Look at the nature of the article - it's like the NCAA for coding in the eyes of the writer, or the Olympics. "Why can't we get ALL the gold medals?" That is the pillar of capitalism - we are better, unequal competition and not collusion or cooperation. Ceaseless competition, like something out of a sports season, does not always create a better environment. Just like all the other coders who've spoken up here in the forum, it isn't about speed. It's about form and the act of graceful coding that is more important.
But the government PAID Bell Labs to do a lot of research! I think you might have missed the point here. They broke up the place, and removed the "protection" that Bell Labs enjoyed as being one of the few places that didn't care about shareholder return as much. T
But I certainly agree that nobody is picking up the slack.
And yet, I would prefer the money-hungry ogres of corp america over the kill-hungry government as funding my research.
So much of what Darpa and NSF are funding are simply either Congressional black holes where they dump cash for their lobby friends with no clear return on the money - or they are just working on defense projects that might possibly stumble over some inadvertent humanitarian usage, like a "search & resuce" Predator drone that has a survival kit attached onto its little Hellfire missles..:-( Or how about the Darpa robot car? They want to put guns on the thing, they could care less about it's other skills. How is that useful to me?
So - we are left with 3 ugly options.
One - govt. supported monopoly doing all different kinds of research (which hurts competition and feeds the greed of unregulated capitalism.)
Two - Nobody does any research, b/c nobody is protected from shareholder abuse and hostile takeovers crushing long-term research, and govt doesn't fund any research themselves.
Three - No monopoly, but govt only funds pork and defense projects. I sure don't see even NASA doing all that much that is new and helpful - they are scared of cut funding. Still making Space Shuttles?? Something is wrong here!
Remember, though - Bell Labs did a whole heck of a lot of that research because they had the monopoly on the govt. money. When the Bells got busted up, the Labs had to scale back a whole lot of that long-term research in favor of the short term investor-improving stuff that nobody really has a use for. Sometimes a monopoly isn't such a horrible thing. At least for long-term science & research.
"If Jack really wanted to solve the problem, he'd come up with a new teenage pass-time that they actually want to do more than games."
He can't re-invent drinking, sex, and shopping at the mall. It's already been done.. Duh.:-)
They are using existing utility poles to screw the wap's into. No new poles, as far as I can tell. And wimax is not very widely used - wifi at least has excellent hardware ubiquity.
There really is no depiction of acts in that game at all - it's very PG. When you commit the unspeakable, you both giggle and there's not much of anything on screen.
Very PG game. Fun for a while, too.
But it sure is a great way to innovate and think outside the parameters of expectations...
Look at those monster garage shows where they basically throw ideas at a wall and build stuff with their sophisticated fabricators... They certainly have to CAD a lot of the work there, but look how often it performs other than planned...That is half the fun of being a basement Dr. Frankenstein...
Although in sci-fi, they usually kill the dude, take a picture of the retina, then make contacts w/ the image transferred onto it.
Owned...:-( Of course, you'd be dead, so who cares if they ruin your credit at that point...
Remember, the job of any abusive monopoly is to discourage organization. From busting unions to breaking up LAN networks, keeping the opposition divided is the single most important job of a capitalistic monopoly. Even though the Bittorrenters are still getting the stuff from the internet, having the intranet up and trading strong make that school a hub of sharers. If you saw one movie shared by 7 users, and the other was 700, which would you choose for a download?
But you just deleted the group that spends a huge chunk of money promoting the band, producing their product (also known as music and the album), also they put shows and tours together, hire the road crew to setup and break down, get the radio stations / music video piece of things put together, hiring talent scouts and marketing groups to see which bands test well and which will slave away at the bar circut for the rest of their lives, and so on.
You think every single band would be successful if they somehow did it themselves, with Apple taking JUST a distribution role in things? Not one of the huge rock bands of the past few decades was able to do any of it on their own. Punk in the past and Indie today are a different story, but they are the exception and not the rule. Somebody needs to pony up the cash, and the RIAA did it for years. They were the only game in town and have been abusing that monopoly like they always have. From suing 10-year-olds to ripping off Bo Diddley so bad he had to keep touring into his 60's & 70's just to stay solvent...no question about their morality or motives - but some entity has to perform all those other jobs for the music to be heard by more than a select few.
However, if Apple decided to open thier own music label to do all those other things the nasty RIAA do now (but cannot due to the Beatles' lawsuit) then they would be wildly successful.
I had the NX80 (I think) and used it for E-books all the time. With auto-scroll, it was done really well I thought. The DRM is the big piece of it, and I worry just like you do.
Maybe if the manufacturers come up w/ a lightweight tablet pc that is more page-sized, it would be more functional than the belgian waffle-maker niche-market that this appeals to. I got enough things with their own power cradles and sync software, etc. Also having a more-pc less-single usage device would let third party open-sourcers create better software that isn't crippled with proprietary drm-esque hangups.
You are right - they had the cash to do it so many years ago. With the Russians and us in the Cold War, the Moon landing, spacecraft launch, etc - they were all given tons of money to get the job done. That is not the case today. I think we'd be a whole lot better off as a human race if we had taken the production effort behind the 100,000 icbms and put it into space achievements.
Of course, given my cynical outlook of the governments, we'd probably just have Death Ray Lasers and zero-grav void-breathing sharks at this point instead of the M.A.D. scenarios.
I am a huge fan of U-Do-It Electronics in Needham, MA. They have been doing home-brew stuff for years and the staff is amazing. They don't sell you junk and can answer almost any question... They started out renting workbench space so you could come in and fix your electronics right there, with a staffer walking around and offering advice. They just sell parts now, but they have everything for the Maker./Plugplugplug
You are correct on that. I have a tight firewall here w/ proxy service and I can't get a single IM client, BT client, pretty much anything besides a web browser to connect outside the intranet, even when I got the proxy settings from my admin.
We have an in-house IM client but AIM, Yahoo, etc, are all blocked. Pretty effective IMHO. No need for "what the shit" policing. Who has time to do that, anyways? If you got time to lean, you got time to clean!
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the nature of the article - it's like the NCAA for coding in the eyes of the writer, or the Olympics. "Why can't we get ALL the gold medals?" That is the pillar of capitalism - we are better, unequal competition and not collusion or cooperation. Ceaseless competition, like something out of a sports season, does not always create a better environment. Just like all the other coders who've spoken up here in the forum, it isn't about speed. It's about form and the act of graceful coding that is more important.
But the government PAID Bell Labs to do a lot of research! I think you might have missed the point here. They broke up the place, and removed the "protection" that Bell Labs enjoyed as being one of the few places that didn't care about shareholder return as much. T
:-( Or how about the Darpa robot car? They want to put guns on the thing, they could care less about it's other skills. How is that useful to me?
But I certainly agree that nobody is picking up the slack.
And yet, I would prefer the money-hungry ogres of corp america over the kill-hungry government as funding my research.
So much of what Darpa and NSF are funding are simply either Congressional black holes where they dump cash for their lobby friends with no clear return on the money - or they are just working on defense projects that might possibly stumble over some inadvertent humanitarian usage, like a "search & resuce" Predator drone that has a survival kit attached onto its little Hellfire missles..
So - we are left with 3 ugly options.
One - govt. supported monopoly doing all different kinds of research (which hurts competition and feeds the greed of unregulated capitalism.)
Two - Nobody does any research, b/c nobody is protected from shareholder abuse and hostile takeovers crushing long-term research, and govt doesn't fund any research themselves.
Three - No monopoly, but govt only funds pork and defense projects.
I sure don't see even NASA doing all that much that is new and helpful - they are scared of cut funding. Still making Space Shuttles?? Something is wrong here!
Hmmm...
Remember, though - Bell Labs did a whole heck of a lot of that research because they had the monopoly on the govt. money. When the Bells got busted up, the Labs had to scale back a whole lot of that long-term research in favor of the short term investor-improving stuff that nobody really has a use for. Sometimes a monopoly isn't such a horrible thing. At least for long-term science & research.
"If Jack really wanted to solve the problem, he'd come up with a new teenage pass-time that they actually want to do more than games." He can't re-invent drinking, sex, and shopping at the mall. It's already been done.. Duh. :-)
They are using existing utility poles to screw the wap's into. No new poles, as far as I can tell. And wimax is not very widely used - wifi at least has excellent hardware ubiquity.
There really is no depiction of acts in that game at all - it's very PG. When you commit the unspeakable, you both giggle and there's not much of anything on screen. Very PG game. Fun for a while, too.
But it sure is a great way to innovate and think outside the parameters of expectations... Look at those monster garage shows where they basically throw ideas at a wall and build stuff with their sophisticated fabricators... They certainly have to CAD a lot of the work there, but look how often it performs other than planned...That is half the fun of being a basement Dr. Frankenstein...
This just in after that : Business models sacrifice quality for speedy delivery of product. :-)
Although in sci-fi, they usually kill the dude, take a picture of the retina, then make contacts w/ the image transferred onto it. Owned... :-( Of course, you'd be dead, so who cares if they ruin your credit at that point...
Remember, the job of any abusive monopoly is to discourage organization. From busting unions to breaking up LAN networks, keeping the opposition divided is the single most important job of a capitalistic monopoly. Even though the Bittorrenters are still getting the stuff from the internet, having the intranet up and trading strong make that school a hub of sharers. If you saw one movie shared by 7 users, and the other was 700, which would you choose for a download?
But you just deleted the group that spends a huge chunk of money promoting the band,
producing their product (also known as music and the album),
also they put shows and tours together,
hire the road crew to setup and break down,
get the radio stations / music video piece of things put together,
hiring talent scouts and marketing groups to see which bands test well and which will slave away at the bar circut for the rest of their lives,
and so on.
You think every single band would be successful if they somehow did it themselves, with Apple taking JUST a distribution role in things? Not one of the huge rock bands of the past few decades was able to do any of it on their own. Punk in the past and Indie today are a different story, but they are the exception and not the rule. Somebody needs to pony up the cash, and the RIAA did it for years. They were the only game in town and have been abusing that monopoly like they always have. From suing 10-year-olds to ripping off Bo Diddley so bad he had to keep touring into his 60's & 70's just to stay solvent...no question about their morality or motives - but some entity has to perform all those other jobs for the music to be heard by more than a select few.
However, if Apple decided to open thier own music label to do all those other things the nasty RIAA do now (but cannot due to the Beatles' lawsuit) then they would be wildly successful.
I had the NX80 (I think) and used it for E-books all the time. With auto-scroll, it was done really well I thought. The DRM is the big piece of it, and I worry just like you do. Maybe if the manufacturers come up w/ a lightweight tablet pc that is more page-sized, it would be more functional than the belgian waffle-maker niche-market that this appeals to. I got enough things with their own power cradles and sync software, etc. Also having a more-pc less-single usage device would let third party open-sourcers create better software that isn't crippled with proprietary drm-esque hangups.
You are right - they had the cash to do it so many years ago. With the Russians and us in the Cold War, the Moon landing, spacecraft launch, etc - they were all given tons of money to get the job done. That is not the case today. I think we'd be a whole lot better off as a human race if we had taken the production effort behind the 100,000 icbms and put it into space achievements. Of course, given my cynical outlook of the governments, we'd probably just have Death Ray Lasers and zero-grav void-breathing sharks at this point instead of the M.A.D. scenarios.
I am a huge fan of U-Do-It Electronics in Needham, MA. They have been doing home-brew stuff for years and the staff is amazing. They don't sell you junk and can answer almost any question... They started out renting workbench space so you could come in and fix your electronics right there, with a staffer walking around and offering advice. They just sell parts now, but they have everything for the Maker. /Plugplugplug
In the article, the investigator said he returned the money and then had the FBI guy buy it.
You are correct on that. I have a tight firewall here w/ proxy service and I can't get a single IM client, BT client, pretty much anything besides a web browser to connect outside the intranet, even when I got the proxy settings from my admin. We have an in-house IM client but AIM, Yahoo, etc, are all blocked. Pretty effective IMHO. No need for "what the shit" policing. Who has time to do that, anyways? If you got time to lean, you got time to clean!