You might scare people into stopping downloading, but that doesn't mean we'll go back to buying your overpriced CDs. $11.99 is a start. Better yet, try $7.99 just like the old LPs.
If nanotechnology could really bring such an age of abundance, we'd probably have a society or economy like Star Trek. In the game Alpha Centauri it was called Eudaemonia. With machines to do all the hard work, people would be free to pursue artistic or intellectual endeavors, and develop themselves to the best of their ability. The big problem here is motivation in the face of material abundance. Some people are naturally inclined to be artistic or intellectual. Then there's the rest of us who'd just turn into couch potatoes. Reality TV anyone?
"The student may not get paid much, but the overhead charged by MIT is horrendous"
Can you explain this horrendous overhead? Most student jobs on campus are work study, meaning that the wages are subsidized by the Financial Aid office and the employer only pays 1/4. That's not even counting the grad students who'd work for free as research.
Sure it could work. The kernel NTFS driver is reliable enough in read-only mode. If you have NTFS partitions on your computer, you most likely have an installation of Windows where you can copy that file. It just has to search all NTFS and FAT partitions for \WINNT or \WINDOWS. This won't work if you don't dual boot and have removable media formatted with NTFS.
Niche markets in general purpose products. Apple buyers are willing to pay more for design, polish, and their beloved MacOS. The products themselves are in existing, although sometimes immature market segments: computers, hard drive MP3 players, online music store, etc.
should be a very expensive electronic legal pad/sketchbook based on a modded version of WinCE & sub-par processors. Every time I see the specs for a tablet PC, my heart sinks, for if it only had a decent processor and decent memory
I wouldn't exactly say that. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition IS full fledged Windows XP. Sure, the PIII-M in most tablets are a step behind the Pentium-M, but otherwise the hardware specs are comparable to an ultraportable (3lb range) laptop, which barely a year ago still used PIII-M's.
It uses an thin organic film between conducting layers rather than electronic components, but OLEDs are just a few years away. They're self-luminous and more efficient than a backlit LCD. Lots of/. stories about them too.
That's a few different spam results I see on google. One is a search portal or domain squatter page. If you search google for "blah blah", the result page is a search page that says "search for blah blah" with their own search results (probably paid placements). Another is Amazon affiliates. Try searching for an item that Amazon sells like Makita 6095DWBLE. You'll see what I mean. I tried the same search on froogle.com, and it did return diverse search results from many different store, but it's just a price search engine. Good for finding prices, not good for finding reviews.
I haven't seen the Costco cash cards myself, but if they're anything like the gift cards that most retailers use, it's just a magstripe card tied to some account balance in a central database. The risk is someone could clone the card and spend the money in the account (sucks for the customer), but you can't tamper with the card and add more money to it which is possible on a smartcard with internal storage.
Yes, this does seem overly complex. You could do this much more easily with a KISS approach:
Print one human-readable receipt that you drop in the ballot box. There's still the problem of ensuring anonyimity and preventing ballot stuffing, but that could be solved pretty easily. Generate a list of random or even serial UIDs for each polling place, enough for all registered voters and a few extra for provisional ballots. Print the UID on bottom of the receipt with maybe a sleeve to hide everything but the UID. Now, have two paper rosters. One for registered voters and one for UIDs. When someone votes, cross their name off the voter roster and cross the UID they used off the UID roster.
There you have it. Instant electronic results. Human readable paper ballots. Anonymous paper trail of UIDs used and voters who voted. Am I missing anything?
It's dumb for more reasons than that. The big risk in screeners is when they leak early, like the week the movie premiers. When they get around to Oscar voting time, the movies have been out for months. They've probably played in the second run $3 theaters already. They might even be close to their home video release date. What's the big deal with sending out screeners now?
The scarcity here is not in musical talent. Look all around you. Bars with live bands, the music department at your university, and other assorted live venues for talented but not famous musicians. For every superstar, there's thousands of talented musicians who will never be famous. There are probably fewer talented composers than there are musicians, but half the recording artists out there don't write their owns songs anyway so that doesn't really matter.
The real scarcity here is in listener's attention, and the media conglomerates have that locked up pretty well. Don't pretend that the music industry is even close to the ECON101 free market.
That's exactly the problem. It seems like people who discuss business in public places on cell phones like to talk as loudly and obnoxiously as possible (maybe it makes them feel important?). You'd have to retreat to a private place to be safe from eavesdropping, which somewhat negates the convenience of a cellphone. There's cheaper solutions, like IP phones over a VPN.
They do have one advantage. NiMH will last through more charge and discharge cycles than Lithium Ion. Li-Ion needs much more precise control of charging current to prevent frying the battery.
The technique is called statistical sampling, and 40,000 is plenty of samples to get an accurate survey IF (a big IF) the sample is representative of the whole population. It all depends on how well they "balanced to represent the online population of PC users".
Of course there's other problems with this survey, the biggest of which is asking a loaded question like have you deleted all your illegal music files now that the RIAA has sued hundreds of people.
Remember the self aware commentary in the Scream movies? Is it a trilogy or just another sequel. Unless they were originially conceived as a trilogy, the sequels are always crappier (or at best not as good) than the original. The example of Empire Stikes Back being better than Star Wars follows this rule too. Bond movies don't really count either. They're not continuations of one plot. They're a series of movies with the same characters.
Most cellular plans come with free long distance and lots of extra night and weekend minutes. If you don't go over your minutes that's the best deal anywhere.
Vonage will connect you to your local 911. Cell phones can call 911 too, but response is a little slower because they don't always connect you to the closest dispatcher. The Big Brother E911 is supposed to fix that by providing detailed location information.
How close are they going to be to have to deal with re-entry? (ie. could one of the teams accidentally "over-achieve"?)
Not any more than you could floor the gas in your minivan merging onto the freeway and accidentally break the sound barrier. Low earth orbit needs a speed of 18000 mph or else you fall back to earth. These X-Prize entries aren't even close. Performance will be close to the X-15 rocket plane of the 60s. That set records of 4000 mph and 62 mi altitude (not on the same flight).
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You might scare people into stopping downloading, but that doesn't mean we'll go back to buying your overpriced CDs. $11.99 is a start. Better yet, try $7.99 just like the old LPs.
If nanotechnology could really bring such an age of abundance, we'd probably have a society or economy like Star Trek. In the game Alpha Centauri it was called Eudaemonia. With machines to do all the hard work, people would be free to pursue artistic or intellectual endeavors, and develop themselves to the best of their ability. The big problem here is motivation in the face of material abundance. Some people are naturally inclined to be artistic or intellectual. Then there's the rest of us who'd just turn into couch potatoes. Reality TV anyone?
"The student may not get paid much, but the overhead charged by MIT is horrendous"
Can you explain this horrendous overhead? Most student jobs on campus are work study, meaning that the wages are subsidized by the Financial Aid office and the employer only pays 1/4. That's not even counting the grad students who'd work for free as research.
Sure it could work. The kernel NTFS driver is reliable enough in read-only mode. If you have NTFS partitions on your computer, you most likely have an installation of Windows where you can copy that file. It just has to search all NTFS and FAT partitions for \WINNT or \WINDOWS. This won't work if you don't dual boot and have removable media formatted with NTFS.
Merry Christmas. Here you go:
Explore2fs
"But Apple specialises in niche products!"
Niche markets in general purpose products. Apple buyers are willing to pay more for design, polish, and their beloved MacOS. The products themselves are in existing, although sometimes immature market segments: computers, hard drive MP3 players, online music store, etc.
should be a very expensive electronic legal pad/sketchbook based on a modded version of WinCE & sub-par processors. Every time I see the specs for a tablet PC, my heart sinks, for if it only had a decent processor and decent memory
I wouldn't exactly say that. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition IS full fledged Windows XP. Sure, the PIII-M in most tablets are a step behind the Pentium-M, but otherwise the hardware specs are comparable to an ultraportable (3lb range) laptop, which barely a year ago still used PIII-M's.
Sure it's possible. The linked site has a page on transparent OLEDs too.
It uses an thin organic film between conducting layers rather than electronic components, but OLEDs are just a few years away. They're self-luminous and more efficient than a backlit LCD. Lots of /. stories about them too.
That's a few different spam results I see on google. One is a search portal or domain squatter page. If you search google for "blah blah", the result page is a search page that says "search for blah blah" with their own search results (probably paid placements). Another is Amazon affiliates. Try searching for an item that Amazon sells like Makita 6095DWBLE. You'll see what I mean. I tried the same search on froogle.com, and it did return diverse search results from many different store, but it's just a price search engine. Good for finding prices, not good for finding reviews.
I haven't seen the Costco cash cards myself, but if they're anything like the gift cards that most retailers use, it's just a magstripe card tied to some account balance in a central database. The risk is someone could clone the card and spend the money in the account (sucks for the customer), but you can't tamper with the card and add more money to it which is possible on a smartcard with internal storage.
Yes, this does seem overly complex. You could do this much more easily with a KISS approach:
Print one human-readable receipt that you drop in the ballot box. There's still the problem of ensuring anonyimity and preventing ballot stuffing, but that could be solved pretty easily. Generate a list of random or even serial UIDs for each polling place, enough for all registered voters and a few extra for provisional ballots. Print the UID on bottom of the receipt with maybe a sleeve to hide everything but the UID. Now, have two paper rosters. One for registered voters and one for UIDs. When someone votes, cross their name off the voter roster and cross the UID they used off the UID roster.
There you have it. Instant electronic results. Human readable paper ballots. Anonymous paper trail of UIDs used and voters who voted. Am I missing anything?
It's dumb for more reasons than that. The big risk in screeners is when they leak early, like the week the movie premiers. When they get around to Oscar voting time, the movies have been out for months. They've probably played in the second run $3 theaters already. They might even be close to their home video release date. What's the big deal with sending out screeners now?
The scarcity here is not in musical talent. Look all around you. Bars with live bands, the music department at your university, and other assorted live venues for talented but not famous musicians. For every superstar, there's thousands of talented musicians who will never be famous. There are probably fewer talented composers than there are musicians, but half the recording artists out there don't write their owns songs anyway so that doesn't really matter.
The real scarcity here is in listener's attention, and the media conglomerates have that locked up pretty well. Don't pretend that the music industry is even close to the ECON101 free market.
"God forbid someone keeps a file on me! You do know that 99.999% of those files will never be seen by a human being, don't you?"
No shit. That's what data mining AI's are for. You think we're still working in the 60's with paper file folders?
That's exactly the problem. It seems like people who discuss business in public places on cell phones like to talk as loudly and obnoxiously as possible (maybe it makes them feel important?). You'd have to retreat to a private place to be safe from eavesdropping, which somewhat negates the convenience of a cellphone. There's cheaper solutions, like IP phones over a VPN.
They do have one advantage. NiMH will last through more charge and discharge cycles than Lithium Ion. Li-Ion needs much more precise control of charging current to prevent frying the battery.
The technique is called statistical sampling, and 40,000 is plenty of samples to get an accurate survey IF (a big IF) the sample is representative of the whole population. It all depends on how well they "balanced to represent the online population of PC users".
Of course there's other problems with this survey, the biggest of which is asking a loaded question like have you deleted all your illegal music files now that the RIAA has sued hundreds of people.
A haberdasher makes men's hats. Get it? hahaha
A milliner makes women's hats. Maybe you mean haberdasher?
George Lucas had planned 9 episodes in the Star Wars story. The first Star Wars even said Episode 4.
Remember the self aware commentary in the Scream movies? Is it a trilogy or just another sequel. Unless they were originially conceived as a trilogy, the sequels are always crappier (or at best not as good) than the original. The example of Empire Stikes Back being better than Star Wars follows this rule too. Bond movies don't really count either. They're not continuations of one plot. They're a series of movies with the same characters.
Most cellular plans come with free long distance and lots of extra night and weekend minutes. If you don't go over your minutes that's the best deal anywhere.
Vonage will connect you to your local 911. Cell phones can call 911 too, but response is a little slower because they don't always connect you to the closest dispatcher. The Big Brother E911 is supposed to fix that by providing detailed location information.
How close are they going to be to have to deal with re-entry? (ie. could one of the teams accidentally "over-achieve"?)
Not any more than you could floor the gas in your minivan merging onto the freeway and accidentally break the sound barrier. Low earth orbit needs a speed of 18000 mph or else you fall back to earth. These X-Prize entries aren't even close. Performance will be close to the X-15 rocket plane of the 60s. That set records of 4000 mph and 62 mi altitude (not on the same flight).