Every time a discussion starts on spam, I see the same two "solutions" to the problem; some sort of vague legal solution (which would be as effective as legislating the weather), or finding technical solutions to make spamming more difficult (which would be, at best, an ongoing and expensive process). I have two rather different suggestions (though one could be viewed as a technical solution).
First solution: Public humiliation. Instead of chasing down the spammers, chase down the bozos who make spamming profitable. If every chowderhead who actually responds to spam (or, for that matter, telemarketers and unsolicited snail-mail) were to be publicly spanked (metaphorically, of course), then maybe spam-related sales would drop enough to slow down this growth. Imagine seeing a a sign on someone's lawn that said,
John Doe
1234 Main St Anytown ST 12345 jdoe@spamme.com
Believes he can make thousands a day with his computer He's losing weight! Ask him how! forvorite porn sites include... etc. etc.
...and while this might not be as much fun as taking such people out behind the building and beating the crap out of them, it might still make a difference. So long as spammers actually make money from such twits, there will be spam.
Plan B is a variation of an old suggestion; charge for e-mail, kind-of. Right now, I have a few-hundred entries of blocked senders, along with the "Spaminator(TM)" service provided by my ISP, and I still get a dozen pieces of spam a day. What if that were turned around? What if I provided my ISP with a list of friends/family addresses, and maybe a few "trusted" sites (like school and/or work) that I would accept mail from without question. Anyone else either coughs up a small charge (perhaps at weighted rates, if there was a way to keep that from being abused) to send me an e-mail or have the e-mail bounced as undeliverable. Online businesses that have legitimate cause to send me e-mail could roll the cost of such e-mail into whatever they charge me (while encouraging me to add them to my "accept" list to reduce future costs) and spammers would see their profit margin disappear.
Back in '91 and '92, I was a junior sysprog on a mainframe system running two different OS's. The security systems (at the time) didn't talk to each other, but the users wanted to have a single password for everything. The result was an ugly kludge (that I got to maintain since I was most junior) and this allowed me to see the day's before/after password change file. 750 or so users, and there were at least a 200 or so that referenced John Elway and/or the Broncos (this was in Denver), another 100 or so that went path of least resistance (AAAAAA1, AAAAAA2, etc.), a couple dozen that used NCC1701, NCC1701A, etc. etc.
Not only is this story obvious, it's seriously dated. Stupid/obvious passwords have probably been around as long as there have been passwords...
Try thinking of it as paying for the lack of something... I already donate once or twice a year to a college station (KVCU in Boulder) partly because I can't stomach the crappy programming on the various commercial stations around, but also because (except for 20 days a year for pledge drives) they don't run ads.
Unless the cost is prohibitive, I'm willing to pay for the absence of banners...
A quick search of AbeBooks turned up a lot of hits, both in its first release in Binary Star #5 (along with George R.R. Martin's Nightflyers), in an illustrated version and in True Names and Other Dangers but, unfortunately, it looks like the story has become "collectible" (and thus expensive as hell). It's a great read, but I'm glad I have my copy and don't have to shell out $50 to $120 for it. Perhaps the local library?
Today, the majority of business requires a consistent calendar.
Actually, a place I used to work used three different calendars. Most applications used the traditional Gregorian calendar (payroll was semi-monthly with payday on the 15th and the last day of the month, and so on), the General Ledger people used a 4-5-4 calendar (where each "month" was four weeks long, then five week, then four weeks to make a thirteen week "quarter"; this adds up to 364 days and so "year end" processing was hitting in November while I was there), and finally, the accounting people used some mysterious "fiscal" calendar that started the year in early February. Working in the data center was loads of fun; month-end processing every week and a half or so, twelve "quarter-end" runs a year, and three "year-end" runs. I could very easily see a business that put up with that nonsense having no problem with yet another calendar.
On the other hand, they got bought out by a larger (and presumably better organized) chain about five years ago...
On the one hand, Libertarianism is just as prone to assuming ideal behaviour as any ideaology. And, to me, that is its greatest failing; while I am registered Libertarian, I am not impressed with the party's "throw out the baby with the bathwater" solutions to big government problems. But no idealogy is perfect because the people that implement it are not perfect. I find the libertarian "ideal" more appealling than the current "give us more of your money and control of your life and we'll make things perfect" approach that contemporary polititians promise.
Your M$ example is a valid demonstration of the limitations of the Libertarian ideal; as it is, even with the DoJ breathing down their neck, Bill and company are screwing around with Kerberos (sp?) and such with a "who farted?" innocent look on their face. I can't see a way that the "invisible hand" could have influenced M$ behaviour, not with the majority of consumers being technologically ignorant.
The rampant capitalism practiced by USia has led to a nation with approximately 1/20th of the worlds population consuming half of the worlds resources. After all, we don't want to impose environmental regulations, the corporations might not like it. It'd *gasp* harm their profitability if they were forced to clean up after themselves.
Is "rampant capitalism" really a bad thing? While we USians (clumsy, but yes, it's more accurate than "Americans") use a disproportionately larger amount of resources than any other contry; so what? Should we, as a nation, apologize for being prosperous? Should we go back to pre-20th century technology (and the higher pollution levels that entails) while the rest of the world catches up (or stay there if the rest of the world fails to catch up)? In spite of the various environmental diatribes, the US is getting "cleaner" every year. Some of that is through government mandates, but a lot of that is "rampant capitalism" in action; e.g. Coors has been striving to make their beer cans lighter and with more recycled materials for years, not because they are legally required to, but because it is cheaper, making them more competetive as well as getting a little environmental karma bonus.
No, libertarianism is just another word for selfishness and apathy, a political stance in which the individual is allowed to give up all moral responsibility in the name of profit. And who cares about those that suffer socioeconomic rape at the hands of greedy corporations - it's not our fault if they're poor is it? Should've worked harder.
On this, too, I must disagree. First, is it philanthropy to surrender your money at gunpoint (i.e. pay taxes) on the pretense that, if enough is left over after paying for polititians and their pet projects, some of that money might eventually help the needy? (That's assuming that Federal Welfare progams "help" rather than harm.) The libertairian ideal is that money given to aid those less fortunate is done so voluntarily, and maybe even with an eye on results. Secondly (and most important IMHO), Libertarianism is emphatic about the idea that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin; that's what distingishes it from anarchism. A libertairian might say "you should be free to do X", but implicit in that statement is the corallary "you are also responsioble for the results of doing X".
In conclusion, I found a long time ago that the USofA is, for the most part, populated by malcontents and the children of malcontents from all ove the world. One of the results of this composition is that we, as a country, are sure that there is a "better way" to do things. Any things, from dishwashing soap to political processes. This comstant state of experimentation has had some bad results (usually when trying to force our ideology on other countries), but it has also resulted in good things and ideas, like equal rights (yes, we're still working on that), advanced medicine, the web, space exploration, etc. Libertarianism is yet another experiment and the results aren't back yet...
Sure, I want to go to Mars. (Actually, I want to visit other places in the Solar system as well, but Mars is a good first stop...) Sure the creature comforts would be on the sparse side. So? "Sorry, I won't be climbing Mt. Everest with you; the nearest Blockbuster is 500 miles away!" Those "early adopters" helped settle the "New World" a few hundred years ago.
Can I explain why I want to go to Mars? No, not yet. I've been trying for years, and so far, people either get it (and don't have to ask the question), or they don't and can't. The scene in Contact where Bryant Gumbal (sp?) is asking Ellie (Jodi Foster), why she's willing to risk her life "in the chair" is a clear example of this; to me (and only a couple other people I've discussed this with) this was a clearly stupid question. But to most people it is as valid as it is puzzling.
I could resort to clichés like "Because it's there." or pick at your "home of humanity" metaphor and suggest that I feel its time to leave home and strike out on my own. But the truth is simpler; I want to go. I am not only ready to sacrifice the local scenery (I live in the mountains just west of Denver), but I'm also abandoning a 16 year career in IT (this Friday, in fact) so that I can pursue an educational path which (I hope) will lead to participating directly in space exploration in the near future.
Things were looking grim there for a while, when the fifth air-drop failed and crunched up the floor pieces and some of the equipment (and let's skip the obvious "simulating NASA-based Mars mission" jokes), but they still managed to put things together; cool!
As a challenge, name one single artist you have heard of who has been completely self-promoted (without the benefit of an agent promoting him).
Anyone remember "Mummer's Dance" a few years back? Loreena McKennit and her self-run recording label Quinlan Road had some success promoting herself; 3 million copies of "The Book of Secrets" sold (a bit shy of your 12M mark, but still a lot of CDs), music in a couple soundtracks, etc. From interviews, its clear she's accomplished this for the sake of artistic control, but it was a lot of work over a lot years; the aforementioned album was her sixth...
OTOH, this is still pretty rare, and it does require a lot of determination and business sense on the part of the artist, which is too bad; it would be nice if, when all the dust settles from this, someone figures out a way that artists can focus on their art without getting screwed (by their agents, publishers, or their consumers)...
For a site speciallizing in "disinformation", I was rather surprised/disappointed that disinfo.com has done just what the MPAA has done and equated decryption (and the accessibility it gains) to piracy. Wrong! As has been discussed here (many many times) bypassing CSS does not automatically lead to piracy.
Unfortuantely, the DivX part of the article seemed to be a "Ha! You can't stop us pirating movies any more than you can stop us pirating music!"-type rant. This is not helping...
I think this was the "Fairchild" (or something like that). I remember a friend who had one (around '78?) and I was boggled by the controller; the triangular dingus was a four-point joystick, plus it could twist clockwise and counter-clockwise, and it could be pushed in and pulled out. Effectively a four-point joystick (like the Atari had), with four nearly unusable "fire" buttons. I also seem to recall that the complexity of the controllers also made them prone to breaking...
I've been using a GUI of one sort or another since I bought my Atari ST back in '87, but I still prefer the CLI for some things. What I want to know is why it has to be one or the other...
To me, the perfect UI would be one where a command is a command is a command, whether it is a text string from the keyboard or mouse click/action. A few years ago, I took an entry level AutoCAD class (V13 I think) and found that I really really liked the way I could do stuff with the mouse, with the keyboard, or both. Why can't there be the same functionality in an OS's UI? A "Command Interface" with a command line component and graphical component; if it were set up right, it would be very customizable (mostly CLI's for dinosaurs like me, mostly graphical for technophobes, etc.), and it would be expandable to other methods of entry (like voice commands). (The only voice-command software I've seen so far has been strap-on stuff that was pretty lame, like Windows sitting on top of DOS.)
OTOH, maybe the problem is that we're trying to find a one-size-fits-all UI and failing; how well would people react to such limited choices in non-computer areas? Like a standardized instrument panel for you car; I know people who think that they can't drive without a tachometer, and others who would find the additional information a tach provides as intimidating and/or distracting.
Sadly, there were no sites available that were simultaneously cold, arid, and otherwise Mars-like, while also having a lot of easy access to local news outlets. On the other hand, the Discovery Channel connection should provide enough coverage without the local news doing a "Look at these weirdos" human interest stories...
Regardless, I'm psyched; this was vaporware at last August's Mars Society convention and now the final product was packed up for shipping just last Monday. The plan is for a report on the first trial to be delivered at the next Mars Society convention in Toronto, August 10-13... A private organization has done more towards a manned Mars mission in the 3-4 years it has existed than NASA has in decades. I better shut up now, before I trigger my Anti-NASA rant...;p
Maybe it is the "safety net" that the FTC provides that is the actual cause of this sort of stupidity... I mean, if people burned by "Free PC" scams and the like were ridiculed instead of rescued, how long before the buying public either wised up or just stopped whining when they end up doing something stupid?
I remember reading somewhere that, while people wearing seatbelts are less likely to be injured in an accident, they are far more likely to cause an accident because of their increased feelings of security. Is the FTC really doing us a favor here by making consumers feel more "safe"?
<RANT>Hell, I want my phone back; right now, one out of every ten calls I get are actually not someone trying to sell me something. Let's do something about it! Next sob story I hear, I'm going to laugh derisively and call them a loser! And when I get stung, I'll be damn careful to make sure no one finds out! Public ridicule is the only answer!</RANT>
Sounds like the guy has all the technical challenges worked out... After all, the action-reaction stuff that drives a rocket is pretty simple.
Too bad the FAA and NASA and DOT and various other government acronyms are going to stop him.
(Unless maybe, just maybe, he gets enough public support through PR like this to keep any particular Bureaucrat from wanting to intervene. I would have kept it secret and done a "Oh? Did I need a permit?" after getting back...)
Yes, Zubrin did slam the space station approach pretty hard, but there were reasons for that. First was the pretense that it was a "prerequisite" for any in-system travel; Zubrin's plan did not require a space station while the then-current NASA option did (along with all the added expense). By eliminating a huge chunk of pure expense, Zubrin's proposal was not only cheaper, it was a great deal faster (i.e. it didn't have to wait for a space station to be built). His program is inexpensive enough that it could be funded privately or encouraged by a government "bounty" instead of leaving it in the bureaucratic hands of NASA.
And yes, off-the-shelf is, at best, a misleading expression in this context; sure, we have a Saturn V lying around (literally) at JSC(?), but it would take nearly as much effort to refurbish it as it would to build one from scratch. But it'd still be easier and quicker to re-invent the wheel than to fully develop a fully functional plasma drive.
And yes, it will be hard, but that's one of the things that makes it worth doing.
Actually, Robert Zubrin has written a compelling and detailed description on exactly how to "launch with today's tech" in A Case For Mars and used his "Mars Direct" plan to a) found the Mars Society, and b) convince NASA to tone down their $150 billion "Battlestar Galactica" approach to Mars Exploration to ~$25 billion "Mars Reference Mission" all using off-the-shelf tech.
I like to see stuff like this, but its progress is like software only much much slower; my first encounter with a "Plasma" drive was an ad on the back of one of my father's Analog magazines from 1963. I think the point that was being made was that if we hold out for "vapor"-ware to become hardware, we're in for a long wait. And I, for one, want to go to Mars now.
Hmmm. On the back of every Ski Lift pass is a slew of legalese esentially saying "Skiing is an inherently dangerous sport. It's not the Ski Resort's fault if you get hurt." Yet my C++ teacher (who spends his winter weekends working in the Ski Patrol at a large Colorado resort) told me that every major resort has at least four or five lawsuits in progress at any given time. How come EULAs are so much more binding?
And a more general observation; is anyone else worried that "IANAL" is in such common usage that it's approaching mainstream?
Sure, Lars finally got back to us, but...
on
Spring Break
·
· Score: 1
...there was an "Ask Douglas Adams..." run two days prior to the Metallica question and I've still not seen a response.
Or am I being dim and the response showed up two weeks ago?
When I was a kid, all we had was LOGO and BASIC... I learned some of my worst habits in Apple BASIC.
Could be worse though; my father started working on computers in the late 60's, so he can get away with the "When I was your age, we coded in 1's and 0's and sometimes didn't even have 1's..." Punch tape; ick.
Actually, we already have exploited it in a similar way; back in the 80's post Ma-Bell breakup, a then little known startup long distance company called "Sprint" decided to build a fiber-optic network from scratch, rather than rely on Ma-Bell's extant noisy copper wires. Initially, things were looking expensive and complicated due to old (and mostly irrelevant) government regulation dictating where they could lay their glass "wires", but eventually they overcame this by running their fiber along existing railway lines (in some complex but less expensive lease deal with the railrods) because the railroads already had all the requisite permissions. Once they had their "pin-drop" network in place, they had the money and wherewithal to lay fiber wherever they pleased, but they started with the railways...
Access on the trains could be tricky; any connection would pretty much have to be radio of some sort which means more (and expensive) hardware instead of "in situ" resources. Give it time though...
Too true. I really enjoyed Rick Dangerous and Rick Dangerous II on my Atari ST way back when, but putting those two on a pedestal ignores the fact that RD was Just Another Platform Game. At the time (mid-eighties), there were dozens of other platform games, all of which could be traced back to Pitfall for the 2600 (or something earlier?), and few or none which are memorable enough to cause the any uproar about "History" or "Art" or what not.
While I'm all for saving these games for posterity or whatnot, let's not forget that Sturgeon's Law was still in effect in the 80's and all "olde programmes" are not necessarily good ones...
If I choose to call myself a pornographer, that's one thing. But if I'm an artist who deals in nudes and someone else labels me as a pornographer, what am I to do?
So don't stop at.SEX TLDs. Also throw in.ART so the Tipper Gores of the world can filter on that too...
Slashdot Mirror
Every time a discussion starts on spam, I see the same two "solutions" to the problem; some sort of vague legal solution (which would be as effective as legislating the weather), or finding technical solutions to make spamming more difficult (which would be, at best, an ongoing and expensive process). I have two rather different suggestions (though one could be viewed as a technical solution).
First solution: Public humiliation. Instead of chasing down the spammers, chase down the bozos who make spamming profitable. If every chowderhead who actually responds to spam (or, for that matter, telemarketers and unsolicited snail-mail) were to be publicly spanked (metaphorically, of course), then maybe spam-related sales would drop enough to slow down this growth. Imagine seeing a a sign on someone's lawn that said,
...and while this might not be as much fun as taking such people out behind the building and beating the crap out of them, it might still make a difference. So long as spammers actually make money from such twits, there will be spam.Plan B is a variation of an old suggestion; charge for e-mail, kind-of. Right now, I have a few-hundred entries of blocked senders, along with the "Spaminator(TM)" service provided by my ISP, and I still get a dozen pieces of spam a day. What if that were turned around? What if I provided my ISP with a list of friends/family addresses, and maybe a few "trusted" sites (like school and/or work) that I would accept mail from without question. Anyone else either coughs up a small charge (perhaps at weighted rates, if there was a way to keep that from being abused) to send me an e-mail or have the e-mail bounced as undeliverable. Online businesses that have legitimate cause to send me e-mail could roll the cost of such e-mail into whatever they charge me (while encouraging me to add them to my "accept" list to reduce future costs) and spammers would see their profit margin disappear.
Back in '91 and '92, I was a junior sysprog on a mainframe system running two different OS's. The security systems (at the time) didn't talk to each other, but the users wanted to have a single password for everything. The result was an ugly kludge (that I got to maintain since I was most junior) and this allowed me to see the day's before/after password change file. 750 or so users, and there were at least a 200 or so that referenced John Elway and/or the Broncos (this was in Denver), another 100 or so that went path of least resistance (AAAAAA1, AAAAAA2, etc.), a couple dozen that used NCC1701, NCC1701A, etc. etc.
Not only is this story obvious, it's seriously dated. Stupid/obvious passwords have probably been around as long as there have been passwords...
Try thinking of it as paying for the lack of something... I already donate once or twice a year to a college station (KVCU in Boulder) partly because I can't stomach the crappy programming on the various commercial stations around, but also because (except for 20 days a year for pledge drives) they don't run ads.
Unless the cost is prohibitive, I'm willing to pay for the absence of banners...
There was an article here last week about the .NET vs. NC issue and MicroSoft's reason for bashing the GPL. (I suspect an "all of the above", myself.)
IBM still uses FUD on the mainframe compatible issue, but they're starting to realize that their credibility is, well, absent...
Yeah, what's wrong with him? My only pre-built was my laptop (a CTX; it seemed like a good idea at the time...).
A quick search of AbeBooks turned up a lot of hits, both in its first release in Binary Star #5 (along with George R.R. Martin's Nightflyers), in an illustrated version and in True Names and Other Dangers but, unfortunately, it looks like the story has become "collectible" (and thus expensive as hell). It's a great read, but I'm glad I have my copy and don't have to shell out $50 to $120 for it. Perhaps the local library?
Actually, a place I used to work used three different calendars. Most applications used the traditional Gregorian calendar (payroll was semi-monthly with payday on the 15th and the last day of the month, and so on), the General Ledger people used a 4-5-4 calendar (where each "month" was four weeks long, then five week, then four weeks to make a thirteen week "quarter"; this adds up to 364 days and so "year end" processing was hitting in November while I was there), and finally, the accounting people used some mysterious "fiscal" calendar that started the year in early February. Working in the data center was loads of fun; month-end processing every week and a half or so, twelve "quarter-end" runs a year, and three "year-end" runs. I could very easily see a business that put up with that nonsense having no problem with yet another calendar.
On the other hand, they got bought out by a larger (and presumably better organized) chain about five years ago...
On the one hand, Libertarianism is just as prone to assuming ideal behaviour as any ideaology. And, to me, that is its greatest failing; while I am registered Libertarian, I am not impressed with the party's "throw out the baby with the bathwater" solutions to big government problems. But no idealogy is perfect because the people that implement it are not perfect. I find the libertarian "ideal" more appealling than the current "give us more of your money and control of your life and we'll make things perfect" approach that contemporary polititians promise.
Your M$ example is a valid demonstration of the limitations of the Libertarian ideal; as it is, even with the DoJ breathing down their neck, Bill and company are screwing around with Kerberos (sp?) and such with a "who farted?" innocent look on their face. I can't see a way that the "invisible hand" could have influenced M$ behaviour, not with the majority of consumers being technologically ignorant.
Is "rampant capitalism" really a bad thing? While we USians (clumsy, but yes, it's more accurate than "Americans") use a disproportionately larger amount of resources than any other contry; so what? Should we, as a nation, apologize for being prosperous? Should we go back to pre-20th century technology (and the higher pollution levels that entails) while the rest of the world catches up (or stay there if the rest of the world fails to catch up)? In spite of the various environmental diatribes, the US is getting "cleaner" every year. Some of that is through government mandates, but a lot of that is "rampant capitalism" in action; e.g. Coors has been striving to make their beer cans lighter and with more recycled materials for years, not because they are legally required to, but because it is cheaper, making them more competetive as well as getting a little environmental karma bonus.
On this, too, I must disagree. First, is it philanthropy to surrender your money at gunpoint (i.e. pay taxes) on the pretense that, if enough is left over after paying for polititians and their pet projects, some of that money might eventually help the needy? (That's assuming that Federal Welfare progams "help" rather than harm.) The libertairian ideal is that money given to aid those less fortunate is done so voluntarily, and maybe even with an eye on results. Secondly (and most important IMHO), Libertarianism is emphatic about the idea that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin; that's what distingishes it from anarchism. A libertairian might say "you should be free to do X", but implicit in that statement is the corallary "you are also responsioble for the results of doing X".
In conclusion, I found a long time ago that the USofA is, for the most part, populated by malcontents and the children of malcontents from all ove the world. One of the results of this composition is that we, as a country, are sure that there is a "better way" to do things. Any things, from dishwashing soap to political processes. This comstant state of experimentation has had some bad results (usually when trying to force our ideology on other countries), but it has also resulted in good things and ideas, like equal rights (yes, we're still working on that), advanced medicine, the web, space exploration, etc. Libertarianism is yet another experiment and the results aren't back yet...
Okay, I'll bite...
Sure, I want to go to Mars. (Actually, I want to visit other places in the Solar system as well, but Mars is a good first stop...) Sure the creature comforts would be on the sparse side. So? "Sorry, I won't be climbing Mt. Everest with you; the nearest Blockbuster is 500 miles away!" Those "early adopters" helped settle the "New World" a few hundred years ago.
Can I explain why I want to go to Mars? No, not yet. I've been trying for years, and so far, people either get it (and don't have to ask the question), or they don't and can't. The scene in Contact where Bryant Gumbal (sp?) is asking Ellie (Jodi Foster), why she's willing to risk her life "in the chair" is a clear example of this; to me (and only a couple other people I've discussed this with) this was a clearly stupid question. But to most people it is as valid as it is puzzling.
I could resort to clichés like "Because it's there." or pick at your "home of humanity" metaphor and suggest that I feel its time to leave home and strike out on my own. But the truth is simpler; I want to go. I am not only ready to sacrifice the local scenery (I live in the mountains just west of Denver), but I'm also abandoning a 16 year career in IT (this Friday, in fact) so that I can pursue an educational path which (I hope) will lead to participating directly in space exploration in the near future.
Things were looking grim there for a while, when the fifth air-drop failed and crunched up the floor pieces and some of the equipment (and let's skip the obvious "simulating NASA-based Mars mission" jokes), but they still managed to put things together; cool!
Anyone remember "Mummer's Dance" a few years back? Loreena McKennit and her self-run recording label Quinlan Road had some success promoting herself; 3 million copies of "The Book of Secrets" sold (a bit shy of your 12M mark, but still a lot of CDs), music in a couple soundtracks, etc. From interviews, its clear she's accomplished this for the sake of artistic control, but it was a lot of work over a lot years; the aforementioned album was her sixth...
OTOH, this is still pretty rare, and it does require a lot of determination and business sense on the part of the artist, which is too bad; it would be nice if, when all the dust settles from this, someone figures out a way that artists can focus on their art without getting screwed (by their agents, publishers, or their consumers)...
For a site speciallizing in "disinformation", I was rather surprised/disappointed that disinfo.com has done just what the MPAA has done and equated decryption (and the accessibility it gains) to piracy. Wrong! As has been discussed here (many many times) bypassing CSS does not automatically lead to piracy.
Unfortuantely, the DivX part of the article seemed to be a "Ha! You can't stop us pirating movies any more than you can stop us pirating music!"-type rant. This is not helping...
I think this was the "Fairchild" (or something like that). I remember a friend who had one (around '78?) and I was boggled by the controller; the triangular dingus was a four-point joystick, plus it could twist clockwise and counter-clockwise, and it could be pushed in and pulled out. Effectively a four-point joystick (like the Atari had), with four nearly unusable "fire" buttons. I also seem to recall that the complexity of the controllers also made them prone to breaking...
I've been using a GUI of one sort or another since I bought my Atari ST back in '87, but I still prefer the CLI for some things. What I want to know is why it has to be one or the other...
To me, the perfect UI would be one where a command is a command is a command, whether it is a text string from the keyboard or mouse click/action. A few years ago, I took an entry level AutoCAD class (V13 I think) and found that I really really liked the way I could do stuff with the mouse, with the keyboard, or both. Why can't there be the same functionality in an OS's UI? A "Command Interface" with a command line component and graphical component; if it were set up right, it would be very customizable (mostly CLI's for dinosaurs like me, mostly graphical for technophobes, etc.), and it would be expandable to other methods of entry (like voice commands). (The only voice-command software I've seen so far has been strap-on stuff that was pretty lame, like Windows sitting on top of DOS.)
OTOH, maybe the problem is that we're trying to find a one-size-fits-all UI and failing; how well would people react to such limited choices in non-computer areas? Like a standardized instrument panel for you car; I know people who think that they can't drive without a tachometer, and others who would find the additional information a tach provides as intimidating and/or distracting.
Ack; enough of my prattle...
Sadly, there were no sites available that were simultaneously cold, arid, and otherwise Mars-like, while also having a lot of easy access to local news outlets. On the other hand, the Discovery Channel connection should provide enough coverage without the local news doing a "Look at these weirdos" human interest stories...
Regardless, I'm psyched; this was vaporware at last August's Mars Society convention and now the final product was packed up for shipping just last Monday. The plan is for a report on the first trial to be delivered at the next Mars Society convention in Toronto, August 10-13... A private organization has done more towards a manned Mars mission in the 3-4 years it has existed than NASA has in decades. I better shut up now, before I trigger my Anti-NASA rant... ;p
Maybe it is the "safety net" that the FTC provides that is the actual cause of this sort of stupidity... I mean, if people burned by "Free PC" scams and the like were ridiculed instead of rescued, how long before the buying public either wised up or just stopped whining when they end up doing something stupid?
I remember reading somewhere that, while people wearing seatbelts are less likely to be injured in an accident, they are far more likely to cause an accident because of their increased feelings of security. Is the FTC really doing us a favor here by making consumers feel more "safe"?
<RANT>Hell, I want my phone back; right now, one out of every ten calls I get are actually not someone trying to sell me something. Let's do something about it! Next sob story I hear, I'm going to laugh derisively and call them a loser! And when I get stung, I'll be damn careful to make sure no one finds out! Public ridicule is the only answer!</RANT>
Sounds like the guy has all the technical challenges worked out... After all, the action-reaction stuff that drives a rocket is pretty simple.
Too bad the FAA and NASA and DOT and various other government acronyms are going to stop him.
(Unless maybe, just maybe, he gets enough public support through PR like this to keep any particular Bureaucrat from wanting to intervene. I would have kept it secret and done a "Oh? Did I need a permit?" after getting back...)
"Better to ask forgiveness than permission..." ;)
Yes, Zubrin did slam the space station approach pretty hard, but there were reasons for that. First was the pretense that it was a "prerequisite" for any in-system travel; Zubrin's plan did not require a space station while the then-current NASA option did (along with all the added expense). By eliminating a huge chunk of pure expense, Zubrin's proposal was not only cheaper, it was a great deal faster (i.e. it didn't have to wait for a space station to be built). His program is inexpensive enough that it could be funded privately or encouraged by a government "bounty" instead of leaving it in the bureaucratic hands of NASA.
And yes, off-the-shelf is, at best, a misleading expression in this context; sure, we have a Saturn V lying around (literally) at JSC(?), but it would take nearly as much effort to refurbish it as it would to build one from scratch. But it'd still be easier and quicker to re-invent the wheel than to fully develop a fully functional plasma drive.
And yes, it will be hard, but that's one of the things that makes it worth doing.
Actually, Robert Zubrin has written a compelling and detailed description on exactly how to "launch with today's tech" in A Case For Mars and used his "Mars Direct" plan to a) found the Mars Society, and b) convince NASA to tone down their $150 billion "Battlestar Galactica" approach to Mars Exploration to ~$25 billion "Mars Reference Mission" all using off-the-shelf tech.
I like to see stuff like this, but its progress is like software only much much slower; my first encounter with a "Plasma" drive was an ad on the back of one of my father's Analog magazines from 1963. I think the point that was being made was that if we hold out for "vapor"-ware to become hardware, we're in for a long wait. And I, for one, want to go to Mars now.
Hmmm. On the back of every Ski Lift pass is a slew of legalese esentially saying "Skiing is an inherently dangerous sport. It's not the Ski Resort's fault if you get hurt." Yet my C++ teacher (who spends his winter weekends working in the Ski Patrol at a large Colorado resort) told me that every major resort has at least four or five lawsuits in progress at any given time. How come EULAs are so much more binding?
And a more general observation; is anyone else worried that "IANAL" is in such common usage that it's approaching mainstream?
...there was an "Ask Douglas Adams..." run two days prior to the Metallica question and I've still not seen a response.
Or am I being dim and the response showed up two weeks ago?
When I was a kid, all we had was LOGO and BASIC... I learned some of my worst habits in Apple BASIC.
Could be worse though; my father started working on computers in the late 60's, so he can get away with the "When I was your age, we coded in 1's and 0's and sometimes didn't even have 1's..." Punch tape; ick.
Actually, we already have exploited it in a similar way; back in the 80's post Ma-Bell breakup, a then little known startup long distance company called "Sprint" decided to build a fiber-optic network from scratch, rather than rely on Ma-Bell's extant noisy copper wires. Initially, things were looking expensive and complicated due to old (and mostly irrelevant) government regulation dictating where they could lay their glass "wires", but eventually they overcame this by running their fiber along existing railway lines (in some complex but less expensive lease deal with the railrods) because the railroads already had all the requisite permissions. Once they had their "pin-drop" network in place, they had the money and wherewithal to lay fiber wherever they pleased, but they started with the railways...
Access on the trains could be tricky; any connection would pretty much have to be radio of some sort which means more (and expensive) hardware instead of "in situ" resources. Give it time though...
Too true. I really enjoyed Rick Dangerous and Rick Dangerous II on my Atari ST way back when, but putting those two on a pedestal ignores the fact that RD was Just Another Platform Game. At the time (mid-eighties), there were dozens of other platform games, all of which could be traced back to Pitfall for the 2600 (or something earlier?), and few or none which are memorable enough to cause the any uproar about "History" or "Art" or what not.
While I'm all for saving these games for posterity or whatnot, let's not forget that Sturgeon's Law was still in effect in the 80's and all "olde programmes" are not necessarily good ones...
So don't stop at .SEX TLDs. Also throw in .ART so the Tipper Gores of the world can filter on that too...