Canada could have had British Culture, French Cuisine, and American Technology. Instead, they settled for American Culture, British Cuisine, and French Technology.
> 3D printers, and CAM in general are great for prototyping, but they're > not going to make a dent in the cost of finished goods. Right now maker > bots can only make 99 cent plastic toys - which some guy in China can > already make for two cents, and which probably costs $1.50 in materials > to make using a 3D printer.
I care about not wasting things. I can't wait until the day comes that it's affordable for me to make little plastic doodads to replace broken bits of plastic in toys and devices. I'd rather spend $1 to fix a $1 toy with a tiny part than spend $1 to buy a replacement and throw the broken one away. There's a whole world of things that are made from plastic that can be fixed with plastic that don't require the strength of a bike sprocket.
You know the first thing I'd make if it were feasible? You know the little plastic battery covers on the backs of remotes? I could use about 5 of those right now. A plastic with the strength of the polystyrene used in model cars and planes would suffice.
> What they've got is some/btard or the like who named the > router that for amusement value, and succeeded in trolling > the public beyond his wildest dreams.
Stuff like this is happening more and more. I think it's time for 4Chan or Reddit or Fark or someone to start an annual "Top trolls of the year" list/award thing.
And the number of people who knew what it was went from 40 people to 40 million people when the episode aired. So for 999,999 out of 1,000,000 people, the term "from a sitcom" is appropriate.
From your link: "Festivus was conceived by writer Dan O'Keefe and was celebrated by his family as early as 1966. The holiday was later introduced into popular culture by O'Keefe's screenwriter son Daniel on an episode of Seinfeld."
> 'We developed the world's first consumer digital camera and Kodak could > have launched it in 1992. We could not get approval to launch or sell it > because of fear of the cannibalisation of film,' he told BBC News.
I doubt he originated the phrase but I heard Steve Jobs once say (in reference to the iPhone eating into iPod sales) "If you're not willing to cannibalize your own business, someone else will."
Disney literally built their empire on PD works. Most of their best-loved and most successful movies come from work that predates copyright--their original classics (Snow White, Pinocchio, and Cinderella), the films that sparked their revival in the late 80s/early 90s (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), and many others.
FUCK THEM, and the lawmakers they buy. Read that old paper you swore to uphold: Article I, Section 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
Key words there:
"limited times" -- yes, a million years is "a limited time" but you know that's not what they meant
"authors and inventors" -- not "their descendants and agents."
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" -- not "to promote megacorps' bottom lines"
Fuckers, it's not even halfway down the page. PD did exactly what it was supposed to do: things that weren't in copyright were available for (in this case) Disney to do wonderful things with. Now, art will be relatively inaccessible from 1928 on.
There's a place for both print books and electronic books. When reading something (especially fiction) for the first time, yeah, I love a physical book. But when I'm out later and don't have it on me, or when I want to search for a word or phrase, I SOOOO wish for an electronic copy.
> They're stuck there on your device
They're all with me at all times, no matter where I am...
> and they're all digitally-slimy
... and they have great digital features like being quickly searchable, copy-and-paste-able,* etc.
Yeah, it's possible I'll be at home when the power is out, or out somewhere with a dead battery, but neither of those things has happened to me more than 3 times in the last 5 years. However, I can't even count how many times I've been out and about without a particular book and wished I had it. If you insist on making it an either-or (which it doesn't need to be), I'd choose electronic.
> People today seem to think that this is something new. > The only "new" in all of this is the instantaneous aspect > of transmitting information.
It's more than just that. We've had sanitized war coverage for a good long while. For quite a large number of Americans, this is the first time seeing things like this.
There is a real demand for an alternative platform... we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform, industry dynamics, and an increased wariness around the walled gardens of Apple and to some extent Google and even Amazon, as they are increasingly in this game as well. [emphasis mine]
Oh please. I have a fondness for Linux as much as the next average Slashdotter but if the last 15 years of "X will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" has shown us, the world at large does not care about privacy, security, data robustness, or the consequences walled gardens. You buy something, you use it, and hope all goes well. If you lose your data for any reason, you rebuild.
People are already used to the possibility of losing real-life items to theft, loss, or damage, so if a picture collection or list of contacts disappears because a company went under or changed their TOS or didn't have good backups, people deal with it an move on. Is there a better way? With data, yes, there usually is. Do people care that much? No. (People have moved away from DRM a tiny bit, but that has more to do with Apple's and Amazon's music services being naturally popular than the Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" debacle.)
I'm guessing that 2012 in tablets will look a lot like 2011 did, with the one difference being the Kindle Fire. The price and prominence of that device will move a lot of units, but I'm predicting that on December 31, 2012, the market will be 60-70% iPad, 20-25% Kindle, and 10-15% everyone else combined. (Though I'm not sure how to count Windows 8 if it starts shipping on a large number of touch-based tablets that are 95% similar to the current crop of Windows-based, stylus-using tablets. I'm mainly thinking of a "tablet" as "a touch-based device that doesn't ship with a keyboard, and functions 100% as designed without one.")
>> Microsoft is offering reasonable licensing terms to the device makers, >> so the licensing agreement costs significantly less than the cost of litigating.
> I think it's pretty clearly this.
Another way to look at this isn't that the terms are "reasonable", as much as "how much can MS stand to spend in court?" MS probably has more lawyers than LG has employees, and a mountain of cash taller than LG's corporate headquarters.
With all the recent G+ shenanigans I'm going to change my browser's default search to Bing for a week and see how it goes. I'll add a link-bar shortcut to Google in case I'm not happy with any particular search, but I have the "go to the search box" keyboard shortcut so totally ingrained in my muscle memory that it'll take conscious effort to use Google.
I'm not saying I'll quit Google forever, because what if MS does something sleazy soon, but competition is supposed to make things better for all of us, so for now, I'll go wherever it's best.
Yes, we all know why large flash drives are neat. Now explain the appeal of having a dozen stainless-steel tools sticking out of the USB port of your media player.:-)
> For example, if you are searching for images of babies, Google > will now personalize your search results and give high preference > to baby photos from your Google+ circles.
Yeah, that was my same thought too--when I'm searching for pictures of something, I probably want to see pictures I *haven't* already seen. Hopefully, if they start doing this, more and more people will realize what a complete waste G+ is and stop using it, which should more or less negate this "improvement".
The suggestion that Nokia will sell off their crown jewels to Redmond has been rebuffed before, and even had an impact on the markets last year, but despite the Finns repeated denials, the rumour simply won't go away.
> To play devil's advocate, the employer could claim that the very > fact that an important executive was looking to leave could give > the impression to outsiders that something bad was going on in > the company and that could result in a loss to their business.
There's an old saying that everything is for sale. I am not trying to sell my house, but if someone walked up to me on the street and offered me $1,000,000 for it, the next words out of my mouth would be "Great! I'll tell my wife we're moving."
In that sense, damn near everyone is willing to look at new career opportunities. You'd be stupid not to. No one should read that much into it. The CEO could be getting $20 million a year, but if another company walked up with an offer of $50 million, damn right he'd be "interested".
> You can only build a house in six weeks because an army of people > is busily creating all of these finished materials for you, and if you > add up all of the labor, it probably does come to somewhere in the > neighborhood of twenty man-years of work to create a house.
You're not really doing the math right. Yeah, it takes a lot of effort in one sense, but every step creates materials for thousands of houses. It's not like someone opened a gypsum mine to make enough drywall for one house. Aluminum gets mined, refined, formed into gutters, and painted... and then I buy it for a couple bucks per foot because they make (literally) tons of it.
If a house costs $100,000, and everyone who has a hand in it makes $10/hr, and there are no other costs (materials, transportation, etc.), even that would be just 10,000 person-hours, or 5 people working a standard work year. (2,000 hours -- fifty weeks x 40 hours/week.)
This isn't rocket science. It is offered, I don't like it, I don't watch it. It's not like it's the ONLY thing on. Not even the most prominent.
The ratings at the moment are a bit screwy because of the holidays, but... http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/top10s/television.html Top 10 broadcast shows: Football, football, 60 minutes, football, NCIS, Criminal Minds, New Year's Rockin Eve, Big Bang Theory, CSI, NCIS.
Sports, news, and scripted shows. Been that way for decades.
Like anything else, the noisy stuff gets attention. Shows like Jersey Shore get a lot of press but no one realizes that the majority of people are quietly watching sitcoms and dramas.
> I think the idea is that destruction of the item > is a "Soloman's Split" type deal.
Wrong. There is no split. The seller gets nothing--no money, no item.
> If the item is really counterfeit, prove you destroyed > it... Ideally, if the item is mostly legit you won't > do that.
Unless the buyer is wrong, or malicious, or stupid, in which case it's a total waste.
Like I said, this is the kind of thing that sounds like a good idea for five seconds, then you can spend the next ten minutes thinking up a hundred scenarios where it's bad. When it comes to counterfeit or even stolen merchandise, the police don't just trash stuff--they hang onto it until everything is sorted out a) to everyone's satisfaction or b) as prescribed by law. PayPal's policy is just dumb, dumb, dumb.
This policy makes sense for about five seconds--"Hey, instead of giving a counterfeit item back to a seller so they can just scam someone else with it, destroy it!"--until you think about about a) the possibility of mistakes and b) the potential for abuse. At that point you say "Oh, right, that's stupid" and no one ever speaks of it again. PayPal is RETARDED for keeping it in place.
Sadly, eBay is still a HUGE (the hugest?) market for many kinds of goods, and they're tied in with PayPal, so it's a chance you take when you do business there. Just as you shouldn't take anything rafting that you aren't willing to lose at the bottom of a river forever, you probably shouldn't sell anything on eBay that you're not willing to take a loss on.
But yeah... this particular incident totally sucks. There should never be any kind of punishment without some kind of proof. No claim of any kind should ever result in automatic long-term or permanent anything, just like with DMCA takedown notices.
Slashdot Mirror
Canada could have had British Culture, French Cuisine, and American Technology. Instead, they settled for American Culture, British Cuisine, and French Technology.
Your data networks are fast enough. Now, please stop charging out the ass for them.
Thanks,
Everyone
> 3D printers, and CAM in general are great for prototyping, but they're
> not going to make a dent in the cost of finished goods. Right now maker
> bots can only make 99 cent plastic toys - which some guy in China can
> already make for two cents, and which probably costs $1.50 in materials
> to make using a 3D printer.
I care about not wasting things. I can't wait until the day comes that it's affordable for me to make little plastic doodads to replace broken bits of plastic in toys and devices. I'd rather spend $1 to fix a $1 toy with a tiny part than spend $1 to buy a replacement and throw the broken one away. There's a whole world of things that are made from plastic that can be fixed with plastic that don't require the strength of a bike sprocket.
You know the first thing I'd make if it were feasible? You know the little plastic battery covers on the backs of remotes? I could use about 5 of those right now. A plastic with the strength of the polystyrene used in model cars and planes would suffice.
> What they've got is some /btard or the like who named the
> router that for amusement value, and succeeded in trolling
> the public beyond his wildest dreams.
Stuff like this is happening more and more. I think it's time for 4Chan or Reddit or Fark or someone to start an annual "Top trolls of the year" list/award thing.
And the number of people who knew what it was went from 40 people to 40 million people when the episode aired. So for 999,999 out of 1,000,000 people, the term "from a sitcom" is appropriate.
From your link: "Festivus was conceived by writer Dan O'Keefe and was celebrated by his family as early as 1966. The holiday was later introduced into popular culture by O'Keefe's screenwriter son Daniel on an episode of Seinfeld."
> 'We developed the world's first consumer digital camera and Kodak could
> have launched it in 1992. We could not get approval to launch or sell it
> because of fear of the cannibalisation of film,' he told BBC News.
I doubt he originated the phrase but I heard Steve Jobs once say (in reference to the iPhone eating into iPod sales) "If you're not willing to cannibalize your own business, someone else will."
Disney literally built their empire on PD works. Most of their best-loved and most successful movies come from work that predates copyright--their original classics (Snow White, Pinocchio, and Cinderella), the films that sparked their revival in the late 80s/early 90s (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), and many others.
FUCK THEM, and the lawmakers they buy. Read that old paper you swore to uphold: Article I, Section 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
Key words there:
Fuckers, it's not even halfway down the page. PD did exactly what it was supposed to do: things that weren't in copyright were available for (in this case) Disney to do wonderful things with. Now, art will be relatively inaccessible from 1928 on.
> Ebooks kinda suk.
There's a place for both print books and electronic books. When reading something (especially fiction) for the first time, yeah, I love a physical book. But when I'm out later and don't have it on me, or when I want to search for a word or phrase, I SOOOO wish for an electronic copy.
> They're stuck there on your device
They're all with me at all times, no matter where I am...
> and they're all digitally-slimy
... and they have great digital features like being quickly searchable, copy-and-paste-able,* etc.
Yeah, it's possible I'll be at home when the power is out, or out somewhere with a dead battery, but neither of those things has happened to me more than 3 times in the last 5 years. However, I can't even count how many times I've been out and about without a particular book and wished I had it. If you insist on making it an either-or (which it doesn't need to be), I'd choose electronic.
* ideally :-)
"We did, however, get full support for these anti-SOPA/PIPA posts, which will be remaining at the top of the page for the day in lieu of new stories."
Then can you maybe post some dupes? :-) There's nothing to read today, anywhere. Seriously, I am *this close* to going out into the big blue room.
> People today seem to think that this is something new.
> The only "new" in all of this is the instantaneous aspect
> of transmitting information.
It's more than just that. We've had sanitized war coverage for a good long while. For quite a large number of Americans, this is the first time seeing things like this.
There is a real demand for an alternative platform... we think we can do that effectively because of characteristics of Ubuntu as a platform, industry dynamics, and an increased wariness around the walled gardens of Apple and to some extent Google and even Amazon, as they are increasingly in this game as well. [emphasis mine]
Oh please. I have a fondness for Linux as much as the next average Slashdotter but if the last 15 years of "X will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" has shown us, the world at large does not care about privacy, security, data robustness, or the consequences walled gardens. You buy something, you use it, and hope all goes well. If you lose your data for any reason, you rebuild.
People are already used to the possibility of losing real-life items to theft, loss, or damage, so if a picture collection or list of contacts disappears because a company went under or changed their TOS or didn't have good backups, people deal with it an move on. Is there a better way? With data, yes, there usually is. Do people care that much? No. (People have moved away from DRM a tiny bit, but that has more to do with Apple's and Amazon's music services being naturally popular than the Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" debacle.)
I'm guessing that 2012 in tablets will look a lot like 2011 did, with the one difference being the Kindle Fire. The price and prominence of that device will move a lot of units, but I'm predicting that on December 31, 2012, the market will be 60-70% iPad, 20-25% Kindle, and 10-15% everyone else combined. (Though I'm not sure how to count Windows 8 if it starts shipping on a large number of touch-based tablets that are 95% similar to the current crop of Windows-based, stylus-using tablets. I'm mainly thinking of a "tablet" as "a touch-based device that doesn't ship with a keyboard, and functions 100% as designed without one.")
>> Microsoft is offering reasonable licensing terms to the device makers,
>> so the licensing agreement costs significantly less than the cost of litigating.
> I think it's pretty clearly this.
Another way to look at this isn't that the terms are "reasonable", as much as "how much can MS stand to spend in court?" MS probably has more lawyers than LG has employees, and a mountain of cash taller than LG's corporate headquarters.
With all the recent G+ shenanigans I'm going to change my browser's default search to Bing for a week and see how it goes. I'll add a link-bar shortcut to Google in case I'm not happy with any particular search, but I have the "go to the search box" keyboard shortcut so totally ingrained in my muscle memory that it'll take conscious effort to use Google.
I'm not saying I'll quit Google forever, because what if MS does something sleazy soon, but competition is supposed to make things better for all of us, so for now, I'll go wherever it's best.
Yes, we all know why large flash drives are neat. Now explain the appeal of having a dozen stainless-steel tools sticking out of the USB port of your media player. :-)
January 11, 2013: "Facebook Adds News to Ad Feed"
> For example, if you are searching for images of babies, Google
> will now personalize your search results and give high preference
> to baby photos from your Google+ circles.
Yeah, that was my same thought too--when I'm searching for pictures of something, I probably want to see pictures I *haven't* already seen. Hopefully, if they start doing this, more and more people will realize what a complete waste G+ is and stop using it, which should more or less negate this "improvement".
The suggestion that Nokia will sell off their crown jewels to Redmond has been rebuffed before, and even had an impact on the markets last year, but despite the Finns repeated denials, the rumour simply won't go away.
Maybe their URL has something to do with the rumors not dying: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/05/nokia-will-sell-crown-jewels-to-microsoft/
> To play devil's advocate, the employer could claim that the very
> fact that an important executive was looking to leave could give
> the impression to outsiders that something bad was going on in
> the company and that could result in a loss to their business.
There's an old saying that everything is for sale. I am not trying to sell my house, but if someone walked up to me on the street and offered me $1,000,000 for it, the next words out of my mouth would be "Great! I'll tell my wife we're moving."
In that sense, damn near everyone is willing to look at new career opportunities. You'd be stupid not to. No one should read that much into it. The CEO could be getting $20 million a year, but if another company walked up with an offer of $50 million, damn right he'd be "interested".
> You can only build a house in six weeks because an army of people
> is busily creating all of these finished materials for you, and if you
> add up all of the labor, it probably does come to somewhere in the
> neighborhood of twenty man-years of work to create a house.
You're not really doing the math right. Yeah, it takes a lot of effort in one sense, but every step creates materials for thousands of houses. It's not like someone opened a gypsum mine to make enough drywall for one house. Aluminum gets mined, refined, formed into gutters, and painted... and then I buy it for a couple bucks per foot because they make (literally) tons of it.
If a house costs $100,000, and everyone who has a hand in it makes $10/hr, and there are no other costs (materials, transportation, etc.), even that would be just 10,000 person-hours, or 5 people working a standard work year. (2,000 hours -- fifty weeks x 40 hours/week.)
He's always looking down his nose at us fun countries, going on about how he doesn't watch TV. Canada and Australia are much more fun.
This isn't rocket science. It is offered, I don't like it, I don't watch it. It's not like it's the ONLY thing on. Not even the most prominent.
The ratings at the moment are a bit screwy because of the holidays, but...
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/top10s/television.html
Top 10 broadcast shows:
Football, football, 60 minutes, football, NCIS, Criminal Minds, New Year's Rockin Eve, Big Bang Theory, CSI, NCIS.
Sports, news, and scripted shows. Been that way for decades.
Here's a random list from a couple weeks earlier. Very little in the way of reality shows.
Like anything else, the noisy stuff gets attention. Shows like Jersey Shore get a lot of press but no one realizes that the majority of people are quietly watching sitcoms and dramas.
> I think the idea is that destruction of the item
> is a "Soloman's Split" type deal.
Wrong. There is no split. The seller gets nothing--no money, no item.
> If the item is really counterfeit, prove you destroyed
> it... Ideally, if the item is mostly legit you won't
> do that.
Unless the buyer is wrong, or malicious, or stupid, in which case it's a total waste.
Like I said, this is the kind of thing that sounds like a good idea for five seconds, then you can spend the next ten minutes thinking up a hundred scenarios where it's bad. When it comes to counterfeit or even stolen merchandise, the police don't just trash stuff--they hang onto it until everything is sorted out a) to everyone's satisfaction or b) as prescribed by law. PayPal's policy is just dumb, dumb, dumb.
Yeah, but will the users be allowed to change the theme?
This policy makes sense for about five seconds--"Hey, instead of giving a counterfeit item back to a seller so they can just scam someone else with it, destroy it!"--until you think about about a) the possibility of mistakes and b) the potential for abuse. At that point you say "Oh, right, that's stupid" and no one ever speaks of it again. PayPal is RETARDED for keeping it in place.
Sadly, eBay is still a HUGE (the hugest?) market for many kinds of goods, and they're tied in with PayPal, so it's a chance you take when you do business there. Just as you shouldn't take anything rafting that you aren't willing to lose at the bottom of a river forever, you probably shouldn't sell anything on eBay that you're not willing to take a loss on.
But yeah... this particular incident totally sucks. There should never be any kind of punishment without some kind of proof. No claim of any kind should ever result in automatic long-term or permanent anything, just like with DMCA takedown notices.
C:\>_
(Hmm, never noticed how much that looks like a clown smiley.)