There's an argument to be made that they are, indirectly, profiting through the strengthened brand they are creating by increasing traffic to a Google branded website but it is a weak argument. Of course, the whole premise is weak. Companies have been taking advantage of the things their competitors leave in the public domain, virtually, forever. Think about all the little businesses that use the location of stores like Wal-Mart, McDonalds, etc. to pick locations. They're taking advantage of all the work done by employees of those, larger, companies to pick locations with high profit potential due to things like high traffic, good visibility, etc.
I do think it would be funny and the perfect way for NASA to reverse the joke back on Colbert. I do take issue with the "only work for half hour at a time" bit (assuming it was a serious jab). I'm sure each show take an immense amount of time and effort to put together and he does one a night.
Not sure what India is like, but most people here in the US wouldn't be willing/able to deal with weather like that on a motor scooter. It's pretty narcassistic to think that just because it works for you it should be pushed onto everyone else or that people that can't handle it shouldn't have the mobility of a vehicle. How does someone with limited mobility (senior citizens, the physically disabled, etc.) drive a scooter in the first place much less in rain/hail. If you happen to have a spouse and one, or more, babies how are you supposed to get them all onto one scooter, become a circus performer? Not to mention, the increased risk to a small baby while riding on a two wheeled vehicle in either good or bad weather. It' a similar attitude as seen in hard-core bike riders here in the US. They think that because they're able/willing to ride a bike 10+ miles a day to work, no mattre what the weather, that everyone else should have to as well.
Some people just need a slightly larger vehicle with an enclosed cabin. Of course, it goes the other way too. Very few people atually need an SUV. Most of the people that think they do could probably get by with an all-wheel drive station wagon but that's a whole other issue. We're not talking about an SUV here, we're talking about a tiny car that gets extremely good milage for what it can hold. Sure, the vehicles it is replacing got better, but then they couldn't do the same thing. Honestly, it would be better to replace both vehicles with public transportation, but it's hard to do with countries as large and spread out as India and the US.
I'm sure it's not the safest vehicle in the world, but it's not meant to be used on the American highway system either. If you read the article, it mentions it can barely reach 60mph. Assuming that the average speeds are lower, average speed of other tracffic might be lower, and average mass of other traffic might be lower (fewer SUVs) then an average accident is likely to be much less severe.
I haven't read many of the comments you're responding to, but there may not be as much racism as you think involved. There are many people that support the idea that even the western countries shouldn't have all the cars they do and that, yes, it's absurd for us Americans to have so many 15mpg vehicles. I'm, quite, such not a hard-line environmentalist like that, but I can see the need for concern as countries like India and China emulate our bad example. This is especially true as, in the rush to produce the cheapest car, chances are that emisions and fuel efficiency will be two of the things that fall by the way-side (I'm sure that, with such a small engine, this new car has a high mpg/low emmisions but how does it fare in mpg per pound of cargo? In the end, is it better or worse overall?).
"The story - in its entirety - was about something divine moving mankind/cylonkind like pawns."
It was about, _something_ manipulating humans/cylons like pawns but it didn't have to be "God". There are other ways they could have explained it to the audience even if the characters ended up thinking it was a divine presence. One example would be to go back even further (to the "original" Kobol conflict or before) and say that a small group of people, cylons, or hybrids survived and developed advanced tech like true immortality and quantum tech that allowed them to predict future events. This would allow them to manipulate their decendents in a god-like fation without the nebulous cop-out of telling the audience that it was, in fact, "God".
"People have destinies in this show, real ones. All throughout."
No, not really. Read the interviews with the Producers (like the one linked to above). They were, literally, making it up as they went along. It was an intentional choice. This is the exact opposite of shows like Babylon 5 where the writer had a full story fleshed out before the show started filming.
"So it's not like they just slapped a Deity into the ending to tie things up. Nothing else at that point would have sufficed."
That's exactly what they did. Try reading the above linked interview where they even talk about alternate endings they discussed. Those discussions happened toward the end of the series.
I believe that what you are doing there is redefining the concept of free-will. No-one questions whether complexity can give The illusion of free will (that is, quite simply, the way human perception already works and isn't in question) but the question is what is actually going on behind the scenes. If we can find a way to prove it one way or the other, we not only satisfy general curiosity but bring our selves one step closer to understanding our reality.
Who knows, we may find a way to use that knowledge as well. Just because computers today can't handle to workload doesn't mean they won't get there eventually. One possible example can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium Think about how tiny the amount of matter and energy in this solar system is used for computation. Now imaging we had the ability to convert all the matter to a near optimal computer materials (possibly taking advantage of such things as quantum computing) and use all the power output of a star to do nothing but compute.
Add me to the list on this one. With a basic dial-up service I should be able to create a network connection in the 14.4kbps - 28.8kbps range. Not fast, but fast enough for basic stuff.
"you gave me an unlimited wireless 3G data plan with tethering I'd probably just run it flat out for a good part of the day and all night."
And why is there anything wrong with that? The point here is that anyone actually doing that (even without tethering) would get disconnected for "unreasonable usage" as has been seen with most ISPs regardless of whether they are wireless or wired. The problem here is dirty marketing practices on the part of ISPs. They oversell their lines. That would normally be ok, except that they have a massive oversell ratio. Then, they advertise their service as "Unlimited" and hide limitations in the small print. It is unreasonable to expect people to have to read the small print on every single contract they encounter now that we have allowed companies to attach EULAs to everything.
Think of it this way, we have created a sub-field of lawyers who, after earning a bachelors degree, have to go through three years of post-graduate school in a competitive program that only a certain percentage of applicants are allowed to enter. All of this they have to do before having to pass one of the more difficult professional certification tests (the BAR exam) in order to be licensed. After all that, they still have to develop a number of years of experience in the field before they are allowed to write off on something like a EULA. To top it off, the legal field has dialect of English all it's own where words have very specific meaning that is often, significantly, different from their more common usage. In what world is it reasonable to expect the average customer, much less the below average customer, to be able to fully comprehend a EULA like that much less read and comprehend every one they come into contact with in a reasonable amount of time to be able to get on with the rest of their lives. Society isn't just for the people with genius levels of intelligence, normal people have to be able to live here too without being easy fodder for companies to lock into binding contracts with unreasonable requirements. The golden age of "lessee fair" capitalism in the U.S. has numerous examples of these kinds of evil practices in the form of the "company stores" that used legaleeze, among other slimy tricks, to make people into, de-facto, slaves due to their dept to their employers.
Data service is a commodity and should be sold as such. When I buy internet access it should be none of their business what kind of hardware I connect to it as long as it is compatible with their system (which should be required to conform to open standards). It should be illegal for them to advertise any service as "Unlimited" unless they are prepared to deal with people that are on 24/7 downloading at full bandwidth. There are plenty of other words in the English language that can be used to describe the situation otherwise such as "always on". Any limits on total bandwidth usage per month should be explicitly posted in all advertisements and should be clearly defined. This is why we have the FCC. ISPs have to rely on public resources that are limited (EM spectrum in the case of wireless and public easements in the case of wired ISPs/telcos). As such, any companies that are allowed to use a portion of those public resources are a special case of business similar to a state supported monopoly and should be regulated as such.
Like many things in the cellphone industry, it's a scam to bilk you for more money. Another prime example is Verizon's policy on wallpaper and ringtones. Most of the phones Verizon sells are designed to support downloading wallpaper and ringtones over a datacable or bluetooth. Verizon, intentionally, cripples this feature so that they force you to buy wallpapers and ringtones from them. It should be illegal, but they haven't been smacked down for it yet.
So, if I'm reading the transcript correctly (which I may not be) they are, finally, confirming the existance of bluetooth hardware in the 2nd generation iPod Touch and will be supporting it in this update. We've known it was there for a long time as the chip that they're using for the Nike tie-in can also do bluetooth (and FM radio btw) but they have refused to support it in software or even acknowledge it until now. It's good to hear they're finally getting to it, but the important thing for me is whether it will be possible to set up a DUN (dial-up connection) through the bluetooth. It's a little known fact that many cellphones can be used as dial-up modems through either a data cable or the bluetooth connection. My cellphone company, Verizon, has a special number (#777) which lets users connect to the internet, for free, at 14.4kbs (or faster if you are willing to pay for it). This may not sound all that fast, but it should do for simple things like checking news, weather, forums, stocks, directions, etc. when you find yourself without a free Wi-Fi connection.
As has already been mentioned, the technology already exists. Regular, rigid, shapes like licence plates are much easier to identify for image recogition software that things like faces, though even facial recognition is getting much better.
What we have here are two, unrelated, issues. The fact is, even with the increase in yellow light time there are still people that run red lights. More importantly, this system is supposed to focus on stuff like identifying uninsured cars and can probably be used to find stolen cars, speeders, as well as cars being looked for by police. It's completely possible for them to both install these cameras as well as increase the yellow light time. The trick is for us to hold their feet to the fire on the issue.
I don't remember, off the top of my head, the deal with NiMH but I do know that while Lithium Ion batteries don't have a traditional "memory", they do degrade over time even if not used. This can be slowed by storing them in a freezer, but it is a problem that most other battery types don't have.
I'm assuming that the OP was refering to the fact that, sometimes, the cost of buying a new battery is almost as much as just getting a new phone. At that point, there is no reason not to get a new phone as the phones themselves do wear out eventually.
Yes, but the important question is how big it is. If they created, only, a single "cell" of this tech as a proof of concept then, of course, it would be less powerful than a potato but it would also be too small to see with the naked eye. The idea would be, assuming it weren't possible to improve the efficiency of a single cell, to find a way to scale up to a huge array of these things. If they make a battery the same size as a pototoe, and it's still less powerfull, then you would have a legitimate complaint.
One possible answer to that would be to only target sites that are in the top tier of Google ad-sense ranking. Google is less likely to just throw them away if they are that significant, to them, as a profit source. Faced with the choice between dropping their most productive ad sites or just watching the value of their ads drop they will be much more likely to respond favorably.
Not saying it's true, but the most obvious reason I can think of would be so that law enforcement can write root kits that act like known viruses without Norton flagging them.
Sure, Nvidia would love to see the world move away from general purpose processors and focus more on vector processors like their GPUs, but they know that, for the short-term, general purpose processors are a market reality (as a side note, Nvidia executives are also known for making absurdly overstated/arrogent statemtents as well). This decision has nothing to do with parallel processing. In fact, it has nothing to do with advancing the state of the art for anything other than power consumption/cost per unit of calculation. They're aiming for a lucrative market. If you want to put a positive spin on it, the money they make by blowing Intel out of the water in the netbook market (assuming they do) can help fund more research in parallel processing on the high end.
Yes, the summary was wrong. Yes, there is a big difference between 36% and 50%. However, how stupid do you look when you use that mistake to call the article sensationalist after missing the, clearly stated, fact that the authors are the ones getting the 36%?
The first thing I thought when I saw the post was "How is it being distributed/advertised compared to other browsers?". While they have a much smaller install base than MS, Apple has a much more controlling attitude which made me wonder if they were pushing this to any network connected Apple system by default. If that's the case, then the uptake rate is, wholely, artificial and will stall as soon as the majority of Apple systems have finished updating.
That would involve finding a hack that gives you unauthorized access to their web based store. That's the bad type of hacking that lands you in Federal PMITA prison.
My understanding is that the reason they had to turn off the app store for these phones is that the DRM is stored in an easly hackable file in the OS that would, otherwise, not be accessable were it not for "developer" settings on these phones. This allows some people to download and copy apps without paying for them. To me, that sounds like incompetently implemented DRM (not that I'm a fan of DRM in the first place). I don't see how devs (especially hobbiest/garage/talented amateur devs without the money to buy this and a normal version) should be punished because Google wasn't competent enough to develop hardend DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an argument to be made that they are, indirectly, profiting through the strengthened brand they are creating by increasing traffic to a Google branded website but it is a weak argument. Of course, the whole premise is weak. Companies have been taking advantage of the things their competitors leave in the public domain, virtually, forever. Think about all the little businesses that use the location of stores like Wal-Mart, McDonalds, etc. to pick locations. They're taking advantage of all the work done by employees of those, larger, companies to pick locations with high profit potential due to things like high traffic, good visibility, etc.
I do think it would be funny and the perfect way for NASA to reverse the joke back on Colbert. I do take issue with the "only work for half hour at a time" bit (assuming it was a serious jab). I'm sure each show take an immense amount of time and effort to put together and he does one a night.
The only down-side being that it would have to be a very cold basement.
Not sure what India is like, but most people here in the US wouldn't be willing/able to deal with weather like that on a motor scooter. It's pretty narcassistic to think that just because it works for you it should be pushed onto everyone else or that people that can't handle it shouldn't have the mobility of a vehicle. How does someone with limited mobility (senior citizens, the physically disabled, etc.) drive a scooter in the first place much less in rain/hail. If you happen to have a spouse and one, or more, babies how are you supposed to get them all onto one scooter, become a circus performer? Not to mention, the increased risk to a small baby while riding on a two wheeled vehicle in either good or bad weather. It' a similar attitude as seen in hard-core bike riders here in the US. They think that because they're able/willing to ride a bike 10+ miles a day to work, no mattre what the weather, that everyone else should have to as well.
Some people just need a slightly larger vehicle with an enclosed cabin. Of course, it goes the other way too. Very few people atually need an SUV. Most of the people that think they do could probably get by with an all-wheel drive station wagon but that's a whole other issue. We're not talking about an SUV here, we're talking about a tiny car that gets extremely good milage for what it can hold. Sure, the vehicles it is replacing got better, but then they couldn't do the same thing. Honestly, it would be better to replace both vehicles with public transportation, but it's hard to do with countries as large and spread out as India and the US.
I'm sure it's not the safest vehicle in the world, but it's not meant to be used on the American highway system either. If you read the article, it mentions it can barely reach 60mph. Assuming that the average speeds are lower, average speed of other tracffic might be lower, and average mass of other traffic might be lower (fewer SUVs) then an average accident is likely to be much less severe.
I haven't read many of the comments you're responding to, but there may not be as much racism as you think involved. There are many people that support the idea that even the western countries shouldn't have all the cars they do and that, yes, it's absurd for us Americans to have so many 15mpg vehicles. I'm, quite, such not a hard-line environmentalist like that, but I can see the need for concern as countries like India and China emulate our bad example. This is especially true as, in the rush to produce the cheapest car, chances are that emisions and fuel efficiency will be two of the things that fall by the way-side (I'm sure that, with such a small engine, this new car has a high mpg/low emmisions but how does it fare in mpg per pound of cargo? In the end, is it better or worse overall?).
"The story - in its entirety - was about something divine moving mankind/cylonkind like pawns."
It was about, _something_ manipulating humans/cylons like pawns but it didn't have to be "God". There are other ways they could have explained it to the audience even if the characters ended up thinking it was a divine presence. One example would be to go back even further (to the "original" Kobol conflict or before) and say that a small group of people, cylons, or hybrids survived and developed advanced tech like true immortality and quantum tech that allowed them to predict future events. This would allow them to manipulate their decendents in a god-like fation without the nebulous cop-out of telling the audience that it was, in fact, "God".
"People have destinies in this show, real ones. All throughout."
No, not really. Read the interviews with the Producers (like the one linked to above). They were, literally, making it up as they went along. It was an intentional choice. This is the exact opposite of shows like Babylon 5 where the writer had a full story fleshed out before the show started filming.
"So it's not like they just slapped a Deity into the ending to tie things up. Nothing else at that point would have sufficed."
That's exactly what they did. Try reading the above linked interview where they even talk about alternate endings they discussed. Those discussions happened toward the end of the series.
I believe that what you are doing there is redefining the concept of free-will. No-one questions whether complexity can give The illusion of free will (that is, quite simply, the way human perception already works and isn't in question) but the question is what is actually going on behind the scenes. If we can find a way to prove it one way or the other, we not only satisfy general curiosity but bring our selves one step closer to understanding our reality.
Who knows, we may find a way to use that knowledge as well. Just because computers today can't handle to workload doesn't mean they won't get there eventually. One possible example can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium Think about how tiny the amount of matter and energy in this solar system is used for computation. Now imaging we had the ability to convert all the matter to a near optimal computer materials (possibly taking advantage of such things as quantum computing) and use all the power output of a star to do nothing but compute.
Add me to the list on this one. With a basic dial-up service I should be able to create a network connection in the 14.4kbps - 28.8kbps range. Not fast, but fast enough for basic stuff.
"you gave me an unlimited wireless 3G data plan with tethering I'd probably just run it flat out for a good part of the day and all night."
And why is there anything wrong with that? The point here is that anyone actually doing that (even without tethering) would get disconnected for "unreasonable usage" as has been seen with most ISPs regardless of whether they are wireless or wired. The problem here is dirty marketing practices on the part of ISPs. They oversell their lines. That would normally be ok, except that they have a massive oversell ratio. Then, they advertise their service as "Unlimited" and hide limitations in the small print. It is unreasonable to expect people to have to read the small print on every single contract they encounter now that we have allowed companies to attach EULAs to everything.
Think of it this way, we have created a sub-field of lawyers who, after earning a bachelors degree, have to go through three years of post-graduate school in a competitive program that only a certain percentage of applicants are allowed to enter. All of this they have to do before having to pass one of the more difficult professional certification tests (the BAR exam) in order to be licensed. After all that, they still have to develop a number of years of experience in the field before they are allowed to write off on something like a EULA. To top it off, the legal field has dialect of English all it's own where words have very specific meaning that is often, significantly, different from their more common usage. In what world is it reasonable to expect the average customer, much less the below average customer, to be able to fully comprehend a EULA like that much less read and comprehend every one they come into contact with in a reasonable amount of time to be able to get on with the rest of their lives. Society isn't just for the people with genius levels of intelligence, normal people have to be able to live here too without being easy fodder for companies to lock into binding contracts with unreasonable requirements. The golden age of "lessee fair" capitalism in the U.S. has numerous examples of these kinds of evil practices in the form of the "company stores" that used legaleeze, among other slimy tricks, to make people into, de-facto, slaves due to their dept to their employers.
Data service is a commodity and should be sold as such. When I buy internet access it should be none of their business what kind of hardware I connect to it as long as it is compatible with their system (which should be required to conform to open standards). It should be illegal for them to advertise any service as "Unlimited" unless they are prepared to deal with people that are on 24/7 downloading at full bandwidth. There are plenty of other words in the English language that can be used to describe the situation otherwise such as "always on". Any limits on total bandwidth usage per month should be explicitly posted in all advertisements and should be clearly defined. This is why we have the FCC. ISPs have to rely on public resources that are limited (EM spectrum in the case of wireless and public easements in the case of wired ISPs/telcos). As such, any companies that are allowed to use a portion of those public resources are a special case of business similar to a state supported monopoly and should be regulated as such.
Like many things in the cellphone industry, it's a scam to bilk you for more money. Another prime example is Verizon's policy on wallpaper and ringtones. Most of the phones Verizon sells are designed to support downloading wallpaper and ringtones over a datacable or bluetooth. Verizon, intentionally, cripples this feature so that they force you to buy wallpapers and ringtones from them. It should be illegal, but they haven't been smacked down for it yet.
So, if I'm reading the transcript correctly (which I may not be) they are, finally, confirming the existance of bluetooth hardware in the 2nd generation iPod Touch and will be supporting it in this update. We've known it was there for a long time as the chip that they're using for the Nike tie-in can also do bluetooth (and FM radio btw) but they have refused to support it in software or even acknowledge it until now. It's good to hear they're finally getting to it, but the important thing for me is whether it will be possible to set up a DUN (dial-up connection) through the bluetooth. It's a little known fact that many cellphones can be used as dial-up modems through either a data cable or the bluetooth connection. My cellphone company, Verizon, has a special number (#777) which lets users connect to the internet, for free, at 14.4kbs (or faster if you are willing to pay for it). This may not sound all that fast, but it should do for simple things like checking news, weather, forums, stocks, directions, etc. when you find yourself without a free Wi-Fi connection.
As has already been mentioned, the technology already exists. Regular, rigid, shapes like licence plates are much easier to identify for image recogition software that things like faces, though even facial recognition is getting much better.
What we have here are two, unrelated, issues. The fact is, even with the increase in yellow light time there are still people that run red lights. More importantly, this system is supposed to focus on stuff like identifying uninsured cars and can probably be used to find stolen cars, speeders, as well as cars being looked for by police. It's completely possible for them to both install these cameras as well as increase the yellow light time. The trick is for us to hold their feet to the fire on the issue.
I don't remember, off the top of my head, the deal with NiMH but I do know that while Lithium Ion batteries don't have a traditional "memory", they do degrade over time even if not used. This can be slowed by storing them in a freezer, but it is a problem that most other battery types don't have.
I'm assuming that the OP was refering to the fact that, sometimes, the cost of buying a new battery is almost as much as just getting a new phone. At that point, there is no reason not to get a new phone as the phones themselves do wear out eventually.
Yes, but the important question is how big it is. If they created, only, a single "cell" of this tech as a proof of concept then, of course, it would be less powerful than a potato but it would also be too small to see with the naked eye. The idea would be, assuming it weren't possible to improve the efficiency of a single cell, to find a way to scale up to a huge array of these things. If they make a battery the same size as a pototoe, and it's still less powerfull, then you would have a legitimate complaint.
One possible answer to that would be to only target sites that are in the top tier of Google ad-sense ranking. Google is less likely to just throw them away if they are that significant, to them, as a profit source. Faced with the choice between dropping their most productive ad sites or just watching the value of their ads drop they will be much more likely to respond favorably.
Not saying it's true, but the most obvious reason I can think of would be so that law enforcement can write root kits that act like known viruses without Norton flagging them.
The artist/writer forgot that Mathematics (and, by extension, all the rest) are just an extension of Philosophy.
Sure, Nvidia would love to see the world move away from general purpose processors and focus more on vector processors like their GPUs, but they know that, for the short-term, general purpose processors are a market reality (as a side note, Nvidia executives are also known for making absurdly overstated/arrogent statemtents as well). This decision has nothing to do with parallel processing. In fact, it has nothing to do with advancing the state of the art for anything other than power consumption/cost per unit of calculation. They're aiming for a lucrative market. If you want to put a positive spin on it, the money they make by blowing Intel out of the water in the netbook market (assuming they do) can help fund more research in parallel processing on the high end.
Yes, the summary was wrong. Yes, there is a big difference between 36% and 50%. However, how stupid do you look when you use that mistake to call the article sensationalist after missing the, clearly stated, fact that the authors are the ones getting the 36%?
The first thing I thought when I saw the post was "How is it being distributed/advertised compared to other browsers?". While they have a much smaller install base than MS, Apple has a much more controlling attitude which made me wonder if they were pushing this to any network connected Apple system by default. If that's the case, then the uptake rate is, wholely, artificial and will stall as soon as the majority of Apple systems have finished updating.
That would involve finding a hack that gives you unauthorized access to their web based store. That's the bad type of hacking that lands you in Federal PMITA prison.
My understanding is that the reason they had to turn off the app store for these phones is that the DRM is stored in an easly hackable file in the OS that would, otherwise, not be accessable were it not for "developer" settings on these phones. This allows some people to download and copy apps without paying for them. To me, that sounds like incompetently implemented DRM (not that I'm a fan of DRM in the first place). I don't see how devs (especially hobbiest/garage/talented amateur devs without the money to buy this and a normal version) should be punished because Google wasn't competent enough to develop hardend DRM.