and he refers me to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) division.
Assuming there are no special legal problems with using Java or any other popular programming language to develop a deliverable product and the fact that the project already specified that you use Java... I think you were just refered to the wrong people to get your software onto a list of approved software to be used internally. Nothing you wanted to do should have been in the scope of lawyers, but sounds like they were just too stupid to know that. This was a software licensing issue and should have gone through the same process as buying photoshop or any other piece of software that was to be used internally. And to be frank, you should have known better also.
If a byproduct of that is privacy that doesn't mean that privacy itself is covered - just that some other rights give us privacy.
And so I reiterate - privacy itself is not a right explicitly or directly afforded to US citizens by the Constitution.
What is your definition of privacy? And what would you say wouldn't be covered directly by the 4th ammendment? If it isn't covered by the 4th ammendment or doesn't flow directly from that, then I just don't see it as a matter of privacy. The 4th ammendment would prohibit all sorts of laws that would violate what most people would consider privacy, so why protest the word?
Really I don't think it is that privacy isn't directly addressed by the 4th ammendment, it is that there are differences in what people consider as matters of privacy and how far the 4th ammendment goes to protect those matters.
I think the 4th ammendment nearly perfectly addresses what should be private and how to balance privacy with the power of the state. I just don't see how anyone thinks that the 4th ammendment does not address privacy.
How does the 4th ammendment not precisely mirror this definition:
privacy (pr'v-s) pronunciation n. 1.
1. The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others.
2. The state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion: a person's right to privacy. 2. The state of being concealed; secrecy.
The 4th ammendment broadly applied covers all of the actual situations that we might broad categorize under a Right to "privacy". A person's right to the privacy of their own body, so that any broadly applicable law that intrudes upon a person that could be considered a search or seizure without warrant could be struck down as in violation of the 4th ammendment. Wiretapping of communications without warrant is clearly a violation in the nature of seizure of papers and effects. Tell me again, where is privacy not found?
So, 24x7 surveillance would not be a privacy violation, as long as it didn't involve searching through (or seizing) the your person, house, papers or effects, right?
No, surveillance in public places is not a privacy violation. But how would you carry out 24x7 surveilance without intruding upon a person's home? Besides, 24x7 surveilance of public places already happens all over the country and it has not been found unconstitutional, because it isn't.
I am not saying that such surveillance is right or appropriate or that it is not subject to law, but it is not unconstitutional. Privacy regards "private" matters. Walking down the street, going to the mall, meeting some people at the local watering hole may be "your business" but it isn't private when you use public roads to get there or you are plainly visible from common spaces. Yes, privacy is found in your own home and in your person and by agreement it is found in other person's homes or private property. I would also say that your "papers" and "effects" is broad enough to cover private communications, where an effort is made to secure them, whatever the means which may not be carried out without a warrant.
Returning to the right to privacy, however, I think it's tragic that we essentially invented one inside the Consitution. The fact is that it's really not there. And that's why no one knows what it really means. If we hadn't invented one but had realized "hmm... privacy is an issue to us in ways it never was to the founding fathers" we could have had the opportunity for a national debate to ammend the constitution with an actual concrete definition of a right to privacy. The invented right to privacy has thrown privacy issues decades back because we're trying to make an iron rod out of cooked spaghetti.
Come on, saying there is no right to "privacy" in the constitution is just plain wrong. Here it is:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I would say that being "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is a very good definition of privacy. Meaning that Congress and by extension of the 14th ammendment the States and local governments cannot may not make a law that allows searches or seizure of a person, house, papers or "effects" except by specific warrant.
Problem is, and I agree, that the legal protection alluded to by the word privacy has been misapplied, by connotation, to sexual relations, for which the constitutional definition of privacy does not apply except as far as the privacy of the location is concerned. It is longstanding that the States have regulated relationships of a personal, business and marital relationships for centuries and the constitution did nothing to change that except by providing limits on the means by which States may enforce their laws.
Consider that the surveillance camera is not a camera - it's someone who recognized you.
This is the part that most people have trouble with, the analogies can be misleading. Your analogy on public observation is correct. A camera should be considered no differently than the observation of a person. As such it should be anyone's right, including the police, to observe public spaces. That includes the right of the press, individuals, corporations to record visual and audio information in a public space. As for police and government use of that video once it has been recorded, that should be a matter of public policy not constitional reasoning. And the community itself should decide whether its police should use cameras. To that end, the power of the purse and political control over policing methods are very important. If a camera is put in place to respond to incidents or threats of physical violence, then the police should not start using it for misdemeanors without public consent either directly or through their elected officials.
Although, perhaps if laws were applied more uniformly without as much discretion, then it is the laws themselves rather than the methods that are used to apply them which are the proper place for people to address their efforts in a constitutional democracy. If people are harrassed at every street corner for jay walking and start getting tickets in the mail (like those corrupt little "gotcha" stop light cameras in DC) then laws will be changed. And if people have trouble changing laws which the majority disagree with, then we need to address the more fundamental problems of an unrepresentative government having been allowed to evolve.
But these issues are outside of the constitutional concept of privacy, rather they are the result of an intrusive and pervasive government that has given itself authority over the minutia of people's lives. Privacy itself only protects those things that could be reasonably considered private. What people are really concerned with in the "privacy" debate is really just confidentiality in their dealings with other people and entities. And there is no constitutional protection for confidentiality between people or between you and your government. That is a matter for mere law, but in considering such laws it is important to remember not to interfere with what is a constitutionally protected right, freedom of speech. Any so called "privacy" laws, will very quickly tend to erode our freedom of speech by putting arbitrary prior restraints on that speech. This is why we should simply not expect confidentiality from our government and we should enforce confidentiality on others by use of contract with explicit terms and penalties.
Expecting confidentiality from our government and expecting our government to act as a clearinghouse for such confidential information is a step towards dictatorship. In this context, "Privacy" means greater and greater concetration of information in the hands of a few and witheld from the public.
Unless their researching social networking and open content systems that's really sad. I can't believe the content on Wikipedia should serve as a very significant source to any research other than to it's social influences. That would be like saying Britannica was a major source for a research project... that couldn't possibly be taken seriously.
I think that is exactly right. Neither Britannica, Wikipedia or any encyclopedia type publication should be used as a primary source or even to verify information for any purpose except for the most trivial. I was taught to use encyclopedias as primary sources in elementary school and was untaught this practice in high school and college. If anything an encyclopedia should be used to help learn more about a subject so that you can figure out where to start doing real research using primary sources. I think the education system would be well served by teaching this as early as possible.
There will always be waste and inefficiencies. Penalizing energy use and subsidizing efficiency will do nothing but hurt people unnecessarily. If the cost of greater improvement in energy efficiency is less than the savings, then people will eventually realize this and be willing to make the investment.
To stack the game arbitrarily and in the process hurt many people because of some false sense of morality is just plain evil.
This is a convergence thing, most HDTV's only have a single DVI or HDMI input on them. It makes sense to have a single box that provides all your HD content since it's so much easier to run out of inputs.
Funny how that works, You might think we just need to see more inputs. Especially HDMI with its USB like connector, should give HDTVs plenty of room for 3 or 4 of them. All-in-one has never been a recipe for getting a good choice of best of breed technologies, more often than not it just leaves you stuck with one poor implementation because it is too expensive to replace everything. With just 1 HDMI or DVI on the back of an HDTV you are really going to be stuck with one device that does nothing well or having to get a remote controlled HDMI switch so you can switch between devices.
So, where exactly do you google bashers want us to look for innovation? Where is there something better?
I have no doubt that google will eventually be corrupted, and maybe it is well on its way, but then it will be on to the next company that doesn't try to squeeze its customers for an extra buck. So far google has given me far more than it has asked in return and they have plenty of competition.
Microsoft are not considedered evil for branching into other areas of business. They're evil because they illegally utilized their dominance in one area to extend their business into other areas, stifling competition and therefore harming consumers.
I would add that microsoft is evil because it has used its market dominance to extend into other areas and lock in its customers to its products by purposefully offering incompatible file formats and making interoperability very difficult. But google has so far supported open standard formats and helped open source software projects. Google has even offered limited interoperability with its search by offering an api and there are plentiful hacks of google maps which would have been shut down by a lesser company. Google isn't perfect and could very well start locking in users and locking out competitors with products like this google box if the media formats are incompatible with other players or something else otherwise blocks reasonable information exchange. But they haven't done it yet. It is right to be cautious when a company gets this big and tries to do big things, but a healthy skepticism is not the same thing as paranoia. Seems that people really have been damaged by microsoft.
Belief that google will come out with a good product is not blind faith, but rather experience based on a recent history of innovation in seemingly well established areas. By focusing on simplicity in user interface design, like apple, google has made technology accessible to many more people and made it more useful to everyone.
I think you set the bar lower than google should be aiming, merely legal has never been a good way to determine good or bad. And merely not being Microsoft, is not enough to show google is a company that is responsible to its customers and users.
But you are right, google has done nothing but push innovation and competition in what were otherwise stagnant areas. In web search, web mail, online maps and directions google has stepped in to what seemed like established and stagnant markets (in the Internet's short history) and really made them competitive again. Seems there are plenty of companies trying to get the living room entertainment center right, but they are pushing proprietary formats and closed networks and making constraining deals with big media who are more interested in maintaining DVD sales and keeping their primarily push cable tv and satellite networks. It will be interesting to see if google follows that well worn path or chooses open formats for video and makes big media play on the same field as the little guys or if google allows other set tops to search and download media available through its networks. And importantly, at what prices all these things happen.
I have great hope that google is big enough to make good things happen, but not yet so big as they have lost perspective.
hat's not the ONLY problem. It is also VERY dorky looking and you can't really move about with that thing on, which really takes away the reason for having an iPod. iPods are mobile. They function well and they look nice (huge factor for those outside of the geek/nerd crowd). So, you're left using this while stationary. If you're going to do that, why not just watch it on a TV or monitory and save yourself $600? I could imagine frequent business travellers using one of these but hard to imagine anyone else having an use for it.
You aren't exactly mobile if you are watching video on your eyepod in the first place. So, the same people actually using the video ipod for watching video could potentially make use of a display like this. In this case mobile means sitting on a plane or sitting on a train.
I liked that description, actually. I thought if you're going to claim it creates the "illusion" of having a huge TV, why not take it to the limit? "Its makers say this creates the illusion of watching a 46,200 inch screen from a distance of 1 mile!"
Who wouldn't want the illusion of a 46 thousand inch screen? Seriously I should go into marketing.
It is because of the optics that the image appears as if it was at 11 or 12 feet. It is about how your eyes focus. Think about it. If you wear glasses are your eyes focusing on the surface of the lens or the image? That would be pretty uncomfortable if your eyes were straining to focus on the glasses less than an inch away. No, your eyes are focusing on the image that appears as if it is some distance in front of you. Same with binoculars or any other lens. Each lens is designed with a particular focus. The one eMagin uses happens to be 12'.
I've used eMagin's z800 and if the eyebud uses the same lens, which it sounds like it does, then the screen does actually appear as if it is on a screen about 12' away.
Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants
But the resulting hybrid was not fertile it seems:
What is not clear in the English case is whether the charlock was fertile. Scientists collected eight seeds from the plant but they failed to germinate them and concluded the plant was "not viable".
But it did produce pollen, so it is possible that it could transfer the resistant gene to another plant.
So, this is not a case of natural selection, but rather the engineered gene actually being incorporated into a different species of plant via cross polination.
Africans, on the other hand, are very genetically diverse.
By what percentage? If you figure an average rate of genetic mutation without anomolies, then a 20% reduction in lifespan would increase your rate of mutation over time. Topical climates are known to be incubators for many diseases, so it seems as if you would have to control for reduced lifespans.
Plus those two links you provide seem to be based on computer models and not actual mapping of the genome of a representative sample of the "native" population. Of course if you base your computer model on an "Out of Africa" hypothesis and then let it run its course you will get less genetic diversity in otehr regions... because that's what you told the program to do. I'd like to see actual testing, even if such a thing is possible these days, given all the centuries of intermarriage (or at least babymaking).
I too am waiting to see Google take this one all the way to the Supreme Court.
I think we need to think a bit bigger than just setting some sort of limited precedent here. Companies like this live on the threat of a lawsuit being remotely credible. So, as long as the patent office continues to issue patents regardless of merit, then the problem will not go away. Sure sometimes big companies act with impunity to other people's intelectual property and it is right that they are sued, but seemingly more often these days it really is the little guy that is just trying to pull a scam on the big company for a few bucks. With a patent office like we have now (and have had for the past couple decades) we will continue to have a breeding ground for parasites that add nothing to our base of knowledge, but rather simply serve to restrain true innovation and thus the economy under a threat of nearly baseless lawsuits.
If the judgement of the patent clerks cannot be trusted then put a hard cap on the number of patents that are issued each year. Perhaps even have the patent office rate the patents that they issue for originality and scope to make it clearer to the courts when companies over reach the original scope of the patent. And the patent office should be continuously reviewing patents that have been issued in view to revoke them. And there should be an easy and innexpensive way to challenge a patent without suing in the Federal courts. Regardless, we are the ones that need to put pressure on Congress and the President to reform the patent office because issuing so many bad patents does nothing but hurt the economy as a whole.
Why the hell should I have to pay tax to a governmant that I can't vote for? You are suposed to pay tax to YOUR local government, the one that you have a duty to vote for once or twice a year. That's the way it's always been, though possibly there's some exceptions that they've slinked through.
No one reasonable is suggesting that people pay sales taxes in the state where the product originated. It is the place of residence, which would be where the tax is taken. Many states already have laws that say if you buy through mail order or online or even if you go out of state and bring back something, you are to pay a "use" tax. But it is to be paid to your home state.
This software is not rocket-science. Address goes in, tax rate(s) come out. It is no more complicated than a Zip+4 database. The same group of states that wants this bill is also working to simplify their sales tax categories to be more uniform across states. This would require the business to add a field to the item database to indicate the tax catagory.
Bullshit.
Tax rates change at whatever arbitrary time each individual state legislature decides to change it, requiring regular Software updates and testing. Tax rates apply differently or not at all to different categories of products, those categories are defined differently by each state, requiring mutiple categories to apply to each product with a state modifier. The taxes collected don't magically get sent to the different States when you click the button, so you are going to track seperately each states collected tax revenue and submit the payment along with the appropriate forms to whatever address you have in your database, which is another thing you will have to keep up to date. I could see this requiring each company to hire a person full time just to deal with the paperwork and potentially causing months of development work and testing even just integrating 3rd party tax software.
It would be far more economical to just have people spend a few hours of their spare time each year tallying up their online receipts and including payment with their income tax.
Way off base. The US is practically alone in the democratic world in having such lax gun control. Gun regulations (that apply equally to everyone) are about as typical of fascism as breathing oxygen is.
Elections are no evidence of virtue and Rights have nothing to do with democracy. Freedom does not flow from the will of the majority, but from the will of the minority to fight for things that are too important to give up. The Right to defend oneself is fundamental, regardless of the means. Whether it be a sword, gun, stick or stone we have a fundamental Right to possess and carry these things as long as we do not initiate the threat of force against others.
It's a tragedy that certain forces have managed to convince so many Americans that rights really worth fighting for are things like the right to guns and the right to not have health insurance. People use their attention on these total red herrings while they're being robbed blind of the rights that really matter. Wake up! You're giving up your gold for worthless glass beads, for christ's sake.
It is telling that you put the "right" to force others to take care of you (government health care) above the Right to defend yourself from harm. You are the one with the red herring, wishing to take away the fundamental Right to self protection, from which all other Rights come, in order to further your goal to make people better.
You fail to see the correlation don't you? Between the advent of this new age of "Total Information Awareness" and the increasing limitiations on our right to defend ourselves. When the influential control all the guns, and then they put them in your sight at every checkpoint and traffic stop, and then they start recording your movements and habits. That is about control, about forced subservience to the few in the guise of subservience to the laws of the State. It is about manipulation, about servitude and slavery. It is about using the apparatus of government to coerce more from people, not about protection.
You and your health care can go to hell, it is just one more way to force subservience and centralize control over people's lives in the hands of a few in order to use us like puppets for their own amusement. It is evil. It is wrong. It can only lead to violence and death.
"1) Be cheap software available to help retailers work this out. The software already exists, since web sites like target.com already have to deal with it."
Please define "cheap" when you are talking about small business? Small business drives the economy more so than the businesses that can afford such things.
Making retailers jump through hoops to collect the taxes is the ultimate cowardice of polticians who want the money but are unwilling to go after their own citizens except through middlemen, because if they did force people to account for their own spending then people would suddenly realize how much they are getting taxed and you would see how much the government really is representative.
Even Joss' comments must be taken with a grain of salt. I sincerly doubt that this will be the end of Firefly - considering that currenty, Amazon.com ranks Serenity as the #1 selling DVD, with the complete Firefly series coming in at #6 (again). DVD sales on this franchise are through the roof, and have been the fulcrum upon which the future of the franchise balances.
And the movie was in theatres for what 3 weeks? The movie was intended for a quick release to DVD, where the studio expects to make more money. I think 3 movies is still pretty likely given the interest, but the studio seems to be milking all the free publicity for all its worth by playing games.
I don't think you can leave it at that. Maybe it is good enough for grade school where all sorts of half truths are taught, but at some point you have to address ID at its heart. Either something can be explained in terms of evolution or it can't. ID puts forth the idea of irreducible biological complexity as proof of Intelligent Design. It is not good enough to say that both have their merits and call it a day. There is a real conflict over our understanding of reality. ID is patently false. It has no place in a classroom not because it is a religious belief as the judge said, but because it is a false and demonstrably so. Its premise is based upon citing arbitrary examples of biological features and merely saying that they are too complex to ever be explained through biological process. That even with thousands of examples of analogous features in other organisms that we should look at the example that we have defined as "the most complex" and simply throw up our hands and say that it is unexplainable and that we should simply study its unexplainability. That we look at a flatworm shrinking from the light and a fully formed human eye and say 'you can't get there from here' is to ignore Intelligence not an embrace of Intelligence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There are certainly gaps in the fossil record, but is reasonable to expect there would be. It is not reasonable to explain those gaps in ways that ignore the simplest explanations.
The word "ignorant" is used pejoratively to apply to ideas like Intelligent Design, as it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
and he refers me to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) division.
Assuming there are no special legal problems with using Java or any other popular programming language to develop a deliverable product and the fact that the project already specified that you use Java... I think you were just refered to the wrong people to get your software onto a list of approved software to be used internally. Nothing you wanted to do should have been in the scope of lawyers, but sounds like they were just too stupid to know that. This was a software licensing issue and should have gone through the same process as buying photoshop or any other piece of software that was to be used internally. And to be frank, you should have known better also.
If a byproduct of that is privacy that doesn't mean that privacy itself is covered - just that some other rights give us privacy.
And so I reiterate - privacy itself is not a right explicitly or directly afforded to US citizens by the Constitution.
What is your definition of privacy? And what would you say wouldn't be covered directly by the 4th ammendment? If it isn't covered by the 4th ammendment or doesn't flow directly from that, then I just don't see it as a matter of privacy. The 4th ammendment would prohibit all sorts of laws that would violate what most people would consider privacy, so why protest the word?
Really I don't think it is that privacy isn't directly addressed by the 4th ammendment, it is that there are differences in what people consider as matters of privacy and how far the 4th ammendment goes to protect those matters.
I think the 4th ammendment nearly perfectly addresses what should be private and how to balance privacy with the power of the state. I just don't see how anyone thinks that the 4th ammendment does not address privacy.
How does the 4th ammendment not precisely mirror this definition:
privacy (pr'v-s) pronunciation
n.
1.
1. The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others.
2. The state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion: a person's right to privacy.
2. The state of being concealed; secrecy.
The 4th ammendment broadly applied covers all of the actual situations that we might broad categorize under a Right to "privacy". A person's right to the privacy of their own body, so that any broadly applicable law that intrudes upon a person that could be considered a search or seizure without warrant could be struck down as in violation of the 4th ammendment. Wiretapping of communications without warrant is clearly a violation in the nature of seizure of papers and effects. Tell me again, where is privacy not found?
So, 24x7 surveillance would not be a privacy violation, as long as it didn't involve searching through (or seizing) the your person, house, papers or effects, right?
No, surveillance in public places is not a privacy violation. But how would you carry out 24x7 surveilance without intruding upon a person's home? Besides, 24x7 surveilance of public places already happens all over the country and it has not been found unconstitutional, because it isn't.
I am not saying that such surveillance is right or appropriate or that it is not subject to law, but it is not unconstitutional. Privacy regards "private" matters. Walking down the street, going to the mall, meeting some people at the local watering hole may be "your business" but it isn't private when you use public roads to get there or you are plainly visible from common spaces. Yes, privacy is found in your own home and in your person and by agreement it is found in other person's homes or private property. I would also say that your "papers" and "effects" is broad enough to cover private communications, where an effort is made to secure them, whatever the means which may not be carried out without a warrant.
Returning to the right to privacy, however, I think it's tragic that we essentially invented one inside the Consitution. The fact is that it's really not there. And that's why no one knows what it really means. If we hadn't invented one but had realized "hmm... privacy is an issue to us in ways it never was to the founding fathers" we could have had the opportunity for a national debate to ammend the constitution with an actual concrete definition of a right to privacy. The invented right to privacy has thrown privacy issues decades back because we're trying to make an iron rod out of cooked spaghetti.
Come on, saying there is no right to "privacy" in the constitution is just plain wrong. Here it is:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I would say that being "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is a very good definition of privacy. Meaning that Congress and by extension of the 14th ammendment the States and local governments cannot may not make a law that allows searches or seizure of a person, house, papers or "effects" except by specific warrant.
Problem is, and I agree, that the legal protection alluded to by the word privacy has been misapplied, by connotation, to sexual relations, for which the constitutional definition of privacy does not apply except as far as the privacy of the location is concerned. It is longstanding that the States have regulated relationships of a personal, business and marital relationships for centuries and the constitution did nothing to change that except by providing limits on the means by which States may enforce their laws.
Consider that the surveillance camera is not a camera - it's someone who recognized you.
This is the part that most people have trouble with, the analogies can be misleading. Your analogy on public observation is correct. A camera should be considered no differently than the observation of a person. As such it should be anyone's right, including the police, to observe public spaces. That includes the right of the press, individuals, corporations to record visual and audio information in a public space. As for police and government use of that video once it has been recorded, that should be a matter of public policy not constitional reasoning. And the community itself should decide whether its police should use cameras. To that end, the power of the purse and political control over policing methods are very important. If a camera is put in place to respond to incidents or threats of physical violence, then the police should not start using it for misdemeanors without public consent either directly or through their elected officials.
Although, perhaps if laws were applied more uniformly without as much discretion, then it is the laws themselves rather than the methods that are used to apply them which are the proper place for people to address their efforts in a constitutional democracy. If people are harrassed at every street corner for jay walking and start getting tickets in the mail (like those corrupt little "gotcha" stop light cameras in DC) then laws will be changed. And if people have trouble changing laws which the majority disagree with, then we need to address the more fundamental problems of an unrepresentative government having been allowed to evolve.
But these issues are outside of the constitutional concept of privacy, rather they are the result of an intrusive and pervasive government that has given itself authority over the minutia of people's lives. Privacy itself only protects those things that could be reasonably considered private. What people are really concerned with in the "privacy" debate is really just confidentiality in their dealings with other people and entities. And there is no constitutional protection for confidentiality between people or between you and your government. That is a matter for mere law, but in considering such laws it is important to remember not to interfere with what is a constitutionally protected right, freedom of speech. Any so called "privacy" laws, will very quickly tend to erode our freedom of speech by putting arbitrary prior restraints on that speech. This is why we should simply not expect confidentiality from our government and we should enforce confidentiality on others by use of contract with explicit terms and penalties.
Expecting confidentiality from our government and expecting our government to act as a clearinghouse for such confidential information is a step towards dictatorship. In this context, "Privacy" means greater and greater concetration of information in the hands of a few and witheld from the public.
but the consensus from the interweb is
Are we for real calling it the "interweb" now? I thought this was still just a psuedo nerd joke along the lines of 'thems internets'.
Unless their researching social networking and open content systems that's really sad. I can't believe the content on Wikipedia should serve as a very significant source to any research other than to it's social influences. That would be like saying Britannica was a major source for a research project... that couldn't possibly be taken seriously.
I think that is exactly right. Neither Britannica, Wikipedia or any encyclopedia type publication should be used as a primary source or even to verify information for any purpose except for the most trivial. I was taught to use encyclopedias as primary sources in elementary school and was untaught this practice in high school and college. If anything an encyclopedia should be used to help learn more about a subject so that you can figure out where to start doing real research using primary sources. I think the education system would be well served by teaching this as early as possible.
There will always be waste and inefficiencies. Penalizing energy use and subsidizing efficiency will do nothing but hurt people unnecessarily. If the cost of greater improvement in energy efficiency is less than the savings, then people will eventually realize this and be willing to make the investment.
To stack the game arbitrarily and in the process hurt many people because of some false sense of morality is just plain evil.
This is a convergence thing, most HDTV's only have a single DVI or HDMI input on them. It makes sense to have a single box that provides all your HD content since it's so much easier to run out of inputs.
Funny how that works, You might think we just need to see more inputs. Especially HDMI with its USB like connector, should give HDTVs plenty of room for 3 or 4 of them. All-in-one has never been a recipe for getting a good choice of best of breed technologies, more often than not it just leaves you stuck with one poor implementation because it is too expensive to replace everything. With just 1 HDMI or DVI on the back of an HDTV you are really going to be stuck with one device that does nothing well or having to get a remote controlled HDMI switch so you can switch between devices.
So, where exactly do you google bashers want us to look for innovation? Where is there something better?
I have no doubt that google will eventually be corrupted, and maybe it is well on its way, but then it will be on to the next company that doesn't try to squeeze its customers for an extra buck. So far google has given me far more than it has asked in return and they have plenty of competition.
Microsoft are not considedered evil for branching into other areas of business. They're evil because they illegally utilized their dominance in one area to extend their business into other areas, stifling competition and therefore harming consumers.
I would add that microsoft is evil because it has used its market dominance to extend into other areas and lock in its customers to its products by purposefully offering incompatible file formats and making interoperability very difficult. But google has so far supported open standard formats and helped open source software projects. Google has even offered limited interoperability with its search by offering an api and there are plentiful hacks of google maps which would have been shut down by a lesser company. Google isn't perfect and could very well start locking in users and locking out competitors with products like this google box if the media formats are incompatible with other players or something else otherwise blocks reasonable information exchange. But they haven't done it yet. It is right to be cautious when a company gets this big and tries to do big things, but a healthy skepticism is not the same thing as paranoia. Seems that people really have been damaged by microsoft.
Belief that google will come out with a good product is not blind faith, but rather experience based on a recent history of innovation in seemingly well established areas. By focusing on simplicity in user interface design, like apple, google has made technology accessible to many more people and made it more useful to everyone.
I think you set the bar lower than google should be aiming, merely legal has never been a good way to determine good or bad. And merely not being Microsoft, is not enough to show google is a company that is responsible to its customers and users.
But you are right, google has done nothing but push innovation and competition in what were otherwise stagnant areas. In web search, web mail, online maps and directions google has stepped in to what seemed like established and stagnant markets (in the Internet's short history) and really made them competitive again. Seems there are plenty of companies trying to get the living room entertainment center right, but they are pushing proprietary formats and closed networks and making constraining deals with big media who are more interested in maintaining DVD sales and keeping their primarily push cable tv and satellite networks. It will be interesting to see if google follows that well worn path or chooses open formats for video and makes big media play on the same field as the little guys or if google allows other set tops to search and download media available through its networks. And importantly, at what prices all these things happen.
I have great hope that google is big enough to make good things happen, but not yet so big as they have lost perspective.
hat's not the ONLY problem. It is also VERY dorky looking and you can't really move about with that thing on, which really takes away the reason for having an iPod. iPods are mobile. They function well and they look nice (huge factor for those outside of the geek/nerd crowd). So, you're left using this while stationary. If you're going to do that, why not just watch it on a TV or monitory and save yourself $600? I could imagine frequent business travellers using one of these but hard to imagine anyone else having an use for it.
You aren't exactly mobile if you are watching video on your eyepod in the first place. So, the same people actually using the video ipod for watching video could potentially make use of a display like this. In this case mobile means sitting on a plane or sitting on a train.
The lowest resolution display that emagin makes is SVGA (800x600) I believe that is what the eyebud "800" stands for.
I liked that description, actually. I thought if you're going to claim it creates the "illusion" of having a huge TV, why not take it to the limit? "Its makers say this creates the illusion of watching a 46,200 inch screen from a distance of 1 mile!"
Who wouldn't want the illusion of a 46 thousand inch screen? Seriously I should go into marketing.
It is because of the optics that the image appears as if it was at 11 or 12 feet. It is about how your eyes focus. Think about it. If you wear glasses are your eyes focusing on the surface of the lens or the image? That would be pretty uncomfortable if your eyes were straining to focus on the glasses less than an inch away. No, your eyes are focusing on the image that appears as if it is some distance in front of you. Same with binoculars or any other lens. Each lens is designed with a particular focus. The one eMagin uses happens to be 12'.
I've used eMagin's z800 and if the eyebud uses the same lens, which it sounds like it does, then the screen does actually appear as if it is on a screen about 12' away.
What article did you read?
Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants
But the resulting hybrid was not fertile it seems:
What is not clear in the English case is whether the charlock was fertile. Scientists collected eight seeds from the plant but they failed to germinate them and concluded the plant was "not viable".
But it did produce pollen, so it is possible that it could transfer the resistant gene to another plant.
So, this is not a case of natural selection, but rather the engineered gene actually being incorporated into a different species of plant via cross polination.
Africans, on the other hand, are very genetically diverse.
By what percentage? If you figure an average rate of genetic mutation without anomolies, then a 20% reduction in lifespan would increase your rate of mutation over time. Topical climates are known to be incubators for many diseases, so it seems as if you would have to control for reduced lifespans.
Plus those two links you provide seem to be based on computer models and not actual mapping of the genome of a representative sample of the "native" population. Of course if you base your computer model on an "Out of Africa" hypothesis and then let it run its course you will get less genetic diversity in otehr regions... because that's what you told the program to do. I'd like to see actual testing, even if such a thing is possible these days, given all the centuries of intermarriage (or at least babymaking).
I too am waiting to see Google take this one all the way to the Supreme Court.
I think we need to think a bit bigger than just setting some sort of limited precedent here. Companies like this live on the threat of a lawsuit being remotely credible. So, as long as the patent office continues to issue patents regardless of merit, then the problem will not go away. Sure sometimes big companies act with impunity to other people's intelectual property and it is right that they are sued, but seemingly more often these days it really is the little guy that is just trying to pull a scam on the big company for a few bucks. With a patent office like we have now (and have had for the past couple decades) we will continue to have a breeding ground for parasites that add nothing to our base of knowledge, but rather simply serve to restrain true innovation and thus the economy under a threat of nearly baseless lawsuits.
If the judgement of the patent clerks cannot be trusted then put a hard cap on the number of patents that are issued each year. Perhaps even have the patent office rate the patents that they issue for originality and scope to make it clearer to the courts when companies over reach the original scope of the patent. And the patent office should be continuously reviewing patents that have been issued in view to revoke them. And there should be an easy and innexpensive way to challenge a patent without suing in the Federal courts. Regardless, we are the ones that need to put pressure on Congress and the President to reform the patent office because issuing so many bad patents does nothing but hurt the economy as a whole.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
http://www.house.gov/
http://www.senate.gov/
Why the hell should I have to pay tax to a governmant that I can't vote for? You are suposed to pay tax to YOUR local government, the one that you have a duty to vote for once or twice a year. That's the way it's always been, though possibly there's some exceptions that they've slinked through.
No one reasonable is suggesting that people pay sales taxes in the state where the product originated. It is the place of residence, which would be where the tax is taken. Many states already have laws that say if you buy through mail order or online or even if you go out of state and bring back something, you are to pay a "use" tax. But it is to be paid to your home state.
"Microsoft is not a company selling apps, Microsoft is a company selling lock-in."
That deserves repeating
This software is not rocket-science. Address goes in, tax rate(s) come out. It is no more complicated than a Zip+4 database. The same group of states that wants this bill is also working to simplify their sales tax categories to be more uniform across states. This would require the business to add a field to the item database to indicate the tax catagory.
Bullshit.
Tax rates change at whatever arbitrary time each individual state legislature decides to change it, requiring regular Software updates and testing. Tax rates apply differently or not at all to different categories of products, those categories are defined differently by each state, requiring mutiple categories to apply to each product with a state modifier. The taxes collected don't magically get sent to the different States when you click the button, so you are going to track seperately each states collected tax revenue and submit the payment along with the appropriate forms to whatever address you have in your database, which is another thing you will have to keep up to date. I could see this requiring each company to hire a person full time just to deal with the paperwork and potentially causing months of development work and testing even just integrating 3rd party tax software.
It would be far more economical to just have people spend a few hours of their spare time each year tallying up their online receipts and including payment with their income tax.
Way off base. The US is practically alone in the democratic world in having such lax gun control. Gun regulations (that apply equally to everyone) are about as typical of fascism as breathing oxygen is.
Elections are no evidence of virtue and Rights have nothing to do with democracy. Freedom does not flow from the will of the majority, but from the will of the minority to fight for things that are too important to give up. The Right to defend oneself is fundamental, regardless of the means. Whether it be a sword, gun, stick or stone we have a fundamental Right to possess and carry these things as long as we do not initiate the threat of force against others.
It's a tragedy that certain forces have managed to convince so many Americans that rights really worth fighting for are things like the right to guns and the right to not have health insurance. People use their attention on these total red herrings while they're being robbed blind of the rights that really matter. Wake up! You're giving up your gold for worthless glass beads, for christ's sake.
It is telling that you put the "right" to force others to take care of you (government health care) above the Right to defend yourself from harm. You are the one with the red herring, wishing to take away the fundamental Right to self protection, from which all other Rights come, in order to further your goal to make people better.
You fail to see the correlation don't you? Between the advent of this new age of "Total Information Awareness" and the increasing limitiations on our right to defend ourselves. When the influential control all the guns, and then they put them in your sight at every checkpoint and traffic stop, and then they start recording your movements and habits. That is about control, about forced subservience to the few in the guise of subservience to the laws of the State. It is about manipulation, about servitude and slavery. It is about using the apparatus of government to coerce more from people, not about protection.
You and your health care can go to hell, it is just one more way to force subservience and centralize control over people's lives in the hands of a few in order to use us like puppets for their own amusement. It is evil. It is wrong. It can only lead to violence and death.
Live Free or Die.
"1) Be cheap software available to help retailers work this out. The software already exists, since web sites like target.com already have to deal with it."
Please define "cheap" when you are talking about small business? Small business drives the economy more so than the businesses that can afford such things.
Making retailers jump through hoops to collect the taxes is the ultimate cowardice of polticians who want the money but are unwilling to go after their own citizens except through middlemen, because if they did force people to account for their own spending then people would suddenly realize how much they are getting taxed and you would see how much the government really is representative.
Even Joss' comments must be taken with a grain of salt. I sincerly doubt that this will be the end of Firefly - considering that currenty, Amazon.com ranks Serenity as the #1 selling DVD, with the complete Firefly series coming in at #6 (again). DVD sales on this franchise are through the roof, and have been the fulcrum upon which the future of the franchise balances.
And the movie was in theatres for what 3 weeks? The movie was intended for a quick release to DVD, where the studio expects to make more money. I think 3 movies is still pretty likely given the interest, but the studio seems to be milking all the free publicity for all its worth by playing games.
I don't think you can leave it at that. Maybe it is good enough for grade school where all sorts of half truths are taught, but at some point you have to address ID at its heart. Either something can be explained in terms of evolution or it can't. ID puts forth the idea of irreducible biological complexity as proof of Intelligent Design. It is not good enough to say that both have their merits and call it a day. There is a real conflict over our understanding of reality. ID is patently false. It has no place in a classroom not because it is a religious belief as the judge said, but because it is a false and demonstrably so. Its premise is based upon citing arbitrary examples of biological features and merely saying that they are too complex to ever be explained through biological process. That even with thousands of examples of analogous features in other organisms that we should look at the example that we have defined as "the most complex" and simply throw up our hands and say that it is unexplainable and that we should simply study its unexplainability. That we look at a flatworm shrinking from the light and a fully formed human eye and say 'you can't get there from here' is to ignore Intelligence not an embrace of Intelligence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There are certainly gaps in the fossil record, but is reasonable to expect there would be. It is not reasonable to explain those gaps in ways that ignore the simplest explanations.
The word "ignorant" is used pejoratively to apply to ideas like Intelligent Design, as it should be.
Don't cry bloody murder every time something happens that you don't 100% approve of (and that goes for the grandparent just as much as you).
If you wait until someone goes "too far" before complaining, then they have already gone too far.