The project includes 18 stations, substantial work on a bridge across the Mississippi, ripping out and rebuilding ten miles of urban thoroughfares and sidewalks, a variety of mitigations to reduce negative impacts on university science buildings and other facilities, and, of course, the actual trains and tracks. You can argue back and forth about whether it's a good way to spend money (I think it is), but I don't think you're going to get all that at a radically cheaper price.
I question your $2 million per mile figure. Minneapolis/St Paul is currently building a 10 mile light rail line at a cost of $1 billion. ($100 million per mile) That's at street level through a moderately dense urban area and it includes the cost of all the stations. Maybe $2 million per mile is the cost through flat countryside with no stations and land acquired for free?
A. The people posting the pictures don't care (at least at the time they are posting them)
B. Facebook doesn't want it to work and they have the power to stop it by not allowing encrypted pictures. (If they wanted this feature, they would just provide it themselves by removing the content on a given date.)
C. Even if posters cared enough to use this system, no one would be able to see their pictures because
most people are to stupid to be able to install a plugin
and posters want people to see their pictures (which is why they are posting them online)
D. It is too easy to circumvent
I'm harping on that movie because from what I've seen, it bases itself on lots of blue and orange colors intermixed with blowing shit up. The story is hackneyed, the little bit of acting I've seen is flat, and any similarity to the original Tron is based solely on the fluorescent colors and that it takes place in a computer.
When was the last time you saw the original? The similarities extend much further then the colors and the setting: the original story was also hackneyed and the original acting quite flat. At least this one has Daft Punk.
It's about the size of your thumb. It contains storage, processing power, wifi, cell voice/data connectivity, and a battery, but no display. It can plug into various, standardized input/output units including touch screens (ranging from pocket-sized to large tablet), TVs, PC stations (which are just dumb monitor/keyboard/speaker modules), cameras, video game controllers, your car, simple headphones, eInk displays, etc. You can plug and unplug it from these things on-the-fly. Wherever you plug it in, all your app(lications) work in whatever capacity is appropriate to the size and functionality of the display. On your pocket display, they act like smart-phone apps, at your home desk-station, they act like PC applications. You can upgrade your peripherals independently from your core.
I see no technological barrier to building this family of devices today. Is anyone building it?
Star Trek and Star Wars are fantasy but not true SF, they have too many impossible things to qualify as true Science Fiction.
Have you ever seen a Rambo movie? It typically contains a great many impossible things. I'm not comfortable with classifying it as Science Fiction.
His definition would not classify Rambo as science fiction. He clearly emphasizes that in SF there is only one impossible thing (which seems a little arbitrary) and that the story focuses on what would happen if that thing were possible. His definition might classify Rambo as fantasy, but it isn't clear.
You've missed his point rather badly. He isn't saying he wants background processes that never sleep. He's saying he wants process that are allowed to do some work, some of the time, when they aren't the actual task in front of the user on the screen. Sure, they might sleep most of the time, but they might, say, wake up for 10 milliseconds out of every 300 milliseconds to process a data stream, decide not to bother the user, and then go back to sleep.
That said, I don't think you deserved the troll mod. Maybe, "+1 Incorrect Point About A Interesting Topic".
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Why would you prefer a model where you pay $60 per year and you have a decide on a click-by-click basis if you want to spend the money over a model where you pay $50 per year and can read whatever you want on a whim?
On days when I visit the NYT I probably click on twenty articles. Most of them I "read" for about 5 seconds. A few merit more attention and a I read them more completely. I like this freedom to skim. A pay-per-click system would make that cost prohibitive.
I think the future model is going to be a small number of iTunes-style markets for media content that are (somewhat) independent from the media providers. You go to one place to spend your money and manage your purchases (eBooks, mp3s) and your subscriptions (NYT, Pandora, Hulu) and you get one account that lets you access multiple sources from your eReader, your browser, your phone, etc. This system has already begun and will mature quite a bit at the end of this month when Apple announces their iPad. Within a few years several such markets will spring up and then consolidate down to 3-5 major "networks". This model will be both better and worse for consumers, but publishers will get paid so it will stick around.
Open two different browsers, say Chrome and Firefox. Use one to log in to your email, but nothing else. In the other, never log in to Google services. It certainly doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is trivially easy and has no serious drawbacks.
Honestly I don't think that the idea of turning our desktops into terminals will catch on
Is that the point of Chrome OS? I had the impression that it was targeted at small, portable, communications devices--somewhere at the intersection of smart phones and netbooks. There are many kinds of applications that just won't ever run in the cloud, and we'll always need powerful desktop-ish machines with full-featured OSes
What I'm more confused about is why they need both Chrome OS and Android.
Since you said "measurable", I felt compelled to look for some data:
http://people-press.org/report/543/
There is a lot of interesting data there, but consider the second table, "Partisan Views of Leading News Outlets". These numbers don't separate the perception of bias from the perception of quality, depth, accuracy, etc, but by comparing Democrat vs. Republican views, they give a pretty strong hint.
Below is a simplified version of the data produced by culling out the "I don't knows", the totals, and the independents and then recomputing the percentages for the remaining numbers. My conclusion: NPR is highly respected and their audience is, on average, pretty middle of the road. Democrats adore it, but Republicans like it a lot, too. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal's audience might lean slightly conservative, but liberals clearly respect it. Compare these to Fox on the right and, even worse, the New York Times on the left.
Go seems to suffer from the problem of not being done. Case in point: exceptions.
The authors at least partly agree with you. They describe the absence of exceptions here. They consider it to be an open issue.
On the other hand, they already provide an alternative to the "finally" block of an exception handler: the defer keyword. I like the looks of this, as it means you can handle all of your closing and locking kinds of issues in a direct pairing with the corresponding open or lock, regardless of whether the function terminates early due to error conditions.
And that is Disney's real problem. The thing that they have of value is the ability to produce new films. They need to stop fixating on trying to sell copies of their films and focus on how to persuade people to pay them to make new films. That is the kind of innovation the industry needs, not new forms of DRM.
Another poster here talks about Disney's new system as being "an industry solution in search of a consumer problem". What you've proposed is a consumer solution in search of an industry problem. DVD sales are a huge cash cow, and they'd be fools to give that up easily. Making new movies is a risky, expensive undertaking. Selling DVDs is a cheap, reliable revenue stream. There is increasing consumer demand to move away from physical media towards downloaded content, and Disney is sure as hell going to try to find a profitable way to make that switch.
Slashdot Mirror
The project includes 18 stations, substantial work on a bridge across the Mississippi, ripping out and rebuilding ten miles of urban thoroughfares and sidewalks, a variety of mitigations to reduce negative impacts on university science buildings and other facilities, and, of course, the actual trains and tracks. You can argue back and forth about whether it's a good way to spend money (I think it is), but I don't think you're going to get all that at a radically cheaper price.
I question your $2 million per mile figure. Minneapolis/St Paul is currently building a 10 mile light rail line at a cost of $1 billion. ($100 million per mile) That's at street level through a moderately dense urban area and it includes the cost of all the stations. Maybe $2 million per mile is the cost through flat countryside with no stations and land acquired for free?
A. The people posting the pictures don't care (at least at the time they are posting them)
B. Facebook doesn't want it to work and they have the power to stop it by not allowing encrypted pictures. (If they wanted this feature, they would just provide it themselves by removing the content on a given date.)
C. Even if posters cared enough to use this system, no one would be able to see their pictures because
most people are to stupid to be able to install a plugin
and posters want people to see their pictures (which is why they are posting them online)
D. It is too easy to circumvent
Damn pedantics =)
I believe you mean "damn pedants". Pedantic is an adjective.
Just sayin...
I'm harping on that movie because from what I've seen, it bases itself on lots of blue and orange colors intermixed with blowing shit up. The story is hackneyed, the little bit of acting I've seen is flat, and any similarity to the original Tron is based solely on the fluorescent colors and that it takes place in a computer.
When was the last time you saw the original? The similarities extend much further then the colors and the setting: the original story was also hackneyed and the original acting quite flat. At least this one has Daft Punk.
I see no technological barrier to building this family of devices today. Is anyone building it?
I used to really like the word "ergo". Now it just makes me think of the Architect from those fake Matrix sequels.
Star Trek and Star Wars are fantasy but not true SF, they have too many impossible things to qualify as true Science Fiction.
Have you ever seen a Rambo movie? It typically contains a great many impossible things. I'm not comfortable with classifying it as Science Fiction.
His definition would not classify Rambo as science fiction. He clearly emphasizes that in SF there is only one impossible thing (which seems a little arbitrary) and that the story focuses on what would happen if that thing were possible. His definition might classify Rambo as fantasy, but it isn't clear.
Of course, you ALSO HAVE TO ACTUALLY CHECK IN on a mobile device for any of this to be relevant, as well.
Apparently that isn't quite true. The link he provided implies that people can check on behalf of their friends. See items 9 and 10.
It says bully pulpit. Which is something else entirely.
You've missed his point rather badly. He isn't saying he wants background processes that never sleep. He's saying he wants process that are allowed to do some work, some of the time, when they aren't the actual task in front of the user on the screen. Sure, they might sleep most of the time, but they might, say, wake up for 10 milliseconds out of every 300 milliseconds to process a data stream, decide not to bother the user, and then go back to sleep.
That said, I don't think you deserved the troll mod. Maybe, "+1 Incorrect Point About A Interesting Topic".
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Why would you prefer a model where you pay $60 per year and you have a decide on a click-by-click basis if you want to spend the money over a model where you pay $50 per year and can read whatever you want on a whim?
On days when I visit the NYT I probably click on twenty articles. Most of them I "read" for about 5 seconds. A few merit more attention and a I read them more completely. I like this freedom to skim. A pay-per-click system would make that cost prohibitive.
I think the future model is going to be a small number of iTunes-style markets for media content that are (somewhat) independent from the media providers. You go to one place to spend your money and manage your purchases (eBooks, mp3s) and your subscriptions (NYT, Pandora, Hulu) and you get one account that lets you access multiple sources from your eReader, your browser, your phone, etc. This system has already begun and will mature quite a bit at the end of this month when Apple announces their iPad. Within a few years several such markets will spring up and then consolidate down to 3-5 major "networks". This model will be both better and worse for consumers, but publishers will get paid so it will stick around.
Open two different browsers, say Chrome and Firefox. Use one to log in to your email, but nothing else. In the other, never log in to Google services. It certainly doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is trivially easy and has no serious drawbacks.
They also have a stupid rule regarding "how important stuff has to be".
On the other hand, they have this rule.
by means of releasing a dangerous animal under circumstances evincing the actor's intent that the animal obstruct governmental administration.
Doesn't apply.
Are you kidding? The man released Justin Bieber into a mall. Has a more dangerous animal ever been released into a more governmental structure?
Honestly I don't think that the idea of turning our desktops into terminals will catch on
Is that the point of Chrome OS? I had the impression that it was targeted at small, portable, communications devices--somewhere at the intersection of smart phones and netbooks. There are many kinds of applications that just won't ever run in the cloud, and we'll always need powerful desktop-ish machines with full-featured OSes
What I'm more confused about is why they need both Chrome OS and Android.
<quote>NPR has a measurable liberal bias</quote>
Since you said "measurable", I felt compelled to look for some data:
http://people-press.org/report/543/
There is a lot of interesting data there, but consider the second table, "Partisan Views of Leading News Outlets". These numbers don't separate the perception of bias from the perception of quality, depth, accuracy, etc, but by comparing Democrat vs. Republican views, they give a pretty strong hint.
Below is a simplified version of the data produced by culling out the "I don't knows", the totals, and the independents and then recomputing the percentages for the remaining numbers. My conclusion: NPR is highly respected and their audience is, on average, pretty middle of the road. Democrats adore it, but Republicans like it a lot, too. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal's audience might lean slightly conservative, but liberals clearly respect it. Compare these to Fox on the right and, even worse, the New York Times on the left.
Rep. Dem.
CNN 56% 91% Favorable
44% 9% Unfavorable
Fox 85% 54% Favorable
15% 46% Unfavorable
MSNBC 49% 90% Favorable
51% 10% Unfavorable
Network TV 61% 90% Favorable
39% 10% Unfavorable
NY Times 34% 83% Favorable
66% 17% Unfavorable
NPR 75% 88% Favorable
25% 12% Unfavorable
WSJ 76% 64% Favorable
24% 36% Unfavorable
N P R
Go seems to suffer from the problem of not being done. Case in point: exceptions.
The authors at least partly agree with you. They describe the absence of exceptions here. They consider it to be an open issue.
On the other hand, they already provide an alternative to the "finally" block of an exception handler: the defer keyword. I like the looks of this, as it means you can handle all of your closing and locking kinds of issues in a direct pairing with the corresponding open or lock, regardless of whether the function terminates early due to error conditions.
We are on Mars. Have been for awhile.
For certain values of "we"...
And that is Disney's real problem. The thing that they have of value is the ability to produce new films. They need to stop fixating on trying to sell copies of their films and focus on how to persuade people to pay them to make new films. That is the kind of innovation the industry needs, not new forms of DRM.
Another poster here talks about Disney's new system as being "an industry solution in search of a consumer problem". What you've proposed is a consumer solution in search of an industry problem. DVD sales are a huge cash cow, and they'd be fools to give that up easily. Making new movies is a risky, expensive undertaking. Selling DVDs is a cheap, reliable revenue stream. There is increasing consumer demand to move away from physical media towards downloaded content, and Disney is sure as hell going to try to find a profitable way to make that switch.
even the mighty slashdot is speechless!
Apparently, several posts that came after yours traveled back through time to prevent you from being first.
if this is true, it's either scary or wonderful!
Why choose just one?
bare with me
*Shudder*
here.