and we'll have college kids playing deathmatches with each other in classroom
I'm absolutely positive that it was gamers in the Indian government who pushed for this network. I mean, come on. It's not like there are any actually relevant uses for this in a developing nation that is trying to leapfrog the 20th century and take a leading position in the 21st.
Nope, it's all about gaming.
Brin conveniently forgets WWI
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As we all know, for years critics have drawn conclusions about the Lord of the Rings based on the assumption that Tolkien was writing about WWII.
Was he an elitist? Yes, of course he was. He was the product of his place and time. But as such, he was also a first-hand victim of technology. It's amazing to me that Brin misses entirely the impact of the First World War on Tolkien and his writing.
Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme, which was a slaughter of unprecidented scale. On the first day of the British attack, 20,000 men were mowed down by German machine guns - this coming after the British bombarded the German positions with hour after hour of relentless artillery. Tolkien lost two of his best friends to the war, and himself was sent home with trench foot.
Relentless belief in "progress" was a defining factor of the prewar period, and it took years of staggeringly innefective and grotesque fighting to convince most Europeans that progress wasn't all it had been made out to be. The men who fought the war and lived to tell the tale certainly harbored no illusions about it.
It's no wonder that Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings, a tale in which individual actions could make a difference. After seeing battlefields completely denuded of vegitation, turned to rotten, corpse-laden mud by machines of death, is it so surprising that he glorified the fields and trees and rivers? Perhaps the Dead Marshes aren't such a stretch when you've seen bodies littering the battlefield.
Tough to stay optimistic about the future when you've fought in one war that maimed you and killed your friends, and seen a second world conflagration that saw entire cities aflame and nations engulfed by mechanized armies.
Mr. Brin is right that we should look to the future. But in moving forward, let's not forget that there are things about the past that do bear preserving. Humanity, decency, individual responsibility, and mistrust of power seem like pretty damned useful concepts to me.
For a time I worked as a contractor on a program in the DARPA ISO (Information Systems Office). A common misperception about DARPA is that they're bumbling DoD idiots who are always running off chasing impossible goals.
DARPA was established specifically to go after high-risk, high-payoff technologies. They know that many of their projects will not result in immediate payoff in terms of useable technologies, but they figure that those technologies which do make it will leapfrog two generations ahead of any competing technology.
That being said, the program methodology at DARPA is oriented toward specific uses of technology. They're not generally interested in creating something just to see if the technology will work.
People also have the impression that the research and development takes place *at* DARPA (the infamous "clones in the basement" episode of the X-Files springs to mind;-) . The truth is that the project managers work out of DARPA, but university labs, defense contractors, and other organizations do the actual development work. In many cases, "failed" DARPA projects later lead to working technologies, based on the expertise gained during the original project.
A few days ago I was so overwhelmingly pissed off and annoyed by an ad on HotBot that I felt compelled to write them about it. Note that it was very difficult to find an appropriate category in which to lodge my complaint, since their contact page forced me to choose one. So I picked "fraud" figuring that would get a response. Here's my message:
Subject: Another Lycos Product
Type of Abuse: Fraud
Service: Report Abuse
Comments:
Congratulations!!!!!
You have managed to place the single most annoying banner ad in the history of the Internet on HotBot. The flashing "Congratulations!" banner ad for The Useful has single-handedly ensured that I will never again visit HotBot or any other TerraLycos site. I realize that you need advertising revenue, but in putting such an annoying ad on a search site, you've rendered the site itself useless because the add is so distracting and homicide-inducing.
As a side note, since it's required that I fill in my email address on this form, why don't you mention that BEFORE I get a pop up alert telling me I need to fill it in?
I didn't really think anything would come of it, and of course nothing may. But this reply made me think that if enough people, even a small percentage of total site users, complained about specific ads or ad formats, TerraLycos might change their advertising policies.
From: Hotbot Support
Date: Wed Dec 11, 2002 1:17:21 PM US/Pacific
Subject: Re: Another Lycos Product: Fraud (KMM16622000V40280L0KM)
Reply-To: Hotbot Support
Hello,
Thank you for writing in about the ad banners that appear when you use Hotbot. HotBot tries its best to maintain a balance between cutting edge advertising and good taste. However, this is sometimes a very gray area until we hear from our users who clarify this area for us. Ad banners in the past have been altered or removed because of user concerns. The HotBot team believes that user feedback is a necessity for an effective and successful product. We appreciate the time you took to write in with your comments and we'll be taking your feedback into consideration for our next Hotbot release. Thank you for understanding.
Farah
Lycos Customer Service
----------------------
Lycos.com - Part of the Lycos Network
http://www.lycos.com
(additional Lycos text advertising deleted to protect the innocent)
Not that this is terribly germaine to conversations about gun control, but having read the book and been in Somalia (Kismayo, not Mogadishu), Blackhawk Down the movie felt very accurate to me.
As for the comments about Somalis forcing the US military out with small arms, I agree with the rest of you in laughing out loud at the statement. Les Aspin wouldn't allow the military to bring in tanks because it was an "escalation". Targeting from the air was strictly controlled by an unwieldy UN C3I system, and the decision to make a daylight air assault raid in the middle of an enemy-held urban environment was questionable at best. The Rangers and Delta operatives still inflicted massive casualties on Aideed's militia while sustaining relatively few casualties. At virtually any other period in American history, the Mogadishu operation would have been considered a tremendous feat of American arms.
As with the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, the battle was won on the ground, but lost in the media.
I unfortunately had a tough time getting to anything beyond the second level of the site. The server is timing out on me. I'll try it again later, as I'm anxious to find hard numbers that I can use with clients, who are almost always very resistant to arguments in favor of accessibility over flashiness.
Settle down, partner. Getting educated is what I'm trying to do, hence the question. While I appreciate your sentiment, there are decisionmakers in this world who won't just provide resources to make accessibility happen unless they have solid numbers staring them in the face. The reason I'd like the numbers is so I can put those same numbers in front of clients who don't want to pay attention to accessibility. It's tough to argue with facts.
As for prioritization, like it or not, it's a fact of life. I can't support Mosaic 1.0 in my web apps. I can't make video-intensive sites that are usable with 56.6 modem connections. But there are informed prioritization choices, and there are uninformed choices.
Some web apps and even regular sites don't support Mac or Linux browsers. My wife can't even log into her company's intranet to complete a required online course, because it doesn't support her Macintosh.
My guess is that a lot of the exclusion that happens on the Internet or even in the larger economy is based on ignorance of the facts. Had someone bothered to inform my wife's employer that 1 in 20 of their employees use Macs, they might have thought twice about making a Windows-only intranet.
So shouldn't the facts (disputed though they may be) about the special needs community be trumpeted loudly, in the interest of informing web developers and most importantly, their clients?
That is, do we know how many blind Web users there are in the world? Do we know how many visually impaired but not fully blind users there are? What about other conditions that lead to accessibility requirements? The figures on color blindness are fairly well-known, but what are the other big ones?
With solid figures, it might be easier for those of us who are interested in providing more accessible web apps to actually convince the folks with the money to throw down for the extra cost of making sites more accessible.
This would also help prioritize usability issues. For example, is color the issue that affects the largest number of special needs users? Or is it type size or alternate text for text readers? What comes next? As much as I'd love to be able to accomodate every single special need, just as with featureset prioritization on any project, I need to know what issues to tackle first.
The interesting thing to me is that even though droves of Windows users would agree with this statement from the article: "Microsoft crams a bad system down peoples' throats. It's the evil empire, big brother, a monolithic corporation," they're still unwilling to explore other options.
Circa 1999 it was Linux user = hobbyist geek. Now Linux has been revealed as a savior to businesses of all stripes, but if you're an "early convert" you're still seen as a hobbyist geek, rather than a smart person who picked Linux early for the right reasons.
Something similar may be going on now with the Mac. It's been the cultists who have kept Apple and the Mac alive, but with the release of OS X and the influx of UNIX folks and perhaps a few Windows converts, the cultists are viewed with scorn as the faith-driven zealots rather than as rational adopters of what is really just a computer system.
The Mac has always offered something basic that Microsoft and most (but not all) PC vendors simply don't understand. The computer is built to work out of the box for the human being, not the other way around. You can argue all you want about how it limits your upgrade options, costs more, doesn't run as many apps, but there will always be a certain segment of the computer-using population that very strongly wants a computer that just works, with no fuss.
Now why should people who believe in that concept get labeled as oddballs? Maybe its the rest of the population that's odd, for settling on buggy, conflict-riddled, nonsecure by default, inelegant crap.
it's not as if the Chinese governemnt wouldn't have something to filter the internet in place if Sun, MS and Cisco weren't selling the stuff.
That's the old, "if we don't do it, someone else will, so why not?" argument. If we don't sell weapons to UNITA, someone else will, and dammit, we don't want the Belgians and Germans to make money when we could be! Why bother with an arms embargo on Serbia, when someone else will just sell them weapons?
The fallacy with this argument is that first, the technology being sold by Cisco, et. al. is not irreplaceable, but it's not exactly easy to simply duplicate in a commodity fashion. It would take a concerted effort to conduct this blocking using other equipment. Sure, it wouldn't stop them, but it would make it more difficult, thereby giving the information more of an opportunity to achieve freedom. Of course, the information doesn't just suddenly attain free status on its own, it takes people to make it free.
The other fallacy is that there's a moral equivalency between profiting from unethical or immoral behavior, and choosing *not* to profit from it. If someone does something wrong, and you assist them in that endeavor, you're doing something wrong, too.
I certainly don't expect big companies like M$ and Cisco to deny themselves the opportunity to do business with the Chinese government. I'm not naiive. However, even big multinationals are very sensitive to public opinion. Witness Nike and the sweatshops, the growth of Fair Trade Coffee, and so on. If we do nothing when companies engage in amoral profiteering, it's no wonder we expect it from them.
I don't share your belief that the Chinese system of control over information flow will somehow magically disappear on its own. Not only that, but the US supposedly represents freedom of expression. How are those millions of Chinese going to feel about American rhetoric about freedom when we've been profiting from the squelching of freedoms in their country?
Remember reading about the Microsoft-driven Hospital of the Future(tm) a couple of yars back? I was trying to find info about it by doing a Google search. Amazing what * Microsoft hospital * brought up. MS is definitely making a concerted push in the health care industry.
Let your imaginations wander, and ponder a point in the future when all of our health care facilities will be run on Microsoft....
Perhaps I've become too jaded and cynical. I've just seen so many hardware items pitched as the Next Big Thing over the past couple of decades. It just seems to me that adoption of new form factors for computers really takes a long time, and getting consumers to try something new is like trying to wring blood from a stone.
I may end up having to eat my words if the Tablet PC takes off in the next two or three years. You'll of course be able to track me down and tell me you told me so.:-) Of course, since you're an Anonymous Coward, I can't do the same if they fail.;-)
Actually, I'm aware of the whole swiveling LCD trick of Tablet PCs. It's quite spiffy, but I still don't buy the idea that people are going to want to shell out the extra bucks for it. In particular, the writing tablet might be good for taking notes. But I still don't think people will see note-taking ability as a reason to buy an entirely new piece of hardware.
The Franklin Planner crowd will love it, but most people are simply not interested in being that organized, particularly when you know even the most sophisticated handwriting recognition software Microsoft can come up with will leave you with some misspelled and unreadable words in your notes.
Seriously. Look at the people you live and work with and tell me that they'd all love to fork out several hundred bucks for a machine that would let them do some of what their laptop does, with the *oh goody!* added bonus of being able to take notes. It won't fly.
Remember how Ellison and lots of luminaries were telling us just a few years ago that we'd all be using thin clients in our kitchens to look up recipies from the Web? Why would anyone want raw processing power on the client side, when everything you needed could be found on the Web?
So with tablets we're getting a bulkier PDA (which is therefore not so handy for PDA uses), yet crippled in functionality when compared to a standard laptop, and certainly nowhere near as useful for all-around home and business use as a desktop computer.
Sure, tablets will be handy for vertical market uses. In fact, anyone who works in the shipping industry can tell you that these things have been around for years in more specialized roles. You could even argue that the Newton 2000 was a scaled-down tablet. Too big to be a good PDA, too small to offer much outside of vertical markets.
The PC industry is desperate for something, anything, that can drive sales. So they're dressing up an old notion and calling it "innovation". Think about it. Corporate IT departments won't buy them when they've already invested in laptops. Kids won't want them, because they want game power. Ma and Pa Kettle won't want them because they don't want to write emails in longhand. It's just not gonna fly as a mass-market product.
Ah! I knew there would be at least one post like yours. You can mod Mac cases, you know;-)
My point was simply that until Apple came out with their "tract homes", nobody really paid much attention to how their PCs looked. If you've moved beyond the Mac and are making your own modifications to your PC case, that's great, but you have to admit that Apple sparked something.
Actually, if your property is threatened, building a sea wall will not prevent it from being washed away. In fact, it may actually speed its demise. Even people who aren't card-carrying, tree-hugging Sierra Club douchebags can see that.;-)
It's somewhat amusing to watch how "geek opinion" has shifted so far in the last three or four years. I remember when the iMac made its debut, and received serious flak in Slashdot and on other geek forums because of its looks. Then the G3 towers arrived, and they took flak, but not so much. The Cube took its fair share of heat, but there was a lot of interest as well. Along the way, more and more stories of people trying to get beyond beige started making their way into Slashdot.
I'm not making any judgements, just making an observation.
Rather than advocating some sort of new system wherein lazy-assed Americans can vote using their televisions, rather than blaming the current problems with representative democracy on the all around pathetic failure of Americans to even give a crap about any of the issues or the candidates, you're giving us some bizarre statement about "voting".
You actually expect me to spend a few hours educating myself on the issues and the candidates? You actually expect me to take five minutes to register to vote, and another half an hour to vote on election day?
Pah! You jackass! How dare you? I'd much rather whine and complain from the critics gallery without even bothering to participate. After all, it's a lot easier to blame everything on "stupid voters" when you're not one of them.;-)
Now if only there were a way to restrict usage of cell technology on planes to text messaging. That way the cellphone junkies could still communicate with folks on the ground, and everyone else could actually relax and (hypothetically) get some sleep while flying.
Of course, it'll never happen. God forbid anyone should take away people's God-given right to use a cell phone.
"Great! A new format! I ditched my vinyl for audio tape, then I ditched my audio tape for CDs. Then I tried out miniDisc, which went nowhere. Then DVDs came along, and I had to upgrade my VHS collection to DVD. Thankfully I can at least use my existing CDs in my DVD player. Now you want me to buy a player with another new format that makes it more difficult to copy music I've purchased? And all this at a time when the last thing I have money for is a new music player. Thanks, but no thanks."
I'm sure your intention was humorous, but I felt compelled to reply anyway.;-)
I know of two, in-the-flesh, breasts and all, have real lives EverSmack players. The funny thing is, they play the game and I don't.
One is a college student who gets drunk often, holds excellent dinner parties, and is engaged to one of my best friends. The other is a clinical technician by day and bartender by night, who plays EQ like a maniac.
I also know of several console gaming women, all late 20s, early 30s, who game. They do it not because their husbands/boyfriends want them to, but because they independently enjoy it. While they might not play to the fanatical exclusion of everything else in life like some men, they enjoy games, they buy games, and they don't mind saying so.
Go ahead, gun me down for this, but I'm curious about how Tomb Raider *the game* is sexist. Yes, the marketing of it is pathetic, but I don't see how the game itself is sexist.
Lara doesn't get naked (admittedly, I've only played TR 1, so maybe I'm missing something that occured later in the series), she's not stupid, she routinely guns down bad guys, she's strong, and she's capable.
She does, however, have large breasts, which coincides nicely with the fantasies of 14-18 boys (and 24-38 year old game designers). But some women do in fact have large breasts.
True story: several years ago I bought my then girlfriend a Playstation and Tomb Raider. I didn't see her on weekend afternoons for a few months, because she was always playing Tomb Raider. She loved it. The fact that this woman also had large breasts might have something to do with why she didnt' seem to mind Lara's physique, but it does beg the question: Why does the appearance of a large-breasted woman automatically make something sexist?
Generational changes forecast a decade ago
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 2
This book is controversial, but the Boomer authors, Strauss and Howe, seem to have a good grip on how generations influence and are influenced by history. If you want to get a historical background on all of this Boomers vs. Gen X vs. Millennials stuff, check out Generations. I read it back in the early 90s, and it validated a lot of what I suspected about generational politics.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm absolutely positive that it was gamers in the Indian government who pushed for this network. I mean, come on. It's not like there are any actually relevant uses for this in a developing nation that is trying to leapfrog the 20th century and take a leading position in the 21st.
Nope, it's all about gaming.
Was he an elitist? Yes, of course he was. He was the product of his place and time. But as such, he was also a first-hand victim of technology. It's amazing to me that Brin misses entirely the impact of the First World War on Tolkien and his writing.
Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme, which was a slaughter of unprecidented scale. On the first day of the British attack, 20,000 men were mowed down by German machine guns - this coming after the British bombarded the German positions with hour after hour of relentless artillery. Tolkien lost two of his best friends to the war, and himself was sent home with trench foot.
Relentless belief in "progress" was a defining factor of the prewar period, and it took years of staggeringly innefective and grotesque fighting to convince most Europeans that progress wasn't all it had been made out to be. The men who fought the war and lived to tell the tale certainly harbored no illusions about it.
It's no wonder that Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings, a tale in which individual actions could make a difference. After seeing battlefields completely denuded of vegitation, turned to rotten, corpse-laden mud by machines of death, is it so surprising that he glorified the fields and trees and rivers? Perhaps the Dead Marshes aren't such a stretch when you've seen bodies littering the battlefield.
Tough to stay optimistic about the future when you've fought in one war that maimed you and killed your friends, and seen a second world conflagration that saw entire cities aflame and nations engulfed by mechanized armies.
Mr. Brin is right that we should look to the future. But in moving forward, let's not forget that there are things about the past that do bear preserving. Humanity, decency, individual responsibility, and mistrust of power seem like pretty damned useful concepts to me.
For a time I worked as a contractor on a program in the DARPA ISO (Information Systems Office). A common misperception about DARPA is that they're bumbling DoD idiots who are always running off chasing impossible goals.
DARPA was established specifically to go after high-risk, high-payoff technologies. They know that many of their projects will not result in immediate payoff in terms of useable technologies, but they figure that those technologies which do make it will leapfrog two generations ahead of any competing technology.
That being said, the program methodology at DARPA is oriented toward specific uses of technology. They're not generally interested in creating something just to see if the technology will work.
People also have the impression that the research and development takes place *at* DARPA (the infamous "clones in the basement" episode of the X-Files springs to mind ;-) . The truth is that the project managers work out of DARPA, but university labs, defense contractors, and other organizations do the actual development work. In many cases, "failed" DARPA projects later lead to working technologies, based on the expertise gained during the original project.
Subject: Another Lycos Product
Type of Abuse: Fraud
Service: Report Abuse
Comments:
Congratulations!!!!!
You have managed to place the single most annoying banner ad in the history of the Internet on HotBot. The flashing "Congratulations!" banner ad for The Useful has single-handedly ensured that I will never again visit HotBot or any other TerraLycos site. I realize that you need advertising revenue, but in putting such an annoying ad on a search site, you've rendered the site itself useless because the add is so distracting and homicide-inducing.
As a side note, since it's required that I fill in my email address on this form, why don't you mention that BEFORE I get a pop up alert telling me I need to fill it in?
I didn't really think anything would come of it, and of course nothing may. But this reply made me think that if enough people, even a small percentage of total site users, complained about specific ads or ad formats, TerraLycos might change their advertising policies.
From: Hotbot Support
Date: Wed Dec 11, 2002 1:17:21 PM US/Pacific
Subject: Re: Another Lycos Product: Fraud (KMM16622000V40280L0KM)
Reply-To: Hotbot Support
Hello,
Thank you for writing in about the ad banners that appear when you use Hotbot. HotBot tries its best to maintain a balance between cutting edge advertising and good taste. However, this is sometimes a very gray area until we hear from our users who clarify this area for us. Ad banners in the past have been altered or removed because of user concerns. The HotBot team believes that user feedback is a necessity for an effective and successful product. We appreciate the time you took to write in with your comments and we'll be taking your feedback into consideration for our next Hotbot release. Thank you for understanding.
Farah
Lycos Customer Service
----------------------
Lycos.com - Part of the Lycos Network
http://www.lycos.com
(additional Lycos text advertising deleted to protect the innocent)
As for the comments about Somalis forcing the US military out with small arms, I agree with the rest of you in laughing out loud at the statement. Les Aspin wouldn't allow the military to bring in tanks because it was an "escalation". Targeting from the air was strictly controlled by an unwieldy UN C3I system, and the decision to make a daylight air assault raid in the middle of an enemy-held urban environment was questionable at best. The Rangers and Delta operatives still inflicted massive casualties on Aideed's militia while sustaining relatively few casualties. At virtually any other period in American history, the Mogadishu operation would have been considered a tremendous feat of American arms.
As with the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, the battle was won on the ground, but lost in the media.
Settle down, partner. Getting educated is what I'm trying to do, hence the question. While I appreciate your sentiment, there are decisionmakers in this world who won't just provide resources to make accessibility happen unless they have solid numbers staring them in the face. The reason I'd like the numbers is so I can put those same numbers in front of clients who don't want to pay attention to accessibility. It's tough to argue with facts.
As for prioritization, like it or not, it's a fact of life. I can't support Mosaic 1.0 in my web apps. I can't make video-intensive sites that are usable with 56.6 modem connections. But there are informed prioritization choices, and there are uninformed choices.
Some web apps and even regular sites don't support Mac or Linux browsers. My wife can't even log into her company's intranet to complete a required online course, because it doesn't support her Macintosh.
My guess is that a lot of the exclusion that happens on the Internet or even in the larger economy is based on ignorance of the facts. Had someone bothered to inform my wife's employer that 1 in 20 of their employees use Macs, they might have thought twice about making a Windows-only intranet.
So shouldn't the facts (disputed though they may be) about the special needs community be trumpeted loudly, in the interest of informing web developers and most importantly, their clients?
With solid figures, it might be easier for those of us who are interested in providing more accessible web apps to actually convince the folks with the money to throw down for the extra cost of making sites more accessible.
This would also help prioritize usability issues. For example, is color the issue that affects the largest number of special needs users? Or is it type size or alternate text for text readers? What comes next? As much as I'd love to be able to accomodate every single special need, just as with featureset prioritization on any project, I need to know what issues to tackle first.
Circa 1999 it was Linux user = hobbyist geek. Now Linux has been revealed as a savior to businesses of all stripes, but if you're an "early convert" you're still seen as a hobbyist geek, rather than a smart person who picked Linux early for the right reasons.
Something similar may be going on now with the Mac. It's been the cultists who have kept Apple and the Mac alive, but with the release of OS X and the influx of UNIX folks and perhaps a few Windows converts, the cultists are viewed with scorn as the faith-driven zealots rather than as rational adopters of what is really just a computer system.
The Mac has always offered something basic that Microsoft and most (but not all) PC vendors simply don't understand. The computer is built to work out of the box for the human being, not the other way around. You can argue all you want about how it limits your upgrade options, costs more, doesn't run as many apps, but there will always be a certain segment of the computer-using population that very strongly wants a computer that just works, with no fuss.
Now why should people who believe in that concept get labeled as oddballs? Maybe its the rest of the population that's odd, for settling on buggy, conflict-riddled, nonsecure by default, inelegant crap.
That's the old, "if we don't do it, someone else will, so why not?" argument. If we don't sell weapons to UNITA, someone else will, and dammit, we don't want the Belgians and Germans to make money when we could be! Why bother with an arms embargo on Serbia, when someone else will just sell them weapons?
The fallacy with this argument is that first, the technology being sold by Cisco, et. al. is not irreplaceable, but it's not exactly easy to simply duplicate in a commodity fashion. It would take a concerted effort to conduct this blocking using other equipment. Sure, it wouldn't stop them, but it would make it more difficult, thereby giving the information more of an opportunity to achieve freedom. Of course, the information doesn't just suddenly attain free status on its own, it takes people to make it free.
The other fallacy is that there's a moral equivalency between profiting from unethical or immoral behavior, and choosing *not* to profit from it. If someone does something wrong, and you assist them in that endeavor, you're doing something wrong, too.
I certainly don't expect big companies like M$ and Cisco to deny themselves the opportunity to do business with the Chinese government. I'm not naiive. However, even big multinationals are very sensitive to public opinion. Witness Nike and the sweatshops, the growth of Fair Trade Coffee, and so on. If we do nothing when companies engage in amoral profiteering, it's no wonder we expect it from them.
I don't share your belief that the Chinese system of control over information flow will somehow magically disappear on its own. Not only that, but the US supposedly represents freedom of expression. How are those millions of Chinese going to feel about American rhetoric about freedom when we've been profiting from the squelching of freedoms in their country?
Let your imaginations wander, and ponder a point in the future when all of our health care facilities will be run on Microsoft... .
I may end up having to eat my words if the Tablet PC takes off in the next two or three years. You'll of course be able to track me down and tell me you told me so. :-) Of course, since you're an Anonymous Coward, I can't do the same if they fail. ;-)
Actually, I'm aware of the whole swiveling LCD trick of Tablet PCs. It's quite spiffy, but I still don't buy the idea that people are going to want to shell out the extra bucks for it. In particular, the writing tablet might be good for taking notes. But I still don't think people will see note-taking ability as a reason to buy an entirely new piece of hardware.
The Franklin Planner crowd will love it, but most people are simply not interested in being that organized, particularly when you know even the most sophisticated handwriting recognition software Microsoft can come up with will leave you with some misspelled and unreadable words in your notes.
Seriously. Look at the people you live and work with and tell me that they'd all love to fork out several hundred bucks for a machine that would let them do some of what their laptop does, with the *oh goody!* added bonus of being able to take notes. It won't fly.
So with tablets we're getting a bulkier PDA (which is therefore not so handy for PDA uses), yet crippled in functionality when compared to a standard laptop, and certainly nowhere near as useful for all-around home and business use as a desktop computer.
Sure, tablets will be handy for vertical market uses. In fact, anyone who works in the shipping industry can tell you that these things have been around for years in more specialized roles. You could even argue that the Newton 2000 was a scaled-down tablet. Too big to be a good PDA, too small to offer much outside of vertical markets.
The PC industry is desperate for something, anything, that can drive sales. So they're dressing up an old notion and calling it "innovation". Think about it. Corporate IT departments won't buy them when they've already invested in laptops. Kids won't want them, because they want game power. Ma and Pa Kettle won't want them because they don't want to write emails in longhand. It's just not gonna fly as a mass-market product.
My point was simply that until Apple came out with their "tract homes", nobody really paid much attention to how their PCs looked. If you've moved beyond the Mac and are making your own modifications to your PC case, that's great, but you have to admit that Apple sparked something.
Actually, if your property is threatened, building a sea wall will not prevent it from being washed away. In fact, it may actually speed its demise. Even people who aren't card-carrying, tree-hugging Sierra Club douchebags can see that.
I'm not making any judgements, just making an observation.
You actually expect me to spend a few hours educating myself on the issues and the candidates? You actually expect me to take five minutes to register to vote, and another half an hour to vote on election day?
Pah! You jackass! How dare you? I'd much rather whine and complain from the critics gallery without even bothering to participate. After all, it's a lot easier to blame everything on "stupid voters" when you're not one of them. ;-)
Of course, it'll never happen. God forbid anyone should take away people's God-given right to use a cell phone.
Hmm... So I guess women should stick to Barbies?
I know of two, in-the-flesh, breasts and all, have real lives EverSmack players. The funny thing is, they play the game and I don't.
One is a college student who gets drunk often, holds excellent dinner parties, and is engaged to one of my best friends. The other is a clinical technician by day and bartender by night, who plays EQ like a maniac.
I also know of several console gaming women, all late 20s, early 30s, who game. They do it not because their husbands/boyfriends want them to, but because they independently enjoy it. While they might not play to the fanatical exclusion of everything else in life like some men, they enjoy games, they buy games, and they don't mind saying so.
Lara doesn't get naked (admittedly, I've only played TR 1, so maybe I'm missing something that occured later in the series), she's not stupid, she routinely guns down bad guys, she's strong, and she's capable.
She does, however, have large breasts, which coincides nicely with the fantasies of 14-18 boys (and 24-38 year old game designers). But some women do in fact have large breasts.
True story: several years ago I bought my then girlfriend a Playstation and Tomb Raider. I didn't see her on weekend afternoons for a few months, because she was always playing Tomb Raider. She loved it. The fact that this woman also had large breasts might have something to do with why she didnt' seem to mind Lara's physique, but it does beg the question: Why does the appearance of a large-breasted woman automatically make something sexist?
Damn, all of us in the US are screwed!