Math is entirely man made. It's an entirely artificial construct that can be used to help convey ideas. Yes, there are a great many properties of numbers and algortihms that we have yet to discover, but all of those properties derive from a much smaller set of properties that we have agreed upon. Take geometry, for instance. There are hundreds of geometric theorems, and probably hundreds more that have yet to be proven, but they all trace back to a dozen or so postulates that can't be proven because they are the definitions that we have agreed to base everything else off of.
The U.S. is just pathetic, especially where I live (Orange County, CA), in terms of giving people spaces where they can interact with the rest of society. Everybody just drives places in their air-conditioned SUV's. Maybe shopping malls are the closest equivalent we have, but I just don't enjoy them as places to hang out, people-watch, or run into friends.
The spaces are still there, but most suburbanites have conditioned themselves not to notice them. I'm not sure how it happened, but it's true. I lived in Southern California for several years, and I would bet you that if you go check out any local city park next Sunday and it will be crawling with people hanging out with their extended families, just like you would see in Greece and many other parts of Europe... But there won't be any white suburbanites there.
You don't have to win to make a difference. The Populists never won a major election, but the platforms that they ran on became a major part of American politics for years to come. If the Pirate Party can show that their views are popular, then (at least) one of the major parties will start to adopt their platform. It may kill the party when that happens, as all of their followers return to the major party that adopted their platform, but they will have far more influence that way than they possibly could on their own, even with some of the more 'fair' voting systems. Our elections system may not be the greatest, but it's a little irritating to constantlyhear poeple say thatanyone other than the two big parties is wasting their time.
Nope, in this case at least, IBM is not at fault. Notes has sucked since day one. If anything, it has imprved a little under IBM's watch, as they have fixed a lot of long standing bugs in the more recent versions.
"Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary? So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty).
Even if a search engine were sophisticated enough to incorporate taxonomies and domains of knowledge, how would it know that you meant a French Horn vs. say, an English Horn. There are many types of horns even in the music world.
Now, I agree there is a lot of room for improvement- one of the other posters used "Cold Fusion" as an example. A search engine that could determine between the programming language and the scientific theory would definitely have an advantage over most search engines today. But would you expect the search engine to know that you were looking for "Cold Fusion" if you just searched for "fusion"?
More intelligent search engines won't eliminate the need for you to be sepcific about what your searching for. If you go to a hardware and just tell them you want a wrench, you'll have to dig through a big aisle with a dozen kinds of wrenches to find the one you want. But if you tell them right away that you need a 4mm allen wrench, an employee can probably take you right to it.
True, but the same is also true if you "rip" the audio from your subscription music service. If you use NetFlix like you are intended to, then it is no different than a subscription music service. Likewise if you cheat the system to gain something for yourself that you are not paying for, then the only difference between NetFlix and a subscription music service is the ease of ripping the content.
Anyway, it's arguments like yours which are why media companies are pushing for such restrictive DRM in the first place.
Forgive me for commenting on the presentation rather than the content. I really tried to read the article, but the randomly emphasized phrases made it really hard to concentrate on what was actually being said. I know that it's common to use bold font to emphasize key phrases but when you emphasize half of every other sentence it loses it's effect.
On the other hand, I bet that this guy is a Wizard at PowerPoint.
Well, I was thinking something more along the lines of Rhapsody- $10 a month for unlimited songs. Emusic is $10 per month for 40 songs and you get to keep them when you cancel, so it's closer to the iTunes model (although substantially cheaper) than what I was thinking of as a subscription model.
That said, I've looked into eMusic, and the biggest reason I haven't signed up is because (last I looked, at least) you can't really see a list of what songs or artists they offer without signing up. Their selection appears to be mostly limited to independant or older artists, which isn't necessarily what I am looking for.
The fact is that no one wants to pay any amount of money per month on some site that lets you download content, if the content is going to stop working when you quit paying that site money.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I (and many, many others) pay NetFlix $10 per month, and when I stop paying them I will no longer be able to watch the movies. From that point of view, a subscription music service isn't necessarily any different.
In fact, I probably would be willing to pay $10 per month for a subscription music service if there were any that would work with my mp3 player. I know I would be much more likely to do that than to pay $1 per song on the other music services. The way I see it, a subscription music service offers me an option I don't really have otherwise. But, at the current price at least, the regular music services do not, regardless of DRM. If I am going to pay $1 per song, I'd rather buy a real CD and get the higher quality and a physical object to own, and evetually resell if I so choose.
It's not like this is a new comparison. A year or so ago, Jonathan Lamy, the RIAA's spokesman claimed that "Intellectual property theft is a national security crime."
Still, I agre with you that it seems stupid for somebody who is arguing against them to give them such golden rhetoric.
Although mostly used in high strength areas, it is used for heat management as well in key areas. For example, I believe many supersonic fighter jets have titanium leading edges on the wings. For the most part Aluminum is sufficient, but on many high speed planes there are a few key areas where the temperature does get too high for Aluminum.
Well, since Firefox extensions are just zip files full of javascript and xml, there's nothing stopping you from downloading this extension and changing sync.google.com to (or whatever url they use) to sync.vux984.com.
For that matter, you could also look at the source and figure out whether the PIN is ever sent to their servers or just the data.
Yes, but over 50% of the voting shares are held by Google executives or VC firms. They explicitly stated in their prospectus that the shares they were issuing in the IPO had significantly diluted voting rights, and that they intended to continue to run the company the way that they always had up until that point.
So if Sergey and Larry decide that not being evil serves their interests better than bringing in a few extra buck next quarter, and they have the backing of a few other top people, then they can go right ahead and do that. That was, in fact, their reasoning for structuring the IPO the way that they did.
Oh yeah...don't forget the Holy 17 Pounds Batman! I'd be willing to bet that doesn't count the power brick. Does it come with wheels and a pull handle?
How about (if my conversions are correct) holy 19"x15" (x2"). That's ridiculous- not only will this thing not fit in most any laptop bag or backpack, it will barely fit in airline standard carry on luggage.
You have just made a very long and well thought out argument that completely fails to address the parent's comment. In fact your closing statement even acknowledges that fact:
And, the copyright holder has every right to say you broke the law and drag you into court if you break that copyright agreement.
They can say that someone broke the law all they want. I can say that you owe me a million dollars, too. I can even take you to court over it. That doesn't make it true. BPI doesn't decide whether you broke the law any more than I can unilaterally decide that you owe me a million dollars. Only the court can decide that.
In this case, BPI says that downloading form AllOfMp3.com is illegal. It's possible (in fact I would say that it is likely, but I am not an expert) that they are correct. However, so far as I know at least, what they say has never been established to be fact by the people who really decide that sort of thing, i.e. the court system.
I have many of the same complaints, and a few more.
(A continuation of number 1) Scoping in general is completely screwed up. GLOBALS aren't actually really global. Unless you specifically bring it into scope with the "global" keyword, but even there the behavior is subtly different. Or if it's a "SUPERGLOBAL" (e.g. the variables which are registered by REGISTER_GLOBALS) which are always in scope. I also find the scoping behavior within functions to be incredibly annoying, but unfortunately that brain damage hasn't limited itself to PHP.
(A continuation of number 4) Not only is MAGIC_QUOTES incredibly irritating, it's just not right. Most databases other than MySQL use '' instead of \' to escape characters, so adding the slash not only doesn't help, but makes it harder to clean the input. (Yes, I know about MAGIC_QUOTES_SYBASE, but in my experience, nobody uses it, instead resorting to stripslashes + str_replace.) That this is even needed as a language 'feature' is ridiculous in the first place. If they had a decent database abstraction from the beginning (or at least much earlier on than they did) that handled escaping properly, this misfeature might never have been created.
And finally, what is with having language features being configurable in the first place? There's no clean way to write a redistributable PHP application that will reliably run on a given installation of PHP without listing a whole set of configuration options that the user needs to set in an.htaccess file (assuming that's even allowed). Some things (like MAGIC_QUOTES) can be worked around by detecting whether the option is set and running all of your input through a preprocessor that compensates for that particular feature, but others (like SHORT_OPEN_TAG) have to be enabled or disabled before your script begins to execute, and there's no way to work around them.
For that matter, I'm still trying to figure out where the "Advertising == Loss of privacy" meme started out. For the life of me I'd like to know how this guy made the jump from "Social Networking sites will lead to more effective advertising" to "Web 2.0 will lead to a complete loss of privacy", regardless of whether either statement is remotely true.
Everyone and their mother? I don't think I've ever heard it called that, and I actually follow video games seomwhat, unlike my mother, wife, etc.
If anything, I've heard the PS2/Gamecube/XBox referred to as second generation. Apparently up until the PS/Dreamcast days everyone was content to group their consoles by how many bits they were. I guess once we got to 64 that broke down...
And not quite related, but AJAX is still 100% Pull.
First, like the other respondant says, make sure you have your bits vs bytes straight. That's not something I would normally question, but 50kB/s sounds like almost exactly what you would expect from a 512kb/s connection, and 512kB/s sounds like a reasonable number for a 7Mb/s DSL connection given that very few people have phone lines that can actually handle that high of transmission speeds.
Assuming you didn't mix up your units, DSL speeds will degrade dramatically with poor wiring in your house / neighborhood and with your distance from the nearest phone company POP. Also, the amount of degradation gets worse as bandwidth speeds go up. If the problem is wiring in your house, that can be fixed, although at some cost. If the problem is the wiring in your neighborhood or your distance from the POP, you're pretty much out of luck, at least with DSL. If it really bothers you that much, maybe it's time to look into cable or other options.
Yes, but the submitter is also talking about DSL, so I'd guess that the more likely problem is that either 1) his grandmother has poor quailty wiring in her house or neighborhood which can degrade the speed substantially, or 2) his grandmother lives at least a mile or two from the POP.
If her ISP was overselling their bandwidth, then the assumption to move to a lower service level and get the same bandwidth might have been valid, however, if poor wiring or long transmission distances are lowering your effective bandwidth by about 50%, that's going to be true at any bandwidth setting. (Well, not exactly. The losses will be higher at higher frequencies. So it would make sense in that light that the submitter's grandmother was only getting about a quarter of the rated speed at 3Mbs, but was able to get almost half her rated speed at 768kbs.)
When a DSL ISP sells a 1Mbs connection, all that means is that they have a 1 Mbs DSL modem sitting in their DSLAM. Whether the customer actually gets that 1 Mbs depends on quite a few factors that are entirely out of their control, hence why they always explicitly sell the lines as "Up to X Mbs". If you don't like it, get cable, or move closer to the DSLAM.
While I would agree with you that Microsoft has trained its users to expect computers to be fragile, I highly doubt that fear is why most users dont experiment more with their computers.
The mindset of the tinkerer who will poke around at something, anything, just for the sake of figuring out every detail of how it works is rare in general, not just when it comes to computers. How many people tinker with their cars constantly to get the performance just right? How many even know how an internal combustion engine actually works? (hint: a lot less than you probably think). There are a few, but the vast majority just want to get in and drive. Its not because they are afraid to tinker with their car, its because they just dont care.
It is certainly unforunate that so many people expect their computers to be so fragile, and I believe that Microsoft does indeed deserve a lot of the blame for that (followed by Symantec/Norton), but I can pretty much guarantee you that even if everyone used a rock solid software setup from top to bottom, the number of people who spend any meaningful time experimenting with their computer would not change. one. single. bit.
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Math is entirely man made. It's an entirely artificial construct that can be used to help convey ideas. Yes, there are a great many properties of numbers and algortihms that we have yet to discover, but all of those properties derive from a much smaller set of properties that we have agreed upon. Take geometry, for instance. There are hundreds of geometric theorems, and probably hundreds more that have yet to be proven, but they all trace back to a dozen or so postulates that can't be proven because they are the definitions that we have agreed to base everything else off of.
The spaces are still there, but most suburbanites have conditioned themselves not to notice them. I'm not sure how it happened, but it's true. I lived in Southern California for several years, and I would bet you that if you go check out any local city park next Sunday and it will be crawling with people hanging out with their extended families, just like you would see in Greece and many other parts of Europe... But there won't be any white suburbanites there.
You don't have to win to make a difference. The Populists never won a major election, but the platforms that they ran on became a major part of American politics for years to come. If the Pirate Party can show that their views are popular, then (at least) one of the major parties will start to adopt their platform. It may kill the party when that happens, as all of their followers return to the major party that adopted their platform, but they will have far more influence that way than they possibly could on their own, even with some of the more 'fair' voting systems. Our elections system may not be the greatest, but it's a little irritating to constantlyhear poeple say thatanyone other than the two big parties is wasting their time.
excuse me? since when?
i'm sure a lot of my former professor's would have been quite shocked to learn that they aren't eligible to teach in a university, as would my father.
Nope, in this case at least, IBM is not at fault. Notes has sucked since day one. If anything, it has imprved a little under IBM's watch, as they have fixed a lot of long standing bugs in the more recent versions.
True, but the same is also true if you "rip" the audio from your subscription music service. If you use NetFlix like you are intended to, then it is no different than a subscription music service. Likewise if you cheat the system to gain something for yourself that you are not paying for, then the only difference between NetFlix and a subscription music service is the ease of ripping the content.
Anyway, it's arguments like yours which are why media companies are pushing for such restrictive DRM in the first place.
Yes, because all of the other countries with giant orbiting space telescopes are going to leapfrog ahead of us once Hubble de-orbits.
Forgive me for commenting on the presentation rather than the content. I really tried to read the article, but the randomly emphasized phrases made it really hard to concentrate on what was actually being said. I know that it's common to use bold font to emphasize key phrases but when you emphasize half of every other sentence it loses it's effect.
On the other hand, I bet that this guy is a Wizard at PowerPoint.
Well, I was thinking something more along the lines of Rhapsody- $10 a month for unlimited songs. Emusic is $10 per month for 40 songs and you get to keep them when you cancel, so it's closer to the iTunes model (although substantially cheaper) than what I was thinking of as a subscription model.
That said, I've looked into eMusic, and the biggest reason I haven't signed up is because (last I looked, at least) you can't really see a list of what songs or artists they offer without signing up. Their selection appears to be mostly limited to independant or older artists, which isn't necessarily what I am looking for.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I (and many, many others) pay NetFlix $10 per month, and when I stop paying them I will no longer be able to watch the movies. From that point of view, a subscription music service isn't necessarily any different.
In fact, I probably would be willing to pay $10 per month for a subscription music service if there were any that would work with my mp3 player. I know I would be much more likely to do that than to pay $1 per song on the other music services. The way I see it, a subscription music service offers me an option I don't really have otherwise. But, at the current price at least, the regular music services do not, regardless of DRM. If I am going to pay $1 per song, I'd rather buy a real CD and get the higher quality and a physical object to own, and evetually resell if I so choose.
It's not like this is a new comparison. A year or so ago, Jonathan Lamy, the RIAA's spokesman claimed that "Intellectual property theft is a national security crime."
Still, I agre with you that it seems stupid for somebody who is arguing against them to give them such golden rhetoric.
Although mostly used in high strength areas, it is used for heat management as well in key areas. For example, I believe many supersonic fighter jets have titanium leading edges on the wings. For the most part Aluminum is sufficient, but on many high speed planes there are a few key areas where the temperature does get too high for Aluminum.
Well, since Firefox extensions are just zip files full of javascript and xml, there's nothing stopping you from downloading this extension and changing sync.google.com to (or whatever url they use) to sync.vux984.com.
For that matter, you could also look at the source and figure out whether the PIN is ever sent to their servers or just the data.
Yes, but over 50% of the voting shares are held by Google executives or VC firms. They explicitly stated in their prospectus that the shares they were issuing in the IPO had significantly diluted voting rights, and that they intended to continue to run the company the way that they always had up until that point.
So if Sergey and Larry decide that not being evil serves their interests better than bringing in a few extra buck next quarter, and they have the backing of a few other top people, then they can go right ahead and do that. That was, in fact, their reasoning for structuring the IPO the way that they did.
How about (if my conversions are correct) holy 19"x15" (x2"). That's ridiculous- not only will this thing not fit in most any laptop bag or backpack, it will barely fit in airline standard carry on luggage.
They can say that someone broke the law all they want. I can say that you owe me a million dollars, too. I can even take you to court over it. That doesn't make it true. BPI doesn't decide whether you broke the law any more than I can unilaterally decide that you owe me a million dollars. Only the court can decide that.
In this case, BPI says that downloading form AllOfMp3.com is illegal. It's possible (in fact I would say that it is likely, but I am not an expert) that they are correct. However, so far as I know at least, what they say has never been established to be fact by the people who really decide that sort of thing, i.e. the court system.
I have many of the same complaints, and a few more.
.htaccess file (assuming that's even allowed). Some things (like MAGIC_QUOTES) can be worked around by detecting whether the option is set and running all of your input through a preprocessor that compensates for that particular feature, but others (like SHORT_OPEN_TAG) have to be enabled or disabled before your script begins to execute, and there's no way to work around them.
(A continuation of number 1) Scoping in general is completely screwed up. GLOBALS aren't actually really global. Unless you specifically bring it into scope with the "global" keyword, but even there the behavior is subtly different. Or if it's a "SUPERGLOBAL" (e.g. the variables which are registered by REGISTER_GLOBALS) which are always in scope. I also find the scoping behavior within functions to be incredibly annoying, but unfortunately that brain damage hasn't limited itself to PHP.
(A continuation of number 4) Not only is MAGIC_QUOTES incredibly irritating, it's just not right. Most databases other than MySQL use '' instead of \' to escape characters, so adding the slash not only doesn't help, but makes it harder to clean the input. (Yes, I know about MAGIC_QUOTES_SYBASE, but in my experience, nobody uses it, instead resorting to stripslashes + str_replace.) That this is even needed as a language 'feature' is ridiculous in the first place. If they had a decent database abstraction from the beginning (or at least much earlier on than they did) that handled escaping properly, this misfeature might never have been created.
And finally, what is with having language features being configurable in the first place? There's no clean way to write a redistributable PHP application that will reliably run on a given installation of PHP without listing a whole set of configuration options that the user needs to set in an
Pretty close, except for the part about using XML. You could use XML, but in practice few people do.
Other than that, you are spot on.
For that matter, I'm still trying to figure out where the "Advertising == Loss of privacy" meme started out. For the life of me I'd like to know how this guy made the jump from "Social Networking sites will lead to more effective advertising" to "Web 2.0 will lead to a complete loss of privacy", regardless of whether either statement is remotely true.
Everyone and their mother? I don't think I've ever heard it called that, and I actually follow video games seomwhat, unlike my mother, wife, etc.
If anything, I've heard the PS2/Gamecube/XBox referred to as second generation. Apparently up until the PS/Dreamcast days everyone was content to group their consoles by how many bits they were. I guess once we got to 64 that broke down...
And not quite related, but AJAX is still 100% Pull.
First, like the other respondant says, make sure you have your bits vs bytes straight. That's not something I would normally question, but 50kB/s sounds like almost exactly what you would expect from a 512kb/s connection, and 512kB/s sounds like a reasonable number for a 7Mb/s DSL connection given that very few people have phone lines that can actually handle that high of transmission speeds.
Assuming you didn't mix up your units, DSL speeds will degrade dramatically with poor wiring in your house / neighborhood and with your distance from the nearest phone company POP. Also, the amount of degradation gets worse as bandwidth speeds go up. If the problem is wiring in your house, that can be fixed, although at some cost. If the problem is the wiring in your neighborhood or your distance from the POP, you're pretty much out of luck, at least with DSL. If it really bothers you that much, maybe it's time to look into cable or other options.
Yes, but the submitter is also talking about DSL, so I'd guess that the more likely problem is that either
1) his grandmother has poor quailty wiring in her house or neighborhood which can degrade the speed substantially, or
2) his grandmother lives at least a mile or two from the POP.
If her ISP was overselling their bandwidth, then the assumption to move to a lower service level and get the same bandwidth might have been valid, however, if poor wiring or long transmission distances are lowering your effective bandwidth by about 50%, that's going to be true at any bandwidth setting. (Well, not exactly. The losses will be higher at higher frequencies. So it would make sense in that light that the submitter's grandmother was only getting about a quarter of the rated speed at 3Mbs, but was able to get almost half her rated speed at 768kbs.)
When a DSL ISP sells a 1Mbs connection, all that means is that they have a 1 Mbs DSL modem sitting in their DSLAM. Whether the customer actually gets that 1 Mbs depends on quite a few factors that are entirely out of their control, hence why they always explicitly sell the lines as "Up to X Mbs". If you don't like it, get cable, or move closer to the DSLAM.
Agreed. Asking HK-47 if he knew the meaning of love was one of the best laughs I've had in a long time.
While I would agree with you that Microsoft has trained its users to expect computers to be fragile, I highly doubt that fear is why most users dont experiment more with their computers.
The mindset of the tinkerer who will poke around at something, anything, just for the sake of figuring out every detail of how it works is rare in general, not just when it comes to computers. How many people tinker with their cars constantly to get the performance just right? How many even know how an internal combustion engine actually works? (hint: a lot less than you probably think). There are a few, but the vast majority just want to get in and drive. Its not because they are afraid to tinker with their car, its because they just dont care.
It is certainly unforunate that so many people expect their computers to be so fragile, and I believe that Microsoft does indeed deserve a lot of the blame for that (followed by Symantec/Norton), but I can pretty much guarantee you that even if everyone used a rock solid software setup from top to bottom, the number of people who spend any meaningful time experimenting with their computer would not change. one. single. bit.