On most things we can say that all the politicians are corrupt. But Alaskas corruption is unique. The highest per captia government dole of any state. Some of this is justifiable, oil, defense, the location, but the bridges clearly show a lack of any accountability. And then the plan to open the wildlife reserve to drilling. Simply a thinly veiled plan to excise even more money from the legitimate a hardworking taxpayer. Such a plan would need massive infrastructure, would only be open a few months a year, and would not have any effect on the world oil market, as it's output would likely be no more than a rounding error. But it would continue the free money to the citizens of the state.
Certainly I have no problem with oil wealth, and have no problem taking advantage of it, but to be wealthy and still be on the government dole, well that is simply too much. Take a look at the other oil states. They have about 1/5 of the per capita budget.
Are we reaching the point on laptop prices where cheaper laptops are not feasible simply due to administrative costs? Consider these examples. Apple puts together an iPhone, and it likely costs $150 to build. They didn't use the cheapest parts but you know they did get a good price. This laptops looks like an emate, and an in inflation adjusted numbers costs only a little less. MS, who does not even need to make money, cannot put together a media player for less than $200. Each component may be cheap, but there is cost in ordering, receiving, qualifying, assembling, and verifying. Each component that is added, each new solder joint, increases the costs nonlinearly. How much did Apple save by not making the battery removable? If one has a device with 10 components, is it possible to engineer, assemble and ship the device for less $200 even if the components are next to nothing?
The point we are at right now is that there has been little advance in merging components. Computers got cheap, in part, to VLSI. Now, instead of creating a single chip laptop, we have dual cores. To get to the holy grail of the computer so cheap that we buy it for no reason, the device count has to go way down. A couple chips, a couple ports, and a screen. It may even have to have a fake keyboard, just like the cheap computers of the 80's, which, btw, were also just a few chips and few ports.
The prematureness of this lawsuit is a testament to popularity of the device. Never again should any analyst claim that the iPhone has not generated revenue beyond any pervious product. For how many other first generation products have produced enough revenue to get the lawyers attention within the first month of sales. If we follow Steve Dallas rules of lawsuits, iPhone is the most successful product ever.
For a class action lawsuit to be profitable, one must have enough units sold, and enough potential damage, to generate a profit for the lawyer. Look at it this way. No one sued over Vioxx until thousands of people were dead.
So now we have lawyer, good or bad, realizing that even just $5 for each unit sold would be some real money. The design in not going to change. The consumer is likely to get nothing more than a minor discount on Applecare. And the $29 loaner is a crock anyway. If they do the same thing they do with an iPod, they probabaly will just swap out phones in the store.
But at $300K units sold. That would be well over a million for a the firm
There must be a need and a demand. There are plenty of APIs out there that are not ported to every OS. There are open source projects that go no where, even though one would think there is a need.
MS Windows is meant to work with anything x86 compatible, so it is easy to emulate it as the basic have to be simple. One can either emulate the chipset, which is what VPC did, or one can emulate the API, which is what codeweavers does. *nux is even better, as it is meant to run on anything that meets some basic requirements, and most computers in the past 10 years do.
But Mac OS is meant to run on a very specific hardware base, and though that base has been generalized, it is still of limited support. One complains that MS Vista does not support all the devices. I suspect it supports more than Apple. It has to as MS products are supposed to run on any piece of junk that you throw at it. It is the cheap alternative. Why would you want to emulate something that is requires tighter specs than one has right now. Even if it someone did it, it would be customer service nightmare.
But it depends on what one wants to emulate. One could emulate the GUI look and feel with a theme type thing on any OS. One could write a finder application, or even interface spotlight in the Linux file index. One could create a whole new compatability layer between the open source darwin and the user, which would be the most useful solution. But why, when one can shell a $1200 for a mac that can is tighter spec than on finds on average, and can now run almost anything you throw at it?
It is the lack of symmetry that bothers me. For instance, a while back a bad check was improperly credited to my bank account. As a result, i bounced many checks and had no money. If I had been worse off, i could have been in real trouble. Fortunately I was not living paycheck to paycheck, so I had time to get the matter cleared up. Clearing up this matter required a trip to the bank and signing many papers. Note that the bank had a copy of the check, and the account number the check was deposited to was not my own, so they could have fixed the error themselves, if they pleased.
So here is the issue. They can bankrupt me with no significant repercussion, and don't even have to make an effort to correct the mistake unless I beg them to do so, but I have to immediately report any mistakes they make. Now, if I could claim treble damages for any mistake the bank made, and double digit damage for any mistake that was not fixed 24 hour after a report, then perhaps I could agree to civil prosecution for taking advantage of a defective machine.
Breaking a machine, or in this case taking advantage as a broken machine is criminal activity. But unless I can prosecute the CEO of bank for criminal negligence when I have no money for week due to the firms mistake, then I don't see how the bank should charge me for criminal activity when their machines give me $400 instead of $100. At most, like they do when they screwed me over, I should asked to give the money back, and perhaps, if necessary,pay a small fine. Note, however, that the bank does not offer to pay me for my inconvenience.
I have used oo.org for most of casual publishing stuff. It works fine. The equation editor is quite powerful.
For the first couple year of college, i used my old Apple with Visicalc and Applewriter. I had a Mac at work that I was doing relatively advanced spreadsheet and flat database work, and PCs and Macs at school for other software. However, when one is producing a paper 2-3 times a week,and production time often occurs between midnight and eight in the morning, efficiency is key. So analysis was done on in Visicalc, formatting and formulas were hand generating using ESC sequences to the printer in Applewriter. The only difference two significant differences between what I do to and back them is that I know have an equation editor, and I don't have to paste pictures in at post production.
That is to say that WYSIWG is in many cases a distracting toy and not tool. For anything one does in college, unless professors have become truly insane people that no long value content over form, a nice text file should be ok. In science and engineering I suppose one could use Mathematica and latex. In later classes, I could get mathematica for free, so much of my analysis was done in it, with word processing in word, as it was cheap and at that time, better. I am actually moving to Latex now as other equation editors are just too inefficient. And this is even though Grapher pulls images and equations directly into pages. Now, much superior to word.
Ideally, we could teach a student how to use a computer, and then have then use whatever they need. Really except for menu positions, the modern word office applications are very similar. The real differences tend to be advance, and not often taught at the high school level. Unfortunately the reality is much different.
First, many employers are going to be looking for MS Office on the resume, and will test for MS office. They often will not be very tolerant of someone who has to look for commands, not do they need to be. Even at higher level jobs, I have seen ads for MS VS, or MFC, or Qt, when in fact if a person is trained to program, they can program in any language, and the employer should be more concerned with design and problem solving skills. Still, even employers who might know better still seem to want training ina specific product.
Second, the teacher has to support the software choice. If the student is running open office, the techer has to know how to help on that applciation. Now, since the average teacher test asks questions like "what is a word processor" and list the components of MS office, I don't think there is much training going on in the general word processor category. BTW, this question is from a national test from a well funded progra meant to educate college bond students. It is meant to test for college literacy, as if knowing hwo to use a single office suite makes one literate.
Third, and this relates to the other two, students can be minimally motivated. Students can do no work for a week because they were not given a pencil, and then complain to their parent that the failing grade is not fair. They can be taught how to solve a linear equation, and the complain to their parents that the test included negative numbers. This is to say that students, as all children, will tend to do more work trying to get out of work, and those that actually try to do work might have trouble abstracting the concepts. Even adults do this. I have seen people never lean that file open actually opens a file on the disk, and any command, evern c-x c-f does the same thing. I have seen people not understand that IE just loads file from the internet, and firefox does the same thing.
So while I think that it is a great waste of taxpayer money to pay for MS products, I do agree that a single product is probably the right choice. I think that OO.org could be a better choice, but that would require a level of sophistication that does not appear to exist in the average school district. We are talking IT people who state that IE poses no undue significant security risk, so there is no reason to support other browsers.
This is also why workaround with older versions of MS is silly. If the software does not work in the exact same way as at school, and the student gets stuck, that is the teachers fault for not teaching, not the students fault for not trying. So if the file is saved at school as 2007, and taken home, and it cannot be read for any reason, the student often gets a walk. Likewise, if the ribbon is taught at school, and all these menu present themselves a home, the same thing happens
Of course I have sympathy for these companies that cheat stockholders by backdating stocks options, cashing in stock options based on insider information and in general treating stockholder property as personal disposal income. Not to mention research and development product that are perfectly willing to engage in mass murder for profits. A terrorist kills a few thousand people, we go to war. A corporation kills a few tens of thousand of people we let them continue to do the same thing another day. I mean corporate balance sheets are so much more a justification for the death of humans than a desire for political change.
So lets take the opposite extreme position. Perhaps the FDA exists to give products official government credibility. Perhaps it works closely with private firms, including the emerging nanotech industry, to create a set of rules that creates a sufficient sense of safety such that consumer can spend more time purchasing products than evaluating products, which in turn allows money to have sufficient velocity to grow the economy.
In this view the FDA is a necessary cost of doing business. The FDA does not so much provide security, but a sense of security, much like Homeland Security. This is necessary to keep the economy running and stock markets up. It is doubly necessary now that the US is dependent on foreign power, friendly and unfriendly, to finance the public debt.
Without agencies like the FDA, the products in a drug store would have as much credibility as the products on the street There would be no generic drugs as the only assurance a consumer would have is company reputation. For instance was anyone worried about buying cheap toothpaste prior to learning there was no effective regulation in China?
Back to the middle ground. My understanding is that nanotech people are trying to leverage the credibility of the FDA so as to not be in the situation of the GM industry. The GM industry got arrogant and greedy, and basically did what it wanted to do without any concern of market forces. The nanotech industry, perhaps because they tend to be hardcore scientist, understand that such behavior is counterproductive in the long run. While the nanotech is probably much safer than most other tech, and while it is likely not a danger in normal operation, there are still concerns. The FFA can help quantify those concerns, and again, create credibility for a product.
I hope they knew what they were doing, and I hope that all precautions had been taken. In any case we are going to see more of this as rocketry moves into the commercial sector and more people gain experience with the materials.
But even with experience, and until we get more I think it will get worse before it gets better, there will still be accidents. It is important to have perspective. There were three people injured in Dallas just yesterday in gas explosion. Last year several people were injured at the BP plant. In that case they were contractors and BP did not even want to count them. It is heartless, and I know some people out there are hurting really bad, and one persons death is no less a loss than another, but what happened is just part of the business. I hope that the event is studied and used to protect people in the future. That is how we can show respect for the fallen.
Certainly piracy is not the problem. It would be wrong to say, here, take this but at some point we still have the right to bankrupt you.
Here is my proposal. MS gives away most of it's software for personal use, just like so many other companies do. For software that is not given away, i.e. enterprise software, the prices should be formally negotiated between MS and the firm. This is what happens in most enterprise software. Only software that is purchased will be supported for free. So if one wants human support, purchase the product. This of course does not include updates.
MS should have a single retail version of MS Vista, and then have a menu of features that would be negotiated with clients. That way, a business does not have have to have IE if it is not needed, or does not need to have hooks to a media player. A company have different builds for different machines. Each build could be watermarked for a single company. This will require that the OS be factored, but what else has MS been doing for 10 years?
For development, a developer has to buy a license if the product is to be sold or used for any commercial purposes. Why do so many people have MS Windows? Because of the applications. Why is mac doing better now? Because they can run MS applications. Why is Linux doing better? Because developers can create without worrying about the MS suing them for treble damages.
OEMs will still ship MS Windows, i believe this is 40%. Large commercial enterprises will still have to buy MS products. Small commercial enterprises won't buy the products, but will buy them when they get large, which is exactly what brought MS to power through the 90's.
And because the price will be negotiated on case by case basis, less developed countries, or countries where MS does not compete well, can be given a better price.If a $150 laptop is produced, a version of Vista can run on it, and the kids can use everything for free.
Ultimately one has to ask if MS seriously believes that software end should be subsidizing Zune and xBox sales. If there is so much excess cash, then shouldn't all effort to insure that the mature MS products continue to be relevent? The irony is that MS created the market in which software is given away, for example the browser, but still expects to paid for products as if nothing has changed
Pretty much what I was thinking. The first console system i remember in the neighborhood arrived around 1980. If one paid $20 for item in 1980, then one might expect to pay $60 now. With that in mind, $60 does not seem steep.
We are used to massive deflation in tech industry, so applying normal inflation makes little sense. OTOH, games tend to be the most technically advanced product of a society, as well as having the fewest price pressures as no one needs a game, and there is no way to actually measure the value of a game. production costs, like so many things is not a reasonable indicator of price.
p.
Therefore, we should expect games to inflate. I certainly would argue all we are seeing here is normal market forces setting the maximum tolerable selling price, which is what normally happens in luxury goods.
I want my phone to be a phone. Very seldom do I need to do anything else. I occasional check the news, which my phone can do. When I am moving around, I am either walking or driving. When i am driving, I am seldom stuck in traffic. All of the places I work have wireless. I open up my computer and am online and ready to work in less than a minute. I email from my computer much more than I text from my phone.
I think this might be different if I rode the bus to work like I used to do. Instead of reading a book I might use the phone to read the newspaper or the like. Or if I spent a lot of downtime away from my computer, which i don't. I also have a different definition of downtown. Sitting in a stadium watching a game or having a meal with a friend, to me at least, is not downtime.
There are two reason I don't often get a new phone. The first is long contract. I hate that the cell phone companies tie me into $600+ dollars of fees. In the US you can get pay as you go, but I still prefer a predictable long term cost so I can budget. I wish after a certain time, the contracts would go away. It is just not worthwhile to deal with that kind of expenditure when i don't need to. In fact this is why I don't have an phone. They force a two year contract on you, something I have never had to do.
I think the market will change and the iPhone will be part of that change. It is reported that 40% of the iPhone buyer switched to ATT. This puts some pressure on Verizon to come up a fun, non business oriented, smart phone. Perhaps that is why the smart phone market in the US is so small. The critical features, like push email, calendaring, etc are just not as important as youtube.
do we "crank" a car. do many of us even push buttons on our phone anymore?
The issue I see is not so much as buttons, but as abuse and misuse of buttons, and even LED bloat. For instance, it is very clear on my powerbook which button to press to turn it on. On my old Compaq the button to press was far from clear as it had 10 buttons, most of which I never used. They just put them there so the salesperson could say that these functions could be controlled with a dedicated button. I know that sometime such a thing is useful. I mean why use the trackpad to turn something on or off when you could move you fingers to an unfamiliar position at the bottom of the screen or front of the machine. Much more useful.
On my new Compaq the button design is significantly improved. I can actually hit the correct button to turn the compute on most of the time. However, I am now awash in a sea of LEDs. can't remember if that is the particular machine with a dozen LEDs, but no LED for caps locks. I know that if it has a caps lock LED it is not on the keyboard. Most of the information on the LED is also duplicated on the screen.
Now everyone is saying, this great, we have a choice, but it also adds to complexity, and reduces overall usability for some of us. For instance, if one is easily distracted, then such LEDS and buttons reduce the usefulness of the machine significantly.
I think that there is some SciFi ideal that the average designer aspires to. The remote control that came with my moms cable was almost useless in this way. The only way to get here to use it was to show here the four out one million buttons that were useful. I applaud designers who consider usefulness and aesthetics over a the vulgar need to market a product based on random features.
Another way to look at patents is as a mechanism to facilitate the transfer of ideas to the public domain. Such a view is supported by the traditional requirement that a patent be detailed enough so someone versed in the appropriate techniques could reproduce the object being patented.
Here are the two current options for an inventor. The first is to keep the process secret, and try to sell enough product before it is reversed engineered. Such an approach not only wastes a societies resources by shifted creative power from new problems to problems that have already been solved, but provides little predictability for business.
The second option is the patent. Put the details of the product out in the public. Accept the protection of the government for 10 years. This gives a predictable interval in which to market the product. It also gives a predictable interval in which to improve the product so it can compete with any copies that might eventually be placed on the market. In exchange for such protection, other can use the ideas to develop new non-competing products immediately, and eventually develop copies of the product for wider consumption. This is a win/win for everyone as the inventor has time to exploit the product commercially, especially in today's mass produced market, and society is allowed to exploit the idea intellectually.
Here is why I disagree with protecting the little guy, or anyone for that matter. First, it is difficult to define. A patent may be granted to a little guy, who may grow into a big guy or sell to a big guy. Is the patent to depend on this? Second, such reasoning lends itself to extend the period of patents, and even copyright for that matter. I would argue that given the reduction in production times, the patent and copyright time should be reduced, or altered based on production dates. For instance a drug might take 5-10 years to enter mass production, and therefore might need a longer patent, but one can imagine all sorts of other products that might only require a five year patent. Likewise, it is inconceivable that Disney has not already exploited the derivitive characters fully, and those characters should be put back in the public domain.
By focusing on return on investment, rather than encouraging innovation in society, one gets into the situation where IP does in fact halt innovation, especially where a five year product cycle seems long.
Ever since I was in middle school I was told that the encyclopedia was merely a starting point and not a reliable source. The nice thing about the Britannica was that it laid out a formal representation of what was known at the time it was written. Although it did not exactly cross our mind that it was wrong, we knew that it was not to be used as a basis of fact. Starting in the 80's, with the less formal style, I think it has become even less useful. This is also the problem with wikipedia. It is useful for pop culture, and some pop technical stuff, but I still go to mathworld when I want to know math, and britannica when I want to know history.
This is used as an excuse, and in some parts it is a valid concen, but it is not the only problem. For instance,in my area there are around 3500 people per square mile. Yet DSL is not available in all areas. This means that cable has a monopoly on broadband. Even in areas where DSL is available, the quality is nowhere near what I got back in the late 90's. I suppose part of this is due to increased demand, but a lot of it is due to failing infrastructure. The Bells managed to get back an effective monpoloy on broad band over phones lines, and then made it practically unusable.
And this is the final kicker. AT&T is putting fiber in our area, but first in the neighborhoods that already have DSL. They are going to let the cable company continue to have a monopoly in the other areas. To make matters worse, AT&T will not sell you just internet access. You have to buy a package.
I tell you what our president has done. He has reduced America to third world status. INstead of being able to pay a private company to give you good access to the internet, you have pay a monopoly. And you can't pay for what you need, you have to pay for what they want you to have. BTW, this is not a new revelation. Foreign affairs did an write on this a few years back. We did not just all of the sudden lose our edge. It was a predictable part of policy,and has been obvious since before out president got reelected.
In general when people say you can' get anything but the latest MS offering, what they are typically saying is that you can't get anything other than the latest MS offering for less than the latest MS offering. If one is talking commercial availability, such people are typically correct. MS, for as much as it's wants it to be different, is the value seller. Even though MS Vista retails for more than XP, much like a Hillfiger shirt, few are willing to pay and therefore the practical cost of MS Vista is about the same as full XP. Same for XBox and Zune.
What is interesting is the trend of people willing to pay significant higher initial costs to move away from MS. This is what this survey actually says. In this year, many people paid more for a Mac, and reletively few pay are paying anything for MS Vista, given the reletive MS market share.
What is even more interesting is enough people were willing to pay the same amount for the obsolete 'XP' OS as the new MS Vista, that retailers were forced to continue to preload XP. And I am sure that everyone of those XP licenses are being recorded as as Vista sale.
You know, we can't blame PHB. Sometimes it boils down to basic results.
Let start slightly off topic as not understanding the problem can often lead to lack of a suitable solution. In this case, the statement was made that somehow sci fi shows don't do well because the viewers are undercounted. While this may be true, TiVo has only been extremely popular for a few years, yet the last sci fi show to go more than a two season was probably My Favorite Martian. There are other factors going on here, and it is likely more than undercounting by whatever arbitrary firm one wants to blame.
The ad supported "content" provided by/., or television, or radio, necessarily serves to attract an audience to the genuine content which is the promotional items for a firm. Ultimately the firm is going to judge the effectiveness of those promotional items not solely by the number of viewers, but by the increase in revenue and feedback from the customer. Therefore, if a target audience of a show sleeps on the floor, eat ramen noodles for the hot plate(now old microwave), and spends all his free time building computer kit from rummage sale parts, it is difficult to fanthom what can be sold at a high enough margin to justify the ad costs. Such a person is not going to be interested in a mattress sale, or what restaurant mid priced sit down restaurant to take a date, or even what movie to see since all movies are belong to us over P2P. So, unless the entire show is a promotion, in the way that kids show re, there is relatively little upside.
I am being a little tongue in cheek, but there is a point. Star trek lasted two seasons, and it was no worse than bewitched. Buck Rogers lasted 1.5 seasons, and it was no worse than the A-Team. Dark Angle lasted 2 seasons, really, like buck, one season, and it starred a women that almost put Ms. Erin to shame. Why does sci fail, and friends, an equally preposterous show about minimally employed young people living in spacious new york apartments make it. I can only think it is sales.
The safeness of a language, at least for the basic code like the OS, should be the responsibility of the developer and not the language. The people who developed the iPhone code should know what they are doing, and developers who know what they are doing can use any language and make it relatively safe. It is a mistake that safety can imposed in every situation. Sometimes one needs to code without a spotter. This is particular true in code that provides basic functionality.
Now, for higher level applications, which have a completely different economic model, it is often justifiable to start introducing spotters, and sandboxes, and the like. This code is often written by unknonwn agents with unknown capabilities and motives. At the very least, it is often not feasible to put these developers to fully comprehend the security model and assumptions. Therefore, the ideal situation is to give them a fixed set of APIs to the OS, which are a compromise between access and security, and then provide appropriate language support. It is indeed the case, at this point, that Java is an ideal language for the random developer, providing the developer can write efficient enough code for the application to run tolerably. As an aside, on of the criticism of the MS DOS was that, allegedly, MS would not allow access to some internal APIs for security reasons, but did allow internal development using those APIs, thus breaking security.
So, under these assumptions, the OS is written in a language that is efficient, by known competent developers. For applications, some safer language is provided with APIs. On MS this is obviously Basic and C#. For cross platform, this is Java. For Macs, this is the Xcode environment with a choice of languages, which can be dangerous as unknown developers can choose an inappropriate language. In todays GUI environment, the key is the API, so the actual language becomes less important as most people are just going to string library calls together.
But here is the rub. iPhone is an embedded device. Embedded devices are not GPCs, and require that code is very effecient and compact as one cannot expect a abundance of cycles or memory. Common applications tend to be written in a low level unsafe language, and there is limited support for add on applications. This is why we see the MS PC with many applications, but I have not seen as much as address book hacked on the Zune. Anyone even suggesting that common applications on an embedded device be written in a very high level language really has little concern for performance. This is what Apple has done with the iPhone. Common applications seem to be relatively fast, and they do have problems. We are in for a long game of cat and mouse, and the only hope is that the Apple developers do know what they are doing and there are no fundamental flaws.
But what about the addon applications. Are they allowing unknown developers to code in C. No. Objective C. No. Java. No. To maintain security, exactly as this thread suggests, they are forcing these unknown developers to use a very high level scripted language. This cause problems for developers, but is the exact security model that this thread proposes.
I find the telephone to be annoying as people expect immediate access, and immediate attention. I mean, I may be hanging with my friend, having a nice cuddle, and the phone rings and people get bent out of shape because you won't answer. I ask, what is more evil than being expected to interrupt a cuddle for some bozo who wants to sell you insurance, or even a friend that just wants to check on some activity for the next week. Both of those things can wait.
I found email to be a liberating innovation as it allowed full asynchronous communication without anyone feelings getting hurt. You send me an email, and when I get a chance, I send you an email. It is a cheap efficient method of communication. Phones and voicemail is nearly as effecient, but people do tend to get their feeling hurt when one never answers a phone.
And all this innovation is ruined by IM. One is forced back into the world of synchronous communication, and really no more effecient than a telephone. I mean we might as well be back to the days of the telegraph as inefficient as IM is. Back in the mid 19th century we effectively had this IM technology, and a good operator could do perhaps 30 words a minute. On wonders why replaced such a perfect system with telephones. Insanity.
In my experience IM has one advantage over email or voice. It can be done without disturbing other people on relatively compact kit. A corollary of this, which I think may be more important to it's popularity, is it can be done covertly. So instead of learning in school, or earning you pay at work, or generally interacting with those around you, one can text. I certainly do not blame IM, as poeple who want to waste time will always find a way to do it, and people who are always looking for that better person will always do that as well, However, it is a new vector, and people use it mostly because is new. Much like the phone, most people will outgrow the novelty, and stop spending every waking minute using it. Sometimes this growth occurs at 20, sometimes 30, and sometime never.
And it is really not about the footprint of the browser application, but the footprint of the helper applications.
I have a Mozilla engine running on some relatively circa 2000 hardware. I have no problems running the normal stuff. The problem only occurs if I try to run a movie, or a flash, or a large image, a complex script, or the like. The machine has trouble handling it.
As a result, it gets very little use. What do people want. They want youtube. They want myspace. They wat pr0n. And what use is a machine that can't quickly handle that. No one really wants to use it. So the problem is not that lightweight browsers do not exist, but that for the content people want, a lightweight browser will not work.
Even in the best case, it will not work. Lets say that a person says they just a computer to write letters, look at the newpaper and send email. Pretty soon they are mad becuae they can't send fancy emails with many pretty fonts. And they can't look at the animation on the newspaper sight. And the font they want in the word processor is not there. Realistically, with computer being so cheap, there is little reason to say that these things are not possible.
The thing about regulation is that allowed a business to live in a predictable environment and allows consumers to have predictable product. Much of our life is regulated, and the regulation causes problems. I can no longer awns out a million emails to random email addresses selling fake drugs and not expect some possible reprucusions. It is terribly unfair as it removes significant profit opportunities. However, there is benifit as consumers have some security in knowing that they are more likely to receive a stated product in exchange for payment.
Other regulation, like the ones of the FCC, help distribute limited resources. In the case of broadcast radio and television, the monopoly covers a section and locality of the public airwaves.In exchange for the monopoly, the business agrees to some limite. Complaining about it is like public companies complaining about the regulation of the stock market. Companies that do not want such regulation, and want to treat the companies cash like thier own private liquid accounts, can choose to be private. There is no law forcing a company public.
The boradcasters have been given a monopoly over the airwaves. They have given enough leeway in what to transmit. The only thing that has changed is that others have come in, and with much less public financing, created a competing system of content delivery. The broadcasters, coddled by years of monopoly status, are apparently unable to work in a free market. Sure they are less free than the paid station, but then they also have the only non subscription fee product. If they can't survive with the huge public subsidy of free bandwidth, then I can only assume that they are truly incompetent. No myspace isn't the killer. Softness from monopoly status is. Braodcast content is an extremely inefficient use of the bandwidth, and cannot support the bloated structure that seems to define most broadcast companies.
And who really cares if broadcaster go off the air. That should be seen as a success. Privately funded enterprises killing government subsidized monopoly. Who can be against that? With the broadcasters gone, the bandwidth can be used for something else, by entrepenuers who are willing to rent the space at auction determined market value. I must say that I do not look forward to paying for radio and television, but I also realize that it might be better that continuously hearing people bitch about how unfair the rules are. Give the airwaves back to the public. Let the market decide how to use them best in the post analog world. Even the threat of such a thing will have the whiny wussy broadcast executives going to the hill and saying how absolutely happy they are with regulation.
Yeah, and this is likely the least of their troubles. The data was basically 50/50, and they did not show that 5% difference was significant.
Given thier analysis, and what often happens in a plane crash, this is what I think might be a more reasonable conclusion.
In the event of a passenger jet crash, probability is that everyone will die. If everyone does not die, the statistics still favor a majority of the passengers being killed in the crash.
The analysis in the paper appears to show a slightly higher probability of survival in the back of the plane, but did not show that the level was statistically significant. In the other cases the was not a clear effect of seat position, and often the back of the plane appeared to be preferentially fatal.
So, in summary, the passenger jet is not likely to crash. In the few cases where a crash does occur, and fatalities ensue, then there are not, on average, going to be many survivors. In the extremely rare case that jet crashes and there are survivors, a passenger may be safer up back, unless it is one of those cases where you are safe in front. Therefore, the best thing to do is sit somewhere in the middle.
That hot chick was informally Seven of Nine, or more formally, Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One.
The only character named Seven I know was the little boy randomly introduced into Married with Children, and later randomly removed in a desperate attempt, presumable perpetrated by lame TV executives, to broaden the appeal of the show. This is surely an absolutely appropriate name, as MS seemed intent on adding random features, then removing them a season later, rather than concentrating on core competencies and quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly I have no problem with oil wealth, and have no problem taking advantage of it, but to be wealthy and still be on the government dole, well that is simply too much. Take a look at the other oil states. They have about 1/5 of the per capita budget.
The point we are at right now is that there has been little advance in merging components. Computers got cheap, in part, to VLSI. Now, instead of creating a single chip laptop, we have dual cores. To get to the holy grail of the computer so cheap that we buy it for no reason, the device count has to go way down. A couple chips, a couple ports, and a screen. It may even have to have a fake keyboard, just like the cheap computers of the 80's, which, btw, were also just a few chips and few ports.
For a class action lawsuit to be profitable, one must have enough units sold, and enough potential damage, to generate a profit for the lawyer. Look at it this way. No one sued over Vioxx until thousands of people were dead.
So now we have lawyer, good or bad, realizing that even just $5 for each unit sold would be some real money. The design in not going to change. The consumer is likely to get nothing more than a minor discount on Applecare. And the $29 loaner is a crock anyway. If they do the same thing they do with an iPod, they probabaly will just swap out phones in the store.
But at $300K units sold. That would be well over a million for a the firm
MS Windows is meant to work with anything x86 compatible, so it is easy to emulate it as the basic have to be simple. One can either emulate the chipset, which is what VPC did, or one can emulate the API, which is what codeweavers does. *nux is even better, as it is meant to run on anything that meets some basic requirements, and most computers in the past 10 years do.
But Mac OS is meant to run on a very specific hardware base, and though that base has been generalized, it is still of limited support. One complains that MS Vista does not support all the devices. I suspect it supports more than Apple. It has to as MS products are supposed to run on any piece of junk that you throw at it. It is the cheap alternative. Why would you want to emulate something that is requires tighter specs than one has right now. Even if it someone did it, it would be customer service nightmare.
But it depends on what one wants to emulate. One could emulate the GUI look and feel with a theme type thing on any OS. One could write a finder application, or even interface spotlight in the Linux file index. One could create a whole new compatability layer between the open source darwin and the user, which would be the most useful solution. But why, when one can shell a $1200 for a mac that can is tighter spec than on finds on average, and can now run almost anything you throw at it?
So here is the issue. They can bankrupt me with no significant repercussion, and don't even have to make an effort to correct the mistake unless I beg them to do so, but I have to immediately report any mistakes they make. Now, if I could claim treble damages for any mistake the bank made, and double digit damage for any mistake that was not fixed 24 hour after a report, then perhaps I could agree to civil prosecution for taking advantage of a defective machine.
Breaking a machine, or in this case taking advantage as a broken machine is criminal activity. But unless I can prosecute the CEO of bank for criminal negligence when I have no money for week due to the firms mistake, then I don't see how the bank should charge me for criminal activity when their machines give me $400 instead of $100. At most, like they do when they screwed me over, I should asked to give the money back, and perhaps, if necessary,pay a small fine. Note, however, that the bank does not offer to pay me for my inconvenience.
For the first couple year of college, i used my old Apple with Visicalc and Applewriter. I had a Mac at work that I was doing relatively advanced spreadsheet and flat database work, and PCs and Macs at school for other software. However, when one is producing a paper 2-3 times a week,and production time often occurs between midnight and eight in the morning, efficiency is key. So analysis was done on in Visicalc, formatting and formulas were hand generating using ESC sequences to the printer in Applewriter. The only difference two significant differences between what I do to and back them is that I know have an equation editor, and I don't have to paste pictures in at post production.
That is to say that WYSIWG is in many cases a distracting toy and not tool. For anything one does in college, unless professors have become truly insane people that no long value content over form, a nice text file should be ok. In science and engineering I suppose one could use Mathematica and latex. In later classes, I could get mathematica for free, so much of my analysis was done in it, with word processing in word, as it was cheap and at that time, better. I am actually moving to Latex now as other equation editors are just too inefficient. And this is even though Grapher pulls images and equations directly into pages. Now, much superior to word.
First, many employers are going to be looking for MS Office on the resume, and will test for MS office. They often will not be very tolerant of someone who has to look for commands, not do they need to be. Even at higher level jobs, I have seen ads for MS VS, or MFC, or Qt, when in fact if a person is trained to program, they can program in any language, and the employer should be more concerned with design and problem solving skills. Still, even employers who might know better still seem to want training ina specific product.
Second, the teacher has to support the software choice. If the student is running open office, the techer has to know how to help on that applciation. Now, since the average teacher test asks questions like "what is a word processor" and list the components of MS office, I don't think there is much training going on in the general word processor category. BTW, this question is from a national test from a well funded progra meant to educate college bond students. It is meant to test for college literacy, as if knowing hwo to use a single office suite makes one literate.
Third, and this relates to the other two, students can be minimally motivated. Students can do no work for a week because they were not given a pencil, and then complain to their parent that the failing grade is not fair. They can be taught how to solve a linear equation, and the complain to their parents that the test included negative numbers. This is to say that students, as all children, will tend to do more work trying to get out of work, and those that actually try to do work might have trouble abstracting the concepts. Even adults do this. I have seen people never lean that file open actually opens a file on the disk, and any command, evern c-x c-f does the same thing. I have seen people not understand that IE just loads file from the internet, and firefox does the same thing.
So while I think that it is a great waste of taxpayer money to pay for MS products, I do agree that a single product is probably the right choice. I think that OO.org could be a better choice, but that would require a level of sophistication that does not appear to exist in the average school district. We are talking IT people who state that IE poses no undue significant security risk, so there is no reason to support other browsers.
This is also why workaround with older versions of MS is silly. If the software does not work in the exact same way as at school, and the student gets stuck, that is the teachers fault for not teaching, not the students fault for not trying. So if the file is saved at school as 2007, and taken home, and it cannot be read for any reason, the student often gets a walk. Likewise, if the ribbon is taught at school, and all these menu present themselves a home, the same thing happens
So lets take the opposite extreme position. Perhaps the FDA exists to give products official government credibility. Perhaps it works closely with private firms, including the emerging nanotech industry, to create a set of rules that creates a sufficient sense of safety such that consumer can spend more time purchasing products than evaluating products, which in turn allows money to have sufficient velocity to grow the economy.
In this view the FDA is a necessary cost of doing business. The FDA does not so much provide security, but a sense of security, much like Homeland Security. This is necessary to keep the economy running and stock markets up. It is doubly necessary now that the US is dependent on foreign power, friendly and unfriendly, to finance the public debt.
Without agencies like the FDA, the products in a drug store would have as much credibility as the products on the street There would be no generic drugs as the only assurance a consumer would have is company reputation. For instance was anyone worried about buying cheap toothpaste prior to learning there was no effective regulation in China?
Back to the middle ground. My understanding is that nanotech people are trying to leverage the credibility of the FDA so as to not be in the situation of the GM industry. The GM industry got arrogant and greedy, and basically did what it wanted to do without any concern of market forces. The nanotech industry, perhaps because they tend to be hardcore scientist, understand that such behavior is counterproductive in the long run. While the nanotech is probably much safer than most other tech, and while it is likely not a danger in normal operation, there are still concerns. The FFA can help quantify those concerns, and again, create credibility for a product.
I am much more interested in the story concerning paper not based on carbon.
But even with experience, and until we get more I think it will get worse before it gets better, there will still be accidents. It is important to have perspective. There were three people injured in Dallas just yesterday in gas explosion. Last year several people were injured at the BP plant. In that case they were contractors and BP did not even want to count them. It is heartless, and I know some people out there are hurting really bad, and one persons death is no less a loss than another, but what happened is just part of the business. I hope that the event is studied and used to protect people in the future. That is how we can show respect for the fallen.
Here is my proposal. MS gives away most of it's software for personal use, just like so many other companies do. For software that is not given away, i.e. enterprise software, the prices should be formally negotiated between MS and the firm. This is what happens in most enterprise software. Only software that is purchased will be supported for free. So if one wants human support, purchase the product. This of course does not include updates.
MS should have a single retail version of MS Vista, and then have a menu of features that would be negotiated with clients. That way, a business does not have have to have IE if it is not needed, or does not need to have hooks to a media player. A company have different builds for different machines. Each build could be watermarked for a single company. This will require that the OS be factored, but what else has MS been doing for 10 years?
For development, a developer has to buy a license if the product is to be sold or used for any commercial purposes. Why do so many people have MS Windows? Because of the applications. Why is mac doing better now? Because they can run MS applications. Why is Linux doing better? Because developers can create without worrying about the MS suing them for treble damages.
OEMs will still ship MS Windows, i believe this is 40%. Large commercial enterprises will still have to buy MS products. Small commercial enterprises won't buy the products, but will buy them when they get large, which is exactly what brought MS to power through the 90's.
And because the price will be negotiated on case by case basis, less developed countries, or countries where MS does not compete well, can be given a better price.If a $150 laptop is produced, a version of Vista can run on it, and the kids can use everything for free.
Ultimately one has to ask if MS seriously believes that software end should be subsidizing Zune and xBox sales. If there is so much excess cash, then shouldn't all effort to insure that the mature MS products continue to be relevent? The irony is that MS created the market in which software is given away, for example the browser, but still expects to paid for products as if nothing has changed
We are used to massive deflation in tech industry, so applying normal inflation makes little sense. OTOH, games tend to be the most technically advanced product of a society, as well as having the fewest price pressures as no one needs a game, and there is no way to actually measure the value of a game. production costs, like so many things is not a reasonable indicator of price. p. Therefore, we should expect games to inflate. I certainly would argue all we are seeing here is normal market forces setting the maximum tolerable selling price, which is what normally happens in luxury goods.
I think this might be different if I rode the bus to work like I used to do. Instead of reading a book I might use the phone to read the newspaper or the like. Or if I spent a lot of downtime away from my computer, which i don't. I also have a different definition of downtown. Sitting in a stadium watching a game or having a meal with a friend, to me at least, is not downtime.
There are two reason I don't often get a new phone. The first is long contract. I hate that the cell phone companies tie me into $600+ dollars of fees. In the US you can get pay as you go, but I still prefer a predictable long term cost so I can budget. I wish after a certain time, the contracts would go away. It is just not worthwhile to deal with that kind of expenditure when i don't need to. In fact this is why I don't have an phone. They force a two year contract on you, something I have never had to do.
I think the market will change and the iPhone will be part of that change. It is reported that 40% of the iPhone buyer switched to ATT. This puts some pressure on Verizon to come up a fun, non business oriented, smart phone. Perhaps that is why the smart phone market in the US is so small. The critical features, like push email, calendaring, etc are just not as important as youtube.
The issue I see is not so much as buttons, but as abuse and misuse of buttons, and even LED bloat. For instance, it is very clear on my powerbook which button to press to turn it on. On my old Compaq the button to press was far from clear as it had 10 buttons, most of which I never used. They just put them there so the salesperson could say that these functions could be controlled with a dedicated button. I know that sometime such a thing is useful. I mean why use the trackpad to turn something on or off when you could move you fingers to an unfamiliar position at the bottom of the screen or front of the machine. Much more useful.
On my new Compaq the button design is significantly improved. I can actually hit the correct button to turn the compute on most of the time. However, I am now awash in a sea of LEDs. can't remember if that is the particular machine with a dozen LEDs, but no LED for caps locks. I know that if it has a caps lock LED it is not on the keyboard. Most of the information on the LED is also duplicated on the screen.
Now everyone is saying, this great, we have a choice, but it also adds to complexity, and reduces overall usability for some of us. For instance, if one is easily distracted, then such LEDS and buttons reduce the usefulness of the machine significantly.
I think that there is some SciFi ideal that the average designer aspires to. The remote control that came with my moms cable was almost useless in this way. The only way to get here to use it was to show here the four out one million buttons that were useful. I applaud designers who consider usefulness and aesthetics over a the vulgar need to market a product based on random features.
Here are the two current options for an inventor. The first is to keep the process secret, and try to sell enough product before it is reversed engineered. Such an approach not only wastes a societies resources by shifted creative power from new problems to problems that have already been solved, but provides little predictability for business.
The second option is the patent. Put the details of the product out in the public. Accept the protection of the government for 10 years. This gives a predictable interval in which to market the product. It also gives a predictable interval in which to improve the product so it can compete with any copies that might eventually be placed on the market. In exchange for such protection, other can use the ideas to develop new non-competing products immediately, and eventually develop copies of the product for wider consumption. This is a win/win for everyone as the inventor has time to exploit the product commercially, especially in today's mass produced market, and society is allowed to exploit the idea intellectually.
Here is why I disagree with protecting the little guy, or anyone for that matter. First, it is difficult to define. A patent may be granted to a little guy, who may grow into a big guy or sell to a big guy. Is the patent to depend on this? Second, such reasoning lends itself to extend the period of patents, and even copyright for that matter. I would argue that given the reduction in production times, the patent and copyright time should be reduced, or altered based on production dates. For instance a drug might take 5-10 years to enter mass production, and therefore might need a longer patent, but one can imagine all sorts of other products that might only require a five year patent. Likewise, it is inconceivable that Disney has not already exploited the derivitive characters fully, and those characters should be put back in the public domain.
By focusing on return on investment, rather than encouraging innovation in society, one gets into the situation where IP does in fact halt innovation, especially where a five year product cycle seems long.
Ever since I was in middle school I was told that the encyclopedia was merely a starting point and not a reliable source. The nice thing about the Britannica was that it laid out a formal representation of what was known at the time it was written. Although it did not exactly cross our mind that it was wrong, we knew that it was not to be used as a basis of fact. Starting in the 80's, with the less formal style, I think it has become even less useful. This is also the problem with wikipedia. It is useful for pop culture, and some pop technical stuff, but I still go to mathworld when I want to know math, and britannica when I want to know history.
And this is the final kicker. AT&T is putting fiber in our area, but first in the neighborhoods that already have DSL. They are going to let the cable company continue to have a monopoly in the other areas. To make matters worse, AT&T will not sell you just internet access. You have to buy a package.
I tell you what our president has done. He has reduced America to third world status. INstead of being able to pay a private company to give you good access to the internet, you have pay a monopoly. And you can't pay for what you need, you have to pay for what they want you to have. BTW, this is not a new revelation. Foreign affairs did an write on this a few years back. We did not just all of the sudden lose our edge. It was a predictable part of policy,and has been obvious since before out president got reelected.
What is interesting is the trend of people willing to pay significant higher initial costs to move away from MS. This is what this survey actually says. In this year, many people paid more for a Mac, and reletively few pay are paying anything for MS Vista, given the reletive MS market share.
What is even more interesting is enough people were willing to pay the same amount for the obsolete 'XP' OS as the new MS Vista, that retailers were forced to continue to preload XP. And I am sure that everyone of those XP licenses are being recorded as as Vista sale.
Let start slightly off topic as not understanding the problem can often lead to lack of a suitable solution. In this case, the statement was made that somehow sci fi shows don't do well because the viewers are undercounted. While this may be true, TiVo has only been extremely popular for a few years, yet the last sci fi show to go more than a two season was probably My Favorite Martian. There are other factors going on here, and it is likely more than undercounting by whatever arbitrary firm one wants to blame.
The ad supported "content" provided by /., or television, or radio, necessarily serves to attract an audience to the genuine content which is the promotional items for a firm. Ultimately the firm is going to judge the effectiveness of those promotional items not solely by the number of viewers, but by the increase in revenue and feedback from the customer. Therefore, if a target audience of a show sleeps on the floor, eat ramen noodles for the hot plate(now old microwave), and spends all his free time building computer kit from rummage sale parts, it is difficult to fanthom what can be sold at a high enough margin to justify the ad costs. Such a person is not going to be interested in a mattress sale, or what restaurant mid priced sit down restaurant to take a date, or even what movie to see since all movies are belong to us over P2P. So, unless the entire show is a promotion, in the way that kids show re, there is relatively little upside.
I am being a little tongue in cheek, but there is a point. Star trek lasted two seasons, and it was no worse than bewitched. Buck Rogers lasted 1.5 seasons, and it was no worse than the A-Team. Dark Angle lasted 2 seasons, really, like buck, one season, and it starred a women that almost put Ms. Erin to shame. Why does sci fail, and friends, an equally preposterous show about minimally employed young people living in spacious new york apartments make it. I can only think it is sales.
Now, for higher level applications, which have a completely different economic model, it is often justifiable to start introducing spotters, and sandboxes, and the like. This code is often written by unknonwn agents with unknown capabilities and motives. At the very least, it is often not feasible to put these developers to fully comprehend the security model and assumptions. Therefore, the ideal situation is to give them a fixed set of APIs to the OS, which are a compromise between access and security, and then provide appropriate language support. It is indeed the case, at this point, that Java is an ideal language for the random developer, providing the developer can write efficient enough code for the application to run tolerably. As an aside, on of the criticism of the MS DOS was that, allegedly, MS would not allow access to some internal APIs for security reasons, but did allow internal development using those APIs, thus breaking security.
So, under these assumptions, the OS is written in a language that is efficient, by known competent developers. For applications, some safer language is provided with APIs. On MS this is obviously Basic and C#. For cross platform, this is Java. For Macs, this is the Xcode environment with a choice of languages, which can be dangerous as unknown developers can choose an inappropriate language. In todays GUI environment, the key is the API, so the actual language becomes less important as most people are just going to string library calls together.
But here is the rub. iPhone is an embedded device. Embedded devices are not GPCs, and require that code is very effecient and compact as one cannot expect a abundance of cycles or memory. Common applications tend to be written in a low level unsafe language, and there is limited support for add on applications. This is why we see the MS PC with many applications, but I have not seen as much as address book hacked on the Zune. Anyone even suggesting that common applications on an embedded device be written in a very high level language really has little concern for performance. This is what Apple has done with the iPhone. Common applications seem to be relatively fast, and they do have problems. We are in for a long game of cat and mouse, and the only hope is that the Apple developers do know what they are doing and there are no fundamental flaws.
But what about the addon applications. Are they allowing unknown developers to code in C. No. Objective C. No. Java. No. To maintain security, exactly as this thread suggests, they are forcing these unknown developers to use a very high level scripted language. This cause problems for developers, but is the exact security model that this thread proposes.
I found email to be a liberating innovation as it allowed full asynchronous communication without anyone feelings getting hurt. You send me an email, and when I get a chance, I send you an email. It is a cheap efficient method of communication. Phones and voicemail is nearly as effecient, but people do tend to get their feeling hurt when one never answers a phone.
And all this innovation is ruined by IM. One is forced back into the world of synchronous communication, and really no more effecient than a telephone. I mean we might as well be back to the days of the telegraph as inefficient as IM is. Back in the mid 19th century we effectively had this IM technology, and a good operator could do perhaps 30 words a minute. On wonders why replaced such a perfect system with telephones. Insanity.
In my experience IM has one advantage over email or voice. It can be done without disturbing other people on relatively compact kit. A corollary of this, which I think may be more important to it's popularity, is it can be done covertly. So instead of learning in school, or earning you pay at work, or generally interacting with those around you, one can text. I certainly do not blame IM, as poeple who want to waste time will always find a way to do it, and people who are always looking for that better person will always do that as well, However, it is a new vector, and people use it mostly because is new. Much like the phone, most people will outgrow the novelty, and stop spending every waking minute using it. Sometimes this growth occurs at 20, sometimes 30, and sometime never.
I have a Mozilla engine running on some relatively circa 2000 hardware. I have no problems running the normal stuff. The problem only occurs if I try to run a movie, or a flash, or a large image, a complex script, or the like. The machine has trouble handling it.
As a result, it gets very little use. What do people want. They want youtube. They want myspace. They wat pr0n. And what use is a machine that can't quickly handle that. No one really wants to use it. So the problem is not that lightweight browsers do not exist, but that for the content people want, a lightweight browser will not work.
Even in the best case, it will not work. Lets say that a person says they just a computer to write letters, look at the newpaper and send email. Pretty soon they are mad becuae they can't send fancy emails with many pretty fonts. And they can't look at the animation on the newspaper sight. And the font they want in the word processor is not there. Realistically, with computer being so cheap, there is little reason to say that these things are not possible.
Other regulation, like the ones of the FCC, help distribute limited resources. In the case of broadcast radio and television, the monopoly covers a section and locality of the public airwaves.In exchange for the monopoly, the business agrees to some limite. Complaining about it is like public companies complaining about the regulation of the stock market. Companies that do not want such regulation, and want to treat the companies cash like thier own private liquid accounts, can choose to be private. There is no law forcing a company public.
The boradcasters have been given a monopoly over the airwaves. They have given enough leeway in what to transmit. The only thing that has changed is that others have come in, and with much less public financing, created a competing system of content delivery. The broadcasters, coddled by years of monopoly status, are apparently unable to work in a free market. Sure they are less free than the paid station, but then they also have the only non subscription fee product. If they can't survive with the huge public subsidy of free bandwidth, then I can only assume that they are truly incompetent. No myspace isn't the killer. Softness from monopoly status is. Braodcast content is an extremely inefficient use of the bandwidth, and cannot support the bloated structure that seems to define most broadcast companies.
And who really cares if broadcaster go off the air. That should be seen as a success. Privately funded enterprises killing government subsidized monopoly. Who can be against that? With the broadcasters gone, the bandwidth can be used for something else, by entrepenuers who are willing to rent the space at auction determined market value. I must say that I do not look forward to paying for radio and television, but I also realize that it might be better that continuously hearing people bitch about how unfair the rules are. Give the airwaves back to the public. Let the market decide how to use them best in the post analog world. Even the threat of such a thing will have the whiny wussy broadcast executives going to the hill and saying how absolutely happy they are with regulation.
Given thier analysis, and what often happens in a plane crash, this is what I think might be a more reasonable conclusion.
In the event of a passenger jet crash, probability is that everyone will die. If everyone does not die, the statistics still favor a majority of the passengers being killed in the crash.
The analysis in the paper appears to show a slightly higher probability of survival in the back of the plane, but did not show that the level was statistically significant. In the other cases the was not a clear effect of seat position, and often the back of the plane appeared to be preferentially fatal.
So, in summary, the passenger jet is not likely to crash. In the few cases where a crash does occur, and fatalities ensue, then there are not, on average, going to be many survivors. In the extremely rare case that jet crashes and there are survivors, a passenger may be safer up back, unless it is one of those cases where you are safe in front. Therefore, the best thing to do is sit somewhere in the middle.
The only character named Seven I know was the little boy randomly introduced into Married with Children, and later randomly removed in a desperate attempt, presumable perpetrated by lame TV executives, to broaden the appeal of the show. This is surely an absolutely appropriate name, as MS seemed intent on adding random features, then removing them a season later, rather than concentrating on core competencies and quality.