My bank offered free bill paying, so I give it a try. After three or four months, I was close to hooked. Then something happened that soured me on it. Permanently. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, I'm just telling you I experienced.
a) The service distinguished between merchants that could get paid electronically, for which it said to allow two days, and those that couldn't, for which it said to allow five. AT&T was one of the latter.
b) At the time I'd been at AT&T customer for about three decades. During that time I paid my bills on time and never received a single late notice from them.
c) I used the service to pay the AT&T bill, issuing the directions on line ten business days before the bill was due. The online service showed the date I entered the directions, and five days later showed the bill as being paid.
d) Two calendar days after the due date for the bill, I got a telephone call from a collection agency saying it hadn't been paid.
e) When I called AT&T they said their records showed the bill had been paid, one day late according to their records, and that everything was fine, they were happy, there was not problem.
But the collection agency kept calling.
f) The bank retrieved a cancelled-check image for me, front and back, showing that AT&T had, in fact, been paid several days BEFORE the due date. It wasn't even one day late. It was paid on time.
g) For a couple of weeks. The AT&T billing office kept saying everything was fine and they'd tell the collection agency to stop, but the collection agency kept calling. They just kept saying that "they had not received that information from AT&T." The collection agency refused to disclose any contact information for themselves except a PO box. I mailed copies of the cancelled check image to that PO box. They said they hadn't received it. They kept calling, day after day, every evening at suppertime, for about two or three weeks.
I cancelled my AT&T service and will never do business with them again.
And, I stopped using the bill paying service and will never use one of them again.
I have no idea why using a bill-paying service would put collection actions on a hair-trigger, but I can't believe it was a coincidence. It is, to date, the only time in my life a collection agency has called.
I want it to be the last time. I'm not the least bit interested in learning how to deal with collection agencies efficiently, or bother to cite me the chapter and verse of the law that says the collection agency can't do what they, in fact, did. I am much more interested in staying clear of situations where a tiny glitch can set off a collection process. On the evidence, using a bill-paying service might be one of them.
Microsoft could have dealt fairly with this in a hundred ways. The essence of fairness here would have been to present this to the user as a conscious choice to be made.
For example, during installation, or at first start, the browser could query the intranet in some well-defined way to determine whether the intranet administrators wanted "compatibility view" for intranet pages. Then it could ask the user: "Your company, Amalgamated Widgets, recommends "compatibility view" mode when you are accessing intranet web pages. Accept this recommendation? [x] Yes [ ] No."
You can think of dozens of variations on this.
What Microsoft chose to do instead was to make the choice that best serves Microsoft's interest, rather than the best interests of its corporate customers (let alone the end-users), without telling the user that it is making this choice. And carefully finding the golden mean: making it a preference, thus deflecting criticism, but cagily burying the preference where 99% of users will not know that a choice has been made for them, or even that a choice exists.
The thing I find most galling about DRM is that we've already been through the same thing, in the early 1980s, with the software "copy protection" wars.
Vendors of copy protection systems would sell their snake oil to software companies, the new uncrackable copy protection would get cracked within months of release, everyone who wanted warez could get copies, but the idealistic suckers who paid for theirs clogged support lines with problems, when the not-quite-standard disk formats turned out to be not-quite-compatible with many diskette drives.
On August 19, 1986, The New York Times reported that "At best, copy protection does nothing good for legitimate users and only annoys software pirates. At worst, it makes it difficult to install software onto a hard disk and to make backup copies that are vital if the original is lost or destroyed. It slows the performance of some programs and causes snarls in others. It can be a pain for networks of PC's hooked together to share data and peripherals. And, worst of all, there have been reports that some ''killer'' protection schemes have destroyed hard disk files, inadvertently or otherwise.... Software makers who have abandoned copy protection this year seem to be avoiding bankruptcy, and they have certainly gained goodwill. When the goodwill comes from big corporate buyers (including the Federal Government, which has refused to buy copy-protected software), it is likely that the losses from pirated software can be offset."
By the end of 1986, all major software publishers had abandoned copy protection, including the longest holdout, Lotus... but not before the failure of Lotus Jazz, a Mac program, which, according to John Dvorak, failed in part because its copy protection was too hard to break.
Why do we need to go through all this again? As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
If you change telecommunications to a free-market system which rewards companies and their CEOs primarily for their quarterly earnings, private corporations sure aren't going to do it.
So, either you better add a Bell Labs'-worth of funds to the budget of the National Science Foundation, or figure it's OK if the United States falls behind in basic research.
Since there's at least a decade's lag between basic research (Leo Szilard conceives of the chain reaction in 1933) and application (the 1945 bomb test at Alamagordo), the loss of Bell Labs probably won't affect us until the 2020s.
25 years isn't too bad... lots of things should work. I hold with those who say "print them..." maybe even in reduced size on some kind of high-resolution media.
Do not overlook flash cards. I know the data in them is stored in tiny capacitors, and the storage time is said to be only "years," but you never know. I was very, very impressed by some tests a magazine did once in which they subjected several brands of flash cards to a number of tests that included dousing them in a cup of coffee and nailing them to a tree. Most of them survived and were readable(!)
Bravo for Microsoft! The feature doesn't affect honest advertising at all.
Anyone who wants to put up a straightforward ad, presenting information about a product and letting me decide whether I'm interesting in learning more and buying it, can still do so.
This only affects companies who are doing more than just advertising.
The fact that this is being described as an "ad" blocker just shows that advertising practices on the Web have become so debased that writers about the Web simply take it for granted that anything under the guise of advertising is likely to be invested with snooper gadgets that gather information about us without our knowledge.
That's not advertising. That's spying. "Advertising" is just the cover story.
A silly little short squib of a thing, part of The Martian Chronicles, yet it has stuck in my mind for over fifty years.
That and The Sound of Thunder--the time travelling tourist steps on a butterfly--but everyone knows that one, of course......and the one about the automated house that keeps running, serving meals and scraping the uneaten meals into the dishwasher, reading the housewife her favorite poem (by Sara Teasdale), and so forth, apparently unaware that the family has been vaporized by an atomic bomb, with silhouettes of what they were doing burned into the paint on the outside of the house.
Anything that involves looking below the surface, wondering whether things are what they seem, and taking a critical attitude toward things will put you out of step with the mainstream of humankind. Most people never get beyond choosing sides and rooting for "their" team, be it sports, products, or ideologies.
It is stressful to be out of the mainstream, and to some extent it is not healthy. On the other hand, believing in things that aren't so isn't good for you, either.
I suspect happiness is mostly governed by kind of internal psychological homeostasis mechanisms, and some people are just naturally Eeyores. If you are, try to "keep an even strain" and maintain a "state of flow" and try to lean in a cheerful direction to counteract your own natural balance.
Someone at a meeting starting talking to me about "PMA" (Positive Mental Attitude) and how everyone needed to have one. I replied that pessimism had served me very well in the past, and that I had had complete faith it would do well for me in the future.
It's OK for it to bother you that other people think two and two make five. When it gets to the point that it bothers you that you think two and two make four, then it's time to take some kind of action.
The marketplace is not very good at assessing declines in safety or reliability. People don't know what they're buying, and the sellers sure aren't going to tell them.
I've talked to half a dozen acquaintances who have been talked into switching off of copper by Verizon or Comcast. No a single one of them was making a free-market decision to trade off reliability in order to get reduced cost.
They had no idea that they weren't getting the kind of service they were used to... service that kept functioning for days, through power outages and the Blizzard of 1979 and the Northeast Power Blackout of 1965.
The communications companies are using small, local backup batteries with limited capacity, only a few hours. On the evidence of the story, they don't have the staff to monitor and maintain thousands of them. Battery explosions are not the best way to find out that batteries need replacement.
Backup batteries should be in a central location, like the dignified brick buildings of the old telephone exchanges, where they can be easily monitored and maintained, and where safety issues won't affect subscribers.
And, frankly, if a central outage takes out a whole town, my guess is that the phone company is more likely to deal with it promptly than if it just affects one neighborhood.
Don't tell me, let me guess. They've figured out something they can call USB 2.0 to convince naÃve buyers to go ahead and buy the stale old stock that's on the retailer shelves.
A big dayglo orange sticker saying something like "Full Superspeed-compatible USB" or "100% USB 3.0 Ready" or "Works With USB 3.0."
Oh, I hope this is a harbinger for the future. I used to use AudioGalaxy regularly, mostly rare 78s and cylinder recordings from 1900 to 1940 which a number of generous collectors were sharing.
One day, virtually all of the shared material was unavailable. If I recall correctly, all of the items were still visible, but now contained individual notices that they were no longer available due to copyright restrictions.
I made a few weak attempts to contact AudioGalaxy and ask them to restore material that was obviously not under copyright, to ask them what checking they had done, and how they could possibly even think that a 1907 recording of Vesta Victoria singing "There Was I Waiting At The Church" was copyrighted.
Of course, they wouldn't even give me the courtesy of a reply.
That's not a rhetorical question. I read things like this and on the one hand, I think, "It's OK, I'm not being a boiled frog about this, we still have our fundamental civil liberties, the mills of justice turn slowly but in the end the Constitution is upheld."
Then on the other hand, I think, "maybe the mills of justice can't keep up with the number of wooden shoes the Administration is able to toss into them." When did all the nonsense begin? The secret, no-appeal, the-reason-why-this-is-classified-is-classified lists... and the "oh, you have no right to appeal because you're not actually ON the no-fly list, it's just that you can't fly because your name RESEMBLES a name on the no-fly list, but of course we can't tell you the name that's really ON the no-fly list. The searches for which no warrant is required because they're "random," even though some people get "randomly" searched almost every time they fly and others never get "randomly" searched at all......the people held at Guantanamo without charges and without trial for five years, long than many prison sentences...
If the executive branch can abrogate a constitutional right instantly just by issuing an order, and it takes the judicial branch five to ten years to undo it, is the system working?
As I say, it's not a rhetorical question. Maybe that IS good enough.
I wish I'd somehow had a chance to view this before knowing that it was a computer animation... say, a side-by-side comparison of a real and an animated person and a challenge to guess which was animated.
To me, "Emily" did not look real and did look uncanny. Actually, it reminded me of nothing so much as one of those videos where they replace a baby's mouth with animation so that it appears to be talking like an adult. It seemed to me that the animation's "mouth" was not stably positioned on its "face;" when the head turned, I perceived a change in the position of the mouth relative to the face. Something about the skin didn't look right, either.
Would I have accepted it as real if I were expecting "real?" Yes. But that's not the same thing.
Some years back I took part in an experiment to gauge something about necessary bit rates and algorithms to make synthesized speech sound real. What struck me forcibly was that, in this experiment, when you were listening to the best synthesized speech, if I'd had no standard of comparison I'd have said it was real. But when they switched to a real voice saying the same thing, there was the most amazing sensation, almost a tactile sensation of sound shaped by warmth and moisture. Only after you heard the real thing did the synthesized speech seem cold and mechanical.
I haven't been able to get a completely straight answer to this, but... I believe the following three facts to be true:
a) Most "HDTV" antennas sold today are UHF-only.
b) All digital TV being broadcast today is being broadcast on UHF.
c) Come February 2009, when analog stations stop broadcasting on VHF, SOME stations that are currently broadcasting a digital signal in the UHF band will CHANGE THEIR FREQUENCY ALLOCATION TO VHF.
According to AntennaWeb, one example of this is WHDH-TV, "Channel 7", the Boston NBC affiliate and a major, popular station.
So, if I'm correct, some people who think they're up and running and all ready for February will be very surprised to see some DIGITAL stations they're CURRENTLY receiving go black in 2009, when the station shifts to a frequency their antenna isn't built for.
if I'm correct, this is going to be a major headache for the few who have bothered to prepare for digital, and one for which there is no publicity at all.
The reason I keep saying if I'm correct is that the salesman at You-Do-It, a great Boston-area electronics store that has a huge selection of antennas and antenna-related paraphernalia says I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. I hope he's right and I'm wrong.
The article makes it clear that they were referring to Office with a capital O, specifically "Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite."
In many offices, Windows is bought for the primary purpose of running Microsoft Office.
If Microsoft Office runs better under XP than it does under Vista, then, for many offices, XP is a better OS than VIsta.
Not that 10% is a very big difference, but I think you'd be disappointed if you paid extra for an SUV with a V8 engine and discovered that it ran 10% slower than the model with the V6--even the V8 model ran fast enough.
"It will pop up a set of pictures for the customer to select from." And how does the customer choose between a picture of a regular banana and a picture of an organically grown banana, since they look alike?
(For my second example I chose Fuji and Gala apples precisely because these two varieties look almost the same).
If the banana has a PLU sticker on it, there's no need for a picture or for visual pattern recognition, and if it doesn't have a PLU sticker on it, neither the computer nor the customer can make the right selection visually.
I've been working on a photobook of pictures from a recent vacation, and, oddly enough, just last night, I was indeed falsifying our memories. We'd taken a hike up Lower Table Rock in Medford, Oregon and we had photos from of the hike and the view from the top, but the only photo of the Table Rocks themselves was one my wife had taken out of a car window.
I removed a road sign, not very expertly, and... I'm a little ashamed of this but what the heck... I made the sky a little bluer. The photo was actually taken a few days after the hike, when there was some smoke from California in the sky, so I rationalize that it's closer to the way the sky really was...
What's really scary though is that Slashdot story yesterday from SIGGRAPH about an automated program that makes faces more beautiful. On the evidence of that story, it works--and, worse set, doesn't change the faces very much, they still remain recognizable likenesses of the real people.
It will be very interesting when the Canons and Fujis of the world build that into the cameras.
The problem with self-service scales in the supermarkets I've been to is not that it's hard to enter the item, it's that frequently _the item isn't in the database_. Or the PLU sticker is missing from the item or the shelf tag... and can't be looked up because it demands an exact name match and you don't know whether a sweet Vidalia onion begins with O or V or S.
The premise that it can recognize produce visually is unlikely to say the least. Do you really think it can tell the difference between bananas at $0.69 a pound and organically grown bananas at $1.19 a pound? How about a Fuji apple and a Gala apple?
I'm willing to bet that the system does more to impede legitimate purchases than to facilitate them.
I'm bet that "ask[ing] the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant" sounds like a smokescreen and a pretext. I'll be these scales really being sold to control-freak store managers who fear that customers are building a better retirement by ringing up expensive orange peppers as cheap green peppers, and is willing to spend $50,000 to prevent a couple of customers a day from bilking the store of $2.67.
I'm assuming the story means this in the literal, not the moral sense. It doesn't really explain why a "self-cleaning" toilet would become "filthy."
It says vaguely that "trash" clogged "the self-cleaning" mechanism. What kind of trash, specifically? Anything that you wouldn't expect to get thrown in a toilet?
Any traditional toilet would be able to handle (say) condoms, tampons, cigarate butts, baby wipes, etc.
In other words, is a toilet of this kind really an insoluble problem, or were these specific toilets just defective products?
Taking a casual picture requires about thirty seconds' of time.
If the owners of a building can raise that price to spending an hour of your time trying to locate someone with authority to talk about their policy, then they win.
I honestly don't know the answer to this sort of question. I don't like to make a hobby out of being a jerk, but we can lose our effective rights quickly and with surprising speed if nobody is ever willing to risk social discomfort for The Principal Of The Thing.
By the way, I don't know how it is with private security, but I once read some very serious and knowledgeable advice to the effect the most inflammatory thing you can say to a cop... the thing that carries the highest risk of your experiencing personal bodily injury... is "I know my rights."
I first learned about this an hour ago. I read a good review of Trumbo and logged on to added it to my Saved list... I hit this great big conspicuous notice saying "IMPORTANT: Your DVD Shipments Have Likely Been Delayed."
My first thought was that it was a sales pitch to upsell me to a higher-tiered plan, but no, it was a straightforward notice and apology.
I for one really appreciate this approach. Most companies' SOP would be to say nothing... wait for you to call.. make an individual apology to you without happening to mention that it was affecting thousands of others... and hope you don't read newspapers or Slashdot.
The bicycle industry seems to be one of the last bastions of Yankee ingenuity, where small entrepreneurs make a successful business out of a few thousand square feet of floor space, some machine tools, and a few dozen employees. Once you get beyond the Huffies in Wal*Mart, a large percentage of the $500-and-up bicycles seem to be made by large numbers of small companies. But I don't think this is going to happen with cars.
The bicycle craze and the horseless carriage fad hit the U. S. at roughly the same time, maybe 1895 or thereabouts. An 1896 Boston Globe article quotes a livery stable operator as being worried by bicycles but dismissing the horseless carriage as "a pack of French nonsense." At the time, bicycles represented a high level of mechanical and engineering sophistication. It's not surprising that the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics; bicycles, early automobiles, and early airplanes were not at terribly different levels of complexity.
Not any more. (Pace, members of the Experimental Aircraft Association; I know that there are people still building airplanes in their garage).
But I don't see cottage-industry carmaking as going much of anywhere. For one thing, it's not about the car, it's about the battery. I don't think great breakthroughs in batteries are going to be the province of cottage-industry entrepreneurs.
In the 1900s, electric cars had a range of about thirty miles. In the intervening time, advances in batteries have been counterbalanced by increased expectations of what a car should do, and I find it very discouraging that the Chevy Volt should have a promised electric range of only forty miles.
The brilliance of the Prius (which uses a fundamental design worked out by the U. S. company TRW in the last sixties, who couldn't get U. S. carmakers interested in it) is that it achieves something significant without requiring revolutionary new batteries made of unobtainium. The battery is just a short-term buffer that makes up the difference between the torque required for normal driving and the torque obtainable from a small, fuel-efficient engine. But it does so by being mechanically and electronically very sophisticated. I don't think anyone could cobble up a Prius-style hybrid engine in a small machine shop.
I'd love to see a disruptive-technology electric car emerge from small companies, but I don't think it will happen.
NPR had a story on this this morning, and they replayed what the announcer actually said. It sounds to me as if the wording were almost deliberately ambiguous. From memory of hearing it on the radio half an hour or so ago:
1) They introduced the segment by saying "You are now literally watching the footsteps of history." That phrase "literally watching," calculatedly or not, was a misdirection.
2) The "disclaimer" was worded something like this: "The [name of fireworks producer] is using a cinematic device, almost an animation." If I'd been watching, I believe I would have interpreted this to mean that I was watching real fireworks, and that the lighting up of the successive footsteps was "cinematic" and "almost an animation," rather like an animated neon sign.
In the segment NPR replayed I did not hear anything simple or clear such as "For safety reasons, the Chinese did not wish to fly a camera helicopter and you are now watching a computer simulation of the fireworks that actually took place."
Frankly, it sounded to me as if the statement had been deliberately wordsmithed to include the word "animation" so that NBC could claim they had disclosed the fakery, without really disclosing it.
By the way, my wife was not a casual or inattentive viewer. When I asked her "what did the commentator say about the footsteps," she replied "he said they extended from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic stadium and that there were twenty-nine of them, each representing an event in China's history.
I've done some Googling and I've encountered numerous blog postings commenting on how spectacular the footsteps were, and not one of them caught the fact that they were faked.
And, incidentally, the news stories about the fakery suggest that this was computer imagery substituting for real fireworks that couldn't be filmed safely... but so far I've yet to see any images of the real footsteps as seen from the ground, or any descriptions of them.
I am wondering at this point whether there really were ANYnot.
There's a difference between an illustration of a real event that is taking place but can't be photographed (e.g. courtroom sketches) and one that's completely fictitious. Which do we have?
Pretty gushy article: "Essentially, Canon wants its fuel cell to power everything you attach to your camera. Thatâ(TM)s right. No more AA batteries to stuff into your camera bag."
Yep, no more AA batteries, you'll just need to stuff little bottles of something like lighter fluid or butane or alcohol into your camera bag. And in order for those little bottles to be safe and not freak out TSA, they'll have to be fairly well-designed little gadgets.
And they'll need to clip neatly and securely into the camera. I betcha Canon and Nikon and Olympus will all have different and incompatible fuel canisters... and probably Canon will have different fuel canisters for different camera models. And if you don't buy a bunch and you do run out, the local camera store in the strange city will stock the fuel canisters for current models but not for your three-year-old model... and you'll need to shell out $129.95 for the adapter kit that lets you refill them from a propane cylinder, which, of course, you'll have to stuff into your gadget bag, too.
I didn't see it myself. My wife said "Oh, come see this, this is incredible, but I got there too late." She was certainly unaware that it was not real. I just asked a colleague at work who saw it "Did you see those footprint fireworks?" He exclaimed "Yes, I did, weren't they amazing?" I asked him if he was aware they were computer simulations. He was not. I pressed him on whether there was a disclaimer, and he "You know, now that you mention it, they might have said something, but I thought they were talking about the computer-generated graphics in the floor show."
So, perhaps it "disclosed"--in the same way that the terms and conditions in a EULA were disclosed.
Is there a video online I can look at--one that doesn't require Silverlight--so that I can judge for myself whether it was fairly disclosed or not?
Slashdot Mirror
My bank offered free bill paying, so I give it a try. After three or four months, I was close to hooked. Then something happened that soured me on it. Permanently. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, I'm just telling you I experienced.
a) The service distinguished between merchants that could get paid electronically, for which it said to allow two days, and those that couldn't, for which it said to allow five. AT&T was one of the latter.
b) At the time I'd been at AT&T customer for about three decades. During that time I paid my bills on time and never received a single late notice from them.
c) I used the service to pay the AT&T bill, issuing the directions on line ten business days before the bill was due. The online service showed the date I entered the directions, and five days later showed the bill as being paid.
d) Two calendar days after the due date for the bill, I got a telephone call from a collection agency saying it hadn't been paid.
e) When I called AT&T they said their records showed the bill had been paid, one day late according to their records, and that everything was fine, they were happy, there was not problem.
But the collection agency kept calling.
f) The bank retrieved a cancelled-check image for me, front and back, showing that AT&T had, in fact, been paid several days BEFORE the due date. It wasn't even one day late. It was paid on time.
g) For a couple of weeks. The AT&T billing office kept saying everything was fine and they'd tell the collection agency to stop, but the collection agency kept calling. They just kept saying that "they had not received that information from AT&T." The collection agency refused to disclose any contact information for themselves except a PO box. I mailed copies of the cancelled check image to that PO box. They said they hadn't received it. They kept calling, day after day, every evening at suppertime, for about two or three weeks.
I cancelled my AT&T service and will never do business with them again.
And, I stopped using the bill paying service and will never use one of them again.
I have no idea why using a bill-paying service would put collection actions on a hair-trigger, but I can't believe it was a coincidence. It is, to date, the only time in my life a collection agency has called.
I want it to be the last time. I'm not the least bit interested in learning how to deal with collection agencies efficiently, or bother to cite me the chapter and verse of the law that says the collection agency can't do what they, in fact, did. I am much more interested in staying clear of situations where a tiny glitch can set off a collection process. On the evidence, using a bill-paying service might be one of them.
Microsoft could have dealt fairly with this in a hundred ways. The essence of fairness here would have been to present this to the user as a conscious choice to be made.
For example, during installation, or at first start, the browser could query the intranet in some well-defined way to determine whether the intranet administrators wanted "compatibility view" for intranet pages. Then it could ask the user: "Your company, Amalgamated Widgets, recommends "compatibility view" mode when you are accessing intranet web pages. Accept this recommendation? [x] Yes [ ] No."
You can think of dozens of variations on this.
What Microsoft chose to do instead was to make the choice that best serves Microsoft's interest, rather than the best interests of its corporate customers (let alone the end-users), without telling the user that it is making this choice. And carefully finding the golden mean: making it a preference, thus deflecting criticism, but cagily burying the preference where 99% of users will not know that a choice has been made for them, or even that a choice exists.
The thing I find most galling about DRM is that we've already been through the same thing, in the early 1980s, with the software "copy protection" wars.
Vendors of copy protection systems would sell their snake oil to software companies, the new uncrackable copy protection would get cracked within months of release, everyone who wanted warez could get copies, but the idealistic suckers who paid for theirs clogged support lines with problems, when the not-quite-standard disk formats turned out to be not-quite-compatible with many diskette drives.
On August 19, 1986, The New York Times reported that "At best, copy protection does nothing good for legitimate users and only annoys software pirates. At worst, it makes it difficult to install software onto a hard disk and to make backup copies that are vital if the original is lost or destroyed. It slows the performance of some programs and causes snarls in others. It can be a pain for networks of PC's hooked together to share data and peripherals. And, worst of all, there have been reports that some ''killer'' protection schemes have destroyed hard disk files, inadvertently or otherwise.... Software makers who have abandoned copy protection this year seem to be avoiding bankruptcy, and they have certainly gained goodwill. When the goodwill comes from big corporate buyers (including the Federal Government, which has refused to buy copy-protected software), it is likely that the losses from pirated software can be offset."
By the end of 1986, all major software publishers had abandoned copy protection, including the longest holdout, Lotus... but not before the failure of Lotus Jazz, a Mac program, which, according to John Dvorak, failed in part because its copy protection was too hard to break.
Why do we need to go through all this again? As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Somebody has to do the basic research.
If you change telecommunications to a free-market system which rewards companies and their CEOs primarily for their quarterly earnings, private corporations sure aren't going to do it.
So, either you better add a Bell Labs'-worth of funds to the budget of the National Science Foundation, or figure it's OK if the United States falls behind in basic research.
Since there's at least a decade's lag between basic research (Leo Szilard conceives of the chain reaction in 1933) and application (the 1945 bomb test at Alamagordo), the loss of Bell Labs probably won't affect us until the 2020s.
25 years isn't too bad... lots of things should work. I hold with those who say "print them..." maybe even in reduced size on some kind of high-resolution media.
Do not overlook flash cards. I know the data in them is stored in tiny capacitors, and the storage time is said to be only "years," but you never know. I was very, very impressed by some tests a magazine did once in which they subjected several brands of flash cards to a number of tests that included dousing them in a cup of coffee and nailing them to a tree. Most of them survived and were readable(!)
Bravo for Microsoft! The feature doesn't affect honest advertising at all.
Anyone who wants to put up a straightforward ad, presenting information about a product and letting me decide whether I'm interesting in learning more and buying it, can still do so.
This only affects companies who are doing more than just advertising.
The fact that this is being described as an "ad" blocker just shows that advertising practices on the Web have become so debased that writers about the Web simply take it for granted that anything under the guise of advertising is likely to be invested with snooper gadgets that gather information about us without our knowledge.
That's not advertising. That's spying. "Advertising" is just the cover story.
A silly little short squib of a thing, part of The Martian Chronicles, yet it has stuck in my mind for over fifty years.
That and The Sound of Thunder--the time travelling tourist steps on a butterfly--but everyone knows that one, of course... ...and the one about the automated house that keeps running, serving meals and scraping the uneaten meals into the dishwasher, reading the housewife her favorite poem (by Sara Teasdale), and so forth, apparently unaware that the family has been vaporized by an atomic bomb, with silhouettes of what they were doing burned into the paint on the outside of the house.
...and I don't know what the answer is.
Anything that involves looking below the surface, wondering whether things are what they seem, and taking a critical attitude toward things will put you out of step with the mainstream of humankind. Most people never get beyond choosing sides and rooting for "their" team, be it sports, products, or ideologies.
It is stressful to be out of the mainstream, and to some extent it is not healthy. On the other hand, believing in things that aren't so isn't good for you, either.
I suspect happiness is mostly governed by kind of internal psychological homeostasis mechanisms, and some people are just naturally Eeyores. If you are, try to "keep an even strain" and maintain a "state of flow" and try to lean in a cheerful direction to counteract your own natural balance.
Someone at a meeting starting talking to me about "PMA" (Positive Mental Attitude) and how everyone needed to have one. I replied that pessimism had served me very well in the past, and that I had had complete faith it would do well for me in the future.
It's OK for it to bother you that other people think two and two make five. When it gets to the point that it bothers you that you think two and two make four, then it's time to take some kind of action.
The marketplace is not very good at assessing declines in safety or reliability. People don't know what they're buying, and the sellers sure aren't going to tell them.
I've talked to half a dozen acquaintances who have been talked into switching off of copper by Verizon or Comcast. No a single one of them was making a free-market decision to trade off reliability in order to get reduced cost.
They had no idea that they weren't getting the kind of service they were used to... service that kept functioning for days, through power outages and the Blizzard of 1979 and the Northeast Power Blackout of 1965.
The communications companies are using small, local backup batteries with limited capacity, only a few hours. On the evidence of the story, they don't have the staff to monitor and maintain thousands of them. Battery explosions are not the best way to find out that batteries need replacement.
Backup batteries should be in a central location, like the dignified brick buildings of the old telephone exchanges, where they can be easily monitored and maintained, and where safety issues won't affect subscribers.
And, frankly, if a central outage takes out a whole town, my guess is that the phone company is more likely to deal with it promptly than if it just affects one neighborhood.
Don't tell me, let me guess. They've figured out something they can call USB 2.0 to convince naÃve buyers to go ahead and buy the stale old stock that's on the retailer shelves.
A big dayglo orange sticker saying something like "Full Superspeed-compatible USB" or "100% USB 3.0 Ready" or "Works With USB 3.0."
Oh, I hope this is a harbinger for the future. I used to use AudioGalaxy regularly, mostly rare 78s and cylinder recordings from 1900 to 1940 which a number of generous collectors were sharing.
One day, virtually all of the shared material was unavailable. If I recall correctly, all of the items were still visible, but now contained individual notices that they were no longer available due to copyright restrictions.
I made a few weak attempts to contact AudioGalaxy and ask them to restore material that was obviously not under copyright, to ask them what checking they had done, and how they could possibly even think that a 1907 recording of Vesta Victoria singing "There Was I Waiting At The Church" was copyrighted.
Of course, they wouldn't even give me the courtesy of a reply.
That's not a rhetorical question. I read things like this and on the one hand, I think, "It's OK, I'm not being a boiled frog about this, we still have our fundamental civil liberties, the mills of justice turn slowly but in the end the Constitution is upheld."
Then on the other hand, I think, "maybe the mills of justice can't keep up with the number of wooden shoes the Administration is able to toss into them." When did all the nonsense begin? The secret, no-appeal, the-reason-why-this-is-classified-is-classified lists... and the "oh, you have no right to appeal because you're not actually ON the no-fly list, it's just that you can't fly because your name RESEMBLES a name on the no-fly list, but of course we can't tell you the name that's really ON the no-fly list. The searches for which no warrant is required because they're "random," even though some people get "randomly" searched almost every time they fly and others never get "randomly" searched at all... ...the people held at Guantanamo without charges and without trial for five years, long than many prison sentences...
If the executive branch can abrogate a constitutional right instantly just by issuing an order, and it takes the judicial branch five to ten years to undo it, is the system working?
As I say, it's not a rhetorical question. Maybe that IS good enough.
I wish I'd somehow had a chance to view this before knowing that it was a computer animation... say, a side-by-side comparison of a real and an animated person and a challenge to guess which was animated.
To me, "Emily" did not look real and did look uncanny. Actually, it reminded me of nothing so much as one of those videos where they replace a baby's mouth with animation so that it appears to be talking like an adult. It seemed to me that the animation's "mouth" was not stably positioned on its "face;" when the head turned, I perceived a change in the position of the mouth relative to the face. Something about the skin didn't look right, either.
Would I have accepted it as real if I were expecting "real?" Yes. But that's not the same thing.
Some years back I took part in an experiment to gauge something about necessary bit rates and algorithms to make synthesized speech sound real. What struck me forcibly was that, in this experiment, when you were listening to the best synthesized speech, if I'd had no standard of comparison I'd have said it was real. But when they switched to a real voice saying the same thing, there was the most amazing sensation, almost a tactile sensation of sound shaped by warmth and moisture. Only after you heard the real thing did the synthesized speech seem cold and mechanical.
I haven't been able to get a completely straight answer to this, but... I believe the following three facts to be true:
a) Most "HDTV" antennas sold today are UHF-only.
b) All digital TV being broadcast today is being broadcast on UHF.
c) Come February 2009, when analog stations stop broadcasting on VHF, SOME stations that are currently broadcasting a digital signal in the UHF band will CHANGE THEIR FREQUENCY ALLOCATION TO VHF.
According to AntennaWeb, one example of this is WHDH-TV, "Channel 7", the Boston NBC affiliate and a major, popular station.
So, if I'm correct, some people who think they're up and running and all ready for February will be very surprised to see some DIGITAL stations they're CURRENTLY receiving go black in 2009, when the station shifts to a frequency their antenna isn't built for.
if I'm correct, this is going to be a major headache for the few who have bothered to prepare for digital, and one for which there is no publicity at all.
The reason I keep saying if I'm correct is that the salesman at You-Do-It, a great Boston-area electronics store that has a huge selection of antennas and antenna-related paraphernalia says I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. I hope he's right and I'm wrong.
The article makes it clear that they were referring to Office with a capital O, specifically "Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite."
In many offices, Windows is bought for the primary purpose of running Microsoft Office.
If Microsoft Office runs better under XP than it does under Vista, then, for many offices, XP is a better OS than VIsta.
Not that 10% is a very big difference, but I think you'd be disappointed if you paid extra for an SUV with a V8 engine and discovered that it ran 10% slower than the model with the V6--even the V8 model ran fast enough.
"It will pop up a set of pictures for the customer to select from." And how does the customer choose between a picture of a regular banana and a picture of an organically grown banana, since they look alike?
(For my second example I chose Fuji and Gala apples precisely because these two varieties look almost the same).
If the banana has a PLU sticker on it, there's no need for a picture or for visual pattern recognition, and if it doesn't have a PLU sticker on it, neither the computer nor the customer can make the right selection visually.
I've been working on a photobook of pictures from a recent vacation, and, oddly enough, just last night, I was indeed falsifying our memories. We'd taken a hike up Lower Table Rock in Medford, Oregon and we had photos from of the hike and the view from the top, but the only photo of the Table Rocks themselves was one my wife had taken out of a car window.
I removed a road sign, not very expertly, and... I'm a little ashamed of this but what the heck... I made the sky a little bluer. The photo was actually taken a few days after the hike, when there was some smoke from California in the sky, so I rationalize that it's closer to the way the sky really was...
What's really scary though is that Slashdot story yesterday from SIGGRAPH about an automated program that makes faces more beautiful. On the evidence of that story, it works--and, worse set, doesn't change the faces very much, they still remain recognizable likenesses of the real people.
It will be very interesting when the Canons and Fujis of the world build that into the cameras.
The problem with self-service scales in the supermarkets I've been to is not that it's hard to enter the item, it's that frequently _the item isn't in the database_. Or the PLU sticker is missing from the item or the shelf tag... and can't be looked up because it demands an exact name match and you don't know whether a sweet Vidalia onion begins with O or V or S.
The premise that it can recognize produce visually is unlikely to say the least. Do you really think it can tell the difference between bananas at $0.69 a pound and organically grown bananas at $1.19 a pound? How about a Fuji apple and a Gala apple?
I'm willing to bet that the system does more to impede legitimate purchases than to facilitate them.
I'm bet that "ask[ing] the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant" sounds like a smokescreen and a pretext. I'll be these scales really being sold to control-freak store managers who fear that customers are building a better retirement by ringing up expensive orange peppers as cheap green peppers, and is willing to spend $50,000 to prevent a couple of customers a day from bilking the store of $2.67.
I'm assuming the story means this in the literal, not the moral sense. It doesn't really explain why a "self-cleaning" toilet would become "filthy."
It says vaguely that "trash" clogged "the self-cleaning" mechanism. What kind of trash, specifically? Anything that you wouldn't expect to get thrown in a toilet?
Any traditional toilet would be able to handle (say) condoms, tampons, cigarate butts, baby wipes, etc.
In other words, is a toilet of this kind really an insoluble problem, or were these specific toilets just defective products?
Taking a casual picture requires about thirty seconds' of time.
If the owners of a building can raise that price to spending an hour of your time trying to locate someone with authority to talk about their policy, then they win.
I honestly don't know the answer to this sort of question. I don't like to make a hobby out of being a jerk, but we can lose our effective rights quickly and with surprising speed if nobody is ever willing to risk social discomfort for The Principal Of The Thing.
By the way, I don't know how it is with private security, but I once read some very serious and knowledgeable advice to the effect the most inflammatory thing you can say to a cop... the thing that carries the highest risk of your experiencing personal bodily injury... is "I know my rights."
I first learned about this an hour ago. I read a good review of Trumbo and logged on to added it to my Saved list... I hit this great big conspicuous notice saying "IMPORTANT: Your DVD Shipments Have Likely Been Delayed."
My first thought was that it was a sales pitch to upsell me to a higher-tiered plan, but no, it was a straightforward notice and apology.
I for one really appreciate this approach. Most companies' SOP would be to say nothing... wait for you to call.. make an individual apology to you without happening to mention that it was affecting thousands of others... and hope you don't read newspapers or Slashdot.
The bicycle industry seems to be one of the last bastions of Yankee ingenuity, where small entrepreneurs make a successful business out of a few thousand square feet of floor space, some machine tools, and a few dozen employees. Once you get beyond the Huffies in Wal*Mart, a large percentage of the $500-and-up bicycles seem to be made by large numbers of small companies. But I don't think this is going to happen with cars.
The bicycle craze and the horseless carriage fad hit the U. S. at roughly the same time, maybe 1895 or thereabouts. An 1896 Boston Globe article quotes a livery stable operator as being worried by bicycles but dismissing the horseless carriage as "a pack of French nonsense." At the time, bicycles represented a high level of mechanical and engineering sophistication. It's not surprising that the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics; bicycles, early automobiles, and early airplanes were not at terribly different levels of complexity.
Not any more. (Pace, members of the Experimental Aircraft Association; I know that there are people still building airplanes in their garage).
But I don't see cottage-industry carmaking as going much of anywhere. For one thing, it's not about the car, it's about the battery. I don't think great breakthroughs in batteries are going to be the province of cottage-industry entrepreneurs.
In the 1900s, electric cars had a range of about thirty miles. In the intervening time, advances in batteries have been counterbalanced by increased expectations of what a car should do, and I find it very discouraging that the Chevy Volt should have a promised electric range of only forty miles.
The brilliance of the Prius (which uses a fundamental design worked out by the U. S. company TRW in the last sixties, who couldn't get U. S. carmakers interested in it) is that it achieves something significant without requiring revolutionary new batteries made of unobtainium. The battery is just a short-term buffer that makes up the difference between the torque required for normal driving and the torque obtainable from a small, fuel-efficient engine. But it does so by being mechanically and electronically very sophisticated. I don't think anyone could cobble up a Prius-style hybrid engine in a small machine shop.
I'd love to see a disruptive-technology electric car emerge from small companies, but I don't think it will happen.
NPR had a story on this this morning, and they replayed what the announcer actually said. It sounds to me as if the wording were almost deliberately ambiguous. From memory of hearing it on the radio half an hour or so ago:
1) They introduced the segment by saying "You are now literally watching the footsteps of history." That phrase "literally watching," calculatedly or not, was a misdirection.
2) The "disclaimer" was worded something like this: "The [name of fireworks producer] is using a cinematic device, almost an animation." If I'd been watching, I believe I would have interpreted this to mean that I was watching real fireworks, and that the lighting up of the successive footsteps was "cinematic" and "almost an animation," rather like an animated neon sign.
In the segment NPR replayed I did not hear anything simple or clear such as "For safety reasons, the Chinese did not wish to fly a camera helicopter and you are now watching a computer simulation of the fireworks that actually took place."
Frankly, it sounded to me as if the statement had been deliberately wordsmithed to include the word "animation" so that NBC could claim they had disclosed the fakery, without really disclosing it.
By the way, my wife was not a casual or inattentive viewer. When I asked her "what did the commentator say about the footsteps," she replied "he said they extended from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic stadium and that there were twenty-nine of them, each representing an event in China's history.
I've done some Googling and I've encountered numerous blog postings commenting on how spectacular the footsteps were, and not one of them caught the fact that they were faked.
Here's one example.
And, incidentally, the news stories about the fakery suggest that this was computer imagery substituting for real fireworks that couldn't be filmed safely... but so far I've yet to see any images of the real footsteps as seen from the ground, or any descriptions of them.
I am wondering at this point whether there really were ANYnot.
There's a difference between an illustration of a real event that is taking place but can't be photographed (e.g. courtroom sketches) and one that's completely fictitious. Which do we have?
Pretty gushy article: "Essentially, Canon wants its fuel cell to power everything you attach to your camera. Thatâ(TM)s right. No more AA batteries to stuff into your camera bag."
Yep, no more AA batteries, you'll just need to stuff little bottles of something like lighter fluid or butane or alcohol into your camera bag. And in order for those little bottles to be safe and not freak out TSA, they'll have to be fairly well-designed little gadgets.
And they'll need to clip neatly and securely into the camera. I betcha Canon and Nikon and Olympus will all have different and incompatible fuel canisters... and probably Canon will have different fuel canisters for different camera models. And if you don't buy a bunch and you do run out, the local camera store in the strange city will stock the fuel canisters for current models but not for your three-year-old model... and you'll need to shell out $129.95 for the adapter kit that lets you refill them from a propane cylinder, which, of course, you'll have to stuff into your gadget bag, too.
I didn't see it myself. My wife said "Oh, come see this, this is incredible, but I got there too late." She was certainly unaware that it was not real. I just asked a colleague at work who saw it "Did you see those footprint fireworks?" He exclaimed "Yes, I did, weren't they amazing?" I asked him if he was aware they were computer simulations. He was not. I pressed him on whether there was a disclaimer, and he "You know, now that you mention it, they might have said something, but I thought they were talking about the computer-generated graphics in the floor show."
So, perhaps it "disclosed"--in the same way that the terms and conditions in a EULA were disclosed.
Is there a video online I can look at--one that doesn't require Silverlight--so that I can judge for myself whether it was fairly disclosed or not?