I worked at a newspaper several years ago (including during the 2000 election debacle) and at the time our paper had to pay for an AP subscription to see the new stories. The only way to see articles through the AP website at the time was to log in as a (paid) subscriber. Apparently at some point in the more recent past they felt they could do OK by charging newspapers for the rights to print the stories that they were giving away for free on the internet.
Exactly why they thought this wouldn't hurt newspapers is beyond me. Now it is apparently hurting them as well, too bad the damage has for the most part already been done.
I may be missing something, but how is it that difficult to do sound for an animated film? I would say if anyone was robbed regarding sound-related categories it was slumdog millionaire. With animation you have all the time in the world to do the sound effects any way you want. Some of the scenes in slumdog were shot on handicams in crowded slums by comparison; how many times can you redo a take with thousands of extras and still achieve some sort of continuity?
ICANN wouldn't approve.sex, but they'll approve.viagra?
Correct. They are going to allow the sale of gTLDs, which will likely at some point include.viagra and perhaps.sex or.xxx (which they had previously declined). The difference is that they did not want to manage the sale of domains within domains like.xxx. Now instead they will pass the buck entirely and sell the gTLD of.xxx to some other registrar who will be solely responsible for who can buy domains within it.
However even worse is that they will sell the right to sell gTLDs to other registrars. So eventually it is all but guaranteed that we will see TLDs of.viagra,.sex, and.xxx. But as ICANN won't have anything to do with those registrars directly, there will likely be unlegible gobbledygook behind the domains under those new TLDs (particularly the gTLDs that are good targets for scammers and spammers like.viagra,.software,.money,.purses,...). And then to make it even better there will be nobody to talk to about who owns the domains under those gTLDs that are selling illegal wares.
Can I have some of what you're smoking please?
There is no smoking involved. The problem lies in ICANN passing the buck again. Soon the things that they reportedly stood for will be torn down by the vendors that are first in line with the requisite amount of money.
So they took feedback, and then did what with it? They compiled (parts of) it into a PDF. Wow, I'm impressed. Now in response they have moved out the date by a few months; great.
I can't wait until some shady group in another country buys the.viagra and.software TLDs and self-administers the registrations within them as permitted by the ICANN plans. Once that happens we'll get spam from dirtcheap.viagra and superubercheap.software, which will be for domains that have no readable whois data and ICANN will just shrug their shoulders and say "talk to the registrar" (who themselves won't speak to us).
Thanks ICANN. I guess the assumption was right, you don't give a damn about feedback after all. As long as you can make a few more bucks on new registrar accreditations (whatever that will mean when you start selling new gTLDs) you're happy, right? And thats really all that matters on the internet.
While games come out at higher prices than before, (seems like very few games launch below $50 or $60), it does seem that the prices drop quicker than they used to. Generally it seems that new games only stay at their initial prices for 1-2 months before they rapidly move into the $30, then $20, then $15 bins.
In short, it seems that the system now rewards the patient. If you don't feel that you absolutely have to have the newest sequel to your favorite series the day it comes out, you can save yourself quite a bit by waiting for it to age a little on the shelf.
Seems to me that with only 1 helipad you may have a huge and dangerous bottleneck to evacuating quickly.
Now I am not exactly an expert on oil rigs, but it seems to me that this rig is on the ocean. And generally oceans are full of water. I'm pretty sure we figured out a way to move people over water a while ago without using helicopters.
It appears that this is more of an attack on intermediate users than the usual attack that goes for newbies. After all, if a PC is infected, a newbie would not likely look to PC Magazine for antivirus information; they'd more likely bring it in to Best Buy and pay the Geek Squad an exorbitant amount of money to fix it (or they would put in the restore CD and try to start over from scratch).
An advanced user (if they were running windows for some reason) likely wouldn't look there, either, as they would have likely just run the update program for the software that they already installed for taking care of such things.
You can remove the engine from an original beetle by removing only 6 bolts, IIRC. The water pump on my slightly newer vehicle was held in by 13 bolts, for that matter. I can pull the motherboard out of my thinkpad with less than 13 screws, for that matter...
For the parents' response to this. The parents can either blow this thing way out of proportion by showing a sense of entitlement in the issue (as in "our daughter is entitled to do whatever the hell we say") or they can agree that cell phones don't belong in class in use.
Not to say that calling the cops was necessarily a reasonable reaction; one would hope that school suspension would have accomplished enough.
That recycling initiatives are being rolled out at a more significant pace. I know some of the electronics retailers are doing more to accept used TVs and such things for recycling.
Sure, we know that you can watch digital TV on your old analog set from 1982. But do you really want to have to get up to change the volume? And while most people know that you don't have to go HDTV for digital, I doubt many retailers are losing much sleep over customers buying new sets because they don't know any better.
My understanding is there is supposed to be a new bill coming forward later for science research funding. While NASA got some nice money on this one, and some money could go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the big money for science is supposedly still forthcoming. At one point on the campaign trail Obama had said he wanted to double NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) annual budgets (by comparison John Sidney McCain III wanted to freeze both of them).
Though as a scientist myself (and one dependent on NIH grant money) I can tell you it can't come soon enough. Grant renewal payments for FY 2009 from NIH are coming out with a 10% deduction right off the bat; they can't run their own budget into the red. Hence multi-year renewable grants that paid $200,000 last year are paying $180,000 this year. That might not sound like much money to some people, but $20,000 is a full year's salary for a graduate student in many parts of this country.
Why do you assume that if you pay more the conditions for these people will improve rather than the pockets of someone else down the line getting filled?
Why do you assume that I want to pay more for keyboards?
I had suggested that we should stop expecting free keyboards. I went on to say that most people buying new PCs don't need new keyboards - I did nothing to suggest paying more for them.
By reducing or stopping the production of sweatshop keyboards all you're doing is taking away these poor people's jobs, free food and place to sleep.
Not necessarily. After all, the owners of the sweatshops want to get paid, too. If the demand for their product dries up they will want to find something else to make. If there is no longer a demand for widgets that can be made with $.04 / hour labor, and the management have to pay $.08 / hour to make a salable product instead, then that would be beneficial to the labor force.
... We no longer expected a free keyboard with our new PCs? The companies on the list are all major PC manufacturers, so a large number of those keyboards are probably the cheap ones that are provided with new computers. But do we really need a new keyboard with every new PC?
After all, a large fraction of all the new PCs purchased today are purchased to replace existing systems; which themselves had keyboards before. And being as keyboards themselves have not changed dramatically in the past 10 years (or more), there is a good chance that the consumer could have just used the keyboard from their old system on their new one.
The throw-away mentality towards consumer electronics is likely a major culprit in the development of these sweatshops.
Foreign companies that utilize this type of thing should be hit with heavy penalties.
I would like to see that, too. Though I think it would be quite difficult to enforce, for more than one reason:
Foreign companies. If we take Lenovo for an example; how do you levy fines on them? They are a Chinese company, after all. You could try to levy against their US division, but the effectiveness of that is probably doubtful.
utilize. How do you define that? From the article:
"The factory named in the report is not one of HP's direct suppliers, but is a supplier to two of our suppliers," the company said in a statement.
So it would appear that HP is not directly utilizing the sweatshops. Would you want to levy a fine against them anyways for a decision that may have been made by one of their partners and not them? Or would you go after the HP supplier who was contracting with the sweatshop (and then what would you do if that supplier was foreign?)
When looking at the list of companies mentioned I wonder if the type of keyboard that is being produced is a cause or effect of the demand for cheap keyboards (and cheap labor to produce them). While I do not actively condone sweatshop labor, I am guilty of using more than one dome-switch keyboard (though I do have one IBM Model M that drives my coworkers nuts).
However, if there suddenly was a spike in demand for Buckling Spring Keyboards would that change the situation? I'm not sure if workers - under pressure or not - could assemble buckling spring keys in 1.1 seconds.
In other words, are the markets flooded with lousy keyboards because that is what sweatshops produce for us at the demand price, or are we using sweatshop labor to produce the maximum supply of disposable keyboards without concern for what consumers actually want?
Satellite radio subscriptions are around $15 / month.
Data plans for the iPhone are around $30-40, plus what you are already paying for voice service.
Granted, if you really need the unlimited data plan for your phone, and already have it, then it may make sense. But if you are only an occasional data plan user, then trying to justify it by claiming it replaces sat radio would still leave you needing to justify throwing out another $15-25 per month.
And that is also ignoring the fact that sat radio works pretty well everywhere. Data access on your phone only works were you have reception on your network. Not every community, even in the US, has good coverage for every provider.
Well, if you get testicular cancer (where the rapid turnover of cells is occurring, after all) you can just drop one testicle. By the time it happens you probably won't need it anyway. Hell, I'd probably be happier with a silicone lump in there. Swap 'em both while you're in there, doc.
While he likely didn't get it from a cell phone, Lance Armstrong would say otherwise about testicular cancer. When they caught it in him there were cancerous cells found throughout his body.
Why would you want to talk on the phone directly? To get cancer?
Yeah, because bluetooth works on pure magic, and doesn't use any radio waves or anything else that we were previously worried about. Bluetooth actually works with little multilingual fairies carrying your voice through the air to your phone.
And of course, if you're using a bluetooth there's a good chance your phone is in your pocket - we all know that nothing down there can get cancer, either.
The back of the phone doesn't seem the most reasonable place for them. Most people after all use their hand to hold on to the phone while talking - hence covering up the back of the phone while using it. And those who use bluetooth are often carrying the phone in their pocket, where one generally doesn't find much sun light, either.
It looks like someone didn't do all their homework on this one...
Is that it took them this long to do it. Palm has been selling devices running windows for how many years now? I was surprised when I recently saw a (new) Palm device for sale that was actually running Palm OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked at a newspaper several years ago (including during the 2000 election debacle) and at the time our paper had to pay for an AP subscription to see the new stories. The only way to see articles through the AP website at the time was to log in as a (paid) subscriber. Apparently at some point in the more recent past they felt they could do OK by charging newspapers for the rights to print the stories that they were giving away for free on the internet.
Exactly why they thought this wouldn't hurt newspapers is beyond me. Now it is apparently hurting them as well, too bad the damage has for the most part already been done.
I may be missing something, but how is it that difficult to do sound for an animated film? I would say if anyone was robbed regarding sound-related categories it was slumdog millionaire. With animation you have all the time in the world to do the sound effects any way you want. Some of the scenes in slumdog were shot on handicams in crowded slums by comparison; how many times can you redo a take with thousands of extras and still achieve some sort of continuity?
ICANN wouldn't approve .sex, but they'll approve .viagra?
Correct. They are going to allow the sale of gTLDs, which will likely at some point include .viagra and perhaps .sex or .xxx (which they had previously declined). The difference is that they did not want to manage the sale of domains within domains like .xxx. Now instead they will pass the buck entirely and sell the gTLD of .xxx to some other registrar who will be solely responsible for who can buy domains within it.
.viagra, .sex, and .xxx. But as ICANN won't have anything to do with those registrars directly, there will likely be unlegible gobbledygook behind the domains under those new TLDs (particularly the gTLDs that are good targets for scammers and spammers like .viagra, .software, .money, .purses, ...). And then to make it even better there will be nobody to talk to about who owns the domains under those gTLDs that are selling illegal wares.
However even worse is that they will sell the right to sell gTLDs to other registrars. So eventually it is all but guaranteed that we will see TLDs of
Can I have some of what you're smoking please?
There is no smoking involved. The problem lies in ICANN passing the buck again. Soon the things that they reportedly stood for will be torn down by the vendors that are first in line with the requisite amount of money.
So they took feedback, and then did what with it? They compiled (parts of) it into a PDF. Wow, I'm impressed. Now in response they have moved out the date by a few months; great.
.viagra and .software TLDs and self-administers the registrations within them as permitted by the ICANN plans. Once that happens we'll get spam from dirtcheap.viagra and superubercheap.software, which will be for domains that have no readable whois data and ICANN will just shrug their shoulders and say "talk to the registrar" (who themselves won't speak to us).
I can't wait until some shady group in another country buys the
Thanks ICANN. I guess the assumption was right, you don't give a damn about feedback after all. As long as you can make a few more bucks on new registrar accreditations (whatever that will mean when you start selling new gTLDs) you're happy, right? And thats really all that matters on the internet.
While games come out at higher prices than before, (seems like very few games launch below $50 or $60), it does seem that the prices drop quicker than they used to. Generally it seems that new games only stay at their initial prices for 1-2 months before they rapidly move into the $30, then $20, then $15 bins.
In short, it seems that the system now rewards the patient. If you don't feel that you absolutely have to have the newest sequel to your favorite series the day it comes out, you can save yourself quite a bit by waiting for it to age a little on the shelf.
I used to sell the Psion Series 5 back when I worked at CompUSA. I really thought the company had gone belly-up.
Which leaves me to wonder, how many others saw the article and thought for sure that Psion was already no longer?
Seems to me that with only 1 helipad you may have a huge and dangerous bottleneck to evacuating quickly.
Now I am not exactly an expert on oil rigs, but it seems to me that this rig is on the ocean. And generally oceans are full of water. I'm pretty sure we figured out a way to move people over water a while ago without using helicopters.
An advanced user (if they were running windows for some reason) likely wouldn't look there, either, as they would have likely just run the update program for the software that they already installed for taking care of such things.
This of course follows well the old adage
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
I was tossing decommissioned servers off the roof of my work back in 2000 and 2001. We just didn't have a Youtube to show off on.
There aren't many things (you can do at work) that are as satisfying as throwing an NT box off a roof...
You can remove the engine from an original beetle by removing only 6 bolts, IIRC. The water pump on my slightly newer vehicle was held in by 13 bolts, for that matter. I can pull the motherboard out of my thinkpad with less than 13 screws, for that matter...
For the parents' response to this. The parents can either blow this thing way out of proportion by showing a sense of entitlement in the issue (as in "our daughter is entitled to do whatever the hell we say") or they can agree that cell phones don't belong in class in use.
Not to say that calling the cops was necessarily a reasonable reaction; one would hope that school suspension would have accomplished enough.
That recycling initiatives are being rolled out at a more significant pace. I know some of the electronics retailers are doing more to accept used TVs and such things for recycling.
Sure, we know that you can watch digital TV on your old analog set from 1982. But do you really want to have to get up to change the volume? And while most people know that you don't have to go HDTV for digital, I doubt many retailers are losing much sleep over customers buying new sets because they don't know any better.
My understanding is there is supposed to be a new bill coming forward later for science research funding. While NASA got some nice money on this one, and some money could go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the big money for science is supposedly still forthcoming. At one point on the campaign trail Obama had said he wanted to double NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) annual budgets (by comparison John Sidney McCain III wanted to freeze both of them).
Though as a scientist myself (and one dependent on NIH grant money) I can tell you it can't come soon enough. Grant renewal payments for FY 2009 from NIH are coming out with a 10% deduction right off the bat; they can't run their own budget into the red. Hence multi-year renewable grants that paid $200,000 last year are paying $180,000 this year. That might not sound like much money to some people, but $20,000 is a full year's salary for a graduate student in many parts of this country.
micro-USB
Though the quoted part of the article mentioned
mini-USB
Hopefully the industry decides on one or the other - if we see an implementation of each then we aren't much better off than we are now.
Why do you assume that if you pay more the conditions for these people will improve rather than the pockets of someone else down the line getting filled?
Why do you assume that I want to pay more for keyboards?
I had suggested that we should stop expecting free keyboards. I went on to say that most people buying new PCs don't need new keyboards - I did nothing to suggest paying more for them.
China is better at capitalism than we are.
I for one don't see that as a bad thing. I would rather not be regarded as the country who is best at exploiting people for money.
By reducing or stopping the production of sweatshop keyboards all you're doing is taking away these poor people's jobs, free food and place to sleep.
Not necessarily. After all, the owners of the sweatshops want to get paid, too. If the demand for their product dries up they will want to find something else to make. If there is no longer a demand for widgets that can be made with $.04 / hour labor, and the management have to pay $.08 / hour to make a salable product instead, then that would be beneficial to the labor force.
And where did you get the notion of
free food
From? I didn't see that in the CNET article.
... We no longer expected a free keyboard with our new PCs? The companies on the list are all major PC manufacturers, so a large number of those keyboards are probably the cheap ones that are provided with new computers. But do we really need a new keyboard with every new PC?
After all, a large fraction of all the new PCs purchased today are purchased to replace existing systems; which themselves had keyboards before. And being as keyboards themselves have not changed dramatically in the past 10 years (or more), there is a good chance that the consumer could have just used the keyboard from their old system on their new one.
The throw-away mentality towards consumer electronics is likely a major culprit in the development of these sweatshops.
Foreign companies that utilize this type of thing should be hit with heavy penalties.
I would like to see that, too. Though I think it would be quite difficult to enforce, for more than one reason:
Foreign companies. If we take Lenovo for an example; how do you levy fines on them? They are a Chinese company, after all. You could try to levy against their US division, but the effectiveness of that is probably doubtful.
utilize. How do you define that? From the article:
"The factory named in the report is not one of HP's direct suppliers, but is a supplier to two of our suppliers," the company said in a statement.
So it would appear that HP is not directly utilizing the sweatshops. Would you want to levy a fine against them anyways for a decision that may have been made by one of their partners and not them? Or would you go after the HP supplier who was contracting with the sweatshop (and then what would you do if that supplier was foreign?)
When looking at the list of companies mentioned I wonder if the type of keyboard that is being produced is a cause or effect of the demand for cheap keyboards (and cheap labor to produce them). While I do not actively condone sweatshop labor, I am guilty of using more than one dome-switch keyboard (though I do have one IBM Model M that drives my coworkers nuts).
However, if there suddenly was a spike in demand for Buckling Spring Keyboards would that change the situation? I'm not sure if workers - under pressure or not - could assemble buckling spring keys in 1.1 seconds.
In other words, are the markets flooded with lousy keyboards because that is what sweatshops produce for us at the demand price, or are we using sweatshop labor to produce the maximum supply of disposable keyboards without concern for what consumers actually want?
Satellite radio subscriptions are around $15 / month.
Data plans for the iPhone are around $30-40, plus what you are already paying for voice service.
Granted, if you really need the unlimited data plan for your phone, and already have it, then it may make sense. But if you are only an occasional data plan user, then trying to justify it by claiming it replaces sat radio would still leave you needing to justify throwing out another $15-25 per month.
And that is also ignoring the fact that sat radio works pretty well everywhere. Data access on your phone only works were you have reception on your network. Not every community, even in the US, has good coverage for every provider.
Well, if you get testicular cancer (where the rapid turnover of cells is occurring, after all) you can just drop one testicle. By the time it happens you probably won't need it anyway. Hell, I'd probably be happier with a silicone lump in there. Swap 'em both while you're in there, doc.
While he likely didn't get it from a cell phone, Lance Armstrong would say otherwise about testicular cancer. When they caught it in him there were cancerous cells found throughout his body.
Why would you want to talk on the phone directly? To get cancer?
Yeah, because bluetooth works on pure magic, and doesn't use any radio waves or anything else that we were previously worried about. Bluetooth actually works with little multilingual fairies carrying your voice through the air to your phone.
And of course, if you're using a bluetooth there's a good chance your phone is in your pocket - we all know that nothing down there can get cancer, either.
The back of the phone doesn't seem the most reasonable place for them. Most people after all use their hand to hold on to the phone while talking - hence covering up the back of the phone while using it. And those who use bluetooth are often carrying the phone in their pocket, where one generally doesn't find much sun light, either.
It looks like someone didn't do all their homework on this one...
Is that it took them this long to do it. Palm has been selling devices running windows for how many years now? I was surprised when I recently saw a (new) Palm device for sale that was actually running Palm OS.