I can assure you that you will have NO effect on Sony, and even less on the personal fortunes of those who make these decisions
Look what bad PR did for Toyota. And, in that case, it was (since latest findings indicate there were no actual problems) bad PR alone. It can work wonders, it just needs to reach critical mass and get some publicity. So, to the GP, keep spreading the "good" word.
I think it would result in a shockingly fair society.
Your description of small town / village life is pretty accurate up till that point. Knowing everyone elses business doesn't make them any less spiteful, arrogant, tyrannical, whatever, it just means they're output is better at leveraging their influence given more input data. The vast majority of people don't find small village life to be ideal living conditions.
Well, since everything those "spiteful, arrogant, tyrranical" people would do would also be transparently visible by the public, I think it would be one of those "people who live in glass houses" situations.
If your house doesn't have enough TVs for everyone and you all want to watch something different then this will come in handy.
A 50" state-of-the-art TV costs as much as an iPad. If you don't have enough TVs, this seems like an poor solution for all but the very most fringe cases.
I don't think this is all that outlandish. It's about equality, and in some senses, openness. If everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, was tracked, chipped, monitored, followed, & watched AND the information was 100% transparent and available to EVERYONE, then well... sure, it'd be a great place to live. In all your 1984 dystopian scenarios, there's an elite segment that isn't subject to the same rules as the masses---arguably, there exists an elite segment in today's society that isn't subject to the same rules as the masses---and it's also a "who watches the watchers" issue. IMHO, alot of the issues that currently exist stem from a lack of (perceived and real) fairness in multiple aspects of life. Even the playing field and make the surveillance universal & transparent, allow everyone to freely monitor everyone else, and I think it would result in a shockingly fair society.
Of course, in theory. I don't know if it could be implemented in practice, and therein lies the rub.
Mod parent up. I like to describe the phenomenon as "inertia" against that impulse buy, but "friction" is an equally apt metaphor. The easier it is to make a purchase, the more likely said purchases will occur.
$1 is too high for a separate purchase. I want to buy a hardcover or paperback and get an ebook free (or "free") with the same purchase. Kind of like how bluray/DVDs are now beginning to include digital copies of the movies in addition to the on-disc version; its a way (albeit, so far imperfect) to provide additional value to someone who actually wants to purchase your product.
Sometimes I like the paper copy, like when I want to take my reading outside, especially when poolside.
It used to be that you could actually get discounts. Nowadays, they can offer discounts for exactly one reason: price matching.
I've been suspicious of actual competitive price matching, lately. For example, I can't find identical model number laptops at local B&M stores... really, how hard would it be for mfr/retailers to set up unique model numbers for each retailer so that each retailer never actually price match certain items with each other? Even if the internal components are 100% identical, if the model numbers don't match, the clowns at customer service will not price match.
This kind of activity already occurs with videogames. Retailers don't deviate from the MSRP whatsoever. When you see a difference in what you pay, it's always via a quirky mechanism (e.g. free gift card, mail-in rebate) that cannot/will not be price-matched.
So what you're saying is that if there's a 0.00001% chance that somebody who looks like a nun is a terrorist, and a 0.01% chance that somebody who looks like a young Arab male is a terrorist, we should search every young Arab male and miss the terrorist nuns?
Excellent straw man, good sir! It completely ignores any discussion on possible behavioral profiling and goes straight for the race card!
Diesel contains significantly more energy per gallon than gasoline, so "MPG" comparisons to gasoline vehicles are totally useless.
As I replied to another post, citation please? References I have cite diesel at 137,000 Btu/gal, while gasoline is close behind at 130,000 Btu/gal. More certainly, but not significantly more, and arguably not enough more to warrant comparisons on a per-gallon basis irrelevant.
Actually, if you wanted to argue on a per-pound basis, the same US EPA sources I cited previously list gasoline at slightly more Btu/lb (20,300) than diesel (19,300).
(1) Remember that diesel has about 1/3rd more BTUs per gallon than gasoline, so achieving 70mpg is no great feat. VW sold a Lupo that got 88mpg highway, and built a three-person family prototype that had 120 mpg.
Citation please? The US EPA cites that diesel is 137,000 btu/gal, all of 7,000 Btu/gal more than gasoline, at 130,000 Btu/gal. A 5% difference, but not a 30% difference.
That being said, I'm a huge fan of Netflix and I don't want my streaming movies throttled down. I lean more toward neutrality, but would hope that the worst abusers of bandwidth could still be corrected when needed.
You can't "abuse" the allotment you have purchased, can you? If you have paid for X Mbps 24/7, should you not be entitled to X Mbps 24/7? If my purchased use infringes on others' purchased use, it seems like a clear-cut case for the company who oversold capacity to increase said capacity.
Net-neutrality is also about the money associated with increasing--or avoiding increasing--capacity.
Extensions only matter if we're talking about porting over NoScript.
I recently made an honest effort to try out the latest stable release of Opera. I was pleased to note that it had a lot of the features baked-in that I was adding to Chrome and Firefox. It was fast and seemed to do a good job as a web browser. However, the first time I visited some forums looking for solutions to a random problem, I was sorely disappointed with the lack of Noscript. Sure, the message boards usually say "Sure you can disable Javascript, do 'this' from the menu", but that isn't the kind of granularity that NoScript offers. Then, there's a substitute called "Blockit", which is apparently supposed to act like Noscript. However, the configuration screen is painful and the addon appeared to be broken; it didn't appear to give me a NoScript-like button to control each page. The plethora of annoying bits on the sites I visited researching how to get a working Noscript substitute in Opera encouraged me to drop Opera. What irony.
I've been spoiled by NoScript. I'm not particularly a Firefox fanboy--it has its own share of problems and issues--but it does run NoScript and I can't stand browsing the web without it.
Further, religion has perpetrated as many evils, if not MORE evils in the world than anything else.
Let's be clear here--it's not the religion that's perpetrating the evils, it's the people in it. It would be more proper to say that "many evils have been perpetrated in the name of religion...". If you have a perfect religion, it could/would still be corrupted and distorted by the imperfect people who administer and follow it.
If religion didn't exist, people would blame their bad behavior on something else. Video games, or rock and roll music perhaps...
Thanks, I installed that some time ago. It doesn't seem to matter, I can be sitting right next to the hotspot (it's behind my monitor) and it will still stop communicating and require that I restart the wifi. I've had the same problem in many locations, hotels, coffee shops, my living room, it will work for some random length of time, and then just stop. If I need a reliable connection for email or something like that, I switch to 3G.
I've heard there's an app that will disable the power saving feature of the wifi; apparently there may be some DHCP issues between router & phone when the phone's wifi goes to sleep.
If you're running Windows 7 or Vista, the first thing you should install is the Network Meter (and All CPU Meter) gadget. If you suspect any unusual activity, you can quickly glance at your CPU and network resources being used.
Those gadgets are trash, and it's so sad that they're the "best" there is for Vista/7. How I wish it had simple, clean, and elegant built-in resource monitoring line Ubuntu/gnome.
Works fine on Moto Droid (Froyo 2.2), perhaps a tiny bit less smooth than a desktop with more processing power, but still completely usable. But I agree with parent: this site didn't need flash for anything.
Wait, a -1 Troll and not a +1 Funny for this obvious sarcasm and reference to net neutrality? Let this be a lesson for safe forum activity: always wear your/sarcasm tag.
Rep. DeGETTE: You know, I've spent a lot of time talking to Senator Orrin Hatch about this.
FLATOW: Yeah, he's one that I was talking about, yeah.
Rep. DeGETTE: A conservative Republican. And here's what Orrin says to me. He says, you know, these embryonic stem cells, they are embryos created for in-vitro fertilization techniques. They don't they're not needed anymore, and so what happens is they're thrown away as medical waste.
What we want to do is allow people to donate those embryos when they don't -the couples who they were created for, when they don't need them, for medical research. And what Senator Hatch says, to him that's the ultimate pro-life decision. They were created for life, and then they can be donated to help save someone else's life. I think that's really persuasive.
Consider first, what if your own embryo had been used for such research? Are you not at least a little glad that it wasn't?
This and all the rest of your arguments are irrelevant and baseless. As reported on NPR last week by persons intimately involved in this issue, the embryos in question were created as requested by couples undergoing IVF. Again, per the NPR report, the extra, unused but fertilized embryos are currently trashed as medical waste. Medical waste. Garbage. Hard to make an argument against constructive use of these embryos when the only alternative is--literally--trash.
and an American public that may be reluctant to relinquish the independence and convenience of their beloved automobiles for a train.
Well, duh. Convenience and independence are huge. Public transportation isn't "when you want it" or "where you want it" and just doesn't have the trunk space. In many major american cities, the suburban sprawl is enormous, bordering on ridiculous. It's too late for the US. You'd need to throw in something like $100 TRILLION in order for (rail) mass transit to work. You'd need to interconnect each sprawling suburb with each other--not just with downtown, regrettably how its often done--in order to make it even feasible.
And it still won't be convenient to travel by mass transit if you have more than you can carry in your arms.
And then, at some point, it's still not the cheapest. For example, $5 a roundtrip ticket for me, my wife, and two others to travel downtown for a baseball game. Even with expensive event parking, that's already about even. If we had a van and squeezed in another couple, it'd be cheaper to carpool, perhaps even including the amortized costs of vehicle purchase & repair for that event, especially since we still needed a vehicle to get us to the rail station...
Most people are not computer savvy. So if their system blows up, they want a simple fix. When it comes down to problems relating to the disk, most of them are going to be one of two things:
1) The installed OS got messed up somehow. A reinstall is the answer.
2) The hard disk failed. A replacement is the answer.
(I gave up mod points for this)
Those are usually the most efficient (in time and/or money) solutions for those of us who are computer savvy. Sure, it's technically not finding "the problem" and fixing (only) "the problem," but it saves a potential crapton of time trying to figure out what clueless user #0528 did to royally screw things up. Plus, as another poster rightly stated, the cost/benefit is nonexistent; it's about equal whether you pay for someone to find and fix (only) "the problem", versus pay for a wipe/restore/replace solution.
As this program appears designed to interpret what you want to say based on actual, English-language words, it would be interesting to see how it would handle poor spellers.
Personally, I am probably somewhat of a spelling nazi, as I cannot stand how inept some persons (seemingly the younger generation--get off my lawn!) appears to be at spelling. If this is released, I would imagine that poor spellers would either (a) be forced to finally learn how to spell (again, get off my lawn!), or regrettably more likely (b) be frustrated with the program and write off it's inability to correct their own deficiency as a problem with the software, itself.
The inferior fakes are not copies, but a physical product disguised as the real thing... Have you ever seen a fake Levi's Jeans for example, it almost looks exactly the same but doesn't last as long by a long shot. I've also read reports of fake Cisco hardware that look and function exactly like the real thing... They only found out because people reported who contacted the helpdesk reported a nonexistent serial number...
This is exactly the kind of counterfeiting China is well known for, and the resulting products are almost without exception inferior copies.
I do agree though, digital pirated copies are without a doubt a 'value added' product! No DRM, phoning home, added portability and compatibility etc. I've downloaded games I bought because the game crashed on install or required the CD in the drive, or another example: a Blueray movie can't be played with an Xbox360, but a Blueray-rip can (full HD)!
In this case, the "fake" merchandise is--almost certainly--ripped off from the very same manufacturing plant that makes the official stuff. They're likely manufacturing the official stuff in China, anyhow. Also, as to quality of "fakes", if you've ever been to a manufacturing plant, you may be well aware that more than Brand X is made at a single factory; it's just not efficient for most products. Products not 100% to spec may be rebranded as Brand Y. Where do you think the "store brand" items come from?
Slashdot Mirror
I can assure you that you will have NO effect on Sony, and even less on the personal fortunes of those who make these decisions
Look what bad PR did for Toyota. And, in that case, it was (since latest findings indicate there were no actual problems) bad PR alone. It can work wonders, it just needs to reach critical mass and get some publicity. So, to the GP, keep spreading the "good" word.
I think it would result in a shockingly fair society.
Your description of small town / village life is pretty accurate up till that point. Knowing everyone elses business doesn't make them any less spiteful, arrogant, tyrannical, whatever, it just means they're output is better at leveraging their influence given more input data. The vast majority of people don't find small village life to be ideal living conditions.
Well, since everything those "spiteful, arrogant, tyrranical" people would do would also be transparently visible by the public, I think it would be one of those "people who live in glass houses" situations.
If your house doesn't have enough TVs for everyone and you all want to watch something different then this will come in handy.
A 50" state-of-the-art TV costs as much as an iPad. If you don't have enough TVs, this seems like an poor solution for all but the very most fringe cases.
I don't think this is all that outlandish. It's about equality, and in some senses, openness. If everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, was tracked, chipped, monitored, followed, & watched AND the information was 100% transparent and available to EVERYONE, then well... sure, it'd be a great place to live. In all your 1984 dystopian scenarios, there's an elite segment that isn't subject to the same rules as the masses---arguably, there exists an elite segment in today's society that isn't subject to the same rules as the masses---and it's also a "who watches the watchers" issue. IMHO, alot of the issues that currently exist stem from a lack of (perceived and real) fairness in multiple aspects of life. Even the playing field and make the surveillance universal & transparent, allow everyone to freely monitor everyone else, and I think it would result in a shockingly fair society.
Of course, in theory. I don't know if it could be implemented in practice, and therein lies the rub.
Forget widgets. Here's what you need.
And, of course, a keg of stout from your better supplied liquor outlet.
Stout nirvana awaits.
For the people who prefer Guinness, I think the investment for homebrewed draft stout is a wee heavy.
Seconded. Guinness is the Budweiser of stouts. The US craft brewing and homebrewing scene can, and regularly does, do stout beer a lot better service.
Mod parent up. I like to describe the phenomenon as "inertia" against that impulse buy, but "friction" is an equally apt metaphor. The easier it is to make a purchase, the more likely said purchases will occur.
$1 is too high for a separate purchase. I want to buy a hardcover or paperback and get an ebook free (or "free") with the same purchase. Kind of like how bluray/DVDs are now beginning to include digital copies of the movies in addition to the on-disc version; its a way (albeit, so far imperfect) to provide additional value to someone who actually wants to purchase your product.
Sometimes I like the paper copy, like when I want to take my reading outside, especially when poolside.
It used to be that you could actually get discounts. Nowadays, they can offer discounts for exactly one reason: price matching.
I've been suspicious of actual competitive price matching, lately. For example, I can't find identical model number laptops at local B&M stores... really, how hard would it be for mfr/retailers to set up unique model numbers for each retailer so that each retailer never actually price match certain items with each other? Even if the internal components are 100% identical, if the model numbers don't match, the clowns at customer service will not price match.
This kind of activity already occurs with videogames. Retailers don't deviate from the MSRP whatsoever. When you see a difference in what you pay, it's always via a quirky mechanism (e.g. free gift card, mail-in rebate) that cannot/will not be price-matched.
So what you're saying is that if there's a 0.00001% chance that somebody who looks like a nun is a terrorist, and a 0.01% chance that somebody who looks like a young Arab male is a terrorist, we should search every young Arab male and miss the terrorist nuns?
Excellent straw man, good sir! It completely ignores any discussion on possible behavioral profiling and goes straight for the race card!
Diesel contains significantly more energy per gallon than gasoline, so "MPG" comparisons to gasoline vehicles are totally useless.
As I replied to another post, citation please? References I have cite diesel at 137,000 Btu/gal, while gasoline is close behind at 130,000 Btu/gal. More certainly, but not significantly more, and arguably not enough more to warrant comparisons on a per-gallon basis irrelevant.
Actually, if you wanted to argue on a per-pound basis, the same US EPA sources I cited previously list gasoline at slightly more Btu/lb (20,300) than diesel (19,300).
Interesting stuff.
(1) Remember that diesel has about 1/3rd more BTUs per gallon than gasoline, so achieving 70mpg is no great feat. VW sold a Lupo that got 88mpg highway, and built a three-person family prototype that had 120 mpg.
Citation please? The US EPA cites that diesel is 137,000 btu/gal, all of 7,000 Btu/gal more than gasoline, at 130,000 Btu/gal. A 5% difference, but not a 30% difference.
http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/ap42/appendix/appa.pdf
Diesel is also arguably dirtier than gasoline. It's a bit of tradeoff.
That being said, I'm a huge fan of Netflix and I don't want my streaming movies throttled down. I lean more toward neutrality, but would hope that the worst abusers of bandwidth could still be corrected when needed.
You can't "abuse" the allotment you have purchased, can you? If you have paid for X Mbps 24/7, should you not be entitled to X Mbps 24/7? If my purchased use infringes on others' purchased use, it seems like a clear-cut case for the company who oversold capacity to increase said capacity.
Net-neutrality is also about the money associated with increasing--or avoiding increasing--capacity.
Extensions only matter if we're talking about porting over NoScript.
I recently made an honest effort to try out the latest stable release of Opera. I was pleased to note that it had a lot of the features baked-in that I was adding to Chrome and Firefox. It was fast and seemed to do a good job as a web browser. However, the first time I visited some forums looking for solutions to a random problem, I was sorely disappointed with the lack of Noscript. Sure, the message boards usually say "Sure you can disable Javascript, do 'this' from the menu", but that isn't the kind of granularity that NoScript offers. Then, there's a substitute called "Blockit", which is apparently supposed to act like Noscript. However, the configuration screen is painful and the addon appeared to be broken; it didn't appear to give me a NoScript-like button to control each page. The plethora of annoying bits on the sites I visited researching how to get a working Noscript substitute in Opera encouraged me to drop Opera. What irony.
I've been spoiled by NoScript. I'm not particularly a Firefox fanboy--it has its own share of problems and issues--but it does run NoScript and I can't stand browsing the web without it.
Further, religion has perpetrated as many evils, if not MORE evils in the world than anything else.
Let's be clear here--it's not the religion that's perpetrating the evils, it's the people in it. It would be more proper to say that "many evils have been perpetrated in the name of religion...". If you have a perfect religion, it could/would still be corrupted and distorted by the imperfect people who administer and follow it.
If religion didn't exist, people would blame their bad behavior on something else. Video games, or rock and roll music perhaps...
Thanks, I installed that some time ago. It doesn't seem to matter, I can be sitting right next to the hotspot (it's behind my monitor) and it will still stop communicating and require that I restart the wifi. I've had the same problem in many locations, hotels, coffee shops, my living room, it will work for some random length of time, and then just stop. If I need a reliable connection for email or something like that, I switch to 3G.
I've heard there's an app that will disable the power saving feature of the wifi; apparently there may be some DHCP issues between router & phone when the phone's wifi goes to sleep.
If you're running Windows 7 or Vista, the first thing you should install is the Network Meter (and All CPU Meter) gadget. If you suspect any unusual activity, you can quickly glance at your CPU and network resources being used.
You can get them at http://www.addgadget.com/
Those gadgets are trash, and it's so sad that they're the "best" there is for Vista/7. How I wish it had simple, clean, and elegant built-in resource monitoring line Ubuntu/gnome.
Works fine on Moto Droid (Froyo 2.2), perhaps a tiny bit less smooth than a desktop with more processing power, but still completely usable. But I agree with parent: this site didn't need flash for anything.
Wait, a -1 Troll and not a +1 Funny for this obvious sarcasm and reference to net neutrality? Let this be a lesson for safe forum activity: always wear your /sarcasm tag.
Citation Needed?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129475831
Rep. DeGETTE: You know, I've spent a lot of time talking to Senator Orrin Hatch about this.
FLATOW: Yeah, he's one that I was talking about, yeah.
Rep. DeGETTE: A conservative Republican. And here's what Orrin says to me. He says, you know, these embryonic stem cells, they are embryos created for in-vitro fertilization techniques. They don't they're not needed anymore, and so what happens is they're thrown away as medical waste.
What we want to do is allow people to donate those embryos when they don't -the couples who they were created for, when they don't need them, for medical research. And what Senator Hatch says, to him that's the ultimate pro-life decision. They were created for life, and then they can be donated to help save someone else's life. I think that's really persuasive.
Consider first, what if your own embryo had been used for such research? Are you not at least a little glad that it wasn't?
This and all the rest of your arguments are irrelevant and baseless. As reported on NPR last week by persons intimately involved in this issue, the embryos in question were created as requested by couples undergoing IVF. Again, per the NPR report, the extra, unused but fertilized embryos are currently trashed as medical waste. Medical waste. Garbage. Hard to make an argument against constructive use of these embryos when the only alternative is--literally--trash.
and an American public that may be reluctant to relinquish the independence and convenience of their beloved automobiles for a train.
Well, duh. Convenience and independence are huge. Public transportation isn't "when you want it" or "where you want it" and just doesn't have the trunk space. In many major american cities, the suburban sprawl is enormous, bordering on ridiculous. It's too late for the US. You'd need to throw in something like $100 TRILLION in order for (rail) mass transit to work. You'd need to interconnect each sprawling suburb with each other--not just with downtown, regrettably how its often done--in order to make it even feasible.
And it still won't be convenient to travel by mass transit if you have more than you can carry in your arms.
And then, at some point, it's still not the cheapest. For example, $5 a roundtrip ticket for me, my wife, and two others to travel downtown for a baseball game. Even with expensive event parking, that's already about even. If we had a van and squeezed in another couple, it'd be cheaper to carpool, perhaps even including the amortized costs of vehicle purchase & repair for that event, especially since we still needed a vehicle to get us to the rail station...
Most people are not computer savvy. So if their system blows up, they want a simple fix. When it comes down to problems relating to the disk, most of them are going to be one of two things:
1) The installed OS got messed up somehow. A reinstall is the answer.
2) The hard disk failed. A replacement is the answer.
(I gave up mod points for this)
Those are usually the most efficient (in time and/or money) solutions for those of us who are computer savvy. Sure, it's technically not finding "the problem" and fixing (only) "the problem," but it saves a potential crapton of time trying to figure out what clueless user #0528 did to royally screw things up. Plus, as another poster rightly stated, the cost/benefit is nonexistent; it's about equal whether you pay for someone to find and fix (only) "the problem", versus pay for a wipe/restore/replace solution.
As this program appears designed to interpret what you want to say based on actual, English-language words, it would be interesting to see how it would handle poor spellers.
Personally, I am probably somewhat of a spelling nazi, as I cannot stand how inept some persons (seemingly the younger generation--get off my lawn!) appears to be at spelling. If this is released, I would imagine that poor spellers would either (a) be forced to finally learn how to spell (again, get off my lawn!), or regrettably more likely (b) be frustrated with the program and write off it's inability to correct their own deficiency as a problem with the software, itself.
The inferior fakes are not copies, but a physical product disguised as the real thing... Have you ever seen a fake Levi's Jeans for example, it almost looks exactly the same but doesn't last as long by a long shot. I've also read reports of fake Cisco hardware that look and function exactly like the real thing... They only found out because people reported who contacted the helpdesk reported a nonexistent serial number... This is exactly the kind of counterfeiting China is well known for, and the resulting products are almost without exception inferior copies. I do agree though, digital pirated copies are without a doubt a 'value added' product! No DRM, phoning home, added portability and compatibility etc. I've downloaded games I bought because the game crashed on install or required the CD in the drive, or another example: a Blueray movie can't be played with an Xbox360, but a Blueray-rip can (full HD)!
In this case, the "fake" merchandise is--almost certainly--ripped off from the very same manufacturing plant that makes the official stuff. They're likely manufacturing the official stuff in China, anyhow. Also, as to quality of "fakes", if you've ever been to a manufacturing plant, you may be well aware that more than Brand X is made at a single factory; it's just not efficient for most products. Products not 100% to spec may be rebranded as Brand Y. Where do you think the "store brand" items come from?