So this is a defect of the rating system. Someone writes an post insulting journalist, with little creative or original content, and it gets rated 5. Now, I think that such posts have their place, but I would not like to see an entire newspaper full of writing whining about taxes, reporting on what celebrity is have sex with what other celebrity, who is on drugs, and why the local team sucks. Again, these stories have their place, but they are part of a greater whole.
Newspapers worked and they worked for 100 years. Here how they worked. Some flashy on the front page above the fold. Something of interest to most people below the fold. Many articles from several different points of view meant to interest a few poeple inside. Very fiew people read every article. Very few articles are meant to be of interest to every person.
Therefore whether journalists are elitists is not the issue. Whether school makes you better is not the issue. I know conservatives all agree that a unqualified and unaccredited and dishonest plumber is the person they want to fix their household fixtures, but even that is not the issue here. The issue that newspapers add value by putting together an mix of stories that will be of interest to different parts of the community, not by prioritizing them based on who will scream the loudest for inclusion. This ratings based system in fact has little to do with the writers, and a lot to do with editors.
In any case, many newspapers already have a rating system. They have the most read, most emailed, most blogged, most linked. This does add value beyond that traditionally added by editors. If one does not like the elite, then go and read something like People, whose content is determined by the celebrity people would most like to screw.
This is what I generally do. I have one older laptop setup as a desktop machine. Plug in a monitor, keyboard mouse. Even can put a hard drive on it to work as an archive solution.
OTOH, sometimes a replacement screen is not too expensive, and the instructions to repair almost any machine can be found online. If the machine cost more than $500, it might be worth the effort.
ST:TOS was a classic literary device, a la the Odyssey and Huck fin. While it was the exploration of the unknown, it was also about the freedom to explore the known in a new context. Take the first episode, where McCoy meet an ex girlfriend. There is nothing so unknown about this. It simply takes the fear that someone we once loved have changed so much that we no longer will know them. Such a thing is a great loss. Episode 2, Charlie X, was dealing with the unknown, in the context of the increasing power of the teenager and rise of adolescence as a protected developmental period and youth activism.
In this light, the non-human cultures were mostly one off creations, meant to be nothing more than a necessary plot device. The exception was Vulcan, but even that was hardly more explored than the Klingons.
What is clear is that later on Klingons played a much larger roll. ST:TNG was very Klingon, with Spock being replaced by Worf as the alien. I would argue that the social aspects of the Kligons were explored much more in TNG than vulcan in TOS. The Klingons reigned large until for many years, and most of the time Kirk was indeed fighting with the Klingons.
What we are probably seeing is that the Klingons have been overexposed, and fully explored, so there is little interesting for a new writer to deal with, at least not without getting into trouble with the the Star Trek purists. We are also seeing a post Roddenberry Star Trek, in which the characters are used to sell tickets, but the stories are not really related.
There are other differences in terms of travel, rapid communication, and data processing capability. One can imagine that 100 years ago we would never have had litigation about farmers in the backwaters being sued because they might be saving seeds. Equal I doubt Bayer had the resources to sue everyone into oblivion for extracting their medicine from willow bark.
Then lets take that great homage to the greatest anti-bussiness anti-free market rally that so many took part in a couple weeks ago. Would destroying massive quantities of legitimate product be successful today? No, because we have international treaties coupled with international communications and travel to protect the products of legitimate business people.
I think this book is mostly a testament against the free market. Continues innovation abd competition is just not viable. The consumer is not going to want to pay enough for most products to cover development cost and generate the profits required for a long term venture. In other words, most people want an aristocracy, of which they have some chance of becoming a part, if they are not already, and that will not happen if someone else will take the idea and just make it better. The aristocracy of the american car companies have fallen to the might of innovation.
Of course, if we focused on small business, allowing them to fail when they become irrelevant, then maybe it would work, and patents and copyright could pay some part of that, if they were limited to a generation or two. As it is patent and copyrights just support the aristocracy,
And if you don't want an iphone, then there is no reason to buy one. This is what innovation is all about. Quit the opposite of what many believe, a variety of devices that serves a diversity of consumers is the best. It is only when everyone begins to believe that everyone needs the exact same thing that we run into problems. For instance, the SUV was a good idea until everyone started to believe they were useful.
There is no reason to believe the smart phone is a zero sum game. Apple opened up the smart phone to a whole set of consumers, consumers that had no use for a blackberry. If an when the pre comes out, this will open the market to those who want something useful and simple, which is why Palm was so successful. They made very useful and simple devices, once upon a time.
With all this in mind, I think it is going to be the recurring bills, not the initial cost, that is now the issue. Verizon, t-mobile, and ATT all have high recurring bills, easily $1000 a year. If apple wants to do something new, either do an bigger iPod Touch that can connect to many different networks, thus trumping the Amazon Kindle, or build a phone for the providers that sell service for under $50 a month, total.
Well, I think this book is a bit of inappropriate conservative circle jerk fodder[Check out the part where he complains an international company won't cowtow to US bullying, but will celebrate internationally recognized days like Earth day. It just isn't fair. They took our jobs! I am surprised he did complain about guy fawkes day].
The grid is a dangerous state, and we are becoming very dependent on electricity. Even 20 years ago we did not have such things a large screen tv's, computers, routers, and everything else that requires electricity to run. Phones would mostly work because the phones were simple and had their own power. Now with so many people using VOIP we need electricity. To be sure, the grid is being asked to work with a reliability and a power delivery it was hardly designed to handle.
Houston saw this last fall. Most of the city our, weeks to repair, some of it preventable. A lot of tree damage, citizens knew this was an issue, power company always playing games trying to minimize costs. Citizens are now going ot have to pay $2-5 a month not to improve the grid but to pay for repairs that might have been avoided with a bit of forethought. To put this in persepctive, we are taking about $100 million dollars a year.
Damage from solar flares is going to be another thing that will not be cost effective to prevent, especially if it can bring additional fess in the aftermath. The houston report is an interesting read. It has stuff the utilities have been not happy about. User generated electricity, adaptive infrastructure. As mentioned it is more complex than a resistor. Some user generated power. Some significant investment in advanced infrastructure. Some rethinking of how we use electricity.
I don't like to see these pictures either, and I wish they would go away. But then there are a lot of people that do. Some children appreciate the gore. Some conservative christians enjoy spending their days marching up and down the street displaying the gore to all passerby. It would be nice if the law would allow police to prevent such disgusting behavior, but there is freedom of speech. I may not agree with it, but as an an American I am duty bound to protect it.
The solution may be to prevent such photos from being taken. Alternatively, as a society we might simply shun those who enjoy such activities, asking them kindly to look at their naughty pictures in the privacy of their own home, not on the public street.
It was always my belief that verizon did not want the iPhone because it was not a good fit. Verizon always seemed to me, at least traditionally, to cater to a group of people who did not paying more for cell phone service, and their policies do tend to limit customers, at least in my experiece. It seems that this would be the Apple group, but it really isn't, because Apple does try to reach out to all potential customers, something Verizon has only started recently.
Before the iPhone, and after all the mergers of the mobile companies in the US, ATT and Verizon had about each shares, maybe a bit more than 25%, and t-mobile was just barely in double digits, and the new companies, like boost and cricket were barely on the radar. It is my opinion that these later companies are where the growth is going to be, not Verizon.
The only reason people are talking about Verizon is because people know with Verizon want an iPhone. I don't know why. Everyone says it is just another phone, and they can go get a G1 from t-mobile, or a superior blackberry from Verizon, or a cheap phone from the other dealers, but some people seemed really annoyed they can't get a iphone from verizon.
There is a reason for this. In the US every carrier wants a custom phone, and they want a custom phone with sub custom features. You know how you can update the phone now? It would be more difficult and more confusing if Verizon got it pesky fingers on it.
The other reason is that there would be little benifit to apple. There would be no differentiation, but there would be added expense of producing a phone with either extra circuitry or two phones, again confusing the public.
Here is what te next iPhone should do. A $99 phone sold through boost and cricket. Here is why. Right now it is reported tat 90% of teens with an MP3 player has an iPod. As they grow up, they will continue to buy iPods, and will likely upgrade from the models they use know. They start with a shuffle, continue with a mini, then buy an iPhone. It works for cigarettes, why not music players. It would make sense to apple to make a phone so that the first phone will be an iPhone mini.
What do many parents want? Control over the phone. We have parental controls in Mac OS X, why not the iphone? What do kids want, unlimited text. Both want no contract. Some families have the resources to pay $200 for a phone and already have a family plan, but other do not. Will Verizon allow apple to leverage this base? No. It will only help with the business user than wants a blackberry, so why bother.
If I am a USPS employee who wants to steal video games, I am not going to steal from companies that sells videos. I am going to wait for a gamefly container to come by and steal it. That way I get a $50 game instead of a $5 movie.
Then there is issue of transit time. Does gamefly deliver with a day to most places? Netflix appears to. Less time in the mail means less time for damage.
Then there is the way the number are reported, 590 thousand units out, 510 thousand units in. There is no indication here that the post office has anything to do with this. The fundamental reality is that the business model of renting a $20 movies for $10 a month is different from renting $50 games for $10 a month. As a customer of gamefly it is worthwhile for me to claim I never got the disc, or claim I did send it back, as I get an expensive game that maybe makes the risk worthwhile. This problem is exaggerated when one considers that a movie can be copied. This may not be a 14% loss rate, but it probably accounts for some of the shrinkage.
In fact we don't really know anything because the article did not list certain critical facts. Like the precent of the subscribers who cancel within a month or so. At lest some of these, we assume, claim that they never received a disc. We also don't know what percentage of the netfix and blockbuster DVDs are damaged in transit, and any reporting of such numbers must be a function of the number of days in transit. Also, how many of these were damaged by the xbox?
Even if we assume that USPS is solely responsible for losing 14% of the discs, one has to assume that there is some insurance involved. Claims are filed, and if the dics are insured at retail price, then gamefly might actually come out ahead as the some fo the cost has likely already been covered i rentals. As far as preferential treatment, I have been in these situations. When the volume is high it is often worth to invest in certain processes to that will reduce cost overall. For a half million pieces of mail a month, there may be no ROI for this, and as a taxpayer I don't want to subsidize it. I suspect that netflix might be an order of magnitude above this, and then it might be worthwhile to implement special considerations.
For cross platform I run XPDF. It does most of what I do. On the mac, of course, there is Preview. One of the reason to have a mac. Capture parts of the PDF and save to many formats with two key strokes. Reorder and combine. Scale graphical stuff. For windows I do use Adobe, because, why not. The other stuff is not that much better. Of course I have to download a file converter if I want to print to PDF from most windows apps. That kind of sucks.
And this is at the crux of your cross platfomr question. There is no incentive for MS to promote such a solution. MS always wanted MS Office to the cross platform solution. The only reason it isn't is because the format has not been stable over time, so there is no way to know a person receiving a document can actually read it. MS has never given up on the hope it would be winner in this battle, even though anyone who does not run MS knows it is a joke.
about 10 years ago it because apparent that the good enough PC was the future. Hot swappable parts, up to entire CPUS and redundant data storage meant the for many applications running 20 computer, with five down at any time, became an effective solution.
I don't know how less good enough computers are going to become over the next ten years. It might be a an issue of power, but I think what happened is that we realized that computers became over powered for the average user. This is not an issue of good enough, but of not expending resources on things that pretty much have no value.
First, batteries energy diminishes, blah, blah, blah.
This is exactly why one wants a model in which batteries are replaced. This way the battery a user gets can always be guaranteed to have a minimum energy in it. If the battery does not charge, it gets sent back to be refurbished. It does not end up in a trash can, or lying out by the side of the road.
One may ask how can we guarantee the quality. Well the same way we do now. By setting policies and regulations, and by the market. I am sure that if you get water in your gas tank you never go back to that station again. Same thing.
You know we did not always have these fancy gas stations, and we did not always have to pump gas ourselves. There was a time, I hear, when you took the gas can to the store. This is the model we will have. Gas stations, grocery stores, quickie marts, will all be have the option to sell replaceable batteries. Consumers will have the option to buy an off brand if they wish, and take that risk. This is the free market we all talked about for the past ten years but never implemented, preferring to get gouged by the monopolistic oil companies who through a noose around the US with their cartel.
Now a few regulations can get the market off to a start. A very few standard sizes. A standard voltage that will hook into a standard voltage conditioner to deliver whatever the car needs. Regulation for standards and safety in the sales of the battery, as well as training for those who put the batteries in.
Have you heard about the recession where so many have lost their jobs. Just imagine if Detroit had began to build these cars 8 years ago rather than collude with entrenched energy interests. Maybe they would have a viable business model rather than needing to steal billions from the taxpayer. Maybe we would have a lot more jobs i terms of full service battery specialists. It would have been expensive, but a lot cheaper than the fake economic growth that has cost us maybe 2 trillion so far. Sure it easier to run a ponzai scheme, and stay in our safe palce, but sometimes innovation is necessary.
In the case of Turnitin, the copyright on the authors work has been potentially violated. The student is turning the work of another claiming that it is his or her own. Turnitin, therefore, is simply protecting the copyright. If the student did gain permission, and can prove this fact, then this is a false positive. I would think that the importance given to copyright that authors would welcome this service, which is almost nothing like google, although one day it could be.
Dependence on shoes are overused, but in a wold where every advantage translates into real money, shoes are important. The right shoes can provide some amplification of effort, and allow more stress, and harder hits.
OTOH, this reminds me of a local story about the other kind of football team. These kids trained without any kind of equipment, and no shoes. When it came time for their first game, they were playing a team whose parents could afford all the luxuries of soccer. It did not help. The team that focused on fundamentals won this game and consistently did better.
It is like an IDE. For complex projects it a useful thing. But if one starts learning on one, it becomes a crutch that limits the developer.
For businesses, it may or may not be $200. The bulk license price may be less, or the price for a complete version, with all component available as free alternatives, could be $600. That is quit a difference.
Then there is employee support. In either case you must pay for support. Sure if you buy the retail package support is free for 90 days, not including 'advance support, but after that it will cost $49. In any case, I did not find many businesses that tolerated telephone support. Most wanted on site support, so they would hire a MCSE. In that case, why pay MS at all. Download the free apps and hire a competent person who understands the basics, not just the MS commands.
In fact, MS is a better deal for the home because may people get free support through the firms that employ them. Highly inefficient because the MCSE is not being paid to support the employees home computer, but the firms computers.
Schools do have control, but the amount of control is tempered by the rights of students and parents, especially in a public school. For instance, a PTA in a small town might say that all information be filtered through the local church website(and I know towns where 90% of the people in control go a single church). This might be construed as a violation of the civil rights. Community standards simply do not apply to this extent. To use you Quaker analogy, no matter how much the PTO believes that violence is wrong, federal law requires the Military recruiters are allowed the same access as other recruiters. We want to shield, but this is why home school and private school exists, to account for the fear that other views will damage a child. A parent has that right.
In this case, the LGBT issue is important. Let's say that the school is very conservative, and the child might have two mommies, so to speak. The conservative community might tell the child that he or she is a bad person, the mommy is going to hell(I certainly had kids and adult tell me this when I was a kid), and that he or she had to convert to save themselves for enteral damnation. Now, a well adjusted educated kid would know that the bible says that only god can judge, that god is the ultimate good, and that pharasis are supposed to be pitied and ignored. But the child has no access to such information, and only hears the side that preaches faith through fear, what damage will be done?
Then there is the case of well meaning people making questionable position. This is a site promoted to the k-12 geek crowd by officials who should now better. I have no problem promoted legal speed to teenagers, but promoting such products to young children. I don't know, what is next, college recruitment sponsored by beer companies?
In a school there are constitutional issues to think about. Then there are legal matters. Then there are statutory rules and regulations. There there is just common sense. Finally, there is a desire to provide a legitimate education. I know this last one gets lost on most people. If the kid knows how to read and write and do maths that is all that matters. That they leave as ignorant as the enter, to some people, is a good thing.
A single data point is a guess. What science looks for is trends and patterns. A coin can land head up 5 times in a row. Three percent of the time this is expected to happen. This does not mean that I am going to bet food money that is will land heads up all the time.
What the uneducated conservative population is looking for are selected data points that proves what they want to believe. This allows them to make money doing what they always have done, and effectively eliminates any pressure to be truly innovative. We see this with record labels who still insist on basing an industry on plastic discs, a energy industry who still insists on basing an industry on non renewable resources, and an auto industry who still insists a product that has not fundamentally changed in 100 years still has a high value. Does a large percentage of the population of us typewriters, much less a manual typewriter?
So what does this mean. It means that, as always, countries that sit back and do nothing will fail. Countries that push for innovation will suceed. Look at Spain. Big fucking superpower until the US kicked it;s ass. Now #8. Why? Because it was more interested in money than wealth. That means that it was more interested in making money than innovation. U.S. last ten years. Same thing. Made money, but no wealth. Now we are down to one barely viable car manufacturer. Why? Because Ford was the only firm that felt the need to innovate. Everyone else was just making cash, most of it artificial.
We do not know what will come, but we know it will provide an excuse for innovation, and increases in efficiency, and better living. It will not be easy. We all want to save money but we do not even want to make nominal sacrifices. But we make sacrifices. In the US you can barely get a soft drink with real sugar. You can only get the mutilated milk, and real yogurt is very costly Try to get real bread, it costs over $5, so most of us settle for fake bread. This all in efficiency. I don't think we will miss our incandescent lights of cars the size of our living room, not in the long run. And if we can save out costal area, where, by the way, much of our chemicals and oil is refined, that would be a good thing too.
This is not so funny. This is likely the next step in exploration. It does not necessarily mean the human will stay on earth.
For instance, if we could build a flying structure that take the pressures in Saturn or Jupiter, we would first likely send these as we do know, as pretty autonomous robots. However, at some point we will likely send people to orbit, for more immediate control, even if they people never go into the planet.
Likewise, it is about time we send more advanced instruments into interstellar space, particularly to categorize the heliopause and the interaction with interstellar space. Several of these, maneuverable without the aid of solar cells, is an issue of fuel, but could also be latency issues. People stationed at the outer planets could be helpful.
I see this article mostly as an argument over funding. Human space flight is costly, and those funds could be used elsewhere. However, human space flight has it place, as a robot cannot internalize the full level of details and make the snap decisions well trained humans can. We are doing the right thing. Human exploration where it practical, and robot exploration where is not. It is not true that the space program, or any country, is stagnant. There are robots exploring the sun, and there are four craft that will hopefully survive to cross into interstellar space. This is science. All together. It is a naive statement to say that robots are the best choice.
This is what I was thinking. Mac OS has this and other parental guidance functionality built into the OS. One requirement, though, is that the child uses Safari. It is anticompetitive, sure, but it is the only way to minimize the user getting around the security.
MS Live and the family filter can only be seen as a value added product. MS spent the money to develop it so parents and schools would have a reason to continue to use MS products. The problem it that though many still use legacy MS products, fewer are using current products.
There is always a risk with using software for any purpose, be in as an end user, developer, or whatever. It is up to the user and the administrators to insure compliance. The only time an issue will every come up, be it in open, closed, or revolving software will be when the assumption is made that the software, code, ideas can be used for free, with no real or opportunity costs. Honestly, this assumption is made quite often, and every once in a while someone is caught. Fines are put into place to deter others from doing the same.
So nothing really changes. If one is a legitimate business, one still needs to insure that all supplies are kosher. Assuming that somehow the laws of physics have changed just because are going on the internet and getting stuff for free has gotten many a bussiness in trouble long before this ruling.
This is the key. Power management must be automated feature. All electronics should be energy star, and all energy star computers should power to a few watts of use automatically within some short time of inactivity. This requires an investment in the hardware and software. Some of my machines behave fine, others don't. I suspect on some of them it is a virus or something. Screen saves, a relic of the dark ages, should be banned. If a computer is not being used, the screen should be dark, with backlight off. This is another problem, many of my monitors appear to have the backlight on even when the software has told it turn off.
Asking businesses to turn of computer are often not cost efficient. Another post states that one company could save 75K. If the company had 400 employees, that may have not been even a 1% savings on profits. It might have been less that five minutes it would take to reload the computer. Much more than that might be saved by cutting out coffee.
I am not saying that saving energy is not worthwhile, just that people are approaching it from the the wrong end. Changing human habits are difficult. Just look at how many people still think screen savers are cool and useful, and how much energy is wasted. If a company can save $50 per machine per year, then maybe they need to spend an extra $100 on machines that can realize those saving automatically. But habits die hard. How many people still have a zealotry towards incandenscent light bulbs.
While just because something is complex does not make it not feasible, it seems to me that the key is that such taxes could form an unfair barrier to interstate trade. Let's say that Colorado set up a particularly weird taxes. An out of state supplier would have to think if colorado would generate enough income to justify the software and personal needed to support such a tax structure. Many would not, so many would choose not to do business in the state, thus create an effective protectionist vehicle.
The alternative is for the federal government to set up a uniform framework for sales taxes, allowing the state only to set percentages. I think most people wold be against this expansion of governmental influence in terms of taxes, given the riots yesterday against the payment of taxes for such essentials such as medical care for our soldiers, help for homeless children, and the like. Such a framework would also likely lead to national sales tax, which, in spite of what the naive people assert, would be likely be passed in addition to the federal income tax.
In the end, the solution will likely be more aggressive of enforcement and stabilization of income taxes. The IRS is going after Americans who use United States services, but pretend to be citizens of other countries. This would mean state taxes, which I think would benefit the country, if sales taxes were significantly reduced. For instance, rush limbaugh is running away from his patriotic duties to live in texas. If these are the type of people no-income-tax-states attract, it is a justification for a state income tax. Texas needs innovate, intelligent people. In Austin alone, we have our fill of drug infested entertainers.
Intel, for a long time, was a dog when it came to the amount of work each cycle could do. In assembly you had to fetch from memory, operate, write to memory. The number of cycles to do this was greater than on say, a 68K. For a while this advantage was held by the PPC. This was the battle between CISC and RISC. Most of the claim made of Apple were made to correct claims made by Intel, that somehow clock speed was a reliable metric, and claims made by other white box manufacturers, that clock speed, memory, and number of ports defined the speed of the computer. Not only does the hardware architecture make a huge difference, but do does the OS.
To put this in perspective, I did significant work on Apples and PCs. It was almost 1990 before the PC was up to the performance level of the Mac in Excel and the like. Even to the mid 90's I still used the Mac for visualization. I believe this was due not only to simple things, like the lack of graphics chip, but other issue like the fucked up memory model and, of course, the inefficient chip.
Intel, leaving the x86 behind, now has fixed the problem by creating hybrid chips. This also allowed them to compete with AMD. So the snail ad is not longer valid. Neither is the caveman ad when MS put out Windows NT. NT eventually became pretty good and XP was nice.
For the most part the claims still make some sense. I was able to play movies on my mac long before it was simple to do so on the PC. Importing DV movies, which require firewire, was easy to do on all machines post 2002. Editing movies became easy about three years ago.
Obviously if one never need the high power killer applications, the the PC makes a lot of sense, and paying for power you don't need makes no sense. Alternatively, if you have the skill, you can build a powerful machine and install a *nix and get a workhorse for very cheap, not counting you time. But the number of people who can do this are small.
This is what fun about some reports on science. Given a set of data, one can always rank the data a state a conclusion even if there is no support for the data. This reminds of ads for safe cigarettes in which one cigarette had the least of certain substances.
Then we get to that ambiguous science, social science, where measurements are never what they seen. In this case there were no measurements, merely self reported data. This is not like an obesity survey in which on can measure a weight, a height, a gender, etc, and use a well know, if controversial, metric to determine a rate of obesity. No, in this case people self reported their state of happiness.
Imagine being asked "do you feel sad" and you live in Hawaii. Is the peer pressure to say yes or no? If you live in a state that is portrayed negatively in the media, and is always compared negatively with such wonderful places such as Hawaii, is there any incentive to say no. You live in a depressing place, you are told, so you have a right to be depressed.
This of course is why social science is called fake. I am sure the actual report has all the proper caveats, and the report is useful in terms of it indicates where the US might put services to help depressed people, but taking it too seriously, in my mind, would be a mistake. OTOH, I could see using it start a PSA campaign in Hawaii to help people who are depressed, but don't feel empowered to get help.
Slashdot Mirror
Newspapers worked and they worked for 100 years. Here how they worked. Some flashy on the front page above the fold. Something of interest to most people below the fold. Many articles from several different points of view meant to interest a few poeple inside. Very fiew people read every article. Very few articles are meant to be of interest to every person.
Therefore whether journalists are elitists is not the issue. Whether school makes you better is not the issue. I know conservatives all agree that a unqualified and unaccredited and dishonest plumber is the person they want to fix their household fixtures, but even that is not the issue here. The issue that newspapers add value by putting together an mix of stories that will be of interest to different parts of the community, not by prioritizing them based on who will scream the loudest for inclusion. This ratings based system in fact has little to do with the writers, and a lot to do with editors.
In any case, many newspapers already have a rating system. They have the most read, most emailed, most blogged, most linked. This does add value beyond that traditionally added by editors. If one does not like the elite, then go and read something like People, whose content is determined by the celebrity people would most like to screw.
OTOH, sometimes a replacement screen is not too expensive, and the instructions to repair almost any machine can be found online. If the machine cost more than $500, it might be worth the effort.
In this light, the non-human cultures were mostly one off creations, meant to be nothing more than a necessary plot device. The exception was Vulcan, but even that was hardly more explored than the Klingons.
What is clear is that later on Klingons played a much larger roll. ST:TNG was very Klingon, with Spock being replaced by Worf as the alien. I would argue that the social aspects of the Kligons were explored much more in TNG than vulcan in TOS. The Klingons reigned large until for many years, and most of the time Kirk was indeed fighting with the Klingons.
What we are probably seeing is that the Klingons have been overexposed, and fully explored, so there is little interesting for a new writer to deal with, at least not without getting into trouble with the the Star Trek purists. We are also seeing a post Roddenberry Star Trek, in which the characters are used to sell tickets, but the stories are not really related.
Then lets take that great homage to the greatest anti-bussiness anti-free market rally that so many took part in a couple weeks ago. Would destroying massive quantities of legitimate product be successful today? No, because we have international treaties coupled with international communications and travel to protect the products of legitimate business people.
I think this book is mostly a testament against the free market. Continues innovation abd competition is just not viable. The consumer is not going to want to pay enough for most products to cover development cost and generate the profits required for a long term venture. In other words, most people want an aristocracy, of which they have some chance of becoming a part, if they are not already, and that will not happen if someone else will take the idea and just make it better. The aristocracy of the american car companies have fallen to the might of innovation.
Of course, if we focused on small business, allowing them to fail when they become irrelevant, then maybe it would work, and patents and copyright could pay some part of that, if they were limited to a generation or two. As it is patent and copyrights just support the aristocracy,
There is no reason to believe the smart phone is a zero sum game. Apple opened up the smart phone to a whole set of consumers, consumers that had no use for a blackberry. If an when the pre comes out, this will open the market to those who want something useful and simple, which is why Palm was so successful. They made very useful and simple devices, once upon a time.
With all this in mind, I think it is going to be the recurring bills, not the initial cost, that is now the issue. Verizon, t-mobile, and ATT all have high recurring bills, easily $1000 a year. If apple wants to do something new, either do an bigger iPod Touch that can connect to many different networks, thus trumping the Amazon Kindle, or build a phone for the providers that sell service for under $50 a month, total.
OTOH, it is still there.
Houston saw this last fall. Most of the city our, weeks to repair, some of it preventable. A lot of tree damage, citizens knew this was an issue, power company always playing games trying to minimize costs. Citizens are now going ot have to pay $2-5 a month not to improve the grid but to pay for repairs that might have been avoided with a bit of forethought. To put this in persepctive, we are taking about $100 million dollars a year.
Damage from solar flares is going to be another thing that will not be cost effective to prevent, especially if it can bring additional fess in the aftermath. The houston report is an interesting read. It has stuff the utilities have been not happy about. User generated electricity, adaptive infrastructure. As mentioned it is more complex than a resistor. Some user generated power. Some significant investment in advanced infrastructure. Some rethinking of how we use electricity.
The solution may be to prevent such photos from being taken. Alternatively, as a society we might simply shun those who enjoy such activities, asking them kindly to look at their naughty pictures in the privacy of their own home, not on the public street.
Before the iPhone, and after all the mergers of the mobile companies in the US, ATT and Verizon had about each shares, maybe a bit more than 25%, and t-mobile was just barely in double digits, and the new companies, like boost and cricket were barely on the radar. It is my opinion that these later companies are where the growth is going to be, not Verizon.
The only reason people are talking about Verizon is because people know with Verizon want an iPhone. I don't know why. Everyone says it is just another phone, and they can go get a G1 from t-mobile, or a superior blackberry from Verizon, or a cheap phone from the other dealers, but some people seemed really annoyed they can't get a iphone from verizon.
There is a reason for this. In the US every carrier wants a custom phone, and they want a custom phone with sub custom features. You know how you can update the phone now? It would be more difficult and more confusing if Verizon got it pesky fingers on it.
The other reason is that there would be little benifit to apple. There would be no differentiation, but there would be added expense of producing a phone with either extra circuitry or two phones, again confusing the public.
Here is what te next iPhone should do. A $99 phone sold through boost and cricket. Here is why. Right now it is reported tat 90% of teens with an MP3 player has an iPod. As they grow up, they will continue to buy iPods, and will likely upgrade from the models they use know. They start with a shuffle, continue with a mini, then buy an iPhone. It works for cigarettes, why not music players. It would make sense to apple to make a phone so that the first phone will be an iPhone mini.
What do many parents want? Control over the phone. We have parental controls in Mac OS X, why not the iphone? What do kids want, unlimited text. Both want no contract. Some families have the resources to pay $200 for a phone and already have a family plan, but other do not. Will Verizon allow apple to leverage this base? No. It will only help with the business user than wants a blackberry, so why bother.
Then there is issue of transit time. Does gamefly deliver with a day to most places? Netflix appears to. Less time in the mail means less time for damage.
Then there is the way the number are reported, 590 thousand units out, 510 thousand units in. There is no indication here that the post office has anything to do with this. The fundamental reality is that the business model of renting a $20 movies for $10 a month is different from renting $50 games for $10 a month. As a customer of gamefly it is worthwhile for me to claim I never got the disc, or claim I did send it back, as I get an expensive game that maybe makes the risk worthwhile. This problem is exaggerated when one considers that a movie can be copied. This may not be a 14% loss rate, but it probably accounts for some of the shrinkage.
In fact we don't really know anything because the article did not list certain critical facts. Like the precent of the subscribers who cancel within a month or so. At lest some of these, we assume, claim that they never received a disc. We also don't know what percentage of the netfix and blockbuster DVDs are damaged in transit, and any reporting of such numbers must be a function of the number of days in transit. Also, how many of these were damaged by the xbox?
Even if we assume that USPS is solely responsible for losing 14% of the discs, one has to assume that there is some insurance involved. Claims are filed, and if the dics are insured at retail price, then gamefly might actually come out ahead as the some fo the cost has likely already been covered i rentals. As far as preferential treatment, I have been in these situations. When the volume is high it is often worth to invest in certain processes to that will reduce cost overall. For a half million pieces of mail a month, there may be no ROI for this, and as a taxpayer I don't want to subsidize it. I suspect that netflix might be an order of magnitude above this, and then it might be worthwhile to implement special considerations.
And this is at the crux of your cross platfomr question. There is no incentive for MS to promote such a solution. MS always wanted MS Office to the cross platform solution. The only reason it isn't is because the format has not been stable over time, so there is no way to know a person receiving a document can actually read it. MS has never given up on the hope it would be winner in this battle, even though anyone who does not run MS knows it is a joke.
I don't know how less good enough computers are going to become over the next ten years. It might be a an issue of power, but I think what happened is that we realized that computers became over powered for the average user. This is not an issue of good enough, but of not expending resources on things that pretty much have no value.
This is exactly why one wants a model in which batteries are replaced. This way the battery a user gets can always be guaranteed to have a minimum energy in it. If the battery does not charge, it gets sent back to be refurbished. It does not end up in a trash can, or lying out by the side of the road.
One may ask how can we guarantee the quality. Well the same way we do now. By setting policies and regulations, and by the market. I am sure that if you get water in your gas tank you never go back to that station again. Same thing.
You know we did not always have these fancy gas stations, and we did not always have to pump gas ourselves. There was a time, I hear, when you took the gas can to the store. This is the model we will have. Gas stations, grocery stores, quickie marts, will all be have the option to sell replaceable batteries. Consumers will have the option to buy an off brand if they wish, and take that risk. This is the free market we all talked about for the past ten years but never implemented, preferring to get gouged by the monopolistic oil companies who through a noose around the US with their cartel.
Now a few regulations can get the market off to a start. A very few standard sizes. A standard voltage that will hook into a standard voltage conditioner to deliver whatever the car needs. Regulation for standards and safety in the sales of the battery, as well as training for those who put the batteries in.
Have you heard about the recession where so many have lost their jobs. Just imagine if Detroit had began to build these cars 8 years ago rather than collude with entrenched energy interests. Maybe they would have a viable business model rather than needing to steal billions from the taxpayer. Maybe we would have a lot more jobs i terms of full service battery specialists. It would have been expensive, but a lot cheaper than the fake economic growth that has cost us maybe 2 trillion so far. Sure it easier to run a ponzai scheme, and stay in our safe palce, but sometimes innovation is necessary.
In the case of Turnitin, the copyright on the authors work has been potentially violated. The student is turning the work of another claiming that it is his or her own. Turnitin, therefore, is simply protecting the copyright. If the student did gain permission, and can prove this fact, then this is a false positive. I would think that the importance given to copyright that authors would welcome this service, which is almost nothing like google, although one day it could be.
OTOH, this reminds me of a local story about the other kind of football team. These kids trained without any kind of equipment, and no shoes. When it came time for their first game, they were playing a team whose parents could afford all the luxuries of soccer. It did not help. The team that focused on fundamentals won this game and consistently did better.
It is like an IDE. For complex projects it a useful thing. But if one starts learning on one, it becomes a crutch that limits the developer.
Then there is employee support. In either case you must pay for support. Sure if you buy the retail package support is free for 90 days, not including 'advance support, but after that it will cost $49. In any case, I did not find many businesses that tolerated telephone support. Most wanted on site support, so they would hire a MCSE. In that case, why pay MS at all. Download the free apps and hire a competent person who understands the basics, not just the MS commands.
In fact, MS is a better deal for the home because may people get free support through the firms that employ them. Highly inefficient because the MCSE is not being paid to support the employees home computer, but the firms computers.
In this case, the LGBT issue is important. Let's say that the school is very conservative, and the child might have two mommies, so to speak. The conservative community might tell the child that he or she is a bad person, the mommy is going to hell(I certainly had kids and adult tell me this when I was a kid), and that he or she had to convert to save themselves for enteral damnation. Now, a well adjusted educated kid would know that the bible says that only god can judge, that god is the ultimate good, and that pharasis are supposed to be pitied and ignored. But the child has no access to such information, and only hears the side that preaches faith through fear, what damage will be done?
Then there is the case of well meaning people making questionable position. This is a site promoted to the k-12 geek crowd by officials who should now better. I have no problem promoted legal speed to teenagers, but promoting such products to young children. I don't know, what is next, college recruitment sponsored by beer companies?
In a school there are constitutional issues to think about. Then there are legal matters. Then there are statutory rules and regulations. There there is just common sense. Finally, there is a desire to provide a legitimate education. I know this last one gets lost on most people. If the kid knows how to read and write and do maths that is all that matters. That they leave as ignorant as the enter, to some people, is a good thing.
What the uneducated conservative population is looking for are selected data points that proves what they want to believe. This allows them to make money doing what they always have done, and effectively eliminates any pressure to be truly innovative. We see this with record labels who still insist on basing an industry on plastic discs, a energy industry who still insists on basing an industry on non renewable resources, and an auto industry who still insists a product that has not fundamentally changed in 100 years still has a high value. Does a large percentage of the population of us typewriters, much less a manual typewriter?
So what does this mean. It means that, as always, countries that sit back and do nothing will fail. Countries that push for innovation will suceed. Look at Spain. Big fucking superpower until the US kicked it;s ass. Now #8. Why? Because it was more interested in money than wealth. That means that it was more interested in making money than innovation. U.S. last ten years. Same thing. Made money, but no wealth. Now we are down to one barely viable car manufacturer. Why? Because Ford was the only firm that felt the need to innovate. Everyone else was just making cash, most of it artificial.
We do not know what will come, but we know it will provide an excuse for innovation, and increases in efficiency, and better living. It will not be easy. We all want to save money but we do not even want to make nominal sacrifices. But we make sacrifices. In the US you can barely get a soft drink with real sugar. You can only get the mutilated milk, and real yogurt is very costly Try to get real bread, it costs over $5, so most of us settle for fake bread. This all in efficiency. I don't think we will miss our incandescent lights of cars the size of our living room, not in the long run. And if we can save out costal area, where, by the way, much of our chemicals and oil is refined, that would be a good thing too.
For instance, if we could build a flying structure that take the pressures in Saturn or Jupiter, we would first likely send these as we do know, as pretty autonomous robots. However, at some point we will likely send people to orbit, for more immediate control, even if they people never go into the planet.
Likewise, it is about time we send more advanced instruments into interstellar space, particularly to categorize the heliopause and the interaction with interstellar space. Several of these, maneuverable without the aid of solar cells, is an issue of fuel, but could also be latency issues. People stationed at the outer planets could be helpful.
I see this article mostly as an argument over funding. Human space flight is costly, and those funds could be used elsewhere. However, human space flight has it place, as a robot cannot internalize the full level of details and make the snap decisions well trained humans can. We are doing the right thing. Human exploration where it practical, and robot exploration where is not. It is not true that the space program, or any country, is stagnant. There are robots exploring the sun, and there are four craft that will hopefully survive to cross into interstellar space. This is science. All together. It is a naive statement to say that robots are the best choice.
MS Live and the family filter can only be seen as a value added product. MS spent the money to develop it so parents and schools would have a reason to continue to use MS products. The problem it that though many still use legacy MS products, fewer are using current products.
There is always a risk with using software for any purpose, be in as an end user, developer, or whatever. It is up to the user and the administrators to insure compliance. The only time an issue will every come up, be it in open, closed, or revolving software will be when the assumption is made that the software, code, ideas can be used for free, with no real or opportunity costs. Honestly, this assumption is made quite often, and every once in a while someone is caught. Fines are put into place to deter others from doing the same.
So nothing really changes. If one is a legitimate business, one still needs to insure that all supplies are kosher. Assuming that somehow the laws of physics have changed just because are going on the internet and getting stuff for free has gotten many a bussiness in trouble long before this ruling.
Asking businesses to turn of computer are often not cost efficient. Another post states that one company could save 75K. If the company had 400 employees, that may have not been even a 1% savings on profits. It might have been less that five minutes it would take to reload the computer. Much more than that might be saved by cutting out coffee.
I am not saying that saving energy is not worthwhile, just that people are approaching it from the the wrong end. Changing human habits are difficult. Just look at how many people still think screen savers are cool and useful, and how much energy is wasted. If a company can save $50 per machine per year, then maybe they need to spend an extra $100 on machines that can realize those saving automatically. But habits die hard. How many people still have a zealotry towards incandenscent light bulbs.
The alternative is for the federal government to set up a uniform framework for sales taxes, allowing the state only to set percentages. I think most people wold be against this expansion of governmental influence in terms of taxes, given the riots yesterday against the payment of taxes for such essentials such as medical care for our soldiers, help for homeless children, and the like. Such a framework would also likely lead to national sales tax, which, in spite of what the naive people assert, would be likely be passed in addition to the federal income tax.
In the end, the solution will likely be more aggressive of enforcement and stabilization of income taxes. The IRS is going after Americans who use United States services, but pretend to be citizens of other countries. This would mean state taxes, which I think would benefit the country, if sales taxes were significantly reduced. For instance, rush limbaugh is running away from his patriotic duties to live in texas. If these are the type of people no-income-tax-states attract, it is a justification for a state income tax. Texas needs innovate, intelligent people. In Austin alone, we have our fill of drug infested entertainers.
To put this in perspective, I did significant work on Apples and PCs. It was almost 1990 before the PC was up to the performance level of the Mac in Excel and the like. Even to the mid 90's I still used the Mac for visualization. I believe this was due not only to simple things, like the lack of graphics chip, but other issue like the fucked up memory model and, of course, the inefficient chip.
Intel, leaving the x86 behind, now has fixed the problem by creating hybrid chips. This also allowed them to compete with AMD. So the snail ad is not longer valid. Neither is the caveman ad when MS put out Windows NT. NT eventually became pretty good and XP was nice.
For the most part the claims still make some sense. I was able to play movies on my mac long before it was simple to do so on the PC. Importing DV movies, which require firewire, was easy to do on all machines post 2002. Editing movies became easy about three years ago.
Obviously if one never need the high power killer applications, the the PC makes a lot of sense, and paying for power you don't need makes no sense. Alternatively, if you have the skill, you can build a powerful machine and install a *nix and get a workhorse for very cheap, not counting you time. But the number of people who can do this are small.
Then we get to that ambiguous science, social science, where measurements are never what they seen. In this case there were no measurements, merely self reported data. This is not like an obesity survey in which on can measure a weight, a height, a gender, etc, and use a well know, if controversial, metric to determine a rate of obesity. No, in this case people self reported their state of happiness.
WebMD> which has a report with a list of states clearly indicates the problem with this strategy. The listed quote Participants were asked by phone how many of the previous 30 days their mental health -- including stress, depression, and emotional problems -- was "not good.", clearly indicates the issue.
Imagine being asked "do you feel sad" and you live in Hawaii. Is the peer pressure to say yes or no? If you live in a state that is portrayed negatively in the media, and is always compared negatively with such wonderful places such as Hawaii, is there any incentive to say no. You live in a depressing place, you are told, so you have a right to be depressed.
This of course is why social science is called fake. I am sure the actual report has all the proper caveats, and the report is useful in terms of it indicates where the US might put services to help depressed people, but taking it too seriously, in my mind, would be a mistake. OTOH, I could see using it start a PSA campaign in Hawaii to help people who are depressed, but don't feel empowered to get help.