How cool would it be to find some plant or little creature and say, what is that?
Or to buy a hamburger at McDonald's and be able to say, "Hey, this doesn't have any cow in it at all! It's all soy protein!"
Seriously, every year one of the expensive private schools in NYC sends a class out into high-end restaurants and grocery stores to buy samples, which are then tested to see if they are really made from what they claim to be made from. Not surprisingly, much of the sushi they bought one year was not the fish it claimed to be.
If you have ADHD, does smoking a cigarette allow you to focus?
Back in the day, if you had to stay up all night you would just smoke and drink coffee. I never quite knew whether the coffee kept you up while the nicotine was just there to control the jitters, or whether the nicotine was also helping you focus. Or maybe just taking away the pain of being up at 4am.
But there may be something to that, since cigarettes also function as an appetite suppressant.
I'm not advocating smoking over amphetamines, just curious whether conflicting social policies are at play here (smoking is bad, adderall use is up).
I don't know how we ever made it to the 21st century without ADHD drugs.
Prior to about the 1970s, adults with ADHD would typically self-medicate (almost any stimulant, including caffeine, will have a therapeutic effect; amphetamines just happen to work better than most) and children would simply get a reputation for being troublemakers or poor students.
Let's not forget nicotine. Between coffee and cigarettes and cold showers you could pretty much stay up for days if you really had to.
Smoking cessation in the 90s also gave rise to the use of fen-phen for weight loss.
You are correct. Actually they patent it. And judges have already ruled that even if your crop is contaminated with Monsanto's strain through direct see drift even if its a fraction of your crop then you Monsanto own your crop. All of it.
I wonder what happens when more than one patented strain is found in your crop, and they are produced by different companies?
Would they just split it 50-50 or would the fraction that was actually "infected" begin to matter at that point? And if it begins to matter at all, then the "uninfected" portion of your crop should belong to you.
The winner-take-all strategy seems like it would break down immediately if there was a major competitor in the field.
Please explain to me how someone can make a $100M+ movie or video game and freely allow anyone to copy, show, or use it in any way they want and still make back their expenses plus a reasonable profit (as should be expected from a somewhat risky venture).
Let's see. Your movie has a budget of $100,000,000? My first thought is, damn, why are you paying your crew a million bucks each? But maybe your story required 30 weeks of filming in Tokyo and you had to blow up some actual buildings or something. That's showbiz.
To make a profit, your movie will need: Movie theater attendance of 11 million at $7 per ticket (for comparison, Night At The Museum 2 sold 22.8 million tickets) 20 million official downloads at $1 per -- convenience sales, itunes, streaming fees 50,000 DVD sales at $10 per -- hard-core fans will want an actual dvd for the shelf and 250,000,000 ad views on the official website
Of course, if you could make the same movie for $10,000,000, you'd be in the black after 1.5 million tickets sold.
All of the above are rough numbers and assume that you have distribution deals with enough theaters (and a good enough movie!) to make that kind of box office. But if you're going to drop that kind of cash on production, I have to assume you know what you're doing artistically.
The world market for entertainment is gigantic and insatiable. Even if everyone could just download the file for free, there are plenty of other ways to experience the work that allow you to recover your expenses and even make a metric shitload of profit.
The funny thing is, WP7 is so unlike just about every other Microsoft product that nobody has a fucking clue how to sell it. Who would ever believe that it is a slicker, hipper, and more polished interface than iOS? Not you. Not anyone else on/. Not even me if I hadn't used one in person.
It's a hell of a lot better/simpler/polished than Android, but Google already owns the "we don't market our OS we let manufacturers do it for us" space. So what is Nokia supposed to do? They lucked into this amazing product that they have no idea how to market.
I highly doubt it. A large majority, if not all, games that Zynga has are copies/clones/remixes of existing games. Zynga just has a better marketing department and a bigger advertising budget.
And, most importantly, graphic designers with a mass-market sensibility.
I mean, I looked at the screenshots of both games, and the Zynga clone looked much more fun and intuitive because I could actually read the damn thing.
You got to put this into perspective. It's not much worse than having a common bank account, or kids: in case of breakup, it can go horribly wrong.
Well exactly. Would you let your teenage daughter have kids or open a bank account with her boyfriend?
Those things are worse than sharing passwords. I'd say this is more like sharing keys with your boyfriend/girlfriend. As a teenager? Not going to happen.
When you get married, you share finances which requires a lot more trust than any Facebook account. I know some couples who share email accounts too just out of convenience.
My wife and I always advise newlyweds to maintain separate bank accounts.
Money troubles --- mostly differing expectations about how to spend -- account for a lot of friction in marriages, especially when money is tight. Having your own account (and splitting expenses equally) means you can do whatever you want with what's left over at the end of the month. Huge safety valve.
Privacy is important to humans generally. The more privacy you build into a relationship (without being secretive!) the more robust it will be over time. Privacy keeps people from feeling trapped, it allows them to approach new things with grace rather than paranoia, and it gives them room to grow. Don't underestimate it.
, Pule said: "The centre has high security parameters to protect all the services delivered through it."
They were originally considering the low and medium security parameters as well. Unfortunately, the chairman of the board demanded only the highest security, so they only implemented that. Such a shame, because now the low and medium parameters are completely unsecured.
when they want to make parts that need to be stronger than the PLA/ABS raw material, they "simply" print the model, use it to make a mold and cast the mold with bronze or copper or what have you.
This. If you're only looking at the initial printing material you're missing out on how that combines with existing manufacturing processes -- it's now possible to make *anything* using a digital 3D model as a starting point. Which means rapid prototyping, version control, download-distribution, and infinite repeatability.
Yeah, our options pretty much boil down to A) Build fission plants. B) Figure out net positive energy fusion and start building those, or C) DRASTICALLY reduce our energy consumption, including using materials that require lots of energy to produce.
I've always liked C) drastically reduce, because it works with the trend that systems tend to become more efficient over time, particularly if given the incentive to do so (where the incentive is usually spent on engineering and r&d, which is a win for nerds and geeks).
The problem is that drastic reduction requires lifestyle changes of the sort that will move us all out of our comfort zones to varying degrees. Smaller screens, dimmer lights, warmer/cooler/smaller rooms, slower cooking, pedal power, manual labor, longer travel times, uglier vegetables...
It's a tough sell, even with planetary apocalypse looming, but dammit our standard of living is so far advanced over our ancestors that a little discomfort is not going to be the end of the world. Whereas going on the way we are now is likely to be.
it's hardly practical to carry around an audio rig everywhere
On the contrary. You likely have a very powerful rig that is perfect for audio signal processing in your pocket. All you need is the software that does what you go on to describe.
There are autotune apps already. You can buy an accessory that takes a mic input and provides line-out via the headphone jack. The auto-tuned future is here!
Why is this necessary? Both already have native apps on mobile devices. Users can browse with IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. What does the browser do that a normal browser doesn't?
These things probably only exist to leech ad revenue off of someone else's product. But with a little imagination, and an appreciation of the art of Greasemonkey scripts, it's not hard to figure out the value of wrapping a web app this way. Here's a few off the top of my head:
1) Every time Facebook or Google or any cloud service upgrades their user interface they create built-in demand for something (anything!) that can make the site look and act like it used to look, for users who are resistant to change. That's a pretty easy sell, actually.
2) Localization into languages that aren't supported, or localization of user-generated content (via Google Translate) on the fly.
3) Muting colors, normalizing text, minimizing ads, converting dynamic content to static --- basically anything that will make using the app less annoying for people who are highly-sensitive to design or visually impaired or cognitively impaired or just easily distracted.
4) Adding a security layer, such as encrypting and/or signing messages, injecting steganographic content, preventing upload/download of certain kinds of files.
Just think about it. This is the web. There is no reason why you have to just sit back and take what cloud providers give you. If you build a custom browser, it's trivial to much around with markup, stylesheets, and javascript to give your customers exactly what they want. Of course, there is likely to be an arms race and/or litigation involved if you are too successful or cut into the profits of the company whose app your are wrapping.
Or burgled. Or infiltrated by enemy agents. Or infiltrated by government agents. Or headed up by a clueless CEO who demands single sign-on access to everything and uses a password based on his birthday. Or outsourced to Sony.
It's true that this is last-mile security only. It protects against someone impersonating OpenDNS and that's it. It makes their service more secure.
OpenDNS's resolvers could still be fooled by poisoning attacks and you'd be just as screwed. They could argue that they have all kinds of proprietary secret sauce on their resolvers, along with DNSSEC where applicable, to prevent that from happening, but we can leave that aside for now.
The thing is, both ISPs and attackers-who-p0wn-routers have good reason to intercept DNS requests to/from OpenDNS. ISPs want to be able to send you to their own Domain Not Found portal (a la Comcast). Attackers... well, we know what they want. One of the features of OpenDNS is that they intercept and neutralize malware lookups. OpenDNS is basically pissing on a lot of people's parades.
So it makes a lot of sense for them to give customers a secure connection to their service. Properly explained, it's a good idea.
But you're right that it's misleading to sell it the way they do.
I agree. Latest Chrome builds (15+) are failing to fully hide parts of DIVs where style.display is set to none, for instance.
It's a nasty rendering bug (and you can tell its a bug because scrolling up and back to force a repaint of the problem area makes the problem go away) that is playing havoc with dynamic display of content.
So in 2009 when it was clear that Google was building its own non-Gecko browser, why didn't the Mozilla Foundation start squirreling a lot of that money into an endowment to help pay for operations when Google inevitably pulled the plug?
Instead, they went full steam ahead, attempting to copy the Chrome look without copying the Chrome feel, and while ignoring a boatload of issues that have been problems in Firefox for years.
I'm so glad I can change the "theme" of my browser with just a mouseover. But is that really a substitute for better SSL certificate handling (a la Persepctives) or security improvements (a la HTTPS Everywhere and NoScript) or HTML5 compatibility (support for H.264)? No. No it isn't. What does that say about a browser when the best features are addons that come from outside the team that was being paid to develop it?
The management at Mozilla has a lot to answer for, pissing away nearly half a billion dollars of support. With a record like Firefox's, why should anyone donate personal or corporate funds to them in the future?
Slashdot Mirror
water is ALSO expensive as hell to put in orbit
So we shoot SEWAGE then. Which has the added benefit that when the water evaporates there are still solid particles traveling at velocity.
Bonus: even if hull penetration doesn't bring down the enemy ship, freeze-dried foreign bacteria rehydrate and bring down the life support system.
Extra bonus: We shot them with our poo!
How cool would it be to find some plant or little creature and say, what is that?
Or to buy a hamburger at McDonald's and be able to say, "Hey, this doesn't have any cow in it at all! It's all soy protein!"
Seriously, every year one of the expensive private schools in NYC sends a class out into high-end restaurants and grocery stores to buy samples, which are then tested to see if they are really made from what they claim to be made from. Not surprisingly, much of the sushi they bought one year was not the fish it claimed to be.
If you have ADHD, does smoking a cigarette allow you to focus?
Back in the day, if you had to stay up all night you would just smoke and drink coffee. I never quite knew whether the coffee kept you up while the nicotine was just there to control the jitters, or whether the nicotine was also helping you focus. Or maybe just taking away the pain of being up at 4am.
But there may be something to that, since cigarettes also function as an appetite suppressant.
I'm not advocating smoking over amphetamines, just curious whether conflicting social policies are at play here (smoking is bad, adderall use is up).
Prior to about the 1970s, adults with ADHD would typically self-medicate (almost any stimulant, including caffeine, will have a therapeutic effect; amphetamines just happen to work better than most) and children would simply get a reputation for being troublemakers or poor students.
Let's not forget nicotine. Between coffee and cigarettes and cold showers you could pretty much stay up for days if you really had to.
Smoking cessation in the 90s also gave rise to the use of fen-phen for weight loss.
You are correct. Actually they patent it. And judges have already ruled that even if your crop is contaminated with Monsanto's strain through direct see drift even if its a fraction of your crop then you Monsanto own your crop. All of it.
I wonder what happens when more than one patented strain is found in your crop, and they are produced by different companies?
Would they just split it 50-50 or would the fraction that was actually "infected" begin to matter at that point? And if it begins to matter at all, then the "uninfected" portion of your crop should belong to you.
The winner-take-all strategy seems like it would break down immediately if there was a major competitor in the field.
Similar issue here: I only use it to visit Google properties like GMail and YouTube.
They want to pay me $25 to find out stuff they already know? Yippee. It's like 1999 all over again.
Please explain to me how someone can make a $100M+ movie or video game and freely allow anyone to copy, show, or use it in any way they want and still make back their expenses plus a reasonable profit (as should be expected from a somewhat risky venture).
Let's see. Your movie has a budget of $100,000,000? My first thought is, damn, why are you paying your crew a million bucks each? But maybe your story required 30 weeks of filming in Tokyo and you had to blow up some actual buildings or something. That's showbiz.
To make a profit, your movie will need:
Movie theater attendance of 11 million at $7 per ticket (for comparison, Night At The Museum 2 sold 22.8 million tickets)
20 million official downloads at $1 per -- convenience sales, itunes, streaming fees
50,000 DVD sales at $10 per -- hard-core fans will want an actual dvd for the shelf
and
250,000,000 ad views on the official website
Of course, if you could make the same movie for $10,000,000, you'd be in the black after 1.5 million tickets sold.
All of the above are rough numbers and assume that you have distribution deals with enough theaters (and a good enough movie!) to make that kind of box office. But if you're going to drop that kind of cash on production, I have to assume you know what you're doing artistically.
The world market for entertainment is gigantic and insatiable. Even if everyone could just download the file for free, there are plenty of other ways to experience the work that allow you to recover your expenses and even make a metric shitload of profit.
You also have reserved seats in movie theaters, if I'm not mistaken.
The USA is so behind the times.
It's almost as if all of Slashdot was born after 1977...
The funny thing is, WP7 is so unlike just about every other Microsoft product that nobody has a fucking clue how to sell it. Who would ever believe that it is a slicker, hipper, and more polished interface than iOS? Not you. Not anyone else on /. Not even me if I hadn't used one in person.
It's a hell of a lot better/simpler/polished than Android, but Google already owns the "we don't market our OS we let manufacturers do it for us" space. So what is Nokia supposed to do? They lucked into this amazing product that they have no idea how to market.
I highly doubt it. A large majority, if not all, games that Zynga has are copies/clones/remixes of existing games. Zynga just has a better marketing department and a bigger advertising budget.
And, most importantly, graphic designers with a mass-market sensibility.
I mean, I looked at the screenshots of both games, and the Zynga clone looked much more fun and intuitive because I could actually read the damn thing.
You got to put this into perspective. It's not much worse than having a common bank account, or kids: in case of breakup, it can go horribly wrong.
Well exactly. Would you let your teenage daughter have kids or open a bank account with her boyfriend?
Those things are worse than sharing passwords. I'd say this is more like sharing keys with your boyfriend/girlfriend. As a teenager? Not going to happen.
In the perfect world, we would come up with a system to allow the teenager brain to interact with the real world without too many bad outcomes.
Bring back boarding school!
When you get married, you share finances which requires a lot more trust than any Facebook account. I know some couples who share email accounts too just out of convenience.
My wife and I always advise newlyweds to maintain separate bank accounts.
Money troubles --- mostly differing expectations about how to spend -- account for a lot of friction in marriages, especially when money is tight. Having your own account (and splitting expenses equally) means you can do whatever you want with what's left over at the end of the month. Huge safety valve.
Privacy is important to humans generally. The more privacy you build into a relationship (without being secretive!) the more robust it will be over time. Privacy keeps people from feeling trapped, it allows them to approach new things with grace rather than paranoia, and it gives them room to grow. Don't underestimate it.
From the second link:
, Pule said: "The centre has high security parameters to protect all the services delivered through it."
They were originally considering the low and medium security parameters as well. Unfortunately, the chairman of the board demanded only the highest security, so they only implemented that. Such a shame, because now the low and medium parameters are completely unsecured.
when they want to make parts that need to be stronger than the PLA/ABS raw material, they "simply" print the model, use it to make a mold and cast the mold with bronze or copper or what have you.
This. If you're only looking at the initial printing material you're missing out on how that combines with existing manufacturing processes -- it's now possible to make *anything* using a digital 3D model as a starting point. Which means rapid prototyping, version control, download-distribution, and infinite repeatability.
Yeah, our options pretty much boil down to A) Build fission plants. B) Figure out net positive energy fusion and start building those, or C) DRASTICALLY reduce our energy consumption, including using materials that require lots of energy to produce.
I've always liked C) drastically reduce, because it works with the trend that systems tend to become more efficient over time, particularly if given the incentive to do so (where the incentive is usually spent on engineering and r&d, which is a win for nerds and geeks).
The problem is that drastic reduction requires lifestyle changes of the sort that will move us all out of our comfort zones to varying degrees. Smaller screens, dimmer lights, warmer/cooler/smaller rooms, slower cooking, pedal power, manual labor, longer travel times, uglier vegetables...
It's a tough sell, even with planetary apocalypse looming, but dammit our standard of living is so far advanced over our ancestors that a little discomfort is not going to be the end of the world. Whereas going on the way we are now is likely to be.
it's hardly practical to carry around an audio rig everywhere
On the contrary. You likely have a very powerful rig that is perfect for audio signal processing in your pocket. All you need is the software that does what you go on to describe.
There are autotune apps already. You can buy an accessory that takes a mic input and provides line-out via the headphone jack. The auto-tuned future is here!
Why is this necessary? Both already have native apps on mobile devices. Users can browse with IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. What does the browser do that a normal browser doesn't?
These things probably only exist to leech ad revenue off of someone else's product. But with a little imagination, and an appreciation of the art of Greasemonkey scripts, it's not hard to figure out the value of wrapping a web app this way. Here's a few off the top of my head:
1) Every time Facebook or Google or any cloud service upgrades their user interface they create built-in demand for something (anything!) that can make the site look and act like it used to look, for users who are resistant to change. That's a pretty easy sell, actually.
2) Localization into languages that aren't supported, or localization of user-generated content (via Google Translate) on the fly.
3) Muting colors, normalizing text, minimizing ads, converting dynamic content to static --- basically anything that will make using the app less annoying for people who are highly-sensitive to design or visually impaired or cognitively impaired or just easily distracted.
4) Adding a security layer, such as encrypting and/or signing messages, injecting steganographic content, preventing upload/download of certain kinds of files.
Just think about it. This is the web. There is no reason why you have to just sit back and take what cloud providers give you. If you build a custom browser, it's trivial to much around with markup, stylesheets, and javascript to give your customers exactly what they want. Of course, there is likely to be an arms race and/or litigation involved if you are too successful or cut into the profits of the company whose app your are wrapping.
I'm just waiting... for Verisign to get hacked.
Or burgled.
Or infiltrated by enemy agents.
Or infiltrated by government agents.
Or headed up by a clueless CEO who demands single sign-on access to everything and uses a password based on his birthday.
Or outsourced to Sony.
Well played, sir!
It's true that this is last-mile security only. It protects against someone impersonating OpenDNS and that's it. It makes their service more secure.
OpenDNS's resolvers could still be fooled by poisoning attacks and you'd be just as screwed. They could argue that they have all kinds of proprietary secret sauce on their resolvers, along with DNSSEC where applicable, to prevent that from happening, but we can leave that aside for now.
The thing is, both ISPs and attackers-who-p0wn-routers have good reason to intercept DNS requests to/from OpenDNS. ISPs want to be able to send you to their own Domain Not Found portal (a la Comcast). Attackers... well, we know what they want. One of the features of OpenDNS is that they intercept and neutralize malware lookups. OpenDNS is basically pissing on a lot of people's parades.
So it makes a lot of sense for them to give customers a secure connection to their service. Properly explained, it's a good idea.
But you're right that it's misleading to sell it the way they do.
What does a not-for-profit Free Software organization do with that much money?
Pretend they are still Netscape.
I agree. Latest Chrome builds (15+) are failing to fully hide parts of DIVs where style.display is set to none, for instance.
It's a nasty rendering bug (and you can tell its a bug because scrolling up and back to force a repaint of the problem area makes the problem go away) that is playing havoc with dynamic display of content.
So in 2009 when it was clear that Google was building its own non-Gecko browser, why didn't the Mozilla Foundation start squirreling a lot of that money into an endowment to help pay for operations when Google inevitably pulled the plug?
Instead, they went full steam ahead, attempting to copy the Chrome look without copying the Chrome feel, and while ignoring a boatload of issues that have been problems in Firefox for years.
I'm so glad I can change the "theme" of my browser with just a mouseover. But is that really a substitute for better SSL certificate handling (a la Persepctives) or security improvements (a la HTTPS Everywhere and NoScript) or HTML5 compatibility (support for H.264)? No. No it isn't. What does that say about a browser when the best features are addons that come from outside the team that was being paid to develop it?
The management at Mozilla has a lot to answer for, pissing away nearly half a billion dollars of support. With a record like Firefox's, why should anyone donate personal or corporate funds to them in the future?