It's all nuances. Provided that modifying the software on your own device is considered fair use (and I would presume that unless you are violating something else like FCC regs it is), then you - personally - are not guilty of violating the DMCA. However, anyone who helps you is violating the DMCA. The DMCA is an odd law in that it specifically preserves the right to fair use, while making it illegal to assist anyone in exercising fair use.
In this way it is the same as DVD decryption software: legal to decrypt your disc for fair use (including standard playback in licensed players and copying for backup or format shifting), not legal to sell or traffic in the software or any instructions on how to do so.
I don't own an iPhone, primarily because the applications - especially the free (beer and speech) ones - are far more limited than for the wmobile market, and because I have an investment in wmobile software I would have to abandon if I switch. That and the iPhone can't do GPS if you're out of cell service (or couldn't as of 4 months ago when I upgraded my phone)...and that's where I need it the most.
Novels are more difficult, but not impossible. You can go with the subscription base model, where you sell in installments to an aggregator (i.e. magazine with a subscription base). Or you can make custom novels like some chick selling the custom Valentines Day romance novels.
Then again, physical copies of books are a premium item - difficult to digitize (well), and many people prefer the physical form. Writing prose to sell paper does seem odd.
I'm not for abolishing copyright; I happen to rely on it in my own work (I'm a professional engineer and when I create a plan, it's for a single installation of a building unless I have a contractual relationship saying otherwise). There are speculative building designers too - you see them in all the home stores as "plan books." I would like to see it drastically curtailed; 5 to 10 years should be the limit, imho. If you can't make your money in that time, you should do something else. Of course, I'm also for compulsory licensing of patents at fixed/sliding rates so that any patent can be freely reproduced. The monopoly production then is not a barrier to competition, but the developer gets value for their work - it just may not be the lottery-windfall they are hoping for.
IP laws are supposed to be for the public good, not for the wild enrichment of the creators. If it takes you 20 years to develop and produce a single patentable item that requires another 20 year monopoly on production, maybe you're really not good enough at that particular craft to warrant using it for your entire means of support.
The beers are to make the waiting tolerable (I always grab one or two when I go to align the satellite dish), the red bull is to keep you up. Overdose on either and your ability to hit your target when the moment comes is significantly reduced!
My daughter got the cc pox vaccine. I'm not sure how well it worked; she appeared to have a very mild case of ch pox like symptoms. Having had it when I was almost 17, getting the vaccine was a no-brainer. The chances of possible reactions to vaccines are so small you'd be better off having the vaccines and never walking in parking lots if you are afraid of your kids being permanently crippled or killed.
I agree with you on the danger that the unvaccinated pose. For every propagation, there is a finite chance of a mutation which will render vaccines ineffective or less effective.
Personally, I think the CDC should get off the "flu vaccines for high risk and elderly" bandwagon and try to get every school age kid to get the vaccine. That's the vector for most of the winter flu, along with adults who are "just too important to stay home" when they're sick. Flu (and the common cold) goes through the schools like wildfire, and the spreads to families. I'm always amazed how people will travel across the country with a horrible cold so that they don't miss some important "family gathering," only to infect everyone along the way, and many in their family who they seem to feel are so important. "Congratulations on your wedding, I've brought you these nice silver candle sticks, and one of the worst colds of the year. Make sure you take both on your Honeymoon. Enjoy!"
There's a reason I've kept the same signature for so long. It never seems to go out of style.
If the housing market is tanking, it's a bad idea to build houses on speculation. The money is in building houses for clients under contract.
Same thing with software. You find someone who needs something, and you code it for them. They pay you. In the event that someone else needs the same thing, you can then sell it to them for either the original price, or at a discount, and make extra money. It's the way "service" jobs work. Speculation is for those who are rich and don't need income. Sometimes they hit it big, sometimes they fold.
Of course, you could be doing direct work and underpricing it in hopes of selling it multiple times in the future. That's just a poor practice, unless you happen to be dealing in addictive substances.
There are two types of vaccines, as far as I know. One has inactive pathogen, the other has a reduced viability. If your "friend's" sibling came down with the disease and died, then correlation of that lot to determine if the vaccine had been properly prepared is in order.
If, on the other hand, they died from reaction to the vaccine carrier (often egg-based, to which some people are allergic), then that suggests that non-vaccine related allergies should have been determined prior to giving the vaccine. Most doctors ask (or have records) about your allergies which helps screen out these occurrences.
Vaccines are, without a doubt, a statistical gamble we as a society make. There will be a very, very small portion of the population which will have a reaction to the event (whether it is to the vaccine, the carrier, infection of injection spot, etc.). The payoff is wide scale reduction of seriously debilitating diseases. Yes, it looks pretty onerous from the hindsight of a parent who's child suffers, but the society as a whole reaps an enormous benefit. 10 children dying is tragic, but 10 million with polio is far, far worse.
The GP made it sound like a national recount would somehow be longer and more involved than a state recount. I simply pointed out that it is neither. Perhaps I should have said "trivially more complex than a state recount".
Being an engineer and having worked with many scientists, it's my opinion that a true recount would require not just a recount, but if the number changed from the original count, at least a third count. If you perform the same operation twice and get a different answer, how can you come to the conclusion that the second count is any more reliable than the first? (barring, of course, the variation in the recount due to the addition of absentee ballots and scrutinizing of correctly cast ones)
Using Linux presumes that you can run all of your mission critical apps. In most technical fields, that's not the case. Thanks to the popularity of NT and the increases in power of desktops, most engineering apps have been exclusively ported to Windows, with the old Unix variants retired. Pro/E comes to mind right off the top. AutoCAD has never been *nix. Many FEM programs are also windows only now.
That said, I'm hoping this option trickles through the product lineup. I keep Dells in my shop because the apps I run require Windows and I only have to keep one OS install CD around and I never have to fiddle with licenses for the OS. I'm going to retire my Precision laptop next year, and I would love to have the option of an email/web subsystem with wicked long battery life.
#1 is true only on paper, and we both know that (you even admit it yourself)
#2 a national recount is trivial, actually, since it's not really a national recount, but simply tens of thousands of individual precinct recounts. In other words, it's a parallel process. Sure, it would be expensive due to the manpower, but it's a trivial process.
Finally, the US doesn't apportion federal votes by population, but by slightly weighted version which gives additional weight to the least populous states (reps + senators). It would shift the balance slightly to change the voting. It's not a perfect system, but unless we start giving out fractional electors even a proportional representation electoral college could anoint a winner due to round-off error (which is already the case when the electoral and popular votes don't match). With the unbalanced weighting, even a split to 6 significant digits could result in a popular-electoral mismatch.
I would prefer a representative electoral system, but I'd be even more happy if there were a way to undo the gamemanship of the whole process.
Shocks generate that 1kW only at peak actuation, whereas solar is continuous. I would find it hard to believe that even a heavy truck would have the ability to generate a continuous 9HP (about 6kW) on shock alone, unless it were in some off road condition.
Second, please don't tell my mother in law, or she'll insist on stopping by and browsing through their souvenir shop for two hours the next time we head through NOVA on the way to DC or MD.
Okay, just a followup after getting through the cache.
(1) wow, there's a lot of setup involved.
(2) Alpha? With my wife's entertainment on the line? Riiiiiiight.
(3) No remote? A wireless keyboard does not a remote make.
From a geek perspective, it's a fun read, but it's still in its infancy. There's a lot there to install after getting Ubuntu up, and before Boxee gets into the mix. I was a little disappointed that there didn't seem to be an off the shelf CE-like remote.
In his defense, $345 of his $825 build (including remote keyboard) went for a large HD and the case (and special fan). Another $120ish for the keyboard. I'm not certain, but you could probably shave the process back to $40-50, too as long as the hardware decoder on the graphics chip works well. Kind of makes you wish you could retask a Popcorn Hour, since it has the video horsepower, the networking, and a remote for $200. Hard to believe you can do 720p video and only get a tree-view directory.
Actually, I've got a Dell 740/745 micro box that has a barely-functioning XP-MCE on it. I might try this out in it's place for the bedroom if I can get a remote that isn't code-compatible with the main Vista media center (everything in my house is tied on an IR network to the equip closet, so I have to be careful of overlapping IR codes...I can't believe MS didn't consider this when the created MCE). It won't do HD (or at least not x264) since it's only a P4-2.4. I've already got 3TB on my unRaid box, so presuming Boxee can read a Samba share, I could see all of the SD content at least.
The bummer is that my slow DSL won't stream HULU, so I'd have to decide whether internet video is worth the extra $35 a month for the next connection speed up (I get 768 for $18/mo; 3.0 is somewhere around $50 on either DSL or Cable).
Courts have repeatedly held up that once you are sold a copy of a product, you are entititled to privately do whatever you want with it. That includes space and time shifting.
Time to put a letter to Rick Boucher on my list of things to do. It would be nice for this to be written into law directly, rather than just case law interpretation. Not that I think it will pass. I wonder if it's too late to get something like this slipped into the stimulus bill in committee? (hey, don't go stepping on my fantasy world).
TFS makes it sound like you can replace your cable (or satellite) provider with this box. Where is the (non-OTA) broadcast content coming from. Has he made a wife-capable Hulu scraper? If so, and Hulu agrees not to break the box every couple of months, then I'm interested. If it's just "you can download stuff that's a year old and on DVD from netflix, do OTA, and access your personal media collection," then it's really not much better than what already exists.
Unless it's that he's put it into a nice looking box. In which case...he's just discovered the world of HTPC cases.
I'd love to believe, but without an article I'm puzzled at where the novelty is.
Actually, space travel is very complex. The only "simple" part about it is that, for two body motion and the limits of our ability to control thrutser force and duration, there are explicit solutions to the differential equations. The brain power behind the programming is immensely difficult, but once coded the computational power needed is not excessive.
More to the point, all the pencil and paper math HAD to be done to make the available processors capable of performing the operations. The fact that they had slide rules indicates that the complexity of the brain work was immense to reduce the solution set to something that can be solved near-real-time on a slide rule. If the same mission were done today, we'd have none of this higher math involved. With the available processor power, it would be a brute force numerical solution. That's what most video codecs are, in essence, is a numerical solution to an equation with known boundary conditions. The more compression you want, the less exact the solution is (And hence the compression artifacts).
Short of computationally intensive activities like video decoding, it shouldn't take much processor power to browse the web. It only does because it's faster (from a programmers time) to do things with brute force than to slim them down. It shouldn't require 250-500+ separate requests to open a page, and there shouldn't be 200kB of formatting for a page which contains - maybe - 5kB of text. That's why Skyfire works so fast on cell phones - there's so much crap in HTML pages now, and so many requests, that its faster to make a VGA snapshot of a page and load that as a damned image than it is to download the actual page.
I want to see a public service announcement with John Hodgson, that Keanu Reeves look alike, and a penguin (or Linus) all trying to read and understand their respective EULAs while a 4-1/2 year looks at a computer with a big chain and lock on it. Each time the kid tries to touch the machine, one of the three sais "don't touch that, it says here..." and spouts a particularly evil portion of their EULA.
Wall street is not just a place where executives take foolishly large bonuses for questionable business practices. If a recent interveiw on the 500k salary cap had accurate data, you don't have to fear anything about the money on wall street going to a couple of super rich people. According to the compensation expert they had (NPR, a week or two ago), the $500k compensation strata hits in the 3rd to 4th year of employment for the MBAs who populate the firms who live and breathe the WSJ.
These are just regular, working folks who want you to know that this money shouldn't got to broadband, especially since (1) they already get great service in New York, and (2) they lose more in $100 bills they leave in their drycleaning than they pay for broadband in a year.
Actually, most magazines have margins of less than 1/2", and books are similar (closer to 1/4". They could do with less, but there's a need to provide relief between the text and the edge of the page for reduced eyestrain as well as printing practicalities. Since I'm sure the screen will have a built-in stay-out border for most text, the edge needs only enough to hold. If the device is small enough - about the size of a paperback, you only need an 1/8"-3/16" of relief to hook a finger on it. I don't hold books or magazines by the margin any more than I hold my pda by the bezel - I cradle it - no grubby hands on the display/page that way.
I'll admit my hands are fairly big, so I'd prefer to have the screen be bigger, but shrinking the thing down to paperback size would be nice too. Anything smaller than 4 inches might be too tempting to put in my back pocket, of course. I'm ambivalent about the keyboard. I can see the utility, and I'm not a big fan of touch-screens for typing. I could deal with a lot of chicklet-crunch if the typing wasn't done too much and the screen was maximized.
...relative to the screen size. We've all been spoiled by the near-zero-bezel devices in the phone/music player market, this one just looks very 90s with the wide bezel around the whole screen. The keyboard doesn't even encroach into that space. Seems like the form factor could be reduced significantly, though they may have used a lot of that space for battery.
That's why it requires a thou shalt mentality from the very top, and a masterful sales job. Professors may be tenured, but the chairs are not forever or guaranteed. Life can be made very difficult for those who do not stand by the University regulations. And if the University declairs that no computer owned or operated may use software which is not open source, things will change and people will grumble. They can get down right mean about it. That will help clean the ranks and allow for hiring in open(source) thinkers to replace them.
If it becomes a selling point (it will never have enough financial incentive), it may ultimately be a win for the college.
This bill was intended to throw money into the US economy by way of creating jobs. As each paycheck gets cashed, the money is inserted into the local economy. The key is that the US government is borrowing to do it. That's necessary because nobody else is willing to lend or borrow at the moment.
Oddly, it's my opinion that if congress simply pulled rank on the banks and forced home mortgages to be capped at 4 or 5 % regardless of original terms we'd be in better shape. The collapse is because banks double and triple sold/bought insurance for all the poorly written home mortgage loans. With all the eligible buyers and low initial credit rates, people bought more than they could afford (or borrowed and spent from the phantom gains in housing). Here's the thing: if everyone just continued to pay their mortgages (standard default rates as typical), nobody would panic.
Instead, the banks called their foolish acceleration clauses and pushed people into foreclosure. With foreclosures, prices went down and nobody could sell for the inflated market and were therefore underwater and had to go bankrupt instead of selling their house and moving on. Had the collapse not happened and the government put some real, hard rules out there we'd see reductions in investment income and a slowdown in the economy until actual values caught up with phantom values (still a housing retreat, but not as drastic). Nobody would get rich, and very very few would be destitute. The economy would falter as the credit-driven spending would subside. It would be slow, but not the catastrophe we've seen.
The simple fact is that people, as a whole and as a small but significant portion of individuals, cannot be trusted to deal honestly with money. Self regulation simply cannot occur in the financial sector. The congress, sad to say, doesn't have the backbone to put in regulations for fear that they, themselves, will be prevented from becoming wildly rich(er) (again, people and money).
The world will not collapse if growth goes to zero, contrary to the markets. But the people who make markets will be hurt by the fact that they provide little to no value, and will suffer greatly relative to their current positions. Think about it - if growth and inflation went to zero, would it really affect you in a significant way? Every dollar you saved would be a dollar for you to spend in retirement. We expect growth because we expect inflation. It's not really necessary for average folks like us. It only matters to those who don't work for a living, but use cash as a tool for making money.
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It's all nuances. Provided that modifying the software on your own device is considered fair use (and I would presume that unless you are violating something else like FCC regs it is), then you - personally - are not guilty of violating the DMCA. However, anyone who helps you is violating the DMCA. The DMCA is an odd law in that it specifically preserves the right to fair use, while making it illegal to assist anyone in exercising fair use.
In this way it is the same as DVD decryption software: legal to decrypt your disc for fair use (including standard playback in licensed players and copying for backup or format shifting), not legal to sell or traffic in the software or any instructions on how to do so.
I don't own an iPhone, primarily because the applications - especially the free (beer and speech) ones - are far more limited than for the wmobile market, and because I have an investment in wmobile software I would have to abandon if I switch. That and the iPhone can't do GPS if you're out of cell service (or couldn't as of 4 months ago when I upgraded my phone)...and that's where I need it the most.
Novels are more difficult, but not impossible. You can go with the subscription base model, where you sell in installments to an aggregator (i.e. magazine with a subscription base). Or you can make custom novels like some chick selling the custom Valentines Day romance novels.
Then again, physical copies of books are a premium item - difficult to digitize (well), and many people prefer the physical form. Writing prose to sell paper does seem odd.
I'm not for abolishing copyright; I happen to rely on it in my own work (I'm a professional engineer and when I create a plan, it's for a single installation of a building unless I have a contractual relationship saying otherwise). There are speculative building designers too - you see them in all the home stores as "plan books." I would like to see it drastically curtailed; 5 to 10 years should be the limit, imho. If you can't make your money in that time, you should do something else. Of course, I'm also for compulsory licensing of patents at fixed/sliding rates so that any patent can be freely reproduced. The monopoly production then is not a barrier to competition, but the developer gets value for their work - it just may not be the lottery-windfall they are hoping for.
IP laws are supposed to be for the public good, not for the wild enrichment of the creators. If it takes you 20 years to develop and produce a single patentable item that requires another 20 year monopoly on production, maybe you're really not good enough at that particular craft to warrant using it for your entire means of support.
The beers are to make the waiting tolerable (I always grab one or two when I go to align the satellite dish), the red bull is to keep you up. Overdose on either and your ability to hit your target when the moment comes is significantly reduced!
My daughter got the cc pox vaccine. I'm not sure how well it worked; she appeared to have a very mild case of ch pox like symptoms. Having had it when I was almost 17, getting the vaccine was a no-brainer. The chances of possible reactions to vaccines are so small you'd be better off having the vaccines and never walking in parking lots if you are afraid of your kids being permanently crippled or killed.
I agree with you on the danger that the unvaccinated pose. For every propagation, there is a finite chance of a mutation which will render vaccines ineffective or less effective.
Personally, I think the CDC should get off the "flu vaccines for high risk and elderly" bandwagon and try to get every school age kid to get the vaccine. That's the vector for most of the winter flu, along with adults who are "just too important to stay home" when they're sick. Flu (and the common cold) goes through the schools like wildfire, and the spreads to families. I'm always amazed how people will travel across the country with a horrible cold so that they don't miss some important "family gathering," only to infect everyone along the way, and many in their family who they seem to feel are so important. "Congratulations on your wedding, I've brought you these nice silver candle sticks, and one of the worst colds of the year. Make sure you take both on your Honeymoon. Enjoy!"
There's a reason I've kept the same signature for so long. It never seems to go out of style.
If the housing market is tanking, it's a bad idea to build houses on speculation. The money is in building houses for clients under contract.
Same thing with software. You find someone who needs something, and you code it for them. They pay you. In the event that someone else needs the same thing, you can then sell it to them for either the original price, or at a discount, and make extra money. It's the way "service" jobs work. Speculation is for those who are rich and don't need income. Sometimes they hit it big, sometimes they fold.
Of course, you could be doing direct work and underpricing it in hopes of selling it multiple times in the future. That's just a poor practice, unless you happen to be dealing in addictive substances.
Which is why he can be tracked any time. Otherwise, he could just turn it off.
There are two types of vaccines, as far as I know. One has inactive pathogen, the other has a reduced viability. If your "friend's" sibling came down with the disease and died, then correlation of that lot to determine if the vaccine had been properly prepared is in order.
If, on the other hand, they died from reaction to the vaccine carrier (often egg-based, to which some people are allergic), then that suggests that non-vaccine related allergies should have been determined prior to giving the vaccine. Most doctors ask (or have records) about your allergies which helps screen out these occurrences.
Vaccines are, without a doubt, a statistical gamble we as a society make. There will be a very, very small portion of the population which will have a reaction to the event (whether it is to the vaccine, the carrier, infection of injection spot, etc.). The payoff is wide scale reduction of seriously debilitating diseases. Yes, it looks pretty onerous from the hindsight of a parent who's child suffers, but the society as a whole reaps an enormous benefit. 10 children dying is tragic, but 10 million with polio is far, far worse.
We can only hope natural selection will manifest itself on this group.
The GP made it sound like a national recount would somehow be longer and more involved than a state recount. I simply pointed out that it is neither. Perhaps I should have said "trivially more complex than a state recount".
Being an engineer and having worked with many scientists, it's my opinion that a true recount would require not just a recount, but if the number changed from the original count, at least a third count. If you perform the same operation twice and get a different answer, how can you come to the conclusion that the second count is any more reliable than the first? (barring, of course, the variation in the recount due to the addition of absentee ballots and scrutinizing of correctly cast ones)
Using Linux presumes that you can run all of your mission critical apps. In most technical fields, that's not the case. Thanks to the popularity of NT and the increases in power of desktops, most engineering apps have been exclusively ported to Windows, with the old Unix variants retired. Pro/E comes to mind right off the top. AutoCAD has never been *nix. Many FEM programs are also windows only now.
That said, I'm hoping this option trickles through the product lineup. I keep Dells in my shop because the apps I run require Windows and I only have to keep one OS install CD around and I never have to fiddle with licenses for the OS. I'm going to retire my Precision laptop next year, and I would love to have the option of an email/web subsystem with wicked long battery life.
#1 is true only on paper, and we both know that (you even admit it yourself)
#2 a national recount is trivial, actually, since it's not really a national recount, but simply tens of thousands of individual precinct recounts. In other words, it's a parallel process. Sure, it would be expensive due to the manpower, but it's a trivial process.
Finally, the US doesn't apportion federal votes by population, but by slightly weighted version which gives additional weight to the least populous states (reps + senators). It would shift the balance slightly to change the voting. It's not a perfect system, but unless we start giving out fractional electors even a proportional representation electoral college could anoint a winner due to round-off error (which is already the case when the electoral and popular votes don't match). With the unbalanced weighting, even a split to 6 significant digits could result in a popular-electoral mismatch.
I would prefer a representative electoral system, but I'd be even more happy if there were a way to undo the gamemanship of the whole process.
Shocks generate that 1kW only at peak actuation, whereas solar is continuous. I would find it hard to believe that even a heavy truck would have the ability to generate a continuous 9HP (about 6kW) on shock alone, unless it were in some off road condition.
First of all, it's Northern Virginia.
Second, please don't tell my mother in law, or she'll insist on stopping by and browsing through their souvenir shop for two hours the next time we head through NOVA on the way to DC or MD.
Okay, just a followup after getting through the cache.
(1) wow, there's a lot of setup involved.
(2) Alpha? With my wife's entertainment on the line? Riiiiiiight.
(3) No remote? A wireless keyboard does not a remote make.
From a geek perspective, it's a fun read, but it's still in its infancy. There's a lot there to install after getting Ubuntu up, and before Boxee gets into the mix. I was a little disappointed that there didn't seem to be an off the shelf CE-like remote.
In his defense, $345 of his $825 build (including remote keyboard) went for a large HD and the case (and special fan). Another $120ish for the keyboard. I'm not certain, but you could probably shave the process back to $40-50, too as long as the hardware decoder on the graphics chip works well. Kind of makes you wish you could retask a Popcorn Hour, since it has the video horsepower, the networking, and a remote for $200. Hard to believe you can do 720p video and only get a tree-view directory.
Actually, I've got a Dell 740/745 micro box that has a barely-functioning XP-MCE on it. I might try this out in it's place for the bedroom if I can get a remote that isn't code-compatible with the main Vista media center (everything in my house is tied on an IR network to the equip closet, so I have to be careful of overlapping IR codes...I can't believe MS didn't consider this when the created MCE). It won't do HD (or at least not x264) since it's only a P4-2.4. I've already got 3TB on my unRaid box, so presuming Boxee can read a Samba share, I could see all of the SD content at least.
The bummer is that my slow DSL won't stream HULU, so I'd have to decide whether internet video is worth the extra $35 a month for the next connection speed up (I get 768 for $18/mo; 3.0 is somewhere around $50 on either DSL or Cable).
Courts have repeatedly held up that once you are sold a copy of a product, you are entititled to privately do whatever you want with it. That includes space and time shifting.
Time to put a letter to Rick Boucher on my list of things to do. It would be nice for this to be written into law directly, rather than just case law interpretation. Not that I think it will pass. I wonder if it's too late to get something like this slipped into the stimulus bill in committee? (hey, don't go stepping on my fantasy world).
TFS makes it sound like you can replace your cable (or satellite) provider with this box. Where is the (non-OTA) broadcast content coming from. Has he made a wife-capable Hulu scraper? If so, and Hulu agrees not to break the box every couple of months, then I'm interested. If it's just "you can download stuff that's a year old and on DVD from netflix, do OTA, and access your personal media collection," then it's really not much better than what already exists.
Unless it's that he's put it into a nice looking box. In which case...he's just discovered the world of HTPC cases.
I'd love to believe, but without an article I'm puzzled at where the novelty is.
Actually, space travel is very complex. The only "simple" part about it is that, for two body motion and the limits of our ability to control thrutser force and duration, there are explicit solutions to the differential equations. The brain power behind the programming is immensely difficult, but once coded the computational power needed is not excessive.
More to the point, all the pencil and paper math HAD to be done to make the available processors capable of performing the operations. The fact that they had slide rules indicates that the complexity of the brain work was immense to reduce the solution set to something that can be solved near-real-time on a slide rule. If the same mission were done today, we'd have none of this higher math involved. With the available processor power, it would be a brute force numerical solution. That's what most video codecs are, in essence, is a numerical solution to an equation with known boundary conditions. The more compression you want, the less exact the solution is (And hence the compression artifacts).
Short of computationally intensive activities like video decoding, it shouldn't take much processor power to browse the web. It only does because it's faster (from a programmers time) to do things with brute force than to slim them down. It shouldn't require 250-500+ separate requests to open a page, and there shouldn't be 200kB of formatting for a page which contains - maybe - 5kB of text. That's why Skyfire works so fast on cell phones - there's so much crap in HTML pages now, and so many requests, that its faster to make a VGA snapshot of a page and load that as a damned image than it is to download the actual page.
I want to see a public service announcement with John Hodgson, that Keanu Reeves look alike, and a penguin (or Linus) all trying to read and understand their respective EULAs while a 4-1/2 year looks at a computer with a big chain and lock on it. Each time the kid tries to touch the machine, one of the three sais "don't touch that, it says here..." and spouts a particularly evil portion of their EULA.
Wall street is not just a place where executives take foolishly large bonuses for questionable business practices. If a recent interveiw on the 500k salary cap had accurate data, you don't have to fear anything about the money on wall street going to a couple of super rich people. According to the compensation expert they had (NPR, a week or two ago), the $500k compensation strata hits in the 3rd to 4th year of employment for the MBAs who populate the firms who live and breathe the WSJ.
These are just regular, working folks who want you to know that this money shouldn't got to broadband, especially since (1) they already get great service in New York, and (2) they lose more in $100 bills they leave in their drycleaning than they pay for broadband in a year.
Actually, most magazines have margins of less than 1/2", and books are similar (closer to 1/4". They could do with less, but there's a need to provide relief between the text and the edge of the page for reduced eyestrain as well as printing practicalities. Since I'm sure the screen will have a built-in stay-out border for most text, the edge needs only enough to hold. If the device is small enough - about the size of a paperback, you only need an 1/8"-3/16" of relief to hook a finger on it. I don't hold books or magazines by the margin any more than I hold my pda by the bezel - I cradle it - no grubby hands on the display/page that way.
I'll admit my hands are fairly big, so I'd prefer to have the screen be bigger, but shrinking the thing down to paperback size would be nice too. Anything smaller than 4 inches might be too tempting to put in my back pocket, of course. I'm ambivalent about the keyboard. I can see the utility, and I'm not a big fan of touch-screens for typing. I could deal with a lot of chicklet-crunch if the typing wasn't done too much and the screen was maximized.
...relative to the screen size. We've all been spoiled by the near-zero-bezel devices in the phone/music player market, this one just looks very 90s with the wide bezel around the whole screen. The keyboard doesn't even encroach into that space. Seems like the form factor could be reduced significantly, though they may have used a lot of that space for battery.
That's just not right. I'm going to have to walk around all day with that image haunting me.
Couldn't you have just linked goatse?
That's why it requires a thou shalt mentality from the very top, and a masterful sales job. Professors may be tenured, but the chairs are not forever or guaranteed. Life can be made very difficult for those who do not stand by the University regulations. And if the University declairs that no computer owned or operated may use software which is not open source, things will change and people will grumble. They can get down right mean about it. That will help clean the ranks and allow for hiring in open(source) thinkers to replace them.
If it becomes a selling point (it will never have enough financial incentive), it may ultimately be a win for the college.
But I doubt it.
This bill was intended to throw money into the US economy by way of creating jobs. As each paycheck gets cashed, the money is inserted into the local economy. The key is that the US government is borrowing to do it. That's necessary because nobody else is willing to lend or borrow at the moment.
Oddly, it's my opinion that if congress simply pulled rank on the banks and forced home mortgages to be capped at 4 or 5 % regardless of original terms we'd be in better shape. The collapse is because banks double and triple sold/bought insurance for all the poorly written home mortgage loans. With all the eligible buyers and low initial credit rates, people bought more than they could afford (or borrowed and spent from the phantom gains in housing). Here's the thing: if everyone just continued to pay their mortgages (standard default rates as typical), nobody would panic.
Instead, the banks called their foolish acceleration clauses and pushed people into foreclosure. With foreclosures, prices went down and nobody could sell for the inflated market and were therefore underwater and had to go bankrupt instead of selling their house and moving on. Had the collapse not happened and the government put some real, hard rules out there we'd see reductions in investment income and a slowdown in the economy until actual values caught up with phantom values (still a housing retreat, but not as drastic). Nobody would get rich, and very very few would be destitute. The economy would falter as the credit-driven spending would subside. It would be slow, but not the catastrophe we've seen.
The simple fact is that people, as a whole and as a small but significant portion of individuals, cannot be trusted to deal honestly with money. Self regulation simply cannot occur in the financial sector. The congress, sad to say, doesn't have the backbone to put in regulations for fear that they, themselves, will be prevented from becoming wildly rich(er) (again, people and money).
The world will not collapse if growth goes to zero, contrary to the markets. But the people who make markets will be hurt by the fact that they provide little to no value, and will suffer greatly relative to their current positions. Think about it - if growth and inflation went to zero, would it really affect you in a significant way? Every dollar you saved would be a dollar for you to spend in retirement. We expect growth because we expect inflation. It's not really necessary for average folks like us. It only matters to those who don't work for a living, but use cash as a tool for making money.