What if someone is pregnant or hurt seriously and needed to get to the hospital quick?
You should call an ambulance? Or if that's not practical, you should get there safely rather than buying a few minutes by speeding... A pregnant wife in the car doesn't give you the right to speed (or blow through stops) and a car going that fast is more likely to cause an accident, or to get pulled over, which would defeat the purpose of speeding in the first place.
What if it's the dead of night and no one is on the road?
Have you never had a pedestrian or animal come out of nowhere? Or a drunk driver from the opposite direction? Being the only one on the road in the dead of night can be more dangerous than being in a rush hour traffic jam... And the accidents more deadly.
I'm in no way for this system, but think about why we need it in the first place-- there are just too many people who think traffic laws don't apply to them. Unfortunately, most drivers aren't as good as they think they are.
I noticed you left some question marks on #3. Let me fix that for you...
1. Monitor P2P network 2. Sue average person 3. Generate enough press and hysteria from the lawsuits that millions of other average persons-- particularly parents who don't know nearly as much about computers as their kids do-- are scared to death of being sued and curtail their downloading activities, and pay a little more attention to what their dependants are doing with their computers. 4. Profit. (Or, to be more precise, retain their fragile hold on music distribution. At least for now.)
It isn't even like loan companies send out the repo man after your first failure to pay. You typically get several months of haggling and pleading before the loan company has no other alternative but to send someone out to repossess the automobile.
Which is how it should be. The threat of the repo man is a pretty strong deterrent to the potential deadbeat, and the hassle of sending one out (and the paper trail) is at least something of a deterrent to keep debtors honest. Look at it from the customer's POV... Used car dealers are known for shady practices, while many are above board there are plenty who live up to the stereotype. Perhaps the lot in the article wouldn't, but I bet plenty would take advantage of this technology to extort customers... Like raising or extending payments unfairly under threat of shutting off their cars (or claiming they missed a payment that was made!) Now, instead of being able to use their car while disputing the charges, the lot holds all the cards-- you pay what we say you owe or you don't drive. And if you take us to court you're going to be taking the bus to get there.
Or how about this scenario-- the lot goes under and sells their debts to a collection agency, as well as the on/off switches to their customer's cars. Don't tell me there wouldn't be abuse there...
Or we could stop using science from the 70's and realize that the climate changes and we're not the cause.
Glad you can make such a definitive statement, but the truth is nobody knows why it's happening. So we can either take your attitude, in which case we're fucked and there's nothing we can do, or we can say "maybe it IS our fault" and make an effort to curb the global climate changes.
Yeah, we're probably all fucked anyway. But it would be nice if we tried to hold on instead of shrugging our shoulders as we watch it all go to hell.
Why do comments like this get modded up? It's downright childish thing to say and should be obvious to anyone capable of rational thought that this is not an either-or situation. They're not pulling construction workers off sites or relief workers from food distribution sites to set up and maintain wi-fi towers. The only complaint I could really undestand would be to consider whether the cost was worth the benefits, but there is so much money being thrown in so many directions at this point I don't think it matters.
I would bet the benefits are worth it, by the way-- Considering how many people are there from parts all over right now working to rebuild, I would bet there are a LOT of laptops and PDA's floating around the city. They're doing whatever they can to keep both relief workers and residents in the area, and wi-fi access certainly helps both with critical and leisure communications. Land-based power and phone service in a disaster area tends to be shaky... If I was in such an area I'd be very happy to have access to any reliable form of communication that could be made available.
So, you're selfish. Some people realize that their actions have an effect on other people, even the small actions. Wasting power is irresponsible and hurts everybody. You might just think it's your business, but it's not - it's all of our business.
The X-Box 360 is a waste. Manufacturing a sophisticated high end computer that does nothing more than play games is a complete waste not only of energy and resources, but talented minds who could be working on the $100 laptop or sending a rocket to Mars. Not to mention all the electricity wasted playing the games themselves, and the hundreds to thousands of hours every gamer wastes a year when they could be furthering their careers or education.
Is that a ridiculous thing to say? It's less so than your argument. Yeah, we're facing a global power crisis, but there are a lot of major things that can and should be fixed immediately and even you must know that a few people running X-Boxes 24-7 is a drop in the bucket. At least SETI, Einstein etc. has practical uses that could benefit society, and since it could be run headless the power consumption would be on par with or less than other household appliances.
No, the dot com bubble was a lot more sad, because it was about rational people throwing cash and careers at products and services that were generally ill-conceived or just vapor. That was a modern gold rush, kind of an economic and cultural temporary insanity.
The bloat we're seeing with cell phones is pretty natural for any new tech product. and it's not so much a crash as an oversaturation... As in the pool of new customers is drying up, and the existing customers don't see much need to upgrade, and anyway we're not that impressed any more. We've seen it before with computers, VCRs, DVD players, game consoles... We're probably close to seeing it with mp3 players, and in five it will be hybrid cars. It's just part of the product cycle.
You want the performance and graphics of a state of the art PC gaming rig? You get the heat characteristics of a state of the art PC gaming rig.
The X-Box isn't sold as a PC gaming rig, which takes some know-how as to the care of computers. It's sold as a consumer appliance. It's a toy. The nature of the product implies it should be plug-and-play and at least as reliable as any other component in an entertainment center.
You put a box with the heat characteristics of a PC gaming rig in a small cabinet? You get overheating problems.
Then it's a design flaw. If it needed a larger case to be a living room appliance (with all that infers, including being placed in a center with other components or even sitting on the living room rug) it should have been built that way. There's no reason it has to be so small (other than the fact that small and cute sells right now.)
Instead of just whining about how many rights and priveleges you deserve because you have $400 to spend on a device, try to understand the technologies and properties of these systems before you start spouting on about what you've decided is acceptable and what isn't.
The consumer DOES have rights and priveleges! If it's a fragile high end computer in a case to small to handle it, and if a substantial amount of problems are arising this soon, that's certainly not acceptable and something Microsoft has an obligation to fix. They don't have the right to sell a faulty product (if in fact they are doing so, I'm not sure the evidence is in yet.)
I understand the bile, especially when you have a problem that needs to be dealt with immediately-- like a problem with broadband service or another utility, or a mission-critical product failure. The last thing you want to do is plod through menus just to be put on hold .
But-- there are times when I've been very happy not to have to deal with a human, and I've had some generally positive experiences (or as positive as they could be considering the circumstances.) Paying a parking ticket by phone in L.A. is actually pretty easy, for example. And when I had to set up automated payments with the IRS a few years back the last thing I wanted to do was talk to an IRS agent... I was downright happy to do it through the automated menus. And I'm always (and I mean ALWAYS) happy when I can cancel a service (like an ISP, long distance plan or cell phone) through a menu, rather than having to hear a customer service agent give me a sales pitch why I should stay.
Bottom line, if you know what you need to do (pay a bill, cancel a service, etc.) it can be much more convenient to just navigate a few menus. Especially if you're a social misfit like me.
With Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, it offers the fast data transfer rates required for substantial jobs like downloading digital photos, saving MP3s or transferring home videos from a camcorder.
Finally, a place to put my mp3s!
Do you really need to explain to us what USB 2.0 is and what we can do with it?
(By the way, good luck working with video with USB2.0. But that's another story.)
Unfortunately, Darwin is no longer an inquisitive scientist (and Christian) who went to the Galapagos islands a century or so ago and postulated some theories about how we came to be... He's, uh, "evolved" into a symbol of pure evil to the Born Agains.
4. What does he produce that we need in say a recession?
The answer, of course, is nothing. But then, how many of us have jobs that are mission critical to our society? Do we mock the thousands and thousands of game designers and developers who are creating the fluff that made this guy a star? (I mean fluff in an endearing way, of course.) If the whole gaming industry shut down, a lot of people would take a hit but society wouldn't crumble.
So hey congrats, if you can sucker people into paying you for playing video games, then all the power to ya. But I wouldn't say it's a good career choice if you don't want to worry about what you'll be doing in 10 years [hint: 43 yr old gamer == teh lame]
If he has brains and makes wise investments, a few six figure salary years could take care of him for life. Or he could parlay this into a consulting job for the next few rounds of FPS's. I'm not too worried about him.
I don't think your arguments hold up; buying a single song on a cell phone might be a little easier in some cases for the extremely impatient people with lots of disposable income, but if one has any common sense at all, buying music through iTunes is simpler and cheaper.
"Impatient, with lots of disposable income and no common sense" pretty much describes the American teenager. Who, by the way, is much more likely to have a cell phone than a credit card.
Name one Nintendo launch title in the last 15 years that hasn't been derivative of a franchise. Take your time.
Yeah, you tell 'em. You know what else I hate? The Simpsons. Every week it's the same fucking characters in the same fucking town.
I have (currently) OS X 10.4.3 installed on a 400MHz iMac G3 (original graphite DV model). The actual specs are 400MHz/1GB RAM/7200RPM disk (120GB, for no reason at all). It runs Tiger just fine, and it's actually faster with Tiger than it was with Panther. Sure, it's not always quite as smooth as OS9, but it does it all in stride, and does a lot more than OS9 would allow me to do on it.
You do realize that iMac was called "DV" (and has a 120gb drive) because in its day, with OS 9, it was capable of running iMovie and even Final Cut. And it did so quite well, in fact. But try the OSX versions of those programs and see how far you get. Photoshop, Protools, and a lot of other apps (and games) that screamed on a 400mhz G3 are pretty much useless in OSX.
Not saying OSX isn't an infinitely superior OS on recent hardware, that's not even an issue. But you have to admit it turned a very capable machine into something just adequate for browsing and word processing.
It's a good point, and you don't deserve to get beat up for it. However... it doesn't necessarily hold up in the real world. For one, jobs are very disposable in our society... It's not unusual for a person to go through several workplaces while living in the same house (especially if they buy instead of rent.) And for couples, doubly so. Since with a few exceptions most American cities have no centers of industry-- most of our cities are sprawling suburbs with pockets of office buildings here and there-- there really is no way to plant yourself in a location that will give you a short commute in the long run.
I really don't see an easy way out-- never mind the suburbs, many of our biggest cities are not only completely reliant on the highway commute, they're downright hostile to mass transit. Look at Los Angeles, Houston-- with such spread and no real centralization there simply is no way for mass transit to be convenient.
I haven't seen one yet in person (they're only available for sale at Wal-Mart online, right?) but I considered the MobiBlue, and my impression is that the cube isn't a very good shape for carrying around-- 1" by 1" by 1" may not seem big, but in a jacket or jeans pocket I would guess it would get annoying fast. The "stick" style of the Shuffle and many others seem a lot more appropriate for portability.
BTW I bought a Shuffle-- not that it's the best or has the most features, but the refurb 1 gig models going for $99 on the Apple site were hard to pass up.
The tag is misleading at best, if not an outright troll. There is no indication that the donor was pressured or coerced in any way. In fact there is no indication of any wrongdoing except for an allegation by the American scientist, with no offering of proof. Do we know what HIS motives were?
Whoever greenlit this should have caught it-- for God's sake the article itself is a blurb, it would take 30 seconds to read. If you're against human cloning there's plenty of fodder for your argument, you should not be allowed to use Slashdot as your pulpit to demonize the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
What if someone is pregnant or hurt seriously and needed to get to the hospital quick?
You should call an ambulance? Or if that's not practical, you should get there safely rather than buying a few minutes by speeding... A pregnant wife in the car doesn't give you the right to speed (or blow through stops) and a car going that fast is more likely to cause an accident, or to get pulled over, which would defeat the purpose of speeding in the first place.
What if it's the dead of night and no one is on the road?
Have you never had a pedestrian or animal come out of nowhere? Or a drunk driver from the opposite direction? Being the only one on the road in the dead of night can be more dangerous than being in a rush hour traffic jam... And the accidents more deadly.
I'm in no way for this system, but think about why we need it in the first place-- there are just too many people who think traffic laws don't apply to them. Unfortunately, most drivers aren't as good as they think they are.
I noticed you left some question marks on #3. Let me fix that for you...
1. Monitor P2P network
2. Sue average person
3. Generate enough press and hysteria from the lawsuits that millions of other average persons-- particularly parents who don't know nearly as much about computers as their kids do-- are scared to death of being sued and curtail their downloading activities, and pay a little more attention to what their dependants are doing with their computers.
4. Profit. (Or, to be more precise, retain their fragile hold on music distribution. At least for now.)
It isn't even like loan companies send out the repo man after your first failure to pay. You typically get several months of haggling and pleading before the loan company has no other alternative but to send someone out to repossess the automobile.
Which is how it should be. The threat of the repo man is a pretty strong deterrent to the potential deadbeat, and the hassle of sending one out (and the paper trail) is at least something of a deterrent to keep debtors honest. Look at it from the customer's POV... Used car dealers are known for shady practices, while many are above board there are plenty who live up to the stereotype. Perhaps the lot in the article wouldn't, but I bet plenty would take advantage of this technology to extort customers... Like raising or extending payments unfairly under threat of shutting off their cars (or claiming they missed a payment that was made!) Now, instead of being able to use their car while disputing the charges, the lot holds all the cards-- you pay what we say you owe or you don't drive. And if you take us to court you're going to be taking the bus to get there.
Or how about this scenario-- the lot goes under and sells their debts to a collection agency, as well as the on/off switches to their customer's cars. Don't tell me there wouldn't be abuse there...
Or we could stop using science from the 70's and realize that the climate changes and we're not the cause.
Glad you can make such a definitive statement, but the truth is nobody knows why it's happening. So we can either take your attitude, in which case we're fucked and there's nothing we can do, or we can say "maybe it IS our fault" and make an effort to curb the global climate changes.
Yeah, we're probably all fucked anyway. But it would be nice if we tried to hold on instead of shrugging our shoulders as we watch it all go to hell.
Why do comments like this get modded up? It's downright childish thing to say and should be obvious to anyone capable of rational thought that this is not an either-or situation. They're not pulling construction workers off sites or relief workers from food distribution sites to set up and maintain wi-fi towers. The only complaint I could really undestand would be to consider whether the cost was worth the benefits, but there is so much money being thrown in so many directions at this point I don't think it matters.
I would bet the benefits are worth it, by the way-- Considering how many people are there from parts all over right now working to rebuild, I would bet there are a LOT of laptops and PDA's floating around the city. They're doing whatever they can to keep both relief workers and residents in the area, and wi-fi access certainly helps both with critical and leisure communications. Land-based power and phone service in a disaster area tends to be shaky... If I was in such an area I'd be very happy to have access to any reliable form of communication that could be made available.
So, you're selfish. Some people realize that their actions have an effect on other people, even the small actions. Wasting power is irresponsible and hurts everybody. You might just think it's your business, but it's not - it's all of our business.
The X-Box 360 is a waste. Manufacturing a sophisticated high end computer that does nothing more than play games is a complete waste not only of energy and resources, but talented minds who could be working on the $100 laptop or sending a rocket to Mars. Not to mention all the electricity wasted playing the games themselves, and the hundreds to thousands of hours every gamer wastes a year when they could be furthering their careers or education.
Is that a ridiculous thing to say? It's less so than your argument. Yeah, we're facing a global power crisis, but there are a lot of major things that can and should be fixed immediately and even you must know that a few people running X-Boxes 24-7 is a drop in the bucket. At least SETI, Einstein etc. has practical uses that could benefit society, and since it could be run headless the power consumption would be on par with or less than other household appliances.
A GBA with added cellphone capabilities would be an awful cellphone (because numbers aren't easy to input).
They wouldn't be that hard to input on a DS touch screen.
In fact text messaging would be a lot easier if you could pull up a keyboard or use handwriting recognition.
No, the dot com bubble was a lot more sad, because it was about rational people throwing cash and careers at products and services that were generally ill-conceived or just vapor. That was a modern gold rush, kind of an economic and cultural temporary insanity.
The bloat we're seeing with cell phones is pretty natural for any new tech product. and it's not so much a crash as an oversaturation... As in the pool of new customers is drying up, and the existing customers don't see much need to upgrade, and anyway we're not that impressed any more. We've seen it before with computers, VCRs, DVD players, game consoles... We're probably close to seeing it with mp3 players, and in five it will be hybrid cars. It's just part of the product cycle.
You want the performance and graphics of a state of the art PC gaming rig? You get the heat characteristics of a state of the art PC gaming rig.
The X-Box isn't sold as a PC gaming rig, which takes some know-how as to the care of computers. It's sold as a consumer appliance. It's a toy. The nature of the product implies it should be plug-and-play and at least as reliable as any other component in an entertainment center.
You put a box with the heat characteristics of a PC gaming rig in a small cabinet? You get overheating problems.
Then it's a design flaw. If it needed a larger case to be a living room appliance (with all that infers, including being placed in a center with other components or even sitting on the living room rug) it should have been built that way. There's no reason it has to be so small (other than the fact that small and cute sells right now.)
Instead of just whining about how many rights and priveleges you deserve because you have $400 to spend on a device, try to understand the technologies and properties of these systems before you start spouting on about what you've decided is acceptable and what isn't.
The consumer DOES have rights and priveleges! If it's a fragile high end computer in a case to small to handle it, and if a substantial amount of problems are arising this soon, that's certainly not acceptable and something Microsoft has an obligation to fix. They don't have the right to sell a faulty product (if in fact they are doing so, I'm not sure the evidence is in yet.)
I understand the bile, especially when you have a problem that needs to be dealt with immediately-- like a problem with broadband service or another utility, or a mission-critical product failure. The last thing you want to do is plod through menus just to be put on hold .
But-- there are times when I've been very happy not to have to deal with a human, and I've had some generally positive experiences (or as positive as they could be considering the circumstances.) Paying a parking ticket by phone in L.A. is actually pretty easy, for example. And when I had to set up automated payments with the IRS a few years back the last thing I wanted to do was talk to an IRS agent... I was downright happy to do it through the automated menus. And I'm always (and I mean ALWAYS) happy when I can cancel a service (like an ISP, long distance plan or cell phone) through a menu, rather than having to hear a customer service agent give me a sales pitch why I should stay.
Bottom line, if you know what you need to do (pay a bill, cancel a service, etc.) it can be much more convenient to just navigate a few menus. Especially if you're a social misfit like me.
With Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, it offers the fast data transfer rates required for substantial jobs like downloading digital photos, saving MP3s or transferring home videos from a camcorder.
Finally, a place to put my mp3s!
Do you really need to explain to us what USB 2.0 is and what we can do with it?
(By the way, good luck working with video with USB2.0. But that's another story.)
Unfortunately, Darwin is no longer an inquisitive scientist (and Christian) who went to the Galapagos islands a century or so ago and postulated some theories about how we came to be... He's, uh, "evolved" into a symbol of pure evil to the Born Agains.
Like the cartoon says...
http://www.nunchux.com/matthew/Darwinwrong.gif
I'll just zero in on this one...
4. What does he produce that we need in say a recession?
The answer, of course, is nothing. But then, how many of us have jobs that are mission critical to our society? Do we mock the thousands and thousands of game designers and developers who are creating the fluff that made this guy a star? (I mean fluff in an endearing way, of course.) If the whole gaming industry shut down, a lot of people would take a hit but society wouldn't crumble.
So hey congrats, if you can sucker people into paying you for playing video games, then all the power to ya. But I wouldn't say it's a good career choice if you don't want to worry about what you'll be doing in 10 years [hint: 43 yr old gamer == teh lame]
If he has brains and makes wise investments, a few six figure salary years could take care of him for life. Or he could parlay this into a consulting job for the next few rounds of FPS's. I'm not too worried about him.
I don't think your arguments hold up; buying a single song on a cell phone might be a little easier in some cases for the extremely impatient people with lots of disposable income, but if one has any common sense at all, buying music through iTunes is simpler and cheaper.
"Impatient, with lots of disposable income and no common sense" pretty much describes the American teenager. Who, by the way, is much more likely to have a cell phone than a credit card.
Kind of crossover, both webcomics and syndicated in alternative newsweeklies...
Maakies
http://www.maakies.com/
Migraine Boy
http://www.gregfiering.com/migraineboy/index.html
Perry Bible Fellowship
http://cheston.com/pbf/archive.html
In the end it probably would have been cheaper and much less hassle to just let us download the damn mp3s.
Name one Nintendo launch title in the last 15 years that hasn't been derivative of a franchise. Take your time. Yeah, you tell 'em. You know what else I hate? The Simpsons. Every week it's the same fucking characters in the same fucking town.
Is there anyone from Kansas with some *plausible* theories about this monkey?
It couldn't fit on the Ark.
I have (currently) OS X 10.4.3 installed on a 400MHz iMac G3 (original graphite DV model). The actual specs are 400MHz/1GB RAM/7200RPM disk (120GB, for no reason at all). It runs Tiger just fine, and it's actually faster with Tiger than it was with Panther. Sure, it's not always quite as smooth as OS9, but it does it all in stride, and does a lot more than OS9 would allow me to do on it.
You do realize that iMac was called "DV" (and has a 120gb drive) because in its day, with OS 9, it was capable of running iMovie and even Final Cut. And it did so quite well, in fact. But try the OSX versions of those programs and see how far you get. Photoshop, Protools, and a lot of other apps (and games) that screamed on a 400mhz G3 are pretty much useless in OSX.
Not saying OSX isn't an infinitely superior OS on recent hardware, that's not even an issue. But you have to admit it turned a very capable machine into something just adequate for browsing and word processing.
It's a good point, and you don't deserve to get beat up for it. However... it doesn't necessarily hold up in the real world. For one, jobs are very disposable in our society... It's not unusual for a person to go through several workplaces while living in the same house (especially if they buy instead of rent.) And for couples, doubly so. Since with a few exceptions most American cities have no centers of industry-- most of our cities are sprawling suburbs with pockets of office buildings here and there-- there really is no way to plant yourself in a location that will give you a short commute in the long run.
I really don't see an easy way out-- never mind the suburbs, many of our biggest cities are not only completely reliant on the highway commute, they're downright hostile to mass transit. Look at Los Angeles, Houston-- with such spread and no real centralization there simply is no way for mass transit to be convenient.
I haven't seen one yet in person (they're only available for sale at Wal-Mart online, right?) but I considered the MobiBlue, and my impression is that the cube isn't a very good shape for carrying around-- 1" by 1" by 1" may not seem big, but in a jacket or jeans pocket I would guess it would get annoying fast. The "stick" style of the Shuffle and many others seem a lot more appropriate for portability.
BTW I bought a Shuffle-- not that it's the best or has the most features, but the refurb 1 gig models going for $99 on the Apple site were hard to pass up.
Bill Gates is in the Trenchcoat Mafia.
The tag is misleading at best, if not an outright troll. There is no indication that the donor was pressured or coerced in any way. In fact there is no indication of any wrongdoing except for an allegation by the American scientist, with no offering of proof. Do we know what HIS motives were?
Whoever greenlit this should have caught it-- for God's sake the article itself is a blurb, it would take 30 seconds to read. If you're against human cloning there's plenty of fodder for your argument, you should not be allowed to use Slashdot as your pulpit to demonize the other side.