Changing the memory address layout is roughly akin to doing home security by locking different doors on different nights, but always leaving one unlocked. The would-be burglar just has to try all the doors to get in. Doing this kind of thing is trivial on a computer.
People really need to stop adding these kinds of things that increase complexity and do not address the real issue, which in this case is access to the memory space of another application without some sort of credential or approval. When the real problem is addressed, this overly complex and fundamentally useless random memory address layout 'feature' will be left in to cause bugs and complexity forever.
If there is an argument for this that is not security-based, then I'm willing to hear it out, otherwise, this is an anti-feature.
Support for FreeBSD images is desperately needed before many of us would consider making the jump. The last I heard is that there is some work going on in FreeBSD 7.0 that will make it easier to run FreeBSD instances on EC2 so Amazon can start supporting it. Anyone else got a more recent update?
DRM or not, it's still lossless and therefore nothing that anyone should spend any money on. Admittedly, some of the newer lossy codecs are pretty good and you might say you would only hear a difference on audiophile equipment. I would argue that it's not so much about equipment as ear training, but if we allow that argument, then as technology progresses, what is audiophile now will be general and cheap in a decade (and you can even now buy audiophile level equipment for less than $1000 if you can stand inserting in ear canal musician-style headphones). Do you want to have to rebuy your entire collection then?
People need to start pushing for non-lossless as much as no DRM. Otherwise it's just an invitation to make you repurchase the same songs over and over again a la the latest super ultimate director's cut edition of x blockbuster.
So is this the final director's cut or the final ultimate collection or the final on HD-DVD or the final but we'll add some new useless commentary in the next edition final, no truly final cut? I jest, but the continual trotting out of new editions of old movies to get people to buy the same thing over and over again is a tad ridiculous. I can acknowledge that there might be a theater release and a director's cut for timing reasons, but once that's done, it's time to move on and create something new.
Also, does anyone else share the feeling that the extra commentaries and features on DVDs are pretty much completely worthless? I remember thinking that it was very nifty when I first got a DVD player, but after watching a few, I haven't watched any in years. The only ones of any value I have seen are sometimes animated shorts that go with animated films. If anything, special features generally detract from the enjoyment of a good movie as you struggle to reconcile how a group of such insipid and insincere people could have pulled it off.
"He said the RIAA established that Kazaa existed for the sole purpose of file sharing."
That's like saying the sole purpose of Internet Explorer is to browse the Web. The main problem here is that people have let the RIAA define the vocabulary by making "sharing" a bad word and using "pirates" to denigrate those who share files of any kind (without charging for downloads). However, don't we teach sharing as a good community value to children at an early age? The day this tide will turn is when people convince the media to start terming all of this as RIAA's "war against sharing" and then in cases like this, if the RIAA cannot prove that the person actually profited from sharing certain files, therefore demonstrating that they actually incurred some injury by not realizing a demonstrated revenue stream, juries will shrug.
In the book the "In the Company of Crows and Ravens", crows on the researchers' campus could distinguish two researchers out of thousands of people and would continually harangue them whenever they were seen as they were rather displeased at previously being captured and manhandled. I wonder how these crows are responding to surveillance and the ability of the human researchers to track them wherever they go? Are any of them self aware enough to know that the device is associated with humans and remove it? What can we learn from them about operating in a society where people are increasingly under constant surveillance? A paranoid might say that its their tail feathers now, but your equivalent is on the line next.:)
It sounds like you have a capability for doing research and a very good reason to be passionate about finding a solution. So why don't you? I'm not saying that you open your own lab and start conducting medical trials, but gathering all all the scientific papers, analyzing them closely, understanding all that they are talking about, and writing your own meta analysis could be helpful if done in a scientific way. Form an online community of like thinkers, not those just desperately searching for a cure, but those willing to put in the hard work of collating and correlating research information. I reject the 'we'll wait on the experts to come up with a solution approach' and it's a lot healthier to do what you are doing, which is actively seeking information, than sitting around feeling sorry for yourself or someone you love who is affected.
Some will say it's not possible to learn all the math and biochemistry involved. That's only true in the immediate sense. Properly driven, anyone can learn anything given enough time. Even if you don't have experimental facilities, coming up with the proposed hypotheses and the protocol is a significant part of the effort for any study. It is admittedly unlikely that you alone will find a cure, but the more people like you, the faster one will be found.
I believe a class action is going to break out and I think it will be successful, though perhaps by media pressure and not by judgment. I acknowledge there are various technical arguments to the effect that Apple can only test its patches against firmware or software it knows, so if a phone that has different firmware or software 'just happens' to be bricked in the update process, that doesn't prove 'intent to brick'.
But it doesn't matter. This is too fine a technical detail to dally over and Apple trying to use it in defense will just glaze over the eyes of judges or jury that to whom this is presented. The rule of law is that of what seems reasonable to an adult, and that people who pay hundreds of dollars for a non-subsidized device can have it bricked by the manufacturer carrying on as if they still own the phone is plainly not reasonable.
Instead, I think this will become a turning point for the carrier and handset industry. Around the iPhone, a critical mass has gathered that is passionate about the device, which no other device has enjoyed in this space until now (most handsets sales are small number or subsidized, cheap commodity phones no one can get excited about). Many of these people are the obnoxious, uppity Mac crowd stereotype who are convinced they are right regardless of the facts, but in this case their conviction may be a triumph for everyone. Once precedent swings against the ridiculous situation where carriers and handset manufacturers believe that they can control and restrict a device they have sold in good faith, it will crumble and just perhaps we will see a shift in power in the mobile space from carrier/manufacturer to consumer. Therefore, I say to iPhone owners: Sue, and sue hard. Punitive damages. Criminal RICO prosecution. An all out attack will keep it in the press and that may be more powerful than the suits themselves.
The article reads as a "I tried to use Rails without learning Rails or Ruby and gave up" story and then admits to using many of the Rails patterns in a home grown PHP solution. Well, obviously, if you are much more familiar with another language and refuse to learn the language underneath a framework, it will be hard to use that framework. Point by point:
1. There is nothing that PHP cannot do that Rails cannot do - Well of course, and there's nothing that any language can do that Common Lisp cannot do. Almost all languages implement a Turing machine and can be used to solve any computational problem. The question is code readability, syntactical sugar, and adaptability, all important concepts. Also, the community that has grown around it that builds a knowledge base and plugins and libraries.
2. Their entire company worked on PHP and integration was difficult - Sounds like they didn't understand RPC and services models. Sharing between different languages and platforms is an unfortunate fact of life. Also, it sounds like PHP was the problem here, not Rails, if interoperation was such a problem. "Interoperation" in the article is used oddly - it's actually more about transition to a new site, which has nothing to with the platform used and, if is such a heinous problem, is a problem with design of the new app.
3. Didn't need 90% of Rails - Then why use it? Also, using a tenth of something is not an argument against it if it still the best tool for the job you are doing.
4. The custom solution they jury rigged is "small and fast" - Many Rails apps are small and fast - there's no statistics or analysis here for comparison.
5. The PHP custom app was built for to their tastes - Obviously. If you write a custom app it will miraculously suit your preferences and will probably be a very good solution to your problem. Custom apps if you can do them are often a good idea, keeping in mind the downside is that you don't have a community of knowledge, don't get patches for free, etc..
6. He loves SQL - Fine, don't use ActiveRecord then. Or use ActiveRecord and make direct SQL calls. This goes against common wisdom, of course, regardless of platform, but if you really want to do it, it's there.
7. Programming languages are like girlfriends? - No idea.
The bottom line is that there are criticisms you can level at Rails or any language or framework. However, you actually have to bring facts and analysis to an argument, and this article offers neither.
Somewhat unrelated questions of curiosity: Since if you buy blank media in Canada, you apparently pay a tariff to make up for sharing, does that mean you could buy blank media from Canada from another country and distribute whatever you want on it, claiming that you paid the copyright fee by virtue of the Canadian tariff, especially if you were giving it away for free? In similar fashion, does Canadian privacy law extend to non-Canadian citizens buying DRMed items? If so, what's the thing that determines what is a purchase that is "Canadian"? Location of server in Canada? Use of Candadian domain or online store customized to Canada? Physical location of purchaser? Billing address of purchaser? ISP or IP address of user (and what about proxy or VPN services)? All of the above? Seems like on the Internet whatever country creates the most beneficial tax and rights protection to the consumer could rapidly find itself with a whole lot of virtual citizens if there's an easy way to extend its jurisdiction.
A manager of a Barnes and Noble has recently stopped selling books to high school students in his area who are getting failing grades. It's uncertain on how they will learn without books, but the manager is taking a tough love position: "Kids should know at an early age that life isn't fair and that choices you make early on determine if you are going up or going down."
If they buy the bands with the open access rules on them, they have to leave them unused (unused = complying so narrowly with the FCC requirements that the bands are effectively underutilized) and therefore it's a very expensive way to protect their existing position. It protects one revenue stream, but does not add another. If they can get the open access rules off, then they can treat the bands as just an extension of their existing anti-competitive position and use it as extra bandwidth unchallenged.
They don't want to be stuck with a band they just pay interest on to keep it off the market for all intents and purposes. They also don't want to see someone buy up the band who would seriously consider the other two proposals that Google made that the FCC chose not to enforce, because that would open them up to a raving mob of competitors. For companies that have implicitly colluded with their oligarchic fellows for decades, that's essentially the apocalypse. Therefore, billions are at stake, either in opportunity cost squatting on underutilized bandwidth bought at a steep price, or having fat profit margins obliterated.
This shows you how scared the carriers are about these rules and Google getting hold of the bands.
Verizon's move vacates its primary contention. The open access rules are going to make the bidding intense because those who want to keep the other two open access rules off the table are going to being bidding heavily. Moreover, it is quite likely that Verizon and others will, if the two existing open access rules stick, attempt to buy up the bands and then simply not build or activate the infrastructure, thereby trapping consumers into the other bands where they are not subject to these rules.
Point being, this is sleight of hand. Their real move is going to be trying to buy the bands and keep them dark. Therefore, the bands are worth more with these rules in place than without and Verizon's contention that the FCC is disenfranchising the government of revenue by adding these rules is void.
Vampires? Fantasy and vampire books do not belong in the Hugos. Yes, I know Harry Potter won a Hugo and the Hugos nearly jumped the shark then, but it seems like they have gone back to real science fiction. If the vampires can be explained as simply a predatory species without all the gothic overhead, I could suffer that (though there better be a damn good evolutionary explanation for how such a species could evolve in such a way to consume the blood of other alien species), but if they come from hell or another dimension or whatever and are totally emo in between maintaining their blogs, that's right out.
Vernor Vinge's best book is Marooned in Realtime, closely followed by A Deepness In The Sky. I have not read the other books that were nominated, so I cannot say how they compare relatively, but Rainbow's End was a rather unorganized, disjointed, and mundane book in comparison to his others. It didn't really have a clear plot line because one plot line about old codgers pissed off about destructive digitization of books just happened upon another plot line by blind chance. The connection was really forced. The haptics technology was interesting, but not mind-blowing. I guess it's to his credit to win the Hugo with an off book.
My advice would be to read the other books I cited before you read Rainbow's End so that it doesn't turn you off from his more impressive works, which are excellent.
'At the end of the day, I'll be interested in the consumers' response, because the consumer awareness for this title was so huge.'
Translation:
"We knew the game sucked, but we marketed the hell out of it anyway so that suckers who don't read reviews will buy it just on the hype and then not be able to return it given the usual return policies. I'm interested to see just how many suckers we netted when the sales figures come in."
They do this with movies that are absolute bombs by not screening them for critics before release weekend, hoping to get a good opening weekend from the pre-release marketing knowing full well the movie is terrible and once critics review it and word of mouth spreads, no one will watch it. It's a marketing scam intended to catch out initial viewers/buyers who have little information to go on.
Ship builders around the world have recently stumbled upon an amazingly efficient design for ocean travel. The breakthrough came when builders realized they could put large poles on the middle mass of a boat. This gave them a platform on which to mount large sheets of material. At first decorative in nature, on some trial runs, the first users reported that some mysterious force was moving the boat even when the engines were off!
A crack team of scientists determined that this force was a result of changing relative atmospheric pressures resulting in a large amount of mostly nitrogen gas moving in one direction or the other. When they encountered the sheets of material builders had mounted on the boat poles, they exerted pressure on them in parallel with the direction of flow. As a result, ships tended to move in that direction, subject to hull shape. Some very enterprising inventors have recently created sheets of materials and ways of attaching them to the poles that allows ships with oblong hull shapes to even move *towards* the direction of the flow, albeit with some zig zagging back and forth.
This revelation is even more astonishing in light of estimates on efficiency. Apparently, ships built in this manner can go virtually an unlimited distance entirely by using these flows. In fact, the limits of their range are basically the decay rate of the materials employed for the flow catch sheets. We are truly in a new age that will allow worldwide commerce, exploration, and research.
90 day price protection on credit cards? I have seen extended warranties, but not price protection on the credit card side. Is this a normal feature? Who picks up the tab, the merchant or the credit card company?
This just encourages whiners and the worst kind of whiners. The people up in arms about this are not the people who were unwilling to pay $200 more. Clearly, they bought the phone at that price. What they are up in arms about is that a cheaper phone may mean that other people will be able to afford them, therefore their status symbol is not as exclusive and their feeling of superiority is diminished. The rebate doesn't solve this problem at all and will not please them anyway.
Psychology aside, from a business perspective, there's absolutely no justification for Apple to give a retroactive discount past the return period (see below). When you buy something, you buy it for a price at a particular point in time. If you want to wait and see if the price will go down, you may do so. If it's worth it at the set price at that time and you buy it, short of manufacturing defect, you have absolutely no claim that you should later get it at a lower price. It violates the social contract to demand otherwise. Would if Apple said you should pay them $200 more for the phone you already bought?
The only reason that some merchants have retroactive prices is that the product is still within its return period and it's not worth processing all the returns as people re-buy the product. This is the only case where it makes any business sense to retroactively price a product like this.
Well, there you go then. If you want to push your point, try to torrent America's Army, get blocked, and file a complaint and/or lawsuit claiming that they are preventing you from downloading U.S. military recruitment material. Then you have patriotism on your side.
You can do this in EVE, at least within a solar system. In regular space, ships travel at, say, 1000M/s on average. You can travel anywhere in a solar system entirely on regular speed or go to a 'hyperspace warp' that peaks your speed at about 3000c (6AU/s). Assuming you started at a planet the same distance from its sun as the Earth, it would take about 4.75 years of continuous flying without going to warp before you plunged into the sun (not that you can actually plunge into the sun - they are just empty shells that do no damage in EVE). We'll just wave away the server uptime issues and such, of course.
Much more fun is taking extremely fast ships and 'moon skimming' from one terminus to the other. A reasonably fast ship does in the order of 5000M/s. Let's say you go into orbit around a moon the size of Earth's moon. At 5km/s skimming close to the surface, you would be all the way around it in about 36 minutes. If you start at the terminus on one side and just fly around the dark side to reach the other terminus and see sunrise, you can do it in half that.
This is a tired sophism. The technological sophistication of the overall population increases in lockstep with that of the individual. In truth, given the long dependency chains for any technology (what you are reading this on now is the product of hundreds of entities and thousands of people working together through procurement and resale chains), if anything, the relative capability of the individual is declining.
People using your line of reasoning have appeared at every time in the past when faced with technological change, predicting the end of humanity and rogue individuals. However, it never happens and the rogue individuals, though they sometimes do exist and cause damage using new technology, are overwhelmed by all the others using the same.
In your specific example, technological innovation in creating killer diseases will result in more knowledge about how they operate and thus how to vaccinate and cure them. National disease control centers will have the capacity and authority to stop rogue individuals employing biological weapons before much damage is done. The more we know, the safer we are.
Slashdot Mirror
Changing the memory address layout is roughly akin to doing home security by locking different doors on different nights, but always leaving one unlocked. The would-be burglar just has to try all the doors to get in. Doing this kind of thing is trivial on a computer.
People really need to stop adding these kinds of things that increase complexity and do not address the real issue, which in this case is access to the memory space of another application without some sort of credential or approval. When the real problem is addressed, this overly complex and fundamentally useless random memory address layout 'feature' will be left in to cause bugs and complexity forever.
If there is an argument for this that is not security-based, then I'm willing to hear it out, otherwise, this is an anti-feature.
Support for FreeBSD images is desperately needed before many of us would consider making the jump. The last I heard is that there is some work going on in FreeBSD 7.0 that will make it easier to run FreeBSD instances on EC2 so Amazon can start supporting it. Anyone else got a more recent update?
DRM or not, it's still lossless and therefore nothing that anyone should spend any money on. Admittedly, some of the newer lossy codecs are pretty good and you might say you would only hear a difference on audiophile equipment. I would argue that it's not so much about equipment as ear training, but if we allow that argument, then as technology progresses, what is audiophile now will be general and cheap in a decade (and you can even now buy audiophile level equipment for less than $1000 if you can stand inserting in ear canal musician-style headphones). Do you want to have to rebuy your entire collection then?
People need to start pushing for non-lossless as much as no DRM. Otherwise it's just an invitation to make you repurchase the same songs over and over again a la the latest super ultimate director's cut edition of x blockbuster.
So is this the final director's cut or the final ultimate collection or the final on HD-DVD or the final but we'll add some new useless commentary in the next edition final, no truly final cut? I jest, but the continual trotting out of new editions of old movies to get people to buy the same thing over and over again is a tad ridiculous. I can acknowledge that there might be a theater release and a director's cut for timing reasons, but once that's done, it's time to move on and create something new.
Also, does anyone else share the feeling that the extra commentaries and features on DVDs are pretty much completely worthless? I remember thinking that it was very nifty when I first got a DVD player, but after watching a few, I haven't watched any in years. The only ones of any value I have seen are sometimes animated shorts that go with animated films. If anything, special features generally detract from the enjoyment of a good movie as you struggle to reconcile how a group of such insipid and insincere people could have pulled it off.
"He said the RIAA established that Kazaa existed for the sole purpose of file sharing."
That's like saying the sole purpose of Internet Explorer is to browse the Web. The main problem here is that people have let the RIAA define the vocabulary by making "sharing" a bad word and using "pirates" to denigrate those who share files of any kind (without charging for downloads). However, don't we teach sharing as a good community value to children at an early age? The day this tide will turn is when people convince the media to start terming all of this as RIAA's "war against sharing" and then in cases like this, if the RIAA cannot prove that the person actually profited from sharing certain files, therefore demonstrating that they actually incurred some injury by not realizing a demonstrated revenue stream, juries will shrug.
i'm in ur mailbox
trashin' ur "rights"
In the book the "In the Company of Crows and Ravens", crows on the researchers' campus could distinguish two researchers out of thousands of people and would continually harangue them whenever they were seen as they were rather displeased at previously being captured and manhandled. I wonder how these crows are responding to surveillance and the ability of the human researchers to track them wherever they go? Are any of them self aware enough to know that the device is associated with humans and remove it? What can we learn from them about operating in a society where people are increasingly under constant surveillance? A paranoid might say that its their tail feathers now, but your equivalent is on the line next. :)
It sounds like you have a capability for doing research and a very good reason to be passionate about finding a solution. So why don't you? I'm not saying that you open your own lab and start conducting medical trials, but gathering all all the scientific papers, analyzing them closely, understanding all that they are talking about, and writing your own meta analysis could be helpful if done in a scientific way. Form an online community of like thinkers, not those just desperately searching for a cure, but those willing to put in the hard work of collating and correlating research information. I reject the 'we'll wait on the experts to come up with a solution approach' and it's a lot healthier to do what you are doing, which is actively seeking information, than sitting around feeling sorry for yourself or someone you love who is affected.
Some will say it's not possible to learn all the math and biochemistry involved. That's only true in the immediate sense. Properly driven, anyone can learn anything given enough time. Even if you don't have experimental facilities, coming up with the proposed hypotheses and the protocol is a significant part of the effort for any study. It is admittedly unlikely that you alone will find a cure, but the more people like you, the faster one will be found.
I believe a class action is going to break out and I think it will be successful, though perhaps by media pressure and not by judgment. I acknowledge there are various technical arguments to the effect that Apple can only test its patches against firmware or software it knows, so if a phone that has different firmware or software 'just happens' to be bricked in the update process, that doesn't prove 'intent to brick'.
But it doesn't matter. This is too fine a technical detail to dally over and Apple trying to use it in defense will just glaze over the eyes of judges or jury that to whom this is presented. The rule of law is that of what seems reasonable to an adult, and that people who pay hundreds of dollars for a non-subsidized device can have it bricked by the manufacturer carrying on as if they still own the phone is plainly not reasonable.
Instead, I think this will become a turning point for the carrier and handset industry. Around the iPhone, a critical mass has gathered that is passionate about the device, which no other device has enjoyed in this space until now (most handsets sales are small number or subsidized, cheap commodity phones no one can get excited about). Many of these people are the obnoxious, uppity Mac crowd stereotype who are convinced they are right regardless of the facts, but in this case their conviction may be a triumph for everyone. Once precedent swings against the ridiculous situation where carriers and handset manufacturers believe that they can control and restrict a device they have sold in good faith, it will crumble and just perhaps we will see a shift in power in the mobile space from carrier/manufacturer to consumer. Therefore, I say to iPhone owners: Sue, and sue hard. Punitive damages. Criminal RICO prosecution. An all out attack will keep it in the press and that may be more powerful than the suits themselves.
The article reads as a "I tried to use Rails without learning Rails or Ruby and gave up" story and then admits to using many of the Rails patterns in a home grown PHP solution. Well, obviously, if you are much more familiar with another language and refuse to learn the language underneath a framework, it will be hard to use that framework. Point by point:
1. There is nothing that PHP cannot do that Rails cannot do - Well of course, and there's nothing that any language can do that Common Lisp cannot do. Almost all languages implement a Turing machine and can be used to solve any computational problem. The question is code readability, syntactical sugar, and adaptability, all important concepts. Also, the community that has grown around it that builds a knowledge base and plugins and libraries.
2. Their entire company worked on PHP and integration was difficult - Sounds like they didn't understand RPC and services models. Sharing between different languages and platforms is an unfortunate fact of life. Also, it sounds like PHP was the problem here, not Rails, if interoperation was such a problem. "Interoperation" in the article is used oddly - it's actually more about transition to a new site, which has nothing to with the platform used and, if is such a heinous problem, is a problem with design of the new app.
3. Didn't need 90% of Rails - Then why use it? Also, using a tenth of something is not an argument against it if it still the best tool for the job you are doing.
4. The custom solution they jury rigged is "small and fast" - Many Rails apps are small and fast - there's no statistics or analysis here for comparison.
5. The PHP custom app was built for to their tastes - Obviously. If you write a custom app it will miraculously suit your preferences and will probably be a very good solution to your problem. Custom apps if you can do them are often a good idea, keeping in mind the downside is that you don't have a community of knowledge, don't get patches for free, etc..
6. He loves SQL - Fine, don't use ActiveRecord then. Or use ActiveRecord and make direct SQL calls. This goes against common wisdom, of course, regardless of platform, but if you really want to do it, it's there.
7. Programming languages are like girlfriends? - No idea.
The bottom line is that there are criticisms you can level at Rails or any language or framework. However, you actually have to bring facts and analysis to an argument, and this article offers neither.
Somewhat unrelated questions of curiosity: Since if you buy blank media in Canada, you apparently pay a tariff to make up for sharing, does that mean you could buy blank media from Canada from another country and distribute whatever you want on it, claiming that you paid the copyright fee by virtue of the Canadian tariff, especially if you were giving it away for free? In similar fashion, does Canadian privacy law extend to non-Canadian citizens buying DRMed items? If so, what's the thing that determines what is a purchase that is "Canadian"? Location of server in Canada? Use of Candadian domain or online store customized to Canada? Physical location of purchaser? Billing address of purchaser? ISP or IP address of user (and what about proxy or VPN services)? All of the above? Seems like on the Internet whatever country creates the most beneficial tax and rights protection to the consumer could rapidly find itself with a whole lot of virtual citizens if there's an easy way to extend its jurisdiction.
A manager of a Barnes and Noble has recently stopped selling books to high school students in his area who are getting failing grades. It's uncertain on how they will learn without books, but the manager is taking a tough love position: "Kids should know at an early age that life isn't fair and that choices you make early on determine if you are going up or going down."
If they buy the bands with the open access rules on them, they have to leave them unused (unused = complying so narrowly with the FCC requirements that the bands are effectively underutilized) and therefore it's a very expensive way to protect their existing position. It protects one revenue stream, but does not add another. If they can get the open access rules off, then they can treat the bands as just an extension of their existing anti-competitive position and use it as extra bandwidth unchallenged.
They don't want to be stuck with a band they just pay interest on to keep it off the market for all intents and purposes. They also don't want to see someone buy up the band who would seriously consider the other two proposals that Google made that the FCC chose not to enforce, because that would open them up to a raving mob of competitors. For companies that have implicitly colluded with their oligarchic fellows for decades, that's essentially the apocalypse. Therefore, billions are at stake, either in opportunity cost squatting on underutilized bandwidth bought at a steep price, or having fat profit margins obliterated.
This shows you how scared the carriers are about these rules and Google getting hold of the bands.
Verizon's move vacates its primary contention. The open access rules are going to make the bidding intense because those who want to keep the other two open access rules off the table are going to being bidding heavily. Moreover, it is quite likely that Verizon and others will, if the two existing open access rules stick, attempt to buy up the bands and then simply not build or activate the infrastructure, thereby trapping consumers into the other bands where they are not subject to these rules.
Point being, this is sleight of hand. Their real move is going to be trying to buy the bands and keep them dark. Therefore, the bands are worth more with these rules in place than without and Verizon's contention that the FCC is disenfranchising the government of revenue by adding these rules is void.
Vampires? Fantasy and vampire books do not belong in the Hugos. Yes, I know Harry Potter won a Hugo and the Hugos nearly jumped the shark then, but it seems like they have gone back to real science fiction. If the vampires can be explained as simply a predatory species without all the gothic overhead, I could suffer that (though there better be a damn good evolutionary explanation for how such a species could evolve in such a way to consume the blood of other alien species), but if they come from hell or another dimension or whatever and are totally emo in between maintaining their blogs, that's right out.
Vernor Vinge's best book is Marooned in Realtime, closely followed by A Deepness In The Sky. I have not read the other books that were nominated, so I cannot say how they compare relatively, but Rainbow's End was a rather unorganized, disjointed, and mundane book in comparison to his others. It didn't really have a clear plot line because one plot line about old codgers pissed off about destructive digitization of books just happened upon another plot line by blind chance. The connection was really forced. The haptics technology was interesting, but not mind-blowing. I guess it's to his credit to win the Hugo with an off book.
My advice would be to read the other books I cited before you read Rainbow's End so that it doesn't turn you off from his more impressive works, which are excellent.
'At the end of the day, I'll be interested in the consumers' response, because the consumer awareness for this title was so huge.'
Translation:
"We knew the game sucked, but we marketed the hell out of it anyway so that suckers who don't read reviews will buy it just on the hype and then not be able to return it given the usual return policies. I'm interested to see just how many suckers we netted when the sales figures come in."
They do this with movies that are absolute bombs by not screening them for critics before release weekend, hoping to get a good opening weekend from the pre-release marketing knowing full well the movie is terrible and once critics review it and word of mouth spreads, no one will watch it. It's a marketing scam intended to catch out initial viewers/buyers who have little information to go on.
Ship builders around the world have recently stumbled upon an amazingly efficient design for ocean travel. The breakthrough came when builders realized they could put large poles on the middle mass of a boat. This gave them a platform on which to mount large sheets of material. At first decorative in nature, on some trial runs, the first users reported that some mysterious force was moving the boat even when the engines were off!
A crack team of scientists determined that this force was a result of changing relative atmospheric pressures resulting in a large amount of mostly nitrogen gas moving in one direction or the other. When they encountered the sheets of material builders had mounted on the boat poles, they exerted pressure on them in parallel with the direction of flow. As a result, ships tended to move in that direction, subject to hull shape. Some very enterprising inventors have recently created sheets of materials and ways of attaching them to the poles that allows ships with oblong hull shapes to even move *towards* the direction of the flow, albeit with some zig zagging back and forth.
This revelation is even more astonishing in light of estimates on efficiency. Apparently, ships built in this manner can go virtually an unlimited distance entirely by using these flows. In fact, the limits of their range are basically the decay rate of the materials employed for the flow catch sheets. We are truly in a new age that will allow worldwide commerce, exploration, and research.
90 day price protection on credit cards? I have seen extended warranties, but not price protection on the credit card side. Is this a normal feature? Who picks up the tab, the merchant or the credit card company?
This just encourages whiners and the worst kind of whiners. The people up in arms about this are not the people who were unwilling to pay $200 more. Clearly, they bought the phone at that price. What they are up in arms about is that a cheaper phone may mean that other people will be able to afford them, therefore their status symbol is not as exclusive and their feeling of superiority is diminished. The rebate doesn't solve this problem at all and will not please them anyway.
Psychology aside, from a business perspective, there's absolutely no justification for Apple to give a retroactive discount past the return period (see below). When you buy something, you buy it for a price at a particular point in time. If you want to wait and see if the price will go down, you may do so. If it's worth it at the set price at that time and you buy it, short of manufacturing defect, you have absolutely no claim that you should later get it at a lower price. It violates the social contract to demand otherwise. Would if Apple said you should pay them $200 more for the phone you already bought?
The only reason that some merchants have retroactive prices is that the product is still within its return period and it's not worth processing all the returns as people re-buy the product. This is the only case where it makes any business sense to retroactively price a product like this.
That is one of the driest and funniest things I have ever read on /. Bravo and thanks for the laugh.
Well, there you go then. If you want to push your point, try to torrent America's Army, get blocked, and file a complaint and/or lawsuit claiming that they are preventing you from downloading U.S. military recruitment material. Then you have patriotism on your side.
If you have to use an IDE to write code in your chosen language, you picked the wrong language, or failed to create the domain specific one.
Yeah, I know, off topic, troll-bait, but someone has to keep the candle burning in the dark times.
You can do this in EVE, at least within a solar system. In regular space, ships travel at, say, 1000M/s on average. You can travel anywhere in a solar system entirely on regular speed or go to a 'hyperspace warp' that peaks your speed at about 3000c (6AU/s). Assuming you started at a planet the same distance from its sun as the Earth, it would take about 4.75 years of continuous flying without going to warp before you plunged into the sun (not that you can actually plunge into the sun - they are just empty shells that do no damage in EVE). We'll just wave away the server uptime issues and such, of course.
Much more fun is taking extremely fast ships and 'moon skimming' from one terminus to the other. A reasonably fast ship does in the order of 5000M/s. Let's say you go into orbit around a moon the size of Earth's moon. At 5km/s skimming close to the surface, you would be all the way around it in about 36 minutes. If you start at the terminus on one side and just fly around the dark side to reach the other terminus and see sunrise, you can do it in half that.
This is a tired sophism. The technological sophistication of the overall population increases in lockstep with that of the individual. In truth, given the long dependency chains for any technology (what you are reading this on now is the product of hundreds of entities and thousands of people working together through procurement and resale chains), if anything, the relative capability of the individual is declining.
People using your line of reasoning have appeared at every time in the past when faced with technological change, predicting the end of humanity and rogue individuals. However, it never happens and the rogue individuals, though they sometimes do exist and cause damage using new technology, are overwhelmed by all the others using the same.
In your specific example, technological innovation in creating killer diseases will result in more knowledge about how they operate and thus how to vaccinate and cure them. National disease control centers will have the capacity and authority to stop rogue individuals employing biological weapons before much damage is done. The more we know, the safer we are.