(Modded this "redundant" by mistake-- I meant "insightful"-- so I'll kill off my mods here...)
Because your suggestion is clear and concise, I give it diddly-squat odds of being implemented by US carriers (unless they're tiny and trying to build a market for themselves). Like brokers of debt (i.e., banks), they want the rules to be as inconsistent and/or incomprehensible as possible, so that they can slap a fee on you just because they can.
Coming soon to the Apple Store: The Apple Seat Belt, a restraining device for your living room couch. Don't let your natural human urges get in the way of missing a single millisecond of movie enjoyment! We'll send the device to you only for the cost of shipping; it will release you when the movie is over or when you pause and pay a low charge of 50 cents.
Best of all, it uncouples from the mount* and doubles as a stylish belt.
"First, shalt thou takest out the holy shell. Then shalt thou telnet to 80. No more, no less. 80 shalt be the number of the telnet, and the number of the telnet shall be 80. 81 shalt thou not telnet, neither telnet thou 8080, except that thou should then telnet securely. Once 80, the number of the port shall be reached, then lobbest thou thy holy SYN grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it. Amen."
In the context of history, Britain may be both a vanguard and a pioneer of liberty (Magna Carta (constitution), common law, due process, jury trial), but there were other times when it was a feudal and/or totalitarian cesspool (Roman Empire, Henry III to name a few).
Freedom and liberty do not come easily, but they are taken easily, and not everyone values them; moreover, it can be more profitable and/or politically expedient to restrict or eliminate freedoms, which appears to be the trend today in political circles.
Not only did he not pay, one of his sons had the benefit of getting the fire department to put out a fire in his house even though he hadn't paid the fee. When the father's house caught fire, he then assumed the FD would put out the fire anyway as a public hazard concern, but that turned out to be quite the fatal assumption.
I have little sympathy for those decisions, and I'm sure he would be more careful with his new house if he were wise.
That said, the county and its residents bear a lot of responsibility for having such a screwed-up system. If you demand no taxes and a powerless government, you will get no help from the government. This, the Massey mine accident, the BP spill, and Katrina are all stark examples of how neutralizing the government has serious consequences.
I hate to sound cynical, but I doubt the county's people will learn from this; they'll scoff at the Cranicks as many of the libertarians here no doubt have, without realizing that they'll be ill-equipped to handle the next disaster.
That's a possibility, but IMO it's just as likely the judge/jury will see it as a fair payment for services rendered, as the fire victim* didn't opt into fire service but asked for it. Since the FD arrived as the house was burning down (the timing is a bit fuzzy), not putting out the fire could make the FD and city liable for negligence. I'm not a lawyer, of course, so I could be totally wrong.
And the straw man being raised here in rebuttal is that the guy offered to pay 75 bucks. He offered to pay "whatever it took", which means that he offered to pay the cost of fire service, which would probably go into the thousands.
Obviously, that's going on the Cranicks' word alone, but if the 911 dispatcher recording also backs him up, the "Everyone else would fail to pay up" argument would hold no water. The sensible thing to have done is to put out the fire anyway and have the Cranicks sign a release stating they would pay up the cost of the service, rather than the annual fee. As IANAL, I don't know if that would hold up-- they obviously can't tax the Cranicks, nor can they demand anything from the county without a pre-approved agreement.
If enough people in that county are motivated, the county and city will change their laws to allow after payment of service. However, I doubt anyone but the Cranicks and their friends care in that neck of the woods, so we'll probably see a repeat event in the future. That's the basic lesson of history.
True, but that's a few steps removed from Blizzard's treatment of StarCraft 2 user-made maps ("You wanna publish your stuff? You go through us, and only us."-- Apple just doesn't make the "only us" a requirement of iOS, even though for all intents and purposes it assumes as such). It's practically impossible to get any mindshare outside of iTunes, unless your app is really polished and well-known outside of the enthusiasts who know about installation of ad-hoc apps. And even if it's exceptionally useful and brilliant, Apple can deny its entry to iTunes for seemingly trivial or arbitrary reasons.
It's like comparing a big-name commercial program sold at a Best Buy with one of many abandoned projects on SourceForge-- great ideas, not nearly enough mindshare, let alone financial support, to take off.
Now, this situation is understandable given the liability concerns Apple has (which are probably overkill, but that's corporate legal departments for you, especially Apple's notoriously paranoid legal team). But it does highlight the need for a more community-based development/distribution app "store" that's more along the lines of SourceForge. Alas, it seems that the companies who would like developers to come forth from the user community also tend to discourage the users from competing with their sanctioned method of app distribution.
I'm sure it's much more an issue of "You dump us, and we'll send our army of lawyers with infringement and breach of contract suits to serve you" than reputation. There must be plenty of producers and directors who would love to say "Screw this, we'll just distribute online with this free Bit Torrent thing and save millions."
Many linux patches involve downloading hundreds of small files, not one big one.
The way to optimize that is to build a bzip/gzip tarball on the fly and download it in one shot, although I don't know if that will make a huge enough difference to be worth it. I think we're all agreed, though, that even if the reliability/availability is marginally higher, BitTorrent is definitely overkill for stuff like small patches.
That reminds me of the Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! "Not My Job" interview/quiz with the Magliozzi brothers (AKA "Click & Clack", AKA "The Car Talk guys"). One of the questions they answered was of a similar mirror sculpture in Britain that some meteorologists warned would kill birds by focusing sunlight on them. The Vegas hotel could draw upon the subsequent banter and rename the place "Click & Clack's Place of Whatever Flies By".
<plug type="gratuitous">Just one more reason to listen to public radio.</plug>
I'm guessing all the creative names (FreeOffice, NeoOffice, Symphony...) are already taken, and this is one way to avoid a debilitating lawsuit.
Personally, I think the quirky name gives the OSS evangelist a good opportunity to explain Free Software or Open Source to the uninitiated.
And a few counterpoints to the idea that geeks come up with silly unmarketable names-- I bet you never thought "Google" would become a verb when it was launched, and I'm sure you laughed or groaned at "iMac" or "Digg" or "Reddit" or "Wii". These names didn't end up stuck in the niche market.
Heck, "Apache" or "Linux" aren't terribly flashy names, and yet these are ubiquitous. It seems the attraction isn't necessarily in the branding, but in the quality of the software.
It does not matter who you are or what you do for a living, your brain is subject to the same logical fallacies as anyone else, and eyewitness testimony from air force pilots is statistically on equal footing as the testimony from cab drivers.
Yeah, there's a reason why logicians call that fallacy an argument from (or appeal to) authority. We should always remember that even the brightest among us are fallible, yet when we reason using authoritative sources, we generally do not.
Verizon has also shown time and time again that it will lock down phones to an extreme degree. If you think AT&T's reluctance to allow tethering is a problem, wait until Verizon gets to dictate terms.
I should point out that the first Moto Droid is the first Verizon smartphone with a stock operating system with no extra software added by Motorola or Verizon.
But given that the Droid 2 got the BLUR treatment of the Droid X, that victory for unmodified handsets was short-lived. I'm guessing this was a push by Google to both partners to "let the customers see what we're capable of BEFORE shoving your stuff on board"; I wish they could have continued to push for this, because this was a huge selling point of the whole "Droid Does" marketing campaign.
That said, more Android phones will probably be rooted (unless Motorola/HTC keeps the bloatware to a minimum), so Verizon will be faced with the same choice that Apple/AT&T faced when iPhone jailbreaking started to become popular-- will they tighten their grip and start locking out paying customers, or will they stop squeezing the enthusiasts?
I'm not holding my breath either-- Verizon has yet to learn that pissing off customers, while affordable in the short run, is unsustainable.
I should add that since DR compression will affect the signal before the digitization and data compression processes, you'll find that a vinyl of an old (say, 60s or 70s) recording will sound far superior to a lossless iTunes recording of its re-release. The best bet is to hook up an audio cable to the mic/line-in input of the computer, "rip" the vinyl, and then make a lossless compressed copy of the song. You may want to clean up the signal a bit to remove the popping and scratching that's a trademark of vinyl, but that's much easier than trying to get the original signal out of a recent digital download.
It's not just the compression of the digital audio data that affects the sound-- 99% of the quality difference is due to dynamic range compression, which practically every studio uses now. It's the main reason why many recent recordings sound "louder" but less "detailed". (See also: Loudness war)
Uh, no. Buckyballs' "inventor", Jake Bronstein, is a fool with a thin skin. Otherwise, he wouldn't call up his competitor with threatening language, nor would he file a frivolous and false DMCA takedown.
Zen should keep their cool and stick to the facts, and Bronstein will exhaust himself in anger and lawyers.
If that's this morning's Morning Edition report on "cyber" security (may that buzzword burn in hell), we need to change the framing of the information security debate in eastern Europe and the Middle East, because those countries view information and ideology, not technology, as the weapons. They want to stop countries from expressing philosophical opinions, which is useless for anything except for suppressing dissidents!
If you've got a caper Then you know who to call. It's The Sneak! It's The Sneak! Who's that Dapper Swindler Out of Tammany Hall? Vo-vo-vo-dee-oh-do It's The Sneak!
That does explain, however, why (non-Blizzard) Mac game ports are often released much later, and tend to be buggier and more costly than the originals-- the D3D OpenGL porting is surely the main thing that most dev houses consider prohibitive (unless you're a company with tons of cash from the most popular MMORPG of all time), and they can only release a Mac port through a third party-- hence, the long delay and many bugs.
Valve's ports of Source games are impressive thus far, and it remains to be seen if they could pull off the same cross-platform quality that Blizzard does on a regular basis.
I hate to say it, but Mac gaming is the single largest consumer market for OpenGL. Apple can (and probably should) demonstrate some leadership and put forward a framework akin to DirectX that is APL or GPL licensed (think CUPS), but I'm afraid much of those resources is going into iOS instead.
Which raises the point of responsibility-- how would you go about discouraging the many idiots from doing stupid things while hunting or owning a firearm?
I would say find a way to revoke/suspend their license to own a firearm, though 2nd Amendment zealots will probably sic the NRA on me. If you cannot use a firearm responsibly, you should not own one. Period.
Also, how many wolves were lost to hunting/poaching by, say, livestock farmers in Wisconsin? It's not like the Enterprise traveled through time (again) and beamed them all into the ether. It seems you conveniently left out why the wolves are gone, because, I'm guessing, hunters were responsible for their near-elimination from the ecosystem.
Slashdot Mirror
(Modded this "redundant" by mistake-- I meant "insightful"-- so I'll kill off my mods here...)
Because your suggestion is clear and concise, I give it diddly-squat odds of being implemented by US carriers (unless they're tiny and trying to build a market for themselves). Like brokers of debt (i.e., banks), they want the rules to be as inconsistent and/or incomprehensible as possible, so that they can slap a fee on you just because they can.
Ah, good! Someone's thinking like a physicist.
No added benefit for western/northern Europe and Australia, perhaps. Verizon is transitioning to a GSM 4G network anyway, so this point will most likely be moot by the time iPhones are sold on Verizon (if ever).
Coming soon to the Apple Store: The Apple Seat Belt, a restraining device for your living room couch. Don't let your natural human urges get in the way of missing a single millisecond of movie enjoyment! We'll send the device to you only for the cost of shipping; it will release you when the movie is over or when you pause and pay a low charge of 50 cents.
Best of all, it uncouples from the mount* and doubles as a stylish belt.
* Bolted to the floor.
"First, shalt thou takest out the holy shell. Then shalt thou telnet to 80. No more, no less. 80 shalt be the number of the telnet, and the number of the telnet shall be 80. 81 shalt thou not telnet, neither telnet thou 8080, except that thou should then telnet securely. Once 80, the number of the port shall be reached, then lobbest thou thy holy SYN grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it. Amen."
You should encourage her to check her credit report annually, as malware is a prime tool of identity thieves.
Or write a scary email convincing her to check it for any accounts she never opened.
In the context of history, Britain may be both a vanguard and a pioneer of liberty (Magna Carta (constitution), common law, due process, jury trial), but there were other times when it was a feudal and/or totalitarian cesspool (Roman Empire, Henry III to name a few).
Freedom and liberty do not come easily, but they are taken easily, and not everyone values them; moreover, it can be more profitable and/or politically expedient to restrict or eliminate freedoms, which appears to be the trend today in political circles.
Not only did he not pay, one of his sons had the benefit of getting the fire department to put out a fire in his house even though he hadn't paid the fee. When the father's house caught fire, he then assumed the FD would put out the fire anyway as a public hazard concern, but that turned out to be quite the fatal assumption.
I have little sympathy for those decisions, and I'm sure he would be more careful with his new house if he were wise.
That said, the county and its residents bear a lot of responsibility for having such a screwed-up system. If you demand no taxes and a powerless government, you will get no help from the government. This, the Massey mine accident, the BP spill, and Katrina are all stark examples of how neutralizing the government has serious consequences.
I hate to sound cynical, but I doubt the county's people will learn from this; they'll scoff at the Cranicks as many of the libertarians here no doubt have, without realizing that they'll be ill-equipped to handle the next disaster.
That's a possibility, but IMO it's just as likely the judge/jury will see it as a fair payment for services rendered, as the fire victim* didn't opt into fire service but asked for it. Since the FD arrived as the house was burning down (the timing is a bit fuzzy), not putting out the fire could make the FD and city liable for negligence. I'm not a lawyer, of course, so I could be totally wrong.
* Victim of his own stupidity, perhaps.
And the straw man being raised here in rebuttal is that the guy offered to pay 75 bucks. He offered to pay "whatever it took", which means that he offered to pay the cost of fire service, which would probably go into the thousands.
Obviously, that's going on the Cranicks' word alone, but if the 911 dispatcher recording also backs him up, the "Everyone else would fail to pay up" argument would hold no water. The sensible thing to have done is to put out the fire anyway and have the Cranicks sign a release stating they would pay up the cost of the service, rather than the annual fee. As IANAL, I don't know if that would hold up-- they obviously can't tax the Cranicks, nor can they demand anything from the county without a pre-approved agreement.
If enough people in that county are motivated, the county and city will change their laws to allow after payment of service. However, I doubt anyone but the Cranicks and their friends care in that neck of the woods, so we'll probably see a repeat event in the future. That's the basic lesson of history.
True, but that's a few steps removed from Blizzard's treatment of StarCraft 2 user-made maps ("You wanna publish your stuff? You go through us, and only us."-- Apple just doesn't make the "only us" a requirement of iOS, even though for all intents and purposes it assumes as such). It's practically impossible to get any mindshare outside of iTunes, unless your app is really polished and well-known outside of the enthusiasts who know about installation of ad-hoc apps. And even if it's exceptionally useful and brilliant, Apple can deny its entry to iTunes for seemingly trivial or arbitrary reasons.
It's like comparing a big-name commercial program sold at a Best Buy with one of many abandoned projects on SourceForge-- great ideas, not nearly enough mindshare, let alone financial support, to take off.
Now, this situation is understandable given the liability concerns Apple has (which are probably overkill, but that's corporate legal departments for you, especially Apple's notoriously paranoid legal team). But it does highlight the need for a more community-based development/distribution app "store" that's more along the lines of SourceForge. Alas, it seems that the companies who would like developers to come forth from the user community also tend to discourage the users from competing with their sanctioned method of app distribution.
I'm sure it's much more an issue of "You dump us, and we'll send our army of lawyers with infringement and breach of contract suits to serve you" than reputation. There must be plenty of producers and directors who would love to say "Screw this, we'll just distribute online with this free Bit Torrent thing and save millions."
The way to optimize that is to build a bzip/gzip tarball on the fly and download it in one shot, although I don't know if that will make a huge enough difference to be worth it. I think we're all agreed, though, that even if the reliability/availability is marginally higher, BitTorrent is definitely overkill for stuff like small patches.
That reminds me of the Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! "Not My Job" interview/quiz with the Magliozzi brothers (AKA "Click & Clack", AKA "The Car Talk guys"). One of the questions they answered was of a similar mirror sculpture in Britain that some meteorologists warned would kill birds by focusing sunlight on them. The Vegas hotel could draw upon the subsequent banter and rename the place "Click & Clack's Place of Whatever Flies By".
<plug type="gratuitous">Just one more reason to listen to public radio.</plug>
Maybe we can draw in the Mexican wrestling aficionados by changing the icon to a lucha libre mask...
I volunteer Strong Bad's face.
I'm guessing all the creative names (FreeOffice, NeoOffice, Symphony...) are already taken, and this is one way to avoid a debilitating lawsuit.
Personally, I think the quirky name gives the OSS evangelist a good opportunity to explain Free Software or Open Source to the uninitiated.
And a few counterpoints to the idea that geeks come up with silly unmarketable names-- I bet you never thought "Google" would become a verb when it was launched, and I'm sure you laughed or groaned at "iMac" or "Digg" or "Reddit" or "Wii". These names didn't end up stuck in the niche market.
Heck, "Apache" or "Linux" aren't terribly flashy names, and yet these are ubiquitous. It seems the attraction isn't necessarily in the branding, but in the quality of the software.
Yeah, there's a reason why logicians call that fallacy an argument from (or appeal to) authority. We should always remember that even the brightest among us are fallible, yet when we reason using authoritative sources, we generally do not.
I should point out that the first Moto Droid is the first Verizon smartphone with a stock operating system with no extra software added by Motorola or Verizon.
But given that the Droid 2 got the BLUR treatment of the Droid X, that victory for unmodified handsets was short-lived. I'm guessing this was a push by Google to both partners to "let the customers see what we're capable of BEFORE shoving your stuff on board"; I wish they could have continued to push for this, because this was a huge selling point of the whole "Droid Does" marketing campaign.
That said, more Android phones will probably be rooted (unless Motorola/HTC keeps the bloatware to a minimum), so Verizon will be faced with the same choice that Apple/AT&T faced when iPhone jailbreaking started to become popular-- will they tighten their grip and start locking out paying customers, or will they stop squeezing the enthusiasts?
I'm not holding my breath either-- Verizon has yet to learn that pissing off customers, while affordable in the short run, is unsustainable.
I should add that since DR compression will affect the signal before the digitization and data compression processes, you'll find that a vinyl of an old (say, 60s or 70s) recording will sound far superior to a lossless iTunes recording of its re-release. The best bet is to hook up an audio cable to the mic/line-in input of the computer, "rip" the vinyl, and then make a lossless compressed copy of the song. You may want to clean up the signal a bit to remove the popping and scratching that's a trademark of vinyl, but that's much easier than trying to get the original signal out of a recent digital download.
It's not just the compression of the digital audio data that affects the sound-- 99% of the quality difference is due to dynamic range compression, which practically every studio uses now. It's the main reason why many recent recordings sound "louder" but less "detailed". (See also: Loudness war)
Uh, no. Buckyballs' "inventor", Jake Bronstein, is a fool with a thin skin. Otherwise, he wouldn't call up his competitor with threatening language, nor would he file a frivolous and false DMCA takedown.
Zen should keep their cool and stick to the facts, and Bronstein will exhaust himself in anger and lawyers.
If that's this morning's Morning Edition report on "cyber" security (may that buzzword burn in hell), we need to change the framing of the information security debate in eastern Europe and the Middle East, because those countries view information and ideology, not technology, as the weapons. They want to stop countries from expressing philosophical opinions, which is useless for anything except for suppressing dissidents!
Speaking of dapper villains...
That does explain, however, why (non-Blizzard) Mac game ports are often released much later, and tend to be buggier and more costly than the originals-- the D3D OpenGL porting is surely the main thing that most dev houses consider prohibitive (unless you're a company with tons of cash from the most popular MMORPG of all time), and they can only release a Mac port through a third party-- hence, the long delay and many bugs.
Valve's ports of Source games are impressive thus far, and it remains to be seen if they could pull off the same cross-platform quality that Blizzard does on a regular basis.
I hate to say it, but Mac gaming is the single largest consumer market for OpenGL. Apple can (and probably should) demonstrate some leadership and put forward a framework akin to DirectX that is APL or GPL licensed (think CUPS), but I'm afraid much of those resources is going into iOS instead.
Which raises the point of responsibility-- how would you go about discouraging the many idiots from doing stupid things while hunting or owning a firearm?
I would say find a way to revoke/suspend their license to own a firearm, though 2nd Amendment zealots will probably sic the NRA on me. If you cannot use a firearm responsibly, you should not own one. Period.
Also, how many wolves were lost to hunting/poaching by, say, livestock farmers in Wisconsin? It's not like the Enterprise traveled through time (again) and beamed them all into the ether. It seems you conveniently left out why the wolves are gone, because, I'm guessing, hunters were responsible for their near-elimination from the ecosystem.