Maybe it's because the other citizens are phoning in tips about the Taliban's operations during non-work hours. If people plainly see a lynch mob forming in their neighborhood, I'm sure a fair number would try to stop it. If the cell network is down, though, and the Taliban wants to go door-to-door torturing people without victims / neighbors calling for help (or to warn each other), this would certainly further their cause.
I'm pretty sure that the Taliban members' own phones aren't the only part of their motivation, or even the larger part.
Right? Somehow, I got modded 'Troll' for that (my first negative mod in ten years, BTW).
It's almost as if the public at large has no moral feeling about the subject, they simply see a big corporation with immense stores of money that they probably don't deserve, but can't prove any wrongdoing. When someone does prove wrongdoing, Microsoft seems to simply pay lip service to the issue and continue unscathed. The basic thought is one of, "Someone should take Microsoft down a peg or two; Nobody deserves to have that much more money than (me/us). Man, I wish I had that much money and power. All the huddled masses of the world couldn't wrest it from me." The resulting cognitive dissonance fails to register.
The envy is obvious, but the general public's contempt isn't the same. I think they have only an intuitive sense that something is wrong, but not precisely what it is or what the real costs are, and can't get the derision and outrage going like so many here.
If you're traveling with a GPS device much, you may want to look into a universal Solar Recharger. You can get several models that will charge any 3V-5.5V device, some have internal NiCd batteries so they can soak up the juice and then charge something later, and I've even seen models with a hand crank in addition to the battery. Mine has a super-bright LED as well that is a nice flashlight in a pinch. They come with all the standard cables for most PDA's, cell phones, mini USB, and iPods. The adapter cables are only a few inches long, and you should be able to fit all of the ones you need in a dice pouch. I got mine from geeks.com; it should run less than $20.00 all inclusive.
I would also HIGHLY recommend retractable USB cables for traveling. I got mine at a dollar store in the US, and boy, am I glad I did.
I think you forget the most important point to justify the social contract: If the driver at fault has to pay medical bills for the victim by law, then every potential victim has a legal and moral responsibility not to die or become maimed unnecessarily and thereby become an onerous burden for other parties.
Don't wear your seatbelt if that's your choice, but (win or lose) don't take me to court when you lose an arm or break your clavicle. And don't let your family harass me if you snap your stupid neck.
It's not a prize. It's funding; A budget. This is the older-than-dirt story of, "If you build it, they will come!" vs. "I have a 0.01% chance of succeeding if I try to build it, so who's going to feed my family in the 99.99% probable case that I fail?"
Who said our own brains had any real sophistication? For all we still know, it's just so massively redundant and generalized that 90% of our brain is malfunctioning at any given moment, and yet we still have the illusion of continuity.
I'm of the opinion that a great deal of our behavior comes from being hardwired to expect X% of the world to make sense, and when the correlation of input/output from any set of cells in our brain fall outside the "acceptable" range, that group of neurons is modified or reset. I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that emotions are simply chemical changes to tighten or relax the criteria for what's in the "acceptable" range. I know this is kind of out there as far as models of cognition go, but there's no real evidence that the brain is sophisticated and elegant from an engineering standpoint. From an artistic, look-at-the-pretty-patterns angle, it might be amazing, but for such observations as those, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
We may yet find that the only elegance and sophistication is in choosing X well.
How are those relevant questions? You may as well ask:
Can you predict who will be murdered next in New York City? Does evolution predict where to dig, and who you'll find there?
And then, you'll have to remember that evolution relies on ALL the proximate causes of death (not just murder), and how much food is available, and weather patterns and pretty much every single miniscule thing that happens on this planet, not just for the human race (or any specific species in question), but the interactions among every last organism on Earth -- and not only even what organisms they are at the moment, but what genes may they already be carrying that will deactivate/reactivate under stress or disease or radiation damage?
And, yet, you wouldn't accept an explanation that since science can't predict and describe the circumstances and targets of murder ahead of time, that murder might not exist... Or, if you believe in free will, maybe substitute the weather for evolution instead.
Wait. Isn't that what people thought about methamphetamines thirty-odd years ago? Color me skeptical, but excited and hopeful in spite of better judgement.
I just don't understand what requires them to make the thing readable from 20 feet away? They don't have to be readable via RF at all. I've used optical passport scanners that work quite well, and if more information needs to be incorporated, then QR codes or some other 2-D barcode technology could be used. If they need to read my passport when I'm 20 feet short of the inspection desk, PUT THE READER 20 FEET DOWN THE LINE. You can put it at a turnstile, where I have to scan my picture page before passing through.
It's kind of unprecedented, but this seems to be the exact opposite of the security theatre we've seen in recent years. Now, the authorities are going out of their way to keep you from being inconvenienced by the 'security' measures, albeit still at the expense of privacy and security. Schneier may have to come up with a whole new thesis to describe this behavior.
I, however, will probably be glad of the convenience in spite of myself, and will happily drop $30.00 or so on an RFID-shielded passport case. Those who may be threatened by the prospect of being identified by their passport number, or who don't want random passersby or hotels, or taxi cabs logging their passport, will need to be aware of the issue. Net security gained / lost : probably nothing, especially if the passports come with bags, covers, or idiot-language disclaimers about covering them up. Convenience gained / lost : also probably nothing. The increased speed of processing will come at the price of vigilance. The world turns as always.
And after your comment, it will no longer be "bloody hard work" to love and respect the US and its people; it will be nigh on impossible. Thanks for throwing sand in a friendly face, when he seems to have had a decent point. Like it or not, the MSM reflects the thinking of an awful lot of US citizens. Loathing the arguments, policies, and viewpoints therein actually will put you at odds with Joe 6-Pack and Suzy Q most of the time.
Exactly. I'm averse to crowds -- it's not pomposity, though the accusation would certainly be nothing new. I loved the Apple Store in the local mall because it was laid back, and the store seemed to always have between 5 and 30 customers in it. It's a tiny store, but you could browse and look around in a relatively serene way, and speak normally to the sales staff, who had time to be helpful. Now, despite having opened a second, 400% larger Apple Store in a mall less than 10 minutes away, both stores are packed to the gills whenever I go. The aisles are so full, it's hard to get anywhere, and sometimes the checkout line winds so long that you can't enter the store until purchases have been made. The same store that had 30 customers before now has more than 100 at any given time, and I feel like I'm in a nightclub because I have to practically shout to the employees just to be heard. I've actually seen employees set at the entrance to prevent more customers from entering the store to (I presume) comply with fire regulations.
This really isn't complaining. I think the new popularity is a good thing, even if it makes it harder for me as an individual to shop there. However, if anyone has a perception of Apple Stores as swanky, empty boutiques full of overpriced, overhyped products, they're either remembering what some of the stores were like two to three years ago, or simply don't have a fire marshal's eye for what constitutes "packed".
That's not exclusive. Just because I like to learn and get relevant information doesn't mean that I agree with NPR's views, or that all I watch is documentaries. This is an ad-hominem straw man argument.
Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I follow the issues, and look for content. Snide comments like this one don't help me find what's good out there. If you think there is worthwhile free (gratis OR libre) content available, share it around. Thanks for the baseless insult, but if you want to drop a few links into the discussion to promote free work worth consuming, that would be thrillingly productive.
Entrepreneurialism and risk-taking aren't going to simply cease being features of markets because you're a pessimist about the market for TV shows. While it's possible that your point may have been valid 15 years ago when "Seinfeld" first aired, things are as bad as you think at some networks already.
The network gets a plot, and orders a pilot. Then, they show the pilot to test audiences. After that, if it's popular enough to bother with, they pre-sell advertiser dollars based on which demographics it seemed to resonate with, and how many of those resonant eyeballs might be watching television for one or more tentative time slots, regardless of whether they are loyal to a competing franchise on another network. The studio purchases, based on the ad revenue, a handful of episodes, which are then shown out-of-order so that the most 'exciting' or sensational episodes can be shown first. After a subset of the first four to six episodes have aired, the bean counters step in and argue that there aren't enough people watching it, and they are concerned about renewing ad contracts at the present rate. The show is canceled.
At least in the on-demand model, there's room for entrepreneurs to compete with each other. There is room for promotion and banner ads in the online store, free previews, downloads of pilot and early episodes, mid-season bundle pricing, and limited promotion at the beginning or end of the video file. Pundits, online and off, can review, promote, and even shill for shows, studios, actors, and directors. There is room for someone, whether an individual or a large group of people, to fund the shows they want to see. And none of this requires third-party advertisement.
Perhaps, those with the winning stratagem will be those who air only reality TV. Or maybe the fans could have picked up the tab for Firefly, or stopped funding Battlestar Galactica at the end of Season 2. In my eyes, rewarding excellence and punishing crap are both important, and the studios have perversely aligned (or at least poorly correlated) incentives in this area. One could argue that they don't really act in their own best interests, but like politics, every cobble in the road to hell represents an expedient and logical decision.
Also sadly, many see copyright infringement as the means to nudge the current top-heavy structure, but I still find most people are merely rationalizing their desire for free-as-in-beer content that isn't free. If one is truly so self-righteous about it, consume truly free content. There's only metric goat-loads of it out there.
So, let me get this straight... There are people that want to come to the party and drink the free beer, enjoy feeling drunk, but not get nailed in the back bedroom by an abusive jerk? How dare they! Of course, they should come to your poetry reading and drink your wheat-grass mead instead.
The above isn't intended to be inflammatory -- it's to point out that the (shiny|TnA|Celebs) that people seek out is vulgar in the dictionary sense. Not everyone seeks out free works, listens to NPR, or watches educational documentaries on television. I do all the aforementioned things, but I also like to listen to popular music, watch big-budget films, and enjoy large-budget dramas that are produced for broadcast television.
I think the point to lament here isn't the type of content or the granularity of the distribution model. There will always be demand for the arts-and-entertainment version of a college kegger. Because a large percentage of the drunk attendees put out (that is, buy what's advertised), it's worthwhile for the host to sponsor. The tragedy is that it crowds out all the other models of production and distribution. Just remember, though, that high-quality video codecs, and nationwide DVD-mailing networks, and P2P, and RSS, and Video-Sharing sites, and a whole host of other critical enabling technologies, including broadband connections to the home, are twenty-first century technologies -- at least in practical use.
It's too early to know what will happen, or even what the true issues of the debate will be. But you won't get rid of vulgar content, and you aren't likely to attract much attention by antagonizing it. Further, I would be aghast to rely on the demographics of my region to determine what content is available or at what price. Region lock-in is not a good solution.
I personally look forward to a day when a show with the quality of "Firefly" or "Heroes" or "Farscape" is funded by my thirty-cent-per-episode contribution, and is delivered to my computer when the final edit for each episode is approved -- regardless of what country my credit card comes from, provided the content is legal to watch in my jurisdiction. But until then, analyse the advertising model. How many people pay a $40.00 cable bill just so they can get two of the channels, like Sci-Fi or the Cartoon Network, love one or two great shows, and then their pet show is either canceled or starved for resources because the viewers, as a group, aren't buying enough of the advertised products? On-demand is the ultimate way to get what you seek -- content created and offered at a sane rate for the audience that is interested in it. And you'll have to bring the proles along for the ride, so that the distribution model is well-developed and well-maintained.
I, for one, am looking forward to seeing a screen with a $4.00 episode of a science documentary next to an hour-long episode of "Ow! My Nuts!" for twelve cents.
The spectre of Vesuvius for our modern age. It seems that no matter what the scale or scope of your civilization, natural disasters just don't go away. Looks like we'd better colonize outside our galaxy as quickly as we can. Since the danger is electromagnetic, this is a case of not seeing the bullet until you've already been shot. Without faster-than-light communication and some monitoring posts quite a distance from Earth, there's no possibility of an early-warning system.
How do you know that we won't go back to some form of tape in the future? As long as the electronics (or storage substrates) involved are flexible enough to be spooled, who's to say we won't have meters-long glass-fiber ribbons filled with trapped electrons? Or RF-powered flash chips deposited inkjet-style onto a polymer strip, and read into memory sequentially as the tape advances, bringing a fixed number of non-interfering circuits out of the shielded spool area?
It's a question of reading and writing the maximum amount of data with the smallest / fewest possible read elements, and I'd say that a single strip that can be wound and unwound is (apart from long seek times) a pretty elegant solution to that problem. In fact, if computers could read books, I dare say we might even go back to binding books as scrolls.
This could be a REALLY depressing aspect if you continue to think about it. Quoth I from Aging at Wikipedia:
Indeed, aging is not an unavoidable property of life. Instead, it is the result of a genetic program. Numerous species show no sign of aging, the best known being perennial plants (e.g. trees) which can live thousands of years and be multiplied by cuttings without limit. Most microbes and some animals, e.g. amphibians and large fish, also seem to be free of aging. In these species, adults constantly reproduce only to destroy their young, usually by eating them. Therefore, "immortal" species evolve more slowly than "mortal" species.
Aging is believed to be favoured by natural selection because it accelerates the evolution rate of a species by increasing the number of generations per unit of time. By dying away, the old individuals liberate the resources for their offsprings, thus increasing their chance of survival. Essentially, aging is the result of investing resources in reproduction rather than maintenance of the body, the "Disposable Soma" theory.
Essentially, genes or omnipresent viruses that cause death shortly after sexual maturity or reproduction could be expected in many cases to provide a survival advantage to the population by making the individual members die sooner. AIDS wouldn't really be ideal for this because of its extant symptoms, but it seems pretty intuitive that we evolved the ability to age and die.
I say this is one reason to champion resolution-independent interfaces. Now, NOT ONLY should it be able to draw elements at any level of dots per inch (like Apple recently took a "preview" step toward in Leopard -- applications do not use the features by default), it should collapse smoothly, or at least reasonably or predictably, to the degenerate case of not having a resolution at all. The case of accessibility for the blind and nonreaders notwithstanding: It's maddening that a person with poor vision can shell out for a 30" monitor, and the widgets are either as small or smaller than they ever were, or unforgivably blurry. I hope that someone develops the resolution-independence further for the sake of the visually impaired, and also (selfishly) so I can web-browse comfortably from my couch on a large HDTV. For those who don't know, OS X already has global zooming where you simply hold the control key and turn the mouse's scroll wheel. The screen pans around proportionately with the cursor, and antialiasing can be turned on and off. It has saved my in-laws many a time. Now, the next step is to keep the crispness of the interface elements when zooming, and hopefully provide some global setting (eg, monitor size: 1920x1080 pixels, screen area: 800x480 points) to adjust the relative size of the UI.
Perhaps this is the real reason that Apple developed and applied for a patent on a special mini-DVD adapter for slot-loading drives. The iPod-encoded x264 version might be a little big to squeeze on next to the MPEG-2 version, but perhaps they will include a mini-DVD in the package that has an encrypted copy of the x264 version on it, and the unique Disc ID must be registered to your iTunes account before it will copy to your library or device. It would also give you a way to put a bunch of movies on your iPod or iPhone without storing them on your hard disk first.
That would totally be worth $4.00, to get an iTunes copy, download-free and re-encoding free, bundled with the regular DVD. This would be especially nice for TV boxed sets, because I wouldn't leave 30GB worth of any show I'd watched on my hard disc. I also wouldn't want to burn a boatload of regular DVD's myself to back them up (I certainly wouldn't pay to re-download them), and it would be nice if the discs with the iTunes copies were easily stored in the box set or DVD case with the regular content.
I was worried until my conscious mind had the time to process the fact that TimeCube != Datacube. I think we should all be glad that TimeCube took much longer to arrive.
why do you need to keep our records for 40 years after you determine that we are not a threat?
For one, so that Joe SixPack Security Guard doesn't detain you for a cavity-search and polygraph thirteen more times just because your name matches. I don't like the potential for abuse, or the ridiculous invasion of privacy, but there's a chance that this would mean they invade my privacy once and are then done with it. It doesn't make it a good thing, but it may actually mitigate one of the more visible irritants common to the current system. And with flight itineraries being reported ahead of time, perhaps they'll be nice enough to load your passport photo and "NO KNOWN THREAT" onto said security guard's terminal before you show up.
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Maybe it's because the other citizens are phoning in tips about the Taliban's operations during non-work hours. If people plainly see a lynch mob forming in their neighborhood, I'm sure a fair number would try to stop it. If the cell network is down, though, and the Taliban wants to go door-to-door torturing people without victims / neighbors calling for help (or to warn each other), this would certainly further their cause.
I'm pretty sure that the Taliban members' own phones aren't the only part of their motivation, or even the larger part.
Right? Somehow, I got modded 'Troll' for that (my first negative mod in ten years, BTW).
It's almost as if the public at large has no moral feeling about the subject, they simply see a big corporation with immense stores of money that they probably don't deserve, but can't prove any wrongdoing. When someone does prove wrongdoing, Microsoft seems to simply pay lip service to the issue and continue unscathed. The basic thought is one of, "Someone should take Microsoft down a peg or two; Nobody deserves to have that much more money than (me/us). Man, I wish I had that much money and power. All the huddled masses of the world couldn't wrest it from me." The resulting cognitive dissonance fails to register.
The envy is obvious, but the general public's contempt isn't the same. I think they have only an intuitive sense that something is wrong, but not precisely what it is or what the real costs are, and can't get the derision and outrage going like so many here.
To speak for the other 99% of the world, replace 'disdain' with 'envy'.
If you're traveling with a GPS device much, you may want to look into a universal Solar Recharger. You can get several models that will charge any 3V-5.5V device, some have internal NiCd batteries so they can soak up the juice and then charge something later, and I've even seen models with a hand crank in addition to the battery. Mine has a super-bright LED as well that is a nice flashlight in a pinch. They come with all the standard cables for most PDA's, cell phones, mini USB, and iPods. The adapter cables are only a few inches long, and you should be able to fit all of the ones you need in a dice pouch. I got mine from geeks.com; it should run less than $20.00 all inclusive.
I would also HIGHLY recommend retractable USB cables for traveling. I got mine at a dollar store in the US, and boy, am I glad I did.
I think you forget the most important point to justify the social contract: If the driver at fault has to pay medical bills for the victim by law, then every potential victim has a legal and moral responsibility not to die or become maimed unnecessarily and thereby become an onerous burden for other parties.
Don't wear your seatbelt if that's your choice, but (win or lose) don't take me to court when you lose an arm or break your clavicle. And don't let your family harass me if you snap your stupid neck.
It's not a prize. It's funding; A budget. This is the older-than-dirt story of, "If you build it, they will come!" vs. "I have a 0.01% chance of succeeding if I try to build it, so who's going to feed my family in the 99.99% probable case that I fail?"
Who said our own brains had any real sophistication? For all we still know, it's just so massively redundant and generalized that 90% of our brain is malfunctioning at any given moment, and yet we still have the illusion of continuity.
I'm of the opinion that a great deal of our behavior comes from being hardwired to expect X% of the world to make sense, and when the correlation of input/output from any set of cells in our brain fall outside the "acceptable" range, that group of neurons is modified or reset. I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that emotions are simply chemical changes to tighten or relax the criteria for what's in the "acceptable" range. I know this is kind of out there as far as models of cognition go, but there's no real evidence that the brain is sophisticated and elegant from an engineering standpoint. From an artistic, look-at-the-pretty-patterns angle, it might be amazing, but for such observations as those, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
We may yet find that the only elegance and sophistication is in choosing X well.
Love it! Lyrics Troll, you just made my day. Now if only I had some mod points...
How are those relevant questions? You may as well ask:
And then, you'll have to remember that evolution relies on ALL the proximate causes of death (not just murder), and how much food is available, and weather patterns and pretty much every single miniscule thing that happens on this planet, not just for the human race (or any specific species in question), but the interactions among every last organism on Earth -- and not only even what organisms they are at the moment, but what genes may they already be carrying that will deactivate/reactivate under stress or disease or radiation damage?
And, yet, you wouldn't accept an explanation that since science can't predict and describe the circumstances and targets of murder ahead of time, that murder might not exist... Or, if you believe in free will, maybe substitute the weather for evolution instead.
Wait. Isn't that what people thought about methamphetamines thirty-odd years ago? Color me skeptical, but excited and hopeful in spite of better judgement.
I just don't understand what requires them to make the thing readable from 20 feet away? They don't have to be readable via RF at all. I've used optical passport scanners that work quite well, and if more information needs to be incorporated, then QR codes or some other 2-D barcode technology could be used. If they need to read my passport when I'm 20 feet short of the inspection desk, PUT THE READER 20 FEET DOWN THE LINE. You can put it at a turnstile, where I have to scan my picture page before passing through.
It's kind of unprecedented, but this seems to be the exact opposite of the security theatre we've seen in recent years. Now, the authorities are going out of their way to keep you from being inconvenienced by the 'security' measures, albeit still at the expense of privacy and security. Schneier may have to come up with a whole new thesis to describe this behavior.
I, however, will probably be glad of the convenience in spite of myself, and will happily drop $30.00 or so on an RFID-shielded passport case. Those who may be threatened by the prospect of being identified by their passport number, or who don't want random passersby or hotels, or taxi cabs logging their passport, will need to be aware of the issue. Net security gained / lost : probably nothing, especially if the passports come with bags, covers, or idiot-language disclaimers about covering them up. Convenience gained / lost : also probably nothing. The increased speed of processing will come at the price of vigilance. The world turns as always.
And after your comment, it will no longer be "bloody hard work" to love and respect the US and its people; it will be nigh on impossible. Thanks for throwing sand in a friendly face, when he seems to have had a decent point. Like it or not, the MSM reflects the thinking of an awful lot of US citizens. Loathing the arguments, policies, and viewpoints therein actually will put you at odds with Joe 6-Pack and Suzy Q most of the time.
Exactly. I'm averse to crowds -- it's not pomposity, though the accusation would certainly be nothing new. I loved the Apple Store in the local mall because it was laid back, and the store seemed to always have between 5 and 30 customers in it. It's a tiny store, but you could browse and look around in a relatively serene way, and speak normally to the sales staff, who had time to be helpful. Now, despite having opened a second, 400% larger Apple Store in a mall less than 10 minutes away, both stores are packed to the gills whenever I go. The aisles are so full, it's hard to get anywhere, and sometimes the checkout line winds so long that you can't enter the store until purchases have been made. The same store that had 30 customers before now has more than 100 at any given time, and I feel like I'm in a nightclub because I have to practically shout to the employees just to be heard. I've actually seen employees set at the entrance to prevent more customers from entering the store to (I presume) comply with fire regulations.
This really isn't complaining. I think the new popularity is a good thing, even if it makes it harder for me as an individual to shop there. However, if anyone has a perception of Apple Stores as swanky, empty boutiques full of overpriced, overhyped products, they're either remembering what some of the stores were like two to three years ago, or simply don't have a fire marshal's eye for what constitutes "packed".
That's not exclusive. Just because I like to learn and get relevant information doesn't mean that I agree with NPR's views, or that all I watch is documentaries. This is an ad-hominem straw man argument.
Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I follow the issues, and look for content. Snide comments like this one don't help me find what's good out there. If you think there is worthwhile free (gratis OR libre) content available, share it around. Thanks for the baseless insult, but if you want to drop a few links into the discussion to promote free work worth consuming, that would be thrillingly productive.
Entrepreneurialism and risk-taking aren't going to simply cease being features of markets because you're a pessimist about the market for TV shows. While it's possible that your point may have been valid 15 years ago when "Seinfeld" first aired, things are as bad as you think at some networks already.
The network gets a plot, and orders a pilot. Then, they show the pilot to test audiences. After that, if it's popular enough to bother with, they pre-sell advertiser dollars based on which demographics it seemed to resonate with, and how many of those resonant eyeballs might be watching television for one or more tentative time slots, regardless of whether they are loyal to a competing franchise on another network. The studio purchases, based on the ad revenue, a handful of episodes, which are then shown out-of-order so that the most 'exciting' or sensational episodes can be shown first. After a subset of the first four to six episodes have aired, the bean counters step in and argue that there aren't enough people watching it, and they are concerned about renewing ad contracts at the present rate. The show is canceled.
At least in the on-demand model, there's room for entrepreneurs to compete with each other. There is room for promotion and banner ads in the online store, free previews, downloads of pilot and early episodes, mid-season bundle pricing, and limited promotion at the beginning or end of the video file. Pundits, online and off, can review, promote, and even shill for shows, studios, actors, and directors. There is room for someone, whether an individual or a large group of people, to fund the shows they want to see. And none of this requires third-party advertisement.
Perhaps, those with the winning stratagem will be those who air only reality TV. Or maybe the fans could have picked up the tab for Firefly, or stopped funding Battlestar Galactica at the end of Season 2. In my eyes, rewarding excellence and punishing crap are both important, and the studios have perversely aligned (or at least poorly correlated) incentives in this area. One could argue that they don't really act in their own best interests, but like politics, every cobble in the road to hell represents an expedient and logical decision.
So, let me get this straight ... There are people that want to come to the party and drink the free beer, enjoy feeling drunk, but not get nailed in the back bedroom by an abusive jerk? How dare they! Of course, they should come to your poetry reading and drink your wheat-grass mead instead.
The above isn't intended to be inflammatory -- it's to point out that the (shiny|TnA|Celebs) that people seek out is vulgar in the dictionary sense. Not everyone seeks out free works, listens to NPR, or watches educational documentaries on television. I do all the aforementioned things, but I also like to listen to popular music, watch big-budget films, and enjoy large-budget dramas that are produced for broadcast television.
I think the point to lament here isn't the type of content or the granularity of the distribution model. There will always be demand for the arts-and-entertainment version of a college kegger. Because a large percentage of the drunk attendees put out (that is, buy what's advertised), it's worthwhile for the host to sponsor. The tragedy is that it crowds out all the other models of production and distribution. Just remember, though, that high-quality video codecs, and nationwide DVD-mailing networks, and P2P, and RSS, and Video-Sharing sites, and a whole host of other critical enabling technologies, including broadband connections to the home, are twenty-first century technologies -- at least in practical use.
It's too early to know what will happen, or even what the true issues of the debate will be. But you won't get rid of vulgar content, and you aren't likely to attract much attention by antagonizing it. Further, I would be aghast to rely on the demographics of my region to determine what content is available or at what price. Region lock-in is not a good solution.
I personally look forward to a day when a show with the quality of "Firefly" or "Heroes" or "Farscape" is funded by my thirty-cent-per-episode contribution, and is delivered to my computer when the final edit for each episode is approved -- regardless of what country my credit card comes from, provided the content is legal to watch in my jurisdiction. But until then, analyse the advertising model. How many people pay a $40.00 cable bill just so they can get two of the channels, like Sci-Fi or the Cartoon Network, love one or two great shows, and then their pet show is either canceled or starved for resources because the viewers, as a group, aren't buying enough of the advertised products? On-demand is the ultimate way to get what you seek -- content created and offered at a sane rate for the audience that is interested in it. And you'll have to bring the proles along for the ride, so that the distribution model is well-developed and well-maintained.
I, for one, am looking forward to seeing a screen with a $4.00 episode of a science documentary next to an hour-long episode of "Ow! My Nuts!" for twelve cents.
The spectre of Vesuvius for our modern age. It seems that no matter what the scale or scope of your civilization, natural disasters just don't go away. Looks like we'd better colonize outside our galaxy as quickly as we can. Since the danger is electromagnetic, this is a case of not seeing the bullet until you've already been shot. Without faster-than-light communication and some monitoring posts quite a distance from Earth, there's no possibility of an early-warning system.
How do you know that we won't go back to some form of tape in the future? As long as the electronics (or storage substrates) involved are flexible enough to be spooled, who's to say we won't have meters-long glass-fiber ribbons filled with trapped electrons? Or RF-powered flash chips deposited inkjet-style onto a polymer strip, and read into memory sequentially as the tape advances, bringing a fixed number of non-interfering circuits out of the shielded spool area?
It's a question of reading and writing the maximum amount of data with the smallest / fewest possible read elements, and I'd say that a single strip that can be wound and unwound is (apart from long seek times) a pretty elegant solution to that problem. In fact, if computers could read books, I dare say we might even go back to binding books as scrolls.
This could be a REALLY depressing aspect if you continue to think about it. Quoth I from Aging at Wikipedia:
Essentially, genes or omnipresent viruses that cause death shortly after sexual maturity or reproduction could be expected in many cases to provide a survival advantage to the population by making the individual members die sooner. AIDS wouldn't really be ideal for this because of its extant symptoms, but it seems pretty intuitive that we evolved the ability to age and die.
Repeat after me: If all the best genes are outlawed... only who will have the best genes?
I say this is one reason to champion resolution-independent interfaces. Now, NOT ONLY should it be able to draw elements at any level of dots per inch (like Apple recently took a "preview" step toward in Leopard -- applications do not use the features by default), it should collapse smoothly, or at least reasonably or predictably, to the degenerate case of not having a resolution at all. The case of accessibility for the blind and nonreaders notwithstanding: It's maddening that a person with poor vision can shell out for a 30" monitor, and the widgets are either as small or smaller than they ever were, or unforgivably blurry. I hope that someone develops the resolution-independence further for the sake of the visually impaired, and also (selfishly) so I can web-browse comfortably from my couch on a large HDTV. For those who don't know, OS X already has global zooming where you simply hold the control key and turn the mouse's scroll wheel. The screen pans around proportionately with the cursor, and antialiasing can be turned on and off. It has saved my in-laws many a time. Now, the next step is to keep the crispness of the interface elements when zooming, and hopefully provide some global setting (eg, monitor size: 1920x1080 pixels, screen area: 800x480 points) to adjust the relative size of the UI.
Perhaps this is the real reason that Apple developed and applied for a patent on a special mini-DVD adapter for slot-loading drives. The iPod-encoded x264 version might be a little big to squeeze on next to the MPEG-2 version, but perhaps they will include a mini-DVD in the package that has an encrypted copy of the x264 version on it, and the unique Disc ID must be registered to your iTunes account before it will copy to your library or device. It would also give you a way to put a bunch of movies on your iPod or iPhone without storing them on your hard disk first.
That would totally be worth $4.00, to get an iTunes copy, download-free and re-encoding free, bundled with the regular DVD. This would be especially nice for TV boxed sets, because I wouldn't leave 30GB worth of any show I'd watched on my hard disc. I also wouldn't want to burn a boatload of regular DVD's myself to back them up (I certainly wouldn't pay to re-download them), and it would be nice if the discs with the iTunes copies were easily stored in the box set or DVD case with the regular content.
So their real motivation is helping the customer buy their products, and licensed accessories on which they collect royalties.
There, fixed it for ya.
I was worried until my conscious mind had the time to process the fact that TimeCube != Datacube.
I think we should all be glad that TimeCube took much longer to arrive.
For one, so that Joe SixPack Security Guard doesn't detain you for a cavity-search and polygraph thirteen more times just because your name matches. I don't like the potential for abuse, or the ridiculous invasion of privacy, but there's a chance that this would mean they invade my privacy once and are then done with it. It doesn't make it a good thing, but it may actually mitigate one of the more visible irritants common to the current system. And with flight itineraries being reported ahead of time, perhaps they'll be nice enough to load your passport photo and "NO KNOWN THREAT" onto said security guard's terminal before you show up.