Since the idea you're talking about involves multiple "independant" companies, it's not really in the domain of anti-trust, which generally concerns itself with true, single-company monopolies.
What you're talking about is called a cartel, not a monopoly. Cartels control the prices of many consumer goods in the world market including oil (see: OPEC) and cocaine (see: a bunch of sketchy guys in a smoky room in Colombia).
I've found this practice of "call or visit" is even more common in Japan. Not only are products (new technology especially) advertised as "Open Price", there are no price tags once you arrive at the store!
I suspect the rationale is somewhat different than that of Rolex et al: You actually have to ask the clerk to tell you the price, meaning that by the time you find out how much your goody actually costs, you've had plenty of time to ogle it and think about how good it would look on your geek utility belt. That way, you're more willing to bite the bullet when you find out it's worth three months of precious paycheques.
I've been a fan of the FF series for quite some time. FFX2 is a huge improvement on FFX, mainly because it devotes far more attention to the gameplay and far less attention to some blonde airhead pretty boy who plays a lot of underwater soccer. If you're a fan of the more thought-driven "Tactics" series, you'll probably get a kick out of the fact that the concept of Jobs have yet again been intoduced into the mainstream of FF games. I think the last time this happened was in FF5, which was released in English as part of the FF Anthology. SO, think of FFX2 as Tactics with better graphics and a better story. Kind of.
No matter what the operating system, I have no doubt that mobile phones in Japan will continue to be used by pedestrian-endangering people on bicycles and incredibly irritating Japanese schoolgirls who insist on keeping their "SMAP" ringtone at TOP VOLUME while riding the train.
Dear God, perhaps Linux based phones will be able to tell when this is happening to reach out and give them a good whack. (That was a joke. Please don't reply and tell me why the OS doesn't make a lick of difference. Thanks.)
Moderators: Think this is a Troll? Move to Japan - I DARE YOU! They'll make you give up all your moderator points at your port of entry, but in return you'll get a delightful pack of ad-ridden tissue paper.
Don't hold your breath, man. Like most things in Japanese broadcast multimedia, BBTV is primarily concerned with domestic distribution. Just yesterday, we had a meeting to discuss "security", which basically amounts to having unique decryption keys for every customer.
Furthermore, the most likely outcome is that the content will require decoding by special hardware built into TVs. Knowing the Japanese penchant for high technology, I'd say the best chance you have is with a Japanese version of Sony's PSX (or a next-generation equivalent).
At the end of the day, the best way to get Japanese TV is to move to Japan. That said, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about: The only thing that's really worth watching is the coverage of the Grand Tournaments of Sumo! Other than that, the most amusing show I've seen is "Find the Cell" where average shmucks run around like idiots trying to find numerous ringing mobile phones that have been hidden in clever places.
As far as English news sources in Japan go, I've always found the Daily Yoimuri highly dubious and I really don't see how a Chinese newspaper is relevant. Here's the story from the Japan Times, which I read this morning over my granola, thinking "Jeez, I should send this to Slashdot."
This story is pretty close to my heart since I'm working on a project in Japan right now that aspires to distribute digital TV content via the internet instead of conventional channels. My understanding is that every major electronics manufacturer in Japan is working on the same sort of thing, so reading that the Japanese government "has vowed to phase out analog broadcasting by 2011" doesn't necessarily mean that this country is headed the same way as the US. As usual, Japan will most likely do its own thing.
Yet another cheap shot to join the thousands that are fired from within Europe toward the "Wild West" on a daily basis. I'm a Canadian living in Japan so I have two degrees of outsider-ness; let me tell you, it's starting to get ridiculous.
Man, three years ago I bought my Dad an acre of land on Io from a booth at the mall around Christmastime. It only cost me 10 bucks and it even came with a deed, although the guy printed that on-site with a shitty bubble jet.
Either way, he was also selling pieces of the moon, but owning land on our moon is like owning a cabin in Aspen - it may have been cool 30 years ago, but not anymore. Jupiter's moons are the next big thing, man.
[hmm... that post started and ended with "man"... maybe i need to get out more...]
I don't have the time to browse almost 2000 comments, so in case it hasn't already been said:
I really don't see the necessity of having a computer for each kid. When did the mentality become "a computer for every man, woman, and child"? I'd say your family needs at most two computers, one for Mom and Dad and one for the kids.
By having one "kids' computer" in a central area, you not only solve the problem of nasty content, but you also teach your kids how to solve the everlasting problem of limited resources. In other words, they'll have to teach themselves how to share.
This is how my parents handled the situation when I was a kid (my brother and I both moved out earlier this year). It worked fine until I started a degree in Comptuer Engg and I needed to use the computer basically every night for school. Until you find yourself in a situation like that, you can have your cake and eat it too by making them share.
Of course, this leads to other problems that may require some actual parenting rather than a write-and-forget set of rules, but that's up to you.
Maybe they can use this as a testbed for their incredibly well-thought out "terrorism futures exchange", an idea which was unfortunately scuttled, probably by the communists.
They could shake things up by combining the two overarching themes: Will Microsoft hire mercenaries to keep Linux out of the Sudan? Will Lars Ulrich be assassinated by a rogue faction of the EFF? Who the devil is Wintermute?
Or if you really wanted to be thorough, you could call it the first six parts of a nine-part series. Thankfully, Lucas has decided not to do the same kind of hatchet job on Episodes 7-9 as is doing on 1-3, but rest assured - they exist.
Would that make it a nono-ology? I can't remember my prefixes...
I'm a student at the tragically underrated University of Calgary, which has come up a few times in this discussion. In the past few years, I've followed this story quite closely - I write news for the school's undergrad paper, The Gauntlet and I covered two relevant pieces:
The first link is to the original story, which attributed the find to Dr. Peter Forsyth. Later on, Dr. Patrick Lee (who has been mentioned multiple times in this discussion) poached the research and headed for greener pastures at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
The interesting fact is that Forsyth's research found inexplicable gray spots in the residue of the destroyed tumour. At the time, I found it quite unsettling that this fact was completely ignored by the mainstream media in spite of the fact that he spent a significant portion of the press conference discussing the potential hazards that the spots could indicate, including encephalitis.
It looks like the clinical trials at Oncolytics (Forsyth and Lee were directly involved) are optimistic, showing no side-effects, but I urge everyone to temper their excitement for the time being. The allure of jumping to the conclusion that REO virus treatment is a miracle cure is significant, but the consequences of doing so could be disastrous.
This may seem like bitter cynicism, but take a hint from someone who has been on the front lines of this very discovery: the story reported by the mainstream media is never the whole story.
...10 to 100...
It's only a big interval if you assume they're using base-10. This being/. we can never be too sure; binary interpretation does give a much more narrow range.
I think it's a shame that this software is getting leaked because it throws a significant wrench in the gears of the natural progression of democracy. Although I agree that the paper ballot system works just fine, the bottom line is that computerized voting - if implemented properly - stands to improve elections in terms of accessability of ballots to the electorate, workload for electoral officials and overall cost.
That said, as long as there are elections, there will be people for whom cheating or rigging the results is a very appealing prize. There's a great deal of hand-wringing going on about the leaking of this software, but in the long run, it's not a big deal - the people who run the elections will simply have to come up with some new solution that circumvents the existing problems and, of course, creates new ones.
I'm living in Japan right now working for a major electonics manufacturer. Over here the trend is moving toward something they call Broadband Television (BBTV - the Japanese truly are obsessed with snappy acronyms).
The idea is that compliant TVs would be able to received digital data both through traditional channels and by streaming content from the internet.
I'm not absolutely sure that it'll fly, but I'm under the impression that almost every one of our competitors is racing toward the same goal of having this consumer-ready by next Fall.
Maybe the US government should contemplate waiting until this next generation of broadcast technology is tested before passing final judgement on what is or isn't required.
windside writes "Rex Murphy is reporting on the Canadian Prime Minister's website's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of America, possibly to prevent people from finding out that taxes are much lower, that money is spent on government programs instead of on kick-ass jets for parliamentarians and that their senate actually does stuff." It seems Canadian officials could not be reached for because they were all busy taking bribes from their favourite soul-devouring oil company.
Note: Remember, Canadians may look nice, but we're mostly just as corrupt and evil as the Americans.
I agree completely, but I've found that the "tray agents" for Netscape and Opera browsers make for a significant increase in startup speed, putting them close to on-par with the lightning-fast but soul-stealing IE.
Over the years, I've tried many times to ween myself from the IE teet and these "agents" have been the most significant factor in helping me stay clean.
Seriously, someone should show this to the Japanese government. Then maybe they'll come up with a solution to their abominable management of traffic.
The Japanese have this habit of being extremely friendly when they're in direct contact with other humans, but once they're in a consequence-free environment (such as the little bubbles of their tiny, ridiculous cars) they become relatively indifferent to people around them (just like Americans!)
The most bizarre illustration of this phenomenon is their behaviour in the presence of Emergency vehicles - they ignore them completely. I was walking home from work one day and an ambulence - sirens, bells, loudspeakers and all - happened to be travelling along the same route. The traffic was so relentless and the people were so stubborn that I was able to walk faster than it moved. I heard the sirens pass by my apartment five minutes after I got there.
POINT BEING, maybe they should just equip ambulences with RPG launchers or anti-matter cannons or something - that would certainly clear the way.
But I'd rather hold on to my eternal soul for now, thanks.
I don't care how much time this saves how many people, it's a fundamentally bad idea that will only at to the overall dehumanization of the internet.
In the last few years, email has quite reasonably overtaken traditional mail as the dominant form of written communication. The consequences have been numerous, but tolerable up until this point. Programs of this nature are one thing in the business world, but when companies start to market this "service" to average users, it takes on entirely different connotations.
We have to draw a line in the sand: people shouldn't need to automate the process of staying in touch with their friends! By taking this extremely basic task out of their hands and putting it into those of some relatively anonymous information-harvesting corporation, we remove one of the mechanisms that nature uses to cull lesser humans from the face of the earth. In short, people who are unable to stay in touch with their friends without using this program should not be allowed to breed.
Let natural selection take its course! Keep the fluoride out of our water supply and keep Plaxo out of our internet!
Yeah, eventually I ended up doing that to solve my problem. In the end it was a razor's edge decision between the Free MS tool and waiting outside the classroom every morning with a tire iron to jump the first unsuspecting hack who had spent 2 to 3 hours last night downloading, opening, and printing the files.
Bah, OpenOffice is terrible...
I had a course last semester that required me to read numerous presentations in Power Point format. Instead of pirating the software, I decided to do the "ethical" thing and download OO to view the files.
As if reading Power Point documents wasn't painful enough before, adding in horrendous load times, an even uglier interface and an inexplicable lack of key navigation features made it totally unbearable.
The fact that it's free does not mean it isn't crap. It's merely free crap.
That's my 2 cents...
Slashdot Mirror
This concludes the daily antitrust lesson :)
Since the idea you're talking about involves multiple "independant" companies, it's not really in the domain of anti-trust, which generally concerns itself with true, single-company monopolies.
What you're talking about is called a cartel, not a monopoly. Cartels control the prices of many consumer goods in the world market including oil (see: OPEC) and cocaine (see: a bunch of sketchy guys in a smoky room in Colombia).
I've found this practice of "call or visit" is even more common in Japan. Not only are products (new technology especially) advertised as "Open Price", there are no price tags once you arrive at the store!
I suspect the rationale is somewhat different than that of Rolex et al: You actually have to ask the clerk to tell you the price, meaning that by the time you find out how much your goody actually costs, you've had plenty of time to ogle it and think about how good it would look on your geek utility belt. That way, you're more willing to bite the bullet when you find out it's worth three months of precious paycheques.
I've been a fan of the FF series for quite some time. FFX2 is a huge improvement on FFX, mainly because it devotes far more attention to the gameplay and far less attention to some blonde airhead pretty boy who plays a lot of underwater soccer. If you're a fan of the more thought-driven "Tactics" series, you'll probably get a kick out of the fact that the concept of Jobs have yet again been intoduced into the mainstream of FF games. I think the last time this happened was in FF5, which was released in English as part of the FF Anthology. SO, think of FFX2 as Tactics with better graphics and a better story. Kind of.
No matter what the operating system, I have no doubt that mobile phones in Japan will continue to be used by pedestrian-endangering people on bicycles and incredibly irritating Japanese schoolgirls who insist on keeping their "SMAP" ringtone at TOP VOLUME while riding the train.
Dear God, perhaps Linux based phones will be able to tell when this is happening to reach out and give them a good whack. (That was a joke. Please don't reply and tell me why the OS doesn't make a lick of difference. Thanks.)
Moderators: Think this is a Troll? Move to Japan - I DARE YOU! They'll make you give up all your moderator points at your port of entry, but in return you'll get a delightful pack of ad-ridden tissue paper.
Don't hold your breath, man. Like most things in Japanese broadcast multimedia, BBTV is primarily concerned with domestic distribution. Just yesterday, we had a meeting to discuss "security", which basically amounts to having unique decryption keys for every customer.
Furthermore, the most likely outcome is that the content will require decoding by special hardware built into TVs. Knowing the Japanese penchant for high technology, I'd say the best chance you have is with a Japanese version of Sony's PSX (or a next-generation equivalent).
At the end of the day, the best way to get Japanese TV is to move to Japan. That said, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about: The only thing that's really worth watching is the coverage of the Grand Tournaments of Sumo! Other than that, the most amusing show I've seen is "Find the Cell" where average shmucks run around like idiots trying to find numerous ringing mobile phones that have been hidden in clever places.
As far as English news sources in Japan go, I've always found the Daily Yoimuri highly dubious and I really don't see how a Chinese newspaper is relevant. Here's the story from the Japan Times, which I read this morning over my granola, thinking "Jeez, I should send this to Slashdot."
This story is pretty close to my heart since I'm working on a project in Japan right now that aspires to distribute digital TV content via the internet instead of conventional channels. My understanding is that every major electronics manufacturer in Japan is working on the same sort of thing, so reading that the Japanese government "has vowed to phase out analog broadcasting by 2011" doesn't necessarily mean that this country is headed the same way as the US. As usual, Japan will most likely do its own thing.
Who the hell came up with that acronym? It's not even close to what it's meant to stand for...
Yet another cheap shot to join the thousands that are fired from within Europe toward the "Wild West" on a daily basis. I'm a Canadian living in Japan so I have two degrees of outsider-ness; let me tell you, it's starting to get ridiculous.
Seriously, grow up.
Man, three years ago I bought my Dad an acre of land on Io from a booth at the mall around Christmastime. It only cost me 10 bucks and it even came with a deed, although the guy printed that on-site with a shitty bubble jet.
Either way, he was also selling pieces of the moon, but owning land on our moon is like owning a cabin in Aspen - it may have been cool 30 years ago, but not anymore. Jupiter's moons are the next big thing, man.
[hmm... that post started and ended with "man"... maybe i need to get out more...]
I don't have the time to browse almost 2000 comments, so in case it hasn't already been said:
I really don't see the necessity of having a computer for each kid. When did the mentality become "a computer for every man, woman, and child"? I'd say your family needs at most two computers, one for Mom and Dad and one for the kids.
By having one "kids' computer" in a central area, you not only solve the problem of nasty content, but you also teach your kids how to solve the everlasting problem of limited resources. In other words, they'll have to teach themselves how to share.
This is how my parents handled the situation when I was a kid (my brother and I both moved out earlier this year). It worked fine until I started a degree in Comptuer Engg and I needed to use the computer basically every night for school. Until you find yourself in a situation like that, you can have your cake and eat it too by making them share.
Of course, this leads to other problems that may require some actual parenting rather than a write-and-forget set of rules, but that's up to you.
--
Maybe they can use this as a testbed for their incredibly well-thought out "terrorism futures exchange", an idea which was unfortunately scuttled, probably by the communists.
They could shake things up by combining the two overarching themes: Will Microsoft hire mercenaries to keep Linux out of the Sudan? Will Lars Ulrich be assassinated by a rogue faction of the EFF? Who the devil is Wintermute?
windside
--
You could call it a hexology, maybe.
Or if you really wanted to be thorough, you could call it the first six parts of a nine-part series. Thankfully, Lucas has decided not to do the same kind of hatchet job on Episodes 7-9 as is doing on 1-3, but rest assured - they exist.
Would that make it a nono-ology? I can't remember my prefixes...
windside
--
I'm a student at the tragically underrated University of Calgary, which has come up a few times in this discussion. In the past few years, I've followed this story quite closely - I write news for the school's undergrad paper, The Gauntlet and I covered two relevant pieces:
Story 1, June 2001
Story 2, July 2001
The first link is to the original story, which attributed the find to Dr. Peter Forsyth. Later on, Dr. Patrick Lee (who has been mentioned multiple times in this discussion) poached the research and headed for greener pastures at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
The interesting fact is that Forsyth's research found inexplicable gray spots in the residue of the destroyed tumour. At the time, I found it quite unsettling that this fact was completely ignored by the mainstream media in spite of the fact that he spent a significant portion of the press conference discussing the potential hazards that the spots could indicate, including encephalitis.
It looks like the clinical trials at Oncolytics (Forsyth and Lee were directly involved) are optimistic, showing no side-effects, but I urge everyone to temper their excitement for the time being. The allure of jumping to the conclusion that REO virus treatment is a miracle cure is significant, but the consequences of doing so could be disastrous.
This may seem like bitter cynicism, but take a hint from someone who has been on the front lines of this very discovery: the story reported by the mainstream media is never the whole story.
Patrick Boyle
...10 to 100... /. we can never be too sure; binary interpretation does give a much more narrow range.
It's only a big interval if you assume they're using base-10. This being
Oh and for the sake of continuity: Nevermore.
I think it's a shame that this software is getting leaked because it throws a significant wrench in the gears of the natural progression of democracy. Although I agree that the paper ballot system works just fine, the bottom line is that computerized voting - if implemented properly - stands to improve elections in terms of accessability of ballots to the electorate, workload for electoral officials and overall cost.
That said, as long as there are elections, there will be people for whom cheating or rigging the results is a very appealing prize. There's a great deal of hand-wringing going on about the leaking of this software, but in the long run, it's not a big deal - the people who run the elections will simply have to come up with some new solution that circumvents the existing problems and, of course, creates new ones.
Is a Hacker's Union. God help us all when that happens.
Look out, Ma, those boys are from Local #0xf00f...
I'm living in Japan right now working for a major electonics manufacturer. Over here the trend is moving toward something they call Broadband Television (BBTV - the Japanese truly are obsessed with snappy acronyms).
The idea is that compliant TVs would be able to received digital data both through traditional channels and by streaming content from the internet.
I'm not absolutely sure that it'll fly, but I'm under the impression that almost every one of our competitors is racing toward the same goal of having this consumer-ready by next Fall.
Maybe the US government should contemplate waiting until this next generation of broadcast technology is tested before passing final judgement on what is or isn't required.
windside writes "Rex Murphy is reporting on the Canadian Prime Minister's website's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of America, possibly to prevent people from finding out that taxes are much lower, that money is spent on government programs instead of on kick-ass jets for parliamentarians and that their senate actually does stuff." It seems Canadian officials could not be reached for because they were all busy taking bribes from their favourite soul-devouring oil company.
Note: Remember, Canadians may look nice, but we're mostly just as corrupt and evil as the Americans.
I agree completely, but I've found that the "tray agents" for Netscape and Opera browsers make for a significant increase in startup speed, putting them close to on-par with the lightning-fast but soul-stealing IE.
Over the years, I've tried many times to ween myself from the IE teet and these "agents" have been the most significant factor in helping me stay clean.
Seriously, someone should show this to the Japanese government. Then maybe they'll come up with a solution to their abominable management of traffic.
The Japanese have this habit of being extremely friendly when they're in direct contact with other humans, but once they're in a consequence-free environment (such as the little bubbles of their tiny, ridiculous cars) they become relatively indifferent to people around them (just like Americans!)
The most bizarre illustration of this phenomenon is their behaviour in the presence of Emergency vehicles - they ignore them completely. I was walking home from work one day and an ambulence - sirens, bells, loudspeakers and all - happened to be travelling along the same route. The traffic was so relentless and the people were so stubborn that I was able to walk faster than it moved. I heard the sirens pass by my apartment five minutes after I got there.
POINT BEING, maybe they should just equip ambulences with RPG launchers or anti-matter cannons or something - that would certainly clear the way.
But I'd rather hold on to my eternal soul for now, thanks.
I don't care how much time this saves how many people, it's a fundamentally bad idea that will only at to the overall dehumanization of the internet.
In the last few years, email has quite reasonably overtaken traditional mail as the dominant form of written communication. The consequences have been numerous, but tolerable up until this point. Programs of this nature are one thing in the business world, but when companies start to market this "service" to average users, it takes on entirely different connotations.
We have to draw a line in the sand: people shouldn't need to automate the process of staying in touch with their friends! By taking this extremely basic task out of their hands and putting it into those of some relatively anonymous information-harvesting corporation, we remove one of the mechanisms that nature uses to cull lesser humans from the face of the earth. In short, people who are unable to stay in touch with their friends without using this program should not be allowed to breed.
Let natural selection take its course! Keep the fluoride out of our water supply and keep Plaxo out of our internet!
Yeah, eventually I ended up doing that to solve my problem. In the end it was a razor's edge decision between the Free MS tool and waiting outside the classroom every morning with a tire iron to jump the first unsuspecting hack who had spent 2 to 3 hours last night downloading, opening, and printing the files.
The fact remains the same - OpenOffice is evil!
Umm... No, stupid, cotton is grown in fields. Wool comes from sheep.
Bah, OpenOffice is terrible... I had a course last semester that required me to read numerous presentations in Power Point format. Instead of pirating the software, I decided to do the "ethical" thing and download OO to view the files. As if reading Power Point documents wasn't painful enough before, adding in horrendous load times, an even uglier interface and an inexplicable lack of key navigation features made it totally unbearable. The fact that it's free does not mean it isn't crap. It's merely free crap. That's my 2 cents...
Perhaps it is a SLAPP suit, but I think there's a better word for it:
barratry
3: the persistent incitement of litigation
SEE ALSO: MPAA, RIAA, Metallica