I have never read Naomi Klein and I was responding to a post which said "Let the market decide"...
I know the market is a mechanism not a "thing", and if left alone will normally find an efficient cost, but it can also (unless stopped) raise the price as high as the customers will pay when there is a monopoly, this is where the market system fails and where you need a body (like a government) to control it (to a degree)
"Western Europe and Eastern Asia traded for centuries if not a few thousand years with no oversight from a ruling body"
Yes but this was a two player market with an advantage for both parties to trade (reasonably) fairly, since both had goods that the other wanted, so there could be no price fixing and no monopoly since their was only a mutual pair of buyers and sellers
The three devices listed, two are available now and are not multi-touch one is imminent and is...
And I still can't see the point of Photosynth - it's not a user interface? It's a program that stitches photos together this has been available for years? what is new about it, and in what way is it an interface? If it's an interface what is it an interface to? an app that stitches photos together???
The licence is a bit confused it contains the standard boilerplate about the GPL then says/* You can do whatever you like with this source file, though I would
prefer that if you modify it and redistribute it that you include
comments to that effect with your name and the date. Thank you.
Let the market decide is the worst argument...... the market like taking without paying and without giving attribution... the market likes not paying for things... the market likes being just good enough
"The Market" would pay you nothing and charge you a fortune to breathe.... if it could get away with it...
The Government is what stops this happening, it regulates the market so that it kept fair, tries to reward innovation, and stop anti-competitive practices (like monopolies, FUD etc...) - I think most Governments do not do this very well but at least they generally try...
3D - Won't work yet outside the lab, same as the last 10 years...?
Touch Screen - 3 times - available now - not futuristic?
Photosynth - Can't see why this is a "user interface" ? It's a nice app but can't see the point?
Bumptop - 3D ish, I have seen many similar fall by the wayside ?
Passenger rail transport in the US does not need MagLev it just needs fast conventional trains and more of them...... The fastest train in use in the US goes at a maximum of 150 mph? (Acela Express between Boston and Washington) the international definition of "High Speed Rail" is 155 mph, so this does not even qualify?
France meanwhile has 1166 miles of High speed track that run at 200+ mph
The Japanese use conventional high speed trains where they can but want to use MagLev because it is fast AND quiet, they want to run high speed trains into the centre of large, densely populated cities and conventional trains are too noisy to run at high speed through densely populated areas.
If your company is run by accountants then get out now....... If you have to justify the cost benefits of every decision then you won't have any customers
This is not to say you should not be careful with how you spend money but you should not "penny pinch" either
This is why some companies make it so difficult to get through to their support department and why you only get to speak to a script reading drone - trained people who actually know how to fix the problems are expensive, but the customers prefer companies who have them
Chapters in books, levels in games - there for the same reason... Pause points.
It's a place you can stop for a moment, and come back to You could stop halfway through a sentence in a book? Just as you could stop halfway through a battle? But it is awkward, and so you don't do it. If there really are no pauses in a game when can you save it and go and get on with your life, when do you eat, sleep etc... ?
Saying that games with only one theme, one area, are generally boring, and games with only one difficulty setting do not exist, they would be insanely difficult (and no-one would play) or trivially easy (and no-one would play) so there *are* levels, they just have smooth transitions, that you hardly notice rather than distinct obvious levels
No I am not a Windows developer... but then as I said if an app does not work then the reason it does not work is not important?
If my app works testably *correctly* on XP but not on Vista then I don't care if it is the app or Vista (or even a fault in XP) on one it works on the other it doesn't, I don't want to start bashing the App manufacturer or Microsoft, I just want my app to continue working. If the app is important to my business then I cannot "prune" it and if the manufacturer has not released a new version then I cannot upgrade (yet)
With XP I don't have stability issues so Vista's "more stable" is a non-issue XP (with AV/Firewall etc...) is at least as secure from outside attack as Vista (or so Mirosoft has been telling me for years..)
Hardware - "if Vista doesn't support your hardware it is time to look at upgrading. It is probably really old" this is simply fatuous, brand new hardware on sale when Vista was released was not up to the Vista minimum spec, and why does Vista need the level of resources it uses, it's not for stability , it's not for security (unless it's DRM!) it seems to be for pretty graphics (which yes I do turn off, I use the Classic themem in XP), and other unspecified dross?
Drivers - "If your hardware can't deliver a stable driver under one OS, why are you trusting them to supply it under a different one?" - because they are the two largest Video card companies in the world (NVidia, ATI) and I don't really have any choice...
So you think I should upgrade to Vista, change my app, upgrade my hardware, all so I can get rid of the stability problems I don't have, and to solve the security issues I don't have.... As I said give me a reason to upgrade?
I agree entirely, it doesn't matter what OS, if my apps don't run it's useless.......the difference is that with Fedora/Ubuntu you didn't pay for the OS, or the apps, you were not forced to upgrade, and you don't have it pre-installed when you bought the PC. Microsoft is selling Vista as stable, compatible and better....
By the way your problem seems to be with an OS upgrade (and yes these don't work on most OS's arrg!)? and isn't there Skype for Linux now?
If you make a claim it must stand up to testing or it is false
Dowsing has been tested, properly, many times, and failed every time
Now this does not rule out that dowsing may work sometimes, under the right conditions, but until someone can show it actually works better than random chance then it will be considered false
You can claim it works as many times as you like (anecdotal evidence) but until you can prove it works better than random chance (note not even every time) then it will be considered that dowsers are deluding themselves
It is not difficult to prove it works just set up a site where there is water/metal/whatever that the dowser can detect and make sure they can have no knowledge of where it is and get them to find it by using dowsing, repeat including random tests where there is no water/metal/whatever present and if they find (or fail to find) better than random chance then you have proved there is something in it........ Oddly this has not been done successfully....
So flash can affect my computer... why is it still used? Block it!
What we need is a replacement for HTML+JavaScript+Other(Flash,Java etc...) that is properly sandboxed and utterly unaware what it is running on, has no concept of your filesystem or processes. What we have now are browsers that are heavily integrated into the OS and run at elevated security level (IE) or plugins that appear to be able to interact with the OS when they should only be able to talk to the browser....
Yes this is the kind of thing that is done all the time, this is why I get adverts targeted at me for where my ISP is (I am over 100 miles from the registered address of my ISP)
Your mobiles position is tracked all the time, it would not work if it wasn't! A surprising large number of people already have or can get access to this information already and if used properly can be used to track you (or at least your mobile) very closely (by triangulation).
But note this only tracks your mobile, not you... If your car is stolen, with your mobile, and credit cards in it, then I'd be surprised if the Police tried to prove you were speeding, buying goods, and using premium rate lines, all hundreds of miles apart all at the same time...
If you don't want to be tracked don't own a mobile.... (or turn it off)
Is Vista stable? I don't care... Will my programs be stable on it... I do care
If the 3rd party apps that work on XP/2000 don't work on Vista then it will appear to be unstable, it does not matter if it is the OS or the app the impression is that Vista is unstable.
Blaming Vista if a 3rd party app that works on XP does not work on Vista should be blamed on Vista, the 3rd party wrote the app for Windows, not XP, so it should work on "Windows". Losing support for legacy apps (16 bit etc..) is fine but all 32 bit apps should work. It is not like a Windows app not working on a Mac, the app probably has a "Designed for Microsoft Windows" sticker on the box and Vista is "Microsoft Windows"! One of the annoying parts of Vista is the files/registry sandboxing it does specifically to support older apps.
If I can't get stable drivers for my hardware - why should I upgrade If I have to upgrade my hardware to use it - why should I upgrade If I can't run my apps - why should I upgrade
Please don't say DX10 - I don't run games Please don't say security - I don't believe it is *secure* and XP is secure enough (with other apps to close the gaps) Please don't say it's pretty - I don't care
What this basically says is that *if you work for the government* and you are given access to personal information you should show that you have made an effort to secure it, if you do then there are no consequences, if however you are negligent or stupid then you must suffer the consequences.... sounds reasonable to me...
I hate to say this but they are not a small company, their printer division is only a very small part of them,and they do most of their business in Asia... so your tactics will not work, most technology companies in Japan are years ahead of US companies, and a lot are diverse companies like this?
There is a country that is part of the evil empire, the current target of the USA, and excepting Iraq (now) and Israel is the most democratic country in the middle east? It is a theocracy, with Sharia law as the highest law, but with a democratically elected government, elected president, and civilian law courts and judicial system that runs alongside Sharia Law, it still manages to have a relatively good (but far from perfect) human rights record?
There is however a country that opress the majority of it's citizens, is a dictatorship run by one family, who are of different origins and religion to the majority of the population, (and who are related to the Bin-ladens), have the most Al-Queda training camps of any country, and where the majority of the 9-11 terrorists came from, and is often berated for it's woeful human rights record
The first is Iran (an evil, anti-american country), the second is Saudi-Arabia (a friendly pro-american country)
Probably not... It's is not Turing Complete, it was designed and built for one purpose (but turned out to be amazingly flexible)
It could theoretically be rebuilt to run Linux... but the boot times would be a bit slow? The nearest thing it has to a clock speed is the input rate (that was the limiting factor in decoding) normally 5000 characters/second, was run up to 9700 c/s but it effectively did parallel processing so....
Vasilyev's "Testimony of Eyewitnesses to the Tunguska Impact" contains three separate accounts (by Kulik's Evenki guide Lyuchetkan, L. V. Dzhenkoul, and V. N. Dmitriev) indicating that Lake Cheko was a well-known landmark on the Strelka-Vanavara trail long before the Tunguska Event (http://olkhov.narod.ru/tungwitn1.htm)
Dr Gareth Collins, a Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) research fellow at Imperial College London, UK has commented to the BBC that Lake Cheko is the wrong shape, size, depth, and displays none of the normal signs of it being an impact crater, and the a the Italian team have shown no evidence that it is an impact crater (they have however ruled out some other possibilities) also an impact would also have felled trees all around the crater, yet there appear to be trees older than 100 years still standing around Lake Cheko today.(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6239334.stm)
So its almost certainly not a crater, is in the wrong place, and no-one seems to be expecting a crater (from an air-burst)?
Perhaps we should use those nice safe oil or coal plants instead, they have never caused anyone any harm.....
Things can go wrong with nuclear reactors, same as they can with any type of power plant, it's only the consequences of a problem that are worse, this is what has to be balanced with the benefits.
Nuclear reactors are a target for terrorism, but so are tall buildings, government offices, water pumping stations, electricity substations, etc... anything that is either essential infrastructure or has a lot of people near it is a target a nuclear power plant is just another target?
The point here is, how many nuclear plants have actually had a major problem? My count is four? (I am not an expert) The three you mentioned and Sellafield in the UK? besides Chernobyl the outcome of these were all minor, that's a pretty good safety record compared with almost any other industry. Chernobyl, 3 Mile island, and Sellafield could not happen today (as you say the safeties are in place now)
Now look at the build dates
Sellafield : 1950
Fermi : 1963
3 Mile Island : 1968
Chernobyl : 1970
Are you saying that we have not learnt how to build safer reactors in the last 37 years?
It has been commented that Chernobyl could not happen in the US or Europe because all the reactors had safety systems in place at the time that would make the exact circumstances impossible
I would however say that the industry needs strict regulation so that safety standards are maintained
Slashdot Mirror
Nope still don't see the point? But maybe that's just not the way I use photos ...?
I tend not to take photos of things, but take photos because they look nice
I have never read Naomi Klein and I was responding to a post which said "Let the market decide" ...
I know the market is a mechanism not a "thing", and if left alone will normally find an efficient cost, but it can also (unless stopped) raise the price as high as the customers will pay when there is a monopoly, this is where the market system fails and where you need a body (like a government) to control it (to a degree)
"Western Europe and Eastern Asia traded for centuries if not a few thousand years with no oversight from a ruling body"
Yes but this was a two player market with an advantage for both parties to trade (reasonably) fairly, since both had goods that the other wanted, so there could be no price fixing and no monopoly since their was only a mutual pair of buyers and sellers
The three devices listed, two are available now and are not multi-touch one is imminent and is ...
And I still can't see the point of Photosynth - it's not a user interface? It's a program that stitches photos together this has been available for years? what is new about it, and in what way is it an interface? If it's an interface what is it an interface to? an app that stitches photos together???
The licence is a bit confused it contains the standard boilerplate about the GPL then says /* You can do whatever you like with this source file, though I would
prefer that if you modify it and redistribute it that you include
comments to that effect with your name and the date. Thank you.
So seems to retract the GPL ?
Let the market decide is the worst argument ... ... the market like taking without paying and without giving attribution ... the market likes not paying for things ... the market likes being just good enough
.... if it could get away with it ...
...) - I think most Governments do not do this very well but at least they generally try ...
"The Market" would pay you nothing and charge you a fortune to breathe
The Government is what stops this happening, it regulates the market so that it kept fair, tries to reward innovation, and stop anti-competitive practices (like monopolies, FUD etc
the article lists 6 examples which amount to
...?
3D - Won't work yet outside the lab, same as the last 10 years
Touch Screen - 3 times - available now - not futuristic?
Photosynth - Can't see why this is a "user interface" ? It's a nice app but can't see the point?
Bumptop - 3D ish, I have seen many similar fall by the wayside ?
Passenger rail transport in the US does not need MagLev it just needs fast conventional trains and more of them ... ... The fastest train in use in the US goes at a maximum of 150 mph? (Acela Express between Boston and Washington) the international definition of "High Speed Rail" is 155 mph, so this does not even qualify?
France meanwhile has 1166 miles of High speed track that run at 200+ mph
The Japanese use conventional high speed trains where they can but want to use MagLev because it is fast AND quiet, they want to run high speed trains into the centre of large, densely populated cities and conventional trains are too noisy to run at high speed through densely populated areas.
So you share your name with the company that runs the Lottery in the UK .... ... that will do wonders for you "net credability"
If your company is run by accountants then get out now .... ... If you have to justify the cost benefits of every decision then you won't have any customers
This is not to say you should not be careful with how you spend money but you should not "penny pinch" either
This is why some companies make it so difficult to get through to their support department and why you only get to speak to a script reading drone - trained people who actually know how to fix the problems are expensive, but the customers prefer companies who have them
Chapters in books, levels in games - there for the same reason ... Pause points.
It's a place you can stop for a moment, and come back to You could stop halfway through a sentence in a book? Just as you could stop halfway through a battle? But it is awkward, and so you don't do it. If there really are no pauses in a game when can you save it and go and get on with your life, when do you eat, sleep etc... ?
Saying that games with only one theme, one area, are generally boring, and games with only one difficulty setting do not exist, they would be insanely difficult (and no-one would play) or trivially easy (and no-one would play) so there *are* levels, they just have smooth transitions, that you hardly notice rather than distinct obvious levels
I know I will have to upgrade eventually ... but why now ...
....
And your example is a bad one, If my app is used for 5 years without problems, I upgrade to Vista and it fails then it's the first failure
No I am not a Windows developer... but then as I said if an app does not work then the reason it does not work is not important?
If my app works testably *correctly* on XP but not on Vista then I don't care if it is the app or Vista (or even a fault in XP) on one it works on the other it doesn't, I don't want to start bashing the App manufacturer or Microsoft, I just want my app to continue working.
If the app is important to my business then I cannot "prune" it and if the manufacturer has not released a new version then I cannot upgrade (yet)
With XP I don't have stability issues so Vista's "more stable" is a non-issue
XP (with AV/Firewall etc...) is at least as secure from outside attack as Vista (or so Mirosoft has been telling me for years..)
Hardware - "if Vista doesn't support your hardware it is time to look at upgrading. It is probably really old" this is simply fatuous, brand new hardware on sale when Vista was released was not up to the Vista minimum spec, and why does Vista need the level of resources it uses, it's not for stability , it's not for security (unless it's DRM!) it seems to be for pretty graphics (which yes I do turn off, I use the Classic themem in XP), and other unspecified dross?
Drivers - "If your hardware can't deliver a stable driver under one OS, why are you trusting them to supply it under a different one?" - because they are the two largest Video card companies in the world (NVidia, ATI) and I don't really have any choice...
So you think I should upgrade to Vista, change my app, upgrade my hardware, all so I can get rid of the stability problems I don't have, and to solve the security issues I don't have.... As I said give me a reason to upgrade?
I agree entirely, it doesn't matter what OS, if my apps don't run it's useless .... ...the difference is that with Fedora/Ubuntu you didn't pay for the OS, or the apps, you were not forced to upgrade, and you don't have it pre-installed when you bought the PC. Microsoft is selling Vista as stable, compatible and better....
By the way your problem seems to be with an OS upgrade (and yes these don't work on most OS's arrg!)? and isn't there Skype for Linux now?
If you make a claim it must stand up to testing or it is false
... Oddly this has not been done successfully ....
Dowsing has been tested, properly, many times, and failed every time
Now this does not rule out that dowsing may work sometimes, under the right conditions, but until someone can show it actually works better than random chance then it will be considered false
You can claim it works as many times as you like (anecdotal evidence) but until you can prove it works better than random chance (note not even every time) then it will be considered that dowsers are deluding themselves
It is not difficult to prove it works just set up a site where there is water/metal/whatever that the dowser can detect and make sure they can have no knowledge of where it is and get them to find it by using dowsing, repeat including random tests where there is no water/metal/whatever present and if they find (or fail to find) better than random chance then you have proved there is something in it.....
So flash can affect my computer... why is it still used? Block it!
....
What we need is a replacement for HTML+JavaScript+Other(Flash,Java etc...) that is properly sandboxed and utterly unaware what it is running on, has no concept of your filesystem or processes. What we have now are browsers that are heavily integrated into the OS and run at elevated security level (IE) or plugins that appear to be able to interact with the OS when they should only be able to talk to the browser
Yes this is the kind of thing that is done all the time, this is why I get adverts targeted at me for where my ISP is (I am over 100 miles from the registered address of my ISP)
.... (or turn it off)
Your mobiles position is tracked all the time, it would not work if it wasn't! A surprising large number of people already have or can get access to this information already and if used properly can be used to track you (or at least your mobile) very closely (by triangulation).
But note this only tracks your mobile, not you... If your car is stolen, with your mobile, and credit cards in it, then I'd be surprised if the Police tried to prove you were speeding, buying goods, and using premium rate lines, all hundreds of miles apart all at the same time...
If you don't want to be tracked don't own a mobile
Is Vista stable? I don't care... Will my programs be stable on it ... I do care
If the 3rd party apps that work on XP/2000 don't work on Vista then it will appear to be unstable, it does not matter if it is the OS or the app the impression is that Vista is unstable.
Blaming Vista if a 3rd party app that works on XP does not work on Vista should be blamed on Vista, the 3rd party wrote the app for Windows, not XP, so it should work on "Windows". Losing support for legacy apps (16 bit etc..) is fine but all 32 bit apps should work. It is not like a Windows app not working on a Mac, the app probably has a "Designed for Microsoft Windows" sticker on the box and Vista is "Microsoft Windows"! One of the annoying parts of Vista is the files/registry sandboxing it does specifically to support older apps.
If I can't get stable drivers for my hardware - why should I upgrade
If I have to upgrade my hardware to use it - why should I upgrade
If I can't run my apps - why should I upgrade
Please don't say DX10 - I don't run games
Please don't say security - I don't believe it is *secure* and XP is secure enough (with other apps to close the gaps)
Please don't say it's pretty - I don't care
Give me a real reason.....
What this basically says is that *if you work for the government* and you are given access to personal information you should show that you have made an effort to secure it, if you do then there are no consequences, if however you are negligent or stupid then you must suffer the consequences.... sounds reasonable to me ...
I hate to say this but they are not a small company, their printer division is only a very small part of them ,and they do most of their business in Asia... so your tactics will not work, most technology companies in Japan are years ahead of US companies, and a lot are diverse companies like this?
...?
KYO : 86.28 Revenue : ~ $10 billion
HP : 50.75 Revenue : $91.7 billion
MSFT : 34.09 Revenue : $51.12 billion
Try buying an iPod or iPhone in Japan they think they are old news
This would seem to contradict reality?
There is a country that is part of the evil empire, the current target of the USA, and excepting Iraq (now) and Israel is the most democratic country in the middle east? It is a theocracy, with Sharia law as the highest law, but with a democratically elected government, elected president, and civilian law courts and judicial system that runs alongside Sharia Law, it still manages to have a relatively good (but far from perfect) human rights record?
There is however a country that opress the majority of it's citizens, is a dictatorship run by one family, who are of different origins and religion to the majority of the population, (and who are related to the Bin-ladens), have the most Al-Queda training camps of any country, and where the majority of the 9-11 terrorists came from, and is often berated for it's woeful human rights record
The first is Iran (an evil, anti-american country), the second is Saudi-Arabia (a friendly pro-american country)
Probably not ... It's is not Turing Complete, it was designed and built for one purpose (but turned out to be amazingly flexible)
It could theoretically be rebuilt to run Linux... but the boot times would be a bit slow? The nearest thing it has to a clock speed is the input rate (that was the limiting factor in decoding) normally 5000 characters/second, was run up to 9700 c/s but it effectively did parallel processing so....
If it's in the US then why bother, however I vote the wrong party gets in... if I want the third party to be elected?
The parties are so similar that they have to highlight their slight differences incessantly
Also...
If the majority of people in my district vote one way and I don't then my vote is wasted
If the majority of people in my state vote one way and I don't then my vote is wasted
References
Vasilyev's "Testimony of Eyewitnesses to the Tunguska Impact" contains three separate accounts (by Kulik's Evenki guide Lyuchetkan, L. V. Dzhenkoul, and V. N. Dmitriev) indicating that Lake Cheko was a well-known landmark on the Strelka-Vanavara trail long before the Tunguska Event (http://olkhov.narod.ru/tungwitn1.htm)
Dr Gareth Collins, a Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) research fellow at Imperial College London, UK has commented to the BBC that Lake Cheko is the wrong shape, size, depth, and displays none of the normal signs of it being an impact crater, and the a the Italian team have shown no evidence that it is an impact crater (they have however ruled out some other possibilities) also an impact would also have felled trees all around the crater, yet there appear to be trees older than 100 years still standing around Lake Cheko today.(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6239334.stm)
So its almost certainly not a crater, is in the wrong place, and no-one seems to be expecting a crater (from an air-burst)?
Perhaps we should use those nice safe oil or coal plants instead, they have never caused anyone any harm .....
Things can go wrong with nuclear reactors, same as they can with any type of power plant, it's only the consequences of a problem that are worse, this is what has to be balanced with the benefits.
Nuclear reactors are a target for terrorism, but so are tall buildings, government offices, water pumping stations, electricity substations, etc... anything that is either essential infrastructure or has a lot of people near it is a target a nuclear power plant is just another target?
The point here is, how many nuclear plants have actually had a major problem? My count is four? (I am not an expert) The three you mentioned and Sellafield in the UK? besides Chernobyl the outcome of these were all minor, that's a pretty good safety record compared with almost any other industry. Chernobyl, 3 Mile island, and Sellafield could not happen today (as you say the safeties are in place now)
Now look at the build dates
Sellafield : 1950
Fermi : 1963
3 Mile Island : 1968
Chernobyl : 1970
Are you saying that we have not learnt how to build safer reactors in the last 37 years?
It has been commented that Chernobyl could not happen in the US or Europe because all the reactors had safety systems in place at the time that would make the exact circumstances impossible
I would however say that the industry needs strict regulation so that safety standards are maintained