How many Google employees have family members in Mexico? Probably not many, but there have to be some. If this anti-cartel initiative actually starts to be successful, how long before Los Zetas go after these family members?
The Mexican cartels don't seem to have much force projection ability into the US (all the killings are on the Mexican side of the border) – maybe this is because they know most US cops wouldn't look the other way like Mexican ones do, or they don't have as many connections and sources in the US as they do back home, or because killing American citizens would get them treated like actual terrorists by the US government, complete with drone attacks and Gitmo. But if they can retaliate against people in Mexico for the actions of US corporations, they will.
If you're talking about the lock, you're talking about Microsoft ARM devices, not desktop devices. Microsoft has no monopoly there, and is FAR behind Apple in that market.
Under antitrust law, it's illegal to leverage your monopoly in one field (desktop operating systems) to gain market share in another field (tablets and smartphone OSes).
The browser ballot isn't aimed at people like us. It's aimed at the kind of people who think that "the big blue E" is "the internet". The whole point is to make inexperienced users aware that there are other choices out there.
Sure, go after Apple's iOS boot loader lock first, since they have several times the number of devices as Microsoft that are affected by a lock.
Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in any of its market segments, so it doesn't have to play by the same rules. Being a monopolist isn't illegal in and of itself, but it does mean you are subject to more stringent regulations to ensure you aren't using your dominant position to lock out competitors.
In my opinion, the attempt to force "Metro" down everyone's throat should be considered an anti-competitive act: it's an attempt to leverage MS's existing monopoly on the desktop into the smartphone and tablet space. It will probably fail anyway, but even the attempt should not be permitted.
If I'm renting my car out under this arrangement, how can I be sure that the renters aren't abusing it in subtle or hard-to-detect ways? Burning up the brakes, doing donuts in parking lots, weird stuff with the transmission... there are lots of ways to damage a car that won't be immediately apparent. By the time it's noticed, it may be too late. And even in the case of overt damage, expect a major fight with the insurance company over just who caused it and whether your insurance or Relay Rental should pay. Dealing with insurance companies is always a nightmare, every time.
For rental recipients, this poses its own set of problems: how do you avoid being blamed for damage you didn't cause? How can you be sure that the car isn't missing basic functionality – you wouldn't be happy to get a rental in the middle of July with broken A/C.
You don't have an automatic, unlike 94% of cars sold? That's easy, this program is not for you.
Agreed, the grandparent used a bad example, but there are lots of ways that careless/malicious renters could abuse a car with an automatic. They can still drag race, do donuts in a parking lot, and so on.
Will people using this Onstar rental service be allowed to restrict rentals to experienced drivers with good records? Can you specify no one with less than 4 years of driving experience or with more than 1 at-fault accident in the last two years?
Are we talking about source code size, or the actual binary footprint on any individual supported system? In other words, does an ARM SoC running Linux get bloated down by the unnecessary PowerPC (!) support code?
Cinema gets an extremely high quality temporal anti-aliasing effect (i.e. motion blur) 'for free'; video games don't.
But that only applies when actual physical film is used, which is becoming increasingly less common in the era of digital projectors. More and more films are distributed exclusively on encrypted hard drives, not film stock. And essentially all home theater installations will operate digitally. 24 fps looks pretty bad when it is displayed digitally with no interpolation. Anything more than the slowest scenery pan results in visible judder. Of course, you could easily use a video processor to do motion interpolation of the missing frames if you wanted – but then why settle for pseudo-48 fps instead of filming the real thing in the first place?
Image quality reveals fake scenes for what they are.
I'm not a Trekkie, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that this was a real problem with the original Star Trek series. It was shot on good film (35mm?) but all the imperfections in the props and sets were covered up when it was originally telecined to NTSC for airing. When they remastered a HD version of the series from the original film, a lot of the seams started showing. (I don't know what the resolution was – did they touch it up manually in Cinepaint or something?) It was an interesting story.
Sorry I misunderstood your original statement, and I think you're right – there is no affirmative obligation to ensure that your construction is signal-friendly, it's just that you cannot actively jam communications by sending out signals of your own. All the enforcement actions on that FCC page involved active jammers; none involved Faraday cages or any other form of passive signal-unfriendly construction.
My impression was that only active jamming (broadcasting an unauthorized interference signal) was illegal. A Faraday cage isn't actually jamming anything, it's just creating conditions where reception will be poor or nonexistent.
Perhaps 48 fps pushes the animation into an uncanny valley.
But if that is the case, why isn't the same true for the many TV shows shot at the even higher rate of 60 fps? Or the countless video games that run at that frame rate or its rough equivalent?
I'm sure the theater owners ought to be able to block signal to cellphones, so it's not a question of intent any more - you just can't use them.
The use of any cell phone jamming device is expressly prohibited by U.S. federal law. If a movie theater tries to jam cellphone service, they will receive a warning letter from the FCC ordering them to stop.
The legal argument here will almost certainly be that, by accepting $5 million from the Bakers for consulting fees, Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to act in their best interest regarding the transaction.
You can argue that they should have known better than to "put all their eggs in one basket". But the fact that the client should have known better is not a legal defense to a breach of a fiduciary duty. That's why you're paying the professional in the first place – because they're supposed to know better than you! They have a legal obligation to use that knowledge in your interests, not double-dip on the side.
The fact that Goldman considered investing in L&H and then specifically declined to do so is strong evidence that this recommendation to the Bakers was in violation of their legal duties.
This has nothing to do with astronauts. That's just the framing device. This is about YOU. The Koch Brothers don't think there should be any workplace safety regulations, and they use their many sockpuppets, including "Reason" magazine, to make this argument in various forms. They think your employer should be able to subject you to any dangerous conditions he/she wants.
Follow the money. Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in the United States, and it is wholly owned by Charles and David Koch. Everything they do, and I mean literally everything, is about stuffing more money in their pockets.
Remember when Street Fighter II came out for SNES? It was $70 at Target. That was almost 20 years ago.
A large part of that $70 price tag was actual manufacturing costs. Street Fighter II was the first 16MBit SNES game, and producing ROM cartridges that large was not cheap at the time.
The Wikipedia community officially doesn't want nasty. If an editor is persistent in being nasty to you, try one of the several dispute resolution processes listed at Dealing with incivility.
Because that's the first thing a new Wikipedia editor wants to do: deal with "dispute resolution processes."
Wikipedia politics is one of the encyclopedia's most serious problems. In that sense it is like many other open source projects (GIMP especially comes to mind here). Good advice from the outside is refused or rejected for cultural reasons or because "they're not our kind of people".
Yes, but if they're geeks in the subject of the article, they'll have absolutely no problem learning wiki's markup language, even if they aren't computer geeks. It's just complicated enough to keep out the worst of the idiots, but not so complicated that anyone who bothers to look at the page can't figure it out.
There are a lot of people who just don't grok the idea of semantic markup. They need a WYSIWYG interface. Don't mistake lack of understanding of IT concepts for lack of competence in that person's chosen field/profession/hobby. Changing your car's oil may be "easy" by auto mechanic standards, but many of us here, myself included, haven't got a clue how to do it.
Having half a dozen banners at the top of every article ("POV!" "Orphaned links!" "Proofread me!" "Locked article!") does not make a page "simple." And I suspect it discourages the "anyone can edit" thing, too.
That's not a technical problem, it's a political one.
I think it would be still nice to have a WYSIWYG interface. Actually I'm surprised that something like that is not in place already.
The Wikipedia brass have wanted this to happen for quite some time. There have been extensive discussions on the mailing lists about this. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to do from a technical point of view because there is no official specification for Wikicode. The markup format was never defined, it just sort of grew. The only real definition for Wikicode is whatever the PHP parser interprets (and that parser is a pile of spaghetti code). Features like templates and ParserFunctions make a WSYIWYG editor exceedingly challenging to develop without breaking many deployed pages.
I'd never heard of Voke before today. What is this company? What credentials do their analysts have, that we should care what they say? (I don't mean academic credentials, I mean proven real-world success.) What are they trying to sell?
There needs to be more skepticism about statements coming from random "consultants", think tanks, etc.
This is a bit off of the main topic... but any idea why none of the browser vendors have implemented native support for jQuery in their JavaScript engines? It seems to me that this would be an easy way to improve performance, considering how many websites use it, and considering that implementing native support for its API would remove the need to go through 2 layers of interpreters.
Not necessarily. Just because MS doesn't officially support it anymore, doesn't mean it's going to just go away. Unfortunately, in our market (web-based MLS software), we're going to have to support these legacy versions long after MS ditches them.
Agreed. In fact, I think there's at least a 25%-50% chance that Windows XP will never go away. What I think will happen is that a substantial number of large corporations and state/local/national governments will still be on WinXP in 2014, and unable to migrate up for a variety of reasons (logistics, legacy compatibility, IE6 ActiveX crap, etc.) As a result, I think there will be heavy pressure on Microsoft to lease the source code for WinXP to trusted third parties for continued maintenance and service. Expect a carrot-and-stick approach from the affected organizations: lots of money offered in contracts if WinXP continues to be somehow supportable, combined with threats that if they have to redo everything to leave XP, they might as well switch to MacOS or Linux instead of upgrading to the newest version of Windows. And, of course, governments have even more tools than this at their disposal if they don't like what MS is doing.
There's a very real possibility that we will see a de facto fork of Windows within the next five years.
I don't have any problem with dropping support for IE6 and IE7. These should have been phased out years ago, and their only reasonable present-day use is not as web browsers, but as legacy applications platforms for badly coded ActiveX apps.
But IE8? For users with Windows XP, this is as high as you can go. IE9 is not supported. And WinXP continues to be supported by Microsoft through the end of 2014, and is still in very widespread use among businesses, and to a lesser but still significant extent among home users.
I wish IE8 would go away (or more specifically, that Microsoft would take the time to backport IE9 to WinXP). Its continued persistence means a lot of css3pie hacks in the website I maintain, which are necessary to get rounded corners and drop shadows in this outdated browser. But it won't go away just because Google wants it to. And saying to use Firefox or Chrome instead of IE is not going to fly in most workplaces, which rely heavily on Internet Explorer's integration with Active Directory and its support for Group Policy. As far behind as IE falls in other categories, no third-party browser matches its abilities on these vital business fronts.
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How many Google employees have family members in Mexico? Probably not many, but there have to be some. If this anti-cartel initiative actually starts to be successful, how long before Los Zetas go after these family members?
The Mexican cartels don't seem to have much force projection ability into the US (all the killings are on the Mexican side of the border) – maybe this is because they know most US cops wouldn't look the other way like Mexican ones do, or they don't have as many connections and sources in the US as they do back home, or because killing American citizens would get them treated like actual terrorists by the US government, complete with drone attacks and Gitmo. But if they can retaliate against people in Mexico for the actions of US corporations, they will.
If you're talking about the lock, you're talking about Microsoft ARM devices, not desktop devices. Microsoft has no monopoly there, and is FAR behind Apple in that market.
Under antitrust law, it's illegal to leverage your monopoly in one field (desktop operating systems) to gain market share in another field (tablets and smartphone OSes).
The browser ballot isn't aimed at people like us. It's aimed at the kind of people who think that "the big blue E" is "the internet". The whole point is to make inexperienced users aware that there are other choices out there.
Sure, go after Apple's iOS boot loader lock first, since they have several times the number of devices as Microsoft that are affected by a lock.
Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in any of its market segments, so it doesn't have to play by the same rules. Being a monopolist isn't illegal in and of itself, but it does mean you are subject to more stringent regulations to ensure you aren't using your dominant position to lock out competitors.
In my opinion, the attempt to force "Metro" down everyone's throat should be considered an anti-competitive act: it's an attempt to leverage MS's existing monopoly on the desktop into the smartphone and tablet space. It will probably fail anyway, but even the attempt should not be permitted.
If I'm renting my car out under this arrangement, how can I be sure that the renters aren't abusing it in subtle or hard-to-detect ways? Burning up the brakes, doing donuts in parking lots, weird stuff with the transmission... there are lots of ways to damage a car that won't be immediately apparent. By the time it's noticed, it may be too late. And even in the case of overt damage, expect a major fight with the insurance company over just who caused it and whether your insurance or Relay Rental should pay. Dealing with insurance companies is always a nightmare, every time.
For rental recipients, this poses its own set of problems: how do you avoid being blamed for damage you didn't cause? How can you be sure that the car isn't missing basic functionality – you wouldn't be happy to get a rental in the middle of July with broken A/C.
You don't have an automatic, unlike 94% of cars sold? That's easy, this program is not for you.
Agreed, the grandparent used a bad example, but there are lots of ways that careless/malicious renters could abuse a car with an automatic. They can still drag race, do donuts in a parking lot, and so on.
Will people using this Onstar rental service be allowed to restrict rentals to experienced drivers with good records? Can you specify no one with less than 4 years of driving experience or with more than 1 at-fault accident in the last two years?
Are we talking about source code size, or the actual binary footprint on any individual supported system? In other words, does an ARM SoC running Linux get bloated down by the unnecessary PowerPC (!) support code?
Cinema gets an extremely high quality temporal anti-aliasing effect (i.e. motion blur) 'for free'; video games don't.
But that only applies when actual physical film is used, which is becoming increasingly less common in the era of digital projectors. More and more films are distributed exclusively on encrypted hard drives, not film stock. And essentially all home theater installations will operate digitally. 24 fps looks pretty bad when it is displayed digitally with no interpolation. Anything more than the slowest scenery pan results in visible judder. Of course, you could easily use a video processor to do motion interpolation of the missing frames if you wanted – but then why settle for pseudo-48 fps instead of filming the real thing in the first place?
Image quality reveals fake scenes for what they are.
I'm not a Trekkie, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that this was a real problem with the original Star Trek series. It was shot on good film (35mm?) but all the imperfections in the props and sets were covered up when it was originally telecined to NTSC for airing. When they remastered a HD version of the series from the original film, a lot of the seams started showing. (I don't know what the resolution was – did they touch it up manually in Cinepaint or something?) It was an interesting story.
Sorry I misunderstood your original statement, and I think you're right – there is no affirmative obligation to ensure that your construction is signal-friendly, it's just that you cannot actively jam communications by sending out signals of your own. All the enforcement actions on that FCC page involved active jammers; none involved Faraday cages or any other form of passive signal-unfriendly construction.
My impression was that only active jamming (broadcasting an unauthorized interference signal) was illegal. A Faraday cage isn't actually jamming anything, it's just creating conditions where reception will be poor or nonexistent.
Perhaps 48 fps pushes the animation into an uncanny valley.
But if that is the case, why isn't the same true for the many TV shows shot at the even higher rate of 60 fps? Or the countless video games that run at that frame rate or its rough equivalent?
I'm sure the theater owners ought to be able to block signal to cellphones, so it's not a question of intent any more - you just can't use them.
The use of any cell phone jamming device is expressly prohibited by U.S. federal law. If a movie theater tries to jam cellphone service, they will receive a warning letter from the FCC ordering them to stop.
The legal argument here will almost certainly be that, by accepting $5 million from the Bakers for consulting fees, Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to act in their best interest regarding the transaction.
You can argue that they should have known better than to "put all their eggs in one basket". But the fact that the client should have known better is not a legal defense to a breach of a fiduciary duty. That's why you're paying the professional in the first place – because they're supposed to know better than you! They have a legal obligation to use that knowledge in your interests, not double-dip on the side.
The fact that Goldman considered investing in L&H and then specifically declined to do so is strong evidence that this recommendation to the Bakers was in violation of their legal duties.
Reason Magazine = the Koch Brothers.
This has nothing to do with astronauts. That's just the framing device. This is about YOU. The Koch Brothers don't think there should be any workplace safety regulations, and they use their many sockpuppets, including "Reason" magazine, to make this argument in various forms. They think your employer should be able to subject you to any dangerous conditions he/she wants.
Follow the money. Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in the United States, and it is wholly owned by Charles and David Koch. Everything they do, and I mean literally everything, is about stuffing more money in their pockets.
I paid fifty bucks for NES games, even though they didn't have much gameplay in them.
NES games, at least the good ones, had a lot more real gameplay in them than the cookie-cutter FPS shit that passes for "A-list games" today.
Remember when Street Fighter II came out for SNES? It was $70 at Target. That was almost 20 years ago.
A large part of that $70 price tag was actual manufacturing costs. Street Fighter II was the first 16MBit SNES game, and producing ROM cartridges that large was not cheap at the time.
The Wikipedia community officially doesn't want nasty. If an editor is persistent in being nasty to you, try one of the several dispute resolution processes listed at Dealing with incivility.
Because that's the first thing a new Wikipedia editor wants to do: deal with "dispute resolution processes."
Wikipedia politics is one of the encyclopedia's most serious problems. In that sense it is like many other open source projects (GIMP especially comes to mind here). Good advice from the outside is refused or rejected for cultural reasons or because "they're not our kind of people".
Yes, but if they're geeks in the subject of the article, they'll have absolutely no problem learning wiki's markup language, even if they aren't computer geeks. It's just complicated enough to keep out the worst of the idiots, but not so complicated that anyone who bothers to look at the page can't figure it out.
There are a lot of people who just don't grok the idea of semantic markup. They need a WYSIWYG interface. Don't mistake lack of understanding of IT concepts for lack of competence in that person's chosen field/profession/hobby. Changing your car's oil may be "easy" by auto mechanic standards, but many of us here, myself included, haven't got a clue how to do it.
Division of labor is a good thing.
Having half a dozen banners at the top of every article ("POV!" "Orphaned links!" "Proofread me!" "Locked article!") does not make a page "simple." And I suspect it discourages the "anyone can edit" thing, too.
That's not a technical problem, it's a political one.
I think it would be still nice to have a WYSIWYG interface. Actually I'm surprised that something like that is not in place already.
The Wikipedia brass have wanted this to happen for quite some time. There have been extensive discussions on the mailing lists about this. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to do from a technical point of view because there is no official specification for Wikicode. The markup format was never defined, it just sort of grew. The only real definition for Wikicode is whatever the PHP parser interprets (and that parser is a pile of spaghetti code). Features like templates and ParserFunctions make a WSYIWYG editor exceedingly challenging to develop without breaking many deployed pages.
I'd never heard of Voke before today. What is this company? What credentials do their analysts have, that we should care what they say? (I don't mean academic credentials, I mean proven real-world success.) What are they trying to sell?
There needs to be more skepticism about statements coming from random "consultants", think tanks, etc.
This is a bit off of the main topic... but any idea why none of the browser vendors have implemented native support for jQuery in their JavaScript engines? It seems to me that this would be an easy way to improve performance, considering how many websites use it, and considering that implementing native support for its API would remove the need to go through 2 layers of interpreters.
Not necessarily. Just because MS doesn't officially support it anymore, doesn't mean it's going to just go away. Unfortunately, in our market (web-based MLS software), we're going to have to support these legacy versions long after MS ditches them.
Agreed. In fact, I think there's at least a 25%-50% chance that Windows XP will never go away. What I think will happen is that a substantial number of large corporations and state/local/national governments will still be on WinXP in 2014, and unable to migrate up for a variety of reasons (logistics, legacy compatibility, IE6 ActiveX crap, etc.) As a result, I think there will be heavy pressure on Microsoft to lease the source code for WinXP to trusted third parties for continued maintenance and service. Expect a carrot-and-stick approach from the affected organizations: lots of money offered in contracts if WinXP continues to be somehow supportable, combined with threats that if they have to redo everything to leave XP, they might as well switch to MacOS or Linux instead of upgrading to the newest version of Windows. And, of course, governments have even more tools than this at their disposal if they don't like what MS is doing.
There's a very real possibility that we will see a de facto fork of Windows within the next five years.
I don't have any problem with dropping support for IE6 and IE7. These should have been phased out years ago, and their only reasonable present-day use is not as web browsers, but as legacy applications platforms for badly coded ActiveX apps.
But IE8? For users with Windows XP, this is as high as you can go. IE9 is not supported. And WinXP continues to be supported by Microsoft through the end of 2014, and is still in very widespread use among businesses, and to a lesser but still significant extent among home users.
I wish IE8 would go away (or more specifically, that Microsoft would take the time to backport IE9 to WinXP). Its continued persistence means a lot of css3pie hacks in the website I maintain, which are necessary to get rounded corners and drop shadows in this outdated browser. But it won't go away just because Google wants it to. And saying to use Firefox or Chrome instead of IE is not going to fly in most workplaces, which rely heavily on Internet Explorer's integration with Active Directory and its support for Group Policy. As far behind as IE falls in other categories, no third-party browser matches its abilities on these vital business fronts.