Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future.
But what about:
- The American Revolution
- The Civil War with respect to slavery (Dred Scott, Emancipation)
- The Civil War with respect to state's rights (or lack of them)
- The establishment of Selective Service
- The establishment of income tax and the IRS
- The trade union movement
- Prohibition
- The repeal of Prohibition
- The New Deal
- The Cuban embargo of 1962
- The civil rights movement of the 1960s
- The Vietnam anti-war movement
- The Reagan "Morning in America" movement of the 1980s
- The gay rights movement of the 1990s-2000s
Every one of these changed the future for vast numbers of Americans and arose through political means. So how can you say only technology has changed the future in America? Or are you saying something different from that?
I agree with you that the staff at the scene were just doing their job, as they must if they want to keep getting paychecks and putting food on the table.
The question, to me, is whether this protocol is reasonable. I don't think it is. Being detained and questioned for 4 hours is not something that should happen to an innocent civilian when no crime has been committed. It just so happens that the framers of the US Constitution agreed with me, which is why they wrote the 4th Amendment the way they did.
I don't buy the argument that all Constitutional rights go out the window when you step into an airport. I could agree that the people's interest in aviation safety justifies some small, marginal increase in police powers. But this does not mean that airports should become "police state lite."
I also don't buy the argument that Constitutional rights don't apply to foreign nationals. Except where otherwise specified, if we've given them permission to come to the US then we have to extend all applicable rights to them. If we don't want to do that, we shouldn't grant their visas in the first place.
So what happened was still wrong, even if you can't fault the people on the ground for it.
I'm not sure exactly how. But, it is a completely different set of ballistics, and I'm not sure anyone has it figured out yet. I am grateful for those of the world who are shot from a cannon without much thought to the results, but I do wish them luck. I hope they don't go splat like everyone else who's tried it.
(Also, isn't "web economics are different" a Web 1.0 statement?)
Riddle me this, though: Why do people buy DVDs when nearly all of them are available through Netflix for less money? If buying DVDs is a financially worse option, why do so many people do it? For that matter, before Netflix, why did people ever buy DVDs rather than rent them from Blockbuster?
The answer is: Because for emotional reasons they want ownership of the DVD. Renting or borrowing from Netflix is temporary. They want to put the DVD in their collection and have it always and forever available whenever they want to watch it.
How exactly are streaming services going to satisfy this?
Developer: "Hey boss, I found a better product for the transaction processing data! It might save us a bunch of money on Oracle licenses!" Boss: "Great, what is it?" Developer: "Project Voldemort!" Boss: "..." Developer: "No really, let me explain..." Boss: "I have a meeting to get to, but hey, let me know if you have any other great ideas."
There's this web site you might be interested in called google.com. Type in Maulana Karenga and look for the fourth link, "Books By Maulana Karenga." I'm guessing the book in question is "Introduction to Black Studies."
If you listen in a general way and look for "appeal," then The Beatles will probably not impress you. At the time they recorded, there was nobody better. But since you're listening in 2008, not 1968, you're seeing them through the wrong end of 40 years of improvements in pop music technology and marketability. We're much better now at making "appealing" pop, so Britney Spears (or more precisely, her extensive team of producers, engineers and session players) is just plain better at it than The Beatles were, in the same way that a middling 2008 relief pitcher could consistently strike out Babe Ruth if you didn't give him the benefit of modern training, video replays, etc.
The difference only arises if you listen for detail, which requires a little more work on your part. If you actually want to get what people see in The Beatles, try the following:
1. Play "A Day In The Life" but focus only on the drums (when they come in at about 0:45).
2. Play "Drive My Car" but focus only on the bass.
3. Play "Nowhere Man" and focus only on the vocals. (If you don't get it on this one, remember that electronic vocal effects hadn't been invented yet: This is simply three people singing.)
4. Play "I've Just Seen A Face" and focus on the interplay of the two acoustic guitars.
5. Play "Eleanor Rigby" and really concentrate on the lyrics, and what they mean.
6. Do the same with "For No One."
7. Now that you're in the right frame of mind, play "Strawberry Fields Forever" and listen for detail. You should immediately feel how much "stuff" there is in it, and how it all comes together.
8. Finish with "Here Comes The Sun." Listen the same way.
This utterly misses the denial of service side of the issue. If you and your BFF are of the age where Twitter is important to you, but then you stop being BFFs, each of you can remove the other's Twitter access by running a script that constantly tries and fails to log in.
It also misses the point that the moving part in the attack is the username, not the password. If I only get three attempts before it locks me out or becomes too slow to bother with, I'll try password, Password1 and letmein on every userid.
Blocking login attempts after 5 different *userids* from the same source might work, but then you have to define what a source is.
Viruses do not inherently require root access. If your user account is capable of downloading and executing outside code, then it can in theory be infected. Email viruses, for example, generally run and propagate just fine in a Windows restricted user account. The presumably-secure FreeBSD kernel of MacOS would do nothing to prevent this. It's a combination of saner email clients (no talk of "rich experiences" like on the MS side), and the lack of high value targets (botnets require homogeneity so they can all run the same spam server / DDoS / whatever).
Actually I was thinking of The Unbeheaded King by L. Sprague de Camp. Each king regins for five years and is then beheaded. Whoever catches the head of the old king becomes the new king. Sort of similar, although it's not entirely random - people are somewhat self-selected by showing up and trying to catch the old head.
I had never heard of this before. Wasn't there some old science fiction series where the king was selected at random, then beheaded at the end of his term?
I wonder how it would work, though. Wouldn't there have to be a permanent bureacracy to form the committees, perform the random selection, provide information and data, and implement the resulting decisions? Wouldn't this bureacracy have a tremendous amount of power, for example, to influence when and on what topic the decision committees should be formed? And if poor people are to be appointed to the committees, what happens to their livelihood while they spend time deliberating on some policy matter? Or what's to stop a newly appointed committee member (rich or poor) from approaching the subject of the regulatory decision and offering to be bought?
Put in a managed PDU, ssh or telnet to it, switch the power on/off to your servers. If the server is up, ssh or telnet to it, start/stop the applications. What am I missing? It's like the poster has never heard of telnet.
Yes, Commodore BASIC was slower than integer BASIC on the Apple ][. That's because Commodore BASIC used all floating point numbers. It was the same speed as Applesoft BASIC, since both of them came from the same Microsoft codebase and ran on the same CPU.
So unless you're comparing Commodore BASIC to Apple Integer BASIC, what are you talking about?
Do you even understand what "mass production" means?
The idea of mass production is that you break the design down into parts and proceses that can each be fabricated or performed on an assembly line. The design itself must be adapted for suitability to mass production. You can't "mass produce" something and make 20 of them. The tooling and design changes required to set up the factory might cost the equivalent of 100 or 1000 units. Break-even would not occur until maybe 10,000 or 100,000 units.
Also, you can't make commodities or services cheaper by mass production. If you want to launch 100 rockets, you still need 100 fuel loads, which costs 100 times what a single fuel load costs. You also need to pay the salaries of all the ground controllers, which don't get cheaper as volume increases. I would guess that two-thirds of the cost of a space launch is not susceptible to economy of scale. Process efficiency is a different story, but most of that is inherent in the design.
The brilliance of the Republican "don't tax and spend" policies is that they create invisible taxes, like inflation or market losses. Everyone pays these, including non-Americans, at least to the extent that your country's economy is interlinked to the American economy. (Which is probably a lot.)
Because once you send the Orion or the LEM (MEM?) up to rendezvous with the transfer vehicle, they are themselves in a minimum-energy transfer orbit. You ahve already paid the delta-V, why not just sit back on your existing vehicle and ride it to wherever you're going?
If you wanted to, you could nearly double the length of this list:
You skipped Windows 2.1, and 2.1/2.11 came in both 286 and 386 editions; you skipped all the Windows 95 subversions like 95B, OSR2, OSR2.1, etc; you skipped Media Center Edition; you counted XP versions for different processors but didn't count the NT 4 or Windows 2000 release for the DEC Alpha; you didn't include any Windows CE or Windows Mobile versions; and you didn't include non-Microsoft Windows-plus operating systems such as Modular Windows or HP NewWave.
1. The ads are just plain freaky. It's hard to imagine any focus group reaction other than possible mild laughter and "WTF?" which means that middle managers would be too scared for their jobs to approve them. The approval for these ads had to come from a top executive.
2. The message is oddly mixed regarding Microsoft itself. The idea is that there's some new stuff on the horizon that will solve all the problems the current stuff has. Why pay to advertise that your current stuff has problems?
3. Bill Gates is prominently featured throughout--the ads focus most of their attention on him. From the 70s drivers license photo to the Conquistadors to reading the story about programming, it's all about showing us who Gates is (or wants to be).
4. If I remember correctly, the word "Microsoft" does not appear - either spoken or as text - anywhere in the ad. The only reference to Microsoft is the Windows logo.
So: The purpose of these ads is to rehabilitate Bill Gates' image as he exits Microsoft and starts his new career as a philanthropist. The middle managers responsible for marketing and communications probably argued against it because it goes against any possible message they might want to convey. But Bill Gates gets what he wants.
These same middle managers are then put on the spot to answer questions about the thing. "This reaction was not unexpected" means "we knew it sucked but we were overruled." And "People would have been happier if everyone loved the ads" means "Gates now realizes it was a mistake and blames us, even though we told him so."
What if I'm the pilot and sole occupant of my airplane? Is it now illegal for me to use my phone in flight? Also, is it prohibited to TALK on the phone, or to USE the phone - such as for Blackberry emails?
Note that the "you're traveling too quickly between cell towers" or "your broadcast covers too large an area" objections don't apply - I'm at 3000 feet traveling at 100 mph. So this is (or should be) purely an FAA, not an FCC matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future.
But what about:
- The American Revolution
- The Civil War with respect to slavery (Dred Scott, Emancipation)
- The Civil War with respect to state's rights (or lack of them)
- The establishment of Selective Service
- The establishment of income tax and the IRS
- The trade union movement
- Prohibition
- The repeal of Prohibition
- The New Deal
- The Cuban embargo of 1962
- The civil rights movement of the 1960s
- The Vietnam anti-war movement
- The Reagan "Morning in America" movement of the 1980s
- The gay rights movement of the 1990s-2000s
Every one of these changed the future for vast numbers of Americans and arose through political means. So how can you say only technology has changed the future in America? Or are you saying something different from that?
I agree with you that the staff at the scene were just doing their job, as they must if they want to keep getting paychecks and putting food on the table.
The question, to me, is whether this protocol is reasonable. I don't think it is. Being detained and questioned for 4 hours is not something that should happen to an innocent civilian when no crime has been committed. It just so happens that the framers of the US Constitution agreed with me, which is why they wrote the 4th Amendment the way they did.
I don't buy the argument that all Constitutional rights go out the window when you step into an airport. I could agree that the people's interest in aviation safety justifies some small, marginal increase in police powers. But this does not mean that airports should become "police state lite."
I also don't buy the argument that Constitutional rights don't apply to foreign nationals. Except where otherwise specified, if we've given them permission to come to the US then we have to extend all applicable rights to them. If we don't want to do that, we shouldn't grant their visas in the first place.
So what happened was still wrong, even if you can't fault the people on the ground for it.
a web page more useless than a blank page.
http://havenworks.com/
Thank you, and good night.
I'm not sure exactly how. But, it is a completely different set of ballistics, and I'm not sure anyone has it figured out yet. I am grateful for those of the world who are shot from a cannon without much thought to the results, but I do wish them luck. I hope they don't go splat like everyone else who's tried it.
(Also, isn't "web economics are different" a Web 1.0 statement?)
-Graham
...which is maybe why Terrafugia calls it a roadable airplane?
The only mention of "flying car" is from Slashdot.
-Graham
Riddle me this, though: Why do people buy DVDs when nearly all of them are available through Netflix for less money? If buying DVDs is a financially worse option, why do so many people do it? For that matter, before Netflix, why did people ever buy DVDs rather than rent them from Blockbuster?
The answer is: Because for emotional reasons they want ownership of the DVD. Renting or borrowing from Netflix is temporary. They want to put the DVD in their collection and have it always and forever available whenever they want to watch it.
How exactly are streaming services going to satisfy this?
I can see the meeting now.
Developer: "Hey boss, I found a better product for the transaction processing data! It might save us a bunch of money on Oracle licenses!"
Boss: "Great, what is it?"
Developer: "Project Voldemort!"
Boss: "..."
Developer: "No really, let me explain..."
Boss: "I have a meeting to get to, but hey, let me know if you have any other great ideas."
There's this web site you might be interested in called google.com. Type in Maulana Karenga and look for the fourth link, "Books By Maulana Karenga." I'm guessing the book in question is "Introduction to Black Studies."
If you listen in a general way and look for "appeal," then The Beatles will probably not impress you. At the time they recorded, there was nobody better. But since you're listening in 2008, not 1968, you're seeing them through the wrong end of 40 years of improvements in pop music technology and marketability. We're much better now at making "appealing" pop, so Britney Spears (or more precisely, her extensive team of producers, engineers and session players) is just plain better at it than The Beatles were, in the same way that a middling 2008 relief pitcher could consistently strike out Babe Ruth if you didn't give him the benefit of modern training, video replays, etc.
The difference only arises if you listen for detail, which requires a little more work on your part. If you actually want to get what people see in The Beatles, try the following:
1. Play "A Day In The Life" but focus only on the drums (when they come in at about 0:45).
2. Play "Drive My Car" but focus only on the bass.
3. Play "Nowhere Man" and focus only on the vocals. (If you don't get it on this one, remember that electronic vocal effects hadn't been invented yet: This is simply three people singing.)
4. Play "I've Just Seen A Face" and focus on the interplay of the two acoustic guitars.
5. Play "Eleanor Rigby" and really concentrate on the lyrics, and what they mean.
6. Do the same with "For No One."
7. Now that you're in the right frame of mind, play "Strawberry Fields Forever" and listen for detail. You should immediately feel how much "stuff" there is in it, and how it all comes together.
8. Finish with "Here Comes The Sun." Listen the same way.
Let me know if it works.
-Graham
This utterly misses the denial of service side of the issue. If you and your BFF are of the age where Twitter is important to you, but then you stop being BFFs, each of you can remove the other's Twitter access by running a script that constantly tries and fails to log in.
It also misses the point that the moving part in the attack is the username, not the password. If I only get three attempts before it locks me out or becomes too slow to bother with, I'll try password, Password1 and letmein on every userid.
Blocking login attempts after 5 different *userids* from the same source might work, but then you have to define what a source is.
-Graham
Viruses do not inherently require root access. If your user account is capable of downloading and executing outside code, then it can in theory be infected. Email viruses, for example, generally run and propagate just fine in a Windows restricted user account. The presumably-secure FreeBSD kernel of MacOS would do nothing to prevent this. It's a combination of saner email clients (no talk of "rich experiences" like on the MS side), and the lack of high value targets (botnets require homogeneity so they can all run the same spam server / DDoS / whatever).
-Graham
Actually I was thinking of The Unbeheaded King by L. Sprague de Camp. Each king regins for five years and is then beheaded. Whoever catches the head of the old king becomes the new king. Sort of similar, although it's not entirely random - people are somewhat self-selected by showing up and trying to catch the old head.
-Graham
I had never heard of this before. Wasn't there some old science fiction series where the king was selected at random, then beheaded at the end of his term?
I wonder how it would work, though. Wouldn't there have to be a permanent bureacracy to form the committees, perform the random selection, provide information and data, and implement the resulting decisions? Wouldn't this bureacracy have a tremendous amount of power, for example, to influence when and on what topic the decision committees should be formed? And if poor people are to be appointed to the committees, what happens to their livelihood while they spend time deliberating on some policy matter? Or what's to stop a newly appointed committee member (rich or poor) from approaching the subject of the regulatory decision and offering to be bought?
-Graham
Put in a managed PDU, ssh or telnet to it, switch the power on/off to your servers. If the server is up, ssh or telnet to it, start/stop the applications. What am I missing? It's like the poster has never heard of telnet.
Is this still going around? It's been 30 years.
Yes, Commodore BASIC was slower than integer BASIC on the Apple ][. That's because Commodore BASIC used all floating point numbers. It was the same speed as Applesoft BASIC, since both of them came from the same Microsoft codebase and ran on the same CPU.
So unless you're comparing Commodore BASIC to Apple Integer BASIC, what are you talking about?
Why do I never have mod points when I need them. +1 funny :-)
Do you even understand what "mass production" means?
The idea of mass production is that you break the design down into parts and proceses that can each be fabricated or performed on an assembly line. The design itself must be adapted for suitability to mass production. You can't "mass produce" something and make 20 of them. The tooling and design changes required to set up the factory might cost the equivalent of 100 or 1000 units. Break-even would not occur until maybe 10,000 or 100,000 units.
Also, you can't make commodities or services cheaper by mass production. If you want to launch 100 rockets, you still need 100 fuel loads, which costs 100 times what a single fuel load costs. You also need to pay the salaries of all the ground controllers, which don't get cheaper as volume increases. I would guess that two-thirds of the cost of a space launch is not susceptible to economy of scale. Process efficiency is a different story, but most of that is inherent in the design.
The brilliance of the Republican "don't tax and spend" policies is that they create invisible taxes, like inflation or market losses. Everyone pays these, including non-Americans, at least to the extent that your country's economy is interlinked to the American economy. (Which is probably a lot.)
-Graham
You do realize that Ares-5 is nonreusable? Meaning that the cost of your plan is in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions?
Because once you send the Orion or the LEM (MEM?) up to rendezvous with the transfer vehicle, they are themselves in a minimum-energy transfer orbit. You ahve already paid the delta-V, why not just sit back on your existing vehicle and ride it to wherever you're going?
Or am I missing something?
-Graham
If you wanted to, you could nearly double the length of this list:
You skipped Windows 2.1, and 2.1/2.11 came in both 286 and 386 editions; you skipped all the Windows 95 subversions like 95B, OSR2, OSR2.1, etc; you skipped Media Center Edition; you counted XP versions for different processors but didn't count the NT 4 or Windows 2000 release for the DEC Alpha; you didn't include any Windows CE or Windows Mobile versions; and you didn't include non-Microsoft Windows-plus operating systems such as Modular Windows or HP NewWave.
-Graham
The most amazing finding from the study: There are actually still 7000 active EQ2 players.
Consider:
1. The ads are just plain freaky. It's hard to imagine any focus group reaction other than possible mild laughter and "WTF?" which means that middle managers would be too scared for their jobs to approve them. The approval for these ads had to come from a top executive.
2. The message is oddly mixed regarding Microsoft itself. The idea is that there's some new stuff on the horizon that will solve all the problems the current stuff has. Why pay to advertise that your current stuff has problems?
3. Bill Gates is prominently featured throughout--the ads focus most of their attention on him. From the 70s drivers license photo to the Conquistadors to reading the story about programming, it's all about showing us who Gates is (or wants to be).
4. If I remember correctly, the word "Microsoft" does not appear - either spoken or as text - anywhere in the ad. The only reference to Microsoft is the Windows logo.
So: The purpose of these ads is to rehabilitate Bill Gates' image as he exits Microsoft and starts his new career as a philanthropist. The middle managers responsible for marketing and communications probably argued against it because it goes against any possible message they might want to convey. But Bill Gates gets what he wants.
These same middle managers are then put on the spot to answer questions about the thing. "This reaction was not unexpected" means "we knew it sucked but we were overruled." And "People would have been happier if everyone loved the ads" means "Gates now realizes it was a mistake and blames us, even though we told him so."
Plausible?
At least you weren't around back when we had to read Jon Katz. Talk about a struggle!
...it will be Ultima Online then? Because I remember how well the mixed 2D and 3D content worked for them.
What if I'm the pilot and sole occupant of my airplane? Is it now illegal for me to use my phone in flight? Also, is it prohibited to TALK on the phone, or to USE the phone - such as for Blackberry emails?
Note that the "you're traveling too quickly between cell towers" or "your broadcast covers too large an area" objections don't apply - I'm at 3000 feet traveling at 100 mph. So this is (or should be) purely an FAA, not an FCC matter.
-Graham