exactly. And remind me the name of the guy who did the Oklahoma bombing?..... remind me of the press's assumptions of who we should be looking for before they found the guy?
Yup, terrorist attacks have been a fact of life in European and other non-USA capitals for much much longer than 9/11. It's a shame when US media makes out global terrorism started then, I really think the US media is the US's worst enemy, so many people have negative attitudes towards the USA because of dumb statements their media (and sometimes their politicians) come out with.
But I think this emphasis on anti-terrorist measures (I refuse to use the dumbed down expression "War against Terrorism") is a very convenient way of bringing in restrictive and possibly invasive procedures and legislation. It's really important we all press for careful policing of how new laws and technologies are applied.
Vandana Shiva -- Patents: Myths and Reality
Penguin India,ISBN 014029824X
A great book destroying some myths, pointing out that a great deal of patents are based on work carried out over hundreds or possibly thousands of years, gradual accumulation of wisdom by people who shared knowledge for whatever reasons.... and along come (mainly western) corporations and claim they have invented a process or discovered a plant and some uses for it and wish to charge everybody else for doing so...
Free software movement? sharing by farmers been going on for thousands of years but the big companies are trying to close it down fast....
(blurb from the publishers follows....)
"Dr Vandana Shiva in her most recent offering, demystifies patent laws and highlights the ethical, ecological and economic impacts of globalised patent regimes."
Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.
The representation can be just as good as the real thing if you only need to get a percentage of the content out of it. Let's leave the very real issue of how well the reproduced medium will survive aside for the moment (others have discussed this). If you just want to read the content, or get some practice at reading cunieform, then a digitised image will be just fine. Thousands of undergraduate students all over the world can gain experience and knowledge without flying to USA or UK or Iraq or wherever the originals are. And they will gain a lot of benefit from them.
It's a bit like books really. I am happy to pick up a cheap second hand paperback copy of a book if my friends have all told me how great it is and I have a long train journey. I might think about travelling to London and looking at a first edition copy if I was a student of printing, interested in the paper and ink and binding. Depends on what you are researching.
Oh I really hope your post is a deeply ironic humourous one, sessamoid. I notice all your examples are from the USA.
Having travelled to India, Spain, several other hot countries, I've seen a lot of architecture designed to work with the temperatures: narrow alleyways which are always in shade, houses with thick insulating walls and small windows, air ways through the houses to channel slight breezes into cooling air flows. These things work. These things have been working for hundreds if not thousands of years.
I believe you are refering to architecture and town planning dependant on artificial cooling techniques: big, open pavements exposed to the sun, large glass and steel buildings with huge windows, big doors facing into the sun.... Also check out people's life styles. Remember Rudyard Kipling's famous line 'only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun'. If you're in India or the southern Mediterranean, people get off the streets by 11 in the morning. It's just the crazy tourists wandering around out there. Everybody else is working or relaxing out of the sun in the nice cool shaded buildings. If you want to see real genius, check out the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (and I am sure there are many other fine examples).
Please tell me your email was one of those 'wind up the dumb rednecks' style postings...
You bin on the water of life? Where's this Egg place then? somewhere near Huy Brasil? surely you refer to Eigg? (though I think Muck would take the corners better...)
Yeah, there was a political sea change, the USSR broke up, pretty well the whole space programme went on hold and afterwards there wasn't the political will to keep spending on this kind of research. I am not sure I understand your point.... there are several well known references to how Buran was actually a better space plane than the US shuttle...
Last time I checked, most Americans seemed unable to get their head round manual gear changing on cars.... Not sure what this means for computerised interfaces for gawd's sake...
I think the graphics on the website rocked! (e.g. http://www.audiovisualizers.com/madlab/lcdproj/lcd plan_1.jpg) . Who needs web designers? Cool or what? Especially liked the crumpled pages:-)
(Great fun, I really mean this, true mad scientist web pages!)
ah yeah, I guess I was pointing out the reason people are veggie sometimes, issues of morality etc. Speaking as a veggie for 18 years, I've never felt the need for tasting meat, but also know some people who do. Guess this is the reason there is a market in meat flavoured veggie products. I suppose the politically correct veggie angle would be that it is better to enjoy a taste of bacon by eating meat substitutes than to actually kill animals. A bit like if you're into guns its probably better to go to a shooting range or play Quake than go down your high street shooting people. Or something. I guess I go with the Gandhi line 'the world has enough for everybody's needs but not everybody's greed'... but that's a whole other conversation... what was this/. thread originally?:-)))) . Nice talking with you.
bacon? yuk. factory farmed animal fed on ground up parts of its own species, forced to live in its own shit in cramped conditions and is force fed till killed at an early age. Hmmm...I bin resisting for the last 18 years somehow, somehow.
cultural thing I guess. Maybe American veggies always give in to twinkies or summink.
Well I am not an expert so I welcome the additional wisdom here... But in recent years, for example, how about Nokia or one of the Japanese companies that have done so much with mobile phone interfaces? Probably a lot of good work being done by people like Sony on more pure 'computer' interfaces as well. How about the guys who put Minitel together? ok so it's dated now but way back there in the 70s and 80s a *huge* percentage of the French public were buying services and getting information over computer networks way before the internet as we know it now had moved into the public domain.
Hmm, is this a bit like a baseball 'World Series'? Surely not every 'Top Research Lab in Human-Computer Interaction' in the last 50 years is from the US....
trusty M16? piece of rubbish, apparently...
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2
Excellent essay you should read: "The American Army and the M-16" by John Fallows, pp382 - 393 in "The Social Shaping of Technology" by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman. Published Open University, 1999. ISBN 0335 19914 3
"By the middle of 1967...a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their pathetically unreliable equipment [M16s], and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen, to attract the attention of a congressional investigating committee [Special Subcommittee on the M-16 rifle Program]"
Well, here in the UK we had a similar set up for a couple of hundred years, called the British Empire. You know the one - 'the sun never sets on the empire' so called because we had land right around the globe.
I think the USA is in a similar position to where the UK was at the turn of the 19th-20th century. We were the number one empire. It didn't matter what anybody else thought, we could do it anyway, other people would just have to follow. We had the mightiest army and navy in the world. We were so powerful the expression Splendid Isolation was used - and we could travel the world and pretty well demand the locals spoke in English and did things our way.
Not just military power either - hey, multinationals eat your heart out, a UK company ran a whole *subcontinent* as its own property (the East India Company).
But times change and we're still picking up the pieces, dealing with the consequences. Actually I think the British dealt with the passing of the Empire a lot better than some other countries, but oh boy we committed some evil in its name.
Guess times will always change so it scares me a bit when people get really excited about the latest military technology and spout forth about it, like it will keep their country top dog and ruler of the world for ever, a bit like how people used to talk about the Dreadnought battleships in Britain when they first appeared.
Everything will change so might as well be good to your grandchildren by assuring that your country is looked on with more positive feelings than negative at that time, use the power wisely, eh?
At some point in the future it will be a Pax China, or a Pax Andorra, or something else....
It would be quite funny if the Chinese hacked together a solution on this one, or maybe did a combined effort with the Russians.
Seems like the USA is the place everybody is holding back on the possibilities of space, it is the Russians who are up for opening up to tourism, the Chinese who have the big dream for their country, Europeans doing a solid commercial job of launching satellites down Guyana way.
Oh, Don't forget it is Yuri's night this Friday...
Get with the real world ksheff - ok for us geeks Friday night might mean LAN party or late night hackery but for Joe Average this means going down the bar, drinking lots, and guess what, a percentage end up in fights/losing girlfriends/ falling off bar stools and lo and behold in Casualty with a sore head, drunk and up for a fight. I have the upmost respect for doctors and nurses who deal with these idiots with angelic levels of care and patience and don't come up with stupid suggestions like 'use weaponry on them'.
Reckon this is as true a definition of a hacker as any other covered by/. , certainly it's news for nerds. The man's into monorails, he builds his own. Charming mad inventor eccentricity.
I think my favourite statement is "While we go around the loop, imagine how much of the garden and fence we would have needed to rip out to put in a garden light rail instead of this!"... wonderful, I mean, hands up how many people assume that the average back yard will have a 'garden light rail'. Good on him and best of luck I say, and keep us posted.
Slashdot Mirror
exactly. And remind me the name of the guy who did the Oklahoma bombing?..... remind me of the press's assumptions of who we should be looking for before they found the guy?
But the craic's great and the pubs are fine :-))
"It was the fraud, not the clueless business plan
"
Funny thing that, I always thought the same about the Soviet Union... :-P
Yup, terrorist attacks have been a fact of life in European and other non-USA capitals for much much longer than 9/11. It's a shame when US media makes out global terrorism started then, I really think the US media is the US's worst enemy, so many people have negative attitudes towards the USA because of dumb statements their media (and sometimes their politicians) come out with.
But I think this emphasis on anti-terrorist measures (I refuse to use the dumbed down expression "War against Terrorism") is a very convenient way of bringing in restrictive and possibly invasive procedures and legislation. It's really important we all press for careful policing of how new laws and technologies are applied.
Vandana Shiva -- Patents: Myths and Reality
Penguin India,ISBN 014029824X
A great book destroying some myths, pointing out that a great deal of patents are based on work carried out over hundreds or possibly thousands of years, gradual accumulation of wisdom by people who shared knowledge for whatever reasons.... and along come (mainly western) corporations and claim they have invented a process or discovered a plant and some uses for it and wish to charge everybody else for doing so...
Free software movement? sharing by farmers been going on for thousands of years but the big companies are trying to close it down fast....
(blurb from the publishers follows....)
"Dr Vandana Shiva in her most recent offering, demystifies patent laws and highlights the ethical, ecological and economic impacts of globalised patent regimes."
Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.
The representation can be just as good as the real thing if you only need to get a percentage of the content out of it. Let's leave the very real issue of how well the reproduced medium will survive aside for the moment (others have discussed this). If you just want to read the content, or get some practice at reading cunieform, then a digitised image will be just fine. Thousands of undergraduate students all over the world can gain experience and knowledge without flying to USA or UK or Iraq or wherever the originals are. And they will gain a lot of benefit from them.
It's a bit like books really. I am happy to pick up a cheap second hand paperback copy of a book if my friends have all told me how great it is and I have a long train journey. I might think about travelling to London and looking at a first edition copy if I was a student of printing, interested in the paper and ink and binding. Depends on what you are researching.
Oh I really hope your post is a deeply ironic humourous one, sessamoid. I notice all your examples are from the USA.
Having travelled to India, Spain, several other hot countries, I've seen a lot of architecture designed to work with the temperatures: narrow alleyways which are always in shade, houses with thick insulating walls and small windows, air ways through the houses to channel slight breezes into cooling air flows. These things work. These things have been working for hundreds if not thousands of years.
I believe you are refering to architecture and town planning dependant on artificial cooling techniques: big, open pavements exposed to the sun, large glass and steel buildings with huge windows, big doors facing into the sun.... Also check out people's life styles. Remember Rudyard Kipling's famous line 'only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun'. If you're in India or the southern Mediterranean, people get off the streets by 11 in the morning. It's just the crazy tourists wandering around out there. Everybody else is working or relaxing out of the sun in the nice cool shaded buildings. If you want to see real genius, check out the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (and I am sure there are many other fine examples).
Please tell me your email was one of those 'wind up the dumb rednecks' style postings...
like Egg fr'instance?
You bin on the water of life? Where's this Egg place then? somewhere near Huy Brasil? surely you refer to Eigg? (though I think Muck would take the corners better...)
is this sponsored by any eco-freaks?
Are you one of those fake readers created by US oil companies?
Can't be less efficient than drilling oil in some far off country like the USA and shipping it 3000 miles to be used...
Russia only flew it _once_ for a reason!
Yeah, there was a political sea change, the USSR broke up, pretty well the whole space programme went on hold and afterwards there wasn't the political will to keep spending on this kind of research. I am not sure I understand your point.... there are several well known references to how Buran was actually a better space plane than the US shuttle...
"Americans are afraid of technology"
Last time I checked, most Americans seemed unable to get their head round manual gear changing on cars.... Not sure what this means for computerised interfaces for gawd's sake...
:-P
I think the graphics on the website rocked!d plan_1.jpg) . Who needs web designers? Cool or what? Especially liked the crumpled pages :-)
(e.g. http://www.audiovisualizers.com/madlab/lcdproj/lc
(Great fun, I really mean this, true mad scientist web pages!)
They should speak to the Long Now Foundation. They've been doing some good long term thinking...
ah yeah, I guess I was pointing out the reason people are veggie sometimes, issues of morality etc. Speaking as a veggie for 18 years, I've never felt the need for tasting meat, but also know some people who do. Guess this is the reason there is a market in meat flavoured veggie products. I suppose the politically correct veggie angle would be that it is better to enjoy a taste of bacon by eating meat substitutes than to actually kill animals. A bit like if you're into guns its probably better to go to a shooting range or play Quake than go down your high street shooting people. Or something. I guess I go with the Gandhi line 'the world has enough for everybody's needs but not everybody's greed' ... but that's a whole other conversation... what was this /. thread originally? :-)))) . Nice talking with you.
So does that mean vegans are higher on the evolutionary scale than meat eating humans?
bacon? yuk. factory farmed animal fed on ground up parts of its own species, forced to live in its own shit in cramped conditions and is force fed till killed at an early age. Hmmm...I bin resisting for the last 18 years somehow, somehow.
cultural thing I guess. Maybe American veggies always give in to twinkies or summink.
nah, probably sold off from British Rail....
Well I am not an expert so I welcome the additional wisdom here... But in recent years, for example, how about Nokia or one of the Japanese companies that have done so much with mobile phone interfaces? Probably a lot of good work being done by people like Sony on more pure 'computer' interfaces as well. How about the guys who put Minitel together? ok so it's dated now but way back there in the 70s and 80s a *huge* percentage of the French public were buying services and getting information over computer networks way before the internet as we know it now had moved into the public domain.
Interested to know your thoughts.
Hmm, is this a bit like a baseball 'World Series'? Surely not every 'Top Research Lab in Human-Computer Interaction' in the last 50 years is from the US....
Excellent essay you should read:
"The American Army and the M-16" by John Fallows, pp382 - 393 in "The Social Shaping of Technology" by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman. Published Open University, 1999. ISBN 0335 19914 3
"By the middle of 1967...a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their pathetically unreliable equipment [M16s], and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen, to attract the attention of a congressional investigating committee [Special Subcommittee on the M-16 rifle Program]"
Well, here in the UK we had a similar set up for a couple of hundred years, called the British Empire. You know the one - 'the sun never sets on the empire' so called because we had land right around the globe.
I think the USA is in a similar position to where the UK was at the turn of the 19th-20th century. We were the number one empire. It didn't matter what anybody else thought, we could do it anyway, other people would just have to follow. We had the mightiest army and navy in the world. We were so powerful the expression Splendid Isolation was used - and we could travel the world and pretty well demand the locals spoke in English and did things our way.
Not just military power either - hey, multinationals eat your heart out, a UK company ran a whole *subcontinent* as its own property (the East India Company).
But times change and we're still picking up the pieces, dealing with the consequences. Actually I think the British dealt with the passing of the Empire a lot better than some other countries, but oh boy we committed some evil in its name.
Guess times will always change so it scares me a bit when people get really excited about the latest military technology and spout forth about it, like it will keep their country top dog and ruler of the world for ever, a bit like how people used to talk about the Dreadnought battleships in Britain when they first appeared.
Everything will change so might as well be good to your grandchildren by assuring that your country is looked on with more positive feelings than negative at that time, use the power wisely, eh?
At some point in the future it will be a Pax China, or a Pax Andorra, or something else....
It would be quite funny if the Chinese hacked together a solution on this one, or maybe did a combined effort with the Russians.
Seems like the USA is the place everybody is holding back on the possibilities of space, it is the Russians who are up for opening up to tourism, the Chinese who have the big dream for their country, Europeans doing a solid commercial job of launching satellites down Guyana way.
Oh, Don't forget it is Yuri's night this Friday...
Big respect to our practicing medical friends.
humans? oh no, I thought it was all written by an Intelligent Designer.....
Reckon this is as true a definition of a hacker as any other covered by /. , certainly it's news for nerds. The man's into monorails, he builds his own. Charming mad inventor eccentricity.
I think my favourite statement is "While we go around the loop, imagine how much of the garden and fence we would have needed to rip out to put in a garden light rail instead of this!" ... wonderful, I mean, hands up how many people assume that the average back yard will have a 'garden light rail'. Good on him and best of luck I say, and keep us posted.