Telemetry will be continuously relayed back to earth, true, but with not much less than about a 15 minute latency, owing to the fact that Mars roughly a quarter of a light-hour from earth right now.
They said the same thing about a-la-carte channel selection.
Internet alternatives like netflix is driving people away from broadcast television in *DROVES*... where people can watch exactly what they want. It's only a matter of time before the broadcasters themselves clue in that they should try incorporating a similar model to meet that demand.
The point of the model that I proposed was to deal with people who do *NOT* want to sit around watching television every day... it is for people who might be interested in perhaps no more than approximately one or two hours of television in an entire week. It is for people who are busy, and who have real lives outside of sitting in front of a TV, but could still appreciate the ability to just relax for one or two hours a week and watch certain television programs that they know that they actually like, and without waiting for a year for the season to come out on DVD, and without paying for all the other programming that they *DON'T* watch.
If you are wanting 20, or likely even any more than about 8 to 10 channels, then the a-la-carte cable model probably makes no economical sense at all. It only makes sense if you only watch a very small number of stations.
Nonetheless, my above proposal was not for a-la-carte channels, but for the specific programs on the channels themselves. Again, it would only be practical if the number of shows that one watched were a particularly small number, but for many people, that's exactly the case.
Before we had a handful of channels, and you could select which shows you wanted to watch from them. Then cable came out, and the variety increased, but so did the cost to the consumer, and so an increasing demand for a-la-carte channel selection came about. In some jurisdictions, recent changes have made true a-la-carte programming imminent.
But today, many people have very busy lives, and are often too busy to watch more than perhaps a handful of TV shows each week. It's far from unheard of for people to simply "cut the cord" and do without television entirely, simply because there are not enough programs on the available networks to justify the expense.
I think, therefore, the time is ripe that we need to move even beyond a-la-carte channel selection, and instead directly to a concept of subscribing to individual television programs - where you can choose exactly which programs you want streamed to your PVR, to be watched at your convenience anytime after they are broadcast (or during, of course). Why should a person pay the full price of having HBO available to them 24 hours a day, for example, if they are only ever interested in watching a single program on that station? Obviously, for anything more than a handful of shows on a given network, it would likely become more economical to simply subscribe to the entire station, but in an age where it's not very uncommon to find people who've cut off their cable entirely, simply because they found they were only watching TV a couple of hours each week, I think that this kind of model is going to make a lot of sense.
This would also have the upshot of giving tv show producers a clearer picture of just how many people are actually watching a given television show, basedon subscription figures. Instead of only monitoring which tv stations particular homes that are part of the Nielson group are tuned to at various times throughout the day, and deducing which TV programs that they are watching or recording, and then extrapolating that to deduce what the greater population is watching, they could instead know directly which programs that a potentially much larger demographic watch.
This wouldn't completely eliminate the need for things like the Nielson group, though... which would be capable of monitoring what time of day people are actually watching their televisions... information that would doubtless be of great value to both content creators and advertisers.
Just my 2c. Er... nickel. I understand Canada is getting rid of its penny within the year.
But by travelling straight through the earth instead of being bounced around it from satellite to satellite, the total distance is perhaps only a hundredth as far, and so the information can be thus relayed proportionally faster.
Not entirely sure how the idea of religion necessarily falls under the category of "scam". Not that I'm saying none are scams, but doesn't the notion of scam imply that somebody is going to benefit from it? Short of conspiracy theories that are approximately as substantiated as the "evidence" the lunar landing hoax proponents utilize, I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that all religions would fit that bill.
Why is it that it's not an altogether unusual thing for somebody who formerly did not practice any religious belief system, upon having a near death experience, they become believers afterwards in some concept of an afterlife, while you rarely, if ever, hear of situations where people who were believers in such a concept prior to having a near death experience, and afterwards conclude based on their experience that there's really nothing beyond it?
I'm certain I'm taking a less than popular position on this issue, but the example they gave, of the New Yorker publishing locations of performances, and comparing that to publishing a computer's IP address, isn't entirely a fair comparison.
The New Yorker is publishing locations of those performances, true, but the performances and their venues don't generally infringe on copyright.
Deliberately publishing locations where practically all content is essentially known to be infringing, and any non-infringing content found there is largely circumstantial, more than a matter of general practice or intended purpose, is arguably an entirely different kettle of fish.
I certainly understand the importance of comparing only PC's of the same generation, but the Apple ][+ was actually introduced in 1979, and itself could reasonably be considered part of the same generation of desktop PC's as the TRS-80 itself. Nonetheless, for a number of years after the Apple was introduced, the TRS-80 continued to sell... and the Apple was not overly superior to the TRS-80 on a technological level such that the latter could have been considered replaced by the former. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the TRS-80's declining desktop viability in the 1980's was much more affected by the increasing variety of choices that people were starting to get as various manufacturers came out with their own PC than it was because newer machines that came out during that same time period effectively replaced it.
Your link only seems to refer to the point that the Apple ][+ was not the actual leader, and does not show its ranking relative to the TRS-80 after 1979.
It was more popular than the Commodore PET, which was also available in the late 70's, but I don't think it ever matched the popularity that the Apple ][+ (and later, 2e) achieved in the early 1980's.
While it's interesting to know what the area of a bit is, what I'd like to know is the minimum amount of mass or energy that one bit represents.... or vice versa, if that is more applicable.
It might be pretty difficult for Craigslist to do that if the original ad contained some explicit text that authorized ad scrapers to copy the ad to their own site.
Of course, it's well within Craigslist's rights to remove any such ads from their site, but such ads would still have to be manually flagged and removed, and unless a person had a specific interest in making sure that ads complied with such terms of use, I'm not sure how quickly all such ads would actually get removed.
Ah.... but "Think Different" reads perfectly fine if you take it as meaning that it is implying the existence of an unstated noun, and "different" is not intending to describe how the thinking is done, but rather describing whatever it is that is being thought about.
You don't say "Think largely" when telling somebody to envision something of potentially grand size or stature, for example. You say "Think big". While it's true that ordinarily the words may be gramatically incorrect, in context they are actually entirely valid.
If, and *ONLY* if, you've gone to some reasonable effort to keep your privacy, then yes. As there's nothing you can legally do to keep your license plate number concealed from public viewing, nor is there anything that you can do to stop somebody from happening to see your car in two separate places and effectively "track" you. And the only real difference between a computer doing it and a person is that it generally isn't humanly possible to be as comprehensive - but I do not recognize that as a significant difference between computer programs and human though.
Anybody with a modicum of sense knows that deliberately trying to peek at what somebody has underneath their clothes is both immature and indecent.
There is a world of difference between what a person has made some reasonable effort to keep private by wearing clothing, and a license plate, which is *SUPPOSED* to be plainly visible whenever the vehicle is in any public place. There's absolutely nothing that a license plate scanner does that could not be done if a police officer simply personally saw and recorded the plate manually. Besides, a license plate is not an individual's private property, it belongs to the state. If you want all the rights to your own license plates, see if you can form your own sovereignty.
And if the notion of license plate scanners really bothers you, you might try pulling what Steve Jobs did, and go out and get a new car every 6 months so that you never need to put a plate on it. Although I'm pretty sure that trick won't work everywhere.
People do *NOT* have any natural right to anonymity when they are in any sort of public place. I do not say this because I think privacy or anonymity is unimportant, but it's the furthest thing from any sort of natural right when a person makes a deliberate choice to be in a place where there are other people.
The *ONLY* assurance that one might have of not being identified whenever they are in public is whatever sense of assurance that they possess that people who might have the ability to do so will simply be too indifferent about them to try.
Of course, one has no real control over what other people think about them, so this sense of assurance, while it may be adequate for some people, is ultimately ephemeral.
Why was the teen who made a nonviolent remark (albeit one that was certainly nothing less than deliberately mean) arrested, while the people who made arguably more threatening remarks, such as the ones which talked about drowing him, or going to his house and shooting him were not?
A decent percentage of people with no interest in being obnoxious post anonymously because we don't want certain other individuals (employer, abusive ex, etc.) to be able to see what we're up to or find ways to contact us,
Could you be more specific, and cite sources that have performed some studies which can confirm some specific percentage? I'm not saying that the demographic you've described above is necessarily a small number in terms of absolute magnitude, but I'm inclined to think that the overall percentage of people that it consists of is probably pretty tiny. I'd wager that it might even be of the same order of magnitude as that 0.09% figure reduction of obnoxious comments reduction mentioned in the article summary (again, of course, even that tiny a percentage of a large population is still going to be a lot of people... but if the percentage reduction in such comments is too small to be concerned with, then, and please forgive me for playing devil's advocate here, why should a similar percentage of impact on people who actually desire anonymity be of any greater concern?)
... when they already had a (much lesser known, admittedly) product named "Surface"?
I understand they've renamed their table computer, but I don't think I've ever seen any explaination on what motivated them to want to change the name of that and call their new tablet "Surface" instead.
... and see that since requiring real names did not significantly reduce the number of unwanted comments, then it would also seem to follow that requiring real names does not tend to adversely impact the level of anonymity that most people already enjoy online by simple virtue of a level of indifference towards them.
Slashdot Mirror
The single most important criteria for something to qualify as "real time" in data communications is low latency. 14 and a half minutes is not low.
Telemetry will be continuously relayed back to earth, true, but with not much less than about a 15 minute latency, owing to the fact that Mars roughly a quarter of a light-hour from earth right now.
Wanna make a bet on that?
They said the same thing about a-la-carte channel selection.
Internet alternatives like netflix is driving people away from broadcast television in *DROVES*... where people can watch exactly what they want. It's only a matter of time before the broadcasters themselves clue in that they should try incorporating a similar model to meet that demand.
The point of the model that I proposed was to deal with people who do *NOT* want to sit around watching television every day... it is for people who might be interested in perhaps no more than approximately one or two hours of television in an entire week. It is for people who are busy, and who have real lives outside of sitting in front of a TV, but could still appreciate the ability to just relax for one or two hours a week and watch certain television programs that they know that they actually like, and without waiting for a year for the season to come out on DVD, and without paying for all the other programming that they *DON'T* watch.
If you are wanting 20, or likely even any more than about 8 to 10 channels, then the a-la-carte cable model probably makes no economical sense at all. It only makes sense if you only watch a very small number of stations.
Nonetheless, my above proposal was not for a-la-carte channels, but for the specific programs on the channels themselves. Again, it would only be practical if the number of shows that one watched were a particularly small number, but for many people, that's exactly the case.
Before we had a handful of channels, and you could select which shows you wanted to watch from them. Then cable came out, and the variety increased, but so did the cost to the consumer, and so an increasing demand for a-la-carte channel selection came about. In some jurisdictions, recent changes have made true a-la-carte programming imminent.
But today, many people have very busy lives, and are often too busy to watch more than perhaps a handful of TV shows each week. It's far from unheard of for people to simply "cut the cord" and do without television entirely, simply because there are not enough programs on the available networks to justify the expense.
I think, therefore, the time is ripe that we need to move even beyond a-la-carte channel selection, and instead directly to a concept of subscribing to individual television programs - where you can choose exactly which programs you want streamed to your PVR, to be watched at your convenience anytime after they are broadcast (or during, of course). Why should a person pay the full price of having HBO available to them 24 hours a day, for example, if they are only ever interested in watching a single program on that station? Obviously, for anything more than a handful of shows on a given network, it would likely become more economical to simply subscribe to the entire station, but in an age where it's not very uncommon to find people who've cut off their cable entirely, simply because they found they were only watching TV a couple of hours each week, I think that this kind of model is going to make a lot of sense.
This would also have the upshot of giving tv show producers a clearer picture of just how many people are actually watching a given television show, basedon subscription figures. Instead of only monitoring which tv stations particular homes that are part of the Nielson group are tuned to at various times throughout the day, and deducing which TV programs that they are watching or recording, and then extrapolating that to deduce what the greater population is watching, they could instead know directly which programs that a potentially much larger demographic watch.
This wouldn't completely eliminate the need for things like the Nielson group, though... which would be capable of monitoring what time of day people are actually watching their televisions... information that would doubtless be of great value to both content creators and advertisers.
Just my 2c. Er... nickel. I understand Canada is getting rid of its penny within the year.
That's true.
But by travelling straight through the earth instead of being bounced around it from satellite to satellite, the total distance is perhaps only a hundredth as far, and so the information can be thus relayed proportionally faster.
Not entirely sure how the idea of religion necessarily falls under the category of "scam". Not that I'm saying none are scams, but doesn't the notion of scam imply that somebody is going to benefit from it? Short of conspiracy theories that are approximately as substantiated as the "evidence" the lunar landing hoax proponents utilize, I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that all religions would fit that bill.
Why is it that it's not an altogether unusual thing for somebody who formerly did not practice any religious belief system, upon having a near death experience, they become believers afterwards in some concept of an afterlife, while you rarely, if ever, hear of situations where people who were believers in such a concept prior to having a near death experience, and afterwards conclude based on their experience that there's really nothing beyond it?
I'm certain I'm taking a less than popular position on this issue, but the example they gave, of the New Yorker publishing locations of performances, and comparing that to publishing a computer's IP address, isn't entirely a fair comparison.
The New Yorker is publishing locations of those performances, true, but the performances and their venues don't generally infringe on copyright.
Deliberately publishing locations where practically all content is essentially known to be infringing, and any non-infringing content found there is largely circumstantial, more than a matter of general practice or intended purpose, is arguably an entirely different kettle of fish.
I certainly understand the importance of comparing only PC's of the same generation, but the Apple ][+ was actually introduced in 1979, and itself could reasonably be considered part of the same generation of desktop PC's as the TRS-80 itself. Nonetheless, for a number of years after the Apple was introduced, the TRS-80 continued to sell... and the Apple was not overly superior to the TRS-80 on a technological level such that the latter could have been considered replaced by the former. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the TRS-80's declining desktop viability in the 1980's was much more affected by the increasing variety of choices that people were starting to get as various manufacturers came out with their own PC than it was because newer machines that came out during that same time period effectively replaced it.
Your link only seems to refer to the point that the Apple ][+ was not the actual leader, and does not show its ranking relative to the TRS-80 after 1979.
It was more popular than the Commodore PET, which was also available in the late 70's, but I don't think it ever matched the popularity that the Apple ][+ (and later, 2e) achieved in the early 1980's.
While it's interesting to know what the area of a bit is, what I'd like to know is the minimum amount of mass or energy that one bit represents.... or vice versa, if that is more applicable.
Neato.... what's the theoretical minimum number of joules it takes to represent a bit?
Of course, it's well within Craigslist's rights to remove any such ads from their site, but such ads would still have to be manually flagged and removed, and unless a person had a specific interest in making sure that ads complied with such terms of use, I'm not sure how quickly all such ads would actually get removed.
Ah.... but "Think Different" reads perfectly fine if you take it as meaning that it is implying the existence of an unstated noun, and "different" is not intending to describe how the thinking is done, but rather describing whatever it is that is being thought about.
You don't say "Think largely" when telling somebody to envision something of potentially grand size or stature, for example. You say "Think big". While it's true that ordinarily the words may be gramatically incorrect, in context they are actually entirely valid.
If, and *ONLY* if, you've gone to some reasonable effort to keep your privacy, then yes. As there's nothing you can legally do to keep your license plate number concealed from public viewing, nor is there anything that you can do to stop somebody from happening to see your car in two separate places and effectively "track" you. And the only real difference between a computer doing it and a person is that it generally isn't humanly possible to be as comprehensive - but I do not recognize that as a significant difference between computer programs and human though.
Anybody with a modicum of sense knows that deliberately trying to peek at what somebody has underneath their clothes is both immature and indecent.
There is a world of difference between what a person has made some reasonable effort to keep private by wearing clothing, and a license plate, which is *SUPPOSED* to be plainly visible whenever the vehicle is in any public place. There's absolutely nothing that a license plate scanner does that could not be done if a police officer simply personally saw and recorded the plate manually. Besides, a license plate is not an individual's private property, it belongs to the state. If you want all the rights to your own license plates, see if you can form your own sovereignty.
And if the notion of license plate scanners really bothers you, you might try pulling what Steve Jobs did, and go out and get a new car every 6 months so that you never need to put a plate on it. Although I'm pretty sure that trick won't work everywhere.
People do *NOT* have any natural right to anonymity when they are in any sort of public place. I do not say this because I think privacy or anonymity is unimportant, but it's the furthest thing from any sort of natural right when a person makes a deliberate choice to be in a place where there are other people.
The *ONLY* assurance that one might have of not being identified whenever they are in public is whatever sense of assurance that they possess that people who might have the ability to do so will simply be too indifferent about them to try.
Of course, one has no real control over what other people think about them, so this sense of assurance, while it may be adequate for some people, is ultimately ephemeral.
Why was the teen who made a nonviolent remark (albeit one that was certainly nothing less than deliberately mean) arrested, while the people who made arguably more threatening remarks, such as the ones which talked about drowing him, or going to his house and shooting him were not?
Could you be more specific, and cite sources that have performed some studies which can confirm some specific percentage? I'm not saying that the demographic you've described above is necessarily a small number in terms of absolute magnitude, but I'm inclined to think that the overall percentage of people that it consists of is probably pretty tiny. I'd wager that it might even be of the same order of magnitude as that 0.09% figure reduction of obnoxious comments reduction mentioned in the article summary (again, of course, even that tiny a percentage of a large population is still going to be a lot of people... but if the percentage reduction in such comments is too small to be concerned with, then, and please forgive me for playing devil's advocate here, why should a similar percentage of impact on people who actually desire anonymity be of any greater concern?)
I understand they've renamed their table computer, but I don't think I've ever seen any explaination on what motivated them to want to change the name of that and call their new tablet "Surface" instead.
... and see that since requiring real names did not significantly reduce the number of unwanted comments, then it would also seem to follow that requiring real names does not tend to adversely impact the level of anonymity that most people already enjoy online by simple virtue of a level of indifference towards them.