In terms of the lists of lists of best things of things that are generated every year, most claiming some value, it is nice to see a list that is honest. The words arbitrary and unscientific should be the preface for every list.
When I listened to the radio, listening to the end of year top 100 was fun because it allowed me to reminisce through the year. Of course, I would then go to my albums and listen to the songs I really thought were good. I always thought it was sad that some people equated the top 100 with a genuine mark of universal quality.
BTW, I think the music listed is probably a representative sample of the best popular music of the last year. The simplicity of method makes the case study interesting.
I can't tell if you are being funny, but here it goes:
Apple IIgs and NeXt Cube were all targeted toward certain educational markets, and these machines did well in those markets. The IIgs was an incremental step in a long lasting and very profitable line of computers. As you know NeXt technology has renamed and integrated into a new product.
The Newton went through many incarnations, sold many units, and was very useful for many people. Given the number of units still running, it cannot be considered a big flop, but merely a small one. The Lisa was a bigger flop.
The RS-232 was a very useful and important harware interface. It is true it had more wires than it needed, but I think that was because the cables were to be useful for other standards. It is a very old technology, and never flopped, just got replaced.
8", 5 1/4, and 3 1/2 inch floppies are the same deal. So is audio cassette storage. I stored stuff on cassette. For the file sizes I was dealing with, it was the perfect portable technology. And it was most useful for portable computers.
My list of flops
Navigator
8088
Cyberdog
Netmeeting and video conferencing in general
Magneto-Optical drives
But metrosexual is specifically talking about someone who, for all intents and purposes, is gay, but does not wish to be called gay. If women really liked thier men to be prissy, men would be prissy. Now many studies show that women do like looking at effeminate men. It is the same with men. Many female model resemble pubescent boys more thatn women. Much haute coutre would look better on a 12 year old boy than a women. However, for the most part, heterosexual people do not form long lasting partnerships with the picture in a magazine.
I know many men who are neatly dressed, well mannered, elegant, perhaps even shaved. These men would not meet the defintion of the so-called 'metrosexual' because no one would think they are gay. They are merely men who care about how they look and perhaps care about fashion. These are, in fact, as you would say, gentlemen.
Given our relationship with Iraq during time that Iraq invaded Iran, I tend to believe we had a pretty good idea of not only what he had, but how far and how much. We probably knew exactly what he got from Russia, and exactly what he got from GE et al.
The first Gulf war established out authority over the region. We set up a survelience system that one of the most advanced in NATO.It allowed to monitor any advances in WMD. And since the probably has the most advanced WMD, at least in terms nuclear and biological power, we certainly new exactly what to look for.
I think if things get declassified in 50 years we migh know what happened with the WMD. What we do know it that the the latest invasion was in the planning stages since the late 90's.
And many liberal critized Clinton for his strongarm tactics. However, liberal can never yell as loud as conservatives, so we are seldom hear.
And, let me reiterate. The US supported Iraq when it killed the Iranians. One of the reasons was because the Iranians were opprressing the Kurdish. I guess everyone does. The Iranians were also at the forefront of oppressing women, killing unwelcome people and them proudly publishing thier deaths in the newspapers. The Iranians at that time dismantled a very respectable and open educational system, killing and exiling teachers. As I recall, no one really thought of the Iranians that Iraq had to kill as victims. It was a war to liberate Iran from the muslim fundementalist. Sounds kind of familiar, huh. The only mistake Iraq made was to lose.
He is complaining that if he follows the rules then his email will be easier to block at the ISP. He, and i am sure all spammers, were hoping that this law would create a system in which the ISP would have to let all properly labeled email through to their subscribers.
Such a system of trusted spam is precisely what the recently reported idea from MS likely is targeted towards. It is really what the spammers want. It is also why these laws are much better than the/. crowd allows. It forces spammers in that advertise for US companies to make thier junk easily identifiable or face stiff penalties. Once the junk is idenfiable, the ISPs can block it. If it blocked, then the stupid lusers cannot reply, and the spammer makes no money.
I not a real physicist, but here is my guess. Physical constants are constant within our ability to measure them. The one big exception is the speed of light in a vacuum, which is fixed by convention and we call it 'c'. 'c' is in fact a ratio of that what we call distance and what we call time. Every other basic constant is measured and the number reported is out best guess with the best estimate of the error. The constant appear to be fixed within our ability to measure them.
We count seconds by counting the transition between the hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. We take any handy cesium atoms, count about 9 billions transitions, or actually the radiation from them, and call that a second. We build a machine to do the counting, increment, and we have a very accurate clock. We take some other arbitrary cesium atoms, build the same machine, and find another good match. In fact over time the scientists who do this thing think that all these clocks match to better than 1 part in a trillion That means that there is not going to be a meaningful difference in the measurements of an experiment of normal duration. Over the course of the year, perhaps a millionth of a second.
In fact our second is not fixed. As we have more accurate ways to measure a second, the standard is updated. The new standard is as closes a possible to the old one, but not exactly the same.
As far as whether constants are changing, I think we have no real way of knowing that. In the spirit of science, the simplest explanation is accepted as the best explanation. In this case, the clocks are accurate and constant, and the earth has a slight variation in it's mechanics. Whether this explanation is 'the truth' is left to the philosophers. Assuming that constants are different in different parts of the universe or that constants are varying below out ability to measure them is an unnecessary complexity wrt the measurement of time. There are people who research these things, but only to make sure everyone else it kept honest. When the discover a constant that is not constant, they will let us know.
The saddest thing is he uses the same excuse as the spouse batterer, the child molester, and the fascist ruler:
Mr. Ralsky said that he was uncomfortable about this deception, but that he had no choice. "Is putting bogus information in your registrations the right way to do business?" he asked. "No. But the Internet world has forced me to do that."
Why do people still think this is a valid excuse. I am sorry I killed my husband but he didn't use a coaster. I am sorry i killed my child but she kept crying. I am sorry I killed one million people, but they were in the way.
No one makes you do something. You make a choice. You make a choice to go to school or not. You make a choice to go to work or not. You make a choice to live an honest life or not. You make the choice, and you should be man or woman enough to stand by them and take responsibility. Not be yet another sorry excuse for a human and say "I don't recall" or "I didn't know" or "I was ordered to".
In case anyone might take the newspaper seriously, here are a few facts. The Chronicle is a barely literate newspaper most suitable for use as a method to teach elementary school students about correcting errors in english usage. The papers main purpose is to deliver coupons and support local and state governments. The chron did little to expose the lies of the local education administrators, even though such lies were obvious to anyone with the ability of logical thought.
The newspaper is beholden to the local oil interests. Weeks into the Enron collapsed, they still had not carried a major story exlaining issue. Again all out news came from the NYT. To this day they still believe Ken Lay is just the most honest wonderful stand up guy. He had no responsibility for the actions of his company.
The funniest thing about the Chronicle, at least locally, is their distribution method. In order to keep the numbers up, they give the newspapers to homeless people. These people are then free to trade the newspaper for money. I think they promise to sell all the papers, and the Chronicle checks up on them. I have had such people throw a paper into my car just so they could get out of the sun. Of course all these papers are reported as circulated.
And the second thing I learned was to do things once and do it right. This means that input should happen in one place, the function should make sure the input will fit in the allocated space and contain only the proper data, and may even take an argument for the maximum size the calling fuction expects.
What amazes me is that people try to optimize thier code by carefully minimizes thier input fuction. It is input. Input is slow. Go somewhere else to optimize. Create a good input fuction and leave it alone.
The third thing I learned was to write a good validitating layer for memory allocation in C. Used as debug tool, it discover all most of the little memory problems that inevitable creep into C, as well as some buffer overflows. I know people bitch about how screwed up C is, but with the proper debug tools I had few problems.
Animaniacs, which probably had the highest concentraion of Star Trek refences of any animation exept for the Simpson, did a wonderful episode called 'Karaoke-Dokie'. It was one of the best parodies of Shanter and Nimoy, rendering both in full Star Trek style. In it Willie Slakmer and Lenny Neeboy present their particular brand of music. Absolutely hilarious.
The McDonalds example is particularly apt. For a long time McDonalds stood on reasonable quality food, served in reasonable stores, by reasonable people, that a reasonable family could feel comfortable eating, at a reasonable price. This is how they built the company. You could get better food, but it would not necessarily be of the consistent quality. However, as they got huge the quality issues suffered and they slowly started allowing their competitors define the marketplace as one in which price was a prime factor. So, today Mcdonalds is just one of many stores trying to bring in customers with the cheapest tolerable foodstuff.
Which is what Apple avoided. When they were losing the PC battle of the 80's, they could have participated in the drive to the bottom levels of hell. They did not. The developed a Brand that enough people were willing to pay for. Though the results have been mixed, I think it s why Apple is still around.
So now Apple again has products that might take off and give then a significant market share. We have $800 iBooks and maybe $100 iPods. I hope these products do not indicate they are going to make meeting a low price point their primary design goal. I would hate for Apple to just one of several vendors offering crap.
I think the ad people are already doing the best they can. It is like all content. The vast majority of it is crap. Some of it is very good. A tiny slice is excellent and becomes part of the culture. They might be able to do better if they let the creative end own the process, but then perhaps you don't end up with the hybrid needed to push products.
As far as whether a commercial is offensive, the criteria is really whether your target market is going to react negatively, and then whether any religious of political fanatics will react negatively. For example, beer commercials can show nearly naked women all they want because it is not offensive to the target market and others that are offended really can only complain. On the other hand, a beer commercial is not going to show much male skin because it will offend the homophobic males that make up a significant portion, though not necessarily the majority, of the demographic.
The future probably holds an increase in embedded ads, or a return to days when a single company sponsors a show. Either one will get a company exposure while maintaining a reasonable ad budget.
My understanding is that this is a pretty common way to explore planets. We shot probes at rocks, let them impact, and hope they survive. It is how we explored the moon. We just kept shooting hardware at it until one of them survived.
Of course due to the limitiations on travel to mars we cannot just launch a new probe every month. And this is the problem we have with the current program. Our probes are minimilist and fragile, and mars is a much more complex enviroment that a completely dead moon.
I wouldn't say guidence systems were the issue, but how about some old fashion redundancy.
No one said OOo was rudimentary. The point was that software without a computer is of little use. If a person already has a computer, that tends to indicate that the person is not all that technologically disadvantaged,since they already have a computer. And if they are technologically disadvantaged, i.e. have no computer, then a rudimentary introductory package is probably much more appropriate. Walk before you run and all that. (and remeber people expect trouble from MS, but any problems with installing or using something else, and they get really upset and go back to MS)
As far as a computer being cheaper than office, that is just bull, at least in the US. Street price on the basic version of Office is around $200, while the professional version is around $300. It may be more elsewhere. That is about the same price as a computer. But that is really besides the point. Again, if a person has a computer they can usually buy, trade, or copy for software. If they don't, a peice of plastic is not going to significantly help.
I know that this is getting modded to hell because all the OSS fanboys think it is antiOSS. But read the words. I think this is a good strategy to get people use OOo. But i know no one with a computer that lacks software, and very few actually had to directly pay for it. The technological gap is not software.
Don't most computer come with a rudimentary work processor and spreadsheet? It seems like mac still comes with Appleworks and PC with a stripped version of office. So how does this help? Is giving away copies of OOo going to reduce the cost of buying a computer so that it is affordable to everyone? Can someone say 'I don't need MS Office so take that off my bill." I think we have already tried and failed to get MS to refund licensing costs.
This is just a way to get people to try OOo in an effort to phase out MS. I think it is a good thing, and may ultimately make MS behave better is Israel, but it is not in any way, shape or form going to reduce the technological gap.
This is what i think will get the studios in trouble in a few years. Although a DVD provides additional content, it also includes a number of impediments to actually watching the movie. Menus, commercials, silly startup graphics that even the lamest website learned long ago grows tedious on the 10th viewing.
I think many people, as bandwidth increases, will choose to download movies rather than pay even $10 for disabled content. The extra stuff is great, but studios must deliver their core content. A movie. Not commercials. Not wussy stuntmen crying over piracy. Not graphics designed by the producer's 3 year old.
If watching an movie free of commercials and useless graphics can only be achieved by unlicensed download, then I for one see little reason to acquire a license. The movie is spoiled product. The additional content is cheap. Just let us watch the movie.
Perhaps this is true to the EFX driven content, but most plot/character driven movies are widely available on VHS. DVD is reletively new format with many annoying properties, like taking over your TV. Many people just want to able to watch the movie.
It seems pretty clear that we remember things through links. I remember certain people in certain settings, but not others. I can put my hand on a book and remember facts contained in that book that I would not otherwise recall. I will meet an old friends and remember details of our relationship that I have not thought of for years. In teaching we try to relate new information with information the student is already familiar.
Therefore the most immediate hope of memory erasure is to interrupt the path of recall. This would not likely result in permanent erasure, as the brain seems to be good at creating new path to old memories, especially when confronted with similar stimulus, but it would be good enough for many purposes
I am not sure where the new insight is. The Holy Grail interpretation is interesting, but no that relevant since most consider it a symbol whose form is not important. Giving it a form related to Mary Magdalene and creating a conspiracy simply restates the old notion that part of the goal of The Church in creating the testaments was to destroy the Goddess based religions. This was done through Eve and Magdalene. Jesus' mother Mary was the only vestige left of the Goddess and she was given a clearly subservient role. As far as Magdalene is concerned, she very well could have been Jesus' wife. Much of this was covered in Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins, published in 1990.
But all that is really besides the point. As we come out of the Christmas season I believe the thing to remember is that we should try not to worship a man, or create an idol out of a book or institution or block of stone. It is easy to call something crap, or a baseless attack, or bigoted. But we should be careful with such attacks when our source book would not stand to equal criticism. The basic teaching of Jesus are relevant and true. Trying to go beyond them to enforce some fictional reality is simply silly and creates all sorts of unnecessary scaffolding, like the trinity, birth stories, and massively expensive and destructive campaigns. The truth will always stand on it's own.
The nice thing is that MS is so heavily covered in the press, their intentions are no longer hidden. Some recent examples:
The media center is a clear attempt to compete and eventually create a monopoly in the video capture and editing market.
The recent patent of the FAT file structure is an effort to generate cash from their patents. They will probably also used the licensing of these products to create incompatibility. For instance, the companies the license FAT technology must include drivers for all version of Windows, and must not include drivers for other OS.
The recent post about them requiring senders of email to solve a puzzle. This clearly has no advantage to current filters and will serve only to create a system of trusted spam. Such a system will run off of MS servers, and work with only with Outlook. Therefore, the spammers will be part of the army encouraging everyone not only to use Windows, but also outlook.
MS has been fighting on two fronts for a long time. It is tightening it grip to making moving from MS products as painful as possible as well as reforming products that can be used to generate profits in Windows loses it's monopoly in the market. As example of the later is the continuing deforming of IE and the propagation of sites that require those deformities. An example of the later is the developing nature of.net, or whatever the hell they are calling it this week.
The fax machine is the perfect assistant. It is almost 100% reliable with almost not setup, maintainance, or fuss. Put paper in, press a fewe buttons, and go. The last time I used a fax machine it offered two line capabilities, ability to store many pages, as well as computer printer functions.
Scanning in a document, attaching it to email, and then sending it requires more time, expertise, as well as less reliability. The time issue is the most important.
I use a fax program but only becuase I hardly ever need to send faxes and I don't want to allocate space for a fax machine. The complexity of me sending a fax from my computer, even if it is a document I create on the computer, is significantly more complex than using a fax machine. I also have used email-to-fax services, but these were only benificial for out-of-area faxes, in which I saved toll charges.
I see it similiar to Advantix camera. The advantix is probably of lower quality than even a simple 35 mm point and shoot. However, for most people is very much simpler, and therefore the quality issue is compensated for.
Didn't the powers that be decree that USB 1.1 shall be refered to as USB 2.0? From the comments on this story, I thought we were supposed to pretend there was no differences because any alleged differences were of no consequence. Anyway, anyone who needed high speeds were terrorist of pirates.
Your movie theater example is interesting. As I understand it, a movie theater is a place where you pay a cover charge, and then buy food and see a movie. The money is made by the sales of food, and not from the cover charge, which largely is paid to the supplier of the content. If the money were made by the cover charge, the tickets would be $20. As it is, average cost for a movie, which lasts $90 minutes, is $12-$15 a person.
So, will people pay. To begin with, some are going to pay a minute or hourly fee to have a connected laptop. The convenience is worth the money. The fact that people bought telegraphs, land lines, beepers, cell phones, and net connections when the costs were astronomical attest to this fact. These connection were not available to everyone, nor did base charges allow you to connect to or from a place outside your local area. However, in the current climate, people do expect cheap connections that work everywhere. Given this, will the market be large enough to support WiFi access points. I would agree with you that it is probably not the case.
So, what is the answer. Movie theaters. Contract with the proprietors of coffee houses, book stores, airports, anywhere that people se laptops. The proprietor can offer access free to customers, or with a per minute charge. This is already being done, but needs to be pushed a no or low cost solution to these establishments. This might provide enough money if every laptop is WiFi capable.
And this means that most laptops must come with WiFi connections just like most desktops come with network and modem connections. If it cost $150 and requires you to muck around the systems setting to get WiFi, most people will not do it. they will say it is not worth the trouble for the few hours a week they might use it. But if the laptop is already set up, and they may choose to go to a place with WiFi connections, and spend the $5 for a half hour in addition to their $5 for coffee.
It a sense you are right. The pork barrel politics is a particularly timely example. In this time of massive budget deficit, when the US government is controlled by fiscal conservatives, the pork has never been greater. This is done directly to increase the personal power of the politicians.
But it would be wrong to say there is a general attempt to increase the size and scope of government. In fact the federal government is trying it best to get rid of many programs, either by de-funding them or moving them to the states. The programs that that they want to grow are those that have to do with insuring long term power of the elite, that is the police and military. So, in this case, the laws another means by which the government can violate the civil rights of the individual. The question need be asked does the nature of the offense (allegedcopyright violation) fit the nature of the remedy.
Slashdot Mirror
When I listened to the radio, listening to the end of year top 100 was fun because it allowed me to reminisce through the year. Of course, I would then go to my albums and listen to the songs I really thought were good. I always thought it was sad that some people equated the top 100 with a genuine mark of universal quality.
BTW, I think the music listed is probably a representative sample of the best popular music of the last year. The simplicity of method makes the case study interesting.
Apple IIgs and NeXt Cube were all targeted toward certain educational markets, and these machines did well in those markets. The IIgs was an incremental step in a long lasting and very profitable line of computers. As you know NeXt technology has renamed and integrated into a new product.
The Newton went through many incarnations, sold many units, and was very useful for many people. Given the number of units still running, it cannot be considered a big flop, but merely a small one. The Lisa was a bigger flop.
The RS-232 was a very useful and important harware interface. It is true it had more wires than it needed, but I think that was because the cables were to be useful for other standards. It is a very old technology, and never flopped, just got replaced.
8", 5 1/4, and 3 1/2 inch floppies are the same deal. So is audio cassette storage. I stored stuff on cassette. For the file sizes I was dealing with, it was the perfect portable technology. And it was most useful for portable computers.
My list of flops Navigator
8088
Cyberdog
Netmeeting and video conferencing in general
Magneto-Optical drives
I know many men who are neatly dressed, well mannered, elegant, perhaps even shaved. These men would not meet the defintion of the so-called 'metrosexual' because no one would think they are gay. They are merely men who care about how they look and perhaps care about fashion. These are, in fact, as you would say, gentlemen.
The is only one superhero by the internet, of the internet, and from the internet
Freakazoid!
"Super-teen extraordinaire
Freakazoid! Freakazoid!
Runs around in underwear
Freakazoid! Freakazoid!"
Given our relationship with Iraq during time that Iraq invaded Iran, I tend to believe we had a pretty good idea of not only what he had, but how far and how much. We probably knew exactly what he got from Russia, and exactly what he got from GE et al.
The first Gulf war established out authority over the region. We set up a survelience system that one of the most advanced in NATO.It allowed to monitor any advances in WMD. And since the probably has the most advanced WMD, at least in terms nuclear and biological power, we certainly new exactly what to look for.
I think if things get declassified in 50 years we migh know what happened with the WMD. What we do know it that the the latest invasion was in the planning stages since the late 90's. And many liberal critized Clinton for his strongarm tactics. However, liberal can never yell as loud as conservatives, so we are seldom hear.
And, let me reiterate. The US supported Iraq when it killed the Iranians. One of the reasons was because the Iranians were opprressing the Kurdish. I guess everyone does. The Iranians were also at the forefront of oppressing women, killing unwelcome people and them proudly publishing thier deaths in the newspapers. The Iranians at that time dismantled a very respectable and open educational system, killing and exiling teachers. As I recall, no one really thought of the Iranians that Iraq had to kill as victims. It was a war to liberate Iran from the muslim fundementalist. Sounds kind of familiar, huh. The only mistake Iraq made was to lose.
Such a system of trusted spam is precisely what the recently reported idea from MS likely is targeted towards. It is really what the spammers want. It is also why these laws are much better than the /. crowd allows. It forces spammers in that advertise for US companies to make thier junk easily identifiable or face stiff penalties. Once the junk is idenfiable, the ISPs can block it. If it blocked, then the stupid lusers cannot reply, and the spammer makes no money.
We count seconds by counting the transition between the hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. We take any handy cesium atoms, count about 9 billions transitions, or actually the radiation from them, and call that a second. We build a machine to do the counting, increment, and we have a very accurate clock. We take some other arbitrary cesium atoms, build the same machine, and find another good match. In fact over time the scientists who do this thing think that all these clocks match to better than 1 part in a trillion That means that there is not going to be a meaningful difference in the measurements of an experiment of normal duration. Over the course of the year, perhaps a millionth of a second.
In fact our second is not fixed. As we have more accurate ways to measure a second, the standard is updated. The new standard is as closes a possible to the old one, but not exactly the same.
As far as whether constants are changing, I think we have no real way of knowing that. In the spirit of science, the simplest explanation is accepted as the best explanation. In this case, the clocks are accurate and constant, and the earth has a slight variation in it's mechanics. Whether this explanation is 'the truth' is left to the philosophers. Assuming that constants are different in different parts of the universe or that constants are varying below out ability to measure them is an unnecessary complexity wrt the measurement of time. There are people who research these things, but only to make sure everyone else it kept honest. When the discover a constant that is not constant, they will let us know.
Mr. Ralsky said that he was uncomfortable about this deception, but that he had no choice. "Is putting bogus information in your registrations the right way to do business?" he asked. "No. But the Internet world has forced me to do that."
Why do people still think this is a valid excuse. I am sorry I killed my husband but he didn't use a coaster. I am sorry i killed my child but she kept crying. I am sorry I killed one million people, but they were in the way.
No one makes you do something. You make a choice. You make a choice to go to school or not. You make a choice to go to work or not. You make a choice to live an honest life or not. You make the choice, and you should be man or woman enough to stand by them and take responsibility. Not be yet another sorry excuse for a human and say "I don't recall" or "I didn't know" or "I was ordered to".
The newspaper is beholden to the local oil interests. Weeks into the Enron collapsed, they still had not carried a major story exlaining issue. Again all out news came from the NYT. To this day they still believe Ken Lay is just the most honest wonderful stand up guy. He had no responsibility for the actions of his company.
The funniest thing about the Chronicle, at least locally, is their distribution method. In order to keep the numbers up, they give the newspapers to homeless people. These people are then free to trade the newspaper for money. I think they promise to sell all the papers, and the Chronicle checks up on them. I have had such people throw a paper into my car just so they could get out of the sun. Of course all these papers are reported as circulated.
What amazes me is that people try to optimize thier code by carefully minimizes thier input fuction. It is input. Input is slow. Go somewhere else to optimize. Create a good input fuction and leave it alone.
The third thing I learned was to write a good validitating layer for memory allocation in C. Used as debug tool, it discover all most of the little memory problems that inevitable creep into C, as well as some buffer overflows. I know people bitch about how screwed up C is, but with the proper debug tools I had few problems.
Animaniacs, which probably had the highest concentraion of Star Trek refences of any animation exept for the Simpson, did a wonderful episode called 'Karaoke-Dokie'. It was one of the best parodies of Shanter and Nimoy, rendering both in full Star Trek style. In it Willie Slakmer and Lenny Neeboy present their particular brand of music. Absolutely hilarious.
Which is what Apple avoided. When they were losing the PC battle of the 80's, they could have participated in the drive to the bottom levels of hell. They did not. The developed a Brand that enough people were willing to pay for. Though the results have been mixed, I think it s why Apple is still around.
So now Apple again has products that might take off and give then a significant market share. We have $800 iBooks and maybe $100 iPods. I hope these products do not indicate they are going to make meeting a low price point their primary design goal. I would hate for Apple to just one of several vendors offering crap.
As far as whether a commercial is offensive, the criteria is really whether your target market is going to react negatively, and then whether any religious of political fanatics will react negatively. For example, beer commercials can show nearly naked women all they want because it is not offensive to the target market and others that are offended really can only complain. On the other hand, a beer commercial is not going to show much male skin because it will offend the homophobic males that make up a significant portion, though not necessarily the majority, of the demographic.
The future probably holds an increase in embedded ads, or a return to days when a single company sponsors a show. Either one will get a company exposure while maintaining a reasonable ad budget.
Of course due to the limitiations on travel to mars we cannot just launch a new probe every month. And this is the problem we have with the current program. Our probes are minimilist and fragile, and mars is a much more complex enviroment that a completely dead moon.
I wouldn't say guidence systems were the issue, but how about some old fashion redundancy.
As far as a computer being cheaper than office, that is just bull, at least in the US. Street price on the basic version of Office is around $200, while the professional version is around $300. It may be more elsewhere. That is about the same price as a computer. But that is really besides the point. Again, if a person has a computer they can usually buy, trade, or copy for software. If they don't, a peice of plastic is not going to significantly help.
I know that this is getting modded to hell because all the OSS fanboys think it is antiOSS. But read the words. I think this is a good strategy to get people use OOo. But i know no one with a computer that lacks software, and very few actually had to directly pay for it. The technological gap is not software.
This is just a way to get people to try OOo in an effort to phase out MS. I think it is a good thing, and may ultimately make MS behave better is Israel, but it is not in any way, shape or form going to reduce the technological gap.
I think many people, as bandwidth increases, will choose to download movies rather than pay even $10 for disabled content. The extra stuff is great, but studios must deliver their core content. A movie. Not commercials. Not wussy stuntmen crying over piracy. Not graphics designed by the producer's 3 year old.
If watching an movie free of commercials and useless graphics can only be achieved by unlicensed download, then I for one see little reason to acquire a license. The movie is spoiled product. The additional content is cheap. Just let us watch the movie.
Perhaps this is true to the EFX driven content, but most plot/character driven movies are widely available on VHS. DVD is reletively new format with many annoying properties, like taking over your TV. Many people just want to able to watch the movie.
Therefore the most immediate hope of memory erasure is to interrupt the path of recall. This would not likely result in permanent erasure, as the brain seems to be good at creating new path to old memories, especially when confronted with similar stimulus, but it would be good enough for many purposes
But all that is really besides the point. As we come out of the Christmas season I believe the thing to remember is that we should try not to worship a man, or create an idol out of a book or institution or block of stone. It is easy to call something crap, or a baseless attack, or bigoted. But we should be careful with such attacks when our source book would not stand to equal criticism. The basic teaching of Jesus are relevant and true. Trying to go beyond them to enforce some fictional reality is simply silly and creates all sorts of unnecessary scaffolding, like the trinity, birth stories, and massively expensive and destructive campaigns. The truth will always stand on it's own.
The media center is a clear attempt to compete and eventually create a monopoly in the video capture and editing market.
The recent patent of the FAT file structure is an effort to generate cash from their patents. They will probably also used the licensing of these products to create incompatibility. For instance, the companies the license FAT technology must include drivers for all version of Windows, and must not include drivers for other OS.
The recent post about them requiring senders of email to solve a puzzle. This clearly has no advantage to current filters and will serve only to create a system of trusted spam. Such a system will run off of MS servers, and work with only with Outlook. Therefore, the spammers will be part of the army encouraging everyone not only to use Windows, but also outlook.
MS has been fighting on two fronts for a long time. It is tightening it grip to making moving from MS products as painful as possible as well as reforming products that can be used to generate profits in Windows loses it's monopoly in the market. As example of the later is the continuing deforming of IE and the propagation of sites that require those deformities. An example of the later is the developing nature of .net, or whatever the hell they are calling it this week.
Scanning in a document, attaching it to email, and then sending it requires more time, expertise, as well as less reliability. The time issue is the most important.
I use a fax program but only becuase I hardly ever need to send faxes and I don't want to allocate space for a fax machine. The complexity of me sending a fax from my computer, even if it is a document I create on the computer, is significantly more complex than using a fax machine. I also have used email-to-fax services, but these were only benificial for out-of-area faxes, in which I saved toll charges.
I see it similiar to Advantix camera. The advantix is probably of lower quality than even a simple 35 mm point and shoot. However, for most people is very much simpler, and therefore the quality issue is compensated for.
Didn't the powers that be decree that USB 1.1 shall be refered to as USB 2.0? From the comments on this story, I thought we were supposed to pretend there was no differences because any alleged differences were of no consequence. Anyway, anyone who needed high speeds were terrorist of pirates.
So, will people pay. To begin with, some are going to pay a minute or hourly fee to have a connected laptop. The convenience is worth the money. The fact that people bought telegraphs, land lines, beepers, cell phones, and net connections when the costs were astronomical attest to this fact. These connection were not available to everyone, nor did base charges allow you to connect to or from a place outside your local area. However, in the current climate, people do expect cheap connections that work everywhere. Given this, will the market be large enough to support WiFi access points. I would agree with you that it is probably not the case.
So, what is the answer. Movie theaters. Contract with the proprietors of coffee houses, book stores, airports, anywhere that people se laptops. The proprietor can offer access free to customers, or with a per minute charge. This is already being done, but needs to be pushed a no or low cost solution to these establishments. This might provide enough money if every laptop is WiFi capable.
And this means that most laptops must come with WiFi connections just like most desktops come with network and modem connections. If it cost $150 and requires you to muck around the systems setting to get WiFi, most people will not do it. they will say it is not worth the trouble for the few hours a week they might use it. But if the laptop is already set up, and they may choose to go to a place with WiFi connections, and spend the $5 for a half hour in addition to their $5 for coffee.
But it would be wrong to say there is a general attempt to increase the size and scope of government. In fact the federal government is trying it best to get rid of many programs, either by de-funding them or moving them to the states. The programs that that they want to grow are those that have to do with insuring long term power of the elite, that is the police and military. So, in this case, the laws another means by which the government can violate the civil rights of the individual. The question need be asked does the nature of the offense (allegedcopyright violation) fit the nature of the remedy.