where I live, they record on the bus, and are reviewed if a fight breaks out or some other crime happens. I'm actually OK with cameras on buses - here in my city, for a long time buses had a bad reputation as a good place to go if you wanted to get mugged. Since the cameras went in, more people feel safe taking the bus, and moving people toward mass transit is good for everyone.
They can already track your movement on the bus (they know who bought what bus pass, and they know what bus it was used on and when, which means they can figure out where you started and where you got off). Buses have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and the cameras don't auto-generate tickets for anything. OK by me.
That may be true right now, but I doubt they'll abandon the enthusiast if the volume guys start reselling iPads instead of building boxes. One of the nice things about being an online retailer is that you don't have to stock the low-volume-sales stuff. Just have it drop shipped from the manufacturer.
They're already spreading their sales base even further - selling crap like musical instruments and thermostats. I don't see them abandoning the enthusiasts just because we aren't jumping on the tablet bandwagon.
No offense, but someone who has no interest in upgrading a desktop (whether he needs to or not) who calls himself a PC enthusiast is like someone who drives a 1992 Dodge Caravan calling himself a hot rod enthusiast.
You might appreciate PC's, but you aren't the type of "enthusiast" that Newegg has ever relied upon for income. That type of enthusiast - the dorks like me who want an SSD not because it is necessary, but because it's a freakin' SSD!, is not going to stop building PC's just because you can play Angry Birds on a tablet now.
Plus, it's not like Egg only sells PC components. They sell damn near everything, from coffee pots to washing machines. I got my last TV through them. I doubt the iPad is going to replace big-screen HDTVs any time soon.
I'd say they're going to do just fine. They've managed to win a very loyal customer base over the years, and they're selling stuff that people buy whether they're into PCs or not.
I don't use facebook apps, so that's not a concern. And I already have ABP installed, though I don't remember putting those filters in place.
That said, I'm just going to shutter my account at Facebook. I shouldn't have to jump through special hoops to keep Facebook from blabbing details about me that I do NOT choose to share on Facebook. That, and Facebook is quite famous for changing privacy settings, requiring you to make even more changes to opt out of privacy invasions. I have little doubt that once enough people install ABP and add those filters, they'll figure out some way to work around them.
The issue that I'm having is the reverse of what you guys are talking about. Apparently with the new timeline update or whatever the hell they're calling it, Facebook will integrate with certain websites such that if I go to an enabled site, it's automatically posted to my timeline that I went there.
Dunno about you guys, but I don't necessarily want all of my fb friends list potentially seeing every site I go to. I signed up for Facebook to keep in contact with people that I don't get to see on a regular basis, not to involuntarily vomit up every minute detail of my life to them.
So Google might track me, but Google is a faceless entity that doesn't give much of a damn about me personally. There is anonymity in huge numbers. For Google, I'm one of millions. They can't possibly drill down to tracking me as individually as conspiracy theorists are afraid of. On the other hand, Facebook forcing people who actually know me to track me as aggressively as Google does is out of line.
the American people are lied to and propagandized to such a degree that they have no basis on which to make informed decisions about government. They are taken advantage of at every turn by self-interested politicians and media outlets. Where can they get good, honest information about what various government agencies are up to, and what policy outcomes are?
That's all very true, but yet you somehow managed to dig up enough information to figure it out. So have I. It's not like I'm some supergenius here, I just pay attention. The information is out there but as you said, people have to be plugged in in order to get it, and they're not. The taking care of the kids and keeping a job bit is no excuse. Politics effects both of those. Want to keep your job? Make sure the politicians don't kill them by writing policy that encourages companies to outsource overseas. Want your kid to go to a decent school? Make sure politicians don't try to kill public education.
Americans are shirking their responsibilities, and that is why these lying sacks of crap keep getting elected.
I think you're right. As a TV photog myself, I don't know how you'd possibly attach a score to the edited footage. A lot of what we do involves editing technique, and trying to get a computer program to understand whether or not a piece is edited effectively would basically require you to inject a human-emulating AI into the thing. I know that The Movies tried to quantify editing, but it came down to "he used X clips and Y transitions. X+Y=Score," which might be fun for a kid, but to someone who understands even the basic concepts of editing, was obnoxious. Obnoxious or not, though, I don't know that it would be possible at this point to improve on the model, so this new game is likely to disappoint from the actual shooting and editing point of view.
We call it shooting, actually. Filming has been inaccurate for decades ever since tape replaced film (and believe it or not, a lot of TV photogs launch into nerd-rage when you tell them they're filming something). And now you can't even call it taping, because most of us shoot on either flash-based card media (Panasonic) or rewritable optical discs (Sony).
That's exactly what I'm saying. If you read Hunt for Red October, and then read Teeth of the Tiger (which follows Ryan's kid and was written some 2 decades later) the difference in writing styles is astonishing. Whereas October was one hell of a good story, and well-written, Tiger was a farcical cross between a Clancy novel and Austin Powers. The dialogue was asinine, as was the entire premise of the book - a super-secret agency set up by Ryan as he was leaving the presidency that sends Ryan's kid around the world undercover - but in exotic cars and 5 star hotels living the life of the ostentatiously rich - assassinating various people because they're "bad" while uttering wisecracks that make the new Duke Nukem game sound like classic literature.
You started to really see the degradation in writing ability in Executive Orders, which is where I figure Clancy was starting to turn Lucas in believing that no one could offer him any useful advice as to how to make his work better.
I completely agree. I can't remember where I saw this (might have been the Red Letter Media reviews, which are awesome), but someone theorized that when the originals were made, Lucas wasn't the God he's seen as now, and so he had to accept creative input from other people - and it was those people who made Star Wars what it was. Once he got 100% control of his work, it all went to crap.
It wouldn't be unprecedented. The same thing happened to Tom Clancy.
It was pitched as a space western because Roddenberry wanted to get a TV show on the air. It was not designed as a space western.
Star Trek launched when westerns were the big show, in the era of Gunsmoke and Bonanza. If Roddenberry had said "We're going to fly around in space and explore not only the galaxy, but the human condition through subtle, and not-so-subtle, plots that serve as vehicles for comparison to controversial social issues of today," he'd have been sent right back to the police department where he came from. Much easier to get a pilot looked at if you tell people "Yeah, all those westerns that are so popular? This is a new spin on that - a western in space!"
As for Star Wars being classic science fiction, no. SciFi requires plausibility. Parasites giving you the ability to hurl objects with your mind and ships making "point 5 past light speed" getting. . Anywhere. . in a matter of minutes, is not science fiction, it's fantasy. Good fantasy - the original versions anyway - but fantasy all the same.
Does it matter (to them) if they can? Go read up on the Amanda Knox situation, and I think you'll get the same impression I did - Whether she's guilty or not, the Italian justice system is seriously screwed up.
That this case can even make it to trial is a reinforcement of that belief.
160 alpha-numeric characters including punctuation gives you a huge data storage potential if you encode it correctly. I would also imagine that flash, videos, and pictures will be stripped out of the page, leaving only text, formatting, and color info.
I would expect it to have high latency, but relatively fast download speeds. I would guess (not having looked in to it very much since I don't have T-mobile and therefore don't care enough to) that it encodes the entire website into one txt message. It doesn't take long to send and receive a txt message, so actual download speed is dependent on the server, which I would imagine is not exactly hooked up to a 2400bps modem.
As to your second point, I wouldn't be surprised if they do that by the end of the week;)
Entirely correct. The Tea Party, and for that matter the Republican Party of late, are economic terrorists - though I do agree with the post below you that suggests not engaging in name calling. They call themselves the Tea Party, not teabaggers, just as it's Boehner, not Boner.
Our arguments are stronger if we don't allow the other side easy shots like comparing us to kindergarteners.
It's the other way around. Paper accounts for the greedy bastard factor quite well actually. Both the ideal communism and the ideal capitalism make the same basic mistake - replacing the actual "people" with their own version of a "perfect man" multiplied so that the entire population is made out of perfect copies of the said "perfect man". And then jumping to the logical conclusion of such an imagined system.
Those two lines don't really go together. The second, however, is pretty much what I said (albeit you put it far less cynically than I).
Anyway, any comparison between capitalism and communism is as logical as comparing apples and bears.
Eh, partly true. However, at least in the Soviet/Chinese et al implementation of communism - that being the Marxist-Lenninist model - the economics were inextricably wrapped up in the politics, because without the economic reforms, communism cannot exist.
And if you want to get really technical about Marx's ideas, a true communist state cannot exist anyway, because true communism eliminates the need for government and therefore you have no state. The USSR was a pre-communist socialist dictatorship that never made it to communism because their plan relied on the economic principals of Marxist-Lenninist socialism, and therefore was economically on even shakier ground than governments which rely on capitalism.
That's getting pretty far down the path of technicalities, though. In common parlance, communism and Marxist-Lenninist socialism go hand in hand, and in fact communism cannot get off the ground without the support of that socialism. As such, it's not entirely inappropriate to compare communism and capitalism, especially since communism in practice has so far involved the state taking over industry and meting out its products to the people, which is a direct opposite to capitalist structure.
Unless one argues that all games where one churns out military units in order to gain and maintain the control of the land and/or resources are actually fascist dictatorship simulators.
That design being precisely why I don't tend to regard Civilization as a realistic government simulator. Of course, being able to blow up a tank with a phalanx in Civ 2 influences that opinion as well;)
I think it's funny that the fax machine is viewed as anachronistic technology that needs to be replaced. It was just a few years ago that Western Union stopped sending telegraphs. By comparison, the fax machine is still in its adolescence.
The fax machine works. Why replace something that works?
"When it comes down to it, how is the organisation of the modern corporation, with it's CEO, directors, officers and hierarchy of management bearing Q10's and quarterly projections any different from the Supreme Soviet, commissars, apparatchiks and 5-year plans? Not at all."
Precisely. Both systems share the fundamental flaw of only looking at the theory on paper, and assuming that humans act rationally and within the constraints of the given economic theory.
In reality, people as a whole aren't very smart, and tend to act in their own self interest rather than for the good of the economy. Communism is great on paper. Better than capitalism, actually. But paper never seems to account for the greedy bastard factor.
Thus some people under communism wanted to be more equal than others, which threw the entire system out of whack, and some people under capitalism want to hold all of the wealth while denying it to everyone else, which equally throws the system out of whack.
The SE30 was still available when we got our 486sx. It was discontinued the year the SX was introduced. I remember specifically choosing a 486 over an SE30.
I do remember drooling over the Quadras in that era, and being mildly disappointed that the 3.5" floppies on the PC side weren't motorized.;)
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where I live, they record on the bus, and are reviewed if a fight breaks out or some other crime happens. I'm actually OK with cameras on buses - here in my city, for a long time buses had a bad reputation as a good place to go if you wanted to get mugged. Since the cameras went in, more people feel safe taking the bus, and moving people toward mass transit is good for everyone.
They can already track your movement on the bus (they know who bought what bus pass, and they know what bus it was used on and when, which means they can figure out where you started and where you got off). Buses have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and the cameras don't auto-generate tickets for anything. OK by me.
The masses do not check their oil level, but that's not a good reason to get rid of the dipstick. (Are you listening BMW? -shakes tiny fist- )
Are you by any chance from the US Southwest?
I grew up in NM and spell it that way too, but the other places I've lived don't.
That may be true right now, but I doubt they'll abandon the enthusiast if the volume guys start reselling iPads instead of building boxes. One of the nice things about being an online retailer is that you don't have to stock the low-volume-sales stuff. Just have it drop shipped from the manufacturer.
They're already spreading their sales base even further - selling crap like musical instruments and thermostats. I don't see them abandoning the enthusiasts just because we aren't jumping on the tablet bandwagon.
No offense, but someone who has no interest in upgrading a desktop (whether he needs to or not) who calls himself a PC enthusiast is like someone who drives a 1992 Dodge Caravan calling himself a hot rod enthusiast.
You might appreciate PC's, but you aren't the type of "enthusiast" that Newegg has ever relied upon for income. That type of enthusiast - the dorks like me who want an SSD not because it is necessary, but because it's a freakin' SSD!, is not going to stop building PC's just because you can play Angry Birds on a tablet now.
Plus, it's not like Egg only sells PC components. They sell damn near everything, from coffee pots to washing machines. I got my last TV through them. I doubt the iPad is going to replace big-screen HDTVs any time soon.
I'd say they're going to do just fine. They've managed to win a very loyal customer base over the years, and they're selling stuff that people buy whether they're into PCs or not.
Who said anything about porn sites? If people find out I read Slashdot, they'll beat me up and stuff me in a locker ;)
I don't use facebook apps, so that's not a concern. And I already have ABP installed, though I don't remember putting those filters in place.
That said, I'm just going to shutter my account at Facebook. I shouldn't have to jump through special hoops to keep Facebook from blabbing details about me that I do NOT choose to share on Facebook. That, and Facebook is quite famous for changing privacy settings, requiring you to make even more changes to opt out of privacy invasions. I have little doubt that once enough people install ABP and add those filters, they'll figure out some way to work around them.
The issue that I'm having is the reverse of what you guys are talking about. Apparently with the new timeline update or whatever the hell they're calling it, Facebook will integrate with certain websites such that if I go to an enabled site, it's automatically posted to my timeline that I went there.
Dunno about you guys, but I don't necessarily want all of my fb friends list potentially seeing every site I go to. I signed up for Facebook to keep in contact with people that I don't get to see on a regular basis, not to involuntarily vomit up every minute detail of my life to them.
So Google might track me, but Google is a faceless entity that doesn't give much of a damn about me personally. There is anonymity in huge numbers. For Google, I'm one of millions. They can't possibly drill down to tracking me as individually as conspiracy theorists are afraid of. On the other hand, Facebook forcing people who actually know me to track me as aggressively as Google does is out of line.
the American people are lied to and propagandized to such a degree that they have no basis on which to make informed decisions about government. They are taken advantage of at every turn by self-interested politicians and media outlets. Where can they get good, honest information about what various government agencies are up to, and what policy outcomes are?
That's all very true, but yet you somehow managed to dig up enough information to figure it out. So have I. It's not like I'm some supergenius here, I just pay attention. The information is out there but as you said, people have to be plugged in in order to get it, and they're not. The taking care of the kids and keeping a job bit is no excuse. Politics effects both of those. Want to keep your job? Make sure the politicians don't kill them by writing policy that encourages companies to outsource overseas. Want your kid to go to a decent school? Make sure politicians don't try to kill public education.
Americans are shirking their responsibilities, and that is why these lying sacks of crap keep getting elected.
I think you're right. As a TV photog myself, I don't know how you'd possibly attach a score to the edited footage. A lot of what we do involves editing technique, and trying to get a computer program to understand whether or not a piece is edited effectively would basically require you to inject a human-emulating AI into the thing. I know that The Movies tried to quantify editing, but it came down to "he used X clips and Y transitions. X+Y=Score," which might be fun for a kid, but to someone who understands even the basic concepts of editing, was obnoxious. Obnoxious or not, though, I don't know that it would be possible at this point to improve on the model, so this new game is likely to disappoint from the actual shooting and editing point of view.
We call it shooting, actually. Filming has been inaccurate for decades ever since tape replaced film (and believe it or not, a lot of TV photogs launch into nerd-rage when you tell them they're filming something). And now you can't even call it taping, because most of us shoot on either flash-based card media (Panasonic) or rewritable optical discs (Sony).
But yes, we also call it "working" ;)
Who said I finished it? ;)
That's exactly what I'm saying. If you read Hunt for Red October, and then read Teeth of the Tiger (which follows Ryan's kid and was written some 2 decades later) the difference in writing styles is astonishing. Whereas October was one hell of a good story, and well-written, Tiger was a farcical cross between a Clancy novel and Austin Powers. The dialogue was asinine, as was the entire premise of the book - a super-secret agency set up by Ryan as he was leaving the presidency that sends Ryan's kid around the world undercover - but in exotic cars and 5 star hotels living the life of the ostentatiously rich - assassinating various people because they're "bad" while uttering wisecracks that make the new Duke Nukem game sound like classic literature.
You started to really see the degradation in writing ability in Executive Orders, which is where I figure Clancy was starting to turn Lucas in believing that no one could offer him any useful advice as to how to make his work better.
I completely agree. I can't remember where I saw this (might have been the Red Letter Media reviews, which are awesome), but someone theorized that when the originals were made, Lucas wasn't the God he's seen as now, and so he had to accept creative input from other people - and it was those people who made Star Wars what it was. Once he got 100% control of his work, it all went to crap.
It wouldn't be unprecedented. The same thing happened to Tom Clancy.
It was pitched as a space western because Roddenberry wanted to get a TV show on the air. It was not designed as a space western.
Star Trek launched when westerns were the big show, in the era of Gunsmoke and Bonanza. If Roddenberry had said "We're going to fly around in space and explore not only the galaxy, but the human condition through subtle, and not-so-subtle, plots that serve as vehicles for comparison to controversial social issues of today," he'd have been sent right back to the police department where he came from. Much easier to get a pilot looked at if you tell people "Yeah, all those westerns that are so popular? This is a new spin on that - a western in space!"
As for Star Wars being classic science fiction, no. SciFi requires plausibility. Parasites giving you the ability to hurl objects with your mind and ships making "point 5 past light speed" getting. . Anywhere. . in a matter of minutes, is not science fiction, it's fantasy. Good fantasy - the original versions anyway - but fantasy all the same.
Does it matter (to them) if they can? Go read up on the Amanda Knox situation, and I think you'll get the same impression I did - Whether she's guilty or not, the Italian justice system is seriously screwed up.
That this case can even make it to trial is a reinforcement of that belief.
This, and the parent to this.
I'll get interested in this thing when it's rolled out to the launch pad. Until then, I don't believe it'll be built.
160 alpha-numeric characters including punctuation gives you a huge data storage potential if you encode it correctly. I would also imagine that flash, videos, and pictures will be stripped out of the page, leaving only text, formatting, and color info.
I would expect it to have high latency, but relatively fast download speeds. I would guess (not having looked in to it very much since I don't have T-mobile and therefore don't care enough to) that it encodes the entire website into one txt message. It doesn't take long to send and receive a txt message, so actual download speed is dependent on the server, which I would imagine is not exactly hooked up to a 2400bps modem.
As to your second point, I wouldn't be surprised if they do that by the end of the week ;)
Entirely correct. The Tea Party, and for that matter the Republican Party of late, are economic terrorists - though I do agree with the post below you that suggests not engaging in name calling. They call themselves the Tea Party, not teabaggers, just as it's Boehner, not Boner.
Our arguments are stronger if we don't allow the other side easy shots like comparing us to kindergarteners.
It's the other way around. Paper accounts for the greedy bastard factor quite well actually.
Both the ideal communism and the ideal capitalism make the same basic mistake - replacing the actual "people" with their own version of a "perfect man" multiplied so that the entire population is made out of perfect copies of the said "perfect man". And then jumping to the logical conclusion of such an imagined system.
Those two lines don't really go together. The second, however, is pretty much what I said (albeit you put it far less cynically than I).
Anyway, any comparison between capitalism and communism is as logical as comparing apples and bears.
Eh, partly true. However, at least in the Soviet/Chinese et al implementation of communism - that being the Marxist-Lenninist model - the economics were inextricably wrapped up in the politics, because without the economic reforms, communism cannot exist.
And if you want to get really technical about Marx's ideas, a true communist state cannot exist anyway, because true communism eliminates the need for government and therefore you have no state. The USSR was a pre-communist socialist dictatorship that never made it to communism because their plan relied on the economic principals of Marxist-Lenninist socialism, and therefore was economically on even shakier ground than governments which rely on capitalism.
That's getting pretty far down the path of technicalities, though. In common parlance, communism and Marxist-Lenninist socialism go hand in hand, and in fact communism cannot get off the ground without the support of that socialism. As such, it's not entirely inappropriate to compare communism and capitalism, especially since communism in practice has so far involved the state taking over industry and meting out its products to the people, which is a direct opposite to capitalist structure.
Unless one argues that all games where one churns out military units in order to gain and maintain the control of the land and/or resources are actually fascist dictatorship simulators.
That design being precisely why I don't tend to regard Civilization as a realistic government simulator. Of course, being able to blow up a tank with a phalanx in Civ 2 influences that opinion as well ;)
I think it's funny that the fax machine is viewed as anachronistic technology that needs to be replaced. It was just a few years ago that Western Union stopped sending telegraphs. By comparison, the fax machine is still in its adolescence.
The fax machine works. Why replace something that works?
"When it comes down to it, how is the organisation of the modern corporation, with it's CEO, directors, officers and hierarchy of management bearing Q10's and quarterly projections any different from the Supreme Soviet, commissars, apparatchiks and 5-year plans? Not at all."
Precisely. Both systems share the fundamental flaw of only looking at the theory on paper, and assuming that humans act rationally and within the constraints of the given economic theory.
In reality, people as a whole aren't very smart, and tend to act in their own self interest rather than for the good of the economy. Communism is great on paper. Better than capitalism, actually. But paper never seems to account for the greedy bastard factor.
Thus some people under communism wanted to be more equal than others, which threw the entire system out of whack, and some people under capitalism want to hold all of the wealth while denying it to everyone else, which equally throws the system out of whack.
The SE30 was still available when we got our 486sx. It was discontinued the year the SX was introduced. I remember specifically choosing a 486 over an SE30.
I do remember drooling over the Quadras in that era, and being mildly disappointed that the 3.5" floppies on the PC side weren't motorized. ;)
Reminds me of when Paramount went full-moron back in the 90's and sent C&D letters to anyone so much as mentioning Star Trek on a website.