Perception doesn't seem to be everything. It IS everything

As someone told me once, politics or ars politica, is the art of negotiation. I would venture a guess that when negotiating something that's not directly "yours" i.e. on behalf of someone else (the people) perception is king. If you can fool your oponent into perceiving something as you would like it to be, you have much more leverage than if you don't. Lather, rinse and repeat and you have politicians choosing their words very very carefully, with the only intent of being able to change perceptions at will. So if it suits them to say something that makes the public believe it one way, but then it also allows them to later change that perception if things don't go as expected, you have a perception game after all.

Methinks.

Uhmm... good point. Maybe I picked the wrong examples.

When a new story comes out about how the government has adapt the law because of some technology advancement, we can all see how slow they are achieveing anything at all. We can see this clearly with patents, copyrights, sexting and any other number of subjects.

But how about when it has to do with money and taxes? Oh boy, so now they understand perfectly?

I actually never thought governments would move this fast to regulate BitCoins. How I wish they would move this fast to address other more important things...

Uhmm... no.. not Taco. I eat tacos for lunch and dinner though. Not kidding! I'm from Mexico.

THIS story and its comments is why I keep returning to /. despite having the many flaws we all know about.

Take any random idea and code it. Post it on /. and two things happen:

- People find prior art of it, to different degrees of precedence.
- People start finding ways to improve/cheat the system, to different degrees of sophistication, complexity and plausibility.

I mean, seriously. You can argue all you want about this community and its (our?) shortcomings, but you can't deny at some point just having a bunch of geeks or whatever you want to call us, discussing things like this story definitely gets interesting and fun.

Cheers fellow /.ers!

I believe the fundamental difference (in this context) between a phone call and text messages is not the input medium (voice/text) but the fact that text messaging is asynchronous. So, what the GP is proposing is a system to communicate by sending/receiving "voice mails" of sorts (without hearing the annoying recorded greeting every time I would hope). One for each message. One of the things that make SMS messages so attractive is not the fact that it's a written message but the fact that I can send it and not worry about an immediate response. And as a receiver of a message, I know I can read it when I want, and even chose to avoid response.

I'm not aware of a system that does what the GP says (althought it shouldn't be too hard) and it seems it could be a nice addition to text messages. I could send the spoken message, but don't need to hear the answer until later.

So...you submit something potentially interesting (for whatever reason... to each is own) and then.. don't expect it to be slashdotted? uhm... interesting. I'd like to suscribe to your newsletter MrAndrews.

Have you teried/seen Flattr?

I'm not affiliated with them or anything, I stumbled across that while reading a blog post and I liked the idea. I have yet to find a page that I would give a Flattr to, but the idea is compelling.

I think Orwell would say all farm animals were equally poor, except for the pigs...
 
  So, *almost* everyone is equally poor.

Even if journalism bullshit at the moment, it would be really cool if one day actual reconfigurable chips where available. Imagine downloading the configuration for the next Intel chip, and applying it onto the same board as the previous gen. Or maybe even on-the-fly reconfiguring capabilities, such that certain parts of the processor change to suit the needs of instructions currently executing. Maybe part of the processor can work as a GPU if you are gaming, and as a multithreaded-optimized config if you need heavy computing. Running financial simulation? reconfigure to optimize for it, etc.
 
That would be really neat! computation power could be used much more efficiently, no?