And automobile accidents are the leading cause of death in the US. But we still do it.
Off by a LONG shot. Heart disease causes almost 20x more deaths. So does Cancer. (source, source)
Plus, people driving cars at least feel like they are in control of the situation (even if they are still likely to be hit by some other maniac.) When hurtling through a tube at 600 mph, you are at the mercy of the odds and nothing else.
Words are harder to remember than they'd like. Say I tell my friend to meet me at "award.tricks.fish" (an example from their page, somewhere in NYC) but he remembers "award.trick.fish". Suddenly he's buying a plane ticket to Chicago, which is all just the same, because I accidentally travelled to "awards.trick.fish" and ended up just outside London.
Plurals, gerunds, past tense and other word forms that have different endings make this a really unwieldy system for conveying precise information verbally. It's easy enough electronically, but then why not just make a google maps short url link and stick it in an SMS? Problem solved...
That's a good question... You're probably thinking of the Democratic Congressman named Weiner who actually did accidentally post a picture of his... well, weiner from his phone.
It's long been a well-known secret among technologically capable people (like you, dear reader) that it's very easy to download the video files for youtube videos. Extracting the audio is just another simple step away from that. Google has ignored such services in the past because they really don't care if people download these videos or the music on them. Sure, it might eat in to their revenues a little bit, but not much, since most people will just keep coming back to the site anyway.
The real issue here is that copyright holders (those big evil RIAA members) never realized how easy stripping music from youtube videos actually was. That's the only reason they let all their music go up on the site (albeit slathered with advertising and overlays.) Anytime someone draws attention to how easy getting the audio (or video) actually is, it makes copyright holders skittish. They think that this guy has somehow discovered some sort of technological loophole that allows him to download the files in a way others can't (he hasn't.) Google is probably under tremendous pressure to shut this guy down, and they'll do it just so that nobody starts asking questions about why it's so easy to do what he's doing anyway.
Better that one man takes the fall (and just shuts down his site) than that the whole world suffers losing unfettered access to youtube source files.
The first sign that something is wrong with the company is when the CEO feels obligated to say, "There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now."
It may not be the thing that he's trying to reassure us about (it probably is,) but RIM sure looks and acts like a duck that isn't going to be saved. Now Mr. Heins is just quacking like one.
It looks like the rockets that launch the capsule may eventually be built in Utah, but that capsule appears to have been built in Louisiana. It's probably pork just the same, but I don't think Orion is really benefiting Utah just yet.
There are at least two huge differences. First, auto insurance is not required at a federal level. This argument was never over whether any level of government had the right to impose such a requirement. States, for example can and do. Second, and probably more important, not every person in the country has to have auto insurance. If a person rides their bike everywhere, or takes the bus, or hitches rides with his friends, he doesn't have to have auto insurance. There, governments (state governments) have said, "IF you choose to drive in our state and on our roads, then you MUST be insured to a minimum level." In the case of Obamacare, there is no decision to do something (other than continue breathing) that would require you to buy a product. You simply must do it. You must purchase insurance not to your own satisfaction, but the government's.
That's a good point. I think the best tactic to combat this would just be to play up the 'tyrannical majority' argument in its most generic sense. Everyone (religious people, atheists, gays, heterosexuals, traditional minorities, and increasingly middle class white people) likes to think that everyone else is out to get them and would gang up against them if given the chance. You don't even have to suggest it to each group, just put it out there in a general way and everyone will think you're talking about them.
And if so, how soon? Will you allow participants to view results of a survey/poll immediately after they vote, or before? Or never? What about all the demographic data you will likely tie to each vote? Will that be available (in an anonymized form) for public inspection? That could be just as interesting as the prospect of a poll-informed internet representative.
.sec is just a fat finger slip away from.sex, which I can only assume will some day be its own TLD at the rate ICANN is handing them out. Can you imagine accidentally stumbling upon https://discreteaccountants.sex/ ?
Hold that thought. I just had an idea for a startup.
The Photo Sniper was initially made for the Russian market. The text on the camera body, on the pistol grip and on the container was in Russian. ÐÐzÐÐz ÐÐÐÐ(TM)ÐYÐÐ means FOTO SNAIPER (Photo Sniper). The container was usually painted in the typical Russian grey hammerite colour.
Does Slashdot STILL not properly render unicode text? I recognize those characters as being Russian characters in UTF-8 being rendered as Latin-1. Shame on Slashdot!
?
Sure, Mac has been making strides, and I have a friend who swears by 'Pages' and 'Keynote,' but it's the iPhone, iPod, and iPad that have made Apple the behemoth it is today. Microsoft would love to make money in these markets as well, but they already ARE raking in tons of cash from MS office, and Exchange servers and other software for businesses. That is where Google (and not Apple) can really hurt them, and with the shift toward cloud services, MS is right to fear Google, and they have some decent points to be made about consistency and long-term reliability that you can reasonably expect from Microsoft.
Clue was actually pretty good. It was very loosely based on the game, and turned out to be very funny. Battleship, however. Let's just say I won't be standing in line for that one.
If you have the ability to take something back it might not be so bad. Also, it seems like it would be pretty easy to tell who you are sharing with and avoid sending the wrong people (like your gay black boss) your inflammatory homophobic racist rants.
and a much more practical one at that. Much of other scientific disciplines (chemistry, biology, physics, etc...) is based primarily on observation. What can we observe and record about things that already exist. Computer science involves taking those observations about natural phenomena (electrons, etc...) and doing innovative things with them.
Figuring out how to manipulate electricity in such a way that a 12-year old boy in a village in India can search the entire corpus of Shakespeare from his phone in milliseconds is pretty damn impressive if you ask me. A lot of Nobel-worthy breakthroughs occurred to get us to where we are now.
Then again, the Nobel foundation was set up by Alfred Nobel long before anyone thought of such a thing. If they want to keep their traditions and not add any new prizes, that's their right. It's just unfortunate that to the general public, the Nobel prize is the prize to get if you've done anything useful in science.
If the event is newsworthy (and if they're allowing press in there already) I don't see how a location can be trademarked. Which part of the trading floor? All parts? Every floorboard? Or are they just generally saying that a crowded group of yuppies in suits wearing bluetooth headsets falls under their IP?
Certain renegade elements of the consumer sector are considering switching to alternate methods of payment in retaliation against Google's proprietary monetary transaction system. "Basically the plan is to exchange small rectangular pieces of green paper in exchange for all debts, public and private," said one proponent of this new monetary system. When asked how his purchasing history would be tracked, indexed, and made available to advertisers in order to better serve him, he responded, "That's kind of the point."
More on this story, and new developments that indicate water may be wetter than once thought, at 11.
I think we're pretty much on the same page here. I agree that DNS blocking will be very inefficient. As a matter of fact, it will probably just increase people's awareness of what DNS is, and how to take advantage of it.
However, as I said before, I'm afraid that this is just a foot in the door. To borrow a phrase from paranoid philosophers of years past, this is a slippery slope. It's not hard to imagine regulators blocking swaths of IP address space or even filtering out specific pages on websites. If China can get away with it (with most people content to be censored and kept in the dark) who's to say it couldn't happen here?
I think you greatly overestimate the technological literacy of the average American. Most people aren't going to have a clue how to change their DNS servers, but even for those who do understand how to get around such restrictions, this is still disturbing. This is just a way for government to get its foot in the door. Soon, they'll be mandating to ISPs which DNS servers their clients are allowed to use, and what IP ranges are 'legal' to access on the internet.
Maybe I should just take off the tinfoil hat and relax, but I can't see how government getting involved in legislating the internet in ANY way is a good thing.
FlashForward was a victim of piss poor planning by the network. They took like a 3-month hiatus, then put it up against tough competition (I think like American Idol or something) that already had strong viewership, and wondered why their numbers were down from before. It's a crying shame too, because FF was, in my opinion, the best show on TV, and its single season stands as the best scifi thriller series ever. Some of the episodes were really, REALLY good. I recently purchased the dvds as a gesture of my support for quality television and have been rewatching them for the third time.
Actually it runs Crysis
on
Homebrew Cray-1
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Turns out the system requirements aren't as stringent as once thought.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure those jokes will be some real boners.
Stop being such a tool.
And automobile accidents are the leading cause of death in the US. But we still do it.
Off by a LONG shot. Heart disease causes almost 20x more deaths. So does Cancer. (source, source) Plus, people driving cars at least feel like they are in control of the situation (even if they are still likely to be hit by some other maniac.) When hurtling through a tube at 600 mph, you are at the mercy of the odds and nothing else.
Load the app up in an Android emulator, and feed the accelerometer canned data to simulate orbiting the earth. Indefinite freefall! High score!
Words are harder to remember than they'd like. Say I tell my friend to meet me at "award.tricks.fish" (an example from their page, somewhere in NYC) but he remembers "award.trick.fish". Suddenly he's buying a plane ticket to Chicago, which is all just the same, because I accidentally travelled to "awards.trick.fish" and ended up just outside London. Plurals, gerunds, past tense and other word forms that have different endings make this a really unwieldy system for conveying precise information verbally. It's easy enough electronically, but then why not just make a google maps short url link and stick it in an SMS? Problem solved...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6HvS0pOoJc&feature=player_detailpage#t=23s
That's a good question... You're probably thinking of the Democratic Congressman named Weiner who actually did accidentally post a picture of his... well, weiner from his phone.
It's long been a well-known secret among technologically capable people (like you, dear reader) that it's very easy to download the video files for youtube videos. Extracting the audio is just another simple step away from that. Google has ignored such services in the past because they really don't care if people download these videos or the music on them. Sure, it might eat in to their revenues a little bit, but not much, since most people will just keep coming back to the site anyway.
The real issue here is that copyright holders (those big evil RIAA members) never realized how easy stripping music from youtube videos actually was. That's the only reason they let all their music go up on the site (albeit slathered with advertising and overlays.) Anytime someone draws attention to how easy getting the audio (or video) actually is, it makes copyright holders skittish. They think that this guy has somehow discovered some sort of technological loophole that allows him to download the files in a way others can't (he hasn't.) Google is probably under tremendous pressure to shut this guy down, and they'll do it just so that nobody starts asking questions about why it's so easy to do what he's doing anyway.
Better that one man takes the fall (and just shuts down his site) than that the whole world suffers losing unfettered access to youtube source files.
The first sign that something is wrong with the company is when the CEO feels obligated to say, "There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now."
It may not be the thing that he's trying to reassure us about (it probably is,) but RIM sure looks and acts like a duck that isn't going to be saved. Now Mr. Heins is just quacking like one.
It looks like the rockets that launch the capsule may eventually be built in Utah, but that capsule appears to have been built in Louisiana. It's probably pork just the same, but I don't think Orion is really benefiting Utah just yet.
There are at least two huge differences. First, auto insurance is not required at a federal level. This argument was never over whether any level of government had the right to impose such a requirement. States, for example can and do. Second, and probably more important, not every person in the country has to have auto insurance. If a person rides their bike everywhere, or takes the bus, or hitches rides with his friends, he doesn't have to have auto insurance. There, governments (state governments) have said, "IF you choose to drive in our state and on our roads, then you MUST be insured to a minimum level." In the case of Obamacare, there is no decision to do something (other than continue breathing) that would require you to buy a product. You simply must do it. You must purchase insurance not to your own satisfaction, but the government's.
That's a good point. I think the best tactic to combat this would just be to play up the 'tyrannical majority' argument in its most generic sense. Everyone (religious people, atheists, gays, heterosexuals, traditional minorities, and increasingly middle class white people) likes to think that everyone else is out to get them and would gang up against them if given the chance. You don't even have to suggest it to each group, just put it out there in a general way and everyone will think you're talking about them.
And if so, how soon? Will you allow participants to view results of a survey/poll immediately after they vote, or before? Or never? What about all the demographic data you will likely tie to each vote? Will that be available (in an anonymized form) for public inspection? That could be just as interesting as the prospect of a poll-informed internet representative.
.sec is just a fat finger slip away from .sex, which I can only assume will some day be its own TLD at the rate ICANN is handing them out. Can you imagine accidentally stumbling upon https://discreteaccountants.sex/ ?
Hold that thought. I just had an idea for a startup.
The Photo Sniper was initially made for the Russian market. The text on the camera body, on the pistol grip and on the container was in Russian. ÐÐzÐÐz ÐÐÐÐ(TM)ÐYÐÐ means FOTO SNAIPER (Photo Sniper). The container was usually painted in the typical Russian grey hammerite colour.
Does Slashdot STILL not properly render unicode text? I recognize those characters as being Russian characters in UTF-8 being rendered as Latin-1. Shame on Slashdot! ?
Sure, Mac has been making strides, and I have a friend who swears by 'Pages' and 'Keynote,' but it's the iPhone, iPod, and iPad that have made Apple the behemoth it is today. Microsoft would love to make money in these markets as well, but they already ARE raking in tons of cash from MS office, and Exchange servers and other software for businesses. That is where Google (and not Apple) can really hurt them, and with the shift toward cloud services, MS is right to fear Google, and they have some decent points to be made about consistency and long-term reliability that you can reasonably expect from Microsoft.
Clue was actually pretty good. It was very loosely based on the game, and turned out to be very funny. Battleship, however. Let's just say I won't be standing in line for that one.
If you have the ability to take something back it might not be so bad. Also, it seems like it would be pretty easy to tell who you are sharing with and avoid sending the wrong people (like your gay black boss) your inflammatory homophobic racist rants.
and a much more practical one at that. Much of other scientific disciplines (chemistry, biology, physics, etc...) is based primarily on observation. What can we observe and record about things that already exist. Computer science involves taking those observations about natural phenomena (electrons, etc...) and doing innovative things with them.
Figuring out how to manipulate electricity in such a way that a 12-year old boy in a village in India can search the entire corpus of Shakespeare from his phone in milliseconds is pretty damn impressive if you ask me. A lot of Nobel-worthy breakthroughs occurred to get us to where we are now.
Then again, the Nobel foundation was set up by Alfred Nobel long before anyone thought of such a thing. If they want to keep their traditions and not add any new prizes, that's their right. It's just unfortunate that to the general public, the Nobel prize is the prize to get if you've done anything useful in science.
If the event is newsworthy (and if they're allowing press in there already) I don't see how a location can be trademarked. Which part of the trading floor? All parts? Every floorboard? Or are they just generally saying that a crowded group of yuppies in suits wearing bluetooth headsets falls under their IP?
I just realized this will never take off. Look at their logo.
Look familiar?
Certain renegade elements of the consumer sector are considering switching to alternate methods of payment in retaliation against Google's proprietary monetary transaction system. "Basically the plan is to exchange small rectangular pieces of green paper in exchange for all debts, public and private," said one proponent of this new monetary system. When asked how his purchasing history would be tracked, indexed, and made available to advertisers in order to better serve him, he responded, "That's kind of the point."
More on this story, and new developments that indicate water may be wetter than once thought, at 11.
I think we're pretty much on the same page here. I agree that DNS blocking will be very inefficient. As a matter of fact, it will probably just increase people's awareness of what DNS is, and how to take advantage of it.
However, as I said before, I'm afraid that this is just a foot in the door. To borrow a phrase from paranoid philosophers of years past, this is a slippery slope. It's not hard to imagine regulators blocking swaths of IP address space or even filtering out specific pages on websites. If China can get away with it (with most people content to be censored and kept in the dark) who's to say it couldn't happen here?
I think you greatly overestimate the technological literacy of the average American. Most people aren't going to have a clue how to change their DNS servers, but even for those who do understand how to get around such restrictions, this is still disturbing. This is just a way for government to get its foot in the door. Soon, they'll be mandating to ISPs which DNS servers their clients are allowed to use, and what IP ranges are 'legal' to access on the internet. Maybe I should just take off the tinfoil hat and relax, but I can't see how government getting involved in legislating the internet in ANY way is a good thing.
FlashForward was a victim of piss poor planning by the network. They took like a 3-month hiatus, then put it up against tough competition (I think like American Idol or something) that already had strong viewership, and wondered why their numbers were down from before. It's a crying shame too, because FF was, in my opinion, the best show on TV, and its single season stands as the best scifi thriller series ever. Some of the episodes were really, REALLY good. I recently purchased the dvds as a gesture of my support for quality television and have been rewatching them for the third time.
Turns out the system requirements aren't as stringent as once thought.