Actually, last year Nesson had the opportunity to shut the copyright nonsense down and dropped the ball. He basically refused to argue the practical merits of the case, sticking only to principles. The SCOTUS was tossing him softballs to allow him to show, basically, that the argument he wanted to argue was important enough that they should decide the constitutionality of it.
What he failed to consider was that, despite granting him the hearing (which was an extreme longshot in itself), and practically begging him to give them a reason to decide the case in his favor, the SCOTUS will NOT decide constitutionality unless it is absolutely necessary. They need to be convinced that individuals and society at large are actually harmed, not just theoretically. In the end, they tossed the case on completely different grounds, and didn't address Nesson's argument at all.
I doubt he'd make the same mistake twice, but hopefully Camera will make the case more effectively than Nesson did.
BTW, Nesson is frickin brilliant, and he was RIGHT in his arguments, he just has little to no experience actually litigating a case, and because of that failed misserably.
I had a bad feeling when Vista crashed on the very first boot of my brand new laptop.
I finally gave it up after it couldn't find a regular USB mouse automatically and decided to stop recognizing my laptop keyboard. I've -never- had those two particular problems on any previous version of windows, though to be fair my win98 and previous stuff was all ps/2, which had its own issues.
I am thinking of re-installing it though, it sounds like it has gotten a lot better since SP1. And no matter how you slice it, Ubuntu kinda sucks, and a custom linux setup is more effort than I want to expend.
It's more likely to trigger the desperation required to seek help than anything else they could do.
Really though, it would probably take getting kicked out of school, losing his job, and getting kicked out of his parents' house if his addiction is taking up 18 hours of his day. Maybe not even then.
Trying to do anything more than saying "I'm not associating with you any longer, because of that stupid game" and then actually breaking your association with him will probably cause him to cling to his game more tightly, not wake up and smell the roses.
Eventually he's going to realize that, as good as online social interactions can be, they are flat out one dimensional and lame compared to the real thing.
Unfortunately you have absolutely no control over that realization, and the quicker he loses things that are important to him the quicker he may wake up.
It's called tough love, sometimes abandoning is what it takes when the person refuses to let you help them.
I guarantee you at the time of the decision it sucks a hell of a lot more for the abandoner than the abandoned. It's only later that the abandoned person realizes what he lost, the guy who had to abandon him has known what he lost from the beginning.
"I don't like hanging around with you when you play games 15 hours a day. It worries and irritates me to think about where your life might end up if you continue to behave this way. We need to think about different living arrangements. I hope we'll continue to be friends. I'll be very upset if we end up falling out over this. One of us needs to start looking for a new place to live. How are we going to sort this out?"
Man, I was all on-board with you until you went all pansy in your leadership example. What the guy needs is "Hey, shithead, this crap is ruining your life, and I'm not going to keep watching it happen. Either you stop, or I'm gone." If you can get the rest of the roommates to side with you, it be comes "...you stop or you're finding a new place to ruin your life."
Don't be all nice about it, the guy needs a slap in the face, my god man give him one! He's more likely to appreciate it if he does come around if you didn't pussyfoot around the issue.
I think you missed the point dude, and are WAY to focused on religion-bashing.
The point was to appeal to what this guy thinks is important.
For a very large segment of the population, Religion is very important. The choice at #1 isn't too far fetched.
However, I don't think he was making a prioritized list, I think he was just listing the most emotion inducing - and therefore most likely to be effective - appeals the guy could probably make to his friend. Religion would definitely be near the top of that list.
It's not like he was telling the guy exactly what to say, good god man, don't be so sensitive!
Damn... the potentional for real life social interaction with ladies was all it took for me. Were my standards too low? You mean I could have gotten sex out of it? Damn...
Seriously though, you need to start going out, and often, to meet up with ladies in order to fix this. Since he won't be going with you, you don't have to be successful at all at meeting up with the ladies, just make sure he knows your intended goal every time you go out, be sure to have adventures, and be sure to talk about them non-stop around him.
At first, you should neglect to invite him, but be sure to have exchanges like "Should we invite Jim?" "Nah, he'll just say no and stay home to play his stupid game" within earshot of him. Then a few weeks later, actually ask him to go with you. By then he will probably have gotten jealous, and just might say yes. If so, and you can actually get him to have real-life physical relations with a lady - and I'm talking waaaay less than sex here - he'll probably lose interest in the game. Real life will be more exciting.;)
On another note, is POTBC any good? I haven't played a steady MMO since I quit SW Galaxies, but I always wanted to play that one...
It's usually a form of negligence. Negligent homicide is murder by inaction. However, I'm pretty sure that only applies when the person's death is directly caused by your inaction.
It would be a quite a stretch to say that by not helping track this guy down Verizon was directly responsible for his death. The person responsible for a suicide is the person who commits suicide. You can get secondary by being the person who influenced the person to commit suicide, but it requires very very heavy influence.
More than likely the secondary in this case, should the man have died, would be a member or members of the man's family. Verizon would have been way down on the list for blame, and since there is no legal basis for the police demand to activate the guy's phone, they aren't legally responsible anyway.
I'd much rather they had an official policy stating that they can't search for a person without anything less than a warrant.
What right of the guy's family is it that they should be able to have the phone company activate a phone for the purpose of tracking him down? Even if the request is via the police, they still don't have a right to it. If the man needed or wanted help, his de-activated phone could still call 911. If he doesn't want to be found, the police have no right to this kind of burdensome search (it is a burdon, even if it is a slight one) unless the man is suspected of comitting a crime or is otherwise a threat to the public.
The only reason I'm not applauding Verizon, is for the fact that their reason for not activating the phone was because the police/family weren't willing to cough up a whopping $20 (shows what the family thinks of the guy, btw). I wish this were standard policy.
Damnit I have a right to go crazy and run off if I want to!
If you read it, that's exactly what Verizon requested.
Neither the police nor the man's family was willing to pay $20 to save his life. All Verizon asked for was $20 to reactivate the phone, $20 wasn't the bill, it was just a portion. If you'll note, even the summary represents this as Verizon holding the man hostage (nowhere NEAR the truth of the matter). Just look up at the titlebar on your browser window.
So nobody felt this guy was worth $20, neither Verizon, nor the police and family.
Why is everybody hating on Verizon so much? I wish I could expect better critical thinking and objective analysis from the slashdot crowd, but too often we are just as bad as the general masses.
Maybe this guy wasn't so crazy after all, if his family didn't even care to spend $20 to find him.
You should not be so blindly anti-corporate. I'm as anti-corporate as anybody, but in this case Verizon did the right thing. The 62 year old, crazy and suicidal as he was, had commited no crime and did not represent a threat to society at large. He had every right to grab a bottle of pills and run off, just like his family had every right to attempt to chase him down and calm him down before he does something foolish.
Enlisting the help of the police to find a missing person is fine, and a good use of public services.
Forcing a phone company to track down a customer (breaching contract or no) just because the police said so? Hell no. You don't want ISPs giving up personal information just because the RIAA subpoena it, well this has even LESS legal standing than that.
Honestly, had Verizon activated his phone and tracked him down, the crazy man would be in the right to sue the pants off Verizon, and he could probably win.
And you people are talking about sanctioning Verizon for protecting the man's privacy? Granted, it was definitely not for altruistic reasons, but frankly I don't want the police to ever have the right to call up the phone company and have them track me down without a warrant for my arrest (not that I should ever be under suspicion, but you never know).
And while you're attacking the phone company for not budging on the phone deactivation for a mear $20, bear in mind that neither the police nor the family was apparently willing to cough up the $20 to have the account unlocked.
Seems to me that the worst you can say about Verizon here is that they suck as much as everybody else involved. Maybe if this guy's family wasn't harassing him he wouldn't have lost it, you never know.
All the mainstream cosmologists, for one, say that the big bang started at an infinitesimally small point.
They call this singularity, and the general relativity that the BB is based on predicts this (GR also breaks in a singularity, so it's a problem, hence more theories).
I think people are confused about the "nothing prior to singularity" issue. Chances are there was something pre-singularity, we'll just never know about it if singularity is actually what happened pre-big bang. The problem is once you achieve singularity, and all matter in the universe is shoved into an infinitely small volume, everything is uniform. It goes beyond shaking your ech-a-sketch to clear what you drew, singularity is like grinding it down to dust and then re-building it from scratch. There isn't even a way of knowing if it was an etch-a-sketch before, it could have been something else, like a remote control car or something.
The reason they say "the universe and time did not exist before the big bang" is because it is an exercise in futility to even think about such a thing. If singularity occured, there is no evidence of a prior-universe in our universe. So, from a practical standpoint, nothing existed for us to look at pre-singularity. It is where our time began.
Also, since time seems to be a function of the structure of the universe (it is tied directly to movement and funny things happen at the speed of light), time as we know it may well have not existed pre-BB. Or, "time" could have been completely different. Same with matter, and the laws of physics. Things could have worked differently. Because of the time issue things may not have happened at all.
All this, and there is no way of knowing. That is, of course, if singularity occurred and the present model is, in all ways that matter, correct. There are a lot of holes in it though, so I think declaring "there was nothing pre-BB" is foolish, even with GR as well established as it is. It still has problems, and we may find new things we have no way of knowing about at the present time.
The "infinate mass" at the beginning of the Big Bang is actually one of the biggest problems the theory has right now. When you go from a state of "incredibly huge amount of mass at incredibly high density" to "infite mass at infinite density" relativity breaks. It stops working, and so does the BB model. It's like a black hole for relativity itself. The entire foundation for modern astronomy and the model for the BB is based on relativity. It's the lynchpin, and if it predicts that prior to the BB relativity breaks, then something is wrong.
Either our (I mean scientists, I don't understand shit other than what filtered and dumbed down analysis tells me) understanding of relativity is severly flawed, or relativity is the wrong model to be using to make these predictions into the past.
I read about a theory that delt with this reasonably well, without breaking the entire model. It was called the "Big Bounce", and it predicted a sort of rebound when matter neared infinite density, triggering a big bang. It also suggests that it was not only possible, but likely that our Big Bang was not the first, and won't be the last. That eventually it will happen again, and that it probably has happened a near infinite number of times before. If I remember right it also predicted the inconsistant distribution of mass in the universe.
Yeah, with registry hacks: Acrobat, or with this or that homegrown solution. There's no excuse for that-- Acrobat is now gone, and the alternative is quite a bit faster as well...
Well, apparently I've never had the same problem. My acrobat reader never checks for updates, none of the readers at work check for updates (that is a scripted package though), Quicktime I'm pretty confident a simple checkbox in the settings is all it takes to disable the updates, and of course I don't use Real, that company is pure evil.
No, that's not correct. While there may be browser-based paint programs, show me the browser-based programs of the quality of Corel Painter, Z-Brush, Maya, Cubase, Pro-Tools, Sonar, Pinnacle Studio, Vegas Pro, Poser, etc. Given the speed of web-based tools of this nature, I'd have to say-- don't quit your day job.
Ever used Citrix? Full blown server-level computing, over the web. There is no desktop that I know of, short of building your own server farm and calling it a desktop, that can top the potential processing power available via an internet connection, a web browser, and a citrix session. Granted, that power is usually divided up so that more than one person uses the server farm (that's kinda the point), but how much power a session gets is a simple configuration setting. The only issue with it right now is bandwidth, the graphics over the web are terrible. That will change with time, but all it really means is remote sessions aren't ready for graphically intesive tasks, like games and graphics editing software.
FWIW, there are already web apps for some photoshop/painter functions. Not whole programs, mind you, but things like minor photo editing (sharpening/blurring, red-eye removal, etc), image and document conversion, etc. They work surprisingly well, I've used some of them.
If you're going to boot an alternative "monolithic" OS, exactly what was the point of a BIOS based browser again?
Because all I want to do is hop on the web for a bit? Maybe check my email and watch a hulu video? Why do I need to run Photoshop to do that?
I'll agree with you that I don't see the browser-OS as replacing the monolithic "do everything" OS any time soon. It isn't outside the realm of possibility, but it isn't practical either. We'd just be swapping to a different set of limitations.
Why not do both, and use one when that is most advantageous to us, and the other when the other fits our needs better? I still don't get why you and others are so adamantly opposed to what is ultimately a boon to computing, a new advance that could make using a computer even more flexible and useful than it already is.
It's not like anybody is saying "PC is dead, long live the browser!", at least I don't think so. This is, to me, kind of like Toshiba's (I think it was Toshiba) "DVD mode" where it would boot into a DVD player and play DVDs without having to power up the whole system. It failed because I'm pretty sure it's a relatively small market that watches DVDs on laptops - the vast majority of people watch them on TVs, and only a few on PCs. A "browser only" mode would probably do a lot better, because I know a lot of times people go "Oh sh*t, I need to check my email!" as they are running out the door. A 10s browser would be a lifesaver in those situations and dozens of others.
If all you're doing is browsing the web, you're probably burning less power too, so if you know that's all you're going to do, that and maybe some light document editing with Google Docs, why would you want to crank up your system for that?
Most all of those processes that Windows requires, even security, are eliminated if the OS is -solely- browser based. Most functions would be like a dumb terminal, and all the processing functions would be based out of your web app in the cloud, all the browser OS would need to worry about is encryption and decryption of whatever secure protocol you use for your sensitive data.
Most of the problems you state are there precisely because the system is designed to serve a vast number of functions, rather than just one. Things get a lot simpler when all you can do is open one application.
That same list of processes I can go through and remove 99% of if my system didn't have to (and would never conceivably need to) support anything but a browser. For some small evidence, look at how much bigger Ubuntu is than the OS on a linux based router, and how quickly it starts up. You don't wait for it to boot, because it boots immediately, and that is because all it needs to do is run its router/dns/dhcp firmware and web server (for the web interface). These things can even be hooked up to large hard drives and act as file servers!! Don't tell me a web browser is harder than any of these, it isn't. Not by a long shot.
I don't know if you know this, but up until now, thin-client implimentations were obscenely expensive because they required a large mainframe to function.
The price only became worth it when you had enough users that the cost savings of the thin-client vs a full blown computer was greater than the cost of the mainfraim and infrastructure.
They are also just beefed up versions of dumb terminals, which are a hell of a lot older than 1993.
Neither thin-clients nor dumb terminals have an OS on the BIOS - terminals are quite literally connections straight to the mainframe, and thin-clients actually boot to a standard OS like Linux before connecting to the terminal server.
OS on BIOS is very new, very cool, and way outside the realm of possibility of 1993 tech.
First, you know in all of those products automatic updates can be turned off, right? You don't have to un-install them, the company is just trying to provide a service (and make sure they stay in your mind for such services).
Second, Acrobat (reader), QT Player, RealAudio Player, Firefox, and Safari are already free, did you pay for them? If so, you got scammed son.
Third, you know browsers can handle all of those things but the editing, and ripping right? And I wouldn't be surprised if local versions of web services weren't made available at some point, browsers are very flexible and there are web based services for most all of these functions.
Lastly, why would a BIOS browser OS preclude a monolithic OS as an alternate boot option?
Most folks in general, however, don't. It's also not recommended unless you are actually running a server.
Do you realise how much energy that wastes? It's obscene, regular appliance-like devices that stay plugged in to the wall are surprisingly vampiric even in standby mode (average entertainment system burns 50-75 watts in standby, like a wasteful incandescent on 24/7), a PC in standby 24/7 would be like the devil in carnate.
Seriously, even a slow-booting machine only wastes a minute or two to boot up if you turn it off, it's such a waste not to. And if you had a browser OS on the BIOS, checking that website would probably be quicker than bringing your always-on desktop out of standby, or at least close to it.
I'd use it all the time, I think it is cool, but I certainly wouldn't use it for everything.
And some things browsers do just fine, especially if you like to use the many web based apps. At present, none of those apps are all that powerful, but a lot of people just need basic functionality from time to time, and a browser OS wouldn't preclude any of that. The browser OS would be for simple, almost exclusively web based tasks. I'd love that.
Firefox is already planning on shifting its design, because browsers are become more general-OS like with or without a monolithic OS behind it.
I don't see why everybody assumes booting into a full OS would no longer be an option.
Like, suddenly all our BIOS technology has to be thrown out the window because we've added the option to boot into a browser-only OS that sit's right in the BIOS?
So your internet is down, so boot into PC mode with your monolithic OS of choice, no big deal.
Why would a browser OS not be able to store data to a local hard drive? OS, storage, and access don't have to be on the same drive, even locally. Consider the fact that you can use any browser as a rudimentary (or in the case of IE, the core) file manager. It's nothing new, and nowhere near outside the realm of possibility. I'd be shocked if a BIOS based, browser-only OS weren't able to save data to a local hard drive, and I'd generally regard it as super-niche and near useless.
Beyond that, the only concern, and I personally think it is pretty minor since it can be reliably secured, is the data moving across the network and how much you trust web-vendor-x to process your data.
Slashdot Mirror
Operating systems aren't immortal beings, and by rights, there can't be (there shouldn't be) only one.
Love the highlander reference, but does this mean there will be no "Quickening" then? Damn, I thought Windows 7 was gonna work on that...
Actually, last year Nesson had the opportunity to shut the copyright nonsense down and dropped the ball. He basically refused to argue the practical merits of the case, sticking only to principles. The SCOTUS was tossing him softballs to allow him to show, basically, that the argument he wanted to argue was important enough that they should decide the constitutionality of it.
What he failed to consider was that, despite granting him the hearing (which was an extreme longshot in itself), and practically begging him to give them a reason to decide the case in his favor, the SCOTUS will NOT decide constitutionality unless it is absolutely necessary. They need to be convinced that individuals and society at large are actually harmed, not just theoretically. In the end, they tossed the case on completely different grounds, and didn't address Nesson's argument at all.
I doubt he'd make the same mistake twice, but hopefully Camera will make the case more effectively than Nesson did.
BTW, Nesson is frickin brilliant, and he was RIGHT in his arguments, he just has little to no experience actually litigating a case, and because of that failed misserably.
No, he missed the joke, it's just coincidence that he tried to make the exact same joke in his reply.
As long as the handjob was by Ballmer's hot brazilian female assistant and not Ballmer himself, it would probably convince me too.
I had a bad feeling when Vista crashed on the very first boot of my brand new laptop.
I finally gave it up after it couldn't find a regular USB mouse automatically and decided to stop recognizing my laptop keyboard. I've -never- had those two particular problems on any previous version of windows, though to be fair my win98 and previous stuff was all ps/2, which had its own issues.
I am thinking of re-installing it though, it sounds like it has gotten a lot better since SP1. And no matter how you slice it, Ubuntu kinda sucks, and a custom linux setup is more effort than I want to expend.
It's more likely to trigger the desperation required to seek help than anything else they could do.
Really though, it would probably take getting kicked out of school, losing his job, and getting kicked out of his parents' house if his addiction is taking up 18 hours of his day. Maybe not even then.
Trying to do anything more than saying "I'm not associating with you any longer, because of that stupid game" and then actually breaking your association with him will probably cause him to cling to his game more tightly, not wake up and smell the roses.
Eventually he's going to realize that, as good as online social interactions can be, they are flat out one dimensional and lame compared to the real thing.
Unfortunately you have absolutely no control over that realization, and the quicker he loses things that are important to him the quicker he may wake up.
It's called tough love, sometimes abandoning is what it takes when the person refuses to let you help them.
I guarantee you at the time of the decision it sucks a hell of a lot more for the abandoner than the abandoned. It's only later that the abandoned person realizes what he lost, the guy who had to abandon him has known what he lost from the beginning.
"I don't like hanging around with you when you play games 15 hours a day. It worries and irritates me to think about where your life might end up if you continue to behave this way. We need to think about different living arrangements. I hope we'll continue to be friends. I'll be very upset if we end up falling out over this. One of us needs to start looking for a new place to live. How are we going to sort this out?"
Man, I was all on-board with you until you went all pansy in your leadership example. What the guy needs is "Hey, shithead, this crap is ruining your life, and I'm not going to keep watching it happen. Either you stop, or I'm gone." If you can get the rest of the roommates to side with you, it be comes "...you stop or you're finding a new place to ruin your life."
Don't be all nice about it, the guy needs a slap in the face, my god man give him one! He's more likely to appreciate it if he does come around if you didn't pussyfoot around the issue.
Perhaps, for some strange reason, the guy actually cares about his friend and wants some help saving his friend from that life?
You know, like a friend?
Honestly, if that's how much you care about your friends, you can't have many. Or at least not many good ones, at any rate.
I think you missed the point dude, and are WAY to focused on religion-bashing.
The point was to appeal to what this guy thinks is important.
For a very large segment of the population, Religion is very important. The choice at #1 isn't too far fetched.
However, I don't think he was making a prioritized list, I think he was just listing the most emotion inducing - and therefore most likely to be effective - appeals the guy could probably make to his friend. Religion would definitely be near the top of that list.
It's not like he was telling the guy exactly what to say, good god man, don't be so sensitive!
Damn... the potentional for real life social interaction with ladies was all it took for me. Were my standards too low? You mean I could have gotten sex out of it? Damn...
Seriously though, you need to start going out, and often, to meet up with ladies in order to fix this. Since he won't be going with you, you don't have to be successful at all at meeting up with the ladies, just make sure he knows your intended goal every time you go out, be sure to have adventures, and be sure to talk about them non-stop around him.
At first, you should neglect to invite him, but be sure to have exchanges like "Should we invite Jim?" "Nah, he'll just say no and stay home to play his stupid game" within earshot of him. Then a few weeks later, actually ask him to go with you. By then he will probably have gotten jealous, and just might say yes. If so, and you can actually get him to have real-life physical relations with a lady - and I'm talking waaaay less than sex here - he'll probably lose interest in the game. Real life will be more exciting. ;)
On another note, is POTBC any good? I haven't played a steady MMO since I quit SW Galaxies, but I always wanted to play that one...
It's usually a form of negligence. Negligent homicide is murder by inaction. However, I'm pretty sure that only applies when the person's death is directly caused by your inaction.
It would be a quite a stretch to say that by not helping track this guy down Verizon was directly responsible for his death. The person responsible for a suicide is the person who commits suicide. You can get secondary by being the person who influenced the person to commit suicide, but it requires very very heavy influence.
More than likely the secondary in this case, should the man have died, would be a member or members of the man's family. Verizon would have been way down on the list for blame, and since there is no legal basis for the police demand to activate the guy's phone, they aren't legally responsible anyway.
Why should it even be prevented?
I'd much rather they had an official policy stating that they can't search for a person without anything less than a warrant.
What right of the guy's family is it that they should be able to have the phone company activate a phone for the purpose of tracking him down? Even if the request is via the police, they still don't have a right to it. If the man needed or wanted help, his de-activated phone could still call 911. If he doesn't want to be found, the police have no right to this kind of burdensome search (it is a burdon, even if it is a slight one) unless the man is suspected of comitting a crime or is otherwise a threat to the public.
The only reason I'm not applauding Verizon, is for the fact that their reason for not activating the phone was because the police/family weren't willing to cough up a whopping $20 (shows what the family thinks of the guy, btw). I wish this were standard policy.
Damnit I have a right to go crazy and run off if I want to!
If you read it, that's exactly what Verizon requested.
Neither the police nor the man's family was willing to pay $20 to save his life. All Verizon asked for was $20 to reactivate the phone, $20 wasn't the bill, it was just a portion. If you'll note, even the summary represents this as Verizon holding the man hostage (nowhere NEAR the truth of the matter). Just look up at the titlebar on your browser window.
So nobody felt this guy was worth $20, neither Verizon, nor the police and family.
Why is everybody hating on Verizon so much? I wish I could expect better critical thinking and objective analysis from the slashdot crowd, but too often we are just as bad as the general masses.
Maybe this guy wasn't so crazy after all, if his family didn't even care to spend $20 to find him.
You should not be so blindly anti-corporate. I'm as anti-corporate as anybody, but in this case Verizon did the right thing. The 62 year old, crazy and suicidal as he was, had commited no crime and did not represent a threat to society at large. He had every right to grab a bottle of pills and run off, just like his family had every right to attempt to chase him down and calm him down before he does something foolish.
Enlisting the help of the police to find a missing person is fine, and a good use of public services.
Forcing a phone company to track down a customer (breaching contract or no) just because the police said so? Hell no. You don't want ISPs giving up personal information just because the RIAA subpoena it, well this has even LESS legal standing than that.
Honestly, had Verizon activated his phone and tracked him down, the crazy man would be in the right to sue the pants off Verizon, and he could probably win.
And you people are talking about sanctioning Verizon for protecting the man's privacy? Granted, it was definitely not for altruistic reasons, but frankly I don't want the police to ever have the right to call up the phone company and have them track me down without a warrant for my arrest (not that I should ever be under suspicion, but you never know).
And while you're attacking the phone company for not budging on the phone deactivation for a mear $20, bear in mind that neither the police nor the family was apparently willing to cough up the $20 to have the account unlocked.
Seems to me that the worst you can say about Verizon here is that they suck as much as everybody else involved. Maybe if this guy's family wasn't harassing him he wouldn't have lost it, you never know.
All the mainstream cosmologists, for one, say that the big bang started at an infinitesimally small point.
They call this singularity, and the general relativity that the BB is based on predicts this (GR also breaks in a singularity, so it's a problem, hence more theories).
I think people are confused about the "nothing prior to singularity" issue. Chances are there was something pre-singularity, we'll just never know about it if singularity is actually what happened pre-big bang. The problem is once you achieve singularity, and all matter in the universe is shoved into an infinitely small volume, everything is uniform. It goes beyond shaking your ech-a-sketch to clear what you drew, singularity is like grinding it down to dust and then re-building it from scratch. There isn't even a way of knowing if it was an etch-a-sketch before, it could have been something else, like a remote control car or something.
The reason they say "the universe and time did not exist before the big bang" is because it is an exercise in futility to even think about such a thing. If singularity occured, there is no evidence of a prior-universe in our universe. So, from a practical standpoint, nothing existed for us to look at pre-singularity. It is where our time began.
Also, since time seems to be a function of the structure of the universe (it is tied directly to movement and funny things happen at the speed of light), time as we know it may well have not existed pre-BB. Or, "time" could have been completely different. Same with matter, and the laws of physics. Things could have worked differently. Because of the time issue things may not have happened at all.
All this, and there is no way of knowing. That is, of course, if singularity occurred and the present model is, in all ways that matter, correct. There are a lot of holes in it though, so I think declaring "there was nothing pre-BB" is foolish, even with GR as well established as it is. It still has problems, and we may find new things we have no way of knowing about at the present time.
The "infinate mass" at the beginning of the Big Bang is actually one of the biggest problems the theory has right now. When you go from a state of "incredibly huge amount of mass at incredibly high density" to "infite mass at infinite density" relativity breaks. It stops working, and so does the BB model. It's like a black hole for relativity itself. The entire foundation for modern astronomy and the model for the BB is based on relativity. It's the lynchpin, and if it predicts that prior to the BB relativity breaks, then something is wrong.
Either our (I mean scientists, I don't understand shit other than what filtered and dumbed down analysis tells me) understanding of relativity is severly flawed, or relativity is the wrong model to be using to make these predictions into the past.
I read about a theory that delt with this reasonably well, without breaking the entire model. It was called the "Big Bounce", and it predicted a sort of rebound when matter neared infinite density, triggering a big bang. It also suggests that it was not only possible, but likely that our Big Bang was not the first, and won't be the last. That eventually it will happen again, and that it probably has happened a near infinite number of times before. If I remember right it also predicted the inconsistant distribution of mass in the universe.
Who the hell gets bored of sex?!!
Yeah, with registry hacks: Acrobat, or with this or that homegrown solution. There's no excuse for that-- Acrobat is now gone, and the alternative is quite a bit faster as well...
Well, apparently I've never had the same problem. My acrobat reader never checks for updates, none of the readers at work check for updates (that is a scripted package though), Quicktime I'm pretty confident a simple checkbox in the settings is all it takes to disable the updates, and of course I don't use Real, that company is pure evil.
No, that's not correct. While there may be browser-based paint programs, show me the browser-based programs of the quality of Corel Painter, Z-Brush, Maya, Cubase, Pro-Tools, Sonar, Pinnacle Studio, Vegas Pro, Poser, etc. Given the speed of web-based tools of this nature, I'd have to say-- don't quit your day job.
Ever used Citrix? Full blown server-level computing, over the web. There is no desktop that I know of, short of building your own server farm and calling it a desktop, that can top the potential processing power available via an internet connection, a web browser, and a citrix session. Granted, that power is usually divided up so that more than one person uses the server farm (that's kinda the point), but how much power a session gets is a simple configuration setting. The only issue with it right now is bandwidth, the graphics over the web are terrible. That will change with time, but all it really means is remote sessions aren't ready for graphically intesive tasks, like games and graphics editing software.
FWIW, there are already web apps for some photoshop/painter functions. Not whole programs, mind you, but things like minor photo editing (sharpening/blurring, red-eye removal, etc), image and document conversion, etc. They work surprisingly well, I've used some of them.
If you're going to boot an alternative "monolithic" OS, exactly what was the point of a BIOS based browser again?
Because all I want to do is hop on the web for a bit? Maybe check my email and watch a hulu video? Why do I need to run Photoshop to do that?
I'll agree with you that I don't see the browser-OS as replacing the monolithic "do everything" OS any time soon. It isn't outside the realm of possibility, but it isn't practical either. We'd just be swapping to a different set of limitations.
Why not do both, and use one when that is most advantageous to us, and the other when the other fits our needs better? I still don't get why you and others are so adamantly opposed to what is ultimately a boon to computing, a new advance that could make using a computer even more flexible and useful than it already is.
It's not like anybody is saying "PC is dead, long live the browser!", at least I don't think so. This is, to me, kind of like Toshiba's (I think it was Toshiba) "DVD mode" where it would boot into a DVD player and play DVDs without having to power up the whole system. It failed because I'm pretty sure it's a relatively small market that watches DVDs on laptops - the vast majority of people watch them on TVs, and only a few on PCs. A "browser only" mode would probably do a lot better, because I know a lot of times people go "Oh sh*t, I need to check my email!" as they are running out the door. A 10s browser would be a lifesaver in those situations and dozens of others.
If all you're doing is browsing the web, you're probably burning less power too, so if you know that's all you're going to do, that and maybe some light document editing with Google Docs, why would you want to crank up your system for that?
Most all of those processes that Windows requires, even security, are eliminated if the OS is -solely- browser based. Most functions would be like a dumb terminal, and all the processing functions would be based out of your web app in the cloud, all the browser OS would need to worry about is encryption and decryption of whatever secure protocol you use for your sensitive data.
Most of the problems you state are there precisely because the system is designed to serve a vast number of functions, rather than just one. Things get a lot simpler when all you can do is open one application.
That same list of processes I can go through and remove 99% of if my system didn't have to (and would never conceivably need to) support anything but a browser. For some small evidence, look at how much bigger Ubuntu is than the OS on a linux based router, and how quickly it starts up. You don't wait for it to boot, because it boots immediately, and that is because all it needs to do is run its router/dns/dhcp firmware and web server (for the web interface). These things can even be hooked up to large hard drives and act as file servers!! Don't tell me a web browser is harder than any of these, it isn't. Not by a long shot.
I don't know if you know this, but up until now, thin-client implimentations were obscenely expensive because they required a large mainframe to function.
The price only became worth it when you had enough users that the cost savings of the thin-client vs a full blown computer was greater than the cost of the mainfraim and infrastructure.
They are also just beefed up versions of dumb terminals, which are a hell of a lot older than 1993.
Neither thin-clients nor dumb terminals have an OS on the BIOS - terminals are quite literally connections straight to the mainframe, and thin-clients actually boot to a standard OS like Linux before connecting to the terminal server.
OS on BIOS is very new, very cool, and way outside the realm of possibility of 1993 tech.
First, you know in all of those products automatic updates can be turned off, right? You don't have to un-install them, the company is just trying to provide a service (and make sure they stay in your mind for such services).
Second, Acrobat (reader), QT Player, RealAudio Player, Firefox, and Safari are already free, did you pay for them? If so, you got scammed son.
Third, you know browsers can handle all of those things but the editing, and ripping right? And I wouldn't be surprised if local versions of web services weren't made available at some point, browsers are very flexible and there are web based services for most all of these functions.
Lastly, why would a BIOS browser OS preclude a monolithic OS as an alternate boot option?
Most folks I know leave the desktop on 24/7.
Most folks in general, however, don't. It's also not recommended unless you are actually running a server.
Do you realise how much energy that wastes? It's obscene, regular appliance-like devices that stay plugged in to the wall are surprisingly vampiric even in standby mode (average entertainment system burns 50-75 watts in standby, like a wasteful incandescent on 24/7), a PC in standby 24/7 would be like the devil in carnate.
Seriously, even a slow-booting machine only wastes a minute or two to boot up if you turn it off, it's such a waste not to. And if you had a browser OS on the BIOS, checking that website would probably be quicker than bringing your always-on desktop out of standby, or at least close to it.
I'd use it all the time, I think it is cool, but I certainly wouldn't use it for everything.
And some things browsers do just fine, especially if you like to use the many web based apps. At present, none of those apps are all that powerful, but a lot of people just need basic functionality from time to time, and a browser OS wouldn't preclude any of that. The browser OS would be for simple, almost exclusively web based tasks. I'd love that.
Firefox is already planning on shifting its design, because browsers are become more general-OS like with or without a monolithic OS behind it.
I don't see why everybody assumes booting into a full OS would no longer be an option.
Like, suddenly all our BIOS technology has to be thrown out the window because we've added the option to boot into a browser-only OS that sit's right in the BIOS?
So your internet is down, so boot into PC mode with your monolithic OS of choice, no big deal.
Why would a browser OS not be able to store data to a local hard drive? OS, storage, and access don't have to be on the same drive, even locally. Consider the fact that you can use any browser as a rudimentary (or in the case of IE, the core) file manager. It's nothing new, and nowhere near outside the realm of possibility. I'd be shocked if a BIOS based, browser-only OS weren't able to save data to a local hard drive, and I'd generally regard it as super-niche and near useless.
Beyond that, the only concern, and I personally think it is pretty minor since it can be reliably secured, is the data moving across the network and how much you trust web-vendor-x to process your data.