No, you missed my point, which is that the MB/MiB controversy is irrelevant.
Imagine that in two adjacent countries, two electronics industries with the same exact level of expertise both produce HDDs. Country A mandates the use of MB and country B mandates MiB.
In Country A the 1 TB drives comes out as soon as the first manufacturer is able to bring them to market. In Country B, the technology is not *quite* ready yet for the slightly increased density of TiB drives, so they come out a month later. A month thereafter, 1.25 TB drives come out in Country A. A month later, 1,25(lol) TiB drives come out in Country B. And so on. Thanks to technological advances, all of these drives come out at the same price point as the original 1 TB drive.
Over time you plot out the GB per unit currency in each country and you get the same exact smooth curve. Nobody saved any money, nobody got ripped off by using one designation over another. Even the loss of capacity is offset by the fact that the next level upgrade comes sooner.
Drive capacity is not like gold coinage where the company can make money by sneakily shaving off bits and bytes. The only advantage to the companies in Country A is being able to release earlier at a certain size point, which, since consumer HDDs are a commodity item and generally not a fashion accessory, counts for very little.
Let's be clear on this situation: HDD makers, instead of making larger HDDs would rather spin the numbers to make them appear larger instead of actually being larger.
No that's not clear at all. All the facts say otherwise. HDD makers have consistently made their disks larger and larger in capacity every year, more quickly than any other consumer device ever made, while the price has stayed the same or dropped.
Let me be clear on the situation: HDD manufacturers use round decimal SI-prefix numbers first and foremost for convenience because that is how people count and think, in decimal. It's a minor secondary consideration that the decimal "looks" larger than the binary. The largest drive in wide consumer release now is 2Tb, roughly 10% short of some imaginary 2^41 drive that you seem to think consumers are getting cheated out of. Manufacturers could certainly, unquestionably market a 2.2TB drive/2TiB drive if they wanted to. But nothing is free in this world. Even naively assuming the price would stay the same, it would take them an additional few weeks of development time to put the increased areal density on the platters. Which means the higher capacity drives would be released a little bit later. Higher capacity drives being released over time at the same price point. Hmm, sound familiar? It should -- that's the situation as it currently exists.
Hence, my contention is that after all the sturm und drang of it all, switching to TiB would in fact be a complete wash.
The part you blokes don't get is that I don't understand Bell's theorem or actually any aspect of quantum physics, or logic, mathematics. But due to the Heisenberg uncertainly principle or maybe that thing with the dead cats, the less I know paradoxically makes me more qualified to stumble upon the truth. They laughed at Bozo the Clown, didn't they, and he turned out to be right about a lot of things.
We can all make up scenarios where something might theoretically be a deterrent, but it's just a fantasy until stats bear out there's a real positive impact. And then that impact has to be weighed against the cost. Are 1,000 CCTVs cheaper than one police officer? Let's have YOUR grandma walk down the street, get mugged, break her hip and be traumatized because one less cop got hired in place of a bunch of cameras that can't do anything but watch.
Some of the points you mention are simply unexplained. That's a far cry from them being inexplicable or absurd.
Consider for example, the fuel. Obviously, as shown in the movie, it's somewhat dangerous, to say the least. It's not much of a leap to assume that the aliens consider it to be dangerous and take precautions to minimize its risk. For example, it could be that the fuel in normal liquid form is inert, and doesn't activate until it is placed in the canister. And the canister has a "safety" in it that prevents it from activating if it's only half full. It needs to be filled to the top to activate the fuel, but once the fuel is activated then any amount of it can be used. That would explain why they needed to gather a full canister's worth, and would also explain why, once active, it no longer needed to be full. It would also explain why no-one had been affected by the alien machinery -- the loose fuel was not active and had no transformative powers.
The "command ship" or "life boat" or whatever, seemed to me to be deliberately landed in a place remote from the mothership, so that a search of the ship's surroundings would not turn it up. Remember the aliens arrived in the 1980's when video surveillance were not nearly as ubiqutious as they are now, so it would not be a forgone conclusion that the little ship would be tracked to a remote location.
The implication in the film was that the lifeboat could not contact/remote control the ship unless properly powered up.
The protagonist was turning into a prawn. It would stand to reason that at least in part his personality would be affected by the transformation.
These criticisms mostly deal with details that are not essential to the appreciation of the film. It was a mistake, was it not, for Lucas to retcon an technobabble explanation of the Force? Sometimes things are just better off unexplained.
Playing it back frame by frame, it looks like the ball made a weird bounce and then skittered out of range of the robot, which sbusequently threw its hands, er, fingers up in resignation.
only a subset of the games they play are available in Linux?
Somehow the iPod and the Wii became successful platforms despite only having a subset of the universe of games. It's grasping at straws to say that all conditions must be right first. People don't need to switch completely. They just need a reason to switch some of the time. And, as we have seen throughout this thread, some people have done exactly that. But not nearly enough to generate the kind of profits that high-quality multimillion dollar games need to survive.
It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's fulfilled by the external factor that not enough Linux users are buying games. For it to be self-fulfilling would indicate circularity -- that Linux users aren't buying games because they aren't being put out. But that's not the case. They have been put out but are simply not selling large enough numbers to justify additional investment. Porting more games would simply make the debit side of the balance sheet worse. And that kind of investment can't be justified these days -- we're in the midst of a huge game recession. Even consoles games are hurting, so what would inspire a major game studio to leap into Linux?
Sure but the real issue is, not if the AC is full of crap, but is Carmack full of crap when he says that your purchases (and those of your fellow Linux game buyers) aren't themselves enough to justify the expense of porting this engine? Certainly he has access to id's sales stats. Why would he lie about such a thing? And furthermore, if the Linux game market is so fertile, yet underserved, someone such as yourself should be able to make a killing funding a Linux games startup.
Did you ever try to perform a complex calculation in your sleep? It never really works out because your brain can't hold in all the figures -- all the numbers and formulae change when you're not looking at them. Or at least, maybe they've changed, you have no way of knowing, no way of verifying your proof. That's what a "miraculous" universe is like, a shifting dream. Like you said, there's nothing concrete about it, but then, there's no rules, and without rules you can't have math, or any game.
your logic of "ID is bad because it will accept a supernatural explanation (i.e., magic)" isn't sound.
The problem isn't really one of ID being "bad" or not. The problem is that it's not a scientific theory, and can never be one. If any laws of the universe could be contravened at a whim, then you can't really say there are laws, not even math, as per your 2+2=5 example. Sure, maybe that's how the universe works, after all. But even so, 1) it is by definition unprovable (since what's real is contingent upon the whim of the Creator(s)), 2) you can't even have evidence to support it, because among other things, 3)ID is observationally indistinguishable from (scientifically based) Really High Tech, and 4) if it's true, all of science is essentially a sham.
By definition, a "miracle" is a temporary suspension or contravention of the normal laws of the universe.
More precisesly, a miracle as an apparent temporary suspension or contravention in what we believe to be the normal laws of the universe. In that whenever we have had the ability to actually examine a miracle, it turns out that either what apparently took place didn't (those were not tears, they were a suspension of iron oxide) or what we believed about the universe was mistaken (yes it is possible for the sun to "burn" for billions of years because it's not really "burning").
When civilization was young, it seemed that everything was miraculous. Now, the room for miracles to take place has gotten smaller and smaller, and the only reason we hold onto them at all is because they are our only shot at true immortality. If brain uploading ever becomes a reality, that will be the true twilight of the gods.
Flickr didn't "silence" anybody, they said DON'T USE FLICKR.
And when did Flickr scream for equal treatment and equal rights in the first place? If they didn't, then your implication of hypocrisy makes no sense.
Or do you mean that because a few people who self-identify as "liberal" have been known to scream for equal rights, that everybody else who you make an off-the-cuff identification as liberal is held accountable to what those few people did?
It would make just as much sense to say, "It's funny how the group that screams for the sanctity of private property and ownership rights is so quick to get offended when others exercise those rights."
Obviously not all conservatives are offended by Flickr's actions, so calling conservatives as a group hypocrites would be wrong in this instance.
Home invasion? As you know, requires intent. The alleged assailant's behavior as it plays in the paper appears to be unpremeditated. "He snapped," the victim was quoted to say, which would undermine the home invasion scenario.
But overall what you say is undeniable - the possibility exists for Verizon's teat to be squeezed in a big way. I missed the fractured ankle in my first read of the story and that changes matters somewhat, although it would irk me to see this guy get some kind of life-transforming settlement. I still think that "blank check" level amounts would be excessive if the goal is for him to be made whole.
He was charged with assault and apparently given the option of accepting an ACD, Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal, which is a standard disposition that means your case will be sealed if you can stay out of trouble. An ACD is a way of accomplishing two things: First of all it does away with the need for a trial. In NYC probably 95+% of all cases MUST end with some kind of pre-trial disposition or plea, or else the court docket would be utterly unmanageable -- they'd have to hire 10x as many judges, public defenders, court clerks, court officers, build more courthouses, hire maintenance staff, etc., all at considerable taxpayer expense. Either that or the defendants' constitutional right to speedy trials would be absurdly infringed. So basically, in minor cases, its in everyone's interest to dispose of them as quickly as possible instead of having a long drawn-out trial. Remember, this guy is presumed innocent so far (an ACD is prior to the entry of a guilty plea) and can easily argue that he was pushed or spat at and there were mitigating factors which led to the assault. There's no guarantee of a conviction at all. Secondly, as a society we have an interest keeping low-level offenders from permanently ruining their lives and becoming a massive drain on the taxpayers. This is a guy with a regular job who has heretofore led a relatively clean life. (We know this because he would not be offered an ACD otherwise.) So locking him up and throwing away the key, or otherwise grinding him under the wheels of the criminal justice system, would not help anyone, least of all the victim who wants to seek compensation from his assailant.
Being beat up doesn't equal "blank check," nor should it. Apparently his injuries amounted to a bloody nose or lip and broken eyeglasses. There's no mention of hospitalization, eye trauma, broken teeth or bones, bruised ribs, or anything serious. In our country we rush for people to be punished without thinking over the long-term consequences. Do we want companies on the hook for infinite sums of money for relatively minor incidents such as these? Would you be happy for this guy to get $10 million for a nosebleed if it means your phone rates permanently go up? Should the Verizon tech be fired, banned from working, forced to turn to a life of crime, in and out of taxpayer supported jail for the rest of his life, his kids put on taxpayer supported welfare, over this one episode that did not cause any lasting harm?
I could see this guy getting from five to $50K for his trouble, sorry you were beat up, here take a little vacation. I could see the tech given the choice of resigning or paying back the lawsuit award through salary deductions. And certainly being made to attend anger management classes as a condition of continued employment. But nobody's life has been wrecked, so far, over this. Verizon was judicious, imo, to keep it that way.
Whereas the apartheid metaphor was obvious, it was certainly not central to understanding and appreciating the story. If anything, the film seemed to go out of its way to make the point that this was NOT an exercise in so-called "white guilt" -- the reluctant human hero was a white guy and some of the nastiest villains were black.
This was a concept film. As such, yes, the concept was simple and there wasn't much "story." It told the story it needed to tell and nothing more.
(spoilers ahead)
To me, one of the most interesting and most genuinely SF-like aspects of the film was the way the that we were easily led to interpret the behavior of the prawns as random and aimless, inscrutably alien. Old junk collecting, circuit boards hung from the walls, seemed like weird habits until the film switched to giving us translations of the aliens' thoughts. When we learned they were collecting fuel and building an apparatus to distill it, we had to reevaluate what looked moments earlier like low-level scavenging.
Then there were the unanswered questions: Was the captain a higher mental caste than the rank and file aliens? Why did the captain evacuate the ship in the first place if it was safe to return to? I like that the film didn't even attempt to resolve such issues. In real life situations are not neatly wrapped up and I feel that added to the verisimilitude.
Nice troll but the GPL doesn't make it harder to write programs. If anything it makes it much easier because you get access to source code that otherwise you'd have no right to.
Unless I missed it, the article just said that the image the sensor makes looks something like thermal imaging. It didn't say it actually IS thermal imaging. In fact manufacturer's page said a "light source" is required. I wonder if the glow from the TV set at 9 feet away will be sufficient?
The manufacturer's homepage seems to imply that the device could be used for gesture-controlled applications, such as changing the channel without a remote control.
In other words, something like Natal.
Or to rephrase that, what does this device do that Natal doesn't have the capability to do? And that being the case, shouldn't people be equally worried about Natal spying on its users?
Material here doesn't relate to an item ("physical matter") but to "something that matters," i.e.something of consequence. In other words, if the adverse terms have no actual impact (let's say they increase the fee for text messages from five cents to ten cents but you're already on the unlimited text message plan for the life of the contract -- that's adverse, but it has no material impact upon you) you might not be able to get out of the contract. But if they demonstrably matter, even if it's something that shouldn't affect you unless you are a nutjob (unlimited text messages goes from "unlimited" to "may be limited at carrier's discretion to 9999 per month") then you should be able to opt out.
No TFA doesn't say that "they stopped doing it." That's the whole issue -- I don't think there's any reason to assume that they were "doing" anything at all except developing a search engine which turns out not to be as good as Google, overall.
What TFA says is that "those results have magically changed." Which indicates to me that the author of TFA doesn't know how modern search engines work. They don't have static results that stay the same week after week, and so results possibly coming up different two weeks later is anything but "magic."
There's also the minor point that it makes zero sense from a logical POV for Microsoft to taint its results. It doesn't have a large enough search-engine market share to cover up the truth, and if its search engine proves to be generally or predictably inaccurate, it will cost it much more in lost users and lost ad revenue than it would gain in customers who overpay for shitty software because they can't find otherwise on bing.com.
Of course the US government could do such a thing. There's no Constitutional right to defraud consumers. However, in point of fact, no fraud takes place because It's simply not our national tradition to consider "news" as being of necessity factual, unbiased reporting. And it never was, except during the early years of the Cold War when the government was able to keep televised network news in line and was able to benefit from the propaganda value of the illusion of news as fact. But particularly after Watergate, when the networks got cocky with the idea of uncovering government malfeasance, it was no longer beneficial to the government for the Evening News to be considered an unvarnished source of truth, so that bit of Cold War ideology went out the window, and in came the postmodern idea of all "news" as spin.
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No, you missed my point, which is that the MB/MiB controversy is irrelevant.
Imagine that in two adjacent countries, two electronics industries with the same exact level of expertise both produce HDDs. Country A mandates the use of MB and country B mandates MiB.
In Country A the 1 TB drives comes out as soon as the first manufacturer is able to bring them to market. In Country B, the technology is not *quite* ready yet for the slightly increased density of TiB drives, so they come out a month later. A month thereafter, 1.25 TB drives come out in Country A. A month later, 1,25(lol) TiB drives come out in Country B. And so on. Thanks to technological advances, all of these drives come out at the same price point as the original 1 TB drive.
Over time you plot out the GB per unit currency in each country and you get the same exact smooth curve. Nobody saved any money, nobody got ripped off by using one designation over another. Even the loss of capacity is offset by the fact that the next level upgrade comes sooner.
Drive capacity is not like gold coinage where the company can make money by sneakily shaving off bits and bytes. The only advantage to the companies in Country A is being able to release earlier at a certain size point, which, since consumer HDDs are a commodity item and generally not a fashion accessory, counts for very little.
Let's be clear on this situation: HDD makers, instead of making larger HDDs would rather spin the numbers to make them appear larger instead of actually being larger.
No that's not clear at all. All the facts say otherwise. HDD makers have consistently made their disks larger and larger in capacity every year, more quickly than any other consumer device ever made, while the price has stayed the same or dropped.
Let me be clear on the situation: HDD manufacturers use round decimal SI-prefix numbers first and foremost for convenience because that is how people count and think, in decimal. It's a minor secondary consideration that the decimal "looks" larger than the binary. The largest drive in wide consumer release now is 2Tb, roughly 10% short of some imaginary 2^41 drive that you seem to think consumers are getting cheated out of. Manufacturers could certainly, unquestionably market a 2.2TB drive/2TiB drive if they wanted to. But nothing is free in this world. Even naively assuming the price would stay the same, it would take them an additional few weeks of development time to put the increased areal density on the platters. Which means the higher capacity drives would be released a little bit later. Higher capacity drives being released over time at the same price point. Hmm, sound familiar? It should -- that's the situation as it currently exists.
Hence, my contention is that after all the sturm und drang of it all, switching to TiB would in fact be a complete wash.
The part you blokes don't get is that I don't understand Bell's theorem or actually any aspect of quantum physics, or logic, mathematics. But due to the Heisenberg uncertainly principle or maybe that thing with the dead cats, the less I know paradoxically makes me more qualified to stumble upon the truth. They laughed at Bozo the Clown, didn't they, and he turned out to be right about a lot of things.
GMAFB, protecting one's patents != patenttroll.
Having said that, TFA is, questionable objectivity aside, a model of a well researched blog posting.
We can all make up scenarios where something might theoretically be a deterrent, but it's just a fantasy until stats bear out there's a real positive impact. And then that impact has to be weighed against the cost. Are 1,000 CCTVs cheaper than one police officer? Let's have YOUR grandma walk down the street, get mugged, break her hip and be traumatized because one less cop got hired in place of a bunch of cameras that can't do anything but watch.
Some of the points you mention are simply unexplained. That's a far cry from them being inexplicable or absurd.
Consider for example, the fuel. Obviously, as shown in the movie, it's somewhat dangerous, to say the least. It's not much of a leap to assume that the aliens consider it to be dangerous and take precautions to minimize its risk. For example, it could be that the fuel in normal liquid form is inert, and doesn't activate until it is placed in the canister. And the canister has a "safety" in it that prevents it from activating if it's only half full. It needs to be filled to the top to activate the fuel, but once the fuel is activated then any amount of it can be used. That would explain why they needed to gather a full canister's worth, and would also explain why, once active, it no longer needed to be full. It would also explain why no-one had been affected by the alien machinery -- the loose fuel was not active and had no transformative powers.
The "command ship" or "life boat" or whatever, seemed to me to be deliberately landed in a place remote from the mothership, so that a search of the ship's surroundings would not turn it up. Remember the aliens arrived in the 1980's when video surveillance were not nearly as ubiqutious as they are now, so it would not be a forgone conclusion that the little ship would be tracked to a remote location.
The implication in the film was that the lifeboat could not contact/remote control the ship unless properly powered up.
The protagonist was turning into a prawn. It would stand to reason that at least in part his personality would be affected by the transformation.
These criticisms mostly deal with details that are not essential to the appreciation of the film. It was a mistake, was it not, for Lucas to retcon an technobabble explanation of the Force? Sometimes things are just better off unexplained.
Playing it back frame by frame, it looks like the ball made a weird bounce and then skittered out of range of the robot, which sbusequently threw its hands, er, fingers up in resignation.
Somehow the iPod and the Wii became successful platforms despite only having a subset of the universe of games. It's grasping at straws to say that all conditions must be right first. People don't need to switch completely. They just need a reason to switch some of the time. And, as we have seen throughout this thread, some people have done exactly that. But not nearly enough to generate the kind of profits that high-quality multimillion dollar games need to survive.
It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's fulfilled by the external factor that not enough Linux users are buying games. For it to be self-fulfilling would indicate circularity -- that Linux users aren't buying games because they aren't being put out. But that's not the case. They have been put out but are simply not selling large enough numbers to justify additional investment. Porting more games would simply make the debit side of the balance sheet worse. And that kind of investment can't be justified these days -- we're in the midst of a huge game recession. Even consoles games are hurting, so what would inspire a major game studio to leap into Linux?
Sure but the real issue is, not if the AC is full of crap, but is Carmack full of crap when he says that your purchases (and those of your fellow Linux game buyers) aren't themselves enough to justify the expense of porting this engine? Certainly he has access to id's sales stats. Why would he lie about such a thing? And furthermore, if the Linux game market is so fertile, yet underserved, someone such as yourself should be able to make a killing funding a Linux games startup.
You don't need a "plural." A singular positive anecdote is enough to disprove a categorical negative assertion.
Did you ever try to perform a complex calculation in your sleep? It never really works out because your brain can't hold in all the figures -- all the numbers and formulae change when you're not looking at them. Or at least, maybe they've changed, you have no way of knowing, no way of verifying your proof. That's what a "miraculous" universe is like, a shifting dream. Like you said, there's nothing concrete about it, but then, there's no rules, and without rules you can't have math, or any game.
your logic of "ID is bad because it will accept a supernatural explanation (i.e., magic)" isn't sound.
The problem isn't really one of ID being "bad" or not. The problem is that it's not a scientific theory, and can never be one. If any laws of the universe could be contravened at a whim, then you can't really say there are laws, not even math, as per your 2+2=5 example. Sure, maybe that's how the universe works, after all. But even so, 1) it is by definition unprovable (since what's real is contingent upon the whim of the Creator(s)), 2) you can't even have evidence to support it, because among other things, 3)ID is observationally indistinguishable from (scientifically based) Really High Tech, and 4) if it's true, all of science is essentially a sham.
By definition, a "miracle" is a temporary suspension or contravention of the normal laws of the universe.
More precisesly, a miracle as an apparent temporary suspension or contravention in what we believe to be the normal laws of the universe. In that whenever we have had the ability to actually examine a miracle, it turns out that either what apparently took place didn't (those were not tears, they were a suspension of iron oxide) or what we believed about the universe was mistaken (yes it is possible for the sun to "burn" for billions of years because it's not really "burning").
When civilization was young, it seemed that everything was miraculous. Now, the room for miracles to take place has gotten smaller and smaller, and the only reason we hold onto them at all is because they are our only shot at true immortality. If brain uploading ever becomes a reality, that will be the true twilight of the gods.
Flickr didn't "silence" anybody, they said DON'T USE FLICKR.
And when did Flickr scream for equal treatment and equal rights in the first place? If they didn't, then your implication of hypocrisy makes no sense.
Or do you mean that because a few people who self-identify as "liberal" have been known to scream for equal rights, that everybody else who you make an off-the-cuff identification as liberal is held accountable to what those few people did?
It would make just as much sense to say, "It's funny how the group that screams for the sanctity of private property and ownership rights is so quick to get offended when others exercise those rights."
Obviously not all conservatives are offended by Flickr's actions, so calling conservatives as a group hypocrites would be wrong in this instance.
Home invasion? As you know, requires intent. The alleged assailant's behavior as it plays in the paper appears to be unpremeditated. "He snapped," the victim was quoted to say, which would undermine the home invasion scenario.
But overall what you say is undeniable - the possibility exists for Verizon's teat to be squeezed in a big way. I missed the fractured ankle in my first read of the story and that changes matters somewhat, although it would irk me to see this guy get some kind of life-transforming settlement. I still think that "blank check" level amounts would be excessive if the goal is for him to be made whole.
He was charged with assault and apparently given the option of accepting an ACD, Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal, which is a standard disposition that means your case will be sealed if you can stay out of trouble. An ACD is a way of accomplishing two things: First of all it does away with the need for a trial. In NYC probably 95+% of all cases MUST end with some kind of pre-trial disposition or plea, or else the court docket would be utterly unmanageable -- they'd have to hire 10x as many judges, public defenders, court clerks, court officers, build more courthouses, hire maintenance staff, etc., all at considerable taxpayer expense. Either that or the defendants' constitutional right to speedy trials would be absurdly infringed. So basically, in minor cases, its in everyone's interest to dispose of them as quickly as possible instead of having a long drawn-out trial. Remember, this guy is presumed innocent so far (an ACD is prior to the entry of a guilty plea) and can easily argue that he was pushed or spat at and there were mitigating factors which led to the assault. There's no guarantee of a conviction at all. Secondly, as a society we have an interest keeping low-level offenders from permanently ruining their lives and becoming a massive drain on the taxpayers. This is a guy with a regular job who has heretofore led a relatively clean life. (We know this because he would not be offered an ACD otherwise.) So locking him up and throwing away the key, or otherwise grinding him under the wheels of the criminal justice system, would not help anyone, least of all the victim who wants to seek compensation from his assailant.
Being beat up doesn't equal "blank check," nor should it. Apparently his injuries amounted to a bloody nose or lip and broken eyeglasses. There's no mention of hospitalization, eye trauma, broken teeth or bones, bruised ribs, or anything serious. In our country we rush for people to be punished without thinking over the long-term consequences. Do we want companies on the hook for infinite sums of money for relatively minor incidents such as these? Would you be happy for this guy to get $10 million for a nosebleed if it means your phone rates permanently go up? Should the Verizon tech be fired, banned from working, forced to turn to a life of crime, in and out of taxpayer supported jail for the rest of his life, his kids put on taxpayer supported welfare, over this one episode that did not cause any lasting harm?
I could see this guy getting from five to $50K for his trouble, sorry you were beat up, here take a little vacation. I could see the tech given the choice of resigning or paying back the lawsuit award through salary deductions. And certainly being made to attend anger management classes as a condition of continued employment. But nobody's life has been wrecked, so far, over this. Verizon was judicious, imo, to keep it that way.
Whereas the apartheid metaphor was obvious, it was certainly not central to understanding and appreciating the story. If anything, the film seemed to go out of its way to make the point that this was NOT an exercise in so-called "white guilt" -- the reluctant human hero was a white guy and some of the nastiest villains were black.
This was a concept film. As such, yes, the concept was simple and there wasn't much "story." It told the story it needed to tell and nothing more.
(spoilers ahead)
To me, one of the most interesting and most genuinely SF-like aspects of the film was the way the that we were easily led to interpret the behavior of the prawns as random and aimless, inscrutably alien. Old junk collecting, circuit boards hung from the walls, seemed like weird habits until the film switched to giving us translations of the aliens' thoughts. When we learned they were collecting fuel and building an apparatus to distill it, we had to reevaluate what looked moments earlier like low-level scavenging.
Then there were the unanswered questions: Was the captain a higher mental caste than the rank and file aliens? Why did the captain evacuate the ship in the first place if it was safe to return to? I like that the film didn't even attempt to resolve such issues. In real life situations are not neatly wrapped up and I feel that added to the verisimilitude.
Nice troll but the GPL doesn't make it harder to write programs. If anything it makes it much easier because you get access to source code that otherwise you'd have no right to.
Unless I missed it, the article just said that the image the sensor makes looks something like thermal imaging. It didn't say it actually IS thermal imaging. In fact manufacturer's page said a "light source" is required. I wonder if the glow from the TV set at 9 feet away will be sufficient?
The manufacturer's homepage seems to imply that the device could be used for gesture-controlled applications, such as changing the channel without a remote control.
In other words, something like Natal.
Or to rephrase that, what does this device do that Natal doesn't have the capability to do? And that being the case, shouldn't people be equally worried about Natal spying on its users?
Material here doesn't relate to an item ("physical matter") but to "something that matters," i.e.something of consequence. In other words, if the adverse terms have no actual impact (let's say they increase the fee for text messages from five cents to ten cents but you're already on the unlimited text message plan for the life of the contract -- that's adverse, but it has no material impact upon you) you might not be able to get out of the contract. But if they demonstrably matter, even if it's something that shouldn't affect you unless you are a nutjob (unlimited text messages goes from "unlimited" to "may be limited at carrier's discretion to 9999 per month") then you should be able to opt out.
No TFA doesn't say that "they stopped doing it." That's the whole issue -- I don't think there's any reason to assume that they were "doing" anything at all except developing a search engine which turns out not to be as good as Google, overall.
What TFA says is that "those results have magically changed." Which indicates to me that the author of TFA doesn't know how modern search engines work. They don't have static results that stay the same week after week, and so results possibly coming up different two weeks later is anything but "magic."
There's also the minor point that it makes zero sense from a logical POV for Microsoft to taint its results. It doesn't have a large enough search-engine market share to cover up the truth, and if its search engine proves to be generally or predictably inaccurate, it will cost it much more in lost users and lost ad revenue than it would gain in customers who overpay for shitty software because they can't find otherwise on bing.com.
Of course the US government could do such a thing. There's no Constitutional right to defraud consumers. However, in point of fact, no fraud takes place because It's simply not our national tradition to consider "news" as being of necessity factual, unbiased reporting. And it never was, except during the early years of the Cold War when the government was able to keep televised network news in line and was able to benefit from the propaganda value of the illusion of news as fact. But particularly after Watergate, when the networks got cocky with the idea of uncovering government malfeasance, it was no longer beneficial to the government for the Evening News to be considered an unvarnished source of truth, so that bit of Cold War ideology went out the window, and in came the postmodern idea of all "news" as spin.
This whole topic is a troll. Look, Xboxen are expensive, Microsoft Windows is f*cking expensive, and apparently, Microsoft sucks. I rest my case.