Or you could read a book. You could buy all sorts of books before you would come close to the price of the iPad + e-book purchases.
Or you could listen to a CD. You could buy all sorts of CDs before you would come close to the price of the iPad +.MP3/AAC/whatever purchases.
Or you could watch a movie. You could buy all sorts of DVDs before you would come close to the price of the iPad + digital video purchases.
Funny thing is, a large and growing number of us have small music players, e-book readers, watch movies/TV on our laptops, play assorted multi-player games, etc. - all on hardware comparable in price to the iPad.
Between a convenient play-everything device and some bulk storage to off-load under-used content, those of us realizing it's 2010 already LIKE the idea of replacing boxfulls of atoms with a few cubic inches of bits.
Always amazes me how many/.ers exhibit Luddite tendencies.
Now wait a minute. Before all the FOSS types get into a slathering fury (oops, too late), consider: - The SDK is free. Free! Download it and start developing apps already. - Distribution is free. Free! There's nothing stopping you from signing up and giving away your self-righteous apps for no cost; include the source code or a link thereto if you like. And if you do want to make a buck (er, $0.99) off each copy of your app, that costs you a measly $99/year (surely your app is good enough to get a hundred people to buy it, right?). - The much-defamed App Store censors mostly just take a cursory glance at each submission to make sure the app is well-behaved (not malicious or destructively stupid) and socially acceptable to all audiences (how much FOSS pr*n are you planning to develop, eh?). Is it really too much to ask that someone double-check your work for brokenness before spreading it to the unwashed masses? Have you _seen_ what got thru that process unabated?
OK, so it isn't totally completely unquestionably end-to-end FOSS. I'll understand if RMS doesn't approve, but that's his shtick, not ours. - App Store is the only distribution process. Well, except that you could publish your source code and let anyone with the SDK compile & run it sans censors. - DRM everywhere. Well, not really - seems you can put whatever content you want on it via iTunes (music is not DRMed anymore, remember? and I shouldn't have to say anything about videos, right?) and the SDK. I expect the iBook stuff will prove the same: minimal-if-any DRM, easily circumvented.
And what does the RMS-approved FOSS get you? - Android is showing diminishing quality of apps with increasing conflict. Windows has been there forever. - "Oh, you just need to..." isn't preferable to "it just works" for most users, including most of us geeks who don't want to have to screw around with your app which wasn't even given a cursory independent stamp of "not blatantly broken".
You want choice, you have choice: get a Droid. A lot of us appreciate a little formalized cooperation, at trivial cost, to ensure stupid code doesn't run rampant.
... Some members of the public might consider Hillary to be insightful and instructive; some might find it to beneither high art nor a fair discussion on how to set the Nation’s course; still others simply might suspend judg-ment on these points but decide to think more about issuesand candidates. Those choices and assessments, however, are not for the Government to make. “The First Amend-ment underwrites the freedom to experiment and to create in the realm of thought and speech. Citizens must be free to use new forms, and new forums, for the expression ofideas. The civic discourse belongs to the people, and the Government may not prescribe the means used to conduct it.” McConnell, supra, at 341 (opinion of KENNEDY, J.).
The judgment of the District Court is reversed withrespect to the constitutionality of 2 U. S. C. 441b’s re-strictions on corporate independent expenditures. The judgment is affirmed with respect to BCRA’s disclaimer and disclosure requirements. The case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. It is so ordered.
The idea, which the "so what" crowd seems to miss, is that the candidate not only have an "equal" address, but should stand out somehow. As parent notes, it doesn't take much to get your own domain, but doing so shows you DO pay attention to polishing details and DO know enough to make those details happen - to wit, going above and beyond.
The question should not be "should AOL etc. addresses be discriminated against", it should be "does the candidate excel beyond his 'equals'?"
(Yes I do have my own domain; my personal email is my name (al la first@last.TLD). I'm amused by how hard it is for people to comprehend this, and how amazed they are when they realize it.)
Being awake for a cardiac catheterization is a different story. Since there are no apparent after-effects, and no slicing-and-dicing of organs, it really was fascinating to watch a live x-ray of my heart in action while feeling only a faint strange tickling in my chest. Nothing showed up wrong save the expected valve regurgitation.
Never dawned on me to ask for a copy of the video... I'll have to ask about it.
I had open-heart surgery. General & deep anesthesia is a wonderful thing. "Lie here... ok... we're going to give you a little something now to make you comfortable..." And then I woke up a few hours later. No sense of time passing, just one moment in the OR and then the next moment I'm in the recovery room.
Now, given what happened in the recovery room, wouldn't want to extrapolate back to the idea of being awake for the procedure. "Waking up" consisted of returning consciousness, but with no vision or hearing, and the totality of my existence being devoted to getting the breathing tube out, engaging enough self-control to know it's supposed to be there and to not panic (!!!!!), and discover that my hands were restrained to prevent acting on exactly that reaction. Then I was aware that something horrible had been done to my chest. And then... well, it gets kinda fuzzy and unpleasant from there.
Now, if awake thru the whole procedure, that would mean not only being aware of the chit-chat ("scalpel... clamp... ") and other mundane activity, but the process of ramming that d@mn pipe down my throat, the sensation (however muted) of having my rib cage sawed up and pried open with a car jack, buckets of ice cubes being dumped into the gaping chest cavity, heart being stopped and partially disconnected, and generally knowing that a whole lotta things are being done to ME that are not naturally part of human existence - apart from, well, being dead (which, arguably, I was).
My wife didn't take it well in the waiting room when told "your husband is doing fine... they just stopped his heart." Somehow I don't think I'd like being awake for observing it first-hand. And I don't think the doctors would be keen on having to watch their language/behavior knowing that the patient is watching & listening; I want them focused on the job, not on how I'll respond to their commentary.
All this "security theater" does little, and does so at the cost of a massive violation of our Constitution's 4th Amendment (to wit: privacy of person and possessions not otherwise subject to individualized judge-signed warrant). The right to such privacy is enumerated for a reason, and this wholesale ignoring of it will backfire badly.
"It's Meat" short story - a memorable discussion among sentient-energy aliens baffled at their discovery of thinking, traveling, talking, singing meat, and their eventual decision to ignore it as repugnant.
Show of hands please: how many here think "color" in movies is just a technological gimmick?
Dig back in time and you'll find pretty much the same complaints about the introduction of color into cinema. "Doesn't add to the plot." "Distracting when directors go 'look! color!'" "Waste of money upgrading perfectly good 5-inch black-and-white TVs." "Nobody really wants to see skin close-up in color."...thing is, color is a part of our visual perception of the world, and we now demand it - in good quality - for our movies; ditto 3D.
(Yes I know there are exceptions to what I'm about to say. I'm trying to make a point, not write a voluminous tome of completeness.)
A CD contains the complete content, uncompressed, with no DRM. Save for a few technical arguments that make most peoples' eyes roll, nothing in audio is better. CD drives are ubiquitous. You can take any CD and pop it into any computer and with few, if any, clicks it is copied into your computer and you never need touch that CD again. Thanks to no DRM, it's so easy to copy/rip a CD it's almost hard not to.
A DVD contains a fraction of the content, with DRM. Until we can distribute uncompressed UDTV-format video content for pennies, we'll keep getting upgrades. DVD drives are close to ubiquitous. While you can take any DVD and pop it into any computer to view, copying that DVD onto your computer requires non-trivial technically-illegal software with the user understanding technical obscurities. Thanks to DRM, most people are incapable of copying/ripping DVDs.
Yes, many on/. know how to beat DVD DRM. Some of us even have the T-shirt to prove it....but it's not trivial, it's not something so easy that it's almost unavoidable. The vast majority of users not only don't have a "video jukebox" set up on their PC, they wouldn't have a clue how to start.
Upshot is: DRM worked. DVD CSS did its job. And the reason "movies are not exactly like music", for purposes of this thread, is that thanks to DRM, DVDs resist ripping, while CDs practically encourage it.
finds it annoying the way that all of the fonts are the same.
One thing that made "The Road" striking was indeed the unique font, which shared a touch of the same depressing tone as the terse text. Times New Roman et al would have degraded the reading experience.
When might we see eBook readers which allow inclusion of text-specific fonts?
Lack of updated, relevant & accurate documentation is another example of the [potential] benefit of paid-development software vs. free: documentation is one of those software development tasks which really should be done but nobody wants to do it badly enough to do it thoroughly without compensation.
Oh sure there are isolated counterexamples all around. Paid software all too often has lousy documentation; some labor-of-love FOSS projects are marvelously documented. Overall, however, it's money that makes a lot of good things happen that wouldn't otherwise - like making sure all levels of documentation are correct for a given package.
And now I return to reconciling a foot-high pile of printed documentation, motivated only by tomorrow being payday...
This move ensures the FCC keeps itself well-funded despite the technology moving well beyond the bureaucracy's purpose. VoIP was desirable in part because it was free of FCC oversight/abuse; threatened with being marginalized into oblivion (at least regarding phone service), the FCC now has a plan to assert control over such growing liberties.
Kinda like the "rural electrification project" which, despite having succeeded in its goal and thus eliminated its purpose for existence, now receives greater funding than ever.
Just because an HDTV has more stuff on it doesn't mean it's more expensive than a same-res same-size monitor without those things. Thanks to economy of scale, it costs more to not have the extra tuner, RGB, etc. stuff built in.
Buy the cheapest unit that does what you want. You can ignore what it has that you don't need.
I have one. I get "tuneups" every six months. Pretty cool how they can change its settings with a wireless interface and a few taps of a touchscreen.
Last time I was in for a data dump on my pacemaker, my cardiologist excitedly explained "there are a _google_ combinations of settings on this device!" Then he paused, and grudgingly conceded most of them would kill me.
Even if allowed to replace implanted medical firmware, such hacking would be unpopular. We all know how reliable fixes, tweaks & updates to software are (i.e.: NOT). A single "oops" could leave the user unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes; even if not a terminal error, screwups can range anywhere from very uncomfortable to subtly distressing. During early diagnostic runs post-implantation, several times I found myself in a fetal position as a bug (!) caused repeated serious abdominal convulsions (didn't hurt, but did cause uncontrolled laughing in a "MTV Jackass" kinda way); nobody ever figured out why (technician: "did I do that?", me: "YEAH!!"). Later I found sleeping on my left side was undesirable, as natural abdominal compression caused diaphragm twitching with each pulse - harmless, but distressing enough to stop the practice (later resolved by reducing lead voltage and increasing pulse width, affecting battery life). When asked what the failure condition symptoms would be, my cardiac surgeon said simply "you'll pass out" (implying not waking up - ever).
Yes, the libertarian principles exist to demand patients have self-funded access to medical gear allowing reprogramming of implanted pacemakers or other medical devices. Absolutely I stand in support of such a notion. In practice, however, methinks this will be - shall we say - a self-correcting issue: those who do, and make mistakes, will die.
A much less geeky/costly solution than using a GPS-integrated self-destruct mechanism is:...have two passwords. One decrypts the data, the other erases it.
Actually, some ATMs have a similar ability: your PIN lets you access your bank account, while entering your PIN backwards does the same thing but calls the cops at the same time. If you're mugged at the ATM and forced to reveal your PIN, you give/use it backwards to notify police while the perp is busy emptying your savings.
I'm pretty sure the capital city of Burkina Faso (you ARE aware of that country, right?) largely lacks paved roads for reasons other than lack of broadband internet.
Yes, the fast flow of free/cheap/vast information is helpful. Remember: it's a luxury, not a human right.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could read a book. You could buy all sorts of books before you would come close to the price of the iPad + e-book purchases.
Or you could listen to a CD. You could buy all sorts of CDs before you would come close to the price of the iPad + .MP3/AAC/whatever purchases.
Or you could watch a movie. You could buy all sorts of DVDs before you would come close to the price of the iPad + digital video purchases.
Funny thing is, a large and growing number of us have small music players, e-book readers, watch movies/TV on our laptops, play assorted multi-player games, etc. - all on hardware comparable in price to the iPad.
Between a convenient play-everything device and some bulk storage to off-load under-used content, those of us realizing it's 2010 already LIKE the idea of replacing boxfulls of atoms with a few cubic inches of bits.
Always amazes me how many /.ers exhibit Luddite tendencies.
Now wait a minute. Before all the FOSS types get into a slathering fury (oops, too late), consider:
- The SDK is free. Free! Download it and start developing apps already.
- Distribution is free. Free! There's nothing stopping you from signing up and giving away your self-righteous apps for no cost; include the source code or a link thereto if you like. And if you do want to make a buck (er, $0.99) off each copy of your app, that costs you a measly $99/year (surely your app is good enough to get a hundred people to buy it, right?).
- The much-defamed App Store censors mostly just take a cursory glance at each submission to make sure the app is well-behaved (not malicious or destructively stupid) and socially acceptable to all audiences (how much FOSS pr*n are you planning to develop, eh?). Is it really too much to ask that someone double-check your work for brokenness before spreading it to the unwashed masses? Have you _seen_ what got thru that process unabated?
OK, so it isn't totally completely unquestionably end-to-end FOSS. I'll understand if RMS doesn't approve, but that's his shtick, not ours.
- App Store is the only distribution process. Well, except that you could publish your source code and let anyone with the SDK compile & run it sans censors.
- DRM everywhere. Well, not really - seems you can put whatever content you want on it via iTunes (music is not DRMed anymore, remember? and I shouldn't have to say anything about videos, right?) and the SDK. I expect the iBook stuff will prove the same: minimal-if-any DRM, easily circumvented.
And what does the RMS-approved FOSS get you? ..." isn't preferable to "it just works" for most users, including most of us geeks who don't want to have to screw around with your app which wasn't even given a cursory independent stamp of "not blatantly broken".
- Android is showing diminishing quality of apps with increasing conflict. Windows has been there forever.
- "Oh, you just need to
You want choice, you have choice: get a Droid. A lot of us appreciate a little formalized cooperation, at trivial cost, to ensure stupid code doesn't run rampant.
Right of free speech + right of association = right of groups, as corporations, to speak freely.
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
In the comments there, MMZ (author) notes "This was written 2 years ago."
http://failblog.org/2010/01/10/avatar-plot-fail/
It's Pocahantas (or a zillion other stories) with just a change of names.
The idea, which the "so what" crowd seems to miss, is that the candidate not only have an "equal" address, but should stand out somehow. As parent notes, it doesn't take much to get your own domain, but doing so shows you DO pay attention to polishing details and DO know enough to make those details happen - to wit, going above and beyond.
The question should not be "should AOL etc. addresses be discriminated against", it should be "does the candidate excel beyond his 'equals'?"
(Yes I do have my own domain; my personal email is my name (al la first@last.TLD). I'm amused by how hard it is for people to comprehend this, and how amazed they are when they realize it.)
Get off my lawn!
Upon seeing the headline I realized there's a whole generation of /.ers who weren't even around when Duke Nukem became old news.
http://xkcd.com/647/ applies.
Being awake for a cardiac catheterization is a different story. Since there are no apparent after-effects, and no slicing-and-dicing of organs, it really was fascinating to watch a live x-ray of my heart in action while feeling only a faint strange tickling in my chest. Nothing showed up wrong save the expected valve regurgitation.
Never dawned on me to ask for a copy of the video ... I'll have to ask about it.
I had open-heart surgery. General & deep anesthesia is a wonderful thing. "Lie here ... ok ... we're going to give you a little something now to make you comfortable ..." And then I woke up a few hours later. No sense of time passing, just one moment in the OR and then the next moment I'm in the recovery room.
Now, given what happened in the recovery room, wouldn't want to extrapolate back to the idea of being awake for the procedure. ... well, it gets kinda fuzzy and unpleasant from there.
"Waking up" consisted of returning consciousness, but with no vision or hearing, and the totality of my existence being devoted to getting the breathing tube out, engaging enough self-control to know it's supposed to be there and to not panic (!!!!!), and discover that my hands were restrained to prevent acting on exactly that reaction. Then I was aware that something horrible had been done to my chest. And then
Now, if awake thru the whole procedure, that would mean not only being aware of the chit-chat ("scalpel ... clamp ... ") and other mundane activity, but the process of ramming that d@mn pipe down my throat, the sensation (however muted) of having my rib cage sawed up and pried open with a car jack, buckets of ice cubes being dumped into the gaping chest cavity, heart being stopped and partially disconnected, and generally knowing that a whole lotta things are being done to ME that are not naturally part of human existence - apart from, well, being dead (which, arguably, I was).
My wife didn't take it well in the waiting room when told "your husband is doing fine ... they just stopped his heart." Somehow I don't think I'd like being awake for observing it first-hand. And I don't think the doctors would be keen on having to watch their language/behavior knowing that the patient is watching & listening; I want them focused on the job, not on how I'll respond to their commentary.
At some point, yes, our relatives shall bore us with their hours-long videos of their cruise, and leave us with (worse) headaches and intense nausea.
But at a current price of US$21,000 it won't be soon.
All this "security theater" does little, and does so at the cost of a massive violation of our Constitution's 4th Amendment (to wit: privacy of person and possessions not otherwise subject to individualized judge-signed warrant). The right to such privacy is enumerated for a reason, and this wholesale ignoring of it will backfire badly.
"It's Meat" short story - a memorable discussion among sentient-energy aliens baffled at their discovery of thinking, traveling, talking, singing meat, and their eventual decision to ignore it as repugnant.
Don't know your name, but you live with someone in an apartment and want to buy a Welsh Terrier.
Show of hands please: how many here think "color" in movies is just a technological gimmick?
Dig back in time and you'll find pretty much the same complaints about the introduction of color into cinema. "Doesn't add to the plot." "Distracting when directors go 'look! color!'" "Waste of money upgrading perfectly good 5-inch black-and-white TVs." "Nobody really wants to see skin close-up in color." ...thing is, color is a part of our visual perception of the world, and we now demand it - in good quality - for our movies; ditto 3D.
Dare I say it on /. but ... for movies, DRM worked.
(Yes I know there are exceptions to what I'm about to say. I'm trying to make a point, not write a voluminous tome of completeness.)
A CD contains the complete content, uncompressed, with no DRM. Save for a few technical arguments that make most peoples' eyes roll, nothing in audio is better. CD drives are ubiquitous. You can take any CD and pop it into any computer and with few, if any, clicks it is copied into your computer and you never need touch that CD again. Thanks to no DRM, it's so easy to copy/rip a CD it's almost hard not to.
A DVD contains a fraction of the content, with DRM. Until we can distribute uncompressed UDTV-format video content for pennies, we'll keep getting upgrades. DVD drives are close to ubiquitous. While you can take any DVD and pop it into any computer to view, copying that DVD onto your computer requires non-trivial technically-illegal software with the user understanding technical obscurities. Thanks to DRM, most people are incapable of copying/ripping DVDs.
Yes, many on /. know how to beat DVD DRM. Some of us even have the T-shirt to prove it. ...but it's not trivial, it's not something so easy that it's almost unavoidable. The vast majority of users not only don't have a "video jukebox" set up on their PC, they wouldn't have a clue how to start.
Upshot is: DRM worked. DVD CSS did its job. And the reason "movies are not exactly like music", for purposes of this thread, is that thanks to DRM, DVDs resist ripping, while CDs practically encourage it.
finds it annoying the way that all of the fonts are the same.
One thing that made "The Road" striking was indeed the unique font, which shared a touch of the same depressing tone as the terse text. Times New Roman et al would have degraded the reading experience.
When might we see eBook readers which allow inclusion of text-specific fonts?
Lack of updated, relevant & accurate documentation is another example of the [potential] benefit of paid-development software vs. free: documentation is one of those software development tasks which really should be done but nobody wants to do it badly enough to do it thoroughly without compensation.
Oh sure there are isolated counterexamples all around. Paid software all too often has lousy documentation; some labor-of-love FOSS projects are marvelously documented. Overall, however, it's money that makes a lot of good things happen that wouldn't otherwise - like making sure all levels of documentation are correct for a given package.
And now I return to reconciling a foot-high pile of printed documentation, motivated only by tomorrow being payday...
This move ensures the FCC keeps itself well-funded despite the technology moving well beyond the bureaucracy's purpose. VoIP was desirable in part because it was free of FCC oversight/abuse; threatened with being marginalized into oblivion (at least regarding phone service), the FCC now has a plan to assert control over such growing liberties.
Kinda like the "rural electrification project" which, despite having succeeded in its goal and thus eliminated its purpose for existence, now receives greater funding than ever.
Just because an HDTV has more stuff on it doesn't mean it's more expensive than a same-res same-size monitor without those things. Thanks to economy of scale, it costs more to not have the extra tuner, RGB, etc. stuff built in.
Buy the cheapest unit that does what you want. You can ignore what it has that you don't need.
I have one. I get "tuneups" every six months. Pretty cool how they can change its settings with a wireless interface and a few taps of a touchscreen.
Last time I was in for a data dump on my pacemaker, my cardiologist excitedly explained "there are a _google_ combinations of settings on this device!" Then he paused, and grudgingly conceded most of them would kill me.
Even if allowed to replace implanted medical firmware, such hacking would be unpopular. We all know how reliable fixes, tweaks & updates to software are (i.e.: NOT). A single "oops" could leave the user unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes; even if not a terminal error, screwups can range anywhere from very uncomfortable to subtly distressing. During early diagnostic runs post-implantation, several times I found myself in a fetal position as a bug (!) caused repeated serious abdominal convulsions (didn't hurt, but did cause uncontrolled laughing in a "MTV Jackass" kinda way); nobody ever figured out why (technician: "did I do that?", me: "YEAH!!"). Later I found sleeping on my left side was undesirable, as natural abdominal compression caused diaphragm twitching with each pulse - harmless, but distressing enough to stop the practice (later resolved by reducing lead voltage and increasing pulse width, affecting battery life). When asked what the failure condition symptoms would be, my cardiac surgeon said simply "you'll pass out" (implying not waking up - ever).
Yes, the libertarian principles exist to demand patients have self-funded access to medical gear allowing reprogramming of implanted pacemakers or other medical devices. Absolutely I stand in support of such a notion. In practice, however, methinks this will be - shall we say - a self-correcting issue: those who do, and make mistakes, will die.
I own a Canadian. Cost me everything I have, and everything I ever will have. Worth every penny.
However, independent observers may conclude she owns me. ...sorry, gotta run, being paged...
A much less geeky/costly solution than using a GPS-integrated self-destruct mechanism is: ...have two passwords. One decrypts the data, the other erases it.
Actually, some ATMs have a similar ability: your PIN lets you access your bank account, while entering your PIN backwards does the same thing but calls the cops at the same time. If you're mugged at the ATM and forced to reveal your PIN, you give/use it backwards to notify police while the perp is busy emptying your savings.
I'm pretty sure the capital city of Burkina Faso (you ARE aware of that country, right?) largely lacks paved roads for reasons other than lack of broadband internet.
Yes, the fast flow of free/cheap/vast information is helpful. Remember: it's a luxury, not a human right.