It is also a matter of vendor lockin. With Flash one is at the mercy of what Adobe feels like this week. For advertisers there is little risk. Macromedia and Adobe have consistently shown that Flash is there fore advertisers, and no changes will made to jeopardize that relationship. The fact that MS was able to get silverlight on Netflix shows that Flash as a container for videos is all that it is cracked up to be. In particular the DRM is not at all secure.
Of course it does not seem that the p0rn industry really worries about DRM. The new model seems to just crank out videos and make money on the volume, as distributions costs have gone to almost nil. I suspect that flash servers and development make this cost somewhat above nil, so moving from flash will bring much less than almost nil.
Since I think it pretty much symbolizes all that is amazing about modern science. That mass and energy, mass and waves, everything, is fundamentally the same thing. That massless objects have energy just live massive objects. This is really why i hate the simplified form, as it does not express the full beauty of the world, only that we can make atomic bombs. I think the full equation would remind me that the world is not as simple as some want it to be, but still reducible and beautiful.
Though some people think that integrals and the like are sexy, so I would include some of those. And maybe some div and grad, maybe the god said type thing.
iPhone is $99. Skype is a little more than that for a years use with a phone number. Jailbreak the phone if you do not want to hook it up to itunes. I don't know if anything can beat that.
Here are three things I see to be a consistent form of trouble. First, obviously as we exist, there was not an equal amount of matter and anti-matter created at the big bang. Furthermore most kludges that have been devised to explain this discrepancy have been less that stellar and have tended not to match real data very well, unless they have been tweaked to arbitrarily match real data.
Second, we think there are infinities in the universe, and infinities tend to be catastrophic in the real world. In fact, classical mechanics met it's catastrophe in an infinity. It is unlikely that all the infinities that are created between quantum mechanics at the atomic scale and relativity at the universal scale can simply be normalized out, and black holes are not going anywhere until general relativity is fixed.
Then of course we havethe hacked dark matter née aether to make everything work out and match the theory. In light of these three things, any new data, especially new data the violates current theories, are not problem buy jewels. Jewels that will help us refine, and supposed depose, old theories. It is why we still train scientists, and laught at those that think the world is so boring that there is nothing left to be discovered. Fortunately for those that are curious, nature has new surprises every day. I would hate to live in a world where the special theory of relativity was gospel. Such a world would so boring that I would probably be thinking not of what wonders will come, but how life can be ended.
Especially since I squandered my youth solving those god forsaken equations.
Not really. Chrome is pushed down the throats of users at a rate that is only comparable to MS IE. Google has the money to create misleading advertisements, they own the online ad services so can spam all the web pages they want. It is really just a click of an ad link to install Chrome, no more than the average piece of malware.
So, if I were a bank and knew how easily customers get confused, I would be afraid that some luser might accidentally install chrome, it would not look the same as in IE, and the bank would have to pay for the support call. This si different from Firefox or Opera where the user has to make a conscious decision to install, and would be much less like to have done it by a drive by install.
This is why organizations should not depend on one or a few people. In my life when I part of something that is run by a single person, even if that single person is me, i don't see much value in it. As soon as the person goes, so will the organization. The tea party in the US has it right. Funding from corporations that are destined to live as long as the US, but no formal leadership. Gingrich did it wrong with contract for America because eventually people could not stand his sins, and they lost it all. He went from being a person who was too poor to pay child support and whose children had to beg for food to one of the most powerful men in the world, but the conservative movement paid the price.
The thing about real world experience is that the only way to measure it is to make it real world. If we are fetching resources from a web site, part of that process is rendering. For instance, i would expect slashdot to load in a few hundred milliseconds based on data size, with a couple seconds to render. This leads to the three second observed time to load. Pages with complex scripts are going to render even slower. What this means is that for anyone on DSL or cable, one would likely do better to switch to opera rather than pay more for bandwidth.
What would be effected by the higher speeds is the time to download an album from iTunes or Amazon, the time to load a Netflix movie, the time to load a Hulu video, the time to download a Youtube video. Of course these number would name and shame companies that don't keep up competing infrastructure, and would be more likely to cost them advertising.
This reminds me of all the computer benchmarks that PC mag does. Sure they sell magazines, but really simply serve to misinform the public.
Such flaws are why professional developers do not put in random features that can be exploited. Sure it might be fun toi say that our application has a thousand more features than the competition, but to those that are savvy it is just a thousand more way to be put at risk.
I don't know, if you google christian internet filtering there are many results. Probably not all of these filter on religious content, but I am sure some do. They certainly likely filter out 'satanic music' and nudity, both which many christian consider blasphemous even though sane people know that worldly pleasures have almost nothing to do with the relationship to the almighty. It is only those of little faith that are intimidated by a breast of flash of a penis. After all the almighty gave us these things.
The difference one may cite is that the government is not suppling such christian software. The US government, however, does require filtering software in certain situations and such filtering software is seen as having a radical christian bent most people who do not suffer from radical christian ideas.
Indeed. It used to be that people who were not able to compete in a fair and open economy would done white hoods and play with fire. Now those incompetent workers who are unwilling to work for the wage they are worth are using the legal system to minimize competition from those that are worth more, and they try to hide behind the very same constitution that they wold tend to ignore in most of their actions.
Here is one thing I like about paypal. I have my account set up to use a one time pad. This in itself is a layer of security. I do not have it linked to my bank account, i only have it linked to my credit card.
I think one issue that people have with paypal is that they expect it to be a credit card. It is not, it is just an way to exchange cash without metting. It really has no level of security beyond that. If one gets the product or not, that is another matter. I like not having to provide credit card credentials to arbitrary people and firms on the internet. Paypal is expensive to use, but I find it to be generally effective.
What I do not like is Verified by Visa. It only wants a weak password and if someone gets the password then they can take all your money. The security check to create a Verified by Visa account is also meaningless, requesting little more information than is required to complete a transaction in the normal way. Verified by Visa is security theatre.
They are not entitled to that under the law, but neither does Google has the responsibility to host arbitrary content. It is there servers, and the point of the Youtube is to generate a profit, not be a cost center. Therefore if the content providers are willing to have pay for the removal of content, rather than google paying for the content, that is a good thing.
I think the mistake people make is seeing Youtube as right and not a service. They think just because they post a video on YouTube it automatically becomes Googles responsibility to incur all necessary costs defending that video. We see this when some whiner complains that Google took down a video of that some silly parent put up that no one really cares about. Google might defend such videos to get some good PR, but they in no way have any responsibility to the person who made the video. If the person who posted the video wants it up, then they can pay the legal fees. In fact google has an incentive to minimize such videos as such videos probably reduce overall profits.
This is different from videos that I might post on a website for which I pay for hosting. In that case I am the customer, and my ISP should be limited in such takedowns. But for google and similar services, giving tools to companies such as Viacom is simply win-win.
Agreed, but it will have to use the modern misgivings about the future. Logans run about a future where resources were limited and therefore lives had to be limited. We do not believe that anymore. Most of us believe that we can have as much stuff as we want, we can live as long as we want and we should never have to suffer. Every old person deserves as much medical care and welfare, because the worked and earned it.
Further, logans run was made at a time when we thought that science was going to make nature irrelevant. We would all be living in cocoons never to see the sun. Some sort of technological disaster, such an oil spill, would mean the natural environment would not be safe and we would no longer have safe food, such as oysters. It was only after time had past and the world had healed that the people could be free.
Obviously this future has to some degree happened. For many, they can move from house to garage to SUV to garage to office with very little natural contact. Filtered water and filtered air is the rule. Processed food using natural food as the base to which synthetics are added to reconstruct the texture and taste.
So the premise has to be different. Maybe a natural disaster killed off the older people. Maybe everyone who is old and unable to work at maximum efficient are shunned and forced to the outside. I can tell you one thing. When Jessica get undressed I expect to see alot more of Jessica. Margo Stilley has no issue with nudity.
Apple got into trouble in the 90's by fixating on a computing product rather than the customers use of the computer. This meant that the only people buying the computers were people who always used Apple product, and a few vertical markets. This was not a very large market share.
Apple now sells systems that allow user to get stuff done. The big desktop is not a big part of that anymore. Embedded devices are a huge part of their market, and will only grow. There will be a time when the general purpose computer is not a big part of any consumer oriented company. Apple will probably be one of the first to cut back on the general purpose computer, as it has to generate revenue to fund research.
I do not see consumer GPC is wide existence in 10 years, any more than the kit computers of thirty years ago exist today.
including zipped attachment management, junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging.
I am surprised that all these capability are needed for a mobile client. In particular, i would think corporate would want to junk email filtering at the server, otherwise there would be risk that an individual user might overfilter.
Likewise zipped attachments are something that is used for desktop, but I don't know why anyone would use them on a mobile device, but then I don't see why i get memos in MS Word format instead of PDF. Sometimes the feature bloat drives the bad habits. I suppose that on some mobile devices application installation might happen through email.
I would also like to see message rule and flagging pushed back to the server. I might be using one of four machines to look at mail. Everything is stored on the server. Keeping the rules consistant on all machines can be a pain. It would be much better to be able to set up one server to check mail, then reroute, then all the other machines feed off that. When I used to one machines going all the time at home, this more or less happened.
In any case many of these complaints seem more about wanting to do things the old fashion way rather than genuine functionality. It is like complaining that Python does not have a traditional for...next loop. Get over it.
And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged."
If Shatner has any government post in Canada, I think the US north better stop whining about how we need to build a fence down south and start worrying about how we can reinforce the longest previously unprotected border in the world.
Also note that many k-12 schools and district have code of conduct that prohibit the use of shopping sites. Blocking SSL is a way to enforce that code of conduct. Many firms may prefer their employees to work instead of shop as well.
As far as snooping is concerned, at least in the US the courts have upheld the right of those that own the machines to control and inspect the contents of those machines. Anything that one does at work or at school should be considered public information. If I wanted to snoop on what the kids were doing, I would not have to resort to packet sniffing. I could just install a key logger, or one of those screen shot programs. Most users would never know. The myth that one is secure on equipment one does not own is simply that, a myth.
The true silliness of the situation is that the submitter is concerned about the school or work snooping, and not about all the information that is being given to google for them to sell to the top bidder. All the school/office cares about is that everyone is following policy. Google wants to monetize the data and does not care about the users at all.
If privacy is that much of a concern, and if we must surf the block sites, then buy a laptop with a 3g connection, maybe an iPad. Then we can go wherever we want without the big bad teachers and bosses controlling us. That is what the modern kids are doing now.
From the nature write up it appears that this, along with older fossils, seems to push back bipedal Hominini to about 3.5 millions year. Almost 2 meters tall, a pelvis that seems modern, and a long tibia. I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked, the agreement on a bipedal Lucy and relatives seems pretty impressive, and meant that our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur.
The thing is that twitter is not aural communication. It is written. Therefore it is pretty easy to ignore what you don't want to see. If you don't want to use it, don't.
What I find most interesting of this survey is the arrogance. The researchers a priori determine what is useful and relevant based on what they think is useful and relevant. I think that facebook is a waste of electrons, but I don't thing it should or is going to go away. I think the only real game and the only real athletes are ftbol players, but I am not going to do a survey and cite that 90% of professional athletes are drug addicted posers. I would say that the least interesting news of the day are sports scores, not because I am not interested in who won, but as technical type I am more interested in process than outcome.
I would say that we have been brainwashed by carefully packaged media mongrels(sic) into beleiving that they only news is what they say is news, and what the common person has to say is meaningless unless filtered through their proprietary channels.
Apple typically has a policy of three years of new OS support for old hardware. For instance, my Powerbook was last produced in 2006, so Snow Leopard released in summer of 2009 did not support the PowerPC. This was a bummer, but it meant they could optimize the OS for current machines. This does not mean the PowerPC cannot be used. OS 10.5 is still good. Typically I can run an OS through two releases, which means that any given mac has a lifetime of 5 or 6 years, if I wish.
What this means is that there is no expectation of support of iOS 4 on the original iPhone. Likewise, the next OS is not going to support the 3G. That is jus the way the support cycle typically works. It does not mean that original iPhone is no longer useful. I might take this as a impetus to jailbreak mine.
I'll happily stick with my Blackberry until my contract is up and then it is probably going to be another BB or an Android phone.
Exactly, MS is going to be competing for those customers who want an enterprise phone or a more open marketplace. That is blackberry and Android. If MS does not provide a superior smart phone experience, stating with the features already expected by users, they will not compete. Most people no longer buy something just because it has the MS logo on it. They will buy crap from Apple and Google instead.
MS seems to understand this when they made the Kin feature phone. Provide functionality to the end user, and have some success. Hell, if I was 20 and trying to get laid and party every night, I might by a Kin. The problem is, as mention, that Windows 7 is still trying to market to the corporate world, which uses blackberry, and there does not seem to be any reason to change.
Verizon provides premium service, so they have to charge premium prices. The problem is that they can no longer charge the premium prices they used to, especially for data services, and still compete against the lesser companies. So they have these hidden costs. It is just like the banks. Take away the overdraft and they will start charging for checking without a minimum deposit.
As far as imposing rules to protect the parents, this is a waste of time. For instance, when a kid has a car, that is a new lability on the family. We do not externalize that liability to other customers, we make the parents pay higher insurance. The same thing for phones. If a parent chooses to give a kid a phone, and I don't think kids can sign contracts, then they need to pay for that service. Everyone offers unlimited texting at very reasonable costs. On verizon unlimited text and voice is $150. If the family can' afford it, then don't have cell phones. What amazes me is that parents do not understand that texting cost money. I don't know anyone under the age of 40 that does not understand this.
The economics is that the service wants to maximize recurring costs and the customer wants to minimize recurring costs, therefore the penalties on lower recurring cost service is maximized. I would like to see some warning that these charges are being incurred.
In your scenario, a family can guarantee a $300 bill by buying the full package for the family, which would run a little above $300 with taxes. It could be cut down to $200 if the kids were not given data packages, and all services were cut.
It is like the new ATT data plan. I like the option of paying only $15 a month for my data, since I use less than the data allowed. I would hate for some emergency to happen and have some law in place, simply to protect families who spoil their kids, to keep me from being able to do what I need to do.
Also remember that, for the most part, there was not much need to know how to weld a cylinder 33 feet in diamater. Or know how to make quartz glass that could withstand low pressure on the outside. or turbo pumps. Or electronics that would not fry under the radiation. I remember on one project I worked on the challenge was to find a machine shop that could work on the specialized alloy we wanted in the dimension we needed. We can't say it enough. We may think we understand space, but the fact is there will always be a surprise which will make the cost rise. Over the past fifty years the technology has been developed to allow the routine access of LEO. Even so, commercial human flight is going to be an issue.
On another note, we also have to realize what happens when disaster strikes. A government vehicle raining debris over Texas will only result in statutory payments. A commercial vehicle exploding over texas, leaving a stretch of debris, will result in many lawsuits that might make the Deep Water Horizon fiasco look tame. It is not going to be a plane crash, where one house is destroyed. We are talking jet fuel raining over large areas and huge chunks of metal. It would be an environmental disaster. With a government vehicle, these costs are not a factor. With a commercial vehicle, we are talking 20 billion.
It may be inadvertent to collect, but keeping it requires a conscious and deliberate effort to allocate resources. For instance, no one can fault me for listening to the conversations around me. The people are talking in a public place and therefore have no expectation of privacy. However, if I start taking notes or recording their conversation, then I have made a deliberate attempt invade what many would consider, at least, a semiprivate situation. If I go further and use sophisticated equipment to record their conversations and acts from a distance, then I am move myself even further from the 'inadvertent sniffing' to the 'actively spying.
My concern with what Google, and many other firms, are doing is that they are dedicated huge amounts of resources to collected huge amount of data on people. As profit making entities, these firms must at some point monetize this data to get a return on investment. Therefore, if google is keeping data other than basic acces point information, then they must be planning to do something with it.
There was a time when calculators were human and knowing how to do math with decimals could get you a good job. Now as long as a kid now 30/4 is between 7 and 8, that is pretty good. There was a time when being a being able to do drawn up handwriting could get you a good job. Now knowing how to type is important. There was a short time when most of our communicate was synchronous and voice based, and those that had that skill were able to get a job. Now we are back to the time of asynchronous written communication. So yes, technology is here to stay and ignoring it is just failing to prepare a kid to work in the real world.
It is probably true that a kid who has unlimited access to a computer will have lower scores, in the same way that a kid with unlimited access to a tv has lower scores. This is why so many kids have no computer at school. I can attest that given a computer in a classroom, the average 10-14 year old is much more likely to load up Twilight rather than learn. That is the nature of kids. It then is our duty as adults to move the computer from a toy to a tool. While it is true that some may be too immature to use a computer as a tool, at some point students must be taught. Otherwise they are going to get a job with internet access and spend their entire day downloading porn.
The computer is not the first time we have had this problem. I recall working in offices, and this stil goes on, and the clerical staff spending the whole day on personal phone calls. These people are going to the same one to complain they never get promoted. And the internet is not the issue either. I remember having Apple ][ computers at school. Some of us would program, the other would play games. Even on the DEC machines, many of my classmates would simply spend the time printing curse words on the screen.
So, sure test scores are going to suffer, but skills are important, and just because some students are too immature to gain those skills does not mean everyone has to suffer. This is really the problem with inner city schools. They are set up to teach the 33% of the students that are fuck ups, and therefore the 33% of the students that really want to learn and are motivated by complex tasks are often not taught at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it does not seem that the p0rn industry really worries about DRM. The new model seems to just crank out videos and make money on the volume, as distributions costs have gone to almost nil. I suspect that flash servers and development make this cost somewhat above nil, so moving from flash will bring much less than almost nil.
e^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2
Since I think it pretty much symbolizes all that is amazing about modern science. That mass and energy, mass and waves, everything, is fundamentally the same thing. That massless objects have energy just live massive objects. This is really why i hate the simplified form, as it does not express the full beauty of the world, only that we can make atomic bombs. I think the full equation would remind me that the world is not as simple as some want it to be, but still reducible and beautiful.
Though some people think that integrals and the like are sexy, so I would include some of those. And maybe some div and grad, maybe the god said type thing.
And then the bra-ket stuff is always fun.
iPhone is $99. Skype is a little more than that for a years use with a phone number. Jailbreak the phone if you do not want to hook it up to itunes. I don't know if anything can beat that.
Second, we think there are infinities in the universe, and infinities tend to be catastrophic in the real world. In fact, classical mechanics met it's catastrophe in an infinity. It is unlikely that all the infinities that are created between quantum mechanics at the atomic scale and relativity at the universal scale can simply be normalized out, and black holes are not going anywhere until general relativity is fixed.
Then of course we havethe hacked dark matter née aether to make everything work out and match the theory. In light of these three things, any new data, especially new data the violates current theories, are not problem buy jewels. Jewels that will help us refine, and supposed depose, old theories. It is why we still train scientists, and laught at those that think the world is so boring that there is nothing left to be discovered. Fortunately for those that are curious, nature has new surprises every day. I would hate to live in a world where the special theory of relativity was gospel. Such a world would so boring that I would probably be thinking not of what wonders will come, but how life can be ended.
Especially since I squandered my youth solving those god forsaken equations.
So, if I were a bank and knew how easily customers get confused, I would be afraid that some luser might accidentally install chrome, it would not look the same as in IE, and the bank would have to pay for the support call. This si different from Firefox or Opera where the user has to make a conscious decision to install, and would be much less like to have done it by a drive by install.
This is why organizations should not depend on one or a few people. In my life when I part of something that is run by a single person, even if that single person is me, i don't see much value in it. As soon as the person goes, so will the organization. The tea party in the US has it right. Funding from corporations that are destined to live as long as the US, but no formal leadership. Gingrich did it wrong with contract for America because eventually people could not stand his sins, and they lost it all. He went from being a person who was too poor to pay child support and whose children had to beg for food to one of the most powerful men in the world, but the conservative movement paid the price.
What would be effected by the higher speeds is the time to download an album from iTunes or Amazon, the time to load a Netflix movie, the time to load a Hulu video, the time to download a Youtube video. Of course these number would name and shame companies that don't keep up competing infrastructure, and would be more likely to cost them advertising.
This reminds me of all the computer benchmarks that PC mag does. Sure they sell magazines, but really simply serve to misinform the public.
Such flaws are why professional developers do not put in random features that can be exploited. Sure it might be fun toi say that our application has a thousand more features than the competition, but to those that are savvy it is just a thousand more way to be put at risk.
The difference one may cite is that the government is not suppling such christian software. The US government, however, does require filtering software in certain situations and such filtering software is seen as having a radical christian bent most people who do not suffer from radical christian ideas.
Indeed. It used to be that people who were not able to compete in a fair and open economy would done white hoods and play with fire. Now those incompetent workers who are unwilling to work for the wage they are worth are using the legal system to minimize competition from those that are worth more, and they try to hide behind the very same constitution that they wold tend to ignore in most of their actions.
I think one issue that people have with paypal is that they expect it to be a credit card. It is not, it is just an way to exchange cash without metting. It really has no level of security beyond that. If one gets the product or not, that is another matter. I like not having to provide credit card credentials to arbitrary people and firms on the internet. Paypal is expensive to use, but I find it to be generally effective.
What I do not like is Verified by Visa. It only wants a weak password and if someone gets the password then they can take all your money. The security check to create a Verified by Visa account is also meaningless, requesting little more information than is required to complete a transaction in the normal way. Verified by Visa is security theatre.
I think the mistake people make is seeing Youtube as right and not a service. They think just because they post a video on YouTube it automatically becomes Googles responsibility to incur all necessary costs defending that video. We see this when some whiner complains that Google took down a video of that some silly parent put up that no one really cares about. Google might defend such videos to get some good PR, but they in no way have any responsibility to the person who made the video. If the person who posted the video wants it up, then they can pay the legal fees. In fact google has an incentive to minimize such videos as such videos probably reduce overall profits.
This is different from videos that I might post on a website for which I pay for hosting. In that case I am the customer, and my ISP should be limited in such takedowns. But for google and similar services, giving tools to companies such as Viacom is simply win-win.
Further, logans run was made at a time when we thought that science was going to make nature irrelevant. We would all be living in cocoons never to see the sun. Some sort of technological disaster, such an oil spill, would mean the natural environment would not be safe and we would no longer have safe food, such as oysters. It was only after time had past and the world had healed that the people could be free.
Obviously this future has to some degree happened. For many, they can move from house to garage to SUV to garage to office with very little natural contact. Filtered water and filtered air is the rule. Processed food using natural food as the base to which synthetics are added to reconstruct the texture and taste.
So the premise has to be different. Maybe a natural disaster killed off the older people. Maybe everyone who is old and unable to work at maximum efficient are shunned and forced to the outside. I can tell you one thing. When Jessica get undressed I expect to see alot more of Jessica. Margo Stilley has no issue with nudity.
Apple now sells systems that allow user to get stuff done. The big desktop is not a big part of that anymore. Embedded devices are a huge part of their market, and will only grow. There will be a time when the general purpose computer is not a big part of any consumer oriented company. Apple will probably be one of the first to cut back on the general purpose computer, as it has to generate revenue to fund research.
I do not see consumer GPC is wide existence in 10 years, any more than the kit computers of thirty years ago exist today.
I am surprised that all these capability are needed for a mobile client. In particular, i would think corporate would want to junk email filtering at the server, otherwise there would be risk that an individual user might overfilter.
Likewise zipped attachments are something that is used for desktop, but I don't know why anyone would use them on a mobile device, but then I don't see why i get memos in MS Word format instead of PDF. Sometimes the feature bloat drives the bad habits. I suppose that on some mobile devices application installation might happen through email.
I would also like to see message rule and flagging pushed back to the server. I might be using one of four machines to look at mail. Everything is stored on the server. Keeping the rules consistant on all machines can be a pain. It would be much better to be able to set up one server to check mail, then reroute, then all the other machines feed off that. When I used to one machines going all the time at home, this more or less happened.
In any case many of these complaints seem more about wanting to do things the old fashion way rather than genuine functionality. It is like complaining that Python does not have a traditional for...next loop. Get over it.
If Shatner has any government post in Canada, I think the US north better stop whining about how we need to build a fence down south and start worrying about how we can reinforce the longest previously unprotected border in the world.
As far as snooping is concerned, at least in the US the courts have upheld the right of those that own the machines to control and inspect the contents of those machines. Anything that one does at work or at school should be considered public information. If I wanted to snoop on what the kids were doing, I would not have to resort to packet sniffing. I could just install a key logger, or one of those screen shot programs. Most users would never know. The myth that one is secure on equipment one does not own is simply that, a myth.
The true silliness of the situation is that the submitter is concerned about the school or work snooping, and not about all the information that is being given to google for them to sell to the top bidder. All the school/office cares about is that everyone is following policy. Google wants to monetize the data and does not care about the users at all.
If privacy is that much of a concern, and if we must surf the block sites, then buy a laptop with a 3g connection, maybe an iPad. Then we can go wherever we want without the big bad teachers and bosses controlling us. That is what the modern kids are doing now.
From the nature write up it appears that this, along with older fossils, seems to push back bipedal Hominini to about 3.5 millions year. Almost 2 meters tall, a pelvis that seems modern, and a long tibia. I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked, the agreement on a bipedal Lucy and relatives seems pretty impressive, and meant that our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur.
What I find most interesting of this survey is the arrogance. The researchers a priori determine what is useful and relevant based on what they think is useful and relevant. I think that facebook is a waste of electrons, but I don't thing it should or is going to go away. I think the only real game and the only real athletes are ftbol players, but I am not going to do a survey and cite that 90% of professional athletes are drug addicted posers. I would say that the least interesting news of the day are sports scores, not because I am not interested in who won, but as technical type I am more interested in process than outcome.
I would say that we have been brainwashed by carefully packaged media mongrels(sic) into beleiving that they only news is what they say is news, and what the common person has to say is meaningless unless filtered through their proprietary channels.
What this means is that there is no expectation of support of iOS 4 on the original iPhone. Likewise, the next OS is not going to support the 3G. That is jus the way the support cycle typically works. It does not mean that original iPhone is no longer useful. I might take this as a impetus to jailbreak mine.
Exactly, MS is going to be competing for those customers who want an enterprise phone or a more open marketplace. That is blackberry and Android. If MS does not provide a superior smart phone experience, stating with the features already expected by users, they will not compete. Most people no longer buy something just because it has the MS logo on it. They will buy crap from Apple and Google instead.
MS seems to understand this when they made the Kin feature phone. Provide functionality to the end user, and have some success. Hell, if I was 20 and trying to get laid and party every night, I might by a Kin. The problem is, as mention, that Windows 7 is still trying to market to the corporate world, which uses blackberry, and there does not seem to be any reason to change.
As far as imposing rules to protect the parents, this is a waste of time. For instance, when a kid has a car, that is a new lability on the family. We do not externalize that liability to other customers, we make the parents pay higher insurance. The same thing for phones. If a parent chooses to give a kid a phone, and I don't think kids can sign contracts, then they need to pay for that service. Everyone offers unlimited texting at very reasonable costs. On verizon unlimited text and voice is $150. If the family can' afford it, then don't have cell phones. What amazes me is that parents do not understand that texting cost money. I don't know anyone under the age of 40 that does not understand this.
The economics is that the service wants to maximize recurring costs and the customer wants to minimize recurring costs, therefore the penalties on lower recurring cost service is maximized. I would like to see some warning that these charges are being incurred.
In your scenario, a family can guarantee a $300 bill by buying the full package for the family, which would run a little above $300 with taxes. It could be cut down to $200 if the kids were not given data packages, and all services were cut.
It is like the new ATT data plan. I like the option of paying only $15 a month for my data, since I use less than the data allowed. I would hate for some emergency to happen and have some law in place, simply to protect families who spoil their kids, to keep me from being able to do what I need to do.
On another note, we also have to realize what happens when disaster strikes. A government vehicle raining debris over Texas will only result in statutory payments. A commercial vehicle exploding over texas, leaving a stretch of debris, will result in many lawsuits that might make the Deep Water Horizon fiasco look tame. It is not going to be a plane crash, where one house is destroyed. We are talking jet fuel raining over large areas and huge chunks of metal. It would be an environmental disaster. With a government vehicle, these costs are not a factor. With a commercial vehicle, we are talking 20 billion.
My concern with what Google, and many other firms, are doing is that they are dedicated huge amounts of resources to collected huge amount of data on people. As profit making entities, these firms must at some point monetize this data to get a return on investment. Therefore, if google is keeping data other than basic acces point information, then they must be planning to do something with it.
It is probably true that a kid who has unlimited access to a computer will have lower scores, in the same way that a kid with unlimited access to a tv has lower scores. This is why so many kids have no computer at school. I can attest that given a computer in a classroom, the average 10-14 year old is much more likely to load up Twilight rather than learn. That is the nature of kids. It then is our duty as adults to move the computer from a toy to a tool. While it is true that some may be too immature to use a computer as a tool, at some point students must be taught. Otherwise they are going to get a job with internet access and spend their entire day downloading porn.
The computer is not the first time we have had this problem. I recall working in offices, and this stil goes on, and the clerical staff spending the whole day on personal phone calls. These people are going to the same one to complain they never get promoted. And the internet is not the issue either. I remember having Apple ][ computers at school. Some of us would program, the other would play games. Even on the DEC machines, many of my classmates would simply spend the time printing curse words on the screen.
So, sure test scores are going to suffer, but skills are important, and just because some students are too immature to gain those skills does not mean everyone has to suffer. This is really the problem with inner city schools. They are set up to teach the 33% of the students that are fuck ups, and therefore the 33% of the students that really want to learn and are motivated by complex tasks are often not taught at all.