What I would pay for, would be a standard approach for digital cameras to use Bluetooth to share pictures with other cameras nearby.
As it is, when taking group pictures, either everyone needs to get a picture taken with "their" camera, or someone needs to email everyone afterwards. It would have been really nice to have a feature to just share a picture you just took with everyone* else.
It's really easy to show people your pictures as you go on a digital camera. What I want, it for it to be just as easy to share them.
*Strangers and passersby excluded from accessing your pictures, obviously.
I am not an author, but write should create some sci-fi that focuses on the population of a "generation ship".
Synopsis: Never seen earth, some of the children will refuse that it exists, and reject the idea that they are born to settle a new planet. Maybe they would think it is lies to control the people, and reject what they are taught? They sabotage the computers with the teaching material and make it impossible to properly teach new generations. Over the next two generations, the population aboard the ship reverts to a basic tribal society with a religion based on what they can observe living on the ship.
Short stories can be set in various segments of those events. Their tribal society arriving on the new planet sounds like the basis for a novel.
If there are any books anywhere close to this out there, I'd appreciate replies telling me about them:)
As everyslashdotter knows, it is crictical to have reduncancy for anything you consider important. Life, for example.
Without another planet, we'll die with this one. Giant meteors, weird bursts of radiation and other freaks of nature could wipe life off this planet. In theory, it could happen anyday. If you're not scared of that because of the extremely low probabilities involved, then consider the 100% inevitable and total incineration of all life on earth when the sun blows.
Anyhow, sitting around on earth until everything is "perfect" is not much better than mass suicide, tomorrow. Because things will never be "perfect". We will still disagree and still be stuck here on earth when the sun blows some billions of years into the future.
Also, keep in mind that we're talking on a cosmic scale here. Other planets may be dead. For all you know, other planets would be overjoyed to have the environmental problems of earth. Because they're fucking dead, mister. I'm just saying that applying subjective standards to ourselves before we spread life, is utterly stupid. Without any detailed knowledge of other planets, our issues on earth could be horrible, or they could be absolutely wonderful, the dream and envy of every other planet. We simply don't know.
Most other planets will certainly not be able to support human life as well as this one. That means that everywhere we settle will basically become a case-study for improving the environment. Which will surely cause some research and feedback to improving things back on earth. I just don't see any problem here.
Sorry, but liquids bending light does not qualify as a mystery of nature. Theory and math behind optics is taught in high school physics, though of course non-zoomable single-lens scenarios. Your eyes use soft lenses to focus over variable distances.
The interesting point here that instead of theory, they have a working prototype.
Enter "Pete the Pirate". He's using the bandwidth in full and he won't fit in that normal distribution. The nice normal distribution turns skewed to the right, everyone gets worse response times and less bandwidth on average. The solution? Sell everyone guaranteed 10M/512k or what? Most of the people don't want to pay 60 times as much as they do because they don't have the need for guaranteed bandwidth. ISDN was about fixed bandwidth and it sucked. Nobody needed that bandwidth that much and therefore the costs were significantly higher than with ADSL technologies. The solution? Stop marketing your service as "infinite" usage if it's going to screw up your model.
No need to bring average users into it. If all you do is reading web pages, there is actually not that much difference between 512k and 100M. Higher speeds are a service you buy for the purpose of moving big files fast.
The real issue here is that IPSs want to market their service as "infinite", but redefine the term so there is no way you can use more bandwith than they want you to. why not sell their service as, say "up to 10M for the first 5GB, then 512k."? Then add higher GB tiers, and people will pay for the actual bandwith instead of an infinte usage fairy tale.
I encourage everyone to access the firehose and vote this article down.
Sad to say, but whoever wrote that article is clueless, and it does not deserve to be on slashdot (or anywhere else).
I can only think that it made the front page because it mentions both Apple and DRM in the title, causing lots of people to flag it up by reflex. It should be buried.
I wrote another comment about this, but...
Eben Moglen said once that the wealth of nations in the 21st century will not be measured by how much steel they make or how well they make it, they will be measured by how much software they make and how well they make it. I make steel, you make software. But you're more wealthy? Hmm... I decided to make swords instead. Good luck!
This is my primary worry about taking the "Intellectual Property" concept too far.
Although stereotypical, imagine a world where China have all the manufacturing plants and the USA only produces content. Content being produced once, then sold many times over. Manufactured goods having to be produced for each sale. Manufacturerers in this system might consider the content producers to have rigged the game to their favor.
Then keep in mind that the underdog is sitting with all those factories. Which can be converted to make tanks, guns, rockets and other nifty stuff.
IP derives power from legislation. Taken too far, those with the production/military power might decide to rewrite those laws.
At least get the analogies right. DRM and speeding tickets are opposites.
Speedings tickets does not prevent you from going as fast as you like. Though they may make you choose not to, as you'll hopefully get caught and punished for breaking the law.
DRM ettempts to make it impossible to break the law in the first place. A car analogy would be some kind of gremlin stuck in the engine, which prevents your car from going faster than, say, 80km/h.
Sub-analogies for bonus: - Gremlins can be removed by car engine enthusiasts, rendering it pointless. - Normal people cannot speed, even for common-sense purposes. Need to get to the hospital in an emergency? Too bad. - People will still go 80km/h on 30km/h roads, while not being able to go faster than 80 on 100km/h roads.
Good scenario: Instead of fracturing the net and create controlled national internets, governments believe they can hook their population to the Internet but still control them. However, a significant minority actually manage to bypass the filtering and access the "truth" and spread the word.
Bad scenario: Companies get experience in filtering from catering to oppressive governments. When the technology is stable and efficient, other governments decide to use it to remove some of the "bad" content off the net.
After the law is in effect, find somehwere that 100+ people that care can meet.
Choose an obscure film, preferably from some indie project that will be happier for the press coverage than for this horrible 'piracy'.
Then have the 100-strong group go see the movie, bringing videocameras. 100 cameras rolling, while they watch. Preferably, call the police yourself and tell them that you're going to break the law. Be open about it.
The decision to make a non-MMO game after the success of WoW is very puzzling. Not puzzling at all. If they topped WoW, people would stop playing WoW. Extremely simple.
Unlike normal games, most MMO players will only pay those $15/month for a single game at a time. If you're the market leader, it makes no sense to launch a game to take customers from yourself. Unless they made a completely differnt MMO that caters to an entirely different segment of players, which is very, very hard.
Sure, they'll make another MMO. But not until WoW popularity is declining, or they have a MMO idea that would be radically different and cater to people that don't play WoW. Which could very well be the starcraft MMO, they just want to see how the Conan MMO and other types play out, as companies release different types of MMOs while exploring player segments different from the WoW medieval leveling type.
"slower-paced survival horror FPS" could have worked fine, if the whole game had been as good as the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay.
At some point, and not really that long after "all hell breaks loose", the game lost its magic. From that point on, it was mostly about being in martian base room 24, trying to make your way into martian base room 25. Story elements were few and far between.
I don't live over there, so I'm not changing anything. But I think some intelligent people over in the US should really start making those very valid points. Talk to your friends and family, and make it clear how utterly irrelevant it is to be worried about terror. Unless terrorists obtain nukes or other WMD's, terror is a complete non-issue for the average joe. Like spending your life fearing that you should be suddenly killed by lightning.
Oh, and if you're taking the global perspective, try these numbers: around 24.000 people die every day due to hunger. Though americans may be annoyed if you take that perspective too far. If disasters were measured solely in terms of human lives lost, 9/11 wouldn't be the headline even on the day it happened.
Because it won't work everywhere. Now, have a look at teh original post again...
Smart admins will typically put a filter on With this attitude, you know there are some 'smart' admins out there that have filtered out this rude spec.
There are alternative evolutionary paths that enjoyed success for millions of years: Tyrannosaurus Rex. I think evolution is altruism-neutral. Altruism is often as destructive as not. Sometimes the most capable sacrifice themselves for the greater "good", thus removing themselves from the gene pool. The evolutionary success of an extinct species! Really?
There is no evolutionaty "whoops". The obvious case is where a selfish group would all die, but a group where some members secrifice themseves for the greater good survives. In that case, the genes of the people that died are actually carried on, indirectly, through the surviving relatives in the group.
BTW: That Jesus thing you wrote? Looks like trolling.
Well, honestly, timber is a renewable resource. What is needed is some basic edumacation (no idiot left behind?) of these tropical meat heads so that will start planting replacement trees. North Americans plant billions of trees each year. There is no reason why the rest of the world can't do the same. Which is exactly why we need "origin of timer" in the first place. That will allow buyers to choose timber from a lumber company that actually replants. Without any proper labeling, they'll differ in price only, and the cheaper option are companies that just chop and burn. Anyone trying to go the "replant" route would do nothing but bankrup themselves if they are competing with slash'n burn'ers.
Also: I'm not sure about tropical hardwood, but I'm a little worried that the regrowth time for those may be closer to centuries, not decades.
You got some things right, but I think you're too optimisttic. Here's the plan:
1. Price Internet radio into oblivion. 2. Negotiate a deal for your wholly-owned-subsidiary Internet radio. 3. Cackle gleefully as you enjoy iron control of another medium. 4. Profit!
If every field was allowed to substitute "kilo" with "whatever unit close to 1000 that makes some kind of intuitive sense for specialists in our field", good luck on wishing anything would be the same!
985 m in a kilometer, 1013 grams in a kilogram, 973,2 watts in a kilowatt?
I appreciate a lot of what americans have accompished in the field of computer science. But for standards, sad to say, the US sucks the balls off an elephant through a straw.
[cue joke about 2 countries in the world still using medieval measurements...]
It's not an issue, though. With double-byte unicode notation and less and less meaning to the term "byte", I am hoping for the whole concept to be replaced with the proper unit (bit) sooner or later. Personally, I am looking forward to the day this stupidity with non-standard measures are dropped completely. I would perfer to be able to buy a 8Tb hard drive instead.
Oh well, at least the network people are getting their units right.
Materialistic or not, what matters if is your "Free Will" can be influenced by your life.
If it cannot be influenced, it means that your free will is oblivious to what happens to you. Die horribly or prosper, those things would simply not matter unless something in your life can feed back into your free will / soul.
I think we all can agree that free will would be meaningless if it didn't care the least what happens to you. Might as well be mind-controlled by the FSM if that is the case.
However: If our free will is influenced by our lives, it means it will be influenced by our genes & environment. And if that is the case, the whole non-materialistic free will is meaningless anyway. If your free will makes decicions based on something that have happened to you before, it is suddnely influenced by that deterministic machine we were trying to avoid in the first place.
Though I agree that "entirely deterministic" is a tad boring view of existence. Some quantum randomess would be nice.
Not sure why parent got rated insightful, it looks like he didn't really read the post before replying.
From grandparent:
But, yes, fake religions, real religions, real presidents, it doesn't matter
Grandparent is not stating that Scientology is fake, thus you can protest it. It making two seperate statements, one being that Scientology is fake. The other is that you should be allowed to protest anything you like, no matter how fake or real it is. There is no conflict or any need to define a "religion".
Either way, the developer deserves to be beaten to pulp. I think you forgot to take your pills today.
More likely, the developer made a schedule estimate for IE support, and an estimate for IE and FF support. Then someone decided that they didn't want to pay that much for supporting firefox.
But yeah. Posting this on slashdot is begging for torches and pitchforks, maybe a few lynchings as well.
Slashdot Mirror
What I would pay for, would be a standard approach for digital cameras to use Bluetooth to share pictures with other cameras nearby.
As it is, when taking group pictures, either everyone needs to get a picture taken with "their" camera, or someone needs to email everyone afterwards. It would have been really nice to have a feature to just share a picture you just took with everyone* else.
It's really easy to show people your pictures as you go on a digital camera. What I want, it for it to be just as easy to share them.
*Strangers and passersby excluded from accessing your pictures, obviously.
I am not an author, but write should create some sci-fi that focuses on the population of a "generation ship".
:)
Synopsis:
Never seen earth, some of the children will refuse that it exists, and reject the idea that they are born to settle a new planet. Maybe they would think it is lies to control the people, and reject what they are taught? They sabotage the computers with the teaching material and make it impossible to properly teach new generations. Over the next two generations, the population aboard the ship reverts to a basic tribal society with a religion based on what they can observe living on the ship.
Short stories can be set in various segments of those events. Their tribal society arriving on the new planet sounds like the basis for a novel.
If there are any books anywhere close to this out there, I'd appreciate replies telling me about them
As everyslashdotter knows, it is crictical to have reduncancy for anything you consider important. Life, for example.
Without another planet, we'll die with this one. Giant meteors, weird bursts of radiation and other freaks of nature could wipe life off this planet. In theory, it could happen anyday. If you're not scared of that because of the extremely low probabilities involved, then consider the 100% inevitable and total incineration of all life on earth when the sun blows.
Anyhow, sitting around on earth until everything is "perfect" is not much better than mass suicide, tomorrow. Because things will never be "perfect". We will still disagree and still be stuck here on earth when the sun blows some billions of years into the future.
Also, keep in mind that we're talking on a cosmic scale here. Other planets may be dead. For all you know, other planets would be overjoyed to have the environmental problems of earth. Because they're fucking dead, mister. I'm just saying that applying subjective standards to ourselves before we spread life, is utterly stupid. Without any detailed knowledge of other planets, our issues on earth could be horrible, or they could be absolutely wonderful, the dream and envy of every other planet. We simply don't know.
Most other planets will certainly not be able to support human life as well as this one. That means that everywhere we settle will basically become a case-study for improving the environment. Which will surely cause some research and feedback to improving things back on earth. I just don't see any problem here.
Sorry, but liquids bending light does not qualify as a mystery of nature. Theory and math behind optics is taught in high school physics, though of course non-zoomable single-lens scenarios. Your eyes use soft lenses to focus over variable distances.
The interesting point here that instead of theory, they have a working prototype.
Stop marketing your service as "infinite" usage if it's going to screw up your model.
No need to bring average users into it. If all you do is reading web pages, there is actually not that much difference between 512k and 100M. Higher speeds are a service you buy for the purpose of moving big files fast.
The real issue here is that IPSs want to market their service as "infinite", but redefine the term so there is no way you can use more bandwith than they want you to. why not sell their service as, say "up to 10M for the first 5GB, then 512k."? Then add higher GB tiers, and people will pay for the actual bandwith instead of an infinte usage fairy tale.
...change it into a "minimal" headline? Or whatever is the term for that one-line/grey-background/no-summary thing.
I thought I noticed this happen to an article once. Maybe I was wrong, and becoming "minimal" after being "full" is just as impossible.
Though I should obviously have known articles can't be removed completely. Or dupes would not be a problem.
Oh well. Ignorance is bliss. I shall now go and see if I can firehose it again. At least, I'll feel better. Call it therapy.
I encourage everyone to access the firehose and vote this article down.
Sad to say, but whoever wrote that article is clueless, and it does not deserve to be on slashdot (or anywhere else).
I can only think that it made the front page because it mentions both Apple and DRM in the title, causing lots of people to flag it up by reflex. It should be buried.
Hmm...
I decided to make swords instead.
Good luck!
This is my primary worry about taking the "Intellectual Property" concept too far.
Although stereotypical, imagine a world where China have all the manufacturing plants and the USA only produces content. Content being produced once, then sold many times over. Manufactured goods having to be produced for each sale. Manufacturerers in this system might consider the content producers to have rigged the game to their favor.
Then keep in mind that the underdog is sitting with all those factories. Which can be converted to make tanks, guns, rockets and other nifty stuff.
IP derives power from legislation. Taken too far, those with the production/military power might decide to rewrite those laws.
At least get the analogies right. DRM and speeding tickets are opposites.
Speedings tickets does not prevent you from going as fast as you like. Though they may make you choose not to, as you'll hopefully get caught and punished for breaking the law.
DRM ettempts to make it impossible to break the law in the first place. A car analogy would be some kind of gremlin stuck in the engine, which prevents your car from going faster than, say, 80km/h.
Sub-analogies for bonus:
- Gremlins can be removed by car engine enthusiasts, rendering it pointless.
- Normal people cannot speed, even for common-sense purposes. Need to get to the hospital in an emergency? Too bad.
- People will still go 80km/h on 30km/h roads, while not being able to go faster than 80 on 100km/h roads.
I imagine two futures for censorship:
Good scenario:
Instead of fracturing the net and create controlled national internets, governments believe they can hook their population to the Internet but still control them. However, a significant minority actually manage to bypass the filtering and access the "truth" and spread the word.
Bad scenario:
Companies get experience in filtering from catering to oppressive governments. When the technology is stable and efficient, other governments decide to use it to remove some of the "bad" content off the net.
After the law is in effect, find somehwere that 100+ people that care can meet.
Choose an obscure film, preferably from some indie project that will be happier for the press coverage than for this horrible 'piracy'.
Then have the 100-strong group go see the movie, bringing videocameras. 100 cameras rolling, while they watch. Preferably, call the police yourself and tell them that you're going to break the law. Be open about it.
Unlike normal games, most MMO players will only pay those $15/month for a single game at a time. If you're the market leader, it makes no sense to launch a game to take customers from yourself. Unless they made a completely differnt MMO that caters to an entirely different segment of players, which is very, very hard.
Sure, they'll make another MMO. But not until WoW popularity is declining, or they have a MMO idea that would be radically different and cater to people that don't play WoW. Which could very well be the starcraft MMO, they just want to see how the Conan MMO and other types play out, as companies release different types of MMOs while exploring player segments different from the WoW medieval leveling type.
"slower-paced survival horror FPS" could have worked fine, if the whole game had been as good as the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay.
At some point, and not really that long after "all hell breaks loose", the game lost its magic. From that point on, it was mostly about being in martian base room 24, trying to make your way into martian base room 25. Story elements were few and far between.
If I remember the statistics correctly, USA has about 10 times the murder rate per population, compared to other western countries.
So while you maybe don't qualify for the South Africa league, you're an order of magnitude from other civilized countries.
I don't live over there, so I'm not changing anything. But I think some intelligent people over in the US should really start making those very valid points. Talk to your friends and family, and make it clear how utterly irrelevant it is to be worried about terror. Unless terrorists obtain nukes or other WMD's, terror is a complete non-issue for the average joe. Like spending your life fearing that you should be suddenly killed by lightning.
Oh, and if you're taking the global perspective, try these numbers: around 24.000 people die every day due to hunger. Though americans may be annoyed if you take that perspective too far. If disasters were measured solely in terms of human lives lost, 9/11 wouldn't be the headline even on the day it happened.
There is no evolutionaty "whoops". The obvious case is where a selfish group would all die, but a group where some members secrifice themseves for the greater good survives. In that case, the genes of the people that died are actually carried on, indirectly, through the surviving relatives in the group.
BTW: That Jesus thing you wrote? Looks like trolling.
Also: I'm not sure about tropical hardwood, but I'm a little worried that the regrowth time for those may be closer to centuries, not decades.
You got some things right, but I think you're too optimisttic. Here's the plan:
1. Price Internet radio into oblivion.
2. Negotiate a deal for your wholly-owned-subsidiary Internet radio.
3. Cackle gleefully as you enjoy iron control of another medium.
4. Profit!
No missing steps, although #3 is optional.
1024? In your dreams!
If every field was allowed to substitute "kilo" with "whatever unit close to 1000 that makes some kind of intuitive sense for specialists in our field", good luck on wishing anything would be the same!
985 m in a kilometer, 1013 grams in a kilogram, 973,2 watts in a kilowatt?
I appreciate a lot of what americans have accompished in the field of computer science. But for standards, sad to say, the US sucks the balls off an elephant through a straw.
[cue joke about 2 countries in the world still using medieval measurements...]
It's not an issue, though. With double-byte unicode notation and less and less meaning to the term "byte", I am hoping for the whole concept to be replaced with the proper unit (bit) sooner or later. Personally, I am looking forward to the day this stupidity with non-standard measures are dropped completely. I would perfer to be able to buy a 8Tb hard drive instead.
Oh well, at least the network people are getting their units right.
Materialistic or not, what matters if is your "Free Will" can be influenced by your life.
If it cannot be influenced, it means that your free will is oblivious to what happens to you. Die horribly or prosper, those things would simply not matter unless something in your life can feed back into your free will / soul.
I think we all can agree that free will would be meaningless if it didn't care the least what happens to you. Might as well be mind-controlled by the FSM if that is the case.
However: If our free will is influenced by our lives, it means it will be influenced by our genes & environment. And if that is the case, the whole non-materialistic free will is meaningless anyway. If your free will makes decicions based on something that have happened to you before, it is suddnely influenced by that deterministic machine we were trying to avoid in the first place.
Though I agree that "entirely deterministic" is a tad boring view of existence. Some quantum randomess would be nice.
Considering the the ICQ serves as a personal identification number, I think you actually got some truth in that joke.
From grandparent:
But, yes, fake religions, real religions, real presidents, it doesn't matter
Grandparent is not stating that Scientology is fake, thus you can protest it. It making two seperate statements, one being that Scientology is fake. The other is that you should be allowed to protest anything you like, no matter how fake or real it is. There is no conflict or any need to define a "religion".
More likely, the developer made a schedule estimate for IE support, and an estimate for IE and FF support. Then someone decided that they didn't want to pay that much for supporting firefox.
But yeah. Posting this on slashdot is begging for torches and pitchforks, maybe a few lynchings as well.