The only thing that happened to me when I read this summary was that when I saw the word "Calabria" I immediately thought of this song. And now I have it stuck in my head for the read of the day.
By the OP's suggestion I should ditch all my books and scan/torrent/rebuy them in PDF.
No, he didn't come out and say that. He said that the prices of CDs have dropped because they are an inferior medium (decidedly by the consumer's purchasing habits). Inferior because they take up space and aren't portable relative to an electronic copy. You could follow that your books are an inferior medium to ebooks, but there are a few kinks with ebooks left to work out, namely how the reading feels with books v ebooks.
It's an interesting topic if the numbers are correct. It warrants some explanation at the least. Perhaps insane FOIA requests are up from 2008, or maybe the Obama administration is taking secret keeping lessons from Steve Jobs. I don't think one year comparison between the two administrations is really fair. We should probably wait until Obama's first four years are over. Who cares where the original story was from if the topic of conversation is true?
I don't think Chinese leadership is inflexible by western standards. Rather, I think they're completely pragmatic and utilitarian. If Google were to make it worth their while, they'd probably be willing to negotiate, however, I don't think Google's willing to go as far as that takes. "Flexible" is a relative term.
Schmidt may owe his allegiance to the shareholders, but he might also be able to make the case that pulling out of China (for now) in the name of free speech will add so much value to the Google brand that it may be an opportunity not worth missing.
Or at least feels the pull and responsibility of profit more so than any sort of ethical dilemma.
How are you so sure?
Pesky ideals and ethics have no place in corporate America.
I think you're being a bit too cynical with Google. At least thus far, I think they've shown a healthy habit of finding a third way to maintain trust with consumers and build confidence in shareholders. Google isn't in an invulnerable position. If they scare their customers enough, people will simply stop using them out of fear of what's going on with their information because they don't trust Google any more. Google has to appease its user base just as much as its shareholders. This issue in China might be a case of it falling in favor of its users to protect its brand in its main markets.
Reworking the line from Steve Ballmer. Everybody seems to be reminiscing about the days when this stuff was open, but it was open because that's what people wanted to buy! Steve Jobs could be a nasty guy like people pass him off (I don't know him, so I reserve judgement), but what he is good at is reading markets. He was good then, and he's good now. Steve Jobs doesn't care about openness more than closed-ness. The man wants a product that sells, he's a businessman to the core (and a damn good one at that). If it's open stuff, he'll make it, but right now he doesn't see it that way, and I'm inclined to agree with him. The typical consumer he's targeting wants an integrated product suite that "just works". Openness takes a backseat to dealing with the alternative (to your typical Mac user, IMO!!). You can't really hold it against the user, or Jobs, for creating a product and acting as such. I'm sure you can come up with other reasons to hate them though.. That Mac user loves his VW, lattes at Starbucks, thick black rimmed square glasses and listening to Moby. Steve Jobs is running a company that, apparently, goes nuts in court over patents and control of its OS.
They didn't change the DRM scheme until after they had secured a strong monopoly position in that market space.
They may have gotten rid of DRM in an advanced stage, but that might have been because the competition was emerging with DRM free files, and Apple was moving to keep step. As a matter of fact, I think that's more the case. There are a few stories that Jobs was against DRM from the get go, but had to go with it per the record industry. I mean you can accuse him of lying, but this is what the man says.
On another point, you say Apple has achieved a "strong monopoly" in the music player space. I don't find this to be true. Yes, they have the lion's share of the market, but that doesn't imply that they have a monopoly or full control of the market. There are competing players, they exist, and they sell. Apple does not have the market horizontally integrated, and it doesn't control the player market. The consumer can definitely still choose alternatives. It just means that they have a majority market share because the consumer considers their product(s)/ecosystem to be that good. Apple was there at the beginning and struck at a pivotal time. They created an integrated music store and player system that competition can barely ape (at best, even today!). Heck, not even Sony has put out an end-to-end system that competes with Apples in the reasonable sense, and they could have vertical integration! (I love using these robber baron terms).
Lastly, I ask you, what would the impetus be for Apple to unlock iTunes to make the music simply compatible with other players? Especially given the fact that consumers can get unlocked music from other places already? It wasn't in Apple's best interest, their consumers could already use the product anyway and people who didn't opt in, hadn't yet opted in anyway.
We need Android to succeed to preserve competition and openness in the smart phone and tablet/e-reader markets.
I'd argue to the contrary on that point. The future of the smartphone market does not depend on Android's success, but it will be influenced by it one way or the other. Android isn't anything special, it's the natural response to Apple's model from the rest of the market. It's like Linux was to Windows, except this time it has a corporate driver that acts like it knows what it's doing. The big dog(s) carve their own way, but the little dogs band together with standards. Happened with IBM PC's vs. Atari/Commodore/etc., MS vs Windows, and now it's happening with Nokia/RIM/Apple vs Android (and WebOS to some extent, but that's not a very big player). To say that competition hinges on the success/failure of Android is false, however. Where Android might fail, somebody will pick up in its stead and not screw up..OR the consumer will decide that openness and competition don't stack up to the walled garden approach that Apple/RIM/Nokia provide (with a good price point, mind you). Competition is necessary, but not required. I say this in the abstract sense. The idea of competition being able to come up and destroy your business is what keeps companies at the forefront of innovation and good pricing...whether or not this environment really exists remains to be discussed.
The title acts as if Iran actually did hack 29 US "spy sites" (wtf). Whether or not this is actually true remains to be seen. The article has a little trouble using quotations, or at least maybe that's how people do it in the UK? I don't mean that as an offense, but rather, in US papers we seem to pepper the articles with double quote marks.
It was not clear whether HRAI had ties to US intelligence organisations or whether the Fars report labeled them as such due to their apparent sympathy for opposition protesters. The Fars report did not tie any of the websites to a specific US government entity.
This article seems shoddy to me, as these claims are as of yet unsubstantiated. Why doesn't Iran use its magic firewall to block these sites instead of hack them? Smells like a publicity stunt against to me.
I get the same thing from Tekken or Street Fighter. Granted, the buttons have to stand up to me palming all 6 of them repeatedly with a lot of intensity.
It's a platform for hobbyists and kids, not for those in industry, clearly. The learning curve is incredibly shallow for people who have no experience with this stuff. For many, it's a great starting point.
Exactly, it's not Communism at all, but Authoritarianism that's the broken feature here. That's not to say Communism does or doesn't work (though I'm inclined to think that any pure "isms" has its issues). I think Venezuela could use a healthy dose of libertarianism (little l), but then again, couldn't we all?
Now that I've mentioned so many "isms" I'm inclined to include this quote:
"A person shouldn't believe in isms, he should believe in himself." -- Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Because it was cheaper than the other two. I mean people knew it wasn't HD enabled years ago. I suppose that not being HD is a much bigger deal now that everybody's getting 1080p TV's. But then, the Wii was kind of always the "value" platform. Sony's gonna have to have some good motion games in order to upgrade...because the Wii already has some good brand/franchises going.
Who fired him? Sounds like he made the wrong people look bad. Rules are rules, I suppose, but if the problem has been fixed, isn't talking about security and attack vectors generally a good thing?
I think it's more common to do fun game-oriented computing out in public areas like cafe's and LAN-party type places in Korea. It's more a cultural thing there than it is in the United States, or Europe, I'd imagine.
Crypto's not the weak link in security anymore, nor has it been for a long time. I think the real security money now is in automated (or proven) software verification and model checking. Private industry is only beginning to understand this, and as a whole, probably will not employ it for some time to come. Why bother testing for security errors when you can prove they don't exist?
SIGIR is the top information retrieval conference in the world. The acceptance rate was 16% last year, [probablyirrelevant.org] which makes it an "extremely selective" conference in the research world. The acceptance rate has held around 15% - 17% for decades now, and in fact tended decrease as the number of submissions have increased. It accepts submission from worldwide and from both academia and industry.
This analsys from 2007 of papers over the previous 30 years shows that China has moved into 5th overall in number of accepted papers. This is in no small part to Microsoft Research Asia.
No offense, but I think your argument just shot itself in the foot with that last bit. So Microsoft Research Asia is a special research center funded, at least in part, by Microsoft, which itself is a big player in research. To me, this makes SIGIR an exception. Regardless, citing only one "famous" conference [I'm not familiar with information retrieval, and who's who] isn't enough to pronounce a country as having an ever increasing high quality research base, regardless of whether or not the country actually has one or not.
You're a fool if you fail to recognize this do [sic] your jingoism and racism.
Skepticism is not jingoism or racism. No need to mudsling. Show me more numbers and I might swing your way.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that happened to me when I read this summary was that when I saw the word "Calabria" I immediately thought of this song. And now I have it stuck in my head for the read of the day.
I fly first class.
Once you have that then how to you tell your own copy from someone elses?
A CD is a token of ownership.
You answered your own question. Proof of purchase is the CD and or the receipt from where you picked it up.
By the OP's suggestion I should ditch all my books and scan/torrent/rebuy them in PDF.
No, he didn't come out and say that. He said that the prices of CDs have dropped because they are an inferior medium (decidedly by the consumer's purchasing habits). Inferior because they take up space and aren't portable relative to an electronic copy. You could follow that your books are an inferior medium to ebooks, but there are a few kinks with ebooks left to work out, namely how the reading feels with books v ebooks.
It's an interesting topic if the numbers are correct. It warrants some explanation at the least. Perhaps insane FOIA requests are up from 2008, or maybe the Obama administration is taking secret keeping lessons from Steve Jobs. I don't think one year comparison between the two administrations is really fair. We should probably wait until Obama's first four years are over. Who cares where the original story was from if the topic of conversation is true?
Texas Li!
I don't think Chinese leadership is inflexible by western standards. Rather, I think they're completely pragmatic and utilitarian. If Google were to make it worth their while, they'd probably be willing to negotiate, however, I don't think Google's willing to go as far as that takes. "Flexible" is a relative term.
Or at least feels the pull and responsibility of profit more so than any sort of ethical dilemma.
How are you so sure?
Pesky ideals and ethics have no place in corporate America.
I think you're being a bit too cynical with Google. At least thus far, I think they've shown a healthy habit of finding a third way to maintain trust with consumers and build confidence in shareholders. Google isn't in an invulnerable position. If they scare their customers enough, people will simply stop using them out of fear of what's going on with their information because they don't trust Google any more. Google has to appease its user base just as much as its shareholders. This issue in China might be a case of it falling in favor of its users to protect its brand in its main markets.
Reworking the line from Steve Ballmer. Everybody seems to be reminiscing about the days when this stuff was open, but it was open because that's what people wanted to buy! Steve Jobs could be a nasty guy like people pass him off (I don't know him, so I reserve judgement), but what he is good at is reading markets. He was good then, and he's good now. Steve Jobs doesn't care about openness more than closed-ness. The man wants a product that sells, he's a businessman to the core (and a damn good one at that). If it's open stuff, he'll make it, but right now he doesn't see it that way, and I'm inclined to agree with him. The typical consumer he's targeting wants an integrated product suite that "just works". Openness takes a backseat to dealing with the alternative (to your typical Mac user, IMO!!). You can't really hold it against the user, or Jobs, for creating a product and acting as such. I'm sure you can come up with other reasons to hate them though.. That Mac user loves his VW, lattes at Starbucks, thick black rimmed square glasses and listening to Moby. Steve Jobs is running a company that, apparently, goes nuts in court over patents and control of its OS.
They didn't change the DRM scheme until after they had secured a strong monopoly position in that market space.
They may have gotten rid of DRM in an advanced stage, but that might have been because the competition was emerging with DRM free files, and Apple was moving to keep step. As a matter of fact, I think that's more the case. There are a few stories that Jobs was against DRM from the get go, but had to go with it per the record industry. I mean you can accuse him of lying, but this is what the man says.
On another point, you say Apple has achieved a "strong monopoly" in the music player space. I don't find this to be true. Yes, they have the lion's share of the market, but that doesn't imply that they have a monopoly or full control of the market. There are competing players, they exist, and they sell. Apple does not have the market horizontally integrated, and it doesn't control the player market. The consumer can definitely still choose alternatives. It just means that they have a majority market share because the consumer considers their product(s)/ecosystem to be that good. Apple was there at the beginning and struck at a pivotal time. They created an integrated music store and player system that competition can barely ape (at best, even today!). Heck, not even Sony has put out an end-to-end system that competes with Apples in the reasonable sense, and they could have vertical integration! (I love using these robber baron terms).
Lastly, I ask you, what would the impetus be for Apple to unlock iTunes to make the music simply compatible with other players? Especially given the fact that consumers can get unlocked music from other places already? It wasn't in Apple's best interest, their consumers could already use the product anyway and people who didn't opt in, hadn't yet opted in anyway.
We need Android to succeed to preserve competition and openness in the smart phone and tablet/e-reader markets.
I'd argue to the contrary on that point. The future of the smartphone market does not depend on Android's success, but it will be influenced by it one way or the other. Android isn't anything special, it's the natural response to Apple's model from the rest of the market. It's like Linux was to Windows, except this time it has a corporate driver that acts like it knows what it's doing. The big dog(s) carve their own way, but the little dogs band together with standards. Happened with IBM PC's vs. Atari/Commodore/etc., MS vs Windows, and now it's happening with Nokia/RIM/Apple vs Android (and WebOS to some extent, but that's not a very big player). To say that competition hinges on the success/failure of Android is false, however. Where Android might fail, somebody will pick up in its stead and not screw up..OR the consumer will decide that openness and competition don't stack up to the walled garden approach that Apple/RIM/Nokia provide (with a good price point, mind you). Competition is necessary, but not required. I say this in the abstract sense. The idea of competition being able to come up and destroy your business is what keeps companies at the forefront of innovation and good pricing...whether or not this environment really exists remains to be discussed.
It was not clear whether HRAI had ties to US intelligence organisations or whether the Fars report labeled them as such due to their apparent sympathy for opposition protesters. The Fars report did not tie any of the websites to a specific US government entity.
This article seems shoddy to me, as these claims are as of yet unsubstantiated. Why doesn't Iran use its magic firewall to block these sites instead of hack them? Smells like a publicity stunt against to me.
I get the same thing from Tekken or Street Fighter. Granted, the buttons have to stand up to me palming all 6 of them repeatedly with a lot of intensity.
It's a platform for hobbyists and kids, not for those in industry, clearly. The learning curve is incredibly shallow for people who have no experience with this stuff. For many, it's a great starting point.
Exactly, it's not Communism at all, but Authoritarianism that's the broken feature here. That's not to say Communism does or doesn't work (though I'm inclined to think that any pure "isms" has its issues). I think Venezuela could use a healthy dose of libertarianism (little l), but then again, couldn't we all?
Now that I've mentioned so many "isms" I'm inclined to include this quote:
"A person shouldn't believe in isms, he should believe in himself." -- Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
I wish I could mod you to +6 insightful.
Because it was cheaper than the other two. I mean people knew it wasn't HD enabled years ago. I suppose that not being HD is a much bigger deal now that everybody's getting 1080p TV's. But then, the Wii was kind of always the "value" platform. Sony's gonna have to have some good motion games in order to upgrade...because the Wii already has some good brand/franchises going.
Who fired him? Sounds like he made the wrong people look bad. Rules are rules, I suppose, but if the problem has been fixed, isn't talking about security and attack vectors generally a good thing?
I think it's more common to do fun game-oriented computing out in public areas like cafe's and LAN-party type places in Korea. It's more a cultural thing there than it is in the United States, or Europe, I'd imagine.
Crypto's not the weak link in security anymore, nor has it been for a long time. I think the real security money now is in automated (or proven) software verification and model checking. Private industry is only beginning to understand this, and as a whole, probably will not employ it for some time to come. Why bother testing for security errors when you can prove they don't exist?
I believe the article said he was a Former NSA technical director.
Ludwig Von Mises, is that you?!?
Money doesn't grow on trees, after all.
The use of futurism has been thoroughly discredited.
SIGIR is the top information retrieval conference in the world. The acceptance rate was 16% last year, [probablyirrelevant.org] which makes it an "extremely selective" conference in the research world. The acceptance rate has held around 15% - 17% for decades now, and in fact tended decrease as the number of submissions have increased. It accepts submission from worldwide and from both academia and industry.
This analsys from 2007 of papers over the previous 30 years shows that China has moved into 5th overall in number of accepted papers. This is in no small part to Microsoft Research Asia.
No offense, but I think your argument just shot itself in the foot with that last bit. So Microsoft Research Asia is a special research center funded, at least in part, by Microsoft, which itself is a big player in research. To me, this makes SIGIR an exception. Regardless, citing only one "famous" conference [I'm not familiar with information retrieval, and who's who] isn't enough to pronounce a country as having an ever increasing high quality research base, regardless of whether or not the country actually has one or not.
You're a fool if you fail to recognize this do [sic] your jingoism and racism.
Skepticism is not jingoism or racism. No need to mudsling. Show me more numbers and I might swing your way.