I've got no specific information about the US situation, but can testify that the situation is very similar in Norway. We've got BankAccept, that are a common debit-card system for all the national banks operating here. The fun thing about it is that the agreement have set transaction-cost quite low (fixed sum that equals ~2-3 cents per transfer, as opposed to percentace of all sales for Visa).
A fun result of that is that the average price level here would be 1-2% HIGHER in the whole country if all shops only could accept Visa and not being able to offer the debit card initiative. Competition in that market is also good.
It may be only me, but the feel of some of the most heated multiplayer fights there, the computer players were at least as interesting as human tactics, and nailing the most difficult ones were downright gratifying. It's kinda ambitious to base a whole singleplayer story on deathmatches head-to-head, so they obviously put some effort into it. When I think of it the thing that impressed me most were their mastery of the weapon arsenal, with 7-8 widely different weapons, there were always split-second horror the likes of; "oh no, he's not going to do that... yes he did".
To anticipate an AI move isn't always a bad thing, because great minds think alike, eh?
Come on people. I kind of sense some disappointment, but this is NOT a phone intended for mainstream use (which I feel is too bad, it'd be incredibly cool to be able to show off uptime on cellphone devices).
They've produced far too few of these to be able to push the price per unit way down, and they've also not bothered to optimize the power-savings options in the kernel all the way (which is kinda useless if it's going to be used seriously as a phone).
All that crap aside, it's a really nifty developer platform for those interested in checking out the Qtopia framework. I've been seeing a real-life demo of this, and can say that if they get a consumer-grade phone out, i'll be considering switching myself.
There are some schemes to even out load on the grid by using mechanics (price fluctuations based on supply). Electricity is a very unstable commodity, so all kinds of peak-leveling, are good, since the grid is a scarce commodity, and with increasing amount of unreliable generating capacity (green stuff, like solar, wind and waves) introduced, the need to more effectively match supply and demand, initiatives like this are going to get more serious.
It's not like you can adjust your wind turbine to 10 if people start putting on those new plasma widescreens all at once. The old coal burner is a bit more simple that way.
The news-factor about this, is that a large-scale project like that, might not've been tried before, at least not with frozen storages. The only minus here, might be that they might use more electricity in total, because of increased temperature difference with the outdoors. Anyways, I loved the idea, and hope people start to be a bit more calculating with their electricity consumption as an added bonus..
TFA of this story is pretty much the same as the 9-year old article that's referenced.
The fun thing is, I've already read this due to a digg something like a month and a half ago. Which would be not too crazy to assume the author of This Fine Article also have had the opportunity. Cause and effect with amplifying ripple effects, now also available online. I'd probably go a bit far, but a good slashdotting would be a very good example of a standing wave traffic jam on the Internet..
Now for the person with too much spare time take the time to examine accumulated slashdot effect, we could come up with a long-time forecast to predict when the Internet will be cross-duped and assimilated enough for all digital matter to collapse into a unified digg-dotted singularity. (oh the horror..)
I fail to see how Opera's closed source prohibits the browser from being used on the OLPC if it happens to perform best at rendering standards compliant web content. In exactly the spirit of free software ANYBODY and their dog can make a competing product for this hardware. If Opera at the time outperforms anything else, and everything legal is taken care of, let the show move on. If there should be some funny incidents down the road, just fall back to that other browser that also kicks ass on tiny platforms (not sure which).
Closed-source hardware on the other hand, is a showstopper, whenever there's a falling-out with the hardware manufacturers, your $100 million worth of laptop may need extensive an illegal reverse-engineering to become usable again.
You can choose software whenever, but the hardware will have stay the same.
1. Company launches an all new webpage.
2. User tries to make this work with his favourite means of accessing the web.
3. SOMETHING is broken (might be either the web code or the browser, but let this rest for a moment.)
4. User reports that he's having a problem.
5. Company representative make unhelpful statements not adressing the problem.
6. User still not happy, makes a blog post.
Now if the user did have some real choice whether to use this company or not, he would probably not bother to complain, since he'd be free to choose any competing offer. Internet's a bit special, since it would make very little sense without standards (just imagine a couple hundred million computers, and NO WAY TO SWAP PORN.. it defies imagination, doesn't it?). Also, try and imagine how fun it be to find the next freeway off-ramp not supporting your vehicle brand. The user is about that dissatisfied, as he feel he's not doing anything wrong, and the followup he gets is not very convincing either.
Websites delivering public services SHOULD have some basic functionality accessible no matter what the means of surfing are. Bells and whistles are nice and all, but once the fallback isn't working, the site excludes some part of the browser bell-curve. The response to the complaint show that somebody really don't want to be bothered, and that they in some respects have a little weak judgement when handlig customers, and none too concerned about being compatible.
And those of you that does not see the problem and couldn't care less; you're probably not responsible for websites of public interest, or you're not doing your job. The rest of you could probably take notice.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: I will stop preferring Opera myself whenever that browser stops being so damn sexy, not whenever some web developers says they can't be bothered making pages that won't suck.)
If the shift away from the DVD format happen as soon as 2008 (No chance, since the demand would still be strong for years) it would illustrate in an excellent way how closed media formats are really risky to 'invest' in. The last shift were hardly noticeable, since VHS were.. well.. nobody in their right mind had 300+ movies lying around. And the VHS as a media, well.. it had room for improvement. Right now there's no immediate reason that people would accept that their shelf-loads of DVDs should not play on a next-generation player.
If this went through, it'd really open some up some eyes.
It seems obvious that this registration is going to be pretty futile in attempting to make the internett safe and pertty.
BUT; I for one can't wait to have my hands on the statistics this will come up with! Who's got the biggest sex-offender approval rating of @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com and all the rest? I say this could be interesting.
Read up further down about complex stuff like, sex offenders being people, not dumb animals. Any 'one fix' solution will most likely be sub-optimal, most likely in a depressing way.
Anyways, except from this proposal being either too intrusive and too little inclusive (yes, you require an adress, either this WILL have loopholes, or it will be an incredible privacy issue for 100% of the Internet).
".. many Wikipedia contributors either use their real name, or if they use a handle give their real name on their user page."
Correct. Mine's 'John R. User'
"This would also make desalinization/decontamination pretty easy right?
Just seaparate the H from the O, capture the gases, recombine into clean water."
Provided that the active proteins won't be contaminated by the contamination, and that it will be able to do this at a energy cost that's cheaper than current pressure membrane systems (~2kW / cubic meter). Yeah! Pretty easy!
One phrase i really miss from political analysis of USA; "for national pride reasons".
Anyways, are there more people than me just finding this a little bit funny regarding the timing of this, and the polonium-stunt they pulled in London?
The big difference here is that AllOfMp3 was a _legal_ service in lots of countries (more like _technically_ legal). In fact the minister with responsibilities for copyright in Denmark gave their local RIIA equivalent a _severe_ public talking to, when the industry rep had claimed that users of that site were breaking the law to the media. Fun but true.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got no specific information about the US situation, but can testify that the situation is very similar in Norway. We've got BankAccept, that are a common debit-card system for all the national banks operating here. The fun thing about it is that the agreement have set transaction-cost quite low (fixed sum that equals ~2-3 cents per transfer, as opposed to percentace of all sales for Visa).
A fun result of that is that the average price level here would be 1-2% HIGHER in the whole country if all shops only could accept Visa and not being able to offer the debit card initiative. Competition in that market is also good.
To anticipate an AI move isn't always a bad thing, because great minds think alike, eh?
Come on people. I kind of sense some disappointment, but this is NOT a phone intended for mainstream use (which I feel is too bad, it'd be incredibly cool to be able to show off uptime on cellphone devices).
They've produced far too few of these to be able to push the price per unit way down, and they've also not bothered to optimize the power-savings options in the kernel all the way (which is kinda useless if it's going to be used seriously as a phone).
All that crap aside, it's a really nifty developer platform for those interested in checking out the Qtopia framework. I've been seeing a real-life demo of this, and can say that if they get a consumer-grade phone out, i'll be considering switching myself.
There are some schemes to even out load on the grid by using mechanics (price fluctuations based on supply). Electricity is a very unstable commodity, so all kinds of peak-leveling, are good, since the grid is a scarce commodity, and with increasing amount of unreliable generating capacity (green stuff, like solar, wind and waves) introduced, the need to more effectively match supply and demand, initiatives like this are going to get more serious.
It's not like you can adjust your wind turbine to 10 if people start putting on those new plasma widescreens all at once. The old coal burner is a bit more simple that way.
The news-factor about this, is that a large-scale project like that, might not've been tried before, at least not with frozen storages. The only minus here, might be that they might use more electricity in total, because of increased temperature difference with the outdoors. Anyways, I loved the idea, and hope people start to be a bit more calculating with their electricity consumption as an added bonus..
TFA of this story is pretty much the same as the 9-year old article that's referenced.
The fun thing is, I've already read this due to a digg something like a month and a half ago. Which would be not too crazy to assume the author of This Fine Article also have had the opportunity. Cause and effect with amplifying ripple effects, now also available online. I'd probably go a bit far, but a good slashdotting would be a very good example of a standing wave traffic jam on the Internet..
Now for the person with too much spare time take the time to examine accumulated slashdot effect, we could come up with a long-time forecast to predict when the Internet will be cross-duped and assimilated enough for all digital matter to collapse into a unified digg-dotted singularity. (oh the horror..)
I fail to see how Opera's closed source prohibits the browser from being used on the OLPC if it happens to perform best at rendering standards compliant web content. In exactly the spirit of free software ANYBODY and their dog can make a competing product for this hardware. If Opera at the time outperforms anything else, and everything legal is taken care of, let the show move on. If there should be some funny incidents down the road, just fall back to that other browser that also kicks ass on tiny platforms (not sure which).
Closed-source hardware on the other hand, is a showstopper, whenever there's a falling-out with the hardware manufacturers, your $100 million worth of laptop may need extensive an illegal reverse-engineering to become usable again.
You can choose software whenever, but the hardware will have stay the same.
I'm going to second that. Here's why:
1. Company launches an all new webpage.
2. User tries to make this work with his favourite means of accessing the web.
3. SOMETHING is broken (might be either the web code or the browser, but let this rest for a moment.)
4. User reports that he's having a problem.
5. Company representative make unhelpful statements not adressing the problem.
6. User still not happy, makes a blog post.
Now if the user did have some real choice whether to use this company or not, he would probably not bother to complain, since he'd be free to choose any competing offer. Internet's a bit special, since it would make very little sense without standards (just imagine a couple hundred million computers, and NO WAY TO SWAP PORN.. it defies imagination, doesn't it?). Also, try and imagine how fun it be to find the next freeway off-ramp not supporting your vehicle brand. The user is about that dissatisfied, as he feel he's not doing anything wrong, and the followup he gets is not very convincing either.
Websites delivering public services SHOULD have some basic functionality accessible no matter what the means of surfing are. Bells and whistles are nice and all, but once the fallback isn't working, the site excludes some part of the browser bell-curve. The response to the complaint show that somebody really don't want to be bothered, and that they in some respects have a little weak judgement when handlig customers, and none too concerned about being compatible.
And those of you that does not see the problem and couldn't care less; you're probably not responsible for websites of public interest, or you're not doing your job. The rest of you could probably take notice.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: I will stop preferring Opera myself whenever that browser stops being so damn sexy, not whenever some web developers says they can't be bothered making pages that won't suck.)
If the shift away from the DVD format happen as soon as 2008 (No chance, since the demand would still be strong for years) it would illustrate in an excellent way how closed media formats are really risky to 'invest' in. The last shift were hardly noticeable, since VHS were.. well.. nobody in their right mind had 300+ movies lying around. And the VHS as a media, well.. it had room for improvement. Right now there's no immediate reason that people would accept that their shelf-loads of DVDs should not play on a next-generation player.
If this went through, it'd really open some up some eyes.
BUT; I for one can't wait to have my hands on the statistics this will come up with! Who's got the biggest sex-offender approval rating of @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com and all the rest? I say this could be interesting.
Read up further down about complex stuff like, sex offenders being people, not dumb animals. Any 'one fix' solution will most likely be sub-optimal, most likely in a depressing way.
Anyways, except from this proposal being either too intrusive and too little inclusive (yes, you require an adress, either this WILL have loopholes, or it will be an incredible privacy issue for 100% of the Internet).
".. many Wikipedia contributors either use their real name, or if they use a handle give their real name on their user page." Correct. Mine's 'John R. User'
"This would also make desalinization/decontamination pretty easy right? Just seaparate the H from the O, capture the gases, recombine into clean water." Provided that the active proteins won't be contaminated by the contamination, and that it will be able to do this at a energy cost that's cheaper than current pressure membrane systems (~2kW / cubic meter). Yeah! Pretty easy!
One phrase i really miss from political analysis of USA; "for national pride reasons". Anyways, are there more people than me just finding this a little bit funny regarding the timing of this, and the polonium-stunt they pulled in London?
Now legal piracy's only for the russians again..