Does anyone else think this is a bit over the top?
Yup. It almost seems that the underlying message is that tourism is a threat to national security and should be outlawed. Obviously the whole tourist industry would be seriously pissed if it were just outlawed and tourists barred entry, but fingerprint them, tag them, etc, and eventually they'll clue in and just stop coming.
I had a trip down there (I'm in Canada) planned for November but forget it. I get the message. I doubt the economy of California will collapse for my not going, but I also doubt I'm the only one who will regard this as a discouragement to visit.
It may be a 'tear down that wall' thing. Reagan says it, later it happens, Reagan gets credit. GW says 'to the moon and mars!', later it happens, GW gets credit. It doesn't matter whether he contributes anything to the achievement, it's enough that he said it. Decades from now when humans land on Mars Republicans will say, "We owe this to the vision of G.W. Bush all those years ago."
This could revolutionize how people use computers. Keyboard shortcuts need no longer be the province of power users, they could be right there on the keyboard, as, for example, in their photoshop screen shot.
But how would this work and would it work across platforms? The faq says it would be OS neutral with the qualifier "at least it can work in some default state with any OS". That 'default' might be 'regular qwerty keyboard'. My concern is that it would be great for photoshop, but just a very expensive regular keyboard for the gimp.
Seriously, this sort of thing does encourage a counter culture and an escalation in the evolution of measure/counter measure. Mod Lumpy 'insightful' ('funny' doesn't net any karma, unless they've fixed that).
A dominant distribution could emerge, but if so it will be through competition, not 'consolidation'. The emergence of such a distribution could be facilitated by the nature of open source itself. I just escaped the clutches of the evil Mandriva (sorry, something about the new name just invites space opera imagery) to Fedora, and there are a few things I'd like to see Fedora take (turn about being fair play, Mandrake started by taking from Red Hat) from Mandriva. They probably won't, sadly, but point is, they could. It is possible, at least in theory, for a distro to 'consolidate' the best features of other distributions.
If they want this law to have any teeth against P2P services, it must be written broadly enough to hurt google too.
This is a good point. It would probably be easier if they simply introduced a bill outlawing anything powerful lobby groups disliked. There may have been a time when laws were passed for the benefit of the citizens of the country, I really don't remember, but if so that's no longer the case. Why not be up front about it and save a lot of time and money with a generic, all purpose law.
And if there wasn't any powerful lobby group with a beef against google, such a law wouldn't impede google. So much simpler than trying to jerry rig some specifics that will hurt one set of entities while not hurting a similar entity.
Check out this Wikipedia article on the Antarctic Treaty System . If it works for one cold, barren, place, perhaps it could work for another.
I'd be more pessimistic if there was easy to get/exploit resources at the LaGrange points, but where costs are high and profits low, I think cooperation is more likely than conflict, or most likely no action at all.
The European immigrants who settled in Newfoundland brought their knowledge, beliefs, loyalties and prejudices with them, but the society they built in the New World was unlike the ones they had left, and different from the ones other immigrants would build on the American mainland. As a fish-exporting society, Newfoundland was in contact with many places around the Atlantic rim, but its geographic location and political distinctiveness also isolated it from its closest neighbors in Canada and the United States. Internally, most of its population was spread widely around a rugged coastline in small outport settlements, many of them a long distance from larger centers of population and isolated for long periods by winter ice or bad weather. These conditions had an effect on the culture the immigrants had brought with them and generated new ways of thinking and acting, giving Newfoundland and Labrador a wide variety of distinctive customs, beliefs, stories, songs, and dialects.
Recently I had to 'reboot' my phone after a java browser I'd downloaded to it crashed it. I had the horrible vision of a future where all appliances are computers, and they all crash and have to be rebooted.
Some form of web tv will eventually catch on and bring with it new problems. There should be a betting pool on the date of the first television virus, possibly one which hijacks the display to present spam advertising.
AMD should be spending their money on campaign contributions, not newspaper ads, if they want to get results. Though it may be they've already considered that and discovered they can't outbid Intel in influence dollars. Perhaps they should fund the Democrats, get in while their stock is low in hopes that it will rise in 2006.
This is great, but I still wish they'd increase the zoom level overall. Britain is literally covered in interesting stuff, much more interesting than Buckingham Palace. The standing stones at Stonehenge and Callanish on the Isle of Lewis come immediately to mind, but can't zoom in close enough to see them.
If the google guys are reading this, please consider putting sites of archaeological interest high on the 'to do' list.
The my in 'my computer' is from the perspective of Bill Gates. The icon label can be edited, so to avoid precisely this sort of confusion I've renamed it to 'Bill's Computer' on my windows machine. Using his actual name makes it a lot clearer.
Hey, look! This funny browser has tabs, just like in Internet Explorer!
This should be modded insightful. I remember a debate about Microsoft on a non-technical forum where someone posted that we should at least be grateful to Bill Gates for giving us the internet so we could even have the debate.
I had to count to ten before responding to that one. "-100, -99, -98, -97, -96..."
Now people will have heart attacks instead of just saying, "What the heck?" and getting frustrated.
Yes, especially with the red alert sound effect that accompanies it. It should be, as you suggest, a soothing colour, and the sound effect should be a slowly fading "Daisy,... Dai...sy,... give... me... yourr..r.... ansrr..r.r......"
With an election inevitable in the not so distant future sometime, it would be good for Canadian voters to know where the major parties stand on this. I suspect the Conservatives would be more likely to fall in line with the Bush administration.
The original internet 'social contract' was that if you take from the net, you give back to the net -- a kind of loose, unenforceable, ethic of reciprocity.
Then AOL let its millions of users on who just took, feeling entitled because, after all, they were paying AOL for the service.
The days of any kind of 'social contract' are long gone. Now the whole advertising thing is just a battle, as demonstrated by the obnoxious aggressiveness of online advertisers (google excepted).
As other posters have noted, Moore's law is about transistors. Kurzweil in his book uses a much more liberal extension of the law which allows him to look at technological development from the stone age through to speculations about the far future. Obviously they didn't have transistors in the stone age. They didn't even have tubes.
Ok, stated that simply results in overstatement and applies more to the software industry than the music industry, but wherever there are legal free alternatives to commercial ones, the 'free as in beer' advantage is diminished when people don't pay for the commercial anyway.
It seems like the objective is to have waking hours correspond more closely to daylight hours which change with the seasons.
The technical solution would be to have alter time at a much finer level, say the second, so that daylight hours and waking hours stay synced in a slow, imperceptible way, using network time servers.
The downside is that all clocks to be considered reliable would have to have a network connection to contact the time server. The upside would be none of this crude 'spring forward/fall back' crap.
Enterprise done right. Frakes in charge of the production, Captain played by Lance Henriksen. First thing the captain does on taking over is have Phlox feed the dog... Feed it to one of his creatures in sickbay.
I never liked pez because I am forced to only use their candy. What if they go out of business, then I would be stuck with a dispenser that couldn't use other candy.
Or if they went of business and you lost the dispenser, you couldn't get an open source one for the candy because it is extremely patent encumbered. See wikipedia for a list of pez patents.
I suppose one could just eat any left over candy without using a dispenser, but with pez that seems somehow very wrong.
Why on earth you would ever want to put a video clip into a word processor document? Isn't the point of a word processor document that you might want to print it out?
I think a very high percentage of word documents are never printed. People send them via email as attachments. And if you hunted these people down and killed them, the courts would say it was you who did something wrong, even if they embedded a video in the attached word document! Strange, but true.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. It almost seems that the underlying message is that tourism is a threat to national security and should be outlawed. Obviously the whole tourist industry would be seriously pissed if it were just outlawed and tourists barred entry, but fingerprint them, tag them, etc, and eventually they'll clue in and just stop coming.
I had a trip down there (I'm in Canada) planned for November but forget it. I get the message. I doubt the economy of California will collapse for my not going, but I also doubt I'm the only one who will regard this as a discouragement to visit.
Ooo, those sneaky Chinese, stealing GW's ideas!
It's all Bill Clinton's fault.
It may be a 'tear down that wall' thing. Reagan says it, later it happens, Reagan gets credit. GW says 'to the moon and mars!', later it happens, GW gets credit. It doesn't matter whether he contributes anything to the achievement, it's enough that he said it. Decades from now when humans land on Mars Republicans will say, "We owe this to the vision of G.W. Bush all those years ago."
But how would this work and would it work across platforms? The faq says it would be OS neutral with the qualifier "at least it can work in some default state with any OS". That 'default' might be 'regular qwerty keyboard'. My concern is that it would be great for photoshop, but just a very expensive regular keyboard for the gimp.
Seriously, this sort of thing does encourage a counter culture and an escalation in the evolution of measure/counter measure. Mod Lumpy 'insightful' ('funny' doesn't net any karma, unless they've fixed that).
A dominant distribution could emerge, but if so it will be through competition, not 'consolidation'. The emergence of such a distribution could be facilitated by the nature of open source itself. I just escaped the clutches of the evil Mandriva (sorry, something about the new name just invites space opera imagery) to Fedora, and there are a few things I'd like to see Fedora take (turn about being fair play, Mandrake started by taking from Red Hat) from Mandriva. They probably won't, sadly, but point is, they could. It is possible, at least in theory, for a distro to 'consolidate' the best features of other distributions.
This is a good point. It would probably be easier if they simply introduced a bill outlawing anything powerful lobby groups disliked. There may have been a time when laws were passed for the benefit of the citizens of the country, I really don't remember, but if so that's no longer the case. Why not be up front about it and save a lot of time and money with a generic, all purpose law.
And if there wasn't any powerful lobby group with a beef against google, such a law wouldn't impede google. So much simpler than trying to jerry rig some specifics that will hurt one set of entities while not hurting a similar entity.
I'd be more pessimistic if there was easy to get/exploit resources at the LaGrange points, but where costs are high and profits low, I think cooperation is more likely than conflict, or most likely no action at all.
From the wikipedia:
They didn't join Canada until 1949.
Some form of web tv will eventually catch on and bring with it new problems. There should be a betting pool on the date of the first television virus, possibly one which hijacks the display to present spam advertising.
Ah, sort of like slashdotters ;-)
AMD should be spending their money on campaign contributions, not newspaper ads, if they want to get results. Though it may be they've already considered that and discovered they can't outbid Intel in influence dollars. Perhaps they should fund the Democrats, get in while their stock is low in hopes that it will rise in 2006.
If the google guys are reading this, please consider putting sites of archaeological interest high on the 'to do' list.
After all, it IS your computer, right?"
The my in 'my computer' is from the perspective of Bill Gates. The icon label can be edited, so to avoid precisely this sort of confusion I've renamed it to 'Bill's Computer' on my windows machine. Using his actual name makes it a lot clearer.
This should be modded insightful. I remember a debate about Microsoft on a non-technical forum where someone posted that we should at least be grateful to Bill Gates for giving us the internet so we could even have the debate.
I had to count to ten before responding to that one. "-100, -99, -98, -97, -96..."
Yes, especially with the red alert sound effect that accompanies it. It should be, as you suggest, a soothing colour, and the sound effect should be a slowly fading "Daisy,... Dai...sy,... give ... me... yourr..r.... ansrr..r.r......"
With an election inevitable in the not so distant future sometime, it would be good for Canadian voters to know where the major parties stand on this. I suspect the Conservatives would be more likely to fall in line with the Bush administration.
I think the MPAA would prefer you to word it as "tipping an officer as a gesture of gratitude".
They would also probably prefer we not consider behavioural theories featuring concepts like 'positive reinforcement'.
Police Dispatcher: "MPAA reports pirated DVDs being sold at Oak and Main."
Two dozen cars call in saying they're on it.
Then AOL let its millions of users on who just took, feeling entitled because, after all, they were paying AOL for the service.
The days of any kind of 'social contract' are long gone. Now the whole advertising thing is just a battle, as demonstrated by the obnoxious aggressiveness of online advertisers (google excepted).
As other posters have noted, Moore's law is about transistors. Kurzweil in his book uses a much more liberal extension of the law which allows him to look at technological development from the stone age through to speculations about the far future. Obviously they didn't have transistors in the stone age. They didn't even have tubes.
Right.
1 pirate copy = 1 less open source software user.
Ok, stated that simply results in overstatement and applies more to the software industry than the music industry, but wherever there are legal free alternatives to commercial ones, the 'free as in beer' advantage is diminished when people don't pay for the commercial anyway.
The technical solution would be to have alter time at a much finer level, say the second, so that daylight hours and waking hours stay synced in a slow, imperceptible way, using network time servers.
The downside is that all clocks to be considered reliable would have to have a network connection to contact the time server. The upside would be none of this crude 'spring forward/fall back' crap.
Enterprise done right. Frakes in charge of the production, Captain played by Lance Henriksen. First thing the captain does on taking over is have Phlox feed the dog... Feed it to one of his creatures in sickbay.
Or if they went of business and you lost the dispenser, you couldn't get an open source one for the candy because it is extremely patent encumbered. See wikipedia for a list of pez patents.
I suppose one could just eat any left over candy without using a dispenser, but with pez that seems somehow very wrong.
I think a very high percentage of word documents are never printed. People send them via email as attachments. And if you hunted these people down and killed them, the courts would say it was you who did something wrong, even if they embedded a video in the attached word document! Strange, but true.