This sort of thing is typical with office machinery. Especially printers, and scanners. Kodak will sell you a scanner for almost nothing, and then charge you 10,000 a year to use the thing at full speed. Ostensibly, you could roll your own scan software, and run it as fast as the hardware will go, but Kodak stops that too with some firmware in the hardware. It's a pain to even get the scanner to work as a twain device, and even if you can, it won't run faster than 2ppm. My company found away around this thanks to some clever IT staff. (bows) It turns out you can clone a dongle pretty easily.;)
Having worked in government records... I have the opposite opinion. Public records are just becoming truly public for the first time in history. I don't have a problem with this. It's a public record, what exactly do you think you are hiding?
So anyone can find out where you live, how old you are, where you went to school, which hospital you prefer, and what you drive. Big deal. All this information was trivial for anyone to look at before. The only difference is you THOUGHT it was hard. That's not privacy any more than taking bottled water from air travelers is security.
People need to realize that PUBLIC records means FUCKING PUBLIC. However, I don't think that's likely to happen, people have a tough time grasping the concept these days. I wonder if facebook/myspace et all can be held accountable?
There have been companies (like Lexis Nexis) that have been collating and gathering this kind of data for a couple decades. People only just now becoming aware of this does not make it nefarious or dangerous. It wasn't dangerous or nefarious 10 years ago, or twenty. Just because you put computers in the mix, it doesn't become so. Specifically, license plate data is ALREADY COLLECTED by most state DOTs. How? Why? With street view cameras, ostensibly for traffic research and control. However, the point is that the data is ALREADY being collected and used by government agencies. What is the big deal about a few private contractors getting in on it?
Respectfully, you are the one that needs some perspective. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people die EVERY DAY. A few thousand in one place at one time is a tragedy. However its hardly a big deal on the scale of the entire planet. We make it out as a big deal because for the most part, people in western "civilized" cultures are largely unaware of the reality around them. Especially outside their own country.
I hate to tell you this, but that bulkhead the Israelis installed has little to do with the lack of hijackings. What has a lot more to do with it is the Mossad, and their habit of killing entire bloodlines.
The Israelis did one thing properly. They made the cost of crossing them VERY high. It won't just cost you the lives of the hijackers, but also their friends and family, and possibly retaliatory strikes in addition.
Which is why DRM is ALWAYS breakable, were as PGP isn't necessarily. DRM is security theater at it's best. Nothing more.
Ultimately, DRM will accomplish nothing other than to frustrate some users, limit others and on good days, go unnoticed. It will NEVER stop people from copying content. It never has, and it never will.
This is where the Intel Education foundation comes in. They pretty much spend all their time developing classroom and learning materials for teachers and students all over the world. At one point, Intel and OLPC were trying to make a deal to get this material on every OLPC, but that fell apart when they ended up fighting about poaching. Two organizations with laudable goals, and they end up in a bitch fight over territory and minor details.
Anyway, the point is there is more than a little bit of educational material out there but for the asking.
Palm is the LEAST locked platform I know of, it certainly has been for the several years preceding the current crop of phones. My treo sitting in my desk drawer nearly doesn't have any original software left on it. I've got remote desktop, shell remote, third party browsers, a hacked message cue that runs threaded convos into a one page readable display (think IRC), a dozen or so games, a file browser with full function, Document viewer and editor, email, fax, SMS, MMS and it actually works as a phone still. I have the source for almost every piece of software on the phone.
I can't speak for WinMo or Blackberry, but Palm is far from locked down. Worth considering, this phone is 8 years old and on a feature level it competes with most of the newer phones. Sure, the touch screen is less than stellar, and the camera SUCKS, but on the software level it competes easily with anything out there.
Also, if you are going to be a rampant fanboi, could you at least not use phrases like "vibrant marketplace"? I get enough buzzwords from the morons in the marketing department. Kthx.
You realize that every machine you swipe your card through has a record of your card number, and a few button presses latter will print it out, along with every card from that day, or week, or month, etc etc... Do you trust the vetted bank employee with some oversight more than you trust the burger flipper and the chic at the coffee drive through? How about the guy working at best buy, he also asked for your address and zip code. Ever consider that one?
The bottom line is that the only reason that credit cards work is because MOST people don't know they can sell those lists of card numbers and names to a third party. If there were a fast, easy way to do so, and it became common knowledge, the credit industry would fall apart in a matter of months.
Gestures aren't only for "multi-touch". I've been using windows software called "Stroke-it" for years. It allows for mouse gestures to be any kind of input you'd like. It's easy to program and even easier to use. Most of the stock gestures are intuitive, and you can record any gesture you can make with the mouse. While it lacks a certain amount of refinement that multi-touch (can) provide(s), it's still a vast improvement for the stand mouse UI.
Incorrect. The DHDs automatically calculate drift and orbit as a matter of course. Normally, if you move a gate from one world to another, it gets a whole new address based on the constellations of it's new home. This is why the earth gate didn't work except between adabadoss and earth (very close together), until they discovered the list of addresses, and Carter figured out that stellar drift would change the addresses over time.
Stargate addresses (until SGU) are based on the position, and nothing else. The 7 symbols are 6 coordinates and a point of origin. Ostensibly based on the constellations visible from the planet you start from. Interestingly, this implies that every planet has different gate symbols on it's gate, but they ignore that except in the first episodes because it's too complicated to deal with. In the first couple episodes, they make a point of having Jackson "figure out" how to dial home. Later they just have a single address that always means earth.
As for humans vs Ancients... Humans are the "second evolution" of the ancients. Nothing made them forget, they simply all died/ascended. However, they did seed many many worlds, and humans on earth are the most advanced of these seeded races (ostensibly).
Actually, little ancient repair bots would have been a really good tie back to the replicators. Since the ancients created the replicators in the first place. (well, the Pegasus ones anyway). However, given the apparent timelines, the repair drones would have to be a precursor technology to the replicators. Which could easily be made to work. "Hey, I found a bunch of little robots patching hull plates over here, see if you can get them to fix the air systems"
The ATA therapy only works for 1 out of 10 people (per atlantis episodes).
Going a bit off cannon, but it's not hard to imagine that this ship didn't have the ATA requirement because the ATA gene requirement was developed for Pegasus galaxy ancients due to the wraith, which were created by the ancients, most likely an eon after this ship was launched from the milky way. At least, that's how I rationalized it.
Not to be pedantic, but they weren't in "hyperspace". The Destiny travels faster than light without hyperspace (unknown how yet). Rush made a comment about it early on.
Which goes a little ways to explain why it looks so damn cool.
They ignored EVE because it's nearly as complicated as the real world and just as messed up. They obviously didn't want the hassle of studying anything of true significance.
Actually, being an attentive and skilled operator of your vehicle can and will reduce the chances of an accident drastically. I have several horror stories about coming within inches of a major accident, only to dodge it. Mainly because I take my cars to track day and know exactly how far they can be pushed. If you do this regularly, and you pay attention while driving, you can and will react properly in an emergency. Your "average" driver out there is a danger to themselves and everyone else. But there are some of us that can actually handle our cars. At the end of the day, nothing is going to solve the problem of idiots on the road, but you can go a long way towards mitigating it.
The bottom line is that there is little technical difference left between phone and internet systems now. As time goes on the difference gets smaller and smaller. Eventually it won't exist at all. What that means is that neutrality applies, or at the very least that it should apply. That is, if it existed in the first place, but it doesn't yet. AT&T runs the vast majority of your phone traffic through it's internet backbones as IP traffic. Ultimately net neutrality will be required to level the telco field in the near future, as it will be required to keep the internet from becoming the quagmire that the telco system currently is.
Personally, I think the infrastructure should be owned by the government and open to all on equal ground. This would allow the infrastructure to be (theoretically) managed for the good of all, and at a reasonable price, while also allowing reasonable competition among service providers. If everyone started from an equal playing field, the best service would win. Instead of the largest monopoly.
My mother has never played a game for more than 20 minutes in her life. However, she does have an iPhone, and every time we talk she has a new game on it to show me. Some of them are even mildly entertaining. I've talked to her about it, and she has no interest in stepping up to a real gaming machine, either portable or console. So there is some truth that people like her are "flocking" to the Iphone as a game console. However, there is NO truth that this is in any way a threat to established consoles. People that buy an Iphone don't buy it as a game console. They do however play some games once they have one.
License agreements can not give a corporation legal rights that don't exist. The license is, and can only, provide legal protections that already exist in law. Any license that takes liberties can be overturned with enough money and effort. This is the real problem with our corporate overlords. They can and do take liberties and seldom do we as consumers take them back.
Amazon has WAY overstepped themselves here, and they clearly know it. The only question that remains is will anyone take them to court over it.
All of this is absurd. There is no "undue" harm or burden on Dell or HP here. I speak as someone that worked in dell's testing lab for more than a year creating these images. It would be TRIVIAL for dell to make new images and put them into production. None of the hardware is changing, only the software and only the office suite at that. There is no known case where removing Office (or just word from the office install) would cause any issues. Other than not being able to open a number of document types, but then, that's the whole point. It might take them a week or two, but they have 60 days or more, so it's not like it's going to hurt them. Further, they make new images regularly for new systems, it's not like they don't do this shit every day.
At the end of the day, this is a further play by MS's lackeys to fight this legitimate injunction on behave of MS. Nothing more. Nothing less.
You, like most people miss the point of the new meters. They transfer the cost of use directly onto the driver. Where as the old meters had to be emptied and maintained by the thousands, these new meters can be emptied less often (more CC, less coin) and there are an order of magnitude less of them.
The ones they installed in Portland even have a spiffy automated cart that empties them. The meter maids pull up in their special golf carts, and the machine does the rest. It's considerably cheaper for the city itself, and the "cost" is the same to the driver. With the added bonus of slightly more hassle. It's also no longer possible to break a meter to get free parking, something I have seen done more than once. Now if the local meter is broken, you are supposed to find the next nearest one and use it instead.
The only downside for the city is the increase in pedestrian accidents because people are forced to cross the street (usually mid block) to get to the meter on the other side. And then back again. Most people just jaywalk, and this causes accidents. Portland had an expose about it a year or so ago, but I can't be bothered to dig through the horrid oregonian website to find it.
The extremely long tradition of what? Did you say fairness? You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Sports, especially professional sports has NEVER been about fairness. OK, maybe back in 776BC, but certainly not in any modern iteration. As with anything else, once you put the incentives on the side of "winning" rather than "competing with honor" you've already lost any shred of fairness you might have had. I'm not going to outright say that all professional athletes are cheating, but it's not unreasonable to say they take every advantage they can get. Often including advantages that are outside the rules of their given sport. Genetic advantages not withstanding. We just haven't reached the level where genetic rules have been put in place, clearly though we are on the way.
I respect professional athletes that do compete with honor. However, I'm never surprised to find out when it turns out they aren't.
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This sort of thing is typical with office machinery. Especially printers, and scanners. Kodak will sell you a scanner for almost nothing, and then charge you 10,000 a year to use the thing at full speed. Ostensibly, you could roll your own scan software, and run it as fast as the hardware will go, but Kodak stops that too with some firmware in the hardware. It's a pain to even get the scanner to work as a twain device, and even if you can, it won't run faster than 2ppm. My company found away around this thanks to some clever IT staff. (bows) It turns out you can clone a dongle pretty easily. ;)
Having worked in government records... I have the opposite opinion. Public records are just becoming truly public for the first time in history. I don't have a problem with this. It's a public record, what exactly do you think you are hiding?
So anyone can find out where you live, how old you are, where you went to school, which hospital you prefer, and what you drive. Big deal. All this information was trivial for anyone to look at before. The only difference is you THOUGHT it was hard. That's not privacy any more than taking bottled water from air travelers is security.
People need to realize that PUBLIC records means FUCKING PUBLIC. However, I don't think that's likely to happen, people have a tough time grasping the concept these days. I wonder if facebook/myspace et all can be held accountable?
There have been companies (like Lexis Nexis) that have been collating and gathering this kind of data for a couple decades. People only just now becoming aware of this does not make it nefarious or dangerous. It wasn't dangerous or nefarious 10 years ago, or twenty. Just because you put computers in the mix, it doesn't become so. Specifically, license plate data is ALREADY COLLECTED by most state DOTs. How? Why? With street view cameras, ostensibly for traffic research and control. However, the point is that the data is ALREADY being collected and used by government agencies. What is the big deal about a few private contractors getting in on it?
One must begin to wonder about the absolutely awe inspiring ability of some people to miss the point.
Respectfully, you are the one that needs some perspective. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people die EVERY DAY. A few thousand in one place at one time is a tragedy. However its hardly a big deal on the scale of the entire planet. We make it out as a big deal because for the most part, people in western "civilized" cultures are largely unaware of the reality around them. Especially outside their own country.
I hate to tell you this, but that bulkhead the Israelis installed has little to do with the lack of hijackings. What has a lot more to do with it is the Mossad, and their habit of killing entire bloodlines.
The Israelis did one thing properly. They made the cost of crossing them VERY high. It won't just cost you the lives of the hijackers, but also their friends and family, and possibly retaliatory strikes in addition.
Which is why DRM is ALWAYS breakable, were as PGP isn't necessarily. DRM is security theater at it's best. Nothing more.
Ultimately, DRM will accomplish nothing other than to frustrate some users, limit others and on good days, go unnoticed. It will NEVER stop people from copying content. It never has, and it never will.
This is where the Intel Education foundation comes in. They pretty much spend all their time developing classroom and learning materials for teachers and students all over the world. At one point, Intel and OLPC were trying to make a deal to get this material on every OLPC, but that fell apart when they ended up fighting about poaching. Two organizations with laudable goals, and they end up in a bitch fight over territory and minor details.
Anyway, the point is there is more than a little bit of educational material out there but for the asking.
This is what passes for insightful these days?
Palm is the LEAST locked platform I know of, it certainly has been for the several years preceding the current crop of phones. My treo sitting in my desk drawer nearly doesn't have any original software left on it. I've got remote desktop, shell remote, third party browsers, a hacked message cue that runs threaded convos into a one page readable display (think IRC), a dozen or so games, a file browser with full function, Document viewer and editor, email, fax, SMS, MMS and it actually works as a phone still. I have the source for almost every piece of software on the phone.
I can't speak for WinMo or Blackberry, but Palm is far from locked down. Worth considering, this phone is 8 years old and on a feature level it competes with most of the newer phones. Sure, the touch screen is less than stellar, and the camera SUCKS, but on the software level it competes easily with anything out there.
Also, if you are going to be a rampant fanboi, could you at least not use phrases like "vibrant marketplace"? I get enough buzzwords from the morons in the marketing department. Kthx.
You realize that every machine you swipe your card through has a record of your card number, and a few button presses latter will print it out, along with every card from that day, or week, or month, etc etc... Do you trust the vetted bank employee with some oversight more than you trust the burger flipper and the chic at the coffee drive through? How about the guy working at best buy, he also asked for your address and zip code. Ever consider that one?
The bottom line is that the only reason that credit cards work is because MOST people don't know they can sell those lists of card numbers and names to a third party. If there were a fast, easy way to do so, and it became common knowledge, the credit industry would fall apart in a matter of months.
Gestures aren't only for "multi-touch". I've been using windows software called "Stroke-it" for years. It allows for mouse gestures to be any kind of input you'd like. It's easy to program and even easier to use. Most of the stock gestures are intuitive, and you can record any gesture you can make with the mouse. While it lacks a certain amount of refinement that multi-touch (can) provide(s), it's still a vast improvement for the stand mouse UI.
Incorrect. The DHDs automatically calculate drift and orbit as a matter of course. Normally, if you move a gate from one world to another, it gets a whole new address based on the constellations of it's new home. This is why the earth gate didn't work except between adabadoss and earth (very close together), until they discovered the list of addresses, and Carter figured out that stellar drift would change the addresses over time.
Stargate addresses (until SGU) are based on the position, and nothing else. The 7 symbols are 6 coordinates and a point of origin. Ostensibly based on the constellations visible from the planet you start from. Interestingly, this implies that every planet has different gate symbols on it's gate, but they ignore that except in the first episodes because it's too complicated to deal with. In the first couple episodes, they make a point of having Jackson "figure out" how to dial home. Later they just have a single address that always means earth.
The timeline is probably off, but who knows?
As for humans vs Ancients... Humans are the "second evolution" of the ancients. Nothing made them forget, they simply all died/ascended. However, they did seed many many worlds, and humans on earth are the most advanced of these seeded races (ostensibly).
Actually, little ancient repair bots would have been a really good tie back to the replicators. Since the ancients created the replicators in the first place. (well, the Pegasus ones anyway). However, given the apparent timelines, the repair drones would have to be a precursor technology to the replicators. Which could easily be made to work. "Hey, I found a bunch of little robots patching hull plates over here, see if you can get them to fix the air systems"
The ATA therapy only works for 1 out of 10 people (per atlantis episodes).
Going a bit off cannon, but it's not hard to imagine that this ship didn't have the ATA requirement because the ATA gene requirement was developed for Pegasus galaxy ancients due to the wraith, which were created by the ancients, most likely an eon after this ship was launched from the milky way. At least, that's how I rationalized it.
Not to be pedantic, but they weren't in "hyperspace". The Destiny travels faster than light without hyperspace (unknown how yet). Rush made a comment about it early on.
Which goes a little ways to explain why it looks so damn cool.
They ignored EVE because it's nearly as complicated as the real world and just as messed up. They obviously didn't want the hassle of studying anything of true significance.
Actually, being an attentive and skilled operator of your vehicle can and will reduce the chances of an accident drastically. I have several horror stories about coming within inches of a major accident, only to dodge it. Mainly because I take my cars to track day and know exactly how far they can be pushed. If you do this regularly, and you pay attention while driving, you can and will react properly in an emergency. Your "average" driver out there is a danger to themselves and everyone else. But there are some of us that can actually handle our cars. At the end of the day, nothing is going to solve the problem of idiots on the road, but you can go a long way towards mitigating it.
The bottom line is that there is little technical difference left between phone and internet systems now. As time goes on the difference gets smaller and smaller. Eventually it won't exist at all. What that means is that neutrality applies, or at the very least that it should apply. That is, if it existed in the first place, but it doesn't yet. AT&T runs the vast majority of your phone traffic through it's internet backbones as IP traffic. Ultimately net neutrality will be required to level the telco field in the near future, as it will be required to keep the internet from becoming the quagmire that the telco system currently is.
Personally, I think the infrastructure should be owned by the government and open to all on equal ground. This would allow the infrastructure to be (theoretically) managed for the good of all, and at a reasonable price, while also allowing reasonable competition among service providers. If everyone started from an equal playing field, the best service would win. Instead of the largest monopoly.
My mother has never played a game for more than 20 minutes in her life. However, she does have an iPhone, and every time we talk she has a new game on it to show me. Some of them are even mildly entertaining. I've talked to her about it, and she has no interest in stepping up to a real gaming machine, either portable or console. So there is some truth that people like her are "flocking" to the Iphone as a game console. However, there is NO truth that this is in any way a threat to established consoles. People that buy an Iphone don't buy it as a game console. They do however play some games once they have one.
License agreements can not give a corporation legal rights that don't exist. The license is, and can only, provide legal protections that already exist in law. Any license that takes liberties can be overturned with enough money and effort. This is the real problem with our corporate overlords. They can and do take liberties and seldom do we as consumers take them back.
Amazon has WAY overstepped themselves here, and they clearly know it. The only question that remains is will anyone take them to court over it.
Not to get too far offtopic, but your sig is highly interesting. Has it occurred to you that Bill and Steve did exactly that?
All of this is absurd. There is no "undue" harm or burden on Dell or HP here. I speak as someone that worked in dell's testing lab for more than a year creating these images. It would be TRIVIAL for dell to make new images and put them into production. None of the hardware is changing, only the software and only the office suite at that. There is no known case where removing Office (or just word from the office install) would cause any issues. Other than not being able to open a number of document types, but then, that's the whole point. It might take them a week or two, but they have 60 days or more, so it's not like it's going to hurt them. Further, they make new images regularly for new systems, it's not like they don't do this shit every day.
At the end of the day, this is a further play by MS's lackeys to fight this legitimate injunction on behave of MS. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Which makes you a good little consumer. It proves nothing else.
You, like most people miss the point of the new meters. They transfer the cost of use directly onto the driver. Where as the old meters had to be emptied and maintained by the thousands, these new meters can be emptied less often (more CC, less coin) and there are an order of magnitude less of them.
The ones they installed in Portland even have a spiffy automated cart that empties them. The meter maids pull up in their special golf carts, and the machine does the rest. It's considerably cheaper for the city itself, and the "cost" is the same to the driver. With the added bonus of slightly more hassle. It's also no longer possible to break a meter to get free parking, something I have seen done more than once. Now if the local meter is broken, you are supposed to find the next nearest one and use it instead.
The only downside for the city is the increase in pedestrian accidents because people are forced to cross the street (usually mid block) to get to the meter on the other side. And then back again. Most people just jaywalk, and this causes accidents. Portland had an expose about it a year or so ago, but I can't be bothered to dig through the horrid oregonian website to find it.
The extremely long tradition of what? Did you say fairness? You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Sports, especially professional sports has NEVER been about fairness. OK, maybe back in 776BC, but certainly not in any modern iteration. As with anything else, once you put the incentives on the side of "winning" rather than "competing with honor" you've already lost any shred of fairness you might have had. I'm not going to outright say that all professional athletes are cheating, but it's not unreasonable to say they take every advantage they can get. Often including advantages that are outside the rules of their given sport. Genetic advantages not withstanding. We just haven't reached the level where genetic rules have been put in place, clearly though we are on the way.
I respect professional athletes that do compete with honor. However, I'm never surprised to find out when it turns out they aren't.