I don't like to mod someone down without saying why.
Lot's of responses on Slashdot are predictable. Mention BSD and you'll get 20 posts about how it's dying, etc. Mention Perl and you will get quite a few posts complaining about how Perl is unreadable or not suited for 'real' programming.
Then you will get a bunch of people saying Perl code can be good or bad depending on the programmer who wrote the code.
It's kind of silly really, and I usually just ignore it. I would have ignored your vulger post as well, but someone modded it as 'funny' I disagree with your statement being funny.
So you can say I am not modding your post, but I am modding the person who thought such a vulgar comment, of which literally dozens of similar ones exists, deserved to be modded as funny.
Maybe the first time it was a little funny, but at this point I don't think it's funny unless it's at least a bit clever. This post is just an AC saying what's been said over and over already.
BTW, I don't object to this simply because it's vulgar. I enjoy watching "South Park", which is often extremely vulgar, but it is also fresh and clever. That is why it's so funny to me.
So unless you got a new angle on 'Perl Code is Trash', I really don't think it should be modded up as informative, funny or anything.
Anyway, you should prove your point with a telling example of Perl obscurity. It's not like such a thing would be hard to find:)
Yeah, I forgot about that interrogation episode. If I remember correctly, Starbuck even says "You're not human so you don't have any rights" or something like that. It is not dissimilar to the govt. redefining what it means to be a prisoner of war in order to skirt the intent of the Geneva Treaty.
I just rewatched the miniseries with my friend last night. After the Galactica is nuked, they have to seal off some decks, sacrificing 85 people. They get blown out of the ship that really reminded me of those terrible videos of people jumping out of WTC buildings one and two. Even the damage control people that survived that were wearing uniforms that were almost identical to the types worn by NYC firefighters.
Yes, it is not a one to one analogy, but it is something I really notice without having to look very hard.
Not sure what to make of the religion issue. Yeah, the humans have a weird mix of Judeo-Polytheism (yeah I know that a misnomer but what else can I call it?) but that is inherited from the previous show, so I don't think they can muck with it too much. I guess they figured to give the Cylons a monotheism in order to add a deeper motivation to their actions and to account for the fact they don't always act like total machines, and since monotheisms historically have not worked well with polytheisms it was probably a no brainer for the writer to choose.
Actually I thought quite the opposite, I really felt it was the first thing I've seen on TV that came close to expressing how I felt on 9/11 and the subsequent actions of President Bush.
Think about it. The Cylons are made by humans who then return to destroy us. The US CIA made Bin Laden and built up Middle Eastern dictatorships to fight the USSR and now that has come back to haunt us.
Some of the scenes in the show really brought back hard memories for me of 9/11. I could really connect with the characters sense of loss, frustration and anger. A lot of the chaos of the time, and of the strength of the people that I saw walking downtown NYC streets as well, seemed to be well reflected.
Other scenes I could barely watch. There's one scene in the first episode where one of the characters goes down to submit photo's of her missing family and she walks down a corridor that is literally plastered with photo's of the missing. NYC streets were just like that. Whoever wrote that must have either lived in NYC or had been exposed to life there immediately post 9/11, because that scene had pictures and little shrines with candles set up in just the same way it was at the end of my block.
Also in the first episode they have to destroy a passenger liner that is being used to carry a nuclear device to attack the fleet, and Apollo has to destroy it, even though he is not sure if there are over 1000 people still alive on it. Although that didn't happen on 9/11 it was in the realm of possibility.
Anyway, as for the idea that is show is some sort of propaganda for current US policy, I would say that just because there is a show with a war in it, that doesn't mean it is pro President Bush.
I think it's more like if we had decent leadership that was wise and level headed, not flag waving and bent on war maybe we could have gotten through this experience much better. I know not everyone will agree with what I just wrote, but I hope that as someone who actually lived through a bombing you would give my opinion some weight.
It was a bit hard to grok at first, but at that point my developers all have xslt coding experience which made things easier in the end.
Once we got going we all started to feel like this is the future of webforms.
the xforms model also really fits into a REST model really well, which is the direction most of my news web apps are moving.
Haven't seen this competing standard since the first draft, but back then when I read it it seems like what we got (which is a mess really) with some extra stuff adding in, like automatic looping. Hopefully it's a lot better now.
Yeah, I had a similar problem. I bought Everquest a few years ago when all my friends were raving about it. I played for a while and didn't like it, so I sold it on Ebay. However when the person who bought the game tried to install it, we found that the CD key was already associated with my credit card, so even though I had canceled my account the buyer couldn't create a new account. I called Sony, thinking it would be no big deal to fix this, but after arguing with their helpdesk for more than an hour I gave up and just refunded my ebay buyer. It wasn't worth the effort.
The Sony people couldn't understand what I wanted. What they kept saying was what was the point of them selling me the disk if I could just turn around and sell it to someone else.
This statement alone tells me where they want to go with all sorts of content sales. We are already seeing this with DRM for music sales, the record companies have been trying to kill the used CD market for a long time.
Hey, you know what, this is what happens when you support closed source software. If you don't like it, just stop paying for it.
It really doesn't matter if they are violating their own EULA since they can always force down a patch with a new one.
Re:Leave the Jingoism to Bush, okay?
on
Steam Users Steamed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I appreciate your points. Maybe I did overhyperbolize a bit, I'm in a bad mood since my neighbors thought 7am sunday morning was a good time to start ripping apart their bathroom, which is right next to my bedroom:)
However I think this is a battle worth fighting over. I am not too familair with secureROM, or why the current Steam system is supposed to be better. But for what it's worth here is why I don't like it.
It appears to be a proprietary system. I don't see anyone opening their own steam servers, like people could open their own web servers back at the dawn of the internet. Without the ability to do this, we are granting our freedom to use software as with like it into the hands of one or a few companies whose interest often is at odds with our interest. Now, in the absence of monopoly this is manageable, but if Steam is the only way to play a game you paid for that it seems an intolerable restriction.
Yeah, it's only a game, but next year this kind of thing could be built into all software. In a few years it could even be built into hardware devices, such as CD players. How would you like to have to log in just to play a CD? And what happens if you borrow a CD from a friend and it doesn't work in you CD player because that CD serial number is associated with your friend's player only.
Seems unlikely to you? This is exactly the type of system that content and software people are looking to build. If we just let it happen it will be much harder to fight.
Plus there is the principle of the matter. If you think this kind of thing is bad, than it is bad whether its for a game or for some software running life support systems at your local hospital. If you think Steam is okay, well then I guess that is you point of view, which I will respect but am forced to disagree with.
I mean, this company comes up with a digital restrictions management scheme that if Microsoft tried you'd all be screaming bloody murder, but just because it's from a game company, and you really want to play, you are willing to overlook the truly draconian measures they came up with to control distribution of their software.
The way I see it, you all gave up your freedom to live in a fascist state because the government promised you something you valued more than freedom. Now you have to live with it. Good luck.
Just remember, if we reward the companies who do this sort of thing by buying their games, they have no reason to stop. Just stop buying the game. It's a freedom thing. If we keep mindlessly buying stuff, sooner or later everything will be like this. I know you want to play, but sometimes standing up for your freedoms is hard.
but with Google paying his wages, we can be sure that new and interesting overlap between the Mozilla Foundation's browsers and Google's services are sure to develop.
I don't think it's very responsible to say (without some sort of proof) that a person can't put a wall between her/his paying job and personal interests. I would be more inclined to grant more integrity, unless some clear example of impropriety emerges.
We should all just be happy, this guy has got a job most of us would probably like to have. I am sure most of the negative posts are hidden envy:)
Yeah, you can say whatever on a service controlled pretty much by one super big company, and you need to pay to recieve the service, oh, and the company in charge of the service is actively trying to keep people from recording broadcasts.
Maybe this helps Howard Stern, because he is already popular enough, but this does NOTHING for new people trying to break into the system with innovative and potentially culturally challenging content. For that, thankfully we have numerous internet publishing sites.
Personally, I just can't figure out why so many pro open/free software people seem to be interested in this service. I guess it's interesting tech, but it is the old school method of publishing. Satellite Radio is not the future, it is the last gasp of an outmoded and undemocratic model of content publishing.
I'm living in Beijing, China and have a lot of friends from Korea (both North and South)
What you have to remember is that in this part of the world, not everyone can afford a computer desktop, but even my maid has a mobile phone, with SMS messaging.
Another important factor is that young people don't always have a personal computer that is private from their parents, while their mobile phone is typically very private. Also, most younger people don't like to hang around the house, they are typically out meeting with friends in some youth oriented location. This is both personal preference and the fact that they want some privacy. So SMS get's really popular because you can always have your mobile phone around.
There are some political issues. Lots of people are more concerned that the gov't is checking emails servers for what is classified as subversive activity. Not that SMS is more secure, but I think that the gov't hasn't quite caught on to it yet, dispite what happened in the Philopeans a few years ago:)
Another thing is that SMS and IM are more interactive, and during that time of life you are working a lot to develop your interpersonal skills, so you want to spend a lot of time chatting.
Why not just call and talk? Well, typically SMS messagin is very cheap compared to talking on the phone. Actually when I first got to Beijing I really annoyed some people when I was calling them, because I was costing them a lot of money.
You can also type SMS with your hand hidden in a coat pocket or in a purse, which is something that a lot of younger people in class do. You can SMS your friends while sitting in class much more easily than calling them on the mobile.
When you get older and have your own apartment you don't mind spending so much time there because your parents are not peeking into your bedroom. So you will be more comfortable to use technologies like email with a desktop, that is tied to a single location. I don't worry that my parents will walk in and see me blowing kisses at my girlfriend when we talk online, for example.
But yeah, this can be a big generation gap. I run a couple of social groups that I use email mailing lists to organize, and several of the younger people in the group are always sending me SMS's because they don't read the emails. So I guess I will look into some sort of SMS to email gateway, since the whole point of having the mailing list is so that I don't spend too much time organizing the projects.
Anyway, just remember that tech is always evolving and that if you want to keep of the lines of comunication you need to stay on top of it.
What do you think NASA does? They do outsource HUGE amounts of work to various companies to build stuff, they don't build it all themselves.
Gosh, everytime we have some sort of problem in goverment, why do so many people think that simply shutting down the goverment agency and handing out huge wads of cash to companies will solve it?
Look at what Haliburton did in Iraq. Arguable the Army Corp of Engineers could have done a lot of that work for less.
It will be years still before commerical interest and technology improvements will allow a non government sponsered agency to pull something like this off. I'm not discounting the amazing achievement of the SpaceShipOne people, but a short, suborbital flight was something NASA was doing back in the 1960's.
Someday technology improvements will push costs down to the point that something like this will be some kid's high school science experiment. But that is not today.
Looks like their 30 CRT will be 16 inches or so thick, which is still several times thicker than the 4-5 inches depth of the LCD and Plasma screens.
Doubt very much this is a challege to the LCD screen on your desk. Even if they used this technology for computer screens you'd still have greater weight and great power usage, and in the end it wouldn't be that much thinner.
Just because the voting exercises of 51% of Americans were not swayed by reports of the US goverment using torture and breaking international treaties of the treatment of prisoners, doesn't mean this story is dead. Yes, it does mean that the main people behind initiating it (Bush and his Administration) will never be held accountable for it in any meaningful way.
Anyway, for a lot of Americans, as well as many, many other people in the world, this story continues to live. In fact, I am sure as time goes on it will become stronger.
I'm in Beijing, China (expat, recently of NYC) and I saw one of these about two weeks ago. Of course to me all the car models seem a little strange looking, but this one was over the top. I couldn't figure out who made it, guess now I know.
The only reason why people used MP3 at all was because it shortened download time back when most people still used dialup. It's actually a big pain to have to rip and then encode the music. Now that lots of people have broadband, we could all just share cd rips using a non lossless format. The only reason why Jobs is talking about encoding formats at all is a self serving one: In order to make money, he needs to assure the music companies that the downloaded music has strong DRM. Also, it makes it less likely people will try to get around the DRM by re-encoding from an analog source, such as the analog out on your Mac, since the compressed music is lower in quality to begin with.
Nah, this has been going on forever...
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 3, Interesting
When I got my first student loan back in 1992, the cut out 4.5% right away... Called origination-destination charges or something like that...
They took like $600 US before the check even arrived at the school!
You might notice these fees apply more to people who are in need. I remember when I first got out of school I had trouble saving money, and a few times my bank account fell below the minimum and they got me for $25 bucks. Of course now that I make a good income, I find that I don't get caught on many of those hidden fees. Everyone wants to be nice to me now:)
Of course I do pay higher taxes, but I really didn't notice that as much as you would think.
If you look at the robots.txt file near the top you will see they removed a bunch of files with the URI of Iraq and 9/11 in them. I can't seem to find them on Google, but one could reasonably suspect that these are now potentially embarrising statements about how Saddam was the real brainchild behind 9/11, since that was the prime argument to convince Americans to go to war. I mean, I don't see them disallow any links to stuff about student loans in that robots.txt file:)
If anyone can find archives of that stuff that is not what I am guessing above, I'll happily eat crow.
Looks like they removed a bunch of files where they were making claims that Saddam was behind 9/11. One could be lead to suspect that now that Bush got his war his doesn't need that lie anymore, and wants to erase all history of it since it undermines his authority.
I checked out the files at www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt and found that there are over 1600 disallow lines and almost half of them had the word Iraq in the URI.
This could lead one to suspect that this website is trying to control the distribution of information about those articles. I mean, that is what a spider is for, right (among other things...)
Honestly, when I saw the robots.txt file, even I thought of Orwell and how they changed old stories in newspapers to continually change history to reflect whatever the goverment wanted people to believe at that moment.
Anybody know where a pix of these can be found that is in a true web standard? Sorry to see (but not surprised) the government embracing proprietary formats to this degree. They've been using PDF for years of course, but PDF has no open standards counterpart (please correct me if I am wrong!) while most flash could be replaced with scripted SVG.
Stop caring about TV so much. I mean, if your freedom to control the way you access information is that important to you, than any of the few (what seems to me at least) shows that might be worth watching are worth giving up.
Just opt out. If enough people do, that would change the industry quick enough. Chances are that won't happen, most people don't feel like these types of restrictions interfere with their freedom in a significant way.
Chances are that people who do care are just going to have to get used to opting out more, like people I know that feel strongly about worker rights won't buy stuff from companies that abuse them. You really don't need those designer Nike sneakers in the end, if you think about it.
People who have strong political feelings about things are willing to put up with the troubles, and something dangers, of living a life in accord with their beliefs.
All you can do is try to raise awareness of the issues, lobby for change, and try to not be too dissappointed from time to time when the powers that be exercise their power. Offering an alternative is also good, like trying to promote using the internet as a way of accessing news and entertainment.
I've never been to Britain, and can't comment on the lines there but I've been in a US emergency room three times in my life and each time I waited 8+hours before I saw a doctor.
1) First I I had a seizure from some bad food I ate. I'm a professional working for a drug company, with a very complete medical plan.
2) My friend had serious bleeding problems the morning after a complicated surgery. She has a private medical plan paid for by her job.
3) Another friend's dad wasy having trouble breathing and suddenly became blind. He is 70 years old (and reasonable wealthy with about 2mil in assets.)
Seems to me these were real issues, not just someone who got frightened by a bad case of the flu! Healthcare, whether socialist, private, or whatever, is having a hard time giving care at a reasonable cost. Thus the lines. So before you go off with your typical republican scare tactic, please take a look at how things really happen in the US for the vast majority of people (not just poor people either.)
I can hardly imagine how rich you would need to be before you didn't have to wait so many hours!
With all the plot changes in the last movie, I was assuming they were going to call it something else, so they could avoid paying royalties to whoever owners the copyright on the books.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like to mod someone down without saying why.
Lot's of responses on Slashdot are predictable. Mention BSD and you'll get 20 posts about how it's dying, etc. Mention Perl and you will get quite a few posts complaining about how Perl is unreadable or not suited for 'real' programming.
Then you will get a bunch of people saying Perl code can be good or bad depending on the programmer who wrote the code.
It's kind of silly really, and I usually just ignore it. I would have ignored your vulger post as well, but someone modded it as 'funny' I disagree with your statement being funny.
So you can say I am not modding your post, but I am modding the person who thought such a vulgar comment, of which literally dozens of similar ones exists, deserved to be modded as funny.
Maybe the first time it was a little funny, but at this point I don't think it's funny unless it's at least a bit clever. This post is just an AC saying what's been said over and over already.
BTW, I don't object to this simply because it's vulgar. I enjoy watching "South Park", which is often extremely vulgar, but it is also fresh and clever. That is why it's so funny to me.
So unless you got a new angle on 'Perl Code is Trash', I really don't think it should be modded up as informative, funny or anything.
Anyway, you should prove your point with a telling example of Perl obscurity. It's not like such a thing would be hard to find
Yeah, I forgot about that interrogation episode. If I remember correctly, Starbuck even says "You're not human so you don't have any rights" or something like that. It is not dissimilar to the govt. redefining what it means to be a prisoner of war in order to skirt the intent of the Geneva Treaty.
I just rewatched the miniseries with my friend last night. After the Galactica is nuked, they have to seal off some decks, sacrificing 85 people. They get blown out of the ship that really reminded me of those terrible videos of people jumping out of WTC buildings one and two. Even the damage control people that survived that were wearing uniforms that were almost identical to the types worn by NYC firefighters.
Yes, it is not a one to one analogy, but it is something I really notice without having to look very hard.
Not sure what to make of the religion issue. Yeah, the humans have a weird mix of Judeo-Polytheism (yeah I know that a misnomer but what else can I call it?) but that is inherited from the previous show, so I don't think they can muck with it too much. I guess they figured to give the Cylons a monotheism in order to add a deeper motivation to their actions and to account for the fact they don't always act like total machines, and since monotheisms historically have not worked well with polytheisms it was probably a no brainer for the writer to choose.
Actually I thought quite the opposite, I really felt it was the first thing I've seen on TV that came close to expressing how I felt on 9/11 and the subsequent actions of President Bush.
Think about it. The Cylons are made by humans who then return to destroy us. The US CIA made Bin Laden and built up Middle Eastern dictatorships to fight the USSR and now that has come back to haunt us.
Some of the scenes in the show really brought back hard memories for me of 9/11. I could really connect with the characters sense of loss, frustration and anger. A lot of the chaos of the time, and of the strength of the people that I saw walking downtown NYC streets as well, seemed to be well reflected.
Other scenes I could barely watch. There's one scene in the first episode where one of the characters goes down to submit photo's of her missing family and she walks down a corridor that is literally plastered with photo's of the missing. NYC streets were just like that. Whoever wrote that must have either lived in NYC or had been exposed to life there immediately post 9/11, because that scene had pictures and little shrines with candles set up in just the same way it was at the end of my block.
Also in the first episode they have to destroy a passenger liner that is being used to carry a nuclear device to attack the fleet, and Apollo has to destroy it, even though he is not sure if there are over 1000 people still alive on it. Although that didn't happen on 9/11 it was in the realm of possibility.
Anyway, as for the idea that is show is some sort of propaganda for current US policy, I would say that just because there is a show with a war in it, that doesn't mean it is pro President Bush.
I think it's more like if we had decent leadership that was wise and level headed, not flag waving and bent on war maybe we could have gotten through this experience much better. I know not everyone will agree with what I just wrote, but I hope that as someone who actually lived through a bombing you would give my opinion some weight.
It was a bit hard to grok at first, but at that point my developers all have xslt coding experience which made things easier in the end.
Once we got going we all started to feel like this is the future of webforms.
the xforms model also really fits into a REST model really well, which is the direction most of my news web apps are moving.
Haven't seen this competing standard since the first draft, but back then when I read it it seems like what we got (which is a mess really) with some extra stuff adding in, like automatic looping. Hopefully it's a lot better now.
Yeah, I had a similar problem. I bought Everquest a few years ago when all my friends were raving about it. I played for a while and didn't like it, so I sold it on Ebay. However when the person who bought the game tried to install it, we found that the CD key was already associated with my credit card, so even though I had canceled my account the buyer couldn't create a new account. I called Sony, thinking it would be no big deal to fix this, but after arguing with their helpdesk for more than an hour I gave up and just refunded my ebay buyer. It wasn't worth the effort.
The Sony people couldn't understand what I wanted. What they kept saying was what was the point of them selling me the disk if I could just turn around and sell it to someone else.
This statement alone tells me where they want to go with all sorts of content sales. We are already seeing this with DRM for music sales, the record companies have been trying to kill the used CD market for a long time.
Hey, you know what, this is what happens when you support closed source software. If you don't like it, just stop paying for it.
It really doesn't matter if they are violating their own EULA since they can always force down a patch with a new one.
I appreciate your points. Maybe I did overhyperbolize a bit, I'm in a bad mood since my neighbors thought 7am sunday morning was a good time to start ripping apart their bathroom, which is right next to my bedroom :)
However I think this is a battle worth fighting over. I am not too familair with secureROM, or why the current Steam system is supposed to be better. But for what it's worth here is why I don't like it.
It appears to be a proprietary system. I don't see anyone opening their own steam servers, like people could open their own web servers back at the dawn of the internet. Without the ability to do this, we are granting our freedom to use software as with like it into the hands of one or a few companies whose interest often is at odds with our interest. Now, in the absence of monopoly this is manageable, but if Steam is the only way to play a game you paid for that it seems an intolerable restriction.
Yeah, it's only a game, but next year this kind of thing could be built into all software. In a few years it could even be built into hardware devices, such as CD players. How would you like to have to log in just to play a CD? And what happens if you borrow a CD from a friend and it doesn't work in you CD player because that CD serial number is associated with your friend's player only.
Seems unlikely to you? This is exactly the type of system that content and software people are looking to build. If we just let it happen it will be much harder to fight.
Plus there is the principle of the matter. If you think this kind of thing is bad, than it is bad whether its for a game or for some software running life support systems at your local hospital. If you think Steam is okay, well then I guess that is you point of view, which I will respect but am forced to disagree with.
...you had to know this was going to happen.
I mean, this company comes up with a digital restrictions management scheme that if Microsoft tried you'd all be screaming bloody murder, but just because it's from a game company, and you really want to play, you are willing to overlook the truly draconian measures they came up with to control distribution of their software.
The way I see it, you all gave up your freedom to live in a fascist state because the government promised you something you valued more than freedom. Now you have to live with it. Good luck.
Just remember, if we reward the companies who do this sort of thing by buying their games, they have no reason to stop. Just stop buying the game. It's a freedom thing. If we keep mindlessly buying stuff, sooner or later everything will be like this. I know you want to play, but sometimes standing up for your freedoms is hard.
Yeah, you can say whatever on a service controlled pretty much by one super big company, and you need to pay to recieve the service, oh, and the company in charge of the service is actively trying to keep people from recording broadcasts.
Maybe this helps Howard Stern, because he is already popular enough, but this does NOTHING for new people trying to break into the system with innovative and potentially culturally challenging content. For that, thankfully we have numerous internet publishing sites.
Personally, I just can't figure out why so many pro open/free software people seem to be interested in this service. I guess it's interesting tech, but it is the old school method of publishing. Satellite Radio is not the future, it is the last gasp of an outmoded and undemocratic model of content publishing.
I'm living in Beijing, China and have a lot of friends from Korea (both North and South)
:)
What you have to remember is that in this part of the world, not everyone can afford a computer desktop, but even my maid has a mobile phone, with SMS messaging.
Another important factor is that young people don't always have a personal computer that is private from their parents, while their mobile phone is typically very private. Also, most younger people don't like to hang around the house, they are typically out meeting with friends in some youth oriented location. This is both personal preference and the fact that they want some privacy. So SMS get's really popular because you can always have your mobile phone around.
There are some political issues. Lots of people are more concerned that the gov't is checking emails servers for what is classified as subversive activity. Not that SMS is more secure, but I think that the gov't hasn't quite caught on to it yet, dispite what happened in the Philopeans a few years ago
Another thing is that SMS and IM are more interactive, and during that time of life you are working a lot to develop your interpersonal skills, so you want to spend a lot of time chatting.
Why not just call and talk? Well, typically SMS messagin is very cheap compared to talking on the phone. Actually when I first got to Beijing I really annoyed some people when I was calling them, because I was costing them a lot of money.
You can also type SMS with your hand hidden in a coat pocket or in a purse, which is something that a lot of younger people in class do. You can SMS your friends while sitting in class much more easily than calling them on the mobile.
When you get older and have your own apartment you don't mind spending so much time there because your parents are not peeking into your bedroom. So you will be more comfortable to use technologies like email with a desktop, that is tied to a single location. I don't worry that my parents will walk in and see me blowing kisses at my girlfriend when we talk online, for example.
But yeah, this can be a big generation gap. I run a couple of social groups that I use email mailing lists to organize, and several of the younger people in the group are always sending me SMS's because they don't read the emails. So I guess I will look into some sort of SMS to email gateway, since the whole point of having the mailing list is so that I don't spend too much time organizing the projects.
Anyway, just remember that tech is always evolving and that if you want to keep of the lines of comunication you need to stay on top of it.
What do you think NASA does? They do outsource HUGE amounts of work to various companies to build stuff, they don't build it all themselves.
Gosh, everytime we have some sort of problem in goverment, why do so many people think that simply shutting down the goverment agency and handing out huge wads of cash to companies will solve it?
Look at what Haliburton did in Iraq. Arguable the Army Corp of Engineers could have done a lot of that work for less.
It will be years still before commerical interest and technology improvements will allow a non government sponsered agency to pull something like this off. I'm not discounting the amazing achievement of the SpaceShipOne people, but a short, suborbital flight was something NASA was doing back in the 1960's.
Someday technology improvements will push costs down to the point that something like this will be some kid's high school science experiment. But that is not today.
Looks like their 30 CRT will be 16 inches or so thick, which is still several times thicker than the 4-5 inches depth of the LCD and Plasma screens.
Doubt very much this is a challege to the LCD screen on your desk. Even if they used this technology for computer screens you'd still have greater weight and great power usage, and in the end it wouldn't be that much thinner.
What an incredibly arrogant thing to say.
Just because the voting exercises of 51% of Americans were not swayed by reports of the US goverment using torture and breaking international treaties of the treatment of prisoners, doesn't mean this story is dead. Yes, it does mean that the main people behind initiating it (Bush and his Administration) will never be held accountable for it in any meaningful way.
Anyway, for a lot of Americans, as well as many, many other people in the world, this story continues to live. In fact, I am sure as time goes on it will become stronger.
I'm in Beijing, China (expat, recently of NYC) and I saw one of these about two weeks ago. Of course to me all the car models seem a little strange looking, but this one was over the top. I couldn't figure out who made it, guess now I know.
Anyone living in Beijing and knows where to buy?
The only reason why people used MP3 at all was because it shortened download time back when most people still used dialup. It's actually a big pain to have to rip and then encode the music. Now that lots of people have broadband, we could all just share cd rips using a non lossless format. The only reason why Jobs is talking about encoding formats at all is a self serving one: In order to make money, he needs to assure the music companies that the downloaded music has strong DRM. Also, it makes it less likely people will try to get around the DRM by re-encoding from an analog source, such as the analog out on your Mac, since the compressed music is lower in quality to begin with.
When I got my first student loan back in 1992, the cut out 4.5% right away... Called origination-destination charges or something like that...
:)
They took like $600 US before the check even arrived at the school!
You might notice these fees apply more to people who are in need. I remember when I first got out of school I had trouble saving money, and a few times my bank account fell below the minimum and they got me for $25 bucks. Of course now that I make a good income, I find that I don't get caught on many of those hidden fees. Everyone wants to be nice to me now
Of course I do pay higher taxes, but I really didn't notice that as much as you would think.
Come down here sometime and see for yourself.
If you look at the robots.txt file near the top you will see they removed a bunch of files with the URI of Iraq and 9/11 in them. I can't seem to find them on Google, but one could reasonably suspect that these are now potentially embarrising statements about how Saddam was the real brainchild behind 9/11, since that was the prime argument to convince Americans to go to war. I mean, I don't see them disallow any links to stuff about student loans in that robots.txt file :)
If anyone can find archives of that stuff that is not what I am guessing above, I'll happily eat crow.
Peace, or....
Looks like they removed a bunch of files where they were making claims that Saddam was behind 9/11. One could be lead to suspect that now that Bush got his war his doesn't need that lie anymore, and wants to erase all history of it since it undermines his authority.
I checked out the files at www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt and found that there are over 1600 disallow lines and almost half of them had the word Iraq in the URI.
This could lead one to suspect that this website is trying to control the distribution of information about those articles. I mean, that is what a spider is for, right (among other things...)
Honestly, when I saw the robots.txt file, even I thought of Orwell and how they changed old stories in newspapers to continually change history to reflect whatever the goverment wanted people to believe at that moment.
Peace, Or What?
1. Stop watching TV.
2. Cancel your cable subscription.
3. Stop buying DVD's of movies or CD's of music.
People who really care about freedom would be willing to give up owning that last season of Star Trek, or whatever is popular with geeks today.
Peace, or What?
Anybody know where a pix of these can be found that is in a true web standard? Sorry to see (but not surprised) the government embracing proprietary formats to this degree. They've been using PDF for years of course, but PDF has no open standards counterpart (please correct me if I am wrong!) while most flash could be replaced with scripted SVG.
Stop caring about TV so much. I mean, if your freedom to control the way you access information is that important to you, than any of the few (what seems to me at least) shows that might be worth watching are worth giving up.
Just opt out. If enough people do, that would change the industry quick enough. Chances are that won't happen, most people don't feel like these types of restrictions interfere with their freedom in a significant way.
Chances are that people who do care are just going to have to get used to opting out more, like people I know that feel strongly about worker rights won't buy stuff from companies that abuse them. You really don't need those designer Nike sneakers in the end, if you think about it.
People who have strong political feelings about things are willing to put up with the troubles, and something dangers, of living a life in accord with their beliefs.
All you can do is try to raise awareness of the issues, lobby for change, and try to not be too dissappointed from time to time when the powers that be exercise their power. Offering an alternative is also good, like trying to promote using the internet as a way of accessing news and entertainment.
Peace, or Not?
Well,
I've never been to Britain, and can't comment on the lines there but I've been in a US emergency room three times in my life and each time I waited 8+hours before I saw a doctor.
1) First I I had a seizure from some bad food I ate. I'm a professional working for a drug company, with a very complete medical plan.
2) My friend had serious bleeding problems the morning after a complicated surgery. She has a private medical plan paid for by her job.
3) Another friend's dad wasy having trouble breathing and suddenly became blind. He is 70 years old (and reasonable wealthy with about 2mil in assets.)
Seems to me these were real issues, not just someone who got frightened by a bad case of the flu! Healthcare, whether socialist, private, or whatever, is having a hard time giving care at a reasonable cost. Thus the lines. So before you go off with your typical republican scare tactic, please take a look at how things really happen in the US for the vast majority of people (not just poor people either.)
I can hardly imagine how rich you would need to be before you didn't have to wait so many hours!
Peace, or Not?
With all the plot changes in the last movie, I was assuming they were going to call it something else, so they could avoid paying royalties to whoever owners the copyright on the books.