I disagree - programmers are two a penny, but a good idea is incredibly valuable.
If you're just talking about code-monkeys, then I'd agree they aren't particularly rare. But the guys involved in this project are developers who it seems will be expected to work out most of the actual *workings* of whatever "idea" is presented, and they have histories of coming up with useful and usable interfaces.
Saying "I want a program that will automatically fix the tags of all my MP3 files" is not hard. It's coming up with an algorithm or system to analyze song files successfully, or an interface to efficiently present songs to the user for identification, that would be the hard part.
Obviously if the entrants of this contest have already worked out the implementation details and interface for the idea and just need a programmer with Objective C experience to get it working, then the idea man deserves the major credit. But that's not what this contest sounds like to me.
A blind feedback system would be vastly preferable to both the current one and my suggestion of seller-first feedback. I'd even heard the blind system suggested before and somehow forgot!
And yes, there should be some account of monetary value and buyer's reputation when a seller gets a feedback score. I've sold several thousand dollars of expensive electronics and photo gear on eBay to other eBayers who've been there for years, yet have a feedback rating in the double-digits. Scammers can come on with new accounts and sell bubble gum to each other for high feedback in a single day. Similarly, the buyer should get more credit for a good high-value transaction with a longtime seller.
Absolutely, a blind system is better than my idea and eBay's current system.
They do need a Google pagerank-ish weighting system of feedback value -- a $1,000 purchase from a guy who has been on eBay 5 years is worth more than a thousand purchases of sharpie markers from a brand new seller.
You get more than just an iPod. Winners get a Macbook as well as royalties over the shareware that will be developed for them. That sounds like a pretty good return for just providing a good idea.
Indeed, ideas are cheap and plentiful. Finding people who can implement them and work out the details is the hard part. As a PR move, this is great for publicity, but I don't think there are many talented [programmers|authors|artists] sitting around just wishing they had a new idea to use their skills on. Usually talented people lament the fact that they'll never get to finish one in every hundred ideas they have in the short time they have on Earth.
But hey, it's still a cool idea and might very well result in some novel new toys. I know I'll be tossing around concepts in my mind for the next few days!
I agree completely that one of the biggest, most fundamental and most easily fixed problems is the feedback machanism.
The sellers should be required, without exception, to leave feedback prior to the buyer leaving feedback. Sellers don't do anything until the buyer upholds their end of the deal (payment), and while issues can still arise (bad addresses, fraudlent claims of loss), the vast majority of issues come from sellers not upholding their end of the bargain, or providing lousy service and communication.
This solution is so obvious and so easy, and I've seen it suggested so many times over the years that I've come to the conclusion eBay actually prefers to be a den of thieves allowing sellers to threaten retribution on any buyer who dares complain about bad service. The one time I honestly had a problem with a seller and reported it (should it take 5 weeks to ship something that was paid for within 45 minutes of auction close?), I instantly got a negative feedback accusing me of all sorts of horrible behavior. What a bunch of con artists.
It won't ever belong to you. "Your honor this person is tampering with the car's safety system." Pretty much says it all.
You can tamper all you like with your car's safety system -- you own the car. However, depending on which systems you disable, it will probably not pass inspection if you do so, and would not be legal to operate on a public street.
Yes, but don't fsck with the black box. Kind of like people rewinding odometers, it will be forbidden.
You can tamper with your odometer all you like. It's yours to do with as you please. What is illegal is selling the vehicle without an accurate disclosure of the vehicle's mileage. If you alter (or break) the odometer but keep other records of mileage, and disclose the odometer situation and records to the person you sell the car to, that's perfectly legal.
You are lucky to have such thought provoking friends, but I'm afraid the individual has no standing.
At least the OP's friend is asking realistic legal questions. You're making crazy statements that have no relationship to the law whatsoever.
You can, if you want to drive with hand signals and during the day time. Hand signals are perfectly legal, I also rear ended a guy who stopped and was making a right hand turn, took me a second to realize that his lights weren't working.
In the vast majority of states, if the car came with turn signals as original equipment, then they must be functioning for it to be street legal. But yes, in the daytime you could certainly use hand signals in lieu of your functioning signals if you decided to.
Would you respect this man as a business man if he were to tell the secret of his invention to the whole world in a Yahoo news story?
"Telling all the secrets" is the primary function of a patent, and I assume as a businessman he submitted a patent application before sending his device out to be viewed by academic reviewers (who of course all verified it worked but refused to be identified -- yeah, right). So yes, I do consider that if he's not willing to share details, he's probably full of it.
Irradiating foods (not making them radioactive, but exposing them to radiation) used to be an accepted practice of reducing the microbial load on fruits and vegatables, making them less likely to give you food poisoning. But then people, like the moderator, thought "Irradiation = Nuk-u-lar = glow-in-the-dark = CANCER!" and the practice stopped.
So? People are allowed to make stupid buying decisions. The answer is not to lie to them about what they're buying in the hopes you can trick them into buying something they don't want just because YOU think it's a good product.
While I personally think irradiating food is great for safety, I can hardly blame someone for not wanting to eat a food processed in an entirely new way that has no history to prove it is safe. There's nothing irrational about choosing the devil you know over the devil you don't know. It's also fairly well-established that even low levels of artificial radiation lower the nutritional value of foods quickly (even normal heat radiation used in cooking). Who are you (or the food industray) to unilaterally say that the lower nutritional value of irradiated foods didn't offset the benefit of irradiation over a person's lifetime, particularly in fruits and vegetables where Americans eat notoriously low amounts and every bit of nutrition is critical?
you simply assume it is not Kosher or Hallal by default.
That's because meat IS not Kosher or Hallal by default. Making it kosher or hallal is a special thing. This is not rocket science.
Adding specially designed artificial bacteriophages is not a "default" food condition. That is a special, artificial process that has to be ADDED.
Also, there is no warning that vegetables have been treated with pesticides. You naturally assume it is the case.
And indeed, that is backwards and wrong. We started using pesticides on food back in the era where we were a stupid species who had no idea that toying with food could have anything but beneficial effects.
If you are putting a warning about something like this, which does not effect the nutritional value of the food, there is a agenda to it.
WTF? If I add water to chicken it doesn't affect the nutritional value, but that is required to be on the packaging because it is a common way to increase the "weight" of the chicken and thus sell less food for more money. If I added a teaspoon of HIV positive blood to your breakfast cereal, that wouldn't affect the nutritional value, and shouldn't (by all current scientific knowledge) affect your health, but I'm pretty sure you'd like to know about it. If I masturbated onto your steak before cooking it in a restaurant, I think you'd like to know, though it shouldn't affect the nutritional value.
Suggesting that someone has to have a sinister "agenda" because they'd like to know what they're buying is an absolutely idiotic straw man argument.
I don't know how such a simple concept as "people would like to know what has been artificially added to their food" can be anything less than basic common sense.
It is as if the Consumers Union is in the bizarro universe.
yeah, some sort of Bizarro universe where Windows and Mac comprise 99.9% of desktop computers available to the general consumer and most people couldn't install a new Operating System if you held their family hostage. Someone needs to tell them to put down that reefer and join the real world!
I generally like CR, but it seems like every time they review something I personally know about, they screw it up. It's possible that my area of interest, technology, is the only glaring hole in their testing ability, but that seems somewhat unlikely.
It's much more likely that you, as an expert or enthusiast in specific feilds, simply aren't judging things the way an average consumer would. I see this in practically every test Consumer Reports does on topics I follow -- every other enthusiast I know complains about the methodology and i have to explain to them that CR isn't testing for people like them who know every nut and bolt of the system.
I have a Jeep and have to hear complaints every year from fellow Jeepers when CR rates Jeeps poorly, that CR "doesn't get it" and that by comparing it to a Honda Accord they're being stupid. No, they aren't -- the Jeep is a lousy vehicle for the average family, and the Honda Accord is great. Just because you or I are not average, or have different priorities, doesn't mean our opinions or taste matter to the average car buyer.
Yes, CR's computer reviews are sometimes strange, but the ultimate result is something that the average consumer can look at and make a reasonable purchasing decision. No, they aren't getting down to comparing FPS per dollar or any other enthusiast criteria, they're taking surveys of past customers and reliability and making recommendations for the average Joe. That's perfectly sensible, even though I'm never going to buy a computer based on their criteria.
I don't agree w/ warrantless wiretaps... Should the administration be forced to bring official charges against suspect? Of course. Should they get warrants (even the emergency court ones would do)? Sure. But if you want this terror problem dealt with, you have to punish those who are caught and convicted. Not let them off easy.
So basically you're complaining about liberals hamstringing the government, yet agree with all their complaints and think the government should have to follow the law.
Which "liberal" exactly is suggesting that convicted terrorists should be "let off easy"?
I think you've been so programmed with a Pavlovin response to the word "liberal" that you're no longer even paying attention to what anyone is actually saying or doing, you're just cheering for your own team and against the "liberals". Seriously, take a step back and ask who does more damage -- some liberal pundit on CNN, or a government official purposely circumventing the fourth amendment and telling you to say "thank you"?
how does listening to INTERNATIONAL phone calls impune your you rights as a citizien?
Um, because I'm on this end of the call? here, in the United States? And I'm a US Citizen, with all the right guaranteed us by the Constitution? What difference does it make where the other end of the call is, they're still eavesdropping domestically on US Citizens. If they want to listen in on calls between Bangladesh and Egypt, go right ahead. But fi they want to listen in on Americans who are in America, then they damn well better follow the laws of America while doing it.
It depends on which Steve Jobs you want to believe. Jobs from 5 years ago spouting off about how "clock cycles aren't everything" and "IBM and Motorola chips are far superior to any Intel chips" or the Jobs of today with "Our new Intel chips make our old chips look like solid state transistors".
I'm convinced slashot is filled with people who just enjoy not being willing to understand the simplest of things.
The PowerPC G5 processor is an absolutely superior design to anything Intel was putting out in the 90s. I don't know of any hardware geek who disagrees, although they may disagree on real-world performance with available complete systems.
That Intel is putting out well-designed power-efficient processors today does nothing to change the past. That IBM is uninterested in desktop computer processors NOW and is allowing the G5 to languish does nothing to diminish the fundamental superiority of the processor design, or the performance advantage it had years ago during active development.
You may as well complain that car buyers today are just fanbois, because beack in the 60s everyone knew Japanese imports were lousy, cheap machines that barely stood up to American cars. Yet now people say Japanese cars are great and reliable -- I mean, gosh, make up your minds, guys, flip-flop much? Once something is bad or good, it has to stay that way FOREVER, Mister Whirly said so!
The local brands at my market have as much combined shelf space as the national brands do, so I can't exactly be alone.
Statistically, yes you are alone. Coke and Pesi are the brands that everyone knows and everyone copies. Yes, local markets will have other brands, but those other brands are fighting over the 50% of the market left once Pepsi and Coke are done.
My prediction was for ten years. Ten years ago "everyone" wanted a Sony Walkman. "Everyone" is an ass, and fickle, especially when it comes to fashion.
Considering iPods have been around for half a decade already, and are more popular than ever, I'm not sure what you expect to change. There are no new music formats on the horizon, no new distribution even being experimented with. Every change for the previous 50 years was because of a change in physical format and portability.
The only change I can forsee is the perpetually "almost available" convergence device, the MP3 cell phone with everything else in one box. People have been trying to build that monstrosity for almost a decade already and have made little headway, and it isn't a technology limitation. Building it isn't a problem, it's making it usable and attractive that is hard, and coincidentally that is the exact set of problems Apple solved with the iPod (and continues to show uncanny ability in solving). There's a reason the only cell phone rumor that continually gets non-phone geeks excited is the iPhone.
I mean, we trust and respect the ACLU because it stands up for our rights. When it finds instances of rights abuse, it takes them to court and makes sure justice is done. But if the ACLU is no longer willing to trust the courts, and instead insists on shopping around until it finds a Judge who will rule according to the ACLU's own opinion, what then?
I don't think there's any mystery to this -- the ACLU specifically argues that every constitutional right should be interpreted in such a way as to give the most amount of freedom to the individuals. That some people (judeges or not) disagree with this interpretation is self-evident, but that doens't change their argument or the principle behind it. And generally speaking the ACLU tends to be correct in the long run -- though sometimes it takes a few generations for the courts to agree that the people have as many rights as the founders intended. Pretty much any federal case filed will be filed in the jurisdiction perceived to be the most favorable to the filer.
Warrants are through a public schema. I can think of two big reasons not to want the existence of monitoring made public:
1. it tips off the bad guys to their being monitored and they respond with counter-surveillance, and
2. unsavoury corporate or political espionage, notably when designed to subvert competition in either area
The prior is legitimate, but could maybe be appeased with a time-delay on making the warrant public.
No, the federal government has the FISA court, which is 100% secret, to approve such warrants. That's the amazing thing -- they aren't even willing to let a secret court they control completely oversee the program!
Indeed, the most effective attack on an airport would probably be to just wheel in luggage carts filled to the brim with explosives in suitcases. Do it right when several international flights are landing and you'll have 2,000 people standing around the baggage pickup. You could kill them all without going through any security checkpoints (yes some airports have baggage pickup behind security -- many do not).
Blowing up planes is splashy and gets attention, but lets's not kid ourselves that their goal is to inflict the maximum physical damage possible. They could do that much more easily -- it's fear they want to maximize, and everything we've done for the past 5 years has been playing into their hands as much as possible.
To carry out the procedure you describe, taking into account all the different interactions between multiple element types, multiple attributes, multiple properties with multiple values of multiple lengths would involve writing millions of testcases. Are you volunteering?
If only we had some sort of machine that could perform tasks in an automated fashion much faster than humans. If it were able to be "programmed" in some way, it could indeed calculate or "compute" results for large numbers of problems in short periods of time.
It would be great if Microsoft looked into such an automation tool, I suspect it would be handy in such situations where you have to test millions of permutations on a system. I guess until now they've only been dealing with simple things like Windows operating systems, which only have a few hundred possible testcases that are all run manually.
I doubt that if Darwin had any inkling of the existence of things like DNA and the unfathomable complexity of the DNA in each of the 50 trillion+ cells in his body, would he so easily have dreamt up the garbage that he felt the need to put down on paper.
I doubt you have any idea what you're talking about. The discovery of DNA is one of the most powerful peices of confirming evidence we have for evolution. The existence of DNA, or something like it, was absolutely required by the theory of evolution, and yet at the time of Darwin there was no reason whatsoever to believe that something like DNA existed.
It was, in fact, one of the main criticisms of the theory at the time -- that there was no sufficiently complex mechanism by which traits could be passed on but which occassionally would screw up and just change the blueprint in unpredictable ways. It had to be some fundamental mechanism shared not just by specific creatures, but in fact all life on earth -- and nobody looking at a plant cell and an animal cell would reasonably believe they had some common mechanism of design. It was, quite frankly, ludicrous.
But that is the predictive power of an accurate theory -- it says that something MUST exist, even it is crazy and counterintuitive. And then if you find, 150 years later, that that thing DOES exist, it is powerful evidence that the thoery was correct in significant ways. That is exactly what DNA did for evolution. It not only provided a mechanism for traits, it was easily shown how despite being rugged in many ways, it could be changed by many environmental factors and pass those changes on to descendants. It was about as close as you get to a slam-dunk confirmation in science.
This is certianly the most insightful comment on the whole topic.
Up there with Suck.com, I'd place TheSpot.com. TheSpot was the first massivley successful viral campaign of all time, something impossible to pull off before the Web existed. Which was ironic since they never figured out what they were campaigning for, other than the agency that made the site.
Slashdot Mirror
That's okay, it wasn't a proper movie.
I disagree - programmers are two a penny, but a good idea is incredibly valuable.
If you're just talking about code-monkeys, then I'd agree they aren't particularly rare. But the guys involved in this project are developers who it seems will be expected to work out most of the actual *workings* of whatever "idea" is presented, and they have histories of coming up with useful and usable interfaces.
Saying "I want a program that will automatically fix the tags of all my MP3 files" is not hard. It's coming up with an algorithm or system to analyze song files successfully, or an interface to efficiently present songs to the user for identification, that would be the hard part.
Obviously if the entrants of this contest have already worked out the implementation details and interface for the idea and just need a programmer with Objective C experience to get it working, then the idea man deserves the major credit. But that's not what this contest sounds like to me.
You're correct on both counts!
A blind feedback system would be vastly preferable to both the current one and my suggestion of seller-first feedback. I'd even heard the blind system suggested before and somehow forgot!
And yes, there should be some account of monetary value and buyer's reputation when a seller gets a feedback score. I've sold several thousand dollars of expensive electronics and photo gear on eBay to other eBayers who've been there for years, yet have a feedback rating in the double-digits. Scammers can come on with new accounts and sell bubble gum to each other for high feedback in a single day. Similarly, the buyer should get more credit for a good high-value transaction with a longtime seller.
Absolutely, a blind system is better than my idea and eBay's current system.
They do need a Google pagerank-ish weighting system of feedback value -- a $1,000 purchase from a guy who has been on eBay 5 years is worth more than a thousand purchases of sharpie markers from a brand new seller.
You get more than just an iPod. Winners get a Macbook as well as royalties over the shareware that will be developed for them. That sounds like a pretty good return for just providing a good idea.
Indeed, ideas are cheap and plentiful. Finding people who can implement them and work out the details is the hard part. As a PR move, this is great for publicity, but I don't think there are many talented [programmers|authors|artists] sitting around just wishing they had a new idea to use their skills on. Usually talented people lament the fact that they'll never get to finish one in every hundred ideas they have in the short time they have on Earth.
But hey, it's still a cool idea and might very well result in some novel new toys. I know I'll be tossing around concepts in my mind for the next few days!
I agree completely that one of the biggest, most fundamental and most easily fixed problems is the feedback machanism.
The sellers should be required, without exception, to leave feedback prior to the buyer leaving feedback. Sellers don't do anything until the buyer upholds their end of the deal (payment), and while issues can still arise (bad addresses, fraudlent claims of loss), the vast majority of issues come from sellers not upholding their end of the bargain, or providing lousy service and communication.
This solution is so obvious and so easy, and I've seen it suggested so many times over the years that I've come to the conclusion eBay actually prefers to be a den of thieves allowing sellers to threaten retribution on any buyer who dares complain about bad service. The one time I honestly had a problem with a seller and reported it (should it take 5 weeks to ship something that was paid for within 45 minutes of auction close?), I instantly got a negative feedback accusing me of all sorts of horrible behavior. What a bunch of con artists.
It won't ever belong to you. "Your honor this person is tampering with the car's safety system." Pretty much says it all.
You can tamper all you like with your car's safety system -- you own the car. However, depending on which systems you disable, it will probably not pass inspection if you do so, and would not be legal to operate on a public street.
Yes, but don't fsck with the black box. Kind of like people rewinding odometers, it will be forbidden.
You can tamper with your odometer all you like. It's yours to do with as you please. What is illegal is selling the vehicle without an accurate disclosure of the vehicle's mileage. If you alter (or break) the odometer but keep other records of mileage, and disclose the odometer situation and records to the person you sell the car to, that's perfectly legal.
You are lucky to have such thought provoking friends, but I'm afraid the individual has no standing.
At least the OP's friend is asking realistic legal questions. You're making crazy statements that have no relationship to the law whatsoever.
You can, if you want to drive with hand signals and during the day time. Hand signals are perfectly legal, I also rear ended a guy who stopped and was making a right hand turn, took me a second to realize that his lights weren't working.
In the vast majority of states, if the car came with turn signals as original equipment, then they must be functioning for it to be street legal. But yes, in the daytime you could certainly use hand signals in lieu of your functioning signals if you decided to.
Would you respect this man as a business man if he were to tell the secret of his invention to the whole world in a Yahoo news story?
"Telling all the secrets" is the primary function of a patent, and I assume as a businessman he submitted a patent application before sending his device out to be viewed by academic reviewers (who of course all verified it worked but refused to be identified -- yeah, right). So yes, I do consider that if he's not willing to share details, he's probably full of it.
DISCLAIMER: I've got a good amount of Irish blood in me, no need to flame.
:P
Yeah, Irish blood is around 180 proof, which is very dangerous around flames.
Irradiating foods (not making them radioactive, but exposing them to radiation) used to be an accepted practice of reducing the microbial load on fruits and vegatables, making them less likely to give you food poisoning. But then people, like the moderator, thought "Irradiation = Nuk-u-lar = glow-in-the-dark = CANCER!" and the practice stopped.
So? People are allowed to make stupid buying decisions. The answer is not to lie to them about what they're buying in the hopes you can trick them into buying something they don't want just because YOU think it's a good product.
While I personally think irradiating food is great for safety, I can hardly blame someone for not wanting to eat a food processed in an entirely new way that has no history to prove it is safe. There's nothing irrational about choosing the devil you know over the devil you don't know. It's also fairly well-established that even low levels of artificial radiation lower the nutritional value of foods quickly (even normal heat radiation used in cooking). Who are you (or the food industray) to unilaterally say that the lower nutritional value of irradiated foods didn't offset the benefit of irradiation over a person's lifetime, particularly in fruits and vegetables where Americans eat notoriously low amounts and every bit of nutrition is critical?
you simply assume it is not Kosher or Hallal by default.
That's because meat IS not Kosher or Hallal by default. Making it kosher or hallal is a special thing. This is not rocket science.
Adding specially designed artificial bacteriophages is not a "default" food condition. That is a special, artificial process that has to be ADDED.
Also, there is no warning that vegetables have been treated with pesticides. You naturally assume it is the case.
And indeed, that is backwards and wrong. We started using pesticides on food back in the era where we were a stupid species who had no idea that toying with food could have anything but beneficial effects.
If you are putting a warning about something like this, which does not effect the nutritional value of the food, there is a agenda to it.
WTF? If I add water to chicken it doesn't affect the nutritional value, but that is required to be on the packaging because it is a common way to increase the "weight" of the chicken and thus sell less food for more money. If I added a teaspoon of HIV positive blood to your breakfast cereal, that wouldn't affect the nutritional value, and shouldn't (by all current scientific knowledge) affect your health, but I'm pretty sure you'd like to know about it. If I masturbated onto your steak before cooking it in a restaurant, I think you'd like to know, though it shouldn't affect the nutritional value.
Suggesting that someone has to have a sinister "agenda" because they'd like to know what they're buying is an absolutely idiotic straw man argument.
I don't know how such a simple concept as "people would like to know what has been artificially added to their food" can be anything less than basic common sense.
It is as if the Consumers Union is in the bizarro universe.
yeah, some sort of Bizarro universe where Windows and Mac comprise 99.9% of desktop computers available to the general consumer and most people couldn't install a new Operating System if you held their family hostage. Someone needs to tell them to put down that reefer and join the real world!
I generally like CR, but it seems like every time they review something I personally know about, they screw it up. It's possible that my area of interest, technology, is the only glaring hole in their testing ability, but that seems somewhat unlikely.
It's much more likely that you, as an expert or enthusiast in specific feilds, simply aren't judging things the way an average consumer would. I see this in practically every test Consumer Reports does on topics I follow -- every other enthusiast I know complains about the methodology and i have to explain to them that CR isn't testing for people like them who know every nut and bolt of the system.
I have a Jeep and have to hear complaints every year from fellow Jeepers when CR rates Jeeps poorly, that CR "doesn't get it" and that by comparing it to a Honda Accord they're being stupid. No, they aren't -- the Jeep is a lousy vehicle for the average family, and the Honda Accord is great. Just because you or I are not average, or have different priorities, doesn't mean our opinions or taste matter to the average car buyer.
Yes, CR's computer reviews are sometimes strange, but the ultimate result is something that the average consumer can look at and make a reasonable purchasing decision. No, they aren't getting down to comparing FPS per dollar or any other enthusiast criteria, they're taking surveys of past customers and reliability and making recommendations for the average Joe. That's perfectly sensible, even though I'm never going to buy a computer based on their criteria.
I don't agree w/ warrantless wiretaps ... Should the administration be forced to bring official charges against suspect? Of course. Should they get warrants (even the emergency court ones would do)? Sure. But if you want this terror problem dealt with, you have to punish those who are caught and convicted. Not let them off easy.
So basically you're complaining about liberals hamstringing the government, yet agree with all their complaints and think the government should have to follow the law.
Which "liberal" exactly is suggesting that convicted terrorists should be "let off easy"?
I think you've been so programmed with a Pavlovin response to the word "liberal" that you're no longer even paying attention to what anyone is actually saying or doing, you're just cheering for your own team and against the "liberals". Seriously, take a step back and ask who does more damage -- some liberal pundit on CNN, or a government official purposely circumventing the fourth amendment and telling you to say "thank you"?
how does listening to INTERNATIONAL phone calls impune your you rights as a citizien?
Um, because I'm on this end of the call? here, in the United States? And I'm a US Citizen, with all the right guaranteed us by the Constitution? What difference does it make where the other end of the call is, they're still eavesdropping domestically on US Citizens. If they want to listen in on calls between Bangladesh and Egypt, go right ahead. But fi they want to listen in on Americans who are in America, then they damn well better follow the laws of America while doing it.
It depends on which Steve Jobs you want to believe. Jobs from 5 years ago spouting off about how "clock cycles aren't everything" and "IBM and Motorola chips are far superior to any Intel chips" or the Jobs of today with "Our new Intel chips make our old chips look like solid state transistors".
I'm convinced slashot is filled with people who just enjoy not being willing to understand the simplest of things.
The PowerPC G5 processor is an absolutely superior design to anything Intel was putting out in the 90s. I don't know of any hardware geek who disagrees, although they may disagree on real-world performance with available complete systems.
That Intel is putting out well-designed power-efficient processors today does nothing to change the past. That IBM is uninterested in desktop computer processors NOW and is allowing the G5 to languish does nothing to diminish the fundamental superiority of the processor design, or the performance advantage it had years ago during active development.
You may as well complain that car buyers today are just fanbois, because beack in the 60s everyone knew Japanese imports were lousy, cheap machines that barely stood up to American cars. Yet now people say Japanese cars are great and reliable -- I mean, gosh, make up your minds, guys, flip-flop much? Once something is bad or good, it has to stay that way FOREVER, Mister Whirly said so!
The local brands at my market have as much combined shelf space as the national brands do, so I can't exactly be alone.
Statistically, yes you are alone. Coke and Pesi are the brands that everyone knows and everyone copies. Yes, local markets will have other brands, but those other brands are fighting over the 50% of the market left once Pepsi and Coke are done.
My prediction was for ten years. Ten years ago "everyone" wanted a Sony Walkman. "Everyone" is an ass, and fickle, especially when it comes to fashion.
Considering iPods have been around for half a decade already, and are more popular than ever, I'm not sure what you expect to change. There are no new music formats on the horizon, no new distribution even being experimented with. Every change for the previous 50 years was because of a change in physical format and portability.
The only change I can forsee is the perpetually "almost available" convergence device, the MP3 cell phone with everything else in one box. People have been trying to build that monstrosity for almost a decade already and have made little headway, and it isn't a technology limitation. Building it isn't a problem, it's making it usable and attractive that is hard, and coincidentally that is the exact set of problems Apple solved with the iPod (and continues to show uncanny ability in solving). There's a reason the only cell phone rumor that continually gets non-phone geeks excited is the iPhone.
I mean, we trust and respect the ACLU because it stands up for our rights. When it finds instances of rights abuse, it takes them to court and makes sure justice is done. But if the ACLU is no longer willing to trust the courts, and instead insists on shopping around until it finds a Judge who will rule according to the ACLU's own opinion, what then?
I don't think there's any mystery to this -- the ACLU specifically argues that every constitutional right should be interpreted in such a way as to give the most amount of freedom to the individuals. That some people (judeges or not) disagree with this interpretation is self-evident, but that doens't change their argument or the principle behind it. And generally speaking the ACLU tends to be correct in the long run -- though sometimes it takes a few generations for the courts to agree that the people have as many rights as the founders intended. Pretty much any federal case filed will be filed in the jurisdiction perceived to be the most favorable to the filer.
Warrants are through a public schema. I can think of two big reasons not to want the existence of monitoring made public:
1. it tips off the bad guys to their being monitored and they respond with counter-surveillance, and
2. unsavoury corporate or political espionage, notably when designed to subvert competition in either area
The prior is legitimate, but could maybe be appeased with a time-delay on making the warrant public.
No, the federal government has the FISA court, which is 100% secret, to approve such warrants. That's the amazing thing -- they aren't even willing to let a secret court they control completely oversee the program!
Indeed, the most effective attack on an airport would probably be to just wheel in luggage carts filled to the brim with explosives in suitcases. Do it right when several international flights are landing and you'll have 2,000 people standing around the baggage pickup. You could kill them all without going through any security checkpoints (yes some airports have baggage pickup behind security -- many do not).
Blowing up planes is splashy and gets attention, but lets's not kid ourselves that their goal is to inflict the maximum physical damage possible. They could do that much more easily -- it's fear they want to maximize, and everything we've done for the past 5 years has been playing into their hands as much as possible.
To carry out the procedure you describe, taking into account all the different interactions between multiple element types, multiple attributes, multiple properties with multiple values of multiple lengths would involve writing millions of testcases. Are you volunteering?
If only we had some sort of machine that could perform tasks in an automated fashion much faster than humans. If it were able to be "programmed" in some way, it could indeed calculate or "compute" results for large numbers of problems in short periods of time.
It would be great if Microsoft looked into such an automation tool, I suspect it would be handy in such situations where you have to test millions of permutations on a system. I guess until now they've only been dealing with simple things like Windows operating systems, which only have a few hundred possible testcases that are all run manually.
I doubt that if Darwin had any inkling of the existence of things like DNA and the unfathomable complexity of the DNA in each of the 50 trillion+ cells in his body, would he so easily have dreamt up the garbage that he felt the need to put down on paper.
I doubt you have any idea what you're talking about. The discovery of DNA is one of the most powerful peices of confirming evidence we have for evolution. The existence of DNA, or something like it, was absolutely required by the theory of evolution, and yet at the time of Darwin there was no reason whatsoever to believe that something like DNA existed.
It was, in fact, one of the main criticisms of the theory at the time -- that there was no sufficiently complex mechanism by which traits could be passed on but which occassionally would screw up and just change the blueprint in unpredictable ways. It had to be some fundamental mechanism shared not just by specific creatures, but in fact all life on earth -- and nobody looking at a plant cell and an animal cell would reasonably believe they had some common mechanism of design. It was, quite frankly, ludicrous.
But that is the predictive power of an accurate theory -- it says that something MUST exist, even it is crazy and counterintuitive. And then if you find, 150 years later, that that thing DOES exist, it is powerful evidence that the thoery was correct in significant ways. That is exactly what DNA did for evolution. It not only provided a mechanism for traits, it was easily shown how despite being rugged in many ways, it could be changed by many environmental factors and pass those changes on to descendants. It was about as close as you get to a slam-dunk confirmation in science.
This is certianly the most insightful comment on the whole topic.
Up there with Suck.com, I'd place TheSpot.com. TheSpot was the first massivley successful viral campaign of all time, something impossible to pull off before the Web existed. Which was ironic since they never figured out what they were campaigning for, other than the agency that made the site.
Wait a minute. Doesn't anyone know that the word google isn't a verb, isn't owned by a company, but actually refers to a mathematical number?
Google is a made up word. Googol is a one followed by a hundred zeros.
Trademarking a made-up spelling of a real word is perfectly acceptable, and quite common.