And there's the real victim of where we seem to be headed with intellectual property: our cultural history.
Picture the broadcast flag, coupled with on-demand movies. Toss in changes of the medium du jour crippled with mostly effective DRM, and you're losing history left and right. There's a new release of, say, E.T. on Blu-Ray. Everyone (not literally everyone, of course, but you get the idea) replaces their old, worn-out VHS (or Beta, in the case of my parents) tapes. Now there's very little evidence that there were ever guns in the movie.
Or pay-per-view/on demand becomes the common way of watching movies. The broadcast flag prevents keeping a copy, of course. So all you'll ever be able to see is the latest version of the movie. Hell, look at Dumbo: can you even buy a copy of the movie that still has the crows singing? They certainly don't show it on television.
Or how about Aladdin? I can't be the only person who remembers the opening song's lyric containing a line about cutting off your hand for stealing a loaf of bread. But good luck proving that it ever even existed - to the best of my knowledge, that didn't even make into the first release of the movie to stores, much less subsequent ones.
The more consumers lose control of the media they consume - not being able to make/keep copies, being forced into a subscription model of media delivery - the more this is going to happen. We've got the technical capacity right now to preserve a closer-to-perfect record of our culture than has ever existed in human history, and we're wasting it. It's being lost to political correctness, revisionist history, and George Lucas.
MS isn't going to pull out of South Korea. Everyone involved already knows that. The statement is just part of the usual grandstanding that always goes on with this sort of thing. They won't pull out because it's too large a market to just write off, and they don't want another country deciding to go with a competitor nationwide.
Anyway: I won't disagree with your point. They are competing for personal real estate, and integration helps address that problem. And, as you say, with camera phones getting better every generation, they might be an adequate replacement for other types of always-carry cameras.
Which is why I don't care that my phone has a camera - I don't use it, but it's not as though it ever gets in my way. Much like my phone's polyphonic ringtones: I don't bother them; they don't bother me.
My only complaint is when obvious features - features that help the device be a better phone - are left out, while exraneous features are crammed in. It's not the existence of the (to me) extraneous bits that bothers me, it's the lack of relevant bits.
But perhaps I'm working from too narrow an experience on this one. A lot of people have commented (enough that I'm not replying to all of them, here's hoping they read this) that Nokia phones provide the nested phone book feature I mentioned. I'm sure they're right, and perhaps it's a result of me not doing enough internet research before making a purchase, BUT: I had already decided on a carrier, Cingular (for a variety of reasons, at least one of which was a show-stopper for other carriers), and I based my comment on my experiences in the two Cingular stores in my area.
I looked at literally every sub-$300 (net) phone they carried, and not a single one of them had this feature, though every one of them (past the most basic brick) had a camera. I don't recall whether or not they carried Nokia phones. I only specifically remember LG, Motorola, and Samsung as brand names I looked at (this was ~11 months ago, so this may be different at those very stores now).
I can accept that the problem is the way phones are marketed, distributed, or sold, but from my POV, it doesn't matter. The camera phone feature has become so dominant in the marketing or distribution phases that I was unable to discriminate on other features important to me.
[RANT] Am I the only person who wants to know how, exactly, deciding which cell phone was better became deciding which camera was better?
What does a camera have to do with a cell phone, really?
When I went to buy a phone recently, the only thing any salesperson wanted to talk to me about was the cameras. I could not care less about the camera, but I ended up with one anyway. At the same time, a feature I really wanted to have - that my old, dying phone had - I couldn't find on any of the "better" new phones: a nested phone book, so that one name (one entry in the phone book list) could be associated with multiple numbers from which I could choose after selecting the name. Instead, every phone I saw had a strict one-number, one-listing phone book.
I really don't care if a phone has a feature I'm not going to use, but I do care if it has that and not features I actively want. Particularly when the features I actively want actually have something to do with being a phone. [/RANT]
Increasing importance of the internet to the average person is, in many respects, a good thing. It means a growing market, which attracts money, which drives innovation forward and prices downward (yes, you can argue that broadband is overpriced, but consider what you bay per Mbit down today as compared to what you would have paid per Mbit down 10 years ago). This is true for anything, of course, but it's more true for the internet: many of the advantages that can be provided by connectivity become more effective in more than direct proportion to the number of people connected.
However, for people like myself (and probably a lot of/.ers), it's also bad. The more popular something becomes and the more money that's involved, the more heavily regulated it will be (by both governments and private organizations...Microsoft's position in re: desktop computing may not technically be regulatory, but it amounts to much the same thing), not to mention the more commercialized it becomes. To use a comparison that's been done to death already, it's the wild West all over again. Enough people move out west, and the freedoms/culture that made it initially attractive vanish.
You can even see this, in microcosm, with/. Not that I'm a 5-digit UID, or anything, but even I remember a much different site. I won't make any claims that it was objectively better or worse, but it was better from my POV before there was a need for meta-moderation, before editorials started getting so slammed in comments that they went away, so on and so forth.
At the risk of being called an MS apologist: even Windows supports not automatically changing the clock for daylight savings time. You just uncheck the box that says "automatically adjust for daylight savings" in the time zone selection dialog.
That depends on which board game he saw. Odds are good he saw the new board game, which is based on Civ III, and is entitled something like "Sid Meier's Civilization: the Board Game." This is not the same as the original Avalon Hill board game entitled (IIRC) Civilization, which does, as you say, predate Civ I.
Personally, I bought SMC:tBG just for the fun of knowing I bought a board game...based on a video game...based on a board game.
It seems a shame to waste so much fuel on reaction mass in rocketry when you could possibly use something else (atmosphere, the magnetic field, a giant cable) for the first acceleration.
Losing the fuel for initial acceleration also has mass (and therefore payload) benefits, but the efficiency of using an external reaction mass is, IMHO, the big upsaide.
Well, yes, but you're borrowing much of that energy from the momentum of the cable, and you're replacing most of it when you ride the cable back down. You lose due to entropy, of course, but it's orders of magnitude more efficient than a rocket boost up and a free fall down.
The advantages you point out are also real, but they're minor compared to the energy efficiency of it.
The minimum speed was 1 meter/s = 3.6km/h = 2.2369 miles/h. I can walk faster than that Not straight up, you can't.
Geosynch is 35,786 km above sealeve according to wiki. At 3.6 km/h it would take over a year to get up to geosynch True, but as gravity decreases, you accelerate faster per unit energy. I can't be arsed to actually do any math, but 1m/s at 1G is going to translate into significantly higher velocity the further out you go. Besides which, if you want to use the elevator primarily for moving materiel rather than personnel, a one-year turnaround might not be too bad; throughput is potentially more important than lag.
Even for personnel, that's on the order of time it took to sail from Europe to America via wind power, and people did that.
There is no automatic linking within the text of the document, but the nodes linked after the document are selected by people going to them from the document. Linked nodes at the bottom are sorted in descending order of their frequency as destinations from the current node (either by being clicked in the node text, or being searched for in the global search box). It's intended to model users' trains of thought as they navigate e2.
Of course, how well this works (or how useful it is, for that matteR) is a matter of opinion.
Good encryption should prevent a third party from determining any information about the payload. Bury all the protocol details in the data, initiate the session with a completely innocuous public-key encrypted exchange of symmetric keys, and proceed.
If carriers want to block all encrypted traffic, well...that's a whole different problem.
If all of your costs are up front capital costs, those are the 'cheap' dollars (rupees, euros, whatever). Money is going to have less purchasing power as time goes by. This effect is amplified by the fact that the consumables are commodities that are prone to an increase in demand and decrease in supply.
Isn't that backwards? If today's dollars are the "good" ones (that buy more stuff as compared to tomorrow's dollars), wouldn't you much rather spend tomorrow's dollars?
More importantly, unless inflation gets completely out of hand, investment returns will outstrip inflation by a significant margin. This is particularly true if your time horizon is measured in decades, thereby profiting on the long-term trend of the market and being insulated from short-term fluctuations.
You are aware that the space program exists because of nationalistic pride, right? That it's keeping the interest of the public that allows funding to keep flowing?
If we want to get down to primary motivations and proper goals, the goal of a government is to foster the happiness of its citizens, not to pursue science of any kind. If sending humans to Mars would make the population happy, then it's the right and proper thing for the government to do. Pursuing your high-minded notion of pure science is what would make you happy, but, thankfully, you're not the only person NASA and the government are trying to please.
I say thankfully, of course, because I, for one, am quite happy we put men on the moon, and am glad your notions of what is right and proper for the government and NASA to do didn't manage to wet-blanket that idea.
Yes, the rover can last for a year on mars...and we all cheer, and say "hooray for unmanned missions."
And then we can sit back and wonder how long it would have taken a guy, even in a space suit - hell, even a slashdot geek in a space suit, and we're not the most in-shape bunch, I warrant - to cover two miles, taking samples all the way. I'd guess a lot less than a year.
And that's not even taking into account 1/3 our gravity!
Re:result of the complicated British rules, actual
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
·
· Score: 1
True, but it's equally true that Americans aren't allowed to take a title from any country, regardless of whether their peerage rules allow it. Where, in this case, Spielberg is prevented from taking the "Sir" by the rules of the granting monarchy, in any case, he would be prevented from taking the "Sir" by Constitutional law.
Specifically, if he had dual citizenship and an entirely legitimate peer-of-the-realm status in Britain, he could still not legally be "Sir" or "Lord" anything to Americans.
(Except, of course, in recongition of a visiting head of state...but then it's his British identity which has the status, not his American)
Re:RTFA (You Are A Crack Addict)
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 1
Joking aside (I couldn't resist that post), you're not defending yourself all that well, here. His response indicated that he did most certainly read the article.
Specifically, you claimed to enjoy the feeling of multitasking. This is exactly the effect that would be expected if you had high dopamine levels, which is what he cites the article as saying. He then proceeded to ask questions regarding your responses to other stimuli, in order to further analyze the situation.
Of course, you responded by calling him a dumbass.
This is not exactly the mark of reasoned argument.
Re:RTFA (You Are A Crack Addict)
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm glad there are very few examples of...uninformed people here on Slashdot.
As a Milwaukee resident, I can confirm that three lanes is pretty much standard freeway fare...right up until Bender Road on I-43 northbound, when the freeway inexplicably narrows to 2, and traffic comes to a grinding halt.
And, before we come all over too pleased with Milwaukee city planning, let's not forget the almost criminal lack of east-west corridors across the city. You've got I-94...and, a couple miles south of that, I-894...and aside from that, you've got nothing. There are city streets (interrupted by Wawautosa whenever possible), but there isn't any good way across the city south of 894 or north of 94...and north of 94 is kind of a lot of Milwaukee. Like all of downtown, the north side, and the northern suburbs.
Slashdot Mirror
And there's the real victim of where we seem to be headed with intellectual property: our cultural history.
Picture the broadcast flag, coupled with on-demand movies. Toss in changes of the medium du jour crippled with mostly effective DRM, and you're losing history left and right. There's a new release of, say, E.T. on Blu-Ray. Everyone (not literally everyone, of course, but you get the idea) replaces their old, worn-out VHS (or Beta, in the case of my parents) tapes. Now there's very little evidence that there were ever guns in the movie.
Or pay-per-view/on demand becomes the common way of watching movies. The broadcast flag prevents keeping a copy, of course. So all you'll ever be able to see is the latest version of the movie. Hell, look at Dumbo: can you even buy a copy of the movie that still has the crows singing? They certainly don't show it on television.
Or how about Aladdin? I can't be the only person who remembers the opening song's lyric containing a line about cutting off your hand for stealing a loaf of bread. But good luck proving that it ever even existed - to the best of my knowledge, that didn't even make into the first release of the movie to stores, much less subsequent ones.
The more consumers lose control of the media they consume - not being able to make/keep copies, being forced into a subscription model of media delivery - the more this is going to happen. We've got the technical capacity right now to preserve a closer-to-perfect record of our culture than has ever existed in human history, and we're wasting it. It's being lost to political correctness, revisionist history, and George Lucas.
Oh, please.
MS isn't going to pull out of South Korea. Everyone involved already knows that. The statement is just part of the usual grandstanding that always goes on with this sort of thing. They won't pull out because it's too large a market to just write off, and they don't want another country deciding to go with a competitor nationwide.
what you probably mean is "US-American lifestyle"
You just came here from Kuro5hin, didn't you?
Glad you liked it. ;)
Anyway: I won't disagree with your point. They are competing for personal real estate, and integration helps address that problem. And, as you say, with camera phones getting better every generation, they might be an adequate replacement for other types of always-carry cameras.
Which is why I don't care that my phone has a camera - I don't use it, but it's not as though it ever gets in my way. Much like my phone's polyphonic ringtones: I don't bother them; they don't bother me.
My only complaint is when obvious features - features that help the device be a better phone - are left out, while exraneous features are crammed in. It's not the existence of the (to me) extraneous bits that bothers me, it's the lack of relevant bits.
But perhaps I'm working from too narrow an experience on this one. A lot of people have commented (enough that I'm not replying to all of them, here's hoping they read this) that Nokia phones provide the nested phone book feature I mentioned. I'm sure they're right, and perhaps it's a result of me not doing enough internet research before making a purchase, BUT: I had already decided on a carrier, Cingular (for a variety of reasons, at least one of which was a show-stopper for other carriers), and I based my comment on my experiences in the two Cingular stores in my area.
I looked at literally every sub-$300 (net) phone they carried, and not a single one of them had this feature, though every one of them (past the most basic brick) had a camera. I don't recall whether or not they carried Nokia phones. I only specifically remember LG, Motorola, and Samsung as brand names I looked at (this was ~11 months ago, so this may be different at those very stores now).
I can accept that the problem is the way phones are marketed, distributed, or sold, but from my POV, it doesn't matter. The camera phone feature has become so dominant in the marketing or distribution phases that I was unable to discriminate on other features important to me.
Internet penetration is only 80% in Denmark?
I can find 100% penetration on the internet without even trying, and I live in puritan America!
17
Am I disqualified from betting for adding to the count?
[RANT]
Am I the only person who wants to know how, exactly, deciding which cell phone was better became deciding which camera was better?
What does a camera have to do with a cell phone, really?
When I went to buy a phone recently, the only thing any salesperson wanted to talk to me about was the cameras. I could not care less about the camera, but I ended up with one anyway. At the same time, a feature I really wanted to have - that my old, dying phone had - I couldn't find on any of the "better" new phones: a nested phone book, so that one name (one entry in the phone book list) could be associated with multiple numbers from which I could choose after selecting the name. Instead, every phone I saw had a strict one-number, one-listing phone book.
I really don't care if a phone has a feature I'm not going to use, but I do care if it has that and not features I actively want. Particularly when the features I actively want actually have something to do with being a phone.
[/RANT]
Increasing importance of the internet to the average person is, in many respects, a good thing. It means a growing market, which attracts money, which drives innovation forward and prices downward (yes, you can argue that broadband is overpriced, but consider what you bay per Mbit down today as compared to what you would have paid per Mbit down 10 years ago). This is true for anything, of course, but it's more true for the internet: many of the advantages that can be provided by connectivity become more effective in more than direct proportion to the number of people connected.
/.ers), it's also bad. The more popular something becomes and the more money that's involved, the more heavily regulated it will be (by both governments and private organizations...Microsoft's position in re: desktop computing may not technically be regulatory, but it amounts to much the same thing), not to mention the more commercialized it becomes. To use a comparison that's been done to death already, it's the wild West all over again. Enough people move out west, and the freedoms/culture that made it initially attractive vanish.
/. Not that I'm a 5-digit UID, or anything, but even I remember a much different site. I won't make any claims that it was objectively better or worse, but it was better from my POV before there was a need for meta-moderation, before editorials started getting so slammed in comments that they went away, so on and so forth.
However, for people like myself (and probably a lot of
You can even see this, in microcosm, with
*shrug*
So the question is, where to next?
At the risk of being called an MS apologist: even Windows supports not automatically changing the clock for daylight savings time. You just uncheck the box that says "automatically adjust for daylight savings" in the time zone selection dialog.
1.8026175 × 10^12 furlongs per fortnight
c?
That depends on which board game he saw. Odds are good he saw the new board game, which is based on Civ III, and is entitled something like "Sid Meier's Civilization: the Board Game." This is not the same as the original Avalon Hill board game entitled (IIRC) Civilization, which does, as you say, predate Civ I.
Personally, I bought SMC:tBG just for the fun of knowing I bought a board game...based on a video game...based on a board game.
However in my opinion, open source fails far less then Windows...
That might be true, but no one gets fired for choosing Microsoft.
It's reaction mass more than storage.
It seems a shame to waste so much fuel on reaction mass in rocketry when you could possibly use something else (atmosphere, the magnetic field, a giant cable) for the first acceleration.
Losing the fuel for initial acceleration also has mass (and therefore payload) benefits, but the efficiency of using an external reaction mass is, IMHO, the big upsaide.
Well, yes, but you're borrowing much of that energy from the momentum of the cable, and you're replacing most of it when you ride the cable back down. You lose due to entropy, of course, but it's orders of magnitude more efficient than a rocket boost up and a free fall down.
The advantages you point out are also real, but they're minor compared to the energy efficiency of it.
The minimum speed was 1 meter/s = 3.6km/h = 2.2369 miles/h. I can walk faster than that
Not straight up, you can't.
Geosynch is 35,786 km above sealeve according to wiki. At 3.6 km/h it would take over a year to get up to geosynch
True, but as gravity decreases, you accelerate faster per unit energy. I can't be arsed to actually do any math, but 1m/s at 1G is going to translate into significantly higher velocity the further out you go. Besides which, if you want to use the elevator primarily for moving materiel rather than personnel, a one-year turnaround might not be too bad; throughput is potentially more important than lag.
Even for personnel, that's on the order of time it took to sail from Europe to America via wind power, and people did that.
There is no automatic linking within the text of the document, but the nodes linked after the document are selected by people going to them from the document. Linked nodes at the bottom are sorted in descending order of their frequency as destinations from the current node (either by being clicked in the node text, or being searched for in the global search box). It's intended to model users' trains of thought as they navigate e2.
Of course, how well this works (or how useful it is, for that matteR) is a matter of opinion.
Good encryption should prevent a third party from determining any information about the payload. Bury all the protocol details in the data, initiate the session with a completely innocuous public-key encrypted exchange of symmetric keys, and proceed.
If carriers want to block all encrypted traffic, well...that's a whole different problem.
Isn't that backwards? If today's dollars are the "good" ones (that buy more stuff as compared to tomorrow's dollars), wouldn't you much rather spend tomorrow's dollars?
More importantly, unless inflation gets completely out of hand, investment returns will outstrip inflation by a significant margin. This is particularly true if your time horizon is measured in decades, thereby profiting on the long-term trend of the market and being insulated from short-term fluctuations.
You are aware that the space program exists because of nationalistic pride, right? That it's keeping the interest of the public that allows funding to keep flowing?
If we want to get down to primary motivations and proper goals, the goal of a government is to foster the happiness of its citizens, not to pursue science of any kind. If sending humans to Mars would make the population happy, then it's the right and proper thing for the government to do. Pursuing your high-minded notion of pure science is what would make you happy, but, thankfully, you're not the only person NASA and the government are trying to please.
I say thankfully, of course, because I, for one, am quite happy we put men on the moon, and am glad your notions of what is right and proper for the government and NASA to do didn't manage to wet-blanket that idea.
And then we can sit back and wonder how long it would have taken a guy, even in a space suit - hell, even a slashdot geek in a space suit, and we're not the most in-shape bunch, I warrant - to cover two miles, taking samples all the way. I'd guess a lot less than a year.
And that's not even taking into account 1/3 our gravity!
Specifically, if he had dual citizenship and an entirely legitimate peer-of-the-realm status in Britain, he could still not legally be "Sir" or "Lord" anything to Americans.
(Except, of course, in recongition of a visiting head of state...but then it's his British identity which has the status, not his American)
Specifically, you claimed to enjoy the feeling of multitasking. This is exactly the effect that would be expected if you had high dopamine levels, which is what he cites the article as saying. He then proceeded to ask questions regarding your responses to other stimuli, in order to further analyze the situation.
Of course, you responded by calling him a dumbass.
This is not exactly the mark of reasoned argument.
You and I must be reading different slashdots.
And, before we come all over too pleased with Milwaukee city planning, let's not forget the almost criminal lack of east-west corridors across the city. You've got I-94...and, a couple miles south of that, I-894...and aside from that, you've got nothing. There are city streets (interrupted by Wawautosa whenever possible), but there isn't any good way across the city south of 894 or north of 94...and north of 94 is kind of a lot of Milwaukee. Like all of downtown, the north side, and the northern suburbs.
Feh.
You're absolutely right that gaming hasn't driven CPU advancement, but it has certainly drive CPU pricing, which is arguably just as important.