you're right - it might be funny to the slashdot crowd but "does it come in pink?" (or blue, or neon, or whatever is kewl this month) is increasingly going to be the reason that these things sell over their competitors. For the vast number of buyers, all the models do roughly the same thing (they hold lots of tunes and fit in your pocket). It will move from differentiating models by technical qualities to aesthetic qualities, same as any other consumer product. When's the last time you chose a toaster based on its technical specs? Bet you went for the kewl chrome/curvy/ retro look one...
good point, you answered my question - "but what percentage of USA has *any form of connection".
I'd like to see a map of Internet usage overlaid with average income, think this would be more interesting than tv use. I am guessing most people in USA can get access to a tv, and most people watch more than one hour a day (how many hours a day to average USians spend in front of computers, that would be interesting as well).
cool, cheers. So actually the teenager ends up getting a fine of 500 dollars or so? something big enough to make him go "ouch" and have to sit at home and watch tv with his mum and dad for a year while his friends are out on the town, but not sending in the local officials to vacuum clean his room for anything worth more than a dollar? Is the 10 million fine then nominally put in place as a precedent (UK law works on precedence as I understand) so if a company/ rich adult with more like this kind of money commits the same offense, the prosecution can request a fine of this amount because there is a precedent for doing so?
How does the Money restitution thing work in the USA anyway? we are always hearing on the media how somebody has been sued / fined 1/10/ 100 million dollars for a crime. How does this work in reality? I'm guessing the 18 yr old in this case has a Saturday job in the local shop, maybe a job delivering newspapers, that sort of thing, few dollars an hour at most, annual income in the region of 5000 dollars if he's lucky. Do they set up some repayment plan over the next 30 years taking a percentage of his income, or what? or is it purely a nominal figure to impress the court and the media and they write it off as he obviously doesn't have 10 million in his piggy bank / teenage savings account?
UK Company is doing this. I saw a presentation by one of the company at a meeting of the London Virtual Reality Group in 2001(?), in the Bartlett School of Architecture.
reads the article, replies to self :-)
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: 1
serves me right, RTFA:-))) - Sniper-Geek-Boy is an Old European whose company lives in a Cold War Bunker... nuff said, maybe there is a pattern here. Maybe you guys can help him join the Army over there, our Army is getting cut back...
Obligatory Old European Response, WTF?
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
WTF is it with USians and their obsession with guns? Next week on slashdot: "Rifle interface to move on screen pointer for word processing"...
WhyTF does the geek with the 'rifle' have that smug expression? I mean, if he really wants to feel like a big man, I got the impression that right now its pretty easy in the US to sign up and go play with the real thing in a real conflict?
"I opened it up, fixed it and have been using it for nearly 5 years. Not a bad lifespan for a free piece of hardware."
Only in the computing industry... I have some of my dad's powertools (10 years old), drive my grandmother's car (39 years old), got some of my great granddad's hand tools (70? years old). The computing model really annoys me, this is just not sustainable, the world is drowning under a sea of thrown out crap. Why can't we build stuff to last a bit longer? or more significantly design systems that can work with older kit... Me, sick of software bloat. Even new distros of linux assume 2Gb hard drives and 128Mb Ram minimum. All my mum wants to do is email, and word process. I'm sure I managed this ten years ago. Surely must be achievable without hardcore linux geekhacking skills. We realy should try to develop a more long term design philosophy. I've got a three year old mobile phone, Ericsson, shockproofed, gortex lined, you can drop it in a pond and fish it out and use it, no problem. They don't make them any more. My guess is - because people like me buy them and don't need to buy another one six months later. We really need a big paradigm shift...(imho)
I'm not sure anybody has any ill will towards Finland today (except maybe Bill Gates, grin!). But the Finns have a history of their big neighbours visiting quite regularly.... (Russia, Sweden...)
This is one of the models that Benford and his team considered - a decline of civilisation. However they also considered the "see-saw" model - we enter a new dark ages for a couple of thousand years, and society loses a lot of knowledge, but then comes back up again a couple of thousand years later. Doesn't necessarily need to be something terminally bad that kills all humans, how about a global genocidal dictator, a global version of what happened to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot? or some disease that wipes a lot of us out (99%?) but the few survivors build up an immunity?
read Benford's "Deep Time" - a fascinating report on his work with Sandia thinking about how we could design texts/monuments that will let our descendents 10,000 years from now that *something really bad* is underneath this pile of rock they are considering digging into. An interesting problem which will require some work to solve....
We invaded a sovereign state just because they wouldn't buy our trade goods..probably many other examples through history as well...
Opium Wars, 1839-42 and 1856-60, two wars between China and Western countries. The first was between Great Britain and China. Early in the 19th cent., British merchants began smuggling opium into China in order to balance their purchases of tea for export to Britain. In 1839, China enforced its prohibitions on the importation of opium by destroying at Guangzhou (Canton) a large quantity of opium confiscated from British merchants. Great Britain, which had been looking to end China's restrictions on foreign trade, responded by sending gunboats to attack several Chinese coastal cities. China, unable to withstand modern arms, was defeated and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) and the British Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue (1843). These provided that the ports of Guangzhou, Jinmen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai should be open to British trade and residence; in addition Hong Kong was ceded to the British. Within a few years other Western powers signed similar treaties with China and received commercial and residential privileges, and the Western domination of China's treaty ports began. In 1856 a second war broke out following an allegedly illegal Chinese search of a British-registered ship, the Arrow, in Guangzhou. British and French troops took Guangzhou and Tianjin and compelled the Chinese to accept the treaties of Tianjin (1858), to which France, Russia, and the United States were also party. China agreed to open 11 more ports, permit foreign legations in Beijing, sanction Christian missionary activity, and legalize the import of opium. China's subsequent attempt to block the entry of diplomats into Beijing as well as Britain's determination to enforce the new treaty terms led to a renewal of the war in 1859. This time the British and French occupied Beijing and burned the imperial summer palace (Yuan ming yuan). The Beijing conventions of 1860, by which China was forced to reaffirm the terms of the Treaty of Tianjin and make additional concessions, concluded the hostilities.
See A. Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes (1958, repr. 1968); H.-P. Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (1964); P. W. Fay, The Opium War, 1840-1842 (1975).
And perhaps parent johnhennessy touches upon a bigger problem:-)
Libraries are generally wonderful, amazing places: well organised, friendly and incredibly expert staff who do their best to get what you need for little or no cost.
But there is a cost - and people forget about it, because its in our taxes. (Whether or not we should pay for public libraries out of our taxes, and whether the money is well spent is another argument). But the bottom line is that we've had 100 years or so of great services because there has been a general philosophical acceptance that it's a Good Thing for everybody to throw in a few cents for a building in every town, full of good books, staffed by experts, and with an infrastructure to enable gaps in individual library stocks to be covered at a national *and* international level by an interlibrary loan service. Most developed countries now have a superbly developed system for getting paper-based information to their citizens for little cost. My question is: would we accept paying taxes to do the same via the internet?
I think it's mainly a philosophical, rather than technical question. If we all agreed to pay additional 'library taxes' then there's no reason why existing sources couldn't be made available to all citizens (e.g. your National Insurance number is your password, now you can get the NYT online for free, NYT gets paid by the treasury for its national-to-all-citizens licence each year) and also in the same way that many library indexing systems were evolved by librarians working under public funding, why not use public funding to develop internet archiving / retrieval systems of comparable value? I think it's a philosophical issue, it depends on how you see these technical solutions being funded.
seeing as we're talking lawyer territory and boy do they like to argue minor points, that's probably 'English Law' - there's no such thing as 'British Law' (e.g. Scotland has different legal system). I believe the same is true on your side of the pond, no 'American law' but a separate 'USA law' 'Mexican law', 'Canadian law' etc:-)
...it's likely he hasn't got the money so the whole thing is irrelevent anyway. It feels like a lot of the posts are arguing "he's stupid because he doesn't understand/ can't afford the global patenting system so he deserves to be screwed". Which is happening right across less developed countries. Doesn't mean it's necessararily right, surely? I heard (welcome to be dis/proved) there's a US company which has the patent rights on Basmati rice, been grown in India for 5000 years... I really don't understand this...
I'd be honoured. Glad to make you smile. Good luck with your publication and good for you taking the risk and using the creative commons licence. I hope it works out well for you.
Releasing a valuable literary work under such a hippy, liberal, communist style copyright agreement? with all sorts of potential financial opportunities such as sales to Hollywood, serialisation in popular magazines, web based commercial exploitation? Is the author mad? IS HE ON DRUGS?
You say the SS-18 is the cheapest ride into space. Out of curiousity, how much did it cost? Say I build myself a satellite, as the radio amateurs did, how much will the Kazakhs / Russians charge me to put it into orbit?
well said. "US Army" or "Bad Guy". Hmmm, and people wonder why some countries are nervous of the USA?... Mind you the parent post does make the good point that a valid point of games is try out alternate scenarios within a historical context, "what if's".
:-) Nice post but seriously... this could close down small companies and freelancers, and mean only large companies can afford the hardware to fire shows. Ok so big shows right now use a lot of expensive equipment (laptops, electronic firing, etc) but it's still possible to do small shows (village celebrations, weddings, etc) with relatively simple set ups. Blackpowder shells cost a few dollars each and mortars (waxed cardboard or grp) don't cost much. You can hand fire or build a small firing box for a few dollars. It's possible for an individual / small team to have fun, make a little money, and work safely for not too much cash. How much investment will be required to purchased the whole compressed air firing system? Will this force the small players out, and reduce the fireworks industry to major companies and individuals working as franchises? is the future Disney/ Mcfireworks? Wonder how the patenting system will work out...
Slashdot Mirror
is the 4th one Tintagel, Cornwall (UK)?
can you recommend free/shareware software for Windows to check my computer for trojans?
cheers
you're right - it might be funny to the slashdot crowd but "does it come in pink?" (or blue, or neon, or whatever is kewl this month) is increasingly going to be the reason that these things sell over their competitors. For the vast number of buyers, all the models do roughly the same thing (they hold lots of tunes and fit in your pocket). It will move from differentiating models by technical qualities to aesthetic qualities, same as any other consumer product. When's the last time you chose a toaster based on its technical specs? Bet you went for the kewl chrome/curvy/ retro look one...
I'd like to see a map of Internet usage overlaid with average income, think this would be more interesting than tv use. I am guessing most people in USA can get access to a tv, and most people watch more than one hour a day (how many hours a day to average USians spend in front of computers, that would be interesting as well).
cool, cheers. So actually the teenager ends up getting a fine of 500 dollars or so? something big enough to make him go "ouch" and have to sit at home and watch tv with his mum and dad for a year while his friends are out on the town, but not sending in the local officials to vacuum clean his room for anything worth more than a dollar? Is the 10 million fine then nominally put in place as a precedent (UK law works on precedence as I understand) so if a company/ rich adult with more like this kind of money commits the same offense, the prosecution can request a fine of this amount because there is a precedent for doing so?
How does the Money restitution thing work in the USA anyway? we are always hearing on the media how somebody has been sued / fined 1 /10/ 100 million dollars for a crime. How does this work in reality? I'm guessing the 18 yr old in this case has a Saturday job in the local shop, maybe a job delivering newspapers, that sort of thing, few dollars an hour at most, annual income in the region of 5000 dollars if he's lucky. Do they set up some repayment plan over the next 30 years taking a percentage of his income, or what? or is it purely a nominal figure to impress the court and the media and they write it off as he obviously doesn't have 10 million in his piggy bank / teenage savings account?
UK Company is doing this. I saw a presentation by one of the company at a meeting of the London Virtual Reality Group in 2001(?), in the Bartlett School of Architecture.
serves me right, RTFA :-))) - Sniper-Geek-Boy is an Old European whose company lives in a Cold War Bunker... nuff said, maybe there is a pattern here. Maybe you guys can help him join the Army over there, our Army is getting cut back...
WhyTF does the geek with the 'rifle' have that smug expression? I mean, if he really wants to feel like a big man, I got the impression that right now its pretty easy in the US to sign up and go play with the real thing in a real conflict?
"I opened it up, fixed it and have been using it for nearly 5 years. Not a bad lifespan for a free piece of hardware."
Only in the computing industry... I have some of my dad's powertools (10 years old), drive my grandmother's car (39 years old), got some of my great granddad's hand tools (70? years old). The computing model really annoys me, this is just not sustainable, the world is drowning under a sea of thrown out crap. Why can't we build stuff to last a bit longer? or more significantly design systems that can work with older kit... Me, sick of software bloat. Even new distros of linux assume 2Gb hard drives and 128Mb Ram minimum. All my mum wants to do is email, and word process. I'm sure I managed this ten years ago. Surely must be achievable without hardcore linux geekhacking skills. We realy should try to develop a more long term design philosophy. I've got a three year old mobile phone, Ericsson, shockproofed, gortex lined, you can drop it in a pond and fish it out and use it, no problem. They don't make them any more. My guess is - because people like me buy them and don't need to buy another one six months later. We really need a big paradigm shift...(imho)
I'm not sure anybody has any ill will towards Finland today (except maybe Bill Gates, grin!). But the Finns have a history of their big neighbours visiting quite regularly.... (Russia, Sweden...)
This is one of the models that Benford and his team considered - a decline of civilisation. However they also considered the "see-saw" model - we enter a new dark ages for a couple of thousand years, and society loses a lot of knowledge, but then comes back up again a couple of thousand years later. Doesn't necessarily need to be something terminally bad that kills all humans, how about a global genocidal dictator, a global version of what happened to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot? or some disease that wipes a lot of us out (99%?) but the few survivors build up an immunity?
read Benford's "Deep Time" - a fascinating report on his work with Sandia thinking about how we could design texts/monuments that will let our descendents 10,000 years from now that *something really bad* is underneath this pile of rock they are considering digging into. An interesting problem which will require some work to solve....
We invaded a sovereign state just because they wouldn't buy our trade goods..probably many other examples through history as well...
Opium Wars, 1839-42 and 1856-60, two wars between China and Western countries. The first was between Great Britain and China. Early in the 19th cent., British merchants began smuggling opium into China in order to balance their purchases of tea for export to Britain. In 1839, China enforced its prohibitions on the importation of opium by destroying at Guangzhou (Canton) a large quantity of opium confiscated from British merchants. Great Britain, which had been looking to end China's restrictions on foreign trade, responded by sending gunboats to attack several Chinese coastal cities. China, unable to withstand modern arms, was defeated and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) and the British Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue (1843). These provided that the ports of Guangzhou, Jinmen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai should be open to British trade and residence; in addition Hong Kong was ceded to the British. Within a few years other Western powers signed similar treaties with China and received commercial and residential privileges, and the Western domination of China's treaty ports began. In 1856 a second war broke out following an allegedly illegal Chinese search of a British-registered ship, the Arrow, in Guangzhou. British and French troops took Guangzhou and Tianjin and compelled the Chinese to accept the treaties of Tianjin (1858), to which France, Russia, and the United States were also party. China agreed to open 11 more ports, permit foreign legations in Beijing, sanction Christian missionary activity, and legalize the import of opium. China's subsequent attempt to block the entry of diplomats into Beijing as well as Britain's determination to enforce the new treaty terms led to a renewal of the war in 1859. This time the British and French occupied Beijing and burned the imperial summer palace (Yuan ming yuan). The Beijing conventions of 1860, by which China was forced to reaffirm the terms of the Treaty of Tianjin and make additional concessions, concluded the hostilities.
See A. Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes (1958, repr. 1968); H.-P. Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (1964); P. W. Fay, The Opium War, 1840-1842 (1975).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2004, Columbia University Press.
Libraries are generally wonderful, amazing places: well organised, friendly and incredibly expert staff who do their best to get what you need for little or no cost.
But there is a cost - and people forget about it, because its in our taxes. (Whether or not we should pay for public libraries out of our taxes, and whether the money is well spent is another argument). But the bottom line is that we've had 100 years or so of great services because there has been a general philosophical acceptance that it's a Good Thing for everybody to throw in a few cents for a building in every town, full of good books, staffed by experts, and with an infrastructure to enable gaps in individual library stocks to be covered at a national *and* international level by an interlibrary loan service. Most developed countries now have a superbly developed system for getting paper-based information to their citizens for little cost.
My question is: would we accept paying taxes to do the same via the internet?
I think it's mainly a philosophical, rather than technical question. If we all agreed to pay additional 'library taxes' then there's no reason why existing sources couldn't be made available to all citizens (e.g. your National Insurance number is your password, now you can get the NYT online for free, NYT gets paid by the treasury for its national-to-all-citizens licence each year) and also in the same way that many library indexing systems were evolved by librarians working under public funding, why not use public funding to develop internet archiving / retrieval systems of comparable value? I think it's a philosophical issue, it depends on how you see these technical solutions being funded.
just a thought, but do you have kids? have you taken this route with them?
seeing as we're talking lawyer territory and boy do they like to argue minor points, that's probably 'English Law' - there's no such thing as 'British Law' (e.g. Scotland has different legal system). I believe the same is true on your side of the pond, no 'American law' but a separate 'USA law' 'Mexican law', 'Canadian law' etc :-)
...it's likely he hasn't got the money so the whole thing is irrelevent anyway. It feels like a lot of the posts are arguing "he's stupid because he doesn't understand/ can't afford the global patenting system so he deserves to be screwed". Which is happening right across less developed countries. Doesn't mean it's necessararily right, surely? I heard (welcome to be dis/proved) there's a US company which has the patent rights on Basmati rice, been grown in India for 5000 years... I really don't understand this...
Hey, Libya is our friend, Libya has always been our friend. Oh, I meant Eurasia. Or did I mean Eastasia?
Huh, politics, I just leave that to politicians, they tell the truth, they know what's best ;-)
sir (I assume)
I'd be honoured. Glad to make you smile. Good luck with your publication and good for you taking the risk and using the creative commons licence. I hope it works out well for you.
-- sir fantomas the digitally meandering
Releasing a valuable literary work under such a hippy, liberal, communist style copyright agreement? with all sorts of potential financial opportunities such as sales to Hollywood, serialisation in popular magazines, web based commercial exploitation? Is the author mad? IS HE ON DRUGS?
You say the SS-18 is the cheapest ride into space. Out of curiousity, how much did it cost? Say I build myself a satellite, as the radio amateurs did, how much will the Kazakhs / Russians charge me to put it into orbit?
well said. "US Army" or "Bad Guy". Hmmm, and people wonder why some countries are nervous of the USA? ...
Mind you the parent post does make the good point that a valid point of games is try out alternate scenarios within a historical context, "what if's".
(sorry, somebody had to make that reference, grin..)
:-) Nice post but seriously... this could close down small companies and freelancers, and mean only large companies can afford the hardware to fire shows. Ok so big shows right now use a lot of expensive equipment (laptops, electronic firing, etc) but it's still possible to do small shows (village celebrations, weddings, etc) with relatively simple set ups. Blackpowder shells cost a few dollars each and mortars (waxed cardboard or grp) don't cost much. You can hand fire or build a small firing box for a few dollars. It's possible for an individual / small team to have fun, make a little money, and work safely for not too much cash. How much investment will be required to purchased the whole compressed air firing system? Will this force the small players out, and reduce the fireworks industry to major companies and individuals working as franchises? is the future Disney/ Mcfireworks? Wonder how the patenting system will work out...