Personally, after trying out an iPod Touch for a few days (even in landscape mode) I just can't type worth felgercarb on it. Audible feedback is just, well, annoying to me. And for some bizarre and unexplained reason, annoying to those around me as well. Can't say why. "tick. tick. tick-tick-tick. tick-tick-tick-tick. tick-whoosh-tick. tick."
I can kludge along at a decent clip on my trusty old BlackBerry Curve, though, and could since the first day I got it. Nowhere near as fast as I can type on a desktop, but the feel of the actual physical buttons and the tactile feeling of pushing a button are huge advantages to me. I have to put a lot of text into my Blackberry, and I can't imagine NOT using a hardware keyboard.
Isn't it great that both companies make devices?;)
Well, keep in mind that most of it is obviously written ABOUT and not FOR you. It's FOR men who apparently like to fantasize that all you gals just want one of us there. Which is obviously ridiculous, but most porn is based on equally unlikely fantasies, and it sells anyway.
But the Top Gear angle intrigues me. I'm already looking at an offtopic mod, so what the hell, can you elaborate on that? It's OK if you'd rather not.
Actually, this really says nothing about Frischling's level of journalistic professionalism. It would have been far more telling, yea or nay, if he actually knew his sources. His claim is that he doesn't know who left the document in his mailbox, so he's not sending anyone up the river by signing a document attesting that.
If he actually had a name, the act of protecting it or giving it up would be deeply meaningful one way or the other. But testifying a lack of knowledge is neither noble nor reprehensible.
Why should he sacrifice his career to protect, well, nothing?
Small plane: You know, it's surprising how little damage a small plane can do. Anything you're likely to be able to rent (after passing all the security checks to get a license so someone would rent it to you) would do far less damage than the car bomb you've already mentioned. Think "Timothy McVeigh" as opposed to "Charles J Bishop". Small planes can be death from the skies, but it's death on a small enough scale that you had to look up the second name, didn't you?
PS: Security around flight schools tightened quite considerably after the Bishop incident. How hard is it to rent a Ryder truck these days?
Our response to an incident is not a response to the actual threat with a balance of difficulty in implementing security measures, it's a combination of fear and the level of inconvenience we think other people should endure.
The real threat of commercial aviation went away after 9/11. We reinfoced the doors. There, we're done. Unless the pilot or copilot of a plane commits a terrorist attack on board an aircraft, the worst that can be done is to bring the aircraft down, possibly in a populated area but even that's a crapshoot. Controlled flight into specific high-profile targets is, in general, no longer an option.
Why do terrorists continue to do things to commercial aviation? Simple. That's what we are making the biggest deal about being scared of.
Why don't they switch to general aviation? Because you can't put enough boom-boom in a Cessna to make headlines.
Why don't they use trucks? Because we've demonstrated we're not changing our way of life over a few thousand lives. Only a few thousand lives that end spectacularly enough to make headlines.
If I understand half of what you said, which I think I do but might be wrong, I'd have to surmise that any parade involving fornication would be modded "redundant" anyway.:)
At my company, everyone in IT has Admin rights to their own desktop (and no one else does, except for a few rare cases). We also use remote reimage. It can be triggered by the developer or the helpdesk or any of the administrators. If your computer is caught by the central manager with something that looks virus-like, God help you, because you're going to be nuked from orbit, and you'll spend a solid day reinstalling software. If you think you have a virus, you call the helpdesk and the machine starts reimaging about 10 seconds later. All corporate data, documents folders, email, etc are on network drives, so little of value is lost in most cases.
It gives the developers the freedom to run their own miniservers to test out ideas, do unit testing, try out new tools, etc, locally. It also gives them a "reset" button in case they screw something up. There's antivirus at multiple levels, and no developer has direct access to the data on production machines, so at worst a virus would compromise random test data and maybe some email even if it did get through, and we've got a pretty good active firewall.
Many developers nuke their own machines between projects so they can start with a fresh slate, and to get the latest and greatest image out there with all the latest stuff. Others stick stubbornly to old images because they have things "just so" and dread the nuking process. We just got a memo from on high that anyone not on the latest image will be remote reimaged soon, so there's much angst and gnashing of teeth.
It seems to be a reasonable compromise overall. Desktop support only helps us out when we have a hardware problem. The desktop support policy companywide here can be summarized in three words: "Reboot. Reimage. Replace." Developers get the exact same help as anyone else, so if we shoot ourselves in the foot we have plenty of time to admire our marksmanship while watching the reimage screen scroll by.
Well, the difficult truth is that wireline infrastructure is less necessary in the areas where it is cheaper to maintain, and more necessary in areas where it is more expensive. For a lot of ruralites, a landline IS their option in terms of communications.
So if you drop wireline, what you'll end up doing is lowering costs for those who already have alternatives today, while making communications (if and when they are available at all) outside the budgets of ruralites.
It's sort of analogous to the DTV conversion. Large swaths of rural dwellers, who don't have broadband or even decent dialup available, lost their TV signal. The government raised a lot of money auctioning off the freed-up bandwidths, those who can be served affordably will benefit from new and exciting communications services like WiMax, but a lot of people who will never have a WiMax tower in their area lost their primary source of information.
The sad fact is that we could easily turn analog TV back on for the majority of those most affected by the switchover. AT&T or Sprint or Verizon don't even have regular towers in those areas, so it's not like the analog TV signal would be interfering with WiMax there anytime soon.
If AT&T cuts off wireline, they'll be completely cutting off a good-sized segment of the population from all forms of communication. TV? Gone. Cable? Never had it. Broadband? What's that? - a lot of current rural phone lines are filtered to 14.4k dialup to prevent overloading as it is.
The world hasn't ended, but for a lot of people I know TV has ended.
Almost all of the ones I know who were affected live in rural areas, and many are older and with fixed incomes. For a lot of them, the TV is pretty much their only source of up-to-date information like news and weather, and they were OK with a grainy picture and a massive rooftop antenna. But that's all over now. They blew their $20-30 on converter boxes and ended up with nothing. The few who can afford satellite TV have lost the local stations they used to rely on for their major news source. Some of the lucky ones have one or two channels left from the four they had before the conversion. A very few have two or three. Most have none. And with broadband unavailable, dialup limited to 14.4k due to telco filtering, no cell signal, and landlines with dialup topping $50 a month, getting information is becoming increasingly difficult.
I'm not saying the conversion was a bad thing, it will certainly open up vast new opportunities for communications. It is a shame, however, that the very people who gave up their old information sources are those who will not be able to take advantage of the new ones that replace them. AT&T/Verizon/Sprint are NEVER going to put WiMax in deeply rural areas, and even if they did many of the people who have lost access to TV could never afford it anyway.
I fear the same will happen with telephone if AT&T gets its way. I realize it's difficult to cost-justify getting information out to rural areas, but at least leave them a phone line.
Trouble is, a lot of areas that lack broadband also lack any sort of wireless telephone coverage as well. Until last year, my mother was in such an area. Now she gets DSL (because the local library got it, and since they had to put a DSL demarc in for the library they went ahead and made DSL available for anyone on that station), but cell service is still very spotty there.
She's one of the luckier ones in her area, though, since she lives near the library and on top of a hill. That means she gets DSL and can get some cell signal, and if you stand in just the right part of the house and hold still you can even hold a conversation on cell. Usually.
Most of her neighbors have only POTS, and the telco put filters on their phone lines that limit dialup to 14.4K because there isn't enough capacity on the lines for everyone to get 28.8K or 56K dialup.
She's also one of the lucky ones on the DTV conversion. She only lost 1 of the 4 channels she used to get before the conversion (refer to the "top of the hill" note above). Many in her area lost TV altogether, and are stuck buying satellite (which cannot offer the local stations due to blackout regulations anyway). That's a lot of dough to watch the 6 o'clock news every night, especially when it isn't the local news.
Well, sorta. Of course, "DRM" (Digital Rights Management) isn't really a relevant term, but there are certainly reality-based restrictions on copying a paper book. In most cases, it's cheaper to buy another copy than it is to make your own copy.
But your point is well-taken. A physical book allows you unfettered access to one and only one copy of itself. If you give it away or if it's stolen or destroyed, you've lost it.
And, yes, that thinking is very much part of the intention of DRM. If you buy one copy of an e-book, you really have the rights to only that copy. Same with a paper book. But when you buy a copy of a paper book, your personal rights to that book are also irrevocable and eternal. Someone would have to come to your house and take it away from you. With e-book DRM, you read your books only at the suffrage of the company that controls the DRM on your e-book reader. They can revoke your right to read it at any time, and have done.
Of course, it's tough to come up with a perfect analog to the rights we enjoy in a paper book while taking advantage of the new capabilities of an e-book, and maybe they will just always remain two separate and incompatible entities.
I'd be far more accepting of DRM if copyright law went back to being a reasonable period. It's very easy today to envision an eternal copyright starting the day Disney created anything they feel is of value, and continuing in perpetuity thereafter.
If copyright was 10 or 15 years, I'd be OK with draconian DRM restrictions on the things that are under copyright, provided there was a way to break it when the items go into public domain. As it is, though, anything written after my father was born is unlikely to fall into public domain before I die.
Apart from reading it, which is the best part of course, I prefer owning a book. I enjoy sharing them with friends. I appreciate the simple fact that every book I've ever purchased is mine forever (barring damage or theft, of course). No corporation or government has the right to remove my books from my control, and it's impossible to change them - you'd have to come to my house and get them.
If I could buy an e-book knowing that in a few years the DRM would be lifted and I could freely share it, and knowing that my Doctrine of First Sale rights would be protected in the meantime, I'd seriously consider some form of e-book reader. But recent events and the history of copyright holders have demonstrated otherwise, and the length of copyright means that the money I'd spend on e-books is for a short-term rental on a book, and if I want to rent my books I'll donate more money and time to my library and get them that way.
Heck, I'd be happy with an analog of the current "hardcover / paperback" model. For the first year or two of a book's existence, it could be available only in a high-priced, heavily DRMed version that is not allowed to be shared. After a year or two, anyone who spent the money on the hardcover then gets an unlock code that allows them to freely share and keep their copy without DRM, and an unlocked "mass market" version comes out at a discounted price that can be shared. I'd happily buy a deeply DRM-encrusted bookreader and buy new releases if I knew there was a sunset provision on the DRM that would allow me to keep and share them in a reasonable timeframe. I'd even pay the same I do now for a new release, as long as the contract clearly stated that the book could be unlocked in a relatively short period.
Paper sucks. Paper is inconvenient, and clumsy, and expensive, and harder to read, and bulky, and subject to damage, loss, and theft.
** BUT IT'S MINE **
And until e-readers can fulfill that desire, I have no desire to get one.
Oh, you mean "dial" as in "push buttons". How quaint.
I use a bluetooth headset, and just press the button and read off the numbers I want to call (assuming it's for someone not in my phone book).
I get three benefits out of this:
1. Everyone around me sees what an Important Person I am, and thinks, "wow, someone that technologically forward and yet tastelessly rude must be important." Many of the females obviously think "and I must mate with him immediately!" but sadly I live in a prudish area, so they just look at me with longing, pass into a slight faint where their eyes roll back in their head, then glare because they are angry they can't have sex with me right away.
2. I get to announce to everyone in earshot what number I am trying to call. I just know everyone wants to know that. It's important.
3. When the phone misunderstands the number I meant to dial, complete strangers have the pleasure of speaking to me, albeit briefly. Most of them understand the value of my time and, once they realize it's me, they remind me that I have important things to do and end the call.
I'm pretty convinced most corporate press releases are machine-generated anyway, so it should be a matter of reverse-compiling them back into plain English and including that as part of a story.
ABC Co. CEO to PressBot: "The market totally screwed us. The building is collapsing because we can't afford maintenance. We have to lay everyone off and we'll be out of business in three months. We can't afford exterminators so weasels are chewing my genitalia into mush."
PressBot's press release: "The company continues to leverage circular market forces to tighten its bottom line, particularly in the area of vertical integration. Resources are plentiful enough, however, that all employees will be allowed to pursue innovative new ideas in an open, creative setting, with plenty of personal time. The CEO is actively involved in the belt-tightening process and has taken steps to ensure that only underutilized corporate assets will be liquidated."
A human or a webbot could probably gather equally-useful information out of it.
The placebo effect is well-documented, but it's also not a fixed constant. In order for it to exist in quantity, the claims have to be at least somewhat credible, credible enough for people to really believe they are possible. The effects also have to be subtle enough for the placebo effect to work.
If I came out with a pill that claimed to cure broken arms in 3 seconds, the placebo effect would be negligible. It's not a very credible claim to make, so there wouldn't be too many people taking the placebo thinking "I just know this will work!" strongly enough for their bones to knit themselves. And I couldn't fool someone who took the placebo into thinking it worked when it didn't. The results would be very easy to validate. The arm is broken or it isn't. If the drug had 50% efficacy, than 50% of the test subjects who received the real thing would have their arms fixed, and 100% of the subjects who received the placebo would not. Even if I somehow managed to fool a bunch of people into thinking it was credible, the results are too easy to test for me to get any placebo false positives.
If I came out with something that claimed to increase blood flow to the brain and thereby enhance memory, the placebo effect would be far stronger, and could actually simulate the desired effect in the absence of the drug. The scientific language I could use to describe what's behind it sounds somewhat credible, and the results are less easy to validate and more easily created by the brain itself. For example, just exercising your memory is enough to improve it, and if you've been convinced that your memory has been improved you'll tend to exercise it more. For a study like that, I really need to compensate for the placebo effect, probably more strongly than is done in blind studies today, in order to differentiate between the placebo effect and real benefits.
Of course, if there is an equal and measurable benefit to both placebo and real drug subjects, I suppose you could release the placebo as a new wonder drug, or just convince everyone that the government put it in their water.:)
Actually, if they wanted to check psychosomatic elements, the ideal would be to have subgroups who "know" what they are taking, but lie to some of them. So you have a group that "knows" they are taking the real thing (some of them actually are, some of them are taking the placebo), and a group that "knows" they are taking the placebo (some are, some aren't). Arrange it so the people appear to have learned accidentally about their faked status, so they feel certain they know the truth.
If a significant percentage of those who "know" they are taking a placebo get a real benefit from the drug anyway, then you've probably eliminated psychosomatic bias and have a winner.
Especially if that exceeds the number who "know" they are taking the real drug but are actually taking a placebo, because you've demonstrated that the real benefits of the drug are better than the placebo effect can even generate.:)
My anti-gullibility crystal isn't humming, so it must be legit.
Just to be sure, what is its harmonic resonance, is it in concordance with the feline music of the spheres?
If so, I'll take three, because I've got three empty chakra points that seem optimal for it. It might even keep my thetans regulated, which has been an expensive issue lately.
That's why I think things like right or left turn indicators should not be solid lights, but flashing indicators instead. They should also be in yellow and not in green. In addition, they should be located up next to the red light (left of the light for left-turn indicators, right of the light for right-turn indicators) and not down at the bottom where they can be mistaken for a green. That way, it's VERY clear they are (a) not a full-on green light, (b) clearly an exception to the still-lit red light, and (c) intuitive for people who are color blind (blinking light to the left of a solid means left turns only are allowed, etc).
Of course, when right or left turn green goes on, the red light is still on, so it would be an odd circumstance indeed where the (dimmer due to fewer LEDs) green turn signal was brightly visible, but the brighter red signal was not. I suspect the person using this as a defense just really wasn't paying attention, but I wasn't there so I don't know. Maybe the snow was somehow really thick over the red and thinner over the green, but if the light was THAT obscured I'd be proceeding with extreme caution.
Some of the LED lights in Maine have solved the "invisible red light" problem, at least partly, by putting a bright white beacon (similar to the visibility beacon found on aircraft) right in the middle of the red light, hooked to the same circuit as the red light. When the light is red, there is a VERY bright white flash about every 2 seconds, which would be pretty visible through a modest blanket of snow that would otherwise obscure the lights. They mostly use them at intersections where a lot of accidents have happened or in areas where the speed limit is over 35MPH where an accident could turn fatal more easily (as a way of saying "LOOK!!! RED LIGHT!!! LOOK!!! RED LIGHT!!! LOOK GODDAMIT!!! RED EFFING LIGHT!!!" to inattentive drivers). But they also come in handy during a bad snowstorm because they are extremely visible.
Slashdot Mirror
That's gonna be some belt holster. Better get some suspenders.
And that's great, for you.
Personally, after trying out an iPod Touch for a few days (even in landscape mode) I just can't type worth felgercarb on it. Audible feedback is just, well, annoying to me. And for some bizarre and unexplained reason, annoying to those around me as well. Can't say why. "tick. tick. tick-tick-tick. tick-tick-tick-tick. tick-whoosh-tick. tick."
I can kludge along at a decent clip on my trusty old BlackBerry Curve, though, and could since the first day I got it. Nowhere near as fast as I can type on a desktop, but the feel of the actual physical buttons and the tactile feeling of pushing a button are huge advantages to me. I have to put a lot of text into my Blackberry, and I can't imagine NOT using a hardware keyboard.
Isn't it great that both companies make devices? ;)
Well, keep in mind that most of it is obviously written ABOUT and not FOR you. It's FOR men who apparently like to fantasize that all you gals just want one of us there. Which is obviously ridiculous, but most porn is based on equally unlikely fantasies, and it sells anyway.
But the Top Gear angle intrigues me. I'm already looking at an offtopic mod, so what the hell, can you elaborate on that? It's OK if you'd rather not.
Actually, this really says nothing about Frischling's level of journalistic professionalism. It would have been far more telling, yea or nay, if he actually knew his sources. His claim is that he doesn't know who left the document in his mailbox, so he's not sending anyone up the river by signing a document attesting that.
If he actually had a name, the act of protecting it or giving it up would be deeply meaningful one way or the other. But testifying a lack of knowledge is neither noble nor reprehensible.
Why should he sacrifice his career to protect, well, nothing?
Small plane: You know, it's surprising how little damage a small plane can do. Anything you're likely to be able to rent (after passing all the security checks to get a license so someone would rent it to you) would do far less damage than the car bomb you've already mentioned. Think "Timothy McVeigh" as opposed to "Charles J Bishop". Small planes can be death from the skies, but it's death on a small enough scale that you had to look up the second name, didn't you?
PS: Security around flight schools tightened quite considerably after the Bishop incident. How hard is it to rent a Ryder truck these days?
Our response to an incident is not a response to the actual threat with a balance of difficulty in implementing security measures, it's a combination of fear and the level of inconvenience we think other people should endure.
The real threat of commercial aviation went away after 9/11. We reinfoced the doors. There, we're done. Unless the pilot or copilot of a plane commits a terrorist attack on board an aircraft, the worst that can be done is to bring the aircraft down, possibly in a populated area but even that's a crapshoot. Controlled flight into specific high-profile targets is, in general, no longer an option.
Why do terrorists continue to do things to commercial aviation? Simple. That's what we are making the biggest deal about being scared of.
Why don't they switch to general aviation? Because you can't put enough boom-boom in a Cessna to make headlines.
Why don't they use trucks? Because we've demonstrated we're not changing our way of life over a few thousand lives. Only a few thousand lives that end spectacularly enough to make headlines.
+ 1 trillion insightful.
Unfortunately, we'll have to borrow the trillion to pay for the wars. Sorry about that.
If I understand half of what you said, which I think I do but might be wrong, I'd have to surmise that any parade involving fornication would be modded "redundant" anyway. :)
Veni, Vidi, Vente.
I came, I saw, I had a Starbucks Latte.
At my company, everyone in IT has Admin rights to their own desktop (and no one else does, except for a few rare cases). We also use remote reimage. It can be triggered by the developer or the helpdesk or any of the administrators. If your computer is caught by the central manager with something that looks virus-like, God help you, because you're going to be nuked from orbit, and you'll spend a solid day reinstalling software. If you think you have a virus, you call the helpdesk and the machine starts reimaging about 10 seconds later. All corporate data, documents folders, email, etc are on network drives, so little of value is lost in most cases.
It gives the developers the freedom to run their own miniservers to test out ideas, do unit testing, try out new tools, etc, locally. It also gives them a "reset" button in case they screw something up. There's antivirus at multiple levels, and no developer has direct access to the data on production machines, so at worst a virus would compromise random test data and maybe some email even if it did get through, and we've got a pretty good active firewall.
Many developers nuke their own machines between projects so they can start with a fresh slate, and to get the latest and greatest image out there with all the latest stuff. Others stick stubbornly to old images because they have things "just so" and dread the nuking process. We just got a memo from on high that anyone not on the latest image will be remote reimaged soon, so there's much angst and gnashing of teeth.
It seems to be a reasonable compromise overall. Desktop support only helps us out when we have a hardware problem. The desktop support policy companywide here can be summarized in three words: "Reboot. Reimage. Replace." Developers get the exact same help as anyone else, so if we shoot ourselves in the foot we have plenty of time to admire our marksmanship while watching the reimage screen scroll by.
Must be because the local stations aren't important enough to be included in the lineup, then. Sorry, my bad.
Well, the difficult truth is that wireline infrastructure is less necessary in the areas where it is cheaper to maintain, and more necessary in areas where it is more expensive. For a lot of ruralites, a landline IS their option in terms of communications.
So if you drop wireline, what you'll end up doing is lowering costs for those who already have alternatives today, while making communications (if and when they are available at all) outside the budgets of ruralites.
It's sort of analogous to the DTV conversion. Large swaths of rural dwellers, who don't have broadband or even decent dialup available, lost their TV signal. The government raised a lot of money auctioning off the freed-up bandwidths, those who can be served affordably will benefit from new and exciting communications services like WiMax, but a lot of people who will never have a WiMax tower in their area lost their primary source of information.
The sad fact is that we could easily turn analog TV back on for the majority of those most affected by the switchover. AT&T or Sprint or Verizon don't even have regular towers in those areas, so it's not like the analog TV signal would be interfering with WiMax there anytime soon.
If AT&T cuts off wireline, they'll be completely cutting off a good-sized segment of the population from all forms of communication. TV? Gone. Cable? Never had it. Broadband? What's that? - a lot of current rural phone lines are filtered to 14.4k dialup to prevent overloading as it is.
The world hasn't ended, but for a lot of people I know TV has ended.
Almost all of the ones I know who were affected live in rural areas, and many are older and with fixed incomes. For a lot of them, the TV is pretty much their only source of up-to-date information like news and weather, and they were OK with a grainy picture and a massive rooftop antenna. But that's all over now. They blew their $20-30 on converter boxes and ended up with nothing. The few who can afford satellite TV have lost the local stations they used to rely on for their major news source. Some of the lucky ones have one or two channels left from the four they had before the conversion. A very few have two or three. Most have none. And with broadband unavailable, dialup limited to 14.4k due to telco filtering, no cell signal, and landlines with dialup topping $50 a month, getting information is becoming increasingly difficult.
I'm not saying the conversion was a bad thing, it will certainly open up vast new opportunities for communications. It is a shame, however, that the very people who gave up their old information sources are those who will not be able to take advantage of the new ones that replace them. AT&T/Verizon/Sprint are NEVER going to put WiMax in deeply rural areas, and even if they did many of the people who have lost access to TV could never afford it anyway.
I fear the same will happen with telephone if AT&T gets its way. I realize it's difficult to cost-justify getting information out to rural areas, but at least leave them a phone line.
Trouble is, a lot of areas that lack broadband also lack any sort of wireless telephone coverage as well. Until last year, my mother was in such an area. Now she gets DSL (because the local library got it, and since they had to put a DSL demarc in for the library they went ahead and made DSL available for anyone on that station), but cell service is still very spotty there.
She's one of the luckier ones in her area, though, since she lives near the library and on top of a hill. That means she gets DSL and can get some cell signal, and if you stand in just the right part of the house and hold still you can even hold a conversation on cell. Usually.
Most of her neighbors have only POTS, and the telco put filters on their phone lines that limit dialup to 14.4K because there isn't enough capacity on the lines for everyone to get 28.8K or 56K dialup.
She's also one of the lucky ones on the DTV conversion. She only lost 1 of the 4 channels she used to get before the conversion (refer to the "top of the hill" note above). Many in her area lost TV altogether, and are stuck buying satellite (which cannot offer the local stations due to blackout regulations anyway). That's a lot of dough to watch the 6 o'clock news every night, especially when it isn't the local news.
Well, sorta. Of course, "DRM" (Digital Rights Management) isn't really a relevant term, but there are certainly reality-based restrictions on copying a paper book. In most cases, it's cheaper to buy another copy than it is to make your own copy.
But your point is well-taken. A physical book allows you unfettered access to one and only one copy of itself. If you give it away or if it's stolen or destroyed, you've lost it.
And, yes, that thinking is very much part of the intention of DRM. If you buy one copy of an e-book, you really have the rights to only that copy. Same with a paper book. But when you buy a copy of a paper book, your personal rights to that book are also irrevocable and eternal. Someone would have to come to your house and take it away from you. With e-book DRM, you read your books only at the suffrage of the company that controls the DRM on your e-book reader. They can revoke your right to read it at any time, and have done.
Of course, it's tough to come up with a perfect analog to the rights we enjoy in a paper book while taking advantage of the new capabilities of an e-book, and maybe they will just always remain two separate and incompatible entities.
I'd be far more accepting of DRM if copyright law went back to being a reasonable period. It's very easy today to envision an eternal copyright starting the day Disney created anything they feel is of value, and continuing in perpetuity thereafter.
If copyright was 10 or 15 years, I'd be OK with draconian DRM restrictions on the things that are under copyright, provided there was a way to break it when the items go into public domain. As it is, though, anything written after my father was born is unlikely to fall into public domain before I die.
Apart from reading it, which is the best part of course, I prefer owning a book. I enjoy sharing them with friends. I appreciate the simple fact that every book I've ever purchased is mine forever (barring damage or theft, of course). No corporation or government has the right to remove my books from my control, and it's impossible to change them - you'd have to come to my house and get them.
If I could buy an e-book knowing that in a few years the DRM would be lifted and I could freely share it, and knowing that my Doctrine of First Sale rights would be protected in the meantime, I'd seriously consider some form of e-book reader. But recent events and the history of copyright holders have demonstrated otherwise, and the length of copyright means that the money I'd spend on e-books is for a short-term rental on a book, and if I want to rent my books I'll donate more money and time to my library and get them that way.
Heck, I'd be happy with an analog of the current "hardcover / paperback" model. For the first year or two of a book's existence, it could be available only in a high-priced, heavily DRMed version that is not allowed to be shared. After a year or two, anyone who spent the money on the hardcover then gets an unlock code that allows them to freely share and keep their copy without DRM, and an unlocked "mass market" version comes out at a discounted price that can be shared. I'd happily buy a deeply DRM-encrusted bookreader and buy new releases if I knew there was a sunset provision on the DRM that would allow me to keep and share them in a reasonable timeframe. I'd even pay the same I do now for a new release, as long as the contract clearly stated that the book could be unlocked in a relatively short period.
Paper sucks. Paper is inconvenient, and clumsy, and expensive, and harder to read, and bulky, and subject to damage, loss, and theft.
** BUT IT'S MINE **
And until e-readers can fulfill that desire, I have no desire to get one.
Skip that and go straight to religion. All that, and tax-exempt status too.
The first time this meme has ever made sense!
In (former) Soviet Moscow, Snow come to YOU.
Dial? What is this dial of which you speak?
Oh, you mean "dial" as in "push buttons". How quaint.
I use a bluetooth headset, and just press the button and read off the numbers I want to call (assuming it's for someone not in my phone book).
I get three benefits out of this:
1. Everyone around me sees what an Important Person I am, and thinks, "wow, someone that technologically forward and yet tastelessly rude must be important." Many of the females obviously think "and I must mate with him immediately!" but sadly I live in a prudish area, so they just look at me with longing, pass into a slight faint where their eyes roll back in their head, then glare because they are angry they can't have sex with me right away.
2. I get to announce to everyone in earshot what number I am trying to call. I just know everyone wants to know that. It's important.
3. When the phone misunderstands the number I meant to dial, complete strangers have the pleasure of speaking to me, albeit briefly. Most of them understand the value of my time and, once they realize it's me, they remind me that I have important things to do and end the call.
I'm pretty convinced most corporate press releases are machine-generated anyway, so it should be a matter of reverse-compiling them back into plain English and including that as part of a story.
ABC Co. CEO to PressBot: "The market totally screwed us. The building is collapsing because we can't afford maintenance. We have to lay everyone off and we'll be out of business in three months. We can't afford exterminators so weasels are chewing my genitalia into mush."
PressBot's press release: "The company continues to leverage circular market forces to tighten its bottom line, particularly in the area of vertical integration. Resources are plentiful enough, however, that all employees will be allowed to pursue innovative new ideas in an open, creative setting, with plenty of personal time. The CEO is actively involved in the belt-tightening process and has taken steps to ensure that only underutilized corporate assets will be liquidated."
A human or a webbot could probably gather equally-useful information out of it.
News flash: Robotic reports indicate that all humans have died.
Oops, sorry, that was a programming error. The robots haven't figured out verb tenses yet.
Update: Ten, nine, eight...
The placebo effect is well-documented, but it's also not a fixed constant. In order for it to exist in quantity, the claims have to be at least somewhat credible, credible enough for people to really believe they are possible. The effects also have to be subtle enough for the placebo effect to work.
If I came out with a pill that claimed to cure broken arms in 3 seconds, the placebo effect would be negligible. It's not a very credible claim to make, so there wouldn't be too many people taking the placebo thinking "I just know this will work!" strongly enough for their bones to knit themselves. And I couldn't fool someone who took the placebo into thinking it worked when it didn't. The results would be very easy to validate. The arm is broken or it isn't. If the drug had 50% efficacy, than 50% of the test subjects who received the real thing would have their arms fixed, and 100% of the subjects who received the placebo would not. Even if I somehow managed to fool a bunch of people into thinking it was credible, the results are too easy to test for me to get any placebo false positives.
If I came out with something that claimed to increase blood flow to the brain and thereby enhance memory, the placebo effect would be far stronger, and could actually simulate the desired effect in the absence of the drug. The scientific language I could use to describe what's behind it sounds somewhat credible, and the results are less easy to validate and more easily created by the brain itself. For example, just exercising your memory is enough to improve it, and if you've been convinced that your memory has been improved you'll tend to exercise it more. For a study like that, I really need to compensate for the placebo effect, probably more strongly than is done in blind studies today, in order to differentiate between the placebo effect and real benefits.
Of course, if there is an equal and measurable benefit to both placebo and real drug subjects, I suppose you could release the placebo as a new wonder drug, or just convince everyone that the government put it in their water. :)
Actually, if they wanted to check psychosomatic elements, the ideal would be to have subgroups who "know" what they are taking, but lie to some of them. So you have a group that "knows" they are taking the real thing (some of them actually are, some of them are taking the placebo), and a group that "knows" they are taking the placebo (some are, some aren't). Arrange it so the people appear to have learned accidentally about their faked status, so they feel certain they know the truth.
If a significant percentage of those who "know" they are taking a placebo get a real benefit from the drug anyway, then you've probably eliminated psychosomatic bias and have a winner.
Especially if that exceeds the number who "know" they are taking the real drug but are actually taking a placebo, because you've demonstrated that the real benefits of the drug are better than the placebo effect can even generate. :)
My anti-gullibility crystal isn't humming, so it must be legit.
Just to be sure, what is its harmonic resonance, is it in concordance with the feline music of the spheres?
If so, I'll take three, because I've got three empty chakra points that seem optimal for it. It might even keep my thetans regulated, which has been an expensive issue lately.
Traffic updates in Morse code as part of the light pattern? Brilliant! :)
Trouble is, they'd all need to flash the same pattern: .-.. --- --- -.-
That's why I think things like right or left turn indicators should not be solid lights, but flashing indicators instead. They should also be in yellow and not in green. In addition, they should be located up next to the red light (left of the light for left-turn indicators, right of the light for right-turn indicators) and not down at the bottom where they can be mistaken for a green. That way, it's VERY clear they are (a) not a full-on green light, (b) clearly an exception to the still-lit red light, and (c) intuitive for people who are color blind (blinking light to the left of a solid means left turns only are allowed, etc).
Of course, when right or left turn green goes on, the red light is still on, so it would be an odd circumstance indeed where the (dimmer due to fewer LEDs) green turn signal was brightly visible, but the brighter red signal was not. I suspect the person using this as a defense just really wasn't paying attention, but I wasn't there so I don't know. Maybe the snow was somehow really thick over the red and thinner over the green, but if the light was THAT obscured I'd be proceeding with extreme caution.
Some of the LED lights in Maine have solved the "invisible red light" problem, at least partly, by putting a bright white beacon (similar to the visibility beacon found on aircraft) right in the middle of the red light, hooked to the same circuit as the red light. When the light is red, there is a VERY bright white flash about every 2 seconds, which would be pretty visible through a modest blanket of snow that would otherwise obscure the lights. They mostly use them at intersections where a lot of accidents have happened or in areas where the speed limit is over 35MPH where an accident could turn fatal more easily (as a way of saying "LOOK!!! RED LIGHT!!! LOOK!!! RED LIGHT!!! LOOK GODDAMIT!!! RED EFFING LIGHT!!!" to inattentive drivers). But they also come in handy during a bad snowstorm because they are extremely visible.