You make a good point: Slashdot should either ban people for checking the front page too much or stop banning checking static RSS files too much. The current policy makes no sense, since encourages checking a processor/bandwidth heavy page.
As for the lameness of blogs, well, Slashdot is essentially just a blog with multiple authors and an assload of comments. Mreh, whatever.
If you need to check slashdot more often than once every 30 minutes (hint: new articles aren't posted that often), you're too engaged in FP pissing contests.
RSS is best for keeping track of 500 sites that only update their content sporadically, say every month or so. That way, instead of throwing it into your bookmarks and forgetting about it, or wasting your time checking it all the time when there's nothing new 29 days out of 30, you can file it away and only come back when there's something new. For that, it's very handy.
For getting FP on slashdot the second a new story is posted, yeah, it kinda sucks. But who cares?
You seem to have a sig line implying that you are (or is... or whatever the kids are saying in Riverdale these days...) a Mac user, so you should know the answer to these questions:
Plug camera into Mac.
Loaded photos into iPhoto and give film rolls semi-descriptive names. (Eg. "Trip to Disneyland")
Periodically copy your hard drive's "Pictures" folder onto a backup medium.
Done.
Now, iPhoto may or may not be the be-all end-all of photo storing, but if there isn't a way to open and convert jpg's into your format of choice in 10 years, I'll buy you and kids two rounds of burgers at Pops.
If however all the competing ISPs dissappear, the telcos then get to dictate whatever terms they want, if you don't like it, you can't do anything about it.
My point is that competing ISPs aren't going anywhere. What's going to go away is competing DSL carriers offering to sell you the same splice of line. What we have today is a classic "tragedy of the commons," where while its in everyone's collective interest to improve local DSL service, it's in everyone's individual interest to let someone else pay for that, and just keep their own prices as low as possible. To get rid of "tragedy of the commons" situations, it's necessary to assign the right to use an area of the commons to one group, since then they'll improve the commons in order to preserve their profits. So, once it becomes in your local telco's interest to improve DSL service, they will. And once that happens, cable broadband will have competition, so they'll have to improve. And meanwhile, they'll both be facing competition from new wireless services. The point is that there will still be competition in the broadband market as a whole, just not phony competition, where a bunch of people all try to sell your the same part of the commons, within the DSL market.
None of your examples are examples of people selling things they don't own, just people using things they don't own as a part of their business.
Long distance carriers don't sell "the last mile." They sell their cross-country networks.
What ISPs sell is a connection between your house and other networks.
Cell carriers aren't selling real estate.
FedEx isn't selling trucks.
Banks don't sell the ability to cash checks. (Hint: they don't take a cut off of checks.) They do sell the service of storing your own money and allowing you to write checks to other people.
Retailers sell the stuff in their store, not their location.
It's true that in all these cases, the businesses are helped by having access to some things they don't own. There's nothing wrong with using things you don't own in your business, basically we all do, since we all use the public highways to move our products and provide access for our customers. The problem comes when you try to make a business out of selling what you don't own. That's the part that makes no sense.
The closest point you make is about the long distance providers, because it does seem to resemble selling DSL on the surface. The difference is that these local DSLs don't own cross-country backbones, the way that AT&T and MCI owned their own backbones. Owning those backbones gave AT&T and MCI real assets that they could parlay into competitive differences. In contrast, the DSLs just have a box in the local phone company's DSL access shed that they hook up to someone else's internet backbone. In other words, they're a complete and utter middle man who add almost no value to their core product, and without government protection via these common carrier rules, they wouldn't exist in the first place.
Um, I didn't say phone booths on I-95. I said toll booths on I-95. Knowing that may help you understand the analogy more. What DSL providers are trying to sell is access to a highway that they don't own. That's stupid, even if they are adding really nice services to their booth that otherwise wouldn't be there. (AKA local companies tend to be slightly more clue-full than the telecos.) No matter how nice the ancillary products like customer support are for the local DSLs, the fact is they're still selling something they don't own: a connection from your house to the internet backbones.
There's a lot of moaning and doom and gloom in this thread, but I think most people have overlooked the one problem with the business of DSL resellers:
They're selling something they don't own.
Think about it, what do local DSL providers actually provide? They provide a link between your computer and some internet backbone. And how is this link made? By going over "the last mile" of copper, which is owned by the phone company. How does it make any sense for someone to sell service on a wire they don't own? That's like having the Canadian government collect tolls in one set of booths on I-95: it might add "competition" in the sense that now there's more than one group competing to be your toll booth, but it doesn't change the physical facts of the highway. Traffic is going to be just as bad, pot holes aren't going to go away, and if anything the situation will be made worse, since the transit company in charge of the actual highway isn't going to see as much profit for the changes it makes.
So basically, we as consumers are essentially screwed, because it's only natural that whoever controls the last mile exerts a natural monopoly over internet service, right? Well no, not exactly.
How the consumer can escape being screwed is, while competition over the same set of lines is basically impossible, there are multiple sets of "last miles" coming into our houses already today. To point out the obvious: cable. Now, in a lot of areas, cable service is shitty, but that's only because cable has little competition for TV service, outside of satellite, and little competition for broadband service, outside of DSL. And the DSL service is always weak, because it hasn't been in the interests of the phone companies to make DSL service better.
But, all of this can change, because of A) new pressures from wireless internet services and B) this new ruling which lets the people who own the last mile of DSL finally act like they own the last mile of DSL.
So essentially, we are going to have to give up fake competition within the realm of DSL in order to achieve real competition between DSL and cable. And that's not a bad tradeoff, in my book.
If you can prove definitely that humans have free will, you've got a Philosophy PhD and tenured chair coming, never mind proving that one's robot companion does.
Of course, I understand the point you're trying to make, but still, I think the compound word "free will" needs to be tossed around less casually.
It profits the farmers to provide me with food. It profits the house builders to provide me with housing. It profits the obstetricians to deliver my babies.
Now, there is more to life than profit, it's true. But, profit is how we reward people for providing those benefits. So, if space is really great and fun, then people will pay to go there, and those providing the rockets will profit. It's as simple as that. Now, there's also things that are probably good for society as whole, but probably not profitable to the individual providers of those services, such as the fine arts and the pure sciences, and in those cases, it is justified for government to tax the society that is as a whole benefiting from the unprofitable burden of the few, but those things are the exception, not the rule.
The space shuttle is not pure science. It's barely even science at all. It's basically 99% engineering and 1%, "hey look what happens to chicken embryos in space." The public as a whole is not benefiting from the shuttle in the same way that we are benefitting from the Hubble or even the Mars Rovers. The job of the shuttle is to get people into low earth orbit safely and cheaply, and it can't really do either of those things. Therefore, I propose that the government disband the manned space mission side of NASA, and instead give companies various subsidies and tax breaks for putting people in space, such that doing so becomes profitable.
I understand that humankind needs to get off this rock someday, if we're going to stick around for the long haul, but if you really believe the shuttle is going to be a part of that process, you're deluding yourself. We'll get off this rock the same way we do everything else-- by giving profit to those who further our interests.
A) When America was attacked on Sept. 11, what was its most recent illegal invasion? Oh yeah, the one in Kosovo, where we tried to keep Orthodox Christians from killing Muslims. The fact is America did a lot of fucked up things during the Cold War (such as putting the Shah into power, supporting Saddam and all the other 2-bit dictators), but since then we've gotten a lot better about only attacking people who have it coming like Somalian warlords, instead of people who don't like Salvador Andelante. In spite of this, Bin Laden still attacked us. In spite of Bali being a nice island getaway it got bombed. In spite of Istanbul being Islamic, it got bombed. Terrorists bomb things because they're angry and they can. Yes, it makes sense to pacify that anger where possible, but when the targets are just random and the justifications are poor and the demands are laughable, there's not a lot of other options besides removing the ability of terrorists to strike by killing them.
B) Bush, as much as he may be doing to roll back democracy in the US with military tribunals for "enemy combatants" and the like, is actually doing a lot to push for more democracy in the rest of the world, especially in his second term. It may be a flip-flop for him to attack Saddam, after Rumsfeld used to be friends with Saddam in the '80s, but that doesn't bear on the question of whether it's right or wrong to remove Saddam. Yes, the justifications for the war were crap and the post-invasion period was poorly planned and Bush should have been fired for it, but at least now the ball is rolling in the other direction now-- AKA they are having elections in Egypt and many other Middle Eastern countries just in order to get the State Department off their backs.
C) None of this has anything to do with the Space Shuttle, so why the hell you brought it up in the first place is beyond me. It's not like during the relatively war free Clinton years NASA was suddenly written blank checks using the surplus. If anything, the time that NASA had the most money was during Vietnam, when we were expending a huge amount of our GDP on bombing rice paddies. If you want to encourage Congress to increase NASA's funding, I recommend you encourage people to join the Chinese space program as volunteers, because unless they see a military need to increase our space capabilities, it won't happen with government money. Which makes sense, because why the hell should taxpayers pay for space exploration in the first place, unless they're going to get more out of it than school teachers showing off crystal growing kits? If there's profit to be made in space, then private companies will find the profit in it on their own. If there's no profit in space, then we don't need it, so why are we funding it?
Anyhow, this whole thread is a waste of time, and I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to post in it, besides my vague hope that in the next/. article about the shuttle I can read about the shuttle instead of people whining about US politics.
Because our military budget was exactly $0/year before Iraq?
OK, so the whole "we're fightin' over there" argument is both bullshit and a little bit racist, but the point remains, that if we took apart the military entirely, there's a whole planet full of pissed off people who'd suddenly want their revenge and come a-knockin'. You know, like that episode where Q became a human for a while.
I totally agree that the Iraq war was a bad idea, but hippie bullshit like "oh let's just give the money to NASA instead" isn't insightful or useful in anyway. It's just off-topic whining that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the astronauts are in danger of dying on reentry (AKA the current article) and I for one am sick of people bringing it up in every single NASA related story.
1. Abolish Daylight Savings Time. 2. Announce that all government offices, schools, etc. will open and close 1 hour earlier in the period from March to November. 3. Encourage other business to do likewise.
Done!
Don't forget the DS VoIP demo!
on
The Handheld War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree with the comments everyone else has made: namely, the author is on crack and the N-gage is dead. However, I'd like to point out that no one has mentioned the demo Nintendo did at E3, where they used DSes to make VoIP phone calls. In other words, if Nintendo ever feels like releasing the software for it, you'll be able to make free call to other DSes and possibly computers and phone lines at any WiFi hotspot. So basically, it's a portable phone that makes cheap calls.
I switched to Mac back in 2000, but even I know the answer to this one:
Hold the cursor over the taskbar, and eventually the window will pop to the foreground, so you can complete your operation. The reason you can't drag onto the taskbar tile is because that's too ambiguous. Say you drag a document on to the Word taskbar item. What do you want? Probably to open it. But, you might want this file embedded in the currently open file. So, to make it clear, you have to wait until the window comes to the front, then drop the item on the document area to embed or the toolbar area to open.
Nevertheless, Windows still sucks. Just not for this reason.
That's not entirely true. My girlfriend is not a techie at all, but she now hates Napster since all of "her" songs expired and don't work, and she's irritated at iTunes since she keeps bumping into the 5 computer limit, between her hardware upgrades/repairs and sharing with me. She may still not know the word "DRM," but she does know that she doesn't like it. Still at least the iTunes DRM is semi-unobnoxious, so at least we can put up with it, but it's nice to dream of a day when we won't have to use any at all.
Be for real man. In 1995, all of 10 people had the web. Whatever the internet was like then, it was bound to change. Anyhow, servers cost money. Are you really so opposed to people making websites without going broke if their site becomes useful to others (and thus has a higher bandwidth fee). Anyhow, we have GNU and Creative Commons licenses for stuff now anyway, so matter what happens no one will be able to lock up future versions of TV tome (such as the aforementioned Memory Alpha) without running afoul of the law.
In my experience, floppies would become corrupt if you so much as looked at them funny. Putting 32MB on one floppy disk is asking for massive and thorough loss of data.
Then again, maybe the problem was that I always used old AOL disks... Damn, do they still make those? That would be good for art projects.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a good point: Slashdot should either ban people for checking the front page too much or stop banning checking static RSS files too much. The current policy makes no sense, since encourages checking a processor/bandwidth heavy page.
As for the lameness of blogs, well, Slashdot is essentially just a blog with multiple authors and an assload of comments. Mreh, whatever.
If you need to check slashdot more often than once every 30 minutes (hint: new articles aren't posted that often), you're too engaged in FP pissing contests.
RSS is best for keeping track of 500 sites that only update their content sporadically, say every month or so. That way, instead of throwing it into your bookmarks and forgetting about it, or wasting your time checking it all the time when there's nothing new 29 days out of 30, you can file it away and only come back when there's something new. For that, it's very handy.
For getting FP on slashdot the second a new story is posted, yeah, it kinda sucks. But who cares?
You seem to have a sig line implying that you are (or is... or whatever the kids are saying in Riverdale these days...) a Mac user, so you should know the answer to these questions:
Plug camera into Mac.
Loaded photos into iPhoto and give film rolls semi-descriptive names. (Eg. "Trip to Disneyland")
Periodically copy your hard drive's "Pictures" folder onto a backup medium.
Done.
Now, iPhoto may or may not be the be-all end-all of photo storing, but if there isn't a way to open and convert jpg's into your format of choice in 10 years, I'll buy you and kids two rounds of burgers at Pops.
If however all the competing ISPs dissappear, the telcos then get to dictate whatever terms they want, if you don't like it, you can't do anything about it.
My point is that competing ISPs aren't going anywhere. What's going to go away is competing DSL carriers offering to sell you the same splice of line. What we have today is a classic "tragedy of the commons," where while its in everyone's collective interest to improve local DSL service, it's in everyone's individual interest to let someone else pay for that, and just keep their own prices as low as possible. To get rid of "tragedy of the commons" situations, it's necessary to assign the right to use an area of the commons to one group, since then they'll improve the commons in order to preserve their profits. So, once it becomes in your local telco's interest to improve DSL service, they will. And once that happens, cable broadband will have competition, so they'll have to improve. And meanwhile, they'll both be facing competition from new wireless services. The point is that there will still be competition in the broadband market as a whole, just not phony competition, where a bunch of people all try to sell your the same part of the commons, within the DSL market.
It's true that in all these cases, the businesses are helped by having access to some things they don't own. There's nothing wrong with using things you don't own in your business, basically we all do, since we all use the public highways to move our products and provide access for our customers. The problem comes when you try to make a business out of selling what you don't own. That's the part that makes no sense.
The closest point you make is about the long distance providers, because it does seem to resemble selling DSL on the surface. The difference is that these local DSLs don't own cross-country backbones, the way that AT&T and MCI owned their own backbones. Owning those backbones gave AT&T and MCI real assets that they could parlay into competitive differences. In contrast, the DSLs just have a box in the local phone company's DSL access shed that they hook up to someone else's internet backbone. In other words, they're a complete and utter middle man who add almost no value to their core product, and without government protection via these common carrier rules, they wouldn't exist in the first place.
Um, I didn't say phone booths on I-95. I said toll booths on I-95. Knowing that may help you understand the analogy more. What DSL providers are trying to sell is access to a highway that they don't own. That's stupid, even if they are adding really nice services to their booth that otherwise wouldn't be there. (AKA local companies tend to be slightly more clue-full than the telecos.) No matter how nice the ancillary products like customer support are for the local DSLs, the fact is they're still selling something they don't own: a connection from your house to the internet backbones.
There's a lot of moaning and doom and gloom in this thread, but I think most people have overlooked the one problem with the business of DSL resellers:
They're selling something they don't own.
Think about it, what do local DSL providers actually provide? They provide a link between your computer and some internet backbone. And how is this link made? By going over "the last mile" of copper, which is owned by the phone company. How does it make any sense for someone to sell service on a wire they don't own? That's like having the Canadian government collect tolls in one set of booths on I-95: it might add "competition" in the sense that now there's more than one group competing to be your toll booth, but it doesn't change the physical facts of the highway. Traffic is going to be just as bad, pot holes aren't going to go away, and if anything the situation will be made worse, since the transit company in charge of the actual highway isn't going to see as much profit for the changes it makes.
So basically, we as consumers are essentially screwed, because it's only natural that whoever controls the last mile exerts a natural monopoly over internet service, right? Well no, not exactly.
How the consumer can escape being screwed is, while competition over the same set of lines is basically impossible, there are multiple sets of "last miles" coming into our houses already today. To point out the obvious: cable. Now, in a lot of areas, cable service is shitty, but that's only because cable has little competition for TV service, outside of satellite, and little competition for broadband service, outside of DSL. And the DSL service is always weak, because it hasn't been in the interests of the phone companies to make DSL service better.
But, all of this can change, because of A) new pressures from wireless internet services and B) this new ruling which lets the people who own the last mile of DSL finally act like they own the last mile of DSL.
So essentially, we are going to have to give up fake competition within the realm of DSL in order to achieve real competition between DSL and cable. And that's not a bad tradeoff, in my book.
Oh yeah, what the classroom really needs is anonymous comments from students.
Heh, slashdot ate my &#...;
Use a Mozilla based browser, and it will automatically use the style unicode that's compatible with ISO-Latin pages.
I'd expect free will
If you can prove definitely that humans have free will, you've got a Philosophy PhD and tenured chair coming, never mind proving that one's robot companion does.
Of course, I understand the point you're trying to make, but still, I think the compound word "free will" needs to be tossed around less casually.
Is the space pope reptilian?
You two have the lamest feud evar.
It profits the farmers to provide me with food. It profits the house builders to provide me with housing. It profits the obstetricians to deliver my babies.
Now, there is more to life than profit, it's true. But, profit is how we reward people for providing those benefits. So, if space is really great and fun, then people will pay to go there, and those providing the rockets will profit. It's as simple as that. Now, there's also things that are probably good for society as whole, but probably not profitable to the individual providers of those services, such as the fine arts and the pure sciences, and in those cases, it is justified for government to tax the society that is as a whole benefiting from the unprofitable burden of the few, but those things are the exception, not the rule.
The space shuttle is not pure science. It's barely even science at all. It's basically 99% engineering and 1%, "hey look what happens to chicken embryos in space." The public as a whole is not benefiting from the shuttle in the same way that we are benefitting from the Hubble or even the Mars Rovers. The job of the shuttle is to get people into low earth orbit safely and cheaply, and it can't really do either of those things. Therefore, I propose that the government disband the manned space mission side of NASA, and instead give companies various subsidies and tax breaks for putting people in space, such that doing so becomes profitable.
I understand that humankind needs to get off this rock someday, if we're going to stick around for the long haul, but if you really believe the shuttle is going to be a part of that process, you're deluding yourself. We'll get off this rock the same way we do everything else-- by giving profit to those who further our interests.
A) When America was attacked on Sept. 11, what was its most recent illegal invasion? Oh yeah, the one in Kosovo, where we tried to keep Orthodox Christians from killing Muslims. The fact is America did a lot of fucked up things during the Cold War (such as putting the Shah into power, supporting Saddam and all the other 2-bit dictators), but since then we've gotten a lot better about only attacking people who have it coming like Somalian warlords, instead of people who don't like Salvador Andelante. In spite of this, Bin Laden still attacked us. In spite of Bali being a nice island getaway it got bombed. In spite of Istanbul being Islamic, it got bombed. Terrorists bomb things because they're angry and they can. Yes, it makes sense to pacify that anger where possible, but when the targets are just random and the justifications are poor and the demands are laughable, there's not a lot of other options besides removing the ability of terrorists to strike by killing them.
/. article about the shuttle I can read about the shuttle instead of people whining about US politics.
B) Bush, as much as he may be doing to roll back democracy in the US with military tribunals for "enemy combatants" and the like, is actually doing a lot to push for more democracy in the rest of the world, especially in his second term. It may be a flip-flop for him to attack Saddam, after Rumsfeld used to be friends with Saddam in the '80s, but that doesn't bear on the question of whether it's right or wrong to remove Saddam. Yes, the justifications for the war were crap and the post-invasion period was poorly planned and Bush should have been fired for it, but at least now the ball is rolling in the other direction now-- AKA they are having elections in Egypt and many other Middle Eastern countries just in order to get the State Department off their backs.
C) None of this has anything to do with the Space Shuttle, so why the hell you brought it up in the first place is beyond me. It's not like during the relatively war free Clinton years NASA was suddenly written blank checks using the surplus. If anything, the time that NASA had the most money was during Vietnam, when we were expending a huge amount of our GDP on bombing rice paddies. If you want to encourage Congress to increase NASA's funding, I recommend you encourage people to join the Chinese space program as volunteers, because unless they see a military need to increase our space capabilities, it won't happen with government money. Which makes sense, because why the hell should taxpayers pay for space exploration in the first place, unless they're going to get more out of it than school teachers showing off crystal growing kits? If there's profit to be made in space, then private companies will find the profit in it on their own. If there's no profit in space, then we don't need it, so why are we funding it?
Anyhow, this whole thread is a waste of time, and I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to post in it, besides my vague hope that in the next
Because our military budget was exactly $0/year before Iraq?
OK, so the whole "we're fightin' over there" argument is both bullshit and a little bit racist, but the point remains, that if we took apart the military entirely, there's a whole planet full of pissed off people who'd suddenly want their revenge and come a-knockin'. You know, like that episode where Q became a human for a while.
I totally agree that the Iraq war was a bad idea, but hippie bullshit like "oh let's just give the money to NASA instead" isn't insightful or useful in anyway. It's just off-topic whining that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the astronauts are in danger of dying on reentry (AKA the current article) and I for one am sick of people bringing it up in every single NASA related story.
1. Abolish Daylight Savings Time.
2. Announce that all government offices, schools, etc. will open and close 1 hour earlier in the period from March to November.
3. Encourage other business to do likewise.
Done!
I agree with the comments everyone else has made: namely, the author is on crack and the N-gage is dead. However, I'd like to point out that no one has mentioned the demo Nintendo did at E3, where they used DSes to make VoIP phone calls. In other words, if Nintendo ever feels like releasing the software for it, you'll be able to make free call to other DSes and possibly computers and phone lines at any WiFi hotspot. So basically, it's a portable phone that makes cheap calls.
Score one more for the DS.
I switched to Mac back in 2000, but even I know the answer to this one:
Hold the cursor over the taskbar, and eventually the window will pop to the foreground, so you can complete your operation. The reason you can't drag onto the taskbar tile is because that's too ambiguous. Say you drag a document on to the Word taskbar item. What do you want? Probably to open it. But, you might want this file embedded in the currently open file. So, to make it clear, you have to wait until the window comes to the front, then drop the item on the document area to embed or the toolbar area to open.
Nevertheless, Windows still sucks. Just not for this reason.
I can vouch for the simplicity of the new KDE:
All I see are a white page and my browser's loading animation!
That's not entirely true. My girlfriend is not a techie at all, but she now hates Napster since all of "her" songs expired and don't work, and she's irritated at iTunes since she keeps bumping into the 5 computer limit, between her hardware upgrades/repairs and sharing with me. She may still not know the word "DRM," but she does know that she doesn't like it. Still at least the iTunes DRM is semi-unobnoxious, so at least we can put up with it, but it's nice to dream of a day when we won't have to use any at all.
...kneel before Zod! Er... Bill!!
Yeah, you're right. There are no more websites for people to talk about Star Trek for free anymore.
Be for real man. In 1995, all of 10 people had the web. Whatever the internet was like then, it was bound to change. Anyhow, servers cost money. Are you really so opposed to people making websites without going broke if their site becomes useful to others (and thus has a higher bandwidth fee). Anyhow, we have GNU and Creative Commons licenses for stuff now anyway, so matter what happens no one will be able to lock up future versions of TV tome (such as the aforementioned Memory Alpha) without running afoul of the law.
In my experience, floppies would become corrupt if you so much as looked at them funny. Putting 32MB on one floppy disk is asking for massive and thorough loss of data.
Then again, maybe the problem was that I always used old AOL disks... Damn, do they still make those? That would be good for art projects.
That erases what you've typed so far... I'd be nice to be able to pause the updating process.