I'd like to upgrade to a "wheeled version of my car." To find out if there is one, I'll use a "search version of Google" on the "internet version of the web" viewed on my "visual version of a LCD" connected to an "electronic version of a computer" while I sip a "liquid version of coffee."
Remember when we had Real, various MS codecs, Quicktime, and Flash, and various others I have forgotten all competing for memory? It sucked.
On the flip side, I remember installing a PNG datatype and then suddenly every single browser could display PNGs, whether the browser author cared (or even knew about) PNG or not.
As for remembering the actually-bad problem you talk about, it happened more recently than you might expect.
Earlier this week, I wanted to give someone a larger-than-4GB video file on a flash drive and suddenly was thrown into a world I don't think about much, where the filesystem typically used on flash drives (FAT32), can't hold files that large. I researched a little and came to the conclusion that the recipient's system (WD Live TV) could read NTFS (and also HFS+ but the recipient also owns a Windows machine so I figured NTFS would be a better choice this time), so I used ntfs-3g to format the partition, and the file appeared to copy onto there just fine.
The problem was, I wasn't really sure I had correctly NTFS formatted the flash drive; how well do these userspace filesystems really work? Do people who use NTFS typically use old "fdisk"-style partition tables, or something newer, or just format the whole device? I just didn't know for sure, and had never used ntfs-3g specifically. So I took the flash drive to work where we have a Windows 7 machine for MSIE9 testing, because I wanted to see a native Windows installation see the files; then I'd know I had a real NTFS system, and could hand it to the recipient without worries.
It read the drive just fine and saw the file. Success. ntfs-3g is solid. Things work just fine and I had been worried about nothing. Then just for giggles, I clicked the file; how well does Windows play it?
It doesn't fucking work. This isn't some ancient Windows 98 on Pentium 4; it's a shiny new machine with very capable video hardware and Windows SEVEN (you know, the latest release) and the built-in Windows Media Player (it has "media player" in the damned name!!) doesn't know WTF a Matroska file is. I shit you not. Windows Media Player in the latest version of Windows, doesn't know Matroska, one of the most commonly used containers in the world (probably #2 right now and still gaining ground). The next time you complain about about your beer being flat, remember there are starving people in India running Windows 7.
I don't really think Windows users can't play Matroska files. I know they can. But a stock Windows 7, which I guarantee many millions of people have, is a crippled anachronism from another planet. It might be ok for a server, but it's not ready for the desktop.;-) This is probably sounding like another Microsoft (*) flame, but that's not really my point.
What does this situation tell you? It tells me that mainstream users are used to having to go find and install a bunch of shit just to make video work. In the real world, it's not just "aptitude install mplayer" and then everyone lives happily ever after. Users are already doing an equivalent thing to installing Real, Quicktime, Flash, whatever -- you're not talking about the old days; you're talking about today, now. I think a majority of people in 2012 are living your 1990s nightmare.
Sure, it sucks, but all it is, is a lack of advance. With lack of a video standard, we're not losing ground, we're merely not gaining yet. That's regrettable, not intolerable. I can't help but think that by the time proprietary mainstream OSes come ready-to-use for playing media, the H.264 patents will have expired and the whole codec situation will be moot.
(*) Really, this isn't about Microsoft. Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" (the latest version, more recent than Windows 7 in fact) also comes with a media player (Quicktime Player), and it also can't play Matroska files. A consumer OS released in 2011! People who run Linux all the time have no idea what a crazy world it is, out there.
Swapping to read files from tmpfs is going to grind slower than using a disk filesystem for/tmp? I guess it's time to do some benchmarks because if it's true, I'd call that a tmpfs bug.
People are telling me don't use disk because it's too slow, but don't use ramdisks because their computer doesn't have enough RAM. The only thing people can agree on, is that I'm wrong.
They shouldn't "support H.264" but rather, they should support any unknown (to the browser) codec by trying the OS.
There are two different issues going on here, and the Mozilla team got one of them right and one of them wrong.
The don't want to implement something that is illegal to implement (or even use!), e.g. patented codecs without permission. Mozilla made the right call on this, all along. Free Software can't implement H.264 without "going underground" (which is itself a loss of freedom, romantic though it be).
They want all Mozilla users to have the same experience, so they define it as "intolerably bad" if one Mozilla user can play codec x and another Mozilla user can't. Mozilla got this wrong; it's not "intolerably bad" ; it's "regrettably bad." It's something to be angry about, but the decision is out of your hands. There isn't anything Mozilla can do that will cause it to be, that all users can play all codecs. That battle is over until we have patent reform (or until patents expire in a decade or two). Until then, a balkanized web is something we simply must live with. That's the political world you live in.
Let VDPAU/VA-API/whatever deal with it. All of it, and Mozilla won't have to maintain Theora or WebM code, either. Then they can get back to hunting for memory leaks.;-)
how will Web developers know when they can and cannot count on system codecs?
They won't, just like they don't know that now. Stuff will fail. And if when does, maybe the browser can tell the user to get off their ass and go vote for a change.
What math? All the base ciders are different (as are honeys), different densities, etc and I doubt there will ever be a database (and if there were, I wouldn't really believe a single number in it). Do you really have a target O.G.? (Maybe you do, but I don't.) If you're off your target, are you really going to do anything about it? No matter what you've got, you're gonna pitch and be happy with it.
Don't think of meads and ciders as being drinks for brewers who flunked math; think of them as drinks for people who are beyond math. If you're worrying about numbers, you're not having enough fun.;-)
The law specifically states that the right to fair use, which includes time and format shifting, is not to be affected by the law.
Judge Kaplan wiped out that part of the law a decade ago, in the 2600 case. Those words truly mean nothing and there is not a single scenario that you can possibly imagine, where they would apply. Seriously. No one can name a single counter-example; it has never been successfully used.
Folks, the movie studios really don't want you to buy shiny discs and try to work with them. Every time you buy one, you just infuriate them. Your money is to the movie studios, what Jack the Ripper is to a woman alone at night.
Let a small number of pirates deal with the discs' problems so that the studios will be impacted the least. Let them deal with what it takes to play the latest BD+ obfuscation, and just download the repaired plaintext so that you don't have to violate DMCA.
There was a time when I would have said those were fightin' words. But actually, you're both right (maybe, AFAIK) and utterly completely wrong.
What happened is that the drive went through several revisions. The first one was the exact opposite of pure reliability; it was pure (as in nearly, and maybe exactly, 100.00%) epic fail. I worked at a place where we sold ATs with ST-251s and there was a year(?) there where every single one of those machines came back to us with disk failure. And it wasn't just one batch on a dropped pallet or something; it was all of 'em, worldwide, dying in months. It was in all the tech news too, though damned if I can conjure it up on Google; obviously Seagate has buried it, which goes to show how evil they are.;-)
Seagate later allegedly revised whatever was totally broken about the drives, but by then, we were making sure to order non-Seagate drives, and (really, at the time) it was damn justified. Now that nearly a quarter century has passed, I ought to have some faith that every Seagate employee who worked on that model has either died of old age or had the good manners to commit suicide, but NO, speaking as someone who has never in his life made any sort of mistake, I say GRUDGE!!!!!1 GRUDGE!!! DEATH TO YOU, SEAGATE!!
Speed. AmigaOS is bloody fucking fast and ought to be able to run rings around most OSes.
That's assuming you have equivalent hardware to your Linux system, which happens to never be the case.
And it's assuming you don't care that any of hundred tasks can write to any particular piece of memory, an assumption which usually isn't the case, though somehow in the 1990s I managed to get by with that, telling myself "run bugfree software, run bugfree software." Whether or not there's actually such a thing as bugfree software, or if Firefox could possibly be an example of it, I'll leave to Firefox hackers to advocate. (Good luck, guys, you're going to need it.)
And it's assuming that by "fast" you're not talking about the filesystems. The Amiga had some third-party filesystems that were pretty speedy for the time but somewhere around 2.4 Linux got into a league of its own.
Not so, they have very explicitly gone on the record as offering ownership rather than renting. "Own" is their word, not mine or my interpretation, in their "own it now on ____" advertising. It's the software industry that has made the weird radical moves of avoiding saying that "sales" have occurred, claiming that "title was never transferred," trying to trick people into looking at their products as services, and so on.
This is a pretty self-destructive industry (their favorite thing to do is tell customers, "We don't want your money, so fuck off and let the pirates take care of your DRM-free needs," but they're not so self-destructive as to retroactively change their position on what happened during previous transations, admit the advertising was fraudulent, and refund decades of sales.
Why did you replace $SOMEONE_ELSES_SERVER with "Facebook?" You should leave the binding for later, when people are applying the moral of the story.
Are distractions really a _book_ issue?
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The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
Seems like distractions would be bad no matter what you're doing, whether that's reading a book or something else (e.g. writing code, driving a car, figuring out whom to vote for). They're also bad whether the personal computer used by the application happens to be a handheld or a desktop.
I can see both sides of calling this a dumb-human problem and a bad-UI problem. On one hand, UI designers know that people are easily distracted, so having an icon blink or bounce when something trivial has happened, is probably bad. OTOH, humans know their computer UIs suck, so they ought to have trained themselves to adapt to the computer's shitty UI and ignore the bouncing ico-- oh geez, see where I'm going with that sentence? This actually is a bad UI problem, 100%. It's just that some people have whatever it takes to adapt to crappy UIs (as just happens to be the case with every other crappy UI and application that we have seen up to now) so they don't see the problem.
What it's not, though, is a tablet problem (desktops have same kind of crap going on), a book problem (reading books are only one of hundreds of things disrupted by distractions, or a multitasking problem (there's no reason multitasking should force UIs to be distracting).
Cars with limited ranges are practical, IF (yes, this is a huge if) you are willing to own multiple cars. That means more expense up front (buy two cars instead of one), plus greater time-based expenses (e.g. insurance, registration -- these aren't the largest expenses but should nevertheless be taken into account). If you get over those hurdles, though, I can see how a non-hybrid plug-in could be reasonably good tech for daily commutes (assuming your commute isn't insanely long-range). Then your longer-range car is for when you need to go further (at reduced efficiency).
I'm not sure the hurdles are easily get-overable, though. The insurance one simply can't be solved, IMHO; I don't know any insurance company who insures by the mile rather than the month/half-year.
The solution is to own things in groups: families. Two adults who work near each other could often share the commuter car, and yet there are also somewhat routine situations where they each need to have their own car for a day, so it's not crazy for the family to own two. Suddenly the math works out. Limited range vehicles may become viable there.
If I woke up tomorrow morning and my old Prizm had magically turned into a 30-mile-range plug-in car at no expense to me (that's the big catch: $40k for a car? fuck no!), I could easily make the best of the situation, and that plug-in would probably become our most-often-driven vehicle.
Although when in power, Republicans don't seem to be particularly biased toward free markets, unelected Republicans are normally pretty rabid about it, and characterize Democrats as being not-free-market-enough.
But somehow Republican candidates, and especially before their convention(!) when you'd think they would be exaggerating their right-wing-ness, are complaining that this one market isn't subsidized enough and is too volatile. Poor proletariat folks are getting pinched by high prices, not receiving their fair share of government-planned wealth redistribution in the form of oil subsidies, boo hoo.
If the convention had already happened, I'd understand it if they tried to appeal to moderates by coming out as left-of-Obama on using government's power to micromanage energy prices. But now? WTF? Shouldn't their strategy be to be quiet on this issue? You know, "freedom is messy" and all that?
Primaries themselves are a dirty trick on democracy. Within this topic. no one can take a high ground or say some particular candidate has unusually frothy feces oozing from them. The whole point of primaries is to subvert the election by removing choices from ballots, so I think it's hilarious someone would complain that distorting democracy for a particular candidate is somehow worse than another.
If anything, persuading non-party-members to participate in the parties' primaries, helps to subvert primaries and therefore could some day lead to better representation. Not that I have any illusions about Santorum's motives here, but if you take a long view, he's doing a good thing in this instance. Harming parties' ability to have "accurate" primaries is good for the country.
The only thing really distasteful here is the robocall angle itself -- that they exist. But of course if you were to give government the power to prohibit political speech (of all speech topics!) that would be even worse. So pay Santorum back by voting for him in the primary, and voting against him (and any other robocallers) in the election if you feel strongly about being robocalled. Make robocalling become a way to lose.
Except that the cops believing someone is guilty is not the same as the cops actually knowing that a hard drive contains evidence.
In that one cop's mind those things aren't the same (or so it seems; actually they might be more similar than they seem at first glance), but to any other person, there's no distinction.
If you show me a screen on your computer containing kiddie porn and the map to your smuggled plutonium depot, I think I know you have that evidence on your computer. But if we go to a third person (e.g. a court) and I say I know those things are on your computer because you previously showed them to me, you might say, "No, that didn't happen," or "My computer runs an X server and an NFS client, there's no way screen contents would imply anything about the computer's SSD's contents other than the presence of software."
I say I know. You say I mistakenly think I know, or you say I'm lying about what was revealed earlier. To any third person, my opinion that you're guilty and my "knowledge" of there being evidence on your computer, are equally suspect.
Let's say that third person and I finally decide to I must be right, so we point a gun at you and demand that you decrypt your computer's contents. Is it not actually true that after we do that, we'll find a total lack of evidence, even despite the fact that I wasn't really lying when I said you showed the kiddie porn and depot map to me? That really might happen. So what's all this crap about my "knowledge" of the evidence being there? I was so sure...
Anyone else notice how the summary excerpt started talking about the web's recent appearance, and then segued into talking about "digital" as though it were a synonym, thereby implying "digital" tech appeared fairly recently?
TFA is just one example of "digital"'s abuse, but it's ubiquitous. That word is now so rarely used in any connection with its meaning, that I think hackers have bricked the word from our language. That is so gay!
If government doesn't grant a monopoly on the facts of timezones, then what incentive do astrologers have to allow timezones to exist? EFF, you people are ruining the progress of the sciences and useful arts!
you have to complete the elevator project before it is worth anything. Invest all that money to FINISH the cable, you can't get incremental results
I'm not so sure about this. We're talking about magic, i.e. tech we don't have yet. Some of the cost isn't going to be in creating the elevator itself, but in creating the tech to create the elevator. These things may be useful in themselves. If you spend $x on building a magic-cable-making factory and inventing all the processes that it will use, and another $y acquiring the materials and operating that factory to crank out a space elevator, your argument applies to the $y but not completely to the $x. You still have a magic-cable-making factory to use on jobs for making suspension bridges, for example.
If you already have the capital and tech to do something, so that you can just "buy" a specialized result, then you're totally right. The premise of the space elevator, though, is that we don't have those things. That makes it cost even more, but those extra costs can have incremental results, and then it's just a matter of having the flamewars about how much Tang is really worth on its own, without astronauts drink it.
Heck you could even possibly replace the lenses themselves with a modified display that uses a camera and alters the image to your prescription.
"Mapper's traffic query suggests we turn left here; I don't care if you think it's faster to go straight. Oncoming car is going only 35.4 KPH and OBD-VIII says we easily have the power, so I'm going to tur-- TAKE THE WHEEL, QUICK! Everything is dark! Dude, this is why I said don't plug your music player into my cigarette lighter. I need that to keep my HUD charged."
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I'd like to upgrade to a "wheeled version of my car." To find out if there is one, I'll use a "search version of Google" on the "internet version of the web" viewed on my "visual version of a LCD" connected to an "electronic version of a computer" while I sip a "liquid version of coffee."
On the flip side, I remember installing a PNG datatype and then suddenly every single browser could display PNGs, whether the browser author cared (or even knew about) PNG or not.
As for remembering the actually-bad problem you talk about, it happened more recently than you might expect.
Earlier this week, I wanted to give someone a larger-than-4GB video file on a flash drive and suddenly was thrown into a world I don't think about much, where the filesystem typically used on flash drives (FAT32), can't hold files that large. I researched a little and came to the conclusion that the recipient's system (WD Live TV) could read NTFS (and also HFS+ but the recipient also owns a Windows machine so I figured NTFS would be a better choice this time), so I used ntfs-3g to format the partition, and the file appeared to copy onto there just fine.
The problem was, I wasn't really sure I had correctly NTFS formatted the flash drive; how well do these userspace filesystems really work? Do people who use NTFS typically use old "fdisk"-style partition tables, or something newer, or just format the whole device? I just didn't know for sure, and had never used ntfs-3g specifically. So I took the flash drive to work where we have a Windows 7 machine for MSIE9 testing, because I wanted to see a native Windows installation see the files; then I'd know I had a real NTFS system, and could hand it to the recipient without worries.
It read the drive just fine and saw the file. Success. ntfs-3g is solid. Things work just fine and I had been worried about nothing. Then just for giggles, I clicked the file; how well does Windows play it?
It doesn't fucking work. This isn't some ancient Windows 98 on Pentium 4; it's a shiny new machine with very capable video hardware and Windows SEVEN (you know, the latest release) and the built-in Windows Media Player (it has "media player" in the damned name!!) doesn't know WTF a Matroska file is. I shit you not. Windows Media Player in the latest version of Windows, doesn't know Matroska, one of the most commonly used containers in the world (probably #2 right now and still gaining ground). The next time you complain about about your beer being flat, remember there are starving people in India running Windows 7.
I don't really think Windows users can't play Matroska files. I know they can. But a stock Windows 7, which I guarantee many millions of people have, is a crippled anachronism from another planet. It might be ok for a server, but it's not ready for the desktop. ;-) This is probably sounding like another Microsoft (*) flame, but that's not really my point.
What does this situation tell you? It tells me that mainstream users are used to having to go find and install a bunch of shit just to make video work. In the real world, it's not just "aptitude install mplayer" and then everyone lives happily ever after. Users are already doing an equivalent thing to installing Real, Quicktime, Flash, whatever -- you're not talking about the old days; you're talking about today, now. I think a majority of people in 2012 are living your 1990s nightmare.
Sure, it sucks, but all it is, is a lack of advance. With lack of a video standard, we're not losing ground, we're merely not gaining yet. That's regrettable, not intolerable. I can't help but think that by the time proprietary mainstream OSes come ready-to-use for playing media, the H.264 patents will have expired and the whole codec situation will be moot.
(*) Really, this isn't about Microsoft. Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" (the latest version, more recent than Windows 7 in fact) also comes with a media player (Quicktime Player), and it also can't play Matroska files. A consumer OS released in 2011! People who run Linux all the time have no idea what a crazy world it is, out there.
Swapping to read files from tmpfs is going to grind slower than using a disk filesystem for /tmp? I guess it's time to do some benchmarks because if it's true, I'd call that a tmpfs bug.
People are telling me don't use disk because it's too slow, but don't use ramdisks because their computer doesn't have enough RAM. The only thing people can agree on, is that I'm wrong.
They shouldn't "support H.264" but rather, they should support any unknown (to the browser) codec by trying the OS.
There are two different issues going on here, and the Mozilla team got one of them right and one of them wrong.
Let VDPAU/VA-API/whatever deal with it. All of it, and Mozilla won't have to maintain Theora or WebM code, either. Then they can get back to hunting for memory leaks. ;-)
They won't, just like they don't know that now. Stuff will fail. And if when does, maybe the browser can tell the user to get off their ass and go vote for a change.
What math? All the base ciders are different (as are honeys), different densities, etc and I doubt there will ever be a database (and if there were, I wouldn't really believe a single number in it). Do you really have a target O.G.? (Maybe you do, but I don't.) If you're off your target, are you really going to do anything about it? No matter what you've got, you're gonna pitch and be happy with it.
Don't think of meads and ciders as being drinks for brewers who flunked math; think of them as drinks for people who are beyond math. If you're worrying about numbers, you're not having enough fun. ;-)
Judge Kaplan wiped out that part of the law a decade ago, in the 2600 case. Those words truly mean nothing and there is not a single scenario that you can possibly imagine, where they would apply. Seriously. No one can name a single counter-example; it has never been successfully used.
Folks, the movie studios really don't want you to buy shiny discs and try to work with them. Every time you buy one, you just infuriate them. Your money is to the movie studios, what Jack the Ripper is to a woman alone at night.
Let a small number of pirates deal with the discs' problems so that the studios will be impacted the least. Let them deal with what it takes to play the latest BD+ obfuscation, and just download the repaired plaintext so that you don't have to violate DMCA.
Once you go tmpfs, why would you ever go back, VTE flaws or not? tmpfs kicks ass.
Then encrypt your swap (random key every boot; you don't even need to know a key to be coerced from you) and you have a safe /tmp.
There was a time when I would have said those were fightin' words. But actually, you're both right (maybe, AFAIK) and utterly completely wrong.
What happened is that the drive went through several revisions. The first one was the exact opposite of pure reliability; it was pure (as in nearly, and maybe exactly, 100.00%) epic fail. I worked at a place where we sold ATs with ST-251s and there was a year(?) there where every single one of those machines came back to us with disk failure. And it wasn't just one batch on a dropped pallet or something; it was all of 'em, worldwide, dying in months. It was in all the tech news too, though damned if I can conjure it up on Google; obviously Seagate has buried it, which goes to show how evil they are. ;-)
Seagate later allegedly revised whatever was totally broken about the drives, but by then, we were making sure to order non-Seagate drives, and (really, at the time) it was damn justified. Now that nearly a quarter century has passed, I ought to have some faith that every Seagate employee who worked on that model has either died of old age or had the good manners to commit suicide, but NO, speaking as someone who has never in his life made any sort of mistake, I say GRUDGE!!!!!1 GRUDGE!!! DEATH TO YOU, SEAGATE!!
It depends on what you're doing with it! Duh... Seriously, that was a deeply stupid question.
Worse than the ST-251? That drive is why I don't buy Seagate. ;-)
Speed. AmigaOS is bloody fucking fast and ought to be able to run rings around most OSes.
That's assuming you have equivalent hardware to your Linux system, which happens to never be the case.
And it's assuming you don't care that any of hundred tasks can write to any particular piece of memory, an assumption which usually isn't the case, though somehow in the 1990s I managed to get by with that, telling myself "run bugfree software, run bugfree software." Whether or not there's actually such a thing as bugfree software, or if Firefox could possibly be an example of it, I'll leave to Firefox hackers to advocate. (Good luck, guys, you're going to need it.)
And it's assuming that by "fast" you're not talking about the filesystems. The Amiga had some third-party filesystems that were pretty speedy for the time but somewhere around 2.4 Linux got into a league of its own.
Not so, they have very explicitly gone on the record as offering ownership rather than renting. "Own" is their word, not mine or my interpretation, in their "own it now on ____" advertising. It's the software industry that has made the weird radical moves of avoiding saying that "sales" have occurred, claiming that "title was never transferred," trying to trick people into looking at their products as services, and so on.
This is a pretty self-destructive industry (their favorite thing to do is tell customers, "We don't want your money, so fuck off and let the pirates take care of your DRM-free needs," but they're not so self-destructive as to retroactively change their position on what happened during previous transations, admit the advertising was fraudulent, and refund decades of sales.
Why did you replace $SOMEONE_ELSES_SERVER with "Facebook?" You should leave the binding for later, when people are applying the moral of the story.
Seems like distractions would be bad no matter what you're doing, whether that's reading a book or something else (e.g. writing code, driving a car, figuring out whom to vote for). They're also bad whether the personal computer used by the application happens to be a handheld or a desktop.
I can see both sides of calling this a dumb-human problem and a bad-UI problem. On one hand, UI designers know that people are easily distracted, so having an icon blink or bounce when something trivial has happened, is probably bad. OTOH, humans know their computer UIs suck, so they ought to have trained themselves to adapt to the computer's shitty UI and ignore the bouncing ico-- oh geez, see where I'm going with that sentence? This actually is a bad UI problem, 100%. It's just that some people have whatever it takes to adapt to crappy UIs (as just happens to be the case with every other crappy UI and application that we have seen up to now) so they don't see the problem.
What it's not, though, is a tablet problem (desktops have same kind of crap going on), a book problem (reading books are only one of hundreds of things disrupted by distractions, or a multitasking problem (there's no reason multitasking should force UIs to be distracting).
640 employees should be enough for anyone.
Cars with limited ranges are practical, IF (yes, this is a huge if) you are willing to own multiple cars. That means more expense up front (buy two cars instead of one), plus greater time-based expenses (e.g. insurance, registration -- these aren't the largest expenses but should nevertheless be taken into account). If you get over those hurdles, though, I can see how a non-hybrid plug-in could be reasonably good tech for daily commutes (assuming your commute isn't insanely long-range). Then your longer-range car is for when you need to go further (at reduced efficiency).
I'm not sure the hurdles are easily get-overable, though. The insurance one simply can't be solved, IMHO; I don't know any insurance company who insures by the mile rather than the month/half-year.
The solution is to own things in groups: families. Two adults who work near each other could often share the commuter car, and yet there are also somewhat routine situations where they each need to have their own car for a day, so it's not crazy for the family to own two. Suddenly the math works out. Limited range vehicles may become viable there.
If I woke up tomorrow morning and my old Prizm had magically turned into a 30-mile-range plug-in car at no expense to me (that's the big catch: $40k for a car? fuck no!), I could easily make the best of the situation, and that plug-in would probably become our most-often-driven vehicle.
Although when in power, Republicans don't seem to be particularly biased toward free markets, unelected Republicans are normally pretty rabid about it, and characterize Democrats as being not-free-market-enough.
But somehow Republican candidates, and especially before their convention(!) when you'd think they would be exaggerating their right-wing-ness, are complaining that this one market isn't subsidized enough and is too volatile. Poor proletariat folks are getting pinched by high prices, not receiving their fair share of government-planned wealth redistribution in the form of oil subsidies, boo hoo.
If the convention had already happened, I'd understand it if they tried to appeal to moderates by coming out as left-of-Obama on using government's power to micromanage energy prices. But now? WTF? Shouldn't their strategy be to be quiet on this issue? You know, "freedom is messy" and all that?
Primaries themselves are a dirty trick on democracy. Within this topic. no one can take a high ground or say some particular candidate has unusually frothy feces oozing from them. The whole point of primaries is to subvert the election by removing choices from ballots, so I think it's hilarious someone would complain that distorting democracy for a particular candidate is somehow worse than another.
If anything, persuading non-party-members to participate in the parties' primaries, helps to subvert primaries and therefore could some day lead to better representation. Not that I have any illusions about Santorum's motives here, but if you take a long view, he's doing a good thing in this instance. Harming parties' ability to have "accurate" primaries is good for the country.
The only thing really distasteful here is the robocall angle itself -- that they exist. But of course if you were to give government the power to prohibit political speech (of all speech topics!) that would be even worse. So pay Santorum back by voting for him in the primary, and voting against him (and any other robocallers) in the election if you feel strongly about being robocalled. Make robocalling become a way to lose.
They shouldn't, but for all the absurdity of the idea, it's slightly less absurd than suing someone else (e.g. Google).
Kate, in 5 years the Corleone family will be completely legitimate.
In that one cop's mind those things aren't the same (or so it seems; actually they might be more similar than they seem at first glance), but to any other person, there's no distinction.
If you show me a screen on your computer containing kiddie porn and the map to your smuggled plutonium depot, I think I know you have that evidence on your computer. But if we go to a third person (e.g. a court) and I say I know those things are on your computer because you previously showed them to me, you might say, "No, that didn't happen," or "My computer runs an X server and an NFS client, there's no way screen contents would imply anything about the computer's SSD's contents other than the presence of software."
I say I know. You say I mistakenly think I know, or you say I'm lying about what was revealed earlier. To any third person, my opinion that you're guilty and my "knowledge" of there being evidence on your computer, are equally suspect.
Let's say that third person and I finally decide to I must be right, so we point a gun at you and demand that you decrypt your computer's contents. Is it not actually true that after we do that, we'll find a total lack of evidence, even despite the fact that I wasn't really lying when I said you showed the kiddie porn and depot map to me? That really might happen. So what's all this crap about my "knowledge" of the evidence being there? I was so sure...
Anyone else notice how the summary excerpt started talking about the web's recent appearance, and then segued into talking about "digital" as though it were a synonym, thereby implying "digital" tech appeared fairly recently?
TFA is just one example of "digital"'s abuse, but it's ubiquitous. That word is now so rarely used in any connection with its meaning, that I think hackers have bricked the word from our language. That is so gay!
If government doesn't grant a monopoly on the facts of timezones, then what incentive do astrologers have to allow timezones to exist? EFF, you people are ruining the progress of the sciences and useful arts!
I'm not so sure about this. We're talking about magic, i.e. tech we don't have yet. Some of the cost isn't going to be in creating the elevator itself, but in creating the tech to create the elevator. These things may be useful in themselves. If you spend $x on building a magic-cable-making factory and inventing all the processes that it will use, and another $y acquiring the materials and operating that factory to crank out a space elevator, your argument applies to the $y but not completely to the $x. You still have a magic-cable-making factory to use on jobs for making suspension bridges, for example.
If you already have the capital and tech to do something, so that you can just "buy" a specialized result, then you're totally right. The premise of the space elevator, though, is that we don't have those things. That makes it cost even more, but those extra costs can have incremental results, and then it's just a matter of having the flamewars about how much Tang is really worth on its own, without astronauts drink it.
"Mapper's traffic query suggests we turn left here; I don't care if you think it's faster to go straight. Oncoming car is going only 35.4 KPH and OBD-VIII says we easily have the power, so I'm going to tur-- TAKE THE WHEEL, QUICK! Everything is dark! Dude, this is why I said don't plug your music player into my cigarette lighter. I need that to keep my HUD charged."