The relative size disparity is an issue, and maybe part of the solution is to start imposing size limits on passenger vehicles if people driving SUVs are forcing other drivers to drive larger cars out of self-preservation.
At the same time, part of being a good driver involves paying attention to what is behind you as well as in front of you, and maintaining both a safe stopping distance as well as an escape route so you can swerve away if someone is coming up behind you too fast. Complacent drivers are at risk no matter what kind of car they're in, while an alert and skilled driver with a maneuverable and responsive car will be reasonably safe (given that driving is an inherently risky thing) without having to rely on airbags and thousands of pounds of steel to protect against collisions.
In other words: take driving seriously and pay attention to what you're doing, and the size of your car becomes less of an issue.
For a long time I thought that Ultima V was the best Ultima ever made. Then I met someone else who shared that opinion and then knew that I may not be crazy. Ultima IV was also not far behind, or at least it's equal. That's probably why a group of people went through great pains to recreate Ultima V using the dungeon seige engine. (see this link for info.)
Ultima V was too ambitious for its time. The depth of its story and gameplay were a huge leap forward from Ultima IV or anything else that came before it, and it was the last of the classic Ultima format with multi-scale maps. The storyline and ambiance were dark and quite mature. Subsequent Ultimas were more detailed and interactive, but also felt so small and cozy compared to the vast Britannia of Ultima V.
Unfortunately, Ultima V really pushed the limits of the computers of the day, both in terms of technology and interface design. On the C64, it ran slowly, and the interface was too clunky to handle all of the complexity, making much of the game play, especially combat, kind of aggravating. The long disk accesses when changing areas were also an annoyance, especially with a single 1541 floppy drive. As much as I loved the game, I actually abandoned it without finishing it (as I did with Ultima VIII, but that was because U8 was just a bad game) because certain aspects of game play were a chore. On a C64 emulator sped up about 25%, the game is considerably more playable.
You know there are more channels on cable that have programming geared towards the "older, wiser crowd", right? MTV isn't the only channel on cable. Channels like The History Channel, Discovery, TLC, The Documentary Channel, and well, CNN, CSPAN, and others provide way more interesting TV than most of the network shows.
I'm not sure how long its been since you watched TV, but TLC stopped showing educational programming around the mid-90s, and for the past 5 or 6 years at least has been pretty much exclusively wedding and makeover shows. Discovery has Mythbusters and... well, at least it has Mythbusters. CNN stopped doing journalism years ago and just does gossip and the kind of quality reporting you get in free daily "news" papers. Being in Canada, I don't get the History Channel, but the Canadian equivalent (History Television) has dumbed itself down considerably over the past decade; don't know if there is a correlation in programming. I don't get CSPAN either. Is it as cool as CPAC? I was under the impression that congressional speeches were even more depressing and shook one's faith in democracy even more than parliamentary ones.
The Liberal Party is in disarray and has an uncharismatic leader with a low profile. The opposition has had ample opportunity to topple the government, but is afraid of fighting an election at this time, especially if they go to the polls with the public perception that they were the ones who made the government fall. It is generally thought that the Conservatives want the government to fall, provided it can be blamed on the uncooperative opposition. If they manage to engineer the fall of their own government and pin the blame on the Liberals, they have a decent shot at a majority.
The Bloc will probably support this legislation; the NDP will oppose it. (If even they support it, we're all screwed.) To defeat the bill, the Liberals must oppose it, but if it becomes a confidence issue--and I don't put it past Harper to abuse the confidence process in this way--the Liberals will have to decide if the bill is unpopular enough to risk being blamed for forcing a new election because of their opposition to it.
Of course, the Liberals introduced a DMCA-Lite bill during their last term in office, so I wouldn't assume they're against it to begin with.
*sigh* I remember a time when Canadians said, "sure our dollar is worthless, but we have halfway-sensible copyright laws, and our police don't go around killing people who pose no danger to anyone." If things continue like this, I'm moving to Greenland.
Look at Master of Orion...Master of Orion II was a great game and Master of Orion III was a complete dog. An upgrade of AI, graphics, buildings and ship gear on MOO2 would have left them with a solid, potentially excellent game. Instead they tossed everything from MOO2 except the name, and proceeded to create one of the great flops of all time.
The trick is to improve the game by addressing its weakest points without changing its strongest. In MOO II, the least fun things about the game, IMO, were: starts were too slow (not enough to do at the beginning), micromanagement got tedious by mid-game when you had a fair number of colonies, and the game reached the tipping point too soon (the point where you knew whether you were going to ultimately win or lose came well before the end of the game, making the last few hours of play anticlimactic). If they had addressed those things (for example: by increasing the management decisions for the home world, simplifying colony management, making it easier to catch up in technology, and nerfing the most powerful weapons and defenses) and combined that with better AI and some nice shiny new graphics, it would have been great.
In Starcraft, I found the greatest weaknesses of the game to be: the difficulty in meaningfully managing hordes of troops and of coordinating a multi-pronged attack or simultaneously attacking an enemy while defending your own base and managing resource gathering, and the enemy AI in the non-campaign game which essentially made one on one fights a cakewalk but two on one fights extremely difficult, with very little in between on the difficulty scale. If those two things could be addressed, Starcraft 2 would be a great successor to the original.
Sid Meier has done a (mostly) good job in successively refining Civilization, adding new interesting features and getting rid of the stuff that didn't work so well last time, without altering the basic formula of the game.
Since no one will bother to RTFA -- the "choices" he's criticizing aren't configuration choices (which is also a valid debate), but redundant (or basically redundant) ways of performing the same action via multiple routes.
Actually, he's saying that the interface is giving the user several options each of which someone would think is important but which most users are unable to distinguish from one another.
The main theme of Schwartz's book (which is a good read) that Spolsky references is that most people will tell you they want more choices but, when you actually give them more choices, they are less happy because more choices means more work: each choice you have to make is one more obstacle to accomplishing your goal, and it is often difficult to judge which choice is the best. Once a choice is made, people tend to feel regret and remorse because they worry that they haven't made the best choice (Schwartz says people tend to obsess over having "the best" rather than being happy with the first thing that is "good enough" and worry that they might have been able to make a better choice if only they had spent more time and effort investigating all the options. If you have ever tried to buy the "right computer" from Dell, you can probably sympathize.)
So, if you take away the "logout" option, someone is going to scream and say that it is absolutely essential that you have the option of both logging out and simply switching to another active user but, for most people, if they even know what the difference is, either one is "good enough" and making them choose which just adds anxiety and yet another bit of work they have to do in order to make the computer do what they want it to.
Exactly right. This is the new reality. Regardless of who thinks its good and who thinks its bad, the reality is that technology has changed the amount of control people can have over what, when, how, and by whom information gets distributed. Passing more laws and suing people can maybe hold back the tide for a little while, but it is impractical to prevent this sort of thing, since it can take as little as a single person with access to the material and a willingness to distribute it to put it on line and then its too late to unpublish.
Regardless of whether its right or wrong, fair or unfair, it seems like this is the way that things are going to work, and everybody is going to have to get used to it. Businesses are going to have to adjust their business models, and publicists and advertisers are going to have to change their tactics. Those that can figure out a way to work with and benefit from the new reality will do well. Those that complain about how it is unfair will die out. Right or wrong, that is the way the world works.
After having seen the video, I think I have a use for that HMV gift card I have lying around somehwere, assuming the CD is not/will not be DRM crippled.
Unless... few P2P defenders want to admit that they really have no interest in paying for music that they could otherwise get for free.
OK, I'll bite. First, I will point out that downloading music via P2P for personal use does not contravene the Canadian Copyright Act or any other Canadian law, so there is no issue of infringing on anyone's proprietary rights. Since the record companies are intent on asserting their rights to the fullest extent of the law (and beyond) I see absolutely no reason to grant them an inch more: if they insist on pursuing their rights to the fullest extent of the law, then I likewise insist on pursuing mine. If they will not decline to assert their considerable rights in full, then I will not give up any of the few rights that I have either.
Second, I have no issue with paying for a copy of recorded music, as long as it provides a good value for money.
Buying CDs is generally a poor value proposition: $20 for one or two tracks I like is not good value or a reasonable price. The music I want is hard to find on CD, meaning that it is a lot of work on my part to track down what I want. Many newer CDs are infected with all kinds of crap that is potentially dangerous and which might make it harder to convert the CD audio into the MP3 format I need to use the music the way I want to. On the plus side, I can get high-quality rips off of a clean CD, but that doesn't offset the other factors. I might buy a CD if the price is low (second hand shops are more reasonable) and it contains enough material I want, but I won't buy a CD at full retail, with DRM, or with unknown/unheard content.
Buying music from ITMS is a bit of a better proposition: 99 cents is more than it should cost, but low enough that I would be willing to pay if I thought a track had a lot of long-term play value. But the selection is mediocre: less than half of what I want is there, and the files are DRM-hobbled, meaning I have to do extra work (and, if we get DMCA-style legislation, break the law) in order to get it into a DRM-free format that gives me the flexibility I want.
Downloading from P2P is a pain: the selection is uneven but, with perseverence, I can find over 90% of what I want. The quality is uneven: a lot of people dont' know how to cleanly rip and encode a track off CD, so a lot of P2P downloads have clicks and scratches and multiple attempts may be required to get a good copy. Download speed is uneven. The ID3 data is sketchy. I have to verify and fill in the data for each track, and manage my own authority system for ensuring that the forms used for artist and band names are consistent. But once all that is done, I have a copy that I can use where I want, when I want, and how I want. The fact that it is free is a bonus but, even considering the large amount of work I have to do myself, it would be worth a certain amount of money to use even the chaotic, mixed-quality P2P systems that exist today. (Are you listening, music industry?)
If some for-profit commercial business could give me a service that would provide me with the same final product as P2P but with better selection, easier searching, and better quality control, I would happily pay a reasonable price for such a service. But there is no way that I will pay for a product that is inferior and less convenient to one that is available for free.
If you are an artist and you want to make a living by selling copies of recorded music, you have to provide a product that people want at a price that provides good value. High-speed Internet connections, data compression technology, and P2P networks have changed what constitutes good value. I would no more pay $20 for a CD today that I would pay $2,000 for a 4.77MHz IBM XT. At one time, that might have been a fair price for a good product, but not anymore. An artist who relies on copyright law to force people to buy, rather than provide a product that people want to buy isn't going to be very successful in the long run.
My job involves digitizing old (pre-20th Century) documents with a view to preserving and providing easy access to them. We have come to the conclusion that preservation of digital resources is entirely possible, but it is an ongoing process: you cannot just put stuff on a CD and bury it somewhere, confident it will be readable in 500, 50, or even 5 years. You have to take active steps to ensure your data remains available.
Media rot and media and file format obsolescence can cause problems if you just digitize and forget. In the library and archival community, microfilm is generally considered the safest way of preservation because it has a theoretical shelf life of 500 years (though no piece of mircofilm is close to that old) and can be read by anyone with a magnifying device. Even so, microfilm gets lost, damaged, or otherwise rendered unusable. Paper can last even longer, with proper care, but it too is susceptible to damage or loss. Some of the items we have preserved no longer exist in their original form because the last copy was destroyed as a result of use or damage due to less-than-perfect (i.e. real-world) storage.
Regardless of the media, the most important aspects of preserving something are to have multiple copies and to actively maintain your collection. If you actively monitor your collection and migrate file formats and media as needed, you should be alright. If you just file and forget, all bets are off.
Nothing can guarantee 100% retention: every year, the last copy of something disappears forever. But the stuff that still exists today is, by and large, the stuff that someone thought was important enough to actively maintain, or else the stuff where so many copies were made that some were bound to survive regardless of the conditions under which they were stored.
So whose fault is it that Government is "inequipped" to regulate high-tech? If I was inequipped to teach my son about how to walk, and he tried to do it himself, should I cut him off at the knees?
Microsoft is not a human child. It is a legal entity created by an act of government (supposedly) on the grounds that it believed doing so would benefit the people. If it turns out to be the case that a corporation, by its existence, does more harm than good, government has every right and every obligation to take all necessary action up to and including forcing the liquidation of that corporation.
Some may download it for the novelty value, but a 700MB file for the price of a DVD rental? Even with a good cable connection and no transmission errors, I could go and rent the DVD and be halfway finished watching it on a real TV set before the file downloaded. Why would I want to wait the extra time and incur the wrath of my ISP for excessive bandwith consumption (one video is OK, but how about 5 or 10 per month?) so that I can watch movies in probably less than DVD resolution on my 19" monitor, hoping Windows survives the full two hours running time with no crashes?
Plus, even Blockbuster now gives you 2 nights (was evenings; subtle but expensive difference) with a new release, so you don't have to feel so constrained as to when you watch the thing.
Maybe this is a cynical move by WB to discredit the Net as a distribution means, but I think it is more of a pilot, proof of concept project. At this moment, at least for North American users, DVD, VHS, and even pay per view offer better value and greater convenience than downloaded video. Bandwidth has to become a lot cheaper and more plentiful before this sort of thing becomes viable.
Now, if they wanted to release a 320x200 @ 11khz sound version for free or for a small download fee, that might be something; it would allow viewers to preview the movie and decide if they wanted to rent the DVD, or even go see the movie on the big screen, if the thumbnail version were released during the film's debut.
I think all this nonsens about ring to be vastly inflated, I was dragged along to see number 1 and wasn't impressed. I'll be dragged a long to see number 2 and i suspect I won't be to impressed there either.
This is probably why Hollywood is terrified about movie downloads. I'll go see the Two Towers because Fellowship was well-done and, barring any startling revelations about a shocking decline in quality, I have no reason to believe it won't be time and money well-spent. I'm not going to watch the thing at 320x200 with 11Khz sound just to save a few dollars.
On the other hand, there are a lot of movies where I suspect all of the good parts were thrown together to make the 30-second trailer, and everything else is crap. Of course, there's no real way to verify that short of me or at least someone I know spending the $12 to go and see. But if I could download even part of the movie in 320x200 and preview it, maybe I'd have a better idea whether or not it was worth spending my time and money on.
Normally, I'll just pass on any movie that doesn't strike me as being especially compelling. I go to first-run theatres maybe 3-5 times a year, 2-3 of those times because someone else wants me to go. But I suspect that that is atypical viewing behaviour, and that most people watch far more movies.
If people could preview movies before they watched them, I suspect people would see far fewer movies, and be far less disappointed with the ones they did see. It's not bootlegs of LOTR or Star Wars that hurt business; it's bootlegs of the movies that aren't guaranteed hits that hurt.
Privacy is a social issue, not a technological one. The only issue on the technology side is whether or not the technology in question lends itself to access by unauthorized parties. (I.e., can it be cracked.)
It seems to me that far greater intrusions into people's private lives occured in Nazi Germany, East Germany, and the Soviet Union using very low-tech tools indeed.
Whether a parent feels that it is necessary or desirable to monitor the driving of a teenaged child is a decision that each parent must make. Personally, if I had a kid, I wouldn't let him or her drive at all if I didn't feel I could trust him or her to drive responsibly, and the idea of parents spying on kids doesn't sit well with me, but that's just my view.
As far as collecting data for police or insurance purposes, the collection of factual data about the state of a car leading up to an accident is probably a very good thing; after all, when accidents happen, we *do* want to establish the facts of the case. The real issue is to whom this data should be made accessible, under what circumstances, and for what purposes. Use of information is a good thing. It is the *abuse* of information that is not. Using crash data to try to determine why an accident occured does not seem to me to be abuse.
Now once we corrected your other statement we find that this last statement of yours is wrong. Society collectively(at least in the US most other countries) decided that using intellectual property without permission is theft. This determination is what drove the creation of copyright laws several centuries ago. This determination maintains a special passage within the US Constitution.
I'll admit that I am not an expert in copyright law and so my understanding must come from a layman's reading of the laws and of the legal interpretations and explanations of those laws, but I am hard-pressed to find anything that suggests copyright grants any sort of ability to control the use of a work or idea, apart from public performance.
My understanding of copyright is that it grants the rights holder the exclusive right to make copies of a work, subject to certain exceptions. I also understand that it was (and I suppose still is) the position of Napster that private sharing of music was one of those exceptions, and that furthermore there was nothing illegal about facilitating such copying.
It is furthermore my understanding that Napster has not received any punishment or penalty of any sort. It was handed an injunction and ordered to block access to works for which the plaintiffs held copyright because the judge believed that the plaintiffs would probably win their case, but (again, unless I missed something) the case has not yet been fully argued, nor has a judgement been rendered, and likely never will, as Napster has agreed to settle out of court with most of the plaintiffs.
In any event, this is all irrelevant because it deals with events after the fact. Presumably, the stakeholders in Napster were not so blindingly stupid that they established a business which they believed was illegal and would ultimately drive them to bankruptcy. It seems more plausible that they believed that their business, while daring and perhaps risky, would ultimately be found to fall within the law. That you personally disagree isn't really important; that the issue is debated publically and a broad-based consensus is reached is.
And please don't tell me what I meant to say. I can speak for myself.
You're missing the point. In the judgement of the RIAA and, apparently, of some others, Napster was abused. But Napster's took the position that person-to-person sharing of music was completely legitimate and protected in the U.S. by the Home Recording Act.
Unless I missed something big, no verdict was ever reached in the Napster case, we don't know if the courts would have sided with Napster. If I recall correctly, the injunction against Napster was based on the judge's ruling that the plaintiffs would likely prevail on the merits of their case--but the judge never made a formal finding that Napster had done anything illegal. And certainly there was no pre-existing doctrine, law, or social consensus that would have unambiguously informed Napster that it's actions were patently unacceptable. In fact, nobody much thought about it until Napster came along.
If the law were, as you suggest, truly cut and dried, (which it is not--why do you think judges exist?) it would be easy for the RIAA to point to the statute that expressly forbids P2P sharing. The fact is that law is highly interpretive, which is why higher courts exist in the first place, and much of it relies on precedent, public policy, and changing externalities like technology. That's the whole point: Napster was a test to see how P2P music sharing would be interpreted in terms of law and public policy.
Napster's business model was based on stealing. Let me repeat that one more time, just in case you didn't get the point. Napster's business model was based on stealing.
It seems to me that Napster simply provided a service to make easier what was and still is common practice: sharing music. Napster took the practice farther than it had been taken before, and so became a test as to what extent music sharing could be taken and remain acceptable, but it essentially offered nothing that wasn't available before in one form or another.
Fundamentally, there was nothing immoral or unethical about what Napster did. You, I, and the RIAA may all have our own ideas as to what extent the sharing of music should be tolerated. So did Napster. It appears that, in the U.S., the lower courts didn't agree with Napster. But they didn't endorse the RIAA's or anyone else's vision of what should or shouldn't be allowed either. The question remains unresolved, but certainly Napster served to bring the question into the public eye.
The aftermath of Napster has brought many public policy questions to the forefront, most of which remain unanswered. While the RIAA may have preferred that the questions remained unasked, I happen to disagree and think that Napster did us a great service by forcing the issue. (The fact that I was able to locate some old tracks that I had until then never been able to find anywhere was a pleasant side benefit.)
Stealing and theft are heavily loaded terms which imply that one has already made a moral judgement about an issue which is far from cut and dried. Downloading music is only stealing if society collectively decides that it is. And that decision has yet to be made.
3) There's always the old numeral "1" swapped for the lowercase "L" or the uppercase "I", trick, among other similar things that never involved Unicode, but rather human vision and high-resolutions.
Since browsers (and possibly Outlook and other HTML-enabled mail manglers) support downloadable fonts, it shouldn't be all that tricky to just create a custom font with glyphs in the 'wrong' position. microsoft.com might be taken, but I bet that mzcyoqoxp.com is free. You wouldn't have to rely on similarities between glyphs in sans-serif fonts; you could spoof most any address through selective use of downloaded fonts.
Is that what the states are asking for? I was under the impression that all they were asking for was a version of Windows that was not tightly coupled with components like IE and Media Player, allowing system vendors and end users alike to easily remove the Microsoft browser, media player, and whatnot, and replace it with an alternative of its own, much in the same way that standard PC architecture allows one to replace the IBM drive on an IBM PC with one made by Maxtor with no penalty, except inasmuch as the IBM drive might be intrinsically faster, more reliable, or whatnot.
That, it seems to me, is all that is being asked for. All of this rhetoric about billions of versions of Windows to support or less flexible system configurations seems like utter nonsense. Modular does not mean embedded. It means that components can be removed and, if desired, replaced by others without breaking the system as a whole.
* The company's vision statement is "A computer on every desk and in every home." That vision is seeing completion (at least in the Western world). How much of it being attributed to Microsoft can be debated. However, Microsoft has been instrumental in enforcing standards upon the industry so that an open PC platform could flourish. Microsoft also provides software that almost anyone can use and use to be productive.
A computer on every desktop and in every home (running Microsoft software) is great from the perspective of Microsoft's bottom line, but this statement neglects to specify any benefit for anyone else of such a massive deployment of computers, nor does it stipulate that the computers must enable people to do anything productive or useful.
How about "A computer on every desktop, a blue screen of death every day, and an expensive upgrade every year."
Microsoft has enforced standards, but it has done so by opposing other, open standards in favour of its own. In most cases, the Microsoft standard replaces something equally good, if not better, rather than fills a void. Without Microsoft, we'd still have standards, and what's more, we might even have different vendors with implementations that compete on quality instead of compatibility.
We can't know for sure how the PC industry would have developed had Microsoft not been involved, but given the inheret usefulness of computers, the inherent usefulness of standards, and the fact that technologies like TV, telephony, and audio/video manage to develop standards one way or another while maintaining at least a semblance of competition, it seems likely that the PC world would have developed workable standards too.
* Microsoft is consistently one of the most philantropic corporations around. They gives tons of money to schools, libraries and universities. They just gave 8 million bucks to build my new CS building. How many of y'all got donations from MS while you were an undergrad?
When philanthropy is profitable (and tax deductible), corporations will contribute. Even drug pushers give the first hit for free. We can't deny that Microsoft and other corporate donations do good and are appreciated, but corporate philanthropy isn't as altruistic as it's made to look. Ask yourself how much of that philanthropy came in the form of software or money to buy software. If they can give $100 million worth of software that cost a few thousand to produce, and then claim a charitable tax deduction for a significant portion of the $100 million, it seems to me that they haven't given away anything; they just sold their software and taxpayers picked up the tab. (I'm not saying that's necessarily how U.S. tax law works--I don't know for sure--but I am saying we need to consider all the implications of their gifts.)
* Bill Gates has given $24 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, which will spend the money on AIDS research, cancer research, and vaccinations for the third world (among God knows how many other uses).
Bill and Melinda aren't Microsoft, even though they happen to work for it. Since Bill is one of the richest men in the world, it would be disheartening if he wasn't also one of the greatest philanthropists in the world.
* Microsoft products are actually pretty nice. If you're an experienced Unix administrator or do-it-yourself Linux guru, I'm sure you can find lots of reasons to not like MS software. But it's typically easier for common folk to use than competing products (Windows) and sometimes just downright superior (Office).
Inasmuch as there are competing products to Windows and Office, the claim that Windows is easier to use than MacOS, and that Office is easier to use tham Lotus Smart Suite or WordPerfect Office needs some serious corroboration before it can be accepted. Part of the problem, of course, is that there really are very few competing products, thanks to Microsoft's business tactics. If Windows and Office seem easier to use, perhaps it is because, lacking other reasonable choices, most users have already learned how to use them and haven't been exposed to other, possibly superior options to nearly the same extent.
This software contains the intellectual property of several people. Intellectual property is a valuable resource, and you cannot expect to be able to use someone else's intellectual property in your own work for free.
Many businesses and individuals are willing to trade their intellectual property in exchange for something of value; usually money. For example, in return for a sum of money, you might be granted the right to incorporate code from someone's software program into your own.
The developers of this software are willing to trade you the right to use their intellectual property in exchange for something of value. However, instead of money, the developers are willing to trade you the right to freely incoroporate their code into your software in exchange for the right to freely incorporate your code into theirs. This exchange is to be done by way of and under the terms of the GPL.
If you do not think that this is a fair bargain, you are free to decline and to develop your own code or purchase it from someone else. You will still be allowed to use the software yourself, which is awfully nice of the developers, since you probably didn't pay them a penny for it in the first place. If you feel that this would make you a freeloading communist welfare addict, you may instead opt to purchase similar software from a less generous developer.
Please, the last thing we need is more all-infomercial networks.
It seems to me that people really do watch infomercials. They used to be confined to late night TV and limited to a few standard scams, but they're now creeping into mainstream broadcasting. We have the Shopping Channel in Canada (I think QVC is the US equivalent) which is an all-infomercial channel. Specialty channels with no original programming and short schedules, like A&E and TLC, now run infomercials during the morning. On weekend mornings, every network seems to run them. Some of those DIY home rennovation shows are now fundamentally nothing more than infomercials for Home Depot and whichever tool company sponsors the show. It's not too hard to envision a future where the primary purpose of all TV is product promotion and the distinction between advertisement and show will have been erased.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to my job of placing tiny classified ads for misleading 900 services in newspapers, at least until my $19.95 (+S&H) plastic egg-microwaving cup arrives so I can have a healthy delicious breakfast. Then I'm going to paint my house with my $70 (+S&H) paint roller and prepare a healthy dinner of sliced tomatoes and aluminum cans using my $19.95 (+S&H) Ginsu knife that looks a lot like the $4.95 crappy knives in the kitchen gadget section of my grocery store.
The ONLY way you are going to detect and remove commercials is with a luminance level detector and a type of "AI" to watch a few of the shows and determine the approximation of the ad-break times and then work on assumptions. AD's are 30 and 60 seconds in length and breaks are from 2 to 4 minutes in length with Turner networks averaging 8 minutes or more. (UPN does 10 I swear!)
Couldn't you also measure the level of sound compression? IIRC, virtually all commercial spots compress their audio range so that instead of a range of very quiet - very loud you get a range of loud - very loud.
My RCA VCR blanks out and fast forwards through commercials. I don't record a lot of programs, but it seems to work almost all of the time. I'm not sure what technology it uses, but it has to go back *after* it's finished recording in order to mark the commercials.
While they are rebuffed by scientists - does that make these things "fake" or non-science?
Phenomena themselves are never scientific or non-scientific. Likewise, all ideas are genuine -- there is no such thing as a "fake idea." But, to the best of my knowledge, every scientific experiment to evaluate the possibility of psychic powers has shown that the only phenomena at work are delusion, self-deception, and trickery. If anyone has managed to find scientific evidence of psychic powers, it is odd that they have not claimed James Randi's $1 million prize, as well as a host of lesser prizes for the first one who can show real scientific evidence of psychic powers.
The "evidence" for psychic powers is based on completely unscientific methods, including subjective validation, uncontrolled experiments, shoehorning, post hoc reasoning, confirmation bias, and a host of other common logical fallacies.
Scientists don't take these things seriously, because these methods can be used to generate "evidence" for virtually any possible claim, including multiple contradictory claims.
There are things we don't know about the world and about the human brain, but there is no more compelling evidence to suggest that people can predict lottery numbers or commune with the dead than there is evidence that demons cause disease or that invisible pink unicorns roam the prairies.
There has been a growing trend among academia for scientific exclusivism lately, that is, the idea that science can explain all things and anything else is ridiculous superstition. This bothers me; in its own way, it is as bad as any religion, and breeds the same sorts of intolerance (albeit with different targets).
It's generally accepted that religion can explain everything, or at least almost everything. Moreover, it does so with absolute certainty; there is no margin for error. In this respect, all religions are approximately equally good. They all offer The Truth (even though The Truth varies from religion to religion), free of doubt, conjecture, or tentativeness.
I am not aware of any scientist who argues that science can explain everything. It can explain some things, but even those explanations are falliable and may be discovered to be incorrect tomorrow.
On the other hand, religion is notoriously poor at predicting things. Religion makes few (verifiable) predictions and has an extremely poor success rate with the predictions it does make. Science can't predict everything either, but it has a far better success record than religion.
If you want to know why it rained yesterday or why your baby was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, any religion will answer your question with as much if not more authority than science. If you want to know whether you should carry an umbrella with you tomorrow or whether it would be a good idea to stop drinking during your next pregnancy, science can offer much better guidance, even if it can't predict with complete certainty.
Well, mail merge isn't really the kind of function that causes problems, since it's not the sort of thing one runs into when one isn't looking for it, but it still doesn't really belong in a word processor. Remember the adage about using the right tool for the right job. Most people use Word as a word processor for preparing lightweight documents. Occasionally, they need a midweight system for preparing more complex documents with sections, chapters, tables of contents, different headers and footers, complex tables, borders, embedded documents, and other featues. Active content is another animal altogether.
There's no doubt that these fetures are occasionally useful for many users and frequently used by some, but they are also the exact same features that get misused or accidentally activated and make a mess out of documents. I suspect they also encourage poor writing and sloppy document creation in simple documents, as users are often enticed to use unecessary features in the preparation of their simple documents. I've received more very large and very garish memos containing one or two sentences of useful information than I can count. It probably never occurs to the authors that they were over-engineering and making a mess out of what should have been a simple interoffice memo that could have just as easily been written in notepad.
A lightweight word processor is what most people need most of the time. I don't just mean something with limited features, but also something that is designed to maximize the efficiency of preparing simple documents, even if that means it can't do anything more elaborate. If they need extra functionality, a second, more elaborate application can be used. They can work with the same file formats, making it possible to write the text in a simple friendly editor and then format it using the second application. And naturally, the heavier document preparation system would hopefully have a similar and familiar interface and not be arbitrarily different from the basic editor.
If a user spends most of his or her time creating and editing simple documents, then he or she ought to have an application optimized for doing just that. Keeping the number of different tools that a user has to use down to a reasonable number is a laudable goal, but it doesn't take precedence over all other considerations. Sometimes, having two or three separate tools for different jobs is easier to manage and more efficient than having to figure out how to make an all-in-wonder tool work in every possible situation.
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The relative size disparity is an issue, and maybe part of the solution is to start imposing size limits on passenger vehicles if people driving SUVs are forcing other drivers to drive larger cars out of self-preservation.
At the same time, part of being a good driver involves paying attention to what is behind you as well as in front of you, and maintaining both a safe stopping distance as well as an escape route so you can swerve away if someone is coming up behind you too fast. Complacent drivers are at risk no matter what kind of car they're in, while an alert and skilled driver with a maneuverable and responsive car will be reasonably safe (given that driving is an inherently risky thing) without having to rely on airbags and thousands of pounds of steel to protect against collisions.
In other words: take driving seriously and pay attention to what you're doing, and the size of your car becomes less of an issue.
Ultima V was too ambitious for its time. The depth of its story and gameplay were a huge leap forward from Ultima IV or anything else that came before it, and it was the last of the classic Ultima format with multi-scale maps. The storyline and ambiance were dark and quite mature. Subsequent Ultimas were more detailed and interactive, but also felt so small and cozy compared to the vast Britannia of Ultima V.
Unfortunately, Ultima V really pushed the limits of the computers of the day, both in terms of technology and interface design. On the C64, it ran slowly, and the interface was too clunky to handle all of the complexity, making much of the game play, especially combat, kind of aggravating. The long disk accesses when changing areas were also an annoyance, especially with a single 1541 floppy drive. As much as I loved the game, I actually abandoned it without finishing it (as I did with Ultima VIII, but that was because U8 was just a bad game) because certain aspects of game play were a chore. On a C64 emulator sped up about 25%, the game is considerably more playable.
I'm not sure how long its been since you watched TV, but TLC stopped showing educational programming around the mid-90s, and for the past 5 or 6 years at least has been pretty much exclusively wedding and makeover shows. Discovery has Mythbusters and... well, at least it has Mythbusters. CNN stopped doing journalism years ago and just does gossip and the kind of quality reporting you get in free daily "news" papers. Being in Canada, I don't get the History Channel, but the Canadian equivalent (History Television) has dumbed itself down considerably over the past decade; don't know if there is a correlation in programming. I don't get CSPAN either. Is it as cool as CPAC? I was under the impression that congressional speeches were even more depressing and shook one's faith in democracy even more than parliamentary ones.
The Liberal Party is in disarray and has an uncharismatic leader with a low profile. The opposition has had ample opportunity to topple the government, but is afraid of fighting an election at this time, especially if they go to the polls with the public perception that they were the ones who made the government fall. It is generally thought that the Conservatives want the government to fall, provided it can be blamed on the uncooperative opposition. If they manage to engineer the fall of their own government and pin the blame on the Liberals, they have a decent shot at a majority.
The Bloc will probably support this legislation; the NDP will oppose it. (If even they support it, we're all screwed.) To defeat the bill, the Liberals must oppose it, but if it becomes a confidence issue--and I don't put it past Harper to abuse the confidence process in this way--the Liberals will have to decide if the bill is unpopular enough to risk being blamed for forcing a new election because of their opposition to it.
Of course, the Liberals introduced a DMCA-Lite bill during their last term in office, so I wouldn't assume they're against it to begin with.
*sigh* I remember a time when Canadians said, "sure our dollar is worthless, but we have halfway-sensible copyright laws, and our police don't go around killing people who pose no danger to anyone." If things continue like this, I'm moving to Greenland.
Look at Master of Orion...Master of Orion II was a great game and Master of Orion III was a complete dog. An upgrade of AI, graphics, buildings and ship gear on MOO2 would have left them with a solid, potentially excellent game. Instead they tossed everything from MOO2 except the name, and proceeded to create one of the great flops of all time.
The trick is to improve the game by addressing its weakest points without changing its strongest. In MOO II, the least fun things about the game, IMO, were: starts were too slow (not enough to do at the beginning), micromanagement got tedious by mid-game when you had a fair number of colonies, and the game reached the tipping point too soon (the point where you knew whether you were going to ultimately win or lose came well before the end of the game, making the last few hours of play anticlimactic). If they had addressed those things (for example: by increasing the management decisions for the home world, simplifying colony management, making it easier to catch up in technology, and nerfing the most powerful weapons and defenses) and combined that with better AI and some nice shiny new graphics, it would have been great.
In Starcraft, I found the greatest weaknesses of the game to be: the difficulty in meaningfully managing hordes of troops and of coordinating a multi-pronged attack or simultaneously attacking an enemy while defending your own base and managing resource gathering, and the enemy AI in the non-campaign game which essentially made one on one fights a cakewalk but two on one fights extremely difficult, with very little in between on the difficulty scale. If those two things could be addressed, Starcraft 2 would be a great successor to the original.
Sid Meier has done a (mostly) good job in successively refining Civilization, adding new interesting features and getting rid of the stuff that didn't work so well last time, without altering the basic formula of the game.
Since no one will bother to RTFA -- the "choices" he's criticizing aren't configuration choices (which is also a valid debate), but redundant (or basically redundant) ways of performing the same action via multiple routes.
Actually, he's saying that the interface is giving the user several options each of which someone would think is important but which most users are unable to distinguish from one another.
The main theme of Schwartz's book (which is a good read) that Spolsky references is that most people will tell you they want more choices but, when you actually give them more choices, they are less happy because more choices means more work: each choice you have to make is one more obstacle to accomplishing your goal, and it is often difficult to judge which choice is the best. Once a choice is made, people tend to feel regret and remorse because they worry that they haven't made the best choice (Schwartz says people tend to obsess over having "the best" rather than being happy with the first thing that is "good enough" and worry that they might have been able to make a better choice if only they had spent more time and effort investigating all the options. If you have ever tried to buy the "right computer" from Dell, you can probably sympathize.)
So, if you take away the "logout" option, someone is going to scream and say that it is absolutely essential that you have the option of both logging out and simply switching to another active user but, for most people, if they even know what the difference is, either one is "good enough" and making them choose which just adds anxiety and yet another bit of work they have to do in order to make the computer do what they want it to.
Exactly right. This is the new reality. Regardless of who thinks its good and who thinks its bad, the reality is that technology has changed the amount of control people can have over what, when, how, and by whom information gets distributed. Passing more laws and suing people can maybe hold back the tide for a little while, but it is impractical to prevent this sort of thing, since it can take as little as a single person with access to the material and a willingness to distribute it to put it on line and then its too late to unpublish.
Regardless of whether its right or wrong, fair or unfair, it seems like this is the way that things are going to work, and everybody is going to have to get used to it. Businesses are going to have to adjust their business models, and publicists and advertisers are going to have to change their tactics. Those that can figure out a way to work with and benefit from the new reality will do well. Those that complain about how it is unfair will die out. Right or wrong, that is the way the world works.
After having seen the video, I think I have a use for that HMV gift card I have lying around somehwere, assuming the CD is not/will not be DRM crippled.
Unless... few P2P defenders want to admit that they really have no interest in paying for music that they could otherwise get for free.
OK, I'll bite. First, I will point out that downloading music via P2P for personal use does not contravene the Canadian Copyright Act or any other Canadian law, so there is no issue of infringing on anyone's proprietary rights. Since the record companies are intent on asserting their rights to the fullest extent of the law (and beyond) I see absolutely no reason to grant them an inch more: if they insist on pursuing their rights to the fullest extent of the law, then I likewise insist on pursuing mine. If they will not decline to assert their considerable rights in full, then I will not give up any of the few rights that I have either.
Second, I have no issue with paying for a copy of recorded music, as long as it provides a good value for money.
Buying CDs is generally a poor value proposition: $20 for one or two tracks I like is not good value or a reasonable price. The music I want is hard to find on CD, meaning that it is a lot of work on my part to track down what I want. Many newer CDs are infected with all kinds of crap that is potentially dangerous and which might make it harder to convert the CD audio into the MP3 format I need to use the music the way I want to. On the plus side, I can get high-quality rips off of a clean CD, but that doesn't offset the other factors. I might buy a CD if the price is low (second hand shops are more reasonable) and it contains enough material I want, but I won't buy a CD at full retail, with DRM, or with unknown/unheard content.
Buying music from ITMS is a bit of a better proposition: 99 cents is more than it should cost, but low enough that I would be willing to pay if I thought a track had a lot of long-term play value. But the selection is mediocre: less than half of what I want is there, and the files are DRM-hobbled, meaning I have to do extra work (and, if we get DMCA-style legislation, break the law) in order to get it into a DRM-free format that gives me the flexibility I want.
Downloading from P2P is a pain: the selection is uneven but, with perseverence, I can find over 90% of what I want. The quality is uneven: a lot of people dont' know how to cleanly rip and encode a track off CD, so a lot of P2P downloads have clicks and scratches and multiple attempts may be required to get a good copy. Download speed is uneven. The ID3 data is sketchy. I have to verify and fill in the data for each track, and manage my own authority system for ensuring that the forms used for artist and band names are consistent. But once all that is done, I have a copy that I can use where I want, when I want, and how I want. The fact that it is free is a bonus but, even considering the large amount of work I have to do myself, it would be worth a certain amount of money to use even the chaotic, mixed-quality P2P systems that exist today. (Are you listening, music industry?)
If some for-profit commercial business could give me a service that would provide me with the same final product as P2P but with better selection, easier searching, and better quality control, I would happily pay a reasonable price for such a service. But there is no way that I will pay for a product that is inferior and less convenient to one that is available for free.
If you are an artist and you want to make a living by selling copies of recorded music, you have to provide a product that people want at a price that provides good value. High-speed Internet connections, data compression technology, and P2P networks have changed what constitutes good value. I would no more pay $20 for a CD today that I would pay $2,000 for a 4.77MHz IBM XT. At one time, that might have been a fair price for a good product, but not anymore. An artist who relies on copyright law to force people to buy, rather than provide a product that people want to buy isn't going to be very successful in the long run.
My job involves digitizing old (pre-20th Century) documents with a view to preserving and providing easy access to them. We have come to the conclusion that preservation of digital resources is entirely possible, but it is an ongoing process: you cannot just put stuff on a CD and bury it somewhere, confident it will be readable in 500, 50, or even 5 years. You have to take active steps to ensure your data remains available.
Media rot and media and file format obsolescence can cause problems if you just digitize and forget. In the library and archival community, microfilm is generally considered the safest way of preservation because it has a theoretical shelf life of 500 years (though no piece of mircofilm is close to that old) and can be read by anyone with a magnifying device. Even so, microfilm gets lost, damaged, or otherwise rendered unusable. Paper can last even longer, with proper care, but it too is susceptible to damage or loss. Some of the items we have preserved no longer exist in their original form because the last copy was destroyed as a result of use or damage due to less-than-perfect (i.e. real-world) storage.
Regardless of the media, the most important aspects of preserving something are to have multiple copies and to actively maintain your collection. If you actively monitor your collection and migrate file formats and media as needed, you should be alright. If you just file and forget, all bets are off.
Nothing can guarantee 100% retention: every year, the last copy of something disappears forever. But the stuff that still exists today is, by and large, the stuff that someone thought was important enough to actively maintain, or else the stuff where so many copies were made that some were bound to survive regardless of the conditions under which they were stored.
So whose fault is it that Government is "inequipped" to regulate high-tech? If I was inequipped to teach my son about how to walk, and he tried to do it himself, should I cut him off at the knees?
Microsoft is not a human child. It is a legal entity created by an act of government (supposedly) on the grounds that it believed doing so would benefit the people. If it turns out to be the case that a corporation, by its existence, does more harm than good, government has every right and every obligation to take all necessary action up to and including forcing the liquidation of that corporation.
Some may download it for the novelty value, but a 700MB file for the price of a DVD rental? Even with a good cable connection and no transmission errors, I could go and rent the DVD and be halfway finished watching it on a real TV set before the file downloaded. Why would I want to wait the extra time and incur the wrath of my ISP for excessive bandwith consumption (one video is OK, but how about 5 or 10 per month?) so that I can watch movies in probably less than DVD resolution on my 19" monitor, hoping Windows survives the full two hours running time with no crashes?
Plus, even Blockbuster now gives you 2 nights (was evenings; subtle but expensive difference) with a new release, so you don't have to feel so constrained as to when you watch the thing.
Maybe this is a cynical move by WB to discredit the Net as a distribution means, but I think it is more of a pilot, proof of concept project. At this moment, at least for North American users, DVD, VHS, and even pay per view offer better value and greater convenience than downloaded video. Bandwidth has to become a lot cheaper and more plentiful before this sort of thing becomes viable.
Now, if they wanted to release a 320x200 @ 11khz sound version for free or for a small download fee, that might be something; it would allow viewers to preview the movie and decide if they wanted to rent the DVD, or even go see the movie on the big screen, if the thumbnail version were released during the film's debut.
I think all this nonsens about ring to be vastly inflated, I was dragged along to see number 1 and wasn't impressed. I'll be dragged a long to see number 2 and i suspect I won't be to impressed there either.
This is probably why Hollywood is terrified about movie downloads. I'll go see the Two Towers because Fellowship was well-done and, barring any startling revelations about a shocking decline in quality, I have no reason to believe it won't be time and money well-spent. I'm not going to watch the thing at 320x200 with 11Khz sound just to save a few dollars.
On the other hand, there are a lot of movies where I suspect all of the good parts were thrown together to make the 30-second trailer, and everything else is crap. Of course, there's no real way to verify that short of me or at least someone I know spending the $12 to go and see. But if I could download even part of the movie in 320x200 and preview it, maybe I'd have a better idea whether or not it was worth spending my time and money on.
Normally, I'll just pass on any movie that doesn't strike me as being especially compelling. I go to first-run theatres maybe 3-5 times a year, 2-3 of those times because someone else wants me to go. But I suspect that that is atypical viewing behaviour, and that most people watch far more movies.
If people could preview movies before they watched them, I suspect people would see far fewer movies, and be far less disappointed with the ones they did see. It's not bootlegs of LOTR or Star Wars that hurt business; it's bootlegs of the movies that aren't guaranteed hits that hurt.
Privacy is a social issue, not a technological one. The only issue on the technology side is whether or not the technology in question lends itself to access by unauthorized parties. (I.e., can it be cracked.)
It seems to me that far greater intrusions into people's private lives occured in Nazi Germany, East Germany, and the Soviet Union using very low-tech tools indeed.
Whether a parent feels that it is necessary or desirable to monitor the driving of a teenaged child is a decision that each parent must make. Personally, if I had a kid, I wouldn't let him or her drive at all if I didn't feel I could trust him or her to drive responsibly, and the idea of parents spying on kids doesn't sit well with me, but that's just my view.
As far as collecting data for police or insurance purposes, the collection of factual data about the state of a car leading up to an accident is probably a very good thing; after all, when accidents happen, we *do* want to establish the facts of the case. The real issue is to whom this data should be made accessible, under what circumstances, and for what purposes. Use of information is a good thing. It is the *abuse* of information that is not. Using crash data to try to determine why an accident occured does not seem to me to be abuse.
Now once we corrected your other statement we find that this last statement of yours is wrong. Society collectively(at least in the US most other countries) decided that using intellectual property without permission is theft. This determination is what drove the creation of copyright laws several centuries ago. This determination maintains a special passage within the US Constitution.
I'll admit that I am not an expert in copyright law and so my understanding must come from a layman's reading of the laws and of the legal interpretations and explanations of those laws,
but I am hard-pressed to find anything that suggests copyright grants any sort of ability to control the use of a work or idea, apart from public performance.
My understanding of copyright is that it grants the rights holder the exclusive right to make copies of a work, subject to certain exceptions. I also understand that it was (and I suppose still is) the position of Napster that private sharing of music was one of those exceptions, and that furthermore there was nothing illegal about facilitating such copying.
It is furthermore my understanding that Napster has not received any punishment or penalty of any sort. It was handed an injunction and ordered to block access to works for which the plaintiffs held copyright because the judge believed that the plaintiffs would probably win their case, but (again, unless I missed something) the case has not yet been fully argued, nor has a judgement been rendered, and likely never will, as Napster has agreed to settle out of court with most of the plaintiffs.
In any event, this is all irrelevant because it deals with events after the fact. Presumably, the stakeholders in Napster were not so blindingly stupid that they established a business which they believed was illegal and would ultimately drive them to bankruptcy. It seems more plausible that they believed that their business, while daring and perhaps risky, would ultimately be found to fall within the law. That you personally disagree isn't really important; that the issue is debated publically and a broad-based consensus is reached is.
And please don't tell me what I meant to say. I can speak for myself.
You're missing the point. In the judgement of the RIAA and, apparently, of some others, Napster was abused. But Napster's took the position that person-to-person sharing of music was completely legitimate and protected in the U.S. by the Home Recording Act.
Unless I missed something big, no verdict was ever reached in the Napster case, we don't know if the courts would have sided with Napster. If I recall correctly, the injunction against Napster was based on the judge's ruling that the plaintiffs would likely prevail on the merits of their case--but the judge never made a formal finding that Napster had done anything illegal. And certainly there was no pre-existing doctrine, law, or social consensus that would have unambiguously informed Napster that it's actions were patently unacceptable. In fact, nobody much thought about it until Napster came along.
If the law were, as you suggest, truly cut and dried, (which it is not--why do you think judges exist?) it would be easy for the RIAA to point to the statute that expressly forbids P2P sharing. The fact is that law is highly interpretive, which is why higher courts exist in the first place, and much of it relies on precedent, public policy, and changing externalities like technology. That's the whole point: Napster was a test to see how P2P music sharing would be interpreted in terms of law and public policy.
Napster's business model was based on stealing. Let me repeat that one more time, just in case you didn't get the point. Napster's business model was based on stealing.
It seems to me that Napster simply provided a service to make easier what was and still is common practice: sharing music. Napster took the practice farther than it had been taken before, and so became a test as to what extent music sharing could be taken and remain acceptable, but it essentially offered nothing that wasn't available before in one form or another.
Fundamentally, there was nothing immoral or unethical about what Napster did. You, I, and the RIAA may all have our own ideas as to what extent the sharing of music should be tolerated. So did Napster. It appears that, in the U.S., the lower courts didn't agree with Napster. But they didn't endorse the RIAA's or anyone else's vision of what should or shouldn't be allowed either. The question remains unresolved, but certainly Napster served to bring the question into the public eye.
The aftermath of Napster has brought many public policy questions to the forefront, most of which remain unanswered. While the RIAA may have preferred that the questions remained unasked, I happen to disagree and think that Napster did us a great service by forcing the issue. (The fact that I was able to locate some old tracks that I had until then never been able to find anywhere was a pleasant side benefit.)
Stealing and theft are heavily loaded terms which imply that one has already made a moral judgement about an issue which is far from cut and dried. Downloading music is only stealing if society collectively decides that it is. And that decision has yet to be made.
3) There's always the old numeral "1" swapped for the lowercase "L" or the uppercase "I", trick, among other similar things that never involved Unicode, but rather human vision and high-resolutions.
Since browsers (and possibly Outlook and other HTML-enabled mail manglers) support downloadable fonts, it shouldn't be all that tricky to just create a custom font with glyphs in the 'wrong' position. microsoft.com might be taken, but I bet that mzcyoqoxp.com is free. You wouldn't have to rely on similarities between glyphs in sans-serif fonts; you could spoof most any address through selective use of downloaded fonts.
This capability has existed for a while.
Is that what the states are asking for? I was under the impression that all they were asking for was a version of Windows that was not tightly coupled with components like IE and Media Player, allowing system vendors and end users alike to easily remove the Microsoft browser, media player, and whatnot, and replace it with an alternative of its own, much in the same way that standard PC architecture allows one to replace the IBM drive on an IBM PC with one made by Maxtor with no penalty, except inasmuch as the IBM drive might be intrinsically faster, more reliable, or whatnot.
That, it seems to me, is all that is being asked for. All of this rhetoric about billions of versions of Windows to support or less flexible system configurations seems like utter nonsense. Modular does not mean embedded. It means that components can be removed and, if desired, replaced by others without breaking the system as a whole.
* The company's vision statement is "A computer on every desk and in every home." That vision is seeing completion (at least in the Western world). How much of it being attributed to Microsoft can be debated. However, Microsoft has been instrumental in enforcing standards upon the industry so that an open PC platform could flourish. Microsoft also provides software that almost anyone can use and use to be productive.
A computer on every desktop and in every home (running Microsoft software) is great from the perspective of Microsoft's bottom line, but this statement neglects to specify any benefit for anyone else of such a massive deployment of computers, nor does it stipulate that the computers must enable people to do anything productive or useful.
How about "A computer on every desktop, a blue screen of death every day, and an expensive upgrade every year."
Microsoft has enforced standards, but it has done so by opposing other, open standards in favour of its own. In most cases, the Microsoft standard replaces something equally good, if not better, rather than fills a void. Without Microsoft, we'd still have standards, and what's more, we might even have different vendors with implementations that compete on quality instead of compatibility.
We can't know for sure how the PC industry would have developed had Microsoft not been involved, but given the inheret usefulness of computers, the inherent usefulness of standards, and the fact that technologies like TV, telephony, and audio/video manage to develop standards one way or another while maintaining at least a semblance of competition, it seems likely that the PC world would have developed workable standards too.
* Microsoft is consistently one of the most philantropic corporations around. They gives tons of money to schools, libraries and universities. They just gave 8 million bucks to build my new CS building. How many of y'all got donations from MS while you were an undergrad?
When philanthropy is profitable (and tax deductible), corporations will contribute. Even drug pushers give the first hit for free. We can't deny that Microsoft and other corporate donations do good and are appreciated, but corporate philanthropy isn't as altruistic as it's made to look. Ask yourself how much of that philanthropy came in the form of software or money to buy software. If they can give $100 million worth of software that cost a few thousand to produce, and then claim a charitable tax deduction for a significant portion of the $100 million, it seems to me that they haven't given away anything; they just sold their software and taxpayers picked up the tab. (I'm not saying that's necessarily how U.S. tax law works--I don't know for sure--but I am saying we need to consider all the implications of their gifts.)
* Bill Gates has given $24 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, which will spend the money on AIDS research, cancer research, and vaccinations for the third world (among God knows how many other uses).
Bill and Melinda aren't Microsoft, even though they happen to work for it. Since Bill is one of the richest men in the world, it would be disheartening if he wasn't also one of the greatest philanthropists in the world.
* Microsoft products are actually pretty nice. If you're an experienced Unix administrator or do-it-yourself Linux guru, I'm sure you can find lots of reasons to not like MS software. But it's typically easier for common folk to use than competing products (Windows) and sometimes just downright superior (Office).
Inasmuch as there are competing products to Windows and Office, the claim that Windows is easier to use than MacOS, and that Office is easier to use tham Lotus Smart Suite or WordPerfect Office needs some serious corroboration before it can be accepted. Part of the problem, of course, is that there really are very few competing products, thanks to Microsoft's business tactics. If Windows and Office seem easier to use, perhaps it is because, lacking other reasonable choices, most users have already learned how to use them and haven't been exposed to other, possibly superior options to nearly the same extent.
How to explain GPL to capitalists:
This software contains the intellectual property of several people. Intellectual property is a valuable resource, and you cannot expect to be able to use someone else's intellectual property in your own work for free.
Many businesses and individuals are willing to trade their intellectual property in exchange for something of value; usually money. For example, in return for a sum of money, you might be granted the right to incorporate code from someone's software program into your own.
The developers of this software are willing to trade you the right to use their intellectual property in exchange for something of value. However, instead of money, the developers are willing to trade you the right to freely incoroporate their code into your software in exchange for the right to freely incorporate your code into theirs. This exchange is to be done by way of and under the terms of the GPL.
If you do not think that this is a fair bargain, you are free to decline and to develop your own code or purchase it from someone else. You will still be allowed to use the software yourself, which is awfully nice of the developers, since you probably didn't pay them a penny for it in the first place. If you feel that this would make you a freeloading communist welfare addict, you may instead opt to purchase similar software from a less generous developer.
Please, the last thing we need is more all-infomercial networks.
It seems to me that people really do watch infomercials. They used to be confined to late night TV and limited to a few standard scams, but they're now creeping into mainstream broadcasting. We have the Shopping Channel in Canada (I think QVC is the US equivalent) which is an all-infomercial channel. Specialty channels with no original programming and short schedules, like A&E and TLC, now run infomercials during the morning. On weekend mornings, every network seems to run them. Some of those DIY home rennovation shows are now fundamentally nothing more than infomercials for Home Depot and whichever tool company sponsors the show. It's not too hard to envision a future where the primary purpose of all TV is product promotion and the distinction between advertisement and show will have been erased.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to my job of placing tiny classified ads for misleading 900 services in newspapers, at least until my $19.95 (+S&H) plastic egg-microwaving cup arrives so I can have a healthy delicious breakfast. Then I'm going to paint my house with my $70 (+S&H) paint roller and prepare a healthy dinner of sliced tomatoes and aluminum cans using my $19.95 (+S&H) Ginsu knife that looks a lot like the $4.95 crappy knives in the kitchen gadget section of my grocery store.
The ONLY way you are going to detect and remove commercials is with a luminance level detector and a type of "AI" to watch a few of the shows and determine the approximation of the ad-break times and then work on assumptions. AD's are 30 and 60 seconds in length and breaks are from 2 to 4 minutes in length with Turner networks averaging 8 minutes or more. (UPN does 10 I swear!)
Couldn't you also measure the level of sound compression? IIRC, virtually all commercial spots compress their audio range so that instead of a range of very quiet - very loud you get a range of loud - very loud.
My RCA VCR blanks out and fast forwards through commercials. I don't record a lot of programs, but it seems to work almost all of the time. I'm not sure what technology it uses, but it has to go back *after* it's finished recording in order to mark the commercials.
While they are rebuffed by scientists - does that make these things "fake" or non-science?
Phenomena themselves are never scientific or non-scientific. Likewise, all ideas are genuine -- there is no such thing as a "fake idea." But, to the best of my knowledge, every scientific experiment to evaluate the possibility of psychic powers has shown that the only phenomena at work are delusion, self-deception, and trickery. If anyone has managed to find scientific evidence of psychic powers, it is odd that they have not claimed James Randi's $1 million prize, as well as a host of lesser prizes for the first one who can show real scientific evidence of psychic powers.
The "evidence" for psychic powers is based on completely unscientific methods, including subjective validation, uncontrolled experiments, shoehorning, post hoc reasoning, confirmation bias, and a host of other common logical fallacies.
Scientists don't take these things seriously, because these methods can be used to generate "evidence" for virtually any possible claim, including multiple contradictory claims.
There are things we don't know about the world and about the human brain, but there is no more compelling evidence to suggest that people can predict lottery numbers or commune with the dead than there is evidence that demons cause disease or that invisible pink unicorns roam the prairies.
There has been a growing trend among academia for scientific exclusivism lately, that is, the idea that science can explain all things and anything else is ridiculous superstition. This bothers me; in its own way, it is as bad as any religion, and breeds the same sorts of intolerance (albeit with different targets).
It's generally accepted that religion can explain everything, or at least almost everything. Moreover, it does so with absolute certainty; there is no margin for error. In this respect, all religions are approximately equally good. They all offer The Truth (even though The Truth varies from religion to religion), free of doubt, conjecture, or tentativeness.
I am not aware of any scientist who argues that science can explain everything. It can explain some things, but even those explanations are falliable and may be discovered to be incorrect tomorrow.
On the other hand, religion is notoriously poor at predicting things. Religion makes few (verifiable) predictions and has an extremely poor success rate with the predictions it does make. Science can't predict everything either, but it has a far better success record than religion.
If you want to know why it rained yesterday or why your baby was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, any religion will answer your question with as much if not more authority than science. If you want to know whether you should carry an umbrella with you tomorrow or whether it would be a good idea to stop drinking during your next pregnancy, science can offer much better guidance, even if it can't predict with complete certainty.
Well, mail merge isn't really the kind of function that causes problems, since it's not the sort of thing one runs into when one isn't looking for it, but it still doesn't really belong in a word processor. Remember the adage about using the right tool for the right job. Most people use Word as a word processor for preparing lightweight documents. Occasionally, they need a midweight system for preparing more complex documents with sections, chapters, tables of contents, different headers and footers, complex tables, borders, embedded documents, and other featues. Active content is another animal altogether.
There's no doubt that these fetures are occasionally useful for many users and frequently used by some, but they are also the exact same features that get misused or accidentally activated and make a mess out of documents. I suspect they also encourage poor writing and sloppy document creation in simple documents, as users are often enticed to use unecessary features in the preparation of their simple documents. I've received more very large and very garish memos containing one or two sentences of useful information than I can count. It probably never occurs to the authors that they were over-engineering and making a mess out of what should have been a simple interoffice memo that could have just as easily been written in notepad.
A lightweight word processor is what most people need most of the time. I don't just mean something with limited features, but also something that is designed to maximize the efficiency of preparing simple documents, even if that means it can't do anything more elaborate. If they need extra functionality, a second, more elaborate application can be used. They can work with the same file formats, making it possible to write the text in a simple friendly editor and then format it using the second application. And naturally, the heavier document preparation system would hopefully have a similar and familiar interface and not be arbitrarily different from the basic editor.
If a user spends most of his or her time creating and editing simple documents, then he or she ought to have an application optimized for doing just that. Keeping the number of different tools that a user has to use down to a reasonable number is a laudable goal, but it doesn't take precedence over all other considerations. Sometimes, having two or three separate tools for different jobs is easier to manage and more efficient than having to figure out how to make an all-in-wonder tool work in every possible situation.