These are technical problems that can be fixed. Put in a gyro and a directional laser and a computer to control it all and you're good to go. Maybe radar and collision avoidance software as well. You shouldn't have to worry about navigating around other objects in the air; your jet pack will have all the smarts it needs under the hood to take care of such things.
As for noise, put a muffler on the jet. Of course, a Harley jet pack would probably not come with one.
I would love one of these. I am so sick of being forced to commute along this predetermined, crowded and narrow little route along with hundreds of thousands of others every day. All that tension, stress, and road rage, not to mention the speed traps. It is so dangerous and inefficient. It would be simpler, faster, and safer to just hop the 25 miles to my destination. And so much more fun.
Just imagine a city full of these devices. People wouldn't need ground garages anymore. Streets could be dug up and replanted to reverse global warming and beautify the city (but leave enough for bike lanes). No more stoplights, no more running over pedestrians.
The telecoms can take the heat for being heartless monopolies, for providing terrible service at a high price, and for leveraging their monopolies to avoid upgrading their taxpayer-financed infrastructure.
They can't, however, be accused of not doing what will profit them the most in the short term.
In this case, they've collectively called Google's bluff. I don't see Google having $4.6B in spare cash, to purchase the spectrum they have no idea how to make money on. This is a tough spot for Google, because not only do they stand to lose their coveted "shared spectrum" rule, but they also stand to lose much of their perceived invulnerability on the market. I don't quite follow your reasoning. Having its own national slice of broadband would be terrific for Google. This 700Mhz band would be a great thing to own--penetrates walls really well, wide area networking potential is great. Google could lease its bandwidth to hundreds of startup wifi phone providers and give established companies like Vonage and Skype a nice alternative pipeline.
Can you imagine what a cheap or free search-ad supported wifi network would do to the existing local monopolies? Skype running on 700 Mhz gPhones would blow everything else out of the water. God, how I would love to get away from cell phone contracts, $40+/month charges, extra $0.40/fraction of a minute when I "exceed the limit", not to mention so-called local phone service with all its limitations.
Having Linux and an open API on these phones would be icing on the cake.
Yeah, it would cost some money up front, but long term it would be a real cash cow for the company. Verizon, Cox, Comcast et al should be getting a little scared right now. Google was not taken all that seriously early on, and later we see columnists writing about how they "should have" bought some GOOG at the IPO. Today it's a $171 billion colossus. They have the money to buy this band and they have the technical know-how and vision to turn U.S. telecom industry on its head.
It's like road rage. When people are cutting you off and breaking all the rules, you have to tailgate and cut them off as a defensive measure (sometimes, at least). Nice guys finish last. The entire system is broken and the Patent Office really needs more legislative direction because it has strayed from its original mission.
I think software and business methods should not be patentable in the same way that physical inventions are. Also, I question the concept of selling patents. We end up with these litigious patent holding companies that have no technical abilities of their own, only a lot of lawyers.
A few years ago I looked into making and marketing a telephony device that would be an incremental but useful improvement over existing equipment, and discovered that so many methods related to telephony and voicemail are patented that practically speaking there was no way to make a device without infringing. "A method for playing back a telephoned message by pressing a button"--give me a freaking break. No wonder the U.S. has slipped behind in technical innovation, when much of the incentive for incremental product improvement has been removed by the threat of instant litigation. Thank goodness the Asians still believe in incremental improvement.
I'm OK with Amazon patenting stupid obvious things, as long as they don't enforce those patents, which I believe they have done very little of, and as long as Jeff Bezos continues to crusade for patent reform. Just my 2c!
With high capacity external drives so cheap, I have to wonder if optical as a mainstream backup medium is dead. Of course there will always be power users who need the storage, but are they enough to make 100GB discs a volume item or will most people buy 25GB to master home video projects to?
Not sure how this will effect the overall market, but in my case it pretty much ended my interest in HDM. I was never willing to pay a premium price for either format if it wasn't backwards compatible, so I'm going to continue buying HD DVD combo discs when possible but otherwise stick to DVD. The Blu-ray camp has stated repeatedly they're not interested in producing combo discs so I'm not interested in their format, even if they do eventually price players closer to what I'm willing to pay (from the CES announcements it sounds like even cheap chinese players are being priced around $300). I guess you've got a point there. You can buy three 500G Maxtor My Books for the price of one blu-ray drive. However, if history is any guide, the blu-ray drives will definitely come down in price. And there is some advantage to being able to make massive backups to disposable disks. Now, a cheap consumer 500G write-once optical disk, that would be a real game changer.
another positive is that now we can hope for new, standardized high density optical disks for computers. With makers such as TDK offering 100 gigabyte write-once disks and many others starting at 25 gigs, we finally have a backup medium that is up to the task of modern needs. I, like many other power users, have two internal 500G hard disks and an external 500G USB drive, and a 4G DVD-R just doesn't cut it anymore. My family pictures and video clips alone come to about 40G. More to the point, businesses will benefit from faster and cheaper backups of their database/web servers.
As Forbes points out, Sony still has its work cut out for it, but it sounds like Toshiba's format has lost the battle. I'm very relieved (even though I don't plan to buy a whole lot of high def movies in the near future). The big news here is that we can now standardize on a new level of storage density, and watching sharper movies is just a nice extra.
If one of your loved ones were on such a flight, would you still be so coldly analytical? Suppose it were your wife? Your son? Your parents? Of course it's worth the money. Every human life is priceless to their dear ones.
We should spend $100 billion--$11 billion to outfit planes with missile reduction tech, $20 billion in better airport external security measures, and $50 billion to design safer cars.
Spend a few billion on other airplane safety research, like figuring out how to make crashes survivable--kevlar-reinforced passenger compartments, detachable fuel tanks, parachutes, etc.
If there's any money left, plow it into cancer research.
parent wrote: >>Speeding isn't good, but it isn't the scourge of society.
Don't know about the U.K. but in the U.S., traffic accidents result in about 43,000 deaths per year and hundreds of thousands of injuries, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage, suffering, litigation, insurance fees, on and on.
If this isn't a scourge, I can't imagine what is. Would I surrender what little anonymity I possess on the road in exchange for capturing and de-licensing the scoff-law speeders, red light runners, tailgaters, road rage perpetrators, and drunks who have made urban driving a miserable experience? You bet I would. I know elderly people who don't dare venture out on the road at night--they are terrorized by young, aggressive drivers.
Have you ever seen someone take an exit ramp from an inner lane? Only meters in front of you? It's a terrifying experience. You see two tons of steel suddenly hurtle across your path and you hope and pray they don't hit you in the process. This has become fashionable behavior in Boston and in Phoenix, two cities I am acquainted with, and likely in other areas as well.
While I agree with you about the potentials for abuse, there is simply no other alternative as long as people choose to behave this way.
Ubuntu is based on Debian so you could argue that Ubuntu has gotten Debian out to the masses. My home workstations have progressed from Redhat to Fedora to Suse to Ubuntu and I feel that they are all fine distributions with their particular strengths, but Ubuntu definitely wins on the plug-and-play aspects. I put it on a Dell laptop and except for having to manually download and configure ndiswrapper to handle wireless networking, it practically required no technical knowledge. The most recent release in fact does away with the ndiswrapper step, I believe. It's not surprising that Ubuntu wins. I hope that the other distributors learn from the success of Ubuntu and make their next releases "just work", thus undercutting one of Microsoft's main arguments against Linux.
Google came out with a search engine when we already had lots of search engines: AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot, etc. Google did it better, and won the market.
Google developed a web mail application when we already had Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail, Lycos Mail, and many others. Google Mail was hailed as innovative and suddenly it was the coolest email address to have.
Google came out with Google Maps after Mapquest, Mapblast, and several others were already on the scene. Google Maps was innovative and quickly rose to the top.
There are dozens of other Google applications, some better known than others but all of them interesting and innovative. Now they want to do a phone OS. I'd put some serious money on its success given their track record of innovation. Plus, they've shown that they're willing to fund projects that don't make much money. I suspect the gPhone will do pretty well and I can't wait to see what kind of ideas they're coming up with.
The Chinese have for years been talking publicly about asymmetrical warfare that has as its cornerstone the concept of computer network cracking.
One may ask, precisely what enemy are they gearing up to fight? The obvious answer would be the United States, whom they have been bashing in their official speeches. Confusingly, the U.S. is also one of their biggest investors and their biggest single market and so anything that hurts the U.S. will inevitably harm them as well.
I wonder what Chinese businesspeople think when they listen to what their political overlords say. Here they are trying to expand their presence in the U.S. market, attract more U.S. investment, transfer more U.S. technology, and Mr. Hu is up there talking about crashing the U.S. defense networks. What exactly is going on here?
My theory is that China is really more concerned about Russia, which still occupies some old Chinese territory, but there's little to be gained from threatening the paranoid Russians, so instead they go after a nice soft target.
In the long run, as awareness of the Chinese regime's hostility sinks deeper into the dim American consciousness, China will reap an unpleasant harvest of ill will culminating in a boycott of China-made goods. Already, one commonly hears people warning each other not to purchase Chinese toys. Ultimately, the regime will be replaced by something more democratic but it only will happen when the Chinese people perceive that the Communist regime has become a total liability. 800 million people in rural areas are close to this perception, but the 400 million urbanites are not quite there yet.
Nerves are complicated. To splice a regrown nerve into a particular spot will require some mighty fine tools, and it's got to be the right type of neuron. Also, if an axon has been cut, the body will have reabsorbed it and there's nothing to splice. You'd have to thread your replacement axon from a ganglion next to the spine all the way out to the muscle or organ that is to be innervated.
Unfortunately this is probably beyond the abilities of current medical science. The problem is that the nervous system grows with the limbs and organs starting from early embryonic stage; it's not something that you can entice to regrow from scratch. Probably the long term solution will be nanomachines that are injected into the body and rebuild nerves along preplanned routes, molecule by molecule. This is very appealing and also probably about 50 years away from reality.
Also, axons (the long part of the nerve cell) usually require a myelin cell wrapping along its length to boost its ability to depolarize quickly. It's not clear that these folks in Manchester were able to grow a nerve cell along with its myelin. If we knew how to do that, we could also help people with multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks myelin specifically.
As for ALS, it's an agent or group of agents that attacks motor neurons; these agents are not fully understood. It might be possible to splice in healthy neurons here and there but you still have the myelin problem.
This kind of research announcement should not be taken as a big step forward in fixing nerve damage until they can demonstrate it in vivo. Until then, it's just another cold fusion type story.
Bottom line, it's not the "broadcasting" of the music but the "reception" of the music by the auditory nerves of customers.
It seems to me it's the burden of proof of the copyright claimant that the customers were taking in this music and deriving substantial enjoyment from it. Suppose that 99% of customers either did not hear the music or heard it but disliked it. Then 99% of the claim should be thrown out, i.e. reduce the claim to L2000.
It's the old story. You have to pay your dues and learn the ropes before you're worth anything. For a few years there, companies couldn't afford to wait for people to accumulate experience, so they hired'em right out of school. That unrealistic situation is behind us now, along with hundreds of defunct Dot Com era companies, and we're back to business basics. You have to have a product that someone wants to pay for if you want to run a business.
Another business basic is that people have to have a skill that's in demand. There's plenty of demand for *experienced* software engineers. A place that hired me to do some perl programming last year told me they were searching for months. Months! Where are all the perl programmers? They hired me not because of my perl, which is just one of my skills, but because I know how to design, code, and test software at a senior level. Newbies just don't have that level of skill yet so they're not going to get hired very easily.
I suggest that newbies in the software field stop feeling sorry for themselves and complaining about how the American software market "sucks" and get on top of the technology and pick up some useful skills. Write a nice interactive website for your church or school pro bono, teach, write some open source software and get your name up on sourceforge.net. It's not that hard; it's called good old fashioned true grit. If you can demonstrate to companies that you are worth something to them, believe me you'll get hired. It also helps to join professional societies and show up at meetings; you develop leadership skills, you build up a network of colleagues, and long term it will pay off in job referrals.
This whole offshoring thing is overblown for several reasons. For one, all the good Indian engineers are hired already, and companies have discovered that near-shoring or local hiring has certain advantages. Like everything else, the pendulum swings and it moves into balance. Good luck to all who are starting out and don't let market conditions get you down; just get out there and pound the pavement and make your career happen.
I don't get it. What happened to locks, keys, and trusted employees? It seems like companies and government organizations are constantly leaving sensitive materials in cars or in unsecured locations where they can be stolen by opportunistic thieves. After thousands of years of civilization, and with all the fancy technology at our disposal today, have we learned nothing about how to keep important materials out of mischievous hands?
A server with sensitive information should not be on the public internet, and it should not be on the premises of a subcontractor! It should be safe behind locked doors with access only by a select few, and protected by strong encryption too. I just don't get it; it's kind of depressing.
Well the Japanese pretty much dominate the world automotive market so it's likely that their standard will win eventually. Besides, if the OS they are developing is for Japanese systems, why would they even care if BMW and Daimler come up with one for their own cars, unless there's some competitive advantage to marketing the OS to other cars, like Windows on PC's. I don't see any advantage here; it's just a way to share development resources.
I suppose. It's so strange these days. You see people doing research, then posing for a photo and making a press release. Then.. nothing. The promises and predictions don't amount to actual products that people can buy. But I suppose they do get you more grant money. Well this has been going on for years; it's nothing new. What's new today is the President's ambivalence if not downright hostility toward science, an attitude shared by a frighteningly large percentage of the population. There was a time when science was the religion in the U.S.; generations were taught that science was the key to better living, greater material wealth and national strength. Today there is a disconnect between Joe and Mary Sixpack and the scientific community, despite the manifold dazzling results of brilliant scientific research: magnetic resonance imaging, for example.
This spray-on solar article is a good example of scientists scrambling to win over a skeptical public. If you search around you won't find any articles, not even on the original journal's web site, that enlighten us as to what this research has produced. Do they have a practical demonstration yet or is it all pure theory bolstered by some lab results?
I suspect that private industry, especially in Asian countries where R&D is better supported, will lead the way in introducing solar energy to the masses. Americans are incredibly short sighted. Every new house ought to have a solar hot water system; it's only a few hundred dollars and over the lifetime of the house would save many thousands of dollars. A photovoltaic system is more expensive but surely it's cheaper to build one in at construction time than as an after-market add-on, and in a development of 150 homes a builder can achieve some economies of scale. According to US Census, about 1.4 million new homes are built each year. Solar systems on these homes would yield billions of dollars in energy savings.
Anyway--keeping people excited and interested in solar energy innovations is probably a good thing, but most people will still do what's in their own narrow short term interest and that means buying the cheapest grid energy instead of investing long term in solar.
1.ask the boss:"can I get more money? " 2.if answer is yes CONTINUE
else find another JOB. 3.work a little 4.GOTO1 I suggest first lining up a job offer, then going to your present employer to see if they are willing to match. It's better not to reveal the job offer, however, because it makes you sound like you're halfway out the door and have little loyalty. Just say something like "I have reason to believe that I am worth $XXXXX in this market. Are you able to give me something close to that?" and settle for something a little less in exchange for keeping your seniority, vesting, etc.
Slashdot's comment features, while not perfect, set an example that thousands of other sites have followed. Do people think the new Discussion2 system will set a new example to be copied? Or is it turning into bloat? I like the new discussion system. It allows for faster skimming of the most highly moderated comments without the multiple page spillover stuff you have to go through with the old system. It's quite good for a nerdy site like/. I don't know if the broader online community is ready for it however; it's a bit sophisticated.
Don't forget they also have no INCOME tax either. Digressing a bit, they do have some pretty hard hitting property taxes... but I'd wager the total burden is far less than most places. Property taxes are very high in New Hampshire. A typical middle class family is paying about $10,000 a year in property taxes. Whether you own or rent, you are paying this money.
Sure, NH has no sales tax, which is wonderful for people in Massachusetts when they come north on weekend shopping sprees. But one way or the other, the schools and other public services have to be funded.
Property tax is a tax on everyone's basic shelter. Given that sales tax is a tax on consumption, and exempting food and clothing from sales taxes as they do in Massachusetts and other states, I would say sales tax is by far the more progressive of the two types of revenue schemes.
Internet tax would probably be regressive overall, raising the cost of nearly every kind of business transaction and hence raising the general cost of living. At the same time, it would put a damper on internet entrepreneurialism. A few pennies a month probably won't make much difference, but like hot air balloons, taxes have a way of rising....
Re:One nice thing about Fedora7 is the buildtools
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I'm very pleased to hear about these packaging tools, and overall I really respect fedora. Unfortunately, I did have a hardware problem with FC6 and was forced to try a different distribution, just to get my workstation up and running. I have heard of many others with similar issues over at fedoraforum.org. I hope F7 has fixed this because I like the fact that they tend to have the latest and greatest kernel releases and the whole Fedora system just feels well laid out (after years of familiarity of course).
Nice but is it bloatware?
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That's nice. I guess I'll try it out on a live DVD some time. I have been a Redhat/Fedora user for 9 years, but unfortunately FC6 was unable to load on my latest PC with an Intel 965 motherboard, so I had to switch to OpenSUSE 10.2.
OpenSUSE has taken some getting used to--YaST admin/update tool, Beagle instead of the locate tool, some interesting tweaks in the UI, European defaults for certain settings such as Ghostscript paper size that I had to track down and adjust. Furthermore, it seems to be a bit behind in its kernel versions. But it's worked great and the functionality is all there, especially after switching YaST's software manager to a set of European archives which include all the multimedia stuff like mp3, full xine codecs, and mplayer. It seems not to have as large a user base as Fedora, also.
I wonder how F7 compares to recent versions of the popular distros like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. It seems to me they've fallen a little behind in the way they integrate the kernel and UI aspects of the Linux system, and Fedora has always required a fair amount of tweaking to get things like multimedia to work up to snuff. It's rather bloated actually. Anyway, will have to give it a spin before drawing conclusions. But I'm staying with OpenSUSE for the moment.
Well there were several things mentioned in the article. While taxing email is technically unfeasible not to mention rather ridiculous, they definitely want to tax commerce that utilizes the Internet to work more efficiently.
For example, if you buy a book off Amazon.com, Amazon would pay local taxes to the "streamlined sales tax" system they're proposing. Of course, the consumer would bear the expenses of such a tax.
They (I'm lumping all the tax maggots into one pronoun) also want to impose a monthly internet use tax, i.e. a DSL tax.
What the Dems don't get is that the supply side approach is much better as was demonstrated during the 90s when many successful companies were founded such as Amazon and EBay. Although local sales taxes are avoided, these companies nonetheless contribute mightily to the tax base through employee income taxes, employee purchase of local homes, cars, food, travel services, and other products, corporate income tax, capital gains and other stock transaction related taxes, etc.
The internet revolution demonstrated the superiority of supply side economics. The successful companies generate the most revenue streams for the government in an organic manner. Imposing a regressive, universal tax on transactions will probably not destroy the current giants but will certainly discourage new companies from flourishing. Instead, incompetence will be rewarded because local governments will get all kinds of revenue they didn't deserve and will become totally dependent on it.
Then there are the unknown future uses of the internet that most of us can't even conceive. What about internet-based medical care? A surgeon on another continent operating on a patient via precision remote control, or physicians providing consultative services remotely--all of this will get taxed, and the middleware companies that are trying to market these services will get taxed to death before they can even get off the ground.
Monthly internet connection tax--what a slippery slope! Next they'll be taxing by the byte. Ultimately the cost of doing business for everyone will go up, including bricks and mortar stores which are also dependent on the internet today to run their businesses. Salaries will necessarily go down, people will have less discretionary income as a result, and the U.S. economy will be further Europeanized.
It will then become even more economically attractive to outsource manufacturing and service jobs. This is all to China and India's benefit. Thank you Hilary and the Dems for destroying the last bits of American competitiveness, and thank you to the American people for voting these imbeciles in.
The Palm Linux OS is going to be "compatible" with Palm Garnet (current OS); thus, it should look and feel like a present day Palm with a compatibility mode for current apps. In this sense, the Palm OS is not going away. In fact, it's being supercharged for multitasking so we can do handy things such as, for example, run both wifi and cell phone at the same time on a future Treo.
I would say you're being very charitable to Mr. Shuttleworth. It seems pretty obvious, though, that Microsoft is pulling his strings. They're not going to want Dell to wander off the Windows straight-and-narrow, so if Dell starts marketing a tiny number of Linux boxes to the hobbyist crowd they'd better not make them too Windows compatible.
Dell is a huge company, but Microsoft is much huger. Microsoft has a lock on its market; Dell does not. Many other companies can easily step into the breach if Dell stumbles, and they both know it. Dell is not going to do anything to annoy its partner, and shipping Wine with Linux is undoubtedly annoying.
Regarding this ideological concept about pure Linux, this has to be some kind of a joke. Most of us who run Linux full time still have a few Win32 programs that we need to run. That doesn't mean we're traitors to the Cause, or we hate Linux. It means we're running the best tool available. For example, I consider the Linux OS the best tool as an OS, but Finale for Windows is the best tool for producing musical scores--nothing in Linux even comes close--and with Crossover Wine I can get the best of both worlds.
In my opinion, they should ship Linux computers with Crossover, which makes it very easy to install and run major must-have Windows apps like Office, Quicken, and Photoshop. Let the market decide which is more desirable--pure Windows or Linux and hybrid Windows or Linux-only. But in the real world, the market is secondary to Microsoft's whims, at least in this case.
Precisely; in aggressive driving cities like Boston and New York, coasting to a stop is just inviting a few horn honks, middle fingers, and possibly a rear ender if not a road rage incident. Plus, those behind you will just speed up and cut around you if they can, filling up all the space in front. Yet, as you point out, such sensible moves as coasting to the red would save everyone a lot of money.
As another poster points out, the common sense move is to let energy prices float up, perhaps through a tax that pays for new road electronics such as guidance systems and accident avoidance systems. $1 or $2 per gallon to save lives, reduce oil consumption, and long term reduce the American incentive to fight wars in the Middle East. Seems like a winning strategy all around.
Oh, and use some of that money to hire a few hundred more traffic cops in each city to nab the aggressive drivers and get them off the road. I know elderly people who are afraid to drive, basically prisoners in their homes. OK a few of them are scary too but not out of malevolence:)
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These are technical problems that can be fixed. Put in a gyro and a directional laser and a computer to control it all and you're good to go. Maybe radar and collision avoidance software as well. You shouldn't have to worry about navigating around other objects in the air; your jet pack will have all the smarts it needs under the hood to take care of such things.
As for noise, put a muffler on the jet. Of course, a Harley jet pack would probably not come with one.
I would love one of these. I am so sick of being forced to commute along this predetermined, crowded and narrow little route along with hundreds of thousands of others every day. All that tension, stress, and road rage, not to mention the speed traps. It is so dangerous and inefficient. It would be simpler, faster, and safer to just hop the 25 miles to my destination. And so much more fun.
Just imagine a city full of these devices. People wouldn't need ground garages anymore. Streets could be dug up and replanted to reverse global warming and beautify the city (but leave enough for bike lanes). No more stoplights, no more running over pedestrians.
Bring'em on!
They can't, however, be accused of not doing what will profit them the most in the short term.
In this case, they've collectively called Google's bluff. I don't see Google having $4.6B in spare cash, to purchase the spectrum they have no idea how to make money on. This is a tough spot for Google, because not only do they stand to lose their coveted "shared spectrum" rule, but they also stand to lose much of their perceived invulnerability on the market. I don't quite follow your reasoning. Having its own national slice of broadband would be terrific for Google. This 700Mhz band would be a great thing to own--penetrates walls really well, wide area networking potential is great. Google could lease its bandwidth to hundreds of startup wifi phone providers and give established companies like Vonage and Skype a nice alternative pipeline.
Can you imagine what a cheap or free search-ad supported wifi network would do to the existing local monopolies? Skype running on 700 Mhz gPhones would blow everything else out of the water. God, how I would love to get away from cell phone contracts, $40+/month charges, extra $0.40/fraction of a minute when I "exceed the limit", not to mention so-called local phone service with all its limitations.
Having Linux and an open API on these phones would be icing on the cake.
Yeah, it would cost some money up front, but long term it would be a real cash cow for the company. Verizon, Cox, Comcast et al should be getting a little scared right now. Google was not taken all that seriously early on, and later we see columnists writing about how they "should have" bought some GOOG at the IPO. Today it's a $171 billion colossus. They have the money to buy this band and they have the technical know-how and vision to turn U.S. telecom industry on its head.
Go, Google! I hope they win.
Bezos has stated in the past that he is patenting software methods as a defensive measure. "We're not saying we have bad patents," Amazon.com spokesman Bill Curry said. "We feel very good about our patents... [Bezos] makes the point very emphatically in the letter that we cannot unilaterally disarm in a world where there are big ugly players who aren't disarming."
It's like road rage. When people are cutting you off and breaking all the rules, you have to tailgate and cut them off as a defensive measure (sometimes, at least). Nice guys finish last. The entire system is broken and the Patent Office really needs more legislative direction because it has strayed from its original mission.
I think software and business methods should not be patentable in the same way that physical inventions are. Also, I question the concept of selling patents. We end up with these litigious patent holding companies that have no technical abilities of their own, only a lot of lawyers.
A few years ago I looked into making and marketing a telephony device that would be an incremental but useful improvement over existing equipment, and discovered that so many methods related to telephony and voicemail are patented that practically speaking there was no way to make a device without infringing. "A method for playing back a telephoned message by pressing a button"--give me a freaking break. No wonder the U.S. has slipped behind in technical innovation, when much of the incentive for incremental product improvement has been removed by the threat of instant litigation. Thank goodness the Asians still believe in incremental improvement.
I'm OK with Amazon patenting stupid obvious things, as long as they don't enforce those patents, which I believe they have done very little of, and as long as Jeff Bezos continues to crusade for patent reform. Just my 2c!
Not sure how this will effect the overall market, but in my case it pretty much ended my interest in HDM. I was never willing to pay a premium price for either format if it wasn't backwards compatible, so I'm going to continue buying HD DVD combo discs when possible but otherwise stick to DVD. The Blu-ray camp has stated repeatedly they're not interested in producing combo discs so I'm not interested in their format, even if they do eventually price players closer to what I'm willing to pay (from the CES announcements it sounds like even cheap chinese players are being priced around $300). I guess you've got a point there. You can buy three 500G Maxtor My Books for the price of one blu-ray drive. However, if history is any guide, the blu-ray drives will definitely come down in price. And there is some advantage to being able to make massive backups to disposable disks. Now, a cheap consumer 500G write-once optical disk, that would be a real game changer.
another positive is that now we can hope for new, standardized high density optical disks for computers. With makers such as TDK offering 100 gigabyte write-once disks and many others starting at 25 gigs, we finally have a backup medium that is up to the task of modern needs. I, like many other power users, have two internal 500G hard disks and an external 500G USB drive, and a 4G DVD-R just doesn't cut it anymore. My family pictures and video clips alone come to about 40G. More to the point, businesses will benefit from faster and cheaper backups of their database/web servers.
As Forbes points out, Sony still has its work cut out for it, but it sounds like Toshiba's format has lost the battle. I'm very relieved (even though I don't plan to buy a whole lot of high def movies in the near future). The big news here is that we can now standardize on a new level of storage density, and watching sharper movies is just a nice extra.
If one of your loved ones were on such a flight, would you still be so coldly analytical? Suppose it were your wife? Your son? Your parents? Of course it's worth the money. Every human life is priceless to their dear ones.
We should spend $100 billion--$11 billion to outfit planes with missile reduction tech, $20 billion in better airport external security measures, and $50 billion to design safer cars.
Spend a few billion on other airplane safety research, like figuring out how to make crashes survivable--kevlar-reinforced passenger compartments, detachable fuel tanks, parachutes, etc.
If there's any money left, plow it into cancer research.
parent wrote:
>>Speeding isn't good, but it isn't the scourge of society.
Don't know about the U.K. but in the U.S., traffic accidents result in about 43,000 deaths per year and hundreds of thousands of injuries, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage, suffering, litigation, insurance fees, on and on.
If this isn't a scourge, I can't imagine what is. Would I surrender what little anonymity I possess on the road in exchange for capturing and de-licensing the scoff-law speeders, red light runners, tailgaters, road rage perpetrators, and drunks who have made urban driving a miserable experience? You bet I would. I know elderly people who don't dare venture out on the road at night--they are terrorized by young, aggressive drivers.
Have you ever seen someone take an exit ramp from an inner lane? Only meters in front of you? It's a terrifying experience. You see two tons of steel suddenly hurtle across your path and you hope and pray they don't hit you in the process. This has become fashionable behavior in Boston and in Phoenix, two cities I am acquainted with, and likely in other areas as well.
While I agree with you about the potentials for abuse, there is simply no other alternative as long as people choose to behave this way.
Ubuntu is based on Debian so you could argue that Ubuntu has gotten Debian out to the masses. My home workstations have progressed from Redhat to Fedora to Suse to Ubuntu and I feel that they are all fine distributions with their particular strengths, but Ubuntu definitely wins on the plug-and-play aspects. I put it on a Dell laptop and except for having to manually download and configure ndiswrapper to handle wireless networking, it practically required no technical knowledge. The most recent release in fact does away with the ndiswrapper step, I believe. It's not surprising that Ubuntu wins. I hope that the other distributors learn from the success of Ubuntu and make their next releases "just work", thus undercutting one of Microsoft's main arguments against Linux.
Google came out with a search engine when we already had lots of search engines: AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot, etc. Google did it better, and won the market.
Google developed a web mail application when we already had Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail, Lycos Mail, and many others. Google Mail was hailed as innovative and suddenly it was the coolest email address to have.
Google came out with Google Maps after Mapquest, Mapblast, and several others were already on the scene. Google Maps was innovative and quickly rose to the top.
There are dozens of other Google applications, some better known than others but all of them interesting and innovative. Now they want to do a phone OS. I'd put some serious money on its success given their track record of innovation. Plus, they've shown that they're willing to fund projects that don't make much money. I suspect the gPhone will do pretty well and I can't wait to see what kind of ideas they're coming up with.
The Chinese have for years been talking publicly about asymmetrical warfare that has as its cornerstone the concept of computer network cracking.
One may ask, precisely what enemy are they gearing up to fight? The obvious answer would be the United States, whom they have been bashing in their official speeches. Confusingly, the U.S. is also one of their biggest investors and their biggest single market and so anything that hurts the U.S. will inevitably harm them as well.
I wonder what Chinese businesspeople think when they listen to what their political overlords say. Here they are trying to expand their presence in the U.S. market, attract more U.S. investment, transfer more U.S. technology, and Mr. Hu is up there talking about crashing the U.S. defense networks. What exactly is going on here?
My theory is that China is really more concerned about Russia, which still occupies some old Chinese territory, but there's little to be gained from threatening the paranoid Russians, so instead they go after a nice soft target.
In the long run, as awareness of the Chinese regime's hostility sinks deeper into the dim American consciousness, China will reap an unpleasant harvest of ill will culminating in a boycott of China-made goods. Already, one commonly hears people warning each other not to purchase Chinese toys. Ultimately, the regime will be replaced by something more democratic but it only will happen when the Chinese people perceive that the Communist regime has become a total liability. 800 million people in rural areas are close to this perception, but the 400 million urbanites are not quite there yet.
Nerves are complicated. To splice a regrown nerve into a particular spot will require some mighty fine tools, and it's got to be the right type of neuron. Also, if an axon has been cut, the body will have reabsorbed it and there's nothing to splice. You'd have to thread your replacement axon from a ganglion next to the spine all the way out to the muscle or organ that is to be innervated.
Unfortunately this is probably beyond the abilities of current medical science. The problem is that the nervous system grows with the limbs and organs starting from early embryonic stage; it's not something that you can entice to regrow from scratch. Probably the long term solution will be nanomachines that are injected into the body and rebuild nerves along preplanned routes, molecule by molecule. This is very appealing and also probably about 50 years away from reality.
Also, axons (the long part of the nerve cell) usually require a myelin cell wrapping along its length to boost its ability to depolarize quickly. It's not clear that these folks in Manchester were able to grow a nerve cell along with its myelin. If we knew how to do that, we could also help people with multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks myelin specifically.
As for ALS, it's an agent or group of agents that attacks motor neurons; these agents are not fully understood. It might be possible to splice in healthy neurons here and there but you still have the myelin problem.
This kind of research announcement should not be taken as a big step forward in fixing nerve damage until they can demonstrate it in vivo. Until then, it's just another cold fusion type story.
Bottom line, it's not the "broadcasting" of the music but the "reception" of the music by the auditory nerves of customers.
It seems to me it's the burden of proof of the copyright claimant that the customers were taking in this music and deriving substantial enjoyment from it. Suppose that 99% of customers either did not hear the music or heard it but disliked it. Then 99% of the claim should be thrown out, i.e. reduce the claim to L2000.
It's the old story. You have to pay your dues and learn the ropes before you're worth anything. For a few years there, companies couldn't afford to wait for people to accumulate experience, so they hired'em right out of school. That unrealistic situation is behind us now, along with hundreds of defunct Dot Com era companies, and we're back to business basics. You have to have a product that someone wants to pay for if you want to run a business.
Another business basic is that people have to have a skill that's in demand. There's plenty of demand for *experienced* software engineers. A place that hired me to do some perl programming last year told me they were searching for months. Months! Where are all the perl programmers? They hired me not because of my perl, which is just one of my skills, but because I know how to design, code, and test software at a senior level. Newbies just don't have that level of skill yet so they're not going to get hired very easily.
I suggest that newbies in the software field stop feeling sorry for themselves and complaining about how the American software market "sucks" and get on top of the technology and pick up some useful skills. Write a nice interactive website for your church or school pro bono, teach, write some open source software and get your name up on sourceforge.net. It's not that hard; it's called good old fashioned true grit. If you can demonstrate to companies that you are worth something to them, believe me you'll get hired. It also helps to join professional societies and show up at meetings; you develop leadership skills, you build up a network of colleagues, and long term it will pay off in job referrals.
This whole offshoring thing is overblown for several reasons. For one, all the good Indian engineers are hired already, and companies have discovered that near-shoring or local hiring has certain advantages. Like everything else, the pendulum swings and it moves into balance. Good luck to all who are starting out and don't let market conditions get you down; just get out there and pound the pavement and make your career happen.
I don't get it. What happened to locks, keys, and trusted employees? It seems like companies and government organizations are constantly leaving sensitive materials in cars or in unsecured locations where they can be stolen by opportunistic thieves. After thousands of years of civilization, and with all the fancy technology at our disposal today, have we learned nothing about how to keep important materials out of mischievous hands?
A server with sensitive information should not be on the public internet, and it should not be on the premises of a subcontractor! It should be safe behind locked doors with access only by a select few, and protected by strong encryption too. I just don't get it; it's kind of depressing.
Well the Japanese pretty much dominate the world automotive market so it's likely that their standard will win eventually. Besides, if the OS they are developing is for Japanese systems, why would they even care if BMW and Daimler come up with one for their own cars, unless there's some competitive advantage to marketing the OS to other cars, like Windows on PC's. I don't see any advantage here; it's just a way to share development resources.
This spray-on solar article is a good example of scientists scrambling to win over a skeptical public. If you search around you won't find any articles, not even on the original journal's web site, that enlighten us as to what this research has produced. Do they have a practical demonstration yet or is it all pure theory bolstered by some lab results?
I suspect that private industry, especially in Asian countries where R&D is better supported, will lead the way in introducing solar energy to the masses. Americans are incredibly short sighted. Every new house ought to have a solar hot water system; it's only a few hundred dollars and over the lifetime of the house would save many thousands of dollars. A photovoltaic system is more expensive but surely it's cheaper to build one in at construction time than as an after-market add-on, and in a development of 150 homes a builder can achieve some economies of scale. According to US Census, about 1.4 million new homes are built each year. Solar systems on these homes would yield billions of dollars in energy savings.
Anyway--keeping people excited and interested in solar energy innovations is probably a good thing, but most people will still do what's in their own narrow short term interest and that means buying the cheapest grid energy instead of investing long term in solar.
2.if answer is yes CONTINUE
else find another JOB.
3.work a little
4.GOTO1 I suggest first lining up a job offer, then going to your present employer to see if they are willing to match. It's better not to reveal the job offer, however, because it makes you sound like you're halfway out the door and have little loyalty. Just say something like "I have reason to believe that I am worth $XXXXX in this market. Are you able to give me something close to that?" and settle for something a little less in exchange for keeping your seniority, vesting, etc.
Sure, NH has no sales tax, which is wonderful for people in Massachusetts when they come north on weekend shopping sprees. But one way or the other, the schools and other public services have to be funded.
Property tax is a tax on everyone's basic shelter. Given that sales tax is a tax on consumption, and exempting food and clothing from sales taxes as they do in Massachusetts and other states, I would say sales tax is by far the more progressive of the two types of revenue schemes.
Internet tax would probably be regressive overall, raising the cost of nearly every kind of business transaction and hence raising the general cost of living. At the same time, it would put a damper on internet entrepreneurialism. A few pennies a month probably won't make much difference, but like hot air balloons, taxes have a way of rising....
I'm very pleased to hear about these packaging tools, and overall I really respect fedora. Unfortunately, I did have a hardware problem with FC6 and was forced to try a different distribution, just to get my workstation up and running. I have heard of many others with similar issues over at fedoraforum.org. I hope F7 has fixed this because I like the fact that they tend to have the latest and greatest kernel releases and the whole Fedora system just feels well laid out (after years of familiarity of course).
That's nice. I guess I'll try it out on a live DVD some time. I have been a Redhat/Fedora user for 9 years, but unfortunately FC6 was unable to load on my latest PC with an Intel 965 motherboard, so I had to switch to OpenSUSE 10.2.
OpenSUSE has taken some getting used to--YaST admin/update tool, Beagle instead of the locate tool, some interesting tweaks in the UI, European defaults for certain settings such as Ghostscript paper size that I had to track down and adjust. Furthermore, it seems to be a bit behind in its kernel versions. But it's worked great and the functionality is all there, especially after switching YaST's software manager to a set of European archives which include all the multimedia stuff like mp3, full xine codecs, and mplayer. It seems not to have as large a user base as Fedora, also.
I wonder how F7 compares to recent versions of the popular distros like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. It seems to me they've fallen a little behind in the way they integrate the kernel and UI aspects of the Linux system, and Fedora has always required a fair amount of tweaking to get things like multimedia to work up to snuff. It's rather bloated actually. Anyway, will have to give it a spin before drawing conclusions. But I'm staying with OpenSUSE for the moment.
Well there were several things mentioned in the article. While taxing email is technically unfeasible not to mention rather ridiculous, they definitely want to tax commerce that utilizes the Internet to work more efficiently.
For example, if you buy a book off Amazon.com, Amazon would pay local taxes to the "streamlined sales tax" system they're proposing. Of course, the consumer would bear the expenses of such a tax.
They (I'm lumping all the tax maggots into one pronoun) also want to impose a monthly internet use tax, i.e. a DSL tax.
What the Dems don't get is that the supply side approach is much better as was demonstrated during the 90s when many successful companies were founded such as Amazon and EBay. Although local sales taxes are avoided, these companies nonetheless contribute mightily to the tax base through employee income taxes, employee purchase of local homes, cars, food, travel services, and other products, corporate income tax, capital gains and other stock transaction related taxes, etc.
The internet revolution demonstrated the superiority of supply side economics. The successful companies generate the most revenue streams for the government in an organic manner. Imposing a regressive, universal tax on transactions will probably not destroy the current giants but will certainly discourage new companies from flourishing. Instead, incompetence will be rewarded because local governments will get all kinds of revenue they didn't deserve and will become totally dependent on it.
Then there are the unknown future uses of the internet that most of us can't even conceive. What about internet-based medical care? A surgeon on another continent operating on a patient via precision remote control, or physicians providing consultative services remotely--all of this will get taxed, and the middleware companies that are trying to market these services will get taxed to death before they can even get off the ground.
Monthly internet connection tax--what a slippery slope! Next they'll be taxing by the byte. Ultimately the cost of doing business for everyone will go up, including bricks and mortar stores which are also dependent on the internet today to run their businesses. Salaries will necessarily go down, people will have less discretionary income as a result, and the U.S. economy will be further Europeanized.
It will then become even more economically attractive to outsource manufacturing and service jobs. This is all to China and India's benefit. Thank you Hilary and the Dems for destroying the last bits of American competitiveness, and thank you to the American people for voting these imbeciles in.
The Palm Linux OS is going to be "compatible" with Palm Garnet (current OS); thus, it should look and feel like a present day Palm with a compatibility mode for current apps. In this sense, the Palm OS is not going away. In fact, it's being supercharged for multitasking so we can do handy things such as, for example, run both wifi and cell phone at the same time on a future Treo.
"trying to please everyone"
I would say you're being very charitable to Mr. Shuttleworth. It seems pretty obvious, though, that Microsoft is pulling his strings. They're not going to want Dell to wander off the Windows straight-and-narrow, so if Dell starts marketing a tiny number of Linux boxes to the hobbyist crowd they'd better not make them too Windows compatible.
Dell is a huge company, but Microsoft is much huger. Microsoft has a lock on its market; Dell does not. Many other companies can easily step into the breach if Dell stumbles, and they both know it. Dell is not going to do anything to annoy its partner, and shipping Wine with Linux is undoubtedly annoying.
Regarding this ideological concept about pure Linux, this has to be some kind of a joke. Most of us who run Linux full time still have a few Win32 programs that we need to run. That doesn't mean we're traitors to the Cause, or we hate Linux. It means we're running the best tool available. For example, I consider the Linux OS the best tool as an OS, but Finale for Windows is the best tool for producing musical scores--nothing in Linux even comes close--and with Crossover Wine I can get the best of both worlds.
In my opinion, they should ship Linux computers with Crossover, which makes it very easy to install and run major must-have Windows apps like Office, Quicken, and Photoshop. Let the market decide which is more desirable--pure Windows or Linux and hybrid Windows or Linux-only. But in the real world, the market is secondary to Microsoft's whims, at least in this case.
Precisely; in aggressive driving cities like Boston and New York, coasting to a stop is just inviting a few horn honks, middle fingers, and possibly a rear ender if not a road rage incident. Plus, those behind you will just speed up and cut around you if they can, filling up all the space in front. Yet, as you point out, such sensible moves as coasting to the red would save everyone a lot of money.
:)
As another poster points out, the common sense move is to let energy prices float up, perhaps through a tax that pays for new road electronics such as guidance systems and accident avoidance systems. $1 or $2 per gallon to save lives, reduce oil consumption, and long term reduce the American incentive to fight wars in the Middle East. Seems like a winning strategy all around.
Oh, and use some of that money to hire a few hundred more traffic cops in each city to nab the aggressive drivers and get them off the road. I know elderly people who are afraid to drive, basically prisoners in their homes. OK a few of them are scary too but not out of malevolence