Certainly I'm for continuing to move forward and make things better, faster, cheaper. But to say that just because PCI is a decade old that it's long overdue relative to CPU clockspeed is just not right--apples to oranges. For the most part, the improvements have gone after the bottlenecks--mostly CPU speed, memory speed, hard drive speed, and even system bus speed. In that context, for 99.9% of users, there have never been performance issues waiting for the "slow" PCI bus--with very few exceptions, no devices were actually capable of filling up the PCI bandwidth--especially with 66 bit & 66 Mhz flavors. And while it's easy now to claim that AGP was evidence of PCI's inferiority, the truth is at the time the main reason given for AGP was so that low end systems could use much cheaper system memory for video.
Spending resources on a replacement for PCI would have been wasteful even a few years ago. Now that CPUs have gotten faster than most people have any real need for, it's a good time.
I don't agree. I'm willing to make my own filtering decisions after the media has decided what to present. Fair enough--on principle, I'd certainly agree. Editorial content should not be presented as news--period. I suppose my bias towards trying to educate the apathetic on an important issue. Certainly hippocritical given Hatch's justification of ends justifying the means. Shame on me.
You've convinced me--I'm willing to concede that it was in fact primarily a rhetorical device. BUT, even if you take his words as figuratively as possible, he still has no business making them. As the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he basically has the broadest influence & power of any elected official short of the President. His words and actions have repercussions. Say Alan Greenspan were to make a similar comment--perhaps he says that if companies don't start hiring more new empolyees the economy will fall into a depression. Just a little hyperbole to draw attention right. Except because of who he is, if he wakes up with a sniffle, the market holds it's breath. Among other things, Hatch oversees the judges for crying out loud. He's supposed to be objective and not have an agenda. He has received $175,000 in campaign funding from the TV/Music/Movie industries and almost $500,000 from the commuications/electronics sectors--underneath all the speculation here, the bottom line is he is being paid to push an agenda.
I don't disagree with most of what you said--it's really sad how the main parties don't touch issues that are not only very important to many of us, but also critical issues from a historical perspective.
I do however have to take issue with your use of people being disenfranchised. That word gets thrown around all too lightly. Certainly it's frustrating that the two main parties almost always get elected but no one is denied the right to vote - or even to run for office. There is no disenfranchising going on because there is no need for Republicans & Democrats to do so--apathy more than takes care of it.
Personally I think I'm becomming a one issue voter myself - campain finance. It just seems that every issue is filtered through that issue - and it's the single greatest barrier to elected officials actually acting in the best interests of the citizens and society as a whole.
Ok so certainly there's an amout of media hype here - but sometimes hype & hyperbole are necessary because people don't actually read things otherwise. That's more or less a separate issue however---are you saying that the direct quotes from Hatch were untrue? To refresh your memory:
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.
So whether the editors were exaggerating or even what his motivations were, as Rep. Boucher points out, Hatch is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and as such, his words carry tremendous weight. He is advocating something that is blatantly unconstitutional (right to due process & unlawful search & seizures).
Not disagreeing overall, but he was as you say Ashcrofted. He was stuck in prison, no contact with anyone or anything for fear he could launch nuclear missiles from a phone, and he was held without being charged for a very long time. This was actually at a time when such treatment uncommon and was still acknowledged as unconstitutional - compared to now where it's generally seen as an OK thing to do.
The times I've seen him (on TechTV a time or two) he's quite clear that what he did was wrong and unequivocally instructs others to not do the things he did or they could end up like he did. The punishment was fueled by a total ignorance of the technology and a paranoid fear based on that ignorance, and was not at all commensurate to the crimes. I seen no reason he can't both explain how unfair (and unconstitutional) he was treated, and yet still provide a good example of what not to do.
The slightly larger (7,000) WI town of New London is also pursuing this--I believe I read the license cost $1000 and the feeling was that like you said, it's a limited time deal--until the cable lobbyists make it illegal.
One thing they mentioned was the ability to remotely read electric meters rather than manually having to check them however often. Maybe a small cost compared to the additional IT support but I'd bet there are some other ancillary benefits like this.
Obfuscation is one form of security but not the only or best option. For example, I know police officers who have unlisted phone numbers for their own privacy. The number is somewhat hidden but if some one with bad intentions does get it, they can give it out to whoever they want & call it at all hours of the day and the phone still rings. A more secure system would allow a person to create filters/rules for whether the phone even rings. The world could get your phone address but only get through if they're on your call receive list--otherwise they can only connect to your voicemail. Or you could set it up to say block all calls between 11 pm and 6 am except a select group. Or whatever. It's like comparing hiding the key to your house under the doormat to using a thumbprint recogintion pad.
As far as supporting old rotary phones--who cares. It's mostly a strawman argument anyway because you can pick up a touch tone phone for free (with rebates). Can you plug in an 1960s (hell even 1980s) television into your digital cable? Or even regular cable for that matter? Of course some new hardware and/or adapter would be necessary--but I'm thinking in terms of finding the best or at least better solution. A transition time would of course be necessary.
And my logic doesn't in the least suggest replacing IP with names only--in fact most land lines and GSM mobile already operate on a dual system similar to IP & domain name anyway. When you dial a phone number, the number you dial isn't the true address of the phone, it's a pointer to the real address the provider uses. If there's already that layer of abstraction anyway, why use numbers for the part that humans use. I'm suggesting we move to a system more like IP & domain names. Address spaces are certainly easier to administer with numbers than names. That's the way computers work. But names are much easier for people to deal with than numbers.
Exactly. People don't remember number strings very well and it's only getting worse--more and more calls that used to be "local" are requiring me to dial the full 10 digit number, and it looks like additional digits may be added in the not too distant future. While the internet domain name systerm certainly is not flawless, the fact that we all use domain names rather than entering IP addresses is at the very least, strong anecdotal evidence of it's success.
I don't know how to set up a new system but bet that people much smarter than me would have no problems. From other posts, it appears that land lines and GSM for the most part are already using the dialable number as an abstraction - it's just a pointer to the real address. This tells me that it would be much more trivial to change the system that I would have thought. Certainly not without wrinkles, but not a huge technical challenge by any means.
Really it makes even more sense to use naming for phone numbers than for web addresses because there's a natural geographical context anyway to current phone numbers that isn't inherent to Domain names (at least beyond TLDs). I can remember how to connect to Bob.Smith/Smallville/KS/US (or similar) much easier than (123)456-789. Searching for some one becomes much easier because of the geographic context - relational databases could do the queries quicker with more information but perhaps more importantly, partial info searching is much more likely to work than with numbers. For example, now if I'm trying to call Bob Whats-his-name, and only remember the area code and last 3 digits of his phone number, I'm probably out of luck. Not to mention I'm probably not likely to even remember parts of the number. But with naming if I do a search for Bob, in Smallville, US it would probably find him fairly quickly.
Either there's a whole lot more to it that you left out, or you're selling yourself short on the explanation because from the way you described it, I got a very clear picture in my head and it seems to make a lot of sense to me. And to some extent, it shows how the dialable number is already an abstraction rather than the true address--which means it would be much more trivial to swich from a numbering system which people can't remember well to a naming system that is much easier to use and makes logical sense.
Phone numbers provide anonymity. Some people don't like to be looked up and called, which is why they make their number unlisted, or they get a cell phone. You could argue that those things are unnecessary, but it has become part of our lifestyle.
Good point on the anonymity but I think that the numbering system is the wrong solution to that problem. It's sorta security through obfuscation rather than valid security models. I agree that any new system should provide the option of letting people be unlisted if they choose. Such anonymity is no more inherent to the current numbering system than it would be to a naming system--it just a feature that can be added to either.
There are a handful of tools that let you export PPT to swf. They have a huge range in price (and quality though I've only checked out the cheaper ones which aren't so great quality). MM also released a really expensive version of this (though admittingly it does some other stuff and hosting can be priced in as well).
Though I agree that it would be a great idea for a product--a familiar, easy-to-use-for-the-suits environment that exports swf. I think it is at least slightly more difficult than it first seems. The open swf format is always a version or so behind Flash so the current swf format is proprietary. Plus I believe that while actionscript is EMCA script based, it's implementation is proprietary with regard to the swf format. Any competitor, open source or othewise will always be playing catch up to Macromedia to some extent. The potential is certainly there, but it's not an easy task. Especially given the target audience would be people who aren't really into open-source or trying/learning new software. To that end, perhaps the export from PowerPoint (or maybe even any program like you can do with Adobe Acrobat Distiller/PDF Writer) might be an easier win if it weren't for a dependancy on deciphering PowerPoint format and all of it's bugginess. Though to this end, whe have found that we can export PowerPoint out as WMF files and they are vector and work with Flash really well so maybe that's an direction to go.
I'd like to have that time back. Seriously the first 10 pages were just words and didn't seem to have much cohesion or substance--some one should have had an editor review it. Eventually there was a little more info when it explained a "day in the life" of a user.
Basically they're making an app that manages client applets. Earth shattering. When you connect, Macromedia Central knows it and tells your local clients as well as their servers that you're connected and they can receive/send info back & forth. In their perfect world thousands of developers would build flash apps that behave and deliever content to the user and send information from the user back to the company--all the while providing both sides with exactly what they want. Kinda cool I guess. But let's move on over to the real world--developers and the companies they work for will not always behave--they'll take as much info as they can get, push as much out as possible probably with little regard for privacy, security or perhaps most important, the actual usefulness of the data they're sending to the end user.
They're pushing for the applets to use XML so they can share data (which is certainly good and bad). I see value in some of the ideas, but would rather the individual companies/services/developers build such applets on their own. This way I can decide whether I agree with their privacy & security policies as well as whether it's actually worth it to me or not. Though to counter this, I guess the Macromedia framework is supposed to allow you try out the applets and they're run in protected mode so they can't access your HDD. Which leads me to the next question, where is the data stored? Must be on a server if the applets can share it but don't have the rights to view your HDD. So whose server? How do different vendors share data across different domains without being wide open to security problems?
And perhaps the biggest concern of all might be that this is just the next evolution for spam. Once you connect you'll be downloading tons of "content" probably determined in part by the "content provider." Now replace the word content with spam.
It's just absolutely sublime. Most of the critics & public alike who were so brutal just didn't get it. I mean the original chemistry of Hanks & Ryan, not to mention Lloyd Bridges, Ossie Davis, Robert Stack and Abe Vigoda for chrissakes. And one of Nathan Lane's first movies as a Waponi, dressed in a straw skirt! There were just so many little offhanded kind of comments & quotes which really meant a lot more than they first appeared.
Patricia: You mean you were diagnosed with something called a brain cloud and didn't ask for a second opinion?
Patricia: Nobody knows anything, Joe. We'll take this leap, and we'll see. We'll jump, and we'll see. That's life, right?
Patricia: My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.
Joe walking in to his office, noticing his shoe is falling apart:
DeDe: What's wrong?
Joe: I'm losing my soul.
DeDe: Yeah.
Joe seeing the giagantic moon rise on the ocean for what he things will be the last time:
"Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot how big . . . thank you for my life."
Granted, it runs like a champ, but just little things . ..things I'm not even sure I can call to mind - the way menus lay out, the lack of some standardized interface items (like a save button) . ..have always left me feeling like the PC version of Photoshop and other Adobe apps are kind of afterthoughts
I'm sure it's more to do with the OS than Adobe being lazy or whatever. Apple is stricter with their UI guidlines for software developers. Partially because they've had such a legacy of documenting and publishing the guidlines, partly because the UI consistency and usability have been a priority in coding the OS and perhaps mostly because the OS forces adherence to UI rules more strictly.
While there were plenty of interesting (if not true) points, and some of the insights were wild speculation by some one clearly not exactly objective, I did find a couple of the quotes to be top-notch:
A principle factor is that America's business leaders simply don't want to think about complex technology issues - they want to think about golf. Microsoft promises them that, and being a large, and hugely successful corporation, they have high credibility with top business executives.
While terribly amusing, and sadly, all to true, that in a nutshell could be one of the biggest roadblocks to growing Linux adoption futher.
Microsoft has direct access to high level managers, many of whom are strong admirers of Bill Gates' wealth,
Something I've noticed subconsciously without actually considering. How anyone can be so entralled with wealth, let alone some one else's wealth is beyond me. And those in the postion of "decision makers" seem to be Gates fanboys a lot more than those of us actually dealing directly with MS products.
Your points are well taken--it's the stores until it's paid for, they can do what they want to protect/track it. But you've got it wrong with...
As a customer the tags had better come off as soon as I buy the merchandise. From that moment on it's mine, not theirs. Note that that would be *before* I get to the exit.
Therein lies the problem. RF tags do not come off when a consumer buys the merchandise. Think about it, if they have to take the time to take the RF tag off, what is the advantage over barcodes or any other security tags? And if they're easy to take off, shoplifters could do it before they walk out. No the whole point of RF tags, is that they're embeded and always on. From the article:
...a store like Wal-Mart that frequently changes prices can attach the price to the item and know exactly what a consumer paid if the item is returned -- even if the customer lost the receipt.
So if I don't have the receipt and want to return it, I can--they just check out the RF tag (which logically must still be on and able to receive a query from a transmitter) and it tells how much I paid for the item. To do this, it means they aren't just tracking the item type as some one else says, they must be tracking the specific item and probably customer because you could pay a different price for the same item type purchased at different times. So the implication, then is that if it's still on and can do what they're describing, then someone could put a transmitter in a busy walkway somewhere and read all the RF tags too. The downside of abuse by companies, the government and heck even hackers, just makes this too qustionable of an issue.
I don't at all begrudge companies that se lots of benefits to both themeselves and their customers as well, but until they can answer some very important questions, I don't think any of us should be at all happy with this. I'm not sure about the specs, but if they could guarantee a range of not more than say 5 feet or so, that's a step in the right direction.
It's just funny. Laugh. It was a fiasco last time so the fact that they're trying it again is amusing. I think also what many of us find especially amusing is trying to figure out what kind of business sense it makes. Apple tries to get people to switch because there's a huge target market--whatever the numbers are 95% PCs to 5% Macs or whatever, if Apple wants to grow their market share they necessarily will have to convert people. Microsoft on the other hand is gearing a marketing campaign at such a small market. It seems to be a pretty dumb business decision, basically just wasting money--especially given those 5% are awfully dedicated to their platform.
Maybe it says more about Microsoft's inability milk further revenues from people who no longer see compelling reasons to upgrade.
Which brings up my biggest gripe about how bad credit agencies are. I suppose it all depends on your perspective, but as far as I'm concerned, they're terrible. Kinda like internet filtering software or OCR scanning recognition, or even facial recognition in airports--95 to even 99% isn't nearly good enough. It means that given the amount of data they collect, they get at least a couple of errors per person over their lifetime. Errors that can have drastic consequences to a person. Errors that the person is responsible for checking--and the burdon of proof isn't on them to prove their right but on you to prove their wrong. INAL, so maybe there's some reason I don't know about, but if I'm ever turned down for a loan or anything like that and end up finding out it was because Experian or Equifax screwed up, I will sue them for whatever harm it caused me.
They have the right, but, by law (in the USA) if they make a negative decision because of the credit report, they have to inform you of that. This is often overlooked. There was a report on this on NPR recently (Jan 31st, All Things Considered) [npr.org].
Sure the law says if they don't hire you because of something in your credit report, they have to inform you of it. But who determines their reason for not hiring you? They do of course, and I hardly think they're going to make more work for themselves or risk discrimination suits. I imagine instead the answer will be a broad comment about another candidate being more qualified. Not that I don't think that's true some/most of the time or whatever, but it just seems that this law to protect individual's privacy and whatnot won't ever actually be applied because there's always some other reason to use.
I've had great success with a very similiar technique. I breathe out as much air as possible, then without taking a breath, I drink a large glass of water for as long as I can until I really need to stop and breathe. Hiccups gone. Every single time I have ever tried it (about 5 years or so). I imagine it's partly due to the trauma I'm causing my body but oh well.
I get the hiccups really bad, sometimes their really pretty painful so I've tried everything and this one works for me. For some reason, if I'm laying or even sitting down and get up too quickly, especially if I jump right out of bed in the morning, I get the hiccups almost every time.
Despite the continuous criticism of Apple and that they should just go away, once again Michael Dell follows in the "beleaguered" company's footsteps. When Apple did this, everyone called them crazy--Dell does it and the story is completely different.
I won't even touch the NYT part beyond saying it's laughable.
But maybe you should have read his answer a little more closely--newspapers may not pay their sources, but certainly for a writer working on a book about some one to pay them wouldn't be unreasonable now would it? I imagine if someone wanted to write a biography on me (especially one packed with lies), unless I had joint authorship or editorial rights, I certainly wouldn't be terribly forthcoming in helping.
Perhaps part of the reason is that he won't sue for defamation (aside from moving on with his life and/or not having the money) is that you can't prove a negative. Tell me this, how does he prove that he never hacked NORAD? When you make that type of allegations against some one, they really can't disprove them. Sometime around 1990 I saw you making love to a sheep. Prove you didn't. And guess what, now everyone can write that it has been alleged that you sleep with sheep. Your are not an alleged sheep molestor, how's that feel? I understand and agree with the freedom the first ammendment guarantees the press. But the burden of proof on accusations needs to fall squarely on the shoulders of the accuser whether they are a member of the press or not.
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Spending resources on a replacement for PCI would have been wasteful even a few years ago. Now that CPUs have gotten faster than most people have any real need for, it's a good time.
Fair enough--on principle, I'd certainly agree. Editorial content should not be presented as news--period. I suppose my bias towards trying to educate the apathetic on an important issue. Certainly hippocritical given Hatch's justification of ends justifying the means. Shame on me.
You've convinced me--I'm willing to concede that it was in fact primarily a rhetorical device. BUT, even if you take his words as figuratively as possible, he still has no business making them. As the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he basically has the broadest influence & power of any elected official short of the President. His words and actions have repercussions. Say Alan Greenspan were to make a similar comment--perhaps he says that if companies don't start hiring more new empolyees the economy will fall into a depression. Just a little hyperbole to draw attention right. Except because of who he is, if he wakes up with a sniffle, the market holds it's breath. Among other things, Hatch oversees the judges for crying out loud. He's supposed to be objective and not have an agenda. He has received $175,000 in campaign funding from the TV/Music/Movie industries and almost $500,000 from the commuications/electronics sectors--underneath all the speculation here, the bottom line is he is being paid to push an agenda.
I do however have to take issue with your use of people being disenfranchised. That word gets thrown around all too lightly. Certainly it's frustrating that the two main parties almost always get elected but no one is denied the right to vote - or even to run for office. There is no disenfranchising going on because there is no need for Republicans & Democrats to do so--apathy more than takes care of it.
Personally I think I'm becomming a one issue voter myself - campain finance. It just seems that every issue is filtered through that issue - and it's the single greatest barrier to elected officials actually acting in the best interests of the citizens and society as a whole.
Ignore the people who say "ignore the people..."
The times I've seen him (on TechTV a time or two) he's quite clear that what he did was wrong and unequivocally instructs others to not do the things he did or they could end up like he did. The punishment was fueled by a total ignorance of the technology and a paranoid fear based on that ignorance, and was not at all commensurate to the crimes. I seen no reason he can't both explain how unfair (and unconstitutional) he was treated, and yet still provide a good example of what not to do.
One thing they mentioned was the ability to remotely read electric meters rather than manually having to check them however often. Maybe a small cost compared to the additional IT support but I'd bet there are some other ancillary benefits like this.
As far as supporting old rotary phones--who cares. It's mostly a strawman argument anyway because you can pick up a touch tone phone for free (with rebates). Can you plug in an 1960s (hell even 1980s) television into your digital cable? Or even regular cable for that matter? Of course some new hardware and/or adapter would be necessary--but I'm thinking in terms of finding the best or at least better solution. A transition time would of course be necessary.
And my logic doesn't in the least suggest replacing IP with names only--in fact most land lines and GSM mobile already operate on a dual system similar to IP & domain name anyway. When you dial a phone number, the number you dial isn't the true address of the phone, it's a pointer to the real address the provider uses. If there's already that layer of abstraction anyway, why use numbers for the part that humans use. I'm suggesting we move to a system more like IP & domain names. Address spaces are certainly easier to administer with numbers than names. That's the way computers work. But names are much easier for people to deal with than numbers.
I don't know how to set up a new system but bet that people much smarter than me would have no problems. From other posts, it appears that land lines and GSM for the most part are already using the dialable number as an abstraction - it's just a pointer to the real address. This tells me that it would be much more trivial to change the system that I would have thought. Certainly not without wrinkles, but not a huge technical challenge by any means.
Really it makes even more sense to use naming for phone numbers than for web addresses because there's a natural geographical context anyway to current phone numbers that isn't inherent to Domain names (at least beyond TLDs). I can remember how to connect to Bob.Smith/Smallville/KS/US (or similar) much easier than (123)456-789. Searching for some one becomes much easier because of the geographic context - relational databases could do the queries quicker with more information but perhaps more importantly, partial info searching is much more likely to work than with numbers. For example, now if I'm trying to call Bob Whats-his-name, and only remember the area code and last 3 digits of his phone number, I'm probably out of luck. Not to mention I'm probably not likely to even remember parts of the number. But with naming if I do a search for Bob, in Smallville, US it would probably find him fairly quickly.
Either there's a whole lot more to it that you left out, or you're selling yourself short on the explanation because from the way you described it, I got a very clear picture in my head and it seems to make a lot of sense to me. And to some extent, it shows how the dialable number is already an abstraction rather than the true address--which means it would be much more trivial to swich from a numbering system which people can't remember well to a naming system that is much easier to use and makes logical sense.
Good point on the anonymity but I think that the numbering system is the wrong solution to that problem. It's sorta security through obfuscation rather than valid security models. I agree that any new system should provide the option of letting people be unlisted if they choose. Such anonymity is no more inherent to the current numbering system than it would be to a naming system--it just a feature that can be added to either.
Though I agree that it would be a great idea for a product--a familiar, easy-to-use-for-the-suits environment that exports swf. I think it is at least slightly more difficult than it first seems. The open swf format is always a version or so behind Flash so the current swf format is proprietary. Plus I believe that while actionscript is EMCA script based, it's implementation is proprietary with regard to the swf format. Any competitor, open source or othewise will always be playing catch up to Macromedia to some extent. The potential is certainly there, but it's not an easy task. Especially given the target audience would be people who aren't really into open-source or trying/learning new software. To that end, perhaps the export from PowerPoint (or maybe even any program like you can do with Adobe Acrobat Distiller/PDF Writer) might be an easier win if it weren't for a dependancy on deciphering PowerPoint format and all of it's bugginess. Though to this end, whe have found that we can export PowerPoint out as WMF files and they are vector and work with Flash really well so maybe that's an direction to go.
Basically they're making an app that manages client applets. Earth shattering. When you connect, Macromedia Central knows it and tells your local clients as well as their servers that you're connected and they can receive/send info back & forth. In their perfect world thousands of developers would build flash apps that behave and deliever content to the user and send information from the user back to the company--all the while providing both sides with exactly what they want. Kinda cool I guess. But let's move on over to the real world--developers and the companies they work for will not always behave--they'll take as much info as they can get, push as much out as possible probably with little regard for privacy, security or perhaps most important, the actual usefulness of the data they're sending to the end user.
They're pushing for the applets to use XML so they can share data (which is certainly good and bad). I see value in some of the ideas, but would rather the individual companies/services/developers build such applets on their own. This way I can decide whether I agree with their privacy & security policies as well as whether it's actually worth it to me or not. Though to counter this, I guess the Macromedia framework is supposed to allow you try out the applets and they're run in protected mode so they can't access your HDD. Which leads me to the next question, where is the data stored? Must be on a server if the applets can share it but don't have the rights to view your HDD. So whose server? How do different vendors share data across different domains without being wide open to security problems?
And perhaps the biggest concern of all might be that this is just the next evolution for spam. Once you connect you'll be downloading tons of "content" probably determined in part by the "content provider." Now replace the word content with spam.
Anyway, that's my take.
"Like got to a dairy and see how miwk is pwoduced."
"The popcorn you're eating has been pissed in. Film at eleven"
Patricia: You mean you were diagnosed with something called a brain cloud and didn't ask for a second opinion?
Patricia: Nobody knows anything, Joe. We'll take this leap, and we'll see. We'll jump, and we'll see. That's life, right?
Patricia: My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.
Joe walking in to his office, noticing his shoe is falling apart:
DeDe: What's wrong?
Joe: I'm losing my soul.
DeDe: Yeah.
Joe seeing the giagantic moon rise on the ocean for what he things will be the last time:
"Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot how big . . . thank you for my life."
And lots more
Something I've noticed subconsciously without actually considering. How anyone can be so entralled with wealth, let alone some one else's wealth is beyond me. And those in the postion of "decision makers" seem to be Gates fanboys a lot more than those of us actually dealing directly with MS products.
Therein lies the problem. RF tags do not come off when a consumer buys the merchandise. Think about it, if they have to take the time to take the RF tag off, what is the advantage over barcodes or any other security tags? And if they're easy to take off, shoplifters could do it before they walk out. No the whole point of RF tags, is that they're embeded and always on. From the article:
So if I don't have the receipt and want to return it, I can--they just check out the RF tag (which logically must still be on and able to receive a query from a transmitter) and it tells how much I paid for the item. To do this, it means they aren't just tracking the item type as some one else says, they must be tracking the specific item and probably customer because you could pay a different price for the same item type purchased at different times. So the implication, then is that if it's still on and can do what they're describing, then someone could put a transmitter in a busy walkway somewhere and read all the RF tags too. The downside of abuse by companies, the government and heck even hackers, just makes this too qustionable of an issue.I don't at all begrudge companies that se lots of benefits to both themeselves and their customers as well, but until they can answer some very important questions, I don't think any of us should be at all happy with this. I'm not sure about the specs, but if they could guarantee a range of not more than say 5 feet or so, that's a step in the right direction.
Maybe it says more about Microsoft's inability milk further revenues from people who no longer see compelling reasons to upgrade.
Which brings up my biggest gripe about how bad credit agencies are. I suppose it all depends on your perspective, but as far as I'm concerned, they're terrible. Kinda like internet filtering software or OCR scanning recognition, or even facial recognition in airports--95 to even 99% isn't nearly good enough. It means that given the amount of data they collect, they get at least a couple of errors per person over their lifetime. Errors that can have drastic consequences to a person. Errors that the person is responsible for checking--and the burdon of proof isn't on them to prove their right but on you to prove their wrong. INAL, so maybe there's some reason I don't know about, but if I'm ever turned down for a loan or anything like that and end up finding out it was because Experian or Equifax screwed up, I will sue them for whatever harm it caused me.
I get the hiccups really bad, sometimes their really pretty painful so I've tried everything and this one works for me. For some reason, if I'm laying or even sitting down and get up too quickly, especially if I jump right out of bed in the morning, I get the hiccups almost every time.
Despite the continuous criticism of Apple and that they should just go away, once again Michael Dell follows in the "beleaguered" company's footsteps. When Apple did this, everyone called them crazy--Dell does it and the story is completely different.
But maybe you should have read his answer a little more closely--newspapers may not pay their sources, but certainly for a writer working on a book about some one to pay them wouldn't be unreasonable now would it? I imagine if someone wanted to write a biography on me (especially one packed with lies), unless I had joint authorship or editorial rights, I certainly wouldn't be terribly forthcoming in helping.
Perhaps part of the reason is that he won't sue for defamation (aside from moving on with his life and/or not having the money) is that you can't prove a negative. Tell me this, how does he prove that he never hacked NORAD? When you make that type of allegations against some one, they really can't disprove them. Sometime around 1990 I saw you making love to a sheep. Prove you didn't. And guess what, now everyone can write that it has been alleged that you sleep with sheep. Your are not an alleged sheep molestor, how's that feel? I understand and agree with the freedom the first ammendment guarantees the press. But the burden of proof on accusations needs to fall squarely on the shoulders of the accuser whether they are a member of the press or not.