They kind of do. Its called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_lawcase law. You could argue that its the judge who technically makes the "laws" but the lawyers are the ones convincing the judge which way to go (and besides, most judges start out as laywers anyway, so you could still argue the original comment based on that;)).
Anything the government doesn't specifically create a law for, the lawyers (and judges) are free to basically make up as they see fit. And once they do, its almost as hammered in stone as a real law.
Of course, YMMV. Not all countries are as reliant on case law as the US tends to be.
More useful would be a message asking tasks to free up memory if they can. Tasks that can't (or were from prior to the new message existing) would simply ignore it and the OS would deal with them just as it currently does.
Tasks that are just holding onto memory for caching or other non-immediate uses could potentially free up a lot. Obviously wouldn't apply to a whole lot of programs, but being applied to a handful of important ones (say, browsers) could make a lot of difference.
Of course the OS would still need to be smart about it.. it would be too slow to try that on the fly.. but the OS could easily determine when it thinks its own cache is getting too small and can start bugging programs to free up theirs.
if Steven Jobs had put the same amount of effort into finding a cure for cancer
Because luckily, the human body works exactly the same as computing devices and cancer is just a Human/Pathogen Interface (HPI) problem that needs solving.
In the real world however, being good at one thing doesn't mean you're good (or even could be good) at everything. Probably the best Jobs could have done for cancer would be throw money at the people who work in the field. I have no knowledge of whether he did that or not, but chances are he himself didn't have a right lick at medicine any more than any other computer- or business-oriented person does.
Control Panel->Display->Screen Saver or Control Panel->Personalization->Screen Saver or Control Panel->Change the Theme->Screen Saver
or any of a dozen other things MS has tried over the past two decades. Whenever I have to deal with a Windows support call my first question is always "What version are you running?" because nothing's the goddamn same between them when you have to look at the control panel.
Working with this all the time, I'm mostly used to the various quirks of the different versions.. Except category view.. its the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. "Simplify" the one place in your computer that should be for advanced users only. And unsurprisingly, it turned out terrible and far more confusing than the basic list view for both novice and advanced users alike.
Out of all the various issues with windows, the constantly changing control panel is probably my biggest pet peeve by far. Sure they might need to add or remove things as the system evolves, but there's no bloody reason to just rename things arbitrarily every version (I'm looking at you this time, Printers and Faxes.. err just Printers.. err.. Devices and Printers.. err wtf).
The Win7 start menu is pretty nice (after I got used to it -- that took a while!) but as long as Ctrl+Esc brings up the program list, I can probably live without the start menu. I'm not going to be impressed if I have to drop back to Explorer and navigate C:\Program Files every time I need to access something that I haven't used in a while or just don't used that often though.
At that point its not vendor lock-in, its manager lock-in. Someone in your company has decided "if it works, its good enough" and doesn't want to fork out the $$$ for Qt/VS licenses plus all of the time taken to re-write their entire software base. Especially if its in-house software and they don't have to worry about first impressions when trying to sell it to someone else.
Cobol programmers aren't even out of a job yet, and it was old news before MFC was a glint in MS's collective eye.
Switching from MSOffice to OOo is a bit of a different ballgame however. OOo is good enough at reading MSOffice documents that vendor lock-in isn't really the problem. Customer lock-in is more the issue. OOo can read and write MS documents well enough for internal usage, but if you send a customer (or worse, a prospective customer) a document that has formatting errors, you're going to receive a bad impression. Even using older versions of MSO has that trouble, so its to the level of version lock-in!
And that leaves you with either taking the easy way out and just upgrading your Office suite to the new version, or going through the hassle of retraining all of your employees, setting up a specific "document formatting" department to clean up every single thing that goes out to customers/media/etc and somehow preventing all employees from skirting that department and just firing off a quick email.
Its a mess. The only real way to clean that one up is for OOo to be able to format-match MSO 100% (at least in the most used things. Last time I tried -- less than a year ago -- OOo still had problems with basic things like tables, margins, columns, etc.. they'd be just a little bit off. Not enough to prevent the document from being read, but enough to make it look ugly as sin and not something I'd want a customer to see.
Well either that, or having the entire corporate world agree to drop the veil of perfection that we all seem to require from each other when it comes to business transactions. Its not like anyone really believes perfection is possible.. yet we rarely take the possibility of failure into account and we all get pissed off when bugs happen (even and sometimes especially simple aesthetic bugs that don't really matter!)
The only people Zoocasa would be benefiting are buyers who use that specific search site and don't bother going through an agent (who would be making recommendations from MLS).
Whether this battle was worth C21's time and lawyer fees is up for debate, but they aren't standing to lose much from the lack of an unsanctioned rip of their data. Who knows, maybe they were foreseeing some future problem with the situation getting out of control and wanted to stem it off?
Remember, Rogers is a big greedy corporation too. You don't take on someone like Rogers without a damned good reason.
The difference is that in the class action, its Sony's nickle rather than yours.
Of course, they'll just turn around and jack up the price of their units by 15c to over-compensate, but we don't like to think that far into the future when there potentially immediate money to be made!
Well they're not facts, but here's some observations:
- Sony is a big, extremely visible, and somewhat hated company (which is redundant, I know).
- They're almost certainly the target of almost continual hack attempts.
- It still took 4 years to breach (whether by an employee screwup or legitimate hack.. I don't know/recall the details).
- Sony is by far not the only organization to have been hacked, including some with a lot more incentive and/or ability to prevent hacks (NSA? RSA? These are some big names in security and they still fell).
I don't see what the problem is here. Sony got burned. They changed their ToS to protect themselves in the future. Yes its annoying but its hardly surprising.
The only really bad thing I could see coming out of this is if Sony now considers themselves "protected" and intentionally laxes on their security duties in future. But that would almost certainly open them up to even harsher lawsuits if intentional negligence could be proven, so that's a pretty big risk to take.
You get to trade off one right for another. You can retain your ability to use class action suits, but you lose your ability to use arbitration if you ever wish to go that route. And in the latter case, its against ALL Sony brands whereas in the former it only applies to PSN.
All of your games will continue working, and most new games will also continue working for the foreseeable future (you don't HAVE to update your games when they ask.. though without PSN access they probably wouldn't even ask).
The only games you'd lose access to would be downloaded games which you have deleted from your harddrive and can't download again (or the occasional game thats online play only).
Which is why PSN is legally a distinct service and not part of the PS3 "product".
Your cell phone company, your cable company and pretty much any other service company you've ever associated with will from time to time "renegotiate" their contract with you in the sense of "you have two choices: accept or cancel your service".
It really does stink (especially when its something that your average person can't live without like telephone service) but sadly, its been common practice for decades and isn't going away any time soon.
As for something happening to you. No, nothing will happen to you or your PS3 except for your loss of service to the PSN. Of course PSN itself is somewhat important if you want to use the PS3 (you lose all online play, updates become a nightmare, etc) but its not NECESSARY to use your PS3.
OtherOS was a much bigger complaint from a product standpoint -- forcing people actually disable part of their PS3 in order to continue using a (theoretically separate) service is quite a bit different than a clause that only relates to the service itself.
At least where I live (Canada), PC games have recently started selling cheaper than their console counterparts (I first noticed it on Alice2 but it may have started earlier) -- typically $60 for a PS3/Xbox game or $50 for the same title on the PC.
Wii versions are ususally cheaper than PS3/Xbox as well (though I don't recall if they're cheaper than PC) but of course you're getting less game for your dollar on the Wii (due to the lack of HD support). And you have to deal with their obnoxious habit of adding an unnecessary wrist-cracking Wiimote jerk in games that are otherwise buttons-only.. though I haven't bought a Wii game in years so maybe that doesn't happen so much anymore.. but now I'm rambling offtopic;)).
Its not a question of the cost of hemp vs the cost of other materials. Its a question of the cost of hemp -plus the cost of the red tape- vs the cost of other materials.
The red tape (licenses, compliance with those licenses, lawsuits, fighting lobbiests, fighting anti-drug citizen groups, etc) is likely pretty pricey.
The lobbiests in particular would be annoying as many of them would be well-funded by cigarette companies, (legal) drug companies, alcohol companies, and pretty much anyone else who even dreams of one day losing a few dollars to marijuana users (because you know, no one can get it under the current system..)
Most mail sent through USPS (or any other snailmail intermediary) is most certainly NOT in clear text. There's that little thing called an "envelope".
Now the clear text is certainly pretty easy to retrieve (open the envelope) but envelopes are usually manufactured to at least make such tampering obvious.
I'm sure someone, somewhere, can open almost any envelope and reseal it with minimal obvious damage, but its not exactly a common thing (the penalties are pretty large for those caught tampering with mail inappropriately).
Email is more like a postcard -- its just out in the open for anyone who gets their hands on it to read.
The more fundamental issue with email though that regular mail doesn't have an analog to is copying. An email intermediary could potentially copy every single email and analyze them, store them, sell them to third parties, etc. All without any trace of this actually happening (at least to the end point parties. Some clever researcher may be able to figure it out by looking at aggregate traffic patterns or something, but for us lay people there'd be no indication).
TFA's idea is that you choose who to trust, and you can revoke that trust at any time and replace it with someone else.
It then takes the step of saying "ok I'm going to look up the information from these 5 trusted guys, and majority rules".
Its definitely running under the assumption that you don't have a majority of your trusted authorities compromised at the same time (and in the same way -- if you ask 5 people at 2 agree and the other 3 are completely at odds from everyone else, chances are you're in a bad place. You might not even want to trust the 2, but you sure as hell don't want to trust any of the other three!)
So there's a few presumptions made: 1) Trusted authorities don't get compromised fast enough to have a majority of rogues.
2) Even if there are, the rogues are not cooperating.
3) When you do find a rogue, you revoke its trust in a timely manner.
This is a huge bloody list of requirements when you think about it. We've either got to (individually) maintain these lists ourselves, or trust a third party to do it. And guess what? As soon as you start trusting a third party, you're back to square one.
So I don't really know what they're fixing outside of a theoretical perspective. The vast majority of people (including website operators) in the world are going to be far too lazy to maintain these authenticity lists.
Now if they can come up with a secure, automated way to maintain the authenticity lists, then we'll be talking. Something like the way the eDonkey protocol has servers distributing lists of more servers so that once you've got that first server address, you quickly and automatically have large lists of other servers. Of course using that method directly isn't secure (it could be easily poisoned by a rogue server) but thats the sort of thing I'm thinking would be necessary to get any sort of large-scale adoption of a decentralized authority system.
TED is overrated. It present flashiness instead of real thought.
You're doing it wrong. TED is about expressing ideas in a way that a good majority of people can understand.
A truly novel idea cannot be expressed in detail to someone unfamiliar with the field in 18 minutes. I don't care how simple the idea or what field its in -- filling in the background knowledge alone would take far far longer.
Saying TED should produce new ideas (and not only new, but BIG new ideas) is like saying your local newspaper should describe the full state of the world. Its beyond wrong and into patently absurd.
And to bring in your example of graphic representation. You're right, the general concept of graphic representation is not new (its been around since the ancient Greeks and their geometry-based math.) The "new" ideas in graphic representation are mostly about coming up with ways to represent not just data, but huge amounts of data, in a way that makes sense to the average non-specialized viewer.
While graphic representaion is not likely to change the world in any fundamental way, its still extremely useful in the modern world as businesses, governments and even individuals try to grapple with the phenomenal amount of information that's become available to us in the past couple of decades.
And once in a while, graphic representations DO consistute a BIG idea. Feynman diagrams revolutionized quantum mechanics, even though they don't provide any more information than the purely mathematical formulations. And they're often harder to compute. But they're (relatively) easy to understand, and that made a huge difference.
By 2011, its not even a poorly kept secret anymore that information is valuable, and anyone who can collect information of any sort will do so.
What they do with that information and how evil they are can still lead you into the land of tinfoil (and for that matter, figuring out who "they" are!) But the fact that information is arbitrarily collected and used is hardly earth-shattering news anymore.
Yes and no. GPS would work pretty well without GR and just having tiny adjustments applied periodically (ie: GR shift is simply another source of error to correct for even if the underlying cause isn't known precisely).
This page gives a big stack of math to back that up. GR shift accounts for something like 4 parts in 10 billion. It accumulates over time to be sure, but its not severe enough to prevent GPS working without it.
Of course, I don't know that the full QED is really needed for all of our modern day electronics either, so it my example could be just as overzealous as requiring GR for GPS;). I suspect though that our ability to control EM and light waves will give QED a much stronger (practical applications) role in the future even if its not entirely there yet.
Then again, there may come a day when our space exploration blossoms past a few unmanned probes here and there. Then GR might become more relevant in day-to-day life (even then though, I'm not sure what scale we have to reach before we worry about it to any great extent. Definitely inter-galactic. Probably inter-stellar. Inter-planetary? Not so sure).
Galileo and Darwin didn't exactly have the 'freedom' to make shit up either. They did it anyway and while they were prosecuted at the time, we've later come to realize how important their ideas area.
I think a lot of these comments have the right of it -- big ideas are pretty damned infrequent. The article itself references what? Less than a dozen people spanning over a century (maybe more, I didn't recognize all the names).
That amounts to a big idea every 10 years at best. I would suggest that perhaps Tim Berners-Lee should get the award for the 90s -- popularization of the internet isn't exactly what one can call a small social change.
Facebook (or Myspace or whichever social media website you decide should be credited) could be a good candidate for the 2000s. Regardless of whether you consider the effects of social media good or bad, the fact of the matter is that its significantly and to some extent fundamentally changed how the world works.
Of course my examples come from the computer world -- its where I live. Perhaps there's equally strong ideas presented in other fields, but I don't think any of them have as much public mindshare as the two I've mentioned (at least, not yet!)
And keep in mind also that this discussion (and the article) primarily revolves around that concept of public mindshare. I would suggest that Feynman & friends working out the kinks in QED has been more important on a human scale than Einstein working out GR. Tracking the motion of galaxies a billion light years away is fascinating and all, but it doesn't really do anything on a practical level. Of course Einstein did lots of useful work on more down-to-earth physics as well, but GR is generally what people think of first when Einstein comes up.
So who's going to take the prize for the 2010s? Hard to say -- the decade is still young. Don't be surprised if it comes from China or India though. I suspect they'll both be starting to throw the ball back into the world's idea pool over the next couple of decades as they become more industrialized and larger portions of their populations are able to start thinking about more than where their next meal is coming from.
Private industry has, for the most part, done exactly as its mandated to do -- produce larger and larger profits at any cost.
The problem is that we (as a general political consensus) have got this idea that profit is the only thing worth having combined with the even flakier idea that government intervention is not only useless, but actually counter-productive.
The government's real job (at least as it relates to industry) is to reduce that "at any cost" clause down to "at a manageable cost". That is, its the government's job to consider and protect pretty much everything EXCEPT profit.
You know, silly little things like freedoms, rights and people in general.
And all of the push for privitization is just showing how badly our governments are failing us. Basically any industry that has such a high barrier to entry that competition becomes implausible (due to cost, right-of-way restrictions, etc) should be a public utility. Not because the government runs it better as a profit-building business, but because the government is (somewhat) better at providing for the people even if it means taking a loss and no matter how niche a particular market area is. Road systems, police forces, telephone systems (at least the expensive wires) and so on.
Now this is understandable. People are, in general, greedy and selfish -- the entire capitalist system is based on this premise. The US in particular though takes this to an extreme when it comes to things like taxation. Basically, Americans don't want to pay for social services (though they're happy to benefit from them!) All they see is the taxes going out rather than the benefits coming in. Especially in areas like health care where everyone thinks it should be someone else's problem.. until they get sick and end up $10-100k in debt.
The capitalist system is flawed. The communist system was flawed. But as with most things in life, this isn't a black-and-white choice. There's a whole range of semi-social greys in between, and many of those greys are in use around the world with great success.
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lawyers do not create laws
They kind of do. Its called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_lawcase law. You could argue that its the judge who technically makes the "laws" but the lawyers are the ones convincing the judge which way to go (and besides, most judges start out as laywers anyway, so you could still argue the original comment based on that ;)).
Anything the government doesn't specifically create a law for, the lawyers (and judges) are free to basically make up as they see fit. And once they do, its almost as hammered in stone as a real law.
Of course, YMMV. Not all countries are as reliant on case law as the US tends to be.
They work for Hollywood studios to ensure that the computer systems in Avatar don't look like the crap we really use.
More useful would be a message asking tasks to free up memory if they can. Tasks that can't (or were from prior to the new message existing) would simply ignore it and the OS would deal with them just as it currently does.
Tasks that are just holding onto memory for caching or other non-immediate uses could potentially free up a lot. Obviously wouldn't apply to a whole lot of programs, but being applied to a handful of important ones (say, browsers) could make a lot of difference.
Of course the OS would still need to be smart about it.. it would be too slow to try that on the fly.. but the OS could easily determine when it thinks its own cache is getting too small and can start bugging programs to free up theirs.
if Steven Jobs had put the same amount of effort into finding a cure for cancer
Because luckily, the human body works exactly the same as computing devices and cancer is just a Human/Pathogen Interface (HPI) problem that needs solving.
In the real world however, being good at one thing doesn't mean you're good (or even could be good) at everything. Probably the best Jobs could have done for cancer would be throw money at the people who work in the field. I have no knowledge of whether he did that or not, but chances are he himself didn't have a right lick at medicine any more than any other computer- or business-oriented person does.
The hard part is whether its:
Control Panel->Display->Screen Saver or
Control Panel->Personalization->Screen Saver or
Control Panel->Change the Theme->Screen Saver
or any of a dozen other things MS has tried over the past two decades. Whenever I have to deal with a Windows support call my first question is always "What version are you running?" because nothing's the goddamn same between them when you have to look at the control panel.
Working with this all the time, I'm mostly used to the various quirks of the different versions.. Except category view.. its the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. "Simplify" the one place in your computer that should be for advanced users only. And unsurprisingly, it turned out terrible and far more confusing than the basic list view for both novice and advanced users alike.
Out of all the various issues with windows, the constantly changing control panel is probably my biggest pet peeve by far. Sure they might need to add or remove things as the system evolves, but there's no bloody reason to just rename things arbitrarily every version (I'm looking at you this time, Printers and Faxes.. err just Printers.. err.. Devices and Printers.. err wtf).
The Win7 start menu is pretty nice (after I got used to it -- that took a while!) but as long as Ctrl+Esc brings up the program list, I can probably live without the start menu. I'm not going to be impressed if I have to drop back to Explorer and navigate C:\Program Files every time I need to access something that I haven't used in a while or just don't used that often though.
At that point its not vendor lock-in, its manager lock-in. Someone in your company has decided "if it works, its good enough" and doesn't want to fork out the $$$ for Qt/VS licenses plus all of the time taken to re-write their entire software base. Especially if its in-house software and they don't have to worry about first impressions when trying to sell it to someone else.
Cobol programmers aren't even out of a job yet, and it was old news before MFC was a glint in MS's collective eye.
Switching from MSOffice to OOo is a bit of a different ballgame however. OOo is good enough at reading MSOffice documents that vendor lock-in isn't really the problem. Customer lock-in is more the issue. OOo can read and write MS documents well enough for internal usage, but if you send a customer (or worse, a prospective customer) a document that has formatting errors, you're going to receive a bad impression. Even using older versions of MSO has that trouble, so its to the level of version lock-in!
And that leaves you with either taking the easy way out and just upgrading your Office suite to the new version, or going through the hassle of retraining all of your employees, setting up a specific "document formatting" department to clean up every single thing that goes out to customers/media/etc and somehow preventing all employees from skirting that department and just firing off a quick email.
Its a mess. The only real way to clean that one up is for OOo to be able to format-match MSO 100% (at least in the most used things. Last time I tried -- less than a year ago -- OOo still had problems with basic things like tables, margins, columns, etc.. they'd be just a little bit off. Not enough to prevent the document from being read, but enough to make it look ugly as sin and not something I'd want a customer to see.
Well either that, or having the entire corporate world agree to drop the veil of perfection that we all seem to require from each other when it comes to business transactions. Its not like anyone really believes perfection is possible.. yet we rarely take the possibility of failure into account and we all get pissed off when bugs happen (even and sometimes especially simple aesthetic bugs that don't really matter!)
They have the right to brag about how many rights they (used to) have. For all other rights, please consult the appropriate prosecuting agency.
We've already got an amalgamated real estate listing service up here in Canada, which is sanctioned and used by basically all of the real estate agents.
The only people Zoocasa would be benefiting are buyers who use that specific search site and don't bother going through an agent (who would be making recommendations from MLS).
Whether this battle was worth C21's time and lawyer fees is up for debate, but they aren't standing to lose much from the lack of an unsanctioned rip of their data. Who knows, maybe they were foreseeing some future problem with the situation getting out of control and wanted to stem it off?
Remember, Rogers is a big greedy corporation too. You don't take on someone like Rogers without a damned good reason.
The difference is that in the class action, its Sony's nickle rather than yours.
Of course, they'll just turn around and jack up the price of their units by 15c to over-compensate, but we don't like to think that far into the future when there potentially immediate money to be made!
Well they're not facts, but here's some observations:
- Sony is a big, extremely visible, and somewhat hated company (which is redundant, I know).
- They're almost certainly the target of almost continual hack attempts.
- It still took 4 years to breach (whether by an employee screwup or legitimate hack.. I don't know/recall the details).
- Sony is by far not the only organization to have been hacked, including some with a lot more incentive and/or ability to prevent hacks (NSA? RSA? These are some big names in security and they still fell).
I don't see what the problem is here. Sony got burned. They changed their ToS to protect themselves in the future. Yes its annoying but its hardly surprising.
The only really bad thing I could see coming out of this is if Sony now considers themselves "protected" and intentionally laxes on their security duties in future. But that would almost certainly open them up to even harsher lawsuits if intentional negligence could be proven, so that's a pretty big risk to take.
You get to trade off one right for another. You can retain your ability to use class action suits, but you lose your ability to use arbitration if you ever wish to go that route. And in the latter case, its against ALL Sony brands whereas in the former it only applies to PSN.
All of your games will continue working, and most new games will also continue working for the foreseeable future (you don't HAVE to update your games when they ask.. though without PSN access they probably wouldn't even ask).
The only games you'd lose access to would be downloaded games which you have deleted from your harddrive and can't download again (or the occasional game thats online play only).
Which is why PSN is legally a distinct service and not part of the PS3 "product".
Your cell phone company, your cable company and pretty much any other service company you've ever associated with will from time to time "renegotiate" their contract with you in the sense of "you have two choices: accept or cancel your service".
It really does stink (especially when its something that your average person can't live without like telephone service) but sadly, its been common practice for decades and isn't going away any time soon.
As for something happening to you. No, nothing will happen to you or your PS3 except for your loss of service to the PSN. Of course PSN itself is somewhat important if you want to use the PS3 (you lose all online play, updates become a nightmare, etc) but its not NECESSARY to use your PS3.
OtherOS was a much bigger complaint from a product standpoint -- forcing people actually disable part of their PS3 in order to continue using a (theoretically separate) service is quite a bit different than a clause that only relates to the service itself.
At least where I live (Canada), PC games have recently started selling cheaper than their console counterparts (I first noticed it on Alice2 but it may have started earlier) -- typically $60 for a PS3/Xbox game or $50 for the same title on the PC.
Wii versions are ususally cheaper than PS3/Xbox as well (though I don't recall if they're cheaper than PC) but of course you're getting less game for your dollar on the Wii (due to the lack of HD support). And you have to deal with their obnoxious habit of adding an unnecessary wrist-cracking Wiimote jerk in games that are otherwise buttons-only.. though I haven't bought a Wii game in years so maybe that doesn't happen so much anymore.. but now I'm rambling offtopic ;)).
Nah, no uses at all.
Its not a question of the cost of hemp vs the cost of other materials. Its a question of the cost of hemp -plus the cost of the red tape- vs the cost of other materials.
The red tape (licenses, compliance with those licenses, lawsuits, fighting lobbiests, fighting anti-drug citizen groups, etc) is likely pretty pricey.
The lobbiests in particular would be annoying as many of them would be well-funded by cigarette companies, (legal) drug companies, alcohol companies, and pretty much anyone else who even dreams of one day losing a few dollars to marijuana users (because you know, no one can get it under the current system..)
Most mail sent through USPS (or any other snailmail intermediary) is most certainly NOT in clear text. There's that little thing called an "envelope".
Now the clear text is certainly pretty easy to retrieve (open the envelope) but envelopes are usually manufactured to at least make such tampering obvious.
I'm sure someone, somewhere, can open almost any envelope and reseal it with minimal obvious damage, but its not exactly a common thing (the penalties are pretty large for those caught tampering with mail inappropriately).
Email is more like a postcard -- its just out in the open for anyone who gets their hands on it to read.
The more fundamental issue with email though that regular mail doesn't have an analog to is copying. An email intermediary could potentially copy every single email and analyze them, store them, sell them to third parties, etc. All without any trace of this actually happening (at least to the end point parties. Some clever researcher may be able to figure it out by looking at aggregate traffic patterns or something, but for us lay people there'd be no indication).
Memory Express is my favorite, though I've shopped both Newegg and NCIX (and a few others) as well.
Amazon often has some decent deals as well.
Its easy to predict something that has a probability near one.
Prosecuting those people is another question.
TFA's idea is that you choose who to trust, and you can revoke that trust at any time and replace it with someone else.
It then takes the step of saying "ok I'm going to look up the information from these 5 trusted guys, and majority rules".
Its definitely running under the assumption that you don't have a majority of your trusted authorities compromised at the same time (and in the same way -- if you ask 5 people at 2 agree and the other 3 are completely at odds from everyone else, chances are you're in a bad place. You might not even want to trust the 2, but you sure as hell don't want to trust any of the other three!)
So there's a few presumptions made:
1) Trusted authorities don't get compromised fast enough to have a majority of rogues.
2) Even if there are, the rogues are not cooperating.
3) When you do find a rogue, you revoke its trust in a timely manner.
This is a huge bloody list of requirements when you think about it. We've either got to (individually) maintain these lists ourselves, or trust a third party to do it. And guess what? As soon as you start trusting a third party, you're back to square one.
So I don't really know what they're fixing outside of a theoretical perspective. The vast majority of people (including website operators) in the world are going to be far too lazy to maintain these authenticity lists.
Now if they can come up with a secure, automated way to maintain the authenticity lists, then we'll be talking. Something like the way the eDonkey protocol has servers distributing lists of more servers so that once you've got that first server address, you quickly and automatically have large lists of other servers. Of course using that method directly isn't secure (it could be easily poisoned by a rogue server) but thats the sort of thing I'm thinking would be necessary to get any sort of large-scale adoption of a decentralized authority system.
TED is overrated. It present flashiness instead of real thought.
You're doing it wrong. TED is about expressing ideas in a way that a good majority of people can understand.
A truly novel idea cannot be expressed in detail to someone unfamiliar with the field in 18 minutes. I don't care how simple the idea or what field its in -- filling in the background knowledge alone would take far far longer.
Saying TED should produce new ideas (and not only new, but BIG new ideas) is like saying your local newspaper should describe the full state of the world. Its beyond wrong and into patently absurd.
And to bring in your example of graphic representation. You're right, the general concept of graphic representation is not new (its been around since the ancient Greeks and their geometry-based math.) The "new" ideas in graphic representation are mostly about coming up with ways to represent not just data, but huge amounts of data, in a way that makes sense to the average non-specialized viewer.
While graphic representaion is not likely to change the world in any fundamental way, its still extremely useful in the modern world as businesses, governments and even individuals try to grapple with the phenomenal amount of information that's become available to us in the past couple of decades.
And once in a while, graphic representations DO consistute a BIG idea. Feynman diagrams revolutionized quantum mechanics, even though they don't provide any more information than the purely mathematical formulations. And they're often harder to compute. But they're (relatively) easy to understand, and that made a huge difference.
This might have been paranoia 30 years ago.
By 2011, its not even a poorly kept secret anymore that information is valuable, and anyone who can collect information of any sort will do so.
What they do with that information and how evil they are can still lead you into the land of tinfoil (and for that matter, figuring out who "they" are!) But the fact that information is arbitrarily collected and used is hardly earth-shattering news anymore.
Yes and no. GPS would work pretty well without GR and just having tiny adjustments applied periodically (ie: GR shift is simply another source of error to correct for even if the underlying cause isn't known precisely).
This page gives a big stack of math to back that up. GR shift accounts for something like 4 parts in 10 billion. It accumulates over time to be sure, but its not severe enough to prevent GPS working without it.
Of course, I don't know that the full QED is really needed for all of our modern day electronics either, so it my example could be just as overzealous as requiring GR for GPS ;). I suspect though that our ability to control EM and light waves will give QED a much stronger (practical applications) role in the future even if its not entirely there yet.
Then again, there may come a day when our space exploration blossoms past a few unmanned probes here and there. Then GR might become more relevant in day-to-day life (even then though, I'm not sure what scale we have to reach before we worry about it to any great extent. Definitely inter-galactic. Probably inter-stellar. Inter-planetary? Not so sure).
Galileo and Darwin didn't exactly have the 'freedom' to make shit up either. They did it anyway and while they were prosecuted at the time, we've later come to realize how important their ideas area.
I think a lot of these comments have the right of it -- big ideas are pretty damned infrequent. The article itself references what? Less than a dozen people spanning over a century (maybe more, I didn't recognize all the names).
That amounts to a big idea every 10 years at best. I would suggest that perhaps Tim Berners-Lee should get the award for the 90s -- popularization of the internet isn't exactly what one can call a small social change.
Facebook (or Myspace or whichever social media website you decide should be credited) could be a good candidate for the 2000s. Regardless of whether you consider the effects of social media good or bad, the fact of the matter is that its significantly and to some extent fundamentally changed how the world works.
Of course my examples come from the computer world -- its where I live. Perhaps there's equally strong ideas presented in other fields, but I don't think any of them have as much public mindshare as the two I've mentioned (at least, not yet!)
And keep in mind also that this discussion (and the article) primarily revolves around that concept of public mindshare. I would suggest that Feynman & friends working out the kinks in QED has been more important on a human scale than Einstein working out GR. Tracking the motion of galaxies a billion light years away is fascinating and all, but it doesn't really do anything on a practical level. Of course Einstein did lots of useful work on more down-to-earth physics as well, but GR is generally what people think of first when Einstein comes up.
So who's going to take the prize for the 2010s? Hard to say -- the decade is still young. Don't be surprised if it comes from China or India though. I suspect they'll both be starting to throw the ball back into the world's idea pool over the next couple of decades as they become more industrialized and larger portions of their populations are able to start thinking about more than where their next meal is coming from.
Private industry has, for the most part, done exactly as its mandated to do -- produce larger and larger profits at any cost.
The problem is that we (as a general political consensus) have got this idea that profit is the only thing worth having combined with the even flakier idea that government intervention is not only useless, but actually counter-productive.
The government's real job (at least as it relates to industry) is to reduce that "at any cost" clause down to "at a manageable cost". That is, its the government's job to consider and protect pretty much everything EXCEPT profit.
You know, silly little things like freedoms, rights and people in general.
And all of the push for privitization is just showing how badly our governments are failing us. Basically any industry that has such a high barrier to entry that competition becomes implausible (due to cost, right-of-way restrictions, etc) should be a public utility. Not because the government runs it better as a profit-building business, but because the government is (somewhat) better at providing for the people even if it means taking a loss and no matter how niche a particular market area is. Road systems, police forces, telephone systems (at least the expensive wires) and so on.
Now this is understandable. People are, in general, greedy and selfish -- the entire capitalist system is based on this premise. The US in particular though takes this to an extreme when it comes to things like taxation. Basically, Americans don't want to pay for social services (though they're happy to benefit from them!) All they see is the taxes going out rather than the benefits coming in. Especially in areas like health care where everyone thinks it should be someone else's problem.. until they get sick and end up $10-100k in debt.
The capitalist system is flawed. The communist system was flawed. But as with most things in life, this isn't a black-and-white choice. There's a whole range of semi-social greys in between, and many of those greys are in use around the world with great success.
Car analogies are kind of like cars. They can take you places, but if you don't turn the wheels at the right moment, you'll end up hitting a wall.