we now use to manipulate bits. I'm not saying we'll have desktop replicators in ten years, but we'll have them eventually. They'll start out probably as simple biological devices and then improve rapidly. So when you can freely download the plans to synthesize some Viagra or THC or the latest antiretroviral drug cocktail to treat some pandemic flu in 2020, this blows the whole business model of the drug companies clean out of the water. No more scarcity, in yet another huge sector of the economy, just like today there are no shortages of free downloadable copies of any major movie/audio/video release.
And how are they going to slap DRM onto the design for a molecule??? And if you can get your hands on a sample of it, you will probably be capable of analyzing and copying it as effortlessly as you can rip a CD.
If we can just solve the interrelated problems of energy scarcity and pollution/global warming before it's too late, things are going to get really, really interesting in the near future.
I was trying to name the most innocent-sounding person who might be accidentally sharing their wireless connection.
I had forgotten about all the free access points at coffee shops, etc. If you only run bittorrent when you are online at starbucks, are you impervious to MPAA/RIAA legal threats?
How on earth are they going to prove that the "John Doe" who was using a particular IP address was actually doing the downloading? There have to be countless apartment buildings nowadays with clueless, naive, rich grannies who got a wireless router to go with their spiffy new laptop which they actually only bought to get online and read emails from the grandkids.
Surely some of these WAPs are located in buildings where the neighbors are leeching free broadband using granny's DHCP server and downloading all sorts of copyrighted torrents.
I wonder how many of these innocent granny types are going to be getting nice subpoenas from the MPAA. If they are senile and ignore them they might get default judgements when the case goes to court. Is the MPAA going to take away their money/home/valuables when they win by default?
Hell, my own home WAP was temporarily wide-open and unsecured for a while when I first set it up. Do I deserve to get potentially sued for being temporarily clueless?
No, actually, you can't. The NYT routinely removes accounts that are being used by more than one IP.
Baloney. This is simply not true. I have been using the same anonymous registration to access nytimes.com from multiple IP addresses simultaneously for nearly a decade.
When single shines the triple sun
what was sundered and undone shall be whole
The two made one
By gelfling hand or else by none
Like all prophecy, this is subject to interpretation. What could it mean? Longhorn will be released this summer with a Linux core?!? Google will buy Apple??! Brad and Jen getting back together?!! Oh, the possibilities...
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're being facetious, but I think the following idea is important. It's 2005, and religion really needs to catch up with humanity and science. I'm agnostic, but if God existed and wanted to communicate a message to us, wouldn't it make sense to embed any sacred truths in the very fabric of reality?
We're discovering more of them all the time, faster and faster, by studying the properties of the atoms we are made of, the electromagnetic fields that permeate space and time, and the rocks under our feet. Life only makes rational sense when understood from the perspective that science allows.
Why would a supreme being rely on a communicating via language dictated to fallible human beings, who would then translate it and allow it to accumulate errors, inaccuracies, and nonsense.
The Bible-thumpers out there are thumping on the wrong bible. If there actually is a bible, it is the universe itself. We are all reading it together in unison as we speak.
There's something to be said for being conservative with respect to grammar and spelling; using well-established and widely recognized conventions and standards allows one to communicate one's ideas with a greater degree of precision and fidelity. Consider the difference in this sort of "quality" between, say, Charles Dickens and Jack Kerouac. But it would be difficult and somewhat meaningless to argue that either of them is "better". Their audiences are quite different, but both are respected as literature.
We have something today that we never had before, thanks to the Internet. We have numerous snapshots of the current state many of the world's languages, thanks to archived Internet content. I don't think there will be nearly as much ambiguity or difficulty in understanding early 21st century English as there is today when we try to grok exactly what Chaucer or Shakespeare meant.
We ought to let our languages evolve as naturally as possible. Natural selection will always produce something "better". After all, we're "better" than bacteria, aren't we?
And anyway, you can sitll raed Egnlsih txet jsut as qiuklcy as lnog as the frsit and lsat lrttees are lfet in pacle.
This guy is loonier than Robert X. Cringely. I think you can tell somebody has finally lost it when they adopt a pseudonym with a middle initial that occurs late in the alphabet.
Darwinizing xbox fanboys/girls is not the solution.
The same exact thing *could* happen to firefox. Maybe only on windows, but still... running under your username even in linux an exploit could seriously fuck with your ~/.
I'm waiting for the Sony rootkit exploit that only destroys vaio machines running windows.
It's only a matter of time folks. Many rootkit-infected CDs will be floating around out there for years to come. Somebody somewhere ought to nail 'em. Maybe not wipe the drive, but it could intermittently disable windows and tell the bewildered user how to sign up for the impending class action suit (while blasting out Neil Diamond at max volume).
Fortunately my other PC (a used Sony Vaio) is running linux.
This is more or less what was done with companies wishing to have their product database indexed within Froogle.
It was actually a nice implementation for a complicated process, and it only took them a week to approve our data feed and begin listing our items.
We upload a new feed as frequently as we need to.
Yes, because the web itself contains no broken links and no outdated information. It would be criminal to pollute such a reliable resource.
--
Kerry/Edwards 2004 !!!!! I love SONY!!!!
The torrent is slashdotted.
It's running so fast, I think I'll download a few extra copies, to hand out to my friends :)
Seriously, more bands need to do this. Release some music for free, if people like it, encourage them to buy a copy from CDBaby or directly from the band. That way the band gets more fans no matter what, and more of the money. The big RIAA corporations (record labels) get squat. That's a win-win for the artist and the consumers.
That's okay -- you pray for us, and we'll think for you.
At least until our posthuman descendants are able to finally get off this rock and get to work colonizing the rest of the galaxy. We'll take our advanced biotechnology and scientific theories with us. We'll need them to continue improving ourselves.
We'll leave you primitive folks to yourselves. You can continue killing each other with your impressive tools.
(Yes, I know AC was being sarcastic -- I, however, am not.)
I don't know WHAT i would do if it weren't for all the quality, personalized legal advice you can get FOR FREE, just by reading slashdot.
Wikipedia in its current state is like the knowledge corpus of a bot that could beat any human at Trivial Pursuit, by knowing correct answers to 99% of the questions. It's like that really smart kid in high school who seemed to know a lot about many things, a little bit about everything else, yet was occasionally, embarrassingly, *dead wrong*.
Wikipedia is great for learning some background information about a topic you're unfamiliar with, but, like slashdot postings, can contain information that's drastically misleading. Instead of debating which is better, print encyclopedias and other more "vetted" sources of information, Internet users need to learn how to use critical thinking and common sense to evaluate the information they find, and make sensible decisions on how reliable that information is, based on its sources, date of publication, etc. Obviously an encyclopedia from 1930 might contain numerous "facts" that are now known to be incorrect.
Hmmm, Breezy Badger Berry Crunch? Sounds delicious...
Since then I have managed to replace many of the CDs which were physically STOLEN from me, which I once rightfully owned and paid retail price for. I have a box full of album sleeves and cover art to prove it.
I don't think I'm stealing anything whatsoever by downloading replacement copies of CDs I used to own. I'm not sure I am even guilty of copyright infringement. I used to have a right to play all that music, whenever I pleased. Was that right somehow erased when my car was broken into?
I wonder if my entire CD collection had instead been washed away in a hurricane or destroyed by fire. If we are to believe the RIAA stance that I owned a "license to listen", I would hope that physical loss of my actual media permits me to re-acquire and re-create that media using filesharing.
Err... scratch that idea. They'd never notice.
Content providers using DRM technology already find themselves in an escalating arms race against information consumers (their customers!) who wish to freely, indefinitely retain copies of "content" in any form which they encounter. The reality is this: 20 years ago, you could check out a library book and if you really wanted to, you could copy it for 5c/page. There was never any way to stop you from doing this, and there never will be. Now you can copy digital information for free. Put some DRM in the way, and you can get around it if you want to. If you have to, you can screen-capture an e-book and OCR the resulting bitmaps if you really, really want to. This sort of activity is only going to get cheaper and easier.
We now have the technology to share unlimited quantities of information worldwide, virtually instantaneously, with perfect fidelity. This is not going away, at least not without a severe, worldwide crackdown on copyright infringement which is probably not feasible anyway. The cat is out of the bag and there's no way for restrictive technology to keep up.
This is great if you're an information consumer, but the outlook is pretty dismal for the business models still embraced by most of the big content marketing corporations today.
What is revolutionary, I believe, is that humanity is on the verge of developing technologies that can be used to manipulate physical matter with the same flexibility we now use to manipulate bits. I'm not saying we'll have desktop replicators in ten years, but we'll have them eventually. They'll start out probably as simple biological devices and then improve rapidly. So when you can freely download the plans to synthesize some Viagra or THC or the latest antiretroviral drug cocktail to treat some pandemic flu in 2020, this blows the whole business model of the drug companies clean out of the water. No more scarcity, in yet another huge sector of the economy, just like today there are no shortages of free downloadable copies of any major movie/audio/video release.
And how are they going to slap DRM onto the design for a molecule??? And if you can get your hands on a sample of it, you will probably be capable of analyzing and copying it as effortlessly as you can rip a CD.
If we can just solve the interrelated problems of energy scarcity and pollution/global warming before it's too late, things are going to get really, really interesting in the near future.
I was trying to name the most innocent-sounding person who might be accidentally sharing their wireless connection.
I had forgotten about all the free access points at coffee shops, etc. If you only run bittorrent when you are online at starbucks, are you impervious to MPAA/RIAA legal threats?
Surely some of these WAPs are located in buildings where the neighbors are leeching free broadband using granny's DHCP server and downloading all sorts of copyrighted torrents.
I wonder how many of these innocent granny types are going to be getting nice subpoenas from the MPAA. If they are senile and ignore them they might get default judgements when the case goes to court. Is the MPAA going to take away their money/home/valuables when they win by default?
Hell, my own home WAP was temporarily wide-open and unsecured for a while when I first set it up. Do I deserve to get potentially sued for being temporarily clueless?
I can't be the only one who just sent you a test message, can I?
Baloney. This is simply not true. I have been using the same anonymous registration to access nytimes.com from multiple IP addresses simultaneously for nearly a decade.
HELO
MAIL FROM: aspammer@zombiesareus.biz
RCPT TO: billg@microsoft.com
DATA
In related news, Slashdot's DUPE search function is permanently broken.
Perfect.
I hear that. There's nothing quite like curling up with a nice torrent...
Yet my Open Source Flea Circus Java Spyware Toolbar Firefox Extension article submission was rejected AGAIN!?
what was sundered and undone shall be whole
The two made one
By gelfling hand or else by none
Like all prophecy, this is subject to interpretation. What could it mean? Longhorn will be released this summer with a Linux core?!? Google will buy Apple??! Brad and Jen getting back together?!! Oh, the possibilities...