Just as many issues with the future in the 80s, no?
Cold war erupts, MAD destroys humankind. Bad fashion causes global intellectual meltdown.
He writes what he wants, but the reason Neuromancer & Co. was amazing was because he took certain aspects of the current time and extrapolated them into an interesting future. Just like all great science fiction, and I'm sure there will be other authors writing great works about the future in the future (heh). If global warming, singularities or a collapse of civilization doesn't make great writing, write about something else.
Heck. If this happened in any theater close to me, I'd print out the article and stand by the doors for a few hours. Handing out flyers to everyone entering, letting them know what that theater just did. This case is so obvious that random people learning about it would be shocked and upset. If two people by the door can hand out flyers and make customers turn away from the theatre in disgust, that would be an accomplishment.
Are there no slashdotters living close too there? Organize!
This is a great opportunity to convince the average joes that copyright is getting out of hand.
Did something changed from the last time I used the firehose, my javascript has been acting weird, or I'm just plain stupid. Because I click the minus, and bam, there was "Dupe". What have I been smoking...?
Why the hell can't we have (Score: -5, Dupe) in the firehose? (Score: -3, Slashvertisement) or (Score: 4, solid analysis) or somthing like that would also be great.
As it, I think the majority votes after skimming the summary. What we need, is a way for people that actually read the article to get the word out. Tags are nice, but not enough. What the firehose needs, is a way for some people to read the article and rate the story according to various criteria.
- Good articly or a stinking pile of self-promoting crap? - Unbiased or paid for? - Good summary or in need of a rewrite? - Enough relevant links (maybe we can add a few more?) - Dupe or new article?
There are many articles that seem interesting from the summary, or from a quick skim. While closer reading reveals that the text is horribly bad.
I was thinking the same thing. That news report ran like a freight train of potential internet memes. Also "Destroy, Die, Attack", "7 different passwords and they got them all", "Gay sex pictures"
We also these days have a color problem. 24-bit (8-bit per component) color seems like a lot, but it doesn't compare to even 10-bit per component color. I can't imagine what a monitor with 12-bit per component color would look let, but I'm willing to bet it'll look better than what we've got now. I fully agree with you on resolution, but not color.
I can easily discern individual pixels with my eyes. I cannot display anything as thin as a hair on my screen, and even antialiasing it only makes it looks like a semi-blurred, slightly thick hair. Color is different, discerning two near colors in an 8-bit palette is almost impossible.
Huge resolutions are needed, because without tiny pixels it is just not possible to display tiny details. Assume the actors are reading black-on-white text on a piece of paper - you need a HUGE resolution to even come close to how clearly the letters on the paper would be visible in reality, even from a distance. The low resolution is very noticeable, especially if you have good vision.
I have never seen a 10-bit display, but as far as I know, color is the first thing any compression algoriths will throw out, because our eyes just can't notice color differences on such tiny levels we already have. Take the black-on-white paper I mentioned above. Your brain really doesn't care if that white paper is a tiny bit yellow or just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit yellow. 16 million colors is enough to display very fine gradients without any noticeable lines, which means my eyes already can't discern the different colors anyhow. What room for improvement could there be?
As we've had to see for the past seven+ years, there is absolutely NOTHING which conservatives don't live in terror of. I'm more worried about the connecting "anonymity" with "terrorism". Anonymity causes people to be jerks, but it's also great for free speech.
Cue suggestions to track people by name and number online, to prevent this kind of terrorism. The police state and crackdown on piracy fits lovingly well together.
Yes, that's a bit on the paranoid side. I'm bored.
Nonlinear voicemail. Got that? My Japanese Sharp WS003SH had that, it's about a year and a half old.
PDA-style phone with 640x480 resolution. Voicemail is recorded on the phone like an answering machine, you can listen to the people calling as they leave their message if you like to. Messages are stored on your phone, listed with callers phone number and length of the message. Scroll to the message you want to play, and tap the screen to play it. Sounds familiar?
I assumed everyone had nonlinear voicemail and was quite surprised when I read that the iPohone supposedly was the first to have it.
Sounds like it's time for module-based surveilance tools. Good thing it'll be secret, or I'd bever be able to choose between Communist Home Professional or Fascist Ultimate.
Right to downloading data files as a "human right"?? It's certainly not a right. But the core issue is quite a bit deeper, though: In order to control a product that is represented as information, you obviously have to control information flow between people.
Either you monitor every piece of information people share, or they pirate data with their non-monitored bandwidth.
But that means it would be possible to dig up each and every case, pull out the names of the involved record companies and create the "racketeering index" web site somewhere. The one-stop place to see which company you're supposed to boycott until they stop suing people.
Bonus points for creating a banner/image that other pages can link, updated on a weekly basis. If there is enough people against the lawsuits that start linking such an index that identical banners with "Boycott Capitol Records, the #1 racketeer" appear on blogs and sites often enough, maybe someone would notice. Preferably Capitol Records.
This should definetely be turned it into a PR-game where the one with the most lawsuits loose.
The great thing about RIAA suing people is that they're the ones doing the dirty work. But as in the MAFIAA, you can be sure that there is never any specific company that ordered each lawsuit. So how can you blame, say, Capitol?
Boycotting the big fours is a good start, but a good thing would be RIAA-tracking sites like http://www.riaaradar.com/ or some other way people can know. It's very difficult, since idependent labels might have a joint venture with a small RIAA member, but it's probably possible to turn it into some kind of "rotten" percentage.
The problem is how to make it easy to use. A user-friendly, but probably infeasible solution would be if you just took a picture of the bar code of an album, then submitted that image to a search function that would immediately return all the dirt of any company involved in releasing said album.
Ever tried learning modern greek? Same goes. Multiple combinations of vowels have the same sound. Haven't tried greek, but if that's a fact I'd just be annoyed if I did;)
My impression is that Korean is the only language on earth that has a proper mapping between the written and spoken language. Already studying another asian language, though, I probably will never get around to study Korean.
Did anyone else feel like the article attempts to horribly overhype something that is extremely obvious?
I think the location-based hype party was back in 2000-2001, with US/FCC or-what-you-call-it requiring location of cellular 911 calls. Back then I was still a student and wrote 2 businessplans as groupwork. One was strongly related to location-based services, the other was bascially all about location-based services.
It was obvious back then, it is obvious now. The missing ingredient is a stable, common and CHEAP positioning service. As opposed to the wireless providers' offer with ~50 meter approximation and charging for every single time they do it. Cheap GPS or galileo will do the trick, combined with a good gyroscope (Hello, wii-controller-technology) for maintaning position during satelite shadows.
Not sure what will happen when we add location to the mix, but I assume it will be about people bookmarking their favorite places and lots of small discussion groups that exists in a "location" instead of a URL. Digital scavenger hunts. Friend tracking. Happen to be in Singapore at the same time as Bob from high school you haven't seen in 7 years? Maybe you don't want to know, but if you do, you can meet over lunch.
I find these scanned original pages FAR more restful to the eye than any other form of electronic book. This way, I can sit down and read a complete book on the screen -- without suffering the eye fatigue that comes from reading large swaths of ordinary onscreen text. I think it has a lot to do with print fonts being designed specifically for the eye, and somewhat to do with the normal yellowing of paper that produces a less glary background. This does not make sense. A scanned document will always have artifacts and imperfections from the scanning process and should by definition be harder to read. A well-sized font on a pleasant background should beat scannded text every single time.
Your issue is more likely that there are a lot of crappily designed webpages out there.
If you're reading "large swaths of ordinary onscreen text", do this: - Copy-paste in into any word processor - Choose a nice, big font. (Small is good for UI, not for 400-page-novels.) - Use a dark background. A page reflects light, a screen projects it. You do not want glaring white. - Use 8-10 words per line. - Profit! Err... less mental exhaustation, at least.
Pay extra attention to words per line. It's a key reason onscreen text is often hard to read. Too many words per line, and you'll have a mental overhead every few seconds trying to figure out which line you just read and which is next. Basically, books do it right and you want to display onscreen text at a similar width. Scrolling is easy these days, and wide lines is a remnant from when computers required a click-and-drag to scroll.
Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.
Heck, even slashdot defaults to a glaring white background and text stretched all over my 1920 pixels. Go figure.
Speaking english is fine, but written "English" seems to be a competition in inserting irellevant letters into words.
Not to mention that every combination of vowels seem to have different pronunciations for every single word, except the different ones except when you pronuncs different ones identically. ("see", "sea", "me", "ski")
Be grateful for anyone trying to clean up that mess of a writing system you call "English" anyway. Some words are so written so different from their pronunciation that it's easier to memorize Chinese. And "Color" is awesome, by the way, and if you don't like it, go back to spelling it "couleur" the way the original french do.
End rant. This is a pet peeve of mine.
(But big thanks for going easy on Grammatical Gender and Cases, there are harder languages out there.)
What if RIAA member companies are thus pressured into not selling to iTunes? (and only to MS and their protected player). What if this is part of MS's attempt at monopoly via patent with the RIAA wholly endorsing them in a way that will cripple the rest of the online music industry? This is silly.
Every single iPod ownder would be royally pissed. iTunes would premote idie music, as there would be nothing else. RIAA online music sales would disappear completely and piracy would surge.
Living in Japan, I have various issues with the Japenese political system. Not being Japanese, I don't think it's my job to make any changes, though.
It's definetely impacted by the seniority system that permeates the country. If you're old, you have a say, if you're young, you do what you're told. Obviously this is not a hard rule, but there definetely is such a trend. The standard view is that such a system would encouage some serious corruption (having a real and powerful organizations of organized crime does not help, they assasinated a difficult major during the last election).
I can't say I understand the Japanese democratic systems. I'm sure it protects the status quo, will probably change, though will change very slowly as the next 2 generations grow up. The system works somehow, and people still have to option to change things if they get completely out of hand.
AND they only charge you from outgoing calls (meaning you don't pay twice) Holy shit, you're still paying for incoming calls over there?
Agree perfectly with your claims. Everytime I read about mobile or broadband access in the US, it just seems to suck so bad it could be orally pleasing to Swedish mööse.
If you have a problem with corrupt officials and corporations profiteering, I suggest you fix it somehow.
Flash mental image of US Dell selling Pentium IIs at full price. I'm sure the industry is raking in money over there.
As for the first, I don't think P2P was made for the kind of streaming that stations do. However, it would be extremely useful to have a local "cache" of the last 50 songs played on radio. Really liked that previous song? Just drag it into your portable music player and go. That tune they played 30 minutes ago stuck in your mind? Just click and play it again.
Such a cache would obviously be illegal. But convenient for the users, and it would mean that most listeners on any channel/playlist/tag would have a large selection of the typical songs. There is some synergy, so I would not discard the possibility of someone coming up with a clever protocol for doing something like this.
Hm... Such a program would actually download and share music without you telling it which songs to download. Nasty.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as many issues with the future in the 80s, no?
Cold war erupts, MAD destroys humankind. Bad fashion causes global intellectual meltdown.
He writes what he wants, but the reason Neuromancer & Co. was amazing was because he took certain aspects of the current time and extrapolated them into an interesting future. Just like all great science fiction, and I'm sure there will be other authors writing great works about the future in the future (heh). If global warming, singularities or a collapse of civilization doesn't make great writing, write about something else.
Heck. If this happened in any theater close to me, I'd print out the article and stand by the doors for a few hours. Handing out flyers to everyone entering, letting them know what that theater just did. This case is so obvious that random people learning about it would be shocked and upset. If two people by the door can hand out flyers and make customers turn away from the theatre in disgust, that would be an accomplishment.
Are there no slashdotters living close too there? Organize!
This is a great opportunity to convince the average joes that copyright is getting out of hand.
So spank my ass and mod me redundant.
Did something changed from the last time I used the firehose, my javascript has been acting weird, or I'm just plain stupid. Because I click the minus, and bam, there was "Dupe". What have I been smoking...?
Why the hell can't we have (Score: -5, Dupe) in the firehose? (Score: -3, Slashvertisement) or (Score: 4, solid analysis) or somthing like that would also be great.
As it, I think the majority votes after skimming the summary. What we need, is a way for people that actually read the article to get the word out. Tags are nice, but not enough. What the firehose needs, is a way for some people to read the article and rate the story according to various criteria.
- Good articly or a stinking pile of self-promoting crap?
- Unbiased or paid for?
- Good summary or in need of a rewrite?
- Enough relevant links (maybe we can add a few more?)
- Dupe or new article?
There are many articles that seem interesting from the summary, or from a quick skim. While closer reading reveals that the text is horribly bad.
I was thinking the same thing. That news report ran like a freight train of potential internet memes. Also
"Destroy, Die, Attack", "7 different passwords and they got them all", "Gay sex pictures"
But how could you forget Hackers on Steroids?
I can easily discern individual pixels with my eyes. I cannot display anything as thin as a hair on my screen, and even antialiasing it only makes it looks like a semi-blurred, slightly thick hair. Color is different, discerning two near colors in an 8-bit palette is almost impossible.
Huge resolutions are needed, because without tiny pixels it is just not possible to display tiny details. Assume the actors are reading black-on-white text on a piece of paper - you need a HUGE resolution to even come close to how clearly the letters on the paper would be visible in reality, even from a distance. The low resolution is very noticeable, especially if you have good vision.
I have never seen a 10-bit display, but as far as I know, color is the first thing any compression algoriths will throw out, because our eyes just can't notice color differences on such tiny levels we already have. Take the black-on-white paper I mentioned above. Your brain really doesn't care if that white paper is a tiny bit yellow or just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit yellow. 16 million colors is enough to display very fine gradients without any noticeable lines, which means my eyes already can't discern the different colors anyhow. What room for improvement could there be?
Cue suggestions to track people by name and number online, to prevent this kind of terrorism. The police state and crackdown on piracy fits lovingly well together.
Yes, that's a bit on the paranoid side. I'm bored.
Did anyone bother to vote in their related poll? I found the current standings hillarious! :D
Have you ever been hacked, phished, or been a victim of computer crime?
Yes. 1.78%
No. 6.35%
Victim? I'll leave it at that. 91.87%
Total number of votes: 13968
PDA-style phone with 640x480 resolution. Voicemail is recorded on the phone like an answering machine, you can listen to the people calling as they leave their message if you like to. Messages are stored on your phone, listed with callers phone number and length of the message. Scroll to the message you want to play, and tap the screen to play it. Sounds familiar?
I assumed everyone had nonlinear voicemail and was quite surprised when I read that the iPohone supposedly was the first to have it.
Sounds like it's time for module-based surveilance tools. Good thing it'll be secret, or I'd bever be able to choose between Communist Home Professional or Fascist Ultimate.
Either you monitor every piece of information people share, or they pirate data with their non-monitored bandwidth.
Ooops, my mistake.
But that means it would be possible to dig up each and every case, pull out the names of the involved record companies and create the "racketeering index" web site somewhere. The one-stop place to see which company you're supposed to boycott until they stop suing people.
Bonus points for creating a banner/image that other pages can link, updated on a weekly basis. If there is enough people against the lawsuits that start linking such an index that identical banners with "Boycott Capitol Records, the #1 racketeer" appear on blogs and sites often enough, maybe someone would notice. Preferably Capitol Records.
This should definetely be turned it into a PR-game where the one with the most lawsuits loose.
Can you also give us a 'who joined when'?
With 14 of the 16 latest joiners voting yes, and one of being RedHat, I'll estimate the votes of the remaining 15.
The great thing about RIAA suing people is that they're the ones doing the dirty work. But as in the MAFIAA, you can be sure that there is never any specific company that ordered each lawsuit. So how can you blame, say, Capitol?
Boycotting the big fours is a good start, but a good thing would be RIAA-tracking sites like http://www.riaaradar.com/ or some other way people can know. It's very difficult, since idependent labels might have a joint venture with a small RIAA member, but it's probably possible to turn it into some kind of "rotten" percentage.
The problem is how to make it easy to use. A user-friendly, but probably infeasible solution would be if you just took a picture of the bar code of an album, then submitted that image to a search function that would immediately return all the dirt of any company involved in releasing said album.
Just wondering,
If the defendant ended up with huge expenses even when winning, could this be used in some form of racketeering lawsuit against the RIAA?
As in "Give us $3000 or we'll sue. Then, even if you win it will cost you ten times more than that."
It's obvious that they're not suing people for money, but to create a public image of it being dangerous to cross them.
Ever tried learning modern greek? Same goes. Multiple combinations of vowels have the same sound. Haven't tried greek, but if that's a fact I'd just be annoyed if I did
My impression is that Korean is the only language on earth that has a proper mapping between the written and spoken language. Already studying another asian language, though, I probably will never get around to study Korean.
Did anyone else feel like the article attempts to horribly overhype something that is extremely obvious?
I think the location-based hype party was back in 2000-2001, with US/FCC or-what-you-call-it requiring location of cellular 911 calls. Back then I was still a student and wrote 2 businessplans as groupwork. One was strongly related to location-based services, the other was bascially all about location-based services.
It was obvious back then, it is obvious now. The missing ingredient is a stable, common and CHEAP positioning service. As opposed to the wireless providers' offer with ~50 meter approximation and charging for every single time they do it. Cheap GPS or galileo will do the trick, combined with a good gyroscope (Hello, wii-controller-technology) for maintaning position during satelite shadows.
Not sure what will happen when we add location to the mix, but I assume it will be about people bookmarking their favorite places and lots of small discussion groups that exists in a "location" instead of a URL. Digital scavenger hunts. Friend tracking. Happen to be in Singapore at the same time as Bob from high school you haven't seen in 7 years? Maybe you don't want to know, but if you do, you can meet over lunch.
Your issue is more likely that there are a lot of crappily designed webpages out there.
If you're reading "large swaths of ordinary onscreen text", do this:
- Copy-paste in into any word processor
- Choose a nice, big font. (Small is good for UI, not for 400-page-novels.)
- Use a dark background. A page reflects light, a screen projects it. You do not want glaring white.
- Use 8-10 words per line.
- Profit! Err... less mental exhaustation, at least.
Pay extra attention to words per line. It's a key reason onscreen text is often hard to read. Too many words per line, and you'll have a mental overhead every few seconds trying to figure out which line you just read and which is next. Basically, books do it right and you want to display onscreen text at a similar width. Scrolling is easy these days, and wide lines is a remnant from when computers required a click-and-drag to scroll.
Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.
Heck, even slashdot defaults to a glaring white background and text stretched all over my 1920 pixels. Go figure.
Speaking english is fine, but written "English" seems to be a competition in inserting irellevant letters into words.
Not to mention that every combination of vowels seem to have different pronunciations for every single word, except the different ones except when you pronuncs different ones identically. ("see", "sea", "me", "ski")
Be grateful for anyone trying to clean up that mess of a writing system you call "English" anyway. Some words are so written so different from their pronunciation that it's easier to memorize Chinese. And "Color" is awesome, by the way, and if you don't like it, go back to spelling it "couleur" the way the original french do.
End rant. This is a pet peeve of mine.
(But big thanks for going easy on Grammatical Gender and Cases, there are harder languages out there.)
Completely different issue. The value in WoW lies in the server and interactive content, not in the playback of recorded media.
Nothing prevents you from recording your WoW session.
Every single iPod ownder would be royally pissed. iTunes would premote idie music, as there would be nothing else. RIAA online music sales would disappear completely and piracy would surge.
Won't happen.
Living in Japan, I have various issues with the Japenese political system. Not being Japanese, I don't think it's my job to make any changes, though.
It's definetely impacted by the seniority system that permeates the country. If you're old, you have a say, if you're young, you do what you're told. Obviously this is not a hard rule, but there definetely is such a trend. The standard view is that such a system would encouage some serious corruption (having a real and powerful organizations of organized crime does not help, they assasinated a difficult major during the last election).
I can't say I understand the Japanese democratic systems. I'm sure it protects the status quo, will probably change, though will change very slowly as the next 2 generations grow up. The system works somehow, and people still have to option to change things if they get completely out of hand.
Agree perfectly with your claims. Everytime I read about mobile or broadband access in the US, it just seems to suck so bad it could be orally pleasing to Swedish mööse.
If you have a problem with corrupt officials and corporations profiteering, I suggest you fix it somehow.
Flash mental image of US Dell selling Pentium IIs at full price. I'm sure the industry is raking in money over there.
Such a cache would obviously be illegal. But convenient for the users, and it would mean that most listeners on any channel/playlist/tag would have a large selection of the typical songs. There is some synergy, so I would not discard the possibility of someone coming up with a clever protocol for doing something like this.
Hm... Such a program would actually download and share music without you telling it which songs to download. Nasty.