Try telling any green environmental lefty that Ethanol is a bad thing and show them why
It's just possible you are losing them at "hey, you green environmental lefty, I'm gonna show you why Ethanol is a Bad Thing."
The ethanol subsidy is fraction of a percent of the federal budget. A good chunk of this is pork, particularly what ADM and probably a few others like Cargill pocket. It isn't a full solution, and indeed it will not survive as a long term solution. For all that, I think ethanol can fairly claim a modest immediate pollution and net carbon benefit and the development of some infrastructure and technology which is likely to provide a persistent utility as long as biofuels are part of the big energy picture. It is a hell of a lot better than a lot of the corporate welfare that is on the federal books.
Ethanol only looks like a big deal because federal investment in energy independence is so pathetic overall. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year to make even a credible effort at promoting real alternatives to oil and coal dependence, hundreds of times what is spent subsidizing ethanol now.
I think it is a pity this article lapses into ethanol lobby ranting so much because it has a lot of interesting things to say.
A more accurate summary should have indicated... blah blah blah...
A more accurate summary wouldn't have angried up my blood enough!
It may be a necessary policy (meet some kind of legal/tax obligation), it may be a practical policy (they need time to deal with all the database changes and paperwork). The lag seems exceptional and it might just be an asshole policy (you screwed up! Guess we'll collect interest on your money for a nice long time. Hey man, what can you do, we have "policies.")
It seems like the Bush admin. has really lost their mojo... This is so badly played. If this article had been allowed to run without obstruction, how many people would really have noticed it? Another dry opinion piece promulgating one aspect of one of the five dominant Opinions on What Ought We to Do with Iraq. Instead, with the NYT's unusual decision to run it redacted with an explanation, the spotlight is on every piece of information they wanted to keep out of the press, and it is making headlines in places it never would have (it certainly never would have shown up on Slashdot just as the story it was).
For the first time in a while I'm looking forward to the next year's politics... Not because "my team" is winning (my team doesn't seem to exist and if they did they wouldn't get on any ballot), but because it's just going to be such a clusterfuck... Watching that three ring circus known as the Democratic party try to joust its razor thin margin against this newly politically tonedeaf lame duck administration, while the GOP try to figure out how to put solid distance between themselves and the ever less popular Bush&Co while holding onto all those endearing litte traits that keep the various "bases" happy...
It's a shame class action suits are such lawyer bait - there just ain't no cream like the cream you skim off the top of a megacorporation's liability to an honest to goodness population. Of course, with class action suits it's more like they skim off the whole milk and give that long-suffering population the whey
I think they geniuses responsible for this one will regret it, though. Some will say Nintendo invited this by offering strap replacement (and general advice on not playing like a full-on spaz), but I think they merely observed the inevitable and effectively froze the potential plaintiff pool.
It looks to me like they're trying to wrangle the notion of some sort of harm being done to people by simply receiving a defective product - whether or not it actually harmed them - but I sincerely doubt (particularly since Nintendo has addressed the problem very early on) that this will fly. Or they may think Nintendo will spook easily and cough up a decent pay-off with little effort... but I think they will find themselves disappointed if so - like all major corporations Nintendo has lawyers just sitting around waiting for stuff like this. Thus only people with some claim to actual harm will be able to apply, and there won't be enough of them to make bringing this suit even remotely (wiimotely?) pay off. Hah hah.
In short, while my first reaction is that this story was merely about greed, on reflection yes, it's equally about stupidity.
It seems to me that both cassette and VHS are not dead but essentially stagnant medium. When the old Samsung finally cacked out the other day, I headed down to Target and picked up a new VHS player (the sole stand-alone model they stocked at that moment, incidentally) without a second thought. I didn't even consider just abandoning VHS.
My tape collection is still significantly bigger than my DVD collection, and I expect it to last 10-20 years. Also, for a person like myself who has regular but not particularly intensive recording needs (i.e. I'm not timeshifting the broadcast stream like your Tivo set but I regularly want to save something I'd otherwise miss or would like to see more than once) VHS is a very cheap option. Another point of view: I just checked the DVD category at Amazon - 158,444 results. VHS category - 199,244 results. Not bad for a dead format.
So I think it will be a long, LONG time before VHS players are as rare as, say, record players - and even longer before it is impossible to buy a new unit as it is with 8-track or Betamax. Hell, I still own a working 8-track, just for fun, I even play 'em sometimes. Some of that legacy equipment was built like tanks, it's amazing how it holds up. I think that's an interesting angle - will it be easier to force a transition on, say, DVDs - because so much more of the equipment base is cheap-jack crap? (My first DVD player lasted 1/3rd as long as my first VHS player).
On the other hand, there's no denying that new VHS prerecorded tapes have little to no shelf space in the big box retailers and the major rental places are getting out of VHS fast, if my local market is any indication. This is very much like the latter days of the cassette, which is still not truly dead. But then again, I bought my last new, prerecorded cassette tape I think around 2000. I sold off my cassette collection (oh the youthful memories) just this year when I realized it had been a couple years since I had listened to any of them. But the used music store bought them all the same, albeit for a pretty paltry sum, maybe a quarter a pop for the non-rare stuff.
The only reason I own a cassette player any more is that I'm still digitally encoding a few irreplacable fragments of tape, old home recording stuff from the 4-track days. When this one wears out I probably won't replace it. Now, the CD pretty much started its reign back around 1988... so it has taken a guy like me, very much not an early adopter who was heavily invested in cassettes, almost 2 decades to get out of them, and it will be over two decades before I abandon the medium entirely. I think things have accelerated in technology transfer but not THAT much. VHS has a good decade or so in it yet, is my guess.
domains like chasebank-online.com, citi-bank.com and bankofameriuca.com. "Why would anybody want to buy these domains unless they are the bank themselves -- or a phishing scammer?", F-Secure asks."
I and all the other proud citizens of Ameriuca resent this craven implication.
Games do not wreck people's lives. People wreck their own lives.
Exactly - any game, puzzle or hobby will have fanatical adherents. Most of the alarmist stuff that's said about online games was once said about cards. Read the Stephen King story "Hearts in Atlantis" where a group of college kids use fanatical hearts playing for pocket change stakes to tune out the stresses of college and Viet Nam. Hearts, simple as it is, is a fucking compelling game. It's stupid to blame a game for being compelling or making its enthusiasts feel rewarded when they accomplish some goal - that's the freaking point of games.
But there will always be plenty of fuck-ups ready to blame the instrument of their escapist immersion and puritanical organizations ready to exploit another ready-made devil. What do I know, though, I don't even blame tobacco companies for my filthy former addiction, you know, I just bit the fucking bullet and quit.
...and brings up such hurdles to the project as 'finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.
It seems like you could easily enough implant these just beneath the skin of say the forehead, or the wrist.
exactly - there's a reason they call it "touch" typing - I feel like tactile feedback is a huge component of keeping oriented to the positions of the keys without looking at them. I bet using this keyboard requires a lot more visual checking to avoid drifting off center. Although the situation where this matters most - rapid transcription from another text source - is not really what this is for.
Then again, I'm having a hard time figuring out the real benefit beyond the space age factor. Are you really saving space in comparison to a folding keyboard? If you've got a flat space to project on you've got room for a keyboard; you can get a wireless folding keyboard for less than a hundred bucks if you shop wisely.
Extending this point, in terms of the exceptionally widespread and rapid shift from VHS to DVD - you are looking at a true paradigm shift for the consumer, from magnetic tape to optical disk. And the thing is, we had all already been schooled in the benefits of disk media by CDs and CD-ROM. In a nutshell, no tracking problems, no rewinding, fast indexed navigation of the contents. We already had a firm sense of what the benefits would be. Video quality was a secondary issue - we knew from the CD experience it would be a toss-up, depending on the source material and how well it was transferred. But the other benefits would remain regardless of the picture quality. Tape collections were showing their age, starting to experience mechanical failure and degredation due to magnetic drift. It was a sensible shift, even to the extent of rebuying significant parts of our collections. Even if you had an older TV it made sense, even if picture quality was not the biggest deal (or if a small screen or having to use some sort of converter box made it basically moot) it made sense. This shift only makes sense to the smallest component of geared-out technophiles, and even they have seen enough too-soon format flops in recent years to be leery.
I hope you (and the many others asserting this sentiment) are wrong. I'm not counting on it, certainly, but I hope you are. The Supreme Court has a long history of dissapointing the people who put it into power, and while I'm not thrilled or encouraged by many of the cases we've seen before, I don't think there is any guarantee that the administration will get a pass on this. It is not so easy to get a total partisan hack or lap dog into the SCOTUS, and people change when they receive that lifetime, practically bulletproof appointment. The degree to which the Bush administration has claimed presidential authority over roles constitutionally assigned to the judiciary is extraordinary and I maintain hope that it will be corrected.
If they capitulate, then we know that we really lost. And that those terrorists, eleven murderous zealots, really won. If the check of the judiciary is that emasculated then liberty in America is truly dead.
It has been widely reported that Qwest refused to comply with these requests on concern of their legality. And the administration did nothing about it because there was nothing for them to do. "Hey, give us a direct connection to your customers' personal data." "Sure thing, where's your subpeona?" "Oh, we're not doing that, we have the authority to ask for this data without any judicial oversight." "Oh wow, who gave you that authority?" "We did." What are they going to do if you say no, ask a judge to make you comply? Oh my, irony! Not only did they do nothing to Qwest, they said nothing about it because they have been applying every possible delaying tactic, including imposing as much secrecy as possible, to put off this day of reckoning. Not only is "because some bureaucrat told me to" not a good excuse for breaking the law, it is the worst excuse, exactly the kind of cowardly capitulation that leads to the worst sort of government corruption. Nobody deserves a free pass on this craven, cynical assault on the principles of freedom.
(on preview, the captcha for my sign-in was "conspire." Damn, they're on to me).
Advertisers are relying on a couple of things in their current business model: that inertia will keep a significant percentage of the viewership on that couch, passively sucking up the message, during the ads, and that ads are allowing them to influence the purchasing habits of a significant number of viewers even despite their better judgement. The quite obvious tactics of manipulation in advertisements work. Stoned dude sits on the couch and while he could just get up and walk away, or mute it and page through a magazine, the activity barrier is higher than just clicking through on FF, and so he sits there, and that taco ad works on him. I'm hungry, I want a taco. The whole point of advertising is influencing the decision of the viewer: making them buy something they didn't think they wanted (and probably don't need and will get nothing from). Does it work? Look at the stupid cars people drive, the rancid garbage they eat, the price they pay for bubbly sugar water.
Advertisers are concerned about DVR fast forwarding diminishing the reach of their advertising and they are right to, it is diminishing the reach of their advertising. Advertisers pay networks for that reach so networks are justifiably concerned about the rise of DVRs impacting their revenue. ABC's arguments that people don't have the right and (most amusingly) don't really want to FF through ads are idiotic, but the counter-argument that ad-skipping is not going to mess with the business model of sponsored television doesn't hold water either.
I certainly hope that Apple doesn't buy nintendo (even if they could)
Yeah, there's a real question. Apple's apparently worth around 72 billion, Nintendo I had a bit harder time finding a figure (and wildly disparate "guesses" online - from 6 to 30 billion). I use the data in this article to guesstimate around 14 billion. Notable from that article is that as of a year ago Nintendo was the opposite of courting takeover. Suffice to say, Apple could probably afford it. It would not be a trivial expenditure. Nintendo would likely resist it. Whether Apple could actually manage a hostile takeover is questionable. It sounds like blue sky bunkum to me. (But guaranteed to generate just this sort of chatter, hmm...)
All of MP3 may be "somewhat" legal in Russia but it is fully-non legal for Americans (or Canadians, Australians, and anybody else who is lives in a country that's signed on with international copyright laws) to buy music from them, as it says outright in their terms of service. You cannot legally make a digital copy of copyrighted material you don't already own without the permission of the copyright holder. I don't really care, honestly - I think it's a little foolish doing something that leads such an evident information trail at the same time as utilities are going out of their way to point out how contemptuous they are of your data privacy and the music industry has certainly demonstrated how sue-happy they are. Lists of honest business enterprises who are selling copyrighted material with artists' approval should not be thrown in the same list with these quasi-legal (or, to put it another way non legal) technoprofiteers.
But I should still say thank you for pointing to that resource link, that is very cool.
It's simply false to say there are only two companies selling digital music online that is compatible with iTunes. Two major companies, perhaps, but there are lots of people legally selling MP3s - from artists who are selling their own product independently to Bitpass' music experiment Mperia. It's unfortunate that as yet these sorts of outlets haven't managed to leverage some combination of blogging, feeds, aggregation and online community to simulate something like a unified entity, so that people would notice they were there. I really wonder what the real impact of these sorts of things are - I'm sure I'm not typical but for several years now I've been getting more music from these truly alternative sources (what's eMusic I'd count as alternative mainstream, still pretty solidly within the label system though clearly a different league - though not always a more enlightened one - than Sony, Universal et al). And I know nobody is counting that shit, speaking of lost sales and suchlike.
Let me be clear on one thing - I wrote what I did on an Apple, I've never owned anything but an Apple - though I've worked in business almost exclusively with Windows PCs for going on two decades, using Apples is an informed and very concious decision.
I'll also confess to conflating Apple and Sony with a bit of mischief in mind, you just know some umbrage is done gone be took. I think there's some validity to my comparison but it is stretching a point for sure.
I'll stand by my basic point - that generic interoperability has never been Apple's point. Rather the opposite. Innovation, ease of use, and exceptional in-brand interoperability have been. I'm surprised nobody is attacking my more fundamental premise, namely whether this has anything to do with Open Source.
how will their new initiatives change your TV viewing experience?
Well, it'll get Tivo taken off the list of pontentials, certainly. The trouble with directed advertising so far has consistently been that it doesn't work. Just as the telemarketer will push you to consider something you clearly don't want, because some people can be pressured into buying things they don't want, advertisers want, certainly to be directed at solid potential customers, sure - but they want to spray all over everybody else too, just in case.
Meanwhile, PC based solutions are so near to delivering fully. Why bother even thinking about proprietary service?
Anyway, precisely. Apple's business model is basically to be Sony (Expensive component systems that only talk to their own kind) but they get away with it because the stuff works in a way Sony only dreams, they have this ironclad against-the mainstream, shinyfunhappy thing going (sorta like VW), and they leave the most important points of generic interoperability (i.e. iTunes and iPods play MP3s) open. Darwin was not one of these.
Re:Nintendo's Wii akin to Chevrolet's Nova?
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course it's impossible to tell without some kind of insider report but I bet you're wrong, it is impossible, the way naming exercises are conducted, that some serious opposition to this idea wasn't raised. Maybe they have some whole different system in Japan.
I think it's a dog, for what it's worth, but I suspect that among all of the arguments about the reasoning behind it, the one closer to the truth is that it surely does set it apart from the pack. Revolution was a totally generic name, a word utterly overused to the point of meaninglessness, and of course conceptually too close to 360 (itself a total case study in a crummy, safe, totally corporate blah naming). A name can only do so much damage, when you have the sterling underlying recognition of Nintendo. In the end just generating crazy amounts of talk may prove it a worthwhile gamble.
We have to remember that Rockonomics is a very young field and that we've only been able to collect rockonomical data for a relatively brief period. Why, remember it seems like only a few years ago that these rockonomists were saying that computer networks would be a boon to our society's rockonomic health.
And then rip it to your HD and then sell it back. Don't slow down the circulation of informational currency. Personally I don't think it's even illegal, though you could argue the point (it is to my knowledge nowhere codified in law that you must destroy copies of information that you have legally created from media you own, and I think ripping a CD you own to your HD is certainly legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Try telling any green environmental lefty that Ethanol is a bad thing and show them why
It's just possible you are losing them at "hey, you green environmental lefty, I'm gonna show you why Ethanol is a Bad Thing."
The ethanol subsidy is fraction of a percent of the federal budget. A good chunk of this is pork, particularly what ADM and probably a few others like Cargill pocket. It isn't a full solution, and indeed it will not survive as a long term solution. For all that, I think ethanol can fairly claim a modest immediate pollution and net carbon benefit and the development of some infrastructure and technology which is likely to provide a persistent utility as long as biofuels are part of the big energy picture. It is a hell of a lot better than a lot of the corporate welfare that is on the federal books.
Ethanol only looks like a big deal because federal investment in energy independence is so pathetic overall. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year to make even a credible effort at promoting real alternatives to oil and coal dependence, hundreds of times what is spent subsidizing ethanol now.
I think it is a pity this article lapses into ethanol lobby ranting so much because it has a lot of interesting things to say.
A more accurate summary should have indicated... blah blah blah...
A more accurate summary wouldn't have angried up my blood enough!
It may be a necessary policy (meet some kind of legal/tax obligation), it may be a practical policy (they need time to deal with all the database changes and paperwork). The lag seems exceptional and it might just be an asshole policy (you screwed up! Guess we'll collect interest on your money for a nice long time. Hey man, what can you do, we have "policies.")
Goddamned domain squatters (fence sitters, in this case...)
Nobody told him you're supposed to use eFence.com for these sorts of transactions.
But isn't this sort of the opposite of "your rights online"
It seems like the Bush admin. has really lost their mojo... This is so badly played. If this article had been allowed to run without obstruction, how many people would really have noticed it? Another dry opinion piece promulgating one aspect of one of the five dominant Opinions on What Ought We to Do with Iraq. Instead, with the NYT's unusual decision to run it redacted with an explanation, the spotlight is on every piece of information they wanted to keep out of the press, and it is making headlines in places it never would have (it certainly never would have shown up on Slashdot just as the story it was).
For the first time in a while I'm looking forward to the next year's politics... Not because "my team" is winning (my team doesn't seem to exist and if they did they wouldn't get on any ballot), but because it's just going to be such a clusterfuck... Watching that three ring circus known as the Democratic party try to joust its razor thin margin against this newly politically tonedeaf lame duck administration, while the GOP try to figure out how to put solid distance between themselves and the ever less popular Bush&Co while holding onto all those endearing litte traits that keep the various "bases" happy...
It's a shame class action suits are such lawyer bait - there just ain't no cream like the cream you skim off the top of a megacorporation's liability to an honest to goodness population. Of course, with class action suits it's more like they skim off the whole milk and give that long-suffering population the whey
I think they geniuses responsible for this one will regret it, though. Some will say Nintendo invited this by offering strap replacement (and general advice on not playing like a full-on spaz), but I think they merely observed the inevitable and effectively froze the potential plaintiff pool.
It looks to me like they're trying to wrangle the notion of some sort of harm being done to people by simply receiving a defective product - whether or not it actually harmed them - but I sincerely doubt (particularly since Nintendo has addressed the problem very early on) that this will fly. Or they may think Nintendo will spook easily and cough up a decent pay-off with little effort... but I think they will find themselves disappointed if so - like all major corporations Nintendo has lawyers just sitting around waiting for stuff like this. Thus only people with some claim to actual harm will be able to apply, and there won't be enough of them to make bringing this suit even remotely (wiimotely?) pay off. Hah hah.
In short, while my first reaction is that this story was merely about greed, on reflection yes, it's equally about stupidity.
It seems to me that both cassette and VHS are not dead but essentially stagnant medium. When the old Samsung finally cacked out the other day, I headed down to Target and picked up a new VHS player (the sole stand-alone model they stocked at that moment, incidentally) without a second thought. I didn't even consider just abandoning VHS.
My tape collection is still significantly bigger than my DVD collection, and I expect it to last 10-20 years. Also, for a person like myself who has regular but not particularly intensive recording needs (i.e. I'm not timeshifting the broadcast stream like your Tivo set but I regularly want to save something I'd otherwise miss or would like to see more than once) VHS is a very cheap option. Another point of view: I just checked the DVD category at Amazon - 158,444 results. VHS category - 199,244 results. Not bad for a dead format.
So I think it will be a long, LONG time before VHS players are as rare as, say, record players - and even longer before it is impossible to buy a new unit as it is with 8-track or Betamax. Hell, I still own a working 8-track, just for fun, I even play 'em sometimes. Some of that legacy equipment was built like tanks, it's amazing how it holds up. I think that's an interesting angle - will it be easier to force a transition on, say, DVDs - because so much more of the equipment base is cheap-jack crap? (My first DVD player lasted 1/3rd as long as my first VHS player).
On the other hand, there's no denying that new VHS prerecorded tapes have little to no shelf space in the big box retailers and the major rental places are getting out of VHS fast, if my local market is any indication. This is very much like the latter days of the cassette, which is still not truly dead. But then again, I bought my last new, prerecorded cassette tape I think around 2000. I sold off my cassette collection (oh the youthful memories) just this year when I realized it had been a couple years since I had listened to any of them. But the used music store bought them all the same, albeit for a pretty paltry sum, maybe a quarter a pop for the non-rare stuff.
The only reason I own a cassette player any more is that I'm still digitally encoding a few irreplacable fragments of tape, old home recording stuff from the 4-track days. When this one wears out I probably won't replace it. Now, the CD pretty much started its reign back around 1988... so it has taken a guy like me, very much not an early adopter who was heavily invested in cassettes, almost 2 decades to get out of them, and it will be over two decades before I abandon the medium entirely. I think things have accelerated in technology transfer but not THAT much. VHS has a good decade or so in it yet, is my guess.
domains like chasebank-online.com, citi-bank.com and bankofameriuca.com. "Why would anybody want to buy these domains unless they are the bank themselves -- or a phishing scammer?", F-Secure asks."
I and all the other proud citizens of Ameriuca resent this craven implication.
Games do not wreck people's lives. People wreck their own lives.
Exactly - any game, puzzle or hobby will have fanatical adherents. Most of the alarmist stuff that's said about online games was once said about cards. Read the Stephen King story "Hearts in Atlantis" where a group of college kids use fanatical hearts playing for pocket change stakes to tune out the stresses of college and Viet Nam. Hearts, simple as it is, is a fucking compelling game. It's stupid to blame a game for being compelling or making its enthusiasts feel rewarded when they accomplish some goal - that's the freaking point of games.
But there will always be plenty of fuck-ups ready to blame the instrument of their escapist immersion and puritanical organizations ready to exploit another ready-made devil. What do I know, though, I don't even blame tobacco companies for my filthy former addiction, you know, I just bit the fucking bullet and quit.
...and brings up such hurdles to the project as 'finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.
It seems like you could easily enough implant these just beneath the skin of say the forehead, or the wrist.
exactly - there's a reason they call it "touch" typing - I feel like tactile feedback is a huge component of keeping oriented to the positions of the keys without looking at them. I bet using this keyboard requires a lot more visual checking to avoid drifting off center. Although the situation where this matters most - rapid transcription from another text source - is not really what this is for.
Then again, I'm having a hard time figuring out the real benefit beyond the space age factor. Are you really saving space in comparison to a folding keyboard? If you've got a flat space to project on you've got room for a keyboard; you can get a wireless folding keyboard for less than a hundred bucks if you shop wisely.
Extending this point, in terms of the exceptionally widespread and rapid shift from VHS to DVD - you are looking at a true paradigm shift for the consumer, from magnetic tape to optical disk. And the thing is, we had all already been schooled in the benefits of disk media by CDs and CD-ROM. In a nutshell, no tracking problems, no rewinding, fast indexed navigation of the contents. We already had a firm sense of what the benefits would be. Video quality was a secondary issue - we knew from the CD experience it would be a toss-up, depending on the source material and how well it was transferred. But the other benefits would remain regardless of the picture quality. Tape collections were showing their age, starting to experience mechanical failure and degredation due to magnetic drift. It was a sensible shift, even to the extent of rebuying significant parts of our collections. Even if you had an older TV it made sense, even if picture quality was not the biggest deal (or if a small screen or having to use some sort of converter box made it basically moot) it made sense. This shift only makes sense to the smallest component of geared-out technophiles, and even they have seen enough too-soon format flops in recent years to be leery.
I hope you (and the many others asserting this sentiment) are wrong. I'm not counting on it, certainly, but I hope you are. The Supreme Court has a long history of dissapointing the people who put it into power, and while I'm not thrilled or encouraged by many of the cases we've seen before, I don't think there is any guarantee that the administration will get a pass on this. It is not so easy to get a total partisan hack or lap dog into the SCOTUS, and people change when they receive that lifetime, practically bulletproof appointment. The degree to which the Bush administration has claimed presidential authority over roles constitutionally assigned to the judiciary is extraordinary and I maintain hope that it will be corrected.
If they capitulate, then we know that we really lost. And that those terrorists, eleven murderous zealots, really won. If the check of the judiciary is that emasculated then liberty in America is truly dead.
No corporation can resist governmental pressure.
It has been widely reported that Qwest refused to comply with these requests on concern of their legality. And the administration did nothing about it because there was nothing for them to do. "Hey, give us a direct connection to your customers' personal data." "Sure thing, where's your subpeona?" "Oh, we're not doing that, we have the authority to ask for this data without any judicial oversight." "Oh wow, who gave you that authority?" "We did." What are they going to do if you say no, ask a judge to make you comply? Oh my, irony! Not only did they do nothing to Qwest, they said nothing about it because they have been applying every possible delaying tactic, including imposing as much secrecy as possible, to put off this day of reckoning. Not only is "because some bureaucrat told me to" not a good excuse for breaking the law, it is the worst excuse, exactly the kind of cowardly capitulation that leads to the worst sort of government corruption. Nobody deserves a free pass on this craven, cynical assault on the principles of freedom.
(on preview, the captcha for my sign-in was "conspire." Damn, they're on to me).
Advertisers are relying on a couple of things in their current business model: that inertia will keep a significant percentage of the viewership on that couch, passively sucking up the message, during the ads, and that ads are allowing them to influence the purchasing habits of a significant number of viewers even despite their better judgement. The quite obvious tactics of manipulation in advertisements work. Stoned dude sits on the couch and while he could just get up and walk away, or mute it and page through a magazine, the activity barrier is higher than just clicking through on FF, and so he sits there, and that taco ad works on him. I'm hungry, I want a taco. The whole point of advertising is influencing the decision of the viewer: making them buy something they didn't think they wanted (and probably don't need and will get nothing from). Does it work? Look at the stupid cars people drive, the rancid garbage they eat, the price they pay for bubbly sugar water.
Advertisers are concerned about DVR fast forwarding diminishing the reach of their advertising and they are right to, it is diminishing the reach of their advertising. Advertisers pay networks for that reach so networks are justifiably concerned about the rise of DVRs impacting their revenue. ABC's arguments that people don't have the right and (most amusingly) don't really want to FF through ads are idiotic, but the counter-argument that ad-skipping is not going to mess with the business model of sponsored television doesn't hold water either.
I certainly hope that Apple doesn't buy nintendo (even if they could )
Yeah, there's a real question. Apple's apparently worth around 72 billion, Nintendo I had a bit harder time finding a figure (and wildly disparate "guesses" online - from 6 to 30 billion). I use the data in this article to guesstimate around 14 billion. Notable from that article is that as of a year ago Nintendo was the opposite of courting takeover. Suffice to say, Apple could probably afford it. It would not be a trivial expenditure. Nintendo would likely resist it. Whether Apple could actually manage a hostile takeover is questionable. It sounds like blue sky bunkum to me. (But guaranteed to generate just this sort of chatter, hmm...)
All of MP3 may be "somewhat" legal in Russia but it is fully-non legal for Americans (or Canadians, Australians, and anybody else who is lives in a country that's signed on with international copyright laws) to buy music from them, as it says outright in their terms of service. You cannot legally make a digital copy of copyrighted material you don't already own without the permission of the copyright holder. I don't really care, honestly - I think it's a little foolish doing something that leads such an evident information trail at the same time as utilities are going out of their way to point out how contemptuous they are of your data privacy and the music industry has certainly demonstrated how sue-happy they are. Lists of honest business enterprises who are selling copyrighted material with artists' approval should not be thrown in the same list with these quasi-legal (or, to put it another way non legal) technoprofiteers.
But I should still say thank you for pointing to that resource link, that is very cool.
It's simply false to say there are only two companies selling digital music online that is compatible with iTunes. Two major companies, perhaps, but there are lots of people legally selling MP3s - from artists who are selling their own product independently to Bitpass' music experiment Mperia. It's unfortunate that as yet these sorts of outlets haven't managed to leverage some combination of blogging, feeds, aggregation and online community to simulate something like a unified entity, so that people would notice they were there. I really wonder what the real impact of these sorts of things are - I'm sure I'm not typical but for several years now I've been getting more music from these truly alternative sources (what's eMusic I'd count as alternative mainstream, still pretty solidly within the label system though clearly a different league - though not always a more enlightened one - than Sony, Universal et al). And I know nobody is counting that shit, speaking of lost sales and suchlike.
Let me be clear on one thing - I wrote what I did on an Apple, I've never owned anything but an Apple - though I've worked in business almost exclusively with Windows PCs for going on two decades, using Apples is an informed and very concious decision.
I'll also confess to conflating Apple and Sony with a bit of mischief in mind, you just know some umbrage is done gone be took. I think there's some validity to my comparison but it is stretching a point for sure.
I'll stand by my basic point - that generic interoperability has never been Apple's point. Rather the opposite. Innovation, ease of use, and exceptional in-brand interoperability have been. I'm surprised nobody is attacking my more fundamental premise, namely whether this has anything to do with Open Source.
how will their new initiatives change your TV viewing experience?
Well, it'll get Tivo taken off the list of pontentials, certainly. The trouble with directed advertising so far has consistently been that it doesn't work. Just as the telemarketer will push you to consider something you clearly don't want, because some people can be pressured into buying things they don't want, advertisers want, certainly to be directed at solid potential customers, sure - but they want to spray all over everybody else too, just in case.
Meanwhile, PC based solutions are so near to delivering fully. Why bother even thinking about proprietary service?
If they did it would be appel.org
Hmmm... http://www.appel.org/
Anyway, precisely. Apple's business model is basically to be Sony (Expensive component systems that only talk to their own kind) but they get away with it because the stuff works in a way Sony only dreams, they have this ironclad against-the mainstream, shinyfunhappy thing going (sorta like VW), and they leave the most important points of generic interoperability (i.e. iTunes and iPods play MP3s) open. Darwin was not one of these.
Of course it's impossible to tell without some kind of insider report but I bet you're wrong, it is impossible, the way naming exercises are conducted, that some serious opposition to this idea wasn't raised. Maybe they have some whole different system in Japan.
I think it's a dog, for what it's worth, but I suspect that among all of the arguments about the reasoning behind it, the one closer to the truth is that it surely does set it apart from the pack. Revolution was a totally generic name, a word utterly overused to the point of meaninglessness, and of course conceptually too close to 360 (itself a total case study in a crummy, safe, totally corporate blah naming). A name can only do so much damage, when you have the sterling underlying recognition of Nintendo. In the end just generating crazy amounts of talk may prove it a worthwhile gamble.
We have to remember that Rockonomics is a very young field and that we've only been able to collect rockonomical data for a relatively brief period. Why, remember it seems like only a few years ago that these rockonomists were saying that computer networks would be a boon to our society's rockonomic health.
And then rip it to your HD and then sell it back. Don't slow down the circulation of informational currency. Personally I don't think it's even illegal, though you could argue the point (it is to my knowledge nowhere codified in law that you must destroy copies of information that you have legally created from media you own, and I think ripping a CD you own to your HD is certainly legal.