The Aol "accident", government trying to subpoena search results, etc. Big companies whose source of income is to store and analyze massive amounts of personal preferences to sell targeted advertisements effectively store and analyze personal data. This article is a complete waste of time, don't bother reading it.
Yeah! Wake me up when the headlines read "100 million iPods... in space!"
That's an impressive feat
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Taking in account that it took 20 years for televisions to sell about 70 millions sets on US (source. I don't have stats for radio and phone sets, but 100 million units is an impressive feat regardless of substitution pieces or upgrades.
Come on, people don't recognize humor when they see it anymore? Next time I'll be telling that Microsoft has given up zune and will pay people to use it and I will be modded informative. Hmmm, wait!
Maybe EFF already has the answer, depending on how long AT&T is routing all phone calls through NSA network. They would even kill two birds with one shot, the subpoena to obligate AT&T to disclose the info could come from the patent suit. It's a win-win! What could possibly go wrong?
Used to have a cap of 10GB/month, if you went above it you would pay something like 1 euro/GB above the limit. But the competition got tough, and now they have an unlimited plan, no holds barred. Mine is 8Mbps/512kbps unlimited and I pay 25 euros/month (something like 30 dollars). They have a 10Mbps and a 25Mbps plan too, the latter I think is kinda 45 euros. Thanks to the competition, I'm expecting them to lay fiber this year, and provide the triple play over cable (digital TV, unlimited 25 Mbps line and telephone) by something like 60 euros/month. Gotta love competition. We're still not France or Sweden, but that's enough by now.
What's up with that? When any of these products pass the vaporware state, then it is newsworthy. Until then, it seems like someone is really interested in free publicity for non-existent or non-affordable products.
Can God make an heptagonal triangle? Well, to spare my time trying to explain why is it a fallacy I googled an article about it. Anyway, discussing this is as pointless as discussing how can the Saci Perere cross his legs if he has only one (Brazilian folklore), or what is the sound of one hand clapping.
Anyway, there is only one thing we can be certain: Chuck Norris can create a rock so heavy that even he can't lift it. And then he lifts it anyways, just to show you who Chuck Norris is.
That's equivalent to "is there something a being that can do everything cannot do?" or, abstracting a little bit more, "is there any A that implies (and is implied) by not A?". "A ~A" is a logical contradiction, thus, leads to no valid conclusion. There are "n" ways to question the validity of religious dogmas, but a fallacy certainly is not one.
Over the years, Bill Gates (among others) has repeatedly predicted that speech recognition will be a major form of input, but it hasn't happened yet.
That's not true. I'm posting this comment using a Windows Vista speech recognition software and Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Never Send A Machine To Do A Man's Job
on
The Virtual Teacher
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I doubt we will see any meaningful result soon on this field. First because AI is not at this advanced point yet (in order to provide improvisation and interactivity), and the use of pre-recorded images and sounds cannot cope with the ingenuity and the unpredictability of the students. Second because human beings, although very sympathetic to the idea of talking heads (just look at clippy), in the long run get bored of it.
On the other side, I already had a couple of teachers that were completely inept to their jobs, following scripts just like a computer program with pre-recorded footage would. But computers are very unlikely to come even near to advantages a real good teacher can provide.
5 (gigabytes / month) = 15.9494775 kbps. That's a quarter of the dialup speed. You can reach 5 GB/month using your good old 56 kbps dialip connection 6 hours a day on its max capacity. Enough said.
In other news, I pay 25 euros/month for a 8 Mbps down/512 Kbps up unlimited cable line, and I consider it expensive, and plan to change to the competitor that offers a 4M/512K by under 20 euros. God bless Europe.
Brazilian judicial system is similar to the U.S. one, each judge has the final say over his jurisdiction. Despite of that, Brazil is ruled by civil law, not common law, so the decision of that judge is completely irrelevant for jurisprudence. There are a lot of judicial activism there too, so it is not rare (but it still weird) that a judge bias can affect the decision, on this case, an animal right defensor judge accepting an animal as a litigant, back in the seventies, a judge acquitted a man that was on trial for murder accepting a witness statement from the dead friend which he had communicated telepathically with a medium.
Despite of those aberrations, judicial system in Brazil is not that ridiculous. It is massively slow and a lot of times unjust, but we are not near to give animals (or companies, for all that matters) full rights of a natural person.
Maybe they could bid for Sealand and create their own country. Or move to North Korean embassy. Seems to be a popular alternative now that U.S. is becoming very unfriendly to the Internet. But if they move, will they take the tubes with them, or will have to call contractors to install them again? Inquiring minds want to know.
Playing counter-strike will now be even more realistic. Imagine the kids screaming "haha, I'm going to blow this plane, you faggots!!!11" inside the plane. And the real CT squad goes berserker and pull their weapons. Pure pwnage!
I've seen it twice already. First, in financial troubles, over the air TV broadcasters began to pack the transmission with endless and annoying advertisements. Here in Portugal the 3 major channels (RTP, SIC, TVI) use to roll out ads for 15, 20 minutes, for goodness sake! It is not that rare for people to forget completely what they were watching *, when zapping through the channels. That pushed a lot of people to cable, as initially they were mostly ad free and, thus, worth the price. But as budgets got short, spendings got high and greed kicked in, they began to pack paid channels (like AXN, History Channel and Discovery for instance) with publicity too, not in volume, but enough to annoy. At the same time, cable companies began to offer premium channels with less or no advertisement on them, but you have to pay extra to get them...
Then, came the internet, and the most tech savvy people began to get access to what they want, ad free and faster than over the legal channels of distribution, going around the artificial international syndication delay, that used to be 12, even 18 months! Most people still don't have access to such goodies, but it is a matter of time until someone with guts and technology creates a high quality YouTube-like system for movies and series.
Trying to push advertisement to this internet target audience will not work, as getting rid of ads is one of the reasons people go to the internet to look for things. People would even pay for content, they do it every time by buying complete season DVDs (although 70/$60 is kinda bitter to shell out in a single season), as long as the price is not extortive. People will not pay $4 to rent an episode for 24 hours. They can buy the whole season for, let's say, $60, what in the average 22 episodes season + 8 extras mean that they can *own* the goddamn thing for $2/episode. People will not download it to watch ads, they can watch with ads TV already, without the hassle of having to download, or watch it without ads, jumping through a few hoops.
Bottom line is: sell an episode of a serie in an ITunes like system (preferentially without the DRM) for $ 0.99 (fixed price) and people will buy it. Better yet, along with the file transfer, let people watch what they bought in an YouTube style interface, so people don't need to bother with media players, codecs or moving the file around.
* By time I was writing this, I remembered I was watching my favorite soap opera ( gasp!) but the advertisement ran for so long that I completely forgot about it, and lost the whole second half. Damn.
As a Brazilian, I can say you are really not trying.
Mardi Gras?
There is no such thing in Brasil. I guess you mean carnival, it differs from mardi-gras in the ammount of naked people (and crossdressers).
Nazi hideout?
I think you confused Brazil with Argentina. A lot of criminals flees to Brasil, a lot are born there, but Nazi is not really our specialty, as our ethnic diversity would easily get them mad and bust their covers.
Soccer?
We don't know this sport there. But we are five times champions of Football (Association), if that is what you mean. (Tongue in cheek)
Regardless of that, I agree with your take, Brasil is not known only by its fine coffee and Martial Arts. It is not even known by it's Martial Arts, for god sake, except for people that follows MMA and know that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu exists (we in Brazil don't call it that, we call it only Jiu Jitsu).
The general sensation in Brazil is that we are known by our futebol, our samba and carnival, our giant man-eater screaming snake overlords (anacondas), our monkeys and our natural beauties (landscapes and women).
"At the same time, unless congress wants to hold and distribute material of questionable moral quality, the copyright law could be amended to limit the protections of copyright to those works that do actually further the arts and the sciences as defined in the constitution."
Uh-uh. Let's repeat the same errors from the past, keeping what the current generation deems "of excelent moral quality", and censoring everything else, just like some works of Michelangelo were. People must to remember, what is of questionable moral quality for some is perfectly acceptable (and even desirable) for others, specially when the benefit of time is give, and that's the idea of archiving for posterity.
What's that? There is no such thing as "Computer Science alike". Either it is Computer Science, a degree that originally has nothing to do with using (or even programming) computers, but with the theoretical science involved in computation processes (disciplines like automata theory, Computability theory, Analysis of algorithms, Artificial intelligence, Formal language, etc., or in the math realm, linear algebra, Graph theory, etc.), or it is not. If studying the inner theories of computation processes is not for you, but you want to become a ready to market programmer, I advise you to choose a Technology Information degree or something more related. It is all up to what you are really aiming to.
Back in the day I was getting my CS degree in Brazil, where you are required to choose your major *before* you are admitted to the university, the dropout rate in the first 2 semesters was something like 20% (8 out of 40), because students choose CS thinking they would learn programming and advanced hackeries, and game programming when the truth was that they would have to go deep in calculus, algebra, data structures and everything "boring" first, in order to have the scientific basis to progress in the course. People just didn't understand that CS goal is not to produce developers to the market but researchers that have the necessary skill to learn everything they will eventually need to use. IT is a fast moving field, but the foundations of it are mostly static. Learn the foundations once, and keep in pace with the zeitgeist and you will be successful.
Name one executive detained, barred, fined, or otherwise inconvenienced by this law.
With pleasure. You can read the whole embroglio here. The relevant snippet follow:
But Toronto-based Sherritt International was among the first non-US companies to be named by a special investigative team set up in the American Cuban Office. Pennant-Rea, Sheehy and eight other Sherritt directors - including Daniel Owen, who holds UK and Canadian passports, and the chief executive, who is Swiss - were sent letters giving them 45-days to 'cease to traffic'.(...)
(...) Pennant-Rea, the brother-in-law of BBC economics editor Peter Jay, a former British ambassador to Washington, suffered another blow. Helms-Burton barred him, his wife Helen, and his two children from entering America.
Enough? What do I need to show for you people to believe that there is a worldwide embargo? I'm not judging merit or anything, I'm just pointing out a fact.
Slashdot Mirror
The Aol "accident", government trying to subpoena search results, etc. Big companies whose source of income is to store and analyze massive amounts of personal preferences to sell targeted advertisements effectively store and analyze personal data. This article is a complete waste of time, don't bother reading it.
Yeah! Wake me up when the headlines read "100 million iPods ... in space!"
Taking in account that it took 20 years for televisions to sell about 70 millions sets on US (source. I don't have stats for radio and phone sets, but 100 million units is an impressive feat regardless of substitution pieces or upgrades.
All right, sig changed. Thanks for the tip :)
Come on, people don't recognize humor when they see it anymore? Next time I'll be telling that Microsoft has given up zune and will pay people to use it and I will be modded informative. Hmmm, wait!
Maybe EFF already has the answer, depending on how long AT&T is routing all phone calls through NSA network. They would even kill two birds with one shot, the subpoena to obligate AT&T to disclose the info could come from the patent suit. It's a win-win! What could possibly go wrong?
'We've been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content.'
Since when? As far as I know, what they are trying is to provide the ultimate protection to content, from the file format to the media player software to the output hardware.
Used to have a cap of 10GB/month, if you went above it you would pay something like 1 euro/GB above the limit. But the competition got tough, and now they have an unlimited plan, no holds barred. Mine is 8Mbps/512kbps unlimited and I pay 25 euros/month (something like 30 dollars). They have a 10Mbps and a 25Mbps plan too, the latter I think is kinda 45 euros. Thanks to the competition, I'm expecting them to lay fiber this year, and provide the triple play over cable (digital TV, unlimited 25 Mbps line and telephone) by something like 60 euros/month. Gotta love competition. We're still not France or Sweden, but that's enough by now.
New Technology Could Lead To 3D Printers
3D Printers To Build Houses
A 3D Printer On Every Desktop?
What's up with that? When any of these products pass the vaporware state, then it is newsworthy. Until then, it seems like someone is really interested in free publicity for non-existent or non-affordable products.
Can God make an heptagonal triangle? Well, to spare my time trying to explain why is it a fallacy I googled an article about it. Anyway, discussing this is as pointless as discussing how can the Saci Perere cross his legs if he has only one (Brazilian folklore), or what is the sound of one hand clapping.
Anyway, there is only one thing we can be certain: Chuck Norris can create a rock so heavy that even he can't lift it. And then he lifts it anyways, just to show you who Chuck Norris is.
A ~A should read A <==>~A
That's equivalent to "is there something a being that can do everything cannot do?" or, abstracting a little bit more, "is there any A that implies (and is implied) by not A?". "A ~A" is a logical contradiction, thus, leads to no valid conclusion. There are "n" ways to question the validity of religious dogmas, but a fallacy certainly is not one.
From TFA:
Over the years, Bill Gates (among others) has repeatedly predicted that speech recognition will be a major form of input, but it hasn't happened yet.
That's not true. I'm posting this comment using a Windows Vista speech recognition software and Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
I doubt we will see any meaningful result soon on this field. First because AI is not at this advanced point yet (in order to provide improvisation and interactivity), and the use of pre-recorded images and sounds cannot cope with the ingenuity and the unpredictability of the students. Second because human beings, although very sympathetic to the idea of talking heads (just look at clippy), in the long run get bored of it.
On the other side, I already had a couple of teachers that were completely inept to their jobs, following scripts just like a computer program with pre-recorded footage would. But computers are very unlikely to come even near to advantages a real good teacher can provide.
5 (gigabytes / month) = 15.9494775 kbps. That's a quarter of the dialup speed. You can reach 5 GB/month using your good old 56 kbps dialip connection 6 hours a day on its max capacity. Enough said.
In other news, I pay 25 euros/month for a 8 Mbps down/512 Kbps up unlimited cable line, and I consider it expensive, and plan to change to the competitor that offers a 4M/512K by under 20 euros. God bless Europe.
Brazilian judicial system is similar to the U.S. one, each judge has the final say over his jurisdiction. Despite of that, Brazil is ruled by civil law, not common law, so the decision of that judge is completely irrelevant for jurisprudence. There are a lot of judicial activism there too, so it is not rare (but it still weird) that a judge bias can affect the decision, on this case, an animal right defensor judge accepting an animal as a litigant, back in the seventies, a judge acquitted a man that was on trial for murder accepting a witness statement from the dead friend which he had communicated telepathically with a medium.
Despite of those aberrations, judicial system in Brazil is not that ridiculous. It is massively slow and a lot of times unjust, but we are not near to give animals (or companies, for all that matters) full rights of a natural person.
Maybe they could bid for Sealand and create their own country. Or move to North Korean embassy. Seems to be a popular alternative now that U.S. is becoming very unfriendly to the Internet. But if they move, will they take the tubes with them, or will have to call contractors to install them again? Inquiring minds want to know.
Playing counter-strike will now be even more realistic. Imagine the kids screaming "haha, I'm going to blow this plane, you faggots!!!11" inside the plane. And the real CT squad goes berserker and pull their weapons. Pure pwnage!
I've seen it twice already. First, in financial troubles, over the air TV broadcasters began to pack the transmission with endless and annoying advertisements. Here in Portugal the 3 major channels (RTP, SIC, TVI) use to roll out ads for 15, 20 minutes, for goodness sake! It is not that rare for people to forget completely what they were watching *, when zapping through the channels. That pushed a lot of people to cable, as initially they were mostly ad free and, thus, worth the price. But as budgets got short, spendings got high and greed kicked in, they began to pack paid channels (like AXN, History Channel and Discovery for instance) with publicity too, not in volume, but enough to annoy. At the same time, cable companies began to offer premium channels with less or no advertisement on them, but you have to pay extra to get them ...
Then, came the internet, and the most tech savvy people began to get access to what they want, ad free and faster than over the legal channels of distribution, going around the artificial international syndication delay, that used to be 12, even 18 months! Most people still don't have access to such goodies, but it is a matter of time until someone with guts and technology creates a high quality YouTube-like system for movies and series.
Trying to push advertisement to this internet target audience will not work, as getting rid of ads is one of the reasons people go to the internet to look for things. People would even pay for content, they do it every time by buying complete season DVDs (although 70/$60 is kinda bitter to shell out in a single season), as long as the price is not extortive. People will not pay $4 to rent an episode for 24 hours. They can buy the whole season for, let's say, $60, what in the average 22 episodes season + 8 extras mean that they can *own* the goddamn thing for $2/episode. People will not download it to watch ads, they can watch with ads TV already, without the hassle of having to download, or watch it without ads, jumping through a few hoops.
Bottom line is: sell an episode of a serie in an ITunes like system (preferentially without the DRM) for $ 0.99 (fixed price) and people will buy it. Better yet, along with the file transfer, let people watch what they bought in an YouTube style interface, so people don't need to bother with media players, codecs or moving the file around.
* By time I was writing this, I remembered I was watching my favorite soap opera ( gasp!) but the advertisement ran for so long that I completely forgot about it, and lost the whole second half. Damn.
As a Brazilian, I can say you are really not trying.
Mardi Gras?
There is no such thing in Brasil. I guess you mean carnival, it differs from mardi-gras in the ammount of naked people (and crossdressers).
Nazi hideout?
I think you confused Brazil with Argentina. A lot of criminals flees to Brasil, a lot are born there, but Nazi is not really our specialty, as our ethnic diversity would easily get them mad and bust their covers.
Soccer?
We don't know this sport there. But we are five times champions of Football (Association), if that is what you mean. (Tongue in cheek)
Regardless of that, I agree with your take, Brasil is not known only by its fine coffee and Martial Arts. It is not even known by it's Martial Arts, for god sake, except for people that follows MMA and know that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu exists (we in Brazil don't call it that, we call it only Jiu Jitsu).
The general sensation in Brazil is that we are known by our futebol, our samba and carnival, our giant man-eater screaming snake overlords (anacondas), our monkeys and our natural beauties (landscapes and women).
"At the same time, unless congress wants to hold and distribute material of questionable moral quality, the copyright law could be amended to limit the protections of copyright to those works that do actually further the arts and the sciences as defined in the constitution."
Uh-uh. Let's repeat the same errors from the past, keeping what the current generation deems "of excelent moral quality", and censoring everything else, just like some works of Michelangelo were. People must to remember, what is of questionable moral quality for some is perfectly acceptable (and even desirable) for others, specially when the benefit of time is give, and that's the idea of archiving for posterity.
Please, mod this comment offtopic, also for no particular ... hey, wait!
Of course there are only two countries in the World, if it is not U.S. it must be Canada, right?
I live in an European country, you insensitive clod!
What's that? There is no such thing as "Computer Science alike". Either it is Computer Science, a degree that originally has nothing to do with using (or even programming) computers, but with the theoretical science involved in computation processes (disciplines like automata theory, Computability theory, Analysis of algorithms, Artificial intelligence, Formal language, etc., or in the math realm, linear algebra, Graph theory, etc.), or it is not. If studying the inner theories of computation processes is not for you, but you want to become a ready to market programmer, I advise you to choose a Technology Information degree or something more related. It is all up to what you are really aiming to.
Back in the day I was getting my CS degree in Brazil, where you are required to choose your major *before* you are admitted to the university, the dropout rate in the first 2 semesters was something like 20% (8 out of 40), because students choose CS thinking they would learn programming and advanced hackeries, and game programming when the truth was that they would have to go deep in calculus, algebra, data structures and everything "boring" first, in order to have the scientific basis to progress in the course. People just didn't understand that CS goal is not to produce developers to the market but researchers that have the necessary skill to learn everything they will eventually need to use. IT is a fast moving field, but the foundations of it are mostly static. Learn the foundations once, and keep in pace with the zeitgeist and you will be successful.
Name one executive detained, barred, fined, or otherwise inconvenienced by this law.
With pleasure. You can read the whole embroglio here. The relevant snippet follow:
But Toronto-based Sherritt International was among the first non-US companies to be named by a special investigative team set up in the American Cuban Office. Pennant-Rea, Sheehy and eight other Sherritt directors - including Daniel Owen, who holds UK and Canadian passports, and the chief executive, who is Swiss - were sent letters giving them 45-days to 'cease to traffic'.(...)
(...) Pennant-Rea, the brother-in-law of BBC economics editor Peter Jay, a former British ambassador to Washington, suffered another blow. Helms-Burton barred him, his wife Helen, and his two children from entering America.
Enough? What do I need to show for you people to believe that there is a worldwide embargo? I'm not judging merit or anything, I'm just pointing out a fact.