Wouldn't the effort be better spent trying to fix the actual disability in the first place?
We spend a frighteningly small amount on fundamental research, and it seems that almost every development comes up against the "moral" luddites who don't want any kind of medical breakthrough in case it offends their religion.
*sigh*
well yeah, but
ANYTHING + DRM = Dead on Arrival.
Why should I buy any new format, when it has been designed from the ground up to treat me like a criminal and prevent me from using the content I have purchased in the way I want?
"what about the transhumanists?" - we are quietly amused. Just wait till you see the luddites react when we we get a ten foot killer robot that we can be uploaded into...:)
No, the purpose of the cartoons was to reflect on the fact that the violence of Islam (as in Theo Van Gogh) has made people genuinely afraid to be seen to criticise it.
Islam is a religion with many failings (they all are, of course, but the other major world faiths appear to have at least mellowed a little in the last thousand years) and it is ridiculous that we are unable to point out it's flaws, the screaming errors in it's holy book, the inherent immorality of it's beliefs and so on.
It's incredibly ironic that a newspaper article about how the fear of speaking against Islam is causing censorship should become such an obvious satire of itself.
I wish journos would stop doing this. Please find something else to write about on a slow news day.
I saw this when I got home from School - I am (and was) a massive space nut: when I got home from school, ran into the kitchen and asked my mum if she had hears about the space shuttle (I hadn't heard - I was just asking if the news had reported the launch". when she answered "It's terrible, isn't it", my stomach lurched three feet to the side.
I'm absolutley haunted by the image of that fireball expanding, absolutely despertately willing the orbiter to come clear of it, unharmed... despite knowing full well that this wasn't live, and that it was all over before I even started watching.
I can remember watching the news re-runs, hoping that the explosion of the fuel tank had been enough to kill the crew there and then, rather than having to endure a 2 minute plunge to their death.
I remember some sick tabloid printing a transcript of a crew voice recorder (faked, I hope). and churning it all up again.
To be honest - I was more emotionally hurt by the challenger incident than by the death of some family members... and I wouldr eally rather consign that to the past rather than see these guys keep digging it up to make a cheap buck.
I.
ps> my copy of Jarre's Rendevouz doesn't have "ron's piece" on it. it's just too darn tearful to listen to.
Doubly pertinent when you consider that Yahoo have done much, much worse things than Google - they helped the chinese authorities discover the identity of people posting political articles.
Perhaps they should say "Don't be as Evil as Yahoo". That would cover pretty much everyone up to and including Joe Stalin.:D
Seriously, I don't see this as anything more than Ellison's continued attempts to have a shot at Bill Gates - this has zero to do with technology, it's one man's grudge match gone awry.
As for an alternative to.Net? How backwards can you get? Why not support Mono, and help build the best of all worlds - a fully cross platform implementation of.Net with incredibly rich development tools (VS2005) running across all the major platforms?
I.
From the moment he decided that what Buffy needed most was one of the characters as a corpse that wasn't walking about wise cracking and sucking blood, just sitting there in an all too human way dead from a thoroughly mundane illness, it seems that he has had this self destructive desire to fling away every chance he has to entertain.
The world doesn't need more angst and misery, it needs more laughter. Your mother dying of cancer may be poignant, but one thing it sure isn't - entertainment.
Personally, I feel that the whole firefly community killed the Serenity movie as an act of mercy - rather than whipping their friends and family up into a "you gotta see this" frenzy, they were debating whether to even watch it themselves as soon as the news broke that Joss was going for the cheap emotional hit. Killing book was almost acceptable, in a pathetic whedon kinda way, but killing Wash - especially in such a trite fashion?
It just shows that Joss, unfortunately, doesn't have the skill required to entertain any more... from that point of view, I'd say that Fox actually protected us from Whedon. When you see what happened to X-Files, and the death throes of Stargate SG-1 circling the drain - that's a fate that won't befall Firefly!
It's worth getting a bit of perspective here - I have been an allofmp3 user for many months, without any dodgy credit card transactions.
Sony have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that "reputable" companies are no more trustworthy than the supposedly "dodgy" companies like allofmp3.com.
Even if allofmp3.com was actually corrupt/criminal, the billing for their site is performed by a dutch bank which participates in the "verified by visa" program, and the billing transaction is verifiably performed off-site: AOMP3 don;t see your credit card details, ever.
What needs to be understood is the distinction between micro- and macro-evolution.
No, what needs to be understood is the difference between religion and science. There is no great debate in science about evolution - and this notion of "micro" and "macro" evolution exists only within god bothering circles... and largely there because they view species as these monolithic unchanging groups.
The entire concept of a species is a handy tool for labelling a creature, not an absolute rulebook for it's genetic configuration - speciation is a much more subtle and imprecise process than the "big switch" that christians seems so hooked up on.
At the end of the day, withdrawing science materials from Kansas will simply reinforce the view that their school system is all about producing inbred hicks for a tehocracy, rather than preparing children to play a part in a modern society.
What's gullible about it?
I mean, seriously - why so anti business? The internet doesn't run for free and someone has to pay the bills - that someone is business - business needs sales, ads drive sales.
The fact that when I am buying cool stuff online, and using google to find it they offer me a selection of ads at the right... is actually very handy.
Especially as google knows that I am in the UK, so the ads are pre-filtered down to only those companies that will sell to the UK - it saves me time and helps me find what I am looking for.
Hating technology like this because someone makes money from it is just a warped worldview.
Copyright is supposed to be a deal - the state protects the author's rights to exploit their creation, for a period of time in return for the public good that their creation will provide.
Somewhere along the line it has been warped into some weird concept of absolute ownership for all time - and that doesn't serve society.
Copyright should be a limited time offer. Never mind Google doing the scanning - anyone wanting Copyright protection should be handing a copy in electronic format across to the national libraries of the nation granting that right.
I.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't the effort be better spent trying to fix the actual disability in the first place? We spend a frighteningly small amount on fundamental research, and it seems that almost every development comes up against the "moral" luddites who don't want any kind of medical breakthrough in case it offends their religion. *sigh*
well yeah, but ANYTHING + DRM = Dead on Arrival. Why should I buy any new format, when it has been designed from the ground up to treat me like a criminal and prevent me from using the content I have purchased in the way I want?
Show them some cartoons of Muhammud... :D
It's usually pretty obvious from that point.
"what about the transhumanists?" - we are quietly amused. Just wait till you see the luddites react when we we get a ten foot killer robot that we can be uploaded into... :)
No, the purpose of the cartoons was to reflect on the fact that the violence of Islam (as in Theo Van Gogh) has made people genuinely afraid to be seen to criticise it.
Islam is a religion with many failings (they all are, of course, but the other major world faiths appear to have at least mellowed a little in the last thousand years) and it is ridiculous that we are unable to point out it's flaws, the screaming errors in it's holy book, the inherent immorality of it's beliefs and so on.
It's incredibly ironic that a newspaper article about how the fear of speaking against Islam is causing censorship should become such an obvious satire of itself.
I wish journos would stop doing this. Please find something else to write about on a slow news day.
I saw this when I got home from School - I am (and was) a massive space nut: when I got home from school, ran into the kitchen and asked my mum if she had hears about the space shuttle (I hadn't heard - I was just asking if the news had reported the launch". when she answered "It's terrible, isn't it", my stomach lurched three feet to the side.
I'm absolutley haunted by the image of that fireball expanding, absolutely despertately willing the orbiter to come clear of it, unharmed... despite knowing full well that this wasn't live, and that it was all over before I even started watching.
I can remember watching the news re-runs, hoping that the explosion of the fuel tank had been enough to kill the crew there and then, rather than having to endure a 2 minute plunge to their death.
I remember some sick tabloid printing a transcript of a crew voice recorder (faked, I hope). and churning it all up again.
To be honest - I was more emotionally hurt by the challenger incident than by the death of some family members... and I wouldr eally rather consign that to the past rather than see these guys keep digging it up to make a cheap buck.
I.
ps> my copy of Jarre's Rendevouz doesn't have "ron's piece" on it. it's just too darn tearful to listen to.
Doubly pertinent when you consider that Yahoo have done much, much worse things than Google - they helped the chinese authorities discover the identity of people posting political articles. Perhaps they should say "Don't be as Evil as Yahoo". That would cover pretty much everyone up to and including Joe Stalin. :D
Seriously, I don't see this as anything more than Ellison's continued attempts to have a shot at Bill Gates - this has zero to do with technology, it's one man's grudge match gone awry. As for an alternative to .Net? How backwards can you get? Why not support Mono, and help build the best of all worlds - a fully cross platform implementation of .Net with incredibly rich development tools (VS2005) running across all the major platforms?
I.
From the moment he decided that what Buffy needed most was one of the characters as a corpse that wasn't walking about wise cracking and sucking blood, just sitting there in an all too human way dead from a thoroughly mundane illness, it seems that he has had this self destructive desire to fling away every chance he has to entertain.
The world doesn't need more angst and misery, it needs more laughter. Your mother dying of cancer may be poignant, but one thing it sure isn't - entertainment.
Personally, I feel that the whole firefly community killed the Serenity movie as an act of mercy - rather than whipping their friends and family up into a "you gotta see this" frenzy, they were debating whether to even watch it themselves as soon as the news broke that Joss was going for the cheap emotional hit. Killing book was almost acceptable, in a pathetic whedon kinda way, but killing Wash - especially in such a trite fashion?
It just shows that Joss, unfortunately, doesn't have the skill required to entertain any more... from that point of view, I'd say that Fox actually protected us from Whedon. When you see what happened to X-Files, and the death throes of Stargate SG-1 circling the drain - that's a fate that won't befall Firefly!
It's worth getting a bit of perspective here - I have been an allofmp3 user for many months, without any dodgy credit card transactions.
Sony have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that "reputable" companies are no more trustworthy than the supposedly "dodgy" companies like allofmp3.com.
Even if allofmp3.com was actually corrupt/criminal, the billing for their site is performed by a dutch bank which participates in the "verified by visa" program, and the billing transaction is verifiably performed off-site: AOMP3 don;t see your credit card details, ever.
I.
What needs to be understood is the distinction between micro- and macro-evolution.
No, what needs to be understood is the difference between religion and science. There is no great debate in science about evolution - and this notion of "micro" and "macro" evolution exists only within god bothering circles... and largely there because they view species as these monolithic unchanging groups.
The entire concept of a species is a handy tool for labelling a creature, not an absolute rulebook for it's genetic configuration - speciation is a much more subtle and imprecise process than the "big switch" that christians seems so hooked up on.
At the end of the day, withdrawing science materials from Kansas will simply reinforce the view that their school system is all about producing inbred hicks for a tehocracy, rather than preparing children to play a part in a modern society.
What's gullible about it? I mean, seriously - why so anti business? The internet doesn't run for free and someone has to pay the bills - that someone is business - business needs sales, ads drive sales. The fact that when I am buying cool stuff online, and using google to find it they offer me a selection of ads at the right... is actually very handy. Especially as google knows that I am in the UK, so the ads are pre-filtered down to only those companies that will sell to the UK - it saves me time and helps me find what I am looking for. Hating technology like this because someone makes money from it is just a warped worldview.
Because at some point you have to start feeding the brain information in the linear, spoken format it's designed to interpret
;)
*cough* "it has evolved to interpret" please.
carry on...
Copyright is supposed to be a deal - the state protects the author's rights to exploit their creation, for a period of time in return for the public good that their creation will provide. Somewhere along the line it has been warped into some weird concept of absolute ownership for all time - and that doesn't serve society. Copyright should be a limited time offer. Never mind Google doing the scanning - anyone wanting Copyright protection should be handing a copy in electronic format across to the national libraries of the nation granting that right. I.